Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason - <AUTHOR> https://www.andyibanez.com/posts/please-help-apple-threatening-terminate-apple-developer-account/ <comment><USER2> And Apple is not even an isolated case.

Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim.

Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world.

For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10.

Paypal may refuse to pay the money you have on their account at any moment. Your money, no appeal.

Twitter and facebook censorship rules are on a case by case basis. If your famous, you may be able to use hate speech. I you are an anonymous political activist, China may ask for your shut down.

Big companies exist to make money. If they get too much power, they will abuse it. Not because they are evil, but because it's the logical thing to do for them.

This is why I was advocating in another comment that we should not use WhatsApp new payment system:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553455)

Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That's why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc.

They are votes, just as much as during an election.

<comment><USER3> >Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world.

That is why I am absolutely against abolishing paper cash.

Edit: I know there are countries where you have a democratically elected representatives and every part of the government and even companies is held ( more or less ) accountable to the people and does not need to worry ( much ) about big business or government taking over some basic right. Yes cashless in that case is great. Is like utopian.

Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury.

<comment><USER4> At one point abolishing paper cash is even remotely plausible? maybe in 100 years? So far cash rules majority of the world and I don't see it going away any time soon.

<comment><USER5> Cash is already going away in some countries.

Almost nobody pays for anything with cash in the UK anymore.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure that applies generally, and not just to you and people like you?

<comment><USER5> I don't live in the South East and I'm not in a tech bubble, if that's what you mean.

<comment><USER7> I am in the South and use cash quite frequently, as do many other people I see or know. I think your definition of 'almost nobody' may be more than you appreciate.

>> Almost nobody pays for anything with cash in the UK anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of post infuriates me. As an iOS developer for 10 years, i can guarantee you that there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of stories like that, with people getting shut down for no good reason, and having their business killed.

It's now so bad people are refraining from trying out innovative business model or apps just because they think there could be a chance someone at apple validation wouldn't like it and kill the product at any time.

I wish the Hey story makes people realize it is not reasonable to have one actor control the only software distribution channel to hundred of millions of customers.

I'm fine with apple wanting to provide a highly curated experience to their users by having them download apps from a store they control. But this shouldn't be the _only_ option.

<comment><USER9> > i can guarantee you that there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of > stories like that, with people getting shut down for no good reason, and > having their business killed

How about Apple telling me they don't like my business bank (a well known UK bank I've been with for 10 years) and simply refusing to set up the account. In a very cold, "go away already", manner. I wasn't going to kill the relationship with my business bank just because Apple told me to, so the app never got onto App Store and I shut down my dev account.

<comment><USER10> OT: why do you care which bank you're in?

<comment><USER11> Why would you allow Apple to decide which bank you must use?

<comment><USER10> My bank doesnt support Google Pay so I switched. Life is full of obstacles but we should go around them and not through them. Only person you hurt in your case is yourself. Or you didn't really want to bother with the whole thing anyway so you stopped at the first issue

<comment><USER12> The person you replied to is not the same one from the original story. And there are many reasons to prefer one bank to another; in the poster's case, switching to an Apple-supported bank might have introduced more obstacles to go through than it would have avoided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I keep reading these comments on HN of people trying to guess on what the reason is Apple, Google or who else is terminating accounts, apps, videos or monetizing opportunities. Usually accompanied by a tone of voice telling people they should have known better. The point is: Your guess is as good as mine.

The fact is that those companies are not telling people what they did wrong and even more persuasive these days not explaining why their apparent transgression is leading to a particular punishment. Or how that transgression fits the punishment. I for one will not subject myself to such a form of tyranny.

In this case even if having your app in TestFlight too long, why is now (3 years in) the time to revoke the app? Having 200 test users is too much. Why not tell people beforehand they exceeded a limit if that is your rule?

Lets say you are invited into a country as a citizen, but the conditions are: You can be punished arbitrarily, even banished, without recourse, harassed, given arbitrary commands by minions. You pay a 30% tax on all your proceeds, but your proceeds are your sole responsibility. There is no right to have your grievances addressed by the tyrant, not even by one of the lower minions. Would you go? I will not. Now say you already find yourself in such a country. I'm sorry for you. I think I would organize and try to collectively have those rights improved.

</comment><comment><USER14> > The big problem is that when Apple tells you that the reasons "are not > limited" the ones they listed, it could be anything. They could call my face > ugly and remove me from the Developer Program under that reason and tell me > it was because of "fraud".

<rant>

Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily. Contact us.". Instead it is just "We closed your account. Get screwed.".

This is why so many developers are going the web app way these days. Dealing with a closed platform who won't even talk to you is just infuriating.

Sorry for the rant.

<comment><USER15> > _Sorry for the rant._

Don't apologize, your rant is valid and unfortunately this issue is not limited to Apple. Google is infamous for closing accounts and sending an automated message along the lines of "You may have violated a rule. We won't tell you which rule, and we won't offer proof, deal with it." They don't just do this to their free users, it's happened to businesses using paid Google services for their core infrastructure. It's maddening that a corporation can get so big that it's effectively a human walking through an ant hill, oblivious to the thousands or even millions of lives it's disrupting in the name of moving forward and making profits.

<comment><USER16> Not defending, but look at it from the attacker's point of view: The more information the target divulges about their process, the more accurate a playbook you are able to develop about what kinds of attacks the target will and won't allow.

When you type your password into your computer, if you do it incorrectly, you get a generic error like "That didn't work, try again". If instead the OS gave out more specific hints, like "Your username is good but your password isn't" and "You tried 9 characters, but your password is not 9 characters", it would only make things easier for the attacker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can only speak for myself, but I have had a number of interactions with the review team, and I have _always_ ended up communicating with a human; although they would often paste "talking points" into their replies.

Because of the nature of a couple of my apps, I've had them bounced for "providing commonly available services" (i.e. competing with OS tools). In each instance, I have appealed, citing some unique features, and have prevailed.

I think that reviewers have a number of "1-button" responses, provided by some kind of dashboard, in order to ensure a narrative is maintained. This is actually common for many customer interaction scenarios. I don't like it, but understand why it happens.

I'll bet that the more heated an exchange gets, the more "canned" these responses become, because...lawyers. He may, in fact, be communicating with a human, who keeps hitting canned response buttons (not much different from 'bots).

I've wondered whether or not folks might use TestFlight for "shadow release." I have seen app makers use Enterprise in that fashion. I have no idea (or opinion) on whether or not that was the case, here.

I'm not sure I would want to pursue my case in the court of public opinion. It's a risky gambit, but this chap may feel he has nothing to lose.

 _EDIT: One thing that I should mention, is that I never have a release in TestFlight for more than a few days. It has a "time bomb"; I think, maybe 60 or 90 days. That means, in order to maintain an app in TF for three years, he'd need to keep re-releasing every couple of months. That speaks to some kind of intent._

<comment><USER18> _I've wondered whether or not folks might use TestFlight for "shadow release."_

They are. I know a real estate company that distributes its app to its customers that way. I don't know why they do it, but it's annoying not to be able to just download it from the App Store like a normal app.

<comment><USER17> _> I know a real estate company that distributes its app to its customers that way._

That's insane. Their brand must be in the toilet. This guy has a "niche" product that is probably only of interest to a few geeks. A real estate company, on the other hand, has a brand that it needs to protect and project.

Also, I'll bet they will get to interact with the account fraud department, sooner or later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TestFlight has its limitations, unfortunately. It is not a distribution platform, it is not intended to be active for longer than 90 days without updates and should not be monetized

[https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#bet...](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/#beta-testing)

I encourage you to read through the entire AppStore guidelines, there might be more sections that apply to Apple's decision to terminate the account

I didn't read through all of your privacy policy on the app's website, but definitely worthwhile to cross check it with the AppStore guidelines as well.

