Show HN: Digital Carburetor Synchronizer (C, Swift) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zilberas/CarbSync <comment><USER2> Just wanted to say the real interesting content is in the writing here: [https://treatwell.engineering/how-i-made-a-digital- carburett...](https://treatwell.engineering/how-i-made-a-digital-carburettor- synchroniser-9ece7fa571fb)

I see you mentioned the Honda CB750 which also had 4 independent carbs.

I once had a CB750C and while grateful that the throttles all open with one shaft, the carbs still had to be synced. I actually never got around to it and ended up selling the bike without tuning it up properly.

I love your commitment to getting your bike working properly. A very fun read. Thank you and congratulations.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I understand, the only thing you can adjust on CB750 carbs is idle mixture on each carb. Yes, they have to be tuned, but that has nothing to do with syncing. If you had problems with your cabs - you had clothed jets or passages most probably.

I'm glad you found my post helpful, tho. Let's keep wrenching!

<comment><USER3> They made the CB750 for 35 years with many different types of carbs. I had a 1971 or 72 for a while and you could perform a standard sync of the carbs. There were screws on the shaft or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Syncing carbs is an art. This is pretty interest to see how to inject a bit of science into it.

When syncing the dual SU carbs on my MG, the "traditional" way is to take a length of tube, remove the air cleaners, fire up the engine, then stick the tube inside the end of the carb. Take the other end and put it near your ear; you'll hear the airflow. Now stick the tube into the other carb. If it sounds the same, you're pretty close. Turns out the ear is pretty sensitive to detecting the changes.

I also have a "bubble-type" or "SU type" tool[0] that you put over the ends, and the vacuum moves a little ball in a tube.

[0] Similar to this: [https://www.jbugs.com/product/5746.html](https://www.jbugs.com/product/5746.html)

<comment><USER5> I did the same on my MG. Buddy of mine used to so it on his Jaguar V-12 XKE with Zenith-Stromberg carbs...took a couple of hours to get it right. :-)

<comment><USER4> Those Jag V12s are so cool, though. Carbs as far as the eye can see....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Question on your RPM: You should see one pulse for every 2 crank revolutions, right? So if you measure 600 pulses per minute, that's really 1200 RPM, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I thought that this might be the case. But actually, one revolution of the crankshaft should make one pulse - piston going down and up creates one sin wave. And I'm counting only peaks at the top.

<comment><USER6> But the piston going down and up doesn't make a pulse. On a four-stroke engine, the pulse is generated when the intake valve opens, which happens once per two crank revolutions. When the piston goes down and up for the power and exhaust strokes, no pulse is generated, since the intake valve is closed. (On a two-stroke engine, you would have one pulse per crank revolution.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, you're right! Well, that's an easy fix. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was just about to write, "where the hell was this when I had my GL1000?" and then I read the story about how the author developed it for a GL1000.

Great bike.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great bike indeed.

<comment><USER7> Now you'll need to track down one of those superchargers.

Have you ever seen the Lars Nielsen build?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Insert old-school mechanics grumbling about how now there's a computer involved in tuning carburetors.

Seriously though, neat project. Personally I'm a "carbs are for weed whackers" guy and would have just seen having to sync four of them as a good reason to swap to EFI, but for those who insist on using vacuum-powered voodoo to fuel their engines this is pretty cool and seems like it'd drastically simplify a very tedious process.

<comment><USER9> Fuel injected cars with ITBs still need to be sync'd up too!

<comment><USER8> Originally I had something about it possibly being useful for that in my post, but I'm only loosely familiar with ITBs through the E46 BMW community so I wasn't sure enough. I think those ones use a single shaft straight through so they don't need synchronization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of my recent quest for an affordable after-market ECU. I really expected to find a bustling open source community of DIY ECU units with the advent of affordable micro-boards. But I think the work required and real risk of damage to expensive property might keep the barrier to entry high enough that it's yet to happen.

<comment><USER11> Have you come across MegaSquirt[1]? The most recent iterations are neither inexpensive nor DIY but the earlier versions are still made as well.

[1] [http://www.msextra.com/product-range/traditional- megasquirt/](http://www.msextra.com/product-range/traditional-megasquirt/)

<comment><USER10> Those look pretty good, I'll have to dig in a bit deeper! At first glance, it looks like it might be a bit of a run around getting one to work with MAF and CAS sensors, but pretty much every other ECU wants a MAP sensor anyway so it wouldn't be a bad time to switch.

I had heard of them but I thought they were a Miata specific ECU replacement not a general purpose one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That is amazing. I have '80 CX500 myself which I have neglected to sync the carbs on. I just bench sync the two when I need to pull the carbs off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah, I miss CX500. I never had a problem with the carbs on it tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nifty. But i do wonder why goto the trouble when megasquirt is viable?

<comment><AUTHOR> :) for fun only!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Need it for my 4-cyl Yamaha outboard.

Now I need to find those sensors...

<comment><AUTHOR> The software works on any bike. Buy the hardware parts (super cheap) and you're ready to go!

<comment><USER9> Cool project! Might have to try this when I get ready to tune my dual Weber DCOEs in a few months!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice to hear that. What engine you have?

<comment><USER9> It's a 1987 Honda Prelude engine, 1.8 liter, 12-valve engine. It came from the factory with dual Keihin CV carburetors, very similar to the GL1000 carbs (except only 2 of them). I had a very hard time finding parts to rebuild them, so I found a conversion manifold and purchased some new DCOEs to bolt onto it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! I heard about Weber conversion kits for GL1000 also. But since I'm pretty happy with the original Keihen setup, and currently found spare carbs (with original Keihen jets inside!) - I'll try to stick to those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally some real HN content! Has anyone else noticed a drop in the quality of submissions recently?</comment>


Quantifying Controversy in Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05224

<comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.technologyreview.com/view/539856/this-is-what- con...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/539856/this-is-what- controversies-look-like-in-the-twittersphere/), which points to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dan, some times I've AB tested this (post both articles, first citation & paper then popular press) and in the past it's always been the generalist, journo written cruft. I almost wish there was another field in the top for _source_ of article.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What pressing world problems should a graphic designer work on? - <AUTHOR> I went through the 80,000 hours (https://80000hours.org) course and felt inspired to do work that matters (rather than just design some stuff for boring corporate companies). As a designer, what would be a pressing problem that I could work on and potentially even get compensated for the work in order to stick with it and pay the bills (so helping out a nonprofit with design might be fun, but it's not sustainable) <comment><USER4> I work for a company called Mark43.

We make software to help police officers do their jobs more efficiently - <USER2> applications literally help save lives. There's a lot of interesting design challenges - for example, emergency dispatchers look at our CAD (computer aided dispatch) software for many hours on large monitors.. how do you design it so their eyes don't get tired?

And then cops look at the same software on their laptops, as they're driving to respond to an emergency.. how do you make a notification "suspect is armed" stand out so they notice it among all other data?

We are looking for designers to help us solve these and other problems:

Product Designer: [https://www.mark43.com/careers/700918/?gh_jid=700918](https://www.mark43.com/careers/700918/?gh_jid=700918)

Sr. Product Designer: [https://www.mark43.com/careers/119568/?gh_jid=119568](https://www.mark43.com/careers/119568/?gh_jid=119568)

(New York City)

<comment><USER5> Why do you call the position "product designer" when it is definitely asking for UX designers? I mean, when I think "product designer" I think industrial design, but this is clearly on the software side.

Ah, I guess this is common confusion; from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_design):

> Product design is sometimes confused with (and certainly overlaps with) > industrial design, and has recently become a broad term inclusive of > service, software, and physical product design. Industrial design is > concerned with bringing artistic form and usability, usually associated with > craft design and ergonomics, together in order to mass-produce goods.[4] > Other aspects of product design include engineering design, particularly > when matters of functionality or utility (e.g. problem-solving) are at > issue, though such boundaries are not always clear.[5]

<comment><USER6> A digital product designer is basically a UX designer with knowledge of product management. While UX rely only on the user experience and the constraints of the user environment, the P.D. have to incorporate (and understand) business requests, production workflow, ect.

<comment><USER5> That really isn't different from what a UXD already does, and it definitely doesn't require any ID skills. You might want to cast your net for just plain old UXDs, rather than people who have been trained specifically in product design (if there is indeed a real specialty there, I doubt that's true).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Healthcare user experience sucks. Last century kind of sucks. Find a job at Cerner or Epic who account for more than half of all hospital information systems and help clinicians avoid tragic errors, make faster and better decisions, understand health records more clearly, capture ideas/observations/memories.

