Survivor: How We Made Eye of the Tiger - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/27/how-we-made-eye-of-the-tiger-rocky-iii-survivor-sylvester-stallone <comment><USER2> This is one of those classic songs that sounds easy, but is really hard to pull off effectively. I clearly remember learning it in one of the bands I played with decades ago. Getting that right 'swing' feel in the opening quarter notes is hard, and the guitar chord riff (that were originally timed with the punches in the trailer) have an incredibly difficult syncopated timing to them. Get it wrong, and the song falls flat. Get it right, and the audience goes OFF!

<comment><USER3> I've heard very, very few worthy covers of it. The most recent is by Vomitron.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jim Peterik is arguably the most famous graduate of my high school. The year this song came out, it we did the marching band arrangement of it at every football halftime show. I still have the tuba part permanently engraved in my brain.

<comment><USER5> All hail the Sousaphones

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The Grammy is still sitting on my recording console. The money doesn't suck, but the best royalty is that I'll be in the supermarket and meet random people who tell me the song has affected their lives in a positive way. It's helped people through cancer or a heart attack. I know people that have been on the operating table and asked to have Eye of the Tiger playing. That's the real shit."

This is what everything's about. If everyone wrote software, designed boards, worked like this...

<comment><USER7> No joke, this song has had a huge positive impact on my life. When I was learning to walk again after a broken ankle, I would put on Eye of the Tiger when I thought I couldn't go any farther, and it would help me walk just a little bit more. When I was having my baby and the pushing phase of labor got really intense and I started freaking out, we put on Eye of the Tiger and it helped me keep going and avoid an emergency c-section.

I wish I knew how to contact them and thank them for writing it!

<comment><USER8> Try the "Contact" link on www.survivorband.com :-)

<comment><USER7> Thanks, I sent them a note and got a reply from a human saying she'll pass it on to them. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _All I did was push the faders up a single decibel and, boom, you could feel the difference. It was kicking and he loved it. He said: "Print it!" I told him: "But that's the demo!" Sly said: "I don't give a fuck what it is." That's his attitude._

There's a really good documentary on Netflix about Clive Davis, the Arista Records founder who has probably discovered and mentored more stars and hit records than anyone on the planet. There's a segment about the Whitney Houston soundtrack for "The Bodyguard" and "I will always love you." The recording almost didn't get made at all (the movie studio was reluctant to have Houston do it for some strange reason), but when the demo came out it was so good that they just went with it, and didn't want to risk messing it up with additional production work.

Davis, incidentally, was a corporate lawyer in his mid 30s with no musical background when he got started in the music business in the late 60s. He realized there was a major shift in pop music, and further had a "magic ear" for hits (this comment was made by Bob Weir) in many pop genres. In the documentary Barry Manilow basically says his only hits he had were the ones that Davis pushed him to record (I believe from other songwriters).

This pattern of Davis and his A&R teams working on the hits was repeated with many artists over many decades. Only a few musicians who were signed to his labels (Patti Smith and Kanye among them) were given a longer leash and more independence.

<comment><USER10> Another famous example is Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. He recorded the songs on an Teac 4-track cassette machine at home as demos, took them to the studio to record with his band, but felt that they didn't work as well as the demos, and so the demos became the final album. (One of the songs from these sessions, "Born in the USA", ended up getting a studio version on a later album.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tunes from before 'does this pass the AI' probably wouldn't pass the AI bland- o-matic test in the system now.

</comment><comment><USER12> > I still have the tape of Rocky III with Another One Bites the Dust on it – > maybe the only one. It might be worth a lot of money today. But out of > loyalty to Sly, it stays locked in my safe.

Pretty good definition of integrity.

</comment><comment><USER13> I will never again hear this song without thinking about _Another One Bites the Dust_. Both songs have a kind of energy to them which seems simple but evades so many.

<comment><USER14> On a first aid course I learned that Another one bites the dust has just the right beat for doing CPR. Delightful irony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can't easily hear a difference of just one decibel. 3 dB is about the minimum that can be reliably differentiated by an average audience.

If you want to test your own hearing:

[https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php?lvl=1](https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php?lvl=1)

<comment><USER16> Chances are good he didn't change anything at all. There are lots of knobs and sliders on a mixing console, and most of them aren't hooked up to anything at any given time. When the client comes to you and says something infuriating like "Needs more balls" or "Needs more feeling" or "Needs more cowbell", you turn one of those knobs conspicuously and do another take.

What you _don 't_ do is argue.

This trick is as old as setting your line spacing to 1.1 if your report is a bit too short to reach the required number of pages or 0.9 if it's a bit too long. Or including something obviously awful in a presentation you're trying to get approved by upper management, so they can go home that night thinking they're the real MVP for pointing it out.

<comment><USER17> ah the old battlechess duck

[It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "that looks great. Just one thing - get rid of the duck." ]

<comment><USER18> I always heard it as the "hairy arms" trick at Disney:

[https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all- of-t...](https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-the-hairy- arms-in-graphic-design)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tildes is open-source - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tildes.net/open-source <comment><USER2> Not a single screenshot, no video introduction, no Docs/Getting Started/FAQ pages, not even a well structured explanation page of what is this project and how will affect the internet in a large scale. No vision or a generic expectation with lots of "what if". C'mon guys you spend so much time coding this thing and you threw up the presentation, that's a shame.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is Tildes?

<comment><USER4> Oh, you mean you didn't see the last sub-clause of the last paragraph of the third section of the announcement page linked to from the page above? /s

"a new link-aggregator-style community site that's starting its invite-only alpha today"

Seriously, site creators and submitters, you need to do a better job of explaining what you're talking about!

<comment><USER5> Oh, reddit without all of the annoying users. Also, without all of the not- annoying users.

Hmmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm bummed that at multiple occasions it says that tildes does not support free speech.

What would stop someone from forking tildes and creating free speech version?

<comment><USER7> You mean like on Hacker News as well? Part of civil conversation is boundaries and consequences. You have Gab if you're bummed so bad.

You seem to know what open source means, so you know full well that you can fork it if you wish.

<comment><USER6> Gab is "open source Twitter". This seems like "open source reddit" which, IMO, is more needed.

<comment><USER7> There's Voat, looks like a really welcoming place with plenty of intellectual discussion.

[https://voat.co/](https://voat.co/)

<comment><USER6> Eh, I checked it out and it's indeed full of xenophobic trolls.

I am bummed again that there are so few "regular" people that care about free speech.

<comment><USER8> Regular people do care about free speech, but you can't have a platform that cares about free speech that doesn't also treat regular people and xenophobic trolls equally, in which case the former tends to chase the latter off and take over like a cancer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is not a single screenshot to explain the product, anywhere.

<comment><USER10> This trend of people putting things on hacker news that weren't targeted at hacker news, and then hacker news readers complaining that they aren't written appropriately to target hacker news is weird to me.

If you're already following tildes' blog, the title alone is enough to know what they're announcing.

