Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/21/facebook-is-rating-trustworthiness-its-users-scale-zero-one/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.83d2f1db1443 <comment><AUTHOR> The content of the story is better than the headline. On a side note unfortunately higher quality news sources are falling for the addictive clicks of more clickable headlines (not necessarily clickbait but definitely more emotive), and so it's hard to know when posting stories from WSJ, Washington Post etc whether to change headlines from the original as they often feel like they fall in a grey area.

</comment><comment><USER2> Prediction: Facebook will be selling access to individual's trustworthiness score to employers and lawyer firms before the end of the year.</comment>


Schumer Pushes to Shut Down Online Drug Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-on-Feds-to-Shut-Down-Online-Drug-Marketplace-123187958.html

<comment><USER2> ...which means we'll all get MORE spam with drug offers.</comment>


Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap - <AUTHOR> https://info.model9.io/lack-of-mid-level-mfers <comment><USER4> Mainframe skills shortage is a complete fabrication, it simply doesn't exist. In June of this year a local company laid off 850 people, a company with a large mainframe installation (SS&C formerly DST Systems). Hundreds were mainframe programmers. This is after a decade offshoring. There are thousands of former mainframers here. And this is just in Kansas City, Mo.

Anecdotal but representative I believe. Mainframes are costs centers, always will be. And the target of cost cutting. Millenials aren't dumb!

<comment><USER5> Your comment made me curious and I ended up finding a great article on the story behind the layoffs at SS&C.

[https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature- story/article/210195...](https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature- story/article/21019526/dst-systems-and-the-gutting-of-a-hometown-kansas-city- company)

<comment><USER6> That was worth reading. capitalism's fixation on quarterly reports is ruining successful companies like DST.

<comment><USER7> That's not capitalism, it's our culture around capitalism. There is nothing inherent to capitalism that stresses short term growth vs. long term growth. For example much of the push for short term growth comes from the stock market, but the stock market (or public ownership at all) is in no way required for capitalism to work (and IMO it would probably be better without it).

<comment><USER8> Sorry, but that is entirely captialism. You don't get to take core aspects of the system and say it's not really part of the system.

<comment><USER9> False. Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The way the article is describing millennials is from someone who has an outsiders view and a poor understanding. The things millennials do are not because millennials have wildly different values, they're because the world changed. Everyone in business learned giving pensions, training people and retaining people doesn't pay off. The post-ww2 bubble of prosperity has let out its air. That environment no longer exists. At this point you've got to have a good reason to commit to working in a dwindling market, for example being ordered to in the military.

The only thing mainframe shops have to learn from Facebook et al is how to do large scale services without mainframes and cobol etc. They've already got the "let's overstate our talent pool problems because we want cheaper workers" part figured out, it seems.

<comment><USER11> > Everyone in business learned giving pensions, training people and retaining > people doesn't pay off.

 _...in the short term._

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?

<comment><USER13> Try this:

Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am {...}.... Question: what is a house and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, tent. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to just get multiple tents instead?

A mainframe is the kind of computer you can buy and set up, turn on, and run for two decades (or more, if you like) non-stop. It doesn't need reboots, it most often doesn't even need to be powered down for hardware replacement or upgrades. It's the epitome of reliability.

Most people don't care about reliability. Heck - most people use Windows, so they can't even possibly imagine what reliability and consistency might be like. Therefore, most people can't even imagine wanting reliability because what they have seems "good enough".

People who run services which should never go down, on the other hand, love mainframes.

<comment><USER14> Except when they do go down it can be a catastrophic business interrupting event. Which is why the cloud model of assume everything is going to break and all your hardware is disposable works much better (IMO).

<comment><USER15> AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure break more often than our mainframes. In this case, the cloud model is a con, essentially the self checkout lane at Walmart. You're paying more for the same ability you had before.

"Well, you want redundancy right? Well you're supposed to be redundant across AZs, and then regions, and then you're going to have to have disparate vendors to mitigate sole vendor risks." And then we're right back to hosting our own mainframes in our datacenters.

<comment><USER16> Clouds reinvent mainframes. They're still cheaper, run more FOSS, and have more talent available. They're a better form of lockin than mainframes.

<comment><USER17> > They're still cheaper

Are they, though? Commodity hardware certainly is, but it's not as if cloud providers are charging a small margin on top of that. They're charging a multiple, potentially as large as 10x.

Combined with the parent's proposed need of multi-cloud, that could turn what might otherwise be a few hundred $k of commodity servers into a few $M of cloud costs, which I understand is the OOM the cost of a mainframe.

<comment><USER18> Problem with IaaS clouds is that it is strictly less reliable than having your own infrastructure.

With IaaS typical reliability issue is that whole location/datacenter/AZ goes down, with your own infrastructure the typical issue is that the colo- facility/datacenter goes down, which would be essentially identical save the fact that with IaaS there is significantly larger probability that the reason for going down is some byzantine failure of orchestration automation, which in the self-hosted case either isn't there or is under your control.

One fact of running your own infrastructure is that you should plan for hardware failures, but not stress about it too much, because even entry-level enterprise-grade hardware just does not break (and if it does you will get signs that it is going to break well in advance).

<comment><USER19> It is only strictly less reliable than having your own infrastructure if you assume the same level of organizational competence at running your own infrastructure as the IaaS has at running theirs.

That is certainly possible for an organization to achieve, but it isn't easy and it isn't cheap. It certainly can't be taken for granted.

<comment><USER17> > if you assume the same level of organizational competence at running your > own infrastructure

I'm not sure that the competence required is organizational (e.g. people managing) so much as operational (e.g. best practices) and even technical, at least at sub-FAANMG scale.

> it isn't easy and it isn't cheap. It certainly can't be taken for granted.

I agree that it can't be taken for granted, but I disagree with it not being easy and cheap. Rather, combining the two, I don't believe it's necessarily hard nor necessarily expensive.

It just requires finding someone who both still has the competence, is willing to use it, and is willing to train others. Running your own infrastructure isn't actually difficult or complicated, but it's certainly not "sexy" and can be a bit tedious at times. That means it's possible to hire inexpensive, less (overall) experienced staff and have them handle that portion. Unfortunately, the "unsexy" part means finding someone to do the training, as well as the actual work when necessary, can be challenging, even though we're out there.

Even then, that's only necessary at substantial scale. In <1000 server environments, I've never had the hardware-specific [1] part of the work take up more than a quarter of one senior FTE (usually me).

What _can_ get astronomically expensive is outsourcing the wrong things, though that ends up being a form of not actually running your own infrastructure (yourself).

Anecdote: I recently had a phone interview with a startup that moved from "hardware" to the cloud and the main reason cited was the inability to ramp capacity up fast enough (nor predictably fast enough), which seemed odd to me. One example of unpredictability of lead times involved a new server underperforming due to mis-applied thermal compound between the CPU and cooler, which I have _never_ experienced [2]. I didn't ask the rhetorical question, "how could you have picked such a horrible VAR?!" Carefully re- reading the blog post about their transition gave me my "aha" moment: even though it's a company in the SFBA, their datacenter was out of state (maybe not even in a tech hub city, but it didn't specify). They were outsourcing the actual installation, running, and maintenance of their hardware to someone else, far away.

[1] for lack of a better term.. i.e. anything that an IaaS cloud provider would eliminate, including purchasing and vendor negotiations, colo space, network hardware and providers, hardware monitoring, and data destruction

[2] well, OK, that's a lie, since I've experienced it when I've personally done CPU moves/swaps/upgrades in exceptional circumstances, when I was out of practice, but I knew to test my work and caught the problem immediately. I've never had it happen with professionally-assembled systems, presumably because CPU coolers tend to arrive with the thermal compound pre-applied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My recommendations:

\- Give lots of young people the opportunity to learn the necessary mainframe skills (ideally by themselves). Lots of today's great programmers learned their programming skills on their own. This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them.

\- Pay really good salaries and advertise it. Money nearly always has a huge attractive force.

<comment><USER21> > This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them.

Bingo. I work in an AS/400 shop. I simply can't invest myself personally in the work because I know my access to that environment is predicated on working for this particular company.

I can hone my Linux skills and even my Windows Server skills any time. I can bring it home. I can use it myself. I can own it.

I can't do that with the AS/400\. Just spinning up a "virtual machine" in the office to play around on is a licensing mess, and there's no "cloud" where I can rent one for a reasonable fee (that I've found). I have no sandbox.

Since my continued access to that environment isn't guaranteed or even convenient, I don't really want to dive in. And if I don't want to dive in then learning about it at all feels like a waste of time. Which then means I end up learning the absolute minimum before moving back to familiar territory.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.timeshare400.com](http://www.timeshare400.com). Starts at $15/month.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for this. Will actually be really useful form me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me add a shameless plug here:

[https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/118484/mainframes...](https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/118484/mainframes?referrer=iAGSGOUsQhhu5K9oA-93Cw2)

It's a proposed Stack Exchange website dedicated to mainframes. It is in commitment phase, which means people need to come up and commit to support the site - with questions, answers, moderation, comments - in numbers sufficient to ensure its viability.

