Stripe Would Be Perfect If... - <AUTHOR> http://liamkaufman.com/blog/2012/11/09/stripe-would-be-perfect-if/ <comment><USER2> I'm sympathetic to Liam's grief with calculating taxes, and handling the edge cases of people moving around different tax zones. It's not exclusive to Canada, of course.

However, my perspective is that Stripe sits one level lower on the infrastructure map than a service like Recurly (<http://recurly.com>) which is designed to abstract the pain of subscription management away from app developers. I use Stripe first and foremost as a best-in-class one-time payment processor. There's nothing stopping me from building a subscription management solution on top of Stripe; I'd just be re-inventing the wheel.

Stripe's subscriptions strike me as a good compromise between nothing at all and something that becomes more sophisticated over time. If they try to stamp out all of those edge cases, they will inevitably break someone else's application that relies on a slightly different interpretation of "the way things are supposed to be".

I sincerely hope that Stripe continues to say No to feature requests far into the future. Where does PDF invoice generation (with HTML templates of course) fit into "the simplest thing that works"? When Stripe notifies you of a sale, generate your own invoice. Maybe even consider open-sourcing that code. Adding it to Stripe is not the best thing to do.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Stripe can't support every bit of functionality out of the box, because then the API would get really convoluted. Just think about what sort of discounts are commonly use: absolute discounts, percentage discounts, coupon codes with expiration dates, conditional coupon codes, bulk discounts, discounts that only apply for the first month. And so on. When dealing with billing logic there is a tremendous amount of accidental complexity.

Stripe offers a low-level API and a higher level API and framework can be built on top of that. So what we really need are some high-quality django/rails modules that deal with all the mundane bookkeeping. Then you can easily fork the module to make adjustments where needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everyone is piling on the "stop trying to feature-creep Stripe!" wagon but there is at least one reasonable suggestion in this post: A per-user fee tacked onto an existing plan.

> In total there are 4 different tax rates and then no taxes for international > customers, for a total of 5 different tax levels. We currently have 3 > monthly plans, and their 3 yearly equivalents. This means that we had to > create (3 + 3) x 5 = 30 plans within Stripe.

This is definitely not ideal.

Agreed with everyone that asking Stripe to take care of figuring out the tax rates is far too much, but being able to say "Subscribe customer X to plan Y," which already exists, "and in addition add a Z fee to each charge." Z could be a percentage or an absolute value.

Maybe Z is tax. Maybe Z is shipping for a monthly package subscription.

Now Understoodit can keep their 3 + 3 plans. +1 to this.

<comment><USER5> Agreed.

People are sure piling on OP for mentioning taxes -- I think you are all interpreting his request as "Stripe, please add tax calculation" but he's only asking for an additional charges field so he can track his subscriptions + taxes instead of his subscriptions with taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I sign up for a service and receive an email from recurly (or similar services), my first thought is, "this company doesn't care about user experience if they're trusting recurly to send me important communications." The email content is always generic and cold, and it's particularly unimpressive when I sign up for a free trial and receive a "thanks for subscribing" email telling me that I was successfully billed $0.00.

I'm glad that Stripe keeps their hands off my invoices. You could argue that Stripe could just let me turn that feature off, but Stripe understands that their customers are 100% responsible for the end-user experience, and I respect their decision not to get involved in that at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I read this article I honestly thought to myself "Are you kidding me??"

Stripe makes receiving payments incredibly easy; easier than it has ever been before. Yet, somehow you complain that you need to deal with edge cases? There will always be edge cases... if your biggest issue in dealing with payments is handling taxes then I would say you are doing alright.

Would it be a useful feature? Sure. Is it worth taking the time to write about? Hell no.

<comment><USER8> Also, there are scenarios when taxes are exempt on particular items and services. This could even occur on a per-item level.

Multiply that by your regional settings and you got some nice bloat.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely. Even the StreamLined Sales Tax Governing Board rules are not comprehensive. They have many different product categories, but they do not have them all. They pay various companies to provide sales tax data to Internet businesses, but the companies I've dealt with basically do the minimum possible and aren't terribly interested in improving. The bottom line is that if you want to be safe around taxes, you have to hire a lawyer and have them investigate the tax situation with your particular category of product in all the different areas it's going to be offered. Really, that's not something I envision anyone doing for free. It's not something you could just do once. Podunk, UT might have a city council meeting next week decreeing a 27% tax on your product/service with penalty of death if you do not charge the tax to your customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems to me that creating several dozen subscription plans on Stripe is indicative of a deeper problem: that you have several dozen different prices consumers end up paying. How about instead you advertise the prices that consumers will actually have to pay? Bump up all of your prices across the board by the expected cost of taxes to even out the cost.

(Unless there's some law about not charging consumers in different provinces a different pre-tax cost, or some province charges so much tax that to make other provinces eat a share of that cost would be unreasonable.)

<comment><USER11> It's funny how different countries and cultures have different views over the same thing. I'm not sure about Canada, but in the US taxes are added on top of each purchase so you advertise a price of 14USD and end up charging X% on top of that price.

If I understood your suggestion correctly people dealing with these problems should do like we do here in Brazil: use the taxes to compose the final price so if I have a product that I want to sell for, let´s say, 10USD and will cost me an average 10% in taxes I would advertise it for 11USD and just deal with the taxes problem internally in my app and not by creating N different plans on the payment processor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a good write up. This is a challenge for Stripe though. They're a payment gateway that can manage recurring payments. Things like taxes and invoices are usually supported by additional applications that run on top of a payment gateway. Edge cases too. So I'm sure they're there saying "Where do we draw the line between where we end and other offerings/services begin"

<comment><AUTHOR> If they support coupons, I don't see why they can't support taxes. Taxes are just the opposite of coupons and should be relatively easy for them to implement.

<comment><USER2> One of my developer pet peeves is when 3rd parties (especially ones that think they're helping you) tell you that something they want should be "easy" to do.

Changing the interface to a payment processing gateway, including all of the support documentation and code/security audits, is not easy.

If everyone that wanted something from you prefaced their request with "I don't see why they can't"... you'd probably get annoyed, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ... available worldwide.

<comment><USER14> Exactly, I came here to say this. Instead I will just upvote you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can entirely understand why Stripe doesn't deal with taxes. They're insane. I was involved in implementing a site that sold off-site discount parking reservations near airports and dealing with taxes was certainly no fun. And this was restricted just to the US. There is a national consortium of states that makes getting state sales tax slightly easy.... but all the services that offer the ability to look up tax rates didn't cover the service we were offering, parking reservation. So we had to investigate the rates ourselves... and it's a good thing we did. Some counties or municipalities have created special taxes to apply specifically to this kind of service in order to make things more expensive so that parking at the airport isn't such a terrible deal.... oh and those laws don't stay static, of course. You have to keep on top of them, and modify your code/data/whatever when new laws take effect or old laws are repealed.

The most fun was when an area in Texas passed one of these laws taxing parking near airports (even if that parking is offered by a hotel or some other established business... if it has shuttle service to the airport, it must be taxed) but all the various people offering parking through our site didn't want to comply with the law, so they wanted us to not charge the tax to customers! Worse, the business types wanted to actually cater to these scofflaws. I refused to implement it though, because that's just stupid. We'll collect the tax, if the clients don't want to actually pay the municipality, that's their business... but we do have to keep track of who charges it, how much, when those rates change, etc... it's a a bit of a pain, and even the services dedicated to tracking this kind of stuff are not comprehensive.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can make invoices by using their webhooks (<https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks>). Just email your customers when a billing event occurs

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, and that is what we're doing right now. However, it would be nice if they dealt with creating nicely formatted invoices and emailed them so we don't have to.

<comment><USER16> Where does that end? They're taking your payments, making your invoices, why not be an OAuth provider for your users? Host your app? Store and ship your physical products?

I love Stripe. They do one thing well, better than anyone else I have used. It's not perfect for everyone, but anytime someone tries to be perfect for everyone they stop being perfect for anyone.

