SiriusXM to Launch "Startup School Radio" with YC Partner Aaron Harris - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/siriusxm-to-launch-startup-school-radio-with-y-combinator-partner-aaron-harris-2015-02-25

<comment><USER2> So strange to launch something like this as a scheduled radio show rather than podcast. Perhaps it's to get the legitimacy of satellite radio, perhaps because SiriusXM wrote a check.</comment>


Universal basic income improves well-being and encourages work - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/universal-basic-income-finland-trial-scotland-ubi-coronavirus-poll-a9504576.html <comment><USER2> I love the concept; who wouldn't really. You wonder what the actual consequences will be though when it's a broad market policy decision.

For example can you count that as income for a mortgage; if so then house prices will rise and all that will happen is the government will have given up more money for the private sector to use versus the government to use for public services.

Another thought, but related is can someone lose their right to that income? Can you hit me with your car and if I win do you lose a percentage of your financial means that's calculated with that income too?

What I'm trying to say is that the income must be a protected source that can't be used by any financial institution or instrument but to spend as cash. At least off the top of my head this is something I think that makes some sense.

A sideshow win would be the millions/billions saved from administratoring welfare and other subsistence incomes. That's definitely no small win.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103251)</comment>


Ask HN: Best Anti-virus for mac? - <AUTHOR>

I've looked at Sophos, but I'm terrified one of these programs will put its hooks in like McAfee. <comment><USER2> Before you go with anything proprietary or closed source, you should read Tavis Ormandy's "Sophail" papers:

[https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/sophail.pdf](https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/sophail.pdf)

[https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/sophailv2.pdf](https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/sophailv2.pdf)

I suppose you could try to convince yourself that the Mac version comes from a different code base than the Windows version, or that Sophos (or any other vendor) has cleaned up their act, or that Ormanday was just being bitter. But seriously, folks...

</comment><comment><USER3> I use ClamXAV and it works really well. The app-store version doesn't have it's constant monitoring daemon, but if you download the DMG from the website, you get constant monitoring as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Avast is the best you can get for free - I'd buy Kaspersky or ESET if you're willing to pay.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have bitdefender. So far it didn't bother me which is good.</comment>


Machine Learning-Based End-To-End CRISPR/Cas9 Guide Design - <AUTHOR> https://www.crispr.ml/ <comment><USER2> This is one situation where a "black box " method is pointless. When you design guide RNAs you most definitely want a transparent method that you can reason and debug.

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the authors. Predictive models like ours are useful for sorting through thousands of potential guides/sites and scoring them. In the paper associated with the service [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-017-0178-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-017-0178-6) (pre-print here [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/05/078253](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/05/078253)) we look closely at what the models are picking up and explain our findings in the context of the current biological knowledge.

<comment><USER4> >"We found that adding these same features from the CFD model further boosted performance and so also included these. The final deployed model was trained only on the Avana data (combining with Gecko did not increase cross-validation performance)." [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/05/078253](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/05/078253)

Sounds like you leaked info from the training data into validation/test data, which will make you overfit and thus overstate the accuracy. I may have missed it, but did you evaluate the skill of this model on a holdout dataset?

EDIT:

This link doesn't appear to work:

>"All source code and a front-end website for the cloud service will be made available from [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/crispr](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/crispr) upon publication."

<comment><USER3> No, there was no leakage. We trained on one dataset and evaluated on a completely different one, then did the reverse to show that the model generalized well irrespective of the training data (Figure 2). The decision of which model to deploy was based on cross-validation over the Avana data. We would have loved to have even more data, but generating data from this kind of experiment is expensive and labor-intensive.

EDIT: we will update the link, thanks. The correct link is [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/crispr/](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/crispr/)

<comment><USER4> If you cv on a dataset, then change the features (or hyperparameters) and cv again, picking the best model, then you will will overfit to the cv. This is data leakage, it will lead you to be overly optimistic about your model performance on unseen data.

This is well known, and honestly only takes one time working with a real hold out set (no cheating) to learn for life. Eg: [https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/17288/why-k-...](https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/17288/why- k-fold-cross-validation-cv-overfits-or-why-discrepancy-occurs-between-cv)

<comment><USER5> The final performance evaluation does not use cross-validation, but uses totally held out validation data not used during model selection.

<comment><USER4> Thanks this is not at all clear from the pre-print. From the final paper it does seem you are right, but the datasets and usage probably could be a bit clearer (eg include a table with that info).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/crispr/](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/crispr/)

</comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice if there was an explanation on what this was

<comment><USER8> Sounds like it's a machine learning based way to make it easier to design the guide RNA for the CRISPR protein used in gene editing, making it easier to target it the way you want to.

But that's basically all I know. It really would be nice to have someone actually knowledgeable describe this better.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is correct. We developed a series of ML models to predict 1) whether a given guide RNA is likely to result in the knockdown of a gene 2) whether a guide RNA is likely to produce unintended effects somewhere else in the genome.

Also see [https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/crispr-gene- editing/](https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/crispr-gene-editing/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> more info? how do I use this at home? also is it broken?</comment>


Show HN: Serverless logging to S3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ellimilial/sqs-s3-logger <comment><USER2> Why not go for App -> AWS Firehose -> S3 architecture. Firehose will automatically take care of batching logs and putting them together. Also it can create partitions. No need to use Lambda at all.

<comment><USER3> Possibly because the app is running on Lambda? Cloudwatch logging is not great for Lambdas.

<comment><USER4> In that case, why not Lambda -> Cloudwatch Logs -> Firehose -> S3 ?

No bespoke logging solution is needed.

<comment><USER5> Don't assume the author made an informed but poor choice, they likely made something work with the tools they know or found. It's really difficult to keep up with all the various AWS offerings if your not part of a team that's immersed in it. Constructively suggesting alternates is welcome, I've got some new tools to read up on this morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not trying to be rude but SQS is not meant for this kind of usage, Firehose to S3 is much more useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, Kinesis is a clear candidate for a larger scale scenario, hence all the disclaimers.

This is aimed at small-scale operations, utilising hopefully simple components.

<comment><USER7> Kinesis works well for low volume, and isn't any more or less complicated than SQS. You should give it a try, it will certainly make some things simpler

<comment><USER8> Even though it'd work, kinesis would probably not fit this use case very well (sporadic/low volume logging), since you have to pay every hour, whether you're using it (or barely using it) or not.

Firehose would work, though... no per-hour charges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool idea. I love that you're very clear where this makes sense and where it doesn't. For higher volume logs files I'd definitely consider something like kinesis agent: [https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis- agent](https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-agent)

But for lower volume logging this seems like a cost effective solution, and then you can use Athena or EMR to further process or analyze the logs. I didn't see any partitioning of the logs by date--that might be a nice enhancement (unless I missed it).

</comment><comment><USER10> Would probably use CloudWatch Logs for this personally

<comment><USER11> Yes if the goal is to archive stuff, event per event I'd use cloudwatch logs. You can create the stream you want in order to log to it.

It's probably cheaper but lambdas and s3 are equally dirt cheap so hey why not.

Edit: Two possibilities here. Either the choice of technology is deliberate and there's a reason I can't quite figure out, or AWS has reached that state where they do so much it's really really hard for people to know what service to use for each problem.

Which actually makes me wonder what am I doing right now that could be done easily using a pre-baked AWS solution?

<comment><USER9> I teach some AWS courses and that's something I always bring up: if you have a system you are thinking of building it always makes sense to see if AWS has a prebaked solution and evaluate it. The solution may not meet your needs but is likely to be available at a price/performance ratio (especially considering fully weighted operational costs) that will make it compelling if it does meet the requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This should have the «Show HN» header

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks for the pointer.</comment></comment>


Why Dark Gray Is Brighter Than Gray in CSS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/commitlog/why-dark-gray-is-brighter-than-gray-on-the-web-cab5b933ec1a <comment><USER2> Originally, HTML didn't support any kind of colours at all.

Netscape introduced HTML attributes for colouring things, and it passed the colour names straight through to X11. Because X11 shipped with a suite of pre- defined colour names, Netscape supported those pre-defined colour names. Because X11 supported custom colours in #RGB, #RRGGBB and #RRRRGGGGBBBB syntax, Netscape supported those too.

