An overview of why the US has problems with Huawei - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fg-huawei-timeline/ <comment><USER3> The article mentions the 2012 US House Intel Committee report on Huawei and ZTE but says (incorrectly) it was never released. Here's the report: [https://republicans- intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligenc...](https://republicans- intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/huawei- zte%20investigative%20report%20\(final\).pdf)

This report is why the US government is taking action against Huawei. In it, Huawei refuses to answer some key questions about the structure of their company that strongly indicates they are controlled by the CCP. So what did Huawei think was going to happen after that?

<comment><USER4> I think china views the concept of separation of companies, the government, and the military as a western notion. The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US, and western observers dont seem to be aware of this.

<comment><USER5> > The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US, and western > observers dont seem to be aware of this.

This comment misses the whole point entirely. Obviously this is not a simple issue about cultural differences. The key point is that a telecom company that is a major player in the telecom infrastructure busines and is desperately trying to control the world's telecom infrastructure is actually surreptitiously controlled by the Chinese government. This fact is not minor cultural nitpicking.

<comment><USER6> > is actually surreptitiously controlled by the Chinese government

There's not evidence for that. It's a private company. It's not a state-owned enterprise, and doesn't function like one.

> This fact is not minor cultural nitpicking.

No, but it is part of a campaign to demonize China and Chinese companies. Many people in the US foreign policy establishment are worried about the existence of a peer-level competitor, and cannot accept that the US is no longer the sole superpower in the world. That's the fundamental issue here. It's why there's such a huge disconnect between all the fear about Huawei and the utter lack of evidence of backdoors in their equipment. This isn't about Huawei. It's about people in the US government trying to head off China as a competitor.

<comment><USER7> > > is actually surreptitiously controlled by the Chinese government

>There's not evidence for that. It's a private company. It's not a state-owned enterprise, and doesn't function like one.

What about the LA Times article?

>A study by professors Christopher Balding and Donald Clarke published April 17, 2019, argues Huawei is effectively state-owned because it is 99% owned by a "trade union committee." Trade unions in China are controlled by the government.

<comment><USER6> It's owned by the employees, through a mechanism that involves their trade union, with Ren Zhengfei (the founder and CEO) having veto power over decisions. The argument that this indirectly means the government controls the company is pretty tendentious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Huawei has extensive ties with not only the Ministry of State Security, which is kind of like a combination of the CIA/FBI, but also the Shanghai State Security Bureau and Organization 610.

Regarding 610, it might exist it might not. Supposedly operating as a "CIA within a CIA", they are kind of like a Praetorian Guard that reports to the highest levels of the CCP.

Anyway Ren Zhengfei, the founder, is a former Army Colonel in the PLA. He was a specialist in comm systems, and was "laid off" in 1983. This was the same year the MSS was founded, which wound up kind of "stealing" all the intelligence work and signals stuff that had previously been the domain of the Army.

Later the MSS would find it much more advantageous to establish front companies, and it was this wave of front companies with unlimited black budget funding that began in mid 1990s that Ren rode all the way to the top.

FUN FACT: The Green Army, one of the original Chinese hacking groups from 1996-1997, eventually all of its first members came together and established Nsfocus.com which still exists today and is quite big.

<comment><USER9> Are they the dark army?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you pick a Chinese supplier then you might end up with Chinese entities backdooring and/or copying your product. If you pick a supplier from another country, then you are up to twice as bad off as that supplier will get their stuff manufactured in China.

<comment><USER11> Naw. A Chinese company embedding a backdoor in a chip is way more damaging to the reliance as China as a global supplier of electronics manufacturing than a Chinese company that controls the software. With software it is much easier to embed a backdoor because a backdoor can look like an innocent bug.

Not that any of this really matters. So many parts of software are broken from a cybersecurity standpoint that it's more a matter of degree than secure versus not secure. I'm sure the Chinese are able to have open source contributors have their patches applied to Linux or Python with innocent bugs in them. Still though, network attacks break a lot of what keeps the internet secure, and I doubt the Americans are making it up when they say that Chinese manufactured network gear is a national security threat.

<comment><USER12> Shouldn't you be able to make a hardware backdoor look like a bug. I mean, imagine if Intel's predictive branching (meltdown) bugs were intentional... it could stay hidden for years and look like a mistake

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why this story is such a big deal, but it keeps getting covered.

There are no US companies that compete with Huawei's 5G technology, so my government is going after them anyway they can. Seems simple enough to me. That said, there is another factor: Huawei smartphones sort of compete with Apple gear, but at lower prices. This also helps a US company (Apple).

It think it is fairly common that governments do back-flips to help domestic industries. The Chinese government certainly helps their industries.

<comment><USER14> To supplement your comment; all the things in being alleged may well be true, but none of it seems unusual or particularly unexpected. It does seem quite likely that it has only become an issue because Huawei is out-competing US companies.

Although I suspect the US will discover their treatment of Meng Wanzhou is crossing a line. The idea that the US can regulate commerce between a Chinese company and an Iranian country is breathtakingly audacious and the idea that the US can go after individuals on this pretext is outrageous. If someone pulled this stunt on them and black-bagged Tim Cook for violating labour laws they might start to realise they've opened a can of worms.

<comment><USER15> Isn't it relating to fraud because they lied about the transactions, as in the US is perfectly fine if third parties conduct trade with blacklisted entities, but the third parties have to suffer the consequences of those trades (such as they themselves getting blacklisted).

<comment><USER14> That might be true but rates as a bit of a "so what?" in practice. I'm sure all i-s are dotted and t-s crossed under US law. However, compare and contrast this to the US law lovingly nicknamed 'Hague Invasion Act' [0] - <USER2> states are not expected to quietly sit down and take it quietly when foreigners start harassing their authority figures.

It certainly has terrible optics - the US decides to bully a strategically threatening Chinese company with superior capability? That is likely to disrupt their extensive data gathering and surveillance operations? In the middle of trade talks? Whatever legal quibbling they want to argue over, it is a tough sell as a rules-based decision. It looks highly political.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service- Members'_Prot...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service- Members'_Protection_Act)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's hardly surprising that the US is going after Huawei. The US enjoys a commanding lead in technology globally. That overwhelming lead is threatened by a company which is now a leader in 5G technology and becoming a global player. Naturally the US will try to protect its own companies, it's very telling that they haven't given evidence of any wrongdoing.

<comment><USER17> Last thing I read was: _'Hidden backdoors' were found in Huawei equipment, reports Bloomberg._

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523701/huawei- vodafone-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523701/huawei-vodafone- italy-security-backdoors-vulnerabilities-routers-core-network-wide-area-local)

Was that disproven?

<comment><USER6> Bloomberg was wrong here.

Huawei routers had Telnet installed on them, which is completely standard. Vodafone, the company that was supposedly targeted, disputed Bloomberg's characterization of standard diagnostic software as a "backdoor":

> The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that > is commonly used by many vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic > functions. It would not have been accessible from the internet.[1]

This is not the first time Bloomberg has made sensationalist claims about Chinese backdoors. This one fell apart with even the lightest of scrutiny. One wonders if the Bloomberg reporter even understood what Telnet is.

1\. [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430)

<comment><USER18> It sounds like a backdoors to me. Oops we forgot to not install telnet on all routers we sell is as close to an admission of guilt as one might hope for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it really that surprising that the US would object to a company with extremely close ties to an authoritarian surveillance state providing the nations' infrastructure? Huawei was founded by a PLA colonel and has deep ties to the Chinese state and power structure.

Imagine if a US company was founded by ex-Military officers, stole tech from Chinese companies, and tried to build China's telecom backbone while accepting huge subsidies from the US government. No one would bat an eye if they passed on that deal.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, because US haven't been ripping off anybody. And no US company has ever had close ties to the government %]

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)

<comment><USER21> Please keep canned arguments like "whataboutism" off HN. They're repetitive and never lead anywhere new or interesting.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20whataboutism&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER19> I think it's a pretty fair rebuttal. tu quoque is a logical fallacy and is often seen whenever these debates happen.

<comment><USER21> If someone introduces a counterexample that they believe is comparable, calling "whataboutism" doesn't refute anything. It's a move to exclude the information, and ultimately to stop discussion. What, after all, can one say in response? It isn't an argument—it's a label that is intended to stigmatize. This verbal trick is so empty that it's surprising it has currency among smart people. I think it's because the word itself is so catchy.

When someone brings up information isn't in fact comparable or relevant, the reasonable thing to do is to explain why it isn't, and give the other person a chance to respond. It's natural for people to disagree about what's relevant in an argument—that's part of having a disagreement in the first place. Trying to close off discussion so only your side's examples count as admissible isn't good discourse. Being first to raise a topic doesn't confer power to control the conversation.

