Ask HN: Which self-hosted solutions are you using? - <AUTHOR> I came across Perkeep[1] project today. I know some other self-hosted solutions like Rocket chat[2](Slack alternative), Redmine[3](Project management) etc.  Curious what other self-hosted are there and which one you are using?<p>[1]: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep<p>[2]: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat<p>[3]: http://www.redmine.org/ <comment><USER2> I run a whole bunch of different servers and apps in Docker on an old laptop with an i7 processor and 16GB RAM.

One of my favourite self-hosted apps is WikiJs ([https://wiki.js.org/](https://wiki.js.org/)). It takes a git repository of markdown files and turns it into an editable wiki and syncs back changes to the git repository.

I also use InfluxDB with Chronograf and Telegraf ([https://www.influxdata.com](https://www.influxdata.com)) to collect and analyse logs. It's not quite as full featured as Elastic or Prometheus but is easy to use, rock-solid and nice to look at. Plus they sent me a free pair of socks (all the way to NZ) for filling in a survey! :-)

And to help manage all the Docker images I spin up and down, I use Portainer - [https://portainer.io/](https://portainer.io/)

Forgot to add that just recently I've started to run Apache Guacamole to give me remote access to my local LAN while I'm not at home. This is so great - HTTPS access to RDP, VNC, and SSH sessions. [https://guacamole.apache.org/](https://guacamole.apache.org/)

<comment><USER3> How do you keep your docker images up to date? With virtual machines or even lxd containers, you can enable unattended upgrades but not with docker. There is a project (I forget the name) to destroy and rebuild containers with the newer image version, but it doesn't work with images that are built off of others using a Dockerfile.

<comment><USER4> watchtower ([https://github.com/v2tec/watchtower](https://github.com/v2tec/watchtower)) is the project you're probably thinking of. It works great for me.

<comment><USER2> This looks useful, thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I setup Redmine, Gitolite, and Jenkins when I started working at a company a few years ago. They worked great and we had a couple of python scripts to make everything fit nicely together (git commit keywords to resolve issues, etc).

Then one day someone decided they needed "reports". We ditched our working system and paid a bunch of money for the Atlasssian suite. To this day I still miss our simple, functional, and free setup.

Bamboo was so bad that we eventually gave up on it and switched back to Jenkins. Seriously Bamboo is one of my most hated software products of all time.

We tolerate Confluence but the fact that the JIRA and Confluence have their own, annoying flavor of markdown, which is different from Bitbucket's flavor annoys me to no end.

Bitbucket (which was called something else before) does have a few nice features but nowadays there are options better than gitolite alone. JIRA has those pretty reports that someone wanted and that are never accurate.

yay.

<comment><USER6> > We tolerate Confluence but the fact that the JIRA and Confluence have their > own, annoying flavor of markdown, which is different from Bitbucket's flavor

How do they justify this? It trips me up every single working day of my life. The products look identical so all I see is a text box on a white site with blue accents and I inevitably start writing the wrong markdown.

<comment><USER7> It's got so much worse. Even within JIRA there's 2 different flavours: the backlog preview _new_ updated version, and the old horrid detail issue view version. Annoying doesn't start to describe it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome list: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted) Subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/)

<comment><USER9> I came here looking for reviews and recommendations instead of a list of everything under the sun where I have to figure out what's good and what isn't

<comment><USER10> I'm with you in that I love the HN input, but it's nice to see links to the 'awesome lists' for reference. I generally bookmark these types of threads under 'hackerNews BestOf', to come back to later on. Doesn't hurt to share them in a comment, just ignore if it doesn't benefit you directly.

So, while today I'm not interested in the 'lists', when I come back looking for x,y,z I might be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been trying out fossil[1] for some small personal projects, it's a DVCS based on SQLite (from the same author, drh) and includes a wiki and issue tracking.

I think I might even be starting to prefer it to git/git(lab|hub).

[1]: [https://www.fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...](https://www.fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

<comment><USER12> How well does fossil work with binary files?

<comment><USER13> Potentially corrected about 9 years ago? [http://fossil-users.fossil- scm.narkive.com/3Gpi9Y1n/fossil-s...](http://fossil-users.fossil- scm.narkive.com/3Gpi9Y1n/fossil-slow-on-binary-file-changes-reason-and- workaround)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> \- Gitea for my git repositories (moved from gitweb);

\- Syncthing + my own FileShelf[0] as a web interface, instead Dropbox;

\- Miniflux, a web RSS reader;

\- IPython notebooks;

\- Customized Jekyll for my blog + comments powered by self-hosted Isso;

\- postfix/dovecot + Roundcube for the web mail;

\- ejabberd (mostly to have notifications from my VPS);

\- goaccess for the web server statistics, portainer and a couple of FCGI scripts for monitoring and deployment;

I am still not satisfied with my setup completely and there are many other things I'd like to tinker with (e.g. DokuWiki, Grafana/Prometheus).

sandstorm.io looks very promising, but the last time I was put off by its desire to take over my VPS (maybe I will bite the bullet and get another dedicated VPS for it).

[0]: [https://github.com/EarlGray/fileshelf](https://github.com/EarlGray/fileshelf)

<comment><USER15> i'm curious, i assume you bought a SSL certificate for your postfix/dovecot setup, myself i'm using one from sslforfree, do you mind to tell where did you got yours ? Recommended ?

<comment><USER14> A free certificate from Let's Encrypt works great for me. Before that I used free certificates from StartSSL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been using sandstorm.io at the recommendation of a friend, and I'm pretty impressed with it. It's kind of like containerised apps that you run like a server, and once it's set up it's super easy to manage. It's replaced Trello and Evernote for me, and had a bunch of useful trinkets out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER17> Running similar setups on my home lab and company lab:

* VMware VSphere/ESXi

* JIRA / Confluence (managing tickets and wiki)

* FreeNAS (server facing file server duties)

* Synology (user facing file serving duties)

* Zimbra (mail server)

* pfSense (gateway, dhcp, dns, vlans)

* SIPP (SIP endpoint testing)

* Elastix (Asterisk PBX/VoIP Server)

* Windows Server (DNS, DHCP, file serving)

* Openfire (XMPP/Jabber server)

* NAKIVO (VMware backup server)

* Zabbix (SNMP/IPMI/Server monitoring server - amazing product but a PITA to setup)

Thinking about trying Proxmox though once my VMware licenses come up for renewal.

As an aside the most trouble free, zero maintenance server in my home lab is the Windows Server. Updates itself without filling up /boot and killing itself (Ubuntu I'm looking at you...). It takes up hardly any resources on the Hypervisor and just runs and runs. Haven't had to login to it in years.

Really wish Microsoft brought that rock solid ethos to Windows 10. Their server products are absolutely incredible.

<comment><USER12> Do you use Zimbra at work? How is that compared to using Exchange for example?

Any drawbacks?

<comment><USER17> Yep, we use Zimbra for company mail. I've only used Office 365 though not Exchange standalone so my comparison reflects that.

Pros for Zimbra are:

It supports Exchange Web Services and ActiveSync so you get complete feature parity for setting up Macs/iOS and other Exchange supporting devices. Makes it as easy setting up users as a full O365 setup.

Licenses are pretty cheap, we're paying I think £400-500 for 25 users per annum.

The web interface is good and has very strong feature support for aliases, mail filtering (O365 filtering is abysmal).

Supports adding External mail IMAP/POP accounts so you can send/receive all your Gmail emails from Zimbra.

It is very standards compliant with excellent IMAP, CalDAV, SMTPS, POP3, EWS, ActiveSync support. No half baked support unlike IMAP on Exchange or Gmail which occasionally does something protocol hostile.

Cons:

Zimbra web interface is not as good as Gmail or O365. It's okay though and feature rich.

If maintaining your own deployment expect some hours put in setting up the usual stuff like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, LetsEncrypt.

Standard support is slow although they do eventually get the issue fixed.

I don't believe Zimbra supports anything like O365's Shared Mailbox feature.

Spam filtering is not great, certainly not compared to Gmail.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for your reply.

It has always annoyed me that almost everyone uses exchange or gmail. It's refreshing to see people use something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Personnaly, I have built a "self-hosted" stack around the following services:

* Seafile (file hosting/synchronization/sharing/history)

* SoGo (a webmail that work with existing IMAP and SMTP servers and exposes an Exchange API)

* Matrix / Riot (matrix is a chat server, Riot is the web client)

* Jenkins 2 (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment)

* FreshRSS (RSS aggregator)

Authentication is managed by a single LDAP service (openldap).

I also plan to test/deploy:

* Peertube (video hosting)

* Mastodon (micro-blogging)

My next goal would be to distribute this stack on more than one server, in order to improve availability.

</comment><comment><USER19> Running on my NAS at home:

* GitLab (GitHub + CI/CD replacement)

* FreeNAS (Storage server)

* Nextcloud (Dropbox replacement)

* Syncthing (Dropbox replacement, Nextcloud did not work properly on my android phone)

* In progress: Kubernetes cluster (just for fun, RKE + rook.io)

* My own notes/wiki/task tracker I will release real soon now (TM)

Thinking about setting up Gitea + Drone.io, GitLab is just too heavyweight for just using it as git Hosting + CI/CD.

<comment><USER20> What sort of hardware are you running? I'm looking to set something up myself, and I like the look of FreeNAS as it sounds like it fits my use case but the HW recommendations are a little out of my budget at the moment.