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's that crazy to wish for emailed invoices from a payment processor. Unlike the examples you provide, it's a pretty natural and easy add-on to such a service which many providers (eg, PayPal, Square) do.

<comment><USER16> PayPal and Square are user facing companies. Stripe is currently strictly a developer facing company (I mean look at their home page, they have code samples!).

Stripe provides hooks that allow you to easily send your own invoices--that's a developer friendly feature that maintains flexibility (everyone will want invoices to work differently).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd also agree that dealing with taxes on Stripe is much more complex than it should be. It could be that there is no way to simulate time. It would be nice to see how Stripe reacts after one month subscriptions, or at least a few days, to get a real sense of how pro-rated prices are calculated in practice. I'd also like to see a better way to test webhooks in two cases: 1. when they are not successful and 2. be able to test webhooks with your application specific parameters.

</comment><comment><USER19> The author is not suggesting that Stripe handle taxes, he is suggesting that Stripe have an option within plans to handle different tax rates, rather than having to create a separate plan for each district that has a different tax rate, and the ability to have that calculated in to the total charge.

</comment><comment><USER20> I quite like the suggestion at the end of the article, that there may be benefit taking some user-centric design methodologies and applying them to API design. I wonder if there are any APIs that already do this and what the general consensus is on their perceived quality.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great writeup. Hopefully they will implement all of this before the time I need to use Stripe (still planning to at this point anyhow).

</comment><comment><USER22> The diagram is really helpful, thanks. I'm currently trying to use Stripe in a school project about REST APIs, and it helped make the concept more concrete in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who's the picture of the guy in the banner? It doesn't look like "High Expectations Asian Father"...

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel this is more a case of poor user experience. This is a company who couldn't mark their service up 10-20% to account for taxes and a unified price.

...And the fact that Stripe doesn't generate and email out PDF invoices FOR YOU? Common now.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you find the business development people? - <AUTHOR>

I have been doing both business development (marketing/sales) and development on my own now for awhile.  My company is gaining traction but I am now at the point where I really need an expert in getting the next client and helping to develop a market, while I focus on making sure we are closing deals and developing what the clients want.  Where do you turn for this type of person?  What do you look for?  And what skill sets would you advertise for? <comment><USER2> Business development isn't the same as marketing or sales, you should step back and hammer out a list of skills you're looking for. Is it primarily sales that you need, is it product management, is it performance marketing, etc. You might be looking for someone who can do all of these roles but they'll naturally have their focus on one of these areas and you should decide what that should be.

What are the main difficulties you face now and need this person to come and deal with ? - is it sourcing warm leads, is it managing the sales process the the client firm, is it figuring out what you need to build to get the most customers ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Try a startup weekend. Thats all you can find there..

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are you located?

<comment><AUTHOR> Central Florida.</comment></comment>


Go 1.7 freeze announced - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/lcvpM-vAoE8 <comment><USER2> I think this is a major step in the right direction for the Go team. Shipping on time and being ruthless with what gets into a release will only help Go in the long-term.

For what it's worth, I think the entire Go core team has done an awesome job with releases, and pushing forward for improvements.

<comment><USER3> Ok, so what strategies do people use for coping with their development / build environments (even entire languages and stdlibs) changing every 6 months?

Is stability out of the window?

<comment><USER4> I'll echo what a lot of people are saying, with some caveats. The Go language spec hasn't changed since 1.0 -- that means that, by and large, code written in the days of 1.0 will still compile in 1.6 (and should compile in 1.7).

Of course, reality is often different. We have a very large Go monorepo at work, and we've run into almost every breaking-but-not-spec-changing change in the language since 1.4. We've had subtle changes in behavior cause panics in production, code that used CGO to stop compiling, third party libraries tripping the race detector when GOMAXPROCS=NUMCPU was introduced by default, etc.

The majority of changes/fixes have been pretty small, and I'd say it takes about a day of man-hours every six months to get us on the next release, which is a drop in the bucket.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to note that all the issues you encountered are because newer versions of Go have exposed issues in your application code and dependencies (with the possible exception of the new cgo pointer passing restrictions).

<comment><USER4> Totally - I hope no one read it as anything otherwise. There's a wide chasm of "change" that can happen without the spec changing, was my main point.

We run a lot of static analysis on our code, which includes things like `go vet`, `go fmt`, etc. Between point releases, there's no guarantee that _those_ tools aren't changing/adding tests and functionality, which has been one of the bigger sources in our work required to upgrade.

All in all, it really is a painless and usually positive procedure - a ton of those fixes were subtly broken things who's behavior has been clarified. I think of it as a positive thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a work-in-progress changelog of what we can expect to see in 1.7? I couldn't find one.

<comment><USER7> Very incomplete: [https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.7.txt](https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.7.txt)

<comment><USER8> Now what does that mean? What does Fortran have to do with Go?

| add support for Fortran (CL 19670, CL 4114)

<comment><USER7> You can now call Fortran code through cgo, from Go.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Read_protobuf for pandas dataframe - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mlshapiro/read-protobuf <comment><AUTHOR> I am working on a project where we store sensor data using protobufs. Since I normally work in pandas for analysis, i started writing a little interpreter to get protobuf(s) directly into pandas.

Interested in feedback from others about how they manage protobufs in a data science context.</comment>


Show HN: Nuclino – A unified real-time workspace for teams - <AUTHOR> https://www.nuclino.com/ <comment><USER2> Lovely design and ui, feels somewhat scandinavian. Lots of attention to detail, very smooth experience. I wish it had more contrast though because it makes me squint a little, if I had to use it every day I'd go crazy.

Can't edit item titles in place, I have to click item and then edit title in editing area.

First cluster (uncategorized items) is not editable, not draggable, not deletable - is this intentional? I guess it makes sense for uncategorized stuff, but what if I don't need it? Bit annoying.

Graph view would make more sense if I could create nested clusters/items, but since data is always one level deep I don't see why I would use it.

I like how search works very much.

Collaboration works very cool - I can see who edits which item at the moment. The only thing I want here is to have a log of who edited what exactly in each item.

Very positive impression overall.

That said, it doesn't make me want to switch from trello and I kinda hate trello. I'll think about this and let you know if i come up with any specific reason.

(this is my first review ever - was it helpful?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your thoughtful review! Here's some feedback:

* Great to hear you like the design and UI! Contrast is not easy to get right with all the different screens and layouts, but we'll improve this.

* Editing the item title in place is planned.

* The current behavior of the uncategorized items is intentional, but as you noted it's not ideal and we're currently working on ways to improve it.

* We're already experimenting with different approaches to the graph visualization like visualizing the links between items. Stay tuned :)

* We're planning to add versioning, which will allow you to retrace how the content evolved.

It would be very interesting to us if you come up with a specific reason. Don't hesitate to contact me directly :)

<comment><USER3> I very much agree about the contrast issue. On my Mac it's great but if I plug in a less-than-perfect monitor it's too hard to look at.

Your product has a great look and feel, looks very polished overall!

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll definitely work on the contrast issue and test it on more screens! Happy to hear you like the look and feel of the product :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your pricing page is tucked away at the bottom. It's one of the first pages I go to, and hiding it like that makes me think you're trying to trick me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Definitely not planning to trick anybody, we're just trying to keep the top navigation simple. We're actually also considering moving the blog and support links to the footer. But we'll keep an eye on it!

<comment><USER5> Please listen to the GP. Pricing needs to be in the top menu and not hidden away in footer. You will lose tons of prospects because they will think pricing is not transparent. I thought the same until I scrolled down to the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! We're building Nuclino, a unified workspace for teams. Here's why you should check it out:

* You can replace several collaboration tools with Nuclino as it combines the best ideas from many! (e.g. the board from Trello, real-time editing from Google Docs, internal links from wikis)

* Real-time collaborative editor with markdown commands

* Visualize your data with different views such as lists, boards, and graphs

You can use it to plan and track sprints, collaborate on requirements, share ideas, goals and more.

It's been working out great for ourselves and our first users, but we'd love to get feedback from a wider audience. If you don't mind a couple rough edges and missing features, it would be awesome if you could check it out and tell us what you think!

