The week old Hollywood finally died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/business/media/hollywood-studios-firings-streaming.html <comment><USER2> Streaming services may be 'in control' but they're still as bad as, or controlled by, the studios they're replacing.

In the UK, suppose I want to watch Forbidden Planet, or Gone With The Wind, or Carry on Screaming. Show me a streaming service that has those films. I either wait 6 months and hope the TV shows them or.... hello bittorrent. Even more recent films.

Suppose I want to listen to Louis Armstrong, or Ella Fitzgerald? Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music all have those songs.

It's just a shame we didn't have higher bandwidth in the Napster era to do to the studios what it did to record labels.

<comment><USER3> You can rent all of these for sub £5 on amazon (probably itunes as well).

There isn't a world where you can pay $20 a month and get everything, every movie, every tv show, ever, the finances just don't work.

<comment><USER4> The lack of unified interface is my biggest gripe. I pay £12/month for Netflix, £8/month for Amazon Prime, £6/month for Disney+. Used to have to pay £8/month for NowTV to watch GoT in 720p. My Android TV has a Google Play store embedded in it for me to rent/buy in one tap. I often find myself jumping ebtween 4 different apps on my TV to figure out what content is where to watch, and occasionally end up finding out it's an iTunes exclusive. That's assuming the content is available in the UK at the time - many TV shows just aren't available on any of the UK equivalent streaming services until months later than the US (Mandolorian for example)

I don't want the content for free/bargain prices. I want the content in a reasonable format, that I can play legally on my TV, phone or laptop, and that I can discover easily.

Compare that experience with something like popcorntime, where a user can type in a movie name, and have it streaming in 1080p/4k/highest available quality in under 30 seconds.

I want that, but paid.

<comment><USER5> The search on my Roku is across services. I'd like to have a cross-service discovery app too, but the in my roku (and even better, on my roku phone app where typing is easier) I can type a movie name and see if it is on one of the services I use, or if not in Amazon to rent/buy).

<comment><USER4> That's really helpful. My Android TV will let me do voice commands to "Play X on <Service>" but if it's not on the play store, it won't respond to "Find <X>". Unfortunately, I'm not in the roku ecosystem right now, but this would be something that would make me change!

<comment><USER6> Kodi plugins are available for netflix, amazon prime and disney+ so you can use these 3 from kodi interface not sur about google play or apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coca Cola sold Columbia Pictures to Sony and Rupert Murdoch bought 20th Century Fox in the 1980s, General Electric got Universal Studios 20 years ago, sold it to Comcast, Stephen Spielberg sold Dreamworks to Sumner Redstone, who had taken Paramount off Gulf+Western, but sure NETFLIX brought a "ruthless new culture" to Hollywood.

</comment><comment><USER8> As someone who worked on early Disney streaming efforts and watched the recent Disney restructuring that saw massive layoffs, I find this article disingenuous and blatantly anti-tech.

The fact is, content consumption is more pro consumer than ever, and I think anyone who argues otherwise is looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. Content delivery has changed and the business models have followed, but this business is all full of the same people. Disney was full of ex-Warner people and vice versa. Many of my ex-Disney colleagues are now at Netflix.

The only thing that's really different right now is the pandemic. Many of the people who'd normally jump from Warner to another company are having trouble getting new jobs right now because Hollywood production is still not at 100%, which means no one is hiring. Doesn't matter if a Hollywood exec can do their job on zoom. Production can't. Tech hasn't solved that yet.

So I'm disappointed that the only thing this article has to say is "look at yet another example of how tech ruined everyone's fun." Between this and the Blockbuster Airbnb you'd think everyone is longing to go back to the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think considering TikTok a threat to hollywood, or a sign of diminishing relevance is naive... disingenuous even.

The medium, art and distribution methods shift. This isn't the first time. Television encroached on film. VHS. Cable. DVD box sets. Home cinema. The rise of the cinematic series.

Shifts sometimes hurt, they may even have some casualties.... but this is not dying. Hollywood, and old media generally, are in much better shape than I had expected.

Remember "information wants to be free?" Remember the initial response to ipod? The scoffs around early DRM? Disintermediation? The end of record labels? None of this came to pass.

The true economics of "content" is centralisation, exclusivity and manufactured scarcity. Tiktok (youtube moreso) demonstrates the point. It doesn't matter that you have millions of viewers. That doesn't translate into money, power or value. 0.1% of the viewership is not worth 0.1% of the money. It doesn't divide. Centralisation itself is where the value is. Content is not a "sum of parts" game.

For success, you need centralisation & control. Theatres, PPV services, cable deals, streaming services... This is why spotify is buying the top podcasts, to exclude them from itunes & youtube.

Porn is the counterexample. As a pariah, it had no ability to affect DRM, Copyright, other legal frameworks and the details of how they will be implemented.

When online payments started working, Porn had its "DVD Boom." When streaming started working, the industry collapsed again. That's what a free media market looks like. Extremely high volatility.

The record industry & hollywood have never dealt with this kind of thing. Never will, probably.

The main thing shaking up hollywood is that they're being introduced to startup/tech economics. Market caps. Short term equity plays. This takes some getting used to, but the structure is as secure as ever. They're just learning that just because investors have valued something @ $Xbn doesn't mean it will make $Xbn.

<comment><USER10> >Porn is the counterexample. As a pariah, it had no ability to affect DRM,

Bullshit. Porn DEFINED the fucking media, no pun intended. They pushed the VHS against Beta. They were pioneers on online payment methods, and live chats over the web.

Currently, porn CDN's are HUGE, and the industry pays MILLIONS worldwide. You have no idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "TikTok has succeeded as Quibi — Hollywood's premium alternative to user- generated content — struggles to find an audience."

I had never until this very moment even heard of _Quibi_

<comment><USER12> That's because it's not only poorly marketed but also a completely awful idea. It's 8-minute shows, chunks so small that it's hard to get invested because a full season can be less than a feature-length movie but has the ambitions of one. Some episodes are actually less than 8 minutes, most show concepts are horrid (they relaunched Punk'd!) and the people at the helm are... unusual.

This interview gives great insight into the mess it is: [https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching- quibi.htm...](https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html)

My favorite quote from that: "When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, "I'm not sure I'd classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.""

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't call Whitman and Katzenberg "unusual". Katzenberg, by all accounts, is stereotypical power-Hollywood. Whitman is an average tech ceo. Their coupling might be a bit unusual, but it makes sense in from an "opposites attract / complement" point of view.

I do agree that 8-minute video-chunks are silly, that's youtube territory and people are not going to pay for that as long as YT is free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It sucks for the employees and executives laid off (especially during this pandemic), but audiences continue to consume a steady stream of high quality scripted content (ranging from low budget sitcoms to high budget action movies). If executives at Warner Media struggle to meet shareholder expectations as audiences vote with their wallets and opt for streaming services instead of cable bundles then so be it. The executives at Netflix have earned their place (and one day, they too will be replaced).

</comment><comment><USER15> Hell hath no fury like print media commenting on tech companies encroaching on their space. When did anyone actually love studio executives and their excessive compensation?

<comment><USER16> Yes. The actual talent is doing very well with the streaming boom, even if it's not sustainable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Old Hollywood died when they stopped creating anything and started doing nothing but sequels and comic book films.

The record industry died when it stopped discovering, polishing, and promoting real creativity and instead started manufacturing pop that all sounds the same because its written by the same couple Swedish guys. There have been no major new breakthrough styles of music since the early 1990s because the industry stopped performing its talent scout function, which was its primary value add.

People will support you if you have something to support. Add no value and you are redundant and the market will go around you.

If the streamers ever stop making fabulous original content, they too will be disrupted.

</comment><comment><USER18> > The corporate shifts at WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal in recent days signal > that the technological shift you've been reading about for years is finally > taking concrete form, accelerated by the pandemic.

Echoes of the collapse of Blockbuster. For those familiar with Clayton Christensen's overlapping s-curves [1], the only remaining questions were the timing of the transition and whether any of the leaders in the old ecosystem could navigate the disruption; the pandemic pulled the rug out from under old Hollywood.

I'm curious how the social aspects unfold if/when the pandemic subsides. The summer blockbuster directly targeted teenaged boys and their dates (indirectly). Will a new public space emerge as an alternative meeting place for teenagers or will the smartphone be the main platform for teenage courtship moving forward?

Is the first date now an anachronism or maybe I'm the anachronism that missed this already long established shift.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

</comment><comment><USER19> It's the classic innovation implosion:

Prior to video streaming progressing to a viable point, there was no reason for anyone in the industry to have the skills to work with it.

Netflix comes along with a business model of providing these services to the industry by hosting their content on its platform

There is massive success, everyone is making lots of money doing what they are good at

The industry, lacking the skills to recognize the value netflix provided them in technical skill, tries to get a larger cut of the pie because "how hard could it be?"

Very hard. The competition leads to cannibalization of the market and the industry has a lot of catch up to do just to get to Netflix's level. Meanwhile the carpet being pulled out from under netflix allows other, actually technically competent, competitors to pick up real gains.

Where before the industry were the customers of the streaming partners, now they are competitors. Both are out of their comfort zone, but there is a lot more free-floating talent from the long term industry than the new niche technology, so the streaming platforms can become content producers faster than the reverse.