<comment><USER21> Check out OpenMediaVault, I'm using it on a low-powered NAS after seeing the requirements fro FreeNAS.

[http://www.openmediavault.org/](http://www.openmediavault.org/)

<comment><USER20> Hmm, that looks interesting. How do you like it? My primary use case is for backing up our computers here at home and to more or less host a private cloud so we can unload photos and videos etc. from our phones, and I like to make it as painless and automatic as possible to make sure it actually gets done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've tried perkeep out but couldn't really figure out its goal or purpose. It seems to be built on a lot of interesting theoretical ideas of generalised storage without an actual current application. In particular there's some talk on their homepage about software archeologists being able to reverse engineer the format easily in future, but that seems a little presumptuous if they don't find a proper use case between now and that future. Right now it just seems like a less convenient alternative to a filesystem.

I had a related thought recently when trying out the SecureScuttlebutt social network: ssb seems like a format that could fill the intended use case of Perkeep (throwing all your stuff in a database) with the added advantages of (a) having broader applications today, (b) having a wider range of mature db clients and (c) having a well-functioning existing hosted ecosystem for cross- device syncing.

This isn't ssb's intended use case and I haven't tried it yet but I intend to.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I remember hearing about it (then called Camlistore) a decade or so ago, and I visited the home page and saw "if you're a developer, you can probably get some utility out of it". You'd think that, after ten years, they'd have made something that the average user can at least install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At home;

Emby-server for my home media library.

APU OpenBSD router for my outer-most internet router at home.

Unbound LAN resolver with a number of upstream unbound instances at different VPS providers.

Libvirt hypervisor for personal projects.

Synology DS411slim NAS and one homemade with emby, I'm wanting to replace the homemade one with FreeNAS mini though because I'm not happy with the HW in it.

At work I've setup, or helped setup;

Owncloud for internal file sharing and to clients.

A couple of gitlab instances, one for internal dev stuff and one for a client.

A homemade password pusher.

In-house developed monitoring system.

Really this list could go on forever so I'm going to stop here. Having worked for 7 years at my current position with setting up various open source solutions.

<comment><USER25> What is a homemade password pusher? Is that a method to securely send a password to a colleague or something?

<comment><USER24> It's very simple actually, some would call it insecure but it's just a means of sending an expiring link to someone where they can view the password temporarily.

Because people were sending so many passwords over e-mail or text messages so it was a necessity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea](https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea) self hosted git service. They provide a prebuild statically linked binary. We use it for some time now and it's just beautiful. In my opinion the nicest self hosted git to date. Also the development is very active and new functionality is added continuously.

</comment><comment><USER27> I probably would happily use hosted solutions, but being in China, everything is either completely blocked, half-works, or way too slow. So we (have to) use Gogs[1] as own Github, Mattermost[2] as own Slack, and StandardNotes[3] as own Evernote (Evernote has China presence, but it's a slightly different product + privacy concerns). I'm also quite happy with Haraka[4] mail server for outbound emails as a self-hosted Mandrill / Mailgun alternative.

[1]: [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

[2]: [https://www.mattermost.org/](https://www.mattermost.org/)

[3]: [https://docs.standardnotes.org/self- hosting.html](https://docs.standardnotes.org/self-hosting.html)

[4]: [https://haraka.github.io/](https://haraka.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Syncthing instead of dropbox. Works great for synching music (and only music as I can just sync a single folder) and for replicating important files across multiple computers.

I've got it on a linode and across all my computers.

[https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

<comment><USER29> You know you can add several entries, and so several directories with syncthing, do you ?

Me, I've got one for all administrative stuff, one for my web WIP, one for my personal photos, etc...

And each doesn't replicate on the same other servers, as you can choose by entry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm quite a big fan of [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

<comment><USER31> Can you explain for example how can i update an app like Ghost which is of 2015 version atm. Is it even possible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I use Metabase for querying our SQL database. I love how easy it is to ask questions of our data. I use it a couple of times per day.

It's free, and by self-hosting it I can keep our firewall rules locked down on the DB.

</comment><comment><USER33> * Mattermost - For chat system. It has proved to be quite stable for over a year and none of the people who used complained of bugs or annoyance. Recent version of mobile app seems to work just fine too. (They rewrote and separated it into a classic version.)

* Dokuwiki - Nothing new but it just works for my personal company memo. Its simplicity is good.

* monit - I love the easy to understand syntax of the config to monitor servers. Can also monitor the freshness of SSL certs when these days everyone uses Let's Encrypt and they expire pretty quickly. And bought m/monit a few times and I get to manage multiple servers' monit from its dashboard. I used to run Prometheus + Grafana for making pretty graphs of server activities but while the set up wasn't so hard, I felt the whole thing was a bit overkill for just monitoring server health and I'm happy with m/monit's simpler graphs. (Also does down sampling and purges old data.)

* InspIRCd - Not using anymore but had it for internal IRC chat before switching to Mattermost.

Tried BitWarden recently for password vault and it seems like a solid one but the clients are not as versatile as Enpass, so, still looking around.

</comment><comment> m-localhost \- Wallabag (Pocket/Instapaper replacement) [1]

\- Embed (Embed.ly replacement) [2]

\- Nextcloud (Dropbox etc)

\- foobar2000 (Spotify :P)

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

[2]: [https://github.com/oscarotero/Embed/](https://github.com/oscarotero/Embed/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you for posting! Self-hosting is something I wish was discussed more frequently on HN.

I'm yet to depend on any of them, but projects I've been eying up are:

\- Airsonic as a Spotify replacement (FOSS iOS clients)

\- Kodi as a smart tv/box replacement (had this for a while, worked great!)

\- NextCloud to host files (generally allergic to php, but too scared of iOS binaries from China to trust the superior SeaFile)

<comment><USER12> For a spotify replacement also checkout funkwhale:

[https://funkwhale.audio/](https://funkwhale.audio/)

[https://funkwhale.eliotberriot.com/](https://funkwhale.eliotberriot.com/)

[https://fediverse.network/funkwhale](https://fediverse.network/funkwhale)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd never thought of WordPress plugins as self-hosted apps until I built my WordPress plugin, Kanban for WordPress [1]. It can be thought of as a self- hosted Trello. I've since seen a self-hosted Buffer, Pocket, Evernote, Delicious/Pinboard, all on WordPress.

[1] [https://KanbanWP.com](https://KanbanWP.com)

</comment><comment><USER36> I use invoiceplane [https://invoiceplane.com/](https://invoiceplane.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> We run the Atlassian products Jira, Confluence and Crucible and soon Bitbucket on premise. Gitlab is not an option because our main repository is a relatively big Mercurial repository. There's also a couple of Jenkins servers.

Most of the on premise IT, with the exception of the Jenkins servers, are managed by a local devops company.

We are a small company with 7 employees.

</comment><comment><USER38> I try to use self-hosted over cloud-based services. The loss of control over data, privacy issues and just being burnt too many times means services are ephemeral to me at best.

Some of the things I use heavily:

* Nextcloud

* Bookstack

* Privatebin

* Mailu (although I'm slowly moving to a manual setup)

* Wallabag

* Selfoss

I'm also waiting for pixelfed, peertube and pleroma to mature a little more.

I'm moving some of my content away from hosted platforms to self-hosted ones, and looking forward to integrating DAT[1] and Gopher so people have (relatively) safe non-HTTPS options to access content.

It's harder than it seems, although a large part of the puzzle is aggregating the data from these sources and getting them into a format that works. I'm considering creating a lifestream generator using my self-hosted data, and then syndicating from there to various services.

[1] - [https://datproject.org/](https://datproject.org/)

<comment><USER33> Out of curiosity, how are you burnt so many times from online services?

<comment><USER38> Probably more than anything else it was from when I bought my iPad. There was an explosion in apps after I bought it, and services came with it, along with subscriptions.

The first thing I knew something was wrong was when my subscription to BBC Good Food Magazine changed, and I could no longer email myself recipes in any meaningful format (I had to screenshot the page and share it).

A common one is when a service is bought out and goes to crap, or when a service just goes under (like ma.gnolia) and you lose everything.

Plex has also burnt me by not letting me access content on my own network when their online service goes down.

Facebook burnt me more times than I can count, but Cambridge Analytica was the last straw.

My favourite type of burn is the breach of a security company burn, like lastpass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Phabricator (tasks, wiki, and code review), Gitolite (actual repositories), Mattermost (chat), Jenkins (CI).

</comment><comment><USER40> I run Nextcloud for my data storage, a Mastodon server, Postal for email delivery, Shaarli to store my bookmarks, a selfwritten analytics system to check what devices I should optimize my website for. Additionally a Gitea instance for git repository access and Drone CI for ... CI as well as TinyTinyRSS. An RSS reader I have yet to find a replacement for, stuff like Miniflux and friends all don't have the category and filter system TTRSS has so I'm stuck there.

Atm I'm preparing to also selfhost a small shop frontend and a Peertube instance for my Mastodon instance. I also want to overhaul monitoring and log shipping to centralize it and maybe reinstall a wiki for keeping track of everything.

<comment><USER41> Why would you want to replace TinyTinyRSS? It's been rock-solid for me.