<comment><USER6> Looking good, but working in advertisement I've got small nitpick:

[https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/e59309758061057655df10...](https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/e59309758061057655df10f5e6ff66cf26f44d39/a120d/img/solution.png)

I would check with your legal if its all right to use competitors branding in your advertising. Depending on way this branding is presented (or not) it's either trademark violation, violation of laws forbidding direct comparisons with other brands (hence "better than leading product" in ads) or grounds for libel damages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for this hint, we'll review it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was tasked with finding an internal knowledge base solution for our small development team last year. I stumbled across Nuclino and we've been very happy users since last December.

I think what makes it so great is just the pure simplicity. I absolutely hate dealing with all the cruft of Wikis and similar solutions. With Nuclino we just go and write the information down without all the hassle.

Couldn't recommend it more, keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! The complexity of traditional wikis inspired us to build Nuclino. We definitely plan to keep the experience as smooth and simple as possible :)

<comment><USER8> Let's say a team signs up with your service and after a couple of years requirements change and they want to migrate. What are the formats that one could export the data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently it is possible to export a whole workspace in the Markdown format. The downloaded .zip file contains all exported items including attachments such as images and files in a separate folder.

We are also thinking about adding HTML as an export format if there is any interest. What format would you expect as an export option?

<comment><USER9> Anything that is properly parsable, including relations and references. So HTML with proper semantics and ids would be good!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Product looks really fantastic, and it was nice to see returns and tabs behaving as expected (feels snappy like a desktop app!).

It's also nice how escape gets you back to the search bar – I don't have enough data to know how search prioritization scales, but feels really snappy and nice so far.

One comment (admit this is a pet peeve) – it'd be really nice if Google and/or Github SSO was available on any of the paid plans. As a buyer, I really don't like having to choose between good security practice (and a bunch of features that aren't needed for my small team) vs. a lower price. Put differently, it's a bummer that across a number of SaaS services the choice to use SSO - but few or no other "enterprise" features - ends up costing tens of dollars per person per month. :/

Edit: Also thank you, thank you, thank you for a nice table editor where I don't have to do things by hand in markdown!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi boyd, that's a good point. We're considering to add certain SSO providers like Google Suite to the basic plan and others like Active Directory to premium. Glad you like the table editor!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually really like this idea, and almost clicked away before understanding it. Maybe try describing it as "What if every Trello card had its own Google Doc?"

(I'm sure you have other features, that was just the one that excited me personally)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! It actually sounds great the way you describe it, we're definitely gonna test it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks interesting. The demo on the frontpage could use a bit more contrast.

The pricing model mentions 'Private workspaces'. Does that mean the free option is visible to all visitors ?! If so then it should clearly mention that...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! The free option is not visible to all visitors, only to your team. Private workspaces are meant for information which should not be accessible by the entire team. You have to be invited to a private workspace in order to view and edit the content. We'll try to explain this better on the pricing page!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Honest feedback here, the choice to use the fade in effect on every single element on the home page resulted in me leaking out of the funnel at the very top. I just couldn't stand reading it, it was frustrating to swipe up a screenful and have to pause to read. Please know I present this constructively. Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment! We did not receive this feedback before, but we'll test it with more users and check if it makes sense to adjust or remove the animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Noticed you are using Mobx. Awesome choice! Anyway looks nice so far. The contrast of the site needs some help though.

<comment><USER15> That's interesting. Normally we hear rhetoric that mobx is unsuitable for complex webapps. What has been your experience vs redux ?

<comment><USER16> At Nuclino we're very happy with MobX and I would say that it is definitely suitable for complex projects and that it mostly depends on the overall architecture that you choose. MobX is rather unopinionated and there are many ways to work with it. You can even use it in a Redux style architecture if you want! In the end it all depends on your requirements and preferences. For us, choosing MobX was key to building Nuclino the way it is today as there are a few key features which would have been much harder to build with Redux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great UI, great product. I'd use your product to replace prodpad.com anytime :)

> We're already experimenting with different approaches to the graph > visualization like visualizing the links between items.

Yes please! Being able to visualize links between items that I created would be amazing.

Coloring items by cluster would be great too: I'd like to have different types of items (some would represent customers, others features-requests, and I'd like to be able to differentiate customers and feature-requests in the graph visually while visualizing links among them).

</comment><comment><USER18> Like many here, I appreciate the design and feel of the product.

It looks like you're experimenting with a desktop app (although you don't mention which platforms) is there any work on mobile apps? I couldn't find any mention of them on your website.

Although the bulk of our Trello usage is on desktops, being able to access and respond to notifications when away from the desk/office/laptop are deal breakers for our team.

<comment><USER16> Great to hear you like the design and feel of the product :) We're currently beta testing a desktop app for Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but haven't started work on a mobile app yet. Of course we see the value in mobile and we'll get there eventually!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having a features page to list features with screenshots will be helpful.

Out of interest, when did you start? I'm confused about "Join over 2000 teams".

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you seen our product page ([https://www.nuclino.com/product](https://www.nuclino.com/product))? There are screenshots and a video tour :)

We started about one and a half years ago, but just recently released a major update introducing the board view and other essential features: [https://blog.nuclino.com/the-new-nuclino](https://blog.nuclino.com/the-new- nuclino)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really nice work. Are you familiar with Notion? I would love to hear your pitch why I might want to use Nuclino instead of something like Notion.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! There was a similar question with an answer a little further down the comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866580)

Hope this helps :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wild. If the founders are reading, I met one of your friends (significant others?) in Bali in April.

Awesome work and hello from the States.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is crazy! That must have been my girlfriend, can't wait to tell her. Greetings back from Germany :)

<comment><USER22> "Omg honey someone on the internet met you!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The graph view on this is really awesome! Kudos guys on a neat product!

I would definitely recommend this for the workplace...however, for private use, I've always been an advocate of self-hosted. Does anyone know of a similar platform for single-person, self-hosted use-case?

</comment><comment><USER24> Sorry for the existential question - but how do you guys not get disenchanted in this space by the idea that if you actually manage to meaningfully differentiate that you're surrounded by nimble giants that can easily mimic your success and crush you?

<comment><AUTHOR> We believe in what we do and so far we've not been able to find another product with the same focus that builds upon the same principles and ideas. Wanting Nuclino to exist and our passion to create it, is what drives us most. As for competition from established players, I wholeheartedly agree with the comment from davidjgraph. Every new startup faces this challenge, but history shows that it can be difficult for large companies to mimic the success of new products.

<comment><USER25> Anything more concrete?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like it. I like idea about it, there is definite need and I like what I've seen so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's great to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Tried it some months ago and preferred Notion. Is there a comparison with pros and cons?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for giving us a try! It would be awesome to hear more about your experience. If you're up for a quick chat, just send me an email.

Obviously I'm highly biased regarding a direct comparison, but here are some thoughts:

Overall we're trying to provide a simpler and faster experience. For example, our editor is just a single stream of content blocks, providing consistency and a fast editing experience. In Notion the editor has more complexity with adjustable multi-column layouts, page header images, etc. If you don't require those formatting options, I'd argue Nuclino is a better fit.

By providing different views on the same information, we also enable you to use Nuclino for different use cases. For example, the list view allows you to prioritize lots of items, the board view to track a workflow, and a graph view to explore information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://nuclino.com/](https://nuclino.com/) gives an expired SSL certificate error. (Got there because I wound up on the blog, and wanted to get back, so I edited the URL.)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for reporting this! We're aware of the issue and will fix it as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It looks promising. I really like the way you set your pricing tiers without limiting the number of items / rows / entries available to the user.

However are there any plans for mobile apps? That's an important feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though we'd love to, we don't offer mobile apps yet. You can use Nuclino in a mobile browser, but it's not something we've been focusing on. As far as priorities go, we're currently focused on web and desktop first, but we'll release mobile apps eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is your product better than the atlassian stack - jira, bitbucket, confluence?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our main differentiators are simplicity, speed, and the fact that you only need a single tool (not counting Bitbucket here).

