Canadian anti-piracy outfit pirates photos for its website - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/canadian-anti-piracy-outfit-pirates-photos-for-its-website-130515/ <comment><USER2> What are the anti-piracy people supposed to do? They trusted the web design firm and apparently were let down. Should the site owner have to vet the content again?

I was on a site buying icons the other day and it occurred to me. There is no way for me to know for sure if this icon I am buying is being sold by the original author. Sure.. I have proof of purchase but if the guy is reselling without permission I have no idea where it leaves me.

Which brings us back to this. Photos from an image bank were apparently used. Well.. anyone can be at fault for putting the images in. Naive intern is just as likely as some rip-off merchant.

I disagree with what the Anti-Piracy people do but I sympathize if they had nothing to do this and were let down by designers / rogue image reseller.

<comment><USER3> _> What are the anti-piracy people supposed to do?_

In this specific circumstance: make exactly the same amends they would expect anyone else to make if they had found someone else inadvertently distributing unlicensed media, which would probably at least be:

* Immediate removal of the content until such time license to use it is arranged

* Payment in full at the author's chosen rate for licensing the content for the period they were using it

* Perhaps including a significant multiplier if the content creators chose to license per user not per server/service

* Definitely including opportunity costs (such as the interest the content creators could have earned had that money been in their accounts from the point it should have been, or interest they have paid out because the money wasn't)

* Willingly open their doors (or not moan when a law enforcer kicks their doors open) for a third party auditor to verify the state of other media they are using

If they are unable to pay immediately, a payment plan (with appropriate interest arrangement, increasing the debt by at least enough to recompense the creators for the continued inconvenience of not having the money and the continued risk of the debt never being paid if the group folds) should be arranged.

 _> I sympathize if they had nothing to do this and were let down by designers / rogue image reseller._

They would not accept the 3rd party responsibility argument if they were going after someone, so they should not be able to use it either. They should pay any costs directly. If they wish to hold one of their suppliers responsible then they can take separate action to be reimbursed for those funds.

Our sympathy should extend just as far as their's would, which is basically the "setting up a repayment plan instead of demanding all the money this instant or sending them to do prison time" thing.

That feels fair to me. If the content creators in question want to be more generous in their interpretation of the situation then that would be fine too of course, as long as the group doesn't _expect_ them to be more generous.

<comment><USER4> If you disagree with what this anti-piracy group is doing, how is it fair to apply the standards they support? Isn't it necessarily, then, _unfair_ to apply their standards to anyone, if you disagree with those standards?

It seems like you'd be agreeing with them if you asked them to apply their own standards to themselves. You either think they're right or they're wrong, and if you think they're wrong, some poetic justice shouldn't be enough to break your own moral code. That seems more indefensible than holding an incorrect set of views - to attempt to knowingly apply views you believe are wrong to someone because it satisfies a primal urge for vengeance.

<comment><USER5> He's pointing out that they're not adhering to their own moral code, rather than trying to hold them to his. That said, they might be able to assert an innocent infringement defense:

<http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Innocent_infringement>

Standard disclaimers about getting a lawyer if you need legal advice apply, as always.

<comment><USER4> I'm saying they should be applauded for not adhering to their own moral code by those who disagree with said code.

<comment><USER3> Not if they then continue to apply that code to other people after not adhering to it themselves. Experience suggests that this is most likely what they will do.

If this is taken as a voyage of personal discovery and they change their ways, then we can applaud their critical thinking ans self inspection. Otherwise we can justifiably cry hypercrit (for all the difference it will make...).

<comment><USER3> (replying to my own comment instead of diminoten's reply as HN seems to have a nesting limit)

 _> Either their moral code is something you agree with, or it's something you don't. Who they apply it to is completely irrelevant._

I didn't say they _had_ to apply their own code to themselves to not be completely hypercrits - the other option (as I have already explicitly stated) is to modify their practises to account for their new found enlightenment.

<comment><USER4> There is nothing meaningful in calling a person hypocritical. It has literally no impact on the validity of their claims.

<comment><USER3> Their current claims, no. But it calls into question the validity of their previous actions which they are now contradicting.

I'm not commenting on which of the two situations is right (perhaps neither is), if railing against the "one rule for you, one rule for us" thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of when the Conference Board of Canada was caught copying content for its copyright policy paper:

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/think-tanks- approa...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/think-tanks-approach-to- hollywood-copy-that/article4211630/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems common, someone should come up with a name for the phenomenon, similar to Muphry's Law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law>

<comment><USER8> Two names come to mind:

Irony[1], and

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?[2]

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony>

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, just like this incident: [http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.htm)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude whenever I see these "Copyright- Troll-Bites-Dog" stories; but I think as it keeps happening again and again I can't help but think that they just show a glimpse into human psychology en masse. A person may stop pirating content, but the nature of the internet guarantees that people will continue to do so.

Back when I was a hardcore pirate, (read: poorer than I am now, which is pretty fucking broke) I would download Gigs and Gigs of movies and music that I would almost never watch/listen to. I just found it soothing knowing that I had Terribytes of interesting data; all categorized, indexed and organized, and that could never be taken away from me if Content Producer A got into a corporate pissing match with Content Distributor X.

</comment><comment><USER11> This headline just took me 45 seconds to parse.

<comment><USER12> Really? It seems fine to me.

<comment><USER13> The Capitalization Made It Harder For Me.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps I'm better at ignoring the capitalisation, having had to deal with it for a while (my native language doesn't capitalise titles).

<comment><USER14> What's your native language?

<comment><USER12> Romanian. Of the languages I've encountered, only English (and German?) appears to capitalise titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> something similar happened here in Italy/other countries... anti piracy advertising stoled music

[http://torrentfreak.com/rights-group-fined-for-not-paying- ar...](http://torrentfreak.com/rights-group-fined-for-not-paying-artist-for- anti-piracy-ad-120717/)

oddly this article is not related...

</comment><comment><USER16> How much, and in what ways do I have to modify an image (add features, delete features, change aspect) in order to make sure I don't get sued because I am using an image I found on the internet to create something useful for others?

If I can get sued for doing such a thing, certainly there has to be a law outlining it? Or is it the wild west like: "the cowboy with the fastest gun/lawyer gets the pesos".

<comment><USER17> Here's a step-by-step guide to modifying an existing image to avoid infringement:

      1. Download image to local storage
      2. Open the image in Photoshop (or editor of choice)
      3. Using the selection tool, select the entire image
      4. Fill selection area with white
      5. Create something useful for others

<comment><USER16> Actually that doesn't quite work, because you can create an image, and use a significant amount of color that's been copyrighted, I think motorola's pinkish purple is pretty much off limits.

So no, try again... Also, I didn't authorize that you look at my picture. The imprint you copied of it onto your brain is illegal, and you'll be hearing from my lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Torrent freak should be auto banned.

<comment><USER19> Certainly biased - but I've read dozens of thought-provoking articles from them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tyba – 250 Startups in Europe (built over last 5 months) - <AUTHOR> http://tyba.com/companies/city/london

<comment><USER2> Your previous submission of this was killed.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8068952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8068952)

<comment><AUTHOR> Resubmitted because I have no clue why this is being killed. It is a genuine post, I've been a member for over 6 years and want to share and get feedback from the community. Nothing spammy or shady going on here.</comment></comment>


3D scanned assets provider will start private beta program - <AUTHOR> https://wireshape.net <comment><USER2> You can request an invitation to the private beta on the official website.</comment>


Varnish: It's Not Just For Wood Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/varnish-its-not-just-for-wood-anymore/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+engineyard+%28Engine+Yard%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> awesome. I have been using varnish for a while now and it's just awesome. The VCL configuration works like a charm and is very simple.

ESI is really cool and can be easily integrated as a normal include with the common frameworks. For example, cached file including when developing and ESI tags when production and stagging. Having ESI is very good to cache and distribute in parallel different parts of the page, that can have different CPU usage. Also it's really good to cache stuff even when the user is logged in.</comment>


The "Doomsday" glacier that could raise sea level by 10 ft - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-doomsday-glacier-w481260 <comment><USER2> Beachfront property in Nevada, anyone?

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't be the first time.</comment></comment>


The Other Important Issue Before the Supreme Court—Medicaid Expansion - <AUTHOR> http://newsatjama.jama.com/2012/03/27/jama-forum-the-other-important-issue-before-the-supreme-court-medicaid-expansion/

<comment><USER2> Why is this getting so much less attention than the mandate?</comment>


MasterCard Tap-And-Pay Barely Registers With NYC Subway Riders - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1813345/exclusive-mta-mastercard-paypass-pilot-17000-customers-six-months

<comment><USER2> The positioning of the device you need swipe looks a little inconvenient. You'd need to look down and stoop a little to touch your card to it (assuming the picture in the article is representative of normal positioning).