<comment><USER40> There is no direct need to replace it, however, TTRSS feels a bit overkill for what I do, I could work with much less. The UI is also quite annoying to deal with and every update breaks the theme I installed to make it bearable. Additionally the author has been quite rude in reaction to bug reports or simple support questions, so I'm not quite inclined to keep using the software unless there is no good alternative.

The Author also pulled WebSub support for no good reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I can't really see what perkeep is or does form the cursoray look. As far as self hosted goes, I do everything. Nextcloud, wekan, confluence, iredmail, web host, /nginx, Hugo, openeats, suricata, etc... If I can't self host it, it's not a contender for me. Anything I want to use, I need to be able to control and host. I don't have a rocket chat, but I do participate in a trusted version that I know the other party self hosts. I want to try out mastodon, slag hosted as well. So many great options out there, I can't ever see myself not using a self hosted version. I did give redmine a try but I'm just not a ruby guy.

<comment><USER43> I've considered going self-hosted a lot of times, for several "everyday use" services. But there are always two things that make me hesitate:

\- Cost. My needs are small so in practice I can stay in the free tier of most services.

\- Availability/Reliability work. All the maintenance burden would now fall over me: data backups, network failures, etc.

Could you comment on these points, from your experience? (also whatever other concerns you may want to point out about self-hosting services)

<comment><USER42> Sure. There are a lot of reasons I feel self hosting is better for my use cases and threat model, yours may be different. The number one reason I consider only self hosted, is for the control it offers me.

Cost wise, my self hosted operational expenses are -way- less expensive than any cloud offerings, let alone signing up for every SaaS/PaaS service I want to try out or actively use. Most offer self-hosted/self install for free, charging for hosting on their infra. A single, reliable small VPS runs around $3-$5/mo at the least. I have almost 30 VMs (not all powered on at one time) on my own two e-bay purchased servers in HA. Also around a third of those VMs require more RAM or storage than the low costs VMs. So just having those VMs would cost around $200 a month. Though if I used cloud based, I likely wouldn't have nearly as many VMs.

Upfront costs for the server + drives was ~$500. I also have a NAS that was around $500 with drives. So all in one time costs around $1000. I've now used those items going on 6 years, replacing a few hard drives here and there.

Backup wise, the hypervisor backs up images and snapshots to the NAS. I backup the entire NAS to Backblaze B2 at a cost ~ $100 a year. S3 would be around $750/yr alone.

Self-hosted: Capex: $1100 (hardware, some licensing items) Opex: $300/yr (hardware replacement, backup costs, external necessities [domain, Voip trunk, etc] )

Cloud hosted: Capex: $0? Opex (Lets say half the VMs, 15x$5) : $1700/yr

In terms of availability and reliability to make it work; it certainly does take some time and effort to maintain. I am responsible for all the updates on the OS and software of course,and I can't blame anyone else for failures. Again, I like this level of control and responsibility. I can update on my schedule for down time or when needed for security fixes. I'm not waiting around for some one else to apply the fixes or inconvenience of unplanned downtime for it. I'm not saying my stack is more reliable than AWS or Azure, but I've taken steps to minimize issues. I'm still at the mercy of my one ISP line and electrical outages of course.

What concerns me about self hosting: You're responsible for everything. Security most of all, people seem to skimp on because it is difficult or gets in the way. You can't make a 100% secure system anywhere, but if you're self- hosting you absolutely need to work WITH security in mind and not sabotaging for the sake of convenience or 'just getting it working'.

It's not a set it up and forget it situation. You still have to do updates and occasionally fix things when they break. Reducing the amount of time and any barriers to this is key in getting it done. Personally, I use orchestration and automation tools to help.

Interoperability with other services/APIs can sometimes be finicky to get right, especially behind NATted situations. Sometimes not worth the hassle.

Some ISPs block certain well known ports. Of course, NATting services that are not well documented, also sucks sometimes. \----

TL;DR: I like the control that self hosted gives me. In my case it's cheaper than AWS/VPSes. If you do self host, keep your stuff updated and as secure as you possibly can.

<comment><USER43> It's been almost a week but I still wanted to thank you for your long and detailed reply.

I also felt that self-hosting could bring security issues to the table where nothing was before... but of course the huge savings in other fronts might compensate the extra work. In any case, that's a good looking setup you have there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> For our company, we use:

\- Gitlab and Gitlab CI

\- Zulip chat(moved from Mattermost)

\- Metabase for data visualization(will be adding InfluxDB soon)

\- Self Hosted Sentry(error reporting): Sentry is linked with Gitlab and Zulip for alerts

\- Taiga: project management tool

\- OpenEDX: a beast :)

We are Python(Django) based ourselves and love that we can tinker with many of these tools as they are too Django based.

At personal level, I use:

\- Mailinabox: Self hosted mail

\- Nextcloud: For file syncing, contact management, calendar and tasks, notes.

I have also looked at Perkeep several times(even set it up two times) but couldn't include it in workflow. Especially mobile file syncing.

</comment><comment><USER41> I self-host a bunch of things, but the most recent is Radicale, to sync my contacts and calendar. I run DAVdroid on my phone, and I haven't had to touch it since I set it up.

</comment><comment><USER45> Quite a few self-hosted stuff already mentioned, I'd add:

* Youtrack for bug/project tracking (made by the awesome guys pf JetBrains)

* Matrix for chat (only some internal rooms on the private instance, the users stay on the main official Matrix)

* Koken for photo galleries

At some point I'd also like to add:

* a map tile server for openstreetmaps, to remove any external dependency on Google/Apple/any maps

* a jitsi server

* a secure file storage/file sharing solution

<comment><USER46> Your own personal map tile server? That's interesting... what are you planning to achieve that you can't just get from openstreetmap.org? Will you run an instance of graphhopper or project-osm alongside?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Shortlist:

\- Apache Tika + Tesseract for OCR of mails - i hate physical paper

\- SOLR to index the output of the above mentioned data

\- Imaginary ([https://github.com/h2non/imaginary](https://github.com/h2non/imaginary)) for image pre-processing of the scanned mails / documents. Its much more lightweight than imagemagick.

\- Openhab2 for home-automation

</comment><comment><USER48> GoCD for Continuous Integration/Deployment and Delivery. It's working quite well. Secondly, self hosted GitLab.

</comment><comment><USER49> On a low end box:

* SSH

* OpenVpn

At home, started as needed:

* Samba for backups (dedicated NAS)

* Gitlab (VM on desktop)

I don't need much more. I'd like to merge all of this into my NAS, but the 14 hdd box draws 70W idle. I'm planning to use a rockpro64 instead to do all that. Maybe then I'll find other useful things.

Oh, and I have a RPi1 as a 3d printing and mqtt server.

</comment><comment><USER50> Gitolite, Redmine. My company and my personal static web sites. Syncthing, if that's self hosting (there is no host.) Etherpad, to experiment on Google free collaboration.

I had a Mattermost server a couple of times in the last few years but I really don't need it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I use wallabag to keep track of things I want to go back to read when I have time. Keeping open tabs wasn't cutting it.

It's not always perfect but after I set it up it has just kept running. Browser add-on and phone app work decently.

</comment><comment><USER52> We are using Phabricator for tasks, kanban boards and chat, Projectsend for exchanging files with clients, Gogs for Git hosting, Kimai for time tracking, Zabbix for monitoring, Matomo for web tracking and SuiteCRM as a CRM.

</comment><comment><USER53> [https://cloudogu.com](https://cloudogu.com) is a complete self-hosted software development infrastructure with SCM, issue tracker, build server etc. and it's Open Source.

</comment><comment><USER54> Our research lab (Germany) uses a self hosted Rocket Chat instance as our primary communication medium. We like the service. Although, their android apps leave a little desired, recent updates have made them usable.

</comment><comment><USER55> \- email: dovecot, postfix (w/ opendkim and opendmarc), bogofilter, rainloop

\- synthing for file sync

\- miniflux for RSS

\- WordPress for friends/family websites

\- prosody for XMPP

\- wallabag for bookmarks

\- centralized rsyslog & collectd

\- radicale for calendar/tasks/contacts sync

\- gammu for sms sending

<comment><USER33> I'm recently using RSpamd for spam filtering and I think I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Sandstorm.io, and the apps I use the most are Etherpad, EtherCalc, and Wekan, which can all be hosted separately as well. Oh, and TinyTinyRSS, can't forget my news reader app.

</comment><comment><USER57> Big fan of cloudron.io !

</comment><comment><USER58> I currently use Emby for handling movie streaming and Gitlab for local development, which I serve with Docker containers running in Docker swarm across 6 Odroid machines.

</comment><comment><USER59> I am building TinyDataCenter to host all my IT on RasPi progressively enhanced by cloud; running the same images built for RasPi/Arm and regular x86 back engineered with my big data platform/devops experience.

I've been running a live stream and vlog all year on it, now carrying it around in a crate with a UPS, and posting design videos that follow scalable patterns with minimal tools.

Nobody can ban me from the Internet, now.

I also recorded bootstrapping videos and most of the development via screencasts and all on GitHub.

Kinda pitchy I know, but I sell nothing except services and only state what I've done, in fact—I believe in it.

</comment><comment><USER60> * Zimbra * Proxmox VE with multiple Windows/Linux services * Rocket.Chat * Jabber (deprecated) * Bugzilla * GitLab * SonatypeNexus * Jenkins

and much more

</comment><comment><USER61> Designing Data‑Intensive Applications. For Data Engineering

</comment><comment><USER62> On home server, CalDAV and CardDAV (instead of iCloud)

</comment><comment><USER63> Gitlab, Jenkins.

