A WebSocket Primer - <AUTHOR> http://caitiem.com/2013/12/02/a-websocket-primer/ An overview of the basics of the WebSocket protocol, what you need to get started <comment><USER2> It's funny that the article says _" This enables server sent events"_ without actually referring to the HTML5 _Server Sent Events API_ :

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eventsource/basics/](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eventsource/basics/)

SSE is realtime server->client protocol that's fully compatible with HTTP and has lower handshake overhead (no Upgrade roundtrip, doesn't require HTTPS to go through proxies).

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Both approaches have their place, but I see SSE getting overlooked too often.

<comment><USER4> I'm not 100% up to speed on SSE but since there is no way to "push" to a client isn't it just some form of polling at the end of the day?

It's also not supported by IE yet: [http://caniuse.com/eventsource](http://caniuse.com/eventsource)

Compare with [http://caniuse.com/websockets](http://caniuse.com/websockets)

<comment><USER5> _> isn't it just some form of polling at the end of the day?_

Probably long-poll, a single connection from client to server kept alive with the occasional byte sent one way which sends the message and disconnects when there is something to send (the disconnect, requiring a new request from the client is because some clients won't process what has been sent immediately unless the connection is closed).

I once wrote a messaging client that operated this way. It is efficient in terms of bandwidth use and client footprint, though if you are using a process based we server it can be quite inefficient there (an event driven service on few processes/threads is far more efficient for handling many long-lived low- activity connections).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related: definitely check out [https://github.com/sockjs](https://github.com/sockjs)

<comment><USER7> Also check out [https://github.com/primus/primus](https://github.com/primus/primus) It's an abstraction layer over sockjs, socket.io, etc.

<comment><USER8> Does any have experiences with Primus they can share?

The idea of being able to insulate the rest of the code from the specifics of which lower-level library I'm using is very attractive. On the other hand, any abstraction layer can introduce bugs in its own right. Thoughts about the tradeoff?

<comment><USER9> I'm using it now for a project that's due to go live early next year and so far it's been a dream. Case in point, I ran in to a bug on Monday and it turned out to be with engine.io itself rather than Primus. The workaround was a one line code change swapping the transformer to something else.

Arnout Kazemier (the lead dev) is a really nice guy and when I pinged him about the egine.io bug, he pushed out a change to Primus 24 hours later that worked around the bug and let me continue to use engine.io as the transformer.

YMMV but so far I've no regrets using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know the purpose of Sec-WebSocket-Key and the associated Accept? I know the hashing stuff ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket)) but I don't understand why it exists.

<comment><USER11> It's there to help guarantee that the server the browser is connecting to actually understands websockets and isn't being "tricked" into opening a connection through clever request formulation. With that guarantee in place, browsers can trust servers to properly check for and limit cross-domain requests and the like and not need to use something like CORS to negotiate that stuff.

<comment><USER10> Why not skip all the hashing stuff? Why not just have Sec-Key: 'secret' and expect a reply with Sec-Accept: 'secret'. (where secret is hardcoded constant)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've actually been writing a MUD in Node.js with WebSockets (well, Socket.IO, thus I get failover support). It's been a lot of fun, and has been really easy to use.

What is really interesting is just how easy it is to use WebSockets with the latest libraries. I've got a project in .NET that relies on a lot of Microsoft-specific libraries right now. But with the ease of WebSockets, I can rewrite the UI in HTML5 like we always wanted and get around to rewriting the MS-specific stuff in Java or Python more likely whenever I feel like it.

It's like completely platform agnostic pipes, in a way that TCP/IP sockets never seemed to quite do.

EDIT: I think it's just that I don't have to listen for new connections and figure out how to bind them in a loop that I keep alive myself. I get an event when users connect.

</comment><comment><USER13> Found out today that WebSockets now work on Heroku. Wrote a little quick app that uses them: [http://colorchats.herokuapp.com/](http://colorchats.herokuapp.com/)

Need to clean up a few things, but it was a neat 45 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER14> Would have rather seen sample code as Plain Old Javascript, or some other language that you can use without buying into the Microsoft ecosystem.

Suggest the title be changed to:

A WebSocket Primer for .Net 4.5

The rest of it is a cool read, though. Thanks for submitting.

<comment><USER15> Maybe C# was just the language at hand when the research was done, perhaps as part of a day job. Why not blog something up about web sockets in JavaScript?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a commandline http client that can negotiate WebSockets? If so, I might be tempted to experiment.

<comment><USER17> Libwebsockets contains a simple command line client and server:

[http://libwebsockets.org/](http://libwebsockets.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great explanation!</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favourite music album? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Revolver, the Beatles. Bar none. Great moment in their history between invasion pop and psychedelic experimentation.

A close second is Abbey Road though, mostly for the holistic composition of the album.

As far as modern(ish) albums go, I'm currently pretty into Weezer's latest (Everything Will Be Alright In The End)</comment>


The Three Most Common Refactoring Opportunities You Are Likely to Encounter - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kylegalbraith.com/2019/06/30/the-three-most-common-refactoring-opportunities-you-are-likely-to-encounter/ <comment><USER2> The worst bug I ever introduced was when refactoring duplicate code.

I was refactoring handling of dates. The code was littered with date handling that was not thread safe and duplicated all over the place. So. I made it thread safe and pull it all out into a central place. But while doing so I accidentally introduced a new bug that then hit every single time dates where being handled. Which was all the time. Several thousand times per minute.

Oh my. The cleaning up we had t do after that.

The lessons I learned was: 1. Don't be so eager to refactor code.

2\. If you refactor repeated code you are introducing a single point of failure. Make sure it works.

</comment><comment> chupa-chups I am also quite careful deduplicating code. Most of the time it is correct and good for code quality, but quite a few times the duplicated code was just seeming to be duplicated (i.e. the code was (almost) the same, but not the reason for the code).

This led a few times to bugs, since someone changed the central, de-duplicated method correctly without thinking about the "other" use case unknown to her/him.</comment>


What G+ is really about (pst it's not social) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/photos/100238778462210489846/albums/5629087019815403777

<comment><USER3> On Facebook you buy ads for ~$1+ because you can set target demographic to something as specfic as "women; 42-47 years old; looking for relationships with other women; with a degree in biology or computer science; attened Harvard; Works at IBM; who likes horseback riding or skiing"

Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously.

That is what Google is trying to get a piece of.

<comment><USER4> I am not convinced it is that useful to have explicitly targeted audiences for advertisement. It may be better to understand and interpret an ad campaign, but generally, what works best when doing statistical prediction is not what is the most intuitive.

Also, even though your example is obviously not meant to be taken as is, it shows that targeted demographics quickly don't have a lot of data behind them. Successful stories in AI usually involves lots of averaged data with only little "focused" data to adapt your model quickly (e.g. as done in speech recognition where models are estimated on 1000s of hours from many speakers, and the model is then adapted for the one speaker to be recognized).

I think the value of the so called social graph for advertising is overestimated. IMO, what's interesting about facebook is more the amount and diversity of data than its personalized nature. But then, I have little knowledge about algo for advertisement targetting, maybe the situation is different than the domains I am familiar with.

<comment><USER5> Who says it's about effectiveness of the ad? It might just be effectiveness of getting money from the advertisers. More data means you can do more hand- waving to say that this ad will be the one that really really reaches people this time.

<comment><USER6> Because in the end if ads are not effective, you won't be getting money from the advertisers anymore. Marketers can't know in advance which marketing channels will work - so they kinda carpet bomb with their campaigns. However once they start getting data, they sure as hell kill of the channels that don't work.

Unethical behavior does not scale in business, no matter how much your calculations rationalize it. In the end people just go away from sleazy businesses. GM and Ford might tell you a story about it and millions of others short term profit oriented businesses also.

Theres only so much bullshit you can pile up before your reputation catches on to you.

<comment><USER7> As much as I'd like to think you're right, you're probably wrong. The advertising industry is making very real money, which gives people an incentive to keep it going even though it delivers close to nothing.

Why do people buy Coca Cola? Is it because of the tremendously expensive advertisements they put out or is it because the stuff is ubiquitous, tastes fairly good and is usually not surrounded by a lot of competing products at the places where it's sold?

Don't believe me? What about if you're in a restaurant that sells only Pepsi. Do you leave the restaurant in search of another that sells Coca-Cola? Most people probably don't, thereby proving that all the so-called "positive emotions" advertisements instill in consumers do absolutely nothing when the time comes to make purchase. Theoretically, yes, in a situation where you can choose either Pepsi or Coca-Cola for (roughly) the same price, Coca-Cola's advertising campain may have an effect, but such situations are exceedingly rare. In most purchasing decisions there are variables that have much more significance than the advertising history of the products.

So ads are, probably, not effective. And despite this fact, there has been an industry selling them for over a century and that industry has been getting richer and richer, thereby proving that you can perfectly well build a business on scamming people and keeping it up indefinitely. You do, however, have to keep playing around with some superficial parameters of your business model to keep it convincing. Which is exactly what Google is doing here.