In the London Underground, the Oyster Card readers are placed on top of the dividers between the turnstiles, so you just move through as normal and swipe as you go.

I also wonder whether combining a credit card and subway payment card is necessarily the best idea. If you want an Oyster Card in London, you can usually grab a pre-paid one in the terminal itself, or in a newsagent by the entrance. If you lose your card, then you've only lost what you put on it.

Getting a contactless card seems more work, and I'd be a little more nervous about it being taken whilst I was waving it around.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I had access to Mayor Bloomberg on this one. This entire pilot has been surrounded by mysticism. How many companies were allowed to bid for this "pilot"? Why will it take 5 years to mimic what other countries have done already? Why is a credit card company and not pure contactless OEMs or service providers not the ones doing the pilot? Why 5 years to do the implementation?

I bet you that my company (or any other NFC startup, for that matter) would've done the entire implementation in less than 1 year and at 1/10th the cost. Shady MTA, shady!

<comment><USER4> @MikeBloomberg is on Twitter and frequently urges people to #AskMike.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reading into this more: While we surely need an easier way to swipe for a subway ride, other than buggy MetroCards, why is .24% usage considered a success? Worth the cost?</comment>


Mongrel2's Got Config Files, Streams MP3s - <AUTHOR> http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1279487547.html

<comment><USER3> Zed came by our office the other day to talk about supporting streamed logs with Mongrel2. As we already use 0MQ, it's a small change to our clients to support taking HTTP POSTs as log events. It's fucking fantastic, as Zed would say. :)

He was talking about the config file viewer thing too. One of the things that pops out of having a SQLite as your configuration store is the ability to programmatically change your server's configs on the fly.

<comment><USER4> >One of the things that pops out of having a SQLite as your configuration store is the ability to programmatically change your server's configs on the fly.

I hope this catches on more. The old Unix way of changing some text file (with its own unique grammar) and sending some signal to some process needs to go away.

<comment><USER5> If we would've reached that stage, I'd be happy enough. There's enough software out there that requires restarting the process and doesn't support the edit/HUP method.

And while I'd prefer something like Lua, tcl or lisp to SQL, at least it ain't XML.

<comment><USER6> Configuration files need to be static key value or a relational algebra - <USER2> cannot have mutations and branches based on logic within a configuration or else you introduce issues you wouldn't want to even dream of.

<comment><USER5> So generating those values in a full-fledged programming language is that much better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really hope he's announcing tomorrow that somebody is backing the project financially. That'd be awesome.

<comment><USER7> You never know what could happen: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1483343>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's just me but I think this is incredibly stupid - He's abstracting the issue that Unix isn't distributed into a single application. It's like putting $5000 rims and mufflers on a $100 van.</comment>


Jason Calacanis: Apple will buy Tesla for $75b in 18 months - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2015/02/14/apple-will-buy-tesla-for-75b-in-18-months <comment><USER2> There's an interesting debate in the comments about Mr. Musk's personal goals -- gives some good insight to the rest of the piece. TL;DR -- cares more about Mars+mass EV adoption (see: open sourcing Tesla patents) than about the cash; money-as-means to get to Mars and get humanity "off" carbon. With the read I say.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just a "wouldn't it be cool?" There are no meaningful deductions being made.</comment>


NASA photo captures strange bright light coming out of Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.chron.com/news/strange-weird/article/NASA-photo-captures-strange-bright-light-coming-5382677.php

<comment><USER2> Left Nav Cam vs Right Nav Cam images. Taken at same time, same direction, only one shows the white spot.

[http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=NLB_44979...](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=NLB_449790582EDR_F0310000NCAM00262M_&s=589) vs [http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=NRB_44979...](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=NRB_449790582EDR_F0310000NCAM00262M_&s=589)

Browse everything else here: [http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mm they say it's a hit from cosmic rays. [http://www.itv.com/news/update/2014-04-08/life-on-mars- light...](http://www.itv.com/news/update/2014-04-08/life-on-mars-lights-in- nasa-pictures-explained/)

Thanks for the post anyways. I believe it's an NSA outpost sponsored by Facebook (or is it the other way around) :)</comment>


Flashnotes Builds a Hyper-Focused Study Guide and Notes Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://venturefizz.com/blog/flashnotes-creates-class-notes-and-study-guide-marketplace

<comment><AUTHOR> There is sure to be some griping from the education sector that upholds the high virtue of 'academic integrity', whatever that is.</comment>


Show HN: Hasura: Instant GraphQL APIs on New or Existing Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://hasura.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! Super happy to announce the first open-source release of the Hasura GraphQL engine. This is a standalone service that gives you GraphQL on Postgres. It comes with fine-grained access control that can integrate with any auth provider. It can also work with any existing postgres database as is, and allows you to expose select tables/views across your postgres schemas over GraphQL.

Looking forward to your feedback!

<comment><USER2> I just stumbled across your submission and checked out your product. I'm surprised this submission hasn't received more comments/love. What you've built is really amazing, as well as really clear & detailed documentation, tutorials, and landing page. I'll definitely try this out</comment></comment>


Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash - <AUTHOR> https://www.csun.io/2020/05/17/gnucash-finance.html <comment><USER2> Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh!

I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically.

I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken.

I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word.

And, finally, none of this matters if I have trouble with the real problem - sticking to a budget. Solving that one is what I want personal finance apps to help me with. Keeping track of my finances should be a solved problem, locked in a box and forgotten about.

<comment><USER3> I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget.

0\. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

1\. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs like 'transport', 'food' and the like. Combine that with your monthly income, and you'll know what your approximate monthly savings should be

2\. Every month, manually record your savings.

3\. Over time, compare your actual savings with your expected savings

4\. If there's a discrepancy of a meaningful amount (however, remember step 0) then you might need to bury in to the details a little bit more.

Given that sort-of system, you have enough manual touchpoints that the budget is in your mind when you're making discretionary purchases, but not so much that it's stressing you out.

I've made a sheet that does basically the above with example budgeting for what I'm familiar with in Sydney - [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KW3i-m8BtJ2O9lKurhJr...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KW3i-m8BtJ2O9lKurhJrynaN50w8v0wzgySByMzlU-A/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER4> Nice!

I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats _ELEVEN THOUSAND_ euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups left per day. At 2 cups per day (which is 4 times as much) it still is 140 years of coffee every 10 years.

I pick 10 years because its short. If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro. Now imagine throwing money around like that all day long.

Think about that when you get a free coffee.

I know it doesn't sound very convincing but most people manage to match their spending with their income. It really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.

Also, if you hoard enough cash and enough discipline it eventually stops making sense to work. More time to enjoy life! (jay!) Also, that bag of candy is probably killing me. If I'm hungry I must have planned things poorly.

<comment><USER5> > More time to enjoy life!

What if I enjoy life by buying a fancy coffee & drinking it on my walk to work?

The downside of your formulation of "why buy coffee? you could be enjoying life instead!" is that this worldview encourages people to feel guilty about buying coffee. Extreme frugality has its place, but remember that "your life" that you have to enjoy isn't something that starts in 5 years or 10 years or once you save $x, it's what's happening right now, all the time. I might not be alive in 5 years, none of has that guarantee. So I enjoy my coffee.

It sounds like you enjoy frugality for its own sake which is fantastic, and more power to you. But I think most personal financial planners would suggest that you have a _goal_ you're working towards rather than "hoard cash." What's the point of that? "Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with" figure out what that "something more interesting" is and it might make sense to forgo your daily coffee. Hoarding cash is not a goal.

> If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro.

Yippee! I'm 85 years old (assuming I haven't died already) and I have an extra €55k. Am I allowed to drink coffee now?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but how fancy is the fancy coffee though? Are we talking Starbucks or a three day roast sourced from a micro lot in Kenya?

If it fits your budget, go for it, but let's not confuse convenience with enjoyment or quality.

<comment><USER5> I say this in order to share constructive feedback, because I know a lot of people on HN are not great at "tone" and sometimes appreciate an explanation why their comment might accidentally offend:

This comment is very condescending and pointlessly critical. You suggest that I do not know how to enjoy coffee correctly, and am instead perhaps "confusing convenience with enjoyment." Rest assured that, I, along with basically everyone, can be trusted to know what they themselves enjoy or do not enjoy, without your advisement.

To clarify, I am using "fancy" as a shorthand for "expensive," i.e. a $5-6 coffee rather than a $2 coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount ([https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/](https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/) with smart_importer: [https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer](https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer)) and fava ([https://github.com/beancount/fava/](https://github.com/beancount/fava/)). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: [https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount).

