Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME - <AUTHOR> https://material-shell.com/ <comment><USER2> Trying this out as it's typed. For background: I really want to love tools like i3 or awesome, but I always go back to Gnome because it juts gets stuff done. I liked Gnome 2, I like 3.

So: just like the site says. Top is the taskbar, which also has a left icon for the current tiling pattern (fullscreen, tiled vertically, etc). The left side panel starts at the top-left with the search button that does the Gnome activities overlay, then a globe icon for each workspace, and a button to create a new workspace. At the bottom of the left panel are the system icons (normally in the upper right in Gnome) and then the clock, crammed into bottom-left.

So I don't hate the tiling, and one of the layout options is "floating" so you can have a workspace full of floating windows. Cool.

My first thought was that the panels are too big -- 48px, which seemed overly large. Luckily this is easily configurable in the extension settings, and updates as you change it so there's no guesswork.

If I switch to floating, or a new workspace, I appear to have no wallpaper behind the windows or the "new workspace" launcher. I liked my wallpaper, and I miss it.

I was going to complain about the globe icons for the workspaces, but it turns out it only preselected those icons because I have browsers primarily in each workspace. It'll pick based on the first open app (I think?) or you can override the icon by right-clicking, or have it display a group of app icons for the open apps in that workspace. This is cool! It's not quite the thumbnail previews of virtual desktops I had in 2004 with Openbox, but It works well.

I'll keep on this for a little while -- I _really_ like that I can turn the whole shebang on and off with a single extension toggle.

<comment><USER3> I use cinnamon, for that very reason. Just works, and works well for my use case, is very stable, and I've no wish to learn and configure another desktop paradigm.

<comment><USER4> I've been using cinnamon as well but in 20.04 the new mac-ish taskbar that conflates the quick launch favorite apps and running apps in one widget turns me off. Starting to look for alternatives that aren't trying to copy Apple.

Installed apps and running instances of installed apps are different concepts, damnit, and I don't need a phone-like interface that fakes the idea that all apps are "always running" when they are not.

<comment><USER5> KDE? You would be surprised at how small it's footprint has shrunk, it's as small or smaller than cinnamon now.

<comment><USER6> KDE uses less memory than Xfce does.

<comment><USER7> > KDE uses less memory than Xfce does.

KDE user here. What you say is false. Xfce is quite primitive in comparison, it has a miniscule amount of features and hence gets away with using less memory. Observational data:

        3570M kwin_x11 (window manager)
        2512M plasmashell (task panel)
        1411M krunner (application launcher)
         895M kded5 (?)
         532M kactivitymanagerd (multiple desktops)
         422M polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 (?)
         389M org_kde_powerdevil (energy settings)
         352M kdeconnectd (use mobile phone as remote control)
         220M xembedsniproxy (make tray icons work)
         277M kaccess (accessibility keys?)
         277M ksmserver (?)
         276M plasma-browser-integration-host (Firefox can show desktop notifications)
         276M kwalletd (password manager)
         265M klauncher (?)
         265M kglobalaccel5 (global keyboard combos)
         213M kscreen_backend_launcher (changing screen orientation and resolution?)
         153M kio_http_cache_cleaner (?)
         101M kdeinit5 (?)
         101M file.so [kdeinit5] file local:/run/user/1000/klauncherXHvFxc.1.slave-socket (?)
          69M kdesud (caches sudo password)
           7M xsettingsd (apply colour scheme to Gnome applications)
           2M start_kdeinit (?)

On top of that, some applications for comparison:

        2805M ktorrent (file sharing)
         694M konsole (terminal)
         402M kate (text editor)

\----

         570M xfce4-appfinder
         332M tumblerd (makes thumbnail images)
         331M Thunar (file manager)
         283M xfdesktop
         266M xfce4-panel
         260M xfce4-session
         251M xfce4-notifyd
         223M xfconfd
         220M xfwm4
         205M xfce4-screensaver
         190M xfsettingsd
         188M wrapper-2.0 /usr/lib64/xfce4/panel/plugins/libactions.so
         186M wrapper-2.0 /usr/lib64/xfce4/panel/plugins/libsystray.so
         179M xfce4-power-manager

On top of that, some applications for comparison:

        411M mousepad (text editor)
        363M xfce4-terminal (terminal)

\----

KDE really has become very bloated. First of all, I cannot uninstall any part of that huge list with the exception of kdeconnectd (don't want/need) or plasma-browser-integration-host (maybe want/need); AFAICT this problem is existing, but not at all pronounced in Xfce.

Due to lazy design choices by the responsible programmers, KDE fails to scale properly down to the user's circumstances or preferences.

• I do not have multiple desktops configured, yet I must spend 532M

• My computer chassis only has a power button that does something in the desktop environment when triggered, and any power saving settings are off, yet I must spend 389M for that

• I do not have any of the five accessibility features enabled, yet I must spend 277M

• I have only one monitor attached, yet I must spend 213M listening for an additional

Then there are many initialisation processes hanging around after the desktop environment has already started. Xfce does not have this problem.

A lot of the processes I cannot even identify in the sense of telling what use they are to me.

Some processes exist only due to their own doing where the responsible programmers painted themselves into a corner (like with the tray icons fiasco), or no one competent stepped in and stopped the submission of a solution that has a simple and superior equivalent.

• Why is there a 153M cache cleaner hanging around resident in memory? This is a job for periodic timer (cron/systemd). Even if real-time cleaning is needed for some bizarre reason, then one would attach an inotify listener to the cache directory, and every time a file is added or changed, a small <1M process executes that calculates the diskspace in use, and only when we are over the threshold, then execute the big cleaning process. Exit the process when done.

• Why is there a daemon for applying the colour scheme? I mean, it's only 7M, but this used to be a checkbox in the settings dialogue.

<comment><USER6> You're looking at virtual memory and not resident memory. I've never had KDE take up 3.5GB of memory on a machine with 4GB, 8GB or 32GB of memory. Right now, kwin_x11 occupies 110MB of resident memory on my machine while claiming 3.4GB of virtual memory. Similarly, konsole occupies 54MB of resident memory and 928MB of virtual memory on my machine.

Virtual memory[1] is not at all the same thing as resident memory[2].

I've experienced similar amounts of memory usage to the stats in this article when it comes to KDE vs Xfce memory usage[3].

[1] [https://linuxconfig.org/ps-output-difference-between-vsz- vs-...](https://linuxconfig.org/ps-output-difference-between-vsz-vs-rss- memory-usage#h1-vsz-virtual-set-size)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_set_size](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_set_size)

[3] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold- prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown- in-2020/#4c8cc81026d2)

<comment><USER7> > You're looking at virtual memory and not resident memory.

That does not change anything in the conclusion.

          685M kwin_x11
          417M plasmashell
          161M krunner
        74820k kded5
        58612k kdeconnectd
        53368k polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
        52460k ksmserver
        50364k kaccess
        49488k plasma-browser-integration-host
        48568k kwalletd
        44268k kglobalaccel5
        44044k org_kde_powerdevil
        44020k klauncher
        40384k kactivitymanagerd
        26068k kdeinit5
        24432k xembedsniproxy
        21508k kscreen_backend_launcher
        18964k file.so [kdeinit5] file local:/run/user/1000/klauncherwpWDlK.1.slave-socket
        11672k kio_http_cache_cleaner
         3984k kdesud
         3652k xsettingsd
           96k start_kdeinit

          144M kate
        96464k konsole

\----

        73828k xfdesktop
        59788k xfwm4
        44508k xfce4-screensaver
        38552k xfce4-appfinder
        36260k xfce4-panel
        29392k xfce4-session
        29216k wrapper-2.0 /usr/lib64/xfce4/panel/plugins/libactions.so
        27156k wrapper-2.0 /usr/lib64/xfce4/panel/plugins/libsystray.so
        27064k Thunar
        25284k xfsettingsd
        25284k xfsettingsd
        25140k tumblerd
        17656k xfce4-notifyd
        15248k xfce4-power-manager
         5880k xfconfd

        54492k mousepad
        51244k xfce4-terminal

The findings from the article are non-reproducible, too. When I run the desktop environments with a text editor and terminal each, `free -h` reports a clear difference in the "used" column:

        KDE 5.19.4:   1.2Gi
        Xfce 4.14.5:  521Mi

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what _I_ think of as applications.

This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in as my regular user), that quick terminal session I opened to work on a script, the SSH connection to an OpenStack director, the 'oc rsh' command that I'm using to administrate a PostgreSQL database running in OpenShift, and so on.

This becomes far worse when using multiple monitors. Say I have teams hanging around on my secondary monitor to keep an eye on stuff. I literally just now alt-tabbed into a terminal and then alt-tabbed back to continue writing this comment. As a result, I'm back in Firefox on my primary monitor (as expected) but now I have an unwanted random Firefox window that I forgot was even open on top of Teams on my secondary monitor!

The only window manager I've ever been at home with while using multiple applications, workspaces and monitors has been i3. Specifically I love how it manages multiple monitors in that each has a current workspace, but workspaces are not bound to a particular monitor. So I was able to have my secondary monitor always showing my 'Slack and email' workspace, and switch between my multiple task-based workspaces on my primary monitor and never get confused like I with GNOME where I want to switch to my email tab but to get there I have to remember ahead of time that I have to switch to my first workspace, then switch applications to Firefox, then switch windows to the one with Outlook in it, and finally switch to the Outlook tab...

Anyway. This project looks awesome and I will try it out!

<comment><USER9> Very this.

My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't ask me to choose based on that.

IMO app-centric task switching works much, much less effectively than window- centric task switching; I hate that all the major DEs have copied the same basic app-based dock design that has been failing in obvious ways since day one.

