The Heroes of CRISPR - <AUTHOR> http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5 <comment><USER2> Comments on PubPeer are very negative about the undisclosed conflict of interest of OP's author:

[https://pubpeer.com/publications/D400145518C0A557E9A79F7BB20...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/D400145518C0A557E9A79F7BB20294#fb44022)

<comment><USER3> According to cell, he did disclose it and they chose not to use it because he didn't have a personal financial stake [1]. As a note, Doudna's review also had no conflict of interest despite her personal stake.

1\. [https://twitter.com/stephenfloor/status/688466159021064192](https://twitter.com/stephenfloor/status/688466159021064192)

<comment><USER4> Doudna's article is a typical scientific review written by someone intimately involved in the research. She doesn't try to teach 'important lessons', or outline the history of CRISPR, nor does she draw on unquoted 'personal interviews and other materials'. Everything is referenced, you can go and read each paper she cites. You can also compare her review to countless others written by her colleagues and patent opponents. Scientific reviews are invariably invited by the journal, with authors chosen based on their research interests and scientific output.

Lander's article is a completely different beast. I highly doubt Cell cold called Eric Lander and asked him to write a campfire history of CRISPR.

It is clear the Cell has a liberal COI policy in any case. I can't find COI mentioned anywhere, even to say that there aren't any.

<comment><USER3> But reviews at Cell are academic papers; they are peer reviewed. Doudna has direct financial conflicts, it should have been disclosed. The viewpoints are usually solicited and not peer reviewed (at least ones I've been involved with), and are often meant to have an individual's biased and perhaps provocative viewpoint. Regardless, I think most of the COI argument is a little silly. None of these folks are particularly motivated by the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      Finally, the narrative underscores that scientific
      breakthroughs are rarely eureka moments. They are typically
      ensemble acts, played out over a decade or more, in which
      the cast becomes part of something greater than what any
      one of them could do alone.

An excellent closing paragraph. Even if the majority of the technical concepts in this paper were beyond my grasp, I did take this much away from it.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is as partisan as inviting emperor palpatine to write a historical perspective to fill in the back story of the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire.

</comment><comment><USER7> Really great article, especially for someone like me who only has a layman's understanding of the biology involved. Thinking out loud:

In computer science terms, the method scientists use to discover and characterize genes (CRISPR, etc) seems akin to studying the assembly of a program, occasionally splicing chunks of assembly into other programs, and observing changes in the output after running. This sounds like a huge slog, and it is amazing that the method works.

One interesting thing from the article was that, even after determining the function of CRISPR, scientists still had difficulty in understanding the mechanical/chemical means of its behavior: the gene is a black box, and its expression can only be deduced when observing its effects after running.

Have there been attempts to characterize genes on a more basic level, eg by modelling how a given nucleotide sequence encodes a protein, and deducing its function from there? Is our understanding of protein folding still inadequate? Or would reconstructing a protein's physical structure still not give us enough insight into its intended function?

<comment><USER8> Evolution produces promiscuous reuse of component parts, and everything is linked to everything else: a cell is a bag of interacting feedback loops in solution. At a detail level, researchers still only have a sketch of the high points of cellular biochemistry. Any particular protein may have numerous roles, and scientists continue to uncover new important roles for even very well known proteins, those studied heavily for decades in some cases.

Modeling is prevalent and helps. Deducing function with any accuracy requires much better and more comprehensive models of cellular biochemistry, however. Those models lie decades of work from here, meaning that altering genes and watching the outcome in mammalian cells and individuals will be the primary mode of exploration and validation for a while yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So it is today technically possible to run a gene therapy in adult humans via CRISPR and some recent innovations in vectors with a good expectation that tissue coverage is going to be what you want it to be - i.e. enough cells take up changes for it to work. (See for example [http://today.duke.edu/2015/12/crisprmousedmd](http://today.duke.edu/2015/12/crisprmousedmd) for the good tissue coverage angle).

This is going to be next year's medical tourism, analogous to the progression of stem cell therapies from the turn of the century.

There are a few really obvious candidates, such as myostatin and follistatin to greatly increase muscle growth - and at least one person who has had that done already, c.f. BioViva. To do this all you need are the connections. Buy into a biotech startup company, make the arrangement with a lab in Mexico or Thailand and off you go. If you knew the right people, you could be on a plane tomorrow and the beneficiary of elective gene therapy the day afterwards.

It can't be overstated how easy CRISPR makes this. It is easier even than induced pluripotency, and that spread like wildfire through the labs when it emerged.

The more interesting thing to me is that there are probably a hundred less obvious, poorly studied, poorly followed up, but very interesting genetic alterations that could be done, and probably will be done largely outside the institutions of medical research. This is what happens when cost falls. Any single gene is fair game now. Want great resistance to ischemia/reperfusion injuries? Knock out PHD1 [1]. Want your aged liver to function as well as it did when you were young? Add more lysosomal receptors. [2] Want to have permanent operation of the benefits of fasting and exercise in the form of upregulated autophagy? Increase AMPK levels [3]. And so on and so forth through scores of genes. Maybe many of them will work as the studies suggest, maybe not.

[1]: [http://www.vib.be/en/news/Pages/-VIB-researchers-discover- po...](http://www.vib.be/en/news/Pages/-VIB-researchers-discover-possible- strategy-against-stroke.aspx)

[2]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/science/06cell.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/science/06cell.html)

[3]: [http://www.salk.edu/news-release/how-the-cells-power- station...](http://www.salk.edu/news-release/how-the-cells-power-station- survives-attacks/)

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems like one thing that CRISPR brings to the table is find and replace, or find and delete.

As a layman, this would seem ideal for treating any sort of cancer... Just find the distinct sequences and delete?

What bad news do I not (yet) know that makes it much tougher than I'm hoping?

<comment><USER2> Sadly, cancer goes way beyond some broken DNA, in cancer cells you have polyploidy = several chromosome copies, these copies break up in weird ways so that some chromosomes are joined to others and other random mixing, you can't fix that using CRISPR

You could, however, identify regions of DNA which make your cells more susceptible to the transformation, but CRISPR is still more unstable than the OP makes you think - in the highly debated human CRISPR experiment (using an older protocol) the scientists started with 86 embryos, of which 71 survived, of which only "a fraction" was successfully transformed, and in another fraction of that the proper target was hit but only in mosaics (with non- transformed cells remaining), in the remaining successful transformed cells the new DNA was inserted in the wrong position (potentially creating a new disease). See Carl Zimmer's take here: [http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/22/editing-h...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/22/editing- human-embryos-so-this-happened/) There's a lot of hype which IMHO damages the technology, it's much more finicky than it's usually presented

<comment><USER10> Another thing to consider is that one could use CRISPR to make lives worse.

What if someone gave Michelle Obama a very high chance of breast or ovarian cancer by giving her BRCA1 or BRCA2[0]? What if a dictator's competition got sickle-cell anemia all of a sudden, or lost their sickle-cell anemia before their trip to a malaria zone (which is also bad[1])?

[0] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12677558](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12677558)

[1] [http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/sickle_cell.html](http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/sickle_cell.html)

<comment><USER11> If you could manage to give someone gene therapy, they're already screwed.

Consider that the only reasonable mechanisms for gene therapy on grown animals is to infect them with a virus (or something similar). If you can infect someone with a virus, they're already dead.

<comment><USER12> Sure but altering their genome subtly so that it appears natural it becomes impossible to police as the murderer is very far removed from the murder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone that thinks this is a great article should read below, where the 'heroes' themselves say there are factual errors that were either not checked or not corrected. Lander really dropped the ball with this one.

[http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45119/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45119/title/-Heroes-of-CRISPR-- Disputed/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess with all these contributions, where do you draw the line for the inevitable Nobel Prize? When these structures were first discovered? Or when some could use them for genevediting?

<comment><USER3> Possibly both. Either way, tons of people always get left out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First of all, why is a Lander writing this? What qualifies him to reconstruct the history of CRISPR? He doesn't do CRISPR research. Historical reviews are always written by the people that actually did the research because A) who else really knows what happened and B) we are interested in their perspective. So Lander's qualification is what exactly? That he's an important person who knows what DNA is?

The article itself also absolutely stinks. First an ad hoc justification why this article is important consisting of nothing more than platitudes about science, then evocative descriptions of the weather in Santa Pola, progressively more brief descriptions of other sicentists' work followed by a long section at the end which could be a slightly edited version of the closing remarks from the Broad Institute's patent attorney in their dispute against the other CRISPR developers.

This in particular, stinks:

"The history also illustrates the growing role in biology of "hypothesis-free" discovery based on big data. The discovery of the CRISPR loci, their biological function, and the tracrRNA all emerged not from wet-bench experiments but from open-ended bioinformatic exploration of large-scale, often public, genomic datasets. "Hypothesis-driven" science of course remains essential, but the 21st century will see an increasing partnership between these two approaches."

What 'growing role'? Biology has always been largely hypothesis-free. Which hypothesis was being tested when DNA was discovered? They were trying to fit a model to the data, not testing out their ideas about how DNA should look. Penicillin was discovered by accident, where was the hypothesis there? And the importance of bioinformatic exploration? How does this: "Using his word processor, Mojica painstakingly extracted each spacer and inserted it into the BLAST program to search for similarity with any other known DNA sequence" support the importance of bioinformatics? Manually pasting 4500 sequences into BLAST? Surely this is an example of progress DESPITE any substantial bioinformatics.

