WeChat is becoming a mobile payment giant in China - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/messaging-app-wechat-is-becoming-a-mobile-payment-giant-in-china <comment><USER2> I used WeChat Pay when I was in Shanghai for 3 months last fall. Super convenient to have one place to buy concert tickets, order a taxi, pay your takeout order, top up your prepaid SIM card, or just send money to friends. It's extremely smooth.

Virtually everybody has WeChat in China. Unlike here in the US (San Francisco) you never have to ask which payment app (if any) your friend uses. "Do you have Venmo, PayPal, SquareCash, Google Wallet, etc?" \- asking this gets old.

Do take note that each Chinese mobile carrier actually also sets up a digital wallet for you associated with your phone number. People can push money into your phone carrier wallet. The same wallet is automatically charged for your phone usage charges. With this mechanism, you can even easily pay folks who do not use WeChat Pay from WeChat Pay (!) - all you need to know is their phone number.

To use WeChat Pay you need to link it to a Chinese debit card and getting one as a foreigner requires a Chinese bank account. Depending on your immigration visa (I had a short term student visa), that may be difficult to accomplish.

<comment><USER3> Does it require a Chinese ID number or will a passport number suffice? Almost all unionpay online services seem to require a Chinese ID number, locking foreigners out.

<comment><USER4> A couple of things to note if you're using WeChat payments as a foreigner:

\- When they started, the process accepted passports only for certain banks (and I opened a CMB account for this purpose) but now it seems to work for other banks, too (at least CCB and ICBC)

\- The process of adding a card to your WeChat wallet is now really smooth, but adding _multiple_ cards can be problematic for foreigners. WeChat won't let you add multiple cards unless they all belong to the same person. Same person = same name registered on your bank account. But the account name at one bank could be LASTFIRST, whilst at another bank it might be FIRSTLAST. In this case, you could only add one of those two bank cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is really easy. In fact so easy, that it does mean you have to educate your elders about not sending money to someone who says they're your kid, without authentication.

My wife went a step further and has a fake alias for her elders in wechat, so if someone steals her login they won't know who is a gullible adult.

</comment><comment><USER6> My comment about WeChat, and China's mobile payment ecosystem in general, when TechCrunch reported in January that "Apple Pay Is Coming To ATMs From Bank Of America And Wells Fargo" ([http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/apple-pay- atm/](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/apple-pay-atm/)).

"The real news about Apple Pay is how painfully slow it's adoption (by merchants and consumers) is after so many years of release. In comparison, in China most people aged less than 70 and most merchants big (like Taobao) or small (someone selling a pile of oranges on the street) have been using mobile payment (Wechat Pay or Alipay) for many of their financial needs for years: paying money online / at a physical store, accepting payment, sending money to people, in-app purchase, borrowing money, buying financial products, paying bills, paying for parking ticket....there's no need to bring cash to stores or input the credit card info everytime someone buys things online. I highly recommend anyone wanting to see the future of North America's payment technology to have a trip to China. I believe there's lots of catch up to do here."

<comment><USER7> WeChat is an ecosystem that integrate so many things extremely well.

First it is a chat app. Almost everyone with a smartphone is a wechat user, including my mother over 70 years old. She even figured out how to video-chat with me in Chinese New Year Eve. I have group chats with my college classmates, high school classmates, etc.

It can be used to pay utilities, TV & internet services. By the way, the CCTV system in my remote hometown had the feature to pay all of these in TV using remote many years ago. It is a pain to navigate with a TV remote, though. With wechat, it becomes so easy.

You can pay your cellular service with wechat. As in Europe, you pay the data amount what you consume. It will remind you before you run out of money in your account.

It is integrated with Didi Dache, the Chinese Uber. Then you can pay the driver with wechat as well. You can use it to order train tickets, including the high speed trains. Order a movie ticket? no problem. Online shopping on one of the biggest online retailer? Sure. Look for where to eat? It works. And more and more ...

You can transfer money to other friends, like splitting a bill, etc.

It is so convenient that I feel my phone is much less useful when I am back in America.

The only hurdle is that you must have an China bank account to transfer money into your wechat account.

<comment><USER3> So I'm resident in China and don't use WeChat, but my wife (Chinese) does however for all the things you listed. One of the annoying aspects seem to be its reliance on QR, but that is changing (UnionPay now supports RFC at places like Starbucks, not sure if this is related to WeChat or not). I've always had a problem with online payment because they always ask for my Chinese ID number (non-Chinese Uber with a UnionPay card works like this also, Uber is in China BTW, but they are supported by Alibaba, not Tencent, so their WeChat app isn't allowed to work). I'm not sure what the process is to get a China bank account linked to WeChat if you don't have one, but to be honest, I haven't tried for WeChat yet (my wife has offered to just put me on her card), whereas ApplePay in the states doesn't have a problem with foreigners.

On the other hand, much of the functionality of WeChat is app based, so I can and do use didi dache without WeChat (if I pay with cash, of course, and the non-taxi service is off limits to me).

I was impressed by Australia, where RFC seems to be ubiquitous, you just swipe and that's it. Hopefully China moves in the same direction.

<comment><USER4> Seriously, just add a bank card to WeChat. Your life will be easier. If you're worried about security, just open a separate bank account (e.g. with CMB) and don't keep too much money in there.

Then you can use Didi for private cars, which are less likely than taxis to smell of smoke.

Regarding Uber in China: they accept Baidu Wallet, which works fine for foreigners with Chinese bank cards.

"much of the functionality of WeChat is app based, so I can and do use didi dache without WeChat"

Taxi hailing is the exception rather than the rule. Many other features (group buy / daily deals, cinema tickets, mobile topup, bill payment, ...) of WeChat require online payment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many Chinese citizens' digital lives exist solely on Wechat. You can even hail a taxi from Wechat.

<comment><USER3> There is also a separate app for that. You can hail a taxi from wechat, it's just not the only way.</comment></comment>


There are many kinds of ugly - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamedev.net/blog/355/entry-2250790-there-are-many-kinds-of-ugly/

<comment><USER2> We should ban the words "ugly" or "dirty" when refering to code. These concepts are not clear, and are used to justify a lot of rewriting and redesigning that is not always needed and often counterproductive.

If you want to criticize code, say exactly what's wrong with it, so we can have a detailed and rational argument about it.

If you say "this script is ugly, it should be rewritten", there's not much discussion that can be had about it. If, on the other hand, you say, "this script is written in a way that is not modular enough", then we can discuss whether modularity really is a requirement or not, for that specific script in that specific project.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but when the guy pointing ugly code is a good coder, "ugly" is just a shortcut for something that usually can be explicitly stated and is really harmful. (A bad coder will say "ugly" for any kind of code he did not write.) Here are some of the reasons behind "ugliness":

\- Wrong logic giving correct results (this is awful)

\- Hidden dependencies making remote changes dangerous (bèè)

\- Misleading variable or function name

\- Unnecessary use of magic (eg programmatically building function names), this breaks a lot of code analyser, and makes your code base ungreppable, which is very bad.

\- Code duplication and configuration factorization.

\- Nasty hack breaking the model (eg changing request parameters on the fly)

All in all, I agree with the OP premices, but not with his solution. Adding comments all over the code is not going to save you, and making sure you understand all corners of the module you work on before starting to modify a comma is not that helpful either. In front of a montain of legacy code that need some ordering, if it is a short cycles mode with versionning, I would:

\- First make sure my tools are accurate and fast. It mostly means tweaking my grep alias, so I grep all the code and nothing more. I may mean to find a way to run the modified code in less that 3 secs (unit tests can help for that part).

\- Second, don't try to understand all the thing, start low, maybe rename a few variables that are obviously wrong, for example marking them as private (adding _ prefix in python).

\- You won't know were are the painful points in the begining, so you should continue doing safe & simple refactorings, one step at a time, in order to slowly "wake up" the code. A bit of temporay commenting can help, like "this func returns a x-blob used by that module".

\- Then when you become familiar with the code you'll be in position to decide if and where to do some real changes. Some people here seem to believe that legacy code should not be changed except in case of earthquake. I don't agree. Adding a pile of hacky crap over a pile of hacky crap to make the thing temporary work is not a good bet on the future: do it only if you plan to leave your company soon enough.

\- Doing a bigger change might require some iterations and lacemaker work. If possible, you can bridge the legacy code, ie write a func_new and compare it's result with func_old during one iteration, to kinda prove that they are the same.

\- I noticed that it is sometime useful to take a big class, a big god-like object doing too much, and cut it in much smaller pieces. Sometime you may have to re-glue together some pieces because you went too far, sometime you may even kind-of rollback your changes, but in any case these operations will shaken the code base a bit, which is good.

These operations require courage regarding of the code base, because you will feel lost sometime, you will fear regressions, you may even fix a functionality that should not be working and, consequentially, break something. Here, be careful, you should not be fixing broken parts and refactor in the same operations, except if you know enough to be sure. One purpose of refactoring is to allow you to fix broken (or slow) part later. I insist on "later".

It is also requiring patience and tenacity in front of the operational team: they will think you are doing nothing (they are right, from their point of view, per the very definition of refactoring).

<comment><USER2> This is exactly why these words should be banned. What you fail to realize is that "good" or "bad", when applied to all these things, depends a lot on the context.

