Ask HN: Non-programming part time jobs? - <AUTHOR> While I am a software developer, somehow the thought of working for another company depresses me a lot at the moment. I guess ultimately I enjoy thinking about concepts more than the actual programming. Programming is a means to an end to realize my ideas. But programming for another company would mean programming for programming's sake. (Just trying to understand why the thought depresses me so much).
And yet, I need money. I wish I could think of any other way to earn minimum living expenses than developing. I'd love to just work in a cafe or a book shop for a couple of days, but I worry that it might not pay well enough.
Part time developer jobs are also hard to come by (which would leave me time to work on my own projects, hopefully alleviating my depression).
Maybe somebody here has ideas for a middle road?
It would also be great to work not sitting at a desk all the time. <comment><USER2> Tutoring has a lot to recommend it, depending on where you live and your ability to get clients. You need more clients than a freelance programmer would, but the hourly pay is not necessarily that different, particularly for well-heeled clientelle. Paying a lot of money is how you know you're getting quality. :)

(Some at my previous day job once remarked that it would be cheaper to order me to do tutoring than to pay for a freelance English tutor, given the hourly equivalent of what Japanese salarymen my age made versus the typical price of an hour of English instruction in this neck of the woods.)

Edit to add:

That aside isn't quite so useful for folks not here. Let me hum a few bars: students at highly competitive suburban high schools, students studying for the LSAT, working professionals with gaps that are impeding their career growth, and middle class women who are filling a hole in their life through learning stuff all pay rather substantially more than 10 year olds who need help with multiplication.

<comment><USER3> Tutoring is great. The "credentials" you need to get a job easily are basically the fact that you've graduated from or are studying in a college, but you can do without this too. Places to look for a job are a) specific topics students commonly get stuck on (polynomials, the bane of middle schoolers! calculus!) b) things that need lots of studying like university entry exams in some countries, SATs, APs etc.

The thing about a) is that often the kids aren't stupid but they've just gotten a bad explanation. I find that a one on one with a no-nonsense explanation and enough examples clears everything up and suddenly you're a hero. The thin about b) is that you might need to know things specific to the type of thing you're helping with (eg, SATs) but you're more likely to get repeat jobs from the same customer.

The marketing scheme here is mostly word of mouth. You can put up signs and that'll get you some business but once you successfully help your first couple of students the word spreads like wildfire between stressed parents and you suddenly have a reputation. Your reputation is very important so don't scam your clients, work on giving a good impression and maybe even give occasional freebies to regulars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know if it will be possible to do where you are, but I mowed lawns for years on the side. Even after I had a "successful" startup. I enjoyed having something completely non-technical to do and it actually let my mind reboot. And before anyone scoffs, the pay is actually pretty decent relative to the time invested. Don't believe me? Call up a landscaping service and get a quote for your yard. There is some initial costs for equipment, but it's definitely something that is scalable. You can get a used lawnmower for less than $50. It doesn't have to be great, little push mowers are work horses and damn near indestructible. Especially anything with a Briggs and Straton Motor. But like I said, this will only be relevant if you live in a part of the country you can mow lawns in.

And on your comment about working in a cafe. I have often thought about how great it would be if someone started a "Startup Cafe" with a rag tag group employees that were all working on their own projects. Somewhere you could pick up a few hours in your odd spare time and still be in a stimulating environment. Maybe have a laptop setup next to the server stand for a few snippets in your downtime. Someone start working on that! I'll buy my coffee there.

<comment><USER5> I had an idea for a "carbon-free lawn service". The idea was to get together about 10 people with the push reel-type mowers, lawn and hedge sheers, and develope a route that could be done by bike. One of the group's garage would be the central meeting place and tool storage spot.

I would seek out about a dozen clients who cared about carbon and hopefully had small lawns, rich aging hippie types. I would charge about twice what normal lawn service costs; the whole group would arrive and cut lawn and do any other work en masse, otherwise I think it would take too long.

The overall goal was to have enough work to have 1 full day's hard work each week, for which each person would earn about $200. I wanted to design the business explicitly to provide a way to pay the cheapest rent in my area (half the cheapest two bedroom apartment) and a little left over for food and etc.

I wish someone would try this. However, the person who actually starts it for the first time will probably find themselves working full time for quite a while, and it won't be a part time backup job for them.

A side note on lawn mowers -- they are almost all not work horses or indistructable, particularly the $50 ones you will get used. They are garbage. Briggs and Stratton has a good reputation, but I am not sure they are currently living up to it. A good rule of thumb is to get the best ratio of engine displacement to cutting swath you can get. If you get the used ones, get three and expect to be constantly repairing them, which will be fun for a while and then get old.

<comment><USER4> You make a couple good points/ideas.

I like the carbon free lawn service idea. My current mower is actually an American lawn reel mower. Coincidentally, I bought it on craigslist for $35. It's from 72, and still cuts like a champ as long as your willing to maintain it. The "carbon free" service would work great in my area where there is a high density of people in town homes with small front lawns.

Maybe YMMV on the small lawn mowers. But I have had extremely good luck with them. I think that most of the problem people have with mowers is failing to maintain them properly. In my experience, if you can buy a used mower that will start quickly without much hassle it can generally be kept in decent working order for a long time. But purchasing one of these used mowers was why I said the idea scales. It's pretty easy to get enough work out of a used mower to buy a better quality mower.

Thanks for sharing your insight. I hope someone jumps on the reel mower service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> During college I worked in a plastic fabrication facility - it was like a wood shop with saws and routers, no giant moldingg achines. Learned an interesting trade that I could easily fall b ack on if developing gets old. Plus going to work was like going to the gym except they paid me.

My suggestion would to find a part time job that has you active physically and mentally. Tradesmen / craftsmen are always looking for some reliable help even if you need to be trained. Go learn cheese making or how to run a printing press.

</comment><comment><USER7> Working at a ski resort in Utah for two years was one of the best decisions of my life. Great town, great people, fun outdoor activities year round, nightlife, and plenty of time to code. Just be ready to barely scrape by - makes it easier that half the town is in the same boat and perfectly fine with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry if this doesn't sound very useful, but my suggestion is to take the time to think deeply about why it depresses you. Have you been unsuccessful in your career? Or significantly less successful than you would like to be?

It resonated with me when you said "I guess ultimately I enjoy thinking about concepts more than the actual programming" because I think I'm that way too. But that's lead me to think a lot about programming concepts and into language design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not achieving what I set out to achieve is certainly a part of it. My dream is to make money with my own products/startup.

Not giving up yet, but at the moment I need money...

Your comment reminds me that there should always be ways to make the programming job more interesting. If it is boring, I should think about creating abstractions/frameworks/IDEs and what not to make it less boring.

So your comment cheered me up at least a little bit :-)

<comment><USER8> > So your comment cheered me up at least a little bit :-)

I should probably taper my words with some warning then.

I'm the kind of programmer that has always thought about methodology, design, and best practice. And after thinking about that for years, and talking with other programmers like me (only smarter) and learning from them too, I can tell you not only is it really really hard but the pursuit of the nicest possible programming experience (clarity, simplicity, lack of repetition) can make you very unproductive.

The guy who spends all day writing frameworks, testing tools, and language abstractions is rarely the guy getting the most done. Unless he's a super- genius.

Only recently I was trying to apply TDD to a really extreme level. I didn't work. I ended up throwing loads of useless tests and suddenly was much more productive. But I probably lost weeks because of that.

But there is some good news: My hardcore desire to make everything wonderful barely exhibits when I program in Haskell. I think this is because the lack of side-effects, strong type-checking, and high-order functions give you such a good baseline and I don't feel like I need to write lots of abstractions and complicated things just to feel like I've got a handle on the situation. But then I'm unproductive because of inexperience with Haskell and FP in general. But that's a temporary thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you have a good typing speed then try out audio transcription. <http://callgraph.biz/freelance-transcription>

<comment><USER10> I can only imagine that being orders of magnitude more tedious than typing code.

<comment><USER9> Yes. But then you only require good English comprehension. The rest is pretty easy. And it gets easier if you become a reviewer/proof-reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you enjoy sports and have a confident personality, I'd recommend getting into officiating your sport of choice.

I've been reffing hockey since the 9th grade and its a great way to get exercise, enjoy the game, build communication skills and make a decent amount of money (at least $20/hour, plus mileage).

<comment><USER12> You also get angry parents thinking you have it out for their kid. Reffing was one of the most exhaustive jobs I've ever done (kids basketball). Will not do it again.

