Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University - <AUTHOR> http://thisanimatedlife.blogspot.com/2013/05/pixars-chris-horne-sheds-new-light-on.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means.

First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figure out what object you're looking at, and where on that object. You take into account the normal (direction of the surface at that point) and the optical properties of the object at that point. You also take into account the position, intensity, color, etc. of any light sources in the scene. Optionally, you may also take into account any shadow casting. That's it.

What's missing from that list? It's a big one: You're not taking into account the way _other objects_ in the scene affect that little point. In the real world, light bounces all around. Each little point is affected by pretty much each other little point. All the points are interdependent.

But with local illumination, you ignore the way other surfaces contribute to the point's illumination. You're just looking at that one point and the light sources. That's why it's called local.

Global illumination, by contrast, does take into account the interplay between different points in the scene. Its main purpose is to simulate light bouncing between polygons.

As you can imagine, managing the complexity of all those interactions is a tall order. We have quite a few algorithms for this; all are approximations. It's worth noting that some of these approximations can converge towards a provably physically correct result if you let them run long enough.

In any case, running global illumination often causes a major increase in rendering time. So it's understandable that Pixar, which has to render a huge number of frames at huge resolutions, did not traditionally use it much.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what would happen if you offloaded the rendering of a movie like Monsters University to something like Google Compute Engine. Would it cost an arm and a leg? Or would it solve a lot of scaling/cost/time challenges?

<comment><USER4> I think Pixar will do low-resolution runs all through the day (so people can get immediate feedback on what they are doing), and a high resolution run overnight (so they can see the current product). If you're at close to 100% utilisation, and have a large cluster, renting hardware is very cost inefficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > ray tracing is a relatively advanced CG lighting technique

Not really correct. Ray tracing is more like the most simple GC lightning technique you could imagine, but so incredibly computationally expensive people have been mostly waiting for the hardware to be good enough for the last 50 years.

And in the meantime, they've been using an incredible pile of hack and tricks to try and approach levels of visual quality and complexity trivial on a raytracer, except said pile of hack could actually be computed before the heat death of the universe.

</comment><comment><USER6>
        I was surprised that ray tracing in Pixar
        was historically a clunky, haphazard process.
        I always thought of it as this smooth, polished
        machine like something you would see at an Apple store.

Life inside the sausage factory never quite looks like what outsiders would expect.

<comment><USER7> A lot of the tools in pixar are wonderfully clunky.

They went through a phase of hiring hip young things fresh out of MIT to write tools. Instead of nice friendly tools that play well together, they got a lot of domain specific languages.

<comment><USER8> It's been this way in the visual effects industry for decades. Most of the tools are used through a Posix layer with Perl to keep things tidy. Going into the VFX forums even a few years ago I was amazed at illustrators knowing enough Perl and Python to get the job done, because, "Designers can't code good!"

Even the commercial stuff looks like some graduate students thesis work. A basic Java GUI and about 50+ commandline arguments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is wrong actually - they've been using ray tracing for ages (all ambient occlusion in PRMan is done with raytracing, by sending out occlusion rays in a hemisphere around the shading point).

What's new with MU is they're using both physically-plausible shading (where the shading is based off physically-based BRDF lighting algorithms, which gives much more realistic results), and global illumination path-tracing for the entire light transfer equation.

<comment><USER10> They explain the extent to which they used to use raytracing in the article - is it misrepresented? It's in a direct quote so I doubt it.

<comment><USER9> Yes, because the article (and the person in it) doesn't seem to understand the difference between path tracing (ray tracing with global illumination - multiple bounces even with diffuse surfaces), and ray tracing = sending rays around a scene and bouncing them off specular reflective/refractive surfaces - which Pixar have been doing for years. It's been possible to write raytraced shaders in PRMan for over 12 years now.

<comment><USER11> Cars was in production about 10-12 years ago. Maybe you're thinking Cars 2?

<comment><USER9> No, the guy in the article was wrong - it's been possible to do in PRMan since at least 2000, but it was very slow (they didn't have any decent acceleration structures for the ray intersection), so it generally wasn't used that much. But it was possible.

For PRMan 13 (which Pixar used for Cars in 2006), they added semi-decent acceleration structures which sped up raytracing a bit. But you still had to use custom shaders to cast rays.

With PRMan 17, ray tracing is now a first-class citizen in PRMan, and it can also trace rays from the camera instead of doing the traditional (pre 17) REYES rasterization of the surface and then shading that surface for reflection based on ray tracing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Actually there's some incorrect information here, Pixar started using ray tracing in films as far back as A Bug's Life. I can't find a picture on line but you can see it in the scene with the glass bottle. That was done by integration with a separate render but since then RenderMan as added support for GI and other ray tracing features.

I'm sure this update is significant, and sounds like a ground up reworking of the engine, perhaps replacing REYES? But it's not at all accurate to say the Pixar is moving to raytracing. Pixar has been in that neighborhood for more then a decade.

<comment><USER13> Yep. A "Ray Server" technique where PRMan farmed out calls trace() calls to BMRT was used in "A Bug's Life" for the glass bottles at the grasshopper's hideout. All other reflection and refraction were done using 'standard-issue' environment maps.

Source: Apodaca,Gritz, Advanced Renderman -- MK 2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was wondering what Toy Story would look like if they re-rendered it with today's technology. Well, it turns out they already did! It was part of the theatrical re-releases of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3D.

[http://www.bigscreenanimation.com/2008/09/toy-story-re- relea...](http://www.bigscreenanimation.com/2008/09/toy-story-re-releases- being-re-rendered.html)

Were these re-rendered versions released in 2D on Blu-ray?

<comment><USER15> I wonder if you really see a difference.

<comment><USER16> You won't see it but for sure you will perceive it ! ;)

<comment><USER17> Well put!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An article about a new dimension in rendering quality, and they're demonstrating that quality with two images the size of a stamp...WAT?

<comment><USER19> Larger versions:

[http://bluraymedia.ign.com/bluray/image/article/104/1044870/...](http://bluraymedia.ign.com/bluray/image/article/104/1044870/monsters- inc-20091112044224899-000.jpg)

[http://pixartimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Monsters- Un...](http://pixartimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Monsters-University- Research-1.png)

<comment><USER20> Wow! There's actually a huge difference! Not that I'm really surprised but still.

<comment><USER21> You also have to consider that Monsters Inc. was one of the earlier Pixar movies.

The contrast to Brave isn't that extreme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From what I gathered from John Carmack, ray tracing is done much more efficiently with voxels than with triangles, so hopefully this will push game engine companies to incorporate voxels sooner into their engines, too.

<comment><USER23> "Let's add voxels!!!111one" is one of the most irritating refrains of gamers.

There are a lot of very nice mathematical properties of triangles, and the trend towards graphical fidelity has really only served to balloon budgets in the gaming space. We don't need voxels, and honestly neither do we need ray tracing.

