Ask HN: Casual hacking in bay area? - <AUTHOR> I just arrived in the bay area as a postdoc (not CS) at Stanford. In spare time I enjoy dabbling with web apps and random side projects.<p>Where can I go to meet others and have company while hacking? Could be very casual like sitting in a cafe hacking for a while, or more organized like a user group meeting with talks. Are there any meetup lists/groups? <comment><USER2> In Oakland, that's on the other side of the Bay, there's _sudoroom_ and _Ace Monster Toys_ :

[https://sudoroom.org/](https://sudoroom.org/)

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

<comment><USER3> I've been to the sudo room but I haven't heard of AMT. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment> ely-s There's a meetup for your favorite JS library here, but I haven't found a group that I deeply enjoy going to yet. The challenge has been finding the right proportions of casualness, skill, and drive to actually build something in a group.

I'm not far from Stanford, so I would also be interested in a good answer to this.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.hackerdojo.com/](http://www.hackerdojo.com/)</comment>


The Rape Joke at Microsoft's E3 Reveal Is a Bigger Deal Than Another Bad Joke - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/06/microsoft-e3-rape-joke/66092/

<comment><USER2> If you think it is a problem that Microsoft is behaving like this, you shouldn't reward them by ending your article with a pre-order link for the relevant product.

Edit: This is why disgraceful "controversial" behaviour doesn't die out: it gets its perpetrators attention that their sales messages piggy-back on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article analyzing what was said and why it's not cool [http://gamersagainstbigotry.org/2013/06/why-just-let-it- happ...](http://gamersagainstbigotry.org/2013/06/why-just-let-it-happen-itll- be-over-soon-is-a-rape-joke-and-extremely-problematic/)</comment>


Ask HN: At your company, what things do you want to outsource but can't? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The problem with outsourcing isn't what we can or can't outsource. It's the constant friction of vendor relationships.

Outsource a function that requires a group of skilled people? The vendor you picked will gradually reduce the quality/availability of the staff you work with. Until eventually you're paying a vendor to train their new hires.

Outsource a software service? Expect them to use vendor lock-in to their advantage. The price will increase 10%+ annually. Changes will become exorbitant.

Outsource a department? Watch their scope become narrower over time, and their demands on anything outside the department increase. Eventually you need massive forms filled out 'just so' to get anything out of them. Errors become rife, and require a lot of effort for an outside party to fix. Emergencies for the business are not emergencies for the outsourced department.

As someone who makes these sorts of decisions regularly, it's rarely a question of what we _want_ outsourced. It's a question of how we can package the function in a way that is conducive to a vendor relationship.

Not a rant against outsourcing. There are other structural risks with in- sourcing.

<comment><USER3> That is perfect description of what happens.

The other quote I had was every 5-10 years management gets the idea to either outsource or insource to save money. Just switch back and forth every time you get a new CEO.

<comment><USER4> I have heard of management consultances generating revenue by simply recommending as "best practise" as whatever the opposite of what their customer/victim is currently doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not sure about "want to" but you can never outsource the "core" of your company. You build software as your core product ? Don't outsource it. You provide marketing as your core ? Don't outsource it. The only thing you can consider outsourcing is things that are tangential and will never directly impact the viability of your company.

<comment><USER6> What about whatsapp ? Didn't they outsource their product development to Russia?

<comment><USER7> This article started that rumour due to an error: [https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2012/07/03/actualidad/13413401...](https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2012/07/03/actualidad/1341340111_145629.html)

Towards the end, they have clarification that states: "Technological development is mainly done at the WhatsApp headquarters in Mountain View and not in Russia as the information suggests. There the company maintains a 'small technical team'."

<comment><USER6> Thank you, I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My firm has been grappling with outsourcing the transcription of sensitive internal communications for years.

Our weekly sales calls are done over teleconference, but not everyone can attend. Obviously, a lot of information that we don't want to be public is shared during these calls, like sales figures and client status reports. The calls can last anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.

Right now, our copywriters in marketing transcribe these calls, which they are not happy about. It can take half a day or more to transcribe one call, and it's not the best use of their time. Although they rotate each week, it still takes up a significant amount of time and is not really part of their job description.

Our COO does not want to use an external service to outsource this, as she is concerned about leaks. The fact that many transcription services exist where an NDA must be signed does not mitigate her concern. However, she also does not feel like hiring a full-time transcriber is worth the cost.

The copywriters have tried automated transcription tools but they are not good enough.

I have no idea how this can be solved except for hiring a full-time transcriber ...

<comment><USER9> Listening to a tape and writing down what you hear is entry level work. You're wasting more money sitting on the fence about this than you would by just hiring a college student at $15/hr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hiring people as employees around the world without setting up an entity everywhere. Stripe for employment.

<comment><USER11> This is a good one. It never occurred to me the hoops one would have to jump through to hire someone in another country by the books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The challenges I've had with outsourcing been due to outsourcing prematurely. Similar to premature optimization. Until I've spent significant time in a role, outsourcing it tends to create more work than it saves.

</comment><comment><USER13> Everything which is not core but without managing the outsourced task.

I don't save money/time when i have to explain to much and when i have to finish it or checking the result takes to much time.

<comment><USER14> > I don't save money/time when i have to explain to much

Wonder how many tasks have "definition" part and "execution" part, so you can make "definition" yourself and let somebody else to do the "execution". Do you mean this approach should work?

<comment><USER13> When i have to define so much, that i could do it myself, i don't save anything much.

Defining only works when you outsource it to someone who knows the task better than you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi, I'm founder of [https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz) I'd love to outsource the marketing, i created a referral program where you can earn .003btc per paying user referred.

But without traffic people don't learn about it.

We have a good conversion rate and good product but without the traffic its meaningless really, advertisers in the bitcoin space seem to accept bitcoin and send fake traffic that never converts into a real user at the rate of other sources (e.g. HN).

Also the way most advertising companies work is they want to see the money upfront, with startups you don't really have it until you get traffic, there's a chicken and egg problem there that makes it hard to get off the ground even when everything seems to be going great.

The advertising companies aren't really bothered about sending you real value just filling the numbers and they aren't aligned 100% with your success, i suppose there are a variety of models that have been tried out already e.g. some companies hire people and offer sales bonuses ect. some offer seo/content marketing ect but again arent incentivized to actually deliver just to take as much of your money as possible... :/

perhaps some kind of paid retweeting service like bitcoin birds (but one that actually works) could work well too. The mainstream advertisers are crazy expensive cpc too.

</comment><comment><USER16> It is hard to outsource reports and mobile applications because setting up a sandboxes version of the database and APIs in order to protect sensitive data from vendors becomes harder as your system grows.

There is also the fact that they will need the same level of expertise with the database as you have and that already takes months each time we get a new recruit in the team.

It will just be impractical to hand over all the knowledge and the experience working with a MLOC ERP, so we write our own apps and reports.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ad-hoc/per project PM/Ticketing. In my day job I've come to appreciate having a backlog of tickets to help me get over the mental hurdle of systems I have to build. I'd love if there was a service where I could chat with a PM for a day or so to explain my project, the vision, the features I want to build, and the structure of the thing; then have them take my assets and make a whole slew of tickets with the specific assets attached to each.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have nothing to add, but as someone who had a business, I just want to say that that's an extremely smart question to ask.

<comment><USER18> Being that this is HN, it's pretty much assumed the person posting is fishing for business ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My leadership team.

They are managing not for growth, but for their own survival until retirement. Totally devoid of innovation or initiative.

</comment><comment><USER20> Architecture & project management. I was promoted from contractor to employee and was told basically not to spend any time on the project anymore because there are new (bright, capable) contractors to work on it.

But it's never in a contractor's best interest to take responsibility for the big picture. So I spend lots of time testing contributions (okay but not much fun/reward) and being a project manager (detestable and a black mark on my resume afaic).

Why I took responsibility when I was a contractor? Clearly I do not always act in my own best interest.

</comment><comment><USER21> We would like to outsource backup of our KVM VPSes. We have a few requirements:

1\. Access to snapshots of the last 30 days with single day granuality.

2\. Backup has to be encrypted.

We have 7 full servers with over 100 vpses.

<comment><USER22> Not looking to do work for you, just a tip. Look into ZFS. Daily snapshot, incremental etc? No problem.

However something you'll need to think about if you're snapshotting - do you need to snapshot the memory state/disk buffers too? e.g. a database. Or anything where the total state of the VM is split between disk and CPU/memory.

If the answer is no this is an easy problem to solve.

If the answer is 'yes' life gets more complicated.

<comment><USER21> We manage this somehow. The issue here is that taking snaphshot is only a part of the problem. Then there is transfering data, managing it, retention, hard drive management and so on. And we don't see competitive advantage here. We just need this requirement to be fulfilled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Marketing, but not just marketing.

I want marketing that demonstrates direct returns and validity through empirical testing.

Most marketing people and companies I've seen will happily take your money all day for no demonstrated return at all, and it's incumbent on you to hold them to account. Holding them to account is the expensive part, not doing the marketing.

<comment><USER11> PPA/CPA? There's a big industry built around letting others market for you based on results alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Speaking of outsourcing, does anyone have any advice on finding, evaluating and hiring contract dev teams?

