Programming is boring - <AUTHOR> http://dividebyze.ro/2016/11/04/programming-is-boring.html <comment><USER3> I'm 34 years old and have been programming since I was 14. I loved it from day one. I still love it. Even after tens of thousands of hours, two CS degrees, and hundreds of projects, I still am still amazed that I get to get up every day, go to my office in the basement, and can literally type into existence complex systems. I love it. I love the problem solving and making stuff work. I get frustrated with people from time to time, but on balance I want to continue to be a programmer as long as I live.

<comment><USER4> I'm the exact same way I'm still very new in my career - I often hear co- workers say "The last thing I want to see/do when I go home is a computer"

I'm the exact opposite of that. I work full time as a programmer - go home - do more things on the computer or work on tech related things. Maybe since I'm younger I feel this way, but I ~really~ don't think like my mind will change.

<comment><USER5> I'm the same way. I wouldn't want to go home and do what I do at work, but I love programming things that I choose to program.

<comment><USER6> "I wouldn't want to go home and do what I do at work, but I love programming things that I choose to program."

This statement here is what has kept me a good distance away from developer positions. I love to come up with programs, study them generally, and even /potentially/ develop a new branch of mathematics with which to frame my ideas BUT I can't bring myself to write code for cash (unless the program is something I came up with personally and just happens to be worth something to someone else.. but even then I dislike the added stress of selling a hobby project).

tl;dr: I like to program BUT my consideration of having fun doesn't involve production-ready code. (In fact, I'm not sure what would make code production- ready [cleansing user inputs(?)], so perhaps it already is.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What _is_ boring is having to spend eight hours a day among people who think that programming is boring.

<comment><USER8> Hackernews fetishes articles from managerial programmer types who have come down from the mountain of business mediocrity to tell all people with creativity and passion that it's getting in their way.

<comment><USER7> From my experience, managerial types in general seem to not think much at all about whether programming is boring or not. They usually concern themselves with other things. But those who do, and, worse yet, find programming exciting - those are the ones that tend to wreak havok and end up inflicting the biggest damage.

<comment><USER9> What sort of damage is that ? I'm of just the opposite opinion. There's people who like to talk about programs, and there's people who like to program. Those who like to talk about it ... well this somehow seems to be appreciated by everyone but they never accomplish anything.

The thing is, I've seen people who love programming learn how to get the talking part down. I've never seen one who seem to enjoy the talking more fix the inability of meetings to achieve anything. Everybody is always convinced meetings fix things, but they never do.

The people who love meetings really seem to hate people who just want to actually do things though. I even think I know why. Actually doing something real, like creating a working program, kills what the organization, the team is doing, for the very simple reason that it's now done. And clients respond to that: either take what is actually there and working or talk about it some more ... well they'll take the working thing every time, after all, that's why they're clients. So for the meeting maniacs this sucks : no more talking about it. No more talking about the need for more people to achieve things. No more getting promoted or getting more reports. No more having meetings about the need for more meetings. No more publishing internal memos about the need for a new standard for publishing meeting standards within the organization (no joke: there is an actual file shared with everyone in my company that's exactly that).

The thing is, it's the life cycle of organizations. When an organization comes into being, there are few meetings, and only when truly necessary. People just go off and do things and little regard is placed into communication ... because doing anything other than actually programming/working would kill the business. Then they get bigger, and bigger and bigger. Not because, but despite the meetings, and at this point there come ever more and more and yet again more meetings. And then meeting paralysis finally kills the business. Nobody is able to achieve anything, why ? Because the meeting folks have convinced management to block people doing things without agreement from, by this point, thousands of other employees. Everything the business does becomes a disappointment, first just internally, then it becomes visible to clients, then someone successfully actually does what this company needs to do, and clients leave in droves. And what does the meeting-infested company do ?

They have endless meetings on what could possibly be wrong. Ironically, this is used as an argument to prevent engineers from doing anything because they'll just make it worse !

I once heard a joke that being a lawyer is a sweet gig: the more lawyers there are, and the more they work, the more lawyers are needed to deal with the problems created. Meetings truly are like that.

<comment><USER7> Looks like you did an excellent job answering your own, now almost rhetorical, question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is something I've thought about quite a few times. It's almost counter- intuitive. The community that we surround ourselves in keeps telling us how exciting XYZ technology is. But at the end of the day it comes down to reading documentation/man pages, and trying to implement something that you're trying to get up and running. I ascribe this feeling of boredom that I get partially to my perfectionism. But a lot of the times, it's just...why? Frankly, I'd rather just enjoy life. Programming is great. Latest technology in language XYZ or framework ABC is fantastic. But there's more to life than that.

Sorry for rambling. Just got home and it's 1am here :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Programming is beautiful!

I'm writing an authorization expression parser that generates a Validation applicative functor (whose errors form a semi-group, so cool!). The users will only notice that the error messages when they fail authorization will be descriptive of what they're missing. The developers love it because they get a rich, descriptive language. And it makes me happy because it's actually not a lot of code.

If I had written it the boring way there would probably be more code, be less useful, and I would've tried to find some way to punt the work onto someone else.

Beautiful code is not just a way to check of your *-ility's. It's also inspirational. And being inspired leads to creative solutions which amplify the value you can generate. Sometimes the boring solutions lead to byzantine, institutional code whose intent, purpose, and function remains a mystery.

For me clarity and utility stem not from documentation and mountains of tests. It comes from being succinct, clear, and precise. At least the author and I agree on one point: simplicity is key.

<comment><USER12> > I'm writing an authorization expression parser that generates a Validation > applicative functor (whose errors form a semi-group, so cool!).

It's either the successful result or a list of errors. That's what you're describing here. Boom -- boringified.

<comment><USER13> Well, if you do that with the right interface, a "successful result or a list of errors" is a "Validation applicative functor (whose errors form a semi- group)".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This times a thousand.

I love programming but I want it to be boring. Boring means no stress, attainable deadlines, repeat ability, the ability to walk away, and the ability to tell these 10-hours-a-day hacks to fuck off. Boring means 5-nines reliability without a devops team because the design was simple, elegant, and most importantly worked. Boring means you're able to get it right the first time. Boring means being able to have a life, with other passions or hobbies completely unrelated to programming or code or geeks, which frankly everybody needs because we nerds are an unbearable bunch.

I want to slap all these Show-HN innovation fetishists that reinvent the same thing over and over again. They make life worse for everyone.

<comment><USER15> You just described the fixed mindset to a T. [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck- mindset...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/)

<comment><USER14> How?

I've seen this chart and it has very little to do with what is described above. My point isn't that people should reject challenges, or to push back unnecessarily when confronted with pressure, or resist deadlines. The point is that you optimize your environment, methodology, tool usage, workflow, designs for simplicity, and that when you've done so it grants a level of control and predictability over one's work that it would appear you guys think is unattainable.

The above mindset embraces challenges by controlling for their parameters, and when confronted with a challenge too large you break it up until the pieces are something that one can assert control over. If that's still too much then you start shaving off requirements, and if that's still too much then yes, you might have to dive in and power through it. But that's where the boring mentality saves you: "diving in" and "powering through it" become more like a light swim than a sprint or marathon. Plus, when the code is simple and predictable its very easy to make estimates and then you can give yourself a larger deadline than you need.

Obstacles are confronted and plowed through -- but again this is not as difficult because the system is simple enough that most of it can be held in one person's head. When that fails, though, a little bit of creativity can get one out of a bind.

Effort... well you got me there. Less work is always better. Smart work, not hard work. If you are working hard, step back and think for a minute, because you are doing it wrong and you should probably optimize. There are very few scenarios for which this rule doesn't apply.

I don't see how my assertions have anything to do with feedback and criticism, other than to say that there is not as much in the bugs department because the boring system generally works. How one handles feedback has little to do with the other components.

It should also be noted that my mentality DOES involve a lot of questioning management, but that is because management desperately needs questioning. When a cabal of socializers and non-technical soft-power types try to run a technology-centered business, they require a lot of course correction so that development can continue unhindered and not get distracted with silly little initiatives (or whatever the third-party enterprise sales hacks walked through the door with this week)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Programming is boring after five years of CRUD/"business"/"enterprise" apps. Unfortunately they make up the majority of the jobs out there but making the effort to get a more interesting job is worth it.

<comment><USER17> I love building CRUD apps! I guess I'm fascinated by learning different business models and mapping them to code.

<comment><USER18> I'd love to hear more about your workflow! It sounds like you've been able to take a thing people consider tedious, and find joy in it.

<comment><USER17> It's nothing special - I'm just genuinely interested in learning about other people's problems. Every organisation has some pain points that can be solved with a CRUD app, and I love discovering them.

I know my tools very well, keep up to date with trends, and I'm constantly grateful at how lucky I've been. I'm a very mediocre developer, but I'm fantastically well paid for a job that really isn't very difficult.

FWIW - I use Symfony (especially the form bundle), Behat, and nginx. At some point, I want to start building Angular front ends as well. I try to be Agile by delivering early and often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "and making sure your solution is easy to maintain and nurture in the future"

...this is why programming is boring

there's nothing actually more exciting then building out a whole idea and being like "didn't exist, now it exists and i built it."

making it maintainable is a thing, but it's separate from that initial excitement. i never go "man i can't wait to make this thing maintainable and write a bunch of tests and shit omg"

i approach programming as more of a way to make cool art. so idk i might be different from most programmers.

he's got some good points though.

