Sources: Groupon rejects Google's offer; will stay independent - <AUTHOR> http://chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/12/sources-groupon-rejects-googles-offer-will-stay-independent.html <comment><USER3> No doubt, Groupon prints cash. However, as far as I can tell (and I have actually done significant research and thinking about this type of business) they are far more lucky than anything else.

Not to say they didn't execute well, clearly they did, but there have literally been hundreds of companies both before (restaurant.com, 1999, val- pak, Entertainment Book) and after (Facebook, Google, Yelp, FourSquare, AOL, LivingSocial, DailyCandy, Zip2Save, + thousands you've never heard of) doing nearly or exactly the same thing.

IMO Groupon was indeed crazy to pass on this deal. I agree with others saying that there is a high risk that they will be worth far less in a few years.

Why?

Their model is not strategically defensible, and there are very few barriers to entry. Look around, anyone with a mailing list or customer base is entering the deals space.

Besides that, in the end, Groupon makes money by giving away other people's money. It's great work if you can get it, but this type of business gets very hard to scale past a certain point. While it's great for certain kinds of businesses, it also incites a race to the bottom. I think that over the next few years businesses will get wise to the model and revert to more sustainable discount levels for the majority of situations.

In the meantime Groupon will continue to print cash but in the long run there will not be one winner in this category, it will end up very fragmented and very competitive (read: high costs and low profit margins).

<comment><USER4> You've summed up precisely what I haven't been able to put into words about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> idiots...2 years from now, when all the businesses know what a bad value proposition Groupon is, they'll look back and kick themselves for not taking the offer

<comment><USER6> Your analysis is wrong; here's why. The founders, employees, and other insiders of Groupon have already been handsomely paid off. For them, Groupon represents a free option. If it sells for $6 billion, great! But what if in 12 months it could be worth $10 billion? That's _$4 billion_ more! And, compared to a site like YouTube, Groupon looks like a much more stable deal. They're already immensely profitable (something YouTube never was, and still isn't). The $5.3 billion offer, as a multiple of revenue and profit, was a surprisingly _cheap_ offer for Groupon!

Maybe Groupon will look back in 2 years with regret. Or maybe they'll have an offer of several billion dollars _more_. For the people in the position to make the decision, the risk is worth it.

Do you know somewhere else with as good a chance as Groupon of making several _billion_ more dollars in a year?

<comment><USER7> TechCrunch reported they'll do 50m in profit this year, so it's not exactly _cheap_. If they were to stop growing it'd take 100 years for Google to get their investment back in cash.

The question is when they'll stop growing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Groupon could have taken a lesson from my grandma:

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

$6BB today invested in AAA bonds for ten years will be more than their corporate valuation after their deal hawk coupon site's novelty wears off. Eventually Facebook, Twitter or Google will create better 'hyperlocal' business models and monetize the long tail of local search with their massive reach.

Good luck bros.

<comment><USER9> "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

And said bush is surrounded by a ring of fire. And explosives. And zero humidity.

Regardless, we don't have all of the data - hard to tell from outside

<comment><USER6> True, we don't have all the data, but we do know that those two bush birds are already producing millions of dollars in profit a _week_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was smart. Let's be clear: Google needed Groupon's local advertising smarts more than Groupon needed anything from Google. It's not like free AdWords would change the limiting factor on the Groupon model - the limiting factor on the Groupon model is the speed with which Groupon can add cities and salespeople: two things where Google can't help one iota. And, to date, Groupon has shown an ability to expand faster into new cities/countries than LivingSocial and all the also-rans.

I also don't think group buying is going away in, say, 20 years. It's such a ridiculously perceived risk free way (no cash upfront? _fuck yeah_ ) for local businesses - really, any businesses - to get additional visits/customers that it'll be a part of the marketing mix forever.

<comment><USER11> > Google needed Groupon's local advertising smarts more than Groupon needed > anything from Google.

Except cash.

This was by far the best possible hope of returning money to the investors and shareholders. Their fiduciary duty is to return money to investors. They failed.

It was an absurd home-run valuation that any venture firm would be happy with. And they are all but begging Google to compete head-to-head. Remember that Google knows everything about you already (Gmail, Google Checkout, Google Maps...); it would be easy for Google to target a buying service not only to your city, but also to your exact buying habits.

<comment><USER12> "Except cash."

Like Twitter & Facebook, they have access to all the money they could ever want. Plus, Groupon's revenues are through the roof right now, right on par with Facebook's.

<comment><USER11> "Cash" to return to investors, not to take from new investors. Taking new investors (especially at such a crazy valuation) just raises the expectations even further and makes Groupon have to take ever bigger risks.

I mean, seriously, a $6 billion valuation (if real) is $20 in _profit_ from every man, woman, and child in the United States. Not revenue, not EBITDA, but true profit returned to investors in 2010 dollars. That is a through-the-moon valuation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see a similar sentiment in this comment section that I saw around the time Facebook rejected the 2 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo.

The fact is, this company has executed well enough to reach a large revenue number very quickly. It's easy to say if you don't work there that they should have sold, but putting myself in this company's shoes, I think their growth potential is actually much higher not being a Google subsidiary.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but where's their moat? Contrast to FB -- the value of the network increases as more people are in it. How does groupon build a moat? Just because more people groupon, does it make competitors less valuable? Is it a barrier to have emails from livingsocial _and_ groupon arriving in your inbox every day? Groupon is almost the complement of fb -- fb had huge lockin, but no obvious monetization method. Groupon has obvious monetization, but no lockin that I can see.

I also question in the long run how many businesses have large enough customer LTVs that selling stuff below cost is worth it to hook customers. Hearing from eg hair salons that groupon people aren't customers but are bargain hunters isn't promising.

My prediction -- in 3 years, groupon will regret this if they haven't found a different sucker. Maybe comcast?

I'd be happy to be wrong -- it's always awesome when people succeed.

<comment><USER15> Groupon has a great network effect. They have 25MM users and tens of thousands of local businesses. It's not as good of a moat as FB but still damn nice.

Also, I'd argue that FB has a very obvious monetization: advertising. They supposedly generate $1B+ in ad rev.

<comment><USER16> 25 million members of a mailing list is not a $6 billion defensible advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For a company with no unique technology or equipment to turn down an offer that ranks them as a mid-cap company is mind boggling to me.

Delta Air Lines has a market capitalization of 10B! And they have 725 freaking jets!

Dr. Pepper has a market cap of 8B! And they have the pepper song!

CarMax has a market cap of 7B! And they have fleets of cars!

<comment><USER17> And almost more than the GDP of the The Bahamas (7B)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Groupon just earned themselves massive exposure. The media coverage of these negotiations elevated their profile beyond their existing user-base and solidified their reputation as the preeminent group-buying site.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really hope they understand that a large in use medium such as google itself or facebook will simply clone functionality of groupon and tweak it for it's user base ultimately killing groupon. Groupon has no 'stick' some person in rural anywhere won't have a clue what groupon is or will use it but will know what and might use google or facebook, and that's what counts - <USER2> recognizability with everyday use.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this a bad move by Groupon. I don't think they have the critical mass yet to win over potential competition from Facebook or Google plus its AdSense network. I see their margins getting smaller. If the numbers that were quoted by the press were correct, it seemed like they had a good offer on the table.

<comment><USER12> A $5 billion buyout for a company with $2 billion revenues is not a good offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw this $2 billion number in one report, but nothing close to it in the others. I hope this one report doesn't count gross merchandise sales as revenue. Anyway, EBITDA would be much more relevant and I didn't see anyone claim that it's close to $2 bil.

<comment><USER20> Supposedly they are at $0.5B/quarter, so the $2B is an annual rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Whether or not this pans out, I'm happy to see someone hold out on an acquisition. _someone_ has to resist the temptation of an acquisition to be the next huge thing, and this means groupon has a chance at being the next 100 billion dollar company. Plus, there in the midwest!

</comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone make the case for why this was a smart idea? The only argument I can think of is that the founders would rather continue the fun of growing their own business rather than having to hand it over to Google right at the peak of its hype.

<comment><USER23> The founders are already going to be super-rich. This isn't Twitter, Groupon is already profitable and raking in the dough.

That gives them the freedom to ride this thing out and see where it goes. Truckloads of money are great, but this is a chance to build a legendary business.

<comment><USER24> "The founders are already going to be super-rich. This isn't Twitter, Groupon is already profitable and raking in the dough."

Is there any chance that the founders of Twitter _aren't_ going to be super- rich? Even if in 2 years Twitter is completely gone, I'm guessing that the founders are already incredibly wealthy.

<comment><USER25> Groupon is profitable in just two years of operation. Twitter is still figuring things out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure if this is the decision I would have made if I were on Groupon's board, but as an outsider I am delighted to see this, because now we get the chance to see if Groupon transcends being a mere coupon site and succeeds at fundamentally changing the nature of commerce. How they grow into new areas and defend their (from the outside, apparently) vulnerable turf will be fascinating, and as an entrepreneur there will be a lot more to learn from the Groupon story watching them be independent than seeing them become part of Google.

