Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts

bsky.app

199 pointsKye115 comments

I think it's interesting how people do sometimes complain about the echo chamber, tumbleweeds of moving from one 'so big it's infinity' space, to another one which is a smaller 'so big it's infinity' yet still immeasurably larger than your normal circuit.

Yes, your favourite filmstar you follow isn't there. Yes, nor are 10 people you know. But you know what? nine million, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight other people are there. If you're bored, why not reach out and say hello to every one of them? (not yourself: that would be wierd)

I had a brief period 3 decades ago where on some electronic fabric (I forget which) I was contacted by random coders in Peru, to try and help debug a problem. I have no idea who these guys were, but we established a basis to communicate for a while. I think thats a lot cooler than Justin Bieber's latest tattoo drop.

I think it's like "but is he the one" -the belief there is only one, only one group, only one fabric to talk to people, only one way, is .. well it's silly. There are lots of ways to talk to people.

I think that's a reductionist view. Platforms like Twitter are pretty unique in that unlike most other social media, you don't have well-defined communities organized around topics or locations.

On Reddit or Nextdoor, you join to discuss specific interests, and that serves as "social glue" that lets you make new acquittances along the way. The same goes for HN, by the way. But on Twitter / Bluesky / Threads / Mastodon, you probably don't have anything in common with another user picked at random.

The most common (non-commercial) motivation for joining is probably to just hang out with the people you already know from elsewhere, and then expand your social network very gradually and conservatively, mostly based on who they know. So it doesn't matter that there's 10M strangers over there if none of your buddies use it.

All true. And of course, at low critical mass, for any new participant, the likelihood of your buddies being there is lower than when you go to the one everyone is one.

Since I started to notice the value of my online presence, I’ve been spending a bit more time going down rabbit holes, and frankly I’m not sure we’ve truly lost the magic of the internet/bbs of decades ago.

Would you mind elaborating? Specifically what you mean with the "value of your online presence", and perhaps with an example of a rabbit hole in which you found the "old internet"? I've recently been thinking about how much the internet changed since I started using it in the early 2000s and how it mostly lost its magic, so I'm really interested in how/where you still find it.

And how many of these 10M are bots now? I reckon in the high 20s percent.

For context (if you’re wondering why that post is written in both English and Brazilian Portuguese), Twitter/X is currently blocked in Brazil [1], which prompted users to massively flock to Bluesky’s main frontend, bsky.app.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazil

Did they also flock to the Fediverse? If not, why not?

It seems weird to me that a media organizations like the New York times doesn’t set up a mastodon server for their journalists. Governments would also be a good option.

You obviously wouldn’t let people outside the organization register an account, but anyone can read, and if you want to comment or follow, sign up to any of the free federated servers.

Even if you have all the software handled, building a team of moderators who are willing to sift through all the crap and stop the child porn, cat in a blender videos, war footage, sexual harassment, upskirt crimes, etc. etc. is tough.

It's not the software that's hard. It's the moderation.

Pure text like Hacker News is a safe zone from this kind of crap. But multimedia sites like Twitter, Threads or BlueSky need to deal with the filthiest content and sanitize their servers. Even as their members complain about borderline not-a-child porn just a petite lady who is over 18 (yadda yadda) flame wars. Moderator teams grow tired of that bullshit.

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Ex: it's not Twitch that's hard to make. But instead the difficult thing is effectively moderating the hot-tub meta, as streamers like to call it.

> Even if you have all the software handled, building a team of moderators who are willing to sift through all the crap and stop the child porn, cat in a blender videos, war footage, sexual harassment, upskirt crimes, etc. etc. is tough.

In the context I think we're discussing, you deal with that by controlling who has accounts on the instance, not by policing posts one by one.

Do you allow replies to your Mastodon instance?

If so, you'll be policing the replies. And those replies can potentially be coming from across the Fediverse from other servers.

> Pure text like Hacker News is a safe zone from this kind of crap. But multimedia sites like Twitter, Threads or BlueSky need to deal with the filthiest content and sanitize their servers

I'm guessing Hacker News is safe because of the context and the small size. Other text-only forums I've moderated in the past have needed plenty of moderation for various horrible stuff that's been linked. And links we have on HN as well, but it doesn't get nowhere near as much misuse as I've seen in other text-only places.

