Countries ranked by ease of starting a business - <AUTHOR> http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/ <comment><USER8> Starting a company in New Zealand was pleasantly surprising. First you sign up for an account at <http://companies.govt.nz>, then you use the web app (which worked fine with Opera) to fill in the details about your new company. Consent forms are emailed to you, which you fill out, scan in and upload. A few hours later, after being reviewed by a human, your company is formed and your certificate of incoproration is emailed to you.

In fact the only trouble I had at all was that PayPal wouldn't let me sign up with a business that had been started that day - I had to wait until the day after to start taking payments.

One of the few government interactions I've ever had that left me in a better mood afterwards.

<comment><USER9> Wondering why remaining nations fail to emulate NZ.

<comment><USER10> They're not so remote from everywhere so they don't need to?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure how accurate this list is. Thailand, for instance, requires all businesses to have at least 51% Thai ownership, and I've heard Thai courts are fairly heavily biased towards locals over foreigners. Foreigners can skirt around this a little bit by having 10+ Thai silent partners in different parts of the country that don't know each other who collect a dividend or payment each year without active involvement, but still a hassle and reflective of the lack of trust Thailand has for foreign investors and entrepreneurs.

Also, I was surprised by some of the rankings. I'd have expected UAE and Israel to be higher than Germany and the Scandinavian countries for instance, but maybe I'm biased by experiences with small sample size. I've had German friends complain to no end about the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the country, and generally I've had Israelis and expats in the Emirates tell me doing business is easy in those places.

<comment><USER12> You're wrong here. For certain businesses, foreign ownership can be the full 100%. When we opened our business here, we actually had the change to go this route, but choose not to because it would have been more hassle though.

But I am also wondering how accurate this list is. And what qualifies as a "business"? Here in Thailand, many small businesses don't requite any form of legal entity and opening a small shop for example would be as easy as renting some space, putting in inventory and open your doors.... doens't get much easier then that. Imagine trying that in the US or UK... The ease of opening a small business here in Thailand beats any country that comes before Thailand on that list...

<comment><USER11> > You're wrong here. For certain businesses, foreign ownership can be the full > 100%. When we opened our business here, we actually had the change to go > this route, but choose not to because it would have been more hassle though.

Could you elaborate on how it went with your business? I'd like to learn more because I like some parts of Thailand, but I always heard differently. Here's the top google result, for instance:

"A foreigner can form or buy a Thai company, and even be the sole director of it, but Thai citizens must jointly own at least 51% of its shares – meaning a majority is technically under Thai control. Currently it is possible to allocate shares to several unrelated people, who could have no combined effect on the company's business, and this can be arranged by the lawyer, but along with most things connected with business in Thailand, there are considerable risks involved."

<http://www.retire-asia.com/thaibiz.shtml>

Actually, the whole article is generally very cautionary and negative against a foreigner owning a business in Thailand, which jives with what I've heard people who spend time there say.

Maybe it's only businesses with real estate ownership or leases that come under these terms? EX, no real estate, then don't worry about it? I think regardless, you'd be fine working from your laptop.

Anyways, I'm curious if you want to elaborate more. International business law is one of those things that every little bit you know becomes more helpful in understanding the broad picture of how markets work, imports/exports work, etc. It's something I try to pay attention to, research, and ask questions about when I'm visiting a place.

<comment><USER12> The way described in the article is indeed the way it has been until a few years back, but recent governments have made some attempts to become more open for foreign entrepreneurs; granted, it's still hard sometimes but I do have the feeling it's getting better.

As far as our own company goes: we registered our first company a few years (2?) back and when we went into the process, we were also still under the impression that the foreign shareholders can only hold up to 49% of the shares. However, we quickly found out it was indeed possible for foreigners to fully own the company (according to the government official the regulations changed about a year before that). But we also quickly learned that this route would mean tons more paperwork and it would become more costly. We also needed to present our paperwork to the BOI, pay extra fees and hope they would accept the paperwork. And according to the government official, we would expose our company to tighter control from the government (which would probably mean more "tea money" as well). So, in the end we decided against full foreign ownership, although it was an option we considered.

I realize many people are negative against owning a business here Thailand, perhaps due to bad experiences. I can only speak for myself (and a few relations who enjoy doing business here as well). Maybe I should mention I don't actually do business here, we pretty much only work with customers abroad. I love living and working here and wouldn't want it any other way for the time being!

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the feedback, very good info. If you happen to stop by Saigon before the end of the month, shoot me an email if you'd like to grab a coffee. I'm in Kuala Lumpur in November too, feel free to reach out. Godspeed and much prosperity in your business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My experience in Canada in starting a business agrees with its 2nd place rank. It only took a couple of hours to get an incorporated business setup, as long as it's a numbered company (e.g., 4312341 Alberta Inc., although, I forget what my number was). It's a couple more hours to open a bank account, make a shareholder loan, and get company cheques (sic).

All in all, it takes about a morning to have a legal operating funded company up and running.

Of course, revenue is another story :).

<comment><USER14> I agree, in Canada it seems trivial. Perhaps the study presumes some lower level of capacity, literacy or computer ability.

The numbers for 'enforceability of contracts' and 'paying taxes' are absurd. Puts the rest of the results in doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My wife is Japanese and when I said I was starting a company she asked me _But, how? Are you even allowed to do that?_ I didn't really understand how you could not be at the time.

I guess that's why NZ ranks #1 and Japan ranks #91 for getting started.

<comment><USER16> One of the big things we did at the tech incubator is tell people how easy it is to start a company -- there isn't a significantly higher paperwork burden or capital requirement these days than there is for a US LLC. (That did not used to be true.) The problem is that this has not hit the mainstream in terms of cultural acceptance yet.

I knew this and I was absolutely amazed by the amount of time it took to get my health insurance, pension, and taxes squared away when I went full-time: 3 hours. Two hours of that was bike riding to and from city hall.

<comment><USER17> How does one get a visa to be in Japan if they intend to start a company there? It would appear to be difficult to get a visa if you are not already profitable, correct?

<comment><USER16> Talk to me privately for specifics. Short version: getting a visa is hard, renewing one is easy if you are as profitable as your previous employment. The easy paths go through native megacorps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> South Africa's ranking is likely to fall in the next survey. There have been recently been well publicised cases where company directors have been fraudulently replaced at CIPRO, the government agency that handles these registrations, due to a lack of adequate controls. The directors are replaced and the bank accounts are emptied (the new "directors" get signing powers at the bank) before anyone realises what's happened.

The Deeds Office (land registry) has also has had fraudlent land transfers going through, and although stealing land is more difficult that hijacking a company, it has happened, with complicity between crooked lawyers and corrupt officials.

In most cases these hijackings, of land, and of companies, have been reversed by courts, but the time and expense of going to court could cripple a small business.

If you start a business in South Africa, and decide to incorporate, you should make sure you verify directors regularly, watch your business bank accounts closely, and hope that the government sorts out the mess (there are new controls that are being introduced already at CIPRO).

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious if anyone has worked for a company in Singapore, done lots of business with one, or better yet started one. By these rankings and the stereotypes I've learned it basically seems like a capitalist's paradise, with practically the whole society being pro-business and a gigantic minority of the population (42% according to Wikipedia) being foreign workers/students.

<comment><USER20> My impression was it used to be a haven for large business. But due to rising costs they are moving nearby to Malaysia and Indonesia and just keeping management offices in Singapore (ex. memc.com). I haven't heard of it attracting young international people looking to do startups primarily because it's not a very liberal society. Chewing gum is illegal and cannabis possession carries a penalty of execution. A sharp contrast to Silicon Valley\California.

<comment><USER21> Why do you bother about chewing gum and having cannabis if you are looking for a place to start or run a business? Doesn't factors like low corruption, safety or market size matters more?

<comment><USER22> "Disneyland with the death penalty" may be a unique selling proposition but I well believe it when metamemetics says it's bad at "attracting young international people looking to do startups".

There's a lot more than that, e.g. you have to be careful about what you write and perhaps say about the government.

<comment><USER21> That is being paranoid. I don't understand the downvoting. Is US a "Disneyland with guns" then? How many people have been killed by guns versus death penalty in Singapore? (Before you downvote me again, hear me out)

I live here. I see lots of curses in facebook and websites about the government and I mean really really mean curses, personal attacks and so on. I complain lots about the government. And to clarify, there is a line which you don't cross, which is the religious line and accusing the govt of corruption without proof. It is rather simple.

I don't really see how young people doing startups care about that? Just respect your neighbours and their religion, is it hard to do? If you have proof that someone is corrupted, just report it. (Btw, some govt guy just got charged for a huge corruption case.) Having a death penalty doesn't mean the whole country is one brainwashed crazed population looking to execute anyone. In fact there are so many foreigners here at any startup event that the locals are beginning to seem like the minority.

Yes, this small place(market) has lots of problems and it is definitely not disneyland. But to say it is a bad place just because of death penalty or lack of freedom to insult other religion is just ridiculous. Just look beyond political nonsense and journalistic opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, that put numbers around my recent decision to return from Spain to the UK. I love Spain to bits, but doing business there, legally, is utterly impossible even when fluent in the language. It's very easy to do business there illegally and cheap, if that's your thing.

