Skylake bug: a detective story - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/ahrefs/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd <comment><USER2> Hardware bugs can be notoriously hard to detect.

One time, during my company's development of a product, we kept encountering a problem while writing a lot of data to an eMMC chip. Was it a problem with the circuit design? Our eMMC controller? Software driver?

It wasn't until we discovered a unit that did not exhibit the problem that we discovered that the problem was isolated to a particular batch of eMMC chips from the vendor (like the OCaml team only realising it was a Skylake problem when they discovered their code worked fine on non-Skylake systems).

<comment><USER3> I've been through so many of those. Here's one:

On a board, we were using an ADC chip. We bought the ICs from an official distributor. They sent us the chips, and we populated the boards (~200 of them).

None of the boards worked properly. We debugged for so long. After so much wasted time, we found out the root cause with the help of the manufacturer and the distributor : It turns out, the manufacturer actually produced another IC, but marked the packages with our part number. It just happened the power/gnd pins matched with our IC, so there were no electrical problems.

Another case:

We designed an ASIC and taped-out. The silicon arrived and we then sent it to a packaging house to get the silicon in a QFP package. The packaging house misread our specifications and placed the silicon with 90 degrees rotation in the package. That was fun to debug!

<comment><USER4> The 90 degree rotation thing is surprisingly common. I've seen it done at least twice. Also several instances of edge connectors that were entirely backwards due to being CAD placed on the wrong side of the board, or incorrectly pin nimbered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/intel-skylake- bug/](http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/intel-skylake-bug/) another great blogpost on the topic

</comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic post. Just one comment:

> This is a fair amount of optimisation passes and it would have been too time > consuming to try them one by one

I loved the fact that they used bisection, but then I was shocked to read this. This isn't the case at all unless you're extremely unlucky. If you just do bisection again, you can test with half the flags on and off, keeping the other half off. You can frequently discard half the flags this way, to narrow down the set, and on average it should be much faster than testing each one by one.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately that often doesn't work well for optimisation passes, as many passes end up relating to each other.

However, you can still keep removing sets of optimisations and hope the bug remains, and do a final pass where you remove each optimisation one at a time.

Another problem is that in the past I found compiler bugs from running unusual sets of optimisation passes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> he said page tables were corrupted which should not be possible from usermode so this is presumably a security issue for cloud providers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rendered unreadable on mobile by a huge sticky header and a floating "open in app" button

<comment><USER10> I swear some sites just want mobile responsive design to die so they can load their malware laden apps onto my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > In late May, devops team noticed a debian package update for intel-microcode

Does this mean that other OS are still susceptible to this? I'm not familiar on how hardware bugs can be fixed at the OS level.

<comment><USER12> CPUs have updates too, Intel makes them for their processors, but every modern OS has to add the update and install it on every power on.

<comment><USER13> > but every modern OS has to add the update and install it on every power on.

This can also be done by the UEFI (though many hardware vendors shy away from releasing UEFI updates, while for OSes this is common routine).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surprising part for me: team building the thing is so unfamiliar with assembly.

</comment><comment><USER15> When I was a newbie, I would often say things like "maybe the compiler is broken" or "maybe the cpu is doing it wrong."

Of course, it was never the tools. it was always me.

Years later, of course, I work on unreleased hardware. And yeah, sometimes it's broken. It's really fucking odd. Write C code, and holy shit, it's actually a compiler bug or CPU bug.

Life was simpler when I was just ignorant and egotistical. Now I'm... well, still ignorant and egotistical, I guess, but often deal with actual hardware bugs.

<comment><USER16> Finding an assembler bug is also interesting. Marched up against a nasm bug once that kept me debugging for quite a while. The good thing with assembler bugs, however, is that you can decompile the generated machine code to something that is really close to your original source code... That helped a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fun thing is that only one instruction used AH, and it can be done perfectly fine with EAX instead.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't the instruction be bigger if EAX was used? I guess it would have to have 4 byte constant then, with this encoding it's one byte. How would you clear the 2 lowest bits in the second byte of the EAX?

For the reference, we talk about:

        andb $252, %ah

I believe it's not an effective speed optimization, given the way modern CPUs work, but it does produce a smaller instruction?

Additionally, what I miss in this story is which source code actually produces "I need to clear exactly these two bits while keeping others" in a loop. For that CPU bug to manifest, it has to be inside of "short loops of less than 64 instructions."

<comment><USER13> > Wouldn't the instruction be bigger if EAX was used? I guess it would have to > have 4 byte constant then, with this encoding it's one byte. How would you > clear the 2 lowest bits in the second byte of the EAX?

Indeed: Here a list of encodings of the original instruction and natural alternatives:

> and ah,0xfc: 80E4FC [3 bytes]

> and ax,0xfcff: 6625FFFC [4 bytes]

EDIT: Note that

> and eax,0xfffffcff: 25FFFCFFFF [5 bytes]

does something different: It also zeros the upper 32 bits of the rax register (Exercise: Why?), which is important since the next line

> movq %rax, (%rbx)

depends on the fact that this has not been changed.

<comment><USER12> At least, as the CPU bug manifests only when "AH, BH, CH or DH" are used, the compilers could be patched to use the 4 byte variant. But if Intel properly updates all the affected processors, it's not going to be needed.

(Response to wolfgke's edit: don't forget the "sign extend" variants).

<comment><USER5> We pondered reporting this directly to GCC too so that they can implement a workaround. But despite the buzz generated by this issue in the press I believe Intel is right in saying that this bug is very unlikely to trigger.

They say it can only happen in tight loops, and although the C code is quite large, the hot path has only 17 instructions in the loop, which only sequential memory loads (since the GC is scanning the heap linearly and most ocaml values are small).

GCC actually did quite a good job here : it managed to lay down the code so that the "memory reachable" branch is the shortest one. Indeed, when scanning the major heap in a generational GC assuming that most values scanned are reachable is reasonable.

In this case, the loop condition will likely be predicted true, and the other jumps predicted false, and there is a very tight loop with no random memory load/store. I suspect those conditions are very unlikely.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> This is referencing an official press release[0] which itself references a lifecycle fact sheet[1]. The real story here is that Windows 8/8.1 mainstream support is ending 6 months early, and that maybe extended support is really actually different than mainstream support this time.

[0] [https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windo...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windows-10-embracing- silicon-innovation/)

[1] [http://windows.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/lifecycle](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh well. If MS wants to completely reverse the direction they've been going for the last 30 years, shooting themselves in the foot is of course their prerogative.</comment>


Etckeeper lets you store changes in /etc to git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joeyh/etckeeper <comment><USER2> More great software from Joey Hess.

<http://joeyh.name/>

<http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/>

<comment><USER3> I liked the part about: _I do everything on a netbook, a Dell Mini 9. I've been using it since 2008, and have worn out two keyboards._

He doesn't look like his fingers would be any smaller than mine, but I have tried to use a netbook and failed. I just ordered myself a new laptop primarily because I didn't like the keyboard on my ultrabook. Joey, I am humbled by you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The cool thing about Etckeeper is that it plugs directly into your package manager. If you're using deb or rpm, a commit is made after each package install if they changed /etc.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't a simple inotify[0] watch on /etc handle that scenario? Does it split up the commits by package?

[0] <http://linux.die.net/man/1/inotifywait>

<comment><USER6> inotify consumes resources (ram), which a hook into a package manager does not. you cannot watch all subdirectories within /etc with one handle, so you will have to recursively setup handles for all subdirectories. then, you might run into the max_user_watches limit (see sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches).

<comment><USER7> Acutally, using fanotify() you can watch a whole filesystem with one watcher; use FAN_MARK_MOUNT (inotify and fanotify both use the fsnotify subsystem in the kernel). So then you set a watch on either /etc (if it is separately mounted) or watch / and then ignore any paths that aren't in /etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using this for quite some time, but mostly as a 'fire and forget' tool. There were some rare occasions when the information from the git history was useful though, like finding out how the configuration looked for an older version of a program.

