Tell HN: In case you're interested, I'm selling my webapp wrttn.in - <AUTHOR> https://flippa.com/auctions/116170/Wrttn-in---A-popular-unique-web-app-

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using it mainly to fund ongoing projects, as I, the broke college student, have run out of cash. The last bit of money I had to my name was spent on the flippa listing.

<comment><USER2> What framework did you use to create this site?

<comment><USER3> From the Flippa description: "The app is built on the simple ruby web framework Sinatra and runs on Heroku."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> sold. the other six 'online notepad' options are terrible. this should be #1. the only thing i'm going to change is stick an ad for one of my sites (inboxSEO) on it. also, i'm a sucker for helping out starving college students.

<comment><USER5> Lucky. I was verifying my account by phone when you bought it out from under me.

I was totally looking forward to playing with that bundle of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TIL: there is a website for buying and selling websites.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that it mixes in content sites with tech apps. I'd be quite interested in buying small but interesting apps, but as the moment I have to wade through a tonne of content sites so it's not worth my while.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, I've been thinking about setting up a marketplace just for webapps because of this reason.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like a neat idea. I wonder if you are interested in teaming up to implement something like this.

<comment><USER9> me too .

<comment><USER10> Flippa without the crud. Would use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wasn't aware of <http://embed.ly> \- thanks, looks useful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! you're welcome, I guess. They're a YC company I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why was the auction so short? They usually drag on for a while on Flippa. I was disappointed to see it had sold ;-)

<comment><USER5> It got bought out within minutes of being posted. The price was incredibly low. Sure, I could build that app, but it would cost (in time) several times the buy-it-now price of $350 to get it to the same level of polish.

It doesn't hurt that the guy who built it is a somewhat known quantity around here.

I think the market for solid micro apps is strong, you just can't find them on Flippa and other site-selling sites. I'm definitely interested in buying these sorts of things, anyway.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I hadn't realized there was a BIN on it. Can't believe he set it so low :)</comment></comment></comment>


Fyre Festival and the Daily Frauds of Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maxnuss/fyre-festival-and-the-daily-frauds-of-entrepreneurship-cf2b09f2f10a <comment><USER2> Is the OP kidding? I just watched the _Fyre Fraud_ documentary two days ago and it's quite clear that not only is Billy McFarland a con artist, he's a serial con artist. He started his "entrepreneurship" by hacking his school's computer to sell crayon repair services. His next venture was the Magneis credit card that promised "exclusive access" to events that it didn't have -- and went out of business. After being told many times that Fyre wasn't workable given the venue, budget, and time limitations in place, he went ahead anyway.

The most telling part of the documentary is when the interviewer asks him about all his lies. McFarland can't even admit to one of them. Ja Rule, though disclaiming responsibility, is just as guilty... and he's going to produce another festival which he claims is "similiar."

The OP says, "it's not a scam if you succeed." Who in the world would call Fyre a success? It ended without a single band performing, people having to be evacuated from the island on an emergency basis, and a $100M lawsuit. Mr. McFarland, for his part, is currently in prison for wire fraud.

It's disheartening that so many entrepreneurs today feel like defrauding people is the best way to success. Let's hope the Fyre Festival's failure acts as a lesson to some of them.</comment>


Why Companies Fire People, Not Fancy Snacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-people-not-fancy-snacks <comment><USER2> I think cutting benefits would be more costly in terms of morale. The article mentioned that sun laid off 5000 people and suggested that they cut out the vitamin water instead. Well, if you assume that sun has around thirty thousand employees, and each drunk a bottle a week at a cost of a dollar a bottle, that works out 1.5 million a year. Assuming each employee costs sun an average of 200k, cutting snacks would have only saved 7 or 8 employees. Even if I was off by a factor of ten, sun would have still layed off 98% of the 5000. So cutting snack and firing 98% of 5000 would be viewed as more drastic by the company than just cutting 5000 people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Snacks always do their job.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you had 100 people and cutting snacks hurt their productivity, you could end up with a more deleterious effect than you might get cutting 3 or whatever. Pragmatism.

<comment><USER5> Worried but full better then calm but hungry.</comment></comment>


Find a Geospatial File's SRID Using Scala and GDAL - <AUTHOR> http://www.whackdata.com/2017/11/23/finding-srs-srid-geospatial-file-scala-gdal/ <comment><AUTHOR> As I've started to work with larger data systems, I find myself relying more on Java geospatial libraries than I have in the past instead of Python/R. My preferred language is Scala though, which is luckily largely compatible with Java.

As I've tried to sort out the ecosystem, I was struck by the lack of examples and documentation. So, I'm going to start posting intro tutorials as I figure them out. Hope you find them useful!</comment>


J.J. Abrams Directing the New 'Star Wars': Exciting or Terrifying? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/jj-abrams-directing-the-new-star-wars-exciting-or-terrifying/272513/

<comment><USER2> My fear isn't that the movie won't be entertaining (I'm sure it will be). I'm only worried that the movie won't have the same feel as the previous, that it will feel like a different universe that just happens to have lightsabers and blaster rifles.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I prefer Cristopher Nolan. Lost was a lost opportunity.</comment>


Wpost Opinion on Bailing Out Newspapers - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503000_pf.html

<comment><USER2> _"Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet. Journalism therefore needs a bright line imposed by statute: that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement. "_

Reading this, the term "spoiled sport" comes to mind...

</comment><comment><USER3> "Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet."

Then put it behind a paywall. Or at least put a small, indexable summary page in front of an unindexed article (using robots.txt). Or invent your own search engine/news aggregator.

<comment><USER4> I think that the lawyers who wrote the article would have benefited from consulting with a couple of qualified internet engineers.

Having said that, the piece was written by lawyers, so it isn't surprising they see primarily a legal solution to the problems newspapers are facing. When all you have is a hammer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> See, the strategy here is to conglomerate _everything_ into one giant too-big- to-fail media monopoly, then get a never-ending stream of taxpayer handouts to keep the tipsy inverted pyramid of bad journalism and political spin from meeting it's final and spectacular demise by ten million otherwise-unemployed FOIA-armed citizen journalist bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613221>

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems funny, to me, that they would talk about making Google do the legwork. If this took effect, Google could simply do nothing -- and watch as the people who forced them to 'come negotiate' crumble. Google is the gateway to the internet for a lot of people. If you aren't in Google, you don't exist. This seems like the exact opposite of what these companies want. Also, the claim that "[newspapers] don't have the tools [to build a new model]" is utter crap. The newspapers have neglected the internet, and it's coming back now to bite them in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER8> Search engines aren't a public service. The article half-way acknowledges the robots.txt solution, and quickly dismisses it as unworkable. It's clear, however, that publishers have a recourse if they feel the search engines are doing them more harm than good. If they want finer granularity than is currently available, they need to talk to Google, not the government.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand, are they upset that you can view cached versions of them?

Or are they upset other people are selling information for cheaper?</comment>


Logic Programming slides from #HNLondon - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/peteris/logic-programming

<comment><USER2> This was a very good talk - a whistle-stop tour of Prolog.

It would have been interesting to hear more about your thoughts on embedded logic systems for other, general languages (having looked at some of the python libs myself recently) - though I realise there likely wasn't time for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah that was a bit of shame; I actually discovered logic programming through Clojure's core.logic. Definitely logic and probabilistic programming are some of the most useful DSL's that can be built. The power is there, it's perhaps the case that Prolog compilers have a much longer history of optimizations, so it might take a while to catch up even though core.logic has some convincing benchmarks too.

Another area is functional logic programming. I've played around with Curry, and it's great and it feels even better than just having a logic DSL. The way you can represent strongly typed bi-directional declarative regular expression parsers is simply magic.

It's an exciting decade for logic :).

<comment><USER3> Nice slides, thanks a lot. An often mentioned reference is The reasoned schemer, or TAoP. Do you have any other recommendations to get a grasp of logic programming ?

BTW, it reminds me of this talk :

      A Taste of Prolog by Aja Hammerly @ Cascadia Ruby 2012
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEOVcLAPRG8

Oh, and David Nolen introduced a bit of core.logic here :

      http://www.infoq.com/presentations/ClojureScript-Optimizations

ps: I don't want to distract people on other talks, just want to aggregate introductions in a single place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've spent a lot of time researching Logic Programming and I'm always amazed how little known some of the languages/tools/techniques derived from it are. For some software problems Prolog, Constraint Logic Programming, SAT solvers are the natural choice for easy representation and solution and yet usually people end up rolling their own DSLs when there are so many out there.

SWI-Prolog has some very useful web features, there are even libraries to expose Prolog through web services. Java has tuProlog, another really clever piece of software which is actively being developed.

I look at some of the claimed benefits of functional languages and so many apply to Logic Programming, its just a shame that it's often ignored because it is so different.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious about what HN thinks of answer set programming - the de facto language is a Prolog variant but in most implementations solutions are found by reducing programs to SAT instances. Upshot is you can reason about belief in an open world.

