Internet horror stories: How ISPs screwed over users - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/internet-horror-stories-how-isps-screwed-over-ars-readers/ <comment><USER3> It's time to make Internet access a public utility, just like water and electricity. In this day and age, Internet access is as much an essential part of life as both of the above.

Remember that the cables that they use were paid for with _public tax money_. The private companies are selling _back_ to us the infrastructure that we already paid to build.

This is one issue on which neither progressives (who tend to favor government utilities/services) nor libertarians (who tend to favor the free market) are happy, because we have the _worst_ of both worlds: a government-sanctioned, unregulated monopoly, using infrastructure built with public tax dollars, and re-sold to the original payers (the public) at monopolistic prices.

Unfortunately, recent efforts in this direction have completely failed. A North Carolina town dissatisfied with Time Warner banded together to create a municipal ISP, and Time Warner sued, on the basis that they "couldn't compete[0]" with the superior speeds and lower prices that the municipal ISP provided. In the end, Time Warner _won_ [1].

I, like 80% of people in the US, have no choice as to my broadband provider. I don't have a landline. I don't have cable TV. All I need is Internet access, and for that, my only option is paying Time Warner Cable, at whatever price they decide to charge, for whatever service they decide to give me[2].

[0] read: "didn't want to compete" == "it's cheaper for us to sue you than to lower our prices to market rate"

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/the-price-of- muni...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/the-price-of-muni- broadband-eternal-war-with-time-warner-cable/)

[2] Pro-tip: If you're stuck with TWC as well, don't pay for the higher speed levels. That's just the maximum possible speed, and they don't guarantee you anything close to that, for any portion of your monthly service. If you live in a congested area, you're likely to get the same speed regardless of which tier you purchase, so just pick the cheapest one.

<comment><USER4> > Remember that the cables that they use were paid for with public tax money. > The private companies are selling back to us the infrastructure that we > already paid to build.

Actually unless I was misinformed, they are selling back the unimproved infrastructure that we paid them to improve. The whole situation makes me so furious and there's nothing I can do. Mesh networks, I guess. I need to make some friends along a line from here to a backbone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The more I think about it, the more I want government to step in and nationalise/regulate internet service, like they did with electricity.

Internet access has become commoditized enough that there isn't much innovation in it's distribution, and it is so necessary for modern businesses that it makes economic sense.

<comment><USER6> I could not agree more for this specific case. Really wish Internet was just another utility that we paid for and not worry about the monopoly these ISPs have specially in some remote areas.

<comment><USER7> Remote areas? I had remarkably little choice in _New York City_. I lived in Brooklyn and had Optimum Online. I was happy with it, but then moved to Queens and now I had to switch to RCN, because they were in my building and Optimum wasn't. Moved to Manhattan, and had to get TWC, until FiOS was installed in the building.

<comment><USER8> You probably had a choice to opt out. I _must_ pay $50/month to Comcast for TV service in my apartment in the DC suburbs, whether I use it or not (and I don't). I then pay them $80 more for Internet. The only other option is wireless.

<comment><USER9> ... how does that work? Was it a part of your lease agreement, or a mandatory part of your ISP's offer?

<comment><USER8> Yes, it's one of the apartment's hidden fees. I'm sure the apartment gets a cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want competition, stop letting local governments make "deals" with the ISP's to bring such and such Internet or service to that area. Almost always that ensures the company will get a monopoly in that area.

It's precisely for this reason why I'm against states making deals with ISP's even if it means bringing gigabit fiber to their areas. Will it still be fast enough 10-15 years later? Because you can bet they aren't going to upgrade it anymore after they get their local monopoly. I'm sure 1-10 Mbps seemed super- fast 10 years ago, too, when they made the first deals from which they got their current monopolies.

<comment><USER11> > _I 'm sure 1-10 Mbps seemed super-fast 10 years ago_

It's plenty fast now, too. Good-quality 1080p H.264 video is 3Mbps. 6Mbps is 50GB/day. If this is not enough, you most likely have a software problem.

Not that we shouldn't strive for progress, but most of the complains in these comments are completely different from the rural horror stories of the article - they're taking for granted development that isn't actually there. Signing up for the cable company because it has the highest advertised speeds and then complaining about the implications of a shared medium provided by an unregulated monopoly is myopic entitled whining.

Look into competing DSL options, really. Your new provider may even have warm- blooded people answering the phone.

<comment><USER12> So we can saturate our internet connections with one video stream. That means it's _not_ fast enough. Presently living alone so this is mostly a nonissue for me, but what about people with 2+ users at home? One wants to watch the latest Doctor Who, the other wants to check their email and browse the web, someone is losing out.

<comment><USER11> This is exactly the kind of knee-jerk entitlement I'm talking about. I'm guessing if connection speeds were 10x higher, you'd still be making similar arguments for why the slower one was also completely unacceptable. I'd love a 100mbit home connection as well, but we don't have those and signing up for cable is a very stressful way to pretend.

As for the current practicalities - first, two of these streams would fit in 6Mbps. Second, streaming is unnecessary for tv/movies, and I'm guessing you don't watch 24 hours of a day - upgrade to a non-streaming setup.

<comment><USER12> I probably wouldn't, my service is around 12Mbit, it is fast enough for me and I've rarely saturated it. I fully understand that (like CPUs and memory) the tech will grow to fill the space provided. You claimed a 1-10Mbit/second data connection was fast enough but essentially made the argument from the standpoint of a single user of that connection. Home connections are often multi-user so by your calculations they are not fast enough for most users.

Second: "upgrade to a non-streaming setup"

What services are comparable to Hulu/Netflix in terms of variety of content (though Netflix streaming seems to have poorer coverage these days, lost some contracts?) that is not a streaming service?

<comment><USER11> I saturate my 10/1Mbit all the time. I've had a 16GB disk image uploading for the past few days, and it will be going for a few more. It would be great if it was done in a few hours, but current consumer connections simply won't do that. If I had cable, I'm sure Time Warner would have throttled the transfer right down and it would have taken a similarly-stymieing amount of time. Either way I have to wait, but this way I'm not also tearing my hair out hating my ISP and wondering when they're going to jack my price or send me a nastygram.

As for entertainment, torrents seem to work for me. If you're looking for a branded service to contribute money to the destruction of the Internet, then I've got to wonder why you'd have any issue with the cable companies besides price.

<comment><USER12> So I like paying people for a service that satisfies a desire. That means I have to like cable companies too (who I've not dealt with in 2 years)?

Do you have another means of contributing to the artists, actors, directors, crews that make the shows/movies you torrent so that they can receive compensation and continue to make the media you enjoy? Or do you strictly avoid all media that isn't CC-licensed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Talking with Comcast on the phone can seem like talking to someone from another planet. When I moved last year and needed to move my service with me, I was instructed to just bring the Comcast box to the new place myself, and then call a specific number when I had connected it to turn service on. Great! I thought, that sounds easy.

Well it turns out the people answering at that number (the number they gave me, remember) were completely unfamiliar with the concept of moving. "You want to do what?" they asked incredulously, as if I was the first person they had ever encountered who had moved from one residence to another.

"I have moved. My service has already been disconnected at the old address, and I would like to activate it at my new address" I repeated, thinking they had just misheard me.

"Have you tried unplugging it and then plugging it back in?" they offered helpfully.

After an hour on the phone and many, many transfers I was finally able to talk to someone who could handle this bizarre and complicated request. I hate to think how much time it will cost me if I ever have a real problem.

<comment><USER14> > I hate to think how much time it will cost me if I ever have a real problem.

If you're a person with clue, get friendly with the folks at the local Comcast office, or one of the technicians. If you're technically inclined and can demonstrate that you're wise enough to only call them about issues with _their_ network, you'll probably be able to get the support number for the local office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the UK, we have loads of broadband companies who sell service through BT phonelines. (catch: you have to pay BT for line rental, which at £13/month isn't too bad, and you do get a phone number for that.) This acts very much like the "municipal fiber network" proposed in the article - all your customer service is with who you pay your bill to, and they set your download limits and any throttling (and there are more expensive options[1] that offer larger, well-defined limits and promise not to throttle.)

Fibre connections seem to be either BT or Virgin running their own (separate) infrastructure all over the place, and you can get cable broadband if you actually want cable TV.

Personally I've stuck with ADSL2+ since, in London, that's good enough. When I move out next year, we'll see which hardware can get me the best speeds.

[1] [http://idnet.net](http://idnet.net)

<comment><USER16> That was supposed to be how it worked in the US, at least in the late 90s/early 00s - phone (and cable too, I think?) telco network operators were legally obligated to let other ISP companies lease their lines and deliver service to customers. There was no real enforcement though, and network operators just waged guerrilla warfare on independent ISPs - <USER2> "delays" connecting lines for customers that disappeared if the customer got impatient and signed up for the telco instead, service limitations and outages that telco customers on the same lines didn't notice, etc - until most/all of the independent ISPs went bankrupt or gave up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how efficient electric service is now in Texas. There is one outfit that installs and maintains the lines, and dozens of competing service companies that just handle billing (and oddly enough all use the same third party billing software). Compare that with the ISP situation where each town has a cable company and a phone company and that's it. Except where an older phone company had a presence years ago where those lucky folks can also get FIOS as an option. My town, the 50th largest city in the US, has TWC and AT&T and no FIOS. So I have an option of Dumb or Dumber.

