Cookieless cookies (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://lucb1e.com/rp/cookielesscookies/ <comment><USER2> That's a surprise to see pop up again! Author here. Now I wish I had improved the demo in the past years... It still generates the etag from a few static parameters to make it work without JavaScript (as the page notes near the bottom), a real implementation doesn't have that limitation because they don't care to echo data (such as your note and visit count) back to you before the image with etag even loaded. I should have switched it to display the data in the image, so it works more accurately.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason I submitted this now albeit dated is due to the fact that now GDPR is alive, CCPA is in the works and overall privacy environment has changed to kill the cookie in advertising as we know it. So there will be a need to explore alternatives to do the same stuff without using cookies (e.g analytics systems such as GA)

<comment><USER3> No that's not a solution. It's the tracking that counts, not the cookies. I commented elsewhere on this thread more details:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394661)

<comment><USER2> And as I said six years ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233362) :p (not to diminish your comment!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was surprised to see that this tracking works across both regular and private browsing in Firefox (67.0.4 on macOS). I can see the number of visits increment and whatever message I've saved on either side is displayed to both.

<comment><USER5> Why is private browsing mode not emptying the cache then? Seems to be contrary to the very purpose of the mode...

<comment><USER6> Private browsing mode wasn't (originally) intended to to prevent tracking by websites. It's goal was to keep your browsing history _locally_ private. (i.e. keep your pr0n viewing out of the local browsing history so your friends wouldn't see what kind of porn you like when they borrow your laptop to check their email.

That definition has expanded a bit (very) recently, but preventing website tracking is usually a separate feature (adblockers, noscript, automatic cookie deletion tools, firefox's recent "tracking blocker").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wikipedia has a list of websites known to use this technique already: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags)

Looks like KISSmetrics are getting sued with a class action lawsuit over using this technique.

<comment><USER8> There are a lot of very cool things that have been in or allowed by the HTTP and HTML specs that have had to go because people can't be trusted to play nice.

ETags are one of the biggest disappointments that way.

I wonder if there's a potential to fix this by suggesting a deterministic version of ETags, that's based off of information the User Agent can see. Like the Vary information, response headers and payload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6231039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6231039)

</comment><comment><USER10> In Firefox, setting

        browser.cache.disk.enable
        browser.cache.memory.enable

to false, seems to stop some of this from working. The last visit date still works, but the text storage and number of visits does not.

<comment><USER11> It's not a perfect solution, though. You're going to stick out as one of _those_ people who disabled their cache entirely. You mitigated this exploit, at the cost of increasing your browser fingerprint entropy. Ideally you want to clear your cache when you clear your cookies.

<comment><USER10> How can a website detect a disabled cache vs. the cache being full, for example?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am shocked firefox still has such gaping privacy holes:

It's just one of many: [https://samy.pl/evercookie/](https://samy.pl/evercookie/)

In the old discussion ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6231039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6231039)) it was revealed that some parties were sued and settled for $500,000. Relatedly British Airways was just fined £183m. That's a beginning.

</comment><comment><USER13> _" Even when you disabled cookies entirely, have Javascript turned off and use a VPN service, this technique will still be able to track you."_

It doesn't work if you disable image loading.

For 90%+ of the web browsing I do, I don't need to see images at all, and browsing using emacs-w3m which I have set up to show only text and not load any images suffices. Occasionally there might be some image I want to see on a website and then I'll usually load it and view that one (or handful of images) manually. Very very rarely, I'll visit a site with an image gallery, where loading and viewing images one at a time is too painful, and then I'll just open it in Firefox, which I have set up to load images.

I know not loading images by default is not a solution for most people, but it's worked great for me for many years.

Update: A lot of replies are mentioning CSS. Just for the record: emacs-w3m does not process CSS

<comment><USER14> I'm not going to have time to experiment for the next few weeks, but I _bet_ I could set up a version of this that worked via CSS as well.

Wouldn't affect you with since I believe w3m also doesn't ship with CSS. But if anyone is reading this and thinking, "ah, disabling images in UMatrix will do the trick" \-- _probably_ not?

<comment><USER13> emacs-w3m does not process CSS

<comment><USER14> More to the point, emacs-w3m does not have a cache at all.

That's the real thing to take away -- that images are not the issue, the cache is the issue, and there are lots of things that can go into a cache beyond just images. If you're not caching anything, you could probably load images by default and you'd still be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a fundamental property of caching.

To avoid an extra fetch, _you have to explicitly tell the data source_ that you already have this piece of data, and sending it is not required.

<comment><USER16> Is there a way to design the http cache so that this is not true?

One way is for clients to first ask for the latest checksum/Etag from the server, and compare it to what they have locally before requesting the resource.

But maybe that's an extra round-trip. I wonder if a different design of HTTP could have avoided all this.

<comment><USER15> No, there us no way around it.

Either a page requests a linked resource, or not. If it does not, we can assume that it has it cached. We can tell these two outcomes apart.

But we can make tracking much harder by not having the client send an ETag. E.g. the server could send ETags of all page's resources in the initial response, and let the client decide. This assumes that the server knows about all the related resources, about the page structure, etc. This is not unreasonable, but this does special-case HTML, and does complicate the server quite significantly.

<comment><USER17> Subresource integrity solves this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried this on the 0.66.99 version of Brave and it works.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wasn't familiar with etags, so for anyone else curious I'll save you the google search:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/ET...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/ETag)

>If the resource at a given URL changes, a new Etag value must be generated. Etags are therefore similar to fingerprints and might also be used for tracking purposes by some servers. A comparison of them allows the determination of whether two representations of a resource are the same. They might also be set to persist indefinitely by a tracking server.

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags)

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. You can store the data in a regular browser window, and it's still there if you open the URL in a private window.

The private mode should have its own cache that is initially empty.

Idea: since private sessions are typically short-lived, they never have to validate ETags. Basically just cache resources indefinitely and never ask "is this item still valid". the cache is thrown away when the private session is closed; that's what invalidates it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Also read: clear gifs / web beacons

You may see this in your email to track how many times you open newsletters and other items.

</comment><comment><USER22> Firefox 69.0b3 here, works across refreshes but not when restarting the browser or opening a private window.

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course this can also be applied to all other forms of tracking for extra persistence: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714446)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's worth noting that when you do a hard refresh, obviously you won't get a 304 Not Modified, which is what this tracking relies on. So, if you wanted to clear the state, that would be one way.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting technique, I learned something new about ETags.

Probably a dumb question but: any reason this couldn't be reliably used instead of cookies to track sessions, e.g. login status etc.?

<comment><USER26> The developer ergonomics are certainly less convenient. The ETag is tied to a particular resource, not an origin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before anyone thinks this (and similar) approaches are a way around the GDPR's cookie consent tracking crackdown: It's not.

The GDPR talks about online identifiers, of which cookies, IP address and fingerprints are examples. If you read any regulator's guidance carefully, you'll see they talk about "cookies and similar technologies", with just "cookies" being used alone for brevity.

To rephrase tracking of any kind is the issue, not cookies. Don't mistake the implementation for the activity.

Disclosure: Founder of a non-tracking web analytics service because of this exact issue.

<comment><USER2> All true. Small note: whereas cookies are easy to identify as tracking, etags have a legitimate purpose and you might not know that you're being tracked by this method. It would be illegal not to disclose it, so I doubt any self respecting company would do it, but also hard to detect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Clever but as you can't analyze cross domain images I don't think you can use this to track people across the web.

<comment><USER28> You can analyze cross-domain images (and other resources) thanks to CORS. There are many other variants of persisting data in cache via JS and CSS, so only cache partitioning by top-level domain can stop it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> On Chrome for Android it does not work with data saver enabled. Disabling it causes it to work for me.

<comment><USER30> Data Saver makes the images go through Google's servers, so the browser doesn't get the ETag. On the other hand, it's much easier for Google itself to track you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't appear to work with DuckDuckGo browser on iOS.</comment>


Ask HN: a good marketing book? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I'm looking for a book that focuses on b2b marketing, especially targeting small to medium businesses. Do you have any recommendations? The industry is payment and creditcard fraud protection, although I don't think there're any marketing books directly focusing on such industry. Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> The book you're looking for is Spin Selling by Neil Rackham.

What sets this book aside is that's it based on research of top sales people not just anecdotes and hearsay.

I would recommend this to anyone who is intersted in any type of selling.

<http://amzn.to/xUcrR3>

Here's a review from amazon.

"I have attended numerous sales courses and read every book under the sun covering basic sales skills to more complex sales strategy. Rackham and co are the first, in my opinion, to approach the topic from the psychology of the buyer and not primarily the seller. What "pain" does the exec feel, not what product or features should I sell. I moved from selling basic individual life insurance products in SA to major IT solutions all over Europe, Middle East and Africa within 18months. Regardless of what you are selling, where and to whom - this book keeps you focused on what is important i.e. the business drivers of the individual/s and not the organisation alone."

