Ask HN: AdSense alternatives? - <AUTHOR> A friend and myself run a tutorial blog for a hobby that makes us a very minuscule amount of money via AdSense. It's a nice extra incentive to push and grow the blog farther and farther along though.<p>In light of the current drama surrounding AdSense (fabricated or not), and in complete seriousness, what are some alternatives in case we randomly get "shut off"? We have used and are currently using BuySellAds and their Unreserved Program - which depends on a buyer though. <comment><USER2> Todd from @BuySellAds here.

An ideal setup is one in which you utilize about a handful of different companies in the "Tier 2" position. Probably no more than a handful though, because after that it gets hard to manage and rather convoluted.

Tier 1 is your directly sold ads (stuff you sell on your own directly to an advertiser or through a company like BuySellAds).

Tier 2 is where the AdSense's of the world will live. It really depends on your "niche", but in general the best options tend to be: AdSense, Rubicon Project (if you're big enough), PubMatic (again, if you're big enough), or a "niche/vertical" ad company that focuses on sites like yours. By-and-large, AdSense "owns" this space outright, and even if you're using a program like ours ([http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved](http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved)) for your "non-reserved" inventory (stuff that isn't sold direct) there's going to be SOME mix of AdSense (or AdX) in there.

Ad money certainly isn't easy, and more and more is going to go toward those publishers creating great content and curating high-value audiences (i.e. not user generated content...). The days of "set it and forget it" are over for most publishers who aren't interested in earning pennies on the dollar. If you can't sell ads directly through a service like BuySellAds or on your own, well, I wish you luck :)

It's not all doom and gloom though - we see publishers make quite a bit of money all the time. It ultimately comes down to the quality of their site, it's content, and the users.

<comment><USER3> Hm, this is what google shows when you type the name of your company (at least in safari)

[http://imgur.com/cfdFdvd](http://imgur.com/cfdFdvd)

There is no link to click on

<comment><USER4> Try disabling adblock and then try again ;)

<comment><USER3> Uff, that's really unfortunate when the adblock block the name of your company.

<comment><USER2> Tell me about... _cough_ someone at AdBlock please write a _smarter_ regex for the default filter... _cough_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> so, I realize this might be seen as spam, but I am always trying out adsense alternatives and regularly maintain a list of the ones I'm trying out. [http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense- alternatives/](http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense-alternatives/)

TLDR: casale, Lijit, technorati are working best for me.

<comment><USER6> Linking to a page that exactly answers the question being asked is definitely not spam.

<comment><USER7> Exactly, but I could see the concern with posting it. Upvoted for relevance

<comment><USER8> One possible concern is that the article uses affiliate links for every recommendation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, none of that. Create your own "ad network".

Basically, figure out the theme of your blog and what kind of people it attracts and then find affiliate programs for that.

For example. Let's say your tutorials are for developers. What do developers need?

* development tools * hosting * further courses/learning

That will yield a pretty good list of affiliates that will convert well such as:

* New Relic * Digital Ocean * TeamTreeHouse

(respectively). You'll make much more cash, and it'll work better for your site. [Checkout my site]([http://antjanus.com/](http://antjanus.com/)) for instance. I have a TeamTreeHouse ad (affiliate) which makes me a solid $X every month. The adsense ad underneath makes about $X/100 (it was slightly better when it was at the top of the sidebar but still made only a fraction of what the TTH ad made). I also have an ad for Bootstrap themes on my Bootstrap tutorials. That ad makes about $X/2 BUT my teamtreehouse ad performed at $X/25 for those articles, makes sense?

Anyways, I'm getting rid of adsense in favor of my own "ad network".

 __EDIT __A good example of other people doing this is [TechPro]([http://tech.pro](http://tech.pro)) (I worked there briefly during the first sprint to make a pre-alpha whatever) which has its own ad serving network and directly serves affiliate programs.

<comment><USER10> is a site called AntiAnus safe for me to view at work?

<comment><USER11> It's a j, not an i. A bit tough to tell with the underline there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have you considered trying another way to monetize? Selling merchandise, especially if you have an engaged audience, tends to have a higher effective CPM ($20-100+ in our experience) and can be run simultaneously with ads.

Teespring (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and t-shirt addict) can be an effective tool for doing just this. We ship hundreds of thousands of products each month, you get retail quality products and margins as though you were paying up front.

Absolutely no risk and no costs. You'll never pay us a penny, we only make money if you do.

</comment><comment><USER13> I suggest to come up with your own buyable products (tutorials, how-to's, etc..) and show half of it (teaser) to everyone and allow to see the rest to paid members.

Then you may charge per download, or full access based on recurring membership fee.

You may also offer free membership to capture emails and then market to interested visitors further.

Whoring your traffic to other people's platforms or products leaves no residual value to you and makes you vulnerable to other people TOS'es, moods and playrules.

The point is to use Google what it's good for - to send you prospects.

Your task is to capture prospect's contacts and establish relationships with them.

Begging for Adsense peanuts is unsustainable strategy as many people are finding out the hard way.

(PS: I worked on bulding membership site software that allows you to do just that with a few clicks)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, this is probably the direction we will eventually have to go. I really like this approach, but we'd rather focus on the content and articles now versus, say, the business side of it - unless it grows into something bigger.

My other thought was to put new articles up with a community-based bitcoin paywall. Basically if we receive "X" donations from the community, this article becomes public forever. I'm not sure how that will be received by our user base though (tech, web developers).

<comment><USER13> I'm actually the one who created free Bitcoin plugin for Wordpress/WooCommerce as well :)

[https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for- woocommer...](https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommerce/)

Feel free to utilize it for that purpose. It could be a great strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi,

Chitika customer support here! Our ad network is often used by those who cannot get AdSense approval but who still have high-quality sites. You can even test us out alongside AdSense -- we've found most publishers who use Chitika AND AdSense make more money than those who use AdSense alone.

We have search-targeted text, display, mobile, in-text, pop-out, and highlight ads available to all of our publishers.

Feel free to drop me a line at email@example.com if you or your friend have any questions. We can take a look at your blog and suggest certain ad types & placements that would work well for your specific blog. :)

<comment><USER15> What is your company's policy on ads that automatically open up iTunes or Google Play if they detect an iOS or Android device.

Because that shady practice is really starting to annoy me.

I've now had to enable parental controls (for myself) and block the iTunes app to prevent these annoying subversive ads from hijacking my browser on my iPad.

I'd like to see a policy of 1 warning then a ban for ad publishers who use these underhanded methods.

<comment><USER14> An ad should never open up an application on your device for you. It should only direct you to content that you've asked to see (because you made a decision to click on that ad). We hate annoying ads too! If you do see a Chitika ad that does this, let us know ASAP so we can remove it and make sure it's not happening anywhere else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are alternatives to AdSense, but the key here is to recognize that AdSense enjoys its favorable position in part by sourcing advertiser demand from other platforms. There is a massive and creative ecosystem around developing technology to suit (and sometimes to drive) the mercurial wishes of ad agencies. So Google captures this through partnerships. Ad demand that's actually originated by Google sales is very significant and very high quality, but there's no doubt that Google is simultaneously interested in serving its own wholly owned properties.

The best thing to do is to build relationships with 5-9 high quality ad platforms and waterfall them through passback tags, one to the other.

Good platforms include, but are certainly not limited to:

AOL x+1 AppNexus Turn MediaMath AudienceScience Criteo The Trade Desk

If you're lucky, you can satisfy all requests without sending a single impression over to AdSense.

If your domain is delivering fewer than 100m impressions monthly, it's unlikely that the companies noted above will be keen to put personnel on your account, and may not be able to work with you at all.

