AP Style alert: Don't capitalize internet and web any more - <AUTHOR> http://www.poynter.org/2016/ap-style-change-alert-dont-capitalize-internet-and-web-any-more/404664/ <comment><USER2> I take a little issue with the article's quoted claim that "capital letters are speed bumps for the eyes when reading. They should be eliminated where possible." Says who? Capital letters appear all over, for a variety of reasons, and it doesn't cause any issues. Not to mention languages like German which capitalize way more than English.

<comment><USER3> > Not to mention languages like German which capitalize way more than English.

And as everyone knows, Germans drive like crazy on their Autobahns, so they're clearly not the type of people who would willingly put speed bumps into their sentences. Therefore, capital letters don't work like speed bumps at all. My logic is bulletproof, case closed!

<comment><USER4> This myth may have been true 30 years ago, but if you go on any Autobahn today, you will find there's at most 5km, if at all, of unrestricted sections. Germany is famous for its forest of street signs and speed restrictions on roads are very popular with the administration. There's often config like UNRESTRICTED -> 100km/h -> 80km/h -> 60km/h -> 100km/h. Or the worst: 70km/h -> 100km/h for maybe 150 meters -> 70km/h again. Arguably the 100km/h section could be replaced with no signs aka still 70km/h. But, street signs are popular in Germany and sometimes I have the impression somebody gains by the number of signs posted. Yeah, so no unrestricted autobahns, really.

I've found it more relaxed to drive at a constant 120km/h in the Netherlands. No braking and accelerating all the time.

<comment><USER5> Japan has a similar system. Thankfully, speed limits are rarely enforced on highways, and hidden cameras aren't allowed.

<comment><USER4> I didn't know Japan had limitless highways.

<comment><USER6> They don't, and most japanese roads (including highways) have ridiculously low speed limits[0], but as rangibaby notes the speed limits are uncommonly enforced, nobody respects them

[0] default 60km/h[1] for undivided inter-urban roads though it's common to get a 50 or even 40km/h speed limits, the default highway speed limit is 100km/h[2] but it's commonly lower than that, and I've seen limits as low as 70km/h on highways, keep in mind that all highways are toll roads and they're expensive as hell (entry fee of ~¥200 plus ~¥25/km[3], Hokkaido has a special tourists rental ETC[4], Honshu does not)

[1] under 40mph

[2] 62mph

[3] ~¥40/mi

[4] from ¥1800/day for 2 days to ¥800/day for 2 weeks or more, unlimited travel. With regular ETC, going from Sapporo to its airport (New Chitose) is ¥1400.

<comment><USER4> But I've heard very good things about Japan's bullet trains, so I'd guess there's lees need for highways.

In Europe only France seems to have high speed train that actually goes at high speeds. German ICE is chugging along in first gear all the time except for short stretches but those are are very few and between.

I once took Cologne to Amsterdam with ICE and it took more than 3 hours, which defeats the point of a fast train.

<comment><USER5> JR built Shinkansen-only tracks that have their own stations and no level crossings, which means they are essentially going their full speed the entire journey.

Driving is still popular here.

A) It's fun, there is a lot of beautiful scenery to admire and highway service areas have restaurants where you can eat some local food or buy souvenirs from that area.

B) It's cheaper to go by car once you have four people, even with highway fees and gas (most journeys in Japan aren't that long in terms of actual distance traveled, and normal cars are legally mandated to have very good fuel efficiency).

TBH my favorite way to travel is by highway bus. They used to really suck, but have gotten better in the last five years or so because they have a lot of competition from high-speed rail and cheap airfares. You can travel comfortably in a big seat with free wifi and power outlets very cheaply, usually less than half of the equivalent Shinkansen ticket, in exchange for the journey taking a few hours more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why the hell not? It's a proper noun, and we capitalize them. The proper noun "Internet" refers to a specific instance of an "internet", a common noun.

<comment><USER8> But in real-world usage the word "internet" always refers to _the_ internet. You would never refer to "an internet"—more likely terminology would be "intranet," "LAN" or "corporate network," or, in a historical context, something along the lines of "internet precursor."

<comment><USER9> That's exactly why you capitalize it - because you refer to a _specific_ thing. The Internet, God, the United States, etc.

<comment><USER10> "the moon", "the sun", "the planet"

<comment><USER9> Last time I checked it was "the Moon", "the Sun", and "the planet Earth".

<comment><USER11> Is that really the AP style? If so I agree it's strange not to keep "the Internet".

<comment><USER12> As of 2009, it was "moon" and "sun."

[http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/moon-vs-moon-a- study...](http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/moon-vs-moon-a-study-in- arrant-pedantry-152666843/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Internet Style alert: Don't capitalize associated press any more.

<comment><USER14> After all, clearly it is just one of many associated presses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have to agree with others here that the particular reasons given in the article for why AP will no longer be capitalizing "Internet" don't really make sense. I'm pretty sure I always capitalize it, except perhaps in IM/chat when I capitalize very little.

I don't know if I've ever capitalized "web". Certainly I remember how the NYT's insistence on spelling "weblogs" "Web logs" drove me nuts for years (this was way back in 1999 and the early 2000s before "blog", kids). The reasoning and usage of the people who coined and actually use a new word surely should have some influence on how it is spelled when the word is reported on.

Which brings me back to "Internet"\--same argument from me: the style should follow that of the people to whom the word is most relevant, unless they are just ludicrously out of step with common usage.

So I'm curious if they actually did research on how people spell "Internet" in non-casual settings, or if they are just trying to set a precedent and truly believe that capital letters are "speed bumps" (that's true in a sense: our brain pauses on them precisely because we've trained ourselves to understand that they are used for Important Things like names).

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, reading the comments is fascinating. It is amazing how strong people's opinions can be on something that is ultimately inconsequential. Well, here's my two cents:

I've never thought internet should be capitalized. I was always under the impression that was the majority view of tech people though from reading the comments here, I may be mistaken. It seems even that what is or is not a proper noun is not self evident. I do not consider internet or moon or sun (other common examples in these comments) to be proper nouns. Those are not their names. Just because we generally consider them singular and unique does not make them proper nouns anymore than "the car" is when I talk to my wife. We only have one car. It is singular and unique, but "Car" is not it's name.

However, follow whatever rule you want. Most people are terrible at following the rules anyway, even when they know them. We just have to accept a certain amount of variability in these things. Just know that it will always look strange to me to see internet, sun, or moon capitalized.

<comment><USER17> The Moon and the Sun are the names for those things and are proper nouns. See: [http://itsnameisthemoon.com](http://itsnameisthemoon.com), [http://itsnameisthesun.com](http://itsnameisthesun.com).

<comment><USER16> I understand that is the opinion of many people. It is not, however, my opinion. In my opinion, those are descriptive and are not in fact names. If I were forced to name them, I might call them Luna and Sol.

<comment><USER18> Click through to the article; you've literally restated one of the FAQs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Internet should be capitalized when referring to the single, proper Internet that most of us use.

However, one can create other internets, and those are not capitalized.

<comment><USER20> Seems like identical reasoning can be applied to many other nouns which are definitely not capitalized:

> Atmosphere should be capitalized when referring to the single, proper > Atmosphere that most of us breathe.

> However, there are other atmospheres (e.g., on other planets), and those are > not capitalized.

<comment><USER21> On the other hand:

> Sun should be capitalized when referring to the star at the center of our > solar system, as opposed to other suns -- the stars at the center of other > planetary systems.

<comment><USER22> Bad example, I'm afraid. The Sun is, specifically, our star. Other stars aren't suns, they're stars with other names.

<comment><USER21> It's common usage to call other stars at the center of planetary system "suns". For example:

> As we came to understand that the stars in the sky are other suns [...]

\- [http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus- areas/exoplanet-e...](http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus- areas/exoplanet-exploration/)

See also the 2nd definition at [http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/sun](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sun) :

> : any star that has planets which move around it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When in doubt, I usually check Wikipedia's style guide [0] rather than anything else. Some of it is Wikipedia-specific (e.g., markup syntax), but there is also good general-purpose advice. It also has the major advantage of being free.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style)

<comment><USER23> I agree, Wikipedia's style guide is great! I think it strikes a good balance between prescription and flexibility, eg. being able to use local date formats and spellings in articles that relate to that locality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't agree with this. The Internet is clearly a proper noun like America, Jesus or Associated Press. It is somewhere between a place and an idea which might confuse the AP people but it is THE big thing between a place and idea of our time and it deserves proper noun status.