(Although Windows can at least configure grouping away, and there's the dash- to-panel extension to make GNOME tolerable again.)

I get that an app-centric view is attractive to app developers, who would love me to be engaging with their brand. And that mobile has its own reasons for putting apps in silos. Does nothing for me as a desktop user though.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well.

The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same application, not even the file explorer (Finder). It's a huge pain.

<comment><USER11> Just press Command-` to switch between windows of the same application. Command-Tab to switch between windows of other applications.

<comment><USER12> Note that on a US keyboard the ` (backtick) key is the one right below ESC.

If you have the keyboard in another locale (I use ES-intl) that hotkey doesn't make any sense at all: ` is next to "p" in my keyboard, and works only as a dead key. Cmd-` is literally impossible to use on it.

If you are in this situation, do yourself a favor and remap the "move focus to next window" hotkey [1]. It is very useful and I couldn't live without it now.

[1] [https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/280220/how-to- chan...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/280220/how-to-change-the- default-shortcut-for-move-focus-to-next-window-to-something)

<comment><USER13> ` (backtick) is also right above tab. On a US keyboard, this makes Cmd+Tab switch apps and Cmd+` switch windows of an app.

It's probably worth noting that the defaults remain on common Linux (at least KDE, GNOME, and Cinnamon) and Windows desktop shells with Alt instead of Cmd.

On Linux, Windows, and OSX, adding Shift cycles in reverse order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The word "modern" is really overused in tech, and it doesn't really tell you all that much, just that "this is better because it's new, and new stuff is better than old stuff".

Consider a more descriptive word, such as: \- minimal \- streamlined \- sleek \- simple \- opinionated \- spatial \- comprehensive

etc...

<comment><USER15> How about providing an explanation for those words?

\- minimal: limited features set aka either you like it in 10 seconds or you don't

\- streamlined: good looking?!?

\- sleek: combination of streamlined and minimal?

\- simple: IMO even more overused than 'modern' and as diverse in its meaning

\- opinionated: There is exactly one way of doing it right and either you like it or you don't, but it might come with an extensive feature set compared to minimal.

\- spatial: no idea; Endless space? 3D? Depending on my geolocation?!?

\- comprehensive: 'Oh, I have to learn something, but not too much'

Modern, on the other hand, means to me: Mainstream look & feel (kinda polished) and with considerable feature set.

Whats your definition?

<comment><USER14> I think those are all valid interpretations that give some useful information about the product.

I tend to think of the words as staking a position vs its opposite, so you at least have some idea where the product lies on at least one axis.

\- minimal vs maximal: "we favor fewer few design elements vs more"

\- streamlined vs not streamlined: "we have intentially chosen to focus on a few specific goals"

\- sleek vs rough: "we are aiming for a polished appearance"

\- simple vs complex: "we prioritize ease of use over supporting lots of use cases"

\- opinionated vs configurable: "we have a philosophy of the right way to do this, which this tool supports out of the box; if you have a very specific use case, it might not be for you"

etc..

On the other hand, the opposite of modern is... old fashioned? Isn't almost everything basically modern, then? And how is that necessarily any better?

<comment><USER16> The opposite of modern is quaint. Modern means that it uses new technologies (Web/HTML5/React), quaint means that it uses old technologies (Win32 UI/HTML 4/command line)

<comment><USER17> You say this with authority. According to whom is web modern and everything else «quaint»? Not to be that guy again but electron-based apps feels nothing like modern, except maybe in the worst possible sense.

«Command line» is still very much alive as well by the way, and underpins a lot of things, say ci/cd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tried it briefly, I currently use i3 on ubuntu and found it to be much much slower than that, the animations while pretty get pretty jarring once u start switching windows too often. I much prefer the i3 style of just showing a blinking cursor on switching windows.

The grid layout is interesting but I found it strange that the all tabs are shown along the left side in split mode. It would be interesting to see how the grid differs from the tree layout that i3 uses.

I did like their default hot keys and the side bar for switching work spaces. Ultimately though if you don't like gnome this isn't going to change that. But if you do prefer i3 and want a more nicer environment with all the gnome system management ui's consider using [https://regolith- linux.org/](https://regolith-linux.org/)

<comment><USER19> I Ctrl+F'ed in this thread for Regolith, this should be higher.

Zero setup, incredible keybindings.

You can install it on top of your existing Distro, as an apt package. And then log out + log back in using new DE.

I had never used a tiling WM before Regolith, i3 seemed too difficult to configure for someone who didn't truly didn't understand the point/benefit of using tiling WM's.

A day into using Regolith on Ubuntu I was hooked. Been using it for years now and it's the best decision I've ever made, productivity skyrocketed and it looks nice.

I tried Pop_OS shell's tiling WM, as I was hopeful, but the keybindings and behavior aren't as nice as Regolith. It does a "swap" animation when changing tile positioning that slows stuff down, and I could never get the gap borders to disappear completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice!!! This is the kind of thing I visit Hacker News for.

I wonder how this compares with the Gnome tiling Add-on from Pop!_OS that is becoming very popular. But this material shell sounds like a much more holistic approach than just adding tiling to Gnome. I'll definitely try this out.

<comment><USER21> I have not looked into these things too much but I like how gnome keyring unlocks when I login to my fedora machine. After a simple initial setup, all my git commits are automatically signed by my gpg key. I don't even have to think about it. I haven't used this for anything serious but I think alternatives will need to achieve feature parity before I can seriously consider them.

Kind of like how I go back to x as opposed to wayland because obs can't capture screen (last time I checked).

<comment><USER22> You don't need to be using the full GNOME DE in order to use gnome-keyring and have it unlock [1].

[1]: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Using_the...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Using_the_keyring_outside_GNOME)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I tried this a couple years ago on a Atom tablet. If memory serves it had no tiling yet, but I liked it because it was the only working solution that would allow a tablet-like experience under Linux, all others being either buggy or incomplete (rotation not working or not consistent with mouse, etc.). I admit it was well thought, beautiful to look at and very usable, although they didn't resist the temptation to dumb down even further the config panels by removing more and more options, which is the reason I avoid Gnome in all my PCs. The only real problem is that it was _slow_ , I mean _really slow_ , and memory hungry. OK, in 2018 having 2GB RAM it's the users fault, although that tablet was impossible to upgrade, so I had no other choice than either reinstall Windows 10 (which was a lot more snappy) or give the tablet away, which I did.

I seem to have read somewhere that an open phone manufacturer (Librem?) is using a deeply optimized version of Gnome 3 to overcome its slugginess on less powerful hardware. Are there any chances their optimizations can be merged back so that every platform could take advantage of them?

</comment><comment><USER24> Pop Shell from System76 also does something similar. That is a gnome shell extension that provides tiling window management. It's focus is keyboard driven window navigation and has the option to switch between tiling and floating mode.

[https://github.com/pop-os/shell](https://github.com/pop-os/shell)

<comment><USER25> I was going to mention the same thing. I liked the old Pop Shell and have now been experimenting with the new tiling interface.

Off topic, but System76 really seems like a great company. I enjoy my Linux laptop and their software support is good. I am stuck on Apple's platform for the Apple Watch and iPhone (and I like iPads), but I wonder if I would ever buy another Mac laptop. Turnkey Linux systems, like those of System76, Dell, etc. really make using Linux low overhead.

</comment></comment><comment> heresie-dabord > "Improve your user experience and get rid of the anarchy of traditional > desktop workflows."

This usage of "anarchy" makes me wonder what is so satisfying to advocates of "tiling". I personally don't have a need for new windows to conform to a strict placement algorithm.

My usability requirement for new windows: a) open the window in a timely manner and make it distinct so I can identify it; b) don't fiddle with my visual field unnecessarily.

I use OpenBox. I make the "active" window distinct using a custom theme. I open what I need and hide the rest in a shaded window and/or virtual desktop until I need it. I find what I need in the menus.

(I won't debate the qualities of Gnome, but I prefer a lighter DE.)

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see why you would need such a complex system (spatial model) to switch between your apps.

In my opinion, this has been solved perfectly many years ago. I simply use Super+<num> to launch/switch to my 10 most important applications. Supported out-of-the box by both Windows and Gnome and 100% predictable. Every shortcut invocation will launch exactly the right application.

<comment><USER27> I find that wierd too, and example of nerds cooking up something no one needs but then it catched on because nerdy things are hip now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've always wanted to try a tiling window system, but they just don't seem to gel with how I work at all. Rarely, if ever, do I want a window to take up some common percentage of the screen. My editor is ~100 columns, which will change depending on the font / font size. My terminal is all over the place. My browser is multiple widths, because I need to test responsiveness, or what fits in my current tab does not fit what's in my next tab.

Is there any sort of middle ground tiling solution for people like me?

<comment><USER29> Shameless plug: [https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/](https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/) Gets rid of window overlap, but doesn't force all windows to be fully visible at the same time.

<comment><USER30> I'm a fan of PaperWM. It's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can the user merge the workspace panel into the the system panel and move all that to the bottom of the screen instead?

I honestly can't stand global top bars and "system panels" that are nothing more than always-visible launcher menus. They're just a waste of space. IMO Chrome looks ridiculous in the video, with a set of tabs directly underneath the workspace panel tabs.

What I'd really like to see is XFCE with automatic tiling. I can probably script a half-assed version of it myself without too much trouble, but it would be nice to have a full-assed version of that.

