Why is it important to have a shorter résumé? - <AUTHOR> http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/11/07/10pages/ <comment><USER4> One page is more than enough. It's important to remember the purpose of a resume.

The purpose of a resume is not to get you a job. The purpose of a resume is to get you an interview.

To expand on that, as I was once told by a helpful professor, "The purpose of a cover letter is to get them to read your resume. The purpose of your resume is to get an interview. Finally, it is the responsibility of your interview to get you the job."

You will never write a resume so good the interview will just be a formality so stop trying. Focus your resume on exactly what it needs to be to get you that interview. And that should be a single page of beautiful, focused, catered content.

<comment><USER5> Having gone through the process recently, this is rubbish.

If you've got 10 years experience 3 pages is perfectly normal and when I tried with a single page cv, kept getting asked if this was just the covering page & can I send my whole CV.

Also as soon as I added a whole load of detail like 'did this, wrote this program, used this tech' to every job, the interview offers started coming like crazy.

<comment><USER6> If I may ask, are you US based? That seems fully out of line with what I've experienced in every US hiring process I've been through, and totally in line with what I've heard about abroad hiring.

<comment><USER5> I am indeed in the UK! So yes, sounds like it is a cultural difference. And not rubbish at all.

<comment><USER4> I learned something today! It never occurred to me there might be cultural differences here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's important to remember that the "x pages" rule of thumb is a hang-over from when we had paper resumes.

Current reading behaviour is somewhat different and tends towards scanning/skipping because the breaks between pages are much less significant with a resume on screen.

<comment><USER8> I dunno, I (and I would suspect many others) have the same tendency when reading PDFs - if it's more than 1 page, I skim to the end then go back up, much like I would on a paper document.

Are you citing something or just generalizing from what you've seen?

<comment><USER7> I've not seen a paper directly comparing the two, but if you look at resume correlation studies (comparing attributes of CV to acceptance/rejection rates), resume length generally has a stronger correlation to outcome in paper resume studies than electronic resume studies.

(there may be other factors at play though, as candidates who submit paper resumes are obviously different from candidates who submit electronic resumes; in addition most of the paper resume studies are now historical (pre-2000) so there may also be a time factor involved)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suffered from this problem until I found myself in a hiring manager position where I had the opportunity to review a bulk load of CVs from hopeful candidates applying for a job that I had the power to grant them.

If this is something you suffer from, I suggest you ask your friends to all send you their CVs and spend a few hours going through them as if you were preparing to interview them...

</comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory Rands link: [http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-glimpse-and-a- hook/](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-glimpse-and-a-hook/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Never read that one, thanks for the share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This won't work for everyone or for every position, but I've converted to something more like:

<Very position-customized and concise cover letter intro>

Github | Blog | Project sites | etc.

<Quickly highlight position-appropriate or interesting repos/posts/projects>

Resume available upon request.

If a company actually needs a resume for whatever reason, I tend to side with the OP. If you send more than one page (with reasonable formatting) then you are just sending over data that will likely be ignored.

</comment><comment><USER12> $acceptablePageLength = ($yearsExperience / 10) + 1;

<comment><USER13> By this formula, I can have four pages. My resume is four pages plus four lines that spill over onto the fifth page. If your formula handled floating point instead of integers, I'd be fine.

<comment><USER14> If I received your resume and the last page was literally cut to just contain those four lines, I'd certainly remember it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unless you are published, a page is enough. Seriously.

<comment><USER16> I was taught in school and recommended by parents to include everything from middle school education to current employment. Combine that with all skills, programming languages and projects I've worked on, and I actually have a hard time fitting it all on 2 pages.

Care to elaborate why you think "one page ought to be enough for everyone"? Seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> Middle school education? What country did you hear this in? That is definitely not the case in the US, and I'd venture to guess that would be customary only in countries where a middle school education is generally the highest level obtained.

<comment><USER16> Not sure middle school was the correct wording, but it's after primary school anyway. Ages 12-19. In middle school we basically have three primary types of education, depending on how smart you are (or how well you did in the tests anyway). At least for me as a student it's still relevant to mention it, even though I've done plenty of internships and projects to prove things. Maybe after a few jobs it should be left out, I don't know.

Edit: country is the Netherlands.

> I'd venture to guess that would be customary only in countries where a > middle school education is generally the highest level obtained.

As you said yourself, cultures differ I guess :)

Edit 2: Looked it up, a better word may be secondary education. Info: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education#Netherlands](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education#Netherlands)

<comment><USER17> What's considered a good resume in the US definitely isn't in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands two to three pages is the sweet spot and a one pager would be considered odd. If you're just out of University two pages should be possible though.

You can check out my resume at [http://michiel.trimpe.nl](http://michiel.trimpe.nl) for a fairly polished three page CV that works well for the Dutch market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Single page resumes can be tough to accomplish if you've got a lot of things you want to highlight. Obviously you're trying to get the attention of the person doing the resume sifting, but that's probably where you can have a little more impact with some minor effort into the way your resume looks. Giant boring blocks of text are probably the majority of resumes, but if you can make something that stands out a bit, perhaps you can at least get someone to spend a bit more time looking over your CV.

</comment><comment><USER19> On the flip side, nothing ticks me off more than large companies who think they are so desirable (they're not!) that they think they can get away with making you fill out pages of propriatary website application forms and upload your resume into blocks of text that never format properly. When I see that... It immediately turns me off and I walk away. Not interested in conforming to BS.It speaks volumes of how you run your company and intend to treat your employees.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think that a single page resume especially in a technical field is difficult if you want to have projects, jobs, schooling etc all included. A two page resume I would say is the maximum size a 5 page resume would be way too long and probably has a lot of extra fluff (unless you are including publications those take up a lot of space)

<comment><USER21> Opinions on this subject obviously differ. My take is this: for most people (e.g. outside of academia), a resume isn't a shipping manifest. It's a piece of persuasive writing. The question isn't, "is one page enough to describe everything I've done" but rather "is one page enough to convince some hiring authority that I'm worth calling back?"

My dad does a lot of hiring. He says he spends about a couple of minutes on each resume that crosses his desk (he usually evaluates hundreds for any given position). That amount of time is enough to give one page due consideration, two pages an adequate read, but not to do anything more than skim through a 3+ page resume. Especially a dense one.

I think part of the problem is that a lot of the classic resume guidelines (chronological ordering) are not conducive to building a resume that highlights the relevant parts of someone's experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are good points. Would you rather write a document that is one page and will be viewed carefully, or a 3 page document that will be scanned? It seems a pretty easy decision, but generally screeners will want to spend the same amount of time viewing every resume and are unlikely to give a candidate who provides 6 pages three times the amount of viewing as they would someone who writes 2 pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This makes me recall the huge deal one of my advisors at University made of little rules at interview lunches. She insisted that we never dare put salt and pepper on our food before tasting it - because interviewers would be watching to see if we were willing to try new things. What utter garbage. When I go over a resume or interview someone, I'm just doing a candidate assessment of their experience and work ethic. If that's 1 page or 3, or if they assume they like their food salty, I don't really care. I think the article itself gives some good suggestions, but when I come across comments about a page being a hard limit I just don't understand it. I assume I would never want to work for people who judge on such arbitrary and irrelevant criteria - but they seem to be so numerous, I must have already worked for some of them without realizing it...

</comment><comment><USER23> I took the alternative approach of auto-generating my resume from my code [https://plus.google.com/104659641866805928410/posts/UeNDaZhE...](https://plus.google.com/104659641866805928410/posts/UeNDaZhEmb8)

<comment><USER16> Has it scored you any jobs or interviews yet?

<comment><USER23> Yes/No (it's been 2 weeks, only a couple of email enquiries/telephone interviews).

I've got no job experience and no college education so it's an uphill struggle. I'm trying to innovate with the resume to overcome that (I can code/write etc, but don't have the standard papers/references).

<comment><USER16> Okay, well at least you're trying something new. That should get some attention. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I prefer a concise, short resume. I interview candidates over the phone so I keep the resume and a condensed job description on the displays in front of me. If the candidate lists something, I ask about it. Knowing what a potential hire did 10+ years ago may be interesting but it's rarely relevant. It provides color but I'm significantly more interested in what was done in the last 3-4 years. When a person hasn't exercised a technical skill for 3+ years, that skill may be obsolete and/or the candidate may prove unable to apply that skill.

</comment><comment><USER25> I usually list HTML and CSS as office skills next to Microsoft Office and LaTeX ;) [http://i.imgur.com/1Yx5PY1.png](http://i.imgur.com/1Yx5PY1.png) (I haven't updated this CV in a while and I think I should downgrade my Java and Eiffel experience again since I haven't written any Java and Eiffel code in a while)

For bonus points: Can you guess the university?

<comment><USER26> I like the way that looks. What font did you use for the headings? Body text looks like Century?

<comment><USER25> The CV was created in LaTeX using a modified moderncv template: ([http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/modernc...](http://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv) )

As for the font in the section titles: I don't know. For the body it uses the lmodern font ([http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/lmodern/](http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/lmodern/) )

I would have been easier to create the CV in word; but I prefer the font layouting in LaTeX to Word/Pages/Google Docs/etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a graduate student (CS) from Europe and just prepared my CV/Résumé for internship applications at U.S. companies, so the comments in this thread are very helpful.

