Synergy (GPL'd Software KVM) switches to paid downloads - <AUTHOR> http://synergy-project.org/download/?paid <comment><USER2> Synergy has been a bit odd in recent years. It doesn't seem like a particularly large or complex piece of software, and many projects that seem to be of similar scope are things maintained in the spare time of a few developers. It has long been stable, and it isn't clear that drastic improvements in it have been made, or even need to be made.

Yet Synergy appears to have a corporation behind it (Synergy Si) that only appears to work on Synergy. They have an office, and apparently provide free meals, Google-style 20% projects, and a variety of other perks. They're apparently hiring. They even offer stock options, despite my being rather bewildered at where the opportunity for growth is.

I donated years ago, and found myself occasionally receiving emails that just didn't make sense, making the whole operation sound giant. If they were working on other projects, too, but it seems like all they do is work on Synergy.

<comment><USER3> From the user's perspective its easy to say: it looks simple, so why shouldn't it be simple to maintain? I don't think its reasonable to compare Synergy to other projects unless you've actually tried to develop the code.

I'm not really sure how we can come across as a large company, there's only 2 of us right now.

Your post baffles me.

<comment><USER4> As a premium user who has gotten a ton of mileage out of Synergy, I totally support this - keeping this software up to date and easy to use while improving its utility for complex computing setups can't be easy, and I don't know what I'd do without it. Keep up the great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should be the norm for a couple of reasons:

* There are still people that believe free-of-cost software cannot be high quality, which is likely a result of the well known relationship between price and perceived quality.

* If open-source developers are paid for their work, there will be more open-source software.

Interesting recent discussion on reddit about this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2hvtuc/dear_gnome_i_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2hvtuc/dear_gnome_i_want_you_to_start_charging_me_money/)

<comment><USER6> Unless "apt-get install" starts deducting BTC from your wallet.dat, charging money for open source software isn't worth it. The revenue collected is minuscule, yet it reduces adoption and fragments the community. People use free forks instead of the "official" version.

There are better ways to monetize open source software: Consulting/support contracts. Bounties for features. Paid SaaS features. "Enterprise" features, such as turning Synergy into a mass remote admin tool. (I bet this would be handy in schools.)

It took me 30 seconds to think of those monetization ideas. I'm sure Nick Bolton can come up with better ones.

<comment><USER7> Your argument doesn't address the parent's first point, that many customers hesitate or refuse to use free software. By having paid downloads from their main front, they can market to these people, and use them to generate a modest amount of revenue that would otherwise not exist.

<comment><USER8> So you offer those people a paid support contract upfront.

* Click here to download Synergy with support ($4.99)

* Click here to download Synergy with no support (free)

It's common to call the no-support option the "community" version.

<comment><USER3> We tried that a while ago. It turns out, around 90% of Synergy users are very technical (fellow Software Engineers and the like). Often technical people aren't that interested in support because they prefer to figure stuff out for themselves (because we find it fun). Synergy does have a private help desk that Synergy users can contact for troubleshooting, but users that contact the help desk are often less technical (when it comes to Synergy troubleshooting).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found out about this when installing Synergy on my fresh Windows box that I use mostly for gaming. I gladly coughed up the $5. Of course, I could have built the software myself but, it wasn't worth the hassle of recompiling on all my platforms and keeping the software up to date. I think this model of open source software makes quite a bit of sense. I hope they get enough funding from this to keep making Synergy... It is a very useful tool.

<comment><USER10> Likewise, I use it all the time and can't really say I begrudge them their one-off $5

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> from the page:

Founder & CEO of Synergy Si, Inc.

Many people believe that the spirit of GPL licensed software is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of your software. This is a misunderstanding. Read more about this in the gnu.org article, Selling Free Software by the Free Software Foundation (the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Operating System).

With that in mind, I have made the decision to charge a small fee for access to the Synergy download page. This will allow us to hire more engineers and improve Synergy faster than ever before. It turns out that given the option, only 0.002% of users will choose to donate, which just isn't enough to fund the team size required to maintain the program. The old donation model was just not sustainable. Synergy is still open source and "free as in free speech" (to quote Richard Stallman), except that now there's a small fee to download the software. As with all GPL licensed software, you are free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

Thanks for your understanding. I hope you decide to buy Synergy and support the development of open source software. Nick Bolton Founder & CEO Synergy Si, Inc.

<comment><USER11> I coughed up the fee and I read this statement prior to doing so. I have used Synergy many times over the years and regularly over the last year. That said, I cannot say I see much improvement, it works with some weird bugs, like unable to cut from Firefox on Windows and paste on Linux desktop. I am not holding my breath on this type of bug getting fixed or the product being any more than what it currently is.

Someone else said it in this thread, over the years I have received strange emails that made it seem like Synergy was some sort of hip Google-like startup company, even a reference to a possible office in California. Yet Synergy seems to have been mostly the same as when I first ever used it and I do not see any other products from the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a bad thing for a lot of reasons. The biggest one is that Synergy is going to get the bad press when users Google "free synergy download" and download the first random binary they come across, which could contain anything. Those users are going to complain "Synergy gave me a virus" or "the installer crashes" or whatever else and hurt the reputation of the project. This is regardless of the fact that they didn't download the official Synergy binary.

The second is that this will hurt the discoverability of the software. There's no way to try it now and see what it does and PC users are used to having that ability. Throwing up a paywall is going to strangle the community, IMO.

Third, you've now stranded anybody who downloaded it free from getting updates. What if there's a security flaw? Charging people $5 for what will be perceived as fixing bugs in the software is going to create a lot of grouchy users, I imagine.

An additional one is that the idea of "we're charging because we can" is something that I think has bad optics; using an FSF essay as your primary justification for charging for "free" software is going to rub several people the wrong way. A low (percentage) donation rate doesn't translate to a low amount of income, and I find it disingenuous to try to conflate those numbers.

<comment><USER13> Sadly, downloading random shady binaries already happens to open source projects whether they charge or not, because the shady people spend effort on SEO and open source developers don't.

For updates, all Windows/Mac software should be self-updating by now. Requiring users to download updates by hand is basically the same as no updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having already donated ~$15 this is entirely reasonable imo. I expect to be paid for my work, just like I expect to pay others so they too can earn a living.

I hope this goes well for them and a higher percentage of their user base chips in, Synergy is good software that makes some painful stuff a whole lot better.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think I've ever installed Synergy by downloading it from their website, so this won't affect me. I use a package manager to install nearly all the software I use.

</comment><comment><USER16> I donated once, and all I get is spam and dramatic whining from the project author, begging for more donations, while major bugs go unfixed and progress is abysmal.

</comment><comment><USER17> For what it's worth, the nightly builds seem freely available still ([http://synergy-project.org/nightly/](http://synergy-project.org/nightly/))

</comment><comment><USER3> Hint: underlying download URLs aren't behind the paywall: [http://synergy- project.org/files/packages/synergy-1.6.0-r241...](http://synergy- project.org/files/packages/synergy-1.6.0-r2411-Linux-x86_64.deb)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hah, cool. I remember using Synergy a lot while I was working at SGI, to connect between a windows, linux, and irix box. I never imagined there'd be a company built around it.

<comment><USER3> SGI, you say! Then this page will be a blast from the past for you :) [http://synergy-project.org/info/](http://synergy-project.org/info/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope they post a follow-up in a couple months. I would find the numbers interesting.

<comment><USER3> Our downloads dropped to 25% (which is sad), but our income has doubled (allowing us to double our team size).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Amazing Pre-Screened Temps for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://temps.io/

<comment><USER2> I also like the idea, but as nemesis1637, google doc powered forms are far too minimal. To me, the whole site, company, everything, is too minimal.

When it comes to hiring, saying something like, "These are people you will want to hire. They have been vetted by startup veterans." Is a bold statement to make. But it's not a very believable statement, not from looking at temps.io. What makes a person a startup veteran, what companies have you done this for, how many, why is temps.io uniquely qualified to determine if a resume is bs or if the individual would actually be a good fit. Are you actually doing phone interviews to screen people. Are you meeting with people in person. Are you just a service that will collect resumes and send them to companies. As i'm sure people need work, you will get contacted. As companies DO need people, you will get contacted. But if anyone put up a site that had a standard sign-up with an extremely generically awesome mission statement, they would get contacted as well. People would sign up in the small chance anything panned out. This may even result in some sort of, "what do we have to lose" scenario for companies. But if you want to grow this into an actual business, provide more info on your site. Don't just answer questions in a comment thread, tell people why they should consider using temps.io on your website, without all the marketing fluff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like the idea, and love that you're going minimal but Google Doc powered forms might be a little too minimal. Also, might want to change the auto answer message on whatever telephony provider you're using. Props to getting on the HN homepage page with pretty much nothing though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your support! We have done this for a few startups and wanted to see how quickly we can scale. We updated the phone and are surprised by the number of calls and emails we are getting in such a short time. We are super- stoked! Thank you HN community! I would love to answer any questions any one may have about our service!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a cool idea, but I am fascinated that this is featured on HN. It's a site created in 10 minutes with a twitter bootstrap default style, and google spreadsheets powering the forms. Any web designer could replicate this idea in 15 minutes...

