Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States - <AUTHOR> https://e-pluribusunum.org/2018/12/21/congress-made-open-government-data-the-default-in-the-united-states/ <comment><USER2> Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aiming to make open data more accessible and to democratize data-science: [https://data-in.place/](https://data- in.place/) ...

<comment><USER3> In case you haven't seen it, I think [https://www.data.gov/](https://www.data.gov/) is an attempt to answer your point about making it "accessible and useful to people." There's room for improvement, but it's a start.

<comment><USER4> I thought there would be a flood of projects analysing the data when it came out, but it seems like the idea everyone applauded but not much came out of it. Steve Ballmer's [http://usafacts.org](http://usafacts.org) seems like the first real attempt though.

<comment><USER5> Is there a HN thread discussing these reports? I'd love to hear folks' opinions about them... Interesting facts to me in the latest report [1]:

\- Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data.

\- Page 30: "There have been more suicide gun deaths than homicide gun deaths every year since 1981". This is crazy to me given how much we hear about gun homicide being a problem in this country.

\- Page 29: Crime rate has declined but "The number of incarcerated persons has increased by 330% since 1980".

[1] [https://static.usafacts.org/public/resources/USAFactsReport2...](https://static.usafacts.org/public/resources/USAFactsReport2018.pdf)

<comment><USER6> >Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data.

Barring some calamity, this is pretty much as expected. Tariffs impact a very small percentage of the economy with large size, and the rest of it with a small overhead, much like a fed interest rate hike. Even with this hawkish fed, there hasn't been anything overly harmful to the economy from a policy perspective.

> This is crazy to me given how much we hear about gun homicide being a > problem in this country.

Anything that's politicized gets this special treatment. Kid kills brother with car, blurb in local newspaper. Kid kills brother with gun, national news and Tweets from Presidential candidates.

Texting and driving is as bad as drinking and driving when it comes to number of deaths (dwarfing gun deaths as well), yet people do it like it's no big deal. Most cities still only levy small fines (in comparisons to DUIs) for doing it. Not all accidental death is created equal.

>Page 29: Crime rate has declined but "The number of incarcerated persons has increased by 330% since 1980"

Welcome to the US where the war on drugs gives us authoritarian level incarceration rates.

<comment><USER7> Every election cycle I look for the candidate with the balls to say the War on Drugs is over, let's wind this crap down, change our laws to reflect this fact, change some sentences ex post facto to reflect this and get on with our lives.

Every election cycle, I continue to be disppointed. Even if they were crazy in every other regard, I would probably still vote for them. It's like, Step 1 towards doing anything meaningful in regards to poverty, education, criminal justice reform, et cetera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All I want for this Christmass is an authoritative list of all US federal agencies. I kid you not, there is no such list and the number of federal agencies is uncertain. From Wikipedia:

>Legislative definitions of a federal agency are varied, and even contradictory, and the official United States Government Manual offers no definition. While the Administrative Procedure Act definition of "agency" applies to most executive branch agencies, Congress may define an agency however it chooses in enabling legislation, and subsequent litigation, often involving the Freedom of Information Act and the Government in the Sunshine Act. These further cloud attempts to enumerate a list of agencies.

<comment><USER8> Shameless plug: does anybody know where I could get detailed spending and receipts data for US federal budget? Including all federal agencies? There is very limited data at [https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/supplemental- materials/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/supplemental-materials/) but I am looking for more detailed data.

<comment><USER9> The main place to explore spending data is [https://www.usaspending.gov/#/download_center/](https://www.usaspending.gov/#/download_center/) and [https://datalab.usaspending.gov](https://datalab.usaspending.gov)

Let me know what you can't find or request via [https://www.data.gov/data- request/](https://www.data.gov/data-request/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a next step I would love to see an exploration of a legal system where a change of a law or regulation is backed by both data (data and methodology directly referenced by the law) and a description of the expected impact. Something such as:

> By changing law A related to B, we expect the increase of C to be at least D > in the next E months.

If not achieved, the change is reversed/reduced. Hopefully that would allow experimentation without taking the risk of creating a system too bad in case the implementation or policy isn't good enough.

Just dreaming here :)

<comment><USER11> I've dreamed the same thing.

Since every law is a trade-off, having both positive and negative effects, I wish each law would enumerate the expected/possible positive and negative effects. In other words, I want the trade-off to be explicit and for the lawmakers to express why they believe the positive effects outweigh the negatives ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm biased (I work on the BigQuery team) but I'm always excited to see more public datasets made available in BigQuery: [https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public- data/](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/). It would be great to have government data available through a variety of cloud services with free exports.

Some personal favorites among BigQuery public datasets include NOAA GHCN[0], the Census Bureau's Zip Code Tabulation Area [1], and FEC Campaign Finance [2].

[0] [https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/noaa- pu...](https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/noaa- public/ghcn-d?filter=solution- type:dataset&filter=category:climate&id=9d500d1d-fda4-4413-a789-d8786fd6592e) [1] [https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bigquer...](https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bigquery- public-data/zipcode_area?filter=solution- type:dataset&filter=category:maps&id=b0de5205-0a3f-4f1f-8cd4-47cfa001de63) [2] [https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bigquer...](https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bigquery- public-data/fec-campaign-finance?filter=solution- type:dataset&filter=category:science- research&id=af2dc7e0-f9bf-4a10-9047-fbc5e43eecb7)

</comment><comment><USER13> Open data is the first step.

I wish I could do more business with my gov't (State and Local) through the internet.

"Copies of documents cannot be ordered through this website, by email or over the telephone." Only fax and snail mail... [https://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/faq_copies.page.asp](https://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/faq_copies.page.asp)

<comment><USER14> Is this because they are required to make this info accessible, but are not required to make it easy?

<comment><USER15> More importantly, there's no specific funding set aside to support the effort to make it available. Government at all levels lives and dies by funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FOIA officers will still find a way to send me scanned PDFs of spreadsheets.

<comment><USER17> I'll defend this practice. It's the only way of knowing for sure that you're transmitting exactly the information you intend to send. Even copy/paste often picks up other stuff you don't intend.

<comment><USER18> It the only, but maybe the easiest.

Having a data review process with automated integrity, confidentiality, and quality checks is not terribly difficult.

But having a prototocol to export the pdf to csv is also dead easy for confirming only the data relevant is included. ASCII is just as "easy" as scan, but it requires training clerks to be data-oriented rather than document.

<comment><USER19> _ugh_ if only CSVs were standardized sooner and more completely. There are many encoding, delimiter, escaping and truncation conventions to deal with in real world data.

<comment><USER18> Definitely. They are better than PDFs, but still have lots of room for improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Too bad thing related to "security" won't be included.

All I want for Christmas: accountability for the DoD budget, which for 2019 will be $717 Billion, the majority of the USG's discretionary spending.

In 2015, an audit of the budget revealed $125 Billion in wasteful spending, and this was covered up. In 2016, the Office of Inspector General for DoD said that the Army made 6.5 Trillion in wrongful adjustments to its 2015 accounting. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense#Criticism)

We still do not know how many contractors the DOD employs, or how much money they are paid, because the numbers are just not recorded. We do know, though, that the numbers and budgets we do have are often inaccurately reported, according to the DOD OIG.

People whine a lot about paying taxes, but the politicians that always complain about taxes are extracting record amounts of tax money for a military that is mismanaged, doesn't do its accounting properly, can't build modern fighting vehicles, and doesn't record basic information like _how many people they employ_.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been working with the GPOs api. The engineer is quite responsive on github and the api is pretty snappy. Constantly asking for feedback and releasing new features. I think we're headed in the right direction. A shame my project isn't further a long for a shameless plug.

If you're interested in informing the public on legislation, have experience on the hill or UI/UX experience hit me up. I'm just some dude with an idea who lives in a terminal. Money is secondary.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that the Federal Reserve was exempted from this legislation.

<comment><USER23> The Federal Reserve [board] bases its data on data from the Reserve Banks (think Federal Reserve of New York)- which are private and get data from banks chartered in the region (so the New York Fed is partially owned by JP Morgan). Requiring the Federal Reserve [board] to release underlying data could get sticky and be a legal minefield.

<comment><USER24> Also the St Louis Fed provides provides FRED, which is pretty open for most purposes.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The first problem here is the data formats state and federal governments use. You'll see a hodgepodge, but primarily MS Office $version .

The biggest problem with this terrible binary format is that metadata can leak a great deal that should have not been released. So this leads to PDF output of word/excel.

The next area is that especially local government offices have no way of setting up a data portal. I'm working on this right now, where the only way to get data out of Bloomington,IN is to do FOIA requests every week/month over the data you want. This absolutely should be available via a portal, and not locked behind "in person, mail, fax at cost of .10$ a page".

