Ask HN: Where to invest 200k / year - <AUTHOR> I own a software company and it profits about 200k a year, after all expenses, including my salary and tax. Its not a big business but it works great and i love what i do... I dont want to remove the money from the company (as a dividend to me), as i would pay a lot of tax again and i dont need it personally. Its also hard to re-invest that money in the software company, because i just do client projects, have some contractors and a most depends on me doing it myself. All i could do is invest in marketing and hope for bigger projects which can be done by employees, but that seems like a shot into the blue... Also i have no clue where to start on this.
So the question is what to do with it... I dont like traditional investments like stocks or index, and i am not sure about real estate...
I used a part and started a mining farm at a local water power plant... its fun and works quite well... but i dont want to put too much into crypto =) I also plan to put some into peer-to-peer lending.. but also, no significant amounts.
I would like to invest in some semi-automated businesses... like lending cars, renewable energy plants... something which requires some amount of time, money and maybe technical expertise (like setting up a website or some required software stuff), but it should be able to run either mostly on itself or by employees on the long term.
Maybe i would also be happy to do small angel-invests (40-70k) into companies which need some technical expertise as well..
I dont really care for the risk of the investment as i am not hurt if the money is gone, but for sure i will verify if the potential payoff is in relation to the risk.
any ideas ? <comment><USER2> 200K is not a large profit margin, you are a few employees' paychecks away from going under. While I'm sure you yourself would survive any technology shift and specialize in other related fields, the business might suffer. And these shocks are more and more frequent, it's essential to dig your heels in when you have a growth opportunity or expect to be amazoned out of your margin in a few years.

Ok, you say you don't know how to grow the business - how about taking that money and hiring somebody who does know, and move to a CTO / proprietor role. 200K a year should satisfy the immediate cash needs of a proven business man if you couple it with a good stock options plan. And if someone who could find work in a corporation for 500K accepts 200K and stock options, you know he's serious about growing your startup.

If you are looking for startups to angel, your own starup is the no-brainer choice because you get to the exponential returns on the rest of your assets. The only reason not to do that is when you diversify or you sense impending failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback. I only work with two freelancers, so there are no paychecks to consider beside of my own.. these freelancers are on payroll as long as money flows. Additionally i must say that i live in central europe, so salaries are not as they are in the valley.. a good dev costs 65k, a "manager" (replace with whatever exec role you think of) is 80-100k.

The person i need to hire would have to bring me new projects, larger and more independent than the ones i have... I dont know if such a job-description exists ??

The company, including myself, (as right now) can survive 2 years without any income.</comment></comment>


PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powershell-is-open-sourced-and-is-available-on-linux/ <comment><USER2> PowerShell is my guilty pleasure of the computing world. Once you've piped strongly-typed objects around between your shell commands, text scraping seems barbaric by comparison. The problem, of course, is that you can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells. I'm really hoping this will help spur a new wave of PowerShell-compatible tools.

Come to the dark side, we have (strongly-typed) cookies.

<comment><USER3> Is this really so useful in practice? I have never used PowerShell before (nor do I have plans to do so in the near future), but I would imagine the downside is complexity, both for user and especially for developers. With text you just read and parse, while with objects you need to know the object type, its fields,... Whatever happend, I hope text stays here (and I have a bad feeling about it ever since I met systemd).

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate on what the actual complexity is, rather than what you imagine?

For a developer writing a tool, exposing an interface as objects is far easier than having to constantly serialize data into a string. Keep in mind that once you serialize data into a string, you can never change the order of the data or else other tools will break. Not so with a object based interface.

In other system-admin type tasks PowerShell _hides_ complexity. For e.g. finding the IP address of a network interface is simply

      Get-NetIPAddress | select IPAddress

compared to something horrendous like

      ifconfig | perl -nle 's/dr:(\S+)/print $1/e'

<comment><USER5> And how to delete files older 2 days? Get-Files / | select olderThan 2 | Delete-File ?

But it's not bash, it's coreutils

      find ./ -mtime +2 | xargs rm

<comment><USER6>
        Get-ChildItem -File | Where-Object LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-2) | Remove-Item

If you prefer shorter (and similarly obscure if you don't know the language):

        ls -file|? LastWriteTime -lt ((date)+'-2')|rm

I actually find PowerShell's version more readable, even if more verbose. But code is written only once and read a lot of times. I may not know what the +2 actually _means_ with the -mtime argument. How would I change it to look for the age of two hours instead of days?

<comment><USER5> > I actually find PowerShell's version more readable, even if more verbose.

Sorry, I can't agree with you.

> I may not know what the +2 actually means with the -mtime argument. How > would I change it to look for the age of two hours instead of days?

If you forget or doesn't know what is mtime, you can open man find. For less granularity than days use mmin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >We will be extending the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (MS-PSRP) to use OpenSSH as a native transport. Users will have the option to use SSH or WINRM as a transport.

Is possibly an even bigger announcement (this means there's actual momentum behind [https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH))

<comment><USER8> This is what I have been waiting for right here!

<comment><USER9> yup, me too!

<comment><USER10> I think it might have rolled out already. Turn on Developer Mode in Windows 10 Anniversary Edition, and ssh to port 22 with a valid l/p?

Doesn't look like you even need to install WSL.

<comment><USER11> It looks like they're a little different for now. See the note under here.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get- started/ena...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get- started/enable-your-device-for-development#ssh)

Full Disclosure: I am a MSFT employee.

<comment><USER12> More specifically, I don't want to SSH from a Windows box. I want to SSH into a Windows box (and say figure out a way to easily install a LE cert)

<comment><USER13> There have been ssh servers for windows since forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> PowerShell is interesting, and I don't consider it evil. I know some people swear by it, and I am not one of those people - I'll take my AWK with a side of Ruby/Python, and a helping of SCSH, thank you very much.

It does seem a bit out of place in a UNIX system, though. In Windows, PowerShell ties to a ton of strongly typed databases (SysReg, &c) and windows APIs together into a nice package. But on UNIXes, those APIs are already well exposed elsewhere, and that data doesn't exist. UNIX data is typically stored as text, or can be extracted as such easily. We don't tend to do a lot of binary object munging. I mean, maybe if it integrated with databases, it could at least be handly for dealing with RDBMS scripting, but those bindings are available elsewhere - ruby, perl, python, etc. And MS could build bindings to POSIX, so you'd get a PowerShell version of tools like PS that returned objects, but what are you going to do if you want to munge /etc/fstab, and, say, generate user accounts for all your boot filesystems? I could do that with a line of bash and a few lines of AWK. I don't know why I'd want to, but I could.

So to conclude, PowerShell seems like a neat tool, but it was designed for an ecosystem that doesn't exist on the *nixes.

<comment><USER15> > But on UNIXes, those APIs are already well exposed elsewhere, and that data > doesn't exist.

I'd go with exposed, but not necessarily well. Examples I run into all the time: get an IP from an interface, change iptables entries, even change fstab options. Sure, if you write enough regex, it will probably work most of the time. But it's never going to be as reliable as get_ips('eth0'), or get_filesystem('/tmp').options.add('nosuid').

<comment><USER14> getting an IP is still pretty ugly, somehow:

      ip address show dev eno1|grep 'inet '|cut '-d ' -f6

But I wouldn't call it unreliable. The cut is the only really nasty bit.

Changing your fstab is easy with a little awk:

      $2=="/tmp"{$4=$4 ",nosuid"}
      {print $0}

Given, it won't remove contradicting options...

<comment><USER15> It's unreliable, because you don't know where you'll find 'inet ' or what's the specific spacing of the output. Also, that's not the ip, because you've still got the cidr attached.

And no, fstab is not easy either. For example it fails for:

        # /tmp has option_blah in order to ...

changing it to:

        # /tmp has option_blah,nosuid in order to ...

Confusing the next person to look at the well intended comment.

It's no impossible to implement fairly reliably, it's not going to take days to do, but you're likely make mistakes. And in both cases you're spawning extra processes instead of just getting the information you need.

PS. also slightly annoying is that everyone is so concerned about the text processing part that barely anyone checks what the tool itself can do. (ip -4 -o a s dev eno1 | awk '{print $4}')

<comment><USER14> Oh, I forgot: the comment you showed wouldn't trigger my AWK script. Read it more carefully.

<comment><USER15> Yes it will. If you mean the $2 part, the comment character takes the place of $1. Or did you mean something else? (either way, I tested it before posting)

<comment><USER14> Nope, you're right. I just miscounted.

You could always add

      && $1 != "#"

To fix this, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great! So I can now run bash on windows (with WSL), open tmux, and open powershell prompts in each tab: the loop is complete!

I wish powershell's documentation was a bit more clear about what's powershell 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... Etc.

