Why founders need hobbies - <AUTHOR> https://baremetrics.com/blog/why-founders-need-hobbies <comment><USER2> Many years ago, I read a blog, possibly linked from here, that gave this definition of a true hobby that I really like.

A true hobby is something that you don't do for money and that has no deadlines attached.

Once you start accepting payment to do something, _someone else_ is setting expectations for your work. If you are a pretty good hobbyist photographer, one of the worst things you can do is shoot a wedding. Shooting a wedding, even for professional photographers, is one of the highest stress environments possible for photography.

If you have deadlines associated with your hobby, what happens if they "slip"? For example, if you set an artificial deadline to make your first ambitious Arduino project that will do something that will make your friends impressed and you get stuck somewhere, does it really matter?

Nothing needs to be said about the combination of paid work and deadlines. That is not hobbying, that is contracting. A long time ago, I did some subcontracting on iOS development. Beautiful weekend? Didn't matter. Monday deadline for client. Sucked.

<comment><USER3> _> A true hobby is something that you don't do for money and that has no deadlines attached._

I think that's a little too specific and doesn't fit a lot of hobbies. People do often make a little money from their hobbies: fixing up and reselling old cars, thrifting and selling on eBay, refinishing furniture, putting up videos on YouTube.

Also, many hobbies have time-critical components. Even all-American pastimes like sports require you to not miss the game.

I'd crystalize it like so: _A hobby is something you sink time into where failure has no negative consequences_.

Since people like to pick nits here, that probably needs a couple of qualifiers. The sunk time itself can be considered a negative consequence. And the failure may have negative consequences within the hobby — if you accidentally crush your ship in a bottle, you aren't gonna be happy.

But the negative consequences of failure don't bleed out into anything else in your life. You have no _need_ to succeed. That encapsulation of failure is what I think makes hobbies safe and thus encourage fun and a sense of play.

The reason it's so often disastrous to turn your hobby into a job is exactly because of that reason: it means you are now adding real stakes to the game. If you failed frequently and safely when it was a hobby, that was fine and you might still love the hobby. Once those failures matter, it can upend the whole cost/benefit calculation.

<comment><USER4> I think that definition is actually too general—ironing my shirts or mowing my lawn might apply. I think some nod toward personal fulfillment needs to be there.

<comment><USER5> Append "and is also not a chore" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Because the last thing I want is you designing or coding all day and night > and then getting burned out and rage-quitting.

Yet both examples of employees with hobbies are people who code outside of work. I'm certainly guilty of this, but I would suggest that unless you're 100% devoted to a single goal during the day, you can use your job as a means to tinker with code-related stuff you're interested in.

For instance, the people doing ML and AI degrees should be doing it on company time, especially if it's benefiting the business. Ask your boss and you'd be surprised what benefits you can squeeze out.

I'd strongly recommend getting into something more creative or totally orthogonal to your career. For example I've done a bit of pottery and learned some basic woodworking - both of which I'd like to improve on. Music or languages are two other hobbies which are generally accessible.

You can sometimes find odd passions via work. I've done some projects in smart agriculture and it got me into gardening in a nerdy way. The science behind commercial horticulture is fascinating - it's half cutting edge research and half "old guy" expertise. My tomato crop was a lot better for it.

If you want to really nail the hipster, rounded, programmer stereotype, get down to the climbing wall and start brewing beer. No surprises why climbing is popular with programmers. It's a lot of thinking, works just fine as a solo (or group) sport and tends to attract people who didn't enjoy "conventional" sports at school.

</comment><comment><USER7> _When you don't take a step back, you get caught in the startup echo chamber. Your brain needs a break._

About six months ago, I started baking artisan bread as an offset to writing code.

Now, while I work fewer hours, I get more done, and I feel healthier.

I bake two loaves at a time and give one to neighbors. They absolutely love it, and I have to say, the bread is very good.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a go-to recipe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I cannot believe people haven't come to this realization yet. I actually feel my brain rotting away when I don't spend time actively pursuing goals outside of work.

To me hobbies are as important, if not _more_ important, than your day job. Before you down-vote me, please understand that I'm someone who learned about 95% of my technical knowledge from fun and hobbies. Although I'm full-force into computer vision, machine learning, and robotics in the company I'm co- founding, I wouldn't know any of that stuff if I weren't building robots to chase cats and deliver toilet paper, training algorithms to classify free food e-mails, and toying with neural net ideas 10 years ago when I was an physics undergrad (no, I didn't major in CS -- that was my hobby).

And I wouldn't have been a physics undergrad if I hadn't spent hours at night back in high school studying physics and differential equations secretly while my parents thought I had gone to bed already.

Likewise, what I do 10 years from now will depend _heavily_ on the things I learn and ponder on nights and weekends today. It would effectively be the end of my life and career if I didn't have, and insist on having, that time to myself now.

I'll also add as very much an introvert I absolutely must have sufficient disconnected / off-the-grid / "me" time to recuperate. Like food and water, that's largely non-negotiable beyond occasional stretches of a day or two. I'd probably go into clinical depression if I was forced to be in front of people all day for extended periods of time.

</comment><comment><USER10> +100 on the advice in the article. I work from home and my home office space is actually 50/50 an area where I can do development work, plus a music studio.

I literally have to turn my chair around 180 degrees to go from my PC & laptop to a rack of guitars and amps. Makes it easy during those long compile cycles or waiting for an up/download to just reach back and grab a guitar and noodle away for a bit.

And to actually get _out_ of the house every now and then for a brain refresh, I recently took up Kendo as a sport as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone who's been involved in hyper-growth startups knows that having a hobby is extremely difficult. The least one can do is squeeze in gym time at hotels during business trips, but otherwise, time is definitely an issue.

For a decently established startup with well-secured funding, this article is spot-on.

<comment><USER12> I dunno. I think it depends.

DHH not only open sourced Rails while he built 37 Signals / Basecamp he also won Le Mans racing trophies and wrote a couple books on entrepreneurship.

Sometimes there are situations where it truly is a matter of hyper growth and full bore competition, but I think there are plenty of opportunities to build a sub-billion dollar business and still have an interesting life outside of work.

<comment><USER13> DHH has been my idol for 10-15 years. His Tweets are legit too. I really should consider the Chicago scene, from Minneapolis originally but gosh do I not wanna deal with snow after a couple years on Ocean Beach/SF. The work culture here is disgusting and my productivity is hampered by management judo- ing me out of hobbies. I am sure I could do a quantative analysis based on historic data, not my forte tho, but I know it. My reputation here is messed from quitting and getting pushed from so many jobs. And I mention elsewhere here, my only hobby is 45min daily empty gym and hr lunch out. The money here gets to peoples' heads, can also tell by popping bottles for trivial accomplishments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've recently (since about 5 months) started learning Piano (or rather, keyboard) and I've looked forward to playing it everyday. It's relaxing and helps me reduce the stress. Plus, it helps me get out of my comfort zone and give me wonderful new perspective on things.

And for the past 2 months, I am also taking tennis lessons, and they've had unexpected positive influences on my life. I am waking early everyday to play, I've improved my stamina, and I get a solid sleep at the end of the day because physical activity tires out over the day and you easily sleep.

10/10 would recommend hobbies to all.

<comment><USER15> Are you taking piano lessons?

I'm trying to learn guitar and although I mostly enjoy it, I can't say I look forward to my 30 minutes of practice each day (although once I'm going I usually go long).

<comment><USER14> Yes, I am. But from a Youtube channel called "Hoffman Academy". It's aimed at kids below 15, but I like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree with Josh completely.

It's unsustainable to focus 100% on your business. Our brains aren't optimized this way. We need hobbies, recreation, and diversions to be healthy.

<comment><USER16> Then there's Elon Musk...who is apparently thinking about a new company to sell bricks made from the mud from his tunnel boring company.

<comment><USER17> I feel as if attempting to start a side business in an unrelated field could be considered as a hobby.

<comment><USER13> Precisely, even at the micro level. Coding a video platform is different than coding an analytics system. 90% of coding is research and lots of that is done without as another commenter said money+deadline, ie. not a contract. Musk surely has lots of hobbies and Hammock Driven Development happens (Rich Hickey/Clojure style). If Musk ever starts getting chubby then I'll worry—elsewhere in thread I qualify this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I collect spores, molds, and fungus.

<comment><USER19> You and my apartment have some things in common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So how come this is specific to founders of companies?

And I am not conviced having side projects as a fronted developer makes you a better developer unless you push yourself really hard.

What is more likely to make you better developer in any job is working with people who have a lot of experience and are willing to share it. So not necessarily a hobby, or you have to spend a lot of time yourself to discover and think about a lot of concepts, at which point is not really a hobby, more like college.

And i would argue also about hiking being a hobby, i never go hiking, but i love walking around the city like a maniac, is that a hoby? oh well maybe, but i'd say it would be more correct to say that you need to relax and gain strength for next working day, how exactly to do it you have to findout for yourself cos not everyone is the same...

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know... I feel like the only hobby you should have with a start up going is exercise. I also understand needing other unstructured off time besides exercise but really... a hobby? If you want to have a hobby you probably shouldn't be trying to start a business...

<comment><USER13> You're downvoted and my managers always make me look like a slacker for holding this one singular hobby/2 routines. Each one, while they are chubby and often have poor posture, fooling themselves into thinking they're on turbo—nope. I can do 12x6 forever but don't F with my 3-4pm empty gym slot which effectively saves time. Superman. Even when the gym was in the same building. Hour lunch out of office is the other. A couple workspaces have given me hell for this, and I just quit at first sign now. Last workplace was 4 people total and of course my supervisor was the fat ass and others did marathons and crossfit—guess how that went. I do judge workplaces based on fitness level; mind-body.