But, tl;dr: it's a reddit-alike</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What contingency do you have in place for your source/apps when you die? - <AUTHOR> This question is mainly aimed at self-employed, solo developers with side projects, e.t.c. where the chances of losing digital work is very high because no one else is around to pick up the pieces or make sense of what you have started / created. Do you have any digital contingency in place for any of the work that you've started/done after you have died? For example, if you don't renew your apple developers account, the apps you have created will soon disappear from the app store and those income will be lost for your beneficiary. So, what have you done to prevent this? <comment><USER2> I spent a non-trivial amount of time on this when I was running my businesses.

There are, roughly, three very different rationales to have business succession planning in place, and at the scale of a solo operator they have very different best options available:

1) I want to avoid negatively impacting paying clients in the event of a bus factor issue.

2) I want to avoid negatively impacting "the community" in the event of a bus factor issue.

3) I want to ensure my heirs receive the residual value of the income stream.

#3 is by far the easiest for the typical case: buy more term life insurance than you otherwise would. The end. Most people in this situation are, roughly, young and healthy, and term life is a cheap commodity. If your app is throwing off $50k per year, great, take a few hundred dollars and buy a million dollars of 10 year term life; if you kick the bucket your heirs now have a ~$40k safe withdraw rate. (You can get almost arbitrarily high amounts of term life if you throw the words "business owner" around a lot.)

#1 and #2 are _a lot tougher_ because they require a combination of technical skill, extreme interpersonal trust, non-technical professional labor (lawyers/accountants), non-trivial liquidity, and fast action at what will be an extremely trying time for your loved ones.

The best answer I have for this could fill a small book, but the very short version is that you prepare an In Case Stuff Happens packet for an _extremely_ trusted technical friend who has run a business similar in character to yours, with the understanding that if you are to kick the bucket they will (depending on the nature of the property) either a) if it is a trivial site, put it into "maintenance mode" or b) if it is an active business, prepare it for a quick, orderly sale, or c) if it is in the unfortunate position of being in the goldilocks zone between sustainable-with-trivial-work and economically-viable, prepare it for an orderly shutdown (turn off for new users, announce sunsetting in 12 months, etc).

For more on this topic, you'll want to consult lawyers (who unfortunately won't have all that specific useful advice) and either people running businesses with similar characters who have done it _multiple_ times before (death is just another form of exit ;) ) or business brokers (who specialize in orderly transitions and know what you'll need to have lined up).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. Certainly food for thought here. I do have a couple of developer friends I could hand over this stuff to on the event the worst should happen. I guess some developers don't have that option. For me, it is just a matter of broaching the subject with them and see which friend is best handling the issue at hand. It is a tricky subject and I believe is it one that is being totally overlooked and we are collectively losing a lot of work that we are unaware of.</comment></comment>


HTC Working on Android Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://anythingbutipad.com/archives/194

<comment><USER3> "an HTC representative let slip"

Do PR people really let things 'slip'? To let something slip is usually indicative of an accidental giveaway. If a PR person tells a tablet-oriented site that HTC are working on a tablet too, surely this is a regular announcement without any useful or interesting details?

At the very least, HTC could have bought a blogger to circulate rumours or pointed a trade magazine to 'expose' an order from a supplier's factory. It's this attention to detail that put Apple ahead of the crowd!

I've been holding off and holding off, waiting for a decent iPad competitor to come along and it seems that there could be a few in 6 months or so - <USER2> Ink's Adam looks very nice and I am sure that HTC's tablet will be pretty too. However, Apple have shipped, the thing works and it has a reasonable software ecosystem. I can actually go to a shop and buy one.

Since I actually want a tablet-like device, I can't really think of any reason not to buy an iPad right now. Why has it taken so long for competitors to provide an alternative?

<comment><USER4> I don't think manufacturers were quite prepared for just how high of a bar Apple was going to set with the iPad. I personally refuse to buy Apple iOS products on my own principles, but the hardware always looks amazing without sacrificing quality. Combined with the fact that nobody was even certain that the iPad would even exist when it was announced, I think manufacturers weren't really taking the tablet market seriously until they realized just how much of a hit the iPad was. I'll bet most companies weren't even investing more than a gee-whiz in tablet technology until then, either, just due to the complexities of development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a funny site name: 'Anything but iPad'.

In a german newspaper interview[1], a random analyst said that the iPad already has become the standard to which any new device will be compared.

This site confirms that theory. Or is a brilliant parody of it. I'm not quite sure.

[1] = [http://www.derbund.ch/digital/computer/Apples-Rivalen- muesse...](http://www.derbund.ch/digital/computer/Apples-Rivalen-muessen-mit- guenstigen-Preisen-Druck-machen/story/18733056)

<comment><USER6> I think the site name is a reference to 'Anything But iPod'[1], which has been around since 2005.

[1] <http://www.anythingbutipod.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm as non-Apple-fan as they get, but this is honestly why I really, REALLY admire Apple - they only announce products that are ready to ship, and steer clear of "We're working on this, stay prepared for our awesomeness to blow you out of the water! Coming soon to cinemas near you!"

<comment><USER8> To be fair, that's easier to do when there's nothing else like whatever it is you're working on. People (me included) are waiting for Android tablets _right now_. There was nobody working for a tablet before the iPad, so Apple didn't have to say "we're working on this, don't buy the competitor's thing yet".

<comment><USER9> Wow! That's a pretty bias view!

If you remember there were a lot of rumours of the iPad coming out. In part it was because of a lot of people, including many Wall Street guys, felt Apple HAD to compete with the netbook-mania by releasing their own netbook.

Apple sticked to its gun then. It could have used such a line just as well: "No, netbook are crap compared to our awesome tablet that we're working right now: stay tuned". Did they? Nope.

You even had Microsoft and others (remember the Techcrunch's tablet) being announced long before they were ready, and even then Apple didn't change its stance.

I'm not saying that Apple is just a genius or something: it's probably as much arrogance as it is a passion to be different (and not just copy some other ideas). But to say that Apple didn't have to say anything, it's partial recollection.

<comment><USER8> There was no good tablet before Apple's, mainly because there was no good OS. PC OSes are a bad fit for tablets, so it has to be either iOS or Android. I'm very surprised Google is going with ChromeOS on its tablet, I hope they make it easy to install Android.

<comment><USER9> In hindsight I agree. But back in those days: a) most people didn't believe that, and b) the Linux community was developing distributions for tablets. And anyway the famous (in those days) techcrunch's tablet was not going to use any PC OS.

Anyway, the only point I was replying to was that Apple did have a lot of pressure back in those days to come out with their netbook or with something that covered the same niche, and some people even suggested that Apple should have lost in the tablet market because there were already a few offers around or soon to be.

In other words I was not discussion what made the iPad a success (if it deserved it, or any of those more hot topics). Simply that it's not true that Apple was not under pressure to present _something_, which is the point the OP was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone is going to get this right it will be HTC.

</comment><comment><USER11> It'll be interesting to see if people take up Android tablets the way they have with Android phones. My experience with the iPad suggests that a tablet is like a traditional computer in that the experience is dependent on the availability of quality apps. Right now, the Android Market is easily the weakest aspect of Android.

