How do you handle notes and ideas? - <AUTHOR>

I write between ten and a hundred notes each day. Sometimes I add to an existing note or document. I have trouble working with notes, documents, ideas and streams of thought.
Do you recognize this? How do you handle it?<p>Do you keep notes in one place? How do you accomplish that? How do you handle physical notes and non-physical notes? Do you try to gather all notes online? Where and how? <comment><USER3> I don't.

Like you, I probably have about a thousand different ideas and streams of thought during the course of a day. Unlike you, I don't write any of them down.

I do this because there is no way I'd get anything done if I didn't. I don't mind forgetting some key insight, because if it was important or relevant enough, it'll translate into sometime I will write down when the time is right. If not, it's probably something that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with. (That's not to suggest it isn't valuable).

You only have so many hours in the day to work on so many things. People like us need to ignore our own brain 80% of the time to be productive. It's a curse really.

</comment><comment><USER4> Moleskine for quick notes, copied into an org-mode (<http://orgmode.org/>) if they're worth keeping.

Org-mode is nice for two reasons: first, it gives you a way to organize projects and sub-projects and meta-projects. Second, it's a reality check -- if you gave yourself a task that in no way advances any goals you've already stated, org-mode's organization scheme means that you end up either creating a new goal or admitting that a new project isn't worth your time.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wasn't happy with any of the solutions out there so we built our own.

We treat notes as a stream and you categorize notes using hashcodes.

We have an iPhone and Android client so you can easily include pictures in your notes.

We aren't live yet, but will be in a few weeks. =)

If you want me to contact you when we are live sign up below,

<https://3banana.com/doLogon.action?s=hn>

</blatant self promotion :P>

<comment><USER6> Make a BlackBerry version and I'd love to check it out.

<comment><USER5> I hear that from all my friends with BB, we will have that very soon.

All depends on my caffeine intake. =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a single text file in a git repository, plus a Perl script that appends a timestamp to the file, opens it in vi, then commits (and pushes) the changes when I leave vi.

It's been working great since September 2000 (it was in subversion then I think, or maybe even CVS).

Search is via grep or vi.

I also have a tiny CGI script that prints the last n lines of it so I can refer to it from my phone's web browser.

</comment><comment><USER8> For me, I'm a college student and that means I have a notebook with me most places anyways, and if its not a physical notebook, its my TabletPC. I usually write notes down in a reserved section in all my class notebooks if I'm in class and something pops up all of a sudden. Same goes for my TabletPC which I have my own venture notebook that I will scribble thoughts down in. On the go, I usually just keep it in my head because I don't yet have my own smartphone. Later in the evening after I've taken these notes I usually sit down and flip through my new ones and look at what I was thinking and figure out if its something worth expanding on or not. This goes a lot back to how you manage your time and the "shinny thing syndrom" (ADD).

It's a system that works pretty well for me, but everyone's different. I'm the kind of person who, even while other things are going on around me, am looking not only at the current state of my current venture but the direction and potential of that venture and others. Needless to say, I get a lot of those "oh crap, that's neat" when I'm out and about. The important part is really how you make use of those notes later on. I go through them on a nightly or bi-nightly basis and just browse through some of my ideas or concepts and figure out what's worth keeping track of or expanding and what's something to set aside as "good idea, but not now." It's important not to overwhelm yourself with notes going in a different direction.

The notes that are worth keeping and expanding I usually stick all together in a folder of some sort and they usually end up typed, expanded, and analyzed in a word document at some point in time where I've fully expanded on or refined an idea or perspective.

</comment><comment><USER9> Warning, Mac-centric answer:

For task lists, I tried a bunch of things at one point, and only one that stuck was Taskpaper (<http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper>). It's so simple that I actually use it. I've been using it for about a year now on a sustained basis. It has simple emacs keybindings, like other OS X text editors, so that's nice for me too.

For ideas best expressed by complicated freehand drawings, I use pen and paper. I always carry an unruled (no lines) notebook for this purpose.

For a while I was using a small drawing tablet and Curio (<http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/>) for drawings, but it didn't stick. The GUI was a little too slow, and plugging in the tablet was too much of an extra step. A tablet Mac would solve this. (Yeah, yeah I could get a PC, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.)

When I take notes at a meeting or a talk, I use TextEdit (again, w/ simple emacs keybindings), and depend on spotlight to help me relocate things. I prepend all filenames with the date in <2 digit year><2 digit month><2 digit day> format, so by default things sort by date across filesystems etc. This is surprisingly useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> EVERNOTE!

I can't say enough good about this program. i use it everywhere (mac, web, macbook, iphone). it's certainly not perfect (auto indent?, the ability to copy check boxes) but it is certainly good. I use a moleskine too, but for searching and loading up data, and keeping task lists, with pictures! Evernote has made me very happy.

this question was asked awhile back on HN and that is how I found out about. I've tried various things in the past, but evernote has worked great for me. evernote.com.

<comment><USER11> I second or third that. Great on the mobile phone for uploading quick notes and pictures.

Evernote is to my memos what dropbox is to my work in progress files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Moleskine - in my pocket with a pen at all times. I jot things down all the time that spark my interest and leave a page or two blank with them. When I have time, usually that night, I will compile more thoughts on the ideas. If they stand up beyond that, I will copy them into a Tomboy notebook (<http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/>).

</comment><comment><USER13> Currently I have a "notes" directory with a bunch of flat text files in it. If I'm looking for a particular thing I use grep to find it. vim is my editor of choice.

I'm not a huge fan of the system because it's not available online, it doesn't support tagging, and it doesn't work well for branching, annotations, or hyperlinking. I have yet to see any particular wiki, blog, or mind-map software which really does what I'm looking for.

This might be a good candidate for me to write up some software to more sufficiently meet my needs.

I also have a physical notebook which I write in chronologically. I tend to use a page or two a week, with things scribbled in the margins and diagrams all over the place. It's kind of neat in that you can read it in order and see what I've been thinking about. Unfortunately this doesn't mesh well with my electronic system. I haven't yet found an interface that I like for doing graphical notes or scribbles yet on the pc... maybe there will be a tablet PC which has support for what I dream of.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by branching?

If it's all plain text, tags and annotations are just conventions. I use tag: and [].

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm currently trying different systems, and to be honest, I'm not 100% happy with any of them.

Started with the lovely and simple Notepad textfiles, but after a bit they are too simple and too hard to maintain, thus not good.

Then I used Google Notebook for a long time, was easy to add stuff, but not so easy to find it later. Plus it's still too simple for my liking, can't categorize ideas too well.

I switched recently to Evernote, which seems to be an improvement over Google Notebook, but for some reason I still don't feel comfortable with it. The fact that I can type offline and sync with different computers or read my ideas online is really welcome and handy, though.

Everytime I fall back to my paper notebook, which is also too simple and not search friendly, but I like handwriting and for some strange reason, ideas flow much better than when I write rather than type them. The real only grudge I have with it is that there is no backspace key and no "insert a new line in the middle of the text" either :(

</comment><comment><USER16> I use Google Docs/Google sites. This allows me to add notes from anywhere with internet access.

Sometimes it's just faster to write on paper, if I don't have my notes doc open in a browser tab. I build up notes all day in one of my pockets. At the end of the day, I take all my notes and copy them into Google docs.

Additionally I use <http://dabbleboard.com/> for sketches, and then save a link to my sketch in my Google Doc.

The concern some have with with Google docs, is the paranoid one, that maybe Google is stealing all your good ideas. I'm just going to assume that they are too busy for that shit(or hopefully too ethical). But otherwise google docs is becoming the defacto file sharing app, so why not just sell out now while it's hot.

</comment><comment><USER17> It all goes in my Moleskine. You'd be surprised how well just the act of physically writing something down w/ pen and paper will help you remember it. I look back at my notes once in a while but for the most part they're all retained in the brain.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have 744 "Drafts" to myself in GMail.

<comment><USER19> Ditto. But I manage (somehow) to loosely categorize them: there is an (ever expanding) message with Music, Movies, Books and other media that I want to look at.

Any little program or something that I write gets `tar czvf`ed into its own new message. Sometimes there will be comments in the body of the message and sometimes not.

For things that haven't made a Gmail message yet, there is a `notes.txt` file that is kept under RCS (via Emacs vc-mode).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was in the same boat, taking at least 10 notes in a session, several times a day. I work best by blasting notes in and sorting through them when I come up for air. There wasn't anything that allowed me to work this way very effectively, so I did what any of you would have done - started a startup, of course!

We are live, you can check us out at the link below:

<http://www.ubernote.com>

</comment><comment><USER21> I use org-mode with Emacs for it's flexibility and because Emacs is always running anyways.

</comment><comment><USER22> I had this exact problem for passwords and random to-dos about six months ago. I ended up writing an app for it:

<http://yellownote.info>

It's like OS X sticky notes (mentioned elsewhere in this thread, which I also love) for the web. There's an iPhone interface for it too.

(sorry to self-promote, but it's relevant to the discussion)

</comment><comment><USER23> Onenote is the best I've found, by far. And I'm still looking for a replacement for linux. In my case, it's zim, a personal wiki.

<comment><USER24> Onenote is great indeed. Possibly underrated because it is a MS product, but it is great for note taking and syncing those notes to pda or mobile phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Haven't seen anyone mention Zenbe Lists yet (<http://lists.zenbe.com>).