<comment><USER20> Writing something new and cool gets me out of bed in the morning. Writing tests for my code lets me sleep peacefully at night. Can't have one without the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> People who say programming is boring belong to one or more of the following groups

\- people who haven't explored the concept enough, which may be a symptom of a larger issue possibly and most likely the one below

\- people who are just in for the money and are trying to convince themselves otherwise

\- people who don't know how to use atomic concepts to make more interesting concepts because they lack creativity and imagination (whatever these terms in comp sci domain)

<comment><USER22> I'm learning an instrument over last few years. To be honest it's super boring to practice the same notes over and over again. Then again all the skills I learned I learned through boring repetitions.

So if someone tells me programming is boring I'll just nod. It takes too many repetitions to finally start to appreciate something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would like to propose that we all investigate how we can be more scientific about our programming.

I imagine we can create artificial scenarios wherein we subject our code to rigged experiments. These experiments can serve to isolate parts of our codebases, pushing known values as inputs to the part and then inspecting the output for what we expect are correct values. We can posit theories about how our code should work, and then test those theories with experiments.

I envision a few benefits to these experiments:

1) isolating our modules to make experimenting easy may help to reduce the complexity of our programs.

2) overall 'correctness', whatever we define that to be, can continue to be verified over time as our programs change and grow as long as we update the expected values in our experiments at the same time or create additional experiments as needed.

3) the experiments themselves will serve as a kind of documentation of the codebase because they will show the code in action in fine detail.

What does everyone think of my idea? I know it sounds like an odd proposition, but science seems to work good in other disciplines. Maybe we can try it in ours?

<comment><USER24> You heard it here folks! HN just invented formal methods of verification and fizz testing! ;)

(But seriously, I do both of these to test/verify the distributed systems on which I work -- both are great ideas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Programming might be boring. Engineering is not.

</comment><comment><USER26> Truth but unlike other professions, throughout the rise of the internet, github, what-have-you, we, programmers have been able to counter the boringness and move to other opportunities in the industry.

For example, someone who wrote test hardware code in embedded C, can move towards full software iOS development which is at two ends of the tech industry. The opportunity produces excitement and the further attainment of knowledge.

On the other side of the spectrum, a pilot who flies a Boeing 777 will not be able to easily switch to flying an Airbus 330.

Simply said, programming is boring, if you make it so.

<comment><USER27> > On the other side of the spectrum, a pilot who flies a Boeing 777 will not > be able to easily switch to flying an Airbus 330.

This sounds super dubious, I feel like you fell down on this analogy. I mean, they probably have some different controls and systems, but you can probably just run co-pilot for a few flights to get acquainted and then be good to go (leaving out the fact that most commercial planes essentially fly themselves for most of the trip these days anyhow)

<comment><USER26> Ah yes. To be honest, both examples I used are real life examples. My brother happens to be a 777 pilot. He tells me it's not really feasible for him to transfer to an Airbus. He can see himself flying another Boeing, but both would take years+ of training.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The part I like the most is refactoring -- once the problem is solved, the requirements are all completely defined -- going back and making it as clean and organized as possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> All of the stuff that comes before, after and in-between the programming part is what's exciting imo. The idea phase is exciting. The planning phase is exciting. The thrill of seeing users use what you have programmed is exciting. Being able to iterate upon user feedback is exciting. Watching something that you programmed grow into a useful and productive app is exiting.

I would be bored to death if my days only involved programming.

</comment><comment><USER6> "You don't create "possible problems" of the future, you don't pigeonhole the solution in to some tool you fancy learning and working with; that's called over-engineering -- ..and keep it simple. That's what being professional means."

The author goes as far as making an analogy between doctor:chest-pain as programmer:program-features to argue the dangers of acting unprofessional but I'd argue that always acting professional can lead to insufficient solutions in the long run.

Creating "possible problems of the future" is often what keeps me on track in the present. Often times I will finish developing a feature prior to fully writing its foundation so as to see how the feature might influence the foundation. It seems a bit ironic but I'd claim over-engineering is what keeps a code-base flexible to change.

But perhaps the type of development I enjoy is unprofessional. It would make sense in explaining why I haven't made a dime on my code.

</comment><comment><USER30> This article is wrong. It assumes that priorities are the same for all programming.

When programming you should be programming to a set of priorities i.e.:

software performance/speed

maintainability

security

reliability

conformance to organisational statndards

conformance to testing requirements

time to market

compatibility

research/problem solving

prototyping

probably more...

The priorities of your project dictate your approach.

This guy says one size fits all.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great! Since programming is so boring all that's left is to start understanding system administration concepts as well and making things easier for your ops team. Right? Right????????

</comment><comment><USER32> It has a flamebait title, jumps straight into false dichotomies and straw man arguments, and is talking about something that's obviously personal opinion. Looks like a troll, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER33> When I got married, as part of our pre-marital counseling, we had to take a personality test. One question I got rated as a "2" (on a scale of 1-5), but I couldn't figure out what the question meant.

Turns out that in our world, it's product lifecycle. 1 is initial conception, 2 is prototype, 3 is rollout, 4 is major enhancement, and 5 is maintenance. My _personality_ is that I find maintenance boring.

But that isn't necessarily true of all programmers...

</comment><comment><USER34> You can always give yourself challenges. See that famous kragen bootstrapping marathon: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/c0ewj2c/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Nope, in the way I encounter people it is: "Programming boils down to: understanding the problem, solving the problem, and making sure you are getting paid." which is quite far from "making sure your solution is easy to maintain and nurture in the future." because the future usually is not there.

</comment><comment><USER36> If programming is boring, then you haven't abstracted enough things away or haven't automated enough things. Things become boring if you are doing the same thing over and over and if you are repeating yourself, then you are doing it wrong. Most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have been programming digital computers for four decades and I still find them magical. A machine does things at your command while being composed of simple understandable parts -- programming is magic that works! How can that possibly be boring?

</comment><comment><USER38> Since I was a child I thought that programming could be the amazing tool to create something that should be a breakthrough and would make me rich. I am still struggling to find that magical key, so I am not bored at all!

</comment><comment><USER39> Writing something that is neat and and understandable is not boring.

It can be challenging and frustrating to get to that point, but it is pleasing once it is done.

Of course, that moment doesn't last for long at all before ascending the next hill.

</comment><comment><USER40> omg I work with a dude now who is brilliant, prolific and super-efficient - <USER2> successfully rolls out twice the number of features the next best person does, but he leaves behind 0 comments ("code documents itself"), 0 unit tests ("unit tests are for rookies who are unsure about their code") and 0 documentation. How? How to get across the point that he's forcing all of us into the dead end when it comes to team scaling?

</comment><comment><USER41> The boring stuff should be automated away, leaving only the fun parts.

I try to make the compiler do the boring stuff.

</comment><comment><USER42> Entertainment is subjective you fucking dweeb. Just say "I don't like programming, it's not for me" if you feel that way.

<comment><USER43> If you read TFA the author wasn't talking about programming being entertaining, he was talking about how the process should be consistent & unsurprising. A silly comparison, but not about what he finds exciting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Programming is boring when you're solving mundane problems, when everything you need is already written in a nice library or package for you to put together like a 24 piece jigsaw puzzle.

Get yourself an arduino, maybe esp8266, now program it to do something exciting.

Another suggestion, an occasional after work punjabi sword fight might do the trick

<comment><USER45> Jigsaw puzzles are not boring, nor is mundane programming IMO. Challenging stuff is super fun of course but there is something satisfying and meditative about just doing a really meticulous job even if you are doing routine stuff. Just me?

<comment><USER46> Sorta not really, I get where you're going with it, but for me it's finishing the feature and getting it to work properly. This can involve wiring up some stuff for CRUD operations. But hey it works well and someone appreciates it, therefore I enjoy doing it.

Meticulous to me is when I have to pour over some very badly written code, carefully stepping over all the frayed knots and ducking under wires, trying to make that one fix without introducing another bug. Hoping to leave behind my little corner of the room in a slightly better state than I found it. It's a thankless job and always takes longer than expected. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Programming is fascinating and endlessly fun.

<comment><USER48> And addicting ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Most of the comments are completely missing the point of the article. I thought it was pretty self explanatory. He's talking about the part where you write code.

I don't get pleasure from writing code. It is actually kinda boring...you've (mostly) already figured out what you're going to do and you're just typing. Most of the time you're fighting against the limitations of whatever programming environment/language/framework you may be using. It's more boring the more familiar I'm with the problem I'm working on.

I get excited when I finish and I see the actual impact of people actually using something I created. Or when I'm in the problem solving mode and I'm learning something new.

That's why I enjoy being a software engineer, not because I spend all day typing on a keyboard.</comment>


German Engineering Yields New Warship That Isn't Fit for Sea - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/german-engineering-yields-new-warship-that-isnt-fit-for-sea-1515753000 <comment><AUTHOR> For those without a WSJ account: [http://archive.is/PZ4YB](http://archive.is/PZ4YB)</comment>


When Nintendo got rid of the headphone jack - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/no-headphone-jack-nintendo-did-it-first/ <comment><USER2> Bandai did the same with the Wonderswan devices, which competed against the Game Boy Color and Advance. The device was only released in Japan around '98 - '01.