</comment><comment><USER27> Honest question: How many companies have had multi-billion dollar acquisition offers from large public companies and then NOT gone on to have valuations much higher than the offer? Obviously the ones off the top of my head-- Google, Facebook, whatever-- could be entirely survivorship bias.

Even so, my instinct when reading this article is that Google was stupid not to double their offer, assuming they were going to be competent enough not to ruin Groupon once they bought it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I feel Groupon has had great success so far due to the economy.

Businesses are looking to make any kind of money while consumers are looking to save as much as possible. Groupon offers this to both users.

I spoke to a family friend that owns a restaurant and ran a Groupon offer, they are less than pleased with how it turned out. Never have they seen so many "customers" come in and not leave tips for their waiter/waitress and none are repeat customers.

</comment><comment><USER29> all you people calling them idiots, did it not cross your mind that they may just enjoy running the business as it is and don't care for the massive payout?

as long as they are making good margins they can do whatever they want.

<comment><USER30> The people I feel sorry for are not the founders, who are going to be rich whatever happens, but the early employees who _might_ have wound up rich immediately with a Google buyout, but now have to face ongoing uncertainty.

<comment><USER31> I don't feel sorry them at all. Not one little bit - it's a job, you work, you get paid, life is good.

Who I feel sorry for is people who are not employed and are trying their best to keep their heads above water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> another plus for rejecting the goog: if groupon continues on and goes public / stays independent but super-profitable, then there is _one more company_ that can serve as acquirer to all the great stuff produced from this community and others, especially ecommerce type startups. more fat wallets as acquirers = goodness all around for hacker news and friends. just sayin.

</comment><comment><USER33> Something to bear in mind: these Groupon guys are some pretty business savvy dudes. They've started several very successful companies in the past and likely have a very good idea of where they're going with this. I wouldn't dismiss their rejection so hastily.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lucky escape for Google if true. This is not the long term shopping model you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER35> You know what's cooler than six billion dollars? Nothing, you idiots, take the money.[1]

[1] <http://twitter.com/#!/DavidKaneda/status/10857535430983680>

</comment><comment><USER36> Balls of brass.

<comment><USER37> brains of ass

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just read this to understand why.

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation- bend...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation-bends-over)

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't get why Google doesn't simply clone Groupon. The barrier to entry seems very low and I can't imagine how they couldn't replicate their business for 5B$.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone else think this dance was just to get a baseline valuation from a serious buyer before they IPO'ed?

It seems like there is too much resolve in this decision to pass.

</comment><comment><USER40> The photo on that article is surreal.

Looks like a smug teenager in a t-shirt surrounded by old men in suits, grinning (at how much money he's making them?)

</comment><comment><USER41> Groupon has just missed their bebo moment.

</comment><comment><USER42> You're making a mistake Groupon!

</comment><comment><USER43> Rule of thumb I have: never never never never never _ever_ turn down a $6 billion buyout offer. (If I don't already have FU money in the bank.)

So much about software buyout valuations is based, directly or indirectly, on speculation and fads that you're taking a huge gamble to turn one down.

</comment><comment><USER44> Another damn student of the Jerry Yang school of acquisitions. #fail

</comment><comment><USER45> That CEO guy looks as douche-y as the Facebook guy.</comment>


Google code now supports Git - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=2454

<comment><USER2> Interestingly, the submission by pixelbeat around the same time already has 78 points and 15 comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2768036></comment>


Show HN: Daily digest of close friends updates from FB/Twitter/Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://followbot.me/

<comment><USER2> For the curious: it does not detect who your close friends are, you have to select from a list of your contacts per-service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. This is our first iteration. We want to see if people actually care. We have a couple ideas on what to do to actually detect them.

<comment><USER3> Since we are on this particular topic, let's brainstorm some of the things we can do to get a list of close friends. I have a few from Facebook.

\- access the friends list api, particularly the close friends list from Facebook. Since Facebook didn't disclose how they come up with that list, it seems pretty accurate to me.

\- look through photos with people who are tagged together with you. These people must be the people you hang out quite often since you take photos together with them. It should works on Instagram too.

\- tags in status update. People who usually tag you/you tag should be people who are close to you. This should work on Facebook or Twitter.

Any better ideas than these?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tags in status updates and photos were the first couple we thought of. A couple more were comments and likes on your status updates, photos, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, we made this to solve one of our own problems. We would love to get your feedback.

<comment><USER4> Just signed up. I assume this is to help combat the "Filter Bubble" phenomenon that is common nowadays?

It definitely felt freeing to pare things down to about 40 people.</comment></comment>


9 things that give you hope about climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/2018/12/10/9-things-that-give-you-hope-about-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> Helsinki Solar Power plant in full speed replacing coal: [https://www.helen.fi/en/sun/homes/solar-power- plants/suvilah...](https://www.helen.fi/en/sun/homes/solar-power- plants/suvilahti-solar-power-plant/)

Yes it is covered with snow. And yes the production was 0.53kWh today. On best December days it produces 10kWh, Which is 0.0003% of its theoretical power.</comment>


Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can't Move Anything but His Face - <AUTHOR> https://unstoppable.me/life-lessons/ <comment><USER2> A question about the insurance in regards to the accident he had.

He says "Bill had crappy insurance, paying out a maximum of $20,000 for the accident". He says the total bill was $130,000, so is he implying that he himself had to come up with the other $110,000? If that's the case, then why did Bill have insurance at all? I mean, if Bill's insurance would pay $20,000 then Bill himself would have to come up with the $110,000 right? I guess I'm missing something here...

<comment><USER3> Bill's crappy insurance paid out a max of $20,000 - which seems to be the minimum legally required by law for some states. Bill had insurance so that he could drive to his job legally, without the risk of being arrested or losing his license due to lack of insurance.

Bill may or may not be liable to cover the rest of the bill - and even then, they might have to go through court. If bill is low income, which is likely true considering the fast food job and minimum liablity insurance - he might not have to pay it back very quickly. Even if they dock his pay at 25%, it'll take some time to recoup the money. By then, the hospital will have already put this into collections. Sometimes normal health insurance won't cover such things, but it is somewhat possible Medicaid would pay for it.

So, basically, Jon is screwed. The only real prize here is that if Jon's insurances covered any of his hospital bills, they are likely to take legal action themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Serious question, how did he break 50 bones when he's confined to a wheelchair?

<comment><USER2> I guess he didn't break them all at once, just totalling 50 breaks over many years, maybe even the same bone many times.

<comment><USER4> That just makes me more confused

How do you have accidents that often if you're in a wheelchair? Once or twice I can see, but 50 bones is a lot

<comment><USER3> Well, there was the car accident, and I'm guessing this accounts for much of it. Likely broken ribs with the infections - coughing can do that, especially if you can't move your body into a better position.

And then outside of this: It takes some practice to maneuver a wheelchair. You wind up hitting your foot and hands and things (or others can easily do this). I'm guessing there are times when things just go badly (wheel stuck in a rut) and he winds up on the ground, wheelchair over part of him. He probably has some bones that are more brittle than we'd expect because they don't regularly bear weight (legs).

And don't forget, this is over 34 years with what seems like high risk factors and some unfortunate accidents over the time - and sometimes multiple breakings at once due to the accidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How was he driving a minivan if he's paralyzed?</comment>


Show HN: I wrote a guidebook on everything I know about applying to Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://guidetoyc.com

<comment><USER2> I noticed a few mistakes. I only skimmed this, so there may be more, but these were the obvious ones:

1\. "Y Combinator invests 5k + 5k per founder in exchange for 6-10% equity."

Should be 11k + 3k per founder in exchange for 2-10% (but almost always 7%).

2\. "According to PG, every partner reads every app over a period of about 10 days."

The partners no longer read every application. Alumni reviewers do a first pass. Better to start from the fact that a partner reading applications will read 70-100 per day, and do the math based on that.

3\. "Oh god yes, we think of ourselves as just utterly terrible at picking these terms."

The "terms" must be some kind of transcription error. Teams?

4\. "They truly would love to have every single company they fund be a "winner" even if there weren't as many mega companies."

This is the exact opposite of what we think. We're looking for outliers. That's why we like to fund crazy ideas. There's nothing we like better than funding an idea that has a small chance of succeeding, but will be huge if it does.

Of course, once we accept a startup, we want it to succeed. But that is a separate question.

5\. "The unofficial YC slogan is "Make something people want.""

That's the official slogan. (The unofficial one is "Never a dull moment," referring to the fact that with so many startups there is always something extreme happening on any given day.)

6\. "My thoughts on the demo are actually that it doesn't play a major role in YC's decision."