Is anyone around here posting unmoderated videos as part of the discussion?

That's the thing: if a link comes from Facebook, YouTube or whatever, you know it's at least passed the first steps of moderation.

I'd expect that constantly posting links to OnlyFans or other riskier sites will get you flagged or banned around here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It’s a valid point. Renting servers sucks, setting up mastodon sucks. When do we see “Hosted mastodon AAS”?

It exists: https://masto.host/

Couple more on this list: https://delightful.club/delightful_libre_hosters/

Happy customer here too. Not affiliated, just impressed with how smoothly it all goes.

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of decentralisation and the fediverse?

Now, you've just moved everyone to hosted Mastodon, and why not make it even easier - instead of hosting multiple mastodons, just make one single mastodon everyone signs up to... and we've just reinvented Twitter.

Yes, exactly. Every decentralized service eventually backend dominated by a small number of service access providers who are actually willing to deal with hardware.

It is one of the reasons I appreciate masto.host as the owner has made it clear that signups are gated in part by how much of the fediverse it collectively hosts, because they don't want to be a central point of failure, they do want to encourage competition, and they also don't want the headaches of running that big of an instance population.

And even the self hosted instances are mostly in a couple of ISPs. (OVH; Hetzner; …).

*eventually becomes

There's also: https://fedihost.co/

FWIW, I have social accounts on X/BSky/Mastodon/Threads and post to all of them. I have noticed most of my engagement this month originating from Mastodon.

They did not. IIRC, one of Brazil’s leading politicians posted his addresses when this went down, and BlueSky was at the top, and fedi was nowhere to be found. Could be that simple.

Yes, they did. Portuguese engagement jumped big time on Mastodon.

"Big Time" on Fediverse: 20k users joined mastodon.social. That's less than 1% of the people that went to bluesky.

The main TV news program in Brazil (Jornal Nacional) is now promoting their bluesky. There is no real comparison.

Bluesky / ATProto is a federated protocol

Because nobody outside of the tech bubble knows about it

no; marketing, and because social media's whole point is to connect large numbers of people, therefore marketing is product quality

An unexpected side effect of this is that my Bluesky feed will now spoil the weekend's F1 qualifying and race.

It took a lot of Brazilians (and their love of Lewis Hamilton) to make that change.

The Mastodon User Count account suggests there are 15M accounts on Mastodon:

https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11314334534088311...

    Mastodon Users
    @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social

    15,438,893 accounts 
    +209 in the last hour
    +2,542 in the last day
    +20,162 in the last week

    Sep 15, 2024, 21:00

Of course there are differences ... I would be pleased to hear first hand descriptions of them

EDIT: I hereby withdraw everything I said about BSky. Based on the replies, clearly I'm completely wrong. I apologise for all inaccuracies.

> Bluesky is one big shouting match with opaque algorithms partly deciding what you will see, whereas Mastodon-the-Platform is a loose alliance of multiple communities, where what you say will only be seen by people in your community

Bsky feed is chronological with optional algorithmic feeds you can choose from so this doesn't sound true. Mastodon is also chronological with trending post on the homepage. I imagine the internals of both platforms are more similar than you might imagine.

If you don't subscribe to any feeds, Bluesky is also a place where what you say will only be seen by people who follow you and people who follow those who repost your posts. Whether or not either of them is a shouting match depends a lot on your choice of who to follow.

This is not to say there aren't significant differences, many generated by the federation choices Mastodon (and Bluesky) have made, as you also noted.

Rather than misinformed dick-measuring between the two, we should be glad that the next generation of social media traffic is distributed among many services and not centralized on one that would inevitably devolve into Twitter-like patterns.

One thing I do not understand about @mastodonusercount stats is: while total number of accounts significantly increased in last year or two, 'thousand toots per hour' is still oscillating in the same range.

Mastodon seems to have a retention problem, but still has a healthy daily new user count. I noticed this back when it hit close to 2m active then slid down to 600k. If they can figure out how to fix retention then it might start growing meaningfully again.

https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon

This is nonsense. Bluesky is not a big shouting match. If you don't like the default algorithms you can pick your own, including chronological.