</comment><comment><USER12> not all that surprising.

what caught my eye was the 5.1 channel smartphone audio remark - how much storage space do they anticipate smartphones having by the time that is released? multichannel audio is pretty huge, spacewise

<comment><USER13> Since you can fit several full-length movies on an iPad (16-64GB storage space), adding 5.1 channel audio won't be much of a problem.</comment></comment>


Improved support for high-resolution displays with the srcset image attribute - <AUTHOR> https://www.webkit.org/blog/2910/improved-support-for-high-resolution-displays-with-the-srcset-image-attribute/

<comment><USER2> Glad to see the browsers supporting modern hardware in a more reasonable way, but for most non-photo images, this seems like a better strategy:

<img src = "my_icon.svg" this.onerror = "my_icon.png" />

SVG is future-proof, scaling elegantly to match whatever display it's being viewed on. And, if you don't care about supporting older versions of IE, you can skip the onerror, leaving you with only one asset per image to maintain.

<comment><USER3> SVG is fine for assets that can easily be described in vector form, but it's not the best choice for all image types. For example, photographs (where you might have an ultra high resolution original that you're scaling down) are not easily representable in SVG other than to embed the bitmap.</comment></comment>


The 9 Lives of Bleichenbacher's CAT: New Cache Attacks on TLS Implementations [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1173.pdf <comment><USER2> that's quite a constraint:

 _" The first capability an adversary needs is to mount a microarchitectural side channel attack against a vulnerable implementation. For that, the adversary needs the ability to execute code on the machine that runs the victim's implementation."_

<comment><USER3> A few lines below: "For example, a TLS server running in a virtual machine on a public cloud server, where the physical server hardware is shared between the victim's TLS server and an attacker's virtual machine."

<comment><USER2> blimey! that makes it too realistic indeed :(

<comment><USER4> Just as Spectre and Meltdown were bigger threats for cloud/serverless systems, this is also. A dedicated server is a vast increase in security. I suspect these attacks may be the start of the distributed/centralized pendulum (for hosting) swinging back towards distributed, at least in some areas .</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forty percent of 'AI startups' in Europe don't use AI, claims report - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/5/18251326/ai-startups-europe-fake-40-percent-mmc-report <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure that it's universal and not restricted to just European 'AI startups'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Investors => We use AI. Employee => Cutting edge machine learning Actual code => linear regression.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is kinda funny, our main competitor(another startup) within the chatbot domain started without using any kind of machine learning. The chatbot just weighted keywords to predict the intent. They won some major contracts, but never got their chatbot to work on more than 50 different intents in a single language.

We started with LSTM's from day one, and has since then supported thousands of different intents in many different languages.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only difference between ML and AI is about $10m in venture capital.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah this is probably a pretty common phenomenon. Somebody claims to have a billion dollar artificial intelligence; what they really have is a file full of frigging regular expressions.</comment>


Database as a Service malware - <AUTHOR> http://www.imperva.com/docs/HII_Assessing_the_Threat_Landscape_of_DBaaS.pdf#! <comment><USER2> I would not describe this as "Database as a Service malware". What the report is discussing is malware operators are starting to be paying customers of the DBaaS providers.

The DBaaS is not a victim, except so far as their capabilities are being used for evil. And the malware is not posing as a DBaaS operation just to get your PII, hah , that would be a long con if it's happening. So title is a bit misleading.

Malware operators take advantage of the latest tech the same way we all should. They are trusting their C&C to the cloud based database, which is some pretty valuable property. So at least to some extent it's an endorsement.

Ultimately the realization is that data isn't secure anywhere you store it. Outsourcing it early might be beneficial, and ultimately you may have to bring it back local if it gets to that point. So DBaaS is a hedged bet that lets you focus on other things. Some applications can take that hedge, some can't. But it's a big and growing market.</comment>


AWS Managment Console Now Has Amazon CloudWatch Support (And Pretty Graphs) - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/aws-management-console-now-with-amazon-cloudwatch-support.html

<comment><USER2> I find the cost a bit prohibitive for CloudWatch - 0.015$ per instance per hour. If you monitor 24/24 7/7 (and why wouldnt you?) it adds up to ~120$ per year per instance.

Wouldn't it be smarter to run something like Cacti instead?

<comment><USER3> $10 per month is prohibitive? How many additional hours of effort will the alternative cost you?

<comment><USER2> Per box - it all depends on the number of boxes you have, but once its setup for one, its setup for all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great except one still has to manage on a machine by machine basis. Not scalable. Why do we move the ball forward with cloud computing only to go right back to old habits?</comment>


What could be more embarrassing for a Russian spy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/05/russian_gru_agents_car_database/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if Western intelligence agencies had already identified these 300 agents and is unhappy with Bellingcat for blowing their identities in public. Russia is always going to have spies. This will just cause them to hire and train new ones that are harder to track.

<comment><USER3> The other side of the coin is that this will burn operations that were years in development and possibly bring to question all intelligence gathered by these agents without multiple confirming sources.

This can set back Russian operations for years and will cost them millions.

So it's quite possibly that western intelligence agencies tipped them about the database in the first place after they leveraged it to its maximum useful potential.

The CIA nor the FBI will never come and publicly burn 300 potential spies however using the media to do so is definitely in their game book.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I pay for college? - <AUTHOR>

Hello<p>I am currently a high school senior and need to commit to a college by May 1st. I was accepted into a number of large universities with great computer engineering departments, but I was denied from the "name" schools (Ivy's, MIT, Stanford) that have the resources to truly cover financial need. My top choice school is USC, as I was accepted into the Iovine/Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation (https://iovine-young.usc.edu/), which appears to be an awesome program focused on exactly the areas I want to study. I was lucky enough to have been awarded a half-tuition merit scholarship, in addition to $8,000 in federal loans. However, that still leaves a $30,000 a year gap. I have some college savings from past internships and a Florida Prepaid savings plan, but not nearly what I need. As my parents currently have no income, I don't think they would qualify for a federal PLUS loan or even be able to cosign a private college loan.<p>[continued in comments- HN's character count is inaccurate for some reason] <comment><USER2> When I was a student, I met a guy who would go to school one semester, then work the next+summer in construction. Then back to school. He seemed perfectly happy to pay the school bills this way.

Some years later when I returned to undergrad education in CS, I took advantage of several summer internships and coops. The money I earned through those basically covered the completion of my undergrad CS degree.

Maybe you could do the same? Does this USC program support coops? I would guess that you could make a large portion of the costs through that type of work.

I will say that my first suggestion echoes many other comments on this page. Don't incur a bunch of debt for undergrad education. Go to the cheap school and work hard to do really well. Definitely try to get internships and work experience. I might go so far to suggest that you look at the institutions you are considering and see which ones have particularly well-formed, visible internship programs in place.

My CS undergrad program was incredibly focused on the transition from school to work. It made getting internship and coop opportunities much easier. My (top 25) CS grad school was almost entirely focused on turning out PhD candidates into academia and had almost no real industry network to speak of. As a matter of fact, the several job offers I had in hand when finishing my MS in CS were with companies I had interned with during my undergrad days. My grad school professor network resulted in not a single job lead.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't going to USC mean $120,000 in loans, not 150k?

