Samsung is building its own AI assistant for the Galaxy S8 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/samsung-ai/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone _actually_ use these voice assistants regularly (other than when it first came out)? If so, what for?

I find most people just use Siri to ask questions to show it off and see if they can get some comic relief from the answers... and then curse the rest of the time when they accidently activate it.

I _do_ use voice-to-text quite often.

<comment><USER3> I mainly use it in two ways (in order of usage): 1\. To set reminders and timers, 2\. To find quick answers, ie. I actually _just_ used it to find out what time sunset is and it answered fine. I might sometimes ask it a bit more complex things like "What time is the GSW game on tonight?", but anything research-related or more challenging questions, I leave to Google.

My biggest gripe with this whole voice assistant thing is is, when I think of a query, I usually _want_ to Google it because I enjoy going to Wikipedia (or some related article) and reading about it myself, picking out the sections I find interesting and reading about them, which sometimes leads me deeper into other areas of interest. I don't find that joy when an AI tells me what I want to hear. That's my biggest limitation to using these things. That and Siri never understanding me.

<comment><USER4> exact same usage. 90% of my usage is setting alarms/timers/location or time based reminders. Voice instructions are a lot easier than ANY interface for that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, when is somebody going to do an assistant abstraction layer so you can plug your service into all N of these things?

<comment><USER6> I hope Apple is going to hook Siri up to that layer to get better results though...

<comment><USER7> Woa, someone is an optimist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> didn't they just buy some company that already had one, or was already building one?

Edit: yep, they bought Viv Labs Inc. on Oct 6th.

</comment><comment><USER8> At this point they don't have many options. Google seems determined to limit Assistant to their hardware.

That being said, I'm not sure the developer community has enough interest in supporting that many AI assistants on their apps (Siri, Assistant, Alexa, Cortana...)

<comment><AUTHOR> People seem to love an oligopoly of two. I call it Coke vs. Pepsi thinking.

<comment><USER9> Personally in this case I'd love for more competition. However I'll probably never buy a Samsung phone now between how awful their version of Android is, lack of updates, explosion concerns, and the fact that I don't think they will ever have an assistant that can rival Google.

They are good at hardware in ways Apple is not, but both Apple and Samsung are horrible at web integrated services like this compared to Google. I just don't think it's in their DNA.

<comment><USER10> I feel like Samsung is preparing for the day they can leave the Google eco- system behind. But as of now, it's not viable. The lockin is strong. It's hard enough to build apps to work with both Google services and Amazon Fire services.

Their UI is pretty terrible. I wipe my devices and usually install a mod like Cyanogen or Omni. But I wish we didn't need mods; I wish we could just install stock AOSP on everything just like a base install of Windows (before MS started adding junkware to it in Win10). I wrote a post about this a while back: [http://penguindreams.org/blog/android- fragmentation/](http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/)

<comment><USER9> > "Samsung is preparing for the day they can leave the Google eco-system > behind"

I think you mean "preparing for the day Google leaves them behind."

Google's path with the Pixel, if successful, puts them on more of an Apple trajectory. I saw a recent stat that 9/10 smartphones run Android, so they've dominated the industry already. The question though is whether that would still stay the same if Samsung wasn't in the mix.

Beyond that, the hardware is fast becoming commoditized as everyone realizes that at a certain point, the core features that make people buy a phone will be cloud-based and increasingly with wearable peripherals your fancy phone will be sitting in your pocket while the inputs are worn.

Those who can't differentiate on software and services will be relegated to low-margin commodity hardware providers. However those who own the ecosystem are asserting their control to build what will likely be an insurmountable moat.

<comment><USER11> I was about to say the same thing. The problem for Samsung is that they need Google and their ecosystem. The other problem for Samsung is that Google doesn't need Samsung anymore. That's not to say Google doesn't want Samsung as an Android partner, but if that day ever came and Samsung decided to switch to Tizen their impact on the Android landscape today wouldn't be as impactful as it would have been years ago.

As Google establishes their supply chain, carrier relationships and grows their hardware unit they'll soon have all of the pieces in place to become the only true competitor to the iPhone in terms of a unified software and hardware experience. Pretty much every review of the Pixel has raved about its performance, touch responsiveness and camera quality. If you're trying to decide which high end Android phone to buy then the Pixel is at the top of that list. Not bad for a first try that was made in only half the time of their competitor's phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> But will it be capable of putting out fires?

</comment><comment><USER13> "Sammy, make my phone STOP BURNING THROUGH MY THIGH!!!"

</comment><comment><USER14> But how will this fit in with their lineup of "things that explode"?

<comment><USER15> It will make funny exploding noises. Basically a glorified fart app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the worst kind of fragmentation.</comment>


The Majestic Monolith - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-majestic-monolith-29166d022228 <comment><USER2> I just spent a day learning about Docker and Kubernetes and then Micro- Services and wondered just that: "is this for me?"

So, thank you for your timely post! =).</comment>


Ask HN: Crowdsourcing a company name - <AUTHOR> Hello, HN community. I'm the CEO of Coding Ninjas; we connect studios and marketers with qualified and vetted freelance developers and designers. We love our name, but some time ago we discovered that there is a big Indian coding school with the same name and we don't want to be associated with young developers, as everyone in our community has 4+ years of experience and is not from India. It is such a pain to find a new one that will stick forever. Especially that our first language is not English. We don't want to use in the name: freelancer, coder, online, marketplace or anything like this. There are a bunch of names like this, and they sound needy.
We want something that will be associated with the safe space, where you can come and delegate coding and design and concentrate on your main business. I want people to think that this is their dedicated team that is always there in their back pocket.
If you have any ideas, would appreciate your opinion. <comment><USER2> If you want to get across the idea of putting trust in you, maybe something like Safe Hands?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment. Something like this, but safe hands sounds more like an insurance company, we are a dedicated team, that you can trust and be sure your work will be done. Something like "Trusted Team", but I don't like trusted team :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just replace Ninjas to something, what about Coding Сossacks ))

<comment><AUTHOR> This is funny :) and actually, could work, but we want to change "coding" too, as we are already beyond coding, and want to expand to design, marketing, data entry, accounting, etc.</comment></comment>


The invisible bike helmet - <AUTHOR> http://www.travelinggreener.com/cycling/invisible-bike-helmet-from-sweden/

<comment><USER2> it seems that the founders put a lot of heart into this product, would love to test it</comment>


Visual Studio 2010 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/ <comment><USER2> Having used Visual Studio for 10 years and even written a book on it I can say I am totally tired of this huge and bloated IDE and can't wait until I am done with .NET work or MonoDevelop is good enough to switch. (it's getting close)

<comment><USER3> Is it slower than any of the other enterprise grade IDEs (eclipse or intellij)?

I haven't used the later in ~12 months but I don't remember them being particularly speedy in comparison.

The only things I truly find insufferably slow in VS are the visual designers which do code-gen "on the fly".

<comment><USER4> I am always annoyed when someone says "enterprise grade". What is an enterprise-grade IDE?

<comment><USER3> integrated tools to support full software development life-cycle: things like version control, test runners, parameterizable builds, etc.

plus the option for commercial support.

<comment><USER5> What IDE/texteditor does not have that? (Or can have it via a plugin?)

<comment><USER4> Well... Notepad, for instance, is very limited.

<comment><USER5> I would not call Notepad a texteditor. It's nothing else than a textbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "A powerful IDE that ensures quality code", they say. Now _that_ would be worth paying money for. If it were possible. Which it isn't.

<comment><USER3> That's probably a reference to their new Code Contracts feature:

 _Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post- conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs._

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/dd491992.aspx>

<comment><USER6> Jolly good, and I'm all in favour of better tool support for contracts, but that still can't "ensure quality code".

(If whoever thought my comment needed downvoting would like to explain why -- because it's too obvious? because it's wrong? because there's nothing at all wrong with a major software vendor making totally false and unreasonable claims in their promotional materials? -- then I am, seriously although not literally, all ears.)

<comment><USER7> I didn't vote you down but, their claim is true at a micro level: I ensure that you give me this, whereupon you can be sure I'll give you that (or exceptions will be thrown). Plus, it's maybe a waste of scoffing to scoff at marketing hype.

Poor Eiffel; its doom was to lead the way, and get picked apart by its children. Maybe if it hadn't looked like Pascal it might have done better. That said, I'm really surprised that design by contract hasn't been incorporated more widely, before now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know that this might sound like an attack, but it's not. I'm just asking out of curiosity: If you want to code in Java, there are highly sophisticated IDEs you can download and code in for free (eg - eclipse). The same for Mac (Xcode).

When MS bought out .NET - was there any particular IDE or language development environment that was distributed for free to encourage (especially young) developers to code in it? Or did you always have to pay for Visual Studio?

I'm not slagging off MS. I'm actually genuinely interested in getting my hands dirty with some Visual C# now that Windows 7 is shaping up to be quite a nice OS to use. It just seems odd that I have to pay someone so that I can write stuff for their OS.

<comment><USER9> What you want is Visual Studio Express. Or more precisely Visual C# 2010 Express. <http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloads/>

<comment><USER4> Or Monodevelop, or SharpDevelop.

Or just your favourite text editor coupled to the build system that comes with the .NET framework.

