Zugzwang - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang <comment><USER3> A great example I love showing people is Alpha Zero's infamous "Immortal Zugzwang Game" against Stockfish [0]. Stockfish gets utterly annihilated in a trap that seemingly springs out of nowhere, though of course the reality is that Alpha Zero was actually really in control the entire time.

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

<comment><USER4> This is insanely exciting. I am terrible at Chess, but I've watched thousands of games on Youtube over the last 10 years or so.

Optically and mechanically, this game feels so refreshing. After being exposed to this almost robotic way of playing at the top GM levels - <USER2> openings, usually the novelty starts around move 12-16 and sometimes longer! It is difficult to describe the "style" of AlphaZero. The best way I can describe it is by comparing how intermediate players chess without being exposed to a lot of theory.

Amazing and exciting for Chess fans.

<comment><USER5> So the humans play more robotically than the robots.

<comment><USER6> "The problem is not computers thinking like people, it's people thinking like computers."

(I think I read this quotation dated back to the 1960s or 70s, attributed to one of usual suspects of that time, but cannot find search results for it now ...)

<comment><USER7> "The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers."

— Sydney J. Harris As quoted, without citation, in Howard W. Eves, Return to Mathematical Circles, (1988), 63.

[https://todayinsci.com/H/Harris_Sydney/HarrisSydney- Quotatio...](https://todayinsci.com/H/Harris_Sydney/HarrisSydney- Quotations.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In German language, the word Zugzwang is also often used figuratively to describe a situation in which you are forced to take (unwanted) action due to external circumstances.

Example from recent news: Most online shops offer Black Friday deals. The ones that don't are "under Zugzwang" to join them.

<comment><USER9> I know this is an English forum, but for this German learner, could you write out the whole example sentence? (I'd mostly like to see which preposition is used. My dictionary says "jmnd. _in_ Zugzwang bringen" but your sentence has a different usage.)

<comment><USER10> "Ich stand unter Zugzwang" is just as correct as "Das neue Produkt der Konkurrenz bringt uns in Zugzwang", although being "under" Zugzwang sounds more common to me. You could also say "Das Produkt sorgt für Zugzwang".

<comment><USER11> "Unter Zugzwang stehen" and "in Zugzwang bringen" both sound natural to me, but "für Zugzwang sorgen" doesn't. (It's not incorrect, but it's not a common combination.)

Source: Am a native German speaker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another German named situation is zwischenzug, which is an intermediate move.

If your opponent makes a threat against your piece, instead of making the expected move to block, move, capture, etc; you can instead temporarily threaten one of your opponent's pieces elsewhere as long as it has a greater value, this forces your opponent to suddenly act defensively to protect _their_ piece, which if exploited correctly can put you in a better position. You will still have to answer your opponent's original attack and defend your original piece but now you have some extra compensation.

Basically you are exploiting the fact that your opponent thought they had played a forcing move and so they probably didn't consider the effect on other parts of the board.

<comment><USER13> And if the Zwischenzug is a move that puts a piece somewhere where it can be easily captured (perhaps because it could already be, or because there are already lots of pieces attacked and the opponent can only take one at a time) then it is called a _desperado_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another interesting zugzwang situation is the game of animal shōgi [0], a simplified shōgi game that is strongly solved and found to be zugzwang position from the start.

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dōbutsu_shōgi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dōbutsu_shōgi)

<comment><USER15> Sometimes people struggle to understand that chess may very well be solved as a win for black. This is a great illustration of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm a big fan of many Michael Brough games like Imbroglio, 868-HACK, and Cinco Paus because of how well he incorporates zugzwang into his designs. They always end up being these tiny, delightful challenges.

</comment><comment><USER17> For German learners: It's a compound word. In German, and in English to some extent, you can join words to create a new word, e.g. Abstimmungsbekanntmachung (election notice).

<comment><USER18> To elaborate: _Zug_ is _move_ (the noun) and _Zwang_ means coercion or force. So being in _Zugzwang_ is means being in a situation where one is _forced_ to _move_.

<comment><USER19> If it's move (the noun) rather than move (the verb) then wouldn't it be more accurate to say it means being in a situation where one's _move_ is _forced_? (ie. the specific move is forced, rather than just being forced to make some move)

<comment><USER18> >the specific move is forced, rather than just being forced to make some move

Thinking about this gives me headaches;-) From a language perspective I think it could be interpreted both ways, a _specific_ move or _any_ move. The reason I chose the latter explanation is that it fit's with the real meaning of the word:

> one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they > would prefer to pass and not move.[1]

The point is that the player is at a disadvantage because they have to move at all and not because they are forced to make a specific move.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's a game which ends with a Zugzwang:

[https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008255](https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008255) (future world champion Botvinnik vs Thomas; Nottingham 1936)

In the game, at the end, black is now, because of Zugzwang, forced to advance and weaken his f pawn. In a chess variant where players could pass instead of moving, it would be drawn, but since black _must_ move, it is won for white.

White now simply has to move his king across the board, use it to take the now unprotected f pawn, then use the knight and king to take black's b pawn, then promote one of his pawns to checkmate the black king.

Black wisely resigned.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've played a lot of Hearthstone over the years and it has a concept similar to putting someone in check in Chess: Reducing their health to where one or two hits can kill them. Minions in Hearthstone can attack the opponent's minions or the opponent themselves - and most decks try to do the former efficiently (value-trade) and only attack (the opponent's) 'face' if they can't (either because all enemy minions are gone or there are no good trades to be had). The reason for this is that each player starts with a pretty big pool of health, so bringing that down to 0 must be a long term goal and going for that too greedily will cause you to lose board control and never get there. Only the most aggressive decks break this rule ('face is the place' goes the aggro motto). But interestingly one of the skills of the best players when playing slower decks is to know when to 'break character' and just go for 'face damage' instead even if it only puts the opponent low on health rather than outright killing them. At that point, the opponent is forced to make any trade they can in order to protect the little life they have left - they are in check. You 'reframe the conversation' by putting your opponent on their back heel.

Anyways, reading about Zugzwang made me wonder if there is a similar concept in Hearthstone too. And coincidentally, the latest expansion comes with a card that kinda fits the bill [1]. It generates powerful minions for you whenever you take damage, but is itself a minion with a lot of health, so it's hard to take down. When played against an aggressive deck with a lot of small minions, they get the choice of 1) Doing what they normally would do - attack your face - resulting in building you an army that would win you the game in a turn our two 2) Trading into the big minion to try to get rid of it - these are very inefficient trades and likely to not even succeed this turn or 3) Do nothing - which is probably the last thing they want to do, as the window of opportunity for an aggro deck to win gets smaller over time.

Obviously having this as a specific card isn't as elegant as the way this can be generated from the existing rules with a specific board state in chess, but I find it interesting to see how many of these more advanced game concepts can be put into a more casual game.

[1] [https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Zzeraku_the_Warped](https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Zzeraku_the_Warped)

<comment><USER22> Zugzwang does not exist in Hearthstone, doing nothing is always a rule- compliant option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can construct a cool game out of non-transitive dice that does this on the very first move but in a completely counter-intuitive way.

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

</comment><comment><USER24> An extremely rare zugzwang with _10_ pieces +kings and pawns on the board. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Zugzwang_Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Zugzwang_Game)

</comment><comment><USER25> Poker has the concept of positional advantage. Acting later is an advantage because you gain more information from your opponent. Although chess is a total information game and doesn't have this phenomenon, the player at turn can still be at a disadvantage due to circumstance.

</comment><comment><USER26> May be it is not a coincidence that this word came up in one of the episode in season 4 of Billions[0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billions_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billions_\(TV_series\))

</comment><comment><USER27> And from that we can conclude that when someone has nothing to lose (and/or nothing they expect or hope to win) - one can not be "in Zugzwang". That is, they might be moving, but their situation can not get worse.

<comment><USER13> Well, a position with say a bare king and against a king and a rook is only lost because of zugzwang. If it was an option to pass, the side with the rook would not be able to force checkmate.

<comment><USER27> I wasn't thinking specifically about chess, more broadly about life. For example in the case you presented the side with the bare king is not "in Zugzwang" cause his position can't get worse. See, right now they are stuck in this useless position, but once the other side forces a checkmate they can finally end the stupid game and go home do something enjoyable...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The game of Go played on a 2x1 board apparears to be zugzwang right from the start, where any first move played is bad, due to the ko rule.

Since Go allows passing it's not a real zugzwang though...

</comment><comment><USER29> _Zugswang_ happens in software too: when your software project is done but people think it is dead because it has not been updated in 18 months...

<comment> Y-bar Can't situations like that be solved with a sentence in the readme (without moving into a worse situation)?

"This software is feature-complete, it works well for its intended purpose. And if you were to experience a bug, someone will read your bug report." … or something like that.

<comment><USER30> Do people do that really?

Most of the time when I think a project is dead: Docker image for the project hadn't been updated in years; many issues of Github with no replies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This comes up in The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Chabon, an unique noirish alternate history dealing with chess and culture, among other things.

</comment><comment><USER32> Zugzwang doesn't appear in Go game that often as in chess, even though it's much more complex game.

