Ask HN: Which headphones should I buy? - <AUTHOR> I have been given around roughly $200 to buy headphones...
The question is, which headphones so I buy?
I'm thinking of beats solo2(White) but I'm really new to these kinds of things. So, a little help needed here, I am a general programmer, and I don't need some specialized headphones or anything, just plain old headphones that are nice and loud, and let me hear music...
So, what do you guys suggest as to which headphones should I buy? <comment><USER3> It's best you go to a more suitable audiophile specific forum for advice. You'll just get a mixed bag of suggestions of "suggesting what I own" responses. This is from the forum I personally use for headphone suggestions. Also, get closed headphones that isolate sound well if it's for a office environment.

[http://headphones.com.au/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6206](http://headphones.com.au/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6206)

The only advice I can give you is try many headphones in person with music your familiar with and like. Shops like to play just the right music that compliments them specific phones. I settled on Brainwavz after testing Sennheiser, Grado, Beats, Audio Technica, Beyer, Koss and Shure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome advice, and, I am still a student, plus, I'm gonna do just that tomorrow morning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're paying largely for the brand with a pair of solo2 - they're fairly low- mid range headphones wrapped in an expensive package. Widely considered a waste of money among audiophiles.

Start looking here for something in your price range, and check reviews surrounding any particular set ([http://www.head-fi.org/a/headphone-buying- guide](http://www.head-fi.org/a/headphone-buying-guide))

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the same thing I thought when I saw those headphones but, I checked them out a little more, and saw that they came with RemoteTalk cables(it's an apple thing) and I don't think any other headphones have that, do they?

And ya, I'm checking out that guide as were speaking...

<comment><USER4> Can't comment on Apple specific technology, but the RemoteTalk seems like just another brand name. It looks like just microphone built into the cable - <USER2> is nothing new - you can get unbranded versions which will work with any headphones that have a detachable cable.

Problem is maybe finding a suitable cable and headphones with detachable cable. A number of those higher quality headphones use 3.5mm male to XLR male cables, and I doubt you'll find one with a microphone. (they all seem to be 3.5mm male to male).

Could just buy a wireless BT mic instead, and get a decent set of headphones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Monoprice 8323's[1] have good reviews[2] for the price. I picked them up and I'm happy with them. I really like the detachable cables and the fact that they provide two cables in the box. I did do some modding to the headband to give more padding, using [3] as a guide. I believe I picked up the headband on amazon for ~10 dollars.

[1] [http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=108&cp_id=10823&cs_id=...](http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=108&cp_id=10823&cs_id=1082302&p_id=8323&seq=1&format=2)

[2] [http://www.engadget.com/products/monoprice/8323/](http://www.engadget.com/products/monoprice/8323/)

[3] [http://www.head-fi.org/t/619640/modding- monoprice-8323-with-...](http://www.head-fi.org/t/619640/modding- monoprice-8323-with-pictures)

</comment><comment><USER6> Quick comment.... If you really like your music, get some kind of headphone amp/usb-connected DAC so that you don't rely on the sound card of your laptop/desktop. Why spend lots of cash when you're using a 30-cent component?

Echoing another comment, closed-ear cans are a must for the office but I think open-ear cans sound better when you can use them. I have Grados but ears are a personal choice thing. There are some excellent in-ear earphones (Etymotics, for example), but these take some getting used to.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll just leave this here

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsxQxS0AdBY&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsxQxS0AdBY&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER8> _I don 't need some specialized headphones or anything, just plain old headphones that are nice and loud, and let me hear music... _

Then a pair of $25 Sennheiser HD 200 series headphones. Cheap, great sound, fairly decent at isolating noise. Why spend $200 if you don't have to?

Alternatively, look at noise cancelling headphones like the Bose series, but try before you buy, some people cannot stand the "pressurized" head feeling of noise cancellation.

</comment><comment><USER9> SteelSeries Siberia V2 Full-Size Gaming Headset [1]

I am wearing those up to 5 hours a day.

\- Fits nicely around me large ears

\- Cable has an extension

\- Audio quality feels better than with any beats I have worn

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-Siberia-Full-Size- Gaming-H...](http://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-Siberia-Full-Size-Gaming- Headset/dp/B003N636VI/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1410346593&sr=1-4&keywords=steelseries)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have the LG Tone Ultra HBS-800 Bluetooth Stereo Headset - Pearl White

Love them. Charges in just over an hour, lasts all day. Connects over bluetooth to my iPhone for music or phone calls or to my laptop for Skype calls / music. Work great when landscaping or cleaning the house or working out. Really, I wear them all the time. Comes in black also.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to charge those headphones?

\- One reason I'd prefer Beats solo2 over these, they don't need no charging...

<comment><USER10> Well, they are bluetooth.

If you haven't already, you should probably get into a routine of charging everything at night. Headphones, smart watch, phone, laptop.

Just the way things are now a days...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you can use in-ear phones and don't need to have any contact with your surroundings during your music, the ER4 from Etymotic Research are by far the best I have ever had...

They dampen the environment so much, that even when I have reasonable lound music, I get surprised about how LOUD the world around me is when I pull out the earphones..

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh... The ER4 sounds nice, but it's a pity they don't sell these in India...

:(

<comment><USER11> They are also not available in my country, but I ordered them online :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You should have a listen to the SoundMAGIC E10, good price good sound. [http://www.amazon.com/SoundMAGIC-Isolating-In-Ear- Earphones-...](http://www.amazon.com/SoundMAGIC-Isolating-In-Ear-Earphones- BlackGunmetal/dp/B005HP3OB0)

<comment><USER12> In my haste I forgot to ask what kind of music you listen to. The soundmagic e10 is bass-heavy and you'll probably have to switch off your eq settings. I use them with my iPod classic (with flat eq setting) and they sound superb. However I found out that there's a bit of interference when I plug them into my MacBook Pro.

I also sometimes use my AKG 451 which aren't as bass heavy as the e10 but also sound really good when listening to Amos Lee for instance.

Bottom line is you should probably take your music player with you and have a listen before purchasing if possible or you'll just have to rely on review sites like WhatHifi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have an Audio Technica ATH-M50 that I'm happy with. It's around the $150 range, sometimes $100 if you find a good sale. Using my iMac, I can never put the volume above 3 notches. It's definitely loud! And comfortable, since it's circumaural.

</comment><comment><USER14> hi-fi: i don't know.

studio/audiophile: [http://www.beyerdynamic.de/shop/hah/headphones-and- headsets/...](http://www.beyerdynamic.de/shop/hah/headphones-and- headsets/studio-and-stage/headphones-for-live-applications/dt-770-pro.html) A little weak in the heights, and no hi-fi (no exaggerated subs). But really good for the money. Also available in half closed. With this clear and neutral sound you will begin to hear youtube compression and bad mixes though :) Also look for the ohms, they need quite some power.

If you prefer a more roomy sound I'd go for studio AKGs, but for a clean sound it might need a little more than your budget here.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just bought the Beyerdynamic Custom Pro One ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDBWrSENTps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDBWrSENTps)) for about $200 and I can't recommend them enough

<comment><USER16> I second the Beyer Custom One Pro's - they are bass cannons and are the best sounding headphone I have purchased (I have many 200 dollar headphones lying around).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I dig my audio-technica. I was happy to see a lot of people at [MHacks](mhacks.org) with them. I got mine for about $150 on sale, just check around the webs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Add $50 and get Bose, around the ear, active noise cancelling ones.

Anything else if either going to hurt your ear or let the noise in or both.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use Sennheiser HD 280 Pro. Really comfortable and at <$100 is probably the best value for money

</comment><comment><USER20> Sony MDRV6 (or MDR7506; both have equivalent parts). You can find a pair in nearly every studio.