Are there any websites/communities where I could get feedback and maybe some hints how to improve my CV and project portfolio?

</comment><comment><USER28> I hate my CV. I have revised it so many times. Its currently 3 pages (25 years experience) and in Australia people have said it needs more detail.

I just have no idea what to add. Anybody got any good sites for CVs?

<comment><USER29> Out of interest, who's telling you it needs more detail?

<comment><USER28> The agents.

<comment><USER29> Huh.

There's definitely a strong culture of having longer resumes in Australia - <USER2> original resume was 3-4 pages long, which I whittled down to 2 when I moved to the US (and could easily get down to 1 now). I think it's a waste of time though, no one actually reads through all that stuff when it's that long. If people need further detail after seeing a one page summary they can ask.

But obviously you just have to deal with whatever people expect. I wonder if the agents are right though, or if it's just what they're used to? I've only ever hired in Australia, only applied for one job while I was there, so I don't have no first hand knowledge of applying for jobs with a shorter resume. I know I definitely appreciated the shorter resumes when I had to look through them though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are Australian recruiters and hiring managers actually reading all those pages thoroughly? I've rarely had to encourage candidates in the US to beef up their resumes (sometimes they need to add more tech content), but I'd probably advise over 50% to trim them down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Opinions differ. I imagine many have an opinion on whether there should be a cover letter or note or not, and how long it should be. But this is rarely stated.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never want a full 'traditional' cover letter as they always tend to be stiff due to the format ("Dear Hiring Manager" and formality), but I'd like a few sentences with the resume submission that say why you are interested in the job, what caught your eye, and maybe a couple sentences on why you think you'd be a fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Resumes/CVs (I'm using the terms interchangeably here) serve different purposes. They really need to be catered for that purpose:

1\. Looking for work

Your resume should be 2 pages, tops. If Guido van Rossum can have a short resume [1] so can you.

There is an important skill here and that's learning how to reduce what you're saying to the most salient points. This applies to resumes and presentations. This ties in to the oft-quoted Blaise Pascal [2]. As soon as you start writing "Responsible for design and development" you've gone astray.

The key things that should be in your resume shouldn't be your responsibilities (nobody cares) but what you've actually done.

You may think all 10 pages are important but they're not. The person reading it might have a stack of 50 on their desk. Each is probably only going to get 30 seconds of attention (tops) before a large number are culled and a second pass is made.

Some seem to argue that this is the hiring manager's problem and they should have longer attention spans. But the fact is if you can't get your point across quickly there value of extra time spent on a resume diminishes quickly.

Now this all changes in certain job situations, for example contracting with large companies. At such places your resume will go through a filter before it ever sees a hiring manager. That filter is of course the HR department. HR departments, as a general rule, don't have a clue about technology. All they do is look at the job description and look for the appropriate acronyms in your resume.

I once got asked "I see you have 5 years of Java experience, but do you have any J2SE experience?" End result? My resume was updated to say "Java/J2SE - <USER3> years".

You have to balance this out. Getting past HR just to appear like buzzword nonsense to a hiring manager is winning the battle to lose the war. So there still has to be enough meat.

Another way of culling information is highlighting what's relevant to that position and de-emphasizing (or removing entirely) the irrelevant. If you're applying for a job doing Linux driver development in C and you did 3 years of J2EE 8 years ago, nobody is going to care. Just delete it (for that job). If that creates a gap, reduce that experience to _one line_.

Tailoring resumes for specific jobs is one skill or idea that many people don't seem to have in my experience. It's OK to have multiple versions of your resume as long as they don't contradict each other.

2\. Visa/immigration issues

Different kettle of fish. Here it's a bit like the HR filter case. Immigration officials will look at the job description and look for that experience on your resume. You need to make it simple for them. That can include putting key terms and acronyms in bold (seriously).

3\. Freelancing

Probably most relevant is what project you've successfully completed and any references of such you have. Your employment responsibilities become less relevant. So have a line "Worked 3 years for IBM" if you must but no real need to break it down beyond job title.

Links to your work are far more important in this case.

4\. Applying for (typically government) contracts.

The HR case on steroids. Government contracts are seemingly decided on the raw weight of supporting documentation. Put in every little detail you can. Or you could do something useful with your life.

[1]: [http://www.python.org/~guido/Resume.html](http://www.python.org/~guido/Resume.html)

[2]: [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Sourced](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Sourced)

<comment><USER16> > If Guido van Rossum can have a short resume so can you.

Nice one-liner, but actually Guido van Rossum would probably get hired pretty much anywhere. He does not need to stress all his various skills; he is not currently in need of a job.

Not to say that your recommendation of "2 pages, tops" is wrong, I honestly can't say. I just think the Guido van Rossum comparison is a bit unfair ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's funny, I've worked contract jobs that want every tiniest little detail you've ever come across in your resume so they can qualify you against a better labor category. My resume for those positions was a grueling 10 pager.

I keep my resume up to date every couple months, and about once a year go through an overhaul it. In my last overhaul, I got it down to 2 solid pages, which isn't bad for handling almost 20 years of work, a bunch of schooling and some other sundry. I have a couple different versions of the resume as well, depending on what I'm shooting for but generally I follow this.

My last couple jobs I try and include quite a few broad level bullets, especially if the job had lots of variety in it. Editing (cutting out things) is really hard, but nobody wants to read a novel. After that I start to reduce the amount of space I'm willing to consume for a position.

Very old positions are pretty much year:title:company and that's it.

Education is also pretty direct, year, degree, school with GPA in the margin. Nobody really wants to read about all the extra curricular activities, especially if you went to school a long time ago.

Way down at the end of my second page, I stuck some misc: tools, awards, publications that sort of thing. People aren't generally super interested in those things in my field, but it pads out the second page. Just work + Education gives me a decently breeze 1.5 pager.

But editing some of that stuff out was _really_ hard. There's work that I've done years ago that I'm really proud of, but it's just not worth it to have on there anymore eating up lots of space.

Having been a hiring manager, I really care about what you worked on in your last job, why you want this job and if a quick breeze over your work history shows a forward moving progression of increasing responsibility.

I remember reading through some really dreadful 9-13 page resumes during the .com boom where people 2 or 3 years out of high school were listing extensive tables of dozens of very expensive technologies like expert level SGI IRIX.

The consistently worst resumes tend to come from people outside the U.S. So I try to cut them slack, but sometimes you get resumes where you can tell they're just throwing buzz words against the wall to see if it gets them a job and they have no idea what they're talking about.

I worked with another hiring manager who followed a strict policy of tossing any resume with a single spelling or grammar error. It sounds harsh, but her idea was that anybody who couldn't take care enough on their resume wouldn't take care enough of their work. Her company has been wildly successful so there might be something there.

<comment><USER33> > and if a quick breeze over your work history shows a forward moving > progression of increasing responsibility.

I'm curious on your reasoning behind wanting a forward moving progression. Are you looking for people who want more than what they have? Or, does this represent a "stable" personality to you?

<comment><USER32> Over many years, people just tend to end up in positions of increasing responsibility unless they're really fouling up regularly or have some other limiting factor. It doesn't mean path-to-CEO, but a steady path from jr. dev to sr. dev or VP of engineering or some such is good.

There's exceptions of course, people from academic backgrounds don't progress the same way for example.

But spending 15 years in exactly the same position doing exactly the same job does not encourage me that they're the kind of creative, forward thinking, ambitious person I'd like on my team. Especially engineering types, who should be internally driven to improve things, from code to their jobs to their salary. Business requirements change over time, and a person who can't keep up with that and just wants to do the same job forever ends up becoming dead weight.

Looking at it another way, I always try to hire somebody good enough that they could be my replacement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > The moment a reader realizes that a résumé is more than say two or three > pages, negative impressions flow and the reader becomes less inclined to > give the document their full attention.

Translation: "I am unable and unwilling to give something a fair judgement."

> Another explanation for multi-page résumés is the common use of CVs outside > North America, as CVs are often much longer and more detailed than what US > companies expect or desire

I wonder if the desires of companies and hiring managers are being conflated.

> When CV users in the US start using the more accepted and brief résumé > format, the industry will be better off as a whole.

Really? Why? Better off how?

> CV formats often used by foreign developers are more likely to list minute > details of each technical environment. This includes languages, operating > systems, IDE's, frameworks and libraries, app servers, databases, > methodologies, and build tools, sometimes complete with version and release > numbers. The sheer volume of this data can be quite cumbersome for > contractors and consultants who work for several clients in a year, which is > the norm for many new arrivals to the US. This information is rarely a major > factor in interview assessments, wastes valuable space, and portrays the > writer in a negative light due to a perceived inability to prioritize the > minimal importance of this information.

So the pattern I'm seeing here is that hiring managers don't give a shit about your experience as long as the buzzwords match. We knew this already, but I was expecting a thoughtful essay, not a reiteration of this disguised as a proper argument. Of course version numbers, IDEs, etc is way too much, but a one liner is not enough to describe anything useful.