It's not even new tech--games going back to _Outcast_ , some Build engine games, Novalogic stuff, and so on have used voxels. Ray tracing has been used in a handful of nifty tech demos, but otherwise nobody cares.

Ray tracing and voxel tech is of marginal utility for games, and things have moved on--it'd be like switching the US construction industry over to metric; too late to make a difference and too minor to matter.

EDIT: In spite of all this, voxel cone tracing looks sexy as hell though.

<comment><USER24> Why do people assume that voxels and polygons don't play well together?

There are voxel engines now that store world data using voxels while what the player actually sees is polygons based on that voxel data.

I'm reminded of one guy's side project[1] that accomplishes exactly that.

[1][http://procworld.blogspot.com/2012/12/videos-of-caves-and- bu...](http://procworld.blogspot.com/2012/12/videos-of-caves-and- buildings.html)

<comment><USER25> There's an awesome library that goes by the name of Polyvox that does exactly this. It's worth a look if you're interested in voxel-y things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What sort of raytracing are they using?

Are they going all the way to an unbiased global light transport algorithm (like LuxRender) or just using basic raytracing (like PovRay)?

Are they using an existing renderer? If not, are they releasing their own like they did with RenderMan?

Are they rendering with CPUs or with GPUs?

How much time per frame does it take them with how many cores of what sort?

<comment><USER12> Interesting questions. I don't have the answers, but I can say that I can't imagine that Pixar would ever 'go all the way' to an 'unbiased' GI renderer.

Our entire function in the filmmaking business is to tell a story visually, and for that you need complete control and directability of the image. This is the opposite goal of unbiased renderers. Nevertheless more tools in the tool box is always good.

<comment><USER9> Unbiased actually isn't slow - Arnold has proved this - what's slow is using hundreds of bounces per path and bi-directional path tracing (like Maxwell, Indigo, LuxRender) which takes a lot longer.

Biased generally means it's interpolated with a point or irradiance cache.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow, I had always assumed Pixar was doing GI/ray tracing by now. Looking forward to seeing MU to check out the graphics porn.

<comment><USER7> Ironically Renderman has had global illumination and ray tracing for over ten years.

Having said that, what renderman is and what pixar animation do/use are rather orthogonal. For example pixar made heavy use of Subsurface scattering in the incredibles. Something that was at the time rather time intensive.

The title is a bit misleading as they've been using raytracing for years 1

[1]<http://graphics.pixar.com/library/RayTracingCars/paper.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Btw, there's a pretty impressive real-time ray tracer in development: <http://raytracey.blogspot.cz/>

</comment><comment><USER29> Here's a paper from last summer on how Pixar is doing the computations for global illumination more efficiently with a "multiresolution radiosity caching method." <http://graphics.pixar.com/library/RadiosityCaching/paper.pdf>

I don't know much about graphics but maybe some of you will find it illuminating (no pun intended....)

</comment><comment><USER30> I would love them to re-generate Brave with ray tracing, I'm guessing though that would take too many resources even for a blue-ray edition.

<comment><USER31> I think the worst part is the amount of man-hours it would take, not compute hours (but maybe that's what you meant?). If the change is as deep as it sounds like, the entire tooling support changed, so all scenes would have to be re-lit by artists, not-entirely-from-scratch but worse than you think.

REYES-rendered scenes that fake global illumination are pretty arcanely hacked together. Just making a legacy scene ray-traced would make it look _worse_ , not better.

<comment><USER30> Absolutely, which is why it won't happen. You'd have to actually place lights, remove the fakes, and render check every scene. Basically the only part of the movie you _wouldn't_ have to do is come up with dialog, sound, and geometry. (not to mention I have never met a movie person who, given a chance to reshoot a scene says "Yeah, it was perfect when I shot it, the only changes here are mechanical." :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm guessing the disco ball scene is Pixar flexing their muscles with the new tech. It's pretty impressive.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anybody knows how other companies like universal's animation department (ice age, despicable me, ...) stand technology-wise? From the visuals, i always assumed pixar is setting the standards but now knowing that they just start to use unified raytracing, the gap might not be that big...

<comment><USER34> Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results.

If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it makes a lot of difference.

There's the obvious render time, but actually render time isn't that important - studios are happy to wait up to 30 hours for a 4k frame on the farm if that's what it takes for a shot. But they don't want artists waiting around, so they want very quick iterations and previews of what the artists are doing, as it's the artists who cost money.

This is why global illumination has taken off over the last 5/6 years (thanks largely to SPI and Bluesky showing it could be done), as although the render times are slower, it means lighting the scene (by phyiscally-based shading) is much quicker and you don't need as many hacks as you did with PRMan (light maps, shadow maps, reflection maps, point caches, etc). You can literally model scenes with lights as they are in the real world.

On top of this, there's how easy it is to do very complex shots and change just bits of it - tools like Katana allow hugely complex scenes to be managed and rendered very efficiently, with very little work from artists. Studios who don't have similar tools often duplicate and waste a lot of time doing things that should be easy.

For example, Weta on IronMan 3 wasted a lot of time doing all the different suits, as they didn't have a decent asset-based pipeline that would have allowed them to re-use a lot of shaders, assets for each suit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Now that Pixar is only ray tracing, can real time move to scanline? I'd really like to see a lot more smooth shapes and complicated geometry in games if possible.

<comment><USER36> That's pretty much what games already use. The only difference is polygon count--doubling the polygons tends to halve the framerate.

That said, of the magic comes from a toolchain that lets artists work with curved surfaces (NURBS or similar) and that converts those surfaces to polygons at the last minute. We finally started getting hardware support for that sort of thing with DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I suppose the holy grail is when ray tracing can be done in real time. At that point things would look so real we might as well call it quits from real life.

</comment><comment><USER38> _sigh_ WHY has he locked the font size down on his blog such that CMD + and - only change the text area width and image sizes?

<comment><USER39> It works just fine in Chrome and Firefox here. Are you perhaps using an old and/or awful browser? He's using a px unit on his font size, but Firefox and Chrome have done full-page scaling for ages now.

<comment><USER38> I'm using the latest chrome for mac. I tested on a different blogspot blog and it works perfectly there.</comment></comment></comment>


Hate ChatRoulette? Then You Hate The Internet - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/02/22/hate-chatroulette-then-you-hate-the-internet ChatRoulette is everything we love and hate about the Internet, all rolled into one <comment><USER2> I love the internet, but if 4 out of every 10 clicks led to a video of a man stroking his dick, I'd find something else to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't really _care_ about ChatRoulette. I gave up using "random web page" as my home page back in the mid-90s.</comment>


Invasion of the Money Honeys - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/finance/Invasion_of_the_Money_Honeys.shtml

<comment><USER2> TV channels hire pretty women as presenters. Where is the mystery?