</comment><comment><USER6> I worked for a company www.quintiq.com that implemented a declarative programming language. They have a propagator that does much of what prolog does. However the syntax is more imperative. Very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is all very interesting, but can anyone recommend some "puzzles" or "challenges" I can solve to better learn Prolog? Having a tough time finding things to program.

<comment><USER8> You might try the 99 Prolog problems:

<https://sites.google.com/site/prologsite/prolog-problems>

The Scala version was fun and useful.</comment></comment>


Effectful Haskell: IO, Monads, Functors - <AUTHOR> http://slpopejoy.github.io/posts/Effectful01.html <comment><USER2> Naming is one area where Haskell's academic background is more curse than blessing. Numerous tutorials and blog posts would never have been written if only functor was named mappable and monad was named computation builder. They're named by analogy to category theory, but their usage in computer science is not at all similar.

<comment><USER3> The Haskell monad typeclass _is_ (modulo technical details) a category- theoretic monad on the category `Hask`.

As Edward Kmett says in more detail in [1] - the point of calling a monad a monad is not to confuse the reader, but to unlock 70 years of documentation on the concept for the reader. How many programming concepts/tools/libraries do you use that have 70 years of documentation?

Being abstract is profoundly different from being vague.

[1]: [https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water- le...](https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-learning-to- learn-by-edward-kmett-1750) (around the 20 minute mark).

<comment><USER4> To be fair, the great majority of that 70 years of documentation is generally going to be completely incomprehensible to most programmers not named Edward Kmett. And, of course, there's a lot of debate about how much practical use CT has in day-to-day programming. Not that I don't get your point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the next article in the series:

[http://slpopejoy.github.io/posts/Effectful02.html](http://slpopejoy.github.io/posts/Effectful02.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was interested and pleased to note that the source for this post is available in Literate Haskell: [https://github.com/slpopejoy/tatterdemalion/blob/working/pos...](https://github.com/slpopejoy/tatterdemalion/blob/working/posts/Effectful01.lhs)

<comment><USER7> working link [https://github.com/slpopejoy/tatterdemalion/blob/master/post...](https://github.com/slpopejoy/tatterdemalion/blob/master/posts/Effectful01.lhs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article has successfully caused me to understand what a monad is.

</comment><comment><USER9> Something I've wondered about: How does Haskell not optimize away IO ()? In a pure, functional languages, a function that doesn't return anything can simply be eliminated — but of course it isn't.

I've always assumed that Haskell's compiler has a built-in rules about IO having side effects, but I never actually bothered to find out.

When I first started with Haskell, one of many small epiphanies was when I realized that the IO monad itself doesn't actually _do_ anything. bind and return don't do anything except wrap and unwrap values, and there's nothing that checks if you are in some kind of "IO context" to permit things like file I/O. There's no magical "side-effectful computation chain engine" behind the scenes.

<comment><USER10> IO is the type, not the value. Something that takes IO and returns IO wouldn't be optimized out for the same reason a negation wouldn't be optimized out simply because it takes an Int and returns an Int.

<comment><USER9> I was referring to IO (), which is a type that can have only one value, () — hence my thinking that a compiler should simply optimize the call to (), since there is no other logical value that it can return.

<comment><USER11> The type isn't the same as its parameter. An IO () is not () just like Maybe () isn't (), and [()] isn't ().

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I find that explanation satisfactory. This only implies that there is information not used by the compiler: The only conceivable value that the type IO () can have is still the value IO (). If the compiler knew this, then it could, and would, optimize it away. Is there a formal aspect of parameterized types that prevents this from — formally — happening?

<comment><USER12> There's no such thing as "the value IO ()". The type IO () has tons of possible values, which all have different internal representations:

1) The IO action that does nothing.

2) The IO action that prints the string "Hello World" and then returns nothing.

3) The IO action that reads a string from the console, reverses it, prints it back, and then returns nothing.

4) ...

It's a common misconception to think that IO X is a wrapper around X with some "type system magic" to prevent it from being used outside IO. It's nothing like that. For example, IO String is not a wrapper around a String, doesn't contain any String inside, and cannot be converted to String. Meditate on the fact that System.IO.getLine is not a function, but a value of type IO String. Then you will understand why IO () has tons of possible values.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. I get that part. After digging a bit, it seems the implementation of IO is in fact a bit magical [1] (and not possible to implement in pure Haskell). GHC's IO is implemented using a GHC-internal pseudo-state monad that uses a magical "world" value to enforce linear ordering — all of which, I'm guessing, would prevent the compiler from accidentally optimizing away or memoizing side-effectful functions?

Edit: I find it interesting that Haskell tutorials and books generally don't try to peel away some of Haskell's abstractions. Many texts will tell you that "IO a" represents an "action" and expect you to take this at face value, intead of explaining how this is distinguishable from a mere function, and how it's implemented internally. For example, I would say one of the big eureka moments for any Haskell learner is to realize how lazy-evaluated graphs of functions can turn into linearly-ordered programs thanks to the transparent "baton passing" of monad chaining (IO in particular). But I've yet to find a text which articulates this idea very well.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/a/9244715/632555](http://stackoverflow.com/a/9244715/632555)

<comment><USER12> GHC's implementation of IO isn't the only one possible. For example, if Haskell had only two available IO operations (read a character or print a character), the following would be a workable definition of the IO type:

        data IO a = PutChar (Char, IO a)
                  | GetChar (Char -> IO a)
                  | Return a

Programs can work by constructing a value of type IO () and defining it as main, just like in regular Haskell. Note that IO is no longer a wrapped impure function, and there are no magical tokens in sight. In fact, the above implementation doesn't even have to be opaque, it can be completely exposed to programmers. Nevertheless, it's just as easy for the runtime to interpret in a sequential way, and there won't be any problems with accidentally optimizing away or memoizing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We can see therefore how Monad offers strictly more powerful transformations than Functor. fmap can only transform an individual value "in place", while >>= can return an empty list, or a list with more elements than the original. Functor is "structure preserving", while Monad is "structure transforming"."

So for a list monad bind = flatMap fmap = map

is that correct?

Studying FP for quite a while first monad tutorial I come to fully understand finally.

<comment><USER14> > So for a list monad bind = flatMap fmap = map

> is that correct?

Yes, although Haskell calls "flatMap" "concatMap". Of course "return" is just "\x -> [x]", AKA "(: [])".

Instead of bind (">>="), you can implement Monads using "join" instead. For lists, "join" is simply "concat".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So is it possible to explain monads with Javascript ? or even LISP ? seems to me monads == haskell so if one doesn't understand haskell one can't understand monads , cause all monad tutorials are written in haskell. So I ask , what is the point of learning what a monad is if i'm writing some Java ?

<comment><USER16> Yes. Infact, a JavaScript Promise is pretty much the same as the IO monad* - the `then` method is a lot like `bind`. Promise.resolve is a lot like `return`

* almost the same to IO, because of recursive thenable assimilation, something that was added to promises but is totally short-sighted and unnecessary; and because promises are eager which means they don't represent the action to be executed, but the value of an already executed action

<comment><USER15> A concise and good explanation thanks.

<comment><USER16> Note that the word "monad" itself refers just to the "shape" of the object (and some rules about that shape), not the functionality.

For example, an array can be a monad if we define a bind method as map + flatten

      Array.prototype.flatMap = function(f) {
        return _.flatten(this.map(f))
      }

which works like so:

      allArticles = authors.flatMap(author => author.articles);

return would be

      Array.of = function(val) { return [val]; }

The shape (type) is the same:

the promise's bind (then) method takes a function that takes a value and returns a promise, and returns another promise

the array's bind (flatMap) method takes a function that takes a value and returns an array, and returns another array

the promise's return (Promise.resolve) method takes a value and wraps it in a promise

the array's return (Array.of) method takes a value and wraps it in an array.

You can get the array method types (shapes) from the promise ones by replacing promise with array (if you decide to give the methods the same name).

The implemented functionality, however, is vastly different.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to bundle as HTML? Maybe even vids included - <AUTHOR> Is there a way to make a rich HTML page self-containing?
I love html, pdf not so much. I also love epub, but it has narrow uses.
Existing HTML embedding in to HTML is possible, but Data URI has a 2MB limit on Chrome I think. Maybe a blob helps?
Is there any way I could bundle/pack all scripts, images and maybe videos in to an html in a sane way? Is this feasible at all?
I guess browsers might load the html in to RAM, that could be a problem. <comment><USER2> Something like an Electron app but lighter? How would you be distributing this?

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

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd attach it to an email or send it over slack and hope html opens with a sane browser on the other end :)

more like [https://github.com/remy/inliner](https://github.com/remy/inliner)

or [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/single- file/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/single-file/)

But I guess these have the 2MB limit and I don't know if maybe more limits.</comment></comment>


Haproxy SSL Termination in Docker Using Letsencrypt – Jekyll Example - <AUTHOR> https://ilhicas.com/2018/04/07/Haproxy-ssl-termination-jekyll.html <comment><USER2> Nice article. I strongly suggest to use haproxy 1.8. Haproxy 1.8 support HTTP/2 to the browers

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you @aleks_me2, will do a check on 1.8 version, thanks for pointing that out.</comment></comment>


Two-legged robot mimics human balance while running and jumping - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/two-legged-robot-mimics-human-balance-while-running-jumping-1030 <comment><USER2> while the headline is technically correctly phrased, it buries the lede on the interesting bit here: the bi-directional feedback mechanism. robots that walk/run/jump like humans have existed for decades, but a bipedal robot that literally mimics the movements of a particular human, and sends force feedback to that human for real-time control is novel. that's the neat part.