<comment><USER20> I don't see the 90 days rule in those guidelines.

As others have said, GMail was 5 years in beta, it's normal for products to be in beta for years as long as they are not monatized. Maybe he didn't get the updates reviewed according to the guidelines though.

<comment><USER19> Yeah maybe this was it. Any significant changes must be reviewed again.

But from the way it sounds the author was not actively developing the application, so I am not sure how many changes went into each 90 day revision, perhaps Apple does not look kindly on resubmitting a build just for the sake of resetting the TestFlight 90 day activity counter. This might be seen as a way to try and avoid deployment and the final app review process.

The 90 day counter is mentioned here [https://testflight.apple.com/](https://testflight.apple.com/) Look for it under "Testing"

From the way I have understood the 90 day counter before is that the app should be updated with new functionality/patches to be more beta tested, otherwise your app is obviously not being developed so no need for beta testing anymore

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For someone who's considering getting into Apple Developer program: should Apple Developer account be separate from primary Apple ID used across devices?

And if not, and a single Apple ID is also used for development, (1) can it remain intentionally unassociated with any payment method in any specific country, and (2) is there a threat of losing it if Developer account is terminated for some unfathomable reason?

<comment><USER22> If your personal Apple ID is on most of your devices, absolutely.

If it's a business ID then I'd still say you have little to lose by using a separate one for the Dev account. You can even switch IDs on iOS for using the App Store if you need to login using the dev account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> An interesting spin of the story would be if Apple announced an intel to arm migration kit called "Mignori" next week at WWDC...

</comment><comment><USER24> I really hate this current reality of having to use social media channels for a chance of proper customer support. Are there any initiatives that are working against this? I would be happy to contribute to any kind of platform or movement or whatever that aims to mitigate/fix this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Apple's decisions in the last 5 years are causing more and more of my developer friends to move away. Bringing back the escape key on the MacBook Pro won't change that.

If Apple were not years behind PWA integration, switching to a PWA instead of native app might be an option. But this is sadly not in Apple's interest.

I wonder how many people will choose Android over Apple in the future because of PWAs. I can imagine there will be a flood of useful PWAs, freely to use and only fully working on Android, not Apple.

</comment><comment><USER26> At this point I am hopeful (but not optimistic) that the EU competition/antitrust investigation [1] might go somewhere and get an outcome. The trouble with investigations like these, as we all know from previous cases, is they tend to drag on rather than yield rapid outcomes.

In this case, it seems we've sleepwalked into a situation where there are conflicts of interest like never really seen before - companies with global scale, able to arbitrarily decide which competition they wish to allow to be present on "their" marketplace, and make them either raise their price by 30%, or be 30% less profitable.

Resolving these conflicts, and recognising these aren't simple "creation of a moat", but rather some actual, tangible, anti-competitive practices would be a good starting point. But what is the outcome? Apple's view is "we're protecting users from bad things on the internet", but perhaps this kind of arbitrary decision-making is not one to be getting made arbitrarily?

[1] [https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1073)

<comment><USER27> We already have the cookie law. Do you need another gift from EU?

<comment><USER26> GDPR itself is a lot more than the "cookie law", and in my view most people are mis-interpreting and mis-applying it. Any site that won't let you in without accepting their tracking cookies is actually breaking GDPR.

If we enforced the law as written, I think the "cookie law" would be a net positive for everyone.

In terms of who deals with the anti competitive situation, I don't think that matters. But this is textbook market distortion that traditional antitrust laws were made for, and I think it's high time we saw them used to break up anti-competitive market practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "In the last few days, Next Anime Episode has started to receive an unusual number of 1-Star reviews and all in a quick sucession, so I am starting to think that someone is targetting me for god knows what reason"

Speculation but my money would be on some unethical competitor or even just a jerk who doesn't like Andy is spamming negative reviews and reported him to Apple for fraud. Since I've never heard of this happening, I don't know if Apple's fraud department takes a guilty-until-innocent approach or if they agreed fraud occurred. Either way the lack of transparency and communication is not right. I'll echo sentiments that I've spoken to humans about app issues but never about fraud.

</comment><comment><USER29> > _I know of developers who were instantly terminated and all their apps > removed. Luckily this has not happened to me._

Well there you have it. The rest of devs will be happy they're still under Apple's wing, and nothing will change.

</comment><comment><USER30> The problem with all these "Apple is being nasty to me" stories that have been appearing recently is that there appears to be a strong smell of "two sides to every story".

I have not read the blog post above fully, but a speed-read suggests that the author was publicly distributing an app through TestFlight rather than App Store.

I am not accusing anyone of anything here. But _if_ my speed-read is accurate, then its not at all surprising Apple have taken issue with him.

TestFlight is a dev tool. Its not for production deployment. Its meant for beta testing.

<comment><USER31> Author says that he develops app in his free time, did not have time to push it to app store properly and that he has 200 beta testers. Apps with a public invitation link for testing are common and if the delay is the problem here, then Apple should have said so.

What's completely unacceptable here is that Apple does not specifically say what the author did wrong and this can't be defended by apologists.

What is surprising or not coming from Apple is irrelevant, stop normalizing this abusive behavior from app store gate keepers.

<comment><USER32> > Author says that he develops app in his free time, did not have time to push > it to app store properly and that he has 200 beta testers. Apps with a > public invitation link for testing are common and if the delay is the > problem here, then Apple should have said so.

I agree that Apple's lack of communication with developers is a massive problem, but I also think there are a couple of gaps in his story that need filling in.

TestFlight betas expire after a short amount of time – one or two months, if I remember correctly. He says the application has been available through TestFlight for three years. This means that he will have had to publish a new build well over a dozen times to keep it active for this amount of time. And if it's already on TestFlight with external testers, it's really not much effort at all to push it live. The build is already in Apple's system – you've got to fill out a couple more form fields and click submit.

So looking at it that way… he gets hundreds of users, keeps pushing new builds to those users on a regular basis for _three years_ , but never submits it to go through the public App Store review process. If I were Apple, I'd think he was probably trying to bypass the review process as well. Apps with a public invitation link are common, but this behaviour is not.

But yes, they should talk to him about it and this is a failure on Apple's part even if he is acting suspiciously. I've been saying for a while that Apple need a VP of Developer Relations to take ownership of this type of thing, because it seems clear nobody owns it at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The consequence of playing in a walled garden.

Is there still no way to release an iPhone app out with the iOS app store?

<comment><USER34> yes, you can i heard instacart for example uses their enterprise cert signed app for their drivers/deliverers. Drivers are instructed to go into settings and change things to allow loading that app

<comment><USER35> I wouldn't call that an alternative to the App Store, as that's exactly what the enterprise certs are for - internal distribution to employees (or more likely in this case to be contractors but whatever). Getting regular users to go in to settings and change things just to install your app is not feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> From what I understand, in the free market system we consider things to be anti-competitive, anti-consumer, etc. when a corporation has some kind of market dominance acquired through earning the trust of consumers, and once they have obtained that trust, they abuse it by imposing a set of self-serving conditions on the market which serves their own interest in some way at the cost of some other player in the market - either consumer or competitor or someone else.

To enable this countries and regions have drafted laws to govern what business and trade practices are permissible.

Some non-rhetorical questions out of curiosity because I genuinely don't know:

Is it illegal for supermarkets to only partner with certain brands and carry their products over those of their competitors? If there is only 1 Walmart within driving distance of 50,000 people, and that Wal-Mart chooses to throw out all toilet paper brands and sell their store brand, is this allowed under current law? What if they allow the brand to stay if they pay an additional whimsical commission to Wal-Mart? Is that legal?

Is there something that makes the App store different from the physical store equivalent?

Putting aside the letter of the law, does it violate the aforementioned "spirit" of the law? i.e. ought there be laws against this kind of behaviour? I am sure there are good arguments for both sides.

