How to undo almost anything with Git (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2015-06-08-how-to-undo-almost-anything-with-git/ <comment><USER2> Also worth noting: you can abort and undo many kinds of in-progress operations with "git <operation> —abort". Works for merge, rebase, and a few other things, and can seriously save your bacon when you do a "git merge <badbranch>" and are suddenly confronted with a bazillion merge conflicts.

Also, if you're in a panic because something went screwy, check "git status" and read every line carefully. status tells you a lot more than you might expect - what branch you're on, if you're even on a branch, what merge/rebase/commit operation you're in the middle of (if any), and even how to go forward with or back out of the current operation.

Finally, commit regularly and often! reflog and rebase mean that you can always maintain a clean history if you want, while committing makes sure that your changes are properly tracked and saved by git so you can rewind when needed. Once you get comfortable with it, git lets you really practice fearless experimentation, which unlocked a whole new level of productivity for me.

<comment><USER3> > check "git status" and read every line carefully.

Seconded, but I'd go even further. Run and read git status before and after running _any_ git command until you get comfortable enough with git to where you can predict the output without running it.

Additionally you can go get git prompt[1] installed so you always know your git status at a glance. Saves a lot of typing in any case.

As a last suggestion I'd say go read git-scm.com[2]. It has the excellently written man pages for looking up what a command does and which flags it takes. It also has an amazingly written free ebook explaining git top-to-bottom. After reading that you'll be a git wizard compared to your peers.

[1] [https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/gi...](https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/git- prompt.sh) [2] [https://git-scm.com/](https://git-scm.com/)

<comment><USER4> I totally second reading the book front to back. It is not that long and fairly well written, and can save so much time and frustration in the long run. Giving the link is the first thing I do when helping someone with git.

Unfortunately so many people put that aside and never read it, and then come back to me a few weeks later because they messed everything up again, and still do not understand what I mean with "index".

Git is very powerful but a bit awkward, so I consider knowing the underlying concepts necessary to use it properly.

<comment><USER3> I don't even think git is all that awkward. It's incredibly elegant but that also makes it somewhat orthogonal compared to how you're used to think about stuff.

I dunno, git is probably one of the few instances where I feel like RTFM is a valid remark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that made git click for me was to understand the data structures that make git work.

There's beauty and elegance in the implementation details of git. You can do and undo with confidence once you can translate the changes you want to make to git object transformations.

To get an overview of the concepts behind git I recommend this article by one of the GitHub founders: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git- parable.htm...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html)

To understand the data structures I suggest: [https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/git-from-the- inside...](https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/git-from-the-inside-out)

<comment><USER6> Here also my 'git from scratch' TODO for the new year list : [https://wyag.thb.lt/](https://wyag.thb.lt/)

<comment><USER7> This looks great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually somewhat surprised that this wasn't mentioned in the comments yet: [https://ohshitgit.com/](https://ohshitgit.com/) Which is a page that covers common mistakes using git and quick ways to fix your mistakes. I've found myself making a mistake mentioned on this page with regularity and always refer to the site to help myself fix it quickly.

(It looks like they have a swearing-safe version now at [https://dangitgit.com/](https://dangitgit.com/))

<comment><USER9> If you have to use the command line, those "gosh darn it git" sites have some good recipes. Because if the problem is "I accidentally committed to the wrong branch!" who is going to remember all this off the top of their head:

      # undo the last commit, but leave the changes available
      git reset HEAD~ --soft
      git stash
      # move to the correct branch
      git checkout name-of-the-correct-branch
      git stash pop
      git add . # or add individual files
      git commit -m "your message here";
      # now your changes are on the correct branch

Or you can use a powerful GUI like SmartGit. Then you don't have to memorize anything or look up a recipe. For the situation above, you simply drag your branch markers to where you want them in the log. Done!

Similarly, for situations where you would look up hashes in the reflog, just click the Recyclable Commits checkbox, and everything in the reflog shows up as ordinary commits in the same commit tree as everything else. You can even see diffs between the reflog commits and your regular commits without having to do any temporary checkouts.

I know many developers like the command line and don't want to consider using a GUI. But I encourage you to give SmartGit a try. It works in conjunction with the command line, so you you're not locked into the GUI, you can use either one whenever you want.

<comment><USER10> > It works in conjunction with the command line

Do you know of git GUIs that explicitly maintain a bijection between the GUI and the underlying command history? It'd be cool to use the GUI and see the command history, or use the CLI and see updates in the GUI.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but maybe close? SmartGit has an Output window that shows the underlying Git commands that it uses when you drag things around or use its commands. And if you make changes in the command line and then switch back to the SmartGit window, it updates to match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It has always bugged me that

        git commit --amend

Doesn't automatically resign (or fail to resign if the key isn't available) a signed git commit message. Anytime there is a non-verified git commit message in my history you can be sure it's because I was a dummy on the original message.

<comment><USER12> Wait, seriously? I sign all my commits as habit and I `--amend` regularly. If this means my signature histories are broken…

<comment><USER13>
      git config commit.gpgsign true

<comment><USER12> I already have this set, which is how I sign all my commits. If that ensures `git commit --amend` re-signs, then I'm happy.

<comment><USER13> AFAIK, it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This flowchart[1] has been useful to me a few times when I've been lost on how to fix something. I usually keep it as a bookmark, but I don't have it saved on this computer, so I just did a google image search and was able to fine it fairly quickly. A google image search for "git solution workflow" or "git fix flowchart" finds it right away, in case this tickles your brain in the future and you want to find it again, and vaguely remember it's easy to find through image search.

Edit: Updated the link to go to the site referenced in the image. Might as well send you to who developed it so they get some credit.

1: [http://justinhileman.info/article/git- pretty/](http://justinhileman.info/article/git-pretty/)

<comment><USER15> Why does the rebase command here include the --force flag? I don't think it's necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Git is one of those once-a-decade technologies that's compicated, user un- friendly, takes months to master and is absolutely worth it.

<comment><USER17> Git shouldn't take months to master if you can understand it conceptually rather than by use-cases. If instead of trying to learn commands to affect the working directory, staged files, or history, you learn how git organizes historical tree of commit hashes, then base what each operation does, it becomes much clearer. It's similar to trying to learn strings of shell pipe commands to get things done rather than realizing that there's pieces of work that each command can do. One tip is to use (even very temporary) branches rather than `stash`es unless it's absolutely short lived. And if you ever get lost, `reflog` is your friend.

For me, I had trouble first using `git` after experience with `cvs` and `subversion`. At some point, everything clicked because I inferred its internal model.

<comment><USER18> git's problem to newcomers - even people without any prior experience with diff-paradigm systems like SVN and TFS - is the idea of a commit representing a snapshot of a file system is difficult to comprehend because it feels so crazy and impractical (especially as CS101 makes a huge deal about computational complexity). The fact that git internally is actually quite efficient is buried in heavy articles about git's plumbing.

Oh, and the fact that a 'git checkout' is an unrelated concept to 'svn checkout' - and how SVN branches are "spatial" compared to git's "parallel- universes" model is also a source of confusion.

If I could go back in time to 2005 (in addition to getting in super early on bitcoin) I'd beg Linus to not reuse SVN terminology. Personally I'd go with "git switch" instead of checkout, and "timeline" or "line" for short instead of "branch". The fact that git branches are not 1-connected graph routes is enough reason not to call them "branches".

I'd also convince him to include a "gitd" mode that would automatically fetch from upstream and automatically add commits when it detects file-move/rename changes. (I understand why git doesn't have an exact "rename" op, but tooling today still isn't good enough to detect rename-then-edit or rename-then-split operations without an intermediate rename-only commit. My dream "gitd" would also make auto-commits every 30 seconds just to give me a powerful filesystem undo feature. If you had hours of work that resulted in new files before you staged them and you accidentally did a hard reset then you're sol - and this has happened to me already :/

<comment><USER19> When I used to use NetBeans the main feature I loved was the history feature.

Basically every save to every file was stored and diffable in a kind of self contained repo.

I've missed this feature in every other editor since.

<comment><USER20> IntelliJ IDEA has that feature (local history)

<comment><USER21> Can confirm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This page is from 2015 yet hasn't once came up on my searches to do a bunch of these things. Thanks for resharing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679367)

<comment><USER24> Managed to miss this first time, this is cool.

Also Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Except you can't undo git reset --hard unless of course you build a safety net. [https://gist.github.com/chx/3a694c2a077451e3d446f85546bb9278](https://gist.github.com/chx/3a694c2a077451e3d446f85546bb9278)

</comment><comment><USER26> For several months now I've been wondering how to get rid of a 700 MB data file that was accidentally committed to our shared git repo. Now everyone has it, and a clean pull takes forever. Appreciate any thoughts.

<comment><USER27> You should be able to run a command that cleans the git tree of the file in all commits. I've had to do it because of committed passwords in files.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35115585/remove-file- fro...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35115585/remove-file-from-all- commits)

<comment><USER17> When using `git filter-branch` it's much faster (up to 100x) to use the `--index-filter` option rather than `--tree-filter` as it only updates the git history and not the working directory. Docs and examples at [https://git- scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not reading. Nothing is ever as good as this flow chart: [http://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html](http://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> > You started a new branch feature based on master, but master was pretty far > behind origin/master

I'm bad at git. So... wait what now?

