Ask HN: What Novel Are you Writing This Month? - <AUTHOR> It's the start of the National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 words novel in the span of one month.
What are you writing?
I am writing the "Courier War" which is about a tax-evading robotic courier network. My goal was to write 1666.67 words a day so that I will achieve the goal in 30 days. <comment><USER2> I'm not in nanowrimo because I was 56,000 words into this one before November 1st, but ...

I'm continuing to write "The Apocalypse Codex", the fourth Laundry Files novel. At the start of the series, Bob Howard, a slashdot-reading sandal- wearing geek, accidentally got himself conscripted by the Laundry, that branch of the British secret service concerned with applications of Computational Demonology -- defending the realm from Lovecraftian horrors.

Ten years on, Bob has been shunted onto the management promotion fast-track as the emergency generated by the return of the Elder Gods gathers pace. In this installment, he's been put in charge of a couple of external contractors (hint: the Laundry _never_ uses contractors -- officially) and tasked with learning just why a certain televangelist is cosying up to the Prime Minister. "I feel like I've been given a sack of catnip and a laser pointer and told to go play with the kittens behind the fence labelled 'Siberian Tigers'" he complains -- except the tigers have run into a big game hunter, and the fecal matter is about to hit the wind farm ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm doing an experiment: I'm writing a novel without knowing what it's about at all beforehand. I find things out only as I write them down.

So far: It's fairly close to real life, with a touch of sci-fi (which I expect to become more than a touch pretty soon). The setting is - currently - a big building in a city, and I'm trying to work hard on character development (since I always have trouble with that).

I'm finding the biggest problem with this strategy is that I need a motivator to keep my characters going. But it seems to be working for now. We'll see in a couple of days :)

<comment><USER4> Good luck with that. I made an attempt at a novel (not during NaNo) where I had an intro situation/scene in my head and an idea at the ending, but that was it.

Around 30k words I was in a hole I had no idea how to get out of, so I sidelined the story until I have the time/energy to go back and fix it, building a proper plot structure with an attempt at keeping as much of what I'd already written as possible. But it's low priority compared to NaNo and a series I've had in the back of my head for something like a year.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Writing something as long-form as a novel without planning it out ahead of time is going to lead to frustration and, ultimately, a weaker final product.

Would you build a house without a blueprint?

<comment><USER4> If you a) have enough of a fundamental understanding of how to structure a story and b) are willing to do as many rewrites as it takes to tighten up the work and fill in small holes/do a better job of foreshadowing.

Is it more work? Pretty much guaranteed. But for people who are incapable of writing with an outline (get bored or what have you) it CAN be done, but it ends up being significantly more work.

<comment><USER5> There may be people out there more "capable" of writing without an outline than others, but would you bank on most neophytes' being those exceptions to the rule? I wouldn't.

I would advise that most hobbyists or newbies stick to the techniques that have worked since as far back as the days of Aeschylus and Euripides. When you're Hemingway, feel free to break tradition and do your own thing. But assuming one is Hemingway before writing one's first novel is often a misguided assumption.

You don't need to outline exhaustively, mind you, but some sort of architecture is probably advisable. It will make for a better story, which is ultimately what the exercise is supposed to be about. Too often, new writers forget that they're supposed to be writing for an audience, not for themselves.

<comment><USER5> Understandable, and I don't mean to imply that there are absolutes applicable to everyone. Rather, I'm a believer in statistics. By far the majority of hobbyist writers will benefit from an outline. Also, I've found that overconfidence and newness to the hobby are correlated. So it's just a matter of saying to most beginners that they should strongly consider outlining. Not necessarily that everyone absolutely should be outlining, but rather, that it's a good starting place for most people.

I suggest newbies try outlining before deciding categorically that they don't need to do so. That's all.

<comment><USER4> I've found in general people take advice better after going through with a choice and discovering it doesn't work :). Then they have a better appreciation for the alternatives and more willing to listen, especially when you can relate it to what they've already experienced.

<comment><USER5> Ain't that the truth, right? People need to experiment and figure out what works best for them. Perhaps it's for the best that some folks will give up after trying writing and not succeeding to their own expectations. And the ones who persist after a few initial setbacks may never go on to become great success stories -- but they'll have cultivated a personally enriching hobby, and the quality of their work will improve with practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An as-yet-untitled fantasy adventure, where I'm including every cool idea I can fit in there, just for the fun of it. There will be a world with Escher- style gravity, and another place with a fractal tree structure where long- distance journeys happen in logarithmic time, and the characters will have very best dialog I can muster. This time, I'm going to try to use foreshadowing, and avoid expo-dumping.

Good luck, everybody.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not really sure what I'm writing, but I'm writing something. There is no focus character development, some action, and so far it mostly consists of the author trolling the reader. So far the protagonist has walked through a desert, talked to a discoloration, survived a gunfight, won the admiration of street urchins, and started the perilous admissions process for some kind of school. It's basically ridiculous(ly bad), and there is no plan for the future plot or really even a well-laid-out setting. But hey, Nanowrimo is not about the plot.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually doing a variant I like to call NaRaRaMo (national rap rapping month) where I write, rehearse, and record (and post on youtube) a rhyme every single day in November. One so far of course.

<comment><USER9> That sounds amazing. Link?

(unless you were joking, but I still think NaRaRaMo is a great idea)

<comment><USER8> I was not joking. This is the link to the playlist... which still only has one rap: <http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=43D4E838F379E338>

The second rap is coming in mere minutes though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm writing "Everwake"

It's about a future where our preoccupation with productivity led us to genetically engineer away our need/ability to sleep. In this future sleep becomes the drug of choice and the domain of the counter culture.

I have a framework I wrote last month and a good friend of mine is a sci-fi editor. She agreed to give me notes, mainly so I would leave her alone.

Not really going to set a word a day goal. With me, I find that sometimes only a few hundred words eek out. While other days 3000-4000 come out freely.

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Are you familiar with "Beggars in Spain" by Nancy Kress? (Hint: past decade Hugo-award winner.)

NB: if not, do _not_ go and read it just now. Finish your own work first, _then_ read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's called "The Xi", it's about the "Firefighters Foreign Legion". They are on a sacred mission ;) I served 5y. in the Paris Fire Brigade, hence the inspiration. Now since it is a hobby, I just need to write a little bit regularly to finish it one day (I should do 1500 caracters without space/day) it turns out that it is hard! That's one of the main reason w/ my cofounder we started Quantter. It allows you to track your progress not only on performance but more important on regularity, and your friends can cheer you on when your regularity drops. One line per day & your novel is on the way;) Looking forward to reading your stories guys!

</comment><comment><USER12> What am I writing? This link to a friend's website: <http://101reasonstostopwriting.com>

Unfortunately he abandoned it after only 17 reasons. Perhaps he convinced himself?

</comment><comment><USER13> A scifi-ish novel set in the slums of Jakarta and ranging over the rest of a near-future Oceania. 3200 words in, pretty much on target for the 50k month, but that probably won't be the end of the novel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mine is science fiction too as it is about predominately robots that carry stuff from one location to another evading polices. Pretty fun stuff.

But I don't know what your story's about?

<comment><USER13> Mostly about a small girl trying to find her brother, who's been kidnapped from the slums and taken to NZ for some nefarious purpose I haven't discovered yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to write this month but:

I'm running an event on targeted attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats.

I have a research paper to finish on a class of vulnerabilities.

I'm preparing for my Tigerscheme SST exam.

I'm taking part in the HN November launch month.

I'm growing a comedy moustache for prostate cancer awareness this Movember (<http://uk.movember.com/mospace/552354/> if you want to donate, all donations gratefully received!)

My November is unfortunately too packed to the gills. Of course, I could always write a novel about my november.... No, wait...

</comment><comment><USER15> I used my app to generate a topic for my novel, here's my blog post about it:

<http://www.tapnik.com/post/nano2010>

The topic was "Mistaken Judgement / Corporate / Cannon", so far the novel is about a burnt out software dev at a large and increasingly irrelevant company in the pacific northwest who travels to mars in a cannon. It's in the modern day but with the astrophysics of the age of reason transplanted -- mars has atmosphere, canals and forests, etc..

I'm "jdavis" on NaNoWriMo, add me as a writing buddy!

</comment><comment><USER4> Shooting for 100k words on a fantasy novel with a working title of The Hand of Power. Already sitting on 3270 words after a full day at work too, so making good time towards the 100k mark.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the Hand Of Power about?

<comment><USER4> My easiest answer is to copy my synopsis:

When a King dies, his son must discover if he needs to follow in his father's footsteps, of tread his own path of rulership. All the while holding onto a family secret dating back generations, one which helps them keep power... so long as no one knows about it.

Meanwhile his most trusted adviser finds herself crippled during an attack on the new King, destroying her both physically and mystically. She must discover who she truly is and how she can help her Liege in her new situation, while coming to understand just how dangerous the world really is.

edit: My "big theme" is exploring identity, in the young monarch's case figuring out who he is as a ruler, in the Elementalist's case figuring out how to handle life after her magic is crippled. All while dealing with strife from those who would depose him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just wanted to mention a site I made called One Page Per Day. Lots of people are using it to do NaNo this year:

<http://www.onepageperday.com>

<comment><USER6> How does that work? Wouldn't you need to write several pages per day to finish NaNoWriMo? If we estimate 250 words per page (typical in ordinary-sized books) then you'd need to write more than six pages per day to finish on time. Do you give people very large pages? Or does the name actually mean "At least one page per day"?