<comment><USER3> I subscribe to a small channel on YouTube and the channel owner had a very impressive demo of low latency bi-directional teleoperation. He's got some Cheetah vids so I'm guessing he at least contributed some code here if not control/hardware.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnQGPGG- vuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnQGPGG-vuQ)

I feel creepy posting this for some reason but if you have even an inkling of the complexity it's a crazy demo that I had to share lol.

<comment><USER4> That channel owner, Ben Katz did the mechanical hardware, motor control PCB + firmware for the MIT Mini Cheetah as part of his PhD, here is his blog post on it[1], which links to a full technical report. The latest firmware is here [2]

[1] [http://build-its-inprogress.blogspot.com/2019/03/hello- there...](http://build-its-inprogress.blogspot.com/2019/03/hello-there-mini- cheetah.html)

[2] [https://os.mbed.com/users/benkatz/code/Hobbyking_Cheetah_Com...](https://os.mbed.com/users/benkatz/code/Hobbyking_Cheetah_Compact_DRV8323/rev/6cd89bd6fcaa/)

<comment><USER3> Ah! That links to the thesis folks were talking about in the comments. Thank you!!!

Also, geez. That's a lot of (very impressive) work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you made a robot big enough to carry the human (and the human sensing/feedback machinery), you'd basically have Battletech, right?

<comment><USER6> Or instead of giant death robots, you could have remote-controlled first responders. They could be dispatched quickly by drone and not put a human at risk.

Personally, I'm most excited about the possibility of robot backup dancers.

<comment><USER7> I love fictional giant deathbots. In reality, I'd be happier with giant robot gladiator fights.

<comment><USER8> The important thing is that it's not taking jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like how they treat the robots and the human on equal terms in the photo label :) No need for a second renaissance anyway.</comment>


Jack Ma to donate 500k test kits and 1M masks to the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/13/jack-ma-coronavirus-test-kits-128522 <comment><USER2> With one simple gesture, he simultaneously helps a lot of people and outperforms the entire United States government.

<comment><USER3> And slaps a glove across Trumps face, which I suspect is the root cause for this gesture.

<comment><USER4> And/or maybe he just wants to help people. He donated to other countries too.

And/or the economy of China depends on the US being healthy (physically and financially) so Americans can keep buying the manufactured goods which China exports. As a customer, the US is too big to fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you look at it objectively, America is a third-world country that no one wants to say it's so:

\- around 2 million homeless

\- extreme wealth inequality

\- lower than average hospital beds per citizens

\- no universal healthcare (Cuba's system is cheaper and better, unless you're rich)

\- no meaningful mental healthcare system

\- heavily indebted workers who aren't making livable wages or gaining full employment

\- home ownership and savings unattainable for most

\- unaccountable police

\- highest incarceration rate per capita in the world except Seychelles

\- racially-biased criminal justice system

\- imprisoning journalists

\- autocratic, corrupt, populist leader

\- deeply-corrupt political establishment</comment>


How I Found a Developer Partner for My Startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-i-found-a-developer-partner-for-my-startup-d7f589d49101#.t2a0ubtbt <comment><USER2> Hey, stop spamming HN. Enough is enough. I thought you would stop eventually, but amazingly you keep reposting forever and ever.

Just look at your own profile [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=peterschroeder](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=peterschroeder)</comment>


Dean Kamen (Segway Inventor) Solves the World's Water Problems - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam.html

<comment><USER2> Somehow, I think the title of the article is a little overblown. I grew up in Central America, and having had Amoebic Dysentery twice as a child, I know something about bad water. :)

Part of the problem is getting the water clean, but another big part of the problem is getting it to the people that are using it. Growing up, I lived in a city of 1.5 million people that had a water treatment program. The problem was water delivery. We lived in a heavy seismic zone, and the water pipes were plastic and the sewage pipes were clay. So, there were a number of cracks in both, and seepage went from the sewage systems to the delivery systems. So, water treatment was needed at the kitchen faucet not at the village center.

Another issue is that people need to realize that the water makes them sick. In many rural villages, you don't really think about water making people sick. They just think that getting really bad cases of diarrhea is part of life, and they think that people just die young. They don't correlate bad water with dying. They really need education systems for that.

Also, systems are needed that are a lot cheaper than $1000-2000. In many countries people make about $1 a day. It's going to take a lot of people that realize that the water is making them sick before they buy something that expensive.

<comment><USER3> You're right that it will take a lot of education, but the point is that at $1000-$2000 range it is financially viable to add these to each village. If the average wage is $1 a day and a village has 100 people living in it, you just need to prevent 10 sick days per person (and I'm not even counting the people dying there) for the investment to pay-off. Apply some microlending to it and that's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whether the Slingshot is a holy grail in providing clean water to the poor in the world's developing countries, its possible future impact is larger than its own achievements. The press it gathers will attract more attention from engineers, funding providers, and the general population. The more smart people we have working on this problem, the more likely we are to achieve a feasible solution and solve one of the greatest problems facing the world's poor. I applaud Dean Kamen for his work to-date and for putting the clean water problem in the spotlight.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sure... but where does the waste go? How do you clean this 'magical' machine? How do you dispose of the potentially highly toxic substances that were in the water?

<comment><USER6> The question of waste byproducts is a good one, and I haven't seen it addressed anywhere.

Calling the machine 'magical' (with scare-quotes) is disingenuous though. Any revolutionary technology could be described that way. As the saying goes, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The proof is in the pudding.

(Ok, enough pithy quotations for today.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dean Kamen has done a lot of good for man kind. Both in terms of inventions and education. We need more entrepreneurs like him.

<comment><USER6> Solving the water problem will enrich the lives of more people than we can fathom. If Kamen's device does what he says it will do, he deserves to go down in history with Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, and John Browning.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a thing for guns?

Anyway, don't forget Norman Borlaug and Ingvar Kamprad.

<comment><USER6> It's more that I come from a family of mechanical engineers, rather than an ag-tech background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Segway may not have changed the world, but the technology was also used for one killer wheelchair.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT>

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know how this compares ($/life saved, or some other reasonable metric) to commonly-used water purification methods?

</comment><comment><USER11> Just like he solved the worlds walking problems!

<comment><USER12> If you can get this at a production cost in the $1000-$2000 range as the site says, then the impact of this thing will be much, much larger than the Segway.

Still, I think the guy should be applauded. There are still _really important_ issues that need to be addressed, and he is working on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish that we the people could take 1% of the wealth away from investment banks and give everyone food and water.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, this went from 3 points to -1 points. Why do you think this is a bad idea?

<comment><USER13> I don't have the ability to downmod but my guess would be that it doesn't address anything in the article or add anything useful to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Still doesn't work in a drought.

<comment><USER12> It is a joke, right? If you can purify urine with something like that, all you'd need is to get users "contributing" to the system.

<comment><USER14> Not a joke in the slightest. It is a distiller, so clean water boils off and is collected, separated from any contaminants.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I know. But most of the problems that poorer nations face are not related with _complete_ lack of water, but with the lack of drinkable water. The droughts you mentioned are oftentimes the same.

<comment><USER7> I really don't think there is a lack of water. Just lack of drinkable water. Unless you are in the middle of Sahara, you should be able to find all kinds of water sources.

<comment><USER9> There's also lack of energy... do all the distillers come with free solar panels? Otherwise you need to have fuel.

<comment><USER15> That's why the article refers to the Stirling engines as a potentially partner - you chuck your cow dung or whatever into the Stirling to generate the heat needed to distill the water

<comment><USER6> Not only that, you get electricity out of the engine as well. The waste heat from the electric generator is used to power the water purifier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Someone forward this to Atlanta, GA...

</comment><comment><USER17> The Segway kinda sucked, but still, you gotta be a real genius to think up and design something that sucks in just that kind of way. I'm glad he's working on something so fundamental. We need more like this. Even if Segway is a little lame.

In fact this is particularly well suited too Dean, because even if the design is lamer then segway polo if the science and engineering are right, it's a worldchanger.</comment>


Storing Energy by Heating Stones to 600 Degrees – Could Power Denmark for Hours - <AUTHOR> https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/19/storing-energy-by-heating-stones-to-600-degrees-could-power-whole-country-for-hours/ <comment><USER2> Any heat pump has a hot and a cold side.

Are they also freezing other stones? Are they cooling a river?

<comment><USER3> I read the HN post over the weekend about Graphene coating heating to 160 degrees in sunlight [1].

Could this be used for the cool side?