Anyway, I've mostly found that the best way to get hired is to bypass the HR gateway. Go through someone you know, or get introduced. Worst case, introduce yourself: report a bug, submit a pull request to their project, keep offering insightful feedback on their blog. If the team likes you, tough shit. They usually get to overrule anyone. And I've never seen an engineer bitch about having too much information on the resume. It saves me the effort of having to obtain that info during the interview and decide that you weren't a match in the first place. Oops.

Final insight to hiring people: If you are getting too many resume spam to wade through, raise the bar. Add a 10 minute code task. Add a secret keyword in the job description body for them to include in their e-mail, to make sure they read it. Hell, add a silly programmer filter like "send your resume to the base64 decoded version of this text: ....". As long as you don't make it too complicated, all of these things are a minor inconvenience to people who genuinely want to work with you. But they are a major inconvenience for resume spammers.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----- edit:

Another point is that with the current hiring process, your resume has two vastly different audiences. HR people and engineers. As a result of this clash of interests, resumes fall in the awkward middle. By bypassing the HR process, you also have the opportunity to write a resume specifically catered towards engineers.

There is always the argument that a resume is a sales pitch, but who are you selling to? I've read tons of one pagers, coming away with nothing conclusive as to whether I should pursue or not. "Worked on implementing payments on an e-commerce site using JSP, JBoss, ..." So what? Were you by yourself or in a team? Did you use preexisting stuff or did you do it from scratch? How big was the site? How did launch go? What kind of process did you guys have? At what stage did you join? Did you lead the project?

If you've had more than 3-4 jobs, a page is not enough. I don't want a slick sales pitch, I want as many details as I can get.

<comment><USER32> > So the pattern I'm seeing here is that hiring managers don't give a shit > about your experience as long as the buzzwords match. We knew this already, > but I was expecting a thoughtful essay, not a reiteration of this disguised > as a proper argument.

Having waded through stacks of breathless resumes exactly like they're talking about, I have to agree with the article on this.

A decent developer should be able to get by with whatever environment we put them in front of. Even if it's just notepad and an old version of Perl. Those kinds of very specific details can come out in the interview.

What often happens with non-US persons is that they start to list every conceivable technology that consumed electrons in their office environment hoping one of them is interesting enough to get them a job. It doesn't, it usually gets their resume tossed because it looks like an identical list of enterprise software stacks from the last 300 resumes my recruiter gave me.

> base64 decoded version of this tex

Actually that's rather clever. Make them do some kind of basic, but hackerish task to submit. That way you filter for people with at least basic technical computer skills so you don't waste time considering them.

<comment><USER35> Would be nice if it was a task that could be solved faster by programming than by googling.

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=base64+online](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=base64+online)</comment></comment></comment>


Boston Doctors Can Now Prescribe You a Bike - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/04/09/prescribe_a_bike_boston_medical_center_has_a_new_prescription_to_fight_obesity.html <comment><USER2> In Greensboro, NC, Greensboro Housing Coalition is a non-profit that wants everyone to have safe housing, regardless of income levels. A common problem with low-income housing is cockroaches, bad insulation, and other conditions which lead to a much higher rate of asthma in children who grow up in such homes.

They are putting together a study to test whether improving the condition of these home would reduce the incidence of asthma in affected children (and the costs associated with the resulting frequent hospital visits) so much as to be a more cost effective use of Medicaid funds.

If the study finds that this is the case, and their experience suggests that will, the end goal is to enable doctors to prescribe home inspections and improvements, and for those actions to be paid for by medicaid/insurance. It would be a clear win/win: healthier children and lower costs across the board.

If this interests you, please consider a donation to [http://greensborohousingcoalition.com](http://greensborohousingcoalition.com) . They are an excellent organization that will make efficient use of your donation.

<comment><USER3> The US is so afraid of socialism it has to medicalize every social problem so that it can be helped. That really does sounds like a good program and this is not a criticism, just an observation.

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_tr...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ireland has cycle-to-work scheme. It deduces price of bike from your income tax, practically it means you pay 40% less for a bike. Ireland is probably the worst possible country for cycling (rain, wind, narrow roads with walls on side) but it seems to work.

<comment><USER5> You just need to make the bike clothing/armor tax deductible too!

<comment><USER4> Already is, I forgot to write bike AND equipment. The limit is about 1000 euro every 6 months.

<comment><USER6> Did it start off as 1000€ every 2 years when the law first came into effect?

<comment><USER4> I am not sure about 6 months, I guess it could be 2 years instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like a good idea to get unfit people onto bikes. However I don't see why Hubway should cost $85 a year. I recently bought a decent second-hand mountain bike for $50 (before that I bought one for $25 that lasted 7 years).

<comment><USER8> I can't speak for Hubway, but most municipal bike programs I've seen have bikes built like tanks, which must cost more than $50. I assume this is to minimize the maintenance costs that must be inherent in a system where the bike users have nearly no incentive to take care of the bikes. And, of course, you still have maintenance costs even for these tank-bikes.

<comment><USER9> Hubway bikes have often been described like that, as "tanks." They are 42 lbs each, designed like that on purpose to be stable & steady street bikes for riders of different skill levels. They do, indeed, cost more than $50, but a lot of that is the technology involved with the docking/rental system, moreso than to minimize maintenance. Alta Bicycle Share, the system that operates Hubway for the metro-Boston region, employees a full team of mechanics and field staff to do regular maintenance, including a full service during the winter months, on the entire fleet of 1300+ bikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What about winters? I'm under impression it can get quite rough in Boston (possibly to the point that health risks will outweight the benefits).

<comment><USER11> The Hubway stations are removed before winter.

<comment><USER12> They kept the Cambridge ones open this year, though, and it seemed like they were still regularly used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about prescribing nutrient rich food?

<comment><USER14> One thing at a time. I like this idea because it encourages activity, not just exercise but just being out. With all the various aid programs we have institutionalized poverty.

For far too many we have nearly found the least cost to society to idle a large portion of it. To give them just enough to exist, just enough to not want to resort taking from others, but too much so that they don't have a need or desire to live. Its a drug.

Here, watch some tv, enjoy that boxed dinner in your microwave, we will even help you with a place to stay. All you have to is stay out of sight, be quiet and it will all be okay

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Now, if we can only get doctors to prescribe stopping at stop signs.

<comment><USER16> Now, if we can only get doctors to prescribe not speeding. #replacebikewithcar

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope pollution levels are low in Boston because making a physical effort while breathing polluted air (= in a city with a lot of cars at rush hours) is not the best for your health.

<comment><USER18> Heart disease kills many more Americans than pollution. Even after factoring in the additional pollution exposure and traffic accident risk, cycling is still a net win:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/)

(And, of course, the more people cycling, the more drivers look out for cyclists. And there are less cars!)

<comment><USER19> Interesting study. Just as a slight criticism of your wording, although I don't think this applies to the study- a lot of deaths from heart disease are actually caused by air pollution. Inhalation of particulate matter is implicated in tens of thousands of deaths a year.

Even though exercise outweighs inhalation of fumes, air pollution is a serious issue, and many lives could be saved by its reduction. Hopefully that will be an extra benefit of electric and hybrid cars in cities.</comment></comment></comment>


Extremely simple sort algorithm with sub-cubic expected running time. [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.ust.hk/~golin/pubs/funsort_dam.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Algorithm: Pick two elements at random. If they are out of order, swap them. Could check every n-1 steps to see whether array is sorted.

Expected running time is O(n^2 log(n)).

See Section 3.

<comment><USER2> Yes, they get their bound by counting inversions. This is much better than the method I suggested in the other thread (which, of course, doesn't actually work.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Usually, binary search only makes sense in sorted arrays. We show that insertion sort based on repeated "binary searches" in an initially unsorted array also sorts n elements in time Theta(n^2 log n)."

At first I thought this is unsurprising - an insertion sort being n^2 and a search being log n, of course that's the running time.

But it's not the running time that is worth of mention here - it's the fact that they are doing insertion sort while "binary searching" an unsorted array, and still coming up with the correct answer, and a sorted array.

The time complexity is incidental to the interest of the paper. In that view, the paper's title is much better than the title here on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the algorithm I'm referring to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> my gut says this is ridiculous given that it's asymptotically slower than insertion sort, selection sort, and bubble sort and doesn't take advantage of cache (through sequential access) the way those algorithms do.

<comment><USER3> I came to say the same. What could be simpler than the O(n^2) algorithms?</comment></comment>


No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/Jekyll-amazon-s3.html

<comment><USER2> While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile.

You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted _nor even charged_ with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman.

This could be an issue for reasons like...

-You make a Web app that Hollywood deems to somehow encourage or abet piracy

-You provide a service used by a customer deemed to be politically controversial

-You facilitate financial transactions deemed to be potential helpful to "terrorists" or the wrong sort of activists (e.g. Wikileaks).

Werner, since you submitted this entry from your personal blog, maybe you could clarify what safeguards Amazon has put in place to prevent a repeat of the Wikileaks situation. Many companies will stand behind a customer barring a court order, but for Amazon this clearly is not the case. How do you decide when to abandon a customer?

