Let's make GitHub better, together - <AUTHOR> http://letsmake.github.com/bettertogether/# <comment><USER4> "Ruby came from Japan. Lua came from Brazil. Python came from the Netherlands."

And all of them use English terms for language identifiers.

English is the lingua franca of IT & software development. As a Brazilian I can tell you that programmers that don't learn at least how to read technical English won't become good practicioners.

And GitHub is a social platform for collaborating on projects. In the vast majority of projects, English is the common language spoken by all participants.

Learn English and get over it.

(I didn't read further into the article. I hope the other suggestions make more sense.)

<comment><USER5> I disagree. My position is not that English is bad (English has some advantages here and there, but it is hardly the best language I know), it is very practical - and necessary - to learn if you want to work in IT. No doubt about it.

However, confining ourselves to one language makes us all think the same way. Research has proven time and time again, that learning other languages will help us apply different ways to think about problems, because different languages uses different grammar to convey the same meaning.

Effectively, if we continue to strive to eradicate localised IT and software related words from non-English languages and replace them with English words instead, language development will stagnate and all languages will eventually become English. And that is not a positive prospect.

I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the fact that Danish _actually_ has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«, respectively).

And English shouldn't be so cocky either, by its current usage, English is slowly becoming less than a language and more of a tool. And with both foreign and native speakers' continue abuse of the language, English will soon be derived of all its beauty, for the purpose of minimising communication.

Are we really that lazy?

<comment><USER6> > Are we really that lazy?

It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish, german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.

We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese, latin or greek. That is _not_ a problem, it's just how things go so that people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work together.

<comment><USER5> I apologise, I did not mean that people who were 'unwilling' to learn other languages are lazy. It is hard to demand that everyone know every language, so a lingua franca (English in this case) is all right.

What I meant to say is that languages are becoming more and more plain. It seems people - and sometimes with language institutions with them - <USER2> accepting that the languages should be less complicated, so we can say the same thing with fewer words.

An obvious example is people writing 'u' instead of 'you', but is actually even more obvious in other languages than English. For instance, I am not a fan of people saying 'issues' in Danish, when we have the word »problemstillinger«, simply because the English word 'issues' is shorter. Should English use »arv« instead of 'inheritance' because it is shorter?

Languages' vocabularies shouldn't cherry-pick.

I do not oppose a lingua franca, I merely advocate keeping each language separate.

<comment><USER7> I can't really get behind you on this. What do you think of the word "niveau" in Danish? Or "risalamande"? Would you advocate their removal? Languages did not sprout fully-formed from the thigh of Jupiter, they evolved organically.

At the same time, I do understand where you are coming from. Having such a large proportion of your population be fluent in English - and thus more influenced by its culture, is potentially an issue for the Danish culture.

<comment><USER5> What you are referring to is history. Languages borrowing terms and lending them out back then is nothing something I have a problem with.

Today, the Internet, globalisation, etc. have decreased the number of languages in the world dramatically (last thing I heard is one language dies every two weeks) and there are approximately ~7000 languages alive.

While I know that most of these languages that are dying are spoken by very few (otherwise it wouldn't die). It is now more important than ever to keep each language unique.

What was great before (loanwords and such) may actually be a problem now.

<comment><USER7> First, as you say, these languages were spoken by very few people. I remember reading not long ago, the obituary of a Scottish dialect spoken in a single village. You can't really expect a language with such a small group of speakers surviving the advent of the automobile and the radio for very long. And these languages did not die by a thousand loanwords: the young folk didn't learn them, and the old folk who could speak eventually died.

There is also another factor at play here. "Proper" languages (that is, not dialects) have hundreds of years of written material behind them, and this is critical to ensure a language's survival.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a native German speaker and this localization thing seems like a really bad idea.

I can understand where the github folks are coming from but it really is a thing not worth putting any effort into. I sympathize with the humanism but programming and programmer communication should be mostly pragmatic.

The open source community is a global thing and English has won a long time ago as the definitive choice for a global language. It seems like it's easy enough to pick up for a lot of people all over the world.

In my opinion it works especially well for technical writing.

<comment><USER9> Actually, as far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with "official" GitHub. It's some guy with the GitHub username "letsmake" using GitHub pages [1].

I really wish GitHub would start doing something about people using that feature to make it look like they're part of (or speaking for) GitHub. It's incredibly misleading some times.

[1] <http://pages.github.com/>

<comment><USER10> Sites that allow users [to have significant control over] personalised subdomains are also problematic for things like NoScript and other whitelisting tools. Since I have github.com permitted, all the subdomains inherit that permission.

I'm not even sure what a good model/UI would be to selectively white/blacklist subdomains.

<comment><USER11> That is a problem only because Github uses the root domain for its own pages. They could rather use www.github.com.

To solve your case on NoScript, whitelist the full address <https://github.com/> and that will keep http subdomains out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if i18n is such a good idea here. I've thought about it on a project I'm currently working on, and my conclusion is that sometimes you need to make the audience interact in a common language (in most cases English). If you i18n your UI, it may encourage your users to communicate in their native tongue and it will be a mess.

> Documentation, you neglected necessity of open-source. [..] Nothing too > fancy; just click a button, parse my repository, and provide a list of > public classes and members.

uhm, Sphinx?

<comment><USER13> Yes and no - but your point is great in general. I think that there are cases where we who are fluent in English just overestimate the English skills of some people and countries.

While internationalization is not always preferable, as you point out, there are times where it means making a service or tool accessible to people who otherwise would not have access to it. We already know how dreadful the GitHub interface can be to newbies, not to mention the English language itself.

GitHub is such an important tool to developers and entrepreneurs that we should think very carefully about barring other people from using it inadvertently.

Internationalization will have adverse effects, _definitely_ , but I still think the discussion of whether making GitHub English-only is worth deterring people who may not otherwise find their way into software development, programming, and the like. Just think of the many other ways people are starting to use GitHub.

But I for one dread the day I receive unsolicited Pull Requests in Russian for an undiscovered 0day vulnerability. :)

<comment><USER14> _Non-native English speaker here, I volunteer at several companies to translate their interfaces._

Almost all people can read basic English (especially those who access Github), so translating the Github interface seems rather pointless to me. Of course, translating the support articles would really help accessibility for those who don't know English as well as native speakers.

Translating interfaces makes people think they can use their language to communicate on a site. Translating only the support articles helps people understand the site, but they will quickly realize that the site itself prefers English-only communication.

<comment><USER13> The bar to entry to newcomers is probably more of a UX/usability problem than one of internationalization; that I agree with you on.

Translating the support docs is one suggestion I think is unequivocally good, and something that should be done.

I think internationalization is great in a read-only capacity, but when non- English speakers start posting Issues, comments and Pull Requests, that's where it starts to turn into a problem.

GitHub has very little to translate in the first place, as it's very sparse on prose, so aside from the question of support docs, we are probably making mountain out of mole hills, since the remaining English is jargon and not beholden to internationalization concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No localization, please. Sure, the languages mentioned came from countries where english is not the main spoken language, but the languages themselves are always in english, and so is everything relating to collaborative software development.

If a user comes to a site that is using her primary language, she will interact with that site using that language. That is very much not desirable at a site like Github.

Other than that, the suggestions listed sound nice to me.

<comment><USER16> +1

If you can't speak english, you can't program for sure. I work with some people who are not very good english speakers. I can see it in their code. Sometimes its a mix of english and their own language. Very bad. NO-HIRE

<comment><USER17> Last year I worked as a freelancer for a company which sold physical stuff over the Internet (ecommerce). All the code I inherited was procedural PHP written with Swedish comments and variable names.

I speak three languages, Swedish is not one of them. That was an awful summer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly meta -

If I was a business owner and a customer wrote something like this, I would be absolutely ecstatic.