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467542)</comment></comment>


Spectrum internet is getting kicked out of New York - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/27/17622846/spectrum-charter-cable-internet-new-york-kicked-out <comment><USER2> Direct link to the (scathing!) press release: [http://www3.dps.ny.gov/pscweb/WebFileRoom.nsf/ArticlesByCate...](http://www3.dps.ny.gov/pscweb/WebFileRoom.nsf/ArticlesByCategory/1F6E451203ADF727852582D7005F8520/%24File/pr18060.pdf?OpenElement)

As a consumer, this transition will be annoying to deal with, but as a resident, I'm proud of my state for pushing expansion of rural broadband where federal efforts have failed. Not sure how the transition will work though, as Spectrum/TWC own the cable infrastructure.

Spectrum has sent a veritable tree's worth of junk mail to my house in the past year, goading me to sign up for their television and landline phone bundle. Spectrum, please die quickly.

<comment><USER3> > I'm proud of my state for pushing expansion of rural broadband where federal > efforts have failed.

Not me. I live in a small apartment that I pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for. In Franklin County people can get a lot more space for a lot less money. Why should I subsidize their broadband rather than them subsidizing my living space?

Life is all about tradeoffs. Wanting to get all the benefits of your choices and have other people pay to ameliorate the downsides is understandable but unreasonable.

If we are going to subsidize broadband at all, we should do it statewide and means test it.

<comment><USER2> This isn't a subsidy. It's an effort to redirect some of Charter's ~$10B yearly profit[0] toward public benefit, in exchange for allowing further consolidation of local monopolies (which would otherwise amplify potential for abuse of market power).

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

<comment><USER4> What exactly is the relevance of the $10 billion number? Charter ran large losses every quarter for more than a decade prior to the merger: [https://ycharts.com/companies/CHTR/net_income_ttm](https://ycharts.com/companies/CHTR/net_income_ttm). Does that affect your view that its recent profit should be "redirect[ed] toward public benefit"? What exactly is the limit to that principle? What other companies should have their profits "redirect[ed] toward the public benefit?" What criteria do you use to decide?

<comment><USER5> It's a company trying to get approval for a merger, so the state has the leverage to get them to do things they feel would benefit the state.

Not a big deal, pretty common, and pretty common sense. These states want to bring internet to everyone.

They are allowing concentration of power, if that power promises to help them accomplish some of their goals.

<comment><USER4> Your comment suggests you're thinking about the problem in moralistic/score- keeping terms. But the question is not "does the state have leverage," but rather "what are the economic effects of using this leverage to impose a particular policy?" State and municipal regulators _love_ the idea of a free lunch. "They have to get our approval, and we can extract these concessions, and it's _free_!" But that's not how the economy works. Every policy has a cost. State and municipal regulators not only fail to balance those costs, they don't even realize that those costs exist.

The most damning example is, of course, the reason why we have so much market concentration in broadband to begin with. State and municipal regulators thought they could get universal cable coverage for their constituents, so they gave out municipal franchise monopolies with universal-coverage obligations. They thought they were getting a free lunch, instead they created massive market distortion.

<comment><USER6> The default option is not letting them merge. It's not a moral thing as much as a simple economic negotiation.

Letting them merge is absolutely not a 'free lunch' situation. It's a trade.

<comment><USER4> The fact that a regulation is easy to extract because it is imposed as part of a merger approval has no bearing on the economic effects of that regulation (except to the extent that the condition is directly aimed at reducing the anti-competitive impact of the merger, _e.g._ a spin-off requirement, which is not the case here).

To go back to OP's point: the government telling a company that the have to service a bunch of uneconomic households is a subsidy to those households. Either other customers' costs _will_ rise in order to pay for that service, or capital will be diverted from upgrading or expanding service to economic customers. There is a very large economic cost to servicing uneconomic customers--that money has to come from _somewhere_. The idea that you can rig the merger so that it comes out of corporate profits with no consumer impact is nonsense.

<comment><USER6> > the government telling a company that the have to service a bunch of > uneconomic households is a subsidy to those households.

Which we have decided as a society is worth it. Everyone should be able to communicate, and it helps those people be more productive too, helping everyone.

> Either other customers' costs will rise in order to pay for that service, or > capital will be diverted from upgrading or expanding service to economic > customers.

On the other hand, having less competition for something with huge last-mile costs can save money overall. The tricky part is keeping the downsides of low competition in check, by forcing more responsibility on the company as it gets more power.

> The idea that you can rig the merger so that it comes out of corporate > profits with no consumer impact is nonsense.

If the merger let them go from negative profits to $10B, then the consumer impact _already happened_. If none of that can be rigged into rural expansion, then the merger shouldn't have been allowed, and they can go back to minimal profits.

<comment><USER4> > Which we have decided as a society is worth it. Everyone should be able to > communicate, and it helps those people be more productive too, helping > everyone.

Except we haven't. One of the consequences of imposing these sorts of obligations through hidden cross subsidies is that it obscures the cost of these outcomes. Would the public be willing to pay through taxes the $X million it would cost to serve those uneconomic households? Probably not. But when a regulator forces them to pay that amount indirectly, they're not in a position to evaluate whether it is "worth it." (Which is why unelected bureaucrats love these "free lunch" measures--it allows them to tax the public indirectly for things the public would not willingly pay for directly.)

> On the other hand, having less competition for something with huge last-mile > costs can save money overall. The tricky part is keeping the downsides of > low competition in check, by forcing more responsibility on the company as > it gets more power.

This is exactly the New Deal-era thinking that has been _resoundingly_ debunked. Regulators applied this kind of thinking to everything from railroads to airlines. But deregulation of those things has yielded enormous real gains. (And not just in the U.S., in many respects western Europe and Japan have been more aggressive in deregulation than the U.S., and have seen concomitant benefits.)

> If the merger let them go from negative profits to $10B, then the consumer > impact already happened.

TWC and Charter did not previously compete, so it's unlikely that the swing is due to increased pricing power. Rather, it's more likely due to (1) the fact that TWC was already profitable; and (2) reduced expenses through the elimination of internal redundancy.

<comment><USER6> > Except we haven't.

Yes we did. Look at phone rules. We 100% decided that.

> deregulation

You don't need trains and airlines to serve every house. And the most effective way to avoid regulation is to avoid monopolies, I'd say. Do you think "no merger, no rules applied" would have been better?

> reduced expenses through the elimination of internal redundancy.

...I think that directly contradicts "The idea that you can rig the merger so that it comes out of corporate profits with no consumer impact is nonsense."

<comment><USER4> > Yes we did. Look at phone rules. We 100% decided that.

We decided, in the 1930s, to bring phone service everywhere. That has been done and the expenses have been incurred. We never decided to take on new expenses to extend that concept to broadband. We certainly never decided that the way we should achieve that outcome is through wired communications, rather than cheaper wireless communications. The FCC's attempts to do so have been achieved by unelected bureaucrats through regulatory fiat.

> You don't need trains and airlines to serve every house.

But you do need trains and airlines to serve every region above a given size, and that raises the same considerations about duplicated infrastructure.

> I'd say. Do you think "no merger, no rules applied" would have been better?

The merger is a red herring, since TWC and Charter did not previously compete with each other. What I think would've been better would have been to abandon build-out requirements, so that they (or other companies) could come in and compete in areas that will support competition. Then, if there are areas that we feel like aren't being sufficiently served, we can use tax dollars to close those gaps. That allows you to serve the people who need it (and subjects those efforts to cost-benefit analysis in terms of whether cheaper or more expensive technology is used to achieve the result). And it prevents you from distorting competition in areas that could reasonably support 2-3 ISPs.

> ...I think that directly contradicts "The idea that you can rig the merger > so that it comes out of corporate profits with no consumer impact is > nonsense."

In what way? The government can't control what the company does with the savings it achieves from the merger.

<comment><USER6> You were arguing that there is a large cost to consumers, and no possible way to pay for the requirements without consumer impact.

Now you're explaining a way for the merger to free up huge amounts of money.

If they free up lots of money by merging, they could use some of it to fund expansion without impacting customers.

The government can't _force_ them to use profits and expenses to cancel each other out, but it's not exactly an esoteric behavior. Especially when the same contract is responsible for both. The idea of it happening is definitely not "nonsense".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spectrum is funny. They kept raising my rates, randomly, every 6 months. And every 6 months I'd threaten to cancel.

Finally, I got irritated and penned letters to my state AG and state Senator. Spectrum went into overdrive. Credited a year of service, wanted me to get on a conference call with their GC, a voicemail wishing me happy birthday (super weird).

Should have sensed their vulnerability.

<comment><USER8> Would you mind sharing more about the content/format of your letter? Verizon has hiked my rates a few times (with no improvement in service, naturally), so I'm wondering what to write if it happens again. Does needlessly increasing rates violate some law/statute?

<comment><USER7> > _Would you mind sharing more about the content /format of your letter?_

Sure! I filed a complaint with the Bureau of Internet & Technology under New York's Attorney General [1]. I've pasted the redacted text below.

"In 2017 I called Spectrum because the rate we were being billed ($104.99) was higher than what we had signed up for (around $80) and more than the rate on Spectrum's Residential Rate Card Information & Disclosure for our apartment ([https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html](https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html)). I was told, on the phone, that the rate would be lowered to $89.99 per month.