The laws in this country to allow monopolies are a joke, but both political parties could care less.

<comment><USER18> Depends on where in Texas you're talking about. In Austin, we have the City of Austin Utilities (though the suburbs do seem to have options). El Paso only had one option when I lived there, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Of course, not everyone's home Internet is terrible.

I dispute this. Is Google Fiber all right? Do you Silicon Valley folks get decent service? Because out here in the real world, ISPs are uniformly horrible. I haven't met or talked to anyone on the entire Internet who is satisfied, or simply not constantly enraged, by their ISP. It seems every single one is corrupt and incompetent at the same time.

<comment><USER20> I love my ISP, CondoInternet. $60, 100M symmetric. Upgrade to 1000 available. Free static IP, full IPv6 support.

<comment> steve-howard Same. The only downside is that the buildings they provide service to are horrendously expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lately, I don't mind connection speeds as much as I care about absurd data caps. It's almost 2014, for god sake. Are we still having to fight for our data usage?

<comment><USER19> Because anyone who uses more than 5GB a month is a pirate, don't you know?

<comment><USER22> It's ridiculous considering the variety of activities that require internet. According to the usage chart for the last few months when I log into TWC our house uses more than 5GB a day (we have 3 adults and a kid in the house).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We have a lot of competing ISPs here in Lithuania. Just for comparison, I pay <15$ for 100mbps connection and in the 10 years I had maybe one or two outages that were fixed within few hours.

</comment><comment><USER24> Makes me think twice about changing my Internet from Earthlink (provided by TWC) to a faster offering from TWC. It works now and I don't think I've ever had an outage in the almost 10 years I've had it in 2 separate houses. Only problem is it's slow as dirt. They advertise 15/3 but I rarely get over 380Kbps upstream which makes working from home all but impossible for me. I'd love to get 30 or 50Mbps down, but I'm afraid of what might happen if I switch...

</comment><comment><USER25> I've had a similiar horror story with Eircom, one of Ireland's main providers. We were paying for 3mb/s at €40/month but only receiving around 0.4mb/s. I gave customer service a ring and they said they could _downgrade_ the line to 1mb/s which would improve the actual signal but we'd still have to pay for the 3mb/s. I really wish it was nationalized like electricity but I don't think our government is technically competent yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been kicked from 7 South African ISPs as a top 2% or 'abuse' user, after paying for uncapped access. Things seriously need to change this side.

<comment><USER27> I visited SA a few months ago, with an eye toward possibly moving there and working remotely (I'm a software developer for a large software engineering corporation that's relatively friendly toward remote workers).

My opinion was that it would be very difficult to be a remote software worker in SA because the network infrastructure was so poor. Everyone I talked to just used USB cellular modems to get online, and the load would actually cause the cell tower near my friend's flat to crash sometimes at peak hours. The Internet was entirely unusable for good portions of the day.

Meanwhile, if you're willing to pay a premium for installation and use of a wired connection, you wind up dealing with the sort of thing you faced or just flat out apathy toward whether or not the service should actually work consistently.

In your own experience, is this an accurate assessment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting article for me, being that I have no experience with the ISP industry in America at all.

 _" The best solution, I think, is to lay fiber in all the municipalities and have consumers choose their ISP, with service delivered on the municipal fiber lines..."_

This is exactly what has been happening where I live - Christchurch, New Zealand. A number of years ago, a city-owned LLC called Christchurch City Networks Limited (now known as Enable Networks[1]) began rolling out an extensive fibre network in the downtown/city-centre area. Initially, for about $700 (NZD) per month, you could lease a dark pair between your premises and your ISP of choice (or even directly between two arbitrary premises, plugging directly into your own equipment at each end, with no ISP involved).

You'd then negotiate arbitrary speed/bandwidth/caps with your chosen ISP. We were paying something like $3000 per month for a 1000 mbit/sec internet connection with (IIRC) a 2TB cap. This was probably 8 years ago or something, it doesn't cost anything like this now.

Latterly, they've been rolling out a GPON-based (passive) fibre network. If you are connected to this part of the network, there are highly standardised plans available from multiple ISPs. You can choose one of two speeds: 30 mbit/sec symmetric, or 100 mbit/sec symmetric. Different ISPs have different usage plans available. Any public (government-funded) school can sign up for a 30 mbit/sec plan, with unlimited traffic, for something like $200/month.

Amongst home users, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 are both still popular choices (and our pricing there seems similar enough to the US, with stupidly low caps and high prices), but fibre continues to gain traction.

[1] [http://www.enable.net.nz](http://www.enable.net.nz)

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there some law that keeps power and gas companies[1] from doing internet?

1) they have right of way to the home

</comment><comment><USER30> Largely I'm happy with my ISP. Except that somewhere in their core network they have a broken link, which means that 0.01% of the internet is inaccessible to me, as of a couple of weeks ago when they "upgraded" my connection. Unfortunately that 0.01% includes my friend's computer which runs my backup email servers. Tried explaining this on the phone to the ISP. The script the phone-jockey had basically took me through rebooting the router, trying a couple of different browsers, and then saying that they were pleased to have solved the problem.

</comment><comment><USER31> I worked for a major ISP - Two of them, one being the largest suppliers of DSL nationwide and the other, their largest reseller.

There are some horror stories out there - in truth, the majority of customers get what they pay for monthly without the plethora of stupids presented here.

On the other hand, when I set up service with Comcast, my bill had 4-5 mystery charges monthly for 4 months, no one could explain what they were, and they got credited. But still, it was an hour of my time each time it happened.

</comment><comment><USER32> Has anyone heard of: "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age"

</comment><comment><USER33> I am surprised AOL is not mentioned. I remember story going around how subscription made by a person could not be cancelled even though that person passed away.

</comment><comment><USER34> There are usually alternatives, but they're sometimes hard to find. MonkeyBrains in SF is top-notch. [http://www.wispa.org/find-a- wisp](http://www.wispa.org/find-a-wisp)</comment>


Realistic rain drops in JS - <AUTHOR> http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/demo1.html

<comment><USER2> Looks great! The biggest drops sort of spoil the illusion at times because they pass in front of or behind other drops without absorbing them. Maybe a cool tweak for v2 would be to add some simple collision resolution?

It would probably look great if you did a front to back sort based on droplet size, and resolved collisions (which you'd have to detect) by deleting the smaller droplet.

<comment><USER3> Looks like they did:

[http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/demo012_3.html](http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/demo012_3.html)

<comment><USER4> That patch of blue sky on the right doesn't feel quite right and takes the realism out of it a bit.

I know, just me being fussy. Impressive use of canvas though, it could be really nice as an appeasing background image on a site. Using the navigator geolocalisation and a weather site we could have a weather sensitive site. Have to test resource wise and see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks pretty cool but the heavy aliasing is a bit distracting.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I mostly see blinking pixels. Maybe it is better on a retina display.

<comment><USER7> Very convincing on Retina display from two feet or more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux This is more impressive than I first thought... I wiped my screen, thinking I had sneezed on it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Press F11 then refresh. Reminds of screensavers I wrote in the 90s/early 2000s. Very nice.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm finally getting pretty comfortable with Rails, HTML, CSS, enough to actually use things like this. Can anyone recommend slick/good looking js like this that would be fun to toy with?

<comment><USER10> You can try it out my hacker news web app for mobile. [http://hn.premii.com](http://hn.premii.com)

Source code at [http://github.com/premii/hn](http://github.com/premii/hn) Or This is another awesome HN app. Scroll down to bottom for source code. [http://hackerwebapp.com/](http://hackerwebapp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love it, used it in a project a while back. Unfortunately it's pretty resource intensive. Had to disable it for most mobile and tablet browsers.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is really great, amazing to see that things like this are possible on a common users browser. What was the inspiration behind creating this?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is just begging for some JS audio to go with it!

<comment><USER14> It would work great together with [http://www.rainymood.com/](http://www.rainymood.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> really cool. Something to help the mood [http://www.noisli.com/](http://www.noisli.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> How do I make it go away?

<comment><USER17> It's a demo page. You can see the other examples here:

[http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/](http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/)

(click on the images to see each demo)</comment></comment>


Sharecropping in the Orchard: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard.html

<comment><USER2> I think you're giving short shrift to the first Gruber Konfab post, which did not simply say "tough luck, Arlo", but also contained a credible argument that Dashboard didn't rib Konfabulator off in the first place.

I would not be surprised to find that you agree with me that it's Apple's prerogative to make whatever decisions it wants to optimize for end-user experience --- the point I _think_ you're articulating with "especially if the orchard is better off under the care of the landlord" or however you put it. Dashboard is better than Konfabulator. iTunes is better than Audion.

I don't know whether the iPhone will be better off in an ObjC-only ecosystem, but it might be. Classic Mode, Java, and Java Cocoa were debacles on OS X.

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly agree it's Apple's prerogative to optimize for the user experience, for the stockholder's value, or both :-) I find the thought of Flash on the iPhone revolting, and it isn't just a case of not using Flash applications: I don't want the platform watered down and the financial race to the bottom becoming a UI race to the bottom as well.

That being said, I am writing my own iPhone Go UI as a web application rather than a native application :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice, especially in view of Apple's new TOS for the iPhone SDK.