The demo can matter a lot. It depends on the type of startup. If you're in a situation where you ought to have something to show for your work so far, it's bad not to. And no matter what your situation, it helps greatly if you have a great demo.

7\. "Make sure you try your hardest to get some recommendations."

Actually it would be better to expend that effort on your company or the application. Don't spend a lot of time spamming YC alumni trying to collect recommendations. They don't carry any weight with us unless they are very strong. We can tell the difference between a recommendation that's being made for our sake (because the alum thinks it would damaging for us to overlook the application), and one that's being made for the sake of the applicant (e.g. because the alum is benevolent and they begged him to recommend them).

8\. "PG has started to re-imagine YC as an institution."

It would be more accurate to say that I've started to talk openly about such things. The imagining started surprisingly early.

<comment><USER3> One point which I really was hoping to see covered in the OP article was timing.

Timing as to when to apply based on your startup's current roadmap.

We've been working on our startup for several months, will be ready to "pre- launch" beta right around the time we submit our application.

This leaves us in somewhat of a schism. A lot of discussions that I have briefly had with other entrepreneurs mention that they have either:

A) Just come up with an idea and are in the beginning development stage; or

B) Are already launched and are starting to pick up solid traction.

We are going to be in the middle of this, and will be starting to "pre-launch" at the beginning of next month with a solid MVP. So we would actually have quite a lot to show you in this application.

And then secondly, when it comes to the application, what do you prefer, direct links with logins to a live demo, or a 2-3 minute demo video of our startup discussing how we will plan to penetrate the market with our application.

<comment><USER4> I have a related question, though at a more micro scale: how early should we _submit_ our application for the summer 2012 class?

The application page says that "Groups that submit early have a significant advantage because we have more time to read their applications." It also says we can edit and resubmit as often as we like. Based on this, we'd be inclined to submit as soon as we've completed all parts of the application to our own minimum standard of satisfaction, then update as needed.

However, I've seen pg say in another HN thread that YC does not reread applications when they are resubmitted, "so submit when you're ready for us to read it the only time we'll read it."

I perceive the trade-off to be that the earlier we submit, the more time YC partners have to read our application and engage with us, but the less time we have to improve the application itself before submitting (better demo, more up-to-date answers, etc). Do pg and the alumni have any advice on this question?

I realize the answer may end up being "you will need to evaluate that tradeoff and decide for yourself."

<comment><USER2> You will need to evaluate that tradeoff and decide for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've loaded the page a few times via Coral Cache, so you may be able to read it here, if wordpress is still misbehaving.

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/0-readme/>

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/1-introduction/>

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/2-why-apply/>

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/3-basic-advice/>

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/4-team/>

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/5-idea/>

[http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/6-users- distribu...](http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/6-users- distribution/)

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/7-writing-tips/>

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/8-video-demo/>

[http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the- guide/9-recommendation...](http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the- guide/9-recommendations/)

<http://www.guidetoyc.com.nyud.net/the-guide/10-final-advice/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! This is really helpful. I have WP Super Cache installed but realized it wasn't turned on. Just did that so hopefully this helps!

<comment><USER6> Cloudflare is good for these moments as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Your idea is not original"

And if it is? I think I'm the only one building a weather network with cell phone sensors :).

<comment><USER8> There's at least three companies doing that in London alone (one's a weather agency the other two are startups)

<comment><USER7> Would you care to provide more information? I'd love to know more, but I don't see anyone else doing this. Maybe I'm searching poorly? I'm collecting barometer readings, and I'm been search for others doing the same thing for about 12-15 months now without luck. Any help would be appreciated.

<comment><USER8> I'll see if I can track them down, one of the startups I just met at some random event, but the other I saw pitching at a pitching event (flagon's den) so I can probably find them again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm starting to wonder if being a VC-backed company in the post YCombinator era puts you at a serious disadvantage by not being in the yc network...

<comment><USER10> Isn't that the Evil Plan! Muahahaha.

Seriously, PG and crew have done an amazing job at positioning themselves to effectively own 6%+ of every tech win that will come along.

Although, I had posed the question previously about YC cloning itself to provide a focus on a vertical (i.e. Health) but PG replied that they were going to stay broadly focused.

Then Rockhealth created a healthcare focused YC clone. I think that is one opportunity YC missed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7axBGiA...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7axBGiApdlYJ:www.guidetoyc.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man, is it crashing already?

<comment><USER5> It looks like you are using wordpress, and doing DB hits on every pageload. The easiest thing you might do to get things working again would be to install a caching engine, which will serve static files.

[http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web- tutorials/wordpress-c...](http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web- tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "next" links from <http://www.guidetoyc.com/the-guide/5-idea/> points to <http://www.guidetoyc.com/the-guide/6-customersdistribution/>, which doesn't exist. It should be <http://www.guidetoyc.com/the-guide/6-users-distribution/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Am I reading this wrong or is the math on page 3 off by an order of magnitude?

If this is true: "every partner reads every app over a period of about 10 days" and there are "2000+ applications", then each parter would be reading 200 applications per day, not 20. That means you have 2 minutes to catch their attention, not 20 minutes. This only further supports the message of that page - impress fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great catch! When the traffic dies down a little, I will be updating the text accordingly:

According to PG, every partner reads every app over a period of about 10 days. Assuming an 8 hour day with 5 minute breaks each hour means each app gets about 2 minutes of each partners time on average. (440mins per day / 200 apps per day = 2.2 mins per app)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Deadline is in less than two weeks - if you are thinking about applying, I hope you find this valuable. YC was a phenomenal experience and I wrote this guide as a way to give back to the community.

<comment><USER4> The deadline is Mar 28, which by my calculation is a little over 3 weeks. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Your guide was good. Number 4 "Team" caught my attention the most. A solid team is vital to any endeavor. So it can't be stressed enough who you choose to work with, needs to be self-motivated.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great guide! Was a good refresher for me and I could probably add to it (which probably means I've done too much research).

Now back to hacking on our alpha.

</comment><comment><USER16> Get W3TotalCache installed, and serve a cached static page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have WP Super Cache installed but realized it wasn't turned on. Just did that so hopefully this helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 11 separate pages, with a landing page to get to the 11 separate pages? That seems a little excessive, especially considering the low content of each page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to make you click so much - I set it up in a chapter model partly to help me keep track of everything. I think next time, I would make a single page with quick links to various sections. Lesson learned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got to read some, but not all. Looking forward to read up on the rest when you get your hosting in check.

</comment><comment><USER19> "I'm nontechnical" - your cofounder was technical then?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have two cofounders: Kalvin Wang and Randy Pang, both CS majors with startup engineering experience.

<comment><USER19> Ah gotcha. "I'm nontechnical but happened to have two technical friends and roommates who both worked at startups." doesn't say that they joined you at the incubator. :)

And yes, lucky indeed. I'm going to be traveling this summer some in hopes of finding one or multiple technical cofounders. Already have the idea well- planned out. They'll work, just need to get the tech cofounders so investors will even take a look.

<comment><USER20> I looked at your blog and saw that you are in Kingston. There are techies here too, so you might not even have to travel much :)

<comment><USER19> Hmm.. lies! :P I've actually not really had any luck finding any. I must be looking in the wrong places. Want to grab a tea/coffee? :)

<comment><USER20> Sure, send me an email. Address in profile.

<comment><USER19> Cool. Sent. :) Let me know if you find it..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this guidebook would be a great test case for gumroad (new payment platform for content). In case you are looking for an easy way for people to pay for the PDF...

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for the guide Jason. Helpful!

</comment><comment><USER23> Did I just get trolled? "Error establishing a database connection"</comment>


Can Airware be the operating system to connect the world's drones? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/07/features/airware-drones/viewall

<comment><USER2> I don't think the operating system to connect the worlds drones is going to be closed source. 3DR and their open source base is going to give Airware a run for their money as the de facto standard "operating system for drones" in the consumer and more and more in the commercial space.

In the meantime people like Drone Deploy and Skycatch will fill the gap when it comes to data collection and processing which is where the real business is long term. Drones themselves will continue to become a commodity. Also, it's worth remembering that a Chinese company, DJI, has about 80Pct market share in the US for consumer and prosumer drones. Lots of competition for everyone.

<comment><USER3> 3DR's software doesn't compete in the commercial space. It's a hobbyist platform and it will be much harder to certify by the FAA or other agencies. That is a huge portion of being successful in the space. Especially when you're doing things that have more risk, like photographing electrical infrastructure in a densely populated region. The FAA is going to be the agency that determines if you can do that, and the companies that has that advantage will win the space.

<comment><USER4> There is no reason why it would be any more difficult to certify then Airware. The 3DR stuff is already more then capable todo the task and 3DR sells in the commercial space. Source: I've personally done multiple long range (many miles) autonomous missions and landed within 3ft of the target landing zone, I have hundreds of hours of flight time with many different platforms (Naze32, APM, Pixhawk, DJI).

