How I automated the boring parts of life - <AUTHOR> http://stevecorona.com/how-i-automated-the-boring-parts-of-life <comment><USER3> Living in NYC makes it easy to automate some more boring things, thanks to its population density:

\- Drop off my laundry at the laundromat's wash and fold service to pick up the next day. There are even a bunch of services and laundromats that will come to your apartment to take your laundry and drop it back off for you.

\- Seamless has about 100 places that deliver to my apartment, about 400 that deliver to work. You can schedule your dinner delivery time.

\- I've had friends my age hire a maid to clean weekly apparently without costing much, or just Taskrabbit for one-off things.

\- Fresh Direct for delivery groceries.

\- No need for a car, so I can be productive on the train or at least read depending on the commute.

\- Cabs are incredibly cheap here.

<comment><USER4> Food prep is by far the most time consuming and drudge heavy daily task, but it remains pretty much impossible to eat healthily if you don't cook daily. Short of paying a personal chef or landing a full time housewife there doesn't seem to be a solution. Restaurants and prepared food just don't have the economic incentive to use high quality ingredients.

<comment><USER5> > Short of paying a personal chef

Ding, I smell a business idea:

OurChef: You want good dinners, and you want a life. We want to sell you good dinners. OurChef is your _personal caterer_ , with authentic quality ingredients.

<comment><USER6> A poor student here has offered something similar: you pay for the food, he'll come cook for you, if he can join you for dinner. He got thousands of requests (see [http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1778538/halvfattig- tilbyder-a...](http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1778538/halvfattig-tilbyder-at- lave-mad-til-dig-hvis-han-maa-spise-med/) )

Someone has taken the idea and try to scale it since: <http://www.facebook.com/cook4food>

It's social, it's local, it's mobile, it's cooking!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious if anyone else is curious about the distinction between automation and delegation. It seems like a better description of OPs life hack is the latter. I'm not sure if this is relevant, but if you take the universe or the world or a society and the amount of work being done as a zero sum equation, handing off buying plane tickets isn't really automation because you're not reducing the total work in the system; you're just changing where the resources come from.

You could say that delegating work to "experts" means the work is done more efficiently so you save resources, and that's a step in the right direction towards automation, but not automation.

Note: I'm very interested in words and the contrast between what they mean and how people use them.

<comment><USER8> I'm not even sure it can be considered a "life hack"; it is literally a service provided by a company. At that point, is it really novel enough to call a hack?

<comment><USER7> When I buy goods and services, I am hacking my life ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With Fancy Hands, how do you deal with tasks (such as buying tickets) that require the use of your credit card, password, account info etc.

If there is a solution, they should mention it on their front page because I'm sure half the people who go there ask themselves: "Wouldn't I have to give my credit card info to complete strangers for this to be useful?"

This seems to be the weak link with these services.

<comment><USER10> From their website: "Fancy Hands can purchase things for you. Yep, if you ask us to buy toner cartridges, lunch, or tickets, we can handle it.

First off, security is our number one priority with this feature and it's totally baked in from the start. At no point, does your assistant, or anybody else at Fancy Hands have access to your credit card number. Not bad, right? You don't have to worry about a rogue assistant using your credit card information, they'll never know it (plus, we don't have any rogue assistants)."

<http://www.fancyhands.com/help/payments>

<comment><USER11> Although... "While we can make purchases for you, we cannot do certain things including reservations (at hotels, etc), and airplane tickets."

So fancyhands couldn't have helped the writer of the blogpost with his airplane ticket problem

<comment><USER12> I've had corporate travel services place tickets on a 24 hour hold for me before (i.e. the itinerary is reserved, but not yet paid for). I assume that's still possible, at least for the legacy carriers.

<comment><USER13> Continental used to have that, but dropped it shortly before the United merger. I think other companies did too. Instead, they let you cancel with no cancellation fee within 24 hours. (Although the funds may take up to two weeks to go back to your account).

So essentially, FancyHands can book it for you with their card, and cancel it if they can't charge you within 24 hours - but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't want to go that route.

<comment><USER14> American Airlines still has this feature (or at least it did last night when I was making a booking) Edit: By this feature, I mean the ability to place a hold without the credit card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> First off, great article! Although, it's just a few quick tips, there was some solid advice in there and some new tips I had never heard. For example, maybe I've been living in a cave, but Amazon Subscribe is new to me, so I appreciate the great tip there!

I, personally, had a bad experience using "Fancy Hands" and cancelled my subscription just the other month. Although, I do admit it was mainly because I just couldn't get the $25/month out of it (like you did).

I am curious, how did Fiverr work out (quality wise) for your proofreading? I have debated using this service before for proofreading, but had not yet actually tried it.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! Fiverr was great. I had FancyHands find me a high rated proofreader on there and ask him if he'd be willing to do a 62-page, 15,000 word doc (the guy normally was doing 1500 words for ~$5). He said sure, for $50, and that the turnaround time would be two days.

Two days later, I had a fully edited and proofread copy of my document, above and beyond what I expected to get for $50.

Mechanical Turk was way cheaper (even though $50 is already pretty cheap) but the quality varied greatly... from super-low to super-high. I would love to build an automated, nearly real-time proofreading tool that harnessed MT, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unless I'm gravely mistaken, the cost is dramatically understated. $25/month will only buy you 5 'requests'.

Related: $1/day is a really bad way to present a pricing plan of $25/5 requests. Yes, that's technically correct, but I don't want to amortize the cost over the number of days in the month; I want to amortize it over the number of days I actually _use_ the product (or, better yet, the number of _times_ I use it - so $5/task).

</comment><comment><USER18> I got all excited about Fancy Hands, then realized that this is just a post to farm referral dollars and give free advertising.

FH had a message on their pricing page that immediately turned me off. Sometimes, it's better to _not_ be so dynamic (i.e. I would have signed up had I not seen the message below):

"Steve Corona knows you'll love having Fancy Hands. Sign up now and get 50% off your first month or 5% off your first year."

<comment><USER16> I'll change the link, I don't care about the referral dollars, it was to get you 50% off for using the link. Anyways, I'd rather it didn't detract from the message of the post.

BTW- I love FancyHands and have 0 ties with them.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for doing that. I'll leave my original comment up in shame--I shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly.

A note for the FancyHands team, though (I know the founder is hanging around here somewhere): I didn't notice the referral link at first; my first reaction when I saw "Steven Corona knows you'll love FancyHands" was that Steven worked for the company, which detracts from the authenticity of his blog post. I'd seriously consider removing that 'feature' and making the referral process more inconspicuous, leaving it up to the bloggers to disclose their participation in the referral program.

<comment><USER19> Or try running an A/B test on it, and submit a blog post with the results to Hacker News!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The things I want to automate are expensive to do so. I'm talking about things like the dishes and the laundry and commuting. I have a house cleaner that comes periodically, but I'd be spending a lot more (and have a lot more intrusion on my privacy) if it were daily / nightly.

The automated driving component might work. Maybe if I lease a black hybrid, have the driver be my employee, and let him do uber on off hours, it could actually net money. But setting this up sounds complicated. If only I could automate it.

<comment><USER21> The dishes, the laundry and commuting have already been automated. Washing machines, dish washers, cars and public transport all made our lives so much easier that we seem to have forgotten the amount of labor that went into such simple tasks in the past.

So now we look to automate the _remnant_ of actually having to operate the machinery. It's interesting because it shows how spoiled we've become. Even loading or unloading a washing machine or dishwasher are now considered work.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but what you call the "remnant" still takes too much time. Laundry requires me to sort clothes, put them in a bag, carry them to my building's laundry room, load up and configure the machines, then set a timer so that I don't forget to go back and pick them up. I then need to fold the clothes and put them in their corresponding drawers or hang them in the closet. The worst part in all this is that even though I am not doing the actual task of washing the clothes, I still need to block off a time period, meaning I can't actually be in another location doing other things while laundry is getting done.

Similarly, doing the dishes and commuting can still be annoying despite the automation. Loading and unloading dishes takes a fair amount of time. Commuting requires having to schedule one's time around bus and train schedules.

<comment><USER8> What is "too much", really? More than zero? You make laundry sound like a daunting chore, but I know I don't spend more than ten minutes a week on it.

<comment><USER23> Laundry is definitely a pain point. You first have the chore of removing and subsequently installing fitted sheets, which are certainly not zero-insertion force. And the folding and sorting of the clothing (distributing towels to bathrooms, etc.) This requires enough seek time to at least hit each room once, and in the case of suboptimal routing, probably twice.

In the case the laundromat, you have the carting of multiple baskets of clothes and materials, often down flights of stairs, into a vehicle, and at some distance. Materials experience spillage. A community (e.g. apartment complex) laundromat eliminates some travel, but your quarter supply may vary unexpectedly, requiring unexpected travel. This probably amortizes to eliminate the gain.

In the case of doing laundry at home, you have both an infrastructure cost and a pipelining problem. Speaking for myself, I can rarely accomplish anything useful during a laundry cycle, leading to a near-total loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very interesting, wish more of this would be applicable in Germany, especially the virtual assistant part, most of which seem to be English only. Although in the case of FancyHands, it's not due to English being more well known in the former colonies, for once…

And apparently Steve uses 10 Q-Tips per day.