I take less issue with web being written lowercase. It is a shortening of World Wide Web anyway.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's interesting to see both terms genericized. It was Alan Kay who said:

 _> The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. . . . The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs._

[http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview- wit...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan- kay/240003442)

<comment><USER26> Alan Kay has so many amazing quotes. One of my favorite funny ones is from an OOPSLA lecture where he says "arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do proper names in English use article, really? I had the exact opposite idea (as in my own language). Actually I believed that "the" Internet was a weird exception, not the rule.

Is there a specific rule? I ask because I haven't seen "The Michael" or "The Germany". I did see "The Netherlands", but that seems like an exception.

<comment><USER28> > Is there a specific rule?

There isn't a systematic rule as far as I know. Some proper names get a definite article, some don't. Sometimes "the" is part of the name and capitalized, and sometimes it's not:

Germany, Washington, New York, Jesus, Dolph Lundgren, Apollo, Godzilla, JavaScript, Madonna, Microsoft.

Uncapitalized: the Netherlands, the South, the President of the US, the Everglades, the Pleiades, the Rolling Stones.

Capitalized: The Hague, The Rock.

English is weird.

<comment><USER27> Thank you for the clarification.

It seems strange that "the President" is a proper name.

In Spanish we used to say e.g. "el papa" (pope) when not mentioned near the proper name "el Papa Francisco".

Nowadays even if they're still common names, a lot of public positions and institutions are capitalized by media, probably to show that they're more important than us, common mortals :-)

I remember being annoyed writing documents for the job that insisted in taking this fad to an extreme and capitalizing everything that was even vaguely related to the authority positions.

There's a special level at hell for language reformers.

<comment><USER28> > It seems strange that "the President" is a proper name.

I believe you say "the president" (lowercase), but "the President of the United States". It's only capitalized when part of the full title, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder where the AP weighs in regarding the use of Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi is a registered trademark [1], with a standard implementation, but I could easily see the sentence, "My phone is using wifi to access the internet." being acceptable.

[1] [http://www.wi-fi.org/](http://www.wi-fi.org/)

</comment><comment><USER30> My wife is my copy editor and she has me capitalize Internet and not capitalize web - and that also seems right to me.

</comment><comment><USER31> What about the Information Superhighway?

<comment><USER32> The highway's jammed with broken startups on a last chance power drive.

<comment><USER33> Underrated comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Someone tell the associated press we're totally down with that.

Signed,

The Internet

</comment><comment><USER35> I can't help but think there's a political motive in here somewhere? Stripping the Internet of its proper noun status could serve to help thwart attempts at declaring ownership over it, and help arguments to have it declared more globally as a common carrier.

</comment><comment><USER36> Next thing you know they'll tell us to stop capitalizing the Aristocracy.

<comment><USER37> "The Aristocrats"

Best story ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Not an April Fools' joke. Colour me surprised, as some of the quoted previous AP changes are hilarious: 'more than' can replace 'over'... "More than my dead body!"

</comment><comment><USER39> Historically speaking, there were many Internets, and even today there are many Internets, it's a myth that there is an Internet, the Internet, etc.

For example, users in China have an Internet that is different than an Internet in another country.

Personally, if their was to be a style change, it in my opinion would be to stop saying "the Internet" since it is vague a leads to the public believing it exists.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am looking forward to the day that AP starts replacing the missing penultimate "e"'s in the poorly spelled names of companies that were too cheap to buy the correct domain name, like Flickr and Flattr.

</comment><comment><USER41> Fuck that. The Internet is a thing. The Web is a thing. Both are singular. Both are proper nouns. There's only one, though it may be huge.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can we also please put an end to the silly camelCaseNamingConvention, and use the much more clear underscore_naming_convention instead?

</comment><comment><USER43> I always thought it did not make sense to capitalize Internet and web, so it's nice to see the AP catch up.

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting this made top voted story. People have strong views on the style guide I suppose.

<comment><USER45> Just wait until Associated Press mandates tabs over spaces.

<comment><USER46> They clearly won't because they've shown just now that they are incapable of making the right decision.

Edit: they did make the right call with email though so there might be hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> was there a push for the AP to not even use "internet (lowercase)" anymore, but go further, what the masses would call it - "Facebook"? (jury's out on whether that needs a capital haha)

</comment><comment><USER48> They are proper nouns. There is basically one Internet (in common speech) and one WWW. Other internets are not the Internet. (My spell checker doesn't recognize "internets".)

What's next: "you are" will formally become "u r" bc ppl r 2 lazy 2 type?

<comment><USER49> Next? No. Eventually? Maybe. We don't generally still say eow, þu, þe, ge, etc.

<comment><USER48> Languages evolve, but I don't think that misuses should be formalized as correct. It's already hard enough for speakers of some languages to understand English's capitalization system. I think that adding more exceptions makes learning the language more difficult to learn.

People frequently spell "I" with a lowercase letter, so why formally approve lowercase for "internet" but not for "i"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> wait, what?!?

</comment><comment><USER51> "Internet" used to be used without an article prefacing it. Sentences were structured like "you can get on internet with just a modem and a computer".

Example usage from 1993, [https://youtu.be/KDxqfgIDvEY](https://youtu.be/KDxqfgIDvEY)

Also antiquated terms like "cyberspace" never adopted an article. "He's on cyberspace" not "the cyberspace".

<comment><USER52> As an old-timer: that was the exception, not the rule. It was just as much "the Internet" in 1993 as it is now. It just wasn't as widely known by the mass public, so different usages were less likely to be caught by editors/etc.

<comment><USER51> The usage appeared even in books on the topic. In my personal library I have a 1993 book, "The Electronic Traveller: Exploring Alternative Online Systems".

You can see the lack of articles being used here: [http://imgur.com/a4qbEuJ](http://imgur.com/a4qbEuJ)

Both styles were widespread. Briefly...</comment></comment></comment>


Launching Processes on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://zatrazz.github.io/Launching-Process/ <comment> loa-in-backup > To try and fix this performance issue, UNIX-like system started to provide > the vfork syscall. It was standardized by POSIX and it behaves similar to > fork with two important differences:

> \- The child share all the memory with parent, including all mmap segments > and the stack (with some exceptions such as memory lock created by mlock or > mlockall).

> \- Parent execution is halted until the child either call execve functions > or _exit.

If the execution can't continue in parallel, then it doesn't seem really that useful</comment>


Ask HN: Need Advice for a Literary Magazine - <AUTHOR>

A few friends and I plan on writing a literary magazine which focuses on philosophy. We don't want to put adds into it but at the same time need to find a way to cover the publishing costs. Do any of you have suggestions?<p>Any kind of advice on the magazine itself would also be greatly appreciated. We've been trying to learn as much as possible from links on design and writing posted to HN. <comment><USER2> Hmm, on first thought, checkout this hot thread going on right now:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499> It's about dead tree version of Hacker News. I am sure these guys are going through the same questions as you are.

Well, without Ads, it's going to be a tough sell (unless you will charge your members?) In any case, you should start off maybe online first? That way you can gauge your market's interest first and then perhaps go on from there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically, a magazine can make money either by selling Content to its readers (what newspapers do, see also [http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Why- conte...](http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Why-content-is- not-king-pd20100409-4BSZX?OpenDocument)) or by selling access to its readers to other people with content (often known as advertising).

The more readers you have, the more revenue you can generate from either, or both, methods.

I don't have actual other suggestions, but figure that's your framework. How else can you charge for access to your content? or access to your readers?</comment>


Examining the Thiel Fellowship: Where are they now? - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/24/examining-the-thiel-fellowship-where-are-they-now/ <comment><USER2> "From talking to them, many express that these experience have focused/clarified what they hope to gain from college, intellectually and personally."

As someone who made money on the internet in my teen years, I too spent quite a bit of time thinking college was a waste. For a lot of people, I still think it's a waste of their money, just that my reasoning is different.

Everyone can benefit from college, but you really need to be in the correct mindset to succeed and take advantage of it. Academic institutions, despite the grant process, politics, etc. really are interesting places where really smart people get together to do things.

