Ask YC: Can "a gay in a garage" compete with  big and established companies. - <AUTHOR>

I am planing to create a startup product which is a server based software (finance messaging). Do you think that "a guy in a garage" can compete with big and established companies with such kind of product and what strategy to use to spread the product popularity (license (open source?), other products interoperability). <comment><USER2> I'm guessing that there's a typo in the title... I imagine "a gay in a garage" is just as likely to be successful as any other _guy_ in a garage.

But to answer the question: If you're going to get into a fight with an elephant, the trick is to avoid being directly in front of it when it charges. Yes, you can compete -- but compete by doing something different, not by duplicating what they're already doing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, darling, and you can be more FABULOUS too!

I think maybe you could start jetting (it's an accelerated version of planing) to compete with big companies by leveraging open-source finance messaging products like RabbitMQ instead of starting from scratch. Then you can concentrate on new functionality with a solid foundation.

You might want to invest in a spel-chekker, as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to apologize for spelling mistakes, but do not expect that all YC readers are native English speakers.

<comment><USER3> My comment wasn't intended to be mean-spirited. I just couldn't resist the 'gay' and 'planing' bait, that's all ;-)

I certainly don't expect all YC readers to be native English speakers. I did try to be helpful (AMQP/RabbitMQ suggestion), but without knowing more details about your idea it is difficult to help. My company does quite a bit of work in the financial messaging area (as a user, not as a SaaS provider), so I'd like to hear more about your ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is about AMPQ. Just a hypothesis, that implementing it in Haskell instead of Erlang is a great idea :) (e.g. provability of correctness of implementation etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Create a great product. Focus a lot on how you can be better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Making an open source project into a startup seems like a very long road. I don't know this particular area (finance messaging) though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why open source is considered to be "long road"? I assume open source to be important to financial institutions (auditing, regulations, etc.).

<comment><USER3> I would say that open-source is a "long road" for financial institutions, in general, even if it is not for rational reasons. They are concerned about crooks finding vulnerabilities they can exploit in open codebases, for example, and they are concerned about always having a 'throat to choke' in the form of a very solid support services provider. Only when an open-source project is huge and very well-supported by several large systems companies do most institutions start to come around. Linux, for example, has been hugely embraced by financial institutions...but most of that acceptance took place only after Red Hat, IBM (etc. etc.) were around for services/support contracts. Financial institutions do NOT like risk. They absolutely HATE risk. A guy in a garage is a huge risk for them, even if you do develop a killer product/service.

As a 'guy in a garage,' I'm not sure a financial messaging product would be my choice to focus on, open-source or not. It is a rather difficult market even for well-financed companies with teams of programmers and salespeople. Isn't there another market where your skills might be better leveraged?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. I have the same impressions about the conservativeness of the financial institutions. This is one of the ideas I am evaluating now, counting the pros and cons. I can focus on other "messaging" areas not necessarily related to financial messaging.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eve is winding down - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo <comment><USER2> I think the problem they really had from the beginning was they were pressuring themselves to innovate in an industry that is already decades old. You can't raise $2 mil and not feel the pressure to perform, and sadly this is not how innovation works. So instead they kept releasing prototypes that didn't really make sense or remotely scale:

\- turning sql into graphs that make a 2 line statment take up the whole screen

\- the database language that had no performance characteristics at all

\- the bouncing ball demo that seems to only be made to create a bouncing ball, and yet doesn't add more understanding to the process anyway

\- the imperative language written in ' english' (but only accepts the english words and specific grammar the computer understands) and so on.

Not trying to be harsh, but this is probably a good thing. Once they take a break and move on to other things, a ton of ideas will no doubt come flooding in, just because they aren't under any scrutiny anymore.

<comment><USER3> > I think the problem they really had from the beginning was they were > pressuring themselves to innovate in an industry that is already decades > old.

I think the problem is that they were kept backtracking over details that were peripheral to the big picture goal (or, at least, to a viable MVP) rather than moving forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://witheve.com/](http://witheve.com/), for those new to Eve.

<comment><USER5> 2.8 mb background, nice...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Eve had some great ideas, and I hope the community is able to do something with the work that was done.

</comment><comment><USER6> First Light Table then Eve. 2 for 2 :)</comment>


It's time to kill off the Dotcom Hero CEO - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/its-time-to-kill-off-the-dotcom-hero-ceo/

<comment><USER2> I think Mike Arrington has been investing too much in companies with no Hero- CEO in their teams ;-)

An inspiring leader is an incredibly valuable asset. Just imagine what would have happened with Apple had Wozniak tried to to it without Jobs.

OTOH, I think a Microsoft with less Gates and more Paul Allen would be an interesting thing.

I will have some experiments to conduct as soon as time-travel becomes possible.

<comment><USER3> True, but Buffet (I believe) considers companies with Hero-CEO's as dangerous investments, as they have a single point of failure.

<comment><USER2> High return often goes hand in hand with high risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is false. I think a determined CEO [well, founding team, but the CEO usually gets the headlines] is the rock solid foundation of any company. The team and advisors build upon that foundation. The founding team _is_ the key factor in terms of success.

</comment><comment><USER5> We need WAY more than we already have. Not the fabled press stories, but the guys+gals that inspire more of us to build world changing products.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there something about British culture that avoids hero figures and prefers to emphasize the team contribution? Read in a certain context, this article could be seen as an attempt to discourage differentiation between individuals based on their levels of ambition, or in other words, to keep the heroes at bay.

<comment><USER3> I'm almost certain there is. It's apparent in most of British culture. I even read an article recently about different approaches to sports throughout history that said basically the same thing. The greek/roman tradition was very hero focused, traditional british sports are very team focused, and american sports have merged the two, where we have team sports but also have standout hero's within those teams.</comment></comment>


Mother-effing hsl() - <AUTHOR> http://mothereffinghsl.com/

<comment><USER2> Note that hsl is a breeze to set, but a pain in the ass to get. Browser engines convert it to rgb(a) and if you want to check if anything has, say, saturation 100% you must first convert back to hsl from rgb.

To make matters worse, the hsl color spectrum covers colors that RGB can't represent, so you if you're checking for a particular color the conversion algorithm will throw you back something with a few digits off.

Otherwise yes, hsl rocks!

<comment><USER3> > _hsl color spectrum covers colors that RGB can't represent_

This is simply false. HSL is a simple deformation of the RGB cube into a cylinder, as you can see in this nice diagram I drew up about a year ago: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Hsl...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Hsl- and-hsv.svg/1000px-Hsl-and-hsv.svg.png)

> _conversion algorithm will throw you back something with a few digits off_

These are rounding errors, and shouldn't be especially noticeable. So what?

<comment><USER2> > This is simply false.

You are right, what I meant is that you can set h = 200 s = 100% l = 0% and you will get back R = 0, G = 0, B = 0.

> These are rounding errors, and shouldn't be especially noticeable. So what?

Not to the eye, but for computers it is. Say you want to check if an element has a background color of hsl(100, 30%, 30%) because you set this color before. Well, you can't. I ran into this problem while building <http://memela.com> and I had to switch to rgb because of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To quote from the blog post that page links to: "HSL is supported in almost all the major browsers: Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Chrome 5.0+, Opera 10+ and Explorer 9.0+."

Not being supported in IE before IE9 means this is pretty unusable for anything commercial, unfortunately. I mean, we only just got to drop support for _IE6_...

Which is a shame, since it's pretty neat.

<comment><USER5> So what you are trying to tell me, is that the cup is half empty?

<comment><USER4> The cup is half full... of Internet Explorer. :P

<comment><USER6> I see this thread is an example of '2 programmers, 1 cup'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you mess with Processing, Cinder, oF or any other creative coding frameworks, using HSL is much easier for programmatically creating visuals and gradients...

<comment><USER8> Could you provide links to those? I'm familiar with Processing, Google found Cinder pretty quickly, but I can't track down oF with just the acronym.

<comment><USER9> oF = <http://openframeworks.cc> Cinder = <http://libcinder.org> Processing = <http://processing.org> / <http://processingjs.org>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apparently no support in IE8.

Which means that I will probably use it anyway, just because it's that nice to deal with mentally.

</comment><comment><USER11> Alpha does not work (reverts) as soon as you hover over the color picker again.

<comment><USER12> Click and it'll stay.

<comment><USER13> This is super not intuitive, and there's no way that I can see to revert back to the original state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In non-web programming areas, HSL (or HSV, take your pick) is a great way to quickly make a heatmap out of a range of values. Just scale them and map them from 0 (hot) to 240 (cold) and peg the other values. Purple looks out of place so I avoid it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Paul Irish might be one of the most productive web developers of the past 6-9 months.

<comment><USER16> probably because he builds things that require (virtually) no support and don't have any features not visible in the primary interface.

I love the guy and his projects, I'm just saying; let's not discount the amazing work of others ;)

<comment><USER15> Oh, I wouldn't think to discount the wonderful things that others create.

I'm just a bit biased to complement his projects (and feverish work ethic) since I find myself using his work on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every now and then someone explains something that should have been completely obvious and I get floored. Of COURSE that's how hsl works, how else could it work? Love it.

</comment><comment><USER18> > one sec, bro.

I have no idea what the heck that means ... The page appears broken.