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest adapting this for your needs:

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing [http://www.amazon.com/Immutable-Laws- Marketing-Explained-ebo...](http://www.amazon.com/Immutable-Laws-Marketing- Explained-ebook/dp/B000FC10HA/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I suggest some of Seth Godin's earlier books. "All Marketers are Liars" and "Purple Cow." Marketing is one of those things you can adapt to any business, any product, you just need to figure out how the lessons apply to what you're doing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much guys!</comment>


Consumer Privacy Tool - <AUTHOR> https://control.my.id/index.php/consumers/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is just too cool / creepy!</comment>


Linux based, Incredibly Cheap handheld game console - <AUTHOR> http://the-nd.com/

<comment><USER2> You can get "cell phone screens for a couple of dollars" when you buy a few million at a time and have a kickass line of credit. Good luck with that.</comment>


F# Bayesian Monte Carlo of Let's Make a Deal - <AUTHOR> http://fssnip.net/bs

<comment><USER2> Cool, but I'd have preferred some commentary and explanation, or at least a conclusion. What's the optimal play strategy?

<comment><USER3> Here's my python version, with some commentary. <http://datadigger.tumblr.com/post/9709584448/monty-hall>

<comment><USER4> "What I didn't realize is that the real choice is this:

what's behind the door you originally picked what's behind BOTH of the other doors, minus the goat"

Mind blown. I've been trying for a long time to understand this intuitively, thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


My Reply to Mr. Feld's Rant on Patent Trolls - <AUTHOR>

This is in reply to: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/11/another-day-another-patent-troll.html and http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2011/11/come-on-yahoo-try-competing-not-dirty-pool.php
My hands are shaking as I'm typing this (I'm angry, sorry), so please excuse any typos.
I'm picking on him cause he's the latest one, but I'm lumping every other top tech person out there who have commented on this.
Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot and putting the same foot in my own mouth.  I'm willing to look like a fool.  I've looked like a total tool way too many times, I'm used it.  If I can't raise money or get any other hacker to talk to me after this, fine, that's the risk.
But I'm FED UP WITH THIS bitching.  If people like Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Paul Graham and Fred Wilson and many other people whom I've forgot to name, people I hold in very high regard, people of character, are saying the same thing but are not doing anything about this, well what the hell can someone like me, who wants to start his own company, has to expect?
What can you people, people like top investors ,advisers and successful entrepreneurs, say to the many people on this forum who have asked for help and advice when dealing with these leeches (patent trolls)?  Just pay the bribe, it's ok to be be blackmailed, shaken down? Cost of doing business?
This is defeatism at it's worst!
And I'm happy to put name to this.  Want to talk, you can find me at the addresses below
Signed,
Misha Manulis http://www.manulis.com misha at manulis dot com http://www.twitter.com/mmanulis  <- Can't check this at work, company blocks it.
Here's my reply: <comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
I'm curious, what's the cost to VC-backed companies for dealing with a patent suit?  I am assuming that most VC-funded companies in the web industry get hit for $100,000+ by different patent trolls. (Judging by posts on HN)
What's the cost of fighting one or two of these patents?  I'm assuming, perhaps naively, that there are a couple of "key" patents, if dealt with, would invalidate some of the biggest threats and the cost of fighting such a suite would be several million, say 10 million, which equals a large? Series A round?
How much would a VC fund save over it's lifetime of investments if just a few of these patents were to be fought?  Once again, assuming there is a good chance of winning.
What if several VC funds got together and pooled it's resources and took on a couple of the bigger patent trolls?  Could you spread the risk and cost enough to make this viable?
Are the politics of this so bad that you cannot win even with a bunch of money ( >= $50 million) thrown at this issue?  Can you guys raise enough money from interested investors to form a fund specifically dedicated to fighting these people?
This problem is due to lots and lots of money being given to various lobbies and politicians from the side that wants to keep the status quo. Why can't the side that wants change get together, pool their resources and do something about it?
I'm just a lowly engineer; I do not have the experience, connections, money nor knowledge to address deep issues, such as this one, in a meaningful way.  I'm developing skills to build the experience, knowledge and connections, but I'm very far from having them.  Yet I'm reading posts, such as this one, from many people, whom I consider authorities and whom I respect a great deal, speaking out against issues such as this one and do not seem to be able to do much about this.  This is unbelievably disheartening.
If you have the money, experience, connections and give a damn, do something about this.  It's always a small group of people who give a damn that accomplish anything.  Here's a problem that desperately needs solving and there is a group of individuals, such as yourself, who have the means to get together and kick ass.
Why don't you?
Only a small group of people who have stood up on their hind legs have been able to change the world.  The masses do not get together all of a sudden.  Every hive has a queen.  Even OcupyWallStreet started with a small group.
Grow some balls, do something about this!  Or stop complaining.
Every time someone of your stature (you have to be aware of your own impact on the overall startup and tech community) posts such a piece, it puts questions into aspiring entrepreneurs and distracts them from building something to research more about patents or try to patent their own ideas.
You'll need help!  We're here to help you.  I will bet that many people will stand behind you on this.  But someone will have to stand first and that person has to have enough __political__ and __financial__ pull to get the job done.  It's not going to be some engineer or entrepreneur who will be eaten alive before they get anywhere.
Cause if you're not going to do anything about this, please don't vent this frustration so publicly, it affects too many people. </comment><comment><AUTHOR> I need to apologize for this post. It's uncalled for and inappropriate.

I wish I could take it down as it sets the wrong tone for this conversation. It was not written from the right place and calls people out in an improper and angry way.

To everyone who might read this, I would like to extend my apology.

</comment><comment><USER2> Point of order: this is a blog post, not an "ask hn". Write it up and submit it. (Given the penalty for "ask hn" posts on the front page and the number of people looking at the "ask" page, that's likely to get you more eyeballs too.)</comment>


Winning Features vs Keeping Features - <AUTHOR> http://adamcovati.com/product-management/winning-features-vs-keeping-features/ Winning vs. Keeping is how I'm starting to look at features that we develop. It's something might help to balance expectations and demands from other groups within the company. <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, Winning vs. Keeping is how I'm starting to look at features that we develop. It's something might help to balance expectations and demands from other groups within the company.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, would this be helpful to you, or do you think this would just complicate your life...</comment>


Facebook Reactions, the Redesigned Like Button, Is Here - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions-totally-redesigned-like-button/ <comment><USER2> Anyone remember YouTube's reaction buttons added over _4 years ago_? [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/youtube- reactions.h...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/youtube- reactions.html)

And it was killed because no one used it correctly and it made things more difficult versus a simple like/dislike?

What makes things different now?

<comment><USER3> I hadn't remembered them, so I checked your source... they were text counters with the labels "LOL", "OMG", "EPIC", "CUTE", "WTF", and "FAIL", apparently. If that was the actual implementation, then I can see several things that are different. The YouTube reaction button effort seems, in retrospect, to have made several horrible mistakes. The one that strikes me as a dead-in-the-water kind of mistake was mediating culturally between the commentator and the comment in what was probably a misguided attempt to be appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favourite part of the whole article is the phrase "Your algorithmically determined best friends".

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting point from another Facebook Newsroom post. The News Feed is going to treat all Reactions as a show of interest. It'll try to show you more of the things that you react to. So if you click sad on everything, your News Feed will be sadder than a Nicholas Sparks story.

Link for those interested: [http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/news-feed-fyi- what-the-r...](http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/news-feed-fyi-what-the- reactions-launch-means-for-news-feed/)

Let me know if I've got it wrong because I'm making this point to everyone I see.

<comment><USER6> "Initially" i think is the point you're missing. This is like a trial run to see how people use it. Once they figure out the weighting I expect changes to the newsfeed.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The large size of the reactions menu feels pretty odd to me. Perhaps they have been influenced by the large size of emoticons in apps like Katalk and Google Chat.

Still, my first impression is that it seems like an awkward in-between size: not conspicuous enough to fit in with the current scale and not large enough to set itself apart well.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand why they are so hideous. The colouring doesn't match Facebook's branding at all, the rounded pop-up box isn't used anywhere else, and the magnification stretches outside of it.

It looks atrocious. Like they didn't even care to make it look seamless—it's just a cobbled together add-on.

Or perhaps it speaks to a big UI-style refresh that they're going to roll out?

<comment><USER8> It definitely feels like they're moving towards a UI refresh just based on some of the tweaks they've rolled out lately. Besides, they're due for an overhaul.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a huge change. Relationships have been broken over "likes" in the past. We invented unwritten rules about what is OK to like and what is not.

I'm really curious how the new additions will change those unwritten rules and our behavior.

<comment><USER10> If a relationship breaks over a "like", then it was a shitty relationship bound to brake anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The way I used to look at it the 'Like' button was intended as a signal of affirmation to a person than to their comment. That is certainly the way my FB "Friends" use it. Often other people don't have a perfectly distilled reaction to something, and the button functions more to say "this affected me" than, say, "I like your perspective on the President's policy in the Middle East."

The semantics of a button labeled "Like" are certainly a little bit weird. I obviously don't like the fact that a friend is diagnosed with cancer. But my friends also don't post "I've got cancer." and leave it at that. People tend to explain their feelings if they share things like that.

In any case, I'm not sure that Reactions are really much of an improvement. If my friend says, "I've got cancer, but my doctor says I can beat it. Thank you for all your support." I think I'd find this new feature confusing. Is it a "Like" because she has a positive outlook? Is it a "Sad" because cancer is difficult and stressful? Is it a "Wow" because it's unexpected? Or is it even an "Angry" because my deity of choice has shown itself to be capricious or vengeful?