<comment><USER16> it means at least one per day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I'm not expecting to finish, and it may be more of a novella than a novel, I started a story based on a weird dream I had a couple nights ago. It involves stupidity, romance, danger, escape, other good stuff, and is all taking place in a world fairly similar to Minecraft's.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm finishing (so it doesn't really count) Children of Vitruvius, a future- punk/sci-f novel on the conflict of humanity's desire to do things because it can, against doing things because we should.

I've about 60-70k words left to go, so going to do that instead.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://github.com/shabda/nanowrimo/tree/master/outline/>

I am writing it with markdown and git.

<comment><USER6> That's pretty cool. I'm using Git and a simple text-based markup of my own devising, which is automatically translated into LaTeX (with the excellent memoir document class) so I can do proofreading on a nice-looking PDF. I was getting a little jittery while waiting for November to start, so that software was fun to write.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someday, I'd like to try this. But right now, every day, I write the book.</comment>


Ask HN: Design patterns for granting access to data scoped to blocks of time? - <AUTHOR> I'm struggling to come up with the right query terms for Google on this one.
Here's the basic business problem I'm trying to solve:
Let's say I have a car rental company. I rent cars one week at a time. I have reports for things like mileage over time periods for my renters to use.
Here's a scenario:
Customer 1 rents Car 1 for 1 week, drives 100 miles. Customer 2 then rents Car 1 for 1 week, drives 200 miles. Customer 1 rents Car 1 again for a week, and another 100 miles.
In my mileage report, I want to give Customer 1 access to the mileage accrued in by Car 1, but only for the blocks of time that they were the renters of the Car (so week 1 and week 3). Likewise, Customer 2 should only be able to access their block of time of rental (week 3).
Setting the UX concerns aside of chunks of missing data in a report, are there any established patterns out there for this type of query situation? <comment><USER2> Maybe I am under-thinking it, but why not just gray out and obscure those regions of the graph (or whatever) with a label "Different Driver"?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that I don't understand this, but can't you represent that problem with this sql?

SELECT mileage FROM table WHERE customer_id = 1;

Am I on the right track?</comment>


Chat with Elbot, which almost passed the Turing Test this morning - <AUTHOR> http://www.elbot.com/cgi-bin/elbot.cgi?START=normal

<comment><USER2> Spectacular failure in two lines of conversation:

      Me: What do you think of Strauss?
      Elbot: I don't know what a Strauss is!
      Me: Richard Strauss was one of the greatest composers of the early 20th century.
      Elbot: Oh, I talked to Richard this morning.

I think Elbot's authors need to work on keeping a bit more state between comments.

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of my attempts to teach A.L.I.C.E. ( <http://alice.pandorabots.com/> ) :

      Human: Who is the prime minister of britain?

      ALICE: Tony Blair.

      Human: No, it is Gordon Brown now.

      ALICE: Oh. Are you serious? Should I know it is?

      Human: Yes, I've told you so before, please remember.

      ALICE: I will ask my botmaster to program it. Take it easy. What happened after please remember ?

      Human: So who is the prime minister in the uk?

      ALICE: Dude! Tony Blair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title of this article is misleading - I very much doubt this thing came close to passing the test.

      > Please tell me one thing you know.
      It would be nice if you could tell me something, such as a fairy tale about robots.

      > Do you know any fairy tales?
      Does this mean you would like me to tell you my story?

      > If that is something you know.
      It's about time that you came to see me. What were you doing before you came?

      > Before I came I was reading news.ycombinator.com but that's beside the point, I'd like to know something you know.
      Couldn't you tell me something for a change, for example: Why don't you human beings rust when it rains on you?

      > I just told you something about me.  Don't you remember what it is?
      I'll say one thing: You seem highly interested in robotic opinions.</comment>


Missing E-Mail Is the Least of the IRS's Problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-17/missing-e-mail-is-the-least-of-the-irs-s-problems <comment><USER2> I buy widespread incompetence in government IT management in general and the IRS in particular. (Not commenting on the political valence of this, in observance of the HN politics rule.)

Last year, after requesting an ITIN for my wife (who is not a US citizen and thus requires an SSN-esque replacement to be able to file joint taxes), we received two letters from the IRS. One had the ITIN. The other denied our request for the ITIN on the basis that "We have already issued her an ITIN." Apparently, the IRS explains, that second letter should have immediately set my accountant and I to doing forensic debugging of their protocols, because it means that something "seriously wrong" happened to our returns.

What? Glad you asked. See, the IRS had lost my return. "What?" The paper was "in the building somewhere" \-- we had gotten a receipt -- but they were unaware of what desk it was at. (Their first hypothesis was "You failed to file", and they threatened penalties for that, until being confronted with a Post Office return receipt. Which is, by the by, why you should always get a receipt.)

My accountant took over yelling at them for a while to find the return, and they eventually did, and -- miracle of miracles -- they typed it into the computer. _Twice._ Thus generating two separate and equal returns going through non-idempotent processes, such as ITIN generation.

When those two returns met up in the reconciliation stage, they blocked each other from processing. No one at the IRS noticed this, for approximately 7 months, until my third call to their CS line got someone to actually look at the file. She hit "delete" on the duplicate. (I really hope she was simplifying that for me, because it scares me if they can _actually_ delete anything.) Return processed almost immediately, refund check cut 48 hours later.

I almost feel sorry for them on being unprepared to unearth potential political malfeasance, because that is after all a distraction from the day to day administration of the Revenue Code, but processing returns is, as the saying goes, "their only job."

<comment><USER3> Tying the healthcare system into this mess was shockingly shortsighted, in retrospect.

<comment><USER4> My experience (fortunately relatively brief) of the American healthcare system's IT was that it could hardly get worse, although perhaps tempting fate is unwise. Lost records, insurance filings never coded or processed correctly; the only way anything got done was waiting on the phone for hours to get claims fixed, and photocopying records myself to have a copy I could physically carry somewhere. My favorite almost-worked-but-not-quite case was when an ophthalmologist managed (after 4 weeks) to get a copy of a retinal scan from my previous doctor in another city... but the photograph was sent as a completely unreadable _fax_ , in the year 2010.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the system is an embarrassment, but Obama knew the Only possible way to provide Americans with Insurance was to use for for profit insurance companies. I have huge concerns over health care, but at least I know I won't end up in Superior Court and lose my house if I get sick. I didn't have insurance when the Obama administration was trying to provide a Universal Healthcare Plan--the Republicans and even some Democrates were ruthless, and beyond dogmatic at attacking him. Obama knew if he didn't do something; we would have nothing!

So Yes, Health Care is a mess and we need to fix it. I feel we need some drastic changes; We need tort reform for Doctors. We need to build more medical schools, and offer a free education to the best applicants. Many drugs should be OTC.(If people abuse the system--they would lose the privilege). Use of fingerprints could weed out the Narco pill poppers? Patients on long term, daily medication should be able to refill their prescriptions--up to a year.(This would include long term pain management drugs). I could go on and on, but we need to drastically change the system, or at least do pilot trials?

I don't have all the answers; I'm just tired of doctors dragging me into office visits for no real reason--other than to take my money, or charge the Insurance companies. The next time your refills run out and you have to schedule an office visit you will know my frustration.

I'm a Nobody, and basically just venting. Sorry about the lenght of this post.

<comment><USER6> > but at least I know I won't end up in Superior Court and lose my house if I > get sick

That would not have happened anyway. If you can't pay a medical bill then don't. Just ignore it. Absolutely nothing will happen.

They might send you letters or call, but why subject yourself to that? Don't open the mail and don't answer the phone (they are required to use caller ID).

People are worried about credit rating but medical bills are excluded from that.

<comment><USER7> Medical debt is, in fact, the most common type of overdue collection account on American credit reports. Ignoring bills you owe is not good advice.

<comment><USER6> If you can't pay then you can't pay. Don't make yourself crazy over it, and you'll certainly not lose your house.

Even if recorded on a credit report it does not adversely affect your credit score.

<comment><USER8> That's not completely true.

I have personal knowledge of a Children's Hospital taking the home of the parents of a 13 month old infant who received a liver transplant and had ran up at 3 million dollar bill in the hospital.

A little backstory -- I love to volunteer. Fire/EMS, STEM, Kids, you name it, if it's a cause that I support, I'll generally be there with a bell if I've got the free time. One of my non profits that I do a fair amount of technical and 'feel-good' work is a foundation that caters to small children who have terminal or other serious illnesses and helps their family out.

One night in 2013, a rather distraught woman came in saying that Children's had placed a lien on her home because of the unpaid medical bills; apparently, they had moved, civil service sucks in Ohio, and had a default judgement against them. New collections company comes in, finds this family, and then places a lien on her homes, car, and gets a court order to garnish their bank account.