<comment><USER37> The App Store is different than in your example. In your example, I could put up a store myself called Toilet Paper Warehouse, and probably be successful in that town given that nobody else sells the toilet paper consumers desire. Whereas if the App Store is Walmart, then the iPhone is the town, but the town has a law on the books that says "No stores except Walmart can be in this town!". Consumers don't get the toilet paper they value, and Walmart can control the supply. In exchange, Walmart makes sure that nobody sells toilet paper with poison ivy on it, and guarantees that residents will have to go to the bathroom less than if they sold non-Walmart toilet paper.

The problem is that the iPhone itself isn't a monopoly. You can buy an Android phone that can access any store and install any app you want, so monopoly law doesn't apply (in the strictest sense). Now, one could say that you shouldn't have to move towns just because your favorite toilet paper isn't sold. But as it stands today, you have to, as I understand it. (With that being said, Apple, start acting right.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The article doesn't pass the smell test to me.

By his own description of what it does, I'd say the app is highly likely to be selling access to content that the author hasn't licensed, and is on sketchy copyright grounds.

Also, the fact that a vote manipulation app...

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa- democractic-...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic- caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store)

...was distributed via a test platform with the financial backing of former Clinton and Obama / recent Pete Buttigieg staffers...

[https://apnews.com/5232ce5601996c1de440806ad30fa4fb](https://apnews.com/5232ce5601996c1de440806ad30fa4fb)

...has likely put Apple in the position of being compelled to more actively police what goes on in test apps. I get the knee-jerk tendency to blame corporate oppression of indie developers since that is usually what we see from the Googles and Microsofts of the world, but Apple has little monetary interest in kicking a successful app developer off of their ecosystem, unless that app developer is blatantly flaunting civil / criminal statutes or trying to scam Apple out of their cut of the profit.

If I had a to guess I'd say this guy is doing both.

<comment><USER39> If you read the article, you'll find that the app itself doesn't even _link_ to any content by default and you have to explicitly enter a data source yourself.

Also, I'd say referring to that app (however problematic it was, and I agree they did a terrible job building and deploying it) as a "vote manipulation app" is unnecessarily inflammatory.

> distributed via a test platform with the financial backing of former Clinton > and Obama / recent Pete Buttigieg staffers This implies that TestFlight has > financial backing from those groups. Maybe that's just unclear wording, but > interpreted as written the claim is unsupported by the provided source.

Assuming you meant to say the Iowa caucus app was supported by those former staffers, it should be clarified that the company who made the app also provided services to those campaigns. I wouldn't consider Shadow Inc. to be competent as a technology company, but it doesn't surprise me that Democrats would buy political tech from a company founded by people who worked on digital outreach for the most recent Democratic presidential campaign.

<comment><USER38> I read the article, I still think this is a fine line that overall points to a nefarious intent, I suppose we can debate which one it is...

1) Desire to cut Apple out of their share by trying to monetize a test app

and/or

2) Desire to escape the review process which might flag and reject an app designed to allow the user to easily fetch data from source that would be in violation of copyright laws.

This is relevant to the political example for a similar reason. Sure, we can say there's nothing wrong with the judge in a politician's criminal trial being seen with the politician in a restaurant after the politician's acquittal.... on the same day (look up Edwin Edwards and you'll see examples of just that), but it certainly does look bad, doesn't it? Similarly we can say that people from the vote counting app and their investors being seen in a bar with the guy responsible for failing to count the votes is not necessarily nefarious, but when the guy who counts the votes fails to count the votes in a way that favors the candidate whose staffers were also at the same get together at the same bar, it sure does look bad, doesn't it?

There's no reason for a guy with a successful app to fail to launch it and monetize it, unless he's trying to skirt Apple's rules in some way. It's just a matter of what way he's trying to game their system, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> You get the same thing with YouTube creators (plus they get bogus or spurious copyright flags with the same result). If we're going to have these big platforms (and I'd include Steam, Amazon, YouTube etc) then we need to have legislation giving their clients basic, non-waivable rights to a quick and independent review and reasonable treatment. Sadly the law seems to be headed in the opposite direction (requiring platforms to do more "moderation").

</comment><comment><USER41> `While the first version of this app was on the App Store from 2014 to 2016, I removed it in that last year because the app stopped working properly with most Boorus, and it was broken for most users. Since then, I started developing a new version called "Mignori 3", which has never hit the App Store. It has been on TestFlight for a while.`

So basically he was calling something a 'beta' and distributing it through Testflight for 3 years.

Yep, no clear reason here. Big Apple bad!

Apple has a lot of problems, and I agree, but most of these 'developer stories about mean Apple' always have two sides of the story. I remember the same outrage about Kapeli's Dash situation, and then came out an account in his name was doing fraudulent activities ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12680131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12680131) )

<comment><USER42> So it was in beta for three years. What of it? That's hardly fraudulent. If something is in beta, then it's... in beta. He wasn't selling it.

<comment><USER41> He was using Testflight to distribute it on his website. This has been a nono to do for a long time. You may not agree with it, but them are the rules.

<comment><USER42> You are speculating though. Do you know for sure that is the fraudulent activity that Apple are referring to?

<comment><USER41> No, I can't say for sure, but it is _A_ reason to terminate the account, and since this post is called 'Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason' I believe it is the case. We will never know the real reason as Apple probably won't provide it, but there is a violation of their rules, even if the termination was because something else, they are still entitled to close it based on the violation.

<comment><USER42> I do t see why it is so hard for Apple to explain what in particular he was doing wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Might be that they just don't like the idea of image board browser. Apple is somewhat strict on what kind of content the apps are providing to user (See "Objectionable Content" [1])

Techically this is of course just like web browser, but Apple could see it differently.

[1] Objectionable Content

<comment><USER44> Then you reject the app in App Review, not terminate the account for "Fraud"

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Where are the people arguing that it's fine because private companies can do whatever they want?

</comment><comment><USER46> > All the skills I have built over the course of almost a decade are obsolete > now, because I do not imagine myself working for other people as an iOS dev > without having my own hobby iOS apps on the App Store. It feels like all the > blogging I have been doing has been a waste because I cannot participate in > the knowledge I myself write, and it's pointless to engage in the knowledge > of others if I cannot try what they write.

The fact that a faceless entity can lock you out of developing like this is just wrong. I fear for the future of such closed off ecosystems.

</comment><comment><USER47> Oh FFS, well, up to the top you go. Maybe someone at Apple will see this and poke their friends in App Store Review or something.

We really shouldn't have to do that kind of shit.

</comment><comment><USER48> Startup idea for anyone who is interested:

Paid customer service where the customer pays money (say $100-$1k depending on how serious the issue is) and each company can have a special channel to respond to these paid requests and be compensated (say 80% of the fee the customer pays). That way companies will have the will and ability to attend to serious issues and filter them out from the "useless" customer requests that flood any large size business.

<comment><USER49> The companies that want to sell dedicated support and the people who want to buy it are already selling and buying it. And since, outside of FOSS that the customer controls hosting of, and some other special cases, only the original vendor, with whom the user will have interacted to get the software, will be able to provide support, so there's not a lot of matchmaking/discovery to be done to justify a middleman taking a cut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Irony. You can publish a book without a publisher right now. But you have to rely on publisher will if you want to publish an app.

</comment><comment><USER51> We need third party app stores and there should be a section on the Apple App Store dedicated for installing these.

<comment><USER52> This.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I once had Apple reject an iOS app update citing IP violations because we had an in-app settings page using a stock UITableViewController with default UITableViewCells with UISwitch in the accessory view (on the right) and vanilla text. Literally no styling.

Apparently it looked too much like the iPad Settings app.

Insane.

</comment><comment><USER54> That's why I often don't bother with Apple. If it doesn't work on OSX or iOS, too bad. People have to learn that Apple is not good for them or for society and I'm happy to make my products unavailable to Apple users to help them to learn that valuable life lesson.

