Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems (DabbleDB, Trendly) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/more-than-dabbling.html

<comment><USER2> Another cool success story out of Vancouver. Scaling up a business here would have been even cooler, but if you're going to be acquired, Twitter is a heck of a place to go. Congratulations guys!

<comment><USER3> I fail to grasp why this is being hailed as a success story. DabbleDB the product is likely going away. These guys are getting jobs at Twitter, which is arguably better for them than going out of business, but hardly is criteria for a very successful exit. Its cool, don't get me wrong, but thats different than a success story.

Does anyone have any indication of the purchase price? Did investors make anything, or even their money back? It is hard to declare this a success, or much of anything at all, without some information regarding terms of the deal, and future of the product. Even if they lost money but the product was going to continue in Twitter's hands I would argue this may be enough to declare success because of Twitter's likely longevity. But without this and compelling evidence that Twitter had any reason to pay more than salaries to the team, I can't find a reason to declare this a success -- other than kudos to the team for getting jobs at a cool company as their funding ran out (I am assuming this is a primary reason for the change, as is common; please correct me if mistaken).

Anyone have more info to share regarding this? I have always been a big fan of DabbleDB and the team clearly has talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wonder if Dabble will follow the destiny of Etherpad and get opensourced

</comment><comment><USER5> Hooray, a success story for Smalltalk and Seaside!

<comment><USER6> I don't know that I would call this a success for Smalltalk or Seaside as much as it is a win for a very smart startup who simply happened to use Smalltalk for some of their products. Furthermore, I doubt they'll be doing much Squeak hacking inside Twitter, so in some ways you could look upon it as a loss for the community.

Regardless, I have a lot of respect for the Smallthought guys. Their presence at Twitter HQ does only good things for my opinion of their business and technical direction.

<comment><USER7> Considering Avi's contributions to Seaside, I think _simply happened_ is an understatement. I'm sure using Seaside was a very deliberate choice on their part.

> Regardless, I have a lot of respect for the Smallthought guys. Their > presence at Twitter HQ further does only good things for my opinion of their > business and technical direction.

My thoughts exactly.

<comment><USER6> My perspective on Seaside may be a little different, because I still remember Avi trying out many of the same ideas in Ruby, and moving to Smalltalk (at least initially) because its continuations didn't leak memory like MRI's did. I also know from personal discussions that the Smallthought guys are very pragmatic about their tools: when Squeak/Seaside were the right tool, they used it, but when Ruby, Java, Javascript, or another language/framework made more sense, they weren't dogmatic about using it.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of Smalltalk to DabbleDB, but it was just one piece of the puzzle. The same "use the right tool for the problem" attitude seems to be increasingly pervading Twitter these days, which I think has helped as much as anything else in their improved stability and scale over the last year or so.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the insight. I didn't realize that ruby's (former?) continuation memory-leaks were the the reason for Seaside being in Smalltalk rather than Ruby.

In this case I wonder whether Smalltalk really is the right tool for the job. Smalltalk isn't a bad language but there aren't a lot of libraries available. I've played around with Seaside a bit and ended up having to rewrite some of the HTTP libraries to do what I needed. Unfortunately I can't think of another language outside of the LISP family that supports continuations well.

<comment><USER8> _Unfortunately I can't think of another language outside of the LISP family that supports continuations well._

Javascript has closures, which you can use to implement continuations. See <http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/cps/>

<comment><USER7> First-class functions can be used for continuation-passing style, but to do what Seaside does elegantly you really need first-class continuations.

There's an interesting article on how Seaside uses continuations here: [http://blog.fitzell.ca/2009/01/seaside-partial- continuations...](http://blog.fitzell.ca/2009/01/seaside-partial- continuations.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They bought Values of N a while back, so this makes at least two companies with top-tier product design chops brought into the fold. I'm a fan of the twitter web UI, and I think they've done a good job with their feature set so far, but I wonder when or if we're going to start seeing stuff that's more than just tweaking the basic model coming out of these talent acquisitions.

<comment><USER10> I think we have seen things. Twitter's semblance of stability comes directly from the Summize acquisition. And I think Rael from Values of N was behind lists.

Dabble DB though seems like it was acquired for backend analytics (according to the blog post).

<comment><USER9> At the risk of setting off a pointless semantics wrangling session, iwantsandy and dabbledb were/are both great products that never got the attention they deserved. I think it's hard to make the case that lists (while nice) are in the same ballpark - they fall under the 'tweak' category to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The announcement on Dabble DB's website:

<http://blog.dabbledb.com/2010/06/140character-dabbling.html>

<http://dabbledb.com/>

Signups now turned off.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, Twitter just picked up an awesome tech team, and the services are nice also. I don't use DabbleDB very much (only a free account, years ago), but it was very well done. Avi's work and writing on Seaside is also great stuff.

<comment><USER12> Also, I just noticed that the blog post was by Kevin Weil (who I follow on Twitter :-) who is also an analytics heavyweight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anybody care to venture a guess why Twitter would buy them? It is surely not for their business. Is it really only HR acquisition? If not, how could Twitter use their tech?

<comment><USER14> They're joining the analytics team at Twitter

<comment><USER13> That makes sense. <http://trendly.com/> is their other product.

<comment><USER15> The parent article makes clear that they will be on the analytics team because of Trendly, sir. I promise it's a quick and easy read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.avibryant.com/2010/06/life-changing.html></comment>


Ask HN: What if the Ocean Marketing fail was actually a brilliant move? - <AUTHOR>

While the Ocean marketing debacle was clearly bad publicity for Ocean, I'd like to ask HN to consider what the effect was for N-Control - maker of the Avenger game controller. How many of you even knew what the Avenger game controller was before the Ocean blowup? Now, thanks to the enthusiastic words of Dave-the-excited-customer, we know not only what the Avenger is, but how thrilled Dave was to get two, how it will help disabled students all over the world, and that thousands of units have just arrived, presumably ready for your purchase.
I'm not literally suggesting that the Ocean fail was intentional, but consider the world where it was... In that world, I'd suggest the "fake fail" was executed PERFECTLY. The victim was outspokenly positive about the product, the fall-guy was disposable, and the whole story went viral. Everyone hates Ocean, feels a little bad for N-Control, and now knows about the Avenger.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> DecorateMyEyes does this and is very effective at it, the article is here [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?pag...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?pagewanted=all) . The owner manipulates his rank on Google via bad publicity. So there are people gaming the system like this, there is precedence that this behavior works.

The fact is, in gaming customers will take a lot of abuse, it is evident in the email exchange where the customer Dave I think his name was does not cancel his order. So the risk of driving away customers that want this product is probably small, given that the recipient of the abuse still wanted the merchandise. Where in most other industries a customer would say you know what cancel my order. Sony's antics are further proof that some gamers have a high threshold for abuse. So given that there is a high upside for publicity with a low downside of canceled orders over the fiasco. Given that it is a third party, they can dispose of them and claim that they are innocent. I am not saying this is what happened but it cannot be ruled out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I wonder if there's a way to assess the "pliability" of my customer base. To borrow your phrase: how much "abuse" will a certain customer segment take?

<comment><USER3> Probably related to how unique your product is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you will find most people don't walk away from this with a full understanding of who is to blame. Instead, many may create a sub-conscious linkage with the Avenger and a bad customer service story. It's easy to create perceptions and difficult to remake them.