<comment><USER19> You might want to enable JavaScript or get a modern browser.

<comment><USER18> >You might want to enable JavaScript or get a modern browser.

Javascript enabled and browser is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:184.108.40.206) Gecko/2009070811 Red Hat/3.0.12-1.el5_3 Firefox/3.0.12" so I should be fine.

Error Console does report an interesting little tidbit;

Error: color is undefined Source File: <http://mothereffinghsl.com/js/script.js> Line: 89

The function in question is

function inputchange(e){

      var target = e.target;

      if (target.id == 'alpha'){
        alpha = Math.floor(target.value)/100;
        if (alpha === 1){
          alpha = undefined;
        }
      }
      if (target.id == 'light'){
        var split = color.split('%');
        split[1] = split[1].replace(/\d+/, Math.round(target.value));
        color = split.join('%');

      }
      setText();

}

Sorry I dont have a full stack trace for you, nor am I inclined to fire up a debugger right now to troubleshoot this any further.

...

page is still stuck at "One sec, bro."

<comment><USER9> Firefox 3.0 is 2.5 years old, bro.

"Mozilla ended support for Firefox 3 on March 30, 2010 with the release of 3.0.19" which is 7 security updates after what you're carrying around.

I'm not the only one who doesn't test it anymore.

<comment><USER18> Then there is a real simple solution for you, don't claim that your site is compatible with Firefox 3.0 + ... because it clearly is not. Say what you do, do what you say.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: HTML styled newsletters? or Plaintext? - <AUTHOR>

Which do you prefer? or don't care? <comment><USER2> You can send both formats, and in fact, if you send text/html, you should send a text/plain copy as well. As one of the remaining mutt users out there, nothing annoys me more than html mail. I don't read it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I much prefer plain text, but this really depends on your target audience.

Based on personal experience I believe those who don't live and breathe this stuff 24/7 prefer a little window dressing.

If it is styled, I recommend minimizing the amount of scrolling required to reach your text. (For example, I don't see much value in a large header mit logo.)

But test, and ask the same question of your prospective readers, if possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is something you really have to test. You can ask, but people often think one thing but react differently.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most HTML email I receive also has a text version. I prefer text, but I don't see why you can't do both.

</comment><comment><USER6> For a BtoC product HTML style I'd say: attractive.... For BtoB, SaaS Product: Plain or HTML but very light.

</comment><comment><USER7> +1 Plaintext using Markdown syntax.

<comment><USER8> Interesting -- are there email clients which can process Markdown and display the body with its intended styling?

<comment><USER2> No, but it's human readable styling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> MIME multipart/alternative type is what you want to use. RFC2346 section 5.1.4.

</comment><comment><USER10> I prefer creating plain text emails. I prefer reading lightly styled html emails.

</comment><comment><USER11> +1 Plain text.</comment>


I studied every user testing platform and here's what I found - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@samdickie/i-studied-every-user-testing-platform-and-heres-what-i-found-6274b16db303 <comment><USER2> I found out that the author had a lot of free time (otherwise, how can you justify the learning/testing the platforms?). That is incredibly good for himself to learn all of them but seriously, why?</comment>


Superconductivity offers tantalising changes from electricity to transport - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/08c4109c-d8f1-11e7-9504-59efdb70e12f <comment><USER2> This article is kind of whack... Yes modern superconducting materials are getting warmer and warmer. No we're not at room temp now. No there's not a clear path to simulating band gaps for extended structure materials with the quantum computing..

<comment><USER3> No, but if you could make Variational Quantum Monte Carlo work better by starting with a good variational guess in your quantum simulator....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What would room temperature superconductivity actually buy society? I can think of a few things but I'm not sure about the implications.

* Long distance transmission is currently high voltage AC to work around losses. The whole distribution network would become efficient but would need reinvestment. This would offset the utility of local instant-response power generation.

* Things that need big magnets would get easier: MRI, particle accelerators, etc. Is this a big deal? Maglev trains would get more attractive.

* What else?

<comment><USER5> Low voltage distribution networks in data centers. Forget 48v - you could centrally distribute 3.3v power for CPUs. 1000s of 80% step down converters become 100% efficient.

Superconducting ring storage of electricity.

Probably some break throughs in electrical storage because SQUID devices can now be commodity parts in hard disks.

<comment><USER6> > Low voltage distribution networks in data centers.

3.3v (or lower, for modern chips) requires _big_ cables. I doubt that's worth it.

> 1000s of 80% step down converters become 100% efficient.

How does this happen? Are you excluding the efficiency of the central step- down converter?

> Superconducting ring storage of electricity.

Can you actually fit a meaningful amount of energy in there before it saturates?

<comment><USER7> Big cables not needed as superconductors can carry more current per unit cross sectional area than copper.

Even one central step-down converter could be 98% (or whatever) efficient, plus you could actually generate power at 3.3V if you wanted to, making step- down not required.

As far as storage of energy, yeah, you can store a lot of energy in a superconducting ring. It is a viable energy storage method.

THAT ALL SAID, the physics of superconductivity mean that even if you ARE able to get room temperature superconductivity to work, you can get even BETTER critical current (i.e. current per cross section area that can be handled while maintaining a superconducting state) so you'll still probably want to cool the cables in some applications, and for a certain current carrying capacity, you'll probably want to use a higher voltage than just 3.3V, even if you don't have any voltage drop, because that would increase the power that can be transmitted for the same cable investment.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm, wonder what the cascade failure of a "full" superconducting ring heated past it's superconducting point would look like?

Maybe impressive fireworks/explosion?... from a safe distance. :D

<comment><USER7> Good question! The thing you're referring to is "quench." Answer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_quench)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, that's interesting info. It's good there seems to be well established ways to detect and cope with this. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vanilla DFT is still a ground-state theory, last time I checked, which means it can't tell you the things about the Fermi surfaces you would most like to know for superconductors. I can't speak for quantum simulation.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder, if cooper pairs can be made with ions?

<comment><USER10> As a rule, the heavier your particles, the harder it is to get quantum mechanics behavior out of them. You won't see atoms forming Bose-Einstein condensates at anything you can cool with liquid nitrogen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://archive.is/gE8kw](http://archive.is/gE8kw)

</comment><comment><USER12> Haven't carbon nanotubes already been shown to exhibit ballistic conduction at room temperature?

<comment><USER7> Ballistic conduction is not the same as superconductivity.

Superconductivity relies on Cooper pairing, i.e. charge carriers that are (relatively weakly) bonded together such that the even smaller interactions with imperfections (including just thermal dislocations) in the conducting medium are even smaller than the minimum energy needed to break the Cooper bond. Until this minimum energy is achieved, then the Cooper pair is quantum mechanically prohibited from losing energy (to resistance/heat) from these small imperfections, similar to how an electron is quantum mechanically prohibited from swirling into the nucleus (losing energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation due to traveling in a circle, i.e. accelerated, as classically one would expect) from the ground state.

<comment><USER12> I know the differences between the two, perhaps I should've elaborated more. My point was that other than the Meissner effect, from a practical standpoint ballistic conduction is just as useful in terms of electron mobility.

<comment><USER7> Ballistic conduction does raise the possibility that the bulk electrical resistivity of carbon nanotubes or graphene (etc) could be lower than (say) copper, but this is not practically as useful as superconductivity. The Josephson Junction (which is at the heart of SQUIDS--used for measuring extremely small magnetic fields--and also superconducting qubits--probably the most promising of the current quantum computing technologies) relies on the quantum mechanical nature of the phenomenon.

Because of Cooper pairing, you can avoid resistance even at the interface between one superconductor and another, thus allowing the complete cessation of all resistance. This allows you to store energy in the form of continual circulating current with no energy input, something that wouldn't be practical with merely much lower electrical resistance enabled by ballistic conduction (which still has significant tube-to-tube resistivity).

So I'd say that probably most practical applications of superconductivity are not transferable to ballistic conduction. Still nice to beat copper in conductivity (which hasn't happened with carbon nanotubes and graphene except for microscopic samples or with corner cases like high temperatures, high frequencies, etc).

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, I wasn't thinking about the quantum computing side :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


wu.js -- A lazy, functional Javascript library - <AUTHOR> http://fitzgen.github.com/wu.js/

<comment><USER2> One interesting idea (for JS) is defining functions as pattern matches on the arguments. Here's a factorial from the docs:

        >>> var factorial = wu.match(
        ...   [ 0 ],      1,
        ...   [ Number ], function (n) { return n * factorial(n - 1); }
        ... );
        >>> factorial(5);
        120

<comment><USER3> That took me a bit to understand what is going on, but now that I see it it really is cool.

Each line (e.g. [ 0 ], 1,) represents something similar to (key,value) pairs. So, in the first example any input that matches the array ([0]) (or [1,293,592] for that matter) would return the "value", or in this case "1".

It gets better with the following line, if the input matches a ([Number]) then it returns "function (n) { return n * factorial(n-1); }", a common recursive algorithm for finding a factorial.

Really, a nice looking framework all around.

<comment><USER4> Yep, it's pretty neat. If you're familiar with haskell (I'm not sure if haskell invented it, but it's probably the most well-known example) this will be familiar to you. For example, factorial could be written as:

fac 0 = 1

fac n = n * fac(n-1)

<comment><USER5> Other languages with pattern matching include Prolog* , ML, and Erlang. (If I'm not mistaken, it originated with SNOBOL.) Awk also uses regular expression matching toward similar ends, but it's like comparing REs to a full parser.