</comment><comment><USER64> gitlab CE, discourse and owncloud.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most important lesson of your career? - <AUTHOR> We've all made mistakes. Learning from those mistakes is important. We often hear most about success stories but the failures and the hard times are just as, if not more so, educational.
One of my big lessons: ommunication is an important skill. Good written communication goes a long way.  A project I worked on lacked clarity on what needed to be done and caused a lot of pain for me and the client.
Another one: a large corporate client is a whole different fish with a very different way of working. You can lose money if you don't adjust accordingly. <comment><USER2> It's like a video game: If you encounter ennemies, that means you're going in the right direction

</comment><comment><USER3> Clients rarely say what they mean. Two hours discussing how a website should look and respond... Isn't wasted. You might find what they actually mean.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the YC startup that detects motion changes in video? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember seeing a YC startup a while back that allows a user to analyze a long video recording and find the points in the movie where motion was detected. Does anybody recall the name of that startup? Thanks in advance.

</comment><comment><USER2> HilightCam

<comment><AUTHOR> That's it. Thank you!</comment></comment>


Python's Instance, Class, and Static Methods Demystified - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/blog/python/instance-class-and-static-methods-demystified#.WOuEDAeGdrE.hackernews <comment><USER2> Best thing about Python is that you do not need those pesky classes at all. You can just write functions and organize them in various files. You only need one class named "Data". That is where you keep your global variables.

All is very clear and comprehensible in comparison to classes and complex inheritances and instances. I presume that self-respecting python programmers abhor global variables too, and all global data should be inherited and carried around as a parameter in most twisted way possible.</comment>


We still see the world like the mathematician and poet who first mapped it - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/81/maps/we-are-all-ancient-mapmakers <comment><USER2> About the maps of Paris, I think the original publication is [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326978295_Psycholog...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326978295_Psychological_Maps_of_Paris) In page 89 it says:

> _They were told further that their sketch should not resemble a tourist map > of Paris, but ought to express their personal view._

So it's not surprising that they don't look like a tourist map.

<comment><USER3> yes, they were being asked to make it different from tourist map</comment></comment>


We need ecstasy and cocaine in place of Prozac and Xanax - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/we-need-ecstasy-and-cocaine-in-place-of-prozac-and-xanax <comment><USER2> There are many different psychiatric issues.

MDMA may throw someone out of an acute depression, but for people with genetic predispositions towards depression, it will get back after a few weeks. And you can't microdose, nor take MDMA regularly.

As for cocaine - Ritalin is cocaine light really. Both increase dopamine, and reduce anxiety in low enough doses.

As for replacing Xanax, it affects GABA if I'm not mistaken, which is a completely different animal altogether. For people who have issues on that front (i.e. experience panic attacks often, due to brain chemistry, not because of traumatic memories), no amount of MDMA therapy, or stimulants, will help.

<comment><USER3> Cocaine causes much less anxiety than adderall or ritalin. It is a way smoother drug if its pure cocaine , not cut with caffeine and other crap.

Cocaine used to be able to be purchased over the counter and everyone carried around snuff boxes. This country was built on cocaine. Unfortunately, with it being illegal, it is risky to obtain and the shitty caffeine youll get with it is inferior to amphetamines.

Would be nice to see cocaine as a prescription drug for ADD and narcolepsy. But thats a pipe dream...

Stick with pure drugs, ie. from prescriptions. Caffeine and that other speedy and anxiety inducing crap street coke is cut with is not worth dealing with

<comment><USER4> Provigil seems to be way better since it doesn't get you high in the traditional sense.

I don't think cocaine lasts long enough to be therapeutic. And certainly not healthy to snort it.

I also don't believe anyone (99% of people) should be taking any performance enhancing drug every day. Ritalin, Adderall and Vyvanse are all essentially meth without the initial rush.

And yes, no one should be doing cocaine since a huge percentage is cut with synthetic balt salts and even sometimes fentayl (not sure why).

<comment><USER3> Not a big fan of provigil but a lot of people seem to have success with it. Cocaine lasts a while if you consume it sublingually or orally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think we also need better mental models of how to deal with life and stress. And how to be energized from being healthy and sleeping properly.

<comment><USER5> >I think we also need better mental models of how to deal with life and stress.

No, we need totally different lifestyles that are more compatible with our biology. The way our society functions is incompatible with our biology, and we're trying to cover it up with drugs and other medical treatments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We need government with real honest people.....

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah yes, another shrooms and mdma cure all article.

<comment><USER8> do you have any experience with either?

<comment><USER7> both but prefer the "harder stuff" but I'm not trying to win any converts either.</comment></comment></comment>


A Fistful of Slack Clones: Chat Apps with Meteor - <AUTHOR> http://info.meteor.com/blog/a-fistful-of-slack-clones-with-meteor <comment><USER2> I'm so excited to score how many points?

</comment><comment><USER2> Positive day and more points?

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems so 3 points yes!</comment>


Fnl: zero-overhead Lisp syntax for Lua - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bakpakin/fnl <comment><USER2> Original author here:

The largest reason for use of S exprs is making Meta programming easier. While certain things like arithmetic are more difficult with S-exprs, Macros and DSLs are far easier than with C like syntax. Since Lua is actually only a few steps from something like Guile, it takes very little code to translate a scheme like language to Lua without adding too much runtime overhead. The difficult parts of lisp to implement, namely closures, come for free.

With LuaJIT as good as it is, I would not be surprised if something like this would outperform guile.

<comment><USER3> As a guile fanboy, I doubt outperforming guile is very hard (even though it is fast enough for most uses).

LuaJIT is most certainly faster than guile, but it isn't a very good comparison. Guile is far from the fastest lisp (or even scheme, for that matter), whereas LuaJIT is probably the best JIT on the planet.

<comment><USER4> _LuaJIT is probably the best JIT on the planet._

Where can I learn more about how LuaJIT compares to other JITers?

<comment><USER5> LtU has an old, but interesting thread. Can't tell how much details changed from that time, but since 1Gb limit was removed from LJ recently, it is my The Only Dynamic Language to Consider.

      http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851

<comment><USER3> Mike Pall indulges in some (well deserved) gloating far down in the thread:

LuaJIT also does: constant folding, constant propagation, copy propagation, algebraic simplifications, reassociation, common-subexpression elimination, alias analysis, load-forwarding, store-forwarding, dead-store elimination, store sinking, scalar replacement of aggregates, scalar-evolution analysis, narrowing, specialization, loop inversion, dead-code elimination, reverse- linear-scan register allocation with a blended cost-model, register hinting, register renaming, memory operand fusion.

Due to the nature of a trace compiler, it implicitly performs partial and interprocedural variants of all of them. And many traditional optimizations, like straightening or unreachable code elimination are unnecessary.

All of that in 120KB for the VM and 80KB for the JIT compiler. And I didn't need 15 years and a billion dollar budget for that, either.

I'm planning to add value-range propagation, array-bounds-check elimination, escape analysis, allocation sinking, if conversion, hyperblock scheduling and auto-vectorization. Anything I forgot? I'll see what I can do. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't have much cause to write Lua, but I can very much support lispy syntax.

When we all started coding, we probably used a text editor and thought in terms of editing characters: backspacing, typing, maybe mousing around for bigger changes.

Then at some point we graduated to a programmers editor where we got comfortable cutting, pulling, yanking, killing larger units of text: words, lines, paragraphs.

With tools like paredit, you can take another evolutionary step to edit the structures of your code. I find this very productive. It feels a little like those code block programming languages for kids.

If for no other reason than to enable slurping and barfing code structures in my text editor, this is a win. May all languages someday have a lisp syntax.

<comment><USER7> I'm with you almost all the way.... however, I think what we should learn here is that every language deserves tools as powerful as paredit--that is, ast- aware editing--not that all languages should convert their ast to s-expressions.

Imagine not being able to save syntactically incorrect code, or being able to have semantic diffs between domain objects (e.g. functions, classes, strings, types, apis) rather than thinking in terms of characters and lines, or being able to query a code base, like "find me all places where I assign to a variable named 'status' with type under 'error' and list me the names of the functions whose frame the variable belongs to". Paredit is simply where text and ast manipulation converge to the closest point.

<comment><USER8> As a fallback. I like LISPs as much as the next guy/gal, but editing the AST _by default_ is too low-level. The importance of paredit is a language smell in my opinion, not something to aspire to.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain in which direction something better should go? The AST is very much at a higher level than how the vast majority of programming is done, which is by manipulating the text that later gets parsed into an AST. I'm having trouble envisioning what editing a higher level than the AST would look like, without jumping straight to visual programming, which I find very inefficient in every incarnation I've seen. (And we could debate how far _above_ an AST such systems actually are.)

<comment><USER10> That seems backwards to me - AST-aware editing is basically embedding more of the compiler into the editor. It seems more valuable to me to be writing in a language that can express higher level concepts with lesser boilerplate, which would eliminate the need (and make far more difficult) for AST aware editing.

<comment><USER11> In regards to lisp a large amount of lisp editors are written in lisp so they do already do exactly that'

<comment><USER12> You might be surprised how little a Lisp dialect brings to the table specifically for developing the text editor features geared toward editing specifically Lisp.