When is Master not Origin/Master? I don't understand what is going on there. Explain?

<comment><USER8> It means your local master is behind remote origin/master. (i.e. you needed to git pull)

<comment><USER29> OHH... ok! That makes sense. My last two projects I've been the only one committing so this pretty much can't happen. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's missing git revert merges

      git revert -m 1 88113a64a21bf8a51409ee2a1321442fd08db705

<comment><USER31> PSA: You can safely refer to those long "commit-ish" identifiers using just the first 7 or 8 chars (eg `88113a64`) without real risk of collision. Let alone in examples / gists!

<comment><USER32> Git will even warn you if the hash prefix you provide is ambiguous!

I had a collision the other day on a mediums-sized when using a 6 character hash and was surprised. Git let me know and told me which objects collided.

<comment><USER10> Wow, that's super unlikely. How many commits did the repo have?

According to [1] using 3 letters you'd need at least 72 commits to have at least 50% chance to observe a clash. Using 6 letters you'd need at least 3977 commits, lol.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#The_generaliz...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#The_generalized_birthday_problem)

<comment><USER33> I've been using git for going on ten years. You don't think I can pull off just one commit/day?

I use six character hashes, I don't recall that I've had a collision yet. But I guess I'm "due". :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> But can it also undo the undo?

Anyway, shouldn't git just come with a "undo" command?

<comment><USER35> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> git-extras has a tool called `git undo`. It's just a fancy wrapper around `git reset --soft HEAD` though.

<comment><USER37> Well you never know what these wrappers and aliases do, and ultimately need to understand what goes on under the hood.

Intellij has a "shelve" command, I decided to stick with "git stash". Magit has the "i", that does "ignore" but also cleans up already committed files, something like "git rm -r --cached ."

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I use GitUp.

</comment><comment><USER39> TLDR: Reflog. That is all.</comment>


Official Google Analytics Android App Released - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.giant

<comment><USER2> How does this compare with the popular gAnalytics app? [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.e6bapps.ga...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.e6bapps.ganalytics)

I find the gAnalytics app is really good. It's easier to navigate to relevant stats than the actual Analytics website. Curious to see how the official app stands up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Other than the Real Time data, this official app is pretty bare bones. It's just good to see them finally working on it. I'm sure deeper functionality will come soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't find the "Traffic Sources". I would like to see where the visitors are coming from.

I saw coincidental this today: <http://analytiksapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if they have an ETA for an official iPhone app...? I'm really jealous of android users right now! This looks incredible!

</comment><comment><USER5> Installed it already and love it. Real time is a great benefit over all other Android analytic tools I have used.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hackers everywhere begin over-checking their stats

<comment><USER6> I have pageview and visits widgets on one of my homescreens from mAnalytics. In fairness, I love them.</comment></comment>


Quora app gets presidential push - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcomunication.com/quora-app-gets-presidential-push/ Obama becomes Quora's first verified user to answer your Healthcare questions. <comment><USER2> I'd love to know whether the (rather severe) spelling mistake in the domain / site name is on purpose (and even then... WHY?)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is it with Quora? Its like.. not useful.. at all: clunky interface, lock- in of information, it is like Google Knol. Again. And yet the funding never stops and now Obama is on board too?

<comment><USER4> To be fair, despite all the negatives that you mention, it has a ton of interesting content and passionate contributors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obama is going closer to his readers and as Quora is really popular, I assume it to be a really good PR move. And it's presumably free, so good to go.</comment>


What are the practical steps for monetizing a web service? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on a library for a while and I've come up with a way to monetize it by making a web frontend for it. With a bit of marketing I think it could make some money (not a lot, maybe ~$10,000 a year given my sense of the rather niche market) I want to know what are the practical steps you take with this sort of business.
Do I have to form a company? Should I be patenting and trademarking logos and stuff? If I just make a website and start taking payments, what are the tax and legal implications? My library is Apache v2 licensed but I imagine the frontend / service would be proprietary. I heard I should consider switching the library to MIT.
I am planning to move abroad in a few months so I don't really want to start a company in the United States. I've just never created a paid service before so I'm really naive about how to go about it. If anyone has experience here or a good link, I'd appreciate it. <comment><USER2> You're worrying about all the wrong things.

Chances are that this idea will go absolutely nowhere (as most ideas do), and as you're new to this you're prone to vastly overestimating the probability of success and estimated returns.

My advice is to relax, and focus on learning what you're doing instead of focusing on "monetizing a web service".

If you want immediate practical direction, set yourself up with a Stripe merchant account (and whatever is necessary for that), and start selling. If you can't get past this, everything else is a waste of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I think I'm going to hold off on actually making a service and consider doing something like Kickstarter. I want to see if I can get some funds to put together a better product and get a sense of the market / interest level.

Are there any protective steps I should take before doing that? I mean stuff like licenses / patents / trademarks / company formation etc.

<comment><USER3> One reason you incorporate or patent or trademark is to protect your capital (money) from taxes and lawsuits. If I understand you correctly, you currently have very little capital to protect. Once you've accumulated enough capital that it'd be painful to loose it, it's time to start thinking of protecting it with patents, trademarks, incorporation, etc. For now, just have fun.

<comment><USER4> _If I understand you correctly, you currently have very little capital to protect._

On the contrary. If the OP goes into business without any sort of company as a legal shield and anything goes wrong resulting in legal action against them, then typically _everything they personally own_ may be at risk: house, car, savings for the kids when they go to university, the lot.

<comment><USER3>
      > ... and anything goes wrong resulting in legal action
      > against them...

Such as?

Without properly weighing the _risk_ of a lawsuit, there's no way that we can conclude whether the risk is _reasonable_.

So, who might be out to sue you? To summarize an article from nolo.com [1]:

       * An employee
       * A landlord
       * A supplier
       * A customer

To mitigate these risks:

       * Don't hire anyone
       * Don't lease an office
       * Don't buy goods on credit. Buy high quality goods when
         you can't afford to have a problem with them.
       * Have an "as is" end-user license agreement. Be very
         cautious about making service quality guarantees.
         Don't sell software that can cause damage or personal
         injury.

If you have to do any of the above, it's time to incorporate. (For another take on when it's time to incorporate, read "The When to Incorporate Decision- Matrix" by Ryan Roberts, J.D. [2])

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/liability-concerns- so...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/liability-concerns-sole- proprietors.html) [2] [http://startuplawyer.com/incorporation/the-when-to- incorpora...](http://startuplawyer.com/incorporation/the-when-to-incorporate- decision-matrix)

(edit: And a nice quote from HN favorite patio11:

      > Incorporation?  Incorporate when you have a good
      > reason to. (I still don't, but I might do it after I
      > go full-time, largely for purposes of dealing with
      > Immigration.)  If you're selling B2C software, your
      > number one defense against getting sued is promptly
      > refunding any customer who complains, and that pretty
      > decisively moots the LLC's (oft-exaggerated) ability to
      > limit your personal liability.  You'll be personally
      > liable for debts from the business, but since the
      > business is fundable out of your personal petty cash
      > that isn't the worst thing in the world.  If sales
      > collapsed tomorrow I'd be on the hook for my credit
      > card bill, which runs about $1,200 a month — not a
      > financial catastrophe for an employed professional,
      > particularly when the business generates far more
      > than that in profits well in advance of the bill
      > being due.  Sole proprietorship — i.e. merely
      > declaring "I have a business" — is the most common
      > form of business organization, by far.
    )

<comment><USER4> You've changed your position fundamentally, from saying you have nothing to lose to saying that even if you have something to lose you aren't at much risk of actually losing it.

That may well be true, but for a trade-off of risking everything I own in this world vs. an hour with an accountant/lawyer who actually knows what they're talking about, it's a pretty easy decision.

Also, there are other reasons to consider setting up a formal business entity besides a possible legal shield. You may not be able to access various financial services as a private individual. It may have tax advantages. Simply keeping your personal and business finances separate from day one may save more time and money when it comes to doing your accounts than it cost to set up.

Again, I'm not saying these would necessarily be the case for the OP here. I'm just saying that based only on what we've been told here, no-one in this forum is likely to be in a position to give reliable advice, while a qualified professional who can ask the right questions in their own field of expertise and in the relevant jurisdiction could.

<comment><USER3>
      > You've changed your position fundamentally, from saying
      > you have nothing to lose...

I specifically used the words "if I understand you correctly" as an invitation to the author to share more information, and to signal to the reader that I was making an assumption about his financial position, i.e. I assume he has very little capital. My exact words:

      > If I understand you correctly, you currently have very
      > little capital to protect.

Which you've now twisted into:

      > ...you have nothing to lose...

Notice the change in meaning?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait until you earn $2000, and then talk to an accountant, who will explain the tax stuff. Forget about patents and trademarks. Good luck!

<comment><USER6> Wait.

Are you telling me that, wherever you're based (I assume the US) you can just wait until you earn $2000 and _then_ start worrying about taxes?

