iOS 11 turns the iPad into a different machine - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/26/ios-11-preview <comment><USER2> It seems like so much core functionality is hidden behind gestures and 3D-touch. What a change for the company that shunned even the right click for many years because it hid functionality.

<comment><USER3> Even the smartest and most technically capable people I know are confused by 3D Touch, almost all of whom eventually turned it off. What is it for? Why is it better than an alternative or a long press? How does it make anything better or more intuitive? How is it predictable in any way?

iOS has been consistently confusing and less intuitive ever since iOS 7, and iOS 10 and iOS 11 are only more so particularly the lock screens which are outright bizarre. They feel very much like they were built for designers, not for end users.

Come to think of it, a lot of what Apple does today feels like it was built for their own designers and not for users. Removing critical ports, 3D Touch, endless dongles, confusing UI and UX, the Touch Bar, awful low travel keyboards, etc etc

Apple used to pride itself in everything being obvious and everything just working as you would expect it to. Perhaps the biggest change in Apple post- Jobs is how that is missing.

<comment><USER4> 3D touch on the keyboard to move the cursor around makes up for every grievance I ever had about it to begin with.

<comment><USER3> I like that too, but how many users know about that? 0.5%? Is it obvious and intuitive?

<comment><USER5> Might not be entirely obvious and intuitive, but it's not required as well. I mean, iOS did without it for 10 years.

People complain about iOS not being for 'power users', but when they add features in like a secondary click or more fine-grained control, people complain about it not being obvious. How obvious is right clicking on a computer to bring up special features?

<comment><USER3> > How obvious is right clicking on a computer to bring up special features?

Well considering that most mice have 2 or 3 obvious physical buttons I would say the right-click on a mouse is pretty obvious. It has also be deeply ingrained in every Windows user since Windows 3.11 (maybe earlier?)

<comment><USER6> I would try spending time with an "average user". They do not use right click, nor keyboard shortcuts (which have also been around for ages). The average user is a basic user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried iOS 11 on the latest version of the iPad Pro 9.7" and iPhone 6S. I've actually downgraded back to iOS 10 because the beta was still too buggy for day-to-day use.

The existing 'multi-tasking' on the iPad Pro is fiddly, and this was no easier. Apps were locking themselves to the Dock and I couldn't work out how to remove them. Switching between apps was far from "Cmd + Tab" of the desktop. A lot of apps that I still use but haven't been updated in years broke because they're not 64 bit. And it was very slow. Even native apps like Settings and Notes were just hanging for seconds at a time.

The hardest bit is the sheer number of different ways of doing things. "You're in landscape mode, so if you slide down from the top and then slide left in the resulting screen you can see the last notification that popped up a second ago."

I did like the new keyboard, where I could just swipe down to get a capital letter or special character. And the control screen was good, as I could enable "Battery Saver Mode" and the "Personal Hotpoint" more quickly.

But I'll need to see a lot more polish to the Dock before re-upgrading.

<comment><USER8> Must of the previous IOS beta have had similar poor performance. I dont know if some debug mode i running in the background or whats going on, but final version, is always much more performant.

<comment><USER7> I upgraded to the iOS 10 beta almost immediately as it came out (only on the iPhone) and it felt very polished. There were a few performance issues, but I was able to live with them - this time around it was unusable.

<comment><USER4> I've updated every one since iOS 5 and it's always been like this in the early releases before the iPhone event.

Though, as always, YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm slightly terrified that this update is going to confuse the hell out of my ageing parents, who find the simplicity, lack of meaningful support for multitasking, and absence of the Dock, to be key selling points of their iPad.

<comment><USER10> You posted exactly what I was thinking. I recently gave my parents my iPad Air 4th gen and orienting them to it was an eye-opening experience. They are retired but they both worked as programmers (think COBOL-era). I've owned an iPad since launch day and so many features that feel instinctive -- double-tap home button to bring up apps, slide-down-from-top to see notifications -- are decidedly not. And that's before you get to the confusion of what's the difference between logging into email via the browser, versus a specialized app.

And then there's me. I got myself an iPad Pro, one of the 9.7 inch models that Apple didn't see fit to put 3D-touch on. It took me a long time to realize that the reason I couldn't delete items from the core TV app was because the delete functionality, which used to work on a long touch, was deprecated for 3D-touch. The amount of no-shits given by Apple designers toward long-time users with year-old devices still amazes me. Making iOS more like a computer is appealing to me, but I feel bad for the non-professionals who are likely to be super confused.

<comment><USER11> None of the iPads have 3D touch so it is not about your tablet being old.

I looked it up and the discover-ability on this feature is pretty poor. You click the "downloaded" button to get the option to delete.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204343](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204343)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think I'm going to sell my existing 9.7" to get the new 10.5" to get a bit more space to work with on this new version of iOS.

I can't wait until I can really use iOS the way I use my mac. Which at this point really is based on either mobileOrg getting better or some app coming out where I can easily manage a rich personal knowledge base/wiki on the iPad.

<comment><USER13> I'm in the process of switching from vimwiki to the built in Notes.app.

The big change is switching from links for organization to folders.

In vimwiki, I did a lot of scripting to manage/edit plaintext notes. Notes.app on the desktop has pretty good applescript support, so scripting is still an option although it is more cumbersome than operating on a directory of text files.

However, it is very nice to have an iOS app designed to view/edit my notes. I'm also really enjoying using the apple pencil to take notes and having them integrated into my computer text notes. Notes has a lot of integrations throughout iOS and macOS so that has been nice too.

<comment><USER12> Honestly, if I could just make links easily between notes I'd be pretty set with Notes.app except for the fact that code is kind of hard to write in it. i.e. snippets, etc.

I tried using it because you're right, it's one of the better experiences on iOS/macOS since it's been designed to be well done from the ground up. I should probably try the new iOS 11 one before completely writing it off because I heard on Gruber's latest podcast that the app has gotten way better now with the big iPad productivity push.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > If somebody tries to join your Wi-Fi network and has an iOS device, you get > a prompt asking if you want to share your Wi-Fi password.

How does that work?

Will it happen on Corporate WiFi networks, and if multiple iDevices are connected will they all recieve the same prompt?

</comment><comment><USER15> read the article. not much there. very fluffy. as usual apple made old work flows different. as usual, people will be confused at first. as usual, not much to write home about.

"Before IOS 11 we arbitrarily limited the apps in your dock to 6. Today we will allow up to 8!" <cheers from the crowd>. They've been dripping out features, that they could have delivered in 2010 but for reasons like Courage chose to hold back.

The article doesn't support the headline. Unless that also means 'Your ipad will still be the same old iPad, but you will find it more awkward to use"

</comment><comment><USER16> Just an observation but at this pace which will happen quicker to market -- mouse integration on iOS or Windows 10 ARM?

And of those two which has a bigger impact?

<comment><USER17> Mouse integration on the iPad would be a disastrous blunder. It just wouldn't fit with any aspect of the interaction model and would represent a dire loss of the plot on Apple's part. So I think that would have the greater impact.

<comment><USER18> I don't know why it would be a blunder. On a jailbroken iPad it's a god send to be able to have a tablet with a mouse and keyboard with a battery that lasts forever. Touching the screen gets "gorilla arm" fast and also makes it dirty. Could also lead to tablet cases with built in track pads. But I can see the "this doesn't apply to me so it's dumb" narrative that seems to circle around Apple opinions so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm planning to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro because Android and iOS tablets have very limited Operating Systems. So I think that some of this changes go in the right direction, for tablets at least.

On long trips, to Japan or the USA, I usually travel with an iPad and a Macbook (1 or 2 phones, 2 digital cameras). It has worked well. Next time I'm trying to get around with just one device that allows me to move around the city with all the information I need, and that I can use to do some more advanced stuff when I get to the hotel (Classify pictures and videos, edit and process them, upload them to Google Pictures/Facebook/...). Let's see how that goes.