Perhaps the more helpful broader point, though, is that all these canned arguments are repetitive and therefore low-quality. They're like slapping a sticker on something rather than engaging with it. Because of that, they make threads worse and more predictable. People tend to respond badly and strike back, rather than continuing in good faith—and it's easy to see why, because labels like "whataboutism" express dismissiveness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A review of Huawei devices by the company I work for, Finite State, found numerous (and some trivial) backdoors in 55% of Huawei projects. It is briefly mentioned in the article above. Here is more information on that report: [https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds- cybersecurity...](https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds- cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-embedded-within-huawei-devices/)

And here is a video of our CEO talking more about it: [https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly- podcast](https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly-podcast)

<comment><USER22> Wow that's a grossly misleading executive summary. Your company should be ashamed of itself.

I read the report itself:

\- Devices came with a default username/password. Called a "backdoor."

\- Devices used password auth instead of public key cryptography for SSH out of the box. Called a "backdoor."

\- Default public key cryptography keys for SSH auth instead of password. Called a "backdoor."

\- Devices contained public certificate authorities. Called a "man in them middle."

\- Devices contained well known vulnerabilities in common open source software.

If I had paid Finite State for this report, I'd fire them on the spot and blacklist them. I particularly love the Schrödinger's cat of public key SSH auth. If the vendor doesn't enable it by default it is a "backdoor" and if they do it is "hard-coded certificates" and thus a "backdoor."

According to Finite State's logic I've never used a vendor that didn't contain multiple "backdoors." Particularly as doing so is impossible (since you need to enable public certificate SSH auth AND not provide users any way of actually using it).

The thing that surprises me is that they found "backdoors" in _only_ 55% of devices? Shouldn't it be 100%, or did you feel like misleading that much was too unbelievable (and people might e.g. read the report and call you out)?

PS - No conflicts or stakes here (don't even run Huawei's stuff that I know of). Just decided to read the report because of the extraordinary claims made, found out there was nothing there.

<comment><USER23> > _If I had paid Finite State for this report, I 'd fire them on the spot and > blacklist them._

Whoever paid Finite State for that report presumably was happy with the outcome that was arranged for them. Alternatively, they could have written the report on their own in order to drum up business and "reputation" in the cybersecurity industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> NSA hates competition

</comment><comment><USER25> Most of the points listed in the article are excuses to attack a successful Chinese company. It looks like the US prefers China to just manufacture for others and not sell directly high tech products.

<comment><USER26> " _Seattle prosecutors alleged in January 2019 that Huawei employees stole T-Mobile trade secrets in 2012. They said that Huawei pressured its U.S. staff to get details about a smart-phone-testing robot named Tappy and that a Huawei employee removed the robot arm and took it home and photographed it. Huawei denies any role. It says employees acted on their own, in "a moment of indiscretion."_ "

That's perfectly believable. I, myself, am compelled to fiddle about with other people's technology.

<comment><USER27> > The Supercomm telecom trade show was winding down and most people had gone > home when Zhu Yibin, a China-based employee of Huawei, was caught by > security June 23 photographing the circuit boards of an optical networking > device owned by Fujitsu Network Communications after removing the casing, > according to a report by Light Reading. Zhu also had two pages of > proprietary AT&T diagrams and a list of six vendors to visit, with two high- > tech products highlighted.

<comment><USER28> The CIA did the same with an entire soviet spacecraft.

<comment><USER27> So you are saying we should assume the same for China and Huawei?

<comment><USER28> they behavior is not deviating form the standards set by the US.

<comment><USER29> If Huawei does not deviate from the standards set by the CIA, than it is very clearly a terrible idea to do business with them

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would answer if I had a meaningful thing to say, but I'm afraid my social credit score could suffer and I could be banned by chinese government from buying cheap backdoored electronic cigarette gears.</comment>


Usability Tips Based on Research Studies - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/10-usability-tips-based-on-research-studies/

<comment><USER3> This is the only sort of UX, interaction design and usability "top ten" list that should ever receive upvotes: one that cites references and only publishes information that has been validated in some fashion.

<comment><USER4> In several of the author's examples - like vertical attention - <USER2> studies show different results - or as new measurement tools become available, old truisms fall.

I am all for documentation / proof in UX but at the same time the problem with vetting out ideas, or common sense "this worked for me " illustrations may keep you from testing that one morsel that puts your ux / conversion rate over the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article was very interesting and I was also interested in the "Removing a Button" article they linked to: <http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/>

I recently bought something from the website of a company that does that exact same thing wrong and made me hesitate a long while before purchasing. I sent the article to them and hope they change their setup, I really want them to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Re: #5.

The referenced "studies" show that users will scroll if they realize they need to access their desired content.

Okay.

That absolutely does not mean that vertical pages provide pleasing UX or good usability. It simply means the user endured the vertical layout in that case.

None of the provided citations support that conclusion of the article. Not only that - sample size, obvious confirmation bias, and extreme extrapolation of data to unsupported conclusions render the "studies" relatively useless.

In the last citation, even though they attempt to wash it away with statistical significance (SD on a sample of 15?) their data actually shows that usability, as defined by comprehension, is maximized by paging.

I think the truth is found closer to the notion that form follows function and the answer to scroll vs. paging is content and site specific.

I am finding the article, overall, unimpressive. The method involved seems to be that of looking for support of one's opinion, not extraction of good practice from objective research.

</comment><comment><USER7> The words-read-per-page graph is presented as a curve; looks to me more like folks read up to 200 words, then start dropping out. The initial plunge is linear in other words, equal to the number of words on the page (when there are less than 200).

</comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone provide examples or references that discuss the importance (or unimportance) of site speed for sites that aren't search engines?

<comment><USER9> [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/googles-marissa-mayer-speed- wi...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/googles-marissa-mayer-speed-wins/3925) When the Google Maps home page was put on a diet, shrunk from 100K to about 70K to 80K, traffic was up 10 percent the first week and in the following three weeks, 25 percent more, she said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought the three-click rule died in the 90s. Krug debunked it in 2000 in Don't Make Me Think.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was surprised that being above the fold didn't matter as much as I thought it did.

</comment><comment><USER12> I assume the F-shape pattern is only effective in languages that read left-to- right?

<comment><USER13> I wonder how much the sites they used biased the results. Google's search results are very F-shaped, for example, and so is any left-to-right language text that is divided into paragraphs with headings. Does the "use an F-shaped pattern" recomendation actually boil down to "display text the way ypu normally would in your language"? If so, that's not nearly as interesting.

<comment><USER14> Well for navigation, the F-shaped or "Top-Left" pattern has been a staple of site design for at least 11 years.

In 1999, when i started making sites, the sort of nav was considered "boring" because everyone was using it, and our designers often created weird (poorly performing) nav just to buck the trend.</comment></comment></comment>


GetAwesomeness: A Directory of Lists - <AUTHOR> https://getawesomeness.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> See also: [https://awesome.re](https://awesome.re)

</comment><comment><USER3> By all means (to the creator of this list of lists), don't be shy on adding some bottom padding to those cards! Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER4> FYI - I'm seeing a "Github does not respond" message in a lot of the lists.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, Awesome Go is well pretty damn awesome.</comment>


What did they do before you came along? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/before-you-marketing.html <comment><USER2> This is one of those things few people seem to get. I keep encountering small companies with a nice product idea whose idea of a market segment is "everybody". "But who are you selling to now?" I ask..... "everybody".... bah.

It was a real pleasure to talk to a founder with a marketing background last week who had a really solid plan for their product's initial launch to a small targeted group of users.

I think part of it's driven by the idea that investors are going to look askance at a company that's addressing a small market. The opposite seems to be true from what I've seen.

Who would you prefer? Somebody trying to sell to a large market with few/zero sales... or somebody selling to a small market, winning sales, and with a _plan to grow the market_. I know which I'd pick :-)</comment>


That's why Myspace has no chance - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/ZeD4pYD.png

<comment><USER2> What if they are not trying to get into the identity market? Imgur is not trying to become your social identity. Reddit is not trying to become your social identity. Success means different things to different people or to the same people at different times. Myspace lost the authentication and identity market.

My question is: What is their hook? Why can they do it better than some random bootstrapped people?

<comment><AUTHOR> > What if they are not trying to get into the identity market?

I have never seen a site using MySpace OAuth login on the wild.. They certainly have no interest in it.

>My question is: What is their hook?

A good question. They kept their initial spirit: "Customizable homepages for Artists and Musicians." – But never overhauled the system to make it better, or useful than a Facebook fanpage. Only a redesign happened, when it was already too late. You obviously can't keep operating a `2000 Style` website 10 years later for the mass market. Myspace apparently has no hook.