However, with intelligent switching, keen arbitrage, and an aggressive performant waterfall (e.g., you never actually want to pass a request to more than two or three of these or you'll see packet loss that exceeds the positive delta you'd have obtained by accessing yet another ad platform) you can do very well without using AdSense. The company I mentioned below, Publir, was cofounded by me about five years ago and does what we think is a rather good job of this. Sites like The Atlantic and others use us for their ads.

We're also terrific fans of BuySellAds, whose self-serve platform is second to none. There, your goal is simply to do direct outreach to advertisers likely to covet your audience. Even the finest brand-name publishers only sell about 30% of their ads this way, though, so your expectations ought not be too high.

</comment><comment><USER17> What's the niche?

It's more work, but you can generate similar levels of income - or sometimes more - using affiliate programs from sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Clickbank. You'll need to test and optimise, but the rewards can be considerable.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have a close friend who went from AdSense to BuySellAds Unreserved and saw a spike in CPM of c. 60-70%, with quality ads (I think he said these were primarily retargeting driven). I don't think he is going back to AdSense.

<comment><USER2> Very cool - always great to hear about people doing well with our Unreserved program! Thank you for sharing with the HN crowd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> MediaCrush ([https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh)) uses Project Wonderful. We describe our reasons here: [https://mediacru.sh/advertising](https://mediacru.sh/advertising).

In short, they are pro-user and generally seem like good guys, and they give us a lot of control.

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://www.media.net/publishers](http://www.media.net/publishers)

media.net, my previous company. We used to consider ourself in competition with adsense. They have some big name customers like forbes, cosmopolitan etc.

<comment><USER21> I recently split my ads (50% AdSense | 50% Media.Net) on one of the blogs I maintain and they both earn very close to the same amount every day. I like the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Agree with Todd's general setup. CPM's on display ads are in a death spiral thanks to a glut of inventory and programmatic buying/targeting options.

Particularly for a tutorial site I would consider paid, clearly marked sponsored tutorials that you produce and keep full editorial control over. In moderation it can work well and still have educational value for readers and drive results for advertisers way beyond any display ads, and significantly more revenue for you. Full disclosure I handle direct ad sales for publishers with this exact same model at TechCrowds.com (including representing a few BuySellAds publishers)

</comment><comment><USER23> For ads, I don't think others pay quite as well, and even those that come close, usually require at least 100,000 uniques a month or something like that.

But if it's not too irrelevant to that topic, I suggest combining whatever ad network you have with Amazon affiliate links. It helped me double my Adsense income for the same traffic.

Ultimately, if you have some quality service or content that you can sell, membership/subscription model is the best. I know someone who just gave up on Adsense, and was making 10x the Adsense revenue from subscriptions.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, there are many folks doing this very successfully. It's certainly not for everyone though, and does require a bit of work. We actually work with a bunch of folks who are doing this successfully over at a side-project of ours: [http://syndicateads.net](http://syndicateads.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are there any ad networks that don't track the people looking at your site? That would be a valuable feature to me.

<comment><USER25> You're basically asking to show ads that are even more irrelevant and useless to your users?

The best ads for publishers and users are ones that are relevant. If you want to display something that is irrelevant to the user and ineffective for the advertiser, you might as well not display ads at all and avoid annoying your users.

<comment><USER24> What if they show ads based on the focus of the site instead of information about the user?

<comment><USER26> You can, there are plenty of XML feed providers who will provide you an XML of ads relevant to the keywords you provide, which you collect server side and display to your users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Have you considered working directly with the most relevant advertisers for your niche market?

<comment><USER28> Thats what I ended up doing after my AdSense account was banned and I couldnt find a good alternative to match my sites.

Its a hit and miss though. Nothing like what I was earning with AdSense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I launched few months ago an alternative to AdSense: PandAd. [https://pandad.eu](https://pandad.eu)

However we focus a French public for the moment. But we try to do not track visitors of our publishers.

</comment><comment><USER30> I had a website that had around 50,000 hits/month and made about $150/month with no input from me. We used the ad network called Project Wonderful. It's simple to use and manage.

</comment><comment><USER16> You could try Publir.com. (Disclaimer: I'm cofounder.)

<comment><USER31> This doesn't look like an AdSense alternative. I think most people are looking for something that they can click a button, get a <script> tag they can drop in their page, and earn a few dollars a month to offset the cost of hosting. Your site looks like something catering to large publishers.

p.s. The landing page makes me confused on exactly what it is that your site does.

<comment><USER16> Yeah -- with Publir, we want to speak with every applicant first. But aside from that, it is more or less as simple as us generated a <script> tag and sending that over.

<comment><USER32> @malchow I work at BSA and would love to chat with you guys. Good way to connect?

<comment><USER16> @livestyle Would love to talk. I'm at joe (at sign) publir.com. Let me know that you came through YC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you're in health/fitness/nutrition/diet, we have some tools using the PricePlow API. Buzz me if so and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER34> Depends on the type of traffic, but I think it's best to just push CPA offers, or actual products from places like cj or clickbank

<comment><USER35> Do you know other places like clickbank?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know of an ad network which pays out in Bitcoin but targetted towards general users? Coinurl, a-ads etc have an extremely low CTR because they are targetted to only Bitcoins users.

Are there any plans for popular ad networks to payout in Bitcoin anytime soon?

Another solution would be to use affiliate programmes such as Privateinternetaccess but once again, it would generate a low CTR I would presume.

<comment><USER2> We've had some folks request to be paid out in Bitcoin. We're open to doing this once we have a handful more (or so) ask for it... the tricky thing is that you then have to play the exchange rate game and withdraw money from BuySellAds when it's "favorable" for you to do so, since the advertisers aren't actually paying you in Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wish Mozilla started their own ads platform for Firefox OS.

It looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER38> SEO is on the way out, and AdSense is too expensive. Social media is the new SEO, check out this book for the insider tips: [http://massivefollowing.com](http://massivefollowing.com)

<comment><USER39> Do you know what AdSense is?</comment></comment>


7 Experts on How to Build a Crazy High Converting Landing Page for Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://inboundrocket.co/blog/7-industry-experts-on-how-to-build-a-crazy-high-converting-landing-page-for-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for including my advice. Happy to answer any questions/remarks. (I'm Marc Köhlbrugge from BetaList)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Marc, for being part of it :-)</comment></comment>


Scrapilicious: A Delicious Scraper built in scrapy (python) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/josegonzalez/scrapilicious

<comment><AUTHOR> A bit of background:

I heard about Delicious closing down while at work, and quickly dumped my bookmarks. But with all this talk about data liberation, I decided it might be wise to try and grab some more info. Or at least someone else would.

Then I read this comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014526>). My immediate response was "Yeah, you could probably build a scraper to do this, here is how...". That never fixes anything, so like any good hacker, I learned some python, some new XPath tricks, and here I am.

Have fun with it, and be kind to Delicious.</comment>


ALMA telescope reveals the Sun in new light - <AUTHOR> https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/2017-alma-solar-campaign <comment><AUTHOR> This is a better writeup [1] but only includes one of the figures. For some context, the ALMA observatory is a radio telescope array that works at wavelengths of around a millimeter. The images show the intensity of the radio emission and are only in a false-color black-orange color scheme. These are the best images ever taken of the Sun at these wavelengths, you can see that the first two "zoom in images" are essentially focused just on that black pip centered in the third figure.