I understand that Apple doesn't want to scare current customers offering something that they don't need/want. But I need it now. :)

<comment><USER20> Speaking as someone using 11 on an iPad Pro 12.5", I would take this (and will be taking this) over my Surface Pro 3. The screen is amazing, the new multitasking features are great, the battery life even on the beta destroys the Surface, I could keep going on but really this is a very laptop replacing device, for me. As usual YMMV, but seriously this can cover probably 90% of what I use my laptop for in a mobile setting.

Addressing my itch of curiousness: Why carry 2 phones?

<comment><USER21> Perhaps a work phone and a personal phone?

<comment><USER19> Yes. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Until I hear that Xcode for iPad Pro is in the works I'll be holding onto my first gen Air. Otherwise there's no point spending a grand when my $200 touchscreen convertible Chromebook does all the tablety things I need and runs Linux beautifully.

<comment><USER23> I don't think Chromebook runs Xcode either

<comment><USER24> What the parent is saying is that it is useless to buy a new iPad, because he already has a Chromebook. If iOS 11 brought XCode, then he would buy a new one, because it would have one more important feature (XCode).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is what I expect 'iOS laptop edition' is. As ChromeOS is 'Android laptop edition' and Win10 already is Windows laptop edition.

With the addition of WSL to Win10 it makes it more developer friendly for me. Very much like MacOS always has been, drop into terminal and blam, there is all of UNIX.

And all of it makes Canonical's "one Ubuntu across three platforms" pitch seem pretty prophetic.

Very fun to watch excellent designers try these things out in the market.

</comment><comment><USER26> If Adobe releases its Creative Suite and Apple decides the iPad is big enough to run Xcode, the Mac is in trouble.

And I think that's fine, even being a die hard Mac user with 30 years of usage under my belt.

The hardware is simply amazing and the software is finally coming of age.

<comment><USER27> Honestly, I see very little appeal in working with iOS as a professional software developer. Both from a form-factor to OS perspective, I'd feel very limited and would not be as productive as I can be with a Mac or PC.

<comment><USER26> Yes, but I imagine using a physical keyboard while coding on iOS. I think I'll always prefer a mouse for a lot of things, but who knows.

<comment><USER27> Even so my concern is more about how one could possibly set up in iOS the local environment needed for developing (terminals, local packages, browser extensions, tools, finder, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> the part of being able to measure items "AR" style is going to be amazing for businesses, both in direct in the home work and allowing customers to do their own measurements and such

<comment><USER29> Not very accurate though. You can see about half a cm difference in 40 cms (compared to a tape measure beside it.)

<comment><USER12> Unless you're doing something either destructive or hard to reverse ARKit will be plenty accurate for things like knowing if a piece of furniture will fit through a door or something will hang on a wall.

It'll also help make the ("it's a 55.5inch TV" \+ "No, it's clearly just a 30 inch one") argument much easier to settle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> lol the discussion at the bottom of the article is about why macos isn't on ipad, reminds me of when people said it was impossible to put macos on x86. My $.02 is that macos has a lot of bloated garbage hanging around and iOS is likely more slim for the task. However I'm sure it's got it's own garbage after 10 years.

<comment><USER31> a much better question (that has the same answer) is why dont macbooks have touch screens. its definitely not because of hardware limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There's a long ways to go, but I wonder if we're headed for an eventual unification of iOS and macOS?

<comment><USER33> That writing has been on the wall since the iOS style application "launcher" was added to OS X.

<comment><USER34> They are certainly experimenting with which features might make sense on the "other" OS. But until your post, I had almost forgotten that the launcher still exists on macOS. Likewise, Dashboard still exists, but does not get much attention any more. But even with the new iOS giving more "desktop" powers to the iPad, Apple still seems to aim for a UI model quite different to macOS. So this seems to be intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Come on Apple, give-in to mouse support.

</comment><comment><USER15> meh. not much, handing back features they could have delivered in 2010. A great bit of positive fluff imho

</comment><comment><USER3> But it's still an iPad.

Touch screens are just slower, less accurate, and more cumbersome than a cursor and a good hardware keyboard for the vast majority of professional applications and use cases.

<comment><USER36> Point, but it may end up as an SLR vs. phone cam thing.

We know the numbers on that ...

<comment><USER3> I get what you're saying, but a phone camera is much easier to use than an SLR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I didn't read the whole thing. Does it do anything better than other operating systems, or just bring desktop features to the iPad?

I'm not saying bringing desktop features to a tablet is a problem, just curious.

<comment><USER17> The only really important question is whether it does anything better than other tablet operating systems. For the iPad, that's what really matters - becoming the best tablet OS it can be. Anything else would be a distraction.

<comment><USER38> Microsoft would disagree, and they have been astonishingly successful with the Surface Pro line.

The iOS11 desktop features are a vindication of Microsoft's original Windows 8 vision. Microsoft didn't /execute/ on that vision particularly well in either Win8 or Win10, but the convergence between handheld and desktop does offer some tangible advantages. It isn't all marketing BS.

<comment><USER39> I have a Windows 10 tablet (well, a "2-in-1" since it came with a keyboard using a Surface-style connector), and it seems to behave reasonably as both a tablet and laptop.

It's certainly more integrated than my experience has been with other OSs on tablets: Android doesn't do well as a laptop, nor does iOS; Windows 10 is a desktop operating system, and works reasonably as a tablet. (I don't like Windows 10 for _other_ reasons that have nothing do with mode switching.)

I'm curious why you think Windows 10 didn't execute well on the idea.

<comment><USER38> My take is this. Win8 was actually an excellent tablet OS, but compromised, deliberately compromised in many cases, its desktop experience to get there.

In sharp contrast Win10 took the opposite approach-- it is markedly less pleasant to use exclusively with touch, but a great desktop with mouse+keyboard. They didn't /try/ to compromise touch, but they didn't put much effort into it either.

<comment><USER40> I wouldn't say the desktop experience was 'compromised'. 'Depreciated' (i.e. made legacy) or 'encapsulated' would be the description I'd use.

Consider how the transition from command-line interfaces to GUI was made. Even today you can open up the Command Prompt in Windows (or Terminal in OSX) and run legacy MS Dos apps. Well Balmer saw Jobs heralding the iPad as the future of computing, the launch lines, and the early spectacular growth and he freaked out. So, following the old interface transition playbook, Win8 was designed as a touch-first UI and then the desktop UI was squirreled away as an app (and the command prompt inside that desktop app ― inception). Win8 was an excellent tablet/touch _designed_ OS and also purists could configure Win8 to bypass the touch stuff and skip straight to the desktop at launch... however Balmer had made a bad bet.

In the broader picture, the future of computers hasn't turned out to be touch tablets. The iPad peaked and the traditional laptop formfactor is still going strong. So Balmer's bet on a touch first Windows wasn't worth it. Moreover the execution was lacking. While Win8 was an excellently _designed_ touch/tablet OS, it was not fully implemented so there were many leaky abstractions back to the desktop interface. Most notably there were many settings that could not be configured in the touch/tablet interface ― the system would randomly throw the user into the desktop app ― and all the Microsoft Office apps (except One Note) could only be used in the desktop interface. There was no way to completely disable the desktop app and hand over a Win8 tablet that worked exactly as an iPad.

Win10 went back to the drawing board and presents touch and desktop UI as complementary options side-by-side instead of a touch-first UI. That unfortunately meant removing some of the system wide Win8 touch designs that didn't quite work well with mouse+keyboard.

<comment><USER41> It absolutely was compromised. The start screen was a horrible UI on desktops.