You could even write an Emacs mode for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone describe how the Visual Studio 2010 IDE compares to 2008 IDE performance-wise?

<comment><USER11> VS 2010 is slower than VS 2008.

That said, with a $900 machine, ( quad i5, 4 gig ram ) with a last gen video card the most recent RC runs just as fast as VS 2008 did.

<comment><USER12> Very true. A lot of 2010 perf hit is because of WPF. Real hardware and a good video card is required. I never dreamed that a decent video card would be required for a text editor but it is.

<comment><USER13> Hardware acceleration is the Microsoft crutch for shitty perf :)

Not that I'm bitter, stuck in VS2008 all day on a circa 2003 machine, stingy ass employers.

They can afford to pay 100k+ for engineers, but not to give them decent machines..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did they fix the bug that forces you to restart your app if you edit a function that has an anonymous/lambda/linq statement?

This has been by far and away my #1 complaint for over three years ([http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2007/03/complaints-about-visual- stu...](http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2007/03/complaints-about-visual- studio.html)). It is a huge deterrent from taking advantage of most of C#'s beauties.

</comment><comment><USER15> ultimate version available for a _completely reasonable_ $12 000! [http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en- us/products/2010-ed...](http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en- us/products/2010-editions/ultimate)

<comment><USER16> I was blown away by this. I have used all versions of VS and always worked at places that provided it or were gold partners or in the MSDN subscriptions. The cost of one copy is MORE than a MSDN subscription. Seriously what is up with the pricing? This is waaaaay too much for an IDE these days. I could buy both Maya and 3dsmax cheaper than that.

<comment><USER17> >The cost of one copy is MORE than a MSDN subscription.

That's because it includes an MSDN sub. Still astronomical, I know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> C++0x! Time to use auto, move constructors, and shared_ptr!

[http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2010/04/06/c-0x-core- la...](http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2010/04/06/c-0x-core-language- features-in-vc10-the-table.aspx)

In fact, I've read existing STL-heavy C++ (returning std::vector<std::string> by value from functions, for example) will sometimes double in performance when compiling with a C++0x-capable compiler.

I wish the new historical debugger worked for C++.

<comment><USER19> gcc's equivalent table: <http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> found some concrete info from Scott Guthrie's twitter feed (he's the VP of the MS Developer Division).

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

MSDN Subscribers & WebsiteSpark/BizSpark members can download VS 2010 Monday morning.

The final release of VS 2010 & .NET 4 will be available ~10am PST.

Free VS 2010 Express Editions + VS 2010 Trial editions will also be available for download.

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

<http://twitter.com/scottgu>

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow. Coming from the Mac, I have never realized you had to pay, and possibly pay so very much, for dev tools on Windows. What kind of things does VS do that are exciting? I see they have a feature list a million miles long, but I can't get a sense of what VS does that eclipse or Xcode does not. Color me surprised.

<comment><USER21> Supports .NET projects ;)

Seriously though, VS and Eclipse compare quite similarly on features. There are also free Express editions of most MS tools which cover perhaps 80% of the features so the price isn't really an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Up voted, cause its news to me. I would like a review of .NET 4.0 or an overview of new features in VS 2010 sometime.

<comment><USER3> F# is a first class language alongside C# and VB.

Major new threading framework which let's you write things like:

      Parallel.For(0, 100, delegate(int i)
      {
        doWork(i);
      }
      );

and to parallelize your LINQ queries with the AsParallel() method:

      data.AsParallel().Sum();  //does exactly what you think

That's just the stuff which I'm most excited about. See [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms171868(VS.100).asp...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms171868\(VS.100\).aspx) for a more comprehensive list.

<comment><USER23> >//does exactly what you think

Bring the database to a grinding halt when it tries to service 1000s of request for different rows in the same table at the same time in parallel rather than just access each line in order and sum them?

<comment><USER24> Is all the data you ever operate on stored in the database? Do you never load things into memory?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it safe to assume they haven't updated their C support from the 21 year old standard to the 11 year old standard?

<comment><USER26> They support _some_ of C99. LMGTFY: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/146381/visual-studio- supp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/146381/visual-studio-support-for- new-c-c-standards)

<comment><USER25> That question was asked in September 2008. One would hope some things could change by then.

Supporting c89 is supporting _some_ of c99. As pointed out from some of the things you linked to, not fully supporting c99 means there are places where bugs are silently introduced (see snprintf) and, more importantly, my code that compiles under various c99 compilers doesn't compile under the stuff Microsoft ships.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hmmm, express editions are not yet updated.

<comment><USER28> Express editions are available now. Follow the link from the MSDN homepage

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't expect too many people on HN are doing SharePoint work, but if you are, you need to get VS 10 now. They've added templates for a variety of projects, and single-click compile/package/retract/deploy/debug of your project.

<comment><USER13> My condolences.

I see SharePoint on a job posting and it goes into the trash immediately...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks cool. I'm a ruby dev on osx, but ill be installing the demo and playing around with this thing for sure. I really like the innovations in .net 4.0 for dynamic languages.

Anyone know the status of ironruby within this release?

<comment><USER31> IronRuby just shipped 1.0 as of today, no VS integration though (yet...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I know named and optional parameters are in there for C#.

<comment><USER4> Do you need to get a whole IDE just for a compiler that supports a given runtime feature?

<comment><USER32> Good question. Are you asking if you can target .NET 4.0 with VS 2008? I don't know, my experience has been that it's like swimming upstream to try to separate the IDE, .NET Framework version, and language version -- best to just get them all.

<comment><USER33> _Are you asking if you can target .NET 4.0 with VS 2008?_

Highly unlikely. However, VS2010 will give you a choice of Runtime versions from 4 downwards. VS2008 will give you a choice of Runtime versions from 3.5 downwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anybody know when this will be available for download in MSDN subscriptions?

<comment><USER35> 10AM Pacific

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What's the cheap legal way to get it?

Empower is going away May 21st; Any other options?

<comment><USER37> bizspark, if you're not a student. Say you've got a startup and you get a free MSDN subscription for three years, then pay $100. Its a great deal

<comment><USER38> ... contact me if you're interested in BizSpark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is it available at MSDN subscription downloads yet?

</comment><comment><USER40> _A powerful IDE that ensures quality code_

Isn't that awesome?

</comment><comment><USER41> This sites switches to a mobile version when I browse there on my iPad. Maybe they haven't noticed the iPad release?

<comment><USER42> believe or not, but the iPad isn't exactly the center of the universe. Especially not for Microsoft.

<comment><USER41> Agreed, but my comment wasn't _really_ aimed at dissing MS specifically for not _not_ showing the regular web page when using an iPad, but rather the bigger point that mobile web sites, in today's age of powerful mobile devices, are just out of place. This is amplified by the iPad's 9.7" screen, but is equally true on an iPhone, and would hope on a Windows Mobile device as well.

<comment><USER43> I disagree. If there were more/better mobile sites, you wouldn't have to use so many apps for things that are essentially website functionality. Plus they save money if you are not on an unlimited plan. I do hate when they scrape functionality, the way I can not add an attachment on a mobile version of gmail so I have to use the html one.

<comment><USER41> Maybe I didn't express myself clearly. Apologies. What I mean is that mobile hardware (and mobile browsers) are getting better and better and so mobile websites are become passe. Decent mobile hardware & browsers can view full websites.

Especially when your screen is 9.7".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Launched smart agriculture project in Syria - <AUTHOR> We are N'bat, a bootstrapped team designing an innovative non-profit project on smart agriculture in Syria. Step 1 is to fund and put together a GSM circuit so plants can communicate data.
We set up a GoFundMe https://www.gofundme.com/smartagsyria but would also be most grateful for guidance and feedback.
Thank you! Flavius <comment><AUTHOR> Why starting with a GSM circuit for communication (vs bluetooth)?

Bluetooth works for short range. We will use that to connect it with farmers' equipment, while a GSM network allows us to keep all the greenhouses data being sent and received to the server. It also helps us to remotely access the processor for update.

We also want the long-range and scalability of GSM. People are spread out and this project will have several parts in different places, like servo in water pumping station and temp+other sensors in the greenhouse. It's also easier to train people to use GSM since we can get it going with any regular smartphone in a way that they understand better than setting up bluetooth, according to our experience. We already have other GSM devices, but want to acquire this one, here in the US, so that we can download all the packages we need and get it running here. That's hard to do there, where there is barely internet.

What do you mean by smart agriculture?

The ability to grow your needs of food with minimal human interaction, because of the shortage of skilled workforce.

Smart agriculture, in this case is providing any individual with the ability to control their greenhouse, even if they don't have the experience.

What do you think?

Thank you so much again!

PS: Because of the mention of S, the gofundme is currently under review and not accessible.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think it would help if you talked more about the need to start with a GSM circuit for communication. For instance, could you instead consider starting with some bluetooth devices?

Also, what does "smart agriculture" mean to you?</comment>


The problem with ideas - <AUTHOR> http://startuppr.tumblr.com/post/19279011613/the-problem-with-ideas

<comment><USER2> Friendly tip. You might want to consider a font that has a little more weight to it. I had an extremely difficult time reading any of the text. Tried zooming in, moving to a different monitor, but eventually just gave up, even though I really wanted to read the entire post.</comment>


Congress demands Jeff Bezos explain Amazon's face recognition software - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90209707/congress-demands-jeff-bezos-explain-amazons-face-recognition-software <comment><USER2> The problems of information technogy and law enforcement are not a recent discovery, though this is much overlooked.

