Ask HN: The Internet is getting lame. What's next? - <AUTHOR> The internet used to be a really cool place full of wild ideas and weirdos. Now its like a tidy, tightly policed suburban shopping mall. Whats the next big thing? <comment><USER2> The weirdos are all still out there.

Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit.

There just wasn't that many of us, so you'd talk to people unlike you. I knew my bbs friends all by their first and last names, had photos of them, would talk to the better ones on the phone, they were some of my best friends despite them usually being completely different from myself.

These days, I don't know a single person on the internet, and I rarely interact with people on the internet who are different from me, so I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost.

The internet used to be like a dive-bar in an ivy-league college town, full of geniuses and weirdo townies. These days it's more like the city of New York -- no one knows you, and no one cares to.

<comment><USER3> > ... I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something > lost.

Others have given some good answers, but I think there is another factor: the way discussions are organized.

In a typical BBS, or on UseNet in days of old, a thread was linear, identified only by its subject line. Multiple people could stay with a thread for a relatively long time and have an extended discussion.

Today, most online forum software (HN, Reddit, etc.) displays threads as trees. Each reply begins a new subthread. As a result, a conversion involving more than 2 people will rarely be linear, and a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one.

But the solution is not to move back to linear threads. Those were abandoned for a good reason: they do not scale. Six active posters might be able to have a reasonable linear discussion. 100 cannot. Linear threads are also much easier for one poster to hijack. Among 6 people, there is a decent chance that none of them is a jerk. Among 100 people, the chance is pretty much zero. So the thread gets filled with troll posts. Conclusion: tree-shaped discussions, along with voting, are what prevents us from being drowned in troll posts & flamewars.

So, what is the solution? I don't know. It's an interesting problem to consider.

<comment><USER4> But Usenet had threads, in a way, with your client trying to detect and put them together as best as possible. It didn't always get it right, but 99% of the time is good enough to get the benefits.

Same goes for mailinglists. Posts get sorted in threads.

<comment><USER3> > But Usenet had threads, ....

Yes, using the "References:" and/or "In-Reply-To:" headers. Later clients tended to do this, I think.

> ... to get the benefits.

Yes, and the drawbacks: in-depth discussions involving multiple people were harder to come by.

In any case, in both Usenet -- late in the game -- and many mailing lists, there are relatively few participants, so scaling is not really an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> REAL LIFE. Real Life is the next internet! In the future, people will go outside and talk to one another, face to face! We will congregate in libraries and bookstores, and drink coffee that doesn't suck or cost over $2 a cup. The future is coming....

<comment><USER2> I keep thinking this same thing myself, and have tried to work the IRL-angle, but when you're an adult no one really wants to meet you.

Up until the early 00s, I used to hang out at a coffee/cigarette bar where I knew just about every single person who walked through the door, and people would sit there for hours and hours talking to strangers about very interesting stuff, while drinking insane amounts of coffee and chain smoking.

If those sorts of places still exist, I have no idea where they are.

<comment><USER6> We gave greasy cafes in the UK. They are the equivalent.

I used to get breakfast every Thursday with a one legged motorcycle courier (still have no idea how that worked) who fought in the gulf war, an HSBC executive and a fishmonger. I miss that.

I have kids now and other parents are horrible people.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that sounds awesome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the internet will become more and more invisible. Everything will be connected to it and just "do it's thing" (like the electrical grid). The web itself will eventually tone down. There will be less unique web apps, individual blogs and online stores as these things fold into the bigger players. As security issues get worse and worse companies will be a lot tighter with their APIs, means of access, etc. Things will be more locked down in general (Apple-like) and most people will be fine with that.

Once we get to this point the weirdos will find some service to call their own and it's less likely that everyone else will care about those groups.

Basically, I see the internet getting busier on a technical level (amount of information/packets flowing around) but quieter in a social sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm rooting for [http://ipfs.io](http://ipfs.io).

<comment><USER9> How does it do DNS? Like Namecoin? Reading the site now..

<comment><USER8> IPNS (The Inter-Planetary Naming System) is a step in that direction...

[http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...](http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdXBFca7D/example#/ipfs/QmThrNbvLj7afQZhxH72m5Nn1qiVn3eMKWFYV49Zp2mv9B/ipns/readme.md)

<comment><USER10> Is everything Inter-Planetary?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You're probably

a) part of groups that have now grown up and merged into the collective internet and diluted

b) need to find new groups that interest you

For my part, there's huge thriving communities of like-minded nerds all over the place, you just have to look outside of popular places.

Pouet, atariage, msx.org, nectarine radio, tons of messageboards, hell; my local neighborhood messageboard is full of crazy internet weirdos of my type.

HN and some very narrow reddits are kind of cliche, but they work also.

I keep saying it here, but there's absolutely nothing to stop old-style internet communities from springing up again, except that the draw of megasites like reddit and facebook seem to steal all the mindshare. Heck, even IRC is still around. Heck _telnet BBSs_ are still around [http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html](http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html)

Just set up the community you want, run it your way, don't compromise and run it like a hobbyist should. The advertise it on other like-minded places (heck, setup a web-ring!) and you're off!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd argue that the maker movement is the next incarnation of "wild ideas and weirdos". It has a higher cost of entry than the internet does (you actually have to know a few things in order to build stuff).