(btw, I use - and love - Google's services, but never in my life have I clicked one of their ads or even looked at one for more than a split second)

<comment><USER6> I was talking of marketing in general. Advertising is only a single branch of marketing.

And its obvious that Coca-Cola's marketing has been waaay better than Pepsi's. And also I believe that Pepsi is quite comfortable in its #2 position. As is Burger King in its own.

Don't forget, that second biggest player in a huge market is usually still a friggin big behemoth. And that for Pepsi and BK being #2 is a core business strategy. Less upside, but also less downside. These companies basically use their bigger competitors as a hedge against market change.

<comment><USER7> Ok. I guess I was confused because the grand parent talked about advertising (Google's targeted ads).

Marketing in general, I agree, has some non-bullshit aspects to it. Not many, though.

But certainly the marketing that causes Coca Cola to be sold in way, way more places than Pepsi has been very effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why can't it be many or all of these things?

I find it highly implausible that google has as strong a desire to form simple, narrow narratives around its strategy and ambitions as bloggers and the media do.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great usage of the G+ photo viewer for slides, but I don't think G+'s main focus is about moving apps/games into the cloud ..

The most convincing argument I have heard is that 'social signals' are (going to be?) a fantastic resource for cutting through the spammy, link-swapping www of today.

<comment><USER10> Social signals also have a lot of noise. It may be even harder to tell the signal from the noise in social signals.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, good point. However, if Google only uses the signals from my circles, I could be insulated from the noise :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not quite used to seeing a photo of myself in the top bar across Google sites, but I can certainly see where they're taking this is more than the 'facebook killer!!' the media would make it out to be. Google has a lot more to offer as a company than Facebook - YouTube, Docs, two OSs, a vast ad network, search and news - in addition to their features which overlap with FB, such as Blogger or Picasa. Google+ is unifying all of that into a very impressive product, which is rather unprecedented. I'd be looking at what Apple thinks, too. And Amazon... it's definitely not just about Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's times like this that I wish HN was curated. It seems that everyday we get posts like this where some random person - "I'm a first time tech founder; I'm also a first time programmer." - conjures up a bunch of ideas supported only by their imagination.

<comment><USER6> I think his usage of G+ album to create a presentation was awesome and inspiring.

Also I believe he has a point. And found his message to be more lucid, clear and entertaining than 90% of three paragraph ramblings about this and that around here.

And just as a conclusion. Bill Gates was once a radnom person, as was Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, etc...

Maybe you should focus more on originality and evaluate merit of these ideas instead of only craving for more stuff to be fed down your throat by current status Quo holders.

And I believe that this is what HN is about. HN is curated, by HN community - and it's obvious that HN community believes this contribution's place is at the top of the front page.

<comment><USER12> What was his point? Where's the data to back it up. That's right, there's nothing of substance, only speculation. If your high profile names wrote some speculative piece I would consider it equally worthless. Either your argumentation has merits or it doesn't.

I don't think you understand the meaning of curation. Curation doesn't imply censorship or that a certain group of people filter content based on a certain set of value, rather it means that they would ensure a high signal to noise by removing posts that don't really contribute to a discussion.

<comment><USER6> I think you're over analyzing. G+ is out for barely two weeks now. It has not even been released to the general public. Any internal strategy Google itself has is merely of speculative nature until it gets proven or not.

Any great strategy is merely speculation also is figuring and/or anticipating other peoples moves. A great strategist needs to have a great gut feeling and be lucky. When Napoleon was presented with a new officer and after his merits have been presented to him, he supposedly asked "Very well, but is he lucky?".

That is why bean counters never get to do anything great. And that is why people love good speculators. And all the guys I mentioned are incredible speculators.

Not everything can be quantified and analyzed. And regarding curation - <USER2> community has decided that this specific piece of speculation is interesting and insightful. I hope I don't need to remind you that this particular mob is not you average Joe Sixpack mob?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Right now, G+ is populated by a bunch of early adopters and it's pretty nice, mostly because 90% of the folks you know and only keep in touch with out of a sense of duty haven't gotten in, and G+ doesn't support superpoke and Zynga yet.

Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy. In to succeed, Google needs to maintain laser- like focus of usability and continue to innovate on a small number of features -- it can't just glom random stuff onto it or integrate random GoogleLabs projects.

For those whom Google Docs is a suitable replacement for Sharepoint, I doubt integrating G+ will make a huge difference. For those for whom Google Docs is inadequate, G+ won't tip the balance. If G+ takes the proposed approach it will actually alienate many potential users. It's better to embrace the outside world than replace it. (And, in fact, it contradicts the "blue ocean" strategy.)

Frankly, from a big picture strategic viewpoint, it's great to see Google annihilating Facebook, but it's fiddling while China burns. It's losing search, and no-one in China aspires to own an Android phone -- they're saving up to buy iPhones and using non-Google Android phones while they wait.

<comment><USER14> "Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy."

My feed has interesting/funny comments and links... because I just put interesting and funny people in my circles. And I don't consider the fact that I can only see 2-3 items on a high-res display bad if the quality of the content is higher than other sites I visit. There are some blogs whose index page have the same issue and I'm fine with it because I know that every single piece of content posted is well worth the surface area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> G+ is about moving _everything_ into the _Google_ "cloud". In a same way Facebook (and VKontakte, and whatever else) is about moving _everything_ into their "cloud".

Cloud is a buzzword, it doesn't really mean anything here.

G+ is just a Buzz (thus, GMail) + GTalk + Picasa + Latitude + Google Profiles, covered under one convenient interface. You can't peer with it, you have to actually use it itself (i.e., have and maintain an account there). Yes, there are some APIs to control that account (FB has some, too), and you could have a backup copy of your own data, but doesn't really matter.

It's still almost exactly the same as Facebook.

<comment><USER6> You can't do that YET.

As far as Cloud hype & buzzwords goes. I was of same opinion until I started doing my startup. Now basically all infrastructure I have (besides my personal computers) is of SAAS nature somewhere in yes Cloud.

We could say Internet, but that would be confusing - since Internet is such a broad term.

For what its worth as a reformed nonbeliever I'm telling you. Cloud is awesome and its here to stay. So you better get used to it.

<comment><USER15> Cloud is a good thing, but it is pointless buzzword in that context. "Cloud" is when you distribute your stuff over some cluster of physical machines. This increases reliability, allows to scale performance, simplifies deployment and so on. Does it matter to end-user how Google infrastructure's organised inside?

Sure, some cloud providers have compatible APIs (as this is the case with Amazon S3 API), so the data could be moved between "clouds" easily. Compatibility is not a general property of a "cloud", and moreover - this is not a case with G+.

And SAAS is not a "cloud", it's just that nowadays most SAAS are marketed as "cloud" because they internally rely on some distributed storage or processing system. It's just that "cloud" quickly became a buzzword, replacing cumbersome "SAAS" abbreviation.

We've had SAAS in 90's (and, probably, earlier). Remember hosted forums, webchats and guestbooks? This was certainly SAAS, and probably not a "cloud".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Summary: Google+ is an attempt to move applications/things onto the web, and make sharing and coloborating easier. The goal is not to take on Facebook/Twitter, but to take on MS Office and App Stores

</comment><comment><USER17> > "do you know how often people still email documents / photos / > spreadsheets?"

Great, so G+ is yet another attempt to get people to stop using common communications standards like email and instead break the internet up into a set of distinct one-provider-oriented services that can't talk to each other?

<comment><USER18> No, the goal is to make it not matter what service you're using.

<comment><USER19> In which way? Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER18> There was a post on here about it recent enough, but I don't think I saved the link. It basically suggested that it shouldn't matter what social network your friends are using - you should be able to seamlessly connect with someone who is using facebook from google plus.

I would expect that idea to apply to apps and the sharing of documents as well. If your friend is not using google plus, the document could be sent to their email instead, but the though process would be "I need to send them this document" instead of "I need to email this document to them" or even "I need to send them this document using google docs".

<comment><USER20> But how does Google+ help accomplish that goal? It's a closed platform just like every other has been; for that you need federation APIs (like those of Appleseed & StatusNet) to enable cross-server communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No, it's about social.

The other stuff is already happening, and Google is winning.

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading somewhere that Google's overarching policy is really a "scorched earth" policy where due to the "fuck you" money afforded them by their search business, they are able to offer services and products from which their competitors (probably anybody in tech) derive their core business from for almost nothing. Effectively this creates a moat around the Google castle with the surrounding land razed, allowing no one else to subsist or grow large enough to ever challenge them.

Sometimes I believe this...sometimes I don't. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER23> Here is the "scorched earth" post: [http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is- an...](http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-android/)

I agree with it regarding Android & Chrome OS, but I'm not sure that it applies to web apps like G+, gmail since those have per user costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why can't it be about both? Also, from the perspective of Google, why let Facebook enjoy the 'blue ocean' of social, if the blue/red ocean is such an important concept for new products?

