Show HN: I built a tool to remove news articles from HN - <AUTHOR> http://hn.luap.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

Being a long time reader of HN I'm sometimes frustrated that top HN content is often coming from popular websites or talk too much about the same thing (Zoom security issues, Facebook leaks, ...) I wanted to understand if this was possible to get only the 'original content' posts of HN (from the not-as- popular blogs and sites). Because to me this is the most interesting part of HN.

So I started analyzing HN new posts, and made a few discoveries :

\- Some HN users post a lot of content, and post several links in a row, which will push away your post if they publish just after you

\- You get a 30 min time window at busy hours (and 1h time window at non busy hours) between the time a new link is posted, and the link disappear from the 1st page of new links

\- There is a second-chance pool for good stuff if a moderator detects it

As a result HN is overflowed with not really useful content and it is not always easy for original content to be noticed (Even if I think HN is doing a very good job compared to any other link aggregator that you can find)

So I tried to built a tool to filter out things like news websites, words that I want to blacklist, and users whose posts haven't been relevant to me.

That way I'm able to remove almost 80% of content and I can go through the list of all the links of the day before going to bed

For those who are interested, this is just a cron job querying the HN API every 3 minutes inserting the new links into a db, and a web server rendering the last 500 links.

You can see more on how the filters works here: [http://hn.luap.info/about](http://hn.luap.info/about) and you can also understand which links have been filtered here: [http://hn.luap.info/links_flagged](http://hn.luap.info/links_flagged)

<comment><USER2> clearly we have different interests in what we like from HN. many of the sites you filter are sites that I like prefer their content because they do offer commentary that provides context and perspective that I don't always get from what might be considered 'original content' by this. Interesting experiment though, might provide more value to someone like me if rather than a black or white list it was more of a content assessment model using NLP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, clearly the goal is not to replace HN, I love also reading the comments of people on global topics, but I also love reading original content

<comment><USER3> Perhaps what we really need is a personalized feed.

<comment><USER4> I'd honestly be surprised if something like this hasn't been built yet by the HN community. A service where you can input your likes and interests (and maybe a blacklist) to get a tailored feed of HN posts including/excluding the right content. Maybe you could even feed in a few links to examples of content you like and it would cater to you based on that.

<comment><USER5> maagnit.com also similar to lobsters tags

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess Hacker News loses its memory after a few years, but six years ago this item[0] hit the front page about using machine learning to train a filter for Hacker News. It is still running to this day[1]. I asked him if he could share his training set or code, but nothing happened. I think the training set may be showing its age, as there used to be more green items on the home page. Or maybe the quality of Hacker News has just gone down. (Perish the thought!)

"Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Again"

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297)

[1] [http://hn.njl.us/](http://hn.njl.us/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I used to have a greasemonkey script that would filter articles or domains they come from based off of keywords.

Found it! (this was made by hn user furgooswft13) [https://gist.github.com/m00g00/e539ec22bf588edca0e6dfe1a05eb...](https://gist.github.com/m00g00/e539ec22bf588edca0e6dfe1a05eb60c)

I think I used it for "737" and "Boeing" for a while.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this! I was quickly able to find some interesting new and niche types of things to read, in contrast to what my normal strolls through news.ycombinator and hckrnews give me.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an interesting experiment and reflection of your personal interests but looking at

[http://hn.luap.info/links_flagged](http://hn.luap.info/links_flagged)

I can't tell the difference between most removed things and the things left alone - either in terms of quality or thematically.

Having a page that tries to summarize the workings of the filter on the inputs is pretty great though - more people who propose alternative rankings/filters should think of ways to do that.

<comment><USER10> There's a ban on *.org? Yikes.

<comment><USER9> The full list is at

[http://hn.luap.info/about](http://hn.luap.info/about)

It's definitely idiosyncratic, as one would expect. A more interesting question is 'does it produce interesting results'. To my eyes and tastes, not really. The filter easily misses piles of the sort of 'news' it is trying to avoid and the quality of the rest of what passes doesn't appear to be any better (to put it mildly) than the HN front page.

Mercilessly culling even slightly frequent submitters (this includes people who, say, mis-posted something and then quickly made another post to correct the problem) is a pretty fun idea though, I wonder what you'd end up if you applied this iteratively over a long period of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, this is very good feedback, I don't try to compete with HN front page

My goal is more to 'compete with' /newest in the sense that I don't think it is easily possible to get the best content publish directly out of an algorithm. If you have some ideas I would be interested to test them

Maybe as you said it doesn't produce interesting results, but I have the motivation to go through the full list every night and I always found some interesting content, whereas I never had the motivation to go through several pages of /newest

<comment><USER9> _My goal is more to 'compete with' /newest_

Oh! That makes an awful lot of sense, thanks. I wonder if you'd have got less confused feedback if you'd described it like that initially, I think a lot of the commentators (including me) somewhat misunderstood what you're trying to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > New 13" MacBook Pro51 min ago

> www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/hn linktga

I feel like that counts as news/not original content/a popular site

</comment><comment><USER12> > flagged because : .org/

That is peculiar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is, at first I didn't filtered it, but statistically domains with org tld are much more likely to be the website of an organization, even if I agree it is not always the case.

The complexity of the task is that if you don't want to miss ANY quality content you will end up filtering almost nothing. I took the risk to miss few good content if that reduce the number of links to go through overall. But this is not an optimum

<comment><USER13> We all have different views on this, of course. For example, in my proxies, I filter .biz and .info, as spammers and malware authors were able to acquire thousands of those domains super cheap. I probably miss out on a decent site here or there, but its a small price for me to pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Some HN users post a lot of content, and post several links in a row, which > will push away your post if they publish just after you

> You get a 30 min time window at busy hours (and 1h time window at non busy > hours) between the time a new link is posted, and the link disappear from > the 1st page of new links

Should /newest list the last-N-hours of new stories, instead of the 30 newest stories?

<comment><USER15> I think /lists/ should have something like OP's idea, especially if you want people to be reading new to find good articles that deserve a second chance.

A list of the last N hours of stories would be good, but a bit overwhelming.

<comment><USER16> Or perhaps, instead of having the 30 absolute newest articles, you could have 30 articles, randomly selected from those submitted in the last hour. That way your chance at success isn't biased so incredibly heavily on how you do in the first 5 minutes. (And also, might make it harder to get brigades set up, since the list is randomly generated.)

<comment><USER14> Interesting idea! Will think about that.

<comment><USER12> It might have the effect that people submit more at once, because the random selection will probably only return one or two anyway. So you don't need space them out manually anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I opened your "about" page, the first thing I see is "If one of these terms is present in text : [nothing]" and "If it comes from these domains : [Nothing]" It's because I built an FF add-on for myself that hides elements based on a regular expression matching on text and/or element attribute values. Since you have several text and domains I already had in my personal filter list, I couldn't see those blocks of text :)

</comment><comment> Seb-C Interesting tool. I am using hnrss.org to get posts in my aggregator and did not have to complain so far. That is probably because I filter the posts by points, so I only get the most popular ones. Sure, I may be missing a few posts I would have liked, but this way I am avoiding the distracting habit of checking the homepage too often.

[https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100](https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100)

</comment><comment><USER18> Back in the day of USENET, readers typically had kill files, and it was quite easy for each user to arrange for items they didn't care about to be elided (based on author, keyword, etc.). Not unlike this.

I'd kill for a general form of that that worked uniformly on sites like HN, reddit, etc., and perhaps random forums, comment sections, and so on. The new interfaces are nice in many ways, but that was a true killer feature, and it's pretty much lost.

<comment><USER19> Strange enough, I recently noticed there's still life in Usenet's comp.lang groups for things like formal anouncements and language spec casuism with content not found elsewhere (after the decline of mailing lists and degeneration of StackOverflow). Seriously considering posting there once again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I once thought about filtering HN based on the content served by the link: page size, JavaScript amount, image count, special items (Facebook share button, GA), etc.

The goal would be to focus on small and light websites which is what I like the most. I doubt it would work effectively though.

<comment><USER21> I can't resist: "you can't judge a book by its cover" ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I highly recommend hckrnews.com to bypass the HN frontpage all together. I usually sort by top 20% for a quick digest or simply sort by new. Sorting by new makes it pretty easy to see all the submissions on a single day

</comment><comment><USER23> I consume my news through RSS subscriptions to specific websites, many of which frequently show up on the front page. I can see this becoming a very useful supplement to HN to find original content, for me at least.

Thanks for making this!