<comment><USER23> It needs especially committers with sufficient reputation on other stackexchange sites, which is the only thing holding it back right now.

Maybe one should start a discussion on meta-stackexchange that the usual criteria are not a good fit for that one, because many of the committers don't use other stackexchange sites that much.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. Let me prepare an argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a mainframer:

IBM should make the z/OS available for free experimentation! That's the biggest obstacle and reason why people do not know it. Even the long dead Solaris has more hackers on it than z/OS.

Also, millenials will also want job security and pensions, eventually. Just wait when they have kids.

<comment><USER25> As a millennial I took a pass on mainframe jobs, even though I find mainframes interesting, precisely because of job security.

Companies are not going to change their culture overnight, and they currently view employees as disposable. There's not many jobs in mainframe developer compared to say web dev, and the skills in mainframe developer to seem like they transfer poorly.

I have a better chance at keeping the actual day to day of my life stable if I keep skills in an industry where I have lots of opportunities for jobs. Unless companies employing mainframe developer start offering garunteed pensions that are funded up front or a much higher average salary than the alternatives, it's not a gamble I'd be willing to take

Edit: additionally the mainframe engineer talent pool seems to skew much older than other development. That wouldn't be a problem if the field was growing. Having a decent chance of always being the new guy or junior even if you've been there 10+ years would probably do little for job satisfaction given how many people automatically defer to seniority. I have no real interest in having my ideas ignored for years

<comment><USER24> There are advantages and disadvantages to mainframe specialization. Because it's a stable thing for big companies, there is actually more job security than in other areas of IT. Big companies need to keep these systems running, somehow; they are more open to training people from the outside, and they are willing to pay for expertise. There is an evolutionary balance.

You also say that you would like the field you select to be growing. Selecting a growing field can be more risky, too. Things that are already widely adopted are probably proven to work really well, and therefore they are there to stay for a while.

As for the older people in the industry, I have always enjoyed it. Compared to young people, older people are generally more calm and less needy to prove themselves than young people. They actually understand (and demand from the company) the work-life balance better. And they have more interesting stories to tell. The truth is lot of smart people worked on the mainframe in the past, and often the most successful stayed in the business.

The fear that innovation gets ignored - well, that is partly unfounded. It's true that mainframe is supposed to be super stable platform (it's a philosophical difference), so you only change things in production when needed. But in tooling, you can innovate a lot.

I work for one of the mainframe companies mentioned in the article, but I am not American. In our office, there is plenty of young people and some of them do really good innovation, like for example writing some Python or JS tools. Usually, the older people are impressed by that, as long as it brings some practical value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My first professional job was to write RPG for an AS/400 mainframe (or whatever it's called these days), and even I don't know what the word "mainframe" is supposed to suggest to the modern user. As far as I could tell, it was just a single bog-standard server rack (amusingly sitting alone in a room that was far, far too big for it; a reminder of the massive bank of computers that _used_ to do the same job) whose only interface was a green- and-black 80x24 IBM terminal emulator speaking a bespoke telnet dialect, and where nothing on the system was textual so you could only use first-party tools to modify the system (conspicuously lacking any support for source control). And I ain't a greybeard, this was in 2011! And the thing was dog slow; I took a batch job that spent hours running every night, ported it to PHP (forcing it to make database requests over the intranet now), and saw the runtime fall to minutes. I estimate that the company paid around $40,000 annually for the privilege of using it. IBM must have the best salespeople in the entire world.

<comment><USER27> You have it go the other way, as well. We were running some accounting software on an System i (AS/400, iSeries, like you said whatever IBM calls it this decade), and recently switched to something that runs commodity hardware.

Another company that I knew from our user group meeting also switched - <USER2> batch processing was so slow, they had to go back to the IBM. Their shipping process just wasn't fast enough otherwise. This wasn't a small company, either. If you're familiar with firearms you've probably heard of them.

You can run the 5250 at 27x132, and if you really need screen space you can run Eclipse/Visual Age on your desktop and have a 'real' environment to code on.

<comment><USER26> _> You can run the 5250 at 27x132_

This does ring a bell, I think I did discover this eventually ("wide mode", they called it?). And I'm not sure if this is damning with faint praise, but I will admit that the 5250 monospace font kinda grew on me.

Interesting to hear that I could have been using Eclipse for RPG; for the PHP side (which was still running on the mainframe via AIX, so I had at least a few Unix tools at my disposal (not git though... I had to expose the PHP source directory via a fileshare and mount it via NFS on Windows so that I could leverage msysgit (it's as ridiculous and slow as it sounds, running VCS in a Unix emulation layer on Windows performing filesystem operations over the network to a virtual filesystem in a Unix emulation layer on an IBM mainframe (but I digress)))), I got the company to shell out for WebSphere, which I thought being an IBM product might have some RPG support, but alas.

<comment><USER27> Zend has a php product for the IBM i that isn't too bad - and it runs like you said on a Unix-ish file layout and everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The answer given by the article is literally conscription: the authors were assigned to the mainframe unit as part of their national service in Israel, and found that they liked it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Fine. I want to learn how to maintain/write software for a mainframe.

How do I start? Can I get access to one? Can I build up something I can learn on? What is the best path for doing this? How would I usefully gain enough experience to get into this?

I have linux, python, c, but unsurprisingly can't afford 30 million (or whatever) on a mainframe.

I know about Hercules, but I'd only be able to run Linux. Is that right? Is that useful?

My feeling is that I'd need experience to get a job, but I can't get experience without a job. Seems like the whole shortage is a lie. If there was a shortage I'd be able to find various organisations falling over themselves to help me into mainframes.

<comment><USER30> When industry X complains about shortage of Y what they actually want is for someone else to pay for the training of a bunch of Y, so they can hire them for peanuts and dispose of them at will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fear of not keeping up with the Technical Joneses is a huge influence in our industry because everyone sees "old" programmers booted first when a company or the economy sours. Nobody wants to be That Guy (or Gal).

If mainframes are perceived as a shrinking or outmoded technology, obsolescence fear kicks in and people avoid it. It may need some clever marketing to trick people into giving up that fear or impression. BS works in other areas, per mind-share. Call mainframes "high-up-time cloud", Cloud++, cloud.js, Deep Cloud, or something. There's better BS'ers out there than I.

<comment><USER32> Dunno, I'm a millennial (didn't even know I was part of that group till recently, gotta love being profiled by things I cannot control) and all it took me to like Mainframes (although I don't work with them) was hearing an older developer tell me all about them and their capabilities. I'm a total computer nerd aside from a programmer so I love learning about tech old, new and upcoming.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, all it would take for me to take on a mainframe is "we need someone for a permanent position that you can live on". I'm in this profession because I loved computers as a kid and it's never stopped. You wanna show me something novel? I'll be happy to learn it (assuming there's a livable job in there at the same time). They just have to be willing to teach it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> punk-coder Back in 1996, I lived in Columbus, GA. There are a couple companies down there that used Mainframes for their processing. Synovous/TSYS, AFLAC and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Those companies teamed up with Columbus State University to provide a program for people to learn how to program in the technologies they used:

\- Cobol, CICS, Rexx \- DB2, IMS, VSAM \- JCL

You got paid to go to 6 months of school, and if you already had a Bachelors degree, you got a second one for the classes you took. You went from 9 - <USER3> each day, and you were guaranteed a job at one of those companies, and if you worked for at least 4 years, you didn't have to pay back the loan you got to go through the training.

I was part of the second group of people that trained, and it started my professional career as a developer. Once Y2K was done, I moved on from mainframe programming to Java and .NET.

</comment><comment><USER34> Do we need to bridge the gap? Or, to be brutally direct: Do mainframes deserve to survive in the coming decades?

<comment><USER35> To be brutally direct, why do you think mainframes should not survive "in the coming decades"?

<comment><USER36> Asking out of complete ignorance: What can a mainframe do that other kinds of machines can't? I barely understand what a mainframe is or why you'd use one over other technologies.

<comment><USER37> This question has an easy answer: exactly what they have been doing for 20-50 years. Inertia is a real thing.

Other relevant answers might include "true fault tolerance". More than half of your mainframe can be burned to a crisp, or being chewed on by a dinosaur - doesn't matter, it will keep working. The closest bad analogy I can think of...is a mainframe is like the NASA space missions of yesteryear. Every component has three or four duplicates, just waiting for a primary component to fail so they can take over. They aren't cost effective, but they are operationally effective.