Quoting:

 _By moving in this direction, we could easily end up with the most effective, oppressive police state ever created._ The old cliche that "knowledge is power" is especially valid in describing a society that holds extensive information about the movements and history of all its citizens. I can think of no organization or government that has proven itself to be sufficiently benevolent to be entrusted with the power that is derived from the volume of information available in such a system.

"Some Caveats on the Contribution of Technology to Law Enforcement", Paul Baran. (1967)

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3550.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3550.html)

Emphasis in original.

</comment><comment><USER3> As if Bezos is going to roll up to a Congressional Hearing in a lab coat with a white board and explain the principles of deep learning and neutral networks. It's mostly just a dog and pony show.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why does congress always need the CEO? Surely there must be someone at amazon more qualified to talk about Rekognition than Bezos.

<comment><USER5> Congress grilling a CEO makes it appear to their constituents that they're fighting on their behalf against a corrupt and otherwise unchecked corporate establishment - CEOs are easy targets and celebrities in their own right; just having "Jeff Bezos" in the headline draws readers, and attention to the lawmakers themselves. Congress grilling some random engineer, meanwhile, would make them look like abusive bureaucrats, if anyone cared, which no one would.

These hearings are rarely if ever about fact-finding as opposed to politics and optics, and being seen "taking action" on "relevant" issues.</comment></comment>


Link Building from A to Z - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z <comment><USER2> I know that SEO stuff might be relevant to _some_ peoples interests here, but this is neither "Hacker", or "News".

<comment><USER3> With so many SEO articles I find that it's all so incredibly gimmicky and formulaic. It's more about writing link bait to get link juice and build traffic than creating and sharing quality content. For that reason I would rather not see HN become a resource for furthering that pap. There are likely some SEO articles that fall into the latter category, and I wouldn't mind seeing them here from time to time...

That said, this one belongs in the former.

<comment><USER4> Articles like this remind me of the covers of Cosmopolitan, the same content every month shifted around the page with a new background image.</comment></comment></comment>


MySQL (InnoDB) clustered and non-clustered indexes - <AUTHOR> http://n3n.in/w <comment><USER2> I saw a presentation on an interesting hack done with InnoDB primary keys used to cluster similar data.

A hotel booking company created a primary key which would put geographically similar entries into primary keys which were close together. i.e. there wouldn't be an entry for a hotel in Saigon ordered between two entries for San Francisco.

I don't recall the specifics of how they did it, but due to how InnoDB orders pages on disk according to their primary key, it meant that all of the results for a particular location could be accessed by fetching one to two pages of data from disk.

Resulted in some huge performance gains for them, both by reducing the number of disk IOs required for your average query, and by reducing the on-the-fly geographical calculations they had to do in the DB. They could do a range query on the primary key in the database and then do fine-grained geolocation on a less contended resource against a small number of entries.

<comment><USER3> A Z-order curve maps from two (or more) dimensions to one while preserving locality: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve)

<comment><USER4> Depending on your application you might want to pick a different space filling curve ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space- filling_curve](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve)). Different curves lead to different characteristics for nearness. You can also use multiple types of curves or two of the same curve oriented differently and then use the minimum distance of the curves as your distance estimate for some applications.

If you just want to generate keys you should look at Locality-Sensitive Hashing ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality- sensitive_hashing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A nice little article. I've always felt that database indexes are one of those fringe topics that's just esoteric enough that people acquire a basic knowledge of them and know they need them, yet understanding indexes and using them correctly leads amazing performance.

On clustered indexes in particular, I try to follow these principles:

Narrow - in terms of a data type's byte length, so that more keys can be packed into each level of the B-tree. You can end up having to traverse fewer intermediate levels to reach the leaf level, where the data resides.

Unique - This ties into the point above, there will be no need to add a "uniquifier" to the key, helping to save space and the overhead of managing that extra tid-bit of data

Static - ideally, never changing. By it's nature, a clustered index is ordered, and updating/changing the keys will lead to data that's in the wrong place. You can kind of get around this by rebuilding the index after every update, but that just adds another task you'll need to manage more often.

Increasing - this can lead to faster inserts; in a sense, the DB is just filling up the last page of the index and then adding another when it needs to. (I think after a certain amount of inserts, eventually you'll have to re- build the index (to add more intermediate level nodes) but I can't recall the specifics, and you're going to have to do rebuild indexes anyway with all indexing strategies.)

</comment><comment><USER6> If, like me, you found the idea interesting but the article a bit confused there's another good discussion on it here: [http://use-the-index- luke.com/blog/2014-01/unreasonable-defa...](http://use-the-index- luke.com/blog/2014-01/unreasonable-defaults-primary-key-clustering-key)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it would have been easier for me to understand if they put everything in terms of a B+ tree, where the leaf nodes contain keys and values.

<comment><USER7> InnoDB does indeed use a B+ tree. A more thorough article on the topic is [http://blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/btree-index-structures-in- in...](http://blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/btree-index-structures-in-innodb/) or the book High Performance MySQL.

<comment><USER3> I know it uses a B+ tree. I wanted to mention that the article doesn't mention them at all.

I'm familiar with the High Performance MySQL book -- I work with one of the authors :).

<comment><USER7> Cool. I was more taking the opportunity in replying to you to point out that this article isn't very good :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Communication for oldies? - <AUTHOR>

Here is an email I recently received from my aging father and the frustration that old people have with ever changing UIs. I thought it might make an interesting Ask HN. Here is his email slightly edited:
>
The other day we were discussing with Susie how challenging it is to keep up the ever changing GUI with things like MSOutlook, Mobile phones, even landline handsets, ....
Even for early adopters like Claude [OP's late grandfather] with his Amstrad, there comes a time when oldies give up on going to the latest way to interact with Technology. Susie said that there should be a way that Oldies can retain the interfaces that they are using  "at the point when they will give up on the next change".
All this begs the question:  can a buck be made out of selling types of interface devices that will retain a connection between old interfaces and the latest that the younger ones are using? <comment><USER2> I think this is a great topic.

I imagine from the email that they want to install Foo OS and the latest and greatest apps, but they want their desktop and apps to behave like they did under a previous OS.

If they had a great workflow with a previous product and OS then good for them, why break it? Sometimes modern doesn't always mean better. A stupid phone might actually be easier to make calls on.

I see this again and again. Foobar2000 being an example of an app that had many useful features for me. I found it difficult to replace under Linux, even apps that came out years after didn't satisfy my needs. I was even thinking about using it today for adding replay gain to a folder of music. And as such I have it installed under wine.

The other classic example is users forced to transition form WordPerfect to Word. My Dad reckoned he could do everything in WordPerfect (and told me time and time again), and loathed Word with a passion. He'd mastered his tool. And once you have done that, you are reluctant to change. And in that case there wasn't that much of advantage for him in using something else (there may well have been for his sysadmins).

In an ideal world apps would be built with a software interface that you could programmically explore to build your own UIs around, so you could build a UI in a certain style. Then under your distro you could flip a behaviour switch - to emulate an Amstrad desktop say, and Firefox there would just blend in. My gut says that the toolkits used to build apps are too tightly coupled with the code to do so, but that's just a guess.

To get the feel of an OS of old, you'd want to replace your file manager and launchers too. But why not!

I don't know about monetising the idea. There might be a solution for them in using an emulator. Sadly though there are some constraints with older programs, perhaps they don't support newer protocols or lack security patches.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've thought about a protocol for web content. How many sign up forms have we seen? Users could design their own (or download from a free store) for specific purposes eg. "Registration", "Signing In", "List of things" etc. For a variety of reasons I don't think this is practical.

It sounds like they're looking for a dead simple webmail client that has consistent (unchanging) UI.

</comment><comment><USER3> This just happened to me.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127)

</comment><comment><USER3> To answer your question, maybe. I would rather that "technologists" (eg, readers and posters on HN), encourage people to understand the technology they use. Explain what an e-mail client is, dive into the "black box" of what an inbox is, a pop3 server etc.</comment>


How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/HowUnixBackspaces <comment><USER3> What is perhaps more interesting is the evolution and thinking about how it is done so easily on modern systems.

I think I've rewritten the basic 'cooked' mode probably a few times the latest being for a simulation of it on embedded systems[1]. The basic code is easy and it fails on the interesting edge cases (the most common one being if you auto CR/LF at the end of the screen few readline functions back up to the previous line.)

These days however if you have "lots" of memory and rendering a screen takes less time than rendering a single character did back in the day. You can just delete the character out of the buffer and re-render the entire screen. No need to count, your screen can do funky things like set your prompt different colors have tabs at an arbitrary number of spaces etc. Basically you can start at the top and render the entire 40 - 50 lines of text, poof in less an few mS. That was unthinkable when even at 9600 baud it took a couple of seconds to re-render the enter screen.