More importantly, the importers (for all my banks and financial services) let me import and reconcile all transactions, but also archive all documents (including PDF, text files, etc) in one, well organized directory: each file is saved into a folder that corresponds to my account structure such as Asset:Current:Cash, Liability:Mortgage, Income:Salary, Expenses:Health:Dentist. It's great to rely on fava (example: [https://fava.pythonanywhere.com/example-beancount- file/incom...](https://fava.pythonanywhere.com/example-beancount- file/income_statement/)) to check your accounting (with all files listed in the journal by date, with tags and links and other neat features) and still be able to browse documents in your file browser.

<comment><USER8> Wow, your setup sounds very similar to what I've converged on. Except I wrote a fairly substantial pipeline that preprocesses the data before giving it to beancount and Fava.

Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file. I really wanted a pipeline where each bank statement PDF would output one file with a corresponding list of transactions (this stage can run completely in parallel and I use "ninja" to make it very fast).

Then another process can run over these files looking for matches (+$X, -$X), and spit out "transaction groups", where each transaction group is a set of transaction ids that sum to zero. And then a different interactive tool lets you categorize transactions and spits out transaction groups with embedded "expense" transactions. It's all non-destructive; each tool only adds data, and nothing ever modifies existing files. Then a final step can combine all these files and spit out a beancount file for Fava.

How does this compare with the way beancount's importer does it? How does its importer handle transfers and categorization? Is it destructive or non- destructive?

<comment><USER9> You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the data out of Chase and BofA.

<comment><USER8> Yes, in my experience CSV/XML/etc export is spotty. Some institutions don't have it at all, and even when they do the time range can be limited or hard to time-window reliably.

For example, I can't get CSV about my pay stub and all the places money flows (taxes, insurance, etc). So I use PDF as the best way to get all the data.

Parsing PDF is a huge PITA, since PDF is really designed only for layout and not to encode semantic document structure. But if you want the greatest amount of visibility, nothing is as authoritative as the actual statements.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I guess I don't really look at paystubs often and my banks support good csv export for like 2+ years, so I'll always have it when I need when I refresh those sheets. I do year-to-date in those sheets to make them not huge.

Regarding taxes, I do a tax year calculation using my W2's and returns to compute an effective tax rate and figure out ways I can improve my situation re taxes -- but my budgeting basically only starts once the net money hits a bank account which has worked pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using Gnucash for my personal finances for a several years now, and really love it - it's not dead simple, and requires an understanding of double entry bookkeeping, but where it really shines is flexibility. A couple of examples are as follows:

1\. Expenses in the future - If I book a bunch of plane tickets for later in the year today, I can book those expenses in those months in which I'm traveling (pre-paid asset until then) there-by seeing when I'm incurring those expenses vs. the cash flow of those expenses.

2\. Corporate expenses - I can book expenses that I will be re-imbursed for as receivables and not have them run through my "income statement" (nothing like putting some business class plane tickets on your personal card to make things look weird)

3\. Loans - whether it's an auto loan on your car or simply a loan to a friend it's great to be able to see your entire balance sheet (and remember that some items are outstanding!)

4.variable granularity - decide how detailed you want to get for some accounts you may decide you don't need that much detail (because you track it some other way - like your 401k) and you can just track your total balance at month end (+/\- deposits)

5\. Track illiquid investments in your net worth (not saying the marks are right, but at least you have a placeholder value for them on your balance sheet (your home - private company stock etc.)

6\. Privacy - it's your data - no sharing it with anyone else

<comment><USER11> These are great examples, thank you for putting this list together. I use mint to track transactions + a running spreadsheet of account balances. These are exactly all of my gripes with my current system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools.

That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which can almost certainly handle all your bookkeeping needs. But simple, it is not.

<comment><USER13> Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if also for personal finance because errors are much less likely than with a spreadheet.

<comment><USER14> This is commonly stated, but I found it relatively straightforward once I saw the _extended accounting equation_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation)) and knew every entry needed a corresponding entry to make the equation balance.

Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Income - Expenses)

For some reason the (Income - Expenses) part gets left off in many introductory explanations of the accounting equation. I think that leads to a lot of confusion about how to treat Income and Expense accounts in programs like GnuCash for newcomers to double entry accounting.

<comment><USER15> I agree this is important to understanding double-entry accounting. Keep in mind that the Income - Expenses gets elided because the Retained Earnings go towards Equity

<comment><USER16> I wish somebody did an explainer of all this, not just for dummies, but for us _European dummies_. I've approached this topic multiple times, and I always get confused by all these Liquidities, Equities, Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, Commodities, and how come any article trying to explain any of that starts talking about stock trading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries.

One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a high-granularity record of where you have been and what you have been doing, encoding some signals you might not have thought to write in a diary. Things like "that was when we were saving for our down payment" or "I was going to coffee shops every day trying to finish my dissertation" or "that was when we had a pandemic." I enjoy looking back through our ledger the same way I enjoy going way back in my gmail history.

[1] [https://github.com/adept/full-fledged- hledger](https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger) [2] [https://plaid.com/](https://plaid.com/)

<comment><USER18> +1 for full-fledged hledger! I just got it set up last week, and putting together the small scripts for parsing all of the CSVs was (to me) a fun programming exercise that reaped huge visibility into how I spend my money :)

It's hugely valuable to have all of your financial data in one, human-readable place. Not only to you, but to whomever might be executing your will ;)

<comment><USER17> Imagining my will as a poorly-documented API makes me feel present stress on behalf of my unborn descendants :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering...

[1] [https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html](https://www.ledger- cli.org/index.html)

[2] [https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html](https://www.ledger- cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html)

<comment><USER20> I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto- complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had.

I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse- heavy GnuCash interface, but couldn't, and went back to GnuCash with my tail between my legs.

I'd still rather use it, so maybe I'll give it another try some day.

<comment><USER21> I've been using ledger for a year next month.

As you imagine, the fact that it's text-only has been both a burden and a blessing.

Burdens:

\- inserting transactions takes a long time, when you're starting out. will always take a long time if you never "automate"

\- it's easy to make little mistakes and not catch it until the next time you compile or make a report.

blessings:

\- git, sed, grep, awk all "work as advertised"

\- you can automate the boring things, as they get more boring, and you can learn a lot along the way

at this stage, I have a combination of awk and python scripts (maybe 500 lines total, but a lot of it is regex) that convert my financial institutions' transaction export csvs into ledger transactions. I pretty much copy paste that into specific ledger files. The next step that I'm currently automating takes a concatenated `git diff` and interactively categorizes expenses/splits/assigns to the correct ledger file.

I also blew a ton of time (maybe 40 hours) on scraping those csvs from bank websites, workday, and fidelity (basically, a puppeteer script for logging in, downloading all the files available). Getting past google auth for workday was hard. But learning these things has been fun.

With all this automation, I spend maybe 20 minutes every weekend importing things over from the banks. I'd do it every month, but I'm still a control freak with it.

Doing this has been super fun! And it also has yielded a lot of insight into my finances. Above all, it gives me a feeling of "control" over my finances like no other. Itemizing deductions takes an hour, just as a throwaway example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's kinda fun to idly scroll through gnu's list of free software

[https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU](https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU)

As far as I can tell, everything there was made simply because somebody out there thought it's important for a Free version of said software to exist. That's pretty cool. There's gnucash of course, but also a gnutrition calorie/macro/micro tracker, a flight simulator, some sort of comic saving software... the list goes on. Fun!

<comment><USER23> There's even GNU Social, a decentralized version of twitter which is either dead or nearly dead.

That list also mentions GNU Health and GNU Med for hospitals. I'm curious as to whether they're actually used, and if so, who uses them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I tried GnuCash and generally liked it. However, it was a little more complicated than I wanted. In addition, I wanted to be able to access via the web, when I was away from my computer. (cause at the time, I thought it was only available locally)

I also wanted my life partner (my lovely wife) to participate. This was going to be the hard part. Behavior modification. So I built a very simple "tracker".(php/codeigniter/mysql) Date, description, category, spender, cost, that could be accessed anywhere.

I asked my wife to start tracking spending. As we had just bought a new house and 1 1/2 year old. She was extremely resistant to the idea. Six months after using the "tracker" she told me that she didn't plan on doing it more than 2 days before she gave up. However since starting it 3 years ago she and I have increased our "frugalness" and really looked where we should spend money (vacations, artisan food and not items to impress other people… such as fancy cars.)

I think part of the trick is not necessarily import or export or "api"ing data. The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be power in manually entering a transaction, although it might not be by pen and paper.

<comment><USER25> > The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a > spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be > power in manually entering a transaction, although it might not be by pen > and paper.

This was a big realization for me. I tend to prefer getting the "robots" to do things for us (in other words, automate things). Developing an intuition of what's happening with your money is hard when you use an automated tool though.