Want to avoid being am iPhone sharecopper? Stick with web apps and HTML(5)+Javascript clients that run on multiple small devices.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I be expecting to pay a designer? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I am just in the infant stages of a new start up and was hoping someone could give me some reference to work from in terms of hiring a designer. Currently, I am looking for someone to help come up with a logo and help with branding. Does anyone have any experience in this area?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> If it's just logo and branding, you can do it cheap at 99designs or do it expensive by hiring a single person with a reputation.

If you're going to hire a design employee, that's an entirely different discussion with lots and lots of variables.

<comment><USER3> Don't do it cheap at 99designs. That's the equivalent of writing your site in ASP.net: it looks like a good idea now, but soon, you'll regret it.

<comment><USER4> I hate to hijack the comments with a response that doesn't address the OPs question at all, but I felt like that wasn't necessarily a fair comparison.

ASP.NET Webforms? Yes, huge mistake you'll regret

ASP.NET MVC? Fantastic choice, you will not regret it so long as you're a microsoft based shop

You can't make a blanket statement like that about ASP.NET, since it's effectively a bifurcated ecosystem at this point (and we're all hoping the WebForms fork dies a quick death).</comment></comment></comment>


Open Thread: How Would You Fix Yahoo? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_thread_how_would_you_fix_yahoo.php <comment><USER2> If I was put in charge; I'd start by examining each unit of the business and the leadership of each of the units. I'd make the tough calls; such as eliminating under performing managers and replacing them with my top team; and/or I'd give each marginally performing business unit a set time to reach agreed upon goals or be sold; and/or I'd help unneeded employees seek employment elsewhere.

I'd breakdown existing barriers to communication. I'd put a focus on innovation and I'd dig deep into the business to see what opportunities exist but haven't been implemented. I'd establish known business and employee performance goals and "push" the business towards those goals. Profit would be a key dimension of my "new" goals.

Without knowing anything about Yahoo - One of the mistakes I think they made was copying Google's Adwords system. I think they should examine closely the reason customers use online advertising - and then create a unique model based on their customers wants. I could go on but everything after this would be a guess since I really don't know the insides of Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) Get bought by Microsoft.

2) Let Microsoft run the Yahoo businesses like they do all of their others, as a P&L that could actually take significant losses in the first few years just to gain market share.

3) Profit (half a decade from now)

</comment><comment><USER4> Complete redesign of website - it looks so messy, compared to Google.

</comment><comment><USER5> sell off all the companies that having nothing to do with the company.

Focus on search. Search is what made yahoo. Also they need to realize that the money is in search ads.</comment>


Apple will reject apps created from app generation services like Xamarin in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jzeferin0/status/942754863083114502 <comment><USER2> This email is completely unverified. Apple certainly has its targets on app generators, but not Xamarin, React Native or other similar technologies, that I have seen. The email contains grammatical errors and has not been received by any other developer, that I know of. It is highly likely to be a fake.

<comment><USER3> It looks like it mixes true and false information. If it turns out the content is actually genuine, in spite of imperfect English, the underlying meaning could be that Apple will reject template-based apps generated by frameworks mentioned, and not that all apps created by them would be banned. This seems the most logical conclusion. Apple definitely wouldn't disclose such a huge policy change via one small letter to one developer, it makes no sense at all.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it looks like they took a legitimate email, and added in that line causing all the fuss. That line is what seems out of place, and has the grammatical errors. The fact they mention Trillian also removes the legitimacy. Unless people are creating apps with an old school messaging service?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, someone got it confused with Titanium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please verify sources before spreading this information, this is uncorroborated tweet by one person, who is supposedly posting an email his co- worker got.

The message is filled with grammatical errors, and list "trillian" as an app generator.

Lastly, it says early 2019 not 2018.

</comment><comment><USER5> As author or cordova and react-native plugins, I'm wondering if it makes sense to continue to support ios.

<comment><USER6> Regardless of the ethics of apple's decision here, iOS' market share makes it pretty clear it's worth it. Does it not?

<comment><USER5> Sure making apps will continue to make sense, no matter if Apple banned cordova/react-native or not.

But my point is no about apps, but rather about plugins. Without iOS, the main benefit (cross platform development) of cordova/rn will be lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a possibility this could fall afoul of antitrust laws or be deemed monopolistic behaviour? What are the legal considerations here?

<comment><USER8> That's fake news. There's nothing to discuss here.

<comment><USER9> If you mean false, please say false.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It specifically mentions 2019 for Xamarin not 2018.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does this include React Native?</comment>


Teeth LEDs - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/new-japanese-fashion-l-e-d-lights-for-your-teeth/?hpw <comment><USER2> I sometimes wish that people's personalities were printed on their forehead, so I could stop wasting my time on the obnoxious and stupid ones.

This comes pretty close to fulfilling that wish.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, how do you feel about folks with tattoos?

<comment><USER4> Well if it's on their forehead, that's a pretty good sign that there's something wrong with them. If it's elsewhere, it really depends... for the most part, no generalization to be made.

<comment><USER5> POOR IMPULSE CONTROL

<comment><USER6> Especially if that is the tattoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some random Japanese trends are destined to go mainstream in the west, while others aren't. This seems to fall firmly into the latter category.

<comment><USER8> Calling this a trend is kind of pushing it. ;)

Publicity stunt by a fashion designer/store in Harajuku sounds much better.

If this winds its way down to Nagoya, I think I'm going to need to move to a different island.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the NYT runs one "Japan... weird, right?" story every three months, typically sourced off a single interview with a counterculture aficionado in Tokyo. Remember, e.g., anti-mugger camouflague dresses to turn you into a Coke machine?

My theory is that Japanese people are rich enough to count as white and rare enough in the NYT newsroom to count as Republican, which makes this OK by their lights. If the published an article on hip hop teeth as a craze sweeping the nation, they'd lose face with people they actually care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure people have been putting glo-sticks in their mouths to accomplish this very effect for many years. The concept isn't new.

<comment><USER11> When I was young(er) a friend cut open a glo-stick and gargled it. "Hey, it says it's non-toxic!"

The inside of his mouth glowed for a week.

Related: Glo-sticks burst in a shower of (hot) glowing liquid when thrown in a campfire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I found <http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/> far more interesting than the teeth lights.

</comment><comment><USER13> While this particular project seems like a novelty item, I recommend taking a closer look at Daito, one of the artist-hackers mentioned in the article. I enjoyed digging a bit deeper into the works on his site.

<http://www.daito.ws/>

<comment><USER14> I've been subscribed to his youtube channel for a while (<http://www.youtube.com/user/daito>) and it's very entertaining to see some of his projects come up, decontextualised: electric stimulation to people's faces (usually his own), drawing on photosensitive liquids with a laser, recreating a photograph using a sheet of cardboard and a nailgun.

Given that history I'm inclined to see this more as an interesting piece of art than a stupid fashion trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Funny to see this on HN after seeing something very similar at a Ramstein concert on Friday night. The singer has a cheek piercing which he feeds a wire through to light up his mouth.

Good photo here: [http://en.affenknecht.com/first-professional-pictures- from-t...](http://en.affenknecht.com/first-professional-pictures-from- the-2009-rammstein-tour/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Body decoration is nearly a human universal -- it's unsurprising that new technology will be adopted for this, though whether this particular fad will take root is doubtful.

<comment><USER4> Doubtful that it will take root, not _whether_ it will take root. (Seems pretty clear whether or not it will take root!)

<comment><USER17> But the upgrade to LED grills would be LED teeth, which always take root.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> These would be pretty cool with a few extra features. Say flashing in time with music or sound as you are speaking. Or wirelessly connected so that they sink and can act out 'symphonies' of light displays. Great for advertising!

<comment><USER19> The first demo video does show flashing and colors sensitive to music, and the second video shows a large groups' lights staying in sync, though the mechanisms of communication (wireless signals?) aren't clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Till Lindemann can pull this off. You can't. Just leave it at that.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU1wLryjuEw>

</comment><comment><USER21> Can't wait to see these on the playa this year.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Hem, the photos and the second videos are fake. The light sometimes doesn't match the mouth.

The first video is quite funny, though.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think JWZ put it best when he said "Dear Japanese people ..."

</comment><comment><USER23> The concept is not worthless: It could be a useful punishment to give these 'glowing teeths' to the avatars of cheating/bad behaviour players in your favourite online game.

It would have been a success in counter-strike!</comment>


Mozilla has 'no plans' to offer Firefox without Pocket - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/12/mozilla-has-no-plans-to-offer-firefox-without-pocket/ <comment><USER2> One about:config setting and it is disabled.

But it is a disturbing commericialization of an open source product.

I suspect there will be (more) forks with the radical upcoming extension changes.</comment>


Sentri: Smart Home Security + Android/iOS App - <AUTHOR> http://www.gadgetify.com/sentri-smart-home-security/

<comment><USER2> Interesting product -- like Canary, but with a screen.</comment>


Why you need a framework with your WebSockets - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois/why-you-need-a-framework-with-your-websockets-98330827e3e <comment><USER2> Yeah, that is cool, also liked the Mozilla tutorial for Java devs: how to develop the WebSocket server:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API/Writing_a_WebSocket_server_in_Java)</comment>


The Economist magazine pension issue - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/04/19/the-economist-magazine-pension-issue/

<comment><USER2> I like this blog (other entries of which have been posted here before), but I find it a bit misleading that it shows up on HN as coming from "harvard.edu" -- which I assume to be Harvard's official web portal. (Clicking through reveals it to be a posting on blogs.law.harvard.edu, which provides free blog webspace to anyone with a Harvard-affiliated email address.)