<comment><USER9> I have one big etckeeper repo for all of my personal machines with each machine being a separate branch. It comes in handy when you cant remember how you have something set up on another machine and or for when i get a new machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using etckeeper on all my machines for a few years now. It's basically "install and forget about it", but it's been a tremendous help on a few occasions when something broke!

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone recommend a good GUI for viewing Linux log files on Windows or Mac? I'd pay for an OSX-Console-like app that'll connect to a remote Linux distro and allow easy browsing/searching of /var/log/, or any paths you add to it.

<comment><USER12> You could setup splunk free (or one of the OSS clones like logstache or greylog2) on the Linux host and use that web interface for visualizing and searching the logs.

<comment><USER13> I highly recommend Logstash and Kibana. The setup might be a little more complex then some would desire (but by no means is it difficult and both have solid docs), but the two are pretty powerful tools.

1 - <http://www.logstash.net/> 2 - <http://kibana.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I ve known people doing it with SVN/Git for at least 7-8 years now.

<comment><USER15> And with RCS for almost 30 years.

<comment><USER16> In a way RCS is a better architectural fit for this than git, because you can check /etc/shadow in and only one file is used to version it, unlike with git where the whole /etc/.git/ directory has to be locked down to avoid exposing its contents.

Oddly, RCS is about the only VCS not supported by etckeeper yet. (Well, and CVS and svn). It'd be pretty easy to write the 8 or so scripts needed to add support for it to etckeeper.

<comment><USER17> Doesn't Mercurial also maintain version info in one file below .hg per file in the tree?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there something like this that works for arbitrary files or directories? Basically, I'd like to have something that monitors files and/or directories for changes and then stores the diffs in git possibly via a cron job or a daemon using inotify? Anything analogous to this would be great.

I've contemplated writing something like this myself many times, but time is just not something I have a lot of these days.

<comment><USER9> At first I thought this was a cute lead up to git-annex and then I realized it was a straight forward question and that you want incremental diffs. You should take a look at git-annex[1] one of joey's other projects if the diff feature is not a deal breaker.

 _"git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space.

git-annex is designed for git users who love the command line. For everyone else, the git-annex assistant turns git-annex into an easy to use folder synchroniser."_

The only joeyh project that I use more than git-annex or etckeeper is moreutils.[2] (Obviously I'm not including joey's enormous contributions to Debian) Included in moreutils:

      chronic: runs a command quietly unless it fails
      combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations
      ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output
      ifne: run a program if the standard input is not empty
      isutf8: check if a file or standard input is utf-8
      lckdo: execute a program with a lock held
      mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first
      parallel: run multiple jobs at once
      pee: tee standard input to pipes
      sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file
      ts: timestamp standard input
      vidir: edit a directory in your text editor
      vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe
      zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command

The only program that I never have a use for is ts, I use tai64n[3] from djb.

[1] <http://git-annex.branchable.com/>

[2] <http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/>

[3] <http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/tai64n.html>

<comment><USER16> Recently the git-annex assistant has gained the ability to check selected files directly into git, so you can have your diffs too if you want them.

[http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_22...](http://git- annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_224__annex.largefiles/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Been doing this with RCS for decades.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd been toying around with different versions of this for a bit; / and etc under git control with .ignore files keeping it limited to only the specific files I wanted. This sounds like a far more mature and robust solution, so I'll likely be switching to it shortly.

</comment><comment><USER21> Having used this for about six months, can confirm that it, plus gitweb, have saved our bacon a good few times. Handy when, as it usually does, push comes to shove and you have to restore right the fuck now, and only have a browser on you.

</comment><comment><USER22> A good analogy is etckeeper is to /etc/* as RANCID is to a (real) router and its configuration. So now if you know one, you know the other.

</comment><comment><USER23> I worry about the security risks of saving your entire /etc to "somewhere on the internet"...

<comment><USER24> I use etckeeper, but only keep the repository locally. I use it so I can keep track of what changes there are to /etc, to help with that time when something breaks.

<comment><USER25> I'm still a little disappointed it doesn't ignore /etc/shadow by default. I can't imagine a valid use case for keeping /etc/shadow in source control.

<comment><USER3> Clearly there are reasons to keep /etc/passwd in version control. Changes to /etc/passwd often need to be synchronized with changes to /etc/shadow.

For something like professionally administered servers accessible only via ssh asymmetric keys, /etc/shadow may not be considered so sensitive that it's worth the risk of having it be an exceptional cases in version control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> hopefully /etc/passwd and all those other important security related files are excluded?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes thats excluded, however your .git is stored locally and it would need be root user to even look at directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> yeah would be nice freebsd support.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it time to engage less with our prospective customers? - <AUTHOR>

We launched a landing page in the beginning of the year and we have diligently followed up with every person who has taken an interest in our product (which is still under development and has not launched yet). We have learned a tremendous amount from the feedback we have been getting and I am happy with the performance of the campaign (we have a conversion rate of 20 percent). However, we have reached the point where we are not not learning anything new from this process and it is consuming resources that we would prefer to spend on product development.
What would you do in this situation? Stop engaging new users who sign up or simply provide lower-quality feedback? (People send us their Excel spreadsheets to learn if they are good candidates for conversion to apps -- which is what the product does -- and analyzing these spreadsheets is time-consuming.)
I would like to think that engaging with users this early has the added benefit of creating solid beta testers down the road when our prototype is ready, but I am concerned about not being able to devote more time to product development. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> If you're not getting value out of it anymore then change it to a waiting list you can ignore and focus on launching a v1 as quickly as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good advice, thanks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Concepts the modern tech industry falsely believes it invented? - <AUTHOR> To rephrase, it would be something that someone new to the tech industry might falsely assume is an invention of the modern tech industry (ie in the last 10-20 years) but has actually been around for much longer.<p>EDIT: Removed my initial list of examples because people were making fun of them (and rightly so, the lists in the comments are far better!) <comment><USER2> Some examples of _modern_ tech, which might not be that modern:

[1] Reactive programming, seems fairly modern, but can be traced back to the 1970's.

[2] Microservices/Serverless, are basically the same as CGI scripts from the early 90's.

[3] Software As A Service (SAAS) can be traced back to the 60's apparently...

[1] [https://spring.io/blog/2016/06/07/notes-on-reactive- programm...](https://spring.io/blog/2016/06/07/notes-on-reactive-programming- part-i-the-reactive-landscape)

[2] [http://rickcarlino.com/2019/07/20/what-were-cgi-scripts- html...](http://rickcarlino.com/2019/07/20/what-were-cgi-scripts-html.html)

[3] [https://bebusinessed.com/history/the-history-of- saas/](https://bebusinessed.com/history/the-history-of-saas/)

<comment><USER3> As someone who wrote a lot of CGI, it was definitely not the same at all as microservices or serverless. That was the earliest mainstream way to do server-side programming for the web, but none of the modern design principles were applied.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm not sure where the comparison comes from. CGI usually meant one script per page, which only bears a slight resemblance to microservices. It doesn't really have anything to do with service encapsulation or API consistency.

AWS Lambda and other serverless function things seem a little more like CGI scripting, but the way that each one was designed and used differs immensely. You might have been able to approximate serverless functions with CGI scripts, but I don't think that people did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Taxi dispatch, food delivery, things like that. People think it's novel since it has an app. But the business categories were around before, just a little more manual, less centralized, etc.

<comment><USER6> Taxi and food delivery are novel though.

They managed to reclassify employees as "gig workers" to avoid any sort of financial and social responsibility. And the way they flagrantly ignored laws and regulations in so many countries and over so many years was definitely unique.

<comment><USER7> You might be surprised to learn some of the history of the traditional taxi industry.

<comment><USER8> Yes, Uber _is_ pretty good at PR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are these really things people definitively think the tech industry invented? I'd say most people just think the tech industry popularized things like this. I'd also say they would be right.

<comment><USER10> I think what the OP means isn't that folks in the tech industry act like they truly invented anything. I think most folks with just a little experience understand that there is rarely a single inventor for anything.