<comment><AUTHOR> True, we are having things coming up as we speak like profiles. But we really wanted to launch _something_ to test the idea as we are continuously building on it. We tested this idea by doing this for a couple of startups already and are trying to see if we can sale this. Thanks for your support! I will keep you updated on our progress!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> #Spam

No features, no details, no hacker tech. Just sign-up forms.</comment>


Programming Fibonacci on a self-made 8-bit breadboard computer [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73ZXDJtU48 <comment><USER2> Saw your posted this on /r/programming. Neat video. Try resubmitting it again later, I'm sure that if you submit it at the right time it could get some attention here on HN as well.

PS: Drop the square brackets next time and just call it "Programming Fibonacci on a 8 bits self made breadboard computer" like you did on /r/programming.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know about any interesting nootropic startups? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Silkroad was one until you know.</comment>


Google at their best. Facebook at their best. - <AUTHOR> http://bryce.vc/post/3789090127/google-at-their-best-facebook-at-their-best <comment><USER2> I find so annoying to hear all those people screaming Google is evil, Facebook is evil, Apple is evil... just bunch of nonsense. These companies are having their ups and downs, learning things on the way, but their primary goal is to help humanity to communicate and grow. Our obligation as users is to give them feedback and they have to adjust themselves to that, which they always do, even if its sometimes against their own financial interest.</comment>


HubNotify - Get updates on Github repos - <AUTHOR> http://hubnotify.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Just launched. Free service to get updates when repos you watch are updated with new tags. You can select which ones you want notifications for and how often you want emails. Currently only support Github, but if enough demand, we can add support for BitBucket.

For those who are wondering the purpose, Github's newsfeed isn't enough to really know when repos are updated. The ideas is to choose repos you use often, say Twitter Bootstrap, htmlpurifier, etc and then you can update however you are using these repos into your projects.

Hope you guys find it useful.</comment>


Audacity 2.2.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-2-2-0-released/ <comment><USER2> I love seeing software that still has a "Screenshots" section of their website. It's looked the same for as long as I've been using computers to record audio, starting with my high school band's demo over 15 years ago.

I could probably make fun of Audacity for not keeping up with the times, but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design. I got a little more serious about my music last year and decided I wanted to invest in a nice DAW, but after demoing I few I felt completely unimpressed. They're nearly identical to how they were 15 years ago, other than my PC being much more powerful. I ended up just sticking with Reaper, and hoping something comes along someday to mix the industry up. Proprietary dongles and tiered versions of the exact same software with gimped features doesn't cut it for me.

<comment><USER3> > but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good > interface design

What? Modern "good interface design" (at least by HN standards) has almost nothing to say about complicated 1000+ feature apps. (In fact every time I rant that modern design sucks and that apps need more features the first response I usually get back is, "but that's so much more testing! Do you know how many execution paths we'd have to manage???" Well, that is kind of _the point_ )

Have you ever produced music with any of these tools? For one, their goals are different -- FLStudio, for example, tries to be "the fastest path from your brain to your speakers", and the interface seems as such and is loved for it. Ableton intentionally crams everything into one screen because it is used as a performance tool -- if you've seen any recent photos of Daft Punk et al performing, you'll see it running right there on a laptop, usually above the mixer or the CDJs. Cubase has kept an interface very similar to its original Atari 2600 (I think?) version, because people have been using that app for 30+ years now.

Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.

<comment><USER4> Logic Audio (I started at v5) remains the most complex UI I have ever had to learn. It makes perfect sense to me now, but I long thought it was designed by sadists. I just did t understand the why of it.

> Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but > cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their > audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.

Absolutely. Also worth mentioning is that many of these tools borrow elements from physical recording studios. If you haven't worked in a professionally wired studio, some of the abstractions seem dated and unnecessary. Replacing / reimagining them is not practical, as DAWs still need to run in these environments. But try explaining that to someone who is just starting out chopping loops in their bedroom.

<comment><USER5> > Logic's UI makes perfect sense to me now

Can you elaborate on that? That UI still bothers me although I love Logic's plugins.

How did you learn the UI? Just through trial and error? By reading the manual? Something else?

<comment><USER6> Just trial and error is enough. And it's not that different from most others DAWs anyway

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish there was a some sort of a Open Source UI squad that would just work towards making awesome UIs for projects like Audacity, GIMP etc. There are so many low hanging fruits here like - iconography, spacing, using the right widget controls etc. that would make a lot more people want to use (and hopefully support) such software.

<comment><USER8> (UI) Designers don't want to work for free. This is more or less the observation I made in regards for Open Source software.

Having some side projects or helping OSS is somewhat expected from a programmer. From other professions not so much.

<comment><USER9> Well, most design people also have side projects, be it a Tumblr page or an endless supply of drawings that they just do to improve their drawing skills.

But that's different from helping an (OSS) application look good. For that, you have to make tons of mockups, iterate again and again, until you have something that looks good and consistent across the entire application. Ideally, you'd also want at least one other person to bounce ideas back and forth, and have an opinion about what you're doing.

This is real work, which requires a lot of commitment upfront. The equivalent of requiring a programmer to lay out the entire architecture before they write a single line of code. That's also something that mainly happens in a corporate environment, whereas for hobby projects it tends to lead to frustration.

<comment><USER10> I agree this is a big job. Overhauling an existing application means a ton of work for both the designer and the developer. However the primary goal of designers should be making users work effectively. Building something that also looks good is a secondary goal. Great designers achieve both goals. If skills or budget are not great, go for the primary.

In the case of Audacity, I remember that I have to google how to silence a selection every time I get back to it after a break of several months. I guess this means that the primary goal is somewhat missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently switched my workflow to all linux compatible free as in beer software. I like being able to produce music on pretty much any hardware no matter where I am.

I love audacity and want to say thanks to the team!

<comment><USER12> What other free-as-in-beer software do you use to produce music?

<comment><USER13> Ardour ([https://ardour.org/](https://ardour.org/)) and LMMS ([https://lmms.io/](https://lmms.io/)) are probably the two most popular open- source DAWs. I also really like MuseScore ([https://musescore.org/](https://musescore.org/)) for composition.

<comment><USER14> technically Ardour is free as in free speech, but not as in free beer. They do not have official binary downloads for free. If I remember correcyly its more involved than ./configure && make && make install Though Ubuntu Studio has a version ready to go.

<comment><USER15> Lots of software that's considered free-as-in-speech-and-beer doesn't have official binary downloads at all. Ardour _additionally_ provides the option of paying to download an official binary. Building from source is pretty much the same as anything else, although there are quite a lot of dependencies. If you're used to installing from source there's no reason Ardour should give you any great difficulty (unless you're unlucky and your distro doesn't supply the required dependencies or something).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've used Audacity off and on for years. Love that it is still around and pretty much _just works_. It does just what I need, as infrequently as I need it, and doesn't require an idiotic (and steep) subscription fee to use (glaring at you Adobe CS).

<comment><USER17> Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. Audacity is one of the buggiest pieces of open source software I've used. Audio routinely gets corrupted or lost. Their "known issues" page is comically long, and little ever gets fixed.

I have a lot of love for them for making audio editing accessible to the masses, but I wish a team would clean the app up like the LibreOffice folks did to OpenOffice.

<comment><USER18> Oh yeah, it did crash a lot and would get into weird states that would make it hard to recover. Oddly, commercial editing software, even late versions, also had weird corruption issues from time to time, usually when plugins are involved.

<comment><USER17> I switched to Audition, and while the last CS release was pretty buggy, the CC version has treated me well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know I've come across a debugging story that ultimately ended up with the author loading binary data into audacity and hearing/seeing a pattern.

Does anyone know what I mean, and has a link, since I can't seem to find it...?

<comment><USER20> It's fun loading images into Audacity. The audio effects look surprisingly like they sound.

<comment><USER21> Reference [https://questionsomething.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/databendi...](https://questionsomething.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/databending- using-audacity-effects/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Modern interface design is all smoke and mirrors, and not about empowering the user. Interfaces in the 90's and 00's were much more useful. Given a choice, most power users would downgrade back to more features if they had that option.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am so glad for Audacity but the UI always feels more convoluted than it needs to be. I wish they would copy Sound Forge's controls

<comment><USER23> That's a thought! I think that Reaper is the one to beat these days though, is there an essay or review of Sound Forge which would capture (comprehensively) what is to love about it?

It'd be nice to decouple the UI from all the major open source sequencer and audio software, just leave some sort of pure data + Core Audio style innards and reconnect the UIs on top. I've taken a few cracks at this in private, but embarrassingly have a hard time getting much done on this particular project without anyone watching.

<comment><USER3> I am not at home with my audio software but, off the top of my head, zooming and navigating a waveform in Sound Forge is SUPER efficient and intuitive, as mouse-wheel zooms and middle-click scrolls, and click-drag to edit individual samples. You can quickly zoom into your work at a level of individual samples and them zoom out and see the whole waveform in only a few movements.