<comment><USER24> I you like RSS and want to find more content related to your feeds, maybe you can give Aktu a try ([https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io)).

It's an online RSS reader that i built, and one of the features might be of interest to you: It automatically aggregates news articles to items in your RSS feeds. That means that for most articles in your feeds, you have the original item from the website you subscribed to, but you also have a list of articles from different sources talking about the same story.

A nice side effect is that it can help avoid filter bubbles by giving more context to the stories you read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be nice to still show the number of points and comments per article in your interface, so that one could quickly scan and see what's generated the most interest.

</comment><comment><USER26> wasnt this shared a few days ago? [https://eaj.no/a-guide-to-big-o- notation](https://eaj.no/a-guide-to-big-o-notation)

</comment><comment><USER27> Somewhat useful if someone not want to see news though. However, this reminds me lobster, so same service already existed. You can give it a check.

</comment><comment><USER28> thank you so much for getting rid of all the garbage that is chronically clogging HN. great work!

</comment><comment><USER29> where there's no link you should maybe consider linking to the article here on hn?

</comment><comment><USER30> _A user is flagged if:

He posted more than 2 two links in the last 1 hour

He posted more than 5 links in the last 5 days

He has posted more than 5 links in the last 30 days and among the posts he posted 30% were flagged_

Some thoughts:

First, not everyone here is male. I'm a woman and a demographic outlier in other ways. If you want stuff that's "different," in theory, you are looking for people like me and your criteria would probably flag me plus your implicit assumption that everyone here is male de facto reinforces the very thing you say you want to combat: Homogeneity.

I don't post links daily anymore. I did at one time when I was homeless and trying to find 2-4 good stories to post daily was my cheap hobby because it amused me to try to make it to the leader board while I was a homeless woman and it was a hobby within my budget. I made it to the leader board under my old handle about a month after I got back into housing and then I changed handles cuz reasons.

When I do post links, I tend to post a few links within about an hour because I'm checking the news as part of my daily routine and if I see anything interesting, the odds are good that's when I will see it. And I do that in part because I am a demographic outlier and I have a pretty terrible track record of trying to predict ahead of time what will fly on HN and what won't.

So I try to look for a certain level of quality and that's about it. I really, really suck at trying to predict what HN wants to read.

I also post a lot of my own stuff, which ironically gets me flak at times. Some people complain that the only thing I post is my own writing, which isn't actually true. So that kind of feedback makes me feel like I "should" be posting a certain amount of stuff not by me in order to be acceptable to the community. Though, in practice, as my life gets busier, I simply fail to post as many articles to HN because I simply don't have the time to do that.

But some people are interested in some of the things I write and some of what I write does well and makes it to the front page. Among other things, I still write about homelessness and some people here are actually interested in my perspective on that topic. So I do continue to post my stuff here and let it sink or swim based on votes because I suck at predicting what will do well.

I'm not asking or even suggesting you change your process in some way. I'm just telling you what I see from my perspective and I'm doing that because I'm an indie writer who takes Patreon and tips to support my work. Most of my sites have no ads on them and I handle things the way I do so I can give a fresh perspective on topics.

I post my own blog writing because other people almost never post my stuff. That's extremely rare and my stuff would never see the light of day if I didn't post it myself.

So to my ear it sounds kind of like you are looking for people like me and your formula for flagging stuff probably already has me flagged. Which you may be perfectly happy with. You may know who I am and you may be reading this going "Good! You are one of the people I'm tired of hearing from!"

You do with that feedback whatever the heck you want. I don't need a reply or an explanation or a justification. I don't care.

Have a good evening.</comment>


Ask HN: Is inductive charging feasible for electric car batteries? - <AUTHOR>

The way I am thinking about it is to have the car wirelessly and continuously charge when it is on the road. <comment><USER2> I'm sure lots of people will say no. The rate of loss in induction charging is too high when you need high-power application, you'd have to wire the entire road, which would be costly, and I'm sure a million other reasons.

Doesn't mean it won't be done though. However, rather than consider induction charging specifically, may I suggest you look at the potential another way?

What is the benefit of 'continuously charg[ing] when ... on the road'? What you want is a car that drives and the battery will never run down. So how else can you get to that state? Why does it matter if the battery runs down? With autonomous vehicles on our doorstep, how does that change the need to always have a full battery? Can a car be charged by another care while driving?

So, is it feasible? Maybe. Is it valuable? Maybe. Keep on your line of questioning and you may discover something more interesting.</comment>


How to price your freelance design services - <AUTHOR> https://webflow.com/blog/how-to-price-your-freelance-design-services?utm_campaign=february1&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> I heard that doubling your prices until you get just enough customers and you don't need to refuse projects is the way to go. But is this strategy (or the ones in the OP) applicable for new freelancers, who want to get into it?</comment>


Ask HN: Did you have "Doubters" in your life? - <AUTHOR>

Did you have people in your life (friends, family, spouses) who openly doubted your entrepreneurial pursuits? How did their behavior change once you were successful? <comment><USER2> I'm not successful yet, but I haven't caved in either. My family has always been quietly supportive, but my friends have always said things to the effect that, "It'll never work". I'm not interested in proving them wrong, rather I'm interested in proving myself RIGHT.</comment>


Building the Dota 2 system - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/more-on-dota-2/? <comment><USER2> Any hints about the architectures used?</comment>


Ask HN: Collaborate on research as a side project? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'd like to work on some (mostly machine learning / statistics / AI) research projects in my spare time and would be interested in e-meeting others with similar ambitions / interests. I've written up my thoughts here: http://www.openias.org/welcome-to-the-institute.
Anybody else out there who'd like to have their name on a couple of papers, and perhaps get some open source written / released in the process? :P
Cheers,
Björn <comment><USER2> Yes - I am building a deep learning platform right now, and it's 95% complete (just some UI to finish) I am starting to look for real use cases to run on the demo servers.

My email is in my profile if you'd like to work together

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've sent you an email. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have been thinking kind of along the same lines. I work full time but I can carve out 5-8 hours a week to work on some research project and add value as a technologist. I would love to contribute especially to projects and folks working in the medical field trying to fight diseases, finding cure and advance genetic engineering to name a few.

I think a lot of people would love to contribute their free time and together that would mean thousands of hours of help into these projects which could mean that the goals could be achieved sooner. The problem is I don't know where to start and which projects would benefit from my 5-8 hours a week. This seems like the same problem I have with contributing towards open source projects.

I would love to talk more and see if there is a viable solution out there.

<comment><USER2> Hi There,

I have a zany idea, but you're profile is empty so I cannot contact you :(

Send me an email (in my profile), I could use your help - certainly in the medical field!

cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you're better off starting it, figuring what it's about, and then, inviting people to join. As is stands, it sounds rather vague.

PS: I'd love to help but I don't think I'm qualified enough in that field! Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply!

I think you're right that the Minimum Viable Product needs to "fleshed out" and concretezised a bit. But my idea so far is to try to run one or two projects with the blog / email as only supporting infrastructure, because it's fun and to learn about the problem "first hand" so to speak.</comment></comment>


Lyft for Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.lyft.com/work <comment><USER2> Maybe they should actually find people who know how to drive first. I'm getting sick of these ridershares and their terrible drivers. I'm strictly speaking in San Francisco. It's ridiculous how many times they randomly stop in the middle of the street to pick someone up causing traffic jams or even stopping at a stop sign to drop or pick someone up. Plus all the illegal U-turns and crossing double yellow lines when they're not supposed to. I don't recall having this issue with cabs. It's almost unbearable to drive in the city now.

<comment><USER3> Don't you rate drivers on Lyft? Shouldn't the rating system take care of this?

<comment><USER4> It sounds like titlex is another road user and not a Lyft customer. I think you have to be a customer to give a driver a rating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many startups in SF already offer a reimbursement for work related travel but many employees don't follow up on it due to the inconvenience involved. This is a really good idea and I wonder how long until Uber announces the same.

<comment><USER6> Uber actually came out with "Uber for Business" at the end of July:

[https://www.uber.com/business](https://www.uber.com/business)

[http://blog.uber.com/business](http://blog.uber.com/business) (the blog post announcing it)

<comment><USER7> Uber business is a good approach. But you'll get individual bills for every trip.

I hope Lyft gets you one consolidated bill a month for the company.