A lot of time I'd find a verbose and tedious way to do one thing because the code was written in "old powershell", when the latest version had a much more elegant solution (either because of new language features or simply more cmdlets were added, removing the need to fall back to some C# syntax)

On stack overflow it often means read more than the chosen answer, somebody would have added a newer way to do it. I wish Microsoft "hey script guy" blog had some versioning info (this post was last updated in 2016, using powershell 3, see powershell 2 version here)

<comment><USER17> Does tmux work well on Windows? Everything Microsoft has been doing recently with bash on Windows has made me consider buying a surface pro as my next machine.

<comment><USER18> I have Surface Pro 4 i5 and while I personally love it- I can't really recommend it due to various issues (battery life is shit, sleep is bugridden so best to hibernate only). It's uncomfortable as a tablet, and near useless for the main thing ultra light computers are used - traveling a lot.

I use it at home. The pros are a really tiny size, yet it packs sufficient computing power for many things, awesome screen. I can use it at a desk or grab it to the sofa - but I need to keep the power adapter handy.

If the execution was as flawless as Apple's Ipads are it would probably be the best computer ever (by my subjective scoring which appreciates a pen and sRGB precise screen probably way more than the average user).

But as it is - and I'm comparing it to my Ipad pro which makes all the problems stick out like a sore thumb - it's not an obvious recommendation.

<comment><USER17> It really is annoying that the battery issues are so persistent. That's the main thing that has kept me from even going to a store to check one out.

I've been stalking /r/surface and I've been seeing complaints about this for over 6 months. Apparently it's more Intel's fault than Microsoft's, but still very disappointing. I love the form factor and I want to support Microsoft lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Microsoft is projecting that the .NET ecosystem will become a main revenue driver, regardless of the underlying operating system.

<comment><USER20> Which is why I have no doubt the Universal Windows Platform will become the Universal Platform and be a true desktop/tablet/mobile/server/etc Java competitor on all major OS (mobile, traditional and server).

It must be rather frustrating for Microsoft to look back a decade or more and see they were sitting on the exact technology a hell of a lot of people said would be their future had they made it cross-platform from the start. I remember using C# for the first time around 2004 and thinking "god damn if this were cross-platform like Java it would kill Sun". Back then Microsoft couldn't see past the tip of their nose though.

<comment><USER21> Yup, I've been playing around with C# more lately and it's such a good language.

Things like embedding with native code is trivial compared to Java. Want to call a delegate(with extras) from a C function pointer? Sure thing, just specify some syntax and away you go. Marshalling strings? Just works.

Totally a breath of fresh air compared to the mess that is JNI.

<comment><USER22> Me too, back in the first .com wave I had access to early betas and was quite critic of it, nowadays I enjoy using it more than Java.

Although I do still like Java, just don't like having to wait for Java 10 for some of the .NET features already available (possible free AOT compiler, value types, reified generics, JNI replacement).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm always in favor of things being open-sourced, but I do kind of wonder in what universe I would use PowerShell when Bash is readily available.

<comment><USER24> As a full-time Linux user, I have to say that bash is overrated.

For instance, on Windows I could press the up arrow through my history 20x to find a group of commands I want to run, press Enter, then press DOWN for the following command, then enter, then DOWN until I run them all. In Bash, I need to press UP 20x every single time.

Yes, you can customize it a lot, and you can script it but default bash isn't that special to me.

<comment><USER25> You can use control-O for that, which does "execute this command as if I pressed enter, then when it's done bring up the following command in command line prompt". So if you have a set of commands to run that are 20 lines up in history, you can first find them (with 20x UP or by reverse-search), then just control-O control-O control-O control-O ... to execute them one after another.

<comment><USER26> I wasn't aware of this. Thank you.

Not that I've been using Bash and zsh every day for twelve plus years...

<comment><USER27> Twelve? Youngster. I'd guess I'm coming up on thirty years. And I did not know this.

Now the trick is to remember it next time the need comes up. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow. I've been very impressed with Microsoft lately. They could have easily set themselves up as the next IBM, in the sense of being a monolithic corporation relying on corporate practices, but they've been spewing some crazy fun things that shows they're not out of the league yet.

Might just be MY miscontrued perception that microsoft was becoming old/monolithic, but really excited with the direction they are heading.

<comment><USER29> I speak only for myself.

Microsoft have been hugely focused on hiring people who have experience outside the Windows bubble, and have been encouraging cross-pollination of ideas with the OSS world. There are holdouts for the old guard of course (there's still a BU that requires Windows Phones), but I think everyone knows that the Microsoft of old cannot compete today by bringing an attitude that pleasing the CFO is all that matters. There are techies in the boardroom now who are familiar with the early-mover advantages of free software and the importance of the OSS culture to their workers.

So when a company of massive resources, who can see the writing on the wall, decides to hire thousands of people who actively disbelieve in the value of monolithic lock-in and who enjoy using open-source tools, and empowers them to build interesting things without regard to company loyalty, the result is Powershell on Linux and Bash on Windows. Oh, and a whole lot of goodwill amongst the people you had previously alienated.

<comment><USER30> Yet that does not prevent them from harassing the linux world with patent attacks. And claim they love linux nonetheless. Thats like shizo behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm glad that Microsoft is doing stuff like this. But, I can't imagine a lot of Linux users are going to want to use it. As a former Windows developer I always found Power Shell to be lacking in nearly everything I wanted to do on the command line, in fact, I mainly did shell commands on a remote Ubuntu server.

<comment><USER32> Would you mind elaborating on Power Shell's lack? I've never used it so I'm curious to know more.

<comment><USER33> I think the most succinct way of describing it is that UNIX tooling is scatterbrained and at times a little ugly, but each command exits because it solved someone's real-life problem. PS by comparison is a set of tools that try to be all encompassing and solve problems MS devs think people will have.

Our PS repository is full of scripts that do nothing but abstract PS into useful high-level actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> PowerShell's object-passing approach ultimately is a heck of a lot more composable and reusable than the "blobs of text with AWK and SED magic" approach that its predecessors took.

It's somewhat surprising to see people here arguing that the pure text methodology is superior. It's difficult for me to imagine a technically motivated scenario that is improved by having everything dump out inconsistently formatted and specialized plain text.

Great example, ifconfig and netstat. Regular interfaces and an object model over these under the covers is a whole universe better than the ad hoc tabular formats they present.

</comment><comment><USER35> And now PowerShell on Bash on Ubuntu on Windows is a thing.

(Spoiler alert, it doesn't work very well right now. The cursor keeps jumping to the top of the console and overwriting existing text.)

<comment><USER36> No, PowerShell on Bash on Ubuntu on a Windows VM on a Linux host is a thing :)

<comment><USER37> And soon Windows VM's will be able to run inside of other Windows VM's so..... VM's all the way down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Finally! I love the methodology behind PowerShell. It's more verbose than bash, and that's OK to me. The readability and _consistency_ far outweigh the extra characters. Now, I get that coupled with all the flexibility of *nix tooling.

It's going to be a long road to hook everything up, but this has the chance to finally standardize command parameters.

I'm sorry. This is truly amazing to me and I'm quite excited!

<comment><USER39> I Can Only See One Problem With PowerShell :)

<comment><USER40> Powershell is case-insensitive, so feel free to avoid that shift key if you're so inclined :)

<comment><USER39> Been using PS for a long time and I had no idea about this. Thanks !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Having powershell + bash on linux lets me compare this way:

powershell, 14 pids(threads?), 3119M Virt size, 80160kb Resident.

bash, 1 pid, 22068kb Virt, 3976kb Resident.

And this is simply starting the process to an idle prompt.

This is on a Debian 8 64bit system. (using their Ubuntu 14.04 binary)

<comment><USER42> I'm not a huge fan of PowerShell but you're not really making a good comparison here. Bash is "just a shell" that executes commands with a few bits of syntactic sugar here and there to make it easier to string those commands together and perform some primitive logic.

PowerShell is basically an _interpreter_ that works more like a Java Virtual Machine. Consider the hypothetical example that you need to lookup 100 users in an LDAP directory from Bash: You run the openldap command 100 times in a loop. That's 100 processes that need to fork and quit in a serial fashion in order to perform the task at hand.

To do the same thing in PowerShell you'll be calling a native PowerShell LDAP API which will execute all 100 lookups without having to fork any separate process resulting in a vastly faster execution.

It's better to think of PowerShell like the Python or Ruby interpreters. IMHO, PowerShell is a vastly superior improvement to cmd.exe _as a shell_ but on a Unix host it will be inferior to bash for day-to-day tasks.

<comment><USER43> So I wonder how it compares to having the python interpreter open.

According to my machine, running the python interpreter results in 1 PID, 129M virt, 4.6M res.

<comment><USER41> Using java + jython, results in 15 pids, 2010M Virt / 196M Res.

Jython is probably the more apt comparison, vs the compiled interpreter. But, it falls into the same trap as powershell: You couldn't invoke jython in a loop like you would 'python' or 'perl'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Cool! I'm having a play with it and it seems to work really nicely. Does anyone know why the following commands don't produce the same output?

        get-childitem | ConvertTo-Csv
        get-childitem | ConvertTo-Json | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Csv

It seems like, if there's a perfect underlying data model doing what's effectively an identity conversion shouldn't change anything.