</comment><comment><USER33> Americans call this up shit Creek without a paddle</comment>


Why does most hotel wifi suck? - <AUTHOR>

I just spent 10 days traveling around the US and staying in budget hotels which advertise high-speed connections.
They all use diverse but seemingly useless and often non-functional systems which appear to do something like:
-hijack the dns server to redirect your first http query
-get you to some webpage where you have to enter a password, or click on a button
-once you jump through those hoops provide access to the internet, most of the time through some sort of NAT gateway,  adding latency to an already undersized connection.
This is a pile of silly hacks abusing the way the internet is supposed to be used and I fail to see what that layer of pseudo-security is achieveing, or even trying to achieve.
Why is it that the companies which sell those contraptions are still in business? Do the people who work in IT for hotel chains not care, or are they all stupid? Why is it this hard to offer a service that just works? <comment><USER2> Business:

Hotels don't want to deal with computer networks, they just buy this service... And for 99% (made up number) of hotel guests it's sufficient that they enter their credentials once, and are able to use facebook / access hotmail.com for the remaining evening. There's no monetary incentive for anyone to go beyond this service.

Technical:

Most of these systems don't hijack DNS but rather employ a transparent proxy: Traffic to port 80 is not forwarded directly but to a proxy that replaces answers to queries from unauthenticated clients with a redirect to a authentication page. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal>)

These systems most often let ICMP and TCP/UDP to port 53 (DNS) through unfiltered, because of the hassle involving customers with strange DNS configurations. Even if unauthenticated. So if you can get a cheap dedicated server somewhere: Just run a VPN on port 53/UDP and have a ssh-server listen on port 53/TCP and quite often you can connect to those without any passwords or credit card details being entered anywhere...

<comment><USER3> So what should the tech providers do to provide a _secure_ and _end-user_ _simple_ Wifi for their clients, the hotels?

<comment><USER4> End user simple usually means more complex for hotels. It's already been said most of their IT is outsourced.

It could be possible to set up more of the enterprise configuration, where each user has their own password onto the WiFi. However, that means creating and destroying authentication accounts on a fairly regular basis. It's so much easier for the hotels to change 1 login key every week to a bunch of random characters and to hand that out to guests.

If a guest has a problem, everyone at the desk knows the passkey, and they can help them on. Otherwise, the front desk won't be able to help. I think most guests would rather the front desk solve their problems if possible. They don't care about the wifi being secure. If they do, they're already using corporate VPNs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Nullth, "a service that just works" is a notoriously tricky goal, in any case; and indeed most things suck) First, IPv4 address pool has been depleted for some time, hence the NAT (there are more IPv4 devices than public IPv4 addresses, yada yada, you know the drill). Second, IPv6 support in COTS computing devices is (still!) spotty. Third, "just works" means very different things - for watching lolcat videos and browsing Facebook, NATed IPv4 is pretty close to "just works" for an average Joe with a laptop; obviously not for more demanding customers. Fourth, this is a market niche that's been refined for a decade - and hotels are not usually in the "early adopter" bracket, more in the "the net connection doesn't need to be very good, but it needs to kinda-work for everybody" category.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not objecting to the NAT only, though I cannot figure why it should be so hard to have enough access points to avoid your NAT gateways being overwhelmed. I am objecting to the weird DNS schemes to force authentications and other hacks..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are you talking about free WiFi or paid WiFi?

If it's free, then of course there are limits to stop people abusing the service. Business travellers would most likely tie up the bandwidth doing video calls to family and associates. Downloading files they forgot to copy to their laptops and let's not forget ... surfing for porn.

If it's paid for, then you should get what you paid for. If not, just wander down to the nearest StarBucks, Maccas, whatever and use the service you find there.</comment>


On the Twitter Hack - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/07/on_the_twitter_.html <comment><USER2> I really feel like everyone is getting one of the broad points in this discussion wrong. If Twitter is a national security risk because people can hack it to speak in the official voice of prominent leaders, or discover state secrets through direct messages, that is nobody's fault but the government's, for relying on a platform _they have no control over_ for official business.

Can you imagine the military complaining that the enemy was able to give false orders or discover troop movements through messages on a privately owned communications network completely outside their control? No, because it would be absurd for the military to rely on such a network. It is no less absurd that the civilian government (which nominally has _more_ power than the military) is doing so.

It was a scandal when Hillary Clinton relied on a private email server. It is a far larger scandal that so many leaders, and especially the President, are now relying on a private company for their official communications.

<comment><USER3> > If Twitter is a national security risk because people can hack it to speak > in the official voice of prominent leaders, or discover state secrets > through direct messages, that is nobody's fault but the government's, for > relying on a platform they have no control over for official business.

I don't see the government relying on it. I see public officials using it as a platform. No coordination is being done (unless it's redundancy), just communication with constituents.

> It was a scandal when Hillary Clinton relied on a private email server.

One problem with using a private email server was because it circumvented FOIA requests. Twitter is open, a private email server is not. We still don't know what 33k of the subpoenaed emails were about that her personal IT guy deleted, other than the ones found on Huma Abedin's laptop.

The other problem of course is having a personal IT staff run your email server with classified secrets (yes there were classified emails). It's not quite the same as having Twitter or the DoD run your security. I mean, the guy (stonetear) was on Reddit asking how to delete emails, I doubt he knew how to protect against state actors.

<comment><USER4> >Twitter is open, a private email server is not.

In what way is Twitter "open"? Can I FOIA a government official's DM's? I don't see that as likely.

From my standpoint, Clinton's private server is equivalent to Twitter (albeit likely less well-maintained from a security perspective).

To my mind, it's wholly unacceptable for the US government to maintain secret communication platforms outside the reach of FOIA. Working to keep communications off-the-record and out of the public's hands is a betrayal of the public trust.

<comment><USER5> >In what way is Twitter "open"?

If a Tweet is posted, journalists can see it and write articles about it. Of course this doesn't apply to DMs, they are not open. I think anonbcpolitics was ignoring DMs.

<comment><USER4> I can FOIA my government's one-to-one email communication. If I can't do that w/ Twitter they shouldn't be using Twitter.

The local government I work for uses some god-awful subscription software to "archive" all their various social media interaction. I'd rather just see the government not use third-party-hosted communications systems but, grudgingly, I'll take thr "archived" social media data over nothing. The data needs to be accessible to the public, ultimately.

<comment><USER5> Shouldn't be using Twitter at all or shouldn't be using Twitter DMs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Companies like Facebook and Twitter have so much power because they are so > large, and they face no real competition.

I find it hard to take the rest of the article seriously when it's talking about Twitter as a giant monopoly that needs to be broken up...

But also the argument seems fundamentally wrong. Account security is a prime example of a place where economies of scale bring a lot of benefit. I would absolutely trust the security of say Facebook, Google or Microsoft above that of Twitter just due to the larger scale. They can afford to spend more on security, since they have more users, and their users are more valuable. Every dollar spent on security applies to the whole user base. And similarly I'd trust Twitter above a 100 person web startup.

If you start regulating for some kind of a minimum security bar, either you're going to be killing a lot of companies, or you're going to be setting the bar laughably low compared to what these companies already do.

> Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies

... they would all be bankrupt.

<comment><USER7> This is very typical of the libertarian streak that underpins HN. I'm always a little turned off by this strange dominate-the-world culture out of SV. I come from a culture that valued open source and interoperable open standards. Where did my people go?

Twitter is clearly and objectively a monopoly or in a duopoly with Facebook/Instagram. At my most charitable, I could include YouTube in the mix. But I'd still say monopoly.

Even though Google and Facebook are much bigger companies, Twitter has clearly cornered the market for online publishing of thoughts and opinions. Only Facebook/Instagram and Reddit come anywhere close, but those platforms are mostly for different types of content.

There's a reason that modern "news" publishes article after article that merely reports on whatever conversation is trending on Twitter. There's a reason that celebs on Reddit provide proof via tweet. There's a reason Trump's YouTube and Facebook accounts are run by staffers.

Could 100 Twitter-like companies all make it? Perhaps not, but we'd be in a better place. Twitter is poison and I'd not shed a tear if it went bankrupt.

<comment><USER8> How exactly do you propose to split up Twitter? Split the userbase into 100 groups? Who goes in which group? And what happens when people want to switch groups... ultimately coalescing in a single node? Because, you know, network effects.

I don't like Twitter either, so I don't use it. It's a really effective solution!

<comment><USER9> There's other ways to deal with anti-trust besides breaking the companies apart. Data portability, interoperability, ownership of your own social graph. If these platforms were forced to act more like email, where leaving google for microsoft doesnt mean i can no longer contact my friends, the network effects that give them monopoly-like power diminish.

Imagine how ridiculous email would feel if you need a gmail account to email gmail peeps, a microsoft account to email outlook peeps, and another separate account to communicate with people in every mom and pop community. Imagine not being able to export your address book in an industry standard format. Imagine not being able to use whatever third party client you want to access your own data.

<comment><USER8> So let's imagine Facebook/Twitter/etc was based on open protocols like SMTP...

* You'd have the same spam and abuse problem that email has.

* You'd have _zero_ control over the information you post to it, just like email. There would be absolutely no way of stopping or even slowing down the Cambridge Analyticas of the world.

"Ownership of your own social graph" is complete and utter nonsense. As soon as you share data with other people through open protocols, _they own it_. Just like email.