</comment><comment><USER26> Well that's cool, but the wording worries me:

public information _should_ be open by default to the public in a machine- readable format, where such publication doesn't harm privacy or security federal agencies _should_ use evidence when they make public policy

The word "should" is used in both one and two. If my time in the government taught me anything, it's that "should" is only slightly stronger than "may". If an instruction says "shall", then it is required to be done.

</comment><comment><USER27> Finally a bipartisan moment, looks like most reps were onboard.

<comment><USER28> They have to be for the law to pass?

<comment><USER29> Not just most reps were onboard; nearly all reps voted in favor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "The Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act (AKA the OPEN Government Data Act)"

Please, could we end this obsession with backronyms in congress. Perhaps some congressperson could create a suitably titled backronym act to rid us of backronym acts. This should just be the one singular "Government Data Act" and it should be amended as needed to cover any law changes around "Government Data".

<comment><USER31> BACKRONYM Act: Banning Acronym Cleverness Keeping Representatives Occupied Nutting Your Mom Act

(struggled with the NYM so gave up and went with something childish...)

<comment><USER32> Naming Your Measures / Mandates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know if this applies to PACER and its fees?

<comment><USER34> It does not. Only CFO Act agencies in the executive branch. But there is a bill to open up PACER.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's good to see the US govt making an effort to step up its technical level. A vast if hidden problem in the political sphere is that most politicians do not have a technical education. This creates a serious misconfiguration of the govt alongside other centers of soft power like large cap tech companies.

There is no way around it that these companies have to work with the government to secure public interests from 21st century threats. Just today I read an article about how black hat hackers are targeting outdated industrial control systems more vigorously than ever before. The government on its own without technical upgrades cannot face down this problem in its current condition. Which is why opening up data is a beneficial thing.

Openness of data is a double edged sword. It will make malicious agents' job easier to have as much data as possible in a consistently machine readable format, but it will also help those on the other side.

If tech is one of the things that can bolster and improve government, tech needs to work in the optimal environment. Which is one with open data.

</comment><comment><USER36> With all the problems its government has, united states is still at it fostering innovation.

Open data will bring innovation and accountability.

Great move

<comment><USER37> > federal agencies should use evidence when they make public policy

the cynic in me just figures that this moves the goal post such that special interest groups will adapt to produce the right evidence for the desired outcomes

<comment><USER38> You're probably right, but at least in that case there will still be a paper- trail of "data" that motivated entities can point to and make a case against.

I would rather have bogus evidence in the official record, that I can analyze and challenge, than no evidence at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > there was a carve out "for data that does not concern monetary policy," > which relates to the Federal Reserve, among others.

Does that mean they won't open data that affects monetary policy or that they will only open data that affects monetary policy?

Either way that seems huge.

</comment><comment><USER40> Can someone who is more familiar with the actual policy shed some light on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, the author, Alex Howard (who I'm friends-via-Twitter with), is as familiar with this as anyone. He was previously a senior analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, which is a prominent open-government organization: [https://sunlightfoundation.com/author/ahoward/](https://sunlightfoundation.com/author/ahoward/)

The submitted post includes a link [0] to an article he wrote a couple days back, which provides more context on "How did open government data get into the US Code?", including the nitty-gritty of how the original bill was proposed in the last session but ultimately left out of legislation. Howard writes that the legislation was "one of the primary legislative priorities for me during my years as a senior analyst and then deputy director at the Sunlight Foundation"

[0] [https://e-pluribusunum.org/2018/12/20/senate-passes- evidence...](https://e-pluribusunum.org/2018/12/20/senate-passes-evidence- based-policymaking-bill-setting-up-historic-win-for-open-government-data/)

<comment><USER39> > (who I'm friends-via-Twitter with)

Full disclosure? Odd brag?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's someone who I mostly learned/knew through social media and am friendly with, even though we've never worked together and maybe have met in person a couple times at conferences.

<comment><USER39> I wasn't sure if you were disclosing the relationship because of the nature of your comment or if you were just bragging about knowing them. It is/was odd.

<comment><AUTHOR> My opinion is that he's an expert on the legislation, but I wanted to be clear that I could be biased :)

<comment><USER39> Haha ok, as an outsider reading that it came off as a brag and I was confused. That's why I asked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> One has to be careful here. Lots of internal details may give trolls and conspiracy theorists fodder to generate controversy and fake news, often by taking things out of context. It may slow work-flow because workers will be hesitant to write anything without expensive pre-vetting.

</comment><comment><USER42> Tangent, but related shameless plug. Especially to San Franciscans: [https://theconstituent.net](https://theconstituent.net).

It makes legislation easier to access. And eventually easier to engage with.

</comment><comment><USER43> For those who don't know, as the article mentions in passing, there's already quite a bit of data online available from data.gov (which was started by the Obama administration).

</comment><comment><USER44> Has anyone read any good analysis about Title I of HR4174 requiring evidence when making public policy? Skimming the bill, I don't have a clue what the implications are other than requiring agencies to make some reports. It sounds like a good thing on the surface, but it has been a talking point of the Trump administration, and put into practice in a rather Orwellian fashion.

Basically, the implied subtext is that regulators should not put any restrictions on industry unless the evidence is completely unambiguously in favor of the regulation. However, science is never 100% certain even at its best. And you can always drag up some study that contradicts the strong consensus of the field, whether by fluke or intentional design of the study. In other words "evidence based policymaking" has been euphemism for "must give alternative facts equal weight".

</comment><comment><USER45> Does anybody know a public source of

net worth + annual earnings+ board positions

of US Senator/congressman spouses+children ?

</comment><comment><USER46> Cool! And they should also adopt UK-like government web design principles.

<comment><USER9> See [https://designsystem.digital.gov](https://designsystem.digital.gov)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm glad they were able to do it before the new Congress came on board.

<comment><USER29> What has that to do with anything?

The bill had large majority bipartisan support (which makes me suspect it's toothless...)

<comment><USER47> There's a reason it was passed during the lame duck session of the Senate, just before change of control. That's when urgent matters that are guaranteed to be ignored by the next Congress are handled.

I'm surprised this needs explaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> We should go the path of Sweden and make all IRS records public too...

</comment><comment><USER49> when I first saw this story, I thought it was a joke ala The Onion. so I looked for it on NYTimes, WaPo, CNN but didn't find it. i still can't find it there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Open data is a relatively niche topic/policy in politics. It wouldn't be front page news on a normal day, and so it's not a surprise if it doesn't make the weekend headlines, on a week in which the federal govt went into shutdown over the border wall, nevermind the resignation of the defense secretary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What type of policy implications does this actually have?

</comment><comment><USER51> Hopefully they release it in RDF.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder if this open data can be (will be?) used by a foreign entity and be turned against the american people? It should be open but not free-for-all

<comment><USER53> I'm not convinced there are really any important national security secrets other than passcodes and so on. The rest seems to be excuses for hiding corruption of various kinds. Secrecy in government is incompatible with democracy by definition.

<comment><USER54> You have to think about how people respond to things. Social media in its current state has basically turned into a system that takes an event, removes all context, spins it in the most negative way imaginable, and then dogpiles on it to no end -- virtue signaling for imaginary points. There are often lots of things in government, and in life in general, where you must choose between two very negative choices. And the decision there does not necessarily imply that you're in any way satisfied with it, but you see it as the decision least likely to produce an awful outcome. Social media and this sort of logic are wholly and completely incompatible.

Take Khashoggi as a contemporary example. Undoubtedly there have been countless heavily classified conversations weighting the pros and cons of any action against Saudi Arabia or MBS as a result of this. How we are _extremely_ dependent on Saudi Arabia for reasons outside the scope of this post, and they know this. And this is all happening at a time when Saudi:US relations souring would greatly stand to strengthen the geopolitical position and power of nations such as China and Russia. In my opinion it's extremely likely we will do nothing, but that's because it's better than doing something. If this was not classified, social media would throw a nonstop hissy fit. Not because they actually care or think we're making the wrong decision, but because it's an incredibly easy way score those imaginary points and followers which are the hottest commodity since sliced bread. Another issue here is that knowing the mechanisms of our decision making here, and how close we came to 'breaking', would be incredibly valuable information to nations such as Saudi Arabia which they could then use to exploit the US.

So while I do agree with you that classification is very often abused, I also think there are indeed vast amounts of information that must be classified. People are not mature enough to impartially process our decision making processes, and the details of such processes would provide invaluable information to other nations which could then be used to exploit the US.

<comment><USER53> Khashoggi is obviously a canard; the Saudi Arabian government is currently running torture chambers in Yemen where they roast people alive[1]. The US has had no problem with this for years; we ourselves appointed a known torturer to head the CIA, the organization which is supposedly agog about Khashoggi's assassination. The CIA itself has been running an extrajudicial assassination program for over a decade now. Talk about "virtue signaling".