</comment><comment><USER21> Audio-Technica ATH-M50 Professional Studio Monitor Headphones for only $169.00

</comment><comment><USER22> Anybody have an opinion on just getting the Bose QC15?

</comment><comment><USER23> Sennheiser HD201</comment>


Latest Chrome Tries to Rid the Web of Misspellings - Digit-Al http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/03/latest-chrome-tries-to-rid-the-web-of-misspellings/

<comment> Digit-Al What I would really like to see in Chrome and Firefox is something that could intelligently fix the spelling and grammar of pages you are viewing. Then I wouldn't have to put up with some of the hideous spelling atrocities that get perpetrated on such a regular basis (lose / loose anyone?) :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's been done: <http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=68>

<comment> Digit-Al Very interesting thanks. It would still be nice to have it built in to the browser. Who's going to pay for a proxy to do it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al What the hell is up with the hideous menu on that site? It pops up on hovering, but then you can't get rid of it.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you tried Project Fi? Do you like it? - <AUTHOR> What do you think of Fi? I've been really enjoying my new phone plan for four reasons: 1) calls via wifi if 4G is not available 2) voicemail transcription 3) 20/month smartphone plan 4) remains connected to wifi (other phones I've found disconnect frequently esp. on unsecured wifi) <comment><USER2> I had two experiences bouncing between Philadelphia and Delaware. In Philadelphia for some reason I got rather slow speeds, usually below 8Mbs. In addition I received a number of remarks about inability to hear me, poor quality etc. Delaware oddly was the opposite 15Mbs down, and no complaints about call quality. I had been a TMobile cusotmer for the past several years, and it's below that but the price was good.

The pay as you go usage was really good. I really only used my data in Delaware. I often ended up about 30$ a month or so. There were a couple of occasions where it would If it weren't for the call quality I would have stayed but...

I had heard some complaints about call reception for Nexus 5X. I didn't get to try it on another carrier. My phone was knocked out of my hand at a bus stop, and the screen cracked. I would say go for it. There are good promotions for the Nexus phones if you need one with project fi activation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like it, too. Reception is really good in my area, and I'm often connected to WiFi anyways.

I was a bit worried that the "pay for actual usage" bit would make me be a bit more frugal about my phone use, but it hasn't turned out that way.</comment>


Did Apple just mistakenly put AirPods "upside down" in the case? - <AUTHOR> https://www.iphonedesign.info/blog/apple-airpods-case-design-flaw <comment><USER2> It looks like a design tradeoff between the ideal orientation and how your hand goes in to pick up an airpod from the case.

Try making a mockup of the case with them rotated, and think about how your hand picks an airpod up. If the stems were on the outside (following the same orientation as it'd be when word), you then have to make your hand go toward the center of the case for each airpod.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the rotation and the way to pick them up are two separate things. With the rotation, I think maybe just 60 degrees rotation, so that the speaker is pointing forward, could make huge difference. It just _feels_ very unnatural now, but I expect Apple has tested this thoroughly.</comment></comment>


Apple: We Won't Make an Exception (Fortnite) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21373108/apple-response-epic-app-store-fortnite-lawsuit <comment><USER2> So now Apple has tied together access to iOS, MacOS, TVOS, WatchOS, and Safari extensions (think those are all covered under the same dev agreement) in a decision over App Store commission on iOS. I suspect terminating the dev agreement might terminate the "publisher account," too--it's possible Epic apps won't even be findable in Purchases.

I realize Epic is hardly a sympathetic company in this to many gamers, and their motives are pure profit and control of their own cash cow platform. That said, Apple is demonstrating about as much bundled-product market control as a company possibly can. They're preventing access to a whole ecosystem over a single product, and they can't even argue their ecosystem is vertical since individual TVOS and iPad devices can run without phones. Sure, Epic isn't _on_ TVOS yet, but they could be...but only if Apple likes what they do on iPhone.

 _IF_ Apple is dominant enough to be subject to Clayton Act controls, this sort of cross-product behavior will most certainly prompt that scrutiny. The fact that the developer program is a "single product" backing them is irrelevant when the consumer products are separate. Epic is making a bold move, but I think it's a very well-timed one.

<comment><USER3> > Apple is demonstrating about as much bundled-product market control

I see this sort of sentiment everywhere. There seems to be a mass delusion occurring. The AppStore is not it's own economic market. It is just one member of many in the actual economic market.

The WalMart down the road from you is not an economic market. It is just a store, one implementation of the entity that is Walmart. But even taking every WalMart together, you do not have an economic market. It is just a store. One store. What economic market is WalMart in? This one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_hypermark...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_hypermarkets&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop)

AppStore is just a store, one of many many implementations of a package management system, with retail sales and free apps. The economic market includes AppStore, Google Play Store, LG SmartWorld, Huawei App Store, Sony Apps, Amazon AppStore, Aptoide, F-Droid, GetJar, AC Market, SlideME, Uptodown Market, Itch.io, Cydia, neXva, Bemodi, AppBrain, 1Mobile, Appolicious, Kongregate, and AppLand collectively all together. And far more than that is included in the actual economic market: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_management_systems)

Apple has many many competitors in both hardware and software. There is no such thing as "the Apple economic market," or "the AppStore economic market."

<comment><USER4> > The AppStore is not it's own economic market. It is just one member of many > in the actual economic market.

Let's be realistic here. Iphone users don't have a choice of app stores, and the useful android options have a high technical barrier to entry. That's not a market, that's an oligopoly.

It's like ISPs that gouge content providers for carriage costs, and then customers for throughput and limits. You can't snap your fingers and make competition appear, so you regulate the players to prevent abuse and protect the consumer.

<comment><USER3> > Let's be realistic here. Iphone users don't have a choice of app stores, and > the useful android options have a high technical barrier to entry. That's > not a market, that's an oligopoly.

Let's be realistic here. FreeBSD users don't have a choice of package managers. It's pretty much PKG or nothing.

So what? Choice does not define an economic market. Competition does. Can't use Apple's AppStore on Android! Google is a monopoly!

These details do not matter. You have a choice. You want iPhone, you're stuck with AppStore. You want Android? You're stuck with PlayStore. You want FreeBSD? You're stuck with PKG. It has always been this way. Linux proper gives a few choices, probably dozens. macOS has the Mac AppStore, but also can use MacPorts, Brew, you can even use pkgsrc if you want. iOS is maintained as a walled garden for security. And, you can still jailbreak it and use Cydia.

Apple is doing nothing wrong, protecting their IP and their walled garden. Don't like it? Go elsewhere. Epic is acting like an infant, and chewing off their own foot while they do it. It is all absolutely absurd. What a waste of resources. At least the lawyers are happy.

<comment><USER5> >FreeBSD users don't have a choice of package managers.

A package manager is NOT the same as a company controlled Marketplace, i can intergrate my own apps, build my own ports, use python-virtenv with pip, Rust with cargo and so on...and the best thing, FreeBSD has no controll over what i have on my computer...and that's good.

<comment><USER3> AppStore is not a speadsheet or a word processor. It is not a graphics editor or text editor. It is a package manager. That is the kind of software it is. AppStore "automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner." That is its type. That it sells things does not change the fact that it is a package manager.

Many are hedging words, confusing a market, where you might purchase bananas and soda, with an economic market, AppStore is strictly not an economic market, i.e. not distinctly "a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange." AppStore is in an economic market, the market of package managers for handheld devices.

You can't force MacPorts to accept your software. The maintainers and regents of MacPorts are pretty reasonable, but if you develop software that locates children for sexual abuse, you're probably not going to be allowed to distribute your software with MacPorts.

In kind, if you violate the terms of Apple's developer agreement, which you must agree to before you can even download their developer tools, Apple has the absolute right to ban you from distributing software in Apple's (it belongs to no one else) AppStore. It is not anti-trust behavior. It is written policy.