It's a free web app which does one thing well: it allows you to maintain and reorder any number of lists.

The reason I use it is because their iPhone app is the best ToDo app I have used on the platform (and I have tried the majority of free ones).

The iPhone app syncs with the web app, which I can access from anywhere.

On my Mac, I use Fluid to create a site specific browser that lives in the menubar to allow me quick access to my Zenbe List at any time.

So in this way, I always have access to any streams of thought that I decide to jot down day-to-day.

Edit: I wanted to like Evernote and used it for several days, but found it was much too slow. As well, the Mac client is not suited for quick creation of notes.

</comment><comment><USER26> Question about moleskines:

I went to the bookstore last night and decided to pick up a couple of notebooks since they were on clearance. I noticed there was a Moleskine section, and since other folks seem to talk about them all the time (many in this thread), I decided to see what the big deal was. I flipped through a couple of them, and they didn't seem to be any better than any other notebook. They were also much more expensive. Are they just popular due to their marketing? They market themselves as being the same notebooks used by Hemingway etc., but that's not true. And even if the notebooks were used by smart people, so what? You aren't going to write like Hemingway or paint like Picasso because you use the same paper. So what's the deal? Is there something better about them that make them cost so much?

<comment><USER27> I've found the quality of the paper to be substantially better in a Moleskine in comparison to your standard drug-store notebook.

However, the hardbound Moleskines are a bit pricey, so I use the tan Cahier notebooks. They are less expensive and they have the added benefit of being able to write on the cover.

I add cataloging information to the front of every notebook; date ranges, project names, any other major items that may be relevant a year down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I email myself the moment I think of something, then process my email inbox once a day. When processing, I either do the thing (if it will take less than two minutes), or file it with a project or under someday/maybe. For filing, I just have a bunch of folders and files on my hard drive. Nothing fancy.

</comment><comment><USER29> I do a more GTD style than the previous suggestions, focusing on reducing mental clutter. Every week I carry around a todo list with the top priority projects. When I think of something, I jot it down on the back of the todo list. I'll review it as "input" along with all the other input from the day. Good ideas make it to my igoogle sticky note, which has become a pretty long list of potential projects. If any idea seems like a worthwhile project, then I analyze it side by side on a spreadsheet against other projects to look at a rough ROI and how it matches with my short term goals, interests, skills, and other projects.

This way, I don't lose any input, can focus on the task(s) at hand, and have some degree of certainty that I'm working on better projects.

</comment><comment><USER30> I use a Moleskine for keeping track of day-to-day records (calories, my adherence to habits I'm trying to adopt, etc), but for everything else, I use my own app ShoveBox (<http://www.wonderwarp.com/shovebox/>).

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree with some of the other comments posted. Paper and pen - I carry a moleskin/stack of index cards on me all the time. Anytime I get a thought that I need to record, I use one of the those (the index cards are for throw away stuff, like things to do, shopping lists etc). Ideas, go in the moleskine (this can include pretty much anything like a good startup idea, a web app, a topic for blogging etc).

Once every few days/weeks, I go through the moleskine and review. If there's anything worth recording, I put that in a mind-map.

Agreed its not a comprehensive system, but like LogicHoleFlaw says, I am still waiting for that one combination of software/hardware that I can use. Someday. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use Google's online spreadsheet program to maintain lists of people and specific work-related tasks, and daily scratchpads for reused HTML.

I sometimes email notes to myself, from my work to my personal account, so I can review later. I also use Palm Desktop to maintain lists of things to do or buy. One problem with the email approach is Yahoo Mail's search function is terrible -- emails that are older than a few months are not indexed. But I've had the account for 10 years, and don't like the gmail interface enough to switch.

I write some notes on paper, especially when I am using the phone, and will re-enter the data into Palm or a text editor if necessary.

Haphazard, but it works.

<comment><USER14> Switching to gmail: 1\. set autoforward on yahoo 2\. import yahoo mail from gmail 3\. set reply-to header on yahoo

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> 3x5 Cards - smaller and more versatile than a moleskine, you can give away the card without ripping a page out. When I had a moleskine, it was like ripping out a little piece of my heart each time. Easy to sort and throw out the ones that are garbage.

I like the ones with a graph pattern printed on one side or blank on both sides. Can take great notes in meetings. Can vary the number of cards that you bring with you. Several times I've been with people and we've mapped out entire projects with them on a bar tabletop. I'll never go back to a moleskine or a handheld app.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have been working with 2 others on a product that will be released to a larger beta within a month called Wizehive. It lets you organize and share among others notes, tasks, upload and share files, integrates with email, has an iphone app, a twitter-like feed that pulls it all together, etc. If you'd like an invite to the private beta we'd love to get more feedback. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER35> I tend to follow the GTD approach, and rely heavily on todo.sh (<http://todotxt.com/library/todo.sh/>). I keep my todo.txt file in an rsynced directory so I just push/pull to/from whatever computer I'll be working at that day.

If I'm away from a computer, good old pen and paper fills in the gaps.

</comment><comment><USER36> I use Things, an iphone app which syncs wirelessly to a mac desktop app. it's primarily a todo list type application, but I've found that I can keep track of ideas that I have as well. the UI is great, and I always have it in my pocket. if I want to do any serious note taking, I can use the desktop app and then sync the notes over to the iphone.

</comment><comment><USER37> I usually have several academic papers and a few forms stacked in a pile on my desk. I write on the backs of those for quick notes and scratch paper.

Anything written on those that's actually worthwhile eventually makes its way into something permanent - either in code or in an actual paper - so I don't care what happens to the note itself.

</comment><comment><USER38> $ echo " this is a text it will be appended to file 'note' don't forget double '>' otherwise you override " >> note

</comment><comment><USER39> I just started using Stickies, the default Mac sticky note application. It turns out that just having it written down somewhere is enough to prompt me to do something about it.

I would use a physical notebook - moleskines have the best reputation - <USER2> since I'm in college going for a computer major, I'm very rarely far from my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER40> One of my pet projects has been to create a minimalist task manager that uses Ajax. It allows you to add/edit/delete tasks quickly without needing to reload the entire page. For those of you who are interested, you can check it out at the URL below:

<http://www.maketask.com>

</comment><comment><USER41> As others do too, I carry around a Moleskine (although I also like a fountain pen); once I have enough for a particular project, they'll often go into a Devonthink database (see <http://www.devon-technologies.com/> ) for organization to the extent I need to.

</comment><comment><USER42> If I'm at a computer, I add ideas and TODO's to a ticketing system (RT) and if I'm in the car and brainstorming, I use the iPhone app voicenote to make a quick voice recording of my idea before I forget it, then I dump them into the ticketing system when I get in front of a computer.

</comment><comment><USER43> <http://notebook.google.com>

It has great copy and paste functionality for capturing snippets of information from web sites. The loose organizational structure of the notebooks is great for jotting down quick ideas.

</comment><comment><USER44> I always carry a moleskine notebook with me and write stuff in there when it occurs to me.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have a small notepad that I try to keep as close to me as possible. When I'm out, it's in my back pocket. When I'm at my desk, it's right there. Ready to rock. It's mainly about keeping track of to-dos and remembering ideas for blog posts.

</comment><comment><USER46> I just started using Google notes and its actually a lot better then I expected. Before that I would jot notes on my iphone notes app and convert them to flat text files or excel sheets when I was in front of a computer.

</comment><comment><USER47> I too use a moleskine for quick notes. And code browser for storing: <http://www.chrylers.com/agile-knowledge-management>

</comment><comment><USER48> Yeah, I've been looking for something like this too where you can keep a list of notes handy, online. I haven't found the perfect app yet. I usually just write them down in notepad and save 'em.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm usually in front of a computer, so I have an emacs buffer or notepad open that I can quickly alt tab to and jot something down.

Then, I can search it all if needed.

</comment><comment><USER50> Two Moleskine. One for serious stuff. One for current stuff.

iPhone notes, reviewed frequently.

Text files which I convert into Moleskine notes.

That's all.

</comment><comment><USER51> Luminotes.com or Google Notebook.

On the go? Moleskine

</comment><comment><USER52> If find VoodooPad (<http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/>) - a personal wiki - indispensable.

</comment><comment><USER53> I use a combination of Stickies on OSX and sending emails to myself in GMail.

</comment><comment><USER54> Backpack, from 37Signals. www.backpackit.com

</comment><comment><USER55> I use the "Notes" (default app) on my iPhone. It's great; the only thing that's lame is that it doesn't auto-sync with iTunes and my Mac.</comment>


Tesla Model X Crossover 'Signature' Series Starts at $132K with 240 Mile Range - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2015/09/01/tesla-high-end-model-x-signature-series-starts-at-132k-with-240-mile-range/

<comment><USER2> _" With same options, Model X is $5k more than an S due to greater size & body complexity. Sig Series is fully loaded, hence high price."_

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/639170376186990592](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/639170376186990592)</comment>


Ask YC:  Does it make sense to combine ads with interactive puzzles/games to get people's attention? - <AUTHOR>

You don't need to go to a different site to play with the puzzle/game.  It can be done right from the ad.
Note that the advertising may have nothing to do with puzzles/games, but the interactive puzzles/games draw you in for a while so that you notice the ad more.
So now creating an effective ad involves not just creating the ad itself but also the puzzle(s)/game(s) that will go along with it. <comment><USER2> Aren't there already ads that are supposedly game-like? "Click on the bouncing ball and win $$$", things like that.