The problem I see with college is that most of the people I knew weren't ready to be there. It should not be the default life funnel that it currently is, because most high schoolers (myself included) just weren't ready to take advantage of what was there. When you're ready for it, it's worth every penny.

edit: Sorry, didn't reply to correct post with that quote.

<comment><USER3> What is the "correct mindset?"

<comment><USER4> Internal instead of external motivation to learn, I think.

I took a year off before college, lived on my own, and worked in a warehouse. For me, it was a great idea, and I think I got more out of college because of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> College is broken in many ways. By definition this isn't a solution because you cannot do this for more than a tiny number of people. It's interesting that it appears desirable to return to college anyway afterwards, which suggests it's really just a resume builder and not much of an alternative at all. Still, I am always interested in anything which tries to shake up the status quo because the current college system isn't working, and the idea of just chucking more people through college really doesn't solve anything to solve our long term problems.

<comment><USER5> The amount of money the fellowship gives is about the same as two years worth of tuition at Stanford. In what ways is it not scalable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but students pay for going to Stanford they're not paid to go. For this program to replace college someone has to pay for the fellowships. Hence not scalable. Money flows to student in one and away from student on other, no?

<comment><USER6> Actually, Stanford does essentially pay students to go. Each undergraduate student costs Stanford about twice as much as they pay in tuition. This is typically the case at elite colleges, which is why they spend so much time seeking donations from alumni.

(Also, the vast majority of students don't pay full tuition anyway because of the extensive financial aid systems at these schools.)

[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search- selection...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search- selection/383286-net-university-spending-per-student.html)

[http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/Delta- Subsidy-...](http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/Delta-Subsidy- Trends-Production.pdf)

<comment><USER7> That can't be right. First, your Delta study is woefully lacking in school - specific information. Second, the college confidential link's methodology seems to be missing a lot to me, particularly in the way of revenue. For example, for many universities (eg UPenn) the parking department is actually a huge revenue driver that must be taken into account to calculate overall university P&L, and that kind of thing is completely ignored here. Schools are businesses; you can't just ignore the other sources of revenue. As such, those estimates are hugely over inflated. Is Yale really spending $100k PER STUDENT each year? How could that possibly be?

Let's look at Stanford. Wolfram Alpha claims 6532 undergrads, $37380 tuition per year. If student cost was truly double tuition, Stanford would be operating at a loss of $244.4MM per year, and (all other considerations aside) the $12.6BB endowment would be gone in 50 years. Ultimately, the reported cost is often based on some key assumptions that aren't always stated, and I'm pretty sure we as a population don't actually have much clarity on the true cost of educating a student, if it's even possible to really quantify such a thing (try measuring the monetary cost of creating a supportive environment or a caring teacher).

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure why you find this so a priori implausible.

You're right that the CC link misses revenue sources -- but isn't that the point? Stanford seems to be using money from non-student revenue sources to subsidize a majority of per-student expenses. (That is, students are getting "paid.")

Or are you assuming that all that other revenue still comes from students (e.g. parking), or directly from an unchanging endowment? Stanford raises hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from people who aren't students every year, more than enough to cover that $244.4m shortfall directly. Direct income from students is only a small part of the overall university budget: <http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances>

Anyway, I'm only making a factual spending claim here. I make no claim about the effectiveness of the spending in educating students -- that's a separate issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _And in January, the unemployment rate for college grads was 3.7 percent, as opposed to 8.1 percent for those with only high school diplomas.

Those are average numbers across the board, and perhaps the opportunities that come from a high-profile program like the Thiel Fellowship outweigh those for the average college student. But at least for now, the data shows college is the more lucrative path._

??

Correlation does not imply causation.

<comment><USER9> In general, you're right. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to defend the claim that there is no causative relationship whatsoever flowing from college education to employment. I don't think it's terribly controversial to claim that employers pretty universally view more education as a positive factor on job applications, all other things held equal.

edit: to elaborate further, I think you might be bringing up the wrong fallacy here - at least, if you're looking to highlight the problems with representing program participants by the general population of high school-educated people.

<comment><USER8> What I'm saying is that it's not obvious that if the student who was admitted to Harvard decided not to go, he'd make less than the student who was admitted and did go.</comment></comment></comment>


Wire Messaging Application – The Downfalls - <AUTHOR> https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/opinion/wire/ <comment><USER2> Since I'm a Wire-messenger fanboy, I'm really happy to see an analysis of the messenger. So thanks for that!

Regarding the last point:

"So, I sent a message to the CTO of Wire, Alan Duric, asking why the server was closed. He immediately got back to me to let me know that releasing the source code for the server was underway. When I pushed for specifics, I got the following response:

"License will be the same GPLv3 and timeline is next year."" [0]

[0] [http://www.networkworld.com/article/3140014/open-source- tool...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/3140014/open-source-tools/down- the-rabbit-hole-part-5-secure-and-private-instant-messaging.html)

<comment><USER3> Have you had much problems with bugs using Wire? I've been using it intensely for over a year or so and I can say that I've never used a buggier app to this day.

Calls connect 75% of the time (at best) and the app is still filled to the brim with UI bugs. Example: often, when I open a notification I'm transported to the right conversation, but at the beginning of the conversation history. This is a year back, and when I begin scrolling down the app hangs. I need to force stop the app and open it again to see the actual message.

It seems they're obsessed with adding new features (like robot voice fx for audio messages), but don't know to fix the important things.

Still, strangely enough, I continue to use it. It works, but has a ton of quirks. I use stock unrooted Android on a 5X and the other 7 or so people that I know uses Wire have all experienced the same problems.

<comment><USER2> The audio/video call doesn't work as expected. Thats true.. But for me, the reason for that could be my old Iphone.

However, I extensively use the chat functionality on iphone/android/linux/osx and that works perfect. And I really appreciate that I can logged-in, with multiple devices at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glad to see this under scrutiny. A lot of websites are eager to recommend any application that claims to be secure, and it is often the case that neither the author nor the audience is equipped to make that judgment. Hopefully we'll see full fledged security audits for less popular secure messaging apps in the future.

<comment><USER5> Check the report again - they've now added Wire replies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wire sent in comments which have now been published in the same analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Last modified: […] 13:37:37

Coincidence? :)</comment>


RoR vs PHP commercial (Mac vs PC style) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5EIrSM8dCA

<comment><USER2> As someone who has created code from scratch as well as inherited it from other developers in both PHP and RoR, I can say that this is the most simplistic and accurate portrayal of a major difference between the two languages.</comment>


A Guide to Pitching Funding and Launch Stories - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/a-guide-to-pitching-funding-and-launch-stories/ <comment><USER2> I don't think I'd ever do an embargo in a cold pitch. My experience is that cooperation is best assured with an incentive structure, and you don't really have the power in a cold email to assure any kind of incentive structure. Unless there's a compelling follow-up story or they fear the wrath of somebody you are associated with, the reporter has zero reason to care what you think or ask for. Being too aggressive in demanding an embargo can come across as an idle threat, which is somewhere between a turn-off and dangerous.

My solution to this is to pitch stories that don't require embargos. "We exist, and we are great" is generally not a tactic I have had much success with anyway. Your affiliations and successes serve as credibility the week of your funding/launch just as well as they do on the day of your funding/launch. The only thing you're gambling on is the time-sensitivity.

I solve this by focusing on the angle. If you tie yourself into an existing popular media narrative/topic/event with a short lifespan, they have to cover you promptly. You also increase your chances of being covered because now you're offering an educated hot take on something everybody is already scrambling to cover. This also boosts social engagement, if you're going for that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Overall this post has some helpful advice, but the advice regarding embargoes is entirely wrong.

Before a reporter has explicitly agreed to an embargo, he or she is under no obligation to keep a story under wraps. So, in the example email from this post with EMBARGO at the top of it, the journalist could immediately publish your funding amount, investors, etc. without breaking any of the established norms around embargoes.

The correct way to do this is: write an email with _very_ little information ("we just raised a round from a top VC") and ask for explicit agreement ("if you can agree to an embargo of date_time, we'll send over all the details")

edit: I've used Upbeat and think the product is really cool – so while I find this post to be lacking I don't mean to diminish the team that worked on it.