<comment><USER7> No, until that point you're not sure if you have a business service that people are willing to pay for.

And that dollar amount - you'd just pay ordinary income on it -- because it's not worth the hassle of setting up a business structure. So set aside some money from your sales to pay the taxman.

<comment><USER8> This is terrible advice. What if he invests $28,000 then earns $2,000, then talks to his accountant and finds out that if he had filled in some paper work that $28,000 could be a tax deduction?

Talk to an accountant, or at least find the local equivalent of a small business service center in your area. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy and most major cities and states or provinces (depending on country) have folks you can contact to get basic guidance in this area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The advice in this thread to "wait to form a company" is just flat out wrong. Form an LLC immediately. Use it to open a bank account, and use that to open a credit card. Use those accounts for every single thing you spend money on relating to this business.

Even if the project goes nowhere, you can use this account for other side projects you want to make money.

Accepting any money from anybody to your personal account is just stupid, and will make for a huge nightmare when you want to transition to being a huge business or paying taxes.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should wait on the company/patents/trademark stuff. Heck, you can even wait on making a web frontend for it. Something I've learned is to get a good idea from the community about who is actually interested in the idea/service. Create a landing page to collect signups and register in the countless sites to get interest. Then, you'll know whether or not to build it.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is not at all hard to set up a payment system with something like Amazon Payments, Stripe, Square, PayPal, Balanced Payments and such and charge people for access to an API.

Do that and worry about the rest once you have enough money.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, but the advice in this thread to just get going without even learning about little things like taxes and record-keeping and incorporation is _crazy_.

Sure, on average a start-up will fail. However, if either it does work out or it fails because you screwed up and someone came after you, and you didn't get a few basics in place up-front, then you are up the creek without a paddle and may not be able to salvage the situation after the fact.

It will probably take no more than a quick chat with an accountant to figure out the minimum you need to do to comply with your local tax laws and whether it's worth setting up some sort of company at this stage. The total spend required to do that in my country, including both the accountant's advice and the legal fees to register a new company and get the proper documents created, is less than a day's salary. This does vary significantly by country, but again a local expert can advise you because they do this all the time.

Likewise, if you're potentially bringing in thousands of bucks per year, spending a couple of hundred to get a real lawyer to look over your terms and answer any general questions about licensing things you really need to know right now is probably money well spent.

None of this is to say that you won't decide to just set up a site and start charging anyway, assuming you can find a payment service available in your location that will let you take payments as a private individual of course. Maybe that really is the right path for you at this stage (though at least if you were in the same position in my country, IMHO that would be unlikely).

But seriously, any accountant and lawyer used to working with small businesses will understand the situation you're in and be able to give you some basic advice about what you really do and don't need to worry about right now, and it will cost you a few hours and a day or two of salary, and even if things don't work out this time you'll still have the useful background knowledge if you decide to do anything else commercial later.

You _should_ concentrate on making what you make and marketing it so you have a business that is worth having in the first place, but part of running a business professionally is knowing how to deal with the administration and keep the overheads in proportion, and it's much easier to do that if you just get something basic but sufficient set up from the start.

</comment><comment><USER12> Also, you can try [http://quickmvp.com](http://quickmvp.com) to gauge interest, etc.

<comment><USER13> Not seen that before, looks useful, thanks for the heads up - however, no info on pricing anywhere so not something I'd consider using myself as things stand. Who signs up to services without knowing in advance what commitment is going to be required to continue using it? I really don't understand businesses that operate like that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the advice everyone, I feel a little less overwhelmed now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just use Bitcoin. If you don't know how to, then just use BitPay, which today has announced a free forever plan, so it's a no-brainer.

<comment><USER15> Man, people are really butthurt with bitcoin around here. You gave him the best answer of all and all you got was downvotes and a sympathy comment from me... ;)

<comment><USER16> From a practical standpoint (which is literally what he asked for), using a bitcoin as the sole method of payment is likely to artificially limit your potential customer-base. Bitcoin isn't widespread enough where most consumers can be expected to utilize them for payment. You may create a phenomenal web service, only to see it fail because people can't figure out how to pay for its use.</comment></comment></comment>


Speedometer: A Benchmark for Web App Responsiveness - <AUTHOR> https://www.webkit.org/blog/3395/speedometer-benchmark-for-web-app-responsiveness/

<comment><USER2> This is a good benchmark for stressing rendering, layout, and style. We should be testing the real frameworks being used on the web and Speedometer is as good as any I have seen. Unlike IE's testdrive, Speedometer's source does not look like it was written by cherry picking examples that perform well in a specific browser.

I'm skeptical of a minor point though: synthetic events do not accurately simulate end-user responsiveness, especially when it comes to frame and event scheduling that occurs in a different process. There's a difference between simulated and real events even on the renderer side (see: [http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/164871](http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/164871)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. Synthetic events are not a fully accurate model of real user events. But they are as close as you can get in a benchmark that runs purely in the browser (as opposed to needing an external OS-specific harness). Making it easy to run everywhere has a lot of value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice, a benchmark that tries to measure something else than JS speed (because it's not really JS that is the actual bottleneck in webpages people actually use). There's also Dromaeo but for some reason it has never gained enough mindshare.

<comment><USER4> Dromaeo has some issues.

It is not a well balanced benchmark so it is hard to know which part are statistically relevant. Doubling the speed of Dromaeo would not double the speed of normal Web Apps.

It is also very easy to cheat on some of Dromaeo's tests. Cheating is rampant in certain engines, modern benchmarks need to perform real workload to avoid that.

Some tests of Dromaeo are great thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Note: Speedometer is not meant to compare the performance of different > JavaScript frameworks. The mechanism we use to simulate user actions is > different for each framework, and we're forcing frameworks to do more work > synchronously than needed in some cases to ensure run time can be measured.

That's too bad. I was mostly curious how the different framework implementations + tests performed.

I noticed that the React implementation was by far the slowest. The jQuery implementation was the second slowest.</comment>


An unsafety bug in rust's stdlib - <AUTHOR> https://lobste.rs/s/i0jf4b/unsafety_bug_rust_s_stdlib <comment><USER2> >> This change takes a concise and clear functional-style implementation and updates it to a long, complex, and apparently buggy imperative-style.

>True, but the numbers in the PR indicate that the new version was faster as n grew. I don't know how often > str::repeat is used, but — and this ties with the point you make about values — when I use standard library functions in Rust, I expect that they be as performant as is possible

You'd think that the same algorithm as in the pull request could be written in a functional style too?</comment>


Tokyo Medical School Apologizes for Test Scoring Practices to Keep Women Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/08/07/636480117/tokyo-medical-school-apologizes-for-test-scoring-practices-to-keep-women-out <comment><AUTHOR> If they were smart, they should have added a personality component and systematically deemed women to have worse personalities.</comment>


Show HN: Chat for Trello - <AUTHOR> http://www.chat4trello.com

<comment><USER2> Fake voting and commenting is a bannable offense on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, keep going, love it !

</comment><comment><USER4> Hello, that`s great!!

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow!

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow</comment>


Josef Frank's Modernist Vision: 'Accidentism' - <AUTHOR> https://placesjournal.org/article/josef-franks-modernist-vision-accidentism/ <comment><USER2> I really love how he softens the edges of a lot of his contemporaries' work with the use of floral patterns and light colors. One of my major complaints about modern design is how quickly it can become sterile. I think today's barn-door HGTV type designers could benefit from some of his near psychedelic prints in their textile choices.</comment>


"My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/littlescale/status/949032404206870528 <comment><USER2> I used a song, with permission from the artist, on a demo reel and got a copyright claim on YouTube. I was surprised to find that the claim was on behalf of a French band who covered the song and added lyrics to it. I tried to dispute the claim, but there was no option or possible way to indicate that their match wasn't correct, you could only dispute whether or not you had a license to the track they matched.

In the end I just gave up, and let some French band monetize my video that contained a song written and recorded by my friend's dad. Enjoy the 25 cents you earned!

<comment><USER3> US copyright law has very stiff penalties for false copyright claims. Just sue YouTube directly.

<comment><USER4> No, it doesn't.

For example, in a DMCA takedown notice the only thing asserted under penalty of perjury is that you are, or are authorized to act on behalf of, a copyright holder. And YouTube doesn't even use the DMCA system; it uses its own separate terms-of-service-governed system.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it does.

17 U.S. Code § 512(f) states:

(f) Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—

(1) that material or activity is infringing, or

(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,

shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

\---

This has been tested in Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Inc. - and Diebold lost and had to pay $125,000 to Online Policy Group.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebold...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebold,_Inc).

<comment><USER4> The Diebold case is basically the only time anyone's ever made that work, though, because the bar for it is so high. It's not enough to prove "they made a complaint and it turned out it wasn't their stuff". You have to prove that they _knew_ , which is next to impossible unless you basically have a notarized statement from them saying "Yes, I was aware it was wrong and did it anyway", and the payout is a pittance.