<comment><USER22> Do you actually like working 12x6 or do you feel it's the only way you'll be successful?

<comment><USER23> 12 to 6 sounds great. Would prefer 9 till 3.

<comment><USER22> I took the parent comment to mean 12 hours, 6 days a week. Did he actually mean he works 12-6?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The comment section is really rich with insights.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the plural of iPhone5s? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Useless post should be dead. Already irrelevant after release of iPhone 4S.

</comment><comment><USER3> iPhone5seseses</comment>


Ask HN: Your last hour on this planet? - <AUTHOR>

(Kind of lost, looking for some guidance)<p>If today was last day on planet earth and you have to live a manual to teach your kids to achieve the success that you did what would you write? <comment><USER2> Above all, always believe that _you_can_do_it_. Anything you set your mind to- it may take awhile, but keep at it & believe in yourself- regardless of what _anyone_- even so-called experts may have to say negative. When you want to go & do something, know that others who have found success at doing something similar, were one day as inexperienced as you might be now. Just try to learn as much as you can- take the good & leave the bad, and have at it as best as you can. Seek out those who can help you, surround yourself with these people- remove negative people from your circle of influencers, and give it your best. Actively do good, & passively fight evil. Make an effort to learn from your mistakes, and remember- god favors someone who puts in good effort, whose heart is in the right place. Don't let yourself get unbalanced, keep pets around you to constantly remind you of what it is to care about someone/something who's not you. Think about what it means to keep them happy, & put forth great effort to have a good relationship with them, they'll always love you, no matter if you're up or down. Be careful not to put all your faith in one person/group of people, they have the capacity/likelyhood to turn on you when the time is right for them. But don't be afraid to ask for help- _everyone_ needs help at one point or another, whether they let you know it or not. And even if you don't believe in god, pray anyway- it does something in our minds that's good for us. Science proves it, believing in something abstract helps our subconscious somehow that science has yet to explain. Look for ways to be an optimist, it'll help you far more than you could imagine. It's very hard sometimes to find the light side of darkness, but it's always there. Even if you have to repeatedly talk to yourself in order to feel a sliver of gratitude for something as mundane as being priveleged enough to not live in a third world country, or a war torn region, that little feeling of gratitude, even if you only feel it for a fraction of a second, has the power to grow in your subconscious and carry you through tough times that will certainly arise. If you can get in the habit of finding something to be grateful for, your subconscious will do some invisible magic & pop up and help you one day when you need it most. Someone like 'mouselover' will post on HN & ask a question that forces you to remind yourself what works for you at a time when you've almost forgotten it yourself.

<comment><USER3> About to board an airplane so +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know of such a succinct manual with practical advise (as opposed to they air "you can do it"). I wish someone wrote one actually.

</comment><comment><USER5> go the gym until u feel good

<comment><USER6> This is great advice. Thank you.</comment></comment>


Serveo: Expose Local Servers to the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://serveo.net/ <comment><USER2> NAT has crippled the Internet. We are permanently dependent on public facing servers to route packets from one device to the other.

This service is absolutely not needed in a non-NAT world. And I strongly believe we have lost a lot by being completely dependent on client-server model of Internet.

I've written more about it here

[https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/](https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/)

<comment><USER3> I'm probably missing something, but I think that, for home networks at least, NAT is wonderful because of how it requires some effort to make devices exposed on the external network. If we were given an unlimited supply of IP addresses from the ISP and all devices were accessible externally, it seems security issues in would be a much larger problem.

<comment><USER2> The original purpose of NAT was to get additional devices connected to Internet since we had shortage of Ipv4 addresses. For security, we have firewalls. If we had not been dependent on NAT for security, firewalls would have been actually configured. We will have to configure firewalls with ipv6 anyway.

<comment><USER4> NAT arose long before any address shortage concerns. Rather it was a response to ISPs attempting to charge "per user" by associating a fee with each additional address (note this is long before residential ISP service we know today: Internet service was for businesses with retail subs only having ppp access via dialup). NAT allowed customers to work around the ISPs pricing model at the time.

<comment><USER5> When my family first got broadband via Comcast@home back in the early 2000s they had a proviso saying if you wanted more then one computer required a separate subscription. My dad and my bother quickly figured out we could get around this by using Windows Internet Connection Sharing. We eventually got a Linksys Router that did the same job and was faster. IIRC even most dial up ISPs did the same thing, if you wanted more then one computer online you had to use separate creds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey cool, this is my side project! I've been trying to think of other interesting things to add to the project. For example, OpenSSH can do TUN/TAP tunneling, so you can use SSH as a proper VPN. (See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VPN_over_SSH](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VPN_over_SSH))

How could that be useful in Serveo? How else could SSH be used creatively?

<comment><USER7> It all almost seems _too_ easy. How much time do you have to spend dealing with abuse reports?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using ngrok for development purposes. This seems like an interesting alternative.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. In particular when testing any sort of web hooks/callbacks, I get pretty sick of constantly updating configurations as the ngrok tunnels change subdomain.

Self-hosting is also a nice option.

<comment><USER10> The paid ngrok options are pretty sweet though and solve these issues.

<comment><USER11> Seriously. ngrok is underpriced - I would pay double the ask without even flinching. I can't even count how many times it has actively aided in me getting paid.

<comment><USER8> Completely agree, ngrok is totally hassle free and it helps speeden my development workflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like Serveo.

I've used it to develop proper previews and unfurls for social media. Facebook etc need a real public URL to even show you a preview.

And the other day I used it as a quick way to debug a server-client communication issue. I'm developing a server, and the client developer is in a completely different location. For a while I kept deploying dev servers with little tweaks, but our progress was slow, Then I gave up and just exposed a local running server to the internet via Serveo. My counterpart pointed his client there, and we quickly iterated to a solution.

Yes we could have solved this in many other ways (remote debugging, VPNs, etc) but this was surprisingly easy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another shameless plug, but I wrote something that pretty much does the exact same thing: [https://github.com/antoniomika/sish](https://github.com/antoniomika/sish). Main difference was I didn't look forward to having to run a proprietary binary to achieve something I could write and I wanted to have SSH authentication built in so I can have it available publicly without having to worry about abuse.

</comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug, but I just wrote a post on rolling this yourself in 15 minutes or less. [https://zach.codes/roll-your-own-ngrok/](https://zach.codes/roll- your-own-ngrok/)

<comment><USER15> I was trying to achieve the same with ssh tunnels a while back, but I wanted to have certbot running on the local machine, not on the DO server. So nginx on the server would have to forward everything as-is, encrypted. Is that possible?

<comment><USER13> It sounds like what you're looking for is to just forward the TCP port without having nginx do the SSL termination for you. You can achieve that with vanilla SSH though, just by forwarding port 443. If you want the virtual hosting, you could use an SNI proxy (haproxy with SNI tcp proxying should do for that)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A thread from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842951)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've written and am running something exactly like this for my work. (We used to use forward.wf but had to move away from it, a third party blocked it).

Very simple system, just a server+ nginx + letsencrypt. Tiny service to set new people up. We've been running out the last year or so, it took an hour or 2 to write, and hasn't needed more than that maintenance since.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using self-hosted localtunnel but man is it unstable. It loses connections several times a day and never releases now "dead" urls, so you can't count on a specific sub domain.

I'll have to give serveo a whirl

<comment><USER19> I have this problem with Servo. Having your own name is big advantage over ngrok. But connection need restart regularly.

<comment><USER20> Hi! check out webhook relay [https://webhookrelay.com/](https://webhookrelay.com/) :) it has multiple ways to forward webhooks and internal connection healthchecks. Disclaimer: I built it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is nice and i remember seeing this a while ago. However we couldn't use it since during local development, the engineers are quite relaxed with secret keys, passwords, standard protocols …etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a big fan of Cloudflare Tunnels: [https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo- tunnel/](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-tunnel/)

[https://ngrok.com](https://ngrok.com) is also a very good alternative.

<comment><USER7> > [https://ngrok.com](https://ngrok.com) is also a very good alternative.

But with non-standard and proprietary client software.

<comment><USER22> True. I believe version 1 of ngrok was open-sourced, or at least source available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have to do something similar when testing Apple Pay et al in development. I only get one connection at a time, and the latency is huge. Is ssh capable of multiple connections within a tunnel? Is Serveo relatively performant?

</comment><comment><USER24> I came across Chisel today -- it supports TCP traffic and isn't limited to 3 tunnels like Serveo

[https://github.com/jpillora/chisel](https://github.com/jpillora/chisel)

</comment><comment><USER4> Note: you can do this yourself with a basic Linux VM, config to permit reverse ssh tunnel, and run some SSL proxy like Apache. And a DNS record.

</comment><comment><USER25> Never really figured out how to use it with for Minecraft server for over predictive firewalls.

<comment><USER19> Isn't it for HTTP traffic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Curious, what was this written in?

<comment><USER27> I had the same question and a hunch it would be Go. The old 2017 thread has the answer and indeed, it's Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Have been personally using it and I believe it's a better alternative to ngrok.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've wanted to do something similar to test webhooks in the past.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why does edge/defender report this site is unsafe ?

<comment> T-A I guess somebody is/was using it to serve up malware, which gets attributed to the serveo.net domain when reported.</comment></comment>


Delta Rocket Family Celebrates 50 Years of Durability - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/news/delta_50.html

<comment><USER2> Kind of disappointing in a way - have we come so ... short? Still ejecting reaction mass in a titanic explosion to fling tiny payloads into space. What happened to superconducting magnetic floating platforms? Antigravity pads? Space elevators?