One thing that makes ALMA unique for these kind of observations is that it can actually observe the Sun--without melting the secondary mirrors from the focused sunlight that is. The antennas are designed to be reflective in the radio, but diffusely scatter optical and infrared light in all directions. The Swedish SEST observatory was not so lucky, and after accidentally pointing at the Sun it's secondary mirror burst into flames (see footnote 2 in [1], here are some pictures [2]).

[1] [https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/e-aso011717....](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/e-aso011717.php)

[2] [https://www.eso.org/public/images/?search=%2Bsest+%2Bfire](https://www.eso.org/public/images/?search=%2Bsest+%2Bfire) (see footnote two in above)</comment>


Show HN: WikiDive – Wikipedia articles open linked articles next to each other - <AUTHOR> http://wikidive.me/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome, really. Are you inspired by the [http://sites.fed.wiki.org/](http://sites.fed.wiki.org/) design? Maybe they could take some ideas of yours, like the ability to close articles and the top bar navigation.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I haven't seen this one! That's incredible how similar the designs are. I just really enjoy the narrow column as it makes the article more readable. I'll reach out to them. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium - <AUTHOR> https://able.bio/rhett/the-new-able-editor--596ha6x <comment><USER2> Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time.

Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms.

If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here.

[https://StartABlog.com/free-blog](https://StartABlog.com/free-blog)

<comment><USER3> This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market.

Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.

To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on developer content and hit the casual crowd. We already have options for the tech savvy that work well, and none for casuals. Medium was the only _good_ option for that. Features like the table of contents are nice for technical content, but an eyesore for casual content.

<comment><USER4> > hit the casual crowd

Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It's always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.

Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.

Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.

 _Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog._

<comment><USER5> > all non-tech Medium blogs

> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog

I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service.

But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so _this particular thing_ or _absolutely everything else all in one bag_. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?

<comment><USER6> If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.

<comment><USER5> > much more likely

Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference.

The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know".

> interesting insights

How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.

<comment><USER4> You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true.

Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Firefox gets first-class support and is the primary browser we test in.

Wow. I would not have believed to ever read something like this for any service, ever again.

<comment><USER8> When I do frontend work I always work in Firefox [0]. I think once we caught something that didn't work in other browsers.

That happens all the time it seems with those who work in a certain other browser. Why? I can't say for certain, I guess it is because that other browser doesn't care as muvh about web standards but there might also be some part that has to do with most users of that other browser not caring too much about the web ecosystem.

[0]: I always do that anyway hehe, it is my not-so-secret research tool ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm always glad to see competition in any space - especially anything that can keep the big boys (Medium!) in check. Kudos to you for giving this a shot!

Although, while i wish you plenty of luck, the only way you're going to get my money is if/when you think about functions and features supporting things like POSSE or even better yet ActivityPub. The last few years have taught me that I'm not going to spend my money on organizations that don't align with my values of wanting more decentralization. If organization X helps foster more indie web concepts, then I'll happily pay. If you don't support decentralization, then I'll pass, thank you very much.

By all means, please don't receive this as a slight to your service - i do honestly wish you luck. Take this simply as a signal from a potential customer clearly informing you of what services and features that i'm (gladly!) willing to pay.

Again, best of luck with you venture!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We're busy working on RSS imports right now and should have something up in a day or two. We're open to ActivityPub too but this might take a bit longer just because we're building Able in our spare time.

Ultimately, we want to create a great place for developers and then charge businesses to advertise their job vacancies to that community. Because we're self-funded we don't have pressure to grow at all costs but we'll need the support from the developer community if we want to turn this into a sustainable business.

<comment><USER9> That's great to hear! And, acknowledged on the activitypub likely taking a bit of time to roll out. That area is still new enough for many people. But again good to hear you're heading in the right direction! Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> RSS support is nice - even better would be if they were also exposed in the metadata [1] so that my feed extension can autodetect it.

        <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://example.com/feed" />

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great tip, will definitely add that!

<comment><USER10> Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> This has now been added to user profiles and posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post.

Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property.

If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.

<comment><USER11> High SERP ratings come from multiple things:

1\. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in)

2\. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite linking).

3\. Inbound links; lots of people link to Medium content. If Medium uses Google's tracking tools, Google has a good idea of the inbound traffic and can adjust based on the site's popularity.

None of this has to do with user experience. Unfortunately.

I'm sure there is more (like page load times, how information is organized in the HTML, etc.) that factors in, but these are the ones that occurred to me.

<comment><USER12> Page load time should include the time it takes to clear away the nag screen before you can see the content. That is easily 2000ms for most people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The oauth2 requirements for twitter signup are quite aggressive.

* See Tweets from your timeline (including protected Tweets) as well as your Lists and collections.

* See your Twitter profile information and account settings.

* See accounts you follow, mute, and block.

* Follow and unfollow accounts for you.

* Update your profile and account settings.

* Post and delete Tweets for you, and engage with Tweets posted by others (Like, un-Like, or reply to a Tweet, Retweet, etc.) for you.

* Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you.

* Mute, block, and report accounts for you.

* See your email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies, we'll tighten that up. We only want social auth to streamline onboarding.

<comment><USER13> Cool. I assumed it was unintentional. Once you do that I'm in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Give us 24 hours. Will reply once it's sorted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What functionality does Able provide for technical bloggers who want to do POSSE? Can users import draft articles from their site's RSS feed, for example?

Also, have you given any thought to integrating with the Fediverse by implementing ActivityPub?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're definitely keen to do both of these things when our time/resources permit. What would be the first step you'd like to see here?

<comment><USER14> Doing RSS Import first might be easier than ActivityPub and help writers get content onto the site faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, we're busy working on RSS importing now. Should be up in a day or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.

<comment><USER16> Gitlab does that for free, with free storage. Just fork any of the existing example projects: [https://gitlab.com/pages](https://gitlab.com/pages)

<comment><USER15> Whenever I've looked at Gitlab/GH pages, Netlify, etcetera in the past I haven't found a good web/mobile CMS to use with them. Most pro options are too expensive for a personal blog. However ellinokon's suggestion for Siteleaf looks promising.

<comment><USER16> Are you saying that you didn't find one example out of the 20 examples they provide on the link i posted (octopress, nanoc, pelican, hyde, hexo, hugo, jekyll, metalsmith, vuepress, plain-html ...) that supports mobile, nor has a mobile compatible theme available ? The gitlab pages option is free even with a custom domain and https.

<comment><USER15> I don't mean a mobile compatible theme, but a CMS mobile app to edit and create content. So something like Netlify CMS and Siteleaf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fantastic to see Medium competition. I've been so frustrated with "let's make it official"-esque messages. Best of luck - I will be using you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for your support. We hope it becomes a useful place for the community. Always keen to hear feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you don't feel comfortable with the reliability of "free" business models, check out [https://etch.blog](https://etch.blog) which is only $11/year for an awesome, no-nonsense blog (and newsletter). We're committed to providing the best blogging experience at the best price, forever. We're also committed to the open web with RSS support and Webmention comments in the pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some pages have horizontal scrollbar on my mobile firefox, such as this [https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with- spring-s...](https://able.bio/DavidLandup/password-encoding-with-spring- security--90gkzie)

Also, why .bio? Sounds like biotech web site.

<comment><USER20> I assume it's bio as in short for biography, which can be fitting in the context of a blogging platform. This was at least my first thought upon seeing the domain, and I didn't make any association with biology, biotech, etc. until I saw your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool, just the other day I was looking for a place to quickly paste the longish top comment from the "who wants to get fired" thread [1] in order to be able to read it reasonably formatted. I've published the story here and given the original author control:

[https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer- name...](https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-named-ralph-- 52gs1cy)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785)

<comment><AUTHOR> OMG, I feel an ulcer developing just from reading that story. Thanks for posting!