I can't see why this was written except to further the agenda of the author and his institute, and to color history to support their legal claims. I can't see how this was published except through nepotism, eminence based science and the kind of shameful arrogance and entitlement that only academics have the luxury to cultivate. Maybe Lander thought he was setting the record straight, but that isn't his privilege.

<comment><USER3> Wow, This is a lot of anger. I for one appreciated the viewpoint (taken with an eye that it is his view). Anyways, for what it's worth, Lander's lab has done a bunch with CRISPR's so your initial premise is flat out wrong [eg., [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24336569/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24336569/) ]. Second, I remember when they figured out that they were targeting phage. I was working with some Cyanobacteria that had a bunch of crispr loci as well. I do remember distinctly it being one of the first times that a whole new bio came from large part from informatics. (Another being lncRNA ultra conserved elements). Anyways, I really don't get the viciousness of this response.

<comment><USER4> "Lander's lab has done a bunch with CRISPR's"

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=CRISPR+AND+Lander+E...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=CRISPR+AND+Lander+ES%5BAuthor%5D)

There are 5 citations. 2 are reviews. 2 are original research: one in Jan 2014, another in Nov 2015.

A similar search for Jennifer Doudna reveals 44. Feng Zhang has 43. Maybe he's been doing years of CRISPR work in secret, but I don't think my premise is 'flat out wrong' \- he isn't the person to write the definitive history of CRISPR.

Second - the human genome project is surely the key example of an entire field that could not have been birthed without informatics - Celera genomics doing the shotgun assembly showed everyone how important it was beyond a doubt. This all happened in 2000. Lander is saying this isn't enough to convince us all how important bioinformatics is. In 2016, when bioinformatics is so ubiquitous, he finds the need to cite Mojica copy pasting 4500 sequences manually from microsoft word into a BLAST search in 2003 as another seminal example to make sure we all get it? This doesn't strike you as even a little disingenuous or ad hoc?

I guess we have different ideas about how problematic it is if someone tries to rewrite history while it's still happening.

<comment><USER3> 1\. You said, "He doesn't do CRISPR research." If you are going ad hominim, it's usually better if you get your facts right.

2\. FWIW, I think you are largely rewriting history by your comment. The dominant feeling I remember about the HGP at the time was that it wasn't worth it and we didn't learn any new bio. This feeling is still widespread... And biology has always been "hypothesis free"??? Really? Anyways, both of these points were largely ancillary imo to the early history of the field that I thought was an interesting viewpoint.

<comment><USER4> We're just two guys arguing on the internet now, but here we go again.

1\. To me, just having your name on a paper does not equal 'doing research in the field'. In the cases of these 2 papers, he is neither the senior author, nor does the first author come from his lab. He doesn't actually cite any of his own papers in the review, after all.

2\. I'm not rewriting history because I'm talking about what people think about bioinformatics in the present because of the human genome project. Lander's point is that CRISPR informs our opinion about bioinformatics today, and I'm disagreeing this is a valid point etc etc see above. I agree with you that at the time HGP happened the reaction was lukewarm. But whatever you want to say about the impact on humanity, it is indisputable that the HGP has enabled so much science that relies on bioinformatics, and elevated bioinformatics to a key part of modern life science.

Not going to get into the hypothesis free argument here, but the issue is essentially that in biology it is often impossible to specify all the necessary details of the model you are hypothesising about, which means that hypotheses have poor generalisability and reproducibility. This means that any progress we make isn't by virtue of falsifying hypotheses, but more by observation and investigation of phenomena which may have been observed by chance. Just the act of making a hypothesis does not make a science 'hypothesis driven' \- those hypotheses actually need to contribute in a material fashion to the accumulation of knowledge or more importantly, insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The patent thicket surrounding it is looking quite daunting, which I find mildly enraging. However, I have mixed feeling on biotechnology. Weaponized biotechnology looks to be getting disturbingly cheap; maybe these absurd government-granted monopolies will do some good in slowing this down.

<comment><USER15> Terrorists aren't going to balk at patent infringement.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Google dun show other domain extension in its search results? - <AUTHOR>

Whenever I search for anything on Google, the results returned almost certainly is from a .com domain. Seldom I will get a .me or .io extension in the results.<p>Anyone know why? <comment><USER2> For most non-unique-brand keywords that have decent traffic volume, it's challenging to rank a domain without resorting to advanced SEO techniques. If you study most of the top affiliate offer SERPs, you'll often see .info, .net, and .org domains rankings. Most other domain extensions simply don't have webmasters at the helm skilled enough to rank for worthwhile keywords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Er.. who are the top affiliates?

<comment><USER2> I meant top affiliate offers, generally stuff like popular weight loss products (acai and green tea were two big ones 1+ years ago), electronic cigarettes, forex, etc.

go to a site like <http://www.offervault.com/> and you can see the details on a lot of the popular offers out there.

Don't fall into the affiliate rabbit hole if you have your mind on other projects though, 99.9% of guys in the affiliate world are broke young bullshitters</comment></comment></comment>


Go's errors vs. exceptions - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/gos-errors-vs-exceptions-6e106c0fbc66 <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this post based on my experience in one year project where the team grew from 10 to 100 people while writing Go and Java.</comment>


Ask HN: How to effectively code with only one hand? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Perhaps voice coding? [https://dusty.phillips.codes/2020/02/15/on-voice- coding/](https://dusty.phillips.codes/2020/02/15/on-voice-coding/) and [https://caster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://caster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Practice? My university lecturer was completely blind and it didnt stop him teaching us very valuable principles. His seeing dog was cool as well.</comment>


Recent Facebook XSS Attacks Show Increasing Sophistication - <AUTHOR> http://theharmonyguy.com/2011/04/21/recent-facebook-xss-attacks-show-increasing-sophistication/ <comment><USER2> Dealing with user submitted content on a 200+ million user platform must really try the patience of security researchers for Facebook.

It would be great if Facebook had a security research group that openly _published the results of their findings_ , those findings that don't expose corporate secrets. They almost certainly have seen it "all."

</comment><comment><USER3> The parse_url vulnerability is probably a good example of why you don't want to use blacklists for filtering out malicious input; you want to use whitelists, and then you want to reconstitute the thing you parsed into a form that can be parsed unambiguously.

parse_url(" javascript:alert('hello')") yields

        Array
        (
            [path] =>  javascript:alert('hello')
        )

which clearly does not have an URL scheme on any whitelist you might apply. Even if it had incorrectly claimed the scheme was "http", the reconstitution step would give you an URL like "<http://localhost/%20javascript:alert(hello)>, which would avoid the problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not mentioned but the lessons are:

1\. Use an unique CSRF hidden field in the form that only users on Facebook can get and so it's them that can submit posts to their wall. (More: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cross- site_re...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cross- site_request_forgery) )

2\. Regarding video; Don't allow Javascript code to be submitted and presented anywhere. The code to link to videos is unescaped javascript (with space) followed by a video link.

<comment><USER5> Seriously, why are they not using tokens on every request? A simple md5(user_id + salt) would be more than enough.

<comment><USER6> They do, and have for some time (although I can't vouch for the particular algorithm used). fb_dtsg is the usual parameter name. Unfortunately, an XSS vulnerability by its very nature allows an attacker to subvert those protections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What would be a (simple) abstraction from browsers that would just thwart all these attacks? The main problem here seems to be the use of heuristics for identifying malicious content.

One of the main problems is mixing code and data. Say there's a new HTTP header that tells the browser to disable inline scripts, would that help solve the problem?

<comment><USER6> You mean like [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introducing_Content_Securit...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introducing_Content_Security_Policy) ? ;-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Composercat – Graphical User Interface for Composer (PHP) - <AUTHOR> http://downloads.getcomposercat.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Op here. This is a side project I've been working on for the last couple of months. I still have a huge roadmap of planned features ahead of me, but I feel the app is now polished enough to be presentable. I'm releasing the beta version, hoping some of you will find it useful. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: How often do you eat leftovers? - <AUTHOR> Both my wife and I were raised on leftovers. Not once a week, but 5+ days out of 7.
When old enough to pay our own way we both stopped eating leftovers. We don't save anything, re-heat anything or otherwise utilize anything after it's initial serving. It has been this way for 10+ years. We both cook very well and cooking is a source of stress-relief and bonding after what seems like busy week after busy week.
Now, within the last 6 months we just sort of started eating leftovers. Our grocery budget went from $600 a month to under $200 a month (food only).
How often do you eat leftovers? Do you do it to maximize your dollars? Do you do it for convenience? If you share your life with someone do they share the same views?
Edit: Our diet consists of chicken, pork, lots of vegetables , sweet potatoes, fruit, rice, beans, etc. We have almost given up beef entirely. After a recent trip to China we almost exclusively cook dishes modeled after the food I enjoyed there.
Edit 2: clarified $200 was food only. <comment><USER2> The only leftover we have is bolognese sauce, great for nachos, spag bol, on toast. Other than that we cook fresh everyday - healthier. I used to work in restaurants, so we are good at cooking exact portion sizes and hardly ever throw anything away. When I buy beef, I'll buy a large piece, cut it into steak sized portions and freeze what isn't used in a day or two.

