Microsoft Partner Network changes spark uproar - <AUTHOR> https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GTn8p4GxT9gJ:https://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/3078458/the-worst-move-from-microsoft-in-30-years-mpn-changes-spark-uproar <comment><USER2> This is all intentional. They're basically killing off their reseller model in favor of self-service for small clients.

When selling SKUs, a reseller model is great. They do the hard work of finding and converting long-tail leads, and all you have to give up is a little margin. When selling cloud subscriptions it becomes a burden — you have to continually pay overhead for your partners to manage your customers. Customer support expectations are low in the cloud (AWS provides minimal support, so MS can too).

Microsoft has been investing in customer-facing solution architects for this reason. They are investing dedicated resources in their big accounts, and are driving their partner strategy through the big consultancies rather than small MSPs. Their strategy seems to be one of landing a lot of "big fish;" which isn't hard to do with a lot of big customers backtracking G-Suite to Office 365. From what I've seen, it's working: Google simply doesn't have the kind of relationships in the enterprise IT world that Microsoft does.

<comment><USER3> And buying O365 via a vendor is actually a huge liability.

The vendor/reseller has full admin access to your O365 account ("subscription advisor"/delegated administrators). They can also transfer this access. If your vendor gets purchased or otherwise decides to transfer your rep' they'll just unilaterally grant some unknown person/company admin access to your whole O365 account.

But you're forced to work through a vendor for any discounts. You're penalized for working directly with Microsoft. And if you revoke this access, don't be surprised if your partner tells you they cannot support you until it is re- granted (even buying more licenses, because they need to "confirm your license allocation" or similar).

It is a huge HIPAA nightmare.

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised how infrequently this is brought up. Folks are either shocked or dismissive whenever I bring this up, but it keeps me from being able to recommend O365 at all.

<comment><USER5> Because the concern comes across as a bit silly if you know how the platform works and you have experience changing your partner ID (say, from acquisition). A customer must deliberately grant a partner delegated admin privs for them to have that level of access to their tenant. If the company the customer works with gets bought out, the buyer doesn't get access to the acquired client tenants automagically. They must go through and request delegate admin again under the different partner ID that's bound to their partner tenant. A client can swap out (or dump) partners of record quite easily, and other service providers are happy to help you do it.

Years ago, if you bought O365 licensing through a reseller, it was very hard to add licenses yourself with direct purchase. That hasn't been the case for a while now though. You can use redeemed licenses from a reseller alongside directly purchased licenses.

We encourage our customers to buy direct anyway, although I don't see anything in the article talking about shutting down the reseller program anyway. They're dropping internal use rights and support incidents for partners.

<comment><USER6> I agree. My clients specifically expect me to be that admin, that is the value for value I offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quoting Wikipedia:

> _Microsoft Partner Network or MPN [...] is designed to make resources > available to a wide variety of technology companies so they can build a > business around Microsoft technologies._

I suspect the matter of the "worst move in 30 years" article will get straightened out, and won't seem nearly as bad as the title suggests.

A backstab would be SOP for much of the last 30 years of MS, but I'd be surprised if they're going to throw away a lot of the developer goodwill they've been acquiring recently.

Right now, I get the impression that a sizable chunk of HN think of MS as good-natured fellow developers who run GitHub and share an IDE, and that chunk has little awareness of earlier history (and how relieved a lot of people were by the escape route that the Web and Linux provided).

Why would MS spoil that goodwill, by alerting all those developers to the proven business pattern of waiting until your partner/customer has built their business around you, before you do whatever you want to them?

Whether MS will someday lose their current goodwill, I don't know, but the timing doesn't seem right (unless someone is really desperate for short-term numbers).

<comment><USER8> Yes, this! Almost an entire subgroup of millennials think of microsoft as some cuddly bear. They do not realize how their machinations were so strong you could not buy a PC without Windows. PC OEMs could not sell you a PC without Windows. Or how they almost took over the web with their browser and proprietary JavaScript "extensions".

<comment><USER9> I was born in the mid 90's and didn't start programming until college, so I missed out on all the 'evil Microsoft' fun and am probably missing something - but I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it. But for example - Mac's and i-Devices's all come bundled with Safari, why doesn't Apple also have this bad rep?

<comment><USER10> > I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a > pain to uninstall it.

The root issue was that Microsoft preinstalled the (free) Internet Explorer _at a time when other web browsers were commercial_. Netscape Navigator in particular was free for personal use, but Netscape wanted a fee for business use.

That was the original sin of the monopoly: Microsoft used its dominance in the operating system market to take over the browser market at a stroke. They compounded on this with "embrace, extend, and extinguish" practices, where they would introduce and maintain IE-only web extensions to the detriment of existing and upcoming standards.

You still see the modern legacy of this with Internet Explorer 'compatibility mode' hacks, since it turned out that Microsoft itself became stuck in its own morass.

<comment><USER9> Yeah as an enterprise web developer, I definitely have met my share of frustrating requirements to support ancient versions of IE. But that's definitely an interesting choice that I don't think I fault Microsoft for making - if you own the platform, why not extend your control into other popular apps running on the platform (word processors, databases, browsers, etc.). Pretty logical step to make imo, though their underhanded tactics were probably also to blame for the US Supreme Court monopoly case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No. This is the latest in a series of good moves that Microsoft has been making lately in order to regain some integrity.

Microsoft's toxic and manipulative partner program has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years. Engineers and consultancies have been encouraged to "level-up" in the system, while customers and casual users are shut out. A whole proprietary ecosystem has been allowed to develop which requires a large financial buy-in just to provide simple services like databases and email.

Its clear that this has to change, and Microsoft is right to reduce partner dependency and vendor lock-in, painful as it may be for those who have heavily invested in these ecosystems.

<comment><USER12> This is a rather incredible take, and you seem to be seriously arguing that Microsoft thinks customers are just giving them too much money and they just feel so guilty about it.

Microsoft once saw MPNs as necessary to get the sale. Now they don't, and they'd rather just cut MPNs out and make the sales themselves (more for them), and begrudgingly let it continue to exist in a minimal fashion.

<comment><USER13> I haven't done a ton of procurement in Microsoft-land but I have often heard the MPN described as a convoluted mechanism for offering software discounts through third-parties. As a Microsoft customer, I would rather they just have bulk licensing discount and easy-to-understand licensing one-click licensing rather than having to call (with a telephone!) up some third-party "distributor" to get a discount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Worst move in 30 years? Thirty years takes us all the way back to _1989._ Just off the top of my head, here are some worse moves: 1) late to the internet, 2) squandering the marketshare lead of IE 6, 3) Windows Vista, 4) Windows 8, 5) late to search.

<comment><USER15> You forgot: 0) Late to modern smartphones.

That's the biggest blunder they've ever had.

<comment><USER16> x) appointing Steve Balmer as CEO

<comment><USER17> Steve Ballmer wasn't a bad CEO. People keep talking about how he dropped the ball on mobile, but so what? So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their _core business_. To think a "better" CEO could've pulled it all off is delusional.

Under Ballmer, Microsoft focused on core business and reached into cloud - successfully. As a result, Microsoft is now stronger than Apple. Microsoft doesn't depend on people buying luxury cellphones, a market which is reaching saturation.

That's not a "sexy" story, but it's the truth. A more "proactive" CEO would've just blown more money on Zunes and Kinects to fail in the market.

<comment><USER18> Nokia dropped the ball on mobile, then Ballmer bought Nokia. Also MS reached into the cloud thanks to Nadella, not tanks to Ballmer.

<comment><USER19> When Satya Nadella became CEO Microsoft Azure was four years old.

As old timer insiders said to me prior to that time "You wouldn't believe just how committed Microsoft is on this. I've never seen anything like it."

(But Satya has made it really work.)

<comment><USER20> I think the parent is saying that Nadella led the charge into the cloud inside MS under Ballmer, which is a big reason he was considered for the CEO position after Ballmer.

<comment><USER19> Could be, could be. I hadn't thought of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Now that they're moving to a cloud strategy, my guess is that the value of their partners for on-premise stuff is going way down.

<comment><USER21> It's not entirely impossible that many on-premises sales are actually, or are predicted to become, a net negative compared to a similar cloud solution. Based on these policy changes, one can argue that it's not only possible, but likely that on-premises is becoming a net negative.

My interpretation, or at least one of them, is that Microsoft want to start pushing the smaller accounts entirely to the cloud by starving that channel while also gaining the option of engaging with more of the largest customers directly. The latter will only be possible once most of the MPN members prone to open critique towards MPN policies have left the program. It also seems to fit nicely into the "open source" narrative with it's implicit, or explicit focus on charging for various services rather than the software itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could this be the reason: [https://www.gtconsult.com/microsoft-terminates- eoh/](https://www.gtconsult.com/microsoft-terminates-eoh/)

(South African IT company found to abuse the MPN license terms when a client lodged complaint with SEC).