<comment><USER25> There's a business opportunity here, at least for French and German... The German work could be outsourced to Turkey, and the French out to Africa.

<comment><USER24> Germany itself has some pretty lenient wage policies if you hire long-time unemployed people. But I doubt that there's a big demand for it. Germans don't like to delegate in general, even if it's with a pretty trivial matter. When Walmart first arrived, they tried to have your groceries bagged for you, just like they do in the US. Quickly dropped that, as people complained about employees touching their stuff or doing it the wrong way. Never mind that for a lot of people the ghosts of the Stasi (or even Gestapo) are still lingering, so e.g. sending people you don't know your bills and other personal data is a bit taboo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love Steve's posts because I can always relate.

I definitely need to start using FancyHands (got the email from the guy who created it recently about how he was killing an old company and putting all effort into FancyHands). Unfortunately some of my current tasks require calling my lawyer and doing some other things that really only I can do.

I do need a dentist though, and a handful of other things. Time to delegate!

<comment><USER27> When you figure out how to outsource going to the dentist, let us all know. That's one of those services that pg talks about that everybody needs but nobody wants to provide: great startup opportunity.

<comment><USER28> Put a dentist in a van and drive to wherever you'd need?

<comment><USER29> I'm surprised nobody has done this, actually. I live in Alaska and have a friend who is a dentist. He works exclusively in remote villages with a portable kit of equipment he flies around with on small chartered aircraft. It would definitely fit in a van.

<comment><USER30> There aren't very many licensed dentists that have to bother much about finding customers.

<comment><USER31> I think the idea would be to charge a large amount to make it worth the dentists while to do so. So high population density high income areas. New York and maybe San Francisco?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That is not automation. That is delegation.

<comment><USER33> I was going to say exactly the same thing. It's automation only if you remove the biological elements from getting tasks done.

Delegation is just getting someone who earns less money than you to do your boring stuff for you.

<comment><USER34> > Delegation is just getting someone who earns less money than you to do your > boring stuff for you.

They don't necessarily have to earn less money than you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If I didn't have my wife I would so do something like Fancy Hands. For those of us that have ADHD, procrastination is a real killer on our quality of life.

<comment><USER36> Are you suggesting <http://www.fancywife.com/> ?

In all seriousness having a SO that can remind you and help out with important reminders and things in life is pretty handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> since nobody has posted it yet, here's the obligatory link to an old esquire article that takes this idea to the extreme. Presenting: "My life outsourced" <http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0905OUTSOURCING_214>

<comment><USER38> This is a hilarious and informative read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think you should make it clear that your link to FancyHands is a referral link.

<comment><USER16> I removed the aff link since a few people think it's detracting from the message of the post. I could care less about the referrals, the point was to get my readers 50% off by using the link.

<comment><USER40> I'd actually really appreciate the affiliate link, thinking about trying it out. Would you mind posting it in the comment thread here?

<comment><USER16> Sure, it's <http://fncy.it/RvrAPd>

You get 50% off your first month, I get 10 bucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's not automation, it's hiring other people.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't say it's full blown hiring. Maybe micro-hiring. Is that a term?

<comment><USER42> It is now !

Not a bad one either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have daily job and children. On side I have an huge open-source project. Procrastination was my huge enemy.

I solved it by 'will'. TODO lists, monthly shopping, booking everything on time... It is easier than you think.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm trying to outsource some tasks myself--mostly home repair--but I'm running into quality problems. I end up with a result that is not up to my standards, and it feels like I have to spend overly much time vetting people or dealing with tha back and forth about quality issues, etc. If I'm paying good money to get a task done, I don't want it to take up my time. If it does, I feel like I might as well have done it myself.

I'm working on changing this mindset but it's proving difficult.

<comment><USER45> That's kind of what sites like Service Magic (Home Advisor) try to solve. But, I think their biggest benefit is the user comments and reviews, not their service.

I prefer to just DIY. Then when it breaks again, at least you're empowered and know what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's been a personal goal of mine to make it a habit to write scripts to automate a repetitive task, no matter how minor or rare the task. As long as the solution takes 9 minutes to code to deal with 10 minutes of grunt work. I'd argue, though, that the benefits of practice (and habit building), that it's worth spending 12 minutes of scripting time per 10 minutes of code, even if you never have to run that script again. Obviously, TMMV.

Using Mechanical Turk for proofreading/editing has always appealed to me. I wonder what the OP's results were with that that led him to choose Fiverr instead? As a writer, I would be paranoid about throwing any of my (commercial valuable) work online to the crowd...what if you wrote a script to break your manuscript into sentences and paid 2 cents per sentence? You could only catch within-sentence grammatical errors. But you'd vastly reduce the fear that your work is floating out there for someone to misappropriate.

[pedantic]

There's a grammatical error (I think) in the last sentence of the post ("half an hour an Amazon"):

> _You can automate almost all of the boring parts of your life, today, for > less than 25 bucks and half an hour an Amazon. And make sure to have your > assistant email me telling me how much time I saved you._

<comment><USER16> Fixed the error, thanks :) Obviously I did not have Fiverr proofread the post for me!

I used Fiverr over MT because of the spin-up time involved in setting up the MT project. I only tested Fiverr with one 62 page chapter, which I was able to send to my guy in one document. If I used MT, I'd have to split up all of the content into paragraphs, create tasks, and review all of the work, etc.

I'll probably test MT again in the future and use some sort of system to.. automate it ;)

<comment><USER47> I've found MT results quality to be a problem. 95% of the workers are great, but you do have occasions where you get a bot completing the task or someone being deliberately careless in the hope that the HIT will get automatically approved. To combat that, I give the task to different workers until 3 answers match and that works well. It's worthwhile once you've automated, but that's worthwhile only if you've got a fairly large number of tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like the idea of Amazon grocery subscriptions but practically it just feels like the time you would need to spend managing the subscription and figuring out the optimal schedule is more than the time it takes to replenish the stocks every 4 months. Or dealing with stuff like Amazon directly selling citrus Listerine but not mint Listerine.

(Except cat litter, that is totally worth getting delivered from Amazon just to avoid carrying it.)

</comment><comment><USER49> You can automate tasks in the house (e.g. a maid) with <http://redbeacon.com> (disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Redbeacon).

I also automate groceries at <http://shop.safeway.com> .

In San Francisco you can automate laundry with <http://sfwash.com> . Great service.

<comment><USER50> Finding personal services professionals sucks, but I'm unsure of how I'm supposed to use redbeacon. I load up the site (in Los Angeles), and find maids, set 1 bedroom, see it's $114 avg, see comments for deep cleaning, find the "reoccurring" checkbox, and get no results.

Automation would imply a scheduled event to me, but it looks like this is more for one-off transactions?

<comment><USER51> Yeah, I did the exact same thing. No love for LA :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wish my bank/brokerage/etc all had the equivalent of "valet key" logins where I could set-up and manage accounts for others which only had a subset of my own rights. For example, I'd like to hire an assistant to reconcile/aggregate/classify my financial records, but I'd either have to take a lot of time to gather everything up or expose the ability for this person to steal from me. My brokerage account includes the right to buy/sell securities, but I only want my bookkeeper to be able to view my transaction history.

One problem I see is that access to one's financial records sometimes is used as a proxy for identity, much like the presumption that, if you can read an email sent to a particular address, you must "own" that email address. Didn't PayPal once (or even still does?) debit N cents from one's bank account and then ask what amount was charged as a way of verifying new users?

<comment><USER53> Credit n cents, and they still do.

What else would you have them do? They are verifying this is your bank account and this is the best way to do it. Think of it like feature detection in JS vs. user agent string matching.

<comment><USER52> They're verifying that I created a PayPal account which links to a bank account to which I have read-level transaction ledger access. It's a better- than-nothing proxy, but it doesn't prove that the person setting-up the PayPal account has the legal right to withdraw funds from that account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think delegating is a little different than automating. Granted it's out of your hands either way though.

</comment><comment><USER49> Does anyone else find useless virtual assistants? Isn't it easy enough to buy your plane ticket at hipmunk.com and book an apartment at AirBnB?

I think it takes me longer to describe what I want to the assistant than doing it myself.

<comment><USER55> We've gone full circle.

People used to book through travel agents. They'd call them and tell them when and where they want to go and the agent books something for them.

Travel agents disappeared because people would rather take the time to do it on their own in order to save money.

Now people are too busy to book flights on their own and want some form of assistant to do it for them. On comes a novel new service!

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How I automated non-essential purchases:

create an account on slickdeals

set up a deal alert for your desired keywords

don't think about it again until you get an email alerting you to a good deal

This removes a cognitive load for me. I no longer waste time researching trivial outlays.

</comment><comment><USER57> Subscriptions for things like toilet paper are a bad idea. Unless your consumption is 100% constant and you know exactly what it is (unlikely if you ever have any people visiting you). Ordering such things every couple of weeks takes just a few minutes and you will always get exactly what you need.

IMHO, the whole post is not very useful and the 2 affiliate links are pushing it ... How much does one earn with such a HN post? Please disclose.

</comment><comment><USER58> I have been using virtual assistants for the last 3 years, and I will never come back. A VA in the Philippines cost $5/h and can be very helpful.