It shows that you've created an awesome product. So awesome that people want more out of it, and are willing to spend considerable time ($$$) to help you make it better.

This is the real reason profit margins are so important to a _good_ company. It means you can re-invest back into the growth of your product and continue to delight your customers.

Good on ya Github, keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER19> A few items I'd like to see:

\- Attachments in the issue tracker. Pictures tell a thousand words and it would be infinitely easier for user submitted issues to have screenshots.

\- Better code search.

\- More granularity in the notifications. For instance, I'd love the ability to toggle email for my own repos but leave it to web notifications for my watches. I've missed pull requests because of the deluge of messages.

\- Better reliability.

It's a great tool. I really enjoy using it, but with a few additions it would be near perfect.

<comment><USER20> We just shipped Issue Attachments: <https://github.com/blog/1347-issue- attachments>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The #1 missing feature in github for our team is that we can't attach files directly from Issues Web UI. Usually we need this for screenshots, but sometimes data files, logs and other artifacts. Workarounds are aplenty but all painful and problematic. See <https://github.com/thisduck/gh-attachment> or [http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/attaching-files-to- gith...](http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/attaching-files-to-github- issues.html) not to mention countless internal homegrown hacks that exist out there.

This lack of attachments makes it a lot harder for non-techies to use Issues (e.g., for casual or QA testing). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE the minimalist approach of Issues, and it is definitely _almost_ good enough feature set, but this one missing feature makes it difficult for one to imagine the use of issues at-large in broad organizations--an undiscovered area of growth for github.

I would definitely add this to the "I <heart> github, but..." list.

P.S., experiment0, great execution of a "feature request".

<comment><USER21> My wish came true in less than one day! Check it out <https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't know why, but for some reason I found that localizing github would in fact not contribute to the better, but to the worse. I know there are a lot of programmers for whom english is not their native language (heck, I'm one of them), but as almost all programming languages are in english, I think it would make sense to keep github in english. My reasons are, more of less, the following:

\- As it stands now, the majority of repositories are in english. If github were localized, it would most likely contribute to more non-english repos since the author would be less inclined to give it any thought.

\- It would require a lot of extra effort on githubs side to, first of all localize it, but also to keep it updated and correct. They would need translators and probably also need to put a lot of effort into localizing the site (which I'd rather they focused on other things).

I know these may not be the best reasons, but I'd rather people learned english than doing it in their native language (english opens it op to more people, ie more people can benefit/contribute to the project).

But hey, those are just my two cents...

</comment><comment><USER23> What if we spent our time making GitLab (<http://gitlabhq.com/>) better instead, since it's open source and users can host their own for free?

<comment><USER24> One of the biggest draws of Github (to me) is that it's one central place for me to go for a wide array of projects that I work with, and where a lot of people I know can host their code to share with the large community of developers already on Github.

By using Gitlab on your own hosting, you lose all of that convenience of having everything in one place. Imagine that every time you want to contribute to a project, you have recreate yet another user account, upload all of your SSH keys again, and more. And then further imagine that you want to fork and work on repos from multiple projects that all have their own Gitlab instances, and now checking on your projects requires visiting N different sites to get the same information that you already get from a single login to Github.

Now I'm just as big of a fan of open source as the next person, but having a single central place to visit for projects is a Good Thing, and IMO Github has proven time and again that they actually _care_ about the open source community as much as we do, and have done so much to foster communication and interaction between developers that their contributions are far more important to me than the value of having my code repositories hosted on an open source platform.

<comment><USER23> I agree, and I think GitHub is a fantastic resource for open-source projects, but it's a bit of a lobster trap in the sense that its existence lessons the need for an open-source alternative, but then locks you in to a paid model once you need private repositories.

What we should be looking for is an open-source project that allows people to keep their own projects private on their existing hosting, and allows easy sync with github for public projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I slightly agree about CLAs. Contributor Licence Agreements are largely ignored by most small open source projects because they're a pain in the ass and prevent contributors from contributing.

However, I think they could go further than the support discussed here. It would be great to see CLAs tht you could get asked to sign when you make a pull request. You could also make it easy to sign - maybe instead of printing and scanning, you could sign using a PGP key.

If Github incorporated this stuff, every project could seamlessly use CLAs.

<comment><USER26> Paperlex has a public free CLA manager which integrates with GitHub: <http://clam.paperlex.com/>

<comment><USER25> I took a quick tour, and I believe this would be too cumbersome compared to an integrated solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The famous "hacker faq" recommends using English for a few reasons:

<http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4>

Other than that...

Since code is shared across many different countries, we cannot be too wishy- washy about which one to use. English is rated as "the most influential language in the world" in terms of how many countries use it and the socio- economic standing of these countries. I hate to be the one to push English (as a native speaker myself), but as you can see others on this thread recommend it, even though it is not their native tongue. By all means, I do not promote destroying cultures, but learning a common language brings us all closer together. :)

<comment><USER28> I like the sentiment, but might I point out that the early inventors of television believed that it might end war by showing the great similarities between peoples and nations.

And that from domestic violence to wars, we tend to fight those who are next- door, closest to us in mind body and spirit.

(If you are not too sure about that, think how easily a rural Shinto Chinese would be able to explain the vast differences between Christianity and Islam)

<comment><USER29> Shinto Chinese?

<comment><USER28> Yeah that was dumb of me. I may have been thinking Shenism, but I am sure there are some Shinto Chinese.

Anyway the point I am making still holds I think - you can barely squeeze a credit card between Islam and Christianity if viewed from a distance - <USER3> billions are on the edge because of the "vast gulf" between the religious

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmm my suggestions:

\- Please make the "show changes" scale to large code changes.

I've been bitten by hanging browsers a few times while trying to review pull requests in which many files were changed significantly or added. One (simple) way would be to show just the changed files, in collapsed form, which can be expanded.

\- Add a way to increase the size of the diff context

Sometimes the given context is not large enough, especially if a file has many similar functions. For example in vimdiff you can "expand the hidden lines" in this case.

<comment><USER31> @wladimir Have a look at the Firefox userscript I wrote very recently: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/153049> \-- feedback welcome! Of course it doesn't eliminate the big initial fetch from the served, just collapses it once loaded to have more friendly UI.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the link, looks useful.

That would be functionality that should be in Github itself. Good to see that I'm not the only one with that pet peeve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Would be nice to have a mega refactor function that could check for duplicate all over the public repos. So, for instance, my "capitalize function" could be tagged as duplicate and I could see multiple projects having a better one.

</comment><comment><USER33> I appreciate this guy's effort, but honestly most of his concerns has ever impacted my productivity. Sure, the editor isn't great yet. What I really want to see, and I'm not the first to say this:

* Explicit licenses: If a repo lacks a LICENSE file, this is almost as annoying as it lacking a README, and GitHub's interface should complain to the repo owner. Searching and filtering by license would be nice, too.

* Explicitly "official" forks. It's way too hard to find the right fork when you just want to improve a public gem, for instance. I was there was an explicit "why does this fork exist" field on each repo. acts_as_solr is a particularly morbid example of why this is important.

* Their code search is basically useless. Last I checked, they don't even index branches. They should just buy or reimplement Ohloh.

