The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business) - <AUTHOR> https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost-every-country/ <comment><USER2> This map seems to use a very variable and at times generous definition of both "company" and "still in business".

Sure, Australia Post is one of Australia's oldest institutions if you count from the date of the establishment of its oldest predecessor (which this map does, as a Postmaster-General was first appointed for New South Wales in 1809), but a single national postal service wasn't established until Australia itself was established in 1901 and the colonial postal services were merged, and even then it was a government department until 1975, and wasn't corporatised until 1989 and remains government-owned to this day.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me how the restaurant Earl of Sandwich, which was founded in 2004 in Orlando, puts established in 1762 on their website and the front of some of their buildings [1]. Just because the "sandwich" was invented in 1762.

[1]: [http://paradisefoundaround.com/wp- content/uploads/disneyland...](http://paradisefoundaround.com/wp- content/uploads/disneyland_paris_earl_of_sandwich_exterior1.jpg)

<comment><USER4> What a tacky and misleading move

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting elements to me:

\- The prevalence of drinking and dining establishments amongst oldest- national businesses.

\- And banks / mints / financial institutions.

\- The relative youth of oldest-national-businesses in Africa. Most notably Equatorial Guinea with Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's _oldest_ business corporation, founded in 1996.

This suggests either a data artefact in which older going concerns are not formally reported (or those reports available), or an extreme level of institutional instability.

Possibly both.

<comment><USER6> > Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, > founded in 1996.

The number looks more like 1962 to me (maybe they changed it).

The actual youngest seems to be South Sudan's Ivory Bank, which was only founded in 1994. This is easily explained by the country being relatively new.

<comment><USER5> It's distinctly 1996 here:

[https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in- almost...](https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost-every- country/)

<comment><USER7> On the world map, it's distinctly 1962.

1996 seems to be the correct date: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Ecuatorial_Airlines](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Ecuatorial_Airlines)

<comment><USER5> Fair point.

Regardless, with other entries in the 1990s, that's amazingly recent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If they're going to include religious companies like the Affligem Brewery, created by Monks, then religious organizations as a whole are fair game. And the Catholic Church, or some form of Orthodox Church, precedes pretty much everything else.

I'd argue that a religion itself doesn't qualify though, it has to be a religious organization that had some level of central control, distinct from the government of nation-states (though potentially intertwined) and had assets & holdings independent of the nations they operated within.

Under that definition, I'm not quite sure when the earliest christian organization would have qualified. I know it became the official Roman religion around 380 A.D., but was it centrally organized then (or was that the advent of its central organization?) Or did that happen earlier/later?

<comment><USER9> I guess it depends on the primary purpose of the entity. It doesn't matter if Affligem (or any other business) was created by monks, atheists or space aliens. It's still a brewery. Of course, you could argue that all religious organizations are businesses, but for all intents and purposes we do not include them in these kinds of analyses, lest everything becomes a business and the analyses become meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The oldest company in the world on this chart (Kongo Gumi in Japan) is not in Business anymore. It seized operations in 2006 due to bankruptcy.

<comment><USER11> According to wikipedia, it was bought by Takamatsu and operates as a wholly owned subsidiary, though admittedly I don't think that counts anymore for this title: [https://www.kongogumi.co.jp/](https://www.kongogumi.co.jp/).

<comment><USER12> According to the standard established in other cases, that would probably make Takamatsu the oldest company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was expecting to see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company) for USA. I suspect there is always some wiggle room in the definitions of "oldest", but wikipedia dates it as earlier than Shirley Plantation (and it is also older than the company given for Armenia).

<comment><USER14> It wasn't started in America though.

<comment><USER12> Because I'm meant to believe HSBC was started in El Salvador right? The standard in the image does not include having started there.

<comment><USER15> That's presumably the local legal entity for HSBC - most large companies operate by having at least one local legal entity in each country they operate in which are usually wholly owned subsidiaries of some other company in the group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FWIW there are some older universities in Hungary, for example the teachers' college in Eger has been continuously under one seal since 1774. There are some much older ones but they have periods of discontinuity which appears to be another flaw of this list.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eszterh%C3%A1zy_K%C3%A1roly_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eszterh%C3%A1zy_K%C3%A1roly_University)

</comment><comment><USER17> Related new: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2232308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2232308)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's amusing to consider the common wisdom that restaurants are a tough, low margin business yet make up so many of the eldest companies. Even if you exceed some threshold to make it to maturity, you'd think the statistics on survival would catch up with you eventually.

<comment><USER19> It seems like restaurants/bars make it to a certain age where they become part of the fabric of a city/town. They turn into those places where "you just gotta go once or twice a year" and anytime someone comes in from out of town you take them or tell them to go. If I had to guess it's around 25 years. If my parents took me there when I was a kid, the restaurant makes it on that list. If my grandparents took my parents there, so much the better.

<comment><USER20> Such restaurants still usually end up going out of business. For example, a lot of the fried seafood warhorses in Boston are gone at this point.

Still, if you talk about entire countries, there are often going to be some institutions that have at least some sort of vague claim to continuous operation/ownership.

<comment><USER21> I wonder if that correlates to the local and affordable seafood also having disappeared. There's a limit to the number of customers you can attract with calamari and other things formerly considered bait.

<comment><USER20> Possibly. Certainly any traditional deep-fried seafood platter is no cheaper than it was.

But tastes have also changed. Although I'm sure they had other things, the traditional Boston seafood restaurants tended to be built around a lot of deep-fried fish (or boiled lobster). There's also been a lot of development in the area where most of them were.

Legal's is certainly still around with a generally less heavy hand in terms of prep. And, in general, there are tons of newer seafood restaurants that are mostly in a somewhat different vein than the traditional ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you didn't care about the "still in business" part—implying the same line of business—Stora Enso of Finland would date back to 1288: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso)

<comment><USER23> Stora Enso is actually a merger of two companies; Swedish Stora and Finnish Enso. It's Stora that was founded in 1288 with the copper mine in Falun ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine)), which produced 2/3 of Europe's copper needs at one point in time. It was also the world's first stock company apparently, and it's still in business.

<comment><USER12> (Being a merger does not exclude a company according to the standards of the map. For instance, Australia Post was at one stage a government department, formed by merging departments from several other governments. It's only by using this extremely contrived definition of "oldest company still in business" that they can reach 1809.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ireland's neighbours: Banks, Mints, Postal Services, etc.

Ireland: A pub

Edit: Not having a go at the Irish. I'm Irish myself.

<comment><USER25> You cannot top central/eastern Europe :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not flippant question, but what is considered as a business?

<comment><USER27> That's a good question, because "Casa da moeda do Brasil" is the "company" that actually prints the real money in Brazil. It's controlled by the state since forever (although the definition of 'state' changed wildly in the last 500 years, between colony, empire, dictatorship, republic, etc).

<comment><USER26> Now, that's a good "business" :-). I imagined that this is the same situation as the other mints in the other countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The "Casa de Moneda de México" year is off by 1 I think (1534), or the Wikipedia entry ( [https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_de_Moneda_de_M%C3%A9xico#...](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_de_Moneda_de_M%C3%A9xico#Historia) ) is wrong (1535).

Interesting trivia tidbit to know that the oldest company in the Americas is actually in Mexico.

<comment><USER5> The oldest continuously operating university in the Western Hemisphere is in Peru, established in 1551.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation#Latin_America_and_the_Caribbean)

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

The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, in Mexico City, was founded several months later, the same year.

<comment><USER29> If I were feeling pedantic I'd mention the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen... As well as a handful in Spain and Portugal ;)

<comment><USER30> Your comment got me interested in where the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (alma mater to Copernicus) placed in these standings which led me to this list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation)

<comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22428584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22428584) ;-)

<comment><USER30> Ouch. Either I need to stop commenting while in a conference call or I'm going senile. Or both.

<comment><USER5> No worries.

I'm mirthed, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mostly the preservation of brand name, which is never the same as the company. Especially true for different public facing things like restaurants and breweries, which is almost always a retrobranding trick.

Family tree washing.

</comment><comment><USER32> The article claims that the oldest company in Kosovo was founded in 1999. I assume this is related to when it gained statehood, because it seems patently implausible that there are no institutions more than twenty years old.

The trouble is, all sorts of entries on this list predate the formation of the modern states in which they reside. Serbia's Apatin Brewery (1756) clearly predates its time as a part of Yugoslavia. What's the requirement for inclusion here?

<comment><USER33> Probably whatever result comes back from a Google search for "Oldest company in _____".