<comment><USER38> Agree. "Deprecated" implies that they ignored it, didn't improve it, that it remained essentially unchanged. That was not the case in Win8, which offered a markedly inferior desktop UX when compared to Win7.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Despite Crackdowns, Neo-Nazi YouTube Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-crackdowns-white-supremacist-and-neo-nazi-videos-take-stubborn-root-on-youtube <comment><USER2> The surface level free-speech argument is beaten to death. Yes, we know free- speech is important. We fight hard for it because it is important. Speech is incredibly powerful.

We _know_ speech causes material changes to the world, that is why we fight so hard for to protect that freedom. So lets move the conversation forward, to the material changes this rise in anti-intellectual, conspiracy minded, anti- science free speech crusaders are attempting to cause--what world are they attempting to create by using powerful speech?

Let's not be disingenuous and pretend these types of speech should be brushed away as if they don't matter, as if speech is harmless, as if it has no impact on the world. We _know_ it has impacts, that is why we fight to protect speech.

Speech can't be both powerful enough to protect and simultaneously meaningless to the point that no one should be concerned. We can't say "Speech is the most important thing we have." and then turn around and say "Oh, its just words, ignore it, snowflake." We can't have it both ways. If we protect speech because of it's power, then targets of hate speech have a right to be upset when it takes aim at them. If we protect speech because it is powerful, then we all have a right to be concerned with the enormous rise in anti-science or just plain bad information masquerading as science. Speech matters, we have a right to be pissed when it's used for nefarious purposes or used carelessly-- it is not meaningless, it is powerful.

<comment><USER3> > the material changes this rise in anti-intellectual, conspiracy minded, > anti-science free speech crusaders are attempting to cause

You lost me here, as in my experience, such activity has been in significant _decline_ over my lifetime. We're actually living in a golden age where science and reason are ascendant.

Using this as a pretext for silencing people that don't agree with us seems particularly pernicious.

<comment><USER2> Did you respond to the wrong post? I'm certain I didn't mention silencing anyone.

In fact, when you take my post as a whole, not partially as you did, over and over again I gush about the importance and the incredible power of speech.

<comment><USER3> You're arguing for limiting speech. I'm arguing against.

<comment><USER2> > You're arguing for limiting speech.

I absolutely am not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course. Free speech reigns. What could possibly be better - banning them from speaking, pushing them underground, jailing them, torturing them, or worse?

Giving people freedom of speech is our only hope of engaging them at some future time in dialogue and of possibly bringing them to some other conclusions. Consider it an application of the "Golden Rule".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule)

And take some solace that, as a group or groups, "neo-Nazis" are not nearly as much a problem as were the original German Nazis, both for their own society and for the world.

<comment><AUTHOR>
        Giving people freedom of speech is
        our only hope of engaging them at
        some future time in dialogue

The diehard ones generally end up in jail. You can pay them a visit there, to engage them.

In the meantime, pushing them underground means that elementary school students won't watch their videos when they auto-play after a make-up tutorial, or RDR2 gameplay video.

<comment><USER5> Where do you stop?

Hitler and his political organization did terrible things, and we certainly should try to stop those kinds of events from repeating.

But the same could be said of Stalin or Mao: should we ban all of the neo- communist videos on YouTube?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not Youtube, so it's not my call, but if they had any sense of responsibility, they should certainly ban Nazis and terrorists.

Whatever they don't want on their platform beyond that is their business. If they don't like videos of baby sea lions, well, I'd have to find my baby sea lion videos elsewhere.

<comment><USER6> Who defines the terms "Nazis" and "terrorists", who defines who to ban? Is it the original "Nazi" definition, or some modern diluted definition where the number of Nazis has skyrocketed? Do we allow content from "freedom fighters" and "rebels"?

<comment><USER2> > Who defines the terms "Nazis" and "terrorists"

On their platform, YouTube does.

I apologize if I'm accidentally misunderstanding what your expectations are regarding decisions in society, but if you're asking for society to eliminate judgement calls, this is an incredibly unrealistic ask and you will almost certainly forever be frustrated.

Everyday humans make judgement calls, and they seem to be reasonable far more often than they are unreasonable. If YouTube's userbase feels YouTube has become unreasonable, they move on to another platform. Whether you realize it or not, in a society based on private property, where we allow individuals to have control over things they own, what may seem like arbitrary judgement calls are necessarily made thousands of times per day. Everything from the local bartender who must decide when someone has too much to drink to the person choosing which stocks to buy, to the interviewer deciding who the best candidate is for a job. Judgement calls are constantly made. In a society which worships private property and places an incredibly high value on individual choice, Asking "who decides X, Y, and Z?" will always end with "The person who owns the _thing_ or is placed in the trusted role for that decision." You interact with this trust over and over and over again throughout your day.

Now if you want to question whether or not a society should worship private property to the level with which we do, this is an entirely different question. But in our current iteration, where we trust individuals to make decisions without seeking permission from every member of society, the owners of something or the people they hire decide what is or is not do with their personal assets.

It likely isn't possible to run a society where no one is ever making judgement calls. Again, if I misunderstood the implications of your question, I apologize.

<comment><USER5> YouTube actually agreed not to editorialize user uploaded content in exchange for protection from copyright laws.

So YouTube actually voluntarily surrendered the right many of you suppose it has in exchange for a privilege — if YouTube removed content that way, it becomes liable for any acts of commercial copyright infringement.

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested to hear more about this, do you have any articles handy which go into detail of the specific language of this agreement? I'm sure this may be a possibility, but I'm skeptical, I'd be more inclined to believe YouTube's lawyers would be more than smart enough to advise them not to break that kind of contract. I'd love to see the language though if you have it handy.

Giving up the power to pick and choose what sort of content would be allowed on their platform seems like something no sane organization would give away. That would be like hackernews signing an agreement where they wouldn't be allowed to moderate, highly unlikely.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Decaf: Ruby in the Browser - <AUTHOR> http://trydecaf.org/ <comment><USER2> I've toyed with this idea before, though I had considered Lua due to its specialization in embedded environments and relatively simple sandboxing.

Interesting choice, here, in going with Ruby. Ruby is not exactly intended for embedding, and I imagine that a veritable mountain of holes in the script sandbox would need to be plugged before anything like this could see mainstream adoption. On the other hand, people are likely to be a lot more excited about native Ruby support in a browser than they would be about Lua.

Overall, I wish this project much success. It will be a long road, but I hope Ruby is just the first language to be supported in this way...

<comment><USER3> mruby[1] is aiming to be an embeddable version of Ruby. Still a massive WIP though.

<https://github.com/mruby/mruby>

<comment><USER4> Mruby has been compiled with Emscripten. There's a demo of it on the Emscripten wiki, where you can edit and run Ruby client side that way, though obviously with the caveat that bridging from Emscripten generated code to "normal" javascript is far from ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a cool hack but it's pretty much DOA.

It's a modified version of WebKit. WebKit devs won't allow this to be part of WebKit itself ([https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-April/024...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-April/024514.html)).

Even if it's actively maintained (and maintaining a fork of WebKit, even if it adds just one feature, is super hard), it'll be of extremely limited appeal.

Basically it's a custom, "toy" browser that you have to download and the ruby scripts you write will not be usable by anyone else (because no one else will use that browser).

There's no way this thing gets traction.

Nevertheless: kudos to the author for a cool hack.

<comment><USER6> Who cares if it's not ready to be distributed as a binary to the masses? Who says they even want it to "gain traction"? It's a POC, and an awesome one.

<comment><USER5> Reading the comments it's clear that majority people do not understand what it is, mostly because the title is misleading.

It's a custom, toy browser with Ruby support, not "Ruby in the Browser" (where the implication is that the browser == chrome or firefox or safari).