<comment><USER3> More realistically, Orion (well, we can save that for responding to alien invasions) and laser launch. The latter is something we ought to be able to do today (the former's Environmental Impact Statement would be ... problematical :-).</comment></comment>


AmazonBasics products are going up in flames, but are still on the market - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/10/21431085/amazon-basics-amazonbasics-dangerous-flammable-products <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of original source (CNN): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24431959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24431959)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a list of the accused items anywhere?</comment>


Elegant exact string match using BWT - <AUTHOR> http://blog.avadis-ngs.com/2012/04/elegant-exact-string-match-using-bwt-2/

<comment><USER2> Heh. A decade ago, I read this article on duplicate code detection in PMD:

[http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/03/12/pmd_cpd.html?p...](http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/03/12/pmd_cpd.html?page=last&x-showcontent=off&x-order=date&x-maxdepth=0)

... and sent Tom a _much_ faster solution based on the BWT. (I tokenized the codebase, applied the BWT to the tokens, and the duplicates can just be read off the list of permutations). It's a neat trick, doesn't take much code, and I still use that from time to time on languages that I don't have tools for; it was used for a while in PMD's CPD, but the current version is based on Rabin-Karp instead.</comment>


How to build a darkroom for £100 or less - <AUTHOR> https://www.35mmc.com/06/04/2020/darkroom-technique-part-1-how-to-build-a-darkroom-for-100-or-less-by-sroyon-mukherjee/ <comment><USER2> I can only chime in with everyone else so far: being able to turn a bathroom into a darkroom is one of the finest privileges there are. Due to living situations I cannot anymore, but I really miss having the opportunity to just take an evening and get a print or two out of it. Watching it develop under the safelight is as close as I've ever gotten to magic.

Edit: by the way, if you have older relatives, make sure to ask around if anyone already has an enlarger. They are big machines that normally just collect dust these days, so most people are happy to give them to you. (I made the mistake of buying one on EBay for non-trivial money, shipping and delivery was a big hassle, and two weeks later three different people had offered me theirs for free.)

<comment><USER3> Some enlargers for 35mm only are not that big and can be had for half-nothing used. I've got a 4x5 Omega here, which is a big beast, but you don't need that unless you're going large format.

When you're doing darkroom work, what kills you cost-wise is paper. There's not really getting around it: good paper is not cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an amateur and untalented photographer, my results have benefited a lot from being able to shoot hundreds of photos and maybe get a single composition I'm proud of. Exposure, contrast etc has always been flexible to a point.

However, I really miss my bedroom darkroom from when I was 16-19.

Sheets pegged over the window, rags taped roughly over the door edges. Good enough for B&W print with a red dull light, but still had to load my rolls inside a hot and sweaty duvet cover because otherwise the negatives would get clouded in my ghetto setup. A £20 used enlarger bought from the local classifieds, a rough bench built with planks and rough-cut legs, nails and glue.

Got some great prints. Not many. Miss those days. I still have my Olympus OM2SP, best Camera I have ever used.

There's something to be said for knowing you only have a limited number of shots, and using another roll will cost money and real effort to develop. Makes you stop and think, in my opinion.

On the flip side, my entire "career" with 35mm I got 4 prints that I still love uncritically. My digital career has given me about 50 that I am happy to pay to have printed and put on the wall.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad that film/print has seen a resurgence in recent years. For a while it was hard (expensive) to get decent supplies. This is a nice ad-hoc setup. Darkroom equipment is definitely like a gas; I think my enlarger timer was around $100 alone.

I have a full darkroom packed away, but just don't have the time/space for it. I miss it. There's something very special about seeing images appear.

I find some darkroom edit methods like burning/dodging more time efficient vs software like Lightroom (much faster to 'mask' with your hand in many cases). But dealing with spot removal -- no contest I'd rather just do that digitally. I don't miss trying to paint chemicals on a negative :)

If getting started, I suggest a class or some good end to end books. Knowing the basic principles is quite helpful (digital or not). You'll also learn a lot about the decisions (+debugging) that ensue. Example -- RC vs fiber paper, properly winding your film onto the dev reel (done by touch), over/under agitating, weak/old chemicals, under fixing, washing, etc.

The more right you get it in camera, the easier time you will have in the darkroom. On average, large sensor digital cameras can be more forgiving than film. That said, there are tricks to fix your mistakes or work around limitations (e.g. pushing/pulling film, printing contrast filters, dodging/burning, exposing multiple frames onto single print, etc.).

If you don't print a lot, a vacuum or accordion container will help preserve your chemicals' life span. Your paper usually likes a cool/steady temp; too hot and it can get fogged. Check your city/county on how to properly dispose of the spent chemicals; usually they don't want spent developer or fixer down the drain.

</comment><comment><USER6> Darkroom printer here. This is one of my joys in life. Dumped all my digital cameras because printing my photographs gets me off the computer and the tangibility solidifies the work as important for me.

You can actually get away with printing without all of this equipment just to give it a try. I used to print 4x5 contact prints with nothing more than the light in the bathroom and a piece of photo paper.

To this day there remains nothing more magical to me then seeing the silver in the developer slowly produce an image on a page. Happy printing to anyone starting out.

Edit: Also of note that depending on your volume if you develop and print at home it can actually be cheaper than chasing the latest sensor every few years. I just barely crest what it would cost me with sensor upgrades to 2 bodies every few years this way because I am a pretty low volume shooter (2-300 rolls of HP5 a year).

<comment><USER7> When my first child was born, I packed up the darkroom because I couldn't afford to set aside several hours in a shot for printing. Went to digital and it basically killed the love of photography for me. It's just too easy to take too many pictures, and then you're stuck spending hours and hours in photoshop or lightroom. I still have thousands of images that I need to cull through and sort. Probably never will.

While I've gotten rid of most of my equipment, I still have my old 4x5 and I've been thinking of just making contact prints. Probably start this summer! Wish me luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who shoot 4x5 (or larger), it's reasonably simple to use a view camera as an enlarger. In a weekend, I built a mount to hold a negative and a light in place of the usual graflok back. Primary materials were laser-cut wood, RGB LED strips, and diffusion paper. I built an Arduino-based controller for use as a variable contrast timer (changing the blue/green mix on the LED strips when printing). The whole rig was about the cost of a good set of contrast filters and took 15 hours of my time.

The back holds the negative on the camera, which I put on an old aluminum tripod and point straight down in a blacked-out bathroom. I develop through a 150mm Nikkor W 4x5 lens; held open. Since I use the timer for timing and never touch the camera/enlarger while exposing the print, the setup is rock-solid and vibration-free.

<comment><USER9> Intrepid sells a kit which converts a camera to an enlarger.

[https://intrepidcamera.co.uk/products/intrepid-enlarger- kit](https://intrepidcamera.co.uk/products/intrepid-enlarger-kit)

<comment><USER10> Or print one for a 4x5 camera if you have a 3d printer: [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3145482](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3145482)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > If you don't have a ticking clock, you can even play a ticking soundtrack on > your phone – just keep the screen facing down.

Or you can just buy a metronome, or get a free metronome for your phone. Set it to 60 or 120 BPM. I use a metronome and a footswitch. The hard part is remembering to count from zero, instead of one.

I love working in the darkroom, but I've sworn off 35mm and haven't touched it in years.

There is an immense body of knowledge associated with darkroom work. If you are interested, it's not too hard to find people who will share all their techniques. Everything from tips on how to most quickly find the correct exposure and contrast, to chemical techniques for preserving prints in an archival way.

Film gets a bad rap for being slow and

</comment><comment><USER12> You could call me a serious amateur and I have done two very cheap set ups similar to what the article describes.

First Setup: Windowless bathroom

What I learned from this is that you need a really rock solid bench or counter to put your enlarger on or very small vibrations from focusing or triggering the timer might cause blur in the printed image. Monorail designs like the one in the article are very prone to this already.

Second setup: A basement

I went to an art supply store with a flashlight and inspected each piece of cardboard they sold until I found one that the light did not shine through (Elemer's, I think). I cut these to the size of my windows and then used electrical tape to make a light tight seal. Electrical tape is just terrible for this but it blocks the light. I had a nice bench for the enlarger and a table for the trays. There was a utility sink already installed that I used to rinse my prints and film. This was way better than a bathroom, but it was not dark enough to change film because of the pilot light on the hot water heater.

Future:

My plans are on hold at the moment, however, I now have a basement with a great room for a dark room with nearby access to water and sewer. I'm planning to go the whole nine yards this time and install a dark room sink plus dedicated lighting and ventilation. Not exactly a $100 project though.

<comment><USER13> Seems like panda poly and gorilla tape would work to stop the light. Panda poly is available at your local exotic herb grow shop. Gorilla tape doesn't stick very well at first, but after a week, is impossible to remove without tearing the panda poly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seek out your local public darkrooms! (private is okay too)

Printing is a craft, and practicing with others is a great way to get better, have fun, make new friends, all that good stuff!

In San Francisco, we are blessed to have Harvey Milk Photo Center (harveymilkphotocenter.org), one of the largest public darkrooms in the world. Once this is all over, drop by and make some prints!

(feel free to shoot me a line! i am a long time member there but otherwise not affiliated)

</comment><comment><USER15> The english term darkroom is solely used in a sexual context in Germany [1]. If you read the comments coming from that perspective some really become awkwardly funny...