Why can they do it better than some random bootstrapped people? They can't. They just have been there for longer than Facebook, which gives them a disadvantage, because people have a the original Myspace brand identity burned into their memory that will not go away, regardless how often Myspace re- writes the UI.</comment></comment>


How to register a company in the USA: the most comprehensive guide for founders - <AUTHOR> http://aynuriev.com/how-to-register-company-usa/ <comment><USER2> One thing to be aware of is that registering a company in the US (or anywhere else) does NOT mean that it's not taxable where the founders or management are resident.

For example, in Australia, a foreign company is taxable if i) Australian tax residents control the company's voting power; or ii) Its "central management and control" is in Australia.

Other jurisdictions have similar laws.

<comment><USER3> > One thing to be aware of is that registering a company in the US (or > anywhere else) does NOT mean that it's not taxable where the founders or > management are resident.

I always wondered about this and how it affects startups. In particular, YC requires that all the companies it funds be registered as US entities. How do these companies manage double taxation ?

<comment><USER4> By filing taxes in every jurisdiction they are legally required to file. Let's use the grandparent post's example: australian founders, company registered in deleware, USA.

They need to file at least the following:

1) US federal corporate income tax

2) Deleware state franchise tax

3) Australian income tax

Probably more. If you want to stay fully legal and compliant, it's just what you have to do.

<comment><USER5> And if this is extended to sales taxes: how companies actually pay taxes worldwide? I mean, a SaaS would require the company to be registered anywhere it gets a new customer? In real life how it is handled?

Also, I have read that some services like 2checkout offer "name of record" where they seems to pay taxes on behalf of a company globally. But I haven't seen any other company offering that, so I'm not sure if it it's standard or not...

<comment><USER6> Sales taxes are a US-centric concept. Most of the world uses VAT, though Australia uses a variant known as the GST. (And not to be outdone, Hawaii has a variant of VAT based on gross income.)

That being said, for SaaS, it is still currently generally the prevailing rule that sales/VAT/GST/whatever compliance isn't required in the customer's country unless you have a physical nexus to that country (i.e., office, employee, etc.)

However, the US tech dominance has resulted in many countries proposing or even adopting rules that would subject SaaS transactions to VAT/GST/whatever compliance regardless of the location of the vendor. Most intl tax experts agree that this will become the standard within a decade, though there is substantial disagreement as to how soon within the next decade the transition will occur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Step 1: do not misspell the word "company".

</comment><comment><USER8> Thought experiment: Suppose that every employee in the USA decides to go into business as a sole proprietor. I really mean everyone. Workers contract out their services and file a Schedule C to report income and expenses. Is this possible? Is it desirable? How would it affect the corporation as we know it today?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is wonderfully detailed about which exact steps to take. Even if I don't agree with each point it gives me a framework for further research. Thanks for the read!

<comment><USER10> I shuddered reading through this but I attribute that to my trained paranoia from the other non-engineering career. For heaven's sake treat the contents as CoreFailure recommends, a starting point or a framework of topics to raise with a professional versed in the laws in all of the states you'll be doing business in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can't all of this be done via Stripe Atlas for $500?

<comment><USER12> This too was my immediate reaction.

Are there situations where Stripe Atlas would _not_ be the best choice?

(Also curious if anyone has experience with Clerky or Gust Launch, which are also mentioned in the article.)

<comment><USER13> Also used Clerky, it's great. Just fill out a form and give them a credit card and it handles all the paperwork, generates incorporation documents & bylaws, files with the relevant secretary of state, and gives you instructions for what to do afterwards.

I've talked to a couple lawyers since that are familiar with the Clerky paperwork, and they said that legally it's pretty solid as long as you're doing something fairly standard. If you've got complicated ownership structures (converting from an LLC, founders quitting or joining after incorporation, spinning off IP that might not be yours) you probably want to talk to a lawyer, but for the standard situation where a bunch of friends get together, can all agree on ownership percentages, and start a company from a clean slate, Clerky's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can't disagree more with Step 1. Just split it 50/50\. Anything else will cause problems further down the road.

<comment><USER15> _> Just split it 50/50\. Anything else will cause problems further down the road._

It's not that simple. There are plenty of horror stories from founders explaining how the ideals of 50/50 or 33/33/33 equal splits actually _caused_ problems and resentment about unfairness.

Sometimes equal splits will lead to problems.

Sometimes unequal splits will lead to problems.

Therefore, there isn't any one-size-fits-all advice. Each group of founders have to figure out what type of equity split is appropriate for their startup.

<comment><USER16> I encourage you to share some of these stories. Future entrepreneurs are in this very thread and such experience could greatly help them out.

<comment><USER17> For the financial split, the goal is to come out with something viewed as fair and reasonable. However for decision making, it is critical to have some way the company can make effective decision. If, for example, the co founders are on a sailing ship suddenly see rocks dead ahead, a decision must be made whether to go to the right or the left. The worst thing is not to be able to decide because two co-founders/co-captains have equal shares/voting and there is no mechanism to effect the decision.

Further more, if two (or more) co founders cannot decide before hand on how to deal with a deadlock, then it is _always_ better to quit while you are ahead.

And yes, I had this experience as well as one that was the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do foreign founders deal with the visa situation when doing business in the US?

<comment><USER19> As long as you are not employed by your company, you don't need a work visa.

If you want to be employed by your company and live in the US, currently the E2 is the best option (for that, you already need ongoing substantial operations in the US).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good article, pleasant read, but it's missing https?

<comment><USER21> Are you worried that a malicious attacker will MITM the connection and give you inferior advice about starting a company?

<comment><USER22> Or deliver malware, or malicious tracking.

<comment><USER21> Thanks to online ads, you can get all the malware and malicious tracking you want securely delivered to your device over https.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very valuable article! Thanks for it.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is brilliant thanks. Perfect help for someone outside the US</comment>


Wrapbootstrap Now Accepts Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://wrapbootstrap.com/theme/crisp-responsive-fluid-business-template-WB0F7FH2P

<comment><USER2> Seems like Bitcoin is being rapidly adopted as a viable currency choice. For a while there I wasn't convinced Bitcoin was going to survive the issues it faced, especially all of the controversy surrounding fraudulent Bitcoin exchanges and wallet services that disappear with users Bitcoins. It's good to see some credibility being restored in the currency finally with notable sites now accepting payments and donations via the pseudo currency.

I think we'll see a true turning point of this pseudonymous currency once the likes of Google, eBay or Apple adopt it as a means for accepting payment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love that accepting bitcoin is now a very effective viral marketing tactic: it's going to lead to rapid adoption.

</comment><comment><USER4> afaqurk, perhaps you should change the story link to <https://wrapbootstrap.com/help/buyers/bitcoin>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. But I don't see a way to edit URL in the edit menu.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I think only admins can change it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "X accepts bitcoin" where as X is a notable entity of some kind. (4chan, wordpress, Internet Archive, etc)

</comment><comment><USER6> anyone know why bitpay was chosen over coinbase as the processor ?</comment>


Show HN: Reinventing conference calling - <AUTHOR> https://app.brring.com/signup <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I've been working for the past year on this app to make conference calling multiple people as simple as a making a regular phone call.

With conference calls you need to dial a number and then a PIN. It can get pretty costly if you're based outside the US/UK and have to dial internationally.

The app leverages Twilio to handle calling people in 280+ countries. It uses the cheapest rate and allows you to setup calls immediately or schedule them in the future.

When the call time arrives the app rings everyone and drops them into a conference room.

Any feedback or questions appreciated!

<comment><USER2> The landing page is entirely dedicated to sign up. I'm lazy. I won't sign up unless I have to. The landing page has no information about the product that makes me want to sign up. There's more information about product in your comment than on the page. In fairness if the information in the comment was on the page, I wouldn't sign up because the product does not solve a need I have. For me, most products don't...I don't use Uber either.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated.

I didn't want to spam HN with the marketing page which can found here: [https://www.brring.com](https://www.brring.com)

It came runner up in a few design awards :)

The app was built using React, TypeScript and Spring Boot.

Here's what the app looks like on Desktop: [https://www.brring.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/brring-das...](https://www.brring.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/brring-dashboard.png)

Mobile: [https://www.brring.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/mobile- das...](https://www.brring.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/mobile- dashboard.png)

Yeah, conference calling is a niche industry, but a fairly big one. I'm hoping the app can find a place. What we're trying to do is literally change the way people make phone calls so you never need to remember or enter a phone number.

If you change your mind and fancy messing around with the app feel free, I've coded it so that anyone who signs up this month gets $5.00 free call credit (about 4 hours of US/UK calls).

We support up to 250 participants per call (start with 10 though) so if you fancy going nuts, making the app fall over or something do :)

<comment><USER2> Marketing isn't a bad thing on Hacker News. There are behaviors associated with marketing that HN deals with efficiently. These include getting attention by an annoying number of posts. I think you're probably far from that. A few posts a few days apart is unlikely to be considered spam. If you're concerned about overstepping HN norms, maybe contact the moderators using the |contact| link.