<comment><USER24> It's not impossible, but it is a gigantic pain in the ass. We contracted a law

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure why I can't seem to edit my previous comment, or what happened to it.

We contracted a law firm specialising in foreigners running companies here in Spain. They're really good, but the amount of running around I have to do is still huge and some things really are impossible (e.g. getting a foreign contract talking about monetary amounts notarised). I would certainly never incorporate here by choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is very inaccurate.

For example, starting a business in the UK takes an hour or so (Fill out a form online). But it's listed here as taking 13 days, and thus UK is ranked 16th for starting a business.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm surprised Israel was so low given the info I read in the book Startup Nation (<http://www.startupnationbook.com/>)

<comment><USER27> Israel ranks really low on "Dealing with Construction Permits" and "Registering Property", according to this list. Don't let this list fool you, it's a true start up nation. The amount of tech and start-ups coming from Israel is amazing.

From the book: "a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources— produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK? How is it that Israel has, per person, attracted over twice as much venture capital investment as the US and thirty times more than Europe?"

<comment><USER28> I suspect that not having the correct ethnicity or religious beliefs would be an obstacle for some though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ranking for the G8 nations:

4 - United States

5 - United Kingdom

8 - <USER2>

15 - <USER3>

25 - <USER4>

31 - <USER5>

78 - <USER6>

120 - <USER7>

With the exception of Russia, which has its roots in communism, Italy is by far the worst G8 country you could start a business in.

<comment><USER30> Italy and Germany have their (recent) roots in fascism. France has its in . . . well. I'm not going to go there.

Note that the UK produced Adam Smith and, to a nontrivial degree, the US, and Canada. The culture and early government of the US in particular was notably influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith as well. What Smith called "economic individualism" is pretty much _the_ foundation of a strong economy, and to the extent that we stray from that two things happen:

1\. individuals find it more difficult to start and run small businesses

2\. the economy suffers

I am not surprised at all at the relative rankings of these G8 nations.

<comment><USER31> The common connection between companies that don't do so well is corruption, not previous government choices.

As far as following Adam Smith's works, the economy the US has is a caricature of Smith's ideas (e.g. Smith was anti-monopoly).

<comment><USER30> 1\. Do you think that the form of a government does not affect its tendency toward corruption?

2\. Note that I was talking about Smith's influence on _early_ US government. The nation has obviously strayed from that quite a lot since then -- and has economically gone downhill quite a lot, as well.

<comment><USER31> 1\. Yes and no. The smaller you make the government's _power_ the less their corruption will matter. On the other hand, if the government handles more things (e.g. Sweden) then I would expect corruption to be attacked more because it harms more people.

The US is kind of a special case I think. They have an absolutely enormous government that few people trust and even fewer think anything can be done to change it. Sweden, for contract, is voted the most Democratic country. Given the size of their government, this seems to imply that they are much more positive about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes, Italy did it! Last in Western Europe and highly developed countries (a part from Greece).

<comment><USER33> I don't understand how Greece is rated 76 in "paying taxes". My understanding is that Greeks simply don't pay taxes... </sarcasm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Starting a business in the United States is a little like pulling your own teeth while getting your fingernails trimmed with a wood chipper. The fact that it still ranks fourth overall just indicates how much _worse_ most of the rest of the world is.

It's amazing to me that so many nations (the US included) seem to want it to be so difficult for people to succeed in business.

<comment><USER34> I set up a Georgia LLC in the course of an afternoon. State registration, federal EIN, bank account. Income for the LLC is treated as personal income for me (it's a single member LLC that's disregarded by the IRS), so even taxes aren't that complicated.

Perhaps I'm doing something very wrong or very illegal, but nothing I've read seems to suggest that.

What did you find to be so much more painful?

<comment><USER30> In my area, it takes no fewer than three different licenses just to set up a consultancy that doesn't even sell products (pure service oriented business) -- and that doesn't address any of the issues aside from licensure (tax ID, ensuring your business name is not a trademark infringement, et cetera). The worst thing about it, though, is not the complexity of it. The worst thing about it is that, because one has to check everything at local, state, and federal levels, and because each of these levels is often very poorly organized where the "end user" is concerned, it took me an afternoon just to find out about all that stuff. In fact, some of it I stumbled across by accident while looking for something else, and was surprised to find it. I'm pretty much _positive_ that I missed some things before I gave up.

It _requires_ a lawyer to be even reasonably sure (as opposed to _completely_ sure) you aren't doing something illegal. If I have to choose between paying for a lawyer I can ill afford and wondering for the first three years of starting the business whether I'm going to end up in court for doing it wrong, the process of setting up a business is _not_ easy enough.

edit: There is a difference between "setting up" a business on paper (so you can claim to have one) and being able to start actually conducting business without running the risk of pissing off government.

<comment><USER34> I agree that there is a difference. On the other hand, once you have the business legally established (the easy part), you _can_ conduct business as that entity. You might piss off the government and the liable for fees/penalties, but you're not going to invalidate the actions of the business by doing that.

Perhaps I'm just being naïve, but I figure if the rules are difficult for me to find it's also fairly unlikely that I'll get caught for not following them. Or, I suppose, I feel like by the time it becomes a serious risk I'll have grown to the point where lawyers become a necessity anyway.

<comment><USER30> One can conduct business in violation of the law _anywhere_. When it's done intelligently, we call the result "black marketeering". When it's done stupidly, we call the result "jail time".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just wanted to mention the process of registering a company in India has mostly moved online using the Ministry of Company Affairs website (<http://www.mca.gov.in/>). The most time consuming thing is acquiring a Digital Certificate (which is how most financial filings are done in India these days), which involves in-person verification.

India recently introduced Limited Liability Partnerships (<http://www.llp.gov.in/>) which is a much, much simpler way of registering a company, especially in the software field, than anything else (most of it online)

<comment><USER36> I was really sad to see India ranked so low. I remember my friend starting a company by paying Rs 6000 to broker, who took care of all the things. Things work differently in India, if you do not go through a broker, you might take a few weeks :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Interesting that the countries with the most startups (USA, Israel, some in Europe, etc) aren't that highly ranked compared to surprises like Saudi Arabia. I really didn't expect Israel to be so low and Saudi Arabia so high.

Anyone know why?

<comment><USER38> Does it not only concern natives? Doing business as a native in countries of the Gulf is far more different than doing it as a foreigner (see how to set up a business in Dubai, UAE).

UAE is also high in the ranks, still for me, as I researched, starting up there seemed more complicated and expensive than here in Poland (low in the ranks), except taxes (a PITA around here).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Really surprised that the UK ranks 16th on 'Starting a Business' and the US ranks 8th. From what I know, it takes a lot longer, costs more, and tends to involve actual lawyers to open a business in the US. In the UK, I did it all online for £25.

<comment><USER40> Where do you "know" this from? Starting a business is dead simple in the US. Create a Delaware class-C corporation, or one in the state you live in if you prefer (in my case, in the state of Washington, it was just a few online forms and a nominal fee).

<comment><USER39> Belated reply, my knowledge for the US side is from threads on HN, which have greatly exaggerated the process if it's true that you can do it all online in a few minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Shocking results for Germany. Know where that is coming from... But once you have done a bit there it is quiet straight forward. So let me know if I can help anybody doing business or starting a company in Germany.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't trust this list at all. I have just formed a company in Ireland and Portugal. Ireland is ranked 7 and Portugal ranked 48. In reality Portugal was about 3 times faster than Ireland, but cost about double.

<comment><USER22> Cost is part of the methodology and they factor in per capita income, both of which adversely affect Portugal: [http://www.doingbusiness.org/MethodologySurveys/StartingBusi...](http://www.doingbusiness.org/MethodologySurveys/StartingBusiness.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Maybe rather than push the startup visa act we should push the: create a company in 5 minutes act and the pay less taxes on your company act :)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm not sure all those numbers are correct. I was born in the Dominican Republic and I can say that the time to open a business is least than 20 days.

Besides, there are some companies offering "packaged business"s with legal fees, registrations, and other paperwork ready. You can buy one of those and get up and running in 24 hours. They take care of transfering the company to you.

<comment><USER22> What's the cost, especially compared to standard incomes in the nation? I know a number of countries score very poorly because of this (CHANGED: per capita income is a factor in the calculation: [http://www.doingbusiness.org/MethodologySurveys/StartingBusi...](http://www.doingbusiness.org/MethodologySurveys/StartingBusiness.aspx)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The rankings seem almost arbitrary. South Africa is 2 for getting credit. I'm South African and there's just now way that's true. Banking in SA is extremely expensive and there's no such thing as a free checking account. Most of the population has no credit history and those who do use credit sparingly and find it hard to get.