<comment><USER32> A few months ago I set up i3 to work within Xfce (essentially swapping out xfwm4 as the window manager), and I love it. It took a bit of tinkering to get the two to play nicely, as you might expect, but once I got it set up properly it was great. I wanted to use a tiling WM, but I had a setup I really liked with Xfce and didn't want to give up all the DE niceties with my panels, system tray, etc. This gives me the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned.

That said, I agree with you that it would be nice to have a built-in option to switch between tiling and floating. I've seen that Pop_OS has this, but that's also using Gnome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This looks decent. Tangentially, why do Gnome windows have such big title bars? Is that something you can adjust?

<comment><USER34> It's because a) GNOME no longer renders title bars b) GTK3 instead treats title bar as combined titlebar + menu space

<comment><USER35> Gtk3's title bar / hamburger menu / tool bar / modal dialog hybrid thing is a great motivator for avoiding Gtk3 apps. I've been pretty successfully avoiding them since upgrading to Ubuntu 20 and discovering that horrorshow.

I'm having difficulty getting different colours on active vs inactive title bars on regular apps, though. Still working on it occasionally.

<comment><USER36> Why is it a horror show? It never bothered me

<comment><USER37> It's not, some people are just a little _dramatic_ about it.

<comment><USER38> I wouldn't go as far as calling it a horror show, but do find it genuinely unpleasant to use. In a default configuration GNOME's task switcher seems to assume that there is only one window open for each application. Switching between multiple windows in the same application is rather inconvenient. The title bar stuffs in frequently accessed options then hides the menu bar under the hamburger icon. Those frequently used options are the ones I am least likely to access from the title bar since they are bound to hotkeys that are common to most programs.

For anyone who is accustomed to other metaphors, I'm not terribly surprised by the description horror show. Even as someone who is willing to adapt to change, many of the changes seem to be contrary to usability or efficiency.

<comment><USER37> GNOME's task switcher has two modes, the one you're using switches between applications. Alt+(the key above tab) switches between windows within an application.

The hamburger menu keeps the applications looking clean, if there's anything I use that frequently I'll just use the keyboard shortcut.

It's improving every release, but if you want traditional, I'd choose XFCE.

<comment><USER35> A "clean" UI is often a less functional or efficient UI; cleanliness is usually achieved by adding indirection or removing functionality. But Gtk3 isn't even clean; it's often cluttered. Just look at the title bar on dconf- editor when you're 5 levels deep in a config tree.

Menus are ideal for commands which are individually infrequently used, but collectively frequently used. That is, where any given menu item isn't used often enough to warrant learning the keyboard shortcut (not that Gtk3 menus show shortcuts, because they don't), but the menu as a total is visited to execute a command frequently. Consider things like IDEs, photo manipulation, video editing, sound editing, basically anything with a lot of tools to apply.

I find it particularly ironic that Gimp - the OG Gtk - doesn't use a hamburger menu, because that would be _ludicrous_.

<comment><USER34> Another point with menus is that the typical top-of-the screen, and nowadays "hamburger" menu is just dumping ground for all functionality, and should be at most of a secondary use to common _and_ context-specific actions represented by buttons/context menus/etc.

Something usually lost in "clean" UIs...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reminds me of the 10/GUI ("contenuum") [http://10gui.com/](http://10gui.com/)

A user interface mockup where everything is grouped, spatially oriented, and scrollable.

[https://vimeo.com/6712657](https://vimeo.com/6712657)

<comment><USER40> PaperWM is inspired by/implements parts of this: [https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/](https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I tried tiling WM: i3/i3gap for a year, then sway and bspwm for a few days but finally went back to Gnome.

I got fed-up spending way too much tweaking the UI to my "needs". (To be fair, most of the time was spent on the toolbar (polybar, i3bar) configuration). I also realized that I mostly needed tiling for the terminal.

Thus I embraced Gnome UI with a few extensions: unite, dash-to-dock, system- monitor, etc. and started using tmux for the terminal.

I might try Material Shell but I am actually happy with today's Gnome3. Performance is decent, and the level of configuration is enough for me with a few extensions. It is not as stable and polished as MacOSX but there is no blocking point.

N.B: I kept i3 for my work Linux VM due to very limited system resources.

<comment><USER42> Beg to differ that macOS is more stable and polished. macOS makes "arbitrary" UI changes over the major versions, including what I experience as regressions, while Gnome 3 keeps what works. And I experience more UI latency with macOS and a less-polished out of the box experience: Eg, macOS has no built-in tiling. Eg, macOS prohibits using the keyboard to interact with system modals unless you change settings. Eg, macOS hotkey for spotlight requires holding down a modifier key. Eg, macOS spotlight autocomplete is unbelievably brittle/dumb. Eg, macOS doesn't allow changing the system font size, you must scale the whole viewport.

(Can you tell I am required to use macOS at work? /facepalm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I really wish people would stop using "beautiful" as if it were an objective adjective.

<comment><USER44> Ditto "fast".

<comment><USER45> Unless it's accompanied by benchmarks; then it's fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Can two windows overlap? Or are they just opened full-screen or inside a tile side-by-side?

If not, then I don't like that very much. For example the calculator: I don't want it to take 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen. It's like going back into a 35 years ago pre DESQview era.

Edit: nevermind. _" In Material Shell windows are tiled. These means they are organised in a predictable way in which they do not overlap"_.

I guess I like my windows to be _not predictable_ , whatever that means.

<comment><USER47> I can't speak about Material Shell, but on dedicated tiling WMs, you get to select a subset of apps that you want to always open in floating mode to accommodate the use case you are describing. Nonetheless, I find myself not using that at all, since in most cases the tiled view allows for optimum use of screen real-estate in my opinion. If I can't see the entirety of a window it's kind of useless to me, so i'd prefer it be on a different workspace. But of course, floating one window like your calculator while your browser and RSS feed reader are tiled on the desktop is entirely possible and probably quite common. I do, however, use a popup rofi window with a custom script as a calculator, so that does indeed float near the top of my screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like the tiling. Unfortunately it breaks my beloved workflow with GNOME 3: I'm using an extension to switch workspaces via scrolling on the top panel, which makes the workspace approach very useful and fast for me.

I also rather would like the left panel at the top since window lists aren't important to me anymore (hot corner for overview is so much faster for me finding the window I am looking for)

<comment><USER49> Do you have a link to that scrolling extension handy? It sounds useful to me. And if you have any other recommendations I'd appreciate them too, as I tried some extensions but have none enabled myself currently (just stock with the animations off). Your scrolling one is the first one that sounds useful.

<comment><USER48> [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/701/top-panel- workspa...](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/701/top-panel-workspace- scroll/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > for GNOME

For the life of me, I can't understand why there are that many GNOME-based desktop environments. I personally dislike most of their approach to UI. Maybe the innards are very pleasant to work with, but it's GTK-based, isn't it? That a somewhat-dated C toolkit, even if it has bindings in other languages. So I kind of doubt that.

And yet - MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE (ok, that's just GTK, not GNOME proper), Unity.

This is not a rant, I'm actually curious why GNOME is that popular, and those projects did not choose some other basis. I mean, that should be possible, right? LXDE switched from GTK to Qt a few years back.

<comment><USER51> I will tell you why I use Gnome. Gnome/Fedora was the first distro that played nice with my 4k XPS display AND the various 2k and HD secondary displays I use. I switched from Ubuntu/XFCE about five years ago. As I get older, I look for applications and DE's that require as little mouse use as possible. In Gnome 3, it's super+space, type application name, enter and use. Super+arrow to snap around the screen. A minuscule top bar gives me the perfect amount of screen real estate. The only application that I like to tile is a terminal and tmux works just fine. So for my use, Gnome just seems to stay out of my way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Looks really nice. I like how creative the Linux community is with their GUI experimentation.

My favourite feature is the ability to tile windows with a little gap between them. Having visibility (even a little) into the wallpaper when you're doing work makes a big difference for me. It's like it grounds you in a more natural frame of reference. I'm sure Mac users can relate to this due to the late introduction of true window maximisation, but as a Windows user I'm coming to appreciate the "non-fullscreen" or "edge-to-edge tiled" working environment.

</comment><comment><USER53> Thinking about those default keybindings (super+<w,a,s,d>) make my wrists hurt. Since the typical keyboard only has super (win) on the left, they should've used super+ <i,j,k,l> or <h,j,k,l>.

</comment><comment><USER54> I can't recommend AwesomeWM enough. You don't really have to customize it at all for the workspaces + basic tiling to be incredibly useful. And the workspaces can be _per monitor_!!! Or you can tie them together! Or use them as tags instead of workspaces! It's really just so good.

I think the only thing I really added was audio key support and I changed the menu shortcut...?

I'm not actually sure what the argument is to not use it. (it supports floating windows, if you want that as the default)

<comment><USER55> > I'm not actually sure what the argument is to not use it.

I'm currently using it, but if I switch away, it will be because there is no wayland support yet.

<comment><USER54> Heh, valid point.

<comment><USER56> Patches welcome :P

But really, someone went quite far a couple year ago. Unfortunately he lost interest before the finish line. There is no such thing as a WM port from X11 to wayland. It's a full backend rewrite.

The design that would have worked (after like 4 rewrite), but wasn't completed, was to have a WLroot process, then some custom protocols to talk to an awesome "client". This was a fork of the old codebase with the X11 code stripped out and the implementation of those little private protocols between the wlroot "server" and awesome "client".

Using this model, the event loops lived in different process and AwesomeWM could restart without losing all applications. It did render stuff, including the wibar and clients (without titlebars). But that's about it. It never got to the point you could dog-food it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> meh, imo, regolith is peak desktop for linux right now. [1]

[1] [https://regolith-linux.org/download/](https://regolith- linux.org/download/)

</comment><comment><USER58> I have tried to like tiling window managers and for whatever reason, it just hasn't clicked for me. I have really come to like the way default Gnome works. That said, I have used material-shell for about 1/2 an hour, and so far this is the first time I can see myself actually liking a tiling window manager.