<comment><USER5> >AppStore is not a speadsheet or a word processor.

True, it's a marketplace.

>where you might purchase bananas and soda

No, you buy apps (maybe buy banans over the app)

>You can't force MacPorts to accept your software

Thats their projekt and they can accept whatever they want.

>if you violate the terms of Apple's developer agreement

The marketplace owner to be correct ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The more big players Apple pushes off its platform, the weaker the network effects are.

The 30% rule only applying to digital products is arbitrary and capricious.</comment>


R coming to Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/r-coming-to-visual-studio.html <comment><USER2> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898507)</comment>


No one likes an unkempt public area - Open Source guidelines to Cleanliness - <AUTHOR> http://edwardhotchkiss.com/blog/2012/03/19/no-one-likes-an-unkempt-public-area-open-source-guidelines-to-cleanliness/

<comment><USER2> > You have an obligation to release code that is tested. Automated spec is > preferrable. You have an obligation to document your code and build process, > most especially — your contribution and pull request policy

No I don't. Unless I signed a document saying otherwise you should consider yourself damn lucky that you get to access my source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. You don't, unless you'd like other developers to contribute to your project.

You also owe it to yourself. But hey: if you want to post sloppy seconds untested code on GitHub - consider yourself lucky that they let anyone in.

<comment><USER3> I'm honestly not sure if I want other developers to contribute. All of my github repos are personal projects. I have no problem with them being open source (and they are all rather tidy and well tested btw) and no problem at all with patches, pull requests, bug reports and such from other people. But if one took off then suddenly my little baby project becomes a second full time job. Popular open source projects are a lot of work for the maintainers. I'd only want that to happen if it was a project I was particularly passionate about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Open source developers tend to fall into two camps:

1\. I am providing a public service, so I'll do my best to make it simple, complete, accessible, and reliable.

2\. I've invested a lot of my precious time writing this code and am graciously providing it free of charge. Therefore, you should consider yourself lucky that I'm allowing you to use it at all.

In my experience, it's difficult for those in one camp to find common ground with the other. Group 2 tends to flourish in wild frontiers, whereas those in group 1 tend to do better in more established areas.

<comment><AUTHOR> I 100% agree, and per @tomjens3 I see the distinction!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a bit uppity.

Many people are graciously letting people share in stuff that they themselves need to have. It's laughable to obligate the guy throwing the free picnic or donating his used couch to anything and similarly so for given code.</comment>


How our ability to forecast weather has improved - <AUTHOR> http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/01/truth-about-pacific-data-void.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose there are web service APIs to a lot of this data. It would be fun to build some stuff against the raw data. Anyone know of good documentation?

</comment><comment><USER2> Does anyone here work with weather data? I'd love to hear more about the techniques and tools used.</comment>


Important Women in CS Who Aren't Grace Hopper (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://hillelwayne.com/important-women-in-cs/ <comment><USER2> No, Latanya Sweeney has absolutely nothing to do with Differential Privacy. The author seems to have confused her with Cynthia Dwork.

</comment><comment><USER3> I cannot cite 12 men who technically inflenced the history of computer science.

Top of mind, I have Alan Turing, Dennis Richie, Bjarne Sroustrup, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvald.

And yes, for the women, I have the three that the author does not want to hear about.

Maybe it's time to stop being paranoid.

</comment><comment><USER4> Needs more Adele Goldberg.

</comment><comment><USER5> Discussed 5 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304603) (232 points/61 comments)

</comment><comment><USER6> " _Sophie Wilson - Designed the ARM instruction set_ "

This is disingenuous. Sophie Wilson was Roger Wilson and unquestionably a man in the early eighties when that work was done.

<comment><USER7> > Sophie Wilson was Roger Wilson and unquestionably a man in the early > eighties when that work was done.

That someone had not yet gone public with a transgender identity does not support this description.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also missing Éva Tardos, former dean of CS at Cornell who wrote Algorithm Design and did significant research on propagation in social networks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco systems. (for memo)

</comment><comment><USER10> No Ada Lovelace? For shame. Or is this contemporary women? Seems like a major oversight.

> Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 > November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for > her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, > the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had > applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm > intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is widely > regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of computers and one > of the first computer programmers.

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

<comment><USER11> The very first sentance of the post is: "I'm tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace."

<comment><USER10> Well I'm not tired of it. She deserved a bullet point, and so did Grace Hopper. You don't have to exclude potentially the most influential people in the entire field, man _or_ woman, just to prove a point that other women also are majorly changing the world in other ways or disciplines. It's two more bullet points. Come on.

Feels like an excuse for a clickbait headline. The post is good! Good content doesn't always speak loudly enough, unfortunately, so clickbait titles are the metric becoming a target.

<comment> globular-toast The extent of Ada Lovelace's contribution is unclear. There is a strong bias towards embellishing a nice story ("the first programmer was female"). There's evidence that many of "her" programs were actually written by Babbage.

<comment><USER10> I never said she was the first, but I don't disagree. She was still in the room when it happened, and she published her findings. Kind of a big deal for a woman of her time.

> According to what Lovelace's biographer Betty Alexandra Toole, author of > Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science (Strawberry Press, 1998) > explained to OpenMind, "she saw what Babbage did not see: the machine might > work on other things beside numbers, e.g. symbols." For Swade, Lovelace was > "remarkably visionary" and "saw the reach of computers extending beyond > mathematics into life and science." Woolley recalls the fact that Lovelace > noticed how the punch card system of Babbage's machine was similar to that > of the complex looms of the time." When she observed that 'the Analytical > Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers > and leaves', she showed what imagination could reveal that mathematics alone > could not."

[https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/visionaries/ada-l...](https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/visionaries/ada- lovelace-original-and-visionary-but-no-programmer/)

<comment> globular-toast Well she was an extremely privileged woman. Same with Grace Hopper. They both had unique access to one-of-a-kind equipment at the time. So you're really not saying much more than she was in a unique position in history. Being important to computer science and just "being along for the ride" are two different things. The difference with Grace Hopper is that she very clearly made contributions that still affect us to this day. It's not so clear when it comes to Lovelace.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Open Source CRM Died - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-open-source-crm-anyway-dmitry-davydov?forceNoSplash=true <comment><USER2> Your first paragraph tells the reader you just deceived them by using link bait in your title. The last sentence tells me to trust you, to click to read another post which is supposedly about what your original link bait title was about. Just tell me the info next time.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: His freemium CRM 'Bitrix24' is best because others are too complicated/expensive.

This is one of the worst native ads I recently encountered.

edit: and the actual link is: [https://medium.com/@did_78238/what-happened-to- open-source-c...](https://medium.com/@did_78238/what-happened-to-open-source- crm-anyway-8612f564c5f0#.f3j15zv83)</comment>


The "We" Pronoun - <AUTHOR> http://geofflewis.org/2012/06/06/the-we-pronoun/

<comment><USER2> I'm guilty (though I consider it a positive quality) of using "we" when describing both success and failure.

First, I believe it builds trust in the department and not the individual. Conversely, failure is is spread among the team (and its resolution) as well.

Of course, this is important when communicating outwardly, and acts as a firewall from politics and tension. Giving kudos and warnings are still necessary, but, overall, team accomplishments, even via the "we" pronoun alone, are beneficial. (Let's be honest: those involved knew their role and weight)

<comment><USER3> How about decoupling from the companies altogether and just saying "It's doing well," or "it's doing poorly." The portfolio is not performing up to expectations." The company our partnership has invested in is doing well --it's doing well.