Unfortunately I don't think 120k in loans in tenable. Go to UF and make the most out of a free education.

I'm actually surprised you didn't get more financial aid, if your parents truly do not have any spare income for college (I'm assuming when you said they have no income you mean no income for college; if they truly don't have any income I'd be even more surprised you didn't get more aid).

<comment><AUTHOR> USC would be slightly less than $120,000 in private loans plus ~$30,000 in government loans.

The reason why I didn't get better financial aid is that my father had a very high income last year, but lost his job. He now owns his own business while trying to find a job, but his business is loosing money. So right now my patents literally have no income, but financial aid calculations are usually calculated based on the previous year's tax returns.

<comment><USER4> Contact the school's financial aid department and explain the situation. They may not be able to help you much this year but they may be able to help you figure out how to re-apply next year. Unfortunately, financial aid calculations are a mysterious black box and your inputs do not fit into it well.

If you REALLY don't want to go to Florida, then there is always the option of community college for a year or two and then transferring. And again you may qualify for more need based aid that way in a year or two.

Also remember that you may change what you want to do several times over the course of your college career. And then several times in your adult life afterwards. At 150k in loans you may very be better off financially working as a janitor at one of these schools than being a student.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My affordable option would be to go to the University of Florida. Because of my Florida Prepaid plan, the Florida Bright Futures program, and a scholarship I was awarded, I would actually be GIVEN money to go there, at least for my freshman year. However, Florida does not have a partially strong computer engineering program, and I have been told that the department is very theoretical, where as I would prefer a more practical education. (I also have strong personal reasons for not wanting to go to UF, but any economist would tell me that making a decision off of these would be highly irrational.)

So, with the exception of taking out $150,000 in loans that I may not even qualify for, is there any other way I could pay for college? I was hoping to get an internship this summer that could possibly cover part of the cost, but I haven't been able to find one. Are there any programs that offer tuition for a percentage of future earnings? Would any investor want to pay for my college for a large stake in my first startup?

Thank you for any suggestions.

<comment><USER5> University of Florida would work well for you under those circumstances. You can get the practical side by working on your own GitHub projects--I know young people who have been there and done that.

<comment><USER6> Gainesville isn't appealing for everyone. For some just as a city [the former "Hogtown"], for others perhaps because of the continued exposure to obnoxious sports rivalries typical in the Southeast.

It can even come down to which fraction of one's graduating class is attending which school and other factors which often disappear once people actually get to university.

<comment><USER6> My comment based on _I also have strong personal reasons for not wanting to go to UF,_ from the OP,

I lived and studied in Gainesville at two different phases of my life. I have longtime friends who still live there, more who graduated and moved away. I have high school friends who many years ago went and left in their teens because it wasn't the right environment for them.

Now I live in a southern university town and meet young people whose college selection is strongly shaped by sports team affiliation. That's American high school and university culture whether or not anyone thinks it should be. At the OP's age I categorically rejected considering FSU for entirely non academic reasons - my high school class broke FSU or UF in part based on who we did not want to go to school with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was able to graduate with no debt by attending College of the Ozarks, where students work 15 hours on campus to pay for tuition. I worked during the summer to take care of room and board and books. I might be biased, but I still think it's a great school.

[https://www.cofo.edu/](https://www.cofo.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER8> It is not much help the first year, but on campus jobs, specifically in housing can help a lot. It can cut $10-20K/year down in cost.

Room and board is typically the highest expense after tuition and if you can cut that down to nothing it can go a long way.

It also doubles as a great way to meet people who are working their way through school.

</comment><comment><USER9> prostitution</comment>


The Search for Eclipses as Perfect as Earth's (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/the-search-for-eclipses-as-perfect-as-earths <comment><USER2> > Are there any other intelligent planet-dwellers near other stars, who > contemplate a coincidence of sun and moon as we do?

Coincidence? Did the occasional perfect eclipse with a corona have some nudging effect on some stage of the evolution of life on earth. Since the corona wouldn't appear when the moon is either too large or too small, perhaps on some recent stage in evolution such as of intelligent life? It's hard to believe in coincidences.

</comment><comment><USER3> When your comment stream has dwindled to flat earthers and moonshot hoax crackpots bickering with the author over trivia, is it time to turn off user comments?

<comment><USER4> Do these nautil.us pay hacker news or something? Why do they get at least one or two derpy links on HN every day?

<comment><USER5> No need to pay someone if you can simply post links yourself or have enough readers that do so.</comment></comment></comment>


Ubuntu 17.10 released - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/10/19/ubuntu-17-10-releases-with-gnome-kubernetes-1-8-minimal-base-images/ <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506334)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is the release where they switch to Gnome, and Wayland at the same time! Anyone try it out yet?</comment>


Saying thanks: testing a new Reactions feature - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/17/saying-thanks-testing-a-new-reactions-feature/ <comment><USER2> The main issue I've had with SO, which while anecdotal seems to reflect the sentiment of a lot of people on here whenever the subject is brought up, is that it's infected with the YX problem.

Now you guys probably know the XY problem (asking the wrong question X to when you really want to solve the problem Y). The YX problem, on the other hand, goes like this:

User: "Hi, how do I do Y?"

SO: "Why do you want to do Y?"

User: "Because I want to do [use case]"

SO: "Are you sure you don't want to do X instead?"

User: "No I don't, I have this constraint and this use case so I'm pretty sure this isn't about X and I really want to do Y."

SO: "Are you sure this isn't a duplicate of [some question involving X]?"

User: "No it's not, the question while similar doesn't have the same constraint or usecase and I have searched SO for a while for questions that specifically involved these and didn't find any so I really need to do Y."

SO: "Wow, I can't possibly imagine why you, for a use case you've examined for a while and which I have been made aware of five minutes ago, could possibly want to do Y while not doing X. I don't know and I rest my case. A solution to Y probably doesn't exist anyway."

Answerer: "Hi to do Y you have to do this [hacky snippet]" (answer accepted)

User: "Cool, thanks!"

SO: "This is _bad_ practice and I don't condone it. It shouldn't be upvoted or the accepted answer."

\</comment><comment>--

Of course this is the optimistic scenario, where the question _does_ get eventually answered.

<comment><USER3> Fast forward a year...

New Answerer: As of v12,5 this is now supported first class like: [....].

Comments:

\- this should really be the accepted answer

\- OP can you make this the accepted answer?

\- accepted answer is out of date, this should be used now

Accepted answer never changes, remains top result indefinitely

<comment><USER4> That's because the question has been answered, so it's out of the OP's head I think; what SO wants to do is turn a question into a wiki / knowledge base, but right now only the OP can make the edits and change the accepted answer if applicable. I guess one way to fix this is to relinquish ownership of the question, change it so that highest upvoted answer becomes the accepted answer for example, so it becomes an internet-democratic resource (note: internet- democratic is not real democracy due to brigading, community preferences, etc; the most popular / upvoted answer may not be correct)

<comment> em-bee i don't see why that even matters? so what if the accepted answer is not the highest voted answer. when i look at a problem it's not always the accepted answer that solves my similar problem. i'll look at the top voted answers, and others too. those are just guides where to start looking

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way.