[1] [https://github.com/ChuckM/stm32f469i/blob/master/demos/util/...](https://github.com/ChuckM/stm32f469i/blob/master/demos/util/console.c#L158)

<comment><USER4> There was a Byte article around 1982 presenting a text editor in Z80 assembler that worked just that way: rerender the view on every keystroke. I was impressed -- "wow, it's that simple?" Of course, this was with memory-mapped textmode display, not a serial terminal, but it felt audacious to me to 'waste' that much computing for simplicity.

The article included the source code of the whole editor. That much assembly code in a magazine was unusual even then.

<comment><USER5> A lot of early text editors, particularly the tiny single-segment DOS ones, worked on the same principle. They didn't exhibit any flicker (most of the time --- anyone remember "CGA snow"?) because writing the same values to VRAM doesn't affect the screen display.

<comment><USER4> This one might've used a vertical-blank interrupt to time the refreshes -- it's what I think I remember, but I could easily be mixing it up with some other article around then, like Chris Crawford's series on Atari 800 graphics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is interesting, because it reveals the reason Windows Services for Linux gets some terminal things wrong - it's just emulating a Linux kernel, and they haven't done this bit the same. Running

      cat > /dev/null

then pressing tab then backspace works properly on Linux (including SSH from a terminal on Windows), but doesn't work on WSL (or Cygwin).

<comment><USER7> In related news, Windows (NT/2000/XP/2003) had a BSOD crasher in terminal tab+backspace handling for decades. [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/The_CSRSS_Backspace_Bug_stil...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/The_CSRSS_Backspace_Bug_still_works_in_windows_2003_sp1)

<comment><USER8> The original article still exists, at [http://jdebp.eu./FGA/csrss-backspace- bug.html](http://jdebp.eu./FGA/csrss-backspace-bug.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know when you are getting _old_ when you read:

> _When you hit backspace, the kernel tty line discipline rubs out your > previous character by printing (in the simple case) Ctrl-H, a space, and > then another Ctrl-H._

And you think 'Yup, I knew that.' ...

(In my case, I just about recall re-implementing it when mucking about with serial consoles in my youth - On low baud connections, you could actually see it do it - backspace - space - backspace )

<comment><USER10>
      > printing (in the simple case) Ctrl-H, a space, and then another Ctrl-H.

For the _really_ simple case, run 'stty -echoe'.

(And perhaps run something like 'cat', since most shells run in raw mode and do their own editing by default.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The whole TTY layer actually contains a surprising amount of functionality, handling line editing being only one of them; this is one of the best articles I've seen about the rest of that: [http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/) (It's also been mentioned multiple times on HN.)

</comment><comment><USER11> When I first started programming a pdpd11 using basicplus2 I wrote a program that had a built in password which consisted of the password which included backspaces and *'s which obliterated the first half of the printed password so when it was printed out you could not read the password.

Primitive but effective.

Even when viewing it on the screen it was quick enough you could not read the password

<comment><USER12> Way back on Solaris I once managed to accidentally name a file backspace. Somehow I managed to finger-flub and hit "mv filename <crtl-h> <enter>" or something like that. Had to use a GUI interface to delete that file.

<comment><USER13> Not at a Unix machine right, now, but this might work:

rm \BKSP where the BKSP represents the backspace key. If it worked, it did because the backslash escapes the usual meaning of the backspace key, which is to erase the preceding character.

Also, related (though may not work for above case), to delete other files with funny characters in the name (like a leading dash):

rm -- -filename

where the -- means (end of the options), so even a leading dash after -- is not treated it as an option.

Best to use the -i option too, with such cases, for interactive confirmation of the remove.

<comment><USER14> You don't even need a special option, just do rm ./-filename

<comment><USER13> Good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems complicated and error prone. Although I can see the advantages of this approach, it really makes me wonder whether the designers chose the right abstractions.

Also, the fact that I can type "cat binary-file" and mess up my terminal settings tells me that they didn't clearly separated concerns.

<comment><USER16> This is legacy built on legacy built to work with minimal CPU cycles on existing hardware designed to be compatible with hardware from the 40s.

Yes, concerns aren't separated ;)

A much more recent and far superior design can be found in Windows NT, where things like coloring are done entirely through an ioctl-equivalent (whereas Unix has amounts of in-band signaling, while some later extension use tty_ioctl).

<comment><USER10>
      > Unix has amounts of in-band signaling

The in-band signalling is not a Unix thing; it's a widely-supported international standard ISO 6429 aka ANSI X3.64 aka ECMA-48.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I didn't read the article and all the comments but this is the sort of thing once again reminds that there's really nothing new in most of the new technologies :) Lets take Dom updates for example. Do you update the whole tree and rerender the whole screen or only the changed parts. Problem is essentially the "same" albeit tech and corner cases have their own set of differences. Next, consider that maybe your browser is just more fancier terminal and webserver is just evolution of old mainframes.

Well, that's just my way of thinking but because way of thinking and having started my career writing unix applications, I still can maintain my interest in latest 'trends' and at least feel that I have something to contribute when trend seems to gear towards hiring younger and younger devs.

</comment><comment><USER18> i'm confused as to why the article implies the kernel is serving the shell.

isn't the shell usually a program running in userspace? that interprets commands, and prints characters on the screen, etc, in userspace? i didn't think the kernel was involved at all, except to receive exec syscalls.

<comment><USER19> You're conflating the shell and the terminal. The shell is a running process, the terminal (or tty) is essentially an input-output device connected to the kernel. If you want to see what I mean, open a terminal and run the `tty` utility. It will print the device file for your current terminal (Probably a `/dev/pts/ _` entry). If you write any data to that 'file', it will appear in your terminal, and if you read from that file you'll get completely unfiltered input from the terminal (Unfiltered as in you simply see the keys as they are pressed. If you backspace, you'll see a backspace character - no line editing).

The kernel acts as the gatekeeper between the input/output of the processes running on a tty, and the input/output of the tty device itself. In 'raw' mode, the kernel simply takes the input from the tty and sends it as input to the running process, and then takes the output from the running processes and sends it as output to the tty device. The kernel still isn't completely pointless in this instance though, as it does provide some other facilities.

But it doesn't _have* to do that. In 'cooked' mode (The default mode), the kernel will allow line-editing. It does this by buffering the inputs from the tty device (And writing them back to the tty device, so they appear on the screen) without actually sending them to the running processes until you press return.

The result is the programs like `cat`[1] which do nothing more then call `read()`, and send the buffer to `write()` still allow line editing features like backspace - even though the program itself has no concept of line editing (or even lines at all).

It should be clarified that modern `bash` does operate in raw mode, and handles all the line editing itself (The `readline` library also does this - <USER2> can't say for certain if `bash` uses `readline` internally or not, I haven't checked). Unix utilities like `cat` though don't change tty settings and thus are generally operating in `cooked` mode (You can change these settings via `stty`, but it's generally not necessary).

[1] [https://github.com/DSMan195276/protura/blob/master/disk/util...](https://github.com/DSMan195276/protura/blob/master/disk/utils/coreutils/cat/cat.c#L89)

<comment><USER20> But try remapping C-w in bash. The tty remaps it on the very next line. You'll have to stty werase unmap it to be able to change it in your read line .inputrc.

So the tty cooking still has charge of some things.

<comment><USER19> I think that's actually just bash messing with you. Bash implements it's own erase-word and binds it to whatever is set to werase in the terminal, so if you don't clear the werase entry bash will just keep rebinding it every new prompt. It's definitely not the kernel's doing - for example vim, which also uses raw mode, can use C-w just fine, and the functionality bash gives to C-w is different from what the kernel provides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> But what if I want a string that includes the backspace character?

<comment><USER22> Honestly, why would you want that?

<comment><USER21> I don't :) I was just asking a stupid question.</comment></comment></comment>


The Easiest Way to Answer "What Are You Passionate About?" Interview Question - <AUTHOR> https://myresumeseed.com/blogs/career-insights/what-are-you-passionate-about <comment><USER2> When somebody asks you about passion, they're asking you if you're willing to work unpaid overtime. Case closed.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. Because if the question really were "What are your motivating factors?" or "Which job areas you enjoy working the most?" then they should ask those questions directly instead of something so easy to misinterpret.

Imagine if someone responded "My children are my passion" or "teaching Sunday school" then - whoops! now the conversation is in a very tricky area where it's all to easy to ask questions which may be regarded as evidence of intent to discriminate.

Instead, I interpret it that the interviewer is using popular buzz-phrases. And if the interviewee doesn't know the buzz-phrase then it becomes an indication of a so-called "bad cultural fit."

Which is all too often another way to say "too diverse for us".</comment></comment>


Best Programming Languages to Learn for Malware Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://www.malwaretech.com/2018/03/best-programming-languages-to-learn-for-malware-analysis.html <comment><AUTHOR> Using ReactOS as a source code reference when analyzing malware is something I never thought ReactOS would bring to the community. I makes me realize that it's good to have open-source projects like that so we can make heads and tails of systems that are affecting us every day.</comment>


Why You Need to Leave Academia in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://cheekyscientist.com/leave-academia/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand how people can remain calm and soldier on in academia, despite abuse from professors. I personally have a real problem interacting sensibly with people, never mind authority figures, who don't reciprocate respect. This isn't the first story I've heard of professors abusing their authority over students; in fact I had a similar issue with one particular professor when I was in college for my undergrad degree. I eventually confronted this professor and told him exactly what I thought about him, but it should never have come to that in the first place.