And I guess it depends on the situation, because I only got $10/hr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You sound like an "idea person" like myself. Realize that the supply of ideas far exceeds the skills needed to implement those ideas. Spend a few years learning to implement solutions at employer expense (a programming job is good). When you have sufficient skills and experience, you can start your own business. A programming job is not so depressing if you think of it as a means to acquire skills needed to fulfill your dream. Maybe you are depressed because it takes so long to learn those skills. If you already have the skills, quit your job and start working on your own ideas.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't have an answer but I know the feeling and hope you find a solution (I have to go back tomorrow).

You might consider looking for something you can do online that doesn't require programming, such as e-commerce. Do you have something you can produce or resell that will let you apply your technical knowledge in a non-technical way? Crafts, or writing, or buying and selling used stuff?

</comment><comment><USER5> Firstly, I would get and idea of what your minimum living expenses really are. You say you'd love to work a few days a week in a cafe or book shop, but worry that it would not pay well enough -- you should figure out how much you need so you know. You may need to adjust your lifestyle - it is far easier to not spend a dollar than it is to get a dollar.

You may find it hard to get a part-time job to start off with. It may be easier to work a full time job for a few months, and then ask to cut back. If you save money in the mean time, you can quit if they refuse and seek out a better position.

There are a lot of posts here about the best kinds of part-time jobs. In reality, you are probably not going to be able to pick out the ultimate pay- the-rent-while-I-code-my-startup job; you are going to end up with one of the first few you actually find, and finding that job itself may be a full time effort for a while.

In that light, I'd like to suggest that the actual job and environment doesn't matter so much as you'd think, and that the fact that it is DIFFERENT is what matters.

Ideas for good products come from experience, not from cloistered ivory tower environments. You might come with a great product after working with several different inventory or point-of-sale systems, or observing how an independent roofing contractor maintains all his contacts on his phone, or whatever.

All the great American writers first learned by writing about real life things - Steinbeck filed many short newspaper stories on dust bowl refugees before he wrote the Grapes of Wrath, Clemens did the same and wrote of real experience in "Roughing It" before his masterpieces.

Here's my advice: 1) know your expences and cut them where appropriate; 2) get a job, and quit it within the first 2 weeks if it obviously sucks, and then get another one; 3) while working, agressively attend meetups and similar events so you don't become socially isolated; 4) after 3 months, ask your boss if you can cut back to part time if you need to do that - if he says no, work another 3 months and ask again; 5) if he still says no, quit, re-evaluate working a corporate development job, and start over again at step 1 if that's what you need to do.

</comment><comment><USER15> Best non-programming job I ever had was a waiter in a fine dining restaurant. I made great cash and met lots of interesting people. I also got eat very well and learned a lot about food and wine, something I still very much enjoy today. Also, keep in mind that fine dining is nothing like Outback or Applebees.

I happened to be in college at the time, but many of my co-workers were people who waited tables on the side of their regular jobs. IIRC, one guy was a minister, another owned a catering business, and another was a teacher.

Another big plus if you're not married is that you meet tons of girls :)

<comment><USER16> I was going to create a new answer, but the "meet tons of girls" thing made me think this would be a good place to reply. :)

I haven't been an employee myself, but I took a few cruises in 2007, and got to know some of the staff members. The pay is pretty basic, and the food apparently sucks, but there was no denying how much fun (and how much sex) they all seemed to be having, and seeing passports so full of stamps they had to order new pages every few months was pretty impressive as well. They hired computer-literate types for tech positions (the ships all have sat Internet) and newsletter-publication jobs - there are probably others for which I didn't speak to the employee.

If you were up for an adventure-type job, this might be something to explore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A point nobody made so far: If you're from a foreign country you have very little chances in getting a visa on freelance/part-time work.

I'm in exactly the same position that you are, except I also need a US Visa. I feel sad reading all those suggestions that I can not do because they won't give me a Visa :(

</comment><comment><USER18> How about working in a technology summer camp? The pay is much better than in normal summer camps and you do what you like to do - programming. Well, teaching it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea - I haven't thought about summer camps for quite a while. There was a brief time in the 80ies when they actually had programming courses at holiday summer camps (not anymore, I think?).

I suppose you are talking about summer camps by universities about some technical subject? Sounds good, but wouldn't they mostly hire students?

<comment><USER18> No, I was thinking about real summer camps focusing on teaching programming (game programming, web programming...). I came across a few when I was looking for summer camps in the US. I can't remember their names. Try googling it. And I don't think it only for students. I had the illusion (but I haven't really checked) that they want true professionals not students. Good luck

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're a dog person perhaps you could walk dogs? Exercise, canine love and money all in one. If you know how to play a musical instrument you could try teaching that. All the best!

</comment><comment><USER20> Warehouse work - working for smaller trucking companies, loading/unloading trucks and preparing shipments. Pays around $18/hr starting out.

Retail - Retail sucks if you hate what you're selling, otherwise it's not too bad. I worked in a supermarket and hated it, but a friend worked for a car parts store and absolutely loved it.

Delivery Driver - Friend who worked at car parts store switched to a driver after awhile and liked that even more. Load up the car and head out, get people to sign off and sometimes collect payments. I always thought I'd like this style job, mostly because it's so independent.

Computer repair/freelance IT work - Most people would give this a big "hell no", in high school I worked for a bunch of small companies and made $25/hr cleaning off viruses/repairing machines/building new PCs. I'd usually go into a place for 3-4hrs on weekends. If you don't hate it, you can make some decent money.

If you're fairly comfortable with computer hardware and windows, you'll get by fairly easily. For all other problems: google. The IT jobs also lead to more side work, typically the companies I worked for didn't have websites. I worked out deals with friends who were designers and asked for a finders fee for referrals I sent. (Knowing what I do now, I would've taken on the work myself at a higher rate for web development and just outsource most of it)

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone on how creating screencasts for new languages/tools would pay?

I'm looking at creating 1hr screencasts.

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't discount what you can learn from working for "the man" as a programmer. Pay attention to what's happening on the business side of things. Ask questions, show interest that you want to know more. If you ultimately want to have your own business, there's way more than just programming a cool idea to make that happen. You have to understand what it means to run a company and the types of decisions that go along with that. If you can't get that from your current job, use your programming skills to get in somewhere else that offers you that opportunity.

I'm on my third full-time job working for "the man" in 10 years and have learned a ton about what is involved beyond the code. I still very much have aspirations to put all that knowledge and experience to use for my own endeavors.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently hit a point where my patent attorney needs more money than I have. I'm not willing to part with any share of my startup, especially over just a few thousand dollars so last night I started looking for part time jobs. It seems like 80% of the jobs available in the area are commissioned sales that seem like too much mindshare and risk, 10% were skilled jobs that I don't have experience with, and the rest were programming. I just decided that it doesn't matter what I'm doing as long as I can keep going on my startup....

I applied for some fast food jobs.

</comment><comment><USER24> Do you have any hobbies? Are there any stores in your area that cater to your hobby? I'm trying to get back into RC-car racing and if I needed a 20-hour/wk job I might look at one of my local hobby shops.

Agree with those who said lawn care. It's hard to build a long-term business because it is competitive but if you're just trying to make $1-2K/month, you can do it. Being a helper/laborer for a tradesperson also sounds like it might fit your desire to not sit in front of a computer all of the time. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER25> I would suggest that you try serving at any sort of restaurant, preferably a nicer one, although you might have to hone your skills at an olive garden or something like that.

Pros:

1.) Work with attractive women/men 2.) Cash in your pocket 3.) Forced exercise/weight loss 4.) Hours can compliment an office job's

Cons:

1.) Dealing with people and their food 2.) Can be stressful

</comment><comment><USER26> Why not find contract work? As a contractor, your hourly pay should be higher than that as an employee. Plus, taxes are not withheld so you

You could find a 3 month contract and then take three months off.

Some other possible jobs with a lot of downtime for doing your own thing might be security guard or small hotel desk clerk.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is not an answer per se, given that I haven't done it myself, but I would love to drive a taxi one day.

</comment><comment> clark-kent As a developer I believe you have general computer skills. Try taking up a Tech support or sys admin gig. You wont be programming everyday but your developer skills will be very handy. This has worked for me, I did this till my side project became a start-up.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are programming jobs with a lot of autonomy and control over the product you build. Maybe you should go for one of those, or become a product manager?

<comment><USER29> > _There are programming jobs with a lot of autonomy and control over the > product you build._

can you name a few?

<comment><USER30> I know people at Google who have a significant amount of autonomy (they work (or worked last time I checked) in the guts of the search engine and Android and on Google Wave).

Also a couple of guys at Yahoo working on Hadoop. Lots of startup founders (of course) who completely decide what to do.

Even a couple of teams at Intuit (which has to be the most manager heavy company in the whole world).

And people paid to work on Open Source projects have significant amounts of autonomy. Now that I think of it almost every developer I know who is _not_ working on outsourced enterprise software seems to have significant (but not absolute) autonomy.