Meanwhile, Microsoft wanted in on the browser game, but a lot of people still used Windows on machines with 16-colour VGA rather than high-end workstations with true-colour displays, so Internet Explorer couldn't offer the hundreds of named colours Netscape could. Instead, it provided names for the standard Windows 16 colour palette: black, maroon, green, olive, navy, purple, teal, silver, gray, red, lime, yellow, blue, fuchsia, aqua, white.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I didn't quite follow the explanation in the article, but I'm still confused. When was the decision made to use "dark gray" for something brighter than 50% gray? Why? By whom?

<comment><USER4> The real problem is the web color uses the same name, but not the same color. X11 'gray' is rather light (#BEBEBE / 75%), where the W3C 'gray' is significantly darker (#808080 / 50%). (X11 also had a 'web gray' that matched this!)

The X11 'dark gray' at 66% (rather like the W3C 'silver') thus made sense in its color set, though not when imported into a different set.

You might say, "this means X11 only had very light grays", and from a named perspective this seems to be true. I'm not certain if this is due to UI fashion or a physical artefact of the monitors. But in any case, if you wanted darker shades in X11, you could use 'grayNN', from grey0 (black) on up to grey100 (white).

<comment><USER3> Ah, thanks, now I get it. Also not sure about the reason for the x11 naming, but I can imagine the gamma curve influencing the choices for those values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Even today in the latest CSS draft the color "dark-gray" produces a lighter > shade than the color "gray", and just to prove naming things is hard both > grey and gray are valid color names._

Now if we can just make both color and colour into valid colour names, I'll be happy.

<comment><USER6> You mean, valid _color_ names right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone remember 'web safe colours'?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web- safe_colors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors)

In the days when you could even get an SGI workstation with 8 bit colours the 'web safe colours' was a safe bet.

I very much like the colour names, although some are way off. In particular 'chocolate' is more orange than chocolate coloured.

I also like the 'black' and 'white' easy colours rather than the hex codes even if it is one or two more bytes.

<comment><USER8> The old X11 rgb.txt has a lot of historical choices that are dubious today.

Randall Monroe built a "better" one[1] from crowdsourced data on the internet, but even he admits that it's too late to change.

[1] [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

<comment><USER7> "Fuchsia" seems a problem colour. Funny to think Google are using the least well spelt colour for their operating system project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If DarkGray is too bright (66%), there's always DimGray at #696969 (41%)

<comment><USER10> nice

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A bit of a tangent: given how modern monitors are increasingly being factory color-calibrated and having HDR with zone-controllable backlights, etc.; is there (or could there be) a color space where "brightness" is absolute, i.e. radiated photons per area, measured in e.g. lumens per square millimeter? (Presumably, anything needing to render elements defined in such a color space would need to probe the OS for information about the nits, DPI, and gamma- curve setting of the monitor, and then work backward.)

I don't know if it's something CSS would adopt, but it'd be neat to be able to create e.g. a JPEG image of the sun that shows up as eye-searingly-bright on all compliant HDR monitors, sitting in a window next to regular windows where "white" just means a not-too-eye-searing shade.

What's CSS's policy on adopting units that only make sense for certain media, anyway? (E.g. "seconds of arc" as a size measurement for VR displays?)

<comment><USER12> [https://github.com/w3c/strategy/issues/18](https://github.com/w3c/strategy/issues/18)

there has been some discussion about adopting HDR images for the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TLDR: "dark-gray" came from when the X11 color set was imported into CSS, while "gray" came from the original HTML colors.

</comment><comment><USER14> This has _always_ bothered me.

</comment><comment><USER15> Once again, an article behind what is effectively a paywall. Medium is perhaps more objectionable than a true paywall, since you have to pay via agreeing to tracking...</comment>


Unisys Icon - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON <comment><AUTHOR> " Current usage Although the Icon was terminated, the QNX operating system is alive and well, if particularly different from its earliest versions. It is in over 100 vehicle models (navigation systems, telematics, speech recognition, bluetooth hands-free systems), and powers the Cisco CRS-1 and BlackBerry's BlackBerry Tablet OS and BlackBerry 10 operating systems. "

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


10 albums from indie games - WHATEVER YOU WANT TO PAY - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamemusicbundle.com/ You decide the price! Don't be ashamed to put $1, the option is there for a reason we want you to check out our music! But if you want to support a bunch of starving indies, now's your chance! <comment><USER2> Since it's well below the checkout form (and because I've missed it on my first buy): if you pay more than 10$ you get seven more soundtracks, including the great ones from Wind-up Knight and Antigravity.</comment>


Ask HN: Does the iPad name inspire? - <AUTHOR>

I know it's supposed to be a play on 'iPod' but does anyone else think the new tablet's name is kind of lame? <comment><USER2> A lot of women are laughing at the name, having other associations for the word "pad." One of my Facebook friends asks, "Max-IPad?"

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the name. When I see it written it conjures all the good associations I have with iPods, then I realize it's different--it's tough to explain.

</comment><comment><USER4> The whole 'i' thing is wearing on me. I expected to see a new angle.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, not too creative

</comment><comment><USER6> A very unfortunate choice. Completely tone-deaf. Apple product line now reads Macs - iPads. Yikes!

Also plays into the "Pink Malibu Stacy iPhone" problem.</comment>


Firefox pref: turn_off_all_security_so_that_viruses_can_take_over_this_computer - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=984012

<comment><USER2> I just wanted to state that I for one welcome our virus overloards</comment>


Coronavirus: Premier League and EFL suspended until 3 April at earliest - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/51867989 <comment><AUTHOR> Also Scottish football, French football, Formula E, UEFA competitions, some golf and cricket, etc.</comment>


ToolsCloud - Hosted Jenkins, Nexus, Sonar + Redmine, git, SVN, more... - <AUTHOR>

http://toolscloud.com
Hi all, looking for some feedback on our service - we're essentially providing a full suite of open src dev tools hosted on an EC2 instance that we manage for you.
It's a pretty extensive package of tools, most customers are custom Java shops that've moved their entire development platform to us.
The website still needs some polish, but just looking to find if what we're doing is at all interesting or appealing to the crowd here...
Any questions, comments, flames, hatemail etc. are welcome. <comment><USER2> I like the fact that you're trying to unify the whole app dev lifecycle. But what about requirements management, don't you consider that as an essential part? Also 99% uptime is not really a 'rock solid' I hope you can improve that along the way.</comment>


~/.osx — a collection of sensible defaults for OS X Lion - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx

<comment><USER2> Cool. I don't know that I'd call them sensible in general, though, even if they are sensible for you. Disabling disk image verification permanently, for instance, is probably a bad idea.

Expanded save/load panel by default is awesome, though. So thanks!

<comment><USER3> Have you ever once gotten a warning from disk image verification that saved you enough time to justify all the time you've spent waiting for it?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Many times.

<comment><USER3> Really? What corrupted disk images are you opening? I've never had it report an error, and I download software in .dmg files all the time (and wait for verification all the time).

<comment><USER5> iOS SKDs are where it usually happens for me, but it has happened other times as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a larger list of "hidden" settings you might want to check out Secrets[1], a database of these 'defaults' settings that you can tweak from a preference pane.

[1] <http://secrets.blacktree.com/>

<comment><USER7> Whoa, cool! I had no idea this existed. I've occasionally had to tweak some defaults but never really knew where the seemingly arcane knowledge had been drawn from (I was usually lucky enough to find a mailing list where someone had mentioned a solution, but of course that eschewed where they had found their knowledge). It's great to have a repository to draw from. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sad that this is now necessary. Mac OS X 10.5 was the first version of OS X which I could start using for work immediately without installing any hacks (with the one exception of the Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin).

My dad says, "I don't want to upgrade! Things work fine! They always dick around with everything!" He's talking about QuarkXPress and MS Office and whatnot, which is understandable. But, for the first time ever, I'm not excited about the new version of the Mac operating system.

<comment><USER9> I'm really disappointed in Lion -- lots of gratuitous changes without much benefit. The Finder in particular is horrific.

I do like the new Terminal.app.

<comment><USER10> I hadn't noticed anything different about the Terminal, so I see what you mean.

<comment><USER11> You can now set background image, you can redefine ANSI colors, there are a few new themes, and you can go full screen (useful on small screens).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> another useful one to avoid creating .DS_Store files on network volumes:

      defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

<comment><USER13> Is there a way to avoid creating .DS_Store files on specific local volumes?