Repeated botched attempts at competition with the streaming services drains the industry of both capital and morale. Acquisitions happen at an accelerated rate as small companies run out of steam and larger ones need to demonstrate something that looks like success to investors. Innovative but risky projects get axed as the call to cut costs grows and the heads of their benefactors roll. Seemingly safe projects repeating what worked in the past are the only ones that survive long enough to produce results, but their failure to make up for the losses continues the downward spiral of morale.

A few players are large enough to shield a division from the worst of it, and they can develop a viable competitor. Others luck out on a convenient merger that actually gets them the resources they need. These become players alongside the newcoming streaming services, but their positions are much reduced in stature. For the bulk of the industry though, there is no recovery - those who can jump ship do, and those who can't re-prioritize to stay afloat just long enough to retire.

It happened with the rail companies, it happened with cameras, its happening with traditional media. It's much easier for a competitor to destroy your empire than it is for you to seize theirs intact.

<comment><USER9> Competence (IMO) plays a role for a short while. Netflix may have been especially competent early on, but that doesn't matter anymore. Streaming is a commodity. Now they have to compete in other spheres. Hence the exclusive content strategies.

I'm sure there was a time when printing newspapers was technically hard. You needed chemistry, mechanical engineering... Some people/companies probably succeeded by being good at it. Eventually though, printing becomes a commodity. Being competent doesn't matter anymore. You buy a machine. The machine is competent.

I agree on the competition point. We know the game at this point. The difference between owning 25% and 5% is not 5-to-1. It's 100-to-1. All the returns are tied to centralisation, bottlenecks.

It looks like Netflix and the old studios will meet in the middle. A cluster of content generation & platforms. They'll eventually find an equilibrium where the major compete more modestly, focusing mostly on keeping out newcomers.

<comment><USER19> The software competence may be a commodity at this point, but there's a lot more to streaming than that. The botched launch of HBO Max is merely the latest in a string of poor performances by the classic industry. Sure they can get a video to the end user, but that's useless if no one wants to watch it.

Netflix has been collecting detailed information on how people select what they want to watch for a decade. Their recommendation algorithms may seem impenetrable, but they obviously work on some level. They are refined enough that they can optimize the content they produce for consumption by streaming - they consistently have a show release every month which no one can really explain why they just have to watch but nevertheless millions of people do. No company has produced a better streaming UI than netflix and most are just straight up copies.

There were no technical hurdles preventing Kodak from creating a competitive digital camera, nor for IBM to keep making competitive personal computers. These giants faltered because they thought the technical problems were all they had to deal with, and did not recognize the non-technical changes they would need to make to stay competitive.

Some of the old studios will figure out that the streaming content market is neither about the streaming nor the content; they will adapt and even thrive. Most though are making horrible strategic blunders, and by the time they learn what they should have done it will be too late to recover. None will be as successful as if they had just stuck with netflix, made it the one and only must have streaming service, and maintained their oligopoly on content creation while cashing fat licensing checks.

<comment><USER9> Maybe. I don't know that there's an objective way for us to convince each other.

Subjectively, I just can't see "streaming media player that is good enough" as a long term differentiator. Seems like too limited a domain. I'm not dismissing "good software is hard," but this isn't iphone vs android. It's more comparable to a single app.

Recommendation algorithms... I honestly think this is overemphasized. It's selecting from a pretty shallow content pool. This isn't TikTok/Youtube/Instagram/spotify etc. Discovery just isn't that big a problem when there are circa 2000 options.

Online streaming is a content game, ultimately. You can't win on tech, I think.

<comment><USER19> There are only a few thousand options on the streaming network, you are correct in pointing out that picking a few recommendations for the user from this list is not differentiating.

For picking what content should be created and added to the streaming network, there are infinite possibilities. Selecting correctly there is very difficult to do reliably. We've all watched movies that made us ask "what the hell were the producers thinking?" Even experienced professionals can do little more than guess what audiences are looking for. When you wonder why a weak movie has 7 sequels, it's because re-using what worked in the past is a very simple risk reduction heuristic that humans are good at applying. With little to go off of beyond past ticket sales, a few test screenings, and personal anecdote, there's little a human can do to improve upon this. You get the occasional genius who has some fundamental understanding of what people like and they regularly make hits, but these people are few and far between, and still they are generally limited to a handful of genres they understand and enjoy enough to work with.

If you had pitched to me an idea for a documentary about a gay redneck roadside zookeeping convicted felon, I would find the idea that any significant amount of people would watch it laughable. No sane person would think of giving this top billing. But Netflix's algorithm spit out that for some arcane reason this would be a hit, and alas now everyone and their mother has watched Tiger King. Such is the power of analyzing tens of billions of viewing experiences in exceptional detail.

Moving beyond this, there is a widely held belief that the key to a strong streaming service is having the best content. Certainly if you are choosing between two movies at the theater you're going to watch the one you think you'll like more. Ditto for if you're flipping through the channels to see which show you want to watch. But streaming isn't the same as going to the movies or flipping through the channels. In those circumstances you have to choose the best of a small number of options that are offered right now; with streaming you watch what you want when you want. This leads to fundamentally different viewing habits. People will binge a season of TV in a weekend, or throw on a movie they've seen 15 times to have on in the background, or will watch a new movie every night for a month, and so forth. Further, the economics of streaming are different. Movies are about getting as many people as possible to pay the price of admission, television is about getting as many people as possible to watch ads, streaming is about maximizing subscription- months. It doesn't matter if 99.9% of a service's offering is crap, if they have 12 releases a year that you want to watch, and they space them out appropriately, you'll remain subscribed. On the other hand, a much anticipated blockbuster that has something for everyone but doesn't have much re-watch value isn't going to get anyone past the free trial period. Success in streaming is all about having the right combination of content being released on the right schedule so that as few users as possible go more than a few weeks without wanting to utilize the platform. When you have millions of users, this is an incredibly difficult instance of combinatorial optimization. This is why, for example, Amazon entered the space and succeeded with ease despite no experience with content creation: online streaming is not a content game, it's a big data game.

Ultimately, all such innovation implosions are a result of a mismatch between the technical challenges perceived by those looking to get into a market and the real technical challenges that actually face those in the market. The old institutions definitely have the resources necessary to reach technical parity, but they squander those resources solving the problems they think are important, not the ones that actually are. At the end of the day, you don't really know what it takes to win until you've won, and even then you may have just gotten lucky somewhere along the way. Success requires the humility to question the validity of our experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been completely disconnected to Hollywood as I've found better content on YouTube.

I admittedly like non fiction, and my wife likes the occasional comedy. Both of these are often better than anything you can get from Hollywood because it's more niche.

I guess I don't understand the problem. People really like their old school classics?

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh cry me a river.. execs routinely fire people with less than a day's notice. People in leadership positions are expected to have a long-term vision of their industries, if they're surprised by this, it just validates the change of guard.

</comment><comment><USER22> Was expecting to read about Olivia de Havilland et al. Oh, you mean the old Hollywood of uh… five to ten years ago.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _(Like much of his industry, Mr. Redstone, who died last week at age 97, > held on far longer than anyone expected._

Picture reminds me of one of the Duke brothers played by Ralph Bellamy in _Trading Places_ (1983 film starring Eddie Murphy).

</comment><comment><USER24> I've this crazy idea for a de-centralized pirate-media aggregator that could fix piracy by going the pay what you want route.

I would only pay back to creators directly, no copyright holders, no studios..

Wonder how that would go...

<comment><USER3> If it's a free choice between paying and not paying for a product, most people will simply not pay because that's the simplest option. Paying what you want actually is much more complicated because you end up having to try and establish the value of something to you, again much easier to just pay zero.

On the otherhand, people will support people directly to create, patreon already fills that niche, but in that respect "you" the creator are the product not just what you create.

<comment><USER25> > most people will simply not pay because that's the simplest option.

I would disagree with that. If you are young and tech/internet savy and have time then sure. But if I get back home after days work. All I have time/strength for is to put on netflix to watch the show i heard from a friend.

Convenience trumps piracy. As long as its more convenient.

The moment I need to figure out if that show is on Netflix Hulo or Amazon, etc the convenience factor is diminishing.

I will check if its no netflix, no... hbo... no ah fuck it, piratebay it is.

> On the otherhand, people will support people directly to create, patreon > already fills that niche, but in that respect "you" the creator are the > product not just what you create.

I have monthly budget for patreon to support people I like. There is a lot of high quality niche content that I want to see being made so I chip in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unpaywalled: [http://archive.vn/wcuxy](http://archive.vn/wcuxy)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'll be back.