At the risk of being the guy who has used it for a minimal amount of time and starts complaining about it because it doesn't work like I'm used to...There are a couple preference things for me that I wish were a little different.

I like gnome's no-frills fullscreen. You only have the app and the top panel stuff. In material-shell, I can SUPER+ESC to get full screen, but I think I want to be able to just mouse-over to the left side to bring up the panel while in full screen. To get to anything at the panel I have to SUPER-ESC first. Which is ok, I'd just rather it optionally auto-hide.

Kind of the same as the left-panel, the top-panel workspace list looks especially jumbled when you have an app like a browser maximized. So you see the workspace list, then your titlebar, then your browser tabs. It just adds extra "business" that I would prefer to not see. And again, enabling fullscreen with SUPER+ESC basically gets me what I want so it's not that big of a deal.

Finally, I understand why people would like it, but for me I would prefer to not have the "+" in the workspace switcher at all. Or at least minimally have it skip being part of my SUPER+A/SUPER+D switching. I REALLY don't like it showing up when nothing is open on my workspace or when I have a vertical split workspace, and only one thing on the screen and it shows the "+" content window. I am so accustomed to just hitting SUPER and then typing the app that I want, its way faster to do that and I'd rather the whole "+" window go away.

All-in-all, I'm pretty satisfied with material-shell and will definitely be using it as my desktop.

</comment><comment><USER59> Please. Add. SCREENSHOTS!

You lost me at having to watch a video. Just lead with a screenshot. A video is fine as supplemental marketing, but you NEED a screenshot otherwise you're losing those first impression opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER60> I think I'll just stick to i3 for now.

<comment><USER61> It's moderately intimidating to jump into i3 or xmonad if you haven't used them before. This looks like a friendlier way for more people to get exposed to tiling, but doesn't seem to offer anything compelling for people already comfortable with one of the others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Looks nice, is there a video of how it works with multi-monitor setups ?

</comment><comment><USER63> This is so close to how I would want my shell to work! For instance, there is a floating mode which can be enabled per-workspace. Big fan of the persistency. I have a few nitpicks, but the author seems active on Discord and work is ongoing. Going to give this an extended ride for sure.

EDIT: For Fedora users, apparently the package is quite outdated and missing some features and fixes. The author is going to make a new release on GitHub and hopefully package maintainers will make an update.

</comment><comment><USER64> Installed and activated this morning. I'm already a fan. Easily revertible if I decide later that I hate it, but I like this workspace strategy much better than what's built-in with gnome.

I did find it a bit challenging to figure out where the settings were located (I don't use many GNOME extensions), but once I figured out the settings are on the extensions.gnome.org page for the extension it was lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER65> I really like the idea, maybe this can make me back to GNOME, but it seems to me it lacks an absolutely vital feature of i3/Sway: the scratchpad[0], I always have an Emacs buffer opened to my org folder, and the scratchpad is very handy.

0: [https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad](https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad)

</comment><comment><USER66> One thing I've learned from using i3wm and trying various other tiling shells/scripts over time is a stacking mode is crucial to my workflow.

It doesn't look like this has one. There's an outstanding PR to add stacking to Pop Shell [0] that I'm hopeful about.

[0] [https://github.com/pop-os/shell](https://github.com/pop-os/shell)

</comment><comment><USER67> How does this handle multiple monitors? Isn't the default on gnome 3 still to only switch the primary monitor when switching workspaces?

<comment><USER68> It doesn't appear to work well with multiple monitors. I could open apps on different monitors but not move them between. The native GNOME shortcuts just caused the windows to flicker and their shortcuts don't have anything to do with monitors.

<comment><USER67> [https://github.com/material-shell/material- shell/issues/269](https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell/issues/269)

>We are currently only compatible with the one workspace per external monitor mode since it's was the most adapted to my vision of the ideal workflow and also because altering the behavior of GNOME Shell can be a bit complex and maintain multiple mode can be very time consuming. Therefore step after step our code base is becoming more mature and I may be incline to work a second option if there enough demands. But we also have other fundamental stone to build like window resizing.

Seems like figuring how it works across multiple monitors would be a rather basic building block but dev has different priorities it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I switched from i3 to bspwm and never looked back. It's more true to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing only and doing it well. I use sxhkd for the hotkey daemon and polybar for the status bar. It's more initial work to set up though than i3 which just works out-of-the box which makes i3 good enough for most people.

</comment><comment><USER70> For folks who are looking for tiling without switching the windows manager, the gTile [0] GNOME shell extension is pretty good.

[0]: [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/)

<comment><USER42> Gnome has [very] basic tiling built in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Installed and activated this morning. I'm already a fan. Easily revertible if I decide later that I hate it, but I like this workspace strategy much better than what's built-in with gnome.

I did find it a bit challenging to figure out where the settings were located (I don't use many GNOME extensions).

</comment><comment><USER71> Looks nice and innovative. But GNOME already lost me as a user. Wish they'd make it independent of GNOME.

</comment><comment><USER72> I find everything other than KDE and lighter desktops really slow - even with good hardware

</comment><comment><USER73> I like it!

There is just one thing I'm missing from Gnome which is the white dot on top of the time signifying there is an unread notification. With Material Shell I have to manually click the time to see if I have any unread emails or slack messages.

</comment><comment><USER74> Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that there are no tests in the repo?

</comment><comment><USER75> I used to switch between gnome and cinnamon. I switched between them when one failed after update. They seldom fail simultaneously, but once that happened, I switched to awesome and never go back.

</comment><comment><USER76> Nice! I use i3 but I've always thought it would be great if it supported manipulating windows with the mouse as well. I don't use GNOME so this isn't for me but I like the idea.

<comment><USER77> You can have floating windows with i3.

Try meta-shift-space, you will get a floating window that can be dragged and resized with the mouse.

<comment><USER76> I know about that and it's a handy feature but I meant the typical window operations (moving in the tile grid, resizing of grid rows/columns possibly also sending to other workspaces or the scratchpad and toggling floating or fullscreen mode via a context menu on the title bar)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I've lived in Awesome WM for years, this looks pretty good to me!

<comment><USER56> You can have both! [https://github.com/material-shell/material- awesome](https://github.com/material-shell/material-awesome)

This was an earlier version of Material Shell based on AwesomeWM. At some point the author wanted more animations and custom menu handling. Those are 2 areas AwesomeWM doesn't really handle well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> My biggest issue with i3 and awesome is as soon as I plug in a second monitor the whole things just falls apart and it becomes too much to manage.

Anyone try this with multiple monitors?

<comment><USER67> The way multiple monitors work out of the box is that a workspace is created when you first switch to it on the monitor that is focused. This means that even if you always use foo on monitor bar you must switch to monitor bar before hitting the hotkey to switch to foo.

If all you know is focus directional hotkeys you could trivially have to hit focus left 7 times to get to the left monitor for example before hitting super+3 to switch to 3. This is of course horrible.

Your life would be simplified if you had a hotkey to focus output right and focus output left. This makes it not TOO laborious however your life would be simplified MUCH MUCH more if you used the assign directive to assign particular workspaces to particular monitors for example 1-5 on left monitor and 6-0 on right.

You would accomplish this for example by using

        workspace 1 output name
        workspace 2 output name
        ...

Then if you watch to switch to 3 on left monitor you don't have to worry about where you are presently you can simply hit super+3 wherever you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Don't worry, the next gtk3 update will break it. /s

</comment><comment><USER81> looks okay, tried it and bang! everything is in disarray. I found organising windows to be a pain. suddenly everything is in full screen mode. I thought the search would've been like the search provided by kde, i.e search through open windows no matter what app. that's one thing I miss about kde. and wish I could get in gnome.

</comment><comment><USER82> These "Workspaces" are called "Activities" in KDE (avaible since KDE 4 I think). I use them daily

</comment><comment><USER83> People jump at the words minimal and modern but "Private secure and fast" is never questioned makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER84> How is the tiling with multiple monitors?

</comment><comment><USER85> Why does this website need javascript to load? Everything in there could fit on a static page with gifs.

<comment><USER86> The issue of the gifs was actually discussed on discord. IIRC it was because the gifs would be to big in some cases.

<comment><USER87> That's a poor excuse given that a) mp4 support is pretty good these days and b) CSS already has responsive loading of assets. It's purely that to a man with a JS framework everything looks like a dynamic site. I highly recommend running Noscript to see how much of the Internet is broken because of this kind of nonsense.

<comment><USER88> Running Noscript doesn't show you how much of the internet is broken but instead is you purposefully breaking the internet for yourself.

<comment><USER85> You don't need Javascript for static content.

<comment><USER88> And dynamic content isn't broken content. Choosing to only view static content is a personal preference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Cool website.

</comment><comment><USER90> I don't like this at all. Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design, and tiling should be an option.

The video is too fast to allow any actual evaluation of its offerings.

The big buttons in the section 'find your tasks instantaneously' are not necessary.

The gnome interface sucks big time and I don't see this as improvement.

<comment><USER91> > Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design

Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling (ie. "what is where in relation to something else") in contrast to just magically letting things appear without animation or transition. There are plenty of UI designs which use scrolling. Sure you can debate whether they are a success or not but I've never head of "Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design". That sounds more like a personal preference.

> and tiling should be an option.

As far as I can tell there is nothing stopping you from simply using a workspace per app. Effectively disabling tiling.