Reminds me of that 2 million LOC monstrosity someone once commented on an ASK HN about the worst codebase they've ever seen.

Btw, there are some duplicate paragraphs in the article that are probably worth trimming out. Search for "Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped."

<comment><USER21> mh sorry, that may have been my mistake… I edited it on my phone

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and tags, in either <> or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider ( __*).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an awesome idea! Would need to request write permissions though and most users are wary of this. Thoughts?

<comment><USER22> Can you have different permissions from different users? If so it could be a setting to "backup to github", and then request that permission then.

Is there a place I can put suggestions/requests? Because I have some for the editor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The very best alternative to Medium is self-hosted Ghost.

[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

And if a person can't figure self-hosting out then the paid version of Ghost is the best option.

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

Ghost is an amazing platform and it's the only blogging solution that I know of that gets a perfect Google lighthouse [https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/) score right out of the box.

If Ghost made switching from WordPress easy they would totally take over the blogging space.

I don't know what's up at their HQ but if I were them I'd be making a "switching from WordPress" tool my #1 priority.

</comment><comment><USER24> Although this seems great, use Ghost. The editing interface is unreal and the SEO/RSS/integrations are plentiful. You can customize it however you like, but there's some nice templates they have for free as well. I use it on Docker and port it around servers all the time (had some server problems here and there and it's super easy to port it using docker to different servers).

The best part is you don't have to worry if Able.bio goes away one day. Self- host will only go away on your account.

Actually running [https://sdan.xyz/blog](https://sdan.xyz/blog) on it. (I personally love how the design and fonts come together... I created this design and it's available on Github)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it me, or have there been an uptick in new writing platforms? Two that I can think of are substack and reading.supply.

It'd be interesting to see an open source competitor to Medium; developments in and usage of markdown editors is an added bonus!

</comment><comment><USER26> Great work - there needs to be a good place to write for free without the site then trying to sell the writing on. I've signed up to your newsletter but it took me a little scrabbling about to figure out how.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll charge businesses to advertise their vacancies, so we don't have to get in the way of developers/users.

It should ask you what notifications you'd like to receive during the onboarding process and you can just check the 'Digest' box. Did that not show up for you?

<comment><USER26> It didn't, but I ended up finding it in the settings. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Providing one point of data for you.

I am bookmarking your site because I will be using the jobs board.

As far as the blogging part is concerned, I would rather use Medium because it has a bigger network and, more importantly, I do not trust your platform.

I don't think "we don't take VC money" and "no ads" will help you build trust. It's good that you don't do those things, but that's just avoiding bad stuff. As far as building trust goes, I think you have to actively do good stuff too. In my eyes the jobs board helps with that.

Just my 2¢. Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER28> 100 on Lighthouse is something to be very proud of. I love this service.

<comment><USER24> Did you get 100 on lighthouse? For some reason I'm getting 59 on performance on this post itself and 93 on the post he indicated (although everything is around 100 as well).

Regardless, it's a great feat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I decided to roll my own blog [0] instead of using medium. Moreover, I wrote the static blog generator myself (2 versions, a Python and a Perl version [1]). I have been blogging daily for over 190 days now, and it feels good.

[0] [http://plurrrr.com/](http://plurrrr.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john- bokma/tumblelog)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is awesome! Especially for data science, Medium has a stranglehold on reliable articles. Excited to see an alternative, and one that actually seems to work better.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes, and in five years they'll start showing blocking modals too, after realising this isn't monetizable.

And the never ending circle continues... Just self-host.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think folks might be more comfortable switching to this if they understood the business model (or philanthropic finding source). This platform will only have value if it scales (and therefore has substantial costs). How will those costs be covered? What about paying you for your time you spend building and maintaining it?

Looking forward to learning more about your plans, and having an alternative to the existing ecosystem.

<comment><USER33> Here's the link you're looking for: [https://able.bio/about#business- model](https://able.bio/about#business-model)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> three things:

1\. its hard to search for you guys. your name is hard to SEO on. for example "medium kafka" gets you relevant search results. "able blog" doesnt even feature you in the first page. Could you consider changing it ?

2\. your tld is nice for branding, but im not sure if you know that these kind of tld have resolution issues in Asia. it would be nice if you were on a .com (even ablebio.com). [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212)

3\. the .bio domain is dangerous. [https://icannwiki.org/.bio](https://icannwiki.org/.bio) > _Thus, to respect the European Union 's standards for 'bio' /organic food, this open TLD will have regulations in place for registrants intending to use it as a space for organic food products. The rest of the non-organic related TLD will not be regulated. The French warning notes the wide range of international standards on agricultural products and organic food, and consequently believes that the TLD can not be implemented unless it is not at all used to denote material related to organic agriculture. It warns of consumer harm or confusion if the TLD were to be implemented_.

Since this is a blog service, you would have to strongly regulate this - otherwise other blogs would go down if the EU screws you because of some agricultural/organic food blog someone writes.

in fact you can read lots of similar posts here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981212) , [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we're still quite a small site so our authority still needs to grow. Google has said that TLD's shouldn't affect ranking.

I didn't know there about the issues in Asia, thanks for mentioning this.

We've looked into the use of bio and there was a case where they considered it to be appriopriate for biographical purposes.

Ultimately though, we do want to get a better tld. I just can't afford it on my current salary :) - suggestions are welcome.

<comment><USER35> If your TLD will be used for email addresses, I'd recommend sticking to .com, .org, or .net.

A lot of spammers are sending a lot of spam using addresses in the newer TLDs. There is so little legitimate mail from them compared to the spam that it can make sense to treat the whole TLD as a spam source and whitelist any legitimate correspondents you have there.

As far as I know, the new TLDs are fine for websites. Maybe do something like able.bio for your site, but also get something like able-bio.com [1], and use that for mail from the site.

[1] I am just assuming that able.{com,net,org} are already taken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The main reason I don't use Medium is due to its restrictiveness on layout. I often include JavaScript snippets that are connected throughout the webpage to showcase concepts, or like to include table of contents for navigation, which you just can't do on Medium.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like it, it's clean, simple and puts content first.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love the cause. Is there a way to donate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! There isn't, but if you just use the site and spread the word about what we're trying to do that is more than enough :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Any plans to support custom domains?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment> 0-_-0 How about math formula support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we want to support this too and will be looking into it.

<comment><USER22> Maybe blocks that can render LaTeX?

<comment><USER25> +1 I would recommend using KaTeX for this. Another thing would be to embed CodeMirror within ProseMirror ([https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/](https://prosemirror.net/examples/codemirror/)) instead of just using monospace font. The additional benefit of that is free syntax-highlighting.

I've played with ProseMirror and math support before, so this is what it about looks like. [1] [https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD](https://imgur.com/a/rV2AATD)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Great. When medium started throwing up paywalls we stopped using it.

Anyone want to guess when these guys put up their first paywall? I'll go with January 2021.

<comment><USER41> It's becoming impossible to "pardon the interruption" with Medium when it happens multiple times a day. For me it's a reflexive response at this point, I don't even remember what they're asking for, my hand just moves to close the thing.

<comment><USER42> > For me it's a reflexive response at this point [...]

Q: Why would one not install NoScript and get rid of these "interruptions" forever?

<comment><USER43> Because images on Medium wouldn't load without JS.

<comment><USER42> I've just loaded a random Medium link in FF with NoScript enabled and the inline images look just fine.

Q: Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The editor looks awesome! Great work :) ..any chanse on open sourcing the editor?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out ProseMirror.