Just find an alternative business strategy that doesn't rely on Apple. You can't rely on them. They don't give a crap about developers and never have. Why do all developers keep enabling them? Seriously, just sacrifice a small % of your income by ignoring Apple and you will help make the world a better place. Developers have to stand up for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER55> I specifically opened HN just now to see if there were any negative posts about Apple, given that WWDC is in a few days, and like clockwork, there it is.

<comment><USER56> What are you implying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> here's my thought on the "raging" debate -- what if, just what if, we are free to set up "stores" where our computing devices can connect to without liability and with the same level of complexity as with the default one being offered up? walled gardens create opportunities for abuse, which, unfortunately for us hapless developers, impose yet another level of bureaucracy.

</comment><comment><USER58> We do need legislation here.

I would suggest requiring cause to be stated for account termination or threatened termination, and a formal right of appeal to request evidence.

Of course this would be onerous for the smallest businesses, so we'd need some threshold for when it kicks in. E.g. 2 years, or $1,000 of transactions.

This wouldn't make any particular kind of termination illegal. It would simply force transparency, so that then if there really are abuses or patterns of abuse taking place, we can expose them.

It would also apply to all businesses - Google, Banks, Gyms, whatever.

</comment><comment><USER59> Had a horror experience with PayPal. Lost tons of cash. Getting paid became incredibly difficult.

</comment><comment><USER34> where is this ? [https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/13/tech/apple-app-store- supreme-...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/13/tech/apple-app-store-supreme- court/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER60> Please build progressive web apps.

There's not much they can't do, now.

<comment><USER52> They can malfunction due to changes in the device runtime anytime the OEM chooses, so no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Have I misunderstood something, or is this app's main goal to view Japanese comics infringing copyright in some way? That's probably the reason it was pulled. Sure it has other uses, plausible deniability, but what did the guy expect?

</comment><comment> 0-O-0 This title could really benefit from some punctuation.

</comment><comment><USER62> If you need an online SaaS account, that can be remotely disabled, to develop and distribute your software, you have been already lost anyway.

Forget that useless malicious platform already. It's not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER63> What is the revenue potential of app store apps? Any studies or surveys on the matter?

</comment><comment><USER64> Impudent code serf thinks he's owed reasoning by his corporate lord.

<comment><USER65> Nice framing. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> govt's need to catch up and start setting some rules. App stores have gotten so large that they essentially become like real estate or store space. You can't just have a few stores control all the means of distribution.

<comment><USER66> I imagine some cities already have laws around this for farmer markets, flea markets, etc. It would be interesting (and hilarious) if cities started trying to enforce those laws on Apple, like they did for taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> > Mignori is a client for Image Board websites (we informally call "Boorus"). > These image boards are popular in the anime community, although there can be > image boards for anything you can think of.

I just googled this, found some references to the anime image boards. Most were Hentai / Porn. If the main purpose of an app is viewing adult content, its main purpose is viewing adult content - even if you have to add the ressources yourself. (I might be wrong, I don't have a clue about the Boorus community).

So prop. Apples "Freedom from Porn"approach?

<comment><USER68> In that case they should ban browsers, too (which in a way they do, there's a de-facto WebKit monopoly on iOS).

<comment><USER67> Honeslty if the browser would be invented in 2020 they prop. would.

<comment><USER69> prop? What does that mean?

<comment><USER70> Probably 'probably.'</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Be careful when you search domain name through godaddy - <AUTHOR>

Found an available domain name that I like through godaddy.com this morning. When I decided to purchase, the domain got taken by somebody else. Now I have to spend $3,000 if I really want it back. I suspect godaddy actually sells your search data to third parties or it just take the name if they like it. <comment><USER2> <http://saferwhois.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> That's why I ended up building my own domain checker, it takes a keyword and queries for .com, .org, .us, .me and .co + it looks up to see if the Twitter username is taken or not. Also highly recommend DomainTyper (<http://domaintyper.com>)

</comment><comment><USER4> I know Network Solutions had (still does?) done this. But as far as Godaddy, I've used them to check for domains (even if I buy through them or not) and never had that issue. It could just be coincidence in your case. Although that's just my experience, I could be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER5> GoDaddy are slimy and this is the sort of shady business practices that I expect of them but did you check the whois record? When was the domain registered? Maybe in was an expired domain which someone snatched using backorder services?

</comment><comment><USER6> Good advice, but better advice is to stay away from GoDaddy completely.</comment>


CES 2015: With Tiny New Computer, Intel Pushes for More Bearable Wearables - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534091/ces-2015-intel-demos-a-button-size-wearable-computer/?utm_content=buffer8265b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> I make this already if you want to check it out: mbientlab[dot]com. Feel free to message me if you have questions or you just want a MetaWear coupon code.</comment>


Hackerspace raided in Sweden - <AUTHOR> http://forskningsavd.se/2009/11/29/i-can-haz-moar-bout-teh-reid/ <comment><USER2> _It is common in Sweden that the police never return computers once they have been raided. If they give it back, it will usually at least take some years, the computers will be old by then._

Ugh. Stuff like this makes me so angry.

<comment><USER3> This happens in a lot of countries. It's unfortunate at best, malicious at worst.

<comment><USER4> Example: 2009 April FBI raid on Core IP Dallas data center

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546067>

> [Core IP CEO] Simpson added that there were 50 businesses without access to > email and data due to the raid. "If you run a datacenter, please be aware > that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at > any time and take whatever they want, with no reason," he wrote.

Bruce Sterling foreshadows "Data Havens"

"A data haven is a computer or a network that holds data protected from government action by both technical means (encryption) and location in a country that has either no laws, or poorly-enforced laws restricting use of data and no extradition treaties."

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

<comment><USER5> In case of encrypted data, can't the US government legally force one to disclose passwords following a raid? In other words they might raid a company, they find encrypted hard drives so they ask for passwords. Then does revealing passwords fall under "self-incriminating" or not revealing them fall under "obstructing justice"?

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that in the US, passwords fall under the 5th amendment. Here's an example where a subpoena ordering the defendant to enter in a password was quashed: <http://www.eff.org/files/Boucher.pdf>

<comment><USER7> The Wikipedia article has more info on that case.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher>

In February of this year, the judge required him to provide unencrypted access to the drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think there is more to this story than people realize.

My Swedish is a little rusty, but from what I read in the media and the police press announcement, the following happened:

The Malmo hackerspace is located in a building that has roots in the squatter/anarchist collective scene. That group was organizing a party there where they were apparently selling alcohol without a proper license.

During the raid of that party, the police simply went through the whole building. Including the hacker space.

If this is what happened then the raid had probably completely nothing to do with the hackerspace and everything with their hosts.

<comment><USER9> So then the Police entered the building ostensibly to break up an illegal party, and then decided to confiscate the computers while they were there?

That sounds like a fishing expedition to me.

I don't know what the law is in Sweden, but in the US there are 4th amendment protections against that sort of thing.

<comment><USER10> Sweden does not have any such protections.

All evidence is admissible in court no matter how it was obtained, legally or illegally.

Of course if you can prove that the evidence was obtained illegally you can file charges for that, but the evidence will still be used.

<comment><USER11> Does this include statements made under duress?

<comment><USER10> Yes. There are two parts to this: parties in a trial are free to present any evidence to the court, no matter how it was obtained.

However, the court alone decides the value of the evidence presented, and thus the weight it places in such evidence.

Obviously statements from people suspected to be coerced in some way is not considered high-value evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The police reports this was a raid on an illegal club, thy were primarily interested in illegal sales of alcohol.