I do not have the link to the complaint to the US SEC but if anyone does, it might help.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good MPN licenses have been abused for far too long; I worked for a company that didn't gave a flying fuck about MSFT was providing mostly networking/security services but since it had a large number of employees paying for a Gold Partner wasn't only valuable to draw in business because CIO/CTO's at the time liked to see the nifty Cisco/Microsoft/Nortel/W/ETel partner on your website but the yearly costs of attaining partnership was just a tiny fraction of what they would've paid for windows, server and CAL licenses.

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to work for a company that was an MPN partner and the changes wouldn't have affected us. I'm assuming that I've understood the changes correctly, so I could be wrong.

Maybe it's some vocal partners rather than the majority that would be affected by this?

In any case, unless they have ample evidence of abuse this is a bad move

<comment><USER25> This is the new licences available to partners: [https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/en-us/mpn-maps-software- iur...](https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/en-us/mpn-maps-software-iur- competency-license-table.docx)

I work for a silver partner and this literally doesn't affect us. There aren't many "good faith" configurations I can imagine that would struggle fitting into this model. I'd be all ears if there's someone affected but I imagine those businesses would be operating multiple arms, one of which is performing the functions of a Microsoft partner and the other is leveraging the free access to tools to drastically cut the costs of operation.

<comment><USER26> yeah, i imagine that they are maybe hosting software for customers with the free licences or something else, or else why would that be such a big change for some of them.

<comment><USER5> It hurts the small partners the most. I think losing the silver and gold on- prem license grants are probably a good thing, and it will be interesting to see if any locals take a material hit having to buy up the replacement licenses for their operation. Like the guy above said, I do think some subsidiary arms are just fronts for buying cheap IURs in the Gold program. But the smallest start up service providers losing the 5-seat IURs for O365 in the action pack will really hurt them and the ability of new partners to start up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I half expect the next Windows to be an XWindow replacement.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are two types of partners in the MSFT ecosystem: those that build, and those that license. If this is a change to support the partners with product/implementation expertise, then it's a good change. But I think it's too early to tell.

</comment><comment><USER29> Have been a MS Partner for close to 15 years - ended up concluding that internal use software licenses are really the only benefit of this program. That said, I didnt renew this year.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hm, cannot really understand the move from MS. Do too many licenses from partners end up in the wrong hands? I doubt the motivation is getting more licensing fees from those that are the responsible for distribution.

That said, fewer partners that try to shoehorn dubious cloud licenses wouldn't be unwelcome.

<comment><USER23> No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses.

MPN allowed their partners to use licenses for free for any "internal" use, now they are restricting it to only business development use cases.

This means that you can have an IT services company that barely sells any microsoft products, paying a small yearly fee to be a partner whilst getting considerably more than they pay out in return in the form of free licenses (for all internal business uses), technical support, training and other perks.

What Microsoft has done now is basically restrict the uses of MPN licenses only for business development and any other in good faith activities that are actually designed to promote Microsoft products to your customers.

Basically with this new change you can't have a 500+ employee company anymore that doesn't pay licenses for Windows, CAL licenses for domain, exchange, gets free sharepoint and more importantly free tech support which is often misused to solve customer problems rather than their own.

This more or less brings the MPN licenses closer to what say MSDN licenses are; you can use them to learn how stuff works, you can use them to demo the tech to clients, and for internal POC's but you can't roll into production on their back.

<comment><USER31> > No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft > Partner than to pay for your own licenses.

This allows Microsoft to compete in prices with cheaper products without risking being accused of dumping. It also helps with vendor lock in by inducing higher dependency than would be achievable on pricing alone. Finally, it creates a steady flow of people trained in an artificially homogeneous ecosystem.

<comment><USER32> Those seem to be good reasons for Microsoft changing things. Less vendor lock and dumping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a small MSP, who is a Microsoft Partner, the IUR elimination will hurt. I don't really care too much about the support incidents (MS support has always been the last of last resorts). It will be that much harder for new IT services companies to bootstrap themselves without this program. I get the idea that companies can get their basic O365 licensing set up easily on their own, but once you wade into Exchange and MDM, it takes some good road miles to know how to implement things correctly. A lot of SMBs w/o IT departments will still need IT partners, certified or not.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've heard tons of complaints about the Partner program, so it makes sense to reform it. I never had a true partner account just an MSDN account that offered free licenses for internal use.

</comment><comment><USER34> If I'm reading the document correctly the "on-premise technical support" refers to any products not in the cloud. Microsoft will still provide support incidents to partners for cloud based products. Microsoft is screaming "GET INTO THE CLOUD" as loud as it can...

</comment><comment><USER35> Makes sense, just like for cern and probably several other previously free riders that's being removed.

MS is going for a personal subscription based lisencing solution in the near future.

If you think office is a cash cow think what windows whould be, every company whould boy this for their employers, the employers when fired e.g without a job whould buy it so that they can log in to their machine and so on. They could easily fetch 5$ a month from about a billion people if not more. Pluss servers being maybe 100$ a moth per server per company and so on.

Allowing MS to capitalize and companies being able to easier shape their own usage.

And some whould argue... A lot of people will move to Linux (no they wont (some but not a lot) simply because for most people it looks, feels and works like something made in someone's garage.

Just my guess.

</comment><comment><USER36> Linking to a document with file://...</comment>


Microsoft Expanding By 1 Million SF in Bellevue - <AUTHOR> http://www.costar.com/News/Article.aspx?id=AE40DC75921BEB714FCC9D697D42A6F2 <comment><USER2> There just isn't enough space here anymore!!! From my 11x22 at Live Search to a 11x11 WITH 6 others at MSCOM!!! Someday, I am gonna have to call the fire department :-D ....</comment>


Large European routing leak sends traffic through China Telecom - <AUTHOR> https://blog.apnic.net/2019/06/07/large-european-routing-leak-sends-traffic-through-china-telecom/ <comment><AUTHOR> Periodic reminder: "Operators, where are your MANRS?"

[https://www.manrs.org/](https://www.manrs.org/)

<comment><USER2> It seems like one of the hit ISPs (KPN) actually _is_ part of MANRS. Shouldn't that have protected them and their customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. When you're in the middle and neither the source nor the destination of a route implements MANRS, there is not much to protect/verify. MANRS does protect you from becoming a leak, among other things. (I am not a total expert on routing, so please take this with a grain of salt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would someone explain to a scrub what "route leaking" is? Would this be an issue because the leak receiver could inspect traffic that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise?

<comment><USER4> The way inter-ISP routing works is that every ISP advertises its IP ranges† (prefixes) to each ISP it's connected to, who in turn stamp them with their own addresses and relay them to all their connections; in this way, advertisements are eventually propagated to every ISP on the Internet.

A prefix can be connected to several ISPs, and thus be advertised multiple times from multiple places. Each ISP resolves all the advertisements and computes paths to each prefix, sending traffic towards the shortest path received.

The protocol that conducts this process, BGP4, is unauthenticated and managed by a combination of fiddly filtering configurations (often based on regular expressions) and trust. An ISP can advertise any prefix and stand a chance of getting some other ISPs to route that prefix towards them.

Here, what appears to have happened was that a Dutch ISP advertised a bunch of prefixes incorrectly (they may have been advertised in such a way as to make them unattractive options for routing, as a safeguard, but that proved ineffective). China Telecom picked them up and propagated them, and, in doing so, made itself an attractive path for the prefixes for many other ISPs.

Yes, this would allow China Telecom to inspect traffic mistakenly routed to them, though it's extraordinarily unlikely that anything like that occurred.

† _ISPs themselves have their own short numeric addresses, called ASNs._

<comment><USER5> Except GFW always check the traffic and likely 1) DNS poisoned, 2) TCP RST'ed some of the misrouted traffic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's start prefixing IP packets with GF forbidden words just in case

</comment><comment><USER7> Why do these routing leaks go through China and Russia so often?

<comment><USER8> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

<comment><USER9> "Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action."

<comment><USER10> You should go read the nanog-l archives and see how often this happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Today's incident shows that the Internet has not yet eradicated the problem of BGP route leaks. It also reveals that China Telecom, a major International carrier, has still implemented neither the basic routing safeguards necessary both to prevent the propagation of routing leaks nor the processes and procedures necessary to detect and remediate them in a timely manner when they inevitably occur.

What incentives do they have not to route data from foreign adversaries through their networks? :')

</comment><comment><USER12> The traffic did no transit through China right?</comment>


Play Framework 2.6.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://blog.playframework.com/play-2-6-0-released/ <comment><USER2> Ah, I've completely forgot about Play Framework. The interesting contribution I did made was just to give a slogan "high-velocity web framework". The website haven't change much over the years. Looking now, Rocket is indeed more of a high-velocity web framework [https://rocket.rs](https://rocket.rs)</comment>


Wi-Fi patent case results in $229M payment to Australian government - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/wifi-patent-case-results-in-229m-payment-to-australian-government.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally I like this story because nothing will hasten the US government into action more than being "victimized" by foreign companies and organizations.

This particular patent is less egregious than many but even so I find the situation ridiculous. As long as US companies are benefitting from patents, the government will do nothing. We need more patent litigation from foreign entities.