<comment><USER28> It may take awhile judging by your username.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER30> Did they use the wrong week? Shouldn't it be weak?</comment>


Ask HN: What are some technical blogs you are reading regularly? - <AUTHOR> And I really mean regularly. I have a few favorite blogs where I would read a post here and there, but nothing that really sticks (except Paul Graham's essays). Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> There's [https://www.schneier.com/blog/](https://www.schneier.com/blog/) which is not probably not what you meant, exactly, and [https://www.hanselman.com/blog/](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/) because I'm a .net programmer. I mostly just come here for tech news and links to tech blogs.</comment>


HitchBOT – A robot exploring the world - <AUTHOR> http://m.hitchbot.me/

<comment><USER2> Supposed CCTV footage of the bot being vandalised:

[http://www.barstoolsports.com/philadelphia/heres- surveillanc...](http://www.barstoolsports.com/philadelphia/heres-surveillance- video-of-that-pussy-hitchhiking-robot-getting-beaten-up-by-a-hero-in-a- randall-cunningham-jersey/)

(apologies for the low-brow source)</comment>


Dropbox officially launches its own password manager and a secure vault - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/16/21290101/dropbox-passwords-manager-vault-computer-backup-hellosign-app-center <comment><USER2> [https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug- made-...](https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made- passwords-optional-for-four-hours/)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2016/09/07...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2016/09/07/hacked-dropbox-data-of-68-million-users-is-now-or-sale- on-the-dark-web/)

lol</comment>


Come to terms with being "only" an engineer - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/01/your-2013-resolution-come-to-terms-with-being-only-an-engineer/

<comment><USER2> I think the article would have been better served if he just came out and said what he wanted to say, instead of skirting around it.

He really wanted to say, "Respect me, dammit. You have no idea how hard my job is. I just sold my business for $200 Million but some of you still don't take me seriously because I don't know how to program."

Tech cofounders have, rightfully, learned to eschew sketchy/crappy/douchey business co-founders. Sometimes the generality of "business guy" takes the fall with that. The truth is that it's a lot easier to fake having the potential to be a CEO than it is to fake having the potential to be a CTO. If you've ever noticed how ready marketers/business guys are to throw out their credentials, that's because until you have at least a somewhat successful startup under your belt, you can't be taken seriously. You have no tangible skill. You're a liability.

The author wants technical co-founders to know what it's like to be him for a minute.

<comment><USER3> Except he didn't. In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of transdisciplinary people in their place by telling them to be happy with handling the technical side of things, while people like him interface with users, design the product, run the numbers, market and sell it.

I'm a programmer/interaction designer. In design school we were told by professors that "programmers think in terms of X, but designers think in terms of Y. You should never code if your a designer, and never let a programmer design" While they are correct that exercising one muscle will benefit at the exclusion of others, they go to far with the assertion that there exists some cognitive boundary between design and development. The same goes for singular- thinking business guys, like the author, who attempt to dress down engineers who want to try their hand at something new.

I've never met a engineer tell an aspiring business guy "just be a business guy, don't try to code". In fact, most engineers I know will heap praise at business people who bootstrap their idea, even if the first attempt is a bit wonky. This just proves how badly the person wants their vision to be realized.

New years resolution for 2013: stop trying to clip other's wings.

<comment><USER4> "In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of transdisciplinary people in their place"

I think his point is also that this type of thing is not just accepted, but encouraged within engineering circles when talking about business people.

But yes, it wasn't delivered very well and the confrontational nature of it will mean that a lot of people who would do well to heed its advice will immediately turn defensive and get nothing from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is extremely negative, and suffers from an assumption that one _cannot_ start a company without necessarily doing the entire Seed + Series Alphabet dance.

Besides, being turned off by bureaucracy is one thing, but some of the biggest success stories in tech history were the result of an engineer taking on the bureaucracy and fixing/obsoleting it.

If your new year's resolution is to stop reading stuff that will not enrich your life, I'd recommend steering clear of this article.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, and just one of many false assumptions.

He assumes an early startup CEO must always have a later stage startup CEO skills ("you must have all 4 magic unicorn skillz"). During the early period, you need product execution first and foremost and not a lot of cash to do it. An engineer-turned-CEO is well equipped to wear the many hats to build a product on a budget. Once the startup starts hitting revenue strides, the startup can tap into advisors to fill the knowledge gap (but more than likely, the VC will try to replace the founder CEO with a "gray hair" anyway).

He ignore the fact there is an engineering scarcity. As the OP stated you can't "fake" being a CTO. You need fulltime engineering/product person focus throughout the startup's lifespan. However, once you are an established startup, even "experienced" CEO are a commodity. Contrast that to the dev landscape (OP already covers all the perks of an engineer's job because of said scarcity).

He assumes engineers who aspire to be founders are naive. The engineer background founders I know (ones who are actually doing stuff) are rarely disillusioned by how hard a startup is. If anything, they are overly risk- adverse being more inclined to make decision based on quantitative data.

What tickles me the most is the notion that engineers have had it so good and and are WAY too spoiled to become CEOs. Break out the violins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> True, being a CEO is very different from being a engineer, and more people should know about the realities of it before they jump in.

But being able to generate more per month doing your own thing than your hot salary at your last job? That's real, and many people are doing it, including myself. Plus, I am still the lead engineer and code as much as I like, and I've learned so much and have grown as a person from it. On top of that we didn't need to raise any money to do it (despite this article suggesting otherwise).

Hiring great engineers is hard, but articles like this come off as trying to keep great people from leaving their jobs to chase their dreams.

</comment><comment><USER8> i'm an engineer turned ceo. and i know quite a few others.

unfortunately, i think his points are spot on. being a ceo is harder than being an engineer. period.

but if we didn't have engineers turning into ceo's, how many companies can you think of that would never have happened? HP? Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal? Google?

so even though he's right - being a ceo is fucking hard - don't let that stop you, engineer. you CAN be a ceo if you're willing to put in the work.

<comment><USER9> It's probably an effective warning to the fence-sitters. If you're extremely determined to be CEO, you're probably going to brush off the warnings and go through with your plan regardless. That's how I perceive it, at least.

<comment><USER8> Agree. And what's harder about it is mostly the emotional and reward aspects. It's easy to close out a bug or a feature and feel some sense of accomplishment. You don't get those micro-rewards anymore, so your own morale is more difficult to manage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, but as we've heard, "software is eating the world" and there's no reason the world of _running a business_ is immune.

Think about all the software and startups out there helping automate things like payroll, bookkeeping, data analysis, marketing spend, etc etc

When your best arguments are dealing with bureaucracy and BS, you're not exactly on solid ground.

</comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR:

Newb geek - you have an equal chance as anybody at becoming a good business person. But it's hard and your life is easy. Don't do it.

Experienced geek - you have ZERO chance at becoming a good business person because you are too used to your cushy life. Don't do it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Must be proficient at Microsoft Excel! Stopped reading shortly after that.

<comment><USER12> Hah, spot on. These people are so far down the rabbit hole, that they can't really tell what they are doing that is actually difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> this is one of the times i feel that hn has a large bubble that i am outside looking in. pretty much everyone i know obsesses about exactly the opposite problem - how long and how successfully we can keep on being pure engineers while still getting promotions, raises, etc.. it's one of the central aspirations of my career not to have to do anything nontechnical for a living.

</comment><comment><USER12> Basically, the only use of business guy is because of necessary evil BS that one needs to wade through in order to deal with paper work. The same use for a lawyer. It's not actually part of the product.

Necessary evil.

<comment><USER14> If you're bootstrapping a SaaS then you're probably right. If you're building something big, like a Square, BankSimple, Spotify, etc then your chances of success drop considerably. Especially on the raising money front.

It's a really odd term though. A lot of non-tech founders aren't necessarily business guys (MBA's). They may have a lot of knowledge in a space, eye for design (Jobs), ability to lead a team and build a product & biz that grows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "A great businessperson must be highly quantitative and analytical. He or she must be attentive to data and proficient in Microsoft Excel. He or she must know how to weave ideas and theories into numbers and benchmarks. A person who is not strong with numbers will be handicapped in running a great business."

I'm guessing there've been a boatload of great companies built by 'businesspersons' who weren't proficient in Excel - what did they do before Excel?

Trite point, I know, but there's more to my critique here, as I think the OP missed a huge point vis-a-vis "technical engineers" vs "business people": a "great business person" can get others to do their work; a great engineer really can't. Yes, the businessperson needs to understand some level of what's going on, but more to the point they can cultivate relationships with trusted advisors who can do deep dives on specific areas of the business and landscape. The 'great businessperson' will have an ability to synthesize that information, at the very least, and to the extent that they _can_ go deeper in some areas, they can augment their advisors' input with their own knowledge and research.

Contrast that with the 'great engineer' - they can't really outsource their work. To the degree that they'd do that, they're now managers, managing others' time and efforts. It's not _bad_ or _wrong_ , but what each party can get away with in terms of using the labor and brains of others and take the credit for the whole is different.

<comment><USER2> I suppose it depends on your definition of "proficiency." If "proficient" means "able to use," is anyone not proficient in Excel?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Henry Ford and George Stephenson were "only" engineers.

So I am happy to be called one.

</comment><comment><USER17> This essay is pretty accurate in a lot of regards. However, many of the things that he gets on about are things that are massively wrong with the American economy at the moment(not that that doesn't make them any less real). He also completely neglects the fact that given the generally poor quality of technical evaluation skills at most companies, one rarely gets to "just be an engineer", but often has to learn how swim in political waters anyways. There's less bullshit to deal with just working in an office than there is being the quasi-celebrity that one must be as a CEO, but there's still a lot more bullshit than there ought to be. Nobody's out there just building awesome stuff, having people notice that they build awesome stuff and handing them fair amounts of money.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Engineers are doing great, and are making massive salaries with or without > an expensive college degree and all the debt that comes with it.

$20,000 in college loans, Bachelors in CS, 3.4 GPA, and I'm still job hunting 6 months later. Don't wanna hear shit. Engineers with 5+ years experience are immune because they are an extremely valuable asset. Unproven graduates still have to fight uphill to get a leg in to the industry if they don't have career center connections.