OK, thinking about it again, it might be a mystery if they did not do it before, using ugly men instead. is it a kind of giving up on the stock market, admitting that for the masses it is just gambling and entertainment?</comment>


Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography - <AUTHOR> https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm <comment><USER2> This was my guide for finding books to buy when my son was little and I first discovered his interest in mathematics. (This list has been on various places online since the turn of the most recent century.) There is good stuff on this list. Now my oldest son is all grown up, living on his own, and teaching other people programming. Life is good. This list helped.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent. I would love to see a list like this for theoretical CS, with the beginner/intermediate/advanced distinctions.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is impressive and odd to me as I graduated in Mathematics but I have never bought a math book in my life. Well, I had to when I was in North America but I don't think I read them, used mostly online resources.

</comment><comment><USER5> My favourite math library: [http://us.metamath.org/](http://us.metamath.org/)</comment>


Amazon Launches Its Casual Games Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/2/amazon-launches-its-casual-games-store-amzn <comment><USER2> Casual gaming is _huge_. I never knew quite how big until I had an in depth look at one of the bigger players in this space and it completely blew me away.</comment>


Ask HN: Longest Long-Distance Friendship? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I am Ahmed from Egypt and my friend is from Dallas, TX. I know her for 16 years and we never met in person, because I failed getting a U.S. visa.
I have proof of emails and chats through this long history.
Can we get into gennes world records? How to to it? <comment><USER2> "The longest lasting pen friendship (pen pals) is 78 years 160 days, and was achieved by ..." They first met after 47 years. [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world- records/72823-mos...](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world- records/72823-most-durable-pen-friends)</comment>


Office distractions could be costing more than $30k per employee each year - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/office-distractions-could-be-costing-your-company-more-than-30k-per-high-performance-employee-each-ba7e4f772d78 <comment><USER2> Exec and management types, if you're reading this: Private offices or hub-and- spoke office styles are an unbelievable competitive advantage. I write this as I hear the laughter from an unrelated standup, and the drivel of no fewer than 8 conversations I don't care about. And I'm on hackernews instead of doing my job.

Please let me work in peace.

<comment><USER3> What's a hub and spoke office style?

<comment><USER4> Microsoft does this AFAIK and it's where you have many private offices flanking shared meeting spaces. You can actually close your door and focus, then pop-out for an impromptu session with coworkers on a white board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been discussed numerous times here, and I agree with the premise of this article, but some of the prescriptions for solving the problem just seem silly and reek of over-complicating and over-managing the process. Trying to gauge or limit how much time a developer spends on a given solution is problematic because a) you're professing to know the solution before it has been developed, in which case you should have just written it yourself or _told_ the developer the solution, and b) you're just making it worse on the developer by imposing an arbitrary deadline that will only induce stress and result in the solution coming _later_ , not sooner. As a deadline gets closer, the productivity of a developer is proportional to the amount of time remaining. The only exception is if the solution, or the design of the solution, is known and all that is left to do is the typing.

</comment><comment><USER6> so if we remove "distractions" and work like robots will we get $30k more a year?

People are not robots. If I'm worth $200 an hour for the first 5 hours to an employee, by the 16th straight hour I'm barely in the positive territory. Companies should STFU and pay more, their earnings and cash piles show that money is being made.

<comment><USER7> If it's so easy to run a profitable business, why not run your own and keep that money for yourself?

The truth is workplaces that limit distractions are much better places to work, and more enjoyable for employees. I've run organizations that offered one person offices to every developer, and it was a big reason why our turnover was extremely low.

<comment><USER6> _If it 's so easy to run a profitable business, why not run your own and keep that money for yourself?_

Irrelevant. How do you know know I'm not already doing that.

My main point, which will valid for as long as humans are are the switch is that you cannot maximize every second.

<comment><USER7> It's relevant that you think the company doesn't deserve the money it makes. If somehow employees could make that money without all the services and assets of the business, they already would be doing so.

And it's not about maximizing every second. It's about providing the best possible work environment to allow people to be more productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr:

More clickbait. This blog assumes that employees are earning $110k a year, get interrupted 6 times a day, and each interruption requires 23 minutes to recover from. So each employee spends 2+ hours a day "costing the business".

Despite the interstellar sized logical jumps, the article is weak. Self- selecting high performance workers? Assuming everyone earns $110k? Etc.

<comment><USER9> I wish I only got interrupted 6 times a day. I usually get interrupted that often by lunchtime. I don't think it takes a full 23 minutes to recover from that, but 5-10 isn't uncommon.

<comment><USER10> I get about 23 full, uninterrupted minutes in a day.

When I'm in the office, I wonder if my coworkers wait for me to start working just so they can ask me how my day is going or to tell me a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree with the morale and wellness argument. Too many distractions lead to mental thrashing.

But -- there's an assertion here that the $30,000 would have been better used in another way. The concept of agile development encourages these distractions because it encourages changes earlier, rather than later in development, where more resources have been squandered. Microsoft famously found that the cost of a defect grew by an order of magnitude for each stage of development in which it was allowed to fester.

Hence, I don't think the author has proven that business-related "distractions" are a net negative. If the distractions are completely unrelated to work, that's another animal altogether.

HPEs should only be considered "high-performance" if they are able to deflect distractions when they need to. Otherwise, they are simply highly compensated.

<comment><USER7> Many distractions aren't work related.

Many of the remaining distractions that are work related aren't necessary.

In an open floor plan the product manager can accost an engineer about a business problem, and they can directly solve it sooner in development, saving time and money. But they did so by distracting a half dozen other employees who had little to no interest or anything to contribute to the conversation.

At a previous job we insisted on one person offices for developers. The product manager would go to the engineers office, they'd solve the problem quickly and early, and we got the same benefits without distracting another half dozen people. If they needed some more people to help with the decisions, we had conference rooms.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Journaling app where you can publish selected entries online as a blog - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1512723406 <comment><AUTHOR> Daily Journal started out as an app that I made for myself, to learn SwiftUI and to start Daily Journaling. Then I started adding more features that I wanted to see in the app and it ended up being something different than the journaling apps out there.

I wanted something minimal. Just go in and journal daily, so I created the most minimal text editor, and I loved how it turned out.

I wanted something different every day, so I came up with themes for each day, supplied by beautiful curated backgrounds from Unsplash contributors. Each photographer is credited on the day of the wallpaper. So be sure to check them out.

I wanted to share some of my entries online as a blog, which ended up a bit tricky to do but I love the final result. Entries you choose to share are generated as a static HTML page and they are placed on dailyjournal.stream under you username. Custom domains are possible as well, and this will be available if anyone is interested. I'm thinking of creating different templates as well for your blogs, which is exciting as well.