<comment><USER8> I just left a healthcare company very similar to Cerner/Epic. The healthcare user experience sucks because the parties involved _want_ it to suck.

Older doctors are highly resistant to change and will look for any opportunity to condemn your product. The nurse's unions will stop you in your tracks for taking away duties that a nurse should be doing (we had a client tell us we couldn't auto-fill date fields with today's date, the nurses had to do that). Patients with chronic illnesses do not want to use any apps at all, they have tried program after program over the years and are sick of hospitals forcing them to hop on and off a platform every 2-3 years (our diabetes app failed in trial because users didn't want to do anything but talk to the doctor).

Give healthcare another 10 years for the generation to turn over.

<comment> le-mark Cerners longtime CEO and founder recently passed away. It's unfortunate one of his legacies will be how NOT to communicate via email[1]. It's also unfortunate the culture he fostered never erred far from this aggressive, intimidating, almost abusive pattern. It was one of the most toxic environments I ever worked in[2].

[1] [http://holtz.com/blog/business/threats-and-intimidation- wont...](http://holtz.com/blog/business/threats-and-intimidation-wont-forge- workforce-passion-but-conversation-will/4289/)

[2] source: me, contractor 2015-2016.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _(rather than just design some stuff for boring corporate companies)_

Picking a company you can believe in and going to work for their design department is probably the best way to make a positive difference in the world while also being able to pay the bills. Plenty of companies are doing "good work" in the world. The world would be a vastly worse place without _business as usual_ for all kinds of products. Improving some of those products can make a meaningful difference.

There is plenty of time to think about how to make a really serious difference. It doesn't have to be solved today. After you get a bit of experience, you can pivot to something that you feel fits that criteria.

I tend to not like these types of questions because a bunch of internet strangers are generally speaking not somehow magically more qualified than you are to decide how to make a "real" difference in the world. The short list of people with such answers are typically working on them in some way and it often doesn't pay the bills.

Best.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a general design problem of translating abstract massive problems (like world hunger) into something bite sized that people can relate to and act on (like feed one starving child). Vast problems like climate change, water shortages, human trafficking, drug abuse, systemic poverty, lifelong education, criminal justice. If you can help on this challenge, you can drive change and make a career for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER10> City Planning software is something I've been humming over a lot and for a long time. It's a perfect problem for computation with statistics - figure out practical actionable things for cities to do when optimising for things like walkability, public transit available, available storefront-rentals, et cetera. The world is catching up on the western nations, and the millions of cities joining the global middle class can be billions of dollars more efficient. A true way to better the world. The computational parts are doable (I'll be tech cofounder if required - not a visual artist though) but how is it best used?

<comment><USER11> I wonder what the chinese do WRT city plannin given the amount of building they have been doing, and if walkability plays a role in their designs, and what they use for said designs.

<comment><USER12> There's been a lot of visible experimentation, but I've not seen anything indicative of a definitive strategy. I would be curious to know if there were any lessons learned from replicating old world European towns.

<comment><USER13> It is my understanding that Barcelona and its superblocks often serves as a showcase for great city planning: [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks- rescue-barcelona-spain-plan-give-streets-back-residents)

Of course this isn't a natural or old layout however.

<comment><USER12> It's _also_ an example of failed city planning! The original Cerdà Plan was considerably more human friendly:

[https://www.failedarchitecture.com/behind-four-walls- barcelo...](https://www.failedarchitecture.com/behind-four-walls-barcelonas- lost-utopia/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm guessing you have very high earning potential. It is almost certainly the case that the most impact you can have is achieved by focusing on earning as much money as possible and donating as much of it as possible to organizations optimized for making impact. But most people seem to want to optimize the feel-good hands-on impact instead of the total objective impact.

<comment><USER15> The term for this effective altruism strategy is called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anything in the public sector, like utilities' and local governments' websites ( _cough_ DMV), websites for your local library system, websites for your local law enforcement and/or hospital, public schools. The usability of these sites tends to suck because they're subject to budget cuts, even though thousands of people have no choice but to depend upon them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure about compensated but tools for the blind/deaf to allow them to experience the everyday design we take for granted

<comment><USER18> Something about "graphic designer" and "blind" doesn't go together for me...

<comment><USER19> Legally blind and professionally employed full-time designer here. :) (Granted - "blind" can be a spectrum of things; for example, extreme nearsightedness but still "seeing", vs truly blind.)

Seconding the major need for accessibility awareness, though. Even little things like increased font color contrast has major payoffs for the elderly and other buckets of populations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Better user interface, websites and documentation for free software and open source.

</comment><comment><USER21> Many people are making suggestions, I'll make a meta-suggestion:

Try and rank your options, and remember that it'll probably look like a power law distribution.

See the two graphs under this section: [https://80000hours.org/career- guide/world-problems/#how-to-w...](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world- problems/#how-to-work-out-which-problems-you-should-focus-on)

 _Many of the companies suggested sound good, though if you 're really optimizing for impact, the best one will probably have more impact than all the other suggestions combined._ No pressure!

</comment><comment><USER22> Content for school kids aged 5 to 9. There isn't much out there for them. Anything interactive and imaginative.

Take a look at the curriculum for ideas of what teachers want to teach, most schools have laptops, chromebooks or iPads.

<comment><USER19> Are you by chance in that industry somehow? I'm (as a designer) with an organization that's looking to break into this very kind of niche - it's almost the other end of the problem ironically; we have plenty of resources, but very little insight in how it should be applied. Are there .pdf examples online that you would point to as a good base? Would you say the content needs to be different for parents vs teachers, and if so, what would most helpful for each?

(Thanks for the comment!)

<comment><USER22> I've thought about you question for a couple of days. I'm not sure what you can do that other companies are not already doing.

For example we use the exam board AQA for computer science. They give you: [http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/computer-science-and- it/gcse/...](http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/computer-science-and- it/gcse/computer-science-4512/teaching-and-learning-resources)

which is tons of stuff to plan and teach computer science for 3 years.

But some of it is pretty crap.

If I were you I'd do something similar for primary schools, for example my son has had topics on volcanoes, american indians, the oceans etc. Find out what topic teachers what to teach, the create good resources that code english, maths, science etc all inside that topic. Give them clear lesson plans that cover say 8 weeks of work. Make them so cool and so easy and so super interesting that teachers fucking love you.

Remove all the pain points: \- marking REMOVE THIS \- testing AUTOMATE THIS \- creating and cutting up resources e.g. a puzzle for each student.

so create a giant crate of stuff, ship it to the teacher quickly - if I order it in a panic on friday have it there for me on sunday so I can rip it open, read "lesson 1" and go.

make it cheap so if it saves me time and effort I'll just buy it with my own money.

Make it shareable - let other teachers in my school use it for free.

etc. talk to a teacher, sit down with them, buy them dinner and a pint and LISTEN to them. If they moan about marking until 3am every day, SOLVE that issue. If they moan about stupid testing that punishes kids of low income families FIX THAT PROBLEM. Invent a smart way of revising/testing that solves it. I imagine you already have 20 ideas on how to do that.

If the class needs an iPad or two to connect to your app/website - SHIP IT IN THE CRATE, ask for it back once the topic has finished.

You want the teacher to open the crate of goodies and say HOLY SHIT this is amazeballs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cirrus-clouds If there is a cause or issue you feel strongly about, is there a way to illuminate or explain this issue using a combination of graphics and text, in a way that doesn't mislead?

I'm not a graphic designer, but during the recent UK election, I created a site to dissuade people from voting for the Conservative party. One issue I wrote about was our method of voting in the UK. Here is a (fairly rubbish) graphic trying to highlight the results of the 2015 UK election. The fact is that many people simply don't know how our electoral system works or what it's flaws are. Is this diagram clear without any context? (Probably not!)

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*OXaiFJ49RtESX0Qjl...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*OXaiFJ49RtESX0QjljGNfA.png)

Here is the article in which the graphic appeared giving additional context:

[https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general- electi...](https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general- election-2017-why-we-need-to-change-our-method-of-voting-74ac31789910)

Often it's impossible to explain a topic or idea without supporting visuals.

Being able to explain things clearly with both text and graphics (whether for campaigning or teaching or persuasion) is a really valuable skill.

If that appeals to you, perhaps this is an avenue you could pursue? But you'll have to find the cause, topic or idea that inspires you.

</comment><comment> old-gregg I always wanted a (relatively) simple mobile application to navigate public transportation in different cities. Basically an interactive map for public transport. They'd be easy to read, easy to understand how connections work, etc. Every city (or even every agency within a city) uses different, and often horrible, diagrams of their lines, like MUNI vs BART in San Francisco.