<comment><USER4> I used to write for Wired and fielded thousands of pitches. A lot of the advice in this post is good, especially giving reporters a week or more to work on the story, but the embargo advice is not great.

It's not a problem with the honor code, it's the overhead. Don't make writers interact with you. You'd be surprised by how little TechCrunch writes about early-stage startups anymore. In a given week of 250-300 stories, there might be 10-20 that are early-stage companies who have raised <$10M and don't have a truly novel hook (our co-founder used to be in prison!).

Send over the entire press kit, full description, etc. in the first email. Generally, if you tell the reporter you're announcing on X date, they'll not publish before that. Especially if you're launching a new product or something, they don't want to link to your site when the newsworthy bit isn't live.

My advice for most startups is to reach out to TechCrunch, the best publication in your vertical (e.g. Skift for travel), and a local tech paper/site. For something as routine as a small fundraise or YC announcement, try to get three good clips. In a given YC class there are literally dozens of companies with the same basic story so don't try to position yourself as you've got inside info on the new iPhone.

If your company is legitimately novel, so novel that your grandparents would get the pitch and be interested, by all means go wide, but for the average "We help people find cheaper airfare" or some SaaS thing just choose a few high- value targets and get back to work.

<comment><USER5> This is good advice, although I would also caution that every journalist has different habits. Some journalists will only publish news that's under embargo, others will only publish news that's happening that day. Some want assets included right in the email, some won't open it if they see there are attachments. After working on hundreds of campaigns, we believe that this embargo strategy is the most effective. Per your advice, this is why we also recommend reaching back out right when the the embargo lifts with the full media kit.

The insight here into TechCrunch is too true unfortunately. It's every startup's dream to be in TechCrunch, but we see publications like VentureBeat have much better engagement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> David, one of the founders at Upbeat here! Our media strategy lead Leo wrote up some advice about two of the most common stories to pitch. Obviously there are stories beyond announcing funding or launching out of an accelerator, but a lot of the advice here applies generally. If you have any specific questions, we'll be checking in here throughout the day to try to answer!

<comment><USER7> Can you talk a bit more about your company? What does "Upbeat is a _software- powered PR agency_ " really mean?

<comment><USER6> Hey thisisit, happy to! Leo replied with more specifics in the sibling comment to this, so I'll try to talk about the high-level aspects very briefly, although I'm working on a post titled "PR from first principles" that will do a better job of explaining.

The "software-powered PR agency" is more a description of the appartus/mechanism rather than the goal, so perhaps it'd be more useful to start with our mission. We want to _enable anyone with a great story to reach those who want to hear it_. Rather than trying to build up the audience yourself, we believe that it is much more effective to connect sources of great stories with storytellers who 1) already have an audience, and 2) can do a better job of telling the story for that audience than you can.

This is the role that today's PR agencies occupy as middlemen. However, they come with prohibitive price tags that restrict access for most stories, and their principle means of making these connections is through individual relationships with both sources and journalists, much the same way it has been done for decades. We think it's time for a change.

The software-powered part comes into play because we ultimately want to create a marketplace that more efficiently facilitates these connections— using both public and proprietary data, we're starting to get a really good understanding of what stories specific storytellers are looking for, and we connect them to the best sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, not everybody who dug for gold in the gold rush got rich, but those who sold shovels certainly did. Nice job.</comment>


Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://investors.etsy.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2017/12-14-2017-130416690 <comment><USER2> I love GCP but honestly have no idea how these big internet properties can make the $ case for "the cloud", unless they're also planning to fire 90% of the Ops/SysAdmin team (ala Evernote).

We run on bare metal and to move to GCP would triple our hosting cost, not including bandwidth (which is free* for us).

Do people get discounts for doing PR? I'm really curious.

<comment><USER3> I don't have very detailed knowledge, but my impression is that this move doesn't make long-term financial sense for the company, but it's being pushed by activist investors / board members who want to appear like they're good stewards of money because investors think cloud is cheaper / etc. (Note that this is on investors.etsy.com, not their tech blog; you can also find a call for public cloud in the Black & White Capital letter, in the NYTimes story from a couple weeks ago, etc.) I heard some rumors about this when I was applying for a job right before the layoffs happened, and I didn't hear anyone expressing interest in moving out of their datacenters _before_ the layoffs.

<comment><USER2> Yeah. The exact same thing happened at Evernote. They hit a sales slump, new "corporate" management, cuts etc -> GCP.

The Ops people there were pretty proud of their infrastructure, but they took it to a pretty extreme level. I think they were racking their own stuff and even running their own routers etc.

<comment><USER4> Racking your own servers and running your own routers is extreme? I don't know about you, but I haven't set foot in the DC in two years after initial setup.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I meant to put it in quotes. :) Hard to find B2C type SaaS companies doing that though (with the exception of Pinboard, who's crazy :)

We actually haven't had a hardware failure (apart from HDD that have all been replaced with SSD) in something like 7 years.

We don't even pay big bucks for Dell, HP etc. Just cheap SuperMicro boxes.

<comment><USER5> What does your hardware and software stack look like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Found some interesting contrasting statements from 2015 [1]:

> The company performed big data jobs early on in the cloud, using Amazon's > Elastic Map Reduce service.

> "That [EMR] got us to a place where we think about what data we collect. At > the time it was really inefficient from a cost perspective, but there > weren't any creative constraints,"

> The team eventually decided to bring it in house. "Our Hadoop cluster wields > a huge amount of flexibility," said Rembetsy. "We can get a lot done on bare > metal, and we know very much what we're looking for. Cloud services, that's > where efficiencies fall away. Spin up and spin down doesn't have the same > value proposition."

[1] [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/11/how-e...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/11/how- etsy-optimized-data-center-infrastructure-for-efficiency)

<comment><USER7> EMR is really expensive, especially you are using spot instances. It is roughly $2 for the EMR tax on $1 instance

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds good. I was an early Etsy seller, as a glass artist and bead vendor, As well as a developer who worked with them as closely as I could for a few years.

They have always seemed a bit disconnected from their customers. The first regime, Rob Kalin, Haim and Revolving Dork, had an age and culture disconnect from most of their customers. The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they wanted to focus on technology for technology's sake, more than what Etsy was actually doing with that as a company. They even made some statements to the effect of how they wanted Etsy to be known as a technology company, like Facebook, and be a platform, like Amazon.

All fine and good, but so far, what all of the leaders of Etsy have had in common is that they don't really understand what it's like to be a micro business person selling handmade art online. If I was an investor, I wouldn't want to be paying for a bunch of guys to experiment with Mongo DB search engines and shards. As long as they're still not understanding their core business, it's a distraction.

Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of handmade art with each other.

<comment><USER9> Disclaimer: I worked at Etsy, a long time ago.

> The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they > wanted to focus on technology for technology's sake, more than what Etsy was > actually doing with that as a company.

I think you're missing quite a bit of this story. I was around during the transition of Chad from CTO -> CEO, and the truth is that Etsy needed to focus on the technology badly during that time. The site would go down constantly. We had very little insight into what was going on with sellers or buyers. Every busy day was basically us crossing our fingers that the site wouldn't go down.

We needed someone focused heavily on the technology. We could never have continued on that path and grown as much as we did.

> Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of > handmade art with each other.

Deciding what potential buyers are interested in and what items to display to them is a pretty difficult technology problem.

Detecting mass-produced goods in a way that's more subtle than "ban all Chinese sellers" is a pretty difficult technology problem.

If anything I would argue that Etsy didn't focus nearly enough on that, and focused way too much on "low-hanging fruit" (minor workflow adjustments for sellers and buyers).

<comment><USER8> Agreed, there is a whole lot more to the story that sadly this comment area is too small to contain. Dickerson and Allspaw definitely did a great job of modernizing Etsy from the relatively ragtag team that operated it prior, and it seems pretty robust now.

That's great – for their engineering department. What about the guiding vision for their core business? It's not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists.

Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm. I think it risks turning the cozy marketplace into some automated hell like Google or Amazon.

<comment><USER9> > That's great – for their engineering department.

Well, no - it's great for you too. Nobody can buy anything if the site is down. First-time buyers are especially sensitive to that. If their first experience with Etsy is a timeout page they won't be back (we actually had numbers asserting as such). Amazon famously wrote that 100ms of additional latency cost them 1% of sales, and Etsy is very similar in that regard.