US is 8 and UK 16 for starting a business. What does that mean? It's hard/easy to incorporate? It's incredibly easy to create a Limited company in the UK or LLC, S or C corp in the USA. (I've inc'd in both countries). What does the number 1 country have that US or UK doesn't have?

Paying taxes in the USA is 61 vs South Africa's 23? No way. Paying your taxes in South Africa is a serious pain in the behind - I continue to do it. We file our USA C corp and personal corp taxes ourselves each year and it's a breeze in the States.

My guess is this is based on public opinion with a relatively small sample size per country.

<comment><USER18> >Most of the population has no credit history and those who do use credit sparingly and find it hard to get

I don't agree with you here. The entire furniture retail industry is based on selling goods on credit to poor people. The National Credit Act tightened lending up, and reduced some of the more blatant exploitation, but it is very easy to get credit, if you want it.

>Paying taxes in the USA is 61 vs South Africa's 23? No way. Paying your taxes in South Africa is a serious pain in the behind - I continue to do it. We file our USA C corp and personal corp taxes ourselves each year and it's a breeze in the States.

I am surprised that you consider tax in South Africa to be more complex than the US. Could you elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting that 8 out of the top 10 countries are former British colonies (or Britain itself).

</comment><comment><USER47> Reading this list made me think, "wow, I could have been born in so many other countries, with such dramatically different possibilities, but I was born in the US." Just a strange thought to consider. A lot of these countries barely have the rule of law: police misbehavior anywhere is unacceptable, but next time I see "Police mistreat innocent bystander X" here or on reddit, I'll think "but at least you can't walk down the street and bribe the cop to get away with Z" for a second before I start being furious with the system.

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting to see Chile so far down the list (well, 49th) given how keen they have been to attract startups recently.

</comment><comment><USER49> Note: there is literally no relationship between a country's 'Starting a Business' rank and their 'Closing a Business.'

<http://plixi.com/p/50051085>

This seems odd to me, but wonder if anyone has an explanation as to why this might be?

</comment><comment><USER50> mmm NZ seems very high in the rankings but the vc/angel investment community very immature over here... possible opportunity for low hanging fruit just across the ditch for a few valley based investors perhaps ? ;-)

<comment><USER51> NZ has expensive (and not particularly fast) internet, which is probably why. On the other hand, setting up a limited-liability company took me an hour (including registering for GST) and cost $40 when I did it (it's a little more now), and costs nothing to renew. And the time zone difference means we're often working when the US is sleeping, which can be handy when you're deploying a new version of a production site for a US audience.

<comment><USER52> Deploying updates to production sites when the US is sleeping is a massive boon, it was one of the reasons my previous employer did all their R&D in New Zealand. The downside is that pagers tended to go off in the middle of our night when server load was highest.

The company has been extremely successful, but the software is complex and recruiting and retaining skilled employees here has become an issue for them. I think they've been forced to move some R&D over to the US as a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I am not complaining, but not sure how they are calculating it. Ease of starting a business also depend upon the business type in every country.

</comment><comment><USER54> What is the spread? For instance, the US comes in fourth and the UK fifth. How much of a difference is there between being #4 and #5?

</comment><comment><USER55> I think there's probably a direct correlation to economic strength and development here as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is a ranking of ease of _doing_ business, not _starting_ a business. If you want to start a business in the USA as a sole proprietorship then you can just go ahead and start it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look at the second column, "Starting a Business".

[http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/?direction=Asc&...](http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/?direction=Asc&sort=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> anyone planning/doing a start-up in Mauritius?</comment>


Microsoft needs to add an 'off' option to telemetry for Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/jerry-berg-microsoft-needs-to-add-an-off-option-to-telemetry-for-windows-10 <comment><USER2> There is one.

[https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/itpro/windows/configure/...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/itpro/windows/configure/configure-windows-telemetry-in-your- organization#security-level)

Microsoft conveniently lets individuals access it for $7 a month - no volume licensing required anymore!

<comment><USER3> > The Security level gathers only the telemetry info that is required to keep > Windows devices, Windows Server, and guests protected with the latest > security updates. This level is only available on Windows Server 2016, > Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows 10 Education, Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise, > and Windows IoT Core editions.

That still sounds like hard-for-consumers to get hold of OS versions...

And as it still includes:

> Connected User Experience and Telemetry component settings

That's not really 'off'.</comment></comment>


The Internet is Killing Storytelling, but Photos are Bringing it Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/tech/the-internet-is-killing-storytelling-but-photos-are-bringing-it-back/ <comment><USER2> Nothing has changed. The people who want to tell stories, tell them.

But for all the complaints about short-form internet media like texts and tumblr, twitter and facebook status updates, at least people are _writing_. That's a lot more than can be said for the time before all of these things existed. Before social media, texting, and blogging, you could go weeks or months without writing a damn thing other than what you had to write for school or work (which often amounted to nothing at all).

Now we have a way for everyone to discover for themselves whether or not they are interested in longer-form storytelling. You can't tell me we don't have many more storytellers telling many more stories today than we did in the time before writing became something that _suddenly everyone regardless of social status did for themselves every single day_.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't that people are writing less than before, it's that so many are doing it so poorly such that we're overwhelmed with information and easily prone to overlooking the stories that are worth telling and are still being told. The author alludes to this: if the Federalist Papers were published today, it would be very easy to dismiss them as tl;dr and move on to the next update. There's no quality control anymore.

<comment><USER2> The quality control exists, but it's become ad-hoc and decentralized. I think this will ultimately be a very good thing, though we are still experiencing severe learning pains.

In many ways, sites like Hacker News and reddit serve as democratized curators of quality content. If quality content is rewarded with high karma, this hopefully rewards more people to produce that content.

Even when a site like reddit gets bogged down in the low-form entertainment of the masses (which, admit it or not, we _all_ comprise at some point in our days), the site itself forms a "bud" off the main branch with a return to quality [1].

In the end, I think we're both right. There's more writing than ever before (good), and there's worse writing than ever before (bad). We as a society must figure out not only how to do quality control in this new environment, but also to recognize when we're merely being _snooty_ (in public, while laughing hilariously at inane facebook updates in private).

[1] see <http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know why this fixation with Instagram or Pinterest.

There's nothing new on photos. We're doing this since the 50's. You had 36 exposures per roll to tell a story, then make a photo album or a series of slides. And you had to make each photo count. Given with Instagram is so easy to upload a photo, it's actually a bad exercise in storytelling: it's full of mundane pics of people shooting themselves at the bathroom mirror.

I'm can't reason why Pinterest is in this article either. A big portion of the content on their site is not original, just products and wishlists.

<comment><USER5> I actually find Instagram is the opposite - because every photo shows up as its own 'story', people use more discretion in what they upload. There are Facebook albums filled with hundreds of photos of parties and people dressed up going out, but that's not really what Instragram is about.

YMMV, of course, and as with all social media, depends on the people you follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The internet is not killing storytelling or long form writing, and photos are not the new storytelling culture.

There is plenty of long form writing on the web, which the people who read long form writing will happily go and read. And storytelling in all media forms, from written, to filmed, to animated, to comic strip and illustrated, etc, is more directly available than ever before.

There is however also another factor at work. More writers. Vastly more writers. Before the internet, the idea that an average person would spend their free time by sitting at a keyboard and communicating mostly through the written word would seem insane.

Look at all the pre-internet sci-fi about communication in the future. Is all video and voice. Almost no-one predicted a mass attempt at literacy by the general public.

But it turns out people just like to see their own words out there.

The act of writing is not just about storytelling, it is also about communication by territorial pissing, and so there are many websites, like facebook and twitter, that are setup to serve this desire to tag the quick epithet and leave a mark.

Complaining that there is little long form narrative in these sites is a bit like wondering why no-one has bothered writing an elaborate dissertation on the theory of mind, on the side of the local bus station.</comment>


"yeah thats not what I was looking for at all." - <AUTHOR> http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

<comment><USER2> david seems like a raging asshole.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not British (or David), but I think if I were (either or both), I would say, "That's rather the point."

It's meant to be funny. I laughed and posted it, but I grant that your mileage may vary. (If you're on the fence, try this one: <http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html.>)</comment></comment>


AWS Config Rules Now Available - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-config-rules-now-available-in-us-east-northern-virginia/ <comment><USER2> Hey jeffbarr, nice feature... But when are we getting IPv6 on EC2?</comment>


VPS Classic: The most afforable VPS - <AUTHOR> http://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-classic.xml

<comment><USER2> OVH is an absolutely horrible company.

I was in business with them years ago and they kept my account all that time. When they got hacked a couple years ago (or was it last year?), I remembered I had an account with them and asked them to delete it.

I had to go back and forth with their customer service, and in the end, they asked me to send them a signed letter to their offices in France for them to even consider deleting my account.

Arseholes. I couldn't be bothered to take this anywhere, but damn it I hope they get hell for this.

I can't comment on their actual services at present myself - all I have is negative hearsay (nothing positive anyway).

<comment><USER3> Same bad experience here.

I have 2Mo/s on my hard drives and they claim everything is normal on their side. I could trigger an investigation but if it comes from my config, they'll charge it on me. I don't know how I could have configured my disks to output 2Mo/s, but more important, I don't want to drop a single extra penny to that company.