Also: sharing stuff with people who would like to learn is still a cool thing to do. Perhaps you should mentor some people and then collaborate on your own weird ideas?

<comment><USER13> +1! I've met some of the most creative "weirdos" in the maker community and in particular the "hacker spaces" [1] around the world. Hacker spaces aren't as numerous however but I love that people have been organizing more and more mini maker faires [2] all over the world.

[1] [https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/](https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/) [2] [http://makerfaire.com/map/](http://makerfaire.com/map/)

<comment><USER14> One problem with hackerspaces, at least in my corner of UK, is that they are very expensive and this acts as a filter for the types of people who go there.

For meeting an eclectic mix of fascinating oddballs, on the cheap, nothing beats an astronomy or geology club. They are great social-status-levellers. Executives, dropouts and just plain odd folk all chatting together.with

<comment><USER15> What's your idea of expensive, just so I can calibrate against my corner of the UK?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A internet where people do not have to think about whether or not they should post a link on their Facebook about controversial issues and can actually be themselves. A internet where I feel I can ask a dumb question on StackOverflow as I progress in learning new programming techniques. Everyone projects their crafted image to the world via the current internet when in reality they are completely different. I could go on and on but overall I would summarize that we need an internet with no ads, a place where we don't have to fear 24/7 about some stupid tweet from years ago being in a data brokers database forever

</comment><comment><USER17> Honestly? I've taken to hanging out on phone conferences with friends a lot more recently. It's not exactly a high bandwidth medium, but there's a lot you can squeeze into mu-law as a codec, and I'd genuinely like to see the network stretched in interesting ways. I guess the most obvious thing for a non- realtime discussion would be like a bulletin board; 818-260-6100 is an example of one for jobs on a small scale.

The phone network has been around for over a century in some form now, and has remained as open as it always has. Just how I see it, anyway.

<comment><USER18> I like this. I've started to try to call my friends more instead of messaging them through some social network, this seems like the natural extension to that. Does iOS or Android offer some kind of built in conference function? Or do you use a service or something self hosted?

<comment> at-fates-hands I thought Google hangouts allow for conference calling. I'm not sure what the limits are in terms of how many people you can have on a hangout at a time.

I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with.

[http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/](http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/)

<comment><USER18> Over the regular phone network?

<comment><USER17> Most phones have a three-way calling feature. With most cell phones, it's done via the switching equipment rather than the cell phone itself to avoid generational loss from the mobile codec/reception issues. You can string a bunch of three-wayed calls together if you want.

The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree. I haven't been on Facebook for at least 2 months. The Verge has become boring and more opinion than fact. News sites have become so overburdened with ads that they don't load well. I stream radio and go to developer sites...that's about it. Twitter -> blog is about the only useful information gathering form factor I use for gathering news.

It's a mess out there.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is my exact frustration. If you want something intellectually exciting with no ads, no filter bubble, and no click-bait, I'm building Canon of Man.

You can sample it at: [https://canonofman.meteor.com](https://canonofman.meteor.com)

It's not launching until Monday, but follow @canonofman on Twitter or sign up on the site and I'll let you know when it's live.

</comment><comment><USER21> The weirdos and ideas are still there, just drowned out by the masses.

I'm not sure anything can replicate the feel of the early internet because it's inextricably linked to the entire cultural context in which it was born, not to mention the physical limitations that the entire world had been used to but were newly lifted by the internet.

However in regards to the suburban shopping mall feel, I think the answer there is movements like IndieWeb, and the general spirit of open source which is stronger than ever. There's no rolling back the clock on the commercialization of the internet, and the indie stuff can't really match the aesthetics, but then again when enough people get bored punk kills disco.

<comment><USER22> _The weirdos and ideas are still there, just drowned out by the masses._

So, just like real life? Not helpful at all.

The Internet was an introvert's dream. Then the popular extroverted high school kids took over our entire Internet media and platforms. We've lost empires to the people who were destined to rule the world anyway. Turns out it's easier to rule introverts online than to rule real life populations who can fight back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you really want to get weird, urbit: [https://github.com/urbit/urbit](https://github.com/urbit/urbit)

</comment><comment><USER23> I stumbled upon the Ethereum project not too long ago. It sounds pretty interesting and possibly full of wild ideas and weirdos too...

[https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> In its simplest form the internet is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. So, if you are looking for a place where people can express themselves without the fear of repercussions, all you need is anonymity.

You don't need something to replace the internet for that, just a sub space where people can't have their writings/ideas/creations tied to their real identity.

</comment><comment><USER25> Things are far from boring if you look closely.

1\. The Intercloud. Clouds of clouds of clouds. Containers and virtualization play a part in this, but much is left to be done in building out less- opinionated stacks, which become deployment targets.

2\. Pay-to-deploy what used to be SaaS software onto various deployment targets on the Intercloud based on trust levels. Enables the MSaaS (managed SaaS) software model. Enables 'house hosting' private data.