In addition to the stuff taken mentioned in Hackerspaces post [http://forskningsavd.se/2009/11/29/i-can-haz-moar-bout- teh-r...](http://forskningsavd.se/2009/11/29/i-can-haz-moar-bout-teh-reid/)

Stuff confiscated. * 860 beers, 33 cl cans. * 39 bottles of booze. * 66 liters wine

Other illegal or "problematic" things found and seized * 6 improvised explosive devices. Of low explosive force, mainly used to make a big bang. * 3 high power green light laser pointers. May need a permit depending on power. * 4 Spring Billy Club or Collapsible Batons. Illegal in Sweden * 3 Cans of pepper spray. Illegal in Sweden. * 1 High Power Slingshot. Illegal in Sweden. * 2 Items of police uniform. This cannot be bought legally * 2 Devices for making keys and key raw-materials.

</comment><comment><USER13> My advice to these guys:

"Better start including defenses against this stuff in your planned activities - I think since the Dutch boys showed Counterfeiting and Cuff keys on their site(s) in relation to the reprap they may as well have painted a giant red bullseye on all open hardware projects. Naivety is a fearsomely expensive trait. I too was raided 11 years ago lost 8 PC's and a bunch of software (20,000 worth) all on a false accusation - I gave up even thinking I'd ever get it back years ago... Disperse your assets, wake up to the REAL situation, Police act, then justify those action as necessary. Analyze why you where targeted and THINK. Police time is a scarce commodity, it is not used accidentally. There are 10's of thousands of us to each one of them. Good Luck.

Sure, I'm paranoid, but, am I paranoid ENOUGH?"

and the last line is a recursive joke... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's nice how they don't mention that the police found 6 pipebombs.

<comment><USER8> I seriously doubt that those were in the hackspace.

Sounds more like a serious case of having the hackspace in the wrong building with the wrong neighbours.

<comment><USER14> Well, I don't know who had them, but Sydsvenskan (Swedish newspaper) published the list of impounded goods, and there were 6 pipeboms on there.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, also listed in the police press release. Together with green lasers (not listed as missing from the hackspace), pepperspray and some other questionable stuff ...

<comment><USER15> Oh no! Not green lasers!

<comment><USER16> The full report makes clear that it wasn't the colour that was the problem as such, but the fact that they where stronger than what is allowed to own without permission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It totally looks like the raids described in "Hacker Crackdown" the operation sundevil(citation needed). Even more like the raid of the illuminates game developers.They raid your office for no reason at all. Cant you sue them in anyway?

</comment><comment><USER18> Why do they have cut away locks to practice lock picking and blank keys and stuff like that? Sounds kind of shady.

<comment><USER19> At least in the Netherlands it has been common for hackers to be interested in lockpicking. The irregular magazine Hacktic (which spawned the awesome ISP XS4ALL) used to have features and tutorials about lockpicking.

I assume it is the same for Sweden.

And if you've got a curious mind I cannot imagine why you would not be interested in it!

<comment><USER18> It's not about being interested in it or not, it's about the appearance. Cops don't know anything about the hacker mind or why they are using them.

Cops aren't hackers. If you're too curious, you can't even _be_ a cop. If I was a cop and I was busting a place doing illegal stuff and I saw lock picking gear laying around everywhere, I would think they are up to no good.

Why everyone here is shocked by thought that cops would think people publicly collaborating to defeat security measures are up to no good is a bit perplexing.

I am not saying they were up to no good. I am saying it is easily believable that they were up to no good. In fact, I would say, cops who did not assume they were up to no good would be remiss in their duties to protect the public, because in most cases, people with that kind of stuff lying around aren't into it for benevolence.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing ShipIt by Shopify - <AUTHOR> http://www.shopify.com/technology/34281221-introducing-shipit

<comment><USER2> Is Shopify still an incoherent mess to develop for if you're on PC?</comment>


Decoding 'noisy' language in daily life - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/decoding-noisy-language-0429.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Paper: "Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation" - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[http://web.mit.edu/piantado/www/papers/gibson2012rational.pd...](http://web.mit.edu/piantado/www/papers/gibson2012rational.pdf)</comment>


Kage shadows production traffic to QA servers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cookpad/kage

<comment><USER2> Great project, I'd be a little cautious proxying all my production traffic through a new experimental piece of software though.

Another solution using only netcat and tee is described on ServerFault: [http://serverfault.com/questions/309583/duplicate- incoming-t...](http://serverfault.com/questions/309583/duplicate-incoming-tcp- traffic-on-debian-squeeze)

<comment><USER3> Yeah good point. We actually run kage proxy behind another load balancer, and only send traffic with a sampling cookie set, which can be controlled from our main app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's probably a good thing that this doesn't support SSL, as you wouldn't want this application as your main contact on the outside web.

I'd suggest going using a frontend (such as Nginx or Apache) => Kage => Backend boxes.

<comment><USER3> Yep, we run kage behind another load balancer that does SSL decryption etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is freaking awesome, I'll be upgrading quite a big busy complex site to a new code version and this should help a lot with testing. Shame that it doesn't support SSL yet, but we can't be picky!

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks really powerful, I will definitely be giving it a shot.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good concept. But this design is insane. The shadow should be attached via a logging plugin to your trusted webserver or load balancer, so it doesn't destabilize your production system.

<comment><USER3> Well, I take "insane" as a compliment :) While it is true you can emulate the traffic by looking at web server logs, it was crucial for us to send the exact same request including the same HTTP headers and request body (think POST requests), in real time with the same access pattern.

It was easier for us to write EM based proxy like this than writing a web server plugin that does it, etc.</comment></comment>


Truemors - just like Reddit, only for rumors and people are spamming it like crazy - <AUTHOR> http://franticindustries.com/blog/2007/05/15/truemors-just-like-reddit-only-for-rumors/ <comment><USER2> Kawasaki needs to re-read his own book on starting up... he made a ton on mistakes with this one.

PS: The idea itself is quite silly too... voting on rumors?! What is a vote suppose to do? Increase the likelihood of something being true? Problem with rumors is that only few people have the inside knowledge and you don't know who. By allowing those who don't know for sure to vote, those who are not stakeholders, the signal to noise ratio becomes quite low. The best predictor of rumors is a market-based model (full of insiders/stakeholders) or your own network of trusted sources (the traditional journalistic model).

<comment><USER3> I'd like to think that the real reason for the site has nothing to do with its stated purpose.

For example, collecting IP addresses or traffic patterns or vote clustering or word frequencies, I don't know, _something_. And the collected data is what has the actual value.

But really I think it was a case of someone hearing a "cool" neologism ("Dude; it's like, a rumor, but _true_!") and deciding to base a business plan on it.

<comment><USER4> Well one cool thing they have is that you can call in and leave a rumour and some fancy voice recognition tech will convert it to text and submit it. Has that been used much by any other websites?

<comment><USER3> Jott has a voice-to-E-mail converter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are so many errors in the launch of the site. It might rank as one of the worst launches ever.