<comment><USER22> Two small suggestions, there's a "placeholder" text for the new post title, but not the content. You also can't hit the enter key to start writing, so at first I couldn't figure out how to write.

The other one is to make the inside is your favicon white instead of transparent. It looks good on light themes, but the A is almost invisible on my dark theme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congrats for shipping! :) How's this different from Dev.to ?

</comment><comment><USER46> Why this feels Medium just all over again?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not. We don't have to grow at all costs for investors. You can read our manifesto here: [https://able.bio/about](https://able.bio/about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is there an RSS feed or am I just blind?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just for individual users at the moment. You can find them on user profiles or at the bottom of articles.

When we launch support for publications you'll be able to follow the publication feed too.

Would you want a feed for all articles?

<comment><USER47> Yes, that would be good.</comment></comment></comment>


5 Startups to Watch at Y Combinator's Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236510

<comment><USER2> This is new</comment>


Dota2 Bot Scripting API - <AUTHOR> https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting <comment><AUTHOR> Valve just released a big gameplay update to its biggest esport game and added support for a bot scripting api along the way, allowing players to exchange them through Steam workshop.

> Programmers, scripters, and mad scientists rejoice! You can now create your > own Dota bots using a brand new scripting API. Upload your bots to the > Workshop for others to download and play. Then, enjoy watching as your > creations slowly take over the Dota universe.

Basically, there's now an API to play the game through bots and make competitions between them. Given the deep gameplay the game has and the available API, this hints of a very promising bot programming scene.</comment>


What Can You Learn from the 4-Hour Workweek? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/01/10/what-can-you-learn-from-the-4-hour-workweek/?awesm=grp.vc_BLr&utm_medium=grp.vc-twitter&utm_source=direct-grp.vc&utm_content=sociable-wordpress <comment><USER2> The "deferred life plan" is one of the items I enjoyed thinking about in the book as well.

Also, I think people get really hung up on the title of "The Four Hour Work Week." Tim has explained before that he chose that title after running AdSense tests to see which possible titles people were interested in. The original title was "Selling Drugs for Fun and Profit" (a phrase he actually uses early in the book) because he ran a nutritional supplement company. I think the story is a retailer balked at the title, so he ran his test, and picked the winner.

Anyway, people seem to get hung up on that aspect of the book, but it's really about much more than that.</comment>


Why Vesper really failed - <AUTHOR> http://movingfulcrum.com/why-vesper-really-failed/ <comment><USER2> The reason Vesper "failed" was because its popularity was based on _who_ developed it rather than _what_ it did.

But you can't just dismiss the issues with the App Store. Productivity apps limited to just the iOS App Store are doomed to fail. There's no money there.</comment>


IP over Avian Carriers - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

<comment><USER2> One of the earlier stories ever submitted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348315)

Here are a few more:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407443)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814047)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211093)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211358)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3345922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3345922)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711451)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4575742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4575742)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4671783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4671783)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837876)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837886)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6512784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6512784)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122985)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261082)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7388184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7388184)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524282)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8051242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8051242)

Interestingly, none have generated interesting discussion.

There's also "Near-Field Authentication over Avian Carrier"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4422155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4422155)

But that's something _entirely_ different.</comment>


Modal Window Destroy Concept - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/sol0mka/full/XJjLxe/

<comment><USER2> oh man i love the sound it makes when you break the modal! haha this is a nice concept, might be a bit annoying for end users with the sound tho</comment>


VIM is the Worst Text Editor Ever (sometimes) - <AUTHOR> http://mutuallyhuman.com/blog/2011/05/06/vim-is-the-worst-text-editor-ever-sometimes <comment><USER2> Oh, boy. Just read this book and be done with the Vim initiation rituals... [http://www.amazon.com/Vim-Vi-Tips-Essential- ebook/dp/B004JF4...](http://www.amazon.com/Vim-Vi-Tips-Essential- ebook/dp/B004JF4NOQ/) For the record, I use both Vim and TextMate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I'm being out of line here, but I'd be impressed if HN could go a week without repeating what has been said 50 times previously about a text editor.</comment>


Tapdo – the ingenious button. Maybe the smartest way to interact with technology - <AUTHOR> https://tapdo.io/ <comment><USER2> The idea of using different parts of your hand to control things is interesting but very few people want one more thing to wear on their hand. They could make it a standalone device but then it becomes a glorified switch. Wonder who their primary target market is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi jaipilot747,

you can use our button standalone, with a clip or glued. You can put in on another wristband or you can use our wristband. We assume that it works best at your wrist.

Best Markus

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hackers,

what do you think about our product? Do you have any ideas for use cases? Do you have ideas to improve our product? We are keen to know your opinion.

Best Markus</comment>


Microsoft: Designers, Designers, Designers - <AUTHOR> http://calebelston.com/microsoft-designers-designers-designers

<comment><USER2> I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. It's easy to forget that there are still a lot of WinMo phones out there with a Start menu and a task manager. MS did a complete turn around with their new Metro UI and the fact that it is aesthetically distinct from anything of Apple's earns them some points in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been thinking recently about the notion that Apple has been successful in recent years because of their amazing design abilities. More and more, I'm coming to the conclusion that this idea is wrong.

I think the real reason Apple has been successful is that they care a lot about _QA_. I know a ton of switchers - from Linux and Microsoft to Apple desktops and laptops, and from other smart phones to iphones. I very rarely hear people talk about how beautiful or intuitive their new devices are (in fact it's often the opposite - "why doesn't the green button maximize windows properly?"). But one thing that _always_ comes up is the expression (usually said very giddily) "everything just _works_!".

That's not (mostly) design, it's (mostly) QA.

<comment><USER4> I would say "polish" is what you're actually looking for. It's design, it's QA, it's UX, all in a box. What it isn't is "features" or "developers."

<comment><USER3> I disagree. The switchers I know have often been _frustrated_ by the UX, and haven't seemed to care very much about the aesthetics. But they _really_ care about things (finally!) just working. This is overwhelmingly achieved by QA.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I guess that's not my experience as a switcher (less things work correctly than did in Win 7), but we can agree to disagree.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. My uncle used to have an old g3 macbook, and a Windows notebook. A year ago, he dropped both for a Macbook (when they dropped the price to €999, not the unibody one) with OS X Leopard, because he had this "notion" that the Macs just "works", and are "virus proof".

You had to see his face when the OS would hang when he performed an update, or the wireless connection problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "[In Windows Phone 7 Microsoft is] dictating screen resolution, GPS, accelerometer, memory, CPU, even the number of physical buttons that can exist on a device...

...[Android has] not established a strong design language, which has led to a hodgepodge of app quality and interaction metaphors which makes it difficult to just "know" how a new app works."</comment>


Bulletproof demos using Chrome's playback mode - <AUTHOR> http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/bulletproof-demos <comment><USER2> Anyone know where the recorded content is stored, and whether it's kept segregated from other cached content? This could be a really interesting archival format...

<comment><USER3> Even more awesome would be the ability to send the recorded content to someone.

<comment><USER4> Yeah that's the first thing I thought of, especially if it's possible to pause and inspect/introspect the DOM and code, that would make debugging client issues much easier.

Although just capturing user session would already be nice, better than forcing people to take videos of their desktop (and with a bit of luck the file would be much smaller)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I'm imagining a world where I tell a customer to use a Chrome add-in that automatically starts recording what they do and uploads it to me and I can see what is going on.

Even if not that wonderful, just the ability to have QA or fellow developers send me a file that I can analyze instead of tying up their computer would be wonderful. Especially when working with remote co-workers.

The problem with video is that I can't inspect their DOM or their console.