<comment><USER10> Other relevent factor: mainframes are probably not riddled with security flaws. If Iran used a mainframe in their nuclear enrichment facility, they might never have gotten hacked by nsa and friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Maybe I am prejudiced but I have the feeling that mainframes get sold to shops with a lot of money based on the salesman's skills and, well, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a kickback here and there, to oil the old engine. Not because they are the best tech.

That may be a bigger obstacle to people getting in that area. You can make money in non-corrupt companies where your career won't get stuck.

<comment><USER39> I bet the kickbacks are like any other enterprise IT sales process: wine & dine, golf and box seats. Except the restaurants and courses are probably much nicer. Decision makers have pretty strict policies to follow that restrict gifts over a certain dollar amount but invite a bunch of employees to a box seat at a sporting event you already paid for and how much that gift is worth depends on how you measure the value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Cloud is initally is a copy of mainframe just a affordable cheaper version. Mainframe aka z/OS is not old it's just like any other software always upgraded only thing is hardware is also upgraded with it. Positive thing about mainframe is if you write a program and if it serves its propose it can run for decades without an issue. Mainframe is made up of TSO CONSOLE, SDSF, CA7(job scheduling), Db2 database, CICS(online system), JCLs to run batch jobs. Languages are primarily Enterprise COBOL and rexx for developing inhouse tools.

Why to use mainframe, less downtime(data sharing & Plex environments make it look like no downtime), no data theft or any malware destroying data.

Why cloud is better ? Pay as you go, this works for all startups and small companies using latest front applications. With mainframes you will be paying from millions to billions to IBM so only large corporates can afford it.

My opinion, Initially IBM with all this tech boom on cloud they thought they can wait it out and it will fade away and they were mostly focussing on Watson. Since that boom didn't stop, now they have started to put some work. Mainframe is not a JSON world yet. Last few years mainframe is developing rapidly as well new flavours of languages like java and python are introduced. z/Linux and z/VM(like compute engines small z/os vm's) are being introduced. IBM Cloud is bluemix free for only 30days anyone interested can try it out. CA-Endevor which is mainframe change management tool is getting integrated with git mostly preference is given to bitbucket as Altassian has many products like Jira under their wings. Now machine learning is also coming in.

During college days i wanted to be a web designer. But got a job in Mainframe technology and given only month training. That's enough to start in mainframes. Yes, you are going to see black & green screens for rest of your life if you are a mainframer, creating a progress bar in rexx is a skill, it looks cool but stalls the screen so you don't want to do it and you will be aware to things like entire CPU is shared across various users across your organisation.

If you want to learn a technology that processes massive data. Mainframe is the place.

<comment><USER17> > no data theft or any malware destroying data.

That would only be true if the mainframes never interfaced to any other systems or to any humans. Since the latter can't be the case, and the former hasn't been the case for a long time, this just doesn't hold.

> Why cloud is better ? Pay as you go, this works for all startups and small > companies using latest front applications. With mainframes you will be > paying from millions to billions to IBM so only large corporates can afford > it.

There's an implied false dichotomy here, though, that ignores a decade or two of using commodity hardware, before cloud was viable/popular. It was also pay- as-you-go, just with much larger increments, so it didn't work as well for as small companies. That's still available and is actually cheaper (and carries less vendor lock-in).

Perhaps ironically, large enough companies routinely pay millions to AWS. In theory, they could switch providers, but not if they bought in to any of the vendor-specific services. As you say, cloud is, in many ways, a copy of mainframes.

> If you want to learn a technology that processes massive data. Mainframe is > the place.

That may be a stretch, since "massive" isn't what it used to be. Something like all the world's financial transactions might have been massive, in computer terms, 20 years ago, but, today, processors have 1000x the transistor densities, spinning disks have 20x+ the I/O, and SSDs are even faster.

I'd argue that the scientific, physical lab, HPC/supercomputing world is the place for that. The quantities of data produced by the instruments at LLNL's NIF or CERN's LHC would easily overwhelm a mainframe, even after initial processing/filtering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What gap, just pay more for the position.

<comment><USER42> best comment of them all, I agree, there is no skills shortage of mainframe programmers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I tend to think the mainframe shortages are the result of a culture that views mainframe "operators" and "system programmers" as nearly minimum wage unskilled jobs until someone has 40 years of experience.

But what really gets me is that tapeless mainframe backup solution abound. Though they tend to fall into two categories. The ones that require code changes in legacy applications that are using tape as hierarchical storage. And the pile of virtual tape solutions (like this one [https://tributary.com/storage-director-2/](https://tributary.com/storage- director-2/)) which appear as tapes on the mainframe and dump the data to alternate sources disk/AWS-S3/whatever.

I guess there is a 3rd "transparent" set of methods that basically back- up/snapshot individual volumes outside of the applications. Either way, their page could do a better job contrasting their product with existing backup solutions.

</comment><comment><USER44> Fidelity Investments has a software engineer training program for fresh college graduates that lasts a few months and is supposed to prepare them to work at Fidelity. The training program is split into different tracks, one of which is a mainframe track [1].

[1] [https://www.cs.uri.edu/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/...](https://www.cs.uri.edu/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/Leap-Job-Description-2014-revised-July-20131.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER45> Working with a mainframe everyday, the system is very fast and reliable. The hardware was very much ahead of it's time when released. I agree that the platform is an impressive one.

My issue is with the developed software and database design. Although the software is custom written, many mainframe developers do not understand the concepts of modern programming and do not improve over time. Once they learn a concept (sometimes 30 years in the past), they continue to develop this way, rather than improving as it is outside their comfort zone. They are not open to new concepts or ideas. When you have a team of developers doing this over several decades, you end up with a big ball of mud. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud)

Trying to port a big ball of mud to another language is very difficult, which contributes to mainframe developer job security and monolithic, antiquated systems. Modern developers are very particular to code portability, readability and modern concepts. Hopefully this is just in my experience and not common across other mainframe developers.

</comment><comment><USER46> Modern mainframes are just cloud compute. These are services and microservices written in proprietary programming languages, using possibly-proprietary CPU and RAM. They're equivalent to a few racks of Windows or Linux servers behind load balancers. Or a small fortune in AWS services.

Cray, IBM, et al sell computing nostalgia and laziness. Their biggest product is the need to not rewrite code in an open system.

<comment><USER47> I think that's rather a flip attitude.

Say you have a 30-year-old codebase. Odds are there's not completely accurate documentation for everything. Even if you have an accurate spec on paper, it may not encode every gimmick and undefined behavior that external consumers depend on. And if you bollix the switchover up, you're burning tens of thousands of dollars per minute of unavailability.

In that situation, saying "pay $5M for a new mainframe, which buys you another ten years of predictability, 20% more performance, and 20% less power consumption" is a solid alternative to "spend five years and several million dollars in developer effort trying to build something modern that's a drop-in replacement and then praying it doesn't catch fire or have hideous real-world performance when you go live"

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I emailed IBM about 10 years ago, to see if they had a certification program for z/OS, they didnt - it appears they do now, which excites me.

</comment><comment><USER49> I work for a large consulting firm and I do a lot of work helping large government and private companies perform data migrations away from AS/400 mainframe environments.

Many people will say that there is a shortage of skills when it comes to mainframe environments, that might be true, however the need for such skills is diminishing significantly.

</comment><comment><USER50> One comment out of that was interesting to me:

>And it's not all COBOL anymore. Today mainframe programmers use Python, Linux, node.js, Java, blockchain.

node.js on a mainframe? That doesn't strike me as being something that can uninterrupted for years.

<comment><USER24> It's not used to run anything critical.</comment></comment>


High risk transactions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coinbase.com/post/44046687068/high-risk-transactions Cancelled orders on CoinBase is going to kill their business. New customers are unhappy and the post does not make sense as the users are verified and money is withdrawn from their account. <comment><USER2> I understand where they're coming from, but my experience with support has been less than stellar. About four weeks ago I bought 10 BTC from them. My transaction was deemed "high-risk" and the order was cancelled. I never got my money back.

I've been corresponding with support over the past four weeks and still haven't seen a dime. Support generally takes 4-5 business days to respond to each email. I understand that their support staff is extremely limited, but it is still unacceptable, especially because they're dealing with monetary transactions.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean, "you never got your money back"? They're just sitting on $2,000 USD of yours?

<comment><USER2> Presently, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If a transaction is decided to be "High Risk", why not postpone the transaction until additional verification is done?

Instead, we are left wondering if Coinbase is selectively cancelling transactions that they can make a profit off of (due to the volatility of bitcoins)

<comment><USER5> If the flagged transactions were immediately rejected it would obviate the need for excuses. What benefit do they get from putting the transaction in limbo for days before they notify the user?