Ultimately, it took a pro-bono attorney about 80 hours to get the entire mess cleaned up. Today, the little guy is almost 4 and the family has a clean title on their home and car, and as long as she keeps less than $2K in her checking account at all times and only has the one home and one car, Children's will never come after her for the money that is owed, and in 3 years, they'll wipe away the debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few years ago I interviewed for a senior architect position on an IRS contract. To get the job I had to interview with the subcontractor who was filling the position, then with the prime contractor and finally with the IRS. You had to be accepted by all 3 layers, plus get through salary negotiations to get the position.

The principle job was to build a fraud investigation system by integrating a COTS analysis tool into the IRS systems to automatically generate cases for fraud investigation officers to review. One hitch, as I found out after getting through the gauntlet of interviews, the COTS product that they wanted to use wasn't built to support this kind of integration and the vendor wasn't interested in forking off a special build just for the IRS.

So I asked them a simple question "knowing what I know about this product, and the fact that it can't be integrated as desired, it seems that this is an impossible task, as the senior architect, I'd want to be clear that I have powers to restart the selection process of the tools and systems so I can build a solution that would actually perform as required, would I have this authority?"

At this point, the senior manager from the prime and the pm from the government side got very agitated. You see, there was only 2 months to get a basic system functional and as a result the selection and purchase process had already been completed.

"Without anybody leading the process?"

This was apparently the wrong question, as I had hit some sort of embarrassing point I shouldn't have dug into. They pretty much just wanted somebody in the role to rubber stamp the crap decisions they had already made. They became very defensive, there was some raised voices. I told them I wasn't interested in that kind of position and walked out.

2 years later I found out that they had scrapped the program completely after spending goodness knows how much money and were restarting the entire thing from scratch.

My gut feeling is that this new program too will fail since any working system would likely detect the fraud in their IT acquisition and management.

<comment><USER10> Not that you did anything wrong, but an IT architect restarting the selection process would, ironically enough, be a violation of the Federal Acquisition Regulations.

The correct way to go about it is to solicit for proposals, and any interested applicants will create a proposal. The submitted proposals will be reviewed by an applications board consisting of contracts officers, COTRs (Contract Officer Technical Rep, IIRC) and maybe a couple of architects, and judged against the criteria established in the solicitation, which may state that the technical superiority is more important than price, or what have you.

Presumably, either the sub or the prime contractor you were interviewing with had already submitted such a proposal, and was obligated to do the work as advertised in their proposal.

If they believed that it couldn't be done, the prime and/or sub-contractor would likely have been fired on inability to deliver, and the government would have had to re-solicit for the project altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked for a company that sold EMC products. one of those was an email product that made sure companies captured ALL emails for ETERNITY. these were mainly banks, where (pardon my spelling) sarbanes oxley required banks to keep them (always and forever). emails from say exchange would be copied before it went to their in box, stored on disk and also immediately stored to optical media, which would also automatically be copied. not getting into the other parts that prevented emails from being lost,

I havent worked at that job since 2007. I find it unbelievable that any major government organization such as the IRS does not make sure ALL emails are never lost.

edit: the fact that they lost emails is a huge scandal in its own right IMO

<comment><USER12> The official party line from Koskinen's testimony this week is that IRS staff members are individually responsible for determining what email is "official" IRS correspondence, then...I shit you not... _printing hardcopies_ of those emails and filing them into physical file cabinets. All other email is subject to a capacity quota, and staff members are instructed to rotate out the email sitting on the servers to free up space when needed, rotating the old email into PSTs on their IRS-issued laptops/desktops (they use Exchange/Outlook).

I would be interested to find out what the email lossage rate is for IRS staff. Not just the 6-8 individual members identified in relation to the Lerner issue, but across the entire organization (even more interesting would be a statistical analysis of the Lerner Group's lossage rate compared to the organization-wide rate).

The NSA has proven the Federal Government has the wherewithal to record everything. I'd like to see what the arguments are against Congress mandating that all forms of communication (snail mail, email, voice comms, telex, _etc._ ) at all Federal agencies for all Federal employees are continuously e-vaulted.

<comment><USER13> It's probably true. Most of the government is busy moving to cloud email, but the IRS's IT security bible -- Pub 1075 is too prescriptive and narrowly focused (it includes mandates for things like rack door locks) to allow that to happen. So they are probably stuck paying some contractor $50/GB for SAN disk to run mail.

After the South Carolina Tax Department was owned, lack of encryption was the main technical issue, so encrypting "all of the things" is probably their main focus.

As a government employee, records management is a shitshow. There's a 50 page schedule of documents with prescriptive retention periods -- but these are intended for the "record copy" only. An email itself isn't a document. Employees either squirrel away everything or toss everything... The higher up you go, the more you toss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> None (Edit: I'm talking about digital data retention) of this even matters when you take into account the fact that it is IRS policy to print out each and every e-mail sent and received by their employees. One would assume that this is required to maintain a permanent record of all communications for the Federal Archives and for legal matters that arise for confidential taxpayer cases.

"The Treasury Department's current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization's files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records."[0]

[0] [http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html](http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html)

<comment><USER15> So why have the emails in question not surfaced in paper form yet? If the whole scandal and potential lawsuits are riding on missing emails, which should have been printed and archived from day one, where the hell are they?

<comment><USER16> As I understand it, the policy is that only emails that should be permanent, official records are supposed to be saved - and the judgement of what those are is left up to the individual employee. If you're someone investigating that employee, you're not going to trust that judgment. You'd want to see all of the employee's emails - even ones about lunch plans and carpool arrangements. Not to mention going through thousands of of paper emails is likely to be even more labor-intensive than the electronic search and review so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My friend works at the IRS, and his computer, network, software and environment are a complete nightmare. Each congress votes less and less budget because they don't want their wealthy buddies to get audited or the corps that give them money to be messed with. So the agency responsible for collecting most of the US governments revenue gets further and further behind. Some politicians even want the agency abolished. How revenue comes in then is beyond me. Sure all government agencies waste money but the IRS is one of the few that actually brings money in. Like the Post Offices's crippling advanced pension payment that makes them constantly in the red, political decisions about funding is very much a large part of the problem. My friend just wants to retire and get out of there before it reaches the Stone Age.

<comment><USER18> _"...and his computer, network, software and environment are a complete nightmare."_

Are we talking P4 and XP here or something worse? Just interested (I teach and we have mostly Core Duos with 2G/4G and log into a roaming profile system based on Server 2008, all seems to work ok).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm seeing this line of thinking a lot, and it's driving me bonkers:

> A private company under investigation that responded to regulators, or a > judge, with this sort of explanation rather than producing the requested > documents would rightly expect to be handed an adverse judgment or a > whopping fine.

Why? Since when is the onus to disprove on the defense and the onus to prove not on the plaintiff? If you suspect a conspiracy to cover up one's tracks, you can go after the defendant additionally for that. But you still have to prove it. I'm not a lawyer but if there is any truth to this statement it is a tarnish on our judicial system. A legal system that convicts based on the possibility of IT problems is hardly reliant on surpassing "reasonable doubt."

<comment><USER20> She's only referring to your duties to not actively destroy evidence.

If you have a regular expiration cycle for data, that's not a problem, unless you're informed you're being sued or otherwise investigated, at which point it's incumbent for you to turn off that process, and do whatever's necessary to continue to preserve the data.

There are other reasonable things that can trigger the requirement to not destroy data.

The only thing you would be required to prove, if you do lose such data, is that it was entirely accidental, and you didn't have any culpability. Say a tornado destroyed the office with the only set of paper copies, and it was reasonable for you to only have that one set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Such policies indicate either an agency that is not concerned with preserving good audit chains or one that has an extremely penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to IT policy."

I think AND is more appropriate than OR here.

</comment><comment><USER22> What happened to the hard drives of everyone she sent emails to, certainly parts of the email chains in question are somewherre on the hard drives of the people she corresponded with

<comment><USER23> According to CNN:

What about the other missing emails? Did six other hard drives also crash?

The House Ways and Means Committee says that this past Monday, the IRS told them that the agency also lost emails belonging to six other IRS employees whose hard drives had also crashed.

One of those six employees was particularly important: Nikole Flax, who had worked as chief of staff to the former head of the IRS. Flax was known to be involved in discussions about the tea party targeting.

Source: [http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/20/politics/irs- emails/](http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/20/politics/irs-emails/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _The IRS 's policies on e-mail storage were primitive even by the standards of 15 years ago_

What? I'm almost certain the hard drive I had in 2000 was less than 10GB. At 500MB per email user, that's 20 users per entire disk...

<comment><USER21> He's probably not referring so much to the specific limits on mailbox size as he is to the policy of forcing responsibility for maintaining permanent archives on the users of the system rather than the administrators of it.

<comment><USER25> It's a she, Megan McArdle.

I'm not trying to be that guy, just letting you know. If you have time, check out some of her other articles. She's a pretty balanced commentator.

<comment><USER21> My bad. I wish there were gender neutral pronouns I could use so that I wouldn't have to worry about shit like this when it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER25> Trust me, I get it. There's always the "singular they," though English majors will hate you for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> According to this: [http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/22/irs-cancelled-contract- wit...](http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/22/irs-cancelled-contract-with-email- storage-firm-weeks-after-lerners-computer-crash/) \- the contract was canceled just before the crash happened. Hmmmm

</comment><comment><USER27> I find it interesting she was archiving on her local hard drive in 2011. Especially given the stories of things people found on hard drives bought at scrap auctions. A better question might be "is it better now?" or not, I'm guessing not.

