End the Gun Epidemic in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/opinion/end-the-gun-epidemic-in-america.html <comment><USER2> Leave it to a private institution like the NY times to have the gonads to do what Obama will not.

Should we start a countdown, or an over/under pool, on when Obama will actually do something about this "gun epidemic"? Obviously gun control is a matter for Congress, but there is plenty of precedent where a President has galvanized public opinion to drive political change. One instance (albeit trivial) is when Pres. Ford in the 70s asked the nation to cut down on energy use. By commanding the airwaves and print media (a unilateral option still available to any sitting president), the next week citizens across the nation wore these stupid buttons in response.

There are phenomenal tools available to the president to completely by-pass conventional political process. It is merely up to him to risk his own political capital and legacy to pull the trigger. Some may call it an abuse of power but if our society believes supremely in following one's conscience than surely history will vindicate him.

This could be one of Obama's biggest miscalculations. If Obama is not careful, his few paragraphs in high school textbooks will include a sentence that reads, "Obama's presidency is marked by his lack of response to the American Gun Epidemic of the early 21st century, which during his tenure saw [1,000] lives lost, including 22 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, leaving it to his successor to enact substantive gun control policy..."

</comment><comment><USER3> What gun epidemic? Gun violence is near an all time low.

<comment><USER4> It's necessary to create a galvanizing idea in the population in order to control them - hence the drumming of "gun epidemic" by government and media when the statistics show otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do the same people who think there is a gun epidemic and guns need to be controlled more also think there is a drug epidemic and drugs need to be controlled more? It seems the same reasoning holds. Interestingly to me, conservatives and liberals seem to be inversely inconsistent on the underlying reasoning.

<comment><USER6> Reading your and similar comments made me think about it, and I came to the conclusion that the commonality between drugs and guns is superficial.

Starting with what they have in common, I would say the restriction of either creates a black market, so that either allows criminal organizations to make a profit selling them. I think there is a difference even there though, since you can argue that criminals still benefit from loosening of gun regulations, because they would have easier access to guns. The primary buyers of illegal firearms are gangs and similar organizations, so that market is mainly there to support criminals who would not be able to obtain them without it. I don't know if that would change with increased restrictions though - maybe some otherwise law-abiding people would be willing to buy illegal guns for self- defense. On the other hand, I can't see how legalizing drugs could benefit crime organizations, except that maybe they could use their existing infrastructure to pivot into a legal drug business. Maybe that is a significant boon, but it doesn't seem worse than any other "legitimate business" that funds criminal activity.

One of the main arguments in favor of drug legalization is quality control - street drugs often contain adulterants that are more debilitating than the drug itself. From what I know, this can't apply to guns since illegal guns are typically originally-legal guns from ordinary gun manufacturers, and don't have as many quality control issues.

And the way they generate harm is different too - drugs mainly harm the user, and guns mainly harm whoever the gun is used on (may sometimes be the same as the user). So drug legalization might be desirable so the harmful qualities of drugs could be reduced (as earlier), and not restricting guns could be desirable in that people will be able to defend themselves from other people with guns (criminals with guns, an oppressive government). This simplifies the issue a bit, and ignores other factors like drug research or hunting and other non-self-defense uses of guns, but I think it's clear that there is significant room to agree with restricting one but not the other.

My post may reek of bias toward drug legalization, but hopefully you agree that it's not as simple as "If you want to loosen drug/gun restrictions, you should also want to reduce gun/drug restrictions".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Gun epidemic" is a nonsense phrase. This is all complete tripe. If people want to talk about reducing violence then great, let's talk about that. Political game playing like this isn't helping anybody.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was a front page above the fold editorial, which the NY Times has not done since the 1920s.

</comment><comment><USER9> A key problem with this debate is that the NYT knowingly and deliberately prints falsehoods on numerous facets of politics in which it has taken an editorial position.

A key example is their reference to this story, as if it supports the editorial case: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/tough-talk-and- a-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/tough-talk-and-a-cowardly- vote-on-terrorism.html)

With the accompanying quote: "on Thursday every Senate Republican except Mark Kirk of Illinois voted against legislation to prevent people on the F.B.I.'s consolidated terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns or explosives."

Well, the problem with this claim is that the amendment didn't fail because of anything to do with terrorism -- it's because that amendment would have _overridden the language regarding the repeal of elements of Obamacare._

Here's the proposed language it is looking to overlay: [https://www.congress.gov/congressional- record/2015/12/01/sen...](https://www.congress.gov/congressional- record/2015/12/01/senate-section/article/S8245-2) (the Obamacare component repeal)

Now, here's the Feinstein amendment (scroll down to "SA 2910" portion, read it only): [https://www.congress.gov/amendment/114th-congress/senate- ame...](https://www.congress.gov/amendment/114th-congress/senate- amendment/2910/text)

Now, if you look at the amendment in a vacuum, it looks sorta like what it claims (but it looks odd, to the experienced eye, because there is no mention of a specific criteria for "terrorist" or refer to the FBI watchlist by its proper statute name). So it wouldn't have any effect on its own, being unenforceable vague.

But that's not the point.

Now, note carefully how the legislation starts: _" In lieu of the matter proposed to be inserted, insert the following:"_

See THAT: In LIEU OF the matter ("the matter" being ALL of SA 2874, the Obamacare repeal).

The parent bill is H.R.3762 - Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015, which had NOTHING to do with terrorism, or guns. That's the first clue right there.

Congressional Democrats have used this tactic (overwriting legislation they oppose with _unrelated_ content that sounds obviously beneficial in order to trick the media into carrying water for their politicking) clear back to the Tom Foley days, if not Tip O'Neill or beyond.

The ignorant media consumers have been duped, successfully, because few bother to look at the bills...

...which, in this case, took me all of about 8-10 clicks in total.

</comment><comment><USER10> Absolutely. I'm consistently surprised that things like [1] are not seen as absurd and even illegal. I found another article, "Gun homicides in Poland are about as common as deaths from bicycle riders being hit by cars in the United States" (and many other variations) [2] very sad, too. How is it that a civilised nation allows such things to happen? The US seems like a very cool place, with so much potential, but increasingly, i'm considering putting it on my personal blacklist as far as destinations to look for work go. I just can't imagine living in fear of some concealed-carry-permit holding goon deciding to shoot the place up (and that's not even considering the violence perpetrated by legitimate LEOs...).

Why would you want to have a killing machine lying around at home? That sounds horrific.

1\. [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/02/gun-tv- home-s...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/02/gun-tv-home- shopping-channel)

2\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/upshot/in-other- countries-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/upshot/in-other-countries- youre-as-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-falling-object-as-a-gun.html) (was on HN recently)

<comment><USER11> "I just can't imagine living in fear of some concealed-carry-permit holding goon deciding to shoot the place up."

You don't need a concealed-carry permit to carry a concealed gun; you just need one to do it LEGALLY. I would venture to guess that a person who carries concealed with the intent of committing murder will not have bothered to get a permit.

My reasoning for keeping a killing machine (it lies around either in a safe or on my person at all times) is because crime happens, and criminals are willing to do things like use force and/or weapons. Police can't be everywhere, and while their response time here is pretty good, it's generally more than enough time for the criminals to do what they want and escape. I'd be happy to go back in time and un-invent guns, but as it stands, I don't see any way to remove all of them from all criminals' hands. So it seems to me the only viable preventive measure is for citizens to defend themselves with the same tools the criminals illegally use to commit their crimes.

<comment><USER10> That's one side of it, and it's a pretty common rebuttal to hear. I have some thoughts on that.