Even email is tending towards centralization, with a few big players that can manage the spam and abuse and still get their messages delivered.

<comment><USER9> >You'd have the same spam and abuse problem that email has.

Don't you have that already, and they have anti spam measures? How would a facebook post coming from facebook or twitter change what they remove as spam?

<comment><USER6> What you're basically proposing is a model of spam where only the content of the message is considered. I do not think that would be very effective in practice, in the modern world.

Email spam filtering is already a lot more powerful, since it can consider things such as IP reputation. (IP reputation would be a non-starter for a federated social network, since it would require passing raw IPs along with messages in the federation protocol. And that is just unthinkable from a privacy perspective).

When all entities posting messages on a social network are managed by the same identity provider, and the identity provider can share information about the account with the social network, you get yet another layer of increase in power. You can, for example, tell whether the account is newly created or not. Or whether it was bulk-created along with 10 other accounts posting similar spam. Or a dozen other account reputation signals which let you classify accounts into organic vs. abusive, and use that to inform the classification of messages from those accounts. And again, the only way this happens is if the identity provider and the social network are one and the same. If they were separate companies, it'd be inexcusable for either party to share detailed information with the other.

<comment><USER9> I dont see why the identity providers couldnt pass trust ratings between each other.

<comment><USER6> There's one element of the tragedy of the commons. Honest Bob's Social Media Emporium might not be entirely motivated to mark their users as untrusted, when most of the pain of the spam is felt by the other thousands of providers they federate with.

"Hey, doing SMS verification of new accounts is expensive, but required by the other nodes on the network. How about we don't, but say we did?"

Imagine a solution to email spam that replaced looking at IP address reputation with looking at the sender's claim about their own reputation. Laughable idea, right?

The other problem with your suggestion is that you can't do abuse prevention with a single signal, even if it's not Boolean. I even gave an example in the previous post, with checking whether accounts doing similar abuse were clustered together at account creation time.

<comment><USER9> Then " Bob's Social Media Emporium" as a whole would get dinged in the trust web. If you cant trust the verifier, you wouldnt trust any of their participants.

I guess nitpicking the details doesnt matter, but none of these problems seem insurmountable.

<comment><USER6> Oh, man. You dropped the "Honest" out of "Honest Bob". That's harsh, it's like you think he's some kind of a crook :(

Once the biggest node on this network starts not peering with smaller nodes due to them being untrustworthy, what do you think happens? I suspect that the users will move from the smaller nodes to the bigger ones. And then we're right back to where we started. People will be complaining about monopolies and will want the big nodes broken up.

<comment> dane-pgp This does seem like a genuine problem, and there are already signs of this happening in the Fediverse. Perhaps it needs a name, so that people can notice when it is happening, and discuss potential solutions to it. The name I propose is "Federator's Dilemma", as it seems like a game theoretic problem.

As for a solution, my intuition is that the first step might be to create a Sybil-proof voting system for determining how popular individual services are. If a service is refused federation by other services which collectively contain 90% of user accounts, then that's a sign that the service doesn't do enough to stop its users from posting objectionable content. Similarly, service A could report to service B how many abuse reports it is getting from its users about people on service B, with a clear rule about when service B would be blocked.

This isn't a perfect system, and I admit that a Sybil-proof global anonymous distributed voting system might be harder than just solving the Federator's Dilemma more directly, but I think it's worth considering, not least because such a voting system would be useful for countless other applications online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Core argument is for "building codes" for software that is effectively mission critical infrastructure. Data and identify security--and privacy--concerns may drive a fair amount of regulation in the next five to ten years. Here is Schneier's core thesis:

"There are many security technologies companies like Twitter can implement to better protect themselves and their users; that's not the issue. The problem is economic, and fixing it requires doing two things. One is regulating these companies, and requiring them to spend more money on security. The second is reducing their monopoly power.

The security regulations for banks are complex and detailed. If a low-level banking employee were caught messing around with people's accounts, or if she mistakenly gave her log-in credentials to someone else, the bank would be severely fined. Depending on the details of the incident, senior banking executives could be held personally liable. The threat of these actions helps keep our money safe. Yes, it costs banks money; sometimes it severely cuts into their profits. But the banks have no choice.

The opposite is true for these tech giants. They get to decide what level of security you have on your accounts, and you have no say in the matter. If you are offered security and privacy options, it's because they decided you can have them. There is no regulation. There is no accountability. There isn't even any transparency. Do you know how secure your data is on Facebook, or in Apple's iCloud, or anywhere? You don't. No one except those companies do. Yet they're crucial to the country's national security. And they're the rare consumer product or service allowed to operate without significant government oversight."

</comment><comment><USER11> Great to see Schneier with a totally level-headed response in comparison to Krebs, who wrote a 5 page apparent doxxing of someone he maybe suspected could potentially have been the hacker.

We have a standard (TLS) for general HTTP secure communications over the internet. We should also have standards for the transport and storage of user- to-user and user-to-public messages.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the level of class difference is substantial. Doesn't make this particular argument much stronger though. It also shows Schneier put in some actual thought before firing this off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This strikes me as particularly salient as to the point on privacy and security:

"The opposite is true for these tech giants. They get to decide what level of security you have on your accounts, and you have no say in the matter. If you are offered security and privacy options, it's because they decided you can have them. There is no regulation. There is no accountability. There isn't even any transparency. Do you know how secure your data is on Facebook, or in Apple's iCloud, or anywhere? You don't. No one except those companies do. Yet they're crucial to the country's national security. And they're the rare consumer product or service allowed to operate without significant government oversight."

Perhaps this hack will bring the security issue to the forefront of our U.S. legislators.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Those messages -- between world leaders, industry CEOs, reporters and their sources, heath organizations -- are much more valuable than bitcoin."

If they had DN access, then those hackers were like a bumbling bank robbery gang who tunneled in during the medieval of night and ran off with all the pennies, leaving the paper money and safety deposit boxes unmolested.

<comment><USER15> Why would anyone message another on twitter with anything important though? Even if they really needed that contact info wouldn't they just use private messages to ask "what's your phone number"?

<comment><USER14> I'm sure that is true 98% of the time. But buried in the mass that is the other 2% are likely some messages that will be very valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >It didn't matter whether individual accounts had a complicated and hard-to- remember password, or two-factor authentication. It didn't matter whether the accounts were normally accessed via a Mac or a PC. There was literally nothing any user could do to protect against it.

Are we sure it didn't matter? 130 accounts were targeted, but attackers only got into 45 accounts. Maybe there was a security setting that stopped the attackers from getting into the other 85.

</comment><comment><USER5> >Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies, and enough compatibility so that all their feeds could merge into one interface, this attack wouldn't have been such a big deal.

That has its own security downsides. Now attackers don't need to find vulnerabilities in 1 specific company, they can search across 100 different companies. And each one has much less revenue so a much smaller security team.

</comment><comment> d--b The comparison with banks is fair. I wonder if people can sue Twitter over this shit show.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would be highly surprised if world leaders communicated anything sensitive via DM on Twitter.

<comment><USER16> World leaders maybe not but e.g. journalists almost definitely.

<comment><USER12> He specifically mentions world leaders. Also, tons of speculation in the article about things nobody is sure about yet and then extrapolating from there and proposing countermeasures that are off the scale. Security is important. But it wouldn't be the first time a communications service is hacked and assuming a nation state adversary you can consider every tech company in the world compromised to some degree by infiltrating employees into key positions. Those can play the long game and work at it for years to reach their destination.

I would consider anything you entrust to a keyboard or some internet or wireless medium to be in principle compromisable, an in practice most likely compromised in the sense that people that should not have access to that data probably do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Breaking up monopolies like Twitter may not work. They must be subjected to heavy regulation. They must not censor/block/shadowban any account or tweet. They must open their entire operation to APIs at reasonable costs. They must allow interoperability with any other Twitter clone, tweets from everywhere should be visible across all Twitters.

Follow all this, or pay $1M/day compounding fine.</comment>


Does Microsoft + Powerset Beat Google? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_microsoft_powerset_beat_google.php

<comment><USER2> If it scales yes, why not?

If it doesnt, well no ldo.

How long would it take for Google to implement something similar?

</comment><comment><USER3> no

<comment><AUTHOR> why not?

<comment><USER4> Several reasons.

First - if Microsoft managed to somehow make a more powerful search with PowerSet then they are still lacking in reputation. Rep alone will get a large portion of Google users to stay with them.

Second - People in general don't like Microsoft. Sure they have some great products (don't knock Windows and Office, the world does run on them even though there are other great platforms/editors) but they have lost face due to poor support options and annoying aspects of the interface

Third - Google is not just a search engine.

That's just some of the reasons.

<comment><USER5> First and Second are the same. Third makes no sense.

<comment><USER4> First and second are similar yes, however Google is not just a search engine. They have a dedicated base of Gmail users, they have a great advertising service. They have youtube (although are thinking it less and less likely to turn a profit). It would be a huge blow yes if Microsoft somehow overcame Google in search functionality, however it would not be the end of Google.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox Buys E-Commerce A/B Testing Service Predictive Edge, Shuts It Down - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/01/dropbox-buys-e-commerce-ab-testing-service-predictive-edge-shuts-it-down <comment><USER2> The greatest challenge will be to see how Dropbox is able to integrate so many teams/developers successfully over time. It will be interesting to revisit this post in a year from now and see how many Predictive Edge (or their other acquisitions) former employees are still with Dropbox.