* Prolog has unification, actually, which is more powerful than pattern matching. Instead of trying to match a value against a list of patterns, it tries to match two (or more) potentially partially-defined values against each other.

Pattern matching is one of my favorite language features. PM-based code is usually quite straightforward to read (especially compared to a jumble of nested 'if's!), and can be compiled to efficient decision trees. It also works well with both static typing (checking full coverage of ML-style variant types) and dynamic typing (such as with Erlang's receive). The closest thing most OO languages have is polymorphism, which tends to break up the pattern table into lots of little scattered ones (unless the language has multimethods), making it harder to see the big picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be very interested to see some real-world cases for lazy sequences in context of client-side JavaScript interpretation.

The "Why?" section doesn't seem to have any information in the docs.

<comment><USER7> > I'd be very interested to see some real-world cases for lazy sequences in > context of client-side JavaScript interpretation.

Please remember that JS is no longer just client-side stuff. Node.js, and other implementations have become quite popular in some circles for doing server side things.

<comment><USER6> > Please remember ...

JavaScript runs on the server side? ;-)

Quote from wu.js site:

 _"Works great in the browser"._

Hence my genuine interest in understanding the not so obvious real-world cases for lazy-seq and client-side programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, this is my baby and I would love to get some feedback.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask anything (but I might disappear for a couple hours because I have a final coming up).

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> (Back from my final now (it went well)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just quietly, I've written a library that provides lazy sequences as MooTools Classes if anyone is that way inclined.

<http://github.com/sharkbrainguy/sequences.js>

Some basic examples:

<http://jsfiddle.net/Zh7pR/>

It does suffer from the whole "what's the point" problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> Killer name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

If anyone isn't aware, it is named after the infamous Wu-Tang Clan: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OEcZqG9xnE>

<comment><USER10> you can sell wu wear

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the idea of these functional JS libraries but I'm always concerned about the performance hit.

<comment><USER8> underscore.js provides alot of functional (not lazy) tools with solid performance.

<http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/>

Check out the benchmarks:

<http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html></comment></comment>


Overstock Unveils Blockchain-Based Equities Trading Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-unveils-blockchain-trading-platform-to/

<comment><USER2> I submitted a direct link to tØ this morning but it got flagged because people didn't understand it and/or thought it was a scam: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008684)

The background to this is that Patrick Byrne (CEO of Overstock) isn't a fan of Wall Street, particularly naked short selling. He became interested in Bitcoin and potential applications of the underlying technology for trading and settlement[0]. Last year, he hired the team behind Counterparty to actually make it happen[1,2].

In April, Overstock filed a prospectus with the SEC, seeking permission to issue crypto-securities [3,4]. In May it emerged that Overstock had purchased a strategic stake in PRO Securities, a brokerage which operates an alternative trading system[5]. Last night, he held a press conference where he laid out plans for tØ to provide a platform/services for trading crypto-securities, and create a market to bring together investors who are willing to loan out their long stock positions, and short-sellers who are looking to borrow stock (this market is currently opaque, over-the-counter and intermediated by investment banks like Goldman Sachs).[6]

0: [http://www.wired.com/2014/02/rise-fall-rise-patrick- byrne/](http://www.wired.com/2014/02/rise-fall-rise-patrick-byrne/)

1: [http://www.wired.com/2014/07/overstock-and- cryptocurrency/](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/overstock-and-cryptocurrency/)

2: [http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-hires-counterparty- develop...](http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-hires-counterparty-developers- build-cryptosecurity-stock-exchange/)

3: [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1130713/000104746915...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1130713/000104746915006473/a2225454zs-3a.htm)

4: [http://www.wired.com/2015/04/overstock-files-offer-stock- wor...](http://www.wired.com/2015/04/overstock-files-offer-stock-works-like- bitcoin/)

5: [http://www.wired.com/2015/05/overstock-stakes-trading-co- sto...](http://www.wired.com/2015/05/overstock-stakes-trading-co-stock-mimics- bitcoin/)

6: [http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-unveils-blockchain- trading...](http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-unveils-blockchain-trading- platform-to/)</comment>


AI tool tells you when to answer a Quora post or make a comment on Hackernews - <AUTHOR> We are building a AI powered tool that takes your keywords and tells when an interesting Quora question is gaining more views or when an Influencer made a medium post or when a hackernews thread is gaining more traction in your niche.<p>Would you want to signup for this? <comment><USER2> No. Sorry.

What I'd like is a decent alert system that would tell me about posts made about some topics that I have a particular interest in.

Something that could tell me when someone makes a post about suicide prevention, or patient safety for mental health patients, or quality improvement in health: I'd sign up for that. I'd even pay a tiny bit of money if it was useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, This tool is primarily for B2B folks who want to chip in and talk about their product/service when a related question is posted or a related thread is gaining traction.

We are going to launch shortly with a few paid plans.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For early sign up for this

[https://dataretro.typeform.com/to/Q6yUol](https://dataretro.typeform.com/to/Q6yUol)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, sure! Does it consider reddit too?

<comment><AUTHOR> As of now below are the ones it works with.

Quora

Reddit

Medium

Hackernews

Stackoverflow (In progress)

Do you want us to consider any other sites?

Signup here for early access [https://dataretro.typeform.com/to/Q6yUol](https://dataretro.typeform.com/to/Q6yUol)</comment></comment>


Union Square Ventures' Investment Thesis - <AUTHOR> http://www.usv.com/2012/05/investment-thesis-usv.php

<comment><USER2> Love it. This is the less pretty version of OATV's awesome investment thesis pages.

<http://oatv.com/are.html>

<http://oatv.com/not.html>

(Which are hosted on Github.)

It makes it easier as an entrepreneur to see where you align with an investment firm, and also shows you who's getting it and who isn't.</comment>


Don't Use Markdown for Documentation (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technical-docs/ <comment><USER2> Articles like this come up every so often, and they usually point to all the problems with Markdown -- slightly incompatible implementations, nonstandard extensions, how difficult it is to correctly parse in all cases, how mixing non-tag markup and HTML offends proper sensibilities, etc. And I can't say that they're _wrong,_ per se. Markdown is a terrific example of "worse is better."

That's the thing, though -- the whole argument for "worse is better" is that it produces more successful software. In practice, it turns out that it's pretty easy for most people to write most things in Markdown, no matter which processor they're using, just merrily mixing in HTML (or template tags) when they need to. The arguments for AsciiDoc and ReStructuredText usually boil down to "they make difficult things easier," which they do -- but they tend to make more _common_ things (links, images, blockquotes, footnotes [not technically "standard" Markdown but the [^fn] notation is nearly universal]) a little more difficult. Markdown, by contrast, makes the things you're typing _all the time_ trivial, while still letting you do anything that you can do in HTML by, well, letting you do it in HTML.

</comment><comment><USER3> The litany of issues about Markdown flavors and interop issues there doesn't ring true to me: most tools these days use Github-flavored Markdown. Never had a parsing problem between the various Ruby, Python, and C markdown libs I've used over the years.

Getting engineers to contribute to docs is hard enough; it'd be quite a barrier in my org to also teach them a new markup language. Everyone already knows Markdown or some subset of HTML.

</comment><comment><USER4> While I understand the point that the article is trying to make, i.e. that no "standard" markdown offers sufficient features to write documentation, I don't think that it matters too much as long as the final result is good.

I always wanted to write manuals and documentation in markdown (or any other lightweight markup language for the matter) but not even a specialized flavor of markdown was able to provide all the features that a technical writer expects from a documentation tools (I am talking especially about block-level formatting and content reuse).

So I came up with HastyScribe ([https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/](https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/)) and then HastySite ([https://h3rald.com/hastysite/](https://h3rald.com/hastysite/)).

Basically, I used Discount as a base and added features on top of it. I am now using it for all my sites and all the documentation of my open source projects. And I know of at least one company that is using HastyScribe for their own user documentation.

OK, there's some degree of vendor lock-in, but at least the final result is OK and both tools are open source.

For more info and a preview of what an HastyScribe document looks like, here's the user guide:

[https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/HastyScribe_UserGuide.htm](https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/HastyScribe_UserGuide.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> Since most people commenting will do so without even opening, let alone reading, the linked article, let me draw your attention to the last line:

>Full Disclosure: I work on a product, Read the Docs, which is based on Sphinx, so my views are likely biased.

</comment><comment><USER6> If I can anyone to actually write documentation, I don't care what tool they use as long as it's a reasonably accepted tool.

Any flavor of markdown qualifies.

</comment><comment><USER7> What we ended up doing was just reusing our existing bbcode support. Markdown wasn't giving us anything over it really and it was easier to reason with, especially for non-technical folks and translators. We were able to extend it for our use cases much easier.

All of this after the initial plan was to use Markdown.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rust seems to disagree, and I'm glad of it. Documentation is easy to write, and reasonably extensible. Sure there are things I wish to see added (LaTeX math mode would be awesome) but there's nothing really stopping this from happening, even if it's not part of a universal standard.