Just as a side note, the CSIRO is a "real" organization. It conducts an awful lot of research with some notable inventions [1]. That money will fund a lot more research. This isn't some NPE troll who will simply line its pockets.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Ind...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Industrial_Research_Organisation#Notable_Inventions)

<comment><USER2> Hi cletus, totally unrelated to this story but would you mind sending me a mail on colin[at]colinfleming.net? I tried to contact you through your blog but the contact form seems to be pretty broken (both the captcha and the submission). Thanks.</comment></comment>


Welcome to the CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository (1994) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/readme.txt <comment><USER2> Does this content actually still exist somewhere? There are some references IPs / DNS names that no longer exist.

<comment><USER3> If you remove the readme.txt from the URL you can browse the directory tree, the stuff there looks the same as I remember it.</comment></comment>


Why the Industrial Revolution Didn't Happen in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-the-industrial-revolution-didnt-happen-in-china/?postshare=2971477913961160&tid=ss_fb <comment><USER2> "And yet they were never able to turn it into economic growth as the West did"

Is it really that much of a mystery? China has had different forms of totalitarianism over the last couple of centuries.

It's like putting a noose around the neck of economic growth and innovation.

The only reason they even saw growth is because the cost of living is still very low in many parts of the country (outside big cities like Beijing) and big businesses can utilize this plus their lax employment laws.

They now just copy our innovations (sometimes, rather poorly) and sell them to their much larger, closed market. Many of these hacking attacks we've seen in the last couple of years are done to steal corporate secrets and copy the business:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-great-brain- robbery-c...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-great-brain-robbery- china-cyber-espionage/)

I know a guy that is a senior engineer at an automotive company. He's originally from China and will go back in a year or so because automotive companies in China are paying Chinese engineers that have worked in the US 3X what they are getting paid here. It won't last long, however. Once they get all of these corporate secrets, engineer wages will go down.

China is slowly stealing all of our corporate secrets through hacking, having Chinese students get educated here and then taking secrets back with them, and outright theft of manufacturing plans/molds.</comment>


OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 Now in Public Beta - <AUTHOR> https://beta.apple.com

<comment><USER2> Has anyone tried beta testing iOS 9? I'm interested to see if there are any speed increases for iOS, since iOS 8, my iPad2 has been as slow as molasses.

<comment><USER3> yeah, so far dissapointed with ios8

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still waiting to hear if the El Capitan beta is stable enough for daily use.

I'm with no ability to backup my MBP but the new improvements tempt me to download the beta..</comment>


A music player for the TS80 soldering iron - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joric/ts80player/ <comment><USER2> TS soldering irons are great. I've been giving them as gifts to techie friends, they're all now fans.

the YouTube personality Marco Reps suggested someone should try to tweak the firmware in order to be able to play music when he did a review on these irons long ago, i'm glad someone took up the task.

personally i'd just try to hack a JBC soldering cartridge together with a TS for a real-cheap 'ultimate' soldering iron.. bit then i'd be without tunes, I guess.

<comment><USER3> How heavy are these USB soldering irons?

I have an iron that plugs directly into the mains, but I stopped using it as soon as I got a Hakko soldering station... Now I only use the old iron to remove hot glue. The advantage of a station is safety, better thermal performance, but more important - the iron is lightweight (as the circuitry is in the station, not the iron) and much easier to work with, especially for soldering or desoldering a difficult component.

I expect these USB irons to be lighter than a mains-powered iron, but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER4> I have one, just weighed it 36g without cable, 52 with the entire cable. So real lift will be between the those two, probably closer to 40g

<comment><USER5> Are the tips more broadly available for purchase at this point?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but realistically I only use the BC2 tip. I've also got a TS-I tip in a box somewhere but I've never bothered to get it out.

I picked up a T12 shovel tip, which extends comically far from the handle, but works just fine: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/myself248/49284798441/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/myself248/49284798441/) and [https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07V7DY8YQ/](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07V7DY8YQ/)

I wish I could get shovel tips like that in the shorter TS100 form factor, but no luck. I've thought about picking up one of those knockoff stations that takes the T12 tips, specifically one with the FX9501 handle, specifically for the added versatility, but I don't think I'd use it enough to justify. But here's the one I've been looking at: [https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07PQ1GJZ5/](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07PQ1GJZ5/)

The native TS100 tips are all over the place. But the ecosystem thereof is still very small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Because you can.

<comment><USER8> i still have my mp3 player from 2009. i am always worried that it will die one day and i wouldn't be able to find a good replacement for it.

i recently heard on a podcast that smartphones are bad as music players because they are very distracting. especially for athletes. a single notification or message can lower their performance for minutes. music on its own can however boost performance.

as most mp3 players are moving to using android as their main OS and requiring wifi, location and whatnot, i have learned to appreciate the simplicity of the first few generations of mp3 players. so i really like what this project is doing for some reason.

<comment><USER3> You can find many music players from second-hand markets, still in good conditions. I purchased one for 15 dollars from eBay (it used to cost a hundred dollars) and installed Rockbox, now it can decode sounds in all encodings, including Vorbis and Opus, and I can even use it as a TOTP authentication token or Morse Code keyboard for your computer ( _I don 't recommend one to use it as such tools, it's not good at doing these jobs, but I tried because I could... If you are a hardcore programmer, you can even try programming a 3D demoscene on the player!_)

If you insist on buying a new one, the Hi-Fi community still makes audio-only music players as well.

<comment><USER9> Which $15 player runs Rockbox?

<comment><USER10> It won't be $15 -- but an affordable player that is great with Rockbox is the SanDisk Clip+. It's got a decent screen, really small form factor, microSD.

My main Rockbox'd unit is an iPod Video (5.5) with an iFlash Quad (up to 4x microSD cards) and a 2000mAh battery. Not the most expensive project, but not as cheap as the Clip+.

My guess is that the parent is talking about the Sansa c200 or something similar.

<comment><USER11> It looks like there's a few iPod Video models on eBay for $16.

<comment><USER10> Make sure they're not for parts. All you really need is the main logic board, but it's nice to start with a complete unit.

The best iPod Video is the Enhanced / 5.5 that has the 'search' item. An 80gb version of this also has more RAM, which I don't think is utilized at this time, but it might down the road. This may not be accurate now, but it was a few years ago.

The 80gb will come with the fat back. If you do the mod I did, you can use the slim back from the 30gb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of a Stephen Chow comedy with absurd spy gadgets -e.g. a leather shoe is actually a hair blower.

<comment><USER13> From Beijing With Love.

Brilliant movie!

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Beijing_with_Love](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Beijing_with_Love)</comment></comment>


Physicists Find a Way to See the 'Grin' of Quantum Gravity - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-find-a-way-to-see-the-grin-of-quantum-gravity-20180306/ <comment><USER2> >Perhaps one clue as to why it is so much harder to quantize gravity than everything else is that other force fields in nature exhibit a feature called "locality" ... But "there's at least a bunch of theoretical evidence that that's not how gravity works."

Really? I was under the impression that gravitational waves propagate at very nearly the speed of light.

Also, this article doesn't do a very good job of explaining why people are so certain gravity can be quantized. Gravity as a deformation of spacetime seems like a perfectly reasonable model to work with. Why should we think it doesn't reflect reality?

<comment><USER3>
      I was under the impression that gravitational waves propagate at very nearly the speed of light.

There was a speaker for January's Silicon Valley Astronomical Society lecture on this, and I asked him that very question. It turns out that the gravitational wave hit us _before_ there was detectable change in light emissions.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tracktions. Achieve Goals. Build Habits. Consciously. - <AUTHOR> https://tracktions.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built Tracktions as I had hard times to remember how long has passed since some actions that I repeat from time to time.

Lets say I want to read more and by default I feel like I am reading a lot, but the timer shows the real situation. I read every 3 days. The goal here is to keep intervals between occurrences as short as possible.

Another usecase I found useful — write down notes about workout. I keep traking what I have done to see progress and adjust my next workout.</comment>


If It Was My Home (Oil spill visualization) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

<comment><USER2> At the risk of getting downvoted, and I'm not saying the oil spill isn't bad - it is (very) - but let's remember some context:

1) The area is large. But this is meaningless without knowledge of the density.

2) I can't find a reference, but a prof of marine biology was on the bbc a couple of days ago and apparently this oil spill doesn't even make it into the top 40 worst man-made disasters (e.g compare to bhopal, chernobyl, pacific gyre)

The Niger Delta sees this volume of oil spilled EVERY SINGLE YEAR and no-one gives a fuck. No-one is held to account, there's no press, there's no nothing. The culprits are all the major US/European oil firms.

<comment><USER3> More relevant than the comparison to other disasters is the list of largest oil spills:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spills#Largest_oil_spills>

on which it is currently somewhere between third and sixteenth, depending on which estimate you believe. The point being that if the ecosystem recovered from all these other oil spills (most of which you've never heard of) then it'll recover from this one too. If you want to worry about something, worry about overfishing in the oceans instead.

Besides, hasn't there been a shocking lack of photogenic oil-drenched wildlife washing up on beaches? Anyone know what the deal is with that?