Edit oooo, and all the linux stuff is available within it too. So you can run this to just augment your linux experience.

        ls | grep '_' | ConvertTo-Json

<comment><USER45> I don't have a powershell handy, but one thing that might be causing changes is that json dictionaries usually don't have a defined order (parsing libraries are free to render the keys of a dictionary in any order); are the changes you're seeing just ordering changes?

<comment><USER46> If you have a Docker Host, you can simply run: docker run --rm -it trevorsullivan/powershell

To clean up the image after you're done:

docker rmi trevorsullivan/powershell

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Powershell is the first language where I managed to save time by writing a program for a task. Needless to say, I'm thrilled at the prospect of using it on Linux. The only thing that I hope they will need to work on is startup time making sure it performs well on low-spec servers (It can be a bit slow starting cold on older laptops).

        ls -Recurse | ? { $_.Name -match ".+docx" }

<comment><USER48> I am not sure what your example does. How does it differ from

find . -name " _.docx "

ls -Recurse | ? { $_.Name -match ".+docx" }

And, if these are the same, why type in twice as many characters as a command? Actually,

ls -R | grep "\\.docx$"

is, I think, closer in spirit.

Now, the issue is things further in the pipeline, I imagine. The find solution allows selection on type name, type, date, depth, mounts, properties, file system type, ownership, relative age, inode, symbolic link. find actions include delete, exec, print, quit. This can pass on needed information to further pipeline commands.

However, an interactive shell is meant to allow expression of commands with a reasonable minimum of keyboarding (thus ls and not dir). I could argue that the "Unix" command should be

find . -n "_.docx"

(because the most common -n... option used is -name).

I think, to be fully reasonable the find command you want is

find . -regex ".*\\.docx$"

which is still shorter than the PS example. I am not sure that for most interactive tasks, PS is a win. It does appear to be more elegant, but only usage over time will show if it is indeed more productive. I am looking for academic productive studies to be done, now that both bash and PS are available on common platforms.

<comment><USER2> If you're just talking about ls/dir, then PowerShell isn't really a win. The advantages are clearer when you start talking about lots and lots of commands. A lot (but not all!) Unix tools have flags to control their output format or input filters, but that means you have to memorize different flags for all of them. OTOH, in PS you just pipe to where/sort/select and they work for everything. IMO PowerShell has better separation of concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've been hoping for a fully-featured Linux version of Powershell for a while, very awesome. I've used various Linux distributions for a long time and find bash very practical usually, but when I started learning Powershell when working in Windows environments I've been impressed with how easy it was to do some powerful stuff, and felt conflicted since I wanted to be able to use similar functionality and scripts across Linux/Windows.

<comment><USER50> Powershell isn't competing with bash, it's competing with Python. So then, how does it compare against Python? While plenty of small scripts are still done with bash, I think Python is pretty common for serious production needs. I use it for virtually all scripting these days.

I had a recent experience where a developer spent a day and couldn't get Powershell's webrequest library to do what he wanted. I was able to accomplish the goal in 15 minutes with Python on a Debian system.

<comment><USER49> Sure, there are different ways to do various things, especially depending on what one is familiar with and what the task at hand is. It sounds more like you knew how to get something done with your tools faster than the other guy/gal in this case. :)

<comment><USER50> There are obviously many factors such as domain knowledge and language familiarity. I respect the developer who failed to do this in Powershell, he's very capable.

In this case, I would chalk it up to Python having a longer history and being more mature. Neither of us were particularly familiar with this domain, but because of the quality of Python's online community and documentation, it wasn't difficult to accomplish the goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> "If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won." \- Linus Torvalds

</comment><comment><USER52> For Fedora 24 users:

So some reason, the rpm that Microsoft provides doesn't list all the dependencies that it actually requires. What is even worse, the compiled binaries inside, require quite outdated versions of icu & openssl that are not available in Fedora 24 any more.

What I've come up w/ to force poweshell to run:

      # dnf install icu lldb lldb-devel lttng-tools lttng-ust

To view what we're still missing:

      $ find /opt/microsoft/powershell -name \*.so -type f | xargs ldd 2>/dev/null | grep not\ found
    	    libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
    	    libicuuc.so.50 => not found
    	    libicui18n.so.50 => not found

(libcypto* is openssl-libs package, libicu* is libicu.)

Now, you need to manually download:

[http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/r...](http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/17/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/o/openssl-1.0.0i-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm)

(Yes, it's Fedora 17 == 2012 (!), which is ridiculous.)

[http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/r...](http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/19/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/l/libicu-50.1.2-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm)

and extract usr/lib64/* files from both rpms to, say, /opt/tmp/lib64.

Then finally run:

      $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/tmp/lib64 powershell
      PowerShell
      Copyright (C) 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

      PS /home/hf> $PSVersionTable

      Name                           Value
      ----                           -----
      PSVersion                      6.0.0-alpha
      PSEdition                      Core
      PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
      BuildVersion                   22.214.171.124
      GitCommitId                    v6.0.0-alpha.9
      CLRVersion
      WSManStackVersion              3.0
      PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
      SerializationVersion           18.104.22.168

It's a very strange feeling to see "Copyright (C) 2016 Microsoft Corporation" in xterm, if you ask me.

<comment><USER7> The build scripts for PowerShell right now require an existing powershell binary to work. If I can untangle this and work out what's required to build from scratch, then that'll probably help you build a proper Fedora RPM.

(I'm looking into it for Debian, but the work will help other distros, too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've been working on this for some time now, and am ecstatic to share this project with the world!

</comment><comment><USER54> That is awesome. Truly an inspired set of changes at Microsoft lately.

<comment><USER55> Indeed

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598)

<comment><USER56> If people could be relied upon to maintain their own systems and apply security and other updates, this wouldn't be a problem. The unfortunate reality, is that they can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> PowerShell is an improvement on Bash, but I'll still be using F# .fsx files for my .NET scripting needs. That said, the real reason I'm excited about this release is that there's finally a great example of a very large project based on .NET Core [1]! Most other examples I'd seen were pretty small, so this is really helpful.

[1] [https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell](https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell)

<comment><USER58> Can you share advantages or powershell improvements over Bash ? or is it kind of over-statement?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> PowerShell is one of Microsoft's better offerings, it runs rings around Batch, thank heaven. However, it has its own quirks. Loads and loads of stuff done implicitly (unwrapping arrays as parameters when constructing an object?) and the .Net integration can be annoyingly flaky. Add in the bizarre syntax, some kind of halfway house between Bash and C#, and you quickly end up writing enough code to hang yourself.

My favourite: defining functions more or less like any other C-inspired language: function abc([string]$param1, [string]$param2) { #do stuff }

...but if you CALL that like any other C-inspired language: abc("string1", "string2)

PowerShell mashes the two strings together and ignores the second parameter. Drove me mad when I started out. Incredibly inconsistent.

I like Microsoft's effort here, and the design is a lot better, working with objects, but not on my Devuan box!!

</comment><comment><USER46> You can run PowerShell Core inside of a Docker container quite easily as well.

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/msftazure/Run-PowerShell- Nat...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/msftazure/Run-PowerShell-Natively-on- Linux-with-Docker)

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm something of an OO zealot and I'm a C# developer so I'm familiar with PS and probably it's target audience so to speak.

PS is a fantastic product but I just find it too verbose. When everything is expressed as an object with properties you need to reference the object and the appropriate property. I know there are alias' for common Bash operations and idiomatic PSallows shortcuts but most people who use PS for short spells to automate something are unlikely to be adopting idiomatic styles.

For PS to gain traction I feel like it needs to be a superset of Bash and offer an easier, intuitive gateway. I know it has enormous potential, I know it has massive capabilities but still I only reach for it as a last resort. I don't think I'm alone in the matter :/

</comment><comment><USER61> I like Microsoft's move here. They first made available bash on Windows and then PowerShell on Linux. So no one is going to cry. And now they will improve PowerShell and win over users with a good tool rather than just because that's the only one available.

</comment><comment><USER62> Powershell is an old tech, so browsing the source tree on github should show some of MS internal practices & guidelines in the old times. Yet the github project start in feb 2015. Where is the source code before that ?

<comment><USER63> On some interal MS RCS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> But why? It's like if VW invents doors that can be connected to BMW cars. (spoiler: BMW cars already have doors)

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't understand Microsoft any more. They are making all their proprietary lock-in stuff open source, and they are alienating their user base. I've heard a number of long-term Microsoft users express frustration the user experience (not to mention the Windows 10 upgrade shenanigans). It was bad enough that my dad, a long-time lover of Windows NT (he liked its VMS legacy) switched to a Mac and loves it.

I feel like Microsoft might be pulling a Sun here. However, I'm sure a lot more likely to use Microsoft stuff if I'm not tied in to Windows.

<comment><USER66> As a counterpoint, I've been a full-time Linux user (desktop and server) for well over 10 years, with server use for 20. (I'm 40, so while others have used Linux/unix longer than me, this is the entirety of my adult working life.)