Personally I avoid clicking on anything ad-like, to avoid pop-ups and generally having the flow of my web browsing interrupted.

Now, if the execution was really good, with a nice design and a fun-looking gameplay, that may change. The gameplay should look intriguing even before the user clicks on the ad -- maybe show a demo screen, like the arcade games?

</comment><comment><USER3> If getting people's attention means breaking the design of the site, disrupting natural UI progression then no. People wont pay any attention to your content (ex. porn on TechCrunch) and ads become self-defeating. hernan7 has the right idea, if the implementation was good and enhanced experience, why not.

Just be careful with how you do it..

</comment><comment><USER4> Many ads have gone interactive. Anything that makes clicks sounds good to me, especially if it leads to money or new users.</comment>


Regulators open enquiry into wireless industry  - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/27/AR2009082701766.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This should open up a very interesting debate.

\- The US wireless market is one of the most expensive for the consumer. \- Competition has been highly limited - with extremely high barriers for entry. \- The prepaid market ( a hit in many places) world over is nearly non- existent here. The prepaid market is a very disloyal non-forgiving market for the service provider but extremely sensible for the consumer.

I am curious what are the changes needed to improve the state of the wireless telcomm business ?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also at <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10319483-38.html></comment>


The Year 2038 Problem - <AUTHOR> http://pw1.netcom.com/~rogermw/Y2038.html <comment><USER2> Okay, so I changed the year to 2039, started WindowsXP in VirtualBox. Nothing happend. Opened Excel, typed in some time-related functions (like NOW), worked fine. And just by the time I was going to post this message ending with "What is wrong with it, I want some blue screen people" I simply couldn't log in with my LiveJournal openID (not sure if this is HN's or LJ's fault), so seems like this time thing really works.

<comment><USER3> _I simply couldn't log in with my LiveJournal openID_

Perhaps an SSL certificate thing? If you wind your clock forward enough it's past the expiry of SSL certificates.

<comment><USER4> Yeah that's likely the issue. Actually, looking at all the root CA certs on my computer (OS X, look in Keychain.app if you're curious) every single one of them (except one) expires in 2037 or earlier.

This is almost certainly not a coincidence. In software that doesn't take the Y2K38 issue into account the expiration date would wrap around to an earlier date, causing the software to think the cert is invalid.

<comment><USER3> Ah ok - yeah, I've hit that issue in testing before.

I'd be surprised if 2038 was the reason though - most certificates are very conservative about expiry.

You'd never have a cert that lasts to 2038 as there is a high probability that the cert would be cracked well before that date (i.e. even if it's brute- force, likely computers in "n" years time will be able to crack it).

<comment><USER4> I would have thought that too, except there's a bunch of certs with expirations all the way up to 2037 at which point they abruptly stop (except for the one 2040)...

[http://tlrobinson.net/skitches/Keychain_Access-20090106-0009...](http://tlrobinson.net/skitches/Keychain_Access-20090106-000936.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> So, if all goes normally, 19-January-2038 will suddenly become 13-December-1901 in every time_t across the globe, and every date calculation based on this figure will go haywire.

Good thing we have 28+ years to sort this out..

<comment><USER6> Any software historians out there? How much heads-up did we have for the whole Y2K thing?

It seemed like it didn't really come into prominence until 1997 or so to me, but that's purely anecdotal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quick Ma, get back into the Y2K bunker! In 29 years Starcraft will stop working!

But really, in all seriousness, the singularity will come in 2032 and we won't have to worry about any of this stuff.

<comment><USER8> A joke about Starcraft not working is a very inappropriate one! Although, as long as Starcraft 2 works (and is released by then), we should be safe.

This sounds like a serious problem, but when you consider how fast computer hardware and software grows and changes, I have a feeling there really won't be any 32 bit apps by then. I mean, christ, look at the past 30 years!

<comment><USER9> We still have Cobol and Fortran (and Lisp).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've already run into a problem with this on one of the sites I worked on. Fortunately that date wasn't to important in that case and we settled leaving the date somewhere in 2037 for the time being.

</comment><comment><USER11> "...re-define time_t as an unsigned integer instead of a signed integer...This doubles the range of numbers it can store."

I don't think that's how it works...

<comment><USER12> it would double the range of _positive_ integers it can store. that would mean no more "cheating," and using negative values to represent times before 1970.

personally i think they should redefine time_t to be a signed 64-bit integer. a better solution, i think.

<comment><USER13> IIRC 64-bit Linux does this. As 64-bit becomes more prevalent, this may become a non-issue (Windows 7 was supposedly going to be 64-bit only, and one of the next releases may make this true).

16-bit Windows only lasted 10 years. There is 30 years until the problem.

The biggest issue will be embedded code, but much of that may have failed/been replaced when 2038 rolls around.

<comment><USER9> And most embedded code does not care about dates anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So what's the fix? Upgrade every machine to 64-bit?

Did/do/will 16-bit machines have a similar problem?

<comment><USER15> heh if you wrote code that used a 16-bit time data type, it would be broken by the next day</comment></comment>


Ask HN: feed for private blogs? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone figured out how to combine privacy and exclusivity with a passive feed?  Many friends and family members have private blogs.  They are a huge pain to follow because I can't get feeds for them.<p>I know I'm not the only one who has this problem.  Has anyone figured out a solution? <comment><USER2> You're looking at a webserver side technology to implement RBAC-style fine grained access control over the feed and use something lie OAuth to authorize users, as many of them as you want.

We implemented something like that, but instead of a feed you have medical records. RBAC might be overkill for your purposes, however, unless you want to give your followers specific permissions on what stories in your feed they can view (i.e. you can use tags/keywords to exclude certain viewers; "sex", "boyfriend" or "one night stand" would block your parents and family members from seeing that particular story, etc.)

About a day's work if you have done it once.

[Correction: this is just for _one_ feed, one you control yourself. For every possible CMS, blog engine or host, you would need the same as well. You would also need to setup a central OAuth authorization service for all the consumers.]</comment>


The Evolving Infrastructure of .NET Core - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-evolving-infrastructure-of-net-core/ <comment><USER2> It's nice to see the .NET Core team hitting on the same solution as we are heading for internally for our multi-repo builds - the "dependency flow" with Maestro sounds very similar to what we intend to do with propagating latest NuGet package versions to consumers via PRs, then auto-merging those PRs if all checks pass (and the repo owner has opted into this, of course).

Will the .NET Core team open source this tooling I wonder?

<comment><USER3> I think they would very much like you to buy into Azure. We're a C# shop, have been for decades, and .Net Core really shines when you hook it up to the Azure devops package. Which is perfectly fine for us, we're in bed with Microsoft anyway and with office365 licenses for 4500 employees, Windows enterprise for 5000 and a farm of local windows servers that's what we would have likely done anyway.

<comment><USER2> Yes I got that impression. Azure DevOps wouldn't be the right solution for us unfortunately.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, what makes it not the right solution? (I work on the Azure DevOps team.)

<comment><USER2> Our build system very much needs to be on-premises for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is having the project split over various git repos a good thing?

Personally I struggle with it, when I look for a bug, I have to do a few transverse search on github (and github search is bad), checkout the code. If I actually want to fix it, I have now a new sub-project "find how to compile the mammoth". Then if I want to send a patch, find the local rulers and their rules, send a PR.

</comment><comment><USER6> The execution of .NET core project has been, with all due respect, a huge mess. The naming and versioning schemes are confusing. The breaking changes are disruptive. Making ConfigurationManager a pain in the ass to use is disruptive.

.NET core has been around for years now but it doesn't inspire confidence and still doesn't seem production ready given the lack of adoption and Microsoft's incessant habit of changing and breaking things for no good apparent reason.

It's such a pity because I absolutely love the dotnet cli tooling.

<comment><USER7> I'll echo your point about confusion. I tried once to figure out how to build a simple .exe with C# and dotnet core, something I could do easily with c++ and gcc.

I gave up after a few days because the dotnet documentation was too confusing. There are 40 different projects with easily-confused names like corefx, coreclr, etc, and the docs are convoluted and split between developer.microsoft.com and msdn.

That was a while ago, so maybe the docs are better now but I can't shake the feeling that when your best source of info on official stuff like "how to build a self-contained application" is a 2-year old obsolete Stack Overflow post, .NET Core is just a mess.

<comment><USER8> What is your definition of "self-contained"? Does not require dotnet, or is contained within a single executable?

Building an application that doesn't require a dotnet core runtime is a one- liner: dotnet publish -c Release -r win10-x64 --self-contained true [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/core/deploying/deplo...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/core/deploying/deploy-with-cli)

If you mean creating a single EXE with no external dependencies whatsoever, that's something that they are discussing in .NET Core 3 but isn't straightforward right now.

It's basically the same story as Python, you have to bundle the interpreter with the application or you have to rely on the interpreter being pre- installed. With dotnet, you rely on the runtime being installed or you bundle it in as self-contained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They like to make noise about how crossplatform and opensource .NET Core is, but their debugging infrastructure is actually proprietary. See: [https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505](https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505)

<comment><USER10> actually this is not 100% correct. it's actually possible to make your own debugger for dotnet core since the interfaces to create one are public and opensource. it's just that the debugger that microsoft has written, is not open source. the "infrastructure for debugging" is actually open source.