The process of managing the ledger bi-weekly really adds something more for me. Working on each entry to determine a category, writing down amounts, noticing how many entries I've entered into a category each session, and looking at it in aggregate afterward gives me some greater sense of how my financial life works. I can almost picture writing the transactions in GnuCash before I even do it.

I get what you mean about it being complicated though. I learned the bits I needed to get by and mostly stick to that. So that works for me. In the long run, the double-ledger manual style is what I think is most important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been using YNAB. I want to switch out because YNAB is too expensive. What I miss with open source alternatives is the mobile app. I don't like to link my bank accounts, so I enter expenses manually whenever I buy anything. The mobile app is critical for that to work.

<comment><USER27> YNAB can sometimes feel expensive. And while I could use an OSS solution like Gnucash or ledger, I don't have the time to deal with the tech support needed to be able to share my setup with my spouse. Likewise, we extremely value the mobile experience. To me, YNAB is cheap and well worth the money.

You might want to try "Every Dollar" which is free and has a mobile experience. It's not open source, of course, but it might fit what you're looking for.

<comment><USER28> This is exactly why I pay for YNAB. As I'm going through all of these free options I'm wondering what support there is for sharing the information with my spouse and how much manual wrenching I'll have to do to make that work and what my less-technical spouse will have to put up with to work with it.

YNAB is drop-dead simple and available on all of our different platforms. Money well spent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I will never understand why people spend time on expense tracking spreadsheets and apps.

I mean, you're the one spending money you already know what you spent it on... Your bank already has a history of transactions if you want to look at it.

Put 30% of your income in a savings account, the money for necessary bills in another account with auto-billing, and the rest for spending in a spending account.

I see so many people categorizing everything with spreadsheets and budget apps and I just ask myself... why? If you set aside savings and necessary expenses what's the point of categorizing your spending?

<comment><USER30> It's because once I started doing it I found that I didn't actually know what I spent money on, not really. I found that my rough estimates for where my money was going were way off and lagged actual changes in my behavior by a number of months. Just as an example, I still don't feel like my family is spending close to double what we used to on groceries during the pandemic, but I know that we are because I have months of history to compare against.

So then you could say, great, so you know that for sure now, so what? Well, this is actionable! Continuing with the example, now we can look at the upward trend in groceries and ask whether we're happy about that. Is it an overall upward trend, or is it coming from something else that we've deprioritized? In this case, yeah, it's pretty directly coming out of eating out and socializing, so not something we need to worry about. But in other cases it has provided data to inform hard decisions about where to cut.

And that actionable trade off thing isn't even my favorite part! My favorite part is peace of mind when we buy stuff. I don't have to wonder whether we can afford things, we either have the money for it, or we can move money for it from some other thing we were gonna spend it on, or we just can't afford it. But there's no guesswork, which is so much more relaxing than what I used to do (guess and hope).

Your mileage may vary, but for me, it's some of the best invested time I spend.

<comment><USER29> Do you put savings and necessary expenses aside when paid? To each their own. If it works for you great. I can't imagine sitting down and tracking whether my grocery expenses fluctuated from one month to the next, since it can't impact my ability to pay bills and save. If I was worried about not having money for groceries I would set that money aside when I get paid.

I also have a family and am the sole income earner. I just set aside everybody's spending money / allowance and they can do with it as they wish.

<comment><USER30> Your system sounds simpler but more rigid than mine. In my system, everything is a negotiable trade off. There is not static bills and savings to set aside, there is a trade-off between those things and spending. If I want to spend more on groceries or socializing or vacations in some period of time, that is just a trade-off against all the other things in my budget. Maybe I'd rather find ways to lower my bills than my spending. Maybe I want to save less in some month so that I can spend more on something that will bring us more joy that month. It is easier to make these decisions on trade offs with good visibility into all spending and saving.

But I would also suggest that it seems like you're actually doing the thing you said you don't understand why people do. You have a budget, it just has a relatively small number of categories. But the answer to your question is that people do this for the same reason that you do your setting aside of money for bills, savings, and spending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I might be the edge case, but I don't actually find double-entry bookkeeping all that useful as a consumer trying to track my expenses.

Instead, I tend to think of my budget as having cycles (monthly, currently), with a net "debit" or "credit" for different aspects of my life. I'm required to credit myself a certain amount in savings every month, and I'm allowed to debit a certain proportions of my income every month for different categories.

I end up tracking this with a set of plain text expense ledgers and a small Rust program: [https://github.com/woodruffw/pledger](https://github.com/woodruffw/pledger)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them).

I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.

<comment><USER33> I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line:

> Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money.

As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better about 1Password?

<comment><USER32> I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check that out.

I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to month with finances. You get really good control over your money and a much better understanding of how you're spending it and where.

Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually leverage it _more_ because you know exactly what you can put where so you can be closer to zero in your checking account (push more towards investments, etc.).

It also makes it easier to change behavior and know exactly what knobs you can turn with your finances.

Only downside with it is that the auto-import sucks (I suspect because the bank APIs suck). I move all transactions through one credit card and I manually create transactions in YNAB when the card is charged. I use the Apple Card which has really good software so it's easy to notice transactions and make sure things line up.

My username is also from when I was 13 and really excited about linux :-), now mostly on macOS - I haven't really lived up to it.

<comment><USER34> I'll give the opposing opinion that YNAB's auto-import works well for me (I use it with a local credit union, 2 credit cards, and an online savings account). In fact, I used my own homebrew budgeting software for over a year before I found that YNAB exists and does everything I needed from my own software plus imports from banks automatically which was my biggest pain point with my own solution (it involved painful csv exports every month). I have been happy with YNAB for a year and a half at this point. Your luck may depend on which bank(s) you want it to work with. I believe their bank import api provider was recently acquired by Plaid so they are now using Plaid (as I understand it).

<comment><USER35> They are using Plaid, and yeah, it varies wildly by bank.

FWIW, I don't know that having a bank that doesn't play nice with Plaid is a deal-killer. There is a school of thought among many YNAB users that you should not use the auto-import, or even csv/ofx/whatever import, because manually entering transactions takes only a few minutes a day, and gives you much better awareness of your outflows. I can see some merit to that, insofar as tightly controlling your spending is kind of YNAB's whole thing.

<comment><USER34> Even with auto-import, you still have to "approve" each individual transaction that is imported, at which time you can assign it to a category (or approve the auto-suggested category). So that works for me in terms of being aware of spending on a regular basis. And if you manually enter some transactions as you spend, it automatically matches them up with your bank's version of those transactions as you import so you don't end up with duplicates. So it's okay to use it in a hybrid mode where you sometimes enter transactions manually and sometimes wait for them to show up automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hold up. Did Gnucash get better reporting or did he make his own? Last time I used Gnucash, which admittedly was 10 years ago, but for a business, I found reporting and the lack of budgeting lacking. The latter could be solved by envelopes (but I find hacky), but the former only by learning Guile, something I was and am not up to. Alternatives like Money dance have a more complete solution, certainly for personal use, in my view.

I guess I'm asking what happened in the past decade to Gnucash ;) 2014 is the last time I really used it, and reporting had then not really changed.

<comment><AUTHOR> The very first plot shown in the article was generated with custom scripts, published here ([https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots](https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots))

I'm not sure how much it's changed since 2014. I think the "budgeting" system is still probably as bad as it was back then, though (and by bad I mean not really applicable for personal use, probably good for businesses). That's why I wrote this budget plotting script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I want to like GnuCash but I just can't. I have found the UI to be confusing. I still use a freeware, abandoned version of Microsoft Money: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=207...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=20738)

The UI is still excellent. It is the only reason I have Windows installed on a spare computer. Despite never being updated, the principals of personal finance haven't changed that much.

<comment><USER38> I'm in the same boat! One Windows laptop in the house dedicated to MS Money. With 27 years of financial history, and counting, it still does everything I need it to. Once a year I export it into Excel to do some forecasting and analysis. I'd really love if there were a reliable and future-proof way to get at the data. Sunriise[0] is the only way I know to export raw data but it has a few issues and the source code isn't public.

[0] [https://bitbucket.org/hleofxquotesteam/dist- sunriise/wiki/Ho...](https://bitbucket.org/hleofxquotesteam/dist- sunriise/wiki/Home)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here:

> _If you're happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less > than a certain amount each month, that's great! You don't need GnuCash._

I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or what.

Do you track your personal finances? If so, in how much detail? Maybe it would make an interesting Ask HN.

<comment><USER40> I'll bite here... I used to track my finances and balance my checkbook. But, it took hours of my time. The best thing I ever did was create a separate account for my disposable income. My bills account gets the exact amount it needs and everything is payed automatically. The rest of my income goes into my fun account and I rest easy knowing I can spend until it's gone and my bills still get payed.

After that worked well for me, I now put small amounts into various savings accounts, like "tires", "vacation", or "emergency". I use an Ally account with "buckets".