3\. Blockchain contracts applied to MSaaS'd APIs to enable routing of data to other MSaaS'd APIs based on privacy policies. Also applies to payments for #2 and target validation via #1.

<comment><USER18> While these things may or may not be interesting developments in the _infrastructure_ of the internet, it doesn't really counteract what OP is saying. Streamlined, boring, closed garden social networks and ad-filled "news". And only the techies are left on the IRC servers :(

<comment><USER25> I tell you what is boring: people voting down responses because they don't agree with them and then having nothing to contribute other than a lame rationalization. Better?

<comment><USER18> You have kind of a point there, the advent of {up,down}voting on sites adds to the dullness by putting disincentives on controversial speech. HN is slightly better, but reddit it a great example of this. The most visible content is the lowest common denominator of comments, often cringy jokes and quips. While 4chan has its fair share of issues, the content is often interesting (to me) because they don't rank posts at all.

EDIT: And for the record I didn't downvote you, I'm not even allowed :/

<comment><USER25> I implied you downvoted me, but shouldn't have. Apologies. It was a blaming statement because I colluded the downvote with the 'rationalizations'.

To clarify my original post a bit, I would say that the Internet _is_ infrastructure, and that changes in that infrastructure give way to changes in the way it is used for all sorts of things. Once a good amount of decentralization with infrastructure happens, we're going to see _really_ interesting use-cases popping up. Robot vacuums with cryptowallets to keep themselves updated, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The internet has become too easy. It was interesting when it required deep technical knowledge just to make it work, that ensured a certain amount of savviness and weirdness among participants.

I suggest you try communities that are built around hard-to-understand technologies.

There are definitely interesting discussions among scientists, for example, but they 're mostly reserved for face-to-face meetings in conferences.

Perhaps the best answer is to build the next big thing yourself.

<comment><USER27> >The internet has become too easy

That's a good thing. The world is an infinitely better place now that any idiot can get onto the internet, and does. A few nerds and greybeards losing their sense of cultural superiority is a price worth paying.

Given that there are over a billion people accessing the internet now, there are vastly more savvy and weird people on it than ever before, but it's understandable if that makes it feel less hip to be a part of.

<comment><USER28> It's not a good thing OR a bad thing. It's different. The sad thing is that a culture of real sharing (not 'social media' sharing, but actual sharing of knowledge, life experiences, and ideas) has been traded for a place that anyone can find any piece of information they could ever want, and contact any person they could ever want.

I think both have very high merit, and can't really be compared. It's not a 'good thing' that we've transitioned from one to the other, it's just a change that the old guard has to deal with.

<comment><USER27> I think you're discrediting 'social media sharing' a bit too much - that _is_ where people share their actual knowledge, experiences and ideas. Granted, some of those people are my mother and her COPD support group, but social media is not entirely vapid and not to be dismissed for its cultural relevance.

Even setting that aside - there are billions of people online, and (quick google) almost a billion websites. That's not a culture, that's a continent. You can't encompass something like that in so simple a narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Who needs the internet when you have Rationality Theory! [http://lesswrong.com/](http://lesswrong.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> The private web, your home server, your decentralized secure/encrypted mesh net.

<comment><USER31> All of the above.

Mesh should have been a thing by now. Better late than never. (I hope.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Message boards are still pretty good for finding some genuine internet culture ... just hard to find good message boards. (Need some more interests I guess ...)

The excessive overcommercialization is pretty annoying though. There's only so much content marketing spam I can take ... Gonna have to go back to reading books soon.

</comment><comment><USER33> Talking to weirdos on the internet is one of my primary forms of recreation. I find IRC is a good place to do it.

</comment><comment><USER34> curation. create you own corner of the net.

<comment><USER35> Plug for my startup - www.sagebump.com to integrate and RANK all your personalised social news accounts

It's alpha but check it out brah

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> You mean the Web perhaps, rather than the Internet. In this case it's a critical distinction. There is no replacement for the Internet coming, and it's not the source of the lameness - it's an infinite blank canvas that you paint upon, that most future technology will rely on. Globally we've got trillions of dollars sunk into development of the Internet's infrastructure and the services/businesses riding on top of the Internet. The Internet will be similar 50 years from now, to what it is today: a 'dumb pipe.' In the same way that transmission lines don't change much, nor do water pipes.

</comment><comment><USER37> USB Drives. Just distribute USB drives to everyone everywhere:

On the subway.

On the bus.

At college campuses.

At bars.

At night clubs.

...

<comment><USER38> What would you put on them? I've a small stack of them collected as swag from various conferences.

<comment><USER37> Webpages, videos, audios, images, fonts etc. basically any format out there that anyone can open on whatever machine or device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash This is the ultimate downside of predictive ads and content: if the Internet only sees you as someone to give what they already want, obviously you'll get bored with the same crap over and over.

This is what happens when we relegate all of our discovery to community aggregators like Reddit and HN, or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter that are, at the end of the day, there to sell you ads.