> What about the guiding vision for their core business? It's not enough to > make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering.

The guiding vision was, and likely still is, to have Etsy be what it is today (but with much better execution, obviously). Amazon with a more hand-made slant to it.

I saw this frequently when I was there - sellers want Etsy to be more like ArtFire or ArtYah is now, but that's not what Etsy's leadership and funders want Etsy to be. They want Etsy to be Amazon, but for unique items.

Now sure, that's not what Rob Kalin wanted it to be. But that vision was lost years ago, way before Chad et. al took over.

> As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and > decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually.

No argument there. The decisions usually made sense internally, but the external communications were poor. I would not be surprised to find out it's part of why the C-suite was gutted. I'm really sorry you had to be a customer during that phase. Seriously.

> Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists.

They tried that. Rob Kalin is an artist, through and through.

Turns out artists don't always make great business leaders. And let me tell you, definitively, Rob Kalin would have ruined that company had he stuck around for much longer than he did.

> Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating > mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right > algorithm.

It is a technology problem. Etsy can't possibly afford to hire enough people to sift through items manually looking for mass-produced goods. They'd go bankrupt. The marketplace is just way too big for that.

Etsy can remain a small marketplace and do that, which is I'm guessing your preference, but that's not the preference of the VCs who backed Etsy. Unfortunately, money has the final say.

<comment><USER8> I realize that snappy pages help, as an engineer myself (who often depended on Etsy's API responses...). I appreciate the great job they did taking Etsy from the substandard heap it was circa 2009 to where it is now. My point is that Etsy needed more of a guiding light than their engineering department providing effective technology.

Rob Kalin was not an artist - what was his art, Swimmy? BS? A couple wooden computer cases? In my perception he was a con-man hipster who dabbled in craft. I have no praise for him or anything he did, and am not suggesting his vision, whatever it was, or certainly his management, would have been better. I believe he is the one who imbued Etsy with a toxic culture from which that they are still suffering. One inept conman doesn't disprove 'artists' being management, and that's not what I called for - someone with retail experience would be nice, ideally online as well as the typical setting where Etsy members sell their wares offline like art galleries, craft fairs, jewelry stores, boutiques, and so forth.

All the time I've dealt with Etsy, I've heard the excuse that it's impossible for them to police their market place in any sort of pro-active way. But the sellers in each category have no problem finding obvious violations in their categories every day, and reports have never been dealt with logically and promptly. I, and others, gave up reporting mass production and resellers after it seemed futile due to lack of response, or even Etsy would claim items that seemed like clear violations were not violations.

I don't have a preference for Etsy's future, as I gave up attempting to use it years ago and have recommended to my friends and clients for years that they buy a domain and set up a shop they actually control, using shopify or big cartel to make it simple.

<comment><USER9> > My point is that Etsy needed more of a guiding light than their engineering > department providing effective technology.

They had that, though. Amazon for unique items.

I think that's just not the guiding light you wanted for Etsy, but it's been there for a long time. They were missing the technology ~2009 up until a couple years ago. It was absolutely the most important problem at Etsy at that time. Now? I'll agree, not so much.

> Rob Kalin was not an artist - what was his art, Swimmy? BS? A couple wooden > computer cases? In my perception he was a con-man hipster who dabbled in > craft.

I have no love lost for Rob Kalin as a CEO, and I would never work in a business run by him again, but this is an extremely unfair characterization of him.

He's an artist. Sorry. To call him otherwise is to pull a "no true scotsman."

> someone with retail experience would be nice, ideally online as well as the > typical setting where Etsy members sell their wares offline like art > galleries, craft fairs, jewelry stores, boutiques, and so forth.

Etsy had plenty of people like that in senior leadership roles. Not the C suite, sure, but high up there.

I also don't see any reason why Etsy needs people like that, to be honest. Bezos had little (if any) retail experience before starting Amazon. Clearly hasn't impeded them any.

> All the time I've dealt with Etsy, I've heard the excuse that it's > impossible for them to police their market place in any sort of pro-active > way. But the sellers in each category have no problem finding obvious > violations in their categories every day, and reports have never been dealt > with logically and promptly.

You're grossly unaware and underestimating of the volume of support emails Etsy got (and probably it's even worse now).

Sellers outnumber Etsy employees by a godawful amount. Reports outnumber Etsy employees by a godawful amount. Not sure if it's still the case, but we used to have so many reports that we needed employees to all go on rotations where they answered emails and went through reports.

I personally must've gone through close to 1,000+ support emails and reports a year during my time there just doing these support rotations. The full-time community staff probably handled that much each day, if not more.

Even with all that, I bet we answered _maybe_ 25% of all reports and emails. And this was way, way before the IPO.

> I don't have a preference for Etsy's future, as I gave up attempting to use > it years ago and have recommended to my friends and clients for years that > they buy a domain and set up a shop they actually control, using shopify or > big cartel to make it simple.

That's fine, but I think it's naive to assume Etsy's future would look anything other than this. Actively managing a marketplace of Etsy's size is a technology problem.

You can bring up Myspace/etc. all day, but don't forget that in addition to monitoring for resellers and mass produced goods Etsy also has to watch out for:

1) Illegal activity e.g. money laundering 2) Pornographic/inappropriate items 3) Scammers 4) Legitimate support complaints (missing items etc.) 5) General complaints (I don't like this new feature, etc.)

Support staff monitoring all of those numerous issues would bankrupt Etsy, even if they did farm it out to a developing nation for pennies.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I'd love to respond to this when I have the chance.

As far as Rob Kalin, you didn't answer the question - what is his art? What medium? I'm a member of a group that doesn't have to stretch, claim or pretend to be artists, since we make things out of hot glass all day and it's really obvious.

I find it odd that you're convinced he's an artist, but I've never seen any of his art. Are you referring to his personality? Does he actually create craft or art? Was he ever self employed to trying to sell it for a living?

A couple of times here, you are using outliers to try to prove broad principles: Kalin proves that artists wouldn't know how to run Etsy, and Jeff Bezos proves that a retail background doesn't help to build a retail website. Hmm, I would be hesitant to draw conclusions like that.

Overall, Etsy is irrelevant to people like me, who were the people that it was nominally created for originally. Obviously, it was taken over by investors who don't care at all about the original mission. What I'm still judging at by is the original intent, which they never managed to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not much meat for the technically interested here unfortunately. The respective business departments were clearly in charge of this press release. Which was a business mistake in my opinion: these press releases are primarily interesting for the CTOs and similar - the fluff presented here would serve to remind them of how they are kept at arms length i many board rooms even in their areas of expertise, more than anything. My guess is both Google Cloud and Etsy would dip in their opinion as result of it.

</comment><comment><USER11> It begs the question why Google Cloud and not MS Azure or Amazon's AWS?

Could it be a price break they got, and also the AI advantages of Google Cloud's offerings? I am sure that played a big part.

<comment><USER12> Many retail companies avoid AWS because they see Amazon as a competitor.

Source: work for a retail company, we went with Azure.

<comment><USER13> I think that certainly comes into it. Seems perverse to take the money you make from sales and give a cut of it to your competitor, who can then reduce the prices in their own store.

<comment><USER14> That and there's a trust issue I'm sure, regarding hosting all your data with your competitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Etsy's transition to the Google Cloud Platform is expected to be complete > within the next two years.

I have no idea what Etsy looks like internally, but that sounds like an awfully long time in this day and age. Anyone have an inkling as to why this is a multi-year project?

<comment><USER16> Having worked for two companies that have shifted to cloud providers, multi- year timescales is fairly usual even just for like-for-like migrations. You can't just shut down the servers, image them and start them in the cloud, you need to have a plan to progressively migrate services while maintaining site operation.

<comment><USER17> Truth. This[0] is how we did it for the NYTimes Crossword platform. It took a year and a half, but was managed with a team of only 2 people (myself being one of them).

[0] [https://open.nytimes.com/play-by-play-moving-the-nyt- games-p...](https://open.nytimes.com/play-by-play-moving-the-nyt-games- platform-to-gcp-with-zero-downtime-cf425898d569)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Did they use another provider prior to the move, or self-host?

<comment><USER19> Last I checked, they hosted their own bare metal machines.