I don't balance anymore, and haven't for 20 years. Just a quick glance at recent transactions to make sure I recognize everything.

It's also amazing how quickly some of those savings accounts add up when I'm not thinking about them much.

<comment><USER41> My wife and I do something similar.

We have our "Expenses" account that salaries go into. We have our "Offset" account that has our emergency fund in it and offsets the interest for our mortgage. And finally we have a "Goals" account that we use to save up for big ticket items like a new car, holiday, or something.

We take 10% of our respective incomes each into a personal, "off the books" account and we do whatever we like with that.

Simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app.

It's more akin to a self-hosted version of Mint. Combined with the Plaid connector[3], I find it the easiest to use for my workflow. And despite the instructions, you don't need a paid dev account. The free Plaid account will let you access up to 100 live financial institutions.

[1] [https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii](https://github.com/firefly- iii/firefly-iii)

[2] Live demo: [https://demo.firefly-iii.org/](https://demo.firefly-iii.org/)

[3] [https://gitlab.com/GeorgeHahn/firefly-plaid- connector](https://gitlab.com/GeorgeHahn/firefly-plaid-connector)

<comment><USER43> I use this too. Maybe I like the beancount more, but having my finances available on the web to share with my so is valuable. Too many told are meant for one pers,on and don't support modern ideas like tagging.

<comment><USER42> The multi-user aspect is super handy.

It's also nifty that it exposes pretty much all of the functionality via a REST API, complete with the ability to manage OAuth clients/tokens. Not something I expected to really leverage, but have been surprised how frequently it's come in handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > We don't care about how much money we've spent at Amazon

That's like, your opinion man. While I'm sure that's one perfectly valid approach, I find a lot of value in knowing where my money has gone beyond categories.

To make it more concrete, how much I spend at Amazon my Rewards Visa determines whether the 2% bump in rewards is worth the cost of Prime. (I know - most people find enough value in the videos or not thinking about shipping. But I find that I simply spend _more_ at Amazon when I have Prime, so I avoid having it!)

To counter myself, my own software is probably too granular and I waste time on those little details of where I've spent money. I could stand to simplify a bit.

<comment><USER45> Last time I looked they seem to have a pretty decent python API so splitting down transactions by retailer shouldn't take too much python-fu methinks.

<comment><USER46> na, the problem is the data doesn't commonly exist in the model. If I buy a book from a local independent bookstore, that's a debit on checking and a credit in the 'Books' account. If--perhaps due to coronavirus--I buy the sequel on Amazon, that again results in a transaction from checking to books. The payee data isn't there.

I think you can do it via vendors but the small business feature set is somewhat cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I used GnuCash for a few years too, then switched to something else because:

1) I couldn't make transaction importing work for the statements that I want 2) I couldn't get to the report that igpay got (this was many years back) for some reason, I also wanted more custom reports and it seemed really complicated to create one 3) I wanted a tool that was more malleable. Although GnuCash is completely open source, the codebase does not look too approachable for me

After trying a few other approaches (including spreadsheets), I settled with Ledger CLI. I also built importing tools over 3 years of coding on weekends and finally got a complete set of features and financial institutions that I want :) Started with the reporting / analytics part recently... You can check it out here:

[https://prudent.me](https://prudent.me)

Any feedback will be very appreciated :)

</comment><comment><USER48> Does GnuCash integrate well with exports from credit-card companies or banks? It seems like the big blocker is the time spent logging transactions.

<comment><USER49> It supports imports from QIF and OFX/QFX files, CSV files, MT940 and MT942 files and DTAUS files. It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what kind of bank has username/password logins that would work with this.

Personally, I don't mind manually entering the stuff, because you'll need to classify everything into the correct accounts anyway.

<comment><USER46> > It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what > kind of bank has username/password logins that would work with this.

That stuff is the OFX/QFX setup. Basically it logs in and fetches those files for you. Banks are notoriously bad at this however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> A macOS and iOS alternative: [https://hochgatterer.me/finances/macos/](https://hochgatterer.me/finances/macos/)

> No data is stored on servers, except when you enable Cloud Sync to keep your > data up-to-date on all your devices. In this case the data is stored > encrypted on iCloud.

<comment><USER51> This looks really nice, thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I've tried many different apps over the years. I was in the "manual entry is better" camp until I stopped due to friction several months later. The only app I've used which I haven't given up on is Emma ([https://emma- app.com/](https://emma-app.com/)). On it since beta and been doing that for more than 1year. It automatically pulls all your accounts, categorises spend and gives you analysis on what you can do to improve.

Many others promise that, but fail to deliver. Emma works for me, consistently. At the end of the day each of us manage our finances differently and the workflows have to be personalised. It's about finding the one that makes sense to you rather than "the best".

</comment><comment><USER53> See also:

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545)

2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884)

</comment><comment><USER9> This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes.

And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage accounts hold funds for which I can get a price using the GOOGLEFINANCE function, so the numbers change over time and I know pretty much down to the penny what my net worth is after I sorta manually enter in a couple bank balances.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you.

In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit card. And I gloss over this, but it looks like GnuCash offers similar functionality for automatically updating stock prices [https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes](https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes) \- not sure if it's a pain to set up or not, but it's probably not as easy as just calling a google sheets function.

Seems like you wouldn't have any reasons to switch over given that you've already got a nice system going, but just wanted to point out that you can use GnuCash in a way that's not quite as... rigid as the way I use it :)

<comment><USER9> I don't really want a GUI - or the GUI I want is a spreadsheet.

I have some charts and graphs embedded with the data - like net worth over time, brokerage over time, etc. My worry with a baked system is it doesn't have the data in a way I want in a chart, whereas with this system, I can pretty much create whatever I want from the raw data in the sheet...

<comment><USER54> Tiller is trying to build exactly that: [https://www.tillerhq.com/](https://www.tillerhq.com/)

I haven't used, because I use personal capital and they both used Yodlee, and my biggest gripe about personal capital is yodlee isn't keeping up with 2fa style logins from banks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Until the open source options have direct download options that 'just work', Quicken is the best.

I've tried GnuCash and Skrooge, can't ever get the direct downloads to work for more than two months without breaking.

<comment><USER56> Quicken died for me ten ir so years ago, as did many other personal finance software applications. It is the syncing between devices that's imperative these days, and this is where Quicken is failing, especially when your database gets larger: it syncs, but as your database grows its latency becomes ever more apparent.

Quickbooks Online, which I have been using for a little over a year, does syncing exceptionally well; but at the cost of a polished UI.

Ideally I would love to be able to access my Quickbooks desktop database using iOS or web, alas that's not doable.

<comment><USER57> Quicken is out from under the Intuit Monster now, so it may be worth looking at again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items

I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the ability to select multiple things and tag them appropriately.

I appreciate the article trying to explain Double-Entry bookkeeping, and I would suggest people look into KMM as an alternative to GnuCash.

<comment><USER59> No way to categorize your expenses? Could you elaborate and compare to KMM? I've used both programs, so I'm curious which of us is missing something.

<comment><USER58> I think I may have misspoken. What I meant to say was that, at least for me, KMM is a little easier to view both accounts and categories, and search within them.

A more accurate phrasing would have been "Filter all the payers that contain this string, and allow me to select them and see how much money was transferred to/from them."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I was an avid GnuCash user for a year or two in grad school, keeping track of my finances using GnuCash Mobile on my android phone. Then I bought a new phone and exported my finances database. When I loaded it into my new phone, I found the xml had been corrupted.

That was a sad day because I'd like to use an offline finance tracker on my phone.

BTW GnuCashMobile is not GnuCash, it's some third party android app.

</comment><comment><USER61> I love the ideas from Ledger and GnuCash, so much that I even created a product inspired on them. I actually think many companies will benefit a lot from having such a simple way to control money movements, instead of having to use something like an ERP system.

The product is [https://decimals.app](https://decimals.app), and the way I thought about bringing the simplicity to it was to wrap the API behind decimals and currency libraries already in use. If you want it for personal use, let me know, but it's something closer to LedgerCLI at this point, as it doesn't come with reports and other things from GnuCash.

I can sync all your data to an S3 bucket, so you would have all the data in the json format on your AWS account. As I use DynamoDB, it would be pretty straight forward to do. So, let me know what you thing and if you are interested in using a lib or REST API to create entries to a ledger, hit me up.

</comment><comment><USER62> I needed a way to track my kids' allowance, so I built this [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fivesaver](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fivesaver) \- very simple and very free. Hopefully, not too massive-aggressive self promotion:)

</comment><comment><USER63> I was a bit flummoxed right at the first example. You bought something at a bakery, so the balance in your credit card _increased_? It's right there in the increased column. Surely it _decreased_ to a larger negative number? (Credit card accounts are almost always negative, although mine occasionally goes slightly positive when I pay it off and round up to the next pound.)