Maybe there's a positive side to this. Maybe it will, unwittingly, encourage people to attempt to share their feelings and try to process them instead of just clicking a button.

<comment><USER12> Here's something to consider. What if the prior lack of buttons other than 'Like' subconsciously conditioned us to create posts that are 'like'-able?

With a slightly wider spectrum of instantaneous reactions, perhaps the content, tone, and nature of our posts will broaden as well.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I'm sure it did in some way. And I'm sure the Reactions will change the way that we create posts in the future. I'm not sure, though, if it will change in the way you suggest. I suppose I would be interested if certain subjects would be shared more, and it's possible that the tone of posts would change. For myself, though, I have a hard time imagining a post that I would make knowing potential reactions included a 'like' that I wouldn't make if, say, a 'sad' or 'angry' option were also available. I guess I'd be even less likely (than completely unlikely?) to post anything vaguely political. But other people post differently, I guess.

To be honest, until I see how others use them most of the new options seem so blunt (or maybe so cute?) as to be almost embarrassing to use.

Maybe 'perplexed' or 'impressed' would be good options?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words" \- Syme, 1984

<comment> qu4z-2 "\-- in reality, only one word."

Because let's be honest... this is because it's awkward to "Like" something awful. I'm pretty sure there will be only one correct reaction for each post, that people spam as they do "Like" now. It's hardly an opinion poll.

      "My cat died today" [10 sad, 3 angry, 1 haha]

EDIT: I put quotes around the quote, 'cause it's a quote and you're meant to use quotes for quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Because liking a "Was diagnosed with cancer today" post is... of questionable taste.

<comment><USER15> And you think a 'sad face' will do the trick do you?

The only appropriate response to such a post - which by the way is questionable to write in the first place - is to reply with actual words in a private context.

If people are posting their cancer news on Facebook, followed by reaction icons, shares, likes and notifications... I'm glad I'm not on Facebook.

<comment><USER14> Consider what I said as a placeholder for very bad news.

And I use FB mainly for events around my area and chat. I'm not much for posting or resharing garbage. And it's not like my "Rah rah candidate" shitposting is going to make someone else vote differently.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I agree exactly with what you were trying to do. You picked a bad example is all.

I have poked fun previously at this very thing you alluded to - that a news story about a natural disaster or murder has a "like" button at all, is plain stupid.

Adding new reaction icons to better represent the more appropriate response _could_ backfire in that even they are still trivializing and almost gamifying our responses. It might end up a tacky mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I tried hovering and long pressing on the Wired article's two like buttons, the one on the side and the one on the bottom. No extra options. Tried the same on the Facebook newsroom post ([https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/reactions-now- available...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/reactions-now-available- globally/)), no luck. Guess there's some sort of developer change required and no one has made the change? Seems impossible to try.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wish the design and image quality of the emoticons was better. They look a bit ugly and the resolution is low. It looks pretty bad on my retina screen.

<comment><USER18> They are rather generic, and has design-by-committee written all over it. They probably spent tens of millions of labor-hours planning, creating, debating, and testing

If I were running the show, I would've released 30 new ones covering wide spectrum of emotions, and many purposely ambiguous. And NO text labels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Facebook announcement: [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/reactions-now- available...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/02/reactions-now-available- globally/)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the link. Based on their promotional video, there are two things I didn't realize.

1\. Even though there are multiple reactions, they're counted in aggregate. So instead of see 6 smilies, 2 sadfaces, and 1 like, you'll see 9 interactions were given.

2\. The most recent 3 reactions are shown. There's no way of telling who reacted in which way, and the reaction break down.

3\. I was completely wrong with points 1 and 2. After testing out the feature, it's trivial to see the reaction breakdown by either hovering over the reaction counts, or by clicking it.

Realizing the hardest part of this change for me is that I have no idea how to refer to the "reaction counts". Should I say, "Hey, your video had so many reactions!"? I guess I'll have to feel it out. Sort of starting to feel that this was a strategic move by FB to capture any new "like" type interaction that a competitor tries to release. Github has stars, Twitter now has hearts, FB has always been likes, but soon can/will be everything.

EDIT: Realized that reactions don't work in comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In other words, it's basically like this XenForo plugin, except applied to Facebook posts:

[https://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-ratings- taking-...](https://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-ratings-taking-likes- to-the-next-level.410/)

It's not a bad idea, the concepts worked pretty well on the forums I've used it on. It's gonna be quite handy for anything news related, like illnesses, crimes, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> A copy of Slack's reactions?

<comment><USER23> Nah these have been in the works since well before Slack's thing.

<comment><USER24> Got a source for that? I've taken a quick look and can't find anything mentioning these before late 2015. Slack's blog post was in July ([http://slackhq.com/post/123561085920/reactions](http://slackhq.com/post/123561085920/reactions))

<comment><USER25> [https://medium.com/facebook-design/reactions-not- everything-...](https://medium.com/facebook-design/reactions-not-everything- in-life-is-likable-5c403de72a3f#.iu6yw8x12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> not sure if i like where this is going. fb is trying to simplify human interactions. e.g. a friend's birthday coming up? send a generic "happy birthday!" message!, want to react to someone? press a button!

maybe i'm just getting too old to be hip like the fellow kids these days

</comment><comment><USER27> There's a back story somewhere in here, in that they tested two Happy faces early on, and eventually opted to replace one of them with Anger.

</comment><comment><USER28> The demographic must be 15-year-olds. Way too cute for me. I'll never click on any of that silly stuff.

</comment><comment><USER29> is this new? I have them for more then a month.

<comment><USER19> were in limited beta tests before, now generally activated.

<comment><USER30> In my country (Spain) they have been working like a year or so. I think more countries were used to test. In my limited experience (I don't use much fb) I don't see a lot of people really using it. It's about 80%-likes/20%-the new "emotions" that people use in posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A factoid:

When Mark Zuckerberg first started Facebook in his dorm room it was called Facemash. Facemash ripped pictures from Harvard's online registar and let other students rate their peers in a "hot or not" style game.

This rating of student's faces was quite successful and cut right to the core of what was to follow: Shitheads using the Internet to gather likes and dislikes of themselves and their "online friends" in a retarded game where creating an artificial pecking order was fun/amusing. Then marketeers saw this and thought, "Oh fuck yeah, free marketing and demographic data plus contact information. Push that shit hard."</comment>


Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/425906/0a67de2f6571a73a/

<comment><USER2> As a victim/administrator of sendmail-based mail systems from the 1980's to the late 1990's, this was a pretty interesting interview: anyone know of good retrospectives from other epochal software, especially open source?

I'd love to see retrospectives and lessons-learned on BIND, awk, perl, ssh, the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL etc.

One of the noteworthy points is that Eric Allman really does skim over the unbelievably crappy model for managing security problems in the code and in configurations (understandable of course, for the time, but a retrospective on how that can be/is better now would be fascinating), the guru-level fragility and bizarreness of configuration (the implementor and administrator use- cases).

And also, more than a line in passing about sendmail.com, one of the first semi-open source startups.</comment>


An Alternative to the Singleton Anti-Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://eamann.com/tech/singleton-alternative/

<comment><USER2> It is really not an alternative in the sense of the Singleton Pattern. It is an alternative implementation of the Singleton Pattern in PHP.

We have been doing this in C# for a while: [http://neonlabs.structum.net/blog/implementing-a- singleton-i...](http://neonlabs.structum.net/blog/implementing-a-singleton-in- c-reloaded/)

But it is still a singleton. It is just a safer way of implementing it. The implementation still suffers from the Singleton Pattern disadvantages.</comment>


C# code search snippets on-demand in Visual Studio 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9-4a48-a5fd-504ff4ad1b65

<comment><AUTHOR> TosbB posted something that led me to this today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8307876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8307876)

You can try out the code snippet search online here:

[http://codesnippet.research.microsoft.com/](http://codesnippet.research.microsoft.com/)

Visual Studio 2012 version here:

[http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4934b087-e6cc-...](http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4934b087-e6cc-44dd-b992-a71f00a2a6df)</comment>


Show HN: LED-UKE, the Glowing Ukulele - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deckar01/LED-UKE/issues/1

<comment><USER2> Love the idea. What's the cost and how water-resistant would you say it is?</comment>


Tinkercad – Create 3D digital designs with online CAD - <AUTHOR> https://www.tinkercad.com/ <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a more "serious" CAD package without paying "serious" money, check out OnShape and Fusion 360. Both of these packages are industrial-strength CAD (parametric, history-based, and constraint-solving) and can be used for free.

OnShape ([https://www.onshape.com/](https://www.onshape.com/)) has a frontend that runs entirely in the browser on the desktop, so you can even run it on Linux, and has apps with real create/edit capability for phones and tablets.

If OnShape doesn't have everything you want, or you run into its storage limits and don't want to pay for more space, check out Fusion 360. It's free for hobbyists. It only runs on Mac and Windows, but it's got a ton more features than OnShape and no storage limits.

I played with Fusion 360 before I found OnShape and wasn't able to make much headway, even after checking out some of Autodesk's training videos. When I found OnShape, I watched its training videos and got a handle on the basic CAD concepts. When I ran into OnShape's limits, I was able to go back to Fusion 360 and understand it. Now I use Fusion 360 to design parts for hobby-level 3D printing and it's great.