<comment><USER19> That means that actually getting a job is not part of your skill set. Regardless of what the rest of the world tells you, getting a job and being good at negotiating perks is a talent. Sure unemployment is rising and all that BS, but lets be real, getting into the business with a degree is easy as long as you don't expect an awesome job, pay, and perks from the get go.

You have three options: a) apply everywhere and deal with a crappy job for a year or two and then search for something more "fun" b) go build some stuff and hope people start to notice (I wish I had done this... Cest la vie), or c) learn some cobol and go maintain some legacy system while working for a PHB.

I don't want to come off as a grumpy negative person, but if you can't get a crappy underpaying job in the tech industry you should really re-evaluate what's going on... It has probably more to do with bad social skills, a lack of talent, or a big ego than with the actual job market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since when is it OK for a news site to tell people with what they can or can't be?

Entrepreneurship is constant self-teaching

<comment><USER21> New sites frequently tell one what to do with their life, or at least how one ought to act or think in a given situation. People don't write things because they like typing, they write things to impress some concept on their reader and influence them to act in some way. I'd even say that life advice is one of the main themes on HN and in writing in general. I don't know why this article particularly incensed you, but it's indefensible to argue that it is NOT OK for news sites to tell one what to do. People can and do frequently tell one to do. It's not outrageous.

Incidentally, they weren't telling people what they can and can't be, but were recommending that people not become entrepreneurs for reasons that aren't necessarily false.

Certainly, there are plenty of assertions that could be contended in this piece, but the fact that the article is making a statement about how to go about one's life is not one of them.

<comment><USER20> It was a bit of a loaded question, in all fairness.

Readers unfortunately aren't sophisticated as we should be, to know the difference between journalism and an opinion piece and what the goals of each are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree with a lot of the points this article makes. What worked for me was to have a co-founder who basically handled everything that was not coding.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dorsey is a fashionable dresser, but what about Zuckerberg.

</comment><comment><USER24> "For example, engineers are largely insulated from the maddening world of government bureaucracy."

What field? Not my buddies in civil. Not my EE buddies. Absolutely not my MechEng buddies. ChemEng? LOL.

He might, possibly, be talking about "network engineers" but any WAN ones will have all kinds of fun with the hyperregulated telcos and any supporting exotic wireless will have all kinds of fun with the FCC. At a previous employer when the SEC said "jump", the software engineers said "how high?" so they don't count.

</comment><comment><USER25> Asking anybody to be a triple-A engineer -- without which there is simply nothing to sell -- and in addition to that NOT to do things in terms of sales and finance that could seriously damage the thing, means that there are indeed only that many Sergey Brins or Larry Pages on this planet ...</comment>


"Spiel des Jahres" Game of the Year 2017 winners - <AUTHOR> http://spieldesjahres.com/en/game_archive/2017 <comment><USER2> One of the more interesting games that, in the UK, had pretty much gone no where, was "Settlers of Catan". Then, around 1998 IIRC, it got a 10/10 in a gaming magazine and I think this, very much, spawned the revival of German board games on the UK games scene.

Before then it really was mainly war games (warhammer et al), RPGs, and card games (Magic TG from about 1993 onwards).

There are some absolutely fantastic games out there, but just don't buy from the top X games. Know the size of your play group and buy to suit them.

For example Agricola is a great game, but works best with 3-4 players. My group has 5 players so it's "ok" [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31260/agricola](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31260/agricola)

Recent games that have surprised us. If you like poker, Sheriff of Nottingham and 5 players is exceptionally good fun in a group prepared to be able to put on silly voices and get into character. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/157969/sheriff- nottingha...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/157969/sheriff-nottingham)

Also Camel Up is great for parties (up to 10 people with the expansion) and kids love it as well but is a lot of fun in groups of 5 [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/153938/camel](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/153938/camel)

Group dynamic is important in buying the 'right' game but you cannot go wrong with Settlers of Catan if you can get 4 players. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13/catan](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13/catan)

If you have a local game shop, or even better, a local games cafe, you can usually get a chance to try out a game. Just remember to buy from them. They are your gateway to a whole new dynamic computer games has pretty much tried to destroy.

Board games are so so so good these days, just avoid Monopoly. ;)

<comment><USER3> > Board games are so so so good these days, just avoid Monopoly. ;)

According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monopoly_(game)&o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monopoly_\(game\)&oldid=789999945) Monopoly was intended as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one in which monopolists work under few constraints.

In other words and put much more harshly: Monopoly is played the right way if after a short time one player is happily winning and all the other ones are really angry.

<comment><USER4> This really should have been written on the box explicitly.

I didn't see the connection until someone pointed it out to me when I was already an adult. All I have from this game is memories of boredom playing it with family as a kid.

<comment><USER5> If you were bored playing Monopoly, you were probably not playing with the real rules (i.e. you had no auctions, you used free parking, etc).

Played correctly, Monopoly isn't a terribly long game, and (usually) once someone gets ahead, it is a fairly quick steamroll.

<comment><USER6> This comes up every time somebody complains about Monopoly but even with auctions the game is still far too long and ends well after the winner is apparent.

<comment><USER3> Then the players are probably much too nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kingdomino is perfectly fine, but I felt the SdJ nominees this year were all pretty safe choices. If anything, I would've preferred Magic Maze, which seems to be the most unique of the SdJ nominees. Plus, Honshu, which also came out this year, is a much better bid-and-build-domino-cities game than Kingdomino, but I understand it's a little more complex than the average SdJ winner.

Meanwhile, Exit winning the Kennerspiel frustrates me. It's a solid design, and the escape-room-in-a-box can be quite fun, but it's hardly a gamer's game and the other nominees were incredible.

I guess my takeaway is that the SdJ is built up too much and doesn't reflect my segment of the hobby very well.

<comment><USER8> Honshu is good, but I actually prefer Kingdomino myself. The bidding for turn order with the cards that form the pool of cards you get to choose from is a little hard for people to wrap their heads around, and seems a bit arbitrary, although it does work.

Magic Maze has the whole no-communicating bit going against it, although it does look interesting and I would like to play it. I'm surprised it got the nomination, and the nomination alone will bring a lot more attention to that game, so that's cool.

<comment><USER7> Funny, that is exactly what makes the game delightful for me: the dual-use of evaluating whether I want to use a card for its bid or try to hang onto it (or both). But yes, Kingdomino admittedly has a much simpler flow to it there, and hence is better for a broader audience that the committee is targetting. Also strictly speaking I don't know if Honshu had a German release this year anyway?

I totally agree that non-communication is a disappointing game mechanic; it almost always ends up being quite... _impure_ design-wise? It still ended up feeling like the most dynamic of the 3 games for me, though admittedly my opinion of El Dorado is only from one play and word of mouth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a digital nomad. I'd like something a bit more exciting than simple card or dice games, but space is at a bit of a premium. Any recommendations for games that have a lot of depth (and thus can be played over and over), are very quick to pick up the basics (so we can teach others), and are physically tiny (or can be)?

<comment><USER8> An iPad. Seriously, most board and card games either have or are in the process of getting an app nowadays. You can load that sucker up with hundreds of deep complex games with good A.I. and play them to your heart's content.

Also, a lot of games have a lot of empty space in their box. I've been able to fit 6 games in the space of a Targi box, for example (great 2 player game that's deep but small, btw). I think I managed to put Targi, Tides of Time, Lost Cities, a Smash Up expansion (playable at 2 players), and a couple others in there.

I'd also recommend a 6 Nimmmt! or a Rage deck (has 6 suits numbered 0-15, suitable for a lot of modern card games). There are a whole bunch of games you can play with those decks and they take up no space at all. Also 6 Nimmmt! is a blast with 6+ players, in my opinion.

Also I'm a game designer, and I find myself bringing out a Rage deck pretty often to prototype new ideas. It's very versatile. Just did it again for a new idea yesterday.

6 Nimmmt: [https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/24313/games-playable- deck...](https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/24313/games-playable- deck-6-nimmtor-category-5-please-ad)

Rage: [https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/1907/games-playable- rage-...](https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/1907/games-playable-rage-deck- not-ccg-please-add)

Some smaller footprint but deeper games I'd recommend are Arboretum, Akrotiri, Kahuna, Targi, Bohnanza, Noir: Killer vs Assassin, Tichu (can be played with standard playing cards and 4 marked up jokers, or with the aforementioned Rage deck.. super deep partner game), Biblios, Armadora, 12 Days, R-Eco, Condottiere, For Sale (playable with 6 Nimmmt! and some tokens), The Game (playable with 6 Nimmmt! deck).

<comment><USER10> This is really anecdotal, and I don't have a ton of experience with iPad versions of board games, but I've tried several on Android and it feels like all of them are _just slightly_ rough around the edges. It's really hard to put my finger on it but something about them is just slightly unsatisfying to use. Maybe it's the performance or lack of snappy animations or sounds. Hearthstone is one that feels pretty good to play.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, this is one of the areas where iOS has a real advantage over Android -- the iOS games are frequently better polished and put together. (That's been true every time I've looked -- which I've done multiple times, but not constantly, so maybe things have/will shift; I dunno.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I found TIME Stories to be an expensive box of disappointment. You can play it only once since there is only one scenario in the box and you need to buy others after that. You'll be done with it in a couple hours

<comment><USER13> We are in the realm of opinion, so I want to offer a contrasting one. We had a great time with it, and yes, it was a one-off thing. The scenarios are about $15 a pop which compared to taking the same group of friends to a movie is a bargain. (and MUCH more engaging, imo) It is like a multi-player point and click adventure with light roleplaying elements. I don't know if it should have won the SDJ, but then again, it didn't. :)

EDIT: added more specific description of what I liked about it, in an attempt to up the quality of my comment.