On February 20th, 2018 I was charged $104.99 by Spectrum. I called and was told that my billing information would be changed to $89.99 for future bills (see Change of Service Confirmation, attached).

On March 2nd, 2018 we received a bill for $104.99, due March 18th, 2018. I called (855) 243-8892, the support phone number provided on Spectrum's website ([https://www.spectrum.com/contact-us.html](https://www.spectrum.com/contact- us.html)), and spoke with [PERSON] (employee number [ _redacted_ ]). [PERSON] acknowledged the Change of Service Confirmation, and said a technical error had prevented my billing information from being able to be updated. [PERSON] discussed the matter with one of her supervisors, [SUPERVISOR], who said a technician needed to visit my apartment to replace my modem. Until this visit was done, the billing information could not be changed. I asked [PERSON] for anything in writing confirming that after an in-person visit, my billing information would be updated. [PERSON] said she was technically unable to fulfill that request. [PERSON] then said a technical issue prevented her from scheduling a technician visit to my apartment."

...

I then called my State Senator's office and asked who deals with telecom policy. Got their name and sent them a copy of the complaint along with a very brief cover letter.

[1] [https://formsnym.ag.ny.gov/OAGOnlineSubmissionForm/faces/OAG...](https://formsnym.ag.ny.gov/OAGOnlineSubmissionForm/faces/OAGBITHome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My spectrum bill rocketed after the 1st year and after numerous unpleasant long calls with their representatives, I haven't been given any viable option. They keep forcing me to take their cable connection which would 'lower' my rates for the internet connection but I would end up paying them more than for just an internet connection.

The saddest revelation through all this is that I couldn't find any other provider in my area (DTLA) which can promise me 100Mbps. I'm stuck with them and I'm not a happy customer! I so wish there were other competing ISPs in this area..

<comment><USER10> At least you're getting 100Mbps. I'm one of the original TWC customers who refuse to switch over to their new "no contract" plans because I don't want them to jump my rates like they did yours. Their retaliation? I get 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. No speed upgrade for me.

Nothing else in my area gets even close to 100Mbps either. I hope NYS can work something out or I'm going to have to move.

<comment><USER9> > I hope NYS can work something out or I'm going to have to move.

I share your sentiments.. In my mind decent internet access is more of a right than an accessory today. Those without it are disproportionately disadvantaged in numerous ways. I can imagine doing something drastic, in protest, if I'm pushed.

<comment><USER4> If you're unhappy with your Internet, move. Whether you have good internet or not is mostly a function of your locality. I can get gigabit through either Verizon (fiber) or Comcast (fiber or cable). The service is second in reliability only to the public water/sewer (it went down once because a tree fell on the fiber).

It's not because Verizon is nicer than Spectrum. It's because my county makes it cheap, easy, and relatively hassle free to build and maintain the infrastructure. The love affair places like NY and CA have with regulation is self-defeating. There is a reason why fricking Kansas City has fiber and LA doesn't (and NYC got it a decade after backwaters in MD and VA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I live in New York and the only provider is spectrum. Yesterday I (and all my neighbors) got a letter from Optimum, offering better prices and higher bandwidth. After calling Optimum I got told that Optimum doesn't service my area.

Is this a new type of turf war?

<comment><USER12> Speaking as an ISP: I would guess more of a fuckup in a database merge for a direct mail campaign. They know what zip codes are their turf and where they have right-of-way, and don't want to waste money on USPS bulk mail targeting people they can't serve. As an example Seattle is a patchwork quilt of either Wave or Comcast cablemodem service areas, it would be pretty rare to see a Comcast solicitation in areas where the cable plant is entirely owned by Wave. Or vice versa.

<comment><USER10> You've posted about ISP related things in the past. How viable do you think it would be to start a WISP in rural New York State? I'm mostly interested in last mile rural stuff (I don't like cities), but from the looks of the rest of this thread it would probably be more profitable to start a WISP in NYC itself.

<comment><USER12> It really depends specifically where, how much competition exists and what type of last mile tech that competition uses. How big the market is in population and small to medium businesses.

There are a large number of ISPs that use licensed PTP gear on rooftops in NYC already, in combination with their fiber networks.

If you have a specific area in mind for a rural part of the state, send me an email address and I'll contact you to see what might be possible.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! I'm interested in this topic, but I have no idea what I'm doing.

lylecubed AT gmail

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used to have Time Warner with a 3mb plan for $15. After the Spectrum takeover I can keep my plan but the next level is $70. There is nothing cheaper. I would like to get something a little faster but I have no need for 100mb at $70 which is the only option I have. Its really annoying that there is zero competition. Spectrum knows exactly that a lot of people will get a connection that's way too fast for them and more expensive but they have no choice.

And every month I get several cheerful letters about "deals" that aren't deals. I really hate Spectrum.

<comment><USER7> > _100mb at $70_

I pay $90 for 400/20 in Manhattan. $70 for 100 Mbps is insane.

<comment><USER13> Is there a cheaper option for you? They can offer 10000/10009 but I don't need it. I want something cheaper.

<comment><USER7> > _Is there a cheaper option for you?_

The cheapest I am offered is $14.99 for 3/1 (as well as something called 30/4 Spectrum Assist).

I suggest you check out your rate card [1]. These are the services and rates you were legally offered, and is required to be disclosed to you under New York law.

[1] [https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html](https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html)

<comment><USER13> In LA they offer only the $70 option.

<comment><USER14> It sucks but your alternative is AT&T with their 250GB bandwidth cap.

<comment><USER13> I don't even have that option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> NC rolled over for TWC against its own cities. Nice to see NY not get bought off.

I'm fortunate that AT&T fiber has been available in my neighborhood for about a year now ($70/mo for gigabit service). Before that I was stuck with TWC's ever increasing prices and worsening service. Now that it's Spectrum it's still more expensive for slower, less reliable service.

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel like the political implications of this aren't being discussed.

So the 60 day period after which Spectrum would cease operations seems to end September 25, a week before online voter registration ends for the November elections... and even independent of that, it's at a critical moment for campaigning.

For many without a fiber connection in the NYC area, Optimum is now the only game in town, and it has no reason _not_ to price gouge (there's no regulation _forcing_ them to offer now-unnecessary promotional pricing to people). So many low-income people in old housing may need to go without internet and cable during the time immediately preceding the elections. Yes, most phones have data plans nowadays, but quick question: how many people do you know who would be able to print the PDF voter registration form easily from their computer, but would have no idea how to do so from their phone, and can't figure out how to set up a hotspot?

Imagine if New York were a swing state - it's normally not. On the one hand, you're making it suddenly more difficult to register to vote last-minute; that's not necessarily voter suppression, but it certainly smells like it. On the other hand, you're suddenly raising the effective price of (for example) Fox News/MSNBC, their online presences, access to Facebook on desktop computers (where ads are more prevalent), and streaming access to both Alex Jones and Bill Maher. You're cutting people off from information that reinforces their world view, and (gasp) they may need to watch basic cable, the most "mainstream" of mainstream media, while eating breakfast. That's ridiculously impactful.

Perhaps some of these concerns are overblown. Perhaps Optimum will, um, optimize for long-term goodwill and provide a reasonable upgrade path. But at the very least, we should be discussing these implications.

<comment><USER17> > to both Alex Jones and Bill Maher.

what a ridiculously false equivalency

<comment><USER16> Fair. I wanted to phrase my comment in a way that would be colorfully illustrated but not single out a specific political viewpoint. However, it is monumentally difficult to find a media personality on the left as dedicated to discrediting scientific consensus as Alex Jones. I chose the most outspoken left-leaning voice I could think of at the time.

Any lack of equivalency, though, should not reflect on the merit of the underlying issue: that a decision to cut off a vital service provider is not without political consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Time Warner Cable has been awful since Spectrum got a hold of it. I didn't have a problem for many years, now I can't even get a customer service rep on the line. I keep getting robocalls about my "upcoming bill". Rates have gone up. Amount of plans have decreased... The list goes on.

<comment><USER19> Here in Ohio I've had the opposite experience, with the exception of the cost going up. I was one of the ones who would make my annual call to Time Warner to "threaten to cancel" in exchange for another year of discounted service (usually $40 or $45/mo for 30mbit). Spectrum doesn't play that game, so I'm paying $65/mo, but I'm also receiving 100mbit service (where I normally see ~120mbit). I haven't had a single outage since the switch over, but that could also be attributed to the replacement of the old cable modem for a shiny new DOCSIS 3.0 model to support the higher speeds.

As far as robocalls, I had them before, and I still have them now. At least once a month they call me and try to sell me on some other service of theirs. Luckily they use the same phone number on caller ID, so I can avoid the calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Verizon also failed to deliver albeit at the city level in, in NYC. The city sued by there has been no such attempt to revoke their charter as far as I have heard:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-sues- verizon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-sues-verizon- fios.html)

<comment><USER21> This is only happening to charter because it was a clause written into their recent large merger with TWC. I don't think the state would have such broad latitude to revoke any other ISPs license to operate.