<comment><USER5> Don't miss what Google uses:

[http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/10/take-bite-out- of-b...](http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/10/take-bite-out-of-bugs-and- redundant.html)

[http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/11/rpf-googles- record...](http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/11/rpf-googles-record- playback-framework.html)

<http://code.google.com/p/bite-project/>

<comment><USER3> Wow. Thankyou. Made my day and possibly our QA team's day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would be interested in recording the actual order of http requests and being able to replay them on the commandline.

something like open -a "Google Chrome" --args --record-mode --output-file output.log

then: some-command-that-plays-it-back --infile output.log

does anyone know if something like that exists?

<comment><USER7> There exist various proxies that do this; for me, the first Google result for "proxy record replay http" leads to [http://code.google.com/p/http- impersonator/wiki/GettingStart...](http://code.google.com/p/http- impersonator/wiki/GettingStarted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _It doesn't record where you click or what you open, just every request as it moves over the wire._

I am getting quite different results - it records http requests and user input (keyboard/mouse).

Windows 7 x64, Chrome 25.0.1364.172 m :

      # navigate to chrome directory
      cd C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\
      # run chrome with a new profile
      chrome --user-data-dir="../User Data/recording_test" --first-run --record-mode
      # use the new chrome profile to browse around
      # close chrome
      # launch it in playback mode
      chrome --user-data-dir="../User Data/recording_test" --playback-mode
      # watch disaster ensue as it locks your mouse (not keyboard),
      #   replays all activity (url bar input, navigation, mouse cursor movements...),
      #   and doesn't even stop when you alt-tab
      #   to a different application

It feels unpolished - mouse _scroll_ wasn't recorded, the "translate this page?" bar wasn't showing up the same way as in the recording, and most importantly, I managed to switch to a different application and it continued sending input to that application. HTTP requests did get cached as promised, and non-cached requests (due to missing scroll event, it clicked on a different link) resulted in a cache error.

</comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately my site works directly with embedded Hulu videos and it doesn't seem like this process can replay those videos from the cache.

I JUST dealt with bad data speeds at SXSW while demoing for @scobleizer so this would have been great for the future.

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought Chrome could record your navigation actions .e.g input URL and click elements, it turned out to be directly cache of URL contents so you could read from cache later...

Anyway, cool concept, except it doesn't work with X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, or ajax call with timestamp parameters.

</comment><comment><USER11> This would be great for capturing usability tests as well.

<comment><USER12> Not really, if I understand correctly this is capturing only the requests, "caching" them in a way, so when on playback mode if you do an action that fires this request, it's fetched from the recorded store.

I think its use is limited to what the article suggests: making sure real life demos don't break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a similar trick built into fiddler, too, although that's Windows only. Does anyone know of a cross-platform equivalent for Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER14> Any idea what the command is for windows?

start /b "" "C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --args --record-mode

doesn't seem to work

<comment><AUTHOR> \--args is an option to the OS X open command, you shouldn't need it on windows. My guess is:

start /b "" "C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --record-mode

Report back if it works!

<comment><USER14> No luck :(

<comment><USER15> You can just run the executable, you don't need to call start.

"C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --record- mode

<comment><USER14> I've tried that also but still no luck. I have the commands in separate bat files but I wouldn't expect that to affect it, or I might be using the wrong chrome executable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're going to go to the trouble of running something from the terminal (even if you save time with a bash/batch script), why would you prefer this over Selenium? With Selenium you can customize the actions, extend using your favorite language (such as adding pauses or pulling inputs from a database), and if you use Firefox, you can get the same recording ability (only you can save the file and can extend via JavaScript)

<comment><USER17> Selenium solves a different problem. With selenium, you record user actions, and verify properties about the state of the site.

The record/playback feature is designed to make a copy of the content you look at during a session, allowing you to retrieve it offline at a later time by revisiting the page (or making equivalent HTTP calls).

Interestingly, if you use both together, you can design a offline-mode reader for hacker news for use on the train or other disconnected environments. Or, combine selenium and playback mode to create kick ass demos that are less likely to fail on weak wifi networks. :)

<comment><USER16> True. I hadn't considered situations where the content would change if you replayed later. For the apps where I'd use this that's never been a use case, and aside from the cached content, Selenium accomplishes the same and more. Selenium is typically used for testing and verification, but it's quite useful as a recording/playback or full-fledged browser automation tool. Another good one is iMacros.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool. Is there a switch to direct Chrome to ignore the cache and pull fresh data from the server?

<comment><USER19> chrome --disk-cache-size=1 --media-cache-size=1

1 is a size in bytes (must be >0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting... I wasn't aware of this, I'll definitely give it a shot.

Thanks for the heads-up!</comment>


As Oracle axes support for GlassFish, MySQL users might want to pay attention - <AUTHOR> http://parelastic.com/blog/oracle-axes-support-glassfish-mysql-users-might-want-pay-attention <comment><USER2> The concerns over MySQL might be justified, but have little to do with GlassFish. GlassFish has never been a popular open source project like Tomcat, Jetty or JBoss, and probably not as commercially successful as Oracle's own WebLogic, or IBM's WebSphere, or JBoss. There was really no good reason to keep it alive, other than as the JEE reference implementation, a role which, as I understand, it will continue to serve.

Also, the compatibility between different Java EE application servers is far greater than between different DBs, and migrating from one to the other is usually very simple.

I do hope (and would like to assume) that only the work on the GlassFish _server_ will be reduced, while popular subprojects like Jersey[1] will continue as before.

[1]: [https://jersey.java.net/](https://jersey.java.net/)

<comment><USER3> Jersey is an integral part of WebLogic as well, so development will assuredly continue.

From the jersey mailing list:

> Jersey remains the JAX-RS implementation in WebLogic as well as JAX-RS RI in > GlassFish. The decision to not provide a commercial GF 4.x offering is > orthogonal to Jersey and JAX-RS development.

> ...and now, just to be safe, I should probably add the standard Oracle > disclamer :) Here it goes:

> The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is > intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any > contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or > functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. > The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality > described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

> Marek

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the difference is that Glassfish is a piece of garbage. Among the few people who have heard of it it has a reputation of being the worst application server you can possibly use.

<comment><USER5> I haven't used it but there is NO WAY that it is worse than WebSphere.

In any case, my firm belief is that the whole concept of app servers is flawed. Libs are so much better than frameworks, and app servers are just horribly clunky frameworks, which take away as much control as possible from the dev.

Taking control away from devs is a really backwards way of thinking of development as grunt work, which has been proven time and time again that it isn't.

Death to all app servers, I say!

<comment><USER6> I actually passed on some repeat client work when they insisted on using WebSphere.

My initial project for them was an eternal struggle to get basic things (XML parsing, Hibernate, CDI, etc) working in their environment because specific versions of these things were already included in the app server, and always ended up conflicting with libs we needed to include for our own app. I remember it distinctly as one of those times where I just felt helpless to make anything work.

<comment><USER7> I was in a similar boat. I abandoned a potentially very lucrative startup because the owner (my friend's brother) insisted on using Websphere and all the associated apps (he was a former IBMer). There came a point where some misconfiguration occurred when attempting to restore a previous version of the application after that point nothing worked. I tried for days on end to fix the problems but nothing would compile without massive errors. The piles and piles of cruft that Websphere added did nothing but obscure the real source of the issue. Eventually I gave up and said screw it and left.