AcquiHire is becoming a real trend in the market. I think the key drivers are a lack of available talent willing to change companies and misaligned remuneration. The lack of talent is a common thread. Misaligned remuneration is something more interesting and likely to affect existing devs and companies more and more.

If you are in that high echelon of dev talent, you can find someone willing to offer a good salary and the promise of x% of potentially something large in the future. Or now, you can launch your own company, throw out a flashy project to demonstrate your skills, and by acquired by a Dropbox (or it's ilk). This way, you will likely get the same salary, the same promise, but a significant signing bonus upfront.

How companies are going to react to this trend will be interesting. Will signing bonuses and ongoing bonuses make a significant return?

<comment><USER3> Hmm, is there historical data of this sort for many companies? Sounds like it could make an interesting survival analysis project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah yes, this acquisition seems to be buzzword compliant

"Dynamic Pricing" using "Machine Learning" in "Cloud computing"

That, or they found a correspondence between a detail in their offering/capabilities that matches what Dropbox wants to do.

<comment><USER5> They're going to leverage that synergy, empowering key corporate values to enable a full service solution. A true game changer.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsr- QfgFRh8#t=50](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsr-QfgFRh8#t=50)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Alright Dropbox, time to pony up and buy my startup, www.gopaperbox :-D

</comment><comment><USER8> One more Talent Acquisition story!!.

</comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this an expensive way to hire a team ?

<comment><USER10> Maybe it's the only way to guarantee having a rockstar team for the next 5 years or whatever they all agree to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From Predictive Edge website:

      Many thanks to you all for your feedback & support, and here's to a
      new chapter!

From _Our Incredible Journey_ ([http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)):

      An incredible journey is:

          One company buying another and closing its services down. This is a
      purchase of the second company's staff, rather than their product. An
      acquihire.

      If you look through the archives this is what all the incredible
      journeys have in common. A company gets bought, its staff are excited
      (publicly, anyway) about their new home, but sorry that the service
      which brought them to the attention of their new bosses will have to be
      closed. "But thanks for joining us on our incredible journey!"

      This is what is galling. A company that can afford to pay millions for
      some new staff but not for what those staff built. The people who used
      the service, and invested their belief and time in uploading photos, or
      forming friendships, or logging data, are left to find new virtual homes
      while their former hosts enjoy a nice (if possibly delayed) payday.

      This repeated pattern only encourages more people to create flashy
      services that have no hope of being sustainable businesses in their own
      right, but may survive long enough, with VC funding, to attract the
      attention of a large company eager for new ideas and staff.

      It's one thing for companies to go bust, or to close their service
      after failing to make it work. This is business. It's capitalism. But
      starting services only to close them a couple of years later when payday
      arrives is a vicious way to treat people.

<comment><USER12> Have you ever seen e.g. a pizza joint, bowling alley, etc shut down? You could write the letter that gets posted in the window with a Markov chain. It is practically identical to the widely satirized language used by startups.

"After 43 years in business, Joe's Pizza will be shutting down after July 10th. Thanks for your patronage over the years. We'll miss you."

Modulo individual stylistic choices, this is the appropriate level of social niceties between a business and a customer. Joe's Pizza is not obligated to say that their bookkeeper embezzled $300k, they misjudged the pizza market, or Joe's heart just isn't in pizza anymore. You paid, you got your pie, and you and Joe _are even_.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but most of these companies are selling _services_ , not products. If I was buying a downloadable software product from them, the you-got-your-pie analogy would be more apt; sure, the company went out of business, but I still have the product I bought and can continue to use it. Services don't work like that; when the company goes away, the product goes "poof" and disappears. Even if you paid in advance for long term use of it! Which makes people confused and/or resentful.

This is the downside of the Everything-As-A-Service model: services are a _commitment._ Customers aren't buying a product, really, so much as they're buying a relationship with you and your team. The only way you can sell a relationship is by convincing people that you're _serious_ about it -- that you're in it for the long haul. So if the next week you announce that you really weren't...

<comment><USER12> In selling actual services to businesses -- the kind they pay tens of thousands for -- they'd often prefer to have a relationship with you. And you do have a relationship. It is a professional relationship and governed by contracts. They owe you what is written in the invoice, you owe them what is written in the SOW, and after acceptance _you 're square_.

This actually comes up in negotiations. "We'll need a follow-up engagement in six months." "I might be available for a follow-up engagement in six months." "Can you guarantee it?" "I am amenable to selling you a guarantee." " _Selling_ a guarantee? We don't want to pay extra. We just want to schedule an engagement six months from now, if we need one." "In that case, you can wait five months and ask to schedule an engagement. I'll generally try to slot you in, subject to my then-prevailing rates and availability."

I think you think that using a SaaS gives you a free option on service next month. This is... an _unusual_ understanding of how business services work.

If you absolutely need continuity of service that is something you can buy. Many HNers do not understand that it is _really freaking expensive_. If you are paying $29 a month and don't remember signing custom language guaranteeing it _you probably have not bought it_.

<comment><USER14> _I think you think that using a SaaS gives you a free option on service next month. This is... an_ unusual _understanding of how business services work._

That might be true technically, but it's certainly a common expectation among organisations that use SaaS offerings.

Moreover, it is a _necessary_ expectation for many of those services to be commercially viable. Frequently the time and resources invested in integrating someone else's service will take a significant period to generate a net positive return and outsourcing will incur a significant degree of risk. If decision makers didn't have a good faith belief that a service they were planning to integrate would remain available for a useful period of time, approximately no-one would ever sign up in the first place.

Obviously many businesses do offer services that, according to their fine print, do not provide any such guarantee. They rely on their potential customers either not noticing or not caring enough to prevent them from buying.

(If you disagree, then if you'll forgive me for using a personal example for a moment, I invite you A/B test Appointment Reminder's current home page against a factually accurate version that does not make any claim that is undermined by the fine print in your Terms of Service. For example, instead of "Clients get a reminder call or text message prior to their appointment" in your main graphic, you could write "Clients might get a reminder call or text message prior to their appointment, or they might get it late or not at all.")

IMHO, current trends like launching MVPs and exiting via acquihires are therefore poisoning the well. Potential customers of future services will, quite rightly, be suspicious of those services' reliability and longevity, and otherwise viable businesses may fail purely because of trust issues.

In the interests of fair disclosure: My own businesses depend on very few such services, and without any exception I can immediately think of, either those services are conveniences rather than critical to business operations or their providers have given legally actionable guarantees about their intentions/exit scenarios.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't going to mention it, but since you asked, my answer when somebody asks this for AR on the publicly available plans is: "I have been in business since 2006. AR has been my main product focus since 2010. I don't have any current plans of exiting the business any time soon. At the same time, I'm a one-man operation. If you were to say you feel less sure that I'm going to be around than $COMPETITOR, I'd say you're probably right. I'd also say that you can always get me to answer your email and their CEO wouldn't even know much less care that you exist. Your call." ($COMPETITOR is a well-known company in the space with eight figures in revenue whose minimum buy-in is close to the maximum I've ever charged a client.)

If you were on one of the non-publicly-available plans, you'd get language similar to "Vendor agrees to provide services as per the attached Statement of Work for the Contract Term as specified in the attached Statement of Work." That means exactly what it and related contractual terms say. It isn't like continuity of service is something that e.g. hospital systems suddenly realized they needed in 2004. They quite literally have similar contractual guarantees written in their contract for garbage disposal.

<comment><USER14> You rather deftly sidestepped my main point there. :-)

Again, I don't really want to focus on Appointment Reminder specifically because obviously it's not as if you're running the only service in the world that does this, but it does make a good example here. Objectively, almost every major claim on the Appointment Reminder home page -- meaning the things that really matter to a prospective customer, including literally the _entire benefit_ someone would get from signing up to use the service -- is undermined by the wording in the Terms of Service.

It may be true that if someone asks explicitly then you give them an honest answer about your situation. I've certainly no reason to doubt you do. On the other hand, does an average small business outside the start-up world actually ask? I can't imagine anyone working the reception desk at my dentist or optician is going to be sufficiently aware of the legal and business environment to consider that a service advertised as Appointment Reminder is might not actually promise to do anything of value at all.

At this point, AR is becoming a bad example, simply because by its nature it falls into the category I described as being convenient but not critical. (No slight is intended by this comment, but I imagine any business that has so many missed appointments that it would be in serious trouble without AR has bigger problems than anything we're discussing here.) However, if we were talking about a service that hosted the professional's calendar of appointments, or their CRM database, or their payment system, and these services were known to be at significant risk of disappearing overnight, how many other small businesses would really sign up to use them?

<comment><USER12> I'm attempting to avoid engaging in your main point, because it would require taking notice of the accusation of fraud.