<comment><USER6> If you give users immediate feedback as to which transactions hit your fraud screen, this allows fraudsters to black box reverse engineer your fraud detection algorithms much, much faster. You very much don't want to do this if you're a financial services business, because if your primary anti-fraud mechanism is an automated system and fraudsters discover the rules to it, you will probably learn about that first when you wake up, run an accounting report, and discover you lost $8 million overnight.

I don't think the average HN user appreciates the risk environment payments companies work in. Imagine if a criminal gang organized enough to have _a payroll_ had ten copies of people who were every bit as good at app security / financial risk management as e.g. Thomas, with two of them whose only marching orders were "Probe payments sites every day, quietly, and tell the team when you find one which is weaker than it could be. We will then conduct several months of quiet R&D on a software product which is more elaborate than that shipped by most YC startups. Our 'launch' will be deployment of that software product against our adversaries at the payments company, and it will blitz them so fast that by the time anyone thinks to pull the plug we'll be millionaires. Then we'll celebrate our good fortune until we do it again next week, to them or another company as circumstances dictate."

(Risk management, which a lot of startups need, is a high-leverage and very fun environment to work in. At present a lot of companies, large and small, custom build systems out of bubblegum and duct tape. If you get good at this you'll have a very rewarding career ahead of you, for many definitions of the word rewarding. I used to want to go into it but got sidetracked by the unexpectedly high amounts of leverage you can get using software to sell software.)

<comment><USER7> I'm curious: what do you mean by risk management (other than credit card fraud prevention - or is that what you meant?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Until Coinbase complies with applicable laws, every transaction they handle is a high-risk transaction. They could be shut down at any moment.

They're not alone. There isn't a single Bitcoin exchange in the world right now compliant with U.S. money transmission laws.

Buyer/seller beware.

Full disclosure: we're in litigation over this.

<comment><USER9> Based on your username, I am going to assume you are referring to this lawsuit:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/139975904/Aaron-Greenspan- lawsuit](http://www.scribd.com/doc/139975904/Aaron-Greenspan-lawsuit)

In which case you are the Plaintiff suing these companies which is very different than the US government suing them.

<comment><USER10> Summary: Aaron Greenspan was running a company handling money online until 2011 when he ran into regulatory issues with the state of CA. He's now suing many other organizations who are doing similar things, claiming those organizations aren't trying to comply with the law which gives them an unfair advantage. He appears to representing himself.

<comment><USER8> "He appears to representing himself."

Not true, look at the docket.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I got that from:

        REQUEST FOR CIVIL LOCAL RULE 3-9(b) EXEMPTION AND RETIREMENT
        This complaint is not signed by a member of the Bar of
        this Court and Plaintiff is a corporation. Civil Local
        Rule 3-9(b) requires corporations to retain counsel...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised that nobody mentioned that yesterday, Coinbase crossed their global "daily buy limit"! Users of Coinbase were greeted with a new interface to buy coins, prompting them to click and confirm their transactions would not be completed until Friday (the usual condition on a Monday) and that their USD-quoted price would be processed at the effective market rate at that time (if you're used to doing business with Coinbase, they mention a time but really the deal is done at the time of their choosing) on Friday.

So, you are agreeing to spend a given amount of USD to acquire BTC, but the price is not fixed and you actually don't know the number of BTC you'll be getting until their calculation of the market rate occurs, five days from now. I had the same experience as the person in Coinbase Blog, they white-listed me, now I have an expectation that they will deliver on their promises.

Before that, I don't think I ever did (or had any reason to.) Some company on the internet is agreeing to take my bank details and make a withdrawal from my bank account, but what happens next is anyone's guess.

(A thought exercise: what is it exactly about letting 5 days pass before that makes it safer for Coinbase to part with a sum of bitcoins when a bank transfer is completed? The owner of the account has had zero opportunity to contest the charge as fraudulent, and those bitcoins go "at-risk" on that day when the transaction is completed. If there is a run on bitcoins, how does Coinbase guarantee they will be able to satisfy all of the orders they've accepted?)

</comment><comment><USER9> People like to make it seem that a bitcoin purchase is life or death and basically equate being able to buy bitcoins whenever and however they want up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

<comment><USER9> Don't be hatin' just cause you have never seen panic buying ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What does a reversible payment method mean? And how does that differ from Mt. Gox? I know Coinbase is not an exchange like they are but are their payment methods different? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER9> Coinbase uses a method called "ACH" to electronically request the money from your bank account. The problem with this method is that it is relatively easy for a fraudster to get the information needed to do this (routing and account number) and submit that as their account on coinbase. Consumer protection banking laws in the US are very consumer favorable and thus if someone goes to their bank and claims they did not authorize the transaction (of coinbase taking the money from your account) the funds will be returned to you and coinbase will take the hit. Now, typically this is less of an issue, but with bitcoin, coinbase is not able to take back any bitcoins they have let you withdraw. Thus you can see where this leaves them in a very delicate situation about having to monitor how and who they withdraw money from as well as the amounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good details. US laws suck. But they have all this account/identity verifications which is trackable. As a new user, I followed all steps to become a good user, but all my transactions are being cancelled. I even tried new accounts, and no luck. So, if they were to follow this trust pattern, no new user would be able to become a good user. I have seen posts where people who are veterans on coinbase have their transactions cancelled. I am to the point that I want to drop by their office with a physical check in hand and tell them to buy me BTC.

<comment><USER9> Ironically enough, due to check fraud that check might not help you as much as you think ;)

I don't know what algos they use to detect fraud but being a veteran does not always mean there won't be fraud on your bank account. Remember, this is not about those five 10 dollar transactions you authorized, this is about that one 5 thousand dollar one that was the result of fraud. From their point of view, a false positive is much better than a false negative.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK. Then with the current bitcoin price, their risk level goes significantly higher. They should really open the option to people walking into their office and drop off physical checks. I am willing to do that and that does not have the problem is ACH because it is in physical form and has your signature on it.

<comment><USER13> Sure it does, especially since many times checks aren't actually sent to a clearinghouse, but scanned and turned into ACH transactions. They're just as easy to counterfeit (you can order checks with any account and routing number you want from Vistaprint online, or print your own at home) and sometimes just as easy to reverse. A cleared paper check that was never converted requires a bank's intervention to reverse, but it's still possible.

You want to show up with cash, not a check.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK. Cash in the suitcase. ;) I feel like a gangster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A couple large bitcoin funds go broke to hackers and the price of bitcoin subsequently doubles in a little over two weeks. I'm curious to see how this will continue to play out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to co-relate it with bitcoin value is finally being realized. Or perhaps because the difficulty for mining it is exponentially increasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Their site seems to be down. Scary!

<comment><USER16> It's up again. Coinbase is YC-backed so the founders aren't thin air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> And they call Bitcoins a currency?

<comment><USER18> A lot of this hassle is interfacing with the US banking system, not bitcoin itself. If banking was implemented as a push system vs. the current pull system with no real authentication that we have in the US because of legacy reasons, it would eliminate entire categories of fraud.

I've heard Europe is significantly better in this regard.

<comment><USER19> So does that mean there are exchanges in Europe where it's much easier to buy and sell bitcoins? Because I'm not aware of any.

<comment><USER18> Supposedly bitstamp with it's SEPA integration? I don't know if it's much easier or not. I just remember people talking about how nobody uses paper checks in Europe and everybody uses the free / cheap online wire transfer interface in their bank website to send money to other accounts in the country. They use it to pay rent, send money for split meals, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to limit devs access to prod servers without impeding their work? - <AUTHOR> We are a small team in our startup and our product is a SaaS application that our clients can use to pay their vendors. Using proper integrations with 3rd parties we accommodate such payments via ACH and Check. Currently we're small enough (3 founders) that we don't worry about rouge employees going in and sending ACH payments to their own bank account, but as we grow that'll certainly be a larger issue that'll keep me up at night. What are some of the best practices to limit such access to production databases, database dumps, and safe storage of API tokens when your company grows to 10 or 50 engineers. We find ourselves (as much as I hate) restoring database dumps locally to reproduce issues or going into production to troubleshoot (checking load, looking at logs, running tests) where all the sensitive data also lives.<p>Any blog posts, ideas or suggestions are appreciated! <comment><USER2> We faced a similar problem here at Etleap. Our current setup involves two sets of credentials for everyone, one more limited and one less limited. Same idea for database accounts.

Most of the time we only need basic monitoring access (got a cloudwatch alert, did something not restart properly?) which we use the more limited account. All the commands are logged and centralized (in case of intruders as well as so that we know what happened if someone fat-fingered something).

API tokens are encrypted on disk with KMS and the encrypted files are not readable by our user accounts.

We've never had to restore database locally so I don't have anything to suggest.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need automated deployments. The deployer of choice should have all the private accounts, passwords etc and only a few people should have access. The build/deployment process should be able to put those keys in the right configs.