I posted an "ask hn" a few days ago about this but it did not seem to make it to the ask page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15816396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15816396)

</comment><comment><USER25> I (and many in my department) wish we could outsource some extract work that is weekly and takes about 2 to 10 hours of my time. Unfortunately, the state of Texas forbids any offshoring when it comes to their Medicare data so that throws a wrench in our plans to do that.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd love to outsource sales. I'd want them to work for a variety of similar shops, and work out deals that use the best services for each job... instead of trying to shoehorn the staff we have into whatever jobs they can get.

</comment><comment><USER27> My own job. Trust is the key issue. Trusting someone to do an important job takes time.

<comment><USER28> If it's something that always must be done exactly right, then it should be automated. Computers are good at that type of thing.

<comment><USER27> I'm a manager of humans and systems - I can automate parts of my job, but long term planning and strategy are very much human domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Build a Magento plugin, because PHP is shit and coding a Magento plugin is a nightmare. Can't do it because it may be too expensive ...

<comment><USER30> please drop me a few lines of spec, i'll send you an offer, you will like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Management. And recruitment, so that I could have direct access to the CVs of those applying.

</comment><comment><USER32> Audits. A lot of it is outsourced but I wish they would fill in forms for me as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> Oncall.

<comment><USER34> For what types of systems? This is something I've worked on a little bit. How far would you want to outsourcee to go in fixing issues? (Ie how much would you trust them to touch/change?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everything, if you could, you would outsource everything, and just jump around one and it'd be so much fun.

<comment><USER3> that's this guy [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workwe...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workweek)</comment></comment>


Genetic Test Changes Game in Cancer Prognosis - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/genetic-test-changes-game-in-cancer-prognosis.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> This is Part3 of a series by NYT called 'Genetic Gamble : New approaches to fighting cancer'

Part 1 : In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene- sequencing-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing- treatment-for-leukemia-glimpses-of-the-future.html?pagewanted=all) (HN : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4218473> )

Part 2 : A New Treatment's Tantalizing Promise Brings Heartbreaking Ups and Downs [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/health/new-frontiers-of- ca...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/health/new-frontiers-of-cancer- treatment-bring-breathtaking-swings.html?pagewanted=all)</comment>


Seaweed Extract Outperforms Remdesivir in Blocking Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.labroots.com/trending/drug-discovery-and-development/18231/seaweed-extract-outperforms-remdesivir-blocking-covid-19 <comment><USER2> The paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-00192-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-00192-8)

Also, I hate to say this, but reading that article whilst being shown ads for t-shirts with plant remedies gave me a bit of a pause. In these confusing times, we should probably raise the bar as to where we get out information from (established journals and institutions vs. blogs). [https://news.rpi.edu/content/2020/07/23/cell-studies- seaweed...](https://news.rpi.edu/content/2020/07/23/cell-studies-seaweed- extract-outperforms-remdesivir-blocking-covid-19-virus) is perhaps a better link.

<comment><USER3> +1</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you back up your data? - <AUTHOR> I have hundreds GBs of photos/videos, thousands of songs, many important docs, Mac's time-machine backups, software installers... I just find it is really difficult for me to figure out an easy and reliable way to backup them.
I currently put the photos, videos, docs and software on two portable hard disks, some photos and docs on both Dropbox and Google Drive. But such way is really inconvenient, every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos. I also don't feel the cloud storage reliable, so looks like hard disks at hand better. However, those hard disks may get older and 'wear out', so I have to upgrade the disks every three or four years..
Just wondering is there a better way to do the backup? <comment><USER2> I've got a Synology DS213j [1] with two WD Red 2TB [2] drives in RAID-1. All machines in my house run some sort of Linux, thus they are encrypted and backed up daily with Deja-Dup (which is just a front-end to duplicity [3]).

The Synology has netatalk configured out of the box so it can be seen in the network as an AFP share and can be used as a destination for TimeMachine backups (I'm not using it in that way but a couple of friends who use Macs told me it works well).

It also has a package to backup data stored on the Synology to Amazon Glacier, and that is something I'm going to enable soon in order to improve redundancy (and to have an off-site copy of my data).

On top of that some of that stuff is _also_ spread between Dropbox, Drive, Github and thumb drives. I might have like three to five copies of each file at any given time.

\- [1]: [http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS...](http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS213j&lang=enu)

\- [2]: [http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810](http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810)

\- [3]: [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)

<comment><USER3> Another vote for Synology here. Have been using them for a good 6 years now. I think I might have had one of the first DSM setups.

Just solid NAS products.

Upgraded recently to the DS213 and the WD RED 3TB disks in RAID-1. Running all sorts of services from SMB, AFP, UPNP, Surveillance, Backups, Etc. Performs flawlessly. Incredibly fast, DSM is an elegant UI (and powerful) and just couldn't be happier for all my wireless/wired client.

I backup the Synology once a month to a standalone 3TB disk via eSATA for even more redundancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since both my wife and I use either Mac or Linux based laptops I have a quick and dirty shell script that gets fired off by hand at the end of the day. The script uses rsync and cpio to copy all files in the laptop's home directory onto a machine running debian packed with 4 1TB drives in a RAID5+1 spare configuration. The script uses hard links to keep daily increments without consuming disk space and goes something like:

      # rotate daily backups
      ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST rm -rf $BASEDIR/home.3
      ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST mv $BASEDIR/home.2 $BASEDIR/home.3
      ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST mv $BASEDIR/home.1 $BASEDIR/home.2
      ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST \
      "(cd $BASEDIR/home.0 && find . -print | cpio -dplm $BASEDIR/home.1)"

      # backup
      TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/excludeXXXXXXXX`
      cat << EOF > $TMPFILE
      quota.user
      .cache
      EOF

      rsync -Lazv -e "ssh -i $SSHKEY" --update --delete \
      --exclude-from=$TMPFILE $HOME $BACKUPHOST:$BASEDIR/home.0

      rm $TMPFILE

<comment><USER5> So you have a hand rolled version of rsnapshot?: [http://www.rsnapshot.org/](http://www.rsnapshot.org/)

<comment><USER4> Wow, guess so. I've been using my script for years but I'm not surprised someone else has done this right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not answering the question, but someone please build this for me (and hopefully a million others): Simple live off-site backup for worst-case scenario.

I buy a pair of devices (e.g. Tonidos) with attached commodity HDDs that I split with a friend. He plugs his into his network, I plug mine in.

I dump files to my local device, but they actually get buffered and then stored overnight at his place, and vice-versa. It's a remote backup storage device, not a NAS. Not for fast file serving.

If my house burns down, he hands me the HDDs and I decrypt them with my password.

If his IP changes, his device re-registers with mine somehow. Cleverness needed here, not a $10 month subscription. E.g. his IP is emailed to me, or my device, or something like that. Someone knows how to make two devices find each other over the net, I am sure.

Edit: Of course, it would be nice if it still worked if he was tech- illiterate, e.g. you could give the other one to your elderly parent or neighbor or whatever.

<comment><USER7> I think Crashplan's software will do this without you paying them a sub.

<comment><USER6> No, it'll back up to other computers with a Crashplan account. I don't want to depend on third parties who may or may not be around, I want to give a drive to a friend and say: Plug this in.

<comment><USER7> Dunno what to tell you. Perhaps rsync and a dynamic dns approach would be good? IF you want the machines to find each other even through IP changes you need somewhat of them rediscovering each other.

Back up should be a multitiered thing so you don't mind if one goes kaput. That way you can use a 3rd party without 'depending' on them.

<comment><USER8> I think we're talking sneakernet here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think for most people, CrashPlan to a local and remote drive gives you the most bang for back. Here is what I do...

# Principles

Back up everything. Preferably to the cloud and to a local disk. Automatically.

You should test restores, but you probably wont. Have two independent backup methods for every piece of data.

You should be able to be up and running to last day's backup within an hour or so.

# Personal

CrashPlan: I want to backup every version of every file on my local computer to a local disk and cloud storage.

SuperDuper: I also want to have bootable nightly images of my machine in case I need to restore immediately.

CloudPull: I want to have a local copy of any Google file I have (Docs, Gmail, Calendar)

IFTTT to DropBox: And whenever possible, I want to have a copy of any other cloud-based service (e.g., Instagram)

# Servers

Linode Backup: Turnkey and presumably the Linode folks are smarter than I am.

Duplicity to S3: In case Linode folks aren't that smart, I will have nightly backups of everything.

</comment><comment> super-serial _I use one weird trick_...

I have 2 USB drives. Every month or so I put my code on a USB drive and take it to my mom's house when I do laundry. I leave the latest backup there, and take the other drive home.

 _Cloud providers hate me._

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been burned before, so now I use a mix of incremental networked backups and offsite storage. My home server runs ZFS, snapshotting every hour/day/week. Critical files get sent off to TarSnap each night. Friday nights, a script archives important data to a set of tar.gz files that are written out to an external HDD. Saturday mornings, I take the HDD to the bank and swap it with its counterpart in my safe deposit box. It's a bit cumbersome, but it works for me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Locally I have a RAID 1 and backup everything to Crashplan. I use Crashplan with family and friends, I plan on subscribing to backup to their servers for extra protection. I also use Wuala / Google drive for photo sharing.