And support takes around 30hrs to answer.

<comment><USER4> what is Mo/s?

<comment><USER5> French networking / disk throughput terminology ...

        Mo: un méga-octet, un million d'octets
      Mo/s: méga-octet par seconde

meaning "Megabyte per second". OVH is based in Montréal, Québec. [or not, actually]

<comment><USER6> noip, it's based in the north of france (one gray and shitty area)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some alternatives with SSD:

[http://vexxhost.com/cloud_servers#pricing](http://vexxhost.com/cloud_servers#pricing)

[http://www.servermania.com/ssd-linux-vps- hosting.htm](http://www.servermania.com/ssd-linux-vps-hosting.htm)

[http://www.atlantic.net/vps/linux-vps- hosting/](http://www.atlantic.net/vps/linux-vps-hosting/)

[http://ssdvps.com/](http://ssdvps.com/)

[https://www.ubiquityhosting.com/cloud](https://www.ubiquityhosting.com/cloud)

</comment><comment><USER8> One of the best things about DigitalOcean is that they charge per hour, which means I can spin up several servers, test things out and then tear them down, incurring just a few cents of costs in total. OVH asks me to pay for 12 months up front.

Also, their support is awfully slow. I'm in the slow process of moving to another host/registrar.

<comment><USER9> You shouldn't let the same company be both your host and registrar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> DigitalOcean's big selling point for me is SSD disk. I don't see that listed on the OVH offering.

<comment><USER11> SSD isn't some magical word or feature - case in point, linode's non-ssd offering beats the pants off DO's ssd

<comment><USER10> Linode may outperform a similar DO box CPU-wise, but IO is no contest:

Here's a 512MB DO writing a large file:

      dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/out bs=1M count=4k; rm -f /tmp/out
      4096+0 records in
      4096+0 records out
      4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 16.1503 s, 266 MB/s

A 2GB Linode of mine doing the same:

      dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=1M count=4k; rm -f /tmp/output
      4096+0 records in
      4096+0 records out
      4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 36.4609 seconds, 118 MB/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's nice that all these hosting companies are dropping their prices so much. However, I've found it extremely hard to compare them against each other.

I wish someone would put together a site that compared each cloud provider when it comes to specific workloads -- for instance: Postgres and Mysql performance, Redis and Memcached performance, apache-bench, and so on. Even the performance of each virtual CPU is unclear.

Does anything like this exist?

<comment><USER13> I think you're looking for ServerBear: [http://serverbear.com/](http://serverbear.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone already pointed out that DO's selling point are SSD drives. There's also a difference in the underlying technology. OVH uses OpenVZ, which are containers more than VMs, whereas DO is based on KVM.

<comment> workhere-io _Someone already pointed out that DO 's selling point are SSD drives._

Yet Linode's non-SSD drives seem to beat Digital Ocean's SSD drives "in just about every area and not by a small margin" ([http://irj972.co.uk/articles/VPS-disk-perf- cont](http://irj972.co.uk/articles/VPS-disk-perf-cont))

I don't know anything about OVH's performance - all I'm saying is that having SSD drives doesn't necessarily mean superb performance - there are other factors involved.

<comment><USER15> Those tests smell fishy. If they use classic disks then typical average seek time is 8ms. Yet they measured 0,2ms which is ridiculous. My guess is that they used small virtual disks and measured page cache of the underlying host. 128MB limit for random read tests is also horribly wrong to make any conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You get what you pay for. Oh, and by the way, this isn't the most affordable VPS. CloudAtCost's cheapest plan is $1.00/month, and in USD, VPS Classic/OVH is around $2.75, give or take ([http://www.cloudatcost.com/](http://www.cloudatcost.com/)). (current exchange: [https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&oq=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&aqs=chrome..69i57.2691j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8))

However, you do get what you pay for. I'm a CloudAtCost customer, paid for their $35 one-time fee because I figured it would be nice to not have to worry about yet another recurring payment (however small) for stupid things like having a Linux machine to test new apps on and run my IRC bouncer. When they had some downtime, they did alert us but I didn't find out my server had failed to power back on until I opened my laptop one day and couldn't connect to IRC. Given their impossibly-low prices[1] and lack of history in our community, I'm probably always gonna be a little paranoid that my server is just going to die one day and there's nothing I'll be able to do about it.

That said, I think OVH is in a similar boat. Crappy customer service, but low prices, so my advice for anyone wanting to take a gamble on this is to definitely NOT host anything important on these low-cost VPS services. They're really best for staging and light internal use, and they're not to be trusted with the architecture of your whole company.

[1]: CloudAtCost is essentially a big Canadian ISP's server hosting brand. Basically, their parent company owns the datacenter they're hosting you in, so the service they're offering is practically cost-free to them. If this is true, the money they get from you must be 100% profit, or they wouldn't be able to keep themselves in business. ([http://www.cloudatcost.com/aboutus.php](http://www.cloudatcost.com/aboutus.php)) Go ask a record label owner sometime about how profit margins on the fraction of a dollar, even when new sales come in every day, work out for his bottom line ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> Chunkhost has the same specs at the $9 price point as DO, though they claim 2 cpus (obviously could be apples and oranges). It's Xen, like DO and EC2, and they use ECC ram.

They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.

I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.

</comment><comment><USER18> Personally, I am still sticking with Linode. I absolutely love their support. I contacted them today and got an answer in minutes. This is a Sunday, mind you.

Sure the low prices on OVH and DigitalOcean seem lucrative and I have used DigitalOcean for a while, but I still came back to Linode. The Linode interface is another thing that I cannot do without especially when you see the alternatives.

YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER19> An Anti-DDoS protection ! That's a god-send ! I had a terrible experience recently with Digital-Ocean. A VPS of mine with a fresh launched project was knocked down with some basic ddos attack. The support nodded and pointed to use CloudFlare. My server was down and they didn't do anything, that really sucks, you can't use a VPS without a DDos protection for anything serious. It can go down anytime when some script-kiddie opens a hunder of sockets.

It's really sad that DDoS protection didn't become ubiquitous yet. It's unacceptable that you can get down a server, even VPS with not-so-much bandwidth. All VPS have limited number of sockets and resources and it's trivial to knock them down. Absence of a DDoS protection makes them extremely vulnerable.

<comment><USER20> What do you believe "DDoS protection" entails? You got referred to cloudflare, a free* reverse proxy is as good as it's going to get. I can't imagine being attacked like that is anything like the norm.

<comment><USER19> Cloudflare is only for HTTP and internet is more than just HTTP.

I had a irc server for my friends, one of not-so-friendly visitors told me that the server will get down, and it went down. I lost ping to my server, CPU & the bandwidth were all at 100%. The support told me that I should use another company. I went to a company that has DDoS protection [http://www.online.net/](http://www.online.net/)

I find it unacceptable that you can be DDoSed so easily, it's like we're still in 90'.. DDoS protection should be something ubiquitous for small power servers like VPS, otherwise it's trivial to get them down.

<comment><USER20> > _I find it unacceptable that you can be DDoSed so easily, it 's like we're > still in 90'.._

You can't stop resource exhaustion attacks no matter what you do. There's always someone with a bigger pipe. I'm still baffled that it's 2014 and I can't flush my gumboots down my toilet yet, shouldn't we have solved that already?

> _I went to a company that has DDoS protection_

What exactly does that entail, technically? Smells like snake oil to me.

<comment><USER21> OVH got a pretty good write-up on their blog[1], well worth a read. It looks as if their solution should be able to mitigate layer 3/4 attacks. From the blog: "Our surplus network has a capacity over 2 Tbps. We have three VAC in production, so we can manage up to 480 Gbps/480 Mpps." Cloud-flare took on the larges DDoS ever seen not to long ago, I think it peaked around 400Gbps.

1) [http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos- servic...](http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos-service- standard)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I set up a cheap dedicated server with OVH a few months ago. it took 48 days to get it set up and the OVH flavor of linux I went with was some bastardized version of gentoo so inbred that after two weeks of trying to get it upgraded to a sane version I just canceled my account.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're after bargain basement VDSes, as far as I know the place to look is [http://lowendbox.com/](http://lowendbox.com/)

<comment><USER24> A lot of those providers aren't very reputable at all. Very few are in fact. Off a glance, RamNode is the only one which I'd trust.

If you're <not> after bargin-basement VDSes or VPSes, [http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104) is your friend.

<comment><USER25> Careful with ramnode. I love their speed, and do have good uptime. That said, I've had service with them for months, generally using next to no resources. Decided to compile qt5 one day, and after about 45 mins of high CPU, they were opening a ticket to take the VPS down due to instability. Honestly, I don't know the policy at other providers, but feel that spiking CPU for an hour once in months shouldn't take the box offline...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's OpenVZ.. IMO you can't compare KVM with OpenVZ, even tho DO thin provisioning of their KVM is far away from "true KVM" (own ISO installs etc..)