You don't expect the same level of quality from a one-page script that will be used once, than from a crucial part of a large-scale program involving thousands of people.

Spending two days making the script robust, modular, flexible and unit-tested is just as bad as pasting an undocumented hack in the large program.

We need to try to be rational and stop mixing morals and code.

<comment><USER3> > We need to try to be rational and stop mixing morals and code.

It's funny because I think you are wrong. I would agree with stopping mixing aesthetics and code. The highest poetry from, say Mallarmé, has qualities that would be considered as stupid plain wrong pure evilness in code.

But morals and code have relations. A lot of relations actually. My moral forbids me to steal and cook my neighbour's cat, not because it is forbidden, but because I have enough self-respect to not behave like that.

The same applies when writting code. Even if operational pressure is high, I am not the kind of guy who will let the shitty work to other coders behind me. I have self-esteem, and don't want peer coder to think I am the worst shit in the world, so I just won't add crap to a pile of crap without doing reasonable efforts to do at least some cleaning.

Like in the toilets: let it as clean as would have liked to find it yourself.

Maybe we should first agree on what is "morals". For me it is not a set of predefined values like "good / bad", it is the very reason why we behave properly to each other (or not), it is a consequence of self-esteem.

Oh, and I think a one-shot script do not need to be refactored to be "beautiful" mind you, no, I think it should be either trown away right after use, or at the very last marked very heavily in the file name and as the first uppercased line: one shot script, no fixing required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've followed a very similar road.

For me, the thing which halted that ivory tower mindset was changing languages. I find that after spending a lot of time in a single language, I start thinking along that language's lines when I'm designing software. There are a lot of things which are a good idea in some languages and rubbish in others. Eg, enums are great in C, but useless in Javascript. Interfaces and abstract classes are silly in ruby.

I think there's a trap programmers fall into with this stuff, where we get used to some method / philosophy. After awhile, its easy to forget that the method comes with a price that is being paid daily. Only by periodically re- evaluating all the little decisions you make can you start to get a real sense for when those decisions are appropriate.

But as for the code rot problem, there are two solutions I've seen which made a difference:

\- Test-driven development (full on, no cheating, tests before you write code. 95%+ code coverage) \- Code reviews before every commit

 _But both of these methods will slow you down heaps in the short term._

I find proper TDD makes me about half as productive in the short term. In the long term, it slows down big redesign work because there's twice as much code to change. The benefit is that you can formalise all your obscure edge cases in tests. If your test coverage is good enough, you can safely refactor code without breaking anything. This removes fear from development and lets you make clear decisions about design. (Also, its amazing how many bugs you find when you start writing tests. It is humbling.)

I suspect that most of the benefits of code review comes from simply setting aside time to talk about code style. It consumes a lot of time. In exchange, you get higher quality code.

How much you care about speed and code quality really depends on what the project is. You need to try them both out some time to be able to make that decision properly.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the commenters says " The answer is probably just situational, but I'd bet that elegance is unimportant for a lot of code."

IMO that is miles from the truth. I handle code that "just gets things done" everyday and it is a real pain. Elegant code is not code that is just well formatted and clean, is code that solves a problem in an elegant way, a way that will scale better and that is easy to understand and maintain.

The real problem is that it's really really hard to get managers and clients to understand to value of elegant code.

When hell that is left after code-like-hell to get things done gets in the way of maintaining the code, the blame gets thrown in the programmer that didn't write good code. But they never want to trade off time for quality. And when we ask for time to get things done with quality, they assume it's an ego thing...

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Elegant code is thin, tall and streamlined. Half as many lines as a quick-and-dirty wad.

If you have half as many lines of code, \-- it takes half as long to read it \-- it may be twice as easy to explain \-- you may be able to fit it all into your brain at once \-- it compiles faster \-- it may run faster

Remember the slowest processor on the planet is your wetware. That's the place where space and speed are critical factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ideally it should be like his diagram from Code Complete: [http://flylib.com/books/2/823/1/html/2/images/0735619670/gra...](http://flylib.com/books/2/823/1/html/2/images/0735619670/graphics/24fig02.gif)

</comment><comment><USER8> I agree with the premise that production code won't be as elegant as you might like once the real world starts creeping in, but describing code as 'ugly' seems to lack information.

Is the code badly formatted? Poor choice of variable names? Non-idiomatic language use? Monolithic code blocks? Spaghetti code? Depreciated methods? Dangerous hacks?

Ugly could mean any of these & more. Some are less tolerable than others.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's an implied assumption in this post that handling edge cases or one- off, extreme cases necessarily is done by writing ugly/dirty code. I think the whole point about writing clean code is avoiding the hacky stuff even if the problem is messy. We're in the business of articulating solutions to messy problems clearly enough so that they can be executed by a machine. The best professionals in our field do that, and also make it so that other people can read and understand their work. That's what clean code is to me.

Admittedly, there's room for interpretation and a degree of subjectivity here. However, this doesn't prevent us from knowing about what _dirty_ code is and I don't see a compelling reason why we ought to tolerate it (e.g. long functions with a lot of branching are difficult for _everyone_ to read, so you shouldn't have any of those; same goes for badly named variables/functions/classes).

</comment><comment><USER10> The Joel on Software article that he refers to is probably "Making Wrong Code Look Wrong":

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html></comment>


Freedom vote: Dutch digital rights voting advice - <AUTHOR> https://freedomvote.nl/compare/ <comment><AUTHOR> The two largest parties both have the word 'freedom' in their name and score worst on digital freedom. These are VVD (Freedom and Democracy) and PVV (Party for Freedom).

The latter has only one party member so it has left out 'democracy'.</comment>


Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on "less is more" - <AUTHOR> https://getkiss.org/ <comment><USER2> ITT: People on _hacker news_ complaining about someone building their own linux distro...

Go install windows and be happy in your mono culture world, but don't shit on other peoples creativity and effort.

<comment><USER3> While i agree with the first part, about the second part... Windows is hardly a monoculture, it contains a ton of technologies that overlap heavily each other. As an example, people used to make fun of the number of GUI toolkits available for Linux and their messy looks, but nowadays your average Windows installation has way more different toolkits installed than your average Linux installation :-P.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to be dumb, but for a newcomer such as myself who read the blurbs about it being simple to use and develop for, not being able to have a single ISO to download and install is from this point in my Linux Journey, not simple.

I'm not making a value judgment as to whether or not I should know how to compile source code and running this on top of another Linux and so fort, but I can intuit my way through installing Debian or Manjaro or Arch Linux or knoppix or any other distro that provides a binary ISO.

It seems like this is simple in terms of 'lightweight for linux pros', not simple as in 'intuitive for users to use'.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just pointing out that I am unable to try this with my current skill level

<comment><USER5> > It seems like this is simple in terms of 'lightweight for linux pros', not > simple as in 'intuitive for users to use'.

That's a common problem with declaring things "simple", and not only for Linux distros.

What's simple in implementation (lightweight and straight to the point) may not be simple for an uninitiated user.

<comment><USER3> Basically simple does not necessarily mean "easy to use". The main "easy" element about most simple stuff is "easy to understand" and that is often what is sought after when it comes to simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In which world replacing removing Wayland in favour of X is considered KISS? We seem to have very different understanding of KISS with those folks.

<comment><USER7> X is widly used since 30 years. Its configuration (and security model) is well documented (xorg.conf). It is as simple as launching the X server using a simple command line and being able to connect any client (even remote) thanks to a single environment variable (DISPLAY).

How do you launch a wayland server and how do you forward "display" (ssh -X or -Y) to launch a remote application ?

<comment><USER8> As for display forwarding via SSH, you may be interested in this summer's GSoC project Waypipe[1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334)

<comment><USER7> Thank you very much. The work seems very complex. At the moment, I am at work on a windows PC. I have exceed and xming started and I have a toolbar with around 70 putty shortcuts with X11 forward. I am using them all the day long. At my previous job (using HP servers), it was a similar setup (with only 5 shortcuts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last time I've checked, kissing involves the mouth, at the least, so if the logo was some sort of play on the KISS, it fails anatomically. On top of that, there is no connection between the logo and the product which is what probably sets people off more than the content.

If it's by some ways a Rorschach case (doubt it), then it fails again as a logo, which should be clear and concise and aligned with the product. If no such alignment can be done graphically, then a text oriented logo would be far better.

I've been doing branding for a big part of my life, consider taking the suggestions from the other commentators as well in revising the logo if this is to be a serious endeavor; think of the various cultures and settings this would be seen.

<comment><USER10> Keep it simple, stupid

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also see "The Pure Bash Bible" posted today, and created by the same person; HN username "dyanaraps":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013150)

</comment><comment><USER12> Been following you for a long time Dylan. Keep up the good work and screw the inevitable BS that will come from these SV nutjobs

<comment><USER13> Thanks :)

<comment><USER14> KISS is great. Been using it for two months. No complaints.

<comment><USER13> That's awesome. Glad you're enjoying it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love this!

The only part I find questionable is the use of tools written in shell. Shell is a very difficult language to understand and use correctly. To the credit of the author, he is aware of this and the code is linted using shellcheck. Still, I wonder if it wouldn't have been a better idea to write the utilities using Python or Lua or even (gasp) C! (Or Rust, or Go or ... Just pick one that isn't completely esoteric and isn't Perl, then stick to it.)