</comment><comment><USER3> We eat leftovers when we have them, but don't necessarily always cook extra unless it's something that is easier to cook more (eg extra pieces of chicken in the oven takes no extra work and results in cooked chicken for salads/sandwiches)

Some things like lasagne are _better_ once they've sat for a day or two in the fridge.

</comment><comment><USER4> I make food twice per week, sunday and thursday. We eat left overs every other day.

My grocery budget (wife + son) is right around $500 - $600 per month (that includes everything from toilet paper to steak). I pretty much can get any high quality food I want within that budget.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you share how you structure your diet? On the 2 days you do cook is there anything you save to cook fresh the day you want to eat it?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ripple – a new way to share - <AUTHOR> http://getkefi.com/ripple

<comment><USER2> Way too permissive of a privacy policy for my tastes. I get that Kefi wants to make money but when you register for Ripple you are giving them access to a ton of information.

> When you register with KEFI LABS LLC and use the Application, you provide > (a) your name and Facebook ID; and (b) game-related information, such as > when you create a game, post a comment, or take a picture of someone in the > Application. Take note that the Application requires your[sic] access to > your Facebook account, which you provide to (a) provide your name, (b) your > friends who have also installed the application, and (c) your profile > picture.

> In addition, the Application may collect certain information automatically, > including, but not limited to, the type of mobile device you use, your > mobile devices unique device ID, the Application version, and information > about the way you use the Application.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks,

Our team has just finished a beta and released a new version of Ripple.

Ripple spreads content and messages to people nearby, and gives those people a choice to send it to others.

We are a great way to find out about local buzz in your community and exchange with people around the world. Messages travel so far as they are relevant and engaging.

We're only on iOS right now, but are building our android version!

Share feedback!

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like Plague! Any comments on how it is different?

</comment><comment><USER4> So you made Plague for iOS?</comment>


Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1404402111 <comment><USER2> Well written synopsis of what ails Biomedical Research in US Academia. If you are in the trenches, like me, you can immediately identify with the problems plaguing the system. Some suggestions in the article are sound, but then again, time alone can tell if they will be effective, if and when implemented.</comment>


Greplin (YC W10) Grabs $4 Million From Sequoia For Social Search - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/greplin-grabs-4-million-from-sequoia-for-social-search/ <comment><USER2> Not only was Daniel (and his co-founder Shai) the youngest in our YC batch, but they built and launched a couple of different startup ideas in the time that the rest of us built a couple of features.

Daniel easily could've packed it up when he lost his cofounder - Shai had to go back to Israel a week or two before Demo Day. Instead, he built a prototype of what would become Greplin (in a week), pitched it to investors at Demo Day, secured funding from Sequoia, and is riding a rocketship.

When PG and YC say that they invest first and foremost in founders, this is a perfect example of what they're talking about. Every startup hits a rough- patch, and some even look like they have no hope at all, but the best founders persevere against crazy odds and will themselves to succeed.

<comment><USER3> I am going to risk being downvoted to hell on this.

Maybe Daniel isn't "persevering against crazy odds" and "willing himself to success". It's apparent from the story that he's a really fucking good coder. With a reasonably accurate estimation of his own abilities, and with all the support and inspiration around him at YC, it didn't take much perseverance and extraordinary will to put something together. He just had to continue doing what he loves and does best... writing code.

I certainly can't speak for Daniel. I get tired of these descriptions of entrepreneurs that make them sound like cancer survivors. I think founders often have extraordinary skill, and that changes the required personal characteristics considerably.

<comment><USER4> Daniel's coding ability, or love of writing code, isn't the reason he's managed to get this far. I remember meeting with him regularly after demo day; no investors were interested, he had no co-founder and an idea that was all of a week old with a very buggy prototype (by very buggy, I mean didn't work). Things looked bleak. I still believed in Daniel's determination but even I was thinking in the back of my head, at least he'll be able to take these experiences with him on his next startup.

"Extraordinary skill" or not, the fact is the majority of people would have given up at this point. Daniel instead kept doing back to back investor meetings during the day and coding at night. He's of course benefitted from being smart and part of YC but clearly those can't be sufficient conditions for success, if they were we'd have a 0% failure rate at YC.

<comment><USER3> Well, this is the interesting part of the story I'd like to hear.

Harj, I wish you the best in selecting people for the program. But, I don't know what the moral of the story is for the rest of us. Be determined? Never give up? That's not quite right... because that's not sufficient. I'm just tired of the heroic founder myth.

<comment><USER4> The only sufficient ingredient for success is luck. Luck is out of your control so the best you can do is to put yourself in a position that increases your chances of being lucky. That includes surrounding yourself with good people but fundamentally, the best way to be lucky is to keep going and not giving up. Perhaps that doesn't feel quite right because it's not sufficient, you're not guaranteed luck by being determined, but the alternative of saying "be lucky" isn't very meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats Daniel, sometime would like to know about the backend rewrite

<comment><USER6> It involved a lot of interesting work, including porting all the infrastructure from PHP to Python and Java.

We were shooting to make the whole system less tightly coupled so that, for example, the machine fetching my GMail data, the machine indexing the data, and the machine displaying the front-end website are all able to survive and do work if any of the others are down.

This allows us to scale horizontally just for our current bottleneck, and to be more robust against individual machine or external service failures. Additionally, it helps us build in much deeper security since each piece of our infrastructure has a small and well defined purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would love to know what their stack looks like and if they re using any open source libs especially what they re using for indexing and search.

<comment><USER6> Some of the main pieces of our stack include Lucene, Twisted, and Tornado. We're looking to do some more work with Hadoop and HBase coming up too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone who applied to Greplin for a job based on the programming challenge looking for a job? Let me know b/c my company is hiring for two engineering positions in SF.

<comment><USER9> contact info?

<comment><USER8> email mmmurf at gmail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea of searching my own online service accounts, but how do they implement visibility layers ? There are reasons why online services don't allow indexing content.

The outcome could be either really good or a privacy nightmare.

<comment><USER11> Most of the service revolves around you authenticating greplin (using oauth or xauth) to provide them with a feed of your data.

Greplin's core service really is tied into reading all of your stuff. That is a privacy nightmare in some regards, but all of this data exists in other services already, so you trust someone else with it. Question is whether you trust Greplin i suppose!

<comment><USER12> There's also a difference between trusting various bits and pieces of your data to exist on a variety of online services, and trusting a single service to aggregate all of your data from everywhere.

A local version of Greplin would be more interesting to me; I think the Locker project <https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker> might make that possible someday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a great example of launching, then improving: if there's a real market need, users will forgive everything else.

</comment><comment><USER14> I never heard of this site until now. Its a great idea. I really wish I thought of this. Not only is it a fun project, but it has the potential to be used by a great many people. I wish the Greplin guys luck with this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Last week Greplin gave all(?) of it's beta testers a free upgrade to the premium tier of service. That was a nice touch even though I have not yet found a use for their product.</comment>


How China accumulated $28T in debt - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/china-debt-to-gdp-statistics-2016-1?r=UK&IR=T <comment><USER2> This is an older article from the beginning the the month as China was really struggling with its stock market. As others have pointed out, debt, in itself, isn't really an "issue" so much as it is money from the future being brought into the present. And when the future has a lot more money than the present does, sending that money into the past isn't a drag on the economy. But when the economy is about the same size in the future as it is now, then that future economy is going to have to figure out how to operate without all that moeny it sent to the past.

For the government debt it isn't a huge issue because the Government can essentially decide not to pay itself back. But for public debt it means that the economy is held back. Imagine if the trillions of dollars corporations in the US are currently holding in "cash" was all going to paying off previous bond holders. That money would not be available for acquisitions or new investment. So those companies would grow slowly or not at all.

<comment><USER3> _For the government debt it isn 't a huge issue because the Government can essentially decide not to pay itself back. But for public debt it means that the economy is held back._

"Public debt" is another name for "Government debt"[0]. From the rest of your description, you means "debt owed by the non-government public", private debt, or "household debt" (which doesn't strictly include corporate debt like your example outlines).

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

<comment><USER2> Absolutely, I'd edit the post but rather that acknowledge the gaff here. Debt the government owes to itself it has a number of ways to manage, debt between private entities is a much harder thing to fix without tanking the economy. The canonical example these days is the subprime mortgage crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Debt is a contract. Important questions here:

* Who owes to whom?

* In what currency?

* How could it be enforced?

If China is in debt to China in Chinese currency the Chinese state has very good leverage to handle the situation. It could even make the debt disappear.

<comment><USER5> The debt is substantially owed by local Chinese governments, SOEs and developers to Chinese banks.

The central government could:

1) Transfer the debt to itself (a bailout) this leaves the central government with a very high (although sustainable) debt load but doesn't address any of the underlying problems.

2) Inflate the debt away. This doesn't address any of the underlying problems but it also impoverishes a lot of people who thought they were doing well. It also increases capital flight pressure.

3) "Stress test" the banks, requiring loans in arrears be paid, bad loans be written off, stopping the process of sending good money after bad. This is the only move that address the underlying problems, but it means the banks collapse (because they're already insolvent), the SOEs go bust, plus the problem of insolvent local governments would have to be addressed; people lose their old age pensions, massive unemployment. Plus most of the PRC's members wealth is in SOEs so this will affect them personally. Also the government will have to recapitalize the banks if it wants a financial sector at all (see option 2).