Alternatively, although a bit artificial would be to use an exclusive "we" (we, but not including you) or an inclusive we (we and you). English did have a dual pronoun which could be repurposed for that, I suppose, but it would seem forced --maybe more artificial than the artificial use of "we" you have experienced being used by VCs.</comment></comment>


GDrive sucking 2-4% CPU on Macs while idling - <AUTHOR> http://johnmarshall4.tumblr.com/post/21864353801/gdrive-sucks-cpu-on-macs

<comment><USER2> Hearing some fan noise, I immediately checked htop to see if any process is hogging the CPU. Nothing looked alarming, but turning off GDrive lowered CPU usage. I am not sure what the root cause is.

<comment><USER3> Chrome 1.0 on Windows had a similar annoyance - it was pretty fast for a 1.0 browser, but was absolutely not a refined product, using amazing amounts of memory and spiking my processor way too often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Typically around 1.6% on my 2.66 GHz Core i7 MBP.

Definitely annoying, and makes our Macbook Air toting staff much less interested.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's nothing. I wouldn't worry about an app that uses 2.2% of one core while it's idle. It's no big deal.

<comment><USER6> This 'app' is technically more of a background process. 2.2% for a background process is a lot. Considering the fact that there may be up to 100 background processes, if they were all running at 2.2%, that wouldn't leave much CPU for anything else. Furthermore, this application is not doing any heavy number crunching, which begs the question, why is it using 2.2% of a CPU? The average CPU load on my MBP is 1.1%. We are talking about bumping that to 3.3% to do virtually nothing, and I'm already running dropbox. 2.2% seems like a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pausing sync doesn't make it any better, either.</comment>


Tech journalists who make no sense - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2960-tech-journalists-who-make-no-sense

<comment><USER2> I'll give David credit where it's due - Rework is an excellent book, ROR has a great fanbase, and 37Signals products are generally very well executed.

However I find myself paying little attention to anything he says because it's all just so negative. I unfollowed him on Twitter because I just found every single one of his tweets to be criticising someone else or someone else's business. There's only so much negativity you can take from one person. </2¢>

<comment><USER3> I understand the distaste for negativity in general, but if you have a quota on the amount of negativity taken "from one person", then you're judging the person rather than the message. Why not evaluate the argument on its own merits?

I'd like to see less discussion of "David" and "Zed"'s peccadillo on this site. A cult around someone's personality flaws is just as vapid as a cult around someone's personality. The well-worn proverb goes, "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

<comment><USER2> I haven't heard that proverb before, and yes, I can see how you can apply it. I think that maybe this is being overanalysed slightly, I don't mean to apply a quota to anyone. I hardly think this qualifies as a 'cult'.

I just think that overall very little of what DHH has to say is praising or supportive of anything. Yes, that's judging the person, but only after I've judged the messages for the several months I was reading what he had to say. It's mostly things like this - "Forbes isn't exactly known as the pinnacle of journalism, but their latest piece on Salesforce was too much" - I can make my own mind up about Forbes' quality of journalism. He states that as a fact, not an opinion.

<comment><USER4> For what it's worth, I agree with you 100%. That said, you're fighting a losing battle on this one - the majority of HNN readers seem to think that as long as you've written a famous piece of software, it's perfectly reasonable to carry on like a sniping, petulant child. Spewing vitriol and sarcasm is being "visionary" instead of "douchey."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what's awesome? That the journalist makes perfect sense to me. This guy is just apparently not the target audience.

First off, the more data that Salesforce controls, the better they have locked in their customers... Or the more customers they have. I pity anyone who uses Salesforce and decides to leave for greener pastures. It would be a bloody nightmare.

The second clip talks about using social networking to learn more about their customers and increase retention. Not that mystical.

The third throws some buzzwords, sure, but it also warns people that not everything that's called a 'cloud' is actually a 'cloud'. In other words, some services behave like you expect 'cloud' services to (insane uptime and rendundancy) and others don't.

<comment><USER6> I have no idea what "post cloud world" means, but other than that, I agree with your assessment. There's a difference between "your phrasing screams that you are an outsider and you don't have a full understanding of what you are talking about" and "I truly do not comprehend what you mean."

I would be surprised if readers of this site honestly could not translate the buzz-filled marketing speak into what they actually are doing.

<comment><USER7> "I have no idea what "post cloud world" means"

I'll use an example:

Client: "I'll be honest we've been looking at some other cloud solutions and they're a lot more competitive on price"

Salesforce: "Yeah if all you want is a cloud solution. What is their post cloud solution?"

Client: "Oh ... umm they didn't even mention that."

Salesforce: "I bet they don't even have one."

<comment><USER8> I will give you another example

INT. SALESFORCE MARKETING OFFICE

CMO: "we need something new, we have sold 'no software', we have sold 'cloud', we need something to sell to investors to keep this stock buzzing, after all we don't want the company to be valued on fundamentals, like Microsoft"

EVERYBODY IN THE ROOM LAUGHS

CMO: "I have a Forbes reporter coming in tomorrow, I need to give him something"

Marketing VP: "ok, how about 'post-cloud world'. it means that we are doing whatever is next"

CMO: "brilliant! a 'post-cloud world'. ok now who is getting lunch, i'm starving"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a programmer and former technology staff writer at Forbes.

For what it's worth, this guy isn't a tech journo

</comment><comment><USER10> Frank Lingua, president and CEO of Dissembling Associates, is the nation's leading purveyor of buzzwords, catch phrases and clichés for people too busy to speak in plain English. Business Finance contributing editor Dan Danbom interviewed Lingua in his NYC office.

Danbom: Is being a clichée expert a full-time job?

Lingua: Bottom line is I have a full plate 24/7.

Danbom: Is it hard to keep up with the seemingly endless supply of clichés that spew from business?

Lingua: Some days, I don't have the bandwidth. It's like drinking from a fire hydrant.

Danbom: So it's difficult?

Lingua: Harder than nailing Jell-O to the wall.

Danbom: Where do most clichés come from?

Lingua: Stakeholders push the envelope until it's outside the box.

Danbom: How do you track them once they've been coined?

Lingua: It's like herding cats.

Danbom: Can you predict whether a phrase is going to become a cliché?

Lingua: Yes. I skate to where the puck's going to be. Because if you aren't the lead dog, you're not providing a customer-centric proactive solution.

Danbom: Give us a new buzzword that we'll be hearing ad nauseam.

Lingua: "Enronitis" could be a next-generation player.

Danbom: Do people understand your role as a cliché expert?

Lingua: No, they can't get their arms around that. But they aren't incented to.

Danbom: How do people know you're a cliché expert?

Lingua: I walk the walk and talk the talk.

Danbom: Did incomprehensibility come naturally to you?

Lingua: I wasn't wired that way, but it became mission-critical as I strategically focused on my go-forward plan.

Danbom: What did you do to develop this talent?

Lingua: It's not rocket science. It's not brain surgery. When you drill down to the granular level, it's just basic blocking and tackling.

Danbom: How do you know if you're successful in your work?

Lingua: At the end of the day, it's all about robust, world-class language solutions.

Danbom: How do you stay ahead of others in the buzzword industry?

Lingua: Net-net, my value proposition is based on maximizing synergies and being first to market with a leveraged, value-added deliverable. That's the opportunity space on a level playing field.

Danbom: Does everyone in business eventually devolve into the sort of mindless drivel you spout?

Lingua: If you walk like a duck and talk like a duck, you're a duck. They all drink the Kool-Aid.

Danbom: Do you read "Dilbert" in the newspaper?

Lingua: My knowledge base is deselective of fiber media.

Danbom: Does that mean "no"?

Lingua: Negative.

Danbom: DOES THAT MEAN "NO"?

Lingua: Let's take your issues offline.

Danbom: NO, WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE MY "ISSUES" OFFLINE.

Lingua: You have a result-driven mind-set that isn't a strategic fit with my game plan.

Danbom: I am not getting the answers that I need from you.

Lingua: Your call is very important to me.

Danbom: How can you live with yourself?

Lingua: I eat my own dog food. My vision is to monetize scalable supply chains.