But, it is true that it is a major tendency for folks in tech to act like our industry is the origin for a lot of things. When in reality, computers are still a very young industry, and many ideas we use all the time have been imported from elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Design Patterns were lifted as a concept from architecture (actual architecture, not software)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_(architecture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_\(architecture\))

</comment><comment><USER12> I think you could make an argument that although not invented, programming language design has slowed quite a lot. There is a lot of new research going in safety and abstraction, but our business languages have arguably not moved on much from ALGOL in the 60/70s (Go, of course, being the elephant in the room in that regard)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is silly. Product managers are not "brand managers" — a good one is far more technical. Google has never claimed to "invent" 20% time — 3M and a great number of other organizations have doubtlessly used something akin to it, but it was hardly heard of in the 2000s. And dual ladders? What? You don't need Dupont for this, of course some companies had technical individuals in the C-suite. Silly post IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER11> File systems. It may seem obvious, but I'm not sure how clearly we associate them with the originals.

We take the file systems of Windows and *nix etc for granted, but they are essentially computerised versions of the physical classification systems that go back as far as humans have wanted to categorise things and put them in related boxes and particular orders.

I feel like that's cheating though, as by the same mapping process we get

mail

networks

etc

</comment><comment><USER11> Scrum. Originated from business studies in manufacturing firms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)#H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_\(software_development\)#History)

<comment><USER14> For a number of years now I've felt ashamed that our industry was responsible for unleashing scrum onto the wider business world. Now I know we're not to blame, and I feel a lot better. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Open Source: 1953 UNIVAC A-2 system

Computer emulation: 1964 - IBM OS/360 (IBM 1400 emulator)

NoSQL databases: 1966 - MUMPS System (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System)

Virtual memory: 1972 - IBM OS/VS1

CI/CD: 1999 Extreme Programming (XP) CruiseControl

<comment><USER16> Amusingly, I've always assumed that open design predates even the computer itself. Electronics hobbyists published designs in ham radio magazines, and scientific experiments were published in a way that made them reproducible since antiquity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's Dotted line reporting?

<comment><USER18> If I understand correctly: it's the idea that you have a direct manager who handles your HR related things (direct line report), and you have product leads and other people you report to who are not directly in your org or team.

<comment><USER19> A lot of devs don't realize that other than your HR manager, you can ignore others. Anytime a PM asked me something unreasonable, I simply said no and if They pretended like i need to obey them, I got my real manager involved. It always worked out in my favor.

It saddens me to see so many devs especially the H1Bs getting abused by PMs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A lot of people seem to think it was impossible to make cross-platform applications before Electron came along.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure that most tech workers know the history of Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't even start to count how many things came from literature film and art. The tech industry isn't really about inventing new things, its about making things that were previously ideas into reality and profiting by putting it into everybody's hands. Sure new things are invented along the way, but overall? Hard pressed to think of things tech created that wasn't previously science fiction, or taking some real world thing and putting it on a computer screen, or improving it by making it more accessible / portable / available to everyone.

</comment><comment><USER22> Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality. Concepts came from scifi writers back as early as the 30's and video artists and scientists started making working experiences in the 60's & 70's

</comment><comment><USER23> Sharing. Though to be fair, it did invent charging people to share.

</comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps nanotechnology? It's a bit older though.

</comment><comment><USER25> Slide to unlock

</comment><comment><USER26> Work from home.

</comment><comment><USER27> Kanban.

<comment><USER21> I've never heard of a discussion about Kanban that didn't reference factories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Machine learning

</comment><comment><USER29> > modern tech industry (ie in the last 10-20 years)

Famous (badly mangled) quote -

"There has only been 3 things invented in the tech industry since the 70's"

I know spreadsheets is one of them. No idea about the other 2.

<comment><USER30> PageRank and blockchain? :-p

<comment><USER31> Eigenvector centrality has been around since at least the 70s, and idiocy is as old as humanity itself

<comment><USER32> > Eigenvector centrality has been around since at least the 70s

Yes, but the novel part is formulating the problem as such.

<comment><USER31> Agreed that's kind of fair for pagerank though to qualify as a "big three" invention I'd be looking for more novelty

<comment><USER32> Yes. I wonder if Google even still uses pagerank. The true novelty, e.g. how to deal with SEO, is kept a secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Smartphones: Around for decades, but used to be called "newspapers."

Less snidely, there's a fine line between adaptation and invention. Shoulders, giants, standing, etc. Good artists and great artists, re: the stealing. For many of these, the more useful approach would be figuring out exactly in what ways these re-inventions are the same or different from their historical predecessors. eg, apps for taxis are new, taxis are old, and centralized surge pricing is a major difference between the two.</comment>


New Horizons planning additional extended missions - <AUTHOR> https://spacenews.com/new-horizons-planning-additional-extended-missions/ <comment><USER2> The Hubble scope had to spend several hours to find Ultima Thule. If Hubble is tied up or having glitches in the coming months or years, it could be hard to find new targets within the probe's aiming cone. I'm not sure Earth scopes are up to the task.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shame the James Webb space telescope isn't yet ready to launch.

<comment><USER2> Yip. March 2021 is the current estimate. Maybe for target #4 it could be useful, but hopefully New Horizons doesn't have to wait that long for its next target. As time goes on, NH has less power and less sunlight for photography & spectrography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> September 11, 2017 - not exactly the latest news...</comment>


How to Set Up Your iPhone for Productivity, Focus, and Your Own Longevity - <AUTHOR> https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-set-up-your-iphone-for-productivity-focus-and-your-own-longevity-bb27a68cc3d8 <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting! I'm the author. I think I mistitled that post--sounds like just any generic productivity article when I read it here on HN. Maybe "Very, Very Pedantic Opinion on Optimal iPhone Setup."</comment>


Help Me Save 300 - <AUTHOR> http://www.helpmesave300.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The short version: 300 teenagers trashed a guy's house while he was out of town and then, when he posted pictures online that he found on their twitter feeds (etc.) and only asked that the 300 kids come back and help restore the home to pre-party status, only one parent showed up to help.

Even more astounding: Allegedly, some of the parents are threatening to sue him for publishing online the same pictures that their children took of themselves partying at his house.

Your thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in case his site goes down from traffic here's more coverage of the incident:

[http://t.foxsports.msn.com/holloway-in-hot-water-over- websit...](http://t.foxsports.msn.com/holloway-in-hot-water-over-website)

And a crowd-funding campaign:

[http://www.gofundme.com/helpmesave300](http://www.gofundme.com/helpmesave300)

p.s. I have no vested interest in the outcome of this horrific behavior from the teenagers involved. I'm just pretty irritate that neither they, nor their parents, are accepting responsibility and doing the right thing: whatever they can to make amends.

<comment><USER2> Your first link didn't work for me, the link I've found:

[http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2013/09/20/holloway-in-hot- wat...](http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2013/09/20/holloway-in-hot-water-over- website/)</comment></comment></comment>


Best way to legally project myself from my current company? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on a website in my own time for around about 5 years whilst working full time for my current employer.  The website may be of modest financial value now, I currently don't charge for the website but am considering doing so in the near future.  Speaking to a friend yesterday he was concerned that my current employer could have a claim on my website as my contract specifies that any ideas I come up with whilst employed belong to the company.
I was wondering if there is a way I can create a company so that I can protect myself.  For example does creating the company in my wife's name help?  I'm sure a significant number of web companies start out as hobbies whilst working for a full time employee so I am hoping there are so things I can do to help make sure I create a company on a sound legal footing.
Just to add...the website has nothing to do with what my current employer does.
Any advice greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> The claim in ideas is _usually_ boilerplate to ensure you don't go into competition with your employer or create a service that addresses some shortcoming in your employer's product/service. An employment or startup lawyer would be able to give you a good perspective on how such disputes actually play out in your state, as well as the probability of such a dispute. Since you say it has 'nothing to do' with what your current employer does you'll likely be OK; I would expect that after advising you a lawyer would then offer to write to your employer's legal department to explain your position and ask for their OK. This would be better than making a casual inquiry yourself because it would create a proper legal record of communication from the outset and avoid arguments about who said what later on if a dispute should arise. Many lawyers would give you a short consultation for free or for a minimal fee, since the potential income from business development later on would be much more valuable. If you're not sure where to find a lawyer, call your state bar. If you're in Silicon Valley then then there's no shortage of them.