For the database, have an annonymization process the clears any sensitive data, annonymizes names, etc. and have developers work off of that (I really like having real world data to work with).

Give them access to logs or regularly copy them to somewhere they can access them.

There really should be need need for devs to be accessing prod (or stagin, or UAT, etc) environments regularly.

</comment><comment><USER4> my 2c:

\- Have logs ship to a centralised logging server. Once developers can get error logs without logging onto a prod server, they often don't have to

\- Come up with a process to build an example database. Rails' fixtures are great at this. A database full of random data is often all a developer needs to identify and fix a certain bug

</comment><comment><USER5> You can't limit devs from prod servers. The obvious answer is to hire honest people. The place I work processes millions per day. No one is going to risk their $100k+ job to steal whatever the ACH limit is.</comment>


The Great Pyramid of Giza is the only known eight-sided pyramid - <AUTHOR> https://curiosmos.com/the-great-pyramid-of-giza-is-the-only-known-eight-sided-pyramid-in-existence/ <comment><USER2> More fun facts:

\- The Great Pyramid is a scale model of Earth, at a ratio of 1:43,200 (a significant number)

\- It also encodes its own latitude and longitude

\- Its base perimeter is equal to 1/2 a minute of latitude (1/43,200th of 360 degrees)

\- It's aligned to true north within 3/60 of one degree (making it, I believe, the most accurately aligned structure on the planet)

These are not undisputed claims, but there is absolutely something different about 4th dynasty pyramids that is worth exploring. There are many, many anomalies about Giza that defy explanation. Another example is precision stone cutting and drilling from thousands of years ago.

For detailed explanations of the above, check out the video here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhGQU3m9E34&t=795](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhGQU3m9E34&t=795) (timelinked, but the entire video is excellent)

[https://youtu.be/H43z2xAis4c?list=PLvuraN2vNappZ6m4jNiK5rDDm...](https://youtu.be/H43z2xAis4c?list=PLvuraN2vNappZ6m4jNiK5rDDmZ6AKNrxB)

and this blog: [http://garyosborn.moonfruit.com/1-43200/4594099844](http://garyosborn.moonfruit.com/1-43200/4594099844)

This is one of my favorite topics to discuss.

<comment><USER3> _" It 's aligned to true north within 3/60 of one degree (making it, I believe, the most accurately aligned structure on the planet)"_

Is that referring to true North today or in 2560 B.C?

<comment><USER4> True north doesn't change - magnetic north does.

<comment><USER5> > True north doesn't change

The alignment of a structure fixed to the ground, relative to true north, will change over time, because the while the axis of the earth can be viewed as fixed, the land on the Earth is not fixed with respect to that axis, but moves.

<comment><USER6> Not really. The time scale for large movement is much larger than thousands of years.

Since the great pyramid was build 4500 years ago the mid atlantic ridge has only moved about 100m. That's just lateral translation, most of which probably did not end up moving egypt much anyway and definitely not enough to throw off the direction a pyramid is pointing by more than a second or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly curious fact, with tons of advertisement trying to squeeze some money off it.

</comment><comment><USER8> And there I was expecting that it had a buried bottom half, making it the shape of a D8...

</comment><comment><USER9> I saw a similar post recently on a different site. This seems fake to me.

Does anybody have different, perhaps more reliable sources to confirm this?

<comment><USER10> The issue is how do you define "eight sides."

It's a four sided pyramid, where each side has a concave bend in the middle, only really visible from a top down perspective. The article contains enhanced, but completely valid photos of it.

It is unknown if this was an intentional design aspect. It does not seem to be a feature of any occult purpose. Sneferu's Bent Pyramid does "not" have 8 sides, but was incorrectly completed at a later date at the wrong angle, thus often used as a (useless) comparison.

All other pyramids in Egypt seem to just be normally 4 sides with no concave outer walls.

tl;dr The Pyramid of Giza is only 8 sides on a technicality. It approximates the usual, and expected, tetrahedral shape.

<comment><USER9> I'm still not convinced. Are you sure the photos are valid? Is curiosmos a trustworthy site?

William Matthews Flinders Petrie is mentioned as having written _La Description de l'Egypte_ in the 1700's - this is inaccurate, the man was born in 1853: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinders_Petrie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinders_Petrie). On a quick search I can't find mention of _La Description de l'Egypte_ , either in French or English.

They're also quoting a text by I.E.S. Edwards at the end. He seems to be a real person, but they quote a 1975 edition of his book, which I can't find on google books ([https://books.google.nl/books?q=editions:ISBN0140136347&id=d...](https://books.google.nl/books?q=editions:ISBN0140136347&id=dBBMvrlrkFQC)).

The mention of _British Air Force pilot, P. Groves_ pops up in multiple places, but none looks particularly trustworthy to me.

<comment><USER10> Don't know if the site is legit, however you can literally go to Egypt and see the Giza Pyramid in person. If you know what to look for, it _can_ be seen from ground level.

It's _extremely_ slight. And, again, not an occult or religious feature, just a quirk of its design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "related video" on the very article references _another_ "eight-sided" pyramid: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid)

They're only eight sided if you don't count the base, too.

</comment><comment><USER12> The link is unreadable for me on mobile (Safari on ios 13). The usual cookies popup appears hiding the view and no action can remove it (neither accepting not rejecting it).

</comment><comment><USER13> The indention is where the tube used to sit that was used to carry grain to the top back when the pyramid was used as a grain silo.

(Yes, I'm joking)</comment>


Paul Graham interview in The Information - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete-Interview

<comment><USER2> Why post this if you need to subscribe to read it???

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Gawker's summary is insta-banned.

Apparently Hacker News is not the place to discuss Paul Graham saying intellectually lazy, ignorant, sexist things. Who would have thought!

<comment><USER4> Valleywag posts have been automatically killed since 2008: [http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/11/hacker-news-considers- banni...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/11/hacker-news-considers-banning- valleywag/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you don't want to fork over the $400 to pass the paywall and view this article, check out vallywag's summation:

[http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent- be...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-been-hacking- for-the-pa-1490581236)</comment>


Show HN: A guitar tab viewer that listens - <AUTHOR> https://www.fatpick.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone. I'd like to introduce you to a side project I've been working on for a little while now.

FATpick ([https://www.fatpick.com/](https://www.fatpick.com/)) is a practice tool for guitar (and bass) that helps you learn to play new songs, improve your skills and stay motivated to keep playing. It's an auto-scrolling tablature viewer, synchronized with backing tracks, that listens as you play along with any guitar, providing immediate feedback on your accuracy and timing.

FATpick will eventually be much more than that - there are a lot of directions to take this in - but even with this more modest scope this M(+)VP release is useful, cohesive and hopefully compelling in and of itself.

A couple of things that might be interesting to HN: (1) So far this has been a bootstrapped, solo effort; but it won't necessarily stay that way. (2) The current Windows and Mac apps are built with Electron; but they won't necessarily stay that way either. I'd be happy to discuss any of that if you are interested.

A direct link to the downloads page is here: [https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads#get- fatpick](https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads#get-fatpick)

You can find a brief (and silent) video of the app in action on either of the pages linked above.

I'd love your feedback on any part of this, but I'd especially appreciate it if you can give the app a try.

<comment><USER2> I spent a while trying to figure out if this was free (not just to download, but to use fully) or would require some kind of paid account. Maybe you could make that clearer?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great feedback, thanks.

To clarify: it is totally free to download and use right now and will continue to be for at least several months. Eventually payment will be required, probably in the form of a subscription plan.

<comment><USER3> > subscription plan

Please reconsider this. If this is a local app, then I see no reason for adopting a subscription plan.

I am interested, but right now guitar is a hobby I can afford only a couple of times a week. Paying a subscription would have a different impact on, who like me, is an occasional player.

Otherwise I can stick with Guitar Pro for eternity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Guitar Pro's list price is more than the likely cost of an annual subscription to FATpick.

<comment><USER4> I do all my graphics editing with a Fireworks CS4, bought ten years back. I use it rarely, so the one time payment worked wonders. In almost every way I prefer apps that I completely own - especially if it's locally installed. And I'd be willing to pay a higher price upfront if there was such an option.

Note: I am not saying that your annual plan would be overpriced or unaffordable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate your input. It's worth some thought.

Just to be clear FATpick is not strictly a local app. It's more like a fat client - a local app that depends on part on services in the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OP: I don't know if you already know it, but there is a huge homebrew tabs community around the Rocksmith "video game". (Try looking for CustomsForge).

If you find a way to support their format, you might gain access to a huge repository of tabs. Maybe this might put your tool on Ubisoft's radar, so I suggest to thread lightly, but it would be awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm familiar with CustomsForge, and there are a lot of interesting things about it.

But you don't need anything nearly as complicated as Rocksmith files or CustomsForge to import songs into FATpick. FATpick already accepts Guitar Pro files, so there are thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of scores you can download from ultimate-guitar and other sites to import into FATpick.