Danbom: When are you going to quit this?

Lingua: I may eventually exit the business to pursue other career opportunities.

Danbom: What is your advice to the up and coming generation.

Lingua: Take it and run with it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I completely agree with that blog post. We are currently in the process of bootstrapping a web project <http://bebbl.com> and got some echo from the local media. From all the media coverage we recieved there was only one journalist who was able to write about our project correctly. All other either just copied text from others or were not really able to get the idea right.

I suppose the problem for them, is that they need to produce something really fast and have no time to go deeper into the field.

</comment><comment><USER12> _This concept uses social media to gain knowledge of internal activities and externally about customers to ultimately help increase customer loyalty and foster interaction between employees and between the company and its customers._

Reminds me of psychotic speech patterns.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Beware of false clouds" is my favorite line. It should continue, "They come to you with miracle solutions, but inwardly they just want your money."

<comment><USER14> It's a great line. I was thinking more "Beware of false clouds. Hide your kids. Hide your wife."

<comment><USER15> Out of context I like the rootlessly paranoid feel of the phrase "the false cloud", makes my stomach queasy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've found that you can just keep shoving marketing bullshit through badtranslator[1] until the message becomes clear:

> Salesforce.com remains a stock with much upside, according to analysts at > RBC Capital Markets, as the company continues to control larger quantities > of customer data and leads the way to a post cloud world.

becomes

> Royal Bank of Canada investment of foreign customers, Salesforce.com (NYSE).

[1] <http://www.cheatingtranslators.com/bad-translator>

</comment><comment><USER17> A lot of tech journalism looks like it was written with a markov chain generator.

</comment><comment><USER18> _Irregardless of the synergies we find when enhancing our "web 2.0" ubiquitous utilization, enterprise-quality, shovel-ready progressive monetization schemes, we cannot eschew obfuscation assiduously enough._

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree there is bad reporting and in his example the bad editing that let the story though. I'm interested in hearing where other people find good reporting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "I'm sure all fields have terrible reporting, but the shit that's coming out of the tech world must be eligible for some sort of cake."

</comment><comment><USER20> Kudos for telling it as it is.

</comment><comment><USER21> I choked on my morning tea when I lol'd reading this.!! :-/

</comment><comment><USER22> Add Cringley to the list, who claims (or rather thinks at: [http://www.cringely.com/2011/06/intercontinental- ballistic-a...](http://www.cringely.com/2011/06/intercontinental-ballistic- app-store/)) that Apple's App store will eliminate software piracy.

If only the world was so much simpler :)

<comment><USER23> Cringley might be wrong, or right, but at least he writes intelligibly.</comment></comment>


New Star Trek's Chekov, Anton Yelchin, Dies in Car Accident - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/new-star-treks-chekov-anton-yelchin-dies-in-car-accident/?ftag=COS-05-10-aa0a&linkId=25700302 <comment><USER2> Ugh, what a terrible way to go. I really liked this guy

</comment><comment><USER3> That's absolutely nightmarish. Horrible tragedy.</comment>


The Art of Failing Upward - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/the-art-of-failing-upward.html <comment><USER2> I don't think "hard failure" is limited to minorities. If you have the right connections it's easier to get money. Some people can be born with them or work hard and get into an elite school and get them. or work at a startup and be introduced to people with money.</comment>


Ultrafast wi-fi on horizon – scientists send data at 100x current speeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/08/10/ultrafast-wi-fi-horizon-scientists-send-data-100-times-current/ <comment><USER2> >high-frequency radiation

Am I the only one concerned with this? I mean it's great that they were able to do this, but I would like some comprehensive studies by various institutions and universities to come to a consensus that this wouldn't have any long-term health side effects.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/416066/how-terahertz- wave...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/416066/how-terahertz-waves-tear- apart-dna/)</comment>


Against Debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/09/11/against-debate/ <comment><USER2> Quote: "You'd have to be a mighty poor Christian (or atheist, etc.) to be converted by a particular argument. You don't get turned from an optimist to a pessimist, from a conformist to a radical, or from a democrat to a republican overnight, unless your initial views were pretty thoroughly unexamined."

This isn't true for people who actually know how to think. For a thinker, unlike an ideologue, ideas, not viewpoints, hold ultimate power, and a well- crafted idea can handily demolish a viewpoint. Here's an example debate between two thinkers (about postmodernism):

A: "Reality is subjective, there are no shared truths, everything is a matter of opinion. Objectivity is a persistent myth, but a myth nevertheless."

B: "If your thesis were true, if everything was a matter of opinion, if it wasn't possible to get two or more observers to agree on the meaning of an observation, if objectivity were really a myth, then to be logically consistent that outlook would first be applied to the thesis itself, fatally undermining it."

A: "I have to confess I never thought of that. You win."

That's how people who are trained to think, think. All this talk about people "sticking to their guns" and refusing to be swayed by arguments, only reveals the shallowness of contemporary education, because a well-crafted idea has enormous power -- in the hands of someone who knows how to think.

<comment><AUTHOR> "I have to confess I never thought of that, but it's beside the point." Because real arguments are not about the provable facts, but about their relevance.

<comment><USER2> > "I have to confess I never thought of that, but it's beside the point."

Not in a debate about the existence of objectivity -- nothing can be more relevant or to the point. I chose that example for a reason -- arguing the postmodernist thesis always reflects a fatal misunderstanding of the subject and its effect on debate.

> Because real arguments are not about the provable facts, but about their > relevance.

No, at least to a scientist, real arguments are about empirical facts, not the subjective persuasiveness of facts or their assumed relevance. "Relevance" is certainly a more subjective issue than whether a "fact" actually agrees with reality.

The reason is that relevance must await the gathering of reliable facts and their assembly into a theory. It is only after a theory synthesizes the facts can the facts' relevance even be assessed. The shapes of finches' beaks is completely irrelevant at first sight, but after they're used as evidence for a theory of natural selection, their relevance becomes enormous.

My reason for emphasizing the scientific outlook is because science possesses more potential to craft an objective outlook than any other human endeavor. In science, when done correctly, a given set of observations forces all similarly equipped observers to the same conclusion, regardless of their personal views. This is either less true, or not true at all, in every other human activity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to confess I never thought of that, but it's beside the point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 1800W Balcony Solar/Battery Microgrid that can power your fridge - <AUTHOR> https://sunboxlabs.com/solar-xantrex-kit-apartment/ <comment><USER2> I think the 25 year payback quoted is way off. Those batteries are going to last 25 years? I doubt it. They'll have to be replaced at least a couple of times and that will increase the payback substantially.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I would add that the inverter will not likely last 25 years with a high surge motor like a refrigerator attached to it, for most people anyway. I have not seen any step-start fridges.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! OP here. This was a user-submitted kit – so just calculating as is.

I'm constructing another kit based off this one which optimizes for payback period here [https://sunboxlabs.com/shortest_payback/](https://sunboxlabs.com/shortest_payback/)

But yes the battery payback is a problem. The discussion of the original article [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14821478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14821478) and the follow-up [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425324) predicted this correctly: the original system with an undersized deep cycle lead-acid battery pooped out after a year. The Xantrex system above has way more extra energy storage, so it shouldn't get discharged completely as often (or ever). This should extend the life of the system, though 25 years is a stretch, yes.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever been on a project where the key person was hit by a bus? - <AUTHOR> We talk about the "bus count" all the time, but I haven't heard a first-person account of what <i>actually</i> happens if one of a team's key people dies or rage quits or otherwise is unavailable. Have you ever been a part of such a team? How did it occur and more importantly how did the team bounce back? Did you successfully take over their code or does nobody touch it? <comment><USER2> I haven't, but a friend of mine has. He had a single developer who built the whole product, and had all the code on his laptop (as far as I know, nowhere else) and was in a car accident. Months later he's still in a coma. Killed the project, lots of angry customers and damn near killed the business.

