Stack – a Haskell development tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/06/announcing-first-public-beta-stack <comment><USER2> This looks pretty cool - I hope it works. I couldn't download the ubuntu package, as download.fpcomplete.com is unreachable here. I downloaded the linux-generic package, but it seems to be a bit older, and so doesn't cope w/o a stack.yaml file.

OK - now with a stack.yaml file it's busy getting me a ghci...

cabal hell was one of the first things that really put me off haskell. I was downloading and trying to get xmonad working, but within half an hour, had a completely unusable ghc / xmonad combination. I think I was on debian, and the version of ghc that was installed wasn't compatible with the correct versions of various libs that xmonad wanted to have installed... Very frustrating.

Well, looks like installing stack does at least allow me to get a ghci up and running. That's cool. The easier getting haskell up and running becomes, the better. It's a wacky and esoteric language enough without it being hard to get going...

Interesting how programming languages "need" their own package manager these days. A bit of a pain that there's no universal one for all languages, but I guess that would be just too convenient...

<comment><USER3> >A bit of a pain that there's no universal one for all languages, but I guess that would be just too convenient...

Nix and GNU Guix are capable of filling this role. Not only can they do the things that the typical system package managers (dpkg, yum) lack, but they also do many things that language-specific package managers lack. Transactional upgrades, rollbacks, unprivileged package installation, gracefully handling multiple versions of the same software, system-wide deduplication, full system configuration (if you want to use their associated distro), etc.

I have read several Nix + Haskell success stories on various blogs, so I would say it's worth checking out. Nix and Guix are the future of package management.

<comment><USER4> Nix is pretty great.

Something to be aware of for Haskell: Nix's Haskell infrastructure has gone through a big breaking change recently. It's settled down now, and the new system (AKA "haskell NG") is much nicer, but all of the "stable" releases are using the old system, and a lot of blog posts, etc. online are now out of date.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any links on how the new system is supposed to work? I'm trying to piece it together and I'm not having much luck.

<comment><USER6> As I understand it, the corresponding section of the nixpkgs manual is being written as we speak; when this is done, it should reflect the new haskell infrastructure which was merged a few months ago (no longer called haskell-ng any more btw). In the meantime, here are a few links to get you started:

[https://twitter.com/garbas/status/601717689225187328](https://twitter.com/garbas/status/601717689225187328) \-- a recent presentation w/ accompanying slides introducing Nix's new haskell infrastructure by github.com/peti, the maintainer

[https://nixos.org/wiki/Haskell](https://nixos.org/wiki/Haskell)

[http://wiki.ocharles.org.uk/Nix](http://wiki.ocharles.org.uk/Nix)

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29033580/how-do-i-use- the...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29033580/how-do-i-use-the-new- haskell-ng-infrastructure-on-nixos)

<comment><USER5> The ocharles link is exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm...

      $ cabal install stack
      Resolving dependencies...
      Configuring stack-0.0.1...
      Building stack-0.0.1...
      Failed to install stack-0.0.1
      Build log ( /Users/Tyilo/.cabal/logs/stack-0.0.1.log ):
      Configuring stack-0.0.1...
      Building stack-0.0.1...
      Preprocessing library stack-0.0.1...
      ...
      [45 of 45] Compiling Stack.Config     ( src/Stack/Config.hs, dist/build/Stack/Config.o )
      ghc: panic! (the 'impossible' happened)
        (GHC version 7.10.1 for x86_64-apple-darwin):
      	Loading temp shared object failed: dlopen(/var/folders/db/kt60mzx93p110r61jzjbf3nw0000gn/T/ghc19215_0/libghc19215_228.dylib, 5): Symbol not found: _stackzuIf4F8EsotzzFA5770kfJV6V_StackziTypesziFlagName_zdfBinaryFlagName_closure
        Referenced from: /var/folders/db/kt60mzx93p110r61jzjbf3nw0000gn/T/ghc19215_0/libghc19215_228.dylib
        Expected in: flat namespace
       in /var/folders/db/kt60mzx93p110r61jzjbf3nw0000gn/T/ghc19215_0/libghc19215_228.dylib

      Please report this as a GHC bug:  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug

      cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
      stack-0.0.1 failed during the building phase. The exception was:
      ExitFailure 1

<comment><USER8> The earlier you see failure, the luckier you are. The haskellverse is jammed packed with popular packages that won't build and run properly on your platform.

Nothing quite works except for small toy projects and Haskell +systems whizzes who can dig into native platform arcana.

<comment><USER9> > The haskellverse is jammed packed with popular packages that won't build and > run properly on your platform

This tool is aimed at fixing that, ironically the GP used cabal in an attempt to install a tool fixing cabals problems.

> Nothing quite works except for small toy projects and Haskell +systems > whizzes who can dig into native platform arcana.

Not true. Did you have a bad experience building a Haskell package for a specific platform in the past? Stack might let you install it all seamlessly, you should give it a try :)

I recommend installing one of their binaries though: [https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/wiki/Downloads](https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/wiki/Downloads)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How anybody give some good comparison with Halcyon?

<comment><USER11> Halcyon author here. Here's a couple of my thoughts:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3957e1/announcing_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3957e1/announcing_first_public_beta_of_stack/cs0ok3y?context=4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Getting a 502 error when trying to add fpco.key. Guessing servers are overloaded?

<comment><USER12> Looks like there was a typo in the download links for Ubuntu 15.04. I've just fixed them, so please try again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there any examples of Haskell being used to do anything really cool and useful to the average programmer. To me it seems as an esoteric language that I would simply not bother using because no one uses it and deploying it would be a headache.

<comment><USER14> We use Haskell for most of our backend (and hopefully frontend soon) work at Front Row: [http://www.kurilin.net/post/117369543198/haskell-at-front- ro...](http://www.kurilin.net/post/117369543198/haskell-at-front-row)

<comment><USER15> If you don't mind answering, which Haskell frontend are you planning to use?

<comment><USER14> I'm hoping that we can find a GHCJS-based FRP solution at some point soon. I've seen Elm in action, and it's pretty neat, same with Purescript, but I'd rather stay _within_ legitimate Haskell for the time being.

<comment><USER9> > I'm hoping that we can find a GHCJS-based FRP solution at some point soon.

Have you tried Reflex (also there is a try-reflex[1])?

Purescript generates really concise javascript code, have you checked out Thermite[2]?

0: [https://github.com/ryantrinkle/reflex](https://github.com/ryantrinkle/reflex) 1: [https://github.com/ryantrinkle/try- reflex](https://github.com/ryantrinkle/try-reflex) 2: [https://github.com/paf31/purescript- thermite](https://github.com/paf31/purescript-thermite)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:Intel's Array Building Blocks(was Rapidmind):What do the purists think? - <AUTHOR>

Increasing programmer productivity has been a grand challenge since time immemorial. In current times, every program written has to be parallel to take advantage of many core processors. The next great parallel programming language is still waiting to get invented. With Array Building Blocks (ArBB), Intel has taken a library based approach to parallel programming. ArBB uses a mix of clever C++ operator overloading and arguably ugly preprocessor macros like _if, _for, etc to mimic C keywords to let programmers express parallel programs. People who know what they are doing could indeed write portable and scalable programs with ArBB. However, novice programmers could easily trip themselves because of the fragile nature of the macros. So what do language purists out there think? Is it wise to promote such unsafe approaches to parallel programming? <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a link to ArBB website : [http://software.intel.com/en- us/articles/intel-array-buildin...](http://software.intel.com/en- us/articles/intel-array-building-blocks/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Intel has a larger problem: they have OpenMP, OpenCL, TBB, ABB, and Cilk. In what situation should I use which tool?</comment>


Why We Prefer Founding CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

<comment><USER2> My question is: if the performance of founding CEOs is clearly better, what are we to make of the VC horror stories where they kick out the founders to make way for professional management. One notable example is Sean Parker and Plaxo. Is this overblown, or is Horowitz different than the majority of VCs?

<comment><USER3> The article describes it as the "most controversial component of our investment strategy" and contrary to conventional wisdom. So if the article is to believed, they are different than the majority of VCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting how this might be confined to tech, due to the shorter product cycles. Case in point: Richard Branson and Virgin's empire. Technically, they're (Virgin Group) a branded vc firm, but Branson himself is a chairman, not a CEO, and I believe that he wasn't the CEO for the companies that he started either (the name Nik Powell rings a bell.)

Taken as such, perhaps it's not that hired CEOs are useless intrinsically(as the tech world loves to believe) but merely are good at operating in existing industries (Virgin Records wasn't the first record company, Virgin Atlantic wasn't the first airline, etc.)

<comment><USER5> Except if you consider that Branson is actually the CEO of his empire. He seems to draw the line of what products needs to be. Telling the story is the CEO job and he seems to be in charge here. I'm referring to some letter send to the virgin airline lately here.

I agree with you though that the tech world love to believe CEO are useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a terrific post, but it is also one of a couple of examples where Marc and/or Ben later acted in seeming contradiction to what they espoused in one of their blog posts (relying on Ben here describing this post as representing both his and Marc's views). It wasn't long after this post that HP's CEO search committee, of which Marc was one of I believe four members, picked lateral CEO Leo Apotheker.