Never rely on hard disk. They will break. Don't rely on home solutions, you'll lose everything in case of fire, flood, lightning strikes, robbery, ...

Any home base solution has a single point of failure, it's location. So any solution with offsite backup will be better.

My suggestions :

\- Buy a 2 disks NAS (Synology, Qnap, Lacie or similar), you can have 8TB on some of them. Want extra safety? Go with a 4 bay NAS in RAID10.

\- Get a Crashplan yearly plan.

\- Subscribe to unlimited bandwidth with your internet provider.

Any other online file sharing service will do the job but Crashplan is built for that and the price is fair.

And whatever solution you choose, the most important thing is, TEST IT. Do a simple recovery test once in a while. Setup alerts or reminder to look at your backup.

</comment><comment><USER12> _every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos_

That is not a backup, that's an external storage. A backup should only be accessed to sync data (preferably with versioning, so the old data is not overwritten) and to recover lost data.

My computers are synchronized with a home server that has mirrored disks, then the home server is backed up to cloud and to my parent's desktop (off-site backup). The backed up data has ~2TB (mainly photos, private git repository, documents).

I use CrashPlan for the cloud and off-site synchronization. With a free account you can backup data to another computer (yours or a friend's). With a paid account you can backup to their cloud storage and you can get more things to tweak. You can provide your own encryption keys, so the data should be safer (as long as you don't loose the private key). The best thing is that it offers file versioning (even with a free account, but you don't get some of the advanced settings for that), so if something really bad happens - like a ransomware virus, that encrypts your files - you can still recover the older version. The only issue is that the application needs Internet access even when using it locally - so if something happens to your account, or you don't have Internet access, you cannot easily[1] access your data.

[1] [http://crashplan.probackup.nl/remote-backup/support/q/how- to...](http://crashplan.probackup.nl/remote-backup/support/q/how-to-restore- from-local-crashplan-backups-without-internet.html)

<comment><USER13> CrashPlan is excellent. You can get a "family plan" for ~$12 a month, backup as many files you want on a bunch of computers. No file space limit, no bandwidth throttling. Online access to files, including from native mobile apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've become a big fan of Arq, although your collection may be a bit large. Crash Plan and Backblaze do well too.

If price is an issue, and you don't care about security, I would also consider a private Flickr account for photos and iTunes Match for music, and then use Dropbox/Arq for the documents/other valuables. Photos/music are fairly safe offsite with those, then your docs will be in S3/Glacier with Arq. Not perfect, but an alright solution for cheap.

<comment><USER15> As I understand it, some of those solutions won't work because they require you to keep a copy on your machine too no? I believe Backblaze and Dropbox does. That won't work if so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't have offsite backups yet (but read on). Currently, I auto-backup daily at 4am, my entire fedora desktop using rsyncbtrfs [https://github.com/oxplot/rsyncbtrfs](https://github.com/oxplot/rsyncbtrfs) which does an incremental backup on btrfs using subvolumes. I have everyday backup for last 4 years and I can access any version of any file at any time with no preparation (ie just cd into the appropriate directory for that day).

I have also written [https://github.com/oxplot/cloudnbd](https://github.com/oxplot/cloudnbd) for offsite backup. It presents any cloud storage (via pluggable backends) as linux block device which you can format to FS of your choosing. You can then mount it, RAID it, etc. and do crazy stuff with it. I don't use it yet because it's not well polished (and I'm lazy) but that's my ultimate weapon. It encrypts everything on the client side too so that should make NSA's job a tad harder.

</comment><comment><USER17> I pay ~$4/m for CrashPlan. I keep all my data - all of it - on one desktop PC (including periodic downloads of remote data like emails) and all my other devices (laptops, smart phones) contain only some subset of that data passively synced with the desktop, E.G. using Dropbox. I do incremental backups down to 10 minutes to CrashPlan's cloud and to a local external HDD. I remind myself to replace the HDD every 3 years.

I've got terabytes of data and it works great. The only thing I want is a third, off-site, non-cloud backup. I don't have a solution for that, but having my data in 3 places, one of which is the cloud, is good enough for me for now.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've got my stuff on my macbook air and usb drive. I've got the drive partitioned into two, half for time machine, the other for more photos (that don't fit on the MBA's 256gb SSD). When the MBA gets full, I move old photos to the USB drive.

MBA and the data part of the USB drive backed up with Crashplan ($5/month)

Also have some stuff on Dropbox (free account) also backed up to Crashplan - it's mostly just stuff I need in other places.

All my documents on Google Drive, don't back that up because I don't think you can (the desktop client doesn't give access to actual documents). Additionally most of best pictures are either on Flickr or Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER19> Previous backup method: 1\. Back up working dir (~1.5 GB) daily with rsync to Raspberry Pi. 2\. Back up encrypted archives of photos/videos monthly to mega.co.nz and external drive, and back up new photos/videos during month with #1 above.

New back up method: 1\. Back up everything with Deja Dup to $25/year, 50GB VPS daily - I don't have a lot of data. 2\. Back up everything with Deja Dup to external drive monthly (maybe going to weekly).

Edit: All photos are resized monthly with a script to create a ~100KB copy that lives on my laptop and phone. I can see all photos I've ever taken on my phone, but still have the full-res copy backed up.

</comment><comment><USER20> My method is pretty close to yours:

1\. Google Drive (got 2 years of 100GB space with Chromebook), was previously using Dropbox

This provides me a backup locally on the computer and one off site.

2\. I have an external hard drive connected to the workstation that runs an update weekly to give me a third copy of all my data. I switch out the drive with a second external drive on a weekly basis.

If my computer dies, I have Google Drive and then the external hard drive x2. If the external hard drive fails then no big deal. If Google drive wipes out everything still no big deal.

I backup around 70GB.

*edit: The OSes I use are Windows 8.1, ChromeOS, and OSX,

</comment><comment><USER21> This is how I do that for servers, but I'm experimenting with using the same backup schema for my local machine, too:

On my servers, every virtual machine is on an encrypted block device, so the data is already encrypted when it's written to the disk. Then I use Shasplit [1] and Rsync for efficient incremental backups. Restoration is a simple "cat" invocation (or use Shasplit for that), and I get back a full, running, encrypted VM with everything.

[1] [http://vog.github.io/shasplit/](http://vog.github.io/shasplit/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a 500Gb portable hard disk that gets appended to daily and cycled every 2 years. Plus a digitalocean VM which gets rsynced to daily.

Oh and a VS320 DLT which gets done when I can be arsed as that has a two decade shelf life. It and the drive live in a 400kg fire safe.

And I print all my photos on 10x8 paper that are worth keeping.

And I have CDs for music still.

Edit: see a lot of people relying on just cloud services. Don't do that. Shit does go missing and fail. And I bet you don't test your multi-gigabyte cloud drop until you need to restore it which is bad juju.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dropbox. (Google Drive is not stable enough, and I have too many things on Google already)

One mistake I made with Dropbox is installing it on one of my linux servers, on my server I moved Dropbox folder, and it made Dropbox believe that I have deleted everything on my server. So it deleted most of my files, and recovering it was a mess. Even talking after talking with Dropbox support, I couldn't recover everything :(.

Looking for a better solution, but I need the cloud as I want to be able to access some of the files from my phone.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. I keep working data on my laptop, and archived data/media on a desktop machine in my home.

2\. Both are backed up to Time Machine to a network drive, and also with Arq to Glacier.

3\. I keep important documents in Dropbox.

This gives me "Oh shit, I deleted a file" protection from Time Machine and Dropbox, two local copies of all media and data in case of hardware failure or machine loss, and a last-ditch offsite Glacier backup.

Works well, and Arq isn't that pricey if using only Glacier.

<comment><USER25> I have independently reached the same conclusions. Glacier for photos / videos backup and Dropbox / time machine for everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> BackBlaze has worked well for me:

[http://www.backblaze.com/](http://www.backblaze.com/)

easy to restore, and works silently in the background.

<comment><USER15> I've been reading up on Backblaze but don't they require you keep a local copy and they only keep history for 30 days before its wiped?

<comment><USER27> Yes. I use them; the other bad thing you might read about is that to download encrypted stuff, you need to enter your password on their server.

<comment><USER15> So I'm curious then, given those flaws, why still use Backblaze as it doesn't seem to be a true cloud backup? Would feel more like a cloud Time Machine

<comment><USER28> Disclaimer: I'm a Backblaze employee. Backblaze tends to be extremely simple to use. After installation, you enter your email address and a password (on the client side) and you are now CORRECTLY configured. By default, Backblaze backs up any and all files on your computer. You don't have to pick and choose folders, write a script, setup a second computer at your Mom's house, nothing. There are only 3 billing options: $5/month (utterly unthrottled and no size limits), or if you pay for 1 year up front it is $50, pay for two years it is $95.

Simple and "just works" makes some customers happy, but Backblaze isn't perfect for everybody. If you like playing with your backups, scripting them, configuring machines, excluding folders - Backblaze will drive you crazy as you fight to control it. For example, if you add a new folder of images to your computer, Backblaze will push them to our datacenter unless you EXPLICITLY exclude that folder. Some customers would like an option that all new folders ARE NOT backed up until they "add" them to the backup. Backblaze must be thought of as a complete solution - if it doesn't fit your needs, we can highly recommend other more scriptable products to you.