Publishing feature I added as a monthly subscription of 1.99USD per month. Other features are completely free. Some of the those other features are:

\- Reminders (opt-in only) \- Daily Journaling Cues: This changes based on the timing of the day \- FaceID/TouchID unlock \- Syncing between multiple devices: Currently only available for iPhone and iPad. MacOS soon, and Android if I get enough support on the iOS versions :) \- Privacy: All your journal entries are encrypted and private \- Share journal entries as an image to social networks \- There is also an additional easter egg you'll see if you use it for more than a day. ;)

I've got more features in the pipeline. You can go in and vote on these on the apps roadmap here: [https://trello.com/b/vbSpHeoS/roadmap](https://trello.com/b/vbSpHeoS/roadmap)

Let me know what you think. Looking forward for your feedback.</comment>


AI takes over the world? Now a free personal assistant for vacation planning - <AUTHOR> http://www.vacaai.com/

<comment><USER2> Wait a second... this looks almost identical to [http://x.ai](http://x.ai) which has been around for a while.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I be doing with our business' cash? - <AUTHOR> Using a throwaway account, since we are semi well known. We are a mature, cash flow positive and bootstrapped company that is sitting on a business checking account with $280k in it. $100k is earmarked for 2015 taxes with a known due date. The rest is just general operating funds, about 3 months of run. What should we be doing with this cash that we can't necessarily spend, but don't want to have sit idle making no money for us? Are there any good options that beat the measly < 1% rate a CD would get? <comment><AUTHOR> Additional details: I am mostly interested in hearing about financial instruments. We do have a murky path to fueling more growth with some strategic hires (a designer might go a long way), but my founder and I are trying to ramp up our team, and our ability to manage that team, in a controlled and smart fashion. Meaning there is obvious gains to be had with an additional web dev and a designer, but it feels like we are 6 months out from having the right culture/structure/management skills to use them effectively. We went from 5 to 8 full time employees this year, so adding more is a bit risky feeling.

</comment><comment><USER2> Keep it in cash & cash equivalents. Here is a great write-up on companies that looked at higher yield options: [http://www.feld.com/archives/2015/04/cash- policies-startups....](http://www.feld.com/archives/2015/04/cash-policies- startups.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Tripling your rate of return from 1% to 3% is only an extra $3600 a year. I suspect the same amount of effort applied to your core business would yield a better return on your time and mental energy.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's my general take as well, but thought I'd float the question. There's also the consideration of $250k FDIC limits, though for the next 2-3 years that's as simple as maintaining a couple of different accounts.</comment></comment>


Bad scrolling by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/AstonMartin/

<comment><AUTHOR> Can someone open it in IE and confirm whether it works better than on other browsers? That'd be a first.

<comment><USER2> It is somewhat better but still not very smooth in IE11</comment></comment>


KodakGallery.com is holding your photos hostage. Bust them free using this. - <AUTHOR> http://axonflux.com/code-39

<comment><USER2> _They're well within their rights to do so (heck, everyone needs to make some money) -- but they also make it quite difficult to download these photos. If you had 200 photos, you would have to click the "Download Full Resolution" button 200 times individually. If these photos are mine, then shouldn't it be a little easier? Sorry, a product manager in some stovepiped organization said no._

I don't exactly spend that much effort making it easier for people to defeat the need to pay me money, either.

<comment><USER3> Do you think that's a good strategy for getting people to be your customers? Really?

Notice how gleeful the author was to have "defeated" the company here. Is that how you want your customers to look at your company?

<comment><USER2> Well, not to put to fine a point on it, _yes_ , I do think that charging money to make things easier is a good strategy for getting people to be my customers. This is partially informed by the fact that I charge money for software to make things easier.

People buy because the paid version is better than the free version for their purposes. If the paid version was not better than the free version, they would not buy. There is a famous pre-Internet A/B test on shareware: functional limitations beat "put out a coin cup and hope some money falls into it" by a mile.

See: [http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people- register-...](http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people-register- shareware.html)

 _Is that how you want your customers to look at your company?_

My customers are distinguished from the poster by a few things. Principally, that they pay me money. (If my customers are looking at my company like it is a business which provides them value in return for being paid, then that is great -- we're all on the same page.)

The opinions of people who will not pay me money and are, in fact, hostile to the idea of paying money are of little concern to me. The free competitors are over yonder. They're worth what you pay for them. Enjoy.

<comment><USER3> In this case, Kodak evidently offered to store his pictures for free, then when he wanted them back because they were going to delete them, they did not make it easy to get out.

As a prospective customer, I pay attention to whether someone is going to try to get money from me for the privilege of no longer being their customer. It's not a good sign. I will probably just avoid being their customer in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> man this is totally sweet. someone should combine this with the Posterous API and make dead simple Kodak to Posterous converter. :)</comment>


What do you think about machines that think? - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/contributors/what-do-you-think-about-machines-that-think

<comment><USER2> A search engine that thinks, almost [http://www2.lbl.gov/Science- Articles/Archive/sabl/2005/March...](http://www2.lbl.gov/Science- Articles/Archive/sabl/2005/March/06-genopharm.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> As long as they serve to humans, they can be highly helpful. However, there are certainly moral and ethical issues that should be addressed prior to creating them.

</comment><comment><USER4> How would one be able to tell if a machine could think?</comment>


All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/ http://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/ <comment><USER2> This is just a fantastic series of programs. Think number 2 of the 4 is the best. <http://vimeo.com/29875053> The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Adam Curtis for me is one of the greatest living documentary makers. Probably tied with Errol Morris...</comment></comment>


Symbolic Execution Over Native X86 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a562909.pdf <comment><USER2> If I understand correctly, modeling a program at the x86 instruction set level is cool but it would have a more complicated list of states than a high level language. More states means more computation to do the symbolic execution, therefore it is harder to optimize well enough to get useful results on large programs.

The intro implies that the main motivation for doing this on x86 instructions is uncertainty that a high-level language's abstraction is faithfully translated into x86 instructions. I recognize that this language->assembly conversion was accepted to be correct as a basic assumption when I did graduate work in validation techniques. I think there are some PL theorists that have more rigorous mathematical proofs for their compilers, but I'm not sure how many of those get all the way down to the x86 instruction set.

</comment><comment><USER3> ISA has never meant Industry Standard Architecture.

Why did they get that wrong? It's just such a weird error to make, especially at the postgraduate level.

<comment><USER4> Industry Standard Architecture was the standard bus interface in PCs, before PCI et cetera.

So the term has certainly been used a great deal with that meaning, although it's of course a typo in this context where it should mean Instruction Set Architecture.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture).

<comment><USER3> Right. I forgot the Not Micro Channel Bus. ;)

Next I'll be forgetting what PCMCIA stands for, I guess.

<comment><USER5> > what PCMCIA stands for

I will remember this to the day I die: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Nuclear Waste Is a Goldmine - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/our-nuclear-waste-is-a-goldmine?utm_source=tss&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=linkfrom_feature

<comment><USER2> "GE Hitachi says it designed PRISM to be leak-proof because the reactor would be contained inside a stainless steel case, which wouldn't corrode"

All modern reactor pressure vessels are lined with stainless steel[1]. They can still leak because of things like embrittlement[2].

This kind of reactor would not be notably safer than current designs.