<comment><USER29> > _Now that I think of it almost every developer I know who is not working on > outsourced enterprise software seems to have significant (but not absolute) > autonomy._

really? do you think you know a representative sample of developers?

<comment><USER30> "do you think you know a representative sample of developers?"

I never claimed to. But hey those are the people I know, "representative sample" or not! You asked for examples of programmers with autonomy so I gave a few. As I was writing that, I discovered that except those working on outsourced enterprise sw, most developers _I_ know do have significant autonomy.

Sorry if that didn't answer your question sufficiently. A "representative sample" developer in Bangalore (where I live these days) has a job screwing around with mountains of crap outsourced code no one in the West wants to touch with layer after layer of management wielding the whip and micromanaging him. No autonomy there!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Infographic: 14 Defunct Car Brands, and How They Failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualcapitalist.com/14-defunct-car-brands-failed/ <comment><USER2> This article says Kaiser "failed" in 1951, yet they were making Jeeps through the 1960s (until being acquired by AMC in 1970). My dad had a 1968 Kaiser Jeep.

One of his favorite stories was that it had the original, unopened owner's manual in the glove compartment, and there was an order form for the full factory technical manual for $5 that was never redeemed. On a lark, he sent it in (this is in the early 1980s) and received a brand-new full factory service manual a few weeks later.</comment>


Show HN: A platform to argue rationally about stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.rationalflip.com <comment><USER2> Looks good! Simple and to the point.

My feedback: a) default font size is a bit large, and b) I would change the placeholder "blah blah blah claim..." to something less distracting/funny :)

All the best to you!</comment>


A decentralized Blockchain is the only sustainable Answer to meetups price hike - <AUTHOR> https://www.parity.io/gather-why-a-decentralized-blockchain-platform-is-the-only-sustainable-answer-to-the-meetup-com-pricing-hike/ <comment><USER2> Blockchain doesn't offer significant advantages over a (much more simple) ActivityPub based event planner. We do not need a signed chain of hashes to track that a person is coming to an event, but rather a simple RSVP.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the event planner is a single centralized global entity, then the end-user features are less significant, that is correct - well aside from no one being able to take down the data and it being open source. If you are talking about everyone hosting their own, then this is incorrect - even if you think they could be federated "discovery" of new groups and members is practically impossible when a new server is added. There is a significant advantage of having a global registry, when it comes to discovery.

<comment><USER2> It sounds like you've never used a federated platform. Discoverability and searchability is not the showstopper you think it is.</comment></comment></comment>


Steam Hardware & Software Survey, Dec 2012 (now including Linux numbers) - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?hn=dec12

<comment><AUTHOR> Realized that this was up when Steam asked me to take the hardware survey just now. Relevant bit of the "OS Version" field:

      OS                         Share Delta
      Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit        0.29% +0.29%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64 bit  0.26% +0.26%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS         0.13% +0.13%
      Ubuntu 12.10               0.12% +0.12%
      Other                      0.71% +0.14%

Given the deltas for all four Ubuntu categories, I feel comfortable assuming that the 0.14% in the Other category (including my own computer) is largely for Linux as well, putting Linux penetration at ~0.9%.

Sadly, the interface doesn't let you filter by Linux yet.</comment>


The Psychology of Being an Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.hightechinthehub.com/2015/09/the-psychology-of-being-an-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> Great article! If you're an entrepreneur (especially if you work from home) you should read this.</comment>


How much should you charge for your Software-as-a-Service tool? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-much-should-you-charge-for-your-software-as-a-service-tool-45595f49a990 <comment><AUTHOR> I think this is an important contribution to the discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840282)</comment>


Apple's Top Designer Explains Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/comment/claire-beale/claire-beale-on-advertising-830554.html <comment><USER2> The amazing thing is that Apple (Steve Jobs?) succeeded in noticing this talented individual and promoting him to a position where his designs could be realized.

 _"With his dramatic return to the company in 1997, Steve Jobs began to revive Apple's fortunes and return it to the industry leader that it is today. Jonathan Ive was instrumental to this turnaround, and under the new Jobs-led Apple he was promoted to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design and began a period of unrivaled creativity and innovation which continues to this day."_ <http://www.jonathanive.com/biography/>

<comment><USER3> I think Steve Jobs noticed importance of production design during the time he worked on Next. I remembered an old profile for him in Time sometime around he going back to Apple. He criticized the design on laundry machines and used a rare German laundry machine that's very quiet in his house.

I am a programmer myself and I know I don't have so much talent in design. I noticed that at least in web industry before Web 2.0, web designers were treated pretty badly by most management teams because they think designers just need to type in some HTML code/cut and paste some photoshop and site is done. What they don't understand is a good designer has to put himself/herself into users' shoes and experiences it when they make design choice and a bad choice will kill the site.

I am actually happy that at least now when you meet a management team that ignores the importance of design, you can raise the popularity of good design such as iPod, iPhone as counter point to persuade them that a good design helps sales. In this part, I really appreciate what SJ and JI has been doing for rest of us.

<comment><USER4> " I noticed that at least in web industry before Web 2.0, web designers were treated pretty badly by most management teams because they think designers just need to type in some HTML code/cut and paste some photoshop and site is done."

It wasn't just the managers - the general view was that design == graphic design (nothing to do with usability). Plus graphic design students saw $$$ and suddenly went into web (I saw that a LOT, more so then any management problem).

<comment><USER5> A lot of it was the designers themselves. I remember one who genuinely believed "users like a challenge" and everything he came up with, from page layouts to actual workflow was like a puzzle.

Fine, except we were working on corporate intranets. He didn't last long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to lecture at Northumbria where Ive studied. Everyone who knew him said he was a really reserved and pleasant guy who just truly loved to design. I think that Apples success lends itself substantially to this guy and his creative skill. He's definitely up there with Steve Jobs for helping the re- emergence of Apple

</comment><comment><USER3> What I like is this sentence from Jonathan, "We don't have to take this great intuitive leap to understand the mythical concerns of our users, because we are the users."

But I guess we also need to have taste.

</comment><comment><USER7> I know it's his name, but the OCD within makes me want to sed 's/Ive/I\'ve/g'

<comment><USER8> You can use it to your advantage at parties:

"Ive won two black pencils this year from D&AD!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file not a big book, he rarely gives interviews you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private."

What?

<comment><USER10> "If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file - not a big book, he rarely gives interviews - you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private."

It seems checking the results is no longer part of publishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "D&AD, as you'll have read elsewhere in this paper, is one of the most important dates in the creative industry calendar"

That's three paragraphs in, the fourth time that "D&AD" is used. It seems to be the important point of the article, being referred to maybe 50 times, yet the author never bothers defining it. WTF?

I'd never actually wished that there was a downmod button here before...</comment>


Search HN for Experts, Content, and More - <AUTHOR> https://hnprofile.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Highly recommend reading the "how it works" section:

[https://hnprofile.com/learn-more](https://hnprofile.com/learn-more)

That section has a few examples and details. I'll add further details below.

The system ONLY looks at comments sent to it. It, kind of looks like:

        { Author, Comment }

From there, everything else is derived. Nothing else, no profiles, no voting, nothing. That's it.

The system identifies:

      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - <USER4>
      - Relevant content
      - Promoter score (an improved net promoter score)
      - <USER5>
      - <USER6>
      - Related Topics
      - etc.

Additional Discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981)</comment>


Migrating Messenger storage to optimize performance - <AUTHOR> https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/migrating-messenger-storage-to-optimize-performance/ <comment><USER2> If you're looking for high level of compression and outstanding insert performance RocksDB/MyRocks is a way to go</comment>


Show HN: A search engine that lets you 'add' words as vectors - <AUTHOR> http://insightdatascience.com/blog/thisplusthat_a_search_engine_that_lets_you_add_words_as_vectors.html <comment><USER5> Hmm. It's a lovely idea but I find the results uninspiring. (Which isn't surprising; it's a very difficult problem. But I was hoping to be amazed.) Here are the examples I tried (all of them, no cherrypicking):

daughter + male - female -> { The Eldest (book), Songwriter, Granddaughter }

(Hopeless; should have had "son" in there)

pc - microsoft + apple -> { Olynssis The Silver Color (Japanese book), Burger Time (arcade game), Phantasy Star (series of games) }

(Hopeless; should have had "Mac" in there)

violin - string + woodwind -> { clarinet, oboe, flute }

(OK)

mccartney - beatles + stones -> { Rolling Stone (magazine), carvedilol (pharmaceutical), stone (geological term) }

(Poor; should have had Jagger or Richards or something of the kind in the top few results)

sofa - large + small -> { relaxing, asleep, cupboard }

(Poor; I'd have hoped for "armchair" or something of the kind)

<comment><USER6> Some of this is that underlying model is insufficiently trained, but some of this is disambiguation. Disambiguation in text is a very, very, hard problem.

