China, the cash triple trillionaire - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18560525

<comment><USER2> Spain became ridiculously wealthy after its conquest of the Aztecs and Incas at the beginning of the 16th century but by the end of the century it was bankrupt. I am not saying that China would be as foolish as the Spaniards in squandering their wealth but I am saying there is precedence for it and it does seem like retaining wealth is far more difficult then creating it. Japan would be another case in point. It will be very interesting to see what China's strategy is. It does look like they are reaching the end of the road on their current path especially with America's financial markets being what they are.

<comment><USER3> The chinese have become wealthy because their people are producing more. Their farms produce the same amount of food, while the children are making things in factories. The world, and china, is richer because the chinese people are make more of the things the world needs.

Filling ships full of gold can only make people temporarily rich. Investing in gold is paying someone in south africa to dig rocks out of the ground and melt them down, then paying someone in kentucky to dig a hole and store it. China has contributed much more to the world than 16th century spanish gold thieves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Holding $3 Trillion in boring American gov securities seems like a safe way to shelter itself from price fluctuations if the FED decides to play with the interest rates.

<comment><USER3> I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but I'll bite. Price fluctuations are of huge importance to the Chinese. They gave the US lots of labor and their domestic savings in exchange for US treasuries. Now those US pieces of paper buy a lot less of the things chinese people need (oil, food, raw materials, etc.) than when they generated those savings.

China should have never bought as many treasuries as they did. They should have bought harder assets, like oil company equites, timber and farm land, mining equities. When they tried to buy an oil company, congress blocked them. There is still no reason they shouldn't have bought diversified assets.

Providing cheap financing for US government during the 2000's, was neither good for the US, nor for China. The US got an asset bubble exacerbated by the cheap money, and the Chinese now have dollars that buy 1/2 as much as the dollars they used to buy the treasuries.

<comment><USER4> Ok, so your overall point is that "Chinese now have dollars that buy 1/2 as much as the dollars they used to buy the treasuries". But isn't this due to inflation and the dollar becoming devalued due to sub-prime disaster and overall global loss of faith in the US economy? Having the $3trillion in US gov securities is still good because it still shelters it from price fluctuations. So the cost of things made in China will still be cheap and US/Europe will still import them. If the $3 trill had been invested in harder assets as you suggests, the Chinese would have made a nice profit yes, but it doesnt safe-guard its import/export industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _China can buy almost anything for a price—but almost nothing for today's price._

In a way, they have become too big to _succeed._

</comment><comment><USER6> It is good to keep this in mind. China as VC of last resort? They could fund the equivalent of the entire 1995 - 2001 tech bubble.

<comment><USER7> No - China as VC means that the government takes over your company, and they would own all your IP (ie give your ideas to "natively developed" companies so they can compete against you with your own work). Would you want that to happen?

<comment><USER8> GP did say "last resort." Sometimes it's more important that a thing exists than whether or not you make a profit off it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No mention of the way China subsides its own banking system in such a way that $3 Trillion in reserves is somewhat illusionary ..pet project disasters alone are $1 trillion counting the high speed rail disaster..and that is before factoring in the banks that China is holding up to prevent them from closing..

<comment><USER4> "the way China subsides its own banking system in such a way that $3 Trillion in reserves is somewhat illusionary"

Care to expand on this a little bit? I don't quite understand

<comment><USER3> I'll make it simple.

Ordinary chinese citizens save $1T in bank deposits.

Bank loans the $1T to mall developers, and high speed railway developers. The developers promise to pay the money back.

They don't pay the money back, because the mall is empty, and no one can afford the high speed trains.

The people worry that the bank can't pay them back, all rush to the bank to get cash.

The Chinese treasury uses $1T in USD reserves to stop the run on the bank.

So, what he is saying, is that the Chinese central bank is already on the hook for about $1 trillion in bad bank loans.

<comment><USER10> A fine summary except...

.. what does a rice farmer in Northern China _do_ when the government gives him 1000 crisp dollar bills ("or their electronic equivalent")?

<comment><USER3> He should go back to farming. He now knows he can spend the 1000 bills, or gold coin, or whatever at a later date when he so chooses. When the time is right, the $1000 dollars can be used to pay his daughters college tuition, or buy a tractor. It doesn't matter, the only important thing is "when the time is right." It is an economic mess when ordinary people can't time shift their spending. This is why good governments guarantee deposits, and keep inflation low.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Politics and Logistics of Ketchup Packet Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904194604576578691502178606.html <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite part:

"... Now, Mr. Peltz sits on the boards of Heinz and Wendy's, which his holding company, Triarc Cos., bought in 2008.

"Mr. Peltz declines through a spokesman to comment on the packaging change, saying it wouldn't be appropriate since he's on the boards of both companies.