That made me wonder what the circumstances in this case were that led Marc to a different conclusion in that case, or whether he was overruled by the rest of the committee, or if his judgment was that HP is such a mature and diverse company and far enough along by now along that all of its potential internal candidates by now are more professional bureaucratic managers than founder- type market-discovering innovators and so they might as well look outside the company, or if he found Apotheker to be among that exceptional breed with the special sauce to be a super-awesome lateral CEO like the two exceptions mentioned in the post, Eric Schmidt and John Morgridge, who will surpass the professional CEO's curse of maximizing the current product cycles but failing to anticipate the next ones.

<comment><USER7> Interesting point because Apotheker was quietly shuffled out of the largest business software company in the world - SAP. Mind you this was only after he served as co-CEO for 2 years. I was shocked when I heard HP had decided to hire him as a CEO, because he was (for lack of better words) horrible at SAP. It was clearly the dark days of innovation at SAP.

I think what Ben might be getting at is that Eric and John are very much exceptions to the norm and that finding/identifying these type of people is extremely difficult to do.

On the other hand, what about some other technology companies who do have founding CEOs. How about RIM? Lazaridis and Balsillie have traditionally done a remarkable job, but lately it looks like innovation is about to fail as Android and iOS begin to eat their market share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ben's posts are consistently insightful. This one is no exception.</comment>


Show HN: Headless, static website CMS - <AUTHOR> https://www.headless.rest <comment><USER2> I try to login with GitHub and get an "Incorrect login" window. It works after I confirm my email, however.

Anyway, this may be good, but the interface is kinda heavy, don't you think? Also, it seems that the "blueprints" should be written in JSON or whatever, something a programmer must write. If you're not offering flashy interfaces with click buttons and you only want programmers, perhaps you should just offer a CLI interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea the "incorrect login" is a generic message now. The title isn't correct, I'll change it.

The blueprints section will get a graphical editor soon, very high on the priority list.

So if you invite users with the Editor role, they will edit content in the same interface but things like Blueprints are hidden for them. Target audience right now is developers but the future plan is to make it so that you start using Headless without any technical knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "For developers, but real people too".

Barf.</comment>


How Apple Bends Reality and Why the Media Is Playing Along - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@krautreporter/the-apple-media-distortion-field-644e9e7b8666

<comment><USER2> Richard Gutjahr: "And as you would expect in the Church of the Apple there are Commandments here that journalists have to obey. One of them is: 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me'."</comment>


Shark Tank Sharks Have Invested $20 Million In 109 Deals, And More [shark tank] - <AUTHOR> http://nibletz.com/2013/03/21/shark-tank-sharks-have-invested-20-million-in-109-deals-and-more-shark-tank/

<comment><USER2> Interesting that Shark Tank can take 5% equity or 2% royalty regardless. More than a handful of companies did extremely well after appearing on the show despite no investment. They did well due to the exposure, and cashed in on it. Clearly Shark Tank understands this and wants a piece of the action.</comment>


Arguments to make managers care about technical debt - <AUTHOR> https://understandlegacycode.com/blog/5-arguments-to-make-managers-care-about-technical-debt/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f8psc0/5_argum...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f8psc0/5_arguments_to_make_managers_care_about_technical/)</comment>


The Lecture System in Teaching Science, and My Discovery of the "Gutenberg Method" (1986) - <AUTHOR> http://www.entropysite.com/morrison.html

<comment><USER2> On the surface I think many will just read that this method is about reading assigned material before you enter a classroom. But I think the real gist of this method is creating a different, better, relationship between student and teacher to create genuine excitement in imagination.

After 2 years in college I stopped taking notes and just started listening. My GPA went from Deans list to "average," but my learning increased exponentially (ever notice how science types like an excuse to use that work?). I did horrible in classes that were only about memorizing facts, like sociology, even though, I have learned now, that that was a horrible way to approach such an awesome topic.

However, I did excel in classes where I had an "endeavor to conquer the subject matter." Most notably, I ended up working way ahead of my CS degree without realizing it. I was just following a path of reading material with just a few conversations with good professors.

In the end, I learned how to learn. I don't really remember much of anything from any of my coursework (4 years out now). But I know how to learn it again if I need to, and more importantly, there is no topic that I fear approaching for the first time or repeatedly.

</comment><comment><USER3> This can go somewhat badly. I had a professor who did something like this. He would assign reading and spent a lot of time answering questions, sometimes around a half hour or so. The bad part is that he would not require homework to be turned in until the evening, so the questions have ended up being over homework. This means that if you have done the homework correctly, there is a fair amount of wasted time in class. So it seems to benefit more the people who didn't actually finish the homework before class.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some people just learn better from hearing, so the lectures are better for them, even if they seem redundant. But reading the book aloud isn't enough. Effective lectures sound different from books: shorter, simpler, more repetitive.

Really, the right thing for a student to do is to read the relevant material _before_ the lecture, then listen for nuances and ask questions in class. Of course, I only occasionally attained this ideal when I was in college.

<comment><USER5> I feel like a good lecture is like a passage in a textbook where someone has highlighted all the good parts for you, and then written a single sentence at the end in thick, dark marker that sums it all up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does this compare to the oxbridge tutorial method? I haven't actually experienced it; others are probably more knowledgeable in this regard.

Basically, the way I understand it is that while the students do attend lectures, the focus of their education is in "tutorials". In these tutorials, the students are assigned reading, which they then write a paper on, and debate about with their tutor and maybe one other student. Now I never thought this would scale that well, but that seems to be what the article is about. Obviously the large class discussions are less personal, but more doable in a university without the bottomless endowments of Oxford and Cambridge.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if there will ever be a "Youtube" method. Students watch the previously recorded lecture on video and bring questions based on that.

<comment><USER8> I can't stand watching a whole lecture in video. I tried for SICP, for various screencasts... I'd rather have a book, really, so I can decide on my own if I need to spend more time understanding a certain section and skim the other.

<comment> old-gregg Agreed. I can't stand watching/listening people talk online in general: interviews, podcasts, lectures whatever. It always feels like enormous waste of time: I'd rather quickly scan the text of what they're saying, slowing down on important things and "fast-forwarding" water.

<comment><AUTHOR> In general, I agree, but if it's a really great video, I would like to watch it. And in an academic world that is growing to embrace free culture, you will only need one great lectures on each chunk of material. In fact, it is best in some cases for everyone to have enjoyed the same bit of greatness, because they can all draw similar references and allusions later. Not always, or even most of the time, mind you, but there are some lectures that are definitely worth watching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huge Block of text written as though someone was speaking it.

Can anyone who's stronger then I, paraphrase it? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is for lecturers. And, for students who want to advocate for better use of class time.

Morrison, the author of the first essay, is a famous organic chemist who wrote the foundational book of organic chemistry used in many programs. He apparently wrote it to avoid lecturing. Class time was for answering questions. His essay extols the virtues of the Gutenberg system he got from Frank Lambert, another organic chemistry professor, and the author of the second essay.

If you want to see the meat of the central idea, the elements of the Gutenberg method, the first section of the second essay is what you want to read: The Beginning, From Failure.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I find sponsors for an online hackathon I'm organising? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've organized a couple of in person hackathons. For in person, sponsors generally provide either $ to cover food/drinks/space, or they cover a sponsor prize track. For an online hacakthon, I'd assume the former isn't a concern. So, mainly you should figure out what size sponsorship tiers make sense for the scale of your hackathon e.g. $500, $1k, $5k and then what you can provide the sponsors in return. Then go through your network ideally starting with big companies (they have more money so writing a $5k check is a less big deal to them) where you know someone relatively high up that would benefit from your hackathon. Any company that employs a good amount of software engineers is a good bet because they're always looking to hire more.

(Shameless plug: I'm currently organizing [http://hackcincy.com](http://hackcincy.com) in Cincinnati, OH which is 2 weeks from now.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Paste the details here and you might find some!</comment>


The Chinese have a weird way of using the iPhone, and no one knows why - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-use-assistivetouch-on-iphone-2015-5

<comment><USER2> I use it because my stupid lock button is busted on my iPhone 4. It works nicely, except there's no way to turn the iPhone back on except plugging into power.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently, It's not just the Chinese. I'm from Malaysia and a lot of folks here, especially young adults and teenagers use it this way. Like the quote from article said, they fear that the home button may break when it's used.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure they use it to bypass the fingerprint scanner.

Oh sure, the scanner may be turned off but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not collecting fingerprints anyway. Perhaps the Chinese are more realistic about pervasive surveillance than we are.</comment>


Facebook Routinely Suppresses Conservative News - gh-lfneu28 http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 <comment><AUTHOR> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565).

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659676)

<comment><USER3> Yes, and this one will suffer the same fate.