[1][https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkroom](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkroom)

</comment><comment><USER16> If my local makerspace had a darkroom, I would be significantly more inclined to join.

<comment><USER5> This would be cool. I used to rent darkroom space at times and it's very costly per hour. I couldn't justify the price and gave up.

Historically I've talked to rental darkroom places and the challenges after staff and space costs have been chemical spoilage (lots), and staying busy enough to be worth staffing on a given day. Some places tried to offset by using dev machines (different costs). It's possible a maker space could handle this better since they scale differently and have a broader customer base.</comment></comment>


AT&T is paying bonuses of $1,000 to more than 200,000 U.S. employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/tax-reform-reaction-att-is-giving-bonuses-to-200000-employees.html <comment><AUTHOR> To all the negative nancy's of the tax reform bill; it is already putting money in the pockets of middle class Americans.

Before the corporate rage comes, just look at your pay stub come February, you will see less taxes and a larger paycheck.

<comment><USER2> To all the positive patsy's of the HN forum: the exception doesn't make the rule.

Instead of being lulled by the veil of consumerism draped over your eyes, realize companies only maximize profits and do 'good' as an accidental side effect of their goings-on.</comment></comment>


Fear of Amazon Pushes Retailers to Take On Risks of Same-Day Shipping - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/business/fear-of-amazon-pushes-retailers-to-take-on-risks-of-same-day-shipping.html

<comment><USER2> This is a bell Matt Yglesias at Slate has been ringing for the last year; specifically, Amazon is financed by the public markets to an extent no other retailer is or can be (look at their P/E), enabling them to compete at a loss against established businesses. People like Charlie Stross ding Amazon for its predatory marketing in the media industry, assuming that it's part of a plot to dominate the market and collect rents.

Yglesias has an even more sinister theory: that there's no real rhyme or reason to Amazon's strategy, that it's acting on the assumption that having beaten the market into submission there will somehow, in some way, be a way for Amazon to capitalize on the resulting chaos --- but that it's equally likely that Amazon will itself crater, having destroyed everyone's profits in the process.

I like Amazon (we're Prime subscribers), but I have to bear that in mind every time I prepare myself to complain about Wal Mart (which I do not like).

In any case: it's close to impossible for a small-scale retailer to compete with Amazon once Amazon decides it's competing.

<comment><USER3> Most of amazon's business is profitable last I checked. The losses come from write downs and investments, but they aren't strictly operating in the red. The business they've built right now is sustainable just as it is.

<comment><USER2> Sure; the issue is that the outsize valuation they receive in the market gives them enormous leverage to compete at (or I suppose near) a loss; they simply have more opportunities to buy market share than other companies. As Yglesias would have it, it's as if the public markets are paying for Amazon to buy up that market share even without any coherent plan for how to profit from it.

The issue Yglesias seems to have with that is that the market can profit from volatility even if, over the long term, Amazon's actions are a net negative for the larger economy, and would fail without their intervention.

I don't know how much of that I buy. I'm just pointing out the hugely privileged position Amazon has.

<comment><USER3> Meh. Where are the tears for all the mom and pop ISPs who can't afford to blanked a city in fiber? How will they ever compete with market funded google? :)

<comment><USER4> For some reason I don't want to like what you've written. I up voted because I agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like retailers who kept complaining about Amazon's sales tax advantage got what they were asking for - local nexus.

</comment><comment><USER6> We sell on Amazon, eBay, Sears, buy.com and newegg, and have been almost dounling our sales year over year. Weve learned this year that the shipping cost advantage of fulfilled by Amazon is just insane - and we already get significant UPS discounts.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tired. Cold. Sick. Not yet unpacked. Apartment barren of foods. I fire up Instacart – for the first time ever – and order groceries to make a stew. An hour later, with free delivery, the foods arrived.

Living in the future.

<comment><USER8> Not that impressive (to me at least). Food delivery has been around since forever- pizza gets to my house in 10 minutes. I don't see why groceries should be different.

<comment><USER9> Pizza places have maybe 20 ingredients in stock that all get used at a pretty predictable rate. Keeping something like a much larger selection of fruits available and fresh when you can't freeze them is a somewhat harder problem.

<comment><USER10> Does Walmart or Target not deliver? In the UK all the large supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury's, M&S, Asda) let you order online and deliver to your house. They actually just get someone to go round a supermarket and pick the stuff off the shelves.

<comment><USER11> Online grocery shopping is more developed in the UK than any other major market. A large part of it is the London effect where you have a large number of middle-class shoppers who don't have cars in close proximity to each other, that makes the economics vastly better for the supermarkets.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps, though I know Oxford also has home delivery so it's not just London. I've not understood how Oxford could have it but San Francisco doesn't.

<comment><USER13> Safeway has done home delivery since at least March, so it's not an unknown service here in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazon can (possibly) pull this off due to their scale and their warehouse technology. I think the other retailers that can be successful are those brick and mortar retailers with thousands of physical locations across the country (Walmart, Target, Staples, Kohl's)- imagine a reverse brick and mortar model where the customer orders from the site but it is fulfilled directly out of their local store.

The luxury apparel market is going to be the next wave of retailers who explore this offering and, could be, successful with it. Shoppers who are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars online expect an elevated level of customer service- same day delivery (like Net-a-Porter offers) is the next step in this personalized service.

<comment><USER15> Some numbers of this in action: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/24/us- usa-retail-ecom...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/24/us-usa-retail- ecommerce-idUSBRE8BN03J20121224)

"292 of Macy's 800 stores have been doing double-duty as mini-fulfillment centers that assemble, pack and ship online orders"

"since 40 percent of bestbuy.com orders are now picked up."

<comment><USER16> Best Buy, when I need something "now", though it has gotten better, has had a nasty, at times outright dishonest history of issues relating to its online experience - at one time they were caught having different pricing when the site was browsed in store ("But online it was $x-20" "Sorry, sir, I'm looking at it here on our website and it's $x" "But I can pull it up on my cellphone and see that it says $x-20")...

So I don't support them, but if I need something, ordering for pickup a) ensures the price, b) minimizes upsell, and c) ensures stock (I'm sick, too, of times when there was a display model out but nothing in stock).

<comment><USER17> Heh, I wish it "ensured stock". Twice now I've ordered for pickup, gotten the email telling me it's ready to be picked up, and gone to the store only to be told that they don't actually have it. (?!?!)

It made me swear off ever shopping at Best Buy again, but I broke that promise when they started price-matching Amazon prices...

<comment><USER18> "but I broke that promise when they started price-matching Amazon prices..."

I've yet to try them on this. I'm curious - do they actually match Amazon every time, no matter what? When they first announced this, the press releases seemed to indicate that each store could independently decide not to honor on a per-situation basis.

<comment><USER17> They have the 3 times I've tried, and one of them was about 35% off of a $400 item. I think it ends in February.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this what competition is all about?

</comment><comment><USER20> I have experienced myself different types of offerings from different startups/Companies (ebay now, Get it Now, Instacart, etc...) and I would say the following:

\- For groceries, it is really awesome. Instacart prices are 10-15% above Safeway prices, but their customers don't care on average, and that's how they make money. Delivery fees are a necessary evil.

\- For premium pizza, "get it now" is really great, but their business model is not sustainable: I never paid for delivery, and they only charge 5% out of which they pay 2.5% for CC processing. The fact that they want to scale now and expand to further categories without having nailed their primary suppliers (fancy restaurants that do take out but don't deliver) seems crazy to me.

\- For other types of goods, one hour delivery is a bit too much, and you feel bad the first time. But then, hell it is practical, and in many ways it seems much more relevant and ecological that having an item shipped from a random warehouse in the middle of the country, boxed specifically for me, etc...Same day/next day would do in 99% of the cases though.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think at the moment you can probably charge enough to at least break even on same day. As the article says most people don't need it so those that really do will probably pay a premium or depending on the item will go to the store.

Prime with amazon is pretty much next day/ 2 day shipping on everything? Which is likely already very fast for most people an most purchases.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if we will see Amazon as a competitor to FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL?</comment>


Can IBM sue Apple for Siri? - <AUTHOR>

Watson was created by IBM a long time before Siri's origin. Had IBM patented Watson (I am not sure if it did so or not), could it sue Apple for Siri on grounds that they copied their idea? I am just trying to figure out the extent to which a patent can be used to defend one's <i>IP</i>. <comment><USER2> Anybody can sue anybody for anything. The question is, do you have grounds to sue that won't get you laughed out of court.

Patents are supposed to cover implementations of inventions. Mere combination of existing ideas is not supposed to be covered. Watson and Siri (and Google Voice Search) combine voice recognition, natural language processing, and some sort of inference engine, but it's unlikely that any of them are using exactly the same techniques for all the parts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep in mind it is much more complex than that. Siri comes from SRI International which did work for the Defense dept., etc. When Apple ate Siri Inc, which formed from SRI, they probably ate a lot of IP with it. SRI dates to like the 1950s at least.</comment>


Problem-solving is time-sensitive - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/909f6d08a680

<comment><USER2> My god, this is unreadable. Paragraphs exist for a reason.</comment>


Streaming Databases in Real-Time with Kafka, Debezium, and MySQL - <AUTHOR> https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/streaming-databases-in-realtime-with-mysql-debezium-kafka <comment><USER4> You know I just can't shake the 90's from my architectural perspective. Back then, we tried making domain models for everything; using a relational database is great but you have it as a backing store for the domain model, and _that_ model is your business case that's exposed to the world. The domain model is what you publish; that's what your web services see, that's what your GUIs see, and if you're publishing out replication events to go to totally other kinds of systems that aren't relational databases, that's the model you publish there as well. Back then, one of the dragons we were slaying was the "stored procedure wall on top of SQL Server" API model, where relational databases had half-broken APIs exposed as crappy SPs and views that the whole world would consume directly from an ODBC connection over many network hops. It was a great way to kill any database, and schema changes were enormous beasts since the whole world hardcoded to your schema.