Meanwhile, the idea that DMCA notices carry some sort of super-strict ruinous penalty for errors remains completely false. And YouTube -- as I said in the original comment -- uses a separate takedown system governed by their terms of service, so the whole thing is moot.

<comment><USER5> Well, that's not actually what you said. You actually said:

> _in a DMCA takedown notice the only thing asserted under penalty of perjury > is that you are, or are authorized to act on behalf of, a copyright holder_

And the Diebold case didn't have anyone with a notarized statement that you speak about. I don't think what you are saying is necessarily supported by the facts of that case.

<comment><USER4> It is true that the only thing asserted under penalty of perjury in a DMCA notice is that you are or are authorized to act on behalf of a copyright holder. The rest of the notice is _not_ made under penalty of perjury.

The notarized statement comment was hyperbole to make a point about how hard it is to prove, sufficiently for a court, that someone "knowingly" and "materially" misrepresented information in a DMCA notice in order to trigger 512(f). In the Diebold case you had the perfect storm, because Diebold's lawyers basically _admitted to the court_ that they knew they were using the DMCA not for copyright enforcement but to take down something that embarrassed them. That is literally what it took to get a judge to nail someone for DMCA abuse.

And even then: the judge only found that they knowingly/materially misrepresented for a subset of the material, and they only paid out $125k, which is literally _nothing_ to a company of Diebold's size.

Meanwhile, DMCA abuse remains routine and rampant today, in large part because it's next to impossible to get someone penalized for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This video of the ending of Star Wars without John Williams' music got a copyright claim from the rightsholder to Williams' score [edited from original post, not actually claimed by Williams himself]. The little bit of music at the beginning is from Gustav Holst and is public domain.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj- GZJhfBmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-GZJhfBmI)

edit for more context: [https://www.wired.com/story/the-star-wars-video-that- baffled...](https://www.wired.com/story/the-star-wars-video-that-baffled- youtubes-copyright-cops/)

<comment><USER7> John Williams stole (borrowed) a lot of music from Gustav Holst and many others. He's famous for it. Specifically parts of Holst's _The Planets_. Does this sound familiar?: [https://youtu.be/Isic2Z2e2xs?t=4m24s](https://youtu.be/Isic2Z2e2xs?t=4m24s)

<comment><USER8> There's a long history - I suppose it's a tradition - of composers leaning on one another for inspiration. Sometimes this takes the form of them outright copying another's melody and elaborating upon it.

Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms etc. all did this. Put in this context what Williams has done in borrowing from Holst and others isn't scandalous whatsoever and shouldn't be thought of as such.

<comment><USER9> Just let me fix a few words, for science:

> There's a long history - I suppose it's a tradition - of composers _claiming > copyright on someone else 's work and sending DMCA takedowns automatically_

That's how absurd it has become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every so often, I come across an old blog post or other content with a YouTube video embedded in it. About half the time, it'll have been taken down by a false-positive copyright claim. It seems that YouTube videos can't be permanent, only ephemeral; as a long-term hosting service it simply doesn't function.

<comment> Digital-Citizen Yet another reason not to host on YouTube. Here are some more reasons not to host with YouTube:

\- some YouTube videos use nonfree Javascript to implement DRM. [https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/](https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/) is a youtube-dl variant that avoids running that JS code. notabug.org seems to be down as I type this, perhaps it will return later. \- should you wish to allow your video to be downloaded, YouTube sets up needless barriers to allow downloads. \- hosting with YouTube means you and your users are being tracked by Google (which owns YouTube). \- YouTube doesn't make it clear how to download the precise video file the submitter uploaded; users get rewritten videos instead. \- YouTube only hosts videos, not arbitrary kinds of other media.

All of these problems are easily solved: use the Internet Archive (at [https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/)) and your own hosting instead of YouTube. IA offers a download URL which is static and will redirect to your uploaded data. You can use this URL in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage (again, no JS needed). IA will (by default) rewrite certain kinds of files, but your original uploaded file is also available and machine-determinable (via an XML file that clearly indicates which is the source file and which are derivative files). IA can be used fully without JS turned on (no need to worry about executing code to get files). IA hosting is gratis (zero cost), as is YouTube.

I have no evidence which indicates IA tracks users akin to how Google does.

I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube.

<comment> loup-vaillant How about distributing one's videos through BitTorrent instead? Should scale pretty well. Granted, viewing the video becomes a hassle. But it works.

<comment><USER11> Or with PeerTube, which makes videos available in the browser AND uses a bittorrent-like protocol: [https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think automatic systems like Content ID should be illegal. Plus I doubt a robot can consider things like fair use. Well maybe they could do some machine learning of past cases where videos were complained about but ended up being fair use...

I think a real human should have to spend all day finding content and manually doing the work. Kinda like how some states have banned red light cams. Technology is not perfect. I heard of those cams going off even when it's legal to turn on right. A real human swearing under penalty of perjury or giving sworn testimony seems perfect for accountability.

At least the money is held until you do a dispute now with Youtube. I know if you license royalty free music - the system will even flag it. I know someone personally who had that problem. I guess the systems aren't linked so no idea you had a license but annoying. So say you made a video for a client and uploaded it, and embedded to their website. Even though you didn't monetize it, your client website now has ads for their competitor as they'll allow the video to stay up but with ads where the money goes to whoever claimed it! I guess the way to protect that is to upload as unpublished or unlisted then dispute it before publishing it when you already purchased a license.

<comment><USER13> It shouldn't be illegal, google can do what the want on their hardware. The problem is that everyone has centralized to googles hardware, and issues like this will happen for as long as that remains unchanged.

We need a path back to the distributed web where people upload videos to a server they own and control. Instead of IoT juicers we need "video broadcasting in a box" solutions.

<comment><USER12> Yeah... It seems like some search engine for some decentralized video might work.

Some search engine indexing, videos hosted on independent sites(regular http), favorites/playlists can be stored in something like Dropbox privately or shared.

Probably could be just a video tag with additional elements and builtin functionality.

Some advertising spec too... Sites can either implement third party ads or host their own ads for example. So instead of being told your content isn't advertiser friendly. You could run your own ad server that's in the video metadata or use a external one agreeing to their terms for video content. So total freedom to go out and get your own advertisers or signup for a service and plugin a URL and they get to handle that part.

So say you just want to make videos, not doing controversial or political stuff and not really into being a sales person just use this ad network... or maybe you are a very political channel, point to this other ad network that targets that audience. Maybe you are a non-profit, run your own ad server with your own in-house fundraising ads.

Not sure how you'd go about handling sensitive stuff some people might not want to see, maybe at the search engine part using AI/machine learning but also allow sites to indicate certain things within the spec itself... Decentralizing the search part even better.

But ideally you'd have a consistent UI sorta like YouTube but all content is fetched from servers like a web browser, you'd have subscriptions, sorta like RSS, etc...

But I guess subscribers counts and commenting/liking would need to be apart of it too. Maybe use somthing like OpenID. but sites that want to host videos apart of it would provide certain metadata and some callback urls to post to for like comments, getting commentings, likes, etc.

Just thinking out loud... One of the benefits of YouTube is discovery and organizing your watch later, subscribers, etc. So some sort of formal spec for a video app would make sense.

Searching random sites, signup and comment and have like 10 sites to check for new videos would get annoying.

<comment><USER11> You may be interested in PeerTube: [https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've had a number of claims against tracks I've made where the basis of the claim is a sample I've used - not a sample of a commercial track, but one from a sample library that I've bought and used legitimately, but where said sample has been used and published on YouTube before the track I've done. There seemed to be no worthwhile way of contesting it as responses seemed to go nowhere. It's not a big issue for me as there's no income from YouTube for us, but I'm sure there are cases where it is a significant problem for a legitimate user.

<comment><USER15> I had a copyright claim once on songs my band wrote and performed. Original material. Our original material. None of which vaguely sounded like any one else's songs. The person I had to talk to to resolve the issue was very difficult to deal with and we went round in circles until I managed to prove we owned the copyright and publishing on our _own_ material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Assemble a botnet

2\. Automatically download and reupload popular videos, with extremely subtle modifications.

3\. File automated takedown notices against each copied (popular) video

4\. Destroy youtube's ad ecosystem for cheap

<comment><USER17> Or, use an adversarial DNN to transform videos into ones that will get copyright claims. Extra points if you figure out to how to have it using reinforcement learning to improve itself.

<comment><USER18> Demonstrating that the system is broken is not an effective strategy. It is impossible to get someone to understand a fact when their salary depends on not understanding it.

<comment><USER19> That's like saying that grocery stores are broken because you can just print out bar codes and use them at the self-checkout. Stores have enough security for their needs and balance it with customer convenience. I don't think even Google would claim that their system is perfect, only that it's currently good enough to stave off ravenous lawyers and keep them from losing safe harbor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I don't get is how when I post a 15 second video that has some music in the background at a coffee shop and I get a YouTube-bot telling me I have violated copyright but then bazillions of others post full HD rips of Hollywood movies and commercial albums.

<comment><USER21> They might post them but the money goes to the rights holder, which I guess is why they'll tolerate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Youtube copyright claim system and ContentID shows us a glimpse of what happens when unchecked AI in many cases reports and handles the report by just removing it.