<comment><USER90> > Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling

The spatial feeling is necessary only if things take more space than needed. In this case, this is not valid. There are no things that take more space than needed. It's simply a distraction.

> As far as I can tell there is nothing stopping you from simply using a > workspace per app. Effectively disabling tiling.

What if I want windows to be connected? that feature is not offered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Somehow the title reminds me of Madonna's song Material Girl.

</comment><comment><USER93> As an i3-gaps user... I would try this.

<comment><USER94> I love how beautiful i3-gaps is. I worked awfully hard to get i3, Dunst, Polybar and many other tools to give me a WM only experience. And frankly, I hate that part of it.

Simple things like configuring bluetooth, or switching audio... or working with multiple displays are just painful. I expected this when I started using Linux in 1996ish. That was part of the hobbiest experience. These days, I just want to get my work done, and if I can do it with a pretty experience, I'd prefer that.

So if I do i3 again, it'll probably be with XFCE underneath unifying some of the experience. Gnome on the other hand, has its own set of issues that make it annoying.

So I'm with you, I would try this.

<comment><USER95> You can run "gnome-flashback" somehow below i3 using [https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome](https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome)

This is nothing too complicated, just a session with the right components selected to provide whatever services you need: display management, screen locking, WiFi, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> when is this material crap gonna die? There are gaps everywhere who wants more gaps in their DE?

<comment><USER95> I do. I don't need them when every pixel counts but I think they are useful If not pleasing in many cases.

That's why I created what I believe was the first tiling wm "useless gaps" patch for dwm 10 years ago. Since then, it has been adopted by other wm, i3 being a notable exception.

I don't use a DE, but I guess a little space between those fat bars and backdrop'd windows might help to see through the bloat.

<comment><USER27> I was referring more to the excessive padding in material design in general, but yeah I'm not a fan of gaps so pairing that with gaps in tilling seems extra bloated to me.

<comment><USER95> Oh yes, I see what you mean.

I have yet to see an enjoyable material design app. With the same underlying motivations, I have better appreciation of Apple iOS interface guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I want 2/3rd 1/3rd tiling

</comment><comment><USER97> There's much to love about Linux but the desktop experience is terrible. Windows and macOS are lightyears ahead.

</comment><comment><USER98> wow that looks pretty darn great... installing on Fedora silverblue right now.

</comment><comment><USER99> Love this. <3

</comment><comment><USER100> So it's not a shell but a theme?

</comment><comment><USER101> With how horrible Gnome 3 is to use I guess nothing can be worse, though I'm sure just like gnome 3 it will also randomly crash every 15 minutes.

<comment><USER36> What desktop/os do you use as your daily driver?

<comment><USER31> XFCE here, for the same reason - I've been trying out Gnome since the early 2000s and it's always been a bug-ridden, bloated pig. Meanwhile XFCE is simple, lightweight and it just works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Sadly it's a material design, one of the worst design frameworks out there. And, it is used contrary to its purpose on all possible levels without any understanding of it.

<comment><USER103> > Sadly it's a material design, one of the worst shits out there.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER104> But actually it's true. Before, It was once great on Android but now it has been abused on the Web, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop apps, etc.

It is the new Bootstrap, but inconsistent and worse every where else apart from its use in Android apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> > Designed to simplify navigation and reduce the need to manipulate windows in > order to improve productivity. It's meant to be 100% predictable and bring > the benefits of tools coveted by professionals to everyone.

Oh dear. Now I remember why I keep using macOS which actually does it better than 'this'.</comment>


Ask HN: Web design a depreciating asset? - <AUTHOR>

High-priced web design seems like a bad investment to me.
Decent designers ask a minimum of $100/hr but no designer wants to be held accountable or be compensated on the basis of driving actual business results.
More often than not a company will spend $50,000 on a web design and get 0 business results.
Then the design itself becomes outdated over time and is less and less valuable for "credibility" each month.
Is design just another depreciating asset? <comment><USER2> web designer != marketer

Some companies will cash in with great (good is not enough) and distinct design, others will not - they just need a marketer and a $10 bootstrap theme. Some need both.

Everywhere we read comments like: "Ugly converts better". This really means that marketing strategies convert better than good design separately, not necessarily that _ugly_ is better. By the other hand - normally - ugly design decreases your desirability and trustability/credibility. Imagine Stripe launching with the old Paypal design or Apple without their design.

A big (huge) problem for designers is that in all artistic careers the barriers to enter the market are very low. Give a design assignment to a random person. Most people would make it, probably with low quality but the work would be done. This lowers the value of average to good professional designers as their work is not very distinct from the hobbyist work. Only great or "lucky" designers will make a confortable living. By the other side an average technical worker will make a confortable living from it.

Another problem is that artistic work is easy to copy: very soon your great design will not be distinct anymore. Time to start from zero again..

Pursuing an artistic career is great for your soul but terrible for your pockets. Along the line most give up, the "stubborn" survive and only few "hit a lottery ticket" and make a confortable living from it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Design is crucial but it's not as unique of a specialization as it used to be. I wouldn't see it as depreciating if you're intent on keeping up with new trends and techniques as they become useful or learning in other realms beyond simply design.

The depreciated web designers will ignore this advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> > More often than not a company will spend $50,000 on a web design and get 0 > business results.

In that case, you're spending way too much money on consultants with no track record. You need to do a better job of choosing a team that can get you legitimate results.

</comment><comment><USER5> IANAL and I am definitely not an accountant, but I do know that if you are asking from a US tax perspective it is possible to amortize the cost of website development over 3-5 years. In fact it is very common.

</comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that many designers do not understand business, and that many businesspeople do not understand the web.

I dont care for most if todays web designs. I want something thatbworks well and am less concerned with what it looks like.

Ask a web designer how they analyze their own log files. I expect most dont because they dont know what that is.</comment>


Ask YC: (Contrarian) Is this a great time to start or what? - <AUTHOR>

What did you think when you saw that the start-up school was a roaring success, its best ever showing (over 650 hackers!)?
COMPETITION, GLUT. And the smart money, like Marc Andreesson is already preparing for cheap roll-ups for the coming "nuclear winter" (his words, not mine).
I hope my prediction doesn't come true, but a lot of people here are going to get acquired for at or below cost. Market gluts do that, every single time.
In 2002, you could have picked up an optical company (or 100 of them!) for 1/10th of the total VC in.
Start up school 2008 == Contrarian Indicator? <comment><USER2> I think it's more that many of these unfunded, small-team startups (possibly including mine) will throw in the towel and get regular jobs, abandoning their startups. Heck, they may join other startups, and the winners will emerge strong with many of these former single founders having rather generous stock option grants.

A good comparison might be the automobile industry in the 1920s or the oil industry in the 1870s. Market was glutted with small fly-by-night operators, who were bought up at or below cost. However, they were often bought for stock in the acquirers, which then skyrocketed when competition declined. Many of them became very wealthy as manager-employees, much better than if they'd been employees from the beginning.</comment>


Stephen Wolfram: I Like to Build Alien Artifacts - <AUTHOR> http://theeuropean-magazine.com/729-wolfram-stephen/730-technology-and-human-nature

<comment><USER2> Interesting question and answer near the end:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

The European: In contrast to Google or Facebook, you are not dealing with personal data at the moment, but the thrust seems to be going in that direction. How might that change WolframAlpha, and what new challenges does it raise?

Wolfram: We know that we can do scarily well at computing things about people. When you look up someone on the web, it's noisy and messy. But by combining different data sources – particularly in the United States, where many sources are publicly available – we can pretty much nail a precise report about a particular person. For the time being, we have decided not to do it because the bad appears to outweigh the good. I feel somewhat squeamish about it. My guess is that it will eventually happen, but it's not a trail I want to blaze.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

</comment><comment><USER3> Made it about 3 sentences in before closing the tab in disgust as Wolfram's ego interjects when asked about Turing, and he claims that Turing got distracted and so failed to create concrete computation, so that task was "left to me." Ugh.

<comment><USER4> Wolfram has never come across as egotistical to me.

Every single time I read the comments in a post about Wolfram, there is always some nitpicking going on, on words and phrases that don't mean anything special, being blow out of proportion.

I don't know where all this resentment is coming from for this man, but I guess some people just see what they believe, as opposed to believing what they see... Or I've just missed something completely.

<comment><USER5> He's an unusual combination of incredibly intelligent (among a handful in the world), but also incredibly boastful and supercilious. Unlike in basketball, where the biggest trash talkers are often the top players, among intellectuals, the biggest boasters are usually complete phonies. Wolfram is the exception -- he is indisputably the "real deal" while also sparing no opportunity to rub everyone's face in it.

His work is brilliant and insightful -- just treat it as work on its own merits and try not to think too much about the sanctimonious tone behind it.</comment></comment></comment>


Half of Americans approve of NSA program  - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/nsa-surveillance-poll-94809.html

<comment><USER2> That's really scary if the survey is to be believed. Especially considering more than half believe the government is abusing this data and collecting more than just metadata...

</comment><comment><USER3> The brainless, scared and entitled ones that is...

<comment><USER2> Or those just not paying attention. If one is to believe the survey, this attitude is more dangerous IMO than the program itself.</comment></comment>


Subtracting large floating point numbers in different languages - <AUTHOR> http://geocar.sdf1.org/numbers.html <comment><USER3> Isn't it an expected behaviour (at least for programmers) because of IEEE 754?

For example, in Racket this also gives 2.0, but if you are using exact numbers (#e), then it gives exact and correct answer 1.0.

Same for Java (and any other language): if you are using Float/Double numbers, then you are loosing precision. Use BigDecimal (or something similar for other languages) if you want exact calculations.