<comment><USER9> What's interesting is that in many really large Windows based enterprises I've seen. The space your desktop points to is on a network someplace. You can use this for roaming profiles and all sort of other things (quotas, centralized virus scanning etc.) Everything else on the system is not accessible to the user. So even if you archive your outlook stuff into a PST on your desktop, it's still on the network someplace an admin can get to it. I've even seen this used to recover emails from terminated employee's accounts.

Why archive at all? My guess is that their exchange server has some absurd quote that requires you to purge after you hit 50MB of mail or something. Nobody wants to delete things, so users generally just move old mail into PST files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This seems to be the default 2 choices for government agencies lately when something bad happens: either they were incredibly _incompetent_ , or they're _lying_ about it. Neither of which puts them in very good light.

<comment><USER29> There's nothing about this tale of incompetence that's particularly incredible. A lot of privately-run businesses apparently have the same mess when it comes to e-mail archiving - central e-mail storage has restrictive quotas and users have a bunch of PST archives stored locally on their work laptops. It tends to come with running an Exchange server because central storage is expensive and hard to maintain. Don't think the manual printing and archiving of e-mails is terribly unusual either, though most places don't bother.

<comment><USER20> I seriously doubt any of those private companies have legal obligations to keep this stuff forever.

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926642) about what banks do per SarBox requirements to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interestingly enough, the IRS contracts to an email backup service and has since 2005. So perhaps the emails can be found?

<comment><USER26> Per this - [http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/22/irs-cancelled-contract- wit...](http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/22/irs-cancelled-contract-with-email- storage-firm-weeks-after-lerners-computer-crash/) \- the contract was canceled just before the crash

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't the federal government already have an entire organization dedicated to preserving and archiving every email sent by government employees, as well as members of the public? The NSA?

</comment><comment><USER32> It's a moronic policy, but it is the IRS.

<comment><USER33> No, it's the IRS's budget.

The IRS _cannot_ spend money on things it's not budgeted for. Did you know the IRS returns $7 in additional taxes for every $1 in fraud prevention funding it gets at the moment?

Literally, a 700% return on investment, yet when was the last time any budget passed by congress raised funding the IRS to hire more auditors?

EDIT: Or let's take the articles conclusion: yes, obviously the government agencies should do better. So naturally we can conclude that the Republicans championing this investigation will be pushing through legislation mandating and funding appropriate upgrades - after all it seems like the inquiry has revealed serious issues which require some dedicated staffing and finance to sort out for a very important agency of the government.

Of course obviously that actually means this will never happen.

<comment><USER14> The federal budget is __very loose __(unless Congress specifies something specific. For example, According To The US Government Printing Office, Section 554 of the Bipartisan passed H.R. 4660, An Act Making appropriations for the Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes.

"Sec. 554. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to carry out Operation Choke Point."[0]

My point is that managers and execs have a lot of wiggle room and the ability to make a number of funding transfers and decisions. They could clearly use budgeted funds or make a request for funding to accomplish actual data retention if they wanted to.

What makes you think that the Republicans involvement will make sure that "this will never happen". It doesn't matter what the Republicans do when the Democrat administration under President Obama just ignores them and the law.

[0] [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr4660pcs/html/BILLS-1...](http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr4660pcs/html/BILLS-113hr4660pcs.htm)

Edited to change the source material because some people could not handle the link originally used and to add the second sentence in the 3rd paragraph.

<comment><USER34> News Busters is a far-right wing rag. I don't trust them any more than Mother Jones for reliable information.

<comment><USER14> True and True. That's why I quoted only a portion of the article and why I checked their source material (the link I put in its place). I originally used it only because it was A#1 on the top of Google when I originally searched for a source.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Net Neutrality Protestors arrested outside Google - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/occupygoogle-arrests/

<comment><USER2> It's good to see Mountain View PD earning that overtime ;)</comment>


RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi released - <AUTHOR> https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2012/10/26/risc-os-pi-released-risc-os-for-the-raspberry-pi <comment><USER2> Why this is interesting:

 _"RISC OS is a fast, light-weight operating system specifically designed for the ARM architecture. It was developed by the same team of engineers who created the original ARM processor"_

Original Acorn Archimedes (which ran RISC OS): 1988, £1000

Raspberry Pi: 2012, £27

</comment><comment><USER3> Too bad Rasperry Pi didn't start on an ARMv7 Cortex A5 at least. So much effort being put into a near-death ARMv6 architecture.

<comment><USER4> Near-death? ARMv5 is still going strong, I'm pretty sure there's a decent amount of v4 being produced, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> for those that would like to play, raspberrypi.org has a mirror with the latest-to-release RC5: [http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/riscos/riscos-2012-1...](http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/riscos/riscos-2012-10-16-RC5/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Site is down, how compatible will this be with the existing software library? If I'm not mistaken there was a pretty good set of Amiga/Atari ST games ported to the Archimedes back in the day.

<comment><USER7> Back in the day, a lot of those games made a lot of assumptions about the hardware that it directly accessed. Even going from ARM 2 to ARM 3 to StrongARM caused a lot of problems for games.

<comment><USER2> When I was writing games for the Archimedes, I was using ARM-assembly routines to write pixels directly to the double-buffered screen memory. So I think a full blown emulator would be needed, rather than just the same OS. Unless ARM-6 can still execute ARM-1 assembly, and it still has addressable screen memory?

<comment><USER8> ARMv5 dropped support for the 26-bit-addressing mode back-compatibility, so v5 and above definitely can't run ARM1/ARM2 binaries. (Even in v4 the back-compat support was optional.)

<comment><USER9> RISC OS and most applications are now 32-bit OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the final inducement for me to buy a whole stack of the things. Having owned a BBC Micro as a kid, I cut my professional teeth on ARM assembler for RISC OS and it remains to this day my favourite instruction set of all time: everything that was necessary & sufficient wrapped in a neat little orthogonally conditional package, and RISC OS was the elegant icing on that cake.

I don't even know what I'll use them for yet. I'll just sit down and play with it, like being 16 again.

</comment><comment><USER11> uh oh, if it run's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch> then goodbye free time :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome. As someone who spent 10 years with RISC OS, this just rocks.

<comment><USER7> 10 years ago is very late in the RISC OS lifecycle, so I'm curious -- how did you come to discover it then?

<comment><USER12> I didn't read the grandparent as meaning "the past ten years" but "ten years at some point in the past".

<comment><USER9> That is correct. 1987 - 1997...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm suspecting the site is getting a bit of a bandwidth issue, but there are emulators to emulate the old archimedes, Atari and IIRC the amiga.

Various people have been testing old style games on the Pi so you guys might lose a bit of free time :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Which RISC OS version?

<comment><USER5> RISC OS version 5.17

RC5 is actually a released version, so the link above contains the most recent code. More links can be found on he forum: [http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=2...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=21184)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Loved using RISC OS back in the day at school</comment>


Show HN: Barley - A web content editor for developers, now public. - <AUTHOR> http://getbarley.com

<comment><USER2> No source code, full of "analytics" trackers, only allows you to upload/edit themes via a proprietary 3rd party application, no revision control on blog posts, and the promo video is just some guy quickly clicking buttons on a MacBook while busy and brightly coloured backgrounds dance around.

Not to mention costs $18 per month, so I assume your content gets nuked when you stop paying.

No thanks, it looks like you're marketing to the wrong audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> p8952: Barley is built ontop of Code Igniter and jQuery. We're thinking of open sourcing our Editor but our API is very, very simple. Also, syncing via GitHub will be coming soon. Revision control is something we've been thinking about with the Editorially team. They've got that down and we'd love to build that in.

A promo video is tough for such a thing. Something that is fun to watch and isn't a 30 minute screencast of me eating chips and drinking beer. Any suggestions?

We don't nuke any content. You can take it with you.

Thanks for the feedback even if you didn't care for it. We really want to make something people like so perhaps if one day we can win you over we'll be doing something right!

<comment><USER2> I think you're trying too hard to jump onto the "ProductX FOR HACKERS!" (Or Developers) market. Such people simple are not interested in paying $18 a month for a blogging system when you could get multiple VPS for that price which can host not only your (Open source and truly hackable) blogging engine but also every other project you have.

If you were selling this to another market it would probably look a lot better.

<comment><AUTHOR> p8952 You're absolutely right. Our end game is to compete with 1&1\. But to get there we need developers to help end users get their sites online. As Barley becomes a more well-rounded product we hope to bridge out of the developer market and go straight to small businesses.