I was never into MySpace, and before Facebook came along I remember MY FRIENDS telling me about this funny video called "Leeroy Jenkins."

<comment><USER26> Maybe they should try the opposite, like facebook or twitter giving you the least relevant content to your interests. That's how one finds rare gems

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bitcoin. Cant ask for more crazy, more potential, or less regularity.

<comment><USER40> "Bitcoin" can hardly be considered a community...you can watch the prices/drama but it's basically the same as watching a soap opera.

It's a cool/potentially useful concept, but definitely not the next internet.

<comment><USER41> Wtf? You've never been to r/Bitcoin I take it...

<comment><USER42> so then you're actually talking about Reddit, not bitcoin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't help but agree that the communities seem to be disintegrating around the edges - but only in the feeling of community from the way the old generalized communities used to be. On the other hand, its hard to find something in real life that doesn't have an internet forum or 3 devoted entirely to it. I feel like a huge portion of my interests can fit neatly into existing forums that form their own specialized communities. Of course, there is no semblance of real anonymity there, I can use a pseudonym, but it would certainly not hold up to a determined investigator - public or private.

Of course, another trend here which really pushes things away from the anonymity/community is that the rise of Social profiles being tied to true identity has become a common denominator across a lot of the content sources on the net. Mobile access has also pushed us toward sole points of access to many of those communities. Sure, you can still log into many sites with a username and password from any old computer, but as more and more sites become personalized it becomes inconvenient to manage the multiplicity of web presences on a phone without resorting to using apps that are permanently logged in and tied to your single point of access.

Finally, the burden of defeating spambots has become nearly impossible without some strong anti-spam membership requirements. defeating spam has become a huge driver for anti-anonymity. The problem is, that even if you defeat bots, the giant number of people participating in discussions virtually guarantees that someone will post something in need of moderation under a pseudonym. A friend of mine at the NYT said they had to implant special filters to moderate the amazing amount of hate speech that would end up as non-sequitur comments on nearly every article. They are not alone in that experience.

Its not so bad, all in all, but the internet is a big place now. Some part of my thinks that when communities are small, they self-manage much more easily since there is a kind of group-accountability. On the broader internet, this isn't true anymore. on large public websites, it isn't true. But thats why we self-organize into smaller communities like Hacker News. As they get bigger, the rules necessarily become more strict because the feeling of accountability for the community's well-being on an individual basis goes down. </rationalization>

</comment><comment><USER44> pedantic: The Internet (the public network of networks) is just fine, and hasn't _fundamentally_ changed for decades. /pedantic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet)

Some of the service providers of the services that run on top of the Internet may or may not be lame, but that's a content issue, not an Internet issue. :)

</comment><comment><USER45> We're where we've always been; usenet and IRC.

<comment><USER46> As a kid born with internet access: how do you use usenet these days? Does your ISP give you access?

<comment><USER44> A good part of usenet is in google groups. Otherwise there are any number of paid providers. There may still be ISP or uni providers, but I don't think that access method is much of a Thing anymore.

Some paid providers: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usenet+providers](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usenet+providers)

Once you have an account, wherever you get it, you can usually access usenet via their browser interface, or with many email clients (like Thunderbird), or with specific usenet clients.

I used to be on a variety of comp.lang.* groups, but I haven't accessed usenet for years. I hear it's still more than useful for technical and other interests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I think it would be interesting to do away with search engines.

It's so easy to find stuff these days, if we could instill the idea of discovery and actually exploring the internet again, I would dig that.

<comment><USER47> So... Don't use a search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> No urls or domains. Search engines becoming deep linked discovery services for web applications. Favicons are replaced with full size icons and structured data for discovery registration.

<comment><USER49> This is already happening. You have to click on the address bar in Safari to see the full URL. People google everything, even domains like "facebook.com" or even "google.com." Gmail's favicon displays the amount of unread emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Start a farm. That'll be quite the challenge for you.

</comment><comment><USER51> Its going to be GNUnet without fancy JS sites.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think a well selected Twitter feed preserves all the cool aspects of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER53> Mobile was the next thing.

</comment><comment><USER54> Urbit perhaps?

<comment><USER55> yeah urbit.net

<comment><USER56> I believe urbit.org is what you're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> mobile apps

tightly policed private boutiques

</comment><comment><USER58> Being disconnected.

</comment><comment><USER59> The next big thing is the small things. All of them.

People will start talking to strangers in big cities, instead of just looking at their phones. People will have conversations again. The phone will listen, and suggest information at various points, evidence for your arguments, statistics to back you up, come backs, jokes.

Strangers will actually meet other strangers in real life, first, unmediated by any online vetting. There will be some app to enhance this process and that app won't violate or distort the inescapable risk and reward of actually saying "Hi" to someone you've never previously met. The next big thing is rich annotations of the things we do and places we go.

Having sex? Your phone / wearable will suggest some useful music, idea or other helpful info.

Visiting some new area? You'll get intelligence about interesting gatherings, art openings, deals, parties, happening right now nearby.

At the supermarket, gazing at the cold items, which to buy? You'll get purchase suggestions and recipe ideas to inform your choice.