Am I just being too picky?

<comment><USER3> blogs.law.harvard.edu also belongs to harvard.edu, so what's the problem? Many universities give blog space (and email accounts) to alumni, as a way to keep them engaged (and hit them up for donations...).

<comment><USER4> ISPs and other services often give customers customername.isp.net... - I do this, customers get username.xen.prgmr.com, while prgmr.com is for official business stuff. most of the stuff on something.xen.prgmr.com has absolutely nothing to do with prgmr.com, other than paying me eight bucks a month or what have you, so marking a something.xen.prgmr.com link with 'prgmr.com' would give people the wrong idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the article may be attempting to show how dire the situation is. Or that the fix may lie in some form of equality of pensions throughout the work force, still a hard thing to fix.

With unemployment at such a high level today, increasing the retirement age would keep all of the baby boomers employed, rather than leaving the work force. It does not look good any way you look at it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if at some point some sections of society will voluntarily move to less efficient methods of production to generate employment - aka resurrecting the self sufficient village.

<comment><USER7> If that does occur I'd take it as a sign of some serious problems with social order. More efficient production should see gains for everyone, but a look at the last thirty years suggests otherwise.

<comment><USER8> If you look at industries with an irreducible reliance on labour (eg medicine, law) then productivity has surged through the accumulation of capital. Programmers today can achieve in minutes what used to take years, because of the accumulation of software and faster hardware.

This leads to the paradoxical situation that as a percentage of GDP, those irreducible-labour sectors begin to loom larger and larger.

<comment><USER8> Correction: industries _without_ an irreducible reliance on labour haven't seen productivity surges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the usual demographic problem. However, the problem is bigger on the military end - you can't defend your interests if 1) you don't have the money 2) if you don't have the manpower.

However, the back to the problem with taxing jobs out of existence: fortune is on youths side. As bad as the problem may sound, once the problem hits criticality, you get a sudden societal upheaval and things right itself immediately. No one should count on their pensions as being forever.

</comment><comment><USER10> The first paragraph describes a common structure of the articles in The Economist, which goes a long way towards explaining why it is so satisfying to read.

</comment><comment><USER11> The missing solution? Immigration.

</comment><comment><USER12> If economic growth averages 2% for the next 35 years America will be twice as rich as it is now. We can provide for old folks now, just like we did 35 years ago, and we can definitely do it 35 years from now. This is just another rich dude complaining about the proles.

<comment><USER13> No account for inflation? No account for the rising costs in healthcare, and diminishing returns on that "investment"? No account for the fact that 35 years ago the proportion of economic active people to retired ones was completely different?

If you are going to dismiss a (very middle class, by social standards) dude, at least you should do a little bit more than hand-waving.

<comment><USER12> 2% is real. The US has average around 3% for years now. And since I don't believe in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall I don't think assuming at least 2% is unreasonable. But let's say zero. Does anyone really think we'll lose the ability to care for the old?

Here's the simple way to think about pensions/SS: we take about 4% of GDP and cut checks to old people. They buy food and pay their rent. Nobody starves. It always works, in 1961, 2011, 2061, whenever. Anybody who says otherwise is trying to fool you.

<comment><USER14> He mentioned this, "Part of the magic is that they don't promise unlimited inflation indexing. If their country gets poorer, the pain will be shared by the working and non-working alike. "

Will we have the political will to do it any time soon?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla media units are full of owner's private data even after a factory reset - <AUTHOR> https://insideevs.com/news/419525/tesla-data-leak-personal-info-ebay/ <comment><USER2> I've seen these issues before professionally, and they typically originate from lack of internal storage APIs and management buy-in for all teams to use them and _only_ them.

I'm purely speculating here but imagine if every team (Calendar, Spotify Integration, Netflix Integration, WiFi, etc) was writing their own storage code; the MCU is a glorified Ubuntu distro so different teams decide to scatter files all all over the place or re-use existing Linux services (e.g. WiFi credential storage). Particularly if they're doing the smart thing and giving each app/components its own Linux user/UID.

Then the inevitable question becomes: How do you wrangle it all for a reset? That's where a storage API comes into play, or you just "nuke the entire thing from orbit" and overwrite the running partition using some stored image using a pre-boot environment but even then the data might not be removed from the physical storage chips.

<comment><USER3> If it is a glorified ubuntu dist, then all the aps can dump user-specific data into a 'home'. Then nuke that directory as needed.

<comment><USER2> Only if you don't plan to leverage any parts of the underlying operating system. Once you start utilizing Linux Services, you may leak data beyond home directories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last time I was trying to sell my Tesla, I used factory reset, entered credentials, the car rebooted, data still fully here. Tried again multiple times. Nothing happened. I don't think that functionality is tested properly even for the basic erasure that you can visually confirm, let alone properly wiping the storage. If someone is reading this at Tesla, you should encrypt storage and destroy the key on reset.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lack of privacy is one of the reasons I've not bought a Tesla.

<comment><USER6> I have a Model 3, and bought the FSD upgrade for $2K when it was on sale for a couple weeks. I've been wanting to schedule the upgrade of the autopilot computer from hardware 2.5 to hardware 3, but now I'm scared. I always considered a Tesla to be like an iPhone - you factory reset/wipe it before you sell it to someone, but if the manufacturer swaps out your computer and doesn't have good hygiene, yikes!

TLDR: I'm going to wait until I hear they have good data hygiene before I let them swap out my computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised nobody has taken them to Small Claims to recuperate the obnoxious $1k fee for relinquishing your old, defunct part. Seems like an easy win.

<comment><USER8> Core charges are permitted under statute requiring the return of replaced parts.

The problem is the lack of consistency. The core charge communicated can vary wildly between locations and staff performing the work, and some owners are told the part is restricted and no return is possible. In these cases, legal complaints with your state's Attorney General might improvise Tesla's consistency across the org. With other issues, I've had good luck with certified letters to Tesla's legal service address, YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about all the data that is sitting on Tesla's servers? Do they delete that when you sell the car?

</comment><comment><USER10> tesla stock price is too high imo

</comment><comment><USER11> Url changed from [https://jalopnik.com/researcher-discovers-that-old-tesla- med...](https://jalopnik.com/researcher-discovers-that-old-tesla-media- control-units-1843322544), which points to this.</comment>


Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - <AUTHOR> http://www.typewritten.org/Media/ <comment><USER2> Ah, A/UX! As a boy I wanted nothing more than to install it on my dad's computer — but of course back then it cost tremendous amounts of money, and it may not have been compatible with the software he wanted to run.

Also, is it just me or were BeOS & Macintosh Systems 7 & 8 the high point of colour GUIs? I've never seen anything since which looks as nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ahhhh, depth. How I miss you. Sigh. Well, back to my flat-everything-for-no- real-reason modern digital life.

<comment><USER4> Give it three years, and the UX community will revert back to something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1280x1024 seems incredible for 1990, were people using those resolutions at the time?

It seems weird to think I'm reading this on a monitor with less vertical resolution than that some 27 years later.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the mid-'80s the workstation PC vendors like Sun were competing to introduce a "3M computer". The three 'M's were megabyte, megapixel, MIPS:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer)

In the thirty years since, we've got fifty thousand times more performance (a recent Intel desktop CPU easily does 50,000 MIPS) and sixteen thousand times more memory... But most computers barely have two megapixel screens.

<comment><USER6> Imagine describing the scene of someone running the Atom editor on a 1080p laptop to someone from the 90s who complained about Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping[1]. It would seem so odd; 8GB of ram, 4 cores running billions of instructions per second each. Also there's a terraflop scale massively parallel supercomputer with 2GB of RAM dedicated to drawing overlapping windows.

1: Backronym for "EMACS"

<comment><USER7> That's one of the reasons that I'm actually a little excited for Moore's Law coming to an end. For years it has been more economical to program quickly and somewhat wastefully, leaving many people with slower computers behind. Now the economics are changing, and the competition will be in creating the most efficient software, to everyone's benefit.

<comment><USER8> We just moved everything to the cloud, where you can microservices your way to even more wasted MIPS. In the past, your text editor only wasted both cores on your laptop, but now it can waste all the cores on half a dozen AWS instances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Packard Bell 486 was my first desktop. I remember working on a green screen at school and discovering the CLI. I probably crashed half of the school's computers just playing around.

<comment><USER10> I had one at home, tinkering around and learning to program in QBASIC on it. I wish I still had it just to experience the certain charm of doing things the way you used to do them, but it sadly stopped consistently booting over a decade ago.

<comment><USER3> I'd pay $300 (maybe more) _right now_ for a tiny, durably-housed (I'd be letting my kids use it) 486-alike machine with a smallish integrated-into- housing LCD and keyboard, and maaaaybe a mouse and an old-school joystick/pad or two, but their absence is in no way a deal-breaker, running legit MS-DOS 6.x or something 100% compatible (not sure how FreeDOS is on the compatibility front) with some reasonable solution for getting software onto it over USB or SDCard or something. And a foolproof factory-reset hardware switch. No moving parts a must.