<comment><USER4> Tighter controls over the media? Did they have no-fly zones and tightly restricted waters during the Exxon Valdez spill?

<comment><USER3> The entire coastline is free and populated... I haven't seen any pictures of dead wildlife or even oil on land yet.

<comment><USER4> There was a story[1] posted to HN last week with oil-covered animals and oil on land. I don't remember of there were any dead animals though.

[1] [http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisia...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisiana_shores.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I click "Put it back in the gulf," the size of the oil spill shrinks. When I click "Put it in Portland, OR, USA," it grows again. I don't think that the map scale has changed, because slider doesn't move.

{edit} Is this just a by-product of mapping the surface of a sphere to a rectangle?

<comment><USER5> It's a by-product of the projection Google Maps uses.

Try "congo" and then "greenland" (and then never trust maps again :).

This is actually another good reason to use a tool like this. Projections distort.

<comment><USER6> Wow. Putting it in the "arctic ocean" is pretty interesting too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Give the subjunctive some love: "If It _Were_ My Home"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Sorry if this was submitted already.)

The genius I see here is that the relative size of a large area is really hard for people to actually understand. Until you show it relative to something they know intuitively (like where they live.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to try and get downvoted and not saying this isn't an absolutely shitty situation for the gulf but this thing cant really take into consideration elevations and/or valleys where the oil would rest and not spread. Then again I don't think google maps can do something like that and/or was never intended to do so.

</comment><comment><USER9> I zoomed out so that I could see the entire Earth, which is where I live. Looks pretty small on that scale.

<comment><USER10> The area covers my whole country and then some. Although small compared to whole Earth, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't enjoy having the spill as a next- door neighbour.

<comment><USER3> Good thing it's out in the sea, then.</comment></comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin's Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/jeff-bezos-moon.html <comment><USER2> See also discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872439)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Rising energy consumption is crucial to raising the standard of living for > more people, but "We will run out of energy," Mr. Bezos said. "This is just > arithmetic. It's going to happen."

Really? It's GOING to happen?

Unless I'm woefully mistaken, this is only the case if we define energy as meaning "fossil fuels". In that case, yeah, we're absolutely going to run out of those.

But nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, thermal? These are going to run out? Why? On what timeline?

<comment><USER4> > Unless I'm woefully mistaken, this is only the case if we define energy as > meaning "fossil fuels". In that case, yeah, we're absolutely going to run > out of those.

I'm sorry to disagree but this is false. I don't have the time to come up with multiple sources, but we'll never ever run out of coal, oil or gas [0].

Additionally, from the sources of news that I get. Every year they seem to find newer deposits of oil and gas [1].

Now throw in the fact that in the next 25 years the majority of transportation on the road will be electric and then in the air the next 25-50 years after that. Demand will simply plummet.

Finally there are even startups who are working on turning bio-waste into plastics, thus in the future lowering the demand significantly [2].

I would bet by 2100. We still have plenty of oil, gas, coal and other minerals and because of advancements and access to space mining. That the world doesn't ever run out, due to demand moving onto other eco-friendly alternatives and will have an over abundance of everything. The world will do just fine.

[0]: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oila...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11971280/The- Earth-is-not-running-out-of-oil-and-gas-BP-says.html)

[1]: [https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Significant-natural-gas- di...](https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Significant-natural-gas-discovery- made-off-Israels-shore-586905)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks awfully a lot like the visions of outer space from the 70s. And space is a lot less hospitable than some underground cavern on Mars or the Moon.

<comment><USER6> Which themselves are less hospitable than living in the middle of the Sahara desert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> These billionaires have quite the pet projects to envy.

I was going to give Jeff flack, but he is doing philanthropy.

What else can we ask of the worlds billionaires? Advancing tech, reducing poverty.

</comment><comment><USER8> I stepped over human feces yet again this morning, how about some infrastructure to deal with that? "Incredible civilization" you say? For who?

<comment><USER6> I get your point but if you look at the number of technologies over the second half of the XX century that spanned from research on planes and space, it is still indirectly beneficial for us mere earth people.

<comment><USER8> Which technologies? Teflon? Tang? Now that we have more and more of our country living either in prisons or under bridges than at any point in time, which of these amazing space technologies will most benefit the prison population/mentally ill the most?

<comment><USER6> First result on google and if you include planes I am sure there are many more:

[https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html](https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Social resume – A way to dream job - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codemunch.com/?p=52 With social resume you can make employer see your resume and contact you freely. You can also add your resume on social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut with our application CodeMunch and can make this platform work for you. To create social resume just create your profile (which is very easy and hardly takes 5 minute). Now you can see profile of all members, can contact them, get your resume rated and rate others resume. One most important thing is your participation on forums. The more you participate, stronger your identity is. Also you can be easily discovered because of active participation. Add this resume on your Facebook and Orkut profile and start getting your dream job opportunities from your personal network and jobs forums on facebook and orkut. <comment><USER2> I'd never do that. It's basically putting your career at a higher priority than your life. Or confusing the two. Confucius was dead wrong: anything you must do per definitonem cannot be enjoyable, exactly because you must do it, therefore it always carries a hint of a fear and threat. At high school I hated the novels that were mandatory to read even though I was reading a lot of very similar novels for fun. But the mandatory novels carried a hint of threat and fear: if you don't read them you'll get bad grades, not get into a uni, end up flipping burgers, etc. And this threat and fear spoiled them. And this is what spoils _every_ job, no matter how fun it might otherwise be. Once someone tells you you gotta receive two blowjobs every day or get fired, you'll hate getting blowjobs, I'm sure of that.

Therefore, accept that your job sucks, simply because it's job. Simply enjoy your hours after work. And enjoyment usually doesn't mean socializing with people who have nothing interesting about them except that they are in the same industry as you.</comment>


Gnome is still the best Linux desktop environment - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/17/8/reasons-i-come-back-gnome <comment><USER2> I tried Gnome 3 a few years ago, when it had already matured somewhat and was curious how it turned out to be. First impression was good, looked pretty and seemed well-polished. However, I found the default font size too large for my taste. No problem, I thought, just head to the preferences and make them smaller. So I opened the prefs and searched and searched... and couldn't find it.

At some point I thought I must be stupid for overlooking it and turned to google. Among the very first hits, google showed me a posting on google+, written by Linus Torvalds himself. In there he was ranting about exactly my problem: not being able to change the font size in Gnome 3. That was kind of a relief: at least I wasn't being too stupid to find it.

In the end I found out that Gnome 3 indeed doesn't have that setting! To change it, you had to install a thing called Gnome Tweak Tool (IIRC). By default, this was seemingly deemed a too advanced feature for normal users.

I then quickly decided that Gnome 3 wasn't for me. (Admittedly, I don't know if this has changed since then in newer version.)

I'm all for usability and not providing a million settings (hello KDE), but changing the system font seems so very basic to me... I still can't fathom why they'd remove it.

<comment><USER3> I personally find that KDE has too many settings and it's a pain. BUT, I use KDE Neon for 6 months now and I like (maybe too much) the new look of it. Also they refined a lot the bottom status bar with NetworkManager etc, very simple, clean.

I still use Gnome on my personal laptop, but at work I find KDE more usable.

<comment><USER4> I don't think KDE has too many settings, but I do agree that the need to adapt to different form factors has made a lot of UI a lot cleaner and more concise. Mobile and tablet interfaces seem to have had a positive impact on cleaning up the desktop, while still providing means to change commonly needed settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty subjective, but I've switched away from Gnome since Gnome 3. I find it slow and unintuitive even on modern hardware. I could use at least 4 out of the 6 points the author makes in this article to describe any modern linux desktop environment.

Disclosure: I use Openbox and Xfce. There are a few rough edges, but nothing that's a a deal breaker for me.

<comment><USER6> GNOME 3 was released 6 years ago. It has gone through several iterations since then.

<comment><USER7> But the basic design principles remain.

<comment><USER8> But it's not slow and unintuitive anymore

<comment><USER9> How is meta (windows?) + ` intuitive? It is only intuitive if you come from Mac os.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The main big problem with Gnome 3 is that if you not like the decisions that the developers take of how your desktop must be, you only can fuck yourself.

At least with KDE you have freedom to change things at your discretion.

Also, Gnome 3 more stable ?? WTF ? I saw more broken desktops and WTFs with Gnome that with KDE. Even I saw KDE working with a buggy X11 driver when Gnome simply fails on a miserable way.

<comment><USER11> I feel like if someone thinks they'll try Linux and they pick a Gnome 3 distro to test, they won't stick around or won't appreciate Linux for the reasons many of us do. Gnome 3 is basically everything I don't like about Windows or OSX but for Linux.

<comment><USER12> I feel this way a lot about Gnome, and even Ubuntu's attempt at "Unity".

It wants to be Mac. It wants to be Windows. In the end it's like all of the worst parts of both, made in to a mutant of dis-congeniality. They want the familiarity and user experience of both, and in the end capture neither.

<comment><USER13> I think it is more about the underlying "paternalism" than any specific UI/UX design.