<comment><USER2> They are still visible in "Most active current discussions":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do startups start with a business plan? - <AUTHOR>

I find the UK is big on business plans. Any business and every business is required to have one. reading the article below, do I need one? or at what stage will I need one when creating a start-up?<p>www.entrepreneur.com/article/38290 <comment><USER2> I don't think you need a detailed 50 page plan, but you need a general idea of your short-term and long-term goals and most importantly, how you are actually going to make money. I find that this is important because without a list, it's very easy to veer off the path and start going in wacky directions, which can lead to your company never getting off the ground or releasing a new product, etc (this has been my mistake for years)

Many software startups start out as something cool and then the owners scramble to find a business model. If you want a better chance at success, figure this out in the beginning and then mold your cool idea to your business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. Worked with successful and unsuccessful startups which all fell in to the above situation.

Can you elaborate on your 'list' comment? Am on the second stage of designing and implementing an idea. I hacked a prototype of the idea but am using devs from oDesk to piece it together. is this a bad idea? I have a plan of how i want to execute but would love some help on how others have executed in stealth mode.</comment></comment>


Your Password Complexity Requirements Suck - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/302-found/your-password-complexity-requirements-suck-7934c4e4b295 <comment><USER2> "like 15 minutes from the login attempt, and randomly generate a string for the token itself. Send a link to the user, when they click it, find them by the token, and log them in."

Many common greylisting schemes will delay for 15 minutes or more.

Don't (ab)use email for something it was never designed for: instant delivery of a token. email will get the message through eventually - that is what it is designed to do but nowadays it has to run through of a lot of filtering and you are asking people to have squeaky clean SPF/DKIM and probably DMARC and also have to consider DNSSEC and lots of other things.

email is still bloody good for message delivery but you are asking for administrators of an auth/auth system to become email sysadmins.</comment>


I fought Equifax's lawyers in court and won: Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@christianhaigh/i-fought-equifaxs-lawyer-in-court-and-won-here-s-how-a16930c53af3 <comment><USER2> Equifax is yet another form of financial corruption. The charge/fee incurred in freezing your credit is so close to a shakedown - this is absurd. Credit ratings of the population are a product they sell to financial firms and then they charge (read shakedown) that population for pausing the sale of that data so you the consumer can prevent irreparable credit harm. Then when they screw up and allow a leak of your data which will eventually cause irreparable harm they have the audacity to bully those they've screwed over.

<comment><USER3> It's even more ridiculous: The _bank_ lets criminals walk out the door with money in our name.

Equifax demands money to avoid punishing us when banks are defrauded through their own incompetence.

This is worse, because Equifax aided the criminals, but we were always getting screwed over.

<comment><USER4> Wonder why there aren't class action law suits against banks and other companies that lie to the credit bureaus about people defaulting on loans? It is not "identify theft" that is the problem, it is banks libeling people and the credit bureaus passing the libel along.

You loaned money to someone and didn't even have their correct identifying information. Well that's a bit of a problem for you. You say that the fraudster used my name and other info to impersonate me. I can see you are in a bit of a pickle in how to get your money back. You are going to lie and say I defaulted on your loan to a credit bureau? Fuck you, asshole. I'm going to call the police and you are going to get a big fine and/or go to jail.

One can dream, anyway.

<comment><USER5> It is because these shenanigans are perfectly legitimatized.

I recently read "A Man for All Markets" by Edward O. Thorp and it opened my eyes to the level of corruption practiced by Financial Institutions.

I find India incredibly corrupt but now I think America is not far behind. Only reason financial crimes in America does not come to light is because they are legitimatized by completely twisting the Laws to favor the right set of people.

Case in point is Mr. Trump who has declared bankruptcy multiple times without having any impact on his personal worth. This is just nuts.

<comment><USER6> >Case in point is Mr. Trump who has declared bankruptcy multiple times without having any impact on his personal worth. This is just nuts

So... if that weren't possible, how do you think it would affect the rate at which businesses are created? Let's say you want to start a business, but if you hit hard times and need to fold, you are _personally_ liable for any debt? Would you start that business, knowing that your financial life could easily be destroyed for the next 30 years? If you _did_ decide to start that business, do you think you'd want to grow at anything more than a snail's pace (if at all)?

<comment><USER5> If that is the case then why business owners should be compensated handsomely when they succeed? while they reap the benefits of success ,failure should be owned by society?

I am not saying personal financial position should be destroyed but if you are a multimillionaire already why your failures should be outsourced to society?

And as far as growth is concerned, what's wrong with growing slowly? Cancer too is growth, it's just uncontrolled.

Coming to Trump, he repeatedly failed doing the same type of business.

<comment><USER7> I would argue that being a multimillionaire doesn't actually count as failing.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live- updates/ge...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live- updates/general-election/real-time-fact-checking-and-analysis-of-the-first- presidential-debate/fact-check-has-trump-declared-bankruptcy-four-or-six- times/)

According to this Washington Post article, he filed for Chapter 11 a number of times. You argue that being super rich doesn't count as failing, quite from the article _"Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004, after accruing about $1.8 billion in debt."_ , which sounds like a failure to me. Trump seems to be good at wiping out other people's money while protecting his own.

<comment><USER7> Actually, you mis-read that. His companies filed for bankruptcy, not himself personally. I don't count that as the guy failing.

<comment><USER7> Lets say that you own stock in a company that goes bankrupt. Sears, for example. Does that qualify you as a failure? Besides, I would wager that President Trump owned a lot more successful companies than failed companies.

<comment><USER5> It not that simple. Excerpt from New York times sheds some light onto his morality and what he actually did [1]. I have used him as an example only. My point is that corporate world is filled with many such examples much more sinister than Trump.

> The New York Times, which conducted an analysis of regulatory reviews, court > records and security filings, found otherwise, however. It reported in 2016 > that Trump "put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the > casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other > payments."

"The burden of his failures," according to the newspaper, "fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen."

[1] [https://www.thoughtco.com/donald-trump-business- bankruptcies...](https://www.thoughtco.com/donald-trump-business- bankruptcies-4152019)

<comment><USER7> Then he must be the biggest presidential failure in history. I write this as I enjoy the nice tax cut he put in my pocket. (Does that count as a failure too?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > prove that the increased number of the spam calls I was getting were a > result of the breach.

Damnit.

I have to admit to not caring so much about the Equifax breach. I, personally, don't really care about that kind of data being public and I relentlessly monitor my credit report for changes, even if someone _did_ abuse my data, I would know quickly and clean it up before it happened.

But I've been getting a literally 100x-fold increase in spam calls in the past few months. I have gone from one every few days to, I kid you not, 20+/day sometimes. If this is even remotely related to the Equifax breach I legitimately want to sue them just for that.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm as glad as anyone else to see Equifax getting what's due to them, but is anyone else bothered by the surreal quality to this story?

It sounds like the rules and procedures being applied were vastly different than what Equifax's highly paid lawyer expected. Is their $1000-an-hour lawyer just incompetent, or is the pro tem judge here allowed to make up the rules as she goes along?

<comment><USER11> Hiring a $1000/hour lawyer for your small claims case is like hiring an airplane mechanic to work on your car. There's a pretty good chance that this is the first time Equifax's lawyer had ever been involved in a small claims case.

<comment><USER10> Any lawyer worth his salt would know that each court has its own particular rules of procedure. If your highly-paid lawyer comes into bankruptcy court and starts trying to invoke procedural rules from juvenile court, that would be pretty convincing evidence of incompetence.

So did this lawyer take on a small claims case without realizing that they should probably read up on small claims rules? Or maybe the judge didn't know the rules either, and just sided with the sympathetic plaintiff?

<comment><USER12> Since the lawyer did not seem to be aware of basic procedures (wanting to have things stricken from the record despite there not being a record) you can assume he just did not read up on the rules.

<comment><USER13> And likely didn't even expect to win since they're paid hourly regardless. Probably was just trying to stretch it out as much as they could. Easy money

<comment><USER14> > _And likely didn 't even expect to win since they're paid hourly regardless. > Probably was just trying to stretch it out as much as they could. Easy > money_

This loss is a huge embarrassment to the lawyer and his firm. The billings for this case are negligible compared to what Equifax pays to their outside law firm every year. But mostly, this is just embarrassing. He might lose the client, and he'll definitely be mocked by colleagues for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For what it is worth to others thinking of doing the same thing, I too took Equifax to small claims court in Santa Barbara.

They sent a lawyer from their legal team to the initial hearing. I presented a lot of the similar arguments that were presented here, but the judge denied my claim based on not being able to prove negligence on the part of Equifax.

<comment><USER16> Did you talk about them being a negligent steward of your data, and not patching a 2 month old bug? They admitted this [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/09/massi...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/09/massive-equifax-breach-caused-by-failure-to-patch-two- month-old-bug/)

<comment><USER17> Negligence would be if they knew about the bug but ignored it, which per a later Bloomberg article isn't what happened. Instead, there was a process failure so that they thought the bug was patched, when it wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be nice if the author (or someone) made available a mostly-automated process for filing similar claims by people who aren't lawyers. The same successful arguments should work for any of us.

<comment><USER19> Isn't the author's company doing just that as a service?