<comment><USER5> Maybe a stupid question, but how exactly do you "personally" do "autonomous" missions? Isn't it a one-or-the-other sort of thing?

<comment><USER4> If drones could build themselves, program themselves charge themselves etc.. then maybe it would be one or the other. For the time being someone needs to do those things so while it might be autonomous as far as flying goes there is still much human interaction to be had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have more than 20 drones of different sizes, some of them are big.

I am never going to buy a drone that is not mine(closed source) when I could buy machines that are totally under my control.

Being closed source means the NSA could easily snoop what I do at every moment, in Europe, send the GPS coordinates, the telemetry, pictures and videos all the time without my consent.

US companies are becoming increasingly spies of the US gobertment all around the world, specially people that worked closely with Uncle Sam, like those guys from Airware.

I don't see Chinese or European companies buying into this, when they can tailor open source into their specific needs. We already do that, so it is not that complex thing to do.

I see this article as PR.

</comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like vaporware :)

<comment><USER8> It is just a pr piece.

<comment><USER9> It is definitely PR. Airware has invested a lot more into doing its own hardware, its own possibly certifiable low level code than doing exciting things (sense & avoid etc). Heck, no amount of money will let you write a single line of code on their OS for drones currently.

But is the PR going to work ? It seems easy enough to deter the "serious guys" doing some "serious commercial inspection" from using 3dr. The same way people use cisco equipment on their network because they're told that's what you do if you want peace of mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "That kind of stovepipe way of doing things isn't going to scale,"

It's amazing how many times this argument is made by proprietary systems people. In their world the web should have never happened.

The only chance they have is to use lots of VC money on certification bs that tries to lock out open source projects.

I smell PR as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good luck. There's so much diversity in the equipment, payloads and use cases for these systems that it's incredibly difficult to standardize. Cutting integration costs has been a dream for many years, but previous standards introduced more complexity than they eliminated.

<comment><USER12> Go back to the late 70s/early 80s and marvel at the incredible diversity in computers, most with unique operating systems.

Standardiztion will happen eventually.

<comment><USER11> It's a good point that we've seen this before. I'm under the impression that many early computer standards were essentially de facto standards caused by everyone trying to be compatible with a market leader. e.g. "Unix-like" or "IBM PC compatible". That's probably not the only way, though.

I guess the real question is "how are successful standards created?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> nah. It will be ardupilot (or another open source flight controller) on linux, and because it's on linux, you have access to all the other open source goodies you need for processing, analytics, connectivity etc.

It's already happening - check out [http://emlid.com](http://emlid.com) or [http://erlerobotics.com](http://erlerobotics.com) for boards you can use with Rpi2 or Beaglebone Black

<comment><USER14> These look nice for consumer applications, but Big Enterprise Companies typically aren't looking for something thrown together using a RPi, and some of them are going to use a LOT of drones. The hobbyist market doesn't really seem significant compared to the number that will be used by utility, mining, telecom, and other companies with sprawling physical networks of assets.

<comment><USER15> I'd still expect that we'll see something like a real time OS microkernel written in hardened C or Ada/Spark or kin with a standard suite of drivers to control sensors, motors, etc.

Most of those kind of things get written as open source projects, and then compiled in to specific bundles by middle men who get certified by insurance companies to reliably choose and compile such bundles.

Big companies (eg, Boeing) will naturally still just use the open source microkernel tied together with a few in house drivers, since they have the capacity to deal with software certification themselves.

Really, I wish hobbyist drones would start having more functional co- processors, because I want one where the flight computer and the user land computer... aren't the same core.

<comment><USER13> normal linux kernel runs fine for realtime tasks when compiled with prempt rt flag - [https://wiki.dronecode.org/_media/elc01.dronecode_and_ardupi...](https://wiki.dronecode.org/_media/elc01.dronecode_and_ardupilot_- _andrew_tridgell.pdf) and it's possible to do very intesive computation on the computer running the flight controller - Andrew does a demo where he flies while compiling the linux kernel on the same computer at the same time, no glitches :)

And if you want a co-computer, it's quite easy - use any board you like, for instance Nvidia Jetson which has tons of GPU cores for paraller processing, and just talk to the flight controller via mavlink over ethernet

<comment><USER15> > it's possible to do very intesive computation on the computer running the > flight controller - Andrew does a demo where he flies while compiling the > linux kernel on the same computer at the same time, no glitches

My point is that it's incredibly dangerous to build this as our default security model in drones, because while it's certainly the case that the flight controller has the raw processing power and if our security worked perfectly, it wouldn't be a problem we live in the real world and errors in userland execution shouldn't be able to break the control loop and send heavy toppling down on your head.

Just because you're probably smart enough to do your taxes while you drive doesn't mean it's not safer if you focused on the road.

> And if you want a co-computer, it's quite easy - use any board you like, for > instance Nvidia Jetson which has tons of GPU cores for paraller processing, > and just talk to the flight controller via mavlink over ethernet

Yes, I expect that the model we'll see for consumer drones is something like a Kepler embedded module running userland, with a second, standalone ARM core running the flight controller (with the flight controller exposed as a device in userland, but talked to as a server on the wire).

Probably with some kind of hardened RTOS on the flight controller, and Linux running userland OS.

This has the benefit that controlling the drone is no different than lots of other devices we control, we can work in our usual operating system, and we get to perform a sanity check between userland and flight control execution.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's faster - a supercomputer or EC2? - <AUTHOR> http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/whats-fastera-supercomputer-or-ec2.html <comment><USER2> What's faster, a sportscar or a truck ? It depends on what you are trying to move.

A load of bricks will be moved faster by truck, even though in an absolute sense the sportscar is faster...

If you are doing vector processing and have a hard-to-parallelize problem then a supercomputer is probably the only way to go.

Otherwise EC2 will possibly be faster (it still depends on lots of subtle factors, such as how compute intensive vs communications intensive your application is).

The only way to know for sure is to do a limited benchmark on the core of your problem in order to figure out which architecture works best.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of the joke about the highest bandwidth available being a truckload of drives barreling down the highway. While true, not necessarily useful.

<comment><USER4> Certainly useful when you don't care about latency.

<http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a reasonably informative article. But...

Does a 25 second process on a 32 node cluster _really_ count as a "supercomputer" task? By definition, you can run that on your desktop in 15 minutes. If that's really your task, and these are your numbers, and latency- to-answer is your only metric (as opposed to other stuff, like "cost" that people in the real world worry about) then sure: EC2 makes sense. But these look like some terribly cooked numbers to me. I mean, how much time are you really going to spend optimizing something you can run while you trot to Starbucks for coffee?

I'd be curious what the answers (including cost) are when you scale the problem to days of runtime on hundreds of nodes. I rather suspect the answers would be strongly tilted in favor of the institutional supercomputer facilities, who after all have made a "business" out of optimizing this process. EC2 has other goals.

<comment><USER6> The NAS parallel benchmark suite are used to represent tasks that appear often in scientific computing. They were designed so that running them on a computing platform would tell us how amenable that platform is for scientific computing.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but it's a benchmark of the hardware environment. This is more than anything else a test of resource allocation latency. The poster posits that EC2 can get the boxes working faster and get you your answers sooner.

But the result here is that the benchmark will complete with "high probability" within about 6.5 minutes on EC2 for a task that _only takes 15 minutes to run on your desktop CPU_. That model is _wildly_ overestimating the impact of latency on the computation cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"_

\- Seymour Cray (<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray>)

<comment><USER8> <rant>These Seymour Cray quotes have been obsoleted by changes in technology, and trotting them out yet again just displays ignorance of those changes.</rant>

There are no "strong oxen" in today's world; both supercomputers and EC2 are clusters using more or less the same processors.

<comment><USER7> > There are no "strong oxen" in today's world

Some problems _demand_ shared-memory architectures. The fact that those who work on such problems lack the funding to support a large market in shared- memory machines does not negate the problems' existence.

<comment><USER8> I assume that Cray was talking about a uniprocessor, not SMP. Besides, it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster against EC2's shared-nothing cluster.

<comment><USER7> > it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing > cluster...

I merely object to the modern redefinition of the word "supercomputer" to mean a warehouse full of cheap PCs.

There once were _actual_ supercomputers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I question the premise of this question and analysis! There is an enormous breadth of work done on clusters vs supercomputers already. It turns out that sufficiently parallelizable ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel> ) tasks can be accomplished much more efficiently on clusters. They've been en vogue in academia for years, I remember playing with the cluster at ND in 2002. Just wow.

</comment><comment><USER10> And... if you don't need lots of communication between nodes, I'd guess EC2 probably is the best way to go in terms of $/computation too.

<comment><USER11> Depends on utilisation. If you own a cluster and are able to keep it busy 24x7 then it pays off pretty quickly. Amazon have to have enough spare idle capacity to handle unexpected customer loads and make a profit - you are paying for this.