Damn it, i have seen a comment from a prominent Gnome developer basically stating that users are idiots. This based on some usability testing that was done back in the day, apparently.

So expect more and more out of Gnome, and by extension Freedesktop, to be about putting users in padded cells...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yet another "holy war" in which we're expected to pick sides and defend our decisions to the death. The reason there are so many different DEs for Linux is because people have such different preferences. The choice is a _good_ thing. Why try to turn it into yet another excuse to start an argument?

<comment><USER12> Because KDE is the Holy Grail, and all non-believers must perish at the end of that sword.

But in all honesty, I use KDE Plasma with a healthy mix of Gnome apps, because I can't stand Kmail and others.

<comment><USER9> I like KDE neon because it comes without too much baggage. If you have 8GB+ RAM, you should give it a try on a live USB. You can install software using apt, use it, and discard it by just rebooting.

Edit: try the dev stable.

<comment><USER15> > If you have 8GB+ RAM,

or even if you have 4 or 2. Plasma itself uses roughly 300 megabytes of RAM.

<comment><USER12> 200 currently. But I have 16gb. And I like how it looks and works. Jiggily windows when I move them. A centering crosshair when moving windows. The way they'll shuffle behind and in front of each other with a cute and quick animation when changing focus. All plugins you can choose to use or not, and even tweak.

And to "SmellyGeekBoy"s point: that's the thing that makes Linux so Linux-y. I can choose that. Or not. Or a raw command line only. Or have Plasma, Neon, Gnome, Cinnamon, LXDE, Lubuntu Next, and XFCE all installed AT THE SAME TIME. It's what you want. It's what you like. It's YOUR machine. Your desktop environment. You choose and tweak the one that suits you. No one should be able to hate or discriminate against that, it's not their desktop. So fuck'em.

<comment><USER16> Did you need to make any changes to get it to 200mb? If I can get it to that point, I would switch from Ubuntu. (Ubuntu takes about 750mb~ starting)

Every time I've tried KDE recently, the starting RAM usage is closer to 800-900mb and it anecdotally felt laggier than Unity. (I tried KDE Neon)

<comment><USER12> Not that I'm aware of. I'll typically start with Ubuntu Server and add a DE to it, but this time I did a clean Kubuntu install. I'm looking at my resource monitor right now and it's been sitting around 200 all day for Plasma. Perhaps if you add up all the rest of the KDE background services like KDE Connect, klauncher, etc, you'll have a grand total above 300. But I have the hardware, so I don't mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> LXDE and Window Maker do minimalist/stable/customizable quite well, I'd put them first.

<comment><USER18> LXDE is the one that keeps my netbook running. The others will freeze or crash repeatedly. Don't know anything about Window Maker. Is it any good?

<comment><USER15> > Don't know anything about Window Maker. Is it any good?

it's a clone of NeXT's UI in the 1990's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Side topic.

I can't believe the list of top GTK3 Themes [1] are so much influenced by macOS ( second "greatest" one basically replicates even the icons ).

macOS is beautiful, indeed, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson's quoted :

"... Imitation is Suicide."

I bet if the effort is put towards themes that can distinguish GTK from anything else, there will be another reason of Gnome being the best LDE.

1 : [https://www.opendesktop.org/s/Gnome/browse/cat/135/ord/top/](https://www.opendesktop.org/s/Gnome/browse/cat/135/ord/top/)

<comment><USER20> A quote widely attributed to Steve Jobs: "good artists copy, great artists steal." Turns out he wasn't really the first to say that or express that sentiment [0], but it'd be hard to argue that Mac OS (at least back in the 80s) didn't heavily rely on copied or stolen features.

[0] [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists- steal/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is so subjective even a rookie like me can tell he's biased. Each desktop environment has its key ideas behind it. You can compare individual components, which would be at least subjective enough, but you have to admit that both are huge code landscapes that offer ranges of exclusives functionalities and features. So saying one is "the best" is not an option I'm afraid.

</comment><comment><USER22> What do y'all have against tiling window managers

<comment><USER23> I think this is remnants of the Windows/MacOS holy wars that keep people focused on the wrong things, while making the interesting approaches seem scary.

Talking about the differences between "traditional" desktop environments seems mindless to me, while introducing newcomers to tiling WMs is refreshing and fun.

<comment><USER13> Funny thing is that the original Xerox UI would tile by default (but the windows were floating). Similarly Windows 1.0 were all tiles.

And to some degree Windows 10 has gone back to tiling.

You can drag windows top corners and the left and right edges to have the take up a fixed part of the screen. Sadly only when using the left/right split will Windows try to auto-resize the opposite window in response to you actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Gnome looks beautiful, but the workflow seems weird.

<comment><USER7> To me it looks rather ugly. Too many UI elements look out of proportion or misplaced. The whole thing feels contrived and lacking harmony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Much prefer XFCE. Strong and stable.

<comment><USER13> I just wonder what Gnome-isms it will have to adopt as it transitions to GTK3...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love Gnome, I'm now using Mac OS for my day to day desktop, but I would argue (subjectively, though) that Gnome is the best desktop environment, period, including Windows and Mac.

I totally agree with all the points in the post - the only problem Gnome has is the extension ecosystem. The idea of extensions is nice and few are awesome - but in practice most of them are low quality.

I really miss Gnome, and still use it for my secondary laptop, which I don't get to use that often.

</comment><comment><USER27> I keep being undecided between Cinnamon and XFCE... :-/

</comment><comment><USER28> Gnome 3 is the default DE I'll install. But I very much dislike the default setup: the combination of the top bar and the title bar and the menu bar inside the applications themselves. 3 horizontal bars which are quite ugly.

Inside bspwm I use xfce bar with the menu extension and I feel like I don't waste as much vertical space. (it looks like macOS or Unity, except I don't have title bars)

</comment><comment><USER29> Yawn. Let me know when I can plug a camera into my wife's Fedora / Gnome 3 computer and be able to download the photos. This hasn't worked properly for years and years.

<comment><USER30> Ever tried shotwell? [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell) I use it under XFCE, does wonders with my Nikon camera and some old tablets.

<comment><USER29> Shotwell is unmaintained. There are two other photo applications, but it's not clear which to use. In any case when you plug a camera or phone into a GNOME desktop what happens is the file manager application and any camera programs you have installed all compete to open the camera. In my wife's case the file manager always appears to "win" and Shotwell gives an error about not being able to find a camera. IOW basic functionality, broken for years.

<comment><USER30> Rats... unmaintained. This is sad, really. About your wife problem, it might be due to a daemon being instructed by the DM to automatically mount and open any newly inserted memory card or USB devices appearing as such. I don't know about Gnome as I use XFCE, anyway on the removable media options there is one to auto mount removable media and I keep it unchecked. Their icons appear anyway on the desktop, but until I access them they don't get mounted so they remain accessible for other software. I'm sure there is such an option on Gnome too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 3 (display switching) and 5 (dynamic workspaces) are the only actual arguments compared to any other DE, and the second is subjective. Pretty weak article.

<comment><USER32> Xfce display switching has yet to let me down.

<comment><USER33> xfce display switching is horribly unpolished. attach a monitor that is already set as secondary and watch _all_ windows move to the new display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Gnome is too slow and clunky for me to enjoy

</comment><comment><USER34> Mate is my go-to interface. Very slick and fast. Any number of workspaces easily accessible, minimalistic.

</comment><comment><USER35> Mate to the rescue! I've been using it for some years now and it just works.

<comment><USER36> Seconded for MATE. Used it when it was Gnome 2 - tried Unity, Gnome 3 and XFCE since. Settled back comfortably on MATE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Gnome 3 is a step backward from its predecessor and sacrificed functionality for mostly aesthetical reasons. I don't have a problem with a 'simplifed' UI, but the fact that Gnome 3 is now the default DE for most Linux distros is worrying, and to me is a sign that Linux on the desktop will not get anywhere anytime soon.

From the article:

1) G3 is stable: "stable" like these weird crash notifications I regularly got on 3 different laptop models (that did not in fact provide any info on what app/service actually crashed...) whenever I resumed from sleep, or "stable" like the Gnome dev indicating they will break GTK3 backward compatibilty whenever they feel like it? So much stable, we're going to be tired of stabling.

2) "Stays out of the way": like not even having a minimize button by default? So when you have your windows lined up, and switch to another one just to check something, now you just... ho wait you don't get to "just" because there is no minimize action to get rid of it. I like this example because on one hand they claim it is not needed[1] even when a most basic example can prove them wrong, but on the other hand they have published a first-party plugin/extension to add this and a number of other "fixes". So double the failure. TFA author also claims G3's chrome takes less space: like having a damn clock take 80% of the top bar? Seriously. And also, "MATE uses two panels so it takes more space" ...you mean exactly like G3 once you enable the taskbar? Plus in other DE you can easily fuse / insert the taskbar into another panel, not sure you can in G3. In short G3 is ignoring _basic UI rules we have known to be true since the 1980s_.