<comment><USER9> have you read the github issue linked? make sure to read the comment from Alex

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Waiting it to be ported to BSD systems[1][2][3].

[1] [https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/labels/os- freebsd](https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/labels/os-freebsd)

[2] [https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/labels/os- freebsd](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/labels/os-freebsd)

[3] [https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/labels/os- netbsd](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/labels/os-netbsd)

<comment><USER12> Which make me sad, considering that FreeBSD was the first actual port the coreclr actually made. However, no one seems to care afterwards.

<comment><USER13> > Which make me sad, considering that FreeBSD was the first actual port the > coreclr actually made. However, no one seems to care afterwards.

The FreeBSD port was a _community_ effort, and not done by Microsoft.

Unfortunately the small team doing the port ran out of time before life caught up with them (jobs, kids, university, etc) at around 95% completion.

After that .NET Core kept moving fast, and catching up (new libraries, llvm versions, mono versions required for bootstrapping, etc) also required FreeBSD updates, and all in all was somewhat hard.

Disclaimer: contributor to the original port.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I remember. Thanks for the work you did. It showed many what is possible. Family first. Have been there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excellent post, thank you.

I've run into similar challenges in a number of (mostly microservice) systems that also avoided monorepos (for various practical and philosophical reasons). Parts of the solution space here are very familiar, especially relating to dependency management and "goldilocks" framework infrastructure.

I've especially found that most cloud CI tools (e.g. Circleci) fall flat here without a lot of additional work. Those ecosystems seem designed for a single repo; there's a big opportunity for someone to get CI right for non-trivial, multi-repo projects.

<comment><USER15> I haven't tried it, but GitLab's CI seems to support multi-project flows as an official feature[0]. I believe Jenkins also allows builds to trigger other builds.

[0]: [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/multi_project_pipelines.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/multi_project_pipelines.html)

<comment><USER16> My team is in the process of moving our Jenkins CI jobs to GitLab CI. We have moved most of them and our feeling is that GitLab's solution is more flexible and easier to manage than Jenkins'. For the really weird or tricky ones, we have a couple custom Docker images.

Right now build Java, Kotlin, .Net, .Net Core and Node projects with GitLab.

We setup Nexus to manage the code we share between projects and that has really made the process much easier to manage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Arcade solve the problem of automatically updating nuget references in a csproj from command line in cases where new version of dependent package has different set of dependencies than the previous one? I mean the stuff mentioned in

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/tools/cli-ref- update](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/tools/cli-ref-update)

Without update package installing new dependencies as required you can't script full rebuild after dependencies change flow for PRs.

</comment><comment><USER18> I see they mentioned Azure Dev Ops. Has anyone tried it? I found it to be unusable. It's way slow. I couldn't imagine having to do any sort of admin in there.

<comment><USER19> Most Microsoft businesses which I worked with use it and I find it extremely confusing. The UI is not very intuitive and it takes me on average 5-10 clicks to get to where I want to go. Most things are not documented at all or not very well or documented wrongly because out of date and things often require hours of trial and error before something works the way the team wants it to be. I'm sure once someone has spend too many hours "learning" Azure Dev Ops then it might pay off if it actually all works, but I find it too frustrating to commit my precious time to figure things out which should be dead simple as other CI systems have proven it can be done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be really nice to have nice documentation of similar size builds of our we system. When I read this post the first time I was really interested (surprised, astonished or impressed are not the right words considering this is engineering).

</comment><comment><USER20> .NET Core was/is touted as a _cross-platform solution_ , but it seems only command-line apps are cross platform? I don't see the point in this...

I think they should put more energy into developing a cross-platform GUI system. There's [1] Avalonia, which is a 3rd party system, but nothing developed by Microsoft...

[1] [https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia](https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia)

<comment><USER21> There is also Qml.Net (I'm the author).

[https://github.com/qmlnet/qmlnet](https://github.com/qmlnet/qmlnet)

<comment><USER20> Woah that looks pretty nice! Can I develop on Ubuntu and create binaries for Windows?

<comment><USER21> Yup. You never have to compile any native code. The C interop layer is provided by NuGet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The future of programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/10/07/the-future-of-programming-languages/

<comment><USER2> Interesting videos. Anders talks about functional support on .net, concurrency, immutability. Guy Steele talks about Fortress on JVM. Too bad they are afraid of macros (access to AST), though Steele does say Fortress has some support.</comment>


For Discussion:  History (time) is immutable storage - <AUTHOR>

Just one of those open-ended tangential thoughts:  So are beings programs?  Memories (corrupted) copies of 'the storage?  Where else does this idea lead?  Certainly it's been conceptualized before...right? <comment><USER2> We don't know if information is immutable, else we wouldn't have the black hole information paradox. Nor do we know if history was created last Thursday.

We can be programs, if you used "program" metaphorically to include time evolution of quantum determinism. We aren't programs in the sense that we haven't been shown to be equivalent to a Turing machine, in anything other than their abstract ability to simulate quantum determinism.

Your use of "corrupted" suggests you think there is an ideal concept of information. There's no shadow in Plato's cave. If we are programs in the quantum determinism sense then our memories are perfect descriptions of our memories, not corrupted representations of some past.</comment>


The bank for the best high school hackathons in the world - <AUTHOR> https://hackclub.com/bank/ <comment><USER2> Ohh! That's great. It's a good step to boost the students skills</comment>


Defensive Gun Use (Including Data from Studies) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use

<comment><USER3> Quoting from the wiki... "Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, who described himself "as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country" and whose opinion of guns was "I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. I hate guns--ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people" defended Kleck's methodology, saying "What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator". He went on to say that the NCVS survey did not contradict the Kleck study and that "I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well.""

He deserves credit for recognizing his personal bias.

Here is Wolfgang's 1995 paper, "A tribute to a position I have opposed." [http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent...](http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6854&context=jclc)

<comment><USER4> Kudos to him for recognizing his personal bias and also to not allow it to color his views of research. This is a hot button topic for many on both sides of the issue, and it's rare to see someone - even in the research field - <USER2> is capable of respecting a logical conclusion that disagrees with their personal bias.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this because I was taken aback by the numbers (would link direct to study, but they're in book form). From the article:

> Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz show between 1 to 2.5 million DGUs > in the United States each year.

> Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the > United States.

> Low end estimates cited by Hemenway show approximately 55,000-80,000 such > uses each year.

Of course, this does not mean that 55,000+ incidents _required_ the use of a gun, but rather that a gun was actually used in defense.

<comment><USER3> I thought NPR's piece on Harper High in Chicago was an interesting look into a culture where, despite strong gun control laws, many young people feel it's a necessity to carry guns for defense. Do they NEED guns? I don't know, but how do you convince them that they don't? What would motivate these kids to disarm when they know the people they're afraid of are possessing/carrying firearms illegally? (Ironically, the gun laws cause people to keep their guns in abandoned buildings and under bushes, where kids can and do find them.)

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/488/h...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/488/harper-high-school-part-two) (Act 3 in particular looks at how kids obtain guns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, defensive gun use rates are extremely sensitive to the rate of concealed carry permits, which are largely independent of the rate of criminal acts. Comparing the DGU/crime numbers is apples and oranges. In fact one can argue that at some larger rate of gun carrying, criminal acts would dramatically be reduced by DGU.</comment>


A Silicon Valley VC leaves work to pursue his Olympic dream - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303497804579240112529250356-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwNjEwNDYyWj

<comment><USER2> TL;DR version: if you're rich and well-connected, the rules don't apply to you.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think people work so hard to get rich and well connected? ;)

<comment><USER2> People get rich in a number of ways (including hard work) but connections in high places are usually made through subtle extortion. That's the only way to get into a good-ole-boy network like the hash the VCs have made of Silicon Valley.

Why do you think it matters so much where one went to school, with earlier education (undergrad over grad, prep school over undergrad) even more important? If you went to prep high school with someone powerful, you met him when he was half-formed and doing all kinds of stupid shit, so you have ample extortion material. You _never_ mention it in an extortionate context; he just knows that if you need a favor from him-- such as an intro to a big-name VC-- he will deliver. If you did grad school with him, not as much; most people have been through most of the stupid shit they're going to pull by that age.

You can tell that I don't have much respect for the private-sector social climbers that rule VC-istan. I know far too much to respect them.

<comment><USER4> wat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've entertained similar ideas... amazing that he went after it and didn't dismiss it immediately.

</comment><comment><USER5> #teampaul is a huge inspiration and demonstrates what being a true entrepreneur means.

<comment><USER6> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its the modern day "cool runnings" story :). Go Paul!

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Sounds like the next Vinko Bogataj.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I see something through to completion? - <AUTHOR> I'm a serial procrastinator.
I have a ~/code folder with about 70 projects, none of which could be classed as finished. I pay for GitHub private repos, of which I have about 30 - again, none finished.
I have a SaaS half-built, with a friend using it (it's a form backend as-a-Service thing) along with a monitoring tool and other bits. I'm unfit, can't stop smoking and getting lazier. I feel like I need a big reset, but every time I try that I fail quickly, and each time it's harder to get back up.
I know if I could dedicate all my being in to focusing on getting fit and buckling down for the remainder of 2018, I could come out in great shape with a published online business - I'm capable of both and I've been very fit before, and made money from side-projects with others (I tend to finish more with someone else working on it) - but I just can't make myself do it. Exercise, meditating, stoicism, good routines, healthy eating - I constantly try one or the other and quickly forget about it.
I'm almost 30 and it's really messing with my head, as I remember being 17 in a bedroom writing Visual Basic apps for money, running PHP and Photoshop tutorial blogs and lots of other stuff - now I can't even get a super simple SaaS out there, despite paying for the VPS and domain for a year now.
I can't go on like this. <comment><USER2> _I 'm unfit, can't stop smoking and getting lazier._

Smoking has brain chemistry implications. Some people do it to self medicate for depression.

