Highly Successful Bootstrapped Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2011/09/01/ten-highly-successful-bootstrapped-startups/ <comment><USER2> I love being part of a bootstrapped startup. I have 100% control of the company, don't have to answer to investors, and can actually focus on making profit instead of trying to scale. Oh, and I'm traveling the world while doing it.

<comment><USER3> Awesome! I recently did a major trip. Loved Istanbul and Rome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bootstrapped, solo founder, and older-person-founder startups are very rarely mentioned in the press. Strangely enough, some stats show these startups are also the most prevalent. Thanks Rob!

<comment><USER5> Also, not especially popular in the press are non-exciting start-ups that are none-the-less profitable. There are many mom-and-pop web hosting companies and online stores for niche products doing just fine. But alas, this doesn't seem to be news.

<comment><USER6> It is news, and I'd love to read about those kinds of businesses. Someone should start a blog about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprised no one's mentioned Atlassian - started by two guys in their garage with $10,000 and now earning over $100 million in revenue per year. More info here: <http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/02/from_startup_to.html>

<comment><USER8> It actually says "$100 million in all time sales." Which means that they had sold $100 million worth of software since the time the company was founded. Still impressive, but very different than $100 million in revenue per year.

<comment><USER7> Whoops - the article's from 2009 but I am pretty sure that they hit somewhere near 100 million in revenue last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was just discussing this with my wife last night. My 2 friends and I bootstrapped our company for $300. Knowing that all the success we are enjoying now came from our hard work and that no one else can take any claim to our any part of our success is such an awesome feeling. I talk to a lot of local angels and VCs now and what they offer really doesn't seem that interesting to me anymore. The business I have now will probably never make hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don't feel the need or desire to hit those kind of numbers if it means I have to sacrifice my lifestyle now (a very awesome lifestyle).

</comment><comment><USER10> Bootstrapped startup owner here... I am of the opinion that if a business on the Web needs millions of dollars to get off the ground, then it's probably a business that isn't worth getting off the ground.

I realize that there are exceptions and there are ideas that need funding to get going, but the whole incestious culture of venture capitalists, investors, and startup idea owners often doesn't foster real innovation. It instead lines the pockets of a select few with millions of dollars. Just a slick redistribution of wealth.

<comment><USER11> _if a business on the Web needs millions of dollars to get off the ground, then it's probably a business that isn't worth getting off the ground_

There are some businesses that you could simply not start without significant upfront investment. True, there are lots of businesses you could start with just very cheaply ($100's or $1000's) and grow organically over time. The easiest of these would be paid online apps/services where you could scale your expenses (servers, bandwidth, etc) with revenue. But some businesses need money upfront to get started. The most obvious example would be anything involving hardware. You could bootstrap while building a prototype, but you would likely need outside investment to manufacture and distribute your product. Even a web only business might need lots of investment to break into a market through advertising or partnerships.

<comment><USER6> That's completely true, but I think you missed the point. Most startups still focus on finding funding. People seem to think that's the right way to do it, maybe because that's all you read about on tech blogs.

<comment><USER11> I agree that many startups focus on getting funded as an end, rather than a means to a greater end. I think investment should be seen as a force multiplier, something that will get you to your goal (market dominance, acquisition, IPO, etc) faster than you could without it. I think startups could use more advice on when and if it is appropriate to seek investment or bootstrap, but I don't agree with the sentiment that startups should avoid investment like the plague.

<comment><USER6> Not like the plague, but it shouldn't be first priority. On that point, I think we're saying the same thing.

I'd argue the end goals you mentioned can be harmful to the startup itself (not to mention the tech community), but that's a different debate. If your goals start smaller, you don't need funding in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some of you might already know about this, but 37Signals produces a series called Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud where they interview bootstrapped companies with more than 1M in revenues.

You can see a list of interviewed companies at: <http://37signals.com/bootstrapped>

<comment><USER13> I really enjoy this series and they do a good job of writing about the companies. However, I don't think it's fair to call companies that took an angel investment as being "bootstrapped." What does the rest of HN think? Is that being pedantic? Please share your thoughts.

<comment><USER14> I don't think it's pedantic. I read bootstrapped to being self-funded by either the founders money and/or cash flow.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious: does the term "bootstrapped" apply only to how you begin the business, or to the entire history? I tend to read it that way, but I can see where others might disagree.

<comment><USER15> Where do you draw the line? I think everyone starts with _something_ of their own before getting investor money, eg: clothes, a computer, travel expenses. What's the cutoff? $100? $1000? etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> half of them I never even heard of...just goes to show the lack of coverage for self funded companies

<comment><USER17> Those of us who are running profitable bootstrapped companies tend to put less effort into getting our name in the tech or business press. It is more important that we get our name into the minds of our customers, as our cash flow does not come from Sand Hill Road.

So, this lack of coverage should come as no surprise.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's something I've been wrestling with lately. LiberWriter has started to turn a profit, and I'm wondering if I should copy Balsamiq's transparency / blog posts about early success. In some ways I'd like to, because publicity should help a bit in any case, but getting on HN really isn't going to get us any new customers.

<comment><USER18> I would say don't do it. I'm in a similar position (profitable company with an interesting back-story) and it seems like a bad idea to start giving out your personal financial details to the world.

<comment><USER19> But there's probably an interesting middle ground.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would that be, though? Either you're talking about your company and making some information public, or you aren't. If you're going to go down that route, granted you may not want to reveal _everything_ , but you should probably do enough to get some attention, if that's the point. Otherwise you're just revealing information for no benefit.

<comment><USER20> I find Rand Fishkin incredible in sharing all the details of SeoMoz. It takes guts to do that. Balsamiq, Bingo Card creator and a few others on HN are transparent when it is not a great deal of money.

(I haven't seen Balsamiq post detailed revenue and their breakup lately.)

I would say do what feels comfortable to you. Most likely, it is to keep revenues etc. secret. Revealing those details might get some eyeballs in the short term but not customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the distinction is between getting some eyeballs who are easy to convert into customers, like Balsamiq or SEOMoz, and something like BCC, where the publicity is less obviously useful, because no one at HN would buy it. LiberWriter is definitely in the latter category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given that VC-backed startups are obviously receiving far more press than bootstrapped ones, is there any statistics on how widespread are former and latter, and how successful they are, in consumer Web?

</comment><comment><USER22> I've heard of 3 out of 10 of these highly successful startups. I think we call ourselves successes prematurely to try to accelerate the arrival of true success. Again today a very good friend who runs a startup with great potential trumpeted the fact that he is profitable. Looking deeper, turns out he's no longer pouring cash into the company, but unable to pay himself a salary.

Lets cut the bullshit guys. You're "highly successful" when you're able to pay yourself and your employees above market rate salaries and retain profit for growth.

Edit: ...as well as being able to start making a dent in the debt you may have accumulated during the cash burning phase of your startup. If you want a really fucking scary exercise, plot your cashflows to date and do a NPV or IRR calculation on the flows. You'll have quite the come-to-jesus moment and will realize how deep the hole is you need to climb out of before you can call yourself successful.

<comment><USER23> I'm not gonna say I know your friend more than I do but what I can say is I understand why he says he is "profitable" even though he is not. Ok, lets look at it this way:-

 _"Looking deeper, turns out he's no longer pouring cash into the company, but unable to pay himself a salary."_

Replace "company" with property and "salary" with capital gains.

Does it make sense now? He (and probably many others here too, including me) sees his startup as an investment and once an investment starts paying off by itself (break even), I will definitely declare it profitable and trumpeted it as a huge achievement. Why? Cause this investment is paying for itself and I can potentially sell it or earn more off it without bleeding any of my cash into it. Trust me, when you reach that position, you will be a very happy man.

<comment><USER22> Trust you?

You've failed to take into account the opportunity cost of your time spent working on the business. Lets assume your labor costs $120,000 a year and the company is not paying you. So it's costing you $120,000 a year.

Sell that "property" as you call it, to someone else and it'll cost them $120k a year to replace you or pay you.

The investment isn't paying for itself, there is no capital gain and the reality is that you would have to pay a buyer to take it off your hands so they could lose money at a rate of $120k a year.

At this point in a businesses evolution you're losing money at a terrifying rate and unable to feed your family because you're working for free, but hey you are profitable because you've managed to pay your $20 a month Linode hosting bill.

Dude, I don't want to crap all over your parade or the OP's. But unless we know what we're all working towards and what the definition of success is, we're lying to ourselves and each other and there's no way to measure whether we're making true progress towards meaningful goals or not.