The data structure representing Lisp data (i.e. code) is stripped of relevant text editing attributes, like how it is divided into lines and using what indentation, and, oh those semicolon-delimited comments.

Text editors also have to let the user deal with bad syntax.

So it's not just a matter of, "oh, we're written in Lisp, so just hand the buffer to the Lisp reader, do something and spit it out again".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This could be interesting to integrate support for racket to allow it to interact with Torch. You would just create a small language to compile to lua and then have that run in Torch.

[https://github.com/torch/torch7](https://github.com/torch/torch7)

[http://racket-lang.org](http://racket-lang.org)

<comment><USER14> Back to Lush...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really interesting! I've been looking for a Lua-like Lisp implementation that would be as easy and clean to integrate, something that would compile with clang/gcc/msvc easily and allow spinning up multiple interpreter instances without having any global state. Only TinyScheme comes quite close I think.</comment>


How do you fail to make money passively? (Passive Income) - <AUTHOR>

Inspired by another question, and we all have these experiences. How do you fail to generate passive income? What have you tried? Which apps have failed to take off? Who is to blame? <comment><USER2> To learn Android development, I created a simple vocabulary learning app, a mash-up of iSpeech, Google voice recognition, and even some Instagram thrown in. There was some interest, despite zero marketing (currently > 20k total installs), and I was approaching $200/month in ad income.

Then Google disabled my Adsense account because of "invalid click activity", which also meant my Admob account was gone, since they're now linked. I moved to a combination of other ad networks, but ad revenue was slashed to a quarter of its former glory. Appeals to Google were fruitless, and to this day I have no idea why exactly I was banned.

For my next app, I'll probably avoid the "free with ads" model.

</comment><comment><USER3> Instimage.com here.

We haven't "failed" yet. But we're dying slowly. No one cares for Instimage, and there's no money backing it up.

No Investors, no angels, just a bootstrap and no boot.

Reminds me of companies that call themselves "startups" for 10 years...

Shouldn't one start-up then get moving?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me get the ball rolling. My first app was called Barcoden. It generated barcodes for science labs. The debt crisis and cuts to schools ensued. Total sales: zero dollars.

</comment><comment><USER4> We built a SAAS product that would allow merchants to build their own coupon landing page or coupon site. It never got any traction. It was a super niche product and none of us wanted to go around selling it. We spent a year building it and simply lost interest in the product as more time elapsed. We should have taken a step back from the project after a few months and realized that it wasn't worth our time to continue working on it.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://inspecthq.com/](http://inspecthq.com/) \- clipboard and camera replacement for construction/inspection companies. Had a large (enterprise level) company interested for almost 2 years before we gave up.

</comment><comment><USER6> I built a tool for visual interpretation of test results against requirements. It was pretty cool and I'm sure large engineering companies would use it if they knew they needed it.

I learned that you should go niche, but find a niche with a problem that customers KNOW they have. Otherwise you have to educate them before even having the chance so closing a sale, which is too expensive.

I'm backing up and making simpler tools for the domain, this one could become an advanced feature for big enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have been working on a desktop application--not yet ready--since the Bush administration.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is HackerNews grey and the logo/name blacked out? - <AUTHOR> Context? <comment><USER2> It links to [https://www.battleforthenet.com/](https://www.battleforthenet.com/) \- it's putting the fight for net neutrality in the forefront.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't we already write everybody about this? Is this brand new, or for the rest of the folks who haven't already signed a petition or two?

</comment><comment><USER4> Click on that black rectangle in the header to find out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha, didn't realize the URL had changed.</comment></comment>


Inside the Feminist Hackerspace - <AUTHOR> http://secret.is/inside-the-feminist-hackerspace/ <comment><USER2> This is a problem:

        "Our geek cred is constantly challenged or
        belittled," Liz Henry, founder of feminist
        hackerspace DoubleUnion writes. "You might be
        there coding, and you want to stop for a while and
        draw in your notebook and think, but if you're not
        staring at a black and green screen or, like,
        melding your brain with an Arduino every second,
        some dude is going to come up to you and act like
        you need his expert lessons in how to hack."

On the other hand, there is a tendency among many newbies at hobbies to be shy and self-conscious when they first go to places where the hobby is practiced in public and in groups, and they end up just observing for a while and then leaving without ever jumping in and participating, so everyone ignoring people who aren't obviously participating would also be a problem.

Probably it would be best to have some formal procedure to identify and deal with newbies, such as having designated people who look for them and offer help, and asking others to let those designated people handle the new people.

<comment><USER3> This is a big problem.

If you think someone is stuck and you offer to help, you're being condescending or mansplaining but if you think that someone is just in their process and working something out so you leave them alone, you're being cliquish and not welcoming to the newcomer.

Is the subculture supposed to change to fit the needs of the newbie or should the newbies be expected to learn to fit in to the subculture?

<comment><USER4> The fact that they're stuck _might be part of the fun_. It's usually easiest, and frankly less intimidating/annoying, to follow a simple protocol:

      1. Ask them if they have a second to chat (if no, leave them alone for a while).
      2. Ask them what they're working on, and what they enjoy about it, and what is hard (if they don't want to talk about it, leave them alone for a while).
      3. Ask them if they'd mind a suggestion about what they're trying (if they don't want a suggestion, leave them alone for a while). This may also be in the form of a leading question.

It's really not hard to do that without falling into one of those two categories. Just ask quietly and politely, and respect their space. This isn't rocket science.

EDIT:

Also, some of my sibling commenters and even my parent comment have language that suggests some grumpiness over gender or feminism or whatever.

If you're there to help with tech, _none of that matters_ , so don't bring it up. Just ignore it and focus on the tech--doing anything else is, by definition, being distracting.

Furthermore, complaining about it just makes you look silly.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's just me, but "Do you have a second to chat?" sounds very little like "You look like you could use some help and I may be able to offer relevant expertise in the interests of addressing your apparent problem". From where I'm sitting, the former sounds like it's so unlikely to lead to the latter that it may not be worth engaging with.

<comment><USER4> That's precisely the point. :)

Take at your statement, and pretend a frustrated/easily embarrassed/grumpy person is hearing it:

"You look like you could use some help" \--> "You look like you don't know what you're doing/you look frustrated"

"I may be able to offer relevant expertise" \--> "I assume that I both have something to offer and that you are having a problem of this particular way/shape/form"

"in the interests of addressing your apparent problem" \--> "whatever you're working on is clearly broken, and needs fixing"

My formulation is intentionally very gentle and indirect, precisely to avoid any of the above misinterpretations. Working with people experienced in the field or who are known to be open to communication, obviously, we want to be more direct; for a novice, or for somebody who is looking for any excuse to take offense at what you're saying (perhaps because they're frustrated at their work and want to vent at something), it is useful to take a lighter touch.

<comment><USER5> I should hope that's precisely _not_ the point unless you just want to frustrate people more. The approach you describe is, in my considered opinion, possibly indirect to the point that could be by some considered to be influenced by Dadaism. Let's model a hypothetical person focused on a problem they're struggling with:

"Hey, do you have a second to chat?" \--> "I want to waste your time with spurious bullshit when you're clearly eyeball-deep in something."

Might I suggest a different formulation that presumes less about the subject? Or perhaps giving up entirely? Personally, I've accepted that there is not and cannot be any uniformly acceptable way to approach a stranger and offer assistance that does not risk backlash or misinterpretation.

<comment><USER6> But then the answer is, "Nope, working hard!"

spurious bullshit avoided, algorithm deployed successfully.

<comment><USER5> And then you and your space are attacked publicly as being a place where nobody respects focus, men are constantly approaching women, and so on. Or someone blows up after being quietly and kindly asked that for the fifth time in two hours by well-intentioned people who are unfortunately less than omniscient and an article entitled "Woman harassed in hackerspace by brogrammers!" hits Jezebel.

Communications failures combined with the human capacity for reinterpretation are a bottomless pit of potential badness.

Maybe I'm just more cynical about people than you.

<comment><USER6> This sounds a lot like black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking (psychology).

"If I ask a woman in a hackerspace ``want to chat?'' then .... Jezebel will print horrible articles about men."

"If I don't talk to the woman in a hackerspace then..... .. .. I am a horrible misogynist (?) because I am not encouraging her."

From Wikipedia, "Splitting creates instability in relationships because one person can be viewed as either personified virtue or personified vice at different times, depending on whether they gratify the subject's needs or frustrate them. This, along with similar oscillations in the experience and appraisal of the self, leads to chaotic and unstable relationship patterns, identity diffusion, and mood swings." I think sometimes folks get too invested in how to talk to women in tech. Do your best and move on. No one is going to fix this problem individually, and heightening every interaction into a chance for a Jezebel article is counterproductive. Not unless you are Iggy Azalea are you going to get Jezebel hate every time you move, so relax a little!

<comment><USER5> An environment has been created where the slightest of perceived infractions is maximally punished. You'll have to forgive me for not wanting to take that risk just because someone asked nicely. It's become quite clear to me that doing my best and moving on isn't good enough.

Have you considered the possibility that there's a real state of fear surrounding these topics? It renders everything toxic and every interaction becomes a minefield. It's not a healthy state of affairs, and it's not one in which telling people to do their best and move on offer is a sufficient response. It comes across as utterly lacking in empathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > most hackerspaces tend to be full of dudes, or more specifically, white > dudes.