These people, the ones who are part of the security apparatus, are not in any position to make moral choices for the rest of us. They are highly immoral actors. I want to see them removed from government. The idea that they are capable of making good decisions in secret, without public input or oversight, is belied by the two decades of war, torture, assassination, and general chaos that they have actively fostered.

The problem, really, is that all of the secret policy conversations about Saudi Arabia have been about how to get them to continue buying weapons from American arms merchants, a policy greatly to the detriment of the American public, which would, in general, favor a policy more like: disengage from the Middle East, stop supporting torture, and transition away from fossil fuels. If we had spent $6 trillion on that instead of funding pointless wars and building up the Saudi torture state, we'd be much better off.

Let's stop having unaccountable, immoral people decide in secret what is good for America, and get back to letting the American public decide. We're better at it.

[1] [https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/inside-yemens- secr...](https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/inside-yemens-secret- prisons-you-can-hear-the-screams/news-story/6f810a5df25919c42bcec8905294f6aa)

<comment><USER55> About this: _" buying weapons from American arms merchants, a policy greatly to the detriment of the American public"_

American arms merchants employ the American public. People get jobs. Taxes are paid. Suppliers and subcontractors benefit too.

A detriment would be if Saudi Arabia bought from China or Russia, enriching people in those nations instead of the American public. We'd also have far less influence over Saudi Arabia... really, they could be a lot worse.

<comment><USER53> In the narrow sense I think you are correct; in the long term deeply incorrect. There are many ways for the American public to be employed. A society built on arms manufacturing seems the least desirable to me. This is the detriment I speak of. Much of our effort and economy is wasted making guns and bombs rather than more useful and less destructive things. This industry sucks up a trillion dollars in government support annually; if it were reduced and that effort (spending) directed elsewhere we would all benefit. We might, e.g., direct it to developing fossil fuel independence and obviate the need for anyone to sell arms to Saudis.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is any bootstrapped startup running their own servers? - <AUTHOR>

I know it is not recommended to setup your own server at home etc. and go with the pros because that is not what a startup should focus on. But just wondering if anyone is successfully running their own server from home/office etc. while they bootstrap ? <comment><USER2> We are running a Hybrid infrastructure. We use Rackspace and our own hosted servers at our office.

We are also bootstrapping this thing. At the beginning we thought creating and setting up our own servers (Google-style) was the way to go. We started at our office, but eventually just got to big for us to support.

We are only 4 people in the company, and we have other things to do than to manage all the servers. So we started using Rackspace.

Let me tell you cost-wise, it is not that different. We still had to pay for a good network pipe, and also cooling for the servers. So electricity was also expensive.

It is not a bad idea to host your own servers. It works fine at the beginning, with time it just gets too hard to scale without a team of people dedicated to that, and while bootstrapping that is though.

Using a provider has worked great for us, and I think it was a great choice to use a Cloud provider instead of fully hosting on-site.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not us. Currently we are working unfunded, so the cost to purchase the hardware and upgrade our home internet service to be reliable enough to support a business server was too high. You would also have to worry about fault tolerance yourself, so then purchasing backup hardware (drives, machine) yourself (and preferably storing offsite) then factors in.

In the end, we went with Amazon Web Services while we build our prototype, etc. I spent an evening getting things set up initially on it (still more to learn), but they have a free usage tier now so there was/is no cost to keep our site there until our usage justifies it. Hopefully by then we'll be making money and can cover the cost.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have always run my own hardware in my apartment. Always.

Here is what I focus on:

1\. I use good, stable UPS's, make sure the batteries are always running properly.

2\. I use fast networking gear (switches, NICS in the servers, wiring, etc)

3\. I buy low cost desktop boxes that support 32gb or 64gb of RAM and I am considering stepping that up to more as a max potential.

4\. I max out the RAM in the boxes from the start. Saves needing to power down, install time, power up time, etc. May not sound like much but it is some savings.

5\. I keep backups on a Drobo (16tb) for each server. In case of a failure I am able to restore fast after installing a new drive.

6\. I run a pfSense box front-ending everything

7\. I am on Comcast business a lot to provide the best service, stay competitive in price and make sure I am always running their latest modem offering.

8\. I have daily logs e-mailed and I review quickly for anything major and then a weekly appointment with my servers to check them more in depth, run updates, etc. We only run CentOS.

I'd be happy to talk more about how I keep this in check or provide any more details.

<comment><USER5> What happens when your internet goes down?

<comment><USER4> I bitch to Comcast! Knock on wood. It happens for just minutes every few months. I also have a backup modem just in case.

<comment><USER6> Can't pfSense multi-WAN? Vyatta can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're currently running most of our stuff from a Mac Mini we own (about US$1500) that's co-located with macminicolo.com in Las Vegas (about US$30/mo). It's mostly a static sight right now, though we'll be setting up an online store to do direct e-book sales in a few weeks. We will also get a second Mac Mini sometime soon to use as a staging/emergency replacement server.

We're selling e-books to a niche market (check out www.photoshopdimensions.com) so we're not worried about runaway traffic growth, though of course we'd love to have that problem.

This has worked out well for us so far. Setting aside our questionable server OS choice, the downside of owning your server is the higher up-front cost and responsibility for the hardware. You can reduce this by leasing a physical server from a hosting company.

The upside is you have the full server CPUs/memory/disk at your disposal; a modern server can support a pretty sizable load if you don't have to share it. I believe StackOverflow got pretty far in their early days on a single app server and a single DB server.

<comment><AUTHOR> so do you have paying customers ? If yes, what is the approx. volume ?

<comment><USER7> We had over 1000 downloads direct from our server of our first free issue, and hundreds more from the iBookstore. Our second issue sold around 40 so far at $5 through the iBookstore and Amazon (with direct sales coming soon).

We're gearing up to publish our next issue at the end of July and do a big marketing/PR push around Photoshop World in September. I'm confident our one little server will hold up just fine.

The bulk of the 1000 downloads came over a couple days after we were mentioned in Adobe's Photoshop.com blog. According to Google Analytics we had on the order of 20 simultaneous visitors at times without a hiccup. That's actually a pretty light load for a modern PC server -- I didn't even bother to ssh into our mini to check performance stats. We do have CloudFlare proxying the site, so undoubtedly that helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am. It's my first web service and couldn't justify the expenditure of a cloud based service. In fact, because it's my first experience, I'm a really better off with the entire control. I can see exactly what happens, when it happens. I can also switch database as I see fit, the only requirement being to be runnable on my machine.

It simply runs on my working computer, on the background. \- 5.8 GB \- 4 CPUs @ 2.33 ghz

If I ever need to get more power/memory/bandwidth, (which would be a nice problem) then I'll reconsider.

I suppose this is all a question of scale. Is your startup getting 10s, 100s, 1000s visitors a day?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have paying users ? How many if yes ?

<comment><USER8> Not yet :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think you'll find this to be pretty rare. Cloud hosting is pretty cheap and easy, which is why so many people are using it. There isn't much of a reason to run your own hardware, especially in the early stages of a startup.</comment>


Microsoft's security chief explains why the company is eliminating passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/01/microsoft-ciso-bret-arsenault-wants-to-eliminate-passwords.html <comment><USER2> Now if only they'd eliminate 'security' questions.</comment>


Why MasterClass Isn't Really About Mastery - <AUTHOR> https://napkinmath.substack.com/p/why-masterclass-isnt-really-about <comment><USER2> Seems to me that MasterClass is basically the Great Courses except much slicker and is funded by venture vultures. We'll see how long they will last until it get ruined.

Beside, I don't really care if the company is really selling X or Y. Clearly, their product contain real valuable knowledge.

However, if you're in the pursuit of knowledge, just watching it will likely result in jack-squat retention. I know this because I watched a whole lecture about the industrial revolution, and can't retain anything beyond the basic overview, if at that.

Master Class appears to have workbooks and exercises, so retention are going to be much better than one of the series in the Great Courses.

Still, 90% of the value is gained by learners doing the work and putting in the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have ever written an educational book or sold educational material, the first thing you learn is that the market for actual mastery-level educational material is infinitesimal. The only way to make money (without charging astronomical, university-enrollment-level prices) is to make content that appeals to a mass audience.

Imagine you wanted to revolutionize higher education, so you build a big- budget website with excellent graduate-level CS content at an affordable price. How big is that market? There are only about 2,000 CS PhDs and 40,000 CS masters degrees issued in the US each year. That's a tiny market compared to the many millions of people who could benefit from learning basic programming to automate a boring part of their non-programming job. There are teenagers in India producing zero-budget PHP tutorials on YouTube in their bedrooms everyday that easily reach 10x your total addressable market. It's a business non-starter. And that's for a popular, lucrative field like CS - imagine trying to launch an educational product in a smaller, less lucrative field like Anthropology or Sociology.