I used to have my Dropbox folder on my secondary (NTFS formatted) harddrive so I could use a symlink to share my Dropbox folder across OSX and my Windows 7 Bootcamp install instead of having duplicate Dropbox folders for each OS. It ended up spewing .DS_Store files all over my employer's company dropbox folders.

<comment><USER14> <https://github.com/binaryage/asepsis>

Asepsis enables you to redirect creation of .DS_Store files into a special, dedicated folder. With redirection, Finder works the same way but .DS_Store files are isolated in the dedicated folder /usr/local/.dscache.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some of these are hard to understand from their one-line descriptions. e.g. 'Remove useless icons from Safari's bookmark bar'? Maybe a blog post is in order?

<comment><USER16> Yes! Mathias, if you could do something like this, it would be very helpful. I didn't even know about .osx.

Edit: And I don't even know how to search for information about it since the dot is ignored in Google and GitHub :D

<comment><AUTHOR> I should probably point out that `.osx` is not a standard or anything. I just found myself collecting all these gems – not all of them are hidden settings, but most are – and decided to organize them into a single file :)

It's pretty useful though; when I set up a new machine, I just clone my repo, run the bootstrapper, then `./.osx` and BOOM!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If anybody else ran into the problem on OS X Lion where, even after turning on devmode on the Dashboard, you couldn't get widgets to show up on the desktop: first go to the Mission Control preference pane and uncheck "Show Dashboard as a space". Took me a while to figure that out.

</comment><comment><USER18> The top of my list is always this.

# Show hidden files/folders

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

<comment><USER19> You can show hidden files in an open dialog by hitting "Cmd-Shift-period". It unfortunately doesn't work in finder though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I want is something to reduce/eliminate the animation when switching spaces with the three finger swipe in Lion. It is so slow that I find it unusable.

<comment><USER21> A million times this. A temporary fix (if you have up to four spaces) is to assign the arrow hotkeys to go to a space directly -- that speeds up the super slow animation to about what Snow Leopard's animation was.

The ability to completely disable the animation (like we could in Snow Leopard) would be amazing though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I disable resume for Quicktime Player as well (I find it even more annoying than Preview):

      defaults write com.apple.QuicktimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

</comment><comment><USER23> OS X keyboard is so slow for me, so I set this one

        defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 0

To make it blasting fast almost like in Linux (Gnome).

<comment><USER24> I'm not on Lion, but I use an external keyboard with a 2008 MB and recently it's downright slow. So much that if I type after a long break it doesn't pick up on the keystrokes properly.

Is that what you mean by slow?

<comment><USER23> Yeah, delay until repeat and key repeat settings, with this you can make them faster and shorter than the UI allows you to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25>
      defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool true

It is interesting how many people don't like the 3D dock. Maybe Apple should think about this.

<comment><USER26> Side-dock is the only way to go.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I don't know if I could use OS X without

      defaults write com.apple.dock pinning start

and either

      defaults write com.apple.dock orientation right

or

      defaults write com.apple.dock orientation left

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a way to disable that awful grey-blue void at the top of every webpage in Safari, that the bounce-scroll resorts to on an overshot?

<comment><USER28> Switch to a sensible browser like Chrome. ;)

But really, Safari feels incredibly slow compared to Chrome. I always get these strange delays/beachball moments when simply browsing and opening a new tab in Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there any way to disable or shorten the animation that happens when you switch spaces or whatever they renamed them to. I like being able to switch between MacVim in one space and my terminal in another and the animation slows me down that by the time it is done animating it has missed all of my keystrokes for running make or other build tools ...

</comment><comment><USER30> The first one is BRILLIANT. I've been wanting this forever. The one thing that I miss from being a Windows user back in the day.

<comment><USER31> Is this somehow different from the "Full Keyboard Access: All controls" setting under System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts?

<comment><USER32> No.

And many of the ones I skimmed can be set from various other GUIs as well. This is just an easy way to apply one person's set of preferences to your machine.

<comment><USER31> Ah, I see. I assumed that this was a selection of mostly-hidden features like <http://secrets.blacktree.com/>. Anything that helps me avoid dialog-diving on a new machine is good in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm looking for the setting that stops OSX from asking me to retype my admin password 1000 times per hour.

ME: Cmd+c

Macbook Air: Seriously??? OK, if you _really_ want to copy that text I'll let you, but first you'll need to prove that you're an administrator.

<comment><USER34> I've been developing on OSX for years and have never run into that scenario. What, pray tell, are you doing where CMD+C requires privilege elevation?

<comment><USER33> C'mon, that was a joke. It was meant to illustrate how trivial an operation you can run and still have OSX pull you up on it.

Basically, anything you do that alters the computer in any way causes it to complain at you. I'm looking for the setting where you can say "yes, seriously, I'm admining. leave me alone."

On the command line, you get sudo, which remembers your password for a while after you've entered it. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent for OSX, so installing a single piece of software can involve half a dozen password prompts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Mac Kung Fu book from Pragmatic Bookshelf describes lots of hidden defaults settings. <http://pragprog.com/book/ktmack/mac-kung-fu>

</comment><comment><USER36> Hey, here's mine why not: [https://github.com/richtaur/dotfiles/blob/master/osx_setup.m...](https://github.com/richtaur/dotfiles/blob/master/osx_setup.md)

</comment><comment><USER37> Just wish I could figure out how to disable the damn Spaces/Mission Control 'swoosh' switch animation like you could in Leopard :(

</comment><comment><USER38> What gets me is the option-click that hides the window you're moving away from. Does anyone know how to disable that?

<comment><USER39> Release the option key before clicking?

<comment><USER38> What usually happens: I select line(s) in MacVim and option-click on xterm to paste, hiding MacVim which prevents me Cmd-Tabbing back to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is there also a setting to make a current-gen MBA wake up reliably from deep sleep?

</comment><comment><USER41> I always used this to enable horizontal buttons for iTunes in favor of the odd vertical buttons.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

<comment><AUTHOR> Nowadays this is the default again, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> so this disables resumes for Preview:

defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Is there a way to disable resume for every app? Maybe it's just this?

defaults write com.apple.* NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

<comment><USER43> I believe you can do that via Settings > General.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to get a command-line version though :)

<comment><USER44>
        defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool NO

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Committed: [https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/commit/7346f4c4592...](https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/commit/7346f4c4592a38605feee862352918eafd41dd75)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> does

        defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

work as well? This feature is infuriating and buggy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that works.

If — like me — you hate the Resume feature so much, you can disable it system- wide in System Preferences. I'm still looking for a command that does this :)

<comment><USER45> Thank you very, very much. I hadn't even thought to look for such an option. It still took Googling to find it. Much, much better. :)

<comment><USER46> Why not then tell people where it is then! :)

After I googled for it as well, I can tell you it is in General (top left icon), near the bottom.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask NH: How to stop Android app piracy? - <AUTHOR>

Ask NH: Hi everyone. I found out my android app has been pirated and offered free at the site "apkpop.com" (which ironically runs Adsense ads). Android devs: what do you do against piracy? Have you tried Google's licensing (http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/licensing.html) and if so, does it work well? Thanks! <comment><USER2> I don't know anything about your application, but if possible, I'd suggest de- coupling the application from the revenue source (i.e.: make downloading the application free, but extract revenue server-side via requiring accounts or another mechanism).

This is especially important if your application has any back-end component (as pirating can go from just an inconvenience to something that costs you actual money if you're paying for network/server resources).

Obviously, certain applications don't behave that way, in which case I don't really know what else you can do.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am also interested in this topic as I plan to be publishing an Android app for a client in the near future. In case you haven't seen it, here's 'Evading Pirates and Stopping Vampires' from Google I/O 2011: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnSNCXR9fbY>

</comment><comment><USER4> Build your own licensing system in C and compile it via the android ndk. Use obfuscation and antidebug. Self modifying code if you want to be risky. Code your own vm if you really want to be secure. Make sure your licensing system is called from all over the program, so that it cannot be removed at any one point. Finally, add a couple of integrity checks that check themselves and each other.

Do all that and i guarantee your app will remain uncracked for a couple of months.

Or,simply spend the time improving your app, and learn to live with the fact that your app will be cracked.

</comment><comment><USER5> The short answer, I believe, is "you don't". Try DMCAing them, but it doesn't always work, and when (not if) it doesn't, sue.