There's research out there. You can also talk to a professional.

You need to fix you first. Work on your health.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have ADHD and it certainly sounds like you might as well. I have struggled with what I call the "sustained effort" issue for some time and believe that the only thing that will work is seeing a coach several times a week.

Here I run into another problem associated with ADHD: procrastination. There are multiple popular approaches to beating procrastination. There is a fellow at Stanford that advocates defining the _very_ first action necessary and setting some event as a trigger for initiating it. Once you are started continuing is much easier. It sort of works for me.

I do hope this helps.

Good luck

<comment><USER4> Can you share more on the Stanford fellow and adhd?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, we sound really similar. Do you have a history of ADHD?</comment>


TomTom Surrenders, Pays Microsoft Licensing Fees For Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tomtom-surrenders-pays-microsoft-licensing-fees-for-linux-2009-3

<comment><USER2> The discussion on Groklaw (<http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090330130655372>) may be useful to anyone not familiar with the implications of this news (which businessinsider.com is quoting from CNET).</comment>


MenuetOS: an OS that fits on a floppy, written entirely in assembly, has GUI - <AUTHOR> http://www.menuetos.net/index.htm

<comment><USER2> The homepage says it caters to assembly developers particularly. Its GUI can be controlled using ASM. This can be a nice tryout for those interested in hacking. Ttruly, hacker News stuff. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The original Mac OS fit on an 800K floppy (plus 64k ROM), with room for user programs and documents too.

It might have had some Pascal, but was >99% assembler.

<comment><USER4> Looking at the screenshots, this appears to go pretty far beyond the original Mac System software. I mean, it's a full OS with file management, pre-emptive multitasking, networking, Web browser, FTP client, USB with device drivers, multimedia playback and a full GUI with transparency and perspective transforms. The Macintosh had — well, it had primitive file management, at least.

<comment><USER5> Most of that stuff has to do with improvements in the hardware. The original Macintosh's GUI was somewhat limited by the hardware.

CPU: Remember Cringely's story of how before Apple fired him, the last thing he did was to implement an animation of flies buzzing around the trashcan to indicate that it was full, which took 30% of the CPU. And it's a lot easier to do transparency and perspective transforms if you have a GPU to run them on.

Pre-emptive multitasking: pre-emptive multitasking takes up very little code (you just need an interrupt handler that saves one set of registers and restores another set) but it's more error-prone to program on than cooperative multitasking. Its usefulness is that no task can hang the whole computer. But on a machine without an MMU, like the original Mac, any task programmed in an unsafe language can crash the whole computer, so that's worthless. Even preemptive-multitasking OSes that use the MMU effectively (with locks, facilities for limited shared memory, message queues, and so on) can be quite small.

Oberon was a system more or less contemporary with the Mac with hierarchical file management, networking, hypertext, networked file transfer, and a GUI (although obviously not an FTP client, a Web browser, or transparency and perspective transforms) that was similar in size.

So why are our other systems so much more code? Here are some of my guesses.

• You can always do something better (faster, in a more general way, with better error reporting, covering that last little detail of the CSS standard, whatever) in 10× the code. So people do.

• In big and old systems, in order to keep communication overhead to a manageable level, people duplicate code — either because they don't know it already exists, or because they don't understand the code that depends on it well enough not to break it when they change what it depends on, or just because changing the interface is so much work. (In theory, you could migrate all Motif applications to use GTK, with enough work on them.) I'm not saying this is justifiable in systems of merely a few million lines of code, but in systems like Debian, up in the billions of lines, it's unavoidable.

• Big and old systems also have lots of code of minimal utility. Do you know about Xdmcp? Your X server does. How about X resource parsing? Lots of your programs are still linked with Xt. How about the xbm file format, to say nothing of three quarters of the formats supported by netpbm and ImageMagick? Handling for printing teletypes that can't erase? Handling of terminals with no lowercase? Hardware-accelerated non-antialiased rendering of polygons? Video cards that have separate palettes for the red, green, and blue color channels ("DirectColor")? Xcms? Have you ever looked at the random crap in terminfo? Did you know that Microsoft Windows machines still have fields in struct sockaddr_in for IMP numbers, in case you're on the ARPANet? And when was the last time you needed magnetic tape handling programs? Did you know Emacs still comes with notes on how to port Mocklisp to it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder why Menuet32 is open source (GPL), but Menuet64 isn't.

<comment><USER7> As I understand it the developer got annoyed with other developers polluting his 32 bit ASM codebase with impure C and decided to focus on a 64 bit version with a more restrictive license. Shame.

<comment><USER8> He could simply deny their contributions, and make them fork it... The license has little to do with who's managing the project and the decisions they make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it slow and clunky on real hardware, or is that just because I'm running it in qemu? (menuet64)</comment>


Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang? - <AUTHOR> http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/haskell-or-erlang.html

<comment><USER2> Haskell is more elegant, but erlang feels a bit more practical. In particular because of erlang's dynamic type system and symbols. If you are writing distributed software, erlang wins easily.

<comment><USER3> Haskell has (optional) dynamic typing now:

[http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...](http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Data- Dynamic.html)

I have played with it a bit, and haven't had the occasion to use it for anything important. Static typing is good enough for me. (And this is coming from someone who mostly programs Perl.)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I think baked-in dynamic typing is preferable, but I suppose there are cases where this could work just as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously both. But if you're looking to make an exclusive commitment for professional reasons, then I suspect Erlang is more industry and Haskell more academia.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if you had the same opinion about Erlang a year ago...

Erlang is trendy Haskell is not.

<comment><USER4> I was introduced to Erland several years ago because it was used in network switches.

I heard about Haskell through academic connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Root beer or apple juice? Baseball or candy? Kitten or voice mail?

What?

<comment><USER7> Kitten. I hate voice mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Haskell for me.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's more modern, more expressive, runs faster (and supports parallelism better, amusingly), and can talk to Erlang apps anyway.

[http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_librarie...](http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/Interfacing_other_languages/Erlang)

<comment><USER7> I don't know about "modern" and "expressive", but it's definitely faster, and I really like the fact that the compiler catches 95% of the silly errors I'd make in a dynamically typed language.

<comment><USER3> I don't find Haskell to be less expressive than languages like Perl. I will admit that I haven't written enough Erlang to really get a feel for expressiveness.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TARDIS in pure CSS (from Doctor Who) - <AUTHOR> http://csstardis.co.uk/

<comment><USER2> More seriously: I have decided that the next time I am working in a large open floor plan (which I am generally OK with) I am going to construct a full-size Tardis replica (plans for these are plentiful, and carpentry isn't as hard as I feared) and label it "POLITE private call BOX) and use it for the rare personal phone call that I don't want to share with the whole damn company.

</comment><comment><USER2> That is truly beautiful. Good work. One question, though: is it bigger on the inside?

<comment><USER3> No, it's smaller on the outside.</comment></comment>


Powerful and Accurate Conventional Alternative to Nuclear Weapons - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/23/world/23strikegfc.html?ref=europe

<comment><USER2> "In face-to-face meetings with President Bush, Russian leaders complained that the technology could increase the risk of a nuclear war, because Russia would not know if the missiles carried nuclear warheads or conventional ones. Mr. Bush and his aides concluded that the Russians were right."</comment>


Show HN: Tool for spotting npm typosquatting - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/check-typosquatters <comment><AUTHOR> Following the earlier discussion ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901566)) about the malicious crossenv package, I've knocked together a quick tool that might help to spot such typosquatting:

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/check- typosquatters](https://www.npmjs.com/package/check-typosquatters)

(It's the first time I've published anything to npm so let me know if I have done anything wrong...)

It uses the list of package names from the all-the-package-names package and returns the 10 packages with the most similar names to the supplied parameter (using Levenshtein distance)

It also displays their rank based on dependent packages to give an idea of how they compare in usage.

It uses a package of package names that is updated daily.

Could a tool like this help to avoid installing a typosquatting package rather than the intended one?

I wonder whether a wrapper for npm install that warns if there is a higher ranked package within a small Levenshtein might be more useful.

</comment><comment><USER2> nice tool please download and install [https://www.npmjs.com/package/check- typosquaters](https://www.npmjs.com/package/check-typosquaters) very good

(Just kidding.)</comment>


Module Oriented Programming: An OOP Alternative? - <AUTHOR> http://www.floopsy.com/post/32582236678/module-oriented-programming-an-oop-alternative

<comment><USER3> Either I'm lacking sleep, or this is really silly.

1\. The key thing you don't seem to understand about OOP is that it decouples actual data ("Floopsy", 38) from the meaning of the data (name, age). The meaning can be applies across all conceivable 'instances' of a Rabbit. However, you appear to have tightly coupled a "Floopsy",38 and Rabbit. How would you define another rabbit "Flapsy", and not have a conflict with the name "Rabbit". How are you going to create new rabbits given an external data source?