The only viable way to make something like MasterClass work is to aim it at adults with disposable cash who want to broaden their skillset while being entertained but aren't trying to become an expert in the field. There's nothing wrong with that. MasterClass (and the numerous similar products, from ad-supported YouTube content to many providers of paid courses) are often really great and entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think anyone could take it seriously as education. I see as an interesting interview, where someone will discuss technical things about his art, great for geeks. The one from Hans Zimmer where he discusses how he progressively comes up with the music for a film is interesting, or Ron Howard analyses an Indiana Jones sequence, etc. Don't think it is meant to make you a composer or a director.

Kind of like a cockpit video for planes.

<comment><USER5> This rings true for me. The analysis of the craft, and looking over the shoulder was really great. Hearing a 'grandmaster' talk about their profession and giving a little demo is quite interesting. There are some real gems in the catalogue.</comment></comment>


Tone - It really is important (Xobni) - <AUTHOR> http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2008/03/tone---it-reall.html <comment><USER2> Seems to me that it's less about tone and more about providing immediate results to the user. Xobni could just make the extra effort to get possible solutions from their "answer search" or "community forums" and put them on that page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if very many YC companies focus on user support. My impression is that they focus on improving their technology, adding features, and finding additional funding the most. If one can get a reply within three months from a YC company, they're lucky.

The sad thing is I don't know if anyone can blame them. There's more value in building up one's application than acting like an established company and having three founders doing great tech support. In my experience at least a third of the people who e-mail a startup with questions (especially paying customers) offer their own phone number. They either straight-out say or imply that you can call them and spend fifteen minutes walking them through. Believe me, this is sometimes worth it the first few times you do it, but can be a time sink later on. (Granted, this app targets a subset of adults.)

Also, I don't believe YC funders are picked for being great customer service representatives. I also think that makes sense. Not only is such experience not necessary for early stage startups, but computer geeks are running the show, not salespeople.</comment>


YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.avos.com/delicious-press-release/

<comment><USER3> Please don't get me wrong, but I never understood what "social" bookmarking is useful for. As long as my supposed ignorance persists, I'm sorry to crash the party with a simple question: why is Delicious relevant?

Assuming many or most here think it _is_ relevant, it should be possible to respond to my question reasonably, without buzzwords and with only moderate downvoting.

<comment><USER4> It's funny, I started to write a reply explaining my love of Delicious. But the more I articulated the reasons, the more I realized I loved what it was, and don't really use it anymore.

1\. Before browsers could sync my bookmarks across multiple computers, posting them to delicious was the best way to have access to them anywhere.

2\. Before instapaper let me save articles to read later, Delicious was a great way to have a tagged backlog of things to explore whenever I have freetime.

3\. Before Twitter, the best way to know what your favorite developers or designers were thinking about was to follow what they were bookmarking on Delicious.

4\. Before HN, looking at the usage of tags and stories per tag helped me figure out what technologies or topics were growing in popularity and find out what to read first about them.

<comment><USER5> There's something to be said about focusing on one thing and doing it well. (Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well.)

<comment><USER6> "Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well." Then what exactly _are_ you saying? :-)

<comment><USER7> I think he's saying that the 'focusing on one thing' part is important. Regardless of how well you do a task, if you offer many services, you might not come to be associated as strongly with a particular task in the consumer's mind. Thus, when they come to think of that function, specialists come to mind rather than the you, the generalist.

That's how the theory goes, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "AVOS is a new Internet company, led by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. AVOS is located in San Mateo, California"

I'm surprised I hadn't heard of that company before. I thought these two were still working at YouTube. Are they?

"YouTube (…) which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B"

I was surprised of seeing that as well, since the price I have seen everywhere else was $1.65B. I guess they know that better than anyone else but why the difference?

<comment><USER9> Must be someone who didn't know the difference between G$ and Gi$ (1024 vs. 1000)…

<comment><USER9> Oh come on, 1.76 G$ = 1.64 Gi$; they're remarkably close to the other values.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> around 14 days ago I updated my browser to firefox 4, and all my delicious bookmarks that were in tag clouds on my deliciousbar disappeared - <USER2> deleted. They weren't to be found anywhere, not in my tagcloud, not in my history not on delicious site. I e-mailed them but didn't get a reply, and now it seems I've lost years worth of bookmarks that were important to me.

I'll never use delicious again.

<comment><USER11> Google syncs all your bookmarks if you use Chrome. I've yet to lose any. Something to think about.

<comment><USER12> Chrome's bookmark sync is not foolproof yet -- I've never lost a bookmark, but I get dupes all the time (usually after renaming a bookmark: the old name comes back as a duplicate).

<comment><USER13> Very true, and don't bother to use xmarks with google chrome sync. It will keep on duplicating every time. Making multiple copy of the bookmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (I've been running social bookmarking site, Faves.com, since 2005).

I still think there is a largely unmet need that fits into the "Social Bookmarking" niche. But I don't think "Social" is the best way to think about it.

As an avid user (of Faves.com, in my case) - I use it for (in order of importance):

        1. Pack Rat - I don't ever want to loose a link I
           found interesting enough to want to recall later.
        2. Personal Search - I need a great search interface
           to quickly find anything I've saved (search across
           tags, and comment text).

The unmet need - NOT "Social" in the sense that I want to share links with my "friends" - but, rather, topic-based "Communities". Help me interact with people who share the same interests. This is more in the vein of Hacker News or Reddit. But I don't have any one service (Faves, included) that do this "right" yet.

I think I want a well integrated system that spans:

        - Personal Bookmarking
        - Personal Knowledge Base w/ Search
        - Topic Forums
        - Commenting system
        - Micro-blogging/publishing

<comment><USER15> I agree. Back in the days before HN, I would often use Delicious as my aggregator of choice. I would follow specific tags (webdev, informatics, etc.) in my RSS reader and I would find amazing resources all the time. In retrospect, each tag could be similar to a subreddit, but with much higher quality links. These topic-based communities as you put it are much more interesting than, say, seeing what links my cousin shared on FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just discovered this when I tried to bookmark something on Delicious. I am positively surprised that they actually _asked_ me if I wanted to give my personal information to Avos. This is the way it should be.

One critical note though, I went to <http://blog.delicious.com/> expecting to read about this, but there is nothing about the acquisition there. If this does not warrant a blog post, what is a blog for?

<comment><USER17> I felt the same. the sheen vanished for me when the email contained the text:

"Originating IP address: 127.0.0.1"

oops!

<comment><USER18> yphp has a different function to get the remote address as the normal methods don't work since it is behind a load balancer and using ytunnel (modified stunnel for yahoo).

Guess they forgot to use the proper function :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably a lot of historical users will never tick the box to allow their data to be transferred, and that data will fall off the web, or at best be archived. That would happen even if there was not a time limit for users to take action; June is likely the time limit. There has already been some work on scraping an archive of Delicious and that is going to pick up steam.

On the one hand, they seem to be doing things right with giving users control over their data, and complying with their ToS. Pity this means the data that got siloed away will be lost. Even when everyone does everything right, data silos are not good in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've switched to Pinboard.in, and couldn't be happier. Still, great news for Delicious users!

<comment><USER21> Same here. Even though I was satisfied with Delicious, I wanted my bookmarks somewhere safe. Now the question arises: will Delicious write importers for all these other services so that I can move back?

<comment><USER22> Pinboard exports in delicious format, so you should be able to just re-import and be good to go.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for your great service; I'm seriously enjoying Pinboard. Can't imagine switching :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.avos.com%2Fdelicious- press-release%2F) and in case that goes, image: <http://i.imgur.com/voNw9.png>

<comment><USER24> I believe Coral CDN (<http://coralcdn.org/>) is a superior way of surviving a front-page placement on HN. AFAIK, all page assets are cached with Coral, not just the page as GoogleBot sees it.

In this particular case it probably didn't matter as much, but for your consideration, anyway.

<comment><USER25> CoralCDN is far more superior. AKAIK, one its main main goals is to help survive front-page placements on popular sites. Its also far more easier to use. Since you mention it here is the CoralCDN for this article: <http://www.avos.com.nyud.net/delicious-press-release/> . The only problem I find with CoralCDN is that if you try accessing a URL that is already down with CoralCDN and has not been cached by Coral it probably won't work. The Google cache would be far more effective in such a case.

<comment><USER26> Well, people _have_ suggested an automatic CoralCDN feature to Hacker News.

<comment><USER25> That would be good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anybody know if any Yahoo employees are going to AVOS at the same time? (Also, are there even any employees with full-time responsibilities on Delicious?) Is AVOS going to try to re-hire some of the old Del.icio.us team?

This is good news but I am thinking that things at Delicious might be a bit rocky as new admins adjust. If you're a happy Pinboard.IN user, or use some other service, it's not necessarily a reason to switch today.