Their voting system began as an outstanding mechanism to separate the QA wheat from the chaff. It evolved and improved organically. It provided a much needed means to surface the best questions and answers, and it provided a sort of incentive system, however imperfect, whereby contribution quality could be quantified.

Then something happened. I think a major part of the problem was that leadership lost its way in guiding the system's evolution. Rather than continuing to evolve the scoring system to better reflect the quality of contributions, at some point they seemed to adopt the outlook that improvements were futile: It would always be possible to game the system such that scores would never approach true quality of contribution, so why try? I believe this was a mistake.

Evolution from there ignored the scoring system. They went off in failed Documentation efforts. They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderators. They seemed to look everywhere else but the origin of their initial strength: Community contribution fairly rated in a manner that allowed good moderation to scale. They should have continued to improve this system to root out the problems of over-eager closure and popularity dominating whatever prefered qualities the community would have liked to have seen measured.

An adjunct "thank you" mechanism that's redundant to the voting system is a sign that those in control do not appreciate the merit of, and do not know how to evolve, the voting system.

<comment><USER6> I think SO has more-or-less solved the problem of providing a high quality crowdsourced information resource focused on software development. They deserve credit for that.

There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry (which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the moderation tasks on SO.

Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic- police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.

<comment><USER7> 1\. "Normal human behavior" is not tapping at a keyboard staring at a rectangle with lit-up points...

2\. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your upvote with a comment.

<comment><USER6> The way you say "thank you" as a human is by saying "thank you"\-- preferably with an interesting explanation or side-bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place. The "be nice" ethos just means that the nasty is more eloquent.

It's now quite painful to ask questions, there, because someone will pretty much _always_ ding it. Usually, you have no idea why, or who. In fact, that happened to me just a day or so ago.

Also, I think that downvoters should be notified when the question/answer is edited, so they can review if the downvote still applies.

I once trolled a community (not SO) by writing an obviously inflammatory post, getting a gazillion downvotes, then editing it to be very reasonable, so everyone was on record as having downvoted a very decent post. Petty, but fun (They did not have edit records for posts, but you could see what users up/downvoted).

I like the idea of a "Thank You" reaction, but that's really just porcine lip gloss.

I think that it would be more valuable to _require_ an explanation for a downvote, even if anonymously. I would have no problem telling folks why I downvoted a question or answer (in fact, when I do, I add a comment, mentioning the reason, unless it is blatantly obvious). As is evident by my HN profile, I am making a point of standing behind what I post. I got rid of my last anonymous Internet account months ago.

Standing behind my words has helped me to be a bit more careful about what I post, and that's a good thing.

<comment><USER9> > My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place.

It's also true of other Stack Exchange sites. Sometimes you feel like in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy where you're sent from one site to the other and none of them think it's their job to deal with a question.

And I don't mean the low-effort questions, but well written interesting ones that are deemed to broad, too opinion-based, too whatever.

There is definitely an effect of territorialism, big egos and rule lawyering going on. As if people were playing a game of spot-the-broken-rule as some intellectual puzzle and going "heureka, there it is, you broke Rule No. 3, gotcha!!". Sites like SO and Wikipedia certainly attract people who get emotionally invested in this role and see themselves as powerful and enjoy feeling better than others.

That's why the debate is complicated. There is a problem with trigger happy moderation, but also with low-effort content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO.

I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about?

I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.

And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism.

Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem _so much better_ , compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google- spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.

<comment><USER11> The part where they try to paint "being nice" as a bad thing pretty much tells the kind of discourse this person wants to have.

<comment><USER9> It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down leadership is dictating how they should interact.

Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach.

It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them.

The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers.

You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation.

This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand what any of this has to do with people not being insufferable assholes on a platform.

<comment><USER9> I think there are multiple issues and it's hard to point them out because everyone talks about what they see from their own point of view.

1) There are certainly power-hungry ego-inflated people killing off questions as duplicates when they aren't duplicate, or labeling things too easily as opinion-based etc. This is often a problem with community efforts, like Wikis and other places where people act like they own the place.

2) On the other hand, you have genuinely low-effort questions that are just pure lazy. Being a novice is normal, everyone started there. But doing at least a minimum of research is expected. Seriously go to the front page and browse the questions from <5 minutes ago. Most is very low effort with no context, just some code from the middle of some software and an error message without saying what they are even trying to achieve. It's not in any shape of form a question that should enter a long term question bank.

3) On the third hand, you have the power grab at StackOverflow by business- minded, MBA type suits, who care more about branding, marketing, and legal CYA than about programming. The project is no longer community driven. They seem to forget that SO's value is derived mostly from the unpaid labor of volunteers and working with the community should be a priority. And this is also a great lesson for all the contributors that sinking enormous amounts of time into a private company's proprietary product, it may not be worth it. At least Wikipedia is guaranteed free and open source and truly community owned. Maybe something similar needs to be created in place of SO.

<comment><USER11> Number 1 and 2 are what I've personally experienced and believe is what the StackOverflow team means when they say they're working to make the platform more friendly. I've been helping people with all sorts of programming problems on Discord for years, and I've encountered my fair share of people who put absolutely no effort in either their problem or asking a question people can work with, but at no point I've ever felt it was justified to publicly shame them or not be kind. If people are going to go around closing / deleting obviously mediocre questions with copypastas in the comments, is it asking to much to make the copypastas at the very least welcoming?

I actually followed your advice and browsed the recent page on StackOverflow to collect some samples of what I mean. To my (pleasant) surprise, it seems to have changed significantly from when I used the platform regularly. That said, I found this one that's a good example:

> Asking homework questions without any other detail is simply unacceptable. > Please put more detail, because we are volunteering our time to help you, > and if you put in absolutely no effort, then we can't help you.

I wholeheartedly, but why not say "StackOverflow is not a code-writing service. Please post another question with sample of your work, so we can direct you to a solution that'll make you learn in the process"? These types of comments are what made me so anxious to ask back when I started programming, and I think is something everyone will benefit greatly from getting rid of.

As for point 3, thanks for clarifying. I agree that dumping knowledge on a proprietary product isn't exactly a good thing, but the perspective of the business people can at least be understood now that they're selling it as a Q&A engine for private teams / companies. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but your previous comments made me think it was some sort of conspiracy theory :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with SO is that it tries to be two things. One is a reference/encyclopedia of questions, and answers. And the other is a welcoming place to ask for help. Those two don't seem to line up 100%.

It's clear the old school moderators seem to think of SO as a reference, but the company itself wants to view it as a place to seek help.

<comment><USER13> I think that's the great thing about SO. It's a repository of common questions, yet also manages to be great for asking questions as well.

A lot of people in this thread seem to hate SO, and I disagree with them. If I ask a question on SO, no matter how obscure of a library or language I'm using, I'll get a response back within a day. And if my question gets flagged for being a duplicate, then I've just been redirected to more resources to solving my problem. It may not be warm and welcoming, but it's very helpful.