Also, while obviously not as convenient, free software like TuxGuitar can convert other formats (MuseScore, MusicXML, etc.) into GuitarPro, so you can import pretty much any machine-readable score into FATpick (modulo proprietary formats like Rocksmith/CustomsForge, but you need to jump thru hoops to "extract" data in that format in the first place).

<comment><USER5> > FATpick already accepts Guitar Pro files

This is interesting. I suggest you add that somewhere in the home page.

<comment><USER6> I agree with this. I didn't see any mention of this either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I don't always reference "Guitar Pro" by name. Do you think that specific phrase would catch your eye or be more significant for you?

I.e. is "import Guitar Pro tabs" substantially more meaningful to you than, say, "import custom tabs"?

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. In fact make sure to mention which Guitar Oro formats as they've got so many and it's irritating to have to keep track of them all.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair.

Full disclosure: right now FATpick will import gp3, gp4 and gp5 files. The "import song" button both enforces and mentions this, as does the user manual IIRC, but it's not something that's called out in any way.

If you have a gpx file (produced by Guitar Pro 6 or 7) then you'll need to convert it to gp5 to import into FATpick, at least for now. If you're using the GuitarPro app itself you can just save it that way. If you don't have the GuitarPro app TuxGuitar is free and handles this well (it works for editing GuitarPro files too).

Obviously it would be better to support .gpx directly, and for that matter things like MusicXML, too. But the GuitarPro format has to be more or less reverse-engineered, and gpx is unlike gp3, gp4 and gp5. Most files in the wild seem to be gp5 (or after that, gp3) anyway so that's where its at right now.

It seems like one could probably use some headless form of TuxGuitar on the back-end to convert gpx to gp5, but other than a cursory scan to see if that's a feature they already provide (it isn't) I haven't dug into it much more deeply than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried importing a tab from ultimate-guitar (.gp4) and after about 10 minutes fatpick notified me that the tab was ready to play, but when I opened it up the tab was empty. The name was imported correctly, but it looked like that was it.

Since this is a semi-established space that you're just putting a few variations on, concur with other posters suggesting you need to reduce friction. There shouldn't need to be a login process to start playing pre- built tabs, and if users can't already see tabs others have uploaded you need that function soonest.

Will check back later, cool idea in general.

In case you're wondering, the tab I tried to upload: [https://tabs.ultimate- guitar.com/tab/the_lumineers/ho_hey_gu...](https://tabs.ultimate- guitar.com/tab/the_lumineers/ho_hey_guitar_pro_1899306)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback PhaedrusV, and apologies for the issue you encountered.

I just tested the Lumineers song you uploaded (meaning that I played your exact import, not that I imported the gp4 file from scratch) and it seems to be working ok for me.

I think that if you try again it will probably work. I think the problem you encountered was that the file wasn't properly (fully) downloaded when the app tried to open it. Specifically that sounds like an example of a file-download race condition we're working on (I mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion if you are curious).

Usually when this happens if you just hit the back button in the header to go back to the track-selection screen, wait a few seconds and then hit the play (or forward) button it will work the second time around.

I realize what a crappy UX it is when that happens but it is almost always a temporary glitch. If you go back to the track selection screen, give it a second to finish flushing to disk it should work. (Moreover once the file is loaded to your local cache you shouldn't see the problem again.)

If you are still having problems you could try flushing your local cache (go to the Settings, toggle "Advanced Options" to on then clicking the "Clear Cache" button that now appears at the bottom) and try again.

If you are still having problems even after that please reach out via the contact form in the app, or online at [https://www.fatpick.com/contact- us](https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us), or contact me directly as rod@<that- domain> and we'll work it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay, I'm probably your exact target demographic - I have about 1,300 hours in Rocksmith and I'm obsessed with it, but often find myself wanting more "pro" features like Guitar Pro has. So hopefully you'll find my feedback useful...

On the tab interface: \- Seeing a blob of 6 numbers come isn't intuitive enough. The strings REALLY need to be colored. You should be able to get away with using the same colors as Rocksmith, as there's generic sets of strings using those ([https://www.guitarcenter.com/DR-Strings/Hi-Def-NEON-Multi- Co...](https://www.guitarcenter.com/DR-Strings/Hi-Def-NEON-Multi-Color-Coated- Medium-Electric-Guitar-Strings.gc)) - or at least make them configurable. It's hard for me to tell which string is which in fatpick.

\- Bar lines for the beat/measure changes would be helpful.

\- Chords saying their name above them would be a huge help - "G" is much easier to parse quickly than "355433"!

Practice mode: \- Just adjusting playback speed isn't enough. To be actually useful, fatpick needs something like Rocksmith's Riff Repeater, where you can select a section, loop it at a selected speed, and have it increase 1% each time you get the notes right. In fact, here's where you can outshine Rocksmith, since Rocksmith only lets you select entire sections, whereas you could make it so you could really drill in on notes

Audio: \- Being able to play the audio file instead of just guitar pro-style midi would be a huge bonus. Don't make it required, so you can still just import a quick GP file to play, but for curated tracks or imported Rocksmith psarcs (see my comment elsewhere about psarcjs), the real audio would be great. \- Even better... multitrack audio! Just play the song .mp3 if that's all there is, but there's plenty of multitrack ogg's sourced from rock band / guitar hero floating out there. For these songs you could play with your chosen instrument removed - IE, pick a song with a multitrack ogg, pick the bass part, the audio engine wouldn't play the bass part but would play the rest.

\- Some kind of effects on the guitar would be nice. Using an AxefxIII and Loopback I can mix in real guitar sounds with the game, but most of your demographic won't have that ability, so being able to pick an AC/DC song and have basic distortion effects will be a must.

Anyways, after playing with fatpick for 20 minutes I'm going to go back to Rocksmith. Will check on this in a month though and see how far along it is - there's a lot of potential here!

<comment><USER10> Personally I switched from Rocksmith to goPlayAlong, mostly because it syncs audio to tabs. It does not do note recognition, but I had more trouble in rocksmith than its worth. Notes that do not get recognized for some reason. My low e string has trouble getting recognized even though its in tune.

I've also realized that its not a good idea psychologically. You basically remove the "did I play it correctly and did it sound good?" part from your brain, and rely on a external system to provide that feedback for you. This would be no issue if these tools could gauge that better, going beyond "does the input have the correct frequencies at the correct times?". It does not recognize fret buzz, it does not recognize you slightly panicing but still hitting the correct notes.

So in goPlayAlong I just select the parts I wanna work on (you can not just select bars, but also single notes), make sure the pitch is correct (it has halftone + semitone corrections), slow it down to the tempo I want to work on. Then I play it a few times. If I am happy with how it sounds, I press the + key on my keyboard to increase the tempo by 5%.

It also has a trainer mode which increases the speed after a set amount of playthroughs (of the section), by a set amount of speed. So increase 1% every 5repeats for example. I use it when I am more focused on improving speed.

It also has a very tight feedback loop. After it played the last note of the section it straight goes into the first note of the section again. No "You did great", no playing 5 seconds after and before the section like rocksmith does.

Unfortunately it costs something like 40$. After trying the demo and the song syncing I instantly bought it. I was very impressed it was able to accurately sync a live version of a song to the tab, accurately.

The only thing I miss about it is beeing able to edit the tabs.

<comment><USER11> Give Soundslice a shot ([https://www.soundslice.com/](https://www.soundslice.com/)). It's tabs synced with audio/video, complete with a notation editor, various instrument visualizations and a community of people posting stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did you tough about removing the account creation at the start. This seem to me as unnecessary friction to try it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not wrong, but to be honest, no, not very much. It might make an appreciable difference in "conversions" (to using the app) for the Hacker News crowd, but I'm not sure if it's justified in the general case, for these reasons:

1\. A lot of the features are oriented around having some identity. There would need to be a lot of special cases in the code to support account-free use.

2\. Ultimately the app will be something you have to pay for, so the account is valuable as a lead but also maybe as a proxy for whether or not someone is interested enough to pay for the product eventually.

3\. By the time you encounter this you've already downloaded and installed (or at least unpacked) the application. I'm not sure there are a lot of people that go through all that trouble only to balk at registering an email/name/password account. (If nothing else I would think at that point you're already committed due to the effect of the "investment" you've already made on basic human psychology.) And if they do balk at entering an email address, are they the kind of people that are likely to enter a credit-card when the time comes?

For what its worth, most of my competitors make you enter a credit card (and promise to charge you if you don't cancel) before letting you try the product.

That said, I guess it _could_ work with some type of gradual account creation flow (like asking for your name when you've earned a spot on the leaderboard). I'm just not convinced that the return that would provide justifies the effort to make it happen (not to mention the complexity that this would permanently add to ongoing development and testing).