<comment><USER8> This is the worst part in using Uber for a company. They won't consolidate on a monthly invoice (like most B2B vendors) so you end up with hundreds of Uber transactions on your credit card statement. It's a real pain to manage.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. In my personal case, I need to individually account for each of those rides when I file reimbursement. A month does not capture that the first week was billable to client x, the second week was work related travel, Monday I was taking a prospective around, etc. individual transactions let me group them by which expense report they belong in.

Maybe this is not true for everyone tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this really that common, an employer offering free taxi credits? I've worked at a handful of software companies in SF, and I don't recall any of them doing this.

<comment><USER11> Yeah it is.

I've also seen it at big end of town. Large corporates can offer transportation to employees that are required to work late – e.g. on a large systems release.

<comment><USER12> Yep, this is common

If you use public transport you get a taxi home after hours.

And the evening pizza usually, but that's more common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> no IE9 support, and showing a blank page with this message "Hey! Your browser is not supported, certain pages may not render correctly! Try updating your browser at [http://browsehappy.com](http://browsehappy.com) . " ? Many people like me don't have a choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole Lyft site shows nothing without Javascript enabled. Even the title is set via script.

Google indexed titles and content for all pages though. How are they doing that? Are the delivering different content based on ip or useragent or something?

<comment><USER14> Google crawlers have been able to execute javascript since at least May of this year[0].

[0] [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/05/understand...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/05/understanding- web-pages-better.html)

<comment><USER3> Interesting. The content must have changed recently then. Because I see different text in the Google serps then on the page with js enabled.

For lyft.com Google shows me "Lyft is your friend with a car" which is not on the page.

For lyft.com/stories Google shows "Discover extraordinary stories from the Lyft community" which is also not on the page.

Maybe it's from good old metatags. The have some, but somehow they apply a scripting engine (angular?) to them:

        <meta property="og:title" content="{{meta.title || 'A ride whenever you need one' }}{{meta.signoff || ' - Lyft'}}">

The "Discover extraordinary stories" text is not in the metatags though.

<comment><USER15> they dont necessarily give the google bot this version of the page. its perfectly ok to prerender the page with something like phantomjs and send the crawler the prerendered pages. this was , to my knowledge, quite common with angularjs apps that relied heavily on seo/google juice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> if ive been banned from lyft for reasons unknown, if my work signs up for this will i be able to use the platform?

</comment><comment><USER17> I am looking forward to the day Lyft announces, "Autonomous Lyft."

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't hold my breath. I refused to use the service when I first discovered it because it was facebook only auth. I believe that has since changed, but user privacy is not a huge concern of theirs.

<comment><USER19> This word Autonomous. I don't think it means what you think it means.

<comment><USER20> I know what the word means and still don't get it.

<comment><USER21> He is confused with anonymous. The parent was suggesting self-driving Lyft, vs identity-free lyft riding.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What determines whether the down-mod is enabled? - <AUTHOR>

It seems quite arbitrary: definitely not based on the age of the comment/post. Just how does it work? Apologies if this is covered in an FAQ somewhere. <comment><USER3>
        (def canvote (user i dir)
          (and user
               (news-type i)
               (live i)
               (or (is dir 'up) (> i!score lowest-score*))
               (no ((votes user) i!id))
               (or (is dir 'up)
                   (and (acomment i)
                        (> (karma user) downvote-threshold*)
                        (no (aand i!parent (author user (item it))))))))

<comment><USER4> @pg

Can I make a suggestion: down voting a comment should cost the down voter a karma point, as well as the person who wrote the comment. This would ensure that people would think twice about down voting, and only down vote items that they really did not like.

I suggest this because I have seen many innocuous short comments - <USER2> attempts at humor - being downvoted to -10 or so. This seems somewhat unfair on the commenter.

<comment><USER5> I upvoted you because I don't think you deserve to lose points for this post and someone else had already down voted you. That said this is like the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

I'm no fan of the down vote but it exists to allow the community to weed out undesirable comments. So those people who use it are at least trying to perform a service to the community. To penalized them for that is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can't downmod root comments on a story you submit or replies to your comments. You can't downmod comments older than 24 hours. You need a certain amount of karma before you can ever downmod comments, and no one can ever downmod stories.</comment>


Most malware in 2009 used Acrobat/PDF for exploits - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=5473

<comment><USER2> Either Microsoft has raised the bar and attackers are going after easier exploits not in the base system, or Adobe has lowered the bar and gained sufficient penetration to be a better target.

How do you tell which?

<comment><USER3> Probably a combination of both (plus a little bit of user education on the MS side of the equation.) Recent MS operating systems and browsers are more secure then older versions that are slowly being phased out, most users are using firewalls/anti-virus enhancements, and users are more aware of the fact that certain attachments/files are not safe to just blindly open. On the Adobe side it seems like a decade of stuffing in useless bells and whistles to Acrobat to justify the size/budget of that group within Adobe is finally making the code too complex to properly vet and things that seemed like a good idea in the "what features should we add to the next rev" meetings are now looking like bad choices. The problem Adobe faces is that it is hard for a big company to remove features and they no longer have enough dominance over the spec or marketshare to create a "new and improved" version that enables them to paper over or rip out their mistakes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many such exploits are in-browser, and require no action on the part of the user apart from visiting a highjacked/fake web-site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the author misses the point at the end - it's not a choice between Adobe messing up and users not updating. The question is "why are so many users running outdated versions?" I believe one of biggest reasons is because Adobe makes it such a pain in the neck to update their products.

</comment><comment><USER5> Flash and Acrobat: more reasons to just go to open source.

<comment><USER6> Then again, there are some perfectly cromulent proprietary PDF readers: Preview.app and Foxit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Make sure you turn off javascript within acrobat.

<comment><USER8> How do I do it?

<comment><USER7> Edit --> Preferences --> Javascript --> Uncheck "Enable Adobe Javascript"</comment></comment></comment>


EC2 Dedicated Hosts - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ec2-dedicated-hosts/ <comment><USER2> I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance.

Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the exact specs and price I get from Hetzner, and being genuinely interested in perhaps getting a competitive quote, I waited and received no reply for some time and then the following:

"I'm sorry for my late response. I've been pretty busy these days…"

"I had a look at what your technical specifications below and I'd like to understand a bit more what type of business you're doing."

"One of AWS's main strengths lies in the scalability of our platform."

"How much is the % of usage of your dedicated server? What happens if it reaches the maximum usage? At AWS, you can start with smaller instances and use auto-scaling to scale up or down automatically according to your traffic."

"Is scalability a challenge for you?"

There was no quote attached. :)

Hetzner's price/performance is an elephant in the room it seems.

<comment><USER3> How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

<comment><USER2> "How do you handle massive traffic spikes?"

Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with.

If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late.

I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance?

Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU?

Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.

<comment><USER4> > If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too > late.

precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic.

but then you need to build your whole architecture for it

anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.

<comment><USER5> Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that.

The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto- recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it.

You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.

<comment><USER4> precisely. recoverable multi zone postgres without paying a sysadmin. we can manage basic maintenance on our own, but setting up something like that require a skilled consultant in short burst at each upgrade/maintenance check, and for a small operation like ours it's too expensive if we want to match what amazon gives.

we do have a custom AMI that just fetch and build the latest snapshot release when we need auto-scaling or auto-recovery, but our real problem is that we currently depend on sticky session, so users accumulated on the initial instances get sucky performances. (and yes we are currently working on fixing it, we cannot outright serialize sessions on dynamo because, reasons)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs.

Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host. I'd love seeing the flexibility of the ECS software, but on metal.

<comment><USER7> Would you mind explaining a little about how bare metal is different from this? Isn't a dedicated host a real physical machine?

<comment><USER8> No I think it's still virtualised isn't it? But on a machine that they guarantee only you are using?

<comment><USER9> Yes. The key is that you can control exactly what combination of your own VMs land on each physical machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non- existent) cloud processing offerings.

A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit.

In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris you only take out on weekends.

*who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't you still see a virtualized network interface with random MAC address from the VM within the dedicated host where the software is running?

You could configure an Elastic Network Interface to have a fixed MAC address, but that would also work without dedicated hosts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single- tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers. Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic provisioning, pay only for what you use, all while ensuring that your Amazon EC2 compute instances are isolated at the hardware level."

<comment><USER13> This basically lets you have an entire machine dedicated to a specific type of VM instance, plus have the underlying hardware information, to ease licensing requirements that certain programs and operating systems have. So you can get a box of m4.larges and know exactly what programs are running on it; for example, RedHat offers per-vm server licensing, so running 20 instances on RHEL on your dedicated box just costs you the flat rate VM host cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sadly there is still no IPV6 support...