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered reporting the offending site to google (at least because they run adsense alongside) but I suppose that's useless in the long term... I need some kind of defense in my app!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.androidlicenser.com/></comment>


SSL certificate chain resolver - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zakjan/cert-chain-resolver

<comment><USER3> Useful script.

A related post worth reading is "Getting an A+ on Qualy's SSL Labs Tester" \- [https://sethvargo.com/getting-an-a-plus-on-qualys-ssl- labs-t...](https://sethvargo.com/getting-an-a-plus-on-qualys-ssl-labs-tester/)

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749931)

<comment><USER4> That is what I suspected - in order to get an "A+" you have to recompile the web server (the article is for nginx but the same idea applies to Apache). I'm not saying this is a difficult process - but not something I want to do on a production system.

While, distro maintainers usually do a great job of maintaining software - <USER2> think it does highlight a certain need for another way to easily install bleeding edge without adding a whole other repo (which could contain/override versions of other software you may not want). You can always rpm/dpkg an individual package - but now your version will never been updated by the package manager, well by yum update/apt-get upgrade anyways (or even worse overwritten).

<comment><USER5> No. If you force HSTS it raises an A to an A+, which requires no recompiling.

Do PPAs not fit your use case?

<comment><USER4> Upon further research it looks like recompiling may no longer be needed. I remember awhile back some feature in a newer version of Apache - however I may be confusing that with my Ubuntu 10.04 (most of my other systems run Debian Wheezy).

In any case - PPAs are a patch for the problem not a solution (and specific to Ubuntu). PPAs require third-party support and if a security issue is found and he (or they) are on vacation - your custom version of Apache is vulnerable. It's not a big issue for something like Wine, but I would just have a warm fuzzy feeling if the security team behind the distro supported it.

I'm even guilty of using random debs however I always check for red flags and go with my gut feeling. I have worked with a group of Linux people who refused to install packages I wanted from the Red-Hat community repos onto the servers (though they would freely install packages _they_ wanted...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've lost count of how many times I had to try reordering the certificates I fed to Amazon's load balancer. You get back very cryptic error messages. Which is annoying since it could almost certainly work out the order for you...

This script looks very useful, thanks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to help. Can you check if it works for you? Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> SSL is hard not only because the pricing barrier, but also setup hassle like these. Thanks OP!

<comment><USER8> These people will sell you a cert for US$5 per year:

[https://cheapsslsecurity.com/comodo/positivessl.html](https://cheapsslsecurity.com/comodo/positivessl.html)

If that's a barrier, I don't know what to say. Registering the domain name probably costs twice that.

<comment><USER7> Well, guess what, not everyone has credit card, payment methods are not available in every country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just went through this issue with my first site I've used ssl on. I thought everything was all good until I visited the site on my phone and got cert errors. Took me all night to figure out how to get them in the correct order, etc... Thanks for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER10> One thing to note is that the Qualys SSL Labs test will complain if your server sends the (self-signed) root CA certificate, which will already be in the end-user's trust store. This uses unnecessary bandwidth for every TLS negotiation.

In many cases, the CA (or company you got your certificate from) will include this root cert in the chain. With most web servers it is perfectly fine to simply remove it, but I have seen applications where you cannot (VMware, which wants a complete chain ending with a self-signed cert) and where you'll have to ignore the SSL Labs warning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you are right, a root cert shouldn't be sent by server. My script doesn't append it to output, because (I hope) no intermediate certificate has AIA extension pointing to the root cert. If you find a counterexample, please file an issue, I will add a check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> thank you very much for this! Added a pull request to fix some issues with relative paths :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your contribution!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A browser that clicks on every ad as a protest against Google? - <AUTHOR> Like the subject line... only instead of ad block you click every add and load it in a hidden tab.
The ad is still hidden too... just that we click on more ads than a usual user.
Sure..  you waste a bit of bandwidth but it's asymmetric and you waste a lot more money on their end. <comment><USER2> In the short term, this helps Google; they profit from each click, with the advertiser paying Google. In the long term, sure, _if_ enough people use it (they won't) then advertisers will start demanding Google do something (I strongly doubt advertisers would pull out of Google altogether). Google will then proceed to add a score to each click "probability that this click was by a bot" which would be pretty easy to determine given they're prowess in this area already.

<comment><USER3> It's generally assumed that a large percentage of clicks are fraud, on the order of a quarter. That's after filtering out the detected fraud. So this is basically another form of fraud, you'd have to be a pretty large percentage of clicks to matter. And even then, advertisers are ok with the fraud, you just pay less per click assuming some percentage is fake, so in the end total dollars wouldn't change, clicks go up and cpc goes down

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sort of exists already in the form of the AdNauseum add-on. [https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is your goal primarily to waste the budget of advertisers, many of whom are small businesses? Because you would be increasing the revenue and profit of ad networks.

<comment><USER6> Yes, because then advertisers will reduce their ad spend.

<comment><USER5> Yes but not to the degree that the ad network will make less money in total. If you understand how advertisers optimize their campaigns and think it through you'll come to this conclusion. Performance-based marketers will reduce bids until they asymptote at the real value of the traffic. But other marketers with bad stats will just keep spending, and performance-based marketers launching new campaigns will need to run run-of-network until they've blacklisted the crappy placements. In the end, the ad network will make more money and advertisers will lose money.

This is just one of a billion issues with a simple implementation of this idea. Another issue is that merely clicking ads without adequately spoofing your fingerprint will just get you ignored by the smarter networks... I could go on and on but don't have time atm

<comment><USER6> This all sounds good to me. Punishing ad industry would be the best, but punishing dumb advertisers and punishing dumb ad networks also sound great.

<comment><USER7> Punishing the people who buy ads is a far more effective strategy that gets to the heart of the issue.

Also, just as effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about FireFox getting rid of Google search from their browser?

<comment><USER9> > How about Firefox getting rid of their main source of revenue.

FTFY

<comment><USER8> So it is okay to promote Google just because it makes them money? That is what allows Google to stay at the top. Why not ask FireFox users to donate a little money to fund development?

<comment><USER10> As much as I pay for services I use, many people don't have the ability or won't see it as important enough to fund. While you and I might see the purpose, I suspect those like us area in the minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you really want to help webmasters get rid of advertising, then start using cryptocurrencies and persuade them to switch to micropayments. It's that simple.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's assuming the metrics they measure actually means anything. It's been proven many times that all the "science" behind these metrics and the resulting numbers are meaningless.

<comment><USER13> I have personally suspected this, but was unaware it has been "proven many times". Do you have some references?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's liking playing aggressive russian roulette with your machine. Do you like malware? Because that's how you get malware.

<comment><USER15> why not sell raspberry pi's that are just clickbots that anyone can buy and plug into their lan as a google protest that just clicks google ads all day long...that way your computer won't get infected just the pi.

<comment><USER16> Follow related searches randomly, use random fingerprints to simulate sessions. Click more ads. Search for terms on the advertiser's page. Click more ads. Search for random terms mixed with common terms in the session. Click more ads.

Spam the damn spammers and teach the AI with uncorrelated garbage mixed into the correlations it's already learned.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best rails-cast-like site for other languages/frameworks? - <AUTHOR>

I absolutely love the pacing/timing of Railscasts. Almost every other site that emulates the episodic style of screencasts either is extremely slow (with long talking-head shots), low on content (Gophercasts), or also about ruby (Rubytapas, also great).<p>Are there good tutorial/screencast sites for other languages that you would recommend? <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, what languages / frameworks would you be most interested in using this format?</comment>


The day we deleted our VM images - <AUTHOR> https://blog.travis-ci.com/2016-09-30-the-day-we-deleted-our-vm-images/ <comment><USER2> Anyone a customer of theirs? Anyone else have any experience from the other side of the situation?

<comment><USER3> For our setup, a 90min downtime was odd, but didn't really impact us greatly.

All developers have to run the test suite before creating a merge request in git.

Then it goes to Travis, where it gets tested across all the platforms we use.

Only if the test passes, does the request get a chance at merging.

As for the difference in the images, it didn't effect us. We already had to work around most systems not having updated versions of gcc. Thus, we were building or installing what we needed.

For others, they may be less lucky. I.e. Relying on docker-compose being installed.