3) "Display switching actually works" ...hu, just like in XFCE? Never had a problem in XFCE. In G3 though I occasionally had it not detect when I unplugged an external screen, which means I was left with a blank desktop background where all of my inputs would only take effect on a now 'ghost' screen.

4) Many extensions: probably. I only know that some of them exist solely to fix basic shortcomings of the default UI. I also know you have to use a browser+plugin to download these, and this feels...wrong?

5) Dynamic workspace: this is the only thing that G3 does right, i.e. not just properly, but also better than the competition. I really wish other DE would implement something vaguely as intuitive. If they did, for many users G3 would have no competitive advantage left.

6) Plenty of themes: Huh. OK. I guess.

I also need to add that the G3 Bluetooth devices app/panel is really aggravating. BT sucks in Linux to begin with, but the G3 UI is really making it worse. At first I thought it was only a OS-level thing, but then I discovered XFCE doesn't have this problem.

[1] It always get me when a OS or DE dev claims you "don't need" a basic feature: you're not building an app, you're building a _platform_ , you _do not know_ how it's going to be used, that's the point of a platform.</comment>


HyperCard -- A Trip Down Memory Lane For Others, Too? - <AUTHOR>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercard
I spent a few years of my early adolescence making lots and lots of HyperCard stacks. All those hours spent with HyperTalk and experimenting with layouts and process flow benefit me to this day.
If anybody else 'round these parts used to spend a lot of time with HyperCard, I'd be curious to hear their thoughts on how it has affected their current work, along with any whale tales of monster stacks. <comment><USER2> I used Hypercard very briefly before moving on to MetaCard, which was more powerful, cross-platform, and had better color and multimedia support. I built a bunch of monster stacks in MetaCard, including a complete ERP system for a 350 person company (!)

I found that both tools were incredibly productive and actually made it much easier for me to jump to Lisp because I was already familiar with things that would seem 'magic' to programmers using more traditional tools. The productivity, dynamic features, and 'macros' had me programming circles around some of my competitors in my niche at the time. Many people thought the _Card tools were toys, but they allowed faster development than anything out there and my compiled stacks STILL run faster than, say, Java. Yes, even today. I know this because I benchmarked it recently. One company is STILL using the MetaCard-based ERP system I wrote, and a video store chain is still using a POS system I co-wrote.

When the MetaCard technology was sold, I moved on to using a tool by the buyer of the technology, a Scottish company called Runtime Revolution. By that time, I had discovered some other tools that were also very powerful and I was focusing on mostly web apps, so I stopped using the _Card technology. (Even though the tool has internet features built-in.) I still know some companies that have great products on the market that are secretly based on *Card technology, though.

If you are really into HyperCard-type technology, you should check out www.runrev.com. In some ways, it is still ahead of many of the alternatives. In fact, I have an enterprise license and a training book that I'm not using if you want to contact me. There is also a Python-based Hypercard-like system around that you should look at, although it is much more primitive.</comment>


Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/ <comment><USER2> For those who do not understand why people are fanatical about vi, here are some reasons:

Vi is keyboard only. This means that actions with the mouse are optimized through the keyboard. There are "hotkeys" for most tasks you use with a mouse.

Vi has the idea of objects. Words, lines and paragraphs are objects you can operate on.

Vi defines a "language" for operating on objects. For instance, 'd' is delete. You can delete a word using 'dw'. You can delete 5 words with '5dw'. Another example: deleting a line is 'dd'. Delete 5 lines with '5dd'

It is a modal editor. At a basic level there is an "edit" (insert) mode, a "navigation" (normal) mode, and a "selection" (visual) mode. The power of a modal environment means that commands and hotkeys now have a context and do slightly different things in different modes. While this may be overwhelming, once all these modes are ingrained in you, it allows you to be extremely efficient since you do not have to remember new hotkeys. For example, in the navigation mode, you can apply the 5dd to delete 5 lines. In selection mode, use '5w' to select five words. 'd' now deletes everything in the selection. If you've ever struggled to manage and remember your hotkeys, modal environment is your friend. (set this up in mac using something like hammerspoon.)

It includes some really nice out of the box features: Macro system to save you time with repetitive tasks, regular expressions search and replace, time travel through your edits, it stores your edits in a tree so you can navigate to your changes even after multiple undo/redo. "." repeats the last change. You can also apply a number before it to repeat the change n number of times. I am surprised how often I use this that this is and this is first thing I miss when using another editor.

Vi is worth learning as it will improve your productivity. This is especially important if you have to edit a file on a remote server. Vi is installed on every unix distribution. Many cli tools and shells have a vi mode. This allows you to take the vi 'language' to all these cli tools for more productivity.

For those who struggle to learn, I highly recommend Vim Adventures. After that, force yourself to use vi for your every day edits and it'll be second nature in a couple of weeks.

[https://vim-adventures.com](https://vim-adventures.com)

<comment><USER3> I've always thought that doing 5dd and such was a bad demonstration of Vi(m) since I never know how many lines to delete. I'll just dd multiple times. More powerful vim commands are like daw (delete all of a paragraph), di) (delete inside of a set of parentheses), and dtX (delete until the character X).

<comment><USER4> daw deletes the word you are in (delete a word). But dap deletes a paragraph. And you can tell vi what you mean by "word" and "paragraph" (I think) in your settings file.

<comment><USER3> Good catch, I meant dap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's not forget Bram Moolenaar, who also deserves credit for extending the work on Vi. Vim [Vi iMproved] is likely (along with NeoVim) the actual Vi editor most people are using these days.

<comment><USER6> What's the story with NeoVim exactly? I am trying it out on Linux because I got some recommendations that it's better than Vim, but I've run into some problems because for instance with setting up plugins and things, lots of times the documentation seems to be geared toward Vim, and sometimes I've gotten errors it's hard to figure out because of this.

It kind of gives me the perception there just aren't that many people using it, so it might be one of those tools which is technically better but doesn't have the critical mass of community to really be useful.

Am I off base there? I mean what are the tangible, user-facing advantages of NeoVim over Vim?

<comment><USER7> Neovim definitely has significant market share, you can compare Github stars as one statistic to consider:

[https://github.com/vim/vim](https://github.com/vim/vim) \- 20k [https://github.com/neovim/neovim](https://github.com/neovim/neovim) \- 36.5k

This is in some part due to the fact that neovim has been on Github longer, but it's still a a major indicator.

Neovim has many benefits over Vim, and has been applying pressure on Vim for years to improve its own development and codebase. Nvim has first class support for Lua outside of Vimscript, which has enabled a lot of people to write more powerful plugins. A lot of NVim's featureset has been copied into Vim over the years (one of my favorites is the hover window, which has allowed IDE like support for code references/comments/source). Supposedly, Nvim's codebase is significantly easier to maintain and contribute to, due to the nature of having a community of contributors that built it from ground up, as opposed to one primary developer working on Vim.

The parity has reduced over the years, but Nvim has been significantly ahead in pushing new features and active development over Vim resting on its laurels.

<comment><USER8> NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage.

Glad to see the project is still alive and moving forward. Seems like most new editors or forks in general die a quick death.

<comment><USER9> > NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in > comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage.

Why? It's a fork of vim, which adds some functionality and removes some functionality. But it's not an entirely new editor or anything.

<comment><USER8> > Why?

Not sure what you are questioning exactly.

Why does it have a cult following? Because there are enough people to keep the project going and it makes them happy for whatever reason.

Why does it have far less usage than Vim proper? Because it's a young, niche project, and Vim has been around forever. Same reason CentOS and Ubuntu have a far bigger usage share than any of the "trendy" distros.

<comment><USER9> Ah sorry I misunderstood. I thought you meant it has functionality for day to day usage, not just less users. My mistake!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Among Joy's list of achievements are BSD Unix, NFS, UltraSPARC designs and some work on Java" \- not to mention Berkley Sockets. But his greatest gift to man was vi? I think not!

Full disclosure: I'm an "emacs guy" but I don't care about the silly old emacs/vi wars. I would just say as awesome as people find vi to be, it's among the least of Bill's accomplishments. That's how awesome he is!

<comment><USER11> I don't know how much he was involved in the "3M" model that Sun pushed, but that was pretty big too: 1 Megabyte of memory, 1 megapixels on the screen, 1 Megabyte/sec network connection. All seems like nothing now, but at the time of the early Sun workstations, that was the definition of a high end machine.

<comment><USER12> I think more people should shoot for something like that.

I remember when tesla first created it's electric cars and they put these huge expensive batteries in them.

Other cars required an engineering degree to figure out how to get across town and back, and tesla had these cars that freed up your mind and let you drive. and then they could build on that with the supercharger network.

Eventually the range went up and the battery cost went down and the future was the present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vi is the ultimate example of software that is "easy to use" as opposed to "easy to learn", it is great that we still have Vi and so many other unix tools that use the same philosophy.

One of the biggest things that has happened to computer software in modern times is the balance between "easy to use" and "easy to learn" has shifted dramatically towards "easy to learn".

There is some software that can achieve both at the same time but IMO much of the time the two ideas are counterbalanced against each other with each hurting the other.