</comment><comment><USER25> G+ is also about giving Google a much richer social relationships graph than anyone has ever had. I can only wonder at the long-term effects of the information asymmetries that are developing. At least with twitter (and fb, for that matter) most of the relationships were public.

</comment><comment><USER26> So ... social networking isn't "blue ocean", but office suites and app stores are? Huh?

</comment><comment><USER27> From where I stand, G+ is about advertising - the more information Google have about you, the better they can target ads at you, and therefore the more likely you are to click on their ads, thereby making them money.

</comment><comment><USER28> G+ is a move into social media, what's a better way to have live data on your user base than the data generated by a service you control, and maybe why profiles must be public.

</comment><comment><USER29> FYI, it's really hard to see the blue ocean / red ocean slides on my mobile device, and enlarging them only makes it blurry (samsung galaxy s). It's funny because I got to the punchline and couldn't read it. I still don't know what it says other than guessing that it's all about the apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, do you know if anyone else has had problem reading it on a mobile device?

<comment><USER30> It was ok on my HTC Desire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nicely done and easier to follow. Although I think just like any good business Facebook cannot let it's guard down no matter what this presentation says.

</comment><comment><USER32> I just like how G+ helps me share internet jokes with my friends, and at the same time, still be within my anti-social comfort zone.

</comment><comment><USER33> I guess this is why there's no Google Chrome App to compete with Tweetdeck.

<comment><USER34> Tweetdeck has a Chrome App. I have it open in Chrome right now...

<comment><USER33> Please re-read my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really don't see Google allowing people to share apps they bought.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can think of better ways of displaying that information. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER37> it's not mobile either... completely impossible to read that on android

<comment><USER20> It's bad for those of us who don't like to use the mouse too. I wonder how is the rest of G+ with regard to keyboard support?</comment></comment>


Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history <comment><USER2> 99% Invisible did a great story on this called Devil's Rope [0]. It's pretty amazing what people were able to accomplish.

[0] - [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils- rope/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Stories like this help me stay a little bit hopeful that if (or more cynically, when) the time comes, we can roll out independent mesh networks to connect ourselves. If our grandparents and great-grandparents could do it, why can't we?

Hell, ADSL works over a piece of wet string. [https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/rfc-2549.html](https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/rfc-2549.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not a dupe but this was linked on both of these discussions five days ago:

Ethernet over barbed wire | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263)

ADSL over wet string | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107)

</comment><comment><USER5> Astonishing how this article does not once use the phrase "party line".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_\(telephony\))

<comment><USER6> my aunt and uncle's farm in interior BC had this setup until the late 90s, well into the 56K modem era. Remember other people in your house yelling at you to turn off the internet because they had to use the phone? Imagine that scaled up to a dozen houses :)

<comment><USER7> Small world. I spent some long weekends at a cabin on green lake (BC interior) with a party line.

Party lines used standard telephone lines. The joke was that they had nothing to do with the cost of the wire. The cost of the wire is a tiny part of the cost of installing the system. It was the phone company not wanting to install the switching gear. Sometimes the party line was tied together within BC- Tell's box. So when they installed better switching gear everyone suddenly had their own line. That's different than barbwire rigs that ran over single lines. (BC-Tell is now called "telus")

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure BC-Tel only has the one L in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My folks power company buried the power lines in the rural areas to avoid trees falling and causing outages. They should have ran cable or fiber while doing this, total waste of man power and work. Too far for DSL but they have power.

</comment><comment><USER10> Something else to bear in mind - most of these 'farmers lines' were one wire circuits - so single wire for talking, earth ground return, local talk battery at each instrument on the circuit too.

You'd get all sorts of atmospherics and other noises during even calm weather (more in storms) (squeals, howling sounds, humming sounds, etc) - figure you basically have an aerial, with an induction coil, a speaker and a mic.

<comment><USER11> Still beats yelling.

<comment><USER12> What about carrier pigeons?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Today, rural internet development is fairly often compared to delivering phone and electricity back in the day. It, too, is sometimes a homegrown affair because it isn't profitable to commercial establishments, yet can serve as a vital lifeline connecting isolated people to the larger world.

</comment><comment><USER14> A friend's rural internet connection was getting 50kb throughput recently. It turned out the line was lying across an electric fence. Clearing it got him back up to his usual 1mb

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds similar to how amateur radio systems are used by people in rural places, or Fidonet, or other hacked together solutions to common problems. Ultimately these seem to be stopgap measures that are replaced by utilities in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER16> Side comment, but I saw this on an HN comment about a week or two ago and since then I've seen it front page here, reddit, and other newsfeeds.

I wonder which of the following apply:

1) It's always been a popular post and I never noticed it

2) It was already catching fire and seeing it on HN was part of that spread

3) It became popular because of HN

Always curious to see the life cycle of how these things develope

<comment><USER17> Atlas Obscura send emails regularly with new stories, people post them when they get them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It illustrates how delightfully simple an invention telephony is. I'm surprised with all the effort that went into improving telegraphy that nobody had stumbled upon it sooner.

</comment><comment><USER19> Funny to see this as I just read about this curious telephony solution in the book "The Master Switch".

</comment><comment><USER20> It's said that Claude Shannon experienced this growing up in rural _Michigan.

_ edit: Apparently not North Dakota

</comment><comment><USER18> What wasn't clear to me in the article was whether these lines were connected to the wider telephone system, or was isolated to the barbed wire locals.</comment>


Archive of my NewsTilt Stories (YC's NewsTilt going into hibernation) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/archive-of-my-newstilt-stories.html

<comment><USER2> Why is it going into hibernation.. an example of fail fast? It'd just launched.

<comment><USER3> We'll announce soon, but we gave the journos a bit of a heads-up.</comment></comment>


In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On  - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-is-anything-but-a-relic.html?pagewanted=1&ref=global-home <comment><USER2> It is interesting to view this as a situation in which some development has had such wide-spread and continued success in some environment that that very success delays the adoption of some later better(?) development in that environment.

      wired land-line telephony in the US vs. mobile in Africa

      personal checks in the US vs. EFTs in the EU & cell credit in Africa

      NAT vs. ipv6

      automobiles in the US vs. effective public transit

<comment><USER3> with most of those examples, there's a huge sunk infrastructure cost that creates a kind of inertia that's hard to move away from...automobiles for example, with finite funding, do we maintain the highway system or do we let it crumble and build robust public transit?

with fax in Japan, yeah there's the fax machines, but we're really talking about a fairly minimal dollar amount vs. a scanner and email, maybe $130 dollars (in a very rich country). And for the receiving parties there's probably no additional cost since they already can receive email. But I bet they're prevented from handling scanned documents due to established business procedures (read, established social ceremony)...

One thing that's striking to most Westerners if they ever have a chance to visit a working office environment in a modern 1st world Asian nation is the tremendous amount of physical _paper_ that gets pushed around. The amount of _clutter_ in a Japanese office is simply mind boggling to the average Westerner [1]. In this milieu, a fax is just yet another piece of paper among thousands. There's no pressure to eliminate yet another source of office clutter. The concept of Japanese minimalism simply doesn't apply.

It seems contradictory, but hey, that's Asia.

[1] - <http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/1182625591/>

<comment><USER4> >[1] - <http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/1182625591/>

Why? I mean, what cultural precedent causes this?

<comment><USER3> pre-digital, yet modern white collar office practices...it's not that much different than your typical office in the 1970s

[http://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/dec-11-20...](http://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/dec-11-2011-twenty- four-images-from-integrated-environmental-design-brochure-electricity- council-1970s/central-accounting-office-at-southwestern-electricity-board- plymouth/)

hell, if you can organize and run a major international military offensive and an empire in a paper-based office, why would you ever need to move on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because someone more efficient could run you over...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See The Verge article _Japan's digital content struggles: the country of the future remains stuck in the past_ [0] for more on Japan's love-hate relationship with new technology.

Anecdotes like "A decade ago, Tamagoya tried to shift to online sales of its bento lunches, but business suffered" suggest to me that a digital interface to faxes using tablets (for writing) might be quite popular in Japan among those who _do_ want to move away from faxes. Just because the person you're communicating with needs faxes so they get warm, fuzzy feelings while ordering their lunch doesn't mean your own business efficiency has to suffer as well.

0: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital- con...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-content- ecosystem-hulu-country-future)

<comment><USER6> I agree. And companies are trying to digitize the faxes, like NTT, "the giant domestic telephone company... It is offering services that allow older Japanese to use their fax machines to send messages to their children's and grandchildren's smartphones, where they appear as attachments to e-mails."

That's found in the last paragraph of the article.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I saw that. I think the option of replying with a handwritten message is important though. Otherwise you're stuck with sending typewritten stuff, which might negatively affect your business if you're selling to elderly Japanese people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Japanese don't switch to electronic document systems because of their great respect for precedent and established procedure. A whole administrative and legal culture has grown up around the paper document, and the Japanese are too attached to the old ways to give that up.

The Japanese mindset loves technology and innovation, but only if it fits into the established scheme of things. Disruptive innovation -- or, indeed, ANY kind of disruption -- is anathema.