On a side note, the author of this article makes an excellent point: many professors are never taught HOW to teach, along with never receiving training on how to manage their academic affairs (the author used funding in this case, but there are other things professors are expected to do that they aren't very good at). It kind of astounds me that universities don't provide this sort of training to their professors.</comment>


You might want to avoid this Windows 10 update as it could make files disappear - <AUTHOR> https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/1241901/Windows-10-Update-Lose-Data-Glitch-Desktop-Reset <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this a rather low-quality article to post to HN given the subject matter and this audience?</comment>


The Mac is moving to Apple Silicon – not ARM - <AUTHOR> https://www.imore.com/mac-moving-apple-silicon-not-arm <comment><USER2> "An orange is a citrus, not a fruit".

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be pedantic at best. They are using their own silicon with the ARM instruction set. So ARM.

</comment><comment><USER4> What puzzles me in this transition is how does Apple plan to manage lower grade chips yielded by the fabrication. Intel's product line is largely built around the need to sell lower grade chips, rather than having them binned.

What's Apple solution to this problem? Do they design their chips to be redundant (e.g. an 8 core chip is actually designed with 10 cores)? Are they willing to take the loss from binning lower grade chips (take advantage of their high profit margins)? Or have they achieved adequate yield of high grade chips, that this loss is really a non-issue?</comment>


What's wrong with GUIs - <AUTHOR> http://crustyoldfart.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/whats-wrong-with-guis/

<comment><USER2> I agree with the article's points.

I tend to wonder if the state of GUIs isn't as simple as "too many developers use Windows and don't look elsewhere". Windows ships with a lousy shell and not many decent commands to build with. If most developers follow that example and don't try to learn anything else, they'll be "comfortable" even in inefficient programming environments.

The Mac's an anomaly...the current OS has great command support, and while the older Mac OS didn't, its _developers_ had access to the excellent MPW Shell. MPW Shell had features that Unix-like systems still can't match, such as the ability to assign significance to many more characters. (When the system makes it easy to enter "weird" symbols, the idea of turning them into shell metacharacters is pretty cool!)

A good book on the way developers think (on Unix-like systems), is ESR's "The Art of UNIX Programming". It has great examples of how many of us would approach system and application design, that don't seem prevalent on other systems.</comment>


Someone stole my identity on Upwork and all I got was this lousy blog post - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@_chelleshock/someone-stole-my-identity-on-upwork-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-blog-post-d63aab2b4c90#.uz3kk8tm7 <comment><USER2> I had very bad experience with Elance some 6-7 years ago. It was really unbelievable, job provider did tried to abuse me (cursing and mind games), I asked Elance to cancel the job and they closed my account because 'thay are losing money on closing $4000 job'. All after making few tens of thousands of successful jobs there. Crazy. I just moved on.

If I understand correctly Upwork is the same team that run Elance? If that's the case it won't work well for developers, stories like this don't surprise me.

<comment><USER3> eLance merged with oDesk and became UpWork - all a shoddy marketing play. I had a similar story. I ended up winning my dispute with a client, after 2 months of my account being suspended. Honestly UpWork doesn't care about freelancers, they make money on the clients; freelancers are just a replaceable commodity to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like Upwork is getting a lot of bad press[1] in the last few days, and it seems like it is well deserved.

I would certainly not use them in the future.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282)

<comment><USER5> I've used Upwork in the past. Which site should I use for freelancers going forward?

<comment><USER6> There are some options listed on [https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer](https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer)

<comment><USER7> As discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775983)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a bit confused over how many players are involved. Is this right?

1\. The author is a freelance writer and does not have any relationship to Upwork. I'll call her Author.

2\. Someone has been doing freelance work via Upwork, claiming to be the author. That person apparently has been scamming at least some people who have hired him via Upwork. I'll call this guy Scammer.

3\. Someone who was scammed by Scammer to the tune of $2000 wants his money back, and is going after Author because he thinks Author is Scammer. I'll call this guy Mark.

Assuming I've got this right, some things are unclear to me. For instance, has anyone told Mark that Author is not Scammer?

Author seems to be mostly trying to get Upwork to deal with the problem, and Upwork is trying to dodge responsibility so I doubt they are going to notify Mark that Scammer was an identity thief and that they have no idea who Mark should be going after.

(Upwork almost certainly very much wants to avoid doing anything that might make labor regulators in any jurisdiction that they may be subject to think that Upwork is actually an employer of the so-called freelancers rather than just a provider of a marketplace for freelances and those who need freelancers to hook up).

Looking over all this, it occurs to me that it might be a good idea in general for people to maintain a list online of places where they have accounts that are visible to the public, with a disclaimer that any public accounts purporting to be them not listed should be treated as fake. Put this list on your website and/or main social media so that it is easily found by anyone searching on your name or the name of any of your public accounts. (If you do not want to make it easy to correlate your accounts at different places, limit this to accounts that are already easily traceable back to your real identity).

</comment><comment><USER9> I use to do a lot of my freelance side work through oDesk (how Upwork use to be known as) in its early years, back around 2010-ish. At the time, I found oDesk really helpful in gaining new work. I logged thousands of hours on it. I built a really good reputation for myself on it. I actually worked with some great clients across the globe.

However, as time progressed they started changing a bunch of site features and it slowly started deteriorating from there. It became less and less useful for me. Once they merged with Elance and became Upwork, it became unpleasant to use so I just quit the site altogether.

In short, Upwork was great at one point then they tried to do too much with it resulting in not-so-great service.

</comment><comment><USER10> The registered domain on the person that was scammed/who is scamming is private:

$ whois michellenickolaisenfraud.com

      Domain Name: MICHELLENICKOLAISENFRAUD.COM
      Registry Domain ID: 2048980654_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
      Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.enom.com
      Registrar URL: www.enom.com
      Updated Date: 2016-08-03T10:06:56.00Z
      Creation Date: 2016-08-03T17:06:00.00Z
      Registrar IANA ID: 48
      Reseller: NAMECHEAP.COM
      Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited   https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
      Registry Registrant ID:
      Registrant Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED
      Registrant Organization: WHOISGUARD, INC.
      Registrant Street: P.O. BOX 0823-03411
      Registrant City: PANAMA
      Registrant State/Province: PANAMA
      Expiration Date: 03-aug-2017

<comment><USER11> Even if it weren't, it's not like whois information is validated, last time I checked, and it would be kinda irresponsible to try to "dox" someone based on just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There were a few parts here that I had trouble getting my head around.

1) The author doesn't actually have an Upwork account at all, right? I can see why Upwork would be slow in talking to her in that case, since she's not even a customer/user and is "attacking" a customer/user. EDIT: I meant that it wasn't clear to me whether she was a user or not for most of the article. For some reason I went in assuming she was.

2) She never tries to reach out to the insane guy directly? She just goes straight to Upwork? EDIT: clearly, this is not unreasonable, although talking to the nutcase may potentially have been faster.

3) Her plan was to sit quietly and hope Upwork made the problem go away for her? EDIT: apparently she made "a ruckus on Twitter" which I did read and then forgot about.

That said, this sounds pretty awful and hard to defend against.

EDIT: apparently this came off as being more against the author than I intended.

<comment><USER13> #1 - The author was being impersonated by a freelancer on Upwork, and no, didn't haven't an account herself. She wasn't attacking a customer/user, she was being attacked by one.

#2 - You probably said it best yourself: "reach out to the insane guy directly" ... I can't comment on whether she did or not, but it's usually best to not interact with people who are threatening you.

#3 - I'd say it was anything but quiet. She raised the issue on social media and with Upwork, which were her immediate means of remediation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been a freelancer for the past few years and am aware of the problems that Upwork has.

I think the problem is that there are no better alternatives to it that fills the same space. Yes, you can market yourself by writing blogs, etc but Upwork definitely helps in getting clients and leads.

I've been thinking maybe I can create something similar but try to address some of the problems now that Upwork is getting this much flak. Obviously it will be a much smaller, limited platform. But does anyone have any suggestions of what they would like to see? Something that could go in the MVP.

</comment><comment><USER15> How is this a billion dollar business?

<comment><USER16> Such a GREAT question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope that when you or your company fucks up, you take responsibility for it.

Take it from me, your client would rather have you take responsibility, and also do whatever it takes to make it right for them.

This appears to be a trend, where tech companies don't take Client Support seriously.... Ex. That programming streaming site.... don't be like them... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487708)

</comment><comment><USER18> Once I found a freelancer without work history on Upwork who stole my full profile description and also claimed he was working "in his own agency" called "Ubisoft". The account screamed "fake".

I went to the support. They said they can't prove he copied my description and he's legit overall. So their verification system is a disaster.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do other websites take action when somebody creates a fake profile? As far as I know, I could create a LinkedIn profile, impersonating someone else. How would they get LinkedIn to take it down?

Does such case even fall under the "stolen identity" umbrella?

</comment><comment><USER20> I have to admit, I'm feeling some schadenfreude re: Upwork's recent PR storm.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know how anyone can actually make a living on Upwork. I tried it out and the majority of project owners wanted to pay under $10/hour with the experience of a senior developer.