<comment><USER20> Correct. I've seen their cages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would love to see a cost analysis of a company moving to GCP/AWS.

We were a 6M customer flash sale company sold for $200M. We had 3 devops engineers mostly helping developers with designing the system and pager duty - mainly because 24/7 was to demanding for only 2 people. We were SOX/PCI compliant.

Hosting costs all in all by year were around the same as the salaries I'd say.

People who moved to AWS/GCP, would I save costs in this scenario moving to AWS/GCP?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not even sure Etsy will exist in two years.

<comment><USER23> Based on this alone?

Etsy seems to be fine for the most part. The only criticism I have of Etsy is that they've moved away or diluted their core business (small business/home business sales) by allowing mass manufactured goods to be sold on the site.

Etsy still has a place, and I've ordered several items from Etsy vendors this last year. They just need to keep a check on what they want to be otherwise they'll be subpar eBay clone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Okay so how much did they get for free by moving to Google Cloud? That's the question you should be asking.

Etsy has been hurting; why would they move infrastructure now unless t hey got kind of kickback for the PR?

This isn't an easy move; so there has to be a huge benefit to them.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another DC to cloud story! I love these!

It's like watching a play in 3 acts:

Act 1) Yay, we did it, we're gonna save so much money!

Act 2) [a year later] Wait, we're spending how much money?!?

Act 3) It's going to cost us how much to leave our current cloud?!?

Haven't people figured out yet that cloud companies make a profit? Sure, companies like Etsy can get a _huge_ discount, but everyone else who isn't a big name is going to pay out the ass.

<comment><USER26> That's not how any of this works.

Boeing makes a profit, but how much money will it cost to design and make a plane from scratch?

<comment><USER25> > That's not how any of this works.

Weird then, considering that I've seen >5 companies go through that process. Something that you say doesn't work one way clearly does.

Planes are _vastly_ different than data-centers. Depending on what you need, a brand new data-center can run as little as a couple hundred dollars for a server + parts, and <$30 / month on everything else. What is the cheapest plane you can buy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> wasn't etsy the company that was using amazon and shifted back to their own infra because they said cloud is not as cheap as own infra?

<comment><USER28> No, they've always self-hosted on bare metal.

<comment><USER29> What's the difference between self-hosting and self-hosting on bare metal?

<comment><USER23> Self-hosted could mean running on a rented server managed by a vendor (e.g. Rackspace) often marketed as a "private cloud." The servers they're using are individually assigned to that client, the vendor manages the physical, the company manages every other layers.

Self-hosted on bare mental usually means the company owns the physical servers, storage arrays, and so on. No renting or leasing. No subscription fee-like service. They may still be renting space in someone else's data center, but it is their hardware.

The distinction isn't super important to be honest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node.js is the latest security risk for developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/t/javascript/nodejs-the-latest-security-risk-developers-244713

<comment><USER2> "Tools can be used badly", by Phil Space</comment>


Los Angeles gas leak is a global disaster - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/las-gas-leak-disaster-is-a-bigger-problem-than-you-real-1750035270 <comment><USER2> hm. article didn't really put it in to any perspective..

how bad is this? deep-water horizon bad? fukushima-bad? wildfire-bad?

<comment><USER3> 1,300 metric tons of CH4 leaked per day seems massive. Total anthropogenic U.S. emissions are 30 teragrams - 30 million metric tons ([http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20018.full.pdf](http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20018.full.pdf)). An extra half a million tons of this stuff per year is probably not good, although I'm not an expert and the data seems subject to some controversy.

<comment><USER4> It is worth pointing out that your link says 30 million metric tons of CH4. The biggest concern I am aware of (from the global perspective) is the global warming effect, for which it would be more meaningful to talk about all greenhouse gas emmisions.

The EPA estimates that we released the equivelent of 6,742 million metric tons of CO2 in 2013 (scaled to look at the warming effect over a 100 year period) [0]. The standard conversrion of CH4 to CO2 emissions is 25x, so we are leaking 32,500 metric tons CO2 equivelent an hour.

If we assume this leak will last for 1 year, it will leak a total of ~285 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, or about 4% of our annual emissions.

[0][http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/pdfs/usinventoryreport/US-...](http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/pdfs/usinventoryreport/US- GHG-Inventory-2015-Chapter-2-Trends.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I've read the 25x conversion number is low and out of date. Is the following source more credible than EPA?

> In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate > Change, methane has a lifetime of 12.4 years and with climate-carbon > feedbacks a global warming potential of 86 over 20 years and 34 over 100 > years in response to emissions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global- warming_potential#cite_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global- warming_potential#cite_note-1)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trello for Android Stores Your Password in Cleartext - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/yarlyyyy/status/309221063659761664

<comment><AUTHOR> Link shows images of it that I captured with a throwaway account, but it was discovered by <https://twitter.com/JBird_Vegas/status/309213249763692546>. Trello has replied that they are going to fix it.

One has to be rooted to see it (since /data/ is not world readable by default). However, an exploit isn't going to have that same issue or anyone running a rooted device.

If there's anyone running Trello for iOS and has a jailbroken device, I would be interested to know if it's also cleartext on there.

<comment><USER2> What bothers me is if they have my password how many other Google authenticated apps also have it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The password caching was removed and a fix pushed this morning (v1.3.33). Fogcreek team should be commended the fix came less than 7 hours after being made aware of the bug.

Well done Trello!

Reference: <https://mobile.twitter.com/hamidp/status/309303911150395392></comment>


Do You Wanna Hook Up? - example of a facebook connect app - <AUTHOR> http://www.doyouwannahookup.com/ <comment><USER2> It's nice concept, because it's immune to the problem of whatever it's called that dating sites have, where they need many profiles to be popular, and to get profiles they need to be popular. A service like this has zero-to-little barrier to entry, it only takes a few minutes to tag who you would want to hook up with, and once you do, it can sit there for months without requiring any maintenance. Once it starts working, word will get around, and I believe the word viral is more than appropriate here.

<comment><USER3> The phrase you're looking for is "network effect", but I'm not convinced that this doesn't suffer from it. If, as someone else has (fairly convincingly) said elsewhere in this HN discussion, there are a bunch of other Facebook apps doing the same thing, do you really expect each user to maintain lists with all of them? If not, the value is greatly reduced.

(I suppose it's possible that different ones consistently appeal to different demographics or something, in which case the effective number of competitors for any given person would be less.)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, network effect. I seem to recall having heard a more specific term for social networks, but that doesn't matter now.

I maintain that the concept is, if not immune, then more resistant to it - I'm not going to a dating site, because the people I want to hook up with aren't there (at least I don't know them to be). They are, however, on Facebook.

Of course, and that's where I think you have a point - it's not immune to competition. But once the first of these services get a few breakthroughs, the viral effect is going to be pretty hefty, I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The last time I saw something like this was way back as a LiveJournal meme. It reappeared two months later as "Pay $5 to see all the people who wanted to hook up with you".

That's when they made all their money. Sinister.

<comment><USER5> ouch! good thing these guys actually have a privacy policy. lol

<comment><USER6> So what if they do? :) You wouldn't even know who to sue if they let your info out.

<comment><USER7> nearly all of the sites out there that you trust with your username/password are susceptible to this. you just have to trust that all of them will protect your privacy, as they indicate in their policies. facebook and google harvest much more personal info on you than this site, btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> all good applications must service one of the cardinal sins.

preferably several at once.

</comment><comment><USER9> What a brilliant way to make use of Facebook. I can see this being great for the High School and college crowd especially.

</comment><comment><USER10> I always thought something like this would be a good idea, but it still requires the people you know to actually use it, which tends to be the sticking point.

Also, there's a significant risk that if people are shy enough to use this rather than asking someone out directly, they'll still be too shy to openly talk about it with the other person even after receiving the notice of mutual attraction. I actually had that happen with a similar feature on OKCupid (where you rate people on looks/personality, and if you have a mutually high rating, it notifies you both). I think it might be related to the game theoretical concept of common knowledge (<http://www.gametheory.net/dictionary/CommonKnowledge.html>) (vs. mere mutual knowledge), or something along those lines.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really have a hard time imagining someone I actually wanted to "hook up" with ever using a site like this.

In fact, I'd be surprised if a single female signed up for this.