(disclaimer: I run the outsourcing marketplace <http://taskarmy.com> where you can find screened virtual assistants: <http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance- outsourcing>)

</comment><comment><USER59> Are there any FancyHands competitors in Europe?

</comment><comment><USER60> A couple years ago, I listened to an interesting interview with Ted Rosen on the Founders Talk podcast:

<http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/2>

I still haven't become a Fancy Hands user, but I do remember him saying lots of new parents turn to them for help when a baby arrives, so perhaps that'll be me someday.

</comment><comment><USER61> I've been interested in a virtual assistant since 4HWW came out - <USER2> thought I was busy enough to justify something like GetFriday.

I dealing with general fake-work but seems like there's just as much work involved in getting someone else to do these things as just doing them yourself?

Also - any recommendations for other services to compare to?

</comment><comment><USER62> My sweet mother, subscribe and save? Hacker News pays for all the productivity it costs, one hundred times over.

</comment><comment><USER63> When I first heard of Amazon Subscribe I _really_ wanted to use it but the bulk sizes are just too large. As a single guy all the quantities they have are about double what I need. 40 rolls of toilet paper, for example, would last me a year or more.

<comment><USER64> Eat more fiber

<comment><USER65> Yes, but the productivity gains from not having to buy TP but once a year would more than be offset by the additional time spend on the can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I love this. And I think being in the business of Automation is pretty cool too : <http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/automation-as-a-service>

</comment><comment><USER67> Immediately I think of that Robot in Rocky 3 that serves them food and the like..

</comment><comment><USER68> Something I'd pay to have "automated": a "ghostwriter" to help me organise my thoughts and experiences into blog- and tweet-sized chunks.

I think I have something worth sharing, I just don't have the discipline to get it written down.

</comment><comment><USER22> How does FancyHands deal with task failure? For example, if I make a request and the result turns out to be "sorry, we weren't able to do it because..." does that count towards your monthly total?

</comment><comment><USER69> How does Fancy Hands differ from the "concierge" service that already comes with my credit card for free?

Is it just that I can make a request via a web form, rather than via a phone call?

</comment><comment><USER70> Amazon automatic shipping....

Of course, you could probably rig a replenishment system using python, some hardware, and the Amazon API... An erp for your home...

</comment><comment><USER71> Just an FYI: websense seems to be blocking your domain, classified as adult- and-pornography.

<comment><USER16> it's because of my run naked post from a few months ago, haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I would love to have a service like Fancy Hands. Is there an equivalent in the UK?

</comment><comment><USER73> So basically, pay for and outsource the tasks that you don't like or find mundane. This is cost prohibitive and a way around or optimising them would be better. I just need to get busy enough to feel forced to.

</comment><comment><USER74> According to my works content filter this is NSFW

<comment><USER16> It's because of the "run naked" post I wrote a few months ago.

<comment><USER36> Well that sucks! That post doesn't seem that lewd. Are you going to ask Websense to undo that categorization? Do people even do this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > CTO at Twitpic

Does Twitpic still not allow you to export your own pictures or did they give up on that?

</comment><comment><USER76> python+iMacros</comment>


Postgresql 9.2 will have boat-loads of performance enhancements - <AUTHOR> http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2011.html#November_29_2011

<comment><USER2> These are fantastic improvements. But I wish there is auto-sharding support for PostgreSQL, or at least an auto-sharding layer. For some data sets I really sharding and building things manually just takes too much time. Unfortunately sharding is not as easy as 'insert into server number object_id % NUMBER_OF_SERVERS'; a proper auto-sharding application should also handle moving data from one shard to another.

<comment><USER3> Adding or removing shards can get complicated and it is better to handle this at _your_ application layer.

For instance, you could keep track of the configuration history - when adding a shard, you create a new version. And when trying to fetch, you could try the latest version of your configuration (which says, for example, that it's on server 3) and if not found you could try the previous version (which says that it's on server 1). You can also add the possibility of removing a shard, however this requires that for every write you'll have to do a secondary write to another server, for redundancy.

In the background you could have a _healer_ that whenever a new version gets pushed, it would go through all entries and move them accordingly. And at the end it would declare such a version to be "healed".

However, what I described above works in case you want to introduce a new server in production immediately. Like say, in the case of something like Twitter, you want to write to the new shard right away and the most important messages are the most recent ones. But you may also want to create a configuration such that a new server isn't hit by the front-end until the healing script hasn't finished migrating.

The thing is, a layer like this gets to be very optimized for your needs and there's no one size fits all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like all the talk surrounding Postgresql recently, does anyone have any experience with moving from MSSQL to Postgresql?

I am not asking if one is better than the other because it depends what I am using it for but what about performance / reliability?

<comment><USER5> Such comparisons are often difficult since MySQL and Postgres typical perform significantly better on Unix based systems than they do on Windows. Also using the Windows/.NET libraries for connections tend to perform worse even if the database server itself is hosted a Unix box.

In general, I would say you should stay on MSSQL if your server environments are Windows and only look at the OSS alternatives if you're willing (and able) to make a full stack switch to Unix.

<comment><USER6> At the company I work for we are currently in the process of migrating from MSSQL to PostgreSQL. However, we are trickling to a full stack switch to Linux. In the meantime, the Postgres databases have performed extremely well and on balance we are happy with it.

Unfortunately I would argue that at an enterprise level MSSQL is better than Postgres (pure conjecture here). If nothing else, it is way easier to employ MSSQL experts where I live and next to impossible to find Postgres talent. This pretty much means that we are learning by trial and error what the best practices are.

<comment><USER7> If you need remote Postgres talent, go to the source: www.EnterpriseDB.com

<comment><USER8> Actually, there's quite a few companies that offer professional PG support, there's a list on the official PostgreSQL page:

<http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know a lot of this will be up to the architecture and specific nature of each app... but has anyone recently compared a modern MySQL and Postgresql installation on a few baseline metrics? I'd love to see the differences. I am starting to use it more and more, being a Django developer surrounded by Postgres users. But, so far the core differences are scaring me away. psql template1? It doesn't make as much sense to me.

<comment><USER10> What's the equivalent of template1 in mysql?

<comment><USER11> I don't think there is one, mysql only creates empty databases it does not have a concept of db templates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait, is a boat-load more or less than a butt-load?

<comment><USER13> Boats are bigger than butts.</comment></comment>


Six Months of Gondor (Update on Django Hosting) - <AUTHOR> https://gondor.io/blog/2011/07/03/six-months-gondor/

<comment><USER2> It appears that Pinax (the Django social network, <http://pinaxproject.com>) development has slowed since the inception of Gondor. Both are developed by Eldarion.

Is it true that Pinax has taken the back burner so that Eldarion can focus on Gondor?

<comment><USER3> Development has stagnated a bit, but it certainly doesn't seem like Gondor took much focus (If it's 6 months old, probably more?)

<https://github.com/pinax/pinax/commits/master>

Are there any particular issues that are not been fixed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Note, don't look on master for the majority of work. See the fresh-start branch <https://github.com/pinax/pinax/commits/fresh-start> (and various external apps used by Pinax)

<comment><USER3> Aaah, of course, looking at that it's impossible to say that development has stagnated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to love Gondor, but the deployments have not been as painless as I wish them to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you let us know (either via email@example.com or the #gondor channel on freenode) what problems you encountered? For some people, things go very smoothly out of the box; others hit assumptions we made that don't always apply (or aren't well documented yet, etc). Please help us fix the latter case.</comment></comment>


The Future the US Military Is Constructing: A Giant, Armed Nervous System - <AUTHOR> http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/future-us-military-constructing-giant-armed-nervous-system/141303/ <comment><USER2> I find all this interconnectedness fetishism troubling, it breeds interdependence and makes systems less resilient.

</comment><comment><USER3> Skynet?</comment>


Why Not Have a Randomly Selected Congress? - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/why-not-have-a-randomly-selected-congress <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea but has the same flaw as term limits: the power would shift from the Congressperson to the staffers who are unknown, unaccountable, and sometimes even worse people.

When I worked for various agencies in DC, one of the first things I learned was who the power players and key people were in each of our Senators' & Congresspersons' offices. It is quite often _not_ the Senator but the scheduler. Yes, the person who runs the Senator's calendar and determines who gets on it and who doesn't.

We found pretty quickly that this scheduler was - _almost without exception_ \- a single woman in her mid 20's. Therefore, whenever we knew that we would need access, we would do little things like bring flowers or chocolates "for the office" but make sure to leave them with her. When we found out about new restaurants or a show she'd like, we'd pass her the info. By the time we needed that meeting and gave her a call, we would get it every single time.. often the same day.

And yes, we worked with both parties and names you'd recognize.

* Am I proud about any of that? Nope but that is how the Hill works. And giving those people more powerful is an awful idea.

<comment><USER3> Why would a representative leave so much influence in the hands of a girl in her middle twenties who's dumb enough to doll out influence to bringers of chocolate?

<comment><USER4> What's dumb about it? It's called greasing the wheel. You want to get the meeting over every other asshole who wants a meeting. Who gets the meeting, gets the laws.

<comment><USER3> The girl is dumb for playing loose with American legislation for fucking chocolates.