</comment><comment><USER28> Just filled out the opt-in form (<https://secure.delicious.com/settings/optin>). Can't wait to see what they do with it. Note to the new owners: if you charge, I'll gladly pay.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is Delicious in good hands? There is no place like localhost: <http://i.imgur.com/KGVzN.png> (funny)

<comment><USER30> Did you notice Delicous in the subject?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congrats!

<comment><USER32> I'm really happy to see this. I think sort of joshu buying the company back, this is one of the better possible outcomes for the future of the delicious community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The URL leads to a 404, but the press release is at just <http://avos.com>

</comment><comment><USER34> When the info leaked that Yahoo was thinking about dumping Delicious, I wrote a Chrome Webapp that lets one scrape bookmarks from Delicious, corresponding to lists of tags (any bookmark, not just your own).

It's still out there (and still works): [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nbahmnpelbdcmkpllm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nbahmnpelbdcmkpllmmadklmmienpggd)

<comment><USER35> Thanks for this! I use the built-in Chrome syncing now, but I never figured out how to grab some of my tagged bookmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tbey are building a search engine. This is data source of human proportions.

<comment><USER37> I have this pet hypothesis that matching delicious tags with actual words found on the web pages will make for a killer query expansion algorithm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> How much did they pay for delicious?

</comment><comment><USER39> Has anybody reviewed the terms & conditions, privacy policies etc. Is there anything in them to make me concerned that Avos will do anything with my data that I won't like above and beyond what the existing Delicious T&C were?

I presume these guys have taken over Delicious because they see it as a good business opportunity and I'd like to know that their opportunity isn't going to be at my expense.

</comment><comment><USER40> I use it along with a team of people who tag stuff according to a particular taxonomy. My scripts pull a bunch of those tags out through the api and cache them on a local server where we can do whatever we like with them to show them to readers. It's a really good way to do collaborative editing or curating of new content. Anyway, I'm glad that it will be sticking around!

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm all in for Delicious. I love it and support and want to see it alive and not rotting in Yahoo.

One thing I didn't understand though, is Joshua Schachter's reaction to the news by tweeting: "inbox asplode!" (<https://twitter.com/joshu/status/63294731077160960>)

Can someone explain?

<comment><USER42> Maybe a bunch of people emailed him after hearing the news?

<comment><USER41> hmm--it could be

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Somebody installs wp-super-cache[0] in that poor dying Wordpress blog.

Glad to see delicious itself not dying.

[0] <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/>

</comment><comment><USER44> I went from being an avid Delicious user to using Pinboard instead. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens now, and hopefully there are so cool stuff coming that I'll go back to being a fanboy again. This is (hopefully) amazing news!

</comment><comment><USER45> Apparently nobody reads the TOS, because clicking the TOS link leads to the press release.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good for all delicious users.It's time to innovate the social bookmark again.

</comment><comment><USER46> I used delicious years ago, but only for the bookmark syncing. I switched to foxmarks when it started, then eventually the built in sync of firefox and chrome. Never cared about the social aspect of it all.

</comment><comment><USER47> Good example to show every area of Internet needs innovation.

Bookmarking is as old as the first web browser. It's great that a great team is trying to save communities and innovate in this area.

</comment><comment><USER48> Great News!!! As a long-time Delicious user, I'm glad to see that it will continue on. I'm looking forward to any enhancements, but hoping the core of the service does not change too much.

<comment><USER49> There is a way to install the old plugin in firefox 4. Look at the post by sergueybloom in this forum: [http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID...](http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5168)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I just used delicious last night for the first time in years and through weird linkage discovered angry video game nerd which I find to be one of the best web shows ever.

</comment><comment><USER51> In case you are still looking for the other setups, do give <http://Pinboard.com> a spin. One time pay, but very nice.

</comment><comment><USER52> That's GREAT news. Delicious is one of the web apps I can't live without. Hope the new company can update the firefox plugin such that I can upgrade to Firefox 4.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if they're hiring ... I would love to work on delicious, was about 6 months out from writing a bookmarking service for myself.

</comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone know what their motivation of buying it ? I'm pretty sure they could write this in a weekend in python.

</comment><comment><USER55> For notes and bookmarks I'm using thinkery.me, is there any reason why I should invest my time into Delicious?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hmph, this one caught me by surprise..... more infos: <http://www.delicious.com/help/transition>

</comment><comment><USER56> I can finally delete my yahoo account.

</comment><comment><USER57> How much did they pay?

</comment><comment><USER58> just transfered my delicious a/c to AVOS

</comment><comment><USER59> is Google buying Delicious next?

</comment><comment><USER60> Dead.

</comment><comment><USER61> The big question is ... How much did Yahoo get for the company ?

</comment><comment><USER62> The following concerns me, from the privacy policy: "AVOS may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your Personal Information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy."

</comment><comment><USER63> Not sure that I'm as excited as I could be since they didn't set up their webserver (avos.com) to handle the traffic this announcement was sure to generate.

"Error establishing a database connection" is not your friend.

<comment><USER64> I wouldn't expect them to set up a web server ( or more likely servers) completely capable of handling a significant chunk of the traffic to a major website, just to serve the blog of their currently unnotable company.

They have until July, where they start to run Delicious themselves to set up the infrastructure to handle that.</comment></comment>


Revolution Pi – The Industrial Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://revolution.kunbus.com/ <comment><USER2> 15 years ago I would love to have had a product like this when working mechanical maintenance in a machine shop but Jesus Christ the price alone is ridiculous. $360!?! some shops have _hundreds_ of machines.

Back when I _was_ in mechanical maintenance, we would wire up every machine on the floor (lathe, shave, heat treat, cymbal cutters, you name it) to Serial Comm adapters that convert the RS232 from most machines into IP/CAT5. These only cost $80USD, and were bullet-proof enough to replace when needed. The CAT5 lines were shielded so they were robot friendly, and went all the way to the front office where the Linux administrator had them all wired into switch panels and network servers for the guys in the QC labs.

Besides, most newer CNC come with remote desktop or SSH or something remote you can use to poll them or interact with them by default. Sometimes they even come with wifi antennas.

I guess if you were building a new robot or machine, and needed a logic interface, this would be an excellent solution to a proprietary world, but as a bolt-on accessory no.

<comment><USER3> If the modules work as claimed, then $360 a pop is fairly cheap. Real world PLC units capable of extensible digital and analog I/O, networked, usually cost anywhere from $1000 - $10,000 per unit.

These aren't little gateways to CNC machines built-in interfaces (although they can be), they're controllers and automation systems for factories and production lines.

<comment><USER4> For most PLC customers this is a no-go. They aren't in the market to save money on hardware. They save money by reducing downtime and eliminating failures. Without certifications for industrial control protocols (which take years and lots of engineering time to get passed), these will only be useful for those who don't really need a PLC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incidentally, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module is indeed "rather unknown", which is a shame. It is amazingly useful and lets you design devices without getting into high-complexity PCBs and BGAs. You can place an SO-DIMM socket on a simple 4-layer board (adventurous types might even go with 2 layers if you don't need USB) and build a computing device that would otherwise be out of reach.

Another added bonus is the built-in flash, which is significantly more reliable than the whole SD card setup (for many reasons). Or the two CSI ports (only one is exposed on the standalone RPi board).

All in all, for anything except prototyping, this is a much better solution than a standalone RPi. In my designs, I found it to be a useful and reliable workhorse.

<comment><USER6> May I ask, in case you use Wifi: Which Wifi module do you use for the Compute Module?

Because I agree it is a very useful form factor.

<comment><USER7> There's a Revolution Pi product coming this year which has WiFi built in (called "Connect Flat", was on display at the SPS fair in November 2019).

We used a chip based on Cypress CYW43455, basically the same as on the Raspberry Pi 3B+, to benefit from the existing decent driver support.

<comment><USER6> I see, thats smart.

My question would be how would I start out doing something similar? Because the I was thinking I would just have a look at the rasperry pi 3 b+ schematics (which do not show the Wifi Module, because they are incomplete, so I guess SDIO or UART?). Compare it to the schematics of the compute module, design a board thats connectso the Cypress Wifi Module and use the same drivers used in the rasperry pi 3 b+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can see a niche for these units in some IoT and small/simple control applications. But they are close enough in price to Beckhoff's ARM-based industrial PC / PLC's that I would tend towards Beckhoff for pretty much anything I wanted to do (especially now that Beckhoff offers FreeBSD instead of windows embedded). Note that Beckhoff offers both a hard-real-time PLC and a soft-realtime general computing environment on their PLC's. You can program the PLC side in standard PLC languages or C/C++ (with some limits on available syntax). On the soft-real-time side, you can pick any programming approach you want (C/C++/C#/Python/MATLAB/Labview/Elixir/TS or JS, etc.) and communicate to the hard-real-time side via a variety of options.