<comment><USER5> I totally disagree - there are lots of females who are lonely and want dates, and would be willing to try something like this. After all, lots of females use dating sites like match.com

<comment><USER12> i think they're referred to as "girls" or "women" not "females" ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I won't be surprised if we see 10 different sites with the same basic concept. The details in each implementation will ultimately determine if anyone of them finds success.

</comment><comment><USER14> Orkut had this feature several years back. My girlfriend at the time made me sign up to orkut just to test it out.

Then I added all 6 of my friends who were actually on orkut to see who liked me. The only hit I got was a guy doing the same thing.

Big problem with this app: some girls will add all their friends just for an ego boost. Dating sites have this problem as well, I think.

</comment><comment><USER15> because it's so hard to send a message to the person you want to go out with? what's next? help me drink my coffee?

<comment><USER3> Very first non-content-free sentence on the site's front page: "Ever want to ask someone out, but are afraid of getting rejected? This site is your solution!"

The whole point is the "afraid of getting rejected" bit. (Well, I guess there are other reasons besides fear of rejection why you might want someone not to know you wanted to "hook up" with them unless it was mutual. For instance: consider someone who has a partner, wants to have an affair with someone else, but doesn't want anyone to know they're willing to be unfaithful unless they won't mind that. I make no comment on the ethics of this.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is excellent. Two suggestions:

\- Filter by gender

\- Check boxes instead of search, for the non-picky people

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought this would be a good idea but there's a problem (as has been alluded to by someone else) in that anyone can add everyone they know so that they can find out who has already selected them and then get a notification whenever anyone selects them in the future. Your data's not safe, not in the least ;P.

</comment><comment><USER18> There are DOZENS of apps exactly like this one already on Facebook. What does Facebook Connect buy them over being a normal app? And what suggests this one will succeed where all the others failed to achieve critical mass?

<comment><USER7> nope. you're 100% wrong. there are tons of cheesy matching apps on facebook, but none do exactly what this one does.

<comment><USER18> I typed in "Crush" to an Application search and found a whole bunch.

"Crush Tracker" says:

Here's how it works: 1\. Add the Crush Tracker application. 2\. Create your secret list of crushes. Don't worry, only you can see this list. 3\. Invite your friends to use Crush Tracker. If one of your crushes adds you to their crush list, you'll both be notified. 4\. Live happily ever after in a magical land filled with rainbows and unicorns.

"Crush List" is described as "Add your friends that you have a secret crush on. If they also add you to their crush list, both of you are notified!"

I only searched for "Crush" and even then only for about a minute. There are at least a dozen of these apps by various names.

Maybe you should check your facts before you declare someone is 100% wrong...

<comment><USER5> this one is really suseptible to someone adding all his/her friends just to see who they match - once you delete someone, the other person is no longer notified of the crush. plus, multiple people can match (downside) and there's only one type of relationship (the crush). and there aren't many fb connect sites out there: this is a good example of one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What would you do after you get a match? Call her/him and invite them to you place?

From my experience, awkward situation like this may ruin a potential relationship.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would just add all of my friends to see who picked me.

<comment><USER5> then you are consenting to a relationship with whoever you match first. if you later say "oh, i didn't really mean to put you on my list!", its kinda like asking someone out and then saying "oh, i didnt really mean to ask you out!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sign me up baby!

</comment><comment><USER22> February 15, 2005:

"So I said, narrow the focus. Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" — jwz @ <http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>

FINALLY IT'S COME TRUE

</comment><comment><USER23> this is a great site!</comment>


Nothing but radio silence from DigitalOcean while 38k sites remain down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/surge_sh/status/748269540778250240 <comment><USER2> While this sounds frustrating, I wouldn't ever put anything that required high availability on DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is great because they are cheap & simple to get stuff setup - not because they are robust and redundant.

<comment><USER3> But is this anything to do with "cheap & simple" vs a takedown notice that resulted in the entire server been taken offline? Redundancy really has nothing to do with this?

i.e. would another provider have acted differently?

If you host all your websites on a single box - then is there an expectation on a server provider to get an engineer to go into the box to turn off "one" site - vs just turn off the box?

<comment><USER2> Yes that's a good point! This seems to be simply a case of bad customer service rather than bad technology. I guess Another reason not to use DigitalOcean for projects requiring high availability I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If it's a parody site hopefully surge has the resources to sue NRA for fraudulent take down .

<comment><USER5> It doesn't sound like the NRA didn't take down Surge, though. The hosting provider/Cloudflare did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not a DMCA takedown request apparently:

"@Sarterus @xor according to @digitalocean we needed to remove b/c of "trademark in general". DMCA was not cited as the reason to remove." \-- Brock Whitten (@sintaxi) at [https://twitter.com/xor/status/748317104965750785](https://twitter.com/xor/status/748317104965750785)

</comment><comment><USER7> This same thing happened back in December/January, when a DMCA for "trademark infringement" was sent and DO took surge offline: [https://medium.com/surge- sh/more-on-january-7th-downtime-the...](https://medium.com/surge-sh/more-on- january-7th-downtime-the-dmca-and-due-process-c4472032856#.dmij8c5x9)

</comment><comment><USER8> Forwarded this via slack to a friend that works there though I am sure they are already working on this issue.

</comment><comment><USER9> Isn't the cloud awesome?

<comment><USER10> DMCA takedowns and the like affect baremetal providers and colos too</comment></comment>


Microsoft Announces Kinect SDK: Why This is the Future of Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_kinect_sdk_future_of_windows.php

<comment><USER2> Only runs on Windows 7. This might solve Microsoft's problem with people not upgrading from XP.</comment>


Planets evenly spaced on log scale - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/04/05/solar-system-on-log-scale/ <comment><USER2> As a former dynamicist, the underlying reason for this correlation is that planetary systems with many planets are always on the edge of dynamical instability. In other words, these kinds of planetary systems with lots of planets are always packed with as many planets as they can support over any given lifetime. It then turns out that the stability criteria imply that the system cannot be any more packed than having approximately log-equal spacing. In fact, if you take a star and put planets around it with a log uniform distribution and evolve it for a while, you find that eventually the planets that remain roughly fit the Bode-Titus law [1]. (I don't think the reasons for this are entirely well understood.)

One consequence of this is that our own solar system has been around for about 5 billion years, and is therefore probably unstable on timescales of 5-50 billion years. Indeed, long-term simulations indicate that there is a few percent chance that Mercury will get kicked out of the solar system or crash into Venus or the Sun before the Sun dies in ~5 billion years [2] [3].

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9710116](https://arxiv.org/abs/astro- ph/9710116)

[2]: [http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_s...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_system#Marginal_stability_of_the_Solar_System).

[3]: [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009Natur.459..817L](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009Natur.459..817L)

<comment><USER3> I wonder what effects Mercury crashing into the sun would have - large solar flares? Nothing at all?

<comment><USER4> Nothing much. The Sun is most of the mass in the Solar system, by over 97%. Most of the rest of that mass is Jupiter, followed at quite a distance by Saturn. Jupiter has more than 5700 times the mass of Mercury. In other words, next to the Sun, Mercury is a teeny little speck that would barely even leave a "splash" as it roasted to a cinder in its corona. It would be the most underwhelming event you can imagine, for Sol. For Mercury it would be an exciting journey of vaporizing outer layers, being torn to little shreds, and those shreds vaporizing completely (all before it contacted anything like a "surface").

<comment><USER5> What would be the effects of Venus crashing into the sun next?

<comment><USER4> This may be disappointing, but it would be the same for all of the planets, even Jupiter. Ignoring the effects on orbital dynamics from the planets changing positions or falling past other planets, they'd just burn up. Jupiter probsbly explode, or be drawn into a rig around the sun that would eventually fall in, and burn up.

All in all, the Sun is just _huge_ and wouldn't be disturbed by any of it. Its gravity would tear things apart before an impact, just like the moon would be shredded if it came too close to Earth. Any sattelite has what's called a Roche Limit, and if passes that it breaks apart from tidal stresses. That's how you get rings around planets, and I guess a star too. Although in most cases you wouldn't have a ring around a star, just burning fragments falling Sunward.

<comment><USER6> Dumb question, but would the asteroid belt count as a ring around the sun?

Never thought about it before until I read your comment, so I thought someone more knowledgeable than me could provide some insight here.