The startup was already on its last legs at that point, as I was the only active developer since the other developer I worked with had already left after getting fed up for other reasons. After I left the startup limped along for a while but as far as I can tell was abandoned. If they had just used a more sane environment I could have easily developed the entire thing myself as it wasn't anything more complicated than a straightforward CMS + payments. I still kick myself for not making a better case for a more sane environment but I was wet behind the ears at the time and I didn't trust my instincts in the face of guys with masters degrees and X years at IBM and other top companies. I know better now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pure FUD. Oracle has owned Innodb since 2005 and now that they own the whole of MySQL impressive releases are coming at a steady clip. To date, Oracle has been a better steward of MySQL than Sun was.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of the big distros have transitioned to MariaDB already ([https://mariadb.com/kb/en/distributions-which-include- mariad...](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/distributions-which-include-mariadb/)). Debian probably will soon as well, which will trickle down into Ubuntu probably.

I think there's plenty of room outside Oracle if they were to ever shut down MySQL. I moved to MariaDB, and it really was a drop-in replacement.

<comment><USER10> Compatibility document for the curious:

[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-versus-mysql- compatibility...](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-versus-mysql- compatibility/)

<comment><USER11> TL;DR: It's 100% binary compatible, but PHP manages to have problems anyway

/facepalm

<comment><USER9> I think it's only a problem if you're using mysql_ instead of mysqli_.

[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/installation-issues-with- php5/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/installation-issues-with-php5/)

Since mysql_ is being deprecated soon (so they say, maybe PHP6 haha), it'd be good to migrate to mysqli_ anyway.

<comment><USER12> Shouldn't everyone be on PDO by now? If you're still on mysql[i]_ you must be used to having problems.

<comment><USER9> Probably. I'm a pretty poor developer. I'm a sysadmin who sometimes writes PHP apps for work. So, I'll look into PDO. :D

<comment><USER9> lmm: (For some reason your post doesn't have a reply link) These are usually webapps for department-specific needs, and I generally find PHP to be easier. I have a few python things that I use on the backend, as well as a plethora of bash scripts. But, I admit to knowing PHP more than Python. (I'm in a smallish company, so I end up wearing a lot of hats)

generalpf: I will do so! Do you have any go-to references that you prefer? Or shall I just dig through the PHP docs?

<comment><USER12> It's really quite simple, read this and get to work! It also explains the 'why'.

[http://wiki.hashphp.org/PDO_Tutorial_for_MySQL_Developers](http://wiki.hashphp.org/PDO_Tutorial_for_MySQL_Developers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why? MySQL has a well-maintained drop-in replacement outside of Oracle control (MariaDB). It's even mentioned in the article.

(And no one's ever heard of Glassfish, probably the reason why Oracle are dropping it)

<comment><USER10> Agreed, every MySQL project I'm on is actually a MariaDB project. While I prefer Postgres and have arguments to present to clients who rely on MySQL, a fear of Oracle is not one of those arguments because I just don't think it matters what happens to MySQL proper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The way they closed down OpenSolaris told me all I needed to know about Oracle's plans for every other OSS project.

We did use GlassFish with JRuby on a project early on in my career, that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't worry too much, since MariaDB is out there.

I'd love to make the switch from MySQL, except Amazon RDS doesn't support MariaDB yet. But since they just added PostgreSQL, maybe there's hope? Presumably MariaDB support would be vastly easier, as easy as a new version of MySQL?

</comment><comment><USER16> I think that would be sufficient motivation to get me to use PostgreSQL. I doubt I'll go running out to buy an Oracle database when there's sufficient alternatives (including MariaDB).

</comment><comment><USER17> I think what's more likely is that MySQL goes the way of Hudson/Jenkins. Oracle strangles the open source community and pushes people to use a fork of the original software. Oracle's in the database business, and I just don't see any reason for them to kill off one of the most popular databases in the world. More likely is that they make it serve _their_ purposes to the exclusion of the open source community's.

</comment><comment><USER18> I switched over to MariaDB on my most recent Linux install, and honestly have no idea that the database is different. Moved my Windows install from MySQL to MariaDB as well. Was a bit more complicated, but not by much.

</comment><comment><USER19> This kind of makes sense; they have WebLogic to sell to enterprise customers.</comment>


Sinatra-like routes in Rails - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/3717973

<comment><USER2> This is really interesting to me, are there other reasons to prefer Sinatra than the simplicity of its routes?</comment>


Google charts no longer will create QR codes - <AUTHOR> Until this week, Google offered a service to generate QR codes as part of its static charts api.
The google page for it links to the new actively maintained charts api, but QR codes are not listed among the gallery of chart types.
https://developers.google.com/chart/infographics/docs/qr_codes
That's too bad, it was a nice, simple service... pass it a url, it gave you back an image of the specified size.
Any thoughts why google would drop QR codes, about a year afte they finally added a QR scanner to Chrome? <comment><USER2> Just speculation, but perhaps related to google also ending their url shortening service.</comment>


Should Creative Workers Use Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/me

<comment><USER2> Yes. Definetely. But the problem is that the big pharma will spoil everything again, by bribing doctors, excessive ads, etc.</comment>


Ask HN: Which blogging platform do you use? - <AUTHOR> Dear HN Community,
I am curious to know which blogging platform you use ? Is it paid or free ? Do you self-host ? What is the running costs in case you self-host and what sort of limitations are there to using a platform vs self-hosting ?
Thanks for your inputs!
Cheers! <comment><USER2> Self hosted here.

I migrated from Wordpress to Middleman for my blog [0], but wanted to have a web UI for writing and editing blog posts so I wrote my own [1]. Here's a screenshot [2].

I also didn't want to lose all the comment history so I wrote another gem [3] for Disqus-like comments, which are loaded via AJAX given that the website is completely static.

I haven't gotten around documenting the gems but hope to do sometime this month!

[0] [http://bootlog.org](http://bootlog.org) [1] [https://rubygems.org/gems/artifact](https://rubygems.org/gems/artifact) [2] [https://twitter.com/tomaspollak/status/753728789679529985](https://twitter.com/tomaspollak/status/753728789679529985) [3] [https://rubygems.org/gems/cachai](https://rubygems.org/gems/cachai)

<comment><USER3> Maybe because I'm so used to reading in english and portuguese, when I see phrases in languages that I'm not as familiar, I find them beautiful (like a melody, say).

Like this one from your blog: "Y ahí empezaba la magia y los sonidos galáticos del módem."

<comment><USER2> Hehe, that's a good one. In english it would go like this: "And that's when the magic would start with the modem's galatic sounds."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For my site [0], I use a custom static site generator that I wrote myself in rust. [1] (Because you know what the world really needed more than anything else? Yeah, yet another static site generator.) It's super basic right now, but it does the job.

Since it's a fully static site, I have Nginx serving it directly on a $5/mo DO server, along with a bunch of other crap. Static sites are great because they need almost nothing from a server for hosting.

Also, the site style is heavily inspired by [2].

[0] [https://psbarrett.com/](https://psbarrett.com/) [1] [https://github.com/azdle/virgil](https://github.com/azdle/virgil) [2] [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered DO $5/month and then also considered posthaven which costs the same minus the hassles of maintaining and monitoring your own server.. just trying to explore and discover how the community maintains their blogs :-)

<comment><USER4> For me it came down to the fact that having a real VPS lets me host all my other projects on there too for the same price, and I'm a cheap bastard. I've got 19 different domains (including subdomains) hosting different things on that one VPS. None of them have an significant traffic to speak of and none of them make money, so having them all on the same server is the only way that I could reasonably afford to host them all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough:) Hey we all would like to experiment on low budgets and sure $5 VPS can do wonders for all the experiments and projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use Jekyll ([https://jekyllrb.com/](https://jekyllrb.com/)) which generates static html pages from templates and your blog posts written in markdown. The advantage of this is that I can put my entire blog in git. Also there is no database needed, which makes hosting much easier.