<comment><USER9> That reminds me, pandoc offers compilation of latex fragments inside markdown source when exporting to pdf, which is how I typeset almost all of my math.

This is of course not even close to the same thing as official support would be, but it's good to have in a pinch, so you can typeset some math without having to bust out a latex toolchain you might not have used for a long time.

PS: pandoc offers a command-line flag to set the latex engine, which means you can use XeTeX or LuaTeX for better unicode support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Markdown is fine for small snippets, READMEs, Github comments etc., but I don't think it's suitable for a longer document such as software documentation. After thinking about that problem and exploring options for a while I have come to believe that some lightweight markup that can be converted to DocBook may be the way to go. I have blogged about such a pipeline here: [https://nablux.net/tgp/weblog/2017/04/02/lightweight- semanti...](https://nablux.net/tgp/weblog/2017/04/02/lightweight-semantic- markup/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for the alternate suggestions (biased as they may be).

My biggest pain point when writing doc in md is tables. They are so hard to parse in the raw text, and I constantly have to be checking the rendered output to make any edits/find my place.

Does anyone know of a good alternative to md (including Sphinx and Asciidoctor) that deals with tables better?

<comment><USER3> I use HTML
 in my markdown. Works great. Many already know the syntax. Supports large table cell bodies in a readable manner.

The downside is the syntax is noisy compared to your average markdown, and the tables don't make much sense in text view.

<comment><USER11> Ah yes I hadn't really thought about that for some reason. Do you view HTML as something that should only be used where necessary in MD or just go crazy with it?

<comment><USER3> I use it when it's needed:

1\. Tables

2\. Collapsable sections with <detail>

3\. Color-coding with  or

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11292280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11292280).

</comment><comment><USER13> The alternatives mention python and ruby. What drew me to markdown in the first place was the absence of dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER14> only if github offered sphinx support.

<comment><USER15> They do, unless there's more to Sphinx than just reStructuredText?

See the list of supported markups here: [https://github.com/github/markup/blob/master/README.md#marku...](https://github.com/github/markup/blob/master/README.md#markups)

<comment><USER16> Plugins, like autodoc.</comment></comment></comment>


A loose rant on maximization - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3434-a-loose-rant-on-maximization

<comment><USER2> "Am I interested in increasing profits? Yes. Revenues? Yes? Being more productive? Yes. Making our products easier, faster, and more useful? Yes. Making our customers and employees happier? Yes, absolutely. Do I love iterating and improving? Yes sir."

Iterated local improvement is a hill-climbing approximate maximization strategy. If you don't know what the cost space looks like, it might be the best maximization strategy available.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a great respect for the attitude that goes into running 37 Signals. Making something simple, enjoyable, and useful is much more concrete, from a development standpoint, than making something "the best". It also allows 37 Signals to sidestep the trap of defining oneself by competitors. This seems to allow them to spend their energy on making their products and their lives good.

Jason Fried has talked before about the importance of making things simple and easy. Simple and easy to use are hard to categorize as "best" when selling a product to customers or investors. Having more features, doing more work, saying "yes" more often gives you easier metrics to claim "best", but they often lead to overly-complex and difficult to use products and harried, stressed, unhappy employees.

</comment><comment><USER4> Based on this post, I'm sure we can come up with some kind of function that he is maximizing.</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News for Computer Engineering? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I enjoy this community, and I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar community for computer engineering. Digital hardware design, FPGAs, Verilog/VHDL, C, microcontrollers, etc. <comment><USER2> Probably something like this is closer? [http://www.concatnews.com/#hardware,unix](http://www.concatnews.com/#hardware,unix)

</comment><comment><USER3> HN should be the place, shouldn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. HN will occasionally have hardware-related content, but they rarely get technical, and HN almost NEVER has content related to hardware design. I work with VHDL and FPGAs every day at my job. I'd really like to see the cool personal projects people are doing with them. HN doesn't do personal projects with FPGAs that I have seen. HN's focus is primarily internet and PC programming.

<comment><USER3> how about [http://hackaday.com/](http://hackaday.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> hardware: [http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces](http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces)

They have a blog and the one near me has a facebook group.</comment>


Schneier on Security: The Effects of Data Breach Litigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/the_effects_of_1.html <comment><AUTHOR> Is a "unique database of manually-collected lawsuits from PACER" enough to create a representative sample?</comment>


Programming and Cognitive Load - <AUTHOR> https://www.dabapps.com/blog/cognitive-load-programming/ <comment><USER2> Having observed people in enterprise software development actually buckle and nearly break under this type of load, I must say this article seems very accurate.</comment>


Google testing new wireless network, asks FCC to keep details secret - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/google-testing-new-wireless-network-asks-fcc-to-keep-details-secret/ <comment><USER3> This is super misleading. This spectrum is part of the sprint roll out of TD- LTE on clearwire's 2.5ghz. They expect to light the first portions in summer 2013 and have said handsets will be available that can use the spectrum in 3Q13.

The equipment is undisclosed because sprint's TD-LTE basestation vendor is as yet undisclosed and isnt one of the existing chinese firms. Google needs a place to test the handset chipsets but has to have a experimental license since none have fcc approval.

The analyst pushing this story is totally aware that's what's going on - <USER2> fact that he fails to mention it at all while talking up longshot deals means all he's doing is market spin.

The firm he works for provides services for institutional investors and hedge funds and includes an "event driven strategies" group which amounts to people you can hire to influence M&A events to your benefit.

If you look at their coverage they are clearly working for someone trying to drive the price up on the sprint clearwire deal. The more you talk up other uses of the spectrum, however unlikely, the more pressure it puts on sprint to up their bid for clearwire under the shadow of the fcc stepping in if washington can be convinced the spectrum is being undervalued.

Basically he's just somebody you can hire to manipulate the press to benefit your investment positions. Truth or reality doesn't enter in to the equation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty much every FCC application requests at least limited confidentiality. This in itself should not suggest Google is doing anything crafty or secretive or even unusual.

</comment><comment><USER5> What else Google has left for others? Is it really a beast?

<comment><USER6> All Ur Base R Belong 2 Us

<comment><USER7> > All Ur Base Stations R Belong 2 Us

FTFY</comment></comment></comment>


My Secret Guide to Find Free Stats About Any Tech Company - <AUTHOR> https://threetempi.com/my-secret-guide-to-find-free-stats-about-any-tech-company/ <comment><AUTHOR> Have you ever wondered while browsing Youtube or Netflix how long the average user watches? It's 21 minutes and 9 minutes respectively. Free data for any website or mobile app is only a few clicks away, and it's even more valuable for private companies where data is limited. This information is useful for evaluating early-stage startups to join or performing competitive analysis to map out a business landscape.

</comment><comment><USER2> Be warned that if you sign up with your Google account it wants permission to view your Google analytics data and data on your verified sites.

I'm using a throwaway Google account to try it out.

I wish I could double flag it. The website is too JavaScript heavy and bad to use on mobile.</comment>


Has anyone else seen an odd customer like this? - <AUTHOR>

We have a retail website and we have a customer who continually orders around 200 dollars worth of product. He then writes in to cancel the order immediately.  He's done this about 10 times this year.  He's always polite and apologetic, but I can't figure out if he has some impulse control/shopping issue or if he's doing some sort of hack.  Has anyone experienced this? <comment><USER2> Wow. this is interesting. Maybe its some payment gateway/credit card refund hack. I have been doing a lot of payment gateway programming and integration lately Looking forward to an explanation of a hack(if any).

By the way, could you tell us which payment gateway/solution you use?

<comment><USER3> Hey, I think it has a new name now, but Paypal Payflow Pro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might want to inquire with your payment processor, as I am sure they have an anti-fraud department/division who (presumably) would deal with this a lot more often than one of us here.

<comment><USER3> Everything looks ok from the payment processor side. I did put in a ticket with them, but wanted to see if anyone could think of something else (like the bing cashback comment) or maybe this guy just has some sort of disorder, in which case I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had a similar experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds almost like some sort of attempt at Bing! Cashback fraud.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fraud him out. Think about it. There is no legitimate reason for his behavior.</comment>


Elysium Health: Optimize your health - <AUTHOR> https://www.elysiumhealth.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Note: I have no relationship with Elysium, I just ran across their website today.</comment>


Docker Acquires Koality in Engineering Talent Grab - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/docker-acquires-koality-in-engineering-talent-grab/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a smart move, but I am still weary as to where Docker is going to land as a company... (the software is great; don't get me wrong)

However, in the grand scheme of things, the more smart people working on Docker, the better!

edit: Yes, I mean "how are they going to make sustainable $"

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "land as a company"?

<comment><USER4> I would guess he means "how are they going to make sustainable $"

Their public acquisitions:

      Fig: cluster deployment configuration
      Orchard: hosting
      Koality: continuous integration

Hosting?

<comment><USER5> My hope is that they will provide personal application hosting as a service along with a marketplace. That sounds confusing, but here's why it's intriguing to me.

The iOS app store changed the way developers build and scale software. By publishing Flappy Bird, the creator was able to handle millions of installations without any thought at all. There was no need for payment gateways in distribution either. The author just built it and put it in the app store.