And so now, if you want to use headphones with it (and you do; as not only do you get stereo instead of monaural sound; you get an extra channel of audio so you'll be missing certain sound effects in some games without them!), you get to buy one of these pricey ($60-80) adapters for it, plus shipping fees from Japan: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/361198122142](http://www.ebay.com/itm/361198122142)

Of course, if you really want to see the fun of removing standardized ports, look no further than the Gamecube's component cables, which sell for a cool $250+ today: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/131939975870](http://www.ebay.com/itm/131939975870)

So, yeah. I'm strongly in favor of industry standard ports, even if it adds a few pennies onto the cost or a few mm onto the device size.

<comment><USER3> The Gamecube example is interesting.

From the Wikipedia page:

> _The only cables that can output a 480p signal from the GameCube are the > official Nintendo-brand YPBPR component cables, available in both RCA[note > 1] and D-Terminal[note 2] variations. These cables are equipped with a > unique digital-to-analog converter developed by Nintendo which has not been > reproduced by any third party company._

So the adapter is proprietary and I'd imagine wasn't exactly manufactured in huge numbers back then, which attracts such a high price.

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

<comment><USER2> The real irony is that component is an analog standard; yet Nintendo chose to output it over their digital port by using a custom DAC. And yet they never released any true digital cable (eg HDMI) for said port.

Although the image quality is said to be slightly worse; at this point your best bet is to buy one of the older, backward-compatible Wiis to get component output. Much cheaper.

<comment><USER4> I might have my timelines confused a bit, but I could swear HDMI was not mass- adopted back when the Gamecube was out... I think DVI was the main digital video standard back then.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but HDMI is compatible with DVI so if they had output it conversion would be a trivial dongle. I think the point they're making is that they had digital output but didn't take advantage of it. But the digital out they had at the time was probably a standard they thought was going to be the winner or long term so I don't know if I'd knock them for not knowing what is obvious with hindsight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember this as well (I still have mine in fact!).

However, I didn't really care that much considering _how much better_ the Game Boy Advance SP was than all the previous Game Boys.

It was the first Game Boy to have a backlit screen, which meant I could finally easily sneak and play on it in the night without alerting my parents (instead of trying to do the same with the much less effective wormlight accessory I had for my Game Boy Advance).

The D-pad was _far_ more comfortable to use over long periods compared with the ones on previous Game Boys. I distinctly remember having my left thumb hurt after playing for a few hours on my Game Boy Advance, since the D-pad on that one makes you feel like you have to press down a lot harder than the one on the Game Boy Advance SP.

And the biggest point: _it was the first Game Boy to include a rechargeable battery!_ This was huge, since people really didn't buy rechargeable batteries nearly as much back then as they do now, so you'd pretty much be either wasting two alkaline batteries per day or two, or staying tethered to a wall by using the included AC adapter. That was a pretty annoying option too, especially when the power in your home died right before you could get to a save point…

When I got one, I essentially stopped playing GBA games on my Game Boy Advance, since playing them on my Game Boy Advance SP was a far more enjoyable experience (so much so that I didn't really lament the loss of the headphone jack all that much).

<comment><USER7> >It was the first Game Boy to have a backlit screen, which meant I could finally easily sneak and play on it in the night without alerting my parents

Actually, there was another Game Boy with backlit screen released much earlier -- just a few months before the Game Boy Color, though only in Japan. I remember said Game Boy because a friend of mine whose father traveled to Japan had brought one such Game Boy back with him for his son. It was called the Game Boy Light.

The screen was monochrome with green backlight. Pretty badass.

[http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Boy_Light](http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Boy_Light)

[http://www.computercloset.org/NintendoGameBoy.htm](http://www.computercloset.org/NintendoGameBoy.htm)

[http://retro-treasures.blogspot.com/2012/04/silver- nintendo-...](http://retro-treasures.blogspot.com/2012/04/silver-nintendo- game-boy-light.html)

<comment><USER8> Are you sure the Game Boy Light was Japan-only?

I've seen at least a handful of them in my childhood here in Germany. Backlit screen, exact same format, etc.

<comment><USER7> Japan-only just means that there was a marketing and distribution effort by Nintendo there and nowhere else. Third-parties could still have imported the GB Light consoles to places like Germany. Could also be that the GB Light consoles you saw ended up in your area the same way my friend got one -- through family visiting Japan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of the "feature phone" era in the early 2000s, where every phone had a proprietary charging port, proprietary headphone jack and the removable memory interface was not yet standardized on MicroSD.

Thankfully European Union pushed for MicroUSB standardization. While vendors (like Apple) can still get around it by bundling an adapter in European markets, it was enough to push the entire industry to standardize.

Still, both Nintendo and Apple still change charging port standards frequently (and not adopting the universal standards even when they're superior): the original GBA used a certain proprietary charging port, then both GBA SP and the original Nintendo DS shared a (different) charging port. But Nintendo DS Lite used another standard (looks a lot like MicroUSB but wasn't). Finally all handhelds since DSi (including DSi XL, 3DS XL and New 3DS variants) all use _another_ proprietary variant!

New 3DS systems don't even ship with AC adapters! Not even a cable from the proprietary 3DS connector to USB type A! This means little Johnny will get between 0 and 1 charges out of the system on Christmas Day, while his exasperated mother has to go find a shop that's open during the holiday period just to charge the device.

Very surprising since Nintendo have sometimes been very good regarding backwards compatibility of interfaces on their hardware - Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 and Gamecube all shared the same video cable (a proprietary connector to composite audio/video out via Red/White/Yellow RCA connectors)

Apple of course do it with constantly changing MagSafe variants, as well the old 30-pin iPod/iPhone connectors (and not switching to the MicroUSB standard) and chasing Firewire (and to a much less degree Intel Thunderbolt) and most recently choosing the superior (to USB2.0) reversible Lightning connector over the new industry standard, USB3.1 Type C.

The reasons for doing this appear to be mostly related control of an ecosystem to enable price gouging. (Can't really be due to increasing water resistance, as competitors show it's possible to have even better water resistance without removing any standardized jacks)

<comment><USER10> They have 2 MegSafe versions in 10 years (MegSafe was introduced in 2006), the 2nd one was necessary to make slimmer laptops. Same thing with 30-pin connector and lightning. Lightning was before USB-C and it's superior to the old 30-pin connector.

Btw, MegSafe is one of the best thing about MacBooks, I'm actually sad they're not using it in the new MacBook.

<comment><USER9> Oh, I stand corrected! Could have sworn there was more. Completely agree MagSafe is a really good innovation though!

<comment><USER11> Bear in mind: not invented by Apple. Japanese kitchen appliances (e.g. deep fryers, fondue appliances) have had that type of connector since the late 90s/early 2000s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nintendo also ended up adding it back for the DS and has kept it since.

<comment><USER13> As a matter of fact, Nintendo added it back to GameBoy Micro, so before DS was released. It's mentioned in the article too.

<comment><USER12> The DS (2004-2014) was released almost a full year before the GameBoy Micro (2005-2006).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I distinctly remember this at the time. I just played all my games with no sound, a mild frustration at best as it was the only real option as a kid if you wanted to play games at night without goofy adapters for your GBA!

It's more akin to the iPhone 1 not including a jack then adding one later than the iPhone 7 removing it.

Another note: Original Gameboy games stuck way out the back. The GBA SP sure made a lot of sacrifices, and odd design choices but the fact that it fixed the _biggest issue_ means a lot for it.

<comment><USER15> > _It 's more akin to the iPhone 1 not including a jack then adding one later > than the iPhone 7 removing it._

And I came to the iphone from the ipod. To me the iphone was (and still is) an ipod with wifi and a crappy mobile connection. Hence me seeing the removal of the audio jack as killing one of the core features.

<comment><USER16> > To me the iphone was (and still is) an ipod with wifi and a crappy mobile > connection.

What do you consider a phone/smartphone then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nintendo really did some cool things. I had played with my daugther's GBA; my son wanted the Sony PSP.

I inherited the PSP from my son. My daughter sold her GBA. They got a lot of use out of them.

I wound up coding on the PSP. Simple stuff, but I almost got into some high- end things, but then PIC chips and 32 bit uCs, and FPGAs flooded the market.

I am to this day amazed at how modern the PSP still looks and feels compared to the way that phones and computers age. Good screen too! I still charge it and play with it once and a while. Something about a dedicated game unit with no distractions from the internet, although it does have connectivity!

<comment><USER18> "I inherited the PSP from my son."

I'm going to become a father in roughly 6 weeks. Besides all the other emotions flying around, your post just made me look forward to it a little more. Thank you. :)

<comment><USER17> You're welcome, and all the best to you and yours!

I joke with my son that when I come home to visit him, I am going to take back the fancy telescope I bought him several years ago! He uses it a lot. There is a secret side of me that wants it, that and the microscope I bought my daugther ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I didn't use a GameBoy Advance to listen to music daily.

</comment><comment><USER20> Remember the time when the first Android phone was released and it didn't have a headphone jack? The HTC Dream AKA the G1? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream)

<comment><USER21> Yup. I recall upgrading to an HTC Hero the next year and feeling relieved that I no longer needed to constantly have a usb to headphone dongle on hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The gameboy advanced SP was the first gaming device, and in fact the first piece of technology I owned. I still remember my excitement of going to the mall with my dad on my birthday to get it + pokemon leaf green. In my eyes, it was perfect.