This is 90% designers problem. The engineering side of this is easy. Hard to say how you'd pay money for it, but if your maps are good, some cities may agree to pay to officially use them.

Google maps kind of does this for you (if you do "directions") but I just don't understand why it doesn't work... It gets me to a subway station and I start searching for the maps on walls.

But if done well, millions of people will be thanking you every day.

</comment><comment><USER23> We (Zenysis) are a recent YC startup using technology to help Ministries of Health prevent epidemics and distribute vaccines in developing countries. Happy to talk if you want to learn more!

EDIT: We're in public health, but compensate competitively, offer significant equity and provide top-notch benefits.

Job posting on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13727071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13727071)

Designer role: [http://www.zenysis.com/designer.html](http://www.zenysis.com/designer.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey there... There are a LOT of ideas out there (for example, I have a vision of a mentoring platform that is stuck in my head).

The thing is... like others on this thread have said, there is a ton of demand. So what interests you?

I have been getting involved with local politics recently, and there is a HUGE need for designers for political clubs, and organizations.

I'd say find something you are passionate about and start volunteering, and if you want to help Progressive Democrats then DM me!

</comment><comment><USER25> Healthcare! My company is currently looking for a designer that wants to make healthcare beautiful, easy to use, and less error prone. If you really want to dive into a company that is making a difference and really cares about changing things for the better shoot me an email benjamin at triceimaging.com

</comment><comment><USER26> Americans are dying because our healthcare is too expensive. Not the insurance but the actual tests and procedures. They're all crazy expensive compared to anywhere else in the world. Graphics that really show this clearly could generate political momentum for fixing that.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does "graphic designer" essentially mean an artist whose job is to create aesthetically pleasing images, or does it encompass UI/UX as well? Most of the advice here seems to assume the latter, but I would not have thought that was the case.

<comment><USER28> It depends on the job. Graphic Design / UI / UX / Product Design is undergoing a lot of terminology changes and uncertainty brought about by a lack of typical degree out of academia and a shortage of people working in the field. Many companies previously had graphic designers who de facto did the UI/UX/Product Design, while other companies are starting to break up/specify the roles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Make it security suck less. Security UX is terrible. We need people with graphic design skills to help.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ask HN: I am but a humble bus driver. I too wonder what world problems I should work on.

<comment><USER31> Make sure the graphic designers get to work on time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do a public campaign to eradicate pie charts.

</comment><comment><USER33> A lot of great suggestions in this thread. To add to those, I want to talk a bit about how to form a strategy that will help you achieve these goals.

First, not every world problem is solvable with design. Being aware that you are one facet of the solution is both comforting and overwhelming. To have broad impact you often need a team of experts to cover the pipeline from end- to-end, so that means things like solving for the terrible Heath Care experience in the US or UK require massive reformations in how that industry has been run for almost 100 years. On the bright side, there are lots of private clinics aiming to solve this - One Medical is a great example (I promise I dont work for them, just a fan of their approach). If you have the motivation to aim for this level of impact that is awesome, but most likely wont be available to you until you have several years of experience under your belt and area ready to move beyond graphic design and into a role as creative director (like Jony Ive for example).

The good news? You can start planning for that career path today. Start small by targeting industries that you already have experience with, even if that experience is indirect. Got a passion for food culture? Maybe run with that. Seek out reputable companies that are trying to perfect food distribution to restaurants and grocery stores. From there you will start to see the pain points that cause issues like food deserts in inner city areas. Start to slowly invest time on the side volunteering with non-profits and groups that are actively trying to solve for these oversights in the food distribution system. See whats holding them back from making big changes. Regardless of what industry you focus on, assume you will always be spending time on the side volunteering with activist/non-profit groups that are already targeting the crisis at hand.

Your journey now is to marry your charitable 'side-job' with your full-time job, and your choices will hinge on reducing the gulf between the two. One day, they can be one and the same job - and youll see the path towards that goal unfold for you as you roadmap your steps to achieve that goal. Sometimes this means creating your own company - but it certainly doesnt have to be that way. Lots and lots of private companies are stepping up to offer people another option than the current, broken norm, such as One Medical that I mentioned above.

Lastly, Ill echo what others have said about donating your earnings. Ill take that a step further and suggest the idea of working a charity initiative into your regular earnings model. If you are working for yourself - this is a great opportunity to build your passion for giving into your pricing. I love seeing places that actively advertise how much they donate and incorporate a breakdown of that cost into their payment model. The invoices they provide will outline exactly how much of your payment is donated and to what organization. By doing this, these companies are not only making a positive impact, but they are fostering a culture within their industry that values giving-back. Often clients will seek them out specifically because they want to support a company that values altruism and sees it as a sustainable business model.

Sorry for the novel-length post! Ill close with this: just remember - <USER3> ask yourself what you can do TODAY, however small it may seem. You may not be Elon Musk, but the path to that kind of impact is created step-by-step with every small interaction. Every relevant experience is a learning experience. Volunteer, find an open-source project, talk to others who are trying to solve problems too, and network with like-minded people. We all start out as little cogs in a big machine, but together we can change the system, one step at a time.

</comment><comment><USER34> Increase people's awareness that they need to wake up. And maybe follow later in the campaign with ways they can empower themselves.

</comment><comment> crush-n-spread Are you passionate enough to work for low pay or free? I would like to build some web apps to display information about pollution and climate change. If we made it good enough, it would be a great tool for everyone around the world to visualize the problem. Obviously I would not make any money - just something that needs to get done if we are to have any hope of convincing the public that we need climate change policy review.

What say you?</comment>


Ask HN: Is ARM the next x86? - <AUTHOR>

Is ARM the next x86? <comment><USER2> Not unless and until a 64 bit version is developed and all the tool chains are updated.</comment>


Dropbox vs. Copy: A comparison of features and benefits - mkr-hn http://mkronline.com/2013/09/25/dropbox-vs-copy-a-comparison-of-features-and-benefits/

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the things that pissed me off about Copy, and in fact made me not want to use them literally 10seconds after I signed up, was they cached referral codes. I first learned about Copy by following someone's referral link, but I didn't sign up at the time. A few days later I decided to sign up so I head over to copy.com and do so. Low and behold, I've someone managed to sign up as a referral despite not following a direct referral link to get there. My account (including personal info) was visible to a random reddit users who I didn't actually know.

<comment> mkr-hn Only your first name and last initial are shown to the person who referred you. Two people even omitted full names entirely, so I only see two letters and how many days ago they signed up.</comment></comment>


FreshBooks For Web Invoices & More  - <AUTHOR> http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2007/04/freshbooks.html <comment><AUTHOR> I briefly poked around. It's an online app for managing your small business invoices and time-sheets; it's free for up to 3 clients.</comment>


Ask HN: Black bar added to top of page? - <AUTHOR> It appears a new <tr> with a black image as background has been added to the top of HN, above the main table. Is that intentional? <comment><USER2> I presume because of:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832)

<comment><USER3> How long does the black bar usually remain. I thought it was 24 hours, but it feels like it was less than 12 this time. People were asking for it midday when I checked HN and I didn't notice it until the evening. It is already gone in the early morning here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is often used to memorialise important figures. I wish there were some set-up where one could click on it to find out whom it's memorialising. Usually there's an accompanying front-page story, but I don't see it today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, didn't realize that, thanks! Yeah that would be a nice feature.

</comment></comment><comment> iso8859-1 Most likely because Bill English died:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032820)

He was at Xerox PARC, where he helped midwife PARC's invention of the personal computer and other innovations.

</comment><comment><USER5> Happens when someone dies.

<comment><USER6> I would be nice to get some kind of hint about who passed away if you hover the mouse pointer over the black bar.

<comment><USER7> That's a good idea. Just flagged your post (!) in order to get an Admin's attention. Hopefully it's do-able. :)

<comment><USER8> If you have any feature ideas it's better to just email firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> HN needs to put a little tooltip description on the black bar.

Every time it happens there's an "Ask HN" about it.</comment>


Monkey Shatters Zoo Glass with Sharpened Stone in Impressive PrisonBreak Attempt - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/monkey-shatters-zoo-glass-with-sharpened-stone-in-impre-1837701562/ <comment><USER2> All I get is...

"Sorry! We couldn't find the page you've requested..."</comment>


Just Give Up. It's Impossible to Bug-Proof Your Home - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/01/just-give-up-its-impossible-to-bug-proof-your-home/?mbid=social_twitter <comment><USER2> Argentinian Ants. Those little critters... Come in when it rains, make trails through the house...