To be useful, SO doesn't need to be welcoming at all. It needs to be exclusive. If it wasn't elitist, it would be filled with Java programmers pasting 400 lines of code with little explanation. The elitism has caused me to write better questions and to really think about the hypothetical person answering my question. Elitism and helpfulness go hand in hand. If you want to see the horrors of a non-elitist Q&A forum, go check out the Unity forums or any popular Github repository.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what happens when you have a successful product that doesn't need any more tinkering but you still have a lot of people working on it. Maybe this is it :)

<comment><USER15> Stackoverflow have pretty solid metrics that show large numbers of users find the site unwelcoming. Just because you aren't one of those people doesn't mean that other people can't benefit from changes like this.

<comment><USER16> The expectation of feeling welcomed is part of the problem. Is stack overflow an information sharing community or a social community? Is it wikipedia for programmers or reddit?

The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social community.

<comment><USER17> Wikipedia is a social community too, as soon as you do more than reading articles. And has well-documented issues in that regard, which limit its quality and who contributes to it. That's not the dichotomy you think it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some pretty thorough discussion on Meta: [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature- test...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-test-thank- you-reaction)

<comment><USER19> Also one of the answers on that question was deleted by an employee (! — itself an unusual event) for satirically opposing the change. More information here.

[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587)

Overall, the biggest complaint against this is:

1\. Not enough people vote on questions or answers.

We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that vote vs. those that comment.

I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of last year: [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587)

Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than 'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the issue with not enough people voting.

Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement mechanism for people to post more answers).

If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is Bad™.

The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to vote?

Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work (the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the issue.

There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces.

<comment><USER20> It seems some basic NLP could detect a "thanks" comment and ask the user to vote. Or do they already do this?

<comment><USER21> Thanks, but your suggestion doesn't take into account when a comment contains information that would suggest that an upvote (or emoji) isn't appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is stupid. Why not give people a way to actually say thanks without cluttering up the comments? A real thank you written by a human is much more touching and encouraging than a clapping icon with a counter on it. The article starts with a beautiful image of real thank you's, and then immediately turns around and implies that clicking a clap button is the same thing?

These kind of things are what dehumanizes the internet, they don't make for better human connections. It's also basically the exact same as the current upvote icon. A way to send a message to the author privately saying thanks seems much more touching. Or even a hidden "thank you's" list of grateful words that can be expanded on the question but that is hidden by default. Either of those would be better than this weird duplication of robotic thank you's.

</comment><comment><USER23> How is it different from upvoting an answer? People who want to write will still write thanks, I already found some posts on the home page with thanks comment and the feature.

Also what about the change in reputation when being thanked? It should be there in the blog post.

<comment><USER24> My understanding is that these are pure vanity. Doesn't require any reputation to give, doesn't give any reputation either, nor does it sort your post.

<comment><USER23> I went to meta-discussion and learned more details. Most of the thanks comment are written by folks who already have upvote powers. Anyways its a fun read. Grab popkorn and go through it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm more curious about what caused the recent spike in "thank" showing up in questions and answers. 19% -> 23% in a couple months seems statistically significant.

Did the pandemic/lock down cause a slew of newer developers that are generally more appreciative?

<comment><USER26> Maybe because of home-office they cannot lean to the side and ask their peers, so they rely more on SO instead for basic questions.

<comment><USER27> Basic questions which includes writing the whole program for the user [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i- make-a...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-make-a- reaction-based-menu-in-discord-py)

<comment> mark-r That's not a new problem at all, there have always been people who look at the site as a free code-writing service. Kind of the opposite of the "Thanks" problem are the question askers who complain that you didn't deliver them production-ready code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The combination of Google + SO always seemed too good to me compared to most everything else on the Internet. It just works really well. I think this is the closest thing we have to mind reading at least when it comes to programming problems. It'd be shame for it to go away be it SO doing more and more dumb shit like adding touchy feely bs like "thank you" mechanism or Google being hit by antitrust into oblivion.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks, but no thanks. See my (slightly) longer post here:

[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077)

(and the rest of the discussion there.)

</comment><comment> seph-reed Perhaps a new user sandbox would make sense. A place where new users can work together to triage each-others questions into something good enough.

If SO was a video game, it'd make sense to have newbies team up.

<comment><USER21> New users trying to help other new users to triage questions doesn't really work well.

If someone doesn't grok the way that Stack Overflow works, the information that new users add (or ask for) may do more harm than good (see examples of people adding random formatting). Many times this just is reinforcing bad habits.

If you feel this could be useful, I would encourage you to try helping out by editing questions in the Help and Improvement queue so that they are good questions with all the necessary information (and matching the style that Stack Overflow expects).

There was a mentorship project at Stack Overflow a bit ago - but it didn't scale and the expectations were mismatched (many new users were expecting help with their problem /now/ rather than help with trying to make their question better).

The video game analogy - its not that you need to team up to solve a problem, its realizing that the quest(ion) has already been solved by someone else _so you don 't need to do it again_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> new comment : thanks for adding the 'thanks' button</comment>


Ethersheet – An open-source collaborative spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> https://ethersheet.org

<comment><USER2> Looks like a great start! First thing that comes to mind - let arrow keys move the focus to the adjacent cells. Without this it is a huge usability loss.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://framacalc.org/_start](http://framacalc.org/_start)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, it looks like it's based of ethercalc which is also a great project. We were trying to go in a different direction though and be a little bit more user friendly and also work on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I gave it a quick spin and it seems like it needs more work to behave like a spreadsheet.

Even simple circular references are not detected right now. For example, I put some numbers from A1 through A5 and then put a SUM(A1:A6) into A6. It added everything up (including the sum itself) and keeps updating A6 with the sum of A1:A5 every time I move from one cell to another using Enter or Tab. You can see this at [https://ethersheet.org/s/IsThisAwesomeNow](https://ethersheet.org/s/IsThisAwesomeNow)

And also, as @binarymax stated, arrow keys to navigate (along with F2 to edit a cell instead of the default of putting a cell in edit mode), usage of arrow keys within formulas to get cell references (instead of typing the cell reference), easy ways to format cells, easy way to extend the width or height of columns/rows...I presume there's a large backlog of features to implement. :)

Right now, this is far behind EtherCalc in terms of features and usability.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was looking for a spreadsheet which I could use to implement custom formulas that would interact with a client-side app, and embed the sheets in the app also, so I started building this: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/react- microspreadsheet](https://github.com/fiatjaf/react-microspreadsheet)

Here's a hosted version for test: [http://sheets.alhur.es/test](http://sheets.alhur.es/test)

It has a lot of features (try the edge cases if you feel like and report your experience to me, please), but it also has some bugs with, for example, the click-at-a-cell-to-add-it-as-input-to-the-currently-being-edited-cell. I'm seeking to make this work.

There are some bugs with the formula parsing too, but they are easy to solve, I'm just being lazy. I was using a very nasty raw regex parsing, but I switched to a Jison implementation that is more reliable, I guess. I've never done this before, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish I had your design skills.