Show HN is explicitly designed for people like you to market their projects. It seems like you value HN, but are maybe erring too much on the side of caution.

For what it's worth, your conclusions about what a large market means may be causing you to avoid finding customers one a time. Big established markets mean that most potential customers already have something that lessens the problem. They're not out actively looking. The recurrent cost -- a $5 credit -- is often not the major cost. Time spent figuring out if your product meets their needs is more important...I mean, five bucks is nice, and consumers may switch for it. A well run business spends more money in salary when an employee looks at the landing page. Deploying a new app at scale means changing a business process. That's where a new app fits into the ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi everyone, I am a developer on this cool project. Will be glad to answer any question you might have regarding the functionality, payment integration, etc. Keep playing with the app and make fun calls with your friends and why not make serious calls as well :)

Looking forward to help you to get familiar with the app more and more...

</comment><comment><USER4> Your description looks cool, but I don't get to know anything from your website. Perhaps fill the landing page a bit more, then re-submit?

Also, let's say I have 3 people joining a call from the US, 3 from the UK and 3 from India. What would be the cost for an hour's conf call?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I probably should post the actual marketing page next time :)

You can see pricing here but a quick calculation suggests a call like that would cost $13.32: [https://www.brring.com/pricing/](https://www.brring.com/pricing/)

<comment><USER4> Do you not feel that's a bit on the high side, given the monthly cost of things like gotomeeting and join.me?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly the cost of making phone calls internationally or even locally isn't free. Our prices are amongst the lowest. We want to drive them down _far_ lower once we hit volume and scale for market share rather than profit.

For example our biggest competitor in the UK charges 5.8p/min just for UK landlines. A call using your example of 9 participants for one hour would cost a whopping £31.32 and that assumes all UK participants. It would cost far north of that if the participants were US and India based.

Feel free to give us a spin - there's no credit card required or any kind of hard sell tactics - we even made it easy to delete your account too once you've used up your introductory credit :) We launched a few months ago and getting useful criticism at this early stage is invaluable.

<comment><USER4> Sure, will do when the need arises :) Btw, who is your UK competitor?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shapefly Diagram|Must Have Free Software Online About Diagram, Flowcharts&Shapes - <AUTHOR> http://shapefly.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!!! I made this. Would love to answer questions, ect.</comment>


Make Google Reader look like it belongs on a Mac - <AUTHOR> http://mariusth.channelwood.org/SafariExtensions/ <comment><USER2> Just an opinion, but I've always thought the mac default UI to be fairly hideous.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there anything like this for Chrome on Mac?

<comment><USER4> Here: <http://userstyles.org/styles/16900> I like Lucidica better, myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks. Really nice Safari extension.</comment>


Show HN: Hide Feed – Replace distracting feeds with minimalist layouts - <AUTHOR> https://hidefeed.com <comment><USER2> Given that this extension will be able to read all data on websites I visit and there's no clear terms & conditions document to be found anywhere, this is going to be a hard pass even if the idea may arguably be good.</comment>


Game of Thrones showrunners made a Rick and Morty audio commentary - <AUTHOR> https://ew.com/tv/2018/04/23/game-of-thrones-rick-and-morty/ <comment><USER2> Visiting this site from Europe gives a page that errors due to network issues and most likely the GDPR.

After connecting to a VPN outside of the EU also with an incognito window, the page made over 1300 connections and transferred over 40MB of data, with no end in sight.

Now I'm kind of happy that I get to avoid this nonsense.</comment>


Ask HN: Home exercises during quarantine and isolation - <AUTHOR> We know how it is. A lot of us can't even get out of the home due to strict restrictions in their countries. I wanted to ask for your bits of advice for home exercises without gym equipment. Maybe you have some blogs or video courses to recommend? <comment><USER2> I recommend 5BX. It's simple, requires no equipment, doesn't take long and works. It's often looked down on because all sorts of other advanced programs have come along. But if you need something you can do anywhere this is a simple plan and it's well laid out.

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

[http://fit450.com/HTML/5BX_Intro.html](http://fit450.com/HTML/5BX_Intro.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this looks cool :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We use the Pamela Reif instruction videos. We got lucky: our gym rented out equipment on the last day they were open, we got some kettlebells, jumping ropes. (No money exchanged, they keep charging the monthly gym cost).

[https://www.youtube.com/user/PamelaRf1/videos?view=0&sort=p&...](https://www.youtube.com/user/PamelaRf1/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid)

</comment><comment><USER4> There is this popular Schwarzenegger guy in reddit who posted exercise regime for home without equipment just 3 days ago.

[https://www.reddit.com/user/GovSchwarzenegger/duplicates/flz...](https://www.reddit.com/user/GovSchwarzenegger/duplicates/flz3es/stay_at_home_stay_fit/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Down dog is really good for yoga and it's free until the end of the month I believe. [https://www.downdogapp.com/](https://www.downdogapp.com/)</comment>


'Extraordinary thinning' of Antarctica ice sheets - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/16/thinning-of-antarctic-ice-sheets-spreading-inland-rapidly-study <comment><USER2> Does this fall right in line with current sea-level-rise predictions? Does anybody know what those are at present? Asking for a friend with sea-side property ...</comment>


Boy 'lived as a robot' for two months [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22125682

<comment><USER2> Would help to say (video) in the title, that said its a pretty content free piece on tele-presense robotics with the hook of a young man who used one during post marrow transplant isolation to communicate with the outside world. As bandwidth improves these will improve. Having seen the difference between using a 720P web cam essentially as the remote view sensor and three 1080p cameras fused into a wrap around 180 degree view, the latter is clearly a more "immersive" experience but also a much higher bandwidth challenge.

Nice plug for Anybots too, the featured robot of the piece.

<comment><USER3> Double Robotics seems to steal the show at the end though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For additional context for people not watching the video / clicking through: this is a kid who had a bone marrow transplant and was in isolation for two months, and was temporarily donated a telepresence robot.

Seems like a great idea for such enforced-isolation cases. You aren't reliant on other people coming to _you_ to interact (though yeah, someone has to cart the thing around), so you spend a lot more time around (a much larger number of) people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Auto play == not good.

Also, the sarcastic voice over sounds more Channel 4 than BBC.

<comment><USER6> > Auto play == not good.

Flashblock ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Saw the title and immediately thought of [http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s08e02-awesom-...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s08e02-awesom-o)

Turns out it was a different form of "living as a robot"

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminded me of the Big Bang Theory episode "The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification". Except in that episode, Sheldon was only using a telepresence robot because he was afraid that some mishap would kill him before the singularity.

</comment><comment><USER9> And now that kid will grow up to join Daft Punk.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is only a couple paragraphs, and the site is full of ads and garbage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure? It's a video report, it's the BBC, there are _no_ ads, and the other links are to other news on the site.

<comment><USER11> That's because you're inside of the UK, where the BBC is funded by the government. Non-UK viewers are served ads.

<http://i.imgur.com/KHV6Mvf.png>

<comment><USER12> I'm outside UK and saw the video.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to learn a language in 3 months - <AUTHOR> http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/01/20/learning-language/

<comment><AUTHOR> Although there's perhaps nothing new in this article, the lifehacking approach is interesting, and there's a lot less insubstantial blabber that I expect to see under this sort of claim.

I searched HN for this assuming it had been posted already - was surprised not to find it.

<comment><USER2> There is [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7390674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7390674) which is about [http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2014/03/12/how-to- learn...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2014/03/12/how-to-learn-a- foreign-language/) \- a different post on the same site about the same topic.</comment></comment>


Wolpertinger - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolpertinger <comment><USER2> Also the _wild haggis_ (Haggis scoticus) which notably comes in two different sub-species - clockwise and anti-clockwise:

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

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. We have something similar in France: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahu)

<comment><USER2> I stayed in the Dahu hotel in Morzine and had no idea that's where the name came from! :-)

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to write the same, but did not expect that this was already written, nice surprise. I stayed at le Dahu in morzine (for biking) last week and had no idea. Now their logo makes sense. Adding to the topic: I have a t-shirt with a Woipertinger, but had no idea about the "existence" of these animals until after I bought it and did some research. Since then I see stuffed ones all over the place in hotels and museums and so on (mainly in Austria).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also see those "animals" from different parts of Germany:

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

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

</comment><comment><USER6> There are actual taxidermies of Wolpertinger at the Jagd und Fischereimuseum (hunting and fishing museum) in Munich.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have one in WoW, they gave it to me for doing the brewfest quests.