There is no shame that we only fit the needs of a subset of customers, our biggest challenge is communicating what we do and do not do clearly so we don't waste your time.

The original question was "with these flaws why use Backblaze?" The answer is, only customers who view these "flaws" as good things should use Backblaze. For example, your files are encrypted at Backblaze and we absolutely don't store your password. But by default, you can "recover" your password with access to your email address. You can enable a higher level of security on Backblaze where you can NEVER recover your password and if you forget your password, you are screwed. This is NOT the best option if your Mom is using Backblaze to backup her cat pictures. Friendly and easy is a BETTER solution for some people. But if you are really, really concerned about security, look into Backblaze's "private encryption key" option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here is a blog post/screencast I wrote almost a year ago on how to go about using OS X TimeMachine and SMB (Samba) to do backups.

[http://rajiv.sg/blog/2012/11/19/configuring-os-x-mountain- li...](http://rajiv.sg/blog/2012/11/19/configuring-os-x-mountain-lion-time- machine-to-work-with-cifs-smb-share/)

Never made it on HackerNews, but many people have found it useful.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have a 1 TB USB drive and allow Ubuntu's backup software to do weekly backups of my code, docs, etc. It's simple a $100 solution.

</comment><comment><USER27> For my laptop: I use backblaze for everything. I have timemachine setup on a small server (running zfs and snapshotting). I also use arq to backup more important stuff an extra time to S3.

For servers with data, which currently is just postgres - Heroku pg backups. We download, verify and archive them on S3 and to local server.

<comment><USER31> > _I have timemachine setup on a small server (running zfs and snapshotting)._

Are you talking about the Apple Time Machine app here? I'd be curious to hear about your setup if so. Right now I'm using time machine to a USB attached HDD, because my last foray into network attached volumes + time machine (using linux/samba as the volume host) was pretty painful.

I also like the idea of ZFS and periodic array scrubbing to detect invisible failures, which most RAIDesque configurations ignore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Dropbox for non-media stuff, I back up everything occasionally on a USB hard drive with rsync. I guess it's not a big deal to me because aside from my work which is in dropbox and git, I don't have anything I couldn't replace.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't have anything really on my computer that needs backing up. I use SkyDrive to store documents like Homework etc. but apart from that nothing.

Everything nowadays is easy enough to re-download from the internet at a later date.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have a raspberry pi at home in which I backup to via sshfs (if I am away from home). It is connected to a usb driven external 2TB drive.

I backup this drive and keep a copy at my parent's house in their safe.

</comment><comment><USER35> I use Apple Time Capsule and iDrive for off-site backups ([https://www.idrive.com/](https://www.idrive.com/)). Both use encryption to protect my data.

</comment><comment><USER36> I switch between Windows and Linux quite a bit but for me it is mainly two tools: Rsync (Linux) and Robocopy (Windows).

I don't store anything online unless it is something mundane, like my dotfiles.

</comment><comment><USER37> I only back up important documents, encrypted on an SD card. I estimate that the chances of fire or theft are not important enough to invest in anything more.

</comment><comment><USER38> btsync [1] seems pretty promising so far. I've been syncing a NAS drive at home with my a disk at the office and a small linode instance.

Shame it's not open source as there have been a few things I'd like to tweak (like quieten down the UDP noise a bit), but it's a pretty good backup solution IMO.

[1] [http://www.bittorrent.com/sync](http://www.bittorrent.com/sync)

</comment><comment><USER39> Arq to SQ and Glacier: [http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq](http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq)

<comment><USER15> What is SQ? I think you meant S3?

<comment><USER40> Yes, that was the meaning, S3. I too use Arq, to Glacier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I use Amazon Glacier through FastGlacier. Pennies a month, and I'm reassured.

</comment><comment><USER42> Arq -> Amazon Glacier

</comment><comment><USER43> Timemachine + dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER44> I use CrashPlan

</comment><comment><USER45> pay for dropbox.</comment>


Receiving Weather Satellite Images With An £8 Dongle - <AUTHOR> http://mattg.co.uk/words/noaa_sdr/ <comment><USER2> The author mentions that he used "A 2 metre bit of wire jammed in the screwhole at the base of the tiny antenna" to try and get better reception. While the signal he is receiving is in the 2-meter band, a monopole antenna works better if it is 1/4 the wavelength, so he might actually get better reception with a 0.5 meter length of wire. What he created is usually called a "random wire" antenna, and may deliver acceptable performance with a strong signal.

But the NOAA satellites (and quite a few other satellites) use a circularly polarized signal, and for just a tiny bit more money (perhaps the cost of the dongle) you can make a MUCH better antenna for circularly polarized signals. Some designs are just helixes made with coax cable, some are just a couple of wires in an x-shape.

Google is your friend, and building an antenna is a fun cheap weekend project and will greatly enhance your results when hunting for satellite signals.

P.S. if you make a circularly polarized antenna and you discover that you made a LH polarization instead of the RH that you wanted (or vice versa), just turn the antenna upside down. It may behoove you if you are planning on listening to signals with both polarities to construct one that is easily flipped over.

<comment><USER3>
        While the signal he is receiving is in the 2-meter
        band, a monopole antenna works better if it is 1/4 the
        wavelength, so he might actually get better reception
        with a 0.5 meter length of wire.

I always thought a lambda/4 antenna is used because it's almost as good as a lambda antenna but much more conveniently to handle. I understand that more complicated antenna designs can be better than a simple lambda wire, but how can a lambda/n wire be better? I don't doubt what you are saying, I'm just curious how this can work.

<comment><USER4> Linear monopole antennas are very easy to reason about.

Imagine (or actually draw) a sine wave graph, and then fit your antenna along the X axis of the graph. Now look at "signal" amplitude at the antenna's extremities. You'll notice that 1/4 wavelength antenna will give you the strongest signal, while 1/2 and full wavelength will apparently give no signal at all. The only reason that full-wavelength piece of wire picks up anything at all are build imperfections - wire length not perfectly matched to wavelength, not perfectly straight, not perfectly aligned with signal source, signal reflections hitting it from different angle, etc. Thats why olympus refers to performance of full-wavelength piece of wire as "random piece of wire"-kind of performance.

On the other hand, linear dipole would be 1/2-wavelength (or 2 times 1/4-wavelength), as it is just two 1/4-monopoles put together.

<comment><USER3> This makes sense. Thank's a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome; am ordering a dongle right away!

Did some digging and there's a whole load of things which can potentially be picked up, including dead satellites [0]. RTL-SDR.com has a whole load of awesome looking tutorials [1].

[0] [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-dead-satellites-rtl- sdr/](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-dead-satellites-rtl-sdr/) [1] [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/category/tutorial/](http://www.rtl- sdr.com/category/tutorial/)

<comment><USER6> I just ordered one too - this looks awesome.

You can track aircraft (newer airplanes broadcast their locations, ships, etc.

This [0] is the one I ended up ordering, I just wish one day shipping was available.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U7WZCA](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U7WZCA)

<comment><USER7> $20 is way too expensive for these. Here's the same thing for half the price: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Newsky-TV28T-v2-USB-DVB-T-RTL-SDR- Re...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Newsky-TV28T-v2-USB-DVB-T-RTL-SDR-Receiver- RTL2832U-R820T-Tuner-MCX- Input-/131532641773?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1e9ff4d5ed)

<comment> TD-Linux There are a variety of factories producing these at variable quality. I'd still recommend the Nooelec version if you have the budget to spare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great, just recently I became passionate about anything relating to radio theory and transmission and I had learnt about these dongles and was ready to get one.

But before that, I decided I wanted a proper "hardware radio", and bought myself a portable wide band radio receiver [1] (great value for the price, I advice it). Then when I was about to get one of these dongles, as usual and as for the above radio, I got sucked into the reviews suggesting this or that other model for better sensitivity or extra features. Now I understand the price range for these cheap sticks is just in the order of a few tenths at maximum, but maybe there is a chance anyone has investigated a bit more on the available choices already?

For example.. the one that has been written about in the article has 4 stars and 159 reviews while the first alternative in the "Amazon recommends" box has some 940 reviews and same 4 star score for just £ +2 (but I'm not even sure they do exactly the same things.. sorry). So, just wondering, maybe someone has already gone through this search and can recommend the best one to get?

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Tecsun-PL-660-Portable-Shortwave- Singl...](http://www.amazon.com/Tecsun-PL-660-Portable-Shortwave- Single/dp/B004H9C4JK)

<comment><USER2> > Now I understand the price range for these cheap sticks is just in the order > of a few tenths at maximum, but maybe there is a chance anyone has > investigated a bit more on the available choices?

Thanks to the popularity of this family of DVB dongles, all the information you need is right here: [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t- dongles/](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/)

Also look into the Funcube dongle for a sdr dongle that is designed for ham radio and not just an adapted DVB dongle -- they are pretty much the same thing though. If you can find an E4000 dongle on ebay it's probably worth twice as much as the R820T dongles because it gives you a wider frequency range. I have an R820T dongle and it works just fine though.