There's ways to mitigate this though, he should have been using source control and someone else should have at least had access.

From the business angle, you can also get "key man" insurance, to provide some financial safety net. I am key to 3 startups, and all of them have key-man insurance against me.

<comment><USER3>
      > should have been using source control and someone else should have at least had access.

I agree. Leaving aside the question of if anyone else understands the code and could safely make changes, it seems incredibly negligent not to use source control and for the company not to have backups in multiple locations that multiple people have access to. Not rocket science.

<comment><USER4> Yep, being dependent on a single person might be unavoidable if you can't afford to hire a backup but not backing up mission critical data is simply incompetence. Doing it at least half way properly does not cost much nor is it difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Worked at a ~50 people agency (non-IT, other field...) where every single decision was okay'ed by the CEO, he had full control of all accounts etc. The guy was a true workaholic and would not hand any tasks or important decisions to anyone else.

He started having various medical issues that lead to him being in the hospital 90% of the time, having surgery almost weekly, for ~12 months. He tried to give out directions and make calls from the hospital bed, but obviously that was not working. The business collapsed to 1/4 the size it was, many people got laid off.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a good example of building a business and focusing on being an operator inside the system versus focusing on designing the system to run autonomously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked in a small team of 6 or so on a web application running in a company data centre, 2 people in the team were doing nearly all the work of implementing deployment automation & rearchitecture to migrate the app into AWS. They both got good job offers from different companies and quit within about a month of each other, shortly before we were scheduled to migrate production.

Fun times! I was happy they'd both found better jobs. Before they left there were lots of knowledge transfer sessions with the team all in a room for a few hours diving through all the layers of all the automation, trying to understand how it fit together, and what the design constraints were.

It could have been much worse: enough lead time to do some knowledge transfer and bring rest of team up to speed, none of the technology involved was proprietary, everything was reasonably standard mix of open source automation approaches + AWS, so plenty of access to documentation or working examples from outside of the project.

In ended up okay in the end but it's still a small bit of data that perhaps you don't want 2 people in the team with specialist knowledge, more than two would be even better.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, and it's the reason I'm still employed with this company.

About 5 years ago, one of the executives wanted to replace our homegrown software with another product. No one really wanted to switch, but she was insistent and said she would take full ownership of the project. Once the product was in place, they would let go of the development team.

So most of the team saw the writing on the wall and left during the implementation of the product. I was also interviewing for new jobs when all of a sudden the executive quit.

We were only 1/4 of the way through and no other person wanted to take responsibility so the project stopped. I then told them I was thinking of leaving, and they made me an amazing offer since I was one of the few remaining members of the team. We actually all got huge raises to stay.

I'm still wary and keep active at networking, but it's been a comfortable day job.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes.

I worked for a small studio that was a part of a big agency. We had two directors - one that sat on the board of the main agency, which was in transition to tech, and a designer that had been relocated. The designer was allegedly a director in name only, due to years of service, but he tried to run everything. Many of the in-house clients went through him, and he led the design work on everything that went through the building.

One Sunday, when I was out with some mates, I got a call from the MD. The designer hadn't turned up on Friday, and we assumed he was ill or that he was busy doing something else. He had died in a car crash on his way into work. The MD was on holiday, and because he was far away he couldn't get a flight back until later on in the week.

That Monday morning was horrific. Most of our PM's were in tears, while I went upstairs with the design team to have a beer. We waited until lunch for one of the London directors to come down, and a few of them spent the week down with us ensuring that everyone could get back to work. To their credit, we were largely functional again within a few days.

Many clients were sympathetic that we had suffered a loss, but I remember being brought into a conference call where one of our PM's was trying to talk to a client. The designer managed a load of smaller clients himself, and one of them had some work that needed deploying that day. The PM asked for a few days to get it ready, and as I walked into the room I heard the client say "I don't give a fuck who died. I want my website live today". We didn't have any of the code, so I had to hack together a FOH website from the HTML we had in a few hours, all while a dozen people were crying downstairs.

We weren't super close, but we had some good chats, and he came across as a good, family man. We bonded over combat sports, because I train BJJ/MMA, and his nephew is an amateur boxer. I don't get too emotional, but I struggled when we all went to his funeral, and I got to meet his family. The main thing I'll take from that experience was watching his kids play in the pub garden, having a fun time with their friends, despite this being the wake for their father.

In terms of bouncing back, the office is no longer operating, but for the months after there was a stronger bond between many of us. Many of us still meet up from time to time, and each year some of us meet up to remember him.

</comment><comment><USER8> No, but my team lead just got married and is on holiday for 2.5 more weeks.

Vacation is a much more common case than death, especially in Europe where 28 days a year is standard.

</comment><comment><USER9> No, but somewhat related, I was at a company that mandated a switch from Java to .net and fired the entire java staff and left only a skeleton crew of java devs. The skeleton crew left and the newly hired .net folks were left holding the bag.

</comment><comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 Reminds me of one weird project as a contractor along with two clueless employees and a project manager who was not producing specs to write code for. He eventually succumbed to the bottle and vanished from view. For some strange reason, his replacement and higher manager blamed me for an inability to pull a rabbit out of a nonexistent hat and for an unwillingness to work for free.

</comment><comment><USER10> Worked on project in a small team, where the lead developer had a heart attack shortly after the project started. I had to step up to take on his role, though he was back in work 3 weeks later. As it was at the start of the project, it didn't suffer any real issues.</comment>


3Blue1Brown Essence of calculus, chapter 1 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMsr9K-rj53DwVRMYO3t5Yr <comment><USER2> I have never seen so many (mainly) positive comments in so short a time on a youtube channel. Many thanks to Grant Sanderson aka 3Blue1Brown (and also Leibniz and Newton). Lets hope probability and multivariable calculus are next.</comment>


How Google Code Search Worked (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html <comment><USER2> And how it might work in the future, semantic code search (submitted 30 mins after this thread):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022357)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would normally go with the first part of the title: Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index but I am interested in seeing if there is interest when the alternate is used.</comment>


My favourite Git commit (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://dhwthompson.com/2019/my-favourite-git-commit <comment><USER2> The author spent all the time documenting his journey but totally fails to explain the actual reason of the problem: If the file contains a UTF-8 byte sequence, why is there an attempt to parse it as US-ASCII? I get that it's just a wrong space, but if some day somebody actually want to put a UTF-8 char there for some reason, this commit essay wouldn't help at all whereas googling stackoverflow seems to deliver (unverified): [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15947425/rake-tasks- fail...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15947425/rake-tasks-fail-with- invalid-byte-sequence-in-us-ascii)

<comment><USER2> Following this thought, it could be argued that the author did not even fix the problem, only eliminated a symptom of the underlying, serious configuration mistake that restricts file contents to an outdated character encoding.

<comment><USER3> I like your approach. And the blogpost's author does not even hint that the story told could mask an underlying issue at all. Which I find mind boggling somehow, but can we call this symptom whack-a-mole and what can be interpreted as anxiety-driven reasoning a cultural issue? Or is there a different, broader context that can wrap this up better that I'm not seeing?

<comment><USER2> The commit message succeeds in justifying the effort but lacks an in-depth understanding of the related mechanics. I can imagine the developer felt bad about 'only' committing a one character change at the end of the day and wrote the message to make up for it. Because of this un-economic outcome, he hesitated to dig deeper.

There is no reason to feel bad.

The cultural issue is bad management that still evaluates developers by lines of code / commit activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm just curious but... did this actually fix anything other than the spec?

The reason I ask is that I find myself (with Rails particularly) spending an awful lot of time on maintaining tests that were written by a much younger and much less experienced developer (me, a few years ago).