A dire misunderstanding of business cashflow like this poster has demonstrated makes me worry for all the starry eyed kids on HN starting businesses. They read shit like this and gobble it up as gospel. Then they dedicate years of their lives to working their asses off for very little pay, thinking they've achieved meaningful milestones on the way to generating wealth and creating jobs, but the reality is they're wasting their time, wasting investment capital and are a distraction from truly productive endeavors and truly talented entrepreneurs.

What perpetuates this cluster fuck is the monthly talent acquisitions that Google, Facebook and other heavyweights make getting conflated with job creation, innovation and the creation of new cashflow. Building an entity that attracts top talent into a single room and selling that room full of new-hires to google for $2 million an engineer has nothing to do with entrepreneurship. Are you hearing me Levchin?

<comment><USER3> Agree with you on most points, d2, however I think you're confusing the terms "successful" and "profitable".

Successful in having their baby at least pay some bills is a milestone. Having it pay your bills as well is another, then having it pay for your future generations is yet another. Success is an arrival at a predefined milestone, may it be anything you so choose to predefine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great job, thanks for sharing! I had blogged about revenues of some more companies here: [http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/compilation-revenue- fig...](http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/compilation-revenue-figures- different-startups.htm)

</comment><comment><USER25> I like the story of Airbnb's "Obama O's." I just read about it today. Respect for the hustle. - <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html>

</comment><comment><USER26> Hmm. Let's see. We're AirBnB. After 4 months of bootstrapping by selling Obama-O's, do we take $20K from YC? Of course! It's YC, and we can still bootstrap if we want. After a few more months, do we take $600K from Sequoia and another firm, and let rapacious VCs into our tent? Well, we're hungry because the Obama-O's ran out, so OK. The next year, do we let Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher(!) and others give us $7.2M more? Tough decision--we can control everything and have a nice, small business like--what was that highly successful company? Carbonmade--and bring in $1M in revenues a year, 100% ours, or give up a third of the business for seven times that. What to do, what to do? We cave in to The Man and take the $7.2M. What, you seriously wouldn't want to hang with Ashton and Demi? Another year goes by and Mark Andreessen and Jeff Bezos want to join in with a crazy Russian and give us $112 million for another 10%. No way! This kind of offer insults our bootstrapping dignity. Besides, if we're highly successful like Carbonmade, we could make that much in 112 years on our own and keep 100% of it, after expenses. But we sell out anyway, at a billion-dollar valuation. We might each get a few hundred million with a successful IPO, but it's just not worth it compared to the satisfaction we could have if we owned 100% of a million- dollar company. Paul Graham must be ashamed of us. We drown our sorrows in an apartment in Saint-Tropez that we rented through AirBnB with Ashton and Demi. Bruce Willis stops by to say, "What's with the sad face, boys?" He's not as tall as we expected. We give him a glass of absinthe. The Mediterranean sun is not unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm glad to see coverage of bootstrapped startups and the supportive comments. I've worked at both highly funded startups and most recently I've worked at a profitable bootstrap for the last 3.5 years. The bootstrap startup is definitely more fun... It's nice that we don't have any investors to answer to and micro-manage every aspect of our business and that also have their hands out to get paid first when an acquisition event occurs.

</comment><comment> g-garron The great thing about not having to report to investors, is that you can focus on your job, and on your product. You do not have to focus on profit (provided you can afford living with low income).

I love the story behind GitHub, they managed to live to a few bucks, and with patience all their effort is paying themselves, not having to share their effort with others.

Congratulations to those guys behind those Bootstrapped Startups.

</comment><comment><USER28> Clicky is a great company with a great product, I've been using the paid version for some time now, and I can only say that they fit my company's needs better than other real-time analytics start-ups. Really happy that bootstrapped start-ups are as competitive and innovative as those which use VC financing.

</comment><comment><USER29> The media needs the sports-like entertainment that lives inside startups to sell their stories, don't get upset because these other successful businesses are not talked about all the time, they just are not that mainstream and IMO some people don't like the attention, so they go low profile and still are extremely successful, just like you know someone did something great at some point that changed your life, and you never got to know who did it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Fotki.com never got funded, always were profitable and we are online for 13 years now. And I agree that bootstrapped companies mostly do not get covered by the press. When we did talk to the press in the last 13 years, one of question they ask is who are our investors, and when we tell them that we had no investors, their tone would change, and then they would loose interest, or just mention once about us somewhere at the end of the article :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting article.

Reminds me of one of the lessons from Soul of a New Machine: forced scarcity can breed creativity. Too much money allows you to defer hard decisions for too long.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have a bootstrapped startup, I work long hours for 1/3 my market value (1/25 if I'd move to the US).

But, I wrote a distributed database and when we show it to prospective clients and they compare it to the competition and they benchmark it, we always come out on top in terms of performance and architecture. So, although it's not "happy times" right now, it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER33> bootstrapping makes your scrappy. the success is ever sweater when you did it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER34> Mailchimp.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm curious what the criteria is for "highly successful".

It might be too much to ask, but I wish I could see/know revenue or profit for all the companies on the list– _especially the freemium ones_.

</comment><comment><USER36> Love to see lists like this as there is way too much talk about VC backed companies that never have any real success and never even create any value with customers.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd add MutualMobile. They are the largest mobile consulting and services firm in the market and straight out of Austin UT, started in a college dorm.

<comment><USER38> Self-funding is pretty much the default for consulting companies, because all you're doing initially is collecting an hourly that you theoretically could have collected working for some other consulting company or going to work for someone FT.

Consulting is also a common way of bootstrapping a company (see Joel on Software for his history of starting Fog Creek this way), because you use consulting revenue to keep the company afloat while working on an actual product in any time you have left over. The goal is to grow the product to where you can build a revenue base from it and wean the company off of consulting revenues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Love how appsumo is mentioned at the bottom without any real quantitative statistics. Leadgen.

</comment><comment><USER40> 37signals? :-)

<comment><USER41> Although they were bootstrapped for a while, they ended up accepting a private investment from Jeff Bezos (mainly to get Jeff as an advisor). So, I'm not sure if we can call them truly bootstrapped anymore.

<comment><USER42> For the record: That money wasn't used to fund operations. 100% of operations have always been funded by customer-generate revenues.</comment></comment></comment>


Ink trap - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap <comment><USER2> I remember learning about ink traps when Opera changed logo [1]. It was quite controversial among font nerds that the font used to write "software" had ink traps, since it was mainly to be used for screen and not print. Nobody else cared, of course.

[1] [http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/423/33204/vers...](http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/423/33204/version/1/file/Opera- logo-PNG.png)

<comment><USER3> Those are much more subtle than the ones in the wiki article. As a non-font nerd, had I not been looking for them, I wouldn't have seen them. The W looks a tiny bit funny.

<comment><USER4> They're noticeable in the "f" and the "t", on the left side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was younger, I always wondered what the big deal is with creating fonts and stupidly thought I could throw together something on my own without any training.

These sorts of things fascinate me in that the average non-designer has little knowledge over the intricacies involved in producing a beautiful typeface that scales to many dimensions accurately and produces a printout that works around the physical limitations of ink. My attempt to create a typeface resulted in a font that looked very good at 10pt and started to fall apart a few points larger or smaller. I gave up and decided to leave that to the professionals. Of course, back then, there weren't large collections of high quality and free fonts sponsored by large players like Google and Microsoft, so the novelty of having a monospaced programming/terminal font with just the right size dot in the zero, slash in the 7 and serifed 1 was worth the few days of nerding around to make a janked up version I could enjoy at precisely the size I wanted to see it.

</comment><comment><USER6> NBC used a face with insanely big ink traps in their titles for Sochi coverage. It looked like a modified version of Stratum. They looked really strange to me on screen. I'll see if I can find some samples.

EDIT: OK, check these out: [http://i.imgur.com/0ovnO49.png](http://i.imgur.com/0ovnO49.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> if you browse the tag "ink traps" at _MyFonts_ [1] quite[2] a[3] number[4] of[5] them[6] are using them solely as an artistic element and clearly not for their originally intended use case.

[1] [http://www.myfonts.com/search/tag%3A%22ink+traps%22/fonts/](http://www.myfonts.com/search/tag%3A%22ink+traps%22/fonts/)

[2] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/capearcona/ca- uruguay/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/capearcona/ca-uruguay/)

[3] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typeco/trapper/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typeco/trapper/)

[4] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/madtype/hydrochlorica/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/madtype/hydrochlorica/)

[5] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mugur- mihai/indento/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mugur-mihai/indento/)

[6] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/yess/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/yess/)

[edit] Here's your NBC Sochi font: _Register_ in Bold or Condensed Bold by _Device_ [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/device/register/bold- condensed/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/device/register/bold-condensed/)

<comment><USER6> Very interesting, thanks! I've seen some apparently decorative ink traps before but hadn't really seen fonts really built around them.