It can be cold and inhuman even if it is a needed service, very vogon-like.

</comment><comment><USER23> YouTube copyright claim system needs to add penalties for false claims with the same banning system that they have in place for youtubers with too many take down claims. This is just insanse...

</comment><comment><USER24> YouTube grants all monetization to the claimant instantly, for the entire period of the claim, even if it's bunk.

So take an algorithm that can flag a million YouTube videos, and maybe you steal $10,000 of monetization over cost in a few days. Nobody can afford to sue you hard on the false positives because you're mostly only hitting "nice guys" who will just change the sound and reupload. So you up the algorithm to be more profitable, wash, rinse, repeat.

That's why this is really happening.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised there isn't a claim from John Cage's estate.

<comment><USER26> That would be silence, or, the absence of music; not white noise. Seriously this is insane that there is a claim against this.

<comment><USER27> If you amplify almost any recording enough, you can get some form of noise. Any white noise of a sufficient duration is effectively a recording of that one John Cage piece.

<comment><USER28> no, it isn't, because that piece is unconscious- it is meant to be what happens without any intention. A crank up to noise is a definite intention of the performer. In 4'33", the performer does nothing but open the score and the keyboard, mark movements, and bow at the end.

<comment><USER27> If you go through enough generations of analog copies of a recording of that performance, you get 4'33" of noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be silly if actual human file these claims so the claims are very likely to be filed by some algorithm, which somehow found matching pattern in the noise.

Maybe:

1) Some copyrighted music has a period of noise that closely matched the segment of noise of the video.

2) There is adversarial pattern in the noise in the video that confused the hunting algorithm.

<comment><USER30> Three of the claims are for other white noise recordings. It's arguably not even an algorithmic mistake, but a result of someone claiming they have rights over a recording of white noise.

<comment><USER31> What's wrong with copyrighting a particular concrete example of white noise? A particular string of randomly generated bits? The fact that an algorithm just hears generic white noise is the algorithm's problem.

<comment><USER32> What's wrong is that copyright doesn't work that way:

"must have been created independently and contain a sufficient amount of creativity"

from : [https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf](https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf)

US copyright of course, ymmv but I doubt other countries are going to be more likely to allow white noise / PN sequences.

<comment><USER33> How do they define "creativity"? Because surely, a specific sample of properly random white noise would have maximum density of unique information (useful or not - but then is a song "useful"? Where's the line?)

<comment><USER34> It's not a precise standard, the exact boundaries of "creativity" would be left up to a judge to decide in a case where it was truly ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that this specific case would count as a minor modification to a work in the public domain, which does not qualify.

[https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of- copyr...](https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of- copyrightable-works/creativity-requirement/)

<comment><USER33> Yeah, that was kind of my point. Including non-precise words in a legal document is like saying "a wizard did it".

<comment><USER35> Using deliberately undefined or "non-precise" words is a core concept in legal documents. It provides leeway and "escape hatches" where humans can decide if a law actually makes sense in a specific case. This is why we are talking about "spirit" vs "letter" of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I had the same problem happen years ago with video using a song that's way out of copyright and already adjudicated in courts as being in the commons. I think most use automated systems to attempt to claim copyrights over your video. At the time, it was very hard to contest claims.

<comment><USER37> While a lyrics or a melody might be public, it doesn't mean the song is.

<comment><USER38> While a song might be public, it doesn't mean that a specific recording of the song is.

The owners of the rights to the recording can only exercise rights over their recording, not on the song itself.

Sorry to nitpick, but if we are going to talk about legal issues let's, at least, be precise.

<comment><USER37> Yes, that's what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I recorded a video once and added ocean wave sounds to it. I googled "ocean wave sounds" and used part of someone's recording of the ocean. When I posted it to Facebook it got taken down for copyright infringement.

I appealed and they put it back, so there's that.

<comment><USER40> IMO that actually would be a legitimate case of copyright infringement (not that I'm a proponent of it) - I'm surprised you were able to get it put back.

<comment><USER41> There needs to be an element of creativity for a work to be copyrightable in the US. If it's just the same sound as you would hear from going to a beach on any windy day then it may be hard to argue that there is any creativity to it.

<comment><USER40> An audio professional would probably argue that there's a level of creativity required to create and edit such a recording for commercial use, but I'm no expert on the subject so you may be right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just imagine if they all claim each others videos lol

<comment><USER43> Jim Sterling adds multiple instances of copyright infringing material to some his videos to take advantage of a similar effect[0].

[0][http://www.thejimquisition.com/copyright-deadlock-the- jimqui...](http://www.thejimquisition.com/copyright-deadlock-the- jimquisition/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Ridiculous

<comment><USER45> All of these claims have been filed under penalty of perjury.

There has to be a reason for why not a single copyright troll has been prosecuted for it.

<comment><USER46> On my youtube channel I use Kimiko Ishizaka's open source bach recordings (under CC0) as background music. I got copyright claims every single time (from the same trolls -- forget their name). Eventually, when replying I got the idea to say, "You have made a claim on the same recordings for every single one of my videos. You have subsequently relinquished the claim when you discovered that I had a license to use this music. Given that you know that I have a valid license, you seem to be acting in bad faith. Please do not flag my videos again".

And, you know what? It seems to have worked. They never flagged me again.

<comment><USER47> Write a letter to your state DA asking them to pursue barratry charges against the lawfirm.

<comment><USER46> Unfortunately (?) neither I nor the company claiming infringement are in the US. I think the reason they actually gave up is not for legal reasons, but because they have to abide by Youtube's terms of service in order to make claims. If Youtube kicks them out, they lose their revenue stream, so potentially serious for them.

<comment><USER48> I have a video of my own noise generator audio plugin. It's repeatedly been copyright struck by somebody who's put white noise into YouTube's ContentID. Every time I notice this pop up again I dispute the claim and they give up.

They're not in the US. I think they were East German? This is not new, I'm sure it's literally the same people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A common misunderstanding: There is no formal/legal claim of infringement being made anywhere in the ContentID process, it's just the automated process YouTube uses to decide whether or not to take down a video.

Any formal/legal claims of infringement should be made by the right-holders industry towards _YouTube_ (which YouTube _really_ wants to avoid) not the uploader. The DCMA was made to facilitate this, but for a huge platform such as YouTube it just falls short. Here's the important part, let it sink in very clearly:

ContentID is a _deal_ that YouTube made, demanded by the larger players in the right-holders industry that goes (something) like: IF the big right-holders can easily make large amounts of claims, and YouTube provides some sort of ML detecting filter to scan for possible infringements, and when flagged the ContentID process will handle these cases _such and such_ , THEN the big right-holder industry people won't file gigantic claims of infringements and take down requests to YouTube.

From the perspective of the little uploader, no courts, claims or legal things are involved. You have no legal relation with the right-holders when YouTube takes down your vid for infringement. You can't sue YouTube for taking down your vid since as a US corporation they have every right to take down any video for whatever reason (and TOS, but mostly because big corporations just get to do whatever). And that reason is mainly: Whatever keeps the big right- holders happy.

YouTube is first and foremost interested in keeping the big right-holders happy, and of course keeping their advertisers happy. That's it. They're not interested in being fair or even ethical (as the recent Logan Paul drama has shown us--considering that YouTube's trending videos are hand-picked by humans ...).

ContentID is not at ALL about YouTube dealing with copyright infringement _in general_. If you write, perform and record an original song with your band and upload it, ContentID is not going to protect you. It's just there to help the big players scan for their own stuff and then flag whatever. If they accidentally flag the wrong thing, original content or even the actual original sample (if it's not licensed to the big right-holders) that was used in a newer big right-holder licensed work, then it's going to get removed. A false positive is only a very tiny little "oops" for YouTube, they don't really care. The dispute thingy is just a pacifier.

They have literally zero reason to reduce their false positive rate. The software works; the big right holders are happy.

</comment><comment><USER50> Youtube is about taking culture and adding your own touch to it. Mostly fair use. This copyright thing is just as stupid as software patents.

</comment><comment><USER51> I do not really understand what the problem is about (I am not a lawyer) : why not simply respond "sue me" and request 10 M dollars of prejudice for false accusations?

The next copyright claim should be more careful, I guess

</comment><comment><USER52> To be fair, the copyrights claims are from other videos containing white noise. An algorithm that matches two white noise audio by claiming they contain the same information is doing its job pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe the white noise messes up the AI trying to find songs in it...

</comment><comment><USER54> There really should be penalties for filing an incorrect complaint.

</comment><comment><USER55> It would be nice to see a timeseries correlation.

</comment><comment><USER56> Have you guys listened to Justin Bieber samplings? I bet he is the one claiming copyrights for all that white noise.

</comment><comment><USER57> The edge case to this classification problem is quite literally noise. If you filter out noise, you're kinda in a pickle ... a Pickle Rick! ... I'll let myself out..</comment>


Who Should Have Access to Your DNA? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/who-should-have-access-to-your-dna-6830fbf8dc79

<comment><USER2> _" Are we to rely on physicians, who largely have no grounding in genomics, to actualize the genomic medicine revolution?"_

I don't think this should really be the role of physicians, or at least not solely.