We went to Disneyland for a weekend. It rained like hell in San Jose while we were gone. Upon return, all was normal. I'd expected to have to go into 'ant hunter' mode and clean up, but there was nothing.

A couple of weeks later, I was moving things around in the pantry and bumped an open container of Dum Dum suckers [0] that the kids had picked up on Hallowe'en. They moved strangely when I bumped them. I pick one up and it had no heft...

The little buggers had worked their way through the wrappings around the sticks and managed to clean out every molecule of sugar in the entire bag. There was no clue and they left without a trace.

These ants are more thorough, determined, resilient and persistent than any other critter on the planet. There must be some value-add way to put them to work.

[0] [http://www.candywarehouse.com/products/cherry-dum-dum- pops-1...](http://www.candywarehouse.com/products/cherry-dum-dum-pops-1lb- tub/)

<comment><USER3> At least they haven't acquired enough genius to resist Terro Ant Killer II (boric acid is the only active ingredient) yet. They'll ignore everything else when Terro is reachable.</comment></comment>


Microsoft's Vista Problems - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/microsofts-vista-problem/index.html

<comment><USER2> "Mr. Liddell dismissed claims that some customers were reluctant to buy Vista machines. "There are no Vista-related issues at all," he declared."

puff puff give, dude...

</comment><comment><USER3> With virtualization coming to the forefront, OSes are going to cease to matter very much soon.

Vista is the last gasp of a dying bloodline.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bought a Lenovo laptop and quite frankly regret it because it runs Vista. The OS is slow and unresponsive in infuriating ways.

Vista simply is the simple reason why Mac sales have gone through the roof in the past quarter.

</comment><comment><USER5> Vista is to XP as WinMe was to Win98. Microsoft will recover with Windows 7, but the question will be how much of a role the OS plays in 2010 compared to what it did in 2001.</comment>


Why Android's Victory is Inevitable - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=3070&utm_source=ycombinator&utm_medium=sb&utm_content=rplant&utm_campaign=sb <comment><USER2> I'm hoping the Android will eventually conquer all. I want to know it's going to happen before investing in one!</comment>


Teenage boy goes blind after existing on Pringles, white bread and French fries - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/03/health/poor-diet-blindness-scli-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> 100% carbs. Plant oils and antinutrients. 0 nutrients 0 vitamins what could go wrong?</comment>


Ask PG: Is voting on HN anonymous? - <AUTHOR>

Not truly anonymous, but can someone with access to your server tell what stuff an account upvoted/downvoted? <comment><USER2> What's wrong, still thinking about that marijuana thread? Don't worry, we all believe you have really severe back pain... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Given the fact that you have to be logged in to upvote, and after you upvote you can't re-upvote - yes you can tell what someone upvoted.

<comment><USER4> After you've downvoted you cant upvote either, so there _could_ just be a flag that says you've done one or the other.

<comment><USER5> Not just _could_ , but as the parent comment implied, given the nature of the system the answer is unequivocally yes.

The system serves to record the arrows you've clicked, therefore this information must be stored somewhere. Someone with access to this this information should be able to determine "what stuff an account upvoted," unless the system has been designed to obfuscate the connections(i.e. accounts & clicked items) at the database level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember a thread long ago where a user complained that someone had systematically downvoted all his old comments. PG confirmed that it was one user that had done all the downvoting, and as a direct result voting on comments older than x hours was disabled.

So yes, PG can see what you voted. I'm pretty sure he won't use it against you though ;-)

<comment><USER7> Downvoting on old comments was disabled. You can still upvote them though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course...

The owner of the server has the power to log each and every access to the site and that includes up and downvotes.

That said I'm pretty sure PG & company can be trusted wrt to such things, HN would die overnight if there ever were any question as to the ethics of the people running it.

There would be much more worrisome things for some people here, imagine being a VC writing here under a pseudonym and being unmasked or someone openly critical of their employer having their posting history revealed.

<comment><USER9> PG has mentioned that he uses (unpublished) algorithms to find "voting rings" coming from the same IP, or someone trying to vendetta-downvote another.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I'll have to think twice before upvoting my housemate's comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tsetse-fly news.arc is open source. Go see for yourself: <http://arclanguage.org/install>

<comment><USER10> I know you're being facetious, but asking someone to learn a new language and then familiarise themselves with a project's whole codebase just to answer a simple question about privacy is not exactly helpful. Especially when the site is served by Apache, a whole separate program which keeps its own completely distinct logs, so the suggested course of action is not only a huge imposition but can't actually answer the question anyway.

As others have said, the answer is obvious from the behaviour of the site. But even if it were not, other aspects of the server's configuration would be highly relevant, indeed central to the matter, and the source code is unavailing.

<comment><USER11> HN is not served by Apache. The Arc source includes the http server.

<comment><USER10> You know, I specifically checked that before posting. Where I went wrong is that I didn't look at the HTML page itself; I looked at the images and CSS, which I erroneously assumed to be handled by the same program.

All images and CSS for this site are served by Apache but the actual text/html request is not. However - my point still stands, as the primary request is _proxied_ by Apache and proxy requests, IIRC, are included, or can be configured to be included, in the Apache logs.

update: I am going to have to eat my words here. I have no evidence news.ycombinator.com is proxied by Apache. All the css and images are served by Apache, but they're hosted on a different domain and a different IP at ycombinator.com. I am kind of amazed PG wrote an HTTP server but .. apparently he did. Kudos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> HN stores the links you upvoted, you can view that list by clicking on the number of saved items in your profile.

Don't know about votes on comments.

</comment><comment><USER13> While we're on the subject, I sometimes see some weird behavior with voting, in particular sometimes my vote doesn't "stick" until the 2nd or 3rd try. It only seems to be down-voting. And sometimes on the second vote it actually drops _two_ points.

Anyone else notice things like that?

Or maybe I'm going crazy.

<comment><USER6> I've seen similar behaviour, but if I reload the page the score is correct. So it seems to be a client side problem which isn't that big of a deal.

<comment><USER13> I only notice it specifically if I _do_ reload the page. Or are you saying you have to reload more than once?

<comment><USER6> hmm, might not be the same thing then. I've sometimes been able to upvote the same article or comment twice, but when I reloaded the page the score was as it would be if I only upvoted once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of course. Even a user who has never seen the source code can infer that.

Vote something up or down, log out, and come back. You will _never_ see an arrow next to that entry again. Why? Because the intersection of your login and that entry _must_ be storing that fact that you already voted on that.

(I cannot infer from this data alone _which way_ you voted, simply _that you did_ vote.)</comment>


50 Bytes of Code That Took 4 GB to Compile (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/50-bytes-of-code-that-took-4-gb-to-compile/ <comment><USER2> I have accidentally discovered a bug in Clang that causes the compiler generate millions of consecutive "addq $2147483647, %rsp" instructions and it wouldn't terminate maybe in hours (it could probably be an infinite loop, I haven't seen it terminate):

        $ clang --version
        Apple LLVM version 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.38)
        Target: x86_64-apple-darwin16.4.0
        ...
        $ cat test.c
        #include <stdint.h>

        int main(void) {
            int x[SIZE_MAX / 31];
            return 0;
        }
        $ clang test.c
        test.c:5:11: error: array is too large (595056260442243600 elements)
        int x[SIZE_MAX / 31];
        $ cat test-2.c
        #include <stdint.h>

        int main(void) {
            int x[SIZE_MAX / 32];
            return 0;
        }
        $ clang test-2.c
        ... Keep waiting :-) ...

<comment><USER3> [http://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31962](http://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31962)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...that took 4GB to compile _in VS2010._

<comment><USER5> VS2010 is slightly more impactful than other versions because that is the latest version of the IDE before the transition to C++11 standard. The conversion from a 2010 to a 2013 solution is much more complicated than say a 2013 to a 2015 conversion for example.

<comment><USER4> No disagreement on any of that. I was mostly wondering who uses VS2010 anymore, and curious to know if the bug still exists in newer versions of Visual Studio (but not curious enough to bother testing it).

<comment><USER5> Yea at my work we have some legacy solutions that depend on libraries that were built with the 2010 compiler but the source is not available and the library shares stl containers on the boundaries. Therefore we're forced to create wrapper libraries that encapsulate the 2010lib and use things like char* ptrs instead of strings on the library API. Those wrapper libraries need to use the 2010 compiler and then we can add those libraries to our modern solutions without having mismatched definitions of stl containers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also previous work in this area: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127821) "Results of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition"

</comment><comment><USER7> @mods

An account with the same username as OP was allegedly spamming r/programming.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5t7akn/50_byte...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5t7akn/50_bytes_of_code_that_took_4_gb_to_compile/ddknrfu/?utm_content=permalink&utm_medium=front&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=programming)

<comment><USER8> Not even alleged anymore. The account's been shadowbanned ([https://www.reddit.com/user/dotnetnews](https://www.reddit.com/user/dotnetnews)), a confirmation from Reddit admins that they've validated it as a spam/bot account.