</comment><comment><USER27> Sometimes it's not about the prices. Most of the time. Always, actually. Especially when it comes to web hosting.

<comment><USER28> Totally agree. These days I want great customer service and reliability. I can pay $20 for Google knowing Google will be around much longer and should come with a reasonable retiring/deprecation/shutdown policy. I chose DO for a similar reason. I know it will be around for a while and I have nothing to lose since I have access to my source code. I can migrate to another provider if I have to.

Also, DO is pretty fast at deploying and enabling new VM. I didn't know OVH until today. Sometimes advertising works well :/

<comment><USER9> > I can pay $20 for Google knowing Google will be around much longer

Not the best example IMO...

<comment><USER27> They cause more product genocides per year than all startups combined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For me, the main reason DO beats other VPS providers is its large collection of tutorials. For people new to managing their own web server, these tutorials are a major asset. I even went back to their tutorials section when i was testing the service of one of their competitors

<comment><USER9> I learned a lot from OVH's guides too, but they vary from language to language. Some guides might be completely missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Over time, I realized I don't really want to manage services needed to run my apps on a VPS, like Apache, nginx or MySQL configuration and upgrades.

Is there anything like WebFaction, but cheaper, that can handle sysadmining for me?

<comment><USER31> Does AppEngine or Heroku work for you?

<comment><USER32> Just dealing with AppEngine's yearly API rewrites and general flakiness is far more difficult than any potential problems you'd have just running it yourself. AppEngine is probably the most hassle you can get from 'commercial' hosting.

Heroku is pretty hassle free though, so it's a good choice. I think people overestimate the amount of work it takes to maintain a basic server though. It's generally on the order of max 1hr/month. Considering the premium you pay for managed hosting, most people don't make the $500/hr that would make hosted worthwhile...

Plus the freedom that comes from not being locked into a managed solution often saves you days of aggravation down the line.

<comment><USER33> 100% agree here. The negatives of app engine vastly outweigh the positives. Being a python shop you would think otherwise but there is only so much you can do before you hit the wall of limitations. A native vhost means no lock-on too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why go for a VPS when you can get dedicated hardware for a similar and sometimes better price - [http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/](http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/)

<comment><USER35> Non-ECC RAM? Okay for testing stuff but wouldn't put it in production.

<comment><USER9> What kinds of issues can you run into with non-ECC RAM? I thought it was more of a nearly theoretical thing, that only critical systems should worry about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This really isn't news, OpenVZ isn't the same virtualisation as DigitalOcean are using and you're effectively tied to a kernel provided by OVH. It also isn't SSD-based.

</comment><comment><USER37> But I had heard, the only catch is that, they are using 'desktop grade' hardware.

<comment><USER34> So do Google :)

<comment><USER38> IIRC Google gave up on non-ECC RAM a long time ago, so this is only partially true (ECC RAM constrains motherboard chipset and CPU family (e.g. Core i7 and suchlike don't support it))

<comment><USER39> From Google 2009:

DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> OVH is not bad, I had some dedis with them few years ago. it just works.

<comment><USER41> > It just works.

I have found this to not be the case.</comment></comment>


Woof Rover.com Fetches $3.4 Million to Be Airbnb for Dogs. - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/woof-rover-com-fetches-3-4-million-to-be-airbnb-for-dogs/

<comment><USER2> When I hear "woof" it reminds me of the Office.</comment>


What I Learned as 500 Startups' Growth Hacker In Residence - <AUTHOR> http://numeratechoir.com/six-steps-to-growth-what-i-learned-as-500-startups-growth-hacker-in-residence/

<comment><USER2> Why prevent copy/paste?

Wanted to send a link and share a paragraph (without using markerly) and it was a pain.

Bad user experience... good article.

<comment><USER3> Ctrl-xcv still work there, you can cut and paste.

Interestingly article, but it says more about how to be a Growth Hacker Advisor than how to be a Growth Hacker. Of course, that is likely what he learned since he presumbaly already knew how to be a Growth Hacker when he took the job.</comment></comment>


Multiple Vulnerabilities in PHP Could Allow for Arbitrary Code Execution - <AUTHOR> https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities-in-php-could-allow-for-arbitrary-code-execution_2019-116/ <comment><AUTHOR> The RCE bug appears to be restricted to fast_cgi:

[https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=78599](https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=78599)</comment>


Ask HN: Is New Relic any different than Carrier IQ? - <AUTHOR>

I use New Relic along with Woopra to keep track of my Rails apps. I can watch clicks in real time and see all sorts of things. I can't specifically track keystrokes or anything like that, but it would seem like advanced analytics programs for web apps aren't much different than Carrier IQ. I admit my ignorance -- I was just curious as to the differences, but morally and technically. Thanks! HN is a great help to me as I develop as a programmer, so I appreciate the discussion! <comment><USER2> Is your question is why monitoring visitors to your website is different from monitoring everything a user does on their phone?</comment>


Your Code: OOP or POO? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000801.html <comment><AUTHOR> The discussion of "coding for other people" _shouldn't_ apply to start-ups, but I recall being bitten by this around 2001 or so. We were in a VC-backed startup and the VCs kept pushing us to rent their pet architects to "help us scale." That's right, we take their invested money and spend it on them, diluting ourselves into oblivion.

Any ways, said architects wanted us to rewrite everything in a buzzword- compliant fashion, J2EE, the whole works. Their reasoning? They wouldn't be able to sell our company to IBM unless our code was IBM-compliant.

Happy days indeed.</comment>


Advice for Solo Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.growthclub.online/advice-for-solo-founders <comment><USER2> 404 Error</comment>


Ask HN: Does a lower capital gains rate increase wage growth? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In the US household wages have stagnated since the early 1980s. Capital gains rates have gone down massively.

So, no.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> wonder if there is a study that looks at changes in capital gains rates and if it effects wage growth.</comment>


EndNote maker's lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/06/thomson-reuters-suit-against-zotero-software-dismissed.ars

<comment><USER2> Suing over a feature is screaming that your competitor got it right and everyone should look.

It is great advertising for the other company, even if you do win.

<comment><USER3> It also speaks volumes when a company would rather direct resources towards litigation instead of innovation. Engineers tend to be cheaper than lawyers and legal maneuvering will only delay the demise of an inferior product temporarily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The linked article said that GMU was sued for violating its license agreement with EndNote. So, this isn't the same question as whether or not a third party app may read/write MSOffice file formats. If an organization signs a license agreement stating that all users of data aggregated by Product A must access that data via a licensed copy of that product but instead issues some of its employees Product B which reads Product A's data, isn't that a legitimate license violation? I probably wouldn't enter into such an agreement as a customer, but one could conceivably do so. We don't actually know from the article what the case was about or what the judges ruled upon.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is impossible to 'unlicense' the right to reverse engineer. (if you reverse engineer only to support another company's format.). If i'm wrong on this one, let me know.

EndNote didn't stand a chance in court.

</comment><comment><USER6> _The case could have addressed some interesting questions, such as the degree to which duplicating functionality falls under the definition of reverse engineering, and whether a file-format translator is a derivative work, as well as whether it's legally permissible to prohibit either of these._

Have these questions not been addressed before in court?</comment>


Eloquent JavaScript - online guide to javascript for beginners - <AUTHOR> http://eloquentjavascript.net/

<comment><USER2> This is very clever and deserves a lot of points. It doesn't look very interesting on the landing page but once you get into it, it's well written and there are some clever strategies (including a small JavaScript console at the bottom you can use to test bits of code while learning).

I haven't got the time now, but I'm going to work my way right through this one day - what I looked through seemed very solid.

The only downside? The font chosen for the code examples looks pretty gross on OS X, but since you can download the book as a ZIP file, it can be changed in the stylesheet! (I'm hoping..)

<comment><USER3> Or - in Safari - you can put such a style sheet in your user/library/safari folder for viewing it according to your preferred font (selecting it in Safari Preferences/Advances).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author is a _very_ competent Lisper; author of Postmodern:

<http://common-lisp.net/project/postmodern/>

:-)

Edit: Holly crap, he wrote a few other things as well:

<http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/>

<comment><USER5> Also a very accomplished JS programmer. He wrote the Code Mirror Editor.

<http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Original source here: <http://eloquentjavascript.net/book.txt>

Neat stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER7> This has always been my favourite JavaScript resource. It has a good breadth of topics, the writing is to-the-point, and it has an interactive JavaScript area with a history-backed prompt and a code area with syntax highlighting and automatic indentation. The examples and exercises are both hands-on, e.g. the object-oriented programming chapter has you build a little terrarium simulation. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> Me too. This was my primary resource while learning the language and I highly recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> you guys should also read <http://www.hunlock.com/blogs> Very thorough articles on JavaScript

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if it's your site or not but auto-play music is one way to ensure that I close the tab immediately and never return.

<comment><USER9> ohh I use firefox with adblock plus so never got to know. Its not my site though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wish this book had existed when I began programing JavaScript.