For example, the iPhone could not have been developed in Japan. It was too much of a break from the past. If left to themselves, the Japanese might have got there in the end, but only through a decades long process of incremental steps.

</comment><comment><USER8> On the other hand, at least I think so, the Japanese are using emails instead of text messages on their mobile phones.

Text Messages: One of the worst, and still the most popular IM systems.

<comment><USER5> This wasn't because of some sort of advanced thinking on the part of the Japanese. They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence.

In fact, the use of email on phones has resulted in people continuing to use their carrier's email service instead of migrating towards Gmail and other device-agnostic services that also have a lot more features.

<comment><USER9> > _They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters > to string together a whole sentence._

Not sure how to interpret this ....

SMS works fine on all Japanese cellphones, between carriers, and even to other countries (I've texted to someone in Korea, though only ascii was really reliable... CJK characters _sometimes_ worked, but sometimes got trashed).

Because of the encoding used (some variant of ISO-2022-JP with custom code points for emoji), and probably some additional metadata, the maximum length of messages is reduced; for instance, on my phone, it's 100 ascii chars, or 50 CJK characters or emoji.

However, Japanese can be very dense, much denser than English on a character- count level, depending on which words you use, so the smaller character limit isn't always a horrible limitation.

The main issue is that things like verb conjugations and polite forms can realllly bloat things up, increasing word lengths dramatically. So there's constant pressure when using SMS in Japanese to (1) use very informal language, (2) be grammatically incorrect, and (3) use emoji for everything...

But hey, texting is generally between friends anyway, so the above aren't such a problem, and indeed, probably add to the sense of informality, which can be a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "One of the hottest sellers is a model that is powered by batteries so it will keep working during power failures caused by natural disasters."

I find it interesting that the Japanese feel there is a need to fax during a natural disaster. However, after reading the article and seeing how useful the they still find the fax machine, maybe it is important to be able to fax during a natural disaster.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fax works with the simplest land line in the noisiest environments (when your DSL or U-Verse is down), is cheap, and almost universally available. Signed faxed contracts are in most instances legally binding.

Fax is older than the telephone: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax>

<comment><USER12> I disagree that operating a fax line is cheap.

Up until the mid 2000s, we still had a fax machine in our office. By that time, because our fax number was listed, we received about 10 spam messages a day – some of them were complete product catalogs that took 30-40 pages. It cost us hundreds of dollars a month in toner and paper.

In 2008, we switched to fax software, which cut costs dramatically, but we still had to pay for the dedicated fax line. We shut it down in 2011, because no relevant faxes had come in for over a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> not just Japan, the German-speaking countries in EU are the same. A signature on a fax is legally binding, a sig on a scanned and emailed doc is not. Tax authorities 'prefer' paper trails as well, going fully electronic is not allowed - and you need to keep stuff for at least 7 years.

e-mail to fax gateways still are very popular in b2b solutions.

not all technology moves on in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is in part driven by the nature of their street markings. Addresses have 4 numbers, rather than number and street. As such it's awful to find places. It is customary to fax maps. Eventually Google will render this obsolete.

<comment><USER5> > Eventually Google will render this obsolete.

If you have a smartphone, it already has. You can get around with no problem if you have Google Maps.

<comment><USER14> I wrote imprecisely. The technology is there - it's adoption is what will render this problem obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been shocked since I moved to Japan about this. The most in-your-face example for me, was visiting Japanese real estate agents, looking for apartments. They'll often literally hand you a book of fax papers compiled together, four inches thick.

We've managed to survive mostly fax free at our startup and at home — but we own faxes in both places.

But my sense is, until there's something "ten times better" for the aging demographic who loves to fax, it ain't gonna change for the population at large (and it is, uh, large). Tablets (and the ability to write by hand) are one piece of the equation, but the paper-trail piece is harder.

</comment><comment><USER16> Another one: even though businesses have POS systems, they all calculate the total bill on a handheld solar calculator. Why???

<comment><USER17> Possibly because there is no paper trail of the final amount like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> See also [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan- fa...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan-fax-machines- find-a-final-place-to-thrive/2012/06/07/gJQAshFPMV_story.html) "In Japan, fax machines remain important because of language and culture"

</comment><comment><USER19> All employees at the company I work for are automatically assigned an email addr, a phone number and a fax number. I know of one case of the fax number being used...it was a prank and got routed to email anyway.

I suspect the Japanese situation has more to do with their alphabet than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER20> Another good article people may be interested in..

[http://edinburghnapiernews.com/2011/01/26/%E2%80%98japan- hig...](http://edinburghnapiernews.com/2011/01/26/%E2%80%98japan-high-tech- image-low-tech-reality%E2%80%99/)

(There was a third I had, but can't seem to find it at the moment)

</comment><comment><USER21> New York Times fax number: 212-556-3622

In NYTimes, the fax machines roll on too.

In fact a great majority of companies in the developed world have fax. Not every company is a SV startup.

<comment><USER22> I think it very unlikely that the NY Times has a physical fax machine spitting out paper. Just because a US enterprise accepts faxes, these days they probably have a fax server in the cloud and get email attachments, etc. I find it hard to believe that at the NY Times fax volume, humans are poring over glossy, fading fax paper, or that the entire fax reception system comes to a halt when something runs out of paper.

Alas, the impression left by that article of the Bento lunch company is that they are printing 30,000 faxes a day to paper. It is hard to see that as being economic, but if it is true, then an electronic fax server system should be a great startup in Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> what is stopping them from moving to a scanner and e-fax based system? you can still use the phone lines and print physical copies if you want. seems like you could save a lot of paper and space.

<comment><USER24> Nothing stops anybody who wants to use those systems. I _love_ how fax-centric Japan is, because it means living here I can do so many things by email using a fax<->email service. (I use JFax, or whoever bought whoever bought JFax... Been using the same fax by email number for 15+ years.)</comment></comment>


Fire And Motion (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ <comment><USER2> I've definitely found that if I can trick myself into getting started, I often end up looking back on a productive day.

The Pomodoro approach has been somewhat successful in making this happen. Another approach that works well for me is the 'Final Version' productivity 'system' by Mark Forster [1]. The key trick is that it's okay to just do 'a bit' of something on your list and then mark it as completed (and re-add it to the end of the list).

In the past I've been a heavy GTD user. I abandoned GTD mostly because I feel it doesn't really fit my kind of work, but I still apply two GTD principles because they're also primarily about lowering the barrier to getting started: 1) turn big tasks into small steps that are easier to get started with, and 2) the 'two minute rule' where if you can do something in two minutes time or less, just do it immediately and don't bother adding it to your system.

I've come to the conclusion that for me, the 'getting started' part is so important to optimize for that everything else feels like little more productivity porn, at least until I get that part somewhat working.

[1]: [http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the- final-...](http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final- version-perfected-fvp.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a getting started hack from Ernest Hemingway, since programming can be like writing in that work is more independent for much of it:

 _The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start._

Leave something almost complete, at a compile fix state or with less cognitive loading steps to start up the next day with the ball rolling.

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it so valuable when people in this kind of position within the software industry admit their human faults.

It is so easy to fall into the trap of impostor syndrome. We all have these problems, and coupled with the potential complexity of some programming tasks it can feel overwhelming.

<comment><USER5> Yes, definitely. Early in my career I had a coach, a very impressive, productive person.

I started using the pomodoro technique, and I brought up the fact that I felt unproductive because I was having a lot of trouble achieving my goal of 11-12 pomodoros per day.

She was like, "you realize 11 is a very hard goal, right? When I was using pomodoros I was usually doing 8 per days. Most people struggle to do a single one when they start."

It was illuminating.

In grad school my adviser was seen as the most productive, intense person in my department. We got on pretty good terms, and when I was struggling he started telling me about how much time he spends doing e-mail and reading random books (if you paid attention you might notice the arts and philosophy books laying around on his desk; he's an engineering prof.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > There's something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get > up to speed, but once it's rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep > it going.

I noticed that too. I could be wrong, but I believe the painful part is loading everything you need into short-term memory.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and > keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features. Look closely at > the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely > least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up > and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

It's interesting to read this essay again in the context of 2017 Javascript Fatigue, and especially the seemingly endless froth in the React ecosystem.</comment>


Tilera 100-core Processor beats Intel Sandybridge - <AUTHOR> http://geeknizer.com/tilera-100-core-processor-beats-intel-sandybridge/

<comment><USER2> couple of questions for folks who might have some experience with this (1) with such a huge number of cores, does it have a cache-cohorent architecture ? iirc, first version didn't. (2) does it have a floating point unit ? from the diagram, it seems that this would _excel_ at IO. i mean, i can see 4 ddr controllers, multiple pci-e lanes providing huge memory bandwidth etc.</comment>


Rustysd – A minimal drop-in for a subset of systemd in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KillingSpark/rustysd <comment><USER2> I wonder if this will impact Debian's current debate [1] on init systems. A minimal systemd-compatible init system seems like a real contender here, and this project shows that there're both interest and capability for developing one.