I'm just trying to clarify that so that people don't get the wrong impression from the misleading title.

<comment><USER7> Chill out dude and stop thinking about market adoption. It's about the journey, not the destination, remember ? This is clearly a new creative process that should be treated with respect. This may open the door for seeing other languages in the browser where chrome might like say be bundled with v8, mruby, python vm, etc.

Your children one day will laugh at you saying our parents only had javascript in the browser.

Stop thinking about market adoption.

<comment><USER8> Since when have we only had javascript in the browser? We've had Java applets. We've had Flash. The issue is security holes. The reason our children will never laugh at us for only using javascript in the browser is because we cared about writing secure web applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, why aren't we talking about browser bytecode you guys? Why is everyone's solution "whelp, you're stuck with js".

Is asm.js going to be a useful halfway point?

<comment><USER10> Really the only reason I see that asm.js should be a halfway point rather than an endpoint is that it's kind of verbose. Even so, gzip makes a lot of that point moot, and it might be possible to make a bytecode with a 1:1 correspondence with asm.js (which could then be parsed using JS in legacy browsers), to make something even more concise.

But including an entire emscripten'd ruby environment on your website just because you don't want to use JS seems insanely inefficient, and no bytecode is going to fix that.

<comment><USER11> If we could just have shared libraries in the browser, it would solve the problem of having to serve the entire ruby runtime with each webpage. You'd just put a tag in the header indicating you're using ruby runtime version X and the browser would download it and put it in some permanent cache for javascript code. Really, it's high time we got some sort of package management for browsers.

P.S. I mean shared libraries in the abstract sense, not .so or .dll files specifically.

<comment><USER10> Well, we sort of have that in the from of CDNs, but taking it any further than that sounds like a very sticky security situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's kind of funny that once upon a time, in the early days, there was actually a language attribute to the script tag and at least one browser actually supported embeddable languages.

Sure, it was an embrace-and-extend move, but I'm not sure it was a bad idea even so.

<comment><USER13> The `type` attribute is still there, it only fallbacks to javascript if not set. Nothing besides common sense prevents browsers from shipping with type="text/ruby" support as done here. It's just not a very good idea.

<comment><USER12> language was a different attribute pretty much only used by IE and its ActiveX language embedding (which was pretty much only ever used for VBScript).

What I'm getting at in a somewhat snarky and roundabout way is that VBScript killed multilanguage support in browsers.

<comment><USER13> Well, I don't think that holds any water. Multi-language support wasn't and still isn't a good idea; having one good toolchain and cross-browser environment is already a huge effort and far from done, supporting multiple languages would just fragment the ecosystem and slow down progress.

There is hardly any popular language today you could embed and get better performance than JS anyway, except for Lua, which barely qualifies as 'popular'.

Meanwhile there are a hundred cross-compilers/transpilers out there that give you the kind of syntax you want, without requiring a ton of changes in browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty cool... the only problem is users are not going to demand Ruby in their browser :/

I created RedScript to try and bring Ruby syntax into the browser, still pretty experimental though (and not the real thing!).

<https://github.com/AdamBrodzinski/RedScript>

</comment><comment><USER15> This project is solving wrong problem. JavaScript is not very popular because it is the best programming language in the world, it's popular because it runs everywhere. Any solution for making better web application (including new programming language) that breaks it will fail. Period.

<comment><USER2> That same logic has been used for decades to discourage programmers from learning any language other than C...

<comment><USER16> Except in the world of C, the common denominator isn't the language but binaries. You can write in any language you want so long as you have a good compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this would work as a platform for desktop apps. HTML+CSS is quite nice for quickly creating GUIs and then Ruby could power the domain logic.

<comment><USER18> If I remember correctly, an earlier version of Appcelerator's Titanium let you do that. But they killed it along the way, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> On the one hand, adding to standard browser engines support for multiple scripting languages, instead of just Javascript, is a cool idea, and something that probably should have happened a long time ago.

On the other hand, the fact that this currently requires the user to install it first, seems to make it less portable than a compile-to-JS solution like Opal (<http://opalrb.org/>). At least until standard support for multiple scripting languages actually does get introduced to browser engines.

Cool project, regardless!

<comment><USER5> It did happen long time. It just died because of lack of adoption.

<script> tag has a type attribute. IE used to (still does?) support Visual Basic as a script. See <http://www.w3schools.com/vbscript/vbscript_howto.asp>

But even the combined might of IE and Microsoft (that was long time ago, when Microsoft and IE were mighty) couldn't get it broadly adopted so it's effectively dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh please yes. Make this standard.

<comment><USER21> People still disable Javascript in their browser. We aren't there yet. I'd like to see native haml, coffeescript and sass support in the browser, that seems to me a more realistic dream in the short term.

<comment><USER22> Let me put this as clear as I can. In 2013, nobody, and I do mean nobody, cares for people that "disable Javascript in their browser".

Those people are freaks anyway.

<comment><USER8> I hardly think Steve Gibson is a freak.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_%28computer_progra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_%28computer_programmer%29)

<comment><USER22> If he disables his JS he very much is one, at least browsing-wise.

Not to mention that the whole entry screams "freak" in lots of places. I mean, how is this at all typical of the average programmer:

"Gibson is an advocate of assembly language programming, and prides himself on writing smaller applications mostly in Intel x86 assembly language"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is cool! I'd like to see a Ruby front-end MVC framework that takes advantage of Ruby's unique strengths. For example, explicit getter and setter methods like in Backbone and Ember.js wouldn't be necessary anymore with Ruby's properties and dynamic methods. Maybe one could even write a Meteor- esque framework with Ruby.

It wouldn't be as useless as one might assume. There is Opal [1], a Ruby-to- JavaScript compiler, which could potentially be used as a fallback for web browsers that don't natively support Ruby.

[1] <http://opalrb.org/>

<comment><USER24> JavaScript can do getters/setters through Object.defineProperty[1]. MVC libraries tend to use methods in order to support legacy browsers.

[1][https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/JavaScript/Referenc...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/defineProperty)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do other browsers support Ruby? I've never heard of this, but the line "if your browser supports Ruby, click here for a sample" implies that Decaf isn't alone in this.

<comment><USER26> Internet Explorer supports the installation of additional scripting languages ... or at least it used to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why not just write a ruby to JS transpiler? I imagine the yacc grammar could be translated to jison (<http://zaach.github.io/jison/>) , and it's really easy to grab those script tags (e.g. [https://github.com/Niggler/scriptify.js/blob/master/scriptif...](https://github.com/Niggler/scriptify.js/blob/master/scriptify.js))

<comment><USER4> Last time I looked, which admittedly was one of the 1.8.x versions of Ruby, the bison grammar for MRI was 6000-7000 lines including thousands of lines of C code that included a lot of state tracking for the parser to handle the more obnoxious parts of the grammar... Hopefully that's improved in 2.0... Or maybe the Rubinius or jRuby parsers might be better starting points (haven't looked at either)

<comment><USER12> Nope, it's still incredibly awful. Most of those thousands of lines aren't actually the grammer but the hand-written, full of exceptions, lexer. It has, if anything, gotten even worse thanks to allowing method selectors (the '.') to be placed on the next line, and the (key: value) syntax for hash args.

And all working active ports of Ruby use either the MRI lexer/parser verbatim or a mostly direct port of it. The JRuby port has the good graces to at least break the thousands of lines of lexing out into a few basic functions based on the first char of the token rather than leaving it in a giant switch statement, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So is it a browser? a browser extension? Does it replace my local webkit installs with something that supports ruby?

</comment><comment><USER6> Great project! It's amazing how much like an OS the browser can be (if that's what we want).

