Ask HN: Any unfinished side projects to give away? - <AUTHOR> Would anyone like to give away / sell the projects which they've started but have no time or interest to finish? <comment><USER2> I had been building [http://wishcan.com](http://wishcan.com), a drag-and-drop travel planner, and will hand it off to someone willing to continue the work. Trip planning is difficult to get right, and notoriously hard to find a business model for. I think it's simply because no one has gotten the UI/UX perfect. I am now working on an IoT platform called [http://smartxlab.com](http://smartxlab.com)

<comment><USER3> Cannot agree more with wishcan. I sketched up a few different ideas for something like this, but never pushed on because I thought integrating with hotels, airlines, etc. Would painful. Also figured I'd need to automatically parse email confirmations, which would be a PITA.

What is it written in and how much work is left to do?

<comment><USER4> Parsing emails seems to have got a whole lot easier - most I interact with have started moving to schema.org microformats (eg, [https://schema.org/FlightReservation](https://schema.org/FlightReservation) and [https://schema.org/LodgingReservation](https://schema.org/LodgingReservation) for flights & hotels respectively).

It seems google/gmail are backing this quite extensively, which is how it's finally found traction.

<comment><USER5> Never heard of [https://schema.org/](https://schema.org/) before. Looks like a great resource thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes. A fully automated business for 3D prints of ultrasound scans in glass cubes. The USP is that you upload a low res scan (most doctors don't want to give you access to the full 3d data) whereupon it does image processing to create a 3d point cloud which it puts into a reverse engineered laser engraving format. If payment is processed on the bundled website it then sends the engraving file and delivery sheet to a sub contractor. Profit. Everything ready to run. Wasn't so very happy with the point cloud quality though, but it's probably good enough. Ran out of interest just before the marketing phase. Hackers eh.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like one of those things that is awesome at the time (everything related to a new baby is), but more like something that will freak you out and make you think 'why!!' a few years down the line.

<comment><USER8> We hardly looked at the 3d baby scan again after the real thing turned up.

You'd also need to deliver fairly quickly as 3d scans are normally done later in pregnancy so the baby is plumper and doesn't look "like a skinned rabbit" (that was a quote from a midwife) and you'd still need to deliver before the baby pops out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is something that I've been designing and playing around for a while...

I wanted to implement a generic MUC protocol bridge. Kinda like [https://sameroom.io/](https://sameroom.io/) is doing, but open source.

My initial approach was to look at Matterbridge (a mattermost<->irc bridge) and go from there. But I simply don't have time to do it anymore. The author is interested by the approach though so ... have at it:

[https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/issues/9](https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/issues/9)

\--

I'm also the author of [https://github.com/jleclanche/django-push- notifications](https://github.com/jleclanche/django-push-notifications) and I don't use it anymore, but it's a very popular django app. If someone around here is using it and wants to maintain it (or part of it), please reach out - I tried handing it off to Jazzband but that doesn't seem to be happening.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://enboard.co](https://enboard.co) \- a web app where you can create "boards" filled with links

Some examples of such boards:

• [https://enboard.co/web/](https://enboard.co/web/)

• [https://enboard.co/frontend/](https://enboard.co/frontend/)

• [https://enboard.co/webdesign/](https://enboard.co/webdesign/)

• [https://enboard.co/startup/](https://enboard.co/startup/)

It'd be willing to hand it to someone (on partnership basis) who could maintain it and grow it.

Stack is Linode/Ubuntu/Python/Django/Sass.

<comment><USER11> Why does it pop up something about another site? What is ggather and why do I want to "Be first to gain access to GGather alpha release"?

<comment><USER10> It's another project that I'm working on right now. The popup is there because the GGather.com will be somewhat similar to Enboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I built [http://mlist.io](http://mlist.io) but currently don't have time to do anything beyond maintenance. If you interested in email newsletters let me know!

<comment><USER13> I just started using this last week! It's just what I needed and is amazing - thanks so much for this!

I think I'd be willing to help with this.

<comment><USER14> Very cool concept. I would love to use it and help it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a great website for that: [https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home](https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home)

<comment><USER14> Great resource. I have been thinking for such a place where every college kid can submit their projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I made WordSafety.com [1] last year. It got some positive attention initially: #1 on HN, and about 79,000 pageviews in the first month... But then I just basically forgot about it, because I was so busy with other stuff. Now, after a year of complete neglect, the site gets about 1300 sessions / month.

If someone wants to take this over, I'd be happy to entertain any offer. The app itself is exceedingly simple (a database-less Node.js app), so hosting costs practically nothing.

[1] [http://wordsafety.com](http://wordsafety.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wrote MSPaint-as-JavaScript library, Literally Canvas ([http://literallycanvas.com](http://literallycanvas.com)). People sometimes want to pay good rates for work done on it. I'm always looking for someone to take over most of those requests, since I no longer have time for it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd be tempted to giveaway [http://spendful.com](http://spendful.com) to the right person.

<comment><USER19> Wow. I was going to build this exact same thing. And I still might. Would love to chat. My emails in my profile-- didn't see yours.

<comment><USER20> Also interested in something like this but I don't think I have time to do it on my own. If you end up taking it up and would like some help, give me a shout.

My email is miguel at <username>.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I made a program for one handed keyboard input. it has a rather unique way of selecting symbols, and it can insert it into any X11 window. So far it's in far from polished. It runs on Ubuntu if you download some rather common libraries. Take a look in the Makefile for details.

I won't have very much time to continue the development.

[https://github.com/richard-jansson/veta](https://github.com/richard- jansson/veta)

<comment><USER22> This really looks cool. But you should add some brief instructions on how to compile the code in the README!

I only managed to compile the code after one hour of work. Then I'm kinda new to ubuntu.

apt-file search

helped me out a lot. It was only when I could use apt-file to search for pc file that I managed to install the necessary deb packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Blanqd. It's a prett neat daily news headline quiz app concept. Built hybrid style and works on both iOS and Android. The quizzes are generated daily using NLP word substitution hacks. Could be cool/lucrative if someone had the energy to put into promoting it, adding in app ads, maybe making it player vs player, etc.

[http://blanqd.com](http://blanqd.com)

hit me up at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER24> Really like the idea. Thought about similar things before. This is an educational app and thereby makes the world a better place. I like the idea of getting people educated without them noticing it at first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a shitload of open source personal projects I no longer work on any more. Take your pick: [https://github.com/priestc](https://github.com/priestc)

<comment><USER26> I like that Giotto project.

Does it use WSGI?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I built DocsApp[0]: Documentation Hub for Your Developers. It is 90% completed. It is similar to readme.io.

If anyone interested to buy, please contact me. Email is in my profile.

The main reason I plan to sell is because marketing it is too hard (I am developer).

[0]: [https://www.docsapp.io/](https://www.docsapp.io/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Hey,

I dont have time to continue with this:

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

Cool thing is that I've made an API to take on orders.

If anyone's interested (even in the domain name) I can sell it to you at a minimal cost.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have built [https://www.writedown.co](https://www.writedown.co) an opinionated immutable Twitter like social network that has most of the features you would expect (something like Akasha). I wanted to make it compatible with blockchains also. Nodejs (ES7) + Ractive + Orientdb. Didn't get much traction / I lack PR skills. If you think you believe in the idea/cause you can either take it or work together (it is almost feature complete).

</comment><comment><USER30> [http://octave.im/](http://octave.im/)

Web IDE for GNU Octave (open source Matlab alternative). Originally built it because Octave had no UI and installation was a pain. It was heavily used by Machine Learning Coursera students and currently just pays for its hosting.

I'm sure it could be useful in niche academia market, but don't have time/connections to pivot. NodeJS/React/PostgreSQL/websockets. Email address on the home page.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've built a couple of App Store & GPlay apps that I am not actively developing or marketing anymore due to lack of time. I believe they have good potential and the ideas can be reused to create similar experiences but you need to invest more time and resources. Prefer to sell but I am open to discuss any interesting options.

\- Really Funny Fish Aquarium is a game where kids click on moving fish, who make funny noises and movements [1][2]

\- Fun Kids Activities is an app where me and my wife used to post one activity you can do with kids every day with a notification but it turned out it to be quite time consuming for us so we just listed all activities and removed the notifications. [3][4]

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/really-funny-fish- aquarium/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/really-funny-fish- aquarium/id737446904?ls=1&mt=8)

[2] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/really-funny-fish- aquarium-h...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/really-funny-fish-aquarium- hd/id782967622?ls=1&mt=8)

[3] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/really-funny-kids- activities...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/really-funny-kids- activities/id837561180?ls=1&mt=8)

[4] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leandot.re...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leandot.reallyfunnykids.android&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://www.kickassapp.com](http://www.kickassapp.com) is never finished!

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a shame that Assembly.com had to close - you'd find tonnes of interesting side projects there.