And I've come to the slow realisation that a lot of what I was testing wasn't really important.

I'm not saying the author shouldn't have written the spec, or that the spec wasn't valuable. But maybe the true bug here was that rspec matchers don't honour utf-8 spaces and perhaps they should? I dunno. Just thinking out loud here.

<comment><USER5> Getting people to write tests is hard. Getting them to write matchers... it's like you're asking them to fly. Which is a shame because you can avoid so, so much test boilerplate by writing a high quality custom matcher.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by matcher?

<comment><USER7> > "matchers" [...] let you test values in different ways

Example docs for Jest's matchers: [https://jestjs.io/docs/en/using- matchers](https://jestjs.io/docs/en/using-matchers)

Generally speaking, if you use a specific matcher, you get a better (more informative) error message when the test fails.

<comment><USER6> Ah, the common testing functions like `assert_equal`. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Right, and some APIs let you write your own. Getting a custom one to hand out actionable error messages is a bit tricky but quite worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I, too, use git commit messages to document the reasoning behind my changes. But I'm unsure if my colleagues even notice, since they regularly write bad commit messages like "Fix bug" and things like that. Also I regularly find my commit messages got lost, since the reviewer squashed several commits into one.

Do you have any tips for establishing a culture of good commit messages?

<comment><USER9> I usually start with being aggressive about people not squashing commits. I think it's bad form. I also find shame works, as well as blocking merges when reviewing when commit messages provide no value. Could also start a swear jar of sorts, the offender puts a dollar in whenever they push a commit with a useless message... and use the proceeds for charity rather than something that benefits the team.

<comment><USER10> This requires an existing buy-in from the team. How do you establish that buy- in in the first place? I know trying to be a good citizen isn't enough, because the worst offenders simply aren't interested in the revision history.

<comment><USER9> Great question I don't have a solid answer to. Due to my seniority I tend to either be the lead or act as the lead for teams. It is easier for me to reason with the team to buy into these kind of things. The worst offenders will tend to be weeded out over time either by changing their ways or leaving. I don't have much sympathy for them if they can't see how their actions affect others. A team has no place for a rogue agent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827) (domain has changed since the last post)

<comment><USER12> I knew I had seen it earlier and was wondering why I couldn't find it…

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do love the social history of good commit messages, and what they teach us about the process of what we do.

I will offer one nit here, which is that I _always_ start my commit messages with one-line summaries; this makes it really easy to scan commits (and git is tooled to do this!)

<comment><USER14> I don't understand your nit: is it that you don't see a one-line summary (which exists: "Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error") or that you don't feel it correctly summarizes the change?

<comment><USER15> It doesn't summarize the intention of the changes, but it does summarize a bunch of stuff already in front of you when you're looking at a diff...

-

Remove non-ascii character to fix error from `bundle exec rake`

-

That commit message would add external context (what was broken/where the error was coming from) and intent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder: what is the bad character? It's apparently not 0x20, but what is it? How did it get there? What keeps this from happening again to someone else?

<comment> robert-boehnke If I had to guess, the no break space that macOS has on [alt]-[space]: " ".

EDIT: Hmm, that doesn't seem to be it, here's the commit in question [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75...](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75a848e2125008aa1e880c5861cf46#diff-18df4bf9d3ebe0f2e326ef9a94f3146c)

<comment><USER2> It IS the no-break space. The hex UTF-8 representation of it is C2A0; you can find that sequence in original version of the file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's the latest on how long a commit message should be? Used to be everyone said a message should never be longer than two sentences and that they should be as short as possible so that people actually read them. This thing posted is an essay. Not the haikus I thought was considered best practice.

<comment><USER18> I've always just gone with

52 ~line~ [edit: character] summary

Then write a book, just being sure to wrap at 72 chars. Never really considered what an optimal commit message length was.

Maybe it's something along the lines of "if you are playing poker and you can't figure out who the easy money is, the easy money is you." I've never seen a commit message, PR description, etc and thought "well that was excessive," so maybe I'm the one...

This one stood out to me: 157 lines of rationale, discussion of alternatives, etc for 22 lines of uncontroversial changes[1]. It's much more likely to be useful in and of itself as a piece of documentation than a one-liner, "Changes to prevent strcpy" though.

[1]: [https://github.com/git/git/commit/c8af66ab8ad7cd78557f0f9f5e...](https://github.com/git/git/commit/c8af66ab8ad7cd78557f0f9f5ef6a52fd46ee6dd)

<comment><USER19> While I'm perfectly fine with this commit-essay, and would probably be with any other, in _this_ particular case I would also be perfectly fine with a terse "ban strcpy" \+ actually a few more comments in the source code.

Commit messages are not going to serve as a knowledge base for state of the art and best practices, and strcpy is universally recognized as problematic. Plus, about the how, while it is fine to see the dev thought a lot about it, did some testing, etc., the way he did the ban is ultra classic in the end. Also, it might have been even better to put some short explanations in comments instead of in just the commit message, in particular the usefulness of the BANNED macro to preserve some line numbers with gcc. So in this particular case I'm not really convinced that the commit message serves any strong purpose.

But it does not hurt. And it participates to a culture where useful commit messages are important. So I still (weakly) prefer it to my hypothetical "ban strcpy".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Linking to the mpv commit[0] message brought up in the last discussion[1]. It's absolutely hilarious, and a great example of someone rage typing after dealing with an issue.

[0] [https://github.com/mpv- player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...](https://github.com/mpv- player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f027338b0fab0f5078971fbe)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21290517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21290517)

</comment><comment><USER21> My personal favourite commit (as opposed to commit message) [https://chromium.googlesource.com/crashpad/crashpad/+/badfac...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/crashpad/crashpad/+/badfacccee)

(Sadly, the commit message isn't great, but clearly it's worth that hash.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Please do not do this. Long essay style commit messages are not really searchable, have no real way of discussions, do not support formatting, images etc and are hard to even read in many tools. A better way is to create an issue first and attach it to your commit.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is my favorite git commit: [https://android- review.googlesource.com/c/platform/system/bt...](https://android- review.googlesource.com/c/platform/system/bt/+/1241366)

result:

[https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/bt/+/refs/h...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/bt/+/refs/heads/master/gd/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER24> That's just way too verbose though. There should have been a ticket with a description of the problem. Name the branch after the ticket and jira will automatically link the ticket to the commits that fixed it.

I've encountered bad utf-8 when data is copied from excel or outlook.

<comment><USER25> I prefer the engineering details to be in the commit message and not an external issue tracking system. That system might not be accessible 3 or 5 or 10 years later.

<comment><USER24> That is true, and it might not work for Open Source development, but I don't see managers trawling through git commits to see what was done / is in progress.

<comment><USER26> Then find better managers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can someone comment on a best practice whereby the commit might merely refer to the problem ticket (in whatever system), which should have all of the relevant problem histories, and the articulation of the solution? As opposed to all of this documentation in git?

<comment><USER12> If you company has a bug tracker like this internally and you maintain the project "in the open", please don't do this. I'm looking at you, Google and Apple…

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone here try to enforce good commit message practices within their engineering teams?

</comment><comment><USER29> All that text and it doesn't mention that the offending character is a U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE with UTF-8 bytes C2 A0.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tl;Dr: Sometimes, Why is more important than What.

<comment><USER31> +1 that Why matters most.

My teammate recently wrote a blog post on how we document Why in git commits and PR descriptions.

[https://medium.com/better-programming/daily-habits-to- turn-y...](https://medium.com/better-programming/daily-habits-to-turn-your- git-history-into-valuable-documentation-15113e1bf312)

Would also recommend checking out a related talk by a tech lead at StitchFix: [https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2018-documentation- trade...](https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2018-documentation-tradeoffs- and-why-good-commits-matter)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's not only about the fact that the commit message for a one char change is about a page long. It's about that all the information in that page long commit message is a useful information

<comment><USER15> Strongly disagree.