<comment><USER15> This should be higher up. It's time for end-to-end IPv6 functionality on all major service providers and applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting:

> each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular > type, all of which must be the same size

I'm surprised by the "same size" requirement. It seems like even if you ask customers to stay within a single family (m3, m4, etc.) the customer could do their own hand placement of 8 vCPUs next to a pair of 4s...

Edit: Disclaimer, I work on Compute Engine.

<comment><USER17> Is it possible that's been going on the whole time? Allowing different flavors of guests to cohabitate has few benefits (at their scale) and many drawbacks; I wouldn't be surprised if they simply never allowed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the networking model? Will two instances on the same host talk over the datacenter network, or will the traffic stay local to the machine?

<comment><USER19> Given placement groups I'd expect 10 GB local networking as this is the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now how long will it take for Amazon to release a dedicated host marketplace where you can sell unused space on your dedicated hosts?

<comment><USER21> Doesn't that defeat the purpose of obtaining a dedicated host?

<comment><USER22> Technically, its the equivalent of a leaseback. It may make sense depending on the profitability of the arbitrage you're targeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can anyone give me the advantages of choosing an EC2 dedicated host over going with a true dedicated server?

<comment><USER24> All the rest of your infrastructure is in AWS and you want the high interconnect speeds.

<comment><USER25> This shouldn't be any faster than normal EC2.

(Edit: I may have misunderstood the comment. This will certainly have a faster interconnect to EC2 compared to a non-EC2 dedicated server.)

<comment><USER26> No, but if you need a dedicated server in addition to other EC2 hosts it will certainly be faster to be in a AWS data center.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Some pro/cons that would be interesting to discuss:

Other than licensing, an advantage I'm guessing is in reducing noisy neighbor affects. In our case, we use a lot of t2.micro instances, which seem to suffer from this.

A disadvantage is that the instances within a dedicated host might all go down together? (similar to if you put all your instances in us-east-1e and 1e goes down?, or of course if all of us-east goes down). Although I'm not sure a dedicated host itself is more likely to go down, while a datacenter remains operational. That's what I'm most interested in knowing - how do these fail?

<comment><AUTHOR> We monitor the health of the host; take a look at [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated- hosts-monitoring.html) to learn more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house box just for running those IP limited tests.

<comment><USER29> Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic- ip-addresses-eip.html)

<comment><USER28> The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> To save a trip to the calculator:

$2.341 (m3 host / hour) * 24 hours * 30 days = $1685.52

before the "up to 70%" reservation discount.

<comment><USER31> Bare in mind that can run up to 32 m3 instances

<comment><USER32> Which would be `$0.067 * 32 * 24 * 30 = $1543.68` on demand

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thanks to the amazing innovation at Amazon, 2016 will be the year, we can finally have a real computer in a datacenter, where we can run all our JavaScript code on, instead of of having to use an anonymous cloud service.

<comment><USER34> Maybe we could distribute the computing on these dedicated hosts, to have like, virtual dedicated hosts. And then run them from Minecraft... It's the future.

<comment><USER35> You can implement the HTTP parse logic in Minecraft using redstone. Deploy nginx or Apache Traffic Server in front of your Minecraft and you are good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Are the hardware specs available somewhere? Is it possible I'm confusing this with an interface for launching EC2 instances at a premium disguised as being actual dedicated hardware?

<comment><AUTHOR> Each Dedicated Host is home to a specific number of EC2 instances.

Check out the EC2 instance types ([https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/)) to learn more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.

<comment><USER38> So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?

<comment><USER39> I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about software licensing.

There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port dongles for some old school commercial software.

<comment><USER38> Yep, you sounded condescending.

I think after 25 years in the industry I know a lot about software licensing. Enough to know that just because lots of software packages are licensed that way doesn't change the fact that they are silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you setup a dedicated host, does that also include local SSD disks, or do you have to still use EBS?

<comment><AUTHOR> A Dedicated Host contains EC2 instances. You would still use EBS if you need storage other that what's available on the instances.

Per the EC2 Instance Types page ([https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/)), many of the instance types already include SSD storage.

<comment><USER40> Thanks Jeff for the response. Appreciate that you personally respond.

Wouldn't dedicated I/O be a big plus and selling point for dedicated instances?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So this is for IO- and CPU-bound users who for some reason are also EC2-bound.

<comment><USER42> According to their docs/examples, this is mostly for legal reasons. i.e. some software can be licensed to multiple VMs if they are all running on the same host.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> That pricing is ridiculous though. I can get 15 Hetzner servers for the price of one EC2.

<comment><USER44> It's more than a bare metal server - you're still running EC2 instances atop of it, except only your instances are running on that server. Looking at the price of the underlying instances if you run it fully loaded, it seems pretty comparable running those instances non-dedicated.

<comment><USER43> So? It's still ridiculously expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So, how much different is this than Vultr's[0] offering?

[0][https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/](https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/)</comment>


HTTP/1.1 pipelining example: DNS-Over-HTTPS - <AUTHOR> As a demonstration using only standard utilities, the three scripts below 1.sh, 2.sh and 3.sh will
1. accept a list of domains and output the required Base64URL-encoded DNS request
2. make a single HTTP connection to retrieve all the responses in binary format and write them to a file
3. convert the binary file to text, suitable for manipulation with text-formatting utilities so the DNS data can be added to HOSTS file or a zone file
bindparser is from curveprotect project; it converts BIND-style output from drill to tinydns zone file format.
Most HTTP servers on the internet do have pipelining enabled, sometimes with a max-limit of 100.  The three examples listed below were pipelining enabled with max-limit greater than 100 last time I checked.
Example usage:

   1.sh < list-of-domains > 1.txt
   2.sh 001 < 1.txt > 1.bin
   3.sh < 1.bin > 1.txt
   bindparser 1.txt > 1.zone
   x=tinydns/root/data;cat 1.zone >> $x/data;cd $x;
   awk '!x[$0]++' data > data.tmp;mv data.tmp data;tinydns-data;cd -

   # 1.sh
   #!/bin/sh
   while IFS= read -r x;do printf $x' ';
   drill -q /dev/stdout $x @0.0.0.0 a|sed 's/;.*//'|xxd -p -r \
   |openssl base64|sed 's/+/-/g;s|/|_|g;s/=.*$//'|tr -d '\n';echo;
   done

   # 2.sh
   #!/bin/sh
   case $1 in
   "")sed '/;;[0-9]*/!d' $0;
      echo usage: $0 provider-number \< output-from-script1.txt;exit
   ;;001)x=doh.powerdns.org;y=1
   ;;002)x=ibuki.cgnat.net;y=1
   ;;003)x=dns.aa.net.uk;y=1
   esac;
   case $y in
   1) sed 's/\(.* \)\(.*\)/GET \/dns-query?dns=\2 HTTP\/1.1\r\nHost: \1\r\n/;
       $!s/$/Connection: keep-alive\r\n/;$s/$/Connection: close\r\n\r\n/;' \
       |socat -,ignoreeof ssl:$x:443,verify=0 > 1.bin
   esac;
   3.sh < 1.bin

   # 3.sh
   #!/bin/sh
   while IFS= read -r x;do sed -n /${1-\.}/p\;/${1-\.}/q|xxd -p|drill -i /dev/stdin 2>/dev/null;done
 <comment><AUTHOR> Better 3.sh

       # 3.sh
       #!/bin/sh
       while IFS= read -r x;do sed -n '/\./p;/\./q'|xxd -p |drill -i /dev/stdin 2>/dev/null;done

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Correction:

\- x=tinydns/root/data;cat 1.zone >> $x/data;cd $x;

\+ x=tinydns/root;cat 1.zone >> $x/data;cd $x;</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good technical conferences? - <AUTHOR> I watched a few videos of DefCon, CppCon and JSConf, and found them to be pretty interesting. I was then looking for other conferences I can watch and follow <comment><USER2> I would recommend any conference by Usenix - mostly NSDI. Also, conferences by ACM particularly SIGARCH.

</comment><comment><USER3> Strange Loop

All Things Open

NIPS

ICLR

COLT

OSCON</comment>


Free Tuition Will Bleed Colleges Dry - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/free-college-will-ruin-the-finances-of-america-s-universities <comment><USER2> Here's a tip to colleges: Get out of the rental business (dorms), the entertainment business (concert halls), the sports business (stadiums), the travel business, the retail business, the financial services business ... Maybe focus in one thing: Be the low cost leader for producing graduates using disruptive technology.</comment>


GitHub responds to Dear GitHub letter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/pull/115 <comment><USER3> Some of the responses here are kinda obnoxious. I helped kickstart the original letter and I'm very happy about this response.