</comment><comment><USER34> I made Paper, an Instapaper addon for Firefox: [https://github.com/yegortimoshenko/paper](https://github.com/yegortimoshenko/paper)

The problem is, I don't use Firefox anymore, so I'm looking for a new maintainer.

<comment><USER35> Hello, i am a heavy firefox and instapaper user, i want to help with this extension

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I bumped into an acquaintance a few days ago who reminded me that he was still using a project I'd written a while ago: A language reinforcement app. I had occasional ideas to revive and monetize it, but haven't yet.

[About Glowso]([http://gcdc2013-glowso.appspot.com/#/about](http://gcdc2013-glowso.appspot.com/#/about))

[GlowSo Web App]([http://gcdc2013-glowso.appspot.com/#/home](http://gcdc2013-glowso.appspot.com/#/home))

[A talk I'd done for GDG Tunisia about how I developed it]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBwOuK9x5VQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBwOuK9x5VQ))

</comment><comment><USER37> I made [http://dillydally.herokuapp.com](http://dillydally.herokuapp.com), a way to share collections of locations with friends. Made it for myself and friends, but didn't get a mobile site done before I had to move on.

</comment><comment><USER38> We (me a and a friend) built [https://board.creonomy.com](https://board.creonomy.com) a visual bookmarking/inspiration organization tool for visual creative professionals, some of them are teams within big corporations that want to pay for the product because they got burned by free stuff such as Pinterest. It is on autopilot. Triple digits paying customers. It also raised an angel investment (that for reasons we can elaborate about if interested, we turned down). A new, better version with much more features and more polished UI is 95% done on my dev machine. Definitely looking forward to someone with the time and drive to make it bigger.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been making a podcast discovery app, it's not live yet but the latest home page screenshot is [http://imgur.com/a/Bkn7Y](http://imgur.com/a/Bkn7Y) (basically: Trending topics, Recommendations (based on social media profile and listening history, subscribed shows, and iTunes charts), and instant search of over 4.5 million episodes across more than 60 thousand shows.)

I may not be able to keep going on it though because of constraints on time and resources. Would be happy to talk to anyone who'd like to partner on this (or ideas about how I can at least handle hosting bills for such a large DB!). firasd at gmail.

<comment><USER40> Interesting! Cool idea.. I'm curious to where you got all the podcast data?

<comment><USER39> Got the Show info from iTunes charts feeds, then parsed the Show feeds for Episode info :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> [http://cloudmatch.io](http://cloudmatch.io) . A server-side app to enable cross-device gesture interaction. Imagine swiping pictures from one phone to another. Currently used by a game app: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=perfectearth.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=perfectearth.animals&ah=PXEdtPiIHdyUTcQ- vi-YzeFqky8) . The engine of my server app is open-source and I tried to make some profit offering it as a cloud service - hence the name.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have built a platform for Networking - specifically for conferences, meetups & business gatherings.

We hosted one conference i.e Apple's WWDC.

[1] [http://wwdcconnect.com](http://wwdcconnect.com)

<comment><USER43> Having built and given up on an app that did exactly this, I would like to learn more about your experience. I am in the process of giving away the app, back-end, etc. as a result of a flippa auction. [https://flippa.com/6895313-curia](https://flippa.com/6895313-curia)

<comment><USER42> An idea came to my mind when I was selected for Apple WWDC. There wasn't a platform to find who else are attending WWDC event.

Connect is an Online platform to meet other attendees before the event -

We build this platform keeping following in mind -

\- To share accommodation

\- Airport Cab sharing

\- A trip/ Sightseeing new city

\- Or Business Networking

<comment><USER43> That's awesome, you are doing much more than I did in the past. Kudos. If you want to connect and bounce ideas you can find my contact in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have a gamification platform like [https://badgeville.com/](https://badgeville.com/) that we've worked on some time ago. It was like 70 percent done.

<comment><USER45> this looks more like a company than a side project?

The blog says the company has already been acquired by another big company...so how can you sell it?

<comment><USER46> He states that his project was "like" badgeville.com, not that it "was" badgeville.com :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I made a music recommendation site: [http://recommendindieband.com](http://recommendindieband.com)

After an initial successful post on the indieheads subreddit, it's slowed down to about 15 users per day.

I also had people writing album reviews and they kinda got bored by it so it's been a while since the last review.

If this is a project people would be interested in (built in python / flask), I'll throw it up on github.

</comment><comment><USER48> [https://github.com/pvinis/mazical](https://github.com/pvinis/mazical) It's not much but it was a start. I airways wanted to play a game like that do I thought I would make it. It's a maze that you do not see and of the walls until you bump into them. I would love to see someone actually programming it so I can finally play it :)

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://github.com/avodonosov/pocl](https://github.com/avodonosov/pocl)

[http://testsheet.biz](http://testsheet.biz)

[https://github.com/cl-test-grid/cl-test-grid](https://github.com/cl-test- grid/cl-test-grid)

Unfortunately time doesn't permit me to move them forward.

</comment><comment><USER50> I started [https://togethr.tv/](https://togethr.tv/), a website where you can watch synchronized videos with your friends. Other features include text and audio chat. I wanted to promote it, but I never did. Average of 1000 unique users / month. You can contact me on firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't have a started project per se, but have some domain names I acquired about 2 years ago for online resume/project/listing sites in the developer/designer space (all ending in ???resu.me). They keep on auto- renewing, but if anyone's interested, I could be talked into offloading them :)

</comment><comment><USER52> A web app to have additional metrics in google analytics (your fb fans, youtube views etc,twitter followers etc). Basically it spiders your fb/twitter/youtube pages to get info and send it to ga via measurement protocol. It stayed online for 2 years, put offline a few months ago.

<comment><USER53> Why take it offline?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> yeah sure, the dns address is not registered anymore (getsdone.io), but i built a productivity app in sinatra; basically it leverages tweet like syntax and allows people to quickly delegate tasks to other people or oneself and track progress on those tasks. e.g. @paulgraham set up meeting for project review at 1pm tomorrow, pick up milk @danny. i basically got the web app up and running, but due to having to work on my full time job and other priorities, i just stopped after the dns name ran out after a year, i might be wrong, but the aws machine is probably still being charged, so all you'd need is a new ssl cert and renew or rebrand the dns name. never really got around to using it myself because most users wanted a mobile client.

epynonymous at outlook dot com for more details.

</comment><comment><USER55> [http://localqueries.com/](http://localqueries.com/) Make localized google searches from any country or language in the world. See how your keyword is performing in Cambodia for example. It's working, just need some follow up.

</comment><comment><USER56> I have been holding on to [http://ampoll.com](http://ampoll.com) for a while. Technologically, it's there despite a couple of bugs but I've not touched it for over a year now and will probably scrap it in the near future.

<comment><USER57> I think [http://www.strawpoll.me/](http://www.strawpoll.me/) is a popular site used on Twitch that does a very similar thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I started this a while back: [https://github.com/libeclipse/starlight](https://github.com/libeclipse/starlight)

Nowadays I'm too busy to keep up with development so if anyone wants to help out that would be great.

</comment><comment><USER59> [https://github.com/movitto/omega](https://github.com/movitto/omega)

A physics/universe simulator, space RTS in Ruby. Would like to continue developing it at some point but am focusing on other priorities

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd be willing to sell tournamentmaps.com - displays tennis tournament information on a google map. I created this when my kids played but they are older now. Data is scraped yearly from the source and map links to source web site. PHP/MySql

</comment><comment><USER61> [http://owlpro.io](http://owlpro.io) , Wordpress Security Testing Platform.highly appreciated but couldn't find time from day job to complete this. contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com for more info

</comment><comment><USER62> I built this site with semi-interactive flash cards for learning a new language:

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

Just abandoned it. I couldn't come up with a good way to monetize it, so I opened it up to be free.

</comment><comment><USER63> Started to build UI for Quartz Scheduler but never had time to finish it. You can see general idea at [http://www.quartzdashboard.com/](http://www.quartzdashboard.com/)

i think its ready to get adopted :)

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm looking for someone to partner with me on [http://www.ballotbin.com](http://www.ballotbin.com)

The system needs changes (in frontend, backend, sysadmin). It is pretty much the same as in 2002.

<comment><USER35> I can help you with the sysadmin/devops stuff, if you want contact me: hn at leandrosf dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> [https://www.starve.de](https://www.starve.de)

[http://cocktailiciousapp.com](http://cocktailiciousapp.com)

every now and then i do some maintenence but... you know.

</comment><comment><USER66> Not exactly give away or sell, rather looking for a partner that could make [http://exmerg.com](http://exmerg.com) better. If interested ping me at sevce at bitfictioncom.

</comment><comment><USER67> I got servpaid.com which is a front end for Stripe payments.

It needs a lot of work done, I only got a few clients. I really don't know what to do with it... suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER68> Can you share your interests / capabilities upfront? Definitely have some side projects gathering dust but they need to go to a good home...

</comment><comment><USER69> Phrase.it - speech bubble photo app.