My other favorite features are how editing doesn't rely on "modes' like Audacity (I hate having to hit a button before I make a selection then another to do something else), and Sound Forge's selection logic itself:

\- the playback cursor will intelligently snap and loop on your selections (or not, depending on how you set the toggle), -

\- the editing scrolls to follow your cursor as you are zoomed in, but not if you're currently editing something. A lot of programs do this but I find their logic is terrible and I have to control automatic scrolling myself. This is very helpful for working on seamlessly looping material, as you can leave playback on loop and continue working at the very end of your selection without the UI losing your place

\- load and save in native formats without having to use some proprietary intermediary format (AUP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Still looks like crap on OSX and Windows due to using GTK. I wish projects with aspirations of being cross-platform would stop using that shitty library and switch to QT.

<comment><USER25> It looks like crap on Linux too, they deliberately chose a widget theme to make it look that way. This version at least includes revamped theme support, so maybe someone will give it a decent coat of paint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Woah, this is still around? Years and years ago when I poorly attempted that "band" life. My friends and I would use this as our recording software and it was great. Glad to see them keep at it!

</comment><comment><USER27> Whilst Ableton Live has long been my DAW of choice I've been using Audacity since around 2004 and still use it today. Mostly it's quick edits on game sound effects: changing sample rate, bit rate, topping and tailing, fading, exporting MP3s.

When I master tracks in Ableton I also still use Audacity to export an MP3 version (that's probably just force of habit though - I imagine there's a better way of doing that these days).

I realise I could automate the MP3 export from the command line but it's infrequent enough that using Audacity to do it, edit the tags, and suchlike is probably the easiest option.

Live is a great DAW, and I really enjoyed FLStudio back when I used to run Windows at home, but for quickly hacking around with raw audio it's pretty hard to beat Audacity. Great software, and good to see it still under active development.

<comment><USER28> I use both Live and Audacity, they are just not comparable. Audacity is an audio editor, not a DAW.

<comment><USER29> Ableton 10 now supports export to mp3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "

Download Audacity Windows Installer - 19.34 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Windows Zip - 11.31 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity macOs DMG - 28.14 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Linux source - 9.72 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity LADSPA plugins for Mac - zip - 2.74 MB | version: 0.4.15 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity LADSPA plugins for Windows - installer - 1.44 MB | version: 0.4.15 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Mac OS X 2.1.1 - DMG (screen reader accessible) - 38.61 MB | version: 2.1.1 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Mac OS X 2.1.1 - ZIP (screen reader accessible) - 16.50 MB | version: 2.1.1 | SHA256 signature "

How can I trust the website to tell me the correct SHA256 signature?

Shouldn't this be linked to a repository, or ideally something my client can verify the commits are correct?

<comment><USER31> Well, for starters, the SHA256 signatures are on both the Audacity website and its FossHub page. You can check if both places match, which makes it less likely to be from an untrusted source. They even have a page explaining how to check the signature.

If you're on macOS, before mounting a disk image the system will verify its checksum. Additionally, the default security settings only allows applications from the app store and identified developers. You can use the codesign tool (codesign -dv --verbose /Applications/Audacity.app) to verify the code signature as well as display the signing identity. In this case, it's signed by Paul Licameli, which is the author of this blog post. With that said, it's not foolproof, as the TeamIdentifier is not publicly posted anywhere, someone could possibly create a Developer ID with his name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sadly, there no yet ready-to-use Audacity 2.2.0 packages[1] for most popular distributives or at least AppImage[2], that could be run without installing. Also, its look like all daily/nightly builds on Launchpad[3] and on Travis CI[4] failed...

[1] [https://repology.org/metapackage/audacity/versions](https://repology.org/metapackage/audacity/versions)

[2] [https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/Audacity](https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/Audacity)

[3] [https://launchpad.net/~audacity- team/+archive/ubuntu/daily](https://launchpad.net/~audacity- team/+archive/ubuntu/daily)

[4] [https://travis-ci.org/audacity/audacity](https://travis- ci.org/audacity/audacity)

</comment><comment><USER33> I recorded my first songs on audacity, I love this piece of software!

<comment><USER34> Back in my day, we had Windows Recorder and Cool Edit.

<comment><USER35> I don't think anyone used Windows Sound Recorder for anything serious. It had a built in maximum record length for starters (I think to prevent piracy?).

Sound Forge was my preferred editor for years before Audacity matured. Cool Edit was ok, but I seem to recall it had a bizarrely over-designed UI that made the thing feel more like a toy than a serious tool. Particularly when compared to the much older and more feature rich (at that time) Sound Forge. It took a while before Cool Edit really became competitive and by that point I was already using Audacity.

I do still miss some features of Sound Forge even now. Though I don't tend to do too much with audio editors these days compared to the stuff I was doing in the 90s and 00s.

<comment><USER36> > It had a built in maximum record length for starters (I think to prevent > piracy?).

It was somewhat related to the memory the computer had. I think it tried to store audio all uncompressed in memory. At the very least it varied a lot between different machines. I remember trying it in a super low spec machine and it could record up to about 5s max.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can the link be changed to HTTPS? Unfortunately the site isn't doing it automatically, even though it does support HTTPS connections.

</comment><comment><USER38> Strange that OGG/Opus has been omitted from yet another release. I don't mind using ffmpeg but it would be nice to export from the same interface.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks like still no native pulse audio support.. dang.

</comment><comment><USER40> Scrolled quickly through the comments and I want to ask one question: How good is this tool compared to commercial software?

<comment><USER18> At least a few versions ago it was okay for basic stuff but quite far behind feature-wise to commercial software, which benefit from more integration, more polished UX, and a large bundle of plugins.

Having said that a tool is a tool and in capable hands Audacity is as good a tool as anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can you apply real-time effects to tracks in multi-track mode these days? A big limitation if you still can't.

</comment><comment><USER42> Complete support for macOS Sierra after the follow up is already released.

</comment><comment><USER43> MIDI support seems like feature bloat to me...

<comment><USER44> bt and hundreds of thousands of other musicians would disagree.

(Actually, let's hope that bt can afford something better than Audacity, but the point remains that MIDI is still a hugely popular protocol.)

<comment><USER3> It's not that. MIDI != PCM or any kind of audio data really

Midi looks like (imagine someone playing two notes: a C then a D):

C4 127 On C4 127 Off D4 127 On D4 127 Off

(not literally, but that is the essence of MIDI)

MIDI support means synthesizer support, which means VST support, which means now you need some sort of MIDI data editor, which means now you've got to work out all the weird timing shit with MIDI, and by this point you are better off with LMMS or FLStudio or Pro Tools or what-have-you. Use the tool most fit for purpose

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Full support for 10.12</comment>


Measuring and Managing Honesty Online - <AUTHOR> http://blog.socialsci.com/measuring-and-managing-honesty-in-a-participa

<comment><USER2> _And even if after all that, they still do? Its not going to be a statistically significant proportion of users who participate in studies to skew the results._

That's beautiful, and absolutely true. When I was younger, I remember answering surveys for random offers. I was caught a few times by different surveys for inconsistencies - although I wasn't told explicitly. To cope with this, I drafted up several identities and thought through a backstory to each character - personality, background, etc, which made it much easier to remember details. Depending on what the survey was about, I just picked a profile I felt a researcher would be looking for. Wasn't perfect, but had a hugely high success rate. I doubt very many people will go to my length though. When you start trying to passively filter people, and hit someone like me - well, we see it as a challenge... for better or for worse.

An interesting note: I used one of these profiles far more than the others. As a result, I remember walking home one day near midnight, and thinking "Geeze, I'm 29 already... one more year until I'm 30 - and I still haven't done anything I wanted to do." It didn't strike me until a minute or so later, that I wasn't anywhere near 29, and it wasn't actually my birthday.

<comment><USER3> > "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

\--Kurt Vonnegut</comment></comment>


Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910.html <comment><USER2> I emailed the researcher, whose address was at the end of the article with the appropriate gene data (BHLHE41 on Chromosome 12) to see if my DNA is a match. The article said its a mutation, but maybe those with the mutation exhibit a certain codon pair. Its an amazing time when you can read an article about such a thing, and then cross check your DNA in a matter of seconds. Articles will have to start posting the raw DNA for results.

<comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity, why do you have your genetic makeup readily available for cross checking?

<comment><USER4> 23AndMe, I guess.

<comment><USER3> I had never heard of that before. Interesting site/service, but I really don't see me ever using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits.

As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again.

Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nights but the results are that I feel worse in the morning, and each night I attempt to sleep 8 hours waking up gets harder and harder.

Over the years I've developed a few theories as to why I need less sleep than is recommended and someday when I get around to finishing my EEG project I'll gather some data to back them up, but for now I'm just making the most out of the extra time I have the same way someone with a different biological advantage might.

I will also mention that (as mentioned elsewhere here) there are definitely people at the other end of this curve who's performance is shockingly better if they get more than the "required" 8 hours of sleep per night, and I believe that we could all benefit by recognizing this fact and adjusting our cultural expectations to accommodate these patterns as well. I think with a little flexibility on both ends we'd see a significant increase in overall productivity and quality of life.

In other words "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep." - <http://users.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/whentired.html>

<comment><USER6> For me, If I get all the sleep I want, I'm lethargic and unenergetic, but if I get less sleep I'm tired all day (but strangely more energetic). It's like there's no happy medium. I wonder if anyone else has this problem, and if there's a solution.