"Since a supply spat between Heinz and McDonald's that arose during a 1973 tomato shortage, Heinz, the country's largest ketchup producer, has been locked out of most McDonald's U.S. locations."</comment>


Proof of Existence: Storing Hashed Files in the Bitcoin Block Chain - <AUTHOR> http://www.proofofexistence.com/about <comment><USER2> Discussion from yesterday's submission, with 75 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6809929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6809929)

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes me think of another thing I was wondering about -- can some entity that doesn't like having Bitcoin around for whatever reason, DDoS it by filling it with meaningless transactions.

Maybe just setting up 100 addresses and constantly transferring small payments between them, filling the transaction history with garbage. Is that possible, and is there any protection against that?

<comment><USER4> Transaction prioritization[1] and transaction fees already rate limit stuff like that, and patches to the clients used by major mining pools may be able to fix it permanently.

1\. priority = sum(input_value_in_base_units * input_age)/size_in_bytes

<comment><USER3> What determines the size_in_bytes value?

In general, let's say a govt agency get assigned an $18.5m budget to break the Bitcoin currency as much possible, what could their plan of attack be, i.e. spend that money in the most efficient way possible? Create a large ring of wallets and send tiny payment around the ring? Create less wallets but send large payments between them?

<comment><USER5> Why $18.5m?

<comment><USER6> That does seem oddly specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is absolutely no proof that one-way functions exist: therefore this is not a 'proof' of existence of files at a certain date.* It is just a strong indication of it.

* that is, at some future date (or secretly, today) an algorithm could be discovered breaking the one-way function used to generate these hashes. Then a collision could be found, perhaps with chosen-prefix. Meaning an arbitrary file could be suffixed so that it looks as though that is what was hashed today. In the past, many hash algorithms thought to be strong were weakened in this way.

</comment><comment><USER8> Adding lots of data to the transaction logs is one easy DDoS. Do so many transactions that the logs get to be larger than fit on most systems. With multiple Gigs of data already required, if someone was evil they could up the volume and keep people out of the game by making sure that that there were over a terabyte of transaction logs. Most machines won't have that kind of storage and would "fall off" the network.

Patient0 mentioned before I got to post this, the other attack I know would work. Destroying tokens. But it is a bit more complex than he mentions, but you can actually generate ECDSA key's that will work for one transaction, and then never again. A one time spend token that then self destructs for the person you paid.

I haven't been able to build anything that would work for two transactions. Which would be the most useful since you'd have a delayed "poison coin" but I don't see any reason it isn't computationally possible.

<comment><USER9> Bitcoin doesn't work by passing tokens around to represent the value. In a Bitcoin spend the value is simply added to the wallet/address's balance. Any further spend is deducted from the wallets balance.

The "coin" is not a single token that lives on and is broken apart to be spent, so there's no way a coin could self destruct after being transferred.

<comment><USER8> You keep telling yourself that.

I understand fractional coins. I was over simplifying for brevity. I'll give you a hint. You have to move the coins between two wallets you own before you create a coin that will "break" when it goes in to the third's wallet. The Third wallet accepts a coin that no one will take afterwards. The coin becomes undependable.

<comment><USER8> unspendable. Damn you Autocorrect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not exactly a big Bitcoin booster, but I love the way techniques and structures developed for it are being adapted to uses like this.

Given that this seems very similar to el33th4xor's Virtual Notary, how would one distinguish between the strengths or use cases of the two?

[http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/06/20/virtual-notary- intr...](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/06/20/virtual-notary-intro/)

<comment><USER11> Technical differences aside, proofofexistence.com predates the Cornell team's blogpost by a couple of months.[2] I am not surprised that the Cornell team did not cite the bitcointalk forum post (given the recent frenzy of their Selfish Mining paper, where they neglected to cite a fairly closely related forum post from two years earlier). However, a published paper, CommitCoin,[1] predates both of these by about a year.

I don't believe there is any meaningful technical difference among these.

[1] Clark, Jeremy, and Aleksander Essex. "CommitCoin: Carbon dating commitments with bitcoin." Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012. 390-398.

[2] www.proofofexistence.com - Upload a document and have it certified by the Bitcoin blockchain bitcointalk user: maraoz [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212701.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212701.0)

<comment> emin-gun-sirer Timestamping services are not novel and date way back before 2012. The earliest work I know of is from AT&T back in the 80's, where they proposed to publish the hash in the NYT. The idea was so well established that there is even an RFC [1] from 2001. And by the way, virtual-notary.org was online for several months or perhaps even a year before the blog post.

But the important differences are actually technical. Virtual Notary is a much more general service, offering to attest to any kind of online factoid. Let's elevate the discussion here -- it doesn't matter who was there first (because the AT&T folks were there two decades before both services), what matters is who offers the most useful service [3].

As for the previous work on selfish mining, see here [2].

[1] [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt)

[2] [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you- dint/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "This is why the bitcoins sent in this special transaction are unspendable, as the addresses are being generated from the document's hash fragments instead of from a private ECDSA key."

I hadn't realised before that this means that you can provably "destroy" bitcoins. That is, you can "prove" that a certain bitcoin amount will never be spent again by anyone including yourself...