Imagine a similar situation with server side software? Imagine a service like "Oh Life" (recently shut down). Instead of signing up for their service and leaning on them to pay for the operations costs, what if I bought "Oh Life" as a server app and paid my own hosting costs. "Oh Life" goes out of business, but I still have my running copy and can continue to use it forever.

Docker may be the key to creating the right user experience here. Launching an AMI for a private service like this is 1) too complicated and 2) too expensive for a single user. The user experience could be streamlined fairly easily, but the footprint is too big without something like Docker.

<comment><USER6> If they were going to get into the hosting business, they wouldn't have sold off the old dotCloud, which was/is a hosting business.

<comment><USER4> so if not hosting, care to speculate how docker is going to make $? Enterprise support / services?

Maybe a premium docker repo (mentioned above), where you pay for ... something?

How about competing directly with quay.io but they link up all the networking pieces for you automatically? a docker sdn! :P

<comment><USER7> No speculation needed. Quick rundown

1) Paid Support (B2B, B2B2C)

2) Docker Hub Private functionality, on-prem offering

3) Services engagements through a set of SI partners, 10 of which we announced at DockerCon US

Happy to answer more questions along this line.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean by "B2B2C Paid Support"?

<comment><USER7> Support to businesses who have Docker as a fundamental part of their product offering which they offer to other businesses or consumers (think services companies - IaaS, PaaS, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats Jon and team!!

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know how docker the company plans to make money?

<comment><USER7> I think we've been fairly clear. Quick rundown

1) Paid Support (B2B, B2B2C)

2) Docker Hub Private functionality, on-prem offering

3) Services engagements _through_ a set of SI partners, 10 of which we announced at DockerCon US

Happy to answer more questions along this line.</comment></comment>


MailTime – The Email Messenger - <AUTHOR> https://mailtime.com/index.html <comment><USER2> From the MailTime FAQ:

Q: _How do I use email accounts other than Gmail?_

A: _We understand that this is very important to our users, and we have been working very hard to make this happen as soon as possible. The next round of support will be iCloud and Yahoo Mails. Please stay tuned!_

What is it going to take to make this product work with IMAP? That's how I access my email.</comment>


ITerm2 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://iterm2.com/news.html <comment><USER2> ITerm is great. It really is. But I wish more time was spent on optimizations. People these days seem to forget that terminals are often used for displaying huge amounts of rapidly scrolling text and that speed is of paramount importance.

To put this in perspective, my computer has two CPUs with 4 cores each, 24GB RAM, a graphics card with 1600 Stream Processing Units (engine running at 850MHz) and 1GB of RAM, and yet it scrolls text in a terminal slower than my 386 machine 20 years ago.

<comment> sir-pinecone This might be an unrelated problem, but I find that when I copy a large amount of text and paste it into iTerm, it takes a long time to paste. This often happens when pasting into Vim, so it could be a vim issue. For example, copying the code of a Javascript library. When I do this in a text editor outside of iTerm, it's nearly instantaneous.

<comment><USER3> Vim will type every character you paste, one by one.

F12 should switch you to paste mode and paste it as a block, though on my new Mac this was already mapped to some GUI function so I had to disable that for it to work.

Some relevant info: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5585129/pasting-code- into...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5585129/pasting-code-into- terminal-window-into-vim-on-mac-os-x)

<comment><USER4> Pasting into a buffer in insert mode is not the best idea. I've remapped <leader>p and <leader>P to paste from the system buffer and it's just as fast as yanking and putting text in Vim.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't work as well over SSH sessions though, which is where pasting into vim really starts showing its limitations. Vim's normal inefficient behaviour plus a link with latency is an unfortunate circumstance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome, congrats on the release!

Aside: _Check For Update..._ still gives 220.127.116.1140629 as the latest version. Have to download a 2.0 build explicitly.

[http://www.iterm2.com/downloads.html](http://www.iterm2.com/downloads.html)

<comment><USER7> You have to switch _off_ development releases to get 2.0.

<comment><USER8> Where does this option exist? I've been going through Preferences and every other menu I could think of but could not find it.

<comment><USER9> It's labeled "Prompt for test-release updates" on the General tab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One feature I really wish iTerm2 2.0 would have introduced was better session restoration support. With Terminal.app, you can issue a command like 'ls' and then quit and re-open Terminal.app and the previous output from 'ls' shows up. This is incredibly useful when you have to restart or if your system crashes and you have some output that you wanted to preserve.

I see from the changelog that some type of restoration has been included: "Support for OS 10.7 features including fullscreen, retina graphics, and window restoration"... but upon actually trying it out, it doesn't do what Terminal.app does.

<comment><USER11> > One feature I really wish ...

It's open source. Why don't you add it yourself?

I wanted a borderless terminal and as I couldn't find one I hacked the functionality into iTerm: [http://i.imgur.com/jOc04sf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/jOc04sf.jpg)

/edit: Wow, being downvoted for suggesting to hack something yourself on Hacker News ... that's a new one. I guess I'll take a time out.

<comment><USER12> > It's open source. Why don't you add it yourself?

In your mind a developer can realistically contribute to any possible open source project, whatever the language and the domain?

He may have to learn an humongous quantity of things to implement a feature and then never use that knowledge anymore.

Founding the project while asking for a feature could be a better advice.

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't the learning be interesting though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> to HN:

What changed you from "terminal.app is good enough" to "I prefer iTerm"?

Because that's what I'm asking myself.

<comment><USER15> FWIW, I've tried switching to iTerm about 3 times and I've always to come back to Terminal.app because it feels more "solid or "native" and it minimizes the installation + configuration I need to do on a new machine to feel comfortable.

<comment><USER16> Likewise - I _live_ in Terminal.app all day long, 4-6 hours at least, and for some reason I always return back to Terminal.app - particularly now that I can auto-rename tabs when I ssh into other other hosts (PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\033]0;remote_host\007"').

With that said, I'm going to give iTerm another try - the tmux support is intriguing...

<comment><USER17> > PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\033]0;remote_host\007"'

thanks for this, didn't know this was possible!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The developers seem to really be promoting their deeper support for tmux integration. I'm probably what you'd call a tmux noob, but after a few months of using it on its own with minimal key remappings, I feel like my efficiency with the keyboard-only UI has already surpassed any gains I might get from sticking tmux integration with mouse support and tmux shortcuts. It's not that I'm opposed to this integration, but that I don't think it goes deep enough.

Ideally, I think tmux would be inseparably integrated with the terminal emulator, with no shims to add complexity to the UI. For instance, it irks me that the workflow for integrating iTerm with tmux is running `tmux -CC` and then leaving that window open in the background for as long as it runs. I'm bothered by the fact that I have to run a command to begin the integration in the first place. Wouldn't it be better to check a box in preferences that says "Integrate with tmux if tmux is installed" and then from then on make sure that the tmux concepts of sessions, windows, and panes deeply align with corresponding concepts with iTerm?

</comment><comment><USER19> Besides Firefox, iTerm2 is my most used app, by far. I love the customizability of it, the Visor mode, and how stable it it to work with. I've used it so long, I don't even remember why I don't use Terminal.app any more.

</comment><comment><USER20> So did everyone here just download this piece of software over HTTP (no HTTPS)? Why is it that large projects like this cannot spend 15 minutes setting up hosting over HTTPS-only using a $10 (or even free) SSL cert? I love me some iTerm but yikers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been putting this off for too long. Waiting to get the cert signed now...

<comment><USER20> Thank you! That's awesome. I'll put it on my TODO to send you $10 in the next week or so for the cost of the cert.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The tmux integration is a really interesting piece of work.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ABI0kqUUxoAjxhWW3AsWFis6...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ABI0kqUUxoAjxhWW3AsWFis6bgvMoEbcTcA2N21ncmU/view?hl=en&authkey=COHZn78P)

[http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration](http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration)

<comment><USER22> Yes it's technically interesting but am I alone in thinking that it sort of defeats the purpose of using tmux in the first place?

I use tmux partly because I come from a background of low resources, but also because I want my essential tools to use as little resources as possible so that they always work as well as possible on any system.

Yet iTerm proposes that you use their GUI tabs, split their GUI terminals instead of drawing it all with tmux in one text console.

I guess you sacrifice some resources for usability.

<comment><USER23> but the scroll wheel finally works

<comment><USER24> A couple improvements I found in some other HN Tmux thread --

        set -g mode-mouse on

        set -g mouse-resize-pane on

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love iTerm, couldn't live without it.. To me Terminal.app isn't much better then PuTTY on Windows.

That said I'm a bit worried when I read stuff like "manipulate the pasteboard remotely" and "performed when text matching a regular expression is received". Are these potential security concerns and/or what is the performance impact of regex'ing every single line of text etc?

<comment><USER26> Naive question, but I keep trying iTerm and not being able to quite figure out why I should switch. In the mid-2000s it was a much better program than Terminal.app, but that doesn't seem to have been true for quite some time. Terminal.app has tabs, 256-color mode, themes, full screen support, and as people have mentioned in other comments, session recovery and _much_ better performance. The only things I can think of offhand that that leaves in iTerm's court -- at least in the 1.x series -- is tmux integration and autocompletion. The latter I've never seen the point of (my shell does that pretty well, thanks) and after trying the former it seemed like it was more bothersome than just letting tmux handle everything on its own.