<comment><USER16> shell is the only portable language. It works on all Linuces, BSDs, and even on WSL. Anyone with a tiny bit of sysadmin experience knows sh.

Python is far too much overhead for something as simple as firing shell (!!) commands and dumping new files in a tar archive.

And also, shell is extensible in the most simple way: you just write a program name, and boom, it runs.

Shell is simple, stable (remember the debacle of Python 2->3?), safe (no pointers, etc.), readable (compiling can even introduce issues), and dangerous only if you do it seriously wrong[0].

The only remark I have regarding code quality is that the word splitting warning is disabled for the entirety of kiss: I would have disabled it on a per-occurence basis.

[0] [https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for- linux/issues/3671](https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for- linux/issues/3671)

PS: the most secure open-source OS out there has a package manager written in perl, with priv-sep ([https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/usr.sbin/pkg_add](https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/usr.sbin/pkg_add)).

<comment><USER13> > The only remark I have regarding code quality is that the word splitting > warning is disabled for the entirety of kiss: I would have disabled it on a > per-occurence basis.

There are 8 occurrences of word splitting in the source, each and every one is intentional.

I also enable all lint errors when working on the package manager itself (to catch any unintentional word splitting which may slip through my fingers).

The ideal goal is to reduce the word splitting count to zero though! :)

(I'll go ahead and make the change you're suggesting until I do remove all word splitting).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't that a bit of a sexist logo...?

<comment><USER18> Only if staring at boobs and failing to make eye contact with women is sexist

Edit: that's a yes. Because apparently that isn't obvious to some folks around here

<comment><USER19> I think that's just "sexual", not "sexist."

<comment><USER18> Nope. The framing, cropping the face and focusing on the chest, is distinctly objectifying.

<comment><USER19> objectifying ≠ sexist

I think there is a strong arguement for objectifying, but still think it's more "sexual" than "objectifying", and definitely those two way more than it's "sexist".

Sexism is discrimination based on sex. Discrimination is different treatment based on a characteristic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> New logo needed. The chopped off head is bad luck in parts of Asia.

<comment><USER21> I've been staring at the logo for a few minutes now and I cannot make head or tails of it. It just looks like a random squiggle to me.

<comment><USER22> It's a woman with the top of head cropped

<comment><USER23> A woman who is not fully clothed, because We Are Tech Bros.

<comment><USER3> This looks to be inspired by pinup poster girls so she's most likely wearing a dress like in [1] but with her right arm on her stomach.

[1] [https://thewondrous.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Pinup- Art...](https://thewondrous.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Pinup-Art.jpg)

<comment><USER23> I don't want to overanalyze this, but there is a small dark upward bump between the breasts which makes the white stuff look like a bra or bikini top to me.

Note also how there is black below it as it wraps around to the back. If all that black space were her right arm, it would have a bump in the middle, and she would hold it in a very awkward position with the hand wrapping around to her back below her left arm. Seems less likely to me.

<comment><USER3> The upward bump at the top is the line between her breasts, you can see it in the painting i linked too, but the logo is black and white so it is more obvious. It could be thinner but seems that all lines on it were drawn with the same width. The upward bump at the bottom is the silhouette her breasts are making on her right forearm as a background. Imagine if [1] or [2] was tilted a bit forward and the right forearm was below her breasts. In both of these paintings the breast silhouettes are visible due to shading even though the colors are soft and they aren't tilted like the woman in the logo. Again since the logo is black and white it makes the silhouettes more pronounced since it relies on them for definition.

The black below is her arm from the elbow to the hand. The hand is just at the bottom right of the image with the line going in a /| shape right below the elbow of the left (right as we see it) arm. The tip is the fingers. They look a bit too long but i think it is mainly due to the line width.

The anatomy could have been better (the neck is a bit too long, the left shoulder is a bit too rotated, the left upper arm is a bit too short) and a couple of lines are too long that can be distracting, but overall it is very obvious to me that this is a pose with a tilted head, right arm on stomach and below breasts touching the side/back, left arm rotated a bit forward, on top of second arm with a slight angle in the elbow.

I mean, it _could_ be a bikini but it also could be a dress like in all the images i linked at. There is not enough detail to say one way or another, the only hint is that the image is inspired by 40s pinup posters and at least from a Google Images search one or two had girls wear just a bra or bikini. All others use full clothes and dresses.

[1] [https://muscleheaded.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/frahm.jpg](https://muscleheaded.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/frahm.jpg)

[2] [https://www.ebay.com/itm/1940s-Pin-Up-Girl-Glamour-Shot- Pict...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/1940s-Pin-Up-Girl-Glamour-Shot-Picture- Poster-Print-Art-Pin-Up-/151095591387)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kudos for not using any pointless HTML tags on the website. I like how you skip head and body. :)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I spent a lot of time ensuring the website would load quickly and I do away with a lot of "optional" cruft.

There's no Javascript full stop, no stylesheets (all CSS is embedded in each page) and every page load is a single web request (with the exception of the screenshots page).

Even the SVG logo is embedded in the pages!

Writing it this way also causes each page to be self contained, a download of the HTML page includes all of the CSS, logo and information so it can easily be saved and viewed locally. :)

<comment><USER25> My main issue with the site is that in my browser i get the mobile version instead of the desktop since i do not use my browser maximized (i have a 1366x768 monitor). Isn't there any other way to figure out if i use a mobile phone instead of using the horizontal resolution?

<comment><USER13> I'll fix this, thanks for letting me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> arch-ninja I'm surprised at the closed-mindedness of the comments here: usually browsing HN I read wonderful insights on tech how "you can't assume X, technology Y has a place and that place is Z". Here commenters appear unable to accept that this tech has a place because it doesn't include "app/feature X" or it doesn't abide by "rule Y". I'm more interested in the ripple effects seen here than the original article.

<comment><USER20> Normies galore after that RMS Twitter drama

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just wanted to say this looks kickass. It is way easier to tear things down than to build them.

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> First off, I love the philosophy, and the package format is nice.

I'm not a language hipster, I don't care what language you write something in as long as it fits the purpose well, and shell can certainly do that here. However, some uses of shell in the package manager are non-obvious, and that will make it more difficult for people to troubleshoot or maintain this code.

@OP: I imagine you've examined Slackware's pkgtools? ([https://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-12.1/source/a/pkgtool...](https://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-12.1/source/a/pkgtools/scripts/)) They're written in shell too, and have been in use since 1994. I wish they would get a bit more updated to do things like read metadata (especially for Slackbuilds) and handle build dependencies, but I always found them pretty easy to understand and modify to my needs. Later I threw together some scripts to automate the most common configure/make/make install/packaging steps ([https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/tree/public- bin/src/sl...](https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/tree/public- bin/src/slacktools)). My scripting experience was, let's say... "limited". :)

I ended up making a couple thousand packages from tarballs. What that taught me was that actually managing build dependencies, and the complications of layering different software into the same file tree, was a lot more weird than it seemed. So depending on people's intentions with this distro, it may end up being a lot more complicated for them to manage than they think.

</comment><comment><USER28> What i am looking for is a distro where the only UI is through webpages.

I had idea about installing a local Prometheus agent, cockpit and other modern administration tools, but it could'nt match all the features of Gnome 3. Especially, I couldn't find a webtool to manage hardware, such as Wifi, keyboard configuration, display, mouse, etc. Also, a very good, fast, and stable web terminal isnt easy to find

<comment><USER29> As someone who works in computer graphics this idea makes me sad. I mean I know web is the closest thing we have to a universal interface, and there are a ton of advantages to it, but the idea of moving more toward a world where _every single thing_ you do on a computer has this thick layer of web technologies between the user and the hardware is just depressing. Like why should AMD and Intel even bother innovating if everything is going to be bottlenecked by single-threaded Javascript?

<comment><USER28> It depends on your use case. In my case, most of the ram of my computer is already dedicated to a web browser anyway. I prefer to have everything done in the web browser rather than having another complex graphic framework running in parallel. Plus HTML is highly hackable and there is no reason we cannot reuse the many tools developed for monitoring remote servers on a local machine.

I like the idea of Google Chrome OS, but I would like to be free to chose the web browser I want.

<comment><USER29> > In my case, most of the ram of my computer is already dedicated to a web > browser anyway

To me that's an argument for why you'd want to do less in the browser, not more.

> I prefer to have everything done in the web browser rather than having > another complex graphic framework running in parallel.

Do you have any technical reason you want that? Because a terminal interface, for example, is going to be much more efficient in terms of resource usage if it's implemented natively rather than in a webview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That logo was a terrible idea.

<comment><USER3> Mainly because it is the easiest (or simplest :-P) part of the entire page to criticize so people do that.

FWIW, personally i like it (though i'd put a frame around it to emphasize the pinup poster girl style) and find it more artistic than most meaningless abstract shapes other projects use.

<comment><USER30> Well no I was criticising it because women I know thought it was disrespectful to women.

A pair of tits isn't "artistic".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Isn't there a distro that's already based on the KISS principle? (Arch Linux)

Is there something that the Kiss distro achieves that Arch doesn't?