2\. Your example is flawed here, because you would use composition over inheritance for this in OOP anyway. Inheritance should be used _only_ for "is-a" relationships. If you've been using it for "has-a" relationship - <USER2> away whichever book told you to do so.

4\. With the loss of abstraction, you lose _polymorphism_ \- the ability to use the same piece of code on different types. Either that, or your language will use duck typing - now you have another problem.

5\. Your ScoreCard module here is doing exactly the same as a static class, or class with all static fields would be doing anyway - you've not solved any problem - it's just polishing global state in a pretty box.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. No, you are not lacking sleep. This is why I fail as a programmer. :)</comment></comment>


.ICU domains are the 3rd most registered TLD at NameSilo - <AUTHOR> https://www.namesilo.com/domain_count.php <comment><AUTHOR> Thought this was odd - I don't think I've ever seen a .icu domain in the wild before. Apparently it stands for "I see you", not intensive care unit. Does anyone know what they're used for?

edit: Seems like it may potentially be because they are cheap to register - about $1.50.</comment>


Traveling to the Bay Area. Who should I meet in the startup community? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I will be in the Bay area from 5/30-6/1. Im already going to SF Beta. Who else should I attempt to meet I understand it is a very open question. I'm looking for bloggers or other social media personalities.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you partition your private and public digital lives? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Completely separate accounts. I have one master account, which I almost never use but which can be used to reset the others; I'm thinking of using Google's extended verification process for it. I have a personal account for family & friends; I have a 'public personal' account which I give to companies and acquaintances as my personal account; I have a work account for each job I do.

I never, _ever_ access a personal account from a work machine; I never, _ever_ access a work account from a personal account.

If I ever get back into blogging, I'll keep all my political thoughts in a login-required section for my family & friends and keep the publicly-available articles technical & professional. There's no point needlessly antagonising a potential client or colleague.

<comment><USER3> You comment is very interesting to me, because I'm totally the opposite. Mind if I ask you a couple of things? I don't mean to critique, I'm just very curious because... well, it's literally the opposite of what I'm doing.

> I have one master account, which I almost never use but which can be used to > reset the others

Do you get security notifications? I personally made sure to use my primary account as a reset for everything exactly because I don't want to miss important notifications.

> I never, ever access a personal account from a work machine; I never, ever > access a work account from a personal account.

Do you travel relatively often and what do you do in those cases? Like can you completely turn off working?

<comment><USER2> > Do you get security notifications?

Yes, to my daily-use accounts. I don't forward mail from my master account so that my daily-use accounts have little to no mail from it (to keep it obscure).

> Do you travel relatively often and what do you do in those cases? Like can > you completely turn off working?

Yup, I travel a _lot_ , and I certainly do turn off work. When I'm at work, I don't work on my personal projects, and when I'm off work I don't work for an employer.

When I do travel and need to work remotely, I take two laptops: one for myself & one for my work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on what's private vs public for you, and what kind of separation are you trying/thinking to achieve?</comment>


Solve Media Is CAPTCHA-ing 620K Type-In Ads A Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/solve-media-is-captcha-ing-620k-type-in-ads-a-day/

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea. Since the traditional re-captcha has been cracked, I wonder what they'll do in order to make sure this remains viable?</comment>


CIA veterans who monitored crackdowns see parallels - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/cia-veterans-who-monitored-crackdowns-abroad-see-troubling-parallels-in-trump-handling-of-protests/2020/06/02/7ab210b8-a4f6-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html <comment><USER2> Having invaded, destabilised, and collapsed most of South America and other parts of the world, all that is left is for America to destabilise itself. Of course the CIA know what this looks like.

<comment><USER3> Let's also not forget if this was in any other country, the US would be sanctioning them already, making a bad situation even worse! I am personally very glad to see this potentially being the end of the US hegemony.

<comment><USER4> The issue of "What comes after US hegemony?" should trouble you even more.

I can envision a lot of scenarios that are worse than now.

<comment><USER5> Time to start learning Chinese?

<comment><USER6> How do you say 'how do I keep my internal organs AND my religion' in mandarin?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If even the CIA is worried you're going too far, that says a lot.

<comment><USER8> If we're coup-watching, the military has sided with the people: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412986)

That's usually a good sign. Is there any song in the US currently equivalent to "We Shall Overcome" or "Winds of Change" or "Перемен"?

<comment><USER9> It's good to have some hope, but to date there's been a consistent refutation of that.

I'm among those that believe that the coup is already complete and it's now a matter of them holding on to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Archive.is: [http://archive.is/CAvh4](http://archive.is/CAvh4)

</comment><comment><USER10> So we're just going to pretend that cities aren't going up in flames, businesses aren't being destroyed and innocent protestors, rioters and police aren't being killed?

There is an extremely blurry line between peaceful and violent protests. Unfortunately all of the chaos of recent days that the WaPo and others (Obama, etc.) seem all too eager to sweep under the rug has ruined things for everyone.

<comment><USER11> I hope there is as at least as much of that pretending and sweeping under the rug as there us when phrases like "most cops are good" ,"it's only a few bad apples" are used and when cops are not charged with a crime after being filmed in broad daylight commiting heinous crimes that would cause any civilian to rot in prison, or after being charged they don't even make it to trial because a grand jury preemptively aquitted them. I think all that counts as sweeping under the rug. But it seems you care more about property than human life being swept under the rug?

As someone said, maybe the right perspective is "it's too bad all this property is needlessly destroyed, but how can we let so many innocent people die, protestors get assaulted for no reason, journalists losing their eyes and being beaten and detained on american soil for doing their job?" Priorities my friend, says a lot about you. I am sure a country that can afford multi trillion dollar wars and bailouts can handle a few insured propertied burning down. Heck, some people might even profit with the right insurance.

<comment><USER12> Democratic mechanisms to address these issues already exist, and they are in the hands of each State's legislature.

If you hold the Federal Government responsible, then you want to put this power in the hands of Federal Legislature. Are you ready to forsake the federal structure of US Government?

<comment><USER13> That is exactly what these protests are - part of the democratic process. To show the majority, who are not affected by police criminality through a combination of race and chance, the severity of the grievances by the minority who are.

As for the decentralization argument - I really don't want to be on this side of the states' rights debate, but that ship sailed a long time ago with regards to civil rights. It's not terribly unreasonable that individual rights are protected by state governments _ior_ the federal government when an individual state is unwilling. Although we are currently witnessing a direct failure mode of this centralization, with the federal government having gone AWOL with regards to enforcing the law and even inciting lawlessness.

<comment><USER10> "inciting lawlessness"

Do we live in separate universes? It is the media on the Left that is inciting violence by justifying and even glorifying violent riots. The federal government has done the opposite of invite lawlessness both now and in the past.

As we are now beginning to realize, the entire narrative of "rampant police brutality and killing of minorities" is simply a lie. Not backed up by the data.

Black communities need the police now more than ever. In Chicago over memorial day weekend over 50 people were shot. 11 killed. A 5 year old girl was shot! Where are the protests? Where is the rioting and the sanctimonious yapping from celebrities and companies?

There is none, because it's not politically advantageous for certain factions to address the real problems in the black community. Shameful and sickening.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, see, when black people call cops they themselves get beat up by cops who show up after a few hours and arrest anyone they see for bothering them. So, more cops would hardly help. But if you can have civil cops that live in the community they protect,maybe that might help.

Regardless, I doubt you will ever get it. I think the rioters are holding back too much if you ask me. If I was in fear of my life from cops and I have exhaused the political process for decades like this people, I would be more strategic about the destruction, target gas stations, 18 wheelers, transformers,etc... Cripple the city's critical infrastructure. When they try to demonstrate peacefully ypu complain, when they democractically elect someone you fight undemocractically and in bad faith to prevent their success. People armed with automatic weapons stormed city halls just a few weeks ago with no consequence. Did you not see cops doing a drive by shooting? Cops marching and breakint car windows for no reason? Cops tear gasing a peacefup protest? Getting caught framing protesters so they can beat them up?

My friend, the rioting is for people like you so you can hear their screaming, I think they need to scream louder since you're still dismissing their plight as if they haven't been peacefully protesting and voting since the 1950's and the current president vowed to unleash vicious dogs on them, something JFK fought against in the late 50's and early 60's. So I think they need to scream louder this way so you can hear them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article makes sense in the absence of proper national reporting on the level of looting and rioting. For those that have seen it first hand, the national guard on the streets is a relief.

<comment><USER14> speak for yourself, I've seen it first hand and the national guard is NOT a relief. I don't need militarized police in my streets, thank you.

<comment><USER6> You prefer a bit of the good old ultraviolence?

[https://youtu.be/HJeu3GEsOq8](https://youtu.be/HJeu3GEsOq8)

<comment><USER14> i can show lots of cherry picked examples of national guard making bad decisions too, what is your point?

also the man in the linked video wasn't very smart, he took a bat to a fight(with an angry mob) severely outnumbered... thats poor tactical decision making. Sometimes the best answer is to sit back and watch it all go down, and make the insurance claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the CIA and their bemoaning the decline of its US manufacturing base (also on WaPo) — while true, it's not encompassing enough to show the resilience of global market (even during COVID-19 crises).