> Women and people of color join hackerspaces all the time ... "Our geek cred > is constantly challenged or belittled ... some dude is going to come up to > you and act like you need his expert lessons in how to hack."

If "white dudes" are becoming more aware that women and minorities are getting into tech and wanting to get into tech, many of them will want to help in any way they can, including asking if you need help. Saying that this is belittling is saying that there is malicious intent, which is alienating to anyone who wants to help spread their knowledge to new people.

<comment><USER8> I am a female programmer in my mid thirties. I've had careers before tech, I learn new things all the time.

I have the ability to tell the difference when someone is treating me a certain way because I am a newbie or because I am a woman.

It's incredibly insulting that every time this is brought up it's written off as women not understanding basic human interaction.

<comment><USER9> "I have the ability to tell the difference ..."

But that's the _whole_ point: it's hard to tell! Of course the classification is easy at the end points (super helpful guy vs total arrogant jerk) but towards the mean the probability of false alarm is much larger. Geeks are a diverse bunch, it may just be that the guy is from another country where interactions are different or it may be just that he's a bit awkward initially because he does not interact with women daily (it happens).

I think the correct approach is to give them the benefit of doubt for a while before labeling them as dudes or whatever. Isn't that the golden rule?

<comment><USER8> I always give people the benefit of the doubt? Why would you think that women aren't?

I am an awkward person with social anxiety. The idea that women like myself aren't already doing that is part of the absurdity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They don't say much about what tools these places have. I heard about DoubleUnion in SF, and asked my feminist punk lesbian artist friend about it. "What tools do they have" was her first question. They have a laser cutter, a low-end 3D printer, some Arduino stuff, and sewing equipment. She wasn't impressed. She's taught at TechShop. She needs at least a small milling machine.

TechShop itself has many women members and employees. But that's in decline. TechShop used to let their employees take any class they wanted for free, and women were getting jobs there and learning all the machines. Their main welding instructor was a woman, and a cynical punker with colored hair overhauled the milling machines. Now TechShop charges their employees for classes and they have to take them on their own time. The result is receptionists at tool checkout who don't even know what the tools look like.

<comment><USER11> Double Union has never had a laser cutter, but it has two small milling machines (a Shapeoko and a Handibot). It has a bunch of other tools as well, such as screenprinting equipment (exposure unit, screens, ink, squeegees, drying racks, paper cutters, etc.), a Silhouette vinyl cutter, button maker, woodburning tool, Dremels, light box for drawing/tracing, hot plate for dyeing fabric, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'As with many extensions of startup culture...' \- is this true? Are american hacker spaces grown out of startup culture?

<comment><USER13> Not in the slightest. Hacker spaces are an extension of just about every enthusiasts club ever, and if anything startup culture is a product of THOSE. Nobody sat down and said "you know, these startups are pretty cool, I should start a casual place to work on such a thing." Most hackerspace projects aren't even for profit, they're just things to learn on or group projects to socialize and expand the craft.

Remember that Wozniak tinkered with hardware for fun and his day job at HP. Such things were possible then, but before that there was always clubs for engineers and creatives of all kinds. We often ignore history when we create these kinds of articles, because writing things in the context of history is hard and doesn't get as many clicks if you don't put more effort into it. I find this phenomenon deeply interesting, as we'd do much better as a species if we learned historical contexts for a lot of things we think are new and powerful ideas.

tl;dr: No, startup culture is a niche extension of hackerspaces. Not the other way around.

<comment><USER4> I disagree further--I don't think that startup culture ( _especially_ the pseudo Ponzi stuff we see nowadays) has _anything_ to do with hackerspaces.

"Startup culture" is purely an invention of "How do I build a business with no resources"? Hackerspaces are the continuation of HAM radio clubs and electronics clubs and engineers bullshitting at bars and people letting folks goof around with their broken television sets and kids goofing around on BBS.

None of that has anything to do with startups--to say otherwise is pretty much just astroturfing.

<comment><USER14> Many 1-2 person startups use hackerspaces (which have no formal definition) as co-working spaces. So there is a symbiotic relationship there, especially when some hackerspaces cost $100 to $300 per month.

Formal hackerspaces (e.g. have a building, have staff, have policies) are [potentially non-profit] startups themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >some dude is going to come up to you and act like you need his expert lessons in how to hack.

Seriously? "The bad white cis-hetero male offers us his help", patriarchy right?

This is ridiculous, really stop it...

</comment><comment><USER16> Here a bit late but I wanted to mention at least one amazing and beautiful project that (at least partly!) arose from Double Union members' work. BubbleSort - zines about computer science. Have a look! They are more like gorgeous tiny books than what you may think of as a zine.

BubbleSort: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sailorhg/bubblesort- com...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sailorhg/bubblesort-computer- science-zines)

Or check out Natalie Freed's work in electronics, bookbinding, and art: [http://www.nataliefreed.com/projects/](http://www.nataliefreed.com/projects/)

Or Jayne Vidheecharoen's awesome projects and her Appaloosa kit for kids learning mobile app programming, [http://seejayne.com/](http://seejayne.com/)

That is just off the top of my head! So much skill, idealism, and energy, combined with hard work! We have many members who are also part of TechShop, Noisebridge, work in tech, in startups, teach coding to wide audiences, and so on. DU and the other hackerspaces centered on women are worthy of celebrating! Our motivation is also very much that we want to support each other so that we feel able to stay in our various fields, and continue exploring our hacking and making arts.

So many talented women have gathered at the space and want to support each others' work. That's what should be highlighted.

I'll stop now :) Really, it's nice, though.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the late 1980s and early 1990s I worked in a community college computer lab with students and teachers.

I sat behind a desk and waited for the students to come to me to ask questions or ask for help. I wasn't allowed to go up to the students and ask them if they needed help.

I handed out floppy disks, and one of them logged into the Novell Network on a PC or PS/2 DOS machine. We had software on the Novell server and on floppy disks.

I debugged programs too, we had a debugger for that but when she couldn't figure something out or it was in a language she didn't know they sent the students to me to figure it out. Lady who was a debugger eventually took over the department. She taught me logical methods when I was a student there. I was let go in 1992 because I graduated (I went half-time and worked half-time there, had to be a student to keep the job).

We had women and minorities as well in the computer lab, I helped everyone equally. We didn't seem to have the issues that exists today in hacker spaces with feminists. I don't know what has changed since 1992.

What I do know is that not knowing feminism or gender studies terms can make one look like a jerk or people can take things the wrong way. For example transgender people, if you don't know to call a transgender woman as a she or her and respect that she has an identity as a woman you could get into a lot of trouble. The slightest thing you say can be taken out of context and found as offensive. For example we had a professor who told a woman that her method for solving a problem was 'bush league' and that his method was a much better one. He was talking about baseball but the woman complained he was talking about female parts and so he got into trouble for sexual harassment.

</comment><comment><USER9> "This kind of agenda evokes the start of a feminist dream sequence, or the basis of a Portlandia episode."

Summed it up pretty well.</comment>


Cuba is hoping to replace Venezuelan oil with American tourists - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/cuba-is-hoping-to-replace-venezuelan-oil-with-american-tourists/

<comment> guard-of-terra They seem to have a bright future ahead now that Russia let them forget $50B debt, and USA suddently became friendly after that.

<comment><USER2> To be honest I definitely think that visit to Cuba by Putin cannot be ignored, but I think the money isn't the main reason for the US's change in stance.

Between 1991 ish and now the cold war ended, but nothing much really changed since then. It was like the entire world was just letting the status quo sit for a while so see how things settled after such a large political change (e.g. would Russia turn into a western-style democracy?).

And I think the Ukraine incident gave everyone (mostly europe and the US) a wake up call that not only has Russia not changed, but it is likely not going to change. So now you have Russia buddying up to Cuba again, and you also have a Russia which is a legitimate threat to world peace (which isn't to say I think Russia will attack the US, I mean world peace in the sense of Russia picking fights with its direct neighbours).

So the US had a choice to make, they could either keep ignoring Cuba while keeping its evidently ineffective embargo going, or they could try to buddy up with Cuba. Given Russia's current financial position (read: bad) and the US's position (read: good) it makes a lot of sense for Cuba to pick the US right now over Russia.

The money forgiveness is just the "cherry on top." The fact that Cuba is now largely out of Russia's pocket financially just makes it even easier for the US to influence Cuba, which they've already started doing.

But ultimately with or without the forgiveness Cuba needs trade and tourism from the US. Russia cannot offer that logistically. I'd describe it with this analogy: "Russia and the US are both employers, but you owe Russia money, Russia says that if you work for them they'll reduce your dept but pay you nothing, the US says that if you work for them they'll just pay you normally and if you wish to pay off the Russia debt so be it (but can keep it after)."

<comment> guard-of-terra "Given Russia's current financial position (read: bad) and the US's position (read: good) it makes a lot of sense for Cuba to pick the US right now over Russia.

The money forgiveness is just the "cherry on top.""

You can roughly translate as "Russia gave Cuba over to the US for free, plus the extra blaming". No wonder one will be in bad financial position when they have to forgive debts owned to them over and over.</comment></comment></comment>


Isotope – Filter and sort magical layouts - <AUTHOR> https://isotope.metafizzy.co/ <comment><USER2> Cool stuff, but last updated in May 2018, and jquery-based. (FWIW this project might well represent the pinnacle of a stack whose time has passed. Kind of like a P-51 Mustang in the age of the jet fighter.)