If tomorrow all gun possession (except perhaps by LEO, but even that is debatable IMHO) was made illegal, then within one year i'm sure there would be many less guns in circulation (without considering who owns them). In my books this is a net win, because a criminal entering the scene at that point in time will arguably have a harder time sourcing a gun than is currently the case. Profit, i would say. Indeed the stable state of this system is, as you point out, that only non-law-abiding citizens will be in possession of guns, but that is collateral i'm willing to accept (as in the society where i currently live. Death rate per capita by guns is much lower here than in the US, see my linked article from The Guardian). The end game of your desired society seems to me that it's an arms race (excuse my wording): everyone who wants to be 'safe' should have a gun, therefore criminals have more incentive to have guns, etc.

The other question i have is how one explains the fact that in many societies where gun possession is not legal, the situation is far from the doom scenario where criminals with guns are rife. Of course, they exist, and of course shit happens, but it still seems that the evidence (just the statistics, no moral arguments) points to the desirability of outlawing gun possession.

And finally, no matter how carefully you treat and/or store your gun, it is still more likely (even if the likelihood is only epsilon) to accidentally go off or get played with by a child than my gun, which does not exist at all.

<comment><USER9> "Indeed the stable state of this system is, as you point out, that only non- law-abiding citizens will be in possession of guns, but that is collateral i'm willing to accept"

You have just described present-day Mexico. How much safer do you feel when there, versus when in the U.S.?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


North America Just Ran Out of Old-School Internet Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/09/north-america-just-ran-old-school-internet-addresses/ <comment><USER2> 5×1028 was almost certainly intended to read 5 times 10 _to the power_ 28.

ARIN's original announcement can be found via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10276711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10276711), by the way.</comment>


Eliminate Frustration from Expense Management - <AUTHOR> https://siftery.com/stories/eliminate-frustration-from-expense-management <comment><USER2> pretty nifty gmail extension!</comment>


Telnet Control of Toshiba Smart TVs - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/11/telnet-control-of-toshiba-smart-tvs/ <comment><USER2> Article needs a little adjustment. Not everyone's TV will get a DHCP address of 192.168.0.123. If that is a default static IP used by the TV, then it may not even be reachable unless the person is using that range. It is the most common, but not guaranteed.</comment>


How to Get Rid of (Paper) Junk Mail - <AUTHOR> https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/05/no-sweat-tech-get-rid-of-paper-junk-mail/ <comment><USER2> Mail can simply be refused: [https://uspstrackingpoint.com/how-to-refuse-usps- mail/](https://uspstrackingpoint.com/how-to-refuse-usps-mail/)

<comment><USER3> That's not an official USPS site

<comment><USER2> This is: [https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/508.pdf](https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/508.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


A Unix Shell poster from 1983 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/0xUID/status/1051208357850345472?s=20 <comment><USER2> >@ kill line

I think I saw this in _The Unix Programming Environment_ by Kernighan and Pike. @ doesn't seem to do anything using various shells on any systems I can quickly think of trying:

* /bin/sh (dash) on Linux on AMD64

* zsh on Linux on AMD64, NetBSD/amd64 (Xen domU), NetBSD/sparc64, Solaris 10 on Sparc64

* bash on Linux on AMD64

* /bin/sh on NetBSD/amd64 (Xen domU), NetBSD/sparc64, Solaris 10 on Sparc64, Tru64 V5.1 2650 on Alpha

* pdksh on OpenBSD on AMD64

None of those seemed to treat @ as anything special so I decided to go older, but…

* /bin/csh and /bin/sh on 4.3BSD on simh-vax780

…equally bust. Maybe I'm remembering the syntax wrong? I don't have the book with me now. Otherwise, wonder when this feature was removed? Probably after video terminals with erasable characters became commonplace.

<comment><USER3> @ was actually the try driver's default kill character through 7th Edition or thereabouts. It was changed to ^U when CRT terminals became common, since those could actually erase the input, and there was no need to leave a visible marker showing killed text.

I think the erasing behavior came from 2BSD. That's where I saw it first in Unix.

<comment><USER2> Yep, I assume the change was due to change from paper teletypes to CRT terminals. 2BSD is interesting, because that would make this likely a V7/SysIII/SysV poster since in 1983 they were already releasing 4.2BSD. The Unix Programming Environment was released in 1984 so that part might have confused BSD users already back when it was released! I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T continued with @ and # all the way to SVR4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a larger version that isn't a photo: [https://i.imgur.com/iicvkdp.png](https://i.imgur.com/iicvkdp.png)

</comment><comment><USER5> I was expecting this one instead:

[https://i.imgur.com/qMN1are.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/qMN1are.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> So the "improper" use of cat, for printing files on screen, dates back to at least 1983. I consider it legitimized.

<comment><USER7> Cat is fine for reading a file. It's when you 'cat <file> | grep <word>' that it becomes improper use.

<comment><USER8> TeMPOraL got the adjective wrong. The correct adjective is "useless".

* [http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html](http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would buy a reproduction in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER10> Funny seeing this pop up as I've spent this whole weekend working on a Rust POSIX shell: [https://github.com/nixpulvis/oursh](https://github.com/nixpulvis/oursh).

`&` is my next thing to implement.

</comment><comment><USER8> The challenge here is to identify the 1983 Unix, or whether it is indeed one single Unix.

It has the old line discipline defaults for the eof, kill, and interrupt special characters. But it also has a job control shell and the susp special character. It does not mention either Mail or mailx. login is apparently the shell built in that overlays the current shell, and there are both vi and ex for the visual and line mode editors. But there's a help command, too.

<comment><USER2> So, in 1983 I think the possible variants are 4.2BSD, SunOS 1.0, Xenix 3.0, SVR1.

Someone in a sibling thread mentioned the kill line characters were already replaced around 2BSD. SVR1 had vi and ex, too. `lpr` is BSDian, I think, but maybe System V included that too as an alternative.

It's hard to tell, really. At the time SVR1 was out and included fairly many bits of BSD in it, as did Xenix. The only thing I can really say is that SunOS is unlikely, since it was designed for workstations with video monitors from day 1 and the kill characters seem anachronistic since erasing was a standard feature in terminals already and default behavior in current BSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that `pr` and `troff` still exists on OS X Mojave!

<comment><USER12> `pr` is part of the POSIX standard, so of course it still hangs around! Can't remove a thing like that! I don't think `troff` is part of POSIX, but since it used to be (still is?) the standard tool for typesetting man pages, it's not so surprising it's still around.

<comment><USER13> Man pages are typeset with nroff to the console and troff to the printer. Yes, you can print manpages, and they turn out quite nice: try "man -t bash > bash.ps" to produce a postscript file which can be printed or converted to PDF etc.

<comment><USER14> Okay. You kind of blew my mind. My `man` command doesn't seem to have the `-t` switch, but I can do this

        MANPAGER=mupdf man -T pdf man

and, bam! I'm reading a pdf man page for `man`. On my system `man` is symlinked to `mandoc` and I've apparently got the latest version from here:

[http://mandoc.bsd.lv/](http://mandoc.bsd.lv/)

Better yet, the `-T` switch seems to take a decent selection of options, even markdown and html!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the comments on Twitter someone said "This inspired Debian". What's that story about?

<comment><USER16> Probably Debian's logo

<comment><USER17> The Debian logo is based on the idea of magic smoke, not this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was Fortran called F77 back then?

<comment><USER19> F77 is the 1977 revision of Fortran standard, which brought major new features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where is "yes"?</comment>


Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a factor of about 3x - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240 <comment><USER2> I tried it after the comments in a previous HN post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850135)).

My results were very positive when idle (I can finally start FF and have it in the background without fans blasting).

However, just scrolling up and down in the default mozilla website increases power usage brutally (macOs activity monitor showed the energy impact as 200).

I'm still glad to see that fixes are finally coming, even though it's not usable for me yet.