 _On the other hand, does an average small business outside the start-up world actually ask?_

No. They don't ask for AR's continuity plan, for the same reason they don't ask for their accountant's continuity plan, or their lawyer's continuity plan, etc. Would the good doctor prefer to deal with the same accountant every year, to avoid having to re-explain every decision made in 6 years to a new accountant? Certainly. Are there accounting firms who they could purchase ongoing services with contractually guaranteed continuity from? Yes. Dr. Carter's Dental Office is welcome to call up the Big Five any time Dr. Carter gets worried about his good buddy Ralph closing up shop before tax season next year. He doesn't, partly because he prefers Ralph to the Big Five, and partly because the Big Five is way the heck out of his price range. Dr. Carter and his team of professionals are, in fact, _actually_ in business, and they're fully capable of making decisions like this. If you're of the opinion that Appointment Reminder is the first time Dr. Carter got into a services relationship you're _wildly mistaken_.

(n.b. I spend about as much on accounting as a small dental practice, and have a great working relationship with my accountant. I also read my contract with him prior to signing. It has specific contractual language about termination which is effectively identical to AR's.)

<comment><USER15> Good example on the Big Five: they became known as the Big Four after the demise of Arthur Andersen in 2002 :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


London's forgotten pneumatic messaging system - <AUTHOR> http://lapsedhistorian.com/get-blower-londons-forgotten-pneumatic-messaging-tubes/

<comment><USER2> New York also used pneumatic tubes for the postal service, but they were replaced with mail-trucks. My understanding is that the empty tubes themselves have been repurposed to carry fiber-optics cables for trading firms and the like.

Heck, the first New York City subway (the Beach Pneumatic Railway) (a) was pneumatic (b) was an abuse of a permit to build a pneumatic tube under Broadway.

There were also open-air pneumatic railways ("atmospheric railways") in a few places, including in the UK -- they used a piston in a small tube to drive the car from underneath, sort of like a cable car ... but they didn't have good rubber, had to rely on leather seals that were plagued with inflexibility and rat problems. Then they invented the electrical multiple-unit train... bo- ring. :b

<comment><USER3> Roosevelt Island uses pneumatic tubes to collect trash because the streets are too narrow for garbage trucks [0]

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_refuse_conveying_syst...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_refuse_conveying_system)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember the Costco on in Santa Clara near the Alameda had pneumatic tubes back in the 80's and 90's when I was growing up. Looking back I think they were used for exchanging cash between registers, and submitting requests for expensive items held in the back room. But as a kid, those tubes were a bit of magic, even when I knew exactly how they worked. I used to think how great it would be to have one big enough for people to ride in -- you could go to work in near record time on a roller-coaster ride!

I think technology of that era had a certain appeal because it operated at human-scale limits. We could _see_ the inner workings and comprehend the ingenuity involved. Sadly as technology has advanced we no longer have that basic, primal connection to the operation of the state of the art :( I wonder if kids are able to get as excited about the inner workings of a fiber optic cable as I was staring at those pneumatic tubes as a child...

<comment><USER5> Costco still uses it here in Canada or at least the ones I've been to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am always amazed at how everything seems to be a reiteration of something before. I thought that telephones were the first long distance communication method. And then I saw a documentary about semaphore towers, and realized that long distance communication has been going on far longer than I realized.

<comment><USER7> I think people generally underestimate how much technology existed in the late 19th and early 20th century. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858. Hydroelectric power plants date to the 1880's. The commuter train I used to take from Westchester to NYC was electrified in 1907.

<comment><USER8> It goes a bit further back than the late 19th century:

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

4th Century BC!

<comment><USER9> This seems more close to optical communication ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse- width_modulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation)), the water is just used as a chronometer.

<comment><USER8> All serial communication depends on timing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used one of these in my first job (pdp11 sysadmin). I'd stick the report in a canister, place it in the tube and it would whoosh away across the factory. They are still used today by Tesco to take cash from the tills up to accounts.

</comment><comment><USER11> As a boy in the 60's and 70's it was still pretty common to see these systems in department stores for handling receipts. I always found them fascinating. The cashier would open the slide and you'd hear the suction, then a solid thunk as the container was sucked into the line. A few minutes later and you'd actually hear the returning container whoosh down the line before it thudded into the padded basket. The development of these systems strikes me as being similar to the development of canals, in that they solved a significant physical problem for a short time until much better technology (railroads, telephones) emerged. Interesting article and thanks for posting it.

<comment><USER12> I remember these still being used in a supermarket in the early 90s here in the UK.

<comment><USER13> I still remember my mom using them at a "drive thru" at our bank in the early 1980s. Instead of a window you'd pull up to a tube station. Slips of papers would go in and come out. I think she even did withdrawals this way. (No idea how this was secure, given how far the observation window was from the farthest tube stations. Maybe there were cameras.)

<comment><USER14> Maybe its a state law thing, but we have these tubes today at local bank drive thru and local walgreens pharmacy. They have cameras now of course.

I've always been interested in building a tube into my house for the pure heck of it, because I can. Main problem is I believe PVC pressure rating for compressed air is 0 psi, so there "seem" to be enhanced modern materials that make the job easy, but things aren't as simple as they appear. Also its harder than you'd think to go bidirectional. Unidirectional with simple one way flaps and a timer hooked up to a valve (about a 5 minute arduino project) is pretty simple. Bidirectional is not so simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pneumatic tubes are still regularly used in large hospitals where rapid delivery of medical samples is required. Multiple companies provide them. [http://www.aerocomusa.com/](http://www.aerocomusa.com/)

Frankly, it's a bit scary knowing what hazardous biologicals goe into the carriers... and how difficult it would be to clean if something went wrong.

<comment><USER16> Cleaning up a spill in a pneumatic tube system isn't that hard: "This procedure consists of sending a carrier containing a clean-out kit from station to station until all affected segments of the system have been traversed. As this carrier travels through the tubing, the clean-out bottle dispenses the cleaning solution while the carrier rubbing bands act as swabs."[1]

[1] [http://www.swisslog.com/-/media/Swisslog/Documents/HCS/Trans...](http://www.swisslog.com/-/media/Swisslog/Documents/HCS/TransLogic_Pneumatic_Tube_System/Related_Information/PTS_400_Infection_Control_White_Paper.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I sent a letter to myself (from my home to the office) using the Paris pleumatique when I realized that it would probably not survive for long. It stuck around for another couple of years after that, but I was glad I did it. It was of course an anachronistic relic by the 1980s but using it made me feel like a time traveler.

</comment><comment><USER18> For years I've dreamed about if New York had a pneumatic tube system working. Forget about transmitting data/documents -- use it to replace small deliveries!

For Chinese takeout or some tacos, for a book delivered from Barnes & Noble, for some lemons from the supermarket when you realize you've run out, for a bottle of shampoo from the corner pharmacy. Heck, try on different sizes of shirts and sneakers and jeans from different stores, and pack them back in the tube when they don't fit. Use it for mail too. Individual tubes that run straight into each apartment.

The convenience would be incredible. And now that we have software to intelligently and automatically route all the canisters, I often wonder why you never see it proposed more often.

<comment><USER19> The last mile costs are significant even for running some wire to every house. Can you imagine what they'd be to run a multiple inch tube?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For an interesting read on how telegraph and pneumatic technologies evolved : search for the book "The victorian internet".

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anybody have a mirror? The page doesn't load for me.

<comment><USER22> Here you go: [http://web.archive.org/web/20150304165118/http://lapsedhisto...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150304165118/http://lapsedhistorian.com/get- blower-londons-forgotten-pneumatic-messaging-tubes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this were we make Ted Stevens jokes?</comment>


Show HN: MonkeyMind – A shortcut-driven to-do list for your Mac's menu bar - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/de/app/monkeymind/id1503893432 <comment><USER2> Congrats on launching!

I have to say, though, this looks uncannily like my own app, Remember, that I launched a few months ago:

* [https://remember.defn.io/](https://remember.defn.io/)

* [https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/remember-quick-reminders/id149...](https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/remember-quick-reminders/id1493354028?mt=12)

* [https://github.com/bogdanp/remember](https://github.com/bogdanp/remember)

Right down to the key bindings and some of the marketing copy[1].

[1]: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/remember-6](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/remember-6)

<comment><USER3> FWIW, in terms of user interface I think we're all consciously or subconsciously inspired by the apps we use everyday such as Spotlight and Alfred.

For example, here's my todo list menubar app launched many months before Remember: [https://wip.chat/menubar](https://wip.chat/menubar)

I bet other people will reply with similar looking apps launched months before mine :)

<comment><USER2> Yes, definitely. I was just struck by how close some of the similarities were in this case. That said, it is a simple enough class of app that there are bound to be similarities between them and I was sincere in congratulating the OP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, Benedict the developer here.

I built MonkeyMind as a scratchpad for thoughts while in deep focus. Whenever something pops up in my mind, I needed a place to put it and get back to work.

Pen and paper can do the trick, but something with a Spotlight-like shortcut would be better.

And that is what MonkeyMind does. A simple global keyboard shortcut to add items and an app that lives in the menubar and gets out of your way.

Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER4> Congrats on making this, it looks slick.

Would you consider adding sync functionality, so that the same list works on multiple machines?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. Sync is definitely something I'm considering, but I can't promise any timelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool. Downloaded and using it. Nit-pick but can you please have right-click to access the setting menu?

There used to be a dead-simple MacOS App called Anxiety that does something similar to this but it somehow died.

I don't use TO-DO Apps to do my tasks, I calendar pretty much everything but I want a very simple task-lister for things such as "Call Ram", "Remind Kid to learn to Type", etc.

This serves the purpose.