Do you think we'd be better off allowing Developers to use this free and only pay for their customer's sites? Or only if our app were open source it'd be appealing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We think developers are going to love to use Barley for their customers when WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla are just too feature-rich for the job. We'd love to get the Hacker News audience feedback too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think $18 is too expensive for what it is. Most web content editors are at least available as a download, even if they are not free.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great work Colin! Love the simplicity.</comment>


GCP Digest: Handcrafted biweekly newsletter of highlights in Google Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://gcpdigest.com/ <comment><USER2> This is relevant to my interests. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Corey, thanks for dropping in! Appreciate the subscribe</comment></comment>


Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.teleread.com/kindle/greenpeace-deluges-amazon-fire-phone-with-one-star-protest-reviews/

<comment><USER2> Once upon a time I used to think Greenpeace stood for something, wanted to make a real change in the world and then they go and pull crap like this. Sorry Greenpeace, but this is just plain childish and in the end, does very little to bring attention to your plight and just makes you look bad.

There are worse things happening in the world than Amazon not running green data centres...

</comment><comment><USER3> Hang on a minute. I've reverse-engineered icloud and I have personally verified that it is hosted, in significant part, on AWS and Azure.

Is Apple buying some kind of carbon offset? Or has Greenpeace gotten the information wrong? Or did things change in the year or so since I looked at this?

<comment><USER4> When did you perform that verification? I know they started out by hosting storage chunks on AWS and Azure in 2011, but they have massively increased their own data center capacity since then.

Have you reverified recently?

<comment><USER5> And "how" was it verified? When Apple was building a large datacenter in North Carolina[1], a lot of local techies were saying it was for 2 purposes -- Siri and iCloud. Granted, that was the popular technology at the time for Apple, so it may have been inferred knowledge, and not directly stated...

I also wouldn't be surprised if they used AWS/Azure for load balancing, geodns, routing and simple filtering before actually being tunneled in to their datacenter.

[1] [http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud- reig...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reigning- over-the-greenest-data-centers-on-the-planet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't see how this makes Greenpeace look good and Amazon look bad. After reading this, Greenpeace looks like a bunch of ignorant thugs, and Amazon seems victimized. How could this possibly be more effective than a boycott?

</comment><comment><USER7> Slacktivism at its finest

</comment><comment><USER8> Nuclear is dirty now?

<comment><USER9> If you're being generous, it's a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good: "We wouldn't need nuclear if we went all-in with renewables!" is the cry, even if it's not necessarily the case in every environment. But if that's your cry, and you ignore all the waste renewables create (what, are solar panel factories 100% efficient now?), then doing anything other than 100% renewable all the time is unjustifiable.

If you're being less generous, it's all about fear-mongering and the people who bought into the fear. Nuclear Is Evil is pretty axiomatic to them, and it takes little to convince them that power plants will explode like bombs and waste is just being dumped at random and everything else you can imagine if you don't let facts get in the way of a good Righteous Indignation.

So, yes, to some people nuclear is "dirty" in the sense of "ritually unclean", and they will not be convinced otherwise.

<comment><USER10> It is fascinating how difficult it is to find a good argument for opposing nuclear power. The discussion usually turns into an endless round of meaningless comparison that pretends that we only need one perfect choice instead several imperfect ones.

The best argument I have been able to come up with is that whilst it could be the perfect energy source humans are fundamentally incapable of designing or operating nuclear plants perfectly. You end up with designs that are tightly coupled and massively complicated, which is always risky from an engineering perspective. To make them safe you have to spend huge amounts of money on staff to maintain and operate.

Fukushima was designed and run by highly trained people but it still went wrong. Several stations in the UK were designed by brilliant scientists and still needed flood defenses built in response to Fukushima. There is a real threat and it is entirely due to the normal fallibility of humans. I personally think that nuclear is a necessary choice, but it is hardly a good choice. We need a new generation of generators that are very small, needs minimal maintenance, and have negligible risk even if they are completely destroyed.

<comment><USER11> I actually don't think that is a good argument either. Even with the 3 mile, Fukushima and Chernobyl disaters, more people have died falling of windmills than from nuclear power (per megawatt hour).

I think the concentration of energy (making it a good target for terrorists), and the probable long term damage of waste which has not yet been realized are better arguments, but still not good enough to have coal over nuclear in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> I agree that it is a risk worth taking. But those risks are not merely unscientific fear mongering and meed to be mitigated by more than just incredibly expensive human processes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will HTML5 leave Flash extinct? I hope so - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedigitalape.com/?p=562

<comment><USER2> And why think flash should be on any platform?. You don't have to please every user, and every platform. Flash has its power features and html5 is handy, but far from getting there.</comment>


jQuery Masonry - <AUTHOR> http://desandro.com/resources/jquery-masonry/

<comment><USER2> Although uniform spacing tends to look better from the macro view, I actually find this incredibly hard to read. My eye jumps all over the page, ignoring many of the articles because they are hard to skim. I went to a few of the demo sites and ended up leaving without reading anything.

<comment><USER3> Maybe the examples aren't great, but it's a very nice tool, and certainly useful if used wisely.

Reminds me of The New York Times app on the iPad. When you changing the orientation, the content is reorganized to fit the available space.

Great work.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget that's quite a tightly controlled space (they know the 2 screen layouts exactly and editorially control the content).

So for sites like that I imagine it would work well (less so for sites with widely varying content etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did something similar some years ago. It works a bit like playing a simple version of Tetris: <http://www.phoboslab.org/files/grid-solver/demo/>

I have to admit though that masonry looks much more flexible. My solution was specifically crafted to display images in different sizes, based on their "importance".

</comment><comment><USER6> Try zooming in by one click in Safari or Chrome. The whole Masonry layout totally falls apart. This seems like a showstopper to me ...

(FYI, I'm not just bitching -- I reported this as a bug six weeks ago.)

<comment><USER7> This man is correct.</comment></comment>


Singapore telcos pick Nokia, Ericsson over Huawei to build main 5G networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-telecoms-5g/singapore-telcos-pick-nokia-ericsson-over-huawei-to-build-main-5g-networks-idUSKBN23V1PG <comment><USER2> Singapore tends to have good relations with China. I'm sure everyone will have a piece of the cake</comment>


Appointlet - Allow your users to schedule appointments on your Google Calendar - <AUTHOR> http://appointlet.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice one - looks good! Hope it works out well for you.

But, just to chip in:

1) Does your target market know that a Google Account is, effectively, a Gmail address? They might think the barrier to entry is higher than it is.

2) Homepage says: >No credit card required. No sign up required. Just log in with your Google account.

Which sounds great. But when I hit the FAQs, I see:

> Do you support any payment methods/services other than PayPal? > Not at this > time. Maybe Google Checkout if there is demand.

Maybe it's just me in my nerddom, but "just log in with your Google account" combined with "no credit card required" made me expect Google Checkout to be the default payment method, or at the very least supported.

May be worth adding a nod to Paypal somewhere earlier on, or an FAQ towards the top of the list explaining what payment methods _are_ supported (and why the customer should be happy about them/it, etc, etc). Would help you avoid the negative, "No, sorry, only PayPal" vibe of the current answer.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for checking out the site!

I agree that just supporting PayPal is a hindrance to people adopting the site. I will make Google Checkout (and maybe Stripe) a priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google Calendar has built in support for appointments.

[http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=...](http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=190998)

</comment><comment><USER5> A year ago we (the guys behind <http://WhenIsGood.net>) built <http://youcanbook.me> to solve this problem. Shipped a ton of features since then. We came out of stealth 6 months ago and are already processing 15,000 bookings a week.

Wishing best of luck to the Appointlet team - looks like they've made a great start!

Keith Harris <http://softlysoftware.com>

<comment><USER3> Congrats on your success! You've got a nice looking site.

I appreciate the best wishes; I hope there will be a team one day, but right now it's just me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> whats the timezone shown in the pop out? Is it mine or can the user configure the timezone to be specified?

what if i have multiple google accounts and i want to show the aggregate availability. for example i have four sales reps and they all have free time between 10 am and 11 am. if all four are booked the end user should see the time slot as full, else till all four are booked the user should be able to book that time slot. if that possible?

<comment><USER3> The timezone shown is that of the owner.

Currently it only support single users. This is my first web business, so I decided to keep the scope very small and focus on sole proprietors.

That said, I looking into building multi-user functionality, as that is required to compete with the "big boys" like Genbook.</comment></comment>


Oracle Hacker Gets The Last Word - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/02/hacker-litchfield-ellison-technology-security-oracle.html?boxes=Homepagemostemailed <comment><USER2> It's amazing to me that anyone could find exposing flaws privately to a company could be construed as hurtful in any way. The mere benefit of having someone tell you about a flaw that you were not aware of could save you millions (if not billions) in lost revenue and PR damage.

If your software has enough attention to garner free QA checks from security firms, I believe you should praise those checks rather than complain.

<comment><USER3> An opposing viewpoint: [http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...](http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/disclosure-1/index.html)</comment></comment>


Unable to open links in Safari, Mail or Messages on iOS 9.3 - <AUTHOR> https://bencollier.net/2016/03/unable-to-open-links-in-safari-mail-or-messages-on-ios-9-3/ <comment><USER2> Good to hear someone has got to the bottom of this. Been unable to use Safari for a few days due to it. I haven't updated any apps for months (I don't trust auto update to not leave my apps in a half downloaded state so I just let them mount up until I eventually download hundreds of updates!) so iOS must periodically check this list automatically rather then just when an app is updated/installed.