<comment><USER14> Same here, we loved it. Played it together with my partner.

We immediately ordered a second scenario after completing the first. The price was worth it for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, kingdomino got an award. I got a copy last year from a friend who picked it up at Essen. It is excellent. Pretty easy to learn, plays in 15 minutes, hidden depths to strategy. Great gateway game, and not too expensive either.

My only house rules are to remove the bonus points for a full board and centered castle, and to allow someone to declare a broken board and discard a tile at any time (instead of discarding their last tile).

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I don't like playing with the full board and centered castle for bonus points variants either. It seems unnecessary in most games, and just punishes someone who has a slightly less optimal board even further (they're probably not going to win it anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a feeling Kingdomino would win it. It feels like a classic pretty much right out of the box and is really easy to teach people, yet still provides just enough decisions to engage the brain and be enjoyable. It also has nice chunky components and a fun spatial puzzle to work out.

I think my copy is going to get played quite a bit in the years to come, and I don't think I'll be getting rid of it for a long, long time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone have suggestions for two-player games?

<comment><USER17> \- Jaipur (set collection)

\- Love Letter (any flavor; draw a card and play one)

\- Condottiere (bidding/bluffing game to take over italy)

\- Citadels (drafting)

\- Masquerade (hidden-ish roles; better at two than Coup is)

\- Portal of Heroes (scales well up to 5)

\- Star Realms (deck-building)

\- Splendor (similar to Jaipur but chips rather than cards)

\- Codenames: Duet

<comment><USER16> Lovely, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Link should be [http://spieldesjahres.com/en/game_archive/2017](http://spieldesjahres.com/en/game_archive/2017)

<comment><USER19> Ok, changed from [http://spieldesjahres.com/en/awardwinners](http://spieldesjahres.com/en/awardwinners). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Title should say [2017], all of the winners are [http://spieldesjahres.com/en/game_archive](http://spieldesjahres.com/en/game_archive)</comment>


Milkman (Postman alternative) now available as native image - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman/blob/feature/graal/milkman-dist-graal/readme.md <comment><USER2> Meh. JavaFX is far from native and is still a memory hog despite it being cross-platform.

Meanwhile, Paw sounds like a better alternative for Mac users [0].

[0] [https://paw.cloud](https://paw.cloud)

<comment><AUTHOR> using GraalVm, it actually is as close to native as you can get ;)

<comment><USER2> As it stands UI wise, it still isn't native and sticks out like a sore thumb, even looks worse than the Electron alternatives, quite frankly.

Paw is native and 'looks and feels' native for me to use on my Macbook.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Is No Friend of Power.com - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/facebook-sues-powercom/

<comment><USER2> So, let's get this straight.

1\. It is fair for Facebook to ask for usernames and passwords to Gmail, Hotmail, et. al. to provide functionality to their users.

2\. It is unfair for Power.com to ask for Facebook usernames and passwords to provide functionality to their users.

<comment><USER3> If it's in Facebooks TOS that you need to access their site specifically through them then yes, Power.com is in the wrong.

<comment><USER4> Then they should ban the users who access through a proxy. A site can't put up a TOS that says you can't access through a proxy and then wait for it happen to sue. The web would be chocked full of liabilities if shit like that were allowed to happen. Searching Google would be too dangerous, what if one of the sites in a SERP had a TOS against coming from a referrer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title here is misleading to me... it sounds like the kerfuffle is about Power.com not using the proper APIs and instead choosing to capture login credentials. That's a real breach of security, and given that Facebook implements an alternate authentication method, seems completely unnecessary. Maybe I'm missing something; is there anything you can do with direct logins that you cannot with Facebook Connect and full permissions?

<comment><USER6> "is there anything you can do with direct logins that you cannot with Facebook Connect and full permissions"

Yes, and that is exactly the problem. Facebook's APIs enforce very strict access controls on the data available to external or embedded applications. If you have my user name and password, you effectively have full permissions.

Secure by design means no access by default. Sometimes, there are things not yet or not fully exposed to the APIs under the API's definition of full permissions. Other times, the granularity of access controls doesn't exactly match what your application needs. The user name and password lets you avoid playing by the rules and has the potential to greatly undermine user confidence in the security of their data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had never heard of power.com until now... no such thing as bad publicity?

That said, I don't use any of the social networks they support, except Facebook...</comment>


Rubinius Retort : What "Ruby in Ruby" really means - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/04/28/rubinius-retort/ <comment><USER2> I have to say that I'm not too thrilled by this move to VMs by everyone in the Ruby world. One of the things that I absolutely love about Ruby 1.8 is that when performance is a dog I can just replace the slow Ruby code with fast C code. Writing extensions is dead easy. With a VM this can ony be a much more convoluted process.

An example (which is a bit Russian Dolls nested in nature) - I recently wrote a tool that takes various modules from a C project with an embedded target, and places them inside a VM to obfuscate the code. Because it's embedded code, we needed to be able to only place selected modules in the VM, for performance reasons, but we needed the transition between VM and native C code to be transparent (Basically, everything is coded in C, but we compile some modules for the VM, not the target).

To make this work, I wrote a tool that generates glue code to cross the interface. Code is generated automatically for both sides of the interface. This requires the use of a C parser, which for performance reasons is mostly written in C. But the high level analysis is done in Ruby, as is code generation, various sandbox management tasks and other peripheral tasks. If I couldn't have written the front end of the parser in C using yacc, the performance would be horrible. As the sandbox is quite large (300 000 lines of code), performance of the parser is a major issue. I don't know how easy it is going to be to port this stuff to the new impls....</comment>


De-batching, or how to juggle too many balls - <AUTHOR> http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/04/23/de-batching-or-how-to-juggle-too-many-balls

<comment><USER2> I started using similar method few months ago and it works well for me. I wrote a simple web app to help me with this... Smacklet <http://www.smacklet.com></comment>


Satoshi - <AUTHOR> http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi <comment><USER2> Shouldn't proof would be as simple as somebody moving 1 bitcoin known to be linked to Satoshi? All else is myth, anecdote and manipulation. Show us the money :)

<comment><USER3> Nah, 1 bitcoin is excessive... only need to move 1 satoshi right? :)

<comment><USER2> Right, but the guy is a billionaire, he could show off a bit :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last time I watched a video of Craig, I was so completely convinced he was not the type of person to be Satoshi.

Now, given this blog post, what I'm wondering is: maybe Satoshi offered his private keys to this guy to avoid problems in the future, and so that they stop chasing him?

EDIT: s/sold/offered/ (because I believe Satoshi doesn't have the need to sell anything these days)

<comment><USER5> > maybe Satoshi sold his private keys to this guy to avoid problems in the > future?

That's the best theory I've heard so far. That would explain why he chose a weak verification message (the Sartre quote, instead of a message that proves the signature to be recent). The real Satoshi would have chosen a different proof, but Wright doesn't know any better.

<comment><USER6> >The real Satoshi would have chosen a different proof

How could you know what the real Satoshi would do?

<comment> TD-Linux The Bitcoin genesis block includes a newspaper headline from that day to prove that it wasn't constructed earlier ('premined').

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Craig signed a message that I chose ("Gavin's favorite number is eleven. > CSW" if I recall correctly) using the private key from block number 1.

> That signature was copied on to a clean usb stick I brought with me to > London, and then validated on a brand-new laptop with a freshly downloaded > copy of electrum.

> I was not allowed to keep the message or laptop (fear it would leak before > Official Announcement).

> I don't have an explanation for the funky OpenSSL procedure in his blog > post."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4hfyyo/gavin_can_you_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4hfyyo/gavin_can_you_please_detail_all_parts_of_the/d2plygg)

</comment><comment><USER8> Turns out Craig is still a fraud. He searched the blockchain for interesting texts signed by Satoshi and then claimed one was proof that he was Satoshi. The Sartre quote has been hanging out on the blockchain for years.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, can you link to the sartre quote on some public block explorer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wait. Are we sure Gavin wrote this? Has Gavin confirmed this anywhere else?

Gavin doesn't mention it on his Twitter account.

Does anyone have a primary source that corroborates this from Gavin?

<comment><USER11> Somebody could do a NLP analysis on the last post and compare to the rest of his writings to see if there are major discrepancies

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Main discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609611)

</comment><comment><USER13> Gavin, if you are wrong about this ...

I hope you are not but it sure looks like it

</comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a comment saying "This is sketchy as fuck" and was forced to delete it given the number of downvotes. Now that this has been debunked guess who was right..

<comment><USER15> Generally if you are polite and articulate WHY you are suspicious, people will cut you more slack.

I'm very reluctant to believe Craig Wright is Satoshi, but didn't have firm evidence (because he hadn't released info). Now that it appears the "signature of message" is just a signature from something else, it looks like he's actively a fraud, but I haven't validated it myself.