So some of your examples, when clarified, are a bit clearer: Paul McCartney - Beatles + Rolling Stones = Mick Jagger is in the 3rd spot. ([http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Paul%20McCartney%20-%20Bea...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Paul%20McCartney%20-%20Beatles%20%2B%20Rolling%20Stones)) Change stone -> Rolling Stones.

Thank you for the comment!

<comment><USER7> Japan - Tokyo + History = Kyoto was what I was expecting but I guess the corpus isn't quite there yet. This was the answer .. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atpara_Upazila](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atpara_Upazila) At least it's geographic!

<comment><USER8> Hitler -German +Italian = Sofiene Zaaboub apparently. Was hoping for Mussolini.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lisp + JVM = Clojure

I'm sold. This is really cool! (Though it's worth noting that a Google search with the same terms returns the exact same result...)

<comment><USER10> I tried Lisp + Java and got Objective C instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was really excited by this writeup, so I tried it. Four test queries returned nothing that seemed useful or even relevant:

fluid dynamics + electromagnetism : expected magnetrohydrodynamics, got Maxwell's equations and classical mechanics (not useful);

verse + 5 - rhyme : expected blank iambic pentameter, Shakespeare, etc.: got nonsense;

writer + American + Russian + Great - Nobel Prize : expected Nabokov, got Meirkhaim Gavrielov + 1 nonsense result;

plant + illegal - addictive : expected cannabis, chronic, etc; got "Plants" (thanks) and "Nuclear Weapon" (?!? ) and some Hungarian village.

EDIT: I thought maybe I wasn't being sufficiently imaginative, so I tried "Nixon + Clinton - JFK" and got nothing that looked interesting. Then I noticed that the "Nixon" part of my query was "disambiguated" to something like "non_film", and the word "Nixon" was just stripped out. I think this thing is just broken.

<comment><USER6> It's not perfect; the real limiting factor is the volume of text. For the research paper behind word2vec, to get accurate associations for common words (King, man, woman, etc.) required a news sources training text of order a _billion_ words. This is roughly the size of all of Wikipedia, but the text in Wikipedia has many more rare words, which spreads the number of training examples per word rather thin. To address that, I'm thinking of expanding the project to use Common Crawl data ([http://commoncrawl.org/](http://commoncrawl.org/)) to dramatically expand the available supply of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey juxtaposicion, fascinating work. I have many questions so I am just going to shoot them rapid fire.

What is the dimensionality of each word vector and what does a words position in this space "mean"? What is this dimensionality determined by? Have your tried any dimensionality reduction algorithms like PCA or Isomap? It would be interesting to find the word vectors that contain the most variation across all of wikipedia. Have you tried any other nearest neighbor search methods other than a simple dot product, such as locality sensitive hashing?

I guess most of those questions are about the word2vec algorithm, but you are probably in a good place to answer them after working with it. Anyways, cool work, and I am glad you did it in python so I can really dig in and understand it.

<comment><USER6> Hey doctoboggan, awesome questions!

>> What is the dimensionality of each word vector and what does a words position in this space "mean"? What is this dimensionality determined by?

Each dimension roughly is a new way that words can be similar or dissimilar. So I've got 1000-dimensional vectors, so words can be similar or dissimilar in only one thousand 'ways'. So associations like 'luxury', 'thoughtful', 'person', 'place' or 'object' are learned (roughly speaking). Of course, real words are far more diverse, so this is an approximation. The 1000 dimensions is configurable, and in theory more dimensions means more contrast is captured, but you need more training data. In practice, the number 1000 is chosen because that maxes out the size of my large memory machine. That said, the word2vec paper shows good results with 1000D, so it doesn't seem to be a bad choice.

>> Have your tried any dimensionality reduction algorithms like PCA or Isomap?

Yes! I've tried out PCA, and some spectral biclustering using the off-the- shelf algorithms in SciKits Learn. I only played around with this for an hour or so but got discouraging results. Nevertheless, the word2vec papers actually show that this works really well for projecting France, USA, Paris, DC, London, etc. on a two-dimensional plane where the axis roughly correspond to countried & capitals -- exactly what you'd hope for! I wasn't able to replicate that, but Tomas Mikolov was!

>> It would be interesting to find the word vectors that contain the most variation across all of wikipedia.

Hmm, interesting indeed! I'm not sure how I'd got about measuring 'variation' \-- would this amount to isolating word clusters and finding the most dense ones? Something like finding a cluster with a hundred variations of the word 'snow' (if you're Inuit)? I'd be willing to part with the raw vector database if there's interest.

>> Have you tried any other nearest neighbor search methods other than a simple dot product, such as locality sensitive hashing?

Only a little bit, although I'm very interested in finding a faster approach than finding the whole damn dot product (see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720359)). I worry that traditional location sensitive hashes, kd-trees, and the like work well for 3D locations, but miserably for 1000D data like I have here.

I should reiterate out that most of the hard work revolves around the word2vec algorithm which I used but didn't write. It's awesome, check it and the papers out here: [https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/](https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/)

Whoa, that was alot. Thanks!

<comment><USER13> For 2D visualization, t-sne is an excellent tool. I've used it with word2vec and you can see clusters of similar words:

[https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visua...](https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visualizations/figure_11.png)

[https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visua...](https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visualizations/figure_13.png)

[https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visua...](https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visualizations/figure_5.png)

And more in [https://github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/tree/master/visu...](https://github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/tree/master/visualizations)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Harvard - Boston + Silicon [http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Harvard%20-%20Boston%20%2B...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Harvard%20-%20Boston%20%2B%20Silicon)

<comment><USER14> Myspace - bands + success [http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Myspace%20-%20bands%20%2B%...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Myspace%20-%20bands%20%2B%20success)

<comment><USER15> I did 'Facebook - users' and got Myspace as the second result :)

<comment><USER16> Facebook - Exploitation + Privacy = Blog

Kinda makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I saw what you wrote about your dot product speed issue. Did you try using NumPy's einsum function? [http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.ei...](http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.einsum.html)

It's really fast for this kind of stuff. Happy to give details about how to use it if you need.

<comment><USER6> Hey SandB0x, thanks for the advice! I actually started off by using numpy.dot, which is precisely what's needed. The problem is that I need it to go even faster (currently takes a few seconds) but this function is already heavily optimized and uses Intel MKL to accelerate the math. In fact, my cython implementation would be slower than numpy.dot were it not for some embedded logic that breaks out of the dot product half way through calculation. As I'm computing the row * row, going element by element, if the running sum of those products gets to be really negative (indicating that in the dimensions multiplied so far, the two rows are highly dissimilar) I stop tryin to calculate the rest of the row, thereby saving me from calculating the full dot product. This is cheating obvioisly, but it's x3 or x4 faster numpy.dot. So, because there's branching logic in my implementation of the dot product, I can't express it interns of Einstein summations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. I've played around with words as vectors (with values) and the cosign similarity algorithm ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity)). This is very cool stuff. I wonder how they're doing it in real-time, it is heavy number crunching

<comment><USER6> Thanks! The number crunching is indeed very intense. The full body of vectors has a million rows and thousand columns, which fills up all of the 10GB of available memory. When you punch in a query, it adds or subtracts the requested vectors and takes an approximate dot product between every row in the table and the search query. This is about 10^9 operations. I'm only interested in the most similar (high cosine similarity) dot products, so to speed things up I wrote a Cython dot product implementation. This aborts the calculation if the sum starts to look like it'll be very dissimilar, essentially skipping lots of bad guesses. This speeds things up by a factor of ~5 or so. I'm debating offloading this computation to the GPU, which would be perfect for this.

Edit. In case you're interested in the source: [https://github.com/cemoody/wizlang](https://github.com/cemoody/wizlang)

<comment><USER19> Since the aim is accuracy rather than throughput, would more memory help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting concept, but how will it work with more dynamic content? You can train the model on a fairly static corpus such as Wikipedia, but what if you content changes with a greater frequency?

Since MapReduce is used, perhaps the model is already being trained on small batches making incremental updates possible.

<comment><USER6> Hi, creator here (Chris Moody). Great question. The underlying algorithm, word2vec, ([https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/](https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/)) isn't built for streaming data which means that at the moment it assumes a fixed number of words from the beginning of the calculation. Unfortunately, until the state-of-the-art advances to accepting streaming data, the whole corpus will have to be rescanned to accept dynamic content. Furthermore, word2vec doesn't scale past OpenMP, single node, shared-memory resources. So while I used MapReduce, it's just for cleaning and preprocessing the text, not training the vectors, which is the hard part.