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> An article that could have been just a big table. Here is the direct link of spread sheet [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ynIAoLhz0SZYzjpwZ5e5...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ynIAoLhz0SZYzjpwZ5e5mFzBxt6V28FTBjX7A99jq3E/edit#gid=1488665788)

<comment><USER35> Thank you. That map was incredibly hard to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Fiskars, Finland (1649) has grown by buying bunch of other old companies and brands, including Waterford Crystal, Ireland (1783), Royal Copenhagen, Denmark (1775), Rörstrand (1726). Fiskars also owns Gerber Legendary Blades, USA (1939) but that's only 80 years old company :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Brand brewery for the Netherlands is incorrect, they use 1340 because its good for marketing I guess but there is no real evidence the actual company was started around that time.

</comment><comment><USER38> Gonna be that guy and say that this map almost certainly has inaccuracies at least in southeast and south asia. If individual owner/operator businesses count I'm sure you can find some hole in the wall restaurant in Thailand dating before 1878. Also the fact that still operating is a requirement obviously imposes a massive colonialism penalty.

</comment><comment><USER39> The top ten list at the end only includes the companies shown on the maps. Wikipedia has a full list of the oldest companies in the world (both active and inactive): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies)

</comment><comment><USER40> Ma Yu Ching's Bucket Chicken House in the oldest in China. Never would have expected a chicken place to top the list!

<comment><USER41> If there's no older egg place, we may have an answer to a certain question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It makes sense that an inn can be very old. Even if they were to destroy a town, soldiers would still need somewhere to drink. In an era of blanket bombing etc this might no longer be the case. I'm sure some pretty ancient businesses were destroyed in WW2

</comment><comment><USER43> The last list seems to be "list of countries with oldest running company" not "top 10 oldest companies in the world". I find it hard to believe none of the first 9 countries has a company older than China's oldest.

</comment><comment><USER44> Canada: Hudson's Bay Company, 1670

England: The Royal Mint, 886

Scotland: Bank of Scotland, 1695

Ireland: Sean's Bar, 900

<comment><USER45> I was hoping my ancestors went to Sean's bar but it's in Athlone Co. Westmeath, Leinster. My mom's ancestors were from Co. Monaghan and dad's one of the counties somewhere in Ulster province.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The map misses the oldest: Roman Church, ~2,000 years old as of today.

<comment><USER12> As profitable as they are, I don't think they're a business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why is Alaska a separate color with no company listed?

<comment><USER48> It's a mystery land, nobody actually lives there...

<comment><USER49> Trump gave it back to Russia when Putin asked for it ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> One bit I find somewhat interesting is that most of "national oldest businesses" predate their current nations by quite a bit.

</comment><comment><USER51> Sean's Bar, Ireland, 900. How many times has Danny Boy been sung in there ? Chuckle. Fun fun map. Thanks for the post.

<comment><USER52> "Sean's Bar"

It doesn't get more Irish than that.

<comment><USER53> What about: "Paddy's Bar" ?

<comment><USER54> Or Paddy's Pub

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not sure what I expected but I was somewhat underwhelmed to see the oldest in Australia is Australia Post.

<comment><USER12> Only by the most contrived and tortured definition. The company only really dates to 1989, 1975 at the outside. Before that, it was a government department. If you can count a government department just because it later became a company, what kind of definition is that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'd be interested to see this broken out by state for the US.

<comment><USER57> [https://www.workandmoney.com/s/oldest-business-every- state-d...](https://www.workandmoney.com/s/oldest-business-every-state- df5db7723801491e)

<comment><USER56> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> According to this map, Georgia doesn't even exist

</comment><comment><USER59> Fascinating stuff, and well presented too.

</comment><comment><USER60> Nice to see a company from Nepal too.

</comment><comment><USER61> no data for Israel ?

</comment><comment><USER62> I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.

<comment><USER63> At that point why not count the British Empire as a business?

<comment><USER64> You could probably consider the British royal family a business.

But even if you don't do that, for a long time the British empire _was_ a corporation — the east India company.

<comment><USER65> Weren't they just a majority shareholder?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are lots, but for context there are roughly 190 million companies on the planet, so to say these long-lived ones are an extreme outlier is still an understatement.

Enter religious institutions: Ballpark estimates in my head indicate that, sure, some come & go quickly, but many have much more staying power than their pure corporate counterparts. Lasting a handful of generations is common: Many major sects of Christianity are hundreds of years old.

I think this is a problem with human ability to truly plan in timescales longer than a generation, much less an entire human life time or longer. The _purpose_ of a corporation is not to last forever, and changing markets often present hard limits on their lifetime, effectively a Great Filter for corporate enterprise. Contrast with the purpose of any religion, which is inherently devoted to beliefs that are not purported to be limited to a discrete period of time (excepting doomsday cults, which are interesting studies, but not in scope for this topic)

I am not particularly religious, but I think this difference in longevity, stemming from inherent differences in purpose, points the way towards the type of mindset necessary for the human race to begin acting and planning from the truly long term, beyond the horizon of a human life time or two. Which is really necessary when you consider issues like climate change (regardless of what you believe is the cause (a separate debate) the effects must be dealt with over time scales that exceed a human life time) and not just that, but other grand projects than cannot be accomplished in a single lifetime.

<comment><USER66> If you had a convenient time machine and gathered up say, a group Catholics from today, a group from 100 years ago, and a group from 1000 years ago, you'd have three groups of people with radically different beliefs. They might even disagree with the idea they followed the same religion.

Part of what makes religions last is bending to the changing times. A lot of the ones that didn't have faded away.

<comment><USER8> I don't have a "convenient" time machine, only an "inconvenient" one. It travels only in one direction, forward, and at much the same pace as everyone else seems to travel. There's always the example of Merlin though, whose time- machine-body traveled only in the opposite direction at roughly the same pace as everyone else's went forward. It has to be awkward for your first meeting with someone to be their last meeting with you. And you can't even warn them about their future when you meet them further in their past: Their future has already happened. A truly frustrating existence. No wonder King Arthur's court collapsed inward upon adulterous scandal and fanatical seeking of religious artifacts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Disambiguated source: [https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in- almost...](https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost-every- country/)

<comment><USER67> Ok, we changed to that from [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERtzZoaVAAE09Og?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERtzZoaVAAE09Og?format=jpg&name=4096x4096). Thanks!</comment></comment>


Linux infosec outfit does a Torvalds, rageblocks innocent vuln spotter - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/27/linux_security_bug_report_row <comment><USER2> Hrmf, yet another mischaracterization of Torvalds...</comment>


Ask HN: (former or current) demomakers here ? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious - are there many HNers that were (or are still) creating demos, released or not ? If so, which group ? <comment><AUTHOR> Responding myself: I released a couple of productions circa 96/98 (see <http://scene.org/search.php?search=jka_>).</comment>


Show HN: Facebook data visualizer - <AUTHOR> http://jackhanford.com/facebook-data-visualizer

<comment><USER2> Looks neat, but really wish there were examples of the output (screenshots).

<comment> j-hernandez I tend to look for the output when prompted with something like this as well. +1 for some demo output on the landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On sentiment analysis. I have a friend who posted a lot of status messages that indicated mood. Often on top of the world, often raging about someone or something. I took the time to put 1 year worth of comments into a spreadsheet and gave them a 1-5 score for what I thought her mood was. I wanted to run an Fourier analysis on this to see if a roughly 28 day signal was apparent, but the data was sparse and I didn't feel like finding a way to do it. Can you do that? Can you do it for other people and not just yourself? That would cause quite a stir. FWIW the person I wanted to analyze is probably bipolar, so her posts were always very extreme and that's what got me thinking. My interest was purely science (and humor) but others might want to use/abuse such information.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice effort. Perhaps you can grab some inspiration from Wolfram Alpha's Facebook Report, which is really comprehensive

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook%20report#_=_](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook%20report#_=_)

</comment><comment><USER5> One thing I have noticed with FB Messages is that if you have a lot of messages (about 410k messages over the span of 3-4 years) its really hard / impossible to actually get all the messages back to the beginning. When I try to download my FB data it actually just leaves the conversation blank with 0 messages. (In the past it would dump everything it could get leaving it incomplete). I have also tried getting the messages via the Graph API but have hit the same limits that after x time it would just timeout and not get any messages. Which really sucks because I wanted to do some analysis and archiving of the messages.

</comment><comment><USER6> I live with Jack and the results are extremely interesting.

People could learn so much about themselves and their relationships just by running some basic sentiment analysis on the conversations they have in Messenger.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll add screenshots right now

<comment><USER7> What do those graphs show? Label your axes!