I generate the static html and then put them inside a docker container to deploy. The host is a bare metal server (not free but cheap) with docker installed.

Both of these blogs use Jekyll + Docker as described above:

\- [http://blog.nimbleci.com/](http://blog.nimbleci.com/)

\- [http://blog.emmetogrady.com/](http://blog.emmetogrady.com/)

<comment><USER6> I use middleman[1]. There is a blog plugin which is very handy.

I used to use github for hosting but I wanted to have SSL so I moved the blog to my UPS.

1: [https://middlemanapp.com/](https://middlemanapp.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ghost, self-hosted, the software is free and I pay $5/month for the small DO box.

The platforms (Wordpress.com, Ghost(Pro), Blogger, etc) will probably handle massive spikes better. With something like CloudFlare, I think you can mitigate a lot of that though.

I've also been happy with Tumblr in the past — there's no self-hosted version available, but hosted is free. I like Ghost's writing tools better, but Tumblr's media tools are far more full featured and battle tested from years of tons of users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, Tumblr seems like a good option. But it's limited by its approach to blogging. It separates out text, images, videos, quotes and links. I find that approach quite limiting as when we write we tend to mix and match all those formats.

Also, I found it limiting to publishing code in Tumblr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly unrelated, you IMHO should always use a solution where you can use your own domain name, so you can rescue your content to your own server or another provider and keep your links alive (in case a service is shutting down, your preferences change, ...)

I personally run a DIY-thing, but that's not because I necessarily think that is a good idea ;) If I weren't using that I'd either use a static site generator of some kind or pay for Wordpress.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! Now i know why i should use my own domain name.:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use wordpress, I actually have 4 of them on the same server. Yes, I selfhost.

edit: cost me ~20 USD a month for the managed server.

</comment><comment><USER10> I use one that I wrote from scratch with Flask. I love the simplicity of both its code & UI. Recently added an admin panel so I can even edit posts while commuting. It's hosted on a 5$/month Vultr VPS. Had lot of fun trying to make it "secure".

In my case the big inconvenience is that I spend more time developing/improving it than actually writing articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, it would be interesting to write from scratch :) I contemplated writing a bare minimum blog from scratch.. now i should just try developing it.

I was only wary about using existing tools like ghost, WP etc since it involves setup, updates and configurations and the learning is pretty minimal - didn't think the ROI was high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If "self-hosting" means "web hosting" these days, then my blog/portfolio site [1] is on a regular web hosting ($45/year, got a few other sites there as well), and runs on the code i wrote myself (PHP, no DB).

It took a few years (about a decade, really) to get the design right - people's perception is a weird thing, what looks nice to me is an abomination to most, and i usually got about one piece of feedback per year.

That's probably the biggest argument i can give against going DIY with web design.

I've had a few game servers self-hosted (in the "PC-under-the-table" sense), and i would really advice to get a real hosting for such things - every time the internet is acting up or you try something that needs parts from the server box, someone would ping you on Skype about why the server is down. :/)

[1] [http://orbides.org](http://orbides.org)

</comment><comment><USER12> I use my own static site generator "minni" \- [https://github.com/jyotiska/minni](https://github.com/jyotiska/minni). The UI used to be really basic, so I tweaked it a little in last couple of days. Here is the link to the blog - [https://jyotiska.github.io/blog/](https://jyotiska.github.io/blog/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey looks interesting. I love the minimalism.

How about the page load times ?

<comment><USER12> Well, each blog post is under 30 kb without images. So page load is very fast. Speed is one of the main reason why I use my own static site generator. Since it is hosted on Github Pages, it depends on how fast Github can deliver the page :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://medium.com/free-stuff](https://medium.com/free-stuff)

I'm using Medium, it has limited features, but it's the best out there if you're just looking for something simple. Quality of posts in Medium as a community is better than MOST blogging platforms out there.

</comment><comment><USER14> I use WordPress on a shared server at A2 Hosting. It's about ten bucks a month and it does everything I need. I recently installed wp-cli so I can make and edit posts from the command line so I can write in pure markdown without getting into knock down fights with the built in editor about formatting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hosted Wordpress (with WP-Engine).

The ecosystem (primarily the number of really nice themes) and the fact I've been using it for years just means it's the simplest option.

I'd probably never self-host it again for anything important, though. Too much configuration / update / tweaking / security / etc / etc time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Precisely! I was unsure if it was worth ur time to maintain all the config, updates etc. I felt the time could be wisely invested into learning or your other priorities in life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://medium.com/sound-shelter/](https://medium.com/sound-shelter/)

\+ Instant access to Medium userbase.

\+ Solid SEO as the site is spidered so much quicker than any blog I've ever had.

\+ Nice layout and easy to read.

\- I don't own the content.

\- If Medium closes, so does my blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't that the point of owning your blog ? Since you dont want to give up the ownership of your content ?

<comment><USER16> There is actually an option to Export all your posts

[https://medium.com/me/export](https://medium.com/me/export)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I currently use Github Pages and Jekyll. I did this because it was free and dead simple. At some point I'm thinking about moving it over to Amazon S3 because its cheap, highly scalable, and a good excuse to try out Amazon S3.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have recently switched to Hugo static site generator (from Octopress), deploy via GitLab CI, and host on S3.

<comment><AUTHOR> Considered octopress too.. seems like a good option.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> EDIT : Please share links to your blogs too.. it would be great to know your work!

</comment><comment><USER19> I wrote my own from scratch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I would be interested to have a discussion with you regarding ur setup.</comment></comment>


Venture Capitalists Actually (Slightly) More Active Than Angels on AngelList - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/02/15/venture-capitalists-actually-slightly-more-active-than-angels-on-angellist-liz-gannes-networkeffect-allthingsd/?ref=curate&buid=1 <comment><USER2> That's great. Should level the playing field a bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> of the last 5 investments we've made, 3 have come via intro's by angel list. we love it!</comment>


Ask HN: Book recommendations for worldly knowledge? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in my 20's and think at particularly this age as well as all that learning outside ones domain is something very valuable to becoming well-rounded.
With that said, does anyone have any book recommendations OUTSIDE the area of programming and science that was particularly memorable for you to help widen your perspectives?
Thanks to anyone with suggestions. -Adam <comment><USER2> You could do worse than: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics)

They're all available for free on archive.org

[https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics](https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics)

</comment><comment><USER3> I will recommend a pair of books that are about the question you are asking: [http://shop.nplusonemag.com/collections/books-n-1/products/w...](http://shop.nplusonemag.com/collections/books-n-1/products/what- we-should-have-known-two-discussions) [http://shop.nplusonemag.com/collections/books-n-1/products/n...](http://shop.nplusonemag.com/collections/books-n-1/products/no- regrets)

</comment><comment><USER4> Anything by R.A. Lafferty, whose fiction is a gateway to thousands of eclectic books from his library. Most of his work is out of print, but a collection of his short stories ("Talled Tales") is online. A few stories are on the web, [http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/online- stories/](http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/online-stories/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been reading and enjoying The Story of Civilization by Will Durant. It's not 100% up-to-date, but it's beautifully written and has lots of Durant's wisdom and observations in it. I often find myself wanting to write down and save passages because they are such concise, insightful, and poetic observations about humanity.</comment>


LastPass lunaches two-factor authenticator app - <AUTHOR> https://lastpass.com/auth/ <comment><USER2> Another app? Doesn't Google Authenticator work?

<comment><AUTHOR> They say it works everywhere Google Authenticator works. Couldn't figure out any advantages.</comment></comment>