<comment><USER3> UPD: But interesting question though: if language X gives correct answer for that example (without using special classes and functions), does that mean that language X is not following IEEE 754 and does something else under the hood, hence will be much slower?

Take, for example, Java: no one is using BigInteger/BigDecimal by default because they are waaay much slower.

You can't have precision for free, can you?

<comment><USER4> Some dynamically typed languages use hybrid approaches - e.g. Ruby has Fixnum and Bignum for integers - but you're correct that additional precision isn't free.

I don't know _how_ much slower, but in theory such hybrid approaches can allow the common case to be just as fast or fast enough (tm) while still returning the correct results for the uncommon case (depending on how much the runtime or compiler can prove about the range of your numbers to enable the fast path.)

EDIT: Poor phrasing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternate title: "How to get IEEE 754 right".

<comment><USER6> Short, but seems an appropriate response given the lack of explanation in the linked article.

IEEE 754 double-precision (64-bit) can only represent even numbers in the range 2^53 to 2^54.

Haskell lets us look inside them fairly easily:

      > exponent 9999999999999999.0
      54
      > significand 9999999999999999.0
      0.5551115123125783
      > exponent 9999999999999998.0
      54
      > significand 9999999999999998.0
      0.5551115123125782
      > 2^54 * 0.5551115123125783
      1.0e16
      > 2^54 * 0.5551115123125782
      9.999999999999998e15

<comment><USER5> Python also makes it easy to see what's going on in the REPL:

        >>> 9999999999999999.0
        1e+16

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kind confused what the point is. Is this a complaint that most languages use IEEE 754 for non-integer numbers and he thinks they shouldn't, or a veiled dig about how many programmers don't know this, or...?

The color coding of results suggests the author thinks that 2 is wrong and 1 is right, but he's going out of his way to specify floating point numbers, and when subtracting those two floating point numbers the correct answer is 1 and NOT 2.

Eg, Ruby thinks 9999999999999999.0 - 9999999999999998.0 = 2, but 9999999999999999 - 9999999999999998 = 1. Which is...correct. Right? Unless you don't think IEE 754 should be the default?

I feel like the author is trying to make a clever point, but if so, I'm not getting it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note that the Common Lisp example could be abbreviated to:

(- 9999999999999999.0l0 9999999999999998.0l0)

However, this will only work (either way) in Lisps where long floats are arbitrary precision, like CLISP. In most Lisps (e.g. SBCL, CCL), long floats are just double floats.

</comment><comment><USER9> For java: BigDecimal b1 = new BigDecimal("9999999999999999.0");

            BigDecimal b2 = new BigDecimal("9999999999999998.0");

            System.out.println(b1.subtract(b2));

prints 1.0

<comment><USER10> Python:

        >>> import decimal
        >>> decimal.Decimal('9999999999999999.0')-decimal.Decimal('9999999999999998.0')
        Decimal('1.0')

<comment><USER11> Or just

      >>> 9999999999999999 - <USER2>
      1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does Google get 0 out of that? Both my high school math teacher and IEEE 754 think that's wrong.

<comment><USER13> 9999999999999999.0 can't be represented as a double. Depending on the rounding mode, it could become 9999999999999998.0, so when you subtract them, they're zero. That happens when the rounding mode is round toward zero, or round down. Any other mode rounds it up to 1e+16, so you get an answer of 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> SymPy, being Python, gets it wrong... but if you use S = sympify to transform the long numbers into SymPy objects it works:

        S('9999999999999999.0') - S('9999999999999998.0')
        1.0

<comment><USER15> You can use Decimal built-in also:

      In [1]: from decimal import Decimal as D
      In [2]: D('9999999999999999.0') - D('9999999999999998.0')
      Out[2]: Decimal('1.0')

From docs: Decimal "is based on a floating-point model which was designed with people in mind, and necessarily has a paramount guiding principle – computers must provide an arithmetic that works in the same way as the arithmetic that people learn at school."

[https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/decimal.html](https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/decimal.html)

<comment><USER13> ...until they divide by 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The perl5 solution is

        perl -Mbignum  -e 'print 9999999999999999.0-9999999999999998.0;print "\n";'

    1

</comment><comment><USER17> MacOS search bar gives the correct result 1.

Because it evaluates the expression using the Calculator App.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wolfram Alpha gives 1. Bing gives 1.

<comment><USER19> Bing gives 1 in full search, 2 in quick/suggested search: [https://i.imgur.com/wCMueSD.png](https://i.imgur.com/wCMueSD.png)</comment></comment>


Show HN: One Metric – Collect and calculate metrics onto shared dashboards - <AUTHOR> https://www.onemetric.io <comment><USER2> One Metric makes the habits that distinguish the most successful ventures available to teams everywhere - i.e. simple metrics dashboards shared often. It's the approach I learned at Trade Me, Xero, Vend & Timely. I couldn't find software I needed to help companies I invested in do this well, so I built it myself! I hope others find it useful. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> The founder have been through _multiple_ successful startups. He knows his stuff!

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks great. It's incredible to me how few founders know their key metrics.</comment>


VSLab: MATLAB-like visualizations for F# and Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://vslab.codeplex.com/Wikipage

<comment><USER2> > Moreover, since F# is a compiled language, the final code can be compiled as > a standalone application.

Matlab allows that too: <http://www.mathworks.com/products/compiler/>

<comment><USER3> Actually, This says nothing.

You can bundle a runtime and a bunch of source (or intermediate code) into a single executable and call it a standalone application.

I had a BASIC compiler for my Apple II that parsed the in-memory source, turned it into sequences of calls to the BASIC in ROM plus a small bunch of "bridge" code and saved the resulting blob as a binary file that could be called from the BASIC prompt. It made my programs up to 5 times faster.

If you really want a standalone app, you have to look into stuff that runs without an OS.</comment></comment>


Scrivener for iPad and iPhone in Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/?p=250 <comment><USER2> "It's still early days, though – we are about to embark on the design process proper, and all we can say in terms of a release date is that our iPad and iPhone versions will be out some time in 2012."

So to be clear, a release is not imminent. Looking forward to seeing how this works out, though; Scrivener is a really different sort of writing environment for the Mac.

<comment><USER3> (ahem) ...and Windows. Although I realy think that a clean, native LaTeX export for both of the current platforms (something that can avoid the current MultiMarkdown intermediate kludge) should be a higher priority than shuffling index cards on the corkboard on keyboardless devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      I'm very pleased to announce that we have just
      signed contracts with a developer, Jen Yates,
      to develop the iOS versions for us.

That name gave me a turn, as they (used to) say, since Jen Yates is also the name of the woman who runs the site cakewrecks.com, and I'm pretty sure I would have known if she was a programmer. I'm still only pretty sure...</comment>


An unusual interactive machine learning challenge - <AUTHOR> http://blackboxchallenge.com/eng/ <comment><AUTHOR> We've extended the challenge up to May 30th, raised the prizes and added Python 3 support.</comment>


Developers, There are Better Ways to Maintain your Notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.devcurry.com/2010/08/developers-should-get-into-habit-of.html

<comment><USER2> I code, I like to spend more time look at code, not some blog editor. Using any of these seems like more time wasting,

On the contrary what I'd love is if i could add comments to the source code on github, similar to the way I add comments to the code commits.

</comment><comment><USER3> I keep all my stuff in .txt files, stored in dropbox. I name them as "Java - blahblah.txt" or "CSS - blahblah.txt"

For searching inside notes, I use agentransack. I find this more efficient and simple.

</comment><comment><USER4> I _really_ recommend fossil. It integrates a wiki, scm and bug tracker in a single sleek package. Its a single stand-alone <1MB executable and the repo itself is a single sqlite file.</comment>


An onslaught of pills, hundreds of thousands of deaths: Who is accountable? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/an-onslaught-of-pills-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths-who-is-accountable/2019/07/20/8d85e650-aafc-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html <comment><USER2> It would be so much easier if just one person was responsible wouldn't it? But time and again we run into systemic, multifaceted failures that we dont have easy answers to. Maybe it will be more productive to, instead of trying to understand who is accountable, ask "why did this happen?" Depersonalize it so you can try and see the big picture, and begin tackling it from there.

<comment><USER3> What if part of the systemic problem is a lack of personal consequences for those who make selfish choices?</comment></comment>


Spain's coronavirus antibodies study adds evidence against herd immunity - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/health/spain-coronavirus-antibody-study-lancet-intl/ <comment><USER2> A few things to remember. Antibodies dont stay expressed for high amounts for long levels of time forever after infection - imagine if your body was 100% against every infection you ever encountered forever? The important factor is that your body _remembers_ what antibody to make and then makes it when the next infection happens. Depending on the sensitivity of the test you might not see a response. And a second important point - antibody mediated immunity is just one form of immunity. Cell mediated immunity definitely plays a role against coronavirus [1] and this doesnt test for the presence of reactive T cells etc. We arent getting a complete picture.

Also, if 5% of people have been infected, and all of them make antibodies, then that means herd immunity is still reachable. We dont have the data we need to figure out the complete fraction. And of course, a vaccine will help us artificially boost our way to herd immunity.

[1] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/t-cells-found- covid-...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/t-cells-found- covid-19-patients-bode-well-long-term-immunity)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Also, if 5% of people have been infected, and all of them make antibodies, > then that means herd immunity is still reachable.

A low rate of antibody prevalence in hard-hit Spain would indicate reaching herd immunity (without overwhelming healthcare systems) would take quite a few years, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1280159343384518656?s=...](https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1280159343384518656?s=20)

> A few other things stand out:

> Spain has 297K official cases -- so this represents about 8X that count > (population 47M X 5.0%)

> Spain with 28,400 deaths -- so if we assume 5% seroprevalence....