If we get to a point of having it fixed and being able to use webrenderer on macbooks to have the gpu drawing, it could be a 180 for firefox's usability on macOs

I would really like an ETA for the rest of the changes.

<comment><USER3> Odd, I've just tried with Current FF and I can't get usage scrolling up and down that page to get above 6.3%

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013)

<comment><USER4> I wonder if this discrepancy could have something to do with switching to discrete graphics or something along those lines. iMacs can run their graphics card always and are designed to take that noise into account. If OP has a laptop, he might be hearing the graphics card revving up after being idle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this also solve the 100% cpu usage on retina screens and the complete locking of macOS every now and then?

How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

<comment><USER6> > How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

You can try it out now. Open a terminal:

$ brew cask install firefox-developer-edition

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles

$ ls -l

(Determine which directory is your current profile directory. It should be recently modified and end with .default-release. $ cp -R this directory to .dev-edition-default and start Firefox Developer Edition.)

Then in about:config put gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

I have to say that with a lot of tabs Tree Tab Style is still taking up a lot of cycles. Up to the point it (nearly) hangs. At such point, I switch to Sideberry which _does not_ , use OneTab, and start from there. Perhaps setting browser.tabs.20FpsThrobber to true solves this. Trying that out now.

<comment><USER5> Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

Setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true makes firefox unusable as alerts aren't readable (might be theme dependent).

The only setting that you need to get FF to work on macos with a retina screen is the 'low resolution' mode trick. But then all text, etc isn't as smooth.

I am now running some tests with the new nightly, so far it seems like it fixes the issues and I am very excited about this!

<comment><USER6> > Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

It isn't, but this fix has already been around for a while. I've been using it for about a week. Back then, I was advised to run Firefox Developer Edition. I'd rather run that, than Nightlies.

<comment><USER7> according to @whimboo[0], these specific changes will land later this week on the developer edition.

[0] [https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168476885766082561](https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168476885766082561)

<comment><USER6> Note the wording: "all of these changes". The first part of the change which I've been using for a week now, is already in Developer Edition. It has the largest effect. The most recent change has a small (but noticeable) effect.

FWIW, Nightly just managed to crash my MBP. Which, for the record, is normally rock stable.

<comment><USER8> Caveat emptor: You are likely to be running with altered config settings, as indicated by your advice above to others, and it's occasionally found that about:config changes are what are causing crashes. Consider unwinding your changes to provide a more accurate outcome. (I'm not part of Firefox, just pointing out an especially common expert user self-inflicted issue.)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the heads up. It hasn't crashed ever since (the nature of the crash made it appear related to using Nightly). I'll be switching back to Developer Edition ASAP as either b3 or b4 has the same fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just installed it. And had gmail running on it and Chrome at the same time. Firefox Nightly showed to be using significant power while Chrome was not. I think this still has a long way to go before I switch to Firefox both in terms of performance and dev tools.

<comment><USER10> You're not the first to complain about the performance of Google property in non-Google browsers.

I'm not sure why it should be, or what it implies, but I've seen more than one person pointing out the difference.

Not being a Google user, I'm quite happy with the current Firefox performance, and delighted that Mozilla is finding even more room to improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone knows how this compares to chrome?

<comment><USER12> It's in the link. The decreases in power usage put it on par with Chrome.

<comment><USER13> So, still terrible then?

The reason I use Safari is because Chrome is unbelievably power-hungry. I didn't know Firefox was even worse.

<comment><USER14> Yes, compared to Safari. The Safari engineering is very impressive! I think there is quite a bit more to come on the Firefox side though, so hopefully they'll close the gap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does the situation compare to other platforms? Android, Linux, Windows?

</comment><comment><USER16> That shows how shitty all previous versions where.

</comment><comment><USER17> What the hell does "decrease by factor 3x" mean? Did power usage previously decrease by 1% and now by 3%? Is power usage now -200%? Seriously, I do not get it.

<comment><USER18> Honestly there nothing ambiguous about it so I don't get why you were confused.

Take the current power, divide by 3, that is the new usage.

<comment><USER17> So decreasing by 3 is the same as decreasing by 66%?

<comment><USER19> Probably some US colloquialism? Doesn't make sense to me either, except in the sense "went down 300%" which obviously wasn't the purpose here.

<comment><USER20> nah, its quite common here even in Southeast Asia</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Sexodus, Part 1: The men giving up on women and checking out of society - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/12/04/The-Sexodus-Part-1-The-Men-Giving-Up-On-Women-And-Checking-Out-Of-Society <comment><USER2> I wouldn't blame it all on radical feminists. Few people realize that the chief idea behind the 1995 'welfare reform' in the US was that a lot of single moms on welfare were not getting a dime from dad.

Before then you could go to the next state and there was nothing they could do to you, and many 'deadbeat dads' would stay in the same state, not pay, and not face any real sanction. Today it is a federal crime to not pay interstate child support and they can efficiently deduct payments from your bank account and paycheck.

In some cases the new system is an improvement but it is not hard to find cases where some guy has to pay more support than he can afford to a mom who makes a lot more money.

Another problem I see is that almost no men are involved in early child care and elementary education. I think kids get a number of bad messages, but the worst is that school is a 'girl thing'.

In any cass the phenomenon here is well advanced in Japan and nobody has blamed feminism there, but the integration of women in the workforce has a huge number of unintended consequences. It is one of the major causes of social mobility freezing in the US. Back then a man would rise socially and bring a family with him, but now the pool of people who satisfy people prejudices has been doubled so men and women from rich families can fill all the good jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not really buying this. Look at the Nordic countries that rank highest in the world in gender equality[1]. They certainly don't have problems with men "checking out". In Sweden and Iceland the difference between male and female unemployment is a couple percentage points (< 5%)[2][3]. As with any major economic change (industrialization, technological revolution, etc..) there will be growing pains. Bringing women into the workforce is a massive change and of course there will be some casualties. But as with the industrial and technological revolutions, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone saying life was better before these events (environmental problems not withstanding)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report) [2] [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/long-term- unemploymen...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/long-term-unemployment- male-percent-of-male-unemployment-wb-data.html) [3] [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/iceland/long-term- unemployme...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/iceland/long-term-unemployment- female-percent-of-female-unemployment-wb-data.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> One can have a perfectly fulfilling life without a partner, and lack of a partner doesn't mean your life is "empty".

People in relationships aren't necessarily happier or more fulfilled than others. There are plenty of relationships that are dysfunctionnal while they last and miserable when they end. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to notice that, or blame feminism to opt out of it.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to see some references for that claim. Far as I know, most measures of quality of life improve with a partner. Even blood pressure for heavens sake.

I suspect 'sour grapes' at work here.

<comment><USER6> >I'd like to see some references for that claim. Far as I know, most measures of quality of life improve with a partner.

You can tell you're on Hacker News when someone asks for verifiable sources for things like feelings, hah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a horrid piece of crap that article is. I feel dirty just trying to read it.

At its core, it complains that men don't and can't know "the rules", and yet it complains about the existence of (unfortunately but clearly necessary) classes that teach them those rules (consent). The article even explicitly doesn't like that you need consent at all.

At that point I really don't know what to say anymore. This article is coming from a really toxic attitude about women and sex.

In any case, I think that whatever problems there are, are mainly caused by extreme gender segregation. The more culture treats men and women as totally different species, the more misunderstanding and lack of respect there's going to be. More egalitarian societies don't have this problem.

</comment><comment><USER8> My feelings are very similar to the author of this article.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a parody article, right?

<comment><USER3> He even trotted out that worn-out trope that woman use rape allegations as a tool against men. That argument should be taken out behind the barn and shot. Its old and it don't hunt no mo'.

I was really hoping for some thought-provoking counterpoints to feminism, but sadly there were none to be found. Just some anecdotal whinging and a couple quotes from the Ann Coulter of feminism.