</comment></comment><comment> mh- Great post-mortem; thanks for sharing such a detailed account.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to design a landing page for two distinct user groups? - <AUTHOR>

I read this article which helped break the problem down a little: http://copyhackers.com/2013/02/writing-a-page-for-2-audiences/<p>I was wondering if anyone else has a good approach. <comment><USER2> Can you segment the user groups in your advertising? If it's possible to push the right people to the right landing page, that would be ideal.

Otherwise, make sure that both segments actually pay money and use the website for information to make a buying decision. I assume they do. If that's the case, imagine a site for patients interacting with doctors. The landing page _could_ focus on the patients and how they benefit. Then doctors (who are much more familiar with the process) will take second place because they naturally see how they fit in the ecosystem.

Is that what you're looking for?

<comment><AUTHOR> >>The landing page could focus on the patients and how they benefit. Then doctors (who are much more familiar with the process) will take second place because they naturally see how they fit in the ecosystem.

Yes. I hadn't thought of it like that. The group that naturally fits in the ecosystem takes second place. Thank you.</comment></comment>


The Great Internet Video Lie - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/ <comment><USER3> When I first saw the title, the lie that lept to mind was: "People want to stream." They don't. Streaming sucks and is a hack around content producers pathological belief that streams are somehow safer than normal downloads because they can't be captured. Or something. (It doesn't make any sense when you get down to it.)

They do in some cases want their video "now" (not in all cases), but they'd be just as happy if the "stream" stuck around in some form for a while rather than evaporating immediately.

Of course, I read the article, and at first it seems I was wrong. But... if you dig deeper, there's still an interesting aspect to my initial reaction. Delivering live streams to 10,000 users? Yeah, you're in for a world of hurt. But one hour of 1mbps video as a simple file is ~450 megabytes of data, and delivering that to 10,000 people an hour average is more feasible; there's more tricks you can play if you're just distributing a file and not a _stream_ , not the least of which is torrenting. Some people might not get it in an hour, but it's a lesser problem to come close to an hour download time than to get everything necessary for the stream to work.

If you're not trying to _stream_ , the problem is significantly reduced back to something manageable.

Whether this actually helps, I don't know exactly. But I certainly don't think it's as dire.

Interestingly, I observe that the big video sites seem to not stream anymore, they all let loading run ahead if possible. Maybe this is the reason?

<comment><USER4> Even conceding all of Cuban's points, this is really only relevant for events people want to watch live. Meaning sports and some news, mostly. Concerts, maybe, but what's the market for watching a live concert without being there? Even bands like the Stones, I think, don't do live broadcasts of their shows, do they?

But in any case, all of the fiction shows on television, and even news commentary (e.g. the Daily Show), work fine on the download model. And that is exactly what's happening, $1.99 from iTunes or free with commercials from the network's web site or Hulu the next day, in HD (don't think it's 1080p, but looks pretty good on my monitor).

So, again, even if Cuban is right about everything he says, it demonstrates a much diminished role for cable TV going forwarded, limited mostly to live events.

<comment><USER3> Speaking for myself, I am _completely_ uninterested in a live stream of a concert at our current tech level, because the compromises to the audio and video to successfully stream are at their worst for a concert. Give me a real, DVD-quality MP4 (clocks in at around 1-2GB) after the event, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mark forgot to mention a "Full disclosure" he founded HDnet, which is a HD television network.

I call FUD. Mark's argument is that point to multi-point streaming of live video events isn't feasible technologically because of bandwidth limitations. His argument is a straw man.

There are problems with point to multipoint video streaming. That doesn't kill internet video. Fewer and fewer people are watching live events as they happen. Many people want the content, but they want to watch it asynchronously, not live. People are increasingly recording the shows that they want to watch on DVR and then watching them whenever they want. Internet video is all about watching content whenever you want to, not about watching the content live. That's where Mark is wrong.

Who here watched the inauguration live? I watched it on Hulu 1 hour after it happened. Much more convenient than trying to remember to hit the DVR record button.

The boon that YouTube and internet video has been for content creators is that they can get any distribution at all. Before YouTube and video streaming, if you had video content and you wanted to distribute it, you could either try to get a TV station to pick it up, sell it to a movie studio, or market it directly yourself via direct sales.

It's actually _possible_ now for a content creator to distribute their video on YouTube and get it seen by one million people. That's the promise of internet video, not that one million people are going to watch your content all at once.

And, it's that sort of distribution is making a lot more cottage video industries possible like Peepcode: <http://peepcode.com/> Where a couple of guys can make a living selling educational video streamcasts. That would never have happened 5 years ago.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, Cuban was also involved in broadcast.com and Red Swoosh, so he has experience with Internet video and traditional TV.

In the comments he says that on-demand streaming with a lot of simultaneous viewers is just as difficult as live.

<comment><USER5> Yes, on demand streaming is difficult, but it's not "the lie of internet video".

Perhaps he's aiming his blog post at TV executives. If they believe that they are going to be able to stream the Superbowl instead of having it on broadcast TV, then yes, internet streaming is a lie. But there are only a couple of hundred content producers that would be true for. Think producers and distributors of hit television shows or event broadcasters.

But, for the vast millions of content video content producers around the world that now have an audience and distribution, internet streaming is a dream, not a lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may be true from the producer perspective. It's difficult to get your message to millions of people at one time using the Internet.

From the consumer perspective, however -- the internet is the clear winner, if you must choose one. There are millions of streams available at any one time. That's the beauty of it. That's why Internet video will win in the long run or at least be a viable option for the individual over television. If you are willing to sacrifice mainstream content, ditch the TV and go all Internet. I haven't had a TV in over 6 years.

But Mr. Cuban is right, TV will be around for a long time. It will remain the winner for mainstream content, but the Internet isn't about mainstream content it's about access to content that isn't popular enough to warrant distributing to the main streams via traditional wireless routes.

Anyone here also TV free? How many years?

<comment><USER8> Cuban's point is largely specious--the cost of distribution is high. The Internet doesn't magically make things cheap. Granted.

However what the Internet does do is level the playing field (at least compared to traditional media distribution methods). This means that cranky old white men clutching yesteryear's business models will have their lunch eaten sooner or later.

Even though scalability is an issue, it hasn't been solved because the demand hasn't been high enough yet. How many events have to scale that big? In this case, the long tail of content (meaning anything that needs to scale to more than a million simultaneous views) is the vast majority of content. Hulu doesn't have any trouble streaming the most popular television shows. How many Superbowls and Obama inaugurations actually happen?

Furthermore, the solution for massive scalability already exists. It's called BitTorrent, and Cuban was remiss in not mentioning it. BitTorrent makes scalability a function of total Internet bandwidth. It also transfers the hardware costs to the users (who don't see it as a cost). The bandwidth is still more expensive than television broadcast, but I imagine reaching everyone in the US via television is not exactly cheap either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back to p2p networks then, is it?

<comment><USER10> There are a ton of chinese live tv p2p networks ( tvkoo, ppstream, sopcast ), in theory they could stream the kind of numbers that Cuban is talking about.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, you are right. I have setup a live broadcast netwowk using TVAnts in my school's Intranet, about 3k-5k peak users. I think it's easy to expand it to 10k.

Report says <http://news.sohu.com/20070320/n248849308.shtml> in 2007 the peak viewer of QQLive reaches to 1650k during the Chinese New Year Spring Festival. I guess this year they may reach a much higher number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cuban argues that serving many simultaneous video streams is expensive, but what's the ratio between simultaneous streams and total viewers?

</comment><comment><USER12> .. and yet if you are to believe the NY Times (I also read something from Google that says the same thing, but was unable to find the link) that TV will be dwarfed by people using the internet in the not too distant future.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/technology/25drill.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/technology/25drill.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin)

Then again, Nielsen shows that the average American household watches significantly more TV than uses the internet?

<http://www.nielsen.com/media/2008/pr_081124.html>

I'd say that while this might be currently true - given the shift in eyeballs from the TV to the Computer Screen amongst the younger people, then costs for content producers should invariably become lower as time marches on - <USER2> cuban's point is a bit of a moot point.

</comment><comment><USER13> the porn industry (notably cam4.com) proves this to be utter bull. The question is if you can make it pay, sex makes a good bit of money so that's where you'll see tech that is 'not feasible' years before the mainstream catches up.

</comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't Joost address the simultaneous user problem?