With the open-sourced .NET stuff, I've been active in pushing for projects I touch to use it. And, I now dual-boot Windows 10 and Linux, actually using Windows for daily work for the first time in a decade.

Open source C#? Sign me up. And I really do like the Windows 10 interface. The telemetry stuff just doesn't bother me. I think it's largely a red herring.

(And, furthermore, I think privacy stuff really has to get nailed down in laws and society, not just with technology. Going just for a technical solution means you'll always be chasing the answer. Encoding it in laws, and setting people's societal expectations, means you get to set the answer instead of follow behind.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Finally! It's exactly what we need since there are currently no scripting languages available in Unix user-land for when you need to do something beyond /bin/bash

<comment><USER68> Poe's law

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> _The initial release is an "alpha" and is community supported. In the future, we will deliver an official Microsoft released version of PowerShell based on open source to anyone running a supported version of Windows or nix. The timing of the official Microsoft version will be based upon community input and business needs. We hope all of you will help us get it right!_

'Based on business needs' = if there's ever enough demand.

Still, pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER70> Windows can have a neat-o shell all they want but when you open powershell on a windows computer you still get the following when you try to ssh... so, not really seeing the point here:

ssh : The term 'ssh' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1

<comment><USER71> see: [https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH). ssh is coming, likely in an official capacity in the future (this is an official MS group on github)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Having lived around the Windows world since Win 3.1, I cannot get over the sneaking suspicion that somewhere deep down Microsoft is working towards an attempt to "embrace and extend" Linux. Maybe it's just me, but they've gotten rather interested in Linux lately and they are reaching out to it in seemly innocuous ways. I hope I am wrong.

</comment><comment><USER73> I just spent all day trying to figure out why Invoke-SqlCmd only works in certain extremely convoluted ways. I'm going to assume this has more to do with the Sql Server team than it does to do with the powershell team, but still: I cannot be excited about anything to do with Powershell since I'm now up to like 10 Googles per line.

</comment><comment><USER74> Strongly-typed scripting is nice, but I think PowerShell has horrid syntax. I would rather take .fsx scripts any day.

<comment><USER74> (.fsx scripts are F#, so also strongly typed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I think PS is miles above CMD but there are still things that bug me. For one, loading scripts into the current session is super confusing to me. Sometimes they are automatically available, other times I have to load them, still others aren't available at all. I'm guessing there is some way to "install" scripts so that they become cmdlets but I don't know what it is.

Another big problem I've had is backgrounding commands. There are multiple ways to do it and I always seem to pick the wrong one. For example, I want to install a bunch of things with Chocolate so I do a lot of Start-Process commands, but they seem to run serially and not in parallel. It's just very difficult to manage jobs in PS, or at least I haven't found any good information on how to do it properly.

</comment><comment><USER76> OK, so you can finally fix the bug that breaks non-ASCII, LF line endings and binary redirection. Link: [https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/1908](https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/1908)

</comment><comment><USER77> A lot of people seem to be missing the point of PowerShell. The concept is far more poweful than the unix shells, because it's a superset of them. It's like Haskell and Haskell-without-types.

We could only dream we had something like strongly-typed pipes in Unix -- and that various tools supported it too.

</comment><comment><USER78> It's amazing what happens when a company starts to lose market share, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER79> I've got this embarrassingly ugly perl-inside-cygwin to automate something with a GUI tool that happens to have an even worse scripting plugin.

I suspect Powershell would allow me to take the whole process native?

</comment><comment><USER80> I dreaded this day would come. As a recent ex-Microsoft alumnus, and with years of System Center insanity behind my back, I saw this coming, and even heard faint echoes of it in the hallways as I left.

I have deep respect for Jeffrey and what he's accomplished (there's a great video of Jeffrey talking to Linux sysadmins and explaining the genesis of PowerShell, including the insane amount of money we burned before he wrote the bits that actually worked over Christmas break), but the grand (corporate) motivation for sponsoring something like this is more driven towards making sure the MS datacenter management tooling (which comprises trendy things like OMS and System Center) attain minimal mindshare in both the on-premises datacenter and on Azure.

That is not something most people would care about, but Enterprise IT likes having a single hammer for all its nails, and PowerShell's promise is to be the one thing that your garden variety IT sysadmin would love to use to automate every single system in your company.

Ironically, PS is effectively lousy at automation because of its inconsistent error handling and incredibly hard to maintain over time due to constant changes and updates, so I'm curious to see how it will evolve to manage all the different abstractions in the UNIX world (knowing my former colleagues, it will likely follow the OMS route of "Windowzifying" those abstractions and making them "uniform" \- i.e., Windows-like).

The underlying issue where it regards PowerShell is not the language itself (although yes, something better, more coherent and with an actual standard library would have been nice, like Ruby or Python). It's Windows.

Windows (the enterprise platform) has always been a hectic patchwork of multiple components (AD, SQL, IIS, etc.) that evolve at their own pace, and PowerShell grew to encompass them not merely because basic automation was an actual checkbox we had to have to be able to sign some hefty deals, but, technically because _none of it had open APIs_. Nor would it be feasible at the time to go back and re-do any of it with proper language-agnostic APIs.

It's very nice to iterate over AD entries and set some fields with a couple of lines of PowerShell, yes. But it's also fundamentally impossible to do so with just about anything else.

Tying it all to the .NET stack (which is still prevalent in everything done internally, because that's what customers invested in) turned out to be a lazy-ass way to ensure we could check all the boxes in terms of automating new things as they came along (mostly - WMI is still iffy). Effective and "scriptable", but essentially still proprietary.

And right now, since my former colleagues are betting the farm on Azure, I expect PS for Linux to become the de facto scripting language for managing Linux on it (it already is, to a degree, since PowerShell DSC already lets you "manage" Linux VMs).

For interactive use, PS was a pain to learn (I was a VMS guy, originally), but, most importantly, it was a nightmare to maintain, because cmdlets would pop up and disappear between releases, change semantics, and were quite often inconsistent among themselves.

I shudder at the level of technical debt would-be adopters will be buying into, and wish them luck.

<comment><USER81> mod parent up!

(sorry, all this MS vs. Linux discussion brought me back to the slashdot days)

Seriously, powershell finally makes sense to me after reading this. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I am pretty excited about this as I have few cross-platform languages that I can use (due to conditions at work). I am wondering how many distros will adopt it into their repos.

<comment><USER83> I fully expect this to be in the AUR in under a week. Probably within 48 hours, even.

<comment><USER83> ...and it's already in the AUR. It doesn't run yet, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Get-CobolFingers -Variant=Microsoft -Payoff=MuchLessThanAdvertised

<comment><USER85>
        Get-Cob{tab}{tab} -v{tab} M{tab} -P{tab}{tab} M{tab}

cmdlet long parameter names both a) work if you type "the shortest non- clashing prefix", and b) tab complete. And if a parameter takes an enumeration you can tab complete those, too. Which is incredibly nicer than usage: somecmd -umhcglsrfmh line noise and man page lookups.

<comment><USER86> Actually, you can ctrl+space in latest versions to get a list of parameters (or values if the parameter takes an enumeration) you can scroll around with the arrow keys :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Is there anything preventing Microsoft from putting a Linux shell natively on Windows? I'm sure PowerShell is awesome, but the DevOps person in me is not excited at all.

<comment><USER88> this x100. i wish they'd work on chef/puppet/ansible/salt support instead. probably never going to happen though, so much functionality in windows isn't available from the command line.

<comment><USER85> Yeah, probably never happen. You'd never see J. Snover the 'father of PowerShell' at ChefConf last year talking about PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and its support for Chef ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh9zfm5gVEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh9zfm5gVEg)) or two years ago the PowerShell team announcing a DSC Cookbook for Chef ([https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2014/07/29/chef-...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2014/07/29/chef- with-powershell-dsc-now-public/)) or last year announcing Puppet's announcement of support for PowerShell DSC ( [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2015/10/06/desir...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2015/10/06/desired- state-configuration-puppet/) )

You know that the entire point of PowerShell is to make Windows functionality available from the command line, for centralised management and configuration, for automated provisioning on Azure, right?

<comment><USER88> I think we have different definitions of support. What constantly amazes me is how similar many OSes are - except Windows. DSC hasn't changed that, even though Mr. Snover is a very clever guy. If you're in a homogeneous environment, DSC is probably great. But it's 2016, and environments are heterogenous. Even shipping an SSH client and server with Windows would go a long way as far as interop goes - which may be happening AFAIK (OK, I admit I love SSH, but it's so useful). PowerShell feels a lot like the xkcd n+1 standards thing. I don't use bash any more, but it (along with ash/dash) is the de facto standard.

Sorry I can't get more excited about this, which is especially sad because my background is QBasic -> VB -> C#.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> In the fifth paragraph: "But this is a new Microsoft". They are acknowledging that they made mistakes in the past due to which the missed out big on the server market. As much as .NET is popular, it would have been a lot more popular (vs Java ecosystem) if they were OSS from the beginning. As primarily a Java developer, C# seems more elegant to code in.