[1] [http://atomicpowerreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/reactor- pressu...](http://atomicpowerreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/reactor-pressure- vessels-metallurgy-and.html) [2] [http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc- collections/fact-sheets/pr...](http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc- collections/fact-sheets/prv.html)</comment>


Achievement Design 101 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregMcClanahan/20091202/3709/Achievement_Design_101.php <comment><USER2> You might also like this article on the psychology of game badges (achievements): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328684>

I'm interested in reading more about achievements and badges. They seem to be a great way to motivate users.</comment>


'Rogue' Googlephone App Raises Questions About Android's Open Policy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/rogue-googlepho.html

<comment><USER2> Looks like it raises questions about eMobiStudio's competency to me.</comment>


Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs Turns More Science Projects Into Businesses   - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/04/17/peter-thiels-breakout-labs-turns-more-science-projects-into-businesses/

<comment><USER2> should I read this? More often than not I regret reading any forbes.com link because a. they've dumbed down the material so much there's no there there, or b. the article was written by the subject's PR team.</comment>


Show HN: Add a custom cursor to improve your UX - <AUTHOR> https://customcursor.com/direct

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if it is my oldish (2010) MacBook pro, but the coursor is very laggy.

And I'm not sure if this really improves your UX, it feels annoying just like scrolljacking.

Do you have any data that shows it provides an increase in conversion etc?

<comment><USER3> Also (very slightly) laggy on my 2014 MBP, even when forcing it to use the discrete gpu.

<comment><USER4> It is not laggy at all on my HP Probook 6545b, which is pretty crap compared to MBPs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh god. Time is a flat circle, 90s are having a comeback, now this, tomorrow under construction gifs and faux 3D buttons in framesets.

The cringiest part is I do believe their usecase (huge annoying CLICK cursors over "buy now" buttons) just _might_ increase conversions enough to be worthwile.

<comment><USER6> This site triggered all kinds of old memories for me. Setting my cursor to be an X-Wing in Win95/98\. VRML. That brief stretch of time when setting custom scrollbar styles for your site was considered cool.

The status bar! We should bring that back.

Welcome to my website!

Firefox (I mean Phoenix, or is it Firebird?) being ultra slim and fast. I miss that.

And yeah, framesets. Oh man. I bet there are millions of lines of Javascript and CSS that exist solely because frames aren't hip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't even know in which universe this can be called "UX improvement".

<comment><USER8> In the "just graduated from college and finding sober life a little difficult" sense, I would imagine ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah... no. What about users that use high visibility cursors? Think accessibility, people.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there anything to suggest this actually improves user experience rather than just making it different?

This was an annoying javascript trick back in the 2000s, it still makes me ask "WTF" when I go to a Gawker blog, the only place I know that still trys this trick.

Do you have use cases (such as the contextual pointer/text cursor change) where it productive to change the cursor?

</comment><comment><USER11> I really hope that this is a joke. I figured that clicking "Buy Now" would go to a page admitting that this was a joke, but it did not.

We knew that this was a bad idea in 2002, so I don't know why anyone would think that we'd change our mind now.

</comment><comment><USER12> 15 years ago? [http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/customcursor.htm](http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/customcursor.htm)

</comment><comment><USER13> Defying users' expectations about standard browser features is the polar opposite of a UX improvement.

"I was on the fence about paying these guys $200/mo for their SaaS product, until I saw that their cursor was a rocketship"

Unless you're building a website for children, I'd be very, very wary of this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Firstly, don't do this.

Secondly, if you insist on doing it, don't pay 5 bucks for it. It's just cursor: url(...);

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor)

<comment><AUTHOR> this is not consistently supported across browsers. plus no rocket-like rotation :-)

<comment><USER14> IE 6+, webkit 1.0+, firefox 1.5+. It's been supported for a loooooong time.

<comment><AUTHOR> We would love to have used cursor: url(...); but in our testing you run into constraints (like sizing and rotation) that don't let you do the stuff we're doing here.

<comment><USER15> In my experience with cursor:url(); in Chrome at least, fairly large image sizes are allowed, and work fine. I haven't tried on other browsers.

I don't understand why one would want the image to rotate?

Maybe I don't understand what you mean by rotation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had no cursor at all before it loaded, you should fix that before getting money from people.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ehh, it's an interesting Idea, not a big fan though to be honest. It's too striking and the cursors are huge. It will probably be like the next scroll tag, a way people can make shit appear in your face and it will just get abused.

<comment><USER11> Cursor size can change, but it's a non-interesting idea that people thought was cool in 1998 and learned otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's obviously a lot of opportunity for abuse in this kind of thing - I'm reminded of custom scrollbars - but I think their shopping cart example is pretty compelling. As with everything, it needs to be used sparingly!

</comment><comment><USER19> This made me cry.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you want to improve your user experience this should be the LAST thing you would do. I was expecting them to have a more accurate or easy to see cursor, but it's just the scrolling marquee all over again.

</comment><comment><USER21> I see a lot of comments taking this seriously. Is it actually serious? It looks like they're accepting real money, but I still have trouble believing it's meant to be taken seriously.

</comment><comment><USER22> The "Pay With Card" and "Pay With Paypal" buttons simply don't work for me. Chrome 39.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm interesting, they're working for me on Chrome 39. Are there any JS errors?

<comment><USER23> Yes, StripeCheckout is being called when it's not defined and they have a problem removing a Node.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh good catch, got it. we accidentally had "async" in our


#ff99cc is not the same - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=%23ff99cc&espv=2&tbm=isch&tbo=u <comment><USER2> If you click on the images that appear to be the wrong colour, it looks like they're not actually even pretending to be #FF99CC. They just come up in the search accidentally. I see #FF99DD and #FF99FF in there too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Woah.. like there are even easter eggs in there. That's not what I expect when I use that color code. Also, are you high?

</comment><comment><USER4> What's your point?</comment>


AlphaZero vs. Stockfish 8 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtY7gNRVRI <comment><USER2> I think it should be noted that Stockfish and AlphaZero were running on vastly different hardware during this match. I wonder which engine would win in a more typical fair match (in my opinion, the match they ran was unfair). It's a shame that AlphaZero is proprietary, and as such, there is no way to find out.</comment>


Dynamic Docker links with an ambassador powered by etcd - <AUTHOR> http://coreos.com/blog/docker-dynamic-ambassador-powered-by-etcd/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've solved it, described here: [http://serverfault.com/questions/615153/running-mesos- master...](http://serverfault.com/questions/615153/running-mesos-master-in- docker-container-cannot-see-containers-ip-from-other-h)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nice work, very similar to sidekick method.

Is there a way though of attaching hosts network to docker container?

I am running mesos-master container which registers itself to zookeeper and I cannot connect to it from another coreos host...</comment>


Wikileaks website to be abandoned - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-dump.htm <comment><USER2> This is getting ridiculous. Why doesn't Wikileaks just host all their content in a Git repository and use GPG to sign their releases?

Then it would be impossible to take down the site, and anyone could easily spin up a mirror.