I see the web inspector works -- it would be fantastic to be able to build apps using nothing but the web inspector, save them and serve them, rinse and repeat.

Great work.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sweet! I would love to use this with my visual novel game framework (<http://rubyai.org>). Right now, it converts all of the logic from Ruby to JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of Google's effort to run C and C++ code on the client side of the browser.

<https://developers.google.com/native-client/>

</comment><comment><USER30> trying it now, few interesting facts,

goto the web inspector console, make sure the page_context = rb

* Ruby 2.0.0

> RUBY_VERSION "2.0.0"

Yay

* automated string conversion does not happen, you would need to do it your self

>Time.now

Time {}

>Time.now.to_s

"2013-04-08 19:47:14 -00700"

* top most object is not Kernel

>Time.ancestors

[Time, Module, Object, Kernel, BasicObject]

curious to know what standard libraries are included, hope will update the post with new findings soon

<comment><USER30> * ObjectSpace.methods does not work, so no global introspection.

* eval works >eval("2+3") 5

* able to extend objects

* browser specific classes Window(possibly a singleton), EventTarget, Console , BarInfo

* if you open multiple windows, it acts like a seperate irb instance, though console history is available

<comment><USER30> found a bug which crashes the app everytime, submitted a ticket <https://github.com/timahoney/decaf/issues/5>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hmmm, might be very interesting for people running automated tests with browsers using ruby.

</comment><comment><USER32> Honest question: what are the security concerns here? Ruby's $SAFE isn't really that great.

</comment><comment><USER33> They missed the chance to name this language buby (browser-ruby).

</comment><comment><USER34> Why not use Dart?

</comment><comment><USER35> What browsers actually support this?</comment>


Supreme Court of India decriminalizes gay sex - <AUTHOR> https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/supreme-court-verdict-on-section-377-live-updates/liveblog/65694784.cms <comment><AUTHOR> > Justice Chandrachud said denial of right to sexual orientation is akin to > denial of right to privacy

India doesn't really have strong privacy rights though, so this comparison doesn't hold up well. However, this is a big day for India, congratulations to all Indians and especially the LGBQT community!</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite split testing/AB/lean framework for Django? - <AUTHOR>

I'm familiar with this one and folks seem to like it, but it hasn't been updated in a while:
https://bitbucket.org/akoha/django-lean/wiki/Home
What do folks using Django like these days? <comment><USER2> Good question. I don't have an answer as I have only been recently evaluating them myself. I was pretty close to trying out <https://github.com/Mathew/django-ab> because of its simplicity.</comment>


Node.js Interview: 4 Questions with Creator Ryan Dahl - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/31/node-js-interview-4-questions-with-creator-ryan-dahl/

<comment><USER2> My first question is "why not coroutines?!"

I _love_ Lua (IMHO, Lua is Javascript, if JS hadn't spent its formative years huffing glue). I get where he's coming from with the "most libraries are blocking" bit, because hey, most libraries _ARE_ blocking -- making a fully event-loop-centric system really is a niche case. If you want to focus on that 100%, cool, _use Erlang_ , damn it. They did it right! Failing that, make a clear point of running "non-async" code externally and message-passing.

But I _really_ don't see the point of deluding JS programmers into writing hand-written-CPS "to be asynchronous". I wish they knew better. See e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150800>

</comment><comment><USER3> The two most interesting points for me:

* JavaScript wasn't the original language choice: he originally tried C, Lua and Haskell. He especially liked Lua but "it already had a lot of libraries written with blocking code."

* He regrets using the CommonJS module system. ("Far too complex and wildly different from how the browser works.")

<comment><USER4> _> He especially liked Lua _

Well, not as much as Haskell : _"Haskell is pretty ideal but I'm not smart enough to hack the GHC. Lua is_ less ideal _but a lovely language [...]"_ (at the beginning of the 2nd answer.)

 _> He regrets using the CommonJS module system_

Yes, and this is pretty interesting. Also, he regrets using WAF as the build system ( _"it introduces more WTFs than necessary"_.)

I have a great respect for Ryan Dahl. He is not orthodox. He is not a blind parrot.

<comment><USER3> Heh, I got the impression that he tried harder to get Lua working, partly because he felt is was a more pragmatic choice, but I take your point.

<comment><USER4> And I do take yours. The fact than Node is actually using Javascript, which is more similar to Lua than to Haskell, makes your impression very sensible ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The WeWork problem people aren't talking about that is spreading - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/23/the-wework-issue-people-arent-talking-about.html <comment><USER2> This article is mostly hype and hyperbole it seems to me. A quick source check (note: not a fact check by any means!) of just some of the stats in the article show how badly they've misquoted.

It claims '40% of American workers will be freelancers by 2020' as a key point - appears to not be true and is an incorrect quote.

I found the original Intuit report that this claim was based off.

[http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futur...](http://http- download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/intuit_2020_report.pdf)

The report's actual claim was 40% of workers will be 'contingent workers' by 2020. The definition provided is 'freelancers, temps, part-time workers, contractors and other specialists'.

That is a lot more than just freelancers and includes many people who have no need of a desk in a freelancer/coworking space.

20,000 coworking spaces worldwide today doesn't sound like that many, but the problem doesn't seem to be as big as CNBC thinks it is (or even the article they're referencing which itself misquoted the stats). So much for checking sources...

<comment><USER2> "71% of WeWork members were corporate full-timers at companies that were either located in a WeWork office or used WeWork to house their remote teams"

Is another example of hype. The source article linked to merely says "Seventy- one percent worked full-time for companies that are either located in a WeWork office or use WeWork for remote individuals and teams."

Sounds a lot less dramatic - because it is. You'd probably expect most to be working for companies, especially if they're startups or one/two employee contracting outfits etc. They're not all big corps using the space for cheap space and evil things :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I recently looked for a co-working space in my city and it seems like most places cater for companies rather than individuals.

Spaces (the same group as Regus) opened a 6 floor complex earlier this year. Their co-working space has a grand total of 10 dedicated desks and a cafe- style area with a few tables. The rest of the complex is (mostly empty) private offices.

It seems that "co-working space" is the hip new term for "serviced office".</comment>


Dancing robots made with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://robotics.ovh/?expjava <comment><USER2> Nice hidden features, e.g. try holding one bot by its head for a minute or so.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So weird .js experiment</comment>


PyPy vs Unladen Swallow vs CPython:  benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2009/11/some-benchmarking.html

<comment><USER2> If PyPy is making progress this quickly, apparently matching Unladen Swallow in most cases, then why is Google supporting a separate implementation rather than working on PyPy? Is it just that PyPy wasn't advanced enough when the Unladen Swallow project began, or is it insufficiently compatible with existing Python libraries?

<comment><USER3> PyPy is fully compatible with CPython2.5, however it is not compatible with C extensions.

<comment><USER4> I thought that PyPy is restricted to only a subset of Python called "RPython" (stands for Restricted Python) so it's not fully compatible at all with CPython. Correct me if I'm wrong though as I'm far from being a Python guru.

<comment><USER5> Only the pypy interpreter is written in RPython, code running in pypy is written in normal python. See <http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/coding- guide.html> for more info

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It'd be interesting to see a memory usage comparison as well, especially considering that last I checked unladen-swallow's memory usage was less than stellar.

<comment><USER3> The PyPy JIT is currently less than perfectly optimized for memory usage, and there are a few leaks related to it. However, without the JIT PyPy has a better memory footprint than CPython, so it's likely that the situation will improve markedly.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Force12 – demo of container autoscaling - <AUTHOR> http://force12.io

<comment><USER2> I already asked a question on another site. But I'll ask some more here:

* Will this at (least the scheduler / scaler component) be open source? * Any plans to scale the EC2 instances as well (scaling containers is great, but I usually need to scale out more CPU and memory as well)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks these are great questions. We do want to open source the scheduler but we wanted to launch the demo first. This is to get people talking about auto scaling with containers and to build what we learn into the scheduler.