<comment><USER32> This distro is much simpler than Arch. It reminds me more of something like Static Linux: [https://sta.li/](https://sta.li/)

<comment><USER33> It reminds me much more of Crux or even Gentoo (with the Bash ebuilds as package management).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looks interesting. Shell can be a good tool for this type of thing, as long as rigorous care is taken to maintain good quality. I view it kind of like PHP, Perl, or JavaScript... you can definitely write good code in these languages, but it requires more discipline than in other languages. Shell offers a number of benefits too, namely it's ubiquitous, most people that would be interested in this distro will know it already, and it makes it easy to drive around other tools and processes.

One concern I would have though is that it seems their package manager does not currently have any way to include patches to packages (or if it does, it's not mentioned in the documentation). This can make it hard to port things if they require even minor tweaks to build properly.

<comment><USER35> > One concern I would have though is that it seems their package manager does > not currently have any way to include patches to packages

[https://getkiss.org/pages/package-system/](https://getkiss.org/pages/package- system/) mentions patches. There is a section on patches alone with an example.

<comment><USER13> We have quite a few patches in use too.

[https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/search?l=Diff](https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/search?l=Diff)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What is the standard pick these days for a no-frills, stripped back, but still usable Linux distribution? One that doesn't start with much, but isn't boiling the ocean like Arch or Slack if you want to add more?

I used to like Xubuntu, but this was like a decade ago at this point.

<comment><USER37> I've been using Void Linux[0] for a few years now. It's philosophically aimed at being a minimal distro for power users.

Design choices:

* Rolling release

* Custom package manager: XBPS with binary package repository. It's pretty darn good IMHO.

* Minimal init process: runit

* LibreSSL (vs OpenSSL)

* User can choose standard library: Glibc or musl

* Prefer dash over bash in system scripts

You get the drift. The biggest change to a user is probably the use of XBPS as a package manager. The repository of pre-compiled binaries is pretty extensive, and the package definition scripts are dead simple. The entire collection of package definitions is in a repo on GitHub, so sharing your package definitions is also quite painless.

Their IRC channel on freenode (#voidlinux) is also pretty active with lots of knowledgeable and helpful people.

[0]:[https://voidlinux.org/](https://voidlinux.org/)

<comment><USER38> You forgot to mention they have a very sane package hirachy that always draws as few dependencies as possible. Many self proclaimed "minimalist" distros will immediately become bloated as soon as you install one package not in the base system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before deciding to try a new distribution, I want to know which important application it supports or not. I assume it supports usual stuff like ssh, vim, emacs, python, ruby, node, but does it support chrome, firefox, visual studio code, docker, virtual box ?

<comment><USER39> Half of your named programs are not supported (Chromium/Electron, Virtual Box, Docker, all non open source software that doesn't support musl libc (which is nearly all proprietary software)). Chromium and Electron are a pain on musl systems, Virtual Box also would require patching for musl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I absolutely love the overall objectives here!

Unfortunately I can't see a reason to use this over Alpine Linux, which is also quite simple and minimal and has been around for a while and works fantastically well.

</comment><comment><USER41> What are advantages of KISS vs Alpine Linux(also musl/busybox based)?

<comment><USER42> KISS doesn't have different packages that Alpine doesn't have. KISS has a more recent "yet another package manager" that sill looks pristine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ominous's screenshot looks amazing. Does anyone know what (software/gui/manager/idk) is?

Even though I've been using Linux (Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the past several years, I really son't know too much about it such as how to ask the right question about desktop manager(?). The install instructions look detailed enough that I could probably figure it out. I will bookmark this, because I want to buy a laptop, amd it might be interesting to try to build/install this as an experiment first.

<comment><USER43> It says it in the screenshot :) catwm

<comment><USER19> Thank you, I see it after "WM", and that jogs my memory a little. "Windows Manager" \- that's the term I was looking for!

<comment><USER43> There are plenty of minimalist ones, if you're looking for a mainstream tiling window manager you should check out i3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A simple solution is often worthless if the underlying problem is complex. It's nice this project foregoes on complex things like pam, systemd, gettext, etc. But these things are often created to solve problems. Problems this 'simple' solution needs to account for as well (if not now, in the near future when use X needs feature Y). And then new functionality is introduced in the solution making it complex again (and often non-standard).

<comment><USER13> Nothing stops a user from packaging and installing these things in KISS, they just aren't included by default.

I envision KISS as a minimal base in which you extend to suit your needs and not something you need to cut to size.

As I state in the Philosophy; "it's easier to add things to a system than it is to remove them".

A user has actually gone ahead and done this! \\[1\\] They run KISS with systemd, pam, dbus, pulseaudio, glibc, chrome etc etc.

\\[1\\] [https://github.com/fanboimsft/kissD](https://github.com/fanboimsft/kissD)

<comment><USER44> But for me that beats the purpose. You still end up with the complexity. Only now you have to add and manage it yourself in some other way, probably being worse off then when you would have started with all that complexity but integrated in one standardised package (distro).

Imho, the issue is not that the solutions are complex but the problems we (assume we) need to solve are. Just making simple solutions that ignore the bigger problems underneath do not really help in the end.

<comment><USER25> The purpose can be to make a simple system, not an easy to use one. A simple system can maintain its simplicity by avoiding tackling complex problems - however if you want to tackle those problems yourself then, sure, you'll also need to handle that inherent complexity that the original system decided to avoid. But that is complexity you invite in, not something that the original system had.

That doesn't make the original system any simpler or more complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Keep making the biggest problem of Linux bigger, please... Yeah, this problem is "fragmentation", and it is not solved with "simplicity".

<comment><USER46> This kind of distro is exactly the point of FOSS & Linux imo. Diversity of ideas breeds innovation and competition, we need that. Otherwise linux will at some point go the way of browsers, with everything effectively owned by google/microsoft/whatever and a big fat artificial lock-in.

<comment><USER47> You are right ! diversity is the good move, that is how life decided to grow, by diversifications. Ok, it consumes loads of time, but the result is without point of thinking. M$ did the opposite in '80, and is not quite winning nowdays... Just a question of time and experimentations ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm always a proponent of simplicity.

Some criticism about the site: What a horrible layout. I zoomed out to 25% (the furthest you can go) and the text is still to big.

<comment><USER49> I like the layout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Looks simple enough to get working. I'll try it out. Am curious to see what the disctro architecture _is_ rather than _isn 't_.

</comment><comment><USER51> Awesome project, nice work.

<comment><USER13> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Seems like an extremely specific minutia to build an entirely new distribution for. Also if less is more, how do you call less? I always preferred it because it is faster. /jk

</comment><comment><USER53> "This distribution has no default desktop or window manager environment." \- goes to prove that "simple" doesn't mean "easy to use"...

<comment><USER54> The website does mention this:

> A distribution being "simple" has many different interpretations. It may > mean simple to use, simple to develop or simple in its implementation. > Further, the phrase "simple to use" may differ from person to person. > > > Users with prior knowledge of Linux and basic programming skills will find > this distribution simple in all three examples given above. A user without > prior knowledge may see this distribution as the exact opposite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I was looking for something like this actually, I thought I would finally have to warm up to BSD if I wanted an OS that I have some hope of understanding fully.

</comment><comment><USER56> this looks kind of nice to be honest, and i hardly ever say that about some custom distro. only thing i'd like is to install it from USB instead of some chroot mumbo jumbo. that would require me to instal linux on a box firs before re-rolling into this. kind of annoying. perhaps something on the roadmap, didn't check. but definitely promising as far as i can see.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. :)

You don't need to install another Linux distribution beforehand, you just need to __boot __another distribution 's live-iso to partition disks and download/unpack KISS.

This is simpler on my side as I don't have to compile and package a heavy kernel, generate an initramfs, build a squashfs and finally package it into an ISO image.

On the user side this enables more flexibility too. You can use a live-iso offering a GUI for "easier" partitioning or an iso in which you _know_ includes the firmware you need for the installation process etc.

The download for KISS is only a 45MB~ tarball and the installation is just unpacking it to your newly partitioned disk at `/`!

This also allows for the same installation tarball to double as a working chroot in existing systems. In my eyes, this method is simpler all round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This reminds me of: [https://arewesimpleyet.org/](https://arewesimpleyet.org/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there a docker image available? I'd like to experiment with the package manager, but I'd rather not setup a VM.

<comment><USER13> You can download the installation tarball, extract it to a directory and use 'chroot' to start tinkering with it. The installation tarball doubles as a working 'chroot' image. :)

[https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/releases/tag/1.1.3](https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/releases/tag/1.1.3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> potential successor to Alpine for lightweight docker images?

<comment><USER60> Is it, though? (That's a bit of a meme, sorry.)

No, seriously. Why would I choose this over Alpine? Or, given the failure modes of Alpine as a container image, why would I even choose Alpine? Everything in this space is absolute shite.

<comment><USER61> What's the problem with alpine?

<comment><USER62> According to Itamar Turner-Trauring on Podcast.__init__[1] the issue with Alpine (at least in a Python context) is that the use of musl[2] instead of glibc (and I paraphrase) is an increased technical risk where corner cases that may not be as thoroughly tested are in view.

ITT counseled in favor of using containers based on ubuntu or centos.

I haven't done huge amounts of container work, but my light outings with Alpine have been fine. Maybe load and internationalization expose more personality in musl, or these concerns pertain to issues that have been fixed.

It's something to keep in mind when assessing risk.