<comment><USER18> I guess they were for some unknown period of time in the past, but not anymore according to [https://www.legalist.com/equifax/](https://www.legalist.com/equifax/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is the HN discussion to Part 1 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217241)

Pretty surprised how much Equifax spent trying to win this case. I'm sure they're doing it to dissuade others from suing them as well but after reading this I really want to sue myself. I wonder if they'll appeal the verdict again.

<comment><USER21> The second judgement is final. No appeal.

<comment><USER22> IANAL.

It's not inconceivable they could make further trouble nevertheless: [https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of- appeal/3d/1...](https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of- appeal/3d/102/164.html)

The relevant part appears to be:

"The Eloby court's dictum suggests that section 117.12 was designed to preclude only appeal, motions for new trial, and motions to vacate judgment. The court's initial issuance of the alternative writ further suggests that section 117.12 was not read as curtailing the ability of appellate courts to review important issues arising in small claim actions.

Following the lead of the Eloby court, we read section 117.12 as not foreclosing appellate court review by extraordinary writ. Since statewide precedents can only be created by appellate courts, jurisdiction to decide appropriate small claims court issues must be retained by appellate courts in order to secure uniformity in the operations of the small claims courts and uniform interpretation of the statutes governing them. We do not believe that the Legislature intended to make all actions of the superior courts in such cases totally unreviewable or reviewable only on certification. (Code Civ.Proc., s 911; Cal.Rules of Court, rule 61(b).) "

This seems a bit weird.

<comment><USER21> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Imagine having to explain to Equifax how your high powered legal team lost a small claims court case to a guy with no law degree.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, he runs a legal startup (legalist) so he has more experience than the average Joe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how easy it is to collect the judgment against Equifax.

<comment><USER26> Collecting against companies is far more easier than collecting from uncooperative private persons - assuming the company is "established" in some way. Given that Equifax is a very large company, collecting is easy: once you get your judgement, file for a Writ of Execution and have the sheriff in whatever CA county Equifax has an office in to visit them in-person and demand they cough up the money or they'll start literally seizing assets there-and- then. Failing that, you can also easily get a bank levy against whatever bank accounts Equifax has in your state - provided you can track-down their account details and financial institution: something you can do with an Examination of Assets hearing, which has an added bonus: if the company representative fails to appear they get a bench-warrant for their arrest which becomes a criminal matter.

I'm surprised at how so many small-claim case victors sell their judgement to a collections firm for a fraction of its true value when collecting money is a lot easier and straight-forward than people imagine. You only need to go to a collections company if it isn't worth your time - not if the debtor isn't cooperative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice, but this needs to be scaled up (many more people need to do this, and a clear recipe provided)

<comment><USER28> Isn't there a class action to that effect?

<comment><USER29> Literally millions of individual cases would be much better. It would overwhelm them and those suing would likely get way more money. Class actions never amount to much for anybody except the attorneys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What a great and inspiring piece.

I have a question - does this become part of caselaw then for this jurisdiction? Is this now precedent for others who want to sue Equifax for being victim of the same data breach?

<comment><USER14> Undoubtedly not. This would be a non-precedential decision. You could mention it in another case but the judge would have no obligation to follow it. Also, your facts are going to be different, which further complicates things.

<comment><USER30> Could you elaborate?

The author himself mention caselaw that he used as reference. If a resident from the same court jurisdiction with the same circumstances(Equifax data breach victim) why would the facts be different beside the identify of the plaintiff?

<comment><USER14> There is binding precedent (which must be followed), persuasive precedent (which a judge may choose to follow but need not), and non-precedential opinions (which are not supposed to be cited).

Binding precedent typically comes from a court to which an appeal would lie. So if the US Supreme Court were to decide (for example) that Uber drivers are actually employees for the purpose of federal labor law and tax withholding, then that precedent would be binding on all Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal, and also all Federal District Courts.

This same precedent would be only persuasive authority if cited in a state court proceeding regarding whether Uber drivers can claim state-mandated benefits conferred to employees (because the test for "what constitutes an employee" for the purpose of the state law could be different than the federal definition.

But some opinions are designated as non-precedential or non-published. These are still "published" in the sense that you can find them in legal research databases, but they shouldn't typically be cited in future cases. I don't know the rules for the jurisdiction where this case took place, but I would be surprised if small claims cases decided by _pro tem_ judges (who are neither appointed nor elected) were considered precedential.

Of course, you could always mention this case if you're fighting a similar case in small claims court (where procedural rules are relaxed). But don't expect a judge to follow the prior decision, even if your facts are pretty close to his facts.

> _why would the facts be different beside the identify of the plaintiff?_

Because the number of phone calls and other facts would vary from person to person. The legal issues could be the same, but the facts would differ in every case.

Background: I used to be a corporate lawyer, but I did not specialize in litigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is amazing.</comment>


Twitter Isn't Raising the Character Limit. It's Becoming a Walled Garden - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2016/01/05/paper-screen-oree-stylograph/ <comment><USER2> The link points to the wrong Mashable story.</comment>


Free Education – Guy crashed elite college classes for 4 whole years - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3043053/my-creative-life/ivy-league-free-what-one-man-learned-by-crashing-elite-colleges-for-4-years

<comment><USER2> Steve Jobs also did it for more than a year.</comment>


How to create an Economic Democracy - <AUTHOR>

This is a new website and service aimed at democratically meta-crowdfunding startups and growing businesses. The original aim was to create a community that focused on micro-economies that traditional finance operations ignored. I thought that in all fairness, the system should also accommodate those businesses and startups that would choose to pursue growth funding through this new venue.
The system works by creating a crowdfund in advance of a product. People join the community by becoming a "micro-angel-investor," they purchase a share in the fund and may then be pitched as if they were an investor with many millions of dollars. All of the members of the fund vote on the pitch and the fund makes the investment based on a majority approval. While multiple shares may be purchased in the fund, membership only comes with 1 equal vote. The system allows for the increased valuation of shares and the eventual sale of shares as well to help add incentive to membership and profitability for all of our angels.
This is a social web experiment. There is a small service fee on top of fund shares to help pay for the exorbitant startup costs that will be levied if the idea proves viable. This will also pay for a market-rate salary for all the employees to help maintain it, once again, if the idea proves viable.
The experimental part of this is the potential for what the individual funds can become. If a fund reaches a certain level of membership and a certain level of money in the bank, it could become a major economic power. This is economic self-determination. The power that comes with being a major economic power isn't concentrated though, its diluted. Think of a board of directors with hundreds of thousands of members voting on the tough decisions.
Economic Democracy can truly be a beautiful thing in the imagination. The Grey Market Collective aims to make it happen.
http://greymarketcollective.com <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but you need some sort of clear statement of the legal factors, both so people know where they stands and so that the SEC doesn't eat you for breakfast.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. Thank you. I will add a "legality" page to the website. The approach is that the organization can be made completely legal by jumping through the hoops designed by business licensing law. We're not setting up anything new, except for the fact that we're letting it be democratically controlled.

<comment><USER2> It's a bold concept that I'll keep an eye on, and which deserves to succeed. Even if it turns out to have problems, this is good economics research you're doing here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, thank you for the suggestion. The Terms of Service page has been updated as well as the about page, viz. legality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _While multiple shares may be purchased in the fund, membership only comes > with 1 equal vote._

How are you going to prevent the abuse of sockpuppets / meatpuppets / shills?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we're using paypal. It takes a bit of bureaucratic finagling to get them to connect multiple paypal accounts to a single bank account, i'm not sure it can be done honestly. In the future if paypal is ruled out, the form of payment will be used to help mitigate people trying to game the system. (posting this to the FaQ section - thanks for the question!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I guess I should have wrote - This only works if users fund it. So join today by contributing to a fund!</comment>


I'm making premium services free on our rev-share and remote collab platform - <AUTHOR> https://crowdsourcer.io/blog/2020/03/20/discounts-to-help-if-youre-self-isolating-or-stuck-at-home/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

With everything going on in the world, I know a lot of people are now stuck at home, unable to leave. As someone who works from home, it's not an issue for me, but I know there are those that will struggle.

Because of this, I thought I'd open up my web platform, [https://crowdsourcer.io](https://crowdsourcer.io), that allows people to create projects together remotely and rev-share in a fair way. We're going to be releasing some premium features over the next week or so but I've decided to keep them free until the world goes back to normal. I'll also automatically apply, to all projects, a reduction to processing fees if you use our selling tools (if you sell outside of the platform then any payment processing is done at cost price anyway so it's about as good a deal as possible).

I hope this encourages some of you to not miss the opportunity to get cracking on any software-related ideas you've been meaning to work on, whilst you're stuck at home.

If you have any questions about how it works or how to use it I'm active on Reddit, so feel free to leave a comment or message me.</comment>


Show HN: Chrome Extension Developer Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://chromeextensionkit.com/?ref=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, ChromeExtensionKit is a side project of mine that includes a bunch of different starter templates for basic (HTML/CSS/JS) and React-based Chrome extensions (with setup and publish scripts) as well as some fully functional example extensions. I originally built the starter templates as I found myself setting up and configuring every extension project roughly the same way and wanted to speed that process up in the future.