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify, unless you're a student/educator, Fusion360 is only free for 30 days....after that you have to pay.

<comment><USER4> Actually, you can use it for free if you're a business making less than $100,000/year. Or something like that, I forgot the exact terms, but it's quite generous. The terms are shown when you first install and register the program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for mentioning onshape and their Linux support, will definitely try. In the meantime (desktop based, multi platform) FreeCAD [1] has been great for me.

1) [http://freecadweb.org/](http://freecadweb.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> The stability wasn't there last time this was posted, but maybe they've made some improvements. I do wish there was a distinction being made between maker- quality and production-quality software in some of these areas - being an engineer that uses CAD on a daily basis, this is cute but closer to CAPD (Computer Assisted Part Design) or some such. Not to denigrate their work, but this is not a full-fledged CAD package - but it is above and beyond for hobbyist / maker grade use.

</comment><comment><USER7> I mean, it's nice that these things are moving online, are cheap or free & all that but it's not quite the same as using a dedicated tool like Solidworks. The average hobbyist who plays with a 3D printing program like this is thinking small: only for 3D printing. I've dealt with files that people want to be made on a mill or designed by a shop & the file ends up having to be re- created along with being imprecise.

<comment><USER8> Tinkercad's a toy, and hasn't seen any significant improvements for the last 2.5 years.

The creators of Solidworks started a new company to do online CAD: check out onshape.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there something like this, which enables me to edit scenes with humans? Like Poser or DAZ 3D?

I would DIE to have something like that in the browser!

<comment><USER10> I never really understood why anyone would like to run anything that requires long sessions of work - in a browser? A CAD program seems like the antithesis of a good case for a web app.

The GUI can never be quite as good, always quirky menus, seldom an undo, a backspace in the wrong place can send your latest changes into oblivion, and the GUI typically feels like it's one the verge to collapse.

It can work 'OK' or even great for short tasks- like Jira (that has all of the above) - but if you spend some serious time in a web app, it really sucks.

OK, it runs everywhere, I get that.

<comment><USER8> Most good web-based editors have none of the drawbacks you've listed. I'm not familiar with Tinkercad, but [http://clara.io](http://clara.io) has:

\- traditional-style menus

\- infinite undo. Checkout the history tab -- you can see your entire history with a timestamp and an icon saying who made the change. Click on any change to undo that change.

\- backspace is captured

\- it's continuously saving, so it's almost impossible to lose your changes. If you lose your internet connection, it uses the browser standard onbeforeunload dialog box to prevent you from leaving before they are saved.

There are some significant advantages to choosing a web app: collaboration, change control, access to cloud computing for CPU-intense tasks like rendering, as well as the avoidance of not having to install license dongles or license managers.

<comment><USER10> Sure. With a significant effort you can almost be as good as a native application, except not quite.

The benefits you mentioned is not exclusive to web apps. There are no inherent benefits, except perhaps licence management, which benefits the service provider more, and the fact that there already is a server side to use for features like collaboration.

<comment><USER11> There are two closely coupled benefits: ease of installation (one machine to do so) and ease of upgrade (again, single machine).

That said, I much prefer desktop applications to web-based ones, especially when it's not me who hosts them. They may disappear overnight, they may break overnight, I don't control backups for them, I need constant internet access to use them (sometimes I work off-line, so this is a big no-no).

And web applications on modern hardware (which I don't own, because why should I? my Dell D830 works satisfactory) are _almost as fast_ as desktop applications on my older hardware. Meaning, they're slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like as easy to use as SketchUp. Sadly Google sold SketchUp, and the new company turned SketchUp in a trialware product.

</comment><comment><USER13> In case you are having issue logging in, make sure third-party cookies are enabled.</comment>


Ask HN: Compiled and Interepted language? - <AUTHOR>

 Is it possible for a language to be both compiled as well as interpreted.<p>* During development we can use interpreter to rapid application development
  * In production environment same code base gets compiled to machine code or bytecode for performance reasons<p>Is it possible? Or is it a stupid idea? <comment><USER2> Actually the different between compiled and interpreted language is very weak. For example, when you compile a C program the result is a code in a machine language and the machine language is "interpreted" by the Control Unit of the processor but if you are running the machine code in a emulator it is actually interpreted by the emulation layer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Although it's not quite what you mean there is Cython - it's a Python extension to Distutils that lets you convert Python code to C & compile it.

We actually use this in the way you describe - using the interpreter as our test bed but compile it via Cython (for code protection and speed reasons) on deployment.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not so sure skipping compilation is going to give you rapid development.

<comment><AUTHOR> During development certainly I can iterate more quickly with interpreted languages than with compiled ones. It improves development time considerably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Common Lisp standard requires implementations to have both interpreter and compiler, but allows some freedom how to do it. Some implementations compile to byte code (I think CLISP does this), and some compile to native code on the fly (SBCL). Haskell and OCaml also have both interpreters and compilers available. So yes, it is quite possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes it is possible. There are countless examples. ghc is one.</comment>


What's your vanity rank? - <AUTHOR> http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2008/09/whats-your-vanity-rank.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to propose another definition of vanity rank: How many consecutive results from Google, starting from the first result, refer to you. I get 21.

<comment><AUTHOR> Propose away!

Here's another: How many hits in the top 10 do you get? I get 5.</comment></comment>


Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/09/open-source-tex.html <comment><USER2> Cool concept - but the last place I'd want to have to avoid adverts is in a text book digital or otherwise! Let's hope their business model remains add free.</comment>


Ask HN: Does everything has to be as-a-service? - <AUTHOR> I get the feeling that every product has to be "SaaS". I wonder if my ovservation is valid and customers expect it. I am aware of the advantages from a customer perspective. Are there still products that ship just an on-prem version and thrive or is the SaaS path somehow unavoidable these days? Thanks for your opinions <comment><USER2> The answer is, of course, "it depends", but let's zoom out for a second.

No one buys software because they like software. People buy software because it's solving a problem. Ideally they are buying the software because it's the most cost effective way to solve the problem given their circumstances. (Just telling a human to go solve a problem for you is often the easiest, but very expensive way)

SaaS as a delivery model has advantages that either help make the solution easier or more cost effective. These can make it a better value than other types of software. For example:

\- there's nothing to install because I access it through a web browser. So getting started is easy

\- there are rarely hardware or software requirements so the Potential audience isn't limited

\- the "state" and data is Usually stored in the cloud, so you can use the software from pretty much anywhere even changing machines and still have access to your data.

To be clear there's are advantages with on premise software as well (data doesn't leave the premises).

The question of what delivery model you should use needs to be entirely framed with what is the problem your customer needs to solve and what is the most cost effective and easy just way for them to solve it

</comment><comment><USER3> I think many executives see cost savings in the SaaS model. Cutting headcount and systems that need to be maintained in-house are a big plus.

Even if it's not the right approach, the points above do make it unavoidable in some organizations, mostly bigger non-tech companies. You can also see this with role combinations, increased developer responsibilities, and reduction in formal training. At least this is what I've seen in my company.</comment>


Mastering Node: Open Source Node.js eBook - <AUTHOR> http://visionmedia.github.com/masteringnode/

<comment><USER2> Funny, I just started a somewhat similar github project covering ZeroMQ (in Ruby) over at:

<http://github.com/andrewvc/learn-ruby-zeromq>

If you're interested in highly concurrent network programming, ZeroMQ's pretty interesting stuff as well (it's not really a message queue, it's super- powerful socket).

It's only been up a few days, but given the dearth of ZeroMQ docs (especially executable ones in Ruby) some here might find it useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Direct link to the PDF so far: [http://github.com/visionmedia/masteringnode/raw/master/book....](http://github.com/visionmedia/masteringnode/raw/master/book.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems a bit hard to follow, right from the outset. Maybe a dumbed down intro chapter or two is in order.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks promising. Be forewarned: this is a pre-alpha book -- not a lot there yet as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER6> Yeah it is very much a WIP, but it's a start. Currently includes roughly 4 complete-ish chapters, the build system etc, but I mean it is free so you cant really go wrong :)

<comment><USER5> Didn't mean to sound like I was being critical! I'm already a fan of this.

<comment><USER6> No worries :) just added epub / mobi :D</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> When I was growing up and first read about computers back in the 80's I was always a bit puzzled by descriptions of programming languages along the lines of "a shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation" - for someone who knows what a programming language is, this is just ridiculous; for someone who doesn't, this does not help.

Our society has changed rapidly in the last 10 to 15 years, technology has made its way to the middle with smartphones, tablets, etc. being ubiquitous, and yet I have to read the same utter nonsense in mainstream newspapers each time there is an article mildly related to computer technology.

"Dennis M. Ritchie, who helped shape the modern digital era by _creating software tools that power things as diverse as search engines like Google and smartphones_ "

Oh, please... seriously? :-(

<comment><USER3> I thought it was a great article to be honest. It laid out clearly in layman's terms what he contributed to the world, their impact, and his legacy. It also gave us a brief but non-intrusive outline of his family situation, which most of the technical bloggers ignored.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. I didn't mean to criticize the article as a whole, just certain phrases, or rather a certain style, that I (personally) find annoying. Besides that I liked the article, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know what he was working on during his last years at Bell Labs ?