<comment><USER8> Okay</comment></comment>


Catnip Immunity and Alternatives - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/Catnip <comment><USER2> One of my cats only responds to it when not being watched. If you give her catnip then she will pretend that it is not interesting until I leave the room. If I peek in 30 seconds later then she is rolling around with it acting crazy, but the moment she notices that I can see her she immediately stops and resumes pretending that it has no effect.

<comment><USER3> That's consistent with Villani 2011's ( [https://www.gwern.net/docs/catnip/2011-villani.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/catnip/2011-villani.pdf) ) finding of considerable measurement error in catnip response: you have to try a cat multiple times to be sure if they are a responder. This, I suspect, may be an issue with a number of catnip studies, since researchers administering catnip may be strangers or not be on good terms with the subject cat, and definitely none of them mention trying to control or correct for this (or any awareness of this beyond Villani).

My suggestion is that the response is not totally uncontrollable and so anxiety/uncertainty/stress can 'shut down' the response, kind of like the socially-dependent response to many drugs in humans, like alcohol or MDMA - boozing with your friends at a cheery party with no inhibitions is very different from meeting a stranger & maintaining your vigilance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A dinner guest once brought a sprig of catnip covered with flower buds freshly picked from her garden, knowing we had cats.

I don't have the words to describe what happened. We'd given the cats dried catnip before, but this was an entirely different situation.

If you want to give your cats catnip, fresh stuff is definitely worth getting.

<comment><USER5> We're they more than a little aggressive to get it from her?

<comment><USER4> No, it just had a very potent effect once we placed it on the floor near them. Particularly on the male who was the larger, dominant cat of the house. There were two mature siblings from the same litter, a large male and petite female.

They were both excited as usual at first, but then the male became very aggressive. Ferociously, with all his claws out, he hunkered low straddling the sprig, digging all claws deep into the carpet while systematically ripping every bud from the sprig using his mouth, and eating them.

The female ran to the furthest bedroom and hid.

He foamed from the mouth, and became somewhat feral for the next ~20 minutes. Not towards the people, just kind of on display to nobody in particular. It was fascinating to watch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My older cat loved catnip. If you had an herbal tea with catnip in it, he'd search our home and track you down to investigate. He'd roll around in it if you gave him enough.

He loved it, right up until we got a kitten. Both male, in case that's important, but after we got the younger one neither of them ever seems to react to catnip at all.

<comment><USER7> My cat acts a bit strange and erratic in my kitchen, the strangest of which is insisting (via clawing the door and meowing) that I open up a pantry door where it will look inside and then leave, only to continue the behaviour soon after.

I've heard certain cleaning products can mimic cat pheromones (not sure how true that is, though), or at the very least affect the cats sense of smell which would affect a cat more than a human. My cat seems uninterested in cat nip.

<comment><USER8> >I've heard certain cleaning products can mimic cat pheromones (not sure how true that is, though), or at the very least affect the cats sense of smell which would affect a cat more than a human.

Not all cats, but I did had more than one that liked a lot the smell of bleach (NOT sniffing from pure bleach but if you wash something with bleach and then wash your hands without soap it remains a little on your hands), my cats went mad, sniffing my hands, self-striking against them, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Today I heard Dennis McKenna on a podcast describe wild cats of south america exhibiting catnip-like-induced behavior after munching wild _Banisteriopsis caapi_ , the MOAI-containing vine used in ayahuasca ceremonies.

</comment><comment><USER10> My cat is one of those attracted to olives. He is always attracted by salads and other foods with olive oil, but it's olive fruits that drive him crazy.

<comment><USER5> Wow I've never heard of that before now. About the funniest I've had is a cat who loved spicy pork rinds. He chased me down from 30' away once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a pretty impressive study on something seemingly so mundane.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's gwern's specialty. I highly recommend browsing around his site if you haven't before. It's the only thing on the internet that reminds me of a 17th century book in terms of structure (and eccentricity!).

<comment><USER12> I have not read enough 17th century books to know what you mean. Can you expand on that?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main things that come to mind are:

\- Encyclopedic scope but enormous attention to detail;

\- eclectic and exploratory approach to organization;

\- highly individualized prose style;

\- significant amount of authorial distance, almost mystery (is the name a pseudonym? where do they live? why are they so interested in catnip anyway? etc);

\- no fixed point of completion, everything is constantly being revised;

\- subscription-based fundraising model (Patreon is far from new in that regard).

Burton's _The Anatomy of Melancholy_ is probably the best example I can think of that illustrates what I like about books from that period: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Melancholy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Melancholy)

Montaigne's Essays and the works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish are excellent too though, if you're interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i only found out about silvervine this week. our cat is immune to catnip but silvervine worked well, worth a shot if yours is the same.

</comment><comment><USER14> [OFF-TOPIC] Katniss. <3

(From the Hunger Games books and movies: "Catnip" is how Gale used to call Katniss Everdeen. May the Odds be Ever in your Favour.)

<comment> Engineering-MD While comments like this can be interesting, they are probably more suited to reddit than hacker news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well immunity to a sexual stimulant, that's the base for a third sex, a caste not participating in the egoistic battle for a self replicating future. A caste allowing for the creation of crowds without large constant infights, a crowd where the young may hide from fraternicide.. What seems like evolutionary dysfunction indirectly creates the ability for society, for a group dynamic that allows for complex stable states. And even though it's risky, it may give the whole species a benefit.

<comment><USER3> It's not clear that catnip's nepetalactone has anything to do with sexual functions (that's not very solid speculation by researchers, and less well founded than for, say, valerian); it doesn't seem to correlate with gender or neuter status; even if it did, it doesn't exist in the wild in order to affect cat populations in the first place (catnip grows wild in only a tiny fraction of domestic cat or the original wildcat ranges and varies dramatically across _Felidae_ anyway); and even if it did affect sex in the wild, wildcats are not particularly social creatures in the first place and the rare 'cat colony' is largely a human creation; and even if it did affect cat colony, 'group selection' like that of species requires unusual and very delicate conditions, otherwise it just collapses into individual selection on 'selfish genes'.</comment></comment>


fish shell - <AUTHOR> http://fishshell.com/ <comment><USER2> The fact that you cannot redirect stderr to stdout and pipe to another command is a bit of a stumbling point for me. When I saw the bug[1] for the first time I thought that it must be some strange corner case, but it turns out it is a real bug. After reading the bug report I started to wonder if there were any other other unixy features that were missing. I/O redirection is a core unix concept in my opinion.

[1] "Redirect stderr to stdout and pipe doesn't work as expected" [https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/110](https://github.com/fish- shell/fish-shell/issues/110)

<comment><USER3> It doesn't have process redirection either, and that's one I use a fair bit. For example

        paste <(hquery -q '//a/@href' x) <(hquery -q '//a' x)

Where hquery is one of my utilities for running xpath queries over loosely parsed HTML. This would produce a tab-delimited list of link urls to link text.

<comment><USER4> Try piping into psub, as in

        paste (hquery -q '//a/@href' x | psub) (hquery -q '//a' x | psub)

[http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/commands.html#...](http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/commands.html#psub)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using fish for a while now. Overall it's pretty great.

Here's my fish config if you want to see an example: [https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/src/tip/fish/config.fish](https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/src/tip/fish/config.fish)

<comment><USER6> Gotta say, this one is my favorite:

        112 function hey_virtualbox_shut_down_or_i_will_fucking_cut_you
        113     VBoxManage controlvm $argv poweroff
        114 end

<comment><USER7> I've always been a fan of die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog() from the FreeBSD source.

[http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/sbin/sh...](http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/sbin/shutdown/shutdown.c?rev=1.26&content- type=text/plain)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussions:

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723235
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5567639
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073162

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried fish, last time it was posted. I quickly abandoned it though.

One of my main commandline utilities is git in combination with git- flow(amazing). I found the normal git completion lacking. I believe branches didn't get completed correctly in combination with some commands. The git-flow completion was non existent.

When that changes I might try it again. But for a shell that has tabcompletion as a selling point I was very unimpressed.

</comment><comment><USER10> One of my favourite features: a single configuration file. No more .bashrc and .bash_profile .

However, it seems like Fish is not fully POSIX-compatible, therefore you can face weird problems in Vim plugins, for example.

<comment><USER11> I just leave bash as my system shell and just configure my terminal emulator to start with fish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For people that just don't care about advanced features or gotchas, fish seems fine.

For people that exploit redirection, file handle rewiring, here docs and such... consider zsh with [https://github.com/sorin- ionescu/prezto](https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto)

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the features it has, but every time someone post a link to fish shell, I wonder why I would switch from bash or zsh. Will this really be THAT MUCH BETTER? Will I just run into weird errors? Is it totally sh compliant? These are important things to know and should be on the homepage.