And good find on _Register_ \-- I think part of my confusion or displeasure with that face is that I was already familiar with _Stratum_ , and in all-caps they are pretty similar (lowercase characters are pretty distinct between the two), so I thought someone had added traps to _Stratum_ just to be different or cool. I now see that _Register_ predates _Stratum_ by a few years, which is interesting also.

I still prefer _Stratum_ …

<comment><AUTHOR> _Register_ (2000) still has bragging rights other _Stratum_ (2004) for being 4 years it's senior and being designed by Rian Hughes, who has one of the most unique job interview experiences retold on his Wikipedia page:

 _He arrived late at his very first job interview at an advertising agency with a lump of dog excrement stuck to the bottom of his portfolio, managed to transfer some of it on to the white shirt he was wearing and the rest onto the meeting-room table. Directors had to open windows to let the stench out. Despite this, he got the job._

Yet they all owe a lot to Morris Fuller Benton's 1932 _ATF Agency Gothic_ , which was extended in 1995 by David Berlow as _FB Agency_ [1] which is similiar to the influential _Bank Gothic_ [2] which he designed two years earlier in 1930.

From there you can venture into that Star Trek TOS typeface (now called _Horizon_ [3]) and into adjacing _Microgramma_ / _Eurostile_ [4][5] territory. It's the future we used to know.

[1][http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontbureau/fb- agency/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontbureau/fb-agency/)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Gothic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Gothic)

[3][http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/horizon/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/horizon/)

[4][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_\(typeface\))

[5][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This really reminds me of the way you cut a metal sheet (with lasers) that you're going to fold afterwards : You leave a small "circle" at the corner where the sheet will be folded because otherwise you'll have excess metal that will damage your sheet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice. This means a true WYSIWYG application should simulate ink flow! Does any existing app have such feature?

<comment><USER9> inDesign has a variety of previewing modes, including a 'printed' simulation as well.

Consider when you're designing for print you aren't limited to CMYK channels, you can have 6 inks (hexachrome), or any number of custom palettes (1 spot colour, 2 spot colours, 3 spot colours, etc) or any combination of a colour process plus additional spot colours. Since you're printing things on all channels it's important to be able to predict (before printing) how different ink layers and transparencies will eventually flatten down on the page.

I do most of my work for screen, but inDesign is truly the most advanced software for taking a print piece to press (in PDF format). Even to designers trying to use Adobe Illustrator for print work I STILL steer them toward inDesign because of the print-related extras and better opentype support.

FWIW, inDesign is the only Adobe product I'll 'miss' now that I've stopped upgrading. I'm not going to Creative Cloud and I can do all of my work using nonAdobe software EXCEPT for inDesign.

<comment><USER10> It's not optimal, but Adobe does have a single-app plan, so you could get InDesign CC for $20 per month, every month, for the rest of your life…

I wonder if you've tried TeX and family. XeTeX has full OpenType support.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately, TeX and sons pretty much begins and ends with typesetting; graphical nuance is not its strong suit. It's easy enough to illustrate a text-oriented document, but it's a real bear to create magazine-style or brochure layouts, spreads, gatefolds and so on. For that sort of thing, you really need something that is tied much closer to output than to content in the working space, and TeX is pretty heavily biased the other way around.

<comment><USER10> I'm told that QuarkXPress was once the leader in page layout for magazines etc. I wonder if it's still a viable alternative. Apparently you can get it for $850.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors- the-...](http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-the-ink- trap.html) is probably a better article on the topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. Just submitted the _Wikipedia_ link not to spam the new submissions page.

Here is my original comment under the ink-saving story of the day: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7488218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7488218)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me a lot of OPC to improve feature resolution in photolithography. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction)

</comment><comment><USER14> I thought this wiki page was going to describe selling ink jet printers as a loss leader while charging exorbitant amounts for ink cartridges.

<comment><USER15> You'll find that one under [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have always wondered what those were. Always thought they were ugly. Surely these only apply to certain types of printing. Why are they still shipped with fonts?

<comment><USER17> It's post modernism. One of the principle elements of post modernism is that the structure becomes the decoration. The internal becomes external. The scaffold becomes external. The walls are stripped back and the plumbing is visible, and you might even add some extra scaffolding and pipes that serve no real purpose anymore.

Serifs themselves are another example of this phenomenon. When the first "Sans Serifs" were produced, as part of the modernism movement (unlike post modernism, modernism is about stripping back decoration and reducing things to their pure functional nature) they were called "Grotesk", and the hacker news of the day widely panned them for being useless and illegible and stupid.

Now it's just boring and normal.

In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it is and what its attributes are.

It's a cheeky rebellion against art history. It's embracing the absurdity of our technological ignorance.

It's the teenager saying the word "LOL" out loud like it has no history or context.

<comment><USER18> > _In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used > only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it > is and what its attributes are._

Wow, that really highlights the ugliness of the "scaffolding" we use. Maybe we should design something better than HTML, so we can have scaffolding that we're not ashamed to show.

<comment><USER17> Or make better designs that don't assume the scaffolding will be hidden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [http://designarchives.aiga.org/#/entries/%2Bid%3A440/_/detai...](http://designarchives.aiga.org/#/entries/%2Bid%3A440/_/detail/relevance/asc/0/7/440/retina- typeface-family/1)

Here is a very interesting example of this.

</comment><comment><USER20> This looks like version 1 of using interference to produce feature sizes smaller than the wavelength of the light used for the lithography.

A physical process distorts the "clean" image in the final product, so the distortion is mapped and doubly reversed, so that a "clean" final product is generated from an intentionally distorted original. As long as the physical distortion is consistent and predictable, you could do this with anything.

I'm thinking the same technique could be applied to improve volume printers. Instead of ink traps you have thermoplastic traps.

<comment><USER21> Why can't the printer detect areas likely to be distorted, and apply the transformation itself?

Then, you send the printer what you actually want it to look like, which makes more sense to me.

</comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale It seems at first that this would have little application in a digital format. On the other hand, maybe there is some anti-aliasing benefit.

<comment><USER12> A digital format is never going to be printed with fluid inks? ;-)

<comment><USER16> Very rarely hot-lead printing (and analogues), which I assume is the exclusive use for ink traps.

<comment><USER22> I will certainly give you "very rarely", but you can also make photopolymer plates of a digital file, and then print it using letterpress printing. That's how I did my wedding invitations. Unfortunately, the font I used didn't have ink traps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Professor Watchlist Is Seen as Threat to Academic Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/professor-watchlist-is-seen-as-threat-to-academic-freedom.html <comment><USER2> Seen by whom? I see it as a beautiful check and balance.</comment>


Posterous not accepting registrations? - <AUTHOR> https://posterous.com/register

<comment><AUTHOR> Sent a ticket to firstname.lastname@example.com a week ago, no response.

I know this was a YC project, hoping this problem will get some visibility on here.

side q - is posterous getting neglected now that it is under twitter?

</comment><comment><USER2> it seems abandoned..</comment>


Ask HN: First time working from home; what to do or not do? - <AUTHOR> I'll be working as a full-stack developer part-time for the next few months from home. It's a small team of about three or four devs that I've worked with before. It's a really nice company and I'm looking forward to going back to work for them. However, I'll be working from home for the vast majority of the foreseeable future, and this is my first time working from home. Any advice on what I can do (or not do) to maximize productivity, reduce distraction, and facilitate teamwork? <comment><USER2> 1\. Have a dedicated area that you only perform work.

Don't use kitchen table. It's good for your mental health to have a dedicated area where you only work and when you're not "at work" - don't use that area.

2\. Get dressed for "work", including shoes.

Don't make you're comfortable as if you just rolled out of bed and wearing sleep clothes. Get up. Get dressed. Putting on shoes is important. It tricks your mind into thinking your not "at home".

3\. Treat your working time as work.

Just because you're home, don't go get the mail. Take out the quick trash. Or other small errands around the house.

You're work time should be for work. And just because you're at home, don't let others (spouse) trick you into doing house hold tasks.

4\. Remove distractions.

If you like to game during the day, literally disconnect your Xbox during working hours.

5\. Leave for lunch.

You can very easily get cabin fever by staying at home all day and night. Go outside for lunch. Even if you just pack your lunch. It's important to movement and to get outside.

6\. Establish a strong social outlet.

Most people don't realize that working from home is incredibly lonely. It's easy to get depressed. Find an outlet to talk to people.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to offer a dissenting point of view on some of this.

I roll out of bed, put on comfy pants, and shamble over to my work/ gaming pc. When I get hungry I go cook something. When I need to think through a problem I go clean the house, do dishes, or lay back in a comfy chair and think. If I need to get something done around the house or run an errand, I just go do it. If I need a nap, I take one. I do try to get up at 8AM and stop at 4:30PM consistently (mostly to be available for calls), but sometimes I get carried away when no one is home and work into the night or through the weekend (guaranteed time with no interruptions).