</comment><comment><USER5> Prediction: A BSD fan is going to go bonkers over a particular line in this article.</comment>


Utah Dept of Agriculture investigates mysterious seeds sent from China to Tooele - <AUTHOR> https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/utah-department-of-agriculture-investigates-mysterious-seeds-sent-from-china-to-tooele <comment><USER2> There was an article / report a couple years back. It said this type of thing was happening because Amazon started requiring customers to have actually purchased the item to review it.

Now, because it's cheaper to send stuff here than domestically, they send a super cheap, "mislabeled" item, and then go give themselves 5 stars. Not sure how they pick the destination address</comment>


Real-time collaborative drawing: Nodejs, Socket.io & Paper.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.byrichardpowell.co.uk/post/23958785278/fun-with-nodejs-socketio-paperjs#ux

<comment><USER2> Handy learning explain - things I've been meaning to play with for ages.

</comment><comment><USER3> I user tested this awesome piece of work. Had so much fun.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great article using new tech, definitely recommend!

</comment><comment><USER5> Great article!</comment>


What are algorithms? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/08/economist-explains-24 <comment><AUTHOR> I particularly like the Economist's "explains" section, where they unpack words/phenomenon that experts in the field take for granted in terms that a layman can understand.

This is their take on algorithms:

> An algorithm is, essentially, a brainless way of doing clever things. It is > a set of precise steps that need no great mental effort to follow but which, > if obeyed exactly and mechanically, will lead to some desirable outcome.</comment>


Kytephone (YC W12) lets parents monitor and schedule their teen's phone usage - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/kytephone-the-yc-startup-making-smartphones-kid-safe-now-helps-parents-monitor-teens-smartphone-usage-with-kytetime/

<comment><USER2> Totally needed this. Great job guys!</comment>


The fastest NetHack death: losing without ever taking control of the character - <AUTHOR> http://tasvideos.org/3080S.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The speedrun submitter goes into more detail, but here's the gist:

 _" In the game itself, a female Tourist comes into the dungeon, finds a shiny artifact silver saber (Grayswandir) on the stairs she entered by (probably the most unlikely thing to manipulate in the run), picks it up (the default options pick up all items you come across), takes damage from touching the artifact (a 1 in 4 chance for an unintelligent crossaligned artifact like the lawful Grayswandir for a neutral Tourist; there are no intelligent artifacts capable of spawning there), and dies from the damage (around a 52% chance for a starting Tourist due to their low starting hitpoints, much lower or even zero for other characters)."_</comment>


Running Kubernetes Example on CoreOS, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://coreos.com/blog/running-kubernetes-example-on-CoreOS-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Kubernetes and CoreOS looks like a pretty good strategy for deploying in a cloud env. I'd be interested to see how this might work with the Fleet strategy that is part of CoreOS.

<comment><USER3> fleet is a cluster-level init system with just enough of a scheduler to handle the fault tolerance of higher-level components (i.e. log aggregation, scheduling, etc). In this case, Kubernetes can be thought of as an application-specific scheduler, as it nontrivially places containers in a cluster. Kubernetes can schedule its containers through fleet's APIs and trust fleet to track the overall state of the cluster.

<comment><USER4> Would that be valuable though? As described now, it appears that kubernetes just replaced fleet, and seems to do work well. What would be arguments to keep fleet under the hood?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kubernetes is exactly what I've been needing to ease our deployments; combining CoreOS and Kubernetes looks like a dream come true!

<comment><USER6> I agree, this seems like it has very strong potential. We are going to give it a whirl for sure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this ingredient will change how a big part of the cloud interoperability problem can be approached. Once you only have to manage a few, relatively static set of VMs, and let kubernetes provide both the API and the scheduler for actually running services, it will become easier to just run your stuff on aws, azure and gce.

<comment><USER8> CoreOS brings to the table the ability to run on bare metal in a manner such that is just as easy to update the underlying OS on metal as it is to re- provision an updated VM in cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kubernetes will be great for organizing my related containers. It's great to see workflows for running on other platforms besides GCE. I look forward to the rest of the articles in this series.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool! the next step would be to make it part of a CoreOS image so that you can roll out kubernetes updates the CoreOS way.

I wonder if there is an easy way to maintain a customized image of CoreOS.

<comment><USER10> For the next post I'm thinking about using containers and cloud-config to set up all the Kubernetes components. That would make it easy to do everything the "CoreOS" way.

<comment><USER11> And please don't forget volume persistency... and maybe sharing those across a couple of containers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might get me to split up my containers better, they're getting a little pudgy. Looking forward to part 2 for more in-depth examples with multiple containers.</comment>


Best Blogging Platform for Non-Technical Person?  - <AUTHOR>

My wife needs to put her interior design portfolio on the web. I could do it for her, but I'd much rather she were self-sufficient. She's not much for solving technical problems, but she's otherwise adept at using CAD, 3D Max, and the tools of her trade.<p>She has a lot of time on her hands, as she recently graduated, so I'd like this to be as much a learning project as a way to get her portfolio out there. <comment><USER2> Although a site like SuperUser or Quora ([http://www.quora.com/What-is-the- best-blogging-software-out-...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best- blogging-software-out-there)) might be better suited for this question, I'll weigh in and say your wife should try Squarespace.com and WordPress.com and see which one better suits her liking. If WordPress feels more right, then she has a plethora of options before her (from Tumblr to self-hosted WordPress). If Squarespace feels better, she should just stick with that.</comment>


Only Two Companies Can Compete with iPad: Amazon & Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/only_two_companies_can_compete_with_ipad_amazon_microsoft/ <comment><USER2> I have no idea what's going to happen—my crystal ball broke last week—but I think this article contains a few interesting points. If Microsoft doesn't try to copy Apple and tries to build something using its living room technology as a starting point, it could expand in very interesting ways.

And regarding HP, I think it speaks quite well of HP that, unlike RIM, they seem to know how to STFU. I haven't heard much abuot their tablet, which is a good thing. It means they might be busy, you know, working on it, and not busy making promises about what they _will_ do that renders everything they _actually_ do seem underwhelming. (They _did_ say webOS apps would run on HP desktop and laptop computers, which sounds insane, but despite that slo-mo car crash in the making, HP still has some credibility.)</comment>


Ask HN: Can employers own my work for a year after I stop working (internship)? - <AUTHOR> I just got an offer from a very large tech company (would prefer not to say which). There's a clause in the contract that says for a year after the internship ends, if I work on anything I have to send them written notice and evidence that the IP belongs to me.
Is this enforceable under California law? Would I be justified in asking them to remove this requirement?
I think the way it's written, it could even include work I do for class... <comment><USER2> From a legal point of view, the commenters below address some of the issues which obtain under these circumstances. But as a non-employed intern you are not going to be able to engage in substantive negotiations with them about the terms of a non-compete/trade secrets clause. You are not a headhunted executive, your negotiation position is different. There is great asymmetry in power in your negotiation. All you can do is sign, if you want this position. If an issue comes up later--if they even remember you six months after you leave, 18 months from now--deal with it then. Or have your new employer deal with it.

Companies are bending over backwards to claim that interns are not employees when in most cases they very much are, except for the payment of wages. It will be interesting to see how the "work for hire" copyright doctrine applies when on the one hand the intern-employing company says, "these guys just hang around, the school sends them, they're not employees" and on the other, "we are entitled to the code, processes and procedures they came up with during their time here."

There was an article a few months ago posted in HN about why it's worth it to take the risk in signing boilerplate. There are very few exceptions--one current dispute is the Hoefler/Frere Jones partnership dispute; one side maintains that an employment agreement that was signed by one of the partners is dispositive of their relationship.

Ultimately, six or twelve strangers (they call them 'jurors') will be dragged in off the street and asked to give their group opinion on the facts.

Your internship is very unlikely to require the intervention of these strangers, so don't worry. Try to learn everything you can.

<comment><USER3> Under US law if the interns aren't getting paid then they can't produce IP for the company, because the company is not allowed to directly benefit from unpaid interns.

Leaving a legal trail showing how your company is benefiting from the work of unpaid interns is pants on head retarded.

<comment><USER4> He never said it was an unpaid position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a paid internship, right?

I would be wary. The law already protects them if you use their IP. This is just bad, controlling company culture.

Please name and shame, if the company is that big they have sent a lot of these contracts out.

This isn't a noncompete, which would almost certainly not hold up, it's a shitty sentence designed to make you think it's a noncompete.

The reason a noncompete wouldn't work is that they aren't giving you anything in return. Your wages are paid for the work you put in, if they want a noncompete they will have to provide valuable consideration for it (a payment when you leave, stock, etc) and in many states there are significant limits to how much they can limit you.

</comment><comment><USER6> IANAL but this is not a non-compete. This is simply a request/requirement for you to proactively inform them of what you're working on after you leave for a year.

Like most contracts, the question you should be asking is what happens if you breach the contract?

Well, if you're stealing IP, then they can come after you.

But they already can.

So, like pseingati said - go, learn, enjoy. Don't worry about the contracts, just be a good person and don't steal IP. They're paying you to work for them, and they own the things you produce while working for them.