And yet this post is back up, which means someone vouched for it.

Flagged it.

<comment><USER9> I vouched it, and I am sure I am among others.

1\. Reddit's moderators can make their own decisions, but that should not change things here. It's an untrustworthy site with a culture and moderation system that rewards untrustworthy users. If it went out of business tomorrow the world would be a better place.

2\. The article is genuinely interesting.

3\. If all he bot does is link us to genuinely interesting back catalog .net writing, that's probably a service (at least for now) as this venue has long ignored a lot of interesting content from that ecosystem.

People can break the rules here and then we'll ban them here.

<comment><USER10> I agree with all your points, except for one thing that made me curious:

Why would say Reddit is an untrustworthy site, with a system that rewards untrustworthy users? I'm not a particularly active Reddit user, in fact it's been a while since I've even visited the site so I'm not taking this personally at all, but I'm genuinely interested as to why anyone would consider it an untrustworthy site that encourages untrustworthy users.

<comment><USER11> There have been a lot of shenanigans from the admins/mods over the past year or so, mostly related to the popularity of the pro-Trump subreddit and their resulting chagrin. There have been several thinly-veiled rule changes and algorithm changes aimed at reducing the number of pro-Trump postings that appear on the main homepage and generally lowering the visibility of that subreddit. At one point, the CEO manually edited some comments in the database that were critical of him. It all comes across as somewhat shady and untrustworthy. They could just come out and ban or quarantine the subreddit, but instead they've chose to subversively go Digg-mode and essentially start curating what users see rather than allowing it to rise/fall organically.

<comment><USER12> > There have been several thinly-veiled rule changes and algorithm changes > aimed at reducing the number of pro-Trump postings that appear on the main > homepage and generally lowering the visibility of that subreddit.

It's worth noting that there's nothing _inherently_ bad about this. Possible valid reasons why this step might be taken include gaming of the algorithm by specific groups, or to even out the distribution of front page items is one of the goals for the algorithm is to have a heterogeneous set of items for the front page. Not that I have any specific information in this case to point one way or the other. I just think it's important to not immediately jump to negative conclusions about that, even if a group that experiences some loss of exposure feels negatively affected.

> At one point, the CEO manually edited some comments in the database that > were critical of him.

 _That_ part is pretty egregious, and while I understand the impulse to do what he did if we take his explanation at face value (I don'[t see a particular reason why not to, it's not flattering), one would hope someone as high up in the organization would understand that playing with the trust of your userbase that way ( _especially_ with the group in question) is not likely to end well.

> They could just come out and ban or quarantine the subreddit, but instead > they've chose to subversively go Digg-mode and essentially start curating > what users see rather than allowing it to rise/fall organically.

I'm not specifically aware of what steps they are taking now. Do you have references to point me towards so I can catch up?

<comment><USER9> Many pro-Trump comments get swept out in botnet purges, because the pro-Trump segment has some actors who are very busy amplifying their voice via sockpuppet accounts to quiet any dissent or discussion on that subreddit.

Try this: post a positive comment about a policy change there. They also talk openly about using multiple identities to control what is allowed to the top. If you watch the "new" section you can see negative or even just not-content- free stories get added often.

There are folks on various forums and IRC channels who will sell you good placement of a story on reddit for a reasonable sum of bitcoin now. It'd be interesting to enlist them to start getting policy questions onto the top of that subreddit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki <comment><USER2> Cygwin is a fantastic system put together by people crazy and talented enough to dig deeply into both the POSIX world and the NT world. I can't recommend it highly enough. A bag of ported _utilities_ is absolutely no substitute for something that, in effect, amounts to GNU/NT.

Yes, there are some warts, but they're papered over remarkably well. Give mintty a shot: you'll never go back to conhost.

<comment><USER3> > Give mintty a shot: you'll never go back to conhost.

No, give cmder a shot: [http://bliker.github.io/cmder/](http://bliker.github.io/cmder/) I've tried mintty and cmder, and cmder was just perfect for me.

<comment><USER4> Oh my goodness thank-you! I'm forced to use Windows at work, and this is the first terminal emulator that looks not terrible!

<comment><USER5> Might take a look at Babun[1] as well. It's a fairly pretty emulator with a built-in cygwin tree, and integrated (default) zsh.

[1] [https://github.com/babun/babun](https://github.com/babun/babun)

<comment><USER6> The problem I have with console replacements is most of them break readline. You can't run many interactive programs with them. On the other hand, you can't have full unicode support without a console replacement.

<comment><USER2> Indeed. People need to stop thinking in terms of building win32 "terminal emulators" (most of which involve god-awful hacks, like scraping hidden conhost windows) and instead emulate the Win32 console API in userspace (just like Windows itself did before Windows 7) and implement the Cygwin pty interface in terms of this library. This way, Cygwin programs think they have a pty and Win32 programs think they have a console, and everything Just Works.

But people would rather just hack up a "terminal emulator" instead of doing things the properly and the hard way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I gave Gow a shot when I got a new Windows PC at work a while back. In my experience it is completely broken for anything but the most trivial use cases.

Basic things didn't work, like "ls -t|head" (broken/missing SIGPIPE implementation IIRC), and "(g)find -iname '*.txt'" (I could not for the life of me stop it from expanding the glob).

I gave up after a couple days and went back to cygwin.

<comment><USER8> Was my experience with Cygwion itself 9 years ago or so -- broken beyond usable for anything except look-ma tests :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the looks of it this is definitely not an alternative to Cygwin, because the latter implements a complete POSIX layer. Instead, this seems to be a collection of native and MSYS binaries, which is fine and all, but I kinda doubt that they have the quality of ezwinports, which is still the best address for native Windows binaries of free software. Also, they don't provide the source and the build scripts for their binaries.

<comment><USER10> Yeah yeah. I opened this: [https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/issues/164](https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/issues/164)

Please comment with clarifications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't really seem like an alternative to Cygwin. Cygwin is valuable because it provies a POSIX environment. I write my programs for sane systems and then Cygwin allows me to get them running on Windows fairly easily.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I used to install Cygwin, it was to get (in order of importance): ssh, vim, rsync & X11. Gow doesn't include the last two, so it feels like an apples/oranges comparison (for my use case). Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age, so a simple, lightweight set of tools like this definitely has its place.

I don't use Windows anymore, but if I did, I would probably just spin up a VM with a tiny live Linux ISO, because it would bring in so much other goodness without any extra effort.

<comment> vertex-four > Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this > day and age

It includes the majority of stuff you'd want as part of Powershell, just under different names, and not available as separate executables on the filesystem. If Powershell is lacking something, you can access any .Net class on the system. Once OneGet is released with the next version of Windows and people start packaging stuff for it, you'll be able to grab additional utilities for pretty much anything.

Windows isn't _that_ far behind. It's mostly just not UNIX. Most things are there, just done in very different ways.

<comment><USER13> Equivalents for:

wget or curl

lftp

dig

telnet

And I mean similar features, not Invoke-WebRequest, ftp, nslookup or writing my own clone in 2000 lines of Powershell.

And to this day I have no idea why telnet was removed from the base installation.

The Windows command line is getting better with Powershell, but even Powershell can't beat 1000 man years of tool development. And I really hope that package manager takes off cause right now most Windows non-Microsoft tools are either shady or crappy.

<comment><USER14> I'm only speculating, but I imagine telnet was removed because the security issues and misuse vastly outweighed the legitimate use by powerusers.

And I'm not really sold that an OS should ship with a bloated utility like modern wget rather than including a very lightweight downloader.

On the other hand, I think PowerShell is a vastly over-complicated and over- engineered response to the conceptually simple Unix shell, which is why most still favour the command line.

<comment><USER13> telnetd ok, but telnet itself? What for? Crappy, slow, port scanning?

<comment><USER15> Removing telnet nudges people to completely stop using telnetd. I know there's a ton of embedded devices that require telnet, but these devices are increasingly going to become a liability and Microsoft probably made a good decision here.

<comment><USER16> That doesn't make sense. If I need to configure a switch, test an http server, or whatever it is I need telnet for, I'm going to download PuTTY. No (sane) person ever went "screw that, telnet is insecure, I refuse to do it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like how we live in a world where you can say "open source" and put a bunch of compiled binaries in a bin directory. Leaving aside the trail of GPL violations, it's ... certainly something ... that the phrase "open source" doesn't make people think about whether source should be _present_, open or otherwise.