Okay: iTerm can put borders around its windows, which one of my friends says Terminal.app's inability to do makes it unusable for him. But beyond that, I just haven't been sold. (If that's the right phrase for free software. You know what I mean.)

[Edit: I think the tmux integration was a 2.x-dev feature, so I must have been using that. IIRC, I actually preferred tmux's own "window" handling.]

<comment><USER27> The most important benefit for me is the "Hot key" feature. I used to have Kuake back in my Linux days, and loved it. It's so much more convenient that having many different screens, and switching between them via "Cmd-Tab". It's gotten to the point where I very rarely open dedicated windows, unless I'm doing some serious debugging or so.

For those who don't know about the hot key; I press "Ctrl-~" to have a terminal screen dropdown from the top of the screen. You can have any number of tabs and splits there. Pressing the same combination again closes it.

The neat thing is I know I can access the terminal with the same single keystroke, no matter which app I am using. Does Terminal.app has this feature?

<comment><USER28> There is a tool named TotalTerminal (formerly "Visor") for the Mac which extends Terminal.app and does exactly this. I even have control-~ mapped to the behaviour. It seems pretty configurable, and hooks nicely into the prefs window of Terminal itself. You can hit cmd-opt-F to temporarily switch the current Terminal into full-screen mode, in case you need to delve into a particular task.

Screenshot: [http://imgur.com/LiYdTu2](http://imgur.com/LiYdTu2) Prefs: [http://imgur.com/YCDROa3](http://imgur.com/YCDROa3)

<comment><USER27> Yes, I also used to have TotalTerminal. But I found that using iTerm from the ground up was somehow more convenient than using TotalTerminal with the regular Terminal. Don't quite remember what was the particular reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I like the idea of triggers. auto-highlighting the following regex's makes life a bit better whille reading logs and traces.

. _[eE](rror|xception)._ highlight error lines :\d+ highlight line numbers in ruby (captures bits of time stamps though...) [lL]ine \d highlight line numbers in python

I bet there are more creative uses. please enlighten me.

<comment><USER30> I tried to use it with terminal-notifier[1], but couldn't get it to work :( Would've been awesome though. (Notifications after build completes, etc.)

[1]: [https://github.com/alloy/terminal- notifier](https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Download link seems broken? [http://www.iterm2.com/downloads.html/stable/iTerm2_v2_0.zip](http://www.iterm2.com/downloads.html/stable/iTerm2_v2_0.zip)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, I fat fingered something. Try again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there a good tiling window manager for OS X that has a feature like iTerm2 where I can drag and drop a tab on top of another to split it, and keep those windows together?

I use Moom (previously Divvy) but they only really give you hotkeys for moving windows around. Xmonad for OS X seems difficult to setup, and I'm not even sure if it does what I want.

<comment><USER33> Did you try Amethyst([http://ianyh.com/amethyst/](http://ianyh.com/amethyst/))? So far I was happy with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> First, thanks for releasing this! Second, silly question, but what is the recommended way to navigate long commands? Is there a way to click my cursor to a specific point, or a keyboard shortcut to navigate large blocks of words? I tried OPTION+LEFT-CLICK, but sometimes it will have the effect of moving my history to the current command.

<comment><USER35> I have Alt + Left and Alt + Right set to send `^[ b` and `^[ f` which are set to move backwards one word in most readline-based apps (IIRC).

<comment><USER36> If you prefer vi-like editing and navigation over emacs, you can also use readline in vi mode with "set -o vi".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Just tried out the tmux integration. Seems to be extremely buggy. The tmux session would randomly detach and you have to have an extra window open the entire time you are using the tmux integration. Nice idea but the execution seems pretty hacky.

</comment><comment><USER38> 2.0 is unfortunately missing inline images, the killer feature that's still only in the nightlies: [http://www.iterm2.com/images.html](http://www.iterm2.com/images.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> So, I have this bash script that runs AppleScript that I use to start up a bunch of servers at once, each in their own Terminal tab. At the heart of it is this 'new-tab' function[1]. I don't really like AppleScript, and would like to not use it.

Can I duplicate this functionality using iTerm, without using AppleScript?

[1] Here's the code; I cobbled it together from some StackOverflow snippet or something: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f16a46c327a14ec8a5b5](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f16a46c327a14ec8a5b5)

<comment><USER40> I built teamocil for this purpose. [https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil](https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil)

<comment><USER32> Warning: Teamocil may cause numbness of the extremities, short term memory loss and may decrease your sex drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm still using version 1 of iTerm because it has the side dock menu, which allows me to maintain a list of the various servers I'd want to connect to, and allows me to close sublists I don't need to see.

The last time I looked at iTerm2 it had a separate window where you had to TYPE the name of the server you wanted, which is WAY more work than pointing and clicking a single name in a side list.

The developers seemed to think the old side dock was bad and refused to add it back in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, hierarchical tree-views suck. In the nightly builds (soon to be betas for v3) tags can define a hierarchy by including slashes in their names. They're also browsable in the toolbelt, which is just like 0.10's side-window. It's mighty close to what you were used to.

<comment><USER41> I see the Toolbelt - I'll try it out and see if it gives me similar functionality. iTerm 1 has a ton of bugs that bother me so upgrading would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> iTerm is what the Terminal.app should have been. Thanks to the devs for your work.

</comment><comment><USER43> Dang, looks like there/s still no preference to disable creating a new window when iTerm launches or is clicked on in the Dock. I only ever use iTerm via system-wide hotkey (i.e. Quake-style HUD mode), and it's kind of annoying that it automatically creates a duplicate window whenever it launches that can't be hidden via the hotkey.

<comment><USER44> You need to create a saved window arrangement (Window -> Save arrangement) with no windows open, then set this as the default arrangement in Preferences -> Arrangements, and finally change the Startup preference to "Open default window arrangement" (on the General tab).

<comment><USER43> Wow, this is great: it still creates a new window when clicking on the dock, but it no longer creates one on startup. That's still a lot better than before. Thanks!

<comment><USER44> Ah, I work with iTerm hidden from the dock and purely in "Visor" mode. If I actually want a regular window to keep around, I can create one by bringing up the visor and then hitting Cmd+N.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Do we have something similar in GNU/Linux?

<comment><USER46> There is Terminology: [http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology&l=en](http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology&l=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Probably my most-used OS X program and the first thing I use when I setup a new Mac. Terminal.app is just so...janky.

</comment><comment><USER48> Am I right in thinking that the tmux integration won't work if you use mosh? (iTerm2 -> mosh -> tmux)

<comment><USER49> It appears so. Probably worth filing a bug about this, but I suspect that something about mosh's terminal emulation filters out the VT100 command sequences tmux uses to perform the handshake with iTerm2.

Details on the protocol are here: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ABI0kqUUxoAjxhWW3AsWFis6...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ABI0kqUUxoAjxhWW3AsWFis6bgvMoEbcTcA2N21ncmU/view?hl=en&authkey=COHZn78P)

<comment><USER48> I expect it would require explicit support from mosh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I couldn't get the Triggers to work with terminal-notifier[1]. Bug? Or something to do with terminal-notifier?

[1]: [https://github.com/alloy/terminal- notifier](https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier)

<comment><USER50> Works for me with pync: python -c 'from pync import Notifier; Notifier.notify("hello")'

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> iTerm looks nice, but is there a reason to switch from Terminal.app? The "jobs" sidebar looked great until I discovered that it only works for local processes, for example.

Generally, it seems there is a lot of room for improvement in terminal apps these days:

\- Probably upwards of 90% of my terminal work involves SSH, and it seems like a huge missed opportunity not to integrate with SSH in any significant way. iTerm doesn't even bother, whereas Terminal.app's "New Remote Connection" is pretty useless. (It should at least be able to infer my commonly used hosts from OpenSSH's known_hosts file.)

\- A terminal should be able to discover the currently running remote process, or at least what host I'm connected to. Neither Terminal nor iTerm do this. My tabs always say "ssh", and so I have to hunt for the right tab to find my shell.

\- Persistent shells. Today, when I want to open a remote shell on a host, I open a Terminal tab and do "ssh <host>". If something goes wrong with my connection, I have to go back in manually, and the shell state is lost, and any interactive program not running with "nohup" will probably have terminated. If I close a tab and ssh back in, my state is also lost. If I want multiple shells on the same box, I have to either use multiple tabs, or a kludge like screen or tmux that tries to be a terminal within a terminal. I want to ssh to a server and be exactly where I was.

\- No I/O integration. Why can't I cat a file into my terminal app in order to copy or download the contents? Why can't I pipe a local file into a remote shell?

\- Grepping. It would be swell if I could tell the terminal to filter its current window contents by a pattern. I don't mean highlighting results, I mean only showing lines matching a pattern. Often I end up doing "tail -f some.log | grep foo", then "...grep bar", "...grep -C10 bar" because I'm not quite what I'm looking for. With this built-in grepping feature, I could do "tail -f some.log", set up a pattern in the terminal app itself, and I could watch it display different matches interactively as I change the pattern.

<comment><USER52> For managing SSH connections have you tried the profiles on iTerm ? It's not exactly what you are looking for but might at least save you from repetitive typing.

<comment><USER51> That doesn't solve the problem of having to create each one manually, when there is a perfectly good list (known_hosts) lying around. I have several dozens hosts I connect to almost daily.