There is so much superfluous cruft in the message.

Listing the error, and the fix, would give exactly as much context for the next person to run into this issue.

If your goal to explain the process to find similar cases, just a couple more lines would have done just as well:

-

Fixes case where `bundle exec rake` would fail with error message:

ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

This is caused by the presence of non-ASCII characters in files.

The following command was used to find files with non-ASCII characters:

`find modules -type f -exec file --mime {} \\+ | grep utf`

Running `iconv -f UTF8 -t US-ASCII` on listed files will show the exact location of offending characters.

-

No long winded exposition, no extremely case specific program output (including current machine's name...)

I'm not saying this is the worst commit message ever, and I'd appreciate the intention if I came across it, but if you're caring enough to give this much context, you can save both yourself, and the next person to look for your message, some cognitive load by sticking to what's needed.

-

And if you're wondering how to decide "what is needed", it varies, but I think a good rule of thumb is: ask yourself how one would find this commit message

What would someone grep for in git's history if they came across this? And if they found it, what information answers their query?

They're likely to search the command that is failing, and the error.

The answer to that query is, what causes the command to error out, and how to find cases of that cause.

They're not going to search for the program output of find, or iconv, not going to search for the exact file you were modifying when this happened, or the fixes you tried that didn't work.

<comment><USER32> I disagree.

I mean, you're right, but I don't think that's time well spent. This is a commit message, not a blog post. Writing concisely is hard and time consuming.

This was probably written in stream-of-consciousness fashion which strikes a nice balance between time invested and possible future usefulness (if any). I mean, the commit might be useful in the future, but there's also a reasonable chance that nobody except the reviewer of the PR is ever going to read that commit message. (If the OP hadn't blogged about it)

<comment><USER15> How is writing concisely more time consuming than this long winded stream of consciousness with multiple quoted command outputs and explanations of non- fixes?

If I come across an error and it takes two commands to fix it, my immediate intuition is a commit message with... the error and the two commands. And that's extremely quick to write...

It's definitely not "let me write a detailed account of the last hour of my life"... that immediately feels like it will take much longer

Also to be clear, the rule of thumb I mention is not about "what should you think about, then write down"

It's a filter on what you were already about to invest effort in writing down.

If you feel like an even shorter message is good enough, that's great.

Just realize sometimes less is more...

<comment><USER33> It's the exact opposite of "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand". This is "This was hard to debug, so let me make it easy to understand and give you (or future me) the hard-won information I just discovered so that you don't have to go through what I did".

If the information took you a great deal of effort to get, that suggests it may be valuable to share. That may not be the right time to attempt to cut out some of that information for brevity, especially if you don't know what the future reader of the message might need to know.

<comment><USER15> What information in the concise version I gave is missing, that causes you to go through additional effort?

I think you edited this in after my reply:

> If the information took you a great deal of effort to get, that suggests it > may be valuable to share.

I think this is the core of where we disagree. I often spend insane amounts of time debugging something, only to find the solution was quite simple and unrelated to what I tried.

Often the amount of time you spent debugging is because the search space for your solution was unbounded, not because each step you took was particularly relevant to the actual solution.

To me a commit message should be able hopefully narrowing that search space, not documenting the original unbounded one.

<comment><USER33> I'm not suggesting that the version you gave would be a problem in practice; I'm also not suggesting that the commit message in the article is the best possible commit message for that change. I'm suggesting that after a long debugging adventure, I'd prefer to err on the side of including any information that feels hard-won, rather than trying to make the message as concise as possible at the _possible_ expense of missing an important detail.

I've read many commit messages with too _little_ detail, and zero with too _much_ detail. (I have read code with too many comments, but it's rare; I've never once read a commit message that made me think "too much detail".) I'm sure it's possible, but on balance I prefer to cultivate instincts of "document anything that was hard to learn" and "in the moment, prefer to over- document rather than under-document".

<comment><USER15> Isn't this exactly what I said in my original comment...

I appreciate the intention and wouldn't complain, it's just if you care enough to write so much, save yourself sometime and the next person to read it some effort by being a little more concise.

Commit messages are like naming things, there's no right way, but the more you try to do it "right" the more "right" you get.

If you just throw your hands up and say "I'm goin to vomit our every thought I had working on this", sure it won't kill anyone and it's preferable to always writing _nothing_ (that's kind of obvious...), but you'll never get to the point where writing even somewhat balanced messages is comfortable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Paraphrasing the first comment of the commit[1]:

A commit message with such a long explanation helps nobody, because it is not searchable by Google, not even by GitHub[2]. [...] If the commit message requires a blog post to be good (searchable) – it is a poor commit message.

[1]: [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75...](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75a848e2125008aa1e880c5861cf46#commitcomment-35571322)

[2]: [https://github.com/search?q=invalid+byte+sequence+in+US- ASCI...](https://github.com/search?q=invalid+byte+sequence+in+US- ASCII&type=Commits)

<comment><USER34> I must say our private git repos are a treasure trove of information, not using git for help is immensely stupid. In the same say it's sad that Jira and all do not help you find commit messages in a better way.</comment></comment>


Entreprenurial Negotiating Tactics - <AUTHOR> http://www.infochachkie.com/kiss-of-death/

<comment><USER2> It's mostly a great post, but the author's first suggestion -- never let the other side draft the contract -- is a good way to kill a big-company deal in its cradle. For reasons good and bad, big companies often insist on using their paper. If you force their contract negotiators to concede on that point, in their minds they already don't like you, and they may be less willing to concede substantive points that you want far more.

I used to be the general counsel for a medium-sized publicly-traded software vendor. Before I would even look at a customer's software license agreement form, I had the sales people arrange a five-minute phone call between me and the customer's contracting people. I was usually able to sell the other side on using our form (because our form was extremely customer-friendly). Even when we wound up using the customer's form, though, that first phone call helped establish a positive working relationship, which softened the blow when I sent the customer a redline of their form.

(Not to try to divert attention, but I did an [http://www.drafterschoice.com/2008/11/how-to-kill-a-big- comp...](http://www.drafterschoice.com/2008/11/how-to-kill-a-big-company-deal- in-the-cradle-insist-on-using-your-contract-form/) of the above comments at [http://www.drafterschoice.com/2008/11/how-to-kill-a-big- comp...](http://www.drafterschoice.com/2008/11/how-to-kill-a-big-company-deal- in-the-cradle-insist-on-using-your-contract-form/))

</comment><comment><USER3> These are more "contractual provisions", rather than negotiating tactics.

However, lots of good advice here, including some that involves little company / big company negotiating tactics.

</comment><comment><USER4> Agreed - I wish I had read this a couple years ago...I am going to send this to my old boss!

</comment><comment><USER5> Very nice post! This applies to real world startups too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nice post - lots of good suggestions here.</comment>


When Patton Rolled Tanks Over Veterans in Washington D.C - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/war-is-boring/when-patton-rolled-tanks-over-veterans-in-washington-d-c-329d9c48044c?mc_cid=3e78746f6a&mc_eid=2f9e0e1f76

<comment><USER2> We still treat veterans terribly. Remember that when your sons and daughters think about joining the military. [Served 6 years in the Navy, no personal veteran issues.]

<comment><USER3> Agreed. 4 years in the Army here. As my children get closer to recruiting age, I will be increasingly vocal in my opposition.

Edit: this strikes me as terrible headline considering (then Major) Patton plays only a small part in the article...commanding six tanks that demolished the illegally-constructed housing, not individuals. Douglas MacArthur was the bigger problem:

 _" The veterans fled across the Anacostia River, and [President] Hoover ordered the assault to stop. But MacArthur saw the protesters as communist agitators intent on overthrowing the U.S. government, and continued the operation."_</comment></comment>