Built it a couple of years ago but lost interest. Still used by 100+ users per day. Ping me at email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER70> I used to write a fairly popular cross-platform text editor. Been thinking about open-sourcing it.

</comment><comment><USER71> I have one side project GTheme.io[1] selling Ghost.org premium themes. Some improvement (SSL, auto payment to sellers, content blogging, etc) can be done to make it as passive income. 11 of the themes are designed by myself.

As my focus shifted, I plan sell it.

[1]: [http://www.gtheme.io/](http://www.gtheme.io/)

<comment><USER72> Which themes are yours and how much would you be willing to sale the copyright to them for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Are you trying to create a website where people can give away their side projects?

</comment><comment><USER74> Yes, Datasets.co. A site for sharing/indexing machine learning datasets.

</comment><comment><USER75> a friend gave me [http://www.thewebsiteprice.com/](http://www.thewebsiteprice.com/) that i am willing to sell, if anybody interested in buying.

<comment><USER14> Seems interesting. What is the logic behind the price calculation. You can send me details at email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Anyone interested in C++/Windows/Desktop products?

Note, this is a commercial product, customers include Airbus, and everyone else.

Mostly pirated, you'll have to figure that one out.

Asking $125K or $500K for everything.

<comment><USER77> You what? Can you tell what it does. Just genuinely interested to know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> www.skeleton.io - Was supposed to be a collection of skeletons for tech projects. Interested in selling if you want to

</comment><comment><USER79> S3b why?

</comment><comment><USER80> a wordpress installer</comment>


Flies can take off backwards - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2008-08-scientists-flies-hard-swat.html <comment><USER2> Thought is was already known; meaning I seen high-speed video of this behavior somewhere before.

(FUN FACT: Flies see so much faster than humans that florescent lights to flies appear to be lights that're blinking on & off.)</comment>


Tablet Musings - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/tablet_musings <comment><USER2> What really amazes me is the fact that even on this site, the discussion barely touches the app store issue.

It might be true that the tablet will have a significant impact on tomorrow's computing platforms. But what really scares me is the prospect that it might become more and more accepted that the user will loose the freedom to decide what software he can install and thus what to do with the machine.

This is something that goes against anything we learned from the open web and, of course, from "hacking" (jailbreaking does not count here). It goes against the central things I value at computing.

By comparison, _I_ could not care less whether this thing comes with Flash or not.

<comment><USER3> Well said. The sort of control that Apple is trying to exert is terrible for both freedom and innovation; if Microsoft had it 15 years ago they never would have allowed the web to develop as it did. Yet Apple's fanboys are cheering them on as they position themselves to block any development that might interfere with their business model.

This is a major reason why I ordered a Nexus One today to replace "my" iPhone, which Steve has made clear is only mine in the sense that I paid for it.

<comment><USER4> 15 years ago Microsoft held a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Apple is nowhere near a majority in the SmartPhone market today. I think there's very little chance they will ever hold that type of dominant position in the SmartPhone market so whatever they choose to do with the iPhone & App Store doesn't really impede the consumer's ability to choose an open platform. I think choice is a good thing. If someone wants an open platform they can get it. If someone wants a nicely packaged, but extremely functional and trouble free, platform Apple will sell it to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really hope he's wrong about several of these things (no flash, only apps from an app store, full Apple lockdown of everything). Why would I want another iPhone, just with a bigger screen? Especially when it's not clear when I'd use it over an iPhone or my Macbook? I can only handle so much of the Apple totalitarianism, especially if the damn thing costs $1500 or something.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately - I bet a lot of this is dead on. I can't imagine the device being more open than any other Apple product is.

<comment><USER5> But that's just it...Apple's products vary widely in their degree of openness, from the iPod / iPhone / Apple TV on the end to their computers on the other end. So is this thing more like a computer (you buy it, you own it, hack it to hell and put anything you want on it), or an iPhone (you're basically renting this device from us, and we're going to dictate exactly what you can do with it)?

<comment><USER7> It's my understanding that the original reason behind the closed architecture of the iPhone was to keep the device secure on cell networks. Most of the restrictions are there to protect outside access, which is a good thing for the less savvy users. Plenty believe the App Store and SDK were an afterthought, added only after people grumbled about the restrictions of web- only apps, which were the simplest way to guarantee 3rd party software was safe.

Without the risk of an insecure cellular network, greed would be the only motivating factor in keeping this a closed device.

<comment><USER8> _Without the risk of an insecure cellular network, greed would be the only motivating factor in keeping this a closed device._

What about the rumors that the Tablet will include nationwide 3G access, similar to the Kindle? I believe this is a necessary addition -- think about how useful the iPhone would be without Edge/3G access: not at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not including flash on a tablet seems like a mistake to me. It's one thing on a cell phone, but quite another on a device that will probably be positioned as a casual use computer.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's necessarily a mistake if your goal is to strong-arm the industry towards abandoning Flash.

<comment><USER11> The problem with flash (and the upside) is that it lets designers tackle the whole problem of site design, fonts, look and feel, etc in their domain. I would love to see flash replaced by html5 and css, but I think momentum is not on my side.

<comment><USER12> Yeah but take projects like typekit, for instance. Clearly there are businesses to be made in solving some of these problems, and smart designers understand the importance of web accessibility. It seems like as developers and designers we'll create much more wealth finding creative ways to abandon Flash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My guess is Apple's tablet is primarily designed as a competitor to PC net books. People have speculated about it being a MacBook replacement but there's a huge difference in the type of consumer buying a $350 net book and a $999+ MacBook. I think Apple has insulated their computer business from being cannibalized from lower end devices. Lots of people say "if I already have an iPhone and a MacBook why would I want a tablet?" and the answer probably is you don't. This product is not aimed at you. It's for the people who don't want a $999+ MacBook and are currently buying PC net books instead. As such I think the price will be <$499 (maybe a bit higher on launch just to cover supply & demand)

</comment><comment><USER13> Check out this week's MacBreak Weekly for more Gruber tablet speculations: <http://twit.tv/mbw174>

</comment><comment><USER14> Take a traditional laptop and swap the position of the keyboard and the screen. Then, make the keyboard detachable and turn the screen into a touch screen. Voila, tablet PC.

With a good industrial design house, someone could give it sex appeal, and between the iMac and the Macbook Air, thats the something different I'm dreaming of from Apple.

</comment><comment><USER15> The browsing experience will be more of a core thing for the Tablet than for the iPhone. One reason for this is that I expect the Tablet will replace the low-end MacBooks and will need to offer great e-mail and browsing experience.

(Alas) too many sites currently rely on Flash to not include it in the Tablet OS.

<comment><USER6> Form and function wise I just don't get tablets. I don't seem them replacing MacBooks.

<comment><USER16> Laptops are kind of awkward when doing something besides sitting and using a laptop. So when cooking, or when gaming (bg more than vg), or fixing stuff around the house, or whatever, tablet form makes sense. It is an information lookup device, like puting documents on a clipboard, more than a laptop replacement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Probably Steve and friends think something like: why have I to complicate my life (and the user experience ov my customers) with some 3rd party technology?

</comment><comment><USER18> How iPhone or iPad are going to be the best web browser devises if Apple restrict content format from the Internet?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the iTunes LP API (not sure what it's actually called) will play a very big part in this thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm amazed that anybody is still expecting Flash. Has the iPhone not conclusively demonstrated that Flash is a legacy feature of dwindling relevance?

<comment><USER21> no, it hasn't. for video, maybe, but there are still a lot of websites that are useless on mobile safari without flash just for stupid things like animated menus.

<comment><USER20> _just for stupid things like animated menus_

Like I said: dwindling relevance. Nobody in their right mind uses Flash for anything important. The one small exception is games, but the iPhone platform has no shortage of games that are faster, better looking, and better tailored to the platform than anything you can do in Flash.

<comment><USER22> _cough_ _cough_ YouTube? (also, the majority of online display advertising, Facebook and countless other uploaders, etc...)

<comment><USER20> The iPhone has supported YouTube through a native application _since it launched_. It does this by streaming the MPEG-4 video directly instead of using Flash as a player. Every other video site does this as well, and they don't even need a native app or any server-side weirdness. The only reason we don't do this on the desktop is inertia.

 _the majority of online display advertising_

Which no consumer gives a flying fuck about and many actively oppose. It isn't "important". Nobody would desire Flash just so they could get Flash advertising.

 _Facebook and countless other uploaders_

The iPhone has no user-visible filesystem for these to interface with. Even if it did, it isn't as though Flash is the only way to upload files: it just happens to be a way that skirts around browser limitations. A native application (even on the desktop, like Flickr Uploadr or iPhoto's Facebook integration) does the same thing.

I'm not trying to say that Flash is dead. Obviously it is in use all over the place. I'm just saying it's not a vital thing to have in anything _new_ , and can cite the iPhone's success in the past few years as an example.