<comment><USER14> I am a year-or-two-old fishshell convert who is reasonably well versed in bash and tried using zsh and bash with a big .bashrc.

A few things stand out to me as huge pluses:

\- It has a lot of cool functionality out of the box such as highlighting, smarter autocomplete (type in a partial word at the prompt and hit up instead of the cumbersome bash ctrl r/s history prompt that loves to beep at you), directory history (alt left-arrow and alt right-arrow), and more.

\- You don't need a 10k .bashrc or 1k .zshrc to unlock most of that cool functionality, it's just enabled by default. So anywhere you have fishshell installed, you get 95% of what you're used to, no need to git clone or scp over your .bashrc.

\- Startup time is _very_ quick compared to bash or zsh with said 10k .bashrc or 1k .zshrc, and is comparable to bash or zdh with no startup file.

The only weird error I ever ran into was with an older version of fish shell complaining about missing directories in your PATH every time there was an automatic completion available. I have not run into that issue with newer releases.

It is not sh-compliant, which will occasionally wreck havoc when you have a program that shells out without explicitly using sh. I remember running into this issue specifically with vim and emacs on more than one occasion, but truth-be-told I consider this a bug with those programs rather than a fault with fish.

There's also the matter of it not being installed on some machines, but I've used bash for so many years now that my brain flips back into bash-mode anytime I see that familiar colorless prompt with a dollar sign at the end.

It's not an essential upgrade. I also wouldn't bother using it for shell scripts either. But I'd say give it a boy scout try for interactive usage and see how you like it.

<comment><USER2> Do you know anyone with a 10k .bashrc?

<comment><USER15> I just checked, for fun:

        $ ls -lh .bashrc
        -rw-r--r--    1 <me>    <me>         10k Jul 26 13:31 .bashrc

Yep.

It's also remarkably fast because I took great effort to optimize the parts that happen the most. Shell is actually pretty fast if you don't fork and exec all the time...

<comment><USER2> What do you have in it that takes up so much space? FYI: I'm not being argumentative, I am genuinely curious.

<comment><USER15> Well, it's about 400 lines total. Roughly 40% of that is PATH handling functions: add_to, append_to, replace_in, remove_from, prefix and unprefix. They're used like:

        add_to PATH /usr/sbin

prefix and unprefix are a macro for a bunch of standard replace_in/remove_froms:

        prefix() {
            replace_in PATH "$1/bin"
            replace_in PATH "$1/sbin"
            replace_in PATH "$1/lib/ccache"
            replace_in MANPATH "$1/share/man"
            replace_in MANPATH "$1/man"
            replace_in PKG_CONFIG_PATH "$1/lib/pkgconfig"
        ...etc.

So that later I can do stuff like:

        prefix /usr/local
        prefix /usr/local/brew
        prefix /usr/local/ports

...All of which are managed by different package managers (stow, brew, ports).

All that stuff is the part I optimized so that it only uses bash built-ins and never execs. Converting that away from sed/perl shaved about 8 seconds off my startup time (it's now so fast I don't notice it).

The next 20% is interactive stuff. Setting up the prompt, aliases, stty, etc. This is generally more complicated than it technically needs to be because it's cross platform so it'll run on any unix-y thing with no changes.

Then remaining 40% is a big chunk of shell functions that are mostly unused in my day-to-day life, but kept there to jog my memory if I need to do a certain task.

That adds up to 100%, but it's also worth noting that 27% of that is blank lines and comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really liked fish, but as someone who is still learning bash/cli scripting, it makes things difficult when instructions from programs come only in Bash syntax, which does not work well with fish (some things with homebrew were an absolute nightmare to install).

<comment><USER17> It definitely makes following instructions a little more complex, but in most instances when a line doesn't work I've found that a quick switch over to bash to run that line and back proves to be sufficient.

Of course I'm also very new to bash/cli so I'm just happy if I can get things done and haven't yet gotten to the stage where I'm worrying about if it's the proper way to go about doing things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using fish for a while and have generally been very happy, I'm even working on creating a set of functions for ROS to integrate with fish the way it currently does with bash and zsh. My one tiny gripe is the way that if I

      set foo this that "the other"

then

      echo $faux; echo $faux[1]

doesn't produce anything, but

      echo $foo[4]

gives me an error message that I can't just pipe to /dev/null

Also, writing autocompletes for functions is both far simpler than in bash, but I'm also missing some of tools that bash provides.

<comment><USER18> That's very interesting, especially for people interested in using ROS as an educational platform.

It would be pretty amazing, considering the file resolution properties of ROS. I actually love it since I don't have to be in the same directory and it's easy to go through many projects.

Just curious what sort of work are you doing on ROS. Earlier this year I was working on simulation stuff in Gazebo.

<comment><USER11> I'm a robotics software engineer at Vecna, working on our QC Bot[1]. We use a combination of ROS and our own Java stuff for the robot system, and since I'm a long time fish user I started doing the port for my own use. I've been working on getting the patch into shape for actually going upstream in the 4 hours per week we get for community service, contributing to open source, etc.

[1][https://www.vecna.com/solutions/hospital- delivery](https://www.vecna.com/solutions/hospital-delivery)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why is this interesting when we have zsh?

[https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my- zsh?source=cc](https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh?source=cc)

<comment><USER20> or prezto [https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto](https://github.com/sorin- ionescu/prezto)

<comment><USER21> One thing I have found with prezto (as well as oh-my-zsh) is that over time, starting up a new terminal window can take a while. On the other hand, when I tried fish, I found certain aspects of it to be sluggish (autocomplete, for example).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fish is a great interactive shell. I've been using it for some time now.

A few things I occasionally run into: You can't just paste somebodies setup instructions into your shell anymore (you can temporarily invoke bash for that though). And when writing setup instructions yourself, sh is still pretty much the standard. VirtualEnv generates an activate.fish out of the box - nice! I still occasionally type !grep by accident. And I do miss &&.

</comment><comment><USER23> I defined the following function to convert my bash aliases to fish functions, which eased my switchover a bit. I saved it as ~/.config/fish/functions/import_bash_aliases.fish

      function import_bash_aliases --description 'bash aliases to .fish function files.'
          for a in (cat ~/.bashrc  | grep "^alias")
              set aname (echo $a | grep -Eoe "[a-z0-9]+=" | sed 's/=//')
              set command (echo $a | sed 's/^alias .*=//' \
                | sed 's/^ *\'//' | sed 's/\' *$//' )
              echo "Processing alias $aname as $command"
              if test -f ~/.config/fish/functions/$aname.fish
                  echo Function $aname is already defined. Skipping...
              else
                  alias $aname $command
                  funcsave $aname
              end
          end
      end

</comment><comment><USER24> I have been using fish for a few months exclusively on my Mac. I really miss a few bashisms: mostly pressing esc-. inserts the last part of the last command. I have not changed the shell on my server, somehow I am afraid of breaking things... (bad shell scripts that don't have correct shebang line).

<comment><USER25> esc-. is my biggest miss as well. There are discussions on this but still havent been able to fix it on osx in iterm2 myself. Did get option-. to work for now but esc-. has 20+ years of pure reflex action burned into my brain.

<comment><USER24> Can you post your solution (or give a pointer)?

<comment><USER25> function fish_user_key_bindings bind \e. 'history-token-search-backward' end

There is a thread about it here

[https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/89](https://github.com/fish- shell/fish-shell/issues/89)

<comment><USER24> Not successful yet on the Mac Terminal.app command line... Thanks anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I just took fish for a quick spin, and... wow -- I am impressed. It really feels "interactive". I don't think I'll replace my battle tested zsh, but even as a "grumpy old man": you should at least try it. It feels really... fresh.

</comment><comment><USER27> One thing I missed in fish was bash's sudo !! to quickly re-execute a command.

A replacement is easy enough though and is in my config here: [https://github.com/dmotz/dotfiles/blob/master/functions/sudo...](https://github.com/dmotz/dotfiles/blob/master/functions/sudo!!.fish)

Beyond a few other syntax incompatibilities, I've enjoyed using it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Gave fish a shot for a week or so. It gives some "oohs and ahs" right off the bat, but in the long term, not something that I could use.

Maybe if it was at least somewhat bash or POSIX compatible I would be on board, but the developers don't even seem to want to help us out in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been using fish for about 3 months now and I love it. Switched from bash.

Here's a presentation I gave to my local coder community on fish: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWmKfb2jQhU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWmKfb2jQhU)

</comment><comment><USER30> "Finally, a command line shell for the 90s"

Now that's an odd slogan. Is it trying to make the point that the competition is even older? Appeal to old-school hackers? Subtly tell me that the project hasn't been updated in a while?