<comment><USER11> I know this may not qualify as "durably housed" but maybe get your hands on an old Netbook or similar laptop? I'd probably give FreeDOS a try for the OS. It's still supported to some degree and is probably better than getting your hands on an old MS-DOS or DR-DOS that hasn't been touched in years. It was good enough for a couple of the major PC makers to ship it on a few models in later years.

You could build something for kicks but a laptop would be a lot easier and probably cheaper.

[ADDED: I have an old laptop I don't use for anything any more. I may give this a try myself.]

<comment><USER3> My kids are very young and there are three of them. I struggle to find time when my brain's not already totally fried to finish even simple 1-2 hour projects, let alone re-housing a laptop to be kid proof and fiddling to get DOS drivers working on it, as much fun as that kind of thing might have been to 5-years-ago-me. This many kids+full-time work is roughly equivalent to having a 90-hour-a-week job. I'd rather pay for a finished product—otherwise it'll never happen, and if I try I'll just have a mess somewhere in the house that I'll fiddle with for 30 minutes every few weeks, never making progress. Gotta pick my battles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a blast to the past. I love seeing old systems, makes me want to get a couple of older machines just to play around with them.

BeOS in particular is a huge lament on what could have been - at the time, it was the slickest OS I had ever had the chance to play with and loved it dearly. I appreciate the Haiku project, but sadly I don't know how much of a place it truly has in the modern world beyond being a nostalgia toy.

<comment><USER13> Well, we're (Haiku) still the snappiest OS around, and while we're continuously playing catch-up, there are a number of people who do use it as their daily driver. Don't give up hope yet. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Alleycat ! Am I that old ???

<comment><USER15> Defeat that pesky broom: [https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's a wonderful collection of images. Specially interesting are the ones showing Unix on Acorn and Atari TT computers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know why those chunky, slightly unattractive fonts were so common - even sometimes in the cases of a higher-res screen? A couple of the examples of what I'm talking about...

Here's Risc OS 3.10: [http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/risc- os-3.10.png](http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/risc-os-3.10.png)

It's an older system with a relatively row resolution but each letter looks (to me) to be stretched vertically (or squeezed horizontally) - if you look at the elements on the windows (like the X or the border on the scroll-bars) you can see that this isn't simply a case of not having enough pixels available

This Amiga Workbench 3.5 one is another nice example: [http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/workbench-3.5-retina...](http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/workbench-3.5-retinaz3-256color.png)

The font seems really chunky to me and the environment clearly supports "better" (very subjective, I know)

I missed this era by a few years - maybe someone can shed some light on whether the window systems themselves were impressive enough on their own, or perhaps people found them more familiar (like they stuck around after moving from command-line to GUI)?

I get that I'm coming from an age where we have extremely high dpi screens and font anti-aliasing etc, but I've also worked with 5x7 and even 3x7 fonts (see [http://blog.mclemon.io/arduino-5x8-iso-8859-2-font](http://blog.mclemon.io/arduino-5x8-iso-8859-2-font) and [http://blog.mclemon.io/hacking-a-tiny-new-font-for-the- ssd13...](http://blog.mclemon.io/hacking-a-tiny-new-font-for-the- ssd1306-128x64-oled-screen)) and the systems above looked like they could support better than this.

<comment><USER18> Some older computers had weird resolution / aspect ratio combination.

[https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/N...](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/No_MSDOS_games_werent_widescreen_Tips_on_correcting_aspect_ratio.php)

Basically, if you play video games from the DOS era on a modern computer without correcting their aspect ratio they look stretched, and that was not how they were supposed to look.

So, the same goes for fonts. They look weird if you look at it with your current resolution and aspect ratio. They would look more condensed/thinner on the CRT monitors of the DOS era.

> The thing is, most MS-DOS games were actually rendered in 320x200, which is > a 16:10 aspect ratio and thus widescreen – but they weren't displayed that > way. I won't pretend I know all the technical details – there are way better > sources for that – simply put, the CRT monitors back then stretched images > to fit the screen.

> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something > close to 320x240. What today we see as a sharp, square pixel was actually a > blurry rectangle back then, about 20% taller than wider (the Amiga, Apple > II, Atari ST and other home computers all had different resolutions, but the > principle is quite similar).

Even if you're lowering your current monitor resolution you're not actually seeing those fonts the way they were meant to be rendered. That's because your monitor will display a native DOS resolution as widescreen. When CRT monitors of the time took that widescreen resolution and turned it square.

There's a lot of understanding about old rendering methods that has been lost in the mainstream. The article I linked also showed how people exploited scanlines to make water look transparent in a very smoothed way. Your LCD pixel grid just doesn't show things the way old low resolution CRTs did.

<comment><USER19> > The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something > close to 320x240.

Not necessarily _close_ to 320x240. Linearly addressable mode X was 320x240.

<comment><USER20> Very few games bothered with mode X. Most used the much easier to program mode 13h.

<comment><USER19> Unchained made int 13h easier than regular int 13h, but what about mode x was much more difficult to program? You got a faster display, square 4:3 pixels, and double buffering in 256 colors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if the source code to those SunOS graphic demos are available? I'd love to see and play with the suncube code especially. I tried to find it, but the best I found was an old tape archive file of SunOS 2.0 - and I have no idea how to easily restore that (plus, I doubt source code was included, and it was for m68k - so yeah, it might take some work to get it running again, if a VM exists).

EDIT: I did find out information about something called "TME" The Machine Emulator ([http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/)) which apparently can emulate various m68k systems to run SunOS on top of, so in theory, I might be able to get this tape archive installed and running.

But again, I doubt that the source code is included, which is what I'd really like to see...

<comment><USER21> For future explorers:

I found this:

[https://winworldpc.com/product/sunos/4x](https://winworldpc.com/product/sunos/4x)

Download the file "SunOS 4.1.4 Solaris 1.1.2 Source" \- go to the "demos" directory and a bit of searching you can find the "suncube.c" file.

Lots of dependencies on "suncore" graphics libs and such, but the code is there. Also - check out the /games folder - it has C source in it for "adventure", "hack" (nethack), and "trek" (star trek).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow. You can just see exactly where MacOS came from when you see that GEM Xerox Ventura screenshot...

I also love the suntools screens: so simple and nicely contrasted. What OS is that?

EDIT: this really makes me sad we only have like 3 major OSs now, I never knew how much I was missing until I saw all this.

<comment><USER23> There's definitely a similarity, but you've got the causal chain reversed (if there is one). The GEM UI was influenced by the Mac, at least determined judicially. This was the source of the initial "look-and-feel" lawsuit Apple won in the 80s.

> _" At this point, Apple Computer sued DRI in what would turn into a long > dispute over the "look and feel" of the GEM/1 system, which was an almost > direct copy of Macintosh (with some elements bearing a closer resemblance to > those in the earlier Lisa, available since January 1983)."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#GEM/1)

It's not surprising, though, given that Lee Lorenzen, formerly of Xerox PARC, wrote much of the code.

<comment><USER22> Oh interesting, I assumed it was the other way around because of the word "Xerox" in the name.

I can see why they sued...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The MS operating systems are weirdly underrepresented in this collection.

<comment><USER18> They're actually represented just about right if the screenshot collection goal is to show changes throughout time. There's screenshots of Windows 2.1, 3.0 and NT 4.0. Windows from 95 to 2000 kept the exact same look. There's absolutely no point in having a screenshot of each iteration in between. There's just not enough visual and conceptual UI change to really make it worth it having shots of 95, 98, NT4, ME, 2000. A shot of any of these will speak for the entire timeframe.

Compare this shot of Windows 2000 to the one of NT4 they feature on their page :

[https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win2000ad...](https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win2000advserv.png)

See any major change? right.

Windows XP is missing but in a way it might not count as retro enough because it has lived and been with us for far, far longer than most OS usually do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's the first Intergraph gui on CLIX I've seen. I almost still regret not buying two Intergraph computers at auction a decade ago. I still somehow ended up with a Clipper CPU board though. The last I searched the Internet, there just isn't much information about these machines.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've never heard of SunTools before – did they really have 1152x900 resolution back in 1985?

<comment><USER27> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2)

A typical configuration of a monochrome 2/120 with 4 Mb of memory, 71 Mb SCSI disk and 20 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $29,300 (1986 US price list).

A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list).

[multiply by 2.2 to convert to 2017 dollars]

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Man... My desktop really hasn't changed much from 2005.

</comment><comment><USER29> Love to see an animated GIF version of this website.

Specially if one can capture some of cool Linux KDE GL special effects.

</comment><comment><USER30> Damn, that SS from 1993 was a sweet system [1]. My 486-66 (DX2) from 1992 with 16 MiB of RAM, a ~340 MiB HD, and 17" sony trinitron set me back more than $5,000.

[http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/nextstep-3.1-x86.png](http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/nextstep-3.1-x86.png)</comment>


Stripe and Wufoo Join Forces to Power Payments in Online Forms - <AUTHOR> http://www.wufoo.com/2012/10/11/wufoo-and-stripe-join-forces-to-power-payments-in-online-forms/

<comment><USER2> Stripe is developing a lot faster than I ever expected. I was really happy with the initial product when it became available. Easy payment integration for developers was a [INSERT EXPLETIVE] dream. Their latest features have been terrific and add extra benefit. To see them partnering with Wufoo to help other developers is great.