We've seen that many teams don't need all the features the Atlassian stack provides and happily trade it for a simpler, faster, and more unified experience.

Feel free to try it out and see if it works for you and your team :)

<comment><USER31> @bjoernm Nuclino is beautiful, reminds me of this (at the end): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AXaFlIFQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AXaFlIFQA)

I love how you've enabled users to take down ideas in a very quick way without forcing them to make decisions about what "category" or purpose the information has at that moment and then they can freeform build on that information to take it from something amorphous to something with utility. This compliments the way humans actually tackle complex work.

Can't wait to see where Nuclino goes from here!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly the idea :) We don't want to impose structure before it actually becomes useful. That's also why the most basic elements are called "items", as their purpose can evolve into ideas, tasks, requirements, etc.

<comment><USER31> Awesome! I reference this quote too much but I love it and I think it applies here: "Design dissolving into behavior." \- Naoto Fukasawa

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really smooth user experience and fair pricing. Still I find one negative point that really makes it unusable for me : Content are only one level deep.

Unless I missed a feature allowing to nest content on multiple level ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Dryken! Inside a workspace there is currently only one level of nesting by using clusters. However, you can use internal links like in a wiki to create index pages that build the structure you need with arbitrarily deep nesting.

Generally, we're trying to keep the organisation flat as we've seen lots of teams struggle with deeply nested information, e.g. in the context of huge shared network drives. However, there are some cases where more nesting might be useful and we're already trying out some ways to address that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does it provide 2FA? I'm looking for a tool like this, but my company handles a lot of sensitive material and so having 2FA is a hard requirement.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're planning to add Google SSO which supports 2FA. Would that work for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anybody know a tool to just build the graphs as in the tool?

</comment><comment><USER35> Trying out right now. Looking for a chat feature? Or is that right on the board?

I'm trying to resize a large picture on the board. Is possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no chat feature in Nuclino at the moment as most teams use it together with a chat tool like Slack. But we're planning to add some lightweight commenting soon.

Resizing a picture is not possible, but we're planning to add different size options like full-width vs. normal-width for each image. Would that solve what you're trying to achieve?

<comment><USER35> I was not sure if the board was more like a blank "powerpoint-like" space, or if it was more linear, thus my question about resizing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This does look a lot like a much better Trello.

Does this support import from Trello?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it! Unfortunately we don't support importing from Trello yet. We offer a generic import for HTML and Markdown, so if you can get the data out of Trello that way you might be able to import it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Consider hosting all web resources and dependencies on your own domain(s). I don't need google, cloudfront etc etc to know i'm using a certain web application. Certainly not if i was paying for it.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the feedback! This is the first time that we hear about this concern, but we will look into it. Serving these kinds of resources (fonts, icons) ourselves has a disadvantage in terms of caching, so we'll have to decide if it's worth the trade-off.

<comment><USER36> I'm surprised to hear a webapp dev say it is the first time he hears about leaking traffic to third parties. Kind of worrying.

<comment><USER16> It's not that I haven't heard about leaking traffic to third parties before. What I meant is that so far none of our users have complained about this being a concern for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What was the tech-stack you used to build this?

<comment><USER16> To give you a rough idea:

For the frontend we use React, MobX, ProseMirror, and Webpack.

The backend uses Node.js, Express, µWS, and Postgres.

<comment><USER38> Can I ask a bit more about ProseMirror? I am currently using a custom text editor but was looking into potentially replacing it with editors like ProseMirror, Slate.js

How easy is it to write custom plugins/behaviour? For example our tables are much more complex than the ones from the default plugin, we have e-signature etc.

I will have a look myself over the next weeks or so but wanted to get some opinion on that!

<comment><USER16> From my experience ProseMirror is not the easiest editor to get started with, but it gives you a lot of power in terms of customization and flexibility. Recently a more feature rich table module was released, which might come closer to what you expect in case you haven't seen it yet: [https://github.com/prosemirror/prosemirror- tables](https://github.com/prosemirror/prosemirror-tables). Once you get the hang of it, implementing custom plugins and behaviors is not that hard. There will be a 1.0 release with more extensive documentation soon, which will make it a lot easier to get started. You can find more information here: [https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/planning-new- documentation](https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/planning-new-documentation).

Apart from that, the maintainer is very responsive and often times issues get fixed in a matter of hours! And the community behind ProseMirror is very helpful and seems to be steadily growing :)

<comment><USER38> Yep I've seen that table plugin (I guess it's the one used on Nuclino?) but our tables are cost tables with calculations, currencies etc so it will probably need to be its own plugin. I can probably base it off this though, it looks better than ours.

Thanks for the reply, I guess I'll play with it once I manage to find some time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Been using it for some months now. Awesome!</comment>


Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.collaboraoffice.com/press-releases/collabora-office-4-2-0-for-ios-and-android/ <comment><AUTHOR> I don't see specific support for right-to-left editing in the toolbar, but I've noticed existing documents in mixed Latin, Arabic and Hebrew can be edited and are displayed correctly respecting directionality.</comment>


Become a C-Founder - <AUTHOR> Tech Company is seeking a technical co-founder. If interested, please email firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> Hi Enayat - I think a little bit more detail would give you a much higher response chance. Who you are, what the startup is about, where it's expected to be located/run, what are the goals, duties and responsibility of the co- founder, skills or experience required... the common sense information really :).

All the best,

Nikola</comment>


Hacker Steals Thousands of Accounts from Police Forum (PoliceOne) - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/hacker-steals-thousands-of-accounts-from-police-forum <comment><AUTHOR> >A hacker is selling a database allegedly containing over 700,000 user accounts from a popular law enforcement forum. The site, PoliceOne, is used by verified police officers and investigators to discuss tactics, weapons, and other specialist topics.

>"Emails from NSA, DHS, FBI and other law enforcement agencies as well as other US government agencies," Berkut's listing on the Tochka dark web market reads. Berkut is selling the full database, which allegedly includes around 715,000 user accounts and dates from 2015, for $400. The hacker said they had already sold the database on other forums.</comment>


NPM Is Joining GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-is-joining-github/ <comment><USER2> Microsoftie here — throwaway for obvious reasons.

Microsoft doesn't do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.

The reality is npm was in a bad place and in a land of not good options, this strikes me as the best possibility. I'd rather have GitHub control this and be able to give the resources to npm than a company like Oracle or Amazon or even Google or Facebook to own it. In a perfect world, some independent entity could fund npm out of gratitude but at the same time, consider how poorly npm as a company was run for YEARS and the general lack of direction.

So yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic this won't be fucked up by GitHub — but I understand the concern.

As for those worried about Microsoft embracing, extending, and extinguishing. Lol. Even if that was the goal (and I truly don't think that's the ethos at all any more), Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now (Facebook too — let's be glad Zuck didn't buy this after we saw what happened to yarn), but Microsoft can't even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure.

<comment><USER3> Given that Microsoft for all intents and purposes killed Atom (along with their really promising xray project [0]) almost immediately after the acquisition [1] even after explicitly claiming they wouldn't [2], please excuse me for not seeing the GitHub acquisition in the same positive light.

[0] [https://github.com/atom-archive/xray](https://github.com/atom- archive/xray)

[1] They never officially announced it, but they almost certainly de-staffed it to the point where it's barely on life support: [https://imgur.com/a/jQBHsUk](https://imgur.com/a/jQBHsUk)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama/e0a2b2e/)

Update:

What a surprise, the VSCode fanboys are coming in droves to downvote and say nothing more than how Atom was going to die anyways.

Sure, maybe it was, but that's not the point. The point is Microsoft _actively pulled development resources away from Atom after explicitly claiming they wouldn't_.

I get that a lot of people like VSCode better than Atom, but _please_ put things into perspective for a moment and consider if you'd make the same comment if the same thing happened to _your pet project that happened to be #2 in popularity but then got axed after being acquired by the company who owned the #1 after claiming they wouldn't do exactly that_.