As they say - the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem.

</comment><comment><USER90> the Unix shell has been quite static in recent decades; its a sign of success, sharing unstructured text through a pipe is good enough for most administration tasks and people got used to the many command line options of grep/sed/ps and friends.

is this really the best of all possible worlds? I think that its good that the shells get some new competition in the form of PowerShell - maybe some new ideas will come out of it (maybe like passing s-expressions or json around the pipe - something more structured so that we could do with fewer command line options - maybe)

doing structured data 'right' is difficult (right meaning uniform and expressive ways of handling it); historically it was easier to stick with unstructured text - but maybe there is a better way that would be easier to learn and handle.

(Well a major problem of structured data is that there are many possible ways of structuring - leading to more problems for the consumer of the data; maybe it was not adopted in system administration because there is not common/agreed upon culture of how to structure things).

</comment><comment><USER91> Excellent news. Now I might actually learn PowerShell

</comment><comment><USER92> Its not clear to me what this means to Powershell SDK? ([https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ff458115.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ff458115.aspx)). Will I be able to write applications (not scripts) in say C++ to communicate to say SCVMM?

</comment><comment><USER93> Great. I wonder what Steve Ballmer is thinking.

<comment><USER94> Ballmer's long gone, so he's probably thinking about the LA Clippers (he's the owner).

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Still need something other than powershell to access a linux server from a windows machine, which seems ironic...

ssh : The term 'ssh' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1

<comment><USER6> What would a shell have to do with the existence of a userland program? ssh isn't exactly a bash built-in either ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> An (unofficial) PowerShell AppImage is now available for anyone interested in trying out PowerShell. No installation necessary. [https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/PowerShell#files](https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/PowerShell#files)

</comment><comment><USER96>
      milek7: ~$ time powershell exit

      real	0m3.323s
      user	0m4.140s
      sys	0m0.507s

Seriously?

<comment><USER96> Propably bit unfair comprasion, but...:

      milek7: ~$ time bash -c exit

      real	0m0.009s
      user	0m0.007s
      sys	0m0.000s

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Can I write tools that use PowerShell and .NET objects in non-.NET languages, like Python or Perl (using the C implementations, not a .net python)? Like, is there an API that I can implement to interact to implement PowerShell-like "native" tools?

<comment><USER98> It's not the most efficient way to do it, but if you just want to get it done, Powershell has had e.g. ConvertTo-Json since version 3, I think? You can serialize pretty much anything at that point, and just hand that off to your target language.

If you're talking an FFI though, not so much, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> On the Java side here I tend to use groovyConsole when I need to do crazy one off stuff like open excel files which then require a DB query, and maybe to run regexs for little things. I use bash for running docker commands in a specific sequence.

</comment><comment><USER100> I made a Docker container running PowerShell on CentOS7: [http://github.com/gbraad/docker-mono](http://github.com/gbraad/docker-mono) Have fun with it...

</comment><comment><USER101> Coming soon to Debian: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=834756](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=834756).

</comment><comment><USER102> If PowerShell on Linux takes off properly, then that will lead to one of the biggest improvements in the general computing ecosystem in a long time; roughly comparable to the adoption of DVCS, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER103> `cat youCantBeWorseThanCmdRight.utf8.txt > openMeAfter.txt` in PowerShell and cmd, and tell me how good posh is

now go tail a 1GB file in posh and bash and tell us your results

<comment><USER6> PowerShell defaults to UTF-16 encoding, indeed. It's a design choice on a system that uses UTF-16LE as its character encoding and one from the early 2000s. UTF-8 wasn't nearly as prevalent back then. However, the _text_ in both files is still the same.

        Get-Content -Tail some1gbfile.txt

works quite well, by the way.

<comment><USER103> well, enjoy typing

        Get-Content -Encoding utf8 .\utf8.txt | Out-File -Encoding utf8 out.txt

and manually removing the BOM, for the rest of your life

<comment><USER6> It's still the same text. Not all of us have to deal with tools that can't handle Unicode or require exact byte-for-byte round trips. Yes, it bugs me too, from time to time, although less so than the extra line break at the end. In that case I have to go through [IO.File]::ReadAllText and ::WriteAllText and thus deal with full paths again. There are a few gotchas.

 _However_ , by now we can actually _fix_ that issue. The encoding parameter that the file system provider adds to a bunch of cndlets is an enum and we _can_ add a new value there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> I am still trying to understand if there are any tangible benefits on learning powershell over bash/zsh.

<comment><USER105> I wouldn't think of it as a replacement for bash/zsh or other shells. Those are meant to control the OS and run programs where powershell is an environment to programatically interact with API's. They can both fill similar roles but their not the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Piggybacking on this thread, I wonder if there's a robust PowerShell profiler out there.

</comment><comment><USER107> I bought a new laptop recently, and used Windows for a little while (I didn't have time or a USB drive handy for installing Linux for a couple of weeks). I was pleasantly surprised at PowerShell. Not because of all the stuff people normally like about PowerShell; all the PS things are still confusing as hell, to me. But, because MS has embraced compromise and meeting developers where they are in ways that I have never seen from MS until recently.

PowerShell now accepts most of the common UNIX shell commands (this feature could have come at any point in the past decade, or so, as that's how long it has been since I last tried PowerShell, when it was new). The changes that resulted from that change of mindset has made it so I could actually stay in PowerShell long enough to learn other things. Having to re-train my muscle memory away from using stuff like ls, cp, cd, was just a bridge too far, and so in the past I'd revert to cmd (as truly awful as it is) until I could get bash installed from Cygwin.

They seem to have, somewhere along the way (again, it may have been a decade ago, for all I know) given PowerShell a reasonable UNIX shell facade. Sure, it's not quite shell, but bash/POSIX shell isn't flawless; I'm OK with changes, as long as I don't have to think every time I want to do basic stuff that I've been doing for 20+ years with a POSIX or bash shell. PowerShell has some Long-Ass-Command-Names, and I still find them difficult to stomach, but at least all the common sh equivalents (except _which_ , for some reason) already have aliases.

Anyway, the change from a company that tells developers how to work (and for whom the command line takes a back seat to GUI tools and most developers live in the Visual Studio environment, I guess) to one that looks at what's working in all sorts of developer communities and borrows liberally from the best of them, means that having to work on Windows is no longer the worst possible thing I can imagine (I'm even considering porting our products to Windows, which is a suggestiong I have laughed at numerous times over the years).

PowerShell, as it is today, reflects that change, and open sourcing so much stuff lately seems to prove it is sincere rather than merely aping the most visible traits of these OSS communities without actually embracing the single most important facet of them.

I still have an old OSS nerds suspicion of Microsoft, and I will probably never choose Windows as my favorite desktop OS (and I can't even _imagine_ it for server usage...how would you even do that without a decent system package manager?), but my most recent experience with Windows was almost entirely positive. Interoperability has gotten pretty good. SSH is a normal thing, rather than a complicated setup process.

It's interesting, to me, that Apple seems to have been retreating on these fronts. They seem to be less interested in participating in OSS than they were in the early days of Mac OS X. That may be my own ignorance of the platform, but I don't see Apple making these kinds of overtures to Linux/UNIX developers on such a regular basis. Maybe they figure the community is taking care of it for them, because so many devs use Apple laptops even while deploying to Linux servers, so the ecosystem is still pretty strong even without Apple doing much of the work.

<comment><USER108> "and I can't even imagine it for server usage...how would you even do that without a decent system package manager?"

I'd be pretty hesitant myself to use it as a web-facing server. But if you're running an enterprise network, the reality is almost everything you need on your server can be added and removed from the "Add Roles and Features" wizard. There's not a whole ton of outside packages you would want to add.

If your server is running third party software, you should probably only run that one piece of software on that particular server, and that software should install everything it needs to run on it's own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Powershell released in 2016 still isnt as powerful as Stephen R. Bourne's shell released in 1971.

</comment><comment><USER110> Is this actually useful?

I always thought powershell was largely just for interacting with windows components, like installing an msi or talking to active directory.

What would you actually practically use this for on a linux box?

<comment><USER111> Scripting. While I typically use Bash on Windows to use grep to interactively test my webserver, I'm much happier using Powershell ISE (which I don't know was ported [1]) to write standard tests with multiple parts, particularly ones that require e.g. checking cookies on the response.

1\. Looks like they ported a service that does the same. [https://github.com/powershell/powershelleditorservices](https://github.com/powershell/powershelleditorservices)

<comment><USER110> Can you be more specific?

Powershell instead of using grep? Or as a testing framework? Or an embedded interactive REPL?

I mean, just broadly, with basically zero knowledge of powershell, what I see is a custom scripting language with a set of common 'macro' commandlets that do little tasks.

...but, I don't see how that's useful?

How do you import a package to upload a file to S3?