If they're NOT paying you, as an intern, well, go work for them, then go talk to an employment attorney, because I think they have to.

<comment><USER7> > IANAL but this is not a non-compete.

It seems to be a kind of non-compete, except it doesn't limit the exclusion to _just_ competition, it effectively extends it to any kind of work that includes any other company's trade secrets.

> Like most contracts, the question you should be asking is what happens if > you breach the contract?

Sure...

> Well, if you're stealing IP, then they can come after you.

 _If_ the contract is enforceable, they can come after you for breach for failure to notify them _even_ _if_ no IP is "stolen", and if they can establish that the notification requirement was part of what they were paying you for, they could recover some of what they paid you even if you didn't do any harm besides failing to uphold your part of the bargain on notification.

I _suspect_ , though, that the clause would be limited in its enforceabilit, if its even enforceable at all. But, IANAL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thats not bad... 1 year. I've seen 2-3 even 5 year non-competes.

If they are paying to make their product better not learn how to make a competing product. This is pretty standard.

However California is a "Right To Work" state and they can't keep you from working for a competitor. However, the next company you work for would also be liable if your stole IP from company 1. Just FYI... Knowledge of the Subject Matter OK... Specific Knowledge and Details of Products and Procedures Not OK.

</comment><comment><USER9> Issue #1 - It could be a problem for your next employer, especially if your former employer sends them a legal threat letter.

Issue #2 - If it's a personal project, don't publish it until after you've stopped working there for a year.

However, given that it's a large corporation, it's probably a boilerplate contract and you aren't going to get anywhere if you try to negotiate that point.

</comment><comment><USER10> Your next employer will probably ask you something like "Are you under any non-compete or similar agreement?" You will either have to lie to them or convince them that reporting what you're workin on is not a violation of their security policies etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Would I be justified in asking them to remove this requirement?

Absolutely. Just cross out the line in the contract, initial it, and ask them to initial it as well. The worst they can do is deny your request to modify the contract. But it would be a totally normal thing to try.

</comment><comment><USER12> These noncompetes are pretty standard, although they usually relate only to competing software / similar industries you may work on.

I once had an issue with one being too broad and asked for clarification and reduction of scope, they were happy to comply. They're mostly boilerplate and most places won't care / do anything with them, its usually just cover your ass stuff should some employee decide to rip-off their code base and sell it.

A year does seem a bit steep, not sure how it works there but here in oceania its usually around 6 months and limited by industry/market.

I'd also ask for them to remove the part about having to confirm IP ownership on everything you work on, its quite honestly none of their damn business.

</comment><comment><USER13> Stop thinking like a techie. Start thinking like a business-person. As a business-person, do you think this clause is fair?</comment>


EnviroMission Plans Massive Solar Updraft Towers for Arizona - <AUTHOR> http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/01/06/enviromission-plans-massive-solar-updraft-towers-for-arizona/ <comment><USER2> These towers are not very land-efficient compared to solar farms, but they are very cheap to build. So it seems strange to build them in the US instead of a large third-world nation.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower#History>

<comment><USER3> Getting the power to the US from a large third world nation is probably not as cheap as easy as building them in the US. There is also lots of land in Arizona that isn't useful for very many things.

<comment><USER2> I wasn't suggesting that we should route the power to the US from the third world. I was saying third-world nations should build these plants, and the US should build other kinds.

<comment><USER4> They're still a helluva lot more expensive than coal-powered plants, which is what the third world is actually building.

<comment><USER2> Which is where carbon-trading comes in. We give third-world nations extra money so they can build these instead of coal plants. They give us their carbon credit so we can continue to drive stretch Hummers. Win-win!

Except for the polar bears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool, both tech-wise and for Arizona (where I live, and more local jobs == a good thing).

I want to put solar panels on our roof (different tech, same motivations) and my wife is just about talked into it. Most things that help the local economy and help people be more self reliant are good things.</comment>


Voicemail for Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/titanous/tropo-voicemail

<comment><USER2> Say what you will about programming by gluing things together, but the fact that "answering the phone" and "doing voice recognition" are services that I can just use is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER3> And a little light bulb just went off over my head. Now I know why patio11 is working on a Twillio app. There are so many cool things that could be done with this.

<comment><USER4> I think most of the "trying Twilio out" apps published barely scratch the surface of the potential, even though many are cool. (I did one, too: time- aware phone secretary, which has totally resolved my "My family does not understand that 3:30 AM Japan time is a bad time to call for a chat" problem.)

Because everything is on your web server, you can seamlessly move data between the phone and an arbitrarily complex web interface. I think that basic pattern allows multiple disruptive applications for any industry you care to name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are the big differences between Twilio and Tropo?

<comment><USER6> I'm the developer evangelist for Tropo. Here's a rundown of the big differences between Tropo and Twilio.

Tropo is 100% free for developers. No credits, no limits on minutes, no ads played to you or your callers. You even get your own phone number. You decide when you're ready for production and when you're ready to start paying.

Once you're in production, Tropo's SMS and toll free minutes are cheaper. Transcription is free with Tropo. Twilio's phone numbers are cheaper by a couple of dollars each. If you're going to have less than 150 minutes per month of usage or less than 200 text messages in a month, you'll save about a buck a month using Twilio.

Tropo has speech recognition. Instead of just "push 1 for this, push 2 for that" your callers can talk to your application.

Tropo is international. We have numbers in 30 countries, speech recognition and text to speech in 8 languages, and can send SMS worldwide. More languages and countries are coming.

Tropo is a unified API. No need for one app for voice, another for SMS and a third for conferencing. A single application can do all of that. The code you use to say something over the phone can also respond via SMS, IM, and Twitter.

Tropo is more than just phones. As mentioned above, we do all the major IM networks and Twitter too. No need to code to different APIs. Click a button and you have a Jabber bot. Or a Twitter bot. Or AIM. You get the idea.

Tropo's SMS supports short codes. If you want a shortcode for your application, let us know and we'll help you out with that.

Tropo offers a web services model where we post information about a call to your server and you reply with what you want us to do with the call. We also offer a scripting model where we've extended popular web scripting languages with built-in functions for communications. You run your code on our server for reduced latency.

Twilio can do some nifty things while you're in a call. They give you some REST apis you can hit to control sessions in progress. Voxeo's enterprise products have offered that for years, but it hasn't made it into Tropo yet.

Tropo lets you call your app via SIP and Skype. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that allows you to buy a number from any SIP provider and connect it to your application. It also allows you to forward your SIP PBX over to your application under certain conditions. Maybe you have an Asterisk box running your business. During off hours, forward to Tropo so your application can answer calls and give information to your callers.

Twilio lets you provision new numbers programatically. Tropo doesn't do that yet, but it's coming soon.

Tropo is built and hosted by telephony experts using the same platforms that power some of the largest companies in the world. Tropo is a product of Voxeo, a company that's been building voice platforms for over 10 years. We have data centers around the world that are optimized for voice. Your voice application isn't sharing space on an EC2 instance with somebody's web server.

Twilio's documentation is better. We're working on it, and in the meantime, our 24x7 support will answer your questions quickly. In most cases in less than an hour.

I'm sure that the Twilio folks have some additional thoughts on how they're different than Tropo. Instead of speaking for them too much, I'll let them reply.

<comment><USER7> Hi, I don't speak for Twilio but as a developer I've used their system quite a bit in the past and enjoyed it lots. Haven't yet used Tropo, but I think it's really interesting. Sorry for necroposting, but I just found this via search.

Twilio isn't indefinitely free for developing like Tropo, but they do give you $30 credit when you sign up, which goes a long way towards pre-production testing. Twilio can do international outbound calls, but as you say they don't yet have international inbound.

Twilio and Tropo both have a REST API. The main difference here is that you reply to Twilio with XML and Tropo uses JSON. Although proprietary, either one is easier to use than VoiceXML IMO.

Tropo has an amazing number of nice voices you can use to read off text to the caller. Twilio has just "male" and "female", last time I checked. On the other hand, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see where Tropo could play an MP3 to the caller, whereas there are lots of ways to play recorded music or messages to the caller with Twilio. As far as recording, you have to give Tropo a place to send recordings, whereas Twilio will store the recordings for you. Twilio also has tons of API methods to access data, like list all your recordings, call logs, and so on. I don't see that for Tropo.

Hmm, this is getting long. I think a comparison blog post is in order. I love the fact that there are at least two smart, highly motivated companies in this space. I hope Twilio and Tropo push each other to greatness.

<comment><USER6> To play an audio file in Tropo, just use the URL inside of your say() command. We'll recognize it automatically and do the right thing.

And you can store the recordings on Tropo -- your Tropo app space has FTP and WebDAV credentials, so you can tell your app to FTP it to Tropo's webhosting. We don't want to store your recording forever, but fell free to use it for short-term recordings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What advantage does this have over Google Voice, apart from GV's limited regional availability?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm Canadian, so that's a major reason why I wrote it. The other advantage is that you can do whatever you want when it comes to processing. For example you could send the recording via MMS to your phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was pretty impressed when my MagicJack sent me my phone message to my email, just audio though, no transcription.