<comment><USER34> Shameless plug, searchco.de allows you to search over github,

<http://searchco.de/?q=irq_create_mapping+url%3Agithub>

You just need to add the url:github portion to any search. No branch support yet, but working on it. I doubt they will be able to buy Ohloh though as that's owned by BlackDuck. I also find Ohloh search lacking in some areas such as the following search,

<http://searchco.de/?q=%3D~+lang%3Aperl> [http://code.ohloh.net/search?s=%3D~&browser=Default](http://code.ohloh.net/search?s=%3D~&browser=Default)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I thought it worth mentioning that everyone opposed to this idea is capable of communicating in English. I am guilty of being monolingual, but if the most popular online source code management community used a language X that I did not know how to speak (especially if X was considered the lingua franca of software development), it would be a huge barrier of entry to me. While I would do well to learn X, an english localization of that platform would greatly ease my transition and encourage me to communicate with the predominantly-X speaking community. I would like to get the opinions on localization of github from people who are currently unable to communicate in English with a high enough proficiency to read these comments and voice their position here.

</comment><comment><USER36> So apparently this is the new standard in job applications.

</comment><comment><USER37> GitHub used to have localization, back before I joined, but it got dropped. Many non-native speakers switched to English anyways, and it just wasn't worth the effort and maintenance hassle.

</comment><comment> why-el I think localisation makes sense for the docs. Maybe we can branch off from here and coordinate the efforts. I myself am ready to work on Arabic and would love to have people join me.

<comment><USER38> I agree, that's where the localisation should go. Github has many things and for a first timer the docs are invaluable, but if you're a non-native speaker having them in your own language is going to help you ramp up to speed on using it that much quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Code search would also be useful, even if just string search. Or filename. E.g. somewhere in this repository there's a file called mysettings.xml

[Yes, I know I could check it out, but still...]

<comment><USER40> Filename search is available for all repositories - hit "t" and start typing your search query. It's fantastic.

A "search source code" box is available for my paid for private repos, so I guess it's a premium feature.

<comment><USER39> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> From what I remember, Github had localization going on but pulled the plug at some point because it was too much of a clusterf __k.

I was surprised not to see any mention of the only thing that irks me: the "Switch account context" dropdown menu being available only on the front page and not in the top bar where your account is displayed. That would save me quite a bit of gymnastic to have that displayed on all pages.

</comment><comment><USER42> Better search in Starred projects! I can rarely find a project I have starred.

</comment><comment><USER43> While it may be an intentional shortcoming, I feel GitHub is lacking in general discussion. Sometimes I just want to ask the developer a question about their code. Usually what I do is look for their Twitter account and @mention the question over to them. It would be nice to find a discussion around a particular repo just as we have here on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER44> Let's volunteer to work for a commercial entity for free?

No thanks. They're doing fine, they can easily afford to pay people to do this if it's necessary. Volunteer your time for non-commercial projects that do not have the option of paying people a fair wage for their work.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a great personal effort to bring improvements to a platform we all know and love - I've got many friends overseas who all speak (and most critically - think ) in English to varying degrees.

Localization is never a wasted effort.

I hope they hire you Garen!

</comment><comment><USER46> The first thing I do when I come across a site that tries to speak my language? I switch it back to english.

Localization makes sense when you're a shopping site aiming at mom & dad and non-techies.

For technical services (pretty much all SaaS) the translations usually turn out so terrible that everyone turns them off. Also good luck googling for the solution to a problem in any other than the primary language of the site...

</comment><comment><USER47> I know this is a call for help, but I find it funny that their big screenshot in spanish makes no sense to this native speaker.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'd love to see a "grouped" pull request option. Something that would let me say show me changes from repo1 + repo2 because they depend on each other. Think refactoring code into a smaller repo, etc. I deal with this quite a bit with clients as they grow from small apps into much more complex apps with lots of inner dependencies and tests.

<comment><USER49> We (my company) actually take this to another level. We provide branch level grouping.

[http://6b507fb6377c7b2ce0ed-f6f6a52addfcf546a4b633fce1dd247e...](http://6b507fb6377c7b2ce0ed-f6f6a52addfcf546a4b633fce1dd247e.r94.cf1.rackcdn.com/search- result.png)

The reason why we've created this feature was because in the enterprise world, it is not uncommon to construct a release based on branches from various repositories.

We also have a smart attributes technology that will allow you to assign arbitrary meta data to a pull request. With this technology, you'll be able to ask questions like show me all the pull requests that have a priority greater than X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Some good points, but I disagree with the following.

\- i18n and l10n

For reasons already stated by many others in this HN thread.

\- Notifications should be more like email

Please no. I'm already terrified of my email inbox. It's a mess, so many messages. Sometimes I'll leave a message unread or mark it as unread if I want to return to it later but instead it gets buried by newer messages. So now I have a couple of hundred unread emails and I have no idea what they are but they surely can't be important.

Keep notifications how they are. It makes using GitHub stress free. If I read a notification, get rid of it so I never have to see it again. If it was so important, I should remember it anyway or I would have set it as my highest priority and worked on it right away.

\- Revamp Inline Editing

Themes? Multiple cursors? Command line? Live linting? ... No thanks, sounds like feature-creep. I like the editor how it is, nice and simple. Want a full- blown editor? Don't use the web interface.

\- Infinite newsfeed

There are reasons why many websites choose not to include infinite scrolling, see [1] for some good reasons.

One thing I'd like to see added to GitHub:

\- View all public activity history

There's been many times when I want to look at my own history or someone else's and I can't because it stops after the first page.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Infinite-Scrolling/What-are-the- downsid...](http://www.quora.com/Infinite-Scrolling/What-are-the-downsides-of- using-automatic-scrolling-pagination)

</comment><comment><USER51> You should add the stuff I posted about last year about this time. Basically my beef is forking being not very in the spirt of how it's supposed to work with git. <http://zbowling.github.com/blog/2011/11/25/github/>

</comment><comment><USER52> Doesn't chrome have translation capabilities? I don't know if the translation capabilities can avoid translating code but if it could somehow (a do not translate tag or something) then localization could be done, locally...

</comment><comment><USER53> Actually, more than labels (that would be good anyway) I would LOVE seeing the open/closed state of issues in notifications. I spend a lot of time checking new issues already closed by the other project maintainer.

</comment><comment><USER53> Issues images, headshot: <https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments>

And don't tell me that you Githubbers don't lurk over here ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> "Bifurcar", that term may be correct, but it sounds awful to my ears.

<comment><USER54> It sounds weird indeed. The literal translation of branching would be «ramificar», which also doesn't seem right. That's the problem: everyone comes up with their own translations that are not what people refer to them in real life.

I say «crear una rama» (create a branch), while most of my friends just say «hacer un branch» (make a branch). And there are also the ugly anglicisms like «branchear» and «forkear».

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> +1 for "likes" in issues.

<comment><USER55> Another feature missing: per branch access control

<comment><USER56> Yes! This would allow developers to set up premium branches: <http://premium- branch.org>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Didn't GitHub have localization at some point in the past? If I remember correctly, the footer had a world map background with links to other languages.

<comment><USER56> Yes they did: <https://github.com/blog/679-github-in-your-language>

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Github shouldn't be localized...

Some projects wouldn't be viewed if it ain't in english, no one here almost speaks Chinese do they? :-)

Facebook should be localized, not github.

<comment><USER29> 我会讲中文。

<comment><USER59> > 我会讲中文。

Google Translate renders this as "I can speak Chinese.", which speaks volumes about how far it's come with East Asian languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Someone wants a job

</comment><comment><USER61> I thought this was a GitHub promotion at first, but this is a genius form of self-marketing. Very creative, and very convincing!

</comment><comment><USER62> I suggest read-only SSH keys for deployments.

</comment><comment><USER63> Very interesting proposals overall, not too sure about the localization (don't most programmers speak English ?) though.

</comment><comment><USER64> I think i18n makes sense - for docs. For getting people up and running. For explaining the benefits of github.

</comment><comment><USER65> Infinite scrolling? Yuck.

</comment><comment><USER62> I think new pricing strategy could make github better.

<comment><USER66> What would you suggest?