I can't just install [https://aws.amazon.com/powershell/](https://aws.amazon.com/powershell/) right? ...because that's not ported? So...? etc. etc. for other practical tasks.

Not trolling; just genuinely curious what actual tasks are actually supported that you could actually use this for, beyond trivial stuff like 'check if file exists'?

<comment><USER112> We are currently performing final validation on our new AWSPowerShell.NetCore module and hope to publish it to the PowerShell Gallery in the next couple of days.

Blog post to the announcement: [http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/net/post/TxTUNCCDVSG05F/Introduc...](http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/net/post/TxTUNCCDVSG05F/Introducing- AWS-Tools-for-PowerShell-Core-Edition).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> symbolic soft link yet?

</comment><comment><USER114> People laugh at me when I tell them I switched "back" to Windows after decades of Unix and Mac programming. But it's a really good, productive platform. Microsoft really seems to be heading in the right direction now.

I hope .NET starts taking off on other platforms, too, because it really is a much better system than Brand "J".

<comment><USER115> If only they resolve the privacy leakage concerns in a reasonable manner.

<comment><USER116> In the Windows 10 thread someone posted this hilarious comic: [http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational- charts/](http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/)

We just have to hope that "our" guys (OSSers) have bigger guns than "those" guys (privacy destroyers).

<comment> UK-AL Considering most OSS devs slam analytics on literally every website. Really there isn't much difference.

That's what windows is sending. Analytics information. Yet I can guarantee every major website developed by open source using devs is sending the same information for their apps. Yet no one complains.

<comment><USER116> Look at the comic. I'm talking about divisions inside Microsoft. I doubt it very much that Scott Hanselman (for example), who is in the camp that pushes Microsoft to open up, is the kind of person that designed the privacy controls (or their lack) in Windows 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> I don't want to be that smug ITT guy but it has to be said:

Bash != Readline and Bash != coreutils and Bash != (what gives your machine the ability to do ssh)

Bash _is_ the stupid if for while syntax

You have Readline in powershell and you can use coreutils binaries in Powershell. No problems there.

</comment><comment><USER118> Powershell is a horrible abortion, what the hell do people see in it? I mean that on a language level, I cant speak for Windows specific features. I have once written a simple script to copy a folder recursively to a fileshare, rename some stuff, edit some files. Took me 4-5 hours. I then did it with julia in 30 minutes and I never did anything in either language before that. It's insane the kind of weird language crap you have to deal with, the weird options that some functions need and worst of all: That the functions have weird problems, like I dont remember the specifics but I'm pretty sure that the folder copy function had no option to actually recursively copy all of them. I had to work around that. Then I had to work around some more specifics around file/folders. In a normal language you would just call something like "copyFolder(srcPath, dstPath, recursive: true)" nope.

<comment><USER119> I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "horrible abortion" \- but it can be painful to use at times. I manage several Azure environments with PowerShell and not a day goes by that I don't wish there was something better. Especially on those days when I have to dig into Azure's JSON templates.

There is an SDK for Python, but I haven't had an opportunity to try it. If anyone has used it I would love to hear about your experience.

<comment><USER120> There are the Azure REST APIs that you can curl. Or the Azure-CLI on Linux and Windows.

That said, I've noticed that powershell seems to get priority with Azure support before the azure-Cli client, so there are a few gaps here and there. I've been told that the Azure REST APIs are all in step with Powershell support, but sometimes go in documented unfortunately.

<comment><USER119> To be honest, I prefer PS to the Azure CLI but I have had to resort to the CLI on a couple of occasions. If I remember correctly it was to reset credentials on a VM (which wasn't possible with PS at the time). I guess the main problem with the CLI is that it's not a shell or a general purpose programming language.

The Azure REST API requires a ton of deeply nested JSON data structures. Take a look at this [1] sample. I just can't bring myself to work with that every day.

I really need to buckle down and try that python API.

[1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/azure/mt163591.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/azure/mt163591.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> This might come across as a little rude, but I really wish Windows developers stayed away from Unix. I moved away from Windows a long time ago because I didn't want anything to do with Windows or Microsoft, and I went to great lengths to avoid their software and their proprietary file formats. Now we had command-line interfaces, desktop environments, running on top of an incredible, powerful Unix-like OS. It was free software, and it was Microsoft- free. Please, don't ruin it.

<comment><USER122> I have to agree. I can only feel like this is pollution or another EEE attempt.

<comment><USER123> Tell me how well EEE works with an optional application released on Github with an MIT license will work.

<comment><USER124> GitHub is just the distribution here, and software licenses are subject to change. That's the embrace portion.

Hypothetically, Powershell becomes widely used on Unix, and Microsoft releases Powershell 2, which extends Powershell. This version only runs on Windows and contains killer features. These new features can't be implemented from the GitHub source either technically or because of intellectual property. That's the extinguish step.

<comment><USER123> So then you switch back to another shell?

<comment><USER124> Yes, or you buy Windows. That's the purpose of EEE.

That's similar to saying, use a different word processor. Just in this case Powershell is less used than Microsoft Word.

<comment><USER123> The purpose of EEE is to extinguish a technology. Your situation doesn't hold up because PowerShell is MIT licensed. Even is Microsoft did release a new version that was Windows only (which, given their use case, makes no sense), there's nothing stopping the community from forking the repo and adding those features, or porting those features to another technology.

People will continue to trumpet the sound EEE banner every time Microsoft does something that people like. The problem is that waging an EEE campaign with MIT licensed technologies on Github is extremely ineffective. Also, it's pretty clear that while Windows is still a big part of Microsoft, they are trying to move beyond the desktop. The rise of macOS, the proliferation of mobile devices with iOS and Android, all these developments have caused the company to shift its strategy to the cloud, namely Azure. Even in that space, they can't wage an EEE campaign, because with competitors like Amazon and Google, there's no way they can lock you into Azure

Times have changed, and so has the company's strategy. Whether or not the company's culture has changed is not something I am concerned with. They have enough watchers that call them out, like with the Windows 10 update debacle and the collection of telemetry data. I am more interested in their actions with regards to their technology, because it's my opinion that have some of the best people working on languages and tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> Cool. [https://powershell.org/](https://powershell.org/) needs some work though. It screams WordPress 2008 website, and I'm not given any idea how to install or use it, or what it's good for, just by looking at the front page.

<comment><USER126> It is not a Microsoft website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

<comment><USER128> This could really be used as the default reply for a lot comments here that don't get why people are still a bit antsy about MS apparently doing things for the good of others besides MS. But it's probably an argument only worth having in one thread. I can't really add much to the argument, other than I think my feeling matches a lot of others in the OSS world: ever since Nadella took the helm I've been cautiously optimistic that we're not just part of a very long embrace+extend cycle that will end with a crushing extinguish, additionally as the years go by without an attempt at extinguishing but even more embracing+extending instead, with MS having lost so much of its former power and weight in the industry as a whole, I think even an extinguish attempt wouldn't be all that successful. It's not enough for me to actually use these offerings, but I'm not going to go on a rant that no one should use them or distros should avoid packaging them. (e.g. Stallman once had a Mono+Banshee rant that was probably justified at the time but it's hard to argue the position now.)</comment></comment>


We find 1k leaks/day on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GitGuardian/Getting-Started-With-The-Individual-App <comment><USER2> Neat, I'd like to add this to my Company's GitHub repos, we already pay for a couple of GitHub integrations and this sounds useful...

> Pricing:

> Contact sales

Nope.</comment>


60 Minutes: What is "brain hacking"? Tech insiders on why you should care - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brain-hacking-tech-insiders-60-minutes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Further, listen to the latest RadioWest podcast about addictive technology: [http://radiowest.kuer.org/post/rise-addictive- technology](http://radiowest.kuer.org/post/rise-addictive-technology)</comment>


Upload, download and perform on-the-fly operations on your files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/postput/postput <comment><AUTHOR> I'm actively working on this project on looking forward any feedback on it :)</comment>


Ask HN: How much time do you spend hustling? - <AUTHOR> If you are a consultant, freelancer or in any other sense not a full time employee at a megacorp, how much time do you find yourself hustling for new work (i.e., networking with people, trying out new technologies, improving your online profile etc)? <comment><USER2> Pretty much all of my time. We're a small shop. I network like crazy, both paid and free networks. If you have to choose, always go with paid. I also setup lunches with potential partners, clients and people who know people. About 3-5 lunches a week. It has a compounding effect and people will start referring others your way after a while.

My company's website is solid and it's purpose is to confirm that what I tell people is real. My online profile is also thought through.

Trying out new technologies isn't relevant, that's improving your skills as a SE. The others in my shop get to do this on a more regular basis since they hardly have to do any sales / networking.

</comment><comment><USER3> ABC. Always be closing. Closing on skills, demos, phone calls, e-mails.

Just finished a Node.js "assessment" for a job opportunity and uploaded it to my Github. I may never touch it again, but there it is.

<comment><USER4> Where do you find these assessments?