And why are the columns different to the example shown later for the checking account (or current account, as we say here in the UK)? You've got "increase" and "decrease" vs "deposit" and "withdrawal". Obviously you're likely to use your credit card and checking account in substantially different ways, but surely the fundamentals of transferring money in and out is similar enough that they ought to look the same in your finance software?

<comment><USER64> The "credit card" account is a _liability_ account, unlike a bank account which is an asset account. If you spend something on a credit card, your liability increases.

> Credit card accounts are almost always negative

This is only true if you think of them like a bank account. Every credit card statement I've ever receive has shown the amount I owe as a positive amount.

<comment><USER63> > > Credit card accounts are almost always negative

> This is only true if you think of them like a bank account. Every credit > card statement I've ever receive has shown the amount I owe as a positive > amount.

I just checked my online banking - I bank with Nationwide, a UK building society (a bit like a US credit union but functions like a bank). In the main statement of accounts, which looks like this [1], the credit card balance _is_ shown negative. So is my mortgage, which makes for a depressing overall sum! I won't bore you with more detail but generally they mostly stick to this pattern in other screens. Oddly, in that example screenshot, the credit card balance is shown as positive - I'm not sure if that's because it's just an example and they faked it wrongly or because the way balances are shown have changed since that picture was taken.

I've never had a credit card with anyone else, so that's why I'm surprised that the debt is presented as a positive number. It's interesting to see (from your comment and others) that's it's normally done that way. My initial cynical reaction was that this is a marketing ploy to make you feel a bit less bad about it, and I'm not surprised that Nationwide doesn't follow suit given that it's not run for profit.

[1] [https://i0.wp.com/money-watch.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2011/...](https://i0.wp.com/money-watch.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/nationwide-online-banking.png?w=512&ssl=1)

> The "credit card" account is a liability account

Interesting, thank you, I hadn't heard of "liability account" before. So it seems that it is something accountants really do use, not just the cynical marketing plot I initially thought. But it still does seem an unnecessary complication to me compared to just having all accounts working the same way (but some happen to be negative). Maybe it's a just mathematician / computer scientist thing of preferring things that make mathematical sense rather normal intuitive sense, a bit like zero-based indexing or end iterators that point one past the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> " _For my stocks and non-money assets, I opt not to track them super closely in order to avoid having to update the values of each stock every time._ "

GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the work laptop).

GnuCash is actually pretty easy to use, once you get used to the double-entry system and how it handles some things. I have a moderately complex situation (and it's been stupid complex in the past), and I don't spend more than a few minutes a month on it (unless I'm trading stocks; it can take more time to set up each stock's account for proper tracking).

<comment><USER66> > GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to > use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a > replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the > work laptop).

It's possible to get Yahoo! data through web scraping, but it's certainly less convenient than it used to be.

IEX also has an open API for querying historical data.[1] I don't think it has as much historical data as Yahoo! has, and it's changed a bit since the last time I thought about putting together a backtester.

[1] [https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/](https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Importing records in GnuCash is a pain.

Credit card payments end up with two records of the payment, one from the credit card and another from your bank.

There's no way to merge records in GnuCash, ideally you would be able to mark them as the same record, but keep them both to keep the import logic happy.

<comment><USER46> How are you doing this? The OFX import tool has a bayesian matcher that will update and reconcile existing records, and classify them based on past behavior.

The big challenge IMO is that each transaction has a date, but sometimes the ends disagree on when it happened. E.g. you transfer money from checking to a brokerage, it takes multiple days but you have to choose one date for that transaction.

<comment><USER67> Using the import tool it identified them as separate transactions... which they kind of are.

They're separate records whichiwould like to keep... but as a single merged ledger entry.

<comment><USER46> Still not sure I follow. If I make a payment on a credit card, it shows up as a transaction from asset checking account to the liability credit card. It shows up on both accounts already. When I later import OFX transaction files, it sees the payment in the OFX and matches it up to the existing transaction: [https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/importing- fro...](https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/importing-from- files.html#importing-matcher)

Apparently not all import assistants do this for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> In the first pie chart [0], am I the only one having a hard time with colours in the legend? For example, the second colour in the legend is #ff851b [1], but that doesn't appear in the pie chart. Going by the amount (33.69%), it must be the segment with colour #ffa85f [2].

[0] [https://www.csun.io/images/gnucash/expenses_piechart.png](https://www.csun.io/images/gnucash/expenses_piechart.png)

[1] [https://www.color-hex.com/color/ff851b](https://www.color- hex.com/color/ff851b)

[2] [https://www.color-hex.com/color/ffa85f](https://www.color- hex.com/color/ffa85f)

</comment><comment><USER69> To all the people who are running ledger with bash scripts and piping thru sed & awk I've been working on another open source alternative.

[https://godbledger.com/](https://godbledger.com/)

I've always thought that having the data recorded in a single text file made the software only suitable for extremely small financial accounts. So I've put a SQL database that you have control over as the place where the data is saved (using a similar schema to what GNUCash does). Also added GRPC endpoints so scripts can talk to it easily.

It's still early stage but plan is to make a bunch of front ends so that every financial task within a business can talk to the same backend (bank reconciliations, payroll etc)

</comment><comment><USER70> I have been using Monefy pro[0] android app for past 4 or 5 years to keep track of my expenses. I log in all my expenses and income in appropriate category. The main free version should be enough for most people but the pro version grants the ability to add custom categories. All the data is stored locally and it has the ability to export our expenses as csv to make reports. Also, Optional google drive and dropbox backup support is included.

P.S. I am not associated with this app. I am just a happy customer.

[0] - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monefy.app...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monefy.app.pro&hl=en_IN)

</comment><comment><USER71> Yep, this is the same reason I've been using [https://github.com/clovett/myMoney.Net](https://github.com/clovett/myMoney.Net) for the last 20 years and I have to say the data I have now is invaluable. But I have noticed a lot of banks are shutting down their OFX gateways which is disturbing. I think Intuit is moving them all to online backend closed systems which sucks. We should start a citizen initiated referendum to stop that trend and force banks to remain open, letting consumers download their data!!

</comment><comment><USER72> We've been using GnuCash for my gf's photo business for years now, it's powerful enough to give everything to do her taxes, but (unlike plain text accounting) very usable for a non-programmer.

Invoicing though, she's still been doing with a different program since the ones in GnuCash are hard to get good-looking. I was about to ask for tips here, but then I see there's a whole bunch of stuff out there we could try first: [https://github.com/search?q=gnucash+invoice](https://github.com/search?q=gnucash+invoice) :)

</comment><comment><USER73> This looks really promising. My current challenge is that I use Ubuntu and my wife uses windows. We definitely need something cross platform. This in turn should help us to share data (version control maybe?) between ourselves, and input the data as and when we feel like it? I work in software dev but my wife doesn't. A simpler layman tech/commands is what she prefers.

Are there others who have faced this issue similar to mine? Did you use GnuCash or something else? I'm more of CLI but she's more GUI. So...

</comment><comment><USER74> I kinda want to try it but just not convinced I will see a good return on my time esp with manual entry. I wish some of these features were baked into my main bank account though.

</comment><comment><USER75> Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple runs with random variation on assumptions.

I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is there anything better?

<comment><USER76> I keep a personal capital sync around for pretty much their retirement planner which pulls data from your synced accounts and does some light portfolio checks / some good visualizations of sectors that you're invested in.

[https://www.personalcapital.com/](https://www.personalcapital.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I've been using GnuCash for years. It has a great many fantastic features and it has some annoying quirks for sure. I haven't found anything to replace it, but if I could I would. One of the most annoying things: Export account names with Umlauts -> Import them again. Now they are all broken. I have to manually fix the csv file to prevent that and there's never been a fix/devs don't see this as an issue.

</comment><comment><USER78> In the last 6 months I have built a set of Python scripts around Beancounter, that import and categorize and archive various bank and CC statements into the ledger.

Paired with Fava budgeting capabilities, my personal finance tracking is almost frictionless. It takes literally 5 minutes to go through 5 accounts.

Since I live in Germany, I still have to use cash, which is a bit a pain to track.

For that, I use an Android app that writes data directly into the Beancount ledger.

</comment><comment><USER79> I really like the system described in this video; it's kind of a mix between double-entry and envelope accounting. It's what _finally_ helped me get my budgeting under control. [https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0](https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0)

In the video, the guy recommends MoneyDance, but the same system would probably work in GnuCash too.

</comment><comment><USER80> The article mentions Gnucash iOS app but the links in the official wiki was a dead end. Can someone point me to the correct link please?

</comment><comment><USER81> the comments thread on this is much more valuable to me than the article itself (not to say the article is not valuable) :)

</comment><comment><USER82> After have using GnuCash, Mint, and about 100 other finance tracking apps, I'm convinced that Tiller Money is the best. Highly recommend checking it out.