The combination of a lack of an official response from Apple yet, the fact that this was apparently found by beta users (not that the issue is related to 9.3 directly, but it was reported as a beta issue by some), and the inability to change default browser leaving my phone in a pretty broken state has got me seriously considering a switch to Android though, where at least such a bug could probably be worked around through changing defaults or worst case flashing a new ROM.

The iOS 9.3 release suggests Apple's QA process is rather lacking and incidents like this won't help confidence in their devices - it's okay for users who know how to work around it and understand what is going on, but my parents would probably think the whole internet was broken!

Rant over, glad to see this on HN as it has been p __*ing me off for a few days :)

<comment><USER3> I actually rolled back to 9.2.1 manually but this didn't fix it anyway, which was even more disappointing! Also the restore from backup was sooooo slow over the weekend, presumably because of all the 9.3 downloads, that after 24 hours my 2 gb backup was still stuck on estimating, so in the end I rebuilt from scratch. I'm glad that I have everything backed up elsewhere and not just in iCloud, which is of course the real moral of this story....always have multiple restore options!

<comment><USER4> > I actually rolled back to 9.2.1

How? I thought Apple didn't allow that. I'd like to go back to 9.1 if possible

<comment><USER5> Apple leaves the signing window for older versions for usually a week after the newest version drops. Go to a site like [https://ipsw.me/](https://ipsw.me/) and find your device. If the iOS version in the drop down menu has a green background, you can still restore to that version. You download the ipsw file and hold shift + click restore/upgrade on iTunes to manually target the ipsw you want to downgrade to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This appears to be caused by a bug in the Shared Web Credentials Daemon, which shares website credentials between apps and Safari. Once particular data is put in its database, it keeps crashing.

[https://twitter.com/aveapps/status/714215571894747136](https://twitter.com/aveapps/status/714215571894747136)

<comment><USER7> Safari kept crashing for me (and occasionally other apps, but don't know if related, just thought they were buggy apps) on my iPhone 5. I originally thought it was a problem with some sites being horribly broken, but it was also happening on mainstream sites such as wsj.com.

After I installed the 9.3 update, the crashes stopped. Maybe the firmware update and device reset clears that database.

Or it could be completely unrelated. Whichever, that's my anecdote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Submitted another story about this couple of days ago but it did not get much attention. Granted, this one calls out very specific technical reason. I have this problem after update to iOS 9.3 and FWIW I have Booking.com app installed. This problem was haunting users for quite a while, since beta for sure and may be even for some users on 9.2.1. The lack of response from Apple is disheartening. I am seriously considering switching to Android. Disabling JavaScript allows to navigate links in Safari, but opening links from other apps freezes them and many sites are broken without JS. My only recourse for now is to factory reset the phone, which is a huge PITA. And of course never ever install booking.com app

<comment><USER9> I ordered a nexus 6p today. Been an iphone user since the first year. I have grown tired of so many things that are ios.

I mostly use google apps and them games and other apps that have android versions.

I'm concerned that hands free calling, which I love from my Honda, may not work. If it does not then I will return the nexus and go back to iphone but will be very unhappy.

I have multiple tablets (for work evals) and love both the ipad pro and several android tables I have. But I still have things about the ipad pro that bug me. Stop trying to upsell me icloud services.

<comment><USER10> Switched from an iPhone 6 to a Nexus 6P in January. Couldn't be happier! Sure it isn't _perfect_ but no phone is and the 6P, for me, gets closest to the perfection goal than any other phone currently available.

Also the camera in the 6P is excellent which is a lovely surprise for a Nexus! It holds up well, better in some situations, to the brand new S7 Edge camera in my experience (my father has the S7 Edge so this was actual personal experience).

<comment><USER9> Yes I am looking forward to the camera especially and the quality and size of the screen for my aging eyes. @bithust do you use hands free phone dialing from a car? If so what car model and how is your experience with HFD?

<comment><USER10> Sorry I never use the phone while in the car. It is a quiet zone for me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fix that worked for me: 1) Put the phone in Airplane mode 2) Power it down 3) Power it up and while staying in Airplane mode 4) Delete Booking.com 5) Power it down 6) Power it back up and turn off Airplane 7) Go to Safari and browse normally

<comment><USER12> This did not fix it on my 6S. I wonder if there are other apps causing the same issue, I have a ton installed.

<comment><USER13> It looks like once the database is corrupted, swcd keeps crashing and there's no way out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if there was something particular about the booking.com site association file (i.e. some particular data in the `paths` array) or whether it was just the fact that the `paths` array was unexpected large, and when put into the overall database, made that too large to handle?

Wonder if anyone has a copy of the old booking.com association file (the one that caused problems) - would be interesting to look at.

<comment><USER15> It could easily be just because it's too large. Either there was a buffer overrun, or something got truncated in a bad way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So thats two pretty major bugs in iOS9.3 (the failing upgrade process for older hardware is the other big issue - and Apple are getting lots of support calls about it).

I really have to wonder what has happened to Apple's Quality Control. More money, more bugs?

<comment><USER17> Check out this patch:

[https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff](https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff)

 _[iOS] Revert overflow:hidden on the body affecting viewport scale (r186786)_

[https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152803](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152803)

 _Reviewed by NOBODY (OOPS!)._

Bug was reported on 6th January, broke thousands of websites, was patched shortly thereafter - and deployed 3 months later.

Three months to fix a major regression snafu. Apple Safari support sucks.

<comment><USER18> This was reviewed properly, you just have to click the actual commit: [http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/194667](http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/194667) "Reviewed by Tim Horton."

The response time here might not be great, but the patch author and reviewer are both experts in this area. I wouldn't consider this patch evidence of declining software quality--it's just a simple bug.

<comment><USER17> You seem a bit confused. I'm not saying the revert of the patch wasn't reviewed. I'm saying the commit that caused the issue wasn't reviewed.

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER18> This is the commit that caused the bug: [http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/186786](http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/186786)

Notice the review line

<comment><USER17> Damn, you're right and I've made myself look foolish. I apologise for my tone and reaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've had 9.3 version 13E233 on my iPhone and I have just received the chance to upgrade again to 9.3. After upgrade the version is 13E237 (as seen in the Settings General About) but the problem remains.

Still no change, https links to other sites dead in Safari, or the right click on the same link makes Safari blocks.

So if you have chance to upgrade to the newer 9.3, better wait, until some newer version than 13E237 appears?

I believe that in "Privacy / Diagnostics & Usage / .. Data / stacks + MobileSafari...." should theoretically contain the stack of the killed Safari at that moment and be sent to Apple?

(Anyway, before I've upgraded to 13E237 I've already deleted booking.com and yelp apps. I've also then installed the new version of booking.com app and then deleted it, all with the suggested "Airplane" mode. Didn't work)

Edit: the 13E237 is apparently

[http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/28/apple-re-releases- ios-9-3-for-...](http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/28/apple-re-releases-ios-9-3-for- older-iphones-and-ipads-affected-by-activation-lock-issue/)

"for users affected by an activation bug"

not for this now.

</comment><comment><USER20> Amen, I've been suffering from l HN withdrawal symptoms due to this. I have only been able to read comments and submission headlines on the iPhone.

Updtae: this is likely due to third party apps (in my case Booking.com). But uninstalling doesn't seem to help. Also I couldn't read the article since safari can only visit URLs that I explicitly type in

<comment><USER21> Does copy and paste not work?

<comment><USER22> Not for me. Long pressing causes safari to lock up and crash.

<comment><USER23> Long pressing works with Chrome

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Had this since yesterday. Best solution so far is to disable JavaScript or use opera mini

<comment><USER25> I can't find it atm, but someone contacted Apple on Twitter and they replied that disabling JavaScript is the best workaround.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> was at the Apple Store in NYC At 1am yesterday. None of the people there knew how to solve it. I looked online and there are, by now, thousands of users in several threads in Apple forums complaining that links don't work. Here is some more info: This isn't just affecting 9.3, it's true also on 9.2.1 Don't bother wiping and restoring your phone, the problem comes back. My guess is that it was triggered by something in the Apple WebView APIs that happened recently, because it started happening on my phone for no reason this Friday (with 9.2.1) and most of these forum messages are from the past few days. Apple hasn't responded yet and 9.3 doesn't fix this problem. For now, use Google Chrome. Long-tap on links in Safari and other Apple apps crashes the app. However, thankfully in Chrome for iOS, it works (even though it also uses Apple's WebView). You can follow links via long-tap and copy-pasting the link into the Address bar. Finally, if you're wondering why some mobile links still seem to work - those are the ones enabled by javascript handling of tap events, that don't use the regular mechanism of loading a url.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've put up a convoluted but working workaround here - [https://bencollier.net/2016/03/how-to-fix-ios-9-3s-broken- sa...](https://bencollier.net/2016/03/how-to-fix-ios-9-3s-broken-safari- links/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I had something similar happen to me on 9.2.1 - switch to readability mode in one app stopped all links working from Facebook. Took me forever to debug it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hate how links can only be opened in safari anyway. I'm having this problem so it's frustrating to no end.

<comment><USER30> This goes back to Apple not allowing you to replace default apps. Android phones let you define the default web browser, map viewer, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anybody know if this causes issues in Cordova / Phonegap apps?