<comment><USER10> Just calling something "a worn-out trope" does not make it false, or any less serious. It needs to be studied, verified, and denied if that is the case. But until then, there have been numerous studies with wildly differing findings. Everywhere for 1.5-2% all the way up to 90%. Even if it's just 1.5-2%, that is no laughing matter, or one to be dismissed as as old, or "shot".

Many studies regarding false-rape accusations are linked to from the wiki page:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Okay, so those men who will only accept a woman's company if she is subordinate are having a harder time to find a willing partner.

What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER10> That's a completely false misrepresentation of what the article is talking about. To boil it all down to "men can't find willing partners if 'she' isn't subordinate to them" is quite frankly, very dishonest.

I'm disappointed if you didn't actually read the article before commenting on it the way you did. But I would be quite a bit less appalled at that option, than the one of you having actually read the article, and still interpreted the way it seems you did from your post.

<comment><USER11> If it's a false misrepresentation, that would make it a true representation, no?

Regardless, be appalled, I read it and all I heard was an obsolete species of man whining that it sucks to be a dinosaur.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thank you for posting this. It was a fascinating read.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seriously boo hoooo Man up for a fucking change and deal with it. This is the same cry baby crap as gamer gate.. If a man is not having sex with a woman.. its because he wants to have sex with men.. We have to deal with the hand we are dealt. I like women and am not afraid to admit it. I could go on and on about how screwed over I have been because I am a man who works for a living but I dont.. I just find a woman I can relate to and learn to love and be loved. We owe a debt to the men and women who change our culture and make treating women with respect and humanity possible. It makes us less violent and less prone to being killed in a war. So I say get over your bromance fetish and deal with being set free

<comment><USER6> It's attitudes like those you've presented here that play a big role in the withdrawal from society a lot of these people (myself included) face.

>If a man is not having sex with a woman.. its because he wants to have sex with men..

If I have a choice between attempting to deal with women who have no interest in me (or a vain interest) with potential destructive consequences to my quality of life, or choosing instead to just say "fuck it" and withdraw to my comfortable job and pornography, I'm going to (and have for years) pick the latter. That doesn't make me "gay", it makes me unwilling to take an inflated risk for little reward. A truly equal relationship is appealing to me, as it would be to others, but that is harder and harder to find.

But you keep doing you. Flaunt your alpha male superiority in our faces. We frankly don't care, because that's not a system we want to be part of if we can help it.

<comment><USER14> I'm 52, married w/ teenage kids so I personally don't have a horse in this "race".

From what I can tell from listening to my kids, girls seem to own their sexuality more than they did when I was a kid. That changes things but I'm not seeing the sort of changes in that article.

I'll admit that as I read that article the idea that "these guys have no game" crossed my mind but I really don't know, I'm not out there dating.

Do people really believe that article? Is fluxquanta's choice a common one? If so, that's a bummer. Porn is fine and all but the love of a partner is an entirely different thing.

I have to wonder if we're talking about a section of society that has a tough time interacting with women (and understandably tough time, women are complicated). Seems like the marriage rate would be going down if this article is correct. Anyone have stats on that? OK, I googled and read for a while and while marriage rates are going down, the sense I got was it was mostly about economics, women aren't that excited about marrying broke people. It appears like the rate amongst upper middle class people is pretty stable.

<comment><USER7> > I have to wonder if we're talking about a section of society that has a > tough time interacting with women (and understandably tough time, women are > complicated)

Women aren't complicated at all. Women are people, just like men. A relationship with a woman is no harder than one with a man, you just have to be honestly interested in the other person. The core of the problem is that a lot of men keep seeing (and presenting) women as alien, as not-real-people, as figures who only exist for sexual relationships and porn. If that's your attitude, then dealing with women who want to be treated as people is going to be hard.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving from Cloud to Self-Hosted - <AUTHOR> My business partner and I are building a bootstrapped B2B SaaS, and designed it from the start with the intention of running it on Azure (or AWS).
The use of Postgres and TimescaleDB is core to the product. But now we discover that Azure's managed Postgres is still stuck on an antiquated version of TimescaleDB, and we've also realised that our compute requirements are much greater than originally anticipated. Aside from the managed Postgres issue, it would cost too much to host at a cloud provider, so we're now considering self-hosting.
The components we need are fairly modest, but we need everything to be highly-available and backed up:

  - <USER2>
  - Blob storage
  - Message queue
  - <USER3>
 We're struggling with HA for Postgres in particular. I'm looking for advice and OSS solutions that would simplify and give more of a "semi-managed" feel, to help us deploy our own HA stack somewhere like Hetzner. <comment><USER4> Interesting. Would try to answer in short but rather ask you go through this webinar video i have given sometime back.

[https://www.percona.com/resources/webinars/enterprise- grade-...](https://www.percona.com/resources/webinars/enterprise-grade- postgresql-built-open-source-tools)

Like some people mentioned - you could Patroni for HA. It is a template that could be configured with etcd like distributed consensus key value stores for leader election using the world famous RAFT algorithm. Could use Watchdog/Softdog for avoiding split-brain. Now, we could also do some actions before and after failover which can be scripted. Regarding HA on other pieces such as Blob store, you could use CRR using the AWS S3. You could just mount the S3 via NFS Gateway to DB servers and let the job be done in a more simpler way. Similarly, all the problems you mentioned are solved, however, anything you feel is still challenging after going through the webinar recording, please reply back here.

</comment><comment><USER5> You could try Google Cloud and you may realize here are a lot more costs you haven't considered which make self hosting more expensive (maintenance and your time). Most SaaS and EE companies are running in the cloud, so why do you think cloud is cost prohibitive? What would happen if 200 people wanted to use your service tomorrow?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware of the convenience of cloud, and I've been using both Azure and AWS for some years - it's very true that it can save you a lot of time and headache. I love working with Azure in particular.

But it's also very true that it's expensive - compute and bandwidth costs elsewhere are a fraction of the cost. Fact is, we're just 2 blokes bootstrapping a new small business with no guarantee of success - no VC funding or massive AWS credit here! Given the current climate, it's also risky timing to spend a small fortune on cloud every month.

And on the Postgres side, it would be wonderful to have full control over extensions (we really kind of _need_ this).

<comment><USER5> I run a fully capable system on GCloud for less than $200 a month. It can scale quite readily if things take off and fits within budget as I too bootstrap.

I'm working on https:/github.com/hofstadter-io

What are you working on? Anything we can check out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Still in stealth mode I'm afraid. I've worked mainly with Azure, a bit with AWS, but never with GCP.

Just had a quick look at Postgres pricing on GCP. Not sure if I'm pricing it wrong, but it looks like a very modest HA setup with 16GB RAM, 2vCPUs and 1TB of storage would run to almost $600/m.

They have "shared CPU" instances too, but they max out at 1.7GB of RAM and aren't covered by SLA. The pricing is also confusing, as it's not clear of the "HA" editions include the secondary instance or not, and HA SSD storage prices seem very expensive.

And the real killer, they don't support TimescaleDB at all :(

<comment><USER5> If you use k8s, you might have a look at the Zolando Postgres operator. Not sure if it supports TimescaleDB, but it should cover the rest of your needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Patroni is a good choice for fully automated PostgreSQL HA. Depending on what you are comfortable with, you could either deploy it using something like Ansible on bare-metal or VMs, or with Spilo and postgres-operator on Kubernetes.

</comment><comment><USER7> We use pg replication and Kafka for message queues - ie streaming data. An alternative is pulsar which has less management overhead.