<comment><USER3> I had the opposite reaction, this library really shines _because_ of its simplicity of implementation.

Just add a single JS script, some CSS classes, a few click handlers and you're done -- you get a really nice-looking sortable and filterable grid layout that seamlessly handles a non-trivial amount of complexity behind the scenes (element positioning, animations, reacting to grid resize, dynamically-sized elements, for starters).

It doesn't try to be a "stack", you can just drop it into existing code (perhaps with existing styles and perhaps with existing page elements). The documentation is really clear and polished (and even works without JS enabled!).

If you need a "jet fighter" to manipulate the DOM, you're doing something wrong.

<comment><USER2> That jab at the end was uncalled for. Keeping it civil, I might counter: If the basis of your web application's approach to something as fundamental as layout is "dropping in" a 3rd-party, jquery-based package, you're doing something trivial.

<comment><USER3> For my penance I shall hereby link a similarly cool, jQuery-free library[1] that also improves a few things:

      - handles element drag & drop
      - very customizable (ability to BYO layout algorithm is nice)
      - better license
      - updated more recently

Cheers!

[1]: [https://github.com/haltu/muuri](https://github.com/haltu/muuri)

<comment><USER2> Right on. Upvoted both your comments, FWIW</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Convert your computer into private cloud storage device - <AUTHOR> https://www.basefolder.com/index.php/features/ <comment><USER2> linux support?</comment>


Setting Up a WebRTC Soft-Phone in QueueMetrics on FreePBX - <AUTHOR> https://www.queuemetrics.com/blog/2017/09/13/WebRTC-New/?lid=H040 <comment><USER2> I find it always a PITA to set up WebRTC in Asterisk. Not sure if it is just me.

<comment><USER3> Worked on it in the past and definitely can confirm. Should be better with Asterisk 15.</comment></comment>


IPhone user? Your views wanted for a public sector report into app marketing. - <AUTHOR> http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Na3g8ekjK1fgdNRx2U9RRQ_3d_3d

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but the wording/phrasing on that survey was just atrocious. Did anyone review this prior to putting it online or was it just a stream of conciousness from one author? Look at question #12:

 _Do you frequently purchase or download apps of established online/digital brands? eg. classic games ported to the iPhone (Doom, The Sims, Rock Band) or web services that you use frequently (eg. Facebook, eBay, Amazon).

How much of your total app collection is made up of these sort of apps?_

I don't know how to begin answering that question.

No offense but the author needs to read a few, "How to design a survey" articles. It won't take more than 15 minutes but the data you get back will be valuable as opposed to "What did he mean when he said 'No'? Was he answering No to the first or second question?"</comment>


Mnuchin: US has 'serious concerns' that FBs Libra could be misused by terrorists - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/treasury-secretary-mnuchin-will-hold-a-news-conference-on-cryptocurrencies-at-2-pm-et.html <comment><USER2> Ha ha, one of the Four Horsemen of the Random Internet Apocalypse. If "But Terrorists!" doesn't work, I predict you'll see "But child porn!" or "But Bombs!" pulled out next. "But Intellectual Propery!" has kind of fallen out of favor these days, after every musician publicly denounces any political opponent who uses his/her music.

</comment><comment><USER3> And other cryptocurrencies cannot? I don't like FB and I personally wouldn't use Libra because it seems to defeat a couple reasons for even using a cryptocurrency.

I don't care for the precedent this commentary would have on product introductions in general. "I don't like 'x' from company 'y' because terrorism!" Yeah whatever, unfair comparison.</comment>


IronPython 2.7 Released - <AUTHOR> http://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/54498

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering what people use this for and if popular frameworks such as Django run on it?

<comment><USER2> The most common use is adding an extension environment to .NET apps, which is very, very easy with the DLR.

Big frameworks don't fully work, primarily because IronPython uses Unicode strings everywhere (like Python 3). We are working to improve compatibility as much as possible though, and moving to 3.0 will really help.</comment></comment>


The Subtle Power of Booleans: Programming with truth and statefulness - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bellmar/the-subtle-power-of-booleans-e6d5fa2fcc4a <comment> caleb-allen Funny, coincidentally I recently read a paper [0] arguing (among other things) that truth values should be completely removed--that for software engineering they are largely useless and cause mistakes.

The argument goes that a True False value will "mean" different things in a context, but then when trying to model a complex entity there are inevitably leakages of definitions.

For formal verification of existing Boolean logic, however, it reasons that "verifying" our truth values would be very helpful, by exploring and modeling the state space that is made up by the composition of multiple booleans. This is very interesting in that regard!

[0]: Formalizing common sense reasoning for scalable inconsistency-robust information integration using Direct Logic Reasoning and the Actor Model, Carl Hewitt. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.4852.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.4852.pdf)

<comment><USER2> > _The argument goes that a True False value will "mean" different things in a > context_

Well, it is the same with numbers anytime they mean something in the real world. One would have to add "unit types" to numbers and check that x + y causes a type error when a "nr. of humans" is added to a "nr. of rainy days", to give an example. If that is represented by adding two integers there won't be an error. In software comparing apples and oranges works fine as long as you use numbers...

<comment><USER3> Isn't that the whole point of nominal type systems that you shouldn't be "comparing apples and oranges"

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but type systems are not fool proof. eg: I've seen plenty of Java code which blindly passes String objects around that eventually get parsed into json/int/long/etc. At that point, the type system has been silently circumvented.

"Nothing is foolproof given a sufficiently talented fool."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > CNF we would not say the Englishman lives in the red house we would say > either the owner of the house is NOT the Englishman OR the house is red > (which effectively means the same thing).

Effectively, maybe. Somebody might object that those two clauses (NOT the Englishman OR the house is red) can't be satisfied both at the same time - because not only the Englishman lives in the red house, also nobody else also lives there. So it's also true "NOT the Englishman IMPLIES the house is NOT red", "house is NOT red IMPLIES NOT the Englishman", neither of which is derivable from the original clause (CNF allows regular, "mathematical" understanding).

</comment><comment><USER6> Confusingly headlined article is about bookean circuit satisfiability (SAT).

</comment><comment><USER7> funfact: Boole titled his on book on his algebra "The Laws of Thought". AI & computation were old friends long before electro-computers.

<comment><USER8> Still on that subject: Russel&Norvig put a "planning algorithm" on the cover of their AI book. The algorithm is by Aristotle ( _De motu animalium_ ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now, here's a great read. Loved it. I've used tla+ ... I'll give alloy a try too. I'm interested in anything else along these lines.</comment>


Down with Algebra II - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/algebra-ii-has-to-go.html <comment><USER2> Throughout my school career I was a top student in math, generally enjoying it and even sometimes just doing math for fun of it. (I still do this on occasion.) But probably the single most _useful_ math class I ever took was "Practical Math" in the 8th grade, which I just did on a lark. All of my other math courses were of the college-bound and later engineering varieties.

But frankly I'm appalled at the amount of math many college majors still require today. I eventually grew quite tired of it myself, once I (as a student already working in my chosen profession) realized that most of it was just a waste of my time, which could be better spent elsewhere. For example, I see no sane reason why someone who has spent their entire life dreaming of becoming a doctor or whatever, and who is otherwise generally well-suited for that profession, hits an impenetrable barrier at calculus or some such and so has to give up their dreams. I once asked a medical instructor some years back how much calculus he and his students (future doctors) actually used, both in school and afterwards, and his response was that they generally didn't use much more than basic algebra. Today I'd expect that they just put a few numbers into a calculator or computer, press a button and they're done.

</comment><comment><USER3> If our educational complexes can't successfully hammer Algebra II into someone's head, why does this Wheeler fellow think they'd be any more successful hammering something else into it?

Compared to the complexity of just about anything that is real, Algebra II is like learning to crawl or use silverware.

Odds are, the educational system is failing just as badly on every other subject. It's just harder to screw up the metric on something as objective as mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER4> > coders of the future shouldn't have to master abstract math that they'll > never need

This is awful. Humans should be moving rapidly towards mathematical literacy, not away from it.

If you only need calculus for .001% of your job, that doesn't mean you only have to learn .001% of calculus. No one is paying you to use calculus everyday. They're paying you to know when calculus needs to be used and how to apply it, the one day they actually need it.</comment>


How Much Longer Can Tech's Free Party Last? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/how-much-longer-can-techs-free-party-last/265384/

<comment><USER2> I'd say - Look to what it takes for a local currency to succeed, and then consider the effect of crowd-funding and the Humble Bundle model. The former is what allows the system to sustain itself, and the latter is what allows an influx of resources from other systems.</comment>


No-tipping experiment at Costa Mesa restaurants axed - <AUTHOR> http://www.ocregister.com/articles/bl246m-719532-marin-prices.html <comment><USER2> In EU businesses have to advertise the whole price of everything they sell: including things like tax and service.

I am always surprised that in the US, with all its consumer protection laws, businesses get to advertise prices that are misleading. You have to pay the minimum service fee, or you'll get into a loud argument. You have to pay tax too of course, but it's added to the bill separately, which makes it inpractical too: buy a coffee for USD4, and you have to pay an impractical amount like 4.36. I always suspect this is a ploy by businesses to protest these taxes.