[1] [https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textf](https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textf)

<comment><USER3> Tangential question: is rust usable for core parts of distributions like Debian that can run on a million architectures and even on different kernels? I hope to see more C code replaced by rust, but that seems difficult if portability to extremely niche systems is a requirement.

<comment><USER4> rustc isn't available for all of Debian's unofficial architectures yet:

[https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=rustc](https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=rustc)

Looks like there is a bootstrap issue, rustc build-depends on cargo, which build-depends on itself.

<comment><USER5> mrustc[1] can help with this issue.

[1] [https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc](https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please note: this does not make use of Linux-specific features like cgroups.

In my kind, that takes away one important m/killer feature which right now only systemd provides.

</comment><comment><USER7> The main issue with systemd is UX. The config files needs too many knobs for simple run-forever-in-background use cases and half of the time you get weird permission issues related to sudo. Documentation feels half baked and requires digging through manpages. A pm2-style init in Rust would be a lot better.

<comment><USER8> What is wrong with it exactly? A typical unit file would for something that runs forever is something like this:

        [Unit]
        Description=This service runs always

        [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target

        [Service]
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /opt/myapp/main.py
        Restart=always
        WorkingDirectory=/opt/myapp
        User=myuser
        Group=myuser

You can skip the last 3 if you want.

<comment><USER9> If main.py crashes ~5 times within ~10 seconds, then it'll get put in a failed state until you manually recover it with `reset-failed`. systemd will be happy to restart it often enough that it hits that threshold, because you told it to. So just `Restart=always` isn't enough; you need to set `StartLimitBurst` too (and `StartLimitIntervalSec` if you want to fine-tune it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes! I'm very much supportant of this project.

Running a monolithical christmas-tree isn't what we need as PID 1.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe a slimmed down version of systemd is what we really needed all along.

<comment><USER12> What features would a "slimmed down version of systemd" provide that isn't available in various _independent_ tools we used to use (and still use today).

* Running/waking a program from network activity? inetd (xinetd) has been doing that since the '70s.

* journald? Logging tools - including multiple types of syslog daemons - are numerous; use whatever you want. Choice is good. Even journald could be an option some people might prefer If it wasn't monolithically tied to systemd and could be used as a stand-alone daemon.

* cgroups? Other managers exist.

* timedated? Managing the clock was never difficult. The standard solution is to delegate most/all clock management to ntpd. If you had especially unusual needs, you probably had to set it up manually anyway (probably with a tiny amount of sh script).

* udevd? Other hardware managers exist. Some of us prefer the peace-of-mind of a simple static configuration instead of a manager, but you _should_ be able to use udevd if you prefer it; udevd used to work stand-alone, but Lennart added it to the systemd monolith[1] when they were trying to push kdbus into the kernel. -sigh-

* daemon/process management? daemontools, runnit, s6, _etc._

* logind? This attempts to create the concept of a "session" as a privilege boundary that is orthogonal to the actual privilege boundary in UNIX: the UID. The entire concept is a terrible security problem waiting to happen. The entire concept of a session is especially stupid considering most people don't actually use the traditional multiuser features of UNIX _or_ this new "session" concept. In the rare situation where someone actually is running an actual multiseat setup, an extra step to install an optional package with these features wouldn't be a burden. The rest of just need a simple login/password prompt that can launch gnome/kde/.xinitrc/whatever at login time, which already existed as {x,g,sd,lx}dm.

If there are features that were only provided by systemd, is a monolithic[1] daemon really the best solution? Or could those feature simply be encapsulated into a small stand-alone package that could work wherever it is needed?

edit:

[1] Any objections trying to claim systemd isn't a tightly coupled, monolithic design will be ignored. If you think the number of binary program files is in any way useful as an objection, see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19024256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19024256)

<comment><USER13> All of the tools you mentioned have different syntaxes. With sd I onlt have to keep a single syntax - ini files - which is incredibly more efficient than ten years ago when I had to memorize a dozen different things to make my system run. I'd rather slit my wrists than write another init script in bash / dash, even for the simplest service.

<comment><USER14> "ini files" are as much of a single syntax as sexprs are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool project, congrats to the author for getting a system tool so far in Rust. Just a couple of years ago that seemed questionably difficult but here we are.

I do have to ask though, does this serve any improvement over or fix any of the shortcomings of systemd aside from being written in Rust?

</comment><comment><USER16> The title here is a little questionable: this project is not an attempt to be a full replacement for systemd, but more a minimalist init system compatible with systemd.

I much more like the title chosen by the author when he posted it on reddit earlier: "Rustysd: A systemd-compatible service manager written in rust".[1]

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/e9o724/rustysd_a_syst...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/e9o724/rustysd_a_systemdcompatible_service_manager/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's my fault. I copied the title from /r/programming.

Would be nice if a mod could fix the title.

<comment><USER17> We've replaced the title with what the Github page says.

Submitted title was "Rustysd – systemd replacement written in Rust"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's fascinating how much the rust community dedicate work to reinvent the wheel. Don't get me wrong, it's not _always_ a bad thing, but I believe there are still a load of interesting types of software that almost doesn't exist, and such efforts would have better ROI on those new kinds of software e.g an hypergraph database or an NLP library that allows for any inflected word to get another inflection (e.g I give in parameters input="be", kind=verb, time=present, person= 3rd plural) and it output "are".

<comment><USER19> The ROI on improving widely used tools is quite large. And for most of them just being in a memory-safe language is already a large improvement.

Not everybody wants to work on hot new things, some want focus on having their tools to stable and working as designed. We need both kinds of work.

<comment><USER18> I agree and I disagree.

 _The ROI on improving widely used tools is quite large_ Yes indeed. You probably wanted to say: _The ROI on reinventing widely used tools is quite large " There are some extremely used binaries that have a stagnant development and have not adapted to modern ergonomics. I beautiful example of that subset of widely used tools is cat. Cat is extremely used and yet, the rust rewrite bat is far superior, because among other things, it has color and code higlithing :0

For a rust rewrite to be successful you need the following conditions: You have ideas of improvments not present in the current tool. Your ideas are not on their roadmap. The current tool has not had too much of man/hours, which you can interpret heuristically as: the current tool has less than a few thousands of commits.

Here we're talking about systemd which has 42,600 commits. By the time rustysd will have as much features as _current* systemd, the original developer will be dead.

As an end user I have almost zero benefits in this kind of rewrites, as I'm aware it's a far poorer software by design.

If it was 1) a new kind of software or 2) a reimplementation of a tool that they can realistically manage to outcompete or 3) the development that will in the very longterm replace an old complex tool that has stopped development, then I would have been interested.

Anyway if it's for fun/learning purpose, they do what they want, but utilitaristically there would be better choices.

<comment><USER20> > For a rust rewrite to be successful you need the following conditions: You > have ideas of improvments not present in the current tool. Your ideas are > not on their roadmap. The current tool has not had too much of man/hours, > which you can interpret heuristically as: the current tool has less than a > few thousands of commits.

I think you are missing the point completely. We are talking about _rust_ , memory safe performant language, and _systemd_ , core system in many Linux distributions, written in C++. I would _love_ to be able to replace systemd (and kernel and core libraries too) with something that was safer at least in this aspect (memory safety).

Big kudos to Mozilla for identifying the cause of many security bugs and for finding a way to solve it while keeping performance intact.

<comment><USER21> > systemd, core system in many Linux distributions, written in C++

s/C++/C

<comment><USER22> Yep, systemd is in plain old C....I wish it would be in C++....

Most of the security vulnerabilities reported ([https://www.cvedetails.com/product/38088/Freedesktop- Systemd...](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/38088/Freedesktop- Systemd.html?vendor_id=7971)) would not have existed in modern C++. Including all the heavy ones implying stack smash due to VLA buffers that do not exist in C++.

Many will hate me for that, but preferring old-C over C++ for a system software after 2011 is a non-sense. Even the maintainers of GCC understood that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like Rust as much as the next guy, but currently Rust (and Go for that matter) binaries are comparatively enormous (compared to C or C++, i.e. compared to systemd).

For comparison: ripgrep (Rust) is >2 MB stripped, GNU grep is <200k stripped.

I have not looked at systemd in a while, but I'd be surprised it systemd in total is not smaller than the Rust runtime, which would leave your minimal subset larger than the original.

So maybe you meant something other than code size here, but using words like "minimal" and "subset" feel a bit (unintentionally, probably) misleading to me.

I'm sure the Rust people will at some point find a way to reduce the footprint of the runtime. Currently they have other, more pressing goals.

Personally, I wrote my own init system. The PID 1 process is a 10k statically linked binary. Resident memory size is 24k on one of my AMD64 Linux production servers. That is what I think could rightfully be called a minimal subset.