If this is sincerely your actual, real experience with Bluesky then you use it in a very different way from all the people who are happy with it.

To be completely fair, feed algorithms can be somewhat opaque. On the other hand, most of the feeds I follow are just picking up on keywords/emojis or include all posts from a specific list of people. So it depends to some degree on your choices.

That's true. I do wish the Discover algorithm were open, but I understand that can open it up to abuse. So far it mostly just shows me nice things. There was no point with Twitter's algorithmic feed when I could say that.

I can't speak to any secret motivations but it seems like the folks running it care about making a nice place for people to hang out. We've seen how a desire to not be evil can clash with a desire to make money, but I remain optimistic.

> the folks running it care about making a nice place for people to hang out

This is actually what I didn't like about bsky. I don't want the developer of software to inject their personal social biases into the platform, and thought one of the main points of decentralization was to mitigate this.

I was talking about UX, not moderation.

The whole comment was about how much you love the Discover algorithm because it just shows you "nice things" but ok

Mastodon is not just Mastodon alone. The network consists of something more fundamental: ActivityPub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

Similarly for Bluesky and ATProto

https://atproto.com/

Maybe I should use this instead of Threads. I had an account there, 'deepsleepcountsheep' and then it randomly got banned/turned off and it keeps asking me to prove my identify. I submitted my state drivers license but apparently they can't use that? Insane honestly, not really sure what triggered it, maybe the icloud private relay?

Anyways, I think I'll try either this or mastodon.

Mastodon is the way, and it federates with Threads.

Only if you're on the right (or wrong) server.

Which is your own choice.

> I submitted my state drivers license […]

Wait what? Why did you willingly give Facebook a copy of your driver license?! That makes no sense at all. There is absolutely no social account in existence that is so important to follow Facebook’s requirements (or any other social network for what is worth). No the president’s account, not the vice-president, not the bishop of Rome, no one’s account is that important to hand over your private information.

Why not? Who cares if Facebook has my drivers license number? Unless they plan on using the new Georgia voter deregistration site, it doesn’t seem very sensitive. Or are you worried about the address part?

Let me answer your question with another question: would you feel comfortable sending a picture of both sides of your driver’s license to my email address? If you say “no”, please share the reasons here, maybe they are the answer to your own question.

I trust facebook not to scam me (..?) much more than I trust a random stranger. As someone who worked in big tech, my takeaway was that they’re absurdly worried about data privacy and security when it comes to PII and such. They’re evil, of course, but not because they’re opening credit cards in the name of their users…

Tho tbh maybe they could sell the resulting info? I guess? Address isn’t exactly top-secret info and I give it out all the time to worse companies than Facebook, but still, they could (and probably would!) sell it for a few fractions of a cent to some big data conglomerate.

Facebook's staff can always try to commit identity theft if you provide them all the identity information needed to do it

Access to any of this kind of information at a big tech company is logged and scrutinized like you wouldn't believe. You will be nuked from orbit before you can exfil even a single DL pic. There's a reason you don't hear stories like "Facebook employee stole my drivers license!" -- despite the media salivating for the opportunity.

Its far more than just being scammed by button pusher #300 at FB to me. All of Big Tech are active targets of very seriously motivated people attempting to get the gourd of information each of these companies collect. And many times they succeed.

Microsoft for example has an active bulletin of various organizations from nearly every country in the world.

As does Google, as does Facebook, and so on. Some of these companies coordinate on espionage as well.

But that is getting beside the point which is you giving up your information is far more than opening yourself up to scams.

It's is likely reviewed by humans, who can just capture a screenshot or snap a photo of their screen with their phone.

sure but if we allow companies to capture this information then it will just be massively leaked like they fumble everything else

- "No the president’s account, not the vice-president, not the bishop of Rome, no one’s account is that important"

What about your friends'?

At some point some "serious" accounts need to take these emerging new decentralized social media seriously and setup shop there.

You cant claim any sort of moral integrity when you engage with your audience on platforms that treat them as product.

So the migration is starting.