The site seems to attract these sorts of employers and I don't have the time or energy to wade through the garbage. It's like a global sweatshop for software developers.

<comment><USER22> Ironically, this is exactly what many software developers are busy doing to other industries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It sucks that someone scammed David, but he needs to grow up and pursue legal options against the scammer and/or Upwork.

Meanwhile, Michelle should get a lawyer to help her get control of the Upwork account, and to stop David's libelous posts.</comment>


"I'd rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane" - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/research/04geno.html?ex=1362286800&en=1a8fb705f5970ec0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> _Biologists have mixed feelings about the emergence of the genome as a luxury item. Some worry that what they have dubbed "genomic elitism"_

...

 _"What the heck am I doing?" Mr. Stoicescu recalls wondering. "And how many children in Africa might have been fed?"_

In the early 1900s, eugenics was a popular topic among a diverse crowd of intellectuals. Then, of course, the method was primarily a matter of encouraging "lesser" people to have fewer children ("Negative eugenics") and "better" people having more. A similar recent program is described thus:

 _To its critics, Project Prevention or Crack - an American organisation which pays drug addicts and alcoholics to be sterilised - is a terrifying throwback to the neutering of "defectives" during the 20th Century._

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3189763.stm>

...and so on. Of course, all of the Equality rubbish that has been preached to a sickening degree by liberals has only one possible realization: Positive eugenics. So Mr. Stoicescu wonders if his money would be better spent on cornmeal or whatever for starving Africans. I would suggest it's egocentric people like himself who are Africa's only real hope. He blows a few 100K on vanity, but that money will advance the state of the art to the point of genetic engineering, which will allow an actual improvement in people.</comment>


The Unwinding of the Asian Currency Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/6155/

<comment><USER2> Certain things in this article indicate that it was not written by a serious man. The confusion between the words 'effected' and 'affected'. The reference to 'capitalists' as an identifiable class of people. The assumption that America lacks "the ability to produce products that the rest of the world wants to buy", apparently irrespective of their cost. Gratuitous references to 'obese' Americans.

I want to make two general points in response.

1.) Many things in Economics have two sides to them, and exchange rates are one such thing. Yes, a weaker dollar means those who hold dollars are, effectively, poorer. OTOH, a weaker dollar makes our exports more attractive to the rest of the world, and will redress the trade imbalance that the professional doom-and-gloomers are always on about. If you're in business, selling to the rest of the world, a weaker dollar is _good_. See, for instance, all the whining about 'artificially' low pegs for the Yuan and Yen.

2.) The _current_ (floating) exchange rates represent the aggregate wisdom of the market on the question of _future_ exchange rates. If the dollar was "obviously" going to depreciate further, it would depreciate now, as traders looked to short it. Predicting deviations from the current market rates is simple speculation. If that's your bag, knock yourself out, but don't act like the future is transcendentally obvious. That sort of talk is simple kookery.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I agree with some of the points in the article, I want to stress that this is only one possible scenario. (Sorry for this long post. It's my first.)

A couple of times, the article mentions a country's wealth and power. In the long run, national competitiveness determines a nation's wealth. Currency changes are a mechanism that can influence competitiveness in the short term. (As mentioned by others, devaluation can increase competitiveness and wealth.) National competitiveness has been studied exhaustively. While there are still a lot of questions, we seem to agree that a nation needs to produce goods/services that the rest of the human race values and are willing to pay for at an efficient cost. The nation also needs to attact the most able and willing workers, call them the "talent". The nation needs a mechanism to identify and provide opportunities to the talent. Thus far, U.S. is recognized as the nation still most able to provide these conditions. Less universally agreed upon is the need for a rule of law including rights to personal property, the opportunity for the talent to accumulate much more property than the average person, and efficient access to capital. As those on this website know, access to capital and entrepreneurial support is pretty good here :)

There are two additional trends that I think have influenced the Asian Currency Crisis. One is the broad aging of the population in the wealthy contries. There is a net savings effect that is still going on. Younger people have more need of loans and older people have more need to invest. Right now, the need to invest outweights the need for loans. Money has been cheap for several decades. No one know what effect this will have when an equilibrium is reached, sometime in 2030. Another effect is land. The U.S. is said to have about the same livable land as China. You can see what this might mean. China has about 1.5 billion people to U.S.'s 300 million. A lot of Chinese will want to immigrate to US to get away from extreme over-crowding and the destroyed environment. (If you get the chance, watch the documentary "Manufactured Landscapes.") This will cause land values in US to rise, in proportion to the rise in China's per capita income.

National economies have changed drastically over a relative short time period -- a few decades. One of the scenarios discussed by experts is similar to the doomsday scenarios caused by a US dollar devalution versus the Chinese yuan. In most estimates, if this particular scenario does occur, it takes about 30-50 years. Interestingly, if you listen to most Chinese government and financial representatives, they present a doomsday scenario where China is the one going bust. They are very familiar with their own potential dangers, while we are much more aware of our own problems. For example, China has a very serious pension issue. Due to the one child policy, their workers-to-retired ratio is far smaller than in the U.S. They have not begun to create a Social Security program. (Think of Logan's Run. Actually, there are scary stories that I've heard from some of my Chinese friends.) I'm just giving another angle to this whole national competitiveness issue.

</comment><comment><USER4> So what are the options?

<comment><USER5> We could stage a coup and get a US chairman of the fed that isn't in cahoots with the sociopathic corporations. Good luck with that.

Basically, we're screwed. The Project for a New American Century has completely failed, unless you count the trillion or so dollars that have been stolen from the American people and laundered through Iraq.

<comment><USER6> Or we could get rid of the fed and go back to free market money (gold). <http://www.mises.org/story/2623>

<comment><USER5> But then economic growth revolves around new gold discoveries. It would make much more sense to have a currency directly fixed to oil.

<comment><USER7> Why not cut to the chase and define the joule as standard unit of currency.

<comment><USER5> That would also work, in theory. It would also future proof the currency against developments that could make oil worthless, though I don't see that happening anytime soon.

At least right now, it makes a lot more sense to trade in an energy containing commodity than pure energy because it's easier and more familiar to people.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing the Qubes U2F Proxy - <AUTHOR> https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/09/11/qubes-u2f-proxy/ <comment><USER2> > Since the U2F model assumes that the browser is trustworthy, any browser in > the OS is able to access any key stored on the U2F token. The user has no > way to know which keys have been accessed by which browsers for which > services.

Note that this should be treated as a "mental shortcut" as keys are never directly exposed to browsers or any other devices in U2F. It would be more precise to say that the browser can ask U2F device to sign any request with any key.

Of course internally the key storage can be optimized. For example Yubikey and Feitan (Google Titan Key) generates private P-256 keys on demand by HMACing a burned secret. That's how they can provide "unlimited storage".

Details here: [https://developers.yubico.com/U2F/Protocol_details/Key_gener...](https://developers.yubico.com/U2F/Protocol_details/Key_generation.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Once again as a reminder - just because your computer is running qubes os doesn't mean it's secure from the 3 letter agencies. If they compromised the underlying hardware then whatever you run on top of it is compromised(e.g. qube os etc).</comment>


I want to work for free in a nodejs web project - <AUTHOR>

I have around 6 yr experience. I worked in lot of technology on and off. I am confident to develop a web app end to end. But not very focussed so far. I want to work with some one preferably a techie like me on some nodejs project. I mean we can brainstorm on some idea, I have few and sure that you also have some. We will pick one and go after it. I played with Ruby on Rails a bit. Now technically I want to focus on NodeJS, no specific reason but feel like it.<p>Any body interested? Or can share some tip with me how to find some one with similar interest. <comment><USER2> I've been playing around with node recently creating some educational games for my local schools. Its by no means with any specific business goals in mind, its more I wanted to try out node and my wife is a teacher. There was no money involved but it was cool seeing the kids get into the games.

see: <http://derrish.net/pages/hacking>

I have been looking for a larger project to get involve in.</comment>


We believe we may be infected with malware - <AUTHOR> http://isc.org <comment><USER2> Disclosure is great and all, but.. which malware?

I searched a few of the *-announce lists and didn't find anything obvious. Is there a discussion somewhere that I'm missing?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.cyphort.com/isc-org-infected/](http://www.cyphort.com/isc-org- infected/)

paragraph 2: > Angler Exploit Kit

<comment><USER2> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technical Details: [http://www.cyphort.com/isc-org- infected/](http://www.cyphort.com/isc-org-infected/)

<comment><USER5> Based on this article, it appears that the exploit is something that takes advantage of IE / Flash / Silverlight. Does this mean if you run Firefox with Flash disabled and no Silverlight, you have nothing to worry about? In any case, if you had accessed the site recently, then it is probably prudent to check just in case, but still, I'm curious if anyone who knows more about the Angler Exploit Kit can explain.

<comment><USER6> JavaScript off will also quite effectively prevent this exploit (and many others), even in IE.

(I've been slowly converting people to use JS whitelists, with mixed results. Several times I've accidentally linked someone to an infected site, which had no effect on my system.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Until this site is restored, you can download your ISC software from our ftp site._

How do we know the ftp site is clean?