I'm probably about 4 times more productive working from home than from our office. It's very relaxing, I get some cleaning done, and I don't feel a strong need for much of the rigid structure you've described.

Spot on about socializing though. I live near our office and if I didn't have the option to pop in for a less productive but more social day, I would have to find something to fill that gap.

<comment><USER4> I'd echo this response. For me the added mentally energy of resisting the desire to take out the trash, clean some dishes etc is just a distraction because I worry about getting it done. I just take care of what I need to take care of at home chore wise and then trust myself to get enough work done to not feel guilty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll skip the pretty standard advice here that basically boils down to "put clear boundaries so your brain is tricked into thinking you are at an office".

This brain hack never worked for me so I'll give you mostly the reverse advices:

1\. Make a very comfy work place at home. It can be at your gaming machine as long as you don't stop work to game or browse HN/Reddit/what-have-you.

2\. To build discipline, you have to change your mindset to goal-oriented and not hours-oriented. It's not about putting your arse at the chair at 9:00 and getting up at 17:30. Not at all. It's about "I want to achieve X and Y today".

3\. One thing from the other advices I do like is: make sure you get social and human contact every now and then. It's _extremely_ easy to never talk to anyone ever again if you work and rest at the same real estate. Go out for coffee or to pack lunch. Do that to refresh your brain and to have an excuse to exchange a few phrases with people.

4\. If you are not a person that has an exact work and rest schedule, that's quite fine; everybody has been telling me that I shouldn't work a minute outside the work hours but I never found this to be productive. I sometimes had days during which my work hours have been all a haze and then I got a power surge at midnight. As long as working at random hours does not depress you (it does depress many though, have that in mind!) then it's quite fine to do it.

5\. Dressing for work is something that I, again, found optional. I am quite fine working in my pyjamas and I never felt lazy because of it. Dress comfy! I've spent days with pyjamas and a blanket on my legs.

\---

Truthfully, your biggest hurdle is NOT to think "I am at home, I can slack". There are multitude of ways to cope with that but mine was to switch to a goal-oriented mindset and not an hours-oriented one.

If you can overcome the laziness because you're at home and are not closely supervised then honestly, you'll be just fine.

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone 90 days into a full remote from home job, I would highly recommend you meditate on whether you are the sort of person that actually wants to exist in what could effectively be a prison in the shape of your home. (Or wherever you decide to work from.)

I have seriously underestimated how important human contact is, even if just with effective strangers.

If it's not compatible with you, you will start a countdown clock to ??? once you start on this journey.

Working inside an office is apparently like having guard rails for an invisible road that many people do not require, but people like me might not thrive without.

I'm now faced with the awkward fork in the road of going back to my old job, which would (probably? hopefully? gladly?) take me back, or forcing some evolution to make myself compatible with this prison I fought so hard to procure.

<comment><USER7> This sort of thing varies from person to person. For example, my wife and I are both very introverted and don't really need the human contact part. My wife does work from home full time and loves it.

I can do almost 100% of my job remotely and so I work from home one day a week. I could do more work from home, but my coworkers can't do their jobs remotely so I don't want it to be unfair for them.

Personally I would recommend against going back to your old job, even if they welcome you back. That won't look good on a resume. Give yourself some time, let your superiors know that this is an adjustment for you and they should be understanding.

<comment><USER8> Disagree with "That won't look good on a resume".

Quite an opposite.

Lots of good reasons why professional could get back to previous place: more interesting project, being valued, maintained good relationshiops, etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Listen to all the advice from everyone who works at home, and then throw it out. Everyone is different, and everyone finds their own most productive setup and techniques. So try different things. Take people suggestions and see how they work, but feel free to reject them if they don't feel right for you.

My personal advice is to make sure you do not work too much the first couple months. It is easy to let work become a pervasive part of your life when your office is always right there. So find ways to make a clear break between when you are working and when you are not.

At the same time, do not just replicate the office experience in your home. People who set aside a desk, get dressed, and work standard hours from home are completely missing the freedom of the experience. I tend to work in blocks of time over 12 hours each day... I get up early (4 AM), work for a couple hours, then have breakfast with my family... then work more, then go on a walk with my wife, then work more, etc. If I need a break, I will stop and play a game for 15 minutes or so. I take lunches, I run errands, I do things. After 4 PM, I shut work down for the evening and just spend it with family or on hobbies. Find the balance that maximizes your productivity for work, but that also lets you enjoy flexibility and freedom.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, I recently started working (full time) from home too (about 6 months ago). In my particular case I combined starting remote work with moving to another country which made one negative aspect of remote work more acute: social isolation. It should definitely not be underestimated and it is very helpful to build things into your life that involve you in others' lives directly. Additionally having a good routine, and being intentional about it, goes a really long way! Figure out what works for you and what does not. For me, I chose one room in my apartment where I work, and when I leave that room I avoid work.

On the plus side, I think working from home can bring you much closer to family - it is crazy to think I spent so much time at work!! 9+ hours of my waking life was away from the people closest to me. Working from home gives you _a lot_ more flexibility so make the most of that! Wanna work at a cafe today? Go for it! Wanna sleep in a bit? Go for it! (but do not do this at the cost of a healthy routine). Make it a treat yo' self kind of thing. Good luck and hope you can make the most of this new mode!

</comment><comment><USER11> So it really depends, I see a lot of responses below and it really depends on your ability to work and focus (everyone is different), but for me, personally, I have a KVM and I have different setups for different levels of concentration. Nobody is ever 100% productive, don't try to be. When I start work, I log in and put my work system on my main monitor and focus on my morning work routine. I triage things as needed (I support many different systems), then I take a break to grab a coffee and take care of my morning routine. I return and work on anything important first and depending on how things go may do another work task or 2 before lunch. After lunch, I triage anything new that's on my list, then shift work to be a secondary focus for a while (personal system as main monitor, work system off to the side). I do this for about an hour, after eating it takes time to regain full productivity. Then I shift back to my work system, on my main monitor, do some more work until people start leaving the office, once things are quiet, it becomes secondary until I log out for the day. This mimics real office life to some degree, it adds in time to de-stress and take it easy, but it allows you to maximize your productivity in bursts without getting burnt out. As for teamwork, I personally prefer group chats when there's an issue we're tackling, but I'm always a fan of a quick 1 to 1 phone call to discuss things, when needed. People always know if they send me an IM, I'll be there and willing to help. Biggest mistake I see people making - Feeling guilted into working until burnout. Put in your 40 hours, don't expect 100% productivity, but do your best and take the work seriously.

</comment><comment><USER12> Find a co-working space near you. I'm currently working two days a week at a local shared office and rent my own desk.

There's about eight desks in our room, and during the day, aout 4-5 are in use. It helps me a great deal to go out in the morning, go to my office, and have the luxury of a good desk with a big monitor, an atmosphere that encourages working and sometimes a little chat at the coffee machine.

</comment><comment><USER13> My partner is also remote and I work from home. This probably the best possible working situation I've ever had. Just do work when you're feeling productive, go for walks, get out of the house in the morning. Don't over work, because once you've set that bar you can't lower it. Realistically you will get done in 2 hours what takes an office worker a whole day.

</comment><comment><USER14> To make the advise from HN more relevant, perhaps it is better to follow up in a week or two and describe your experience working from home. Are you indeed easily distracted? Or, are you working crazy hours? Are you more/less productive? Are you happier? Are you less stressed, more stressed? Are you eating more/less, etc. It is also relevant to whether or not you live alone, have a family...

Working from home is not for everybody, and can create a myriad of unexpected issues, some of which can be easily solved, others require more effort. For others it can be a blessing.

The one thing to bear in mind, though, and which is repeated often in the responses below is that by working from home a lot of necessary actions which force you to structure your daily life suddenly fall away. Getting up, showering, dressing, getting to work, etc, don't just prepare your mind to get into 'work' mode or whatever, but also force you to think about grocery shopping, breakfast, dinner, planning for the weekend, planning recreational activities and more.

</comment><comment><USER15> You may be different but I find it impossible to work from home.

I go to a co-working space. It's worth the $150-$300 per month for a shared space.

If you want to do business go to a place where other people are doing business, otherwise you might be like these guys...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3lhfVpLL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3lhfVpLL4)

</comment><comment><USER16> A lot of the advice here is good!

For me: what helped was easing into it: I would only work a bit from home for an hour or 2 in the morning before going into the office (it was during my PhD so no one was monitoring my time).