Haven't found a good alternative to blob but consider minion

<comment><AUTHOR> I use minio elsewhere and it's been rock solid (altho it's for personal use, so only on a single node), so it would be my first choice for blob storage assuming it supports HA.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you look to find large consulting jobs? - <AUTHOR>

  1.  Company A finds out about a large consulting job
  2.  Company A puts an ad out for someone to build it
  3.  Small company B (or a couple freelancers) puts in a proposal to Company A for $x.
  4.  Company A puts in a proposal for $x + $y
 Now, the smaller guys are getting work and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.  But small company B would like to put in their own proposal.  Basically, how is Company A finding these jobs?  Is it all referral based? <comment><USER2> A few thoughts off the top of my head.

1) You've gotta network the shit out of it if you want the big $$$. Otherwise get ready for assholes on craigslist who are looking for "a college student that wants to build their portfolio"

2) Pricing balls. You need them. It's a huge signaling factor. If you are charging $40/hr it doesn't matter how good you are because you've already communicated you suck. My biz partner heard Obie Fernandez (I think) saying if you develop in Rails you should be charging $175/hr minimum. Arbitrary but it works. As a programmer you have to constantly deal with feelings of inadequacy that will make you want to flinch. Don't worry though, it gets easier with each project.

3) Don't take projects less than $10,000. That means no band websites, no real estate companies, etc. They are a waste of your time. The problem with referrals is that if you charge one person $40 you're not gonna get a referral to drop $175. Stay hungry.

4) Partnerships. Quote projects in the $30k-$250k range. Maybe the client doesn't have that much money, so take $20k and half the equity. Never ever do a partnership unless they have lots of skin ($) in the game.

5) Finding new business. What is the best product or tool you've built already? Find businesses in related industries or ways to apply the technology in other industries. The only way to do this is to read a lot and talk to other people about what their pain points are. Don't write any code. Spend time thinking and talking about the problem domain and then seek people out and pitch them. If you have actually thought through what THEIR problems are it's usually an easy sell.

6) Get ahold of some proposals from some big design firms that you respect. Copy their style.

7) Watch this video from Carlos Segura. He is talking to designers but it's all the same. You have to learn how to communicate like this or biz people will not respect you. You have to proactively define the relationship up front.

<http://www.businesspov.com/article/315>

8) Have an opinion. If someone has a shitty idea don't you dare code it just because they are paying you. The reason people hire consultants is because they are clueless. If you just do what the tell you then they rightfully will assume that you are clueless too. Fight through it with them and you both come out ahead.

<comment><USER3> I'll endorse everything oldgregg said here PLUS one critical factor: be competent.

You shouldn't expect to jump into the pool with the big dogs unless you can swim. Good talk is one thing, but if you can't back it up with genuine competency (unless you're working solo) you'll be found out _fast_ and nobody will like you. At all. And you can forget about referrals after that.

I've worked large contract jobs for several years and love it. There are a few of us who follow each other around in my industry and we can spot the fakes pretty quickly. If you can really deliver on the goods--i.e., you're as productive as 5 or 6 average programmers and can communicate effectively-- you'll be able to ask for what you want and get it most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm young so I must relate my experience as limited and my advice as such, but most of the jobs we did in NYC came through networking. We had established relationships inside big players. These relationships fed the sales pipeline and kept us busy. Networking and, more importantly, building relationships were what provided the 80% of leads (ie. If there was a single effort that yielded the highest results it was networking).

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that in the government sector, there are similar websites to BC Bid (Where the Province of BC and BC municipal governments post their product and service requests). Is this the same in the US? <http://www.bcbid.gov.bc.ca/open.dll/welcome>

<comment><USER6> Yes. In the US, there are a couple of sites. The one that I can think of right off-hand is <https://www.fbo.gov/>.

There is also a book called Winning Government Contracts by Malcolm Parvey & Deborah Alston. ISBN: 978-1-56414-975-6

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're a couple of freelancers it may help if you can bill and present yourself through a corporate identity. Corporations have less of a problem outsourcing to other corporations than they do hiring individuals, especially if it is more than one individual for a single job, even if they apply together.

It makes it very hard to manage responsibilities when you subcontract with multiple entities at once so a corporation will likely pass you over for that reason alone.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is mostly done through networking in non-tech circles, with executives of other types of businesses that would need the consulting projects. And responding to lots of RFPs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks to everyone for such great responses.</comment>


Human readable QR Code Generator (Kufic Inspired) - <AUTHOR> http://hrqr.org/

<comment><USER2> Looks like P↔Q is only two blocks of difference… Which means that a single- block damage is unrecoverable. Unfortunate…

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks pretty well done. Last time i used QR codes, they looked gibberish

</comment><comment><USER4> I am gonna make my t-shirt that.

</comment><comment><USER5> looks pretty nice and clean. i like it!

</comment><comment><USER6> brilliant!</comment>


Somebody Has To Say It: It's Time For iTunes Lite  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/09/somebody-has-to-say-it-its-time-for-itunes-lite/ <comment><USER3> I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide a compelling reason why those features shouldn't be in iTunes if you want to make this argument. "I don't need them" isn't good enough.

Is 88MB too much for you to download? Is it too much to store on your hard disk? Is that "Burn Disk" button in the bottom right when you're viewing a playlist too distracting? Is the UI hard to navigate now with all these features? Is the "Share on Facebook" contextual menu item getting in your way when you're trying to listen to music?

All of those things (and more) could be potential arguments against adding those features to iTunes. However, I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of iTunes users would answer "no" to every one of those questions. Apple has done a great job of adding features to iTunes without sacrificing much usability at all. If you click the button that hides the Genius bar, then the main screen is still just a list of playlists on the left, and your music library in the main pane. Pretty simple.

Thousands of other people use and love those features. People love Macs _because_ they don't need a separate application to burn CDs. Have you forgotten what a refreshing experience it is for a PC user to use a Mac for the first time and realize that it does everything they want out of the box?

Presenting users with a set of checkboxes during install is one of the worst things you could possibly do. That's a usability nightmare. It's like setting a trap for your users. How do they know which components they need? How can they be sure it will work if they don't install all the components? What if they choose incorrectly and want to install more components later? Is that possible? The lack of these types of installers is yet another breath of fresh air when you switch to Mac OS X. In most cases you just drag the app into your Applications folder.

Apple's applications need to work for ordinary people, not just techies. If you're going to accuse Apple of getting usability wrong, you better be a legitimate _expert_ and have a compelling argument.

<comment><USER4> There are some good points in this comment. Still, have you watched over the shoulder of a non-techie trying to use a recent version of iTunes? Accomplishing many goals, like configuring what content ends up on your iPod, is remarkably confusing for several people I've observed (and then helped).

I'd just suggest that the number of installs of iTunes doesn't necessarily correlate to user satisfaction. If you own an iPod or iPhone, you have essentially no choice but to use iTunes, particularly if you're not technically inclined enough to investigate alternatives. Apple has a captive audience for iTunes.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right. Apple is daisy-chaining each one of its products to get more and more users. The iPod/iPhone requires iTunes, which requires Quicktime and Webkit, and which (on one occasion) was bundled with Safari.

Because Apple has a captive audience, their usual aesthetic of hiding everything complex and letter the power user discover things has given over to the profit motive. Apple has an incentive to showcase features like the Genius Sidebar right off the bat, because Genius links into the iTunes Music Store.

I read an interesting article on Steve Jobs and the original design of the iDVD application: [http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/28/idvd_hung_out_...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/28/idvd_hung_out_to_dry_as_apple_pushes_movies_online.html)

The key bit for me was in this quote:

Evangelist and a group of Astarte developers described pitching the simplified app concept to Steve Jobs. "Jobs never glanced at their presentation," the article noted. "Instead, _he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a square. This is the program_ , he said. Users will drag their movies here to create DVD menus. Then they'll click 'burn.' That's it. 'I don't want to hear anything about drawers or pop-out' windows, he said."