Verizon was at least smarter about being technically correct, they apparently ran fiber "past every household in the city". The joke probably being, good fucking luck getting your building hooked up to it. If they'd even do it, it'd probably cost you thousands

<comment><USER4> It blows my mind that people act like Verizon is running fiber past households then refusing to service them for funsies. Passing a household costs more than building the final bit of fiber to the house. It makes no sense for Verizon to pass a bunch of households then not try to recoup that money by hooking up service. The reason for the delay is because New York (particularly New York landlords) are a total nightmare to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like many folks living in NYC, Spectrum is my only choice for broadband. The only other option is Verizon DSL with "up to" 7Mbps. If this transition causes issues for my internet, I'm screwed.

<comment><USER23> At least you have that... there are many places outside the city (it's a big state) where 7Mbps would be very welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm in Brooklyn. This thread prompted me to check the Spectrum rates. I was on Time Warner Cable pre-merger, and with Spectrum just called and got a 100MB upgrade that costs me $300 less per year than I was paying. Call was easy/fast with good service. No upgrade fees, etc. And they offered me a technician appointment with a one-hour window within 24 hours. Just one experience, but clearly for this NYC consumer, I seem to be benefitting from the merger.

From Spectrum's Brooklyn rate card (link below): Spectrum Internet 200/10 = $64.99 Spectrum Internet Ultra 400/20 = $89.99 Spectrum Internet Gig = $124.99

Looks like TWC had topped out at 300MB, and they charged about $110/mo

Spectrum Brooklyn rate card: [https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html](https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html)

Time Warner Cable Brooklyn rate card pre-merger: [https://www.spectrum.com/content/dam/spectrum/residential/en...](https://www.spectrum.com/content/dam/spectrum/residential/en/pdfs/ratecards/NYC/NY_Brooklyn_7001-RC.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> Fuck Spectrum. They are just awful. The jack your rates, don't follow through, and are so awful to deal with I just am kind of resigned to it. I think Fios may be here soon. They can't be worse, can they?

<comment><USER26> As bad as it is, how can decreasing the number of competitors increase the quality of options for consumers? Are they preventing other companies from operating?

<comment><USER27> Since cable companies are already a monopoly, they aren't really decreasing the number of competitors. They are just replacing the one incredibly bad ISP with a somewhat less bad one.

<comment><USER10> > They are just replacing the one incredibly bad ISP with a somewhat less bad > one.

... we hope. That certainly wasn't the case the last time (when Spectrum bought TWC). As far as I can tell, NYS doesn't have any idea who's going to replace Spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am curious what happens to their assets in the state after their charter is revoked? This would leave large swaths of that state without TV and Internet no?

<comment><USER28> > ...but the state is asking it to come up with a transition plan.

Apparently they need to come up with some orderly plan and not just give them a nice "f-you, its been fun."

Not too sure how motivated they'll be for it to be orderly as they have zero incentive for it to be though...

<comment><USER20> Well if they just abandoned it they would be leaving a lot of money on the table. They own all that cable plant, the head ends, etc. I don't think they can afford to do that.

<comment><USER29> They'll rip out anything of value, but how valuable is installed coax? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to leave that in place?

<comment><USER20> Its FTTN - fiber to the node and then coax from the node to the home. Fiber and coax running to nearly every home or neighborhood in a state is quite valuable.

<comment><USER29> It's valuable to someone with the right to use it where it's already installed. It doesn't seem like something that can be removed and reused, however. Perhaps there will be some sort of down-to-the-wire negotiation between Spectrum and whoever the next anointed turns out to be? "If you don't pay us the first installment on Friday, we'll start tearing out fiber on Monday!" This scenario illustrates the insanity of municipalities selling franchises that include ownership of the networks. They didn't have to do that. Since we'll never need more than fiber, they shouldn't do that ever again.

<comment><USER20> I really don't think Spectrum will be the party that's negotiating from a position of power here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I had TWC/Spectrum and it was cheaper and faster then the Comcast I get now after moving. What does the state plan on doing for all the millions of people who only had TWC/Spectrum? Maybe they should invite more competitors in rather than kicking them out.

<comment><USER31> _Maybe they should invite more competitors in rather than kicking them out._

Gotta kick one out to make room for the other. New York isn't about to let every ISP in the nation run independent lines over all of the poles in the state.

The good thing is that when the replacement company steps up (or wins the bid), it will know that the state is serious about keeping obligations.

OTOH, this might be when we find out just how much collusion there is between the big companies, if none decide to fill the gap, thus putting pressure on the AG from the voters.

<comment><USER32> > New York isn't about to let every ISP in the nation run independent lines > over all of the poles in the state.

Why not? I would expect the barrier to entry there to be the expense of doing so, not regulatory refusal.

It makes sense for a regulator to require "universal" coverage and prohibit cherry-picking only the profitable areas, which brings the cost barrier back into focus. However, encouraging a monopology would seem to encourage a similar result.

Has the state actually expressed or implied such a policy?

<comment><USER31> _Why not? I would expect the barrier to entry there to be the expense of doing so, not regulatory refusal._

A quick GIS of telephone poles in India or Thailand will provide you an answer.

<comment><USER32> No, it does not, unless you're asserting that India and/or Thailand have comparable regulatory structures for utilities, other than the one detail of which ISPs are permitted on poles.

To whit, I believe you're presenting a false dichotomy between monopoly and completely unregulate free-for-all.

<comment><USER31> You're thinking about it too hard.

People don't want massive bunches of cable lines running through their neighborhoods. Most people don't even like the few they have unless they're underground and there aren't access pillars every hundred feet.

Voters aren't going to let regulators ugly up their neighborhoods and drive their home values down.

<comment><USER32> > You're thinking about it too hard.

Mostly, I'm trying to determine if your assertion was a speculation based on, say, evidence (either from NYS previous behavior or from another jurisdiction), or strictly your intuition or guesswork.

So far, I've only seen the latter. My own intuition is this has nothing to do with voters and everything to do with legislators and administrative regulators, over whom voters have only a vague influence and only after deals like this are already done.

Even so, do you even have anything to back up your claim that voters (and most of them, at that) care about _additional_ cables on utility poles, especially in New York State (and not just something that shows people merely prefer underground utilities to pole-mounted, which is undisputed)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is removing yet another competitor from the market a good thing for consumers?

</comment><comment><USER34> I seem to have the opposite experience of people in this thread. I'm down in southern California using Spectrum and they have by far the best rates. 100 Mbps for $40/mo. I suppose there is a lot more competition for internet out here than average though.

<comment><USER35> Is that just a promotional rate though? I live in Orange County and the list price for 100 Mbps is $65 (and my area has actual competition from FiOS). The promo rates are good, but they'll expire after a year and unlike TWC, Spectrum won't just renew at promo rates forever. You either have to cancel and re-sign up, or just pay list price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would kill for 100mbps for $80/mo. I'm paying twice that for 10mbps in rural Nevada with a WISP.</comment>


$100M in Facebook stock sought by Russian "Digital Sky Tech" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/dst-to-buy-up-to-100-million-in-facebook-employee-stock/

<comment><USER2> is it an artifact of my machine or is that video _really_ hard to hear?</comment>


'I went blind and feel partly to blame' - vanilla-almond http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-34847776 <comment><AUTHOR> "People assume it must be like closing your eyes or being in a dark room, but it's not like that at all. It's a complete absence of light, it isn't black or any other colour I can describe.

"Instead my mind gives me things to look at. It shows me a shadowy representation of what it thinks I should see - like my hands holding a cup of tea. Since my mind is constrained only by my imagination, it rather charmingly overlays everything with millions of tiny sparkles of light, that vary in brightness and intensity depending on my emotional state."

Great article; very informative, about the physiological and emotional effects of advanced diabetic retinopathy. Really connected, for me, especially her description of the transition into blindness--from grief to eventual acceptance.

<comment><USER2> As a developer myself recently diagnosed with diabetes, this too really hits home. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you; upvoting for support. Wishing you health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's some great talks on accessibility by Leonie such as "Design like you give a damn" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1tlLOavvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1tlLOavvM)</comment>


Debit cards replacing credit cards on college campuses   - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/03/AR2010100304352.html?hpid=topnews

<comment><USER2> This scheme is very confusing for someone who used loan money to pay tuition directly. Why not just get a debit card from your bank or credit union? Is there some sort of barrier to entry, besides minimum deposits, that I do not know about?</comment>


Smartphones Are Killing Americans - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/smartphones-are-killing-americans-but-nobody-s-counting <comment><USER2> No, reckless drivers are.</comment>


Why we wrote our Kafka Client in Pony - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2018/01/why-we-wrote-our-kafka-client-in-pony/ <comment><USER2> Man, I really hope Pony grows a decent library ecosystem _fast_! The language itself is sooo nice, the type system is pure bliss (at least this side of Haskell), and I even managed to get beyond the first peak of "I have no clue what is going on here" to using the type system sensibly.