One thing to keep in mind is that these dongles only have 8 bit ADCs in them, so no matter how great your signal path, you will top out at ~48db of sensitivity (rough formula is sensitivity in db = 6*bits of ADC). A "real" SDR like the USRP B210 has a 12 bit ADC in it, which means that it will top out at around 72db of sensitivity. Plus, spending the big money means that you will get a radio that takes less shortcuts than a cheaply produced dongle, so you are much more likely to get closer to that theoretical peak. But certainly start with a dongle, and play with it and see how far you get before you "absolutely need" some TX capability or have truly maxed out what you can do with only USB 2.0 and 8 bits of resolution (though there is a guy who was passively tracking aircraft with FM radio stations and two synchronized dongles so what you can do with these is pretty crazy).

<comment><USER9> _One thing to keep in mind is that these dongles only have 8 bit ADCs in them, so no matter how great your signal path, you will top out at ~48db of sensitivity (rough formula is sensitivity in db = 6x bits of ADC). A "real" SDR like the USRP B210 has a 12 bit ADC in it, which means that it will top out at around 72db of sensitivity._

Of course, the ~6 dB per bit rule applies only at the ADC's full (Nyquist) bandwidth. If the ADC is followed by a decimation and filter chain it can potentially do a lot better. Do these dongles perform their conversion at the final signal bandwidth, or do they digitize at a wider IF and downconvert to baseband digitally?

<comment><USER2> Excellent point. I believe that the ADC samples at 28.8 Msps and then decimates to the rate requested by the computer (max ~3.2 Msps). So theoretically it could be doing ~3 bits better, if everything was implemented properly and those extra bits were delivered across the USB to the computer. I think the samples delivered to the computer are still only 8 bits so the ~48 dB theoretical limit to the dynamic range remains.

CamperBob you sound like you know what you're talking about and I'm mostly self taught in this area so if I'm wrong please let me know.

<comment><USER9> Same here, I (try to) spend most of my time out of my depth. :)

It sounds like the bandwidth of the 137 MHz satellite signal is in the 36 kHz vicinity, going by the article. So one possible strategy would downconvert 137 MHz to somewhere in the first Nyquist zone of the ~30 MSPS ADC (i.e., below about 15 MHz). The ASIC picks up 3 more bits of process gain by decimating to 3 MSPS, then the host CPU could pick up about 5 more bits by further decimation to about 100 kSPS. The 36 kHz signal would then have a dynamic range approaching that of a 16-bit ADC, which is quite adequate for most purposes.

Of course, IMD artifacts and other spurious tonal responses due to the cheap RF front end don't experience any such improvement, but you sure can't complain for $20.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did this a few years ago with a similar dongle and a homemade antenna. It's a pretty cool thing to see something you cobbled together receiving real-time messages from space.

[http://robotrising.org/2012/10/capturing-weather- satellite-i...](http://robotrising.org/2012/10/capturing-weather-satellite- images-using-a-homebrew-antenna/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Last thing I used my R820T for was decoding POCSAG[0] messages here in the UK. It's a paging system, and the messages seem to be broadcast nationwide in the clear. Seems to be mostly used by the NHS and vets. I got kind of depressed reading about dying pets.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POCSAG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POCSAG)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's a Reddit for software defined radio, using the cheap Realtek RTL2832U devices.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/rtlsdr](https://www.reddit.com/r/rtlsdr)

<comment><USER13> Just be aware that some of the moderators have iron fists and like to go ban happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I did something similar using the same libraries and all using a Raspberrypi and DVB-T dongle [1].

Then I configured the tcp server, rtl_tcp to forward the packets to my workstation. This allowed me to put the Pi in a location more suited to receive transmissions, i.e. not next to RF emitting servers and power supplies. Then, using Gqrx with remote server, I analysed the results.

[1] [https://www.joechin.com/raspberry-pi-and-sdr-getting- started...](https://www.joechin.com/raspberry-pi-and-sdr-getting-started/)

<comment><USER15> Looks like your SSL certificate has expired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would expect the communication to be encrypted, or is it supposed to be open to the outside world?

<comment><USER17> I think weather satellites were meant to be useful to everyone who could receive the signal.

<comment><USER18> Especially for marine traffic.

<comment><USER19> WeatherFax has been used for decades now.

This, however, wouldn't be of much use in a regular cruiser as you do not want to keep your laptop constantly to wait for broadcast. Dedicated devices are quite cheap and reliable.

<comment><USER18> I think most people are doing this for fun. But if you needed it and couldn't get your hands on the real thing, adding an Rpi and a screen to it makes a functional substitute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have this one: [http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/nesdr- mini2-rtl2832u-r820t2...](http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/nesdr- mini2-rtl2832u-r820t2.html)

I already received aircraft positions (ADS-B), aircraft radio, ACARS, VDL, HFDL, satellite pictures, ISS pictures, a ISS astronaut speaking, a bunch of other satellites (including radio pirates on US military sats), small outdoor weather stations, a portable radio for children, some AM radio stations, a lot of ham radio and pagers.

There is also huge amount of signals I can't decode yet.

<comment><USER20> BTW: I'm using an old TV antenna.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand these signals are not encrypted, for commercial reasons.

<comment><USER22> It's not a commercial service, but a government one. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) satellites belong to a department of the US government.

<comment><USER21> In many countries, public transport is run by the government, but still costs money.

Governmental does not have to be orthogonal to commercial.

<comment> bjelkeman-again In Sweden the agency that deals with cartography and land measurements (Lantmäteriet) charged money for their data. An acquaintance who works with the government checked their income and where it same from. Something like 80% came from other government departments and the rest from companies. But the extra 20% was roughly the cost of running the administration to manage the billing. So the data got limited use for no financial gain.

In May they started releasing the maps under Creative Commons [1]. Not only me was really excited about this here in Sweden.

[1] in Swedish [http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.616018/slapp- kartorna-...](http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.616018/slapp-kartorna- loss-det-ar-var--lantmateriets-databas-ute)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can use the same dongle to tap into ADS-B signals to get realtime ATC and display it on a map. Also, it's interesting to just sit and listen to SFO ATC audio channel.

<comment><USER24> He has a screenshot of this in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice hack! I wonder what other useful common digital signals can one record with a dongle? Time and date, teletext (which includes weather forecasts and news) I am aware of. There is also project Lantern & Outernet which might deliver 20 MB of data to all continents through nanosats next year. What other digital signals are transmitted?

</comment><comment><USER26> Free fast shipping: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/251240985308](http://www.ebay.com/itm/251240985308)

Most of them seem to have the same two chips in them, RTL2832U and R820T. Does anyone see an issue with this item I linked to? Some people were mentioning quality issues with generics.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is also OsmocomSDR[1] which is an excellent starting point into software defined radio.

[1] [http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl- sdr](http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr)

<comment><USER8> How does this one differ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> All I have done till now is tune to local FM stations. I would like to tune to AM SW stations all over the world. I think buying a 50 USD RF up converter is the only option ?

<comment><USER28> You can do a very simple, though somewhat permanent, modification to the dongle and receive DC-14MHz. [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-direct-sampling- mode/](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-direct-sampling-mode/)

<comment><USER29> There's a software modification here which is also interesting:

[http://superkuh.com/rtlsdr.html#directsample](http://superkuh.com/rtlsdr.html#directsample)

The whole idea of the community figuring out hacks to use this hardware in ways that were never intended by its original designers, including exploiting bugs/artifacts, reminds me of the demoscene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if that would work on a commercial jet @ 30K feet. Would be an interesting test.

<comment><USER31> \- [https://twitter.com/grkvlt/status/600998588475375616](https://twitter.com/grkvlt/status/600998588475375616)

This is the output I got on a flight from EDI to LHR at about the half-way point, decoding ADS-B transmissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> done this few years ago [http://imgur.com/a/3GELZ](http://imgur.com/a/3GELZ)

</comment><comment><USER33> That's totally awesome! Have to try this myself.</comment>


Show HN: Minimal Weather - The web app with iOS icon auto update - <AUTHOR> http://minimalweather.com/

<comment><USER2> Very Cool. Can I have your email address?</comment>


Ask HN: LoadError on Installing Rails via Cygwin - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to instal rails on Windows XP to do the Ruby on Rails Tutorial but attemtpting to install rails, I am getting this error:
Marlon@DevComputer ~/rubygems-1.8.15 $ gem install rails C:\Ruby192\bin\ruby.exe: No such file or directory -- /cygdrive/c/Ruby192/bin/gem (LoadError)
Any help? All the links I am finding so far on Google search does not solve the issue. Any solution? <comment><USER2> I tried getting rails working under cygwin a while ago, and never had much luck. If you're using a windows system, my suggestions would be either to use Rails Installer:

<http://railsinstaller.org/>

(haven't actually tried this myself, but I've heard it's pretty solid) or to run a unix VM in virtualbox or vmware. I did the latter and had no problems getting everything working with the help of rvm.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend re-asking this on StackOverflow. You'll probably get faster results, and it's a more appropriate place to ask technical questions regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's right.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8796124/loaderror-on- inst...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8796124/loaderror-on-installing- rails-via-cygwin)</comment></comment>


Immer is a library of persistent and immutable data structures written in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arximboldi/immer <comment><USER2> Ironically, there's a name clash with a fairly popular immutable update library for JS:

[https://github.com/immerjs/immer](https://github.com/immerjs/immer)

Looks like the C++ one started first (2016-05 vs 2017-12).