The next big thing is people aren't "going to" the internet. It will come to them.

People will get back to living normally, just normal lives enhanced with relevant timely information.

The internet will become less overt and more covert. After a brief period of being a visible tangible thing in the world, it will recede back into the periphery, ever present, like a collective subconscious. It will be re- absorbed by the world it emerged from, enhancing that world.

The actual "library index" internet ( and its interaction "searching" ) will become rapidly less and less important once the critical mass of software, algorithms, and wearable tech brings us this new golden age. The quiet internet. The silent internet. The internet of nothing.

Like Seinfeld -- a show about nothing. The internet will be an internet about nothing. That's what it has been best for anyway, pictures of cats, trivia, distraction. Now it will be absorbed back into the culture it emerged from, subtly modulating the rhythms of daily life that it was used for anyway.

The shouting internet, news, headlines, adverts, games, apps. The feed. The Consumer. All that will fade away, like the fading of a roaring train. Like the peace that returns to a quiet glade once the busload of snapping gabbling tourists has departed. We'll all get less gawkish and more introspective. Our interactions less "selfie and me me me" and more "you and me, here, now". And all these companies, with their fetishisms of "big company" are going to become, or be presented to us, as a whole lot smaller. The original idea of villages, and geocities, and usenet, and turn of the century blogs, and lots of tiny stuff, disconnected stuff, will come back. Zuckerberg will eat his words, it won't be about "connecting the world", it will be about "connecting a community", one community at a time. They'll spin it as a "return to their roots, after all, they started as a Harvard social network", and yet we'll all, old enough, will know that it's just spin. Google won't be distributing "all the world's information", it will be making sense of information in "your world." Company names will increasingly become less bombastic and more like single letter diminutives, the way hipsters sign their emails "j". Hackers will be obsessed with doing things that don't scale. No, really don't scale. Ever. Everyone's ambitions will become a lot smaller, or will seem to.

We'll increasingly live in even more populated cities, and after a brief gaudy explosive renaissance of "ALL THE THINGS RIGHT NOW" we'll value our personal, quiet, disconnected, small world lives more and more, subtly enhanced. We'll delight in the tiny things, the meaningless, trivial interactions. Gen Z will look ancient with its selfie obsession, and prescient with its incognito mode and ephemera.

The internet of nothing is coming. And not yet.

People, cool people, will actually say "my internet." Internet will lose its "the".

An internet of all the small things is the next big thing.

<comment><USER60> "Company names will increasingly become less bombastic and more like single letter diminutives, the way hipsters sign their emails "j"." A couple of days later, Google becomes abc.xyz. Can I have the jack pot numbers man? I promise to give 50% to the charity of your choice. :D

Joking aside, I am seriously mindblown by this comment. Can't upvote it enough and gotta read it a couple more times for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ethereum

</comment><comment><USER62> VR + WebGL

</comment><comment><USER63> Hahahaha what, that's completely crazy.</comment>


Show HN: PartTimer.io – a job board for skilled work under 40 HRS/week - <AUTHOR> https://parttimer.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I'd like to share with everyone my latest project. I've been exploring ways to balance working on my own projects with reliable streams of income. The traditional advice is to keep a full-time job (and work on your projects on the side), or to become a freelancer/contractor/consultant (and treat your project as another client).

I think part-time roles are underrated here. For a bootstrapper, they combine the additional hours that are taken by full-time roles with the stability that's lacking from project-based work. When looking for such roles, I noticed most job boards don't particularly highlight them and there is no place that curates high quality, skilled roles that don't require the typical full-time commitment. Part-time roles, when they are posted, tend to be for unskilled/scut work.

I wanted to create a resource for high quality, skilled part-time jobs. I think this could be valuable to a few different groups:

\- Bootstrappers who want to spend more time on their own projects than a full-time gig would allow, but who also want the income stability that freelancing/consulting tends to lack.

\- Skilled domain experts that, for a variety of reasons, prefer to work less hours, or for more than one firm/industry.

\- Those who want to spend more time with family, hobbies, travel, etc but don't believe that should mean giving up opportunities to work on meaningful and interesting work.

Right now I'm linking to roles from HN and Stackoverflow. The idea is to add more high quality links over time and to feature ads directly on parttimer.io

Hope you guys find it useful. Let me know what you guys think and where it can add more value. Would also love to hear your thoughts and experiences with part-time work in general.

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks cool ! It could be even cooler maybe to add a pricing page</comment>


Serving Vue.js Apps on GitHub Pages - <AUTHOR> https://blog.usmanity.com/serving-vue-js-apps-on-github-pages/ <comment><USER2> There's also this: [http://client-side-vue.herokuapp.com](http://client-side- vue.herokuapp.com) as an alternative

[https://github.com/justinwash/Client-Side- Vue](https://github.com/justinwash/Client-Side-Vue)

</comment><comment><USER3> So you just build your app and pushes the "binary" output on Github Pages? It would be better to push the output dir to another branch folder and force push it when you update.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, creating an orphan "gh-pages" branch is what I always do. Repositories that include build output in the main branch make me rather quite upset.