Maybe it does work well for N-Control this time....but a strategy? I'd like to hear what marketing professionals would say, but it sounds much too risky for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Also consider that their listing on Amazon has been flooded with "bad" reviews

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. Would likely negate the upside of customer awareness if the first thing they learn upon researching the product is that it has 1 star.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> nah. the victim was keen like a gamer (not over-keen).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's fair. I don't think it was intentional either. But my question is what the implications are for other companies looking for publicity. Is there a strategy there to emulate? (e.g., find some fool willing to be the fall-guy like Paul from Ocean)

For the record, I'm not condoning such behavior - if anything, I'm interested in exposing such intentional strategies as dishonest. But awareness must come before defense.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: In search of cure to a disease called loneliness... - <AUTHOR>

This is my status on Facebook right now -
"I guess more than a dating site or social network, we people need something that can keep us away from spending time online. Facebook is not a solution, it is a symptom of disease called loneliness, affecting billions worldwide. :|"
Social networks, dating sites, chat rooms, virtual life all these are meant to socialize and be less lonely but I think they aren't helping in anyway. When I see people on facebook and other dating sites, I think of them as suffering from disease called loneliness and their online activities as symptoms. As the virtualization is becoming more and more prominent loneliness is growing many folds. Sites like facebook are designed in a way to keep people online for longer duration. In no way, facebook can compensate for real world socializing.
As hackers, we should come forward with novel solutions for this problem, which is also our own problem. I believe there should be some kind of web application that encourages members to spend as little time as possible on itself, by finding opportunities for them to go out. Something like a local events and interest based social network where people find ways and partners to enjoy the REAL life by going out to events, movies, sports meet etc.
Share your ideas about a next generation social network that doesn't suck, that doesn't promote virtualization but mingles with the reality....or any other solution? <comment><USER2> I'm not lonely IRL, and I find real value in online social networks.

My cousin has ME, and she is lonely. Online support groups have really helped. A friend of mine, who has been single for a while and I suspect quite lonely, is currently getting heavily laid because of Guardian Soulmates.

But I agree with the goal in a roundabout way - too much of my online time is un-productive - not informative in a useful way, not entertaining, and often emotionally and psychologically draining. I want to spend less time online too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I put this up just today morning:

<http://apps.ninjagod.com/app/hackersocial/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice initiative but I doubt it will succeed in its current state. I think it would be better to develop it on top of facebook's social graph. Anyway, I haven't fully conceptualized it yet. Let me know your feature list assuming that you can develop anything and not a minimal solution.

<comment><USER3> It's a 3-hour hack - built for the purpose of me meeting more hackers in the city.

The code is open source. Feel free to modify and I'll incorporate your changes. <https://github.com/ninjagod/apps.ninjagod.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll definitely look at that and try my best to contribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Loneliness" and "aloneness" are two distinct and separate things. A person may enjoy aloneness using a computer to collaborate and do work without being lonely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree but I'm sure most of the people on social networks use it due to loneliness and not aloneness, except those who use it for professional purposes.

<comment><USER5> I know anecdotes aren't data, but I use social networks primarily to avoid having to maintain active contact with acquaintances I'm expected to run into in the future. It lets me say "yeah, I heard about Dan's new house" when I talk to Jesse, for example, even if I don't really want to talk to Dan to find out about that. It's easier to lurk than it is to maintain active contact or actively break ties with said acquaintance (who may have done nothing worse than fail to be interesting enough for me to spend time on him).

I wouldn't say that counts as me using social networks out of loneliness. I'd probably name it social efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> meetup.com</comment>


GM make ventilators? Why not order BD, Stryker, S&N or other med companies? - <AUTHOR> Was this just a ploy to get union workers at GM their jobs back?  I don't understand this.  GM doesn't know the first thing about making a med device - procedures, clean rooms, FDA, etc.  It will take too long for GM to understand how to do this. <comment><USER2> Might be a good time to retell the story of how the US tried to stockpile ventilators a decade ago As Project Aurora, but were stalled and eventually made zero ventilators thanks to a company called Covidien (actual company name, not an April fools joke).

Covidien bought the company that was to make the cheaper ventilators for stockpile and then stalled and finally cancelled the project. Covidien incidentally already made a much more expensive ventilator.

[https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/sns-nyt-us- failed...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/sns-nyt-us-failed-to- build-ventilators-coronavirus-20200330-tvrot5uh3vbszo6vw2ymxh6g64-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> BD no longer makes ventilators. Stryker never did, they make mostly O.R. and hospital kit, tools and accessories. No idea who S&N is.

These are the major global manufacturers:

\- Philips Healthcare (Netherlands)

\- Vyaire Medical (US) formerly Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD - US)

\- Getinge (Sweden)

\- Dräger (Germany)

\- Smiths Group (UK)

\- Hamilton Medical (Switzerland)

\- GE Healthcare (US)

\- Air Liquide (France)

\- Zoll Medical (US)

\- Allied Healthcare Products (US)

\- Airon Mindray (China)

\- Schiller (Switzerland)

\- Löwenstein Medical (Germany)

\- Medtronic (Ireland after corporate inversion from US)

<comment><USER4> Through virtue of working with them once, S&N is Smith & Nephew.

To my knowledge they do joint implants, wound care and scoped tools but not ventilators.

In Australia we are having Resmed make ventilators! So that's a bit more on brand than a car company!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had the same take. The medical device industry and auto manufacturing are very different industries.

I can only assume it came down to volume. GM has the space and the machines for volume manufacturing. The medical device companies don't.

<comment><USER6> GM also, unfortunately, has been hammered on demand for their core business - vehicles - right now. They have surplus manufacturing space and human resources and that may continue for anywhere from a few months to the rest of this year (before perhaps slowly recovering from late 2020 through 2021). It fits quite well in terms of context. The medtech companies need to keep their resources focused on producing medical devices, they are unlikely to have the vast manufacturing capability slack that GM is seeing (some of them may have a bit of increased slack as we turn down elective procedures, delay equipment purchases). The ideal is perhaps to have GM (Ford, etc) working with such companies who can help guide them properly in the medtech manufacturing space, utilizing the best of what both bring to the table. Ford is working with GE, GM is working with Ventec.

An interesting Bloomberg article on it:

[http://archive.is/SLUlj](http://archive.is/SLUlj)

Here is the key response to the parent's questions:

"They asked Barra's team what they needed to make ventilators. GM needed a ventilator-making partner with an established product and a medical sales force."

"For his part, Ventec CEO Chris Kiple said that he needed a partner with mass- manufacturing expertise, factories and a workforce to produce on a huge scale to help cities like New York as patients overwhelm hospitals."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.thedrive.com/tech/32726/how-ford-will- use-f-150-...](https://www.thedrive.com/tech/32726/how-ford-will- use-f-150-seat-fans-to-build-emergency-respirators)

</comment><comment><USER8> Survival. GM won't be able to sell new cars for at least 2 months.

</comment><comment><USER2> They won't even start manufacturing until April 20.

</comment><comment><USER9> Taxpayers lost $11 billion bailing out GM around 2009.

Trump showed up to collect what the people were owed.</comment>


Bullets to Dodge When Scaling Your Sales - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/Looking-to-Scale-Your-Sales-Seven-Bullets-to-Dodge <comment><USER2> I can't remember the company-name, but wasn't there a story about how their sales/marketing folks hyped the improvements in upcoming Product 2.0 so much that all their long-term-focused customers decided to skip buying Product 1.0, and they went out of business?

<comment><USER3> Yes, Osborne Computers:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "hire a sales architect instead of a sales builder" point may be the best one in there: A good sales architect will so do things that several (all?) of the other points are subsumed in their work.

This [1] article from Harvard Business Review provides an excellent overview of the different types of sales staff needed at different stages. Too many companies go for "coin operated sales" too soon, instead of getting "agents" who will work with product management to develop and refine the sales process.

[1] [https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning- curve](https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-curve)

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone has questions about building a sales team, I'm happy to discuss over coffee if you're in SF. I was the first sales hire at PagerDuty. Email is in profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really great offer. I'm no longer in the bay area, but make it back a few times a year. I'll be sure to reach out when I'm around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first two suggestions are very easy to argue against:

(1) Focusing on more than one segment costs a lot less than focusing on the _wrong_ segment. Especially when you're relying on anecdata to support your hunch that Customer Group X will actually be the easiest to sell to. It also means that even if your hunch that big enterprises are the companies that most desperately need your service is completely correct, the length of their sales cycle can still kill your startup stone dead. If they're not thrusting extremely divergent development and marketing-spend requirements on you, a diverse pipeline and customer base is a good thing.