I do not care about scalability so much (I do not complain, either), but the language and especially the type system was an eye-opener for me. Having a guarantee - proof! - that entire classes of bugs that haunt software written in C, C++, Java will be impossible to smuggle past the compiler sounds like a realistic approximation to the four-dimensional compiler I once envisioned, that would retroactively turn any and all runtime errors into compile time errors (without creating a paradox, of course!).

<comment><USER3> 4D compiler? That sounds amazing. I imagine that could be extended with a Kafka stream of errors from staging and production. I guess that would require a 'system aware' compiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What was the reason for not contributing a "reactive" API to the existing C client?

Especially because now you have a maintenance burden on your own client which, ironically, performs quite a lot slower than the C client although that was the major concern for not using it in the first place!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question.

Yes, Pony Kafka is currently slower than the C client. But it is also almost completely untuned as of right now. We expect there is a lot of low hanging fruit on that front that will give us significant gains.

There is also the secondary concern regarding the thread pools internal to Pony and librdkafka. We've seen first hand how CPU cache invalidation can impact performance so we are very aware of the potential negatives if the Pony and librdkafka threads ever end up fighting with each other over the same CPU resources.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, that was my question-- was there a way to avoid using librdkafka's threadpool and essentially use it as a 'dumb' client, moving all the async stuff to your Pony actor layer?

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I understand of librdkafka, there's no easy way to disable the internal thread pool it uses.

I'd imagine that the internal thread pool for sending/receiving data from Kafka is as core to librdkafka as the internal thread pool for running actors is to Pony and trying to remove or disable either of them would be a large undertaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Pony Kafka sends data to Kafka about 5% - 10% slower than librdkafka but > reads data from Kafka about 75% slower than librdkafka.

What? So what's the point? Wouldn't it better to just contribute and optimize the existing clients then?

The Kafka/confluent team specifically chose to implement everything in librdkafka (because kafka is client-side logic heavy) and then make thin wrappers for every language so performance, bugs and stability can all be worked on in a single place.

<comment><USER6> That was for what I'd imagine is v0.1 quality code, they said there were plenty of optimizations available to make it at least parity with the C client. Secondly, the issue was the system performance between Wallaro and the Kafka client, not necessarily the raw performance of the library.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's correct on both counts.

Pony Kafka is almost completely untuned as of right now. We expect there is a lot of low hanging fruit on that front that will give us significant gains.

And yes, we're concerned about the potential thread pool contention between Pony and librdkafka.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pony is such a cool project, it's what Go could have been if it wasn't stuck in the middle of the eighties : it has a super expressive type-system, and a bit like in Rust, it gives you the data-race freedom.

I really wish it gains traction.

<comment><USER8> (this has nthing to do with wallaroo or kafka but:) go isn't stuck in the 80s it just stuck on Rob Pike's belief that him personally being lazy and jury rigging in general is "simple" and a virtue.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that making criticisms personal like that accomplished anything useful. The fact that a large number of other people agree with his decisions suggests that it's not "being lazy" and more balancing different goals. It would be far more productive to understand those pressures rather than simply assuming the worst.

<comment><USER8> Any criticism of any project Rob Pike has been attached to or Pike himself has over the last 40 years accomplished nothing no matter if they are technical or personal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the author of the blog post and the primary author of Pony Kafka. I'll be around to answer questions.

<comment><USER10> _" Why we wrote our Kafka Client in Pony (wallaroolabs.com)"_

I love the fact that the words "Kafka," "Pony," and "Wallaroo" are all together in one sentence, and not as part of an elaborate joke. I love even more the fact that Serious Business Executives will have to use these words to discuss useful technology. Awesome names.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just one of the many perks of working here at Wallaroo Labs. 8*P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kafka is written in Scala, though it exposes a Java interface for ease of use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Blog post corrected.

</comment></comment><comment> princess-aslaug Ehm, pick a niche programming language, build your client for a complex system. All cool, but it's not the straight line to solve problems in a company in the simplest and most effective way. Good thing if you have some spare R&D time maybe but hardly a sane approach for most.

<comment><USER12> The investors must be thrilled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who has worked on building a custom consumer API for kafka (in a distant past, before the 9.0 Java consumer came out) I am curious about how much engineering effort this required.

I can see from github that the project is about 16k lines of code. I wonder how many developers worked on it, how much of each of their time it required, how many false starts in the architecture of the library had to be abandoned...

<comment><AUTHOR> 99% of Pony Kafka is written by me (for better or worse). I've been working on it since about May 2017 off and on with it being my primary focus for the majority of that time. However, due to working arrangements and other commitments, I've only spent about 12 or so weeks of time on it (where 1 week is equal to 5 days and 1 day is equal to 8 hours).

There have been a few iterations on the abstractions and API of the library but the majority of the architecture has been the same from the initial design sketch. I started by envisioning the features the library needed for end users and also internally in order to fully take advantage of Pony's actor concurrency model. From there I worked out the data and functionality ownership of the various bits (i.e. which actor does what and why). Lastly, I ran it by a couple of folks here at Wallaroo Labs to make sure I wasn't making any obvious mistakes.

The biggest change so far has been caused by building in the leader failover handling in relation to the data/responsibility ownership transferring from one actor to another. That's not entirely completed yet but it has mostly been an internal change. The end user API has also changed, but that has mostly been about fixing abstractions and/or data ownership issues.

I'm sure there will be additional changes as I have time to go through to fix abstractions and add in other features. Dynamic configuration changes, exactly once semantics, and group consumer functionality are all likely to impact the end user API along with requiring internal changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Out of curiosity, what pushed your team towards Pony rather than Erlang? It seems your team (or at least part of it) has experience with both languages which is interesting.

<comment><USER15> Short answer is in another thread here.

After discussing our performance goals with folks we knew at Basho, they expressed a lot of skepticism that we could meet them with Erlang.

How to plug-in potentially heavy user computations in non-Beam based languages is an incredibly tricky problem as well.

If you'd be interested in chatting more, I'm happy to that. See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16266220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16266220) for more information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dipon, why not rewriting Kafka itself in Pony? The biggest problem is the synchronous API, and as pony service it would be much better, being controlled by async actors, without polling. Scala is very similar to pony.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not overly familiar with Pony, but I'm curious, and the code looks nice and clean. One oddity though; so many of the identifiers have "Kafka" in them. Does Pony not have module namespacing?

<comment><USER15> It does.

But the point you raise...

"Should this be HTTPLogger or Logger given that it is in the HTTP package"

and variations thereof is something that has been a point of contention at almost every job I've been at.

by default with Pony if you use a package, you'll have the classes imported directory into your namespace so...

HTTPLogger is more clear in that case, but you could use a qualified import and then have something like http.Logger.

It's a matter of preference.

<comment><USER17> I understand, but the sheer amount of duplication is rather overwhelming. Also, a lot of it seems like implementation details related to the API/protocol and so on that don't need this kind of naming uniqueness.

Go solves this by never dumping namespaces into another namespace: You have http.Request, and that's it, which is both unambiguous and self-explanatory. Name clashes can occur (e.g. packages have the same name, or a local variable has the same name), but that's rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really like why we wrote x in y sort of blog posts. It is almost always like this: because we could or because for our use case it works.

<comment><USER19> It's actually almost always a post-hoc justification for scratching an itch.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Pony looks interesting though. I am wondering how is it comparing to Erlang. Seems like they are trying to address the same problem (actor model with memory safety) with different approaches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR

Because it's more fun to learn a new programming language than deliver features to users. We're VC financed so no need to get money, also spend it before people talk about profitability, then the good times are over (see Etsy). We also can add Pony to our CV and move on in one year to the next company where we will introduce the next big thing to add to our CVs. Plus 10% more salary! Kaching! #LivingTheLife

<comment><USER21> You jealous?

Also, picking a right tool for the job can be a real advantage, which makes it easier to deliver features.

Getting so close to C implementation (in terms of speed) with Pony is actually insane if you look at the number of guarantees Pony gives you. Next time you dereference a NULL pointer please remember that it's impossible in Pony. Oh, and next time you spend a week debugging some hairy locking issue, consider that issue wouldn't happen in Pony at all. EDIT3: removed EDIT1 from here.

Currently, Pony is in direct competition with Go (but uses the other concurrency model) and Erlang/Elixir (but is natively compiled). People and companies frequently choose Go or Erlang, so I don't really understand why they shouldn't choose Pony if their use-case fits.

EDIT2: And here I am getting downvoted... I wonder, is anything I wrote not true?

<comment><USER22> >so I don't really understand why they shouldn't choose Pony if their use-case fits.

The difference between Pony and Go or Erlang (or even Elixir) is that the Pony team still are making breaking changes to the language. That means that your dev team may need to spend time to update features due to breaking changes in the language. Also, the ecosystem isn't there like it is for Go or Erlang.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, but both Go and Elixir (Erlang less so - commercial and internal PLs work a bit differently) were in the same situation at some point: very small ecosystem, small community, lots of changes to the language. Adopting a language at this stage of evolution has _a set of very well-known risks_ , but it has to be done by someone for the language to ever reach maturity. Trying to use it seriously is one of the best ways to contribute to the language.