<comment><USER8> +1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I ran this and found some really interesting data to back the context around relationships I have with friends. Really interesting to see male vs female, college vs work vs social, new best friends vs old best friends, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is super neat! For usability reasons, I think it might be good to add some labels. For example, on the two "by Year" graphs, there are two lines, and I have no idea what they mean.

<comment><USER11> Titles would clarify everything (which is easy to add in the data_graphic calls)

[disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the graphing library used. So neat to see it in action!]

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How long does it generally take to load? I have a lot of fb messages so I expect it to take a while, just want to know what's the average wait time.

</comment><comment><USER13> Two potential bugs:

1\. it doesn't really work with non-English messages or am I mistaken?

2\. I changed my name recently on Facebook and now I'm my own best friend, nice :)

<comment><AUTHOR> unfortunately I haven't been able to test a data set that isn't english :(

And right, that is kind of a known bug. I discovered earlier today when a friend ran it.

Thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER15> The instructions seem to be missing step zero, "Buy a Mac"

OK, I get that I could probably run it in a Debian VM too I am sure. Just a pet peeve of the assumptions around operating system monoculture.

<comment><USER16> This seems to be based on Node.js and Bower? Both fully cross platform. At the worst it would be Unix-specific.</comment></comment>


The Surprising Truth About Raising Your Seed Round from VCS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/the-surprising-truth-about-raising-your-seed-round-from-vcs-a0e6af038e46 <comment><USER2> This sounds like a bunch of frat boys helping each other out. It's not so much whether an idea works but whom you know. I think this is the type of thing Peter Theil mentioned about SF being monoculture. Makes me kind of sad it's no longer about meritocracy and more about joining the club.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title is misspelled: it should say "VCs", not "VCS". If you capitalize the _s_ , it looks like part of the abbreviation. (Version control system? Video Computer System?)</comment>


Oracle Java SE 8 Release Updates: from 2019 businesses will need to license - <AUTHOR> https://www.java.com/en/download/release_notice.jsp <comment><AUTHOR> Quite the bait and switch, methinks.

EDIT: Actually this may not be entirely new: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/)</comment>


Defence Against the Docker Arts - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heroku.com/defence-against-the-docker-arts <comment><USER2> Here's a little known fact: "docker build" can trivially be extended to build buildpacks or CNB. Now that the buildkit refactoring is complete, Dockerfiles are just the default frontend. There's already a buildpack frontend in the community repo, and it works great. Writing your own frontend is real straightforward.

Honestly after years of stagnation, the most exciting work on container building is now coming out of Docker. Buildkit is amazing, a real hidden gem.

See [https://github.com/moby/buildkit](https://github.com/moby/buildkit)

<comment><USER3> My favorite Docker BuildKit feature is SSH agent forwarding. Add "\--mount=type=ssh" after RUN commands in Dockerfiles and the command will use your host machine's SSH agent. I've been able to greatly simplify a lot of Dockerfiles and CI build processes using it.

There's a good introduction here: [https://medium.com/@tonistiigi/build- secrets-and-ssh-forward...](https://medium.com/@tonistiigi/build-secrets-and- ssh-forwarding-in-docker-18-09-ae8161d066)

<comment><USER4> This feature currently does not work with the OS X ssh agent:

[https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/410](https://github.com/docker/for- mac/issues/410)

<comment><USER5> ssh access at build time via buildkit works on os x

[https://medium.com/@tonistiigi/build-secrets-and-ssh- forward...](https://medium.com/@tonistiigi/build-secrets-and-ssh-forwarding- in-docker-18-09-ae8161d066)

the link you've supplied regards ssh access when running docker images, not when building them.

... i did notice that for lots of downloads, it is somewhat slower, or perhaps more prone to lag, than authentication from inside the running image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been very close to creating something like this internally. It is easy to write a Dockerfile that produces a compact and optimal container. But it's the same lines of code over and over again. Anything we have that's a static site looks like:

        FROM node:10 AS build
        WORKDIR /foo
        COPY . .
        RUN npm i
        RUN npx webpack

        FROM nginx:whatever
        COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/config.d/
        COPY --from=build /foo/dist /srv
        ...

It's fine when you have one. Annoying when you have a couple. This isn't code that needs to be checked into the repository and updated. It needs to just work.

The other thing I'd like to see is the ability to output multiple containers from one Dockerfile. There is so much wasted work where I have webpack stuff and a go application that run in separate containers but are built together. There is one Dockerfile like the above to build the static part. There is another to build the go binary and copy it to an almost-pristine alpine container (including dumb-init, cacerts, tzdata, and grpc_health_probe). I don't understand why I have to have two Docker files to do that.

<comment><USER7> You don't have to have separate dockerfiles. If you use multistage builds, you can name the specific terminal stages and then invoke them with 'docker build -t stagename', which will reuse the build cache as you'd expect. I've done this to export multiple app containers from a monorepo.

<comment><USER8> Yo, their example has multiple stages.

<comment><USER9> I think they're talking about intermediates, which wouldn't have to be rebuilt every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a novice docker user, but I found Dockerfiles to be probably the most direct, graspable, important part of docker.

It's one readable text file used to recreate an entire environment. It's sort of a picture worth a thousand command lines.

That said, I wish there was a way to get rid of all the && stuff, which is used to avoild writing a layer of the filesytem.

Why not have something like:

        RUN foo
        RUN bar
        RUN bletch
        LAYER

<comment><USER11> The && is just layer squashing and not really needed. You can just use run on every line. Docker even supports squashing images now, so the && doesn't matter if you squash.

<comment><USER12> && doesn't layer squash, it's a trick to avoid the layer commit that RUN implies.

And squashing comes with a major drawback: you lose layer caching and any hope of a vaguely-efficient rebuilding process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You are setting up an entire operating system to install a single Microservice and just now noticed that you have redundancies?

You could have the same issue by simply trying to rpmbuild your app. No really, you are just doing packaging. If you want more comfort, look into how redhat or Debian maintain their packages. They have similar problems and most likely they have mature solutions.

<comment><USER14> If you have a single service and will never want more - sure. Once you have multiple, you actually get benefits if you depend on a lot of native libraries and external binaries. If you're in that situation, not having to upgrade every service at the same time when moving to a new base os release is really convenient.

<comment><USER15> NixOS offers the same benefits(more actually). Without containers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always felt that buildpacks in Heroku / Cloud Foundry are the way to go as they offer a higher level of abstraction than Docker files. The resulting containers are often production ready with good default settings. In docker you are re-inventing the wheel more often than not.

<comment><USER17> With Dockerfiles you can achieve high level abstractions by using proven images and composing multi-stage build assets. And then you can customize them with some lower level abstraction by in-line bash or independent scripts.

E.g. look at phusion/baseimage or phusion/passenger - they are production ready and with good defaults. But you also have an easy way to augument them with latest ffmepg compiled from sources to support some exotic format for video conversion worker.

<comment><USER9> I mean, I'm essentially a beginner (with lots of system experience), and _I 'm_ noticing a lack of intermediates in these comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish this had gone into some more technical detail about what "CNB" does that is actually better. Most of the article was just rehashing some problems with Dockerfiles, but the conclusion is just "CNB fixes it!" The one specific improvement they mention is being able to "rebase" an image without rebuilding the whole thing, which certainly sounds interesting, but is not explained. How does it work? What else is CNB other than a wrapper around `docker build`?

<comment><USER19> The presentation to the CNCF TOC covers some of the technical details: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDLa5cc-B0E&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDLa5cc-B0E&feature=youtu.be)

Some key points:

\- CNBs can manipulate images directly on Docker registries without re- downloading layers from previous builds. The CNB tooling does this by remotely re-writing image manifests and re-uploading only layers that need to change (regardless of their order).

\- CNB doesn't require a Docker daemon or `docker build` if it runs on a container platform like k8s or k8s+knative. The local-workstation CLI (pack) just uses Docker because it needs local Linux containers on macos/windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like they way they highlight that combining Ruby and nodejs makes for a complicated Dockerfile, while their example after only includes Ruby and not nodejs. And do they propose a buildpack called ruby-nodejs, because in many cases you don't need nodejs in your Ruby app. OMG now buildpack's are a leaky abstraction!

<comment><AUTHOR> The Ruby buildpack shown in the example installs Node.js for you. A developer doesn't even need to be aware that it's required to precompile assets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love the fact Heroku have open-sourced their buildpacks. Dokku takes great use of these and provides a very similar platform to themselves that you can host yourself (DigitalOcean even provide a base-image that will pre-configure Dokku for you). Great for personal websites and the like.