When I got more comfortable working from home I started doing entire days, but not the entire week. Eventually, I started working only from home. This way meant that I could set up good habits (they'll be different for everyone) before doing it all the time.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't just have a dedicated area, make it a place you want to work from. It seems obvious, but once you're working from home, it's easy to just cobble together a workspace in a room and call it an "office". Your office should feel comfortable, a place you want to spend a good amount of time in, but is not distracting. At the end of the day, it should also be a place you leave in favor of living life. I wrote about my home office just in case you want some ideas, [https://medium.com/@9bplus/my-home- office-f531f662fc51](https://medium.com/@9bplus/my-home-office-f531f662fc51). Been working from home for 2 years now.

</comment><comment><USER18> Get a gym membership, and make a plan to use it. The time you used to spend commuting is now at least partially for the gym.

Going to the gym gets you out of the house, adds the physical activity you might lack, and will help with the weird bouts of depression that _can_ come with remote work.

Since you're on a small team, I'd add that finding a hobby or show everyone likes and can be a safe topic of conversation to bond over, even when things are stressful, will help keep lines of communication open. Making a watercooler Slack channel with that topic helps a lot.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi. I've been working from home for about 1.5 years and have had spells of working remotely from coworking places.

I am very distractible. It was and remains very difficult. However, I think I'm in a zone now where work is a place I go to in my head, rather than a place that exists in reality.

Meta-advice: keep trying things. There is no settled consensus. For now, this is a very individual choice.

How you work at home / live your life:

Some people advise a strict separation between work and home. I don't agree. The best benefits of working from home are cooking more of my own food, doing chores during the day, and working the hours that I choose. Exception: never code from your bed.

I have put some effort into making my desk area nice. It helps.

The real question is staying motivated when you don't see faces, or hear voices, or are even in physical proximity to anyone that you work with. I find that I need voices/faces to believe that anyone cares that I exist. I have a very supportive spouse, so a lot of that is taken care for me. Even so I leave the house once a day, minimum. I often go to the library, cafes, or restaurants. And I have a regular "hack session" with a friend of mine in a similar situation on Mondays. Mostly we just chitchat with the excuse that we might actually hack on something, but it's important.

How you work with co-workers:

General theme: many things that used to happen randomly or accidentally now will have to be done intentionally.

You probably have standups or some other regular way to check in with your co- workers. Keep doing those and take them seriously. Always ask more questions than you think you should. You don't get chances to ask them later.

Build informal and private channels for your team. It's important for your team to have a place where your team talks among yourselves and where you feel you have privacy. My current company isn't that nosey (and we're the Slack admins anyway) so a private Slack channel works. If you have to go to Signal or Keybase, do it and say it's for "emergency ops".

In other companies where I've been remote, or part of a remote office, I've found that the Donut Slack app has been very helpful. It just randomly assigns you a "date" of sorts with a co-worker, and it is almost as good to do over video chat. You need these kind of random unstructured interactions with coworkers both for your social needs and to be effective in a large organization. It may seem weird to take a coffee to your desk and have no official business talking to a coworker, but it really helps.

</comment><comment><USER20> I`m working from home for quite a long time already. If you`re interested I`m a writer and that`s an example of what I`m writing: [https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-and-contrast-paper- the-v...](https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-and-contrast-paper-the-vietnam- war-and-korean-war/). All that was mentioned by people here is important, but the most important when you`re working from home, it`s to schedule work perfectly. If you`re wouldn`t have scheduled work would be never-ending.

</comment><comment><USER21> One thing that really helped for me was "walking to work", I would walk to a coffee shop a few blocks away and then back home and go straight to my office. It really helped having a clear routine to delineate working time from home time.

Communication is the biggest challenge. Try to talk to your co-workers every day and overcommunicate even if it seems too much. Making quick screen recordings and narrating them for even little things is invaluable, it seemed like a hassle at first but soon you get the wrinkles out of the capturing side of it and people really appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER22> One item that is often overlooked that I wished more remote team mates would do: Get a business line for your internet connection or better yet, get a second line and use it only for work so you can segment your network activities between home and work.

You want a static IP address for at least one on-all-the-time box to route all traffic through and get a domain pointed at it. You don't want to have to deal with an ISP that thinks they can determine which ports you want open.

</comment><comment><USER23> The advice here is good but it only confirms for me that I would much rather commute to and from an office every day than work from home.

<comment><USER14> Though I feel most of the advice is centered around a subset of concerns wrt working from home, I want to hear more about your thoughts. Can you please elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Do you with others? In particular, with children? Then it's crucial that you have an office or similar with a door you can shut. Then you have to nicely train everyone you live with to not do things like shouting to you through the shut door on the assumption that you're free because they can't hear you listening to a conference call.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wrote about the challenges of remote work here:

[https://www.culturefoundry.com/cultivate/digital-agency- life...](https://www.culturefoundry.com/cultivate/digital-agency-life/what- are-the-challenges-of-remote-work/)

Try to avoid/mitigate them :)

</comment><comment><USER26> A lot depends on the expectations of your workplace.

Roll out of bed whenever and work in my PJs? Not when my meetings are all over video.

Change up my work hours to take random long breaks and work odd hours? Not when a fair portion of my work is collaborative.

You need to take the time to find out what works for you.

</comment><comment><USER27> For me, the most important thing I do is "act" like I am at work. I.e., shower, shave, put on work clothes, sit at a desk, and only take the type of breaks I would in an office environment (e.g., make coffee)

</comment><comment><USER8> Go to bed early, wake up early. Go to gym before "work" early morning.

This way your mind and body will be full of energy, sharp and fresh

</comment><comment><USER28> Do whatever in which you have an interest any access.

</comment><comment><USER29> Do not check HN</comment>


Apache open sourcers welcome Google's unwanted Wave - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/24/apache_google_wave/ <comment><USER2> _Wave didn't wash outside a few early adopters like Novel, SAP, and, er, the US Navy, and it looks like Google's still having trouble conveying exactly what Wave is and what it does._

Just wondering what the plans of these early adopters are. You can't make money off something if nobody uses it. Isn't this why Google scrubbed the project in the first place?

Don't get me wrong. I think that Wave is/was an interesting project and I tried really hard to use it, I really did. But somehow email/IM/whatever was always faster and more practical, in the sense that people responded to my requests. When using Wave I always had to remember people: "It's in Wave", "Haven't you checked Wave?"...

I, and the other people I worked with, just couldn't get Wave into our workflow and someday we just forgot about it completely.

It would be really interesting how the Navy uses Wave and for what. A kind of best-practice report on how to use Wave productively would be very interesting and motivating (at least for me). Tell me how to use it and I'm ready to give it another shot.

<comment><USER3> > A kind of best-practice report on how to use Wave productively

I think that, right there, is why Wave failed. It needs "best practices" to work well.

The tool on its own did not improve productivity. It needed discipline and training to learn how to use the tool, and there was a large gap between what was possible and what was useful or productive. By many people's accounts, once you cross that gap it becomes useful, but for anybody who doesn't self- identify as an early adopter, it's a non-starter.

Compare Wave to email, or to IM. There are people who are good at email and people who are bad at email. There are people who just don't get the medium, and are bad at communicating with it, and who could benefit from learning some email etiquette or best practices. But you know what? Even without being good at email, _they can still use email effectively_. Even when the medium is not being used to its full potential, it's still more efficient than other media. The same goes for IM.

With Wave, this is not the case. If you throw a bunch of people at Wave, the first thing that comes out is an unstructured, ad-hoc clusterfuck. It doesn't become useful until you standardize a process on what gets its own wave, what info goes where, and so forth. Learning to be productive in the tool is an additional step beyond learning how to use the tool. And whatever you decide, isn't enforced by the tool itself, so if someone doesn't "get it," that can put information in the wrong place or disorganize stuff, and make everything confusing again.

Compare this to email, where there is an existing workflow defined by the Compose, Reply and Send functions. Put the text in the box, other person reads the text, and each email is a line item in Outlook. In short, all the organization that you have to invent in Wave is already present in email, and it's enforced by the tool rather than a gentleman's agreement not to make everything into a clusterfuck.

Wave lets you make your own rules, but it also makes you make your own rules, while email comes with its own set of rules built-in. For some people, being able to make your own rules is useful because email's are sub-optimal, but for the majority of people, email is Good Enough, and the benefit of making your own rules is worth neither the cost of having to invent your own process, or the friction of having to maintain it by fiat.

<comment><USER4> Further reinforcing the idea that google is good at engineering and bad at UI.

Good systems with good UI should guide you to the best way of doing things naturally. Much of good design is picking good defaults, for example. That's the point of user interactive software. Your software serves as a translation between the abstractions and mental models of the user and the mechanisms necessary to do work in the computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wave was a paradigm shift with too many paradigms.

Had they integrated only the functionality you could find in etherpad into Gmail the story would have been very different IMHO.