<comment><USER32> We have a Cordova app that begins on a local web page then immediately redirects to a remote page, and we have recently had a bunch of users on iOS 9.3 complain that they are just stuck on the first screen.

So it looks like it _probably_ does affect Cordova apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> WTAF, Am I reading this right? Booking.com was sending a 2.3MB file to every user, but only usable to iOS users?

<comment><USER12> No, this file is part of the iOS app.

<comment><USER34> Both you and the OP are incorrect. The file is not included in the app (only referred to), but is only downloaded by iOS itself - or anyone who points a web client directly at it, of course.

<comment><USER35> Do you have a link to it?

<comment><USER36> Looks like a signed json file found at `/apple-app-site-association` on sites that support it (eg. booking.com/apple-app-site-association, nytimes.com/apple-app-site-association, &c.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> from your iPhone

<comment><USER38> It does say "on iOS 9.3".

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's funny that unpaid developers who release ROMs for my Android phone apparently do a better job at QA than the people at Apple.

<comment><USER17> That might _sound_ snarky, but actually it's entirely true. Apple QA around Safari is dreadful. They literally break the rendering of thousands of websites in 9.2 and only fix it in 9.3 - three months later. All because of checked in WebKit code that wasn't reviewed correctly.

[https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff](https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff)

<comment><USER17> Oh, and I should note: I love my iPhone and iPad - I own three iPads and 4 iPhones. So lest anyone think I'm an Apple hater, think again. In fact, I replaced my Windows PC with a Mac some time ago and never looked back.

Which is why I'm hear to tell Apple: fix your freakibg regressions in Safari _quickly_. There is absolutely no reason why the browsers rendering engine can only be updated every three months!

Sort it out Apple. You force all web apps to use your engine and prevent effective completion in this space: fine. But you now face the burden on ensuring you prevent and fix your bugs quickly!

<comment><USER40> I do find it odd that Safari's update cycle is tied to the OS updates. Seems to me like they should be separate.

Example: a few months ago Safari had a bug where it was still using apple's old WWDR certificate, preventing anyone from packaging their safari extensions. The fix came out months later in the next OS release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apple broke a fundamental rendering issue in iOS 9.2 - if you put overflow hidden into the body tag then it screws up the viewport.

Thousands and thousands of pages broke. They fixed it three months later.

Basically, Apple Safari support sucks. Why the hell is their web page renderer only updated in minor releases of iOS?

<comment><USER17> Oh? Genuinely curious: what's so awful about my comment? If Apple can stuff up a fundamental rendering issue [1] and it takes them 3 months to release a simple revert of the unreviewed commit, then how are my comments on their incredibly slow bug fix timeframes for browser issues out of line?

1\. [https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff](https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff)

<comment><USER41> While I agree with the content of your comment, this one at the bottom of the page seems to be the third of nearly identical comments about this one WebKit bug made by your account on the page. It's approaching my SPAM threshold.

<comment><USER17> Indeed - I found this bug to be totally relevant to the issues being discussed. The first was to point out the issue. The second (the parent comment) was to ask why Safari rendering bugs take so long to fix and I used that bug as context for my question. The third was to respond to the huge downvotes of this comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11376114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11376114)

Each of those are entirely relevant in their context. It's hardly spam.

If you want, I'll find more regressions, it won't be hard. Apple are utterly useless when it comes to Safari rendering regressions.

(were you the one downvoting, incidentally? And what do you mean by the "third at the bottom of the page"? The comments shift around in ordering you know)

<comment><USER42> _And what do you mean by the "third at the bottom of the page"?_

The commenter meant that the referenced comment was the third such comment you've made in relation to this bug. IOW, you're sounding like a broken record. I tend to agree with this assessment. You made your point, move on.

And before you ask, meh, maybe I down voted you, maybe I didn't. That's not what you should be focusing on.

<comment><USER17> Meh. I had no intention of referencing it again, those comments were entirely relevant. That's indeed what I'm focussing on. In fact, I'm focussing on the fact that Apple's updates for Safari entirely suck and used that bug as the primary example of just how bad they are. I don't apologise for being a "broken record" on this issue. Maybe you should also. Next time I'll find one of the dozens of other regressions that have bit me in the arse if that would make you happy.

This bug was so bad that if Apple hadn't fixed the issue in iOS 9.3 then I would have asked for a refund on every single one of my devices and returned them. Under Australian law they'd have to.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: best way to read ebooks on the computer - <AUTHOR> Ask HN: best way to read ebooks on the computer.
I have read a few programming books in hard copy that I got out of my library and found that I was able to learn a lot from them, but there is a wealth of free ebooks available online to use. The main issue I have with reading on the computer is when you close a pdf you loose where you are and the next time you open you have to find your way back. Do you guys have any suggestions for ways to read ebooks on your computer.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I have a hp tc1100 tablet (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Compaq_TC1100>) that I use for reading. It has two distinct advantages:

1) You can disconnect the keyboard so that it becomes easier to handle and more like a book, meaning that you can read in bed, in the sofa, etc.

2) You can switch the screen orientation so that the reading area becomes more like a book (higher and narrower)

Regarding finding my way back I usually just leave a PDF open till I'm done - the spurs me to finish it as well :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> My apology if the following is too detail oriented for HN. I've no affiliation with any of the below, just an interest in reading and researching comfortably on-screen.

I was recently looking for a PDF viewer with annotation, and found the following for Mac. Unfortunately, I'm on Windows; otherwise, this looks to be what I was after:

<http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/index.html>

[http://openwetware.org/wiki/Skim_- _PDF_reader_and_annotation...](http://openwetware.org/wiki/Skim_- _PDF_reader_and_annotation_software)

Skim maintains annotations in a separate file. I would imagine this also allows it to work with locked PDF's, whereas Acrobat Reader won't permit annotating such. The annotations can be merged into an updated PDF for distribution, if needed.

On Windows, the two seemingly most legitimate options I've found are both commercial products with free versions:

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

<http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php>

These both appear to add annotations to the PDF file, and to be limited by the Acrobat permissions assigned to that file. Foxit Reader says it adds some sort of visible component to the presentation of the annotated page, unless you upgrade to the paid version.

I haven't used them, yet. (I've had some hesitation about installing them.) If anyone has better suggestions for the Windows environment, I'd love to hear them.

Noting Johnny2112's comment re MS Reader blanking the background: For blanking the screen (or graying it), donationcoder has a little AutoHotKey based hack that dims all but the focused window. It's named ghoster, and is available in both AHK script and compiled format. Recently, Spyware Doctor has balked on a few things from donationcoder, but this appears (please to check for yourself) to be a false positive against AHK -- other anti-malware products find no problem.

[http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/index.html#Gh...](http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/index.html#Ghoster)

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought I was a dork b/c I could not solve this problem. PDF's have a bookmark function, am I missing something? Anyway what I do is, close the pdf and then I right click the icon and I click "rename" and I had the page number into the name of the work. Nifty, eh?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well you got playing around with foxit reader to see if I can get bookmarks to work. I found that you can create bookmarks fairly easily and they are listed in order of creation. With that as long as you remember to bookmark where you are it seems to work. That being said I am still looking for something that does that automatically. I know that Microsoft reader actually does that nicely and I like how when you go full screen it blacks out the rest of the screen so you can focus. But nobody makes .lits anymore so its basically a useless tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had a kindle for about a week. (Long story short, Took it to class, it broke and Amazon wont replace it). During that week, it worked pretty well for reading things, no strain on my eyes.

Now, i just use Preview on my mac. It saves where I'm at and it's UI does the job.</comment>


HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/03/16/2001541/0/en/HashiCorp-Raises-175-Million-in-Series-E-Funding-to-Support-Multi-Cloud-Transformation-for-Global-Enterprises.html <comment><USER2> I had the chance to work with Armon as a contractor at HashiCorp when I was in college. Armon was absolutely one of the most down-to-earth leaders I've ever seen. Even though he was technically brilliant and I was only an undergrad, he never made me feel like I was stupid or inexperienced, but rather patiently guided me towards the best solutions, so I was able to gain a lot of confidence and grow a lot along the way.

If you are an aspiring distributed systems engineer (as I was), I highly recommend applying to HashiCorp. They are solving some of the most fun challenges in distributed systems and they have a great engineering culture, not to mention that they are remote-friendly.

<comment><USER3> One time quite a while ago, I randomly hung out with the Kiip team one day when there were like 6 of them. Mitchell struck me as a super nice guy, and at some point he randomly dropped the fact at some point that he wrote Vagrant.

I'm glad that they have done so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Series E have never been a good indicator for success, especially with the stock market behavior of late, and I don't see how HashiCorp's enterprise offerings are worth a 5.1B valuation. They've continuously struggled to find a good fit for their "enterprise only" features, and the amount of money they charge for these features is nothing short of extortion. Vault seems to be the only runway they have, and I see that area ripe for competition (or even AWS Vault like they did with MongoDB). Also, based on the company's glassdoor reviews, it seems the exec team are a bunch of jerks, which is an interesting contrast to Armon/Mitchell.