<comment><USER3> I think you nailed the TINY niche of things that amazon could take issue with and pull your site down. So now back to 99.9999999% of content producers on the internet: S3 is "extremely durable"

I've heard of other (large) providers pulling sites that contained "objectionable" content down. Wikileaks just had the media's attention at the time.

<comment><USER4> At least one customer had issues removing data without court order. So in order to satisfy your 99.9999999% estimation amazon should have at least 1B S3 customers which is way to optimistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you go to the bottom of the page at <http://allthingsdistributed.com/>, you'll see that the blog actually requires "Movable Type Pro".

AWS doesn't provide a way to serve from S3 without the help of a CNAME redirect, which means that you're out of luck if you want to use the Jekyll+S3 setup with a naked domain name (naked, as in no "www" or "blog" subdomain). And it also means that you're going to have to get some other server (Google Apps can do it), to redirect your *.domain.com queries to www.domain.com. And then your users' DNS is running all over the place, incurring, in my opinion, unneeded delay.

<comment><USER6> Do you even really need S3 if you're just serving up static pages?

A $5/mo web host or a VPS slice would probably be overkill - you're not hitting a database at all.

<comment><USER7> S3 is less than $0.1 per GB per month. How big is your static pages before hitting the equivalent $5 cost?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to get really exotic, you can check out the Haskell version of this tool. My site (<http://dave.fayr.am>) does the same thing using Hakyll and S3. You can see the code here: <https://github.com/KirinDave/public- website>

<comment><USER9> <http://www.gwern.net> is built on Hakyll as well; I'm currently hosting the static files on NFSN, but they're noticeably more expensive than Amazon S3 and I've been thinking of doing the same thing. What did you have to do to get S3 working?

<comment><USER8> Basically nothing. I drag-drop the produced site via S3 Browser.app. I need to fix that part of the workflow; it's a little awkward here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Except for the servers at Disqus which are running the comment system. And the servers serving up the static HTML pages.

<comment><USER11> Aha! That's how he did it. I couldn't figure out how commenting worked. He does have a comment count link at the top of the page. Is that fragment from Disqus also?

<comment><USER10> A simple inspection of the source reveals that it is also an embeded javascript file from Disqus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any open source alternatives to Disqus that I could host myself? I don't want to use Disqus - apart from wanting to "own" my comments, it is also incompatible with my browser configuration (blocking 3rd party cookies).

</comment><comment><USER13> Coming from the CTO of Amazon...

<comment><USER14> Do you mean that in a "he's clearly just promoting S3" or a "woah, the CTO of Amazon has time to code neat tools" kind of way?

<comment><USER13> It doesn't sound like he coded all that much from the post. He even mentions that Cactus is a little bit too much work since there's not much of an existing community surrounding it. I was just surprised that it was the CTO of Amazon after I read the post.

S3 are kind of his "servers" no ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I did do some coding for the conversion, etc. :-) But I like it when doing something new to be able to look at how other people solved similar problems. And it is a bit early for Cactus in that respect, and Liquid feels much simpler than Django templates.

The extension and plugin mechanisms will make it easier for me to start adding my own code without having to modify the core framework. But it is always more fun to add these kind of things if there is a community to give you feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a pretty over-used subject for blog submissions here on HN, see previous ones at [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinato...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+jekyll+S3)

<comment><USER16> To be fair, the submitter/author runs AWS, which makes this a little less typical to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember running this type of setup back in 2003 with text files and Blosxom. What's old is new again?

<comment><USER18> This is more about the S3 part than the jekyll one.

But yes, I guess there is some movement back in time. I'd say the two main reasons are a return to more minimal blogging (i.e. something like tumblr as opposed to blogrolls, widgets, plugins etc.), and the fact that you can do some dynamic stuff in the client now via JavaScript (e.g. comments with Disqus).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I started using a method really similar to this to host a blog a few months ago, shortly after the S3 static website feature was released. However, shortly after a post ended up on the front page of hacker news, requests to anything on the S3 bucket started responding with 503 errors.

Not entirely sure what the issue was, since I use S3 to host static assets for other sites that see similar traffic levels, and haven't gotten any 503 errors. And clearly ATD seems to be handling the HN traffic just fine.

</comment><comment><USER20> I actually made a Ruby gem to do exactly this on a repeatable basis for my own site.

Here's the code: <https://github.com/ohrite/vacation> Here's the gem: <http://rubygems.org/gems/vacation>

<comment><USER21> Oh, I've been looking for something like this forever. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's an interesting use case. However, if you have almost static content you can also make use of heavy caching. That is a low end dynamic site with a powerful caching/delivery layer. I guess this is also doable with Amazon Cloudfront. It is all about how comfortable it is to update your site.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome. I was going to put my blog onto GitHub (you know, being a hacker it just makes sense since I already pay for it anyway), but it is intriguing to be able to put it on S3, especially with CloudFront.

<comment><USER16> I'd be more likely to put it behind Cloudflare than Cloudfront.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it just me or is the site down?</comment>


Depression Part Two (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html <comment><USER2> I get why the corn was funny, it makes sense to me having depression. She was feeling really down, everything was pointless. She was on the floor at her lowest. Then she saw a very concrete example of something just as pointless / sad. A corn under the fridge is going to be alone, forever (or at least until the fridge is moved). I think it probably felt like relief, she wasn't alone. Someone understood. That's what she had been missing throughout the blog post.

<comment><USER3> That's a great explanation -- I didn't get why it was so funny when I read it originally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a companion piece, I remember finding this other post [1] by a psychologist explaining the (non-biological) causes and stages of depression displayed in this comic.

Hyperbole and a Half was one of the funniest things on the internet. I keep hoping the author will come back one day.

[1] [http://www.thedirtynormal.com/post/2013/05/09/the-science- of...](http://www.thedirtynormal.com/post/2013/05/09/the-science-of-feelings- as-illustrated-by-hyperbole-and-a-half/)

<comment><USER3> It's worth buying her book to read the introduction. It's not on the net, and it's one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I go back to this post when I'm feeling my worst. It's salient and relateable and has probably saved my life

</comment><comment><USER5> It's sad to be reminded of Allie Brosh who published these wonderful stories and then went silent[1]. It's nice that the stories are out there and people continue to rediscover them.

I hope she's alright and having a good life off the internet.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allie_Brosh#Book_and_later_act...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allie_Brosh#Book_and_later_activity_\(2009%E2%80%93present\))

</comment><comment><USER6> This was very relatable. In some cultures, becoming disinterested in the world is not seen as something wrong - you end up a monk as one example.

It's really, everyone else not knowing what to do with you that causes so many problems. If we viewed it as ok that a few % of the population will want to drop out of playing along and simply do their own thing without harming anyone, we'd be in a much better place.

<comment><USER7> Ascetic types may indeed become uninterested in the day to day grind of the world at large, but they are very much seeking some culturally-specific version of exaltation or enlightenment. The utter inability to ever feel anything but detached boredom is something very different, and eventually excruciating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the > emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. __I had always > wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — > annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. __And I finally > didn 't have to feel them anymore.

This part rang alarm bells for me. Not going to play armchair psychologist with this guy, but for anyone else who views emotions as "obstacles"/unnecessary and is depressed, that's probably why. You need to learn to regularly express your feelings in a healthy way, even the unpleasant ones.

<comment><USER9> > Not going to play armchair psychologist with this guy

He's a she.

> You need to learn to regularly express your feelings in a healthy way, even > the unpleasant ones.

This is a bit simplistic. There's more to the effects of depression lending to the inability -- or lack of desire -- to express one's feelings. Expressing feelings as a part of a healthy way of life isn't lost on folks with depression, it's just that the depression makes it so easy to avoid what is seemingly an undesirable situation. Things that don't make sense to an otherwise healthy mind make a lot of sense when you've got depression (or some other mental malady).

<comment><USER10> I think it entirely depends on your past experiences. Let's compare two hypothetical experiences:

1\. When Alice was 7 years old, she scraped her knee and started to cry. Her mom ran over and comforted her and then they went and got her a bandaid.

2\. When Mark was 7 years old, he scraped his knee and started to cry. His dad yelled at him to stop being such a pussy and shut the hell up. He couldn't stop crying so his dad hit him.

It is pretty clear who is going to try to not cry going forward. You don't need to repeat what happened to Mark many times for him to learn that expressing how he feels in that scenario is not a good idea. Keep this pattern going long enough and you get an adult who is probably going to view emotions as a burden. As to whether expressing emotions is a good thing or a bad thing, it entirely depends on who you are expressing them to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really good read. As someone who can't really relate but knows someone very close who likely can, if any of you know of any other similar articles I'd love to read some more and have them to share from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is why I love the internet.

Thank you so much for posting this here. It made my day.

<comment><USER13> She's very salient and talented. A lot of psychologists have recommended their patients to send this and "Part 1" ([http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures- in-...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in- depression.html)) of hers as a way for those who are _not_ dealing with depression to better understand and relate to those who are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really beautiful and expressive.</comment>


JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events - <AUTHOR> http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html

<comment><USER2> Part of DOM Level 3 is a new set of keyboard event attributes[1], including a string value[2] which can make this whole keyboard mess much simpler.