<comment><USER22> _Nobody in their right mind uses Flash for anything important._

iPhone has, but I'd wager the vast majority of YouTube users watch videos in their browsers.

 _the majority of online display advertising_ Advertisers are the revenue source for innumerable online sites; they like Flash so it _is_ important.

Re: uploaders... _A native application...does the same thing._ Sure, but again, I'd wager that most people use the on-site bulk uploaders.

The point is that Flash is useful and easily accomplishes things (with nearly 100% market penetration) that would be much more difficult without Flash (building a native app, trying to animate ads across browsers).

<comment><USER20> _I'd wager the vast majority of YouTube users watch videos in their browsers._

Yes, but what are they actually doing? They're streaming the exact same h.264 video, except using the Flash plugin as a (buggy, inefficient) decoder.

 _they like Flash so it is important._

Not to users. Users are the ones who actually buy and use the devices that end up viewing the ads. No user buys a device for a _better ad experience_. That's nonsense.

 _nearly 100% market penetration_

This is not going to hold true as more people browse the web on devices that lack Flash. Such devices may not be the sole or even primary way of browsing the web for some time, but in terms of total volume of web usage, it is _already_ significant, and will only grow. It will make less and less sense to target a web platform that can't be reached every way that people use the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, useless as a tablet PC, in summary.</comment>


Keep Webpack Fast: A Field Guide for Better Build Performance - <AUTHOR> https://slack.engineering/keep-webpack-fast-a-field-guide-for-better-build-performance-f56a5995e8f1 <comment><USER2> If anyone is tired of Webpack configuration issues / slow performance, give Parcel a try:

[https://parceljs.org/](https://parceljs.org/)

The project is less than two months old, so Parcel might not be a good fit for you. But if it is, it's usually a drop-in replacement. Zero configuration. Just run it and go.

We're working hard to add the most requested features: source map support is coming very soon, for example. But if you can put up with a few rough edges, Parcel promises to give you a ~5x performance increase over webpack.

(We kick off multiple processes to do the actual bundling work, and we have an asset cache, which accounts for most of the speedups.)

If you'd like to participate or have any questions, hop on our Slack! [https://slack.parceljs.org/](https://slack.parceljs.org/) We have about 500 devs ready to help you out and chat with you (about anything, really).

Feel free to snag an issue and start working on it: [https://github.com/parcel- bundler/parcel/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%...](https://github.com/parcel- bundler/parcel/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+sort%3Aupdated-desc+) There's plenty of work to go around.

It's been really cool to see so many people pitching in. We recently had a Japanese contributor help get Parcel up and running for multi-language projects: [https://qiita.com/zacky1972/items/0ce05454b67506edc634](https://qiita.com/zacky1972/items/0ce05454b67506edc634)

<comment><USER3> Maybe a naive question but did you consider writing it in language that is typically faster (C++/Go/Rust)? I understand the many benefits of it being written in JS but there is an inherent maximum level of performance that JS can achieve in certain workloads.

<comment><USER4> My naive answer, but I'd think that the heavy lifting for bundlers like this lies mostly in the external packages that parse and modify the code (Babel, uglify, postcss, etc). The core work of the bundler to wrangle which dependencies to pass to those external libraries probably isn't a performance bottleneck, surely?

<comment><USER5> In my experience you are not wrong. Resolving a build graph can be done efficiently. The main cost is typically the tools invoked to satisfy build targets. However, if the build graph does unnecessary work, it can slow the build down by a large amount, e.g. compiling files which were already compiled. In. a large project, it might be the difference between a 10 second build and a 10 minute build for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excellent summary of some of the techniques you can use to speed up Webpack builds. It'll be interesting to see how the ongoing work on performance in Webpack 4 relates to this [0] [1], and I'd guess that the just-announced Rust->WASM sourcemap lib work [2] will help too.

If anyone's looking for more info on this topic, my React/Redux links list has a large section of additional posts on improving Webpack build perf, code splitting, bundle size optimization, and other related techniques [3].

[0] [https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/6244](https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/6244)

[1] [https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/945486181575340032](https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/945486181575340032)

[2] [https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/954053251854344192](https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/954053251854344192)

[3] [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master...](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master/webpack-advanced-techniques.md)

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone explain how someone can make a build system and not make correctness and speed the top priorities from the start? Once you do that parallelism is third feature you implement, the first being running an action, and the second being a hash based dependency graph of those actions inputs & outputs. Once you have that dependency graph parallelism and caching just appear pretty much for free.

It looks like google uses bazel (a parallel dependency graph based build) internally and they have 1-2 second rebuild times on apps much larger then Slack [0].

0 - [https://medium.com/@Jakeherringbone/what-angular-is-doing- wi...](https://medium.com/@Jakeherringbone/what-angular-is-doing-with-bazel- and-closure-21f526f64a34)

<comment><USER8> See also, pants and buck.

I think it's a story of PostgreSQL vs Mongo - do you start out with conservative correctness and slowly expand your feature set, or do you advertise a lot of (poorly imolemented) features, and with the large userbase slowly increase your quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From someone who has experienced the dev flow on apps with very large, gnarly webpack configs 17 seconds is extremely impressive and sounds like heaven!

What a lot of devs may not be aware of, if their projects aren't of a certain scale & complexity (support for legacy code/library-choices/extreme- modularity/etc.) is that the magical nearly-instant hot-module reloading you experience with a clean, "normal" project should not be taken for granted because webpack builds/reloading can become a monster! Not to say you can't scale up good webpack performance (obviously slack has) just that it's not an automatic thing but something that requires some TLC.

Thanks for taking the time to share slack team!

</comment><comment><USER10> Hoping that someone might have some recommendations for a problem that we have in particular.

We have multiple sites, each of which has it's own theme. Our various sass files check the theme variable passed into the sass loader, and decide on the correct values for particular styles. Our react components import the stylesheet and reference values accordingly. We also have a spattering of old backbone on some pages, so it's not just react involved.

Unfortunately, this means that we have to build our entire application for each theme. This takes an excruciating amount of time. Parallel Webpack makes it somewhat manageable, but I'd like to eliminate building for each theme altogether.

Any ideas on paths we can look into? If our application was all React, I'd consider styled components or a theme HOC. It's not though, so I've put those options on the back burner for the moment.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use webpack every day. But the config for it scares the crap out of me.

<comment><USER12> I recently discover Poi [https://poi.js.org/](https://poi.js.org/). It's built on top of webpack. If your issues with webpack are configuration complexity, not speed, then Poi may be appealing to you.

<comment><USER13> Another option similar to Poi, that I'd recommend adding to any comparison, is [https://neutrino.js.org/](https://neutrino.js.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate webpack, it has been a hack from the start. I can't wait till HTTP2 is more widely supported.

My latest projects use polymer and a custom built service (in go) to automatically parse entry points to my application and index the required files. When a HTTP2 connection is made -- and the browser supports push, I will automatically push all the required files. With browsers like chrome the results are near instant and I have full control over what gets pushed or not.

Personally I think we need to stop hacking the web together and properly solve these problems. I think HTTP2 with push is a good step in that direction.

<comment><USER15> I don't see how HTTP2 can replace webkack. Even if websites stop making single file bundles of JS, I think we'll still need something to: \- Transpile from latest ES standards, to browser supported code \- Compile from non-JS languages like TypeScript, Flow, and so on \- Do dead code elimination, minification, and tree shaking \- Bundle code shared by other bundles \- Optimize images And on and on...

I think webpack is a mess, but I think it really is just a reflection of the complexity of the web platform.

<comment><USER14> You are just highlighting more of the problem. The fact a blunder is responsible for doing all these things is just proof of more hacking.

Most of the things you described live outside of webpack, and webpack is NOT required to use them.

<comment><USER15> Sure, I don't disagree that webpack merely brings those features together into one place. But webpack was born because 80% of the time you make a webapp you don't want just minifcation, or just transpiling, or just cache busting file names, or just file event based recompiles, or just bundling, or just tree shaking, and on and on. Most of the time, you want all of that stuff. People got tired of maintaining their 1000 line npm/gulp/grunt task files, so a bunch of projects were launched with the goal of eliminating that glue code. Webpack is the most popular, but there are of others like Brunch or more recently, Parcel.

I think webpack is a mess, but will probably end up being the mess we're stuck with for sometime, because while it is complicated, it does solve a lot of problems. I see a lot of parallel with the GNU make and autotools setups used to build most C projects. The layered way that autoconf, configure, and make build configuration to compile and install programs is pretty complex (to my eye). Sure, it could probably be simplified a bit, but cross compiling code that dynamically links to libraries and installing it on different operating systems is just a complex problem.

<comment><USER16> I use and am very happy with Brunch. Yes, Webpack might have more features but my Brunch config is like 25 lines and it just works. It took me fifteen minutes to set up having struggled with Webpack for a couple of days.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


19 Groups Sue NSA Over Data Collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/19-groups-sue-nsa-over-data-collection <comment><USER3> I think this has a strong chance of succeeding, eventually.