Instead there's one monolithic distribution site which isn't decoupled from their submission network. The site is frequently down during a fundraiser, and due to how they run it other people can't easily directly contribute resources to run mirrors of the site.

I'm beginning to think that Wikileaks is not as interested in actually getting leaks out as it is furthering Julian Assange's personal indispensability.

<comment><USER3> I really share this feeling especially during the past 7 months while the fund-raising was ongoing.

Now, to be more practical and maybe start an implementation of a distributed Wikileaks. There are two processes : the submission process and the distribution process. I think the distribution process is easy with Git or any distributed VCS. The submission process is more tricky as this is involving a human/social process to merge content into the distribution "branch".

The submission process could be "à la" HN where there is a way to up/down vote a submission. When the submission is reaching a defined level, the submission is released for distribution. In this is case, the submission network is still centralized but the distribution part is really decentralized.

For submission process decentralization, distributed ticketing (e.g. <http://ditz.rubyforge.org/> ) could be used to show status of a submission within a same git repository but showing/merging only submission reaching a level in its ticket. Just an idea...

Update : my humble comment is just on some technical aspect. The social/legal/human aspect of Wikileaks is something much more complex...

<comment><USER4> Submission for leaks (usually) also involves some sort of authentication, however. And that authentication needs to be kept confidential.

The result is that there's no way around a 'trusted' provider who signs releases, and that will inherently be a personality like Assange.

Simply relying on a reddit-style submission method would lead to a worse form of reddit. Currently you can evaluate whether or not you 'trust' content submitted to reddit by looking at the site hosting it (is the content from the NYT or a random blog?). For a wikileaks-reddit, all submissions would have to be anonymous, and you'd have no idea what is a real leak or not.

<comment><USER2> There's no need for a trusted singular provider. You can just implement this sort of thing as a circle of trust.

A leak could be made by anyone. But content would only be published on somerandomsite.com if it has been digitally signed by someone.

Who that someone is could be configurable. wikileaks.com would be things that are only signed by Assange, but you could spin up your own site with your own signing policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With the turf wikileaks is treading on, does some authentication code really confirm that this is not a counter intelligence op?

I'm not saying that any of these things are untrue, it's just that there would be some very valid reasons for wanting to keep the details of the operation opaque. (eg. paying in cash, etc)

When you piss of the US National Security apparatus to that degree there is going to be some blow back. Yes, ideally they'd want to put him behind bars in a supermax, like other political prisoners, but he's fairly high profile and has a large amount of public support. You'd definitely want to kill the crusader for freedom aspect of his media image and promote an in it for himself persona. A hit piece in mainstream media is going to give him a better platform and have absolutely no effect on anyone with a clue. The spooks know this so they aren't going to do something like that.

This is super effective, cryptome is legit as far as hackers and others that would contribute to his cause. This isn't a money issue it's a technical expertise issue. No one is going to join wikileaks for the money. Yes, money will help buy servers, but it's more about the technical expertise required for the people you're pissing off not to be able to build a solid case. Wikileaks itself has nothing to fear from the axis of evil, but a lot to fear from the G8 (except Russia). They will never honour a chinese extradition request because Assange found a video of Chinese soldiers killing civilians. They will however put his ass right next to the shoe bomber for posting vids of army dudes doing what army dudes are trained to do.

Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar.

<comment><USER6> > Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, > OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site > because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar.

You can't blame people for being suspicious. Humanity has proven time and time again that when there is a reason to suspect somebody absconded with large sums of money, they probably did. I have no opinion on the matter, but what could make a more effective cover story for vanishing than a believable 'Big Brother wanted to find me'?

<comment> ultra-nihilist You make a good point. Sure Assange is self-aggrandizing. Some may even call him flamboyant, but is that such a bad thing for wikileaks? I recall similar criticism of Jimmy Wales. Wales acts like a rock star and he, like Assange, is a master fundraiser and aficionado of private jets. Despite mass defections of editors, and the enduring pompousness of Mr. Wales, Wikipedia is better than ever. Sometimes a greasy-haired, eccentric diva is the best person to represent your cause.

<comment><USER7> > but is that such a bad thing for wikileaks?

Honestly, yes. Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda. But Assange does very much have those things.

The reason Wikipedia is good is because the community decision process is very strong (mostly through being slow and laborious); they, obviously, have a lot of respect for Wales but he can't influence things dramatically without being called on it (look at the fuss over the commons porn images).

Wikileaks doesn't have that sort of critical buffer of individuals (from what I have gathered about his personality Assange doesn't strike me as someone who would take any criticism at all). Sure there are volunteers but from my understanding it all works through Assange.

<comment><USER8> _"Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda."_

Why? Where's the argumentation? Your opinion is not fact, mister.

<comment><USER7> Well, yes, this is always opinion (I refuse to constantly add "in my opinion" to all statements :P it stifles the flow).

But I am not sure how easily it can be argued that bias/agenda could be good things for a whistleblower site. Or that it could compromise their aims.

On the other hand there are copious reasons why they would be good things (not least reputation).

<comment><USER8> Assange is aiming at maximum impact. He knows human nature well enough to understand that people love polarization, and he exploits human weaknesses in order to accomplish his goals. Who has ever heard of Cryptome or Steven Aftergood? Very few. By contrast, everyone knows Assange these days. You may find his approach distasteful, but you can't claim it's not effective.

In any case, why shouldn't the "collateral murder" video have been editorialized? I don't care if the soldiers were obeying the ROE and had the right to defend themselves. They still are the invaders, and the invasion is still illegal. Ultimately, I don't blame the soldiers, for they were following orders. I blame the American people for blindly trusting their government and failing to demand accountability from the morally challenged elected officials. A docile populace is the first step towards tyranny.

If Assange stokes the masses and gets people angry, I am perfectly fine with that. Anger in the face of tragedy is preferrable to utter indifference. If Assange is self-aggrandizing and has an agenda, I am fine with that too, for he has done a great job so far and it would be enormously unrealistic to demand zero self-interest from a person who has amassed such immense power in such a short period of time.

<comment><USER7> _In any case, why shouldn't the "collateral murder" video have been editorialized? I don't care if the soldiers were obeying the ROE and had the right to defend themselves. They still are the invaders, and the invasion is still illegal_

I think this is the core of our disagreement; because while I agree with you I _abhor_ the idea of pushing an agenda and opinion on _anyone_. The video could have stood for itself; instead I believe Assange weakened it via it's presentation in an effort to raise the profile of Wikileaks.

 _If Assange stokes the masses and gets people angry, I am perfectly fine with that._

It matters; it matters a lot. Because the editorial was gleeful and gloating. It was saying "screw you US government" - and that is silly because the video stands for itself.

That Wikileaks has an agenda is, in my mind, wrong - when the information you present/possess comes from secret sources and contains highly controversial material it should be treated objectively.

I don;t care of Wikileaks languishes in obscurity like Cryptome; enough people know of it that anything seriously big (like the video) will make the media.