Whatever your opinion might be on Atom vs VSCode, can we not at least agree that this kind of behavior is something we should hold acquiring companies accountable for? It might not make any difference to their bottom line at the end of the day, but the least we should do is hold them to the fire in the court of public opinion.

<comment><USER4> Counter thesis: what "killed" Atom is the balance of user enthusiasm quickly shifting to VSCode. Well before the acquisition was even announced, VSCode started grabbing developer mindshare real, real fast. I remember being an Atom user who resisted that tide for a while, but it became pretty clear that VSCode was taking off like a rocket and Atom, well, wasn't.

If commit activity graphs are really a meaningful measure, look at VSCode's:

[https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/commit- activity](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/commit-activity)

The number of commits per, uh, date unit (the graph is not super clear on that axis, honestly) across the entire length of VSCode's activity graph rarely drops as low as the _highest_ number of commits per date unit for Atom.

I'd have preferred to see both survive and do well, but that really hasn't been the way the text editor space seems to have worked. Editors that are conceptually awfully similar to one another tend to have one dominant player: TextMate (at least for Macs), then Sublime Text, then Atom, then very quickly Code. Given that Code and Atom are probably the closest of any two in that list, this just isn't that surprising.

<comment><USER3> It would be delusional of me to claim that VSCode wasn't already winning in terms of mindshare by a large margin when the acquisition happened. That's not what I'm claiming here.

Atom still had a healthy number of active contributors (presumably most of them were from GitHub) making improvements to the product on a daily basis to make it a perfectly viable tool for the people who chose to use it (and despite the much smaller developer base they continued to innovate with projects like xray and tree-sitter)... That is until the Microsoft acquisition happened.

Before anyone jumps in with the causation vs correlation argument, I think any reasonable person looking at the evidence would agree that the timing is convenient enough to make it highly unlikely to have been a coincidence, especially considering that most of those contributions were from employees at GitHub who were _getting paid to work on Atom_, so the only reasonable explanation for the contributions to stop abruptly within a month is that they _stopped getting paid to work on Atom_.

To add insult to injury they even had the audacity to claim they wouldn't do exactly what they did. That is the crux of my issue with how they handled this acquisition.

<comment><USER5> From Microsoft's perspective, what's the advantage to them or their users to pay for two somewhat similar free offerings to be worked on in parallel? Given that one was gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds while the other was rapidly losing market share and relevance, what course would you recommend? "Fund both indefinitely, to keep the handful of atom users that want new features happy"? Be reasonable.

<comment><USER6> I don't think anybody's expecting them to fund both indefinitely, but given that their soon-to-be new CEO went on the record to say that they would actually keep funding Atom development, I feel it's fairly reasonable to expect that they wouldn't pull funding from Atom almost completely as soon as the acquisition went through. That's a really shitty move no matter how you look at it.

<comment><USER4> He said "we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward," which at least of right now is still happening -- Atom 1.45 was released last week, along with 1.46 beta 0. The conjecture that they've effectively defunded it is reasonable, but it's still conjecture, and even if they have it doesn't actually break Friedman's (possibly quite deliberately worded) statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like a good outcome overall. NPM being such an important pillar in the software supply chain while having an unviable business model and largely being funded by VC money was never a good position to be in. There are problems with more of the software ecosystem consolidating with a single entity but it still feels like an improvement.

<comment><USER8> > NPM being such an important pillar in the software supply chain while having > an unviable business model and largely being funded by VC money was never a > good position to be in.

Why does NPM need to be funded as a commercial entity at all? What other open source library has a private company running its package manager? This one still boggles my mind.

<comment><USER9> For programming languages, there are several examples of commercially run package managers:

        - the Java/Kotlin/Scala ecosystem is based around maven central, which is run by Sonatype, Inc.
        - Go modules are hosted by Google. Previously, most libraries were hosted on Github
        - Rust's crate index is on Github
        - The Docker/Moby registry is run by Docker, Inc. (though that might be a stretch for "package manager" :))

<comment><USER10> I wasn't aware that I was a commercial entity because I use github!

<comment><USER11> I think the point is that you are using a commercial entity to host your code. There is a bill for the code you have hosted, and you aren't the one paying for it.

<comment><USER10> If that was the point why did they write "commercially run"? That is explicitly about management, not hosting or single points of failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks to Microsoft/GitHub for this acquisition. NPM is essential to the Javascript eco-system and it is hard to have a business model for just a registry. In the ruby eco-system the awesome Ruby Together [https://rubytogether.org/](https://rubytogether.org/) was started to run the registry. In this case one of the worlds most valuable companies will run it, which means it doesn't need a not-for-profit.

Regarding "trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it" will there be an API to add a source in case the change was made outside of GitHub? Although I recognize that the vast majority of changes to npm packages happen on GitHub.

<comment><USER13> That must make you nervous over at GitLab, no? GitLab's integrated workflow is one of its main selling points (I love it), and GitHub now seems to be well underway to cross that moat.

<comment><USER12> It is exciting to see that having everything in a single application is being validated by GitHub. Last year it was very clear they are switching from a marketplace model to a single application by including Verify (CI), Package, and Secure.

We think Git(Lab|Hub) will become the two most popular solutions and we look forward to this competition [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/biggest- risks/#...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/biggest- risks/#competition)

I think the companies that should be nervous are ones that have only one stage or ones that have multiple stages but as a suite of applications instead of a single application [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single- application...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single-application/) There are a lot of these [https://about.gitlab.com/devops- tools/](https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/)

<comment><USER14> > It is exciting to see that having everything in a single application is > being validated by GitHub

I wish Gitlab would get over this passive-aggressive negging of GitHub.

I would squirm seeing something like that among any two competing companies. But it takes a strange configuration of overcompensating an inferiority complex to use it for the specific case of one company starting out as an explicit clone of another, to then lord any small feature the original company may have followed over them.

This isn't the first time. I've seen it dozens of times, and I don't even specifically care about these two companies.

<comment><USER15> I don't think GP's comment was negging or passive-aggressive at all. The original GP said "That must make you nervous over at GitLab, no?" so it only seems rational to explain that they see this as validation and not as a risk.

Somehow, you took this explanation of why they aren't worried about this and turned it into a passive-aggressive stance..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> VsCode, Typescript, Github, NPM.

And Microsoft doesn't even have to maintain the main runtime, Google does. What a clever strategy!

<comment><USER17> Yes, they almost own the entire JS ecosystem at this point.

They lost a decade of battles for the web, but it seems they just found a way to get back in the fight.

Now at the IE 6 times, that meant monopoly, and it was terrible news.

But today, it means more competition between the giants, which is very good for us.

<comment><USER18> One could argue that the IE6 of our times is Google Chrome at this point..

<comment><USER19> Safari.

<comment><USER20> Care to explain? Safari has one of the highest standards compliance of any modern browser [0], which IE famously did not.

It has been argued with various success [1] that Chrome is the new I.E., due to "Chrome exclusive" web standards.

[0]: [https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-30/...](https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-30/firefox-60/edge-12.html)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070595)

<comment><USER21> I think the honest truth is that a lot of developers see Safari similarly to IE because Firefox and Chrome are quick to jump on and ship new features and "if only Safari kept up" they could be used "everywhere". Combined with the fact that iOS is large enough that you can't just drop Safari support and tell them to use Chrome.

It's a weird world where webdevs apparently ideally just want everyone on the 6 second old version version of Chrome. I totally get it -- it's an absolutely rational stance but it feels a lot like how devs felt about IE6 at the beginning.

<comment><USER22> You're right, IE6 was amazing at the time. It made a ton of things possible that previously hadn't been, and the standards bodies were lagging behind it. Had MS actually kept updating IE6 and kept it ahead of the standards, the standards would never have mattered, and we'd never have developed this sick taste for IE. No one hated that they had a monopoly, we hated that they had a _stagnant_ monopoly.

<comment><USER23> Those of us that were using non-MS OSes like Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris back then hated it that sites were made to work correctly only on IE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if more people will look into adopting Deno[1], the new node alternative by one of the creators of Node. It does not use NPM, you pull in packages Go-style (via URLs[2]). It's supposed to be more secure because you have to explicitly give it access to anything (i.e. network, file system, etc).