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the fact that bitcoins can be permanently destroyed is a little bit worrying, one of BTC's benefits is it's cap. What's the economical consequences of these coins being destroyed?

<comment><USER9> You can burn fiat cash, and fire gold bars into space. What are the consequences of those actions? Other coins are presumably worth more because there are now fewer of them.

<comment><USER14> I would think in a 'tulip bulb' bubble supply is not entirely the important variable. Growing demand would be the driving force behind valuation. Losing a few coins would matter not at all. Maybe even a lot of coins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been interested in the benefits of something like [http://www.guardtime.com/](http://www.guardtime.com/) for a while. Using a distributed network like Bitcoin seems perfect.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can a coin survive without a ledger? I rather see a coin with proof-of- exchange without a ton-of-gigs blockchain at all.

<comment><USER17> Then how will I prove i possess a certain amount of this coin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bitcoin would be an awesome "dead drop" for untraceable communication of small data.

<comment><USER8> Except you'd have to spend some money, so the origin would always be known.

<comment><USER2> There are still some Bitcoin Faucets open, such as FreeCoins[1]. They give out almost nothing, but it's enough to make transactions just for the registration, and you don't need to provide any information.

[1] [http://freecoins.herokuapp.com/](http://freecoins.herokuapp.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Slow Electronic Payments Can Cause Cash Flow Problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2015/02/18/386769503/why-slow-electronic-payments-can-cause-cash-flow-problems

<comment><USER2> First, I know its NPR, but really, there's a lot of "Get off my lawn you pesky kids!" going on in that comment section.

Second, cash is becoming increasingly nonviable, at least in the US. Prices are so high on most consumer goods and services that the amount of cash that you would have to carry around is ridiculous. $50 for a tank of gas, $150 for a week's groceries, $40 for a pair of movie tickets and a popcorn. Worse, banks often don't even have enough cash on hand to cover more than one or two non-trivial withdrawals per day. My father recently paid off his mortgage. To do so, he had to pay cash at one bank with monies withdrawn from an account at a second bank. The total amount was about $5000 dollars. The second bank had to give him every $100 and $50 bill they had in stock, plus a large number of $20s, to cover the withdrawal. One withdrawal wiped out nearly the entire stock of cash at that branch for the day.

Third, it is ridiculous how long it takes "direct deposits" to clear. About half the time, my employer will do payroll on a Tuesday, sending out the electronic deposits. If I am lucky, the monies will become available by end- of-day friday. If there is any kind of holiday, or the bank is just slow, it will roll over the weekend and into Monday or the next Tuesday.

<comment><USER3> > My father recently paid off his mortgage. To do so, he had to pay cash at > one bank with monies withdrawn from an account at a second bank. The total > amount was about $5000 dollars. The second bank had to give him every $100 > and $50 bill they had in stock, plus a large number of $20s, to cover the > withdrawal. One withdrawal wiped out nearly the entire stock of cash at that > branch for the day.

Could he not have done a certified/bank check or even a wire transfer? I understand the urge not to incur the $10 or $20 fee (respectively) both instruments incur, but surely that must be easier then carrying cash between financial institutions.

I, of course, pine for the simplicity of UK/EU money transfers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is sort of a confused article.

It sounds like it's referring to Same Day ACH, but it starts out by mentioning non relevant things (unless the consumer in question is paying with ACH at a grocery store ...).

Same Day ACH is exciting, but well over a year off. Also, it comes with a limit of $25,000 per transaction, which makes it useless for certain types of transactions, and it also has an added fee of about $0.08 per transaction. For something like payroll or bill payment, this really adds up, and I'm guessing it will see less use because of the fee.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't the problem here more one of _not being able to readily determine your account balance_?

And of financial institutions capitalizing (which is to say: imposing arbitrary and inescapable fees) on this situation?

Which, I'll note, they themselves have caused?

There are reasons cash is frequently preferable.</comment>


Is BP Smarter Than a 10-Year-Old? - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/is-bp-smarter-than-a-10-year-old-20467971?fifthgrader 10 year old fixes oil spill. Maybe BP can learn something. <comment><USER2> Cute, I guess, but, um, I'm guessing the pressures involved are a bit much to just do this. Why the hell is this on a news channel??</comment>


Interview with Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder - <AUTHOR> http://startupstories.com/2006/11/29/passion-for-your-users-will-come-back-alexis-ohanian-co-founder-of-reddit/#more-9 <comment><USER2> Great interview. I actually learned a lot. Heartwarming to hear that reddit actually DIDN't get chosen first time around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, they did. Heh.</comment></comment>


Netflix says Fortnite is bigger competition than HBO or Hulu - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/17/18187400/netflix-vs-fortnite-hbo-hulu-competition <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm an outlier in how I use streaming services, but I don't really understand why "Consumer Screen Time" is their most valuable metric. Whether I'm playing Fortnite or not my Netflix account is paid for and waiting. I keep it around for kids shows, or for breaks when I want to stream something instead of gaming. Some months I stream more than others, but I _maintain_ my subscription because it serves me when I need it.