(2) A good "builder" is much easier to identify than the more elusive "architect" and will get your company revenue positive faster. Better CRM practices might salvage a handful of sales and fraction of your renewal rate in the long run, but they don't drive growth. And if your salespeople can't devise, adapt and share their own "scripts" your "architect" is wasting your money by hiring bad salespeople. Plus the salesperson that stresses their ability to make you five sales a week is _much_ easier to hire and fire than the enigmatic architect with their flair for bike shedding, premature optimisation and effortless grasp of _which stats prove the success of their process and which prove the failings of individual salespeople_. Plus the builder, if they're still landing and collaborating on big deals, probably won't mind having to report figures into a newly created SVP Sales Ops at some stage. Before then, a software startup probably has plenty of analytical and process-automation skill on the rest of their team...

I'll throw in a couple of others though

(i) Don't hire salespeople and especially sales leaders specialising in the wrong type of market. Some companies succeed by soaking the market with sheer volume of calls. Some succeed through impressing the customer with sophisticated insight (even if the product itself is quite simple the sale can be highly conceptual and vice versa). Some depend on knowing how and when to pitch against the competition, and being very aggressive (up or down, depending on situation) on pricing. A small sales team can't specialise in all three, and a sales leader focusing on one in optimizing for one will, for better or worse, tend to drive salespeople specialising in the others away.

(ii) Don't assume it's of sufficiently low importance to be left to interns to do it (unless "sales" means handing out flyers, or sales admin). Fresh graduates with the focus and drive to actually succeed in sales will be willing and able to find jobs that pay real money. There are a lot of entry- level positions out there for them and your no-name startup is an obstacle rather than a stepping stone to getting them. You want the primary point of contact with prospective customers and main revenue driver to be someone that's good enough to deserve more than lunch money (or if you're pre-funding, at least capable of negotiating themselves an extremely large chunk of commission and/or a founder-level equity). Even if most of your sales are driven by inbound marketing: you wouldn't let a developer of well-below- average ability commit straight to your production server; don't give the bottom percentile of entry level salespeople commit privileges to your customer base</comment>


Law enforcement have known about iPhone tracking since at least last year - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20056344-281.html

<comment><USER2> _At least some phones running Google's Android OS_

Android is a _dream_ for someone like me (forensic analyst). It is easy to get data off, and is chock full of all sorts of cached information. iPhone is more difficult, and can sometimes be very hit and miss in what you can get off it.

I've used pretty much all of the tools listed on that page, and none are as magical as they claim. One of the best is .XRY, which is my preference because for a lot of phones you can use it to extract a raw memory dump and analyse it more carefully/deeply.

The key thing to know here is that _all_ phones cache location information like this in some form. Older phones used to only cache a little bit, but usually enough to recover some previous cell sites. Modern phones, with more location features, more memory and more advances OS's, just store more of this information.

IMO it's not so much that LE have been keeping it deliberately quiet. I mean, I for one figured it was fairly obvious. The story here is, IMO, it being sent back to Apple/Google etc. Not that the data is cached.

<comment><USER3> Somewhat unrelated - but who do forensic analysts work for, and what do they look for? Are they only working for government agencies, or is there some kind of private work as well? Are you looking for terrorists, kiddie porn or something entirely different?

Just curious...

<comment><USER2> I work for a private company and we contract out to both the private and public sectors. There is definitely a lot of private work; not just investigations but document recovery etc. It also segues into general security work. The public sector, at least in the UK, is on the decline. Budgets are dropping and so everything is going in-house and they are getting rid of the expensive contractors.

Most of the work in my experience is fraud related, probably around 80% of it. But this can vary (with the time of year, current economic/political climate etc.). As exciting as it sometimes gets to sound (and indeed, sometimes is) 99% of digital forensics is sheer. absolute. boredom. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is quite common, years ago I was working as a security consultant to a police department and this was before EFF made it public - <http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/> they were actually arresting people based on tracking printer serials in money counterfeiting cases.

</comment><comment><USER5> This particular topic has been discussed to death lately. It's really not that big of a deal. Apple is doing this to aid in the phone being able to Triangulate it's position in relation to cell towers (when gps is unavailable).

Also, the phone is NOT constantly tracking your location. It only logs a new location (a) when you launch a location-aware app, e.g. Facebook, Maps etc. And (b) when you have never been to that location before.

It does not log the amount of times you have visited the location.

I suspect Apple is planning to do something cool with this Data, because of the way it is synced across Computer and Phone. Keep in mind however, the Data cannot be used to Track you constantly, only to see where you have been in the past, but, the log will never update to show that you visited a certain location more than once. Hope this helps!

<comment><USER6> The article totally contradicts you:

 _Among computer forensics specialists, those location logs--which record nearby cell tower coordinates and time stamps and cannot easily be disabled by someone who wants to use location services_

And worse still, the article clearly shows this data is already being used by law enforcement for unmonitored tracking.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't contradict him at all. "cannot easily be disabled by someone who wants to use location services" is totally in line with "when you launch a location-aware app".

Also, I didn't see the part of the article where law enforcement is using this for unmonitored tracking. They can pull the data off your phone once when they arrest you. But how do they continue to keep pulling the data off your phone? If the police take my phone from me every day, I don't think that qualifies as unmonitored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any iPhone app that can quietly log your gps location every minute and let you replay your life's movements at the end of the day or week?</comment>


A Standard Password Change API - <AUTHOR> https://kryogenix.org/days/2017/02/24/a-standard-password-change-api/ <comment><USER2> I remember suggesting a different and simpler "API" \- all websites (etc) should be able to parse the concatenation "oldpasswordnewpassword"or perhaps oldpassword_newpassword" where "_" is any character reserved for a delimiter. The website would then swap the new password for the old one.

Of course, other implementations of the same idea using other ways of distinguishing old and new are possible, too.

<comment><USER3> That would certainly be simpler, in that it just fits in to the existing password login, but I'm not sure it helps all that much here? Mainly because the point of this suggested approach is discoverability; your password manager can change your password without you having to manually do it. Most of the time, this doesn't apply; a password manager knows that such-and-such-a-site has such-and-such a username and a password, but it doesn't know how to actually log in with them, just that these are the values, and maybe these are some form fields on a particular URL to fill them into.</comment></comment>


Microsoft rescues XP users with emergency browser fix - <AUTHOR> http://news.msn.com/science-technology/microsoft-rescues-xp-users-with-emergency-browser-fix

<comment><USER2> XP is turning out to be quite the headache for Microsoft. Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out, but it's 13 years old now and not even corporate conglomerates have an excuse for not updating. Yes, the alternative to XP is only a meagre few years old and I understand it costs money to upgrade, especially a large-scale corporate network spread out over multiple locations, regions and continents.

But then we need to ask ourselves this: at what point does supporting an older operating system like XP cost you more money then it would to spend the money upgrading to a later version of Windows? Surely there is a point where you're spending more money on maintaining the older version on-top of added security expenses and unexpected expenses due to loss because of an undiscovered vulnerability.

<comment><USER3> My CNC machines aren't so easy to update.

<comment><USER4> For closed systems I think there is no need to upgrade.

What is the harm of not upgrading, what is the worst thing that can happen?

Of course, this is for a system that is not connected to the outside world.

<comment><USER5> > what is the worst thing that can happen?

An operator that plugs in an infected USB drive that injects a virus that will destroy your Uranium enrichment facility? Air gaps are not what they used to be.

<comment><USER6> The USB drive was presumably infected on a computer that _is or could be_ up to date though, indicating the strong possibility that even if the CNC machine were or could have been up to date, it would still be vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft is going to have to take a stand and make this the last XP patch (for anyone not paying for extended support like certain governments) forRealThisTime if they ever want to move on.