<comment><USER7> Do you exercise most days? Do you at least a similar wake up\sleep time for a month? And another obvious about drink enough water\food?

All have a huge impact for me. I can go on much less sleep when I do hard exercise that day.

<comment><USER8> Re: Hard Exercise - Bizarre. I work a mostly sedentary silicon valley lifestyle, with the addition of 2-3 miles walking a day, and typically get 5-6 hours of sleep a night, going to bed around 2:00 - 3:00 AM and getting up around 9:00 AM.

Recently, though, I started a linear progress novice strength training program (Squats, Dead Lift, Bench Press, Overhead Press) - three times a week for 40 minutes. My sleep patterns immediately shifted, and I am incapable of waking up without at least 8 hours of sleep on off days, and 10 hours of sleep on the days that I lift heavy.

For the first time in my life, ever, I'm finding myself going to bed at 10:00 PM at night so that I can get up by 8:00 AM the next morning.

<comment><USER6> I've done Starting Strength.

Starting Strength is raw lifts involving the entire muscle toolchain until you can't do anymore. It works your body in a total, basic way that most Americans haven't ever done.

So you'll be sleeping alot as your body gets used to it. You'll notice incredible increases in everyday strength--as if the entire world, including you, lost a significant fraction of its mass over the course of a few months-- and the desire for sleep will subside.

Of course, I still have my original sleep problem...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of the studies not too long about how some very _small_ percentage of the population actually CAN multitask well. Then a very _large_ percentage of the population used that as "evidence" to justify their existing habits. I see it here already.

<comment><USER10> Do you have a link to these studies? I looked around a bit and only found the ones claiming multitasking doesn't work.

<comment><USER9> That's what I was referring to. Did I misunderstand you?

[http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask- resear...](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research- study-082409.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's obvious what we must do next. According to every science fiction film or book I've ever read, we must capture them, confine them and study them in an attempt to learn their secrets and duplicate it in everyone else.

<comment><USER12> As a bit of a lesson from someone with HN experience to the new HNers downvoted below: your jokes are (a) bad, and (b) off-topic. Parent was off- topic as well, but he was funny.

Just providing feedback for the newer posters beyond a downvote.

<comment><USER13> I think you're partly right, but I also suspect they may have been downvoted to quell any "piling on". Repeated jokes on the same theme have diminishing returns.

<comment><USER12> Well said. Not just diminishing returns either, but scrolling past a comment branch full of "It's just a flesh wound!" or some other oblique reference is irritating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a false dichotomy, on a lot of hard problems progress is a step function, and you often "get much done" _while_ sleeping. I.e. when you wake up well rested you see things from a different angle. If it's something like chopping wood, sure, the less you sleep the more wood you chop, within reasonable limits, but I don't think that is what these articles aim for. I think it's wrong to look at sleep as a waste of time the same way time spent thinking about something is not wasted either.

Here's some information I mostly agree with: <http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm>

<comment><USER15> I think that you are missing the fact that short-sleepers wake up well-rested, even though their sleep-time is much shorter and would not suffice to give us normals enough rest.

I'm not sure if there has been any actual studies that show that longer sleep- times given ad-libitum sleeping is more effective in helping the brain process more information during the sleep phase.

<comment><USER14> You are right, I'm not aware of any such study either. What I meant is just that there is no need to feel guilty for whatever amount of sleep feels right, regardless of what society says in the name of efficiency and productivity. It's ok to enjoy sleeping.

<comment><USER15> I fully agree with that. I love to sleep, and like my 8 hours of sleep per night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There has been a link to depression and too much sleep so much so that sleep deprivation is used as a treatment for depression where other treatments fail. It actually puts the patient into a manic episode.

It was peculiar to note that people who are short-sleepers also share a slight manic trait in their personality. While the article makes short-sleep cycles out to look like all sunshine and roses it is not all it is cracked up to be. I get between 2 and 4 hours sleep a night and on a good night I get 6. I have to monitor the sleep I am getting because if I allow myself to fall into a cycle of 2 hours for an extended time I start to have problems with my heart and abnormal rhythms. If the > 4 hours cycle goes on for more than a week I have to start taking medicine to sleep to ensure that my body is receiving an adequate amount of sleep. I see no negative effects if I get 4-6 a night, but it is probably safe to assume that short-sleep cycles rides the line between good and bad health. I never considered myself a short sleeper I just figured I have insomnia but never worried too much about it because I feel no different if I get 4 or 8 hours of sleep a night (if I can get 8) and the fact that my father and grandfather shares the trait and are healthy (grandfather is almost 90) . On the plus side, I experience more life and get more done which are really the only benefits to sleeping less.

<comment><USER17> I have used total sleep deprivation to kick myself out of persistent low mood. So far it has worked every time.

Not a method to use too often, of course.

<comment><USER18> Please tell us more!

I'm very curious about this, because I know that if I don't have something regularly scheduled for morning or early afternoon I tend to sink into depression, and now I'm wondering if I could perhaps be getting too much sleep. I had thought it was either a) getting sleep at the wrong times (I'll tend to stay awake later each night) and thus missing out on sunlight, or b) that regularity itself prevented my depression. This would also explain it, though.

<comment><USER17> I don't ordinarily sleep a lot, so I doubt that I could be getting too much sleep on a regular basis. And my mood doesn't ordinarily seem to be affected by how much I sleep or when I go to sleep.

The best way I can describe the effect is that for me it's like hitting a "reset" button in my brain. At first there's the tiredness and irritability that always go with not sleeping, but eventually I get a "second wind" and I feel normal, calm, and content. This generally lasts the whole rest of the day, until I fall asleep again.

The sleep deprivation treatment for depression used by some doctors in the '70s involved either total deprivation or waking the patients up around midnight, so that they slept only a few hours. I think I read that both worked equally well, but I have only tried the former. And as far as I know, nobody has figured out why it works for so many people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. 'These people talk fast. They never stop. They're always on the up side of life,' says Dr. Buysse."

Reduction in sleep is a known symptom of abnormally elevated mood, whether hypomania (elevated mood without psychotic symptoms) or mania (elevated mood with psychotic symptoms). For most normal subjects, as has been demonstrated by studies of unusual sleep patterns in armed forces personnel, reduced hours of sleep or disrupted daily sleep cycles seriously degrade performance of many tasks involving judgment or multitasking--without the subject of the experiment being aware of the degraded performance.

<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+mania>

Note that controlled reduction of sleep has been shown experimentally to elevate the mood of depressed persons. In other words, if a person has had a prolonged period of depressed mood, and begins reducing hours of sleep (especially if a light box turns on to help the person wake up on time in the morning), that can bring the person closer to normal mood.

<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+depression>

Following up on the interesting comment posted first by mechanical_fish, there surely is a range of variation of "natural" human need for sleep, with most people concentrated in a band of needing approximately seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and some few needing significantly less, and some few needing significantly more. But social pressure and environmental conditions for sleep induction (electric lights in the evening) in current society probably result in most people getting less sleep than what they need to perform at their best when awake and to maintain good health.

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone whose blanket feels like its made out of lead every morning after 7 hours sleep i have to say: unfair. :(

<comment><USER21> Indeed - envy, thy name is a longer day without suffering sleep deprivation

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've always wondered if this was mostly a psychological issue.

There are two circumstances in which I get less than 7 hours of sleep a night: if I'm really stressed about getting something done, or if I'm really excited about getting something done.

In the first place the lack of sleep exacerbates the stress and really starts to weigh on me. But in the second case it doesn't seem to have much negative effect.

Now if only I could continuously keep my motivation up...

</comment><comment><USER23> Damn you, science! I've read so many studies saying there's absolutely no way you can get by without at least 7 hours sleep and now you tell me that that completely doesn't apply to 1-3% of the population?! That's actually not that small of a percentage. How big were the sample sizes of all the other studies? Did nobody encounter at least one of these low-sleep requiring people? Maybe they were just eliminated as being an anomaly.

I've met some of these people who insisted they didn't need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.

This is fantastic research, I just wish it had been around 10 years ago.

<comment><USER24> _I've met some of these people who insisted they didn't need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more._

Don't. If you insist on only giving advice that applies to 100% of the world you'll never say anything useful at all.

I'm sure the studies do encounter these people. But studies use statistics. These people are on the far edge of the bell curve. The mean [1] is probably around 7-9 hours. But just because the far edge of the bell curve has very few samples in it doesn't mean that those samples don't exist, nor that someone is "hiding" them.

Which reminds me: What this article does _not_ talk about is the _other_ side of the bell curve: The folks who need considerably more than 7-9 hours of sleep to attain peak performance and happiness. Or maybe those people don't exist, because the "bell curve" is actually a bimodal distribution, or cliff- shaped, or something. We could tell if there was any actual data here, or a link to the actual data and published science -- we could look at the shape of the distribution. But this is an article by a science journalist, so naturally it is nigh-useless.

I wonder why the article doesn't talk about the "long sleepers"? Probably because the sleep researcher quoted herein is correct: There are more people who like to _believe_ that they only need four hours' sleep than there are actual people who thrive on less sleep. And I'm sure that no _Wall Street Journal_ wants to learn that they might really need _twelve_ hours sleep.