It does seem that PRISM is building a list of who people associate with - through email and phone communications, or various chat programs. Through this list of who you associate with, you can certainly start to label people and deny them rights based on their membership in various groups.

Back in the 1950s, the State Department was asking people to promise they weren't communists before granting them a passport so they can travel abroad. The amount of information they can get on people has grown exponentially since then - and that doesn't mean we have to be less careful with it.

First amendment - freedom of assembly - grounds is a brilliant way to argue this.

<comment><USER4> Except that in what way is PRISM preventing you from being able to assemble ?

There is NO evidence that the NSA et al are using this information to target anything other than the most serious of terrorists. Until we evidence of the contrary I fail to see how these lawsuits will be able to stick.

<comment><USER3> The 1958 Supreme Court ruling struck down a law that required groups to provide their membership lists to the State of Alabama. They don't have to "prevent" people from being able to assemble, but building lists of which groups people belongs to still violates their "right to pursue their private interests privately". So in large part, the right to assemble also includes the right to be part of any group (even communists!) without the government needing to know.

<comment><USER4> But again what evidence is there that the NSA is creating these list of groups ? They could just be simply looking at which individuals a person is speaking to. It is a subtle distinction but legally a significant one.

I just seem to see a lot of conjecture but no actual evidence.

<comment><USER5> I think especially in light of recent events, it'd be foolish to give them the benefit of the doubt.

You don't see evidence because these programs are hidden from the populous. Maybe you're right - we don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Metadata collation as impinging on freedom of association. Brilliant! Of course these concepts are very US-centric so we need to package these ideas up and sell them globally, adapt them to local markets if you will.

What we need to build is a website based off of Google Maps which allows us to drill down and wiki style tabulate the social and tech systems that individual nations are pursuing at the expense of citizen's privacy. The key players and enablers of these programs need to be highlighted. Questions need to be asked of our politicians globally exactly when they were thinking of consulting us about this growing global dragnet, this Leviathan as some have called it, Panopticon as others have called it.

</comment><comment><USER7> In simple terms, what do the people in the lawsuit hope to gain from the lawsuit? If they won, would the NSA have to stop the program, or would the government have to pass laws saying it was allowed?

I'm just trying to figure out what the end-game is and/or if there is any way to stop something as powerful and uncontrollable as the NSA (government in general?) appears to be.

<comment><USER8> The goal would be to get a permanent injunction barring the activity until such time as laws were passed making it legal. In the US system of laws its the way folks force someone to stop doing something when that someone is more than an individual (you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])

<comment><USER7> "you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])"

Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? It seems like after the banking industry was pretty much caught red-handed breaking all kinds of laws and/or causing all kinds of programs to end or start, none of them ended up behind bars. I have to think the NSA would be better at avoiding jailtime than bankers...

Maybe I'm just pessimistic but it seems more like the best this could hope for is the NSA stopping Prism and then finding out 5-10 years later (or never) that they started Diamond or some other program that does the same thing except doesn't record the first 5 seconds of phone calls, or something else that "obeys the new rules"...

<comment><USER9> > Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, > FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though?

Yes. E.g., [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's smart of them to include a variety of groups across the political spectrum, both left and right. It's interesting how this issue is positioned and who supports the fight.

<comment><USER6> I don't think smart has anything to do with it. I believe that this issue transcends normally antagonistic parties. This is something most of us can agree on. Left/right/liberal/conservative/anarchist/socialist/capitalist/whatever - <USER2> all expect a certain base level of privacy w.r.t. our private communication, both contents and metadata.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hooray.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really don't mind these data collections if it indeed can thwart terror attacks & can provides an adavtange over China/Russia/Iran, BUT I wish I had access to the data- like being able to see your own FBI file

Imagine, the NSA for "free" (kinda) has created "Dropbox++"\- all your online content indexed & backed up</comment>


Ask HN: Which are some of the best books on Mental Toughness? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The Enchiridion by Epictetus (and basically every other book on stoic philosophy).

[http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html)

My own opinion is that a lot of mental toughness can be developed simply by realizing what you can control and what you can't. This is known in stoic philosophy as the "dichotomy of control", and is put this way in the Enchiridion:

"Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing."

</comment><comment><USER3> Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Julius Caesar

By far my favorite example of any individual human's mental (and often physical) toughness. There's a thousand examples where he displayed herculean mental strength in the face over overwhelming situations.

Some that come to mind:

1\. He took groups of cavalry out on attacks during a heavy winter, letting each group of soldiers take a turn resting, while he went out on every mission.

2\. He grabbed a shield an went to the front of the lines when the Nervii were about to slaughter his entire force. Turning the tide in a situation almost no one else could have survived.

3\. Instead of giving up the siege of Alesia when a massive relieving army was inbound, he went double or nothing by enclosing himself in a double wall investment.

4\. He attacked a beach full of unknown numbers of enemy soldiers with chariots, in D-day style amphibious assault.

He did a hundred major things like this in his life, and a thousand minor ones we know about.

An excellent audiobook version is available free [https://archive.org/details/Commentaries_Gaius_Julius_Caesar](https://archive.org/details/Commentaries_Gaius_Julius_Caesar)

</comment><comment><USER4> I never thought of mental toughness as something that can be learned from a book. Has anyone had a transformative change from reading a book on the subject?

I learned mental toughness from physically grueling experiences (wrestling, digging holes, mixing cement). Experiences where I put myself in a mindset where I didn't have a choice but to persevere. After doing that for years, dealing with most mental/emotional struggles are manageable.

<comment><USER5> It's funny you mention digging holes and mixing cement! I spent a year as a labourer working on the M25 motorway. It did wonders for my mental (not to mention physical) toughness. Four years working in seismic and then on oil rigs in absolutely horrible conditions seemed to help too! {grin}

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Extreme Ownership" was popular this year: [https://www.amazon.com/Extreme- Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U- S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1250067057)

My personal favourite is called /Winning Through Intimidation/ , I think it is much more relevant to our capitalistic and legalistic society than military memoirs or the ancients, as much as I enjoy them. [https://www.amazon.com/Winning-through-Intimidation- Victor-B...](https://www.amazon.com/Winning-through-Intimidation-Victor- Business/dp/1626361142) . It is not prescriptive because it is a bit dated and specific to real estate, but the core ideas are rock solid.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think mental toughness comes with knowing yourself and how to deal with the world around us. Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is a great starting point. It's a favorite of General Jim Mattis the US Secretary of Defense. The biggest badass we would all be lucky to know.

</comment><comment> J-dawg I'm just beginning to realise that a bit part of mental "toughness" and resilience is actually self-compassion.

Striving directly for toughness can lead to you feeling bad or angry at yourself for having certain feelings, when actually feelings need to be felt, not repressed.

It's shifting your inner monologue from:

"You shouldn't feel so sad about that girl dumping you. You were only together for a few weeks. Stop moping around." to "You're feeling really sad right now, and that's totally expected and ok. It's probably going to last a while longer, and that sucks, but you're going to be fine."

This might be obvious / intuitive for most people, but as someone who always used to default to the first version when "talking" to myself, it's been a big shift.

To actually answer the question, the book that introduced this idea to me was "The Art of Extraordinary Confidence" by Dr. Aziz Gazipura.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read The Obstacle is the Way last year and I liked it. Also, Man's Search Meaning is a very interesting book about the personal experiences of Viktor Frankl surviving 4 concentration camp during World War. His outlook on enduring suffering and overcoming it is very deep and enlightening.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for your inputs and really interesting opinions and point of views. Appreciate it people :) I know mental toughness can't be learnt sitting at home reading a book, a combination of reading and maybe some physical, gruelling activities goes a long way in improving mental toughness. Putting yourself through that physical pain is a must.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I am a great believer that setting and achieving tough physical challenges can do wonders for your mental toughness. A marathon for example is well within the physical capabilities of most people, but many have not got the mental toughness to see the training through - getting up at 5.00am and heading out in the rain and dark of November is pure mental toughness. When tackling a modest mountain like Snowden or Scafell Pike in foul weather conditions it is primarily mental toughness that keeps you going when hail is lashing your face and all you want to do is go home and throw some logs on the wood-burner. You can build that mental toughness though just as you can your leg muscles.

<comment><USER9> I agree with the physical and mental connection. I use a kettlebell daily because of the combination of cardio and resistance training. Pavel's Enter the Kettlebell is a great source of inspiration for toughness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not directly focused on mental toughness but I think it indirectly explores the themes of mental toughness: Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations".

Really any text that explores Stoicism by it's very nature also explores the different aspects of your mind that people traditionally refer to as "mental toughness"

</comment><comment><USER11> Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield is a favorite of mine.</comment>


Ask HN: Freelance Management Services/Apps - <AUTHOR> What services are freelance developers using to manage time logging, expense tracking, invoice generation, and reporting for multiple clients?<p>Preferably a service that offers both a web and native app. <comment><USER2> We use [https://www.getharvest.com](https://www.getharvest.com) for that.