In this case, I can understand the reprieve, if only because it came like 20 days after the EOL. In fact, you almost wonder if this wasn't publicized until after the EOL in an attempt for malicious parties to do maximum damage.

But this won't be the last hole. Others will exist and if Microsoft doesn't stop from now on, it won't disappear until web standards change to such an extent that all versions of IE that run on XP won't render modern sites at all.

Kind of a good reason, in retrospect, to decouple the web browser from the OS, huh?

<comment><USER5> > Microsoft is going to have to take a stand

And risk having all those corporate drones move to Linux, Android, ChromeOS or anything non-Microsoft or, worse, Microsoft-hostile? Risk spawning a non- Microsoft ecosystem around vast IT-deficient corporations (any reasonably managed IT infrastructure has moved on long ago) that would undermine their other side businesses?

They'll never do that.

<comment><USER8> No other desktop is suitable for the enterprise desktop environment out-of- the-box. Much as Windows is maligned, OSX doesn't have the range of tools available for enterprise use, and free desktops still aren't quite there for regular users en masse.

<comment><USER5> There may be many Windows-specific functionalities missing, but it's certainly possible to work around those. Why do you think OSs like Ubuntu or Red Hat are not suitable to be used as enterprise desktops?

<comment><USER8> My housemate is a regular user (not power user) and a known potterer. He loves figuring things out and patching things together, and wanted to try a linux desktop, so I set him up with one. He didn't want me to help him out, as he wanted to find things out for himself, to try it without me coming in and 'just fixing it'. I watched him struggle for months, then he admitted defeat and went back to Windows. He still (theatrically) shivers if we discuss the topic.

I've seen this experience is seen in the wider desktop space - the only time a free desktop is suitable for low support usage is when it's so locked down it's not really a proper desktop environment anymore; that locked down, it's more like an appliance. When something goes wrong with a free desktop, it's not just a matter of figuring out what went wrong, but which are the right steps to fix it. This error on Gnome, will this fix I found for Fedora work on Debian? Is the problem in Gnome desktop or in the distro?

My colleague once had a problem with something in Ubuntu, and found that there were four different solutions depending on which of the last four releases were in use. When your changing releases are years apart (Windows) this is less of a problem than when they're 6 months apart. I was pleasantly surprised when I loaded up ubuntu 14.04 and saw that it looked the same as before.

Note that I'm not in the enterprise environment, only that I've had to help a lot of people with changes from OS version to version, and understand the need for stability... which is a reason why the path Win8 took particularly puzzles me, given Microsoft's strong position in the business world. I think that the free desktops are getting there, but haven't quite arrived yet.

<comment><USER9> Your anecdote may tell us something about the "typical grandma end-user" situation, but it is totally irrelevant for situations that arise in large "enterprise" IT facilities, where the admins set everything up for you (in some central, network-booted/installed image), and the users don't really have to figure out anything. Configurations are centrally managed with cfengine etc.

Where I work we have around 10k RHEL workstations, and they are all centrally managed. Users neither install nor uninstall software, they don't set up printers, they don't set up their own hardware configurations, ...

Another example is Disney animations/pixar, where all animators use RHEL workstations.

Your colleague may have given up on ubuntu because he couldn't get "desktop dungeons" or "plants vs. zombies" to run without windows, but in a coorporate setting, management does not generally consider that a priority.

<comment><USER8> You make valid points, but please stop saying that naive users are grandmas. I even specified he was my housemate - how many elderly people do you know share a house? It's even the wrong gender. The world's non-power computer users are not limited to grandmothers (who seem to be all about desktop use) and toddlers (who seem to be all about iOS).

Also, my colleague didn't give up on Ubuntu. He just noted four different ways to fix the given problem in four consecutive six-month releases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's breathtaking to see such a blunder: a Forune 100 company telling nearly 20% [1] of its installed user base, it's second largest desktop OS customer base, to stop and make a financial decision about what to do, instead of giving them a low-cost, path of least resistance option to continue in some way similar to the status quo. For many people still on XP, the users are not technical enough to understand how to do an OS upgrade or how to migrate user data to a new machine, let alone understand why they would want to when the current system appears to work fine.

I'm surprised that they're not trying to monetize their current XP user base with some sort of "XP extended support" fee-based subscription so they don't force users to look elsewhere for a desktop OS -- between Windows 8's blunders and a Mac, I suspect many of those XP users will consider a Mac. Or simply by offering a ~$40 upgrader app to get to Windows 7 "lite" for XP users that works on the same hardware and drivers...

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/discontinued-windowsxp- stil...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/discontinued-windowsxp-still- no-2-desktop-os-after-windows7-windows-8-lagging-far-behind/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's pretty obvious that they did this because people were being advised not to use IE - without specifying a version.

If they didn't update IE on XP then even IE on Win 7/8 would get hit by advice not to use it.

<comment><USER7> Right. Of course, the fact that that advice came from DHS, which still has a ton of XP/IE6-based internal apps probably made it that much worse. The government is a big client. Having them move to another browser, even if they haven't agreed to upgrade all the clients to the new Windows yet, is just a bad idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I'm wondering is how many times is this going to happen? Where they're more-or-less forced to continue emergency patch mode for major vulns?

</comment><comment><USER13> Out of support should mean out of support -- no one off patches.

ETA: Organizations will use these 'emergency patches' as yet another reason not to upgrade.</comment>


Reliable backups: How to backup Linux, BSD and other Unix-like systems properly - <AUTHOR> http://www.halfgaar.net/backing-up-unix

<comment><USER2> Bacula or any real corporate backup software should also do the job quite nicely, if a bit painful to install initially.

It's also not enough to simply look at backup, you also have to look at recovery, how long it will take to recover from an incident, how frequently data needs to be be backed up, etc........</comment>


Ask HN: GitHub login for B2D service? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on a B2D service. Right now my only login method is GitHub. I thought it made sense, since most seem to be using GitHub for their projects. It will use GitHub as a way to help add services to your development projects.
I wanted to know if this a bad way to go? Should I allow a native login? Various login types?
Thank you for your time and feedback on this issue. <comment><USER2> I don't have too much specific feedback, but I know one thing that has irked me in the past (and irked users of services I've worked on) is when the OAuth permissions requested are very broad. For example, why request "write" access to a resource if you don't need it? In other words, ask for the bare minimum permissions from the user that your app may require to function.

What stack are you developing in? Maybe there's a solution like [https://github.com/intridea/omniauth](https://github.com/intridea/omniauth) available that you could utilize if applicable.

Hope that's helpful and good luck :)

<comment><USER3> Having written a couple of Github-based applications, Github permissions are fairly non-granular. My specific complaint with Github oAuth permissions is that if I want read access to private repositories (which I already feel guilty asking for, but genuinely need) I _must_ also request write access (which I have completely no need for, and am uncomfortable having).

You're completely correct in that asking for unnecessary permissions is gauche, but with Github specifically, they make it nearly impossible to be a responsible custodian. It's quite bothersome, and to the extent that I've written an application that I think could have a moderate revenue stream if I released to the world, but I only use it for myself exclusively because I am that uncomfortable asking for write permissions on private repos that I don't need or want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that is my problem too. GitHub seems like a natural fit for a B2D service, but the permissions is a problem. I don't want to piss of devs.

<comment><USER3> Pissing off devs is bad, but yeah, my main thing is that securing a website and database is hard enough, but fairly easy to mitigate.

If an attacker could gain write access to a customer's private repositories though, I feel like that would make an otherwise unattractive service far more of a target.

You're dead on though -- I've wanted to use Github oAuth for at least five different dev-oriented projects, but their permission system just makes it impossible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Updated Request for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/updated-request-for-startups/ <comment><USER3> Try to remember that this is probably just a marketing document for YC. It's aspirationally what they'd like people to think about YC startups. There's not much point in debating it. If you have a good idea in almost any field, they're going to consider it.

With 25 categories, their cost to saying "we'd like YC to help end global warming" is zero. As the world's leading early-stage investment vehicle, the cost to them leaving out, say, adtech is also zero: the same people will apply either way.