I also wrote and included a short ebook outlining how to use the kit as well as a lot of what I learned growing a number of extensions to over 4,000 users each.

If anyone has any questions, I would love to answer them!</comment>


Are systematic reviews neutral? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/briandavidearp/status/1078529309478838272 <comment><AUTHOR> Submitting this mostly because of the slide "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it".</comment>


Crypto Wars - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars <comment><AUTHOR> With the US AG agitating for back doors:

* [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/tech-firms-can-a...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/tech-firms-can-and-must-put-backdoors-in-encryption-ag-barr-says/)

* [https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/william-barr-consumers-sec...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/william-barr-consumers-security-risks-backdoors/)

I figured it'd be useful to remind ourselves that we've kind of been through this before. At least with open source software, the old solutions can perhaps be revived if needed:

* [https://wiki.debian.org/non-US](https://wiki.debian.org/non-US)</comment>


Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal - <AUTHOR> https://aerc-mail.org/ <comment><USER3> I haven't dug too deep into the features or how this works yet, but it's very exciting to see any kind of movement in this space at all. I've spent a lot of time configuring mutt just the way I like it, but I'd throw it all away in a heartbeat for a good, modern alternative. My wishlist:

* A daemon that pulls new mail from my IMAP servers to my local maildir as soon as it arrives. (I know mutt has an IMAP mode, and it looks like that's aerc's primary mode of operation, too, but I like to have a local copy of my entire mail archive.)

* Rendering plain text markdown into multipart/html emails. I love me some plaintext, but no one else in my life even knows what a terminal is. 80-char lines are too short for desktop displays and too long for small phones (leading to awful linebreaks), which makes me the guy whose emails never look right.

<comment><USER4> > _80-char lines are too short for desktop displays_

Nothing makes them "too short for desktop displays". Text is not supposed to fill all/most of the available display width:

"Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line(counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal." \-- The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

<comment><USER5> "The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web" was originally released in 2005 and I'm afraid some of the advice may be stuck there. This advice being among that advice. In 2005 many displays were still 4:3 ratio and this advice more applicable. With modern 16:9 ratio screens 66 character line lengths can seem extremely short and require unnecessary vertical scrolling to view a message with such line length. I find it quite visually jarring to receive an email with a fixed width that wastes the horizontal space of the viewing window. Instead of being fixed width the text should be reflowed to properly fill the viewing window.

<comment><USER6> I got typographic education, and the reason we limit line with on paper (think about the biggest newspaper you know), isn't because the lack of space. I know newspapers that are bigger than any typical display you'd find at a work place.

Shorter lines are easier and faster to read and you don't have to turn your head back and forth every line. This is what German Typographers would call a _Bleiwüste,_ which means "lead desert" and translates to _wall of text._ And they call it that for a reason. Typographers use a wall of text when they want to disencourage users from reading it (legal text etc).

Column based layouts (like in newspapers) don't work well with scolling pages, but limited line width certainly does. Scrolling doesn't really cost the user much and on top of that smartphones limit the line width anyway, so users get a more consistent design.

<comment><USER5> I think you minimize the impact of scrolling. I fine scrolling to be extremely distracting and annoying when the material could have been presented without requiring scrolling.

On my computer I can resize windows and within some apps such as my email app the display view so that it meets what is optimal for me and not some generalized value. It is not unreasonable to expect the text presented to me to reflow to meet my preference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I saw the title [was: "World's Best Email Client"] and thought, "yeah, sure".

But WOW. It's the e-mail of my dreams. Take my money, damn you!

EDIT: I may have been seduced by the clicky keyboard noises in the video. But no! Is good!

EDIT2: I forgive you for Wayland.

<comment><USER7> I notice aerc is not on the list of projects to donate for...

<comment><USER8> Whoops, it is now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Off-topic, but damn, Drew, how do you manage to be so productive? Sway alone is an impressive beast (and the only thing that got me off my awesomewm addiction). Now you're throwing in an impressive mutt alternative? Thanks for all the hard work!

<comment><USER10> _[–]drewdevault[S] 26 points 17 hours ago_

 _I work on free software full-time now thanks to the support of the many people who donate to my work :)_

 _[https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full- time.h...](https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.html*)

_ _Lots of people help with these projects, too. aerc 0.1.0 includes contributions from a total of 16 authors._

From: [https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bwao4d/aerc_an_email...](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bwao4d/aerc_an_email_client_for_your_terminal/epwnx9p/?st=jwhohuww&sh=37d10be2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I dunno what it is about the screencast, but it takes _forever_ to load. Any chance you could upload to Youtube or something so that I can actually watch the thing?

EDIT: I'm getting about 20kb/s download from sr.ht where the video is hosted. Definitely not an issue with my connection, as I can download other files right now at 2Mb/s.

<comment><USER12> Agree. Can he throw it on Streamable or something?

EDIT: Here it is: [https://streamable.com/3ysv9](https://streamable.com/3ysv9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it:

[https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches- in-g...](https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-gnus/)

Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.

<comment><USER8> Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to email@example.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.

<comment><USER13> Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for [https://patchwork.kernel.org/](https://patchwork.kernel.org/) to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! I wonder if you've seen my work with mailing lists on sourcehut, by the way?

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

I'm working on a replacement for patchwork. Here's an example of a thread which was rendered with my tool, which is just generated from organic mail threads without extra human intervention:

[https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556](https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556)

If you have more feedback or thoughts around this, I'd love to hear it too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those of you already using emacs, this mirrors my workflow in mu4e.

Here are some screenshots[0], and here is a guide on how to set up mu4e[1].

[0] [https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html](https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html)

[1] [http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email- emacs-...](http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-using- mu-and-/)

<comment><USER15> My main concern with mu4e is that I have to fetch _all_ the emails on my local machine. That's terrible, hope one day there will be a mu4e-like client for emacs with a thunderbird-like workflow, aka fetch in a lazy manner, before reading.

<comment><USER16> I am the opposite of you, I prefer all my email to be avaialble offline to me. I use offlineimap to mirror my remote IMAP folders, and usually read them with mutt, but occasinaly read them in GUI emacs where the terminal does not support RTL, such as Arabic emails.

<comment><USER15> >I am the opposite of you, I prefer all my email to be avaialble offline to me.

Even spam or mails you want to delete before reading? There are dozens of mails I want to delete or put to the archive folder before reading, thus this feature is annoying me. And when I want to backup mail, I use offlineimap explicitly.

Besides, I use mu4e of 3 separate machines, and on each I have to keep a local copy of all my mails, even mails I've read already.

<comment><USER16> I selectively choose which IMAP dirs to sync. ``Spam`` isn't one of them. I do however sync my ``Archive`` or ``ALLAMIL`` dir as I often need to quickly grep (notmuch) for messages wihout having network connectivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is Sir_Cmpwn a person or a committee? How can one person produce so much decent software?

<comment><USER18> @Sir_Cmpwn do you have some insights to share on this? What are the conditions that make you most productive, and what conditions make you the least productive?

<comment><USER8> I get a lot of help. Fostering a healthy and happy community of contributors in each of my projects is extremely important to me. I'm also able to be more productive myself thanks to the support of hundreds of people who donate to my work or buy a sourcehut subscription, which allows me to work on free software full time.

<comment><USER19> Any advice or insights on creating and fostering that community for your projects?

<comment><USER20> [https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS- proje...](https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS- projects.html)

<comment><USER19> Perfect! Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How easy is it to tell it what IMAP folders to use for sent mail, deleted mail, and drafts?

A while back, I engaged in epic combat against Apple Mail on my Mac, Apple's iOS mail app on my iPhone, Outlook on my Mac, Outlook on my gaming PC, Outlook on my Surface Pro 4, and Thunderbird on my Mac to banish the blight of, e.g., Sent, Sent Mail, and Sent Messages, and similar for drafts and deleted.

It was an epic struggle, but I finally got them to all agree on Sent, Trash, Drafts (and Junk for spam). I'm not going near any other email client now without being sure I can tell it to use those before I let it have access to my IMAP.

<comment><USER8> Easy, you can change what folder it treats as sent. It doesn't have a trash bin (and it won't) or draft support (and it will) yet.

<comment><USER22> Out of curiosity, why won't there be a Trash bin? What about an Archive folder?

<comment><USER8> Well, you can get both by just adjusting your keybindings a bit. For example, add this to binds.conf:

        [messages]
        D = :mv Trash<Enter>
        A = :mv Archive<Enter>

<comment><USER22> Perfect! That's great to know that there are adjustable key bindings (although, I don't know why I didn't expect that!)

Thanks for all the hard work. Every year or so I try to switch my email workflow over to Mutt. I think I know what I'm trying this year!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love the idea, and I really will give this a go as a daily driver.

Just a small feedback: I had trouble with one of the requirements -> scdoc, didn't know what exactly that is (Googling didn't help), so might be worth to provide a direct link in the README.md to [https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/)

<comment><USER8> scdoc is probably available in your Linux distro's package manager, and aerc is designed to be packager-friendly - so eventually the idea is that most users will apt install aerc, rather than build it themselves.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, the problem is I am on OSX, and I actually had to compile scdoc myself without the -static flag (missing libraries).