<comment><USER4> This whole phenomenon is over your head, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As far as I can see, they advocate for a Randomly Selected Congress that still operates on a term basis (i.e. new members are randomly chosen at fixed time intervals, e.g. every two years).

An alternative approach that I've found quite interesting is to assemble a new Randomly Selected Congress for every single bill. The idea is that certain parties (e.g. government offices or public petitions with a sufficient amount of backers) gain the right to identify problems. For each problem thusly identified, a Randomly Selected Congress is formed, who can either vote that no action is required, or who can enact a bill with the intention of solving that problem.

The appeal is that every legislator will only be involved in exactly one law over their lifetime (maybe two or three, but the chance of one person being selected multiple times is excessively slim). So horse trades cannot work anymore, and every legislator knows that whatever they sign into law will be the single one impact they can ever have on the political system. Like: "This may only be a zoning law for small villages, and I don't care because I live in the city. But everyone will judge me by this law forever, so I better make sure it's the best fucking zoning law ever."

<comment><USER6> This sounds a lot like jury duty. I'm not sure what to make of that similarity.

<comment><USER7> It's also similar to the Slashdot moderation system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do we want the statistical average of us to create laws that stick around for years? If so, we need to raise the average significantly.

Also, this would put enormous power in the hands of lobbyists and bureaucrats; a demographic that is not exactly brimming with the diversity that this 'solution' attempts to put in place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the solution is just to ban lobbying as it currently exists. I ran across an interesting argument about a month ago basically saying that, legally, there are things we can own but not sell, like a spleen, because the societal consequences of allowing people to sell their organs are so disastrous. They made the point that maybe you should similarly have the right to lobby your congressman but that you wouldn't have the right to sell that capability.

<comment><USER9> So no lobbying from EFF or Natural Resources Defense Council?

<comment><USER10> The EFF wouldn't need to lobby if Comcast/Google/etc. didn't lobby

<comment><USER9> I disagree. Laws like CFAA get passed because legislators want to look tough on crime. Not, IMHO, because corporations are lobbying for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Neighborhood DC lobbyists here.. It's an idea worthy of study, but in practice it would be difficult to implement. First, the warm-up time for someone entering congress, to get them to the point where they do know what they're doing, is about six months. These are folks who want to be there, who have at least spent some time studying the issues, the process, and time on the campaign trail. A completely random, lay congress picked off the street would need about a year to get to that point. Those who have some advanced education, knowledge, or training in government, are going to quickly run right over them. Then there's the staff. You've got a randomly selected congress, but what about the staff? That's who really runs the place, and those with the best staffers are going to get up to speed the quickest. What about parties? Who is the Speaker? Who runs the committees? If it's a free- for-all with no one in a party, and no one able to unit a group to control, it's chaos. Even Britain, with its myriad of parties and voting blocs, has a lot of function built into their structure.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone agreeing with this should read The Next Revolution by ya boy Murray Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism has the members of democratic citizen's assemblies of a town or city creating laws directly, and the representatives form a completely administrative role. By separating legislation and representation he even suggests that randomly selecting the delegates is completely reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER13> The level of knowledge of civics, current events, and history, not to mention the level of civic responsibility has done nothing but go down since this nation was founded. This idea might have been more tenable 200 or even 100 years ago.

The jury system is an entirely different problem space. There the decision is made based on a relatively narrow pool of information, and is in fact constrained to that pool of information and the personal experience of the individual jurors.

Congress is a whole other matter. There decisions must be informed based upon a vastly greater background of knowledge and, dare I say, wisdom. International affairs and history, broad understanding of current events, economics, knowledge of our system of law and jurisprudence. Do the individuals in congress all meet this standard? No. But the process of putting oneself and one's knowledge and experience forward to the voting public does act as a sort of filter to weed out people who have no understanding or ability to govern.

</comment><comment><USER14> Or teach people to become leaders who can govern. What does it take to have a specialized field of studies to prepare people? The more the qualified experts compete each other in getting elected, the better.

<comment><USER15> That is precisely what an aristocratic elite (or any semi-permanent elite subgroup) is supposed to do. What seems to have changed in America is that the elites no longer grow up learning that "we are better, and therefore, it is our job to run things correctly for our heirs (and the plebes too I guess, as long as they keep their place)".

While this is distasteful attitude on the surface, one thing it does do is make sure that at least a few of the elites grow up with a sense of nobles oblige and fosters a longer-term outlook. There are, of course, a host of disadvantages. So while I welcome the dismantlement of such attitudes among the elite, the problem is that nothing has risen to take its place. We sadly seem to be becoming more and more a "what's in it for me" society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would much rather see all bills and amendments put under a public version control where everyone could see who is adding what in real-time.

This transparency would really help out democracy in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been on a sortition kick for some time now and am a big proponent, but simply choosing congressmen at random would never work. I believe that with subcommittees and some sort of filtering mechanism, it could work very well. The filtering mechanism is the trickiest part though. So far I haven't come up with anything better than a qualification exam, which has some obvious flaws.

The way I see it working is like this: You have a central committee that is like the legislature, but they don't draft bills. They only debate them and vote on them. This committee is made up of at least 40% unfiltered complete randoms. The term could be anywhere from 6 months to 4 years; the position being non-compulsory and well compensated. The central committee also selects someone to serve as the head of state, who will act kind of like the SoS and be commander in chief of the military. This person could be replaced with a vote of no confidence like a PM.

The actual legislation would be written by filtered subcommittees. For example, you could have an infrastructure committee that has two lawyers, 2-4 engineers, two economists and two social scientists. These would be selected at random from a pool of people who have passed some sort of qualification exam. The exam would be very difficult, but people would be highly encouraged to take it to maximize the size of the pools. Of course study materials and services should also be provided by the state to make sure that everyone has approximately equal access.

It's not an ideal system, and there are some flaws, but I believe it would work very well. Having committees of experts crafting legislation would limit the influence of lobbyists. You could also potentially have some sort of petition system to keep effective leaders around for a second term.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is such and outstanding idea and I would love to see it implemented for some seats in the UK House of Lords - a low risk way to trial it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Get some information on the internal democracy of the Bahai faith. They have candidateless elections - essentially you vote for any member of the faith you personally think is very capable and the ones who have the most votes is elected. And to avoid any cult of person, you elect councils of 9 people that have to decide with absolute majority about their topics. This Bahai system is almost impossible to game - in case you do bad as an elected person, they will not vote for you the next time. This system also is multilevel: the elected persons of a city do the same candidateless approach on the national level, then those elected in all countries come together and vote for the international "House of Justice" as they call it, which is located in Haifa, Israel. This election process serves really as the perfect sieve for bad people.

<comment><USER20> You have a clear definition for "bad people" as part of your religion. Whether or not that process works, adding a rigid morality does not improve simple plurality voting for most populations.

<comment><USER19> I don't say copy this religion, but its processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I m interested by this topics and I recommend a book by David van Reybrouck that speaks about this topic: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/18/against- electi...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/18/against-elections- the-case-for-democracy-david-van-reybrouck-review)

I think the way we produce new legislation and control the government is not satisfactory as it is. My favorite approach would be to have a sortition (based on a quota method maybe) then some intensive training (law, constitution ... ) before the one term and after that training of the member of the assembly that go back to the civil life.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think there would need to be some minimal filter on those who would govern. Age, for one, but maybe also a high school diploma or equivalent and a "citizenship test" that everyone would have to pass to graduate high school.

<comment><USER23> China has something like this: bureaucrats have to pass the civil service exam, which is like a souped up IQ/SAT style test. The former president, Hu Jintao, apparently had a photographic memory. Make of that what you will.

<comment><USER10> I would like this, but the anti-SAT / whiteboarding group would complain about a system like this to no end.

And to be fair, there is a huge potential for a system like this to be abused or to codify massive inequality in representation across racial / socio- economic lines. So complaints would definitely not be without merit. Usually additional barriers to participate in government only end up hurting those who are most marginalized already, even if they are supposedly well-intentioned. So while a system like this might sound good to your typical hacker news browser, consider that a system like this would also mostly exclude poor and uneducated people from government even more than they are already

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to come up with a solution to one problem that doesn't create a new one. I guess I am kind of imagining a system of mandarins. Perhaps the requirement is that you attend public school, where passing the course is required for graduation. And so you cut out HS dropouts but you also cut out private and charter school kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We could also bring back ostracism (not from society, but from government, at least). We wouldn't be able to select our representatives, but we would be able to rule out those we definitely don't want.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is how democracy was orginally designed in ancient Athen.

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

</comment><comment><USER15> IMO, a randomly selected congress hands power to the executive, or God forbid the government bureaucracy (aka "civil servants"). Whichever one, they will become the only ones who know what the hell is going on.

If a law gets passed they don't like, they will simply drag their feet until they can get next random congress to change it. Assuming they listen to the congress at all.

</comment><comment><USER26> Obviously I have no idea whether this will be better than the current system or not. However, I'm completely left cold by most of the the argumentation in the article.

For example, it complains that 40% of Congress are lawyers, effectively arguing that it's better to have substantially fewer people making laws who are trained in law. Why? because people don't like lawyers.

Also, it complains that 50% of Congress are millionaires so reducing the number of millionaires will remove the influence of lobbyists. Presumably because it's only millionaires who are influenced by marketing and free money?