<comment><USER24> > _I like Rust as much as the next guy, but currently Rust (and Go for that > matter) binaries are comparatively enormous (compared to C or C++, i.e. > compared to systemd)._

> _I have not looked at systemd in a while, but I 'd be surprised it systemd > in total is not smaller than the Rust runtime, which would leave your > minimal subset larger than the original._

Isn't this simply a result of the C runtime not being bundled with the executable? How does the comparison look when accounting for that difference?

<comment><USER25> Depends obviously but in general small, busybox is statically linked that uses a relatively large swath of libc and you can compare different libc versions somewhat by looking at the tags here: [https://hub.docker.com/_/busybox?tab=tags](https://hub.docker.com/_/busybox?tab=tags). If parent was correct you could link all of musl libc and have 1.3MB or so left over for an actual application.

It also depends on the how the code is structured, musl for example is structured not to pull in unneeded objects while the size of the glibc docker container speaks for itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just because you coulda, doesn't mean you shoulda.

<comment><USER27> If you dont have constructive criticism then follow your own advice.</comment></comment>


CPM advertising emails: What kind of scam is this? - <AUTHOR>

So my company gets tons of emails like this and I usually always ignore them because every single one is the same format..some random no name marketing agency has a client with a large monthly budget.<p>"We have recently acquired a client interested in running a standard banner campaign on a CPM model. If possible, we would like to partner with you in running this campaign. I am currently unavailable to chat over the phone, although I would be delighted to get a campaign organized via email. Overall we would like to run the campaign for a total of 2 months with a $20K/month spend ($40K total)."<p>Anyone ever get emails like this? What's the deal behind it? I get these emails every few months from different people, and they are actually submitting them directly through our contact form...but they are always the same format (some client that has $20k/mo budget for a cpm campaign). <comment><USER3> Take the money and run! jk

Seems like an opportunity to either a) create a newsletter you can market to and inform - weekly digest, etc. or b) build a product that people want - <USER2> new bars to visit in April, new restaurants in NYC, etc.

Good Luck!</comment>


Stop giving kids Ritalin - <AUTHOR>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/01/athletes-with-adhd<p>Micheal Phelps was diagnosed with ADHD, along with many other kids (particularly boys).  Maybe we should embrace kids have different inclinations rather than funneling them through an institution which crushes their innate talents. <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/01/athletes- with-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/01/athletes-with-adhd)</comment>


Jack Ma explains how he got started doing a startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/jack-ma-explains-started-startup <comment><USER2> You can find Jack Ma's speech on Youtube easily. I love this sharing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5BKaDCda_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5BKaDCda_0)</comment>


How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time - <AUTHOR> http://anthonyshort.com.au/blog/comments/how-to-get-cross-browser-compatibility-everytime/

<comment><USER2> Great stuff in there. This is required reading for anyone looking to brush up on their front end coding skills, or for anyone that is new to cross browser compatibility issues. The article is clear, practical, and concise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone else think that if you're going to put up a page like that (as the hosting provider), you don't want to brand it?

Like, it's one thing to put up such a page and piss off a current customer. It's another thing to proudly display your logo telling all visitors not to host with you.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I don't follow... was this comment meant for a different article?

<comment><USER5> Explained in another comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=221787>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone have any mirrors for this?

Looks like they've run out of bandwidth.

<comment><USER7> mirror: <http://nfriedly.com/stuff/cross-browser-compatibility.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And just when I thought I had read everything there was about cross browser compatibility.

This is definitely as saver. Thank you.

<comment><USER9> Yep, great content for sure and there's good remarks in the comments too. Most of the stuff I'd say I'm aware of but the Safari text opacity trick is new to me.

Side note: The site was down temporarily and redirected to the hosting provider who advertises "unmetered bandwidth" in their tag line, yet can't support a minor influx. :\

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No, no no. No.

Don't hack support for badly behaving browsers ;-(</comment>


What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/style/modern-love-what-shamu-taught-me-happy-marriage.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is an excellent piece! The techniques she uses successfully to modify her husband's behavior are also applicable in the workspace, esp. for new tech managers who have to deal with some interesting personality types.

Many useful lessons mentioned but my main takeaway was:

"Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously."</comment>


Ask HN: Design and requirements docs generation - <AUTHOR> As a developer I've always despised having to spend countless hours manually drafting , formatting and getting requirements & design documents reviewed. In spite of the obvious value of maintaining a knowledge base of instructions and information for the future developers of the app, I have felt there is a way this can be improved. So all those hours of manual effort can be saved both for the developer and the company. I was looking for already existing solutions or software that automate or enhance the experience of creating such docs. Is there something that exists of this sort? Has this field been amply explored as per your opinion? Any thoughts on a solution on Design & requirements docs generation? <comment><USER2> I think you have to formalize the process first. If everyone in the company does something different every time a requirements doc is written, it is just chaos. Steli and Hiten had a great podcast episode on this recently.

As part of that process, you will need tools to capture the documents and track changes to them. Consider something like Confluence or another type of wiki. You will also need good training. If you expect people across the company to use the process, you have to make it accessible and easy for them to learn.

A book I would recommend that I am working through now is Writing Great Specifications by Bicieja</comment>


Semantic Tag Suggestions for WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-calais-auto-tagger/

<comment><USER2> I need some enlightenment on the tagging business. Do people really find tagging useful? Do people really browse by tags?

Is there a site that uses tag in such a way that I can get something substantial out of it?

I ask this because, for example, blogs all have tags and I click them occasionally, but I never get much out of it.</comment>


Ask HN: Crowd sourced lobbying for public interest start ups? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any reputable crowd-sourced lobbying for public interests (rather than corporate) start ups worth looking at? I see "we the lobby" and "amplifyd" thoughts anyone? <comment><USER2> Have a look at Cause Hub - [http://launch.causehub.io/](http://launch.causehub.io/) It has just come out of the UK based social good incubator Bethnal Green Ventures and is working with charities such as Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth.

</comment><comment><USER3> i mean, there are a lot of public interest advocacy groups that accept donations online, but i don't think they fall under the category of start up, and i think most of their funding comes in larger donations from individuals and orgs they have relationships with.</comment>


An Empirical Analysis of Linkability in the Monero Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B59AisMv54waZXRhbE9GV2NDQUE/view <comment><AUTHOR> Google Drive because the original research site is being DoS'd.

[https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/852940039814352899](https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/852940039814352899)</comment>


Persistent state for Node.js application servers - <AUTHOR> http://kfalck.net/2011/04/30/persistent-state-for-nodejs-application-servers

<comment><USER2> A clever hack, which nobody should ever use

<comment><USER3> That's essentially what hacker news does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it really so hard to install Redis?

<comment><USER5> ... or MongoDB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Write data to a file and then load it at startup. Genius!

<comment><USER3> That's what hacker news does.</comment></comment>


My Month With a ChromeBox: How I Survived Without Windows or Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/08/my-month-with-a-chromebox-how-i-survived-without-windows-or-mac.php

<comment><USER2> The first link in the article is formed incorrectly. It should point to [http://www.chromestory.com/2012/05/two-chromeboxes- second-49...](http://www.chromestory.com/2012/05/two-chromeboxes- second-49999-intel-core-i5/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this just the same experience as restricting yourself to using a chrome browser on a PC and no other applications?

If it is, it seems seems pricey for what you get (no monitor, keyboard or mouse so far as i can tell).</comment>


Your users passwords stolen. Admin, how do you know? - <AUTHOR>

Because of the recent incidents with stolen password hashes I asked myself: How would I notice that passwords have been stolen from one of my servers?<p>What for security measure should be taken to make sure an invader is detected? <comment><USER2> Assuming that your passwords are going to be stored within a database, log the number of requests to that database or even better the database table holding your authentication data.

Look for spikes in requests and also the number of rows been returned per database request (for a MySQL select).

Specifically see if you can compare these database requests to authentication events (login/logout), for most applications you would expect a 1:1 ratio of 'authentication events':'database requests'.

Finally and what most people forget, secure your backups, as these will hold all of your authentication data as well!

</comment><comment><USER3> One way might be to watch for your password file name on the way out while sniffing at points of egress.</comment>


How Accounting Makes Corporate Profits – And Rich People's Income – Invisible - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/accounting-smoke-mirrors-makes-corporate-profits-rich-peoples-income-invisible/ <comment><USER2> Headline is completely inaccurate. This piece says nothing about "accounting". All it seems to say is that Bezos is rich due to capital gains and then claims (with absolutely no evidence) that Bezos' motivation is reducing his taxes and, therefore, he is doing something (piece does not say what) to transform taxable profit to untaxable capital gains.

Piece also seems to equate being a big business with having a big market cap, which makes no sense as plenty of big corps with big revenues have small market caps.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not bullshit as other comments are saying.

"Profit" in this sense is a means of personal cash flow. Once the shareholders (including the founders) have their personal cash flow needs taken care of, the focus shifts to long-term value creation.

Part of that is reducing tax expense.

<comment><USER4> Profit is derived from subtracting expenses from your revenue. Wage for businesses is a expense, and so is accusation cost of assets. I would assume Net Profit is taking into account all liabilities/assets/expenses/revenue for all departments.