This looks like spin to me. I'm much more likely to cut off my subscription due to a lack of satisfying content than distraction by other sources of entertainment. That's probably the message they are trying to push to the background with this "Consumer Screen Time" metric. As content competition increases with other established producers, the likelihood that Netflix original content will be enough for current customers to maintain their subscriptions is reduced. Netflix originals already tend to have a specific "flavor" which I'm not particularly fond of.

There's only enough room in my media budget for one, maybe two services, so whichever one has the content I want gets my money.

<comment><USER3> >> _I 'm much more likely to cut off my subscription due to a lack of satisfying content than distraction by other sources of entertainment._

I think their viewpoint is that "amount of satisfying content" is a metric that is purely relative to everything else out there. A complete global monopoly on all passive viewing content wouldn't help them if the entire world has moved on to Fortnite and video games in general for their entertainment.

<comment><USER2> But are people actually cutting their Netflix subscriptions because they play so much fortnite? I get that the game has a widely varied demographic, but I would assume that a majority of people putting in large amounts of "Consumer Screen Time" are probably still dependents of their parents, who likely maintain a household media streaming subscription of some kind.

I can't imagine that instances of people cutting out media streaming entirely in favor of gaming are significant enough to pose the kind of threat that Netflix is stating. If so, HBO and Hulu and all the others are in similar peril and the entire entertainment economy is due for unprecedented upheaval.

<comment><USER4> If I'm playing a game, I usually have the TV on anyway, and I watch plenty of Netflix.

I have no interest in playing Fortnite, but I wouldn't mind developing a game called Sennite, just because almost no one would get the joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the same joke they already made when they said that sleep is their strongest competition.

It's false of course. Netflix has actual competitors. And a real threat in the fragmentation of the video content market

</comment><comment><USER6> As a Netflix subscriber I'm far more concerned about Disney etc. launching their own services and pulling their content than I am by Fortnite.

I think the Balkanisation of streaming is what will be the challenge.

<comment><USER7> Right, but I think Netflix will be less likely to admit that given that it's the more probable outcome.

If Fortnite is their largest competition then I, as a hypothetical stakholder/investor, am not going to be entirely concerned, since it seems unlikely that it'll actually have an effect.

Then again, there are some thinking people who might think that if this analysis might betray some backwards internal understanding of the company.</comment></comment>


The Stack That Helped Medium Scale to 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time - <AUTHOR> http://stackshare.io/medium/the-stack-that-helped-medium-scale-to-2-6-millennia-of-reading-time?utm=emailsx <comment><USER2> Da-yam.</comment>


Google confirms critical Android crypto flaw used in Bitcoin heist - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/google-confirms-critical-android-crypto-flaw-used-in-5700-bitcoin-heist/ <comment><USER2> And now we simply wait for cell carriers/handset manufacturers to push out updates for all the handsets in the field.

<comment><USER3> Yep. Everyone who normally pretends that Android fragmentation is "not that big a deal" is going to squirm.

<comment><USER4> I know, right? Things would be so much better if the dominant OS was a closed platform, and only ran on hardware made by the same company and only ran apps purchased though a tightly controlled store run by the same company. Of course then they could shut out other service providers such as maps and cloud services, and basically wreck the industry for almost everyone except themselves, but at least we would get timely updates.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious. What maps and cloud services providers have been shut out of iOS? I recall that google maps has an app, dropbox has an app, there are even non iTunes music players. One of the criteria for the app store doesn't seem to be "can't compete with Apple." So this little diatribe about "wrecking the industry" is a bit unfounded. There's nothing stopping you or anyone else from creating their own OS and their own hardware to run it on and marketing it to people and selling it.

Dropbox is a huge competitor to Apple's cloud services. While they're different, if Apple really was trying to be heavy handed, Dropbox would never have gotten on the App Store. By the way, what's the default maps application on Android? Google is a model of openness right? So open that your gmail has "no expectation of privacy." I wonder how they feel about things being done using an Android device. After all, if even your private person-to-person emails have no privacy expectation, then what expectation would one have for using an Android device?

As far as "wrecking the industry," I've never made more money from development as I have since the App store came along. So unless your industry is creating malware or porn apps, iOS has hardly wrecked anything. If it weren't for iOS, there'd likely be no Android. Apple essentially created the smartphone industry, at least as we know it today. Entire new businesses were created because of the App Store. I can't even on one hand the number of consumer mobile development companies that existed before iPhone. I'm sure there were plenty, but hardly the billion dollar industry it is today.

I'm not an Apple apologist, however when I see the same tired arguments about the "closed" ecosystem it gets frustrating. Especially since the App Store has over 900,000 apps. That's a lot of apps for such an oppressive system. A large percentage of them are crap, but comparing sales numbers to Google Play, it's pretty obvious that Apple is doing something right, at least from the perspective of the consumer -- which is the market. There are some notable screwups with the app approval process, however weighing that in the aggregate against the overall success of developers within the App store, the screwups are a drop in the bucket.