<comment><USER10> Good point. I wonder at what % utilization a cluster beats EC2 in terms of $/computation. Actually I'm sure there are all sorts of variables, and it becomes an optimization problem, but I think it would be cool to see an analysis of this in terms of $, computation power (time/jobsize or something), etc.

<comment><USER11> Custer scheduling is a huge area. I used to work on MPI clusters and it is an art to balance CPU, Bandwidth, propagation time to pick the optimum number of processors for a particular algorithm.

Especially on commodity ethernet based MPI, it doesn't do broadcast so shipping a Gb common dataset to 64nodes can take a lot longer than actualy doing the calculation.

<comment><USER10> Strange -- I always just sort of assumed that since they are making big clusters, they could spend the extra $$ for a good multicast switch, and that MPI did ip multicast. (a quick googling shows me to be wrong...).

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure a lot of people would donate for a statue in your likeness if you solved that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's better? Rock, paper or scissors? (I can't resist)</comment>


Start your open-source career - <AUTHOR> https://blog.algolia.com/start-your-open-source-career/ <comment><USER2> Why do people want to have an "open-source" career at all? Why are people asking, "what should I contribute to?"

I honestly don't understand this attitude at all, assuming the people who want to "do" open source are in earnest, and not because they want to pad their CV in order to get a job completely unrelated to free software. So, assuming you really do want to do free development, why do you need help being told where to start? The typical self-motivated reason to start is because you have found open and free software that doesn't do what you want it to do, so you go ahead, and by golly, you've had enough of these blighted bugs, and you're going to make the software work for yourself (or rarely, for someone close to you that you care about).

Shopping around for something to work on without having a personal problem to solve seems like putting the cart before the horse. I assume that's not why people want to do it. They must already have a personal problem. So, what is it, what's the motivation to have a "career" in "open-source"?

<comment><USER3> I think there are a few answers to this.

1) There are a lot of worthy projects to contribute to. Should you work on Firefox? Linux? LibreOffice? OpenSSL? I think it's as reasonable to ask "where should I volunteer?" as it is to ask, "to which charity should I donate money?"

2) Fame/clout. There are a number of Internet-famous developers who work in open source. When they blog, people listen to what they have to say. When they file a bug on an open-source project, people fix it. When they start a project, people download it, try it, and contribute patches.

This is totally unlike the experience for ordinary developers. When most people blog, nobody reads it. When most people file a bug, or even file a PR, it just gets ignored. When most people start a project on github, nobody notices it.

Clearly there is a path, however narrow, from here to there. How, people ask, can I walk that path?

3) When people really are talking about an "open source career," they often are asking, "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off.

4) In some cases, people are asking, "what are high-impact open-source projects where it's easy for newbies to get started?" Even once you've chosen a project, not all projects make it easy to submit your first patch.

<comment><USER4> > "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting > good projects that have the potential to pay off.

Or selecting a company. E.g. at our company (transloadit) >80% of work is on open source

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I must say Github has been amazing in enabling this, at least the first steps bit. Ever since they introduced editing in the browser, I have committed to maybe half a dozen open source projects. All of these were trivial one-liners with very little added value, but still, given that I could do all that without even having git on that given machine, is amazing. That + integrated CI tools whose results are integrated within relevant pull requests... it's at a point when almost anyone can fix documentation or typos in code.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, and open-source projects can also have "Edit this page" links on every pages that directly goes to the edit mode of the file, example: [https://community.algolia.com/react- instantsearch/guide/](https://community.algolia.com/react- instantsearch/guide/)

We got many first time contributions with that.

</comment></comment><comment> juicy-fruit Having a popular open source project is a pain in the ass. At some point the happiness from seeing people use your project turns to annoyance once you become the janitor and problem solver to people who won't take 1 minute to read the README. However, I honestly appreciate people who create open source software and answer all issues and questions.

GitHub should have a Q/A section on repos so that frequently asked questions can be answered there instead of having someone open the same issue every few months.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. I am on the watcher list of a project I use a lot and contribute to.

I don't know how the main maintainer can answer so many stupid questions in a polite way.

99% of the answers are either in the ample doc of the project or a google search away.

I am not even sure how to curb this.

<comment><USER7> Seems to me that this is an opportunity for someone who wants to contribute to a project but lacks the technical skills to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rust is among the most welcoming of communities to start out in. If you're interested in the language, definitely check here for easy ways to get involved.

[https://www.rustaceans.org/findwork/starters](https://www.rustaceans.org/findwork/starters)

<comment><USER9> It's worth noting that this newcomer friendliness is no accident: building and maintaining a welcoming FOSS community, and doing so at scale, can only be achieved with deliberate efforts.

The video [Rust's Community Automation]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=407nwX6__70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=407nwX6__70)) offers an excellent summary of the strategies used in the Rust community to handle the social dynamics so that both contributors and maintainers are able to engage positively and productively, and continue doing so over extended periods of time.

It's definitely something other projects should look at and replicate :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've recently made a contribution to a well-known project (DBeaver, a database management software). It started with a feature request and somehow I was able to implement it myself. It sure makes you nervous when it's the first time contributing, especially because your code/issue will be read by many other people. But, once your PR is merged, you will feel you've accomplished something great and want to contribute more.

</comment><comment><USER11> I started my own project free libre open-source project. It become quite popular in a year. I even found a guy who wanted to "invest" XXXk (I said no), and I won a grant of 25k from one non-profit accelerator (but never able to receive it). Also, I already had couple of job opportunities I rejected, and already spoke with some legendary folks from Open Source world about the future of the project. So it is definitely interesting and worth doing. The only downside is you need to invest some time into it. So it's better to do something what's really interesting for you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe a better title would be "start working open-source into your career".

The article is more geared toward those who think they don't fit into the open-source community.

Rest assured, anyone is welcome; that is generally what free software is about.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The article is more geared toward those who think they don't fit into the > open-source community.

Exactly what I wanted to outline in the article. Too often I thought that open-source people where inside the NBA of developers, that's not true at all. It's just people that have code visible by everyone. It's just code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I value the altruism of open source.

But I do not value people that piggyback on existing high profile projects for personal gain.

If someone tells me they contribute to a project, I would usually check what was actually contributed.

A couple of unit tests and docs are always helpful but do not give enough credit compare to the effort of building such projects.

<comment><USER9> > A couple of unit tests and docs are always helpful but do not give enough > credit compare to the effort of building such projects.

You might want to take a look at [https://github.com/kentcdodds/all- contributors](https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors) :)

<comment><USER13> If a contributor is responsible for significant part of the code coverage, funding or documentation, by all means kudos.

But someone that donated $5 or wrote 2 test cases and a couple of comments to me is a casual contributor not a core contributor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks, but i like getting paid. That's why they call it "career".

<comment><USER15> Yea but I also like getting paid more and adding a feature to something like React or Node would pretty much put you in the upper echelon of JS developers most companies will hire.

Also if you're switching to new frameworks and languages, doing open source will open up your career opportunities.

<comment><USER14> That's what people who want you to program their frameworks or produce some other code for free would _really_ want you to believe.

<comment><USER16> I think it is actually true. Just ask some of the people who created and maintain some popular / high profile libraries or frameworks. That leads to a lot of job offers and more demand for your services means you can charge more.

If you have companies reaching out to you with potential job offers frequently, you can use that when negotiating salary when applying for a new job or to negotiate a raise at your current job.

It's the same principle as the guy who interviewed at Google, Facebook, Airbnb & dozen other companies and then used several offers he got to negotiate and he ended up with ridiculously good package for software engineer.

<comment><USER14> a) that's survivorship bias - for every one who "worked" on those frameworks and got somewhere because of it, there are thousands who wasted their time. I would go as far as to say that those who worked on those frameworks and got hired would have been hired without that.

> If you have companies reaching out to you with potential job offers > frequently, you can use that when negotiating salary when applying for a new > job or to negotiate a raise at your current job

If you are one of those people who is a target of companies rather than recruiters outreach, then you do not care about frameworks. Hint: these are people who don't have interviews. They go for lunch. Or dinner.

> It's the same principle as the guy who interviewed at Google, Facebook, > Airbnb & dozen other companies and then used several offers he got to > negotiate and he ended up with ridiculously good package for software > engineer.

That's an imaginary guy.

<comment><USER17> You're right on track in this thread. My guess is Rob Pike was not answering data structure and algorithm questions on a white board when he got hired at Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Open source has a problem where a lot of people demand and request updates, fixes and all that without ever giving back. I am not talking about medium sized companies or even smaller ones, I am talking to a plethora of small one or two human teams that do consulting/freelance development and simply don't have the visibility in the world of open source that others like maybe you and me have. It feels a bit like the recycling problem, it's really easy to do yet only a percentage of the population does it correctly. In the uk, on the defra.gov.uk website, it states that only 16% of the picked up waste is recycling... Why ? How can wr change that?