4) Claiming to do 3 while actually doing a combination of 1 and 2. This is probably what they will do and if they succeed, at the end of the day, the can will be a little further down the road.

<comment><USER6> I think you missed:

5) Do nothing about the problem while attempting to hide as much as possible, silencing any whistle-blowers or sources of accurate information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's my anecdote about taxes and finance in China after spending ~5 years working there.

I have a number of friends there who are entrepreneurs/small business owners in China. Over the past few years, they have regularly been "asked" by local government to pre-pay the current year's taxes. One friend has now pre-paid three years' worth of tax after successive approaches by tax authorities. (The conversation went like this: "We need you to pre-pay this year's taxes." "But I already did." "Then you can pre-pay for the coming year.")

</comment><comment><USER8> Damn. I didn't realize their debt was that high.

Interestingly, the U.S. outlook is brighter today than China's, in contrast with a mere couple of years ago when China looked destined to be the dominant economy.

There are a couple of reasons why. The U.S. has enormous energy reserves and will in the long run emerge as the major energy exporter in the world, helping reverse the perennial balance of trade deficit to a surplus, potentially $500 billion to a trillion annually.

Also, Chinese wages are rising even as manufacturing technologies such as 3-D printing and other software-driven approaches are helping bring factories back to the West. The Chinese model of cheap outsourcing is just about tapped out or will be in the next ten years.

<comment><USER9> "Interestingly, the U.S. outlook is brighter today than China's, in contrast with a mere couple of years ago when China looked destined to be the dominant economy."

A lot of it is news hype. Disaster sells stories, a "2% decrease in growth" doesn't. The US wasn't doing badly a few years ago, and China isn't doing all that badly now.

Something to remember when the hype and stories come up in the next few years. We'll all muddle through, just like we always do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR: China has moved from a 170% debt to GDP ratio to a 236% ratio in six years.

For comparison, the US is at a debt to GDP ratio of 270+%.

<comment><USER11> You're comparing public + private Chinese debt with public US debt.

The public + private US debt/gdp ratio is ~270%.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States)

<comment><USER10> You are correct, I did have the wrong number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This blog post explains why China's debt is a problem: [http://blog.mpettis.com/2016/01/will-chinas-new-supply- side-...](http://blog.mpettis.com/2016/01/will-chinas-new-supply-side-reforms- help-china/)

From what I understand (something may be getting lost in translation)

\- The increasing debt is being used to keep up growth

\- The growth that is being bought by the debt isn't enough to service the debt

\- Some sector of the economy will have to pay for it, because growth will wither until it is paid.

Quoting: _China is also constrained from reducing the debt burden though monetization, financial repression, or taxes on households because in each case the cost is indirectly allocated to the household sector, which simply exacerbates the original imbalance. This leaves only two alternatives. First, Beijing can expropriate the wealth of small and medium enterprises directly or indirectly (in the latter case by raising taxes), although this means undermining the most productive part of the Chinese economy. Second, Beijing can liquidate government assets and use the proceeds to pay down debt. There are no other plausible options._

edit:

also: the process of deciding who gets forced to bear the debt will be highly politicized and contentious. The blog post explains how there are strong negative consequences to each choice.

</comment><comment><USER11> For context, the US has ~$145T outstanding public and private debt.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States)

<comment><USER13> But it's assets are huge, such that there's a net $128 trillion. The question is, what's the other side of China's balance sheet look like?

<comment><USER14> I'm not arguing with you, but... what's the source of that number?

<comment><USER15> The very first sentence of the linked Wikipedia article.

"The financial position of the United States includes assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP) as of Q1 2014."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems irrelevant because like any country with a sovereign currency they can just print more money if they want to. It's a much bigger problem if you have debt and can't print your way out of it (for example Greece).

<comment><USER9> "Printing your way out" isn't really a solution, either.....Zimbabwe tried that for a while, but gave up after inflation hit 80 billion percent per month.

Prices would literally go up two or three times a day. If you had Zimbabwe dollars, you would try to get rid of them as fast as possible, either by exchanging them on the black market, or by buying something. If you waited until the next day, you would lose a lot of money.

<comment><USER11> Hyperinflation (Especially unrealiable hyperinflation) is an untenable state of affairs. Nobody lends, hedging is impossible, and cash becomes worthless.

Moderate amounts of inflation (Under 10%), on the other hand, has worked 'fine' for the better part of a century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What would be the implications of this to American or European citizens , if any ?

<comment><USER10> Both China and Japan have extremely high amounts of debt relative to GDP, and are both are still increasing spending.

Short term, the Chinese stock market will continue to fall - it's still incredibly overvalued from the bubble. US and European stocks should continue to be slightly affected. Anyone with a clue has already priced the Chinese effect into stock prices.

Short and mid term, any money that can will continue to attempt to escape China. Land/Houses/Industries in popular areas may be a little overvalued in the popular places in the US and Europe.

<comment><USER18> So we can expect Bay Area home prices to continue their trend for a bit longer?

<comment><USER10> Yes. At least until people figure out that life can be awesome (and real estate is 1/4 the price) outside it.

<comment><USER19> Land values are not about lifestyle and preferences, they are about interest rates, scarcity, and proximity to economic production.

As services and particularly technological services become more important and create more value, the value of land proximate to these activities will continue to increase, because the business depends on talent, and network power i.e. relationships with other individuals (which require proximity). As for interest rates, I forecast they stay low for decades as inflation will remain suppressed.

There could be several cyclical downturns along the way but I can't see any way land values in the Bay Area don't appreciate at an annual rate greater than national CPI ~30 years from now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> China is impervious to any amount of debt and should let it all default right away. Normally if you are heavily in debt say you have a bad credit score, no one will want to lend to you. However if you have a bad credit score and millions of people moving from poverty to the middle class and companies around the world want to sell to them... that is a different story altogether. It is not like there is another market like China available. China is the only growth market available, anywhere. Companies are so desperate to sell in China they have transferred all of their intellectual property to companies inside of China for the privilege even though it will destroy the companies in the long run.

<comment><USER21> You wouldn't consider India or many parts of Africa a growth market?

<comment><USER20> No, right now India doesn't have a growth mindset because of their many laws and probably corruption. Africa is not stable enough for meaningful growth however... China is doing their best to change that and make Africa a growth market for them by working with stable dictators no matter how brutal and terrible they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For a good context on this, I would highly recommend "The Global Minotaur" by Yanis Varoufakis. It really changed my understanding of the use and flow of debt, specifically sovereign and institutional debt.

</comment><comment><USER23> This article: "How China accumulated $28 trillion debt in such a short time." At the bottom it says "Now watch: China is immortalizing its founding leader with an enormous 121-foot gold-plated statue."

I guess the second headline answers the first headline's question.

<comment><USER24> Gold plate is cheap.

<comment><USER15> Not symbolically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Debt to whom? Who had 24T to lend to them? How did they make that 24T?

</comment><comment><USER26> > _So now that government debt doesn 't look so isolated. China might need its > money back, suddenly._

So is this referring to debt that America owes China?

<comment><USER11> Unlike a loan shark, a holder of government debt can't just ask the debtor to pay up their five year loan yesterday.

<comment><USER26> Gotcha. Thanks for the reply. Is it likely China would try and do something crazy like that?

<comment><USER11> They can ask for whatever they want, but they won't get it. (And they won't ask.)

What they can do is start selling the debts they own for cash on the open market.

<comment><USER26> and that would cause a run from the yuan, right?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure - it will, however, make it more expensive for the US to sell new bonds. (Why lend Uncle Sam $100 at a 1% interest rate, when you can buy a piece of paper that says Uncle Sam will pay you $100 next year for $98 from China?)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shine: Elegant Activity Tracker With A Neat iPhone Syncing Trick - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/14/shine-misfit-wearables/

<comment><USER2> Not sure how it's communicating with the phone.

Maybe it's the tech from that company that uses songbird-like sounds to communicate back and forth?

</comment><comment><USER3> How does that syncing thing actually work? Light flashes? Vibrations?

<comment><USER4> Light or Vibration were both of my guesses as well. I personally think that wireless is better. The new Fibit syncs over bluetooth 4.0 and it uses very little power while doing so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Think it must use the magnetometer.

It's interesting that compatibility is iOS5+ and Android 4+

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this going to charge, I wonder?

<comment><USER7> They could potentially do wireless inductive charging through the same coil they (hypothetically) use to do magnetic communication. That, or the top/bottom half of the device are isolated and act as the -/+ terminals (probably wouldn't be good for the swimming application though).</comment></comment>


HN Startup Idea: Introduce me to a VC and Get Equity - <AUTHOR>

Introduce me to a VC and if (s)he invests, I'll give you 2% equity <comment><USER2> Interesting. One thought is that currently people get free VC introductions by their colleagues, so this could attract the most unscrupulous introducers. However, the incentive structure is pretty robust.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your probably running into SEC issues if your contact isn't licensed as an SEC broker. Might want to talk to a lawyer. Basically you offered commision to sell stock for your company.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pitch Deck? Product? Link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just spewing crap out as I think of it. Feel free to jump on it</comment></comment>


IPv4 is almost gone (in Europe anyway) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-announce/2012-September/000615.html

<comment><USER3> This seems to have been rumbling on for some time now - at least for the past five years or so.