I never felt like it needed a headphone jack, and my friends at school who had the previous generation which had a headphone jack never used it either.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very interesting reminder of the parallel that exists in the GBSP...

However, since Apple's focus is unequivocally (and technologically and commercially viably) on wireless headphones, the author does this fact a disservice by burying Apple's counter argument in the middle of the article:

> On the other hand, the GBA SP existed before Bluetooth headphones were a > relatively cheap and widespread alternative to the wired standard. And Apple > includes both Lightning headphones and a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter in the > box with the iPhone, which ought to ease the transition for many.

</comment><comment><USER24> Many mobile phone manufacturers did the same at some point. Sony used to cell phones with their own propietary sound output and their propietary memory sticks. LG did the same for sound. Then the industry matured with standarized chargers, memory and sound output. But Apple somehow got their own way, sound is just one more thing.

<comment><USER25> Mobile phone companies didn't "mature" into using the same micro USB charger. The European Union sat them all down at a table and said "you standardize on something you like, or we make a law to force a standard". They agreed, and renewed the agreement yearly.

Few years down the line and Samsung says "I'm not signing this year, because Apple doesn't play ball and use their own cable", and the EU moved on their threat and started process on a law. Don't know if it's finally passed or not.

(the EU original intent was to limit waste, and was triggered by seemingly every single Nokia phone needing its own specific charger)

<comment><USER24> Yes, it's true, they needed some help. Although memory and sound was product of maturity, I always thought that Samsung has been a big pusher in this matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The real problem with iPhone 7 is the lack of lossless wireless capabilities, bluetooth does not have enough bandwidth.

<comment><USER27> This could be fixed in the iPhone 7s with the introduction of Bluetooth 5.

<comment><USER26> Indeed, after having that we just need headphones with reasonable battery life.

<comment><USER28> Or you could just buy two pairs instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I rarely used headphones on any handheld console (except for the PSP, on which I watched movies sometimes). I remember being annoyed though because whenever I actually did want to use headphones on my GBA SP, I had to look for that stupid adaptor.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you wanted to replace the headphone jack with your "new thing" the most effective way to do that would have to involve as many audio hardware companies as possible also producing headphones that work with your "new thing". You would want to pre-announce it along with specs and make it an open standard that other companies can utilise without paying royalties.

The GBA still wouldn't have had anywhere near enough market share to pull it off. Apple definitely could've, I think. I haven't followed closely enough, but are other accessory manufacturers able to produce headphones for the new iPhone, or is it completely limited to whatever Apple release?

<comment><USER31> Bluetooth Capable Headphone Sales Surpass Non-Bluetooth Sales (in dollars, not in units) - [https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press- releases/20...](https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press- releases/2016/bluetooth-capable-headphone-sales-surpass-non-bluetooth-sales/)

<comment><USER32> Correct. There was also a recent report that said > 50% of iPhone users only ever use the included headphones.

In short, it is a non-issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A game system (worth around $100) that was not meant to have a multimedia experience vs something that has been a multimedia experience that costs around $850 (the only one I would buy)... Is the comparison a joke? Because they also omitted reference to more comparable products that deleted the jack.

<comment><USER34> "multimedia experience" is such a 90s phrase. Encarta on win95 was a "multimedia experience".

<comment> gm-conspiracy What MPC level?

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The difference here is that the primary purpose of an iPhone is to make phone calls. And uses multimedia, like music. Leading to this:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z_wImaGRkNY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z_wImaGRkNY)

<comment><USER36> I'm starting to see a trend in the comments where anyone who actually posts something rational that makes sense gets down voted.

He is right, no one used the Gameboy as a media player.

<comment><USER37> I didn't downvote, but I suspect he's getting downvoted because what he said is not rational, but actually a pretty bad rationalization.

The Gameboy Advanced SP is used to play video games, and I don't know of a single game on it that doesn't include music and sound-effects. In other words, 99% of the GBA SP's use case involves sound, in contrast to the iPhone, where there are plenty of apps that don't require sound, such as texting, browsing the web, looking at maps, etc.

Better to just accept that the SP not having a headphone jack was bad, but it sold anyway, and that the iPhone not having a headphone jack will be bad, but it'll probably sell anyway, instead of coming up with illogical post-hoc justifications for why it's okay for the SP but not the iPhone.

<comment><USER35> I don't tend to make many phone/FaceTime calls that lack sound. I also tend to enjoy listening to music and videos with sound. Could be just my illogical post-hoc rationalisation kicking in though.

<comment><USER37> Sure, there are plenty of use cases that require sound in the iPhone. I never disputed that.

But this is something it has in _common_ with the SP, not a _difference_.

I guess I was pretty rude about it, though, so sorry about that.

<comment><USER35> Its ok, I've said worse. Thank you for apologising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's worth remembering these devices are primarily used by children. Children who are both at risk of permanent ear damage and lacking in judgement as to what is too loud. I call this an unintended benefit.</comment>


Magic Memcached - <AUTHOR> http://nleach.com/post/4664527538/magic-memcached

<comment><USER2> Code samples and fixed width web sites don't mix, even if the code samples have horizontal scroll bars, which everyone hates anyway. This nleach.com site has a fixed width of 70em (which seems awfully low in general, and is measured with the width of the non-fixed font in the outer container, so the effective length of the fixed area is only 44 chars, at least on my system), and the longest code line is 170 characters. If anything, the user should be able to resize their browser window (rather than have to edit the CSS) to make it wider to see the content.

(I also wish HN had a more dynamic width for fixed width content and/or had a different way to specify fixed width font than just indentation, since people also use indentation for bulleted lists, which makes them really hard to read, especially on smaller screens).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, it's a pretty awful layout for displaying code. I've been meaning to fix it for a while, just haven't gotten around to it. Thanks for stopping by though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This approach makes caching no longer invisible to the caller. Moreover, all callers, rather than the class, have complete control over the cache activation and expiration. Also, the caller needs to know which methods can safely be cached at all.

So for the whole application, this approach will probably cause more brittle code than caching "by hand", where caching was at least hidden behind well- defined interfaces.

Nevertheless, I think that meta-class magic is the right way to abstract away this caching code duplication. It just shouldn't change class interfaces.

For example, there could be a static attribute that contains the names of all methods that should be cached. And there could be an additional method for invalidating caches, probably with an array argument to facilitate invalidation multiple method caches at once. And, of course, this cache invalidation should mainly be used by the class itself, and ideally not be available to the caller at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perl has had this for 12 years or so, and Lisp way before that.

<http://perldoc.perl.org/Memoize.html>

I suggest you look into the design here. memoize() works on functions, which is a lot more useful than catching missing methods. That way, the library author can memoize functions, and so can the library user, if they are sure the function they want is pure (i.e. no side effects).

I see problems with allowing callers to memoize methods of an object. You're breaking encapsulation when the caller can suddenly decide how a method is to be cached. In principle, every method of an object depends on the object's private state, which could change at any time. So how are callers supposed to know what is and isn't cacheable? Or when to expire a cache?

Also, the average object has methods for writing and reading. It would be pretty silly to allow there to be cacheable writing methods. Again that suggests control over what is cacheable should be in the class.

That said, you've got a good idea here -- just figure out how we can give the class control over what is memoized. I am pretty sure this is doable; perhaps you have a private method _get_memoized_methods() that tells the inherited abstract class Memoizable what can be memoized. It can then make it appear as if $object->fastQuery() exists, when it's just a wrapped around the private method $object->slowQuery(). You can do this, I think, by catching missing methods with a __call function in Memoizable, and, I think, you can throw exactly the same exception as PHP would whenever a method that you don't want to mess with is called.</comment>


Refurbishing a classic microphone – the Electro-Voice RE20 - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/refurbishing-classic-microphone-electro-voice-re20 <comment><USER2> This is _rad_. I've long wanted RE20s for my podcast studio, but they're approximately all of the money--and I'd need four, to standardize, so dropping $2,000 on microphones isn't in the budget. Now I'm wondering if I might know anybody with some older/beat up ones to part with...

Right now I'm using GLS Audio ES-58s, which are knockoffs of the Shure SM-58 but around $39 rather than $100 (and, to my ears, have an audio quality closer to the Shure SM-58 Beta, itself more like $160). And they're basically indestructible, which is nice.

<comment><USER3> The RØDE Procaster is a popular (and much cheaper) alternative to the EV RE20. It doesn't sound exactly like the RE20, but it has the same characteristic low-mid presence.

Bear in mind that big dynamic mics like the RE20 need a colossal amount of clean gain. Unless you're using an excellent interface or mixer, you'll need to budget for some better preamps.

[http://www.rode.com/microphones/procaster](http://www.rode.com/microphones/procaster)

<comment><USER4> Any recos for mic pres? I'm looking at sm7b's also

<comment><USER3> If you need a USB interface with one or two pres, look at the Audient ID4/ID14. If you need more, I suggest the larger Focusrite Scarlett interfaces. If you already have an interface you're happy with and need a bit more clean gain, try a Cloudlifter.