</comment><comment><USER15> Most people don't have time at the same time and will watch stuff timeshifted to one another.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hold on. Has he never heard of ustream.tv?</comment>


Digg Cuts 10% of Staff - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/digg-cuts-10-of-staff/

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised they cut so little. I could never understand, for the life of me, why they had such a big staff. It seems to me Kevin Rose could have made himself a very nice living off the site with a staff of around 5 people maintaining the site, but instead they had to get all "future of news" and overstretch themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.

<comment><AUTHOR> This would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a standard because of this.

<comment><USER4> Jack Welch strongly advocates for this approach, and it's how GE operated when he was CEO (I don't know if they still do or not). NetFlix also does something similar.

Why do you think it would be a morale nightmare? If you're doing well at your job, wouldn't you take comfort in knowing the person down the line who isn't pulling his weight will be cut out of the company at some point? High expectations are motivating.

<comment><USER5> Well you could be pushing people to only be about themselves and their team and not the company as a whole. Why would I want to work with and help another team if it means I may move them above the 10% line and me below?

So while you're right that it would push people to do their job well it could also push them to submarine others.

<comment><USER4> The point is that companies shouldn't waste a lot of time trying to salvage or put up with people who aren't helping them succeed. If a person is hovering around the bottom 10% and they think the solution is to screw someone else over, they probably should go. I know I wouldn't want to work with them.

<comment><USER6> The idea is the manager doesn't know the sabotage happened, and only sees the results. The failed sabotages, yeah, of course those don't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They have 72 staff? Doing what??

<comment><USER8> For comparison, reddit has four people (I think).

<comment><USER9> And about 10% of the traffic. This isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison:

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/>

<comment><USER10> Reddit also has considerable more uptime and speed issues than digg. I like Reddit, but it is slow and recently often experiencing issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't used Digg much in about a year...it lost its charm when they started to make the site too complex with unnecessary features and ever-so-slightly related vertical topics.

K.I.S.S. like HN !!

<comment><USER12> The site was slow and if you read via RSS you couldn't get to the article without going to digg first.

That alone drove me to Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know what kind of revenue they have?

<comment><USER14> Last report was around $15m. Presumably the new shady ads have bumped that up some.</comment></comment>


Use ownCloud provided Packages, then VM, then Zip, no distro packages - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2016/01/virtual-machine-zip-files-and.html <comment><USER2> That is an exceptionally bad title. I though it wanted me to install an owncloud provided zip package or something.</comment>


Ask HN: What brilliant but available .com domains do you know of? - <AUTHOR>

I thought I would share a couple of domain names which are available and totally brandable but I have no interest in them:
memespawn.com haxbit.com mutify.com
And here's the idea: If everybody post their suggestions maybe someone will find the idea for a domain name they were looking for. Make sure you only post available .coms to keep the quality up.
If this gets any interest I'll do an update with the list of domain names that got registered by HN users thanks to this post :) <comment><USER2> Surely anyone with disposable income will just register everything they see here in the hope that they'll be worth more than the $10 registration fee?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice try, domain squatter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought that what I'm promoting is the exact opposite of squatting, ie sharing domain ideas instead of registering them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The two best .com domains that I own at the moment are: cyapix.com nearbuyit.com and not a com but still good userna.me

<comment><USER5> Username is pretty cool to do something with (maybe tracking all the different usernames/accounts at different sites someone has through a browser plugin or something)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I bought it a while back with something in identity related in mind but other things keep getting in the way of implementing it. Maybe one day..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Go to name.com and recently deleted. Look for 4 or 5 chars domains.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did this and found these available:

adoof.com zenaku.com doxpad.com woopok.com ewindy.com kweries.com komaday.com subdust.com rectwo.com tarpoo.com

Maybe these are not the most brilliant names I've seen, but great tool anyhow. Thanks!

<comment><USER7> I found bagofpee.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> exercise-app.com

handseller.com

<comment><USER7> exercise-app is now taken. (not by me).</comment></comment>


When Hospitals Merge to Save Money, Patients Often Pay More - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/health/hospital-mergers-health-care-spending.html <comment><USER2> My ex-boyfriend was an attorney at UPMC doing M&A. Their business strategy goes something like this:

1\. "Rescue" the only small hospital in a rural area through merger or acquisition. The hospital entity is a "non-profit."

2\. Over the course of the next year or two ramp up sales of the very much for-profit (and, conveniently, affiliated) health insurance plan, UPMC Health Plan to all major local employers.

3\. Once sales of the health insurance plan reach "critical mass" within the community, the "non-profit" hospital becomes out of network, and ridiculously expensive, for all major insurers except one: UPMC Health Plan.

4\. Within the year all local employers are basically forced to adopt UPMC Health Plan.

5\. UPMC Hospital and UPMC Health Plan rates go up. UPMC Health Plan shareholders rake in the money while a small town goes broke trying to receive adequate healthcare.

<comment><USER3> Step 6: solicit donations!

[https://www.upmc.com/about/support/faq](https://www.upmc.com/about/support/faq)

Out here, it's Sutter Health. They have a slightly different strategy involving acquiring near-monopoly status and screwing everyone over. It's gotten so bad that the state is suing to partially break them up.

To be somewhat fair to the hospital groups in question, a lot of this is driven by outlandish regulation that makes it hard for independent medical groups to survive.

<comment><USER4> That regulation favors hospital groups and reinforces their monopolies. Independent physicians who can't deal with the regulations sell out to big hospital groups, who then, enabled by their greater control of physician supply, squeeze insurance companies, who then in turn must squeeze the remaining independent physicians who can't fight back, who then give up and sell to hospitals

I think in some ways the ACA empowered monopolies by enabling them to further consolidate physician supply in the guise of integrating data for "population health"

<comment><USER5> In some ways? Or by design? After all ACA was always a capitalist form of healthcare.

<comment><USER6> Maybe for a very strained definition of capital.

The ACA was essentially written by the big industry insiders that are now benefiting from it. This is cronyism, not capitalism, and is the hallmark of a socialist / regulatory state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even worse is that some states have legally mandated monopolies that prevent competition from opening up. See this doctor who has to fight in court to allow his clinic to offer MRI's [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/7/31/17629526/m...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/7/31/17629526/mri-cost-certificate-of-need-north-carolina- lawsuit)

New medical schools must be allowed by the American Medical Association, artificially capping the number of doctors minted. This is why it's so difficult to get into medical school - the supply of spaces is constrained, unlike law school, where there is a spot for everyone who applies.

Dentists in Maine vehemently opposed allowing dental hygienists with a special kind of license to fill cavities without needing a full DMD. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-unexpected- polit...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-unexpected-political- power-of- dentists/2017/07/01/ee946d56-54f3-11e7-a204-ad706461fa4f_story.html?utm_term=.6ef22f2853d1)

If we want to fix the medical and legal professions, and by fix I mean make it cheaper, we need to remove the warped incentives caused by the government that prevent natural competition from fixing the issues.

<comment><USER8> I see what you're saying there, but I'm not positive artificially capping the number of doctors minted is a terrible idea. Don't we want to make sure only the best and brightest end up being doctors? If there's a spot for everyone who applies to med school, wouldn't that leave us with far more incompetent doctors?

There should probably be more doctors, but it doesn't seem wise to lower the bar too far down.

<comment><USER7> By that logic, we should artificially cap everything. Why allow just anyone to be a programmer? Don't we only want the _best_ programmers to write our software?

Any entrepreneur should be able to open up a licensed medical school. Anyone who graduates should be able to get certified as an MD. This is how markets should work - not capping doctors on the hope that we get "better" ones.

Also, I have seen some awful doctors, so I'm not sure the system is working.

<comment><USER9> Anyone who meets accreditation requirements can open a new medical school. The actual bottleneck in producing new physicians is downstream of medical schools in the residency system. Every year there are students who graduate with an MD degree but can't find a residency position.

<comment><USER8> I know so very little about how all this stuff works, that's really interesting, I've not heard that before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The other side of the story that's not covered here is that when hospitals buy up independent medical groups, patients, insurers and tax payers pay more.

In general, if a practice is hospital owned, they're allowed to bill about 2x what an independent provider could for the exact same procedure.

My wife is an ophthalmologist in private practice. A couple years back, we were looking at the economics of buying a laser to do a common treatment for patients with glaucoma, called a Selective Laser Trabeculoplasty (SLT).

Even with a decent understanding of medical reimbursement models in the United States, I was still kind of shocked by what I found.