My OS supports IPv6, my home router supports IPv6, but at no point have any of the home ISPs I've used (three in the past five years - BT Internet, Be and Origin Broadband) made any mention of any sort of IPv6 support.

I'm not au fait with the workings of such huge operations, so is there any reason for ISP adoption of IPv6 to be so sluggish? It's not like it's been an overnight thing. I'm aware it's unlikely to be a simple case of flipping a switch, or installing a new software package - but we do appear to be approaching an IP crunch.

Are there any consumer ISPs that do offer customers a block of IPv6 addresses for use, rather than (or as well as) a single IPv4 address?

<comment><USER4> According to [1] there are a few - no big names, though. As [2] says, running IPv6 is fairly boring; you get access to the same web as everyone else.

[1] [http://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native&countr...](http://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native&country=gb) [2] <http://bens.me.uk/2011/adventures-in-ipv6>

<comment> X-Istence I'm running on IPv6 on Comcast in the US, and yes while I get access to the same web, I have noticed that I was having issues with IPv4 that I don't have on IPv6. Such as limits per IP/account tuple logged into certain servers.

So my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro being logged into the same Google account over IMAP would sometimes cause issues because of too many connections for that specific account, now with IPv6 that isn't an issue because all of my devices now have their own unique IPv6 address. Perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm afraid of the possibility that instead of adopting IPv6, internet providers will just switch to ISP-wide NAT, making the internet even more asymmetric than it already is.

<comment><USER6> I sincerely hope not! ISP wide NAT is bound to cause countless issues for internet services and businesses.

The first and mose obvious examples I can think of:

* Internet services (eg websites, netfix etc) can no longer blacklist IP addresses without blocking entire ISPs.

* Businesses can no longer offer "direct to the office" VPNs for remote workers.. Actually - even site-2-site VPN's will break if both sides are behind an ISP wide NAT.

<comment><USER7> Look on the bright side: users will have more privacy.

<comment><USER8> <http://panopticlick.eff.org/>

Works over NATs and proxies. And obviously the techniques from there are already used by those who want to sell your info for profit. So, please, let's put this meme to rest :-)

Blacklisting can and will happen based on other things, just that it is more costly and less performant. So the consumers will pay for that in hidden costs - less of the "useful" services delivered, etc.

The VPN part is sort-of correct - it will depend on the type of the NAT. With most of the NATs, establishing the direct connection over a pair of them is technically possible - take a look at STUN, TURN and ICE (IETF standards).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those of you curious about IPv6, and wanting to experiment with it at home or in the office, have a look at SixXS[1] and Hurricane Electric IPv6[2].

They both offer free IPv6 "tunnels" which can be used to provide IPv6 to your home/office.

We use SixXS in the office, and the tunnel has been alive without issue for 83 weeks and counting..

(P.S. SixXS is probably the easier choice if you have a dynamic IP, or are not setting the tunnel up from your router directly..)

[1]: <http://www.sixxs.net/> [2]: <http://ipv6.he.net/>

<comment><USER9> worth noting that HE has tunnel endpoints all over the world. i'm using one right now in europe and it works really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know these folks are well-meaning but I find these constant "warnings" to be insulting. What people really need to be aware of is that the folks making decisions of how the internet should run, "the experts", are not always as smart as they think they are. They make mistakes. And it's hard to get a bunch of know-it-all's to agree.

It's also hard to get the entire `net to switch their behaviour, and adopt something that is incompatible with IPv4, without telling them what benefit they will gain by doing so. Can you blame them? But the "experts" and their zombie followers sure are trying.

IPv4 works. NAT works. NAT can be traversed. So what is the problem exactly?

As a home user, I can set up my own NAT'ing scheme with private IPv4 space far easier than I can learn to deal with the added complexity of IPv6.

OK, now I will get skewered by IPv6 fanatics. How many of them are getting paid to do IPv6 consulting work?

IPv4: It Just Works. "Experts": They make mistakes, just like everyone else.

Now, let's hear from the "experts".

<comment><USER11> What happens when your ISP has to NAT you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And in Asia: APNIC initiated last block measures in April last year.

<http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8>

</comment><comment><USER13> "almost"?

I'm still stuck on an IPv4 connection at home, in Britain. My phone still can't get IPv6 on mobile internet. My VPS host still doesn't support IPv6 on my server. And PHP still fails to properly parse some types of IPv6 address.

Things have got better, sure, but don't say it's almost gone. Far from it.

<comment><USER14> The notice is about IPv4 allocation, not about IPv6 market penetration. RIPE NCC has just begun allocating IPv4 addresses from the last available /8 block.

<comment><USER13> Ah, fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey 2004 called, they want their headline back.

When you consider the ability for inter-RIR transfer of networks, not to mention the market being developed (already released?) by ARIN (do other RIRs have markets?), and you've got a great recipe for a run on IP addresses.

</comment><comment><USER16> IPv6 is just like the transition to Python 3: it'll happen... eventually. But the only people with an incentive to put the hard work in are people who are genuinely enthusiastic about the transition. Everyone else is sticking it in the too-hard basket.

<comment><USER8> This is a fairly outdated meme by now. Just that the enthusiasts are loud about it. Everyone else does not rush tell the world about their plans - <USER2> takes on average about 3 years to get everything in place, so this is a pretty good head-start against the competition :-)

<comment><USER16> I didn't realise I stumbled upon a meme!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yep and nothing will be done by ISPs until they are all completely gone (and maybe not even then, scarcity is good for business).

<comment><USER18> This isn't true.

Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile are a few of the big eyeball networks who are making large infrastructure investments in IPv6. ISPs are far ahead of most content and hosting providers in this area, as they bear the pain of IPv4 scarcity when providing addresses to their subscribers.

Transit providers are on the whole prepared for v6 as well.

As an ISP, you don't want to wake up one day and see analysis that your network numbering is at odds with your growth plans.

<comment><USER19> Not only are they making large infrastructure investments, a many of their customers (including myself) can get IPv6 service from all three of those companies today and have been able to for some time.</comment></comment></comment>


How To GitHub: A Complete Guide to Forking, Branching, Squashing and Pulls - <AUTHOR> http://gun.io/blog/how-to-github-fork-branch-and-pull-request/ <comment><USER2> I tried using git for several weeks now and still cant manage to do the simplest things, like maintain a work repo and a sync repo and then pull/merge between them before pushing upstream from sync. It feels like I have to know the internals of git workings just to perform a simple action, and I need to know all the side-effects of its actions, and how to fix those as well. With mercurial all the commands I need to know are hg log, diff, incoming, outgoing, pull, update push and merge. With git I need to know at least two or three flags for each command where each flag is really special to that command and using/not using it changes everything. With mercurial I just know -p -r and -l for limits thats it.

I hate git with a passion now. Its like forcing everything through its world view, for the tinies action it barks are you with insane messages.

Version control systems are supposed to model commits or sets of changes on a repo, not model and show you their own internal representation of what it thinks about my code.

Also Ive noticed most git tutorials really simple things (like this is how you do cvs but now with git), while "the rest" is left to some black ninja voodo magic expert dudes who "get" it.

And this is just another tutorial to work in a very specific environment using git.

Im so glad we use mercurial at work right now.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, I spent a few days trying to wrap my head around Mercurial so I could commit to PyPy, lost a bunch of code, and switched to just using the hg- git bridge. It's mostly about what you're used to.

<comment><USER4> Mercurial is far from being the only alternative to git. For instance, have you tried bzr?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rebasing is the thing I need a good howto for. Some documents give me the impression that rebasing is evil and then others like this one make it seem harmless.

<comment><USER6> Start by always using rebase --interactive (or just -i) to help you get a feel for it's behavior.

Learn how to use `git reflog` to recover if you botch it up.

The golden rule is: rebase your own stuff all day long, as much as you want. Don't rebase once you've published.

Rebase is a tool for reasoning about your changes as a collection of logical transformations. It's to help you prepare a patch to share with the team. Interactive rebasing (and squashing, fixups, etc) are there to let you checkpoint your work as you go and to give you the freedom to come back and reason about your patches later.

Once I got comfortable with rebase, I began using it as a tool to help me write code. By that I don't mean putting characters into a text file. I mean teasing out isolated changes without interrupting the flow of bigger tasks.

The fear of rebase comes from people who are used to centralized version control systems. They view their version control system as a tool for backups and accountability. Git provides sha1 hashes for backups/security/accountability. Everything else git does is to help you write, reason about, communicate about, share, separate, combine, and otherwise fiddle with patches as logical changes.

If you don't want people to rewrite history, don't give them push access to your repository. Everyone has their own, right? If you want to prevent people from _accidentally_ rewriting canonical history, disable --force pushes to your team's shared repository using a pre-commit hook. But in reality, that won't be an issue because as soon as some one accidentally force pushes, everyone else will have their pulls broken and know the perpetrator immediately identified for flogging.

<comment><USER7> `The golden rule is: rebase your own stuff all day long, as much as you want. Don't rebase once you've published.`

This is a great rule of thumb, which I have had to repeatedly drill into my team-mates. The crux of the problem, I've come to realise, is that people can't differentiate between a "local" commit and a "published" commit.

Git tutorials need to focus a bit more on the nature of git than on simply showing the basic operations.