In any case, if you are aware of the risks and plan to mitigate them - by, for example, employing people capable of debugging and fixing the language's implementation - you're left with some risk and a lot of advantage (if you're lucky and your domain is indeed the one your language is best suited for). It's a gamble, of course, but then nearly every decision (other than buying IBM) is one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any payment system integration for GitHub? - <AUTHOR> Is there any way to 'release funds' when your commit/s get merged into a specific branch.
Example of work flow:
Create milestone Link budget to the milestone Define issues Link payout to issues (% or fixed)
Once the issue is closed via commit and the commit is merged into the master branch (or the branch related to the milestone) the 'prize' is automatically released to the author/s of the commit/s. <comment><USER2> BountySource does this, with an approval step to confirm that the PR met the issue requirements. [https://www.bountysource.com/](https://www.bountysource.com/)

I've used it twice and it worked as expected, though the audience of people doing work is fairly small.</comment>


Brexit: The best thing that could happen to Holland - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/brexit-best-thing-could-happen-holland-bart-verschoor <comment><USER2> For correctness, it's The Netherlands, not Holland. Though Amsterdam is located in one of the Hollands.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc)</comment>


If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life - <AUTHOR> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/04/30/if-you-code-html-zen-coding-will-change-your-life/

<comment><USER2> There's a reason why C compilers aren't implemented as editor macros that convert what you type into assembly, as you type it. It's because a high-level programmer never wants to work at that low level; he should never see the lower level. Ideally, he shouldn't even know that the lower level exists. (When was the last time you debugged your CPU microcode?)

If something is so cumbersome that it needs to be abstracted away, do it right. It's really fun to press a few keys and watch a bunch of code show up, but it's even more fun to not watch it show up. Because then you have something that's not a write-once operation.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand your point: Zen Coding just makes it easier to _write HTML_ (like autocompletion in an IDE) instead of translating it into some other language (like your Assembly example).

<comment><USER4> The point is that, while Zen Coding is easy to manipulate (C), it's being converted to something hard to manipulate (Assembly) as you go, making it challenging to go back and rearrange things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Zen Coding seems like the Haml philosophy implemented as code completion rather than as a run time compiler. The upside is that the markup you generate is plain old HTML that any web framework can serve. The downside is that it has the readability of plain old HTML.

<comment><USER6> For me, its never been the initial coding of HTML that was the problem; there's always been plenty of text-editor solutions like auto-close and find- matching tags. Instead, the PITA of HTML is refactoring it and moving bits around, which is what Haml alleviates, but this does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing I don't like about all these ways to "improve" HTML/CSS is that they all seem to assume the rest of the webapp ecosystem doesn't exist.

Take SASS's variables and arithmetic, for instance. I agree that CSS desperately needs some way to abstract out common values. But any decent webapp will _already_ be using some sort of template system, and the template system will have some sort of variable. Why not use it and be consistent with the rest of your UI? If you introduce SASS into the mix, you just have to do things one way in your CSS and another way in your markup.

Same thing with Zen Coding. Instead of using an editor plugin that expands abbreviations (which then have to be maintained), why not use your template system and avoid writing all that code in the first place? If I were writing the example listed here, it'd look something like this:

            {{#CELL}}{{/CELL}}

(That's using google-ctemplates because it's what I work with daily, but substitute in Django, Cheetah, Mako, or erb as necessary.)

Yes, there's still room for improvement, and yes, I wish my editor were more aware of available template variables. But I also don't have to maintain the 5 separate  tags once I've typed them out, I can change one and have its updates be reflected across all the generated code. I can avoid those pesky closing tags by simply not typing them; the HTML spec doesn't require them, all browsers handle it fine, and it saves end-user latency as well. And I don't need to learn a new tool, I just have to use my existing tools better.

<comment><USER8> You could do CSS in a templating system, sure. First off, you'd want to cache it, but that's a solved problem. And you'd be well served to cook up some subtemplates/helpers/whatever that automated away some of the drudgery. Pretty soon you'd have more ideas on how to keep your CSS more maintainable, your subtemplates would become more general, etc.

At this point you have implemented most of Sass/Less/etc but you have a bunch of templating gunk, less documentation, and hundreds fewer eyeballs looking at the code. Or, you have not implemented most of Sass/Less/etc and you are still writing CSS like a chump.

<comment><USER7> But it would be the _same_ templating gunk that is used by the rest of your webapp, which most likely has _more_ documentation and thousands _more_ eyeballs looking at the code than Sass. Most people don't roll their own templating systems. They use an established library that's been battle-tested on websites before. These libraries have been around a lot longer than Sass/Haml has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's a seriously exaggerated title.

<comment><USER10> some lives are more easily changed than others :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find this odd. It's been awhile since I have done dedicated front-end work, maybe 5 years or so, but it was never writing this kind of code that was the real time suck, it was always making sure it worked in every browser that was the real problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks almost exactly like the Sparkup plugin for vim + TextMate, which also ended up on HN not too long ago: [http://jetpackweb.com/blog/2010/03/04/write- html-faster-with...](http://jetpackweb.com/blog/2010/03/04/write-html-faster- with-sparkup-vim-and-textmate/)

<comment><USER13> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167716>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Emacs minor mode: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ZenCoding>

Doesn't seem all that life-changing to me, but I guess it could speed you up if you churn out a lot of html every day.

</comment><comment><USER15> I prefer something like Markdown, which is:

a) Dead-easy to write;

b) Dead-easy to read; and

c) Dead-easy to 'compile' into HTML whenever you're ready (e.g. at runtime).

</comment><comment><USER16> Is writing TONS of HTML really a problem that needs solving? Are people writing Bible-Tome sized pieces of markup? This feels like a solution in need of a problem.

<comment><USER17> as a guy who gets paid to write this shit for 8 hours a day -- Yes, and yes.

<comment><USER18> You spend 8 hours a day just writing HTML? That sounds horrible.

<comment><USER17> yes it is. now it is just a little bit less horrible thanks to this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When i want to code HTML i use HTML.vim (for vim of course). Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy.

I'd be interested in knowing if this is available for some OS X editor (pref a free one) and whether they have vim support. (Cant recall if TextWrangler is free)

<comment><USER20> >Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy.

I hope those shortcuts are writing CSS?!

<comment><USER21> Doesn't look like it:

<http://www.infynity.spodzone.com/vim/HTML/HTML.txt>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can it do html back to zen and then can I use it with erb/any other templating language? That would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER23> This plugin really shines in conjunction with your editor's power features. I use Zen Coding with the SublimeText editor's multiple and reflective selections.

Writing lengthy boilerplate code becomes trivially fast.

</comment><comment><USER24> The nested tag syntax would be a sweet addition to haml.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sorry, but you don't "code" HTML, you just write it.</comment>


Ask HN: NET Core a Viable Alternative to Django and Rails? - <AUTHOR> I've done a fair bit of web development in Django, Rails, and Laravel, but recently have been working on some C# desktop applications. I've found C# delightful to use. LINQ in particular is absolutely wonderful. I was wondering if anybody has experience with using .NET Core as an alternative to Django et al? I love almost everything about Django, except for the lack of static typing due to Python. I would like an ORM that offers composable queries, migrations,  and a built-in administration interface like Django offers. <comment><USER2> I find .NET Core to be much better than Django. EF Core is great and mature.

The admin interface isn't built in, but the C# ecosystem is huge, and you can easily find one that suits your needs.

When considering language usability, safety, ecosystem, stability, support, performance, and popularity together, I wouldn't use any other stack. I want to use F# or Rust, but I'm worried I won't be able to hire enough people who know them already.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more. .NET core is amazing. I generally use Ruby with microframeworks like Roda for most of my projects. But now after spending some time with ASP.NET Core, I don't think I would want to do any web project in a dynamically typed language/framework. The tooling is also awesome with ASP.Net Core.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main contention in industry is - It is not a viable alternative unless it has robust support for non-Windows based OS.

I can't wrestle with them but I don't have to. I am comfortable with Windows.

<comment><USER3> I would say the support is pretty good for non-Windows based OSes already. Giants like Bing and Tencent have been using .NET Core in production for some time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've play a little bit with netcore but I still have the feeling that people are more for enterprise business and not so much packages. I like more the rails/django community :)

biased opinion :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Look at AutoMapper for .Net</comment>


Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2322 <comment><USER2> If you want to see this in action, just visit the CCC event. People regularly manage to DoS (or just overload, I don't know) even the DHCP servers. So at some point all you will get from the network is a little wooden peg with a number. :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> On using avian carriers to transport the IP information: would standard bird tags, etched with the IP information, overcome the weight problem?

It doesn't solve the problem of lost avian carriers, of course. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> so, this is like the DHCP client/server version of IP over avian carriers?</comment>


What is a good sales target for a sales person in SaaS? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kookoo.in/2014/11/what-is-good-sales-target-for-sales.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Please comment with your models. This will help in collaborating and coming out with a good SaaS sales strategy</comment>