<comment><USER4> Apple has a rule that disallows apps from the app store if they "duplicate the functionality of one of apple's own apps". Alternative browsers for instance are effectively banned, you can only skin safari. There have been plenty of examples where they have abused this rule. Google maps was around before Apple Maps, but when it launched it became the default app, and there is no way to change it. On android, the user can swap out gmaps for an alternative.

Luckily iOS never became dominant, and so the long term damage to the market is limited. In the short term, certainly a lot of developers made some quick money on iOS, and as one of them I can see why you are so keen to defend them. But in the long run, if they had reached dominance then it would have been a catastrophe for the industry on a scale far worse than Windows dominance in the 90s.

There are a lot of other reasons that it would have been bad, that often don't occur to people in cozy western environments, such as the impact it would have had on developing countries. A lot of elitist iOS developers say its not a problem that you can only develop iOS apps on a Mac, because "anyone can afford a Mac mini", but try telling that to a highschool student in India.

<comment><USER6> "certainly a lot of developers made some quick money on iOS"

AKA: iOS developers make more money because iOS users are more likely to spend it. Android users are people like the highschool student in India who is never going to buy an app.

<comment><USER4> Ahhh, there's the elitist attitude we all know and love. As I said, I can see why a developer targeting rich Americans would want to develop for iOS (for now), but the fact remains that it would be a catastrophe if iOS were to gain any sort of long term dominance.

<comment><USER6> So it's elitist to expect profit off of the app you're selling? I'm not sure what you mean by a "catastrophe".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm actually shocked that someone used a zero-day Android exploit to steal $5,700 of BTC. Couldn't they have sold it for significantly more on the black market?

<comment><USER8> It's possible that the exploit was used previously and the incident went unreported.

<comment><USER7> Which is perhaps even more frightening considering many other high security apps use these libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> irony of the month: anyone NOT following the age old advice about not implementing your own crypto would have been spared from this.

<comment><USER10> Why?

This is a failure of the CSPRNG. What "not implementing your own crypto" usually means is trying to cobble together primitives like AES, RSA, and some mode of operation (and, if you're lucky, there's a MAC algorithm in there too), which would still probably have been horribly broken in some way. That's completely orthogonal to this issue.

Are you insinuating that explicitly seeding the CSPRNG with information from the OS' CSPRNG is somehow a bad thing, or that it is frowned upon, or that it constitutes "implementing your own crypto"?

<comment><USER11> Indeed. The irony is that anyone following that (good) advice were affected by this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone looked to see if the NSA Secure Android project has this bug?

</comment><comment><USER12> I thought OpenSSL's default code already pulled from /dev/[u]random at initialization?

<comment><USER13> The Official Sun/Oracle JDK SecureRandom class already pulls from /dev/random. The Android class does not.

<comment><USER14> where does it pull from?

<comment><USER15> [http://xkcd.com/221/](http://xkcd.com/221/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much would a good hardware RNG cost, and when can we have a phone with one that can run Cyanogenmod?

</comment><comment><USER17> Why does the blog post also suggest /dev/random?

I thought urandom should only be used for crypto.

<comment><USER18> Random blocks when waiting for entropy. Urandom is "unblocking random" and will return strictly predictable results when the pool becomes drained enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah......that looks like an easy fix o_O</comment>


Twitter Acquisition Announcement - <AUTHOR> http://dustinsdispatch.com/2008/03/31/twitter-acquisition-announcement/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this year could turn out to be a lame April 1st.

Try something creative, like announce an ultra-secure social media blogging startup, in which the whole site is write-only to prevent spouses, co-workers, or employers from seeing your funky 3AM passed out drunk with your head in the toilet pics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ignore all news everywhere starting.... now.

This is just stupid. Twitter is worth at least 60 million!

</comment><comment><USER4> At least the Facebook/Techcrunch lawsuit prank was decently well written and moderately funny.</comment>


I want my OpenID - <AUTHOR> http://www.16thletter.com/2008/04/29/i-want-my-openid/

<comment><USER2> I installed OpenID on one of my sites to avoid people having to go through any sign up process and still had people complaining about having to sign up to view it.

OpenID is a great idea. But I think it will probably remain as a niche thing used by few enough people that it probably isn't worth the time to implement it properly.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is nothing more annoying than a company that makes you jump through hoops (complex registration system) to get something that they want from you (your comment, which makes their post/site/life better).

<comment><USER4> Correct. The answer is to put your comments on a site that is easy and worthwhile to log in to. Like this one. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Immad and Peter: Stop reading news.yc and get back to work on Clickpass. :-)</comment>


WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ - <AUTHOR> https://ma.tt/2018/11/a-gutenberg-faq/ <comment><USER3> I know a lot of people dislike PHP and WordPress, but I haven't found _anything_ that comes close to it in terms of sheer extensibility and plugin ecosystem. There's a plugin for pretty much anything you might want to do with a platform. I even moved my personal Jekyll-powered blog to WordPress a few years ago.