<comment><USER6> Tell your team to add these aliases to their .gitconfig:

        [alias]
          l = log --oneline --decorate --graph
          la = log --oneline --decorate --graph --all

\--online --graph : Will really help visual learners

\--decorate : Makes it super obvious how labels and tags work

\--all : Extends the usefulness of --decorate to branches and remotes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this. I'm still learning git and didn't know about the squash feature.. Now that I think about it, even if I spend 5 minutes on HN, I manage to learn something new! Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not only a good guide to Git but also a good guide to open source collaboration for new-comers.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is exactly the kind of article I was looking for! I'm still very much learning git and eager to commit to more Repos on Github however have been unsure about how to do this effectively.

</comment><comment><USER11> Could this be linked to somewhere on the GH site, please?

</comment><comment><USER12> offtopic, but looking on the main page for gun.io i saw their tech stack, and i went to see what etherpad was about, and saw one of the best Descontinued Product Page ever.

<http://etherpad.com/>

they mention that they release the source, and list alternatives to the terminated product BEFORE sending you over to their google docs.

<comment><USER13> If you're interested, you should check <https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks managing a team github problem sometimes feels like a full time job on top of coding. It doesn't get errors a lot, but when it does they stick around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, then I hope this guide is useful! Send it out to your team, have them take a look at it.

I enjoy the disorganized nature of GitHub, but there are some serious faults. I think they can probably be overcome by rationality and standard practice (clear communication, being polite, documentation, etc). Politically, I see myself as a 'vulcan anarchist' so it's fun to see GitHub as a little microcosm of intelligent anarchy.

From order, chaos. From chaos, order.</comment></comment>


An idea for combining chatbots with social networking and getting everyone "programming" in the process. - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about a new version of the Chatbot Game based on social networking.
In particular, when you chat with a bot, only chatbot rules created by you, your friends or forwarded by your friends would be active.
These chatbot rules would be like those used in the Chatbot Game and simple AIML.  Example: if the user's text includes the word "why", then reply "Just because.", etc.
Advantages of using social networking for rule creation:
* Chatbot replies would be more relevant and rarely offensive -- they have been approved by your friends after all.
* Encourages most people to actively participate in the creation and/or forwarding of chatbot rules -- not just in chatting with bots. If they don't, the chatbot(s) will have essentially nothing to say.
* Chatbot rule creation can be viewed as a simple form of programming and so this app might get more people interested in programming and computer science. <comment><USER2> It would be neat if my chatbot would act as a personal agent for me when I'm not around. So when I can't chat (or tweet for that matter) and my chatbot is turned on, it will talk to my friends on my behalf, and those conversations can help program it, in addition to my own activity stream.

This would be difficult sure, but pretty cool nonetheless.</comment>


Pedestrian attacks self-driving car - <AUTHOR> https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/18/16905686/self-driving-car-attacked-gm-cruise <comment><USER2> This is not really of as much significance for self-driving as it is a glimpse into social habilitation issues in SF. I've seen people bodyslam random cars in SOMA before.</comment>


Extremely rare stratospheric warming shows no sign of ending - <AUTHOR> https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/115841066/extremely-rare-stratospheric-warming-shows-no-sign-of-ending <comment><USER2> Provided I have no scientific basis to back this; I can't help but think this is kinda good thing as I'm guessing there is less greenhouse gas in the South Pole atmosphere (again no evidence to back this) and the excess heat from the earth is then able to more easily escape into outer space.

I wonder how much climate change models take into account the distribution of green house gases and the fluid dynamic of air molecules with regard to temperature differences.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me that the obvious context is that it's spring there, so saying it's massively warmer than usual is another way of saying spring is slightly earlier than usual, but making it sound more extreme.</comment>


Tips to Unlock the Potential of Microsoft OneNote (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://onthehub.com/blog/10-tips-to-unlock-the-potential-of-microsoft-onenote <comment><USER2> (Sorry, this turned into a little bit of a rant)

I love OneNote. Big problem though is the organization. Once you get more than, say, 8 tabs (more like 2-3 on mobile) it's a pain in the ass to find the others. Sure you can organize them so maybe nest them but eventually you're either going to run into having too many tabs in one place or too many pages in another (on my computer's resolution having about 20 pages under a tab and now I have to scroll which is a huge pain in the ass). Tags are half assed because you can't organize around them only search.

Honestly I tried making Evernote, OneNote and Google Drive my go-to places for notes. But I keep running into two issues:

1\. I want my notes and documents to be in the same place. In fact many notes turn into documents and sometimes vice versa. The definition of either one is so blurred to me right now that I end up not doing anything because I can't decide if something is a note or document.

2\. Organization is really freaking important. Google Drive can work well for this (to a degree; it takes forever to open something nested though because the UI is far slower than anything native) but OneNote just isn't good enough. Evernote is okay as I would tag everything but even sub tags are wonky; at least last time I used it I couldn't search for a parent tag and get the children. Plus I've lost data with Evernote before so I can't go back to that.

I started picking up writing a little side project and decided to use GitLab + Markdown for this. So far it's actually not that bad but I miss spell checking and easy mobile access. Sure I found an app that let's me edit the markdown on my phone but it's a pain in the ass. Worst I can't embed multimedia and it's not easy to use in this regard anyway.

I need something that's going to be reliable and around for along time too so I usually steer clear of the very new start-ups; I don't want to invest putting my hundreds of notes and documents into the thing only to have them go bankrupt or pivot months later. I'm thinking about trying Microsoft Office 365 next using it in much the same way as Google Drive but this time I can open stuff in the native apps.

<comment><USER3> I got around the tab issue by knowing Chinese. My longest tab name length is 3. Everything else is 2. Doesn't help you much I'm sure (although you could try things like TD for To Do) but I'm quite pleased with the solution!

計畫, 家服, etc.

<comment><USER2> That's quite clever! Yeah doesn't directly help me but I'll think about the abbreviations as that's not a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently released an open source note taking application called gthnk ([http://gthnk.com](http://gthnk.com)). It's based around markdown-formatted text files, in part because I do not want to commit my thoughts to a proprietary format that may not be readable in a decade or a century.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you handle Screenshots?

I never thought it was important. Now I'm screenshotting a lot.

<comment><USER4> my workflow is like this on OS X:

1\. use hotkey to capture screen or portion of screen

2\. screenshot is automatically stored as PNG on Desktop

3\. click-drag PNG onto gthnk attachments target

4\. done. now it is stored with that day's entries

Updated to add: the PNG itself is stored in a SQLite3 database. However, each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format.

<comment><USER5> > each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future > retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a > filesystem than an obscure database format.

In 20 years, how do I know which binary blob goes with which text file, and also with what point in each text file?

I want add: It's so wonderful to hear a developer concerned with these issues. Almost always, future-proofed data is an accident or afterthought, which means I can't depend on it being implemented well or being supported in the long term. It puts gthnk on my shortlist.

<comment><USER4> I will need to document this, but it's an important question.

\- All attachments are named using the datestamp, so the first attachment today would be called 2016-01-19-0.pdf or whatever.

\- The entries are also named using the datestamp, so we end up with a text file like 2016-01-19.md.

\- The markdown itself contains an explicit link to the attachment; it is automatically inserted during export.

\- However, datestamp acts as a primary key so that entries and attachments can be paired using another technique.

Finally, attachments are linked to days. It is not currently supported to associate an attachment with a specific entry on any given day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No. I have been burned couple of times and since then I refuse to store my digital notes in anything else than a bunch of minimally-formatted (think Markdown or potentially org-mode) files.

OneNote binary blob format, while nominally open, is supported on a limited number of platforms by a single company.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great in theory, but utterly impracticable on the phone etc.

And the "limited number of platforms" includes everything 98% of people are using.

I do sympathize with your views, but I value convenience more, in this case.

<comment><USER4> On the specific point of mobile note capture, I believe I have solved this problem in my own text file-based system.

I use dropbox to sync a text file from my phone and a separate file from my tablet. These text files are managed by gthnk ([http://gthnk.com](http://gthnk.com)), which combines all of these files overnight. By the next morning, all of my notes are together no matter where I originally wrote the note.

<comment><USER7> With most current note-taking systems, the sync is near-real-time - which, is super handy when moving from the conference room or on-the-go on your phone to your desk/laptop during the day - an overnight sync in that scenario doesn't meet requirements.

I'd imagine it wouldn't be too far fetched to utilize a sync service like your current solution for flat files in a more real-time manner...

<comment><USER4> That's an excellent point about real-time sync. There is a button in gthnk that will grab any notes from mobile devices on-demand. I think this would permit somebody to move from a conference to their desk. However, I can also see how/why that might be tiresome for somebody who frequently transitions devices multiple times per day.

Also, you're right; there's no deep architectural reason why you couldn't sync more frequently than once per day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last year I started importing my firefox bookmarks into OneNote with OneNote Clipper. In theory this awesome:

\+ Ability to organize bookmarks with searchable content.

\+ No more dead bookmarks.

\+ Boomark into a quick notes section and organize later.

Some drawbacks:

\- Clipper does not work in article mode on some websites (github and reddit for example...)

\- Syncing sometimes does not work and theres no way to see why. For example pages with lots of images.

\- Clipper cannot create new sections.

I'm quite happy with the solution, but still sceptical, because if stuff does not work, I'm on my own.

<comment><USER9> Have you tried Zotero for this. Works brilliantly and it is relatively easy to export to a form of bibtex.