<comment><USER62> First of all, it's too expensive. $7 for 5 repos? I'll use bitbucket instead and keep github account for opensource projects. Probably price should depend on a number of collaborators and some special features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> How do people have so much free time lol?</comment>


Show HN: Country flag – Quiz game to identify the flags of different countries - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nad.countryflagquizgame <comment><USER2> Please tell us why this app needs so many permissions. I don't see why it would need any permissions. At. All.

<comment><AUTHOR> No fear about using your private data or something! Kindly go through the privacy url in the app, since the app is build with the builder they might need some permissions to show up ads, but the permission won't be allowed by default, users can able to deny the permission during the request! Enjoy the game :)

<comment><USER3> One's location and storage contents are inherently private data.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best new or modern languange for game dev? - <AUTHOR> 	So I'm currently a full stack javascript developer. I'd like to learn a new/modern language (Go, Clojure, etc) and also tinker with some game development in the process. What language with that criteria has the best libraries or would lend itself best to game dev? <comment><USER3> C/C++ (or possibly C# if you count Unity) is still the only choice for "real" game dev.

But Haxe ([http://haxe.org/](http://haxe.org/)) has some great momentum these days, and with a bit of cleverness can target native and web at the same time. Checkout out [http://snowkit.org/](http://snowkit.org/) and [http://haxor.xyz/](http://haxor.xyz/) for some examples.

It might also line up nicely with your javascript background.

Dart + StageXL ([http://www.stagexl.org/](http://www.stagexl.org/)) also looks like an appealing choice, especially if you're coming from the JS world. It lacks an easy way to build a native target, though.

But pretty much any language out there has bindings for input, graphics and sound, so if you're more interested in just learning a new language, use whatever you want.

<comment><USER4> I'd second Haxe, there's a lot of nice things going on in that space, and the language itself[0] has a lot of nice [1] features too, things like algebraic data types and static typing make me slightly less queasy with the idea of writing a game which also deploys to the web (and somewhere else for that matter once you realise you want a native app). (writing a game in it myself right now too)

You're probably going to be going through some more untested ground (compared to working in straight JS if you're going for web), but I quite like working in Haxe personally, and the #haxe irc channel at freenode is very helpful :)

I think it's weird to say process doesn't matter, it definitely does, the fact that (some parts of) the gamedev world sticks almost entirely to "tested" technologies is more a sign of it's conservativeness than anything else. (okay, it's not just that (cue endless memory and performance arguments), but in large part, it really is!, okay and sure friction may be slightly less in something which is more well used, but that's not an excuse to not go for the interesting alternatives!)

So for the OP, if you want to learn an interesting, but sort of fringe language, take a look at haxe (people like: [http://grapefrukt.com/](http://grapefrukt.com/)) use it for game dev for example!

[0] [http://haxe.org/manual/lf-pattern-matching- guards.html](http://haxe.org/manual/lf-pattern-matching-guards.html) [1] [http://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/language- features...](http://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/language- features.html)

<comment><USER5> I third Haxe. From what I've read and done in it, it is a extremely nice language to work within. I just wish it had a bit more tutorials for people to learn from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your primary goal is to learn a modern language, and you're ok with it being maybe a bit too modern and not quite polished yet, Rust is a very interesting choice.

It seems like it could fit well with the needs of game developers since it offers fast and predictable performance, compared to anything with a garbage collector, but it also offers compiler infrastructure to make it a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot, though it does feel restrictive to start.

Piston is a game engine that folks have written in rust that you might be interested in playing with: [http://www.piston.rs/](http://www.piston.rs/)

<comment><USER7> Chiming in for Rust. It's trying to be a C++ killer, so it has a shot at a very entrenched part of the current game development ecosystem. It's definitely not a safe and solid bet yet though, the whole language might still end up fizzling in the marketplace, and even if it thrives, it might not end up getting a foothold in professional gamedev.

If you want to learn a modern language with interesting ideas and a robust paradigm for developing efficient programs, and are happy to work in the single developer indie gamedev space for the time being, Rust is good and occasionally mindbending fun.

It depends a bit on what OP wants here though. You're not going to get a job writing a game in Rust for anyone else anytime soon. If you want to be an industry game programmer, you pretty much have to know C++. Knowing Rust will help in learning C++, but if you want to be sensible and efficient, you'll just go straight for C++.

If you want to go the indie route, nothing stops you from starting your own game project in Rust right now. But again if you want to be a sensible and efficient indie game developer, you'll pick up an established engine like Unity, and start making your focus-group tested game concept with market projections and publicity plan using all the ecosystem juice you can get. Rust has no established engines yet, Piston is work in progress and doesn't have any big games done with it, so your game development endeavor is going to be more about developing your own basic engine technology than being an efficient and competitive player in the indie game marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since others have indicated C/C++, you should check out handmadehero.org - <USER2> will give you a taste of C/C++ programming for a game. I started watching the beginning youtube videos and haven't been able to keep up because of lack of time. He starts out with basics in C - structs, etc. and by the time I dropped off we were moving something around the screen.

</comment><comment><USER9> This clojure wrapper for libgdx has been fun to play with [https://github.com/oakes/play-clj](https://github.com/oakes/play-clj) and a relatively accessible way to write games in a functional way. You can run it on Android and iOS as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd venture to say "The one you know best". If you find yourself struggling to do something in the language of your choice, see how others are accomplishing it and then decide.

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case, I'm actually using game dev as the excuse or motivator to learn a new language. So the one I know best doesn't necessarily apply here. Haha

<comment><USER11> In that case, check out Reactive-Banana, after learning some Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wth's a full stack Javascript developer? I know what a full-stack developer is. Are these the same?

<comment><AUTHOR> Javascript frontend (React/Angular) Javascript backend (Node.js) Javascript DB (MongoDB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's kind of a backwards goal (instead of trying to make a game, and moving towards the technology that enables that) but to entertain your question: there isn't one.

The game development community doesn't really buy into the crap that the web development world does. People care more about results than process there, and as a result, care far more about performance and ease of development, too. That means using tested technologies.

Large game engines are built in C and C++, and their exposed scripting APIs are provided in Lua, C#, and JavaScript.

I don't know anyone that writes games other than Flash ones that don't subscribe to the language ecosystems of the ones above or general game development ecosystem that you can take seriously.

Game development is a multidisciplinary field, don't test the waters there for playing around with a new language. You're missing so much more when you make that your goal.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you're saying I should embrace C/C++/a scripting language and not try to chase something new? I think my main reason for both requirements was so that I could learn something that'd help me in my current position, and also get started on the path I'd like to be on: toward game development.

<comment><USER14> You should decide what you are really trying to accomplish, because learning a trendy language and game development are not really on the same path. Maybe you could learn Go and use GLFW, but if you want to do things you can't do in javascript you will likely want to learn C++11/14 and get familiar with a couple of solid libraries. Cinder might be worth checking out.</comment></comment></comment>


Experiment 19: The back story of Microsoft's work to bring NT core to ARM - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/experiment-19-the-back-story-of-microsofts-work-to-bring-nt-core-to-arm-7000000895/

<comment><USER2> This sort of story would only be newsworthy to Mary Jo Foley, one of the Microsoft-only journalists. Porting a major OS to a 32-bit, little-endian processor? Wow, is it still 1995?

Does a 32-bit (of either endianess) processor that NetBSD doesn't run on? This doesn't seem very newsworthy.</comment>


Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/14/the-red-pill-reddit-modern-misogyny-manosphere-men <comment><USER2> "Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent."

This makes me scared for the facts in the rest of the article.

[Correction, as nkurtz points out, the above quote is not actually the authors opinion.]