I tried Tot[1], another interesting simple tool to do a similar function but MonkeyMind is simpler for me to for these small tasks.

Feature Request: Can we make this have a Powerpack option for Alfred. So, I can keep this running in the background but use Alfred to add tasks. This is the same request I asked the Command-E[2] guys too.

1\. [https://apps.apple.com/in/app/tot/id1491071483?mt=12](https://apps.apple.com/in/app/tot/id1491071483?mt=12)

2\. [https://getcommande.com](https://getcommande.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad MonkeyMind is useful to you.

Quick question about the right-click: What exactly do you mean? Right click on the settings icon or anywhere in the list?

As for Alfred: it's probably simpler to just set up a separate keyboard shortcut for MonkeyMind.

<comment><USER5> I want to right-click on the icon and access the menu right away.

Alfred; Ok. Just wishing that I used just one single Keyboard Shortcut for both. I use Alfred very often, so if I can continue to use that and do something like -- CMD + Space > "MM Get a Haircut."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TickTick has a nice "quick capture" experience too. Will try this.

\-- edit --

This has a super reasonable price of 2.5 EUR in Brazil. I forget the term now but its of course a discount due to lower purchasing power.

How does Apple calculate that?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a much more polished version of what I do, which is to keep a note (in Notes app) called Brain Dump, and I jot down anything that is cluttering my mind, which I hold on for fear of forgetting. Just the act of writing it down helps; it's a reassurance that it's ok to let go of those thoughts because they are saved elsewhere.

What I like with MonkeyMind is the minimal amount of friction involved, as well as automatic timestamp.

<comment><USER8> I thought I was the only one.

I've had repetitious thoughts and originally thought they were repeating because there was some thing missing, some nuance that I hadn't explored.

But once I would write them down, sometimes they would just go away. It must have been a fear of forgetting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is definitely something I need, thanks. One small feature request: Would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to show the list too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea. What exactly would you do with that? Simply open up the list and look at the past entries?

<comment><USER10> I could see keyboard based navigation, e.g. press keyboard shortcut to pop open the menu bar list. Then navigate through them with the up/down arrows, press spacebar to toggle completion status, then hit escape to close the menubar list.

<comment><USER9> Exactly this. Arrow key navigation already works, so being able to open it with a shortcut, and hit enter or space to toggle would make this complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really nice good job.

I have one suggestion. It would be nice if this app can fetch data from reminders app of MacOS and put them in the menu bar along with the ones added.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like that idea, but I also want to keep the user experience really simple. Would you want to display a single list from Reminders? Or show all reminders alongside?

And the other way around: would you add to Reminders from MonkeyMind?

<comment><USER12> Yes to adding to reminders from MM. Reminders syncs to mobile — that can be convenient!

<comment><USER11> Yes this looks like a good idea. But i wanted the reminders also to be able to display in that quick toolbar rather opening another app(Reminders). It would be nice to merge them and show or choose a list that we wanted to show.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome! Looks similar to a short-cut driven note taking tool I'm building - [https://mmap.it](https://mmap.it)

Major difference is mine is focused on longer form documentation and comes with an inline markdown editor. Congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER14> Should have named the app goldfish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn, that's a great name too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks slick, great job on launching!

Any possibility of a way to purchase outside of the AppStore? I appreciate this is extra effort for possibly little extra reach but I have managed to survive without signing into my icloud and hopefully won't ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not as of right now. I am considering other distribution channels like Gumroad. Would that work for you?

<comment><USER15> That would be amazing. Feel free to update me using my email (in profile) if you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Damn I love this. I think I might save this for when I get a mac, but since I'm on Linux right now, I'm going to copy this idea with my rofl menu I think

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks great, thank you for sharing!

A question I have about macOS development - where should I start in order to learn how to make menu bar and shortcut driven UIs?

<comment><USER18> Please, don't forget about the Dock!

I personally hate when apps crowd my Menu Bar when they don't need to e.g. Dropbox, NordVPN, Keybase etc. I always try to disable the Menu Bar icon for an app if possible, and if I can't I will delete the app if I can find a suitable alternative.

There are so many advantages to a dock icon:

\- Richer, colorful icon

\- Support for badges, configurable by user

\- Won't be hidden by the system (macOS will hide icons in a crowded Menu Bar)

\- Can be hidden by the user (Dock Autohide)

\- Icon can be repositioned by the user

The Apple HIG makes it pretty clear that most apps don't need the Menu Bar, and should use the Dock instead. But we're in a vicious circle where users have been trained to use the Menu Bar (even though it's inferior), so that's what developers do.

<comment><USER17> Hadn't thought about that! Thank you for the remark, will definitely keep it in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks nice and slick will give it a try. Thanks for sharing Benedict :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I would give up Todoist if I could view todos on my phone as well :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I should consider adding sync and creating MonkeyMind for iOS as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks good. Checking it out.</comment>


Covid-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios - <AUTHOR> https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html <comment><AUTHOR> Note the .004 overall "Symptomatic Case Fatality Ratio". Quite a few conservative outlets are indicating a true IFR of .26% based on this, instead of the .4 - .6% a lot of recent studies have indicated. Interesting stuff. I think that would indicate we must have had 33000000 cases by 4/29/2020 in the U.S. alone.</comment>


Change Your Name - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/name.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious if the prediction at the end of the essay turned out to be true:

 _100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another._

It was written in 2015, so five years is a decent amount of time to measure.</comment>


Suggest HN: Klout for blogs - <AUTHOR>

There's no way to autonomously rank and score blog influence. Someone should build something of the sort. I'd imagine a hosted script ala Google Analytics would be a good way to track visitor activity, and tie that in with some sort of influencer rankings, to have a single, objective directory of blogs ranked by the influence they have. The reason for this: To prevent so-called hotshot bloggers from charging excessive media fees. <comment><USER2> something like technorati? Or am I missing something?

ie:

<http://technorati.com/blogs/daringfireball.net></comment>


Notch Buys Beverly Hills Mansion - <AUTHOR> http://bhcourier.com/beverly-hills-news-70-million-is-highest-price-ever-in-beverly-hills-for-a-home/

<comment><USER2> There are certain aspects about Notch's rise to fame and fortune that make his story more inspiring to me than practically any other celebrity. He got wealthy doing what he loved, he never bullied anyone or got into any kind of real drama, he didn't need to build an oppressive empire, his product was something that enabled and inspired people in itself, and when it wasn't fun anymore he just quit and is (from the looks of it) currently enjoying life.

It's immensely comforting to know that this is possible, unlikely and unconventional as it may be. I'd much like to see more Notches out there making it big, as compared to the flood of Steve Jobs-wannabe assholes who are on a perpetual mission of conquest and destruction.

<comment><USER3> I would imagine the biggest opportunity of "unexpected wealth" is that you have the benefit of knowing better. As in that you don't have to value the same things as society at large and can go on and do things that really matter. Seems like he's wasting that opportunity.

<comment><USER2> _> As in that you don't have to value the same things as society at large_

He's not from a rich background, is not well-connected, is not a business person, is not stunningly young or good looking, is not being sponsored by a media conglomerate - he is just a nerdy nice guy. I'm having trouble seeing the conformity you ascribe to him. In fact, he started out by being different.

 _> can go on and do things that really matter. Seems like he's wasting that opportunity._

It's depressing but interesting that big-time CEOs who are unpleasant in every way imaginable are somehow beyond reproach as long as they make a big show of donating a bit to charity here and there, but when someone who's not "a captain of industry" or a line-manufactured superstar buys something extravagant, people's propriety alarm bells start going off.

You also seem to imply that his wealth is somehow random and undeserved, and that he should retroactively work on deserving it - as if Minecraft didn't have an enormously positive impact on many people (including children) already.

<comment><USER3> I don't really follow your reasoning, we probably have quite different outlooks on the subject.

No he doesn't come from a rich background. That's the point. A lot of people that end of rich come from a background where vanity is very important. They then have to spend a large part of their life trying to achieve that goal. That's why I don't care about "captains of industry". I don't expect any better, they've already "sold their soul".

I don't necessarily dislike people like that, because it can be very hard to opt-out of that life. The classic case is where you father works to much and neglects your mother, which self medicates a bit to much and in turn neglects you. So the only thing you know is trying to be your father to rationalize your sense of abandonment.

When people who doesn't have that background become rich and can do whatever they want, but instead opts-in to those values I think it's sad. Maybe he has personal problems of his own, or he just don't care anymore or whatever, I'm not going to be first in line to celebrate the guy. Because buying the most expensive house in the most vain place in the world is just not something I value.

Minecraft is still pretty cool though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good for him. I also enjoy the fact that he's bought something which I can imagine would be relatively straightforward to recreate in the game which got him there.

People saying it's a "tasteless piece of real estate" seem misguided. It's a lovely building, architecturally. I don't think the furnishings do it justice (it's all too plush and nouveau) but it's a really lovely design.

<comment><USER5> To be honest it's probably not something I would do. I mean it's certainly a lovely house but it is 70 million worthy?

A slightly more modest but spacious house on the outskirts of the city is more my style.

I mean imagine how many other cool things you could do with that money instead of having sit in some house.

Well regardless it's his money and he can do whatever he wants with it although i wish he would invest it in something more interesting.