Don't DIY and put it in your wife's name; in the event that a dispute does arise that's _exactly_ the sort of thing that a plaintiff would point to as a denial of honest services, and courts take a dim view of such legal 'workarounds'. If you absolutely insist on DIY then do _everything_ in writing, send emails from a personal rather than business email address etc. You can be circumspect (eg say you'd prefer not to say what your traffic is, should they ask) but don't ever be dishonest - again, when a dispute arises the first person to lie is often the one that loses in the end.

I'm not a lawyer, and I repeat that you would be far better spending a few bucks getting a professional opinion than trying to wing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Time to go shopping for a good attorney with expertise in employment contracts & corporate law. You can find one by networking for referrals with other lawyers. Personally, I prefer sole practitioners, with previous Big Firm experience. Usually they offer personalized attention, backed with major- league seasoning, more reasonable fees. You'll want someone who listens, asks good questions. Here's a good overview> [http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/08/hiring-legal-help-ent- law-c...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/08/hiring-legal-help-ent-law- cx_rb_1008bovarnickhire.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you kindly for your comments. As you suggest I think my next step will be to get some professional advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Others may be able to give you general advice, but it's important before you make any actual decisions to have someone also review the specific facts. Especially if you are planning to transition your employement relationship. EG, even if you keep this as an external side project you may want to protect it going forward if you take another full time position (which you may specifically negotiate in your terms of accepting and offer).

Some of the variables involved: You will need copies of your contracts and/or employee handbook (or similar) as appropriate. Also relevant may be thinks like using company resources for your project. And similar along those lines. Again, its best to focus on being organized with the information you would need to discuss this with someone knowledgeable, rather than try to anticipate what such a person may say.

It may be better to solict advice and recommendations for contacts that may be relevant. The Lawyer would need to review your terms of employment currently. So, this is one step you can take now if you haven't already.

TLDR: This is (likely) a serious question for a lawyer.</comment>


How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting - <AUTHOR> https://jerryalex.com/how-i-finally-won-my-name-from-domain-squatters-after-9-years-of-waiting/ <comment><USER2> Timely. Not very relevant, but I just sold a domain I've owned for 5 years after being contacted by GoDaddy's brokerage service about an interested buyer.

It was actually cathartic for me -- not only did I realize that I may seem like the squatter to someone else in this situation, but it forced me to come to terms with the fact that I won't be working on that idea, ever.

<comment><USER3> > it forced me to come to terms with the fact that I won't be working on that > idea, ever.

I think this is a feeling so many people working in the web sphere have to contend with at some point.

<comment><USER4> I had this, myself. I had a similarly named domain in the early 2000s. I think, technically, I was there first, and I had my name registered as a combo of a gaming tag + "tech" in the domain name. If I had more resources, maybe I could have secured the name, but they jad had a full company, and I wad just exploring amd didnt have anything commercial in the works.

I decided to just let it go and let my domain expire. I didnt approach the company to try and sell it, just let it expire. I wasn't squatting, amd I intended to use it, but the purpose didn't materialize, so I let it go. I never had any communication from the similarly named company; I dont even know if theyre still around. I just didnt renew when my time expired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I settled on ds.gy after a lot of searching. At the time I was hoping for as short as possible unless you operate a domain (it's one letter off for standard, 2 if you operate a 2 letter TLD like [http://ai./](http://ai./)) since it maximizes the efficiency of DNS tunneling. I was expecting a lot of similar uses or a log of clever things/url shortners like t.co but what I found was basically every single and most every dual letter domain was being squatted. Made me a little sad until I saw one that matched my initials and decided that was good enough.

<comment> mark-r There's a reasonably large public company that has the name of my initials, so I never had a chance with that one. I do have two friends who were much more forward thinking and managed to get their 3 initial .com domains early enough before they were gobbled up.

I also tried to get my full name, but that was already taken too. He's a performer so it's probably in better hands but that doesn't lessen my disappointment much.

<comment><USER6> Aren't 3 letter domains worth a fairly insane amount of money? Did they sell them?

<comment> mark-r No, they both still have them. They're unusual enough that I doubt they'd be worth the kind of money you're thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have way too many domain names, but I like it. I have several .uk, .no and .com for my own name, e.g. firstname.tld or firstnamelastname.tld. All redirecting to my main site.

For the first decade or two that was fine as usually the first page or two on a Google search of my name was all me. Very vain. Though I think there are many that shares my Norwegian name, most were not early internet adopters.

However in the last few years, some of the people that also share my name have started to creep up the search result, i.e. they have been covered in news articles or websites of their own. I have now started to feel guilty for hogging all the good domain names. If one of them reach out I would probably hand one of the domain names over at cost or share it somehow.

Though recently I have "reclaimed" some of the first page on Google as the search now states the infamous "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe" at the bottom. Someone did not want to be infamous. Wasn't me, honest.

I also feel slightly guilty for the few Irish people that have my username as their firstname. Sorry, but I am keeping those domain names.

<comment><USER8> >However in the last few years, some of the people that also share my name have started to creep up the search result, i.e. they have been covered in news articles or websites of their own. I have now started to feel guilty for hogging all the good domain names. If one of them reach out I would probably hand one of the domain names over at cost or share it somehow.

Similar for me. I have RyanMercer.net .com .co.uk and almost 18 years of blog posts there but this guy in Canada had a fashion show a couple years ago and he comes up frequently now, and another 'name brother' in Canada was a kid with cancer and articles about him come up frequently, and of course the journalist in Vermont (haha so some girl matched me on Tinder last year and goes "I used to work for a Ryan Mercer!" and it was the journalist, also for years I would occasionally get email for him, his email address has an additional character where mine does not, I once got his wired.com credentials because whoever set them up omitted the character, as well as many of his assignments from employers, I also got medical and paystub info for one in the UK for the better part of a year, one in Georgia I get hotel reservations/appointment reminders/sometimes receipts for semi-regularly too...).

I also discovered recently someone bought THEryanmercer.com.

I however feel no guilt at all about owning the domains. I owned .net first (I don't know why I got it instead of .com first) and then grabbed the .com, being an Anglophile at some point I picked up the .co.uk just because. I always try to get ryanmercer on any social media service too, sadly by the time I got to twitter someone else had and had abandoned the account early on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had some luck with a .de domain of my name that was being squatted.

There are some judgements in Germany that say you have a special right to the domain with your name, and it's not just first come first serve. I don't remember what exactly I did because it happened a while ago. But it involved sending a physical letter to Denic pointing out that this was domain was my name. I never heard back, but when I checked in a while later, the domain was free for the taking and I bought it.

I assume this only worked because it was a squatter and not someone else with the same name.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good for you! I enjoyed reading about your persistence and eventual triumph, knowing how shady the business of domain squatting is.

> Generally, these auctions will drive up the price by bidding on their own > domains to get you to pay more.

This practice feels like a form of fraud, but I guess it's not against any law..?

> I had also initially setup the script to auto-purchase the domain, but that > failed due to Namecheap not recognizing the domain availability in time.

Interesting to hear this, as I was curious about using their API to automate domain purchasing as part of a larger web service. I imagine they cache results and refresh periodically, which is good enough for most purposes.

<comment><USER11> Shill bidding is illegal in most places, and if not, would definitely be under the fraud umbrella, although IANAL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone explain why there isn't a rule that if you let a domain lapse then it stops working, but you have a year to renew it again before anybody else can buy it?

Even if you really didn't want it anymore and somebody else did (and didn't want to wait the year), they could always just ask/pay you for it.