\---

[1] I actually have no idea if the "7-9 hour" rule of thumb is based on a mean, a median, or a mode. Pity that nobody ever links to the original research.

<comment><USER25> I suspect the problem with studying "long sleepers" is that the number of people who need, say, 12 hours of sleep "legitimately" is dominated by the number of people who need 12 hours of sleep due to a health issue, making them hard to identify and study. I've done the 12+ hours of sleep thing when I was a teenager, and only much later did I learn the health issue it was trying to tell me about.

<comment><USER26> I'd say you're probably right. I usually only need 8 hrs sleep, but when I'm sick, for example, I often find myself easily sleeping for 12+ hours (like this morning, oops! :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only five or six hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says._

The article didn't mention this, but the ability to wake up regularly without an alarm clock is probably another commonality short sleepers have. Although < 7 hours isn't something I can do regularly, I can't stay in bed, even if I'm a little tired, much past 6 AM on any day of the week.

"People need less sleep as they get older" is something I've heard a lot, but don't know. Sleep patterns seem pretty ingrained, and people with weird sleeping patterns tend to be either hardcore early birds (me) or unapologetic night owls.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am 46 now and I still need more than 8 hours a night. I tried less, but that does not work: thinking is a torture then, sports too.

If I get enough sleep, I feel great, I get 3 times as much done and I run and swim like a champ (still).

I love to get enough sleep!!!! It simply feels great.

</comment><comment><USER29> Candidate number two for gene surgery (my current #1 being that color vision y'all talk about so much).

<comment><USER30> There's no colour vision. They just make it up as they go along. It's just a huge conspiracy / April fools' joke.

<comment><USER29> My family seems not only convinc{ed|ing} but consistent in their delusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is this few-hours sleep business feasible when you need to think deeply about abstract things during the day, eg. programming? I can see it working if your success is tied to being energetic, on the ball, constantly negotiating, acting on information or leading lots of people. But what if you need to do the analysis yourself?

<comment><USER32> In my case I've had this issue (advantage?) since childhood, where I vacillate between both states in 2 week blocks - 2 weeks at a time where I'll get 7-8 hours, and 2 weeks where I get approx half as much. In the latter case I simply don't get naturally tired. But it does eventually catch up to me, and then all of a sudden - bam!, I'm tired one night and naturally fall asleep say at 10pm every night.

What I've found is with the poor sleep cycles I tend to be more energetic and get to solutions quicker. If the problem requires deep thinking, I can focus on the problem at hand much better, but at the same time I can make many superficial mistakes. The best I can say is it's a bit like being in a minor psychedelic state all the time, where the creative pathways of my mind are more open with a manic desire to latch onto something interesting. It also exacerbates my Asperger's-like condition. OTOH, if I am in the design process and building a piece a software that requires high conceptual integrity getting more sleep is certainly beneficial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The article is mostly content-free.

<comment><USER34> To me, it gives the following data: that there are a significant number of people who can sleep short hours, that there's at least one identifiable genetic factor that might possibly cause it in a couple of cases, and that there are researchers working on this (and soliciting information from "short sleepers"). It fails to deliver on its subtitle: "Why".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to know one of these short sleepers. He had never felt the need to sleep more than about two hours per night, and did so for his whole life (which was respectably long, no noticeable side-effects from the exceptionally short sleep). He used a lot of the extra time to run a small local business, interact with customers during the day and do the administration during the night.

</comment><comment><USER35> No sleep is a feat I could pull off regularly when I was younger. It was no problem to go 48-72 hours without more than just a catnap or two. That was a decade ago. In my early thirties, I struggle beyond the sixteenth hour, except for rare occasions.

Fortunately, I think it's a sort of bell curve. From what I understand, I'm only about fifteen or twenty years away only getting a couple hours of sleep per night. How productive sleepless nights full of trips to the bathroom will be, I have no idea. I guess I'll finally catch up on all that damn reading.

</comment><comment><USER36> Lucky buggers. Technically since time is money, that could make them 16% richer than most of us (assuming they sleep 2 hours less).

<comment><USER37> In fact, probably more, since they also accumulate and compound valuable experience that much more quickly!

<comment><USER30> Probably less. Since most people have a day job, and work something like 8 hours a day, no matter what.

Staying up longer just increases the time you spent spending money and consuming stuff. Sleep is a cheap entertainment.

<comment><USER38> You're assuming that everyone spends all of their waking life either working a day job or spending money/consuming stuff?

<comment><USER30> No. But it's a factor to take into account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I sleep 2am to 7am most days and keep myself busy so much that I sometimes go to 3:30am before forcing myself to sleep. Sleep time happens within 3-5 mins after going to bed - according to my WakeMate.

I think alot of this is due to a busy lifestyle. I find myself doing multiple things at the same time in the evening and being very productive in getting stuff done. While on holidays where I actually disconnect from work I find I sleep long hours each day.

An afternoon 20 min powernap is an amazing recharge! Everyone should do it. Using Paul McKenna's audio helps with the powernap. There's something weird about the hypnotic audio. Instantly puts me to sleep.

Finally, supposedly the need to nap in the afternoon is normal and every animal in the kingdom does it. Humans has largely forgotten about this clock due to the "working culture". In the book Brain Rules, this is described in more detail: <http://www.brainrules.net/sleep>

My 2c's worth.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not saying that I'm one of the sleepless elite, but I seem to function best on 6 hours of sleep a day. Whenever I try to sleep more I just feel tired all day and when I sleep less ... well that depends on how much less.

For optimum energivity I find an hour of sleep is best, just enough to reset your cycle. But you can't do this more than once at a time, the next day the whole 6 hours are needed.

Don't have any idea why I'm like this, but I'm told that even as a baby I would often lie in bed for hours before finally falling asleep and as a toddler I would wake up at 5am because I was put to bed so early. Nowadays a healthy 4am to 10am schedule seems best.

Oh and anyone who doesn't want to sleep as much as they should, meditation is a great way of doing it. I managed to shave 2 hours off of my daily sleep need with 10 minutes of meditation ... so essentially I averaged 4 hours a day, for something like 5 years before I got out of the meditating habit for varying reasons.

<comment><USER41> _Oh and anyone who doesn't want to sleep as much as they should, meditation is a great way of doing it. I managed to shave 2 hours off of my daily sleep need with 10 minutes of meditation ... so essentially I averaged 4 hours a day, for something like 5 years before I got out of the meditating habit for varying reasons._

OK, I'll match your anecdote with one of my own. I meditate 40 minutes per day, and it hasn't shaved a minute off of my sleep time. I average 8 hours of sleep per night, substantially more on the weekends when I can get it.

<comment><USER40> This is likely due to different meditation techniques, mine is particular in that it is essentially lucid dreaming. When I actively practiced it took me 30 seconds to go into REM stage and stay in there for as much time as I felt like it.

The end effect is that I smashed a sleep cycle into a meditating session and essentially got polyphasic sleep.

<comment><USER42> Is there a particular technique you can describe that brings about that effect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If they cannot find any "actual" short sleepers, how do they it's 1-3% of population...Oh science you are scary...

<comment><USER44> They do find short sleepers. They mention that the studies have them -- they're just not _easy to find_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think the level of sleep I need depends on what I'm working on. When I was working on a business with my friends, I'd only sleep for 4 hours or so a day. Whereas when I was working a job I hated, I was exhausted unless I slept 9-10 hours a night. I think sleep requirements are a function of brain activity and engagement. It's just a theory but it seems to be true, at least in my case. Another theory I have relates to the sleep schedules of people. I'm nocturnal. I have been since I was 8 years old. And when I was working with my friends, it was at night. So I wonder if nite people need more sleep to function during the day like morning people need more to work nights?

</comment><comment><USER46> Read the actual paper, take a look at the hypomania test: figure out things about yourself. <http://cl.ly/313A0x2k011t400C3N3C>

</comment><comment><USER47> I question how much "work" someone that fits this really gets accomplished. I can run on limited sleep for weeks at a time and am more energized, but throw me at something mentally challenging like Quantum Physics or Solving some Linear Systems model, and it's like my brain says it needs time to process everything, so I end up sleeping absurd amounts. (I also find I make significant headway the next day after that kind of sleep)

</comment><comment><USER48> I have to admit that I'm a bit confused here. 7-9 hours seems to be the "normal recommended" range, and under 6 hours puts you in the short sleepers category. What does 6-7 make you? Irrelevant to the research?

Many people make the mistake of oversleeping on the weekend and undersleeping on working days. I try to average 6.5hrs every night, weekend or no weekend. Just being consistent really helps in keeping the energy levels up imo.

</comment><comment><USER49> Given that the trait is genetic and extremely advantageous, why doesn't a much larger portion of the population have it? Is there a significant downside?

<comment><USER50> Maybe no downside in these modern times but perhaps back when we still lived in caves and only had fire and a full moon now and then to light our ways I can imagine them short sleepers to be quite bored out of their skulls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The primary function of sleep is to permanently store the things learned during the day (long-term potentiation). Although different people need different amounts of sleep, those who need less usually find that they sleep longer if they learn challenging new material (e.g. a new language). That is the reason why babies sleep the most. Their brains are empty sponges constantly absorbing new information.