The article here as well as the yelp one seem to be interested in streaming out the MySQL database schema itself, not just data changes but schema changes as well. If you're doing this as part of bigger MySQL database replication scheme, e.g. that the stream is just consumed by other MySQL databases that agree to share the identical schema, that's great. But the context here seems to be more along the lines of a swarm of microservices, which we would expect are each dealing with their own private set of MySQL data, are not sending INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements to each other and instead are speaking more in terms of the domain model. My 90's-esque sense is that if you've built up on lots of services, the messages you want flying around the network should be in terms of the domain models of those services, not your raw SQL / DDL.

Disclaimer: this is an "I'm an idiot" comment because I think I'm missing something

Disclaimer: I'm the author of SQLAlchemy so yes, I get the SQL/DDL/ORM thing

<comment><USER5> I think asserting the primacy of a domain model over a relational model - <USER3> particular, an OO domain model - is a recipe for pain, especially in a polyglot world. OO is for modelling communicating agents where coordinated behaviour is the desired outcome. Databases are for storing facts, not serialized objects; the ideal relational model would be pure enough that rows are almost Horn clauses.

I think OO is particularly poor at modeling the kinds of problems I've been involved with - all our perspectives are probably path dependent. My domains have involved lots of data transfer, manipulation, ETL, and transmitting tuples from one language to another; the interface between different modules is at the data layer, not the API layer, because the business of our business is working with the customer's data. In so far as there are core objects, they're things like schemas and transformation rules - configuration, metadata, information about the data and its transformations.

I particularly like the way it's possible to express global constraints over sets of data with relational algebra in a declarative style. Databases aren't (usually) built to evaluate these kinds of constraints, and I don't want to build stored procedure APIs or triggers that emulate them, but the conceptual model is powerful, much more powerful and expressive to me than anything I see in OO.

Wirth once wrote: Algorithms + Data = Programs. I'd put Data first; and in fact when I want to understand a big program, it's almost always the data structures and data flow which reveal more, than the control flow.

<comment><USER6> > I think asserting the primacy of a domain model over a relational model - <USER3> > particular, an OO domain model - is a recipe for pain, especially in a > polyglot world.

It's unfortunate that, in common usage, "domain model" basically means "OO domain model". Relational model, one which properly reflects your domain, is most certainly as worthy of that name as an OO one.

We can, of course, debate if simply sharing relational database among multiple applications is good architecture. It very well might not be, due to missing intermediate layer that can absorb schema changes, provide caching, etc. Or due to crappiness of languages used to write stored procedures and databases generally not being great application servers (although PostgreSQL seems to be getting there...)

But it is not because relational model is not a "domain model".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I respect the process involved in putting so many moving parts together, sometimes I wonder why we have to complicate these things so much.

From my reading of the flow chart, it appears that data jumps through 5 different data layers before it gets written in its final destination. This doesn't appear to be a transformation pipeline, that's just how much it takes to go from user input -> saved in indexed storage.

What unique featureset does WePay provide that justifies this type of complication?

As an industry, there's been an explosion of this massive overcomplication the last few years. We're contorting ourselves pretty bad here, and it seems primarily to be in service of the engineer's desire to, well, engineer. Can you imagine if we let road engineers get away with this kind of stuff?

</comment><comment><USER5> I recently had cause to work with Kafka Connect; we needed to get data from MySQL into Hadoop. It was not a positive experience, and IMO Kafka Connect is pretty immature, and Kafka as it is currently constituted isn't well featured enough for this purpose.

Kafka Connect is architected around the idea of producers and consumers that either add messages to Kafka, or read messages from Kafka.

The MySQL producer isn't suited for anything other than the most basic of table replication, though; if you need any ETL, you'll be gluing more stuff into your pipeline downstream. And when the producer falls over, the first you'll know about it is when you read the logs or poll status indicators. It didn't give me warm fuzzies about reliability nor visibility nor flexibility. It was very basic stuff.

The Hadoop consumer had an unpleasant surprise: you have zero choice over table name in Hive metastore; your Kafka topic _will_ be the name of your Hive table, no ifs, no buts, no choices. And since Kafka doesn't have any namespaces, either you're going to be running multiple Kafka clusters, or you need global agreement on topics vs Hive metadata (which does have namespaces). We have a multi-tenancy architecture and use namespaces. A non-starter.

Why do I think Kafka doesn't have the right feature set? Because Kafka message expiry has only two policies, as far as I could tell: time or space. Either your message is too old and gets discarded (en bloc, IIRC); or Kafka hits a space limit and starts clearing out old messages. The natural question that arises when you're using Kafka to buffer a consumer vs a producer, then, is flow control / backpressure: how do you get the producer to slow down when the consumer can't catch up? And vice versa? Well, there's knobs you can manually control to throttle the producer, but it's in your own hands. You're dancing at the edge of a cliff if a consumer has died and messages start expiring; there's nothing stopping data loss.

The only way you can start to turn this situation into a win is if (a) you have such a big firehose of data that nothing else can cope, or (b) you can take advantage of network effects and use Kafka as a data bus, not just as a pipe with exactly two ends. But it has to overcome the downsides.

<comment><USER8> > Well, there's knobs you can manually control to throttle the producer, but > it's in your own hands. You're dancing at the edge of a cliff if a consumer > has died and messages start expiring; there's nothing stopping data loss.

At least how we run Kafka, our logs expire after 7 days, and our alerts go off pretty quickly if consumers fall behind. Additionally, we archive all our messages to S3 via a process based on Pinterest's Secor [1]. If we were to ever run so far behind that we needed to start over, we can just run mapreduce jobs to rebuild datastores and then let consumers catch back up.

Since Kafka is explicitly a pub/sub replicated+partitioned log, it doesn't make sense to provide backpressure. A single ailing consumer would cascade failure through your system. If you need synchronous or bounded replication, Kafka isn't for you.

Having run Kafka in production for 2 1/2 years now, I can say with certainty that we've never felt like we were lacking in terms of features from Kafka its self, nor have we ever had a consumer fall so far behind it could never catch back up. We do leverage our archives for batch jobs though.

[1] [https://github.com/pinterest/secor](https://github.com/pinterest/secor)

<comment><USER5> I think it's worth qualifying my criticism more explicitly. I think Kafka doesn't have the right feature set for Kafka Connect. When trying to use it as a data pipe for real-ish time updates between two persistent stores, rather than a persistent store in itself, it's inadequate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been building some bits of this although with I think much simpler components -- our event pipeline is nginx+lua -> nsq -> python consumer (transform, etc) -> bigquery I also have nsq_to_file hanging off of here to archive both event formats - raw+bigquery It is surprisingly little code and I'm happy with its performance although we are at a smaller scale. I've never been happy with the hadoop ecosystem or java tooling around it -- it's all designed to be scalable and fault tolerant, but it seems like it's always broken if you actually run one of these things.

Regarding the ETL, the thing I haven't figured out yet is what to do with the data that's not events. We do daily/hourly exports of those tables in-bulk, but it's not real-time in the data warehouse. This is mostly ok, but I'd love a magic bullet that let me stream these updates into BigQuery as well.

In any case -- nice blog post -- nice to see how others are doing it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Related:

\- [https://github.com/zendesk/maxwell](https://github.com/zendesk/maxwell)

\- [https://github.com/confluentinc/bottledwater- pg](https://github.com/confluentinc/bottledwater-pg)

<comment><USER7> Following the BottledWater-Pg link through to the Confluence blog [0], there's a hilarious illustration of what we're doing to ourselves.

The first flow chart [1] is simple. It shows a user, an app, and three separated data volumes that each serve a separate use case (db, cache, and index [assuming for OLAP workloads]). The chart is headlined with the adamant imperative "Stop doing this".

Instead, Confluence suggests that we _start_ doing this [2]: user -> app -> DB -> extraction -> Kafka -> (Index <-> Cache <-> HDFS) -> monitoring -> samza. Ehhh, no thanks. I like the other option.

We need to understand that good engineering is not about making more work for ourselves. It's about simplicity and elegance, and being able to accomplish complex tasks WITHOUT wrapping ourselves up into some intractable mega- contorsion. More moving parts means more fragility and more waste. Simplicity means beauty, power, and flexibility.

Now, I'm not suggesting that such architectures are never justified. I just want to highlight that the complexity should be eschewed, not celebrated.

If you find yourself writing a blog post that converts a simple 3-step process into a complex 5-step, 9-destination process, alarm bells should be ringing, and you should be talking about why your organization (see Conway's Law) and/or the state of computer science sucks so bad that the 3-step process isn't good enough.

[0] [https://www.confluent.io/blog/bottled-water-real-time- integr...](https://www.confluent.io/blog/bottled-water-real-time-integration- of-postgresql-and-kafka/)

[1] [https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/540072/file-3062873213-png/blog...](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/540072/file-3062873213-png/blog- files/slide-37-4-3.png)

[2] [https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/540072/file-3062873223-png/blog...](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/540072/file-3062873223-png/blog- files/slide-42b-4-3.png)

<comment><USER11> I've seen this blog post and I find the 'Confluence' method _simpler_ than the other method.