Seems like Steve needs to take his own hypercritical hatchet to iTunes. ([http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a...](http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.ars)). It would be just in time for iTunes X (pron. iTunes ten).

<comment><USER6> That is because all these devices center around media.

Note, iMovie, iPhoto, Garage Band, Final Cut, are separate, because they would not make sense as part of iTunes (but they do integrate beautifully with iTunes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't usually like techcrunch but this hit the spot for me. Itunes is broken for my (simple) needs. A 'lite' option that is basically a file manager would be very welcome.

<comment><USER6> You can always double click on your .mp3 in your file system browser, no?

<comment><USER8> That's far less convenient than a searchable bank of music that plays consecutively.

<comment><USER6> i.e. iTunes.

<comment><USER8> Yep!

Problem is, iTunes is so good at what it does (in terms of satisfaction, anyway) that it's got no real Mac competitor, so that the people like me who get pissed off at small things like not looking like a goddamn toy don't have anything to switch to. If only I could code.

<comment><USER6> Just let it go; enjoy your music, podcasts, videos, iPhone apps.

<comment><USER8> I do. I'm an outspoken supporter of Apple. It's just that such a significant UI downgrade feels a little like a betrayal.

<comment><USER9> you could always.. just.. you know.. not upgrade

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree that iTunes needs reworking, but I don't believe a Lite version is the answer.

I'd rather see Apple rethink the entire iTunes interface and try to rebuild it while making it simpler - think iMovie '09 or the iPhone. Asking for a Lite version sounds similar to Henry Ford's customers wanting a faster horse - <USER2> doesn't fix the underlying problems.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is exactly why I run Rockbox on my iPod. I can now use simple folder- organization to sort my music and have it show up exactly the same way on my iPod! I hated having one organizational structure on the disk and an entirely different one when I opened iTunes. Who knows if the ID3 tags in all my various mp3s are correct, standardized, or contain the information I would need to find them? In iTunes, I'd often have to go back to my folders to find a file, figure out how that file was tagged, then go back to iTunes and find it again!

When I find mp3s online or get them from friends, I never bother to edit their ID3 tags, but I often sort them using a simple tree-structure that's built into almost every device called a _file system_. I'm used to storing documents, photos, and source code this way. Why should I learn a new way just for one app? If my files' ID3 tags were entered correctly or can be downloaded automatically, I'm happy of course, but when I make my own mp3's or find ones with empty tags I hardly ever bother to fix them. What's the use?

<comment><USER6> Isn't the whole premise of the iTunes approach that you shouldn't have to bother with folder structures? I mean, really, what's the advantage of doing that?

Isn't it better that you can literally just type in a keyword and the system shows you the matching music?

<comment><USER11> The advantage of a folder structure is that I know where my files are all the time. If I use another OS or copy files to another device, I can just browse through my files just like I'm on my own desktop. Rockbox also allows you to browse by ID3 tags, but I rarely use this. I have my own classification scheme that doesn't exactly fit with iTunes' artist/genre/album scheme. For example, in my spoken audio tree, I have two folders, one called "en", another called "ch". These are for English and Chinese respectively. Sometime, I have an file with Chinese audio, but an English filename. What could be easier than to have a folder for Chinese audio? There's only one thing that I can think of that could improve it, and that would be tagging. Sometimes I have a file that falls under more than one classification. If I could tag it with both that would be great. But this doesn't bother me enough to start using iTunes, which has too many annoyances.

<comment><USER6> 0\. BTW, you can tell iTunes NOT to copy your music into their folder structure. Check it out in Prefs.

1\. Just use iTunes on both OS's. ;-)

2\. In iTunes you can right click on an album, track, etc. and copy it elsewhere.

3\. You can tag songs/albums/etc. multiple ways in iTunes.

I understand where you're coming from, that used to be me; but if you give up your compulsion to control every little (unnecessary) mechanical aspect of managing your media and just let iTunes does what it thinks is right, you'll see that it frees up your time.

<comment><USER11> 0\. I did that, but why can't I browse my folder structure _within_ iTunes? Rockbox lets me do it.

1\. What about Linux? Portable devices not made by Apple?

2\. It's easier to drag a drop a directory or use cp -R /audio /media/mp3player than figure out iTunes' methods.

3\. I give iTunes one star for that one. Hopefully next gen OS will give us the ability to tag files.

<comment><USER12> 3\. Fulltext-search applies to every column, even the not-so-often-filled-out ones. Try mentally reading "Genre" as "Tags"—works perfectly, both practically and semiotically, even when creating playlists. For example, I think I have a few songs from DDR in my library; their genre is "Dance Game Soundtrack". A few from some old japanese equivalent to MP3.com are Genre'd "Indie Asian- language Pop".

<comment><USER13> I do that too, but it doesn't work perfectly.

For instance, how do you select all your tracks with genre Game, without also getting "Love is a losing game", or creating a smart playlist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> iTunes has basically become "Stuff-that-can-be-synched-to-an-iPhone Manager." It could be broken down with little effort—Quicktime Player would get the movie/TV store; iPhoto would get the menu for synching photos; Software Update would get the App Store (and hopefully make it a Mac App Store in the process, because that's really not that much more work), and a new "iDentity" app would be created to handle all the other crap (because I use Gmail's web interface, not Mail.app, but want my Notes synced anyway, goshdarnit. Or they could just make a free reduced-capability version of MobileMe.)

The only thing that's stopping them from doing this is that, right now, you only need to download one thing in order to use an iPod or iPhone on _Windows_ , and that one thing is completely owned as part of the Apple experience. After the conversion, you'd need quite a few more apps, some of which, due to just working through APIs, could usurped by badly-written, no-UX- consideration-given preinstallware that would give Apple a bad name (I can just imagine the "Dell App Store client"—oh, how Apple would rage at that.)

<comment><USER14> What he said.

Apple would not design iTunes like this, if not for the need to deliver it on Windows. It breaks many of its own design rules.

The saddest part for me is seeing the open source desktops head down the same path when this could be a key differentiator for them. Like Apple they bundle a full working desktop with apps that can work together and build on the same libraries. But they don't.

Instead the future appears to be continuing with the totally inappropriate iTunes clone but switching to one that comes with it's on Mono VM and is becoming an independent development platform. It's latest feature is built in photo management! When I read that it was one of those _satire is dead_ moments.

<comment><USER15> What app are you talking about in your last paragraph?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Agreed that iTunes is tries to do too much of everything and what I've noticed from Apple is that there is only the Apple way.

I do really like one feature in iTunes, the Genius playlist is great for people with very large libraries.

And now I have a dedicated device (iPhone) to play music. I only use iTunes to sync.

<comment><USER17> > And now I have a dedicated device (iPhone) to play music. I only use iTunes > to sync.

Same here, but I consider that a failing of iTunes, because I'd prefer to play music on my iPhone rather than deal with iTunes shitty interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be happy with a version doesn't randomly delete a song file (not just a library entry, but the actual file) every few months and doesn't make my X4 940 feel like a Celeron.

<comment><USER6> So if you didn't add new music, over time you'd have nothing left?

<comment><USER18> I suppose I might, given a few centuries...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This guy is certainly entitled to his own opinion but I wonder why he's even using iTunes in the first place. Obviously it doesn't meet his needs or desires. He seems to be having some sort of mental breakdown over iTunes 9 specifically but he's choosing to use any of the alternatives. Why not use VLC? If you can't be bothered to download something new just use QuickTime. Better yet how about Cog? It's open source and 3.8MB. I bet he could dig into the source and slim it down to a cool 3.0MB on the dot.

Just for fun I decided to see how minimal I could make the iTunes GUI: [http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2594/3906199116_89fecdd502_o....](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2594/3906199116_89fecdd502_o.jpg)

Took me about 2 minutes and these are all permanent settings. Change it once, forget about it. Or just be a normal, emotionally stable, human being and make choices that suit your own personal needs.