<comment><USER3> This is the "homework" that is often given out by organizations looking to hire people that filters out those who "can" and those who "cannot."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jeb Blount recommends an hour daily for prospecting > [https://youtu.be/hfGqPHWv9b4](https://youtu.be/hfGqPHWv9b4)

</comment><comment><USER6> 0... the best side business is the one without clients...

<comment><USER7> What is a business without clients?

<comment><USER6> Mine is stock trading robots, basically I am going against everyone else... no clients, no investors, location independent and completely automated... Just the best thing I can come up with, but I am open to other similar ideas, since I have a lot of free time on my hands...</comment></comment></comment>


Britain's scientists are freaking out over Brexit - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/britains-scientists-are-freaking-out-over-brexit/2016/07/28/5735fb26-5375-11e6-b652-315ae5d4d4dd_story.html <comment><USER2> Same kind of thing is happening in Switzerland.

The people voted to restrict the number of foreigners that can go in the country which is against the treaty of free movement that Switzerland signed with the EU which probably (it has been a while since I looked up the consequences) make lots if not all the other treaties that Switzerland and the EU signed invalid. For example the EU is threatening to cut research funding among other stuff like partnership in space exploration...

The people that were against the law didn't think it would pass and didn't really fight against it and now Switzerland and the EU have until the end of year to agree on something. I wonder how it will pan out... Maybe a revote ? You probably didn't understand the consequences of this law. Are you sure you want this ?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm sure I want this. Are you sure you want to get bribed with money for science to completely give up every single shred of independence and autonomy? The issue is much larger than science funding. The issue is that the EU bullies and pushes everyone in Europe around at its whim and people are incredibly fearful of taking back control of their own countries because of EU repercussions. Just think: The EU threatens to cancel student exchanges with Switzerland if the Swiss control their borders again. These are absolutely disgusting power plays: The student exchange has a longstanding tradition and existed way before the EU shat in its diapers, and during a time where border controls were very strict. And now it thinks it can just cancel that? Why isn't anyone calling the EU out on this? The Swiss people voted for something, it would be unconstitutional and even illegal not to do it now. If this does not happen, the Swiss direct democracy has been overruled by the EU, which would be an extremely dangerous and undemocratic precedent.

<comment><USER2> I was talking about a revote because I think that too much people voted thinking: yeah less foreigners sounds good and had no idea of the possible consequences if the swiss diplomats didn't work a miracle

As a swiss this saddens me but I think the EU is right to use the big guns because free movement is the foundation of the EU. If the swiss get an exception it would be hard to deny it to other states. "Unfair ! I also want to restrict the number of polish going in my country"

I think that the swiss government should focus on punishing salary-dumping because that's what most people are afraid of when they think of foreigners: he's going to do my job for less money. I heard it's a big problem in Tessin.

Firms should be able to hire anyone they want but they should give them a swiss salary, swiss or not and pay a big fine if they don't.

<comment><USER4> _> I think that the swiss government should focus on p unishing salary-dumping because that's what most people are afraid of when they think of foreigners: he's going to do my job for less money. I heard it's a big problem in Tessin._

How exactly would you "punish" this (or otherwise prevent it)? I mean, it happens due to market dynamics, so it's either salary dumping, no free movement of people, or no capitalism!

<comment><USER2> You raise a good point. Maybe with a minimum wage but the swiss voted against it. I honestly have no other idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I voted to remain, I believe that being in the EU is beneficial to the United Kingdom. This article, however, at the very beginning suggests:

> Britain has been a powerhouse of discovery since the age of science began. > Newton, Darwin, Crick? They parted the curtain on gravity, evolution and > DNA.

> Now comes Brexit, and to use a non-scientific term, the scientists in the > country are freaking out.

Britain joined the EEC in 1973, the discovery of gravity, evolution, and deoxyribonucleic acid, all happened well before we joined the union and happened without EU funding. I don't think the sciences will suffer too much from a withdrawal of EU funding, since the government will want to remain a leader in these fields, the industries that will suffer will be agricultural and manufacturing, fields that are deemed to primitive for the current century.

<comment><USER6> Agriculture might benefit because the UK now has the option of allowing GM crops, which the EU tries hard to block for what it claims are health reasons but (given the lack of scientific evidence to support such a policy) is actually yet another form of agricultural protectionism.

<comment><USER5> Farming is heavily subsidised by the EU though, only this morning the Independent was reporting that farmers are now regretting the decision since their funding could be lost, and that they voted leave because they didn't understand the ramifications: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/farmers- brexit-regret-b...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/farmers-brexit- regret-bregret-funding-common-agricultural-policy-a7163996.html)

It could be spin, the farmers I know though (I'm originally from a very rural town in mid-Wales) don't really understand what GM means, they're old school wellies and corn hanging out their mouth types.

<comment><USER6> The Independent might as well be the official state outlet of the EU as far as I can tell. You'd get more balanced coverage from reading Chinese media about China. Just taking a few representative headlines from its website:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit](http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit)

"Why there could be post-Brexit riots this summer"

"Ford to consider closing UK factories in Leave towns after Brexit"

"The only way to save Britain after Brexit? Stop London's dominance"

"Brexit blamed for Bank of Japan monetary stimulus plans"

"Brexit doesn't make me proud to be British"

"I've been mapping kindness across the country to tackle racism"

"Why our post-Brexit economy can't be saved by slashing interest rates"

"Revealed: the shocking scale of racist hate since the Brexit vote"

"Incident by incident – the grim litany of post-Brexit hate crime"

<comment><USER5> I actually agree, I (maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously) choose to read the news from the left, since the United Kingdom doesn't really have balanced news. The BBC, for example, might as well be the official state outlet of the Conservatives and American news democrats, with their outright disdain for Corbyn, and their refusal (with late acceptance) to publish stories about DNC leaks – I'm forced to pay for the BBC, I'm not forced to pay for news from the left.

<comment><USER6> If you deliberately seek out news sources you know to be biased, and then compare them to other news sources, aren't you always going to conclude that those other sources are biased in the other direction?

You say the BBC has "outright disdain" for Corbyn but in my experience BBC News does manage to do a pretty good job of being unbiased. Are you sure that they aren't just reporting an unfiltered flow of stories and many of them happy to be pretty negative, thus they may seem to be biased?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have had the unusual pleasure of being amongst two distinct groups of people over the last few months.

Firstly, a group of businessowners. 'local' businesses though most have strong ties to the local port or northern regions of France. Pre-brexit they were mostly close mouthed on the issue, though personal conversations indicated a lean to leave. Post brexit they are generally quite happy; their foreign affairs are relatively easy to keep in order and they have just gained leverage on the local stage.

The other group is composed of PhD students and their professors. I'm a casual aquaintance to these people, mainly on the student end, and have dropped in for lunch a few times (and after work pints). These guys are all anti brexit. I know from the way they make up stories about why people voted out and then insult them - its quite unpleasant. From what I gather very little of their funding comes from the EU, but I'm not familliar enough with their funding system to judge them on it.

It seems we have a shit ton of echo chambers in this country.

<comment><USER8> > I know from the way they make up stories about why people voted out and then > insult them - its quite unpleasant

You dismiss the possibility that they are right. Many people do support Brexit for wholly racist reasons (e.g. my father who wants to 'get the poles out').

<comment><USER4> That's not racism. Xenophobia, maybe, but obviously not racism.

<comment><USER9> Why is it obviously not racism?

<comment><USER4> Because Polish and British people are of the same race (white/Caucasian).

<comment><USER9> You do know that historically (and like recently as well) white people -- specifically British and British-descended white people -- have been all sorts of racist towards other people we now consider white (but didn't always), including but not limited to, people of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and, yes, Polish heritage?

<comment><USER4> I find that quite hard to believe, as I don't see any visual distinction between Brits, Ashkenazi Jews, Irish (unless ginger), northern Italians and Poles. Southern nations could be distinguished (e.g. southern Italians, Spaniards, Greeks), in that case it could have been racism (e.g. in the US they still consider "Hispanics" a different race, although I don't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since most of the discussion here seems to revolve around funding, let me point out that the article is mostly about other factors:

"Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the island's universities will find themselves isolated. [...] The community is asking: Will the foreigners continue to be welcome in British laboratories and will British researchers continue be partners with collaborators from abroad?"

Funding can be replaced, but if foreign researchers have a harder time getting into Britain, that could be a problem for research in the UK

<comment><USER11> This sounds like fear-mongering. Is there reason to believe that foreign researchers will have a hard time getting into the UK? This surely is not an issue for the US, which is not part of the EU.

<comment><USER12> Yes, there definitely is.

The difficulties of getting non-EU nationals into the UK to work are already pretty much top of the complaints list of folk I know who run significant IT companies.

I don't know about the academic sector, but in general UK immigration law is already very harsh, and the exit from the EU was largely driven by a desire to limit immigration.

<comment><USER13> In 2014 the net migration into the UK was 318,000. Half of that was from outside of the EU.