The problem of "I have to get a large portion of the DB into service X" is one I've worked on, so the initial solution is more fragile. It doesn't deal with back pressure. If a service goes down, it "loses" writes and must be resynced from a good state. If for whatever reason data science sets up a HDFS cluster I need to push writes there from my app.

With the second method - I don't _have_ to use all those services - and while I'm not given the same latency guarantees I can be more sure that a user's given change will eventually end up in every service that cares about that given change.

Sure if you only need to write to one DB, the Confluence method is overkill - however if that solution works for you, I'd imagine you haven't hit the volume and the latency requirements that would require you to seek out a solution like Confluence's anyways.

<comment><USER7> >The problem of "I have to get a large portion of the DB into service X" is one I've worked on, so the initial solution is more fragile. It doesn't deal with back pressure. If a service goes down, it "loses" writes and must be resynced from a good state. If for whatever reason data science sets up a HDFS cluster I need to push writes there from my app.

It's hard for me to discuss this because the terms are loosely defined, but my feeling is that you may be making implicit false assumptions around the necessary design of the architecture.

>Sure if you only need to write to one DB, the Confluence method is overkill - however if that solution works for you, I'd imagine you haven't hit the volume and the latency requirements that would require you to seek out a solution like Confluence's anyways.

This explanation is probably the reason for the explosion in overengineering. People hear "Hey, if you're not making things really hard, you're just not important enough!"

Well, everyone thinks they're important, so of course, they must make things hard! If they don't, they're not important.

I work with an organization where most people insist we are at this scale. It's totally false. Our load could easily be managed by one well-tuned database replication setup per app and probably 3-4 app servers per app. But this isn't good enough, because, you see, we are very important.

That means that we have dozens of different types of data storage solutions scattered all over the place (including Mongo, Riak, and Dynamo in addition to a variety of SQL DBs), we have dozens of "microservices", and we have hundreds of app servers, even though the technical requirements could be fulfilled with much, much less.

So why do we have all that? Well, because we're "at scale", which is to say, we want to be important. We have a bunch of people sitting around an office all day who appreciate the feeling of importance more than the feeling of a well-engineered system.

Again, I'm not saying complicated architectures are _never_ justified, but I think that in many if not most cases, complication arises due to organizational and personal psychology much more than any technical constraint that truly mandates it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "traditional" Kafka infrastructure (i.e. LinkedIn) uses Kafka as the source of truth. Everything gets written directly into Kafka and makes its way from there. This is a powerful concept, but involves giving up a lot of advantages of a RDBMS.

This is the first time I've heard of the approach WePay uses and I really like it. Now MySQL is the source of truth and Debezium pipes it into Kafka, allowing you to leverage Kafka while still using MySQL as your primary data store. (Or Postgres, which Debezium includes support for.)

<comment><USER13> tl;dr but so the simple operations like "update my birthdate" happen with sync MySQL operations?

<comment><USER12> Yep. All their applications always write directly to MySQL.

<comment><USER14> I guess if that became a bottleneck, they could set up a queue for write requests. Maybe even something more sophisticated that automatically batches similar writes that pile up in the queue. They could use something like Kafka for this...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the indicators you need to find another job? - <AUTHOR> Talking with my peers we noticed that we have different indicators that trigger a "nope! I need to clean up my resume and find another job asap!"
For example: * People around you quitting * Bad Manager, micromanaging * High pressure * No overpaid time, no rewards
What are yours? <comment><USER2> The last company I worked for was a horror story from hell.

On my interview day, the manager of said company passed me in the hallway without stopping to acknowledge me, because he had to go out on a personal errand; this despite the fact that I had an appointment and was expected. When he returned and after my interview with him, he took me over to the owner who hired me immediately without reading my three page resume( "too long") at a less than competitive wage ("because the other guy ho you'll be working with is earning that amount.")

The work environment was filthy, the staff were insubordinate and the manger had a system wherein his favorites ratted on other workers.At the onset, I was cheated of one weeks wages due to an accounting quirk peculiar to the company. Everyone there was actively looking for other jobs. Pay was often late.... I could go on.

I stayed on for far too long because I needed the money.When do you think I should have quit?

The signs are always there.

</comment><comment><USER3> you find yourself talking / thinking about it ;)

On more serious note, your linked-in stream is most probably filled with posts about signs you have to quit. Mine is.

What I never saw is articles about when _not to quit_. What are the signs the job is worth sticking around.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a bit quip-ish, but:

Your gut. Your gut. YOUR GUT.

The third time your gut tells you it's time to go, get the wheels turning (if you haven't already.)

Also, if you think people are starting to treat you differently, they probably are. Leave, before you're asked to.

</comment><comment><USER5> When the best developers leave</comment>


Transportation Secretary Muses on Idea of Blocking All Cellphones in Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1703662/transport-secretary-muses-on-idea-of-blocking-all-cellphones-in-cars <comment><USER2> Alright! I can't wait until I, as a passenger, can't use my phone! Or I can't use it while walking near running cars (as in, every city street)!

Or my new car comes with a free cell phone blocker I bring in to the theater (some disassembly required)!

Honestly, wouldn't it be more effective, and less invasive, to install breathalyzers in every car?</comment>


Why Super Nintendo Is the Reason You're Still Playing Video Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/super-nintendo-25-year-anniversary-why-snes-still-matters-w435671 <comment><AUTHOR> I never understood why anyone preferred Genesis over SNES. The only cultural impact left by Sega was its marketing strategy. Meanwhile, Nintendo made games that still remain iconic and playable.

<comment><USER2> WOW!! Sonic is as iconic as ever. Sega has had many many great video games and revolutionized video game industry in its hay day with games like; Virtua Racing(first 3d racer),Virtua Fighter(first 3d fighter and recognized by the Smithsonian)

To think Shenmue was originally developed with the Saturn in mind also just shows how brilliant Yu Suzuki.

Other great games were, NiGHTS into Dreams, Burning Ranges, Panzer Dragoon series, and the list goes on.. These games now were in the Saturn Era though and I am not saying the Super wasn't a great console. I owned one and had great fun with Donkey Kong and Mario games. The Genesis is the only Sega console I dont own.</comment></comment>


Rebol language - <AUTHOR> http://rebol.com/

<comment><USER2> A recent Ask HN article[1] asked about the viability of a programming language startup. Rebol is a perfect example of how tough that road can be. It's always had lots of potential as a language/platform, but never got traction beyond a small but devoted following.

[1] - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427467></comment>


Show HN: Dakait – SFTP file download and organization tool. - <AUTHOR> http://udayv.com/dakait

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to add, my use case and motivation behind this tool has been staging content locally from my seed boxes. I am posting it here hoping that people find it useful.</comment>


Ask HN: How many of you would like a Google code crawler? - <AUTHOR>

I like to stay updated with what is happening in the webtoolkit & appengine communities and I sometimes browse code.google.com project hosting to see if there are any interesting projects.
It turns out there are many that are interesting and offer a) some immediate use in my current projects or b) a learning opportunity to see how something has been implemented.
The problem is that the search on code.google.com sucks and there is no way to filter by date / activity / lastUpdatedDate etc.
So, the only way you are going to discover new projects is by clicking through every single page until you find something interesting and very few have time for that.
I am thinking it might be an interesting project to write a crawler that would periodically crawl the site and publish notifications about new projects to subscribers who can opt-in to notifications about a particular label (gwt/jquery/appengine etc.).
Would you find this useful? Are there other ways of doing this today? <comment><USER2> If you just want to target code.google.com, they already offer Atom feeds of project issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm aware of that. However, you're talking about staying up-to-date with some project whereas I was referring to getting to know about new projects in your area of interest.

<comment><USER2> Ok. But why restrict only to code.google.com? why not track other project hosts as well?</comment></comment></comment>


Metadevelopment: A digest on career and life in tech - <AUTHOR> https://digest.metadevelopment.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi fellows!

I curate a small online community about career for people in tech. Every month we collect and produce a lot of useful materials on career, engineering, learning, lifestyle, business, and everything else related to building a successful career in tech. And as I said, the community is small, but I believe that such materials are worth sharing with a wider audience. So I decided to manually compile a free newsletter every two weeks and feature the most useful findings.

Hope you'll enjoy it! I will appreciate your feedback: what do you want to see on the digest, how often, and how to make it more helpful for you?</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone able to get transactional emails through to MSN and AOL? - <AUTHOR> We use mailgun for a transactional emails.  Essentially just password resets and the occasional receipt.  We have basically a 0% success rate for AOL or MSN emails.  Does everyone have this same problem?  We are just constantly dealing with password reset problems and every single time it is an AOL or MSN email address.  They don't even go to spam, just silently discarded.<p>We are using a shared IP plan with Mailgun, but I assumed the whole point of their service is reputation management. <comment><USER2> Hey, you need to white list yourself personally on Microsoft's network for your servers IP's.

It's a sneaky bastard of a link to find but I dug it up for you: [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/getsupport?oaspworkflow=...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/getsupport?oaspworkflow=start_188.8.131.52&wfname=capsub&productkey=edfsmsbl3&locale=en- us&ccsid=635707736344041971)

Look at that address... I bookmarked it for when we had to do it for GamerDating.com a while back.

Anyway that will sort you out for MSN/Hotmail/Outlook etc.

AOL I have no clue.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to have delivery problems (throttling errors caused by another customer) sending messages to Microsoft related domains (hotmail, msn, live, etc.) when using MailGun.

There was no progress at all when discussing this topic with MailGun's support so I created another account at PostMark [1] to choose provider depending on recipient's domain. No more problems when sending messages to Microsoft related domains.