I could easily be wrong about this, but that's been my intuition and rationale around this topic so far.

Do you really think that _that_ many "normal" users that are serious paid- subscription prospects will be lost at that step. I can probably measure that to find out, but its also plausible (and maybe harder to measure) that is a useful way to filter out users that will never pay for the service before they become a support or capacity burden.

<comment><USER13> I'd immediately delete it. And I have done so with several other applications. Time-limited trials don't need anything other than the time limit and usefulness to make paying customers out of trial downloads.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, though. Did you download this app?

<comment><USER13> No, but that's because I saw this thread first. There was no point. And it would have been immediately deleted as soon as it asked for info had I downloaded it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Running into problems on MacOS Catalina 10.15.2 (MacBook Pro 2019 16" model). My mic isn't being detected for some reason. I tried messing with the settings and running the "Latency Calibration" but it just says "We were unable to measure the system latency". Can't determine what's wrong as GarageBand and the System Preferences both show it as working.

Also, just a minor bug I found - if you have a song already loaded then it will play on top of the test tones in the Latency Calibration menu.

Edit:

Some other thoughts. It would be great to show the tuning somewhere while the track is being played. I keep forgetting to tune my guitar until after I've selected the track to play.

<comment><USER15> Also suffering the same problem. Did this get resolved? I noticed that Catalina has a security panel for what can and can't access the microphone (god bless it), but can't find anyway of registering FatPick inside of that panel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Per [https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/control-access- to-y...](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/control-access-to-your- microphone-on-mac-mchla1b1e1fe/mac) you should be able to grant the FATpick app access to your microphone from that panel.

It is likely you'll need to "install" the app (drag it to your Applications folder as prompted in the DMG), not just run the app directly.

<comment><USER15> I have the app in the Applications folder, but I am still not seeing it in the microphone access panel...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi royletron, for what it is worth I think the latest version (v1.4.2) now available at [https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads](https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads) fixes this.

I think same updates that fixed the notarization issue may fix this problem also (since we had to add an explicit entitlement for the audio input). If it doesn't please reach me via the contact form at [https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us](https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us) or email me directly at rod@<that-domain>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks very cool will try this out and report back but just curious first thing that comes to mind, how are you differentiating between the several frets that could produce the same note, or for example 6th string 5th fret(A) vs open 5th string(A) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now for pitch-detection purposes I'm not differentiating between them. If you produce a sound of the right pitch and octave that's considered a "hit" regardless of which fret or string you used to create it.

Personally I see that as a feature, but I guess if you wanted to be very prescriptive about fingering for educational/training reasons I can see the value in treating them differently.

There is some subtle difference in the tone (which is why you can hear the difference, obviously) so this is _possible_ but not trivial. I've actually been experimenting with "string detection" recently so that I can warn users when they are off by one string (a common beginner mistake).

<comment><USER10> Well, for chords not differentiating between them is correct anyway, since you can play different voicings.

The string detection is a good idea imho

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anybody interested in guitar tabs and great tech, Soundslice is a community built around learning music from tabs synced with real recordings.

[https://www.soundslice.com/community/](https://www.soundslice.com/community/) is a good place to start. You can follow people to get updates on their posts (licks, transcriptions), it has a fully baked notation/tab editor, it imports GuitarPro/MusicXML/PowerTab/TuxGuitar files, and it's just really damn good. (Disclaimer: I am the developer.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice work! Do you think this work could be adapted to recognize human-sung notes in real time (e.g. turn my humming into an orchestral melody)? If so, let's get in touch!

<comment><AUTHOR> It can absolutely do near-real-time pitch detection of singing or humming or even better whistling. We may want to tweak the parameters a little bit for that specific domain but it probably does reasonably well right now.

If you want you can test out how well it does as-is right now. Within the app go to "Settings" then "Audio Analysis Settings" then click the "Test Settings" button. That will show you the same pitch and note-onset detection as used during game-play.

I'd be happy to talk more -- you can reach me as rod@ the domain I linked to -- but to be candid monochromatic pitch detection of the human voice is not a hard problem. I'm not sure FATpick is as special at this as you seem to think, but I'm not quite sure what you have in mind. And I certainly don't want to talk you out of thinking that :) I'd love to hear more about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love the idea for this (and for Yousician), but it never works for me. If the note recognition by the software isn't at least 95%, I feel like I'm wasting my time and it's just an exercise in frustration. I tried using FatPick with both (1) a Rocksmith USB guitar cable hooked directly into my guitar; and (2) a microphone picking up my amped guitar externally. And for both connections, I didn't think that the note recognition from my playing was anywhere close to accurate. I tried playing a very basic 12 bar blues, which I can play in my sleep, and the software just doesn't pick up the notes. I feel like a software developer needs to make a guitar that is specially tested with its software just for practicing. The software may work for others and I admire your effort, but I'm just sharing my experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Pitch detection can be tricky and system dependent but when it's not working at all (or missing most of the notes you are playing) the root cause is usually one of a few common problems. The troubleshooting guide at [https://www.fatpick.com/support/troubleshooting](https://www.fatpick.com/support/troubleshooting) may help.

If you want to experiment some you can enable the advanced settings (under General) which will add the Audio Analysis options to the main settings menu. There are a lot of knobs you can turn on that screen to adjust how the audio analysis works, and you can test the pitch detection from that screen.

There are actually a bunch of additional options, including alternative pitch detection algorithms that are included but not exposed on that screen. If you reach out to me (rod@<that domain> or using the contact form on the web) I'd be happy to try to help get it to work for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like a helpful tool! Thanks for sharing!

One thing that was frustrating when learning guitar was figuring out which finger goes where. Even though the tabs show where you need to press, they don't really tell you which finger should go where.

Is this something you would be able to help with?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Yes", in general but "not yet", in practice. FATpick's internal data-format supports color-coding the note "bubbles" to indicate the recommended finger to use to "fret" the note, but the standard import format doesn't include this information.

FATpick has an algorithm to programmatically determine where to place your fretting hand and fingers (when the information isn't available in the score) but to be honest I wasn't confident enough in that logic to enable it by default quite yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would recommend making your entire database of songs available from the web page. Is there any technical reason preventing this?

None of the bands in your "small sample of songs" were really what I wanted to play, so I didn't bother downloading this. It seemed like it would probably be a lot of work to download, install, get past the security errors on macOS Mojave, presumably create a login, and _then_ find out what songs you have.

However, maybe the library of songs isn't what your main target audience cares about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in case this isn't obvious: You can import any GuitarPro file and play it in FATpick.

<comment><USER20> GuitarPro is a $70/year subscription. I would hope I wouldn't need to pay that in order to get some sheet music for this app...

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need the GuitarPro software, you need GuitarPro-format files.

GuitarPro is a pretty common format for machine-readable sheet music. Most "tab editor" programs can open and save to the GuitarPro file format. TuxGuitar is one example of a tab editor that is both good and free and does this well.

But you don't need to do that either. There are tens of thousands of GuitarPro format files readily available on the Internet. Ultimate-Guitar is one major source but there are lots of others.

EDIT: Name a band or a song and I'll import one for you. (Just don't go out of your way to "stump" me with an obscure choice).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I tried using this and it's a damn mess. You need to sit down with someone unfamiliar with it and take a note of all the roadblocks on the way towards getting it to do something.

I never could get it to do anything. I got as far as pressing "play" and then seeing a page with a little bar on the left, two quotes in the middle and the word "practice" on the right. Press that and it says "paused". Oh, I was playing? Didn't seem like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. That sounds like a bug. If you see the two quotes and didn't see the tabs you definitely weren't playing anything. Specifically it sounds like we failed to load the song data, so you don't really see anything at all.

This is typically a momentary issue. If you want to give it another try you can go back to the track or song selection page and try again. That generally clears the problem up.

(The problem is that data file wasn't fully flushed to disk when the player tried to open it. If you give it a second and try again it generally works.)

If the file happens to be very large or the network connection is slow you might see this more often. Also if you are a little more leisurely about going from the track-selection page to the player this is less likely to happen.

Worst case scenario is that the data file was somehow corrupted when being written to the cache. That will clear itself out eventually, or you could clear the cache from the settings panel, or try another song if you are just playing around.

I know this seems like a problem that should be easy to fix, but it's been a little bit of a whack-a-mole problem to address all the edge cases. I'm sorry you ran into this, but fortunately it's almost always a temporary glitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks awesome! Gonna try it out when I get home. I'm sure you're already familiar with Yousician - what would you say your app will have that they don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Moxie.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually that probably deserves a less flippant answer, so let me offer one.

To be honest the most interesting differentiators are not really visible in this MVP release, but there are some, even now.