And [https://basecamp.com](https://basecamp.com) for project management.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been really happy with Typeform-->Zapier-->Invoice Ninja. TF feeds a bunch of other apps too. The Invoice Ninja guys are super responsive with customer service (<12 hours in many cases) and immediately helped with some minor tweaks I needed to get off the ground. The app is well laid out. They have a self-hosting version but the SaaS is so affordable and snappy, I see no need unless some privacy issues. Not affiliated but a happy customer. Please use my referral code if you find it meets your needs ([https://app.invoiceninja.com/invoice_now?rc=DNCBCKGS](https://app.invoiceninja.com/invoice_now?rc=DNCBCKGS)).

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using [http://hellobonsai.com](http://hellobonsai.com) for invoicing. It has been an amazing experience.

They do time tracking and a bunch of other things as well and are continually improving the product.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a settled on Toggl for time tracking and Zoho Books for invoicing. Toggl supports csv export and Zoho Books has an import feature that makes getting data from one to the next fairly simple, with the help of a simple script I wrote to transform the data ([https://github.com/joshrickert/toggl- zoho-books-timesheet-co...](https://github.com/joshrickert/toggl-zoho-books- timesheet-converter)).

I did a pretty exhaustive search when I set out to solve this problem a couple years ago, and ended up with a considerable amount of research that I summarized on my blog ([https://joshrickert.com/blog/invoicing-apps-for- freelancers/](https://joshrickert.com/blog/invoicing-apps-for-freelancers/)).

<comment><USER6> I second Toggl. It's simple and gets out of the way. The desktop app even reminds you to track your time if you are actively using the computer for a while but forget to hit the start button.

I charge a weekly rate (for a variety of reasons that I should probably write down as a blog post), so the data is more for my consumption than for my clients'. Still, knowing how many hours of productivity you can sustainably manage per day is valuable for setting your rates and coming up with estimates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> AND CO is a good service [https://www.and.co/](https://www.and.co/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks amazing - much better than most of the comparable services I've looked into. Going to give it a shot - thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I run my own time tracking tool over at [https://logmyhours.com](https://logmyhours.com) \- great for both freelancers and small teams! Built in invoicing tools, report exporting and mobile app for both Android and iOS.

If Log My Hours is missing a feature you need, reach out and I'll be happy to help :).

</comment><comment> alexander-edge Freeagent (UK) [https://www.freeagent.com](https://www.freeagent.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're comfortable setting up a server, I've been using duet for a couple of months which is great. Doesn't have a native app though but no monthly fees. [https://duetapp.com/](https://duetapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I use Timely for time tracking because of it's fast time-to-data-entry. Also, they integrate with calendar and todo services for those "what did I do today" moments.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Very early on:

* time tracking: a frankenstein combination of system logs (especially helpful when jumping between workstations), paper notebook, and chatlogs

* invoicing: [http://billable.me/](http://billable.me/)

* both: some elbow grease

Evolution (and current, w/ a small team):

* time tracking: [http://getharvest.com/](http://getharvest.com/)

* invoicing, accounting, etc: [https://www.xero.com/](https://www.xero.com/)

The first one carried me for a few months, at an average workload of 60~140h/mo and a maintenance workload of about 4 hours total.

The latter is solving somewhat different problems, but does equate to time won on the admin side.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://cushionapp.com/](https://cushionapp.com/) is a favorite of mine. Mainly a scheduling/forecasting app but has some great, newer features around invoicing/payments and time tracking.

</comment><comment><USER13> It might not be as hip as some of the other options, but Quickbooks invoicing allows you to accept payments as ACH transfers. Not many services do this. (Or at least, they didn't when I last researched it ~2 years ago.)

An ACH transfer costs me $0.50. A credit card transaction costs at least 2.9%, although some invoicing tools charge an additional percentage on top of that. On a $4000 invoice that's over $100 I would pay out as fees with another tool.

Nearly every client I've worked with has been okay with paying this way instead of credit card.

<comment><USER14> They also allow you to use Direct Debit if you are in UK/EU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use Pancake ([https://www.pancakeapp.com/](https://www.pancakeapp.com/)) for my invoices, expense tracking, proposal/estimate writing, and reporting. They don't offer a native app, but the site is responsive and works well enough on mobile. Pay once and run on your own server.

I previously used Toggl for time-tracking, but have been transitioning out of hourly billing and haven't been tracking time for months.

</comment><comment><USER16> Gsuite / Trello / Toggl / Xero . This is comprehensive as I have found a combination of services to be and still be relatively low overhead.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hear freckle ([https://letsfreckle.com/](https://letsfreckle.com/)) is good for freelancers.

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://books.zoho.com](https://books.zoho.com) is international and has been wonderful for my project billing. I've been using it for ~2 years as a freelancer and have no complaints. I don't have any business or accounting education and I credit the design of the UI with helping me learn basic accounting principles.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm currently building a small weekend project that will automatically chase invoices for freelancers. Would people be interested in that?

</comment><comment><USER20> \- [https://managewp.com](https://managewp.com)

\- [https://www.godaddy.com/pro](https://www.godaddy.com/pro)

<comment><USER21> never would have thought they expanded into that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Freshbooks. It's not free, but it has all the features you want, both on web and mobile. It costs me ~$200/year, but it saves me enough time that it more than pays for itself.

</comment><comment><USER23> We use Albert [https://www.getalbert.com/](https://www.getalbert.com/) (UK- only). Very easy for invoicing.

</comment><comment><USER24> QBserve is a great Mac app for time tracking and logging.

</comment><comment><USER25> We use [https://tmetric.com/](https://tmetric.com/). Simple to use and gets the job done.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been using harvest for years - and It's been great. The time-tracking widget has been updated - and the invoicing is smooth.

</comment><comment><USER27> Toggl is good for time tracking. [https://toggl.com/](https://toggl.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://hubstaff.com](https://hubstaff.com) \- for management and payments

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://wakatime.com](https://wakatime.com) for automated time management

</comment><comment><USER30> Wave accounting / [https://waveapps.com](https://waveapps.com)

</comment><comment><USER31> Time: Toggl

<comment><USER32> I have to second this. Toggl is fantastic not just for freelance time management, but for managing time spent on any project. It has a lot of features that you'd just expect to be there, like when the browser icon changes whether you're on the clock or off the clock, or how you can just click 'play' on a previously logged task to resume the timer for that task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google Sheets

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://www.upwork.com](https://www.upwork.com) (odesk in the past)

</comment><comment><USER35> freshbooks for basic accounting/invoicing/timetracking.</comment>


Show HN: A better way to keep track of the books you've read? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mylifethroughbooks.com/phil/ <comment><USER2> I would rather try to bring some of the experience of physically browsing through shelves online.

I am moving from Atlanta to Seattle. In the process, I am shedding six shelves of dead tree books. When I get out there, I may have some of those books shipped out there ... but I'm getting a taste of living with most of my possessions in the cloud. (Besides, what is past is past).

Nothing really replaces the experiencing of having a wall of books you have read and curated. I'm thinking of a device that would allow me to display my collection to visitors. A tablet someone can walk up to and browse. (With sensors to softly light up the space, like you would expect in an awesome museum). It would not be like the iBooks UI (which sucks), but something more immersive. It should be more like playing with Second Life, without requiring someone to be a badass at first person shooters.

Ah well, I will figure it out. Who knows, maybe I'll even organize a kickstarter for the app.

<comment><USER3> "Nothing really replaces the experience of having a wall of books you have read and curated". I strongly second that.

As a long-time avid reader, over the past decade its been an interesting change going from a wholly physical library to mostly digital, thanks to my Galaxy Note and Kindle.

But something I truly miss is having friends come over and curiously rifle through the books on my shelf and the conversations that were started as they asked about each one (as well as the opportunity to show-off a bit). Almost as nice an experience was, sneaking a peek at the cover of the book a guy sitting next to me on the subway/bus was reading and going on to discover that it is another good read.

So far, none of the digital bookstores/libraries have been able to sufficiently reproduce this experience for me.. though I have hope they, or something else, will be able to in the near future. Until then, I will keep a physical copy of any favorites on my shelf for that next curious mind.

<comment><USER4> I've had many walls of books for many decades, and can only remember a couple incidents where anyone ever poked through them.

Now, I'm in the process of cutting them up, running them through a scanner, and throwing them in the recycling bin. I have apps for ipod and kindle that enable me to browse the books on my lan, and I enjoy poking through them that way from whereever I am in the house.

I'm looking forward to the day that I can store the entire thing on my ereader. So far, that would be 70Gb, but I expect it to rise by at least a factor of 10.

<comment><USER2> Almost all my friends come over make a beeline for my library and start poking around.

Sometimes, I look at a person and pick out a book that they need. Maybe it is because I am gushing over book X and pressing it into their hands.