<comment><USER4> Baseless cynicism is not helpful.

Technically you aren't false, this could be just a PR thing, but why would you assume that?

"YC requests these startups because they want these startups" is a much simpler explanation than "YC requests these startups as a marketing ploy".

I don't see a good reason to be so skeptical, so I will go ahead and take this post at face value.

Obviously everyone should think for themselves, and if your startup doesn't fit these categories you should apply anyway (as the article says). I'm just saying that assuming they're being honest here is valuable to me, as a guideline for thinking about startup ideas and YC's vision for the future.

Dismissing this stuff (without a good, specific argument) would hurt more than it helps.

<comment><USER5> It's always interesting to see how different people read the same text. The sentences I focussed on were:

> _" There's not much point in debating it. If you have a good idea in almost > any field, they're going to consider it."_

And I read them as basically saying (a) if you're working on something cool that's not on this list, don't let that prevent you from applying as it's likely not a list of criteria; and (b) while it might be a jumping off point for conversation, it's likely missing the intent if you spend much time criticizing what's omitted and included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The world's financial systems are increasingly unable to meet the demands of > consumers and businesses.

I would love to learn more about this. Precisely what needs are the world's financial systems unable to meet?

<comment><USER7> In my opinion, the main issue with many financial services today is heavy regulation.

This may be good regulation and necessary, but it makes it very difficult for consumers to do simple things like transferring money and setup accounts. Especially for lower income people who tend to have difficulty getting together all the required identification and documentation.

And it seems that any "innovation" in this regard will be companies attempting to skirt these regulations, only to be eventually reined in when they get popular enough to be used for fraud or other nefarious purposes.

<comment><USER8> The solution to this is simple: allow the USPS to offer banking services to the unbanked. This is what other first world countries do, but for political reasons, we don't do it in the US [1]. Financial regulation is not going away, and the issues you see with cryptocurrency make it glaringly obvious why regulations exist in the first place.

That's what's so discouraging about a lot of these issues. They're hacks around political apathy, the chances of success are low (to this day I still use the Standard Treasury and BankSimple outcomes as what happens when you go up against the banking industry).

Why YC doesn't stop skirting the issue and align with political representatives and parties that are congruent with the values they're attempting to push through funding is beyond me. They've already chosen a side (looking for solutions for climate change, animal welfare, support of the arts/creators, sustainable use of planetary resources), embrace it fully. If YC wants to create a legacy, they should aim to obsolete themselves by working towards public policy that removes the risk inherant with becoming an entrepreneur (funding, health insurance, derisking opportunity cost, etc).

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=usps+banking+services](https://www.google.com/search?q=usps+banking+services)

[1a] [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie- sanders-lets-turn-post-offices-into-banks/411589/)

Full disclosure: I work for a financial utility in risk management.

<comment><USER9> The USPS lost $2.7B last year, even though it has a monopoly on mail. Why anyone would want to give it more responsibility is beyond me.

<comment><USER10> > The USPS lost $2.7B last year, why anyone would want to give it more > responsibility is beyond me.

The loss comes from having to serve literally the entire country by law. A postal service in cities is profitable - a postal service that has to serve even the remotest ditch in the deepest desert of a flyover state with daily mail will always incur loss. And that is what society is for: to bear the cost of providing everyone in the country with affordable mail.

To add banking services to the unbanked (or those who do not trust the megabanks any more, given their historic lack of customer support and historically low image) is something that can very well be used to offset these losses.

<comment><USER9> So the postal service loses money because it's mandated by law that it has to serve the entire country. But mandating that it has to provide banking services for the entire country is going to save money? Ok.

<comment><USER11> When you receive a money transfer does your bank send a truck out to your remote mountaintop cabin to drop it in your mailbox?

Providing basic banking services at a post office is not nearly as big a proposition as delivering mail to every address in the country.

Plus banking services are touched less frequently than mail. I get junk mail every day. I don't know the exact logistics of what they're suggesting, but I have a hard time seeing how it could be as expensive as mail delivery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am hesitant to ask this as it seems you only hear about young folks being accepted into YC and succeeding. But I also know that YC thinks differently - so here goes:

I am a 62 year old solo founder working on my fifth startup - all have been bootstrapped and successful to varying degrees. How much does age factor into YC's acceptance decision - if at all. What is the oldest founder YC has ever accepted? Thanks!

<comment><USER13> Well, the oldest founder in the 2015 Winter batch (first I could find data on) was 66: [https://phaven- prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/...](https://phaven- prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/1364942/Lmk2_Us-- C7NsS4g6iJGzQbXU_8/YC-infographic_v4.png)

<comment><USER14> But most are 20-30 ...

<comment><USER15> I dont have the data but probably most applicants are 20-30 too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This list always strikes me as a remarkable assembly of the cultural norms important to the "ycombinator" demographic.

To me it reads as an eclectic mix of academic, governmental, business and technology opinions in the guise of startup ideas. Not that there's anything wrong with that... ycombinator is free to invest in the areas it cares about. But it is very isolated from my own cultural experience of what matters and makes a real difference in the world.

<comment><USER17> > _my own cultural experience of what matters and makes a real difference in > the world._

Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER18> Not your parent, but I come from a pretty rural area, which is what a lot of people would call the "real world." The people who live there certainly would.

Many startups are 100% irrelevant there. Take huge poster children like Uber, for example: everyone has a car already, as it's basically mandatory. Or smaller startups, like Slice, for example. I live in NYC. I have lots of pizza options. I love pizza. In my hometown, there are two pizza places. You don't really need reviews, you order from one, and if you don't like it, well, you have the other one.

Now, that's not to say that there are _zero_ startups that do; not that Facebook or Twitter are exactly "startups" today, but when they were, they still had a big impact. But a _lot_ of startups are focused on "upper middle class people who live in population centers". That's a lot of people, but it also leaves a lot of people out.

<comment><USER19> > _which is what a lot of people would call the "real world."_

[https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban- population-w...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population- what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/)

80% of the population lives in urban areas, and this fraction is increasing, so it's unsurprising that most companies target them.

<comment><USER18> I don't disagree. At the same time, the long tail is something startups claim to be good at, generally...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Self-taught non-US teenager here, created this with a co-founder & friend: [https://financi.io/](https://financi.io/) \-- we're an open, anonymous, and inclusive marketplace for creators to collect payments for their premium content through cryptocurrencies.

It is currently being used by adult entertainers, which didn't bring in as much money as we expected, so we plan to pivot and add nsfw filtering options (a la Safe Search) amongst other features before applying to YC. Any other tips to improve our application?

P.s. I wrote all the code for financi and will be happy to answer any questions in comments or `mail@${username}.com`.

</comment><comment><USER21> I find it interesting on the support creators side it is purely about easing getting money. That is certainly important, but I feel like it ignores exploring more ways to ease the act of creation, giving ways to increase rate of creation or improve ability to prepare etc.

We developers create a lot of this sort of stuff to make our own jobs easier, but other types of creatives don't necessarily have the ability to explore the same space for their own work. I think there are opportunities there to be explored, if we can just find the right places to inject possibility. I have one idea I'm working towards now for writers (as that's my secondary interest after dev) but I bet there are ways to help musicians, painters, etc as well we haven't even begun to dream of yet.

<comment><USER22> The problem in that space has nothing to do with money or reaching fans. It is that to succeed as an artist via online tools, your primary skill must be marketing. All the existing sites bring success not to the best creators, but to the best marketers of their creations.

Or, I guess I should say, reaching fans is the problem... but it isn't correlated with the quality of your work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Has YC ever provided the data around how many RFS startups get funded? What they attempted to do (starting biz model)? What they learned? Etc. I feel like this would be really interesting information to study.

</comment><comment><USER24> Was RFS Water removed from the list? I tried to apply for RFS Water last year, and while it was on this list, it wasn't in the application page dropdown when you actually apply. I emailed YC and asked about it, and was told it would be added shortly.