At a practical level:

* FATpick lets you import and play any song you can get your hands on (as well as those shared by other users). You can import any GuitarPro-format scores directly (or at least any .gp3/4/5 files) and if you're motivated enough you can easily convert anything else to the GuitarPro format using free software like TuxGuitar.

* FATpick is also totally free right now. There are no time limits or features hidden behind a paywall. To be clear it won't always be free, but it will remain free for at least several months (as we refine the product) and we'll work out a special offer for early-adopters as we get closer to defining the actual subscription model.

At a philosophical level:

* Most of the competitors in this space - possibly all of the "big" ones - focus on trying to "teach" guitar and so invest heavily in instructional videos and in content selected for pedagogical reasons.

* FATpick takes a different approach. We assume you've heard of JustinGuitar and focus instead on being the best platform for viewing tabs and learning to play songs, to the extent that even someone that is brand new to guitar can be playing songs they know in just a few minutes -- maybe slowly or poorly or relatively simple ones -- but literally going from "Where do I put my fingers?" and "Is this where the guitar strap should go?" to "Cool, now I can play Seven Nation Army along with the recording as if I'm in the band" in a just a few minutes. More experienced players are able to sight-read new stuff, even on the first play thru, making it easy to learn new songs. And all with objective feedback on your performance and the ability to track your progress over time. We aren't trying to teach you guitar -- you should be looking at multiple sources for that anyway -- but we are trying to be an indispensable tool on your belt, helping make your practice sessions more fun, more engaging and more _effective_.

But again I think the most interesting and unique stuff is still on the roadmap. A big part of what I'm trying to do now is field-test the technology. This version was more or less scoped specifically to be useful and compelling enough to support that but the really good stuff is still in the pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some early ideas:

Dynamics exercises. Capture amplitude changes, so users can practice crescendos when using acoustic guitars.

Solve the reverse problem, but for singing. Given a song, extract it's melody and replay as a karaoke with scores.

Guitar Pro compatibility is more important than you think. You'll probably have to differentiate yourself from Yousician.

Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that. Just in case you missed this point, you can already import Guitar Pro files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I tried this out and I really just need a way to manually set the latency. My recording computer only has an audio interface with no monitors (just headphones) and I pretty much can't use this software because you don't seem to support ASIO input or manual latency settings.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can manually set the latency using the button on the bottom of that screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wait, I'm sorry, that option is hidden by default.

You can set the latency manually but first you must got to "Settings" (gear icon) then "General" then toggle "Show advanced options" to on. This will expose a bunch of new configuration options, both in the settings and in a few other places in the app.

Once you have enabled advanced options you'll see a "link" at the bottom of the Latency Calibration screen that says "Manual configuration...". That will let you manually configure the input and output latency.

It's unfortunate that this wasn't easy for you to find but I'm glad you said something. I wasn't sure whether anyone would know what to do with this, so you've at least validated that it's worthwhile to have that option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is cool! What about availability on phones/tablets? Can Elektron apps be easily ported?

</comment><comment><USER26> This looks very interesting. Alas, it doesn't pass security on Mac OS Mojave.

<comment><USER27> confirmed on Catalina as well! - can you please post here when it's fixed? I would love to try it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey ladino, just to update you (as requested) this should be fixed now.

The version currently available at [https://www.fatpick.com/downloads/FATpick- mac-latest.dmg](https://www.fatpick.com/downloads/FATpick-mac-latest.dmg) is fully notarized by Apple and should not have this problem.

Release notes here: [https://www.fatpick.com/blog/release-notes- fatpick-v1-4-2](https://www.fatpick.com/blog/release-notes-fatpick-v1-4-2)

Please let me know if you encounter any problems with this new build. You can reach me via the contact form at [https://www.fatpick.com/contact- us](https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us) or you can email me directly at rod@<that-domain>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Please add support for Ukulele tabs!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can import and play Ukulele tabs right now, if you have a GuitarPro file the contains one.

Most string-instrument-based tracks are playable in FATpick so if you have a GuitarPro file (or want to use TuxGuitar to convert another format to guitar pro, ideally gp5) you can import and play it right now.

To be fair we haven't really tuned anything for Uke so the pitch detction might need a little TLC but it should work reasonably well as-is. Even banjo would theoretically work but to be honest I'm not sure if the short-string on the banjo is handled properly, nor how that's represented in GuitarPro files.

Let me know if you run into problems (rod at fatpick or via the in-app or on- web contact form). Obviously we'd like to support ukulele, we just haven't been able to prioritize that yet.</comment></comment>


Upstart Gangs Filling the Yakuza Power Vacuum - <AUTHOR> https://www.nippon.com/en/features/c04205/ <comment><USER2> From the article: _Meanwhile, the Kantō Rengō members had started out working as drivers and bodyguards for the heads of major entertainment agencies. By this time, they were starting their own businesses, like loan sharking, adult movie production, and IT. The different members were pushing forward with their own various businesses. I myself had a legitimate web advertising firm that was highly profitable and growing rapidly._

There isn't much money in street crime. Unloading stolen goods is dead. Who wants a partly broken used car stereo? Any TV one person can lift is worthless. Used computers are E-waste. The old-line criminal organizations are either being bypassed or are moving into more profitable areas. Initial coin offerings, binary options, FOREX, and payday loans are the new big moneymakers.

<comment><USER3> Just to make sure, you mean in Japan, right? Because unloading stolen goods are alive and well in countries where cell phone prices are high and average income is low(my personal experience is with the situation in Brazil).

Phones are easy to steal, people just start using them and lose focus on their surroundings, thieves can just grab and run, they are easy to conceal and a lot of people want to own an iPhone and can't afford it, there is a market.

I know there are ways to brick the device to make it unusable after it is stolen but most people are unaware of how that works.

<comment><USER4> If "find my iPhone" is on and it's a 64 bit iPhone there is no way to use it without knowing the iCloud details of the account it is registered to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> upstart gangs should beware of the systemd gangs.

<comment><USER6> I imagine you could get savaged by either of them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was there an error in translation here?

>These criminals don't belong to established yakuza groups, but they don't have legitimate employment either. They make their living from violence or engage in crime on the side, in addition to their main job.

It seems to be saying they are part time criminals with real jobs, but it also says "they don't have legitimate employment".

<comment><USER8> The alternation was kind of lost. The sense of the sentence is that hangure refers to people who have neither legitimate employment nor belong to an actual criminal organization but who make a living from violence or illegal activities; or else, it refers to people who may have legitimate employment, but make money in that way on the side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm always interested in reading about the inner workings of gangs. It seems like these biker gangs are not particularly sophisticated nor well organized, though. The main one in the story immediately lost cohesion when their leader fled the country and were absorbed by the Yakuza. In many ways, they seem less robust and effective than biker/street gangs in America.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if having all of your members be independently mobile on their motorcycles allowed them to thrive in North America. It's so much easier to commit crime when you just hop on and off a bike, access paths unavailable to cars

Recently I've been reading about Vancouver's gang wars and it strikes me just how persistent Hells Angels seem to be compared to other groups that have all but disappeared off the radar or become friendly to Hells Angels.

Perhaps decentralization is the new organized crime paradigm...we won't be seeing supercartels like Cali anymore

<comment><USER11> "Leaderless Resistance" has a long history within groups that seek to remain covert (for both legal or illegal reasons).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The difference in wording when describing gang members is interesting to me - "hoodlums" kind of describes a paternalistic disappointment, but in the US the language usually describes them as sub-human.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's the same in western Europe.

Motorbike gangs like the Hells Angels got outlawed or severely restricted and violent youths on welfare looking to get involved in crime didn't have the money for expensive Harleys either way.

They started street gangs involved in drugs and fought with brutal violence for control over the nightlife and prostitution, as they had nothing to lose either way.</comment>


2 Cups 100 Floors - <AUTHOR> https://pnjct.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/2-cups-100-floors/

<comment><USER2> I'm glad that I didn't judge this one by the first 6 letters. Some great math and algorithms here.

<comment><USER3> Hahaha - i also have been half-expecting something weird involving 2 naked ladies...</comment></comment>


Simple, distributed, fast. Pick any three. (GPL v3 VCS written in Rust) - <AUTHOR> https://pijul.org/faq.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470281)

<comment><USER3> Actually, that feedback was one of the motivations to continue working on it, even though a complete rewrite was needed, for many reasons.</comment></comment>


The Node v0.12 Release Branch is Here – What's Going On? - <AUTHOR> http://strongloop.com/strongblog/node-v0-12-release-branch/

<comment><USER2> Time to put on your helmets and rev your CI! I wonder how many patch releases it will take before it is widely usable.</comment>


Show HN: PDF Multitool – pdf reader with dark mode and built-in tools for geeks - <AUTHOR> https://bytescout.com/products/pdfmultitool/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

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Hope you will like it and will appreciate any comments and suggestions. Thanks!</comment>