The "contributing" page is pretty awesome, along the same lines: it describes a list of things you need to do in order to ask the maintainer to implement the feature you want.

</comment><comment><USER18> The repo does not seem to have the source code, which is a bit of a problem as most of the software is GPL.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Shell window from any directory: Adds a Windows Explorer shell window > (screenshot) so that you can right-click on any directory and open a command > (cmd.exe) window from that directory.

Windows already has that, hold down shift and right click either on a subfolder or in the white space/nothing within an open folder.

Since, I dunno, XP maybe? I don't think 2000 had it. I know Vista did.

<comment><USER20> While we're on the topic, here's a cute tip: To make the opposite move -- from the command prompt to an explorer window of the current directory -- use "start ."

<comment><USER21> Similar, for OS X use "open ." (or replace the "." with whatever file you want to open)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortianly Gow is very buggy.

And the maintaner does not reveal sources for the binaries, which makes it hard to help out. In practise he is acctualy breaking the GPL license, by not giving sources.

</comment><comment><USER23> This doesn't seem to have some of the things I use in Cygwin, so it useless to me. Also 10MB vs. 100MB is irrelevant to me. I don't download any movies and music or anything like that so my tiny flash hard drives still have plenty of room to make that difference irrelevant. Might be good for some people.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looking at the change_log, it does not look like their version of BASH has been updated recently, indicating it is capable of the ShellShock exploit.

<comment><USER25> This seems hugely irrelevant to me. Would you consider using Unix lookalike utilities under Windows to launch an Internet-facing Web server that allows users to do CGI scripts? Because that's pretty much the only scenario where ShellShock would be an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had used UWIN for a while a few years ago, when I was on Windows and needed UNIX functionality:

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

It was originally written by David Korn, creator of the Korn shell. Can't forget "ksh -o vi", which let you edit your command history with vi commands. (It is like "set -o vi" on bash these days.) I used to use it as the last line in my .kshrc.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korn_(computer_scientist)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korn_\(computer_scientist\))

Not sure where UWIN stands in comparison to Gow and Cygwin but it was somewhat useful. IIRC, it was at least more than a collection of UNIX utilities.

The installation procedure (from an AT&T site) was a bit of a pain but doable.

</comment><comment><USER27> They should provide tools that run in both Windows and plain MS-DOS / FreeDOS (hey, sometimes it's useful). One way I know how to do this is to compile with [http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/](http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/) and link in the CWSDPMI DOS extender from [http://homer.rice.edu/~sandmann/cwsdpmi/index.html](http://homer.rice.edu/~sandmann/cwsdpmi/index.html)

The DOS extender will not run if it detects DPMI provided by Windows, so the binaries work in both environments.

I suggest this for some Atari 800 utilities I wrote: [https://github.com/jhallen/atari-tools](https://github.com/jhallen/atari- tools)

</comment><comment><USER28> What's the point over MSYS2?

</comment><comment><USER29> I dunno about Gow. But I have been very happy with the (not so) small package included in MobaXterm: ssh, X11, busybox, git, perl, ... [http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/](http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/)

</comment><comment><USER30> >"Gow is one of the few things that makes Windows bearable/usable"

Good quote, but that is not necessarily a positive if you look at things from the perspective of the sooner Windows is ditched, the better.

<comment><USER2> Why? Windows is an excellent system and gets a lot of things right that POSIX gets wrong. WMI is wonderful; COM is wonderful; the NT kernel is from 1989 and still worlds ahead of Unixy kernels in many respects. (It's 2014 and I still can't open a file descriptor that represents a process.)

<comment><USER31> I think some of your examples are iffy, COM and WMI are sometimes wonderful but sometimes definitely not. Windows is not perfect and POSIX is better for some use-cases, vice versa.

<comment><USER2> Of course. The systems have a lot to learn from each other, to be honest. One of my biggest gripes back when I worked on the Windows team was the lack of a pseudoconsole API equivalent to the Unix pty interface.

That said, using Cygwin is, as far as I'm concerned, the best of both worlds. Unlike some people, I like integrating the two environments as much as possible. I install Cygwin to C:\, for example, and I added support for using native win32 widgets to Cygwin Emacs. (Try the cyg32 package. You'll like it.)

Try the "injob" utility too. It gives you native Unix job control with arbitrary Windows programs. (That it's even possible to implement it is a consequence of NT job objects being much better abstractions than POSIX process groups.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I use cygwin on a daily basis and the only question I have is, apart from a smaller disk space footprint, which is becoming increasingly relevant, how much more lightweight does one need cygwin to be? This obviously does not apply to the true power users of cygwin. I was thinking more along the lines of a general user of it. Basic greps, batch file operations, etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> Honestly, I don't really understand why people use UNIX-shells like Cygwin in Windows. I found them slow and difficult to work with, to the extent that it's much easier to just spin up a VM with a lightweight Linux distribution (or to dual boot, but that's another use case).

<comment><USER34> I develop on Windows for Windows and use these tools. Here is my reasoning.

It's easy to see that Unix shell tools are much superior to the Windows cmd. There is PowerShell which gives you more flexibility, but in my experience I have found PowerShell to be slow. It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my time to learn.

Given that, I would rather install Cygwin or MinGW. Spinning up a VM is much more heavy-weight that just directly using Cygwin.

<comment><USER19> > There is PowerShell which gives you more flexibility, but in my experience I > have found PowerShell to be slow.

Powershell can be a little slow to launch. Actual execution speed is pretty respectable. It does get faster after the first couple of times as it will ngen stuff into the GAC (this is particularly bad on new Windows installs where little .Net code has previously ran in any contexts).

It can be fixed by running a script like this:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2008/09/02/speedi...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2008/09/02/speeding- up-powershell-startup-updating-update-gac-ps1.aspx)

Which will populate the GAC.

> It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my > time to learn.

You're missing out. Powershell's syntax is quite intuitive after you learn the basics, you quickly start to be able to guess commands and params.

<comment><USER34> >> It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my time to learn.

>You're missing out. Powershell's syntax is quite intuitive after you learn the basics, you quickly start to be able to guess commands and params.

I have grown up using Unix tools and I am quite comfortable with them. If I have to learn a new shell and scripting language, there should be a demonstrable benefit for the time I spend learning it. Can you give examples where PowerShell can do something which CygWin/MinGw can't? Trying to understand why you say that I am missing out :)

<comment><USER35> The main benefit of PowerShell over other shells is the object pipeline.

In classical shells, a pipe basically connects binary stdout -> binary stdin. A pipe between PowerShell cmdlets, on the other hand, can produce .NET objects directly without having to serialize them, so the pipe can connect .NET object producer -> .NET object consumer. If the consumer can't handle objects, the pipe degrades to binary stdout -> binary stdin.

For instance, the pipe in `ls | grep` is drastically different from `ls | fl`, because the latter is an in-process transfer of a .NET object collection, while the former transfers lines of text from one process to another, (in this case, to GNU Grep.)

Upside: the consumer doesn't have to "parse" stdin to get reasonable data on which it can operate.

Downside: if you want to write a consumer, you're stuck in .NET land. (Oh, how I wish I could write a consumer written in python that could advertise that it supports a specific object-oriented serialization on stdin! Then we could write a PowerShell stdin/stdout compatibility layer into python as a module... Alas, I'm guessing this task is reasonably hard.)

Oddly, I couldn't find a great readable intro to the topic, but this comes close: [http://www.darkoperator.com/blog/2013/1/28/powershell- basics...](http://www.darkoperator.com/blog/2013/1/28/powershell- basicsndashobjects-and-the-pipeline.html)

<comment><USER36> The main problem of object pipeline is that only software written .Net understands it. That means most of the utilities we are familiar with in the Linux world doesn't work with them.

And I don't want to find every .Net equivalent of the command I use in Unix systems. Perhaps all the coreutils have counterparts in Powershell, but for all the other third party ones I use, probably not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> i already have msysgit and mingw. should i use gow?

<comment><USER38> Probably not. From the looks of it, GoW is just a mashup of MSYS and MinGW compiled binaries, much like msysGit except without Git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been using Babun [1] and fully enjoying it.

[1] [https://babun.github.io/](https://babun.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER40> I still use Windows SUA for my unix needs on Windows. It allows me to do most things and provides real POSIX (except fork), but stuff like sensitive filenames and unix style permissions actually work with NTFS. OpenSSH runs as a real service, and so on. I don't understand why this subsystem never got much recognition and suacommunity.com is even dead now...