If you want to scale in a pinch then it's a case of making some tiny tweaks and pushing to Heroku instead.

<comment><USER22> I run some things at home using dokku and I switched them all to use Dockerfiles since the buildpacks are crazy slow.

Not 100% sure if that is the fault of the dokku implementation or buildpacks in general though. It's all IO related, so I might not even have noticed it had I had faster disks.

<comment><USER12> Cloud Native Buildpacks are substantially faster in a number of scenarios. Some of the preliminary Java buildpack changes on the Cloud Foundry side have updates dropping from minutes to milliseconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's nice that they've built a tool that understands specific application contexts and can do the right things to build an efficient image. But imo that does not make the dockerfile a leaky abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just saw a submission on the "demise" of Cloud Foundry (a Heroku-like PaaS) that's relevant to this discussion: [https://medium.com/@krishnan/lessons- from-the-demise-of-clou...](https://medium.com/@krishnan/lessons-from-the- demise-of-cloudfoundry-ed4f77a08a73)

 _Opinionated Platforms Are Risky: The CloudFoundry platform was more opinionated than some competing platforms in the market. In fact, the biggest debate between CloudFoundry and its direct competitors was about whether customers need opinionated platforms or not. CloudFoundry only supported 12 factor applications whereas platforms built on top of Kubernetes could support both stateful and stateless (12 factor) applications._

If you're building a stateless 12-factor app _and_ there's a buildpack that does what you want, buildpacks are clearly better than lower-level Dockerfiles. But there's no buildpack for something like a database and there probably never will be, so the flexibility of directly building containers needs to exist.

<comment><USER25> Now that Cloud Native Buildpacks build OCI images instead of platform specific artifacts (slugs or droplets), developers can choose the best build solution for their problem (buildpacks for 12-factor apps, Dockerfiles for a data store)and deploy them to the same container orchestrator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It took me a while to get the pun, it doesn't show up in the article anywhere from what I could fine and I don't actually see how you're defending against anything here so I wonder - Did you just have this pun sitting around and were itching to use it somewhere, anywhere?

<comment><USER27> Personally, I still don't get it; would you please care to explain? I'm really confused with what does the title really try to convey... :/

 _edit:_ Also, clicking to the article, the actual title seems (now?) to be: _" Turn Your Code into Docker Images with Cloud Native Buildpacks"_, so I'm even more confused now... o_O

<comment><USER26> Defence against the dark arts is a professorial position at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter universe - why the pun was used is what I'm confused about, since without a matching context it loses capacity as a pun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Gitlab would benefit from this in the context of their autodevops featureset

<comment><USER29> For sure! I was wondering about the same question and asked the team in [https://www.dropbox.com/s/lcdlpz2l46e1uu1/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/lcdlpz2l46e1uu1/Screenshot%202019-04-03%2015.15.54.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER12> Please come visit us! We'd love to help. [https://buildpacks.slack.com](https://buildpacks.slack.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So instead of a Dockerfile we now need a builder.toml file. In addition you need a detect and build script: [https://buildpacks.io/docs/create- buildpack/building-blocks-...](https://buildpacks.io/docs/create- buildpack/building-blocks-cnb/) Is this really a simplification?

<comment><USER12> > _Is this really a simplification?_

Yes, because for end-user developers, you don't need any files. The files you mentioned are used by buildpack authors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's not a case of buildpacks vs dockerfiles. They both solve different problems with different solutions.

Buildpacks fit nicely into the heroku way of doing things. But at any medium to large sized engineering organization, there's no way they could satisfy the requirements for even a simple majority of services that using a Dockerfile provides.

<comment><USER12> Could you give an example of such requirements?

Disclosure: I've worked on Cloud Foundry Buildpacks twice and worked on this latest effort until recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This seems written from an outdated perspective of Dockerfiles -- multi-stage builds landed in Docker 17.05 which are almost a year old and address most of the concerns in the article...

<comment><USER12> Multi-stage builds address some of the problems, but they still have drawbacks. For example, at the moment they need a Docker daemon, which is a non-starter for lots of environments. They also don't help you with fast updates across a fleet of many applications unless you standardise all your Dockerfiles. At which point you are, essentially, recreating buildpacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Vote me down, but oh god that title...

<comment><USER34> I really wanted to hate the article because of the title, but it actually taught me some neat tricks...

<comment><USER35> They gave one docker tradeoff/alternative. Didnt come to the article to learn about heroku, came for docker tips, and tricks.

Assuming most people arnt going to change thier whole platform because they didnt bother rtfm, or googling.

Yes docker doesnt handle this well, but there is a lot more nuance to that example.

<comment><USER36> I liked the title, and even though I don't do Ruby, I saved it because of the tips and tricks.

Flick and swoosh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Mixing operational concerns with application concerns like this results in a poor tool for developers who just want to write code and ship it as painlessly as possible."

Yeah, throw that code over to the ops team. Let them figure stuff out themselves.

<comment><USER38> Docker's vision was to throw images over to the ops team so they can figure it out themselves.

Generally speaking I don't know of many dev teams that enjoy OS and middleware patching or the nuances of Linux security. Some do of course, but many just want to code.

Buildpacks' vision is that the ops team already knows how to install run production systems and that knowledge is encoded and tweaked in a buildpack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > creating Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNB), a standard for turning source code > into Docker images without the need for Dockerfile

This is a solution in search of a problem. Please stop.

<comment><USER40> I understand and accept that you're fine with Dockerfiles, but your statement is overbroad: Heroku and Pivotal aren't the only ones in the industry frustrated at the shortcomings of Dockerfiles. I'm glad alternatives are growing in number. (Others include Buildah, to be included in RHEL 8; and the Docker image support for Bazel.)

<comment><USER12> As well as Kaniko, Makisu, Orca and I've genuinely lost track.

Though buildpacks differ from most of these by skipping Dockerfiles altogether.

<comment><USER40> Thanks for that list. If I'm not mistaken, Buildah and Bazel skip Dockerfiles as well; not sure of the three you just named.

<comment><USER12> I forgot Jib! It also skips Dockerfiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Lol no. Heroku is way too much magic for my taste.</comment>


For anyone who wonders how reddit used to be..[Crosspost from Reddit] - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/duplicates/78ud/learn_to_multiply_the_ancient_roman_way/

<comment><AUTHOR> Click the comments on each Reddit article, one recent and another from 4 years ago, both pointing to the same article.</comment>


Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications - <AUTHOR> http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-applications/ <comment><USER2> (2005)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone here on HN tested this?

<comment><USER3> This comment was made under an other article.</comment></comment>


How listening to our 4.1M users inspired a new product idea - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-listening-to-our-4-1-million-users-inspired-a-new-product-idea-49b2526d3b5b <comment><USER2> > So, we decided it was time to revamp a feature that probably won't land us > on the top of TechCrunch, but it will save our customers time, money and > frustration. We'll reveal this feature next Monday, on October 15th.

I'm honestly not a big fan of how this article isn't even going to discuss the product idea that's teased in the title.

It's a teaser for a teaser.

The odds of me running into the follow-up article are pretty slim, so this just seems like a lost opportunity to actually communicate what's coming.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The odds of me running into the follow-up article are pretty slim"

I'll just have to write an even better more viral article so that you can also run into that. :)

<comment><USER3> You will need a much better title and opening paragraph to have any hope of that.</comment></comment></comment>


More Google TV Details Emerge - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/03/26/more-google-tv-details-emerge/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also with link to more detailed analysis from VideoNuze - [http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?2010-03-24/Here-s-How- Google...](http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?2010-03-24/Here-s-How-Google-TV- Will-Work--And-What-It-Might-Mean/&id=2488)</comment>


Milano: Hacking Team Malware Detection Utility - <AUTHOR> https://www.rooksecurity.com/hacking-team-malware-detection-utility/

<comment><AUTHOR> Source is available on GitHub : [https://github.com/RookLabs/milano](https://github.com/RookLabs/milano)</comment>


Ask HN:what to improve again on my mobile webapp, care to help? - <AUTHOR>

My mobile webapp http://www.gmbhnews.com is in a beta state, after valuable feedback from HN, I've made some improvements and will welcome your feedback once again. The site is optimized for webkit browsers. <comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://www.gmbhnews.com/></comment>


SimpleAI: Artificial Intelligence with Python - <AUTHOR> http://simpleai.readthedocs.org/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting, but the code example used in the documentation is pretty poor:

        from simpleai.search import SearchProblem, astar

        GOAL = 'HELLO WORLD'

        class HelloProblem(SearchProblem):
            def actions(self, state):
                if len(state) < len(GOAL):
                    return list(' ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')
                else:
                    return []

            def result(self, state, action):
                return state + action

            def is_goal(self, state):
                return state == GOAL

            def heuristic(self, state):
                # how far are we from the goal?
                wrong = sum([1 if state[i] != GOAL[i] else 0
                            for i in range(len(state))])
                missing = len(GOAL) - len(state)
                return wrong + missing

Among other things, why create a class and hardcode the GOAL as a constant?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just illustrative, to understand how you give the information needed to run one of the algorithms.