[1] [https://www.pythonpodcast.com/docker-python-production- episo...](https://www.pythonpodcast.com/docker-python-production-episode-222/)

[2] [https://www.musl-libc.org/](https://www.musl-libc.org/)

<comment><USER63> I think of it as being like the "dash as /bin/sh" thing in Debian-derived distros. Software that's carefully done "by the book" or intended to be highly portable is unlikely to have a problem. But a lot of things depend on bash/glibc without anyone particularly intending or realizing it, simply because their sheer market share means that such dependencies will "just work" for the vast majority of users.

<comment><USER62> I think that's a fair assessment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Very curious, applying the "less is more* philosophy by making _even more_ Linux distributions...

<comment><USER23> Well, it's "less is more", not "fewer are more" :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> That logo makes it a non-starter in any organization I've seen in the last decade.

<comment><USER43> Regardless of that logo, those north-American organizations would not be running a minimalist Linux distro written by a single guy in the first place, but some sort of Lovecraftian Kubernetes setup involving redundancy everywhere, especially in the software stack.

<comment><USER66> It never occurred to me before, but the word "Lovecraftian" is indeed perfect for describing the modern approach to infrastructure. Well put.

<comment><USER43> "Kubernetes, The Great Abomination in the Network, The Soul-Eating Son of Borg, was first described as a demanding and destructive cosmic entity in the forbidden book of Google, guarded in the temple of Mountain View by the practitioners of the heinous cult of Silicon Valley"

<comment><USER27> I, for one, am not in the least terrified to be a member of the Cult of Kthulhlbernetes, and welcome our Old Internet Gods, waiting in the deep shadows of the cosmic data center, until that fateful day when the machines finally rise to the surface and replace our tongues with YAML parsers. May they devour our souls and privacy first! Apiivihr, apiivihr, apiivihr!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Looks cool but WTF is that logo? I'm an artist and I can't figure out what it's supposed to be even after staring at it for 5 minutes ¯\\(°_o)/¯

<comment><USER68> i think it's a woman leaning over - we're seeing some cleavage there. but... it may just be a rorschach logo...

<comment><USER67> Yeah I thought so too but then other parts it stop making sense. Vastly ahead of its time or just bad? Either way, it's kind of a millstone around the neck of the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Just what we need, another Linux distribution. Spread the effort even more thinly.

No thanks

<comment><USER70> "Fewer distros mean more active developers per distro" is just as much a fallacy as "Less music piracy means higher profits". Many distros exist exactly because their devs don't want to touch something like Ubuntu.</comment></comment>


Robots vs People: Or why Android device marketing is just weird. - <AUTHOR> http://www.netwhisperer.com/2010/08/25/android-marketing/

<comment><USER2> It really is a shame that so much of the Android marketing has taken its cue from Verizon's techno-masculine Droid branding.

Google was dead on with the Nexus One's "Web Meets Phone" ad. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching - right at the center of Google's brief expressive / cute / minimalist advertising phase. Think back to the "Parisian Love" Super Bowl ad and the Motion Theory "Google Chrome" short. They're delightful.

These shorts present Google as a very different company - one that's personal, bright, and helpful. Much of this work is coming from (or commissioned by) a division called Creative Lab that's largely independent from the majority of Google's culture and management structure. I had the pleasure of collaborating with them on a couple projects and was amazed by their creativity, insight, and lighthearted approach.

I would love to see more work in this style from Google. They've demonstrated they're perfectly capable of creating very good ads that deliver a consistently solid impression, but have ceded much of the opportunity to brand Android to carriers who have screwed it up to the nines (though we shouldn't forget that the platform is actually called "Android"), with the lone exception of HTC's highly personal commercials.

I hope they can turn it around. If and when they do, I further hope that it will be a part of a more comprehensive strategy to rebrand Android as a whole. It's a solid platform with a lamentably robotic image.

\---

[1] Nexus One ad: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6COwgigJ-g>

[2] Parisian Love: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU>

[3] Motion Theory's "Chrome": <http://vimeo.com/5721933>

<comment><USER3> I don't know much about advertising, but could this be on purpose? That is, an attempt to create the impression in the market that the Droid is the powerful, bold, masculine device, and so by implication (certainly never stated directly) that the iPhone is the rounded, feminine device. I don't have a marketer's sense about why that'd be an agenda item, but I could guess it may be a tried-and-true PR advertising technique -- if you're coming from behind, try to create an identity issue around the decision that will get you the fraction of the market you think you can get.

I think if you try, you can see analogues to this strategy in Apple's marketing, especially when it was famously coming from behind in the "I'm a Mac" ads. By attempting to segment the market -- "If you're a serious older person, PCs are for you, but if you're a young hipster, the Mac is your natural choice." -- they attempted to artificially create this sort of identity-based split in preference.

Again, I'm not a marketer, so I don't know if this is standard playbook or just reading more into what I see. I don't even know if this stuff works, but based on Apple fans' statements, it seems to me the message that they should think of themselves as a young, hip, enlightened minority who "just get it" and have great fashion sense seems to have taken root pretty well.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't seem to be hurting Google to much, with over 200,000 devices activated per day, if the CEO is to be believed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He's obviously never sold PCs to regular people. They care about features as much as techies, maybe more. I did this in the late 90s. People were asking how much RAM a computer had, how many megahertz the processors were, etc. who didn't have the slightest clue what they meant.

The laundry list of tech specs works even on people who don't have the slightest clue what they mean.

<comment><USER6> Yes... the "geeks/techies" he talks about are the normal people. As opposed to the "if its purpose is something I want, and it's expensive enough, it can't really suck" crowd that Apple is able to tap into.

The second group of people would have significant reservations to buy a copycat design if they can afford the original. The first group is concerned about _bang for the buck_. And they only know how to measure "bang" in terms of numbers - because, among nondescript gray boxes (or small packets of shiny black) that all run similar software, those numbers are all you can easily find out.

Care to see how good the camera is? Either take a standardized benchmark to try out in controlled lighting conditions, or ask for the numbers. Do you want to know how well the microphone does? Either take your oscilloscope with you, have very good hearing, or ... well, people are not eagerly asking for numbers, they just assume that the microphone is always good enough for talking and not good enough for serious music recording.

Apple can work towards their targeted pricepoint by selecting which features/experiences to include such that the product as a whole is a pleasant experience. (Even though, among the "experience" crowd, no one would go for the quality of earphones that the iPod comes with, if they were to shop for new ones). The "commodity" people have a given feature set (the industry standard) and a pricepoint (or even worse, compete based on price) and all they can do to preserve their margins is squeeze hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While his point may contain some truth, his examples biased: it's unfair to compare 30-60s brand advertising for Android to what's effectively an 8m infomercial for the iPad.

</comment><comment><USER8> > "There is no wrong way to hold it" As opposed to some other Apple products.

</comment><comment><USER9> 6-word summary:

        Android sells *what*. Apple sells *why*.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a puzzling approach. Are they hoping early adopters/influencers on the hardcore geek end of the curve convince the less tech savvy in the middle?

I don't buy it as a good strategy, if that's what they're after. Android, from a UX perspective, is an odd mix of feature phone and high-end ATM. (I mean, really, it's like a Bank of America cash machine and my old RAZR had a child together.)

It's not immediately apparent how to get around, at times, and the mystery meat behavior of the hardware back button is often baffling.

The iPhone, of course, was first a hit among nerds before it exploded into the wider market. The big reason for that was that the phone was just genuinely better than what most people were carrying in their pockets. So while techies influenced adoption, they were only channels for that influence, not influencers themselves.

The real influencer, of course, was a focused, enjoyable UX.

Android still has catching up to do; it's far more likely to leave a toe-in- the-water user cold than inspire buying behavior.

</comment><comment><USER11> Different marketing for different audiences. I don't think the Droid is going to be sold much as an enterprise device, so why advertise to those users? Apple advertising is almost always androgynous, agnostic, and basically smooth and clean. I think mainly Apple wants the user to decide how to define the product, not predefine it and then hope to attract users who fit into that category.</comment>


Using Feature Queries in CSS - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/08/using-feature-queries-in-css/ <comment><USER2>
      /* NOT IE */
      @supports (@supports) {}

IE does not support it so it's kind of pointless, no? If I ever actually make the user of a feature query, I would need to create a backup plan for everything and then another backup plan when that backup plan fails!

<comment><USER3> No, that's exactly the point. If the browser doesn't support @support then it ignores the whole block and falls back to the regular CSS you've likely, or hopefully, already written. The article actually discusses this. It's a modern equivalent of the stupid hacks we had to do back in the day because of bad, or good in some cases, IE CSS implementations.

<comment><USER2> No I get that but I now have to look at it three times. Say I am using some feature, f, then I have to go check the case where the browser supports @supports but not @supports(f), supports @supports(f) and does not support @supports, since the styling changes are not all in isolation.

Now to make it even crazier say we have another feature f1 that somehow impacts the case of @supports(f). We'll need to check five different cases (@s(f) + @s(f1), !@s(f) + @s(f1), etc...). It seems like I might as well just find the minimum feature set I can use and just go ahead with that. Anything more and there would be too much mental work for me.

<comment><USER3> Well, if you are fine with the minimum feature set then start with that. Then use the @supports for the enhanced version to make things nicer for everything other than IE. Just don't check for browsers not supporting @support.