Your additional point about force pushing is a good one also. While I've been using separate branch I've still been commiting each new build as a new commit. But overwriting the initial commit makes a lot more sense actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You don't necessarily need the whole server-side dance:

[https://jsfiddle.net/chrisvfritz/50wL7mdz/](https://jsfiddle.net/chrisvfritz/50wL7mdz/)

I find developing without a server side build process much more lightweight and enjoyable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion.

My example app is pretty contrived but I was mostly running into this issue when I had a multi-component app. An example is another repo I was working on: [https://github.com/usmanity/prompt/tree/master/src](https://github.com/usmanity/prompt/tree/master/src)

I guess, I should've prefaced my blog post with that :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is not a good approach. Much better to use

\- Vue with no build (see e.g. [https://github.com/stared/interactive-machine- learning-list](https://github.com/stared/interactive-machine-learning-list))

\- build -> push to a separate, orphan branch:

[https://medium.com/@codetheorist/vue-up-your-github-pages- th...](https://medium.com/@codetheorist/vue-up-your-github-pages-the-right- way-955486220418)

Pushing binaries to the same branch is a very, very bad git practice.

</comment><comment><USER7> Vue seems very similar to react[1]. Anyone know why vue is seeing a big swing in adoption when we already have react? Maybe because it's built into laravel[2]? Some other reason?

1\. [https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/i-created- the...](https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/i-created-the-exact- same-app-in-react-and-vue-here-are-the-differences-e9a1ae8077fd)

2\. [https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/frontend](https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/frontend)

<comment><USER8> Because the work is done mainly by a small team instead of backed by a company that we are all starting to really distrust?

Also, excellent docs.

We have used Vue at my company for almost three years now. Love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any suggestions for running a Vue.js application as a local set of files, without running a web server? My use case is slightly more obscure than this, but imagine something like a local, off-network kiosk interface.

<comment><USER10> You mean running production frontend-only apps?

You can just open "index.html" in your browser and it will run fine, as longs as the paths inside your files are relative.

You might have to reconfigure your bundler. If you're using Parcel, just pass `--public-url .` as a command line option when building. For Webpack use the publicPath configuration, etc.

But remember that pages accessed via file:/// have limited permissions: you can't use localStorage, access some sites using CORS, can't capture audio/video, etc. But if you're not using these things then it's fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm using the deployment method to the gh-pages branch documented on Vue CLI's website [0]. Works pretty well.

[0] [https://cli.vuejs.org/guide/deployment.html#github- pages](https://cli.vuejs.org/guide/deployment.html#github-pages)

</comment><comment><USER12> I have been using Vue.js for a while and I'm really impressed by it. During development using `npm run serve` and having it automatically rebuild whenever a file is added or changes is great and then baking it out for static storage using `npm run build` is a great follow up.

<comment><USER13> yes, have you been using vue-cli? that's what makes prototyping new ideas so easy it's a no brainer!

<comment><USER12> Yeah I am using `vue-cli`

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You could just use gitlab: [https://gitlab.com/pages?page=1](https://gitlab.com/pages?page=1)

Much better imo

<comment><USER15> can you quantify how it is better? I can't find any details on what differentiates them

<comment><USER16> The main difference in my experience is the fact GitLab CI is very flexible. In this case, it would be trivial to use a node docker container and automatically build static assets on the server instead of doing it locally and polluting the repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do you manage subroutes and direct deeplink to a subpage?</comment>


Unity Technologies Raises $5.5 Million From Sequoia Capital - matthew-wegner http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/20/unity-technologies-raises-5-5-million-from-sequoia-capital/

<comment> matthew-wegner We use Unity for our Blurst.com games. The $5.5 million strikes me as a low amount, but I also heard they were shopping a very small percent of the company to investors. I'm curious if they'll be able to use this money (and Sequoia's connections) to accelerate their growth as a "Flash but 3D" plugin. Technology wise they're definitely strong enough to pull it off, but I don't know if they'll be able to get by the plugin perception issue. The average person doesn't even view Flash as a plugin anymore; hopefully Unity can eventually get there...</comment>


Judge preserves privacy of climate scientist's emails - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/judge-preserves-privacy-of-climate-scientists-emails.html <comment><USER3> Without making any statement about the climate change debate itself...

It bothers me more than a little when research is funded by taxpayers, yet we taxpayers are forbidden from seeing what was happening with our money.

Even absent public funding, the nature of science is that, at the very least, all results, data, and methodological information should be wide open. When you add in that we're paying for it, I can't see where they get the right to conceal part of their work. If you don't want open books, then don't look for open funding; the private sector would be happy to keep your communications secret, if it's on their dime.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious - a quick look at your comments history shows you to have a fairly libertarian type of political leaning. But in this specific case you seem all for the government intruding to force one organisation to hand over information to another. Why the change of heart on the role of government?

<comment><USER5> I don't mean to speak for CWuestefeld, but from my perspective its about transparency in government. Mann is/was a government employee (I'm not talking about federal funding, but the fact that he was an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia through UVA), and as such should be subject to the same laws and ideals governing transparency with regard to government workers (and resources), from the Governor down to low level bureaucratic civil servants.