</comment><comment><USER52> Check out my new app coming to the App Store. It's called MultiSnooze. It's the ultimate alarm clock app. It allows you to press the snooze button multiple times as soon as you determine that you are going to be pressing it more than once anyway. Now you don't have to keep waking up. Roll over and sleep peacefully with MultiSnooze. multisnooze.com for details. Thanks for looking.

</comment><comment><USER53> > Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of > sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest > end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who > get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a > report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think I could sleep 20 hours if given the chance, but I routinely will sleep until 7am regardless of when I go to bed. If its 10pm or 4am. I just wake up at 7am, I'm super sleepy still, but more hungry. So I have to wake up, make some cereal and then I'm up.

Not sure what that is, but I've never met anyone else who shares this trait.

</comment><comment><USER54> Hmmm.. Something I would _think_ I could relate to, but we all know (a) how easy it is to convince yourself/diagnose yourself with something, and (b) how we would _all_ love to consider ourselves from this group. So I'll just let this make me smile a little and leave it that :)

</comment><comment><USER55> Arianna Huffington (and me) certainly are no natural "short sleepers" :)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_g...](http://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_get_more_sleep.html)

</comment><comment><USER56> My boss is exactly like this - sleeps a tiny bit, has ridiculous amounts of energy and enthusiasm, and loves to deal with the world in a flurry of stimuli and decisions.

Me, I'm just an insomniac.

</comment><comment><USER57> I used to need very little sleep. Unfortunately, it was because my thyroid was overactive. As soon as I went to a doctor and got it taken care of, I became a normal sleeper.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is a talk given at google about sleep <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1nMQq67VI>

</comment><comment><USER59> Jon Gruden, former NFL coach and Monday Night Football analyst is one of these. He goes to bed late and gets up as early as 3-4 AM.

</comment><comment><USER60> red bull?

<comment><USER60> it was a joke :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> A majority of us here are wanna be short sleepers. And we make do with that

</comment><comment><USER62> Leave it to the WSJ to exemplify the behavior of people with an erratic gene variation as something "Elite" (or L33t, lol).</comment>


A Detailed Guide on how SendHub moved to Heroku. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendhub.com/post/16800984141/switching-to-heroku-a-django-app-story

<comment><USER2> Coming next week: How we moved off Heroku onto AWS after the Heroku outage.

Cloud services go down. If that's a problem for your business, plan for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heroku is on AWS, so I'm not sure that would help. I agree cloud services have disadvantages but you pay a significant productivity tax to manage your own hardware, otherwise you're always putting your faith in someone else to keep your site online.

<comment><USER3> A Heroku outage is not necessarily caused by an AWS outage.

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily, but I think history would show, usually.

<comment><USER5> In our experience, Heroku has orders of magnitude more issues than AWS. Look at their status page for a list of issues since only Jan 25th: <https://status.heroku.com/>

They pretty much have an issue every other day. Sure it usually only effects a small subset of users, but you wind up getting bit by them more often than necessary.

We were on Heroku for more than a year before we couldn't tolerate the sporadic outages and performance degradations anymore.

<comment><USER3> But you also don't automatically get AWS's level of reliability by skipping Heroku and maintaining your own deployments on AWS. Once you go that route your uptime becomes AWS minus your competence level.

Could easily be worse than Heroku, especially for a very small shop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did you guys look into exporting your data from mysql to postgres with taps? (<http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/taps>). I've done this many times and it's been pretty simple.

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried taps but it wasn't working for us and Craig Kerstiens, Heroku's Django guy, told us to use the pg:backups approach instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great details in the post. Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Caltech/UVic Team breaks Internet data transfer speed record - <AUTHOR> http://supercomputing.uvic.ca/

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also a BBC story about this: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16174972></comment>


Show HN: When WebMD failed me, I built LaDoctura.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
using a throwaway account for reasons that will become obviously shortly..
some time back i was diagnosed with a severe and incurable form of male infertility (i'm 35, recently married).
that shock and what followed thereafter made me realise just how difficult it is to get 'the full picture' when you're dealing with a rare and still not fully understood disease (in my case the doctors believe its a genetic issue, DNA deletions, but they can't prove it).
this made me realise there may actually be a huge unsolved problem right now, problem in that its virtually impossible to get rich, good quality medical info on diseases in one place on the web right now.. WebMD, as we all know, is horrible.
i built ladoctora.com to tackle this problem. right now it only has one patient guide for my condition on it, but i'm thinking if people like the format and think there's a need for it, i can start adding more and do this as a dedicated project..
Would love to get your feedback on the site and the overall concept.. thank you. The website address:
http://www.ladoctora.com <comment><USER2> If a person knows their actual, true, legitimate diagnosis, there are many places for web help (google scholar, for example, can lead the persistent patient to research based PDF's that can be quite helpful).

However, many patients have symptoms, or signs of disease, but have not had a "true" diagnosis made. The doc they saw may be uninformed, the necessary test may only be available at the Mayo Clinic, there may be confusion because of unusual symptoms that are possibly but not definitively associated with the correct diagnosis -- there are many reasons why an ill person may not know their "correct" diagnosis.

So another web site that catalogs information about "known" diagnoses may be helpful to some patients, it will not be a universal cure for lack of information, because a correct diagnosis is necessary before a patient can search for information about that diagnosis online! Also, there are hundreds (thousands) of medical textbooks that do what you are proposing to do, filled with incredibly useful information, that is all behind a paywall and not available to the casual searcher.

But more information is always better, so good luck with your endeavor!

</comment><comment><USER3> Just to let you know, as you're using a throwaway account here, the whois information for your domain contains what I assume is your full name, postal address, and email: [http://whois.domaintools.com/ladoctura.com](http://whois.domaintools.com/ladoctura.com)

If you wish to mask this from the general public, your registrar has instructions here: [https://uk.godaddy.com/help/add-private- registration-420](https://uk.godaddy.com/help/add-private-registration-420)

</comment><comment><USER4> Ah I was confused when I saw bull-fighting :). Is the condition on Patients Like Me? I think there's definitely room for supporting communities like this. How's it going so far?

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.ladoctura.com/](http://www.ladoctura.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sorry I got the URL wrong in the message body: its www.ladoctura.com

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a good idea, keep building it.</comment>


More than a million minutes of historical video added to YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/23/9019727/associated-press-historical-video-on-youtube

<comment><AUTHOR> More than a million minutes and, of course, theverge chose a cat video to highlight!

<comment><USER2> The parasite, _toxoplasma gondii_ , is estimated to have infected about 60% of the USA's population. I'm not sure about worldwide infection rates. This parasite is thought to make animals (from rats to humans) more docile, less aggressive, and possibly like cats more.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what's the highest version number ever seen? - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering, what is the highest version number (years used as versions do not apply) ever seen, before the software name is maybe changed? <comment><USER2> Unreal Engine 3 started off with a build number of 3376, building ontop of the previous engine builds (Unreal Tournament came out at build 300).

[http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Unreal_Engine_Versions](http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Unreal_Engine_Versions)

</comment><comment><USER3> A revision number on almost any software. x264 is 2431, ffmpeg is 62612.

</comment><comment><USER4> systemd is first that pops to mind. They're at 212, I think. Though given they seem to skip any point versions, that may be seen as "cheating".

</comment><comment><USER5> Google Chrome? ;)

Isn't it over version 30 now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I was thinking about Chrome, it's at 34, and Firefox is following.

It just popped in my mind Terminator (although it's a hardware), like the T1000 :-)

<comment><USER6> Since the T1000 is from the future, that's cheating. In the near future Chrome will be version 10^100 at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > NVIDIA Display Control Panel Version 335.23

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder how they increase the version numbers. A couple of years ago weren't they around version 6?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> MAME 135</comment>


An inappropriate interview question - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hyper_linda/an-inappropriate-interview-question-83babb28c98e <comment><USER2> I'm in Denmark, that's too close to Norway in consulting terms, so can you say what the company was so I can make sure never to take a consulting job with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> At a guess, the company referenced in [https://medium.com/@hyper_linda/help- me-get-my-dream-job-7aa...](https://medium.com/@hyper_linda/help-me-get-my- dream-job-7aaccd6712c7)</comment></comment>


Work-Life Balance Is a Myth. Do This Instead - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5601671/work-life-balance-advice-love-loathe/ <comment><USER2> This article smacks of corporate apologia. A lot of jobs just genuinely suck, and no amount of cognitive dissonance will change that.</comment>


Startups dying faster than they are being created - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/06/how-startups-are-dying-faster-than-theyre-being-created-in-2-charts/

<comment><USER2> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7703721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7703721)</comment>


NTCP2 – An authenticated key agreement protocol for I2P - <AUTHOR> https://geti2p.net/spec/ntcp2 <comment><USER2> In other i2p news a new implementation of i2p called Kovri just had alpha release.

[https://getkovri.org](https://getkovri.org)

Funded by Monero but useful for any program. Eventually all Monero nodes will also be i2p nodes which will make Monero more anonymous and the i2p network much larger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Archive link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180813133112/https://geti2p.ne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180813133112/https://geti2p.net/spec/ntcp2)

</comment><comment><USER4> Its good to see such development in i2p. Anoncoin/Anoncash uses this protocol as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Kovri FTW</comment>


WWDC live blog from Engadget - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/11/apple-wwdc-2012-liveblog/

<comment><USER2> These guys every year have the best and fastest coverage with TONS of pictures just after they're taken, for good reason. With WWDC keynotes you want to be able to "see" new products! However they do it, they usually don't get overwhelmed by excessive traffic either.