That's .5% increase in our population per year. Per year! The net migration to the UK has gone mental since 1996.

It's simply not sustainable. House prices are crazy, council services and the NHS are struggling as we cut funding due to austerity and you're complaining about how _hard_ it is to get into the UK when we've actually been letting in massive amounts of people.

Unbelievable.

[http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration- sta...](http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration-statistics)

<comment><USER12> One question - why do you say it's not sustainable?

I agree that an increase in population requires an increase in funding to the NHS (or at least keeping the funding stable per capita) and more housing.

But I don't see why those things are impossible, given the political will to make them happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've got a hunch brexit basically isn't going to happen. The vote was advisory and our new PM was a remainer. It's incredibly difficult to really leave without screwing the economy. See [http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/07/14/everything-you- ne...](http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/07/14/everything-you-need-to-know- about-theresa-may-s-brexit)

The article concludes May will probably kick the problem into the long grass which she seems to be doing by saying it won't happen without Scottish agreement which probably won't happen.

<comment><USER6> You appear to be in denial.

"Our new PM was a remainer" \- but, she was eurosceptic her entire career, the very first thing she said was literally "Brexit means Brexit", she has repeatedly confirmed it's going to happen and she has set up an entirely new ministry to ensure it does. Meanwhile the EU is so impatient for it to happen they are demanding it starts immediately. There is no way back.

With respect to "it's difficult to leave without screwing the economy", that seems hard to justify given the number of countries that are not in the EU and yet which are not "screwed".

<comment><USER14> I may appear to be in denial but look at the two closest comparison countries that voted to not be in the EU, Switzerland and Norway. The voters said out but there were huge practical problems with being out so they ended up with basically being in the EU but not completely. That's what I think the most likely outcome will be - something like those countries, still with free trade and movement but a fudge where the politicians can say look we're independent.

Incidentally on the denial thing I voted remain but bet leave would win at the bookies. I'm predicting a Norway solution as the most likely bet rather than my preference.

<comment><USER6> The Norway solution was already ruled out by the PM.

I agree that there will end up being some compromise, eventually: one that involves free trade without freedom of movement a la CETA. The question is only how long it takes to get there. The EU is starting to realise that leaving is in fact thinkable, and is caving on issues that might upset local populations. Eventually it will realise that blocking European co-operation and blaming it on a country that wants to sign deals isn't going to fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Britain has enough of "experts" apparently [https://next.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d...](https://next.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c)

The whole Brexit hoopla was filled with dishonesty and anti-intellectualism that would make likes of Trump proud

no wonder scientists are suffering, sure who needs experts...

<comment><USER6> The claim you're making is itself an example of dishonesty and anti- intellectualism. Let's take a look at what Gove actually said - the full quote, not the abridged version people like to throw around:

 _" I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong"_

Gove was clearly talking about a very specific subset of all possible 'experts' here - the ones from various (mostly governmental) acronymed organisations who have a long track record of making incorrect forecasts and yet still claim to be able to predict the future using their 'expertise'. The campaign was full of absurdly precise predictions like "leaving the EU will cost each household exactly £4300 a year".

Gove's position is not unreasonable or anti-intellectual. Post-vote, Paul Krugman started laying into economists and the economics profession as a whole, saying essentially that economists didn't deserve to be trusted because they so often made arguments that were just intellectual-sounding nonsense.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/the- macroeconomi...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/the- macroeconomics-of-brexit-motivated-reasoning/?module=BlogPost- Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body)

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/more-on-the- shor...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/more-on-the-short-run- macroeconomics-of-brexit/?module=BlogPost- Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body)

<comment><USER16> So people are tired of _incompetent_ experts? Sure!

And experts from organisations with acronyms? As oposed to those from organisations without acronyms?

This looks like he wants to hear opinions from his preferred kind of experts.

<comment><USER6> The Platonian ideal of an unbiased, expert economist who can see into the future is a fantasy. No such people exist.

<comment><USER16> Sure, so he was chosing his particular brand of experts, of which there seems to be few.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Diversity society will fail" \--Putnam; [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)

</comment><comment><USER18> But nowhere near as much as headline writers are.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes when my friends and I go to a restaurant we've never been to, we look at the menu and change our minds and decide to go somewhere else.

Can the UK do something like that i.e. get the best terms possible from the EU and then put that to a vote?

<comment><USER20> Uk had the best possible deal in the EU. Now, as a best case, they will pay the same amount of money (like Norway and Switzerland), they will still have free circulation from EU people (like Norway and Switzerland) to have access to the EU market without all the benefits that they enjoyed earlier. And this is the best case, I can't imagine UK cut off from Europe with all the jobs in the City of London and Canary Wharf that will migrate somewhere else, along with all the other industries that are heavily disinvesting as of now.

<comment><USER19> I don't think they will have free circulation so I think that the "best case" will be worse (than Norway & Switzerland).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the cultural angle is much overlooked here. Yes, a lot of funding comes from the EU, but it's about more than money.

In a University you work with many people from all over the world, and success depends on doing so.

Of course you end up favouring international cooperation at a policy level. Your values are shaped by your personal experience.

<comment><USER22> _In a University you work with many people from all over the world, and success depends on doing so._

This is the thing I don't quite understand about the position described in the article here. We already do have partnerships with other researchers _from all over the world_ , not just the EU. I've seen some academics talking as if it will suddenly be impossible for colleagues from other EU member states to come and work in our universities, or vice versa. Sometimes they were literally making that argument with a colleague from a US university sitting on one side of them and a colleague from Japan on the other!

There are plenty of legitimate concerns that will need to be addressed, and the uncertainty in the near future affecting those planning longer term projects or research funding isn't helpful. However, the idea that it will become dramatically more difficult to collaborate with colleagues from the other EU member states or to run research programmes together seems paranoid at this stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The UK is a net payer of the EU budget. It can replace all EU subsidies like for like and still save some money as a result of Brexit.

<comment><USER24> It could but it won't. Same as economic support for the Celtic fringes. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are not going to see the same level of investment from Whitehall that they have from Brussels. When Margaret Thatcher took aim at the trade unions and in one full swoop killed off various b British industries, she made no British attempt to fix the problem. It took EU money and EU programs to setup enterprise zones in the Celtic fringes. UK governments have long ignored the needs of the country outside the south east.

Same as investment in the NHS, which although not funded by the EU has badly needed structured investment for decades. Never happens. Successive governments just blame their predecessors or bad management and on this the cycle.

<comment><USER25> The EU also funds, e.g., nursing education programmes at ex-polys that aren't likely to survive a post-Brexit funding winter. NHS staffing isn't quite so critical -- NHS is highly reliant on immigration from the Commonwealth more than the EU -- but it still would pose a concern.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I just made a webapp that helps young EU people to start a new dream life - <AUTHOR> https://mynewdream.eu <comment><USER2> Survey of 10 questions. This is the result.

Well Done! That's all for you!

We will review your application and we'll send you an email within 3-5 working days containing your full itinerary plan matching best with your criteria.

You will be able to start your dream life straight away by following the email and the TODO list that you will receive.

Good Luck! (and well done for the big step you just did and that most people will never do...)</comment>


MIT withholds certificates from Syrian, Cuban, Iranian and Sudanese edX students - <AUTHOR> https://www.edx.org/faq "Note: At this time, edX is holding certificates for learners connected with Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan pending confirmation that the issuance is in compliance with U.S. embargoes."<p>Should embargoes extend to education? <comment><USER2> This clearly is a US embargo compliance

       At this time, edX is holding certificates for learners
       connected with Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan pending
       confirmation that the issuance is in compliance with U.S.
       embargoes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, new to HN, had quoted that in the submission. You are, of course, correct.

Should education be embargoed was the discussion I wanted to prompt.

<comment><USER2> Oh well, I posted the comment because the title did not specify anything. I guess probably to the 80 character limit so just quickly pointed it out.</comment></comment></comment>


How is matrix different from IRC? - <AUTHOR> I'm researching matrix and am curious how it differs from traditional IRC server setups. Any help would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> Matrix address this in there FAQ and attempts to resolve all the issues listed.

[https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the- differen...](https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-difference- between-matrix-and-irc)</comment>


How Radioactive Poison Became the Assassin's Weapon of Choice - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/how-radioactive-poison-became-the-assassins-weapon-of-choice-6cfeae2f4b53#.hax0s8sm4 <comment><USER2> Holy heck this article is all over the place, history of nuclear physics? How radiation works? A full history of everyone involved? Uhh... I am patient and love a good story but this got old because it couldn't decide what it wanted to be and jumped from around...

According to read time this article takes 25-60 minutes to read. I made it half way down before I got fed up.</comment>


Integer Factorization: Part II - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideshare.net/SubhendraBasu3/integer-factorization-part-ii-76070550 <comment><USER2> As per a previous thread on your claim to efficiently factor arbitrary-length numbers, I encourage you to factor one of the RSA challenge numbers. Then everyone will immediately pay tons of attention to your research.</comment>