If you don't have friends poking around in your library, it's probably best to drop it into the cloud. Those collections get heavy. That's why I am thinking of up designs to draw people into the virtual library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Respectfully, I think this is a better way to _show off_ what books I read. When I think of keeping track of what books I read I think of notes, subject matter, author, etc. From the title I was under the impression that the audience would be the reader not the reader's friends...

</comment><comment><USER6> If you could grab this from your Amazon kindle purchases that would be quite wonderful to have a beautiful reference of the book covers.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I was thinking too. Not quite sure how to make it happen automatically yet...so far this was very manual.

What do you think of being able to send an email somewhere...and then a little bit later the book is added automatically?

<comment><USER6> You might need some kind of browser extension that reads your Media Library, I can't find any other way of automating it at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good job shipping.

That said: I use Goodreads for this. One big feature it provides for me is community curation, so it would be difficult for another service to usurp it at this point. My Goodreads account is also tracking 789 books - well past the breaking point of the GUI paradigm you're pursuing. A timeline is not really suited to administration either.

If you want to add a timeline for visualization, restrict it to visualization, then make it compact enough to accommodate more than one title per week across years of use.

<comment><USER8> Ditto. Although if I could pipe my goodreads collection into this I probably would. Why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love it. Probably not for me but I'm not sure if people here are your target audience. We're all techies and we see stuff pretty black and white usually. My father though would love it.

I've never taken the time to know if the following is possible, but it would be really cool this app could automatically get the books you've read from your amazon kindle account or itunes account.

Either way, I could people using it and posting a link on their personal website (e.g. click this link to see a small bio about me, click this link to see what I've read, click this link to see my portfolio, etc..)

If you're really interested I would enhance it a bit, maybe make a video that explains the concept, and try to pitch it to non-techies to validate the idea further. Spend a few bucks in Facebook adds or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER10> You know what I want? An easy way to be notified when my favorite authors publish/release a new book.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I might have to implement this myself since there's apparently no existing service =\

<comment><USER10> I have thought about it as well. I got as far as a bit of searching for sources of ISBN data[1]. It looks like the only place in the US to get it is from the entity that manages the US ISBN database -- R.R Bowker[1].

[1]: It seemed an ISBN stream was the best input to act upon at the time -- Amazon API might be another useful source, but then you would be beholden to a vendor's api requirements/restrictions.

[2]: [http://www.bowker.com/en- US/products/servdatalic_license.sht...](http://www.bowker.com/en- US/products/servdatalic_license.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Better? I don't know about that... Amusing though, with plenty of potential. I imagine at some point things won't stay so vertical and begin to branch out, and it would be interesting if you could start showing multiple timelines side-by-side (per subject maybe).

One suggestion + one question: Add zoom, or some way to get a much broader overview. I'm using the scrollbar to see four books. If I read that many in a week, that's going to be a lot of scrolling! And so my question is, how does it perform with hundreds or thousands of objects?

</comment><comment><USER11> I have a site I made to track the books I read. It's pretty much entirely optimized for my own usage, but I've taken the opposite approach. The main view is a table with sortable columns/searching. At least given the amount I read (> 100 books/year) anything less dense is not very useful.

I do have a "feed" type view that shows a subset of the books with pictures, but it's more for visualization rather than actually being able to find anything.

<comment><USER13> Would you be able to share it? I've been reading as much book as you for a few years and it's a pain remembering what I read, what I did not like in a specific book (to avoid buying same author if it was the writing), etc. And I happen to read a book I've already read sometimes and remember only in the middle of it "oh that reminds me something".

Right now I've moved so I made a list of all my books in a small spreadsheet but it's not enough!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very brave try. The concept of reading timeline is interesting (although I agree with others' opinion impractical).

b.t.w. is this service available for others to try?

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't available for others to try yet. Before I put a lot of work into the idea I wanted to see if anyone else found it worthwhile.

I read a lot of books these days, but for the most part they're digital. Because of that, they're not staring at me on a bookshelf and I find myself forgetting what I've read. Most importantly, I find myself forgetting the memories attached to those books.

Before e-books, I'd have physical copies that would remind me of specific moments in my life. It was nice to see a few books and think, "Oh yeah, that was when I lived in San Francisco and met my girlfriend," or "oh yeah, that book reminds me of my family back in Southern California."

I wanted to get that feeling back. The feeling of being able to look through my past...but by using books. I put this together as something quick and easy to make me happy.

In fact, all the code can be found here: [http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/12/05/lateral-on-scroll- sli...](http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/12/05/lateral-on-scroll-sliding-with- jquery/). If folks are interested in the idea then please let me know and I'll see about making something that we all can use.

This is just my way of showing the quick idea :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice delivery. Since you got our eyeballs, and all things being equal... you might as well add Amazon Affiliate links to your timeline product (or use a third party service like Viglink or refer.ly to deal with things). An extra bonus for yourself, if you will. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Already have <http://www.librarything.com>

</comment><comment><USER17> Heavy book readers will have hundreds of books. This is very pretty but also impractical.

</comment><comment><USER18> In you do this please let the data format be a simple text file with one line per book. Then I'll have this list on some pastebin or github and give your service read perm.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use <http://shelfari.com>

It is quite good, integrated with Amazon and even provides some stats.

</comment><comment><USER20> On my iPhone it is not a good user experience.

</comment><comment><USER21> I started a blog. It's nice to write a little something when I finish a book too. 52booksinayear.com

</comment><comment><USER22> Love it! I want my fifth graders to track their reading this way. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER23> The site look messed up on iPhone. Not complaining (or whining), just FYI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Uh oh. Thanks for letting me know. I'll add that to the list of "Things to fix if people actually like this idea" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> this would be a great feature for goodreads.com

</comment><comment><USER25> really nice, maybe could open source this on github with a small app that would allow others to do the same thing :)

</comment><comment><USER26> integrate it with goodreads

</comment><comment><USER27> only 3 ?</comment>


Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://inbound.org/blog/confessions-of-a-google-spammer <comment> kenny-log_ins This guy reminds me how normal i am in the grand scheme of things: "I felt discouraged and depressed. I tried to buy myself some fancy clothes and toys to feel better about myself. I immersed myself in a shallow relationship with a model who would end up being Miss Universe China 2014. I took weekly hiking trips with my friends in the hills of Beijing on psychadelic mushrooms."

</comment><comment><USER2> Appropriately enough, this page triggered >400 requests blocked by my various privacy tools.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I'm using uBlock Origin with pretty much all 3rd party filters enabled, and only have 19 requests blocked. Would you mind sharing what tools you're using?

<comment><USER4> Block `twimg.com` and see the count climbing to over 460 -- because of the avatars in the comment section. Personally I block such ubiquitous hostnames by default (using uBO's dynamic filtering), as they are as good as trackers (for Twitter in the current case).

<comment><USER5> Lots of people install ublock but never look at the settings or enable dynamic filtering. Thats probably why you get more than them.

<comment><USER6> Ironically, the guy you replied to is the developer behind Ublock. He's the person who knows the !most about internet privacy in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google is only a proxy to The Internet, nothing more. There's a bucketload of untapped traffic coming from sources Google could only dream of. I found this out by mistake when I had AWStats running for way longer than it should have, and it hoovered up globs of what we would call 'big data' today.

Some of the referal links are still alive today and funneling terrabytes of metadata through their servers; a practice I thought was more or less frowned upon, but still serving SEOs today. Still so much to tap into, still like 2012 too!

<comment><USER8> Google has been trying to put a damper on linking from your website to another one for years now. My first website in 1996 I developed the first thing I did was go to websites that had similar customers and we would exchange links so our customers would find out about our complimentary services. Now that freaks google out because they prefer everyone to see Google ads when searching so finding websites must be done inside of Google otherwise they threaten you to take you out of Google search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was kinda one of those guys.

I never used ALN (Authority Link Network), but I used smaller-tier services. And I ranked well for quite a while in my low-to-medium keywords -- things that I loved, used, and believed in (and still do). Never touched crap like HCG or Acai.

So here's the truth: It took me exactly 3 _years_ to get back to the pre- Penguin traffic levels. Only difference is, this time I've done it with an actual _brand_ and legitimate content: Breaking stories, researching things never heavily-researched, getting quotes from sources, and exposing scams and scandals as well.

Building a small brand is a chore, and we still have tons to do, but it's SO worth it. This isn't some-scumbag-domain.com - it's a real brand that has its own personality, fanbase, and return visitors who regularly come back to read new stuff and use our services. People Google _for_ our brand more every month... We even have our own haters!! That's like the highest honor!

Branding is hard work, but it's FUN. Repeat: it's FUN.

I still get emailed and asked about SEO frequently. My simple advice is this: _blow the lid off of something_. If none of your content isn't worth real people legitimately sharing... if none of your content isn't worth an experienced user from a niche forum reading it and saying "wow"... then you might as well not even waste your time.