<comment><USER19> >How can we change that?

When someone demands an update for your open source project, ask them what they can give back in exchange?

<comment><USER20> Even better: tell them what they give back in exchange. That is what patreon and the like is about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are some useful, active web based projects to contribute to?

<comment><USER22> It's a valid question, but you may want to start by contributing to OSS projects that you actually use. The story in the article is about the author and his cofounder contributing to a library they used heavily. You already have a vested interest in things you use. The next step would be to visit the git repo and see how you can help.

<comment><USER23> Why? This answer is most common one and always puzzled me. Just because I like to use something does not mean it is good project for me to contribute to. They tend to be very different categories.

Plus, the pool of people who have time to spare and want to do something is different then pool of people who have scratches all around the projects.

<comment><USER24> > Why? This answer is most common one and always puzzled me.

If you don't use it how do you know you're solving actual user problems?

I used to contribute to an OSS project and there were a lot of times where the devs and users had differing opinions on how a feature should work.

<comment><USER25> > If you don't use it how do you know you're solving actual user problems?

There are many (many) ways to contribute to a project that doesn't require you to be solving actual user problems.

I'd suggest just finding new projects, review code, create pull requests for those small mistakes you see. Provide feedback if applicable. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Different terms convey different ideas. Writers pick "open source" to signal that they find user freedom unimportant, and "free software" or "libre software" to signal that they find user freedom important. While the author's intentions are probably good, it's interesting that neither user freedom nor licenses are mentioned in this type of article.

In the unlikely case anyone wonders what I mean: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)</comment>


$150 Later Using MyLikes.com Social Ad Platform. - <AUTHOR> http://tinycomb.com/2011/03/08/150-later-using-mylikes-com-social-ad-platform-fail/

<comment><USER2> WhiteyBoard is a physical product. Get it on the shelves of Walmart, then use social media to build brand awareness. Otherwise, stick to intent based advertising like search ads.

<comment><USER3> This is particularly true for non-geographically targeted traffic. I'm the ideal customer for this product, but given that I live in Canada, any cent spent to reach me is wasted. I won't pay $40 in shipping for an $18 product or even a $35 one.

<comment><USER4> This is Arvind - one of the co-founders of MyLikes. We do offer location targeting (all the way upto a metro level). In this case, his campaign was paying only for US clicks - (our system guides and publishers self-select since they are only paid for clicks from the location that the advertiser is interested in).

<comment><USER3> That's a great feature, Arvind. I'll keep MyLikes in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No offense, but if you're reaching out to that many people and getting zero engagement it's probably just not an interesting campaign. Young people (twitter user demographics) are awesome at filtering out ads, they don't process things unless they're unique/funny/interesting. I'm not a marketer (in fact, I'm pretty terrible at such things; so take my critical view with a grain of salt), but the reason people remember old spice isn't for the deodorant.

Perhaps try a new direction with your messaging, before you give up on the medium/channel. I'd love to see more A/B testing here to know what really works.

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried creating an Old Spice type commercial. <http://www.youtube.com/user/whiteyboard#p/a/u/0/JUi2bLcryfc>

<comment><USER6> Personally, I wouldn't buy your product based on your ad because it looks like your product is a flimsy plastic sheet someone can make by unwrapping a plastic bag.

I remember reading about this on Reddit, how were sales there? Also, have you considered targetting your product to people like college students, or designers, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not like a flimsy plastic sheet. I know the kind of product you're talking about, WhiteyBoard is not that. We just did a bad job of showing the product off in the video (correction; our director and set designers did a poor job)

We've thought about advertising to college students. We did a couple of free promotions at UCLA where we handed out our sticky notes for free, but those are tough sales to track. Students are also a tough demo to reach with marketing. Probably one of the main reasons 99% of our sales still just come from word of mouth. We have a good product and it's cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am the CEO of MyLikes. Just wanted to chime in and say that the system typically takes 24 - 48 hrs to match your campaign to relevant publishers / disapprove irrelevant ones etc. Please check your campaign again. Only $50 of your campaign is currently spent. My sense is you will also get a lot more tweets from relevant publishers in the next 24 hrs.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're paying that much for non-targeted advertising, you might as well just get junk traffic (it's cheaper).

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're comparing $0 revenue, then yes, junk traffic would work the same. We've proved with other avenues, however, that non-targeted advertising works for our brand in some cases.

<comment><USER4> Jason, how are you measuring conversions on your end? I didn't see any tracking codes in your campaign urls. We do have a advertisers who measure conversions as well as a lot of them who are just interested in building brand awareness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You're paying for people to astro-turf your app to people that are interested in what that person has to say, not necessarily looking for whatever your site does.

</comment><comment><USER10> what ad service did you use for the reality star ?

for those talking about the campaign or the non targeting, I think the example he mentions about using another service is relevant.

I'm not familiar with MyLikes, but are the influencers that are used for advertising, are they able to be chosen by the companies, like ad.ly ? How transparent is the process of what influencers are running the ads ?

<comment><AUTHOR> The reality star was just a friend of my co-founder.

<comment><USER10> I'd be more interested in who are the people MyLikes chose to advertise your campaign based on the categories you chose. From the categories you chose.. Moms, Youth/teens, Finance,Education, Art, Small business. This seems like its the right target for your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, we certainly picked the correct target demos based on all the research we have on who has purchased products in the past. MyLike lets people categorize themselves, which is a problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Phone numbers are the new social security numbers - <AUTHOR> https://celsusio.blog/2017/10/31/phone-numbers-are-the-new-social-security-numbers/ <comment><USER2> Two thoughts from reading this article:

1\. Yes, "porting attacks" (where an adversary convinces your carrier to port your phone number to his/her own) are a real threat. You can mitigate these somewhat by choosing a carrier that has a relatively strong porting procedure. Project Fi (Google) requires a temporary PIN generated by the user's Fi app, as well as logging in to one's Google account. I don't know what the other carriers require today, but this is less than what I experienced when I ported my number from Sprint years ago for example.

2\. The author says that 2FA is overhyped, which is maybe true, but why don't more services allow physical devices (e.g. Yubikeys) to be used for 2FA? Often the phone number is the only choice offered for 2FA.</comment>


WhoisUP v0.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.ciscozine.com/2013/09/26/whoisup-v0-2-released/

<comment><USER2> I am not in active PHP development anymore. Is "chmod 777" still as common in installation instructions as it was a decade ago? Have we learned nothing at all about security?

> Set the 'TMP' and 'conf' folders to chmod 777 (on *nix systems) or to > writable permission (on Windows systems)</comment>


Processing.js 1.0 Released - <AUTHOR>

http://processingjs.org/ <comment><USER2> <http://processingjs.org/>

Click-able link.

And I'm glad to see it is now considered stable.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get open source projects to move away from SourceForge? - <AUTHOR>

I (and probably many others) would really like to contribute to Notepad++ but because it is on SourceForge there is a much higher barrier to do so. How to convince them to move to github? <comment><USER2> Contribute, become valuable to the project and then pitch your proposal. See how democracy works in action.

Or fork to github and see what happens?

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the barrier?

<comment><AUTHOR> Github: Click the "Fork" button, branch, modify, push and send pull request.

SourceForge: ???

<comment><USER4> Checkout from svn, modify, generate patch, and attach patch to sourceforge?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Windows and Mac come with a locked bootloader? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The iMac Pro comes with a lockable bootloader, that includes support for Windows 10 Boot Camp. It can be unlocked if necessary.</comment>


The rise of the Apache Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3079813/open-source-tools/the-apache-foundations-incredible-rise.html <comment><USER2> IMO large number of apache projects are in 2 categories:

1) First try out in open source. If it gets popular, develop commercial package around open version + extra/proprietary feature or support while open source version is relegated to experiment or lab evaluation in companies.

2) First offer a commercial offering. Once it is proven to be failed or non- strategic or both, donate to Apache foundation.

None of that is bad per se but it makes me feel very many apache projects are of middling quality and riding on vendor driven hype.

<comment><USER3> I had that feeling about the Apache Foundation, but I also saw that they had a lot of projects which seemed to be important, even if most of them seemed to be heavily oriented towards large enterprise-style Java-based things, which I haven't had much use for myself. Then they took on OpenOffice, and lost what little of my respect they still had.

Background: OpenOffice used to be the go-to Microsoft Office compatible free software suite for Linux and other Unix-based systems. Then some politics happened and it forked to LibreOffice, and essentially all the developers left for LibreOffice, which is where the development happens today. However, the company still legally owning the OpenOffice code, and the name, still try their darnedest to get people to still use the rapidly-failing OpenOffice, to convince new developers that this is the same OpenOffice that they once knew, etc. (They have had a booth with staff at every FOSDEM for many years now, often conveniently located right beside the LibreOffice booth.) For the Apache Foundation to accept OpenOffice as a project _in this situation_ is unacceptable. Predictably, the aforementioned company tries to play up the Apache Foundation connection at every opportunity, trying to imply that since it's an Apache Foundation project, it is therefore a serious and still active software project.