(Yes, I do use tools like Puppet and dsh for configuration management, and probably should use them more, but sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.)

Unfortunately iTerm's solution is even less useful than Terminal's remote connections, since in iTerm each profile have associated settings like colours and cursor type, things which should be the same across all connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> On the downloads page, the link text for the stable release says "iTerm2 2.0 (OS 10.6+, Intel-only)" but the description below it says "It requires OS X 10.7+ and an Intel CPU."

Can anybody confirm whether it works on 10.6?

<comment><USER53> Answering my own question: I downloaded it on 10.6 and it seems to work correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a short demo of the tmux integration: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9j1GvZypq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9j1GvZypq0)

</comment><comment><USER54> If anyone else is wondering where the toolbelt is, once you enable toolbelt with "Toolbelt" -> "Show toolbelt", you'll have to resize the iterm window.

<comment><USER55> I didn't have to resize anything for it to show up, for whatever reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> FYI, there are lots of color themes available for iTerm2 at [http://www.iterm2colorschemes.com](http://www.iterm2colorschemes.com)

</comment><comment><USER57> > When you cmd-click on a filename in a diff, remove the a/ or b/ prefix and > replace with the real directory to open the file.

Still doesn't work for me :(

</comment><comment><USER58> "Check for Update" from the menu in iTerm tells me:

      iTerm 220.127.116.1140629 is currently the newest version
      available.

<comment><USER59> As mentioned above, in Preferences -> General, untick "Prompt for test-release updates", then run a check for updates again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Can anyone convince me the benefit of iTerm2 over Terminal.app? I'm on an Intel Mac. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm getting a 404 when I try to download this. Anyone have the same problem?

</comment><comment><USER62> Sweet look forward to trying out the new trigger and escape sequence features

</comment><comment><USER63> Just downloaded and used it. It is better than Terminal.

</comment><comment><USER64> You page has some bug, try scroll down very quickly.. the page is jumping. I like it BTW.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is cool~

</comment><comment><USER66> Awesome & Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER67> How about fish? I would like some of the fish features implemented in iTerm.

[http://fishshell.com](http://fishshell.com)

<comment><USER68> Fish is a shell & iTerm is a terminal emulator. Just use them together. Or am I missing something?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Minimal and clean ordinal date utility - <AUTHOR> https://julian.today <comment><AUTHOR> I need the 'julian date' frequently at work, and got tired of searching a table, or clicking through a site filled with lots of other 'stuff' looking for it, so I created this instead.

My intent was to make it as single-focused, clean, and fast as possible. Clicking on the day number allows you to type in another to get the date for that ordinal date.

Feedback/criticism welcome!</comment>


Damming Lebanon: Bisri Valley to Be Submerged - <AUTHOR> https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/06/article/damming-lebanon-bisri-valley-to-be-submerged/ <comment><USER2> Lebanon is an oasis in a parched middle East. The country has been blessed with great water resources. But the government has squandered the opportunity to build proper infrastructure to the people.

With the influx of 1 million refugees from Syria into a country of 4 million, water resources are at capacity.</comment>


For Single Mothers, There Is No "Day Without Women" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sarahnadav/for-single-mothers-there-is-no-day-without-women-bc3333e49f27#.p23tslll9 <comment><USER2> Yes, as others around the internet have noted, it's a "day without women who can afford to take a day off".

<comment><USER3> Not only who can afford it, but who have the privilege to choose to do so.</comment></comment>


The U.S. Military's Force Structure: A Primer - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51535 <comment><USER2> There's a nifty interactive tool for playing with costs! [https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54351](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54351)

I gave it a whirl. There are some built-in constraints. For instance, you can't take away minuteman missiles. Nor can you cancel dental insurance for servicemembers.

Also, you are not allowed to entirely disband any component. There must be at least one aircraft carrier, one army brigade, etc. Force reductions in general staff are limited to 50%.

But I tried. I took away everything I could. Cranked every slider to its minimum value.

For a total reduction in personnel of 1,071,000.

For a grand total annual savings of...$184 billion.

That savings is roughly 30% of the actual us military budget (depending on what year you compare with)

In other words, if the US military shrinks to its absolute minimum level, it somehow still costs 2/3 of the money. According to the CBO's online slider tool, at least.

<comment><USER3> Does it work well other way around? If you wanted to massively increase the capability, does it scale up well?

...checked, it does... just +120B makes a force that really kicks ass, +50-100% of the current. why not just do it, then regularly practice overseas deployments to seriously scare shit out of the Arabs and get better oil deals for everyone, doesn't it save money in the end?

<comment><USER4> > then regularly practice overseas deployments to seriously scare shit out of > the Arabs and get better oil deals for everyone, doesn't it save money in > the end?

No. Pulling tax money out of everyone's wallets to make gas at the pump cheaper doesn't save everyone money.

<comment><USER3> It does. Money spent on the military is spent domestically with only a small fraction of them leaving the country, the rest being spent inside and boosting the economy; the money spent buying all foreign oil is all just going away... so even if we are to spend somewhat more than $1 for the military to reduce oil spending by $1 that will make perfect sense, net result for the economy overall will be positive.

<comment><USER4> But, if the US is a net exporter of oil [1], where is all that $1 going, really?

1\. [https://www.ft.com/content/9cbba7b0-12dd-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e5...](https://www.ft.com/content/9cbba7b0-12dd-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e548a)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


React.js pure render performance anti-pattern - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@esamatti/react-js-pure-render-performance-anti-pattern-fb88c101332f <comment><USER2> (tl;dr) The title is getting a lot of flack but I think there are two good patterns highlighted: 1) Avoid creating functions in React render and 2) Learn about and use defaultProps.

1: Example of arrow functions + Class property initializer: [http://babeljs.io/blog/2015/06/07/react-on- es6-plus/](http://babeljs.io/blog/2015/06/07/react-on-es6-plus/) 2: Default Props: [https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/reusable- components.ht...](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/reusable- components.html#default-prop-values)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it really an anti-pattern when you're just writing code that depends on equality without understanding how equality works?

There's probably a lesson to be learned in here, but if I wrote an article every time I wrote bad code, I wouldn't have time to write any bad code ;)

Edit: This particular issue is pretty common, and it's good to draw attention to it, but let's just call it what it is - a common bug.

<comment><USER4> "Anti-pattern" sounds close enough, as shorthand, when "bug" might cause readers to file the article incorrectly. The author is warning others that a normally-unremarkable JavaScript idiom causes suboptimal performance in this particular case, and it's likely not to present itself as a bug (having no visible symptoms on smaller pages and no impact on functionality otherwise). Putting aside whether suboptimal performance should always be classified as a bug, there are many ways to accidentally break equality comparisons (despite a full understanding of them), and now my eyes are primed to catch one more pitfall. I appreciate when that happens for reason that doesn't involve hard experience.

<comment><USER3> I think calling it a common pitfall might be the most descriptive. I've certainly made the mistakes the article mentions, but I'd never have considered it a pattern. To me a pattern in this context is a repeated practice, workflow or solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not an anti-pattern, it's a mistake you made.

</comment><comment><USER6> We just use Immutable.js in our Redux stores. Then, using PureRenderMixin is trivial. You just need to be careful not to use the vanilla reducer composer from Redux.

<comment><USER7> Can you expand on "You just need to be careful not to use the vanilla reducer composer from Redux." a bit more? Is that 'combineReducers' from Redux?

What's wrong with that? What are the alternatives?

<comment><USER8> combineReducers is for taking plain objects and returning another plain object. With immutable you need to either write your own combineReducers or use one that someone else has made that taks immutable objects and returns an immutable object.

<comment><USER7> Wait - we're talking about the result of the combination?

If you follow a 'get started with redux' thing and end up with a root reducer that uses combineReducers: You're talking about the outermost 'state' object? Because any reducer that you write can certainly accept/understand/return immutables, right?

If I picked that up correctly: Is that a problem for a single combineReducers at the root? Because if all the properties of that thing are immutable, wouldn't you get the cheap identity based comparison benefits whenever you pass on props.foo in your store-aware component?

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's the actual combiner that can't create an Immutable object.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do you avoid the e => fn() here in stateless functional component? This is very common case and I can't see other workaround than to use redux mapStateToProps, or without redux maybe mapProps from recompose. Or to use something stupid like writing the item.id into data-attr-id on the li -element and digging out the id -value in the event handler...

      const List = props =>

          props.items.map(item =>

 props.itemClicked(item.id)}>{item.name}

          )

</comment><comment><USER10> I think that some of the issues that you're running into might be mitigated by taking advantage of the "key" attribute on repeated elements. There's more here: [https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/multiple- components.ht...](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/multiple- components.html#dynamic-children)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it wrong for me to think that having a thousand Cell elements on the page is the true anti-pattern? The user can really only see maybe 10-20 at one time. The cost of re-rendering on 15 rows should be trivial enough not to worry about creating a callback function in render.

Edit: To elaborate, you can solve this by using pagination (a common solution), or, if you want the user to be able to scroll and not click, occlusion culling. Someone out there must have written an occlusion culling library for React by now, surely.