<comment><USER5> No way do Scarlett pres have the amount of clean gain we're talking for SM7B or RE20 territory. Unless you really get an excellent interface/mixer I would go for external pres.

<comment><USER3> The larger, non-bus-powered Scarlett interfaces provide perfectly good results with the SM7B.

[http://recordinghacks.com/2012/06/18/sm7b-audio-interface- sh...](http://recordinghacks.com/2012/06/18/sm7b-audio-interface-shootout/)

<comment><USER2> Even their 8i6 only boosts about 60dB, though. You _can_ work with that, but that's a little low. I shoot for -14dB to -10dB for spoken stuff, and at that point you'd basically be eating the mic.

The article you linked was using a Cloudlifter with the SM7B, which is a preamp on its own.

<comment><USER4> I'm looking at the scarlet 18i8, I want four mic pres and will try with the 4-channel cloudlifter. 25db from the CL and another 25 from the interface ought to sound alright

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that should be completely fine. Presonus has a 8-channel preamp that's about the same price as the 4-channel Cloudlifter, too, btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It probably wasn't something I'd ever consciously thought about, but I just realized that RE20s grills aren't _supposed_ to have a dent in them. Mine is somewhat lived-in, as I'm sure a great many of them are.

For me it's one of the all-time great moving coil mics, along with the Sennheiser MD-441 (about which I think I already knew that the grill wasn't supposed to be dented.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think about half the RE20's I've ever seen have that trademark dent. Just like about half the SM58's in the world have a mangled ball that's not perfectly round anymore. Some mics are just made to be abused I guess!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice! I have a couple of old EV mics with rotted foam, but never thought that I could just buy spares. I'll have to check out the supplier.</comment>


Where to start – pondering over couple of ideas, no money to invest - <AUTHOR>

Mind munching a couple of home business ideas for a month now. No money (literally) to invest on. Time is precious as I am full-time mom for a 2 yr old. Longing to do something on my own to gain satisfaction in life. Where to start? <comment><USER2> A lack of time and a lack of money doesn't change anything. You still need to focus on what pain you're going to solve, and what solution you can sell to people. Figure that out first, then test the ideas by putting them in front of people and getting feedback. At that point (hopefully) people should start offering to buy what you're offering (if they say they love it but they're not willing to buy, they don't love it enough). If they're not buying, iterate and improve the offering, then try pitching it to people again. If there are people buying, start doing the thing you're suggesting. Congratulations, you're now running a startup.

If you don't have much time, do it all over a longer period (months instead of weeks).

If you don't have money, do everything digitally instead of on paper. That's the only difference it makes (at this stage).

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks onion2k! I will now move forward.

And not to forget, thanks to my dear friend who suggested me to ask in this forum who also said this is a place where people are helpful and positive. True!</comment></comment>


The tale of creating a git mirror for Mozilla - <AUTHOR> http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-08-31/git-mirror-mozilla-central

<comment><USER2> Having used git svn on occasion, I can positively state that git's interfaces to other VCS's are slow, clunky and generally questionable.

The ideal case would be complete interoperability, where you could use git locally, yet collaborate on a daily basis with people using the project's non- git VCS, and no one would be inconvenienced -- or even necessarily aware of other developers' choice of VCS!

<comment><USER3> > _The ideal case would be complete interoperability, where you could use git > locally, yet collaborate on a daily basis with people using the project's > non-git VCS_

My impression is that this is the goal of the git "svn remote" work which has been slowly worked on for a quite a while, mostly by Google-Summer-of-Code participants.

With svn-remote support, subversion repos would be handled as a special types of remote at push/pull time, instead of requiring the user to use special commands and a different workflow. This same discipline would work for other repo types as well, and I think much of the infrastructure work being done now will be useful for implementing remote handlers for them.</comment></comment>


The Insane Engineering of the SR-71 Blackbird - sahin-boydas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hYSnyVLmGE <comment><AUTHOR> Read the novel Skunkworks for a fantastic account of what the engineers had to overcome.

<comment><USER2> at the end of that they give Kelly Johnson a flypast and he is too far gone to realize what is going on. Ben Rich says "Kelly, they are saluting you !". That part made me tear up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> At the time they built this the motor industry could not even build a car with a clutch that lasted! How on earth did they build this out of Titanium? Is feels like progress has stopped or even reversed

</comment><comment><USER3> If I were around in 1962 and looking at the first A-12, I'd almost believe the Roswell stories. After 50 years of "progress" not so sure about that.</comment>


I like b-sides - MP3 Mix-Tape Generator - <AUTHOR> http://ilikebsides.com/ <comment><USER2> Alert! There is very little usable-data in your iTunes. We haven't been able to build a complete mix-tape, and will not be able to until you either: a) play songs you enjoy (to increase 'Play Count') b) or, use iTunes' star- ratings features...</comment>


Growing Tomatoes in Space (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10255/365_read-10095/#/gallery/14438 <comment><USER2> Per Wikipedia [1], the satellite just launched in December 2018, so the results of the experiments will be forthcoming after about a year in orbit.

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

It's a shame there are no plans for re-entry of the crop. A taste test would be really nice to have. I hope they are growing a good, tasty varietal. We have been cursed with flavorless, 13 mph tomatoes on Earth for too long. Hopefully, the future colonists will be growing Brandywines, Yellow Pears, or similar varieties with lots of flavor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Page is badly out of date, it says the mission is planned for launch in 2016. It launched in December 2018.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because there are not enough tomatoes on Earth?

<comment><USER5> No, because people in space need oxygen, food, and biomass.

<comment><USER6> i love how science spends billions to create a problem, and then more billions to solve that artificial problem :D paying taxes is so wonderful. thankfully, we all enjoy that!

<comment><USER5> Wait, what?

Are you saying science created the problem of wanting to send humans to space? If yes, that's not a science problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/sf-fines-two-landords-2-25-million-for-illegal-airbnb-rentals/ <comment><USER2> > "This is a win for San Francisco residents," Herrera said. "Whether you're a > tenant or a landlord who has been following the law, this is a victory. This > outcome frees up more homes for long-term tenants and stops unfair > competition in the marketplace. The serious financial penalty is an > important deterrent. It sends a clear message to those looking to illegally > profit off of San Francisco's housing crisis: Don't try it. We will catch > you. Most importantly, we preserved more than 45 housing units to be used as > homes, not hotel rooms. We are fighting back against San Francisco's housing > crisis in every way possible."

This city attorney seems... extra.

You know what else frees up more housing units? Letting people build housing does. You know who is responsible for the housing crisis? The city is.

<comment><USER3> Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

But that's beside the point, because this is a case about an unlicensed Airbnb. I don't know what the laws are where you come from, but someone illegally turning their multi-tenant property in a residential neighborhood into a 24-hour motel isn't someone I have any sympathy for.

Besides, Airbnb is no answer to the dearth of housing in any city. The lawyer is spouting facts. Those are 45 units that would be going to people who would live or work in SF and instead are used to price gouge visitors (relative to the going rent/mortgage rates) who want to save $50 on a hotel room.

<comment><USER4> Either they're being price gouged or they're saving $50 on a hotel room. You can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER5> The hotels can gouge them harder, or the hotels can be worth the $50 price, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > As part of city law, San Francisco requires property owners renting out > units for less than 30 days to register with the city's office of short-term > rentals, as well as be a permanent resident of that unit.

As far as I can tell, AirBnb is blatantly complicit in allowing renters to violate this law. When I moved to SF I stayed in an AirBnb for a few weeks. It didn't occur to me when I booked that it could have been an illegal operation. Once I became aware, I looked up the public records and, lo and behold, there was no short term rental permit.

<comment><USER7> Not only are they complicit in it they are profiting off of breaking the law but having zero consequences. They are paying no fine in this case or any other I've heard of because of something in their TOS.

"As part of city law, San Francisco requires property owners renting out units for less than 30 days to register with the city's office of short-term rentals, as well as be a permanent resident of that unit. " \- The registration can easily be made a requirement to list on AirBNB and they could limit one unit rental to users.

"These are not the type of hosts we want on our platform and are glad the City has the tools it needs to enforce the rules" \- Ha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are they not going after airbnb to get their fees back? Airbnb seems to charge a fee of around 10-13% on bookings, putting their haul around $100k for the 11 months mentioned in the article. Maybe the settlement mentioned also included a financial component.

Not downplaying the landlord's unlawful acts, but they couldn't have easily operated at this scale without the help of a popular platform.

There's also a 14% occupancy tax _only on rentals of less than 30 days_ , so SF has a financial disincentive against converting all these properties to long term rentals. (Edit: if airbnb is lowering the average short term rental price, then the picture is less clear. There are tourists who will go outside SF if there aren't any 'whole house' options there...)

</comment><comment><USER9> Airbnb is suing NY right now because the city wants the names and addresses of those who are illegally renting without registering their apartments. I believe it's called "disruption"

<comment><USER10> So you also support Facebook giving up names and addresses to law enforcement?

<comment><USER11> This is a little different.

Law Enforcement want data from Facebook because it's useful to an investigation.

Law Enforcement want data from AirBnB because the act of working with AirBnb is the illegal part.

So asking a drug dealer for the name of his distributors seems reasonable to me. Or asking the illegal online betting company the names of those who were placing illegal bets.

Though the regulations should hopefully be more clear on this.