<comment><AUTHOR> So much incorrect in the above I don't know where to start... what "aforementioned company" are you talking about? You imply it's a company that "own(s) the OpenOffice code, and the name", but it's the ASF that "owns these" not whatever company you seem to be implying.

I would suggest getting your facts right before posting things... it makes one look kinda foolish.

<comment><USER3> Maybe they don't own the name (i.e. trademark); it's not very important to overall accuracy of the summary. It's also very odd of you to _ask_ what company it is – shouldn't you, of all people, _know_? I left the name out because it's _not important_ what company it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Conspicuously not mentioned: OpenOffice.

<comment><USER5> Or Apache Wave.

<comment><USER4> The important point for a report on 2015 is that OpenOffice's six-month security hole was a huge embarrassment, and it had been deliberately kept out of project reports to the board.

Jim Jagielski, who was interviewed for this article, was one of the people pushing super-hard for Apache to take OpenOffice in 2011, insisting Apache could maintain a desktop application, then having nothing to say when they utterly failed to.

And Matt Asay knows all this! And that's why its absence in a report on Apache in 2015 is conspicuous.

<comment><AUTHOR> The success, or failure, of OpenOffice itself says little-to-nothing about the success of the ASF itself. Why OpenOffice was not as successful as hoped is a long and drawn out story, and Apache suffered from the ill-will that the OpenOffice community accumulated over the years, due to mismanagement by Oracle. By the time it was donated to the ASF, maybe it was unwise to think that those dynamics could be changed, but it was worth it to try. Even so, the donation of OpenOffice to Apache, and the subsequent relicensing of that codebase to ALv2 was a MAJOR benefit for the entire OpenOffice eco-system, especially LibreOffice which, as soon as the ASF did the relicensing, consumed those changes to their benefit. Which is one benefit of permissive licenses in general.

I would encourage people to look at the (open and public) discussions when the incubation of OpenOffice was debated; I would also encourage people to read the tons of other communications about it as it progressed. Instead of having "nothing to say", as this clueless poster suggests, there is/was a LOT to say, which WAS said, and done so in an open, public, and transparent fashion. Maybe all that is uncomfortable for people to admit, since it goes against their misleading and incorrect narrative to paint the ASF and OpenOffice so negatively, and for this reason it is good when _real_ journalists keep the facts straight.

<comment><USER4> During the discussion of the security hole last year, you conspicuously had plenty of time to comment at length on how unfair it was for people to note Apache's utter inability to maintain a secure desktop application, as did several of Apache OpenOffice's alleged developers.

However, neither you nor they apparently had any time to fix the security hole. The fix being, literally: _remove one file from the download_. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> The below link as well as the (public) dev@ list clearly show you to be mistaken:

[https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html](https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html)

<comment><USER4> That's a mention from October 2015 and April 2016. The absence from board reports was brought to public attention in July 2015, and the October 2015 mention you cite is a direct response to that: [https://lwn.net/Articles/650411/](https://lwn.net/Articles/650411/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please read the thread:

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.openoffice.devel/2...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.openoffice.devel/23907)

<comment><USER4> That supplies the background to the LWN piece, and doesn't in any way contradict its assertions that this was a serious problem that should not have been suppressed. That public attention is why it was mentioned at all in the October report.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your point was that discussion was suppressed. The links show clearly that it was not, and when the CVE was published (and therefore public), there was open discussion and a suggested work-around. You may not agree w/ the method used to "fix" the CVE or the speed in which 4.2.1 was released (for myself, I don't either), but your claims of suppression and stuff being "deliberately" hidden is obvious FUD.

<comment><USER4> That's literally the thread demonstrating the accuracy of my claim above that "it had been deliberately kept out of project reports to the board." That's literally the thread where they're doing that. You have literally cited something completely supporting my claim and saying "see, this cite proves you wrong!!"

<comment><USER6> That conversation took place on a publicly archived list with hundreds of subscribers. Any one of them could have escalated the issue to the Board.

<comment><USER4> My claim (as the cited conversation is the smoking gun for) is that the project excluded it from their report to the board, not that it was never reported to the board.

In any case, the board were fully aware for a long time of what a disaster the AOO project was; are you claiming they didn't know about the security ineptitude or something? What, precisely, is your claim here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the ASF founders, Brian Behlendorf, was recently appointed E.D. at hyperledger.org (a project of the Linux Foundation). Perhaps Hyperledger is aiming to become the Apache of blockchains.

</comment><comment><USER8> As an open source contributor and developer myself I never feel good about releasing stuff under GPL or Apache (yes, both) because they're long and some parts like the liability section kinda contradict what a liability disclaimer is about, and most importantly, it's impossible for a developer to understand it. That's why most projects initiated by developers (without a company) are MIT or ISC or a BSD variant. Also see the OpenBSD project's (which I don't use and am not affiliated with) views on the Apache 2 license. All I can understand is that both GPL and Apache licenses are that long and hard to understand for non-lawyers because they wanted to have a water-proof legal document. Which means as a developer you have to trust what others think the text means if you were to release code under it. I use the ISC license because I understand it and can explain if someone asks me about the conditions. I couldn't do the same with eith GPL or Apache. ISC/MIT with a patent clause might be useful addition for those of use who need that.

<comment><USER9> _> That's why most projects initiated by developers (without a company) are MIT or ISC or a BSD variant_

[Citation Needed]

A lot of Linux software of all sorts is GPL. A lot.

<comment><USER8> I said "initiated by developers", particularly with the post-Github ecosystem in mind. In Linux, obviously, there are many GPL projects, that's not a surprise. I'm talking about what license most developers choose who aren't working on the linux userland (or kernel). There are whole communities where liberal is the default license choice (Haskell, Erlang, Apache, BSDs, Golang).

<comment><USER9> Sure, there are a lot of communities out there, but before you can say "most developers", you'd have to give me some numbers.

My "anecdata" is exactly the opposite. Until a few years ago, most software I'd use or release was GPL, or bastardized versions like MPL. BSD was seen as legacy and MIT was fairly rare; APL was just used by the ASF.

Things have changed a bit, mostly because GPL is a bit messy when applied to stuff like JS libraries (Wordpress themes were probably a turning point for many). But the GPL is still _massive_.

<comment><USER10> Black Duck's data says that GPL (2 + 3) is the most common followed by MIT followed by APL.

[https://www.blackducksoftware.com/top-open-source- licenses](https://www.blackducksoftware.com/top-open-source-licenses)

<comment><USER8> I've archived the link to be sure, and from what I see, MIT is first, followed by GPL2, followed by Apache. Here's the snapshot right now: [http://archive.is/L4hLm](http://archive.is/L4hLm) ([http://archive.is/L4hLm/image](http://archive.is/L4hLm/image)).

<comment><USER5> Combining versions 2 and 3 of the GPL makes it larger than MIT, at 30%.

<comment><USER8> That's one way to look at it, so if you combine MIT and Apache => 42 (add BSD and ISC => 50).

<comment><USER9> Still not "most" in the absolute terms that prompted my response. "More" could be argued, "most" implies a dominance that is simply not there. I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, but I'm just trying to explain the point.

<comment><USER8> I didn't check all the other licenses on that page for copyleft/liberal, but assuming it's just GPL2,GPL3,LGPL2,LGPL3, it didn't look like the absolute sum would dominate, but these statistics are necessarily precise anyway because many projects are not under a consistent single license, so...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JSTOR torrent - <AUTHOR> https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331 <comment><USER2> Please keep in mind that JSTOR paid almost $100,000 to digitize these files[1]. I think a lot of people don't realize that they're a non-profit organization with similar goals to many of you.

I don't think it's such a bad idea to give them money to continue digitizing works that no one would have had access to otherwise. They provide full-text search of all of their documents and undoubtedly employ programmers and designers much like yourself.

[1][http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_journal_1.html)

<comment><USER3> The non-profit status doesn't automagically make an organization "good". The executives of the institution still get paid and have an interest in perpetuating and growing the organization, even if it goes against public interest

I don't know much about JSTOR, but I know the IEEE (for example) can be a good bunch of sharks. In the past, they forced you to hand them your copyright for the privilege of publishing your work in their journals, and proceeded to go after you if you committed the cardinal sin of distributing your own papers through your research website. They also put your work behind a 30$ paywall without, of course, giving you a dime.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, being a non profit only means that they distribute all their profit amongst themselves as salaries or investments.

The data would be much better at the hands of an entity that keeps the data accessible and gives the authors a right to reproduce their works elsewhere. A startup which does this would be excellent.

<comment><USER2> You guys are vastly oversimplifying this whole thing. The only reason JSTOR gets access to these documents in the first place is because of licensing agreements with the publishers.