You have quite a few journalists and news feeds that post on bluesky. Phil Lewis and Aaron Rupar (two fairly notable US liberal journalists that have substantial followings on twitter) are on bluesky and now that video has started rolling out they have become more active again.

And not a "serious" set of accounts by any means but the consensus from the vtuber community (which is to be honest one of the massive communities on twitter) is that they'd start moving over to bluesky once video support and some degree of moderation were in place. I suspect a lot of the other fairly cohesive niches on twitter will start looking at bluesky now for the same reasons.

Significant portions of Brazil's government and media are on there as well, including the president and one of the top news programs in the country. The latter caused a huge spike of growth all on its own by putting its handle in broadcasts.

https://bsky.app/profile/lula.com.br

https://bsky.app/profile/jnoficial.bsky.social

And the most important: Duolingo.

https://bsky.app/profile/duolingobrasil.com.br

> https://bsky.app/profile/duolingobrasil.com.br

Is that actually the real Duolingo? duolingo.com is managed by "Amazon Registrar, Inc." with masked owner, while "duolingobrasil.com.br" seems to be managed by CloudFlare and owned by "JOTACOM COMUNICACAO E PUBLICIDADE LTDA" which seems to be a marketing agency based on Brazil.

If that account was really official duolingo, I'd expect it to use the official duolingo.com domain for verification. Instead it's using a domain created in 2024-09-09 and people on Bluesky treats it as the official duolingo page?

What's the point of using domains as verification when people just ignore it outright?

It's their Brazil marketing team. Thus the .com.br.

It's also consistent with their other socials which is probably why they did that rather than ask the DNS people for the other Duolingo br domain to add it.

A number of people have already increased their social platform presence by adding Threads and Bluesky. The moral integrity comes when they leave their large following as the platform diverges from their values

You mean like https://social.bbc and a few others? There are also smaller accounts on https://verifiedjournalist.org/ It's happening.

Netflix should make a documentary on why people in this modern day and age still gravitate towards Twitter-esque social media platforms. It has been shown over and over that they make people less happy, less productive, more stressed and (ironically) less social.

It's often just a place to go when your preferred one dies. A lot of tumblr users moved there for this reason in the mid-2010s. I moved there when reddit killed its third party (read: the only usable) apps and went through its own cultural death: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

It's been really fun seeing the growth over the last year. Tons of people and fun/interesting posts. Feels like the early days of Twitter.

Does anybody else at this point want to mostly stop posting on async text-based services anyways?

Honestly, I'd rather just hang out on Google Meet all day and chill with a handful of besties. We can still all share our thoughts and other things we find interesting on the web, but if we're gonna all be terminally online, we might as well at least bring as much of the human experience back into it as we can.

Is it the async part that's a problem? Or is it that chilling with besties is all we ever really wanted?

I was pretty happy with Facebook in 2007 when it was posting pictures and making stupid jokes with my actual friends (not the whole world and whatever is trending).

Async has a lot of benefits, but I think if 10x as much of the content we engage with asynchronously was originally live interaction between people we have a personal bond with (or at least can recognize the humanity in from a distance), we would notice a positive difference and want the internet to be more like that.

I specifically use social media to not engage the same people. With friends we often still use a mumble server or the next random chat app for the extended circle.

But I do like to read other peoples perspective. Naturally I prefer platforms like HN or reddit that are more orientated around topics instead of people. I don't care for e-celebs at all and as such platforms like bluesky or Twitter are often too boring.

Instagram is too stupid for me and I would suggest this is a form of pathological absence of any intelligence. There is some very good art though and some good ideas and this is generalizing, but the signal/noise ratio makes you crazy. Everything is filled with some form of very radiant moron aura. Sometimes I believe it is deliberate.

I think Threads was a conspiracy by Facebook to make Insta less stupid and expand the demographic. But it isn't open enough and anonymous usage isn't possible.

In the current form and with the dynamics around Twitter, I think Bluesky draws in quite a few insufferable people. Probably those that hate Musk the most and I am wary of them as I was with those that wanted to make him king of the universe in times past.