<comment><USER9> What kind of of pricing are you getting on these (and what base model CX unit did you select) that they're 'close enough'?

I'm at a Rockwell shop getting 5069-L306 PLCs for just under $1000 (which is a pretty good rate), and have only gotten list-price quotes for a handful of Beckhoff parts. I wish they'd just publish a price list and discount schedule. They wanted a lot more than $500 for a CX5020 or CX9020 last I looked.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, I don't have current detailed pricing for Beckhoff's lowest end. I, too, wish they would just publish pricing. IIRC, low end beckoff arm controllers do get down to 400-500 USD. A CX9020 1GHz A8 based unit, with win embedded compact edition runs about 1000 USD with the runtime. As I understand it, this is the lowest end unit system for basic multi-axis motion control. Keep in mind that this is actually a lot of computational horsepower. When beckhoff says "basic" that means mid range for most other PLC's.

For complete honesty... I ended up using a Galil motion controller rather than the Beckhoff ARM unit mentioned above, but that was due to really tight form- factor issues. Technically, the Beckhoff unit would have been better. The overall hardware cost was moreorless a wash between Galil and Beckhoff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to work on a product that these would have been perfect for. At the time (early 2000s) we were using consumer mini-itx stuff in industrialised cases, because the true "industrial" stuff was all decade-old tech, or an absolute fortune (and still at least a couple years out of date).

These tick a lot of useful boxes, in particular the supply voltage, DIN Mount, usb host ability (plug in a PC to be able to field service a dead unit), real- time clock, and isolated IO modules.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi, I'm a kernel dev on the Revolution Pi team. AMA.

<comment><USER11> I've been searching for RPi's in this formfactor and with protected I/O for a while. Besides your product I found some others but all suffer from the same drawback (for me at least), which is the price. I can understand there is some extra cost involved in the certification of these devices, eMMC and such. Most industry customers will probably find the price resonable even. But for me as hobbyist I can't justify it to myself if I could buy a handful of 'normal' pi's instead (solving the DIN mounting problem using zip ties).

Do you think your company might develop a non-industrial line for hobbyists which could bring the price more into the range of sub $100?

<comment><USER3> I could see them potentially selling just the bare motherboard to hobbyists in non certified form.

However, they might not since that's the main product, along with the I/O expansion modules and the software that drives all of this. To make the motherboard useful that software would probably be needed.

$360 is cheap if this system does what is claimed. Sub $100 is probably not realistic given what is involved with being truly industrial grade - the level of protection from the environment and reliability alone would require raising the price beyond that.

There's a big difference between an "Industrial Pi Case with a DIN mount" and a certified Industrial Pi PLC. This seems to be the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The DIN rail idea is very neat. I've seen a few projects of mounting regular Pi's in server racks but DIN is a much more compact form factor. Wonder how long until someone makes a regular Pi to Din kit.

<comment><USER13> Are you referring to this? [https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute- module-3-plus/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-3-plus/)

I guess I'm not sure what you mean by the word 'kit'

<comment><USER12> A din rail is a way of mounting things. It's very compact, cheap and simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ships with a non deterministic OS and is labeled for automation?

It looks cool and I want to like it, but it needs a RTOS, if any at all, for automation.

<comment><USER15> First, start Linux with only one process running, and it's no worse than VxWorks, at least.

Second, you can run bare metal on the Raspberry if you _really_ want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How's the Compute Module with temperature? We've had trouble keeping Raspberry PIs (3 not 4) stable in industrial settings because they overheated (no, they weren't doing anything critical so we just configured them to reboot every couple hours).

I see something about a passive heat sink, I wonder if that's enough...

<comment><USER17> There's a temperature hat that you can get that puts a 40mm fan powered by the fan headers out there ($10 each).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does it still ship with minecraft installed? We had 2 of em full of bloat and gui tools, don't know exactly why

<comment><USER7> Not anymore, no. We use the "Raspbian with desktop" image as a basis and delete most of the games to make the image fit on the 4 GByte eMMC variants of our products (with about 1 GByte to spare).

Customers who don't need a GUI may create a custom Revolution Pi image based on "Raspbian Lite" using our imagebakery scripts: [https://github.com/RevolutionPi/imagebakery](https://github.com/RevolutionPi/imagebakery)

<comment><USER10> Why desktop as opposed to a server (headless) image?

I would suspect it would be more common to connect via ethernet from a PC or laptop, vs local console. Especially for field servicing, carrying a laptop is simpler.

In the case HMI is needed, installing the desktop is just some additional packages.

This raises another question: what repository are you using? How are (security) updates handled, if at all?

<comment><USER7> A lot of our customers have a background in automation and are used to Windows on their desktop PC, with little prior Linux experience. Shipping a desktop by default is intended to make their life easier.

Since the image is based on Raspbian, updates are installed via apt-get as usual. There are some deb packages of our own pre-installed. Updates for those are made available via our apt repository at packages.revolutionpi.de.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Revolution Pi is an open, modular and inexpensive industrial PC based on the well-known Raspberry Pi. Housed in a slim DIN-rail housing, the three available base modules can be seamlessly expanded by a variety of suitable I /O modules and fieldbus gateways. The 24V powered modules are connected via an overhead connector in seconds and can be easily configured via a graphical configuration tool._

</comment><comment><USER20> I like the modular I/O.

Partly off topic, but I've imagined an ecosystem where Pi-like SBCs _only_ connect out via USB-C to a powered hub, and from there to physical I/O. Sort of a different take on North Bridge / South Bridge.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know anything about electronics, but I would like it if the replacement cost for home appliance control boards wasn't $300. Making it a cheap interchangeable part would really cut down on waste.

<comment><USER22> It's a good idea. It's realistic.

But appliance manufacturers aren't interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was hoping this would be price competitive with the BBB industrial. Alas, it's not (although it has substantially more raw computing power).

<comment><USER9> The big advantage this has isn't its temperature range or price, it's the form factor and power supply. Pluggable screw terminals for the industrial 24V power supply and a professional case with a DIN rail bracket make this a much easier sell than a bare singleboard computer. In units of 1, you'd trivially burn through the hour of engineering time that represents the price difference while setting up a case, mounting hardware, and accessories for a Beaglebone Black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks cool for storing a home automation server in an electrical closet, although it would be pretty expensive at that price point

<comment><USER25> For that application, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use a regular raspberry pi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How is it different from Strato and ModBerry?

<comment><USER27> Different take on a similar type of device. This one is much smaller and has a custom image which skimming the ones you mentioned I don't see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Raspberry Pi was all about the price, hence the success vs. Arduino. Checking the prices on site for these...and cheapest is above 100 Euro? Not a chance in hell.</comment>


Arduino FIDO2 Authenticator - <AUTHOR> https://en.ovcharov.me/2020/06/29/uru-card-arduino-fido2-authenticator/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool, and being able to make a FIDO2 device that I can just keep at home next to the PC is pretty appealing. I already have a Yubikey in my keychain for carrying with me, but the keychain isn't at my desk, so having a second one would be pretty great.

It would be amazing if this supported FIDO2 resident mode, it could store thousands of credentials (Yubikeys can only do 25 non-thousand credentials).

<comment><USER3> Not sure if applicable to your use-case, but I'm using a HyperFIDO Mini[1]. Much cheaper than the Yubikey, and the form factor is also nice for just keeping it in a (reachable by hand) USB port. Though I carry mine on the keychain (and have an older, bigger one at home as a backup).

[1] [https://hypersecu.com/tmp/products/hyperfido](https://hypersecu.com/tmp/products/hyperfido)

<comment><USER4> That's surprisingly cheap, less than $10 for a token. Any downsides?

<comment><USER5> No FIDO2 so it won't work with everything. No NFC.

<comment><USER2> Oh, it's just U2F? You want FIDO2 with resident key support to get the really nice OpenSSH workflow (plug the key in to a new computer, run ssh-add -k, now you can SSH to all your computers).

<comment><USER6> Can I do this with a Yubikey?

Last time I tried there were a few, more complex commands than this. Could I use a udev rule to add my SSH keys as the device is plugged so I don't have to run anything?

I think I was using PIV last time.

<comment><USER2> Yes you can, SSH 8.3ish uses FIDO2 and doesn't do anything Yubikey-specific. That means you don't have to bother with all the agent stuff, and it works with any dirt-cheap FIDO2 key.

EDIT: I'm going to post a writeup tomorrow detailing how to do this, because it's wonderful and super secure.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, going to look into it more tonight, see if I can get a 5C setup.

<comment><USER2> It is literally just the two commands, I can send them to you when I'm at the pc. I have a 5C too.