I also like the firebug-style console at the bottom of each chapter.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been reading this site all day since I found it on here. Awesome.</comment>


Swift Forums - <AUTHOR> https://forums.swift.org <comment><USER2> The old title was "Official Swift forums switch to Discourse," or something along those lines. The current title ("Swift Forums") tells you _nothing_.

Aside: I _detest_ Discourse. It is an abomination of good ideas mated to horrible UX by developers and designers too caught up in drinking their own koolaid to understand that most people do _not_ live in Discourse and expect the website to act the same way every other website does. Hijacking `ctrl+f` in a webpage should reserve a special spot in hell for the person that decided it was a good idea [0].

[0]: [https://meta.discourse.org/t/options-to-disable-hijack-of- cm...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/options-to-disable-hijack-of-cmd-f-ctrl-f- and-keys-for-search/16875/21)

<comment><USER3> meta: I noticed titles getting changed to something nonsensical more and more often on Hacker News. The current title is absolutely ridiculous, as it provides no value.

I know that the title is supposed to match the submission, but there are cases where a custom title makes much more sense, and provides a lot more value to the community.

<comment><USER4> In this case, a link to the announcement post[1] would have been a better submission, and the title of that post is "Welcome to the Swift Forums". It's not perfect, but that, combines with the first sentence or two from the post gives a pretty clear indication of why someone might consider it noteworthy (it's a new forum), although others I'm sure would not.

1: [https://forums.swift.org/t/welcome-to-the-swift- forums/8](https://forums.swift.org/t/welcome-to-the-swift-forums/8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are they written in Swift? If so where do I get the source code?

<comment><USER6> Looks like discourse [0] to me which is an open source ruby forum software

0: [https://github.com/discourse/discourse](https://github.com/discourse/discourse)

<comment><USER5> Damn, I was hoping they dog-fooded some server-side swift. I was just interested in seeing a larger server-side swift project not the actual forums themselves. Thank you for the link, though.

<comment><USER7> Forums are such a massive undertaking that these days I consider it irresponsible to roll your own unless you are building a seriously novel integration.

Building a large exploratory project in Swift and having a robust place to have technical conversations should be two different projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the advantage of this forum over Stack Overflow?</comment>


Curiosity Rover finds round 'ball' on Martian surface - <AUTHOR> https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/25117432/curiosity-rover-finds-round-ball-on-martian-surface/

<comment><USER2> In Argentina, in el Valle de la Luna, we have a place with a lot of big natural stone spheres. They are bigger than the sphere in the picture, so perhaps it has a different geological origin. [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valle_de_ichigualasto...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valle_de_ichigualasto,_cancha_de_bochas.jpg)

More info about natural stone spheres: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_ball#Natural](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_ball#Natural)

Some pages with photos of similar places:

[http://101lugaresincreibles.com/2010/10/cinco-sitios-con- roc...](http://101lugaresincreibles.com/2010/10/cinco-sitios-con-rocas- esfericas-que-parecen-talladas.html)

[http://www.cesarlizano.name/sibowak/esferas_de_piedra_costa_...](http://www.cesarlizano.name/sibowak/esferas_de_piedra_costa_rica_htm/esferas_de%20Piedra_en_el_mundo.htm)</comment>


Kaspersky: Duqu Trojan uses 'unknown programming language' - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/kaspersky-duqu-trojan-uses-unknown-programming-language/10625 <comment><USER2> The payload could have been modified (to obfuscate its origin / source language) using a product named codesurfer/x86.

[http://www.grammatech.com/research/products/CodeSurferx86.ht...](http://www.grammatech.com/research/products/CodeSurferx86.html)

If it has access to source code, it can instrument the build process, and obtain disassembly that is high quality enough to support rewriting. Using it's scheme API you can modify the CFG of each procedure directly, serialize the rewritten parts out as nasm, and even relink with the object files you don't have source for.

It works with any build system, and supports gcc / as / ld and cl / link.

So it may not have actually been written using a custom pl.

<comment><USER3> As a part-time Schemer this does not surprise me... Schemers have a tendency to craft their own languages. It's only natural.

<comment><USER4> But surely the compiler (assuming a compiler is used) would convert the new high level language into regular Scheme primitives - I think it's unlikely that the result wouldn't be identifiable.

<comment><USER2> No... the product allows you to write scripts to manipulate its machine code IR database in scheme, and then spit out the machine code as nasm assembly, assembly them, and then run the appropriate linker in the same way that was used to produce the original exe. Scheme is used as a macro language. So you use scheme to say: change the code at EA 0xdeadbeef from a mov to a jmp. You can reorder functions, insert and remove code, etc. It works because it has very high quality disassembly based on observing compiler and linker invocations and introspecting the artifacts involved.

<comment><USER4> Ahh, that makes more sense, I thought it meant simply creating a higher level language from Scheme rather than manipulating the last stage(s) of producing the binary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The company has named it the Duqu Framework_

I am confident that within a week there will be 3 front page posts on HN along the lines of 'Why I use Duqu and you should too'.

<comment><USER6> Within a month there will be a Dice job listing asking for five years of Duqu experience.

<comment><USER7> TFA

> Duqu and Stuxnet components date to 2007

<comment><USER8> That's the joke, e.g., "Ruby on Rails expert with 10 years of experience wanted"

<comment><USER9> Amusing joke, yes, but the parent was pointing out that 5 years experience in Duqu framework might not be impossible. 2012 - 2007 = 5

<comment><USER8> Ah, I misunderstood. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will be repeating a notion I read on YCombinator elsewhere - but I, too, find it incredibly cool that we live in a time when wars are fought online like that.

We have online revolutionaries anarchists and REAL nation-wide revolutions, started on online networks (talking about Arabic Spring here); we got FBI agents, looking through IP addresses on IRC networks to catch a small group of bragging attackers; we got invisible army of Chinese hackers that noone knows who they are, only that they are _really good_ ; some unknown entity making amazingly well done and thought out trojan like stuxnet and now duqu, that seems to be right from pages of some hyperbolic comic book; and, last but not the least, the Russian mafia lords employing Zeus trojans and whatnot to make botnets that mine bitcoin, purely digital currency.

It's an amazing world we live in. Can't wait what the future will bring.

<comment><USER11> You seem to be pretty enthusiastic about rather worrying and even disturbing developments. This is not a science fiction novel, this is real life. One day it is Israeli hackers destroying Iranian centrifuges, perhaps the next day it will be nuclear reactor facilities that are sent into meltdowns.

<comment><USER10> As I think about it, you are probably right.

And yet, I can't help myself but watch in fascination as all this happens. Maybe it's because this time, the war is fought with means and tools I understand (if only a little)? Maybe.

Maybe it has something to do with the morbid fascination people have with anything destructive - the World War II books and movies are still sold like cakes, while noone actually wants to repeat the world war.

<comment><USER12> I, for one, appreciate your enthusiasm. I mean, it's just amazing to look at how far man has advanced from just 100 years ago.

And for me, it's definitely not about the destruction. I just think it's awesome to realize just what humans are capable of. Now, humans are also capable of some ridiculously destructive things. But the problem with @adriand's point of view is that it's as if there's something to be lost from all of Man's destruction. When really, what significance does Earth have in the Universe anyway?

<comment><USER13> It's pretty significant to us, because we're here :) Seriously, from our point of view, including adriand's, there is something to be lost from Mankind's destruction because it would be the end of our entire species. From the perspective of the universe as a whole, it may not be significant, but it seems eminently sensible for humans to be concerned about it.

Also, it is possible that Earth _is_ significant to the universe because it's the only place where intelligent life has arisen. I don't expect that this is actually the case, but so far we have no evidence to the contrary, and if it were true it would be tragic if we wiped ourselves out by playing with virii and nuclear technology.

<comment><USER14> 500 years ago all human settlements on Earth had always been agrarian economies with different levels of development but primitive nonetheless, until the industrial revolution started.

What if it had never happened? Now we now there were previous attempts at industry, like steam engines and chemistry, but there was always a war, a drought or some other disaster that destroyed the framework where said developments were made, and sometimes even killed the people making them (Archimedes for example).

What if the universe is just like that? what if we're the most advanced species and all the aliens out there are either animals or still haven't even figured out how to build clocks or engines?

If that's the case then all the knowledge that ever existed would die with us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unless I'm mistaken it looks like a very dynamic language. The screenshot they're showing seems to point at initialisation of a new object, which actually copies function pointers for each of its methods. That's not needed for static languages which would just point to vtables. It looks like it doesn't use real GC though - object's destructor is called right away on a failed allocation. And the destructor is possible to change too...

So something like compiled javascript sans GC really. Or maybe like precompiled python.

Doesn't seem very obfuscated either imho - there's a bunch of static data copied in a series of moves. If someone really wanted to obfuscate those, this looks like a fairly low hanging fruit: grab a list of 5+ mov-s of constants and change them into xor+copy of a memory range to confuse pointer detection.

Can you see any more characteristics in that fragment?

<comment><USER16> The characteristics listed in the actual article (posted by computerbob: [http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duq...](http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework)) also support this conclusion.