[1] [https://deno.land/](https://deno.land/)

[2] example import in Deno:

        import { serve } from "https://firstname.lastname@example.com/http/server.ts";

Previous HN about Deno: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102656)

<comment><USER25> The thought that's going into Deno about permissions and upstream package issues have me considering it where I've generally rejected node.js for anything serious (also recognizing that it's probably early for production use).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Assuming this was an acceptable exit: I'm impressed that NPM pulled this off. They were basically doing the "no revenue model to speak of, hope we'll get acquired by a bigco" startup play that was starting to go out of vogue already when they were founded.

I wonder to what extent they've had influence over their own success at all though. Basically they had to hope that JS stayed popular (it did), that Node stayed relevant (it did) and that the entire JS ecosystem would move over to NPM (it did, but I'd say rather despite NPM than because of it) (I mean, otherwise Yarn wouldn't even exist, right?).

So basically their bet was:

\- Turn NPM into a startup

\- Keep the lights on

I bet I'm missing all kinds of key behind-the-scenes stuff, but still, I don't know many startups that manange to successfully exit by "just" keeping the lights on. In a weird cringey way, it's motivating.

<comment><USER27> Here's what isaacs writes in the NPM blog post ([https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase- mo...](https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase-montage)). It doesn't seem like anyone on the NPM team did great financially from this:

"I have a set of goals that I wrote down back then, and have shared openly with the team.

...

3\. Get a big enough exit that I can quit my job and see what comes out of me a second time. 4\. Share the rewards equitably with the people who got npm to where it is.

...

On (3), well, I'm still working a jobby job, but I always knew that was a long shot, and "make npm a better package manager" is a job I enjoy. And as for (4), I'm proud of the deals that we've been able to negotiate for the team.

It's not a kajillion billion dollar 10x startup cinderella story, and we've taken our hits, but in the end we've done right by our community, team, and careers, and I'm extremely proud of what we've achieved."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised there's not a single mention of "Microsoft" in this or the npm announcement [1], given the old-evil-history of Microsoft and the new-nice Microsoft we have today.

I would expect that there was at least a mention, considering the reason that most modules in npm are still in ES5 is _exactly_ because of the monopolistic practices that Microsoft followed back in the day which makes Internet Explorer still relevant.

Not negative, not positive comment. Just surprising there was no mention. And I do think Microsoft is doing a great job recently with Open Source in general.

[1] [https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase- mo...](https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase-montage)

<comment><USER29> I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on an older machine just now. The MSFT of today is definitely a far cry from the MSFT of yesteryear. Such a thing would have been unheard of 15 years ago.

<comment><USER30> Embrace, extend, extinguish?

<comment><USER31> My prediction, that my IT department hates to hear, is that Windows is going away.

Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.

I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.

However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.

<comment><USER32> > I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out > compatibility layer on top of Linux.

I think this is unlikely. In many ways the NT kernel is superior to the Linux kernel. I just wish it were open source and didn't have the rest of windows around it.

<comment><USER33> Since when has technical superiority ever determined which product wins in the marketplace?

The Linux kernel is ubiquitous and free-as-in-beer, so it might win out. Android has already shown how you can build a proprietary userland on top of it.

<comment><USER34> And how fragmentation on Linux profits OEMs, each with their own little distribution, not giving anything back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Github acquires npm" would be a better title IMO.

<comment><USER36> I am glad that the npm team will finally have some adult supervision.

Meanwhile, I _almost_ have my team switched to yarn.

<comment><USER37> yarn v1+ or yarn v2/berry?

Switching to berry has been a huge PITA over here, but I don't want to give up workspaces

<comment><USER36> Our 'workspace' is so ornate that yarn couldn't handle it. 1.21+ almost looks right, but something very bad is still going on with mocha deduping, such that tests are failing with really bizarre error messages.

I check yarn about every three months, or when I find a new, infuriating bug with the npm CLI (so, every couple of months on average). I think npm install suffers greatly from not having a formal spec. It has been bugfixed by so many different individuals now that it has reached a truly astounding level of schizophrenia.

If yarn didn't exist, I would have started trying to break down the install problem into many independent concerns that can be reasoned about individually and tried to solicit help in making a full installer out of it. If I'd known I'd still be trying to make yarn workspaces work for us 18 months later I probably would have.

Node modules in general have some bad patterns of delegation that are utterly antagonistic to self-documentation, and both yarn and npm seem to suffer from this as well. I think in the next week or so I'm going to have to set up a small test case that exhibits the yarn bug I'm seeing, or any of the half a dozen interlocking (emphasis on 'lock') npm bugs that now have me painted into a very tiny corner.

<comment><USER38> Your take on the installer in npm v6 is not wrong. It got that way by a process of gradual iterative evolution, and it has lots of warts.

npm v7 features a ground-up rewrite of the tree resolution and deification logic in the @npmcli/arborist module. I recommend checking it out, or at least staying tuned for the beta coming soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I occasionally forget that Microsoft bought GitHub. They certainly don't do anything here to remind me of that fact.

How separate from MS has GitHub been in day-to-day operations?

<comment><USER40> I've been at GitHub for 7 years and we operate independently but have the support and resources of Microsoft when we need them. IMO, they've been amazing partners but day to day the GitHub team builds, prioritizes, and supports GitHub.

<comment><USER41> It's totally the smart thing to do. Github needs a ton of cloud compute with github actions, Azure powers it. Github brings a very strong brand that developers love, which gives Microsoft a good rep amongst technical folks.

This is as good as Google acquiring Youtube because Youtube needs an insane amount bandwidth and it was a perfect fit for Google's infrastructure and ad platform.

It's just sad to see Google not playing the Developers game well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I hope this doesn't alter the current GitHub npm package registry policy where all packages _must_ be published under a scope corresponding to name of the owning GitHub user/org. The resulting increased transparency and clarity of ownership will be great for the JS ecosystem.

The existing npm ownership model is markedly less clear and has led to several problems, including the transfer of package publishing rights to bad actors without anyone being aware. On the whole, npm accounts and orgs were always just an unnecessary abstraction that obscured the actual provenance of software, of which GitHub is the de facto source.

<comment><USER43> Does this mean using alternatives (GitLab, et. al) is not an option?

The worst option has been Elm's system where the whole package system requires you to not only use GitHub, but when GitHub in down (which isn't uncommon unfortunately) packages that weren't cached locally were inaccessible with no mirroring options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Microsoft does have a much better track record in terms of keeping their products alive than other Way Way Large companies that could have made this acquisition, and for that I'm pretty glad.

That said, and just in case their notoriously warlike legal team manages to fumble this somehow, I'd like to take the opportunity to remind every other frontender that Verdaccio ([https://verdaccio.org/](https://verdaccio.org/)) exists, is easy to implement, and relatively low maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER45> Gotta respect how Microsoft couldn't build anything the open source community wanted to work with/on so instead they used their Windows and Office monopoly to buy everyone's favorite playgrounds.

<comment><USER46> They should get props for TypeScript & VSCode.

<comment><USER45> They do and I will give them props for that. But no company should have as much control over open source that Microsoft does.

<comment><USER46> They should & deserve to have full control over everything they've created.

You can blame AWS/GCP for letting GitHub & npm be acquired, how many years were they on the open market?

Most of the $$$ in OSS is being funneled towards rent-seeking major cloud providers that are hosting OSS software, whom should all have blank checks with the money they've reaped so far, but seems only Microsoft has the strategic savvy to focus on acquiring the obvious targets for increasing dev mindshare. I don't fault them for their M&A's, it's just good business.

<comment><USER47> It's also not like Amazon is being an amazing open source citizen; I don't see them acquiring the tech to be an automatically-better outcome than the current version of Microsoft doing so.