<comment><USER4> It is my understanding that university employees are not civil servants. According to Wikipedia, public universities in the US on average receive only 43% of funding frOm government, the rest is made up for by student fees and endowments. Also according to Wikipedia, UVA has the biggest endowment of any public university in the US.

All of which is to say that universities, even public universities, are not government entities in the same way that public schools are. It is far from clear to me that libertarians would support the idea of a private citizen working for a non-government organisation being compelled to hand over private communications by the government.

Of course I might be wrong about UVAs status, but I did a fair amount of searching, and could not find anything that would indicate that university employees were in fact government employees, and the information that I did find tended to support the idea that they were not. If I'm wrong about this, then the OP's position is easier to understand...

<comment><USER5> Interesting point to think about, however the % mix of funding source has little to do with whether employees of an organization are classified as civil servants. An example of this would be departments of transportation or other toll collecting public agencies - generally tolls and fees provide the bulk of the funding with taxpayer dollars making up a smaller percentage, yet the employees are very clearly civil servants.

Since UVA employees's salaries are publicly available through FOIA (see [http://datacenter.timesdispatch.com/databases/salaries- virgi...](http://datacenter.timesdispatch.com/databases/salaries-virginia- state-employees-details/)) I think that's one pretty good indicator of civil service status. In Virginia, the University is required to report salary information, etc, to the Virginia Department of Human Resources Management. They are able to adjust how they report salary information for employees who are paid a portion through endowments and other outside sources.

Now, I have no idea or information about the specific case with Mann - <USER2> knows, maybe he was being paid exclusively by some special endowment and so his records would not be subject to a FOI request - but I would have thought they would have used that in part of their justification for not complying with the request.

Also - I don't consider myself a libertarian so I won't speak for them - I'm just a big proponent of government transparency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If they want people to not care about their emails, stop using Global Warming to take away our freedoms (I can't get a decent light bulb anymore because of this shit) and make 21 century living unreasonably expensive (yeah, we need gasoline).

Don't get me wrong, the environment is important but maintaining it as is should not be a priority. Nature is not holy, but it is useful.

<comment><USER7> Not to diverge too much from the article (which should be about expectation of privacy rights) and get into politics and moral philosophy, but people in Bangladesh could just as well be like "quit using your lightbulbs to violate our property rights."

It's not a matter of whose "rights" are going to be violated, it's a matter of configuring property rights to improve human well-being.

<comment><USER8> First off, Bangladesh has been on-net _gaining_ land mass in recent years.

Quote: "Satellite images of Bangladesh over the past 32 years show that the country is growing annually by about 20 square kilometres (7.72 square miles)" (source: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7532949.stm> )

Now, it's true that that article claims that _eventually_ sea level rise will overcome this, but the rate of sea level rise has actually _not_ been accelerating in accordance with the predictions made back then - sea level has been continuing to rise at about the same low rate it had been doing for the last century. (Um, here's one source on that: [http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/current- wisdom-n...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/current-wisdom-no- climaterelated-acceleration-sea-level-rise) )

In short, if the people of Bangladesh have any reason to be concerned about "our lightbulbs", it's a distant future concern, not a current one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very glad to hear this. These people aren't criminals, they're researchers publishing their findings and proposed hypotheses.

<comment><USER10> These findings and proposed hypotheses likely influence policies which financially hit just about everyone. Billions of tax dollars have been diverted on the basis of climate research. Is it really an extravagant demand to know what these scientists' discussions amount to?

<comment><USER11> Verifiable and reproducible publications are all the communications you need. The public pays for their research, not their emails.

<comment><USER6> You and I both know that the most WTF results are not published precisely because you can't write them up in any way that would be reproducible.

But what I am really interested in is reading any and all political stuff in those emails. Global Warming is too hot a political tropic to allow a few percent insiders to stir the pot to take away what little freedom we have left.

<comment><USER12> I'm glad you agree that a few profit-driven CEOs shouldn't hold more sway over policy than hundreds of hard-working researchers.

<comment><USER6> I was refering to the leadership of the so called democratic party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> no link at all to the story that precedes this one? :/

<comment><USER14> Yes, it does seem a rather one-sided article. Notice how they give a quote as to how the scientists are being "attacked" by people "abusing" public records and FOIA laws. No real indication of why these people are using public records and FOIA laws nor what it is they wish to find.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:help with algebraic equation - <AUTHOR>

any idea on how to solve this equation 2x(4-x)^(-1/2) - (4-x)^1/3 = 0..i could somehow simplify and reach 2x-(4-x)^5/6 = 0.now i don't know what to do <comment><USER2> [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2x(4-x)^(-1/2)+-+(4-x)^...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2x\(4-x\)^\(-1/2\)+-+\(4-x\)^1/3+%3D+0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Since this is a nonlinear equation, I would try to solve it numerically. I don't see much interest in solving this analytically.

</comment><comment><USER4> Move one term over to the other side, raise both sides to the power of 6, then multiply by (4 - x)^3. You now have an equation of the fifth degree...