      -Everything is wrapped into objects
      -Function table is placed directly into the class instance and can be
       modified after construction
      -There is no distinction between utility classes (linked lists, hashes) and
       user-written code
      -Objects communicate using method calls, deferred execution queues and
       event-driven callbacks

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of Smalltalk.

<comment><USER18> Smalltalk objects typically don't have a per-object table of function pointers (some dialects do, such as Self).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To me this just seems like someone wrote their own little OO system in C, similar to how GObject works. The book Object Oriented Programming with ANSI by Axel-Tobias Schreiner[1] even has example types which use the nomenclature 'ctor' and 'dtor' as in the snippet of code they show (See section 2.5, page 17). It isn't hard to write a little class generator that writes out all this boilerplate code[2] from a C++/C# like input file. The benefit is, of course, the resulting code size and avoiding any linkage to the std C++ library.

[1] <http://www.planetpdf.com/codecuts/pdfs/ooc.pdf> [2] <http://www.jirka.org/gob.html>

<comment><USER20> The inconsistent placement of the "this" argument in function calls seems to support this being C. The vtable moving around would indicate that each class layout is hand-written, though.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, the author made a point of noting "this" could be in a register or the stack, but that to me just says "C". The functions moving around wouldn't necessarily mean it is written by hand, though. There just needs to be some rules governing the system and we don't know what those rules are (yet).

I would just be very surprised if this is anything other than some convention developed on top of C.

<comment><USER21> Differing calling conventions can point to combination of hand crafted object system in C with some custom code generator with some high level input that produces machine code directly without C in between. When you generate machine code that does not directly interface with system libraries it is often useful to ignore platform ABI calling conventions and make up your own.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps they use some kind of right-to-left fastcall convention. Or maybe they are just unconventional, putting "this" at the end of the parameter list, hence ending up in different registers or the stack depending on the number of arguments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The actual real blog which zdnet summarized from which is far more interesting:

[http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duq...](http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework)

<comment><USER23> and from the comments on that blog:

> The code your referring to .. the unknown c++ looks like the older IBM > compilers found in OS400 SYS38 and the oldest sys36.

> The C++ code was used to write the tcp/ip stack for the operating system and > all of the communications. The protocols used were the following x.21(async) > all modes, Sync SDLC, x.25 Vbiss5 10 15 and 25. CICS. RSR232. This was a > very small and powerful communications framework. The IBM system 36 had only > 300MB hard drive and one megabyte of memory,the operating system came on > diskettes.

> This would be very useful in this virus. It can track and monitor all types > of communications. It can connect to everything and anything.

<comment><USER24> But this comment doesn't ever mention specifically what makes his suggestion "look like" the given examples. I find it highly unlikely, given all the available networking/comm libraries available that old, proprietary IBM code would be used. Maybe there's something to it, but he certainly didn't mention anything convincing.

More unusual (to me) is that there are two separate comments suggesting it may be RPG (an OS400/iSeries language), which is very unlikely due to it not being an OOP language therefore not having constructor/destructor functionality, and otherwise a very high level language.

I'd guess some high level assembly, though this suggestion does look interesting.

[http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duq...](http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework#c15313)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Writing an unpolished programming language isn't that much work in comparison to writing a complex virus. Especially low level languages where instructions map pretty closely to the CPU instructions are easy to create.

I think it makes a lot of sense to write a custom programming language/compiler because virus scanners tend to use fingerprints to recognize dangerous pieces of code. So you want a compiler that deliberately obfuscates the code it writes and also outputs instructions in such a way that it avoids triggering known virus scanner fingerprints.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. Writing compilers is easy; The "hard" aspects of creating a new language usually boil down to issues like tooling, documentation and support libraries. In the case of a virus, the only users of the language are the virus authors and the language can be highly tailored to the domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They doing it wrong.

Instead of trying to compile code examples in every candidate PL, they should:

1\. Crawl x86 binaries from the Internet / download sites / code archives.

2\. Write M/R job, which will disassemble and look for patterns they discovered.

3\. Once patterns found - investigate the source of binary (i.e. who uploaded it to download site, maybe it was on university FTP server or maybe it's part of commercial driver released by company XYZ).

</comment><comment><USER28> It might well be a macro language and not compiled. For example, HLA (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Level_Assembly>) has many of the features that are present here. It has its own library functions, objects/classes, and produces code that looks bit like it was compiled.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looking the assembly I see two things: (1) no name mangling. So either this was lost in the decompilation/deciphering phase by the Kaspersky guys or mysterious language does not support method overloading. (2) the assembly looks reasonably tight and optimized, so a solid code generation backend (GCC,LLVM,MSVC,...) was used.

Especially because of the name mangling i was thinking of Vala [0]. However, Vala relies on GObject and does probably not work on Windows. Anyways, I guess it's an OO language compiled to C in an intermediate step. This would explain (2).

</comment><comment><USER30> This is one of the most interesting netsec (if not THE most) questions of our time.

We have what is effectively an alien virus, given how advanced it was, its construction and spawing of duqu and being written in an unknown language.

This is serious awesome cyberpunk stuff - but scary as hell at the same time.

With the revelation of Stuxnet and Duqu, NOBODY should think anything they do/say online is safe.

<comment><USER31> Not necessarily. Occam's Razor. It's more likely that they used something obscure to compile or obfuscate the code or wrote a tool to do so. Creating a new language just to write this seems highly unlikely.

<comment><USER32> Is writing something like this in pure assembly beyond the realm of possibility for some reason? There are still a few dedicated people that code on the metal for high level operating systems (Steve Gibson comes to mind immediately)

<comment><USER33> Writing something like this in assembly isn't impossible (or that difficult), but the patterns look like something that you wouldn't be using if you were writing in assembly.

My bet is that it's just C with a hand-rolled OO framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> is it dumb to suggest that someone who understands c++ (or other compiled oo language) would/could write assembler in this way? just from reading the description (things like variable locations of method tables, various registers for "this", and lack of memory management) it sounds like it could be handwritten, but structured in a similar way to c++.

<comment><USER21> The disassembly snippet looks like typical C/assembly handcrafted object system without real classes, but responses by Kaspersky guys in blog comments seem to imply that it uses these objects even in places where it is highly impractical when writing code manually. So it's possibly C/assembly written by typical hardcore Java programmer, but I find that highly unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If I read that properly, it sounds like Objects have their own function tables- this would seem to indicate an object oriented language based on prototypal inheritance.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've seen the theory that Stuxnet/Duqu was developed by a state thrown around a lot, but what's the actual evidence?

It's not particularly hard to write a simple programming language. Worms are very specialized pieces of code. It doesn't seem that crazy that someone would create a language tailored for worm development.

<comment><USER35> Considering the facts that are known (e.g.: [http://www.digitalbond.com/2012/01/31/langners-stuxnet- deep-...](http://www.digitalbond.com/2012/01/31/langners-stuxnet-deep- dive-s4-video/)) it is nigh impossible for Stuxnet to be commissioned by a nongovernmental entity.

The sheer complexity is off the charts. Stuxnet's sophistication and complexity is an cybernetic equivalent of Manhattan project. E.g.: As a domain expert on industrial automation of this kind Langners states that whoever created Stuxnet _had to have a testing facility_. How many hackers do you know who build uranium enrichment centrifuges to test their cyber attack tools?

Yeah thought so.

Edit: TL;DR: There are two pieces of evidence. No.1: Motive, No.2: Sophistication and complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> They learnt from watching all the research firms reverse engineer Stuxnet and eventually stop it. What they are doing is obfuscating the output. If you look at a default DLL or EXE build from VS it is amazing how much information is included that helps you attach a debugger and work out how it works.

The authors learnt from the Stuxnet experience and I wouldn't be surprised if they are not testing their own worm using black-box reverse engineering tools to figure out what the research guys will work out when they eventually find it in the wild.

This has worked so well that Kaspersky think that the authors actually invented a new language, when it is likely still just C++, some machine generated code, some obfuscator tools (game makers have been using them for years to stop crackers) and likely manually changing the outputted assembler.

<comment><USER37> > The authors learnt from the Stuxnet experience and I wouldn't be surprised > if they are not testing their own worm using black-box reverse engineering > tools to figure out what the research guys will work out when they > eventually find it in the wild.

Don't they mention that these components were floating around in 2007?

<comment><USER36> Where does it say that? All the references are to 'Duqu Framework', which they recently found, I may have missed something

They also completely rule out C++, C etc. when what they should be ruling out is C++, C compiled with a standard VS compiler (or an easily recognizable compiler). It is silly to completely rule out C++ and C just because they don't immediately recognize the output and because it doesn't reference anything else

<comment><USER37> bottom of TFA:

"Duqu was first detected in September 2011, but Kaspersky Lab believes it has seen the first pieces of Duqu-related malware dating back to August 2007"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> MASM32

<http://www.infernodevelopment.com/introduction-masm32>

[http://www.opensc.ws/asm-sources/11120-masm-simple-memory- co...](http://www.opensc.ws/asm-sources/11120-masm-simple-memory-code- injection.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> Why would creating your own programming language for a virus be a good thing? If viruses are the only thing written in this language, wouldn't the language make it easier for the anti-virus companies to detect it without having to worry as much about false positives?