So there's some exciting work to be done in parallelizing and streaming the word2vec algorithm!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> daft punk - repetitive + lyrics == La Roux

nice work!

</comment><comment><USER22> I guess we all just need a little more LeAnn Rimes. [http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/the%20world%20-%20violence...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/the%20world%20-%20violence%20%2B%20love)

</comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like this paper from Google

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519581](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519581)

For example, the operation 'king' – 'man' + 'woman' results in a vector that is similar to 'queen'.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it just me, or do almost half of my searches return `Dvbc' for no apparent reason?

[http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Saturn%20-%20Rings%20%2B%2...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Saturn%20-%20Rings%20%2B%20Spot)

[http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Chrome%20%2B%20open%20sour...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Chrome%20%2B%20open%20source)

[http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Unix%20%2B%20Open%20Source](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Unix%20%2B%20Open%20Source)

</comment><comment><USER25> Does this relate to Latent Semantic Indexing? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing)

<comment><USER13> Kind of. LSI is a dimensionality-reduction method, which means it takes really sparse "bag of words" vectors and compresses them in a way which approximates the original structure. Word2vec gives each word a non sparse vector based on the hidden units of a neural network language model. The model is trained to predict the middle word from it's surroundings, which makes it learn how words are used in context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like another go-around at 1990s (& early 2000s) concept search -- Excite, Northern Light, etc.

And it sounds really close to what I was trying at Elucidate.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey, nice work! Can you explain the "comma delimited list" functionality any more? It seems (awesomely) similar to a hack I did a while back with Word2Vec which would pick out the word which didn't belong in a list.

My hack: [https://github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample](https://github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample)

</comment><comment><USER27> Fun bug: handheld - sony + nintendo = {Wii, Wii, Snes}

I was hoping for the DS or Gameboy but expecting at least something handheld.

<comment><USER18> I would guess that the "handheld" keyword is big with the Wii because of the new control scheme it introduced which was the main (sometimes only) thing talked about with regard to the system

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. Currently it generates garbage for lot of queries but, some stuff is kinda fun. Forrest Gump - comedy + romance gives pulp fiction (!), as good as it gets (match) and polar express (?) Avatar - action + comedy gives The Office (haha!)

</comment><comment><USER29> I know people like to keep things positive, but this is completely useless. Apart from a few cherry picked examples, subtracting words makes no sense most of the time, and there is no clear advantage for their method when it comes to adding words.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is neat, and I found a few queries that added interesting results. However, I tried

        Slavoj Žižek - Jacques Lacan - <USER2>

which yielded an internal server error, probably due to the diacritics not being encoded properly.

</comment><comment><USER31> Bug report: using some non-ascii characters crashes the server (for example é or É).

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I'll have to spend more time sanitizing the input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Albert Einstein - Smart = Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli

Ouch, that's cold

</comment><comment><USER33> Neat stuff juxtaposicion.

Seems like this is how Numenta's AI works: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNMbsvK8Q8Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNMbsvK8Q8Y)

</comment><comment><USER34> Stanford - American + Canadian = University of Toronto

I think it should be Waterloo.

<comment><USER35> Maybe because you thought CS and the algorithm thought some other field, say math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Works for me:

[http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Dick%20Cheney%20-%20evil%2...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Dick%20Cheney%20-%20evil%20%2B%20good)

<comment><USER37> Try this slight refinement...

The results were... Interesting.

[http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Dick%20Cheney%20-evil%20%2...](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Dick%20Cheney%20-evil%20%2Bdumb%20%2Bgood)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Fantastic work and is relevant to something we are working on in this space. Thanks.

On a lighter note I tried "sarah palin + sexy" and I got John Mccain, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney.

</comment><comment><USER39> Also interesting to try something like:

sleep - <USER3>

[http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/sleep%20-%20sleep](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/sleep%20-%20sleep)

</comment><comment><USER40> [http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Germany%20-%20Fun](http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Germany%20-%20Fun) Germany - Fun = USA

:)

</comment><comment><USER41> Hey this is pretty cool!

superman - male + female:

      - Lex Luthor (hmm..)
      - Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen (haha, what?)
      - Wonder Woman (That'll do it!)

</comment><comment><USER42> Great writeup. Curious, are there clear advantages that the vector representation has over graph models (FB graph search, Google Knowledge graph)?

</comment><comment><USER43> The default example "justin bieber - man + women" was ok, but I have found a better one - "justin bieber - women + man "

</comment><comment><USER44> What are the use cases for this fancy feature? I'm thinking of e-advisor for fun, but what are the real life serious use cases?

</comment><comment><USER45> ThisPlusThat.me - fast + slow...

Just kidding! :)

You could also say...

ThisPlusThat.me - another rant + something cool

Thanks for posting this, very interesting work!

</comment><comment><USER46> I thought this one was good "Stanford - Red + Smart" = Berkeley

</comment><comment><USER47> Server apparently wasn't ready for HN frontpage load

</comment><comment><USER48> Pretty impressive for my first try.

iPad - cool -> Windows Phone

</comment><comment><USER49> reddit - <USER4>

Expected: HN, Got: Digg</comment>


NYC offering to pay homeless a year's worth of rent if they leave town - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2017/09/29/city-offering-to-pay-homeless-a-years-worth-of-rent-if-they-leave-town/ <comment><USER2> I can imagine situations where such a program would be a global net positive. For example, if the victim of homelessness is working homeless, and has family in another city they want to get back to, but do not have the means to secure an apartment in the other city. I doubt they are offering to toss money like this to vagrants.

The optics are awful, but I can think of situations where a program like this comes from a good place and accomplishes some good. Maybe not as much good as building 10x as many new skyscrapers for housing, but some good.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't address the problem by shifting externalities elsewhere and reinforces prejudices. Maybe instead of arrogant "quick fixes" it's worth considering, lower TCO permanent solutions like micro apartments, real and integrated drug, health and mental healthcare coverage coordinated with social workers would address the major sources of costs (ie social services, emergency rooms and justice system).

<comment><USER4> Most homeless are temporarily homeless, and such assistance would be a huge help to get them back on their feet. It is very difficult to pull yourself back up when you don't even have a secure place to sleep. Let alone shower or keep clean clothes. Homeless shelters help a little, but you end up needing to wait in line much of the day to get a spot making it real hard to go looking for jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Under rug swept...

<comment><USER6> ... or this could be a program with the same goals as Utah's wildly successful housing first program ([http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced- chronic...](http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic- homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how)), but it's just too expensive to house homeless people in the city itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who pays taxes in New York City, I'd much rather see my tax dollars go towards paying the rent of the homeless than 99% of the other things the city does with our money.

</comment><comment><USER8> And they'll all end up in San fran, Portland, Seattle, or la.

And if they end up in Portland the city won't do anything other than move their camps around.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been thinking we should have a Federal program that helps people in small towns relocate into urban areas or suburban areas at the outskirts of cities. I think letting sparsely populated rural areas depopulate would save us billions on infrastructure since it costs far more per person to run and maintain miles of road out to nowhere rather than short roads to apartments, townhouses, and neighborhoods. As a city dweller, I would gladly exchange the massive federal infrastructure costs that incentivise rural life for the much more consolidated stress this would put on my local infrastructure.

The irony of my proposal is that, while it is in a sense the converse of what NY is doing, I guarantee you it would draw vastly more outrage. The costs of sheltering the 60,000 homeless in NY is nothing compared to the costs of subsidizing rural America to the tune of trillions of dollars. The former is considered a debatable charity, while the latter is never questioned.

<comment><USER6> >subsidizing rural America to the tune of trillions of dollars

I'm not sure where you're getting that number from. Here's a federal budget breakdown for FY2016 [1]:

      Non-discretionary spending:
      Social Security: $910 billion
      Medicare: $588 billion
      Medicaid: $368 billion
      Other: $563 billion
      Interest payments: $241 billion

      Discretionary spending:
      Defense: $584 billion
      Non-defense: $600 billion

Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payments, and defense would not decrease if rural citizens moved to the city. Thus those subsidies aren't solely for rural America, so I won't include them in your "trillions of dollars" claim unless you want to make the claim that the government is subsidizing both rural and non-rural citizens to the tune of trillions of dollars, which nobody would doubt.

The rest of the budget adds up to $1,163 billion dollars. Even if you made the wild assumption that all that money went straight into the pockets of rural Americans, it's hardly _trillions_ of dollars.

(Note that I'm ignoring state budgets. But I think the trillions of dollars assertion is so absurd that I'm not going to waste the time to look up those stats as well.)

[1] [https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs...](https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs- images/52xxx/52408-Land-Budget_Overall.png).