<comment><USER12> Airbnb isn't banned in New York, it can be operated legally. The city is asking for a full list of all operators, including hosts abiding by regulation.

If continuing the (poor) Facebook analogy, this is akin to asking for a full list of their users, even the ones abiding by the law.

<comment><USER13> The city already has the names and addresses of the law abiding ones. They registered with the city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Holy crap, they made 700k in profit on Airbnb? How much would they have made as just landlords?

<comment><USER15> 14 units times 11 months times the median rent in 2017 ($3000) = $462,000 in revenue.

I suppose the article implies approximately $200,000 in expenses but it's not clear whether those are Airbnb specific or whether those would have been required even if rented to tenants. It's unlikely that each unit requires $14,000 in maintenance per year. It's fairer IMO to use $1/sqft per year for condo maintenance when an HOA looks after the exterior, though I'm assuming these were condos? Assuming 750sqft, that's just $11,000 in costs. Then there's opportunity cost of capital, etc. The top line number should be good enough for napkin math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The city government would like to blame illegal Airbnb rentals for contributing to the housing crisis but at the same time still enforces strict height limits on buildings because NIMBYism. It won't be today, or tomorrow, but eventually SF and the greater Bay Area will no longer be sustainable as the major economic hub it is without some serious change. You can't complain about increasing income inequality and cost of living problems without addressing the core component that makes up the cost of living...

</comment><comment><USER17> The fines have to be large enough to discourage breaking the law. Is it a good law? I generally trust the residents to pass laws that make sense for those that live there. What I want to understand is what makes SF different from other cities in terms of zoning laws?

</comment><comment><USER18> What is the motivation for this law? Why is SF regulating the length of stay or rentors at all? Seems like a gross violation of freedom and property rights. Zoning I can understand but duration? This seems like a bad law.

<comment><USER19> This is what SF does: create a ton of laws or regulations so that it's onerous to not break one, then selectively enforce them when it's palatable to. Try street parking in SF; it's like an SAT problem trying to figure out if you're doing it legally. Arbitrary justice is not good.

<comment><USER20> The distinction between hotels and residences is pretty standard across the world and is hardly arbitrary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are essentially Airbnb hotels in Seattle too (e.g. JMFM+R8 Seattle, Washington), I wonder if they're in violation as well.

<comment><USER22> You could find out if interested (Department of Finance and Administrative Services contact info on that page, who regulates short term [ie AirBnB] accommodations).

[http://www.seattle.gov/business-regulations/short-term- renta...](http://www.seattle.gov/business-regulations/short-term-rentals)

<comment><USER23> This actually sounds like it could make for a really interesting endeavor in open records requesting for anyone who geeks off on that sort of thing ( _looks around_...oh wait I guess that's me).

<comment><USER22> I look forward to your results!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Amusing bit of hyperbole in the very first line of the article:

"San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is laying down the law — literally. "

Nowhere in the article is it explained how they "literally" are laying down the law.

<comment><USER25> What's hyperbolic about that? The article says:

"As part of city law, San Francisco requires property owners renting out units for less than 30 days to register with the city's office of short-term rentals, as well as be a permanent resident of that unit."

They were breaking the law, Herrara enforced said law.

<comment><USER26> You literally need to look up the definition of what literally means.

<comment><USER27> This seems to be a literal case of "laying down the law" when the phrase usually just refers to some authority figure disciplining a subject.

<comment><USER26> Idioms are not literal. The implication of my original comment, is now spelled out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Communist California at its best

<comment><USER29> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not flamebaity ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Personally, I see no problem with Airbnb and I think the government forcing you to be licensed is bad.

Airbnb has a review system for a reason. If it's a shitty place, you write a review and other people will be less inclined to rent.

I've been in hotels that were shitty and licensed. I've been in airbnb rentals that were cheaper and better taken care of. I've also been in great hotels and shitty Airbnb's.

How is suing two property owners a win for city licensed landlords? Are they getting the 2+million? No? Oh the city is getting it for "reasons" and calling it a win.

Stupid.

<comment><USER20> The licensing is not to ensure quality, the licensing is to restrict supply of hotel units. Not to keep hotels in business, but because people simply do not like having short-term visitors as neighbors or floormates.

It's not a win for city licensed landlords. It's a win for residents. Residents are ultimately voters. And AirBnB is bad for the vast majority of residents.

<comment><USER31> > people simply do not like having short-term visitors as neighbors or > floormates.

That's a commonly provided explanation, but I find it very hard to believe that existing laws and leasing rules can't/don't already easily solve this. If too many instances of noise complaints, property damage, improper trash disposal, etc. occur from your property, you (the owner or renter) get fined or evicted. It's obviously not an excuse to say that you rented out your unit on AirBnb. Surely these laws and rules have always existed, since that problem is not unique to short-term rentals. What am I missing?

<comment><USER20> People want _zero_ short-term visitors as neighbors, and the law reflects that.

Landlords, under existing US law, are only really liable for tenant nuisance if they should have known that the nuisance was likely (e.g., an aggressive dog in the apartment.) It's hard to really argue that you could tell anything about noisy short-term visitors, since fine upstanding members of society on a weekend trip may turn out to be party animals at night.

Short-term rentals are even more difficult to enforce against just because there is a shortage of police and inspector manpower in most major cites; by the time one is able to get to you the visitor may have left already. And first offence is generally just a warning, but a warning is of little use to people taking a plane out the next day.

<comment><USER31> I don't think simply not wanting short-term visitors in your neighborhood is a legitimate desire that should be respected. It's fine to desire a lack of specific symptoms like noise or damage. If a landlord or property owner allows guests that cause problems I don't see why they're any less liable than if they cause the problems themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Holy shit, how can the city regulate private property like this?

<comment><USER33> This is nothing new. There are many zoning laws restricting what you can do with your land: What can you build? Is commercial and/or residential use allowed? It's very much in line to say if a unit can be used as a hotel-like or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Rather than putting restrictions on what private people can do with their property, I'm starting to think the city should consider bulldozing some of the GG park to put up affordable housing or renting it out for cheap to those who need it where the city of San Francisco would be the landlord.

<comment><USER35> Yeah what a great idea to destroy one of the city's great landmark.

<comment><USER36> It's actually a good idea if viewed as a coercion tactic.

<comment><USER37> Building shitty housing is never a good idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The dreaded "application configuration is incorrect" error - <AUTHOR> http://virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=296

<comment><USER2> This used to bite me all the time before I switched to using Python when distributing Windows builds of stuff. I figured it out in an ad-hoc way, but with this article I actually understand it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely one of the least helpful error messages of all time.

It's a shame that more technologies aren't moving toward a "compile and statically link everything" model, there's a lot to be said for that model in certain circumstances.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it is bizarre how bad Microsoft error messages can be. I can _just_ conceive designing a system that works this way, but I have absolutely no idea how someone would design such a system and have it produce absolutely no useful diagnostic message _anywhere_ when it goes wrong.

<comment><USER5> My first experience with COM involved a week of staring at a dialog box saying "Error -1" and twisting knobs in my code until the error dialog went away.

This was from a piece of COM that was entirely procedural, no UI at all. Yet someone had had the bright idea of (a) indicating an error with a dialog box instead of a return value, which brought the entire synchronous call to a screeching halt, and (b) reporting an absolutely useless error value.

It would have been more useful had the COM code in question /crashed/ -- at least I could have debugged it.

It's not just Microsoft, I've seen this "error -1" behavior in many APIs, on many systems. I've seen code that reported /any/ error as being "out of memory" (trying to blame it on someone else? I've never understood that one, if it's not just being lazy).

Detailed error reporting is as much of an art as designing the working face of an API. The problem is, if you flub it, you're trying to mollify and calm an already irritated user. Think of errors as the first line in customer support, and get them right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, why would you want to use the CRT as a DLL? The article doesn't make that clear.

<comment><USER4> It enables someone else (a system administrator, microsoft patch, etc.) to redirect it to a new version without your intervention if a security issue is identified in the version you have shipped with your application. It's actually a very sophisticated system that allows any number of versions of the same dll to be used simultaneously within the system. It is also a nightmare for unsuspecting developers when it goes wrong.

<comment><USER6> I've never seen a sysadmin do that, they just nuke the offending app. So I'm filing it as "science fiction". Don't worry, use /MT.</comment></comment></comment>


Why good storytelling helps you design great products - <AUTHOR> http://www.gv.com/lib/why-good-storytelling-helps-you-design-great-products

<comment><USER2> Good points. I'd also add, that story-telling keeps you see the product from the user's perspective from start to end. Product owners usually break the story into parts and then build it. That's where they might lose the details. And 'the devil is in the details' as you know.</comment>


I'm Moving to the Valley What next? - <AUTHOR>

So what next, I have enough money for a year to live, looking for a parnter/programmer to mix up some ideas. Then what! Tell me your game plan, I have an idea, but my time is limited so i gotta hit the ground running. <comment><USER2> Are you a programmer or just idea guy?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a designer. I know about programming etc. but I know I need someone who knows it better than I do. Design is my main skill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Make connections fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really!? Lol come on tell me something I dont know. ;)</comment></comment>


Kevin Rose: How to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users - <AUTHOR> http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/9-ways-to-take-your-site-from-one-to-one-million-users/

<comment><USER2> It's worth noting that Kevin himself didn't use these tricks to go from "one to one million", and already had many fans and lots of momentum by the time Digg was launched. He was already a celebrity of sorts and even used his later appearances on the Screensavers show to plug Digg.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, this makes no sense. It doesn't matter how famous you are - if your product sucks, people won't use it. Look at Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls. It's a miserable failure - even though he's much, much, much more famous than a mere Kevin Rose - because no one really needed to see cartoon girls do a weak TMZ imitation.