This article is also based on scant socio-political vector data so it needs more parallels to reach that causation level. For now, it's a bare correlation and merely coincidence.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible that Bitcoin saves the answers to Crypto problems? - <AUTHOR>

So I have never read the code for Bitcoin, and a little while back pg asked why a government would create Bitcoin (since the authors are anonymous), but people are going out and building Bitcoin mining hardware.  Really what we have now is the most powerful cloud based code cracking system ever created, as far as I know.<p>As I understand it the problems are random, the system distributed, but is it possible someone somewhere is storing these answers? <comment><USER2> Mining hardware hashes SHA256(SHA256()) of the block header. If anybody does that to crack some passwords, they do it at expense of _not_ earning bitcoin. If they want to earn bitcoin, they have to hash block headers instead of passwords.

Intermediate non-valid hashes are thrown away, but all of them hash almost the same data: header with some nonce value.</comment>


Holographic Tabletop Gaming – AR D&D - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-tabletop-gaming <comment><USER2> Looks really cool, something I've been waiting for at this price level for years since I saw the Microsoft Hololens. I'll never fund another Kickstarter, however, due to the time I funded a 3D printer that was almost as complete a product as this and it was still 1 year late and never worked right. If a product like this is seriously awesome, they should get proper funding to produce it as a sellable product rather than take this Kickstarter shortcut and, as is the usual case, fuck over the customers for some time before getting it right. I predict they will come up with a decent finished product in the next few years, but before that happens some other company will come out with a similar but better working alternative that I don't have to take the Kickstarter risk for. I'm not trying to be a dickhead, but a Kickstarter is nothing but a red flag for me and a ton of other people at this point.

<comment><USER3> Jeri already delivered pretty much the very same Kickstarter 4-6 years ago [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/cast...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar- the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system) but company was lured by no other than _Andy Rubin_ into a VC circus [https://www.roadtovr.com/ar-glasses-company- castar-lands-15-...](https://www.roadtovr.com/ar-glasses-company-castar- lands-15-million-investment-led-by-android-co-founders-firm/) and the rest is rather predictable - your product is worth more unreleased, and whole purpose of the company is finding a bigger fool to buy you out. Board fired technical staff, bought few game studios, ran out of VC money and moved on to pillage something else.

You can listen to the whole story straight from horses mouth in this podcast [https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise- of-...](https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-castar/)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Jeri's Amphour talk is one of the things I make people I know who are trying to get into tech startups listen to. It's a great insight into what happens when a sucessful startup gets the wrong kind of VC help.

For what it's worth, the original glasses set worked wonderfully years ago when I used them and I'll back this one again. I'm still determined to have my floating CAD solidworks demo with it. Customers will freaking love it.

p.s. The games were fun too. Try it with Alien Swarm.

<comment><USER3> >wrong kind of VC help

But it was the very best kind of VC you could hope for. Andy Rubin, former Apple/General Magic employee, founder of two companies with very successful exits (danger, android).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Are Voters Angry? It's the 1099 Economy, Stupid - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/132407/voters-angry-its-1099-economy-stupid <comment><USER2> The tagline of the article is

"But none of the presidential candidates is offering a solution for the growing millions of independent contractors without social safety nets."

But Bernie Sanders is running on a platform of single payer healthcare which would provide social safety nets to all people regardless of their employment status.

<comment><USER3> Bernie Sanders is also proposing the biggest income tax increases. Two people working non-manager tech jobs would be paying an extra $15-20k per year under Sanders. That's just crushing for people that have done everything right and are trying to save for a downpayment on their first home, for some runway to do a startup, for their children's education, for their retirement, or to help take care of their aging parents. No thanks!

<comment><USER4> To be fair, they would also be freed of the health care costs that are currently well above $10k/year for your example couple.

<comment><USER3> And, to be fair, they would also be deprived of the last shred of choice left in health care. Want a second opinion under that system? Prepare to pay the doctor under the table (at the risk of criminal prosecution), or stand in line until you feel better.

If health care is ever going to be truly available to all, it's going to be through the same means and rules that gave us the iPhone. (Unfettered pioneers are left free to pay high prices at first, then economies of scale bring prices on that new innovation to ever-lower levels. Let me count the ways _that_ is not the case in health care today!)

<comment><USER5> Most consensus is that normal market forces don't work very well for health care for a variety of reasons. Firstly people are notoriously terrible in predicting what coverage they might need (so any choice offered becomes of nebulous utility right off the bat). Secondly, because of the nature of health emergencies, most people are not in a good condition to investigate their options at the time of care. You can spend months researching the optimal smart phone for your budget and use case, you spend the same amount of time on looking into your cancer treatment you'll end up in the same place as Steve Jobs.

For the average consumer, demand is very inelastic when it comes to ~not dieing~ and availability of information + expertise to evaluate said information is sparse. Single payer is the far more efficient solution for everyone except the middle men profiting off the current system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Color blind accessibility on Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://julesinthemiddle.tumblr.com/post/51755312122/color-blind-accessibility-on-bootstrap

<comment><USER2> Uh, theres no hard and fast rule for how colour blind people see. I'm colour blind and I can quite clearly see the difference between the top set of buttons.

It's really difficult to talk about, because obviously when I use the simulator, the colours look really messed up and don't make sense but that's already equating in my colour blindess, but I imagine it's a lot more subtle for the vast majority of those who are colour blind and therefore it's hardly 560 million people.

I honestly don't think the wins would be worth the losing green/amber/red standard that most people instinctively understand and have had their eyes grow used too.

<comment><USER3> I was thinking the same exact thing. I'm color blind, and Success and Danger look very close while Success and Warning are easily distinguishable.

EDIT: After another read, I see that it was a typo in the article. That being said, is Primary not already blue? I'd venture a guess that it's actually purple (again: color blind) if the OP is suggesting making Success blue.

<comment><USER2> Primary looks blue to me. I find it a bit strange that you would call one distinct colour another colour, as we're taught to label them as children, so generally colour blind people only trip up on edge cases as it doesn't matter what you see, you've learned to associate a shade with a label.

Your eyes must be more messed up than mine; are you talking about the top Primary or the lower Primary, because I can kinda understand with the lower, but I'd be suprised if anyone with a decent monitor couldn't tell the top colours apart and call them by name, extreme cases being the exception.

<comment><USER4> Blue and purple are problematic because of the red component. If your color blindness comes from a deficiency in red then it's difficult.

On the other hand, if you're deficiency stems from lacking green, then blue and purple won't be as difficult.

Red-green color blindness stems from a deficiency, and therefore some colors are aliased. It is not a substitution where the total unique colorspace is the same size but with different elements.

The colorspace has is reduced. So it is not matter of memorizing that a shade of X is really Y. That may work in some cases that are likely unique to the individual, but there WILL be aliased colors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm colorblind (probably deuteranomalia; red-green problems) and I can't see any problem. In the simulated daltonism version Success and Warning are probably even more different than in original ones (but Warning seems a little greenish).

Does anyone with impaired color vision actually have any problem?

It's completely different with plots using red and green (especially red-green gradient). Don't do it ever - or at least not when showing results to anyone who you don't know to have proper color vision. Orange and blue are much better.

</comment><comment><USER6> Color is only one way to improve the usability. I think glyphicons included in bootstrap can complement the color as an indicator of the meaning of buttons, and they should be used whenever appropriate for that very reason.

<comment><USER7> Exactly.

      SC 1.4.1 Use of Color: Color is not used as the only
      visual means of conveying information, indicating an
      action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual
      element. (Level A)

      Users who have color-blindness benefit when information
      conveyed by color is available in other visual ways.

[http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio- contr...](http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-contrast- without-color.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone mildly effected by colourblindness, I am happy to see this consideration. I think it's important to note that making UI colourblind- sensitive, you don't have to do a whole lot of work. Contrast being the most important.

<comment><USER2> Should check out the colour blind checkbox for l4d2. Works for me, and doesn't the change the colours from one to another (in the sense that I call different shades of red, red. :P ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it would make much more sense if the web application / browser / operating system can adjust the colours to fit a colour-blind person, rather than applying the same logic for everyone. In addition, different types of colour-blindness (deuteranopia, protanopia, tritanopia) make it hard to come up with one scheme that fits all.

There are a couple of browser plugins and scriptlets for this purpose - e.g. <http://daltonize.appspot.com/>

At kenHub (working with John Cupitt, the creator of ruby-vips), we've also created an implementation of the daltonize algorithm for ruby/rails that does this server-side. see <https://github.com/kenhub/shikimo>

(we are hoping to use this soon on our anatomy atlas, so colour-blind people can more easily distinguish between highlights and colour-coded structures)

</comment><comment><USER10> Success is grey Warning is yellow...

<comment><USER11> Noticed that too. Maybe the author is colorblind for those? Maybe we are?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here! I just noticed that they are not really contrasting, and maybe I'm mildly colorblind!

<comment><USER12> I think you have some colorblindness. They are very distinctly different to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For one example of this look at <http://jenkins-ci.org/>. They use blue for successful builds and red for unsuccessful builds.

</comment><comment><USER14> My eyes are pretty messed up. Red and green look the same and I can't definitively tell dark blue from grey from purple. However I have no trouble with the default bootstrap buttons.

That said, I find the most helpful thing people can do is add icons or other effects completely different from colors. Because of my difficulty with colors, even ones I can "see" I have to concentrate on. Icons let me skip that.

<comment><USER4> I'm with you here. An overlayed pattern can be very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would much rather this sort of thing be handled by the OS along with other accessibility features.