Before the mouse almost all software was harder to learn but users would become extremely fast & efficient when they learned to use it. Vi is a classic example. So were lots of applications that had character cell user interfaces and function keys & shortcuts for everything.

A lot of mobile stuff is the ultimate opposite.. it takes 2nds to learn but you're never going to be able to use it any more efficiently or quickly than you did 5 minutes after you first tried it.

<comment><USER14> I agree. While vi has an unusually steep learning curve among software, I think of it sometimes when I design user interfaces. Design with the 2-week user in mind, not the first-time user.

What I would call fraidy-cat designers work themselves into a tizzy asking themselves, yes, but will users like it or understand it the first time they see it? I encourage people to instead be a bit bold and ask, will the user grow to like it after using it for a week or two?

There are three kinds of software:

1\. Easy at first, and mediocre for the rest of your life.

2\. Takes some getting used to at first, and awkward for the rest of your life.

3\. Takes some getting used to at first, and wonderful for the rest of your life.

I suppose there might be tools that are easy at first and wonderful for the rest of your life, but they are rare. Most classic tools are in the last category. And it's not just software. An audio engineer probably took a long time to learn how to use a mixing board, but now it's second nature. Manual focus on a professional camera, also something that's hard at first but effortless and even preferred after practice.

The thing is, if you optimize for the first-time user, you might be blocking yourself from making something really powerful and simple, though at first strange. Some of the best things in life are at first strange.

In case someone is still trying to read my post in bad faith, of course you should not make it harder than necessary for first-time users. Designing interfaces is hard work. This is not an excuse to be lazy. It is an invitation to make your software as good as possible for long-term users.

<comment><USER15> fwiw, I totally agree with everything you've written, and take it in good faith.

I've heard the words "power tool" and "platform" used to describe what you're talking about. The best tools have a simple core with many silos, but those silos are highly-configurable and composable. You can call it UNIX-philosophy, but it's evidently existed in other domains (carpentry, baking, "interchangeable parts" in manufacturing) for a very long time.

I don't think there's a lot of software written this way. Vi, Excel, UNIX pipes, functional programming languages, regular expressions, GNU ledger, Redis come to mind.

Not a lot of consumer software fits this description, that I can think of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Required reading for anyone who uses Vi (or wants to take the dive)

"Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi." : [https://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118)

Anecdote time:

Just a few hours back, I was working with a json file and needed a way to copy data between 2 matching parens in a Json node.

'v' is vi-speak for switching to visual mode '%' is vi-speak for skip to matching param 'y' is vi-speak for copy (or yank)

So 'v%y' is for switching to visual mode and jump to matching param (which visual mode highlights text) and then copy the highlighted text.

Ah, the joys of vim! Truly one of those tools that can elevate your whole productivity once you grok the basics! :)

</comment><comment><USER17> He also created Berkeley sockets, which pretty much powers networking today.

<comment><USER18> I personally think that the Berkeley socket api is really _really_ ugly. Plan9's networking api is very nice, though: [https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man3/dial.html](https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man3/dial.html)

<comment><USER17> The man page in the link has further links to source code.

Seems like the API is built on top of sockets, which is not a bad idea.

I certainly agree that sockets can get tedious.

<comment><USER19> the plan9 port API is based on sockets, yes - because plan9port is a port of plan9 runtime to other OSes.

However, BSD Sockets are _bad_ API, and can be argued to be one of the reasons, if not _major_ reason, behind many issues in IP-based networks, including slow IPv6 rollout.

They also were a rushed port/rewrite of existing TCP/IP code done essentially by grad students on a grant from DoD because vendor (DEC) told DoD that they are not getting any new models of the computer they used primarily for TPC/IP.

Part of the requirements was that the resulting code is shared so that vendors could quickly provide support for TCP/IP in various products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My career as a software developer is indebted to vi.

text editing can be a thankless, soul-sucking chore without the proper tools. I've seen otherwise intelligent individuals abandon a software career because they never quite figured out how to efficiently do it. I wouldn't say that vi/vim is the only tool that can do the job, but it's the one that I've chosen.

I was introduced to vi by a stroke of fate. My buddy in college pulled me aside and introduced it to me. I initially thought he we crazy because we had no shortage of schoolwork to do and vi just seemed impenetrably nuts. Really glad he did: my career might have taken a very different arc without that encounter.

</comment><comment><USER21> vi has been life changing. Learning vi altered my entire concept of what interacting with text could be, and even my personal physical relationship with a keyboard. Using vi is like driving a stick shift; satisfying in the depth of control once the learning curve is done. vi has been a daily friend now for over 20 years. So much insight is cooked into those little key mappings.

<comment><USER22> > So much insight is cooked into those little key mappings.

Just a point of historical order, didn't those key mappings mostly come from ed? Aka Ken Thompson and Ritchie?

<comment><USER15> yes they definitely do. ed -> ex -> vi

It's fascinating to read comments praising how great it is that you can edit text without a mouse.

ed was written to interface with tty systems, where mice weren't even a thing to be avoided. :)

<comment><USER21> It's not about doing it without a mouse, it's about doing it fast, comfortably, and powerfully. Pointers are a useful addition to graphic capable vi implementations, but if you do everything with mouse or trackpad movements then I don't think you can claim the zen of vi.

<comment><USER15> oh to be clear, I totally agree.

My fascination is that the original motions were not invented to escape the imprecision of graphical pointers, even though that's their main selling point today. They were invented to minimize (1) excessive tty printing, because printing is slow (2) keystrokes.

That, in 2020, these optimizations made in 1960 allow you to avoid the imprecision and slowness of a graphic pointer, we get for free :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system. I've never looked back since I learned this way of working.

<comment><USER24> I've tried several times to get into vim. I feel like it's similar to dvorak though - unless you use it 24/7 you won't develop the muscle memory necessary to use it efficiently.

<comment><USER25> Using it 12/7 was enough for me for me to be become proficient. ;)

<comment><USER26> If it takes 84 hours a week of use in order to become proficient I think I'll pass.

<comment><USER27> Maybe 80 hours total, but then that's it. And then you have speedy skills that can serve you in almost any command line environment. AND vi commands are used in a lot of other places, like man pages and such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On Nov 8, 2018, I sent Bill Joy a birthday greeting: "Happy 17,179,869,184 MIPS Birthday, Bill"! (2 to the (year - 1984))

Bill Joy's Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per Second

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bill-joys- law-2-year-1984-mil...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bill-joys- law-2-year-1984-million-instructions-per-second-3a8c92165cfe)

>The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy's law (computing)

>C++++-=

>"C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less." -Bill Joy

>In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls "C++++-=", which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy%27s_law_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy%27s_law_\(computing\))

>Introduction

>These are some highlights from a prescient talk by Bill Joy in February of 1991.

>"It's vintage wnj. When assessing wnj-speak, remember Eric Schmidt's comment that Bill is almost always qualitatively right, but the time scale is sometimes wrong." -David Hough

</comment><comment><USER29> It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down. There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?

<comment><USER6> Some things seem unnecessarily unintuitive to me about the shortcuts. For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity. Every video game ever came to the conclusion that the inverse-T layout is ideal for this task.

<comment><USER30> I mean, putting all they keys in the home row is admirable but the up/down placement seems so counter-intuitive! Almost everywhere I see arrow keys put in a line up comes first…

<comment><USER31> ^H in ASCII is backspace (move carriage to the left), and ^J is linefeed (move carriage down), so h-j were completely intuitive to people who already knew ASCII (i.e. everybody) and then it just makes sense to continue the row of other cursor movements.

"intuitive" doesn't mean "I was born knowing it"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I watch in awe as vim experts fly with amazing speed. They have undeniable powers, built on top of highly personalized .vimrcs. And I try to learn, but get stranded in the very basics.

Example is searching for text on my system clipboard. There's no way to do this in vim: it insists on interpreting special regex chars. If you google it, you will find line noise that you can paste into your vimrc; these solutions inevitably have caveats and are now personalized to you.

(I asked our resident vim expert how he accomplishes this, and he seemed confused why you would ever need to do that. vim is its own universe, huh.)

Anyways looking for practical suggestions for getting into vim - a "cheat sheet" that has actually worked for someone!