[https://www.tillerhq.com](https://www.tillerhq.com)

Easy to set up and requires the least amount of ongoing work to accurately categorize transactions.

</comment><comment><USER83> I love the introduction to this post. It reads like an absurd GNU infomercial. Someone is dissatisfied with their current software? There must be a better way!

I imagine Richard Stallman himself rappelling down a sold rock face to spread the good word of GNU.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is anyone regularly or reliably getting bank/credit card data via OFX? I've considered switching from Personal Capital to these libre/open solutions, but I'd love to automate the data gathering.

</comment><comment><USER84> Most banking services - at least mine already provides reports and graphs along with simple budgeting features for free with online banking. I prefer to use that, as that is where most of the data lives anyways.

</comment><comment><USER85> No sync with banks - a complete non-starter for most people. Even if you enthusiastically start using something like this, in a month or two it'll get super old.

<comment><USER86> It supports multiple methods of sync with banks, although I don't know how common these methods are in various parts of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> The last time I used GnuCash, it was not able to import it's own export. Does anyone know if this has been fixed?

</comment><comment> S-E-P I have a slight question, why is the install binary 150+ MB?

How many libraries you got?

</comment><comment><USER88> I never understood the point of these personal finance apps. When I run out of money I just withdraw a some more out of our familys multimillion trust fund.

<comment><USER24> are you looking for any relatives. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Shameless plug, our product, Domestica, is better for personal finance tracking as it uses the envelope model of categorization. It also includes to do lists, meal planning and more--in the cloud or self hosted.

[https://about.domestica.app](https://about.domestica.app)

<comment><USER90> Just paid for a year of ynab. Do you have anything I can sign up for to be reminded you exist in a year's time?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't my landing page work? - <AUTHOR> https://orchestrahq.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wondering if someone can help figure out why my landing page doesn't work? A potential issue could be our corporate firewall but I was wondering if anyone else was having issues.

Is there anything I can do to fix my SSL certificate? I'm using the Free SSL Certificate on CloudFlare and am getting a ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR on Google Chrome.

<comment><USER2> Is there a middle box here? Anti-virus software or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I work in financial services company so I reckon it might be their corporate firewall?

<comment><USER2> It could easily be.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Marriage reduces depression in couples earning less than $60,000 per year - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180410132857.htm <comment><USER2> Being single and making less than 30k increases depression. Who knew!</comment>


Lloyd Conover, Inventor of Groundbreaking Antibiotic Tetracycline, Dies at 93 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/business/lloyd-conover-dead-inventor-of-groundbreaking-antibiotic.html <comment><AUTHOR> I know the legend of penicillin makes it sound as if revolutionary drugs were discovered by miracle accident, but I'm guessing the less famous drugs, such as tetracyclene, involved a more "routine", non-sexy methodical-hypothesis- testing process, as described in the OP:

> _Dr. Conover, however, became intrigued with two naturally occurring > antibiotics that, except for two atoms, were chemically identical. To Dr. > Conover, the atoms seemed out of place. Each antibiotic had a chlorine or > oxygen atom where he expected to find a hydrogen atom. Would swapping in > hydrogen improve the potency of the drugs?_

> _Using a routine chemical procedure, he stripped chlorine from one > antibiotic and inserted hydrogen, creating a more stable molecule. He worked > with a single assistant. "I didn't want an audience if we failed," he told > The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1992._

> _The result was tetracycline, a powerful antibiotic with fewer side effects > than the drug from which it was derived — proof, Dr. Conover wrote, that "a > superior drug could be made by chemical modification."_

In computer science and computer engineering, students typically learn about, and then how to implement such fundamental breakthroughs as Hamming codes [0] and implementing ALU's in VHDL [1].

What's the equivalent in chemistry/biology/pharma? That is, how do you get into the field/expertise/mindset in which you're creating and testing out drug compositions in a methodical way that Dr. Conover did when he was able to discover and confirm tetracycline in a matter of months.

I realize this already feels like a silly question. Discovering new drugs is more complicated today. And a single science, such as chemistry, isn't enough to create an antibiotic, because you also have to be able to test the result. And perhaps there's a significant amount of chemical engineering process involved to efficiently create the target antibiotic.

[0] [http://nifty.stanford.edu/2011/hansen-hamming- codes/](http://nifty.stanford.edu/2011/hansen-hamming-codes/)

[1] [http://www.utdallas.edu/~poras/courses/ee3320/xilinx/upenn/l...](http://www.utdallas.edu/~poras/courses/ee3320/xilinx/upenn/lab5-ALUDesign.htm)

<comment><USER2> The field of study that most directly relates to what you describe is Medicinal Chemistry ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_chemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_chemistry))

It's a fascinating discipline. Typically for any given drug, large numbers of candidates are made. Those candidates are trivially different and go through a battery of tests for toxicity and efficacy. While there's a lot of science to it, the amount we know about biology is too primitive for it to be a pure engineering discipline. There's a certain amount of art to it because it's not enough to make the compound. You need to consider that if it works, some day a person is going to have to make it at scale, so it needs to be easy to make too. Finally, biology is surprising and messy so sometimes a gut instinct tells you to go a certain way.

I once was in a talk where one of the medicinal chemists who developed Amoxicillin described his excitement when they discovered the drug they had made had no taste whatsoever. The standard of care oral antibiotic that preceded it for brief period was horribly bitter (I forget the name). Kids hated taking the liquid form as a result. The team realized that with no innate flavor, the liquid form of Amoxicillin could be flavored with something more subtle than the typical grape or cherry flavors that they were accustomed to using to mask the flavor of drugs. He chose bubblegum.

<comment><USER3> There's a very nice introductory medchem course on edX with Prof Erland Stevens at Davidson College. It has been through a few iterations already, and another round just started this Monday: [https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal- chemistry-molecular-bas...](https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry- molecular-basis-drug-davidsonx-d001x-2)

Some members of the audience may find it interesting as this or that facet of the subject is discussed with regularity on this forum - the FDA, antibiotics, intellectual property &c pp.

Discussion of the regulatory and business environment is included, it's after all part of the environment that med. chemists find themselves in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My dermatologist prescribed handfuls of tetracycline to battle my teenage acne. I took around 8 pills of the stuff daily for years. My GI tracks been messed up for years and there was very little improvement in my acne.

<comment><USER5> Why would your doctor do that?

<comment><USER3> Doxycyclin is a first-line treatment for acne, it's a chronic bacterial infection, after all. But there's simply no good reason to continue first-line treatment that isn't working, hippocratic oafs are everywhere, one would guess.</comment></comment></comment>


How the Languages in Game of Thrones, Defiance, and Thor Were Created - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/how-the-languages-in-game-of-thrones-defiance-and-thor-were-created

<comment><USER2> Tolkien could probably have given a very similar interview.

He created an ancient proto-elven language called quenya, and a modern elvish language evolved from it called sindarin. He created the language with specific goals in mind, working on it over his whole career, and the Lord of the Rings came into existence as a result, in the same way that a really nice hat rack tends to naturally accumulate hats.

[https://www.academia.edu/4901880/Elvish_Linguistics_The_Scie...](https://www.academia.edu/4901880/Elvish_Linguistics_The_Science_of_Sindarin)

<comment><USER3> He also created the Black Speech with the goal of making an ugly and harsh language, but apparently never got that far with it because he found it unpleasant.

<comment><USER4> It really bugs me that people consider some languages ugly or harsh. It seems like an extension of xenophobia and racism.

<comment><USER5> Why?

French and Italian [0] are considered romance languages, because among other things they sound pretty. Russian [1] (and I suppose most Slavic languages) just don't generally sound pretty. For what its worth, I speak Russian; not terribly well, but I speak it. Russian really isn't a language that sounds "pretty" or "silky", or whichever adjective you'd prefer.

The reason I decided to respond to you comment was a little more abstract than that though. People liking or disliking things about other kinds of people isn't racist. Some people just don't like things. I don't like black licorice (no idea who invented it, but I don't like it). I don't particularly care for traditional German food (I'll eat it, its just not my go to for food), and I don't think I'd ever wear a kilt to a wedding (I'm mostly Irish, then Italian, then Native American).

I don't think those things make me racist or xenophobic. At least, I don't think less of anyone who prefers any of those things. I just don't like them for me.

I think if we start claiming that not liking something like a language is racist, we're on a slippery slope indeed. For example, I don't like the color red. I don't like traditional Mexican music. Do either one of those things make me racist?

I'm not trying to attack by any means, I'm sincerely curious.