To be fair, I haven't used it on a production site so far.

<comment><USER4> If you are not fine with the minimum feature set, it is not the "minimum feature set" and the in-browser app that you are writing will not work with it.

I get what is so compelling about it, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody use such things correctly in practice. At least not on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been wanting to use these in some of my CSS, but I had never considered the case where a browser supports a feature, but doesn't support `@supports`. My best guess is you'd need a three stage CSS file to support that: first, use the new feature, then `@supports not` the backup code, then `@supports` the new feature. Maybe I won't be using this for a while...

<comment><USER3> No, you set default properties on your element. Then you have @supports to enhance that element if the properties you wish to use are supported. It's a far better solution than the silly hacks we had to do before.

<comment><USER6> @supports is pretty necessary when you're using backdrop-filter. For instance, you want a navigation bar translucent with blurring on browsers that support it, and a solid colour for others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ran into a funny situation with this the other week where IE 10 supports flexbox (sort of), but doesn't support @supports. So that can happen. But if you're OK sequestering "doesn't support @supports" browsers into the non- enhanced experience, it works great.

<comment><USER8> IE10 and IE11 have a large numbers of bugs in their flexbox implementation or only support the 2012 syntax, so this might actually be desirable. (Compatibility info from [http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox](http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox) )

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that's why I said "(sort of)". But in my case, the flexbox features I was using worked OK. I was actually fine with having IE10 see the "block layout" fallback (b/c if you use IE10 the web looks broken for you anyway, so you should be overjoyed that you get _a_ layout that works even if it's not that fancy), but my marketing manager felt differently. Life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't @supports slightly redundant, though?

Unless you're avoiding a broken feature, CSS will simple cascade down with the first supported property by default.

It's how we've handled browser prefixing, background gradients, wonky flexbox and pretty much _everything_ since forever.

Im sure it'll be an unpopular opinion, but whilst I can see some edge cases where you only want to apply certain ancillary css if your markup is going to be rendering in a certain way, I honestly can't think of many (any?) real world usecases where you're not pretty much frigging it to provide 2005-tier browser sniffing.

<comment><USER10> This is what the author herself says in the article. Specifically, that feature queries should be used when you only want to apply a set of styles if a given feature is supported.

<comment><USER9> But surely that is in itself counter to how css is supposed to work at a very fundamental level?

If you want to render different content for different browsers, I'm not convinced that is a function of stylesheets, not should it be.

If my layout needs extra padding or whatever if a div is a flexbox, rather than display:table, I would consider that to be an implementation issue rather than something I would want to cover with additional code.

I might just be completely missing the point, but it feels like a bandaid.

<comment><USER11> It's a total bandaid, but that's the point. If the browser lets you sanely style things with display:grid, then you can. But you can have a fallback for browsers that don't support it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to make opportunity out of Brexit? - kuro-kuris Hi HN,
I am an EU national working in London at the beginning of my career working as data scientist for a startup I am crippled by fear of Brexit, how could I make an opportunity from this fear?
I am worried about the London startup ecosystem shrivelling from the economic fallout and hostile immigration environment.
Thanks for your advice HN! <comment><AUTHOR> While things could get complicated, it seems worldwide, STEM careers, especially IT, seems to adhere to a more-friendly policy for foreign workers.

Besides, it is UK, not some unstable, backwater nation that would rush to cancel work permits and kick out foreigners.</comment>


SXSW and Reddit's Introspection Problem - <AUTHOR> http://skepchick.org/2013/03/sxsw-and-reddits-introspection-problem/

<comment><USER2> "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us."

False. On 8/13/12, I got a Google News Alert showing my name listed on a panel on the SXSW Panel Picker that I had never even heard of, let alone agreed to.

The way SXSW works, people submit panel concepts (presumably with the knowledge of everyone involved) in order to get 'votes' that help the SXSW team decide which panels to approve. I have no idea how long that post was getting 'votes' with my name falsely associated with it.

I immediately emailed Farhad, who was listed as the organizer:

> my email to Farhad

I wasn't even planning on being at Sxsw interactive this year.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt but this appears to be remarkably unprofessional.

Please have my name removed from this immediately: <http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/3709>

Let me know when it's done.

Thanks Alexis

> Farhad's reply (Jason, reddit's PR, CCed)

Hey Alexis,

I'm sorry, I guess there's been a misunderstanding. I asked Jason Bellinger at Reddit PR -- CCd here -- a couple months ago if you would do it; he said that either you or Erik Martin likely would be able to.

I thought that we were submitting a generic "Reddit representative" for the event, but apparently we put in your name. (This entry was being coordinated by Slate's PR company -- I didn't create it.) I'll contact them to get your name removed ASAP.

Jason, do you know if Erik will be able to take part -- should we switch his name in there?

> Jason (reddit PR)

Hey Farhad -

I had said that I'd get back to you if they were interested, and as they aren't going this year, I didn't confirm it with you. I'm sorry if there was a misunderstanding here.

> Farhad

Ah, it's my mistake, then; I understood that to be either/or. I do apologize and will get it taken care of.

\---

I do believe there's a discussion to be had about promoting civility (and curbing bigotry, assholish behavior, etc) on social media -- these ills exist on wordpress, on youtube, on twitter, and yes, on reddit -- but when one can't even honestly invite participants, let alone frame the debate, we all miss an opportunity.

I've had & heard frank & thorough discussions on the subject with friends like Latoya Peterson (www.racialicious.com) and Christina Xu (www.awesomefoundation.org) so I know it's possible, but my concern is that there are people engaged who'd prefer pageviews over progress.

<comment><USER3> Why do you imply that the members of this panel are being disingenuous?

\- Yes you never agreed to the panel, but how does this email chain not reflect an honest invitation?

\- Of course the debate was framed; it is impossible for an event to not have context. Would you have preferred it framed differently? How so?

\- Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?

<comment><USER4> > Why do you imply that the members of this panel are being disingenuous?

The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.

<comment><USER5> Farhad didn't know what happened. All he knew is that Ohanian was supposed to at least be _asked_ , and he supposedly wasn't even corresponded with, which could, by all accounts, not even be true. He was on the invite list, and decided against. I'm not sure what part doesn't correlate with "dropped out."

<comment><USER6> How can you possibly "drop out" of a panel that you explicitly said you were _never planning on attending_?

Dropping out means that you were planning to go and then you had to cancel. Whether Farhad knew this before or not, Alexis's email was _very_ clear and so there's no excuse to claim today that Alexis dropped out of anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I preface this by saying I don't know the author and I don't recall ever having read anything by her previously before, so all of this drama about past things she's spoken about is new to me.

Regardless, this is a great example of how the challenges women face (particularly on the anonymous web) are even further worsened by inappropriate skepticism from those who claim those challenges don't exist at all. All of her points were unmistakably valid and yet she was publicly shamed, her Wiki vandalized (it says this happens 2-3 times a month, and that her page has been on a watchlist for years because of this), and most of these people weren't even at the talk.

And she's right; truly civil discourse just doesn't happen in most subreddits except in very rare instances where someone decides to take the high road. Regardless of gender, because karma exists, people'd rather not risk their worthless points over being the guy that says "Hey, that's not cool." Social janitorial work isn't pretty, but it needs to be done. If Reddit won't take responsibility for the direction of the discourse on the primary subreddits, users that value stimulating conversation over the same tired [pointlessly offensive] jokes will flock elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> > Social janitorial work

This is the most hilarious euphemism for "censorship" I've ever heard.

<comment><USER3> Your comment is wrong and rude.

Oh look, I just did some social janitorial work. Was your comment somehow deleted by my act?

Should I presume that Convo provides no moderation mechanisms because they would constitute censorship?

<comment><USER8> I took "social janitorial work" to mean cleaning up other peoples' comments, which really isn't possible without altering or deleting them.

If it was used to mean "indicating disapproval", then I have absolutely no problem with it.

<comment><USER9> The original context was:

> _"Regardless of gender, because karma exists, people'd rather not risk their > worthless points over being the guy that says "Hey, that's not cool." Social > janitorial work isn't pretty..."_

Which doesn't read like it implies editing or deletion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I full-on ditched Reddit about 3 months ago and haven't looked back. Any sort of criticism I lodged against the site for its insipid circle-jerking nature, to the small-minded, deep-south like approach to cultural issues were met with extreme hostility, or simply downvotes, so as to keep unpopular opinions ignored.

I was a user of that site for _6 years_. I had over 85k karma points for comments, and several thousand story karma points. It seems like the audience has changed greatly in more recent years, and I want no part of it.

The users who evangelize that site, or are so devoted to it as to attend meetups are pathetically biased, and contribute nothing to the advancement of internet culture, or the culture of idea exchange.

I feel very sad for the site, as I thought, at one point, it was a great bastion of freely-exchanged ideas. And now it's just a great place to espouse radical views for worthless internet points.

<comment><USER9> I still use reddit, but I have literally unsubscribed from every default subreddit (save /r/gaming since it tends to stay pretty light/fun).

Reddit sans the default subreddits is substantially more pleasant. I'd go as far as to say that subreddits like /r/politics, /r/atheism, /r/worldnews, and even /r/technology are just cesspits.

I'm not sure what causes large subreddits to spiral into utter shit, but it does. I'm also of the general opinion that most of the large subreddits are poorly moderated - mods will rarely take action even against egregious trolls, and there is no attempts at leadership.