(The back-dated PGP key and alternate subkey from earlier was super sketch, but could have been someone else.)

You're probably right.

<comment><USER14> You are right I should've elaborated. To me it reeked of conspiracy, it was odd for both Anderson and Matonis to come out with parallel blog posts endorsing this guy without a solid proof. He could've signed the genisis block and be done with it but no they had to go through all this trouble.

Cryptographic proofs speak for themselves, just release them to the public instead of relying on a centralized authority (Anderson and Matonis) to verify them, which is ironic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Show everybody how you move one of those old Bitcoins in the early blocks. Other than that, this is just a circus.

</comment><comment><USER17> He is not Satoshi. He is just a fraud like most "entrepreneurs"

</comment><comment><USER18> Will the real Satoshi please stand up? I repeat, will the real Satoshi please stand up?</comment>


Thinking in Parallel - <AUTHOR> https://blog.baasil.io/thinking-in-parallel-d854e904d821 <comment><USER2> Is it just me that thinks the title is wrong ? I think networking is about concurrency rather than parallelism and parallelism is merely a resource that can be used when your code was written with concurrency in mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so because the article discusses sharding cross multiple processes (and therefore CPU cores) - Running in parallel.

You can handle multiple concurrent connections/requests on a single CPU core; but that would not classify as parallel processing. So the term 'parallel' is more specific than 'concurrent'.

The paragraph under 'Introduction' here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_computing) seems to give a pretty good definition.

<comment><USER2> "Understanding and expressing scalable concurrency" ( [https://people.mpi- sws.org/~turon/turon-thesis.pdf](https://people.mpi-sws.org/~turon/turon- thesis.pdf) ) addresses the difference between parallelism and concurrency in detail (page 11-12). Rereading that, I'm pretty sure the title is wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just read those few pages of the thesis. It seems to imply that concurrency has some sort of 'locking' or 'coordination' component. The 'Thinking in Parallel' article makes no mention of either of those concepts - Quite the opposite.

In French, the word 'concurrent' literally means 'competitor' \- Which in our case implies competition for computational resources (E.g. specific memory locations) - On the other hand, the 'Thinking in Parallel' article talks about how to partition resources in a way which removes the element of competition between processes - So the word 'Parallel' seems fitting.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately in the last few years concurrent and parallel have taken on technical meaning, so any understanding gained from what it means in the common tongue doesn't really help.

Concurrent is for separate entities working together in a coordinated manner. A prime example is threads working together on a work queue. Parallel is for a singular entity doing multiple things at the same time. For example a vector instruction that does multiple additions at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a big, abstract, and not entirely useful introduction to this post in order to describe a useful case of pub/sub (rather the exact or nearly exact case pub/sub was designed for).

</comment><comment><USER5> > To summarize; the key to thinking in parallel is to think about your data as > being made up of small, fixed-size subsets of data that can be dealt with > independently.

This isn't quite the idea behind thinking in parallel. In fact, parallelism is more about understanding the dependencies between any given piece of your program. Each piece need not necessarily be independent of another; rather, it's understanding _where the dependencies are_.</comment>


Crawling the Hacker News - <AUTHOR>

How legal and possible is that to crawl news.ycombinator.com and repost it on my blog, for instance? <comment><USER2> Perfectly possible. Ethical? Different question.

Further, if you annoy hackers and they think you are being unethical, they may choose to take more "direct action".

Why would you do this anyway? If you actually do some work and invest some effort, somehow to increase the value, it would be less objectionable. Perhaps curate, summarise, then point at the original.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to make it look more readable. Like that Chrome extension, just posted on some permanent url, so you can access it from anywhere.</comment>


Ask HN: Malwaremonger's moral bind - <AUTHOR> I have found a zero-day cross-platform exploit that is nasty (as in make-the-nightly-news nasty).  Mitnick doesn't want it.  Zerodium doesn't want it.  Apple and Microsoft don't even want to hear about it without my agreeing to give them exclusive rights to it (even to the exclusion of each other), before they even look at it.
What's the right and moral thing to do next?  Apple and Microsoft are making friendly (if half-hearted and half-assed) overtures to researchers with one hand while behind them are corporate lawyers preemptively giving all researchers the finger.  These lawyers strike me as the very same bullies who took your lunch money in school, and ready to do it again.
Is there any path forward that involves the right people taking the exploit seriously and perhaps a reasonable bounty for my trouble?  Or am I doomed to bury it, sell it on some darknet market to "tha NSA" or dump a guide on github? <comment><USER2> Bug bounties work by: You tell them what the bug is, they pay you money if it's real and dangerous. It's not a way for you to blackmail companies by threatening to give it to the dark web. That's a sure fire way to get lawyers involved.

The way you are asking mommy/daddy/uncle/aunty for who will pay more for your bug indicates you are not a trustworthy person and are not interested in doing the right thing. These companies will naturally not want to do business with you because you are not acting professionally.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple does not have a bug bounty program when it comes to macOS.

Bug bounty programs run by Apple (for their other platforms) and Microsoft require you to agree to their draconian terms and conditions before you can even submit the bug.

As to the rest of those pithy comments, I'll try not to take them too much to heart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I read "right and moral" but I have the feeling you're more disappointed that you can't profit from the exploit as you've hoped.

<comment><USER2> That isn't quite fair to the OP. Wanting to make money for your efforts is not mutually exclusive to doing the right thing.

That said, if you really want to do the right thing, you'd submit it to the companies running the bug bounties. They aren't going to pay you first just to hear what it is. That'd be blackmail. Either you trust the big companies to be fair and pay you, or you don't, but you should choose which.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like the payout is higher if you auction it on the darknet, so you're doing mental gymnastics to invent justifications to satisfy the voice in your head that knows that isn't the right thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER5> No corporation is a monolythic entity. You may just not be talking to the real right people.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my thought as well. My hope is one will see and respond to this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not clear about what the problem is. I was under the impression several large IT companies have bug bounty programs; is this not the case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple does not have a bug bounty program when it comes to macOS.

Bug bounty programs run by Apple (for their other platforms) and Microsoft require you to agree to their draconian terms and conditions before you can even submit the bug.

<comment><USER6> So if this is a macOS bug, you forget about it and get on with your life. If it's something else for which a bounty would be payable - what are the terms and conditions, exclusivity? -then you go ahead and agree to that and hopefully get paid. Is there something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're not telling us why you got turned down. Do they not share your assessment of how severe the vulnerability is?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're assuming they told me. I would gather not, or perhaps, they did not consider it to be a salable asset, or not one they couldn't develop themselves.</comment></comment>


Dreaming in Reverse Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://sweetcode.io/dreaming-reverse-engineering/ <comment><USER2> That routinely happens to me too -- finding solutions in the morning of the next day (revelation typically comes while I am in the shower), after having banged my head at the problem for several days before.

Putting the subconscious to work... I read somewhere that his is how it has to be done -- "stimulate" it hard enough first, then "disconnect" and let it run free-wheeled.

Does anyone have any particular tricks and hints to improve this process?

<comment><USER3> Not for sleeping hours but I've discovered that going for a run is a boost of creativity. And related to this, I would say that any automated task that you can do almost with your eyes closed, without paying attention, free your mind enough to see things from totally different perspectives.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree (swimming and running in my case), but this leads us to the next very controversial question -- how much our free time off the job during the day, impacts our results on the job (so shouldn't we have more of it)? I know I am not creative past 6-7 hours a day at work.

This question is of course applicable only to people in positions where creativity is heavily involved in producing the value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I played the game another way, without reverse engineering but with execution tricks:

> > [https://gist.github.com/kpouget/d13b6328dd6ad8489affb3d24ad8...](https://gist.github.com/kpouget/d13b6328dd6ad8489affb3d24ad8a81a)

1/ a simple GDB.py trick: `make debug` (passme.py ) 2/ a not-so-easy-in-the- end LD_PRELOAD trick: `make run` (passme.c)

<comment><USER5> Mind asking a few things? What's the purpose of this line

      void *call_addr = (void *)CHECKSUM_CALL_ADDR;

to then casting the rvalue to a double void pointer here:

      void **target = (void **)CHECKSUM_CALL_ADDR;

(why not just void*) ? Also, even though mprotect() succeeds, I got a segfault.

<comment><USER4> > Mind asking a few things?

sure! nothing and nothing ;-) they were just leads I was trying. `target` was for:

        void **target; *target = *mov_addr; // move sizeof((void *) bits

I've updated the gist.

> Also, even though mprotect() succeeds, I got a segfault.

try in GDB something like:

        (gdb) disassemble main
        ...
        0x00000000004005dd <+64>:	mov    %rax,%rdi
        0x00000000004005e0 <+67>:	callq  0x400566 <checksum>
        0x00000000004005e5 <+72>:	mov    %rax,-0x8(%rbp)
        0x00000000004005e9 <+76>:	cmpq   $0xad4,-0x8(%rbp)
        ....
        (gdb) break passme.c:62
        (gdb) continue # should ends up *after* the memcpy
        (gdb) disassemble main
        ...
        0x00000000004005dd <+64>:	mov    %rax,%rdi
        0x00000000004005e0 <+67>:	movl   $0xad4,-0x8(%rbp)
        0x00000000004005e7 <+74>:	nop
        0x00000000004005e8 <+75>:	nop
        0x00000000004005e9 <+76>:	cmpq   $0xad4,-0x8(%rbp)

and in both disassemblies, look around 0x4005e0 (<main+67>) to see how instructions have been overwritten. In the second disassembly, if you see strange-looking instructions (eg clc), there was a problem with the copy / the instruction copied. Let me know !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ray Kurzweil also talks about routinely using sleep and dreams to gain new perspective to difficult problems:

[http://www.afb.org/info/living-with-vision-loss/using- techno...](http://www.afb.org/info/living-with-vision-loss/using- technology/ray-kurzweil/part-2-of-4/1245)

</comment><comment><USER7> This was a fun puzzle and learning challenge. Glad to see the next generation is still suffering with null terminators :)

</comment><comment><USER8> That happenned to me aswell all through university!