<comment><USER20> yes for all the grumbling - there things like Cog that seem to do exactly what he is asking for.

I have to say I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum - I use a great deal of the features in iTunes - I keep video in it, I keep TV in it , I have a massive music library , I have several machines round the house that I and the family use to listen/watch stuff. I have an iphone. I buy things in the store.

In all I _love_ the fact it is all integrated and works together without me having to think about it (apart it, must be said, for stupid DRM on video which is a pain). When I used to run winamp on a PC back in the day I used to need a collection of perl scripts to manage the library...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Slightly off topic, but I'd like to know how Apple managed to remove physical media whilst keeping the same pricing.

I'm no economist, but shouldnt the massive iTunes media surplus supply reduce the prices significantly?

<comment><USER22> because the physical inventory was only a small part of the cost. recording costs, promotion, etc haven't gone down. plus you are paying for convenience.

and as is pointed out here often -- price!=cost , price==value

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm so sick of TC whining about every freaking thing! If you want a dead simple music player for OS X then freaking write it!

Maybe it will work about better than that 'dead simple web tablet' we're still waiting for.

</comment><comment><USER24> I still use Winamp. iTunes only gets some CPU time when I need to sync my IPod.

<comment><USER25> You can sync your iPod, unless it is iPod touch or an iPhone, using Winamp ([http://blog.winamp.com/2009/03/11/how-to-manage-music-in- ipo...](http://blog.winamp.com/2009/03/11/how-to-manage-music-in-ipod-using- winamp/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Amen. I've moved to Songbird for playing music on my Mac. It's not perfect, but I prefer it to iTunes. And there's nothing out there that's more compelling. I still use iTunes to sync my phone, but that's what I've come to see iTunes as - a store + a syncing platform, not a music player. There's a real market opportunity sitting there for a slim, slick music player on the Mac.

<comment><USER26> A comment in the techcrunch post tipped me off to <http://ecouteapp.com/> Liking it so far.

<comment><USER27> Wow, that's a very nice app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It amazes me that I read through all of these comments and didn't see one mention of the Zune software. Yes, it's Windows only. Yes, it only syncs with Zunes. BUT, it offers a far better music-playing and music-finding experience. It's laid out better, looks better, is easier to use, has folder monitoring (I can't believe that's still not in itunes), doesn't try to move or edit any of your files or metadata, and overall just performs better.

I actually have a virtual machine of XP just so I don't have to install iTunes on my host Win7 box. I only open it maybe once a month to check out new podcasts that aren't in the Zune marketplace yet. Because of this, I don't want ituneshelper, quicktime, safarai, bonjour, etc etc. installed on my system and put in my Startup group just so I can open iTunes. It's just unnecessary. I cringe every time I see someone struggling with iTunes.

</comment><comment><USER29> Personally, I'd be happy with an iTunes that worked well, was more intuitive, and more responsive.

I like my iPhone. I think the MacBook I use for work is swell. However, iTunes remains one of the most horrible applications that I've ever been forced to use.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like what Banshee is heading, pretty cool!, no mac love yet though (yes there is a experimental version, I don't care I use Ubuntu anyways).

In other words you don't need another iTunes you need iTunes mini-mode.

</comment><comment><USER31> Honestly, the 'genius' sidebar was one step over the boundary. It bogs down iTunes everytime it opens.

Now Facebook Integration? I just want to listen to music, and rip any cds I have left.

<comment><USER32> Uhh, close it? You'll never see it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> i think a better approach would be to split it into separate apps: one for syncing with ipods and iphones, one for listening to music, one for browsing the itunes music store, and so on. all of them could use the same backend data store and xml description files.

<comment><USER6> That'd be crazy. I want to manage all my media from one spot. Think iTunes == media management.

<comment><USER34> You could use the full version of iTunes and leave a lite version to those who wanted that. FWIW, I'd use a lite version - the full thing is a bit of a slug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> its time for my current selected item to scroll into view when I re-sort by a different column. or maybe I'm just being unreasonable, asking for too much?

</comment><comment><USER36> Analyzing gapless playback information...

</comment><comment><USER37> Switch to Mini-Player? (Cmd+Shift+M)

</comment><comment><USER38> iTunes was painful to me the first time I installed it on windows and it got worse over time.

I never picked up the iTunes habit.

</comment><comment><USER39> Need one say it in so many words?

</comment><comment><USER40> Apple has been forcefeeding music lovers for years, but have never been able to give any true nourishment to the unsigned independent musician. Its like eating candy, fried foods, bacon, and soda for the rest of your life. Sounds fun on the surface, and might be a good idea and exciting for a while But if you keep it up, you will die. Or at least end up with a heart attack or other serious illness. Try some vegetables, fish, and water for a change. Or at least another, more nourishing music service. By offering what of what musicians and music lovers want, you actually offer them more "meat" in your service. Makes for more satisfied consumers, and greater brand loyalty.

<comment><USER6> Uhm, right after installing iTunes 9, I got a free 20-pack indy music collection. That's kinda nice.

<comment><USER40> And in comparison to the major label artists such as U2, Kanye West, and Amy Winehouse, how much do you think those indie artists from that free 20 pack are actually earning? Not much. The guidelines are not the same for all musicians.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Who's offering the biggest holiday discounts? - <AUTHOR> http://labs.diffbot.com/pricetracker <comment><AUTHOR> We've been tracking prices across hundreds of retailers for much of 2015, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's Amazon. This list is a subset showing the realtime prices from dozens of merchants on some popular items.

Walmart is a close second and will regularly outprice Amazon on certain items.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to contribute to an open source project. Where do I begin? - <AUTHOR> I'm a graduating CS student and I've always wanted to contribute to a cool open source project. There are languages I really like writing (python in particular) and I think contributing to an open source project would be a good way to do that. I have experience writing relatively high quality code (a couple internships at Google, etc.) but I find it difficult contributing to open source projects. I feel like the barrier to entry on most projects is too high. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Are you familiar with IPython Notebook? If so, you could jump right in on [http://introtopython.org](http://introtopython.org). It's a fully open resource for people interested in teaching and learning Python. I started it last fall, and it is slowly building critical mass. The main parts of the site are Python Essentials and Python Projects.

The biggest thing that will improve the site is having people write up projects they are interested in. For example, someone recently requested a project that shows how to build maps that show changing data, such as traffic around a city on a road map.

Writing up a project is easy. Clone the project, make a new notebook for your project, and submit a pull request. If you are interested let me know, and I'll be happy to help you get started.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be honest it depends on _your_ interests. I would start out with what floats your boat - you did a _couple_ of Google internships - what were they on? DevOps? Big Data Analysis? Do you love maths or music? Build something that you will use each day.

Ok, chosen a project, lets assume it's pyMusicExample on github. It has over 300 issues, most of which have not been touched in months as the main devs are busy at the day jobs.

So, drop them a mail, introducing yourself and start triaging the bugs. Don't go crazy, see recent HN article

Documentation - Sphinx is a fantastic piece of work, as is readthedocs, but most of us do not use it as well as we should. PyMusicExample has code examples in their docs that no longer work. So make a branch and get the docs running doctest / coverage and get the examples upto date.

</comment><comment><USER4> You say you have experience writing high quality code, what frameworks and tools did you use in your code projects? It is likely that a lot of those frameworks you used and libraries you imported for your project are themselves open source projects in need of contributors, and you have experience using them, so you would be a good candidate to contribute to them as well.

For example, since I write Rails and Django apps, the first place I'd look to contribute would be on a popular open source plugin/gem/app for Rails or Django that I use in my projects.

</comment><comment><USER5> Take a look at Gittip[1]. It's a Python-based, crowd funding platform that's also open source and part of the Open Company Initiative[2].