One option would be to have the OS add a pattern to the red component of the RGB space. That would work for sufficiently large patches.

Another idea would be to add a time domain function to red that pulsates the brightness.

With options for always on or momentary.

<comment><USER15> As a colorblind photographer, I keep waiting for systems like this which can intuitively show me where a specific color is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Only 8% of the MALE population are colorblind while only around 0.5% of women are colorblind.

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess nobody actually reads the labels??

<comment><AUTHOR> well, I was talking about contrast, not labels. Usability is when you guess what is something before you focus on it!</comment></comment>


This Is My Brain on Rock Climbing - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/this-is-my-brain-on-rock-climbing <comment><USER3> Am I the only one who's skeptical of how quickly Nautilus reach the front page? I swear on like 15 different occasions a mediocre article with no comments get a surge of upvotes.

I'm hesitant to say there's foul play but something's not right...

</comment><comment><USER4> I will say, believing in your skills as a way to manage fear is a dangerous path in climbing.

Your protection, not your skills, are what keeps most climbers alive and healthy.

Obviously skills are important, but far far more important is diligence with rope skills, carefully and frequently placing pro, checking and rechecking harnesses and anchors, putting knots in your ropes when rapping, and generally not getting complacent or lazy with these things.

But relying on just not falling is a great way to die by overconfidence (and yes, I'm saying that all free soloists are running on borrowed time and, frankly, are poor models to look to)...

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry but this is just not true at all in alpine climbing. Plenty of no- fall zones where being comfortable climbing icy 5.8 in boots and crampons is the difference between falling to your death and making it up.

<comment><USER4> For the vast majority of recreational climbers my comment holds. If you're in a no-fall situation where your life is at risk, it's because you're off route and run out, an entirely avoidable situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Then there are people like Alex Honnold who don't seem to have this fear at all, able to free solo (climb without ropes) that same route

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAloYst7p8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAloYst7p8)

<comment><USER7> I have climbed for many years, though as more of a gym rat. What this article seems to primarily be about is the psychological aspects of the sport - <USER2> are many times when you need to do a move which is physically not a stretch, but your mind resists, because you become stuck thinking about the consequences of failure. For a non-climber, think of walking in a straight line for ten seconds. What are the chances you will fall over and sustain an injury? Very small, of course, you do more dangerous things every day without thinking about it at all. But now walk in a straight line along a small ledge, where falling would mean certain death. Objectively, you know you can do it, it doesn't become any more difficult just because the consequences are much more serious. But if you panic, it does, and the panic can kill you... Still, I tend to prefer to stay closer to the ground, what can I say, I haven't achieved that level of confidence.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the fastest open source single-node SQL database? - <AUTHOR> Despite various searches, I haven't been able to find an adequate answer to the question in the title. I know that there are various database technologies out there apart from PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB, but I haven't found any performance benchmark on a single-node across various options. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> Use Postgres and don't worry about the absolute single node fastest. It should be sufficient unless you have unusual compute environment, (iot, embedded) at which point the discussion would be very different

</comment><comment><USER3> See Omnisci: [https://www.omnisci.com/](https://www.omnisci.com/)</comment>


Einstein Analytics and Go - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/07/how-salesforce-converted-einstein-analytics-to-go/ <comment><USER2> This is nice review of a project that transitioned from Python+C to pure Go in an enterprise setting. Covers the pros and the cons and concludes that the transition has been worthwhile.</comment>


Getting started with FPGA DSP designs  - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/getting-started-fpga-dsp-designs <comment><AUTHOR> Normal computer systems use microprocessors which execute software instructions to perform a wide variety of tasks.</comment>


'Hidden city' travel: why airlines are cracking down on a discount trick - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/16/hidden-city-travel-discount-loophole-airlines-crack-down-lawsuit-skiplagged <comment><USER2> There have been many submissions of this story, some with significant discussion:

        Lufthansa Sues Hidden City Ticketholder
        for Throwing His Ticket (cnn.com)
        111 comments[0]

        Lufthansa Sues Passenger Who Missed His
        Flight – 'Hidden City' Trick (slashdot.org)
        10 comments[1]

        An airline is suing a customer who skipped
        a leg of his flight to save money (vox.com)
        6 comments[2]

        Lufthansa sues customer for skipping flight
        (godsavethepoints.com)
        2 comments[3]

        'Hidden city' travel: airlines are cracking
        down on a discount trick (theguardian.com)
        No comments[4]

        Airline sues passenger for not taking a
        connection (ctvnews.ca)
        No comments[5]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144006)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153457)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19159914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19159914)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19126675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19126675)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182808)

[5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19156064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19156064)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I may be misunderstanding but the article seems to be saying airlines are claiming against lost revenue from not being able to resell the seats not used by travellers who skip a leg. This makes no sense. They sell the ticket. Whether the customer uses it or not does not cause the airline to lose money.

On a related note I feel like overselling flights should be illegal. You're trying to sell the same thing to two different people, which in another industry would be considered fraud.

<comment><USER3> This is an area of light handed regulation. aircraft fitness compliance is far stronger. business practices in selling seats is an almost unregulated area, noting the warsaw concerto (sorry.. warsaw convention)

I suspect if it was regulated properly, the last ones standing would be the state subsidised actors. Nobody else is on thick margins.</comment></comment>


How to design a good native-looking WordPress Admin icon - <AUTHOR> http://julien-c.fr/2012/07/wordpress-admin-icons/

<comment><USER2> Decent enough article, some good points made, but what the heck does it have to do with Inception and dream states?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here -- wait, what ?!</comment></comment>


Big Tech is taking our freedom – How Apple is making developers pay ransom money - <AUTHOR> https://mateusguimaraes.com/posts/big-tech-is-taking-away-our-freedom-how-apple-is-making-companies-their-hostages-and-demanding-ransom-money <comment><USER2> 30% seems to be the standard commission rate in the gig economy for "I did something for you".

Grubhub: I brought you an order, give me 30%

Apple: I brought you a customer, give me 30%

Uber: I brought you a passenger, give me 30%

Competition can lower the industry rates for food & personal travel, though I suspect there is price fixing at play right now. But it cannot for Apple platforms. The antitrust proceedings _must_ happen for us to see progress here. You don't persuade the largest company in the world to change their ways. You legislate them to. Too bad our lawmakers have no teeth.

<comment><USER3> > Competition can lower the industry rates for food & personal travel, though > I suspect there is price fixing at play right now.

Considering (food & human) delivery is already a notoriously unprofitable industry, I think the more likely answer is that competition already occurred and these are somewhat fair prices we are left with.

Apple on the other hand, can host an app download on the app store without paying a human to use a depreciating asset (that burns fossil fuels) to travel several miles in meatspace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if I sympathize well with this but I am open to hearing more. If I am a US citizen, then I have to pay ~30% taxes on my worldwide income. In exchange, I have a very convenient passport, I have access to the US stock market, etc...

Is it not the same for Apple? You pay 30% tax and you have to implement their IAP. That's the cost of getting access to all the iPhone market share amongst other things.

<comment><USER5> It is the same for Apple but you're forgetting that this is bad for everyone who isn't a US citizen. And in the same vein, these tech mini nation-states create walled-gardens around themselves in the same vein nation-states erect borders. And borders are a reason for huge welfare losses.

One reason you have a nation-state in the first place is so you avoid local zero-sum games and you can force companies to compete on an open market, which has huge positive upside for everyone who isn't Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I bet we're all think, I wish I wouldn't have bought all those 99 cents ipod songs.

</comment><comment><USER7> The concept of "freedom" defined in the article makes no sense to me. It is like saying "I would like the freedom to go where I please, even if it means I am trespassing". No, that's not how it works in the real world.

>>Basecamp (DHH and Jason) can make their voice heard, but how many companies (specially the small) have faced the same thing and just succumbed to Apple's "rules" and just had a 30% pay cut?

If you choose to use Stripe, are you taking a 5% (or whatever their commission is for your region) pay cut? Arguing for the amount charged is different, but calling it a pay cut (as if you were entitled to get that amount) is just idiotic. Remember that you are _free_ to not release your app on the App store if you don't want to "succumb" to the rules. Is the marketplace forcing you to build the iOS app? Then blame the marketplace, not the gatekeeper. Or even better, go play a different game where the marketplace doesn't force these options on you.

DHH is acting like a whiny little baby, to be honest. How about: don't create an iPhone app. Isn't Basecamp supposed to be an amazing pioneer when it comes to SaaS? So see if you can chart a new path for others by refusing to build an iPhone app and see what happens? Will that become the new trend? Will Apple be forced to lower the commission or change these rules because everyone building a SaaS starts doing the same thing as Hey? Also, will people switch to using Android just so they can use Hey? It is not as if iOS is the only game in town.

</comment><comment><USER8> Classic sensationalized title about apple. Yes this is a problem, but ransom isn't the right analogy here. Apple's payment solution is both an outdated and very apple way of doing things.

<comment><USER6> antitrust bundling is probably a better description.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I switched from android to iphone because of privacy reasons I don't agree that I'm a customer of the service I'm using if i use it on Apple product I trust Apple to do a review where it checks if service is harming my privacy and I'm paying Apple for that

I think apple is fair here.

<comment><USER10> The App Store doesn't do that or else Xcodeghost would never have happened. If you mean at a high level that only certain categories of apps are allowed to ask for certain permissions, the Google Play Store does that too.</comment></comment>