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a quote from the article, but it's not intended as a fact. In the context of the full quote, he's offering a caricatured viewpoint that he does not agree with, and then going on to show that the world is not so simple:

 _Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question "how shitty are men really?"_

 _The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of course. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably._

 _The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is "really pretty shitty"._

 _But an entirely different approach emerges with a slight shift in emphasis: how shitty are men really? That is, how does these men's behaviour online translate into non-digital life ? The Red Pill poses one of the absolute conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we not?_

<comment><USER2> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My personal theory that the path to becoming one of these 'red pill' people goes like this:

-Naturally unsuccessful with women, because of personality / looks / etc.

-Sense of entitlement, where this person "deserves" to have women desire them, specifically attractive women.

-Discovers some sort of methodology that is supposed to help them get women, such as pick up artist communities.

-Techniques fail to help them get women.

-Warped sense of reality develops, where it isn't their own fault that they can't get women to love them, it's society's / women's / feminists / someone else's fault.

-Intense hatred and fear of the opposite sex, supported by a reactionary ideology that permits their beliefs and behavior.

<comment><USER4> > personal theory

Yeah that's just your theory. I don't fit into any of those bullet points. My path to red pill started after being married to someone with severe depression and she could never be happy about anything. Since discovering red pill my wife is doing a lot more than just sleeping all day. Not ALL women act entitled, but geez the ones that do can seriously screw up your life if you don't take action. Just passively trying to meet her endless irrational needs never worked.

<comment><USER5> Are you saying that your wife's _severe depression_ came from a sense of entitlement?

If that's the case, you absolutely fit into the second-to-last bullet point.

<comment><USER4> No, the severe depression came from childhood trauma and abuse. Acting like a child all the time, however, when you're a grown adult and never doing anything responsible is entitlement.

<comment><USER6> Your language is weird, though. And keeps coming back to associating you wife's "never being happy about anything" and "sleeping all day" to being childish and/or acting from a sense of entitlement.

<comment><USER4> Being a victim is different than playing the victim card. It's hard for a victim to get out of bed and do things but isn't impossible. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether she has legitimate reasons or not and other times its clear as day she's taking advantage. One thing I like about the red pill and also happens to coincide with stoic philosophy is that you call things what they are rather than what society tells you they are

<comment><USER7> (Please don't think I'm extrapolating all this from your comment, or applying it to you specifically. Your comment was mostly just a writing prompt of sorts.)

I think your comment nicely expresses the core problem I see in the red pill 'movement', and in a whole bunch of other movements (and moreso on the internet).

These 'types' of groups oversimplify or warp an aspect of reality primarily because of negative personal issues or experiences. And while that in itself is not necessarily a problem, in these particular cases it often causes real damage to real, complex people who are usually not responsible for these personal or past issues. It also 'traps' the individuals in a way of thinking that, collective, is probably much more powerful and extreme than the individual themself.

The thing is, I can actually agree with 'red pillers' to a degree. I've had some really, really bad experiences with 'damaged' girls who took advantage of me, and something like the red pill could've probably helped me before and after these experiences. My life _has_ improved when I became more assertive.

But at the same I try to avoid codifying this experience or lesson into a (personal) philosophy or into a movement I interact with regularly. I try to keep the experiences and the resulting lessons small, because I've found that generalizing from negative experiences and basing world views on them can have terrible consequences. In fact, I believe it's the root of a large number of our problems.

Unfortunately, the worse the experience, the more likely we are to draw lessons that are too out of proportion to these experiences. It's understandable, but dangerous.

Doing this is particularly difficult for me because I'm the type of person who likes to generalize and systemize things. I have to actively and constantly remind myself that life and people are messy, chaotic things and not a pattern to be recognized and generalized (too much, or too early, anyways). Even if I'm good at it.

I'm a big fan of stoicism and have become huge fan of all things zen. I see the same dangers there. There's a sharp divide between those who _fled_ into the 'mindfulness' world because of trauma and/or burnout, and those who took it up for other reasons. The former group is often quite unpleasant and deeply unsettling to me, and has in fact played a big role in keeping me from 'discovering' meditation and whatnot. I've noticed the same with certain groups of Christians, cleaned-up drug addicts, atheists, and so on. The main difference is that in most of these movements there's a healthy mix of different people who came to be part of it for different reason.

On the internet, it's not only easier to form and become part of such groups, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also attracts a disproportionate number of 'systemizing' people like myself ('spectrummy', for one).

<comment><USER4> I agree with what you're saying. Generalized advice doesn't work with everyone and with every situation since people are different. You've got to take what does apply and leave the rest. I'm going to therapy now too and my therapist does help me to not to take the assertiveness too far but at the same time she admits that she's shocked to see me go through such vast improvements in such a short amount of time. I'm surprised too, once I stopped caring so much about the relationship and I actually tried to end it after my wife got physically abusive again, my wife is now getting her act more together and realizes that domestic violence is an immediate relationship-ender for me now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we have a moratorium on generalizing about groups of people, please? Women do X. Black people do Y. Jews do Z. Men do AA. It's offensive.

"The online community hosted on Reddit is where men go to air their toxic views about women."

Ah yes. Men go there. That's what men do. Go to Reddit and hate on women. Didn't you know?

<comment><USER8> Good god what a stupid article. A stupid article about stupid people. It's a singularity of stupidity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All I know is that it works. I do not agree with everything, but the opposite idea that every women is an angel is also not true (except for Mothers).

</comment><comment><USER10> Mark Manson put out a great explanation why people go to such extremes, he called them a "fake-alpha". [1] It happens when going from a "nice guy" with repressed anger and unmet needs to a so called "alpha-male" popularized by the modern pick-up communities. While the short-term it might be working, it doesn't actually make you a better person to live with. This can changed be with opening up more. [2]

[1] [http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment- page-1](http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1)

[2] [http://markmanson.net/power-in- vulnerability](http://markmanson.net/power-in-vulnerability)

<comment><USER11> The concept of power in vulnerability fails to distinguish two important things about being vulnerable. If a person is mentally weak they _are_ vulnerable. If a person is strong enough to make him/herself vulnerable they are strong.

These are two different people and its all about where the person is coming from. If a person is putting themselves into a position to fail they are considered strong because they can afford to fail, the thought being that they obviously have a lot of confidence and competence in some other parts of their life.

If a person is weak or obviously trying to appear tougher than they really are, we say they are vulnerable because we know they are compensating for something.

All of this is to say that boldly putting yourself out in the world for criticism is a powerful thing to do because you are obviously secure enough to accept some criticism. The solution proposed from Manson appears to suggest that if you are vulnerable that you are powerful right now, but that isn't true.

This basically means that you need to be powerful to let yourself be vulnerable, otherwise you aren't letting yourself be vulnerable, you are being forced to be vulnerable. So the issue for weak people remains in TRP as well as in Manson's case, how do weak people become powerful?

<comment><USER10> As with everything in life - with practice. There are no shortcuts without actually meeting people. He only advises a lot of simple strong points to actually think about which ones we want to attract and how to prepare ourselves to lessen the possibilities for rejection (not stopping it, since it's completely normal to be rejected, since you can't be compatible with everyone). It's all well laid out in the Models book.

Now I don't mean to spin all this around about the book, so I'd suggest reading through his blog posts, perhaps starting with the "best articles" to get an impression of what he's about. I'm positive that someone open minded enough will get something compelling out of it.

<comment><USER11> You're right, I should probably read into his theories a little more.

One other interesting point is the possibility that making oneself vulnerable is a proxy for risk taking which is a more masculine tendency.

[https://www.cogneurosociety.org/testosterone_risktaking/](https://www.cogneurosociety.org/testosterone_risktaking/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait. Red pill is misogyny? Is this just intentional conflation and misinformation?