<comment><USER9> The problem is that you can't look up those stats. They don't exist. I'm not talking about Federal Budget alone or roads alone. I'm talking about Federal Taxes, State Taxes, and Local Taxes as they apply to roads, electric lines, sewage, bridges, community centers, and the myriad other projects that go into supporting a healthy community.

There is a well established flow of taxes from urban areas to rural areas. We frame it as a progressive flow of taxes from high-income to low-income, but much of that low-income is tied to geography. I think the reaction to my post reinforces this. Comments in support of NY's export of low-income citizens out of the city have been up-voted. But, as I predicted, observing that rural Americans are consuming more public services than they pay for has drawn outrage. It's easy to call homeless people a problem, but people get angry when you point out how reliant they are on the government for their rural lifestyle.

<comment><USER10> > The problem is that you can't look up those stats. They don't exist.

Yes you can. You can obtain just about every budget online, whether it be state, federal or local. The person you're replying to showed you the federal budget which you seem to have conveniently ignored: [https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs...](https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs- images/52xxx/52408-Land-Budget_Overall.png)

You can see on that chart that the chunk which might apply to "roads, electric lines, sewage, bridges, community centers [...]" is the "Nondefense" chunk, which is $600b, or about 15% of the total federal budget.

I can't be bothered listing the budget for every state in the country but they're there. As for local budgets, they're going to apply to the local area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is such a Republican solution. They think they're just lazy.

<comment><USER12> Please don't post information-free partisan flamebait like this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


I built a discord for business during quarantine - <AUTHOR> https://timberlineapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> You can read more about why in the blog post I wrote: [https://blog.timberlineapp.com/timberline- welcome/](https://blog.timberlineapp.com/timberline-welcome/)

To put it simply I just haven't really been happy with the options so I created one that _I_ would want to use.

I know it sounds funny because Discord was the Slack for gamers, and a Discord for business sounds like it'd be Slack. But it makes sense I promise.

I built this by myself over the last month and a half roughly while sitting at home during quarantine. There's a lot it's missing but it's a good start and I feel like a lot got done in a short amount of time.</comment>


Slow down distracting sites instead of blocking them entirely - <AUTHOR> http://fascinated.fm/post/5942546298/slow-down-distracting-sites-instead-of-blocking-them

<comment><USER2> Anyone knows an equivalent for linux?</comment>


Uncovering the Flop of the EU Cookie Law - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08884 <comment><USER2> The EU just couldn't have stood to have developed a competitor to Google, Facebook, etc.</comment>


Rust RFC: Opt-in Builtin Traits - <AUTHOR> http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/02/28/rust-rfc-opt-in-builtin-traits/

<comment><USER2> _> Making opt-in explicit effectively solves this problem. It is clearly written out which traits a type is expected to fulfill, and if the type is changed in such a way as to violate one of these traits, an error will be reported at the impl site (or #[deriving] declaration)._

Please implement this RFC. I _really_ hope this gets in before Rust 1.0. I'm extremely excited and looking forward to using Rust in all my hobby projects once it stabilizes, but honestly when going through the tutorial this stood out as the only ugly wart in an otherwise amazingly beautiful language.

<comment><USER3> It'd have to be 1.0 if we want to do it at all, because it's not a backwards compatible change. (We're serious about backwards compatibility for 1.0.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a rather technical post about the precise details of some "internal" Rust semantics... Not exactly designed for a general audience.

I'd be interested to hear if people unfamiliar with Rust can make head or tail of it. :)

<comment><USER5> I can't tell what your point is. If it's that this is not appropriate for HN, I disagree strongly. If posts relating to a specific technology were not allowed, HN could hardly live up to its name. For myself, this was one of the few immediately interesting things on the front page, despite having little more than passing knowledge of Rust.

<comment><USER6> Having contributed a small amount to Rust, I wouldn't have naturally posted this one to HN because I though it would be of little interest to folks outside the community, but I'm glad it has interested some people! If you are interested in reading more posts like this, they pop up sometimes on our subreddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/)

<comment><USER5> My point is, no one bats an eye when someone posts something that's only relevant to, say, the Python or Haskell community. Further, I bet there are a lot of people like me who aren't really rustites, but are interested enough to want to keep tabs on Rust's progress. Anyway, I mean no offense, only to encourage people to be bolder in posting. :) I'll go subscribe to /r/rust now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So I really want to work with Rust on something and get to know it better, but as a layman of it this struck me as the wrong direction. As a potential but not current user of the language I'd rather see these kinds of traits _always_ be implicit, because that allows for more interaction potential between independent libraries.

But more specifically, this part of the post struck me:

        >   struct Cell<T> {
        >      priv value: T
        >   }

        > This is a perfectly ordinary struct, and hence the
        > compiler would conclude that cells are freezable
        > (if T is freezable) and so forth.

So how does it work, in the opt-in case, if Cell should be freezable only if T is freezable? Can you declare this kind of expectation and how complex does it get (particularly when considering several different traits)?

<comment><USER8> > _So how does it work, in the opt-in case, if Cell should be freezable only > if T is freezable?_

        impl<T: Freeze> Freeze for Cell<T> { }

> _I 'd rather see these kinds of traits_ always _be implicit, because that > allows for more interaction potential between independent libraries._

Quite the opposite: them being implicit causes trouble with interaction between independent libraries. Because at present, a seemingly innocuous change deep in the internals of one library can prevent its being used in another library—for example, a POD type can have an owned type added to it, and all of a sudden utterly independent code that depended upon its POD behaviour will fail due to move semantics on the linear types.

<comment><USER7> I'm not clear on how it being implicit or explicit changes this issue. Sure, it is a benefit for the library writer that they can be told that their library is breaking a contract that it previously held to, but if they change it anyway the downstream user is still shit outta luck either way.

If it's just about making sure library writers don't accidentally fail a changed contract just make it so that they _can_ declare an explicit contract that will cause an error if they don't meet and thus make clear the contracts they intend to continue honoring.

This makes the error explicit for exactly the right person in the event of a contract change: the library writer if they break without intending to and the user of the library if they are using the library in a way that they expect to work but were not guaranteed to by the library writer.

> impl<T: Freeze> Freeze for Cell<T> { }

I see. Is it multiple statements for multiple traits or can theybe combined into one statement? Forgive the newbish question.

<comment><USER8> It makes it clear that a contract is being broken, which, if one is following semver, would necessitate a new major version number. As it is, an expert could easily miss the change; making this explicit is a Very Good Thing™.

On the Cell Freeze matter: I don't understand your question. Can you clarify what you mean?

<comment><USER9> Do you need multiple statements if you want your type to be "Freeze if T is Freeze", "Share if T is Share", etc?

<comment><USER8> Yes, you do. But that's not arduous.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to switch to a new IDE in an afternoon - <AUTHOR> http://mthreat.posterous.com/how-to-switch-to-a-new-ide-in-one-afternoon

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of why I like Vim so much: every one of its users has a working set of commands that they know, and provided that enough users are in close quarters and can occasionally watch each other work, they pick up bits and pieces of each other's command sets. (Until they all converge on the entirety of the Vim manual, of course.)

Of course, it also scares non-Vim-users to watch us work so quickly. ;)

<comment><USER3> I love Vim, too, but I think the method outlined in the article does not work for learning Vim at all. The method basically works because every IDE has a similar standard set of actions, only organized differently. Vim on the other hand has its very own set of actions which does not map to any other application at all (with the possible exception for Emacs).

Thus, whenever a non-vimmer is watching a vimmer he only sees magic happening, but not understanding why or how. It takes an experienced vimmer to learn from other vimmers. This has happened to me a lot, but has not enlightened anyone yet. (Does this imply that IDEs are plumbing and Vim is magic?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or you could use the key promoter plugin to tell you what shortcuts are. Sure, you need to find at the first time but then at least you know the location of the action in menu and you don't annoy the hell out of your pair. Or use the find action command: Meta Shift A

<http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1003>

</comment><comment><USER5> The key assumption here is that you both have someone to pair program with, and that they're patient enough to teach you key commands. I wish I could learn a new IDE this way.</comment>


Touch screens useful on PCs? (Poll results) - alok-g http://polldaddy.com/poll/6880911/?view=results

<comment> alok-g You can cast your vote here: <http://polldaddy.com/poll/6880911/></comment>


Realtime monitoring of Wikipedia edits via node.js - <AUTHOR> http://nodelay.no.de/

<comment><USER2> Would really like to see articles it links to via the reference links if it runs into another recently edited one. Actually any information that will begin to connect the articles, edits, and users together.

Cool demo and thanks for writing it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [BTW, this app was done over this weekend as part of Node Knockout.]

</comment><comment><USER3> This is neat. I was playing with the wiki API the other day comparing edits to IP addresses. I am unsure about how I feel, but alot of companies edit their own articles; and the edits usually stick. Monsanto practically wrote their own entry.