<comment><USER41> Originally Windows had the concept of personalities and three were available Win32, OS/2 and POSIX.

OS/2 went away, as soon as, OS/2 stopped being relevant.

POSIX was there mostly to get the foot into the door of US government, due to its requirements in POSIX compatibility.

I guess when this stopped being required and Win32 was accepted as viable platform, there wasn't a business case to keep on spending resources in POSIX support.

After all, Windows is not alone in lack of full POSIX support when one looks to embedded and mainframe OS as well.

<comment><USER40> It's deprecated now, but it is still there in Windows 8, and can be used for a lot of things not even possible in 'build to win32' scheme.

<comment><USER41> I thought it was fully removed in 8, but I am yet to upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have been using Gow almost three years, it's a great tool !

</comment><comment><USER43> Has any tried busybox for Windows?

How is that compare to Gow?</comment>


Once in a blue moon == 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=once+in+a+blue+moon

<comment><USER2> How many hertz is the pitch drop experiement? (Sorry I am so lazy)

<comment><USER3> The data in [1] has a mean time between drops of 9.28 years +/\- 0.66 years which means a frequency of 3.42e-9 Hz.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment)</comment></comment>


Games in the browser via Scala-Js - <AUTHOR> http://lihaoyi.github.io/scala-js-games/

<comment><USER2> Kindof a big deal, but won't get any press here because some random startup just got 1 mil in funding and that's what matters.

I think if there are more examples of scala.js and clojurescript doing the intensive stuff that javascript is the "only way for", people in the node community will start to lose their stockholm syndrome. Keep up the good work.</comment>


Smacktive app with automatic notifications - <AUTHOR>

Smacktive now has an automatic notification system built into the app for finding people who have the same activity likes you do. Simply choose which activities you want to be notified about that are going on in your area and the app will send you a notification when someone is nearby. Once you tap on the notification you can chat with that person in real time to meet up OFFLINE.<p>Thoughts on getting alerts from people you do not know in real time to chat and then meet for activities like soccer, tennis, board games, anything in person. Can download on the app store or feel free to ask us anything here. Appreciate your insight very much. <comment><USER2> Can I filter who i want to search for (ex. Just girls or just guys etc)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we built in a feature so if you are a female you can ONLY be seen by other females. If you are a male you can change your settings to only be seen by males too. You can also specify age ranges and proximity as well as notifications for the exact activities you want to do with someone else nearby.

:)</comment></comment>


The surprising science of motivation - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/post/19506?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+amixdk+%28amix.dk+blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390>

Lots of comments over there - this adds nothing new.</comment>


Puppet vs. Ansible - <AUTHOR> https://www.devopsgroup.com/2018/01/10/puppet-vs-ansible/ <comment><USER2> Puppet has an agent, Ansible does not. Ansible is far better imho. I dont want/need another 'agent' to have to install/manage etc.</comment>


The most important trait of an aspiring entrepreneur - be there or be square - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230107

<comment><USER2> I think that one reason the author feels that this is " _the_ most important trait" is because of selection bias. He says in the article that he does not trust anyone who isn't punctual. Therefore, if there _are_ entrepreneurs out there who are successful despite not being punctual, he would never do business with them, and they would fall off his radar screen before becoming successful.

Certainly there _are_ successful entrepreneurs out there who are habitually late. The Google founders had a punctuality problem in the beginning that became enshrined in the company culture; when I joined I was quickly educated about "Google standard time", which runs 7 minutes behind wall-clock time. One of Larry's first actions when he became CEO was to try to change this culture, which he's largely succeeded at with new hires, although many executives who were there in the old days are still habitually 7-15 minutes late to meetings.

I think a more accurate model of the world is that there are _some_ people who care deeply about punctuality, and there are some other people that show up when they show up. And the two camps don't interact much, because the latter folk are inscrutably annoying to the former, and the fact that the former are annoyed is inscrutably annoying to the latter. So everybody thinks that most of the people in the world are like them, when it's really because they simply refuse to associate with the people who are not.

If you're a founder, the best way to harness this dynamic is to be "strict with what you output but lenient in what you accept." Always show up to your appointments on time, but carry a smartphone or something with you so you can do something productive and not get too annoyed when a person is late. That will let you interface with the greatest number of people, which exposes you to the greatest number of opportunities.

I'd further venture that each of these styles correlates with other traits that are desirable in an organization. Lateness correlates with creativity and deep problem-solving ability; someone who is "in the zone" solving a tricky problem is very likely to lose track of time and miss their next appointment. Punctuality correlates with planning and organizational skills; someone who can manage their own time is far more likely to be able to manage somebody else's. I suspect that Larry's culture change is because the needs of Google as a large company are very different from Google as a startup - the culture was driving away planning & organizer types who are very necessary for coordinating the work of hundreds of people. And the cost of that is that the new, more rigid culture drives away creative types, which is why so many recent products (outside of X and acquisitions) have been ho-hum.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny but looking at it, there's a lot of truth to this. I've seen this a few times where some of the best entrepreneur or investors I met were almost always right on time, but were also very efficient with theirs - you can get a lot done with those guys / gals in an hour, so even if they didn't have a lot of time for you they really made very good use of it.</comment>


Show HN: Notify for Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://thommeret.com/posts/2020/06/11/notify-for-spotify <comment><AUTHOR> I recently switched from Apple Music to Spotify and one feature I was surprised was missing was a notification on song changes. I built an app to add this feature and also the ability to control Spotify via the menubar.

One fun emergent behavior is that because Spotify synchronizes player state between all your devices, you can play music on your phone, and if you have Spotify open on your desktop, it'll show notifications for all songs and even let you control playback.

Happy for any and all feedback!</comment>


Measuring Angle and Distance with your Thumb - <AUTHOR> http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/bodyruler_angle/

<comment><USER2> The width of your thumb at arms length is a very natural unit of measure. As the article states, it is approximately 2 degrees of solid angle. If you ray trace your thumb at arms length back into your eyeballs, the image of your thumb will cover the fovea <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea> The fovea is the little dimple on your retina responsible for sharp vision. This happens to be the solid angle that is used to define the CIE color charts <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space>

If I am not misremembering, two degrees solid angle (your thumb at arms length) also covers the angular width of the sun and moon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now that's cool. This seems like one of those things they should teach recon soldiers.</comment>


Britain bans gasoline and diesel cars starting in 2040 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/26/news/uk-bans-gasoline-diesel-engines-2040/index.html <comment><USER2> Well technically, they _will ban_ it in 2040. It hasn't happened yet. Of course, we could argue that time only seems linear because that is how we perceive it. Who knows... maybe they will change their mind in 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is like how Germany banned nuclear power?</comment>


Search for your name in pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.dr-mikes-maths.com/pisearch.html

<comment><USER2> _Because the number "10" keeps appearing in the denominator, we say this is pi in "base 10". It is also why we have 10 different digits._

I thought we have 10 digits so we can count our fingers.

<comment><USER3> Also, every number system is base "10" in its own system :-)

<comment><USER4> That's profound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is indeed the coolest thing:

 _The first English word in pi is... wait for it... PI, coming in at position 18. Now isn't that cute?_

<comment><USER6> That argues for using base 27 better than the article does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is one of those silly things that you just can't stop playing with.

      * "allah" isn't there but "jesus" is found twice!
      * "hate occurs more than "love"

Just as I was really excited about the mystical possibilities here, I came across this party pooper: [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there- ar...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there-are-no- hidden-messages-in-pi)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To accompany this, a link to a wonderful article about π by one of the leading researchers on the number π, an article I share with my students each year on π day.

[http://www.nieuwarchief.nl/serie5/deel01/sep2000/pdf/borwein...](http://www.nieuwarchief.nl/serie5/deel01/sep2000/pdf/borwein.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I am now going to lock myself in the bathroom until I can prove that pi + e is irrational. I mean, how hard can it be?

<comment><USER9> Very, very, very hard.

You almost certainly know that already, so here are a couple more remarks just for fun:

One useful technique when making pseudorandom number generators is to take two not-so-good RNGs and combine their outputs (e.g., adding them or XORing them). If the two RNGs have different enough "structure", the combined generator can have much better statistical properties than either of its two components. The fact that it's much harder to prove anything about pi+e than about pi or e individually is rather like that.

But even proving that pi is irrational is highly nontrivial. (Proving that e is irrational, on the other hand, is a fairly easy exercise. Sketch: suppose e = p/q; then q!e is an integer; but q!e is the sum of a series whose terms are initially integers and then abruptly positive numbers small enough that their sum has to be between 0 and 1; contradiction.)