Looking now, I can't find any trace it ever existed. Was RFS Water deleted? The URL used to be [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#water](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#water). Thanks!

<comment><USER25> If you're working on a water startup, and you'd like to apply to YC, you should still do it. You can apply to YC with any type of company -- it doesn't have to line up with an RFS. Our blog post for water startups is still out there -- it's just not a current RFS. As I mentioned in a comment above, this isn't an exhaustive list of the ideas we'd like to fund.

<comment><USER24> Well, I think there's a lot of promise in weather modification for the purposes of transporting fresh water long distances. I'm probably not ready to apply right now for that idea, but if someone is out there working on that, good job and we should chat.

<comment><USER26> Looking at shooting silver iodide pellets up in the sky or painting deserts black? Lots of issues with weather modification. Virtual water is the most cost effective way to transport water, by far, unless you have some crazy new product

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm very excited about this. Happy to answer any questions about Carbon Removal Technologies or Cellular Agriculture and Clean Meat

<comment><USER28> I'm surprised you think carbon removal from the atmosphere is relevant.

Just from a physics perspective, a dollar invested into substituting coal burning is likely to be many orders of magnitude more effective than first burning the coal to CO2, diluting it to 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, concentrating that CO2 back to some high percentage, maybe turn it CO2 to some higher density form of carbon again etc.

Every step requires a lot of effort, capital and energy.

The best way to store carbon is coal. And it's already there, in the ground.

<comment><USER29> I think the transition to near 100% renewable technologies is a foregone conclusion at this point: the economics of carbon-based fuels basically don't make sense any more, and it's just a matter of transitioning away. Natural gas has already basically killed coal and that transition is well under way, and renewables+batteries are now starting to eclipse natural gas peaker plants, transportation, etc.

But there's still 200 years of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to deal with.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, but if you're going for most bang for your buck, improving and making accessible renewable tech is still better value. I also think you'll have an easier route to profitability with alternative fuel over carbon removal.

Ultimately, I think carbon removal will be a necessary technology if we want to maintain a similar climate to what we have now, but it's farther out there. Would be awesome to see something come out though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, surprised to see "One Million Jobs" still here, from back when Uber was widely praised, and even so it encountered rampant skepticism[1]. Especially curious to see it on the same list as the "Future of Work" which implicitly contradicts its premise.

But hey, maybe there have been some compelling pitches for it. Does anyone have an idea for a One Million Jobs startup that isn't another transportation company?

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978163)

<comment><USER32> How many people make a living from YouTube? What about Twitch?

It is not only the people on the screen but people behind the scenes and managers and more.

<comment><USER33> >How many people make a living from YouTube?

Not many: "96.5% of all of those trying to become YouTubers won't make enough money off of advertising to crack the U.S. poverty line"

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-youtube- stardom-201802...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-youtube- stardom-20180228-story.html)

<comment><USER34> There's a whole ecosystem around it though - advertising agencies, video production equipment, etc. Then there's things like GoPro exist largely as a side-effect of social media networks like YouTube.

The real effects of YouTube on the global economy are pretty big!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've bootstrapped the last 3 years. I'm in the "supporting creators" category. 100k happy users so far.

I'm really hesitant to join YC because I feel like the personal touch of having a dozen companies per cohort is lost. Can anyone speak to that?

<comment><USER3> If you want to raise in the future, go. The stories you read about people effortlessly raising 1-3MM in syndicated convertible note rounds? A significant coefficient of how easy that turns out to be is "got accepted into YC".

<comment><USER35> Did you go through yc?

I've gone through techstars and I worry the new yc format will be more if the same.

<comment><USER3> Nope. We were invited for a previous startup but had no plans to raise. But I have close friends who have gone through YC, one of whom actually did something pretty close to a natural before/after experiment re: fundraising.

(Ironically: we have no plans to ever raise for Latacora, but because the YC alumni network is basically our entire customer base, we'd probably do it this time.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does this remind anyone else of the FSF High Priority Free Software Projects ?

[https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority- projects/](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Where is the actual updated RFS with descriptions of the new categories?

<comment><USER38> Bump. The links are broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Surprised to see "Supporting Creators" on here too. I thought Patreon (and others) had made meaningful progress on this front.

<comment><USER40> Patreon is another walled garden that can become much worse than Facebook if left in isolation. For the investors behind it it would be great, but I don't believe Patreon was a YC company? Which means its a huge untapped industry with only one major player that has consistently moved towards pulling creatives into their ecosystem and keeping them there while trying to increase revenues.

We _need_ , probably more than in any other use case besides general social media, a federated solution to patronage. We _cannot_ let Facebook et al happen again with crowdfunding and recurrent subscription services like Patreon. The kickstarter space has opened up to several options including the original Kickstarer, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, Fig, etc. That is a healthy competitive ecosystem and Kickstarter went public benefit so their general dominance in the market is less dangerous for it.

Patreon sits alone, and has been growing exponentially for years. They acquired their only ever major competitor, Subbable, in early 2015. Kofi is about as close to a competitor as they have, but its not the same thing in the slightest because its not automatic which is a fundamental part of what makes Patreon work.

The mindshare of creators Patreon has acquired should be terrifying to anyone who can see the writing on the wall about how this will just lead to a hegemony of Patreon controlling all the amateur and hobbyist and even some semi-professional small creative / online business ventures. And unlike most companies their revenue is plastered right in their face - all they need is a breakout moment into popular culture, which they really have not had yet - <USER2> number of people actively supporting anyone else on Patreon is still a small percentage of the whole Internet user population - but if they got that consumer breakout moment they would be unstoppable and way more directly dangerous and harmful in how many people are now making careers out of having a Patreon.

<comment><USER32> For completeness Gratipay[0] (formerly gittip) is also dead.

[0]: [https://gratipay.com/](https://gratipay.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If I have a really good idea, why would I need YC? Starting an ICO will likely give you 10-1000x more money.

<comment><USER42> You don't even need a good idea! You can just find a bunch of people trying to get rich quickly and sell them a bunch of tokens that will end up worthless!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Hmm. Just started something in the creator space over Christmas vacation, and its already profitable with over 180 brands signed on... the standard deal fits my budget and needs... but SF is a problem for my cofounder.

</comment><comment><USER44> Universal basic income, without knowing how YC Research experiment is going locally but assuming it is simply not feasible globally from a financial point of view. How make it work then? Good old collectivism works well with scientism. Not with giving cash in hand then but with crediting day-to-day points onto your ID card to be converted into the bare minimum food & drink to survive, think of a k-ration, from your local supermarket or automatic dispensing machines.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't see health technology in any of these lists. Is it not common in startups? I don't mean insurance related companies, more along the lines of hardware companies serving the medical or health care field.

<comment><USER46> "Healthcare" is #14, and it specifically mentions the areas of Diagnostics, Medical Devices, Pharmaceuticals, and Preventative Healthcare. Does that not cover what you're thinking of?

<comment><USER47> Are current Start-ups cross referenced to this list anywhere? I'd love to check out more of them in the Med-Device space, specifically, but I imagine a listing would be useful for other areas as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Curious, what was the thought process behind removing the 'News' and 'Mass Media' request for startups?

Not sure when they were removed exactly, just noticed now.

<comment><USER49> [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#safeguards](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#safeguards)

"now I am become death destroyer of worlds" and all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It seems blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are purposely absent from this list. Can we assume that YC is not interested in funding these types of startups?

<comment><USER51> I would say that "blockchain", as a concept, isn't a suitable category, in the same way that "mobile application" or "website" isn't.

Blockchain is a tool. The applications are varied. There are potential applications for blockchain technologies in each of the rfs categories.

<comment><USER50> Thank you for this answer. It makes a lot of sense. I suppose I was conflating blockchain technology with actual problems that it could solve. The same probably also applies to cryptocurrency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Would an applicant come off as unfocused if their bootstrapped startup actually hit a few of the items on the RFS list?