> if we're gonna all be terminally online, we might as well at least bring as much of the human experience back into it as we can

So Myspace, Foursquare? (Not being witty, I loved that era)

I mostly mean talking to each other to our faces with our voices. But I recognize the sentiment you're referring to. I think the stagnation of social media in the last 10 years, combined with the clear societal harms it has caused in some cases, has given many of us who have been around the block a few times reason to reflect on some of the ancient success stories and even yearn for their lost appeals.

Advertisement disclaimer.

Bluesky is a VC-funded corporate network that expects return on investment while saying it is open. Up until the present date that same company made it difficult for anyone to run their own server, only permitting to self-host their own data rather than the promoted decentralized open data: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080334/bluesky-self-hos...

It also restricts anyone from adding their algorithms or even create new clients to access the data. It is a _defacto_ walled garden that somehow gets promoted on mainstream media. The same media that largely ignored open platforms, or when mentioning them has adopted a negative tone. That media has forgot that the same brazilian person they called names is now living in a country under effective control with walled gardens: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-fiatjaf-nostr-do...

The same ignored Nostr counts today with +700 volunteer-based servers that are decentralized and permit anyone, anywhere, to publish their own texts: https://nostr.watch/relays/find

HN, it is time to make a stand if you want to keep the internet free.

> Up until the present date that same company made it difficult for anyone to run their own server, only permitting to self-host their own data rather than the promoted decentralized open data

> It also restricts anyone from adding their algorithms or even create new clients to access the data. It is a _defacto_ walled garden that somehow gets promoted on mainstream media

This is not remotely close to true and the verge article you picked was from the initial rollout of federation which was only 2 weeks after they got rid of invite codes and the service became public.

----------

Feed generators (aka the algorithm) are open. You can create your own feeds and their app literally has a UX for adding new feeds.

Labelling and Moderation services are also federated.

And data storage like you mentioned.

And the "firehose" (the event relays).

And even the app-view system/API services.

Oh and of course the Bluesky app's web, android, and iOS implementations are open sourced as well.

There are certainly some things they still control but that's because this project is still actively being developed to basic feature completeness. An example of that is the primary DID format used for defining accounts. The standard DNS record based DID format is federated by it's nature but ATProto's in house DID format is still limited to their instance until they can get it to a production state where they feel comfortable opening it up to federation (like they have every other aspect of their codebase so far).

I'm actually not sure how they could be more open about their push for federation. They want to relegate themselves to the position of developer and infrastructure maintainer as quickly as possible and their work has all been towards that effort.

They do need to disclose their corporate charter.

Is that really important in your opinion?

I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate charter that was more than vague corporate speak sounding grandiose and impactful while saying absolutely nothing.

It is more important in a public benefit corp, if there is supposed to be something different about them.

Legally there aren't many (any?) meaningful differences with a public benefit corp. Law changes in 2020 made it such that a PBC is more of a marketing thing than anything else in my opinion.

We've already seen the number of PBCs increase quite a bit since the law change, there was exactly 1 before 2020 if I'm not mistaken. I fully expect companies to start using it as virtue signaling, making the distinction effectively meaningless.

Excuses, excuses, excuses. NOSTR is literally doing all of that in the open with the community involved since the beginning, without a single excuse.

This isn't exactly a new thing. Walled garden companies will feed hope for years while dripping a bit of freedom as slowly as they possibly can get away with it. Reminds when google wanted to support XMPP, Microsoft stating they love Linux and more recently Meta now claiming they will support mastodon.

It isn't an open development, it isn't open data.

Just another VC-funded company with deep pockets for advertisements everywhere.

> It isn't an open development,

It is literally open development. There isn't a CLA and they accept patches/PRs from the community. The "least open" aspect is their contribution guidelines which are essentially just "the maintainer is not required to waste time on low quality PRs and reserves a right to veto PRs that move counter to the vision they have for the project".

If that's not open development then neither is Linux or Git.

> it isn't open data.

And how is it not open data? The data is literally self-hostable, the relays and API servers are self hostable. And you can choose between an in-progress ID standard and a DNS based DID standard.

There is literally no part of the data that isn't open.

Anyone can make a feed (algorithm). There are multiple independent projects that can access and put stuff on PDSes. There are lots of clients. They just added OAuth to make it easier for them.

https://docs.bsky.app/showcase

I have no idea where you got your information but you should treat that source as unreliable.