<comment><USER13> I mean, there's like 40 days to renew a domain once it expires. So you want to extend 40 days to 365? [1]

The thing is, if you forgot to renew your domain, and didn't do it even 40 days after the expiry date, are you going to do it 365 days after?

I think 40 days is a lot of time to check your email and see 20 emails from your registrar screaming at you to renew...

[1] [https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/renewal- grac...](https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/renewal-grace-period)

<comment><USER12> > I think 40 days is a lot of time to check your email and see 20 emails from > your registrar screaming at you to renew...

Apparently it isn't when so many people have it happen to them that there is a profitable business in registering the names right after they expire in order to sell them back to the original owners.

And there are a lot of domains, especially for personal use, that you might not notice disappear right away. The registrar has your old email that you don't check very often, the domain is for a low-traffic site you don't check very often, it takes a while for you to realize it. Meanwhile I can't see any legitimate _disadvantage_ in it at all -- what's the big rush to assign the name to somebody else without the original owner's permission?

Also:

> Some domain extensions do not offer renewal and/or redemption periods or > offer them for different lengths of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some bottom feeder stole my personal domain after I let it lapse and is now literally holding it hostage for $6000 last I checked. [http://sergiotapia.me/](http://sergiotapia.me/)

I just bought sergio.dev, the squatter can choke on my old domain.

<comment><USER15> If you let it lapse, is "stole" a bit strong? I'd think "stole" would be getting your login/email and transferring the domain away while you had it registered?

<comment><USER16> It's more like you dropped your wallet on the street and the guy walking behind you picked it up and won't give it back unless you pay him.

<comment><USER17> No, it's more like you accidentally put something out on the street by your trash and someone came by and picked it up. Just because you got rid of it on accident doesn't mean you didn't get rid of it.

And to forestall arguments about that being someone's property, trash on the street is considered public property in many (most?) jurisdictions, which is why the police don't need a warrant to go through it.

Edit: and there are ways that this gets slimy too. I'm not debating the maral ramifications of this, just whether it fits the common definition of stealing. It's less theft and more more someone looking for people's small mistakes and making a living my making them very costly for those people. Morally bankrupt, but not illegal. Like the person who drives around looking for ADA compliance issues with businesses so they can sue them, not to make the situation better but just to extract money. Not illegal, but pretty despicable when done for personal gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If it was 9 years, then the squatters definitely won.

<comment><USER19> No one won. The squatters lost money, the guy lost time.

<comment><USER20> I don't know about Game Theory, but is it correct to call this outcome a Nash Equilibrium?

Edit: I thought about it for a while, and it seems incorrect to say so. If the buyer's strategy is "always wait", and the seller's strategy is "always sell at an outrageous price", it should be a Nash Equilibrium, similar to a Prisoner's dilemma. But the buyer's strategy is actually "buy if the price is reasonable, wait if not", so the broker can always choose to lower the price to a reasonable level, both allowing the blogger to purchase the domain name, and profits from it. But the broker doesn't appear to be rational enough to choose this strategy, possible due to stupidity or limitations of the business model. What is the suitable term for this phenomenon?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't know if one can call that "domain squatting", but it's worth buying young kids a domain after their name while it is still available. The chance that it will be useful to them one day is pretty high.

<comment><USER22> Pretty high? Even most of my nerd friends don't have their own name registered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was in a similiar situation where I have the same name, spelling and all as a very famous person in my country. So this person had the .com domain and I waited 7 years for it to be dropped and eventually the person switched to our country's domain instead.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had a domain 2004-2006 for an online alias. I was in high school and it was just for fun. Not even valuable or interesting. I let it lapse intentionally, but then it was held by somebody for 10 years.

They finally dropped it in 2014 and someone else who had taken up the nickname registered it in 2016. I had mostly given up on the name anyway because I had collisions on a few services with 1 or 2 people using the same.

Seems so silly to hold a domain like that. Shit for traffic. Hosted only hobbyist/personal content (easily verifiable on archive.org). I certainly wasn't going to shell out anything even if I could find who was holding it. They did have a contact/interest form at some points during those 10 years, but I know there were times when there was nothing. I avoided contact because I expected showing interest in it would prolong their hold or just result in a stupid price. Just a dead domain.

</comment><comment><USER25> I might be late at this discussion but does anyone know how to I can win my domain name back from Yahoo Small Business?

Back Story: In 2005, when I was new to Computing world, I searched for "Free domain" and something led to another and Yahoo at the time bought the domain (while it seemed I would have to pay later). I did not use it and tried to see it in 2012 again, turns out someone was indeed using it (had same name), fair enough but now the domain is back with yahoo and I can not contact them at all. I tried their customer care [1], no reply. Also tried their forums, no reply. Cant get them on call either.

Any suggestions?

1: [https://help.smallbusiness.yahoo.net/s/](https://help.smallbusiness.yahoo.net/s/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Have any TLDs attempted to implement a property tax on domains according to value to reduce cyber squatting? To implement a property tax, Glen Weyl and Eric Posner have proposed using self-assessment so that users pay what they want ([https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494) and [https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting- Capitalism-...](https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism- Democracy/dp/0691177503/))

<comment><USER27> I don't understand how you can ever have a just society if society can deem at any point that your property is too valuable for you to hold anymore. Of course they happens in society today, but I don't see how making it easier for property to be forcibly reallocated would help create a more just society.

<comment><USER26> Do you realize that the reason the squatter abandoned the domain (instead of keeping it forever) is the $8/year registry fee? My question is why should the squatter pay only $8 per year, and not, say, $50?

<comment><USER28> Why should they pay $50? What are you charging for above cost of service?

<comment><USER26> When speculators hold onto domain names without using them, their right to exclude imposes a cost on the other member of society who wishes to use the property productively. So like progressive property taxes in general, a domain tax should be high enough not only to pay for the direct cost of services, but also to discourage idle speculators and encourage owners to use the domain productively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't think name as domain is important anymore since it's pretty much a numbers game - it is unlikely you'll get your name as a .com domain(the only domain that matters if you want more than a toy website) is going to either be squatted on or already occupied.

There needs to be some sort of TLD with authentication. Let's call it .name You only get .name if you do a KYC/register with the government.In case of collision you get bidding wars, however the money goes to a non profit internet charity. Instant SEO and a guarantee that you actually get to have a web presence without gatekeeping.

<comment><USER30> Of course there is actually a ".name". I co-founded the company that set it up, and the original idea was to share the second level so you'd get full control over firstname.lastname.name with e-mail forwarding from [first name]@[last name].name. This followed an e-mail service (Nameplanet) we set up when two of us were discussing how we were both basically blocking a whole [lastname].[tld] domain for ourselves.

Unfortunately .name largely proved too hard to communicate quickly enough, and meanwhile it's clear that people for the most part don't mind weird addresses and/or don't have an issue with seeing e-mail addresses as transient. Which I find quite weird, given I've had the same e-mail address for 20 years at this point. Today .name is operated by Verisign, and second level registrations were enabled years ago, and I do occasionally see them, but the original concept really was part of a wave of people talking about "digital identities" on the net that just died off, in part I think because it seems most of the time peoples identity is much more fluid outside of very official circumstances. E.g. you don't necessarily always want your e-mail address to give away your full name, or your name at all, and in the more formal contexts (e.g. work) you often have another e-mail address anyway and/or your e-mail address is not an important element.

Incidentally, in retrospect I wonder if ".nom" or ".nym" or one of the other proposed names would have been (marginally) easier - people often hear ".name" and think it's a placeholder for _a_ name, especially when you try to explain that your e-mail address is [your first name]@[your last name].name. I use my .com of the same format, and it seems to lead to fewer questions than when I also had/used my .name.

<comment><USER31> My email is my [first]@[last].com. I constantly have to explain to people that I am indeed saying [first]@[last].com and not [first].[last]@gmail.com. Ughh.

Still, worth it. I love my email address!