Who needs to build links when you can write (or code) so damn well that people build them _for_ you?! What's better than that?!

Thankfully, when I was doing well, I wasn't stupid with my money. I invested into the future, and was able to handle the downturn without getting a job.

The lessons learned from this:

1\. Many entrepreneurs make their most serious money in SHORT bursts of time. No matter what it is, it can dry up, so don't go buying cars just yet. Get financial help from someone who knows what's up (not easy to find)

2\. If people aren't searching for YOUR brand name, then you're not doing "SEO" right, or you have ways to go.

3\. Despite all this social media stuff, Google _still_ controls some of the most valuable traffic. Don't do things that piss them off!

4\. You can have your filler content, but on frequent occasion, you must write full-tilt content like this article here - fresh, insightful, and worth sharing and posting to a number of sites and forums. Otherwise, you don't have a real content strategy. You have a WOMBAT strategy. (Waste Of Money Brains and Time)

5\. You can hustle for short-term money, but if you do that, you MUST re- invest it into the long-term game. If you don't, you'll just turn into that old guy spinning and hustling until the day you die. And at that point, you're not an entrepreneur, you're just a hustler.

Dang, maybe I should get back into blogging. So much to say...

<comment><USER10> Congrats on the biz Mike, hope you're doing well :)

<comment><USER9> Thanks dchuk, you too! Gearing up for a "go big or go home" kind of attack soon... definitely can't complain!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me:

A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map.

Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly described my product and service, which, considering the market I'm in had around 12 competitors (at that time), and considering my site was built for humans, had no keyword stuffing, and so on, felt, well, justified.

At very minimum if you were in the market for what my product did a visit to my site was a _great experience_. The site was fast, easy to read, well laid out, the product rocked, and so on.

I stress those points as the penalty left me reeling. I had _heard_ about SEO before sure, but considered it a gross exercise in unnatural manipulation -- I would never go down that road. Hell, it took me months to realize I had a "penalty", and then several more to figure out it was from this thing named after an arctic fish.

And yet here I was penalized, and where my question comes in. I have a few small pieces of information that may be relevant.

About a year before my penalty I started a blog covering general product announcements and other items of interest to programmers. These items almost never had links, and if they did, would be directly related to the subject mater. As a concrete example, I wrote a post about learning SSE in assembly, and linked to an Intel blog post on the same subject.

However, I did allow comments on this blog at first, and exactly two times I logged in to find spam comments linking to discount shoes or handbags. These comments were promptly removed, and, after that second time, I disabled comments altogether.

Fast forward two years into the penalty (yes, two years in!). It's mid-2014 and I've been researching what happened. Turns out at the time of my initial penalty I had well over a million "back links" pointing to my site. All were from incredibly shady sites. Chinese language pages with literally hundreds of "form posts", 99% filled with absolute gibberish text. But within that mass of garbage would be a link to my site, the homepage no less, advertising discount Louis Vuitton handbags. The link would generally be along the lines of (broken HTML intentional) href = "formboss.net" > Discount Handbags </a

At first the scam seems obvious: If my site had links pointing to knockoff handbag retailers, then my high Google rank would transfer over...wait...huh?

See, that's where I get stuck. I see the individual pieces, but I cannot piece the scam together in any way that makes scene. The Chinese sites that linked to me, who in the world would be reading those? Further, they linked to my home page. Short of being hacked (which I never was), how would a home page link make sense?

The short-lived links on my blog: Sure, they linked to outside sources, and so conceivably my high rank would valuable, but _why_ the 1,000,000+ inbound links to my site?

That's the part that keeps me awake at night. The thing I had control over, the outbound links -- Zapped 'em immediately. The damage clearly came from those inbound links, but they make no sense to me.

What was the game I played for?

<comment><USER12> I am not a black hat SEO expert by any means, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. It sounds like you may have been the victim of a negative SEO attack. In short: one of your competitors may have created these millions of spammy links in order to decrease your rankings (and, presumably, raise their own closer to the top). If this is still a site you care about, consider disavowing the spammy links: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en)

<comment><USER11> A very solid piece of advice on the disavow links, and very much acted upon a few years ago (of course I still maintain a close watch on links!)

Also, to another reply a bit further down, I actually started fresh with a new domain about 6 months after the initial penalty, and used 301 redirects from the old (penalized) site to the new.

I did this to reduce confusion from my existing users, as their was no reason why they should have to retype or bookmark a new domain name. Sure I was going through a very rough patch, but my users should not have to as well!

I had a simple bit of logic that said if you were coming from the old domain, to pop up a message say hi, we had a name change. Not ideal, but that's the best I could come up with.

Little did I know that the 301 actually transferred the penalty to the new site. Shortly after launching I was hit with a second penalty, and the thought of having to change domain names _again_ was just...it's just wrong. The inconvenience and confusion this creates for users is still being felt to this day. I routinely get emails from users of the first domain asking if I'm the same company.

So yeah, I've been trying here, but my lucks been pretty bad : )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fun read, thanks for posting. Illustrative of a young industry and people exploiting the temporary holes.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, he's still slimey - and he considers himself reformed!</comment>


Ketamine acts fast to treat depression and its effects last – but how? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180621172450.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Main upsides of Ketamine for depression vs typical antidepressants (SSRIs, etc) \- Ketamine seems to have a much larger effect size (-~0.99 [1] vs -~0.35 for typical antidepressants [2]) [If anyone spots an error, please let me know]

For context, an SMD of 0.2 is small, >0.5 is medium, and >0.8 is large.[3]

Advantages of Ketamine vs other antidepressants

\- Ketamine seems to have a much stronger antidepressant effect than our current antidepressants (To me this seems to be by far the most important/interesting thing)

\- Benefits occur within hours rather than weeks

\- Doesn't seem to interfere with sexual function, unlike many antidepressants

Main downsides of Ketamine for depression

\- Much more expensive and normally not covered by insurance

\- It's less well studied

\- You have to go in for additional ketamine infusions to maintain the effects, it seems roughly ~1x a month long term

(The SMD for typical antidepressants seems to range from ~-0.13 to ~-0.35, with Tricyclic antidepressants slightly higher at around -~0.42.[4][5][6])

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25038867](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25038867)

[2]: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wps.20112](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wps.20112)

[3]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730804/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730804/)

[4]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2903535/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2903535/)

[5]: [http://www.annfammed.org/content/3/5/449.full](http://www.annfammed.org/content/3/5/449.full)

[6]: [http://www.cochrane.org/CD011735/MUSKEL_selective- serotonin-...](http://www.cochrane.org/CD011735/MUSKEL_selective-serotonin- reuptake-inhibitors-ssris-fibromyalgia)

<comment><USER2> There's really no cost/benefit if you're at the medical point if needing to try ketamine - that usually means you've tried all the previous medication. It's not really expensive, just expensive for humans because pharmaceutical companies set their own prices (veterinarians have been using it for decades).

My suspicion is that it works as a strong dissociative and allows for building some new neural connections to things, away from having practically every event/trigger in life being connected to a depressive spiral (depressed the last time I ate lunch, triggers another depressive spiral).

<comment><USER3> It's not expensive at all. It's around $5-10 for a vial of ketamine.

The cost benefit definitely matters because it's possible to go broke with IV infusions. I pay. around $5 a lozenge.</comment></comment></comment>


The Math Ceiling: Where's your cognitive breaking point? - <AUTHOR> http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/04/08/the-math-ceiling-wheres-your-cognitive-breaking-point/

<comment><USER2> The second half of the article is the interesting one. Skip/skim past the "do you have a ceiling" bit. The meat is the idea that if you go too long with a missing bit of understanding, the workarounds and coping strategies you form to keep progressing can create a barrier which is not remedied by filling in the original missing bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> The proper way of playing fast notes on a guitar (with a pick) is alternate picking, up/down/up/down. So a three note per string scale ascension would be dud udu dud udu ... I never learned that. Instead I took the shortcut called economy picking, just picking in the direction the pick moves. The same scale ascension would be dud dud dud dud... (since you move down to the next string). This is also a valid technique, but meant as a compliment and normally learned after mastering alternate picking.

Now, economy picking worked pretty well for me for a while, but I'm starting to feel the disadvantages now (very hard to keep a perfectly even pace, easy to get "stuck" in certain picking patterns, etc.) But now for the life of me I cannot unlearn and relearn.

Far fetched parallel, but it makes me think that he could be right about the math as well.

<comment><USER4> In your second example I think you meant: dud udu dud dud</comment></comment>


Tips for software engineering internships - <AUTHOR> http://www.shubhro.com/2014/10/15/tips-for-internships/

<comment><USER2> >Barriers blocking me from getting work done

It took me too long to figure this one out. I had a habit of hiding what I was having trouble with because of fear of looking incompetent. Even if you're not actively looking for help on a tough problem yet let your team know. There's a good chance that either someone else has solved that problem or you'll pair up and solve it together.</comment>