You can try and a start a company that gives it all away for free, but you're not going to be given access to any documents or you'll be sued for releasing the ones you don't have rights to.

This is not as simple as "Just throw that stuff up on a Torrent and we're good to go".

<comment><USER3> >This is not as simple as "Just throw that stuff up on a Torrent and we're good to go".

As a scientist, that would pretty much solve my access problems, and help me do a better job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not quite, it's just the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It's a good start, I guess.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709> (lots of comments)

        >   This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
        > 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
        > and which should be  available to everyone at no cost, but most
        > have previously only been made available at high prices through
        > paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Btw, the court documents from 2011-2012 show that aaronsw transferred his collection to an unidentified server in China. Maybe he has a deadman's switch? Or maybe it's time I go on a modern-day pirate treasure hunt.. yarr.

<comment><USER6> I've been thinking that perhaps some sort of mass downloading could be organized, to be distributed among current college students with access to JSTOR.

If it is thousands of students all doing a small part of the downloading, what could be done to stop it? The trick would be distributing the tasks, and collecting all the results.

This is all assuming there is no dead-man's switch, but since he went out on his own terms I assume that would be triggered already.

<comment><USER5>
        > to be distributed among current college students

I've been thinking about a mobile proxy app that students run on their phones, and a server that distributes tasks. The app would HTTP itself to the server and ask for a task, then HTTP the results back. Metadata (and the pdf url) would be extracted with zotero/translation-server, and a second request would be sent to phones to finally grab the actual file. Let me know if you're interested, contact deets in profile.

proof of concept of the zotero/translation-server doing its job: <https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This archive is not directly related to Aaron Swartz's prosecution, it's something different. "The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data."

<comment><USER8> Yes, as the file description says, this was released by Gregory Maxwell rather than Swartz, though it's tangentially related. Maxwell had assembled this collection of public-domain articles earlier, but hadn't decided whether to release it yet. After the Swartz/JSTOR case broke, he was spurred to release this torrent (the linked file description contains a statement from Maxwell explaining his motives).

I don't think Swartz's famous JSTOR collection has surfaced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To hell with this shit. I don't want what the copyright owners do not want to give. I don't want what they got by arm twisting authors. I don't want what they got for free but now want to make money off. They can die with this in their collective behinds. I will never submit anything to a closed journal, never ever.

<comment><USER9> Are you an academic? You're right that their arms are being twisted. I can't have an academic career and not publish in closed journals. I hate it and I don't know what I can do about it. If I only publish in open access journals I'm just offering my career up as a meaningless sacrifice.

<comment><USER10> No longer an academic, but as a student I always appreciated it when authors put their own work on their own websites as a form of common man's dissent. I have done the same with my own meagre two publications, for which IEEE and ACM (or probably Elsevier and friends) charge up to $31 each.

Ironically, due to the closed nature of their websites and the fact that the PDFs on my websites have since been indexed by various 3rd party research portals, they now far outrank the official (paywalled) versions on the ACM and IEEE websites.

<comment><USER11> Seriously, thanks for doing that. It's a wonderful feeling to search for the title of a paper and have the first result be a PDF link to an academic or personal site rather than a springerlink/JSTOR/citeseer result.

<comment><USER12> Citeseer is an open indexer, collecting files from the web and making them openly available. Many of those PDF links you mention are the sources for its index.

It is nothing like Springer, Elsevier, ScienceDirect, Thompson, ... websites. Please don't lump them together.

JSTOR sits somewhere in between.

<comment><USER11> You're right, I didn't mean to imply that they're all the same. It's just that when a PDF is openly available, it's often one of the first results, so seeing citeseer is a bad sign. I seem to remember them creating pages for citations they didn't have a download link for but now I can't find any examples so I may be misremembering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We wish it didn't have to be that way. We wish that information, particular academic publications, could be share openly and legally.

Now, it's 1855. You want the slaves to be freed. By law. By right.

So, do you shut down the Underground Railroad?

<comment><USER14> Underground Railroad: people risking their lives to help slaves fleeing slavery, rape, beatings, murder, and the wholesale destruction of their families.

Aaron Swartz: releasing academic articles that are already available for free or a low cost simply by visiting your local university and acquiring a guest access card.

Not even remotely comparable.

<comment><USER2> Especially considering JSTOR is a non-profit that has to employ many people with similar occupations to those of HN. They digitize documents that wouldn't have otherwise been available at all before.

It's incredible how if they hadn't digitized the works, no one would be outraged. But when they ask for a fee to cover the costs of such things, everyone paints them as villains who try and lock information away from the masses.

<comment><USER15> Isn't Google digitizing all printed works they can get their hands on?

<comment><USER2> Many of Google's digital works aren't freely available, so I'm not sure where you're going with this.

<comment><USER15> The original argument was that JSTOR is doing the service of digitizing many papers that are out of copyright, but otherwise not available in electronic form. And if it wasn't for them charging access for this, then the work wouldn't be done. I was pointing out that Google is doing the same thing, and NOT charging for access where possible (i.e., the out-of-copyright works).

<comment><USER14> Google has several billions in free cash lying around to do stuff like this, and many billions more coming in from its various income sources.

JSTOR does not many billions in cash, nor any income sources other than access fees.

Ergo, JSTOR must continue to charge an access fee so that it can continue to perform its function of archiving articles and providing access to those articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Please downvote this. A torrent of the JSTOR content shouldn't be Aaron Swartz's legacy. With JSTOR, Swartz was making a larger point; if all you have is these docs, you missed it.

<comment><USER17> You can't downvote on HN.

<comment><USER18> Yes you can. It just requires sufficient karma.

<comment><USER19> You can downvote comments, not submissions. You can only upvote and flag submissions.

<comment><USER18> Oh. Thanks, I didn't know this. Curious choice.

<comment><USER14> Recent change, after the downvote wars this past fall in which Microsoft articles would get unceremoniously downvoted to oblivion the instant they hit the front page.

The idea is that articles should rise to the top on their own merits, but not be pushed to the bottom simply by people disagreeing with their content.

<comment><USER20> But there is still the floagging. I have noticed some pro MS articles still disappearing suddenly, due to the flagging I presume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think we should pressure JSTOR to release the documents into the public domain. If it is in the best interest.

<comment><USER22> JSTOR doesn't own the copyrights, they have the documents under licence from the journal publishers.

<comment><USER23> JSTOR has happily allows publishers to restrict documents which are lawfully in the public domain and over which the publishers have no say except via the TOS they clipwrap you with when you try to access them.

Excusing JSTOR is like saying "Hate the game, not the players". While JSTOR isn't doing everything in their power to fix this broken system I say: Hate the game _and_ the players.

<comment><USER14> JSTOR does not have the power to direct what others do. If the publisher chooses to restrict a document, JSTOR has no say in that decision--JSTOR _is merely a repository_. JSTOR has access to essentially every academic article in existence precisely because it does not attempt to enforce any political goal on contributors.

If you want to change what publishers do with articles which should be in the public domain, get the law changed. But don't hold JSTOR responsible for something outside of their control.

<comment><USER23> The law already is what it needs to be. JSTOR has limited access— and continues to do so through their terms of services— access to even old documents which are already lawfully in the public domain.

<comment><USER2> They have operating costs. They're a non-profit but they pay people to digitize the works. It costs a lot of money to access some of these things. It's not prohibitively expensive to access these documents. You can read three articles free every two weeks if you're exceedingly down on your luck.

<comment><USER23> You couldn't a week ago. This isn't some accident. Their openness comes hard won with threats of their reputation.

Their digitization is largely done by a for-profit company. It's not competitively bid. There are many parties who would digitize these works at no cost— archive.org and google for example, and could afford to do it without pay walling the results.

<comment><USER2> >Their digitization is largely done by a for-profit company.

I was unaware of this. What company does the digitization for them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So is this safe to dl? Newbie here. I don't even know what these papers are.

</comment><comment><USER25> I finished downloading this last week.

<comment><USER26> So, do you want upvotes?

<comment><USER25> That was the first thing on my mind.</comment></comment></comment>


Kueri: A Natural Language Interface for Databases - <AUTHOR> http://kueri.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Repost, because I think it deserves a discussion</comment>


CLion 1.1 EAP starts: parser re-work, LLDB, new formatter options - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2015/07/clion-1-1-eap-starts/

<comment><USER2> I'd pay twice the price of CLion for a version of CLion that was focused on Rust and C.

Oh and don't even think anything Eclipse related Like RustDT cuts it. When the plugin system does bloody work and I actually have a runable version, it's a dog slow hunk of crap. Eclipse needs to be taken out behind the woodshed and put down.

<comment><AUTHOR> C is supported out-of-the-box. For Rust there is some 3rd party plugin, however it's just syntax highlighting and nothing interesting.</comment></comment>