Anyway, "silently discarded" sounds like you need to put in place DMARC reports [2] to troubleshoot what is going on there.

PS: I chose PostMark because I like its online documentation. Currently a happy customer, not affiliate at all.

[1] [https://postmarkapp.com/](https://postmarkapp.com/) [2] [https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/faq/](https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Make sure you have your DMARC, SPF, DKIM all correctly setup. Then test some emails with this tool: [https://www.mail-tester.com/](https://www.mail- tester.com/)

Go through the issues one by one and you should be all good.

I've used Mailgun for years with hardly any issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that will be a useful tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Quick thought I had, you're right those services should be charging for rep management, the fact your emails aren't getting through is a sign that perhaps the IP Mailgun are using to send those mails from isn't exactly white listed. If you're sending legit traffic it's way easier and cheaper to setup a mass mailer on a server of your own with a dedicated IP and then build the reputation slowly. It doesn't take very long if your emails are legit and you have unsubscribe etc inside so people don't flag you as spammy once they get bored of you.

</comment><comment><USER5> For AOL deliverability issues, postmaster.aol.com has some tools for diagnosing the issue along with the ability to open a trouble ticket or whitelisting request.</comment>


The Crash of '87, from the Wall Street Players Who Lived It - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-16/black-monday-at-30-wall-street-remembers-the-1987-stock-market-crash <comment><USER2> This happened just after the Great Storm of 1987 which hit the UK on the 15th-16th October. Wikipedia has the following slightly unbelievable snippet:

"Following the storm few dealers made it to their desks and stock market trading was suspended twice and the market closed early at 12.30pm. The disruption meant the City was unable to respond to the late dealings at the beginning of the Wall Street fall-out on Friday 16 October, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded its biggest-ever one-day slide at the time, a fall of 108.36. City traders and investors spent the weekend, 17–18 October, repairing damaged gardens in between trying to guess market reaction and assessing the damage. 19 October, Black Monday, was memorable as being the first business day of the London markets after the Great Storm.

</comment><comment><USER3> My fake portfolio as a kid was heavily IBM weighted. I think it was 120 or 126/share before the crash.

This is one of the reasons I got a degree in finance (and economics). I wanted to know what to do with my money if I ever had any.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a strange logic to me... Is that not like wanting to become a MD just so you can "know what to do" if you ever get sick?

<comment><USER5> I bet a lot of doctors became doctors for exactly that reason.

<comment><USER6> I bet it's even more common with psychologists.

<comment><USER5> I have definitely heard mental health professionals say they got into it to better understand and deal with their own issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The nascent equity options market saw assumptions based on the Black-Scholes model overturned and replaced by a more complex world of volatility skews"

Black-Scholes is based on an assumption that stock moves are normal/Gaussian distributed. If have a background in statistics, that should make you revolt.

<comment><USER8> Black-Scholes was prescient went it first hit the scene in the late 60s/early 70s. Ed Thorp (who independently derived the formula before B-S published it) made tens of millions of dollars applying it through his statistical arbitrage hedge fund. It was the most accurate predictor at the time.

It's also remarkable that four people independently derived the formula: "In coming up with a trading strategy for warrants, Ed discovered a handy formula. A few years later, three finance professors independently came up with their own slight mathematical variant of the same formula. Ed Thorp, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, and Fischer Black all had almost the same formula, but each had a different reason for believing it was true. Ed showed that it was a way to make money..." Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (Wiley 2006)

<comment><USER9> That and cointegration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's say there is a big crash coming, where would you put your money for a safe bet and for a speculative bet (and please don't say bitcoin) ? During the crash of 87, it seems like you could still get a good fixed income yield. Parking it today for 1.5% just doesn't seem that valuable.

<comment><USER11> There are more people looking to invest more money today, so supply/demand means you won't get as good a return. In '87 access to capital was more valuable, so you could get paid more for it.

<comment><USER12> Thats one thing that hasnt been studied enough, I suspect. Huge amounts of capital from 401ks alone may have more effect on the market valuations than actual value creation. There is just so much money chasing a return, increasing constantly.

<comment><USER13> This might be an unpopular opinion on this forum, but one of the best ways to reduce the money supply seems to be more taxation right? This is why I don't get why Republicans seem so hell bent on tax cuts... we already have so much money going around. Better take it out, fund healthcare and education and reasonable welfare systems.

<comment><USER6> If you fund healthcare and education you are putting the money out again.

-When you tax and spend, you are redistributing, but the final quantity is the same.

-When you tax but don't spend, you are reducing demand in the economy by making worse the people with money.

-When you don't tax and don't spend in public services (austerity), you are reducing demand in the economy by making worse the people without money.

That should explain the Republican position.

Anyway, there are different "kinds" of money, and only one "kind" is reduced or created that way.

<comment><USER13> Great comment. I guess I should have clarified my statement since I meant redistribution, when talking about taxing and spending on healthcare/education.

I guess the argument on the merits of redistribution is the fundamental difference b/w democrats and republicans.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that's the fundamental difference. It's more down to different tribal identities, and any correlation with differences in policies is contingent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Crashes are actually great for the middle class. The value of the dollar increases as prices come down. Homes, land, property, etc all become cheaper during crashes. This "bull market" is the actual "crash." All its doing is depleting the value of your money

<comment><USER16> This is only partially true. It ignores the job losses that result from the fall in capital available to firms. Additionally, anyone owning equities, which should be most of the middle class although I'm aware this isn't the case, will see their wealth decrease. I'd argue that the only people who benefit from crashes are those with large amounts of cash assets, which is generally not how you should be holding your wealth. Holding cash, after all, is just withholding wealth from being productive.

<comment><USER17> > Holding cash, after all, is just withholding wealth from being productive.

Unless you're literally storing notes under your bed, your bank is lending out your money to someone.

<comment><USER6> "Unless you're literally storing notes under your bed, your bank is lending out your money to someone."

Banks don't lend deposits. It seems that it's one of those fallacies that never die. Maybe, because it's in the textbooks.

"[..]reserve requirement does not act as a binding constraint on banks' ability to lend and consequently their ability to create money. The reality is that banks first extend loans and then look for the required reserves later."

From: [http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022416/why- ba...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022416/why-banks-dont- need-your-money-make-loans.asp)

<comment><USER18> From your quote: "..and then look for the required reserves later."

Banks are required to have certain reserves. It's true that they can already lend money while they are still looking for the required money to refill their reserve. But they will have to fill up their reserve at some point, and for that they need money, otherwise they will have to stop lending.

So it is not a fallacy that banks are lending deposits and it's not so strange that this is in the textbooks.

<comment><USER6> Banks can get reserves three ways:

-From deposits. -In the interbank market, where banks with excess reserves lean to bank that need reserves. -From the Central Bank.

The Central Bank always lend the necessary reserves. A different issue is if that would be a good business for the bank.

The point is that the quantity a bank can lend it's not limited by deposits as the normal narrative imply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The stories are interesting to get a sense of what things were like, but they fall short as evidence of who knew what was going on in the moment. Holding up a stock analyst who "saw it coming" is survivorship bias in the extreme.

<comment><USER20> The article itself calls this out:

> Most of the people willing to share their memories count themselves as > winners who seized the moment as an opportunity not only to make money, but > also to insert themselves in the new financial order—Paul Tudor Jones, > Stanley Druckenmiller, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone else find it surprising and remarkable that Paul Tudor Jones' monospaced letter is perfectly flush on the left and right margins with apparently no hyphenation nor additional inserted spaces within the lines? Surely this did not happen by coincidence (?).

<comment><USER22> Looking closely, it doesn't actually seem to be monospaced. For instance in the last-but-two line the "t" in "we project" is pretty much midway between the two letters of "it" in the line below it. The text has been justified I think both by increases in inter-word spacing and by putting slightly more space between letters as necessary.

<comment><USER23> Does that mean there's a 1/4 space button on his typewriter that he started using towards the end of the line?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very ominous Breaking News headline at the top of this article right now: "Dow Passes 23,000 for the First Time"

<comment><USER24> Annnnd it's gone, but not forgotten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A side note, and I'm really hoping someone can explain this. What benefit does the stock market provide to us?

I understand investing in companies, but for me, and I'll admit a completely naive person to this whole system, it seems to have taken an 'inbest in company with money to help them succeed', to a 'who cares let's just cut and run to make the best profit'.

I'm perfectly willing to take a link to a great explanation at this point btw.

<comment><USER26> > What benefit does the stock market provide to us ?

Direct benefit: liquidity - whether you need to buy or to sell, you have a place where you'll find a counterpart quickly.

Indirect benefit: information - just watching the bets lets you have an idea about how much people with skin in the game value things, letting you take better decisions about resources allocation.

<comment><USER25> Direct: I can understand.

Indirect: that seems like a losing game. Why would gambling on a companies future ever help anyone(except the lucky?).

<comment><USER21> > Why would gambling on a companies future ever help anyone

Most transactions in the market are not gambling. Trades happen, yes, but that is because the prospects of companies are continually changing. When it became apparent pretty much everyone would move to Netflix and streaming video, would you want to continue holding Blockbuster stock? No; you would want to sell it.

People who simply "gamble" in the market lose money about as often as they gain it, and soon stop. Hedge funds and mutual funds generally try to invest in shares on a longer-term basis rather than continually trading them; trading incurs transaction costs, and if an investment was correct and is generating better-than-benchmark returns there is no reason to sell it.

The "day trading" books you might see at your local Barnes and Noble are get- rich-quick books and are not representative of the actual professional investment industry.

<comment><USER14> > [...] would you want to continue holding Blockbuster stock? No; you would > want to sell it.