Red pilling is about embracing the sometimes painful reality or truth in lieu of the short term and blind comfort of illusion and self-delusion.

<comment><USER13> What you may remember as red pill and what the red pill community was at the beginning wasn't misogyny.

Sadly, you only need to take a look at their subreddit to see that everything went downhill from there.</comment></comment>


Facebook to do over $1 Billion in Revenue in 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/12/yahoos-project-fraternity-docs-leaked Amazing. Facebook has already hit Yahoo's predictions for 2015 size. Predicted: 52 million Today: 58 million now. Now look at he expected earnings based on 52 million active users. I can see why there is so much FB Koolaid now. And for the skeptics, remember Google had 2002 revenues of $240 million. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html I'm no fanboy, but I have to respect them more now. <comment><USER2> Article does not claim $1B 2008 revenue. It does cite a Yahoo projection of $1B revenue by 2015.

Actual 2006 revenues were $50MM.

<comment><AUTHOR> But the 2015 projection was based on FB having 52 million active users.

It now has 58 million....and this is likely to be 100 million sometime in '08.

Hence the conclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> in fact the projection was based on 48 million active users (92% of registered)...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think we can all agree that projections are meaningless.</comment>


Google donates $6.8M to SF public transit amid bus controversy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/02/27/google-donates-68m-to-sf-public.html

<comment><USER2> I didn't realize elementary school students like to ride MUNI all by themselves. Publicity stunt.

<comment><USER3> Publicity stunt, sure. But this is pretty significant for youth (up to 17 years old) who will continue to get free MUNI passes. There are something like 40 school bus routes in SF and that may seem like a lot but it's really not when you understand that the district has 55k students and 146 schools [1]. But thanks for adding to the conversation. People like you keep me coming back...

[1] [http://www.sfusd.edu/en/about-sfusd/sfusd- profile.html](http://www.sfusd.edu/en/about-sfusd/sfusd-profile.html)</comment></comment>


Yet another task management tool? Or is it something different? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tivit.me

<comment><AUTHOR> Good for ios</comment>


Free electronics circuit diagrams - <AUTHOR> http://www.free-circuits.com/circuits <comment><USER2> Meh... A mash-up site, that took circuits from other sites, and reposted them. They did give credit to those sites, but I'd still be pissed if they took circuits from my site.

However, a community on electronic design (ala sci-electronics-design from the old days) but with a stack-overflow type of interface, but augmented with an integrated simple javascript powered cad package to allow askers and answerers to communicate with consistently rendered drawings of the circuits. Now THAT would be a site I would hang out on.

<comment><USER3> sci.electronics.design still exists, and there's still some good stuff mixed among the nntp spam and political arguments.

Good point about an integrated CAD package--while some sed posters do great ASCII art schematics, many do not and it can be hard to follow.

<comment><USER2> I visited it a few months ago, and left with a heavy heart. It seems almost useless, with all the spam.

<comment><USER3> There are still some good guys buried in the noise: Phil Hobbs, John Larkin, Jim Thompson, Joerg, James Arthur, Tim Wescott, Tim Shoppa, and Spehro Pefhany, among others.

I haven't seen much from Winfield Hill lately. Hopefully (fingers crossed) he's too busy working on the 3rd edition of AoE to spend time on usenet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a somewhat related topic. I find Paul Falstad's circuit simulator applet simply amazing. I had spent hours playing with it. (<http://falstad.com/circuit/>) [that page will start a Java applet).

Checkout his other physics applets. I like all the Quantum ones along with the antenna simulator.

<comment><USER5> I think his 555 timer is busted it seems to be missing a ground pin IIRC.

Also I tried making simple circuit, connecting a voltage source to a capacitor to ground, and it kept oscillating which isn't the right behavior.

I tried emailing the author but never heard back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.opencircuits.com/> is another great circuits website.</comment>


Tony Hsieh talks HR at Zappos - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10corner.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=print

<comment><AUTHOR> Admittedly, I didn't know much about Tony Hsieh's earlier days pre Zappos. What I find very interesting is that he really took to heart what he perceived to be a big failure of his first company and actually worked hard to not make that mistake again. The fact that it was corporate culture, which manifests itself as fantastic customer service for it's customers is all the better for me.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are so many great things free? - <AUTHOR> There seems to be an abundance of really great services that are offered free of charge, or have a free tier that fulfils my needs perfectly and offers no incentive to upgrade. Examples include Surge [0], Netlify [1], and Migadu[2], which I just discovered from the front page of HN. Why do so many services offer a really good product free of charge? Do they benefit at all, or is it about giving to the community?<p>[0] https://surge.sh/<p>[1] https://www.netlify.com/<p>[2] https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html <comment><USER2> You're right, air is free. Thank God.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's free, the product is you

<comment><USER4> That's the case sometimes. It's not the case with something like GNU.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. Technically the aggregate of "you" is the product. in the case of GNU it propagates via free labor. In aggregate people contribute to the product providing free labor.

<comment><USER4> I use GNU and don't contribute to any of it's projects. The same is true of the Linux kernel and many other pieces of software.

By and large, my non-contribution to GNU and other projects is a lack of technical expertise. Beyond that it is mostly a function of not being embedded in a community of contributors. However, I'll admit that some small fraction of it is due to a lack of effort on my part.

<comment><USER5> just like a bunch of people don't click on ads.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Incite the Dreem - What Music Means to Me - <AUTHOR> http://www.incitethedreem.com/music/incite-the-dreem/

<comment> simba-hiiipower Nice. I feel very much the same.

Just curious, what genres are you into these days?</comment>


Ask HN: Better efficiency in laptops running Linux? - <AUTHOR> So I have this laptop (nothing crazy) it's an Acer Cloudbook 14, I bought it mainly because of the insane purported battery life of something like 12 hours. Also it looked really nice/thin profile. Of course it's pretty much a piece of garbage eg. visible pixels, 2GB fixed ram, etc... Still it's not bad.
I found that running Windows 10 as it is, that's really good on power management.
I was running Ubuntu and Lubuntu on it for a bit and found the battery performance to suck. I'm primarily interested in using Linux to drop the idle RAM usage, as it sits at like 900+MB without anything open (except background tasks).
I'm a web developer so normally I have a local LAMP server setup with i3-wm.
I was looking through some forums and one thing mentioned was to modify the kernel regarding power management.
I'm just wondering if this is a lost cause eg. no point in trying.
I just think, for example the Macbook Air supposedly has really good software that manages the task management and what not and this helps with battery life and resource management. I was wondering if I could do something similar with Linux regarding battery life.
Going into standby when not in use, closing the lid, etc... ultimately though yeah I want to extend that 2GB.
I know... this computer is garbage, I bought it for $99 on eBay. Even with 8GB running VM on my desktop, 8GB is almost not enough with 2GB set for the VM. I remember the days when I had 16GB ha. <comment><USER2> A few of those can be already done by the distribution, but if not, the main points are:

\- make sure TLP is installed

\- disable Bluetooth if you don't use it

\- disable services you don't care about (file indexing for example)

\- use the right cpu scaling governor (you're likely interested in powersave)

\- enable power management on all devices which support it without issues (tlp-stat will give you some hints)

\- check powertop for some ideas about what exactly is using the most power

\- update your system to the latest version (kernel gets power usage fixes all the time)

\- there's often even more things to do - arch wiki ([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management)) and ubuntu one ([https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks)) may give you some ideas, but keep in mind they may be out of date a bit

<comment><AUTHOR> Your first link there is for Arch, are you suggesting to use Arch or just grabbed a link? I saw that you said "...done by distribution..."

Also file indexing, is that like a constant polling event to check for modifications?