Unlike some of the other comments, I see HashiCorp as a textbook example of poor execution for converting customers. They clearly have the things people want, but they have always struggled to give people a reason to pay for them. They've created a community that would easily raze the goodwill they've floated on if they started to heavily monetize their products, so they're in a lose/lose situation to me.

I see them being acquired, but I can't think of any cloud provider that would pay for them. Maybe Oracle? :)

<comment><USER5> What is the purpose of Vault if you're already on AWS?

Even though I prefer CloudFormation, Terraform is quite popular. As far as Consul and Nomad, they are both nice for on prem infrastructure - I've used both - but once you're on either AWS or Azure, the native solutions are a lot less of a hassle and Nomsd (sadly) will never get the mindshare of k8s.

<comment><USER6> You don't want to pay $1/month to store a single secret. You want a nicer workflow for creating ephemeral users and tokens than AWS themselves have. You want to do on-the-fly encryption of all sorts of things. You want a real PKI without every bit of know-how.

<comment><USER7> 1$ per secret a month sounds extremely cheap considered on how much does it host to run vault

<comment><USER6> You can run vault on a single t3.medium backed by s3 with auto unseal and get pretty decent performance.

<comment><USER5> If you don't care about silly things like high availability and reliability. Hashicorp even recommends a cluster of three.

[https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/ha/](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/ha/)

And what business at scale is optimizing over 0.25 per secret and doesn't care about HA?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Their execution is impressive. Very impressive. And, execution is what often separates the leaders from the pack, rather than some "unique" aspects.

However, HashiCorp seems unique in a few regards:

1\. A pioneer in monetizing OSS via SaaS services.

2\. Many successes. Can't think of a recent startup in this space with so many successes - can you? Sentinel, Consul, Terraform etc.

3\. Arguably at the start of the curve, e.g. service mesh automation is really difficult?

<comment><USER9> You should take a look at Databricks, in all three dimensions.

<comment><USER10> Databricks is easily the best spent money in my stack.

I also love Hashicorp's products, but unfortunately I'm not paying them anything. Before Terraform Cloud their enterprise offerings were quite bad IMO (no SaaS, had to talk with Sales, provision infrastructure yourself, high initial commitment, etc...).

I will probably start using Terraform Cloud in a near future thought, just waiting for some key features to be released so I can integrate it to my pipe (Gitlab Groups integration, more flexible module layout).

<comment><USER11> I tried Terraform Cloud and went back to open source. I felt like it was a step backwards from Terragrunt. I'm only using it in the context of AWS though. I might try it again for a future project.

<comment><USER12> Would you mind sending your feedback?

firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just to note that the relative test code to production code ratio in Hashicorp products is 10:1 (10 lines of test for every line of code).

<comment><USER14> Ew. I feel bad for their developers.

<comment><USER15> Care to elaborate why? Do you assume the company forces this on the engineering team?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Recall that VCs are all about finding the greater fool - actual value may or may not relate. One of my favourite videos on the subject (Chamath Palihapitiya):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vErPgQF3N38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vErPgQF3N38)

I wonder if cloud-in-the-cloud.com is taken? That's 50% more cloud.

</comment><comment><USER17> Congratulations! Fantastic products, regardless of my past complaints about documentation :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I've only used Terraform out of their set of tools and loved every minute of using it. By far the most intuitive and the clear leader out of the Infrastructure as Code tools. Fingers crossed they can live up to this massive valuation.

</comment><comment><USER19> They could not have more last minute timing. Now everything melts and the time of funny money is over.

<comment><USER20> Last Thursday, Axios contacted 40 VC firms and every single one said they were still actively investing: [https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-open- business-dry-powd...](https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-open-business-dry- powder-b78e743b-f47d-42a2-ba17-15c245e13dd3.html)

<comment><USER21> I'd love to see the results of that call next Thursday

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations. I have always had a love-hate relationship with Hashicorp's tools. In the end, though, the product that they provide _freely_ to us all is absolutely phenomenal. I also have a lot of respect for Mitchell Hashimoto and really appreciate his humility. Great to see this positive news for Mitchell and the team.

</comment><comment><USER23> Insanely cool that they are able to do it in this incredibly volatile market.

<comment><USER24> I suspect that the deal was signed earlier and this is just the press release.

<comment><USER25> Even if it were the release, there is a lot of cash that needs somewhere to go right now. The market has volatility without the returns, whereas you can get nX yield for the same perceived risk in venture funds. This could be a very good time to be in VC or doing a startup.

Liquid capital needs productive assets, and fed-backed crazy town might not be the place for it.

Hashicorp also has awesome and sticky products, and they have earned whatever they got. With Vault, they got people to adopt their defacto HSM, without the friction of selling hardware, and all the benefits of being the root of trust in each enterprise. Everything about that company is f'ing brilliant, imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder why HashiCorp needs to raise more money as they seem fairly profitable and in a very good position in the market? Why dilute your stocks and ownership of the company?

<comment><USER27> No idea about their profitability, but doing a big raise before a recession to try and tide you through with minimal layoffs is probably not a bad idea. (Yeah, I'm sure this has been in the works for a while before the coronavirus hit the fan, but the signs of recession have been brewing for a while, bulls notwithstanding.)

</comment></comment><comment> dynamite-ready A bit of caveat, but do many people here still use Vagrant?

<comment><USER28> I'm playing with it. I don't like the "middleware" plugins, but after more research, since it's all Ruby, I managed to put a tweak into my Vagrantfile to force my order of execution (plugins vs. provisioners).

The startup of the vagrant CLI is sooo damn slow! It takes seconds to print help... That's my major problem with it.

I'd rather see something more lightweight, but this gets the job done quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A bunch of my friend group (average 5 years of experience each) just went through job searches, and all of us applied to hashicorp. Among us, we had big data experience, distributed systems experience, frontend, backend, etc. Very wide gamut.

None of us even received a reply, and from what I've heard this isn't unusual. I'm always a bit flummoxed as to what companies like this want when they somehow even develop a reputation for ghosting.

Vault is cool though I guess. Maybe they just get that many applicants.

<comment><USER30> Didn't receive a reply after interviewing, or didn't receive a reply after applying? Not getting a reply after applying is pretty common. It could mean a lot of things, including that they might want to keep your resume on file for a future availability.

I don't mind it, personally. It's the ghosting after interviewing that I find annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hope these news means that we get a native, Hashicorp-supported Podman plugin to Nomad ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Would love your advice, critique and ideas - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I would like to seek your advice and feedback on a social media platform that we launched a week ago. We are in the process of courting the media (press releases, connecting with reporters, etc). Before going too far into the process, I wanted to reach out to you to see if we could get your collective suggestions, critiques or ideas on the site (UI, navigation, message, etc).
Although the site is designed for stock investors, we felt it would be great to get feedback from this group based on your collective technical and development experience.
Any feedback is highly appreciated. Here is the link: http://www.marketconsensus.com/
Thanks and looking forward to your thoughts.
Ogbe Airiodion <comment><USER2> I kind of like the idea, but I think your are really out of the way with the design, there is still a LOT of work to do. Everything feels like a website from some years ago, it looks really...flat it's say. There are too many shades of blue and they are used without an apparent reason. The gradients are wrongly used, a light blue fading to white under a white text is not a good idea. A lot of elements have unreasonable inconsistent size, like the search box, is too small.

After this quite harsh review, I suppose you are not having access to a designer. That's fine but I strongly suggest to at least have a look to the designs you can find on themeforest.net, most are quite cheap(20$) and will give a whole new feeling to the website.

I know the design might sound as a secondary thing to a developer but I'm afraid that without a decent one the media will not even take you in account, which is a real shame because the idea is really nice.

<comment><USER3> I second this comment about design. Looks very outdated. Why don't you use bootstrap or zurb foundation to get it giong ?

<comment><USER2> I agree that Zurb might be an idea, but I would not use Bootstrap, while it's a great product it is not to create ultimated websites but, as the name suggest, jsut to hack something together quickly, it should be avoided for final products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- What's good

While I don't know much about what you're talking about, I quickly understood what's the purpose of this website

\- What should be your first priority

Your goal is to have the highest number of people signing-up. Focus on that. Reduce the clutter. Improve your signal to noise ratio. Have a look at some of Edward Tufte principles (in his own words _"Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective."_ )

\- What's wrong but can be fixed

Well as almost everyone said, it's not a design up to our standards in 2012. But this should not be a problem. It seems that you're usign Drupal. I'm quite sure there's a Drupal Bootstrap module. Just moving your design to Bootstrap will be a huge improvement. You'll be free to fine-tune the design later.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow! A big thank you to everyone for all the provided feedback. Taking the various reviews into consideration, I see that the design most definitely needs to be enhanced. Will be looking at revamping the site design to best gain a more professional look. Our goal is definitely to have the highest number of people signing-up, as such we'll also be focusing on reducing the clutter.

Thanks duiker101, Tangue, codegeek and Y234.

Looking forward to receiving more feedback and critique from the HN community. Please keep it coming.

</comment><comment><USER5> I also agree with the above comments that more could be done regarding the design. The navigation is great and I kind of understood the message, but the overall design is ....an eye sore to say the least</comment>