<comment><USER11> Could someone explain the downvotes? I'd genuinely like to know what my comment is doing wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where is anti-pattern?</comment>


Ask HN: Is IT support becoming an anachronism in startups? - <AUTHOR>

I've been in IT support for longer than I like to think, always striving to make IT a department a technical lubricant that enables a company to grow smoothly. One way that manifested was my goal for new employees to be able to walk in to a station 100% IT complete on day 1: after a brief IT orientation, they should be able to enter their password and get straight to work. On more than one occasion, my IT teams have been told our on-boarding was the best the user has ever experienced.
Recently however, I've had a number of people in both HR and IT proudly proclaim that new employees are handed an imaged laptop and an instruction sheet on their first day -- everything else they figure out themselves and IT as a support organization is nearly non-existent. If their Mac has problems, they hoof it to the Apple Store themselves for service.
I can see some advantages to this -- it has to help get you socialized in a new place and it certainly teaches self-reliance, but IMHO it also discourages standardization -- it feels like instead of 3 IT people doing things 1 way, you could have 50 people doing things 50 different ways. Having developers take time out of their day to diagnose printer problems or spend an hour in line waiting for a Genius Bar appointment also seems crazy.
Is this a growing trend in companies? <comment><USER2> I've been on both sides of this. I spent a few years doing IT support and I know how much of a difference a good IT team can make.

On the other hand, I've also seen how much damage a bad IT department can do. In a previous job, I was writing device drivers, but IT only allowed general user access. If I needed software installed (e.g. compiler, text editor), I could submit a support ticket and they'd get back to me in 48 hours. That's 48 hours per program. Once I'd written a driver, I could send another support ticket to have the driver installed. After 48 hours, I could then test it. Just as a pointless side not, but I heard that, as of last year, the IT department was still maintaining the requirement that everyone use Firefox 3.0 for their browser.

A good IT team is invaluable, but a bad IT department can be worse than having no IT department. When you have 50 people doing 50 different things, probably half of them are wasting their time. However, when you have 3 IT people headed down the wrong path, then EVERYONE is wasting their time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it depends on how I.T literate the staff members are and how many employees the company has. Letting staff do their own thing maybe just a symptom of starting out as a few people and not having migrated into the processes of a bigger company yet.

If the majority of employees are developers, their set-up is extremely personal and no doubt having them customise to their liking aids productivity. In that scenario the I.T team are responsible for providing equipment, imaging laptops and keeping the infrastructure running then that would work fine.

I've worked in some organisations where a lot more hand-holding is required and in those situations the I.T team takes on a completely different role - including thorough onboarding.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not sure why the end user has to take the laptop to the mac store, we use lenovo and they send an engineer to us to check any issues.</comment>


Snapchat loses 2M more users in Q3 as shares sink to new low - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/25/snapchat-q3-2018-earnings/ <comment><USER2> Snapchat isn't necessarily dying, it could just be plateauing like Yahoo and Myspace once did, but damn is it humbling seeing this giant fading away from the spotlight.

I think if Snapchat really wants to pivot and grow internationally, they should look into voip/im like Whatsapp, Imo or Viber. Millions of people use these apps to communicate with loved ones both domestically and internationally. Also, make it super easy to send people money even if they don't have bank accounts.</comment>


Mice can inherit learned sensitivity to a smell (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131202121544.htm <comment><USER2> I've read the paper. We don't know the exact mechanism by which this works, but I would bet that it's related to the chemical exposure (as the authors suggest in the Discussion section), i.e. exposure to the scent causes ingestion of the chemical which then affects the genetic contents of the gametes. That's really really interesting, but isn't the same as "learned behavior can be inherited". In this case, it looks like it's sensitivity to the scent that is inherited, which was confirmed not just via behavioral methods but by looking at the neurons devoted to it.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to throw out an off-the-cuff hypothesis. What about microchimerism as an inheritance process? Microchimerism is the presence of of cells that originate from another individual and are distinct from the cells of the host. Transmission between mother fetus has been observed. Moreover, olfactory bulbs are one area with continued adult neurogenesis. Thinking on that, I reasoned that if so, there might be increased neurogenesis in the olfactory bulbs during pregnancy in mice. A quick lit search came up with: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12511652/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12511652/) Yes, increased neurogenesis during pregnancy in response to particular hormone. Pretty out there hypothesis, I know...

<comment><USER4> Note that the "inheritance" can come from the father, and also happens with in vitro fertilization.

<comment><USER5> Well it's also true that you can pick up cells from people you are genetically similar too and live in close proximity to. This might play a part in group cohesion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It makes more sense that learned behavior and can be inherited by offspring rather than random mutations producing complex advantageous behavior but exciting to hear that it's been replicated.

I wonder if offspring of older parents possess an advantage of possibly having more learned behavior passed down.

</comment><comment><USER7> Final vindication of Lamarck.

<comment><USER5> The Darwinism/Lamarckism thing is wrapped up in politics. Darwinism is used as a justification of the social order. Might is right. The strong survive. Lamarckism has a more touchy feely feel to it. Not that Darwinism is fundamentally wrong! Its just that the nuances are ignored because of the politics.

<comment><USER8> I thinks that's a misinterpretation of Darwinism. The strong don't survive. The surviving ones survive. That's the whole point. Darwinism isn't an optimisation algorithm. A set of circumstances that were favourable for survival with a particular trait may not necessarily be favourable in the future. At any given point, though, the ones that survived are the ones that you can see, so it appears as though they were "selected". This theory is nicer than Lamarckism because it literally needs no mechanism. In order to accept Lamarckism you need to show that species change due to environmental pressures. That's more difficult.

<comment><USER9> > _Darwinism isn 't an optimisation algorithm. A set of circumstances that > were favourable for survival with a particular trait may not necessarily be > favourable in the future._

While agreeing with the thrust of your post, personally I think that Darwinism is a form of optimization, but the mild confusion around Darwinism that you're describing is a confusion about what that system optimizes _for_.

Darwinism optimizes for survival in the specific environment and circumstance, and plays out over time. Darwinism does not optimize for "best" or "strongest" or the "mightiest".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this also blows apart some nascent theories regarding toxoplasmosis.

</comment><comment><USER11> This isn't particularly rigorous. Like all of these studies that claim to support epigenetic memory in mice, they've started with mixed genetic background mice, so that none of the offspring are genetically identical to the parents. You can't rule out the possibility that genetic differences are responsible for this result.

This is publication bias in action. Studies that don't show epigenetic inheritance don't get published. Where are all the properly controlled experiments using inbred strains?

<comment><USER12> I am far from a geneticist (or in fact any form of scientist), but why do normal experimental controls not work in the case of this experiment?

You perform the odor exposure to half of your group and not the other half (the control group). Then you compare the results (measurement of the offspring) between control group and non-control group.

Assuming that your group size is large enough that the measured difference can be considered statistically significant, then it doesn't matter what other variances there are - you have controlled for them.

<comment><USER13> There are strains of mice which have very little genetic variability, thus excluding (or at least diminishing) other variations than the studied effect. This study apparently didn't use one of such strains, so many genes could interfere. Large enough is otherwise _really_ large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sometimes I wonder what the epigenetic effects of porn will be on the long run. The illusion of living in a plentiful environment could have unforeseen consequences over the brain of our children.</comment>


Tribute to Erasure – 8 Bit Weapon - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/8bitweaponandcomputeher/in-my-arms-erasure-tribute-by-8-bit-weapon

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://8bitweapon.com/2015/02/04/8-bit-weapons-tribute-to- er...](http://8bitweapon.com/2015/02/04/8-bit-weapons-tribute-to-erasure- project-underway/comment-page-1/#comment-584)

Just a bit of idle weekend fun. Enjoy. This group has incorporated 8 bit computers and their sounds into their music for some time. I liked this track and thought some of you might enjoy the nostalgia.</comment>


There Are No More Good Things - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/there-are-no-more-good-things <comment><USER2> I read this and expressed confusion to a colleague. She said "It's humor." and my only reply is - "Are you sure?"

Asimov once wrote[0] that it's possible to try to write suspense, miss and be slightly suspenseful, you can try to write horror, miss, and be slightly horrific. But try to write humor and miss, and what you get is of no value at all.

[0] This is badly reconstruct from memory - I'll try to find the reference[1] ...

[1] This isn't the exact reference I had in mind, but it's close:

"There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn't."

\-- Buy Jupiter and Other Stories (1975), p. 33 (in my copy).

<comment><USER3> Asimov is wrong because if he were right it would mean that being funny is just about the only human capability that is not comparable in relation to other examples of that capability.

If you are either funny or not and if Louis CK is either funny or not then are you as funny as Louis CK?

Anyway it was mildly funny while also somewhat true.</comment></comment>


Free Stock Photos Resources (111 websites) - <AUTHOR> https://avospy.com/list/free-stock-photo-resources <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone,

I just made a list with 111 free stock photos resources (sort by popularity, with screenshots and stats)

The most completed and updated resources of free stock photos under Creative Commons Zero licence, as known as Public Domain. Millions of free photos for personal and commercial usage with no costs.

P.S.: About the "list function", I just made it for this specific purpose - <USER2> automatically and on daily basis checks the website status, speed, ranks (popularity), makes a screenshot and some other possibilities. I'll create more lists and maybe open the function for people to make their own lists, is this interesting for anybody?</comment>