This is the site to be on if you're anxious to follow the news as it happens.

</comment><comment><USER3> Welcome to the least friendly UI ever. Anyone figure out a way to get rid of the pictures? (besides opening up Chrome's developer tools)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a fan of the new UI... it's a much worse experience if you're coming in late & catching up.

</comment><comment><USER5> a couple of others:

<http://www.macrumorslive.com/>

<http://live.theverge.com/wwdc-2012-live-blog/></comment>


High School Club Learns to Code With Team Treehouse - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/highland_park_deerfield/ct-tl-lk-0228-d113-mobile-apps-20130227,0,7375749.story

<comment><USER2> 50$/month!? :(</comment>


1/3 Rule - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2004/07/valuation.html

<comment><USER2> I was under the impression that far fewer than 2/3rds of VC investments break even. I am more surprised that 1/3rd of them "work out the way you want them to."

Anyone have more concrete statistics on general VC success rates?

<comment><USER3> Rates vary a lot among VC firms. Union Square is one of the good ones, so they have a higher success rate. But the median VC Fund actually loses money.

<comment><USER2> That's interesting. It really is gambling.

<comment><USER3> Well, not quite. The median VC _partner_ makes a lot of money from the management fees even if the fund loses money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Essentially the middle-third (get back 1-to-2x the money back) and the bottom- third (lose money), hence canceling out each other [Assuming that the middle gives just 1x and the bottom loses 100%].

But the top third is expected to make 5-10x. So that gives .333 * 7, (assuming 7x), which is approximately 2.33 times the original money invested.

So every year if the investment is $100 and the eventual return on it is $233, that looks like an awesome deal. Why is everyone not doing it then ?? Whenever any scheme yields more than the long-term-market-average (approx 15%(?)), it is good to ask why and how it works, if it is indeed true. My guess is that there is way more risk involved and the one-third rule is an optimistic view as well as a very simplified theory.

So while it could hold good for a very good VC firm, it might not for every VC firm out there.</comment>


Flask-Potion: REST framework for Flask, now supports Peewee - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/biosustain/potion <comment><USER2> Everyone seems to agree that Flask is great for APIs and Rest. But am I still better off with Django for user apps? I'm attracted to the simplicity and transparency of Flask, but I also want to be efficient, as well as attract open source contributors. It's been difficult to get an objective and practical amswer to this question.

Also troubling is that the creator of Flask seems to want to hand Flask over to someone else, is unhappy with Python 3 to the point he seems to be ditching Python for Rust:

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/7/3/growing- flask/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/7/3/growing-flask/)

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/11/28/emotional- programming/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/11/28/emotional-programming/)

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/tags/rust/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/tags/rust/)

<comment><USER3> Where do you see him "unhappy with Python 3 to the point he seems to be ditching Python"? I only see him saying he can't use Python 3 at work. That's fairly common and frustrating, but it's not unhappiness in Python 3.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I had meant to post this link: [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/11/28/emotional- programming/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/11/28/emotional-programming/)

But you're right. He hasn't said he's ditching Python. It was more me reading between the lines.

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/10/1/a-fresh-look-at- rust/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/10/1/a-fresh-look-at-rust/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Im not versed enough to compare it with Flask Restful and Restless, anyone care to pitch in ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried all three. They're very different.

Flask-Restful is really a toolkit to build a REST API, it leaves much of the heavy lifting to you. If you want your REST API to map your models, Flask- Restful expects you to implement that yourself on top of it.

Flask-Restless allows you to quickly build a REST API using SQLAlchemy models. But I found it's design limiting. If you want to change the way your REST API behaves you have to rely heavily on pre-processor and post-processor hooks.

What I like about Flask-Potion is that it resolves the design problems I had with Flask-Restless by leveraging meta classes and a declarative approach for resources. You can also create relationships between resources much like you would a SQLAlchemy model. Flask-Potion also is self-documenting and follows the JSON Hyper-Media spec [0].

0: [http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-hypermedia.html](http://json- schema.org/latest/json-schema-hypermedia.html)

Flask-Potion probably has more in common with the Django REST framework than the two projects mentioned here.

Full disclosure: I'm a contributor to the project.

<comment><USER4> Thanks a lot, I understand and appreciate better the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not nice. potion is _why the lucky stiff's VM. [http://perl11.org/potion/](http://perl11.org/potion/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really Flask-Potion, but that seemed redundant.

<comment><USER6> We changed the title to say Flask-Potion.</comment></comment></comment>


Goodbye Basecamp, This Is The End - <AUTHOR> http://www.christianjung.com/2011/goodbye-basecamp-this-is-the-end-of-a-true-love-my-heart-is-broken/ <comment><USER2> The 37signals ethos of having an opinion and saying no a lot creates wonderful experiences and products for users who are new to a certain field. For someone who is new to project management, for example, the fancy programs with every feature and option are confusing and scary. Products like Basecamp are beautiful for these users.

As users gain more experience, their needs become slightly more complex. They start to understand the simple product completely, and then they have the cognitive ability to understand more fancy bells 'n' whistles. For users who have been doing project management for a long time with any software product, they will have a long list of things that they know -- from experience! -- that they need.

That is why there's a market for simple and there's a market for full- featured. Both are discrete markets, usually. Obviously every software designer strives for "power made easy" -- it seems easy at first, but there is power under the hood when you need it.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if there is room for a product that grows with you?

What if there were a product that is exposed to you first in the simplest form. It's clean, elegant and simple. Easy and not intimidating to use.

As you use the product, your needs begin to increase and suddenly you need a new feature. As it turns out, the product actually supports this feature and so you turn it on. Now, you are turning on feature X, not feature package premium--just feature X.

In fact, the product actually has several additional features and functionality that can be enabled and disabled one at a time. None of these "extra" features cost "extra". They are all included in the base price of the package.

What if your product has a training module, where users can be guided through test use case scenarios that expose and demonstrate new feature modules. And what if we make it so that when you enable a new feature on the product, that feature only shows up to users who have completed the training guide for the new feature in the module.

In other words, in order for any specific extra feature to show up it needs to be:

        1) Turned on by the administrator.
        2) Flagged as "trained" on a per agent basis.

This way the base product has easy accessibility and additional features can be exposed gradually not taking effect for an agent until they have gone through the training to learn how to use it.

<comment><USER4> That is how emacs has felt to me. There was a large amount of upfront learning, more than there probably should be for this example to make perfect sense, but after a few months with it I am able to do the basics pretty well. Every time I wish I could do something in emacs, a little bit of googling shows that there is a key binding for exactly what I want. So bit by bit, emacs is going from a weird text editor that does the basics into something way more useful than I thought.

/noob rant about the magic, _magic!_ , of using emacs.

<comment><USER5> I also came here to talk about emacs. Two of the things that I think made it this way:

* Scripts such as keywiz let you incrementally improve your knowledge.

* Having a REPL in _scratch_ means you can interactively tweak things.

<comment><USER6> _Having a REPL in scratch means you can interactively tweak things._

IELM is more of a proper REPL, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Jason Fried and DHH might take issue with, "You proved yourself wrong, I think."

In addition to "Say no by default," one of their other points of advice has been: "Let your users outgrow you."

37signals has found that there's more people to sell to at the bottom, and when customers need/want more, they're free to find it elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> Then perhaps 37signals need to make exporting existing Basecamp data for easy importing into the "next step up" products. As far as I know they only provided a raw XML data dump.

<comment><USER9> "Only"?

How else would you have it provided to you? That's pretty well the most versatile form of the data you could get, I'd think.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. It's really up to those other products to develop import routines for BC data. Wordstar didn't develop 'save as MS Word' functionality, but MS did WS imports just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was expecting the author to say something to the effect of "37signals added too many new features and now the software is confusing." So I was a little surprised to read on and learn that, no, 37signals kept their software somewhat basic, just as they said they would.

I have a feeling the author will write a similar piece in a year or two after using Podio -- no software is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER12> For those who say that 37signals has allowed Basecamp to stagnate, I'd trot out as exhibit A the changelog: <http://basecamphq.com/changes>

Being very deliberate about making sweeping changes to an application with an extremely large number of very satisfied users is not the same as allowing it to stagnate. Having spent 4 years of my life working at 37signals I know first hand the incredible amount of energy that is devoted to it by an extremely talented team.

That said, it's certainly not for everyone. And if you outgrow it, fantastic, feel free to move onto a new product that suits you better. We do this with many other aspects of our lives, why should software be any different?

<comment><USER13> I love the idea of that change history for each 37signals app.

We're trying to be very open with our own product, but often very small fixes or changes don't make sense as an announcement on the blog.