<comment><USER4> > i wish he would invest it in something more interesting

Something I learned the hard way: it's super hard to even politely suggest that there are better ways for people to spend their money without coming across as churlish. Be happy for the triumph of the nerd!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is almost like an article from The Onion: Rich Person Buys Big House In Expensive Neighbourhood.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I know this is primarily a forum for American capitalists, but am I the only person here who would feel utterly ashamed of myself for spending 70 million dollars on a house? I'd feel outright embarrassed to admit it to any of my friends. The good you could do with that sort of money... And then to just blow it on a house.

<comment><USER7> I think it is difficult to imagine what it would actually be like to have that kind of money, the Minecraft success is such a ridiculous outlier. He pretty much went from being an average swede with little savings to having more money than everyone. At this point, he can give away millions of dollars every month and still end up having more money than he started with.

In theory I agree with you in your sentiment, but I have a hard time truly imagining my life with that kind of money.

<comment><USER8> I'd be careful if I were him. His income is gone as far as I know. Unless he does some smart investing with the current cash reserve he could be broke in ~10 years.

Just an interesting observation; Minecraft was sold for 2.5B $, let's assume Notch got 1.5B $ out of it. Buying that house alone cost him 5% of his entire wealth.

<comment><USER9> >Unless he does some smart investing

This is an investment. He didn't throw a $70 million party, he bought an asset he can sell in the future and which he presumably thinks will increase in value over time.

And anybody who just became a billionaire is not going to stick that money into a savings account, they will get hooked up with a very good financial advisor who will help them to grow their wealth. Say he has $1 billion, a decent but not great return on that would be 8% a year. That's $80 million! He could buy one of these every year, spend $5 million and still have $5 million left over. And that's exactly how he should and presumably will manage his wealth. You don't spend your wealth, you grow it and spend some of the income it produces. Which is precisely what any rookie financial advisor would teach him on day 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> >>Beverly Hills recorded the highest-priced sale in its history Thursday at $70 million for an 8-bedroom, 15-bath home in Trousdale Estates.

I've often wondered what Notch intends to do with his Minecraft millions. Looks like he's "loading up the truck and movin to Beverly, Hills that is". Sounds like a nice house, kind of an odd bedroom to bath ratio though.

<comment><USER10> From what I've seen about it online, it's designed from the ground up to be optimized for entertaining. In other words, a party house. In that case having plenty of bathrooms makes more sense!

<comment><USER11> I suppose it would depend on the type of party

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I freaking love everything about the story of Notch and Minecraft, including this. I want to live in a world where a geek can sit in his bedroom and create some cool shit, that enables him buy a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills.

<comment><USER8> Don't correlate creating games with money. He was really lucky; there were other very similar games on the scene at that time, his just happened to stick.

The observation should really be: creating anything interesting gives you potential to be wealthy.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, how is the guy who made Infiniminer doing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > John Aaroe said, "I have been in this market for over 30 years and have > never seen the level of growth that the luxury market has experienced in the > past year, with no end in sight."

Hyperbole, or truth? and why?

<comment><USER15> The top 0.1% are doing really really well

[http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth- inequal...](http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequality- united-states/)

<comment><USER6> I think the top 0.1% are always doing really well, by definition, no?

<comment><USER16> No. If all were equal the top 0.1% would be doing exactly as well as everyone else.

<comment><USER17> Then how why would they be the "top" 0.1%? If everyone is equal, there is no "top".

<comment><USER18> > Then how why would they be the "top" 0.1%? If everyone is equal, there is no > "top".

Start from:

If all were _almost_ equal the top 0.1% would be doing _more or less_ as well as everyone else.

Then take the limit for almost -> exactly

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No surprise that the mansion looks like it was made out of blocks.

Also amusing to see a nerd outbid entertainment megacouple JayZ/Beyonce.

</comment><comment><USER20> What cracked me up is if you watch the video advertising the home on the website ([http://1181hillcrest.com/video.html](http://1181hillcrest.com/video.html)) the guy's contact email address is a Gmail address.

If you're offering a home at $85,000,000 (the original list price) and you even create a website for the property, at least spring the extra $12/year for your own domain name.

<comment><USER21> Except it's not just $12/year for the domain name but also all the hassle of having to administrate it or dealing with someone who administrates it for you. Gmail does have a big convenience bonus.

<comment><USER22> Except Google does offer gmail for work that lets you add a custom domain name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > When the home was purchased, the Minecraft creator also purchased all of the > furniture for $6 million.

I know good furniture is expensive, but seems like a lot!

<comment><USER12> I think, when you have the kind of money that Notch now does, your time becomes by far your most precious asset. Saving the hassle of interior decoration probably makes it well worth it for him.

Tangentially, it is probably a lot of pressure to be that rich. Must be easy to feel that you are not making the most of it, when at any given moment you could be doing whatever ridiculously expensive thing you can imagine, rather than sitting in a dentist's chair or being stuck in traffic somewhere.

<comment><USER24> Right, but surely if he wanted to, he could hire someone to do it his way for $5 million. He probably just likes the way the furniture fits the house or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm assuming his accountant told him to make a large investment/purchase for tax reasons, homes are an easy write-off when your wealthy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Those chairs in the first picture (city on left, chairs on right) look like pumpkins.

</comment><comment><USER16> Façade seems kind of blocky. ;)

<comment><USER27> It was an easy sell once they figured out that he is afraid of creepers: [https://www.google.com/search?q=creeper+suit](https://www.google.com/search?q=creeper+suit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wasn't this the house owned by the douchebag director in Mulholland Drive?

<comment><USER10> No, but it does very vaguely remind me of the house in THE LIMEY.

[http://www.estately.com/listings/info/2210-astral- drive](http://www.estately.com/listings/info/2210-astral-drive)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Glad to see he made it out of Sweden in time and that this time his millions didn't go for a wife that divorced him just for the money.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here's what this tasteless piece of real estate looks like: [http://vimeo.com/102897742](http://vimeo.com/102897742)

<comment><USER31> I thought that candy bar looked familiar [https://twitter.com/notch/status/545729155359207426](https://twitter.com/notch/status/545729155359207426)

<comment><USER32> Not trying to be snarky but the pic was posted in connection with the news being out.</comment></comment></comment>


Icon Sets - <AUTHOR> http://speckyboy.com/2009/02/02/50-of-the-best-ever-web-development-design-and-application-icon-sets/

<comment><USER2> _If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."_

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems I can't at this point (doesn't accept my change). Will keep this in mind for next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is this... digg?

<comment><USER4> I to am really surprised this got to the front page. I'm kind of interested in how that happened. But on the other hand I've been browsing HN for about 2 years now. I wish now that I had contributed more in the past so I could down vote submissions. It's probably schmucks like me who tell everyone, not just those that have the same interests, that they read HN. Yes, the account I'm using is a more recent account, I forgot my old password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> speckyboy is awesome, but "best ever"?

<http://www.iconfinder.com> <\-- for those who dont know</comment>


Gearman: Bringing the Power of Map/Reduce to Everyday Applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.gearman.org/

<comment><USER3> Here's an interesting alternative to Hadoop using two HN favorites, Erlang and Python: <http://discoproject.org/>

Seems simple enough, though I haven't used it myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> Gearman is a batch queueing system. They aren't really the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how they plan to distinguish themselves from hadoop.

<comment><USER6> It's not Java? It's under rapid, active development? It's embeddable?

I think it looks very interesting. I've learned to always pay attention to what Danga is doing - they have a knack for taking a task, cutting out all the bloat and crap and yak-shaving, and delivering just what you need; see memcached, perlbal, mogileFS.

And Hadoop is an utter pig. It might work great, fine, but it is way, WAY too complex IMO. It doesn't have that elegance and efficiency that is the hallmark of excellent software. Plus did I mention it's in Java? Hope you like XML.

Disclaimer: This is just my opinion and I have not used Hadoop extensively, although I do work with the M/R pattern elsewhere. It's just my impression of the software from not-very-thorough investigations.

<comment><USER7> Gearman is a framework for quickly offloading computation of small jobs. It's especially useful for running background jobs from a web site, like e-mailing or image resizing.

Hadoop is a clone of Google's distributed computing framework and is necessarily more complex than Gearman. Hadoop will let you reliably distribute single computing tasks over thousands of nodes. It's under rapid development. If you think it's too complex, you're probably not operating at the right scale.

It's apples and oranges.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. But the thing is - how many people _are_ running at Hadoop-appropriate scale? You say thousands of nodes - so, top 50 websites plus some mining companies/research institutions? That is probably an exaggeration - <USER2> Hadoop is useful even past 5 or so computers - but the point remains, it's a big, heavy pig of a thing with high barriers to entry. It is Big Serious Enterprise Software for Serious Business Only.

Hadoop core is 41M of compiled code, for christ's sake. Zipped!

This is hacker news, not large scale enterprise news. Hadoop has way too much overhead just to play around with. A smaller, leaner, cut down alternative is most welcome.

<comment><USER8> For some interesting thoughts on mapreduce frameworks check out this interview with Jonathan Ellis on the Cassandra project which is facebooks version of a distributed data store.

<http://techzinglive.com/?p=75>

From what I remember: Google built it's parallelizable stuff around it's already excellent distributed filesystem. In hadoop they are essentially cloning the filesystem and the rest of the stuff from scratch, which is a pretty hard thing to do, and a more leaner approach would be better.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, will check it out.