<comment><USER32> I have the same thing, and it gets really annoying when your TLD is not, say, .net/.org/.com, and you're interacting with non-tech-savvy people like in your local municipal office, etc. It's funny how so many people assume that your email will be something@gmail or something@yahoo...But then you ask them how their work email is structured, and then they respond: oh, yeah, i never thought private people would have their own email addresses!" I would expect this in the early 2000s, but now in 2019!?! It's surprising and annoying - because you have to spend extra seconds explaining stuff to people, and getting them to "believe you" that, yes, that is my personal email address.

<comment><USER33> I have $FIRSTNAME@$LASTNAME.me. Not only do I get people being like "...dot me ...dot com?" when I speak it aloud, I've actually encountered one municipal government whose email address validation _actually rejects it_. Thank goodness I also have $NICKNAME$LASTNAME.com, although that has its own problems ($LASTNAME[0] == "Y" and $NICKNAME has a common hypocoristic form ending in "y", so people sometimes misread it as ${NICKNAME}y$LASTNAME.com).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have solved this by cunningly being born outside of the anglosphere. I own my first name domain in my native language's script (.com) as well as in Latin (.dev, my people are too plentiful for me to have got the . com).

</comment><comment><USER35> My first domain name was my full name (never occurred to me to look for my initials). Then maybe a year after I was able to get the full name of my brothers and mom and dad and gave this as a holiday gift. After a year they let them expire. :p

I have a few domains for projects I want to do. Unfulfilled dream squatting. But for me the thrill of buying domains was always to nab that hip domain name. Some favorites—which I never owned but wish I did: JoanieLovesChachi.com, Superbad.com. Hahah makes me laugh every time.

</comment><comment><USER36> Curious on what experienced domain buyers would suggest in my case.

After many years of procrastination I decided to see how much would it cost to purchase myfirstname.com (about 5k people in the world have this name).

Turns out it is impossible to even enquire on purchasing this domain.

The domain is not being used.

Archive.org shows 3 hits in the last 15 years, all minimal parked pages, last hit being 2013.

Domain registration is private. My whois-fu is rather weak.

So what can I do to contact the owner?

Some big name reseller is just sitting on this name for 10+ years and waiting for who knows what.

<comment><USER37> You can either contact them through the privatized email in their whois info, or use a domain name broker who will attempt to purchase it on your behalf. I have never used one myself, but have had them email me about buying my domains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Still waiting to get mine. I registered my first domain name from my national provider, and always wanted to move the domain aboard to the U.S. or a European registrar, however, the bureaucratic process of initializing a transfer is ridiculous. It's not an important domain name, so I decided to take the risk and allow the domain to expire, so I could re-register it. Unfortunately, the dropped domain was instantly caught by a broker.

Waiting mode...

</comment><comment><USER38> Good for you Jerry! I hope I never forget my renewal myself! Luckily I use Gandi as a registrar and they're good about reminders to their clients!

<comment><USER39> I have Google Domains autorenew my domain for me. Does Gandi have something similar?

<comment><USER40> I think auto-renewal is quite universal nowadays; the problem is keeping the payment method up to date!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would like to get nathanbroadbent.com one day. The only problem is that the current owner is also named Nathan Broadbent, and they're also a software developer and startup founder. (This has caused some confusion a few times, such as identity verification for a bank, and during an interview with US immigration.)

ndbroadbent.com will do for now!

</comment><comment><USER42> My domain name was mentioned in a bunch of publications associated with a very famous national treason case. I've tried to get them to edit the articles to remove it as there's no real journalistic value in it and just hurts me.

Sucks to have a domain I've used for over 10 years for email and stuff to be rendered unusable by bad press.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is great and all unless your domain drops and it is caught by something like dropcatch.com or competitors.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was caught by dropcatch actually. I didn't bid in the auction though. Eventually it was released.

<comment><USER44> sounds like you didn't want the domain?

<comment><USER45> This is addressed in the article. He wanted the domain, but didn't want to pay more than necessary for it. This includes avoiding an auction that could unnecessarily inflate the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Took me a while to get mine. Glad more people can avoid the John Malkovich problem:

[https://youtu.be/vNInrUkctc4](https://youtu.be/vNInrUkctc4)

[https://youtu.be/YjzYaLxplbw](https://youtu.be/YjzYaLxplbw)

</comment><comment><USER47> There is a big difference between domain squatting and domain investing. Or simply buying domains that drop.

I don't understand how you can say that it's "domain squatting" on "your" name if you don't own a trademark on the word or on your name. As others have pointed out, there may be other people who have the same name as you. How is it your name versus their name? My definition of domain squatting is buying a domain name that already has a trademark on it. The "rule" states that even if a word has a trademark, if someone bought the domain before the tm holder applied for the tm, then the domain owner still can own the domain. As long as it was not registered in bad faith.

The key here is "bad faith".

Python scripts are no longer necessary to grab expired domains, that's what backorder services are for. I recommend backordering the names of all your current sites just in case you fail to renew the name. Backorder it on multiple services, as it truly is a race to see which service gets it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I remember in the early-mid 1990's, we print (yes print) the entire list of register domains and laugh at the big company names NOT in the list.

</comment><comment><USER49> Would you mind sharing how much they actually wanted for it?

Are we talking 9 years of waiting, vs $500, or 9 years of waiting, vs $10,000?

Regardless, congrats on getting it back.

<comment><USER50> Says $1500 in the post.

<comment><USER49> Sorry, I missed that -- cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think a lot of people don't know what "domain squatting" is.

If there's a domain you want, but someone else has it but is not using it, that's not squatting. If you let your personal name domain expire, and someone else registers it, that's not squatting.

In order for it to be squatting, they have to be trying to profit off a trademark. I assume Jerry Alex is not a trademark.

"Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using an Internet domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. " [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting)

<comment><USER51> People know full well what they're talking about: holding domains for profit, not any crime, not domain underuse, not domain snatching. That may not be the legal definition of "domain squatting", but neither are the common and legal definitions the same for "brief", "motion", or "harassment". US law narrowing a term doesn't make common use wrong.

<comment><USER13> I get that people misuse words sometimes, and occasionally the definition of those words changes to match the common use.

But still, squatting is not "someone bought a domain that used to be mine. And when I asked to buy it back, the price was not what I was willing to pay." It's not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I personally think that some engineers should just help create some dockerized name servers that can be deployed and do away with ICANN altogether, that way you can have your own TLD without paying $15,000+ dollars a year.

<comment><USER53> It kind of amazes me that we cannot resolve arbitrary strings as TLD's. Yeah let the .com's and country codes get locked down by the regs, but there's an almost-nowhere-dense space of strings.

I guess the hard part is in resolving contention over particularly desirable strings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> After reading this I thought what the heck let's see if I can grab my name. For 15$ I now own my name at a .ca domain. I know I need to find a host I think but literally have no website experience or idea what I need to do next lol.

<comment><USER55> A .com is more valuable than .ca

<comment><USER56> I disagree. If the person is Canadian and the domain isn't for a "generic brand," then no, I'd actually say that .ca is more valuable than .com. It makes the name more personal to the individual and, in an industry where a lot of us have our own domains, uniqueness can be more valuable.

<comment><USER55> Op's comment says the .com is for 3500 USD so the market thinks a .com is more valuable.

<comment><USER57> Theses prices are arbitrary. When I was able to get a credit card, the first thing I tried was to buy my username domain name, obviously, the .com was my priority. At the time it was 8k CAD, the .net was a bit better at 1.6k CAD.

Both were renewed at first but the second time .net didn't get renewed, unlike OP it didn't get into an auction (I don't think it was usual in 2011) and I just had to wait until the expiration delay was up and I got it.

Now the .com is worth 38 618,96$ CAD. There's no reason for an inflation that high for the past 8 years. No one needs that domain. I never received any request for mine. Except the fact that it contains "wild" inside, it's pretty much useless for much.

It's not at all related to any market, it's arbitrary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ideas suck - <AUTHOR> http://hackfwd.tumblr.com/post/4527016456/ideas-suck-a-tale-of-lust-vs-love <comment><USER2> The concept that ideas aren't important is getting really old. Sure, once you have your idea, the execution and vision are what's going to make you successful. But is one idea better than another? Yes. Do you want great vision and execution to go along with a brain-dead stupid idea? No.