I definitely agree that there is a place for auto scaling both VMs and containers. Auto scaling with VMs means if it takes several minutes to add a VM to the cluster you have to scale up early and scale down slowly. We think auto scaling with containers can help a lot here by smoothing out the demand. Lower priority containers can be stopped while extra VM capacity is added.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Ross one of the developers of Force12. If you've got any questions or feedback on the demo please let us know.</comment>


The Billionaires' Loophole - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/david-rubenstein-and-the-carried-interest-dilemma <comment><USER2> "But, if we had a government that was better funded, it could probably fix its own monuments" Yeah, right!</comment>


Reserve raises $15M - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reserve.com/post/110717022874/announcing-our-15-million-series-a

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope they are going to cover London ASAP

</comment><comment><USER2> goodbye OpenTable...

<comment><USER3> You can't make this comment when you work for the startup being mentioned.</comment></comment>


Melting Glaciers Threaten to Inundate Russia's Far North and Siberia - <AUTHOR> http://rbth.com/science_and_tech/2017/03/14/melting-glaciers-threaten-to-inundate-russias-far-north-and-siberia_719366 <comment><AUTHOR> _In addition, permafrost retains pathogens, including anthrax. An unusually warm summer in 2016 in Yamal led to the first outbreak of anthrax in the region in the past 75 years, with 90 people ending up in the hospital. As the permafrost melts, dormant bacteria and viruses – some of which might be new to humans - will present a growing danger, scientists warn._

That's scary.</comment>


Paul Graham on Why Boston Should Worry About Its Future as a Tech Hub - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/03/10/paul-graham-on-why-boston-should-worry-about-its-future-as-a-tech-hub-says-region-focuses-on-ideas-not-startups-while-investors-lack-confidence/

<comment><USER2> This is a great interview that really underlines a lot of the issues we face in Austin too — not Boston. Coupled with an regional investment community that doesn't quite get it, makes the web movement here that much more difficult to ignite. And, I think a lot of people don't realize how important community is in this regard:

 _Another difference is that because the Valley cares so much about startups, people here are always half a step ahead. All the lawyers know what the latest standard terms are for various types of deals. The investors are less frightened by new ideas, because the ideas are less new to them. The founders feel less lonely, because there are three other groups of guys in the same building starting startups._

Last week a group of us re-launched Startup District to help foster a community online and bring the guys out of the woodwork in Austin.

<http://startupdistrict.com>

Also, Capital Factory was recently announced. A ycom-like accelerator in Austin ran by Josh Baer, who's also at the founder of OtherInbox - a really smart web startup that I've been a fanboy of the past 6 months.

<http://capitalfactory.com>

If you're going to be at SXSW, would love to meet up and catch a drink. Follow us: @startupdistrict, @capitalfactory, @pxlpshr, @johnerik

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't say firsthand whether this is true or not since I was in diapers during it's heyday, but I'm told that when DEC died, it's unwieldy, monolithic culture leaked all over the northeast. With 150,000 employees, it was basically the anti-startup. And it's pretty shocking the percentage of older programmers that were at DEC at one time or another here in Mass.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it could have made a critical difference. Oracle and Intel have been leaking their bureaucratic corporate culture all over Silicon Valley for decades.

<comment><USER5> I think it does. It's the culture the leakees take with them. DEC tried to stamp out entrepreneurialism, but most of the SV companies tolerated it or encouraged it. My first customer at my first startup was a former employer. When I moved to SV from Boston decades ago, I remember how impressed I was with the informality, no suits, ties, deference, that kind of stuff. Equally impressive was the infrastructure, from Wilson, Sonsini to Frys to an entrepreneurs club to all the little companies that had just what you needed.

<comment><USER6> If you look around Silicon Valley, you see a lot of companies that have a culture similar to HP in its heydays, when the "HP Way" was still going strong. HP was one of the early companies to succeed in the Valley. I suspect other early companies in the Valley also had strong cultural influences on startups in the Valley. We know, for instance, that many startups emerge from individuals that worked for established companies, and what better way to transmit a culture than through individuals leaving one company and starting another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We should be realistic about two things:

1\. Saying that Boston is the center of ideas is lacking. Ideas aren't an industry, the way movies, finance, or tech is. Also, ideas are cheap. It's the vetting and execution of ideas that is valuable.

2\. The quality of life issues need to be addressed. It's embarrassing that MIT students leave for Google, Facebook, etc., but I can also understand why. Aside from Kendall, the Boston area feels old, expensive, somewhat dilapidated, miserable in the winter. That's going to turn off a lot of people.

<comment><USER4> Ideas are an industry. Universities employ tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in Boston.

And while the quality of life in Boston could definitely be improved, the oldness of the city is one of the things that attracts me about it. Old things are rich and comforting. New ones can be somewhat bleak. Not just because old things have a patina. Old things are more human, because they tend to be smaller and handmade, instead of just extruded from a factory somewhere.

<comment><USER8> There is also a very good architectural argument that old cities make for better quality of life. If you're Houston or LA, you're built for cars. That makes for a worse experience than subways and walkways. The public parks in Boston are excellent. The Minute Man bike trail is unrivaled, as far as I'm concerned.

There is a great feedback loop here too. People that like things like the Public Garden are more likely to demand changes keep the feeling.

Even the Big Dig, while a bullshit waste of public resources, turns out to make the city much more pedestrian friendly. It largely emerged because the city was too old to retrofit a freeway system that could handle the capacity above ground.

<comment><USER9> The Big Dig made for a huge improvement. People who lived here in past years should see <http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2008-05-14>

<comment><USER8> That's quite striking. I agree that is has been pretty awesome, from what I can tell. I only moved to Boston right as it finished.

There was inexcusable corruption and incompetence in the construction though. That puts of a taint on large municipal projects generally.

<comment><USER4> The elevated highway it replaced was such a complete disaster that it's a net win to have it gone even with all the corruption.

From what I've heard, though, the old highway was designed the way it was because of corruption too. The palpable aura of corruption in Boston probably doesn't help it as a tech hub. Corruption tends to yield low quality of life, because so much of the money that goes into the government goes to political supporters rather than into beneficial projects.

I've noticed practically all very corrupt cities (Syracuse was a striking example) are economically backward, though it's hard to say which is cause and which is effect.

<comment><USER10> I doubt corruption is the cause. Most American cities were very corrupt during the late 1800's, yet had amazing economic growth. Detroit, Cleveland, Syracuse, etc were all startup hubs back then.

All governments funnel money to their employees and supporters. For us subjects, what matters is that the rulers are competent and think for the long term. If they are smart and optimize for the long term, they realize that the best way to enrich themselves is to grow the pie, not to gobble it all up. The guys who ran Tammany Hall understood this, more recent corrupt rulers like Detroit's Coleman Young did not.

<comment><USER8> Don't you think the industrial revolution is a unique period? And who is to say corruption didn't have a big impact, just lessened by the booming period?

<comment><USER10> I don't get what you are trying to say. Yes, it was a booming period, that is the point. The question is why it was a booming period.

I don't think rule by corrupt political machines is ideal, I'd prefer if it if cities were run as joint stock corporations. But despite its many shortcomings, Tammany Hall and its ilk were much better at ruling than most of our modern city governments. Compare how the recovery of Chicago after the great fire to that of New Orleans after the flood. Or compare it to the (non- existent) rebuilding of the World Trade Towers. They were building infrastructure at amazing rate, we are letting it decay. If I could trade the current Boston government for Tammany Hall, I'd do so in a second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PG's last line in the article is amazing.