I found that sometimes while debugging something, we go very deep into the problem and trying to understand every little details. Sleep helps get your mind back on the original issue and look at it from another perspective, in a more relaxed way.</comment>


Manipulate Machines, Not People - <AUTHOR> http://johnstanderfer.com/2012/03/13/manipulate-machines-not-people/

<comment><USER2> I think this is an inherent side effect of advertising-based revenue models. As they say "if you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold".

If you sell something for money, there's a single moment where your interests diverge from your customers -- when you accept payment. But the rest of you customer interactions are all about adding value.

<comment><USER3> I think you hit the nail on the head. But it does restrict the ambit of the possible for web properties to ones where the end-user both understands the value and is willing to pay the cost of the service being provided. It would be impossible to build facebook or google without an advertising based business model, you just can't reach critical mass.

<comment><USER4> " It would be impossible to build facebook or google without an advertising based business model,"

really? just like that . . . why give up so easily? let's throw some intelligence at the problem instead of just assuming it's not possible.

<comment><USER3> Recognizing the harsh practical reality is not "giving up"; if you're acting under the constraint that the end user of a web service must also be the customer, then you cannot under any circumstances get people to pay the actual costs per/customer of building something like Facebook or Google. There are other businesses that you could build at that scale that do fit under that constraint, but not web services that depend on millions of simultaneous users to produce any value at all.

The best estimates I have for what it costs google to provide service to one customer for 1/year is $20 < n < $24 and Facebook is probably more, can you name even one person of your acquaintance who would pay even $12/year for either of those services...? Even if hardly anyone else was using them? Before they were big?

So yeah, impossible, at least in the given constraints; like asking for a 50 seat airplane that's self-piloted, safer than current small planes AND costs less than $500 to build.

You might argue about my definition of impossible, but this isn't reddit, and I hope you recognize and understand that difference.

<comment><USER2> According to Facebook's S1 filings, their expenses correspond to roughly $1 per user per year, and their revenue is $4 per user per year.

I would pay > $4 per year if it meant I controlled my Facebook data (i.e., I was the customer, not the product).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We might be more focused on getting people to do things, but it doesn't need to be just about getting people to sign up for things. We can also use software to make people behave better, to make people's lives better.

Just yesterday there was a post from Grouper talking about how they figured out basically a hack to get people not to flake out ([http://blog.joingrouper.com/intro-to-social-hacking-how- we-l...](http://blog.joingrouper.com/intro-to-social-hacking-how-we-lowered- our-ca)). Anil Dash talks about using technology to create more civil conversations on the web ([http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites- full-of-assh...](http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of- assholes-its-your-fault.html)). If you ask me, those are good developments and we should focus more on figuring out how to create online communities that are best. That may involve some manipulation but it may all be for the best.

<comment><USER6> > We can also use software to make people behave better, to make people's > lives better.

Progressive (US car insurance company) gave my girlfriend this device that she plugs into her car's diagnostic port. The incentive is that if an insured driver agrees to use the thing and wants to "prove" they are a good driver. In return the user gets an insurance discount if their driving stats are good.

The little object does something very basic: It counts the number of "hard stops" in every trip and uses cellphone networks to report the data. People can then go look up the stats online. 2 hard stops for this trip, 7 for this trip, etc.

Eventually it turns into a sort of game to eliminate the hard stops from your driving routine. You pay more attention to driving because of it and therefore become a more attentive driver.

At the end of 6 months you send the device back and your insurance is adjusted (or not).

This is a huge win-win for software making people behave better:

1\. Girlfriend gets a lower insurance rate

2\. Progressive has evidence she is not an insane driver

3\. Most interestingly, the device has forced her to be (seemingly) permanently more conscious about her driving and has made her a better driver. Not only does the device find bad drivers, but it can convince many to become better drivers, possibly without them even knowing it!

Literally software has consciously and unconsciously made her into a better driver and literally every party involved (her, progressive, people near her on the road) are better off for her having used this device.

<comment><USER7> Yes, yes the potentials here are limitless! Only downside: Less privacy and freedom.

At the moment it might be a nice discount for those who choose to volunteer. Its easy to see a future where it will be impossible to get affordable insurance if you opt out.

Now exchange car insurance with health insurance. My health habits are probably better than average. I do plenty of sports, no overweight, no smoking, not a heavy drinker etc.. In order to get an appropriate discount I would have to record my whole life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with author whole-heatedly that the software-development industry has shifted from manipulating machines to manipulating people. Writing software today is more about the content that the software provides than about figuring out how to make that actual software work.

Any modern web-based business must think of themselves as a media company. The software designers must ask themselves not how can I make something happen, but what content should I deliver to my users. There has been a paradigm shift in the industry. The code and how it works is irrelevant, and what matters most is the media that your service offers.

The author seems to wish that this weren't so, but unfortunately it is. I wish it weren't so, but it is. There does not seem to be any way around the issue.

<comment><USER9> _"There does not seem to be any way around the issue."_

Do something different. Write software that solves real problems and give it away. Fund yourself by coding for companies that solve real problems.

This isn't complicated.

<comment><USER10> Why do you have to give it away? Does a web-based tool like Jira not count as a way of solving problems for people and making money at the same time?

I don't agree that all web-based businesses are media companies. It's possible to do real work and solve problems on the web and have nothing to do with "media" or advertising or social anything.

<comment><USER8> What are the top websites today? Facebook, Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, ect. What are examples of the up and coming websites? Pininterest? Reddit?

All of these websites are media based. These websites focus on the content that they provide. None of these services, with the exception of perhaps Google, really care about software development. All of them care about their sites content.

Because all of these websites are media based, their business models revolve around ads and click counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1) Why is manipulating people inherently bad? The author simply throws:

> "The downside to this model is it that the company's and user's interests > can never be aligned because the user is not the one paying for the > product."

But he doesn't expand on it. To get users you still need a good product even if it's free or users would use something else. Part of the lessons behind increasing click through rates is to build a desirable user experience. The users are not wiring you money directly, but they're still worth money indirectly. Just saying "every free product must be bad for the consumer" sounds like a simplistic over-generalization.

2) How is every business not manipulating people instead of just machines? There isn't a black or white here. You don't manipulate machines simply out of love to build a genius technological innovation. You do it to manipulate people. Each piece of hardware or line of code is put in place trying to solve the same questions the author poses for manipulating people. Which GPU I need for users to buy games? Which algorithm gives better recommendations that the user will actually click on? Businesses manipulate machines while manipulating people. Only hobbyists do otherwise.

3) Is he using Apple as an example of a company who favors manipulating machines over people? Apple are the most extreme example of the contrary. They're genius at manipulating people. Many here will point out their technology are just small evolution over what existed before. But it's their genius marketing, branding and expert people manipulation skills that convince users their products are status symbols worth of their loyalty. And there's nothing wrong with these. Every business wish they had the people expertise that Apple does. That's what make businesses work. It's genius people skills that brings genius machine skills into user's hands.

</comment><comment><USER12> Advertising is all about manipulating people. Furthermore successful advertising is all about making the perceived voluntary cost to the user smaller than the perceived value to the advertiser. If you took Facebook's revenue and divided it by the number of users, I'm guessing they would lose a lot of customers by charging that amount as a subscription fee.

If you don't advertise, you need to charge money.

If you charge money, and a competitor launches with successful advertising, then you will go out of business since the perceived cost for their users is lower than what you need to charge to stay in business.

</comment><comment><USER13> "I wonder what a company like Facebook could build if it could treat its users as customers instead of products."

Not exactly sure that treating users as customers is better by much than treating them as products. How about treating users as users and let it flow from there?

<comment><USER4> how about treating users as people, because they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was expecting an article on management styles. I left a firm after it was taken over by people who wanted absolute control of behavior. This was attained through Bolshevist Change Management meetings and mandatory ITIL course attendance. ITIL, for those who don't know, is the Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library, a collection of smug, manipulative, platitudinous and mind-numbingly boring volumes that serve as an outlet for the frustrated British Colonialist impulse, and all this implies (think Parkinson's law).</comment>


CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/ <comment><USER3> > "They want to kill people with my software that doesn't work"

Let's see, we assassinate people without any trial, in a country we are not even at war with, and the obvious problem is that the software is a little buggy.

What is "buggy" here is the whole assassination system. When Bush wanted to dispatch special ops around the world to assassinate "terrorists", everyone was up and arms about it, When Obama does the same thing using drones, nobody seems to care, and the problem is a couple of bugs in the software.