May be we can think of a better example, will try :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome. I really want to play with some AI lib and all of the ones I tried have way too many problems compiling on Windows. pip install them fails too. I don't want to spend time compiling libraries.

This one just worked. This is the Python way.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried active python? Pypm install has many libraries compiled for windows.

<comment><USER3> I totally forgot about it. You are right, I might give some of the more hardcore ones after I'm done playing with this one. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alok-g See also: <https://code.google.com/p/aima-java/></comment>


A Beginner's Guide to Recurrent Networks and LSTMs - <AUTHOR> http://deeplearning4j.org/lstm.html <comment><USER2> If this feels like jumping in the deep end, I highly recommend Stanford's online course on this subject:

[http://coursera.org/learn/machine- learning/](http://coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Andrew Ng's course is a great place to start with ML. We've got a list of great online ML/DL courses here: [http://deeplearning4j.org/deeplearningpapers.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/deeplearningpapers.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Machine Learning is in my bucket list of things to focus on at some point in my life, just like many of you.

I know it's a bit off topic, does anyone of you know any practical resource that teaches ML while creating some kind of robot with AI?

Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER4> To address what you and tgflynn are saying. Machine learning != robotics. Robotics is mostly probabilistic inference / search, control theory, etc. The Sebastian Thrun course actually looks great - for robotics. Even computer vision is _mostly_ not related to machine learning. And when machine learning is used, it has usually been simpler, faster "dumber" algorithms.

Deep learning has only recently made advances in computer vision and robotics - it's still definitely an open area of research. Even in production it's only going to be a component of a larger system. I would bet the vast majority of the work in Google's self-driving car is related to probabilistic inference / mapping / search / feature-engineering, and mostly does _not_ involve machine learning.

<comment><USER5> The future of both computer vision and robotics is in machine learning, that is where the state of the art will advance.

No autonomous vehicle that isn't integrally dependent on machine learning algorithms will ever hit the market, unless the entire road system is redesigned and human drivers are outlawed.

<comment><USER4> Maybe. Maybe not. Impossible to tell. People were saying this about SVMs and kernels 10 years ago (which, by the way, is why it's important to have a broad knowledge of probability and machine learning).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been meaning to set aside more time to better understand ML as it applies to NLP. I've wanted for a while to understand how to, say, perform unsupervised training on my iMessage, Facebook and Slack history (which spans many years now) to tag messages, threads, and people with topics, sentiment, frequency, etc. I want to correlate that data with other time-series metrics that I either already have it can acquire easily enough, such as weather, medications taken, apps I have open on my desktop (which could signal context), to see if there are any interesting correlations. I have always thought that depression, anxiety, and AD/HD have had their own impacts on my life that are impossible to quantify without this sort of thing exercise, which could help me understand myself better, and help create a tool chain that would let others get the same kind of insight into their own data. I had always planned to make an open source kit of scripts or maybe Python notebooks out of the endeavor.

Things that I get stuck on, which then takes the wind out of my sails: tokenization (specifically handling the Unicode Emoji entities and ascribing meaning to them - Do I use them as tags/signals, or replace with synonyms?), lemmatizing (do I spend time going down the rabbit hole of simplifying all lines of chat to their most basic words?), grouping likes of dialog (if my reply was within ten minutes, consider it part of a "conversation" object), and how best to time stamp things (everything is individually stamped, but for some correlations, the time of day is the important bucket - for others, it may be the calendar day/season/busy work day).

It's such a huge domain, I keep spinning my wheels trying to feel like I'm going down a path that will lead to some form of success, no matter how small.

Another topic I've tried getting into is using ML to process my Hearthstone logs (live, not historical) to try my own approach on an unreleased project I recently read about that sought to predict opponent's cards. My thought was to create a series of dicts from popular "net decking" sites and compute cosine similarity between the cards an opponent has already played - the other project used game histories to predict the "next card", and I was seeking to predict which archetype my opponent is likely playing, since my own domain knowledge would figure out their likely "signature moves" once I had that clue. I'd maybe expand on it to predict how likely it is the opponent can go lethal on their next turn, given the cards they likely have and the ones on the board. With that topic, I've been trying to figure out state machines and various data structures in Python. Computing similarity I've figured out, with Counters seems to work, but the mechanics of doing so against potentially hundreds of "net decks" is challenging. Is a comprehension the way to go? A matrix function? I have no idea.

I guess I'm making this big dump of my own thoughts to see if anyone has any pointers, guidance, example projects, or general knowledge to share or direct me to that could help me figure this stuff out, because I'm excited to learn and I learn best when I have a pet project to which I can apply my newfound knowledge.

Anyone in the same boat? Or have anything to suggest?

<comment><USER7> You've got the data, so that's actually the hard part done. Now just pick some method and don't worry too much about the details. Go with the easiest route first, for example: each emoji is a word, no need to treat a smileyface differently in your model from a word like "happy", _until you see how the representation actually matters_, only then will you know what the right way is. If you pick a complicated method first, you won't know if it was worth it. If you pick a simple method first, you'll know if it doesn't work, but you won't have wasted time.

Re:lemmatisation, either grab an existing machine-readable dictionary [1] if you just want all lemmas with their ambiguity, or just do simple PoS-tagging with something like [https://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/a-good-part-of- spe...](https://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/a-good-part-of-speechpos- tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/) (I love that post for its no-nonsense approach)

[1] [http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Using_an_lttoolbox_dictionary](http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Using_an_lttoolbox_dictionary) has some (and will tokenise for while analysing).</comment></comment>


Ghetto Geo-Location or How To Find Your Users Location Using Pron [SFW] - <AUTHOR> http://msteigerwalt.com/articles/2008/07/18/SpecialFriends <comment><USER2> _Rob wanted geolocation without actually having to pay for it_

Rather than abusing the resources of a company which you have no intentions of doing business with (even one which is fairly odious), you could go with one of the free solutions for this.

Here's a GPL geolocation database for you. If you're capable of tying your shoelaces in web development, the rest should be academic.

<http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity>

P.S. I largely like the free software movement. One of the core components of it is that _we are not thieves_. I sort of bristle when I see folks confusing the two. For my fellow shoestring budget developers here, when you see a submission offering something for free-as-in-beer, could you please do a quick sanity check "Does this submission advocate getting free stuff by stealing it?" and, if the answer is yes, NOT upvote it?

<comment><USER3> I think the author just meant to explain the nifty javascript trick and as a warning to developers who might consider data transfered by a javascript include to be safe. At least I hope he (Rob) is not actually using this method on a real site.

edit: confirming my suspicions, this just popped up on the site: "This is a security example, guys. At least I hope nobody's using this in the real world."

<comment><USER4> Someone didn't read the about page. Michelle's a she.

Apart from that, while there are much better options available now, for a period the adult companies were sinking huge portions of their budgets into keeping that geolocation cutting edge.

Getting as close as possible to a person's actual location is going to make ads like these much more convincing after all.

<comment><USER3> > Someone didn't read the about page. Michelle's a she.

Thanks for pointing that out. I ignorantly assumed the author was male. I edited my post.

> Apart from that, while there are much better options available now...

interesting, I didn't realize that. I guess it's another example of adult entertainment pushing technology forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While using this is obviously pointless - (there are much easier ways to get an IP geolocation), the method (override document.write), and the security warning are interesting.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is amusingly serendipitous with today's XKCD.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to know one can do that, but how long until this becomes unreliable? Suddenly your website is displaying an AFF text advertisement when they figure this out.

Geo-location is not super expensive if you really need to rely on it... (I use maxmind.com personally).

EDIT: agree with patio11 too, don't be a dick

</comment><comment><USER8> Each service listed in these comments listed in me in a different city. Not one of those is the city I am actually in.

Not to mention at my house I use satellite internet, so any geolocation service thinks I'm 10 states away from where I really am.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting.. It seems AFF (or this script) either doesn't support spaces in suburb names - or has something else going wrong. It picked up the first word of my suburb, but not the "Hills" at the end.

</comment><comment><USER10> "You're using an ad-blocker."

Yes. Is there anyone who _doesn't_ block pornographic ads?