Whoever put together Stripe's roadmap should get a beer or at least a high five.

Consider me a fanboy (and smarter at security thanks to them).

<comment><USER3> I'm right here with you. And in addition to their roadmap, the overall structure / priorities are also stellar.

+1 for being open, accesible, and responsive on all fronts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stripe are absolutely killing it right now, well since the beginning really. The amount of growth this company has gone through in the last 18 months alone is impressive. If I were Paypal I'd be starting to get really worried once Stripes takes off on a global scale and has the same kind of reach as Paypal.

Just waiting for Square to hit Australia and I'll be first on-board the Stripe train.

</comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't have been a better day to come across this.

Needed to sell seats for my workshop, and was going to build a registration page and hook it up to Stripe's new button. 5 minutes later with Wufoo and I'm up and accepting registrations :-)

Feature request: Allow for a coupon field.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ask Stripe: How have you managed your execution and releases so well? It's inspiring, though I'm wondering what core function or role in the organization allows this? I imagine it's a team effort with an overall vision that everyone is fully aware of and contributing to. Is it that simple?

</comment><comment><USER7> Excellent. I love the progress Stripe is making with payment options.

<comment><USER8> Looks like Jotform hooked up with Stripe too, with an even deeper integration with recurring billing too. [http://www.jotform.com/blog/64-JotForm-Stripe- Beautiful-Paym...](http://www.jotform.com/blog/64-JotForm-Stripe-Beautiful- Payment-Forms-in-Minutes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Neat!

Next: Stripe and Curebit. (With their speed of development, I just had to check their site to make sure this hasn't already been done.)</comment>


$100 Novo7 tablet: Android 4.0, 7" capacitive screen, USB 2.0, HDMI - <AUTHOR> http://www.ainovo.com/

<comment><USER2> I thought I'd seen this all before with the $100 tablets last year, but then I noticed something that sent my jaw to the floor: <http://en.ingenic.cn/product.aspx?ID=78>

That's the manufacturer for the JZ4770 SoC (system-on-a-chip) used in the Novo7. Their page has:

\- Product Datasheet (admittedly with only physical/electrical not logical details.)

\- Links to Android NDK, Linux toolchain, Linux source, uboot source, sample Linux rootfs for the SoC family.

This is more open development information than almost any other SoC platform used in cheap Android hardware! Admittedly, it all looks a little old but even as an indication of attitude, it's a great sign.

To date, nearly every vendor of these kind of designs has kept this information close to their chest and charges for it - if it's available it's nearly always because of leaks not releases. That's one of the underlying reasons why most of the cheap tablets violate GPL.

Unfortunately, I can't turn up any information about the "vivante gc860" graphics engine - drivers for that will probably be binary blobs (like on nearly every other Android device, at any price point.)

Anyhow, I'm excited that if Ingenic put out sufficient information about this SoC and its features, and if the hardware is "good enough", you might expect to see some interesting other uses & ports in the coming months.

<comment><USER2> Ah, of course - the JZ4770 is the big sibling of the SoC used in the Ben Nanonote series of "fully open source" mini-netbooks, and the Dingoo A320 gaming handhelds, and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One nice property of tablets is they don't need to go obsolete like laptops or desktop computers. They can be turned in to picture frames, home automation interfaces, cookbooks, mini-TVs, combined into larger interfaces, (if only they had narrower borders!) etc.

The only real obstacle to making them really useful is power supply, but wireless electricity should solve that problem shortly (and tablet computers might be their "killer app").

</comment><comment><USER4> Really bizarre formatting on this page, looks almost like a stitching together of images. That, plus the way its worded makes me suspicious of some kind of scam (worst) or is not fully baked (likely). Does anyone know more? Anyone have the same thoughts?

<comment><USER5> From a Youtube demonstration[1] it looks a little laggy. Looks like it can barely power Angry Birds at a decent speed. Oddly though, the Spiderman game looks like it runs a bit better. Not perfect, but better. I don't have sound at work, so the guy might be saying something related to his personal experience with it.

It's MIPS-based, not ARM. I don't know if that gives it anything of note. The thing _does_ exist, people have them in their hands. Not saying it's a worthwhile investment, but it might be.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb3k4fZpB8&feature=yout...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb3k4fZpB8&feature=youtube_gdata)

<comment><USER6> Here's another Youtube video I found. This one running ICS instead of the older version from the previous video.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44&feature=rela...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44&feature=related)

This one is in Spanish, but you can see the FPS performance in a number of games, flash, PDF, etc..

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDKgNBjlTw&feature=rela...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDKgNBjlTw&feature=related)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone notice that it can handle 1080p, not just 720p. Not that you would be able to notice on that 7" screen.

Always the option of plugging it into the tv....but I have never ever in my life seen anyone do that.

<comment><USER8> I plug in my Samsung E4GT into my TV to stream netflix, watch videos, and listen to music.

Works well as a "HTPC". Although I haven't found a solution for a remote yet so it's like the good old days when the remote to the tv was physically tethered with a long cord.

<comment><USER9> In the youtube link posted by freehunter <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320245> the tablet actually has a remote control with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Video from MIPS Technologies showing this tablet: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq79h-HA5lU>

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that MIPS are getting behind this one, I assume they're hoping they can steal some share back from ARM in this space.

However, as it's a marketing video there are approximately 4 seconds of "actual device" footage on there. Here's a video purporting to show 4.0 actually running on the Novo7:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuYE_u19i44>

Looks good, although they don't really do anything apart from navigating around menus.

(Lots of videos show Novo tablets with Android 3.x, which it apparently already shipped with. Which I don't understand at all, did Google provide MIPS/Novo with sources to build Honeycomb for MIPS?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wrote this up last night: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/05/99-chinese-tablet- is-mips-b...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/05/99-chinese-tablet-is-mips- based-runs-android-4-0/)

I thought it was interesting for a couple reasons, though of course at a hundred bucks you're not going to get an impressive device, merely functional. It's running a MIPS-compatible processor, which was what caught my eye.

<comment><USER12> Do you happen to know if it supports Bluetooth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmmm...already sold out. The owner of this website is registered using the email of the domain of this company: [http://ainol.com/plugin.php?identifier=ainol&module=page...](http://ainol.com/plugin.php?identifier=ainol&module=page&action=info&pageid=1)

So it's probably not vaporware, but the lack of English certainly doesn't help me figure out anything.

<comment><USER14> It's hard to look at stuff like this and think that western companies have much of a future in China.

<comment><USER15> The counter examples are legion, but Apple's future growth is dominated by Asia (esp. China).

Western companies selling (likely chinese-made) goods to China without investing in serious design, development and marketing (not to mention ecosystem and support) are not going to have much of a future, I agree.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious about the other direction. Will the little scrappy Chinese companies be able to win over a significant fraction of Western customers, or will brand-recognition act as to much of a deterrent against them?

<comment><USER17> My motto when buying Chinese stuff is to steer clear of brands that try to be fake.

Such as not buying Hyundai because their logo tries to mimic Honda's.

<comment><USER18> That isn't a very good example because Hyundai now makes some rather good cars and isn't Chinese. It's also a bit like avoiding Porsches because their logo looks like Ferrari's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It goes without saying, you get what you pay for. Quality parts, which are required for a quality experience, cost money.

This isn't going to be in the same league as an iPad, or even a Kindle Fire no matter what tweaks or custom ROMs you load.

<comment><USER20> Did you actually test it ?

<comment><USER21> For $100? Do you really need to?

<comment><USER22> Yes

<comment><USER23> Ok I am not expecting miracles here. How usable is it? Will it play angry birds (smoke test). Bascially, is this a repeat of the previous $100 android tablet fiasco?

<comment><USER24> It looks like it has a 1Ghz MIPS CPU & a GPU that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 & operates @ 444Mhz, so I would say Angry Birds is a yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If it runs video Skype, I am in...</comment>


Match Fixing Analysis Across Europe (2013/2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://federbet.com/media/Federbet_report_v3.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is a little bit more context to it [1]:

 _Match fixing analysis:_

There are frequent concerns about the phenomenon. Match fixing threatens the credibility of the entire sports system. Attempts to rig games cause serious damage and above all affect consumers. Despite the fact that the topic has become public knowledge, match fixing is not decreasing. In fact, due to a strange effect, the more we talk about it the more the corruption spreads and it seems acceptable.

The police are the only hope, but because of obsolete legislation or attempted cover-up by the same sports federations, they move with limited powers and with little chance of eradicating a phenomenon that has now reached substantial proportions. From our analysis, we estimate that the number of disguised fixing now exceeds 1000 matches per years.

Attempts at match fixing, whether bland or full are really easy to discover. The pure and simple analysis of numbers always brings out the truth, this applied to sports betting leads to discover wired betting trends and possible fixing.

 _How does it work?_

The betting market is like the stock market where instead of the shares, odds are traded. Like with the "shares", odds are subject to movement, whether physical or dictated by other changes, and as long as these changes remain within a range defined as "acceptable" there is no suspicion. However, when the changes in prices lead to violent shocks and are not justifiable by the event in question, then without doubt we are witnessing an attempt at fixing. The checks on fixing are easily achievable via cooperation of bookmakers, whom by joining FederBet, have the right channel to interact and provide valuable match data (ex: matched bets).