Also, I had to run it as:

      TERM=xterm-256color aerc

On OSX, otherwise got:

      panic: terminal entry not found

<comment><USER8> This issue comes from tcell, which has a baked-in terminfo database. I'm also not sure about the state of the terminfo database in general on OSX... in any case, I plan on improving terminfo support in tcell at some point.

<comment><USER23> It's probably because i use _xterm-kitty_.

Awesome work on aerc, looking forward for continued development.

<comment><USER24> Can confirm, am running Kitty too and ran into exact same error messages, exporting different TERM environment variable did fix this though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really, really like that the editor is embedded within the mail client. The need to shell out to vim or whatever is what always kept me from using Mutt, despite loving its UI.

aerc isn't quite as colorful or well-laid-out as Mutt but this is very promising.

This reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite mail editor, which I miss dearly: GoldED [0] [1]

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

[1] [https://blog.onlime.ru/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQA...](https://blog.onlime.ru/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQAAeOq0.jpg) (Russian screenshot but you get the idea)

<comment><USER26> Some color would be nice. (I quite like Irssi's color scheme)

<comment><USER27> > (I quite like Irssi's color scheme)

Irssi's default color scheme which, incidentally, is the same as Mutt's default. Both can be changed. For example, to a solarized color scheme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I miss pine

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28email_client%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28email_client%29)

<comment><USER29> It's still around: [https://repo.or.cz/alpine.git](https://repo.or.cz/alpine.git)

<comment><USER30> I've been using it (Pine, the Alpine) as my primary mail client since 1998.

Months after i started using it, someone suggested i try mutt. I'm definitely going to, but i haven't got round to it yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My least favorite email begins with a +Russell at the top, meaning that there's been a long email thread that I haven't been a part of, and now I've been pulled in. The text below that is your standard mess of email text: 1) It's in reverse chronological order starting at the bottom. 2) Each message has 4 or 5 lines of "to", "from", "cc", "subject" and "date" in between. 3) Previous messages might or might not be repeated by other email clients 4) All with varying levels of indenting.

This has to be a common problem. Are there any libraries, projects, email clients or scripts to help parse it all into something readable? I've looked and haven't found zip. I know Slack is the new hotness, but for the rest of us stuck in email, this is a daily hell. The progress of email clients basically stopped in the mid-2000s.

I swear, the first email client that actually solves this problem will be the next billion dollar business.

<comment><USER32> The solution is to have the thread forwarded as message/rfc822 attachments instead of full quote madness.

<comment><USER31> This is definitely already a solved problem - for open or homogeneous platforms. This is why it's still an issue for everyone else... Microsoft's general attitude is, "everyone should use Outlook", Apple wants you to use Mail, Google wants everyone on Gmail, etc. I'm sure this is rarely an issue inside those companies - threading "just works" since coworkers all use the same clients. So not only do they have zero financial reason to support interop or openness, they probably don't even know its an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How's the UTF-8 e-mail address support? As most clients suck so bad at that it would be awesome to have an alternative.

How's the GPG and S/MIME support? We'd really need an e-mail client that has first class support of both. Current solutions I've tried are cumbersome at best.

Having those two it'd actually be the best e-mail client for me.

<comment><USER8> UTF-8 support is excellent.

First-class PGP support is planned and a blocker for 1.0, but not there yet. Here's a mockup to tease you:

[https://cmpwn.com/system/media_attachments/files/000/351/218...](https://cmpwn.com/system/media_attachments/files/000/351/218/original/8a53d9a17950318a.png?1553974029)

[https://cmpwn.com/system/media_attachments/files/000/351/219...](https://cmpwn.com/system/media_attachments/files/000/351/219/original/ec726537fd432d01.png?1553974041)

<comment><USER34> I was about to ask about PGP support too so thanks for the screenshots, they look great!

Is PGP key discovery based on email planned/welcome? I'm talking about Web Key Directory introduced by GnuPG [0], being standardized by IETF [1] and already used by kernel.org [2], gentoo.org and others. GUI e-mail clients such as Enigmail or Mailpile support it but there is not CLI client with WKD.

[0]: [https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD](https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD)

[1]: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-koch-openpgp- webkey-s...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey- service/)

[2]: [https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the- we...](https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the-web-key- directory)

<comment><USER8> Yes, I'd love to have WKD support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I used mutt+offlineimap for a few years, with a corporate account on an MSExchange Server and the two biggest issues I had (which I hope Aerc addresses) were:

* no good way to search/auto-complete addresses (I used vdirsyncer which got me the address book locally but there was no easy way to fill-in addresses when typing an email).

* no way to accept calendar requests - I would pull them up on my phone to accept or reject.

Otherwise, everything worked quite well, but those issues annoying enough that I eventually switched back to a Windows machine with Outlook. The Email+Calendar+Addressbook integration may violate the Linux philosophy of doing one thing well, but for today's typical office workflow it is frustrating not to have a platform with all three integrated.

<comment><USER36> You might be interested in dav mail.

[http://davmail.sourceforge.net/](http://davmail.sourceforge.net/)

I have it setup so I can use thunderbird for all my exchange interaction (except group management).

<comment><USER35> Thanks - I was actually using Davmail but at the time it did not have the address book and calendar integration, and I had not checked up on it ina few years. Looks like it has gotten more features since then. I may have to give mutt another try...:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What about full text search? This feature has brought me to from mutt to sup to alot: [https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

<comment><USER20> notmuch support is planned! It shouldn't be too hard, if an interested user were to take ownership over the feature it could probably ship in 0.2.0. Want to help?

<comment><USER38> Since the client is written in Go, I believe this could be easily done with [https://blevesearch.com](https://blevesearch.com)

<comment><USER8> Eh, I would rather use notmuch than develop my own index from scratch. Keep it email, yo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'd leave Thunderbird in a heartbeat if I could find a contact/calendar syncing terminal client as well. Any recommendations?

<comment><USER40> I currently use Thunderbird for mail, and MineTime for calendar. I found the Thunderbird calendar integrations (5 calendars) way too flaky.

<comment><USER41> Would be good to have a calendar client in terminal.

MineTime looks cool, but I got a wrong feeling about the looks and yeah, scrolling down and I saw it: "MineTime is a calendar built on Electron". Nah, I prefer to have just one browser open (and not Chrome/Chromium).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is pretty awesome. I see only two things missing :

\- a way to have all accounts in the same tab, with a unified inbox

\- threading support, ideally with folding

<comment><USER43> For what it's worth, I would want neither of those and would turn them off if they existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Nice, looking forward to trying it out. Other similar projects worth mentioning:

[https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze](https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) \- As the author says, "Unix utilities to deal with maildir".

[https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail](https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail) \- A noninteractive client with ex-like commands

[http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/](http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/) \- for Plan9 people.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thank you Sir_Cmpwn, awesome that someone is picking up where mutt left off.

<comment><USER46> My attempt was [https://lumail.org/](https://lumail.org/) a console-based mail-client inspired by mutt, but with 100% lua scripting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Looks interesting!

Based on a quick stroll through the source code, I don't see any search integration. Is that correct?

I guess I could just shell out to notmuch? But I do find virtual folders for searches really convenient. Currently using neomutt with notmuch support, over a Maildir (which in turn is separately synced via IMAP using mbsync).

Not having all the context vanish ala mutt would sure be nice.

<comment><USER8> There's a ticket planned for adding a notmuch backend straight up:

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/105](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/105)

No indirection through mbsync & maildir. This shouldn't be terribly hard - <USER2> you're interested in working on this feature, swing by the IRC channel to get a rundown of the technical details.

There's also a ticket for search in general:

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/93](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/93)

Which will probably be implemented for IMAP by 0.2.0.

<comment> em-bee i am looking forward to this. i am currently using supmua, the ancestor of notmuch, and i haven't been able to switch to any other notmuch based terminal client because their interfaces all felt inferior to sup. aerc is the first client i see that does the interface with multiple switchable screens right from the start. notmuch integration with the ability to keep virtual folders based on tags and on searches is the only thing keeping me from trying out aerc right now.

i'll be keeping an eye on it.

<comment><USER48> You should have a look at astroid ([https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid](https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid)). It is written by one of the ex-maintainers of sup but uses notmuch, so the workflows are mostly similar. It's not in a terminal though.

<comment> em-bee yeah, i am aware. if it wasn't for the terminal i would have tried it. but for my workflow, email in a terminal is a must.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Very cool!

How does this compare to sup / mutt / alpine / astroid ?

</comment><comment><USER50> I wonder how good it is with wide width characters (in CJK languages). Handling them in a terminal is rather tricky, and I haven't seen anything that's good except ones that are developed by the actual users of the language.

<comment><USER8> aerc dev here. I am a fluent speaker of Japanese and frequently work with CJK characters in the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Any idea how to fix this error?:

        panic: Attempted to draw outside of context

        goroutine 1 [running]:
        git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/lib/ui.(*Context).Printf(0xc0002fa450, 0x2, 0x1, 0x0, 0x84de7f, 0x4,                   0xc0000d3c98, 0x1, 0x1, 0x50)
        ...