<comment><USER11> I don't use an ad blocker. I found that they're more hassle than they're worth.

EDIT: In response to the "why don't you?" my answer is that I've found that it messes up layout on many sites, and it fucks up my experience on certain video-heavy sites, including ESPN.com and MLB.com. The other answer is that I have a large number of friends who still sell words for money, and I consider it stealing to turn off ads. (Yes, I am the guy who once wrote a blog post who called people who sold words for money fucking morons.)

<comment><USER12> In several years of using it, Adblock Plus with EasyList has never once blocked something I wanted to see, and has let through very nearly zero ads. The web is just _painful_ to use without it. Of course I whitelist most sites I visit regularly, as long as they behave.

edit: Missed my sibling post, which says basically the same thing as me. I guess we adblock users are fairly single-minded. But seriously, after using things like host files and privoxy, ABP is very nearly magic.

<comment><USER13> The only time Adblock Plus blocked something I wanted to see is when I was working for an advertising company and testing ads -- wondering why I didn't see any of them. Heh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, weird super obscure hack... or download geoIP from maxmind for free.

<comment><USER15> or don't download anything...

<http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js>

<comment><USER14> Neat</comment></comment></comment>


How to reduce the number of ads in Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-reduce-ads-in-gmail/ <comment><USER2> Well that's definitly an oxymoron, use your own mail server, or paid mail server, use imap for google, ose AdBlock, or just don't use free service if you don't want ads...

</comment><comment><USER3> > You can't stop Google from scanning your inbox

You can encrypt your email which would stop Google scanning it. I guess even ROT13 would work.

But if a service is showing you too many ads the answer is to find another service or pay for the service.

(If Googlers are reading this there is a problem with some ads when using Chrome to browse the web. Some ads open the ap store. This takes me out of Chrome. This is bad. Almost as bad as IE's "content type=crash" bug.)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's somewhat interesting to me that articles like this make no mention of services such as AdBlock.

...then again, cnet does get by on advertising dollars.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it normal for VC to take a fee on exit? - <AUTHOR> Hi All,
Quick question for you all:
Have any of you been asked for a % fee from their VC on a term sheet being tabled for acquisition to help close the deal?
Is this normal?
What kind of fees are usual?
Any experiences would be much appreciated. <comment><USER2> I feel like you should name and shame, to some degree. Ask the VC for a reference to another portfolio company who had this arrangement. Or, cold email their other founders and ask if they have this arrangement. Email any other investors you have to ask whether this is ok. My guess is that the investor knows they are being greedy, and they know that their reputation would get hurt if others knew they were doing this. If it's not a shady action, then I think nobody will fault you for asking around.

I don't necessarily think the VC has bad intentions. But, it sounds like they are trying to change the terms of an existing agreement. That, to me, seems unethical. Talking about these shady actions publicly tends to cause the community to self-police a lot. Perhaps another investor will inform this VC that they make money now, but hurt deal flow later, by taking actions like this.

\--

One other thought: you could say something like "the company lawyer says this is not a normal arrangement and wants specific paperwork due to SEC deal maker rules. Can you have your lawyer send us the proposed agreement?" My guess is that they will drop it then they realize it will cost $10k in legal fees to do this, and it might even be illegal to do contingency fees without being a registered deal maker with the SEC.

<comment><USER3> No. He should not name and shame, he should go talk to a laywer.

Whats with the trend lately to constantly trying to solve injustice with more injustice? That's just making more problems instead of less.

<comment><USER4> > Why is the latest generation constantly trying to solve injustice with more > injustice?

Why is this a generational thing?

<comment><USER5> Because the previous generation could only publicly shame through the press, and the press was reluctant to print potentially libelous attacks.

<comment><USER6> I'm not seeing anything potentially libelous in this proposal (assuming that the OP claims are not purely made up), as truth can't be libel.

<comment><USER7> I think he was commenting on the generational trend. There is naturally going to be a shift when two billion new users enter a media landscape that was previously only occupied by a few professional firms. In addition, I think it would be hard for an intellectually honest person to deny that in the current age of click bait news that agencies of all stripes are running articles with less corroborating evidence than they would have in the past so as to be the first ones to the scoop. Unfortunately, Russian facebook trolls have set the new burden of proof for online kangaroo courts, and it is not much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apologies for the meta commentary, but I just want to say that I'm glad these kinds of questions still get asked and can reach the front page of HN. Ask HN and Show HN were the two big things that attracted me to come here.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an unusual term that I haven't seen before.

I'm of two minds here:

1\. If the investor is a former rainmaker banker who will go above & beyond in the transaction, effort that would normally cost you $mm's, she might be justified. She could also have factored that "value add" into a lower valuation rather than in a separate right.

2\. Ascribe a monetary value to the term and adjust other areas of the financing (valuation, control rights, etc) accordingly. There is nothing unethical about issuing unusual terms as long as all parties are informed and it is done transparently.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi All,

I am not looking to name or shame. I'd love to just understand the experience of others within the community and get more understanding of everyone's view on this request.

To be fair, until this point the VC in question have been good to work with so it's not the usual nightmare investor rant. I was just shocked at the request from a preference shareholder that I thought would have real incentive to do this, at the same time I don't want to damage a relationship. I get covering costs, some kind of bonus incentive with a fixed fee, just not what is essentially increasing their equity holding.

Any experience or examples would really help me get more of an understanding outside of my own direct network.

</comment><comment><USER10> It would be really useful if the responses offering firm advice on this thread could indicate whether they'd had experience successfully raising VC in the past. There are a lot of opinions about how VC should work on this forum, but the question here is pretty specific. They're not asking whether HN in general _thinks_ this is OK.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not normal. Walk away from this investor. Will save you a lot of time, and emotional distress, in the future.

</comment><comment><USER12> To be clear, is this VC already on your cap table or are they just a _potential_ investor in the next round that won't be happening because of the acquisition?

</comment><comment><USER13> The only clause I've seen which is similar was from a crowd-funding firm who had some administration fees around the collection and transfer of the funds to the company. It was rather nominal and was fair given the work they'd done and the number of investors they worked with on our behalf.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've never heard of that. Typically, the acquired firm hires an investment bank to handle the sale. The VC is already highly incentived to do what they can to help due to their equity holding, for example using their network to make intros to possible acquirers.

<comment><USER15> I guess it depends, as the incentive structure differs. The VC is likely trying to squeeze some extra fees out for a different role he's fulfilling.

If I own 20% of a business worth $50m as a VC, and I run a $10m fund, then I will make 20% carry on the $10m exit. That's $2m in my personal pocket, pre- tax.

If I can facilitate a deal through a highly personal contact (i.e. close friend) where the company is sold to BigCo for $50m, and I can also charge 2% of the acquisition value to all investors (i.e. in line with what an investment bank or broker charges) then I pocket another $1m. So now I made $3m.

There is nothing inherently unethical about wearing two caps if you actually put a deal together -- whether that is raising capital (equity or debt) or facilitating something. Though in this case there MIGHT be a conflict of interest. But taking small percentage commissions is very common in business on certain transactions.

<comment><USER16> I disagree.

If an investor is already invested in my company, then the expectation is that they are _already_ trying to help me fundraise from future investors _and_ helping me to realize exit with potential acquirers. So I shouldn't have to pay extra.

Obviously there is likely more to this story, but on the average this feels perverted.

<comment><USER15> If this is the rising star in your investment portfolio, you're totally right.

But if it's a sinking ship then the personal relationship might be worth more to the fund manager than trying to save it by making a small acquisition.

Honestly, like you said it all depends on the context and we're not hearing the full story.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see this more in Europe, where most of the VC funds invest government money (money from the EIB, local government funds, etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No It is not normal.

Atleast, based on the experiences of Rand Fishkin (of Moz.com fame ) as recorded in his autobiographical book [1] "Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World". In it, he elaborates on his experience with working with VCs at different stages and what is normal and what is not. It should be required reading for anyone working with or approaching VCs.

His Arguments: Since VCs already profit from your acquisition, they are part of the team. They are stakeholders just as you are. The main reason they are allowed on board, is so that they can provide advice on how to lead the company. So no fees for advice or such.

Also, another important aspect he points out. Sometimes, what is good for you and your company is at odds with what's good for a VC. Thats because VCs expect enormous growth from the successful companies to offset the loss of investment in the startups that don't pan out. A startup with a more modest year on year growth does not cut it from them. Yet that might be the best strategy for you and your startup.