Yeah, I appreciate what Hadoop is trying to do. I am just not sure they are going about it in the right way. I don't like their technology choices and do not get a good feeling from the few times I've looked at their issue tracking system (bureaucracy).

I mean look, MogileFS is also a distributed FS. It works. It's very good, actually. It's in production in a lot of places.

 _MogileFS is 268KB of Perl._

Gearman is basically a distributed jobs broker, just like Hadoop. There are some complexities but it is not rocket science. They basically do the same thing.

 _Gearman is 560KB of C, the original was 12KB of Perl._

One of these solutions is literally 100 times larger than the other. I don't know about you, but for me .. that is not a good sign. I do not see what Hadoop can do that the Danga tools cannot. Hell, I have a hard time seeing what Hadoop can do that a couple hundred lines of Python can't. Sure, might not be enough to operate like Google does, but 90% of the time, quick and dirty gets it done ..

<comment><USER5> As far as I can tell, right now Gearman is only a load balancer for small requests using a nonstandard RPC protocol. It's easy to be smaller when you don't yet have most of hadoop's major features:

* use the whole cluster for large jobs, consuming all the data right where it's stored and combining output from every machine you own (what's the point of remote work on just one box?)

* retry partial failures on different replicas of the same data (without losing successful work)

* ship intermediate values between workers (without this you don't even have map/reduce)

* roll new code and data beforehand (and clean it up after)

* avoid job starvation</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tweeting Too Hard is digg for self-important tweets - <AUTHOR> http://tweetingtoohard.com/top

<comment><USER2> ha for your revenue model you can charge people who want their tweet to be removed from your site.

I say this only half-jokingly.

<comment><USER3> It should cost a dollar an upvote. Incentivize people to get their tweets removed early.

<comment><USER4> I think something like that could be built upon twollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I quit reading when I saw "okay... the poop is coming out". Suddenly "tweetingtoohard" took on new meaning.

<comment><USER6> Heh. Pretty sure it's a reference to this: <http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who does not use Twitter, and cannot see why I would ::

I feel like a person who, caught unawares, has to take refuge[1] when the tide comes in. You then just have to wait while the sea rages and eventually recedes.

it is amazing to watch the swirling currents of Twitter news around HN/Slashdot/Regular Press.

\-----

[1] <http://www.flickr.com/photos/7765409@N06/3483551927/>

<comment><USER3> Thank you for providing the obligatory comment about the Twitter fad. Now we have something to use to vote whether we like Twitter or not.

<comment><USER8> But that's not what voting is supposed to be for!!1

<comment><USER3> I voted you up so now we can have another meta-vote on what voting is for.

<comment><USER8> I voted you up because I am thoroughly confused now and it just seemed like the right thing to do.

<comment><USER9> Is it just me or does this tangent feel a bit like Reddit?

<comment><USER8> Is it just me or does it feel like people here spend way too much time wondering if something feels like reddit?

I had the unfortunate necessity of reading some reddit comments recently, and believe me, _nothing_ on HN feels remotely like reddit. When it does, I'll be sure to sound the alarm bells, I promise.

<comment><USER9> I don't usually say so, it's just that chains of "I voted you up because..." can be found in almost every large discussion on Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> actually, TTH uses the purported Hacker News algorithm, so i'm not sure if Digg would be the best comparison. [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/reddit- stumbleupon-delicious-and-...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/reddit-stumbleupon- delicious-and-hacker-news-algorithms-exposed)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to think that these tweets are actually parodying the "real" Twitter, but sadly I know better than that. Oh the world... what an interesting place you are...

</comment><comment><USER12> oh man this site is too funny</comment>


Show HN: Product Hunt for Niche Podcasts - <AUTHOR> https://www.listennotes.com/community/ <comment><USER2> I used the ListenNotes API for a previous startup idea I had and it was great. It's amazing how few (if any) podcast search APIs there are and ListenNotes is definitely a good example of one.

Wenbin also had a great blog post on "Good enough engineering" that deserves linking to: [https://www.listennotes.com/blog/good-enough-engineering- to-...](https://www.listennotes.com/blog/good-enough-engineering-to-start-an- internet-27/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > We will review and move your post to the "POPULAR" tab, if the post meets > our standard.

What is your standard?</comment>


Operating Manual for VC Firm Bloomberg Beta - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Manual <comment><USER2> One of their investment paths is "Beacon":

> _We believe that there are exceptional individuals with great ideas who > likely have the skills to build a company but lack the network or personal > financial means to get started. So we will invest a small amount of capital > -- $50K (for roughly 2% of the startup idea you pursue) -- to support very, > very early-stage founders explore an idea, validate a key hypothesis, or > build an early prototype._

[https://github.com/Bloomberg- Beta/Manual/blob/master/1%20-%2...](https://github.com/Bloomberg- Beta/Manual/blob/master/1%20-%20Manual.md#beacon)

<comment><USER3> Just a hunch, but it's likely something close to 100% of said individuals will have a (pre-existing, not a result of reaching out specifically for this investment) network to connect them the "right way" for the money. That's just the way this industry works. It's exceptionally rare for someone without connections to make any headway.

<comment><USER4> They pretty much say that in this document.

> If we don't know you ourselves, we prefer if someone we trust knows you.

<comment><USER5> I believe Marc Andreessen has said the same thing in the past. When he was accused of elitism, he said:

"That is my test of whether this person is a true entrepreneur. If they are, they will find a way, by hook or crook, to get to someone who knows me"

<comment><USER3> What's _not_ elitist about that statement?

<comment><USER6> I think what he's saying is, if that stops you, you weren't going to get very far anyway.

It will obviously be easier to draw Marc's attention from a high socioeconomic stratum, but as a VC it's not in his interest to make it completely impossible for anyone. At least that's the way I read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'd be nice if a majority of websites were exposed like this: if you wanted to save an article or blog-post for example, you could just fork it into a repository. What's saved is just the original text, or anything that has a flat representation. Then you could edit and re-publish with changes; I think this is more in align with how knowledge works, sort of an implicit graph with splits and merges.

The basic idea is to separate the content from how it's rendered (html, css, js). How content is rendered can be a repo-by-repo decision. Benefits of this is better portability of data and easier way to organize things on the internet: you wouldn't have to web-scrape with some type of dom parsing heuristic library since the content is readily accessible.

It's also feasible in implementation: plenty of people are publishing via Github pages and Jekyll; I just haven't seen the ability to fork posts yet. Bloomberg Beta definitely could've done this for their website.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even better, they do share templates of some (I guess) of the legal documents: [https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Investment- Documents](https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Investment-Documents)

Very useful if you are into that stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> The average investment of $500,000 is way too small IMO. That's less than the salary of one L5 (or L6?) engineer at Google.

<comment><USER10> 1\. 100% - FANG employees are indeed known as potential bad fits for early stage startups! Beyond asking for salaries multiples over international norms, which many teams are better off hiring vs 1 FANG type, they also often risk needing to overcome other critical bigco weaknesses: unready for the ups-and- downs, weird tooling, used to large org support in tools and distribution, must unlearn prioritizing tech / scale / reliability over hustle & iteration, and more. Startups may be a big leap for you and too much of a cultural mismatch. Which is OK! RSUs are great and you'll do fine, and good to realize now what it means to take a leap! If this is too much, equity shiftz to salary by Series A / B, and a few co's raise a lot in seed so already do that dilution trade off.

2\. 500k is a lot for pre-seed and fine for the common case of a 1-5M seed party round, which is generally 1-2 leads + various smaller checks. Interestingly, w/ softbank floundering and us economy prepping for a recession, I expect seed rounds to back down -- current is 2-5X over just 5-10yr ago.

(Disclaimer: founder that works with them and has to think about this stuff professionally)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> kind of funny that they all have twitter and linkedin links, but no github

</comment><comment><USER12> Connection is always needed to progress

</comment><comment><USER13> > We've moved our entire web presence to GitHub to become even more > transparent. Here, you can see how things have changed over time, propose > improvements, or even take our ideas and make them your own..

Sorry but to me this is screwy. Why do I have to spend time navigating github to find basic info about the firm if I am just curious? Why is it beneficial or implied that anyone who is anyone knows the secret handshake of finding what they need by finding it in this manner? Why is it not possible to have transparency with a 'normal' website and then if there is a reason point people to github?

From wikipedia:

"Bloomberg Beta consists of six full-time employees: Roy Bahat, Karin Klein, James Cham, Shivon Zillis, Morgan Polotan and Shaina Conners. Bahat was previously the President of IGN Entertainment and was the chairman of Ouya Inc. until June 2015."

The github site says nothing about who these people are either. Sorry they are not 'well known enough' to present this way. This is not 'everyone knows who Bill Gates is'.

Example: [https://github.com/KarinK](https://github.com/KarinK)

This is not transparency it is the opposite.

<comment><USER14> They're part of an insider club, if you're an insider you'll know who they are.

These are the kind of people wear their graduation rings upside down so you'll feel the chunk of metal in the handshake.

<comment><USER15> If we don't known them, we need to get in touch with people they may know. who we most likely don't know either, esp if the circle is small and keeps helping friends of theirs.</comment></comment></comment>