GitHub more than anything has been a blackbox, and this was a very notable first step towards opening up. It should be encouraged, not shut down.

Privately (and some publicly), in the past few days, a lot of major open source projects were discussing a coordinated move away from GitHub. This likely puts that all on hold, but we'll see what changes GitHub makes and how people want to respond to it.

Again, I'm very happy about this response, as should everyone in this thread. We'll see in the coming weeks what it really means though.

<comment><USER4> Where would those projects move to? There's no real alternative to GitHub, at least none that combines the social side of it with the Gittiness of it.

That I know of, anyway.

<comment><USER5> Gitlab is a worthy alternative. It's only missing critical mass, which gives Github the upper hand in considerations such as "all my foss contributions are on there in one place and that's what companies look at when they offer me a job".

Hey, sytse - I know you're reading this. Have you guys thought about a way of including, in gitlab profiles, user info from Github in a non-intrusive way?

<comment><USER6> > It's only missing critical mass

As somebody who loves Gitlab... no, what it's missing is Github's reputation of lasting uptime reliability. If they get it to the point where people trust it to always be up to the same extent as Github, the rest will follow.

<comment><USER5> That's one of the definitions of critical mass. Reputation is built up over time and usage. Gitlab's uptime reliability isn't particularly known or unknown, mostly because, compared to Github, it's not used enough for those issues to come up.

Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their _uptime is such a problem_ "? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile?

As a sidenote I would totally use MySpace instead of Facebook if not for their notable history of extended downtime...

<comment><USER7> I partly agree, but those that have done the research or already use Gitlab know that Gitlab's uptime _has_ been problematic compared to Github's, which is a bigger issue for most companies than the community. As sytse correctly notes below, it's a lot better than it was a few months ago - but the pessimistic/risk-averse way to say that is "as recently as two months ago they were having major uptime issues". I have high hopes for Gitlab and I think they're doing great things, it's always great to see new competition in the space. And I applaud their transparency, it's refreshing! But it'll require some more "burn in" time before I consider it a reliable Github replacement, all questions of critical mass aside.

<comment><USER8> On the plus side, if the manage to fix their problems at some point people will start trusting them to be up. It is not set in stone that they have worse uptime.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely, and I do think most of their problems have been fixed. So it's just a matter of time - the longer they are stable, the better their reputation will become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I complain every 6 months about their "releases" page - eg this one for my project [https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/releases](https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/releases)

They unhelpfully add a "Source Code" link, which would be great if that is what it was. Instead it is actually just a zip file of the repository at that tag. But the repository is in a maintainer state, so the "Source Code" isn't useful to an end user because various tools need to be run (eg building help, automake/autoconf, dependencies). The people mislead by Github due to this "Source Code" contact me, not github.

Every six months for several years, I send the email explaining how this doesn't serve anyone's interest, how it hurts, and that I am happy with any solution (eg don't auto add, change the name to make it clear, be able to label an existing file as the "Source Code" etc). I get the usual response of understanding and sympathy, and vague suggestion that it may be addressed. Three years and counting ...

<comment><USER10> > They unhelpfully add a "Source Code" link, which would be great if that is > what it was. Instead it is actually just a zip file of the repository at > that tag.

Huh, if all the files of the repository at that tag aren't the "source code" of that release what is?

<comment><USER11> Any reasonably complicated project has some pre-processing that has to be done for a source release. e.g. creating the configure script for autotools repos, or building the documentation. These steps can and should be automated, but github is not providing hooks to perform these automated tasks.

<comment><USER12> Yeah but those steps should be part of the normal build process. If you have to use weird tools (e.g. autotools) to generate your "real" source code, I'd say the problem is those tools. Also. Seriously. Autotools? In 2016?

<comment><USER13> So what would you suggest in lieu of autotools? The only real mature alternative is cmake, and cmake's main advantage is that it is a cross platform build system. Basically that means it works on windows without cygwin or its equivalents.

If you use something other than cmake or autotools, you're going to end up making the lives of packagers more difficult. If they have to change anything, as they usually do, they're going to have to know how the build system works, and they dont necessarily want to deal with whatever new-fangled build system you're using.

Usually projects using cmake distribute their source code with cmake build scripts because they're taking advantage of cmake's cross plaform features, and cmake generates different source distributions for different platforms. But this does place a burden on the user to have cmake installed. There's a good argument to be made that that's no longer much of a burden, after all, it's just one package manager invocation away. But you have to think about who's downloading a source distribution (as opposed to binaries or checking out the repository). They're people who are compiling from source for esoteric platforms, perhaps and embedded system, where a cmake package might not already exist. They're people like me who are writing their own pkgbuild script because they like to keep their system well organized and not have too many useless packages (like cmake) lying around. They are people creating a new linux distribution who haven't yet packaged cmake but want to package your software.

And in terms of software design, cmake isn't very good, at least in the eyes of many people writing unix systems software, which as far as mature open source software projects written in C/C++ go, is a lot. Don't get me wrong, cmake certainly has the cross platform advantage, and if you're making software that you want to compile on windows, you'd be remiss to not at least seriously look into using cmake (not that it's the only option, you could also opt to lean on cross-compiliation from a unix platform to windows, distributing binaries only, or requiring users to install cygwin, which isn't worse than having to install visual studio if you don't already use it).

But if you're _not_ taking advantage of the cross-platform features, I'd say cmake is pretty awful. Precisely because it's cross-platform, cmake rejects the typical design principles of unix software, instead offering a monolithic build system that requires special scripts to be written for any different tools you want to use, or even any complicated dependencies (for example: SDL). This is necessary because cmake needs to establish a consistent internal interface that can work for both the windows and unix tools. As a result, everyone has to learn how to use the monolithic cmake system from the ground up, and those skills won't be useful for anything else.

In contrast, autotools, known for having a high learning curve, is really not that bad for people who already _know unix_. If you understand how to use a unix system, you can figure out autotools faster than you can cmake. And you can _really_ know it, to the extent that you feel confident diving in and messing with its defaults, much sooner than you would with cmake.

But of course, ease of learning isn't the only factor autotools integrates with external tools using their standard interface while cmake demands you essentially write a wrapper for them. Autotools is simply more flexible.

I don't like autotools, for the record, but given the options available, I'd probably choose it over any other build system in almost all the places it's used currently and more.

<comment><USER14> > In contrast, autotools, known for having a high learning curve, is really > not that bad for people who already know unix. If you understand how to use > a unix system, you can figure out autotools faster than you can cmake. And > you can really know it, to the extent that you feel confident diving in and > messing with its defaults, much sooner than you would with cmake.

I've been using unix since 1992 and find the entire autotools suite to be almost incomprehensible. The low point was in 2014 when I was trying to compile a package that intentionally did not ship a configure file and made the user explicitly call autoconf. This would have been ok except that in the 3 or so years between when the code was released and I was trying to build it, autotools made some backward-incompatible changes and autoconf/automake errored out, with no indication of how to fix those. Eventually I just gave up and used a different package.

Conversely, when I started using cmake (motivated by clion using it as a build system) I was able to get it up and running basically immediately, and 12 months later I appear to have become the cmake guru for my company.

<comment><USER15> " _The low point was in 2014 when I was trying to compile a package that intentionally did not ship a configure file and made the user explicitly call autoconf._ "

At the risk of having to admit I've had my share of bad experiences with autotools, _don 't ever do that._ That is a big sign with flashing lights and sirens, saying that you should put that package down and leave it alone. Because...

" _This would have been ok except that in the 3 or so years between when the code was released and I was trying to build it, autotools made some backward- incompatible changes and autoconf /automake errored out, with no indication of how to fix those._"

The version of autotools someone was using when they wrote the scripts is very closely tied to the scripts. It's not at all a good idea to use a different version of the autotools.

<comment><USER16> > _At the risk of having to admit I 've had my share of bad experiences with > autotools, don't ever do that. That is a big sign with flashing lights and > sirens, saying that you should put that package down and leave it alone. > Because..._

And indeed, the exact issue the OP is complaining about is how the zipfile automatically created by GitHub has NOT had autotools run on it yet, and the maintainer cannot even manually overwrite that file!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't have any giant opens source projects so I guess I don't get bothered by the +1s and cries for help. Chromium gets those on their non-github issues. So does Firefox. I'm guessing WebKit does too.