These sites are important simply by existing because they present a critical danger to those who want to abuse government positions; I don't want someone aggrandizing and pretentious and seemingly biased as those politicians presenting the information.

<comment><USER8> I disagree that the video could have stood for itself. WikiLeaks sent people to Baghdad to meet the children who were in the van that was shot by the Apache. That's investigative journalism, and it's laudable.

If the Pentagon shows you footage of a combat operation in which insurgents are hiding in a building that is seconds later destroyed by an Hellfire missile and they tell you that there were no civilian casualties, you may believe they're telling you the truth. If someone investigates the attack and finds out there were non-combatants in that building and that the Apache attack was a stupid abuse of force, later releases footage with captions suggesting a version of the facts different from the Pentagon's, then such editorializing is not bias, it's an accurate portrayal of the facts. The problem is that when the mainstream media is so biased and people have grown accustomed to it, then a cold-blooded depiction of the facts may look as an attempt to manipulate people's opinions, as if telling the truth were propaganda.

Lastly, Assange is burning bridges wherever he goes, and he's probably not making that much money. He lives the life of an international man of mystery, which may sound cool until one thinks of the downsides. A person who willingly embraces such lifestyle can only have a strong desire to amass power / fame and deliver impact. Assange is no saint, but he's useful, and that's all that matters.

<comment><USER7> This probably isn't the place to argue out the difference (for the record the points you highlight are _not_ what I refer to as editorial - I mean stuff like calling it collateral murder etc. which is unnecessary) however...

 _Lastly, Assange is burning bridges wherever he goes, and he's probably not making that much money._

I'm calling bull on that. Or at least argument from the unprovable. Who knows what he makes or how he lives. I doubt he is a millionaire from all this but he flies around the world a lot.

 _He lives the life of an international man of mystery_

Everything we know and read (mostly from the main himself) paints a picture of a guy living in this in his head. The reality is probably quite different :)

Im not calling Assange bad or anything; but I think he has too strong beliefs to head up such an important movement. He's a good poster boy - but I actually feel his attitude can harm the movement - because the mainstream media have a tough time taking him seriously.

<comment><USER8> _"...because the mainstream media have a tough time taking him seriously."_

Honestly, I can't think of anyone with less moral authority than the (bulk of the) mainstream media. If WikiLeaks could simply bypass the MSM, we'd all be better off.

I don't know if Assange helps the movement more than he hinders it, but at least he has done more for the cause of monitoring centers of power than the MSM in the last 40 years, since Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. If he's using the donations to live the good life, I really don't care. Donations are voluntary, unlike the taxes that fund the Iraq War.

<comment><USER7> _Honestly, I can't think of anyone with less moral authority than the (bulk of the) mainstream media._

Sadly that is how you contact most people. Besides - one of the main issues with modern media is bias and vitriol, shouldn't Wikileaks rise above that?

 _If he's using the donations to live the good life, I really don't care. Donations are voluntary, unlike the taxes that fund the Iraq War._

And that, I think, says it all. My principles are not so easily bent (I'm not convinced he is misappropriating funds btw). I gave them a donation to fund the support of whistleblowers - not to fund a lavish lifestyle. If he _is_ doing that then I am very pissed off :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Guys, wikileaks is basically fighting for survival against the US government, among others. Can we really suggest they "just" use this or that, or complain that they're not handling thing so well ? They are basically trying to exist in a space that's almost impossible for most _countries_ to exist in.

We're not talking about your average (or even uniquely scalable) startup here.

Seriously, do you have any doubt that anyone involved in this could end up secretly detained for years ? Assange is taking _huge_ personal risks here, so yeah, it is about him, to a very large extent.

<comment><USER10> I upvoted you, but shouldn't this be a reply comment rather than a comment on its own.

<comment><USER10> I meant a reply to one of the comments above. It felt so when I read it much earlier, but never mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article's been discredited by Wikileaks on twitter:

<http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17646287388>

Found on reddit by the way =P

<comment><USER12> Actually, check the time stamps. Wikileaks disputed the first 8, but not this one. No word from Wikileaks on this so far.

<comment><USER13> There it is: "WikiLeaks will NOT be abandoned. Don't listen to disinfo being spread! We'll issue clarifications soon. Should've done earlier." <http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And this comes about 2 months after it's declared a national security threat by the Pentagon.

How strange.

</comment><comment><USER7> IIRC Cryptome has "history" with Wikileaks (I believe they were pretty fed up of WL's profile of _The_ Whistleblower site despite being the new kid on the block compared to Cryptome).

Bear this in mind when reading.

With that said; I much prefer Cryptome to WL - they do consistently publish stuff! Usually without to much editorializing.

And even if this is all just made up (a possibility) it does highlight some of the concerns over WL. Assange is becoming a concerning character, where _is_ the money going, the website does seem to be stagnating etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't know what exactly is going on there, whether it's a bankruptcy or something else, but whatever it is is not being particularly well handled. Shambles, really.

<comment><USER16> Shambles? At this point the site is up, and it seems like they're working on building a solid base in Iceland, starting with pretty good political and legal support.

All things considered, as long as one year from now they're still in business I'd say it's an impressive achievement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to participate in an open, transparent, and fair equivalent to wikileaks. Currently, cryptome actually does a 99% job of this.

Tools, vs. Services, and definitely in preference to individual personalities as gatekeepers!

</comment><comment><USER18> WikiLeaks will not be abandoned: <http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888>

</comment><comment><USER19> Cryptome seems to dislike Wikileaks for some reason, at least that's the impression I got. Never tried to dig into it though.

<comment><USER20> I think the word is "rivalry".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anybody care to share some context for this article? It doesn't give any background into what wikileaks is and why it is being abandoned. It reads like somebody's personal email.

I'm sure there's an interesting story behind this, but the article doesn't attempt to provide it.

<comment><USER22> What Wikileaks is? How have you managed to avoid hearing about it, and its struggles so long?

Here's a place to start: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks>

<comment><USER21> Funny, I'm actually amazed that so many people keep up on this sort of thing. I wouldn't know where to begin.

I've been on the road the last several years, so unless it concerns rock climbing or surfing, or is something that you'd talk about with fellow travelers, it usually doesn't make it onto my radar.

Evidently there was some sort of economic downturn recently. Missed that too :).

HN is the only exception, since it keeps me up on the tech side of things.

<comment><USER22> If that's the case, you may want to try Googling the references you don't catch, before asking the folks here to explain further.

<comment><USER21> Why would it make a difference why I hadn't heard of this company?

Googling the site didn't help, nor did visiting the site itself, so I asked here. Seems like a reasonable thing to do.

In general, I think that a story on the front page of HN should stand on its own, without the need to go off and do any research to figure out what it's about. This story doesn't even attempt to give any background about its subject matter, so it fails that test.