I personally really wish the public sector (here in Canada) would undertake similar efforts to 23andme. My group does to an extent (for specific cancers mostly), partly research-grade and partly clinical-grade, but we're very limited in scope and resources, and hence scale.

Add to that the crazy politics at play which incur huge costs in terms of duplication of effort (e.g. everybody's implementing their own variant annotations databases expecting everybody else to chime in) and also really limit how and what information can be shared.

For instance patient data is mostly anonymized, yet that doesn't guarantee you can share this information freely with other research groups or even clinical groups. This is only the tip of the iceberg though, the barricades faced by the public health sector here (and I suspect a lot of other places too) are only getting worse. Meanwhile, private organizations have practically no problems sharing information internally or plowing through (often using research backed by the public sector).

If we want genomics and the benefits that come with it to become more widespread, the public would need to demand greater transparency and efficacy from the public agencies that rule over the health sector. Of course, the public would also have to be willing to invest more (or better) in their health, which is considerably easier said than done. Finally, people working in the health sector might appreciate not feeling like they're going to get sued all the time ; their time might be better used if they didn't spend half of it filling in forms after forms or writing 100 pages validation documents every time they change a couple of lines of code... The public is, most likely unknowingly, largely responsible for that.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not exactly what happened. The FDA required 23andme to stop reporting health risks as if they were properly vetted medical data. I think that's the wrong decision, and it did have the effect of greatly limiting their market in the US, but you can still do a 23andme test and then just go to Promethease to get just as detailed a look at all the health implications as 23andme provided (and still provides to the rest of the world.)

The FDA did not shut down 23andme or make them stop offering DNA tests, they stopped them offering interpretations of those tests.</comment>


The 'cliff effect': Getting poorer while working harder - <AUTHOR> https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2019/06/03/getting-poorer-while-working-harder-the-cliff.html?link_id=2&can_id=296837f367fc5ae5c386dcb443cc6374&source=email-todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-6419&email_referrer=email_558442&email_subject=todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-6419 <comment><USER2> It's commonly thought that the so called first world is rich. It's not true.

For example, the US on average is twice as poor as the average person in China in terms of housing cost. On average China spends 8% of their take home wage on housing, thanks 0 property taxes and super low cost of building, compared to 22% US average. Avg condo size is slightly larger in the US about 15%. And yes the vast majority of housing in China has electricity, sewage and wayer

However the US is very food rich. Only 13% of us consumer spending is needed for food, as opposed to 35% in China and even more in 3rd world countries

Sure developed countries can afford much more cell phones and merchandise but the necessities of life are housing health insurance and education

<comment><USER3> Those numbers hide important truths underneath. Cheap housing in China does not meet health and safety standards available in the US, so Chinese are "paying" more in the form of risk. Likewise with food - not sure I agree with your statistic at all, as food can be incredibly cheap in China, but not safe. Developed countries are incredibly rich, if you take into account what is available in terms of basic public services and quality. You may not be able to afford restaurant food in Iceland, for example, but you can be confident that you wont be robbed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a big problem.

In the case of New York State I do better when my income is less in that I can get a health plan called "The Essential Plan" where I pay $25 for a psychological visit, $50 to see a dietician, etc.

If I make more money I can get a high deductible plan where those things cost me about $200 each. If I don't want a high deductible plan on the Obamacare market I have to pay the whole cost of the deductible in my premium so what's the point?

Every private insurance plan from a company I might work with is high deductible. You've got to have a government job to get something else.</comment>


Surprise: Silicon Valley Doesn't Employ Minorities - <AUTHOR> http://www.blackweb20.com/2010/02/22/surprise-silicon-valley-doesnt-employ-minorities/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BlackWeb20+(Black+Web+2.0)

<comment><USER3> That's utter nonsense. The reason blacks and hispanics are not employed in silicon valley is that there are not as many skilled in IT blacks and hispanics as there are from other races in the United States.

Whatever the reasons are, it is a socio-economic problem, it's not a problem caused by any form of systematic discrimination in silicon valley.

I do not believe that I have ever seen any youtube video of a black person complaining about how he is fighting to get a job in silicon valley, but nobody is hiring him, even though he has a great number of projects online and everyone agrees his code is great.

It IS a meritocracy. If you put a bunch of bad black programmers in silicon valley and expect them to learn the tools on the job, then this will be an even greater disservice to the black community - as it would result in a negative stereotype about the quality of 'black programming'.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, mastery of technology is the last thing that most blacks and Hispanics want to achieve in life. Why is this so is an important question and the answers will, sadly, often point to discrimination. But none of it has anything to do with Sillicon Valley.

<comment><USER5> Feeling pretty insulted by that comment, what life achievement would you recommend us then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. OK, I'm a little tired of all these recent "I'm Indian so I won't get funded", "We need women for Web 3.0" and blog-posts. I've got a little time on my hands so excuse this little diatribe:

>> "As I've mentioned many times before there is no innovation without diversity"

OK, well I agree with the general premise, I'd like a little elaboration on what kind of diversity you're talking about. I'm going to make the assumption that the writer's talking about racial diversity, and pose the question: How does having black skin automatically mean you're going to bring a different outlook to the table? Why shouldn't I go to Russia and find someone with an entirely different culture, background, language and religion? By that logic, that candidate will increase the diversity in my workplace far more than a Harvard educated black guy who grew up in Greenwich.

As an aside, organizations like TiE are absolutely absurd. You're trying to fight a "boys club" by forming your own boys club. The battle of racism(1) was never won with additional racism. Additionally, you're further isolating yourself from the community as a whole. Assimilate, infiltrate and smash the system from within if you really think you're being discriminated against(2).

In terms of practicality though, outrage isn't going to get you ultimately anywhere. If you don't think the Valley employs enough minorities in startups, then _start your own_. The barrier of entry is literally a 15$ Dreamhost account and a weekend reading the Django docs(3). Fork a project on Github and do something clever with it. The valley wont care if you're a philandering albino, you'll get job offers left and right if it's clever enough.

(1) I'd argue you'd have to be actively searching for instances of racism in the Valley to actually find it. I'm a second-generation Indian-American. The startup community least discriminatory group of people I've ever encountered bar crust-punks and hippies.

(2) Hint: Odds are you aren't.

(3) I'm well aware of Norvig's <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>, this is just for the sake of argument.

<comment><USER7> "As an aside, organizations like TiE are absolutely absurd. You're trying to fight a "boys club" by forming your own boys club."

Amen. I am Indian but I think TIE perpetuates a racist/ethnic mentality and I would never take a cent (or rupee :-P) from them. Indians can be very racist/exclusionary

I don't want to be judged on my skin color dammit, just judge me on how well (or not) I code (or do product design or marketing or whatever).

In one company I worked at (ThoughtWorks) the owner was a kind of weird socialist (he was a nice guy just had these weird political beliefs - <USER2> thought the USA had too many conservatives but China had a very nice political system and that Reagan was a tyrant but Chavez was cool and so on) who believed in "Affirmative Action" and many dumb folks (carefully not specifying ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion etc here, to avoid a conflagaration) were promoted based not so much on any skills or successes but because they fit into a predetermined "diversity" slot.

Soured me on the whole concept (No, I didn't want a promotion to management. I was (and am) happy being a dev).

Thankfully , to date, programming remains a field where affirmative action and other half baked political fantasies don't apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Why is Affirmative Action okay in every other industry and region but somehow when we take into account Silicon Valley it should be ignored. Bogus. As I've mentioned many times before there is no innovation without diversity._

Agreed. How 'bout it. And while we're at it let me say that I'm appalled by the over-representation of black sprinters in track and field too. How can it be that they are so consistently and completely the best? There's obviously something amiss. The total number of gold medals and world records they own is astonishing and a perfect example of why more diversity is needed. How can there be any innovation in the sport without slow white guys like me adding my perspective 80 meters behind in a 100 meter race ?

Pure human athletics and complex digital systems are very unforgiving in many of the same regards.

<comment><USER9> _How can there be any innovation in the sport without slow white guys like me adding my perspective 80 meters behind in a 100 meter race ?_

Right, because having a diverse team means hiring incompetent people.

Trust me, the fact that you happen to be a slow white guy doesn't mean that I'm an intellectually slow black one. There are fast white people and smart black/Hispanic people: the fact that you aren't personally one of them, while sad, is certainly not an effective argument against a team or company recruiting from either group, respectively.

Your metaphor is a canard, plain and simple.

<comment><USER8> Let me make my point more succinct.

Digital systems could care less whether you're black, white, brown, red or yellow. If it turns out that one group is better than another at innovation, design and implementation then so be it.

It's simple. Usain Bolt is the best because of hard work, talent, and a belief in himself. He doesn't need diversity. He's competing in an arena where pure performance is all that matters. If I could beat him I would. I can't. But I'm not running around crying foul because I'm under-represented.

If the author of this blasted article wants to be part of some Silicon Valley success story then let her sit in the library or computer lab for years at a time like everybody else.