[0] [http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/List_of_Romance_Langua...](http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/List_of_Romance_Languages.html)

[1] [http://www.russiaslam.com/2012/stories/the-russian- language-...](http://www.russiaslam.com/2012/stories/the-russian-language- what-does-it-sounds-like.html)

<comment><USER6> > French and Italian [0] are considered romance languages, because among other > things they sound pretty.

No, they (along with Spanish and others) are considered "romance languages" because they descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of the common Romans of the late Imperial period. [0]

Has nothing to do with sounding pretty.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Origins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Origins) and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Name](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Name)

<comment><USER5> No comment to the rest of it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those interested in constructed languages, I recommend checking out Mark Rosenfelder's website [http://zompist.com/](http://zompist.com/). His Language Construction Kit in particular is a great resource: [http://zompist.com/kit.html](http://zompist.com/kit.html)

<comment><USER8> That site is a time capsule: the hilariously out-of-date "EZ Home Test", the complaints about "Bob and Newt", a review of _Snow Crash_ , references to various events that were current in the mid-90s. It's good that languages don't change very fast...

<comment><USER9> Not so much out of date as continuously maintained for nearly 20 years. It's a remarkably useful personal Web site from the era of Geocities ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love constructed languages.

A great example of languages evolving to new technology is "internet". Composed of "inter" (Latin), "net" (English) and "work" (English). You have a culture (English) with an external influence (Latin), that sees a grouping of connected computers and decides to compare it to a fishing net. Network describes the topology, not the function. We see that we need a society that has invented fishing nets to even describe the Internet. But a different society might've called it something else. For example, the Internet is often called a web, much like a spiderweb, which also looks like a net.

You can't just invent an alien language for a technologically-advanced society without thinking about how they got there.

<comment><USER11> (Off-topic rant alert)

...And there are people who just decide they need to (and are qualified to) make new words for new technology, and make a total botch out of it.

Case in point: Some Koreans decided to make "pure Korean" word for website. Nothing wrong with that in itself. But then they looked at "world wide web", and also looked at "homepage", and decided that "world" and "home" patched together makes perfect sense as a website.

So was invented the word _nurijip_ , from "nuri" (an archaic word for "world") and "jip" (house). A Korean website is thus a "world-house". WTF is it supposed to mean?

Makes me twitch every time I hear it.

<comment><USER12> How much do people use that new word, instead of whatever they were using before?

<comment><USER11> Everybody around me just says "website" or "homepage", but I've seen _nurijip_ quite frequently in news articles. I guess they're under extra pressure from know-it-all prescriptivists to keep our language "pure".

(Well, to be fair, sometimes people do coin a good new "native" word to describe new stuff. Sadly, that's not the case here.)

<comment><USER13> That's why I like to use "espertofone" for "smartphone" in Portuguese. It's a quite literal translation, but has precisely the same meaning.

And always cause people to smile when they hear it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For all those interested, David J Peterson actually has a book coming out in September this year on how to go about constructing your own language. Loads of great resources can be found on [http://conlang.org](http://conlang.org), and [http://dedalvs.conlang.org/](http://dedalvs.conlang.org/) (DJP's own conlang website) as well!

<comment><USER15> Do you know the title of the book? I looked around briefly on his site, but didn't see it.

Is the idea similar to Zompist's Language Construction Kit?

<comment><USER14> Here it is for pre-order! [http://www.amazon.com/Art-Language-Invention-Horse- Lords-Wor...](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Language-Invention-Horse-Lords-World- Building/dp/0143126466/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1430935808&sr=8-2&keywords=david+j+peterson)

He told me it covered the essentials of language construction as far as his methodology goes, but I think it offers some insight into the development of other major and not-so-well-known conlangs as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd also recommend DJP's interview about Dothraki on the Conlangery podcast (the last half of the show, starting about 55'00"): [http://conlangery.com/2012/06/25/conlangery-56-growing-a- lex...](http://conlangery.com/2012/06/25/conlangery-56-growing-a-lexicon/)

DJP has stuff up at dedalvs.com , dothraki.conlang.org , dedalvs.tumblr.com , twitter.com/Dedalvs, &c. &c.

</comment><comment><USER16> I highly recommend Carter's biography of Tolkien. I read it in my teens and thought everybody (and especially Tolkien fans) knew Tolkien started working on many of his fictional languages many years before and that both the languages and the stories evolved together.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember the conlanging talk from Sai at one of the CCCs. Really awesome stuff. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEKcsto7Mjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEKcsto7Mjk)

<comment><USER7> This is great, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> On Game of Thrones we accept for convenience's sake that the dominant on- screen culture speak English, despite this being, you know, an alien world. That's cheating on a huge scale if you think about it a little, so why not extend the cheating a little and re-use Lithuanian (say) or some other natural language as a proxy for Dothraki rather than going to all the trouble of inventing a whole new freaking language.

<comment><USER7> Unlike Tolkien, George R.R. Martin never created full-fledged languages for his books, but he did make up a bunch of words. I guess they didn't want to replace those with different words from other real-world languages.

One of the challenges for David Peterson was to 'retrofit' the languages he created to what Martin had already made up. He coined a bunch of words and phrases for the books, and those needed to make sense and be grammatically correct in the newly created languages.

The phrase "valar morghulis", meaning "all men must die" in High Valyrian is a nice example. Peterson made the -ar suffix indicate the collective number. This is expressed by 'all' in English, but in many languages this is a separate number from singular and plural. He also added a paucal number (meaning "a few"). vala (man), vali (men), valun (a few men), valar (all men).

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I didn't know any of that. So my modified proposal is to add these words and phrases as deltas on top of your selected natural language. Still saving 99%+ of the work involved in inventing a new language.

<comment><USER7> I guess... but that's so boring! ;)

<comment><USER18> Of course you are right, and I suppose I am basically speaking with tongue in cheek. I am sure inventing languages accounted for an absolute minuscule percentage of the lavish GoT budget. So why not use the opportunity to be a perfectionist and do something very cool and fun ?

Still if you are ever looking to create your own fantasy series on a shoestring, maybe my idea has merit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried to do some conlanging in my school days, but I always hit the word invention bottleneck. So I tried writing scripts to automate that. Turns out making randomized phonemes sound good was too hard for me (probably still is, haven't tried in a while). Kinda sad, really.

<comment><USER20> It's not sad. You had fun. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > di- or tri- continental root

Is that a transcription error? Surely "consonantal root", right?

<comment><USER7> I think so.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Will YC compete with YC? - <AUTHOR>

The title might be a bit misleading so please read on.  How would YC treat a proposed idea that is in one of the following categories:<p>	1- direct competition with one of its current companies and/or products<p>	2- possible future competition of one of its current companies and/or products<p>	3- if the new proposed idea is not really in competition with any of YC's companies, but it does have some major ideas, that  another YC company could take advantage from, or add in as new feature to their system?<p>of course, if there is already competition then your idea might not be as interesting, regardless of whether the competition is a YC company or any other company.  I guess the real question is whether they review any new application without considering what they previously own and give it a fair treatment or not? <comment><USER2> Overlap is always a matter of degree. We deal with it by warning startups with substantial overlap about one another, and then leaving it to them to decide how secretive or open to be.

We try not to tell startups about the ideas of other startups working on related things, including applicants we turn down. (Usually this isn't an issue, because few applicants have genuinely novel ideas, but one applicant this last batch had cooked up a trick I'd really like to tell a startup from summer 2007 about.)

I was worried about funding competitors when we started YC, but it has turned out not to be a problem. In most good markets there's room for many companies, and it's unlikely that two we fund will take exactly the same route.

But even if we told everyone about everyone else's ideas, it wouldn't be as bad as you might think. Secrecy is not as important as beginning founders think, because (a) ideas are less valuable than they think, and (b) the most common form of death for startups is suicide, not being killed by competitors.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to how snipshot and splashup deal with their substantial overlap.

I notice that <http://www.paulgraham.com/> has a new link for splashup, but still says "photos edited with snipshot."

<comment><USER2> Those two compete less than you might think. Snipshot is an easy tool for ordinary people to tweak their photos; Splashup is aiming at Photoshop.

The link says the photos are edited with Snipshot because they _are_ edited with Snipshot. All I need for my site is something simple.

<comment><USER3> The link is there for the additional reason that you are still promoting Snipshot. This is good news for me, because integrating Snipshot with ourdoings.com is in my plans, and I wouldn't want them to disappear. That they recently added a Pro version seems a good sign.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CISO Magazine Honors KrebsOnSecurity - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/ciso-magazine-honors-krebsonsecurity/ <comment><USER2> What is CISO Magazine? Does anyone actually read it or is it just yet another nonsense "industry publication" for CISSP-folk?</comment>


How New Versions of Android Work - <AUTHOR> http://rustyshelf.org/2015/01/31/how-new-versions-of-android-work/

<comment><USER2> Read this before complaining about "fragmentation."</comment>