Thanks for the check list

<comment><USER2> The hints are valid for any distribution. They usually rely on the kernel settings, not anything userland. So it doesn't really matter if you're looking at Arch, Ubuntu, or other guide. Even with specific services, the ideas usually hold between distributions - maybe you just need to correct a path or two.

File indexing services are things like _locate_ , _baloo_ , _zeitgeist_ , etc. that try to save information about created files, so you can find them faster later on. On one hand side they give you faster results, but on the other they keep monitoring disk writes and impact your battery life.

<comment><AUTHOR> So the file indexing services that you mentioned, often you have to go out of your way to install these, these would not be part of default file/folder management like pcmanfm?

I see Arch mentioned a lot. I used to be Linux Mint > Debian > tried Slackware > Ubuntu.... Slackware kind of sucked just because it was harder to setup/a lot of things didn't work like video playback. Not blaming it on them. Ubuntu I primarily switched to because they had drivers that Debian would sometimes not have like WiFi. Seems to make sense if more people use Ubuntu.

Anyway thanks.

<comment><USER2> Baloo comes by default with most KDE installations. Ubuntu used tracker (don't think it does anymore). So it's not that hard to find one of them running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the information. Hopefully all of this will result in long battery life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Generally a good place to start would be powertop[1]

1: [https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop](https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop)

(my memory is it's in the Ubuntu repos so you should be able to apt install it)

it has an "I'm feeling lucky" flag,

> powertop --auto-tune

which theoretically should make good choices for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool I will check that out. I do feel bad wiping the original OS though at least with Windows 10 there's no worry about serials, also I did use USB 3.0 as a "hard drive" For a bit, but the inability to sleep I think since it has to be constantly powered but I might be mistaken. I am using a USB 3.0 for a house web server, pretty cool. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well it does work well, I am idling around 150MB, as opposed to 900MB+, but it does suck with i3 when you resume, the wifi is off, screen dim isn't right, mouse pad isn't on (can't turn back on yet from what I've tried) I did modify /etc/rc.local ... other files regarding startup... I was able to set background with feh, but on restart this is also lost.... ahh well.

Battery consumption is good though, hard to believe this thing pulls around 3-4 watts and it has a ~5500WH battery but I think my battery only charges to ~5200WH

</comment><comment><USER4> One difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux will allocate pretty much as much RAM as the machine makes available and use it to avoid swapping pages to the swap disk versus Windows which performs similarly when a bunch of RAM is reported as free. Or to put it another way, Linux using all the RAM is a good thing for the same reasons that Windows not using all the RAM is...it means the system is running more or less optimally.

None of which directly relates to battery life. That's mostly a measure of Microsoft being the target platform of system designers and Linux not being the target. Linux power management will probably never be as good.

<comment><USER5> That's no longer the case for some time

<comment><USER6> Linux still caches stuff in RAM?..

<comment><USER7> yup, it still does

cat /proc/meminfo

MemTotal: 32884616 kB

MemFree: 344496 kB

MemAvailable: 20994872 kB

Buffers: 1796324 kB

Cached: 18710768 kB

SwapCached: 0 kB

Active: 12009748 kB

Inactive: 18639200 kB

<comment><USER5> I am taking about the windows side, it too now utilizes as much ram as you have for caches

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I run a T520 Lenovo on Ubuntu and had similar challenges until I started to manually turn my GPU on and off. Windows and Mac have excellent drivers which automatically control GPU while Linux does not.

At least on Ubuntu if you have a Nvidia GPU there is a handy widget you can install so simply toggle the GPU but it requires a logout/login each and every time.

Just not the same experience as Windows but in terms of battery life it does the job. I get about 3x battery life when in Intel Graphics vs my Nvidia.

<comment><USER9> This would be my first thought, I also have a laptop with Intel and nVidia graphics. Have you tried Bumblebee? I have it installed, but I don't see much difference. I didn't buy my laptop for the battery life, but it'd be nice if it lasted more than an hour!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am running Arch Linux on the same laptop and have noticed a tremendous increase in performance.

While trying out the preinstalled win10 I wasn't even able to playback 720p YouTube videos without lags.</comment>


Google Fiber reaches preliminary franchise agreement with Portland - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/04/google_fiber_reaches_prelimina.html <comment><AUTHOR> Note that those of you who live in Seattle should be aware that Comcast's franchise is up for renewal: [http://www.seattle.gov/cable/renewal.htm](http://www.seattle.gov/cable/renewal.htm) . Seattle used to be in the running for Google Fiber but apparently the City Council isn't interested in meeting Google's terms anymore. I wish I had a link for a better discussion of this but I can't find it on the Seattle Times or elsewhere.</comment>


Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7388/1.html <comment><USER2> For several months I have a 500MB tmpfs ramdisk (which I will probably turn into a ramfs one after reading that article).

I put my browser cache, several logging files and other volatile things there. Whenever I download something just to dispose it later, it goes in there. If I try something stupid with a lot files or some big ones, it goes in there.

It feels much nicer than to fragment the harddisk for such things; maybe it is just a placebo but it makes me happy. And of course access and usage of those files is blazing fast.

PS: Having Opera's temporary download directory automatically wiped away alone is worth it... :)

<comment><USER3> can this be done using osx?

<comment><USER4> <http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/1808>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=ramdisk+osx>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A thing you can do with these is use an "at boot time, prime the ramfs" technique on file/web servers to pin important static files in memory if your normal serving patterns will push certain things in and out of the page cache more than you like.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article exemplifies one problem with the Linux/tech crowd. All that text and command line output - and not a single damn graph on the page! One graph showing speed differences would eliminate the need for tons of text on that page.

<comment><USER7>
      Hard disk: _                     100 MB/s
      Ram disk : ____________________ 2000 MB/s

'K?

<comment><USER8> No, but that's not the point: anyone can be cajoled into making a graph (and I love ASCII art as much as anyone), but the fact that there wasn't the culture of putting a pretty ribbon on nice results, that's the problem.

<comment><USER9> Additionally, there is not-universal-but-fairly-widespread culture of contempt for folks who make suggestions like that. "Bah, typical Excel user with your useless eye-candy and summaries and obsession with ease of use."

I wrote an article some months back about competing with OSS, which included some very basic advice like "If you offer software for download, you should have a prominent button which lets people download your software". I did not anticipate this recommendation would be controversial. I got some absolutely priceless comments about it. My two favorites: users who can't find the software without a big ugly button don't deserve to have it, and technically disinclined users who are attempting to install software from the Internet are already doing something wrong, they should be getting it from their distro's repo instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can I ask a question?

Does anyone know how to signal to the Operating System NOT TO CACHE these filesystems? This would be ram caching a ram cache which wouldn't make performance sense.

I cannot work out if that is part of the tmpfs/ramdisk driver itself, or if people who write these sort of articles don't know about normal read/write caching that occurs in all operating systems.

<comment><USER5> Both ramfs and tmpfs on Linux cause writes _directly to the page cache_ , just like a normal write but without a backing store (though in tmpfs' case, the backing store is swap). So there is no double RAM usage.

This is confirmed in these docs:

Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt

Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody here use ramback? If so, please report your experiences.

Also, what other RAM-to-HD backup mechanisms are out there?

</comment><comment><USER12> Any alternative for Windows?

</comment><comment><USER13> On Acard's page that CD-ROM sized module supporting up to 64GB without memory included costs $550. The memory for it would cost about $900 more. Maybe Joel could get this for all employees after they get tired of their new X25s.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some common traps that smart people fall into? - <AUTHOR> At least in the software engineering world, I think a very common one is NIH, the idea that <i>we can do it better</i>, which almost never works out in experience. <comment><USER2> The idea that just because you can do smart things, you should be exempt from doing boring things.

Wash the damn dishes, literally and figuratively.