<comment><USER24> It may not have been done for that reason alone. NIHS is pretty common among hackers:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here#In_computing>

It also seems to me that a new language for this exact purpose is unlikely, however, it could very well be a proprietary or otherwise unknown language that may have been built for another purpose (internal company, domain- specific development, etc) and not often seen in this context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Haskell or Lisp, perhaps?

<comment><USER41> I really had to laugh. Cmon guys, this humor is ok on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> are properly written code obfuscators able to throw off detection of their originating language?

</comment><comment><USER43> Please forgive, and correct, me if I have this wildly wrong:

This is referred to as Stuxnet 2. And the original was "proven" to have been made to attack Iranian nuclear labs, and what not. Conclusion being that it was made by some government agency. I suppose foil hat theory would point fingers at CIA/NSA type people.

Assuming the above is correct, or correct enough, its it not surprising to see what might be a new language for this virus, if it has a nation state's resources behind it? If that is the case, what chance is there that any one will be able to crack this mystery?

<comment><USER44> The best guess, at least in Israel, has been for a while now that Stuxnet was a joint Israeli/US effort.

I haven't heard any similar speculation about Duqu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This makes fairly little sense to me. Why wouldn't one write such a virus using straight ASM, or possibly write a VM in ASM and write the payload in the VM's bytecode (this option makes it particularly easy to do metamorphic code, though doing it with well-written ASM is also very possible)? It seems like creating a custom language -- or hacking up compiled C++ or whatnot -- is a bit of overkill considering that the basic tenets of virus writing are: keep it simple, don't get caught; this wouldn't aid in either of those.

<comment><USER46> Perhaps because this is no simple virus? Perhaps because Stuxnet/Duqu is one of if not the most sophisticated examples of cyber warfare* we have public examples of? Perhaps because its compiled binary is a whopping half-megabyte in size?

The amount of effort that went into Stuxnet is truly massive. It'd be no surprise if a custom framework or even a domain-specific language were written to support it.

* Usually I cringe at just hearing the phrase cyber warfare and at the ridiculous way in which it is used by media and the government. But looking at what Stuxnet accomplished ( _physically_ damaging or disabling critical components of the Iranian nuclear enrichment program), the term applies completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Maybe they just embedded something like RTOS-32. The company that makes it (www.On-Time.com) say it can be integrated with Visual Studio and used along side Visual C++.

</comment><comment><USER48> What driverdan said makes sense. It is much more likely that they obfuscated or masked their code instead of inventing an "unknown" programming language. Even so, the obfuscation method used I'm sure would be pretty cunning (seeing as these folk mean business).

It's interesting to see Kaspersky suggest that the state is behind this solely based on some unknown code. Does anyone know why that would be a likely conclusion on their part?

<comment><USER24> From what I gathered from the article, this doesn't appear to be obfuscated since the purpose/method is transparent in the decompiled code, it simply doesn't match the constructs you would expect to see in common programming languages when decompiled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Apparently I am the only one who thought immediately "Goldman Sachs." My money is on this being SLANG.

<comment><USER50> Slang is not compiled, and isn't very useful without SecDB behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like the idea that it is an OO language that forgoes its own runtime library and instead uses the Win32 API as its native library. This would be a great language to write viruses in -- perfect for just glueing together APIs and doing some very small scale business logic without having to learn C++.

<comment><USER52> Anyone writing a virus already knows C++.

<comment><USER51> Sorry, anyone who is writing the "business logic" for a virus. Someone else might write the exploit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> related: an anti-reverse engineering tool at microsoft called "warbird" (<http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-130166.html>, search for warbird)

</comment><comment><USER54> To me it seems just Kaspersky are advertising their product, nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER55> Well, given that Unit 8200 is up, and the U.S. Cyber Command is active this looks exactly like what they'd do.

Just wait until they let the A.I. make the language as so it is not human decipherable.

<comment><USER56> Relevant link:

<http://www.kurzweilai.net/ai-designs-its-own-video-game>

Pretty much, let the machine make the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Someone in an earlier post had claimed it is MASM32

</comment><comment><USER58> ahh, that's assembly

</comment><comment><USER59> In my best Commander Tigh voice: "Looks like exactly the kind of code a Cylon would write, to me."</comment>


Virtualized iOS builds at Shopify - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/scaling-ios-ci-with-anka <comment><USER2> Apple allowing MacOS server on major cloud providers would be a game changer. I don't really understand their reason for not allowing this.

<comment><USER3> They are deviating from standard PC architecture quickly with the introduction of things like the T1/T2 chips. They will want to depend on these things at some point.

The only 2 use-cases I can see for virtualised macOS are remote development/test machines, to which their answer would be "buy a real, local, Mac", and for continuous integration, for which their answer is currently fuzzy, but their acquisition of BuddyBuild makes me think they are likely to launch some sort of CI for developers in the future.

<comment><USER2> That would be good. At the moment, I can autoscale CI builders that run on Linux on EC2 with a moment's notice at cloud scale.

I don't like having to run, maintain, and rack physical Macs to do the same for iOS/MacOS projects. It's a pain.

I was unaware of the BuddyBuild acquisition! I hope that helps in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much the software costed in total.

<comment><USER5> My gut feeling guess based on "small team, 4 months" would be around $200k for the initial development + a single full time employee for the future for maintenance and improvements. Add opportunity costs on top for focusing on something that's not their core business.

(Assuming US salaries, benefits, taxes and any related costs such as office space, equipment etc.)

But I'm probably biased as I spent 4 years of my life building and running a company that built a cloud based CI service for iOS, so that others wouldn't have to..

<comment><USER6> most of them that I tried are not working well enough. i.e. lots of performance issues, blocker bugs when runnning builds and/or reading reports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much the hardware costed in total.</comment>


Ask HN: Is now only a GER-language site for fitness gear ok for US market? - <AUTHOR> We are a small company that produces fitness gear for home workouts, in particular pull-up bars and dip bars, see [1]. I guess, now it's the time to serve also the US market.<p>Does it make sense, despite having only a German-language website?<p>[1] https://klimmzugstangen.de <comment><USER2> On a hunch, probably not. I would assume equivalents of any of these products can be bought on an English language site (Amazon etc.) and in my experience the US & Canadian market will go for the most friction-less purchasing experience. Trying to figure out a German language site (plus trying to figure out currency conversion) makes me think why bother when I could purchase something similar in 30 seconds. Perhaps if these were unique products that couldn't be bought anywhere else I would consider it.

<comment><AUTHOR> hhm, ok. yes, it's the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No. Few people understand German and it's not like fitness accessories are likely to be an unique offering people are going to be willing to deal with unnecessary hurdles for. And compared to setting up the logistics of distributing your product well, getting some english translations is probably very cheap.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sorry, here is the clickable link [https://klimmzugstangen.de](https://klimmzugstangen.de)

<comment> core-questions I feel like I could navigate by pictures to buy something, but... I wouldn't, you know? Even though the site looks fine, I'd have to use Google Translate to get all the details and they might not come through properly.

Probably worth it to get it professionally translated - surely there are plenty of homestuck people who can do that for you for some Paypal - and then put up an English-language domain name. If you're serious about the market, that is.</comment></comment>


Astronomers Watch a Supernova and See Reruns - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/astronomers-observe-supernova-and-find-theyre-watching-reruns.html

<comment><USER2> This the most exciting astronomical development I've heard about for several years. One gets the impression that there might be perspectives like this all over the place, much as the discovery of the first few exoplanets was followed by an avalanche of others.

Am I right in thinking that the temporal offsets of the gravitational lensing allow for a sort of controlled experiment, eg where astronomers study the oldest image of the supernova and form hypotheses about its development, then test those hypotheses against the later ones?

<comment><USER3> Not quite, I think. The supernova is more used to study the dark matter lens, which cannot be seen directly. Seeing the supernova being lensed by different parts of the galaxy cluster will allow them to map the dark matter profile of the galaxy and study how it's distributed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to think about this: Would it be possible to find a configuration of galaxies with enough mass to bend light from one point on earth back to another point on earth? If we could do that, we actually look at an older timestamp of earth.

Yes, we'd need a reeeeally powerful telescope, but maybe we could find that in another configuration of galaxies as well.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it is possible, but we'd need better telescopes. This post has a pretty good analysis: [http://rein.pk/gravitational-lensing-to-observe-ancient- eart...](http://rein.pk/gravitational-lensing-to-observe-ancient-earth/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The whole series of videos about various astronomic subjects is extremely well done. The music and narration of Dennis Overbye remind me of the old Carl Sagan movies, this time made for the newer generation, with a shorter attention span.

</comment><comment><USER7> If we had powerful enough telescope that we could see a civilization growing up 1000 light years away we could record it and provide it as a gift for when we finally meet. Or maybe there is someone out there doing that for us.</comment>