<comment><USER6> Into GMail? Why?

Do you mean Docs? It's there.

<comment><USER5> Because gmail is a communication platform and that is basically what they wanted to make Wave into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can't wait more to see the algorithm behind Google Wave. It may have failed(?) as a commercial product, but as a technical product it was kick-ass.

<comment><USER8> What algorithm in particular? I don't want to imply that getting everything to actually work is a small feat, but I wasn't aware of anything especially clever going on...

<comment><USER9> The core algorithm is called "Operational Transformation". See [http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and- applyi...](http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applying- operational-transformation)

<comment><USER10> I found this paper to be really helpful as well, which is linked to from that article: ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/JupiterWin.ps

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been really happy with wave and would like to thank Google for releasing it. I am sure they use it internally, and will keep using it at Google in 2011. Although, they might have something better going on.

Kind of reminds me of Google Answers that they closed down (I think prematurely,) which was in a segment that is and has become highly demanded.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't help it, but it's my Wave in a box.</comment>


Pythonista - an iPad editor and interactive Python prompt - <AUTHOR> http://omz-software.com/pythonista/

<comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Codea, but prefer Python to Lua. This looks like the most credible Python implementation for the iPad so I think I'll get it, but a path to legitimate App Store publication would really put it over the top. Codea managed it, so here's hoping!

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks fantastic - tangent: is there anything similar to Ruby?</comment>


Happy Anti-Valentine's Day from Grouper - <AUTHOR> https://www.joingrouper.com/anti-valentines-day

<comment><USER2> I like the concept and it got me interested in joining, but I was really put off by the sexism as I scrolled down. Almost everything is perfect, except for the few columns in your table that just scream "we've stereotyped everyone into really unimaginative roles".

Why not replace "all guys, and especially single women" with something more neutral like "people who don't like pink". I'm a guy and I don't hate valentines day.

<comment><USER3> "People who don't like pink" is significantly less funny than "all guys, and especially single women"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be interested in this if you didn't have to give it access to your facebook information.

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly appreciate your hesitation, but we currently don't have any plans to offer other forms of authentication, simply because it would slow down the onboarding experience by at least an order of magnitude.

We want to get people meeting each other offline as quickly as possible (not filling our laborious questionnaires) and Facebook really helps to lower that friction.

<comment><USER5> "we currently don't have any plans to offer other forms of authentication, simply because it would slow down the onboarding experience by at least an order of magnitude."

I think you are overestimating both the time required to fill out a questionnaire and the reluctance of people to do so.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that people generally don't want any chance of their online dating lives to intersect with their social media profiles. The peace of mind of knowing that there is no interaction between a dating site and their Facebook newsfeed is enough to justify filling out a few duplicate questions.

<comment><USER6> To a large portion of their audience, that's a feature rather than a bug. Not so much that their information is opened, but rather that they have assurance the human beings they're meeting have real friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea, but I'd really like to know more about why you need some of this information (I'm sure you expected these kinds of questions from Hacker News).

For instance, why do you need to know if i'm interested in guys or girls if the matching is, for now, always the same (3 guys 3 girls).

Why do you need my phone number? What would you ever use it for?

It seems likely from the format of the information that some of it will be shared with whomever I'm matched with. What information do you give them exactly?

Something like giving out your phone number, especially if it's not optional, makes me much more careful about signing up somewhere.

<comment><USER8> This site is going to send you on a date with three girls offline. If I were a girl and someone told me to go on a date with a dude who was unwilling to even share his number with the coordinating party, I would feel very unsafe and vulnerable. I would want to have this guy traceable to a real live human being to feel secure enough to go out with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just joined. They have access to a lot of my personal information on Facebook now. I hope they have some fancy algorithms to match me with a compatible group. Anyone from Grouper want to elaborate on the algorithms?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a fairly trusting person, but I think your Facebook permissions need to be rethought. I really doubt you need access to all my photos, family, and info that other people share with me.

</comment><comment><USER11> What if I'd prefer to Grouper with a different gender mix?

<comment><AUTHOR> That will be a feature we'll add in the future, but for now 3 guys + 3 girls keeps things simple.

<comment><USER12> Personally, I prefer 1 guy, 5 girls but that might just be me..

<comment><AUTHOR> Unsurprisingly, that's a relatively common feature request. Although that one isn't on the roadmap :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Try new Power8 CPU for free on RunAbove cloud: 176 threads! - <AUTHOR> http://labs.runabove.com/power8/

<comment><USER2> Quick benchmark, compared to this one Intel Xeon E5-1620v2 4c/8t 3,7 GHz+/3,9 GHz+ [0]

#Intel

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=100000 --num-threads=8 run execution time (avg/stddev): 29.8777/0.01

#Power8

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=100000 run --num-threads=8 execution time (avg/stddev): 9.5050/0.00

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=100000 run --num-threads=16 execution time (avg/stddev): 4.7733/0.01

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=100000 run --num-threads=126 execution time (avg/stddev): 2.6502/0.14

[0] [http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated- servers/infra/2014-EG-32.xml](http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated- servers/infra/2014-EG-32.xml)

<comment><USER3> Pretty impressive

I wonder what the temps look like and how it would perform at 3D rendering and video encoding.

<comment><USER2> I would be really interested for a database server, right now they offer a single ssd (no RAID), this is a no-go for a production db.

<comment><USER4> Not exactly, it says "Local RAID" on the Power8 lab page. So it's a RAID of HDD.

<comment><USER2> yes, I forgot it is actually a single virtual machine running on a physical server.

The main disk is /dev/vda2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is the /proc/cpuinfo:

        processor	: 0
        cpu		: POWER8E (raw), altivec supported
        clock		: 3026.000000MHz
        revision	: 2.1 (pvr 004b 0201)

        timebase	: 512000000
        platform	: pSeries
        model	: IBM pSeries (emulated by qemu)
        machine	: CHRP IBM pSeries (emulated by qemu)

The OS (Fedora 19) runs on Big-Endian ABI.

Python is available out-of-box.

Ruby, Java (OpenJDK) and Nginx are available from yum, Node.js and Mono are not.

</comment><comment><USER6> Make sure to provision a huge screen if you ever plan to run htop. Or you might not even be able to see the top of the process list...

<comment><USER7> Or just Setup -> Meters -> CPUs bar -> Remove (However leave the CPU (average) bar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anybody explain the sorts of workloads for which the Power8 architecture would be a cost-effective option?

<comment><USER9> It's useful for hightly intensive workload that can't be distributed but that can use multicore. Like SQL databases, video encoding, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can you run Java with full JIT on Power8? What about nodejs? I know IBM did some talks/slideshares of porting nodejs to power.

<comment><USER11> Yes, Java and Node work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've just read their main website. Out bandwidth at $0.01 per GB? Has anybody tried this? Looks too good to be true.

<comment><USER9> Disclamer : working @ovh

> "Looks too good to be true"

It's not :) we built a brand new network to be able to offer this at scale.

<comment><USER12> Brilliant, I can finally implement one of my bandwidth intensive ideas! Thanks Steven!

<comment><USER9> You're welcome ! feel free to feedback your impressions or remarks @runabove : [https://twitter.com/runabove](https://twitter.com/runabove)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Absolutely massive!

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, here is what htop looks like with 176 threads: [https://community.runabove.com/kb/images/2014-10-06-power8/h...](https://community.runabove.com/kb/images/2014-10-06-power8/htop.png)

<comment><USER14> The creators of htop just need to get inventive on how to present the data. One idea is to change it into a histogram of percentages (these many threads @ this level of use).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> RunAbove recently released a $2.50/month VPS, but they have also a power8 offer. This seems like an exclusivity.

Anybody tried it already ?

<comment><USER15> FYI I am currently working there and can give you some proper benchmark results running MySQL on power8: [https://twitter.com/o_erreip/status/521411270411816962](https://twitter.com/o_erreip/status/521411270411816962)

We are trying to optimize it with Stewart Smith, who achieved 1 million req/s on p8</comment></comment>


A Brief History of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/ <comment><USER2> A bit disappointed there was no mention of Server Side JavaScript in Netscape Enterprise Server. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server- side_JavaScr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server- side_JavaScript) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Enterprise_Server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Enterprise_Server) which was a compiled version of JavaScript used to create dynamic web pages much like JSP/ASP</comment>


Ask HN: Starting a new web project. - <AUTHOR>

I'm starting a new web project in the coming months, mainly as an excuse to learn a new language. I'm thinking Python but I'm not sold on that yet.<p>Anyway, what resources do you guys use when starting a new project from scratch? Can be a favorite language you always use, a front-end or back-end framework, maybe a site that offers a specific service (99designs, etc)? I'm interested in what the community uses to start their projects off the right way. <comment><USER2> If your main motivation is to learn a new language then pick the one that you don't know. If your motivation is to start your project straight away pick the one that you know best.