We had experience with Italian team, Novara, which willingly decided to undergo the Federbet checks. In the end Novara, received an important reward in sports justice and it is now satisfied that any attempt at corruption attempted by its members will be reported promptly and putting the club in an advantageous position when it comes to liability…

[1] [http://federbet.com/match-fixing/](http://federbet.com/match-fixing/)

</comment><comment><USER2> What does the "Fixed" column mean? I don't understand the notation.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems that FederBet will publish a detailed explanation about the meaning of that notation very soon on their website.</comment></comment>


Why Don't Designers Talk About Money? - <AUTHOR> http://branch.com/b/why-don-t-designers-talk-about-money

<comment><USER2> Discussing money, at least in the United States, is frowned upon. It's not that way in the rest of the world though.</comment>


Electronic Arts Standard Template Library for C++ Open Sourced - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL <comment><USER2> We on the Rust team got to speak about the lessons learned from the EASTL with Paul Pedriana (the author of much of it) while designing the Rust standard library. It's a significant influence on the proposed allocators API currently in RFC. The EASTL is worth looking at for anyone interested in designing libraries that work well in low-memory environments. (Much of this library was written with devices like the Nintendo DS in mind, which had 4 MB--4 MB!--of RAM as I recall.)

<comment><USER3> I had the pleasure of being Paul's intern way back in 2000. At the time, Paul was at Maxis and if IIRC the library actually had its roots in the C++ frameworks Paul built for SimCity 3000. Those games actually were quite a bit ahead, engineering-wise, in terms of the C++ of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> STL is maybe a bit missleading because it doesn't seem like it is a drop-in replacement for the STL.

However, this is certainly interesting because the emphasis on speed (and thus also on simplicity) is what I'm sometimes missing in the real STL or in Boost. That's exactly what you need in a game but also in much other performance critical code.

As far as I remember, Chrome has used the STL earlier. But I looked now and I see this: [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/master/So...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/master/Source/wtf/)

Gecko also seem to have a lot of custom stuff: [https://github.com/mozilla/gecko- dev/tree/master/xpcom/strin...](https://github.com/mozilla/gecko- dev/tree/master/xpcom/string)

Doom3 idLib: [https://github.com/id- Software/DOOM-3-BFG/tree/master/neo/id...](https://github.com/id- Software/DOOM-3-BFG/tree/master/neo/idlib)

Unreal engine: [https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/2695/rocket- and-t...](https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/2695/rocket-and-the- stl.html)

You'll find much more similar libs when you search in some of the big games.

<comment><USER5> What parts of the EASTL are faster than the normal STL? Does it have better maps?

Edit: From a look at the source it definitely at least has some extra map classes for more specialized uses.

<comment><USER6> One goal of EASTL is to be faster in non-optimized builds compared to other variants. If a game is running too slow to be playable, it can become impossible to debug! This was especially a problem on consoles with no OOE. It achieves this by sacrificing a lot of encapsulation and accepting non-DRY, manually inlined function implementations.

<comment><USER7> I didn't realise this was a goal, but it's good that it was. C++'s prime faults tend to be spiteful iteration time (common cause: too many templates) and appalling performance in unoptimized builds (common cause: too many function calls, possibly due to overloaded operators and overly-finely-grained code that relies on inlining not to run like shit).

The famous maxim about how much cleverer you have to be to debug code than to write it always applies! No need to make things worse by forcing yourself to debug the optimized build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Writeup on the key design and advantages of EASTL for their target platforms (game consoles): [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2271.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have worked for game companies making large console games both with the STL and without. One thing I noticed about STL is that it really bloats the build times because the STL headers are so massive. I did some analysis of the preprocessor output one time and found that just including a couple of headers like vector.h and string.h would increase the size of the preprocessor output by 80000 to 100000 lines, even for a cop file that is otherwise trivially small. Typically almost every cpp file in the codebase would either directly use STL headers or bring them in as dependencies, and so in a codebase of a few thousand files you are talking about hundreds of millions of extra lines of code that the compiler has to churn through. This amounted to each cpp file talking several seconds to compile and the entire codebase taking most of an hour to rebuild. People would not have been able to survive that without using Incredibuild to farm off compilation to other machines. The company I currently work at does not use STL and so largely avoids this problem. I an curious to what extent EASTL has this problem or avoids it.

<comment><USER10> Isn't part of this addressed by taking advantage of the new C++ 11 extern template feature? [http://www.stroustrup.com/C++11FAQ.html#extern- templates](http://www.stroustrup.com/C++11FAQ.html#extern-templates)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was open sourced years ago on the EA open source page: [http://j.mp/1Kh4L2C](http://j.mp/1Kh4L2C)

It's just on Github now.

<comment><USER12> The previously released version was significantly incomplete (it only included what was needed for the copy of webkit they embedded in some games), was years out of date, and was GPL rather than BSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A quick reference guide in PDF is available at [https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/doc/EAST...](https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/doc/EASTL%20Quick%20Reference.pdf). Lists all Algorithms, functions etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Cute. It's fun to see game programmer code. This is really C with a little C++. Lots of pointer casts, comments like "The user must provide ample buffer space, preferably 256 chars or more." There's a lot of stuff in there to deal with Microsoft Visual C++'s interpretation of the language, which prior to 2010, was kind of off.

Why does "swap" use EASTL/move_help.h? There are things that can go wrong with a move that can't go wrong with a swap. Move is a swap with a constraint that the destination be empty.

(Doing things through swapping has its uses. It preserves single ownership, for example.)

<comment><USER15> > Cute. It's fun to see game programmer code.

This. I work almost exclusively with game programmers and it can be ... difficult at times. They seem to be largely unaware of the larger computer science community that's existed since the mid sixties, often "discovering" things that were solved by the science years ago.

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, game programmers are just as frequently the only ones exercising anything close to the full functionality of today's hardware. It's kind of depressing how little use SIMD, multicore, and GPU (compute or otherwise) get outside of games. Games have done a pretty good job keeping up with the ending of Moore's Law for sequential code, but we continue to use our old sequential libraries and leave so much performance on the table in the app world.

I do agree that the apps and server world is ahead, in many cases way ahead, in terms of effective development practices and programming languages. But we've lost sight of how to get performance out of the hardware.

<comment><USER16> I was re-exploring that issue recently. It wasn't obvious to me which of two strategies I commonly saw are best: extend existing languages with parallel constructs as in Cilk/C, ParaSail/Ada, or Lime/Java; create custom languages + compilers like Cray's Chapel or academic Triolet whose output cleanly integrates with apps in an existing language. My uncertainty comes from the fact that general-purpose languages founded in sequential use might be too hard to max out on arbitrary multi-core & CPU architectures. What's your opinion on which looks to be the best route so far?

Cilk [http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk/](http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk/)

ParaSail [http://www.embedded.com/design/other/4375616/ParaSail-- Less-...](http://www.embedded.com/design/other/4375616/ParaSail--Less-is-more- with-multicore?page=0)

Lime Compilation [http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us- bacon/D...](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us- bacon/Dubach12Compiling.pdf)

Chapel [http://chapel.cray.com/overview.html](http://chapel.cray.com/overview.html)

Triolet [http://impact.crhc.illinois.edu/shared/Papers/dissertation-r...](http://impact.crhc.illinois.edu/shared/Papers/dissertation- rodrigues.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Anything and everything. I don't believe there's a one-size-fits-all solution for parallelism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Scott Wardle gave an interesting talk at CppCon 2015 which mentions EASTL a bit, with the reasons they use it (and other non-standard tools): "Memory and C++ debugging at Electronic Arts" [https://youtu.be/8KIvWJUYbDA](https://youtu.be/8KIvWJUYbDA)

<comment><USER18> CppCon 2015 was also the site of the first formal meeting of SG14, the game developer study group of the C++ standards committee. Michael Wong has just announced that it will meet again at CppCon 2016: [https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/?fromgroups#!to...](https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/sg14/9CcqpRTe- yw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Note that EA had already released some of the code in 2010: [https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL](https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL)

<comment><USER20> But 2016 version is full HD. Can't wait for 2017.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> And I thought my workplace was the last shop in the world to still write new code in hungarian notation ...

<comment><USER22> That's "bad" systems hungarian instead of "good" apps hungarian

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html)

<comment><USER23> If you use C++, you should really be using a separate type for this, rather then rely on variable names. The compiler is much better at catching these things than you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like build is failing !

</comment><comment><USER25> I just upvoted the same news just 4 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069305)

There is some issue with duplicates in HN, I think points should go to the original poster, more if it's recent.

<comment><USER26> Eh, is it really that big a deal? I have a few times posted something which gets no attention and is then reposted with up votes and comments (sometimes only a few hours later). Maybe a little irksome, but I don't think HN karma/score/points should be that big of a concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now we can at least explain with code examples why Electronic Arts Games suck so much.