<comment><USER4> This project sounds somewhat relevant, though it doesn't really correlate the content of edits (it just groups the edits by organization): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner>

<comment><USER3> I have found that the majority of edits appeared in the before time(pre 2010), and the amount of edits that stick are relatively low. On that note, I would also like to point out there are still ones that do. I have no issue with a company editing their page with updated information and what not, but I do have an issue with companies writing about them selves in a word-game kind of way; in the sense that certain words have different emotional impacts.

I guess this is one of the reasons I was never allowed to cite wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would suggest making the "Most recent 20 edits" section grow down instead of growing up (i.e. insert the new edits at the top of the list).

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice. Annoyingly, the talk page for "Object Relational Impedance Mismatch" came up, and I almost wasted the entire morning writing a rebuttal to person saying that the article was not neutral.

Then I realized I didn't care what he thought.

</comment><comment><USER7> This immediately crashes Safari 5.0.1. :(

Works fine in Chrome though. Pretty awesome, I love it!

<comment><USER8> Safari 5.0.1 (6533.17.8) here, no issues.

<comment><USER7> Strange, must be something conflicting with it on my end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do you prevent the evil Realtors messing up your statistics? If I am a Realtor I am submitting 5 million dollar rents in my sales area today, maybe even unleashing a bot...

<comment><USER10> You've posted in the wrong thread. You want this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644691></comment></comment>


Is the Answer to Phone Addiction a Worse Phone? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/grayscale-phone.html <comment><USER2> Possibly an option to reduce the amount of time you spend on the phone. Example, I moved and lived from Los Angeles, CA to Lima Peru for 3 years without a cell phone. It was a great 3 years disconnected from constantly being connected. What ever works to cut back on your phone use is better than not cutting back. Phone addiction and digital dependence is on the rise in the U.S. and developing countries. We just covered the topic with an info-graphic. [https://latechnews.org/digital- trends-2018-infographic/](https://latechnews.org/digital- trends-2018-infographic/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not enough ink has been spilled on this topic. Great share!</comment>


Hackers' Contest #1: Hack the way people are shopping. - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I would like to submit a series of short contests so that we can all practice our hacking skills. I do not want to focus on computer hacking at all.
The first one is this: Hack the way people are shopping at supermarkets.
The subject to be hacked is deliberately specific so that we all might make proposals along the same line.
Hope many of you will submit their ideas. You do not need to give the actual solution but , merely suggest some other ways the task could be achieved in a different way. For example: the goods that you need will be delivered to your own fridge every 2 days.
Let's see if this thread would be followed. It is quite amusing, isn't it ? <comment><USER2> I don't know if this is related but does anybody else think we should be given discounts for using self checkouts? I mean it completely bypasses the checkout chick but were still being charged for that service.

<comment><USER3> There' still a 'checkout chick' at WalMart by the self-service lanes. And a line waiting for her services.

Self-service has to improve an order of magnitude before I subject myself to the hassle and indignity. Want to buy a pocket-knife from the camping section? Alarm goes off, wait for the attendant to come type a code. Have an oversized item? Wait for the attendant to scan it manually. And where the heck is the code on these key-limes? Poke around at an opaque interface hoping to find the item in their manual menu, finally lie and call them lemons.

I never use the self-checkout even if the regular lines are considerable. Usually its broken or closed anyway, or nobody on duty.

The cure? Maybe rfid tags (have to come down from $0.75 to be practical) and an airlock where they scan your card and purchases and you're done. That would save lots of thrashing over the old grocery cart too - you have to handle every can of beans about 7 times with the current system.</comment></comment>


Why SourceForge Lost - <AUTHOR> http://usersinhell.com/why-sourceforge-lost/ <comment><USER2> Having worked at sf.net for a few years as github was gaining ascendancy, I would say that we thought about this a lot. And while a lot of the things that he says are true, they're symptoms of why sf.net lost, not the real reason.

The real reason why sf.net lost was much more fundamental than that. Really it was so fundamental that it was a business problem rather than a technology problem. As a company, management just wasn't that interested in competing, and therefore we didn't have the institutional ability to focus on competing with some of the things github did.

I am proud to say that it looks like sf.net finally has a fork button, though, and it also looks (from the outside) like there's some focus on delivering developer oriented features now on sf.net, so that's a positive thing.

The engineering and ops team that's over there is awesome and has great open source pedigrees, and has always been super interested in working on things that would make open source development better and easier, but really has been hampered from doing that for years by more basic business issues. I think things might finally be turning around for them, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's another take on this - programmers hate ads and SourceForge is riddled with them. GitHub isn't.

Also, if I want to setup a repo and put it on GitHub, it's stupidly, ridiculously easy. SF isn't hard, but it isn't as easy.

Open source software is about PROGRAMMERS collaborating. GitHub makes that incredibly easy and straightforward. Want to join a project? Fork the code and tweak til your hearts content. Your code shows up in the network and other people can find/clone/fork/hack til their hearts are content. Want to contribute to a SF project? Um... contact the dev and hope the project isn't dead?

SF is designed to be a kind of Download.com for FOSS. For that it's fine, but GitHub is designed for developers to share code.

Also, GitHub is great because it also does private code hosting, so if I'm working on my own stuff or FOSS stuff, I can use GitHub for both. That is incredibly convenient.

<comment><USER4> I think that's an understatement. Sourceforge is so bad that for years (well before Github) I have dreaded downloading anything from it or needing to use its navigation in any way.

Also, a fair bit of malware has been hosted there over the years and the site offers no useful search or way of finding what you're looking for.

The initial idea was a good one, but the founder cashed out long ago.

<comment><USER5> E.g., wget support was broken for a very long time. So, you had to either a. algorithmically compose a URL or b. navigate to the real download link using the browser, collating all of them together and then wget -i blah.

These days, it feels much better though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know as much as I hate these terms, I think nothing captures the undeniable yet intangible difference between SourceForge and GitHub as Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0.

For the younger members here I think it's hard to imagine just how freaking cool SourceForge was when it first came out. The idea of free, featureful project hosting was amazing. Back in the 90s, even if you had free hosting, there wasn't the selection of easy-to-install FOSS web software that we take for granted today. It's sort of like how cool Slashdot was in a world of Usenet and BBSes. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo. It's easy to forget how impressive Web 1.0 was for its time.

GitHub by contast came out of the Web 2.0 era where we had solid CSS, solid JS/AJAX, solid web frameworks, and a lot of hard-earned knowledge of UX design, and perhaps more importantly the browser technology to support it. I think the article makes a good distinction between code hosting and project hosting, and no doubt that makes GitHub's job easier, but it's not the whole story. GitHub is the result of a holistic vision that goes from the metal up to the UI and design bits. In the early days of the web putting together a team to do something like that was well-nigh impossible. With the ubiquity of the web today, the new generation of web folks can much more easily pick up both the technical and design skills to create the kind of amazing UX experience that sets GitHub apart from SourceForge.

<comment><USER7> Sourceforge seems unable to evolve because its business model is stuck in Web 1.0: bring as many visitors as you can and throw as many intrusive ads as possible in front of them before they can get what they wanted in the first place and leave.

<comment><USER8> As far as the terms themselves, O'Reilly was talking about a change in focus from _software_ to _data_... <http://twit.tv/floss73>

From that angle, then: SourceForge is a great place to download installers, while GitHub is a great place to get the nitty-gritty details about making a bit of software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would only argue one point in this: Github is _not_ a developer's paradise. It's good. In fact, it's _really_ good. But it has one huge weakness, something which all DVCS repositories seem to have followed: they charge per repository.

This is a terrible pricing model. It should, if anything, be based on per-GB of storage regardless of repositories. Otherwise it gets hideously expensive for people to, say, have many small repositories.

It just doesn't make sense that, say, the Linux kernel, and a 500 line personal Ruby project are equal units as far as Github is concerned.

<comment><USER10> Bitbucket charges by "private users". You can host as many open source projects as you want--many forks of the Linux kernel, for example--for free. However, if you want a private repository, you can only give read/write access to 5 people with the free account. <https://bitbucket.org/plans>

That's why I use it for all my projects--I have a Plan 9 kernel fork, an Inferno OS fork, and a bunch of smaller projects for a total of 13 repos, on the free plan.

<comment><USER11> Even though I prefer mercurial to git, Bitbucket could get a lot of converts if they started supporting git. Bitbucket is not the serious competition that I'd like to see Github get. For developers that prefer Hg to Git, Bitbucket has to compete with Google Code, Codeplex, and others...

April Fools:

<http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like Github a lot, and SourceForge has definitely dropped the ball, but is anyone else tired of linkbait article titles? SourceForge has a _ton_ of projects still. They didn't "lose" anymore than Github "won". Competition is trip not a destination. Nothing is for sure, and there's no reason why SourceForge can't improve their service and take back more of the market.