<comment><USER7> Usually I would agree; however Wikileaks has been massive news and regularly features on here (they are not a Company - it is a Whistleblower site) so it is reasonable to assume the majority of people will know what it is about. Anyone who reads HN regularly in the last 6 months should have read about Wikileaks before.

(in the same way you would expect everyone here to understand what Reddit is)

I don't know why you got slated for asking though; seems reasonable.

<comment><USER23> Googling wikileaks here anyway nets the Wikipedia page as the third link:

> Wikileaks is an amorphous, international organization, originally based in > Sweden,[1] that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive > documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the > anonymity of their sources.

I normally hate the passive-aggressive JFGI response but in this case I can feel the pain. It's pure noise that a simple google search could have avoided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, crazy stuff. I hope there will be a new, and possibly better website to replace it.</comment>


Breaking the NES (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://yachtclubgames.com/2014/07/breaking-the-nes/ <comment><USER2> In a similar vein, this video covers ROM City Rampage, which is the NES prototype of Retro City Rampage:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, the platform limitations are one thing, another set of limitations were set by the development environment that was also limited.</comment>


How to bootstrap your company to profitability - <AUTHOR> http://spencerfry.com/how-to-bootstrap

<comment><USER2> Love this article. If you're going to start a company because you're confident in your technical ability, you can start a consultancy easily; tens of thousands of devs freelance, running single-person consultancies instead of taking W2 from a single company. A small consulting company is a better starting point for a new business than a full-time job.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree with you. I originally started (a little reluctantly) consulting 12 years ago because we moved from a large city to the mountains so telecommuting-based consulting was a necessity, but now, I would not want to give up my independence. Also, as a consultant you can never lose your job if the economy gets a lot worse (although business can be lean). I have two business ideas I want to pursue, one at a time (one dealing with statistical NLP, and the other taking my old cookingspace app and revamping it more for mobile use for shopping and use in the kitchen).

I think that consulting is a great way to get varied experience, enjoy working with lots of different people, and have flexibility for working on side projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author mentions 10+ years experience at running startups but according to the blurb he's 26.

It also looks like he was doing consulting work to pay the bills between his 3rd startup and Carbonmade... for a full 18 months. That doesn't make much sense to me. How can you first sell 3 profitable companies and then go back to consulting for 18 months while trying to bootstrap a new company?

I can only guess to the explanation...

I also question some of his advice. "Your first dollar validates your product, your business model, and everything else" contradicts my experience. So I'm a little skeptical.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually been doing Internet businesses starting at age 11. But my first real business was at age 16 when I started an ISP, web hosting, and shell service company over the summer. We did very well and made a nice tidy profit on that. But I began by starting and selling small websites (forums, game review sites, etc.).

I then started my second real business at 18 where we sold game server hosting, web hosting, and ventrilo services. This company lasted about a year until I took the web hosting clients, built the web hosting services up, and then sold that to a much larger NYC based web hosting company to pursue what would be lead to my third business. Note the progression in size.

My third business was a voice over IP company for computer game players called TypeFrag. I started that in 2002 during my sophomore year of college, and ran it for five years and five full-time employees all while in college until getting a buyout offer of my 50% share that I couldn't refuse during 2007 when I was 22 years old. During that time, I also launched a software company called GameComm under the TypeFrag brand. That company won first place and $75k during a business plan competition and we hired two full-time guys to build out the software for us. That's company number four.

After selling TypeFrag and GameComm, I started in on Carbonmade when I was 22 and have been working on that since. Carbonmade is company number five -- I say company when it's a registered LLC and cash positive and profitable -- and continue to work on that to this day.

So, technically, I actually have 15 years experience working on the Web, but tend to shorten that to 10, because my first "real" company (not just a small money making forum/review site, etc.) came when I was 16... 10 years ago.

You can see my bio here: <http://www.crunchbase.com/person/spencer-fry>

<comment><USER5> How did you and do you decide which services to provide? How do you gauge demand as you're thinking of possible products?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> looks to me that Spencer Fry would be a good candidate for Mixergy

<comment><USER7> I'll email him now.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...and replied. I love the Internet. ;)

<comment><USER8> Just checked out Carbonmade, the designer in me is in awe.

Excellent presentation of some beautiful content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> well written with good tips, and inspiring

</comment><comment><USER10> Great article.

To which I'd add:

The only real downside of bootstrapping while consulting is that consulting is a soulsuck, and it's so much more fun to work on your own thing. Or, consulting is so much of a soulsuck, that it depletes your energy to even work on your own thing.

You just have to monitor your energy & passion levels carefully to ensure you make choices that help you keep both balls rolling.

We're doing the same - and I just quit consulting a couple mos ago. It's fabulous to look at my fledgling product, designed just how I wanted to, and know it will start grossing $10,000/mo in just a few more short weeks.

<comment><USER2> If you're only good when the work isn't a "soul suck", your odds on getting a company going aren't great. The fun stuff is a small fraction of the job. Even when you optimize for "fun stuff". This may be part of the reason Graham keeps saying that the determinant for successful startup people is "tenacity".

<comment><USER11> tenacity is key, but personally, I don't think 'soul suck' relates at all to 'hard work' except in the sense that soul sucking work is hard. 'Soul suck' is almost always a sign that work is being done that doesn't need to be done, or that work is being done in an inefficient manner.

In my space, the major 'soul suck' for most people is phone support and sales. I simply don't provide those services (and I've lowered my prices to compensate)

The thing is, when it's your company, you never have to do something you think is stupid. (yeah, you still do some stupid things, or, at least, I do, but when I notice it's stupid, I stop.) It's completely different from working for some PHB because when a customer gets unreasonable, it's simple enough to simply refer him or her to your nearest competitor.

Sure, you still have to do things that are /hard/ but there is always a clear reason why you are doing the thing, and if you don't think that reason is good enough? you don't have to do the work.

<comment><USER12> _In my space, the major 'soul suck' for most people is phone support and sales._

I've often wondered if it would be possible to offer people a chance to outsource phone support in the small business or startup space?

<comment><USER11> It would certainly be possible; people do it even. (I don't know of anyone targeting small companies specifically, but there's no reason why it would need to be difficult to setup.) But, it's something that is so difficult to do right that I personally am probably better off not doing it at all. /bad/ phone support, at least for my target market, is worse than none at all. (this is quite different if you target more business oriented and/or less technically oriented people.)

That's the thing about phone tech support; it's cheap and easy to do badly, and really difficult and expensive to do well. You need to look at who your customers are and decide if bad phone support is better than no phone support at all, unless you have more volume than I have and a higher margin than I have.

<comment><USER12> Just a first-order filter to answer FAQ items might be worthwhile, with messages taken for callback.

<comment><USER11> a phone faq? Really? when I hit those as a customer I assume that the company in question thinks that 1. I am illiterate and 2. my time has no value.

I mean, sure, I'm a nerd and hate talking to people over the phone. But talking to a machine over the phone is even worse.

The advantage of phone support is it's immediacy. if you get rid of that, you might as well eliminate the phone altogether.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>