My favorite thing about WordPress is that it's a known quantity. There's an easy to follow tutorial teaching you pretty much anything you might want to do with the software. PHP isn't the prettiest language, and WordPress itself feels a bit creaky at times. But it's a practical tool. It does the job, and does it very well.

Since I'm a JavaScript developer, I was optimistic about Ghost becoming a viable alternative to WordPress. Sadly, Ghost's plugin API still doesn't seem to be complete. Without that, it can't replace WordPress for anything besides basic blogging. That seems to be the niche the Ghost developers are interested in, though, so I don't think it's coming anytime soon.

I'm really excited to see this release. Gutenberg is certainly a step in the right direction for the editor, and I'm planning to upgrade all my websites over the next few weeks!

<comment><USER4> You're absolutely right. The big issue (for me, at least), is that it's a security nightmare. At least last I used it. It seemed there were security exploits popping up every day. Either from the core codebase, or from some random plugin everyone seemed to be using. I think that was just the nature of how their plugin system works? I'm not sure if anything's changed, but _maintaining_ a WordPress install is not fun and requires constant - <USER2> tiring - oversight.

<comment><USER5> I used to help artists with setting up Wordpress portfolio sites. But the constant maintenance required (updating Wordpress & plugins, making sure that all plugins are secure and maintained, and checking after each update to make sure nothing was broken), as well as the rise of platforms like Squarespace, Wix & Weebly, means that I no longer recommend Wordpress for those types of clients. Artists just want to show and sell their work, not deal with whether or not a plugin update is compatible with their version of Woocommerce.

<comment><USER6> Check out Jetpack, it can auto-update all your plugins, and has a "Rewind" feature with real-time backups so you can one-click take your site back to a previous state if anything didn't work.

<comment><USER7> Jetpack has some nice features, the comments form especially. It is, however, very bloated - especially since you'll often only use 2 or 3 features on any one site.

<comment><USER6> Since Jetpack code is also what we run on WP.com (tens of billions of pageviews) it goes through a huge amount of performance tuning and optimization. The way modules work when you turn them off they don't have any overhead, similar to turning off a plugin. If you were using literally one thing it might feel like a lot, but as soon as you use 2-3+ things Jetpack does it's a lot more efficient than separate individual plugins to accomplish the same task.

<comment><USER8> Can you give a couple examples of when / how Jetpack has to be a single plugin, instead itself being a suite of individual plugins?

If the knock on that product is bloats, and the compromises adoption, how is X a benefit to those who refuses to abopt the whole alphabet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The big problem with 5.0 is that it's not actually ready and they are shipping because of Wordcamp.

There are 152 open issues that they conveniently allocated 1 to 5.0, 28 to 5.0.1 and the rest to future point releases. [https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/06/5-0-gutenberg- sta...](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/06/5-0-gutenberg-status- update-dec-6/)

The introduction of Gutenberg is a huge change and yes if you've been following the development, you're probably ready for the major changes but if you weren't following along you're in for a nasty, buggy, surprise.

<comment><USER10> "if you weren't following along you're in for a nasty, buggy, surprise. " this scares me and may bring tears. I don't have time to backup all the sites I have with custom themes and plugins.

Hope someone writes a tutorial on how to undo this update, including the database and change over to the class press fork.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think it deleted all my plugins this morning. Yay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who hosts over 150 WordPress websites for small businesses ... I'm not thrilled about this release and the work it will entail given the editor overhaul.

Another user posted this: [https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/06/5-0-gutenberg- sta...](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/06/5-0-gutenberg-status- update-dec-6/)

Also this posted by the author of Advanced Custom Fields, a very popular plugin: [https://twitter.com/wp_acf/status/1070089217479307264](https://twitter.com/wp_acf/status/1070089217479307264)

<comment><USER13> Supposedly, you just install this and you're good to go: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic- editor/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/)

I just tried updating to 5 on a test copy, as far as I can tell it didn't break anything.

<comment><USER14> For as long as that plugin is supported..

<comment><USER15> 2022 at the earliest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know this is not for everyone, but sometimes it makes sense to jump off the CMS bandwagon and build a custom site. First I used Drupal but got tired of rewriting the site on every major release and jumped on WordPress. Then on WordPress I realized I could not create the user experience I was after without committing massive amounts of time and resources in custom plugins/themes. Leaving me too dependent on a moving target that might take a direction I don't agree with. It looks like there is a plugin for everything, but having them all play nice together is difficult. The more plugins the bigger the security risk, and the greater the risk of an update breaking your site.

I rewrote the site in Node.js/Express with Vue.js and server side rendering. The ecosystem is ready with so many libraries to quickly get up and running. Another major benefit is being able to design your own database instead of having everything stored as a post (WordPress).