<comment><USER8> It's ftp, not http. You cannot serve scripts over ftp, so unless there is a completely seperate exploit for ftp clients out there it should remain unaffected. Note that most browsers include an ftp client which is why you are able to browse it.

It's possible the binaries you download may have been modified, but I assume digital signatures are available.

<comment><USER3> The signatures are available but they are distributed through the same channel as the binaries. If the one was modified it stands to reason that the other has been too.

<comment><USER8> That only works for hashes. Signatures are produced by a private key which will not be available anywhere, so they can be verified by the public key which is already know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea to link to a potentially infected site. "Please scan any machine that has accessed this site recently for malware." OK, thanks, now I have to scan for malware.

<comment><USER3> 'view source'.

Every site you visit is a potentially infected site, this one right now is probably one of the safer ones.

That said it contains a surprising amount of cruft for such a simple homepage.

<comment><USER10> Looks like it was thrown together with WINWORD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The source says this temp page is made by Microsfot Word, i am pretty sure there is a clue here but i can't sniff it, and i am being serious.

</comment><comment><USER12> I thought it was the Internet Storm Center at first, which was going to blow my mind.

</comment><comment><USER13> Please explain how "this is a WordPress issue"

Given that WordPress runs over 20% of the internet, it would be prudent to elaborate.

<comment><USER14> WordPress is a large and soft target, security-wise, and the malware targeting it has become fairly sophisticated. Note both "large" and "soft" are important, which is why I said both.

If you are implying that you're going to try to claim that WordPress is not a large and soft target, all I can do is really strongly recommend against dashing yourself against those rocks voluntarily. If you'd like some light evening reading, you can try browsing through: [http://osvdb.org/search?search[vuln_title]=wordpress&search[...](http://osvdb.org/search?search\[vuln_title\]=wordpress&search\[text_type\]=alltext)

<comment><USER15> Although check this search out: [http://osvdb.org/search?search[vuln_title]=wordpress+-plugin...](http://osvdb.org/search?search\[vuln_title\]=wordpress+-plugin+-theme&search\[text_type\]=titles)

And my filtering isn't that thorough, a number of results are still in plugins or themes.

My point is that the majority of WordPress problems are not actually WordPress problems but problems with the enormous set of third-party content produced for it. WordPress's security engineering is generally pretty good now, but the plugins are very much a mixed bag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> isc.org also has the DLV registry... should users be worried?

</comment><comment><USER17> so basically,

uninstall adobe flash and silverlight and never use IE.

*I just uninstalled adobe flash and reader. Probably will never install it again. Adobe is the new Java Applet.

<comment><USER18> > uninstall adobe flash and silverlight and never use IE.

Alternatively turn on ActiveX Filtering [1] in IE, whitelist [2] any websites that you need to run ActiveX controls on, make sure your plug-ins are up-to- date and install IE11 if you haven't already.

According to the Cyphort article linked above:

> Cyphort Labs researchers are still in the process of analyzing the > Silverlight and flash exploits which exploit a known IE vulnerability > (CVE-2013-2551). Angler EK is known to perform file-less injection (memory- > based malware where nothing is written to disk).

As you can tell from the CVE number, the exploit used by Angler EK is quite old and doesn't affect IE11 [3] or older versions of the browser that have installed the KB2829530 hotfix [4].

> Use-after-free vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 through 10 > allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted web site > that triggers access to a deleted object, as demonstrated by VUPEN during a > Pwn2Own competition at CanSecWest 2013, aka "Internet Explorer Use After > Free Vulnerability," a different vulnerability than CVE-2013-1308 and > CVE-2013-1309.

[1] [http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/browser/activexfiltering/a...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/browser/activexfiltering/about.html)

[2] [http://withinwindows.com/blog/2011/02/10/short-manage- your-i...](http://withinwindows.com/blog/2011/02/10/short-manage-your- internet-explorer-9-activex-filtering-exceptions)

[3] [http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-2...](http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-2551)

[4] [https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms13-037](https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms13-037)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Friends don´t let friends run bind...</comment>


1 Week Vacation. What should I do? I will be alone without plans. - <AUTHOR>

I have a week off with nothing planned (no travel or anything planned). I'll be by myself as I recently separated from my SO. What would you do with a week of free time alone? I've never traveled or actually never done much alone. I'm definitely not used to doing things by myself and have quite a bit of social anxiety... I'm from Pennsylvania and there doesn't seem to be much interesting local places to visit. So I mostly planned to learn as much as I can about a couple of things, most notably C#, ASP.NET, and a bit of Android development. What would you do with a week of free time? <comment><USER2> Well, it sounds weird for me that place with at least 300 years history you refer as "nothing interesting". To name just two completely different things to visit - place of battle of Gettysburg and village used to film Silent Hill (Centralia) - just to start with.

If you are more into hacking, I also don't know why you asking advice, you should have pretty good idea of what you havent touched yet but want to.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Google provide an option to open .txt files in Google drive? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> nobody seems to want to serve files.

dropbox once offered, but has stopped.

github is about the only place that'll do it nowadays.

just avoid the middleman and get your own site.

-bowerbird

</comment><comment><USER3> Or Markdown for that matter. Or YAML.</comment>


Productivity Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ProdEngSV/productivity-engineering-4aff8b560d0b <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of productivity engineering, but I find this article is a bit light on actual suggestions for increasing the productivity of teams.

I find automating the simple tasks has huge pay-offs as your team grows. Specifically:

* Linting - set up a linter which enforces code quality across the board * Code formatting - similar to linting, but instead of just highlighting errors, automatically fixing them * git pre-commit hooks - Use hooks to run the linter and formatting on pre-commit and reject commits which break company standards * CI - Running test-cases and building on push is the single greatest time saver a company can invest in

I wonder what other things people do.</comment>


Ajax Startup Launches Web Desktop Linked To Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3QWZOBMEGCVGOQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=201804435

<comment><USER2> "'What was missing from the market was the notion of the unified experience,' [Robertson] said." I don't understand the obsession people have with cramming thousands of apps into a single site. It seems to miss the point of the web. Isn't it much better for apps to run on their own sites with their own interfaces? Interoperability and sharing data between apps is huge, but the answer is not to put all apps on the same site. What are users supposed to think? "Oo, feature-crippled versions of all my favorite apps!" Web desktops strike me as having the worst of both worlds: none of the feature richness of the web and none of the UI advantages of the desktop. For non-power users, having everything in one place doesn't seem compelling enough to ignore that.

In fairness, the writer may have taken Robertson's comment out of context or altered its meaning, so apologies if that wasn't the fairest launching pad for a rant about web OSes.

<comment><USER3> I've been asking myself the same question for a while. I would like a unified experience so I have to spend less time worrying about interoperability, etc. On the other hand having a choice about every application means I can have the best application in every category. I wonder where the middle ground lies.

<comment><USER2> Facebook is probably one of the best unified experiences, but I guess if you're looking for something very OS-y, something like this is more your bag. Users shouldn't have to be the ones to worry about interoperability, but c'est la vie. Now if I can only find a French phrase about balancing trade-offs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First off, you can't call your desktop environment Windows. That's just asking for a cease and desist.

Second, why copy the Windows GUI when you can do something more suited for the browser?

<comment><USER3> I think the problem might be that most users are used to the Windows UI experience so in order to reduce the learning curve this might have been the easiest option. However if the call it Windows and has a Windows GUI look and feel they are really asking for trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i think where all these desktop copycats fail, approaches like NetVibes and widjets, succeed.

We all know the reasons for that, with the most important being that human kind needed to get away from desktop to web because of the decentralization of information.

oh and the "start" task bar every one of these tries to mimic, is soo 1995...come on, some innovation wouldn't hurt us...

by the way, this thing it crashed my firefox v3...

</comment><comment><USER6> Web OS will take off when you can run Win32 native apps on them... or GTK apps, or OSX native apps...

</comment><comment><USER6> What's 'middleware'?

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow! That's a lot of buzzwords in one sentence.

</comment><comment><USER8> I just gave a quick look. It looks decent.</comment>


Life Extension Factor Klotho Enhances Cognition [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(14)00287-3.pdf

<comment><USER2> Too bad that I don´t have it.

It you have a 23andme.com account, you can check it by browsing your genetic raw data and searching for SNP rs9536314.

TT is the normal one. I got this one.

GT is the one this article talks about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there any pills that contain this factor ?

<comment><USER3> [http://rockstarresearch.com/increase-longevity-and- intellige...](http://rockstarresearch.com/increase-longevity-and-intelligence- with-boosted-klotho-levels/)

> It turns out that lots of people get their klotho levels increased as a > side-effect of taking prescription forms of "activated" vitamin D (VDRAs) > for chronic kidney disease (CKD). But there's no reason to wait until you're > almost dying and need dialysis to start benefiting from this knowledge. > Instead, this implies that taking something like 0.25 mcg/day of Calcitriol > or 1 mcg/day of Paricalcitol right now for someone without the beneficial > KL-VS variant of the KL gene might actually give a huge longevity and IQ > boost.

Also, maybe exercise! [http://mangans.blogspot.com/2014/07/klotho-increases- both-lo...](http://mangans.blogspot.com/2014/07/klotho-increases-both- longevity-and.html)

\-- just reporting what I've read, I have no idea whether it works / is safe.