<comment><USER12> "not that he should cultivate his unique potential as a pedestrian"

Ha, yes, that made me chuckle too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have advice for what to do if you are in Boston? Is it realistic to look for early-stage / seed funding, a la YCombinator, or do I need to get further on my own before seeking funding? Not that I'm opposed to moving to California, but I'll be in Boston for a while either way, and I might as well see what can be done here.

<comment><USER4> It's never too early to apply to YC. That's the point of YC: it's first gear.

<comment><USER14> _Really_? So, if I'm doing wildly uncertain research in AI which I hope shall eventually (in 5 years) lead to a Unix killer... Applying before having actual technology to show for it wouldn't be too early?

<comment><USER4> If you're working on something that can't be launched immediately, then what you build during YC is a proof of concept. You just have to be able to make something good enough to convince the next round of investors to back you. That's the threshold.

The details of your plan worry me though. How much money do companies make from Unixes now?

<comment><USER14> _You just have to be able to make something good enough to convince the next round of investors to back you._

That's the problem. I've been working on it for a while already, and it's unlikely that 3 more months would yield a convincing prototype. I'd still have to sell the idea and myself.

 _How much money do companies make from Unixes now?_

I'm not sure I get what you mean. If someone came up with an OS that was much more powerful than Unix, I'm sure there'd be _some_ people interested, and it'd be possible to snowball from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I moved to Boston from the Valley and back for similar reasons last year and I can tell you its a very good move.

Finally, here is a link from arcana that discussed the same:<http://whyorg.com/comp/startups.html></comment>


Example of fantastic customer service - BatchBlue - <AUTHOR> http://tedvickey.posterous.com/example-of-fantastic-customer-service-adam-fr

<comment><USER2> I'm a little skeptical about all this.

From:

<http://blog.batchblue.com/tag/tj-sondermann/>

This smacks of astroturfing:

Slide 38: TJ Sondermann (@sondernagle) is the closest thing BatchBlue has to a mascot. Not only is he a great friend and full of great ideas, he actually came up with the concept of our wildly popular Twitter tee shirt (shown on Slide 39).

Account made 4 days ago first submission promotes FANTASTIC service at affiliated company.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure that's the same guy who posted the link to HN, but the article he linked to is from some fitness consultant's blog. I guess I don't see the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good example of how to do it right. Replies like that will convert interest into customers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Where is the boundary between sales and customer service?

<comment><USER6> This was my thought also. No doubt it's great sales, which may indicate great customer service, but it ain't customer service.

I know I've had plenty of experience where the sales process has been fantastic, and the customer service (once the bills have been paid) quite ordinary. And it's anecdotal, but I've experienced more than one company with an automated phone system, which will send customer service enquiries to voicemail, but ring back and select 'Sales' and have your call answered in 3 rings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone here used BatchBlue? Any feedback on the service itself?</comment>


Pass: Very minimal CLI password manager that follows Unix philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://www.passwordstore.org/

<comment><USER2> Pass: The standard unix password manager 150 points by po 58 days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337)

Still a very nice tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> You've submitted too soon: the DNS hasn't propagated yet (at least I get an invalid domain error)</comment>


Ask HN: Are any of you blind programmers and what tools do you use? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> See following stackoverflow question, I'm the highest voted answer but some good info from others as well. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how- can-you-progra...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you- program-if-youre-blind) It's a bit out of date because I now use windows 7 and Vagrant with a command-line for a lot of things but screen reading software is still the same.

<comment><USER3> A massive high-five to you brother. I read through your answer. Such an inspiration you are. More power to you!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you anyone tell me that what we should do when we are not finding the better way to picked up our site on the top ?</comment>


IMHO: The Mythical Fullstack Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/17/imho-the-mythical-fullstack-engineer/ <comment><USER2> Right from my school days I've been involved in all layers of developing apps - assembler, C, Java, HTML, PHP, Django, databases, HTML/CSS/JS. Many years before this "full stack developer" popped up, I never thought being involved in all the layers of developing apps needs a name of its own. For me it was just being able to do both frontend and backend.

So when "full stack developer" roles first begin to pop up in the industry, it left me very confused. Why a whole new name for it? How exactly is it defined? Am I a full stack developer or am I not?

<comment><USER3> It seems the latest term is "full-cycle" developer. You must know FE and/or BE, plus how to test, release, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What drew me to software development was the desire to make things. It's not possible to make software worthy of today's audience without front-end, back- end and release engineering.

So if this person is saying "you can't make anything yourself[1]", that would be a sad situation.

For me, and I know this is common, my backstory goes like this: HTML -> PC building -> Photoshop -> graphic design -> web design -> CSS -> PHP -> JS & jQuery -> Node.js -> Mongo/Postgres -> Angular -> React -> React Native -> Heroku -> Docker -> Gitlab/CI/tests -> ArangoDB -> Kubernetes -> CDNs and lots more

I simply do what I need to do to make stuff. I've made back-end REST+WebSocket frameworks, cross-platform front-end component libraries, database ORMs and query builders, mobile apps published on the App Store, built CI pipelines for test and release, and configured containers, orchestrators and CDNs (which I programmed) for max availability. And I've lead teams in doing all these things.

Are my experiences "mythical"? No--but if you set your own standards or definitions when defining something you oppose, you'll often prove yourself right. While I've made route-finding systems and address search services, I honestly don't know some of the algebra about sorting algorithms. I learned as I went; and while I probably need more study and a little more time on new tasks than those who focus on a narrow aspect, I'm eager to do it.

In my pursuit of making stuff, what's expressed in this article won't stop me.

[1] Of course, nothing is made ourselves, we all rely on open source code, computers and servers.</comment>


Took me more than 2 years to get 200 paying customers for my Web App - <AUTHOR> http://www.startbreakingfree.com/1640/universitytutor-races-past-200-paying-customers/ <comment><USER2> congrats! It's always inspiring to see people having success doing what they love. 200 users seems almost laughably smalltime compared to some of the companies who get featured on here, but to me, and I'm sure much of the HN readership, it's a dream; if I can get 200 paying users of my business when I launch I'll be ecstatic!

It's really good to see a success story which doesn't focus on "hey wow, I got a million users overnight through sheer luck". It reminds us that 99% of the time, companies are built slowly and surely, not astronomically.

<comment><USER3> People have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers (not to mention 200!!). It's one thing to get people to say "I love your product - will buy premium plan for sure!" and the completely other thing to actually receive a payment ("I'm sorry I was busy", "Will buy, just waiting for my customer to place an order" etc.).

Best of luck to everyone trying to persuade their customers to pay. I'm also one of you!

<comment><USER4> _People have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers_

I'm kind of conflicted on this. Yes, it is hard to get ten people to pay money, in that you have to have a mostly-functioning product, a website which markets it, and some way to charge their credit cards. But this is not really _that_ hard.

BCC 1.02 ("Like 1.00, but with less crash bugs and the brand new ability to print to non-default printers") got to ten customers in six weeks from 1.0's launch, entirely on the strength of organic search marketing on two pieces of content. That was when I was young and stupid. Y'all can do better.

I think software (let's scope it to B2C software for the moment) is like lemonade stands. You know how you get ten customers with a lemonade stand? Your price? Doesn't really matter. Your stand's design? Doesn't really matter. Your taste? Doesn't really matter. Your location? Probably matters for getting hundreds or thousands of customers, but for 10, pretty much any street will do. The key hurdle you have to get over is _charging money for lemonade_. I am worried that people think it is really really hard to run a successful business, and that stops them from ever charging for lemonade.

<comment><USER5> But how do you get over charging for something that competitors offer for free? Even if your product is better in different ways, that's a hard sell.

<comment><USER6> 3/10 cent a gallon for water delivered straight to the home.