Not only would you be helping build a platform that many people in our industry use to fund their projects and sustain a living, but you can also choose to take your own share of money that Gittip earns through the site.

[1] [https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com](https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com)

[2] [http://www.opencompany.org/](http://www.opencompany.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually, seeing this post and also that I ve struggled in finding those resources, I have created a github repo yesterday which can be used by the repo owners to post the contribution required and the contributors can take a look at it..

[https://github.com/avinoth/OpenSourceForBeginners](https://github.com/avinoth/OpenSourceForBeginners)

only problem, don't know what to do next.. let me know what i could do next..

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't just pick a random project to contribute to.

Learn software that you need to use, for example, if you're a web developer, learn one of the popular frameworks. Once you've mastered it you'll see where the problems are and what you can do to improve it, and then contribute patches.

Basically just find and fix problems with things that you actually use.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://github.com/nyddle/pystash](https://github.com/nyddle/pystash) You're welcome!</comment>


Samsara.js – Reactive layout for user interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://samsarajs.org <comment><AUTHOR> Developer here. Samsara grew out of my work at Famo.us where I was its Chief Architect. It's goal is to think of layout as a stream, and to create user interfaces by composing streams.

Happy to answer any questions.

</comment><comment><USER2> Really like the architecture of streams driving updates to surfaces.</comment>


Bpftrace for Linux 2018 - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for-linux-2018.html <comment><USER2> Hi Brendan, thanks for the update and the work on this! Coming from dtrace, the main thing missing in bpftrace when doing kernel debugging is being able to navigate structs.

You've mentioned that we do have BTF now in Linux 4.18. I've tried to find if it was leveraged in bpftrace, but it looks like it isn't yet. I see you've opened an issue in one of the bpftrace forks related to this here: [https://github.com/ajor/bpftrace/issues/30](https://github.com/ajor/bpftrace/issues/30).

Do you know if there's been any update on this? Support for BTF/CTF would be amazing.

<comment><USER3> That's the old repo (we should add a note to it pointing people to [https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace](https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace) instead!)

Alastair added struct support for kprobes yesterday, based on the functionality in bcc (which bpftrace uses). That was the final missing piece, and why I'm posting about it now. See the last example here:

[https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/blob/master/docs/referen...](https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/blob/master/docs/reference_guide.md#2-kprobekretprobe- dynamic-tracing-kernel-level-arguments)

It's the same struct support we had in bcc, using linux kernel headers. Some things are available, some are not. Just like in bcc, we sometimes need to define some of a missing struct.

BTF will mean that all structs are available, plus, bpftrace should be able to automatically figure out the arguments so you don't have to cast them. It'll be great, but in the meantime, I am able to do tons of stuff.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. Having to include headers is one thing I found tricky with BCC, as there's sometimes non-trivial dependencies between various header files, especially for kernel modules that aren't included in the mainline kernel. That said I'm very excited to see all the progress that's been done in bpftrace, and looking forward to what's to come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is huge. The Linux community should be glad that Netflix hired Brendan Gregg to work on Linux performance.

<comment><USER5> Is this because they are also using Linux or do they plan to use it on FreeBSD?

<comment><USER6> Those aren't mutually exclusive options.

<comment><USER7> For now they are, and that might hold true in the future as well.

There are some projects to bring BPF features needed (generally called eBPF) to FreeBSD, such as [https://github.com/YutaroHayakawa/generic- ebpf](https://github.com/YutaroHayakawa/generic-ebpf) \- but there's no accepted mainline implementation as of yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seeing this come together makes me super happy.

Now the next time the hot rage of an audio xrun overcomes me I will have a path forward!

In general audio xruns actually is an area that could use a permanent userspace program.

Musicians need low latency audio processing which Jack2 can provide but the random xrun and the internet flimflam/mummery of how to sort it out is waaaaay beyond most of us (I have less of an excuse but yah its a vibe killer when you are trying to make music).

The goal would be "hey you had a/some xrun and its might be mostly this disk or process or..."

Maybe this needs hard ai but maybe it just needs a compass like tool...

</comment><comment> Birch-san This is a great update. I'd wondered how ply differed from bpftrace. And structs support is a huge step in achieving parity with DTrace.

DTrace has really helped me out* on macOS. To be without it is to lose a superpower, so I'm really rooting for bpftrace to bring the same tracing experience to Linux. I've been excitedly following bcc, too. It's just the right tool for HTTP metrics. But my most basic experiments so far have failed, and I don't know how to get support.

* DTrace is a real swiss army-knife. It seems intended for observing production systems, but I've found it indispensible for local development. The mysqld provider is great for tracing queries and perf. Opensnoop answers all sorts of questions. And DTrace saved a C++ project of mine: explaining a deadlock that would've otherwise spelled the end of the software. The most fun I've had is using the pid provider to hook text out of visual novels (in WiNE!).

<comment><USER7> >But my most basic experiments so far have failed, and I don't know how to get support.

I'd recommend the #iovisor irc channel on oftc. I haven't stopped by in a bit, but the times I did, I usually was able to get assistance from nice people!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey Brendan! Super exciting - I'm already updating some internal documentation to point people towards this :)

When are we getting a Linux performance engineering book with all the bpf/bcc/bpftrace stuff in it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any chance this tool or maybe a wrapper for it could get a higher level, less C-like syntax?

<comment><USER10> The syntax seems to be inspired by awk more than c.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Obviously Linux-only. How is it DTrace 2.0?

2\. That's a staggering amount of NIH, from CTF to syntax. Why?

<comment><USER3> 1\. There's work to bring eBPF to other operating systems.

2\. bpftrace is built from the ground-up to operate with eBPF, which does much more than DTrace. I made a list in the post, and that's only happened in the last two years. I understand that if I'm narrowing eBPF to just DTrace vs bpftrace comparisons, you might question why we're doing all this, but consider the bigger picture of eBPF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The 2 major problems (ie the Elefant in the room) compared to DTrace are missing:

1\. security: eBPF still supports arrays and and is therefore inherently insecure to be used in the kernel. DTrace didn't support that feature on purpose and not because they couldn't do it. see spectre/meltdown.

2\. availability: eBPF probes only work within the kernel. DTrace extends the same interface to the libc level and the user space level. you can trace not only kernel calls, also lib calls and with its high-level language support (Java, python, perl, ruby,...) into userspace. Linux-only eBPF will never be able to support that seemless integration. thanksfully we now have Oracle Linux with proper DTrace support on Linux.

<comment><USER13> Hmm, looks like you are missing some crucial details, eBPF has the same mitigations to the CPU bugs in place as the rest of the kernel (e.g. retpolines on tail calls, index masking for arrays, sanitation of speculative store bypass, etc). Also, eBPF probes do not only work in the kernel but user space as well via uprobes as one example.

<comment><USER12> Of course they ran after possible array problems post-spectre, but nevertheless it still allows precise timings on anything cache related. it's still highly insecure and needs to be turned off in production. and this is where it makes sense to use.

2nd: do you see uprobes supported anywhere? I still can only use DTrace with high level languages. and I wouldn't use this island solution anyway. DTrace works everywhere, now even on windows. eBPF is Linux-only. And should have stayed netfilter only BTW.</comment></comment></comment>


Is the Third Wave here? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wmediaventures.com/news/is-the-third-wave-here-or-is-this-just-another-step-in-the-internets-evolution/

<comment><USER2> No, but something big and important is happening.

One could recast his argument into the disruptive and sustaining innovation approach, with PCs clearly being the former and Web 2.5 being the latter.

But I myself put the Internet as something more than simply a disruptive technology. It's a general purpose technology (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology>) in ways that PCs, a "merely" new form of computer, weren't. The computer was also a GPT.</comment>