My biggest issue, which I guess is a non-issue for most others?, is I hate when reviewing a PR that every single line comment generates a message/email.

Maybe it's because I'm used to Rietveld but my normal workflow is to start reading the patch and adding comments. I might have made 10 separate line comments before I get to a part of the patch that invalidates all those comments. Therefore I don't want them sent until I'm ready. I want to be able to make line comments across all files in the PR and only when I'm ready, send them as one coherent message.

As it is now, AFAICT, the only way to do this is to write line comments in some other file on my computer and then later manually find the lines again in github and add them one at a time. Rietveld also lets you respond to line comments inline and mark them as "done".

is there anything for github that does the same? Maybe one of their offline tools?

<comment><USER18> I've been working on a bot to copy Github Pull Requests into Gerrit reviews, using the Google-hosted Gerrit servers.

My bot isn't running publicly yet, but you can see the start of it working at:

[https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/546](https://github.com/grpc/grpc- go/pull/546) or [https://github.com/grpc/grpc- go/pull/545](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/545)

(Code is at [https://github.com/LetsUseGerrit/gerritbot](https://github.com/LetsUseGerrit/gerritbot) for now, but I don't imagine anybody would use the code themselves... they'd only interact with it via the Github bot)

<comment><USER19> Gerrit has an excellent REST API, and because I like working with code in a terminal, I wrote Gertty -- a terminal based interface to Gerrit. It should work with the Google hosted servers.

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gertty](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gertty)

<comment><USER20> Gertty is the greatest greatness ever. Doing code reviews on a plane and syncing up when back online is so cool. Thank you for your work on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, It took them 29 days to say "we hear you stay tuned"

<comment><USER22> Some other companies usually don't reply at all. E.g. Apple, Microsoft, etc.

<comment><USER23> Apple responded to antennagate and other hardware issues pretty quickly actually. 2 weeks for Antennagate:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/201297/apples_iphone_4_antenn...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/201297/apples_iphone_4_antenna_gate_timeline.html)

<comment><USER22> Yep, i guess that was an exception

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Qual...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Quality_control_and_customer_service_issues)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Brutal delay in responding to their most important constituent? What the hell? This wasn't a minor user's feature request, it was an open letter signed by a ton of major open source leaders. If I was an investor in GitHub I would fire the CEO.

<comment><USER24> That's the problem. GitHub brass thinks their most important constituent is the people paying thousands of dollars to buy GitHub Enterprise. The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first. However, at this point their enterprise popularity may be big enough that success there is self-sustaining -- enterprises make decisions based more on what other enterprises do rather than on what open source and small companies do.

That being said, I bet that enterprises are screaming about Issues too. Enterprise loves their custom fields.

<comment><USER25> _> The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first._

I have absolutely no idea how GitHub could have lost sight of this simple fact.

<comment><USER26> Didn't they just replace their complete management?

That'd explain it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if this has more to do with ESLint[1] than the letter.

[1]:[https://github.com/eslint/eslint/issues/5205](https://github.com/eslint/eslint/issues/5205)

<comment><USER28> Nope. We'd been working on our response ever since Dear GitHub was published. It just took a little time because we wanted to think long and hard about our response - beyond just the words we used to respond – and actually consider how we are interacting with the community, and where we can make demonstrable improvements. It is just coincidence that the ESLint thread happened this week, and our response came out today.

<comment><USER29> You really should consider _telling_ those who filed the letter that you were at least working on it. Did you expect them to know?!?

<comment><USER30> Did they who filed the letter ask? If they asked and didn't get a reply to the effect of "we're working on it", then I can see your point. If they didn't ask, well then that's on them. I not finding any stories about them asking about what's going on and not receiving a reply, so I'll assume the latter, since I'm sure the former would have been posted about.

<comment><USER29> Who, precisely, were they meant to ask?

Perhaps you should reread that letter:

 _However, many of us are frustrated. Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. We've gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them._

<comment><USER31> It's a statement. There's no question there.

<comment><USER29> It's a statement that said that they asked them to address some critical issues via their regular support channel. The statement said they have already reached out, and they had nowhere else to go so hence the open letter.

Or in other words, to answer the question _I_ was asked (which was "Did they who filed the letter ask?"), yes, they did ask. Apparently repeatedly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now, if only we could get a movement behind a "merge" button that does fast- forward only commits.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, and here's a git alias I made for the occasion:

      merge-pr = "!f() { git fetch $1 $2; git branch _FETCH_HEAD FETCH_HEAD && git rebase HEAD _FETCH_HEAD && git checkout master && git merge --ff-only _FETCH_HEAD; git branch -d _FETCH_HEAD; }; f"

Syntax: `git merge-pr <remote> <branch>`. You can copypaste url + branch from github's UI above the merge button.

Note: This merges only to master, no way to specify another merge target. Feel free to suggest improvements.

<comment><USER33> I have these for merging a PR into develop and master respectively. Usage is `git pr <#>`

      pr  = "!f() { git checkout develop && git fetch -fu ${2:-origin} refs/pull/$1/head:pr/$1 && git checkout pr/$1 && git rebase -i origin/develop && git checkout develop && git merge - && git push; }; f"
      prm  = "!f() { git checkout master && git fetch -fu ${2:-origin} refs/pull/$1/head:pr/$1 && git checkout pr/$1 && git rebase -i origin/master && git checkout master && git merge - && git push; }; f"

<comment><USER5> I remember trying and failing to get exactly that working. I'll give yours a shot, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> From reading the comments on this thread, one could get the impression that HN Github users would have been happier had Github not responded at all.

<comment><USER35> I think some people are miffed that it took them almost a month to just respond to the letter. Maybe you don't care as much about certain software, but some people are _really passionate_ about it.

Perhaps HNers would have appreciated some more substantive action by now, rather than just a response.

<comment><USER34> I'm confused by what these people are asking for. Should Github acquire a time machine? If so, instead of asking for an earlier response to this later, maybe they could just do things differently from the beginning so the letter was never necessary!

<comment><USER35> Being flippant is really unhelpful, and kind of insulting.

People really care about software.

Instead of just responding to us now with a letter that's totally sparse on details, what if GitHub gave us an idea of what they're actually going to do? "We're sorry" is really annoying to hear almost a month after the fact.

<comment><USER36> Maybe they are still trying to figure out what to do? There isn't an easy solution to some of these problems, and it is not like they have NOTHING else to do than solve this issue.

<comment><USER35> They could be as transparent as possible and tell us what they have. This seems like just a stopgap to prevent leakage of the more popular OS repos.

Damage control is not a replacement for answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Github is a large bloated organization that's slow to move, more news at 6.

I don't see how it should shock anyone that its taken Github 29 days to respond. Github can't move at the speed of say, an open source project with a hand full of contributors. They're a company of 100s of people. And the larger an organization is, the harder it gets to make a decision about anything, because more people have to agree. In this case, they have to agree about how to respond to open criticism while saving PR face, which is a difficult task.

I'm fairly confident that the stink this whole Dear Github thing has raised will result in positive changes of some kind, but let's be real, Github is still just a corporation that faces a lot of the same problems other corporations face. They're probably scrambling to get a whole bunch of people to agree on what it is they should do.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Issues haven't gotten much attention from GitHub these past few years and that was a mistake, but we've never stopped thinking about or caring about you and your communities."

A lot of thinking but no action. Github, what have you been up to these years??

<comment><USER39> Keeping a gigantic software application running, mainly. The ease of your role as a bystander and critic in no way reflects the work they have to do to keep the system up.

</comment></comment><comment> rafael-rinaldi I would love to know what the reasonable approach would be ideal from the people talking bad things about GitHub. If they responded to issues right away people would complain too.

It's not easy to come up with a solid plan for new features and improvements, specially in a company this big (that has a lot going on as we all know). What? You think they're going to get that list of complaints and start smashing some code? That letter is not even 1 month old. I can kinda understand the frustration but keep in mind that there's a lot of other things to handle, it's more complicated than that.

In the meantime if you're really struggling, there are other great options available out there like BitBucket and GitLab.

<comment><USER40> _I would love to know what the reasonable approach would be ideal from the people talking bad things about GitHub._

Treat their software development savvy usebase as stakeholders in their ongoing project rather than unwashed masses consuming a loss leader?

A mutually-agreeable reasonable approach probably doesn't exist. Limited visibility into the project may be considered exposing too much of the business for GitHub's tastes. So it will continue to be a one-way relationship, with all the baggage that comes with a one-way relationship (incl "talking bad things").