<comment><USER3> Assets are amortized and not a part of the net profit calculation.

<comment><USER4> Thanks jaxn, I don't do accounting thats why I said `assume`.

<comment><USER3> There are two primary documents that make up a businesses financial statements. The P&L and the Balance Sheet.

The P&L is the profit and loss. It is where the terms "top line" and "bottom line" come from. The top line is total revenue. The bottom line is net profit.

The balance sheet shows the assets and liabilities.

Basically, the P&L is how a company performed for a period of time (month, quarter, year, etc) and the balance sheet is what the company is worth at a specific point in time.

<comment><USER4> Jaxn, just curious what books would you recommend to read to get into accounting? Because of hacknews i've been introduced into double entry book keeping using ledger (that I found really really useful). Kind of want to expand on the knowledge base (Not with ledger).

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately I have no idea. I just hard to learn it from doing my own books. It is something that was very opaque until all of the sudden it clicked. Kinda like learning object oriented programming for the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't accurate. These companies do make billions and billions in profit. And they do pay taxes. They shelter a lot of hose profits in licensing deals off shore though. so the effect is the same.

And yes, the stated goal of a for profit corporation is to increase value for the share holders, so there's that too.

But these aren't accounting problems. They are issues with regulations and shitty personal values/moral codes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regulations are based on how we can account for profits, net revenue, capital gains. These companies don't record profit (an accounting term). They record net revenue to avoid income tax. See the chart in the essay.

What stated goal? Reference? Increase shareholder value is not legal requirement. see [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/why-the-maximize- shar...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/why-the-maximize-shareholder- value-theory-is-bogus.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> If they pass the stock on to their heirs, those gains are never taxed at all.

Is this true? If one inherits stock, does the "purchase price" of that stock get reset to the price at the time of inheritance? Is that how it works or something different?

<comment><USER7> It's simplifying things a bit but basically the first $5.5/$11 million in total assets are Federal tax free. They are valued and taxed based on current market value and therefore the basis is stepped up to current market value at that time.

After the lifetime exclusion of $5.5/$11 (single vs married) million then any further inheritance is taxed around 40%.

<comment><USER3> But, if the inheritance had at one point been income for the deceased, it would have been taxed at the time they earned it and (again) at the time it transferred to their heirs (after the cap).

The opponents of the inheritance tax state that they were taxed when they earned it, so it shouldn't be taxed again at the transfer to their heirs. With stock, it is only taxed at the transfer.

You could argue that the person holding the stock never received benefit since it was illiquid, but it can still be leveraged.

Which is the other piece to this. The stock holder is able to leverage the asset to create cash that has an interest rate significantly lower than the tax rate. As long as the loaned capital also results in a return, the stock holder is able to "grow their pile" essentially tax free.

<comment><USER8> Inheritance is a mess.

An inheritance tax is a catastrophe for family businesses because you aren't inheriting money, you're inheriting the business. It isn't a liquid asset. Families end up forced to sell the farm to pay the inheritance tax on it.

The natural thing to do would be to not have inheritance tax but leave the tax basis where it is. But then suppose grandpa bought shares of GM before the war and never sold them. Now they're worth a million dollars, but if you sold them the government would immediately take ~40% of the money. Which means you're stuck with a choice between keeping $1 of GM shares or selling them at $.60 on the dollar so you can buy Tesla shares or a Tesla or anything else whatsoever. Tax policy is forcing people into making otherwise economically irrational decisions, which is bad for the economy.

So to prevent that from happening, when you inherit grandpa's shares you get a new tax basis. But then people start complaining about rich people not paying taxes and bring back the inheritance tax. And then rich families with family businesses quietly get an inheritance tax holiday passed every generation or so that lets them keep the family business in the family, or otherwise do tax planning to prevent it from having any effect.

The solution to this mess is to realize that rich people never actually pay taxes until they spend the money anyway and we're better off with a VAT that doesn't have any of this trouble, combined with a UBI to make it progressive.

<comment><USER3> The threshold for inheritance taxes in the US is so high that very few family businesses are impacted.

A small fraction of family-owned businesses are worth more than $5 million. That family-farm comment sounds more like an out-dated PR talking point than a legitimate concern in 2017.

<comment><USER8> This is what farms, or many family businesses in general, look like.

A light truck or small tractor is five figures. A larger truck or tractor can be a quarter of a million. A combine harvester is half a million. Livestock would add six figures. The land itself will typically be worth seven figures. Add these together, more than one of some, plus sprayers and irrigation systems and various other pieces of farm equipment each in the five to six figure range, farmhouse, feed and crop storage and other structures, you can easily exceed five million dollars. Many businesses are very capital- intensive.

And a farm is just an example. A family construction business is going to own the same sort of expensive industrial equipment. A family that owns and operates residential apartments could exceed that amount with _one building_ in many cities.

The only reason very few family businesses are impacted is that the ones who failed to engage in tax planning to avoid it were dismantled by the tax a generation or more ago and the remaining families do the tax planning. But what's the point of specifically screwing over the families without the civic disloyalty to rearrange their affairs that way?

<comment><USER3> I started a family-owned retail business with my father and have been growing it for 13 years. I get it.

The farm example is trotted out all the time because it is an emotional example. But it isn't really a meaningful one.

The 2016 estimates from the USDA states that 98.3% of family farms would not need to file a estate-tax return at all. Of the 1.7% that do need to file a return, the vast majority of those would owe no taxes.

Only 0.4% of family farms will owe any estate tax for 2016.

It only affects a very small percentage of family farms. And yet it is the go- to example of how the estate tax isn't fair.

<comment><USER8> > Only 0.4% of family farms will owe any estate tax for 2016.

The estate tax comes due when someone dies. Most people don't die in a given year.

And those numbers are artificially low on top of that because many of the affected families only don't owe estate tax because they did estate tax planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another great way to not have profits is if you have a SaaS service is to give it away to non-profits (or start your own non-profit to give it away) and get the benfit from the tax deduction. It costs you about nothing for a few database entries.

<comment><USER10> Then isn't the "nothing" it cost you the extent of what you can take as a tax deduction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Better title: "How a clever business strategy helped Amazon succeed."

</comment><comment><USER12> This is utter nonsense. Companies can also opt to pay zero income tax if they reduce their taxable incomes to zero by donating all of their profits to charities. The only difference is that the charity Amazon supports is called "consumers".

<comment><USER13> "Utter nonsense" is a bit harsh. I think the (poorly articulated) issue behind this article is that some companies (and some rich people) have arranged their affairs to reduce the tax they pay. This increases the burden on other taxpayers, and those people feel this is unfair.

I see society as a resource that my company exploits to generate revenue - most companies would fail miserably if we didn't have education, the rule of law, roads and national security to provide a stable market for our goods and services. So we celebrate paying our taxes, because we're helping the thing that makes us money. So why doesn't Amazon and it's ilk?

OK, Amazon is huge enough that your argument that society in general benefits as much from their zero-profit policy as it does from the taxes is tenable. But Amazon deciding how it will best benefit society is exactly like a billionaire arguing that only she should say where her tax goes. That just doesn't work - relying on philanthropy alone would give us awesome animal sanctuaries, with raw sewerage and mentally ill people running down the street outside.

<comment><USER8> > So we celebrate paying our taxes, because we're helping the thing that makes > us money. So why doesn't Amazon and it's ilk?

Because they have competitors who don't and it isn't reasonable to compete with them on uneven terms.

The problem isn't corporations paying no taxes by following the law, the problem is that the law allows them to pay no taxes.

The shell game is very simple in principle. Microsoft Offshore owns the copyright to Office. When Microsoft US sells a copy of Office, they collect money from the customer and then pay Microsoft Offshore almost that much for the right to sell it, so Microsoft US makes no profit.

The solution is equally simple. Replace corporate income tax with VAT. Then when Microsoft US sells a copy of Office, they pay VAT on the full purchase price and can deduct any US VAT already paid. Since Microsoft Offshore doesn't pay US VAT there is nothing to deduct and they have to pay their taxes.

Though Amazon in particular is actually a different case -- they don't pay taxes because they spend all their revenue expanding their business. They're not diverting profits offshore, they legitimately don't have any. This is completely unproblematic and meritorious, because as long as it continues they're creating jobs and growing the economy, and the instant they stop and actually turn a profit they owe taxes.</comment></comment></comment>


Stepping away from open source - <AUTHOR> https://omar.yt/posts/stepping-away-from-open-source <comment><USER2> "Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube" \- TIL. Running an open source project can be exhausting, and a thankless task, almost all of the time. An active community and user-base helps, but it seems like omarroth has come to the end of the road.