<comment><USER17> I would love to do something like this. Drupal was a nightmare for me as a designer. Wordpress is much more manageable, but HTML/CSS/Javascript are king for me to have full control. What I'd like to learn next is implementing a database to cover the CMS side of things. Any resources you care to share that would put me on that path?

<comment><USER18> I believe that the static site generators of this day are the next step in custom web development. I'm currently working on a Gatsby.js project using Contentful as the content provider and it really feels like the stack of the future - build with all the shiny tools but send a fast, static website to the end user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will Gutenberg actually help Wordpress? I don't think so. Why? Most site owners aren't designers and don't do layout or content building well at all. Maybe I am short sighted on this though.

Much of my business has been replacing sites that run on Wordpress with my own CMS Archetype. Even though it lacks a lot of the power of mass of WP plugins, it makes up for it with simplicity of production and ease of use.

Some site owners want more control/power over layout building, and others would be overwhelmed by the extra features of Gutenberg.

Will Gutenberg become a core complaint of WP in the future? Maybe. The biggest complaints I've gotten about Wordpress are these:

1\. Can't hand it off to clients to edit their own content, because it's too hard to learn. Or if you do train someone, it turns into a cycle of retraining. (though this seems to be Gutenberg's real target goal)

2\. Updating is painful. Plugins break on a regular basis.

3\. Security, WP sites get hacked alot. Think this is primarily because most WP sites aren't run by professionals, but individuals.

But also, #2 applies here, there's motivation to _not_ upgrade because of the possibility of breaking the site.

There are others, but Gutenberg would not solve these 3 largest problems with WP that I have run into.

<comment><USER20> > Will Gutenberg actually help Wordpress? I don't think so. Why? Most site > owners aren't designers and don't do layout or content building well at all. > Maybe I am short sighted on this though.

I agree! I use wordpress.com because I DON'T WANT TO DESIGN MY SİTE. Nor do I want to design each individual post. I want my blog to have a uniform look. I may make some tweaks to CSS and that's all. I don't want to think about design.

WP is arrogantly pushing the new editor but I tried it and I see no use for it. I think it should only be an option for people who want to design their own site.

It's true that there is no other place I can take my blog to. WP knows this and they know they can get away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's the holy land:

\- React components (Gutenberg)

\- You can visually edit react components (Gutenberg)

\- You can render the site with anything (Gatsby?)

Wordpress made some insane decisions with Gutenberg, like 1. storing the parameters (data you enter visually into the component) in an HTML comment (!!!) alongside the rendered HTML and 2. deciding to show the equivalent of "FATAL ERROR IN THIS COMPONENT" when the component author makes any adjustment to the markup output. Their idea for the latter was for you, the component author, to keep a deprecated version of any change alongside the new version.

They have the start of something great but crippled it with laughably bad decisions. Feels like... well, developing in the PHP ecosystem again.

More specific discussion: [https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/10444](https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/10444)

</comment><comment><USER22> No mention here about Gutenberg's lack of support for accessibility standards. They pretty much went full steam ahead and left the accessibility team behind. See: [https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the- word...](https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress- accessibility-team/)

<comment><USER23> There's a whole paragraph in the linked article talking about accessibility - it looks to me that they're mostly planning to improve it in the next few point releases. It's too bad they couldn't bake it in from the start, but at least they seem to acknowledge it

<comment><USER24> not "couldn't" but "refused to"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You guys need to check the 1 star reviews for Gutenberg on the link below for some good comedy. Most reviews are 1 star.

[https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/?filt...](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/?filter=1)

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe I'm in the minority here. Is this the "new editor coming soon" on wordpress.com blogs? If yes, I tried it and was left more confused than before (features like copying an existing post with its categories, tags and content in order to create a new post were missing). So I switched back. I've found WordPress becoming more complicated to administer and use over the years. I hope aiming towards simplicity doesn't inadvertently add more complexity.

<comment><USER27> The move seems aimed more at website building (ex. Wix) than blogging. These should be two different products because the blocks-based idea makes WP.com unusable for blogging, IMO. As a 10-year user, if they remove the option to revert, I'll be taking my blogs elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of Drupal 8 which was a massive departure from previous versions. As a part-time Drupal user with a handful of sites. The changes in Drupal 8 were just too much for me. Suddenly I had to learn Composer before I could do anything. Nothing wrong with Composer but if you aren't fulltime PHP developer this is just too much to learn to use a CMS. Installing Drupal changed from just unzipping a file to a whole convoluted process (I know I exaggerate).

The technologists were happy but the hobbyists not so much.

<comment><USER29> Composer mostly replaces 'drush make'. You can still download zip files (for core, themes and modules).

Composer helps if you have to manage complicated modules. For example, CiviCRM is CMS-agnostic and bundles its own versions of Symfony, Guzzle, etc. If we only used zip files, we would end up with library conflicts. Composer helps fix that.