Unfortunately none of the browser vendors have implemented this - which I find irritating considering so much time is spent on things like the GamePad API.

[1]: <http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#keys> [2]: <http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#key-values-list>

</comment><comment><USER3> And then there is the question of what an "event" signifies. I noticed the other day in testing a web app that the Windows Phone 7 browser fires the "keyup" event before the character of the key is added to the relevant text box value - while all other browsers I have tested update the text box value before firing "keyup" (although after "keydown" of coure).

Just a thought: Is it fair to characterise this as JavaScript madness and not DOM variations?</comment>


Using GitRoyalty to fund my nearly abandoned 2.6k star Open Source project - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sdrzn/using-gitroyalty-to-fund-my-nearly-abandoned-2-6k-star-open-source-project-364cf68f05da <comment><USER2> I would pay for projects at these prices if it meant avoiding fiascos like event-stream. npm's new funding command is a joke, nobody is going to use it</comment>


Hg advent -m '02: extensions' - <AUTHOR> http://kamalmarhubi.com/blog/hg-extensions/ <comment><USER2> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596197)

Edit: oops I meant [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583782). Hilarious responses though.

<comment><USER3> I think this is the wrong link. It just links back to here.

<comment><USER4> It does, but you have to admit that that is related.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Build a Low-Tech Website - <AUTHOR> https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website/ <comment><USER2> The dithering on images is actually kinda nice. Less visual over-stimulation.

But whatever this site is doing with the fixed-scroll yellow block is super weird. There's a "95%" thing next to a sun - is it somehow related to the solar battery powering the server?

Rather than focusing on the content, the design focuses on the infrastructure at the expense of the content. Maybe that's the point, but this particular element is certainly off-putting.

<comment><USER3>

          95%

Looks pretty much like the battery level and current weather conditions ;-)

<comment><USER4> Before starting to read the article, I tried clicking and dragging on that element and searched the page for "brightness" and "dim" before peeking at the source to realize it isn't a brightness control after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the aesthetic! Great work.

Here's my unsolicited design riff on the "battery indicator." I'm a fan of the concept, but the 100vw element width of the yellow fill was distracting me from the rest of the content. I used DevTools to mock up a narrow version which fits within the right content gutter, right next to the scroll bar. I had to tweak the percentage metric display a bit by stacking the sun above the value and removing the "%" indicator, but feel the end result has increased readability and is still understandable.

[https://imgur.com/a/IIPZILz](https://imgur.com/a/IIPZILz)

<comment><USER6> Lower tech access to the image:

[https://i.imgur.com/o0Dtkai.png](https://i.imgur.com/o0Dtkai.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Small sub-cultures, like this one, do experiments all the time in their little corner of the web. Some of the cultures die after a while, and some grow into something else, something bigger, something that starts to percolate on the mainstream surface, albeit possibly only tangental to how it started. I'm not sure I'd predict this movement will grow into something that reaches mainstream tech, but let's say I'm wrong, just for fun. Can anyone here think of a potential narrative that would describe how the current state of this experiment could possibly be perturbed and squeezed into a form that the mainstream soaks up as the next big (or medium-sized) thing?

I'm just curious to know how my prediction that this won't grow any larger than it is today could be wrong.

<comment><USER8> I think the article hits on the key problem:

"Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the- grid solar system."

IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general.

It's far-fetched, but I can imagine it becoming mainstream if mesh networking becomes popular, or if the Internet were to become a widely self-hosted platform (e.g. people had their own "clouds" running in their homes). In such situations, 100% uptime would no longer be an expectation, so the perceived cost of using an off-the-grid system would be reduced.

<comment><USER9> Having been in the "mesh" space for years, there's a ton of this techno- primitivism fantasy floating around. The reality is that people want to access the internet and they want it to work well.

This article is a perfect example. This solar powered server which does not have 100% uptime for artistic reasons is probably sitting in someone's kitchen next to a refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.

<comment><USER10> They seem to be working on that as well: [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off- grid...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-in-your- apartment/)

The solar webserver is another step towards that goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Neat article, but I think we should distinguish basically two things here that the article blurs together:

1) Reducing website bandwidth and computational usage (static sites, small images, reducing extra resource requests). Super common topic that HN talks about all the time.

2) Reducing the electricity bill for the server and powering it with renewable resources. This part is quite neat, I think, but for a single bespoke website, the energy savings of using a single low-power server seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things — I could get similar savings by changing a living room lamp to a more energy efficient bulb.

This inspires me to propose a third category of energy efficiency that the article doesn't touch on: human energy costs.

Humans are quite energy intensive devices, and I suspect that the labor and human-maintenance costs of making this website dwarf the direct energy costs of running a webserver. I'd be curious how one would go about optimizing these other energy costs, and whether that can be done in a way that still preserves quality of work/life for the humans involved.

<comment><USER12> On topic 1 I was thinking to myself the other day, "I wonder if I can create a static webpage that isn't some sort of SPA or web app."

It took me time to work out where to start... Once you think it through you realise it is pretty easy and obvious. But (and this gives away my age a bit), I have not built a static webpage since school (over 10 years ago), and have become so accustomed to all the crazy shit that goes into web development today like Webpack, NPM, React, Angular etc etc that I had forgotten how to actually just serve a piece of HTML.

My dependence on all these frameworks and CLIs sent me on a quest to find out more about pure javascript, and I came across an incredible talk by a developer who created a pure javascript web app for music notation. I really wanted to link it here but cannot find it.

<comment><USER13> Yea here is the talk ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7n2xnOiWI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7n2xnOiWI8))

I have found that static generators, specifically Hugo, have made just plain HTML fun again. They give you just enough power to not repeat yourself endlessly (e.g. maintaining each page and copy-pasta all changes between them) without turning into the system's we're all trying to step back from.

<comment><USER12> Yes, thank you! What a great talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am going to guess they are getting a massive surge of traffic about now and yet the site still renders in a fraction of the time it takes most "modern" web apps or even just static content sites - this is how it should be.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, I'm not even sure what modern website are doing when they generate pages. I've had highly dynamic PHP/MySQL websites running on crap hardware, and it was trivial to attain .03 second page generation time. Didn't even need fancy caching, just some common-sense SQL optimizations.

<comment><USER16> At my last job we had an ad bidding API that would reach out to every advertiser we worked with, got the highest bid, then presented an advertisement to them.

The page was also framework after framework piled on top of each other, so they'd be using React and jQuery at the same time, stuff like that. And so marketing could change whatever they wanted whenever they wanted without breaking the entire site, everything was served from a CMS.

So it's probably a lot of that.

<comment><USER14> LOL - oh man... I can relate!

At a previous gig we had a similar situation. It was so bad my coworkers and I would joke that we needed one of those "break in case of emergency" boxes with the glass front and a hammer hanging adjacent. Inside the box: a can of lighter fluid and a match. The purpose: when the crazy got to be too much you just light own hair on fire and then go run around in traffic.

What you just described would definitely be a break the glass kinda situation :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The dithering is nice for some images but it takes some details on graphs etc..

The example image given can be re-compressed using techniques like structural similarity (SSIM)[1] or Multi-scale structural similarity (2003 Paper)[2]. Using jpeg-archive[3] I resized the example image from the blog[4] with decent results:

      /tmp  ls -1sh *.jpg *.png | sort -nr
      740K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png
      100K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.jpg
       64K small-fry.jpg
       56K mpe.jpg
       24K ms-ssim.jpg

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_similarity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_similarity)

[2] [https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~z70wang/publications/msssim.pdf](https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~z70wang/publications/msssim.pdf)

[3] [https://github.com/danielgtaylor/jpeg- archive](https://github.com/danielgtaylor/jpeg-archive)

[4] [http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b...](http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi)

<comment><USER18> If I understand you correctly, you propose a image format which should provide a better quality for less file size. However, to implement an in-browser client-side reader, one probably needs a javascript library, and this will blow up the size again [Side note: Actually I am surprised the site uses JavaScript at all, being that static].

Another proposal for image compression is to fall back on SVG, c.f. [https://jmperezperez.com/svg-placeholders/](https://jmperezperez.com/svg- placeholders/) \-- at least this does not need JS.

<comment><USER17> Those are compression techniques, they do not require js, nor a different client and work with the jpeg standard.

<comment><USER19> To implement the improvements you suggest on this site (which appears to be a static site), the best way would be to have your proposed image compression as part of the static site preprocessor, correct? Just trying to understand how it would be implemented, as this site is an interesting idea but the dithered images would likely not have mass-appeal.

<comment><USER20> Yes, you'd just run all of the images through jpeg-recompress (from the GitHub repo linked above). They're already doing something like this to dither, so it's just a question of swapping out which command to run.

Incidentally, even where PNG is appropriate (images with crisp edges, such as text and icons) you can frequently get a large size savings by applying zopflipng, which uses an alternative GZIP compression algorithm to get a higher-efficiency compression, at the cost of greater CPU use for encoding.[1]

[1]: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/zopfli-optimization- literally-...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/zopfli-optimization-literally- free-bandwidth/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From clicking around this site, it looks like their image dithering technique has taken away the color quality required to properly view the graphs on this article: [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/the-4g-mobile- inte...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/the-4g-mobile-internet- thats-already-there/)

<comment><USER22> I'm not convinced it saves much in the way of bandwidth, either.