<comment><USER9> _Digital systems could care less whether you're black, white, brown, red or yellow._

This is a great point but it's not applicable here. I'd agree with your argument if the article were, for example, insinuating racism because code written by blacks and Hispanics had more bugs in it or had poor test coverage. That would be absurd; as you said, digital systems don't care about your race. Sadly, people usually do.

Metrics like how fast you can run and how many users like your software are objective and essentially independent of race. The article wasn't talking about objective metrics like those but rather how many blacks and Hispanics are being hired — an area in which race-based discrimination is well- documented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't care what color, creed, sex, or sexual preference you have. I care if you're innovative, can code well, and have unwavering dedication. This article is silly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Different perspective alright: the original article is better balanced <http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14383730>

This you're-picking-on-me attitude is annoying.

</comment><comment><USER12> Unless you count Asian people.

<comment><USER13> I wish there were stats for Eastern-Europeans employed in the tech industry in Silicon Valley; I'm betting they're classified under "White" in demographic surveys. Many tend to be immigrants to the US themselves.

<comment><USER14> I don't mean to be naive, but aren't Eastern-Europeans white? This is more about visual minorities than foreigners.

<comment><USER13> As a race, yes, but many tend to be immigrants that came to the US after the breakup of the USSR and come from different backgrounds than American-born whites, with mainly western-European backgrounds. They constitute a sizable bloc of their own that would be interesting to see the data from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _As I've mentioned many times before there is no innovation without diversity._

I would love to see that supported. These things are parroted around a lot, always in relation to race. Is it true? Should VC's only fund companies with multi-cultural founders?

I'm pretty sure that it's most definitely not.

<comment><USER14> I believe if you asked mother nature, she would say there is no live without diversity. The quote may not be directed strictly at business innovation, but you find that in most environments, the rule is true, therefore why would a business be different. As an example, we would agree that a diversity of skills is necessary to business success. You need a leader, a coder, a designer, a marketer, etc.

Where this becomes true when related to race and culture is in bringing different view points and ways of thinking. However, I believe the most important thing is that we get beyond race as a differentiator. I don't believe that the color of a persons skin affects their work.

Are we trying to have it both ways, where we say 'skin color doesn't matter', and at the same time saying 'mixing race is good for innovation'?

I'm confusing myself on this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a counter-example. Out of the 5 people that I tried to hire last year, 2 of them were black.

There are very good black programmers out there but I don't think any startup in their right mind will trade skill for diversity. It's strictly business, not personal.</comment>


Go Doesn't Need Generics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@meeusdylan/go-doesnt-need-generics-6cb9cf0da9c <comment><USER2> I've never understood the argument that someone can use a feature to add complexity

The problem with C++ is the various features can interplay poorly, leading to the "subset" language issue. Presumably, golang can avoid many of the issues caused by organic growth by looking back on such attempts.

And a couple weeks doesn't tell you much; generics are a large-scale feature. They produce their benefit with larger codebases with more opportunities to reuse. Like the stupidity of cli namespace pollution with parse_int and parse_int32 and parse_int64 and parse_string and so on doesn't matter when you have two arguments; it matters when you have a whole variety of them, and you also want to toss in a parse_int128 which didn't come with the library.

Map and filter and so on doesn't matter much when you have 2 boilerplate forloops; the value hits you after you've written that boilerplate 30 times.</comment>


MongoDB Performance & Durability (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://redbeard0531.s3.amazonaws.com/mikeals_blog_backup/MongoDB+Performance+&+Durability.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just starting MongoDB, and I really like it. It's got nice documentation, and a nice culture.

But it does have weaknesses, and having just been bitten hard by one.

I had a schema something like "db.post.insert({'tags'=['python','mongodb']}).

One tag just couldn't be reliably deleted (via "$pull:{'tags':'immortal tag that will not die'}.

It turns out, I had made "tags" unique, but somehow managed to get a duplicate tag in. (Before the unique index? After? I forget). Trying to delete the tag would "throw" a E11000 error, but since mongodb doesn't check errors it would just result in this immortal tag sitting there. Smirking.

Apparently, using a unique index on an array is the wrong thing to do anyway (does it mean different posts can't share tags? or that you can't have 2 posts with exactly the same set of tags? I'm not sure), and you are just meant to use $addToSet. I'm not sure how you are meant to clean an existing array with duplicate elements though. Perhaps you just have to check in the app layer, then update: db.posts.update({'_id':post['_id']},{'tags':set[post['tags']}.

Lesson 1: if something is failing a lot, or might fail in an annoying way, use db.error() (in Python ... or whatever the last_error command is in your client).

Lesson 2: don't try to use unique indexes on array elements.

Otherwise, it's a very nice db.

</comment><comment><USER2> Keep in mind this is a year old and MongoDB has since implemented journalling (although afaik it's not on by default yet).

It's not specifically a response to this article - But you can read 10gen's view on durability here: <http://blog.mongodb.org/post/381927266/what-about- durability>

<comment><AUTHOR> As I would put it:

In the event of a single server crash, Mongo may need to be restored from backup, or another master. CouchDB handles this much better, and can just restart where it left off. But in the worst possible single-server scenario, there's smoke coming out of your server and the hard drive is toast. CouchDB and MongoDB perform about the same - if you had replication or a recent backup, you are fine. If you didn't, you are f*cked.

CouchDB is better for small servers which crash a lot and can't use replication. You can run it on a mobile phone. Mongo is better for logging (where you need fast writes, and don't care about a couple of lost records). Most uses will be somewhere in between, and you need to know the limitations of the stack, so you can work around them.

<comment><USER3> If you are running with journaling enabled, you should get a much stronger crash recovery case.

In the event of a crash, the journal will be replayed: <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Journaling>

<comment><USER4> And that is a good feature on a database to have! Why not make it the default?

<comment><USER3> When we added it, being a new feature the decision was made not to initially flip it to default in case of bugs, unexpected behavior, etc.

As noted, it's possible that will change in future releases; there's been a lot of improvements to journaling since its initial release.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Predicting loneliness across various groups - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/619304978155290624/predicting-loneliness <comment><USER2> This is an uncredited literal copy and paste of

[https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/news/articles/agegenderand...](https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/news/articles/agegenderandculturepredic.html)

Also beware: this site traps the back button.</comment>


Fast MySQL Backup and Restore Using Mydumper and Myloader - <AUTHOR> https://wplobster.com/extremely-fast-mysql-backup-restore-using-mydumpermyloader/ <comment><USER2> There are no benchmark numbers to back the claim that it's fast. At least the OP should have done some measurements; I'm interested in anything that will speed up our DB's 300+M record tables.

The article also does not link to the official maintainer page/github page.

<comment><USER3> I don't have numbers right now, but we've been using mydumper/myloader for a long time and it has been much faster for us (we have tables with 1B+ rows).

I should note that the version of `mydumper` in the Ubuntu repos is out of date. IIRC 0.9.1 is the latest and Ubuntu packages 0.6.1 on the latest LTS. 0.9.1 has some good improvements so it's worth building yourself (small utility so quick build time).

As always with database stuff, RTFM and use an abundance of caution. In particular, take care to ensure no bad locking behaviors occur.

<comment><USER4> +1 to everything here. Use the version out of launchpad, and try it out on a copy of your DB first (though, being a standard mysql client as far as the DB is concerned, its not going to do much damage; especially if you create a read-only backup user first).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this compare to the percona tools?

<comment><USER6> Percona talk about these tools on their website / blogs. Basically, this thing is for logical backup, where you might want to eg only restore a single table. Logical also compresses much better. Innobackupex binary full restore will still be much faster though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Shows password on CLI

2\. Segfaults for me

I'll be using mysqldump for now...but doing a flush+lock+copy the innodbdata file(s) seems like it would be much, much faster.

<comment><USER8> Yep, same for us, it's a great tool, except it crashes a little to often for a backup tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Watch out last time I looked most of these tools miss some things like stored procedures, though I haven't checked mydumper specifically recently. mysqlpdump certainly did, and I think I tried mydumper.

There's also other things to potentially worry about; events, functions, etc.

<comment><USER10> Since version 0.9.1 mydumper supports all schema objects [1]

[1] [https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/12/logical-mysql- backup...](https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/12/logical-mysql-backup-tool- mydumper-0-9-1-now-available/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of my colleagues from my time at Percona worked fairly extensively on Mydumper and Myloader; making the locking semantics better and the segemented files work. It's a pretty amazing tool, since it lets you dump tables in parallel, with very granular locks (something mydumper does not allow).

As a logical backup tool, it's invaluable. When combined with binary logs and regular binary backups, it makes for a nice and comprehensive MySQL backup solution. It even works with managed DB services like RDS.

YMMV of course, but given how easy it is to test for your own use cases, it's absolutely worth taking a look at.

</comment><comment><USER11> Note that with 5.7 there is a new tool, "mysqlpump" that can do parallel export/import and direct compression.

I haven't test it yet because mysqldump is enough for our needs.