Ideas don't suck; ideas are important; ideas are the genesis for everything else talked about in this article. Sure, it's just part of the foundation of what will turn into a business, but it's often the cornerstone of that foundation.

<comment><USER3> I'm tired of this 'ideas suck' meme on hacker news as well. For that you get the up-vote. But, You're getting it wrong in that one idea is better than another. That's not really the point.

The point is that your STARTING idea sucks, while out of that could come good ideas. The point -> Groupon, restaurant ordering from your cell phone -> to reddit, paying with your cell phone -> paypal, craig's e-mail list -> craig's list. You get the idea.

I think we can assume most people on HN aren't brain dead, and for those that they probably wouldn't listen to you or I anyway. So, most people's ideas on HN probably look like a slightly manipulated bell curve with less really bad ideas and slightly more really good ideas from the beginning. For most people their ideas fall in the middle.

The reason why ideas are important is because they give you a foot hold to pivot from to something better. Most of the time their related (paypal, groupon) other times their not(reddit) but by executing ideas you can see where the real opportunity is. That's what people in the middle need. They need to be able to pivot their ideas quickly.

<comment><USER4> "Vision without execution" is getting old too.

What exactly are we calling execution? Is it the fleshing out of the idea into focused executable parts? Because we could also call that part of the idea or the vision.

When I think of execution I think of deliverables. Doing what you intended to do or leaving no stone unturned. That involves thinking things out and doing them. The thinking things out part could easily be part of the idea. You can blame the success of some startups on "the execution", but you can't prove it. The success could also have come from the idea that had the most clarity.

It sucks that we're not always able to picture which ideas will be successful, but that doesn't mean ideas suck.

<comment><USER5> Execution on the technical side means implementation, while on the business side it means "finding money." It's as simple as that. Drawings/mocks, blog posts, bantering at bizsocial events, etc. don't qualify.

Think of it in terms of criminals. Putting someone on Death Row is not the same as execution.

<comment><USER4> I know you said it's pretty simple, but where does finding users come up in your equation?

I think that's also on the business side.

<comment><USER5> "Finding users" is pointless if none of them are going to give you money. Don't put the cart before the horse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem with visions is that being a visionary is even harder than keeping to a diet.

If it's a good vision everyone will think you're crazy, if it's an awesome vision you probably _are_ crazy, if it's an incredible vision you probably won't live long enough to enjoy its coming to fruition.

But always keep in mind that even a vision isn't everything, because a vision without execution is merely hallucination.

Personally I try to have a good mix of both. A vision and then a bunch of ideas around the vision to keep me excited, energetic and up all night. It might not be the most efficient of ways, but it sure helps deal with an internet-reduced attention span.

<comment><USER7> Perfect post. Absolutely spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This meme "execution is everything; ideas are useless" is rampant here. I also believe it's a bad frame of mind. There is little distinction between an idea and a vision. A vision is just a fully fleshed-out idea; a collection of ideas: some inspirational, but many technical, economic or sociological.

I understand why the meme gained traction: too many people put everything into just one inspirational idea and never put enough effort into the execution of this idea -- the community wants to distinguish themselves as superior to these people so we attempt to tell them off and posture about execution in order to prove to everybody else here that we 'get things done'. But is talking about it really the way of proving that? Are we taking this concept too far merely because we want acceptance in the community?

All you need is to have a good idea, some supporting ideas about how to turn it into a business and to put a lot of effort into its execution. The rest of the article about a vision went into what was needed but not having ideas is not the way of going about this. You want to have some disruptive ideas as part of your execution.

</comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr : 'hey, look at me, I'm a _doer_!'

how many more blogs do we need about this exact notion? here's the thing about ideas: they don't need to be turned into business models to be incredibly valuable (cf. the world wide web). and here's the thing about business models: it doesn't necessarily take another business to make them obsolete. so I see why startup people want to downplay the value of ideas constantly, but it gets tiring

<comment><USER10> tl;dr : 'Ideas suck unless they evolve into a vision.'

I thought it was pretty good article, myself. I especially liked this bit: "In terms of traits, a vision is more similar to love than lust. It takes time to achieve a vision, it's something you nurture, something that you grow into more and more each day and the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. A vision is something that you spend every waking minute thinking about. Something that is so ridiculously complex that it becomes beautifully elegant. Simplified. Real. A vision will give you the foundation for genuine confidence, hope and expectation."

<comment><USER9> The vision bit was good it's just the 'ideas suck' spiel/meme I object to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen Is it just me or is it in tech today, that people are apt to make sweeping generalisations at the foot of an inch of experience?

<comment><USER11> I don't think this behavior is new to humanity. My grandparents do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you stop having ideas, you're done for. It's not ideas that suck, it's acting on the wrong ones. In order to have good ideas, you have to let your mind wander, and that means in addition to the good ones, there will also be plenty that are unrealistic or silly, but they all supply wood to the fire. It _is_ possible to work hard, stay focused, and have ideas churning at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't buy the idea that ideas suck.

Less when the idea is of easy execution and there are ideas where execution matters less! for example if you have an idea that can be implemented in short time and you can be in the market in less than three months then the idea matters a lot.

I'll give you some rants of how I handle my ideas. Like everyone in HN I have a lot of ideas, so I put them in a XY graph, in the X the time needed to implement and have some market feedback on the idea (the time can be logarithmic, it doesn't need to be accurate). Then the Y is the value of the idea. If you want to add other dimensions like complexity or resources do it, this can be added with colors or with a bigger circle instead of a point I try graph as many ideas as possible.

Then, I trace a line in the 3 months. It's very possible that there are no ideas there or very few, so I try to "fix" the ideas or invent new ones to fit in the 3 months time.

This is like a game of idea generation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Re: Ideas suck! <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2453957>

Ideas don't suck. You do if you think you should stay with only one idea. If you have only one idea then go for it! That's great! But don't limit yourself.

In my case I found a way that works for me very well after a lot of frustration.

Painters don't get famous if they have only one painting; musicians don't have a career if they write only one song, no matter how popular it is.

The "just one idea" is bs. Stay away from it. If you have many start with one and if you get tired or bored continue with a new one. Then come back to the first one.

The most creative people in the planet don't do one idea at a time.

Think about it!

</comment><comment><USER11> How does one get these ideas in the first place? Is it something that can be trained?

<comment><USER15> Yes, there are various processes. If you ask, it's usually because you are not naturally overwhelmbed by your brain firing ideas every second (some people are overloaded with ideas, 99% not worth doing of course). It usually involves note-taking, watching how the world works and cross-referencing situations and asking "what if X worked like Y".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bad ideas "suck". Good ideas are golden.

With bad ideas, execution has to do "everything" and is "difficult" and likely a fool's errand.

Good ideas are difficult and rare but make successful execution routine, and the US is awash in the ability to do routine execution well.

Key is how to find good ideas and evaluate them. Can that be done? Yes, the US DoD has been doing that with astounding accuracy for 70 years. The US NIH and NSF also do well. There's even 'education' in how to do that: It's call a Ph.D. from a good US research university.

Here endith Lecture 1 in 'Ideas 101 for Entrepreneurs'.

In this elementary course, the author of the post of this thread didn't do well. Neither did KPCB VC Doerr who at

[http://www.youtube.com/v/nBvuirDPHKA&hl=en_US](http://www.youtube.com/v/nBvuirDPHKA&hl=en_US)

claimed that "Ideas are easy" and "plentiful" and "Execution is everything.". Neither did Union Square VC Wilson who at

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/how-to-allocate-founder- and-...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/how-to-allocate-founder-and-employee- equity.html)

said "Ideas are pretty much worthless.".

For the most diplomatic view, mostly by an 'idea' they mean some nearly instant guess at a one sentence description of what would make a good description of a product or service to a customer, and the hope is that the business would be good.