As the maintainer of a relatively large OSS platform (OpenFaaS), I also wrote up about this last year too. For anyone who can't relate to omarroth's statement, it might help with perspective: [https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of- leadership/](https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/)

<comment><USER3> You are an absolute machine of a human and a wonder to behold. Keep being awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that [https://invidio.us](https://invidio.us) is not the only instance, just the most popular one. You can host your own, or use one of the others:

[https://instances.invidio.us](https://instances.invidio.us)

<comment><USER5> Repository at [https://github.com/iv-org/invidious](https://github.com/iv- org/invidious)

It's written in Crystal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For anyone unfamiliar, Invidious is just Youtube without ads and it lets you turn the screen off on mobile. It also lets you turn videos to an "audio only" mode for speed/bandwidth.

It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.

It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is better off for it though.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a neat way to use Youtube without being tracked by Google analytics. I guess that's the next project I will try to run on my Raspberry Pi :)

<comment><USER7> YouTube tracks you regardless, if I understand correctly. For instance, if you search on DuckDuckGo and there's a YouTube video in the results, you can play it right there. However, DuckDuckGo warns you that you'll be tracked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is the github issue thread: [https://github.com/iv- org/invidious/issues/1320](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1320)

Hopefully the community will pick it up and continue development. Projects like invidious, nitter and bibliogram have turned clicking youtube, twitter and instagram links into something I actively avoid (especially twitter which for which some thing's always gone wrong and I have to refresh) to being a joy to browse again.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hadn't heard of invidious before, and it's not clear what it is when visiting Invidio.us. so for others that are curious:

[https://github.com/iv-org/invidious](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)

> Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube

</comment><comment><USER10> Invidious is such a treasure and something I do not want to see go by the wayside. I would like to think, for whoever is available to work on the project with the time in energy, there could be enough support to keep this going via donations.

<comment><USER11> There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and disappear at any time.

Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

<comment><USER10> I'm glad that we have the option to self-host, and would be curious to learn more if you have other self-hosted youtube frontend options. As it stands now I think if invidious isn't maintained it will likely break soon. Newpipe breaks every other week and it's actively maintained.

Invidious I found to be uniquely and particularly convenient because, for a while at least, it ran like any other website and I could skip the steps needed to self host.

<comment><USER11> There's also this which includes a frontend:

[https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube- downloader](https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-downloader)

I'm unaffiliated but I like to follow this particular project when I want to know if others are having the same trouble with YouTube when things break for me. I only ever implemented a backend myself when I chose to self host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the original title, "Stepping away from open source," works better here.

</comment><comment><USER13> What struck me is this:

> I can't help shake the feeling that somewhere, the software I use is being > developed solely by volunteers who would rather quit, but don't have the > ability to say "no".

I've witnessed a number of developers similarly burn out in the last years. This suggest either the opensource movement attracts people prone to such burn-outs or that it produces them. The general reaction tends to be a bit of sympathy mixed with a hard-nosed "Well, it's difficult. Some make it, some don't" attitude. Yet given the trend we seem to ignore a fundamental flaw in how we're working, interacting, consuming, supporting, and rewarding one another. Even Shuttleworth cited a kind of opensource community fatigue when he killed off the phone project. It disappoints me to think that the opensource world talks a lot about freedom at the same time we have Omar's suggestion that those working in it really are not free.

<comment><USER14> This is a risk of volunteerism in general. I think this is why you often see age gaps in organizations. You have a lot of young people who can't pace themselves, and 3/4 of those who decide to stick around are gone in 2 years. I suspect that it's a small but not insignificant contribution to young people moving somewhere else and starting over. I just need a change of pace...

Someone just a couple years ago wrote up an opinion piece in which they asserted that the standard oath for volunteers should be "I promise not to burn out".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Im sad to see invideo.us go, I was a casual user and loved the simplicity of it. But the reality is that open source goodwill projects have a cost in resources and free cannot really survive as free in the long term, whoever is maintaining the software has a life and bills.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can someone explain what this did? I visited the site but it just seems to be a random collection of videos.

<comment><USER17> It's an alternative front end for YouTube. A rather nice one at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any chance of donating the domain to the community? I think we can take care of hosting :(

</comment><comment><USER19> The main instances are so unreliable that I just run my own.

<comment><USER20> I have never had problems with the instance from [https://snopyta.org](https://snopyta.org).

They seem to host a lot of other services as well, such as searx, nitter and bibliogram. I mainly use their searx instance and it is my primary search provider.

They also have hidden .onion instances iirc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh that's a shame.

> The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any > services relying on it to migrate to other solutions.

Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I guess I won't!

I have need of a YouTube streaming server, backend only, which I can embed on a web page. I made my own with youtubedown and bash but maintaining it is a pain since YouTube is always changing ciphers and also I forked youtubedown which means I need to adapt my changes to new versions when I upgrade.

So I was thinking of ditching my own and adopting an existing service. Trouble is existing services tend to stop existing. I made my own YouTube streaming server in the first place because I was using HMA YouTube proxy which was always breaking.

So this is a great reminder to me to keep maintaining my own YouTube streaming server.

[I'm using a different VPN today! Is it IP banned?! I don't know. Will this comment be [dead] on arrival?? I don't know!!]

<comment><USER20> There are many alternative instances, that's the great thing about projects like invidious.

[https://instances.invidio.us](https://instances.invidio.us)

For your own projects, I would recommend relying on multiple instances anyway because if one has downtime you could just use another one.

<comment><USER11> Yes except the whole invidious project is rapidly being abandoned according to discussion on GitHub. The next breaking change in YouTube could break invidious forever if the project is unmaintained.

I just need to remember not to be lazy and to continue maintaining my fork of youtubedown. The only obstacle for me is I really don't use YouTube frequently so mostly it's a matter of remembering to do the necessary maintenance.</comment></comment></comment>


How to build community trust in police - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-christopher-dorners-rampage-how-to-build-community-trust-in-police/2013/02/15/7a6f8482-76c8-11e2-8f84-3e4b513b1a13_story_1.html

<comment><USER2> I've never understood the cultural distrust of internal affairs investigations. Why do they have such a persecution complex that it's more important to them to protect their own than to get rid of bad people in their ranks?</comment>


Wired Names N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" Book of the Decade - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/best-books-2010s-science-fiction-fantasy/ <comment><USER2> Such an unreasonable amount of work has gone into pushing this author's work the last few years, and to completely silencing any who writes even a slightly-negative review of it.

It's incredibly transparent, and incredibly tiresome.</comment>


Microsoft's Bosque Wants to Change Everything About Programming - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/04/23/bosque-language-wants-to-change-everything-about-programming/ <comment><USER2> Bosque doesn't bring anything new to the game that other languages don't already do.</comment>


1 in 4 Renters is Severely Cost-Burdened, 50% of more of their Income on Rent - <AUTHOR> https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/cost-burdened-renters-2017/ <comment><USER3> When I was young I have been told that your rent should not more than 1/3 of your income. This was meant as a rule of thumb. Also this would apply for the majority of people. If you make 10 million a year and pay 5 million on rent you probably still have enough left to get by.

<comment><USER4> I still run into (elderly) people who expect a mortgage to be about three to four times a person's salary. When the houses costs eleven times the median salary, that would require a deposit of seven times a person's salary. The past was a different (cheaper) world when it came to the largest expense most people have.

<comment><USER5> > I still run into (elderly) people who expect a mortgage to be about three to > four times a person's salary

I'd argue that's still a reasonable target, most places in the US. The pockets where things are insanely, insanely expensive are smaller than you might think - especially if you spend time reading the comments here on these kinds of articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I spend 50% of my income on rent. I am not cost burdened in any meaningful sense: the remaining 50% is more than enough to live on (just not enough to buy a condo with).

It would be more interesting to know the absolute dollar amounts people have after taxes and rent, rather than the percentage spent.

<comment><USER7> I think savings rate is much better suited as a primary percentage-based metric to track on to see how people are doing. For those who have low to 0 savings rates, we can then look at why that is - and most the most likely case would be high housing costs.

_Those_ people are burdened, whereas you are not (I'm assuming you are able to save).

<comment><USER6> I think that depends on the goal you're saving towards. Mortgage down payments, college tuition, etc. aren't that dependent on your income - <USER2> 80% of a low income is likely worse than saving 10% of a high income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it safe to assume that they are defining "income" as "after-tax income"?

<comment><USER9> Take home. Otherwise, using gross pay doesn't really mean much since tax rates are so individualized

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Low-Rent, No Jobs - Pick one</comment>


Hack your Canon to take crazy pictures (open source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/personaltech/27basics.html

<comment><USER2> "Crash? He was using programmers' slang, he said to describe when the camera locks up because of a software error."

God, I'd hate to be a normal.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really want to do the balloon-camera thing. Any one in SV want to build one?

</comment><comment><USER4> those software is really worth to contribute and its a pity that there are no projects like it for other cams.</comment>


Rules for Business - <AUTHOR> http://gtcaz.com/post/33443862/rules-for-business

<comment><USER2> This is basically ripped word for word from the blog that he links to. Because of that, I'm flagging as spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooops, I didn't see the link to the original (<http://b.lesseverything.com/2008/4/30/rules-for-business>); thanks for pointing it out.

I don't agree that it's spam though. The rationale is that you get the content in your RSS reader without having to follow the link.</comment></comment>