<comment><USER10> Though the technology is impressive, I'm disappointed it's taken so long for it to reach the mainstream. Asterisk has been able to do this kind of thing forever, and I had a fax modem in the mid 90s that had voice capabilities and a programmable voicemail app included.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say it's taken this time to hit the mainstream. It's just experiencing a second wave of popularity. VoiceXML and it's predecessors were all the rage in the late 90s among the web developer crowd. Most of the automate phone systems you call at larger companies are VoiceXML backed.

One thing that has changed in recent past is that the cost has come down significantly, making voice apps accessible to smaller developers and hobbyists.

For those that want to use Asterisk and still take advantage of a web-centric programming model. Take a look at Adhearsion. It's an open source Ruby framework for writing Asterisk apps. Voxeo is a current sponsor of the project. <http://adhearsion.com/>

We do plan on implementing the Adhearsion API on Tropo, allowing someone to build a portable app that runs either on their own Asterisk server or on the Tropo cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a similar service/workaround that could be used in Europe? Tropo doesn't work in Europe, does it?

<comment><USER6> As noted by others, Tropo works worldwide. We've got numbers in 30 countries and 8 different European languages for text to speech. If you want a number in a place we don't list, let us know and we'll see what we can do.

<comment><USER12> Any plans for Asia?

<comment><USER6> We plan worldwide domination. :)

We already offer phone numbers in Japan. Some Asian countries don't allow voip services to operate or have extremely high costs. So it depends on where in Asia you're looking. From your Twitter profile, looks like you're in Singapore. We can get you a number there but they are fairly expensive. Feel free to send an email to Tropo sales or support and we can figure it out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rate my startup: Adore.ly - <AUTHOR> http://www.adore.ly

<comment><USER3> You need to get rid of this error: [https://img.skitch.com/20110209-rtu2pqwq6kqjqrdeuf34y6p2ep.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20110209-rtu2pqwq6kqjqrdeuf34y6p2ep.jpg)

I like the idea. The execution was well done. Clean, simple, easy. Your initial landing / signup page needs some work. You did a good job of instilling trust, but I didn't know what your service did. This will have a negative impact on signups.

1) Make a video introduction. Do some grass roots stuff like sponsoring a rose exchange at a few local schools (might be a bit late for Valentines day now). Write a press release _today_ \- this is newsworthy with the proximity to Valentines day and newsies are struggling for feelgood stories. Get some testimonials. Find out when someone gets married after using your service and do something huge. Take out some Facebook ads. Do some in-game sponsorships with facebook games.

2) Users. Your product is built around users. Your product balances on trust and if you monetize too early, you won't stand a chance of being trusted. Switch when marketing is no longer a problem and something you do to continue to push the product.

3) In order: Trust, scaling technology, competing services from people with money, the "one off" usage case.

4) The design is well done. You start building trust on the first page. Inside of the app, your product is easy to understand. It's fun. I didn't like the error message above. The number of modal popups got annoying fast. There was nothing to do "after" I sent my note.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points!!!

1) WIP - we're only 2 devs and one business guy! 2) Agreed - its all about the users. 3) Good points, we agree with this - we just wanted to see if there are valid opposing viewpoints. 4) We'll fix the error message and figure out what to do after you send the adore. Thanks for bringing this to our attn!

<comment><USER3> "we're only 2 devs and one business guy!"

You're in Waterloo? I'm local. If you'd like to chat x@y where: x = rob.brown and y = gmail.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It started as an app for the University of Waterloo Facebook hackathon but it's taken off since then. We launched 4 days ago. We have seen decent growth. So what is it?

Adore.ly lets you adore a friend on your friendlist and your identity stays anonymous unless they adore you back.

We're looking for feedback on everything from interface, to troll and creep protection. Our questions are:

1) How do we keep growing? Is it launching features, or focussing on promotional stuff? 2) Do we focus on users or focus on monetizing? When do the priorities switch? 3) What are the challenges you think we face? 4) What do you like about the app? What don't you like?

Thanks guys for your feedback.

<comment><USER4> \- Love love the basic idea.

\- Focus on promotion.

\- Get users, don't monetize until you're at least a year in.

\- Don't launch features. Make your existing feature better (by keeping the creeps out, increasing its viral factor etc, all the backend stuff that's actually really hard, versus adding comments and likes, which is easy.)

\- You can slowly add little interactions, but stay away from commenting, private messages etc for a loooong time, that's not where your value is.

\- Again, don't add "standard" features like comments, profile pictures etc, since that will just dilute your positioning.

<comment><USER5> "increasing its viral factor" Care to recommend a few?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember an email version of this app about 10 years ago - I loved it for a bit surreptitious flirting at school!

The app looks really great and the signup process is straightforward with clear CTAs. Alas the FB integration makes it rather slow (maybe I have too many friends? ;). It seems to loads friends each time I open the page - <USER2> this not be cached? It took me a moment to realise the grey box was a friend selector; it might help to make it white and give it focus on page load. It couldn't seem to grab my girlfriend's email address and asked me to type it in (making me wonder why integrate with FB at all).

There's no way for me to share content on either FB or Twitter. I'd be happy to post to my wall (and tweet) that "I just adored someone with adore.ly".

If you're trying to build up UGC then I'd happily rate a few anonymous adores and I'd be interested to see the wittiest/cutest ones.

For user retention, consider email updates: 1. thank you for signing up, 2. thank you for sending your first adore, 3. it's been a few days, time to send another adore? And for the receiver: sending a second (and third) email a week or two later if they haven't clicked through to the site. The option to opt- out of emails is important but the granularity of notifications settings looks good. I also hope you have a Valentine's day promotion lined up!

I'd forget about making money until you have say ten thousand users and I'd remove the limit of three adores until then too. Then I'd limit adores (to 5) and users could unlock more adores using a platform like SuperRewards or FB credits.

If my girlfriend 'adores' me back then I'll get back with what happens...

<comment><USER5> Hey,

Initially, we had a "wall posting" feature. User signs up via facebook and it will give them an option to post on their wall. However, I realized that if we require wall posting permission right up the front, that would really put off a lot of people. You see facebook doesn't allow us to change permission half way and this is one of the drawbacks of the facebook API (even if you like it, you can't force a permission change).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love it, especially the naturally viral nature. Two thoughts:

1\. These things need to expire - or, I need to be emailed and asked to come back and renew them periodically. I don't want this popping up 2 years from now and killing my marriage.

2\. Make it easier to understand that it's okay to adore many people.

Bonus thought: Might want to warn people that adoring friends with a very small number of facebook friends is DANGEROUS.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Good idea, we have some other ideas on what to do with adores that just "sit" there. I agree that something needs to be done with them.

2) True - a big counter perhaps.

Bonus: aww, that's the whole fun :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea. One thing I found confusing at first was the explanation of how the process works. I had trouble understanding how the system would keep my adoration private while at the same time providing a meaningful way for the other person to adore me back. It made more sense after reading the "How does Adore.ly work?" and seeing that the other person is simply prompted to then "adore" people from their list of friends, and then triggering only if you were one of the "adored". Take that observation with a grain of salt, however. I've never really gotten into Facebook applications.

Also, I'd agree with Peter's advice that you simplify the home page further. I personally wouldn't put the "No wall posts", "Troll and Creep Proof" on the front page. It seems to me you'd be inviting objections that weren't present in the first place more often than not. If the Hacker News crowd was the target audience, it would probably be different.

Great work and good luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> I feel like I've seen this idea before, recently. Did you used to have a video?

Maybe I'm just mixing up startups though

<comment><USER10> Not your imagination.

Posted four days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2179649>

Of course, eCrush, crushlink, and many others did this years ago: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_matching>

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you really think we could push out an app like this in 4 days? Our application has FB integration, and is significantly more complicated than Secretpoke, which is essentially just a mailbot from what I can gather in the front-end. I'm sorry, but it requires SIGNIFICANT imagination to map the social graph to who you like and adore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Counterpoint to a lot of folks here: I don't like the idea.

This sort of thing has been around for a very very long time, mainly as a way of harvesting email addresses to spam. I remember receiving an email "crush" that is exactly this as early as 1999.

How is this different at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are misunderstanding the concept. We don't want to spam you at all. Our goal is to improve matchmaking by bringing in the social graph. We are talking friend-to-friend matchmaking here. Its anonymous and there is a degree of trust between mutual friends. That wasn't there in 1999. There was only web + email. There was no social graph.

<comment><USER11> Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_ results. (For an example close at hand, I believe that I did an awful lot of growing up by confronting fears of rejection and learning to _act_ on an attraction.)

Me responding to your points: Of course there was a social graph, it just wasn't reified in a database. Here's how it worked: You got an email saying someone had a crush on you. Curious to see who it was, you then entered all your friends & classmates email addresses in to see if there was a match. Not a whit of difference in what's actually happening; you've just made it shinier and removed some of the manual data entry.

The "Step 3: ??? that comes before Step 4: profit" was, of course, that all your friends now received "someone has a crush on you!" emails too, and the marketer running the site had a nice fat verified mailing list to sell to unsolicited bulk email operations.

Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product.

<comment><USER12> _Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product._

That is a criticism not only of this start-up but all other start-ups where you are not paying a subscription fee. _If you are not paying then you are not the customer, you are a part of the product._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice, but is it wise to put your startup in Libya's hands?

<comment><USER5> I agree.