The main subreddit I use, /r/photography, has a relatively new mod team that actually actively ban trolls and initiate weekly/monthly events to steer the conversation (e.g., "no talk about gear" threads, "weekly photographers that inspire you", etc).

<comment><USER10> > _I'm not sure what causes large subreddits to spiral into utter shit, but it > does._

My money? Karma systems.

I don't think they scale as well as many would like. When you get up to "default subreddit" sized karma systems just turn into some sort of currency system that rewards those who are ultimately detrimental to the conversation: specifically those making repeated boring puns/memes because they are easy and formulaic, and those making formulaic complaints about superficial elements of the post in question (flooding entire comment sections with complaints about grammar/spelling/limited vocabulary).

I don't think these behaviors would be nearly so prevalent without a karma system. Why would the 200th person to comment on an article make the 200th comment about a "there/their" error, if not because they thought they would get imaginary internet points?

Karma systems take the initial reward for discussion (intellectual satisfaction) and out-bid it with gamification induced endorphin rushes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I normally expect trolls at certain events, especially cheaper ones. However, I'm utterly _shocked_ at the behavior of some of these people at SXSW who are in all likelihood representing a company, and/or paid $1000+ for a badge. The comments that some of the attendees made at this were something I'd expect at a PAX or ROFLcon (due to the price and age of participants), not SXSW.

Also, its unfortunate to hear about how they tried to rope in Alexis.

<comment><USER12> Having money or connections does not transform one from being a jerk/troll/bigot. It's not surprising that there were such people at SXSW. It _is_ somewhat surprising the panel did not have better moderation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Violentacrez is like the gift that keeps on giving for Adrian's and this women's career.

She asked some interesting questions, It would be nice if she took the same amount of time that she took in shaming Redditors to answer her own questions.

</comment><comment><USER14> This article seems to take SRS as a legitimate subreddit. I always thought SRS was a satire, an over-the-top parody of extremist feminist/minority groups.

Have I fallen victim to Poe's law or has the panelist? Is SRS mostly 'real' or mostly satire?

<comment><USER15> SRS started as one guy who would post lists of quotes from Reddit (iirc, upvoted comments in mainstream subs) and Stormfront, with the object being to guess which quote came from which. It was harder than most Redditors would like to admit. Eventually, he quit the site entirely.

At some point a bunch of SA goons took over the then-defunct subreddit, to use it as a platform to take down the highly active /r/jailbait. The effort continued to hold a mirror up to some of the more racist/misogynistic/etc comments of reddit.

A lot of the criticism of SRS comes from the fact that people don't like being called racist. Nearly everyone agrees that racists are bad people who deserve terrible punishments for their actions. No one wants to accept culpability for the fact that by upvoting a racist comment they are supporting racism.

<comment><USER16> I would say a lot of the criticism comes from the fact that they commonly take quotes out of context, or take quotes meant as dark humor and use them to portray the poster as a horrible person. Combine that with their immature attitude and one-track mind and you're getting closer to understanding why even open-minded redditors don't support SRS.

Sure, there's plenty of legitimate cases where reddit needs to be called out and have a community effort around fixing some of their problems. But no one takes SRS seriously because, for all the good they have the potential to do, they're publicly harming their own image by crying wolf (or as they might say, crying poop).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting discussion. I've looked at Reddit off and on over the years and to an outsider like me it seems to have become less and less civil over time. I've wondered about that.

Clearly the Internet gives the broken and angry people a voice they didn't have before. Sometimes that helps them, but often it seems to result in just a bunch bile being spewed around.

At what point does the combination of IP address + bile start to become a corpus for focusing our efforts at community remediation? Is there a common good to be had by finding out if these are communities of angry people or are they just scattered about in the general population. Can we help them? Should we?

<comment><USER18> There is a problem where dysfunctional people can meet online and their behaviour feels more normal to them.

Thus, peeping toms would normally be alone and feel some kind of shame, and maybe want to seek help, but now they have /r/creepshots and a receptive audience and validation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This really does match up with my current view of reddit as a brutal hivemind of anonymous posters with a true lack of moderation (lest mod's get the "free speech" card pulled on them).

I admit to being an active user there but there is a true lack of acceptance of criticism and the inability to see things from multiple points of view.

Unfortunately, it seems like getting an objective view on what happened at the panel would be impossible now but those tweets in response are pretty vicious and uncalled for.

</comment><comment><USER20> If she actually answered the questions she proposed the article might have some weight. But instead she spends most of the article complaining about the people criticizing her.

Unfortunately people like this make their money from stirring up controversy so it is a never ending cycle.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, man, you just know she's buying private jets with her blog ad money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It continues to amaze me how seriously people take Twitter comments--good or ill, and that we can have entire posts citing 140 character insults from assholes.

The jerks were in the wrong, but I think the wrong approach is to engage them in their own medium. They are vocalizing their beliefs because they know it will provoke a reaction. You'll never convince them, so the best thing is to ignore them and get on with your life. In the case of reddit, the problematic set is best left to fester and dealt with at higher levels (bans, filtering) or discussed out of band (as in the linked post). "Arguing with a fool only proves that there are two," as they say.

</comment><comment><USER22> Only Rebecca Watson would accuse someone of wink-nod ignoring child porn, and cite it with a link that says "We weren't aware of this content and our DNS host couldn't reach us to tell us because our contact info was out of date"

</comment><comment><USER23> Your first mistake was using Reddit. Your second was going to South by Southwest.

That might be backwards, I am undecided.

</comment><comment><USER18> SRS is a troll sub reddit. There are only two uses for SRS. i) A nice centralised location for the bigoted or otherwise idiotic thing that many people on reddit say. ii) trolling reddit.

There are plenty of other meta subreddits where criticism is welcome. Reddit's only problem with those other subreddits is "brigading".

</comment><comment><USER24> _What would an ideal question have been, in my mind? How about this: [...]_

If they wanted to have that kind of discussion, why not use a panel moderator to ask those questions and invoke that conversation in the portion of the event the panelists were driving?

I didn't attend this, but based on Skepchick's own summary, the presence of Chen on the panel, relying on the audience to challenge their criticism, other posts online covering the panel and the fact MrGrimm felt the need to strait up "filibuster"; I get the impression they were there to recite well-known criticism rather than engage in analysis of reddit.

I wonder if, out of an audience of 300, nobody was able to meaningfully challenge the panel's position or if those that could just didn't bother. Why didn't they?

</comment><comment><USER25> Those tweets are infuriating. That having been said SRS has a shit ton of baggage and as long as Laurelai roams there I have no problem disparaging it. Laurelai's behavior, and the cover-up and apologetic behavior of the mods of /r/lgbt are a stain upon the feminist movement and I hate that they're the snapshot of feminism on reddit, because they're not.

Take the top post in SRS right now as an example, there are things in that subreddit that are _very_ obviously misogynistic and then there are things that they simply "don't like" or are unwilling to even have a discussion about. The comments in that subreddit are just as insidious and redunctionary as the commentary they proclaim to be against. It's done in some sort of tongue-in-cheek irony style, but it's not, it's gross and annoying to read.

The mob mentality is bad either way, and the tweets are a gross depiction of the dark side of reddit. But for every post in SRS, I encounter dozens of trolls every day that are downvoted for homophobia, racism and misogyny.</comment>


A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project - <AUTHOR> http://toadjaw.com/hn

<comment><USER2> Here I am reading hn on a Droid and boy is it terrible. Text too small. Text poorly wrapped. Buttons misclicked all over the place. So bless you sir. With half a billion smart phones sold in just the last couple of years, this is overdue.

You still need to bump up the fonts on the FP about 2 points. On mobile, favor horsey big usable text over any concession to style.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites.

I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.

<comment><USER4> On the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page from being zoomed withe the following meta tag :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum- scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>

But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.

<comment><USER5> (that tag is on the site)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The 'Article Text' is incredibly useful on old mobiles and slow connections.

I will now be able to read actual articles, not just HN comments. Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful.

I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it.

You can pass any URL through it on this form: <http://toadjaw.com/article>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you! I've been using iCombinator but half the time I get a Python exception when loading comments. Hope this will work better. Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version.

The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool, but doesn't look much different than a simple feed in google reader really.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like Jakob pointed out, I added the ability to pull the text of the linked article, which still needs some tweaking but works for most normal blog/news articles. It really makes articles readable on phones. It's based arc90's readability.

In addition, I added in the ability to read the comments and made them collapsible (like reddit).

But yes, if you only want the list of the front page links, the RSS will do.

I plan on adding more features soon: -Make comments sortable by date or points -More extensive caching of the comment pages along with the article text (in case either go down) -Improve the overall look and feel

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would love to see the text displayed inversely - whether in traditional terminal style (green text on black background) or something similar to arc90's readability style.

<comment><AUTHOR> That should be doable with just CSS. I put on a "settings" page on my TODO list to do just that.

<comment><USER9> Sounds great. I'll be looking forward to the settings update which I assume will be accessible via a different url (versus user controlled setting)? I.e. toadjaw.com/hninverse Again, nice implementation and it's become my default as of now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please add proper support for discussion (Ask HN, etc) posts. This is my #1 annoyance of iCombinator. Too many taps and backs to view the question then view the thread.