<comment> rafael-rinaldi Well they used to be open about their future plans on their blog[1]. It hasn't been even a month after that letter and we _finally_ have a response from them. It really doesn't seem to be that big of a deal IMO.

[1] [https://github.com/blog](https://github.com/blog)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Quite nice answer. - Googled for some background and stumbled upon the following:

[Danilo Campos, has been known to tweet similarly strong views about diversity. Campos joined in August]: "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathie and compassion anytime soon so let's limit their scope of damage"

Such a rubbish. I think GitHub has their priorities / focus wrong. - Glad I'm using Gitlab.

<comment><USER42> A couple of thoughts come up, I'm not a white guy and I'm offended by that guys statement, its prejudiced and I'd be embarrassed if that came out of my mouth.

Second if a company is going to trade on being a meritocracy, then be a meritocracy. Why have a diversity council, why be concerned over a bunch of "white guys" and what they can't learn. If they are the best at what they do and if github considers good management traits include compassion and empathy, then whats it matter what color they are the best people would rise up regardless.

This is just prejudice plain and simple.

<comment><USER43> _Second if a company is going to trade on being a meritocracy...._

They haven't for some time: [https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug](https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug)

<comment><USER26> What GitHub did is the worst possible response.

We women get worse education, so the solution is to lower hiring standards for us?

Seriously?

Lobby for better women education, sponsor groups and events engaging in that, but don't hire less qualified people just for their genitals or their skin color.

<comment><USER43> Except that, in all but the most intangible possible metrics, at least in the US women _officially_ get better educations, as measured by graduation rates, grades, and sanctions including most especially medical interventions (for ADD), for both K-12 and college. And in the former most of their teachers are women.

<comment><USER26> Well, that makes it even more ridiculous.

But even if women get worse education, the answer can't be to reduce hiring standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Thank you GitHub, to know that you need 29 days to reply, let my OpenSource GitHub Project look not soooo bad. :-)

<comment><USER45> It took GitHub's support exactly 82 days to respond to my issue[1]. In the end, I literally had to ask a GitHub employee on his AMA to look up what the hell is going on.

[1] [https://blog.r3bl.me/en/worst-support-experience- ever/](https://blog.r3bl.me/en/worst-support-experience-ever/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> If they take 29 days to respond to this, I wonder how long they might take to respond to the fairly shocking allegations within the recent Business Insider article [0]?

In fact I wonder if this response was ever going to happen on its own? Perhaps the cause of the response was their recent string of bad press - dear github, business insider, eslint, etc.

It strikes me as strange that a company that has so many people focused on community and social impact doesn't have time to talk to its users.

I hope they manage to sort themselves out as it's getting embarrassing.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067)

<comment><USER47> Why do they have to respond at all to that article? I fail to see how that article is relevant for anyone who has projects on GitHub.

<comment><USER46> They're not being forced into responding.

But it was unsettling to hear an anonymous source say they were avoiding interviews on racial grounds. That sounds illegal if it's true - and even if it's not true, surely it's something you should be open about? People care about fairness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Reading the reactions to their addressing the complaints, I really don't envy the folks at Github. A lot of folks in the "Yeah that's nice but what about X/Y/Z" range (and same here on HN).

There's simply no winning.

<comment><USER49> It'd be a little easier to identify key requests if they implemented voting to solve the "+1" comments, as identified in the "Dear Github" letter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wish more companies would take more time to respond to these sorts of situations. Perhaps this was excessive (I see conflicting reports of where they responded and when). But...

Let things cool off, take a hard look at things internally, get the stakeholders committed to actual change, _then_ provide an update. I'm far more likely to believe that then even a perfectly executed PR play. I've watched even the most pathological and idiotic tech people get good at those the past 10 years. Beware people with good haircuts who say nothing and only appear during times of trouble.

<comment><USER51> > Let things cool off, take a hard look at things internally, get the > stakeholders committed to actual change, then provide an update.

This is _not_ an update - this is "we're looking into it", which should precede the internal soul-searching and actual change. They should have released this the moment they decided they were going to look into it - <USER2> outsiders, that moment seemed to be 29 days after the open letter was published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> That's a great question on the page by EGreg:

> I wonder if GitHub itself can use its own issues system for prioritizing > feature requests and bugs :-)

</comment><comment><USER53> I just hope they also add new features centering around depreciation of repos and the ability to add a "THIS IS NO LONGER BEING MAINTAINED" flag or an equivalent.

Finding a repo that appears to solve my problems only to find a mass of issues and an absent maintainer is a pretty big time sink, for both me and likely the maintainer too!

<comment><USER54> It's pretty easy right now to just change the header of the README, and/or the project description to indicate deprecation. What added benefit would making it a feature provide?

<comment><USER55> It requires the maintainer to do this. Often if the maintainer isn't maintaining the codebase then they won't be updating the readme either.

<comment><USER56> Wouldn't it be up to the maintainer to toggle the "no longer maintained" flag?

Sometimes a project that hasn't seen commits in a long time isn't orphaned, but just doesn't need changes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Great, but please resist the urge and goading to build another JIRA in github. The second best thing about github is its simplicity.

<comment><USER58> In an ideal world, the Issues team would develop and support a plugin ecosystem for the tracker. Users can customize and add the features they see fit and even create their own custom plugins. Allows flexibility and power for those who want it while keeping the core simple and clean

<comment><USER59> This is the best idea.

While some features like +1s and contributing guidelines should be baked in, other features like extra fields, requiring people to sign a disclosure, etc would be best left to plugins that can hook into issues much like CI services hook into pull requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Has anyone else made the decision to switch due to github's internal racism and sexism rather than technical reasons? That's my biggest reason for looking at alternatives lately (although I haven't made the move yet, but plan to as soon as I have some spare time)

<comment><USER61> We haven't switched an existing project, but we're looking around for a place for a new library we're going to publish in a few weeks. It will most probably be on Assembla or Gitlab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> To any githubbers reading this:

A lot of people posting here are being unreasonable, demanding, and childish. Recognize that for what it is, don't let it affect you, and just continue moving forward based on the constructive part of the feedback.

<comment><USER20> Yes, continue to ignore feedback from the community and enjoy your market lead because once you have that users will never leave for another product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is rather a nonresponse. It basically says GitHub read the letter. It makes no promises, proposes no solutions and no timeline. After working in gaming for years we would post responses just like this all the time and get something scheduled 6 months to a year out knowing that just responding with general affirmations would placate customers without having to do actually fix anything.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'll be more optimistic and be happy they replied and very interested in what they have in store. They say "next week" and it's Friday so it won't take that long.

</comment><comment><USER65> Can't wait to see what actually _tangible_ outcome this will have.

I think that's far more interesting than that they took 29 days to respond; ok, they did. Deal with it. They have responded now.

What's important is what happens next.

A public issue tracker?

A rust style RFC process? ([https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs))

Just please, whatever you do, do it fast, and stop people from doing what babel did and migrating to phabricator. :P

</comment><comment><USER66> Businesses are ridiculously slow. What I can tell you about a business that is a blackbox to you which will surprise you: It's a blackbox to them as well. They just don't know how to manage so many people and ideas. And the sad part is most managers don't. So I don't think it will change. The solution would be to educate the manager about how to find out what's not working and how to resolve such problems, or switch the manager with one that is willing to constantly work on getting things to work instead of just keeping the head above the water. It's a really hard problem though, since as an employee you don't gain much by resolving true systematic problems, and you even may lose some value with your coworkers by changing their daily processes that they are used to so well. It's really something that must come from the top, but if there is nobody to do that then it won't happen.

</comment><comment><USER67> I think a lot of the disappointed comments are understandable here. (obnoxious or not).

I know I personally expected one of either to happen

1\. Github responds in 2-3 days with the EXACT response they made.

2\. Github responds in 1-2 weeks with a concrete plans that addresses at least some of the concerns the original letter addressed.

They basically did the bad combination of both.

One of the things that frustrates me the most about companies responding to feedback is "We have it planned" and "we don't have an exact timeline".

More than anything I really dislike the "stay tuned". I don't want to stay tuned, you should either tell me when to expect it or I will tune out (and I think that's what most people think).

To me, this is a non-response.

I like Github, I use it every day. I don't have any plans to move away from Github. If I had a project that I felt wasn't fit for Github, this response would not change anything for me, I would still likely research for alternatives.