<comment><USER6> That'd be great, thanks. I'll have to do a follow up to my blog post: [SSH 2-Factor's First Factor]([https://2byt.es/post/totp2/](https://2byt.es/post/totp2/)) once I've had a play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be careful with the bluetooth implementation.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18625028/google-titan- sec...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18625028/google-titan-security- keys-bluetooth-vulnerability-replacement-free)

[https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/17/google- recalls-t...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/17/google-recalls- titan-bluetooth-keys-after-finding-security-flaw/)

edit: formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I have seen this recently. Google is so unsatisfied with BLE in FIDO2 so they removed support for it from the Chrome browser.

<comment><USER8> Yubico has said from the very beginning that they will stick to NFC because Bluetooth is not secure.

Bluetooth is a 3000+ pages spec that's a mess and will likely always remain a mess. Maybe it's time for something better?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using a bluetooth keyboard and I type my passwords in plain text. I don't think that public key sent over bluetooth is less secure. So it's a very tricky topic and I think it's more about corporate insterests that actual security.

<comment><USER2> Is Bluetooth not encrypted? It would be disastrous if just anyone could read what your Bluetooth keyboard is sending.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is encrypted with MITM protection. That's why I do not believe in severe security issues in BLE. There can be problems with particular implementations, but in general it should not be less secure that typing password on a keyboard.

<comment><USER6> Your keyboard very likely isn't using BLE (Bluetooth Low-Energy). The issue appears specific to BLE which behaves differently than Bluetooth X (4.0, 4.1, 5.0, etc) "proper" and has a different security profile.

<comment><USER9> Just so we're on the same page, "Bluetooth X" was discontinued at 3.0 -- it's now named "Classic Bluetooth."

Bluetooth 4.0 (4.1, 4.2, 5.0, 5.1) are almost exclusively the artist formerly known as Bluetooth LE. LE is a totally different standard than classic Bluetooth, and was developed by Nokia ("Wibree") and dropped on the desk of the SIG with a big thud. Nokia told the SIG this was Bluetooth now, and they adopted it as "LE" and it forms the core of all version of Bluetooth 4.0 and later.

4.0 and later specs include "LE", "Classic" and "High-Speed". It's very unlikely developers are building for Classic mode anymore, that protocol is an utter nightmare. I don't know anyone building High-Speed devices.

I'd be surprised if a new keyboard opted for anything other than LE. That's just the kind of embedded system it was designed for.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the clarification. That's interesting, I had wondered why I always "felt" Bluetooth had gotten slower lately, but thought it was just me!

Perhaps you can clarify whether I was barking up the wrong tree in my original comment; My understanding is that keyboards, HID devices in general, are usually using something like "Classic mode" or perhaps even actual classic Bluetooth (particularly cheaper/older hardware)

The security keys like the are using the "modern" type, which is a different "spec". I don't know if it's using something like like (G)ATT, but it's not the same spec/tech?

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure where the industry is at these days, to be honest. So as far as I know all LE devices use the GATT profile (though I wonder about headphones). The LE spec includes HOGP (HID over GATT Profile) which defines a set of services and characteristics for LE HID devices. [1]

Older devices almost certainly use a Classic Bluetooth HID profile, but newer devices like the Apple Magic Keyboard are LE HOGP devices. It uses much less energy so IMO a battery-powered HID device would be pretty nutty to implement using Classic Bluetooth in this day and age.

Interestingly there's no concept of "pairing" in LE devices, just "bonding" (where previously derived keys are persisted and re-used as an optimization). All LE peripherals operate in promiscuous mode by default and vendors have to implement their own pairing system -- or piggyback off bonding.

[1] Warning PDF link: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiJisHl4afqAhWXgnIEHR14DhUQFjABegQIBhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bluetooth.org%2Fdocman%2Fhandlers%2Fdownloaddoc.ashx%3Fdoc_id%3D245141&usg=AOvVaw2eTvnztUnfGJ1WtGtxTHs_)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not Arduino, but there is an open-source fingerprints reader for RPI: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspireader-fingerprint- sca...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspireader-fingerprint-scanner/)

Is it that much worse in smaller form-factor? NDA only?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is small UART biometric module [https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=2304-100018754-...](https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=2304-100018754-ND)

The biggest downside - it's more that 3 times more expensive than the device I have now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic. I have been thinking that the best possible thing would be an external device with a screen and a key pad input. This seems to be exactly that.

You need the screen because the protocol includes the concept of an authenticator with a screen, and that allows you to verify the information even more compared to a yubikey or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

<comment><USER12> I love this project. right approach for the problem. Will pitch in on the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it really necessary to use external ATECC508A with ESP32? I would not be surprised if software implementation on ESP32 is actually faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can not extract private key from ATECC508A while it can be an issue with custom key storage built on Arduino. The chip itself costs around one dollar so why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > But, wait, is it difficult to find a charger or power bank with Micro USB > nowadays?

It's definitely trending that way IME...

<comment><USER6> I understood the point the article was trying to make here, but, actually, it's become almost a nightmare to find a Micro USB cable in my home, so I had to answer "yes".

Every time one breaks or gets tatty I bin it and don't replace, because, really, the only thing I need it for is my PS4 controller and the baby monitor. I've burned through a decade or so worth of them thrown in boxes and drawers.

It gets really hard these days to find one when I need to charge my PS4 controller and the baby monitor needs charging at the same time.

While I'm on the go, I guarantee I don't have one. Phone, wife's phone, Switch, tablet, power bank, laptop, earbuds, all USB-C charging. It's taking me some time and careful purchasing choices to get to the point where I can carry a single power brick to fast charge all the devices I carry with one connector/cable, adding Micro USB back in would actually be an inconvenience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing can stop us from making the same PCB but with USB Type C connector for charging.

Actually I'm using it in my other device according to the exactly same thoughts.

<comment><USER6> I've never tried hand soldering a USB-C SMT connector, expecting it to be somewhat harder than Micro USB, is it reasonably doable with hot air?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, in fact it's much simpler than MicroUSB. There is special type of USB Type C used for charging - [https://en.ovcharov.me/uploads/2020/04/06/20200404_092055.jp...](https://en.ovcharov.me/uploads/2020/04/06/20200404_092055.jpg)

It has only six huge pads and can be soldered either with hot air or normal soldering iron as a charm.

<comment><USER6> Oh, now this is a revelation, I had no idea!

P.S. the link has hotlink protection for anyone wanting to click; you'll need to paste the link straight into your address bar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't there is a good option is to use wireless charging instead of USB one?

</comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone explain or further expand on this statement

> plain C and ESP IDF are too difficult for the broad audience

My intuition is that most folks who hack on EPS32 and other microcontrollers have no problem with these things.

<comment><AUTHOR> From my experience - most people say "Arduino is ok" but struggle working with plain C.

As well keep in mind number of ready-made libraries for Arduino that can be reused here almost out of the box.</comment></comment>


The Google+ Project - Content Policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised at how straightforward this policy is. It's written in layman's terms, rather than legalese.

E.g., " _Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content. For example, do not use a photo that is a close-up of a person's buttocks or cleavage._ "</comment>


Livement (YC S16) Lets You Skip Lines for Tickets, Food and Parking at Events - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/livement/ <comment><USER2> Hi guys! Let me know if you have any questions about Livement =)</comment>


Pirate stock exchange helps fund hijackings - <AUTHOR> http://www.financialpost.com/news-sectors/story.html?id=2289558

<comment><USER2> This only works because the "gangs" are actually all members of the same tribe (Majeerteen.) If anyone else wanted to join in with capital, they wouldn't see a dime back.

Majeerteens are such pain the ass, they have civil war conflicts open in three fronts; they're fighting in the south for pan-Somali presidency seat while still maintaining their own sovereign entity in the North East as "Puntland". They're fighting the unrecognized Somaliland for territory. They're being paid by the U.S. to catch al-Qaeda and fight Islamists. And still, they're maintaining a successful business in piracy and smuggling, not to mention their own exports in livestock.

Only reason they haven't been cracked down on harder by the U.S. is that they're bonafide mercenaries and bounty hunters, chasing Islamist groups everywhere in Somalia.

(they never were fighters, btw; Somali lore is full of anti-Majeerteen poetry, calling them sissies. Every time the Somali tribes raided Ethiopia the Majeerteen were the first to roll and return the loot. They're making up for lost thievery.)

<comment><USER3> Athigga Soomaali maatahay, saxiib?

<comment><USER2> Haa walaal. Waxaa ii muuqata in af soomaaligaagu uu yara xunyahay ;-) ma dibadaad kusoo kortay?

<comment><USER3> Haa; waligayga (oo 16 sanadood ah) Amerika baan ku noolaa ;)

<comment><USER2> Rageeda!

Waryaa, shoot me an email as soon as you can, haye dhe? Waxaan u soo guuray ostralia, waxaan ka imid maraykan dhawr bilood kahor.