<comment><USER11> Anything in particular you were thinking of? I'm not sure I quite get the feedback.

<comment><USER10> The OP discussion text is not in the same view as the comments. Otherwise, I love iCombinator!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be very nice someone purchased a more rememberable url... hnmobile.info is available, for example. I guess that would do the trick. No need of a .com tld here.

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.icombinator.net/> I really wish there was a way to comment and vote from the interface, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like icombinator but I wanted to address some problems and add new features (View the article text, collapse/expand comments, and return to the previous position when using the browsers back button).

<comment><USER11> This is awesome! (iCombinator author here :) Looking forward to the new features coming to your app!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! My first attempt with mobile specific web pages. A lot to learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use a mobile browser (Atomic) which has great support for tabs- therefore I liked icombinator because it would by default open artcle links in a new tab.

Is there a way that you could have an option stored in a cookie that would determine whether or not to open those links in a new tab?

Very excited that you are working on this project and nice work so far!

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds very doable. I'll eventually have a settings page to set those kinds of options. Thanks for using it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes, HN could really need a mobile version. Also, is there some official API? Could people write mobile apps based on HN?

<comment><USER15> The official API is to scrape the HTML

<comment><USER14> that's no API. It's subject to change whenever they wish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> An icon for iPhone users would be nice...

EDIT: Oh, and thank you! It really seems to be better than iCombinator.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know where to find a HN icon in ico format?

EDIT: Duh... HN itself has one. I'll use it.

EDIT: Ok, I added it. Thanks for reminding me about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess by mobile you mean iPhone; it looks pretty poor on Fennec/Maemo or probably any landscape device.

<comment><USER18> If it is any consolation it doesn't look very nice on the iPhone in landscape either.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fixed the landscape problem. It turns out that adding -webkit-text-size- adjust:none; prevents the text from enlarging when rotating the phone to landscape. Adding that appears to have fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks nice! You should steal my favorite iCombinator feature, though: the Instapaper links. Also, the Article text links all return errors, but I'll take it on faith they produce or will produce in the future some easy to read version of article text.

</comment><comment><USER19> How does this work?

<comment><AUTHOR> For the home page, I request the HTML from HN, process it, and create a collection of elements that represent a HN news item: URL, Title, # of comments, ID, Posted By, Date, and so on. Then use that to generate the new HTML. I cache that for 200 seconds and store a copy in the event that I can't read the HTML from HN.

Works just about the same way for the comments , except it adds some additional functionality like collapsing comments. With the nature of comments being nested, a recursive function worked really well on rendering the output.

The article text functionality uses the algorithm from arc 90's readability project, which is in javascript. I used the main idea behind their readability algorithm for this, except mine runs server side (C#) where theirs is all done on the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I actually wish the main site stylesheet can be changed so that the white columns on left and right sides does not show up in mobile screen. This will save spaces, make the text bigger and make navigation/zooming easier on small screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the front page or the comment pages?

<comment><USER20> Both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> joe-mccann Was planning on doing something similar using YQL. Nice one.

</comment><comment><USER21> Bookmarked. It is now possible to click the comments link on an iPad without missing 70% of the time.

Edit: forget it. The links are target="_blank".

<comment><AUTHOR> I just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a new window/tab either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Feature request: Add the time that has elapsed since last update. For example:

"Last fetched 5/30/2010 8:23:51 AM PST (17 minutes ago)"

</comment><comment><USER23> I can recommend the HN app on Android market too.

</comment><comment><USER24> Works and looks great on my gphone.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could you easily add duckduckgo style infinite scrolling?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, shouldn't be hard. I'll add that to my list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> good readable on my iPhone, better than what I have seen so far, nice weekend project. I will keep using it for now. Thank you

</comment><comment><USER27> nice..but looks little bit dull.... anyways nice work..

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks great!</comment>


Doctors in Scotland can now prescribe nature to their patients - <AUTHOR> https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/doctors-in-shetland-can-now-prescribe-a-walk-in-nature <comment><USER2> In many other countries, it's available without a prescription.</comment>


Intel says chips to become slower but more energy efficient - <AUTHOR> https://thestack.com/iot/2016/02/05/intel-william-holt-moores-law-slower-energy-efficient-chips/ <comment><USER2> Really, _really_ shallow reporting, for example confounding Moore's Law with Dennard scaling ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling)).

</comment><comment><USER3> Original article at _Technology Review_ : [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600716/intel-chips- will-h...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600716/intel-chips-will-have-to- sacrifice-speed-gains-for-energy-savings/)</comment>


Ask HN: Can niche ad networks work?  - <AUTHOR>

I was browsing the deck today (http://decknetwork.net/) and noticed they have a small but well-known network and get a decent rate ($7,600 per month per advertiser).
I think I have the connections/resources to build something similar in a niche industry (weddings) and find some advertisers.
Could it be a decent source of additional revenue? Could it grow into something bigger?
Anyone ever done something like that? <comment><USER2> I run a number of niche networks (<http://zerkmedia.com>) and they provide a good source of income. The small ad size of The Deck and some of my networks works well in technology, but in the wedding space you would probably want more conventional sizes. You would also be dealing with larger advertisers which means more of a sales effort, do you have sales experience? (if not it's not very hard, it's just not very fun either)

I have also written software to manage running these networks, if you are interested in using it drop me a line (javery at zerkmedia.com).

<comment><USER3> btw you have a bug on the <http://rubyrow.net/> index page(probably other sites too) when javascript is disabled. The footer is fixed height, with the photos appearing below it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> isn't that what adroll does?

<comment><USER2> adroll is more of an open ad marketplace, a site can be in multiple rolls and from what I can tell the sales force isn't actively pushing individual rolls. It also doesn't appear to be very selective. The CPMs are pretty bad compared to what I would expect with a niche network and a good sales team.

If you want to advertise on Surfing sites would you rather go to the surfing roll at adroll or to a niche network focused on Surfing sites that has the best sites and good ad placements?

Playing around with adroll I also noticed that once you want to advertise you still choose sites individually where in a network you are usually paying for the expertise of the network builder to have chosen the best sites.

<comment><USER4> hmm....what you're saying doesn't make much sense. niche networks charge premium CPMs (e.g. expensive to the advertiser) because they have to support their sales force and support staff. they are also generally not self service at all. adroll is way, way cheaper than a vertical niche network because it is self service. if you want to pay +$20/cpm for someone to pick sites from a list for you, definitely go with a niche vertical network. if you want a cheap self service option that has access to the same sites go with adroll.

<comment><USER2> well, from a publisher perspective would you rather get 50% of $10 or 80% of $1? Adroll doesn't contain the same premium level of sites as a vertical niche network because those publishers know that they can make much more with the niche network then something like adroll.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 14 Days of jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://jquery14.com/

<comment><USER2> Ouch. jQuery is great, but was this the site that the guy behind the "JavaScript rock star!" page has dreamt of making ever since?! It took me a couple of minutes to work out that there was actually some useful content there, and I would long since have given up if I hadn't been expecting something worthwhile since I found it via an upvoted post on HN.

For those who are wondering, this seems to be the only real page there today: <http://jquery14.com/pre-release-1/new-jquery-api-site>

<comment><USER3> I don't know who downvoted this comment but I agree completely.

There's a tiny, tiny window of visible content if you open it in a 1440*900 window. I looked around for ages thinking wtf is this?

One of the worst sites I've seen in a long time.

How this submission is getting upvoted I do not know.

<comment><USER2> It was the misleading tabs that threw me. After reading all about the 14 days thing and January 14th as the anniversary date, I expected that today being January 8th at least the tabs up to 8 would show other content, but none of them do, except the first one, which actually goes to the link shown below anyway rather than working like the tab it appears to be. Everything else is just sponsor spam and subscription (to what?!) options.

Anyway, I eventually figured out where the real content was, hence my post above to save others wasting their time the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't been keeping up with jQuery for awhile, but I look forward to the updates. Site could be toned down a bit, as I find the horns to be a bit distracting, but other than that, all I really care about are the 14 updates.

</comment><comment><USER5> wow they rewrote all the documentation? The current documentation for jQuery is some of the best out there, I feel it is one of the key factors that lead to its success.

(incase you didn't see the close button on the popup: <http://jquery14.com/pre-release-1/new-jquery-api-site>)

<comment><USER6> It is very nice, but more examples would be a welcome addition.</comment></comment>


The most famous companies per state (visualization) - <AUTHOR> https://alpha.app.net/tylerborchers/post/7095210/photo/1

<comment><USER2> I spent way too long trapped in an internal debate of which was the more famous Seattle company: Starbucks or Microsoft.

I settled on the caveat that while Microsoft had undoubtedly affected more people and had a greater impact on the world, their corporate brand really doesn't approach the ubiquity of Starbucks'. (Some of my teachers in high school thought Windows was its own company, which I suspect to be a relatively common misconception.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish it described how it quantified fame. Looking at Texas and seeing "Dr. Pepper" instead of "ExxonMobil". Second rate soft drink brand trumps one of the top ten companies in the entire world in market cap and revenue? I realize it may not be easy to quantify fame, but it makes all the other choices suspect.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a life long New Jersey resident, I expected Johnson & Johnson. It took me a while to remember that Campbell's is Jersey based.</comment>