Our society has a lot on working with ideas from 'intellectual property', 'trade secrets', patents, pharmaceutical research, peer-reviewed original research, military classification, and more.

Really what we have here is that the author, Doerr, Wilson, etc. either are so astoundingly ignorant that their understanding of ideas is somewhere below the fourth grade level for a poor student or that they have their own reasons for joining in the drum beat that ideas "suck". Either way they are embarrassing themselves in public. No good entrepreneur should want anything to do with them.

</comment><comment><USER17> No. Great ideas are truly great. However: morons without imagination, who blabber on repeating stuff they heard somewhere - yes, they suck.</comment>


Functional TDD: Codd is my Copilot - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/functional-tdd.php

<comment><USER2> mmh, no. Functional programing is declarative, but I does not mean I don't declare utterly wrong and nonsensical things to my compiler. That's why I have not only a type system, but also testing tools even for pure code: see Quickcheck in Haskell. But, yeah, I often have less state to manage and patterns that avoid a lot of buggy boilerplate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd really love it if you would explain yourself a little better.

Remember the title is about TDD and functional programming, not about testing in general. Of course you'd still test, and debug, and all the other things involved with programming.

If you have more to offer, I'd love to hear it. I couldn't understand what you meant from your comment.

<comment><USER2> FP code can still be in mismatch with your thoughts about it, so functionnal programming does not magically "just work", nor does "it works or it doesn't work" (except in the dumb sense of this sentence which applies to all code). You still write tests even for pure functions to check that certain assumptions hold just like you would in Python, except you also have types to prove certain assumptions.

It is not always trivial to see pitfalls in pure code either (think of a complicated function like a parser). Whether you write your tests before or after you write code, you always have a at least one form of testing written (or infered) first: types. And yes, the shape of your code _is_ influenced by your types and your tests (e.g. by making code easily testable with more meaningfull tests/propositions about it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Meh. I'm not buying it.

I never said it was trivial. And when I said it works or doesn't work, the implication was that transforms more naturally map to requirements, not that the requirements are always understood.

I guess I could have written a more complicated article full of all of these caveats, but I'm happy that testing and developing functional code is much different than imperative. Things like parsers and ASTs are more complex concepts, sure, but they are common concepts that leave little room for doubt.

I think data structures become much more important in FP for some of the reasons you've outlined. Hence my comment that those OOP skills and Codd comes in handy. This is also why used the SQL example.

But thanks for clarifying yourself. At least now I know that I disagree with you and you misunderstood the article, instead of just wondering wtf you were talking about. I'll make a note on the article to help clear up this confusion.

<comment><USER2> Ok, so I (think I) agree with you that the following poperties make it compelling to test/develop/refactor code: purity / statelessness, algebraic properties of programs (transforms…), high level (brevity).

Where I (think I) disagree, is that I think methodology stays globally the same: I would even say that it desn't throw away TDD but gives tools to reinforce it. FP removes whole classes of nasty bugs and so it makes you test more essential stuff ; secondly the tools help you more because the compiler and the testing library know more, so for example in Haskell statistical tests are easy to write, pervasive, and often very meaningfull.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like your statistical testing example. I haven't seen a lot in the agile community about statistical testing, but in data transformation-like code, as you say, it can be very meaningful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Find Hackers At College? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If you have an entrepreneur's club, I've seen couple hackers hangout at that club. It is easier to work with a hacker who is already looking to be an entrepreneur than someone who is doing a Masters and looking forward to making that nice salary after graduation--selling your vision to him is one hard task.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree with pg's belief that college is the best place to find cofounders, so...

1\. Where do hackers like to hang out on campus?

2\. What languages do great hackers love using?

<comment><USER3> 1\. The computer lab where the Vaxen are... d'oh. These days, check freshmeat, the programming sub-reddit, and mailing lists for languages/projects of interest.

2\. All of them, and they keep writing new ones

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> YC News seems like a good place to start. ;-) Anyone here at Stanford? If so, hit me up (my email is in my profile).</comment>


Ask HN: High School Student Looking For Learning Resources - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone, my name is Brandon and I'm a junior in high school. I have been programming in Python for almost a year now and have been, for the most part guided by my teacher. Now I'm reaching a point where my programs are to complex and asking my teacher for feedback is time consuming, preventing me from programming as much as I want.  So I would like to take on the role of teacher for myself, and be active in the hacker community.
I have the basics of programming down and have been practicing MVC framework for desktop applications. I'm currently getting into Django to start learning web frameworks and databases. I'm not sure where I should go from here. I am stuck on what resources to use, and how to get word of upcoming resources.
Can anyone recommend some resources I can use for independent learning such as websites to follow, and books to read, that will make sense to me but is respected by the professionals. The resources I find are either not complex enough or to complex. If anyone can help me get on a path so that I can be in charge of my own learning, I would be very grateful. <comment><USER2> One thing that worked really well for me when I was learning was StumbleUpon. Choose the python, html, css, web design, photoshop, etc categories and stumble along until you find a tutorial or article that interests you. It will expose you to alot of concepts and topics you otherwise wouldn't have thought to teach yourself.

Also, come up with an idea that you think is just out of reach of your current skill and just dive in and build it! It doesn't have to be the best thing in the world, and you don't have to be focused on making money with it, but the process of trying to architect the thing, and then putting together all the pieces will be a more valuable experience than any classroom could give you. You have IRC, stackoverflow, and other similar resources to ask for help if needed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Brandon! I am also in high school (currently a sophomore). Personally, I would suggest two main things.

1\. Just build something. You said you were using Django. Find an idea, and build it! You will learn a lot as you build it. 2\. Udacity. I found the Udacity online courses to be amazing! They are very helpful (I took Web Development (CS253) taught by Steve Huffman)!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the Udacity resource I will definitely go check that out. Just wondering but do you have any finished public projects? I would really like to see how another high schooler approaches programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't worry too much about whether or not the sources are "respected by professionals." Rather, you should focus on whether or not the information is good.

If you're interested in theory, I would point to iTunes U; I've been impressed with what I've seen of the courses there. I personally can't recommend any books (that's not really my learning style; I'm much more hands-on).

For the mechanics of programming, there's nothing better than just writing code. The Python docs are a great source of information, as are sites like Stack Overflow; search engines will be your friend if you get stuck. Open source code can be a good reference, as mentioned below, for seeing approaches to a specific problem (or implementations of a specific algorithm), but pouring through reams of others' code probably isn't the best use of time.

Overall, you sound like you're off to a good start. I'm a senior in high school, but, a year into my learning, I wasn't nearly as far along as you.

<comment><AUTHOR> iTunes U, that's very interesting. I've never really used iTunes so I had no idea they offered tutorials.

I have tried open source projects a little on github but the files were too long. I'll look more into open source but I need to dig around to find smaller projects. If there are any small projects you can recommend that would be great.

Thanks for the help, I will start digging into the resources you gave after I take a look at Udacity.

<comment><USER4> I've not done enough work with Python specifically to be able to recommend any projects; sorry. As for iTunes U, it's all recorded college courses (some with exercises and the like, others without); some are better than others (both in terms of content), but you'll have to look in the description about prerequisites and languages used.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that was what I thought when you mentioned iTunes, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess you're mainly looking for python related stuff. But if you're open to alternatives and me being a c guy, I would suggest hacking through the linux man pages and libc, it will definately help your overall programming skills and understanding of cs.

Here's a link (posted elsewhere on HN) to intro c programming resouces online: [http://www.mycplus.com/featured-articles/best-free- programmi...](http://www.mycplus.com/featured-articles/best-free-programming- courses-online/)

</comment><comment><USER6> So something that worked for me when I was starting out was to reverse engineer an existing Opensource project or maybe even look at their buglist. IMO reading code and figuring out the intuition behind it is almost half the battle. You may also want to pick up some engineering/algorithms/computer science books to get the underlying (and almost universally) applicable concepts.

Coursera is a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER7> Shoot me an email Brandon. You might enjoy hanging out with the Nuuton team. We work with python and django.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone for the response it helped a lot.</comment>