My spreadsheet sideproject: www.cellmaster.com.au

Small business wants to automate. At the moment they use spreadsheets, email and web forms to interact with customers, but want these to work together. I have seen 20 requests a week, on a single forum, for small bits of code. Code to do very simple automation tasks. I am making it so they can automate with only basic spreadsheet skills.

Happy to chat with you eddyparkinson after the at add gmail dot com

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks pretty similar to ethercalc... [https://ethercalc.org](https://ethercalc.org)

</comment><comment><USER8> Like ethercalc, you can use any URL, even non-secret ones like: [https://ethersheet.org/s/1](https://ethersheet.org/s/1)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love that it's anonymous. It would be cool if it had a read only version (using a random url) to share. Like piratepad (etherpad) has.

</comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't currently mention this on the site, but one use case for Ethersheet is to embed it as a component in a larger application.

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you get a sum of a range of cells?

<comment><AUTHOR> The same way as you would in excel `=SUM(A1:A11)`

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is this better than ethercalc?

<comment><USER13> It sure seems lighter/faster. Other differences:

* It doesn't support drag to enter ranges in formulas

* Arrow keys don't move the selection

* It doesn't have nifty pie menus for dragging a selection

* It doesn't support ctrl+z undo

Does EtherCalc have multiple worksheets? Ethersheet does.

EtherCalc's tabs-and-forms UI is clunky.

<comment><AUTHOR> The undo functionality is actually almost there, I think we just don't have an interface for it. The arrow keys thing should be easy to implement. I will add it to github, and of course accept a pull request! We definitely need to accept ranges for formulas or some up with some easy way to do that.

The project as a whole is definitely unfinished but we have been working on it for so long and lost some motivation. I wanted to just get it out there to at least re-motivate myself to work on it.

<comment><USER13> Please note, I don't think all the features I listed are desirable. (Pie menus for dragging gestures? Pretty hokey.)

Ethersheet allows typing ranges in formulas and that is possibly enough. Dragging to choose a range can be nice but it has to be implemented carefully. When to stop acquiring cells for the range and return focus to the formula editor? Some versions of Excel do this badly. For example, after dragging to enter a range you use arrow keys to balance parens. Excel thinks you are still selecting cells and inserts multiple ranges into your formula.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> EtherSheet Got Me Laid!

<comment><USER15> EtherSheet Got Me Paid!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love spreadsheets. So much so that I even mentioned Excel in dating profiles. But Excel is expensive, OpenOffice slow and buggy, and Google is... well, Google. Ethersheet is a fast, effective, and reliable alternative to get your spreadsheeting done. I love spreadsheets and so I love Ethersheet. If you're like me, you will, too.

<comment><USER17> This post reminds me of [http://www.zombo.com/](http://www.zombo.com/)

FYI you can rent Excel, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, OneNote, Access and publisher for three beers a month at London prices. That's pretty cheap and it works online and offline.

Agree with OpenOffice though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What stack to migrate - <AUTHOR> Currently I'm working at a growing Startup where we use Ruby on rails as the main stack for huge monolithic app, even the front-end is server side rendering. We are thinking adding new features, front-end will probably be React communicating with new API. We are still deciding about the best approach to add this feature and try to split this feature and future features from the monolithic part while keep sharing data and communication.
Also we are discussing about using another language other than Ruby, some co-workers suggested Elixir (with Phoenix), personally I would like to go with Go ...
Any advices on how to add new features to big monolithic app ?!, any tech/stack/lang/framework you recommend ?!, any experiences to share ? <comment><USER2> What problem are you having with Rails currently? A lot depends on that.

Personally, I've found that API/SPA apps end up being more development work per new feature than a single Rails monolith.

Also, anything you switch to is going to feel a lot more productive at first. This is somewhat deceptive, because what your really seeing is that your new software codebase is solving a much smaller problem at first, and of course that's much easier to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> The current app is huge and has a lot of legacy/messy code, that still running, changing it will be really hard now. Tests takes ages to finish, the initial project structure is bad, many mistakes were done in the past. We are planing to build huge new feature, that can has it own UI, So we decided to go for SPA, but where are asking ourselves what's the best way to build the API, Just build it on top of the current project or new project with Rails or other stack ?!

<comment><USER3> You screw up your architecture and development process. Choosing your stack is not what you should focus on, whatever you choose will not solve your problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rails is great. Front end server side rendering is great. Monolithic is great. These things aren't problems in themselves unless they are creating problems.

You should approach this question with a problem solving mindset. Write down what your main features are and then choose the right tool for the job. Is your app mostly business logic? CRUD updates? Lots of real time push communication? a bunch of custom UI components?

Are customers complaining about the speed of the app? Does it render too slowly or have long wait times? Is it too costly to run? Is development too slow?

Technical decision making is for solving problems, so make sure you know what problem you are solving. Unless you can name a real problem that can't be solved without a new stack, there's no point to rewriting.

For adding features on a monolithic app, you just add features... not sure what kind of answer you're looking for. Rails gives you the ability to build an api on it, you can add react, vue, or any SPA framework on top of it pretty easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our current app is so huge, testing takes a lot of time, it has a lot of legacy code and it is too messy. That's the main reason behind building the new feature in different project. And we are not rewriting we are adding new features ... So the monolithic part will stay there for ever. Just we want a clean way to do it.</comment></comment>


Keep a Changelog - <AUTHOR> https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/ <comment><USER2> I've found having a line like `CHANGELOG:` in commit messages to make generating / maintaining a change log or release notes type document to be somewhat handy.</comment>


When Genetic Diseases Threaten Patient Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/when-genetic-diseases-threaten-patient-privacy/564848/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Damn the notion of a person having privacy. Society is setup where the ones holding privacy of the ones vulnerable, hold full control in violating it and being defended where no action of real repercussion will happen to violators for the victims. Unless you're financially stable and having fuck you money there is nothing. I suffered HIPAA violations by a hospital in my life with a lot of abuse by a doctor for my LGBT status and saw no resolve by the government when reporting. It's similar everywhere for all things and people would be better off without assuming privacy is a real thing in our world.

<comment><USER3> You're not important enough. HIPAA rules, which are _incredibly_ vague (I've had to implement HIPAA-compliant systems, and the guidance is non-existent), are in place to protect the rich and powerful, not ordinary people. The fines are exorbitant, and are targeted to individuals, not institutions (i.e., the hospital doesn't pay the fine, the nurse who accidentally lefty a folder lying around does).

Personally I think HIPAA is a cruel joke and we would be better to do away with it, in favor of writing or enforcing laws against abusive behavior. I.e., it should not be a problem if people know your medical history if there are laws protecting you from, say, insurance discrimination, or personal prejudice by your medical practitioner. Such a law, however, might require protecting ordinary people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When it comes to my health, fuck your privacy.

When it comes to _your_ health, fuck _my_ privacy.

<comment><USER5> In my opinion you should still have complete control over your health data. I'd rather propose that everyone is responsible to get all diagnostic data on their own health, especially if they plan to procreate. I dream of a world were it becomes common practice to do DNA screening before getting children.</comment></comment>


1100 Open Source UI Designs - <AUTHOR> Link here: https://www.uidesigndaily.com/ <comment><USER2> I would recommend inserting the link in the url section for posts. It's pretty inconvenient to copy that link on mobile and then paste it into a browser.</comment>


Clojure beta book now available - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2008/11/5/clojure-beta-book-available

<comment><USER2> It's been a while since I felt great excitement about a language!