</comment><comment><USER53> Out of curiosity- why is detection of fake videos a hard problem? It sounds like a classification problem that a simple NN with enough data would be able to solve(?)

<comment><USER54> A lot of the scariest work in fake video lately has involved generative adversarial networks (GANs) whose whole optimization strategy as I understand it is to try to produce videos that can fool classifier/discriminator NNs, which are trained in parallel.

<comment><USER53> Right, and great point, but aren't the adversaries targeting a specific model? Are they agnostic to setups differences?

<comment><USER55> Some approaches target multiple models to come up with more general attacks. It's also worth noting that manipulations that will fool humans are starting to pop up as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The issue of longevity and aging seems to be one that is given significant attention by super rich people, who for obvious reasons would like a wonderful life of privilege to go on for as long as possible.

<comment><USER57> It's not just about living to 1000 years old. To me, it's more about solving age-related diseases, e.g. Alzheimer's, etc.

<comment><USER56> Yes of course to deal with aging you must tackle the many age related illnesses.

But I'm pointing out, with of the vast array of health related issues humanity faces, do venture capitalists care in particular about this one enough to put it in their investment hitlist?

Why, for example does YC care enough about aging to want to find it in particular, rather than say, well any other major field of human health research?

The answer is, "how can we spend our money to get more time on earth because after that it's worth nothing"?

Put another way "we'd like to live longer and we have the money if you can use it to work out how".

Look there's nothing wrong With this, it's human nature. Of course you use the means at your disposal to try to make life better, longer, healthier for yourself in any way. All I'm noting is that this thing about aging is something that the super rich have a particular focus on and that's why it's in this list.

If one of the VC who makes this list had a family member with a particular medical issue we'd likely see that here too as a desired funding area.

I suspect people are uncomfortable about this being pointed out because VCs like to project the idea that their work is to better everything and everyone, in Silicon Valley lingo to "make the world a better place", but this one is self serving, whilst being plausibly argued as being for the benefit of all humanity. And heck being self serving is OK too ... heck it's their money they can do with it whatever they want, no need to apologize for spending on yourself every now and then.

<comment><USER58> _Yes of course to deal with aging you must tackle the many age related illnesses._

Ideally it's the reverse. If you can prevent or repair the effects of aging, those conditions become much less harmful. 25 year olds don't have heart attacks or get Alzheimer's.

 _Why, for example does YC care enough about aging to want to find it in particular, rather than say, well any other major field of human health research?_

The payoff is potentially much greater. Curing all cancer would only increase life expectancy by 3.2 years, because if you don't die of cancer when you're 75 then you'll have a stroke at 78 ([https://www.quora.com/If-we-cure-cancer- so-nobody-dies-of-ca...](https://www.quora.com/If-we-cure-cancer-so-nobody- dies-of-cancer-how-much-would-that-extend-the-average-life-expectancy)). Eliminating the negative effects of aging would add many more years, plus they would be of much higher quality.

 _whilst being plausibly argued as being for the benefit of all humanity_

Aging is terrible for everyone, rich and poor. Arguably it's even worse for the poor; the increased medical expenses and decreased mobility and ability to work are much easier to deal with if you have several million dollars lying around.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I don't love the single responsibility principle - <AUTHOR> http://sklivvz.com/posts/i-dont-love-the-single-responsibility-principle <comment><USER2> Blindly following Robert Martin's princinples is plain stupid in itself. Martin often makes ridiculous statements based on his experience of not using various things and techniques, so one has to filter out what actually makes sense and when.</comment>


Open-sourcing Pushprom: our solution to Prometheus data retrieval issues - <AUTHOR> https://blog.messagebird.com/open-sourcing-pushprom-our-solution-to-prometheus-data-retrieval-issues-ba08ab0bb11d <comment><USER2> How is this different from [https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway) ?

<comment><USER3> I'm assuming it's the aggregation aspect: the pushgateway will overwrite existing values with the same grouping key. If I'm understanding this correctly, with pushprom each request could send a message like "http.bytes_sent" and you'd get a cumulative total, as you could with the statsd exporter but using the Prometheus data model.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is correct. Where pushgateway is specifically not an aggregator we do support it.

Happy to answer any more questions you might have!</comment></comment></comment>


What Apple's Money Can Buy - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/03/apple-dividend-tim-cook.html <comment><USER2> "Over the past five years, it has spent, on average, less than three per cent of its revenue on R.&D. Microsoft has spent fourteen per cent, Google thirteen, and Amazon five and a half."

Apple hasn't had to spend a lot on R&D to accomplish what it has so far. Why would simply spending more on it be any better?

"Whether true or not, the public eventually comes to believe that behind every great fortune lies a crime. Having a sweeping research lab, which continues to invent things that help both the company and the public, can soften a harsh reputation. That, in fact, is the model that Bell and Xerox used, more or less. They were both monopoly companies who got some slack because of all the good they did. Microsoft has created all kinds of important things through its extensive R.&D."

Sure this might have worked for those companies, but why should it be applied to Apple? Apple is clearly different in the way it operates. The thing is that this "harsh reputation" has largely been fueled recently by the Chinese labor problems which has been portrayed by sensationalist reporting. Is it really going to last that long? How long is it going to be before people forget about it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Long-term research isn't in Apple's DNA. They did it before, and it almost ended up killing them (cf. Knowledge Navigator).

They know this fact. Apple has been forthright about saying that they are a company that takes technologies that are 3-5 years out and bring them to fruition.

Look at Microsoft. They've spent hundreds of billions on advanced R&D. Where did it get them?</comment>


Apple to become most profitable company ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/06/18/apple-most-profitable-company-iphone-5-ipad-mini-itv/ <comment><USER2> wow bgr.com finally got some spam to the front page!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kemper>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zacharye>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=CitiiDB>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this video by Simon Sinek explains very well why Apple is successful. It's the motivation behind doing the things they do that matters, not just what they make. This tends to attract a lot of customers to think the same way, and believe in Apple's goals and philosophy.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4>

</comment><comment><USER4> I continue to hope that more companies will take the lesson from Apple and start doing more in-house engineering with a focus on quality and not the race to the bottom.

<comment><USER5> Cargo-cultism. Apple was doing both those things back in 1998 when they were going broke, and they could have just as easily gone broke doing 'em.

There are many ways to run a successful company. Some of 'em involve in-house engineering and a focus on quality, while others involve outsourcing all your engineering and focusing on cheap crap (see also: Wal-Mart, nearly as profitable as Apple).

<comment><USER6> Yeah, like Steve Jobs making sure the NeXT factory looked pretty by painting the robots is an example of silliness because NeXT failed. Yet if Apple showed that off in a product video today, it would be held up as attention to detail.

<comment><USER7> NeXT didn't really fail. They had a reasonably profitable exit by being bought by a large tech company, and subsequently basically took over the acquiring company and drove it to become incredibly successful.

But of course the popular image of NeXT is that it failed, so your point still stands entirely.

<comment><USER8> And perhaps most importantly, while it was an independent company, NeXT was operating under a very restrictive non-compete agreement that forced them to go after only low-volume segments.

<comment><USER7> I hadn't heard about that, do you have any links to more info? It sounds interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> AAPL Stock Chart 1984-2012: [http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#symbol=a...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#symbol=aapl;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined);

<comment><USER10> Wow is that highly deceiving.

You need to put stock charts on a log scale otherwise normal growing stocks (5% per year, say) always look like they are just about to peak.

Here is how it should look for the same time period:

[http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1339617600000&chddm=2779843&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:AAPL&ntsp=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it the most profitable company ever after accounting for inflation? Probably not, but would love to see some data on that.</comment>


The Art of Hollywood's Made-Up Languages, from Dothraki to Klingon [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/04/conlang-analysis/ <comment><USER2> It's a shame they didn't include Belter from The Expanse(from the little bit I watched). Ars[1] did a great interview with the creator a while back(minor spoilers in the episode summary before the podcast).