<comment><USER3> A corrolary of it: procrastination.

It's a double-edged sword, really; on one side, taking a step back and putting off the project currently undertaken can give one a clearer perspective of the subject at hand, providing a fresh take on it, in some way(s) previously not even crossed one's mind.

On the other side, all too often it paves the path to development hell--be it due to the neverending quest for holy grail/unicorn of your project (if you're leaning to being a perfectionist), or eating lotus by indulging on various diversions to entertain your boredom (if you're more of a slacker like me). Or, god forbid, both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Conflating negativity/criticism/pessimism with intelligence.

Making a declaration about viability of software based on its present state (youtube will never work they'll get sued), (bitcoin will never work because it can't scale), instead of predicting the viability of a future iteration of it.

Nitpicking someone's communication/word choice/edge case instead of focusing out what they were trying to convey

<comment><USER5> You just summed up maybe two-thirds of the comments on HN.

<comment><USER6> Wrong. More like two-fifths.

<comment><USER5> =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Procrastinating on an assigned task because you think you can do things faster than everyone else. It's a trap that I fell into often. Nearing the shipping date, I found myself scrambling to finish the task wishing I had started earlier. The learning: Even if you're faster at doing things, underestimating unknown unknowns is going to be detrimental in the end. It's better to start sooner. There's a good article that covers this hazard[1]

[1]: [http://bookofhook.blogspot.in/2013/03/smart-guy- productivity...](http://bookofhook.blogspot.in/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity- pitfalls.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Smart people can be impatient and can be short on virtues other people have, like persistence. They often expect things to come easily and will give up quickly if they don't.

They can be prone to thinking that if someone disagrees with them, the person is just stupid or doesn't know enough. It can be very challenging to get smart people from very different domains to collaborate effectively because both sides may throw their hands up quickly and assume the other side is just dumb.

Getting smart people with very different world views to really communicate in a meaty and respectful fashion can be challenging. Both sides may be quick to dismiss the other as both wrong and stupid.

<comment><USER9> "...that if someone disagrees with them, the person is just stupid or doesn't know enough."

Believing that smart = right, thus, less smart = less right.

<comment><USER8> No. They believe they have an informed opinion, so anyone who sees it differently must have an uninformed opinion rooted in prejudice, partial information etc.

This is partly a product of the culture and it is part of why I turned down my scholarship and spent two decades as a homemaker. I was one of the top students at my high school and it was an incredibly poisonous experience.

Raising kids was a wonderful antidote to this shit. It helped me develop mental models concerning the superior density and value of local information, even in cases where a person has substantially less formal education.

In other words, my inarticulate 2 year old knew more about his situation than I did, never mind his lack of education and challenges in communicating it. Disrespecting his knowledge was guaranteed to go bad places. The challenge was in serving as an effective resource for him instead of simply trying to lord it over him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is less software-related, but one trap smart folks can fall into is being afraid to seem not smart. Like let's say an authority figure is trying to do something that doesn't _feel_ right to you, and you say something about it. And then Mr. Authority Figure says, "Come now, _be reasonable_ or _be rational_." The fear of being perceived as "irrational" may stop you from standing up for yourself or someone else.

<comment><USER10> On a similar note, "fear of not looking smart" can make it hard to ask a question. Often when I'm in a meeting and they're going deep into some technical thing I don't understand, I (nowadays) assume that everybody else is confused, too, and I _ask the question._ And then once I do, everyone else relaxes and follows up. But until that ice is broken, we're all sweating bullets trying to look like we get something we literally do not understand at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The ability to rationalize seemingly any position.

</comment><comment><USER12> Developers who think that launching a successful startup involves just writing a bunch of code and then the money will come flooding in. With the exception of a few outliers this is simply not true, you need marketing, business development, support, netwoking, accounting.

Speaking as a developer who believed this myself for too long

</comment><comment><USER13> a: assuming everyone around them is as smart as they are and unintentionally losing people in conversations by skipping over logical leaps they think everyone can make.

b: assuming everyone around them is as NOT smart as they are and unintentionally condescending to the ones who are.

c: assuming they never play the other guy in scenario a.

<comment><USER14> Actually starting with scenario a and then realising people are unable to catch up to them, slowly changing to assuming scenario b.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a concept called "fluency illusion" which everyone is susceptible to, which is when you are passively flipping through a book on some topic, and you say: yeah, I know this, I know this too, yeah yeah, I got this. And then you are stopped and asked a question about the material and it's like: _gulp_. Shit.

Everyone falls victim to this, but I think smart people can be especially prone.

</comment><comment><USER16> Being so smart that you can make a lousy situation work - where everybody else would fail fast and move on.

</comment><comment><USER17> One thing I see a lot with fellow students is the following mentality:

"I don't need to spend a lot of time studying for X because I can figure it out when I need too" or similarly "I don't feel like learning about X right now but I know I could do it on the test when I need to"

I think that sort of thinking is a classic trap smart students can fall into but often fail to correct. Often, these students can get by in High School and first two years of undergrad but often fall hard in upper division courses. I saw one of my closest friends, who I consider to be much smarter than myself, fail an entire semester of 300 and 400-division courses because he didn't put in the work needed despite having a 3.6+ GPA in our Universities physics program.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would say that one is tying your self worth to your (coding) skills. Ironically once I got out of this mindset, my coding got arguably much better. Shit takes time yo, code hard and enjoy your bad code, it's gonna get somewhat better eventually.

</comment><comment><USER19> Assuming they're smarter than their surroundings.

Smart people will end up working with equally intelligent people to the point where they're no longer "smarter", they're now just average.

</comment><comment><USER20> Trying to use data to directly measure things that are better suited to intuitive understanding. Smart people often take for granted that the human brain is still far better at recognizing patterns than it is at mathematical modeling, and the human brain is still many orders of magnitude more powerful than any computer. Data-driven approaches are great for some domains, but are still poorly-suited for others.

Common manifestations of this trap include using code coverage metrics to decide where to write tests and using measurements like cyclomatic complexity to decide when to refactor code.

</comment><comment><USER21> From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumption_trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumption_trap)

</comment><comment><USER22> Execution and iterating in the real world more valuable than being smart inside your head at home over analyzing everything. TLDR; get out of your head and into the real world

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel one of the larger flaws is there are distinct attributes of intelligence so while people may be smart in one way they can be very ordinary in others. This can lead to people making decisions on areas better deferred or advised from others. Though this can as much be due to personal confidence as much as intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER24> working for someone else for their entire life?

<comment><USER25> That reminds me of discussions about whether it's better to rent or buy housing... who's to say that it isn't smarter (for some people) to choose to work for someone else? What if working for yourself required you to do things like hire and manage employees?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Stock market education, stock market tips and stock market signals... Scammers are making millions out of well educated people... A lot of investigations into the dark world:

[https://www.tradingschools.org/](https://www.tradingschools.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Distraction and procrastination. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to qualify for your "smart people" designation, but those are two ailments that are affecting me. :) Perhaps being smart is being not easily distracted, then I'm very dumb.

</comment><comment><USER28> Believing other people are stupid.

</comment><comment><USER29> To consider oneself smart.

</comment><comment><USER30> Thinking you can beat the market. Trying to trade individual stocks. Thinking you can make a genuinely new SASS product that noone has ever thought of before.

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

</comment><comment><USER32> Not using systems when starting out.

<comment><USER33> Not using what kind of systems, when starting out doing what? I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean.

<comment><USER32> I meant thinking in systems instead of just doing things, esp when it comes to business. There are two very good books that have a lot of stuff about this: the emyth and work the system. I'm on a mobile phone right now but if you want me to elaborate please let me know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What is NIH?

<comment><USER35> Not Invented Here

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)</comment></comment>