$1.50 gallon for a jug in isle 13 at your super market

or $1.75 for a 20oz bottle at the checkout counter.

Are these all the same product? Do they even compete?

<comment><USER4> That example is going in my playbook. (And the product is available for free, in nigh-infinite quantities, in every occupied building in America. You don't even have to ask for it. In fact, asking for permission to take some would have whomever you asked immediately question your mental state!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is actually a significant milestone for any entrepreneur. 200 * $10/mo == enough to pay your rent.

$2k/month is the tipping point where you're no longer bleeding money and eating into savings. Sure, you're not getting richer and you might still need to take the odd freelance job for spending money, but it's a great place be, no longer watching your bank account on its slow & steady march toward zero.

From here, it's all profit!

<comment><USER8> Remember, not everyone lives in the Bay Area. ;-) Depending on where you live and if you have roommates, the $2k per month may be enough to pay rent, bills, college loans and leave some left over for spending money.

<comment><USER7> Don't you mean "not everybody lives in Honduras"? There aren't many places in the US where you can live for $2k/month all in, and the Bay Area would be the last place I'd expect to do so.

I meant "pays your rent" quite literally. As in, taking the biggest of your financial worries away and leaving you only needing to deal with the spending money part. So you still can't live on your income, but you can coast along for an entire year on $10k savings.

Up to that point, $10k in the bank meant you'd better start scrambling to pick up a contract in the next couple months before you run out of money.

<comment><USER4> _There aren't many places in the US where you can live for $2k/month all in_

$2,000 / 160 = $12.50, which is substantially higher than the minimum wage in all fifty states of the Union, so I'm guessing that there exist at least a few people who are somehow making do...

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing you've never tried to live on $12.50/hr. And if you take that as a gross number not a net number its even worse. Sure, people are "making it work" but if you aren't single without kids and have zero college debt then you aren't doing it without some sort of assistance. Just because the minimum wage is $7.25 or up to $8.55 (depending on the state you live in), doesn't mean you can live on it.

<comment><USER9> Really? negative points for a post that simply points out the fact that $12.50/hr is a lot harder to live on that what the majority of people on here want to make it sound? I'm not trolling, just offering a different point of view from different observations. I live in rural PA not a metro area or anything like that. I'm not saying it can't be done, but its not the norm.

<comment><USER10> _Really? negative points . . . ?_

Well, you opened with,

 _I'm guessing you've never tried to live on $12.50/hr._

I consider this aggressive and personal. Rather than stating your position and evidence, you've attacked the credentials of anyone who disagrees with you. Aside from the fact that it's naive and almost certainly false (there are folks on this site from _all_ walks of life with _all_ kinds of experience and opinions), it is distracting. I do not care at all whether someone has the particular credentials you think are necessary to comment on the topic; I care only about what evidence and experience they _do_ have.

Above all, I want to hear about ideas, not people. If you speculate on people's motives or qualifications (especially if you're suggesting downvotes are the result of disagreement or censorship), or any time in general that you attack the person of other commenters, you won't interest me. You'll annoy me. And unless you say something particularly redeeming, I'll probably downvote the comment.

<comment><USER9> Understandable, I agree I came off a bit strong. It struck me the wrong way a bit, and I overreacted. I certainly mean no disrespect. I hope that what I said after that was on point with what I was trying to get across. I'll be better, thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations on the 220 paying customers, that's certainly no small feat. I've been running RateMyStudentRental.com for about 3 years now (well, really I stopped actively working on it about a year ago), and it only reached about half that in revenue.

Then, LeadNuke sprang forth as an internal sales tool for RMSR barely a year ago and it's approaching that level already. In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't have this kind of success the first time around, because I have a much more realistic perspective now and I can appreciate it that much more.

In summary, mad props and respect to you.

<comment><USER12> > In summary, mad props and respect to you.

Totally off-topic, but some of my friends lately have started joking around about making a subgenre of Nerdcore devoted to startups. There's so many good names and parody opportunities...

> I got 99 problems, but my pitch ain't one.

> whatddup, founda?

> An east vs west style rivalry between the 'Limited Liability Crew' and > 'S-corp'.

> Names: 'Series C', ... I forget the rest. There's others.

<comment><USER13> That's awesome. Have any of them been so brave as to actually record a song?

<comment><USER12> Not yet, but this is pretty close: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/12/the- solo-founder-startup...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/12/the-solo-founder- startup-rap/)

Patrick doesn't know about what I'm talking about though, this is unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats. As other people have said - it's refreshing to see some stories like this rather than just the 'here's my web app I built in 48 hours'. Hopefully it will help people reliase the difference between building something and building a business.

At 200, you are close to what I consider to be a major inflexion point. It's often as easier (big separate post that I won't go into the full reasons why) to go from 200-2000 then it is to go from 20-200.

Well done and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I think you're right on that - the first 200 was just figuring out the right place for everything. Should get easier from here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> congratulations! when barmstrong was down here in Buenos Aires, we talked a lot about universitytutor.com and it's cool to see him just make little tweaks to the site and let it grow slowly and steadily. very inspiring!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - those were some good discussions, learned a lot from you down there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did you get 16,000+ tutors signed up? That's an impressive number.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried a bunch of ideas, but the most successful was posting jobs to university websites. Can email me if you want more details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congratulations. A great idea and an important niche to serve. I just told two friends that do tutoring about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I may be assuming too much based on my reading of your post, but it sounds like you could really stand to implement some (or more) A/B testing. The fact that it took two years to reach 200 customers but in only a week or so you've added another 20 customers after making some changes makes me think you should have been making (and testing!) changes like that all along. Either way, congratulations, and best of luck in the future!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yur right - I just didn't have the idea to do this test until recently :) Have done some split testing on price etc, but could def stand to do more.

<comment><USER18> Hopefully you'll continue to see a faster increase in signups. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats! With 200 paying customers, you now have more than enough information to start tracking churn, CPA, life time value, life time profit, etc. You can turn those 200 paying customers into a lot more by accurately tracking your metrics and building from them.

I recommend reading:

[http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key- metric...](http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for- your-web-app/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe I missed this in the post, but are you working on this full time? If not, how many hours/week would you estimate you've invested, on average?

<comment><USER21> read his about page: <http://www.startbreakingfree.com/about/>

Shows he's started a few other sites, including working on a YC funded (stealth) startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I have a day job. Right now it takes very little time to run the site, maybe a few hours per week. But I definitely spent a lot of time building it up front, and occasionally still do when I add new features. As a strict hourly ROI I could have made way more at a job or doing consulting work, but it's an investment that may pay off long term (or not, but either way it was way more fun :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not to nitpick but your about page shows that universitytutor.com was started in 2004 but your post shows that you started the site in 2008? Also the dashboard shows decreasing timeline which means you are either losing customers and below the 200 (can't guess the scale) subscribers or there is a simple error somewhere...

What are we missing ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point - I actually first registerred and built a site back in 2004 but it was a different business (matching people manually in Houston only). 2008 was when I switched it over to a directory site that was open to anyone and let tutors and students contact each other directly (also rebuilt it in rails).

Not sure what you mean on the graph though - it seems correct to me.

<comment><USER22> The dashboard graph shows just a months worth of data and for some reason I thought the timeline was decreasing. Congratulations on your success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congratulations. That's a great milestone.

</comment><comment><USER24> The site is beautiful. Nice work!!

<comment><AUTHOR> I did the programming, but hired this guy to design it: <http://www.jackherbert.com/>

I'd recommend him, he was good and fairly priced. (Found him on 99designs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice job dude! -Amal

</comment><comment><USER26> Congrats :)

</comment><comment><USER27> That's an AWESOME dating service.</comment>