<comment><USER4> Everything in the Solar system is gravitationally bound by the Sun, which is what makes it part of the system in the first place. In that sense, yes, and really the whole Solar system is too. There's some nuance lost in that formulation though, because unlike a moon that came too close to its planet, broke apart and became a ring, the asteroid belt is much more distant and diffuse. It's also true that Jupiter sort of "shepherds" the asteroid belt, so unlike something like planetary rings, it's a much more complex system. I hope that goes some way to answering your question, which wasn't dumb at all.

<comment><USER7> Just wanted to chime in and say thank you. HN needs more comments like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One has to be careful with inspecting log graphs by mere looks. What looks like a small difference from expected to actual value in log scale can be very large difference in terms of actual values.

So it bothers me a bit that there is no actual fit and error margins.

<comment><USER9> Mar's Law: "Everything is linear if plotted on a log-log scale with a fat magic marker."

It's #6 on the excellent (and surprisingly software-applicable) "Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design": [http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html](http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html)

<comment><USER10> Those are good. My favorites:

16\. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

21\. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

29\. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30\. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mar's law: Everything is linear when plotted on a log-log scale with a fat marker.

(I know this is a lin-log plot)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's an extra large jump from Mars to Jupiter, but that's because there's an asteroid belt between them, which might be an aborted planet. If you put the average distance of the asteroid belt as planet number 5, I bet it would look even more linear.

<comment><USER13> The asteroid belt doesn't have nearly enough mass to be/have been a planet[0]. Largest thing there is Ceres, followed by Vesta, of which only the first qualifies as a dwarf planet.

There was an hypothesis about it being the remnants of a destroyed planet[1], but that was mostly an idea to support the Titius-Bode law[2], which was disproved a few hundred years ago.

[0] Currently about 3x Ceres mass, though it may have about Earth mass early in its history. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Formation) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Evolution)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaeton_(hypothetical_planet)#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaeton_\(hypothetical_planet\)#Phaeton_hypothesis)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law)

<comment><USER14> > ... the Titius-Bode law[2], which was disproved a few hundred years ago

Er... the Wikipedia page you're citing at [2] has this to say:

"Results from simulations of planetary formation support the idea that a randomly chosen stable planetary system will likely satisfy a Titius–Bode law."

and

"96% of these exoplanet systems adhere to a generalized Titius–Bode relation to a similar or greater extent than the Solar System does."

<comment><USER15> "Disproved" in science often means "superseded by more accurate theory".

<comment><USER16> True, but the article doesn't mention a more accurate theory. It implies that the rule works better than we have theoretical reasons to expect. (But as I commented above, the article contradicts itself to some degree.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's an interesting conjecture, but what about the anomalies? There are over a hundred planet systems discovered by Kepler with various levels of confirmation. None of them are mentioned here. The essay only lists 9 systems. How do the rest compare? Are there anomalies in unconfirmed systems? Why were these systems chosen; was it a random selection?

<comment><USER18> You need a system with more than two planets. A system with only two planets is going to be linearly spaced on any type of scale.

Once you've filtered out systems with two or fewer planets, you need orbital measurements with decent precision to tell whether a plot of planet spacing is actually linear on a log scale or not. Measuring a planet's orbit requires a decent amount of observation (since we can't measure star/planet mass directly and don't usually measure period directly), so unconfirmed systems likely don't have good measurements.

It's likely that most of the unmentioned systems get filtered out by one of the above two criteria.

<comment><USER19> Also, even if we detect a system with N > 3 exo-planets, we often cannot tell if there are more than N, but below the threshold of detectability, making the plots incomplete and incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We might be able to start using this as a way to specify planets, rather than the arbitrary number-by-discovery. Try StarName(with catalog info)#log(approximate radius of orbit)

Earth would we Sol#0 Kepler-90#-1.3, Kepler-90#-1.1, out to Kepler-90#0 for the outermost one on his graph.

That way, finding a new planet doesn't require either renumbering to specify where the planet is relative to the star. (BTW, I'm not real happy about using AU as the base measurement. It might be better to use Megameters since you're less likely to end up with negative log)

<comment><USER21> What would you do for highly elliptical orbits?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Something tells me that the mass of the planets should be in the conjecture somewhere, because small objects have little meaning and perhaps would not even classify as planets.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone care to speculate based on physics why this might have worked out this way?

<comment><USER24> Indulge my wild guess (I'm not a physicist):

If the proto solar system's matter distribution was a Gaussian-like distribution, it would make sense that matter density droped in a logarithmic scale, and thus planets formed droped logarithmically w.r.t radius.

More intuitively.. further away from the sun has less probability for rocks/particles to interact with each other.

<comment><USER25> In our solar system, the small planets are closest to the sun.

Jupiter, with 72% of all planetary mass, is more than twice as heavy as all other planets, combined.

Saturn, Uranus and Neptune take most of the remaining 28% ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size#Graphical_overview))

(Of course, there also is way more volume that far away)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Fascinating that this relationship scales from solar systems in which the planets are close to the star to solar systems that are more spread out. I wonder if the mass of the star has an effect on the average distance that the mass of the rest of the solar system is from the star. I also wonder if the mass of the star has a correlation with the tightness of the logarithmic distance relationship exhibited in this article.

<comment><USER27> I suspect some expert will come in and tell us that there is some fundamental of orbital mechanics which correlated to the observations. That is, stable planetary systems have orbits that correlate with the area of the orbit (the square of the distance from the star)

I recall one of the earliest breakthroughs in orbital mechanics was someone figuring out how the area of a slice of a elliptical orbit was the same anywhere in the orbit, when the angle of the arc is calculated as a unit of time and not degrees.

Not to say you're wrong. I think you're right, but the quality you're attributing to the system is a behavior of the system that has an underlying link to physics that may already be well explored. Just nobody has bothered to put a pretty plot in front of us armchair types and students before.

<comment><USER28> > I recall one of the earliest breakthroughs in orbital mechanics was someone > figuring out how the area of a slice of a elliptical orbit was the same > anywhere in the orbit, when the angle of the arc is calculated as a unit of > time and not degrees.

That would be Kepler's second law. It states that a line between the sun and the planet sweeps equal areas in equal periods of time.

<comment><USER27> There you go.

And calculus has an explanation for why that's the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some more discussion on Reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/58plow/why_are_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/58plow/why_are_the_planets_logarithmically_spaced/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Was kind of hoping to see pictures of the planets themselves, evenly spaced on a log scale. Those line graphs were a little less exciting.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, I believe we only have decent photos for one of the mentioned solar systems.

<comment><USER31> Would have made for a great illustration, methinks!

<comment><USER32> I'm working on a solar system chart for my daughter, to my eye it's more aesthetically pleasing to scale both distance from the sun and radius by square root.

Regardless of your approach the sun is too big to usefully represent on the same scale and have all other objects be visible

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anything is evenly spaded on a log scale...

</comment><comment><USER34> ...sort of like what you'd expect inside a simulation.

<comment><USER35> A simulation is very general concept. You may as well have said "sort of like what you'd expect to hear with your ears."

Obviously you hear things with your ears. And equally obviously, you can expect things in a simulation.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wordsearch puzzle using KnockoutJS - <AUTHOR> http://nonstopwords.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I would appreciate any suggestions and feedback!</comment>


"Rare hardware malfunction" brings down Digital River, Directtrack networks   - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/business/140497143.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Theories abound as to what is really happening. <http://maxstiegemeier.com/digital-river-server-blackout/>

<comment><USER2> That article doesn't really say anything at all. He harassed some employee who wouldn't comment, that's all.

As for redundancy, yes, that's a good idea, but there is a lot that can go wrong even if you've planned for redundancy. Have you ever yanked a disk out of your RAID setup during peak load? Why not, don't trust the redundancy? And that's why things break, even if the architecture is designed not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My only exposure to digital river has been attempting to purchase windows anytime upgrades. I say attempt, as the process just doesn't work.

Its pretty surprising that Microsoft (who run a reasonably functional store on xbox) cant figure out how to run their own online store.

</comment><comment><USER4> Was it just me or was that article written by a bot? The entire piece just doesn't seem to flow or fit together. Cant really put my finger on it, but it is almost like it was written by a non native speaker.</comment>