</comment><comment><USER33> I think vi is good. I think the modal editing is good. The ZZT external editor I wrote (ZZTQED, and later frezed) is inspired by features of vi, such as modal editing, numeric prefixes, macros, etc. It is also good that vi has the ability to interact with external programs by pipes, which is something that Heirloom-mailx also does and I like that, and my own NNTP client software (bystand) also does, but unfortunately the web browser doesn't (the web browser is one of the worst software). One problem with many newer programs is lack of good documentation as well as using mouse-based interface; I like to make most functions working by keyboard commands. A lot of existing software I don't like so much, so I try to write my own better ones, which can use pipes with external programs, using mostly keyboard-based interface rather than by the mouse, using UNIX philosophy, using you have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case, etc, to do what I will think is a good idea to do. And yet, it isn't just a lot of computer software that is badly designed these days, but even user interfaces of VCRs, DVD recorders, etc. I don't really like MSE so much, so I wrote TeXnicard. I don't really like most NNTP software so much, so I wrote bystand. I don't like KevEdit so much, so I wrote ZZTQED. I don't like Inform so much, so I wrote Glasm. etc

</comment><comment><USER34> The first editor I used was pico, then nano. I joined a sysadmin team shortly after college and they said they would not install those tools on the Sun servers; I had to learn vi. I wasn't prepared to argue but I wanted to know why. They said you'll find vi on almost every system and it will work fine in almost any terminal. To me there was a lot of value in that, and once I did learn vi, I liked it for all of the other reasons folks are mentioning in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ok, I get that vi is a legend etc. I think I understand why, but I'll keep that to myself. But honestly, it's a relic. Hell, it was a relic in the late 80s when I was in college! Few of my classmates bothered with it unless they HAD to use it, which in my view is what makes vi so sticky. We can thank the academic community for perpetuating it as some kind of "expert" tool and encouraging or even requiring students to use it. The same ignorance that keeps CS dogma alive such as "good programmers don't use GUI debuggers or IDEs." My college age kid in CS came home parroting this nonsense. But at this stage of her education I'm quite used to unindoctrinating. There is no reason a university should teach kids to use vi as a primary code editor. It's a crime in the context of a modern, statically typed language such as Java.

<comment><USER36> But it is an expert tool. Does that mean that a GUI editor isn't? Not at all. But I don't expect my non-programmers friends to use vi/vim (or any person, really), but its definetely something that proves its worth to programmers more than to other people. The elitist attitude is terrible, I agree, and people should use it for whatever they want, but to deny that it is an expert's tool is wrong, imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> BTW it's :x to save and exit.

<comment><USER38> ZZ for the win (3 keystrokes vs 4 for :x)

<comment><USER39> I use command mode a lot, so have swapped ":" and ";". With that, :x + enter is 3 keystrokes, and hitting x is a bit easier than hitting z.

<comment><USER37> I aliased it so either : or ; work for :

I admit I typed :wq for more than a decade before learning about :x

<comment><USER40> :wq! because I really mean it!

<comment><USER38> why not just :q! to live dangerously :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Mandatory link for those who wonder "Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?"

[http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html](http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi- vim.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Dating myself, but I found _vi_ fairly easy to learn since I had used _TECO_ on DEC machines. I rather liked _TECO_.

      iHello World\n<escape>

is the same in _TECO_ and _vi_.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sad to see Bill Joy's contributions so minimized.;-)

</comment><comment><USER44> Highly overrated, and I've been using Vim professionally (or vim emulators) for ten years now. I'm just used to the keys - muscle memory - but that's it. (Its actually my first editor, my first job was at a place with a lot of vimsters)

There's no proof that it makes you more productive or a better programmer. It's actually gonna trip you up and get in your way if you don't soup it up like an IDE

Downvote away

</comment><comment><USER28> "I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard." -Bill Joy

Interview with Bill Joy from the August 1984 issue of Unix Review magazine:

[https://github.com/sysprv/vimrc/blob/master/joy84.html](https://github.com/sysprv/vimrc/blob/master/joy84.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> Thank you Bill Joy, no other tool in my programming career has been as impactful as vi, and all its iterations.

</comment><comment><USER46> If the original vi used 'jkl;' for movement and put a startup message on the screen for newbies explaining how to exit, I'd probably be using it today.

Turns out that was enough to send me on to glorious decades of emacs.

</comment><comment><USER47> The Unix Hater's Handbook is an excellent read: [https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf](https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER48> Yesterday I spent an hour trying to figure out how to NOT use vi to make a Mercurial commit on macOS. It was one of my most frustrating computer experiences in recent memory.

<comment><USER2> My guess is that you ended up on a machine that has the default editor as vi. TO fix this, set your shell's EDITOR env variable to something like nano.

I agree that VI's default is so different from the modern editor that it's very frustrating to get stuck in it. However, learning vi pays dividends.

<comment><USER48> I tried setting the editor to TextEdit app path. That didn't work. I also tried Sublime, which also didn't work.

Setting the editor is really a 3 step process. Add application to PATH. Create an alias. Specify the alias.

VSCode has a command to do steps 1 and 2 for you.

My next weekend project is to learn Vi. (Any tutorial suggestions?) I don't want to. But I have to. Smartphones are so intuitive toddlers can use them. Vi is so non-intuitive it requires going to external tutorials to learn how to edit text. Sigh. :(

<comment><USER2> Use vim adventures to learn. It will take the pain out of learning and will make you proficient in about a day.

After that, force yourself to use it. Install vim plugin in vscode. In about 2 weeks, you will wonder why you didn't learn it sooner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I used to use vi all the time and the joke always was

"vi is a four letter word"

</comment><comment><USER50> the vi editor is a masterpiece for the ages. a true work of art.

</comment><comment><USER51> tl;dr The Register interviews Bill Joy about writing vi over a very slow data link.

I use vi (m) every day. Thank you, Bill Joy, and Happy Birthday whenever chron brings it up.

<comment><USER52> What is chron?

<comment><USER53> cron is a tool to schedule tasks

see: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man8/cron.8.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/cron.8.html)

and: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man5/crontab.5.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man5/crontab.5.html)

<comment><USER52> But what does "chron" have to do with cron? Or was that a typo?

<comment><USER53> typo on my part, but the etymology of "cron," is related to "Chronos," if you didn't know</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Handwritten.js – convert typed text to realistic handwriting - rahil-kabani https://github.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js.git/ <comment> rahil-kabani I get a lot of school projects which I need to submit as handwritten document! It is very tiring to write all that stuff! Why not save time? Most of the stuff is already available on the internet. Just create a text document and let handwritten.js do the writing part. The handwriting looks so realistic that only a few would be able to tell the difference.

Example: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias- rahil/handwritten.js...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias- rahil/handwritten.js/master/screenshots/lorem-ipsum.jpeg)

PS: I am new to HN and I had posted this project earlier to but did not know about the Show HN flair. I am unable to delete my previous posts and I am posting this again with the correct tag. You may feel that I am spamming this project but I am not. Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Help me find a niche for my file sharing site - <AUTHOR>

I launched Fileslap (http://fileslap.com) a couple months ago. The basic idea is that it's a better way to share small files (images, word docs, PPTs, songs, etc.) than emailing them which is what most everyone is currently doing, because Fileslap displays the file on the web without making the user download it.
The response has been lukewarm (lots of free users but only a couple paid users), so I recently started thinking maybe I'd see more success by targeting a specific niche.
One example that I thought of is targeting teachers who want to share assignments/docs with their students and maybe get assignments turned in through a website, rather than emailing back and forth with all of the students (like lots of college professors do).
Like I said, that's just an example (I'm sure there are already sites like that for teachers), and I'm wondering if anyone has any other ideas for niches that could benefit from an online file sharing/viewing site like Fileslap? <comment><USER2> Congrats one two milestones: launching and having paid users. I think I first saw FileSlap on reddit - well done.

I like the simplicity of the audio player. I can't pinpoint a niche off the top of my head, but I can see the appeal of sending a quick link, "Hey, listen to this". I know a few musicians who might be interested in using FileSlap for that purpose.

While I'm here, may I offer a suggestion for your website? I would keep that slider for view demo/see examples visible by default. I just read that I can view files without downloading them...my next question is how, say, PDFs are going to look on your site. I actually missed your "see some examples" link the first time I scanned the page. (You could then remove the "View demo" button and have a bigger call to action, but I'll leave the details to you)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Interesting feedback on the music uses. I'll post in a couple music subreddits and see what they think about it.

Great suggestion. I've been toying with the idea of leaving that open by default and switching the "Demos" button out with a "Try Now" button, so that people can actually upload a file before registering (and just have it expire after 5 minutes or something). I'll go ahead and get started on that.

Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So for image sharing you have Flickr, and for music/videos you have Youtube for sharing.Both are these services are well done, have big money backers, and are household names. That leaves document sharing opening, sure there is Scribd & Google Docs but I would argue neither are house hold names.

You could also change up your game plan to offer something like Posterous. It seems like you've already created a service that easily allows users to get content up on the web. Maybe it's just a matter of giving them additional tools to share that content?

</comment><comment><USER4> Rather than going for a niche, how about a wider audience? The majority of file sharing sites allow anonymous uploads and yours does not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally allowed anonymous uploads (back when it was just a hobby site that I wasn't trying to make money off of) and took it away for a couple reasons:

\- It was losing me tons of money because uploads were coming in like crazy and I wasn't making any money off of the site.

\- I had no way to keep track of who's uploading what and interact with or analyze my customers and their usage.

I'm considering adding anonymous uploads that expire after a short amount of time (like 5 minutes or so) just as a way to let people try out the service before signing up. Do you see that as a good alternative? Or is even that not enough?

<comment><USER4> > losing me tons of money

There are a lot hosts that charge for throughput and not actual bandwidth, i.e. <https://www.gandi.net/hosting/>

> I had no way to keep track

Cookies?

If you like reddit, advertise it there as "like imgur but for all file types"</comment></comment></comment>