It's been some time since I read it, so I am a bit rusty. He enunciates all this much better.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Founder-Painfully-Honest- Startup...](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Founder-Painfully-Honest- Startup/dp/0735213321)

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe they wished they had preferred shares? There are better vehicles for this, worked out far in advance of the liquidity/change of control. You shouldn't be surprised by the actions or requests of a shareholder during an acquisition.

Does your shareholder agreement include a "drag along" clause? What percentage of shareholders are required to vote in favor of the acquisition? I would check to make sure they can't screw up the vote if you don't take their (a bit worrying) offer.

</comment><comment><USER19> It sounds like, at the last minute, you are going to find out they aren't the VC, they are a broker-dealer looking for a payout.

If they are a VC, this isn't typical - I'd run.

</comment><comment><USER20> If it's an ugly situation, VCs can play hardball. For instance, if another investor is squeezing them (or squeezed them in a prior round) this can be their way of getting back at them. It's one reason to be very careful who you give veto power to.

Is this VC also an investment bank or Private Equity firm? Those businesses are much more likely to tack on fees.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To add context:

* The VC has already invested in our co. * A term sheet has been put forward for acquisition of our co. * They want a fee to help close the sale but it is a % rather than a $ sum. * VC have been good to date, no complaints. * I have also invested small amounts in co's I am passionate about. Always helping with intro's / tech advise within my area of expertise, often putting in many days of work. I do this because I like the founders, am passionate, curious about their product and always end up learning lots this way. I would never dream of asking for payment unless hit with a direct expense, expecting any payback to come at liquidity and a hopefully good feedback if anyone else asks about me.

Still trying to guage if my personal code working with startups is out of line with industry in general. I don't have significant VC experience and appreciate that there is some value add here.

<comment><USER21> If they're asking for a cut to shop and help close the deal then they're playing banker. That's the kind of thing bankers do. It would blow my fucking mind if they wanted a cut to shop their own exit. If that's the case you should be profoundly distrustful. Either way lawyer lawyer lawyer.

<comment><USER22> Unless, as someone mentioned above, they invested just a little bit and this deal will be making fortunes for others AND they are putting huge efforts into the deal process. In this case they are acting as a banker who happens to have a stake. I don't like it but if you compensate them based on uplift from the proffered term sheet then that might be palatable.

But if they are trying to stall the deal unless they get paid then charitably they may be saying this is a premature and under market price and they are only happy, if the founders want out, to get their return through the top up. Uncharitably they see they can stop the deal and have negotiating power and are screening everything until they get paid. Overall a deal needs everyone to smile to get done. If they make you a lot more money over the offer then it's ok to make them happy - as long as all shareholders agree. If they just need a kicker to make everyone else happy then you might need to grimace and pay, and I imagine sign an NDA. That's not a great way to do deals but it is an exit. (VC - and we never charge the companies anything)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is unreasonable and I would be surprised if it's permitted by their agreement with their customers (umm, I mean "limited partners"). Not that you could find that out.

Note that their customers are already paying them 2% of the commitment every year to pay their expenses. So it's already unreasonable that most VCs use the capital invested to pay their own legal costs (that's supposed to come out of the 2%!). Having them transfer additional funds they pay you back to themselves borders on fraud (the LPs are committing money on the promise that it will be invested in _your_ growth).

If you have another VC option I suggest you take it -- this may be a sign of problems to come.

If you have no alternative...well you have no alternative.

</comment><comment><USER24> No. Run.</comment>


Show HN: Data Wrangling Tool for Excel - <AUTHOR> http://reshapexl.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I want to introduce my newest tool - Reshape.XL. Simple add-in for data wrangling in Excel. Tool was strongly inspired by dplyr/tidyr packages in R. Add-in does not require programming and is used through the visual interface. Complicated data processing can be done in few clicks.</comment>


Introducing Google Places - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/introducing-google-places.html

<comment><USER2> Damn, these guys are relentless, and have seemingly unlimited resources.

(My hat's off to them.)

<comment><USER3> Your hat wouldn't be off if you were a competitor that just got squished.

I'm sure they're all great people, and they're not evil and all, but damn they're starting to look like the Borg.

<comment><USER4> "It is not what you do IF Google enters your market it is what you do WHEN they do If you can not answer that, then you should not be putting time and money into a business that you are obviously incapable of making successful"

\- From the guy who welcomed Google Voice entering his market and seems to be winning the voice transcription race, at least quality-wise.

[http://jamessiminoff.com/post/86801254/thank-you-google- than...](http://jamessiminoff.com/post/86801254/thank-you-google-thank-you- thank-you)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With Foursquare, FB and now Google, I think there is room for a "neutral" competitor that lets businesses set up shop with their own domain and integrates easily with the other sites.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is what a service area looks like: <http://tinyurl.com/y7o56e6> ie polygons instead of points on the map. disclosure: i worked on it.

<comment><USER6> [http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/show-customers- wh...](http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/show-customers-where-youll- go-with.html)</comment></comment>


Y2 Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://y2combinator.com/ <comment><USER2> If I apply to Y Combinator with my new start-up, Y3 Combinator, a start-up that writes web apps for companies that help companies that help companies get started, will we be in an endless loop?

<comment><USER3> It will be until the call stack overflows.

<comment><USER4> Just voluntarily go bankrupt every time a new company is funded, so it's tail- recursed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last time: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764>

</comment><comment><USER6> "copying the Y Combinator site without making silly mistakes."

Copying is great. Cost: cheap

Copying _and_ visually cloning something successful _while_ insulting the original site _while_ quoting friends of the original site? Priceless.

Good grief. Do they think the kind of people they'll "catch" with this won't figure it out?

<comment><USER7> Very naive. Don't they know that Paul Graham has patented _all_ fixed point combinators, not just the Y Combinator?

<comment><USER8> Paul Graham doesn't sue - he just delivers an arc kick to his opponents

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Couldn't get it to load, so I had to find Google's cached version.

The site was apparently created by <http://collison.ie/> which is by Patrick Collison, who also is a part of auctomatic (Chief Bottlewasher, according to their site) - a YC startup I believe.

So in the end this looks like a just-for-laughs project by a former YC goer. (I don't know if these people are real or not, but did you notice their names? Paul Blackwell, Trevor Graham.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Musta have been a slow friday afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER11> During the last bubble's proliferation of 'incubators' (circa 2000), I joked with friends about starting 'Incubus', the incubator-incubator (and homage to the Shatner Esperanto horror movie).

The next step would be 'In^3' ("Incubed"), the incubator-incubator- incubator... and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, it doesn't have all the copycats just yet:

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guide_to_seed_fund_incu...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guide_to_seed_fund_incubators.php)

</comment><comment><USER13> Apparently they copied thumbnails of images to put in the flash scroller.

Pixelization is not pretty.

</comment><comment><USER14> Shouldn't it be another type of combinator?

</comment><comment><USER15> This must be satire.

<comment><USER16> No it isn't. My startup, ReCurse, was accepted. We encourage our client's competition to fragment into many meta-startups, which our client can then acquire for next to nothing. So far we've been very successful and are taking applicants.

<comment><USER17> What about Y^n Combinator? Y^n convinces our client's client's competition's competition to spend time thinking about meta-startups, thus preventing them from producing anything useful, which obviates the need for acquiring them in the first place.

But this is only the precursor to Ackerman(Y) Combinator. But even thinking about that one makes my head spin.

<comment><USER18> I have already begun development of BusyBeaver(Ackerman(Y)) Combinator.

I'm hoping to complete it sometime in the next lifetime of the universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A hollow voice says "plugh".

</comment><comment><USER20> "Y2 Combinator is a new kind of firm: a company that starts companies that starts companies."

why don't people proofread shit?</comment>


Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source? - <AUTHOR> Let's consider I am a company and I want to donate 1000$ for Open Source projects and Open Source libraries as I am using them heavily. What can I do?
Option 1: Pick my favorite project and send them 1000$ -> simple but only one project benefits from my donation Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -> very time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.
Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is used as effectively as possible? <comment><USER2> I would like to slightly disagree with some of the posts here that say $1000 may be too small or not have much of an impact...

I think of it this way, no matter what you give, it's a great start. While I have open-sourced some of my apps and libraries, none of them got popular (except for one CakePHP plugin that had all of 64 stars and as many forks on GitHub way back in the day). But I think I would be excited with whatever folks donated, it's a shot in the arm, and more than the money, a validation that something I did contributed positively to society and was useful to someone else.

Secondly, if 1000 people thought like you did and donated $1000 each ... that's $1 million there, enough to hire 5-10 folks to work full-time on that project. And if all the big cos (I'm looking at you, FAANG) could donate five or six figure dollar amounts to all the open source projects they use (a rounding error in their annual revenue / incomes), open source might actually be a sustainable model, and a win-win for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you use Node.js, then you can run `npx thanks` to see which of your dependencies are seeking financial support.