> Gives us an Infection Fatality Rate of 1.2% in Spain

</comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand Germany antibody tests provide evidence for herd immunity.

There's no country yet which reached herd immunity, but antibody tests in several central and east European countries with its low infection rates, provide evidence that previous similar "Schnupfen" (cold) outbreaks provided enough antibodies to fight it off.

</comment><comment><USER5> All of a sudden, we need herd immunity against a flu virus? Have we ever had herd immunity against a coronavirus?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. It's not a flu virus. (Some coronaviruses cause colds; none are influenza.)

2\. It's entirely possible any number of coronaviruses in the last few million years have been eliminated from humans via herd immunity. The faster the spread, the more likely herd immunity.

<comment><USER4> First the flu is not a virus, it's an illness (combination of symptoms) caused by an influenza virus. Since the SARS viri cause the exact same illnesses, virus infection in the lungs, bacterial lung infection by the immunosystem overreaction plus a cykotine storm (T-cells running amok), it's commonly called the flu.

The virii don't do any damage, the immunosystem is doing the damage.

2nd, the speed of the infection is irrelevant for herd immunity, only the concentration. In some cases 30% is enough, in most cases 70%. The higher the R, the higher the needed percentage. In our case with a natural R of 3.5 80% is needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Flu-like symptoms" and "the flu" are not the same thing. COVID-19 is not the flu (and it's substantially more fatal than what we term "the flu", as well). SARS-CoV-2 causes a number of symptoms not typically seen in flu, as well; it is not "the exact same illnesses".

> The virii don't do any damage...

This simply isn't true (and would be a pedantic quibble if it were, akin to describing getting shot as "acute lead poisoning"). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytic_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytic_cycle)

> 2nd, the speed of the infection is irrelevant for herd immunity, only the > concentration.

Faster spreading viruses tend to have higher R values as a result.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cory Doctorow has the "worst hours" of his life thanks to Find My Phone - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1293940275480387592 <comment><USER2> one thing I've learned is that 99.99% of the time when somebody doesn't answer their phone, it's not because they're having an emergency. however, as a parent/spouse it's really hard to interpret no response to frantic calls (IE, if I try to reach my spouse and don't get a response on any chat system she uses for 4 hours, I'm going to assume tehre's an emergency, but usually it's jsut that spouse wasn't near phone).</comment>


Why the attack on our cameraman was no surprise - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47219957 <comment><USER2> Words have consequences, indeed. This is a very light form of radicalization or "stochastic terrorism": point a finger at people and declare them the enemy often enough, from a position of power, and someone will attack them.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, must be what conservatives feel like every time they tune into the grammys, Oscars, Twitter, Comedy Central or the View.

<comment><USER4> Nobody's calling for violence in those places. Don't what-about this.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, perhaps you missed this?

[https://youtu.be/07-VvcsrUIE](https://youtu.be/07-VvcsrUIE)

I don't know what to do about the escalation of rhetoric and action in this country. But let's not pretend it's one-sided.

<comment><USER6> You can't seriously be equating the two

<comment><USER7> I don't, but in all fairness I did watch the clip cited above, and at the end there was a "and we will punch people in the face" comment to which the crowd raised an already frenzied jeer to an even higher level. I am sorry, but I reject a call to violence on both ends, and I don't see the above comment as only figurative, since there has been punching on both sides of the political fence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking as a non American, reading this thread, theres obviously a tremendous amount of division here.

What I would like to ask though, is this the America you want projecting to the outside world? The BBC is British, are they also fake news? If so, what reasonable means are there for the rest of the world to get this news.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, is that international, and domestic news are distinct. People are obviously more emotionally invested in domestic journalism. For me this is international news, it isn't fake news, in the same way as that natural disaster isn't fake news. These people aren't competing for my votes, I'm not paying their wages.

</comment><comment><USER9> >66 points

>[flagged]

<comment><USER10> That just means the flags outweighed the points, as many of those as there were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Well last night that violence unfolded in El Paso. Ron was unhurt. It wasn't > life-threatening, but it was aggressive and violent. But what about the next > time? Or the time after that?

This is the same shit you see from "Antifa" on the left, and it's abhorrent regardless of the source. To pretend that both sides aren't getting increasingly violent is to reject reality. This isn't a false equivalency situation; both left and right are being pushed into division.

And it's the media that's doing it.

<comment><USER12> I'd suggest the BBC are more balanced than most, so I'd suggest your comment here is close to being cut out false equivalency with a side of whataboutism as you can have on a topic that's talking about violence at Trump rallies specifically.

This article is about mindless violence towards the media that's displayed and documented at Trumps rallys. It's not about antifa.

I don't know what media outlet is to Antifa, that is Fox News to the Right. But I'd welcome a discussion on what we can do to encourage a more fair and balanced media and what we do to hold drunken louts like the gentleman in the article for abhorrent violence.

<comment><USER13> > This article is about mindless violence towards the media that's displayed > and documented at Trumps rallys. It's not about antifa.

This is a single instance and it makes headlines. Antifa on the other hand have had dozens of large scale riots and targeted attacks but corporate media avoids painting them in a bad light. They're simply "protesters" rather than a mob.

> I don't know what media outlet is to Antifa, that is Fox News to the Right.

CNN is easily the most far-left news show. There's hundreds of videos on YouTube of the hoaxes, lies and biased news they've broadcast.

> But I'd welcome a discussion on what we can do to encourage a more fair and > balanced media

There needs to be stronger anti-libel and anti-defamation laws. The lawsuits coming from the "MAGA kid" Nick Sandmann should a good barometer of whether or not the corporate media can truly be held accountable for their lies.

My guess at this point is that the media will continue to lose trust from the public because they can't ever be held accountable when they lie.

<comment><USER14> >Antifa on the other hand have had dozens of large scale riots and targeted attacks but corporate media avoids painting them in a bad light. They're simply "protesters" rather than a mob.

[citation needed]

>CNN is easily the most far-left news show. There's hundreds of videos on YouTube of the hoaxes, lies and biased news they've broadcast.

And there's videos of the Earth being flat, climate change being a "liberal hoax" and the Sandy Hook massacre being made up

If I might quote from an (at the time) controversial Sony ad "you can't believe everything you read on the internet, that's how World War 1 got started"

>There needs to be stronger anti-libel and anti-defamation laws. The lawsuits coming from the "MAGA kid" Nick Sandmann should a good barometer of whether or not the corporate media can truly be held accountable for their lies.

America is a very litigious society, compared to the rest of the world. I'd love to see the defense for the "MAGA kid" trying to explain that wearing that hat was not a deliberate act</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Giant star Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/06/09/red.giant.star.betelgeuse.mysteriously.shrinking

<comment><USER2> From the Wikipedia entry on Betelgeuse: _"Some theorists[who?] have speculated that this behavior is expected for a star at the beginning of the gravitational collapse at the end of its life.[citation needed] The mass of Betelgeuse puts it in range to become a neutron star or possibly a black hole."_

So this might be what is happening. .

</comment><comment><USER3> Quick, someone see if it's being collapsed upon by a Hrung!

<http://hhgproject.org/entries/collapsinghrungdisaster.html> [http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Great_Collapsing_Hrun...](http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Great_Collapsing_Hrung_Disaster_of_Galactic_Sidereal_Year_03758)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is old news. Why should anyone care about a star that was shrinking more than 500 years ago?

<comment><USER5> Um, because it's home to Ford Prefect?

Like you even have to ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!</comment>


Show HN: Find public pianos around the world - <AUTHOR> https://pianos.pub/ <comment><USER2> Cool idea, bookmarked it. I play jazz and blues piano and love to play gigs. I like how you've added descriptions of the pianos!

Would like to play the one on the Salesforce tower but I don't know anyone at Salesforce.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really cool idea! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It was one of those ideas born out of my own problem of trying to find pianos to play while traveling.</comment></comment>


Building an OpenID Connect flow for native mobile, the right way - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/klaxit-techblog/openid-connect-for-mobile-apps-fcce3ec3472 <comment><USER2> Anyone interested in OAuth 2/OpenID connect on mobile should absolutely watch Eran Hammer's (one of the creators if the OAuth 2 spec) talk on the subject [0]. He contests both the "security" and "user trust" claims made in this article. I very much doubt that most users have more trust in an app when it blasts open a browser vs allowing credentials to be typed into the app. The claims this article makes about maintainability however are very accurate in my experience. Nice to be able to adapt your auth flow etc without releasing new native apps.

0: [https://vimeo.com/52882780](https://vimeo.com/52882780)</comment>


Engineering Tradeoffs, From A Google Chrome Developer - <AUTHOR> http://community.livejournal.com/evan_tech/259655.html

<comment><USER2> You can't build an improvement on another products by copying all their features and then adding some more of your own — that's usually a recipe for becoming as bad as your competitor(s). Firefox, IE, Opera — do they _really_ do things differently from one another?

I hope Chrome stays simple and to the point. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This happens all the time, at least in my experience. I've yet to be part of a project where every good suggestion was implemented.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hasn't Google put an embargo on blogs by its employees?</comment>


Replacing Disqus with Inline Comments - <AUTHOR> https://txtpen.com/blog/2017/05/01/replacing-disqus-with-inline-comment.html <comment><USER2> 404\. Perhaps it was moved to [https://txtpen.com/blog/2017/05/01/replacing- disqus-with-txt...](https://txtpen.com/blog/2017/05/01/replacing-disqus-with- txtpen.html) ?</comment>


Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/dotcloud/ <comment><USER2> I've said it in a previous DotCloud post and I'll say it again: _If_ they can pull it off then they'll be golden.