<comment><USER8> Thank you, I will definitely give it a try. Never heard of "reference management software" before, so I learned something today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Over the past year, OneNote has become my go-to notetaking app and the app I use the most out of the office suite. Sharesheet integration with iOS makes it incredibly easy to save links from my phone, and it's whiteboard scanning tools are unmatched.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some people are saying they don't want to use OneNote because they don't want to store their data in a binary, proprietary format that's not future-proof. I agree.

But I think we're not defining the problem well by focusing on the application: A failure of the tech community is that we never provided the equivalent of a plain text format for the multimedia age: An open, universal mixed-media file format.

With a standard format we'd have editors popping up that target it, the way we have such a great ecosystem of text editors. HTML does the job in a way, but it's not portable. One of the HTML archive formats might do the job, but none are widely supported (AFAIK).

<comment><USER11> How about MIME? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME)

* ASCII encoded / support for other character sets

* Mixed media

* Standard

* Battle tested

<comment><USER12> several browsers and email programs support MIME incl IE9-11 (.mht), Opera (12?)

It's called MHTL: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht)

<comment><USER13> You can also add MHTML support to Firefox and probably Chrome...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Mac App Store version of OneNote doesn't have the drawing tools. I could see things I written and drawn at work, using a Windows computer, but at home they were more like pictures than drawings.

<comment><USER15> Also, lack of basic image editing tools.

I do lot of research and often store bunch of screenshots but inability to do basic image cropping really puts me off! For almost all the images I store I need to chop off non-relevant part, but have to do it outside OneNote. It gets tiresome very soon (take screenshot, paste in a image editor, crop it, save it and then insert it in OneNote).

<comment><USER16> One possible efficiency gain you might be able to use is the Snipping Tool if you're on windows (and I'd bet OSX has an equivalent). It lets you drag a box around a part of your screen, takes it as an image, which you can then copy to your clipboard with one click (or ctrl-c I believe)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For note taking during meetings where people draw a lot on whiteboards, I once tried to set up a workflow that would let me take a picture from my Android phone, in one click (with a link on the home screen), and would then automatically send that picture to my laptop and put it into OneNote. Preferably through bluetooth so that I don't need an internet connection. I couldn't even get the first part to work, despite spending half a day messing around with Tasker and Pushbullet. That would be a killer feature for me.

<comment><USER15> Have you tried Office Lens?

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.office.officelens&hl=en)

"Never miss notes on a whiteboard or blackboard, and never look for misplaced documents or business cards, missing receipts or stray sticky notes again! Office Lens makes your pictures magically readable and re-useable. Capture content right into OneNote with automatic trimming and clean up."

[https://www.onenote.com/apps](https://www.onenote.com/apps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Working on something kind of similar: \- vector graphics/drawings created by freehand / writing [http://write- live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934](http://write- live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934)

[http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e](http://write- live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e)

\- unlimited* levels of zoom [http://docs.write- live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=34...](http://docs.write- live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=3483c3de-b329-4af1-97d7-2d7f27d96ad1)

\- draw on a tablet, view on tablet / web [http://write- live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab](http://write- live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab)

A bit like if google docs had a baby with OneNote"

</comment><comment><USER19> Why ideas why Microsoft doesn't officially support OneNote plugin development? I was trying to put something together the other day to bulk insert pages and it took hours just to piece together a working VS project that was compatible with OneNote 2013.

<comment><USER20> Did you try the REST API? [http://dev.onenote.com/docs#/reference/post- pages](http://dev.onenote.com/docs#/reference/post-pages)

<comment><USER19> I didn't, I was hoping to work on the desktop app with offline files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "5\. Use tags for better organization"

I'm still waiting for the Mac version to get custom Tags. They only give you a few canned options like Project A and Project B :/

</comment><comment><USER22> If anyone's interested, I have been working on this template tool for OneNote: [http://notegram.me](http://notegram.me)

It's made with the OneNote cloud API, so you don't need to install anything, and can use it with iOS/Android/Mac/etc. versions.

</comment><comment><USER23> One thing I missed while evaluating OneNote (and coming from Evernote) was reminders/alarms on notes.

I searched around for a solution, but it seems the only way to do it is by using Outlook, which I'm frankly never going to do.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, HN has changed. Doesn't anybody else run linux on the desktop anymore?</comment>


EWW: Emacs Web Wowser - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eww.html <comment><USER2> The article notes that this browser was originally written by Lars Ingebrigtsen, probably best known for Gnus. Lars is still hacking away on emacs regularly, you can see his blog posts about his work here: [https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/](https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good to see some competition in the browser wars. Badly needed.

<comment><USER4> A highly specialized browser for emacs from 2013 is hardly competition against consumer browsers. I don't think they're directly comparable either.

<comment><USER5> I guess eww is for those who are infatuated by their editors, rather than getting things done with it, when the rest of the world just uses Chrome.

<comment><USER6> Here's a practical use-case eww: reading technical articles (e.g., grom google search) without a context switch to a different application: a single key chord to start a typing a query (counsel-web-suggest), then choose the desired link , then read it in eww — all without leaving emacs (while using the same commands that work throughout emacs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related, xwidget browser in emacs with keyboard navigation, etc:

[https://github.com/BlueFlo0d/xwwp/tree/xwwp-ace- dev](https://github.com/BlueFlo0d/xwwp/tree/xwwp-ace-dev)

<comment><USER8> I wanted to try that a while ago but didn't get it to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using emacs-w3m for a long time, but I haven't used eww. If someone who's used both could compare the two, I'd be grateful.

<comment><USER10> \- Not sure if it's still the case in most recent versions, but apparently w3m used to be snappier (I suspect there is some blocking still happening in eww, or maybe it's just that it loads emacs/elisp more).

\- w3m just ignores colours, while eww applies the ones it recognizes, though in newer versions it can be disabled (it seemed like a major misfeature to me, but YMMV, and it's not that relevant anymore).

\- Being written in elisp, eww is more hackable and generally fits a bit better into emacs.

Both render reasonable HTML subsets fine, can load images and handle forms.

<comment><USER11> > _it seemed like a major misfeature to me_

Webpage-provided colors may not play well with the color scheme you're using (AFAIR, eww doesn't "reset" to black-on-white, but keeps your current color theme for things not explicitly styled), and may cause problems on the terminal (e.g. with low-contrast text getting rounded off to the color of its background). So the ability to disable styling is useful.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, that's what I meant: the colourisation seemed like a misfeature to me, while the newly added ability to disable colours resolved it. Probably didn't state it quite clearly above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> EWW is a little too austere for general browsing IMO, but it's more than useful enough to make up for it in a few situations.

1\. Copying large sections of text. Say I'm reading a tutorial or something with code blocks, and I want to run them. If I'm in a "real" browser, I have to click and drag to copy the text to my editor, and clicking and dragging sucks. Instead, I can open the page in EWW, then set the mark and search (C-SPC and C-s) for a more pleasant copying experience. (I realize this sounds petty, but it makes for a little less hassle in my life.)

2\. One-off scraping tasks. This is a powerful technique, and it's my go-to example in a "but can your editor do this" discussion. For details, see [https://nickdrozd.github.io/2018/10/17/web- scraping.html](https://nickdrozd.github.io/2018/10/17/web-scraping.html)

<comment><USER13> I use eww for reading long articles. It works well with read-aloud.el which I also use with nov.el when reading epubs.

(Incidentally eww and nov.el both use shr.el for rendering HTML.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use it every now and then, but I think its missing a few things to be really great.

1\. Its slow. I don't know if it just "feels" slow due to lack of visuals or if it is really slow. I suspect it loads a lot of things that never gets rendered anyway.

2\. It needs some smarter focusing. Each page normally has a few screens of garbled menus etc. to scroll past before getting to the content. Maybe filtering out some html tags would be enough.

<comment><USER15> > It needs some smarter focusing. Each page normally has a few screens of > garbled menus etc. to scroll past before getting to the content. Maybe > filtering out some html tags would be enough.

There's (of course) an Elisp command for this. I cant't remember it's name now though.

<comment><USER16> It is literally the fourth thing mentioned in the linked documentation.

<comment><USER14> Thank you! (Press 'R')

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ha. I was just playing around with EWW a few weeks ago.

In the old times, the 1980s, I would use Emacs to read email. So convenient and fast. I should set that up again for the fun of it.

I am using Emacs less now because I use VSCode more often now just because it is easier. The thing that keeps me using Emacs is how well it works with mosh and tmux for doing development in fast remote servers. This is also getting easier with VSCode.

<comment><USER18> I am using emacs with OmniSharp which... sort of works. It gives context- sensitive help when it's in the mood. It allows me to stay in emacs a little more )I don't like visual studio).

Point is, maybe have a look at OmniSharp.

<comment><USER19> Are you on Linux? I found that on mac, omnisharp "just works" whereas on Linux it would only offer completion if the file has previously been visited that session.

I always meant to file a bug but never did.

<comment><USER18> Nope, windows. And if you update a file it sometimes doesn't update the info that changed in the file (even if the file is in a buffer), which is frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So I've been learning Emacs for a bit now and was just thinking about trying to figure out how to web browsing in emacs as a browser is the only other program I need right now. Gotta give this a try see how it works.