<comment><USER3> I assumed it was some sort of port, but they're totally different things!

OT but it's worth reading the code for immerjs. It's super small, super clever and shows the power of proxies in js.

<comment><USER2> Yep. Michel Weststrate is a genius, and also an all-around nice guy. I hope to have a chance to meet him in person.

(For reference, I'm a Redux maintainer. We now recommend Immer as the best way to write immutable update logic in Redux apps, and use it in our Redux Starter kit package.)

<comment><USER4> Immer looks awesome but we're relying on Immutablejs shallow object comparison to stop rendering React components when not needed. When I last checked I could not figure out how to achieve the same thing with Immer.

Do you know some reference that addresses this?

And if we're here an additional question: since our store data is currently composed of deep immutable JS data structures, do you know of a way to slowly migrate to Immer?

I've tried to move parts of the store to Immer, but since the root store obejcts are still Immutable js objects, this didn't go well.

<comment><USER5> ImmerJS is a direct replacement for ImmutableJS.

We recently switched from using ImmutableJS in our Redux store to using ImmerJS.

We took the approach one reducer at a time. We have multiple reducers and we're using combineReducers (the ImmutableJS one until it was completely converted).

We had no issues whatsoever in the change. ImmutableJS doesn't care about plain JS objects (which is what ImmerJS reducers return) so everything worked as expected.

React's shallow comparison worked as expected since ImmerJS produces new objects on mutation (just like ImmutableJS).

Essentially: there is no case where ImmutableJS is needed. _All_ functionality and benefits are available in ImmerJS which is a much easier to use library.

To do the migration, we literally just used the docs on the Github repo. This was back with version 1.0 or something and it wasn't documented very well but we were able to figure it out. The first code example is how to use it with Redux. Also the section on Currying is useful.

Edit to add: This is all within the context of web apps, specifically React apps with Redux. I'm sure there's probably __some __places where ImmutableJS is desirable, but I don 't know of any.

<comment><USER6> "there is no case" is a strong statement. ImmutableJS is generally the wrong tool for the job in a reducer. It's optimized for if you have a single flat object with 1000s of keys. Immer can't implement the same level of structural sharing

<comment><USER3> Can you explain this scenario further? I've not used immutablejs but I'm familiar with both functional data structure concepts and immerjs.

Immerjs just improves the ergonomics updating a native nested structure in a way that the original contents are maintained as much as possible. Because js has dreadful support for equality checks, this definitely comes in useful.

<comment><USER2> Immutable.js implements a specific set of data structures that internally share references. When you add a new field or copy an object, Immutable.js doesn't have to completely recreate things. For small objects this doesn't matter, but for _very_ large objects and arrays, it does improve performance to some extent.

With Immer and "hand-written" immutable updates, doing a `{...obj}` or `someArray.slice()` will do a "shallow" copy of the object. This is equivalent to what Immutable.js does in that it keeps all the fields pointing to the same references. However, the JS engine does have to do an O(n) processing of all the individual top-level keys, whereas Immutable.js's internal data structure is O(logN) or something like that. So, for _very_ large objects, it is faster for Immutable.js to make a copy than it is for plain JS data.

My take, however, is that

\- Most apps will not be dealing with gigantic objects, so there's no perf benefit from using Immutable.js

\- Immutable.js is a much larger dependency than Immer

\- The fact that Immer works with POJOs _and_ gives you the ability to write trivial "mutative" syntax for updates is a huge improvement over Immutable.js's Java-inspired API

So, to me, the only hypothetical use case where Immutable.js would actually be worth it is if your app is consistently dealing with huge objects, _and_ there is truly serious overhead from copying them that needs to be optimized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For some perspective on why the name was probably chosen: 'immer' means 'forever' or 'always' in German

</comment><comment> ur-whale Could someone provide an actual example use-case for immutable data structures in C++?

The linked document only mentions high-level examples, all of which seem to be trivially implementable via mutable data structures and a bit of being careful.

Does this buy anything beyond peace of mind that if you pass an immutable DS to another thread, they won't be able to change it?

<comment><USER8> The author has created a text editor which uses immutable data structures s.t. he can do fast undo / redo [1]

[1] [https://github.com/arximboldi/ewig](https://github.com/arximboldi/ewig)

<comment><USER9> I saw a demonstration where he copy pasted a file into itself until it was larger than whatever memory he had in the computer. He could still efficiently edit it (the data pointers were duplicated, not the data).

Pretty impressive.

<comment><USER10> Do you have the URL to the video?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Clang Static Analyzer uses immutable data structures. Here, for instance, is its immutable list implementation: [https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/blob/master/llvm/includ...](https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/blob/master/llvm/include/llvm/ADT/ImmutableList.h)

The data structures are used during program state exploration because they are more memory efficient than storing many copies of the program state with small mutations.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is something about this immutability thing I really don't like. In the authors example it looks like v1[0] is set to 42 (const auto v2 = v1.set(0, 42)), at least that's how you read it because it contains the word 'set', but you have to 'know' that v1 is immutable and is actually not setting the value, but returning it. So IMAO the naming should be better, I like to read code that is not confusing.

If this construct, that I actually never needed in my entire career, is handy for undo/redo, why not just have a dead simple undo stack? In what situation is an immutable structure your best choice?

<comment><USER13> what would be a good word for this ? recreate ? recompute ? with_new ?

<comment><USER14> In general, I think verbs should be avoided, when possible, as names of functional operations. For instance, in Java, 'BigInteger.add' should have been 'plus'. Compare:

      x.add(y);
      x.plus(y);

People have been known to write the first one expecting 'x' to be updated. With the second, I think it's clearer that it's a value that needs to be assigned to a variable.

For the operation in question here, I suggest 'with'. This is what I have used in my own functional collections libraries; I think it originated in SETL.

<comment><USER15> I am a fan of nouns(or gerunds) for pure functions, and verbs for mutating functions. I.e:

        x.add(y); // x now equals x + y
        x.adding(y); // returns x + y without mutating x

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Related: it'd be great if C++ had const constructors, so that we could have true const objects.

<comment><USER17> What would be the utility of such a constructor? You can just initialize const objects with regular constructors. How are these objects not "true" const?

<comment><USER16> The specific use case I had in mind was a implicit "conversion" constructor that took an immutable object and gave back something that you couldn't strip the const off of (it'd also take a mutable object and give you a normal thing back). What I have specifically is a class that provides a base set of operations and a subclass that lets you do some modifications, and what I am trying to do is wrap it in C++ with an object that is const depending on which class I am converting (converting object to const wrapper_class and mutable_object, a subclass of object, to just wrapper_class).

<comment><USER18> > What I have specifically is a class that provides a base set of operations > and a subclass that lets you do some modifications

Your object isn't actually immutable, it just doesn't let you directly mutate it. That's a really important distinction.

That's a common pattern. In C++, rather than using a subclass for the mutator, use a different (friend) class. The semantics for implicit conversion between two different classes will allow you to accomplish what you are asking for with enforcing no changes from one interface but not the other.

<comment><USER16> > In C++, rather than using a subclass for the mutator, use a different > (friend) class.

Unfortunately I don't control this class :(</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Migration of Monarch Butterflies Shrinks Again Under Inhospitable Conditions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/us/monarch-butterflies-falter-under-extreme-weather.html?ref=science&_r=0 <comment><USER2> we're going to fund this research on microryza</comment>


Japanese companies not willing to hire Western-educated, Japanese students - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/business/global/as-global-rivals-gain-ground-corporate-japan-clings-to-cautious-ways.html?_r=1

<comment><USER2> The Japanese corporates know that the Western educated candidates are so far ahead of the Japan-educated candidates that they will hate the first few years of any job in a Japanese company. A graduate in Japan is expected to be a low paid blank slate to mould. These guys _should_ work for a foreign company ("gaishikei") in Japan. Not quite sure what they are complaining about, they have dodged a bullet.

</comment><comment><USER3> All I can say is, this makes for a very easy competitive environment for companies that are smart enough to grab up all those foreign-contaminated rejects.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is this a surprise? Those western schools don't have the prestige that the top Japanese schools do. Well unless you're doing some thing like studying to a chef in Paris.

<comment><USER5> The very first paragraph has a student from Oxford.

<comment><USER4> In Japan Oxford may not be seen as prestigious as the top rated Japanese universities...

<comment><USER5> That wasn't what you said.

<comment><USER4> Throw away your western bias and re-read tomflack-chan: "Those western schools don't have the prestige that the top Japanese schools do." : D

<comment><USER5> Accusing someone of cultural bias always feels to me like a shorthand for "I want the last word no matter what". As such, after this post I won't be engaging with you any further.

Your two posts have different meanings, the first gave no cultural anchor when saying western schools were not as prestegious as the top Japanese schools, while your second one did. It's a semantic difference, but it matters. That said, in the scope of the article that is the _problem_ being posed. Japanese firms not hiring based on talent and ignoring good internationally educated candidates.