I think people like to chalk up Digg's success to Kevin's "celebrity", where in reality, he's a nobody and Digg actually is a really, really good product for the niche it's serving.

<comment><USER4> I think one not necessarily has to do with the other. In this example Kevin simply used his existing network for the launch of Digg. I agree with you that Digg is a great product for the niche it is serving. That's why it is successful. Pownce on the other hand wasn't a good product and had limited success despite Kevin's efforts to push it.

<comment><USER5> I actually thought Pownce was an interesting product I'm actually kind of surprised it never took off, except it was too "Twitter-like" so it never got the network it needed to gain critical mass.

<comment><USER6> Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It failed because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.

Launching a product that is similar to popular incumbents isn't a negative feature. In many cases, it can help your unique selling point. Mint: Quicken but online and great UI. Hacker News: Digg for startups. Digg: Slashdot by the people.

<comment><USER7> >Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It failed because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.

What problem does Twitter solve? (Not a rhetorical question)

<comment><USER8> It gives them a way to quickly communicate feelings, and to see what other people are saying quickly. Because it's so short, you can follow a lot of news without being overwhelmed.

<comment><USER9> Async communication is key to twitter. It's also cool that you can tweet by any method anyone has ever thought of, from almost any device that can send any sort of data whatsoever. The API has helped them greatly. I'm sure that someone, somewhere has a computer that transcribes short voice messages that can be left by phone. If not they will by the time I hit "reply" ... there should be a rule #34 for twitter.

* e-mail

* sms (key for reaching mobile people w/o smartphones)

* web browsers

* native apps / widgets

And then services like twitpic built around twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally, an insider's explanation for how Leah Culver got so "famous":

#1. Ego

       1. Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego?

</comment><comment><USER11> if it's this simple, why didn't Pownce take off? Hell they even had access to all of digg's power, and still had to shut down.

the reason digg took off was that he was more or less the first in that niche, and he had the power of his tv celebrity to drive that initial amount of early adopter traffic

<comment><USER12> getting the users and getting them to keep coming back are different challenges

<comment><USER13> Did Pownce do either of those things?

<comment><USER14> I guess it did. Remember Pownce was very popular back in 2007 and they added more features than Twitter had at that time.

The matter was people didn't wanna write thing twice, one in twitter and one in pownce, and since twitter had more users than Pownce (don't know how many more), it "won the race".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kevin is a great Entrepreneur but it strikes me that we have heard this a million times before. There is some value for someone who is either very young and/or very inexperienced.

</comment><comment><USER15> When listening to this talk I did have a moment of 'wtf' on the "Start a podcast" part. It's clearly a big part of Kevin's success - the whole rockstar celebrity diggnation thing.

But how good are podcasts _now_? Any startups finding them effective? Or am I just biased because I have no attention span to listen to them, so automatically discount them?

How about online video? Back when digg was young, podcasts were the thing; is video today's equivalent, or is it just 'being interesting on Twitter'?

</comment><comment><USER16> Start with a good idea and get lucky?</comment>


Realtime Metrics for 128 Million Users with Redis: 50ms + 16MB RAM - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getspool.com/2011/11/29/fast-easy-realtime-metrics-using-redis-bitmaps <comment><USER2> This was posted a while ago, and I have since implemented bitmaps myself. One thing I learned from the documentation[1] is that setting an initial bit at a very high-numbered place (like 2^30 - 1) takes a while to allocate (compared to Redis's normal speed) and blocks other operations in the process.

In my case, and it appears to be true for Spool too, I don't know what bit will be set first. It could be 12 or it could be 2938251, so to prevent a slowdown if the initial bit is a high place I use buckets of bitmaps, each holding around 8 million bits.

[1] Read _Warning:_ <http://redis.io/commands/setbit>

<comment><USER3> There is an easy fix for this, that is also the recommended way to use bitmaps in Redis: split your bitmap among multiple keys.

For instance you want to set bit i, but you want k bits per every key, the you do:

        keyname = "bitmap:"+(i/k)
        keybit = i%k

k can be fairly large, like 128k bytes per key. It's still small but big enough for keys overhead to be negligible.

<comment><USER2> Wow, that's almost exactly how I implemented it:

       var bucketSize = 8190;

       ...

       var bucketNumber = Math.floor(userId / bucketSize),
           bitInBucket = userId % bucketSize;

...correction on my last comment, looks like I use ~8 thousand bits per bucket, not 8 million.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Repost from <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3292542> if anyone's interested in reading the comments from then.

</comment><comment><USER5> I know disk space is cheap these days, but at 16MB/metric/<level-of- granularity>, it seems like your metric dataset would grow pretty quick. With just 10 metrics tracked daily, thats another gigabyte per week. Of course it does come with the benefit of maintaining all the raw data since you never roll up or aggregate the data...so the pros probably outweigh that con. :)

<comment><USER6> Redis stores everything in RAM, and RAM is not as cheap as disk. Adding GB's of RAM every week will quickly get rather expensive. But I guess you could dump old data to disk and load it back to Redis only when you need it. It might even compress well, depending on what the metrics track.

<comment><USER7> "But I guess you could dump old data to disk and load it back to Redis only when you need it."

Redis has a mode which does this automatically I believe (and it's the default if I remember correctly).

<comment><USER8> Isn't Redis still single-threaded for queries, but saving in the background? That seems a little risky: you've got your 100 million users setting bits in your bitsets and suddenly everything blocks for 10 seconds while old data is being loaded from disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not often you see 16MB these days and it turns out not to be a typo.

</comment><comment><USER10> The only problem with this method is that it requires that IDs are integers, start at 1 and increment by 1.

I'm using MongoDB and IDs are 12-byte values of which the first four are a timestamp. Does anyone know of a way to make this method work, ideally without adding another field to the collection?

<comment><USER11> The comments on the article address this - the OP is using UUIDs as the primary key for their users, but each user is also assigned an "analytics key" which is an integer that started at one. You can even use the redis INCR command to generate these on demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kind of a disingenuous title, since that time sort of implies that redis is handling that many users and that that's the average response time...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry - Although I think the word 'Metrics' must debunk that implication, I can understand what you mean.

I hope it's clearer now.

was:

       Realtime Metrics with Redis: 128 Million Users + 16MB RAM = 50ms

is:

       Realtime Metrics for 128 Million Users with Redis: 50ms + 16MB RAM

<comment><USER12> I still think that those user numbers in the title evokes a mental image of a certain type of load with a certain type of response time. I think if you got rid of the response time, it would be less linkbaity, because then it's clear that your focus is on the amount of storage it would take. It's not very important either way.</comment></comment></comment>


Ok HN, You Were Right. Unpaid Internships Are Wrong - <AUTHOR>

A while ago I tried to argue (unsuccessfully) that if knowledge was bestowed on ignorant, young interns then an unpaid internship would be justified.  Knowledge could be exchanged in lieu of monetary compensation.
This was the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545335
However, I have since thought about this issue quite a bit and I have come to agree with all of you (or those of you that disagreed).
I can say unequivocally now that unpaid internships are wrong.
What caused the change of heart?  Besides the gradual eating away at my soul, I have recently experienced a very frustrating situation.
Last year I found out about a new (unpaid) internship at a company for this summer. I was delighted when they brought me in for an interview because I really really enjoyed this company's product and I really really wanted to have my hand in making it more successful.
The problem is that over the course of a year, I gained new skills.  The company found out about those skills and knew that I could address a very specific problem they were having.
After I was "hired", I tried (unsuccessfully) to negotiate some sort of compensation.  They stood firm saying the unpaid internship was a way for them to screen for good employees.
A few months ago, I would have agreed with them.  Now I see, quite clearly actually, that unpaid internships unfairly take advantage of others.
How does one go about to fix this problem? <comment><USER2> It seems that:

1\. You have skills they want

2\. They believe the experience and knowledge you gain will adequately compensate you for their use of those skills

3\. You disagree, and want paying.

If they won't negotiate, don't provide your skills to them.

Just say no.

</comment><comment><USER3> As wrong as unpaid internships are, you'd agreed to work for the company for a set amount of time on an unpaid basis. Changing your mind after the fact is unfair both to the company and the next-in-line would-be intern whose place you took.

Or, think about it this way - if you are a kid who's been taken advantage of, maybe you deserve to be paid as such. If on the other hand you are an adult capable of making informed decisions and sticking to your commitments, then a couple months at a company whose awesome product you clearly admire shouldn't be that hard.

Take some responsibility and finish what you started. Or at least bow out gracefully by giving them sufficient notice and finding a replacement.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your complaint doesn't make sense to me.

If you think your skills deserve money, then find an internship or job where you get paid. This company isn't forcing you to work for them. How can you say their internship offer is "unfairly taking advantage" of you?

It sounds like you really want to work for this company, but you feel insulted that they are not paying you. It is not the best situation, but if you have no better offers then why not do it. In the long run the only way to "fix this problem" is to get enough skills that you can easily get real jobs or start your own venture. And this internship sounds like it could help.