> "HN, it is time to make a stand if you want to keep the internet free."

That ship sailed long ago:(

Is this a Scuttlebot joke?

Agreed. Make a stand. Open and free internet is the last bastion. Look at everything. We're not the god damned product. We're not advertisement data. I'm not a fucking ROI. We're human beings, and we enjoy the internet, hacker culture. We're visionaries. We tinker. We build. We share.

Seeing what the internet grew to from the 90s to now, is ...well you see it.

It went from being a potentially infinite public creative/informational space to a privately owned strip mall with a few boring shops where you have to show your ID to get in. Same thing happens with any neat physical location too - gets commercialized to hell, becomes totally ruined and boring by last-movers, commandeered by academics who act like they invented it, and productized by capitalists who want to turn any/all freely available blessings into expensive yet shoddy products (plus ads).

What once presented a true and superior alternative to the mainstream firehose of advertising and propaganda became "Fox News Presents The Donald Trump's Presidential Campaign Show (Sponsored by SquareSpace), With Your Hosts Kim Kardashian and Jake Paul!" just like the radio, film, etc. - it gets commercialized/ruined.

We need a new thing, bsky aint it.

  >is a VC-funded corporate network that expects return on investment while saying it is open
  >Nostr

Do you mean the same Nostr that is backed by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter billionaire?

There is a difference between revenge-donations and VC-funded business.

One of them is pissed enough to break walled-gardens and that donation is now sponsoring multiple open source projects from small developers that even yourself can check in the open how they are used.

What is the VC corporate money sponsoring at that company? Right.

I tried skimming the docs, but couldn’t find how domain verification works on Nostr. Does a verified domain work as your handle or only as a verified domain?

That’s my favorite feature in Bluesky. I don’t need to worry about a handle since I can just use my domain.

Domain verification is NIP05, here is a tutorial: https://nostr.how/en/guides/get-verified

Basically create json file on your site at /.well-known/nostr.json

Place inside your username and the npub, done.

So instead of just using a domain TXT record you're required to host a page and provide access to this file? Seems worse than how AtProto handle's this.

That is a wrong assumption.

First: You can easily host a million user handles on a JSON file without impact on the website, you cannot host a million user handles as TXT record.

Second: It is far easier to update a JSON file on disk than using an API to a specific domain registrar provider and change TXT records there.

What are some popular user accounts on Nostr?

You can check that here: https://primal.net/explore/global/trending

It would be nice to also know seven-day actives on BlueSky, but I don’t know where to look or where to ask.

3.2 million

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-day.html

More stats sites

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

https://clearsky.app/

Thank you!

Edit: how do you find out about such things?

>> "Edit: how do you find out about such things?"

Being there when the deep magics are written. These kinds of tools come up if you follow the developers and people interested in decentralized social media.

Seeing this submission just reminded me that there are a number of X alternatives growing at the moment. Of the alternatives are there any that you use and recommend?

BlueSky is excellent. I just miss some international commentators. I'd love to have a tool to notify when they enter BlueSky.

Skip Mastodon, BlueSky, or Threads, join cohost by the anti software software club, a software company that hates the software industry:

https://cohost.org/rc/welcome

// On second thought, cohost sign-ups are closed, as it's shutting down end of year. Turns out Twitter alternatives are hard to keep going, even if all you're doing is changing your name from Twitter to X.

>If you're bored, why not reach out and say hello to every one of them?

Because that's not how social media works and you know it. People want to connect with people they know either personally or via media.

The majority of Brazilian users aren't using it by choice.

Using social media shouldn't be some philanthropic effort, that's how you end up with the desktop Linux. Linux is successful because it made all those commercial Unix vendors obsolete, what does Blue Sky or any of these fediverse things have to offer other than a refugee camp? They don't have important users, therefore they havent made Twitter obsolete.

How does it pay its costs?

And what are the daily active users ?

Stable around 1.6m.

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

How many bots?

Before it could load I hit back. Honest feedback.

Wow, so low. That explains why its still a ghost own compared to xitter.

Why downvote facts?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com