If you take this[0] image, it's 43 KB for a 800x533 image. I'd expect a JPEG to be able to do that without too much in the way of artifacts.

It does give the page a kind of neat newspapery vibe, though.

[0]: [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/sps_wide.png](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/sps_wide.png)

<comment><USER23> Even if it did save bandwidth, that does not equal significant energy savings. And if it did, there are better ways to save.

For example, looking at their response headers I see the image cache control expires after a day, plus has validation caching. This could be significantly improved. First, get rid of the `etag`, `expires`, and `last-modified` headers and go with expiration caching only. Increase the `max-age` from one day (86400) to one year (31536000). I get the HTML expiring after 24 hours, but images should be more aggressively cached. Validation caching always requires a round trip to the server, plus running validation rules on every single request so it can't save nearly as much bandwith and CPU as simple expiration caching.

Also, if they got rid of the those headers, plus the pointless `server: nginx/1.10.3` they could save over 100b per HTTP response. I counted 19 requests on that article, so it may seem small, but it can add up to a significant amount.

<comment><USER24> > _First, get rid of the `etag`, `expires`, and `last-modified` headers and go > with expiration caching only. Increase the `max-age` from one day (86400) to > one year (31536000)._

Since it's a statically generated website, I'd favor _never_ expiring the cache, and using cache-busting hashes instead. That way the cache is only emptied when the file actually changes.

<comment><USER25> Isn't the etag just a hash of the content?

<comment><USER23> It can be, but doesn't need to be as long as it is some sort of indication of the uniqueness of the content. A last modified date should work in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Dithered images do not compress well. I'd be interested to see side-by-side comparisons of optimised pngs, optimised jpeg, reduced-pallete optimised pngs, and some more cutting-edge formats like BPG[0] and FLIF[1]

[0] [https://bellard.org/bpg/](https://bellard.org/bpg/) [1] [https://flif.info/](https://flif.info/)

<comment><USER24> > _Dithered images do not compress well._

That does somewhat depend on whether we are talking about positioned or Floyd- Steinberg dithering. Positioned dithering is a lot more regular and predictable, and hence easier to compress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope they fix the RSS feed and put the whole articles in there. It should be the norm, especially on a website with "low" uptime.

<comment><USER28> [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all.atom.xml](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all.atom.xml)

^ seems to have full articles.

<comment><USER29> Seems to have links to, and 1-sentence descriptions of, all of their articles.

This isn't very useful if you want your RSS reader to pull down articles for you to read while you're offline. For that to work, you want the feed itself to have the full text of every article embedded inside it.

<comment><USER30> It has the full content. See view-source. Firefox hides it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cool experiment!

My suggestion is to get a larger solar panel. Solar is cheap now, less than US$1 per watt. Why not get a 100W or a 200W panel? It will put out enough power to supply the server and router on a rainy day. The battery will only be necessary overnight.

The price of 18650's is low enough that building your own pack to handle 30W continuous overnight is not costly. To help with the environmental impact and cost you can get used batteries that are being recycled or thrown away.

</comment><comment><USER32> Some cool concepts there.

>Static Site

This should be an obvious choice for sites not requiring dynamic elements. Also their choice of comments through email is a good solution to a problem static-made blogs have.

>Dithered Images

That won't work for every case, but is interesting.

>Default typeface

That's nice. I'm already disallowing sites to choose their own typeface. Except if a site is about design, then the typeface doesn't matter and probably I won't prefer their choice over mine.

>No Third-Party Tracking

This makes sense and I don't understand why self-hosted sites are doing it. The logs are there. Analyzing them is all that is needed.

>No Advertising Services

I'm fine with that but some sites rely on ads. I ain't aware of a method that will keep with their goals and provide ads.

<comment><USER33> > _This makes sense and I don 't understand why self-hosted sites are doing > it. The logs are there. Analyzing them is all that is needed._

1) Laziness. A third-party JS tracker usually comes with a complete dashboard, full of pretty (and sometimes even useful) graphs.

2) Data. Client-side trackers can spy on users more, giving you more information you can e.g. missapply in an A/B test trying to drive "engagement".

RE 1, there exist tools aimed at analyzing server logs. I played with GoAccess a bit, it's quite OK. [https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)

<comment><USER34> You don't need a thirds party tracker to get fancy graphs. Matomo is free, open source, self-hosted, works on logs, and has fancy graphs. An ELK stack would also work fine.

Lazy-loaded 1px images can be used for tracking how far users have read and a/b testing can be done by compiling multiple versions and redirecting users to the version you want them to try.

<comment><USER35> If I could toot my own horn for a moment, Gravwell (gravwell.io) has a 2GB/day free license which should be plenty to ingest web logs. We've got a GeoIP module to resolve IPs to locations, we can display geographic heatmaps (see [https://dev.gravwell.io/docs/#!search/map/map.md](https://dev.gravwell.io/docs/#!search/map/map.md)), a variety of charts, tables, etc.

Matomo looks really polished and if it provides the features you need, it seems like an obvious choice. If OTOH you're looking at rolling your own with ELK, Gravwell might make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The idea is great, the software side especially is something I'd like to see more of, and the not-always-available scheme is very commendable as well.

But the end of article stuck out at me.

> we'll be offering print on demand versions of our blog.

How is that consistent with low energy footprint? Will the printers and the cellulose factory run on solar as well?

<comment><USER30> Print, on it's own, is not that high energy. Paper has been made for thousands of years, printing has been here for 400.

But the question is indeed an intriguing one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I once basically did just that, besides the image dithering. I ran a small blog off a Raspberry Pi, only using Markdown files and something to render them to HTML. I used my own IP address, which I know you're not technically supposed to do but in 15 years I've never had an ISP crack down on me for it, and had a script that would run periodically to update the A record for my domain in Route 53. (since my IP was dynamic)

Whether you're doing it for energy purposes or not, it's a fun project because it feels a bit like sticking it to the man, since we're used to always hosting our sites on someone else's machine.

<comment><USER38> What is the reason for not using your own ip?

<comment><USER39> I believe it goes against most terms of service agreements with non-commercial isp plans.

<comment><USER40> My guess is that this is mostly a way for them to object if you start using too much bandwidth. Most ISP's "guarantee" way more bandwidth than they can actually provide on a daily basis. If you're hosting a website that gets low traffic, normally, they probably will not only not know, but not care. Just my guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> And then, at the end, there's one line of useless info - a weather forecast for their server location.

Forecast: today Partly cloudy in the morning and breezy until afternoon. / tomorrow Partly cloudy until afternoon. / day after tomorrow Clear throughout the day.

For that, they pulled in JQuery and made a XMLHTTP request.

<comment><USER42> The weather content is relevant in that their server would go offline with too many cloudy days.

If their intent is to lower energy consumption of their server alone, offloading this weather check is the correct choice. But surely requesting+caching that info on their end (by perhaps rebuilding the static site every hour with an updated forecast) would be overall more efficient than having X number of clients request the data.

<comment><USER43> All it amounts to is one additional request, and the json file itself is probably generated by a cron job, not dynamically on demand.

Surely rebuilding the website every hour (and invalidating the cache for X number of clients) would result in more requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think this website is a beautiful piece of engineering: simple, efficient, clear and humane. It solves a pressing human problem with mature, straightforward technologies.

The dithering is obviously not to everyone's tastes, but I like the paper feel and think it's appropriate for a 'low tech' brand. Bravo to the lowtech team.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think this is a really cool idea actually. I help run a fair few websites for authors/creators that don't need 5 digits of up-time and super heavy websites. I'm sure most blogs/sites would be fine being much much lighter and running off something like this.

</comment><comment><USER46> I like the gauge, but wish it was only in the corner or something. That it is the background of the whole page is pretty distracting.

</comment><comment><USER47> Solar power, low-bandwith, clean markup, and lots of numbers to optimize. Practical or not, the makes my inner hacker pretty happy.

</comment><comment><USER48> Could save an easy 80kB by cutting out Jquery. All it does is the little weather widget, and could be easily written in standard js.

<comment><USER49> In a similar vein, the weather icons are 800x800px images displayed at no larger than 20x20px

<comment><USER43> Those large icons are rather compression friendly compared to the dithered images. It would still be a relatively huge save at 20x20 (after resize to 20x20 with imagemagick and pngcrush -brute, the 5.5k clear-day.png goes down to 559 bytes).

<comment><USER50> 800x800 indeed is excessive. We'll resize them to something smaller. Jquery is already on its way out. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Wonder if they've considered a gravity battery? As an additional benefit it'd let someone local "recharge" the battery manually rather than being 100% tied to the Sun.

<comment><USER52> I imagine huge weights hanging off the balcony of a Barcelona apartment :)

<comment><USER51> Could be pretty stylish I'd think. Chandelier with moving crystals? #LowTech :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm curious how the energy usage for this site compares to something like hosting a site on S3.