<comment><USER8> How awesome would it be if pi + e _were_ found to be rational? Maybe everything starts cancelling out past the zillionth digit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      > Your chances:
      >   3 or fewer letters: about 100%
      >   7 or more letters: about 0%.

While this might be true for the set he's calculated, doesn't an infinite sequence of non-repeating digits suggest the likelihood of every sequence approaches one as the number of digits are calculated approaches infinity?

<comment><USER11> No! Consider this number:

0.101001000100001..... (continue the obvious pattern)

This number is irrational but there is an obvious pattern to the digits. The pattern is not random. It's an open question on whether or not the digits of pi are randomly distributed. If so then what you write is correct.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't the difference between just being irrational (e.g., sqrt(2)) and being transcendental (e.g., \pi, e) matter here?

<comment><USER11> The claim I responded to had to do with the randomness of the digits of a number. The person appeared to have the belief that irrational numbers have to have random digits. This isn't true. This isn't true for transcendental numbers either. The number I gave is transcendental but doesn't have random digits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That site has 30 million (base 27) digits of Pi. I used a dump of the first 5 trillion digits, and am now submitting prior art to all software patent trolls.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is, of course, bizarrely arbitrary, since its assuming there's any underlying meaning to the ordering of the English alphabet (since, ya know, there isn't).</comment>


Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/motorola-secures-europe-wide-sales-ban-on-iphone-ipad/1435 <comment><USER2> This is brilliant - but not because I hate Apple or have anything against someone choosing to use Apple, even tho I don't myself.

But hopefully a ban on such a popular product (right before Christmas to) will bring software patents and all the issues around them fully into the public attention and debate.

In the past it's been really hard to explain to non-geeks why they should care about such issues ...

Or am I being optimistic in hoping it would be reasonable debate and not just an "Evil Motorola/Google!" hate fest?

<comment><USER3> I downvoted you. Here's why: It's hard to take anyone seriously when they misspell "though" "tho". You may have made a good point, but I didn't read past your first sentence. I'm not trying to be a dick about it-- and I hate to clog up the comments section with a garbage comment like this one-- but you would really be doing yourself a favor to use somewhat correct spelling and grammar. It really sucks when people ignore what you have to say, not because of the message, but because of the delivery.

<comment><USER4> The HN website can do what they want but it seems anti-democratic to muzzle opinions and debate by making comment box text unreadable making the text colour lighter, just because some people (a few downvoters) find the words uncomfortable.

<comment><USER5> On the contrary, the community decided that text is not worth reading. It's very democratic. If enough disagree with the downvotes they can upvote the comment and make it black again.

<comment><USER4> If you can read it you may upvote it but often you, I know I often do/did, will just breeze over it and ignore it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty big piece of FUD here. Title is "secures Europe-wide sales ban", yet the article is littered with bits like "could be barred from sale" and "whether Germany can enforce a Europe-wide ban on 3G-enabled iOS devices is unclear".

<comment><USER7> I like that HN tends to stay away from reddit-style sensationalist titles. I suppose here the OP is just copying the original title verbatim, but it's still misleading.

Regarding the article itself, hopefully this will help popularise the fact that software patents are a bad joke.

<comment><USER8> Copying the linkbait article title is not an excuse, the submitter (Garbage) could have linked to a more balanced article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if we could get into a situation where all leading mobile devices in the world are banned.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't be surprised if every leading mobile device gets banned in at least one country or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ironically, these kinds of law suits remind me of a book I read long time ago about in late nineteen century how American railroad tycoons bribed judges against each other: one day the judge bought by Vanderbilt would ban his opponents from operating, while a week later another judge bribed by his opponents would side-track the order. Heck, policemen bribed by each side even open fired against each other.

Of course, nowadays, we replace bribery with lobbying and "influence". The same game is still on-going.

</comment><comment><USER12> My view is that if someone takes your idea and makes it better, it's called progress, and it should be encouraged, not banned.

</comment><comment><USER13> A german court enforcing a europe wide ban? Now that would be rich.

</comment><comment><USER14> How is any of this in the interest of the consumer? Can't one of those nice gov't agencies charged with protecting consumer rights stand in and say enough is enough?

I guess things have to get a lot worse before Apple/Motorola/Samsung/etc. realize that this is just not good for anyone.

</comment><comment><USER15> How can Germany ban something Europe wide, since patents count per country?

I don't get it, at the price they sell these Apple products why would they not buy the right licenses?

I only have questions, no answers. Sorry for that.

<comment><USER16> Because Motorola isn't selling them a license. Ah, so why isn't Motorola selling them a license then? Because Apple is unique among the big mobile phone players in that they have no interest in licensing their own patents to others for money or for access to the other party's patents. Instead Apple are using them just for the purpose of getting the others off the market.

Nokia apparently managed to bludgeon a cross-licensing agreement from Apple. Motorola is presumably attempting the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3333939>

</comment><comment><USER18> Lol, can't blame the writer for not understanding how Europe works. It's actually a bunch of countries, not states.

<comment><USER19> EU legislation doesn't use the word 'country' anywhere, and neither does anyone working in the Commission. The EU is made up of 'Member States' in the parlance.

<comment><USER20> Good thing too. 'Country' is a loaded word with various populations both claiming and denying their geographic locale as a separate country from the legal entity (or 'Member State') they're a part of.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is Google not offering real time analytics? - <AUTHOR>

Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the advanced free solutions but not being a real time platform definitely sets it back. It has been so long and i am wondering why Google is not offering real time tracking (may be with premium accounts, if not for free). Infrastructure might be a bottleneck but is it the only reason? GA might be mammoth in size when compared to Mixpanel or Chartbeat but how are these companies addressing the scaling issues? <comment><USER2> Mixpanel and Chartbeat start charging for analytics at a relatively low level of usage. Money, smartly applied, can solve a lot of scaling issues.

While I've got no doubt that Google _could_ make their analytics product real- time, they've probably done the cost-benefit analysis and decided it wasn't worthwhile. Real-time analytics are just eye candy for the twitchy unless you're able to make real-time changes based on those analytics, and the vast majority of analytics users aren't nearly so nimble.

</comment><comment><USER3> GA becomes much closer to realtime once you realize that you do not see data for today simply because it is not selected by default. Select today and you'll see data with 2-4 hour lag only.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google Analytics exists so marketers can measure the impact their AdWords and AdSense spend is making and turn around and get a bigger budget.

It doesn't really try to be a business analytics tool - nor a real time analytics tool.

So the answer to your question is "Because that's not their business."

(Some of the more tin-foil hat wearing PPC guys out there say it's an incredibly bad idea to share your conversion rates to people that sell ads to both you and your competitors in an auction. This is probably not wrong.)

</comment><comment><USER5> First, ask what the purpose of GA is: ultimately, it's bottom-line justification is that it helps prove to advertisers just how effective their ad spend is on Google. Use AdWords / AdSense, see how much money you are making per conversion etc., spend more money in a virtuous cycle.

From this perspective, real-time results might not help so much - how long would someone want to run a campaign to see if it was effective, after all?

This being said, I think that even within that context there is a business case. Given the distribution of ad dollars on Google, if P&G or Ford or some other big client was doing huge ad spends, it could be meaningful to tweak things in real-time throughout the day to try to find the best results of A/B/C/.../X tests without wanting any real lag. Now it could be that GA responds faster for certain accounts and this isn't a problem; I wouldn't know first hand one way or another.

I think that conceptualizing the problem from a business perspective helps explain why, for most cases, it isn't important that Google offer a real-time product. But, as we see with Google Instant, there is always room to improve even when things don't appear to be 'compelling' of their own accord!

</comment><comment><USER6> I find GA to lag about 20 minutes - 1 hour. Good enough for me. Analysis is done best when you have the whole picture, not just the first 2 minutes of it.

<comment><USER7> If your on a top 1000 website GA can lag 24 hours ;/

<comment><USER8> If you're running a top 1000 website you can probably afford to pay for real time analytics ;/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find getclicky a good alternative. It also has a neat iPhone app - clickytouch.

</comment><comment><USER10> Use Reinvigorate bro I can't live without it!

This is the reason...because they don't have to! A company...excuse me a mammoth of Google size is not distracted and moved by little seemingly meaningless issues unless they get to a point that they have to address this issue.

If Google was a small startup that would have been the first thing they tacked to keep innovation & momentum charging forward and therefore gain traction and a larger userbase.

<comment><USER10> How does this negatively effect Googles market share?! If it does ok...damage control how sever is it...yeah it's said I know.</comment></comment>