<comment><USER12> mysqlpump is a terrible product, both in the implementation and the design, in particular:

      - it will create broken backups for databases with triggers; the bug has been open for more than an year;
      - it breaks compatibility with the `mysqldump` output format, since it adds the database name to the table names (without the option to avoid this);
      - it has an unclear product placement: it's not a subset of mysqldump (it has functionalities added), but it's not a superset either (it has functionalities missing).

The status of the mysql dump/restore tools is, in general, very underwhelming.

The Percona mysqldump version adds a switch for improving innodb indexes re- creation on restore (by moving the ADD KEY after the records insertion), but it's never been merged upstream.

Also, the pattern table matches is extremely useful for cases where it's required, but it's not clear why they added it to mysqlpump rather than to mysqldump.

Mysqlimport has a limitation (bug?) which prevents tables with mixed UTF-8 data and JSON columns to be imported (!!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> this is not really new as this has been out for atleast 7 years now. but this really is fast. i think atleast five times faster from what i remember.

</comment><comment><USER14> What tool would you recommend to easily take frequent backups and pump them to S3 glacier storage for example? I don't want to spend hours configuring something as it's only for a small personal server.

<comment><USER15> Regular MySQLdump + tar/bz2 + s3cmd or AWS CLI would do it. Probably just a few lines of bash or Python to put those together.

<comment><USER14> Found this [https://gist.github.com/abulte/4079819](https://gist.github.com/abulte/4079819)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice for my Linux (and possibly BSD) customers but some of my customers use MySQL on Windows servers, it would be nice to give them some love every now and then :-)

<comment><USER17> Would bash-on-windows thingy work for you? (Assuming it works with it)

<comment><USER18> Should build it with the MySQL client library installed. So should Cygwin, if your Windows doesn't support the Linux subsystem.</comment></comment></comment>


What Makes a Leader? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/02/634639437/what-makes-a-leader <comment><USER2> But is that because they had an innate tendency to make decisions for others that caused them to be chosen as leaders? Or because they'd already had experience as leaders and were thus already experienced and comfortable with the idea of being responsible for outcomes for others?</comment>


Ask HN: Should I sell or cash-cow my startup? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN Community,
Really appreciate your brutal honesty on this one.  I run a social network in a small niche, and I'm trying to figure out my next steps for this business.  Here's the situation:
THE GOOD:
* My team and I have been running this site for years and have successfully dominated our domain (more traffic than any other site in this space)
* Our business is profitable: we expect about $800K-$1M in revenue this year.
* We are bootstrapped and thus have no investor obligations.
* Costs can be controlled to under $250K each year--maybe much more.
* Only 1 or 2 people is needed to keep the business running.
* Finally, our business is VERY stable--unlikely for it to be disrupted in the next several years.
THE BAD:
* I've been working on the site for many years and I'm not emotionally excited about the business any more.  I'm proud of what we've achieved, but I want to move on to new projects and learn new stuff.
* My team doesn't think there is much growth left in our space (both traffic and revenue).  We could start to attack other verticals similar to our space, but I think our team doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to make it happen since we're a little tired of what we're doing.
THE CHOICES:
Scenario 1: Sell the business - An attractive option if we can get an offer.  Our team can get some liquidity for all our hard work.  With the right parent company, we may be able to more easily grow our business as well into adjacent verticals with a decent bankroll behind our efforts.  However, in this scenario, we may be tied to a retention term of 1-2 years, which keeps us in this domain even longer than desired--this may be okay though at the right price and right company.
Scenario 2: Cash cow the business - Since our business is stable, we could stop new development on our site (our biggest cost) and reduce expenses/headcount to a point where the business throws off a lot of cash.  Our business is quite stable and I think that we can go several years with decent profits and decent owner's draws.  However, in a cash cow scenario we still will need to put in some effort--at least on a part-time basis--to maintain the site; that may be tough for us later on if we're emotionally tired of the business.
A Scenario we don't want: continuing 'as is' is not an option for the team.  Raising money also doesn't seem right either.
*
HN community, how would you evaluate a decision to try to sell or cash cow?  Are there other options I should be thinking about as well?
Thanks very much for your input.  Also, if you might be interested in acquiring this business, feel free to reach out at thenext20years [at] gmail [dot] com <comment><USER2> A bit hard to comment without knowing what it is about, but ff the business is stable and anyone can run it, you can probably get a deal without a lock in. You won't get a 10x but you might be able to sell it for 5m if you find the right strategic acquirer that can fit it into his business model.

Having it as a cash cow is also cool, and you might be able to sell it in a few years at the same amount, pocketing the cashflow in the meantime.

What I'd do is:

\- start transitioning to other people. This will take you in the sweet spot of being able to pursue option 1 and 2.

\- get the dividends every month

\- get heavy on the lookout for an acquirer

In this way you'll be free to do other things (or party), not be in the pressure to sell for a small amount and be ready for the big payday when it'll come

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat hybrid idea between the two scenarios. Thank you for the advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion, the first step is to collect information. It won't hurt to see what interest there is for selling the business... from there crunch the numbers on what you think you can generate on your own. Then it's a matter of what you think is more profitable. If you don't find the acquisition offers suitable, Scenario 2 is always a good option, because in general the more profit you're generating from the business, the greater the valuation. Step 2 could be a good intermediate step before Step 1. I'd imagine in either scenario, there's the capability for you to be more hands-off, which it sounds like its one of your ultimate goals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you valuegram!

<comment><AUTHOR> One follow-up question--do you have thoughts on how to float interest among interested buyers? Or, once I have identified a potential set of buyers, how to propose that I'm open to an acquisition?

Thanks! I'm a newbie to M&A as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you tell us what site it is there is a chance that the right acquirer might be on this forum who wants to buy it, invest a little and use it as a lifestyle business.

Between the 2 options it is more of a personal choice, but one will become more clear if you have an offer. I'd suggest posting it on those flippa type sites at what you're willing to sell for and seeing if anyone bites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't provide more info publicly, but if anyone is interested in making an offer, feel free to send me a message (can you do that on HN? total newbie)

And thank you for that response too. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it seems like you can't send any private messages on this platform. Created an e-mail: thenext20years [at] gmail [dot] com

Thanks for that suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might want to have a look at the book "Built to Sell" [http://www.amazon.com/Built-Sell-Creating-Business- Without/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Built-Sell-Creating-Business- Without/dp/1591843979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329442172&sr=8-1)

This book talks about one approach to converting an existing business into a more sellable one. Judging by some of the other posts, there's some concern about what you'll get for a sale price. One of the tips in this book is to take a piece of paper and write down your immediate thought on how much money you'd like to get for the business - stick this in an envelope; down the road, once you have been negotiating and are starting to get emotionally attached to the process, open the envelope and see how the current offer compares to what you'd originally thought. That should help bring some perspective to the whole process.

</comment><comment><USER6> This post might help you - [http://cdixon.org/2011/11/28/business-development- the-goldil...](http://cdixon.org/2011/11/28/business-development-the- goldilocks-principle/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it really a good idea to ask potential suitors if they want to buy it? Wouldn't that send them the message that you're desperate and receive low ball offers as a result? I'd probably establish relationships with people in the same space as you, and just mention you're looking to move to something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, how you send that message that you want to get acquired matters. In my case too, I'm not really that desperate, so I do have the advantage of time on my side to work on a good deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Contacted by email..</comment>


Ask HN: When was the last time you read a newspaper? - <AUTHOR>

When was the last time you read a newspaper? As in one printed on broadsheet or tabloid paper. <comment><USER2> I imagine you want to set this up as a poll, as you're going to get a lot of repetition of short (one-word) answers.

Mine: Today.

</comment><comment><USER3> Physically, when I was stuck at SFO; ~2 months ago.

</comment><comment><USER4> Today.

</comment><comment><USER5> Today.</comment>


Pantone Color Institute Announces PANTONE Minion Yellow - <AUTHOR> http://www.pantone.com/pci/pages/index.aspx?pg=21182&from=hp

<comment><USER2> ""Just as the sun's rays enliven us, PANTONE Minion Yellow is a color that heightens awareness and creates clarity, lighting the way to the intelligence, originality and the resourcefulness of an open mind – this is the color of hope, joy and optimism," said Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director, Pantone Color Institute."

Wow, like watching Mad Men (60's copywriting :) )

</comment><comment><USER3> The minions pictured on the very same page are clearly a darker shade of yellow. When I grap the pantone color with a color picker I get #f8e763, while a minion gives me #fad24e.

<comment><USER4> That could be from a number of different effects, ranging from render parameters (of either the minions, the color sample or both) to optical ilussions. Also, they may already have a similar colour and chose to name "minion yellow" a new shade, which still resembles the minion's iconic colour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And what is the exact Pantone color for the Minion Yellow?

<comment><USER6> It's a new color they're adding, not an existing Pantone chip.

Pantone as a collection of colors is not a color order system. It has no organizing principle, and given the identifier of a Pantone color, there's no way to predict what the color looks like. It's just an arbitrary and idiosyncratic collection of specific color swatches. Pretty similar in principle to, say, the set of named Crayola crayon colors.

As a way of specifying colors, it's a truly awful standard, compared to a real color order system like the Munsell system, Natural Color System, CIELAB, or the like.</comment></comment>