I follow the logic above.</comment>


Pyrofex - <AUTHOR> https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2018/02/04/pyrofex/ <comment><USER2> Why, why, why? What's the point? Why do we want this?

The technology may be marvelous, if you don't tell me why it's useful, I won't care one whit.

<comment><USER3> To put it very simply, the purpose is to develop software with provable correctness, fault tolerance and security using a category theoretic model of computation and programming. In particular, the goal is to do this in the context of distributed systems, where byzantine fault tolerance is a typically desirable property.

I'm not affiliated with Pyrofex, but I'm working on research in applied category theory and cryptography, and I'm familiar with Mike Stay's publications. Category theory is broadly applicable to both programming theory and distributed systems, especially in the context of deterministic state machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope this means folks aside from me are trying to bring linear logic into new programming models for resource modelling computations.

</comment><comment><USER5> RChain blockchain - applied Category Theory. Very cool.</comment>


Why Michael Dell Is Still No Steve Jobs  - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/2/why_dell_is_no_apple_aapl <comment><USER2> I actually liked the video. Dell is selling lots of cheap computers to schools, governments, big and small companies; it doesn't have to be trendy.

</comment><comment><USER3> that was so lame. olivia munn is no top caliber talent either. where did they dredge this up? are only the good writers on strike? how do i sign up to get contracts for producing these turds?

<comment><USER4> <http://jobs.alleyinsider.com/>

I bet programming pays more though.</comment></comment>


How much will the meltdown patches cost the industry in electricity? - <AUTHOR> based on the performance penalties <comment><USER2> Even though CPUs have been made more power efficient the last decade, I've read that there'll be a performance reduction of 30-50% on the intel ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was more like 20-30% for specific applications, mostly database stuff.</comment></comment>


Hackers Claim to Have 2.2 mil PlayStation Users' Card Data - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/hackers-claim-to-have-playstation-users-card-data/

<comment><USER2> Anyone else find it a little surreal when the New York Times is reporting "... and we called this hacker guy, and he hangs out on IRC with these other hacker dudes, and one of em was saying, like, 'yeah they totally DLed the shit outta that database with 2.2M CCs ' ..." ?

</comment><comment><USER3> This comment struck me as strange:

"Sony is saying the credit cards were encrypted, but we are hearing that the hackers made it into the main database, which would have given them access to everything, including credit card numbers," said Mathew Solnik, a security consultant with iSEC Partners who frequents hacker forums to track new hacks and vulnerabilities that could affect his clients."

I am by no means a security expert (let alone novice) - though I know what words like "salt" and "hash" mean - and this seems to my layman ears like a gross distortion of the threat. If their encryption was approached properly, Mr. Solnik's comment makes no sense at all; don't the crackers just have a huge database of gobbledygook (assuming Sony approached their encryption intelligently)?

This is not a rhetorical comment - I would be interested to hear from our resident HN security gurus on the actual threat to Sony customers.

<comment><USER4> I'm no expert, but Sony must be able to decrypt the card information in order to use it to process payments. So even if the card numbers were encrypted, it's possible hackers could obtain the passkey for decrypting the data, if it was also stored on a compromised server. (Generally speaking. I don't know what happened here.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another link talking about the story, with screenshots from some discussions online: [http://www.neowin.net/news/psn-database-with-22-million- cred...](http://www.neowin.net/news/psn-database-with-22-million-credit-card- details-up-for-sale)

</comment><comment><USER6> $1 on each credit card. Just like they did in Superman 3.

</comment><comment><USER7> That 2.2mil number is most certainly only a small subset. 77 million total accounts, but only 2.2 attached to a card?

Doesn't sound right to me.

<comment><USER8> PSN was free, so most wouldn't have cards attached. The 77 million figure will also be inflated because a lot of people had multiple accounts. 2.2M doesn't seem too unreasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> According to the Ponemon Institute's study last year, the average cost of a data breach that results from a criminal attack is $318 per compromised record. Even if we only count the 2.2 million credit card numbers supposedly stolen, that's ~$700 million. And Sony has already lost over $10 million in revenue due to the outage.

All the articles circulating recently have counted all 77 million PSN user accounts in their calculations of the breach's cost, which comes out to $24 _billion_... lol

</comment><comment><USER10> If anyone is interested in some of the background of what happened:

"The Sony PS3 console was hacked, or more appropriately "jailbroken", by iPhone hacker, Geohot. He managed to reverse engineer his own PlayStation 3 to run homebrew applications on it. He then later released the method to the public through his site, geohot.com. Sony responded with a lawsuit and demanded social media sites, including YouTube,[citation needed] to hand over IP addresses of people who visited Geohot's social pages and videos.

PayPal has granted Sony access to Geohot's PayPal account,[citation needed] and the judge of the case granted Sony permission to view the IP addresses of everyone who visited geohot.com."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Sony_lawsuit>

<comment><USER11> I definitely think these two cases are related, however I haven't seen any hard evidence yet. Have I missed something?

<comment><USER12> No, I don't think you missed anything, I haven't seen any evidence. In thinking it though, you may not be considering a case where Sony had _all kinds_ of problems, and these things both happened independently.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Remote Companies Around the World - <AUTHOR> https://reworkin.com/hop <comment><USER2> One of the first job aggregators I enjoyed using was "Who is Hiring" [1].

Reworkin seems like a bad copy of the basic features of that website.

• Search is useless: searching "San Francisco" returns two jobs [2] (one in Toronto, one in a misplaced map marker). Searching "Seattle" [3] returns an empty map, even though there are seven (7) markers around the city;

• Bad UI/UX: there is no tech filter, so I have to click and read every marker to know if the job matches my skill-set;

• Missing company information: some posts have no information at all [4];

• Irrelevant companies: What's the point of adding companies like Microsoft [5] and Amazon Web Services [6]? They are not a remote companies. They have some teams that allow remote work but they almost never advertise their jobs as being remote friendly. Usually, they prefer to relocate people and if they allow remote from the start of your contract is because you are someone with very good credentials;

[1] [https://whoishiring.io/search/45.7060/-37.3540/2?remote=true](https://whoishiring.io/search/45.7060/-37.3540/2?remote=true)

[2] [https://reworkin.com/hop?search=san+francisco](https://reworkin.com/hop?search=san+francisco)

[3] [https://reworkin.com/hop?search=seattle](https://reworkin.com/hop?search=seattle)

[4] [https://reworkin.com/hop/629](https://reworkin.com/hop/629)

[5] [https://reworkin.com/hop/169](https://reworkin.com/hop/169)

[6] [https://reworkin.com/hop/70](https://reworkin.com/hop/70)

</comment><comment> duncan-donuts Is this for companies that are 100% remote or for companies that include distributed roles?

</comment><comment><USER3> very interesting website, should be useful when you want to find some remote ideas or job applicants.

</comment><comment><USER4> This website makes me think they're gonna make me write PHP</comment>


Charlie Miller to reveal 20 zero day security holes in Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/19/charlie-miller-to-reveal-20-zero-day-security-holes-in-mac-os-x

<comment><USER2> From a linked article at [http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Mac-OS-X- safer-bu...](http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Mac-OS-X-safer-but- less-secure-Update-957981.html)

> Update: Miller has clarified that he does not intend toreveal the details of > the twenty vulnerabilities at

> CanSecWest, but will show only how he found them.</comment>


Ask HN: What periodicals do you subscribe to? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> National Geographic

</comment><comment><USER3> i get a german magazine on interactive design, usability and development called weave. it´s quite good quality :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Make, Games, World of Puzzles

</comment><comment><USER5> businessweek, time, fast company and entrepreneur <\--probably not typical

</comment><comment><USER6> New Yorker, The Atlantic

</comment><comment><USER7> Circuit Cellar Ink

</comment><comment><USER8> harper's</comment>


Food inflation is far worse in grocery stores than restaurants - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/16/food-inflation-grocery-restaurants/?iid=HP_LN

<comment><USER2> seems like the real takeaway from this is that groceries are more sensitive than restaurants to raw food costs because they have less ancillary overhead (rent, labor etc.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been deeply weirded out at how the costs of feeding myself from the grocery store have approached the prices of cheap restaurant food (mexican and chinese food places primarily). Not that it's actually cheaper, but the marginal cost of buying, preparing, and cleaning up outweighs the price savings in the case of complicated meals far far more than it used to.

<comment><USER4> Just like with childcare options, as you increase the number of [dependents,eaters] in-house options become more economical.