IMO this shows the importance of separating technology from platform. Ideally we would have non-profit groups with good governance & corporate support (rather than control) to grow these technologies. If an open source project can be acquired, it's only so free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This kind of consolidation is probably not good for everyone who depends on open source projects. Microsoft now owns a significant portion of software distribution.

</comment><comment><USER46> Just like GitHub this is a cloud play to make Azure more appealing by meeting developers where they're at, increase dev mindshare/reach, hosting their packages, CI Scripts/Actions then making it seamless to deploy to Azure.

Smart, have no idea where AWS or GCP's control team are at when these strategic plays are going down.

<comment><USER49> I honestly think that Google cloud platform will be shut down within a couple years. It seems like it's losing the war very badly.

<comment><USER50> I am honestly amazed that there is no official way to install Fedora or Fedora CoreOS on GCP. There are no images even on the GCP marketplace.

Stuff like this is what irritates me. Even small vps providers have this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I did not see that coming. I trust Microsoft to be able to offer great availability and nice software. It is maybe not the best overlord we could have hoped for but it's way better than the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER52> I see this as a straightforward play, simply put, I think (to summarize, perhaps a little to broadly)

\- They want to sell Azure Services

\- Most (if not all) NPM packages already live on github

\- NPM has a business revolving around package management, including private npm instances and increasingly around node/package security

\- This being primarily a business that will sell to has-money businesses (e.g., medium to large businesses, Fortune 500 corporations etc)

So, given all of the above, it makes sense to have a vertical selling into one of the fastest growing package management ecosystems where you can be the "full stack" provider of developer/enterprise tools.

I don't think its anything beyond this, personally. I expect to see a lot of pushes to integrate with Azure Pipelines, cloud deployment etc. centered around this.

I wonder if they'll buy Passenger[0] next, its a popular (in my experience) to deploy nodejs applications.

[0][https://www.phusionpassenger.com/library/](https://www.phusionpassenger.com/library/)

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm always worried when thing like this happen :

Critical open source entities are bought by private company. I understand the need for money and sustainability these entities need, but it's really a shame that the open source community doesn't "own" themselves.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ok now Microsoft just needs to acquire what remains of Docker and their Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers collection will be complete.

</comment><comment><USER55> I understand some folks trepidation but where was npm going anyway?

<comment><USER56> Am I weird for thinking it didn't need to go anywhere?

<comment><USER55> My understanding was that financially they were not going to last long doing what they were doing.

<comment><USER57> That raises the question of how GitHub/Microsoft plan to profit off the acquisition though? It can't be just for goodwill or marketing.

<comment><USER58> These companies don't need to profit off of acquisitions. If they're going to, it doesn't have to be direct either, it can be a method of growing their sales funnel if nothing else, or even just acquiring talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> NPM's blog post: [https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase- mo...](https://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase-montage)

</comment><comment><USER60> How much did Microsoft pay? What did the founders take away?

Most people don't know, in these open source acquisitions by for profits there's money involved and "founders" get an exit. Not always clear To the public who those are or what they took home from a mostly volunteer effort.

<comment><USER61> I too was curious about how much the acquisition cost. According to TechCrunch:

> GitHub, the developer repository owned by Microsoft, made a little deal of > its own this morning when it bought JavaScript packaging vendor npm for _an > undisclosed amount_.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/github-nabs-javascript- pac...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/github-nabs-javascript-packaging- vendor-npm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is this a too big to fail kind of charity acquisition?

<comment><USER63> no, this is microsoft "embracing" (buying control of) a huge point of centralization in a software distribution ecosystem, positioning them to have greater power over a huge number of developers.

<comment><USER64> Microsoft turned their reputation around in recent years with developers but I wonder how long it will last.

<comment><USER45> I think people are "okay" with Microsoft because so many hackers have a problem with the data agglomeration and monetization strategy of Google and Facebook, but this Microsoft "embrace" will come to a head within the next couple years and I just can't wait for it.

The way people think Microsoft's embrace of open source, GitHub, and now NPM is genuine is completely ridiculous. Microsoft had to change because much of where the action was is on *nix systems. Microsoft will start to use these companies to make developers embrace Microsoft services. It's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER65> I can't even come up with a scenario of _how_ MS would realistically do so? Sure, making GH actions easier to set up with Azure than AWS seems plausible, but also strikes me as somewhat benign.

Banning python from Github? Requiring \r\n for NPM packages? What's the move you're afraid of?

<comment><USER13> One question GitLab's CEO (sytse) is rightfully asking is whether the ability to trace code from npm back to the repository will be available to competitors. If not, less competition is bad for users.

I still think this is good news, given where npm is coming from, but it's certainly not risk-free.

<comment><USER47> This is where effective anti-trust enforcement is important and valuable.

Until we come up with better trusted federation protocols there will be natural monopolies, but that doesn't mean they get unchecked power. We have laws for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> They could probably save tons just by deduping the npm and github homepages of every package!

</comment><comment><USER67> I worry that this is too much consolidation.

<comment><USER68> I hope you're spending lots of money at independent places then, because this is the inevitable result of the current "OSS infrastructure funded by VC charity" model. NPM was losing money, as was GitHub when Microsoft bought that. Under such conditions, getting bought out by a megacorp is the only path forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Current me loves this, and I love all the GitHub tools they've added recently.

Future "5-10 years down the road" me _knows_ this will suck, ending up where all concentrated monopolies end up...

</comment><comment><USER41> Github announced the Github packages feature a while back, but without npm it didn't quite make sense. Acquiring npm means github not only hosts source code, but packages as well. With Github Actions, they want to be the one stop shop for code lifecycle and be at the forefront of javascript ecosystem.

If developers love Github, they love the cloud. Microsoft is betting big on the cloud, they lost the Mobile war but they definitely want to be the developer and cloud darlings.

</comment><comment><USER70> There's plenty of alternatives already so I don't see MS being able to do anything untowards. /shrugs, I'll panic only if something bad happens.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'd like to see Microsoft bring Ryan Dahl (original author of node) back in the fold by sponsoring/buying Deno with TypeScript. It's a good fit.

</comment><comment><USER72> Interesting transitive ownership/dependencies here.

</comment><comment><USER73> Who predicted it 5 month ago? hmm?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031266)

I also predicted a few more controversial things but if you think it terms of ecosystem and cloud market strategy, then it makes perfect sense.

</comment><comment><USER74> What I'd hope : Somehow make packages more secure than hoping that nothing is tainted in the dependency. I think this is the biggest issue of volunteer package repo.

What I'd not hope : MS changes strategy with change of people etc and npm and GitHub rot.

</comment><comment><USER75> Most important question: Will you still be able to see user-submitted phrases explaining the npm acronym? (See upper left-hand corner of [https://www.npmjs.com/](https://www.npmjs.com/))

<comment> kyle-rb Damn, someone just beat me to "Now Part of Microsoft"

[https://github.com/npm/npm-expansions/pull/2936](https://github.com/npm/npm- expansions/pull/2936)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Microsoft owns so may day-to-day tools and platforms. LinkedIn, GitHub, NPM.

</comment><comment><USER77> Microsoft have been making their code analysis tools available in GitHub post- aquisition; doing the same for npm could really help improve the risks JS programmers face when pulling in libraries from npm.

</comment><comment><USER78> (Wishful thinking ...) Does this mean the next release of npm will be yarn v2 and that typescript will implement support for the pnp spec so we can converge the javascript packaging space to a sane place?

<comment><USER13> There already is a Yarn v2: [https://dev.to/arcanis/introducing- yarn-2-4eh1](https://dev.to/arcanis/introducing-yarn-2-4eh1)

<comment><USER78> Does typescript support pnp somehow now? (That's actually the thing I'm wanting ...). npm's cli going away was an attempted tease (in bad-taste i think)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> At anytime in the future, the product might have licensing gotchas to run elsewhere than Microsoft cloud products.

This is already happening with Windows and SQL server licensing. This will happen sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER80> Time to get behind Deno

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deno_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deno_\(software\))

Built by the node team to replace node.