But I'm extremely skeptical they can.

Many of the components they list require intimate domain knowledge. E.g. there are entire companies dedicated to designing and babysitting Hadoop clusters, yet DotCloud just lists it casually alongside other bleeding edge mammoths such as Riak or Cassandra.

DotCloud will need to not only stay on top of things for so many components and provide smooth upgrades for an inherently growing diversity of deployments. They'll also have to support old versions effectively forever and deal with all those little customizations that people need.

Of course all that is doable, given enough man-power. However, after a certain point it's not very _automatable_ anymore.

So, that said, I remain curious if this will really come out as the holy grail that they seem to be shooting for. Or if it will gradually degrade into "just another managed hosting provider" (which isn't a bad thing either, of course).

<comment><USER3> That was exactly my concern when I first heard about it. I got a chance to sit down and chat with one of the co-founders a few weeks ago and came away very impressed - he demonstrated deep level knowledge of a bunch of software I care about (I particularly quizzed him on Solr and Redis) and managed to convince me that his team is very sharp when it comes to keeping on top of the infrastructure elements they support. I think they might be able to pull it off.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I didn't mean to criticize the team. I'm just in the same business (making my living with what they are trying to automate) and know the hurdles they are going to meet.

For example, my provisioning system looks nearly identical to theirs. I also have the central config file to map out roles/services/dependencies, network relations, and the CLI tools to 'manifest' a layout in the form of server instances, EBS volumes etc. And finally puppet to beat everything into shape. I can compose and deploy a production-ready runtime environment with many permutations of commonly used components in a single day.

The thing is, every seasoned admin builds that stuff over the course of his career. It cuts down manual labor significantly.

But you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Each individual component has corner cases, special optimization potential, and more than one valid operation mode (e.g. cluster vs master/slave).

Automating and maintaining(!) _all_ permutations that customers will request is nothing short of a herculean task. That's why every managed hosting provider limits itself to a tiny subset of components ("We are experts in X"), charges significant fees for their services, and refers to specialized consultants for requirements such as "let's have a hadoop cluster".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Solomon and crew were incredibly helpful in providing hosting for us when we were trying to get into YC this last round. Solomon even took a couple hours with us to sit in a park near his apartment and give us some guidance on the day of the interview. These guys deserve all the success they can.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to the DotCloud guys—if they can crack the language-agnostic cloud hosting nut, they'll be worth every cent. It's a big problem to tackle though :)

<comment><USER6> I've been using it religiously for a little while now, and I've deployed a couple of Django instances, a Flask project, Wordpress, a Simplemachines forum, a handful of MySQL databases, 1 postgreSQL instance and memcache.

The only tweaking I had to do for any of it was provide a WSGI script for the Python, which Dotcloud was able to provide in a tutorial.

It might be a big problem to tackle, but they are most of the way there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats guys. Dotcloud is awesome, the team is amazing! Even though we weren't hosted on Dotcloud, Solomon always was willing to help us out. That's the kind of service that comes from a company that you know will do well =)

</comment><comment><USER8> Speaking as a current Dotcloud customer, the setup they've created to handle creating and managing the various components of your "stack" is very cool - within a week of starting work on our first project hosted on Dotcloud I was already planning and thinking about how to move ALL of our projects over, as the flexibility and ease of use is awesome. Right now they are still in beta, but so far I'm super impressed.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really like this DotCloud business model. Although i see a competition directly from Amazon Cloud Formation. What will happen to DotCloud if all the independent vendors make their software Cloud Formation ready?

There is a difference here, DotCloud making the platform ready for to you vs the vendor makes the platform cloud formation ready.(Thats AWS they make others to work for them)

Would love to see how this little, nimble start up being chased by a big, fat, bully AWS, fights back.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very promising concept. This could be the killer app for the cloud. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER11> So what is THE advantage of using dotcloud over my own AWS account where I can configure my servers using libraries like boto or Chef. Using AWS I can go for Elastic BeanStalk or do the complete configuration myself. Not able to see what is the benefit it provides.

<comment><USER12> Elastic BeanStalk only does Java so far, or so I guess. Sure, they will expand - Amazon has an awesome R&D so I don't expect them to stay sitting there. And if you're daring, you can probably already run JRuby and Jython on BeanStalk, but YMMV. DotCloud already has Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis... The CLI is also quite easier to use than Boto. It doesn't need you to learn everything about instances, EBS, ELB, etc. for starters :-) Finally, I like Chef/Puppet, but mastering them takes some time. And most folks prefer pushing your code with git/hg (Ã la Heroku/Djangy/etc) rather than authoring AMIs, I was told :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My concern would be, what do you do if you've built on top of these guys and then they get bought by a company like Salesforce that will shut down the service? What are Heroku customers doing post-acquisition, for instance?

</comment><comment><USER14> my initial reaction, as a developer, is that _most_ of what I do _is_ in one language, so I want to use a platform that is a specialist and not a generalist.

That said, I'm sure I'll check it out and it does sound intriguing.

<comment><USER15> It may be that for small projects, this is mostly a non-issue.

Historically, heterogeneity has been a big problem for a long time. Vendors want lock in; customers don't. Much of Oracle's early success was about being hardware agnostic. Similar for Java. All that XML nonsense, that everybody hates but that has incredibly widespread adoption, was also about inter-op: it's crap, but it's _ubiquitous_ crap.

Now, I _don't know_ is this is an issue in the cloud. But vendors will want lock in; customers won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> DotCloud guys, if you are reading this, I am not sure if this is a typo on your main page. It looks like it is, but not sure.

>"Wow. DotCloud have been completely amazing. Their support is second to none. They've taken this chore that we hated doing—systems administration—and turned into a magical, fully automated system."

That's from the testimonial of whereoscope.

The 'have' been. Shouldn't that be 'has been' ?

<comment><USER17> There is a dialect of English spoken in a certain European country where that usage is common and correct:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> DotCloud is interesting but I think I'd prefer a set of comparable Fabric scripts and an AWS account. But that wouldn't be a very good business I suppose.

<comment> old-gregg This works well... up to a point when you realize that you're paying someone close to a full-time salary to manage your ever growing Fabric scripts and an AWS account.

<comment><USER2> That fulltime salary is a rounding error for most companies, especially when you consider that _you need that person anyways_.

Seriously, I'm making a large part of my living off companies that once thought (or were told) that they could do without a sysadmin.

If the internet-part of your business consists of more than a static website (or a wordpress) then, by all means, pay that fulltime salary. Even if you decide to go fully managed hosting; you absolutely want that to be an educated decision rather than an educated guess.

And it doesn't end there. A never-ending chain of small decisions is waiting on every step of the road. Pull that knowledge inhouse (or to a trusted longterm advisor) as early as you can. Otherwise you will inevitably foot a much higher bill later in the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think at the moment, customers still value performance and reliability over flexibility and customizability. But it won't always be so...

</comment><comment><USER19> So when will Dotcloud be hiring?

<comment><USER20> We're actively hiring already :) Infrastructure engineers, frontend dev, community manager, product marketing. Drop us a line!</comment></comment>


A Command Line vs. GUI Meeting - <AUTHOR> https://gravitational.com/blog/command-line-vs-gui/ <comment><USER2> Surprising or not but this is the issue of user perception. If grandma wants to run her old windows programs on the Ipad and it isn't available on the appstore, why cant she just put them on the usb stick and install as she done with her last device: tablet-laptop? These questions do come up from technology naive people. In the same vein the distinction between GUI and cli isn't in capabilities but in user mindset. Just because you can bridge things with dmenu on your linux machine doesn't mean it should be default. All kinds of edge cases will inevitably emerge whether you like it or not so the user needs to do an informed decision, so don't force your own strange preferences when designing application. In the linux world, look at GNOME, they implement very opinionated changes and test those on they peers. GNOME is getting "better" for some power users and becomes unusable for the regular normies.

<comment><USER3> _GNOME is getting "better" for some power users and becomes unusable for the regular normies._

My decade long perception was that GNOME was changing to target normal users at the expense of power users. It appears they are failing both ways?

<comment><USER4> I don't have much personal experience with GNOME so I can't comment on that specifically, but I've worked on making a primarily dev-focussed product more friendly to marketers in an attempt to speed up their workflow. The problem was we did that based on out perception of how marketers think of the platform to drive the changes. Long story short, it made the devs more frustrated and it was still too technical for the marketers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really interesting article! I work exclusively in the realm of GUIs, but I like reading articles about the interactions that users have with CLIs as I feel that lots of UX people operate in the realm of GUIs and forget that CLIs are also a vector for user interaction.

</comment><comment><USER6> The one ssh app built on web technology that gets this 100% right is Blink on the iPad

<comment><USER7> In addition to the price of the client itself ($20 seems like a fair price to pay for high quality software): If you spin up some AWS services while SSH'd into a box using Blink, doesn't Apple rightfully deserve a 30% commission on the payments to AWS?

<comment><USER8> Unless Blink is getting a share of that money to AWS then no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> real OGs don't maximize terminal space. maximum terminal space is 80x25</comment>


A Framework for Automatic Web Application Generation in Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://www.fractalconcept.com/ilc2002-marc-battyani.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what drove the Common Lisp Directory site, of "finally crashed after 823 days" fame ([http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/901a31c82d...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/901a31c82d9ffb16)).</comment>


Advice from George Patton - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/944-george-patton-quotes

<comment><USER2> Reminded me of my favorite planning quote: "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable" which comes from Eisenhower.</comment>