A family of 3 (w/ 1 kid) with two working couples finds daycare centers and eating out much more economical than say a family of 5 (w/ 3 kids) in the same boat... in fact, in the latter case, it makes sense to have one parent stay at home just to feed/care for the kids (usu. the wife).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We haven't seen a phenomenon like this since, my God, 2007 through 2009. And then earlier from 2003 through 2004. But, ignoring those anomalies, this hasn't happened even once since, let's see, 2002. Truly amazing stuff here.

</comment><comment><USER6> One reason for this is that food prices are only one component of restaurant prices. You're also paying for the wait staff, brand, surroundings and a lot more.</comment>


Getters/Setters/Fuxors - <AUTHOR> http://tomayko.com/writings/getters-setters-fuxors

<comment><USER2> Fifteen lines for fifteen, functionally identical, and no where have I implemented a getter or a setter :-)

      ;; define the class
      (defclass contact ()
        ((first-name   :initarg   :first-name   :accessor contact-first-name)
         (last-name    :initarg   :last-name    :accessor contact-last-name)
         (display-name :initarg   :display-name :accessor contact-display-name)
         (email        :initarg   :email        :accessor contact-email)))

      ;; printing is built into lisp, you just customize its behavior
      (defmethod print-object ((c contact) (stream t))
        (print-unreadable-object (c stream)
          (format stream "~a<~a>" (contact-display-name c) (contact-email c))))

      ;; implement some logic to validate the the slot values
      (defmethod initialize-instance :after ((c contact) &rest initargs &key &allow-other-keys)
        (when (slot-boundp c 'email)
          (unless (valid-email-p (contact-email c))
            (error "~a should be a valid email" (contact-email c)))))

      (defun valid-email-p (email)
        (check-type email string)
        (find #\@ email))

<comment><AUTHOR> Your code is the same size and still runs the method when when the state is changed - which is cool. But what's the advantage?

<comment><USER2> The advantage:

1) I can generate accessors, setters or getters automatically with just a keyword; :accessor, :reader, :writer.

2) DEFCLASS can be wrapped to provide further functionality with no change to the source code. For example, if I had wrapped defclass with a macro named defview, I could have the same exact code, but inherit from a serialized class or use a serialized metaclass. Both Postmodern and CLSQL ORMs will let me use a DB-CLASS or similar, and the class will map to a database table. All instantiated objects will be persisted to this table as records. Should I have gone the NoSQL route, I could persist to Redis, MongoDB, Berkeley DB or TokyoCabinet, with the _exact_ same code.

3) Print object is a generic function of two arguments, class and stream. I can have as many of it, with the second argument specialized to various classes; TEXT-AREA, DIALOG-BOX, HTTP-STREAM, SHELL-BUFFER, FILE or whatever. The rendering will be different for each; my object would be rendered as a text in a buffer for TEXT-AREA, as editable GUI elements for DIALOG-BOX, as an HTML form for HTTP-STREAM, as plain text for the unix shell in SHELL-BUFFER, as a structured CSV/XML for FILE, etc. It's all up to me, all with no change in the code. To port from CLI to the web I would just have to write a series of "backends" and the logic stays the same.

4) INITIALIZE-INSTANCE is a standard generic function built into Lisp. The generic function dispatch is a bag of tricks all on its own. Right now I only wrapped the initialization protocol once, actually it's an :after method, which doesn't interrupt the initialization sequence but only does some post processing. There are also :before, and :around methods, which take place before the applicable method is called or instead of it, respectively. I could have as many of those as I want, with the most specialized ones being called first. The generic dispatch has further configurations; I don't need to call the functions in this order, I could use a host of dispatch methods modeled after Lisp operators: PROGN dispatch would call all the applicable methods in sequence. OR would return the result of the first non-NIL method. AND would return a value of all applicable methods that don't return a non-NIL value. Others concatenate the result of applicable methods. CLOS is on a class of it's own.

5) I have used CHECK-TYPE and ERROR for error checking, both of which throw you in the debugger with several restarts as options. I could have used SIGNAL and started passing around some high-level conditions. Advanced control semantics the likes of which this side of call/cc has never seen.

6) I wrote a VALID-EMAIL-P predicate to validate email input. I could have written a generic function, VALID-INPUT-P which dispatches on the type of its arguments, and used regular expressions to validate my input. In my project, I don't even do input validation. The rules for valid input come from my users who know the application domain better than I. This is what makes a typical application more of a "Business Rules Engine". My boss has a table of all the types of data used in the system, including stuff I don't care about; EXPIRATION-DATE, for example, is a date input type with further constraints coming from several parts of my application, including billing. I could never foresee input validation like this, it would be a nightmare to hardcode this into the app, so I exported a web form where they can input business rules in plain English which gets compiled in to Lisp code (actually, so far it's a human compiler, moi, but I hope to develop this further into a DSL; I cheat and write regular expressions, along with some methods that query the various parts of the sytem, the exact regexes are used by the javascript client validation as well.)

I can look at a page of my code, and the are becomes a volume! I can see the screen of my laptop translate further back in to the horizon, on a negative Z-axis, giving that snippet of code of mine far more depth and weight than it would otherwise have in any other shallow language. It's hard, taxing work, but once you tame it, the possibilities are endless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that, it was a real eye-opener.

<comment><USER2> No worries :-)

I tried to reach you on freenode but I guess you were away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A nice way to validate object state changes when you need to without having to make getters/setters for when you don't.</comment>


Ask HN: How does one persist when there are a lot of naysayers around? - <AUTHOR> Building any product/company is hard. For various reasons. Sometimes founders/makers/creators are flowing against the tide. They have a vision that no one else either understands or refuse to accept due to some personal/political agenda. In such environment how does one persist and continue to follow the dream? BTW, not all dreams start with the idea of building a unicorn. Lot of them start because someone in the world has a vision for a better tomorrow. <comment><USER2> Find your yaysayers. Prioritize for impact. Get feedback. I believe in you. Also this doesn't work for all things but try to find a way to make it profitable. Then you can build a positive feedback loop. From what I briefly read it looks similar to Lambda School. They are definitely for profit. I'm a skeptic of that approach to education reform but you could try emulating what they are doing with your own differentiators.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I believe in you.

Thank you!

> Also this doesn't work for all things but try to find a way to make it > profitable.

I want to make it a non-profit. But I do have a self-sustainability model for this project.

> From what I briefly read it looks similar to Lambda School.

This is not like Lambda School(LS). The model LS is implementing is what one professor described as "job training centers". Education is more than that. I want students to learn whatever they want without the fear of loans. And I want the education sector to be a magnet for the best talent.

The whole point of this project is to make loans obsolete so that students are not hesitant to take education. But students should also be made, whenever able, to help sustain the education system so that the society as a whole benefits. And the staff of education institutions also should be compensated well enough to help attract the best talent.

With the present system neither the students, the education staff nor the government benefits. And the education institutions fail to find innovative ways to help sustain themselves without the infusion of government cash via student loans.

The core of my proposal is to divert the flow of funds directly to the education institutions rather than channeling it via the students in the name of loans. That way the education institutions are directly in the loop with the funding process. But the students afterwards should be made to repay for the education they received so that the cycle of funding continues with transperancy and the government can then slowly reduce its funding load. Otherwise the students in future will anyway have to pay more in the form of increased taxes if the government fails to recover the funds it has spent on education. So why not ask the students to start making contributions immediately once they start generating income, even if they are not given loans per se.

In short, students are paying back because they received a service(i.e. education) that helps them pay back and not because they have a loan. Everyone who has benefited from education has to make their fair share of contribution to help improve and sustain the system. So it is really simple, if you get a service(i.e. education) you pay for that service if the outcome is as expected(i.e. you are able to generate income); and because the education system is for the greater good of the society, the government intervenes(by giving grants and loans to education insitutions) whenever required, similar to the way it does now.

So the proposal is not that radical, it is just a little bit of tweaking to the direction of the flow of funds. But the positive impact will be enormous.</comment></comment>


Chrome's Internal URLs - <AUTHOR>

Since HN apparently won't allow me to post this as a URL, here's the link in text form:
chrome://chrome-urls
Of particular interest:
chrome://histograms <comment><USER2> What exactly is going on in chrome://histograms/?

Also does anyone know what chrome://tracing/ or chrome://sessions/ do?

chrome://sync-internals/ is pretty interesting. I've been wanting a way to get more info on how and when everything is being synced.

</comment><comment><USER3> Both don't work for me (Chrome 13.0)

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe you will need at least the beta channel (v14), and perhaps the dev channel (v15).</comment></comment>


Kickstarter campaign for an Apple II compatible retro smartwatch - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730981799/cinnamon-ii-the-ultimate-retro-smartwatch

<comment><USER2> Problem is, for Daylight Saving Time adjustments, you need an 8" floppy drive</comment>