</comment><comment> nv-vn Ironic that most of the replies were '+1's

</comment><comment><USER68> Right, this is typical for proprietary software. Everyone has to beg and petition and then if a company isn't _awful_ , they'll respond and do something. Meanwhile, you still can't adapt things to your needs or submit pull requests or otherwise do what you could with free/libre/open tools. And if GitHub does a good job addressing these requests, it will encourage everyone to stay with GitHub… where we're still helpless serfs.

If we all demand software freedom, then we won't be so helpless in the future with whatever issues come up.

</comment><comment><USER29> That took a long _long_ time for them to respond. It's day 29 now. In fact, they could have communicated something after even a week - probably something similar to what they have actually written, only more 'We're looking at your list and we'll try to get back to you as soon as possible'.

Where is Jono Bacon in all of this?

 _edit:_ OK, I feel kind of bad for mentioning Jono because I've watched him do awesome things over the years. I've sent him an email out of the blue asking him to respond - hopefully he gets it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you, and when Jono made his post on the original Hacker News thread, I immediately followed him on twitter and even CC'd him on tweets that had people talking about things hoping that he'd respond to them, at least post a public post outside of the HN thread saying that they're working on things... But he was more worried about promoting the community leadership summit.

Kind of sad honestly. Not very good community leadership by ignoring your own community to promote a community leadership conference.

<comment><USER29> To be fair, he was flying into linux.conf.au all the way in Geelong - that's a _long_ flight. It could well have been that he's recovering - I notice that his last blog post was February 1st.

And of course I'm kicking myself that I missed the conference entirely. Sigh. Next year I guess.

<comment><USER69> You are not kidding about the long flight. I wish someone could move Australia a little closer to California. :-)

Hope to see you at linux.conf.au next year, chris_wot! :-)

<comment><USER29> Thanks Jono :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Next we need to figure out how to light this same fire under Docker. In someways they're even worse. They often close issues because they won't be addressed in the next release. I've tried to explain that this is exactly the case where you want to leave an issue open. They said they would think about that but still leave issues they don't want to work on right now closed.

</comment><comment><USER71> The fact that this discussion is being made by committing to a README.md file seems to point to a serious lack of tools for interaction...

</comment><comment><USER72> Remember it took _years_ just to get them to properly display code that uses tabs (and we still didn't get a simple ui setting).

</comment><comment><USER73> Oh wow, that's all they have to say after weeks? Funny enough Gitlab responded in hours. Opportunistic or not, that is why people are taking it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER74> Not sure why they did this on a Friday. I know the standard PR playbook says to release bad news on Friday but I wouldn't call a response to this bad news.

</comment><comment><USER75> Well, even if quality is declining I wouldn't know where else to go for now. Gerrit doesn't cut it and neither does Bitbucket. Guess we will see.

</comment><comment><USER76> What's the point of "we're going to reply next week" post on a Friday? Just make a statement next week.

</comment><comment><USER77> GitHub should consider "open sourcing" GitHub itself so the community can submit PRs and RFPs.

<comment><USER78> But if they did that it might hurt their enterprise, non-SaaS, offering considering people could then install it on their own.

<comment><USER77> True, but that's GitLab's business strategy anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> this would be a better link : [https://github.com/bkeepers/dear- github](https://github.com/bkeepers/dear-github)

</comment><comment><USER80> What I want, more than anything, is to search on commit hashes.

</comment><comment><USER81> Since they only offered a "receipt" for the original letter, why did it take two months? They could have put this response out the same day the "Dear GitHub" letter was posted.

</comment><comment><USER82> So tempted to add a +1 comment...

(This is a joke, please do not do it)

</comment><comment><USER83> TLDR; We've been busy making piles of money in Enterprise land and forgot that we acquire customers via FOSS. Oops.

</comment><comment><USER84> And the first response to their letter was a:

:+1:

</comment><comment><USER85> I complain every day more about how we organize our works and need the insanely complex git to collaborate because we have insane ways of producing code.

An industry that requires increased insane level of complexity for simple task to "progress" amaze me at failing to get the problem is not in the tools.

I can guarantee that for 10 weeks work with "old" technologies (python + whatever static HTML server) I can make a one size fits all website for all restaurant that can be customized without security holes. Make it in a free license so that people make money with my second creation ... on purpose. And we would all win. All the economy from having something simple and well thought.

But I can't do it. I am not an influent trend maker so no one will bet a kopek on my business.

And you know, these tools cognitive load on the brain, is a load that should be spent on business problems, where cost efficiency matters.

Where operational expenses are better kept low whatever the initial investment is.

The fact we all use at least git (+ a ticket tracker) that are heavyweight, should tell us that we are dangerously inflating the cost of building software. Hence, contradicting our very primary reason to be : which is to diminish operational expenses the most we can.

And we still have not proven anything about how much money this increased expenses due to complexity finally create value anywhere... In decreased price, decreased incidents, higher quality, better jobs, better economical growth ... saved lives...business values true SLA (and not the one measured by the editors/operators)...

So, well, github may not be the problem.</comment>


How we built the prototype for Split by GroupMe in a weekend using Balanced - <AUTHOR> http://blog.groupme.com/post/44797051373/how-we-built-the-prototype-for-split-by-groupme-in-a

<comment><USER2> > Not a programmer? It's cool. Be good at something. If you're awesome at > making pitch decks for your boss, spend a weekend making a killer pitch deck > about your own idea.

This is great advice. While it's important to push your limits and learn new skills -- hacker culture often looks very favorably on jacks-of-all-trades, or "learning to build x" with no prior experience -- it's also important to know exactly what you can bring to the table, and then deliver quality work, in whatever it is you do best.

</comment><comment><USER3> These kinds of things are fun to read but I'd love to see more posts along the lines of "how we built x in y years".

<comment><USER4> That would be the summation of their blog posts. It's easier to search for and access blog posts that are around specific topics as opposed to longwinded novels covering several processes.</comment></comment>


Will the iPad Kill Reading? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/11/who-needs-catch-22-when-you-have-flight-control/

<comment><USER2> My experience is quite the opposite.

Unless it's in a darkened room, where the glow really does cause eyestrain, I've found reading on the ipad to be surprisingly pleasant. In landscape mode it feels "odd", but in portrait I find the device becomes as invisible as the kindle after a few pages despite, having an LCD screen. Not at all what I expected.

With the instapaper app installed I find the ipad is actually the superior reading device. Before leaving work I'll fire up instapaper and download all the articles I've marked during the day to read on the commute home. After they're finished i flip over to the kindle app and continue with whatever book I'm on.

I've loved my V1 kindle since it was released, but aside from heading to the beach or on some really really long trip I can't imagine a reason to use it over the iPad. Like I said, not at all what i expected.

<comment><USER3> I've actually found the opposite to be true - reading on the iPad is atrocious in bright light because of the glare (probably would be alleviated with an antiglare screen protector), while pleasant on the kindle. I like the slight glow and lack of a need of external light convenient in near darkness.

Overall I end up reading a lot more than I normally would regardless of the device, mostly because I have some combination of {kindle|iPhone|iPad} with me while I don't often like to carry around books for weight and inconvenience stuffing into my purse. I daresay the convenience of my iPhone was what prompted me to really start reading a lot daily, whereas before I wasn't such an avid casual reader because I always found something else to do. My kindle then made it a little more convenient to read newer mainstream books, and then the iPad made reading all sorts of books possible.

While eink is convenient and vastly superior for outdoor reading, the benefit of a full color display means there is so much more to read now that needed a higher resolution and/or color display (see: many textbooks, graphic novels), not that it's only for games or whatever else I want to do. If I decide to go check my email and play We Rule instead of reading, blame my ADD, not the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depressing but insightful article. But perhaps a bit premature; the e-ink folks are presumably still researching better techniques, and someday we'll almost certainly have e-ink that works in colour (in a CMY space, no less!) and with update times well south of a tenth of a second, and then you can have your cake and eat it too---at least on the readability part.

The distraction part of the argument I don't really have a response to, alas.

<comment><USER5> The experience he describes of reading the NYT on the iPad is just like reading it online, they way most NYT readers consume it now.

For that matter, it's like reading the paper NYT in a room that has a TV on.

Yet, reading is still alive.

So we live in an ADD culture. We've been living in it at least since the invention of the Remote. The iPad is completely meaningless in that sense, even if it will manage to become more than a true-believer product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the iPad (at least iBooks) is best for people who have no interest in investing the time in perusing book stores or buying a device just to read books. But now that something you wanted has a nice book reader inside of it, you might as well check out a copy (maybe just a the sample) of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.</comment>