For every seller, there's a buyer. The market will settle on a price at which those are evenly matched---even if that's close to zero.

You have to offer a good enough price on your Blockbuster stock to find a buyer who thinks it's a good idea. (Unless it's someone who has to cover a short position, those guys are basically forced to buy. But they'll still buy from the seller with the best price.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm old. I remember one of my friends and classmates - aged 8 - losing some money his parents had given him to learn how to buy stocks.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Eurodollars are U.S. dollars deposited in commercial banks outside the United States and futures tied to the interest rates paid on them are among the most- traded contracts in the world._

Even back then, they had crazy derivatives.

<comment><USER28> Its not crazy at all. A eurodollar contract gives a purer valuation of the dollar since it doesn't need to consider the added cost depository requirements.

Then like now, they are only crazy if you don't understand them.

<comment><USER12> So it's like a more speculative bet on the overseas bank being able to make riskier loans with a higher return profile?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wave principle represent

</comment><comment><USER30> Paywalled. So I can't determine whether the author reports the effect of an FBI undercover operation running out of the Chicago Board of Trade's commodity pits. An untrained (not with respect to guns, of course) undercover agent was trading with the FBI's practically unlimited money. His wild card futures trading negatively affected those commodity prices, which in turn affected stock prices, which in turn...you get the picture.

<comment><USER31> Bloomberg paywalls? (I was able to click through the headline and see the article)

Out of curiosity what's Bloomberg's paywall trigger?

<comment><USER32> Sometime in the last few months they've begun paywalling more and more content on Bloomberg.com. They had been doing that with their Businessweek division for a long time.

They have a note at the paywall cut-off that says (summarizing): sign-up for a free Bloomberg account to get unlimited access to articles (portfolio tracker, video content, etc).

Opening a new incognito browser seems to bypass the paywall, so I guess they're using a basic cookie check for now (5-6 articles in N time). They're nudging people to free accounts, so I guess they're not looking to be overly aggressive just yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Can meditation help you find your purpose in life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theflowstatecollective.com/flow-habits/purpose-meditation

<comment><AUTHOR> The question of why is something I have never had clear consensus on. Many do it for mental hygiene or for less stress. I found all of that, but also found it connected me with something I had been unable previously to connect with, and this was a game-changer for me. Have others had similar experiences?</comment>


Meldium Appathon - 24 Hours to Add Apps for a Good Cause - <AUTHOR> http://appathon.meldium.com/

<comment><USER2> I got a sunburn from that page. High contrast legacy monitors do not fare well in that kind of environment. My eyes were going back and forth. The white on red induced some weird ADD.</comment>


Don't substitute MVP for beta - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iterate.no/2012/12/05/dont-substitute-mvp-for-beta/

<comment><USER2> This is so true! I see it all the time how especially marketing managers mix the MVP-konsept with alfa, betas and big launches.

Shouldn´t marketing and product managers support this way of testing, to avoid hurting the brand?

Another important point for me is to combine MVP with off-branding. If you already have brand that people like, you might influence users if you revile your brand - and visa versa</comment>


How To Work With CSV files Like Two-Dimensional Arrays? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/18012440/1577343

<comment><USER2> A high-level way for Python is to use pandas. _pandas.read_csv_ does a good job of parsing CSV files, and you can access a cell in data frame _df_ with _df.iloc[x,y]_</comment>


G'MIC, full-featured ImageMagick alternative - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dtschump/gmic <comment><USER2> It should be noted that the project CIMG/GMIC is _not_ built and billed as an IM alternative. It's an image processing framework that happens to have similar utility to IM for some folks and that is also available as a plug-in to GIMP for visual+interactive use.

<comment><USER3> "In this setting, G'MIC may be seen as a serious (and friendly) competitor of the ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick software suites."[1]

[1][http://gmic.eu/](http://gmic.eu/)

That feels a lot like being billed as an IM alternative to me.

<comment><USER2> As a single _example_ of one (of many) possible interfaces for it? Seems to hardly qualify as 'billing' as much as one example of how it might be used...

<comment><USER3> One of two possible interfaces (command line vs not command line) The context is that their command line interface is billed as an alternative to IM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently using G'MIC to produce a video for a client. We used the G'MIC plugin in GIMP to build up the look, then used those parameters to drive it on the command line frame by frame. It's very slow, so we ended up having to build a solution with AWS to do massively parallel processing, but in the end it turned out great.

G'MIC is really good at that kind of thing. I wouldn't use it to replace ImageMagick though.

<comment><USER5> Which G'MIC features did you use for the video?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, a question: why? Just so that there is an alternative (not that there is anything wrong with that), or is there an issue with ImageMagick that discourages some people from using it?

<comment><USER5> GMIC is far more powerful with a lot of very sophisticated filters [1] and a completely different beast to ImageMagick to the point of this title being actively misleading. Yes, both can edit images. But so can Gimp or Darktable, but they are not trying to displace IM either.

[1]: [http://opensource.graphics/christmas-is-already-here-for- ima...](http://opensource.graphics/christmas-is-already-here-for-image- processing-folks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want to be nothing but encouraging, but I have simultaneous positive and negative reactions. On one hand, we need better FOSS alternatives to imagemagick, on the other hand, using imagemagick as the target to compare against means it's doomed to repeat some of IMs mistakes. And sure enough, using the online server's filter examples, so many of them seem to exist to fill a checkbox and increase the filter count, but are utility wise, useless as a serious filter, and aesthetically unpleasant to boot. I have the same contention with a significant portion imagemagick's feature set.

The IM/GM command line is also a disaster of weird names for things and inconsistent conventions and hundreds and hundreds of pages of manual. Reinvent IM's command line to be pleasant and simple and make sense, and it'll be a HUGE win!

What we really need is an open source alternative to is Nuke or Shake (RIP). Anyone want to help build that? ;)

I can't get to the project page, but I hope that GMIC borrows the positive developments from GraphicsMagick. One of the things GM improved over IM is large image handling. GM can stream a gigapixel image resize in minutes, while IM gets stuck in virtual memory swap for hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please mention good filters, both free and commercial, that you think "aesthetically pleasant to boot"?

<comment><USER7> Sure, though clearly I need to explain that it's not symmetric. I don't expect a filter to output a beautiful image. It is possible for some filters to be neutral while others spit out "ugly" results. And, of course, ugly is strictly my biased personal opinion, not an objective result.

What makes filters more ugly to me is filters that aren't very functional as a building block or a node in the middle of an image processing graph. When I said aesthetically unpleasant, I was thinking about _design_ too, not just the aesthetics. Filters that include any aesthetics at all, frankly, are not very useful, and that is the main problem with many of G'MICs (and ImageMagick's) filters. Photoshop has some too.

I'm using [https://gmicol.greyc.fr/](https://gmicol.greyc.fr/) as the reference for filter names.

G'MIC Filters that are useful as a building block (filters you're likely to find used by professionals), and are not aesthetically unpleasant:

Basics, Colors|Channel Processing, Contours|Difference of Gaussians, Degradations|Blur, Details|Sharpen, Repair|Upscale

A small sampling of G'MIC Filters that are aesthetically unpleasant to me, primarily because they are poor building blocks (less likely to be used in professional work), secondarily because they add an aesthetic that I personally don't like, and try to do too much:

Arrays|Puzzle, Artistic|Ellipsionism, Deformations|Rain drops, Frames|Tunnel, Lights & Shadows|Shadow Patch, Patterns|Hearts, Rendering|Cupid, Sequences|Lava Lamp

Note that many of these could be re-created easily using proper image processing building blocks, like an over operator for compositing, or an expression node for image warping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I see, thank you for detailed answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does it support vectors? And PDFs, AI, EPS? Does it handle CMYK/RGB properly?

<comment><USER9> Looks like a raster library to me. I imagine if it does handle vector graphics, it's only on the input side, same as ImageMagick. Didn't see any indication one way or another on color spaces.

<comment><USER10> It is announced as an "image processing tool". This is a field mostly interested in raster images usually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> G'MIC home page is : [http://gmic.eu](http://gmic.eu)

</comment><comment><USER11> The only thing I want to know is if it breaks every dependency, on every update, like ImageMagick does.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a very popular plug-in for GIMP. I don't think this is an alternative to ImageMagick

<comment><AUTHOR> I marked it as alternative only because it has full command line support, which is rare case for filters. But it is mainly strong _filter_ library, than batch convertor/resizer, you are right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As far as I understood, it calls GIMP to do the work?

<comment><USER9> It appears the GIMP dependency is just so you can build the GIMP plug-in. It appears to use (the same author's) cimg to do the heavy lifting. ([https://github.com/dtschump/CImg](https://github.com/dtschump/CImg))

<comment><USER12> Thanks. CImg seems to be whole in one 2 MB header file? Wow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and all 450+ filters compiled in one 5 MB file.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Revolutionary storage technology could make hard drives and tape obsolete - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/this-revolutionary-storage-technology-could-make-hard-drives-and-tape-obsolete <comment><USER2> It's a device to save data in DNA.

> _Right now though the biggest barriers to mass adoption are size (Shannon is > the size of a family kitchen), price (unknown at the time of writing but > likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) and writing speed (a > pedestrian 10Mbps)._

Size may be reduced, prize may be reduced, but how are they planing to increase the writing and reading speed?

<comment><USER3> Highly dense storage is a nice goal but ultimately not very practical if the data can't be retrieved easily and quickly.

The goods news, we have your data safely stored in a sugar cube.

The bad news, it may take months to retrieve it.</comment></comment>