<comment><USER4> There was a great piece whose identifying information I'm blanking on that explained how we stumbled into drone warfare. Basically, we tried doing snatch & grabs with commando teams for a while, and that kept generating one negative externality we weren't willing to tolerate. Illegal acts? No. Media pressure? No. Collateral damage? No. Diplomatic reprecussions? No. _Prisoners._

Prisoners are a real handful. What are our options? Let them go? Well, no gain there. Put a bullet in the back of their head? Americans won't go for it. Try them in a civilian court? You get to expose sources & methods, they might walk anyhow (evidence tends to be testimony of equally unsavory characters plus something classified to the nth degree and not worth burning on Mook #473), and the _successful_ outcome is they go plot their next terrorist act from a federal penitentiary. Try them in military court? All the fun of a civilian court, and the New York Times editorial board will make it sound like you took the bullet option anyhow.

You know what has never once happened as a result of a Predator drone strike? A live prisoner in US custody.

<comment><USER5> Interesting anecdote: up until WWII or so, American commanders had little problem dealing with enemy noncombatants on the battlefield. There was a brief trial followed by an execution.

Over time, the whole trial and such got to be counter-productive for the military, all that publicity and such. Warfare became much more a PR game. So commanders started emphasizing killing over capturing.

This trend has nothing to do with the war on terror. Eisenhower back in WWII sent out memos to his commanders saying he didn't want to see a lot of snipers being captured. The implications were pretty clear. Drone warfare is just the continuation of this larger trend.

<comment><USER6> _American commanders had little problem dealing with enemy noncombatants on the battlefield._

Did you mean combatants? Typically noncombatants would refer to medical personnel, chaplains, etc. It'd be interesting to know if people like this were routinely tried and executed.

<comment><USER7> No, a chaplain in a military uniform is a combatant as far as the Geneva Convention is concerned, and must be treated as a POW.

The term more recently used was "unlawful combatant".

<comment><USER6> _Though the Geneva Conventions do not state whether chaplains may bear arms, they specify (Protocol I, 8 June 1977, Art 43.2) that chaplains are noncombatants. In recent years both the UK and US have required chaplains, but not medical personnel, to be unarmed. Other nations, notably Norway, Denmark and Sweden, make it an issue of individual conscience. Captured chaplains are not considered Prisoners of War (Third Convention, 12 August 1949, Chapter IV Art 33) and must be returned to their home nation unless retained to minister to prisoners of war._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplain#Military>

<comment><USER7> I stand corrected :-)

But the point still stands - a chaplain in uniform on the battlefield wouldn't be tried and executed at a drumhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You really can't tell a lot from this article. It all comes down to what this piece of software does. A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands off target.

They definitely aren't modifying the guidance system on the weapon - <USER2> weapons are not built by the CIA. It sounds like this piece of software helps them correlate coordinates for targeting from one computer system to another. That may be bad, it may not.

(Also, in my experience the vetting of designs is pretty rigorous, but I work on the mechanical side and our customer is DOD not CIA so your results may vary.)

<comment><USER9> > A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands > off target.

Someone on reddit pointed out that even if it does, it doesn't matter. If the kill radius is 20 yards, and the bugs mean that it has an error of up to 5 yards... that's not really significant.

edit: Unless, of course, you happen to be bombing something next to an elementary school, a mosque, or a hospital.

<comment><USER10> I would argue that any time accuracy (or any feature) is expected, then a lack of said feature does matter. You never know when someone somewhere could be relying on the fact that they can get within 5 yards.

<comment><USER11> Look up "circular error probable" (CEP). When they say "accurate to x meters", they might well mean that 50% of munitions land in an x meter circle --- the other 50%? anywhere (maybe gaussian distro). So all this talk of x meter accuracy is quite misleading.

<comment><USER12> That may be true, but (assuming a normal distribution [1]) that would also imply that 99% of shots land within 2.6x meters (assuming I didn't mess up my arithmetic).

Whoever is doing the aiming gets a big red circle that encloses the margin of error. If you are off by 5 meters, that big red circle is in the wrong place. The pilot expects a 1% chance of error, in reality it might be 4% (i.e., 4x as many screwups).

[1] Of course it isn't a normal distribution, but this only changes the programming details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love government contracting. First we pick a schedule, then we pick a technology, then we decide who gets the contract and who will supervise the execution of said contract. The best part? When something gets delivered, no matter how sad a state of affairs it is code-wise, no matter how difficult or expensive it will be to bring up to any sensible standards of maintainability, they won't pay for it. No, they'll only pay for a new feature.

This is why government contracting is fun. You never know when a story like this is going to come out and if you're going to be involved with it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Let me get this straight, the drone is inaccurate by the worst case 13m. So the drone itself is off by at most 13m, while being 26,000ft in the air. This hardly seems like a major issue to me, according to wikipedia the Predator drone is equipped with hellfire munition, which have their own laser guided trajectory. Depending on the type the hellfire munition has approximately 8000ft range, so something tells me the drone itself doesn't guide the hellfire to the ground.

But 13m? I'm no munitions/combat expert, but I assume 13m discrepancy, even if it does apply to the hellfire itself, won't make much of a difference. Something is going to get blown up anyway, even if it is off by 13meters the target will essentially no longer be there.

</comment><comment><USER10> The CIA does not seem to be having very good press karma with their drones, if I recall there was a few issues with data stream encryption, and software that allowed hostiles to intercept and view UAV downlinks in the battle field. Perhaps its just tempting to write a story about such a high profile target, but it seems partly like some corner cutting is going on on the CIA's end.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't really care if it's illegal. But inaccurate? That's not good.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's the main problem with American foreign policy. _Win-Lose_ proposition is not scalable in globalized internet world.</comment>


Show HN: Ospry – Simple image hosting for developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.ospry.io

<comment><USER2> _Get started in 3 steps_ is assuming jQuery is being used - please include Vanilla JS option.

<comment><USER3> Here you go:

       var ospry = new Ospry('YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY');

       //UPLOAD
       var el = document.getElementById('up-form');
       el.addEventListener('onsubmit',function(e) {
         e.preventDefault();
         ospry.up({
           form: this,
           imageReady: imageReady,
         });
       },false);

       //DOWNLOAD
       ospry.get({
         url: metadata.url,
         maxHeight: 400,
         imageReady: function(err, domImage) {
           document.appendChild(domImage);
         },
       });

It's the same amount of steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> pricing compared to s3: assuming 5,000 photos ~5gb of data. $0.15 for storage 40gb of outgoing traffic is $4.80 So you're basically paying double the s3 prices for convenience. This service also does image manipulation and cdn integration. So you should also calculate your expected cost of using ec2 and a cdn. (BTW not ripping on the op. I like the service and was genuinely calculating the costs for my own use case).

<comment><USER5> Assuming you perfectly use the maximum capacity, at which point, the service is probably useless because no one can upload new photos.

It's super easy to do this if you're already running your website on ec2, and S3 for a few hundred photos will cost you less than a dollar per month.

Is this for Heroku users because running a single dyno to resize images costs $30 / month?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> $10/month for 5,000 images and 40GB of transfer.

No bulk bandwidth pricing, but $0.15/GB isn't a huge mark up over Rackspace's initial bandwidth price of $0.12. With room for 5000 images (2.5GB? 5GB?), it's a pretty slim margin if users really push it to the limit.

Not a bad deal, all things considered.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see services like this out there. I've been extremely happy with Cloudinary and have used that on several projects. I wonder why I would choose Ospry over that? I didn't seen any mention of transformations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out. Our privacy features come with every account. We also offer similar capacity to their Basic plan at lower cost. They have high total image allowances but you'd likely hit the storage limit before getting close to those totals.

We have more image processing features on the way, we'd love to hear your suggestions. Shoot us a mail at firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great job. Does the JS client support mobile browsers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We know it works on iOS7 and Android (KitKat). It should work on any browser that supports file inputs (see [http://viljamis.com/blog/2012/file- upload-support-on-mobile/](http://viljamis.com/blog/2012/file-upload-support- on-mobile/)). We also have native mobile libraries in the pipeline.</comment></comment>


First programmable quantum computer created  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49951/title/First_programmable_quantum_computer_created

<comment><USER2> The ENIAC of quantum computing? Perhaps not, but immensely exciting! Maybe it's more accurate to compare it to Colossus.</comment>


Slashdot Idle - finally admitting Digg is winning - <AUTHOR> http://idle.slashdot.org/ <comment><USER2> Digg is winning on what? The war for the most retarded users and comments on a news article?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that Slashdot has a niche that they stick to. Digg has grown wildly and as a result it is filled with crap that joe six-pack and his friends vote up. Slashdot values their core users, and it shows. They might not have as many articles or comments, but the comments on Slashdot are extremely insightful - i learn more from the comments on Slashdot than on any other social news site.

</comment><comment><USER4> Slashdot really doesn't get it and as a result, it's becoming a ghost town. I used to visit Slashdot constantly. Now I look once or twice a week.

Digg, Reddit, and even YNews to some extent, can be filled with junk but they let me decide what's important, rather than what someone named Commander Taco finds important. It's the same as Wikipedia: give me all the information and leave the onus on me to separate the wheat from the chaff.

</comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't improve the content, but I've always found using the slashdot search url to return more useful results. e.g.

<http://slashdot.org/search.pl?start=1>

instead of

<http://slashdot.org>

the search result leaves out the useless icons and article title bars.</comment>