The one good argument that I can see is that it definitely means that there's no money spent on campaign financing as there are no campaigns. Obviously the suggestion that that money will then be spent on soft and fluffy causes is just silly but at least the original argument makes sense.

Maybe it's just me. A big part of my day to day is understanding the consequences of the decisions I make and mitigating for them. So I get particularly irritated by arguments that only have pro columns. But if one does just make pro arguments they really ought to be better than this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Obligatory Doge [http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.html](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.html) . I think it would work better as a means for electing the President though (as in Venice).

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't see the advantage of such a system over some form of direct democracy.

A right to call for a referendum puts the final say always to the people.

So policymakers will need to ask themselves "Can this law pass a popular vote?" instead of "Will this law increase or decrease the probability of my reelection?"

<comment><USER17> The advantage is this: A randomly selected jury has the time to carefully consider a bill for days at a time, whereas any particular member of the voting public cannot be expected to devote more than an hour or so considering it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In my opinion. Instead of randomly selected congress, we should have a randomly selected electors. You select them randomly. They are sequestered like a jury for a few days. They listen to the candidates and at the end they chose one. Their power only lasts until they make a choice.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Maybe. Maaaayyyyybe this could work. Or it could spell the end of the world's largest economy as we know it.

I have in the past toyed with ideas like randomly selecting the Senate from a pool of outstanding civil service exam scores, or by instituting a third legislative house to be randomly selected, but in any case to do so is to jump headfirst into an uncertain pool of chaos.

The system set up by our founding fathers is, for the most part, a good system. A large republic was supposed to be impossible. It has lasted nearly 250 years. It has survived a bloody civil war (1864 marked the first national election conducted during a civil war in history). It has expanded liberties to abolish slavery and grant the vote for all citizens (with some exceptions).

Right now, the system has been hijacked and rigged by the rich and powerful. Change them, change their influence, by all means, but upending the system for the sake of "trying something new" or god forbid "drain the swamp," will be akin to using a sledgehammer for a problem that requires a screwdriver.

<comment><USER29> Funny you say that when your name is rm -rf /

<comment><USER30> It's getting bad when he's the conservative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The author Ernest Callenbach made a very detailed proposal for just this back in the 80's, called "A Citizen Legislature": [https://www.well.com/~mp/citleg.html](https://www.well.com/~mp/citleg.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> Not bad to think about this, but I think much smaller changes would have huge effects.

Thinks like approval or rank voting, for example.

I don't understand why these minor changes don't get implemented.

</comment><comment><USER33> Or like the Canadian Senate, members need to be independent

<comment><USER34> How does that work? What does "Independent" mean in this context?

<comment><USER33> As no party affiliation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If your job is to create laws, then you must be an expert in that field. So the pool of candidates should be meritocratic in its nature, like a Law School degree and at least 10 years of experience plus 2 in public domains.

Then you can randomize.

Most countries in the world allow any bus driver to be a congressman and we know how great their understanding of laws and human rights are, none.

<comment><USER36> Bias towards those whose profession benefits from a growing abundance of laws?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER35> If you are going to build a bridge are you going to hire an engineer or a cook? Now if you're going to create laws would you hire someone who has studied roman, germanic, sharia law since the times of Hammurabi, philosophy, sociology, politics and everything necessary to understand human interaction and association, or a bus driver?

We get the government we deserve, proportional to our level of ignorance.

There is a big difference between picking from a pool of politicians (crooks who climb the ladder by manipulation, backstabbing and deceit) and the best lawyers according to market forces and meritocracy then randomized.

<comment><USER36> The writing of laws can be left to staff, who may be lawyers, the impetus to have them written and passed need not be left solely to those who benefit from there being an abundance of them.

It doesn't take an Engineer to recognize that a bridge needs to be constructed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why not have random jurors like we do in the UK?

<comment><USER4> The US does have random jurors, congress would be akin to houses of parliament.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> eventually, congress should be ai (with human oversight).

</comment><comment><USER39> How is a "popular mandate" measured if not by elections?

</comment><comment><USER40> Because it leads to tyranny of the majority.

The original idea was congress would be intelligent people supporting decisions for the good of the nation. That doesn't work so well anymore now that the only decisions remaining are split between party lines.

</comment><comment><USER41> >Limits the likelihood of Congress being dominated by rich white guys

>There is no downside to this

I guess that whoever wrote this piece didn't consider that it also increases the likelihood that some poor white guys whose political positions are way farther to the right from the author's own than Ted Cruz's positions are get into Congress.</comment>


Mozilla's new CEO explains his love-hate relationship with Google - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/09/mozilla-gary-kovacs-google/

<comment><USER2> "Google isn't deliberately lying, he said. However, the company created Chrome for a business reason, and Kovacs said that purpose is not "to free the world from any connection to Google." Instead, the search giant wants to use the data gathered by Chrome to create a better, more personalized experience in search and other Google products, he said."

I dunno, I think Google just wants to make sure that the experience of using the web rocks as hard as it can, because the web is the platform that Google uses to deliver all of its applications.

The web is competing with proprietary technologies like iOS apps. If the web is perceived as inferior to iOS apps, then Google is held hostage by the owner of the proprietary platform (Apple). Apple can and will flex this muscle, as we saw when the Google Voice app was denied. So it's in Google's interest to invest into any technology that advances the state of the open web.

If Google just cared about "gathering data," it could save 99% of the work by just making search toolbars for other browsers that "phone home."

<comment><USER3> I'm a Mozilla engineer, but I tend to agree with haberman's comment. I haven't seen any sign that Chrome benefits Google web properties any more than the web in general.

 _"If Google just cared about "gathering data," it could save 99% of the work by just making search toolbars for other browsers that "phone home."_

...which of course you have done, for a long time. But as far as I know Chrome has succeeded in gaining more users than the toolbars ever did. So maybe building a browser _is_ a necessary cost of total world domination. :)

(P.S. Hi Josh!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Firefox doesn't need to privilege any particular website or application, while Google's Chrome is "tied to their commercial purposes," he said."

Ironically the Mozilla Foundation's primary (practically sole?) source of income is derived from the privilege they give Google in their default search box.

<comment><USER5> _The effort comes just months after Firefox's creator, Mozilla Corp., killed a powerful new tool to limit tracking under pressure from an ad-industry executive, The Wall Street Journal has learned._

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870458480457564...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575645074178700984.html)

<comment><USER3> That's some very bad reporting from the Wall Street Journal:

 _"Mr. Simeonov reached out to the chief executive of Mozilla, who put him in touch with Jay Sullivan, vice president of products at Mozilla. The two spoke on June 9... The software was removed from the Firefox prototype on June 10."_

But in fact the software was removed on June 8, before the conversation between Sullivan and Simeonov. Here is the Mercurial changeset: <http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/76e9dd2d9322>

Unfortunately, the WSJ reporter looked at the date of a Bugzilla comment, rather than the date of the change it was discussing. This was pointed out by Mozilla security engineer Jesse Ruderman, who provides more details in the comments here: [http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2010/12/did_we_...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2010/12/did_we_kill_a_do_not_track_feature.html)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for clarifying that. The journal series has otherwise been quite illuminating.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node.js 0.2.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c040c5fd7d761d57

<comment><USER2> So the API with ASCII as the default encoding is frozen :(

<comment><USER3> I got the impression that was a performance trade-off. UTF-8 decoding/encoding isn't free.

<comment><USER4> let's see.. ascii is 4 bit. UTF8 is 8 bit. Is this really an issue on todays computers?

<comment><USER5> ASCII is 7-bit (encoded in 8 bits - the high bit is ignored) and UTF-8 takes 8 bits for most characters, but can take 16+ bits for some characters.

Node is built for massive scalability on applications that (mostly) pass text from one source to another. Thus, having to convert the encoding of every string that passes through node can be a bottlenck.

Felixge has a good writeup of this: [http://debuggable.com/posts/streaming- utf-8-with-node-js:4bf...](http://debuggable.com/posts/streaming-utf-8-with- node-js:4bf28e8b-a290-432f-a222-11c1cbdd56cb)

<comment><USER6> _UTF-8 takes 8 bits for most characters_

It should be noted that "most" here presumably means "most characters in an average English or western/central European language text" as out of the ~2^21 (~2 million) Unicode code points, only 128 are represented using 8 bits in UTF-8.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't matter. Whenever ASCII is an option, UTF-8 is optimal too.

ASCII is not an option for languages other than average English with poor typography and inability to deal with foreign names and addresses (e.g. LinkedIn made horrible mistake of using Latin1 initially. I still have contacts with &xxxx; visible in their names).

I think node.js should use UTF-8 by default, and require users to consciously switch bottleneck parts of their apps to ASCII.

<comment><USER6> I wasn't stating my opinion in my last post, just facts/clarifications.

But yes, I agree that UTF-8 would be a better default than ASCII unless someone provides hard evidence that encoding/decoding is a severe performance bottleneck in most real applications. (even then, I'd default to the "correct", not the fastest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Finally, a (hopefully) frozen API for 0.2.x!

I hope Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick gets a stable 0.2.x version of Node.

<comment><USER8> If you want to keep track of hot, fresh node-y goodness independently of the Ubuntu release cycle (as I do), then please enjoy my nodejs PPA builds.