I just installed it on Fedora 30 and got that when trying to setup an account.

<comment><USER8> Try using a bigger terminal emulator. There's a ticket to deal with too-small terminals more elegantly but it hasn't been done yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> What I miss is a low-resource email client with a GUI, something I (in principle) can run on a 20 year old computer.

<comment><USER53> Have you ever tried Claws[1]? I haven't used it for a while but when I did I was able to use it on quite older hardware running trimmed down versions of various Linux and BSD boxes.

Besides being light weight it's got some good features for an older client, it's GPL and can use plug-ins for extra functionality.

Nothing to do with he project, just a previously happy user.

[1] [https://www.claws-mail.org/](https://www.claws-mail.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Great work! I'm looking forward to using it full time. A couple of quick comments.

1\. It doesn't seem to work with when $TERM is set to some non-default setting. (panic: terminal entry not found) 2\. When term is forced to xterm-256-color, aerc crashes when the window is resized.

</comment><comment><USER55> It can't do maildir. I tried mdir:/// maildir:/// file:/// and /.

grep -R maildir of the code returns nothing.

So I guess, using it on local mail is a no go. Sad. I tried it only because this was advertised, only to be disappointed.

It's better to not advertise features you don't have. Or at least state what features you have instead of mixing what you have and have not into a feature list at random.

It's also far cry from the configurability of the mutt/neomutt. But that can change. It would certainly be nice to have a properly scriptable terminal based MUA, as neomutt, while nice, and flexible, is kind of hard to configure.

<comment><USER8> There's a big red disclaimer on this page that says the feature list is a bit wishful, and the latest version is only 0.1.0. The docs (man pages, start with man aerc) only document implemented features, you may want to start there.

Here's the ticket for maildir support:

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/16](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/16)

Several people have expressed interest in working on this, I expect we'll see it for 0.2.0.

As far as configurability is concerned, yeah, the plan is to continue making it more customizable and configurable. Stuff like filters already afford you a lot of options today. At some point I might also be interested in adding a fifo you can use to feed commands into it from a script, too, for turing- complete customization.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, I read it, assumming that easier features would be implemented first.

I still think it's better to split the list into what is completed and roadmap. It would help me track the progress.

Anyway, good luck. I'll keep my eye on the project, because it certainly seems interesting.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe on implementing the easy features first. If you implement the hard features first, its smooth sailing for the rest of the project!

If you would like to keep track of specific features, check out the bug tracker:

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Exchange compatibility? Asking for a friend;)

<comment><USER57> Can exchange do IMAP?

<comment><USER58> Yes

<comment><USER57> Then it 'supports' exchange. \o/

<comment><USER56> It _can_ but whether it _does_ depends on your local IT. Which means it _doesn 't_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> In the video, it seems to be being pronounced "arc". This is unfortunately confusable with a widely-deployed email authentication standard, ARC ([http://arc-spec.org/](http://arc-spec.org/)). I suggest contemplating at least a different pronunciation (even without changing the name, the spelling is open to about four pronunciations of varying obscurity and cumbersomeness—none of which particularly suggest the spelling "aerc" when heard, I may add).

</comment><comment><USER60> Hmmm, I'm not familiar with command line email clients but this looks cool. I wonder if I can use aerc in a bash pipeline? Say, to pipe email content from/to gpg?

<comment><USER8> You can't pipe emails into aerc (yet?), but you can definitely pipe emails out of aerc. The :pipe command is bound to | by default, so you can type, for example, |gpg --decrypt | less<Enter>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Gnus has been great for me, but after about 40k+ (I stopped looking at the counts actually) messages in my Maildir, performance suffers for me (that is, if I start gnus from scratch it takes more than an hour and a half to open, with my entire Maildir in the page cache, and a huge amount of extremely fast memory). Notmuch doesn't seem to help at all, or if it would, it's hard to tell if it's configured correctly.

<comment><USER62> 40k email? That sounds too much if it is for a single person. If you get 10 email per days for 10 years, you'd not get to 40k (35.6k).

My suggestion will be to clean your mailbox instead of finding a new client.

<comment><USER63> > If you get 10 email per days for 10 years

I recall times (mid 2000's) when I was active in a bunch of open-source communities and mailing lists were the main way to discuss. Getting around 50 e-mail per day was normal.

I kept a lot of those discussions in my e-mail client for later reference, because the mailing list website had sub-par search function compared to Mozilla e-mail client I used at the time.

It's possible he's using it as an e-mail archive for mailing lists or something like that.

<comment><USER61> Seems the number has also doubled. This Maildir starts about eight years ago IIRC, and there are now ~110k messages in it.

Some of that is mailing lists for sure, I'd say I respond to about ten direct emails (not from lists) per day. If I could use SMTP for IM, I'd probably do that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Crashed on first email I read from Gmail. Also, I had to enable "less secure access" in Gmail for aerc to work. Will try again after a few months.

<comment><USER65> 'Less secure' access is a choice by google to lock people onto gmail, they choose not to implement random device specific passwords.

Better to avoid gmail.

<comment><USER66> How does it lock you in to gmail? They provide a method by which you can use any mail client if you'd like.

Applications can always implement OAuth 2.0, which is pretty open (and is what you'll need to do for other mail providers, not just gmail.)

<comment><USER65> They took something that worked fine, then broke it after they had the majority of users. There are backwards compatible and secure methods (Like allowing a unique password per device). It is an obvious tactic to force people to choose between gmail web client, and outlook/thunderbird/aerc.

To make matters worse they falsely point the blame at competitors and then people like you defend them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> How does this compare to mutt?

<comment><USER55> Mutt/Neomutt is much more mature and has more features and better performance. (fantastic threads support, fast and very flexible filtering, etc.)

Aerc is very new and written in Go. I tested it on my 100 thousnand mail ARM linux mailing list archive, accessed via localhost dovecot IMAP server, to see the best case performance, but it doesn't look good, atm.

It looks like this when I scroll through the archive: [https://megous.com/dl/tmp/cjitwkaxpsypgcfdvncr.mp4](https://megous.com/dl/tmp/cjitwkaxpsypgcfdvncr.mp4)

It's not really comparable to mutt, yet. The performance is slow, and it doesn't support threads, which is a must for MUA.

<comment><USER8> aerc doesn't download all of your message headers upfront - mutt does. All that time you spend waiting for mutt to open your inbox is downloading all of the data that aerc is downloading as you scroll. Also, you can scroll faster with ^d/^u, half a page at a time, or pgup/pgdown, for a full page at a time.

Yes, aerc is not yet as featureful or mature as mutt, but it definitely does not have inferior performance.

<comment><USER55> I use POP3, and only wait for mutt when changing to a folder (4s/100k mails). Then everything is basically instantaneous.

But yeah, I don't know about mutt IMAP performance, as I never used it. I've only configured a local IMAP server over my maildir to be able to try aerc. I have no clue why aerc is taking 100-200ms to load a single message (as you see in the video) from the localhost. Maybe naggle (is it even used on localhost)?

Also, I'm not sure how you'd make threads work while loading message list only partially. So full load of the message list is needed anyway (at least once and cache it locally). It's not some failing. I want thread that started 5 months ago to pop forward if new message is posted to it.

EDIT: Faster scrolling loads multiple messages at once faster. Maybe aerc can take into account that user may have scrolled past more than one message in the time the previous message finished loading.

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing the main problem is that I can't cancel an IMAP request once it goes out. When you scroll down, one at a time, through all of the messages like that, I have to wait for ones that scrolled offscreen long ago before I can read out the details for the ones onscreen now. Adding an option to fetch all headers when opening a folder might be wise, or just fetching the offscreen headers in the background while idle. Another thing some email clients do is open several IMAP connections, but pooling connections to implement cancellation could get icky.

aerc will also support maildir before 1.0, which doesn't have the same issue, and will be at least as fast as mutt.

>Also, I'm not sure how you'd make threads work while loading message list only partially. So full load of the message list is needed anyway (at least once and cache it locally). It's not some failing. I want thread that started 5 months ago to pop forward if new message is posted to it.

IMAP has a thread extension I intend to put to good use for this purpose.

<comment><USER55> > IMAP has a thread extension I intend to put to good use for this purpose.

I didn't know. Very nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Pretty amazing! Some observations:

\- Attachments that don't have a filter can't be visualized. For this case would be interesting to open with 'xdg-open' when hit <Enter>, and/or '.mailcap' support.

\- Account password is stored in plaintext

\- Occasional rendering artifacts when switching tabs/folders

If those above are fixed plus theming, unread, etc. I can easily see myself using it as my daily driver.

<comment><USER8> >Attachments that don't have a filter can't be visualized

You can use :save or :pipe on these, but yeah - xdg-open would also be cool. Mailcap support would also be great.

>Account password is stored in plaintext

In a chmod 600 file, though. There's also an option for configuring a command to run to retrieve your password by e.g. decrypting it with gpg: see aerc- imap(5), or :help imap, for details.