Demo GIF: [https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/img/example.gif](https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/img/example.gif)

GitHub repo: [https://github.com/feross/thanks](https://github.com/feross/thanks)

P.S. I am accepting donations here: [https://feross.org/thanks/](https://feross.org/thanks/)

</comment><comment><USER4> How about using GitHub Sponsors, OpenCollective or Patreon?

[https://github.com/sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors) [https://opencollective.com](https://opencollective.com) [https://www.patreon.com](https://www.patreon.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks andrefuchs for the links, I wasn't aware of OpenCollective. If I get it correctly I still have to manually find all collectives that I want to support and send them money. So if I want to support 100 projects and I'll have to do 100 transactions?

<comment><USER5> Donating to 100 projects will be hard to manage, and with only $1000, it would be better to give that to 2-5 projects at most, since $10 would barely cover a month of hosting.

It is noble to want to help 100 projects, but with limited funds, it would go further on only a couple projects. Think, new laptop, a few months of their CI/CD service, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would recommend to choose one library, that is especially important to you, and that you think could be underpaid, and send it to them directly. If everybody does so, other libs will get paid by other donors.

I would recommend to avoid services, which "redistribute" donations. Such companies need to keep a part of money for themselves as running costs, and it is often not clear, if they keep 1% or 90%. And the way they decide who gets what, also might not be clear. I am not saying they are corrupted. I am just saying the transparency is lost with each "man in the middle".

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, that is definitely a good way to donate money. It is just that I heard "The software that is the easiest to build -- the software that is the easiest to fund the development of -- tends to serve those who are already extremely well-served." in [https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/capitalismethicaloss/](https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/capitalismethicaloss/) and I thought that there might be a smater way to "redistribute" the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One possibility is to donate to Free Software Foundation [0]. They are very efficient [1] and they support many FOSS projects [2].

[0] [https://www.fsf.org/](https://www.fsf.org/)

[1] [https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=8557)

[2] [https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About](https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About)

</comment><comment><USER8> Umbrella organisations would do. There's FSF, FSFE, Software in the Public interest, Software Freedom Conservancy, and more.

...or ... <shameless plug>You're always welcome to give it to us: [https://fosdem.org/2020/support/donate/](https://fosdem.org/2020/support/donate/) :-) </shameless plug>

FOSDEM is a huge yearly free and open source developer conference since 20 years. Have a look through our video archives to get an idea of what you'd be supporting.

P.S. Our overhead is basicly zero because we're all volunteers.

Edit: s/meta/umbrella/

<comment><USER9> The Free Software Foundation is not just a meta organization: It's the organization behind GNU! and GNU is a _lot_ of free, and many fundamental, piece of software.

Donate to them here:

[https://my.fsf.org/donate/](https://my.fsf.org/donate/)

<comment><USER8> I do know the work of the FSF fairly well and respect it. My comment was in no way meant to belittle their achievement, quite to the contrary! Feel free to s/meta organisation/umbrella organisation/ or whatever sounds more accurate a description to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think you need to be more specific about what your goals are. Is there a particular project that you make heavy use of? Is there a particular area of projects that you care about? Is there a particular ideology that you care about?

In terms of impact, paying for $1000 worth of consulting on an open source project that you use is probably where it's at. "I really want bug #1234 fixed." Pay someone $1000 and it's fixed. (For a bug that takes a day or so to fix, that is.)

<comment><USER11> would you welcome a platform that specifically open bounties on issues?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you were to donate $1000 to "open source", not much would actually get anywhere useful IMO.

On top of this, as a company, donating is… complicated. If you can do it, great, but it's often easier to find a project that has a support contract and pay for that. It gives you a real and justified expense and is in general more stable income for the devs.

Furthermore, a renewable contract gives the project _predictable_ income, which is instrinsically worth more to the project.

If you have $1k and just want to give it away once, _and_ want it to end up in open source, I think what's best is you pick your personal favourite project and double check they both need and can take the money (then move down the list if they don't). But if you can afford to give a recurring donation, go that route instead! Patreon is a good avenue for smaller projects that don't necessarily offer contracts of their own, but at that point there's a lot of money that goes into their fee.

Edit: Another potential avenue is donating directly to a developer for their open source work (Github Sponsors will let you do that), assuming there's a dev you like a lot for that.

<comment><USER5> As a company, I typically find donating to a company/foss/whatever that "advertises" their donors is the best way to give them money, and it be an advertising expense.

<comment><USER9> "Best" for your company's business interests? :-(

<comment><USER13> I took it as "best" in "most likely to actually reach a person who can write a check" in the corporate bureaucracy.

In most of the companies I'm familiar with, it's very hard for engineers and their managers to spend money on things that don't have a tangible return, particularly something you can stick an inventory tag on.

Marketing departments, on the other hand, are purpose-built to spend money on intangible things.

I've coached a high-school robotics program that's mostly funded out of the company's marketing budget, which they justify because the students put logos on their machines. Everyone knows we're doing it because we think it's awesome, but we have to call it marketing to slip it past the beancounters.

<comment><USER14> I know you probably agree with me, but supporting an open source project your company's infrastructure depends on has a tangible return (better maintenance on the project). It's just that managers don't see it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, as far as the time-consumption you could try Randomization:

Decide what fraction you want to give each of several projects (or make it uniform-probability), and partition the range [0,1] by those fractions. Now draw a random number between 0 and 1 (you can do this online if you like); give the $1000 to the project in whose range you've drawn.

I'm not saying that's such a great idea, but the expected donation to each project remains the same (well, depends on some ontological considerations I suppose).

</comment><comment><USER11> @feross published an experiment on funding mechanisms on opensource. [https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/](https://feross.org/funding- experiment-recap/)

My suggestions for now would be BountySource (great for micro-financing on issues) and GitCoin (great for crypto-payments)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure if your scenario is completely hypothetical and you are limited to $1000, but if you are a company and not an individual, why not hire someone with the intention that he or she will work heavily on OSS that you require in your organization?

</comment><comment> michael-ax You can also donate for articles or factoids that people shared -- which helped you in your own work or field. If you want to keep this human-scale with a high impact potential for both parties. That gets lost when you give to .orgs

<comment><AUTHOR> what are good platforms for that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are some organisations that handle paperwork for many open source projects. You can donate to these and mark you donations for specific projects or towards "overhead".

The two I've donated to are

Software in the Public Interest ( [https://www.spi-inc.org/](https://www.spi- inc.org/) )

The Software Conservancy ( [https://sfconservancy.org/](https://sfconservancy.org/) )

</comment><comment><USER17> How about a maven plugin that searches for libs in your pom that registered in a db (put together by a service), and creates a mutual-fund sort of thing that you can donate to, to be distributed later? When I was in an investment club the portfolio of stocks we bought was something any of us could collectively buy into, for any amount.

Then more plugins could be written for gradle, npm, etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Use [https://www.korabo.io](https://www.korabo.io).

Core contributors to an OSS project can decide on percentage share allocation and create a credit card checkout that is accessible via a shield button. The donations/proceeds would be split on a per payment basis.

At the moment the application only handles those with a US-based account.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would consider to donate not to the IT tools but the domain specific software. It's often undervalued, underrepresented, and underfunded. Science, engineering, literature/music/art creation, etc. I believe, these are in the need more than IT, also have a bigger impact to the society.

</comment><comment><USER20> >Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.

>Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$

Well every project will get a part of it regardless of how you do it :D

>very time consuming and cumbersome

If you really care and want to donate this should not stop you.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just curious to understand how do you currently do ?. Does OpenCollective solve your problem ?.

Apart from individual/company liked projects and you can consider foundations like apache, mozilla which have contributed a lot to the community..

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://sfconservancy.org](https://sfconservancy.org)

I almost got my employer to donate to them and have a staff member give us a presentation. That fell apart, but it's a thing that can happen.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just a suggestion: you could donate "time", which probably could be valued much more than $1k:

\- Contributing back the changes you've made (if any)

\- Improving official documentation

\- Writing blog posts on how you used the project

\- Taking some time to fix upstream open bugs

</comment><comment><USER24> There is a list of open source organizations here[0].

[0] -- [https://opensource.com/resources/organizations](https://opensource.com/resources/organizations)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. But then again, I am not sure what they are doing with my money right? So is there a platform which distributes my money to those people who work on those projects and libs that I am using - Without checking everything manually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Open source collective Patreon

</comment><comment><USER26> Tidelift</comment>