</comment><comment><USER81> Interesting subtle implications that the NPM paying users are going to be moved to Github's distribution system, while maintaining the OSS version of NPM for everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER82> Was gonna write about all the bad stuff that can happen, but don't want to give any ideas. Instead I give advice; embrace and empower, rather then extend and extinguish.

</comment><comment><USER83> After how Microsoft have handled GitHub I'm not worried.

However even a non-.NET web-developer now could be using quite a bit of Microsoft owned tech; VSCode GitHub npm Azure

</comment><comment><USER84> So essentially, Microsoft has bought npm. Smart move. Seeing that node.js builds on top of Googleware, this is not the worst that could have happened.

</comment><comment><USER85> Wait, so is it joining Microsoft? Or is it under Github, which is under Microsoft?

I don't fully understand the way it's governed from this article.

<comment><USER86> Part of GitHub (I work at GitHub and lead the Packages team)

<comment><USER87> Can I be so bold as to suggest a new feature?

It'd be wonderful, as a package consumer, to have visibility into some security metrics for a given package. This would be useful both at initial install time, and when the package is upgraded. Something like:

1) who are the latest commits GPG signed by?

2) is the package publisher using 2FA?

3) what is the security profile of all dependent packages?

4) are there any new authors (directly or via dependencies) since the last version (with links to the author and their contributions).

These might help avoid prior situations where popular packages get injected with malware by new maintainers.

<comment><USER86> Yes, we (internally) call this a "Bill of Health" and believe that all packages should have this kind of diff-able information available. Understanding what's happening at the source level is key to being able to trust any package published.

<comment><USER87> NICE! It would be wonderful to expose that information!

Somewhat related, I believe NPM pulled in (or co-opted) some of the heuristics from this: [https://github.com/npms-io/npms-analyzer](https://github.com/npms- io/npms-analyzer) (but those don't seem to include any of the aspects I suggested above).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> in as much as I love Github, putting our eggs in one basket as developers is gonna burn us soon or later. we need redundancies in the system, that if one thing goes down, the world can go on as normal. now we're centralizing github as a single failure point. we've already seen the the panic outages of Github or S3 cause.

</comment><comment><USER89> Yay more centralization! What could possible go wrong with critical components being hosted by one big corporation?

</comment><comment><USER49> This is pretty great. NPM was struggling to monetize and is a critical part of the JavaScript ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER90> A sad day I think. I wish more independent ecosystems were evolving, instead of consolidating.

</comment><comment><USER91> For how much money I wonder.

</comment><comment><USER92> Mid Oct 2009 -- Github ceased gems.github.com to focus on source control

</comment><comment><USER93> Thank god. NPM is so crappy it desperately needs institutional support.

</comment><comment><USER94> Next in line is Canonical.

</comment><comment><USER95> NPM is joining GitHub, GitHub joins Microsoft, Microsoft joins... ;)

</comment><comment><USER96> What are they buying, precisely? Open source software?

</comment><comment><USER97> You are all Microsoft developers now :)

</comment><comment><USER98> <tangent>

Sometimes I wonder what the business world (and the internet) would be like if mergers and acquisitions weren't allowed. Like, if businesses had to be sustainable or they'd just die, rather than capturing a whole market while eating VC money, maybe we'd all be better off? All of the really embarrassing stuff coming out of SV would just go away? Just Pinboards and Sourcehuts and Mastodons ruling the web?

I'm capitalistically illiterate, so somebody please tell me why this thought is stupid.

<comment><USER99> What would happen to all the tech, equipment, and employees after the company goes out of business? We have to burn it?

If we did that, it would be a crazy waste of resources. The alternative is to let another company buy the stuff... and if a company buys the failed company's tech, equipment, and hires their staff... that is basically the same as buying the company.

<comment><USER98> I mean, what would normally happen is employees look for new jobs, equipment is sold, and tech is thrown away (or open sourced in rare cases). Doesn't this already happen all the time?

<comment><USER99> It happens when no one wants the tech... but if it has value, it will be sold at liquidation time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Am I the only one surprized that there's an npm Inc. to be acquired?

Why is there a for-profit corporation behind every open source project these days?

</comment><comment><USER101> i didn't so far realized that npm was a company, and not a tool . wow.

</comment><comment><USER102> Any npm alternative yet ?

</comment><comment><USER103> this should really be titled "npm is joining Microsoft"

</comment><comment><USER104> I hope it's not going to do a left-pad fiasco on everything in github.

</comment><comment><USER105> title should be "microsoft acquires NPM"

</comment><comment><USER106> what does this mean for yarn?

</comment><comment><USER107> WHAT. A. JOKE.

</comment><comment><USER108> Heh, I called this 10 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838122)

Somebody replied "Microsoft won't acquire npm for sure."

<comment><USER109> Neat contribution! You guessed one thing, someone else guessed another, but they were wrong, and you were right! Yay on @pavlov. Boo on them.

<comment><USER108> A special day. The stock market is down 388% and 142% of people are predicted to die, but I got Internet karma points for guessing something right and that's what really counts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> THANK FUCKING GOD

</comment><comment><USER111> Happy to hear this. Microsoft has been doing a great job with Github IMO.

</comment><comment><USER112> Sorry, but npm burned me too many times. It is (was?) the worst package manager I've ever used. Not a fan of npm the company either. I'm sticking with yarn.

<comment><USER113> Yarn is majorly only a CLI. It still uses NPM as the source for most packages.

The product Github is probably most interested in is NPM as a repository for packages, not its CLI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> I'm not liking the consolidation. Never ends well, ever. Not even in one case in the history of humanity.

I'll be switching from Github to other providers for my own projects, and use a different editor soon (using vscode now).

</comment><comment><USER115> Hopefully they don't drop Linux support like they did with Skype, Minecraft, Xamarin[1], Corel Office and a long list of products.

Their strategy from my perspective is to ensure Linux does not become a competitor for their desktop OS.

1: it never had Linux support.

<comment><USER116> Skype returned with a Linux client, and Minecraft never dropped Linux support at all.

<comment><USER115> Minecraft for Linux does not have the same features.

<comment><USER116> What features are you talking about? It literally uses the same launcher and same jar files. It's exactly the same game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> It's on there already. [https://github.com/npm/](https://github.com/npm/) and [https://github.com/npm/cli](https://github.com/npm/cli)

<comment><USER118> No, NPM _the company_ is being acquired by Github.</comment></comment>


Can Metals Supply Keep Up with Electric Vehicle Demand? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/woodmackenzie/2019/07/24/can-metals-supply-keep-up-with-electric-vehicle-demand/#72fb136d6c9b <comment><USER2> The article looks at the various metals required for batteries, also graphite, and concludes that things look pretty good, except that for a few of the metals investments for the long term need to start at some point.

An interesting point of article is that, except for lithium, for all of the other raw materials battery demand will continue to be vastly exceeded by existing demand from other established industries.</comment>


A list of programmers notable for their contributions to software - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers <comment><USER2> Given that it's Wikipedia, it's more of a random sample of programmers who have got enough media attention to avoid deletion.

Though to be fair, the deletionists generally trust that the the community of editors who write articles about programming-related topics can self-regulate their topic area. Of 337 names currently on the list, only 16 have been subject to deletion attempts: Doug Bell, Brad Cox, Hugh Daniel, Andrew Gower, Paul Gower, Dave Hyatt, Dan Ingalls, Rod Johnson, Mark Overmars, Jacek Sieka, Mike Shaver, Audrey Tang, Simon Tatham, Andrew Welch, and Dave Winer. (Okay, technically someone tried to delete the Bill Gates article too, but that was clearly a joke). Plus they tried deleting the list itself too.

(To be honest, I myself only recognised about three of those names: Audrey Tang, Dan Ingalls, and Simon Tatham. The rest of them I had to look up ... in Wikipedia.)</comment>


Eviation Alice Is an All-Electric Airplane That May Replace Turboprops - <AUTHOR> https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/eviation-alice-electric-airplane-revolution-sooner-than-you-think-2830522/ <comment><USER2> Unreadable on mobile due to _two_ non-dissmissible overlay ads.</comment>