<comment><AUTHOR> yes i now have an quintic equation.now i can use any method to solve for 'x'. thank you</comment></comment>


Indian court orders seizing a startup's machines based solely on allegations - <AUTHOR> http://news.oneindia.in/2010/01/30/data-theft-hc-asks-askme-in-to-shut-down.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The Delhi High Court has granted an exparte injunction against askme.in ordering them to stop business and ordering the seizing of their machines and storage after justdial filed a case against them. From what I understand from googling[1], an ex parte injunction is a court order granted after hearing only one party in matters of great urgency, without notice to the defendant or other parties.

This doesn't bode well for the start up climate in India. Soesn't this mean that any established company could sue me and my machines would be seized pending the results of the case.

[1] <http://www.google.com/search?q=ex+parte+injunction>

<comment><USER2> Yes, ex parte anything means the judge(s) only listened to one side of a dispute, and as one of the Just Dial people noted, they're rare. For this sort of case, unheard of in the US.

It does sound very bad, especially given that Indian courts aren't noted for speed.

<comment><USER3> Could this be due to bribery, or political connection?

<comment><USER4> In India? Doesn't seem unreasonable.

I've heard Indian coworkers practically brag about how corrupt their officials are.

<comment><USER5> You may want to be weary of those co-workers of yours. People who think they can get away with anything because they have "connections" are corrupt themselves.

/an Indian.

<comment><USER4> "practically brag" is a bit of a colloquialism. It doesn't mean that they were proud of it, just emphatically suggesting that something is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Infomedia 18 can hardly be called a startup; its parent company is joint- partner in the TV channel "CNBC TV18" plus they own a host of other businesses.

<comment><USER7> Yep. Network18 is practically the Google of businesses in India :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this can happen everywhere?

I wonder how to protect against it. Maybe having backup servers in several countries is the only way?

<comment><USER2> I've never heard of something like this happening in the US, the Fifth Amendment has a well enforced provision blocking this, "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Ex parte orders "will necessarily be temporary and interim in nature" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte>).

In this sort of case, the plaintiffs would have to show some sort of massive _irreparable_ harm that must be remedied so quickly that the other side cannot be afforded notice and an opportunity to be heard. I can't see how this sort of case would (in the US) rise to that level.

The only possible exception would be massive bad faith from the other side's lawyer(s) ... one real instance of this that I've heard of was where the lawyer on one side was caught burglarizing the business office of the other side. Maybe Infomedia 18's legal team was showing bad faith of some sort, but it doesn't sound like it based on the cited article.

<comment><USER8> What about piracy allegations, or child porn? Wouldn't police have to grab servers quickly before their owner has a chance to erase things? I think it can happen in Germany. Not sure how solid the accusations have to be.

<comment><USER2> Child porn is criminal and has nothing to do with civil law.

Piracy in the way you're talking about it is also criminal law, i.e. you are getting the authorities to preemptively intervene for you. If you just need proof, their copying disks is sufficient, you wouldn't need to seize everything. This is in fact an alleged piracy case.

Civil law would come into play where you're trying to get an injunction to stop someone from continuing to commit piracy, e.g. _Apple v. Psystar_ , where that sort of thing was handled in discovery.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean by copying disks? I think the police would like to check all servers for traces of illegal material. I find it shocking that it's possible, but then, we are always at the mercy of our governments.

<comment><USER2> What I mean is make disk image copies. That would be impractical for a big enough outfit, but I didn't gather something like this was needed, "Just Dial alleged that Infomedia 18 had copied its extensive database and was displaying the same on its website askme.in".

That's relatively easy to prove or disprove, they're alleged to be basing their business (or a part of it) on the stolen database. And the harm to Just Dial can be ended without shutting down all of Infomedia 18.

"[W]e are always at the mercy of our governments", but some governments are less arbitrary than others, and this does seem to correlate with healthy business climates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe India doesn't want to have a startup culture?

</comment><comment><USER10> Obviously we don't know all the facts but if it turns out that _Just Dial_ is wrong and _Infomedia 18_ is innocent, the court will have egg (?curry?) on its face. In which case there should be some harsh downside for _Just Dial_ like, say, reimbursing _Infomedia 18_ for lost revenue, plus damages.

As a general rule I don't like _ex parte_ hearings for all the obvious reasons. There needs to be a means to limit their use, and a heavy fine for being wrong is about all that comes to mind.

<comment><USER9> > _In which case there should be some harsh downside for Just Dial like, say, > reimbursing Infomedia 18 for lost revenue, plus damages._

That seems entirely reasonable to me; I might even go further and suggest the original plaintiff pay punitive damages. Furthermore, there should be no limitation of liability for Just Dial, apart from the limit of the actual damage they caused.</comment></comment>


SF Bay Area Fire Information and Resources - <AUTHOR> https://listorio.com/yangtheman/sf-bay-area-fire-information-and-resources <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks,

This is a list of information and resources for SF Bay Area fires. It's on a site I have been developing on and off for some time. I would appreciate any feedback you have.</comment>