<comment><USER6> What were the errors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Guy Kawasaki writes fantastic books, and I hope to meet him one of these days. But, I won't be visiting Truemors again.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yikes. Well, one can only hope he writes up a postmortem of this launch as a "lessons learned" review.</comment>


Ask HN: How to say no? - <AUTHOR>

We are currently going through the process of launching our digital distribution application Desura and have begun accepting games.
One of our aims to differentiate our product is to create an open platform which lists free games and mods as well as commercial games and indies. This doesn't however mean that we want to list absolutely everything as I believe this degrades the user experience and draws attention away from developers that go above and beyond to polish their work.
For example the iPhone app store: I find it crazy that they brag about having hundreds and thousands of apps and yet only 50 apps in the top charts get any coverage. As a developer who spent ages working on perfecting an app - i'd find it annoying to have my app drowned in a sea of duplicates. As a user I find it frustrating that when I want an app that does X there are hundreds of matches, the majority of which are quickly built. I know there is a good app in there, but finding it is a real challenge. Many times now i've brought an app with great reviews and description only to discover it isn't as good as another app a friend recommends a week later. It isn't a user experience I enjoy.
The challenge is that no one wants to be told their game or mod doesn't qualify - so most digital distribution services simply ignore the majority of applications and only respond to those they are interested in. While that would be easy to do, we view that as a cheap cop-out (is there anything more infuriating than having your email ignored?) so instead we want to tell developers the areas they don't qualify. But that is equally challenging because there is no easy way to say no and not everyone will agree with our reasoning so we want to come up with a basic checklist which we can give to teams. This way everyone is graded by the same criteria, and if teams want us to explain beyond the checklist we can.
Obviously being bug free, legal and owning full rights is a must. After that we hit the grey area of criteria such as: not unique, polished, suitable or deep enough. What information should we provide in this checklist? As a developer how would you like to be responded to, good or bad? <comment><USER2> As a developer I don't write anything I submit anywhere, but I have had some experience with rejection letters when trying to publish my comics. Most publishers have a standard polite rejection that says the comic doesn't fit in any of their collections. But my favorite rejection letter was actually a checklist. It was a pretty devastating list of everything that could go wrong in a comic, but only one item was checked. It was a relief to see that while I didn't meet their criterias I still had most things right.

This was a relatively small publisher at the time and I suppose that they had started by writing a letter for every rejection, then found that many of these letters fell into similar categories, which allowed them to rationalize the process when they started getting more propositions.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you provide a check-list or other criteria, be prepared for a world of pain. There will be people who claim they qualify, and they won't let go. They really, really won't let go.

They will harrass and harrangue you, they will call you liar, cheats, thieves and worse in public, and they will question your parentage and, what's worse, your ethics and morality.

And they won't stop.

I speak from experience.

You may choose to publish somewhere a list of things you consider, but say it's incomplete and for guidance purposes only. You may choose to provide a form response to those who you choose not to accept/list/whatever, and you may say that while it's no doubt worthy in it's own right you've decided it's not a good fit for your service.

Just don't be specific.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly the same reason why people who are hiring and decide not to give you a job offer usually won't say why they passed. There is a large percentage of people who can't take rejection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like you all are about to open a huge can of worms.

Maybe you guys can have a two tier system? Games and apps you've tested and vetted and those you haven't yet or won't? Users of you system could go into your curated list or sift the unchecked section to find some unknown gems.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. That's how it's been done for ages, at least as far back as Tucows.

1) List everything you can find.

2) Rate and show the ones you have reviewed first.

<comment><USER7> Yes. But I would say innovate a little, and perhaps drop games that don't get any ratings after a certain time (e.g., 6 months) and/or games that consistently get rated poorly by users.

<comment><USER6> Usability innovation at that level will have to be accompanied with tests. But for now, it's a good idea to be very liberal in what you accept, at least so you can have a big enough catalog that you can refine at leisure later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not just tell them if there is something specific, but failing that just repeat what you just said: you want to focus on keeping the catalogue small, which means that some applications that are otherwise appropriate will be omitted. Invite them to email you back if and when they release and update to their project and promise to reassess it at that time.

</comment><comment><USER9> The Flash industry suffers the same curse. I can and do remove games and even entire accounts from my distribution feed. One thing I did do to mitigate it is to let individual people have their own personal listings so people can still get their games if they're explicitly looking for them.

Ultimately you have to just man up, ignore the details and don't even bother telling them why they're rejected - that sucks for the developer but it'll sap your resources and you'll get stuck arguing about it. Just send a nice, generic, neutral message:

"Your game has been declined because it does not meet our quality standards. Please review them at x and remember to polish your game until it shines."

If you want to be extra nice link to them some resources on the importance of polish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, there is such a low barrier of entry to creating games these days with kits and drag / drop interfaces available. It is great for the developers starting out, but generally speaking content made in this manner lacks the polish that is required to stand out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What if you tell them one specific thing to work on (whatever their major downfall was), and then be vague about the rest? Then, even if they insist that that one problem area was actually good, you can point to the part that vaguely says something like "Though your game is not a suitable match to our site for a few reasons, [we suggest you work on blah blah blah]..."

I don't have any experience with rejecting people in this situation, but I know it would be nice as a developer to have something to try to improve after a failure/rejection.</comment>


Ask HN: Why has there not been large scale adoption of digital pens? - <AUTHOR>

There's been many on the market for a while now, have you used or considering using one? What has your experience with them been.
Probably the most famous, consumer facing firm that makes digital pens is LiveScribe:
http://store.livescribe.com/
Equil Jot 2, funded on Indiegogo I believe, just came out to mixed reviews:
http://www.myequil.com/
And there are several others on the market. Why do you think adoption of digital pens has not really taken of en masse? Is the technology not good enough? Do people just prefer using laptops/tablets/phones? <comment><USER2> What is the use case being solved? Old fashioned people who like notes on paper don't care about digital copies. Newfangled people who don't like to write would prefer to type or record audio.</comment>


Google expansion to downtown San Jose; Up to 20,000 jobs possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/06/google-san-jose-craft-search-giants-downtown-expansion/ <comment><USER2> Having a giant facility so close to Google's other offices has obvious benefits, but there are costs as well - more expensive real estate, difficult to compete with other companies for staff of all levels, hard for workers to find affordable housing, etc.

To mitigate some of these issues, would Google ever consider setting up such a giant campus outside of the Bay Area or in another state?

<comment><AUTHOR> Employees like the urban work/eat/live concept with mass transit at their fingertips. San Jose will be great for that, especially with BART eventually coming. It will be interesting to see what happens with downtown rents.. I know there are a lot of new developments going up</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I scale up quickly? Thinking about trying EC2. - <AUTHOR>

Traffic to my facebook app is growing at an insane rate and I need some suggestions on how to scale. I'm probably not going to even be able to keep it running by the day's end, as it's hosted from my already overloaded dedicated server. I need to either move it to its own box or a cloud service like ec2.<p>Something like ec2 seems like the way to go, but my server admin skills are terrible. Is there a good front end management UI for ec2 or another hosting service that is comparable in cost that is fully managed? I don't mind going with something a bit more expensive now if that means I can get everything switched over and running within 24 hours. <comment><USER2> People can say what they want, but EC2 is not really about scale. It's about on-demand resources. Which can help with scale, but it's not an automatic solution like AppEngine for example. You might be able to provision a huge box there faster than anywhere else right now (e.g. m1 4xl - 68.4G (!!) of memory and 8 cores -- $2.40/hr or $0.80/hr with spot pricing) and move your app over, but that'd just be scaling up, not out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you know python? What about AppEngine? It has zero administration.

Also, I'd go with <http://www.linode.com>, seems to be a cheaper, easier to admin, alternative to EC2.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recommend you get more servers, get a dedicated one for db and make sure the HD is super fast (15000 rpm).

Cloud solutions would be too expensive for your scenario.

I used to develop facebook applications with one that reached 1 million users a day. I needed 5 servers to handle the load. It would cost me three times if I had used cloud solutions.

In Europe, you can use giga-international.com for cheap powerful servers with responsive customer service.

Then use memcache if needed.

<comment><USER4> Tell us the technologies you use so that we can better advice you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> EC2 is pretty complicated. You really have to restructure the way you work your app to make it scale well with EC2. You can usually get a lot of scalability out of a normal web app without going that far.

Start "top". Is MySQL using a lot of CPU? If so, get a second dedicated server at the same data center and put your MySQL on that. Next, look at the MySQL top queries and figure out what you can cache out of the equation with memcache.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd be willing to offer advice or a hand to a fellow HNer in need. This will require some discussion so e-mail me if you want to take me up on this offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I appreciate the offer to help. I ended up getting everything running on rackspace cloud, which was surprisingly easy considering I knew nothing about setting up a server.. so we'll see how this goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> E2C? Do you mean EC2?