</comment><comment><USER3> Success running based on steps here: <http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081023.html>

You'll need big.txt from here to run the Clojure spelling corrector: <http://norvig.com/big.txt>

</comment><comment><USER4> The beta version is not free.

<comment><USER5> What you're actually paying for is the final version in PDF which will be released in March 2009, and in the meantime, until it becomes available, you're getting all the betas.</comment></comment>


99tests launches $99 demo pricing for developers - <AUTHOR> http://99tests.com/software-test-pricing/

<comment><USER2> Nice! Their pricing page text is almost unintelligible though, sort of unprofessional.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for upvote. Great way to get your application tested by 20 testers for $99

</comment><comment><USER3> The pricing is insane. I don't need 60 testers and 1.4k$ to run a test cycle. That would only be appropriate for some major release which is not "how we do thing (tm)". This just wont work for the weekly release cycle.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think I would actually prefer just one REALLY GOOD tester. They're so hard to find. Quantity is no match for quality.

</comment><comment><USER5> Now if there was only a service called 99bugfixes.com with the same pricing.

</comment><comment><USER6> The new plans are quite affordable, esp for startups like ours...

</comment><comment><USER7> 99tests is one of my fav company from Bangalore. Good luck team!

</comment><comment><USER8> that seems to be the right move. good going.</comment>


New startup develops wireless electricity - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_5708216?nclick_check=1 <comment><USER2> Site requires registration, here's the full text:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Takahashi: New idea? Electricity researchers work on cutting the cord

By Dean Takahashi

Mercury News

Article Launched: 04/19/2007 07:12:46 PM PDT

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Who ever heard of wireless electricity? Seems impossible.

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen a demo myself at PowerBeam, a Sunnyvale start-up. The technology they showed off makes me believe that big, revolutionary ideas are still possible in Silicon Valley - even after decades of innovation. Don't close down the patent office yet.

PowerBeam co-founders David Graham and Xiaobing Luo showed me how they could power up a little toy with a spinning fan without using either batteries or a wired power source. They can do so with an invention that seems suspiciously simple.

They pointed a laser beam at a solar cell. The solar cell collects the light energy from the laser and converts it into electricity. Light in, electricity out.

Then the electricity travels from the solar cell into the device. They call it an "optical power beam."

It's the same principle that powers your pocket calculator with a solar cell. But in this case, PowerBeam gets a lot more electrical power from a laser as far away as 65 feet.

In a patent application, PowerBeam says it can produce much more electrical power than other methods because it has tamed a dangerous laser. It uses a powerful laser of the sort that could cut through your hand, but it has integrated a safety system, allowing it to channel a lot of energy into the solar cell.

I can't be a good judge about the PowerBeam technology (other than vouching that the demo worked). But I love the vision. I believe Advertisement that someone who pioneers this market will find a bonanza.

Graham envisions someone using a laptop without plugging it in at all. You could, for instance, sit at a cafe or in the middle of a hotel ballroom and draw power from a light fixture above the center of the room. A laser atop the light fixture would seek out any solar receptor in the room with help from a detection system, such as a camera. When it finds it, the laser would concentrate its light beam on the laptop's solar cell.

The size of the solar cells needed would vary based on how much power is needed. A cell phone could be charged with a solar cell the size of a silver dollar, says Graham. For a laptop, the cell would be bigger and be mounted as a pad on the laptop's cover. If PowerBeam systems improve and became popular, you wouldn't need batteries for your laptop as you travel.

Another application is security cameras, which often need to be placed where it's not convenient to string an electrical cord. A security camera can run on just four watts, which Graham says his device can produce using a very small solar cell. Still another application is to use the PowerBeam system to connect high-end audio speakers anywhere in a room without having an unsightly electrical cord attached to it.

It's a big dream for a little company. PowerBeam is just a two-person company in Sunnyvale's Plug and Play Tech Center, a building that houses scores of start-ups. The company still has perhaps two years or more before it gets a product on the market. But Graham says the company has filed for patents on the basic invention and is now talking to potential partners about applications.

"We produce wireless electricity," Graham says. "Think of us as PG&E.; Our partners will do interesting things with it."

As for competition, it isn't hard to find patents for "wireless electricity." In the early 1900s, radio pioneer Nikola Tesla unsuccessfully tried to commercialize a wireless electricity invention. Many wireless power solutions aren't really useful because of problems relating to how much power they can transfer over distance.

Last year, a research team headed by Marin Soljacic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it could transfer electricity wirelessly using a concept called electromagnetic resonance. Powercast, a Pennsylvania start-up, says it has a safe wireless power system that uses radios to transmit power. The company says it will be used in lots of devices by the end of 2008. And another start-up, WildCharge, is preparing to start selling a pad that wirelessly charges cell phones that are placed on top of it.

PowerBeam's Graham says his solution uniquely combines a powerful laser with a safety system.

This isn't his first start-up. He sold a previous software company to National Semiconductor in 2003 for an undisclosed sum. After a year at National, he left to start something new. He dreamed up the PowerBeam idea about two years ago and later recruited Luo, a former National colleague who is an optical scientist.

The two men were able to get a short-range demo working in December, and I saw it work across the width of a sizable room. The company is self-funded so far, but it plans to raise venture money. The solution eventually has to solve somebody's problem, and it has to be inexpensive.

"About 10 percent of this is science," Graham says. "The rest of it is engineering."

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also get to the article without registering by clicking this link: <http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_5708216>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Splashpower from the UK have been doing this for years. They got funded in 2001.

See <http://splashpower.com>

<comment><USER4> Splashpower and powerbeam work differently. Splash power recharges devices wirelessly in a way that is more useful than powerbeam. I've been waiting a long time to get splashpower in my phone, ipod, etc but still no sign of it :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing Splashpower uses electromagnetic induction.

The advantage of lasers is that they work over longer distances, and can therefore can be used in situations where Splashpower couldn't - i.e., powering a whole room full of laptops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pretty cool concept. I've been waiting for this for a while... Although I was thought the technology would use electromagnetic induction - not lasers.

For more on powerbeam, also see: <http://venturebeat.com/2007/04/20/powerbeam- the-wireless-electricity-start-up/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the potential ability to enable a truly wireless home environment where electronic devices all use wireless tech in place of physical cables. Speakers would be the first thing I would want to receive wireless power in addition to the wireless data signal.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. Would it replace Solar cells to power home/big devices?

</comment><comment><USER7> Very cool! Another Tesla invention is gaining acceptance.</comment>


Show HN: PiBar for macOS – Manage your Pi-hole(s) from your menu bar – FOSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/amiantos/pibar <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! I made this app in the past week to make it easier for me to view my Pi-hole network stats and toggle them on and off. It's got a lot of features I see Pi-hole users asking for on the internet, so I hope it satisfies everyone!</comment>