As for your accusations of a western bias - you don't know Mr, you don't know how or where I was brought up so don't be so quick to fall on that crutch in argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ex-MIT professor told friends he 'robbed the bank' - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2015/01/12/no-one-believed-this-former-professor-would-rob-a-bank/ <comment><USER2> Gibbons' actions are extremely selfish in my opinion. I know someone who used to work behind the cash registers of gas stations in North Houston. He has been robbed and held at gun point multiple times. According to him, the experience is traumatic and made him fearful and stressed out at work. To put someone through that for no reason other than your own curiosity is intolerably inconsiderate.

Instead, Gibbons could have picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment or some other work of art if he wanted to acquire a sense of the desperation felt by "the disenfranchised of society." It is not a stretch to imagine that it probably sucks.

Great art can teach us about life without the burden of living through the worst it has to offer. Trying to force traumatic experiences on yourself at the expense of others is not art but stupidity.

<comment><USER3> It feels like the classic "but, officer: it was only a joke!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not that it matters to the bank robbery, but: he is not quite an ex-MIT professor. ([http://act.mit.edu/people/lecturers/joe- gibbons/](http://act.mit.edu/people/lecturers/joe-gibbons/))

<comment><USER5> Getting tenure is almost like winning the lottery, except more folks have PhDs than buy tickets it seems. (Double-edged sword of university pension commitment cheapness and oversupply of labor to grind out papers.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the most interesting part of what I just read:

>"I left a message with my girlfriend's sister and I told her, 'Yeah, I've got into the city, I've got myself a room at The Bowery Hotel, I filed for Social Security, I robbed the bank and I went to the drugstore,'" the 61-year-old told The Post in an exclusive interview at the Manhattan Detention Complex on Sunday. "I told them, but they just didn't pay any attention to the 'robbed the bank' part."

Next time you need to break some bad news how about it! "I left a message with my investors saying, "Yeah we have another two hires, we've just gotten a small TC story, filed for a provisional patent, I closed a down round, and I went to meet with that guy who you introduced me to last week."

"I told them, but they just didn't pay attention to the 'I closed a down round' part."

can't say you didn't mention it!

</comment><comment><USER7> _The former visual arts and film professor, whose contract was not renewed by MIT in 2011, said he had no regrets and wasn't afraid he would do hard time. "This latest project is akin to 'bank robbing for dummies,' " he said, noting that he expects to get probation._

Rather than probation, I think he's more likely to get locked up in a psych ward. There's definitely something going wrong in this guy's head.

<comment><USER8> Judges & juries really, really hate reasoning like that.

<comment><USER5> Definitely playing Russian roulette with a loaded justice system. May skate on the (arguable) basis of "white male privilege" and possible lack of prior convictions.

IANAL, but I would play on empathy for an retiring, unaccomplished non- professor risking ignominy for ignescence... Dude was just deperate for attention. (Making an example of him wouldn't necessarily deter folks because they would throw their lives away anyhow... Making an example rarely does anything other than rationalize malicious sentencing.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Check out this excerpt from his 2001 semi-autobiographical film, "Confessions of a Sociopath":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-tHqOz5zTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-tHqOz5zTo)

More information on the film:

[http://creative-capital.org/projects/view/154](http://creative- capital.org/projects/view/154)

<comment><USER10> Is the low quality intentional? We made better looking, sounding, and edited videos in high school AV class.

<comment><USER5> One would think surveillance audio/video should be sufficiently high resolution to remove reasonable doubt as to identity and circumstances. Then again, it might be that surveillance systems are considered a "bothersome cost of doing business" so the cheapest system that checks boxes is used and rarely, if ever, upgraded... Until there is an incident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if they'll cut all ties with him, ban him from campus, revoke his emeritus status and remove his online courses from the OpenCourseWare site...

</comment><comment><USER12> Not the way to rob a bank anymore.</comment>


One Application (same code base), Five Screens (Including the iPad) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2010/04/one_application_five_screens.html <comment><USER2> So awesome. Adobe Air is really making strides.</comment>


Show HN: Fight for Net Neutrality with slowlane.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yodaiken/slowlane/

<comment><USER2> I made a similar snippet of JS code earlier today (never got around to posting it). It's pure JS and only a few lines that devs can add to their sites. Feel free to use or modify it as needed: [https://gist.github.com/matthewdfuller/69f990f58f1e0850443e](https://gist.github.com/matthewdfuller/69f990f58f1e0850443e)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would place it on my websites but at least make the warning message centered horizontally and vertically. Give it a background color, a border, something.

Remember the SOPA banner that was widespread and easily gave across the message? Aim for something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the new version!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you organise a world wide protest using this I definitely think it would spread the message.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my StartUp VersionEye.com - <AUTHOR>

We just changed the design and the pricing last week. And we did many small improvements in the last weeks.<p>I would like to have feedback from developers how they like the service. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome. Any kind of feedback is appreciated. <comment><USER2> A minor point that nevertheless caught my eye right away:

Your undertitle is "...VersionEye Follow your libraries..."

but right below you have "What is VersionEye? More than just following your libraries."

Considering that these are the only 2 messages I see above the fold on load, they feel somewhat at odds with each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK. I will think about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't see much value from the homepage. How is this data actionable? Can you tell me what's going to break if I upgrade? How does this make my devs happier?

<comment><AUTHOR> VersionEye can monitor your project on GitHub and notify your dev team about outdated libraries. In that they they don't have to spent time to look for updates. They can save a lot of time and are always up-to-date.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another awesome feature is the detail page to any library. There you can see the average release time of a project and how many days ago the latest version was released. In that way you can see if a project is still alive or already dead.

<comment><USER3> Don't tell me, tell your visitors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here the full link: <http://www.versioneye.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> I like it. Design is clean and simple. Any customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. There are already some paying customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Many Thanks :-) That was a lot of work.</comment></comment>


Is your stuff falling apart? Thank Walmart. - <AUTHOR> http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/

<comment><USER2> Its a bit of a two edged sword. Walmart-ism democratized _stuff_.

Just before my grandfather died he gave me a circular saw he got in the late 50's. It cost him a months salary. Its a monster. 100% metal right down to the trigger you pull to switch it on. It works as well as the day it was made. Its a piece of fantastic quality engineering... that my grandfather couldn't afford until he was middle aged.

The existence of plastic throwaway circular saws at Home Depot is a good thing. It means that some people who would never have had them at all can now have one, albeit a poor one. The trouble is, it makes it harder to find a saw like my grandfather's when you decide that its what you want.

And it is what you want in the end. Carefully buying top quality things as you can afford them is brutal at the beginning, but as you build up a cache of high quality things, you can stop buying the cheap garbage over and over again and begin to enjoy the things you have, even as they _save_ you money, time and hassle in the end.

<comment><AUTHOR> As usual, the capitalist view has it in terms of the individual (as opposed to the collectivity or even the whole planet). One can think about the (perceived) benefits of buying (allegedly) cheap products. But like many things, the figure on that price tag is not the real price. It leaves out externalities.

Indeed, there was both a human (e.g. low salary for those workers, incredibly long working days for those Asians manufacturing the cheap product) and an environmental cost (e.g. pollution in countries where the anti-pollution laws are non existent, carbon emitted during transport). Those costs are not factored into the figure one can see on that price tag.

<comment><USER3> "Indeed, there was both a human (e.g. low salary for those workers, incredibly long working days for those Asians manufacturing the cheap product)"

They may work for a low salary, but in those countries, it's low salary or their family starves.

"(e.g. pollution in countries where the anti-pollution laws are non existent, carbon emitted during transport)."

Blame the government. They are the gatekeepers that choose to allow this type of pollution.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Blame the government. They are the gatekeepers that choose to allow this type of pollution._

It is Walmart – not the government – which pollutes in somebody else's garden. And North American consumers are certainly to blame as well for shopping at Walmart and thus contributing to increase its clout.

If consumers could see the details of the whole supply chain (from collecting the raw materials all the way to putting the product on the shelf), companies with no concerns other than maximizing profits – like Walmart – would lose their customers in no time.

<comment><USER3> If only the illegal drug users in the US saw it the same way, the cartels would be out of business. Maybe a solution to stop the violence?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: LLC vs. C-Corp - <AUTHOR> What are the benefits of LLC over C-Corp? How do you issue shares to investors in LLC?<p>Why did Waymo start as LLC? <comment><USER2> I wrote a bit about this for the day job, but it's essentially same advice as I've given in ~10 HN comments over the years: [https://stripe.com/atlas/guide#should-i-have-an- llc](https://stripe.com/atlas/guide#should-i-have-an-llc)

<not legal advice> You issue shares to investors by writing a process to do so into your LLC's operating agreement and then following that process when issuing shares; a lawyer can help you with this. Note that there exist investors who will not be willing to invest in an LLC because your operating agreement likely gives investors less protections and less certain protections than standard equity ownership in a C corporation; they may ask you to convert to LLC as a pre-requisite for taking investment. You will find this to be the market norm among e.g. sophisticated investors in Silicon Valley. </not legal advice>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You wrote: "They offer pass-through taxation, which may be more tax efficient in some circumstances". Can you give an example of when it is more tax efficient to be an LLC?