<comment><USER54> Using a datacentre such as S3 will gain the benefits of an economy of scale. Per-website S3 energy costs are going to be substantially lower than the energy cost of a solar-server: each solar-server that is installed will have had to have been built in factories which cost energy to run, shipped in delivery vehicles which cost energy to drive, plus the humans behind the website would require energy while building the server... all of which would easily be more than the net energy consumption of a single website in S3.

That being said, the point of the project is to produce a website that is 100% solar powered. They never said they were aiming for something that is feasibly sustainable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I would be interested to see how the additional traffic from HN is impacting their power usage.

</comment><comment><USER56> As a way to make use of resources you'd otherwise not have a use for this is interesting, but my feeling is that as a way to reduce "your" energy consumption it's misguided. I'm pretty sure that the energy usage of running even on very efficient dedicated hardware is going to be a lot higher than the incremental increase in consumption for an incredibly tiny VM instance in a data center focused on energy efficiency.

The hardware choice is arguably overkill as well, at least if wifi is available and on use. Run it on a repurposed old phone, eliminate its share of the power draw of a network switch, etc.

</comment><comment><USER57> The best part is the dithering, this website reminds me of old Chemistry lab manuals.

</comment><comment><USER58> > Default typeface

I adore this for whatever low or high tech. As for me all this web-font stuff seems a huge piece of BS (except for rare cases when a website is meant to be more of a piece of art than serving a practical function or when you need to use an exotic language letters of which are rare to be found in the standard fonts on clients' computers) and I just block external fonts all the time.

<comment><USER25> For developers it always seems like a good idea to use the system defaults but then you push it out to users and find out they all have insane defaults that work like crap.

I had someone complaining to me that my mailto: link doesn't work but actually its just they had the wrong mail client set as default on their system.

<comment><USER58> Not using custom web fonts that have to be loaded from external resources doesn't imply using pure defaults of the client's system. You still can specify font size and style with pure CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is one of the coolest web projects I've seen lately. Great job!

> _Increasingly, activities that could perfectly happen off-line – such as > writing a document, filling in a spreadsheet, or storing data – are now > requiring continuous network access. This does not combine well with > renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, which are not always > available._

I'm surprised no one has mentioned progressive web apps. This seems like a perfect use-case for them.

On a related note, I just found this research showing that Service Workers (on which PWAs are built) "do not have a significant impact over the energy consumption of [mobile] devices, regardless of the network conditions." [0]

[0]: [http://www.ivanomalavolta.com/files/papers/Mobilesoft_2017.p...](http://www.ivanomalavolta.com/files/papers/Mobilesoft_2017.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER33> > _The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the > 500,000 most popular domains) increased from 0.45 megabytes (MB) in 2010 to > 1.7 megabytes in June 2018._

It's the second place I see such low average size values (I'd say, somewhat reasonable), but I'm having a hard time believing in them. On a typical site, when I hit F12 and proceed to Network tab, I usually see ten times greater values. I fear that those statistics are either undercounting something, or 500k is just so many domains that the long tail of lightweight sites drags the average down, making values not representative of the real situation. I wonder how those stats would look if the average was weighted by the number of visits.

<comment><USER60> I remember from over a decade ago there was an annual contest to make the best web page that would fit into 5KB - yes, 5000 bytes. There were many impressive entries.

I'd really hoped it would catch on.

Sadly, that lightweight concept is now so forgotten that I can't even find it in a quick search. (perhaps someone else can find a pointer?)

<comment><USER61> [https://the5k.org/about.php](https://the5k.org/about.php) :)

<comment><USER60> Thanks, nice!

Seems I'd misremembered it as being more recent than in was, last one in 2002. They apparently 'grew' to 10K, and that site is now 404 also.

At this point, 50K would be a welcome respite from the mountains of cruft that download with every click...

<comment><USER61> Preach!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm proud of my low tech personal website: [http://mrtno.com](http://mrtno.com) \- I promise: it will never work on smartphones, just good old computers...

I will build your static html page for money. Hit me up. ;)

<comment><USER63> You're proud that you make webpages that can't be consumed by the primary method most people use to get online?

<comment><USER64> Even more confusing, the linked website seems to work just fine on my Moto.

<comment><USER62> well, it's just not optimized for it, it's just HTML + CSS, so it should work pretty much everywhere.

I don't have a cellphone myself, so i never tested it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Speed in your biggest feature in every application. I don't understand why the current state of affairs _is utterly obsessed_ with lazy loading static content and SPA for things that seldom change.

</comment><comment><USER66> It's a good start, but the CSS is obnoxious and definitely not low-tech, and the image dithering is a bad compromise between having real images and simply not having images at all. In short, it's an attempt at a low-tech website made by people who've never seen a real low-tech website, and probably wouldn't know Lynx if they saw it in use.

<comment><USER67> Doesn't this seem a bit uncharitable a characterization? What's an example of a "real low-tech website" that does better than the work presented here? Are you browsing hackernews using lynx or surfraw?

<comment><USER66> [https://yarchive.net/](https://yarchive.net/)

That's a low-tech website. Absolutely nothing but content.

<comment><USER68> According to the article, the goal here was to demonstrate the possibility of making an attractive, modern-looking Web page while still having it be lightweight. Your example does not achieve the first goal at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> If you want to be online only part of the time, look into IPFS. Even if you go offline, your popular pages will likely be cached for a while, and can be cached forever if someone takes an interest in them.

</comment><comment><USER70> I wish the content of the photographs wasn't so obscured

</comment><comment><USER71> Unrelated, but I really like the background/font color contrast on the site. Makes for very easy reading to my eye.

</comment><comment><USER72> So, how many requests per second can one serve with such setup, without a noticeable impact on performance?

</comment><comment><USER73> Can someone explain to me how to reproduce the image dithering look in photoshop please ?

<comment><USER74> Easiest method I know of is Image > Mode > Indexed Color...

From there you can heavily reduce the color count and select the dithering type.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Didn't Bruce Sterling or William Gibson write a story where there was a street tribe called the "LoTeks?" I think it was William Gibson in the Johnny Mnemonic short story. Molly Millions fought a monomolecular weapon wielding assassin, using the LoTek's space to defeat him with "culture shock."

</comment><comment><USER76> For static sites, what's the strategy for user authentication?

<comment><USER33> What would you need user authentication for in a static site?

<comment><USER76> Just want to see how far can it be pushed beyond simple sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> What if you moved this to Saudi Arabia or somewhere where it's always sunny? I feel like this is the grassroots movement where actual decentralization occurs-imagine a mesh network localized within cities and then somehow branching out to other.

</comment><comment><USER78> "Progress"

</comment><comment><USER79> Low-Tech seems a bit of a misnomer when referring to deceptive simplicity. Wonder if they considered building After Dark.

[https://after-dark.habd.as](https://after-dark.habd.as)

</comment><comment><USER80> Does someone has already tried to code on an AlphaSmart? I suppose it's a little like using ed.

I would be happy to have a distraction-free device to focus on my code. But I am not sure the screen is large enough to really work on it.</comment>


Show HN: Search the pages that HN links to - <AUTHOR> http://kakapo.susa.net:8080/cfs/ <comment><USER2> Woa, I looked for that, for years, and you use even Tomcat? Bravo!

I always see comments as more interesting than the submitted links (which most are from same sources, often submitted repetitively).

This is a kind of double indirection, as links are probably even more interesting than comments.

Something I would love is some kind of email alert about some keywords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tomcat made sense because I'd be running a JVM for Lucene in any case, and I'm trying to minimise resource requirements as far as is practical.

I intend to add an option to return a JSON response with the top 100 results. You may be able to make some kind of cron based alert from that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I start my own company after I graduate? - <AUTHOR> I'm sure many forums have asked this question before, but I'm not looking to start a startup, but a consulting business. Specifically a technical recruiting agency. The backstory is that I learned how to code in college, but wasn't that great. I ended up working for a recruiting agency while in school and I'm trying to figure out if I should continue to work with the agency I'm with or go out on my own. Happy to give more info if needed. <comment><USER2> Do you have a plan for finding customers? If you have worked in the sales part of the company and the recruiting part you have a chance. assuming you know what it takes to get new customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but I don't know how it will play out since I'll be recruiting under my own brand and not the company brand.

<comment><USER2> I doubt recruits will care about you, it's the hiring company that's more important. just make sure they aren't working with someone else with that company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There will never be a better time.

If you're lucky enough to fail quickly, and have learned from it, then dust that dirt off your shoulder and try again

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes!</comment>


The Rapid Packing Container invention - <AUTHOR> http://gazerlog.com/true-ingenuity-henry-wang-and-chris-curro-create-the-rapid-packing-container-video_1804e27c2.html

<comment><USER2> A number of professionals in the shipping and packaging industries weighed in on this a couple days ago on Reddit. Critical flaws were identified...