Scaling is a very big field, and it's going to be hard for us to provide any useful advice without more information. What's your facebook application? What does it do? Where are you currently hosted? In what way is your dedicated server overloaded (CPU time, RAM, bandwidth, disk...)?

<comment><AUTHOR> My dedicated server is overloaded because I'm running a number of medium/high traffic sites on it, not really much optimization I can do there.

I definitely need to move the app to the cloud or its own server. In a few days the app could easily be getting 50 requests a second. It's fairly light, in that there is no database interaction (there will probably be a DB soon, but it will only be 1 or 2 simple queries per page load). It's really just a simple html page and a JS file which I'll be moving to S3.

<comment><USER8> If it's just HTML + JS, you can host them both on S3.

<comment><USER9> Presumably the HTML page needs to be generated by some code that talks to the Facebook API.

Perhaps the code is also making a bunch of Facebook API calls that are slow to return. That might explain why it doesn't perform well even though it isn't talking to a local database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You may also check Windows Azure (from MIX10 , Building Facebook Apps with Microsoft .NET and Deploying to Windows Azure <http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX23>).

</comment><comment><USER11> If you have a rails app, use heroku and rds.

How long has the app been growing? If you grow too fast FB will delete it without warning.

<comment><USER12> What's the justification for deleting apps that grow too fast?

<comment><USER13> In the past, lots of scammy/spammy apps grew fast by bribing the user to invite all of their friends etc. But you have to grow pretty fast for FB to see this and delete you, I doubt anyone can replicate that growth now since lots of the viral features were removed. Seems like the only way to mass a huge audience is to buy it with FB ads.</comment></comment></comment>


Learn Linux The Hard Way (β version) - <AUTHOR> http://nixsrv.com/llthw <comment><USER2> Hey @mwargh could you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com? I got awesome goodies for you.

I ended up completely redoing the LxTHW base structure and converted all my books to it, but I haven't got around to updating the repo with the new gear. If you email me I'll hook you up with the latest.

The new gear uses dexy (<http://dexy.it>) still, but uses all the features of the newer dexy and switches to rST intead of latex. I also have a converter that converts from the old latex structure pretty well. The results are much easier to host and convert to pdf, mobi, epub, html, etc. and easier to write.

So, contact me (or anyone looking to do one of these).

<comment><USER3> +1 for being a sport.

Your convivial reply on this thread also probably puts to rest speculation around whether it is OK to name open tutorial projects in this way or not.

It's great what you are doing with the "hard way". I wish you well, and hope you keep doing it for a long time. :-)

The site finally loaded for me, and I think it is great what the author is doing there.

Good luck, @mwargh!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love the idea, the context, and the execution. It's a great project. Not a fan of the name.

Zed Shaw has a well-established series of "Learn $topic the Hard Way" online books, with Addison Wesley publishing a 3rd edition of his "Learn Python the Hard Way" this spring. He is building a brand and a business around this name.

I'd be surprised to learn that "Learn ... the Hard Way" isn't trademarked, but even if it isn't, it strikes me as disingenuous, misleading, and potentially confusing to name your work after his.

As far as I can tell, Mr Shaw has nothing to do with this project, but then the "Learn Linux the Hard Way" name might, to some, imply that he does.

Edited to add: I do not have a dog in this fight, just pointing out a potential conflict.

<comment><USER2> Actually, my understanding is you can't really trademark titles of things. That's why you'll see books and movies with the same titles and nobody getting sued.

There's also a Perl book that predates my book which I didn't know about, so there's precedent for people to do this already.

Finally, I really don't care so much about the title, I care more about people getting the method right. It looks like this was taken down so I can't comment on how it's written, but my typical beef with these books is they use the title, then they proceed to write a completely different book that doesn't follow the method at all. To me that's just obnoxious arrogance on their part and typical programmer "I can do it better" crap. There's a reason my books are structured the way they are, and just taking the title to pimp a book that isn't even close to the same structure just pisses me off.

But, I haven't seen this book yet so I don't know what it's done.

EDIT: Ok found the google cache, and it looks like this one's doing it right. I officially bless this title in the name of ... like whatever and shit.

<comment><USER5> IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can trademark titles. An example is the "X for Dummies[1]" series that has at least _threatened_ to sue people[2].

People currently associate "Learn X the Hard Way" where X is computer related to your lcthw project. If you let other people use it, that distinctiveness will go away and it will likely not be something you could trademark

[1] [http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4009:ae...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4009:ae8221.3.7) [2][https://www.chillingeffects.org/protest/notice.cgi?NoticeID=...](https://www.chillingeffects.org/protest/notice.cgi?NoticeID=355)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to stuff vim in there. It's hard enough to try to learn unix command line skills, throwing vim in to the mix is just a detour. Nano is good enough for tutorial purposes.

And I'm a hard core Vim user. I have no strong opinions for or against specific text editors but any hacker worth their salt should know Vim and/or Emacs to be able to use a powerful text editor when stranded in the console for one reason or another.

But this kind of superficial introduction to Vim is a big disservice. The last thing we need is people who hate Vim because they understand it poorly based on a short tutorial.

<comment><USER7> I wrote this guide and I'm convinced basic vi usage is essential to learn. I have to encouter a system without vi yet.

<comment><USER8> The first time I go to a machine for the first time, and I need an editor, I fire up emacs. If it isn't there, I do [apt-get|yum] install emacs, and then I fire up emacs.

<comment><USER9> Lucky you :) Good luck running emacs on some embedded things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More like "Learn scaling your web app the hard way" ;)

(Page isn't loading for me)

<comment><USER7> Ain't no webapp, just a wiki. Fixed already, anyway.

<comment><USER11> Did you?

At least for me, the site is still down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote this guide, sorry for 502. I wasn't really anticipating this much interest. I'm doing something about it now.

Also you can blame me for including vim, but I'm conviced that basic vi knowledge is essential.

<comment><USER12> "Also you can blame me for including vim, but I'm conviced that basic vi knowledge is essential."

It is, don't let them get you down. Who would call themselves a Unix professional without knowing vi? 'Uh yeah I'm a professional driver, except I don't know how to drive a stick shift'. Sure buddy - NEXT!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks like a great guide. One piece of advice I was given early on was to start with a minimal distribution like Gentoo. While not as essential for day- to-day use, knowing about how the various lower-level components interact has gotten me out of a lot of otherwise catastrophic situations across several operating systems - FreeBSD especially and occasionally on OSX. Thanks for writing this guide, it is sure to give a sturdy foundation in *nix usage to the ambitious beginner who follows it.

<comment><USER14> I'm biased in favor or Arch Linux. It's fairly similar in spirit with Gentoo, but offers binaries rather than forcing users to build everything from scratch.

AUR packages usually require compiling from source code though.

<comment><USER13> That is exactly why I switched to Arch linux a few years ago :)

I love Arch's KISS approach and the ease of administration. Gentoo is an incredibly customizable distro that leaves quite a lot up to the end user, and because of that it can be a great learning distro for some people. But yes - at the time I made my switch I was becoming impatient with time time I was putting into administering it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Other than occasional 502 errors, the site doesn't work for me. Browsers used:

1\. FF 17x

2\. Maxthon 4x (IE engine)

3\. Seamonkey

Chrome is too memory intensive for my machine and the font rendering is poor, so stopped using it.

Any others having problems?

<comment><USER7> Yep, too many people found about my project somehow, I'm sorry for not anticipating this. Try now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 404 for me.

Make sure to update your nginx/0.7.67, there was a number of security related upgrades.

Don't use the one in ports. Compile or if you are on Ubuntu:

        sudo -s

        nginx=stable # use nginx=development for latest development version

        add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/$nginx

        apt-get update

        apt-get install nginx

;-)

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I moved my site to another server. It should be ok now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for doing this. I have gone through a similar course on bash commands though it was not interactive but just list of basic commands and explanations. This is very helpful in building Linux knowledge for enthusiasts like me.