The laser to perform the procedure costs about $30,000 to purchase.

The Medicare allowable for a physician performing the procedure in a standalone surgery center was about $315. There's really no reason that the procedure needs to be performed in a surgery center, and Medicare does let the physician bill about $30 more if they bought a laser for their office, and performed the procedure there. But, at an increase of $30/procedure, you'd have to be doing a ton of SLTs to make buying your own laser financially attractive vs. just using the local surgery center's.

Where things get crazy, is in terms of facility fees.

If a physician performs an SLT procedure at an ambulatory surgery center, the physician's Medicare allowable is about $315, and the surgery center can bill a separate facility fee of about $290, making the total procedure cost medicare just over $600.

If my wife's practice were bought by a hospital tomorrow, and they brought an SLT into her office, every time she performed an SLT in the exact same office that was now hospital owned, they'd be able to bill the $315 physician fee, plus a "hospital outpatient department" (HOPD) facility fee of $443, bringing the total cost of the procedure to over $750.

So, to recap the total costs to medicare:

Physician does the procedure in their privately owned medical practice: $345

Physician does the procedure in a surgery center: $600

Physician does the procedure in a hospital-owned medical practice: $750

This is why independent medical providers are getting bought up by hospitals and large health systems at an alarming rate.

You hear a lot in the healthcare market about the efficiencies of scale, and how large integrated healthcare organizations are doing amazing things. You don't hear a lot about the potential for independent practitioners to reduce costs, but it's absolutely there, and largely ignored.

<comment><USER4> I wish more people talked about this

I attended a talk by the president of a major academic hospital system. He talked about how his friends who were independent physicians would call him up and ask him to "save" them. Their practices were failing (probably bc the big academic center was so massive that it crowded out any smaller practices). The big system bought the small one, and overnight the previously independent practice doubled its billing rates. This was a core part of the strategy of the hospital system, as it is for hospital systems nationwide -- buy up small practices and use them as loss leaders to direct patient flow to the hospital profit centers (I've talked to people at these systems who view primary care as a loss leader even after their rates double when they are acquired). Then negotiate higher rates with payers since you control the market

There was no talk of benefits of better care coordination or data sharing through integration. Not in this talk or any of the other half dozen similar talks I've been to. "Population health" is a PR play that big hospital systems use to justify monopolistic behavior. And we wonder why healthcare costs are so high

<comment><USER11> You should expect EMR integration but I do know that it has not happened in many places where the local clinic carries the major group name but the EMRs are separate.. It's actually a shame. This is relevant to the Children's hospitals and clinics in Minnesota for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Patients also (as the article mentions towards the end) get worse results, e.g., in [1] "Higher hospital competition was associated with lower 30-day mortality for three to five of the six study conditions, depending on the choice of competition measure, and this finding was robust to a variety of sensitivity analyses".

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1955358/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1955358/)

My local non-profit healthcare org was bought out by a giant conglomerate a couple years ago. They promised prices wouldn't increase. My monthly bill jumped 20%. It boggles my mind that state regulators approved this merger.

</comment><comment><USER13> Both the prices and costs of a hospital/clinic are very much politics-driven.

And the most infuriating part to all of this is that whether a system does well financially has little to do with patient outcomes or any other metric related to human health. Yes, I understand Goodhart's law ("when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") since it's a common counterpoint used against my argument, but surely there are better metrics to optimize for other than profit?

For example, I work closely with a medium-sized reference laboratory, and it's clear to me that they have to take literally every shortcut possible in order to survive. The only reason that they're able compete in the market at all against a LabCorp or a Quest is due to the fact that they have deep political connections (lobbyists, governors, lawyers, etc) - certainly not because they have a better product or have better testing methods (although if you asked them, that's what they'd tell you).

<comment><USER14> >The only reason that they're able compete in the market at all against a LabCorp or a Quest is due to the fact that they have deep political connections (lobbyists, governors, lawyers, etc) - certainly not because they have a better product or have better testing methods (although if you asked them, that's what they'd tell you).

Exhibit A: Theranos

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> People are worried about "socialized medicine".

In my metropolitan area, almost all doctors are working for one of three very large and expanding private networks.

And more and more insurance offers are forcing members to pick a plan serviced by only one of those networks.

It may not be "government", but their healthcare is already dictated by a single large and not very transparent nor accountable organization. Where employees aren't worried just about making money, themselves, but also about maximizing "returns" for shareholders.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, it's hilarious that people are concerned about "socialized medicine" here when we already spend more public money on healthcare for worse benefits that any other developed country. We keep on passing up opportunities to do it right because our politics are so broken (to be clear: intentionally broken by one party who represents a minority of the population).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I saw something very interesting the other day. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma doesn't take insurance and they can't charge you if they make a mistake. Their post-op infection rate is 5% the rate of hospitals that get to bill your insurance for the infection you got. That is mind blowing.

<comment><USER18> It should be noted that you _cannot_ bill Medicare or Medicaid for preventable infections that arise during a hospital stay.

I'll also say the statistical adjustment to actually make those infection rates comparable between hospitals is _very_ non-trivial, and hospitals with low rates often tout them in ways I find fairly deceptive.

<comment><USER17> I think it is worth studying. In regulatory based hospitals there are natural profit incentives that are only gated by the law. The hospital has no incentive to go above and beyond the basic legal requirements for sanitation and won't if there is a profit based incentive not to.

Free market solutions where the consumer has strong rights usually leads to superior solutions and their result lines up with the hospital adopting free market methods.

<comment><USER18> A couple notes:

"The basic legal requirements for sanitation and won't if there is a profit based incentive not to."

As I mentioned, there is not really just a 'basic legal requirement for sanitation'. There are significant financial _penalties_ in the form of both uncompensated expenses and genuine cuts to reimbursement rates based on outcomes.

"Free market solutions where the consumer has strong rights usually leads to superior solutions and their result lines up with the hospital adopting free market methods."

This is not necessarily self-evident. For example, for many quality measures, despite their bad press, the VA outperforms private hospitals. Furthermore, many hospitals like the one mentioned in your original post are able to pick and choose their cases, which very frequently leads to lower rates.

I think it's worth studying as well, because it's my career. I am however also noting that you're making a couple false assumptions, and even measuring things like "Does Hospital A have more infections than Hospital B" are deceptively challenging if you actually want the correct answer.

<comment><USER17> Good points, and I'm no expert. I do think the VA outperforming private hospitals could be in line with it having different incentives, like fixed pricing and not being run as a profit mill. Different incentives due to a different non-free market structure could explain some of the other problems they have too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh, you thought they merged so the _patients_ could save money? Heh. No.

Seriously though, as a market moves towards a monopoly, prices increase. How is this a surprise to anyone at all?

<comment><USER20> "Are—are you with the Friends of Sleep?" she asks hoarsely.

"I told you, we're from the govern—" Agent Jones begins, just as Agent Smith says, "Yes."

Agent Jones clears his throat. "We are the Friends of the Lord of Sleep, and we're from the government, and we're here to _help_ ", he explains.

"To help our Lord", Agent Smith clarifies, "not you."

( _The Labyrinth Index_ , Charles Stross, 2018)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is just part of a general consolidation trend in the healthcare industry. Payers (insurers and claims administrators) have been merging to gain more negotiating leverage over providers and drive down prices. Providers responded by merging to maintain pricing power. The next step, which is happening now, is payers acquiring provider organizations to have everything under one roof. Essentially the industry is converging on the Kaiser Permanente model.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron Man, _just imagine_ having to worry about how much going to the hospital will cost you.

<comment><USER21> Well nothing much to imagine. It's true in most of the world that decent hospital treatment for serious ailment can bankrupt people. Now it is different in some rich european countries. But people here somehow behave as if apart from US one can get top notch hospital care anywhere in world without severe financial consequences.

I have seen here many who visit from US singing paeans for excellent healthcare in third world nation like India. It mainly works because 1) Whats very cheap for people in US is still very good amount of money there. 2) Local hospitals there would not dare ripping off Americans as it can cause great reputational harm if that incident ever covered by first world media.

However for locals these hospitals behave in absolutely atrocious and corrupt manner. And anyone not in top 5% in wealth pyramid will be ruined financially by treatment expenses.