<comment><USER21> Make sure you also try Xwidget browsing, which has become my de factor browser while at work [https://emacsnotes.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/why-a-minimal- br...](https://emacsnotes.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/why-a-minimal-browser-when- there-is-a-full-featured-one-introducingxwidget-webkit-a-state-of-the-art- browser-for-your-modern-emacs/)

<comment><USER22> Is there any way to get Xwidget based browser apart from trying to compiling Emacs (for a Linux environment) ?

Also, if it's only available via the compile yourself route - how long does the compilation take in a 4-core Intel based system ?

<comment><USER23> Less than 30 minutes. Pretty simple to follow too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> i really enjoy using eww browser for at least 30% of my browsing. it's very hackable -- you can easily hook into its code to make handlers for different urls, load differently, render differently per website, etc.. i usually open up eww when i want to properly digest a website too, or create a bookmark or link to a part of a website. eww is great!

<comment><USER25> Recently I've been prioritizing sites that don't use require JavaScript, and therefore have been using Eww a lot more (I'll still often escape out to Firefox).

But I love that I can write lisp macros to scrape out data - it's like a cooler GreaseMonkey... though I haven't found a good jQuery-like way to get at elements... any ideas?

<comment><USER24> firstly, it is possible to get the javascript-generated dom in eww:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/heaoiu/weekly_tipstr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/heaoiu/weekly_tipstricketc_thread/%20chrome%20dom%20dump)

as for looking into elements -- i would probably access the dom and put it through xpath or something. sounds like a challenge

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I keep wondering if there's something for Emacs to open warc, maff, htz or mhtml. For the purposes of archiving web pages.

</comment><comment><USER27> EWW is a godsent, very cool. Nice replacement for emacs-w3, which was very slow to render.

</comment><comment><USER28> post a comment on HN using Eww. :-)

<comment><USER28> I tried to post a comment here using Eww. But only the last line of the comment was posted, as above. (this one is from Firefox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can't think of a more perfect name

</comment><comment><USER30> This is more like a novelty feature to showcase the "power" of elisp. I haven't tried it but it's not really going to compare with normal browsers like chrome and even FF. There might be some use cases for things like viewing well structured HTML documentation or browsing a few sites but apart from that, I'm not sure what the value is.

I'm a long time Emacs users and it's quite frustrating to see how hard it is to use ecosystems of modern languages/frameworks like vue etc. I'm not that familiar with the ecosystem so it might my fault but this is my impression. I actually shifted to vscode to do this. If energy like this were spent there, I think it'd help adoption and usage much more.

<comment><USER31>
        Posting from Emacs
        </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

        It works well enough to post in hacker news. You just need to
        enter all the text in another buffer first, add a line of blank
        spaces at the top, and then kill and yank into the text area. As
        far as I can tell you can copy the way that org-mode deals with
        src-blocks to automate it, but this works well enough for me for
        now.

        It even works in emacspeak, which is kind of amazing. I have a
        blind accessible webbrowser inside an editor without even trying.

        (define identity
          (lambda (x)
            x))

        Even the scheme and paredit-modes work. Essentially it lets you
        author plain text emails as HN comments.

        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+
        |Pros                      |Cons                           |
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+
        |You can make things look  |You can waste a lot of time.   |
        |amazing.                  |                               |
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+
        |You can use whatever text |You have to choose what format |
        |mode you think is best.   |you like best: org vs md vs    |
        |                          |rest.                          |
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+

<comment><USER15> It's also good for documentation and stuff like Stack overflow.

You don't need JS for all web-content.</comment></comment>


What stack are you using to develop desktop apps lately? (Win/Lin/MacOS/other) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm using electron for a few years now. I believe it's the most efficient way how to create/maintain a multi-platform app. Also you can use the best from the web world: HTML5 APIs (SVG, canvas, WebAudio) and all the libs/frameworks available (React, RxJS,.. ). Also you can share most of the code base with a web version if you need any.

</comment><comment><USER3> Last two desktop UI apps I did were in C++ with QT.

Last few console based apps for desktops were in node.js

If I need to do anymore I'll likely stick with the same stacks.

</comment><comment><USER4> PLEASE check out electron! It is amazing! You wont be disappointed

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And what do you plan to use in the near future?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answers, people.

</comment><comment><USER5> WPF/C#</comment>


Ask HN: Netbooks for hacking and development? - <AUTHOR>

So I'd like to use my AA1 for a little more than web surfing and AIM. VI, Emacs and the standard command line tools allow for fairly easy hacking in minimal space, but jeeze, I never thought I'd get so lost in that tiny screen.  I actually thought I would be less distracted on this thing.<p>Does anyone have thoughts on developing in such a small space? <comment><USER2> I use an EEE 701. I mostly work at the command line with Vi for programming. Occasionally I'll look at code in KWrite. If I need an IDE, I often use Arachnophilia, which is a pretty stripped down but easy to configure IDE that recognizes syntax for a number of languages.

You can also use Eclipse or NetBeans, but it takes a lot of configuring. For myself, I ended up taking both off my drive, since I found that I was doing most of my work in a terminal window even after I'd cleared up a reasonable amount of screen space in both.

It depends on what you want from your dev environment.

And if distraction is a problem, turn off wireless. ;)</comment>


New Startup Working on Software to Help Government Fix Housing Problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.govtech.com/biz/Exclusive-New-Startup-Working-on-Software-to-Help-Government-Fix-Housing-Problems-Enters-Y-Combinator.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem like the case but Cathy O'Neil (the author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy) raises the point that we often see algorithms implemented in non-traditional ways when society faces tough questions. It makes me really hesitant about using algorithms as silver bullets to solve hard problems in society.

<comment><USER3> Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1831/](https://xkcd.com/1831/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our startup, Fabrica.city, is trying to solve housing problems by focusing on the financial side of it, and "attacking" the issue of how to handle titles digitally (and therefore, save costs, etc.).

It's early in our journey, but I hope that we'll be able to show some real progress soon. Wish us luck :)

<comment><USER5> Finance is a huge part of the problem, especially insofar as it currently constrains what kind of housing can be built. Last I checked, co-housing projects in the US were typically self financed because there were no loan products available for them. So what is a mixed income development offering affordable housing and high quality of life in most countries becomes housing for mostly rich people desiring a certain lifestyle in the US because it can't get financing here.

Best of luck.

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a bad idea. There are many instances where government policy has had the exact opposite of the stated intended effect. One example: trying to preserve the real character of an area by setting a large minimum lot size. The result: places like Apple Valley, with giant houses set in the middle of huge yards. It becomes an enclave of the rich and famous. In fact, Apple Valley is reasonably popular with well heeled actors and movie biz people because it is about 2 hours from LA/Hollywood.

If these folks can deliver on actual solutions for this problem space, more power to them.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the goal, and I'd even love to work on something like this, but is this a business or a non-profit project? Where are they gonna make money?

Also, I don't think reform is bottlenecked on data. At this point, we have strong causal hypotheses and the data we do have supports those hypotheses almost unilaterally. The problem is almost entirely in the hands of political science: juridictional and generational politics, regulatory capture, etc..

<comment><USER7> Governments aren't generally cash constrained at the core (they often are at the margin, though) so if you can substantially contribute to solving a problem government cares about, it can be quite lucrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Buy a 10 acre lot in a nimby area (Palo Alto Hiils/Atherton/Los Altos Hills) for $5M, Split it into 20 x 0.25 acres and sell it for $250K each to teachers, firefighters, police, retired army soldiers telling the buyers it is sold as- is. Let them build houses on their lots and figure out the rest.

<comment><USER9> Ignoring the fact that undeveloped land in PA is going for about $3mm an acre, What you're talking about is commonly known as a subdivision. You need to account for roads, utilities, zoning, etc. im also fairly certain you would run into nimby problems even just by trying to subdivide and sell individual lots.

You would also have no way (that I know of) of only selling to people like teachers, firefighters, etc because of fair housing laws. There's may be an exception for military.

<comment><USER10> > You would also have no way (that I know of) of only selling to people like > teachers, firefighters, etc because of fair housing laws. There's may be an > exception for military.

Isn't the San Francisco school district doing precisely this for teachers? I also recall reading that Stanford was securing housing nearby and 'selling' to faculty members by granting them loans with super generous mortgage payments, with the expectation that said faculty member will never actually pay off the mortgage.

<comment><USER11> From talking to SF Planning Department, my understanding is that a school district can own housing and use it for employee housing, but another entity (such as the Mayor's Office of Housing) can't rent only to a specific profession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great idea but I don't think the government really cares about fixing this issue.

<comment><USER13> In Denmark we do, it's one of the top priorities in most municipalities. As nice as these ideas are, the solution isn't software, it's building more affordable housing.

It may be different in the US, but we have really great censuses data on everything mentioned here, and it seems strange an American government body wouldn't know where things like it's taxes are coming from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is great, it is about time some scientific process was forced into a system that sadly has been largely driven by protests of idiots in large numbers so far.

<comment><USER15> I am not sure if the problem is scientific process, or greee of the nimbys. I guess unless state overrides everything somehow and changes zoning and increases # of stories allowed, and this somehow helps, then yes.

<comment><USER14> I agree, it won't be enough, but it's a great first step. Currently, given how difficult it is to find reliable data, one often can't easily disprove even the most ridiculous of arguments (like the various groups in the Bay that believe, almost literally, that to solve rising costs people should stop building, rent control, BMR, and similar).</comment></comment></comment>