[http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1thf9w/my_buddy_and_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1thf9w/my_buddy_and_i_are_looking_to_revolutionize_the/)</comment>


Agile Borat - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/AgileBorat <comment><USER2> One for the FP people:

"Azamat say state of functional program is maintain by nomads with objective camel?! Is not make sense. Is crazy."

heh ;-)</comment>


Gos: Armed Golang ( solutions for go module,goproxy,cross compilation, etc.) - <AUTHOR> Github: https://github.com/storyicon/gos <comment><USER2> It does not clearly say what it does and why I should use it on the GitHub repository.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be interested in seeing additional options for grpc/gogo support for the proto generation, as well as integration with myitcv's gobin.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do Bitcoin people write stuff in "White Paper" instead of HTML? - <AUTHOR> I've been wondering about this for quite some time. I know Satoshi Nakamoto the founder posted his first Bitcoin document as a PDF, but I am not sure what the reason for continuing this tradition is. HTML documents are much easier to share, more portable, etc. Is there some reason I'm not aware of? <comment><USER2> A "White Paper" is like a report, whereas PDF and HTML are just technologies used to display it.

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


This Is What A Seed Term Sheet Looks Like...On Wordle - <AUTHOR> http://blog.salestie.com/2011/03/this-is-what-a-seed-term-sheet-looks-like-on-wordle/

<comment><USER2> Cool site. I uploaded my vc pitch and it showed me my emphasis. Great tool!</comment>


Startup Bootcamp: October 12th at MIT with many YC speakers - <AUTHOR> http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/

<comment><USER2> I'm coming in from out of town on Saturday for this if anyone wants to get together - HN Meetup? Somebody mentioned in the other thread meeting up Monday morning before the event, but how about Saturday or Sunday night for sharing some beers/ideas?

<comment><USER3> Looks like I won't be able to make it on Monday but I'm game to try a meetup on any evening you desire.

Can any fellow Bostonians help suggest the proper bar? I have yet to find my ideal HN Meetup bar in Cambridge: One where I have decent odds of hearing someone else speak, instead of being unable to hear myself over the music.

<comment><USER4> I would suggest The Thirsty Scholar Pub, Miracle of Science, or Tory Row (in about that order).

<comment><USER2> Thirsty Scholar Pub - I like the sound of that. Saturday night or Sunday night? Looks like maybe Sunday night would be better for some.

<comment><USER4> I'm available either one. Email me (address in profile) if you want to set something up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would love to jump in on a hn meetup - Monday morning or evening works best for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Check out the site on your iphone for fun –

</comment><comment><USER7> Damn, wish this was a weekend. I don't think I can afford taking a weekday trip to Boston.

<comment><USER5> It is on Columbus day.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Tools for non-profit organizations - <AUTHOR>

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0206.cabot.html
I was reading this article about donating cars to charity, and I was a bit surprised to learn that non-profits have to go through a for-profit organization to auction off the cars that they have.
In general, this led me to think about non-profit org problems (which are many).  Every one that I know who's worked in non-profit before says that money is tight, and it's mostly based on volunteers who can be flaky and non-committal.  The most glaring problem that I see are usually their basic IT needs, and getting the tools to coordinate and communicate.  I can't help but feel there's an overlooked opportunity in an under-served market here.  However, the only thing I can think of is consultancy, as most good tools they need have an open source version.
Anyone know what's currently done in this arena? <comment><USER2> Here is the problem I see with open-source tools in the not for profit arena.

The person who knows how to use them, administer them, whatever, quits.

Specifically with web sites (my arena) We (Servee) work with a lot of non- profits. We give them organization, communication and web-management software, and they pay a subscription for us to be their web dept.

They're paying a subscription for hosting anyway, and they are usually willing to pay a little bit more to be able to call me when something is awry, and to be able to have full control themselves.

As far as the physical infrastructure of IT, I'd suggest that all non-profits go to Dell or Apple or somesuch. Again, your on-board techie may save you 25% by going through newegg and putting them all together himself, but when he leaves for college or decides that his other job is taking up too much time you are stuck.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill Problem is that non-profits with money waste it, and non-profits without money can't afford to follow your advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/npo/>

</comment><comment><USER4> techsoup.org is a great resource for non-profits looking for technical advice, services and products.</comment>


Show HN: Call to Speakers –  Find and track conference speaking opportunities - <AUTHOR> https://calltospeakers.com

<comment><USER2> Suggestion: wherever the information is available (with the understanding that it's usually not public), a very helpful thing to know is what the conference's default policy is on travel/lodging for speakers.

If a conference is far away, but pays for travel and lodging, that's very different than if you're going to be out a lot of cash if you want to speak there.

Knowing this up front can make a big difference in deciding whether to submit a talk.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea! I like how you'll email me about upcoming opportunities.

I just wish I could add my zip code and get opportunities within a fixed range of my address.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm planning on adding filtering to the site and email notifications. However, right now there aren't that many new conferences each week (<20), so it's easy to scan through them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lanyrd also has a calls for speakers feature: [http://lanyrd.com/calls/](http://lanyrd.com/calls/)

(I don't want to detract from this post, just want to make people aware of the data we have. Having a dedicated service that curates and emails out this kind of information is definitely a plus for the community - our CFP feature isn't particularly well publicised)

</comment><comment><USER5> You really need to add ability to filter by categories.

<comment><AUTHOR> What categories would you like to filter on? I was thinking `programming language` and location.

<comment><USER5> Location, but needn't be too localized. (I think most people travel nationwide)

I'd filter on language, but also include "concepts" (for instance, mobile, or startups). You also should identify conferences which aren't immediately obvious what the language is, or that cover other languages. (for instance, RIACon was traditionally a ColdFusion conference, but in recent years has added a JavaScript track; Ruby conferences usually have some functional talks, etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This site shouldn't really be called "call to speakers" but "call to attenders". Only last 3 conferences on the list have still open call for papers/speakers. From the other last one closed in July. The deadline counts down to the conference not call for papers deadline. The site itself doesn't really provide any useful information for submitters. You have to dig it all up yourself - I'm wondering beside giving a list of conferences (in pretty near future, cause conferences in March that are last on the site will be closing call for papers pretty soon) - what is the value added?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure you're looking at the same list. All conference on the front page have open calls for speakers. The deadline counts down to close for the call, not the start of the conference.

What other information are you looking for? I provide the link to the application, as well as all important dates for the conference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Suggestion: You should add keyword filtering and allow me to receive an email alert when a speaking opportunity in my speciality becomes available.

</comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of speakers: The official deadline has just past (we just missed this!) but I'd love to have some HNers submit for DevOps Days Toronto here: [http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-toronto/propose](http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-toronto/propose)

</comment><comment><USER9> Theres something similar thats become somewhat popular in the infosec space, [https://secore.info/](https://secore.info/)

Its a bit clunky and has been around for a while without getting a lot of attention, but its been quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Super cool, are you open to non-tech, non-business speakers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I'm only focusing on tech conferences. After that, I'll probably focus on science, health, and medical conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent resource! I added you to my Twitter conf-stalking list. I assume you tweet about every single CFP posted on the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! The account is set up to tweet once every three hours. Each conference will be tweeted three times: when it's added, 14 days before closing, and 3 days before closing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Brilliant, very useful. Found and applied to a few that I didn't know were open.

</comment><comment><USER2> Songkick for Conferences! Love it! I signed up immediately.

<comment><USER4> If you're excited about Songkick for conferences, have you tried [http://lanyrd.com/](http://lanyrd.com/) (I'm a co-founder)?</comment></comment>


A Fork() in the Road [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf <comment><USER2> All true except they sort of beat around the bush regarding the fact that there exist no real alternatives. As they admit CreateProcess and pthread_spawn are also horrible interfaces: "It is infeasible for a single OS API to give complete control over the initial state of a new process."

The superior alternative is cross-process operations, which "yields the flexibility and orthogonality of the fork/exec model, without most of its drawbacks". However, it only exists in a couple of experimental operating systems and has never been tested in the real-world. There's a boatload of boilerplate library code that would invariably need to accompany such a primitive, and it's not at all clear that we'd end up in a substantially better position. I mean, technically speaking ptrace already permits such a design, but I don't see anybody clamoring to build that solution. Perhaps the people with the skills appreciate the pain the Cygwin developers dealt with, as it's basically how Cygwin emulated fork with the Win32 API.

There are many ways to improve the downsides of fork. For example, in Solaris' original thread design fork recreated all threads so there was never the async-safety issue. But we don't pursue these fixes. Why? Because it's good enough, and in particular flexible enough to allow for the emergence of things like containers without having to make a giant leap to an entirely new primitive.</comment>


Your Logical Fallacy Is - <AUTHOR> https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/poster

<comment><USER2> I found this rebuttal to be quite a good read as well. [http://plover.net/~bonds/bdksucks.html](http://plover.net/~bonds/bdksucks.html)

<comment><USER3> It's not a rebuttal, it's just pointing out that while it is useful to know about logical fallacies, simply citing them does not an argument make. Worse, citing a logical fallacy is often employed by those who are lazy and aren't genuinely addressing a given argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Contradicting itself, "Genetic: Judging something good or bad on the basis of where it comes, or from whom it comes".

And just one row down, "The Texas sharpshooter".

</comment><comment><USER5> I've got the large poster, framed, hanging up in my townhouse. I get lots of compliments on it :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm getting one for our conference room, we sure as hell need it.</comment>