<comment><USER3> I feel forcing restaurant and vendors to quote the full price allows politicians off the hook for high tax rates. I think it serves a purpose that anyone that has parked in NYC knows there is 18%+ tax on their parking lot, and everyone in PR knows of 11% tax tacked on to nearly every item.

<comment><USER2> If you feel that way, why not also let everyone know the profit margin as well, and put that separately on the tab? So everyone can know how much profit goes to the business owner?

These things are politically motivated, and do not serve the consumer, who simply has to pay the full cost of doing business.

<comment><USER4> Profit margin is a private personal manner of the business owners, and sales tax is a matter of public records and government law.

<comment><USER5> Which is why the tax is printed clearly on the receipt. Personally I do not like the American way of not including the tax into the listed price because it makes it harder to shop with a limited amount of cash on hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > At Marin, a large bacon and egg breakfast sandwich was $22, and refillable > coffee was $7. On Friday it will go down to $18 and $5, respectively.

It was not exactly an inexpensive restaurant to begin with.

<comment><USER7> > Marin

> $22 egg sandwich

I can hear the world's smallest violin playing for the wealthy snobs of Marin County.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps, but this article is about a restaurant called Marin in Orange County.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the "lower prices" of $18 for bacon and eggs and $5 for coffee, you'd think they could pay the servers more than minimum wage, even with tipping.

<comment><USER10> High end restaurants don't get their ingredients from the same place you do or McDonald's does. The quality there is above and beyond.

<comment><USER11> The cost of ingredients for coffee are a small fraction of the cost, whether you charge $2 or $5 for it. There is a student-run café at my university, all staff are unpaid volunteers, they serve really good coffee for 50 euro-cents (~55¢ US). The beans are from a high-end local roasting house, and it's in a real cup. Milk (whole/soy) is included. Coffee is cheap.

<comment><USER12> _Coffee is cheap_

Rent isn't. I bet those students pay a lot less in rent every month (and quite possibly they don't pay anything at all) than what it costs a nice restaurant to rent a centrally located place.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but the post I replied to was about the cost of ingredients. And McDonald's has some really expensive locations as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > McKenzie surveyed 40 servers working for moderately priced sit-down > restaurants. He asked what hourly wage they would need to voluntarily forgo > their current minimum wage and all tips. The rate they wanted ranged from > $18 to $50 an hour, according to the study

Ouch. Living somewhere where tipping is already not the norm, that seems...wildly unrealistic? I wonder what the average was.

<comment><USER14> One would need to know what moderately-priced meant.

Three of us went to a Thai restaurant in the Washington suburbs last night. Dinner was $75, and we tipped 20%. Suppose each server had six tables (which I think was about right) and that the turnover is 1.5 hours per table, that's four tips per hour. Our bill might have been on the high side (a beer each, and one more entree than we needed); but it would probably be safe to set $20/person as the low side of the bill, and a table average of 2.25 persons--I saw no solo diners, and a number of tables of four persons. So the hourly turnover during busy hours might be upwards of $180. The slow spells later would be less, though maybe compensated some by more alcohol with the meals. Anyway, with an average tip of 15%, that's $27/hour for the busy hours at least.

So $18/hour seems fairly realistic. $50/hour suggests a turnover of something more like $350/hour, so maybe a $90/table charge. I guess that Washington counts this a moderately priced.

(It could also be that not all of cash tips come to the attention of the IRS; but I don't know how much cash gets put down in that range of restaurant.)

<comment><USER10> You're on the right track but it must also be remembered the time of year affects this along with seniority of the waiter (how many hours they get) and their own availability. Waiters can have great days and weeks followed by poor ones but waiters at good restaurants can make decent money on tips. Too many bad stories are from IHOP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a shame. Tipping is a pernicious practice in the US. But he seemed to have good data.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sometimes it's painful to realize how not economically rational people are.

<comment><USER17> I know, right? Sometimes when I am sitting through an econ talk it is very hard not to say, "But your assumption one is wrong."

<comment><USER18> Coincidentally, I submitted this interview an hour ago.

"An interview with Professor Richard Thaler, godfather of behavioural economics"

[http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/id-have-said-lets-not- do-...](http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/id-have-said-lets-not-do-this-what- osborne-never-asked-his-nudge-guru/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927635)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately it's another case of "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"

Maybe it could have been handled differently.

</comment><comment><USER20> They removed a 15% tip, increased pay from 10 to 15 and prices by 20%, replacing a payment you should do with one that you must do. What could go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER21> "And most were actually working even harder because they were working as a team for Arc, not themselves"

Give me a break!

<comment><USER10> You don't understand. When you wait tables, you are in a little fiefdom of your own that you are responsible for and no one else's. Helping others takes time away from your space and, potentially, your own income. When your income isn't based on helping yourself alone, then you can form a team to help each other when they run into problems.

Note that I am not saying waiters never help each other out.</comment></comment>


Ask/Request HN: Personal Metrics Apps - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a web based application that is focused on personal metrics and logging.
Things such as the ability to manage a timeline with various waypoints and periods that I can set according to things that happen in my personal life.
Do you know of such apps, or startups focused on this area? (If I got the terminology wrong please let me know) <comment><USER2> I'm not sure, but maybe this is what you are looking for?

<http://www.goalsontrack.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Daytum.com</comment>


RaphaëlJS — A JavaScript library for drawing, using SVG and VML - <AUTHOR> http://raphaeljs.com/

<comment><USER2> They are beginning to release some charting api built on top of raphael here <http://g.raphaeljs.com/>. The project is at this url <http://github.com/DmitryBaranovskiy/g.raphael>

<comment><USER3> thanks for the heads up!! i'm mucking with the code now.

edit: i had to patch uses of this.raphael.is(obj, "array") with my own isArray function, since the raphael object doesn't have an is property.

i was using the latest raphael.js in the github repo.

probably the g.raphael repo is out of synch.

anyway, i got the demo graphs on test2.html working. the look ok, but clearly pre-alpha. very little features, definitely rough.

i can't wait to see where this goes, though.

i tried a quick hack using one of the hard coded demos from the raphael demo page. dang.

it's late. i'm not sure how far i should persue this. time to sleep on it.... it's so hard to escape the pull of pretty AND fast graphs....

<comment><USER2> Dmitry Baranovskiy is the guy who wrote the <http://raphaeljs.com/analytics.html> page too.

<comment><USER3> i was hacking on <http://raphaeljs.com/chart.html> first because the animation is just so beautiful. definitely got me digging into the SVG path specs <http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/paths.html#PathData> but man is that code a rats nest. i just had a look at analytics.html and it is a breath of good design.

i really want analytics and chart demos, plus <http://raphaeljs.com/github/impact.html> to be part of g.raphael.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> i like raphaeljs. i'm right now hacking on some graphs and wondering if i should merge some of the demo's from raphaeljs's homepage into a graphing library or not...

i'm on iteration 2 after static google code api charts, so a little library building could be ok. normally i'd shoot to reuse a js library, eg flot, for an iteration 2 hack, but some of this work may be useful for my startup...

i found this jquery+raphael simple graphing library: <http://github.com/benaskins/simplegraph>

it's definitely simple and...not pretty, though that might be easily tweakable. could be a good starting place.

Prototype+Raphaeljs <http://github.com/alexyoung/ico> has some nice screenshots

Prototype+raphaeljs library under "heavy pre-alpha" development, help desirable: <http://github.com/savetheclocktower/krang>

</comment><comment><USER4> Raphael replaced flash for us. Nice little thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks jeff18 for submitting this. I am attending the SVG Open 2009 conference in a couple weeks to present a paper and a workshop on RaphaëlJS.

As a quick intro, Raphaël can be used to create rich interactive graphics, generating vector elements that are native to the browser and the DOM. Native DOM elements are exposed to Javascript, allowing for them to be used in the same manner as any other HTML element.

Raphaël can attach Javascript handlers, events, animations, and other features native to Javascript to SVG/VML elements created in Raphaël. Raphaël works in IE6+, FF3+, Safari 3+, and Opera 9.5+.

The presentation and paper will be available on the SVG Open website (as soon as I finish it): [http://www.svgopen.org/2009/registration.php?section=abstrac...](http://www.svgopen.org/2009/registration.php?section=abstracts_and_proceedings#paper_20)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very very nice, it seems to offer more capabilities than using the javascript canvas facilities (dashed or dotted lines for example) plus the fact that the graphic elements are in a DOM structure makes it easier to update existing graphics rather than having to redraw everything.

Its now on my todo list to experiment with it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The developer, Dmitry, is a nice guy and pretty responsive on Twitter to questions about Raphaël.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks really good! This could be really useful.

I've been looking for something to replace openflashchart, but I would ideally like something with stacked bar charts. Maybe there's a charting engine written on top of this somewhere (or that could be written).

</comment><comment><USER9> It looks great, but is browser support sufficient? I don't care about IE5 that much, but has everybody upgraded to Firefox 3 yet?</comment>


Show HN: How hacking my wife's Etsy business turned into my first SaaS product - <AUTHOR> https://getnovelty.com/novelty-blog/how-hacking-my-wifes-etsy-business-allowed-me-to-create-my-first-saas-product <comment><USER2> Congrats on the launch. Looks to be a promising product. All the best!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>