They're built for lucid, but run fine on maverick, and like everything else in that PPA, are used in production (thus I have an incentive to maintain them well).

      https://launchpad.net/~jdub/+archive/ppa

Enjoy!

(Note: I build a static version of node built against the internal copy of libraries it ships, rather than the dynamic build used by the main Debian and Ubuntu node packages. I really only do this to avoid maintaining those libraries in my PPA as well, and ryah keeps up with their updates anyway.)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for doing this. Any idea if they'll ever make it into the official reps?

I've avoided installing much from PPA (never sure about security / stability there), but this may break my habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nothing like a big release days before Node Knockout! I can't wait, either way.

</comment><comment><USER11> What types of projects have you used node.js with?

<comment><USER12> A lot of projects where I would have used python twisted (<http://twistedmatrix.com>) in the past, I now use node.js.

It's all projects where I need to connect different protocols together. Like amqp & websockets for example.</comment></comment>


Show HN: BashScanner – Script to list Outdated Software on your server + cronjob - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PatrolServer/bash-scanner

<comment><AUTHOR> And next to coffee, it now also returns composer modules (top 100 used and still expanding)

</comment><comment><USER2> A coffee brake? Yes, please.

(in the screenshot)</comment>


Introducing Add-on Collections (FireFox) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/06/10/introducing-add-on-collections/

<comment><USER2> This is nice simply from the perspective of getting a new install up and running. And the add-on collector plugin makes keeping your plugins in sync simple too.

</comment><comment><USER3> FEBE and the related CLEO extensions have provided the ability to (locally) back up and transfer extensions, as well as other profile information, for some time.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109>

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2942>

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6152></comment>


Are Dogs Smarter Than Cats? - <AUTHOR> https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/dog-cat-brains-neurons-intelligence-study-spd/ <comment><AUTHOR> It seems that the sample size is extremely small for a scientific paper. Original article is here: [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.0011...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.00118/abstract)

</comment><comment><USER2> >Number of neurons

Ha. That's not intelligence. Cats are superior.</comment>


Rhythm of breathing affects memory and fear - <AUTHOR> https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/12/rhythm-of-breathing-affects-memory-and-fear/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the original paper: Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function [1]

[1] [http://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/49/12448](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/49/12448)</comment>


Moore's Law may work for years to come due to quantum anomaly - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/nanoscale-wires-defy-quantum-predictions-1.9747

<comment><USER2> "Scientists have predicted that it may not be long before [the transistors'] performance is compromised by unpredictable quantum effects"

It is comforting to hear that the unpredictable quantum effects were, in fact, unpredictable. Science wins even when it fails.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honesty, its not conductivity that's the problem. What we really need are transistors that have a big enough difference in conductance between their on and off states.

<comment><USER4> Also the thermal issues are relevant. It is a common misconception that quantum effects are the limiting factor in Moore's law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's disappointing you have to pay to see the original Science paper.</comment>


Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? - <AUTHOR> http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/

<comment><USER2> This deserves so much more attention here than it's going to get. It's also genuinely TL, and many here DR at all. For what it's worth, if he starts to lose you, here are some of the key points:

* You'd want to know that David Lowery was the lead singer for Camper Van Beethoven (of "Take The Skinheads Bowling" fame) and Cracker (of "Low" fame). You'd quickly learn from this that Lowery was trained as a mathematician and worked as a quant near the CME, and worked with Andy Mason at his pre-Groupon company. He's a punchcard and packet radio chat nerd.

* He's tired of people telling him that musicians need to "embrace" technology. They were embracing technology in the '90s. They paid to have people run complicated websites. He's tired of people telling him to sell more t-shirts. Bands have sold t-shirts since the '70s. It's shitty money. And people pirate t-shirts too!

* Concerts are also shitty money for most artists. People thought otherwise because we inadvertently cherry pick stats from artists that happen to do crazy well at concerts. Lowery runs a serious recording studio, his wife is a notable concert booker. Musicians aren't making money at concerts. Many are living out of their vans.

* Recording albums is deceptively expensive in ways that technology doesn't address. ProTools can get marginally cheaper but the mix engineer doesn't get any cheaper. Mix engineers are expensive skilled professionals. Recordings sound like crap when you don't do them professionally. The mix engineer doesn't get to sell t-shirts at concerts.

* He's going to lose a lot of you by sniping at the industry for "defending software patents", as if that was a double standard. Get past that to his real point: technologists work in an industry that is supported by protectable IP. Even if you work solely on NetBSD, you'd make a lot less money if no software was protectable. No music is protectable anymore. There is a serious double standard.

* He gets it: you can give to get. He's been giving away music for decades. His shows were all recorded and given away for free; his bands organized CD burning trees. But that was his choice and he did it on his terms. The new terms are dictated to artists: your stuff will be available for free online.

* The old system was better for artists. Not because the labels were better. It was probably an accident. Editorial aside: or maybe tech companies are just better at squeezing surplus value out of systems.

* People tend to remark about how low artist royalties were in the label system. That didn't tell the whole story! Artists received sizable advances calibrated for "modest success" level outcome for their recordings. The overwhelming majority of artists never recouped those advances. So the _effective_ royalty rate was much higher; possibly, for most bands, over 50%.

* Not only that, but artists received a _mechanical_ 70-95 cents every time their album sold, even when they hadn't recouped. So no matter what the economics of a given contract were, when you download a pirated album instead of buying it, the artist loses nearly a buck.

* Artists don't talk about how good they have it because it's not cool to talk about how good you have it.

* Music distribution in 2012 is lockers, streaming, and stores.

* Lockers are straight-up piracy. They make huge revenues (ed aside: "MegaUpload Considers IPO" revenues) from "accelerated downloads" and from ad placement. Musicians get zero of that money.

* Speaking of piracy: recorded music sales are off over 60% since the advent of piracy. There are studies that try to show that musicians are better off in the long run. But many of them are playing games. Some pour game revenue into the same bucket as music revenue. Others use sleight of hand to equate 99 cent single downloads with album sales. One suggested a successful indie musician had seen increased revenues recently, but it turned out that musician made only 34k/yr. People circulate wildly inaccurate stories and infographics about how labels screw artists and accept them without question.

* Streaming tries to pay artists but not by viable amounts. Moreover, streaming pricing isn't transparent. Some artists get better deals, paid on different scales, than other artists.

* Stores are reliably paying artists. But the economics don't totally add up.

* The 1980s value chain: artist < store < label. The artist got the least, yes. But stores took on inventory risk and were compensated for that. Labels financed recording and distribution and were compensated. All three links in the chain provided significant value.

* The 2012 value chain: artist < iTunes < label. The artist makes marginally more. But iTunes does't add significant value: unlike the stores, which were paid to take inventory risk and predict demand, iTunes takes no risk and performs almost no service other than dealing with card processing fees.

* BUT HE'S FINE WITH THAT. He's a market guy. More competition would fix this problem.

* Except: how do you compete with Apple, Google, and Facebook? For a little while musicians could make decent money selling music on their websites. 100% of the revenue less processing fees. Then Facebook and Youtube took all the traffic. Visitor stats plummeted. New content has to be released on Facebook or Youtube; that's where the audience is. But he has no control on Facebook or Youtube. He has to fit into their revenue model, or swim against a tsunami to try to find an audience for a standalone web site, hoping to be one of the few people with outcomes like Louis CK.

* Again, he says: the old system was better. You could make a living more reliably as a musician under the major label system than you can today. The label system at least cared about music --- not in the "have great taste, prefer The Kinks to The Turtles" kind of way, but in a "our incentives align somewhat" kind of way. But music is just a footnote to Facebook & Google. The new players don't care at all about the music industry, because they're in the tech industry, and the only thing that matters to the tech industry is turning software into money.

You don't have to agree with any of this (I happen to buy all of it, wholesale; maybe it's because the rest of my family are musicians). You also don't have to believe that the tech industry owes it to musicians to change anything so that people can make a living as musicians (that's not what I believe, but I believe a lot of things you don't). But you should probably _engage fully_ with what Lowery is saying before you try to claim that startups and tech companies are making things better for musicians, because this is him calling bullshit on you directly.

<comment><USER3> It's _very_ hard for me not to read this as thrashing in a tar-pit. Even if everything he says is spot-on, I don't see a positive call-to-action here. If all this is supposed to be is someone in the know saying "don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining," that's one thing, and I can get behind that, in a way. What I _can't_ get behind is the implicit call for technology not to be developed, or for new business models not to be tried.

The 20th century was a complete historical outlier in the support given to professional musicians, brought on by a confluence of technology that had a high barrier to entry but low barriers to distribution. That situation has now changed, and it's inevitable that there's going to be a squeeze.

One specific issue I do take with what he's saying comes here:

        But what many of you forget is that IT IS MY CHOICE whether I choose
        to give away my songs or sell them.  IT IS MY CHOICE how and where to
        distribute my songs.  IT IS MY CHOICE to decide which websites get to
        exploit my songs.   Like it or not, the right to control one's
        intellectual property (like songs) is a constitutional right.

The first of those choices I have no disagreement with. That's just the nature of how he chooses to distribute his work in the first place. However, from then on, while he does have rights in the work, _those rights are limited_. I wonder what he'd say the proper length for a copyright term should be? As much as he conflates free software fans with software patent owners, I could easily conflate this part of his talk with the actions of the copyright lobby to extend copyright in perpetuity.