Us in the tech world need to stop thinking that something needs to "win" and "lose". It has fueled way to many (idiotic) religious wars about editors, compilers, and other technologies. Solve problems. Make the world a better place. And quit trying to find "losers".

/rant

<comment><USER13> > SourceForge has a ton of projects still.

That may be true, but I suspect that many, if not most, new projects aren't created on SourceForge anymore.

Most statistics are lies, of course, but Github currently has 2M repositories (including forks), as compared to Sourceforge's 300K projects. Seeing as how SF is over ten years old and Github was launched in 2008, that says to me that Github's where the real action is now.

<comment><USER14> How many of those forks contain anything useful, though? Not that most SourceForge projects aren't abandonware, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sourceforge was always hard for me to use, the standard template (code, forums, issues, mailing lists, wikis) were hard to set up (my experience) and use.

GitHub's UI really made impact on me, and the short name, the agenda from the people (I've seen couple of videos from the founders talking about not github, but GIT itself).

I still get very lost using git (p4 user at work, so svn feels closer) but with enough help from github I can see it done.

But all in all github is personal first.

<comment><USER16> GitHub UI is significantly better. It just works.

Visiting SourceForge feels like going to RapidShare, with all sorts of ads vying for your attention. Each project has numerous sections which may or may not have been filled out by the owner. Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

<comment><USER13> > Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

Or the bug tracker. Ulch!

<comment><USER17> Or the mailing list archive software they use, which must be the worst of a bunch of very bad ones. It seems incredible that there is no halfway decent way to view mailing list archives (mailman's html pages don't count).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Firstly, it's _not_ because GitHub's front-end is nicer

Nope, I'm pretty sure that's the reason.

<comment><USER19> My mind got snagged on that, too, and it wouldn't let go. The rest of his arguments are not wrong, but I think they fit under that umbrella. That is, it's because GitHub's front-end is nicer, and it's front-end is nicer because SourceForge is oriented around projects and GitHub is oriented around code. The change in focus enables a better presentation.

<comment><USER20> It's not that Github's CSS is better, or their graphics are better, but that their design is better, and design encompasses everything, top to bottom. Most things on Github feel effortless, and even the tricky things are far from frustrating. This is evidence that they care, and that care shows in that the graphics and CSS are very well done.

Good design doesn't start with appearance, it ends with it.

<comment><USER21> In _Startups Open Sourced_ , Tom Preston-Warner is interviewed and says to design every detail of every page of a project before touching any code. While graphic design and technical design are very intertwined, I think in Github's case the graphic design came first, or was at least equally weighted. I don't know how SourceForge came to be, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the backend was designed before the front end design.

<comment><USER22> IIRC, the general wisdom during SourceForge's heyday _was_ to design the backend before the frontend. I recall reading a zen programmer story about someone writing a finance package, who was mocked by the "wise" programmer for designing and writing the UI first, before having any finance-related code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't have a repo on GitHub and while it may certainly be better than SF (and probably is, judging by the comments here), I have to take issue with the overall quality of this article.

First of all, when I started reading the article, I genuinely expected that it would be a good analysis of why GitHub surpassed Sourceforge, but instead it read like a GitHub fanboy's rant about how much cooler GitHub is. Some of the things said about SF are simply not true, for example, one of his main points - that if you host your project on SF, your project page is your website and that's it, the only other way to have a website is to host it elsewhere. That's simply not true. SF does provide web hosting, and your domain name is not some convoluted URL, it's "yourprojectname.sourceforge.net".

The author of the article states that GitHub is a "code host". But what does that mean, is SF also not a "code host"? Does it not hold your code in a repo? Except that besides doing that, it also offers a plethora of other services. They might not be the best there are, but hey, they're here, and if you don't want to use them, don't. Want to have a forum hosted by SF? Ok, you can do that. Want to have it somewhere else? No problem, host it elsewhere. Nobody's forcing you. It seems that the author is somehow trying to turn the fact that GitHub _doesn't_ have these features into an advantage for GitHub.

The thing is, this could have really been a good article. There are a number of reasons why devs move away from SourceForge. Unfortunately, the article makes no mention of them. SF's frequent downtime is one of those reasons. The general slowness and unresponsiveness of the site is another. There are good reasons why people are leaving SourceForge. Just not those that the author of this article mentions.

</comment><comment><USER24> I can say personally that the only reason I use GitHub and would never consider SourceForge is because of the D in DVCS. SourceForge always wanted to be your world: You have to give your repo over to them and let them manage it on their servers. By doing that you are now locked in to their world.

With git I don't care if GitHub goes down for a month or accidentally loses all my code or kicks me out and starts to charge for hosting. It's because they are hosting a _copy_ of my repo and are not the sole keeper. I _always_ have my repo with my precious source code history and it's impossible for them to take it away.

I suspect a lot of hackers are like myself and don't like giving up control where they don't have to.

That and GitHub just doesn't feel as hostile as SourceForge.

</comment><comment><USER25> SF.net lost because the site is incredibly slow, it's usability is somewhere between "whatever" and "bend over", they keep moving things around for no apparent benefit and for quite a while the site assumed visitors weren't potential contributors.

I started hosting code there using CVS in 2000 and it has certainly improved since then, but I recently pushed a branch to GitHub and there's just no comparison.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's absolutely astonishing to me that nobody ever mentions how Github handles viewing code. I always thought it's painfully obvious why Github won. They make viewing code easy. Duh. They have that nice little animation of code sliding in which lets me think that I'm not waiting forever, and I can actually navigate and explore other people's code.

I may overestime myself a little here, but I'm pretty sure that's the main/only reason Github succeeded. Not some new pricing scheme.

<comment><USER27> If I had to attribute GitHub's success to one thing, it's that animation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The first battle SourceForge lost was against Google Code hosting. Google offered a nicer interface and had some features SourceForge hasn't, the most important one, subversion.

SourceForge, like other sites managed by VA Linux/SF/Geeknet, has a terrible record of user friendliness. How many Slashcode-based sites are still running?

</comment><comment><USER29> The key is that GitHub understands open source. People who write open source aren't magical. We still need food and that means a j-o-b. You can have your public open source code and your private proprietary code right next to each other, in the same place. How brilliant is that?

<comment><USER2> Sourceforge was definitely created in an era when open source was much more project oriented (think, Samba, gnome, python, etc.) and back then it didn't make as much sense to have open source + closed source code side by side. But things have fundamentally shifted with regards to how open source software is created and sf.net definitely hasn't made the shift as smoothly as it should have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One key point that I think this article missed is the activation energy required to create a new project. On SourceForge, at least when I last used it, it was a very involved, explicit process, where you created a new project and went through several screens of populating license, status, etc., and then you finally had a place where you could stick code.

Whereas github lets you get a repo up and running with just about a single click and a 'git push', and then add on features and information as you grow. So it became the place to stick all of your one-off, throwaway, or experimental code, which got developers in the habit of using it, and it also had the room to grow if once of those things grew into a "real" project.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Using a SourceForge page as your project's homepage is fine in the early days. But once you get big enough, it's just not enough. The URL is long and doesn't seem permanent; the landing page is modular and boring, and it doesn't really convey that much information about your project. It looks like every other SourceForge project page."

It seems to me the author doesn't know sf.net too well. sf.net does still quite well for hosting web pages. I don't know pidgin but I wouldn't be too surprised if the homepage is hosted at sf.net and if pidgin.im simply is an alternative address for pidgin.sf.net. They (sf.net) are notorious for their downtimes though.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I created a SF project some years ago, it required approval from some mysterious and unknown administrator. That process took a week, and during that time I didn't have access to the resources I needed (version control, mailing list, issue tracker, etc.) to get my project off the ground.

Things may have changed since, but I wouldn't know because I never came back.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, we got rid of that process at least 3 years ago when I was still there. There's some after the fact attempt to not allow spam projects, but you can get started right away now (thankfully, that was a super slow process).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One part where SourceForge wins and GitHub doesn't is executables can be downloaded.

<comment><USER34> And mailing lists. The day that GitHub allows me to create and manage mailing lists for my projects is the day I can finally tell sourceforge to burn in hell.

<comment><USER10> Just run them through Google Groups, it's extremely convenient. I host my project on bitbucket and run the dev list on Google Groups.</comment></comment></comment>


Rapid Response Was Crucial to Containing the 1918 Flu Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/rapid-response-was-crucial-containing-1918-flu-pandemic <comment><USER2> There was no rapid response. The military and others routinely broke containment due to the war cause. Allowing the virus to spread.

</comment><comment><USER3> Eh? An estimated 40-100 million people died in this outbreak.</comment>