<comment><USER68> It seems ':pipe' sends the data to stdin, I was trying to see a pdf file and the programs I tried (evince, mupdf) do not seem to support this (or perhaps usage is different?).

Seems like a good patch to implement a command that saves to a temporary file and opens with provided program, will certainly follow development, great work!

<comment><USER8> [https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/125](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/125)

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Is it groundbreaking to display mail with an external pager or to pipe it to filters? These were/are core features of elm, from 1986.

<comment><USER8> IMO the key innovation is that aerc does it with an embedded terminal emulator, tmux-style. This allows you to keep using the client for other things while reading or composing emails.

<comment><USER69> That is interesting and different. I guess I am accustomed to the "unix way": I use screen to multiplex my terminal and I have no bad problems from running multiple instances of mutt on the same maildir.

<comment><USER8> That workflow to me seems like more of a hack begging to be improved than a comfortable daily driver. I've never had a problem running mulitple instances of mutt, either - and I run multiple instances of aerc sometimes, actually - but since aerc has ownership over your emails and mail accounts it only makes sense to me that it would multiplex them for you.

<comment><USER70> I'd argue that the aerc approach is also bit of hack[1], but ultimately it mostly boils down to the limitations of terminals; to have "sub-windows", you need to implement basically a whole windowing system and terminal emulation layer.

Makes me think what would email client designed for and integrated with tmux look like, i.e. the client would open new tmux panes for editors etc.

[1] don't take that as a hard criticism, I happen to think lot of things, especially around terminals, being hacks.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's not as hacky as you portray it to be. The windowing system already needed to be there for other aerc features (and the embedded terminal is used in more integrated contexts than just windows, too). The terminal emulation is delegated to libvterm, the same library vim uses for this purpose. The actual aerc code is pretty simple:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/tree/master/widgets/termina...](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/tree/master/widgets/terminal.go)

<500 lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Very excited by the prospect of a modern terminal-mail client that is easier to use!

After following the README: this is clearly not ready/designed for wide consumption - the recipe neglects to mention how to install a custom doc-tool called scdoc (by the same author?) that is required to build it - and there are no pre-built binaries (that I can see).

<comment><USER8> Most Linux distros already have scdoc available:

[https://repology.org/project/scdoc/badges](https://repology.org/project/scdoc/badges)

It's not designed to be installed from pre-built binaries. It requires some other stuff to be set up on your system, too. It's designed to be friendly for distros to package instead. If you want to install it from source, use the Makefile like everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> [https://github.com/ddevault/aerc](https://github.com/ddevault/aerc)

> This repository is abandoned in favor of ongoing development on git.sr.ht. > The codebase has been rewritten in Go and is much more stable and useful > than what you see here.

@Sir_Cmpwn what's the advantage of git.sr.ht over github?

<comment><USER73> That's his own site that he built himself. It runs a ton of services, bug trackers, CI, mailing lists, wikis, etc. [https://sourcehut.org/](https://sourcehut.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I can tell from the video that the interface is quite easy to navigate if you're a vim user. Very impressive work!

</comment><comment><USER75> I just tried it and I love it! Mutt could never convince me because the configuration seemed overly complicated and I didn't like the controls.

Now maybe I'm just blind but I can't see a way to highlight unread emails in any way. Once I can get this working I'll switch in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why account passwords are stored on plaintext after the wizard? How do you encrypt them while configuring?

<comment><USER77> Unless you are willing to provide a decryption key on every "check my email" call (eg. every 5 minutes), an email client (or well, anything requiring frequent reauthorization) virtually has to have it in "plain text" (or any obfuscated form which is equivalent to plain text).

Workable alternatives are to store the decryption key in memory for the runtime of the program (eg. using login keyrings or per-app logic).

If you encrypt your $HOME or your entire disk, storing it in plain text achieves roughly the same level of protection (eg. decryption key is in the memory).

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> How is this any improvement over mutt?

I can use mutt with emacsclient as my editor, in tmux.

<comment><USER79> Mutt IMAP is unusable on a laptop since it hangs and loses changes (eg read/unread status) when the IMAP connection flaps.

<comment><USER78> I've used it for years and never had this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Good job. Markdown support for sending html-Mails would be very nice ;)

</comment><comment><USER81> Is there any way to add a new folder from aerc? I'm loving it (besides a bug with reddit emails) but that's a major bummer (as well as no manual "refresh" option)

</comment><comment><USER82> As another point in the space, have you looked at nmh? [https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/](https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/)

</comment><comment><USER83> Hmm why not mblaze[0] over aerc?

[0] [https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze](https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze)

</comment><comment><USER77> I find it funny that the first thing on their web site for a text-mode email client is a video screencast: as someone who likes spending time in text interfaces (terminal or emacs), it's exactly for the reasons videos are bad.

You can't skip-through videos to get to the part you care about which is obvious in a textual format (and it's obvious if it's even there). You can't copy and paste stuff. You usually have to have sound on to understand what's going on.

Sorry for ranting a bit about this modern tendency to record videos instead of write text :)

</comment><comment><USER84> Thats neat. I aways wanted an text only email clientem easier to use than alpine and mutt. This on seens usable out of the box. I will take a look.

</comment><comment><USER85> That looks promising! I wish Mutt had a mail account configurator like the one in Aerc. Definitely giving it a try.

</comment><comment><USER86> I have to be skeptical of any email client that's not integrated in to Emacs.

<comment><USER8> What about integrating emacs into aerc? You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set. Send me your binds.conf and I'll add it to contrib in case anyone else wants an emacs- esque setup, too!

<comment><USER86> _" You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set."_

I appreciate the suggestion, but unfortunately that's not even remotely adequate.

By integration I mean exposing every single function and UI element of the client to Emacs, so that they can be bound, wrapped and extended as needed. Ideally, these functions would be written in eLisp, so they themselves could be modified and customized to taste while leveraging the enormous Emacs eLisp ecosystem.

Emacs email clients have this sort of integration, and it is what gives them tremendous flexibility and power.

<comment><USER8> I'm not ignorant of how emacs works - I was just giving you a cheeky response to your cheeky comment.

<comment><USER61> You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. As currently configured, opening gnus on my (admittedly a bit large) Maildir takes more than an hour (no, really, I'm not joking); of course, once it's up I dare not close it, and that works out fine for me.

<comment><USER87> >You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky.

gnus is not the only way to do email in Emacs. IME, it is the most bloated way to do it.

While I didn't like the tone of the person's comment, I do sympathize with him. I used various email programs (pine, mutt, Thunderbird, etc) for years - but all of them seemed to lack something, and the effort to add my desired features was too high. With Emacs, the barrier to customize my workflow is a _lot_ lower. Now that I've been using Emacs + notmuch for mail for the last few years, it's really hard to motivate myself to try anything outside Emacs, and the feeling is much worse when it's something cool like this.

I even haven't bothered with alot, although it is notmuch based. I mean, is it trivial for me to make an Org mode TODO linking to an email while in alot?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Any chance one could convince you to also support nano as a editor option?

<comment><USER20> Just set EDITOR=nano in your environment, or add it to your aerc.conf. It already works :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> What a beautiful code! It's not that common nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER90> This is great! More email clients are always welcomed. :)

</comment><comment><USER91> Is there any way I can see the name of attached files?

</comment><comment><USER76> Doesn't work on Terminator.

<comment><USER8> Set TERM=xterm and try again. tcell (the library aerc uses to render its UI) has a really annoying built-in terminfo database, which at some point I plan on fixing myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> This looks fantastic. Thanks!!

</comment><comment><USER93> What the TL;DR; difference between Aerc and mutt?

<comment><USER94> Watch the video. Aerc is usable.

<comment><USER93> I currently use mutt and have no problems with it, what's the issue?

<comment><USER94> You don't want to hear, but I tried to use mutt with Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Does anyone use alpine?

<comment><USER96> Yes, and it works so well that I cannot imagine what the benefits of Aerc could have over it. I guess I'll have to do a comparison !

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> It's good to know that the world's best email client is still a work in progress.

</comment><comment><USER98> You did it! Congratulations! World's best email client! Great job, everybody!

</comment><comment><USER99> Dont really see the need for a new email client, we already got Mutt, sup, alpine and a few others.</comment>


Digital Signing 2.0 - Unlimited & Free – With Blockchain and Smart Contracts - <AUTHOR> https://dashboard.attores.com/register?utm_source=hacker_news_25_09&utm_medium=dashboard_link&utm_campaign=signature_update <comment><AUTHOR> A. Digital Signing 2.0:

Our uncluttered interface lets you easily sign documents and secure them with blockchain technology

B. Smart Contract and Blockchain Secure:

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Say goodbye to the days of printing, signing, scanning and emailing!

<comment><USER2> Unfortunetaly, on Brave browser, it doesn't show this text. It appears what it looks like a placeholder:

iron:router Organize your Meteor application.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes. Really sorry about that, @im_dario

Mind giving a try in Chrome / Firefox / Safari?

Would really appreciate that.</comment></comment></comment>