<comment><USER2> Great comment.

You can never go wrong with exercise; that´s for sure.

But I wanted to comment in the activated Vitamin D. People with CKD get this form of vitamin D because their kidneys cannot build it (the last hydroxylation step occurs in the kidney). So, in theory, supplementing with regular Vitamin D3 could boost IQ and longevity.

<comment><USER4> Is this a proper excuse for me to enjoy the sun more every day?

<comment><USER2> Sure it is. Not only for this IQ and longevity thing, but for a myriad of health benefits[1]

The sun has made life possible in this planet and our body has evolved to use it for its own benefit.

[1] [http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/](http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you do during your commute? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'll start commuting one hour by train each way this week.
What do you do during your commute by public transport to keep yourself busy or the commute pleasant ? Do you use any specific mobile phone apps ? Preparing reading material for later reading ?
Shoot ! <comment><USER2> 10-20 mins bike ride via bike share - I use Overcast to listen to podcasts at 2x+ speed, shorten silences, and voice boost. Since I'm biking, somehow the speed of bike matches really well.

On Caltrain, I tether my wi-fi. If you're on the fastest bullet, don't bother trying to get internet, it doesn't work. Otherwise, the moderately fast bullet or the regular trains will give you reasonable internet to answer email.

Oh, I also use VLC with a tv show or movie and watch at 1.25-2X speed so that I can watch a whole thing in a fairly short span of time. You'll realize it works pretty well.

Additionally, I swear by Pocket (which also reads articles to you), Voice Dream (which integrates with a bunch of other things and can read to you as well at a fairly fast clip). If I'm reading, I'll also use the Kindle app or potentially have my Kindle with me.

If I'm reading an online article, I've been trying to train myself with Spreed so that I'm reading faster.

I've seen others just play games on their mobile devices or use dating apps - both of which seem to magically make the commute disappear.

<comment><USER3> Now I am stressed from reading this

<comment><USER4> My style is to consume less but more deeply. I wouldn't get anything out from a fastened show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have this habit of saving articles which takes longer than 2 minutes to read to my Pocket(any other reading app for you) and I go through the list while I commute.

Other than that, I like to watch 20-25min TV Shows ( Older ones like Futurama, or Rick and Morty ) if I don't want to read.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm fortunate enough to have a 5 min commute each way (20 min if I walk), however I recommend to approach this like an enormous gift: you suddenly have ten hours every week with no distractions. What do you want to learn but have never had time to? What have you always wanted to do but didn't have time? Write a book? Start a blog? Learn a language? Read all the classic books? Learn to knit?

Think about what you want to accomplish with all that time and then build from there- do you want to use the hour in the morning to get a leg up on your workday? Do you want to use the hour in the evening to relax from work fully so you can jump into chores/hobbies when you get home?

</comment><comment><USER7> I work from home, but I'll still often do a "commute" if the weather is nice.

Here's a recent one, involving a quick six mile mountain bike loop in the hills, with a pause in the middle to fit in a 36 problem bouldering circuit:

[https://www.strava.com/activities/196113578](https://www.strava.com/activities/196113578)

As nice as it is to have that extra couple hours of free time each day to spend with the family, it's still a good plan to fill it up with some time for yourself every once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read books, catch up on news articles if need be, or doze off. Special phone apps? Just a RSS app of your choice.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like to listen to podcasts. Here's my list: Welcome to Nightvale - has to be heard to be understood. It's very strange.

Cat & Cloud - It's a podcast about the specialty coffee world & community

I Brew My Own Coffee - A podcast about coffee brewing, tasting, and lifestyle.

Lore - A Podcast that explores the facts behind scary stories, myths, and stuff.

Radiolab - An awesome podcast that is super cool and rad.

This Developer's Life - Like This American Life but for developers. Stories from around the development community on different topics.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, it is a 40 foot walk from our bedroom to my home office. During my commute I stop to play with our pet parrot for a few minutes and get some coffee.

I used to have long commutes when I lived in California and when I travelled by train or in a van provided by my company I considered the travel time to be work time, bringing whatever materials I needed with me. Listening to music or fun reading seemed like a waste of time. When driving to work I would organize my work day, as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> I picked up a macbook pro in July and I work on my side project about food offline. I optimized my setup so I can startup all the pieces I need with a single iterm script. The backend is all in go, so using godoc with the -http option makes it easy to lookup all the docs in your browser without having to have a internet connection.

When I have to make my connecting train, I just close the laptop and can quickly open it back up when I get to my next seat.

On days where I do not want to program, I use the amazon kindle app with the whisper sync so I can listen to audio books. If I just want to listen to music, I use the free version of Spotify on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER12> I normally work on side projects. In my GitHub repositories I have defined several tasks which can be performed within 5-15 min. I may not get much done on a single day but small tasks add up quickly.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use my laptop to do home projects or writing (eg for InfoQ or books/blog posts). The trick is to be able to partition work and be able to stop and start quickly - plus to use a laptop efficiently you need to be able to get a table seat and a power socket.

If I'm not travelling with my laptop then I will typically read a book or magazine.

You might also find noise cancelling earphones and a supply of music useful if you have noisy fellow commuters, but it's not strictly necessary.

</comment><comment><USER14> One of my commutes involves driving 30 minutes each way. I usually listen to local AM talk radio (Bloomberg or AM 770).

The other commute is a 1.5 - 2 hour trek each way broken into legs. I use my laptop on the safe leg unless crowding prevents it. On the unsafe legs, I read a magazine or book. I was reading the latest issue of 2600 today and will do so for the next commute or two. I listen to music the whole way.

</comment><comment><USER15> I listen to podcasts. Recently got into Welcome to Night Vale, but would also recommend anything by Gimlet.

</comment><comment><USER16> Been listening to audiobooks for the past 7-8 years. My commute by car has been between 30 minutes to an hour each way, but audiobooks have also been great when I'm doing chores at home or exercising. Have gone through tons of fiction and non-fiction that way.

</comment><comment><USER17> Instapaper, to state the obvious example, was developed for this purpose.

Other apps I use: Pocket Casts, Safari To Go, Feedly, Play Newsstand (subscription to New Yorker), Boston Globe (subscription), Amazon Kindle.

One thing to know is that your local library has free ebooks and audiobooks for download.

</comment><comment><USER18> I read books on my kindle (mostly fiction), listen to podcasts or sleep.

</comment><comment><USER19> 20min by car. Audio podcasts (the amp hour / chaos radio via Antenna pod app) or find new bands/songs in the sxsw music archive. Create a todo for the working day, coffee, ...

</comment><comment><USER20> My old train commute was where I did all my reading, subscribed to science fiction magazines. Then my train commute ended and my reading dropped off. Now I do podcasts and audiobooks.

</comment><comment><USER21> I telecommute so it's just a few seconds of walking mostly.

</comment><comment><USER22> My commute is about half an hour door-to-door by bus, an hour walking. When I catch the bus, I read. When I walk I think or daydream, or just look at what's around me.

</comment><comment><USER23> I code or read. Usually a physical book, for the latter.

I specifically take the slightly-slower bus rather than the slightly-faster train so I can reliably get a seat even at busy times.

</comment><comment><USER24> I listen to Howard Stern on SiriusXM (there's a 1 month free trial for the smartphone app). It's my morning indulgence while sitting on the T drinking a coffee.

</comment><comment><USER25> I listen to audiobooks.

</comment><comment><USER26> I just got my laptop out and treated it as part of the working day. And I got the train around 9 to compensate so it didn't turn into a longer day.

</comment><comment><USER27> I usually do some lessons on Duolingo. Quite useful! Apart from that I mostly spend my time reading books.

</comment><comment><USER28> What do you do with an hour at home?

</comment><comment><USER29> If you work on a computer all day in an office you are stuck in past. Do you still use fax machines too?

The Internet has been fast enough to make remote work feasible for at least ten years.

Commuting is a horrendous waste of resources.

</comment><comment><USER30> I drive my car, two hours per day :-/

</comment><comment><USER31> Read HN</comment>


Ask HN: best way to manage communication on a small coding project - <AUTHOR>

me and a couple friends are about to start a project and i want to set up a good way for us to keep one another up to date.<p>i set up a git already but i wanted to know what was out there for project management. thanks! <comment><USER2> The question is, how elaborate you want it to be. And how far the distance is, between your teammates.

If you are able to meet and you "just" need a way, to track status-updates, perhaps updating the readme on git would be enough (if everyone read it).

Or you could use a small and nice project-management-tool like Splendid Bacon (<https://splendidbacon.com/>)

You could use Skype (or anything like that) to discuss things (if you are far away from each other), if you can't meet in person.

Or - if you all have an email-adress with the same domain-name - you could use yammer to chat/discuss, make planing documents, and so forth... (<http://yammer.com/>)

</comment><comment><USER3> We've been using 37 Signals <https://launchpad.37signals.com/signin>, which has worked great and we send emails constantly (saving docs/files with a date for easy reference)

</comment><comment><USER4> Try Yammer, it works great for small teams (I am biased, I am the UX/UI designer at Yammer)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just talk to each other.</comment>