</comment><comment><USER5> When you agree to 'hire' someone for an unpaid internship, it's usually because they have no experience and can add very little value to your team.

However, if you, the intern, find yourself being taken advantage of, that's a sign that you have more leverage than the average unpaid intern. If you had skills that the company needed, and they refused to compensate you appropriately, I would actively start looking for a different place to work, and I would market those skills that I now had "professional experience" with.

I'd also let the company know you are doing so - a lot of times they treat the intern like crap because they think "you need us - you won't leave". If they know you are marketing your needed skills elsewhere, they'll think twice.

<comment><USER6> > I'd also let the company know you are doing so

Don't.

You've already told them that you want to be paid. They've already said no.

It's almost always a mistake to threaten. It's almost always a mistake to accept an offer to stay after you've accepted an offer somewhere else. It's almost always a mistake to make an offer to stay to someone who has accepted an offer somewhere else.

The only reasonable time to address issues is before the employee has accepted an offer elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> > It's almost always a mistake to accept an offer to stay after you've > accepted an offer somewhere else. It's almost always a mistake to make an > offer to stay to someone who has accepted an offer somewhere else.

Why?

<comment><USER6> Which one?

The relationship is basically broken at that point. The employer is looking to replace you and you're quite willing to leave. (Nope, they're not going to fix what made you want to leave.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You were willing to work for nothing because of what you might learn. For one thine, you didn't know that you had skills that were worth money. Now you see that you do. You probably learned a lot of other things too. I also think that an internship should always be a two way street, with each party doing something to help the other. I would certainly expect the person in your position to make a contribution. The other guys are spending time on you, and taking a little bit of a risk.

You already wrote off the summer and the paycheck. Do what you can and see how it plays out. You could be pleasantly surprised. The probability of that certainly goes up when you do something of value.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused about what happened. You accepted an unpaid internship position, provided something of value to the company, and are now upset that they will not pay you for your unpaid position?

</comment><comment><USER10> I was the engineering manager at a small company quite a while back. A woman asked to work for us for free. She had some experience, but couldnt get a job. It might have been visa issues or something like that. I said no. We didnt have the budget for even a minimal salary and I felt it was wrong to have someone work for nothing. I still feel my decision was right.

</comment><comment><USER11> quit.

edit: to elaborate more, tell them that unpaid internships do the exact opposite of what they claim -- they unequivocally screen _out_ good employees. then, quit. if you have to, put in 2 weeks or whatever, but do it ASAP. tell them that there is no negotiation, and if they wish to re-hire you with a salary, they know how to contact you.

/my $0.02.

</comment><comment><USER12> Quit. They don't value you enough to want to pay you. Get the hell out of there.

<comment><USER12> And if "quitting" feels like being a loser... then MOVE ON instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> wait how long have you been an unpaid intern? unless it was part time ( couple hours here or there ), anything more than 2-3 months tops should result in the end of the internship.</comment>


Why CoRate is the Future of Content Curation (via crowdsourcing)? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.corate.us/post/58056684572/crowdrating

<comment><USER2> Hi!

We are also trying the same concept for products. It is called Kritk. We had a soft launch to family and friends at [http://alpha.kritk.com](http://alpha.kritk.com)

So far getting comments/reviews from people have been a challenge.

<comment><USER3> Most of the consumer prefer branding as an indicator to make the purchasing decision. FMCG and Electronic goods are brands-driven. F&B's review are dominated by a lots of food apps and Foursquare. Books, Music Albums, DVD, Software and Video Gaming are also dominated by review portal.

sourc3, you need to find a very niche market for the product review.

<comment><USER2> I got that that after the low traction we had in the past weeks. At this point, I am absolutely on the same page that we need to focus on a single market to make the comparisons.

Lesson learned, the long and expensive way :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting in understanding user behaviours and maybe can be used for modelling responses to some interesting problems.

I like the concept. Also, like the chrome ext but not able to sync on mobile platforms.

Gautam email@example.com

<comment><USER3> Stay tune for our <Gone Mobile> updates =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello Start-up Entrepreneurs, Techies & Avid Readers!

CoRate just past one-month-old and still improving. Please give us a shout out !

Heislyc, YiHang & Steason(Co-Founders of CoRate)</comment>


Dave.TV - putting ads into videos the second a product is mentioned - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2006/04/startup_watch_d.html <comment><AUTHOR> If somebody in the video says the word bread, for example, an ad shows up for a few seconds for Wonder Bread.</comment>


Opera mini/Mobile - <AUTHOR>

  I do not know how else to contact HN but there seems to be a bug when trying to submit a Post or Question to Hackernews from an Opera Mini or Mobile browser.The page just reloads without posting anything.
 <comment><USER2> Also Opera mini/Mobile, on my dated Win-CE hand held Pocket PC fails to render any page from my internal network. This must be from some proxy doing extra rendering else where. Probably all related and imo not worth fixing. Time for some upgrades, me and you both.

<comment><AUTHOR> true that....but but am using an android with the latest opera's.o well!</comment></comment>


PostgreSQL Prefers the Scenic Route - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Bruce-Momjian-PostrgreSQL-Prefers-the-Scenic-Route-80045.html

<comment><USER2> Besides Bruce Momjian, Tom Lane is also a defining, fundamental character behind PostgreSQL. His unforgivingly insightful posts on the pgsql-hackers mailing list makes reading it a very entertaining and educative experience.

(By the way, I can't recommend enough reading that mailing list. It's an ongoing masterclass in "this is how grown-ups write software".)

<comment><USER3> It's also one of the nicer open source communities, on the whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This people have all my respect, they are doing a great job and I am really happy to see postgresql being used more and more.

One thing I really like about postgresql is the stability of their releases.

I wish other projects had the same kind of care when releasing a major version of their software (yes, I am looking at you Cassandra)

<comment><USER5> Funny how conservative EVERYONE is when it comes to their data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow...I'm generally not bothered by ads, but when they cover up the text of the article and don't give you a way to click out of it, they give me no choice but to not read it.

<comment><USER7> I didn't even get an ad, the page just covered itself in black stripes with a little white lozenge in the middle.

<comment><USER8> Chrome + F12, inspect element, delete.

I do this too often. We screwed the web.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if--in the same way most browsers use a heuristic to block pop-ups if they weren't triggered by a user action--we could come up with an effective heuristic to do the same for pop-overs.

I'd think the simplest thing would be blocking "position: fixed; width: 100%; height: 100%;" curtain elements, along with anything that stacks "above" them. They only have two _valid_ uses that I can think of: displaying lightbox-like image galleries, and embedding modal confirmation dialogs in single-page apps. It'd probably be easier to figure out a heuristic to whitelist these two uses, and deny everything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DailyBooth (YC S09), 4chan and the importance of context - <AUTHOR> http://jonathandeamer.com/2009/08/19/daily-booth-4chan-importance-context-restrictions/

<comment><USER2> ___But by changing the context of a simple imageboard, it's overtaken a stalwart of internet culture (see chart) and got people talking_ __

You should be using the domain 4chan.org instead of 4chan.com:[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/4chan.org+dailybooth.com+4c...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/4chan.org+dailybooth.com+4chan.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that was a pretty basic error of me to make! Corrected the post...but I hope the rest of my insight still stands ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a foreword, I like incubator companies because they tend to ship nice looking, solid products.

In all cases you stated - "Who you know" matters more. Not context.

I/You/Anyone could make a "twitter for families" or a "twitter for sports" or a "url shortener for bacon" or whatever & it would not get written up on techcrunch - unless I/You/Anyone knew someone there (at TechCrunch) or was part of an incubator (like YC/TechStars).

TechCrunch needs some news, even if it is mediocre, every day, covering every company from every incubator is a good way to keep that news flowing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I partly disagree. Of course, networking, contacts and "who you know" are important. And DailyBooth were undoubtedly helped in getting TC coverage by the YC connection. But that's PR, which is different to creating a compelling product in and of itself, which is where I believe context and positioning (eg. link shortener for bacon) is important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In this case, I don't think context matters so much as structure. 4chan is 4chan because there are no individual feeds, only a few giant public ones, and anonymity is allowed. That's hard bits creating the difference, not soft social norms.

<comment><AUTHOR> DailyBooth could easily switch on anonymity - there's nothing technically difficult about that. But 4chan has a culture that allows for anonymous posts, which is why I think the context of a community is often more important in defining a service that technology.

Admittedly, individual feeds do change the way users behave a lot...but I'd argue that this feeds into changing the context that the tech is place in ;-)</comment></comment>


How to Get Started with App Store Optimization - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-get-started-with-app-store-optimization/ <comment><USER2> I find it deeply weird to see a guide to ASO in 2017 that doesn't mention Search Ads.

Like Google Adwords, Apple's Search Ads allow you to buy keywords for searches on the App Store. Rather than toying around with keyword research tools, just sit down with your team and brainstorm a bunch of keywords. Then set a reasonable budget, buy those terms, and see which ones convert best.

Even if none of the ads are actually profitable, they can tell you which terms to directly incorporate into your limited-space keywords list, description, subtitle, and other metadata. Then, if you're lucky and good, you can start ranking for those terms organically.</comment>