Why not start as LLC (for tax benefits), and change to C-Corp when we raise $100,000 from investors?

<comment><USER2> A trivial example of LLCs being more efficient than C corporations for a sole proprietor is that, if you make a loss your first partial year running an LLC, you can deduct it against your personal income taxes incident to e.g. your employment for part of that year, whereas if you make a loss running a C corp, you would have to carryforward that to get a tax benefit from the loss.

I have to stay clear from giving tax/legal advice regarding particular situations, so I'm going to politely decline to answer the second question. Knock on wood, we'll have a better answer than that at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Waymo is not a startup but a subsidiary of Alphabet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, but why LLC? What are the benefits?</comment></comment>


Traders Are Talking Up Crypto, Then Dumping Them, Costing Others Millions - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/cryptocurrency-schemes-generate-big-coin/ <comment><USER2> Paywalled.

Can someone explain this for me please?

<comment><USER3> Classic Pump and Dump scheme.

Non-paywalled link: [https://outline.com/gaCSBy](https://outline.com/gaCSBy)</comment></comment>


The Spirit of Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=1252 <comment><USER2> As a lisp nerd, I always like seeing lisp articles on HN, but this one lacks... substance. I know there were qualifiers at the beginning of the article, but I just got the feeling that if I didn't know what he was talking about, then I wouldn't understand what he was talking about.

That said, I'm always glad to see people interested in lisp, so I'm not too unhappy with the article.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry I didn't get my point across very clearly. Perhaps my writing style is to blame. I often start writing when I "feel it" and figure out what I'm really trying to say as I go then go back and rework as necessary. Too top heavy, I suppose.

Anyway, my point was to celebrate the "heads down, working" nature of a lot of common lispers and to try doing some minor image adjustment. (Common) Lispers don't do terribly much promotion of the language and community or some of its shared values. That often complicates things because folks show up with the wrong idea.

I was hoping this would celebrate where "we" are and maybe clear some things up a little for outsiders. Seems I missed that latter goal. :-/

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind that those were just my impressions, and I could be completely wrong as to how others feel. I think your points are correct for the most part. I also appreciate that you are trying to promote the language, which can't happen enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Xach: "*I really like getting together in space and time with other Lispers. An ideal future Lisp conference for me, personally, would … attract hundreds of cheerful and enthusiastic Lisp nerds…Navel-gazing and nostalgia would be at a minimum."

That's kinda what happened at the Clojure Conj last month. 200+ Lispers exchanging ideas, and unencumbered with baggage of the past.</comment>


Google warns users about active malware infection - <AUTHOR> http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1777 <comment><USER2> I think this is a pretty significant step forward, and for me really highlights the changing relationship between Google and its users.

The transition from a passive search service requiring a user's input to an active provider fulfilling a variety of online needs is something that Google has clearly been working on from some time, and something they're good at. Still, the shift from "you might be interested in these shoes based on your search history" to "you might be interested in not having a computer infected with malware" seems pretty significant and bold to me. I really admire their vision and execution, but it still frightens me when I consider how much access I give Google to a large portion of my personal and professional life.

When Google becomes self-aware on August 29, 1997, I am really going to be screwed.</comment>


BuyWithMe Lays off More Than Half of its Employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/10/19/buywithme-lays-off-more-than-half-its-employees/

<comment><USER2> The reckoning is clearly coming on this industry (daily deals / group buying). Just look at Groupon cutting their IPO in half today.

But the way this happened is really terrible. They laid of tons of people with no warning and no severance.

They did not have to try and raise more money at a ridiculous valuation. They could have taken a flat to down round, stopped buying other little companies, and tried to make it work.

<comment><USER3> Groupon cut their IPO by more than half to $10-11b from $25-30b. If you think its bad that they laid off 75% of their employees wait until Groupon has to lay off a good portion of their 10k +- sales force. Through being in the business, understanding Groupons financials and the market I have a hard time believing they are worth more than a few billion. The market requires a large on the ground sales force (expensive) and huge marketing expenditures to keep and gain new customers who are not loyal. Groupon may be better off pivoting into some sort of social network as they do have >100mm subs. What about Living Social? Their recent valuation was in the billions but not hearing much about them.

<comment><USER4> A Groupon IPO is one of the worst things that could happen to the industry, at any price.

It's reminiscent of the .com crash and it gives me serious doubts about the rationality of the current tech market.

Let's sell stuff at a discount so large that the merchants lose money but we make money is not a sustainable business model, it's a predatory strategy. How on earth could you offer stock in a venture like that to the public with a clean conscience?

Sooner or later you run out of merchants, it only works for goods that have such a huge profit margin that you can actually afford that. And I rarely see Groupon deals that suggest that they're still profitable for the merchants. Why merchants do Groupon deals is a mystery to me, maybe someone that has done a Groupon deal as a merchant can shed some light on the economic returns for them.

Maybe they're out-of-band in recurring visitors or something like that but I simply don't get it. Or maybe there is something crucial about how Groupon operates that I'm missing, in that case enlighten me please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _At this time BuyWithMe is laying off 75% of their workforce_

Technically yes, that's more than half, but maybe they should have said 75%. That's quite a chop and it certainly tells us something about (a) the finances of the company, and (b) the state of the group-buying industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> 6 purchases in 6 months, then asking for more money... Sounds like a VC/PE firm, not a deal site. If you're out of cash, I understand letting people go in a hurry but that management team will struggle to get employees in their next venture.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't get why startups go into acquisition binges, trying to buy their way to the top rather than out-innovating the competition. It is really sad for the poor folks laid off, and this seems like it was run purely on greed rather than any kind of desire to do something awesome. (Sorry, do I sound like a hippie?).

<comment><USER3> It's the Eric Lefkowsky model.. Grow as fast as possible at an unsustainable rate in an unproven market and take be money and run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great companies focus on their products and understand that their employees are a key part of the team. Passionate employees will work their tails off for something they believe in. Too bad the CEO wasnt passionate about the employees or actual products.

</comment><comment><USER9> So what, it was just a lame MLM scheme anyway. They weren't doing anything even remotely interesting or innovative.

</comment><comment><USER10> It just doesn't seem like there's any room in the market for Groupon and all of the me-too startups. The business model for most of these companies don't seem to add up in the long run either.

<comment><USER11> i'm curious, how is it that this business model not sustainable? isn't that being "broker" is always profitable? basically they're just middlemen between merchant and customers right?

<comment><USER12> Not if you raise $21M, acquire 6 companies and have over 100 employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If there are any buywitme employees out there check out adaptly.com send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com. We're highly profitable, and have the kind of people who make big things happen

</comment><comment><USER14> Groupon can't get it to work with unlimited $ - how can a 3rd rate clone make it work?</comment>


Should You Cancel Your Travel Plans Because of Coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> https://www.gogaffl.com/blog_posts/cancelling-travel-plans-because-of-coronavirus <comment><AUTHOR> You've probably heard a lot about the coronavirus and it might be scaring you from pursuing your travel plans.

With this post, we aim to cut through some of the noise out there about the coronavirus (COVID-19) by providing you with:

\- Reasons why many frequent flyers aren't changing their travel plans.

\- New facts about the COVID-19, including fatality rates and comparisons with SARS, MERS, and the Common Flu.

\- Much needed context behind scary clickbait headlines.

\- Some of our personal advice about precautions you can take.

\- Information about whether COVID-19 is the new normal

<comment><USER2> What makes you an authority on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> what a surprise that the travel company says you shouldn't cancel your travel plans.</comment>


YouTube Gaming - <AUTHOR> https://gaming.youtube.com/coming_soon

<comment><USER2> Relevant blog post: [http://youtube-global.blogspot.ca/2015/06/a-youtube- built-fo...](http://youtube-global.blogspot.ca/2015/06/a-youtube-built-for- gamers.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, this is going to be a Twitch competitor?</comment>


A scenario where you might want to upvote comments that you don't like. - <AUTHOR>

Consider a comment that appears at the very bottom.  Such a comment probably has higher visibility than comments that are somewhere in the middle.
Consequently, if there is a comment at the bottom that you don't like, you might want to upvote it!
The choice is between penalizing the person's karma vs penalizing the visiblity of that person's comment. <comment><USER2> don't worry too much about numbers on a website.</comment>


Possible security vulnerability in Dropbox? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/04/08/dropbox-security-hole-could-let-others-access-your-files/ A possible security hole in Dropbox ?
"Newton's concept, tested on a Windows machine, uses Dropbox's own configuration files; configuration data, file/directory listings, hashes which are stored in numerous SQLite database files located in %APPDATA%\Dropbox. Inside one file lies a database row containing a users "host_id", which is used to authenticate each individual user.
Modifying this file and changing the host_id to that of another Dropbox user automatically authenticates the account, providing complete access to that person Dropbox until the user realises that there is a new computer in the "Linked Devices" section of the Dropbox website."
Dropbox says there is no issue, a successful attack requires access to the user's computer (which seems inconsistent with the above), and that this is similar to stealing someone's cookies and using them to access Web services.
I would think for a service as potentially sensitive as Dropbox, something more secure than cookies could be used, and they could become invalid when used from a different machine. <comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2421110></comment>