</comment><comment><USER17> The guide could be great, but the JavaScript based shell takes a life to open up and kills the experience. Why not use Linux on a Linux machine than a VM, JS shell etc? This makes it real hard to learn.

<comment><USER18> Is there some reason you can't do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> values of β will give rise to dom?

</comment><comment><USER20> This looks awesome. I've yet to find a really focused and directed guide to learning Linux basics, this looks like it could be it.

</comment><comment><USER21> 502... Bad gateway?

Or I may be missing something deep and hard?

<comment><USER7> Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> i learned linux the hard way, eons ago: i broke shit. didn't mean to, i just did. then you learn how things fit together when you try and fix them.

(it's also why my shell was ksh for eons, my editor was vi for eons, etc. all stuff you have when /usr won't mount.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone have a link to the working .ova download?

<comment><USER9> FIxed. It's in the guide now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Scary, when you see linux loading in browser

<comment><USER7> That was actually the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you want to learn Linux; use Linux.

It's that simple. It won't be easy, but it will be worth it. There are no silver bullets. For anything.

</comment><comment><USER26> 404 not found..!?

</comment><comment><USER27> a mirror, a mirror, my republic for a mirror!</comment>


NewsHour Report On Startup Accelerators In Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Q_44Apgzho

<comment><USER2> My favorite quote @minute 1:20 by @Scobleizer <http://youtu.be/6Q_44Apgzho?t=1m20s>

" ... getting in is like winning the lottery, and then once you got in you have to work your ass off, go without sleep for 9 weeks, working around the clock ... "

</comment><comment><USER3> AngelPad was an awesome experience. Thomas, Gokul +Team are amazing mentors, truly. So female entrepreneurs apply! I'd like the AP Girl's Night to be sizeable and formidable. Feel free to ask me any questions.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad PBS decided to do a report on Startup Accelerators. AngelPad was immensely helpful for Crittercism.</comment>


19 States Still Allow Corporal Punishment in School (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/18/19-states-still-allow-corporal-punishment-in-school/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone know if this is still accurate today?

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't see it before I posted this, but this New York Times article from the end of last year indicates it's still 19 states.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/corporal-punishment- sc...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/corporal-punishment-school- tennessee.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is Google purging all search results for Syrian Arab News Agency? - <AUTHOR>

The website sana.sy of the Syrian Arab News Agency has been 'censored' or 'purged' from Google search results.  Even after clicking through 10 pages of results, not a single one links to Sana.sy. Contrast with the results from DuckDuckGo and Bing where it's the top result.
Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency
DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=syrian+arab+news+agency
Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency
This test was conducted based on a post about the Syrian War (http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/09/a-short-history-of-the-war-on-syria-2006-2014.html#more) which has been posted on HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387286). <comment><USER2> Technically it's not purged, 178000 pages are in index: [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sana.sy](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sana.sy)

Perhaps they're downranked, but anyway the first two links on your link leads to wikipedia and facebook pages of that agency which both has direct link to the site in question.

[http://sana.sy/robots.txt](http://sana.sy/robots.txt) \- oops, no robots.txt. Maybe it's just a results of poor SEO.

<comment><USER3> Not having robots.txt just results in Google defaulting to their reasonable crawl settings. For most sites, a hastily configured robots.txt usually results in problems rather than SEO help.

The indexed pages are also missing most of the 'important' landing pages and other big pages, so most likely some sort of automated spam detection was triggered.

My ISP seems to time out on the domain, sshing and curling from various servers returns the page.

<comment><USER2> Just saying, the absence of `robots.txt` can be sign of not really caring about SEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To quote from the Wikipedia article about SANA:

      Up until November 2012, SANA's website was hosted in Dallas, Texas by the United States company SoftLayer. Due to sanctions related to the Syrian civil war, which make this hosting illegal, the SoftLayer company was obliged to terminate its hosting responsibilities with SANA.

I have no idea about the exact legal powers of international (unilateral?) sanctions in the US, but is it possible that Google de-listed SANA because of legal issues?

<comment><USER5> I'm curious what sanctions prevent hosting a Syrian website? [http://damascus.usembassy.gov/sanctions- syr.html](http://damascus.usembassy.gov/sanctions-syr.html) claims there are only 3 sanctions: No US goods(basically) can be exported to Syria, something against the commercial bank, and denying Syria access to the US financial system.

<comment><USER4> How can you host a website without paying for it? Just like fighting against "pirate" websites, just in reverse this time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I asked the crawl/indexing team about this, and it looks like sana.sy hasn't let Google crawl the site since August. It's unclear whether it's deliberate vs. something like timeouts. So it's nothing on Google's side. No webspam- related issues or anything like that, either.

In fact, if sana.sy were to register for Google's free webmaster console at google.com/webmasters/ , then they would have gotten automatic alert emails regarding the high level of errors we get when trying to crawl the site.

</comment><comment><USER7> Technically it may be purged by blackhat SEO, because google search result ranking algorithm is poor actually and can be easily gamed by anyone who has 100 dollars in her pocket.

Only because Bing/DDG SERPs were not gamed by "SEO" activity doesn't mean it can't be done and/or those SEs algos are any better than Googles.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's obvious. That's our reality unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> As far as I know, this is an unprecedented action for Google in the US. Just because it fits your narrative does not make it obvious!

<comment><USER10> I have a website where not only did Google remove it, they removed all pages that linked to it, and all future pages that linked to it. You could search on the domain and get zero results. So they have the capability to do anything. (The website is a DMV licensed traffic school for traffic tickets). The website doesn't have to be anything too special for them to purge it.

<comment><USER11> I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's more to the story than what you have stated. There are numerous reasons why your site may have been removed. It could have been shady SEO tactics such as link building or invalid meta data, which is a big no no for Google. Should definitely check your Google Webmaster Tools to see what's up.

<comment><USER10> It was a classic I bought about 20 links. But as soon as the webspam action happened I removed them (through text-link-ads.com). I was on top of it and cleaned it up but I have 3 times resubmitted it for re-approval over 1.5 years now with no luck.

I broke the rules but Viagra sites get better treatment.

The problem was that 80% of the customers came from lists given out by courthouses. Customers would type in the web address into Google search instead of the address bar.

Once the website disappeared from the Internet the only way customers could find the site was by Google adwords which went from spending $150 a day to $500 a day. A total win for Google I guess!

It was impossible to spend $500 a day forever, I put the website (the same website, no changes) onto a new domain and now it spends about $200 a day in Google adwords. Much better. I seemed to have received the worst possible webspam action for really very little. Consider other site buy thousands of links.. my 20 links were small potatoes that I thought would fly under the radar.

The whole incident cost about $100,000+ in sales mostly from customers who if they just knew how to use the address bar would have made it to the website.

When I see other websites have issues with Google, I know it doesn't take a whole lot to bring a great deal of Google issues upon them. Google if they wants to can just remove them or send them to page 200 and since Google gets 80% or so of searches and people don't know how to use the address bar the website is going to have to buy Adwords in order to stay online or change domains (assuming it is not an on-page issue).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Best Countries For Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/06/26/denmark-ireland-finland-biz-cz_jg_bizcountries08_0626bizcountries_bestcountries.html

<comment><USER2> If one spends some time reading various international rankings, they'll quickly notice that Nordic countries dominate pretty much everything out there - business friendliness, tech preparedness, quality of life, democracy, government transparency, happiness etc.

And its probably a bit more complicated than Adam Smith's little recommendation. Far more than any other countries, they seem to have a dedication to finding things that work - regardless if they are "socialist" (ie, their relatively high personal taxes and great social programs) or "capitalist" (ie, the business friendliness cited by the article).</comment>