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/decrypted-the- expanse...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/decrypted-the-expanse-the- truth-is-never-what-you-expect-it-to-be/)

<comment><USER3> I loved the books, like the show, but wish it had a bigger budget . . .

<comment><USER4> I read the books after someone recommended it to me, then tried to watch the show but bounced off it in the first few minutes. Budget was obviously a fraction of what it needs to be but it was miller's casting that caused me to turn it off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Didn't Anthony Burgess make up the rudimentary language used in _The Quest for Fire_?

<comment><USER6> Also Nadsat in _A Clockwork Orange_ was his handiwork, influenced by Russian slang if I remember correctly. He wrote about that at one point I think (was a High School book report years ago).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's actually a book on this topic from the guy who did Dothraki for the GoT show. Haven't read it yet though I did buy it at some point. (no affiliate link)

[https://www.amazon.com/Art-Language-Invention-Horse-Lords- Wo...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Language-Invention-Horse-Lords-World- Building-ebook/dp/B00TY3ZMVG/)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent is great.

<comment><USER9> Upvoted; I love this book. Amazon recommended it to me out of the blue when I started studying Esperanto again and I went in totally blind; enjoyed it from start to finish.

Also, if you're interested in languages invented for TV and movies, read David Peterson's "The Art of Invented Languages", in which he describes how he created Dothraki and a whole bunch of other languages, including writing systems. As a linguist who would love to get into that kind of thing (and who has studied some very obscure languages which would make good influences), I totally enjoyed this. A little more technical than Arika Okrent's book, but still very accessible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I this article only 3 paragraphs long? I was expecting more. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER11> It's mainly a video, the text is just a caption.

<comment><USER10> Ok, thank you.

The video is blocked in my job. I just noticed the large white square in the article.

<comment><USER12> Is youtube accessible? The video is on Wired's Youtube channel too</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using evolving images for image compression: 256x256 image in 1k - <AUTHOR> http://www.screamingduck.com/Article.php?ArticleID=46&Show=ABCE

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind that when you're fitting a compression algorithm so close to the test cases, what you're really doing is pushing data from the test cases into the compression algorithm. For instance, prior knowledge that blurs are important gets pushed into the algorithm.

This is why when testing compression algorithms against each other you usually weigh the total of the code and the compressed versions of some common corpora which is large relative to what you expect code sizes to be.

If you don't do this, I mean, you can do lossless compression of the Mona Lisa into one bit while remaining able to display any other JPG. Check bits of input. If first bit is 1, then decompress into the Mona Lisa. If first bit is 0, the rest of the stream is a JPG, interpret as normal.

Still, I'm of the opinion that it remains an outrageously good tech demo for GAs. (Visual, easily described task, results anyone can appreciate, etc.)

<comment><USER3> I have been watching the development of this for a while, and I don't think that the algorithm has been tailored towards the test cases at all. The file format is extremely general (vertices forming polygons, color, alpha and blur per vertex). It's been fed anything and everything from around the net, but it takes so many days of computation to make the images look good that only a few examples were used in the article itself.

If anything, Mona Lisa and Lena were specifically chosen to be hard for a system like this to compress (fine brush detail does not mix well n sided polygons). Blur for example compensates for the shortcomings of polygon rendering to make the whole system more general purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am getting a whiff of a fractal image compression.

It was developed by none other than Michael Barnsley (of "Barnsley Fern" fractal fame) and it was the compression technique du jour in the early 90s. It looked _very_ interesting.

And then it got patented all over, which effectively inhibited any further academic research. The patent holding company (Iterated Systems) struggled with commercialization of the technology, so the practical applications never really took off either.

Too bad really. The idea of compressing an image down to a _formula_ was both elegant and damn smart. And so are these genetic algorithms. I just really hope they don't follow the path of the fractal ones.

<comment><USER5> it's actually turned out much worse than that. 1) fractal compression never worked very well, not for lack of trying. it's just a bad idea if you actually think about it. 2) the company is now involved in penny stock scams and is using the wikipedia to prop up their claims. see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fractal_compression> where the conclusions from the definitive research and the FAQ are being kept out of the article. i tried to keep the page sane, and in return i got a campaign of assassination run against me and my edits all over the wp.... which i won but i was unable to fight 2 editors back on this page. and then i ran out of time and gave up. anyway, if you can help, please do!

<comment><USER5> these are good: [http://math.lanl.gov/~brendt/Publications/wohlberg-1999-revi...](http://math.lanl.gov/~brendt/Publications/wohlberg-1999-review.shtml) [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression- faq/part2/section-8.htm...](http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression- faq/part2/section-8.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who are curious, ran some comparisons versus jpeg here (<http://www.flickr.com/photos/corylinden/3330168391/>). Short version is that, as expected, jpeg block artifacts completely overwhelm image at very low quality levels. Minimal jpeg file size ends up ~3k.

<comment><USER7> What I want to know is how their algorithm looks with _out_ the space constraints.

For any compression scheme to take hold, it'll need to handle both large and small files well.

Before looking at your comparison, I thought their pic looked like crap. Now it looks absolutely stunning given the comparison shots. But how would it look at 200kb? Does it compare (dis)favorably against JPEG then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool algorithm demo. How well would this compare to a very extreme JPEG compression?

Also, I'm not an image compression expert, but I wonder if you could use this technique as a pre-pass before a more standard image compression algorithm to improve the overall results. In other words, maybe subtract the image created using the polygons from the original image and then compress the result using JPEG (or something else more suitable?).

<comment><USER9> Very extreme jpeg pre 2000 compression would probably do considerably worse as it would degenerate into drawing in boxes of averaged color. jpeg200 would absolutely destroy this compression technique as it specifically uses a form of fourier analysis (wavelet analysis) which is _provably_ optimal for this kind of compression. In fact, AFAIK jpeg2000 is designed so that as more bit are read from a file, it is possible to get a better and more accurate picture -- one of the benefits of using a fourier-analysis like technique. Sort of like a compression on steroids. Getting a lower res. picture is only slightly more complicated than truncating the file and requires minimal processing.

<comment><USER10> "Provably optimal" always involves unwarranted assumptions. For example, least-squares fitting is provably optimal, assuming all your distributions are independent and gaussian. Image compression quality is all about sensitivity of the human visual system to various kinds of errors, so nothing can be proven optimal, ever.

<comment><USER11> Proving still retains value. Because you reduce the burden of choosing a good algorihtm to choosing good assumptions.

<comment><USER12> One common set of assumptions in image denoising is that:

1\. The pixels in the output image should be close in value to the corresponding pixels in the input image.

2\. Neighboring pixels in the output image should have similar values.

I wonder if anyone has compared compression techniques using these sorts of assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting how there's only one fitness loop comparing the accuracy of two polygon steps. This could totally be optimized with adding more comparisons to the fitness loop. This is awesome actually, and I have to say that this is one of the better genetic algorithm examples I've seen. 1k! woo!

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm getting a Bandwidth Limit Exceeded message. Looks like talking about such a technology would bring huge traffic ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> does GA and GP behave somewhat predictable then? Couldn't it, if you are unlucky, take a very long time to converge?

<comment><USER16> Going by the javascript version he was inspired by, it takes a long time to converge if you are lucky (I kept it running for several days on and off). If you're unlucky, it doesn't converge before you get bored.

<comment><USER17> It's actually not so bad. It's just JavaScript and maybe my code (I wrote JS version).

Roger Alsing (who was the original author and inspiration) did later an optimized compiled parallel version that was able to get Mona Lisa in 1 minute 34 seconds (on a 64 bit 4 core machine).

[http://rogeralsing.com/2009/01/04/scaling-clustere- evolution...](http://rogeralsing.com/2009/01/04/scaling-clustere- evolution-1-1-4/)

Also there are supposed to be some efforts to run it on GPU, which should be even faster.</comment></comment></comment>