<comment><USER28> That's a pretty low punch under the belt. If you are being serious, please give some examples of why this STL sucks. Corporations like EA, which is a long hauled bureaucratic labyrinth should be celebrated for open sourcing code.</comment></comment>


Question: joomla v drupal v comentum - <AUTHOR>

hi everyone,
im trying to program a prototype so I can get some traction behind my idea (usually the more business side).  since its really hard/exp to get a programmer in silicon valley, or at least a programmer I would trust, I've been given the advice to do a simple mock up myself for the proof of concept and get some $$ behind it so I can get a real team.  Granted I haven't programmed anything harder than VB in my life, and that was 20 years ago, but I think I cam put something basic together provided there are widgets, etc.
So here's the question, what should I use, joomla, drupal or comentum?  Or do you have any better idea for me?
am i totally missing something that joomla doesnt seem that easy?
many thanks, max <comment><USER2> I have not worked with Joomla or Comentum but have done extensive work with Drupal. That said, there's a reason Drupal has become widely adopted with grassroots campaigns. They often have limited technical resources, just lots of eager volunteers. Drupal has a great theme engine with a very active community so you can do quite a bit of look n feel stuff with simple web interface and no PHP work. If your mockup needs to do anything dynamic then Drupal's very extensive framework might be too easy to get lost in.</comment>


Gmail smartphone app hacked by researchers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28895304 <comment><USER2> > A Google spokeswoman said the technology giant welcomed the research. > "Third-party research is one of the ways Android is made stronger and more > secure," she said.

That's a really great response and attitude. Nice to see and gives me hope that Android will be something we can look to for security and privacy at some stage in the not too distant future.

I wonder if a permissions overhaul is in the works? The recent change to categorized permissions seems both like a step backwards but also like it is showing off how flawed Android's permissions system really is. If Google really want Android to be "stronger and more secure" this would be a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's not many details, it looks a failure of JVM sandboxing?

Ok, the actual paper describes the problem "popular GUI frameworks by design can potentially reveal every UI state change through a newly-discovered public side channel — shared memory".

The attack works by watching the size of shared memory in use in /proc, detecting UI events by allocations of shared memory, and then pre-empting the new screen with a phishing screen.

<comment><USER4> Sounds to me like it detects the activity to activity transition (which on Android creates an Intent which is passed to the system and back via shared memory) and then does something else, i.e. display a fake password entry screen when the transition is detected.

It sounds like the actual Intent contents remain secure, however, the creation of an Intent while a particular app is in the foreground and using a particular amount of memory might be the kind of trigger they'd be looking for.

An OS level patch to get around this could involve preallocating shared memory for each application so that differences in it during the app lifecycle do not actually occur. Modern systems have enough RAM, and there are low enough limits on what is flying around, that this shouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER5> or just remove /proc access from apps, which is totally useless.

<comment><USER4> Actually it's not, and it would break enough that they wouldn't be able to do that without complaints. See the entire permission system for another case.

Therein lies Google's problem, as once anything is usable in public it does get used/abused. There are certain VM behaviours in compatibility mode which are like this, where outright bugs have to be preserved in later versions for the benefit of apps which aren't going to receive timely updates.

<comment><USER3> I would actually like to know what apps want in /proc that they can't get through the API.

<comment> void-star Well... how do you suppose the API gets at all the things? (not everything is done across IPC/binder, much is in process)

<comment><USER5> The permission model in Android goes through the APIs. If you can bypass the API to go lower-level, then you're effectively giving up the security, and just waiting for some cool researcher (or attacker) to find ways to exploit them.

The above makes sense if you want to assume that you need /proc at least at some permission level. If you don't (which I think you don't), then it should simply be unmounted in the sandbox.

IPC is the standard way to get out of the sandbox, and should be used also for whatever features the APIs need /proc for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The "Fail Fast" motto would had left Silicon Valley in total dark. - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com.uy/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpablobrenner.wordpress.com%2F2011%2F10%2F02%2Ffail-fast%2F

<comment><USER2> The author confuses Menlo Park, California with Menlo Park, New Jersey.</comment>


Ask HN: Any advice for negotiating a partnership with a bigger company? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
We have just launched a fantasy sports app on Facebook. Following a lot of the principles learnt from HN, we focussed on just getting the app out as quickly as possible and iterating rapidly based on user feedback. In two weeks we have grown to 600 users with some users playing the game daily.
Unexpectedly, we caught the attention of a much bigger web company, with approx 1.5 million visitors per month, who is interested in forming a partnership because we have the same target market and this company has been hoping to get into the Facebook space for sometime now. They are offering to advertise our app on their website in return for a 50/50 revenue split as well as having their name on our app.
Does this sound fair? From our perspective, we will benefit from a lot more exposure but because we funded the project from our own pockets it'll make the task of breaking even much harder. The ongoing maintenance costs and enhancements will be funded by us too. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks B. <comment><USER3> So in exchange for some traffic they want

\- their branding on your app

\- you to pay all the bills / labor / support / etc

\- 50% of the revenue

The revenue's the real killer, them funneling some traffic to you is almost certainly not worth 50% of your revenue, especially when they're just sending a pair of eyes (quality eyes perhaps, but still) that you have to effectively monetize.

Adwords and Facebook ads can also do that and they won't cost you anywhere near as much.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an excellent point, is the quality of their traffic that much better than targeted Adwords or Facebook Ads to justify 50%? I'm leaning towards no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd advise you to have a fallback option. A BATNA, as described by the negotiation books.

To achieve this, I'd try reaching out to a couple of similar companies that have similar user bases, where you could do a similar deal.

Write a sales-y email describing the growth of the product, IE, 15% day on day growth, 600 users, good engagement, etc. Then drop that you've been approached by a similar company, and you're looking for a company to partner with, on both this application, and future applications.

And, boom. Once they're interested in bidding, you're suddenly negotiating from a place of power.

Don't forget that you have built something thats very valuable - <USER2> application that's growing, that has active users. Ensure you get a fair price for what you've done. And the best way to get a fair price, is by getting a better feel for the 'market value' of your partnership by talking to some other companies.

I wouldn't be too concerned about the idea that "breaking even is harder". If you can find a great partner with a X.X million person built-in user base, you'll be able to replicate this success many times over, for a mutually beneficial partnership. And with a couple of offers on the table, you'll be able to negotiate more favourable terms as well.

You'd definitely be able to negotiate a better split than 50/50. Plus, during the negotiation process, you'll be able to put some interesting benefits on the table to help you get an even better deal, such as - the partner company you chose will get first right of refusal on the next 2 products you generate.

Anyway, best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice Jason, we often loose sight of how valuable our product is when comparing it against the big guys. I agree, having other options to gauge your market value takes the pressure off and balances the negotiation. Do you think it's better to delay the negotiations until we have a similar interest from another company?

As an fellow Australian you might be interested to know it's for AFL :)

<comment><USER4> I think it's good to do things in tandem.

As soon as you've sent your first email to another company discussing potential partnership options, I would recommend sending an email along the lines of:

"Thanks very much for your interest in doing a deal with us. I've looked into your companies background, and I'm really impressed with what you've managed to build.

We're definitely looking for opportunities to partner with companies like yourself to expand our potential userbase, since we've had demonstrated success with this particular app we're keen to continue to build on this success and growth.

In the interests of being open and upfront, I should let you know that we're in discussions with other companies about potential partnership options.

We'll be in touch soon with some more information or questions on how we might be able to move forward."

I would recommend sending a message like that. It does a number of good things.

1\. Reinforces your interest to work with that particular company 2\. Reinforces your app and the success and growth it's having 3\. Shows that you're an experienced operator since you're fielding other quotes, and you're a good operator, because you're being up front and honest about it. 4\. Shows that you're in no rush to make a deal, and you'll deal with things in your own time.

All together that sends quite a powerful message, and lets you start negotiating from a position of strength. Which, really, you're in. You just need to realise it, and communicate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Focus on your app...harder and faster. This validation from the competition means that you are onto something. Maximize in-game social remarketing potential to expand the audience. 600 users is small enough set that a willful larger competitor can throw 50-100K at to develop their own solution and market it to out penetrate you. Unless this is ESPN calling to market your app on their website, I don't see this as anywhere near a fair deal at current terms. The value of traffic is relatively low compared to high value terms like equity, brand and rev share, especially in a high growth, early stage product.

Don't get into hard negotiations with this firm until you know they are serious about making a play that benefits both parties equitably. This deal initially sounds like a mid-level VP found you guys, is hustling for a stellar deal that'll make him/her look great, without the CxO's awareness. Remember, a banner ad and pixel space on a website is cheap and relatively intangible, cold hard cash and brand awareness is not. Make sure you get to personally know the general directors of the company. Impress them with your team's insight and prowess on the social market.

They should fear your team--not vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a few things to think about. First if you put their name on it, can they then enter the market with a competing product acting as though their app is yours. Second, is it a permanent arrangement? If you can get in a cancellation clause and aren't worried about the first their isn't much too lose. Every 30 days do the math and figure out how much revenue they are bringing to the table if it's more than 50% than you are gaining from the deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I don't quite understand the first question, do you mean if they create another competing app it will tarnish our brand? For the second question, I think the agreement will have a time expiration, possibly a few months so both parties can test out the partnership. Is it worth contracting KPIs? A cancellation clause is a great idea, having some kind of protection so we can walk away from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fantasy sport fan and I would love to see your FB Fantasy sport app if its already available :)

PM or post here

<comment><AUTHOR> We are too! It's in Beta so any feedback would be appreciated too :)

[http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=152643458091...](http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=152643458091452&sk=app_125778794174766)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You're basically paying for traffic. Price it out and see if that makes sense.</comment>