<comment><USER2> This is just rationalizing. The system as it exists today provides him with virtually _no_ rights over his work. Also, what right is more reasonable for a creator to claim than the right to price and market their work on their terms? This whole message board is full of people who post "Show HN" stories about their random weekend projects priced at $9.99/mo.

<comment><USER2> (This comment was overly strident; preface all sentences with "I think" and add an implied "we", because I've been just as guilty of this rationalization as the rest of us.)

The core point here: there was an old system with some control over distribution. There is a new system that _dictates_ terms to artists, and those terms are "your content will be free to all comers online, and you can compete with other businesses to derive value from it".

When Apple applied the same terms to the app store, people freaked. And app developers had a _choice_ of whether to deliver on the app store!

<comment><USER3> Right. I guess what I'm not seeing is how it could be any other way, given the economic incentives and technical landscape. This argument sails awfully close to begging humans not to be human.

<comment><USER2> That seems true if what you're implying is that it's human nature to cheat on contracts, renege on promises, and free-ride whenever possible. I concede that humans have those streaks, but I don't accept them.

As for the arc of technological improvement: it speaks very poorly of any YC company's ability to protect its customer data, too. Or of any HN reader's ability to retain control of their laptop. How do you feel about that?

<comment><USER3> Pretty neutral. Everything is broken or circumvented in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> _I realize that some of you may not know much about me or even who I am. I like to think that I am uniquely qualified as an artist, entrepreneur and geek. I was trained as a mathematician. My first job after I graduated involved being the systems operator for an MPM OS system and I wrote a lot of DBASE IV scripts. I had a fascination with the old RPG punch card programming language. I am deeply involved in the digital amateur radio world. You can sometimes find me operating PSK31 on 20 meters. I spent some time in Chicago near the CME. I worked as a "Quant" doing some semi high frequency trading. While there I became involved with a company called www.thepoint.com which evolved into www.groupon.com._

This post is blowing my mind and I'm only a couple grafs into it. David Lowery was a f'ing quant for CME traders?

<comment><USER4> I didn't know any of that either. But I was mainly struck by how comprehensively he attacked the arguments of those he calls 'freehadists.' I sit (uncomfortably) on the fence in these things; I think the current law on copyright is a disaster on wheels, but having spent years as a Starving Artist the problem of revenue for content creators is not an abstract one to me, and I can't bring myself to download copyrighted movies and music the way other people do. I used to buy a lot of media, now I compromise by renting it or opting for what's available on YouTube (where rightsholders have a reliable mechanism for asserting ownership of their IP if they feel an upload infringes upon them).

The bit that really pained me was his mention of John Perrry Barlow doing his schtick at the SF Music Summit. I was getting into the internet when the WELL was still in full swing and vividly recall Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - what young digital idealist _wouldn't_ thrill to such vaulting sentiments? Two decades later, the notions of elective citizenship and intentional nationality continue to fascinate, but not the notions that the ends justify the means and that the economics will take care of themselves.

I am very happy that the technological means of production have become so much cheaper; I have several synthesizers and related audio gear sitting on this desk I'm at now, and a great camera that allows me to shoot excellent video in HD - one handed. When I first learned my way around a movie set the cameras weighed 30 pounds and I had to use a tape recorder the size of a concrete block. Unfortunately, my technical mastery (or at least commercially viable skill) came at the same time that the market for the end product fragmented drastically - as the technology became cheaper, so the skills of people who were skilled in its use became massively devalued. We had another example the other day involving a photographer talking to a calendar publisher whose photo rights budget amounted to a mere $100. Now, I'm not really an entrepreneur, and I don't dispute that there are abundant commercial opportunities that I could have exploited and haven't; I'm hopeful that the increasing popularity of crowdfunding and the possible democratization of investment from the JOBS bill will facilitate capital-raising for small projects.

But the downside that Lowery so elegantly articulates here is that to succeed in the new commercial marketplace, a creative type needs to also be his or her own manager/marketer/salesperson/etc., to a far greater degree than before - and that means less time spent developing one's craft and creations. The old models of funding and distribution in the arts weren't totally fair, but they _were_ predictable and relatively stable. If you were lucky and/or talented enough to get and exploit a few breaks, then there was a professional infrastructure within which you can find your own niche, whether as an artist or a technician. As the market for the end product has fragmented and revenue models have become obsolete, producers and publishers have become more risk- averse and increasingly channeled their funds to the surest prospects (which are often the lowest common denominator in creative terms). This naturally means fewer insiders willing to take the risk of financing and publishing an unknown prospect. And why should they, when people will bend over backwards and pay to have their films considered for inclusion in a film festival (most indies have neither the know-how nor the cash to sell their project at a film buyer's market, and film schools are in no hurry to teach them)?

It's not all bad, by any means. But it's not all good either; the old system provided extremely valuable mentoring and marketing utility to emerging creatives, and trial and error isn't a very efficient alternative.

Also interesting is this MetaFilter thread about the same post, though the first half is kind of Night of the Living Strawmen: [http://www.metafilter.com/114955/Fool-me-once-shame-on- you-f...](http://www.metafilter.com/114955/Fool-me-once-shame-on-you-fool-me- twice-wont-get-fooled-again)

<comment><USER2> I am pretty much of exactly the same mind, down to my take on copyright policy, with a couple provisos:

* Promises should be kept. There's nothing unconscionable about conditioning a sale on "don't share this with the world for free" terms.

* Piracy has had a massive disruptive effect on the music industry. It isn't that technology simply devalued the professional skills of musicians (it did that, too). Much of what's happened to music with technology _wasn't planned by the industry_ , but rather abetted by it once it started happening. That's why we have one dominant iTunes Music Store; they got to be the first mover on "downloading music not for free" when the whole industry was getting shellacked by pirates.

* The tech industry is fundamentally more heartless and efficient than the music industry was. Lowery thinks musicians had a better deal under the labels than the tech giants "by accident". It's not an accident: tech companies are much better at extracting surplus value than most industries, and they're merciless about it. And I think for the most part (with the possible exception of Apple) he's right: the tech industry could give a flying fuck about the economics of professional musicianship. The musicians could all go broke tomorrow; they'd get their pageviews somewhere else.

Ultimately, and this is pretty navel-gazey and arrogant so I apologize in advance, I have a diagnosis. At least with regards to the geek mindset. We're bullies. It's ironic, since so many of us got picked on in school, but the prevailing attitude among technologists is "if you can do it with a computer, it's pointless to reason about whether you should do it". Maybe it's because my particular field spends so much time discovering things people _really shouldn't be doing with computers_ , but this is an especially aggravating and hollow attitude to me. It's bullying when you break contracts, promises, and the law just to get convenient access to a piece of music by a guy who's making less than a McDonalds manager; it's especially bullying when you tell him he should get a better business model. "Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself!"

Man, what I wouldn't give to hear Steve Albini's response to Lowery's rant. They had to have met; Andy Mason worked at Electrical Audio before he started ThePoint.com, where Lowery worked. It blows my mind that the lead singer from Camper Van Beethoven worked for Andy Mason in Chicago at ThePoint.com.

<comment><USER5> > That's why we have one dominant iTunes Music Store; they got to be the first > mover on "downloading music not for free" when the whole industry was > getting shellacked by pirates.

I largely agree with your points (that musicians are getting screwed), but this seems to place too much blame on technology. The record labels actively fought digital distribution for a decade before iTunes won. If the record industry wanted a better position, maybe it should have been more strategic.

> I have a diagnosis. At least with regards to the geek mindset. We're > bullies....It's bullying when you break contracts, promises, and the law > just to get convenient access to a piece of music by a guy who's making less > than a McDonalds manager

I'd argue it's not that techies are bullies, but that techies are human, and humans are lazy. One person builds DeCSS or Napster because it's fun and cool, and then someone else downloads because they're lazy, or they don't feel like spending $20, or they get irritated by unskippable ads at the beginning of a movie. I've certainly done all of the above.

I don't want to say "That's human nature" and let it be, but any economic/political system should take into account the skills and motivations of several billion humans.

<comment><USER4> The labels fought digital distribution, but musicians embraced it. Now that it's ubiquitous, the musicians are arguably worse off than before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This ought to be the top post on HN right now. There's a reason it sank like a stone.

<comment><USER2> I would not have seen this had you not written this comment. Thank you. This is so excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a long post, but a fascinating dive into the business of music. Here we have facts, hard numbers, more-questionable numbers, anecdotes, experiments, and some rambling hyperbole from an industry veteran. I have rarely seen this kind of detail in discussions of online music.

</comment><comment><USER6> The backbone of this seems to be complaining about musicians having things difficult and not making as much money as they should. And accompanied by lots of numbers and information. The problem is, it is in itself irrelevant.

Why should anyone else care? Maybe professional gardners are having a hard time nowadays and not making much money. Do you care about that? Perhaps they are going to lobby for a law that will increase their income -- i.e. take money from you, and otherwise inconvenience you -- how does that sound?

The point is this: we do not care about musician's, or anyone else's, self- interest; we, in general, care about how much _we_ get from them. That is ultimately the only basis of justification for any law here. The public, though laws, grants 'creators' special provisions, in order that the public as a whole benefits.