<comment><USER31> It's satire.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See it in action here: [http://youtu.be/MVw8N3hTfCI?t=56s](http://youtu.be/MVw8N3hTfCI?t=56s)

</comment><comment><USER20> the developer should provider a converter tool to convert .bashrc/.zshrc to fish config

<comment><USER32> it looks like a NP-Complete problem

<comment><USER33> A solution that converted as many easy things as possible and then output anything it couldn't figure out somewhere so you could convert that by hand would still probably be rather useful.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. And from what I understand it's how the python 2 -> 3 transition was dealt with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> fish: the shell for people who want to use multi-line echo instead of here- docs.

</comment><comment><USER35> Oooh, it's like a MUD!

</comment><comment><USER36> I like auto-complete in web-browsers, but I can't see a single use for it in my terminals. After all, what Linux-user hasn't automated their terminal input to some degree? Nah, I'll stick with my [TAB]...

<comment><USER37> You could just try it instead of speculating

<comment><USER38> I tried it for a while and I just can't work with it. I'm back to fish 1.23 for now, and I don't know what I'll do when that becomes unmaintainable. I might just have some personal patches, I really wish they included an option to disable it.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel Xe-LP GPU Architecture Deep Dive - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15973/the-intel-xelp-gpu-architecture-deep-dive-building-up-from-the-bottom <comment><USER2> > The downside is that it also means that Intel is the only hardware vendor > launching a new GPU/architecture in 2020 without support for the next > generation of features, which Microsoft & co are codifying as DirectX 12 > Ultimate. The consumer-facing trade name for feature level 12_2, DirectX > Ultimate incorporates support for variable rate shading tier 2, along with > ray tracing, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. And to be fair to Intel, > expecting ray tracing in an integrated part in 2020 was always a bit too > much of an ask. But some additional progress would always be nice to see. > Plus it puts DG1 in a bit of an odd spot, since it's a discrete GPU without > 12_2 functionality.

Not really on a good starting foot.

<comment><USER3> meh. Ray tracing is hype. I don't think it's omission is that big of a deal.

<comment><USER2> Hollywood is of a different point of view.

[https://home.otoy.com/](https://home.otoy.com/)

[https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyper...](https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperion)

Also a standard feature of PS 5 and XBox Series X.

<comment><USER3> The price premiums for hardware with ray tracing hardware is still high and only when it becomes common place so as to not command a higher price will your average gamer care. There's also always the next gen for Intel to add it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> CPU cores are pretty much a done deal IMO (unless Nuvia's hype is real. I guess we'll see about that soon). For the last 10, maybe 20 years, CPUs have simply grown bigger and have more or less done the same features.

CPUs simply push wider SIMD (SSE -> AVX -> AVX512), bigger out-of-execution buffers, larger registers, deeper branch prediction, more cache. The biggest advancement seemed to be Intel's uop-cache in Sandy Bridge (a concept that was first tried in the Pentium4, so not really a "new" innovation).

Even ARM chips are more of the same. Wider SIMD (see A64fx: #1 supercomputer in the world for 512-bit SVE), deeper out-of-order execution, better branch prediction. Its rare to see something new

\</comment><comment>----

In contrast, whenever I see GPU-architectures, everything is so hugely different. True, GPUs all have a "SIMD focus", but there's so many exciting things about SIMD that just haven't been explored yet.

NVidia has Tensor-cores, Raytracing cores. It was already crazy that NVidia had a full matrix-multiplication implemented in its FP16 processor in Volta, but Ampere is now pushing sparse matrix multiplication at the chip level (!!).

AMD GCN and RDNA push GPU/SIMD architecture in a different direction. While a chunk of RDNA can be described as "more of the same", the "SubVector execution" feature grossly changes how Wave64 wavefronts are executed to save on register space and potentially have a better memory access pattern. Innovation continues in the AMD space for sure.

Intel finally enters with their GPU / SIMD architecture, and they start of with... SIMD8 + SIMD2 (instead of the Wave32 of RDNA/NVidia or Wave64 for GCN). Finally, Intel is minimizing hardware scheduling (saving on die area), and focusing on software to schedule the instructions.

Three very, very different architectures. Three very different ideologies for how SIMD compute / GPUs should be built. The SIMD / GPU architecture space remains more innovative than the CPU-architecture space by a longshot. Its exciting to see.

\</comment><comment>--

I'm not saying that CPU-advancements are dead per se. AMD did make chiplets a hot commodity (but chiplets were already experimented with Power5, and chiplets seem like a natural evolution to dual-socket or NUMA architectures... just cheap enough for a consumer now). Intel's new Tremont Atom core has this cool "dual-decoder" design (where one decoder works on one-branch, and the 2nd decoder works on a 2nd branch in parallel). There are certainly new ideas being tested in the CPU world. But nothing as majorly game changing as what Intel / AMD / NVidia are doing to the GPU space. (Or Google if we include TPUs in the discussion. A TPU isn't SIMD, but it shares some degree of similarity, especially to NVidia's Tensor cores)

I guess big.LITTLE (and Intel's Lakefield platform) was a big change in the last 10 years. But that hasn't really seen much success in the Desktop/Server markets.

<comment><USER5> David Kanter makes an excellent point about why CPUs still aren't going away any time soon - nobody's building GPUs with arbitrarily upgradeable memory, and there are still more larger-than-memory problems you want these systems to be able to tackle. As soon as your data set is too big for memory, you're basically forced to head to a CPU to coordinate things. And as big as some GPU memories have grown, the ML programming models are vastly bigger still, so there's still a lot of reasons you want a CPU in these systems.

So naturally the market is currently trying to find a middle, which is exactly where Intel's been heading if you've been paying any attention. That's the total explanation on why CPUs have been getting wider and wider - it just makes sense for them to, given the transistor budgets and the fact that just stamping more CPUs on a core is already showing signs of diminishing returns (to the point where you _have_ to use an approach like chiplets to manage thermals appropriately, even).

The laptop market being repressed by Microsoft's stone-aged kernel CPU core management holding back designs like Lakefield (which are now completely old hat for phone-class processors) for a decade is a completely different discussion and really goes out of band with what we're talking about here though.

<comment><USER4> To clarify: I don't mean to say that GPUs will become superior to CPUs.

Just that CPUs are a mature technology that seem unlikely to have any dramatic evolution any time soon. GPUs in contrast, are a lesser understood architecture with significant amounts of experimentation still being done on them. Its a more exciting field to keep an eye on.

After all, CPUs are latency optimized, GPUs are bandwidth optimized. They're made for different kinds of problems.</comment></comment></comment>


Will Nokia Become The IBM Of Handsets? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/05/16/will-nokia-become-the-ibm-of-handsets/

<comment><USER2> _However, a move like this could put WinPho on the map, especially in countries where the name Nokia is synonymous with quality._

I think the author overestimates the power of Nokia's brand. In South Africa, the sort of place the author seems to refer, RIM is taking the lower-middle end of the market by storm, and displacing Nokia. Users who used Mxit (a hugely popular chat app) on Nokia are jumping to BBM in droves ("unlimited" data with BIS also helps).

Users in developing countries, which may be seen as the last viable market for Nokia, are more savvy than commonly assumed.

Nokia may be able to hold on to the very basic entry level market though.

<comment><USER3> There's always Finland.

As far as I know, Nokia is still pretty strong in Europe (?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The blog post that the author points to says NOTHING of what the author claims it does. If the author is not referring to that particular post - none of the recent posts touch on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, that niche is already occupied by Blackberry.

</comment><comment><USER6> As far as I know what was holding MS back before was the EU's reaction to MS maybe buying Nokia as far as EU's overseeing monopoly issues of MS..and certainly you had the Finnish government costs of winding down workers..

What we do know thus far is that possibly that much cash is still parked in EU due to MS's tax savings strategies</comment>


T.t.t:a blog engine that only needs PHP. No ruby, no DB. Cache-enabled. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tslmy/t.t.t

<comment><USER2> composer support is nearly a requirement these days for php projects. No composer support is an automatic no sale for me (if not for many others)

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a experimental one: <[http://www.tslimi.tk/myblog/admin/write/>](http://www.tslimi.tk/myblog/admin/write/>)</comment></comment>


InfiniteUSB-C - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/668098663/infiniteusb-one-usb-port-unlimited-devices/description

<comment><USER2> This is a quite nice design.

Obviously (?) this is a 2-port hub in the connector housing, with one port going to the extension cable, and the other to the through-port.

Those hubs chips will need energy to run, so there will be a limit to how many you can daisy-chain.

I didn't see any mention of what this limit is, it would have been interesting to see if the higher power spec of USB 3.1 means it comes closer to infinity than for USB 2.0.

<comment><USER3> The chips use virtually no power.

The only limit is the power the connected through the hub devices draw.