I wanted to buy adore.me or adore.com

As you can probably guess, none of that was within my financial reach lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The design and UX is really nice. The launching page is also great especially with those promises about privacy etc.

Couple of issues: 1\. "blockup popper", intentional? 2\. Why do I need to submit the adore's email? I don't buy the explanation about traffic, it should work without it.

I don't really see the reason why somebody would use (or keep using) this service, there should be some deeper purpose and the adores would just act as easy actionables which would initially attract users and keep users active.

Edit: I read the "how does adore.ly work" and it makes more sense! You should explain this earlier. Well, I see it's there put I didn't get it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you clarify what you mean regarding traffic explanation? I didn't get that part. Your other points are very valid, and we are working on features to make people come back (multiple times a day) to our service.

Glad "how does adore.ly work" clarified matters, we will try to show that more prominently!

Thanks so much!

<comment><USER14> I meant the part where it says 'Due to traffic, we need your friends email.' I don't want to give it.

<comment><USER5> We are trying to work around that. Facebook DOES NOT allow us to obtain your friend's email (without them explicitly agreeing).

<comment><USER14> Why do you need it in the first place? I'd believe there's way to make it work without the email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent, I love the basic idea (just read it, didn't use it).

You should work on simplifying the homepage further, there's probably still too much stuff in there. The "how it works" should perhaps be up front, not behind a click.

<comment><USER15> That said, it's already _really good_

<comment><USER16> Yes, but remove the focus from what you _don't do_ (post on your wall, reveal your identity, etc) and focus on what you will do. Put the tag line about what adorly does above the privacy stuff at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> Through our user testing, we found that users have a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to using FB apps. It's important to build that trust with them.

I agree with what you're trying to say - maybe we will do both? Then content size becomes an issue though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't have facebook so sadly cannot play, my girlfriend does but I don't see any upside is showing this to her :)

from reading how it works, it seems that it might be a good idea to offer some hints to bias the match, possibly with location or something that doesn't identify you but hints at you. 'Someone in your state adores you...' that kind of thing. Find something in common, analyze 'likes' for example. 'Someone who also liked Twilight adores you...'

</comment><comment><USER18> Cool, I've always thought this would be a good idea.

Do you ask for the adoree's email because you don't get permission to send them facebook messages? That part seems sketchy / makes it much less useful in the case where you don't know their email.

Also, a hover with full name on each friend would be very useful, to e.g. distinguish between every "Ben" with an obscure artsy picture.

I like "blockup popper".

<comment><AUTHOR> facebook messages don't work because facebook doesn't allow applications to send anonymous messages. The only scalable way is really through email (maybe SMS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow. This is nice and great timing for Valentine's day. The concept is very well done. Agree with RBr, trust is absolutely required.

Why do you need friend list data for the FB login?

<comment><USER14> It's needed so you can adore your friends. You can't do anything on the site without the friend list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't work out where I turn off my popup blocker (assuming that's what you mean). Why can't you just use an absolutely positioned div or a new page?

</comment><comment><USER21> If this site takes off, I'm going to be extremely annoyed because I had this same idea a few months ago but didn't implement it. I'm an idiot.

<comment><USER6> The model has been around for a while - you should give it a go! Your execution will be different and could be more successful. You'll learn a ton in the process too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> really interesting..and nicely designed.. good luck with your startup! keep an eye out for competition though..cuz theres a lot!

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd be more worried if there wasn't competition than if there is!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The "How does it work button"... doesn't work...

JS Console: "Uncaught ReferenceError: FB is not defined"

Disconnect is breaking your page before I even get a chance to give it a chance.

<comment><USER19> Are you sure you don't have facebook blocker? I had to turn off that Safari extension in order for this site to work.

<comment><USER23> That's what Disconnect does. I think there's a bigger problem if using Disconnect breaks all javascript on your website though. Especially if it breaks the piece of text that is supposed to convince me to turn it off. Additionally, I don't know my crushes/adores' email address...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Revenue Ideas for Hacker Stay at Home Mom's - <AUTHOR>

Ok, she's not a hacker, but I am.  This is an anonymous account, due to the subject matter.
My Ex lives away from me, with my children.  She has no formal education she can put to use, no job at the moment, has some knowledge of some random topics, and is eager to start generating some income.  She can obviously go to school for something... but, her goal is to work from home, so she can spend the days raising our kids, and the evenings generating income.  Her technical capabilities are minimal, but mine are great.
My only ideas at the moment are:
- Marketing.  Blogging/Creating a site about something she is passionate about.  Generating income on content via Affiliate Marketing or Search.
- Teaching.  Holding classes in the evening about a specialized topic.  She knows a few subjects in depth, and if she was to focus on them, I believe she'd be able to start teaching them.
That's all I have.  The reason I posted this on here is that I'm a hacker by trade.  I've been involved in a couple startups, and have the knowledge to design/build/deploy websites/applications quickly.  I can support my family with the income I currently have, however, she wants the piece of mind that she's generating her own income (even though I'm going to play a big role in getting her bootstrapped and teaching her everything I know).
Suggestions/Ideas welcome! <comment><USER2> -babysitting service -be an aws mechanica turk -submit content to any of the content farms

does she have any hobbies or interests she can possibly build a product/business idea from?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great options. Yes, there are some possible brick-and-mortar ideas she could possibly run with. I'm going to research that avenue a bit more. Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


Course: The Google Technology Stack - <AUTHOR> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/lecture-course-the-google-technology-stack/

<comment><USER2> My guess is that this stack is getting out-dated, or at least improved vastly as Google tries to do index updates in near real-time. The major problem with map-reduce is that the results aren't in real time (e.g. you collect data and then you run analytics on this data), running the analytics can take a lot of time depending on the data set and the hardware in play. Calculating the PageRank is done via map-reduce and this task can take an awful long time, since the data set is huge. This has resulted in slow index updates. I don't know how Google has solved this problem, my guess is that they have thrown an awful amount of hardware at the problem or have improved their stack.

What's a better way to do it? I think it's creating an algorithm that can be updated in real time and where you don't have to re-calculate the rank for every page on each update. Such an algorithm would require a very different stack than Google currently uses and my guess that their architecture will move into this direction as they try to make their search real-time (which from what I have read and experienced they are trying to do).

<comment><USER3> For the PageRank part, I'd expect the previous solution to make a great seed to iteratively solve on the updated dataset.

I've seen some ideas about incremental mapreduce batted around and apparently implemented: <http://www.google.com/search?q=incremental+mapreduce>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's great that people are looking at Google's tech as a source of teaching material. But other big companies have equally interesting tech, some have been around longer...yet it can be very hard to learn anything about what they do...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The FriendFeed Room for the course: <http://friendfeed.com/lecture-course-on- the-google-techno></comment>


Web Startup Ideas that Failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/07/10-web-ideas-that-failed.html

<comment><USER2> There are hundreds of recent failures in start-ups, I think there is no much to learn from the 10 recent failures in the post. I would be better to know examples of those that are going to succeed.</comment>


Show HN: SoupNextDoor - <AUTHOR>

We're about to start promoting our coming soon landing pages and wanted to get some feedback from the HN community first.
http://soupnextdoor.com - Marketplace for dinner parties
We're running a competition about where our launch will be. This will give us something to promote other than the fact that we're coming soon and hopefully get some conversation started.
We're looking for feedback across the board. UI, color scheme, browser compatibility issues, problems with our idea, marketing ideas, issues with how we've worded things, etc
We've left Django in debug mode for the time being so if you get any errors give us as much detail as you can. If you want, you can email screenshots me. (Email in my profile)
If you want to sign up to test it, just use a clearly fake account and I'll delete it if it makes it through.
Thanks!
[Edit] I think HN is broken right now. As soon as I post, it disappears. ed209, I did get your feedback. Thanks. I deleted the old thread to repost in an attempt to get it to work. Sorry for the confusion. <comment><AUTHOR> ed209's Feedback.

I haven't thought much about the concept, so I won't comment on that. Regarding the design, it doesn't really say 'dinner party' to me.

A good way to start is to look at google images for 'dinner party' [http://www.google.de/search?q=dinner+party&hl=en&biw...](http://www.google.de/search?q=dinner+party&hl=en&biw..).

• I would have 4 or 6 larger dinner party images as a background

• I would change the tag line from "Eat with your neighbors!" to something more like "Make great friends right next door" - so sell the outcome, not the literal act

• colours are not bad, just think food

• this is actually your selling point "meet great people, eat amazing food, and you'll always have a lot of fun"

<comment><USER2> I'd agree with the call for pictures. Either something rather neutral and abstract (50s style silhouettes and line drawing) or some actual images – preferably not just middle-class white people (social networks also need upper-class hipsters…).

Also, I think it's mandatory to mention the word "foodie" at least once.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We agree about the pics and had been toying with the idea a little. We're working now on a way to integrate some into the landing page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The "next door" bit folds some interesting hits into your Google results.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm almost scared to ask what you're finding. My searches aren't really returning anything too off topic as long as the word "soup" is also in there.

<comment><USER3> Google updates a bit more quickly so the "interesting" results are below things like this thread. Others...well.

<http://i.imgur.com/Ne8bq.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic. Thanks for the heads up. lol</comment></comment></comment></comment>