Does anyone know where Basecamp links to this change history page? The only link to it so far I can find is from their blog: [http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2009/10/basecamp-a...](http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2009/10/basecamp- and-highrise-change-history-pages.html)

<comment><USER14> Change log for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire: <http://37signals.com/changes>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a story of success, not failure. He used BC and loved it for almost 6 years. I'd be very impressed if the next product Christian uses fulfills all his project management needs for the next 6.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just left Basecamp for Apollo for a few reasons:

1\. Apollo has great customer service, and listens. 2\. Apollo's interface doesn't look like Windows NT 3\. Apollo is moving forward, while Basecamp seems to have stagnated/rested on its laurels.

I think Basecamp is a good product, but it's not that good.

<comment><USER17> Damn, this is exactly what I've been looking for!

It's like Basecamp under active development with CRM integrated! It looks friendlier for external users/clients too!

<comment><USER18> Thank you for your ind words! Yes, we do develop Apollo actively. It's definitely a lot of work! Tony Mobily <http://www.apollohq.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd really like to hear from hackers organizing their projects what software in this category they like best. I have liked Basecamp as a framework for sharing do-list items with colleagues (most of my colleagues and I work independently of face-to-face meetings most of the time) but I am willing to learn about other products or service. Efficency is key. What do you recommend to do best what Basecamp does?

<comment><USER20> Redmine is great after Basecamp. Minimal, fast wiki. Repository viewers (svn, hg, git). Access control, which can be used to create public pages quite easily. Nested projects.

GitHub's nice if you're focused on building software. Project wikis, home pages, code review, huge open source community.

<comment><USER21> I just set up redmine about 2 months ago, and I'm loving it. Recently got my SVN linked up and now I can cross reference commits with issues in the tracker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Refering to a Robert Scoble post while accusing DHH of being on insider bubble is really hilarious. There is no one more in the bubble than Scoble, and no one who is more blinded by the fact that he's in the bubble than Scoble.

DHH was fundamentally right, even if the details were wrong. For 99.9% of apps there is a replacement app available on any of the mainstream phone platforms. The long tail maybe gets you a bit more polish, but its polish on non-core scenarios. Most people will decide based on the polish for their core scenario, not on Textalyzer.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm just glad somebody said something about their prices ... they're ridiculous now.

<comment><USER24> The cheapest Basecamp plan (Basic) is in fact $24/month, not $49 as mentioned in the article.

If you run a full time consulting business, $24/month is a negligible expense for software that supports the core function of your business.

I'd argue that all the prices are negligible as they scale with the size of the business. Even the Max plan ($149/month) is only $1788 per year, which is equivalent to less than 2 weeks worth of man hours. Logically, if using the Max plan of Basecamp saves you and your team 80 hours over the course of a year it should be a no brainer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just finished reading ReWork, Jason Fried's latest book. The irony of this submission is that the book describes Christian to a tee: the customer who always wants more; the customer who has outgrown the product; the customer who compares competitors but would rather complain than move.

I have to admire the way 37signals has grown over the last few years. Sure, they clearly don't integrate every feature. The user interface certainly works but has no iGloss about it at all. Pricing is steep and they hide the lower- priced plans. But it works: people still use the service.

If you're a coffee shop you concentrate on your coffee. If you're an electrician, you concentrate on the quality of your work. Adding extras like "nice cable ties" are irrelevant. 37signals are concentrating on their core functionality. When the day comes that the majority of their users require X feature and that feature becomes a norm in Project Management, Contact Management, Collaboration, etc then I'm almost sure they will react: why wouldn't they?

</comment><comment><USER26> Basecamp is a good product but only if you share its "opinion" on workflow and design. Obviously 37Signals has done well by sticking to a minimal set of features and catering to a very specific audience.

We are of the mindset that software should fit the way you work, not necessarily the other way around. We're building a Force.com-like platform that allows you to create custom business workflow apps in minutes to handle not just tasks, but also lightweight crm, recruiting, and other business functions involving a relatively defined process. We provide a fast UI to access these records, so all you do is specify the schema and callbacks.

We're still in beta, but happy to release some invites and work with members of the HN community -- <http://www.devcomb.com>

</comment><comment><USER27> The fact that a user goes out of the way to broadcast that they're walking away from the service is a testament to how bad ass it truly was for them. Every developer should hope for that sort of torment at the end of use period for a user. Clearly it was a big enough part of their workflow to complain.

Most (all?) of us developers / product guys fight with feature creep. I'm glad 37signals is there to remind us, by example, that it's OK for a software business to focus on a specific solution, sans bloat. There are users that will appreciate your vision - and gladly pay.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think you've listened enough, because 37signals has stated repeatedly that it prefers customers to outgrow the services (as is your case) than to intimidate new customers.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was introduced to Basecamp through a project I was invited to contribute to. Before I had heard about the product, but I had never used it and as far as I can tell I wasn't significantly biased for or against the product or the company that made it.

However, within days I came to hate Basecamp intensely. Not so much because it imposed certain structures and ways of working -- discomfort is to be expected when you learn a new tool. And, of course, sometimes, it turns out you can learn better ways to work from tools that force you into certain ways.

No, what made me hate Basecamp with a passion is that the thing is _slow_. It is _unacceptably slow_. And the UI, be it the web UI or the various apps that existed for it at the time (late last year), did not manage to meaningfully mask the fact that the system was slow as molasses.

The fact that 37signals, a much lauded company, would allow an important product to have such a glaring fault now means that I see anything that 37signals say or anything that is said about them in a different light. I am now thoroughly biased to think that they have no business telling anyone how you make good software. I can't help this, though I will acknowledge that this is an emotional response rather than a rational one.

It also means that anyone singing the praise of 37signals now also seems suspect. Do they even form their _own_ opinions or do people just parrot the praise that people they look up to heap on the company.

Slow apps are not cool. Companies that make slow apps without visible embarrassment are not cool. Basecamp is dead slow and it is perfectly okay to point out that the monarch appears before the court sans clothing.

</comment><comment><USER30> _You didn't integrate the Writeboard into Basecamp._

Worse, it hasn't been papered over well either. I can't load a Writeboard from Basecamp without some weird 1990s-style "we're loading your Writeboard" page hanging around for a couple of seconds. UI-wise, I'd be satisfied with it being separate if it weren't for the extra page coming up wasting time and making me think something happened.

<comment><USER14> We agree. We're not happy with Writeboard integration in its current state.

<comment><USER30> Glad to know it's on your radar :-) I sympathize with the 37signals attitude to piling on features but this is really more sanding off a speed bump.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think the effectiveness of project management software depends greatly on the type of project being managed.

For example, I don't consider Jira as in the same arena as Basecamp (and I've used both a good amount). I see Jira as a programming/development specific management tool, to be used by programming teams and maybe the managers of those teams.

I see Basecamp as a far more flexible project management tool that can fit a wide variety of needs. It works great for organizing our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd events. It works well for some web dev projects and design projects, but not others.

Basecamp isn't always THE solution. For some types of projects, it is. For others, it isn't.

At the end of the day, the right answer is the project management software that helps you more efficiently organize your specific projects. Because Basecamp doesn't work for Joe and his projects doesn't mean it can't work amazingly for Sally and hers.

<comment><USER32> You make an important point.

A few years back, when I was working for an IT analyst firm, I headed a project to find us new task/project management software. (Our existing application for this was old and homegrown and pretty bad.)

The issue is that the significant majority of our tasks/projects were very small: Take a briefing with a client, write up notes, attach presentation, possibly include a followup note for sales, done. So project management software that was organized around the principle of a modest number of projects with milestones, actions, sub-tasks, etc. didn't really work for us. (Including the 37signals options.)

We eventually settled on trac which worked pretty well for the purpose. And we'd probably have supplemented that with something more like Basecamp if we got into some more complex projects and simply handled them as a separate case.

My broader point though is that I found that the "best" project management software depended on what you were trying to track.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> My company pays a whole hell of a lot more for a far far more complex and way over bloated system. I applaud 37signals for their choices and sticking to it. The author here needs to just get over the fact that his needs outgrew the software and to seek another solution. No need for the dramatics.

</comment><comment><USER34> I got quite put off by lack of email integration in Basecamp and recently wrote this: <http://goo.gl/Vthjb>

I've, since, moved away from Basecamp and am almost completely on Jira now.

</comment><comment><USER35> The customers you start off with are usually not the customers you end with. People grow, products grow.

</comment><comment><USER36> Basecamp seems to be designed exactly for a web design shop that wants to take on bigger projects and present an organized appearance to clients. More client management than project management.

</comment><comment><USER37> Shameless plug: we built <http://www.kanbanpad.com> because we wanted something simple and intuitive. Basecamp never fit our flow.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think every Project Manager has its place. I really like the development of Asana. <http://asana.com/>

</comment><comment><USER39> Just wait for what we are planning to release ;-)

</comment><comment><USER40> Am I the only person who couldn't get anything out of this post because of its bad grammar?

<comment><USER41> Well, the OP is German, so I'm sure he's doing the best he can. And it's really not that bad -- certainly writes better in English than I can in German! :-)</comment></comment>


Which domain extensions are startups using in 2020? - <AUTHOR> https://jamesnames.com/2020/05/data-driven-which-extensions-are-startups-using-in-2020/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! I've done an analysis of 991 startups that have been launched in 2020 to see what kind of domain extensions are popular.

Knowing the type of domains other companies are launching with may help with your own projects.</comment>