If you want to argue for such special provisions, you must show the benefits that the public generally will get. If you say creators are not making enough money, show that there is, from the public's view, too little stuff being produced.

So _is_ there too little music (etc.) being produced? The article did not seem to answer that question -- yet that is the only thing that counts. And from a casual view, as anyone can see just looking around them, there seems to be a heck of a lot of music out there at the moment.

Show that insufficient stuff is being produced, and show that any proposed corrective laws or provisions are overall to the public's gain. Otherwise you have failed to make a case for laws that the public must bear the costs of.

If the gist is that some big companies are making lots of money using your goods therefore you should get a larger share of it, that fails too. If some industry is making too much, the answer is not to divide it up differently, it is to stop them, somehow, making so much in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how come he didn't mention publishers, who are the people who make the real money in music these days. Sure, record labels make more money in total since they're very big, but publishers have much much juicier profit margins. There's a reason why Sony paid almost twice as much for the publishing arm of EMI than Universal for the phonographic arm. Yet nobody ever talks about them even though they are very very relevant to discussions such as this.

<comment><USER2> Probably because that's not his point; he writes as if conceding that there was something superior about the major label system makes him want to throw up in his mouth a little, but that's better than eating out of dumpsters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So technology companies create new means of distribution, compelling enough that people will pay for music that can, and previously was, being obtained for free -- his complaint is that the tech companies don't take over the role of talent discovery too?

He makes a convincing argument that things are worse than they used to be, but not that Apple et al are to blame.

<comment><USER2> You didn't read him very carefully, because he doesn't blame Apple.</comment></comment>


HTML5 Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3schools.com/html5/default.asp <comment><USER2> It's not a good tutorial. Terse reference at best. Very little content, lots of ads. Descriptions of the elements are often oversimplified and examples are useless, e.g.:

<http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_phrase_elements.asp>

</comment><comment><USER3> Both Mozilla and Opera have great tutorials as well... here's some Canvas tutorials:

<http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/html-5-canvas-the-basics/>

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/canvas_tutorial>

</comment><comment><USER4> I hate w3schools.com because so many people have confused them to be the actual spec site of the W3C.

Here are three good links to HTML5:

\+ <http://html5doctor.com/> (A lot of info on the semantics based tags)

\+ <http://diveintohtml5.org/> (You've all seen this one!)

\+ <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html> (The full HTML5 spec, which once you find the tag you want to read about is easy to follow.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a good novice to pro book on HTML5/CSS(latest)? I have basic knowledge of both, but wouldn't mind starting from the basics again. I prefer not to read HTML4 books, as I hate trying to then parse out what got deprecated or has a fundamentally superior approach in the new version of the technology.</comment>


Our AI President - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/donald-trump-our-ai-president.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0 <comment><USER2> That's more like Karl Rove in his heyday as a data analyst.[1]

[1] [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/f8/6d/f6f86d6de...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/f8/6d/f6f86d6deb17e5072a69e1313afeba14.jpg)</comment>


Show HN: Gifcap, a browser based client-side GIF screen recording tool - <AUTHOR> https://gifcap.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Added some cool features like trimming and cropping, to make it easier for you to nail on the particular area of your screen and keep the recording to a minimum. Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER2> Hi, macOS / Firefox 74.0 user here. It will ask for permission and then fail with this message:

        MediaStreamError { name: "NotFoundError", message: "The object can not be found here.", constraint: "", stack: "" }
        main.js:116:15
            oncreate https://gifcap.dev/main.js:116

[https://imgur.com/a/2pIsGto](https://imgur.com/a/2pIsGto)

<comment><USER2> I just figured it out. I have to go to macOS system preferences -> Security & Privacy and permit Firefox to record the desktop. The OS-level permission popup didn't open in focus for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is really cool!

I love how simple and straightforward the UX is. It was instantly obvious how to use it, and it worked quickly and perfectly without any modals/banners/ads/whatever.

I think a single sentence somewhere on the page after you stop the recording telling you that you can crop by clicking and dragging, and you can trim by moving the little time markers might help with discovery.

I didn't realize you could do either of those things until I read your comment here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great feedback! Created [https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap/issues/9](https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap/issues/9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There's hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 video IIRC.

Unfortunately there are still many places where only images are allowed (e,g, GitHub README). HEIF is supposed to solve this problem but support is apparently abysmal.[1]

Anyone aware of any progress on a replacement of GIF?

[1] [https://caniuse.com/#feat=heif](https://caniuse.com/#feat=heif)

<comment><USER5> I find this particularly annoying. Back in the early 2000s I wrote some small app to generate static webpages for photo collections to be put on CD because OSes couldn't browse jpgs natively but browsers could. Now the problem has gone the other way, my iPhone and Android save HEIF but I can't use those on the web. I have to first go through a manual conversion process. It's like my computers have regressed 20 years.

<comment><USER6> GIFs are the new VHS - bad quality, bulky, slow - but truly ubiquitous.

<comment><USER6> ... and maybe a certain charm. My VHS collection implies there must be some charm to VHS - and a grainy meme clip with 100% guarantee of no sound has a certain charm too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice tool, but it would be great to be able to control the framerate, or the speed, or the number of frame. Because in my case, when I test, the gif is way too fast. It would be nice that it goes at least at the same speed as the real user. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER8> Neat idea but it doesn't work for me. Not sure if it's because of my browsers (Brave Browser) or my operating system (Arch Linux) or because of my window manager (AwesomeWM). No matter if I select record entire window or one window, I end up with a GIF that has the right duration but it's only black.

<comment><USER9> Probably hardware vs software screen buffer issue.

<comment><USER8> Other applications work (at least recordmydesktop, maim and screensharing in zoom). Also tried running compton which used to fix screensharing in zoom before Zoom solved it built-in.

Any ideas how I can troubleshoot this "hardware vs software screen buffer issue" so we could track down the issue?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is good please set frame rate choice also add webm if you can

<comment><USER11> I agree a video codec would be much better -- curious as to why animated gif was chosen in the first place ?

<comment><USER12> Because they are everywhere and lots of people still use them. Or that would be my guess anyway, I'm not the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice UI; I really like the timeline view!

I would highly recommend adding .webm export (since Browser-based .webm encoding strongly correlates with the ScreenCapture API). If you'd like an example, you can reference my take on this: [https://gifcorder.com/](https://gifcorder.com/)

There's also an Emscripten implementation of Gifsicle which you can use to reduce the size of the .gif (at the cost of color depth and encoding time).

</comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome, thanks! I was looking for something like this just yesterday.

That said, the GIFs it outputs seem pretty huge in filesize. Have you considered other output formats?

</comment><comment><USER15> Shameless plug. I did something similar. [https://screenrecord.43z.one](https://screenrecord.43z.one) (no gif conversion though) but additionally it allows you to share you desktop recording via webrtc if you want.

I tried to keep the UI as simple and friendly as possible.

<comment><USER16> Its not shameless, it's webm and hence smaller. Great.

EDIT: Any way to record the mouse cursor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. Is there some kind of library so one can integrate this into one's own application easily?

Also, slightly related, Google Mail (and probably other products) has a "Report issue" feature, where I can take a screenshot of the current tab (and even crop it), is that in any way related (technology-wise)?

</comment><comment><USER18> Pretty cool Joao, works fluent! Now for instruction videos where e.g. typing is involved, I'll prefer ScreenToGif still (e.g. because of frame speed and export options (webm, mp4), but if it's to record a video on screen or something quick, this works just as easy, if not easier.

<comment><USER19> I think webm and mp4 support can be easily added to this tool, I submitted a feature request: [https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap/issues/8](https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap/issues/8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Safari is a modern browser, but this doesn't work on it. Perhaps changing the description to the specific browsers supported(Chrome, Firefox, etc.) would be best?

ADDENDUM: Thought that maybe just detecting the browser is best, showing a notice that the tool doesn't work with it.

<comment><USER21> Maybe Safari is no longer a modern browser.

<comment><USER22> I loathe safari. I use Brave and only switch to FF when something doesn't work in brave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I seriously just was thinking I needed this to send some customer's some demos / examples of changes I'd made to web apps and etc... this is great.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's neat!

I also didn't know about the cropping feature until I read other comments, I thought it didn't support cropping.

<comment><USER19> I submitted a feature request to convert output to mp4 instead of gif: [https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap/issues/8](https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap/issues/8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is great! Thanks a lot.

</comment><comment><USER25> licecap?

[https://www.cockos.com/licecap/](https://www.cockos.com/licecap/)

Been around for about 10 years, from the guy who created Winamp.

<comment><USER26> thats not browser based

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know it's not really "amazing" because lots of software allow you to record screen but it's great that you made it too damn simple. That said, a suggestion to consider webm because 5.6mb for 7secs isn't probably justifiable.

side note: if you're on windows, win+g is a great new tool for the same.

<comment><USER27> It's a GIF. Hence the name Gifcap...

<comment><USER16> Thanks, that solves the size problem for me!

<comment><USER27> You're welcome, maybe you won't demand features from a tool that's obviously not made for your needs. Hell, maybe you'll consider forking the project, renaming it and implementing the feature you seek instead of being passive- aggressive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>