Barasho wanaagsan, good to see another somali meeshaan. Yarka kale een aqaan oo HN akhriya waa professor of applied mathematics oo dagan yurub, laakiin magaciise halkan waan iloobay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's fascinating/ironic that the original joint-stock companies were formed for seagoing trade: _The East India Company (of England, later of the United Kingdom), sometimes referred to as "John Company", was one of the most famous joint-stock companies. It was granted an English Royal Charter by Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600, with the intention of favouring trade privileges in India. The Royal Charter effectively gave the newly created Honourable East India Company (HEIC) a 21-year monopoly on all trade in the East Indies._

 _Soon afterwards, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

During the period of colonialism, the joint stock company Europeans, initially the British, trading with the Near East for goods, pepper and calico for example, enjoyed spreading the risk of trade over multiple sea voyages. The joint stock company became a more viable financial structure than previous guilds or state-regulated companies. The first joint-stock companies to be implemented in the Americas were The Virginia Company and The Plymouth Company._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_stock_company#Early_joint...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_stock_company#Early_joint- stock_companies)

</comment><comment><USER5> "I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

So many questions from these two statements.

</comment><comment><USER6> Quite a misleading title. From what i read, this is absolutely nothing like eBay. It's more like a stock exchange. It's a place where gangs of pirates can receive funding for their exploits from outside investors.

"Offline ebay for pirates" suggests to me an auction house to sell stolen wares, but this isn't what the article is about at all.

<comment><USER7> It seems almost like a "pooled stock" from what I read: you invest in all the pirates at once, then make money when any one of them makes money.

Maybe I just didn't read carefully enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They are called "auctions" and have been around for hundreds of years before ebay or even the internet. Wikipedia should have more information on the concept.

<comment><USER8> Ah, now I see why I was downvoted - the original title called the thing "offline ebay", hence my comment that such a thing is traditionally called an auction. Now that the title is changed to stock exchange of course my comment doesn't make sense anymore.</comment></comment>


Discussing a bytecode standard in browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122

<comment><USER2> The curious thing about the demand for bytecode in browsers is that there doesn't seem to be a practical reason to do it. Bytecode doesn't seem to bring better performance, as flash doesn't outperform javascript. And web developers don't seem to want to use other languages, given that aside from GWT (almost) nobody cross-compiles from another language. Javascript-to-javascript compilation (closure compiler) is more popular than cross-language compilation.

It's more likely at this point that the server-side world will standardize on javascript than that the browser will gain a method for supporting other languages natively.

<comment><USER3> > And web developers don't seem to want to use other languages, given that > aside from GWT (almost) nobody cross-compiles from another language.

I've met tons who WANT to use other languages. The reason they don't cross- compile more often is that for the most part cross-compilation sucks - it is impossible to debug through, for one thing. GWT managed to get around most of these issues which is why it's so popular, but it was quite a feat, and it comes at a cost (two seperate runtimes for GWT code which are every so slightly different).

If programming in any other language for the browser was just as easy as javascript, I expect you'd see javascript usage plummet.

<comment><USER4> _The reason they don't cross-compile more often is that for the most part cross-compilation sucks - it is impossible to debug through, for one thing._

So, is the issue really the ability to use source debugging? We could still treat Javascript as an Intermediate Language and add a Source Pointer data format that would enable source debuggers in the cross-compiled languages.

In fact, we could build such things into Firefox and Chromium ourselves!

<comment><USER2> My point exactly. The demand for other languages is clearly not big enough for people to have hacker together an implementation of it on top of what's there today. It can be done, it's just that very few people are busy doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it comes down to: 1) nobody will agree on a bytecode, 2) bytecode is less flexible than source so it would limit what you can do in the future. It would take versioning and versioning doesn't work.

(2) only seems compelling in light of (1).</comment>


Update on Google Play refunds - <AUTHOR> I received following note from Google Play:
Hello Google Play Developer,
In order to keep Play fair for users and developers, and bring Play in line with the majority of app and game stores in the industry, we are making a change to our developer policy regarding refunds. We will subtract all refunds from developer payouts, not just those made within 48 hours of purchase. The Google Play Developer Distribution Agreement ("DDA") will be updated to reflect this change in the coming months.
With the same goal in mind, we've just launched the Voided Purchases API to help you maintain a fair ecosystem in your app or game.
With the new API, you can check which users have refunded or charged back in-app purchases in order to claw back those items for that user in your app or game. This change helps to deter abusive behavior and will make the ecosystem fairer for all users.
We updated the Google Play Developer API terms of service to include the terms governing the use of this new API. By using the new API, you indicate your agreement to these terms
There's a lot open for interpretation, i.e. does this affect both app purchases and in-app purchases? Can a user effectively claim back the money for all purchases a couple of months after he used the in-app items?
I don't really understand how this is supposed to work. <comment><AUTHOR> There's also a discussion on reddit, there seems to be a lot of confusion: [https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5vkria/no_time_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5vkria/no_time_limit_on_customer_refunds_anymore/)</comment>


I Made My First Sale and Made It to #7 on the App Store - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dark-hacker-news/id1459946382 <comment><AUTHOR> After a year of being free on the iOS app store, my app Dark Hacker News has received some positive reviews and maintained a 5-star rating.

About a month and a half ago, I decided to make Dark Hacker News a paid app at $1.99. I felt at this point it had enough features and I've never had a paid app on the app store so I decided to just go for it!

In the first month and a half as a paid app, its been able to generate $42 in sales! I've never made money off of an app I've built so its been awesome to see those sales come in.

At one point in June I even made it to #7 on the list of top paid news apps!!! (I'm not exactly sure how the app store algorithm works, but hey I'll take it) Up to this point I really haven't done any marketing so I'm considering getting the word out there to see how it would impact sales.

All in all, it's been awesome to make my first real dollars as an Indie Developer!

<comment><USER2> > In the first month and a half as a paid app, its been able to generate $42 > in sales!

> At one point in June I even made it to #7 on the list of top paid news > apps!!!

So being #7 for sales in a whole category on Apple's all store (famously the easier market in which to make money as compared to Android) means only $42 in sales? Are the economics of making apps really this tough?

Maybe that's why everyone just tries to make a game app? Is that the only way to make money?

<comment><USER3> I would guess many news Apps are free, with subscriptions used to make money.

Also, looking at the list on my iPad, I'm sure the top lists aren't global. They seem local by country (and might even be personalized, but that would surprise me)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you check the top paid news chart now? Thanks to the HN support we are back up to #8! I'd be curious to see if it is at #8 for other people as well.

<comment><USER3> It isn't in the top 50 in paid news apps (checked iPhone and iPad)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. It's back down to #11 for me now. So it seems then like it is personalized to user to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's amazing work, do keep it up.

I wonder how much difference it would make to have a free trial for a week. I don't mind paying for apps, but I also don't like paying for something I'm not sure I'll be using. Especially when I'm already using an app with (from what I can tell at least) pretty much the same features. Once I try it it's possible I'll change my mind and actually buy it.

<comment><USER5> It's only $2.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. The price is fine. I think the sinister looking icon will be a bigger barrier than the price.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've thought about simplifying the icon or at least making it look less sinister. Maybe take away the red eyes or something. Appreciate the feedback!

<comment><USER6> Otherwise, it's amazing. Exactly what I was looking for and the folders are something I didn't know I needed but love.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!! So glad you like the folders. I really felt like bookmarks were missing something until I added folders. Let me know if you have any other feedback or features you'd like to see. Enjoy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Hack for awhile. Just looked and saw there is a bunch of option now in the App Store! Does yours, or is there one that collapses threads like the reddit app? So many times I upvote and star a post on Hack because that's what the swipe does.

<comment><AUTHOR> On Dark Hacker News you collapse threads by tapping anywhere on the comment you want to collapse and it will collapse that comment's thread. Let me know if you have any other questions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work! I'm going to buy it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thank you so much for the support!

<comment><USER9> Great job! Just bought it too. At $1.99 it's a steal considering how much I am on HN on a hourly basis. :-)

I've been using the "Hacker News (YC)" app on iOS written by Dharmesh Patel, and it works good, but it hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and unfortunately it has occasional display formatting issues on the iPhone 11 Max Pro.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the support!

That's one of the reasons I really wanted to make it a paid app so I had more of an incentive to support it long term and keep it updated.

If there's any suggestions you have or features you'd like to see added just let me know. Enjoy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How did you do screenshots?

<comment><AUTHOR> I take my screenshots on the iOS simulator on my Macbook Pro. Then I frame them with this cool tool I found on ProductHunt called AppMockUp. ([https://app-mockup.com/](https://app-mockup.com/))

<comment><USER11> Wow, this is great! Thanks for the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great work mate!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It was definitely a fun one to build and learn React Native along the way.</comment></comment>