<comment><USER22> Meh, it's the norm in developed nations that medical care will not bankrupt you, period. You can fall off a cliff and break every bone in your body and in any of the green countries here, your out of pocket costs will be minimal:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/he...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/heres- a-map-of-the-countries-that-provide-universal-health-care-americas-still-not- on-it/259153/)

It's not the norm in the undeveloped countries, which admittedly have a lot of population, but is that really the standard the USA wants to compare itself to?

<comment><USER2> Even in Saudi Arabia. The government might chop your hand off for stealing but even they take you to the hospital immediately and you won't go broke when you get the bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "When elephants dance, the grass gets trampled."—African proverb

</comment><comment> your-nanny the tend to blame insurers for high medical costs (and hey it's easy not to like them), but the relative size of providers when negotiating prices with insurers is more likely

</comment><comment><USER24> Health care is a good example of some of the problems of the current debt- based economy. Charles Hugh Smith mentions insulin as an example.</comment>


HLS Video Playback in Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/native-hls-playback/emnphkkblegpebimobpbekeedfgemhof <comment><AUTHOR> Safari has had HLS playback integrated in the browser for a while. Now that dailymotion has created a javascript library to play hls, it's possible to play m3u8 urls inside chrome with this hlsjs wrapper extension.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommended Way to Build P2P Web Apps? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For centralized signaling but p2p transfer:

* webrtc

* socket.io or datachannels

For truly decentralized:

* webtorrent

* secure-scuttlebutt

And of course, Ethereum and Bitcoin exist, but they're hard to take advantage of in a browser with decentralized trust.

What kind of apps are you thinking of?

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't. It increases your development costs significantly and ensures that you'll never get paid enough to recoup them.</comment>


Today's $60 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the '50s - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9201519/Computer_History_Museum_to_highlight_storage_from_RAMAC_to_microdrives <comment><USER2> Quote:

'One way he [Al Hoagland] tries to illustrate the importance of modern storage systems to school children for whom technology is ubiquitous is to ask them a random question, such as "What's the height of the Hoover Dam?" When the kids all jump on a nearby computer to search for the answer, he then asks them where the information came from...

'They just stare. It's a total blank," he said. "That's the frustration when you worked on something to make that possible, but you're not even recognized. Most people just want to see a 3D movie, they don't much want to know what made it possible.'

Says a lot about today's society.

<comment><USER3> I was with him until the 3D movie part. Who actually wants that?

<comment><USER4> Lots of people do.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)#Box_office>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The iPad's storage would've been adequate 10 years ago? I'm pretty sure I didn't have a laptop with 32-64GB of storage in 2000 and I did just fine.

My current laptop drive is about 100GB (SSD) and it's pretty roomy (considering I store my big media on an external 1TB USB drive).

<comment><USER6> I remember back in the day, my first very own computer (Pentium 2, 266Mhz) had a 6.4GB drive and I could still put a bunch of games & applications on it without worrying about disk space. These days, a single game like starcraft 2 requires around 9 gigs of disk space.

It's crazy to think that 10 years from now, your average application will require 100GB of disk space, which will still be nothing compared to your 10TB drive. Maybe future games will be packaged in their own virtual machine since everyone will be running a hypervisor normally.

<comment><USER7> > It's crazy to think that 10 years from now, your average application will > require 100GB of disk space

Doubtful.

Outsite of games, "your average application" is still mostly in the 10~100MB range, and generally on the lower end of the spectrum. And I'm talking desktop: on OSX, Acorn is 35MB, Address Book is 20MB, Adium is 73MB, Camino is 48MB, Colloquy is 22MB, Delicious Library 2 is 42MB, Divvy is 3.7MB, ForkLift is 25MB, Handbrake is 15MB, iCal is 53MB, mail is 77MB, Reeder is 9.3MB, RipIt is 6.6MB, …

Of course on the other hand Emacs is 133MB, iMovie is 256MB, iTunes is 158MB.

But really, games and multimedia (video and audio) are the eaters of disk space. In no small part because games are full of multimedia data and multimedia files are simply huge as they're continuously increasing in quality.

<comment><USER8> OS X programs are a really bad benchmark for average program size. Many of them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel -- so that inflates the size significantly. OS X also just tends to have bigger applications, I'm not sure what all is in there; maybe larger icons or maybe OS X just requires a lot of extra big files somehow.

For instance, the VLC 32/64-bit package for Intel on OS X, which is the first linked download and the one users are mostly likely to click, is ~40MB whereas the Windows download is ~20MB (the OS X 32-bit only is ~24MB). The Arch Linux package is a 6MB download.

Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for emacs (<http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/>) is 89.7MB installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

So really the space requirements will even less for non-OS X users.

<comment><USER7> > Many of them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel

Actually, most of them nowadays would contain i386 and x86_64 code, but for most big software the major contribution to size is (as with games) assets rather than binaries.

For instance, Acorn has a dual-arch binary weighting 5.5MB, or about 15% of its total. A single-arch binary file would shave about 7% off the application. Not exactly significant.

For Address Book, the dual-arch binary is 319K (out of 20MB), Adium packs two architectures in a 3.9MB binary (about 5% of the total package size), …

> Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for > emacs (<http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/>) is 89.7MB > installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

Not all of the difference comes from the binary by a long shot: the binary itself is 33MB and triple-architecture, even single-arch the package would be around 110MB. The Arch Linux package might not contain compiled elisp files for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And this article makes it also perfectly understandable why software in those days would store years as '85' instead of '1985'.

<comment><USER10> It just leaves me wondering, if space was so important, why represent numbers as character data/BCD? I'm assuming it must have been some holdover from punchcards or some other input format?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Weird <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050168>

</comment><comment><USER12> Today's $60 1TB drive would not have been possible in the '50s for _any_ price. Equal storage capacity? Sure. Equal storage density, power usage, throughput speed, seek times? So much beyond simply impossible that it's not even funny.

</comment><comment><USER13> It also would have encompassed several factory spaces.

</comment><comment><USER14> ... jumping into my DeLorean DMC-12

</comment><comment><USER15> it's probably more like $120 in Italy, just to give you the idea...

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's the case. You can get 1TB drives from amazon.it for €53 ($70) [1] which closely mirrors prices in other European countries, for example Germany [2]. I didn't even look for the cheapest drives, just the first one that came up.

[1] [http://www.amazon.it/Samsung-HD103SJ- Spinpoint-F3-HardDisk/d...](http://www.amazon.it/Samsung-HD103SJ- Spinpoint-F3-HardDisk/dp/B002MQC0P8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1293702645&sr=8-2)

[1] [http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-Spinpoint-HD103SJ-interne- Festp...](http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-Spinpoint-HD103SJ-interne- Festplatte/dp/B002MQC0P8/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1293702583&sr=1-3)

<comment><USER15> ops, sorry, I thought we were talking about external drives.</comment></comment></comment>


Sentiment Shifts in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ready-big-sentiment-shifts-2013/238746/?goback=%2Egmp_134079%2Egde_134079_member_196018810

<comment><USER2> Doc Searls' book, The Intention Economy spends a great deal of time covering all 5 shifts that Shapiro mentions. If you were interested in this article, you should definitely check out The Intention Economy.</comment>


That's code you don't see every day... - <AUTHOR> http://exilejedi.livejournal.com/246380.html <comment><USER2> Dupe.</comment>


IT professional family of four found shot dead in Iowa - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/iowa-family-four-found-dead-gunshot-wounds-n1018081 <comment><AUTHOR> We don't know entirely what happened here, but after reading this, maybe you should be paranoid and keep loaded guns at arm's reach after all. I am sure this family like a lot of us believed it could probably never happen to them.</comment>


Love and Lhotse - <AUTHOR> https://www.si.com/sports-illustrated/2020/02/06/lhotse-skiing-jim-morrison-hilaree-ne <comment><USER2> Intense climbing isn't a treatment plan for everyone but it worked for them I guess.</comment>


A VC: Checking Out Google Trends For Websites - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/06/checking-out-go.html <comment><USER2> If he took time to login, he would have seen real numbers. Duh</comment>


Show HN: Scopy – catalogue your digital books - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/narimiran/scopy <comment><AUTHOR> I know this is not as impressive as some other projects here, but I would very much appreciate your feedback.

Is it easy to use? If not, what should be changed/improved? Some feature to add (or remove)?

Is the code ok? Should I refactor some parts (and why)?

Thank you in advance.</comment>