<comment><USER4> That and USB's limit of 127 devices [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB)</comment></comment></comment>


HTML as a programming language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/HTML-as-programming-language/HTML-as-programming-language <comment><USER2> This reminds me of XSLT. What are the benefits of this over that?</comment>


Ask HN: How would you sell open source software? - <AUTHOR> This is a hypothetical question, I don't actually have anything I wish to sell.
If you had a piece of software that you wished to be open source, but that you also wished to sell; how would you go about doing so?
Of course, if the source were to be hosted publically, then it would be easy for anyone to build it. But assume the software did not exclusively target developers, then it would still be possible to sell binaries and make money, I imagine. But what would be the best way to go about making money from your work, while still allowing others to browse the source, and make PRs if they wish?
Just wondering how easy it would be to keep things open, while still make money from your work. <comment><USER2> Really depends on the software what is a good fit. Some common options are:

a) for server software, you can sell a hosted version

b) for software for corporate use, you can sell support

c) for software users might want to change or integrate with their own code, have a strict open-source license like AGPL and sell differently licensed versions to customers that don't want to conform to the original license

d) sell closed plugins or companion tools (e.g. sell an iPhone app that integrates with your open-source web app)

</comment><comment><USER3> You can sell value adds such as additional services or support. Nothing stops you from selling an open source project as is, either, you just have to be a aware that you are essentially competing with your own "free version".

There are also a couple of good Open Source consortiums that are run as non- profits. They act as a 501(c)3 parent organization that handles a lot of the legal footprint for the open source projects they manage and in return they provide a useful, charitable way for businesses and enterprises and individuals to donate to open source projects that they use and have it count as charitable giving that can be used to a tax credit advantage. You aren't going to get rich on "donation-ware", but it certainly is a good way to get smart people to help pay for the maintenance of long-term open source projects.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are plenty of examples of this, look at some of the software that is open source but have sales around them.

nginx, redhat, surgarcrm etc. There really are a lot of examples. Once you find a few, look at the different license types they use, GPL has different versions that allow for different things, MIT is probably the most permissive and probably wouldn't be the choice given the description you gave. Then of course, you can always have a license written that fits your specific requirements.

</comment><comment><USER5> As it's related I'll post some links.

I've recently discovered: [http://fosslawyers.org/the-copyfair- iniciative/](http://fosslawyers.org/the-copyfair-iniciative/)

And I have an idea how to organize open source project to be both free, and sustainable (make income to fund it's development):

[https://github.com/CopyFairCorp/copyfair](https://github.com/CopyFairCorp/copyfair)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wrote up an article a while back on open-source business models for startups which you might find interesting:

[http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business- models](http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business-models)

(although it focuses on startups and not so much lifestyle businesses where other business models are also viable)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hosted version with some extra features built in along with support.

Open sourced host-your-own but you pay for fast support and potentially setup.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spend 5 minutes googling license types.</comment>


Texas Instruments: Insiders profit on enormous buy backs - <AUTHOR> https://www.epsilontheory.com/yeah-its-still-water/ <comment><USER2> What's the best way to change the incentivization of executive management to ensure focus on long term growth and benefit of all share-holders, not just the few in the know? Or is the way stock buybacks used the right thing to do in a time of cheap money?</comment>


Editorial and Marketing Calendar for Small Business - <AUTHOR> https://planitpdq.com <comment><USER2> This is just product spam from a brand new account. I don't really see how this applies to the HN crowd.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi acconrad - yup, I am a brand-new account. And I searched the site and saw a bunch of people announcing product launches, so thought it was appropriate. Also read all of the site guidelines, but I apologize if you feel this isn't a fit. Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> New, easy-to-use marketing & editorial calendar for small business. Just launched the beta and am offering free accounts until we do our commercial launch. I would love your feedback! I'm offering lifetime discount for anyone who signs up for beta. Go get it! And thank you.

<comment><USER3> Some things of note:

UI is dated. Logo isn't great. Name isn't great. The help videos have terribly inappropriate music.

This looks rushed/outsourced, or both

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback, handbanana - I am definitely new at this, so I will take your comments seriously. UI is the next focus for us - I wanted to get as many integrations in place as possible before launch. I will take another shot at the music for the videos.</comment></comment></comment>


Exact Exponential Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/3/161189-exact-exponential-algorithms/fulltext

<comment><USER2> Like learning about the physics of the very large and very small, the study of computational extremes will change your intuitive sense of the laws governing the universe -- especially if you are a working programmer and used to interacting primarily with tractable problems.

At U Maryland I took a course from Bill Gasarch on computation. The first thing he said to the class, famously, was "I'm going to show you that there are problems that are impossible to solve. Then I'm going to show you some problems even harder than those. And by the end of the class, you will no longer laugh at that joke." He went on to show us the Halting Problem (an impossible-to-solve problem), then problems that one still can't solve _even given an oracle for the halting problem_. In other words: even if you _could_ solve the Halting Problem, you _still_ couldn't solve these other problems. And even if you _could_ solve some of those problems, there are others you still couldn't solve, etc. Ultimately, we learned about Recursion Theory, which examines this implied infinite hierarchy of "impossibility".

Another interesting -- and, really, somewhat devastating -- conclusion one can draw from Recursion Theory is that tractable problems are incredibly rare. From a cardinality standpoint, the set of solvable problems is vanishingly small compared to the universe of unsolvable problems. It just so happens that many problems we actually care about are solvable and tractable. But, numerically speaking, this is incredibly unlikely. (In other words, if the distribution of problems we cared about were actually uniform, we'd be able to solve basically nothing we cared about.)

Exact exponential algorithms -- those "right at the edge of tractability" -- open one's eyes in similar ways. Why do we end up with magic numbers x, where the known lower bound seems to be O(x^n) where 1 < x < 2? Will we find underlying mathematical constants here that we don't yet know about? I think every day working developers would do well to learn about these tractability "edge cases".

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very much a theoretical perspective. If you have to solve an NP- complete problem in practice, you wouldn't use any of the algorithms described in this article, you'd use a DPLL based SAT solver. A modern SAT solver will be orders of magnitude faster than these algorithms for practical cases. There is an international SAT solver competition every two years where you can find the current winning SAT solver: <http://www.satcompetition.org/>

<comment><USER4> That's true, the heuristic approach is the one that's been more successful in practice. I think it can still be interesting (even if only theoretically) whether an non-approximation algorithm with worst-case running time guaranteed better than brute-force is possible for a given problem. There might even be some practical applications of having a guaranteed running time.

Nonetheless I would use the heuristic approach on most problems. And it's a _little_ misleading when texts like the one linked here emphasize the need for "exact" solutions over those given by approximation algorithms, when heuristic algorithms also give exact solutions (just not with any particular guaranteed worst-case running time, which is a different issue from exactness).

Some of the issue, I think, comes from the fact that these classes of problems may be too "big" and heterogenous: we say that "SAT" is NP-complete, but it's only really a subset of SAT problems that are hard, amidst huge swathes of trivial SAT problems. Heuristic approaches are just very good at finding those, which happen to be quite common in a lot of real-world situations. If you narrowed it down to some kind of "hard SAT" (like the research on "phase- change" SAT problems is trying to do), then these algorithms may have more of a reason for existence, because you've pruned out all the stuff heuristics can solve well, leaving only the still-hard stuff. That feature, that NP-complete problems, without further restriction, typically have a lot of instances that are easily heuristically solvable, is also a main reason NP-complete problems haven't been historically successful as a building block for crypto [1].

[1] <http://www.kmjn.org/notes/nphard_not_always_hard.html>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Annex - this rather illuminant book :

<http://www.nature-of-computation.org></comment>


Note taking chrome extension - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/my-notes/kpcknabohpkeelnnnbfdnmoampijbnpb <comment><AUTHOR> A simple note taking chrome extension that saves your notes to your Google drive. No data is sent to any third party. Its the most simple and secure way of taking notes.</comment>


Show HN: Gtop, a system monitoring dashboard for terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aksakalli/gtop/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> If you're using PuTTY, you may need to `export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1` or change "Terminal-type string" from "xterm" to "linux" in Connection>Data for the boxes to be displayed correctly.

Sources: \- [https://superuser.com/questions/278286/making-256-color- and-...](https://superuser.com/questions/278286/making-256-color-and-line- drawing-characters-both-work-in-putty) \- [https://superuser.com/questions/735269/why-does-yast-now- sho...](https://superuser.com/questions/735269/why-does-yast-now-show-lines- as-lqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq)

</comment><comment><USER2> FYI: Not for Windows

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, Windows is not supported. It relies on systeminformation* package and it does not cover all resources for Windows. PRs are welcome to fix the issues for Windows.

[https://github.com/sebhildebrandt/systeminformation](https://github.com/sebhildebrandt/systeminformation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazing. Thank you. I've been looking for something like this for years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks awesome! Thank you for creating this.</comment>