(However, I agree that Drupal tends to make things insanely complicated, and the upgrade process is underwhelming.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is anyone else impressed with WordPress/Automattic's willingness to "just ship" despite things not being perfect?

As someone who struggles shipping software that basically nobody uses, I don't know if I'd have the guts to say "it's good enough" on a project as big & widely used as WordPress.

<comment><USER31> Quite the contrary. "Just ship" is a great approach for individuals or startups. WordPress is a behemoth that powers a significant portion of the web, including numerous enterprise corporations, and is the lifeblood of thousands of freelancers and agencies. They should hold themselves to a much higher standard.

When WordPress ships a bug, or a security vulnerability, or drastically and negatively alters the user experience the repercussions are vast and long- lasting.

I can't imagine how many man-hours and how many millions (billions?) of dollars it costs every time this happens.

<comment><USER30> I know what you're saying, but on the flip side: How many billions (trillions?) of dollars has been created by WordPress? And it keeps growing!

I feel that this "shipment" has been fairly responsible, with the Classic Editor plugin as a fallback for people who don't want Gutenberg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For what Automattic want WordPress to be, WP 5 seems to be a sensible move. WP is a viable choice for the Squarespace and Wix crowd that want to build a website without knowing anything about how to design or code. These services are eating their (lucrative) lunch, and a move toward ease of building makes real sense.

Sadly, this isn't the reason WP is popular. People use it because it's the most popular CMS, because of the marketed belief that it's the easiest to use, and because there is a perceived belief that it's quick to develop features because "we'll just use a plugin for that". While there are many teams out there that do WP "right", I'd say they are in a small minority. Most WP sites I've used have been a total mess.

I've used a lot of content management systems and frameworks in the past, and while it's on a framework many refuse to use, I'd say the best open-source CMS available for user experience and extensibility is Umbraco. While the core community can be a bit reclusive to outsiders, and HQ eager to push profitable products, Umbraco is easy to use, easy to install, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins to allow developers to build stuff easily. I liken it a bit to the early Rails community in how it acts.

As far as WP is concerned, I feel that WP is too big to simply be a site builder to some, and a framework to others, making Gutenberg a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't really solve either problem. The best thing they could do is accept that WP developers are analogous to React developers or Rails developers in that they define themselves by their framework of choice, and to do that WordPress needs to expand into its own PHP framework. Gutenberg can be a part of that, but it would be a part of the framework, not the driving force behind page creation.

Disclaimer: A few years ago, I was making a tidy side income from porting WP sites to Umbraco, and if I weren't too busy I'd continue to do it because there is no shortage of pissed off clients with crappy WP sites that want a usable CMS.

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks very similar to Sir Trevor:

[http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor- js/example.html](http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor-js/example.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I updated a test sight to 5.0. I activated Gutenburg. I played with the blocks. I looked for - having just done some Shopify work for a friend - a way in WP to preview page (while on desktop) that simulated mobile. Again, like Shopify.

Afaik there is no such preview. I'm aware "the WordPress way" is fond of turning its back on industry standards. But ignoring "mobile first"? If the dev team missed that, what else did they miss?

</comment><comment><USER10> surprised no one has mentioned the fork, [https://www.classicpress.net/](https://www.classicpress.net/)

I brought up similar issues times ago when WP was rolling out major changes that were likely to break things and not add any value to a majority of WP users. Glad to see enough others have banded together to actually make a good fork a serious option now.

I have already begun using a couple of plugins that convert WP sites to static html /css - so no updates needed, no more breaking things from auttomatic.

Unfortunately some of WP sites I'm running need to stay open to udpates regularly, fingers crossed I can revert them when the update rolls out.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you have ever used Medium.com or the inspired niche of editors that followed, you will love Gutenberg.

It's in this niche of editors where other names would be Dropbox Paper, and obviously the best in niche Notion.so - but Gutenberg is quite decent so far.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'll just leave this here: [https://www.alexkras.com/how-to-rollback- wordpress-5-to-olde...](https://www.alexkras.com/how-to-rollback- wordpress-5-to-older-version/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I seriously dislike the fact that an exteremely wide-spread open source project - wordpress.org - is driven by a for-profit company, wordpress.com. I guess there's no way around it, given Automattic employs most contributors, but this is not the first time when community requests and doubts are ignored (see emojis, half-baked media library refactoring, etc).

On the other hand, I'd welcome if these forced changes would revive half- forgotten CMS systems - Typo3, Silverstripe, concrete5, or boost newcomers, like Grav, ProcessWire. Maybe this will break the WordPress monoculture.

(downvoting an opinion, that is not how discussions should be made.)

<comment><USER37> I've been looking hard for an open source replacement for the backend that would let my users edit as simply as with WordPress, but not tie my hands with PHP and an odd API for creating the front end. But so far, I haven't found anything that meets users needs like WordPress does. I wish there were more competition in this space. The closest I've seen--different services that let you create content and provide a GraphQL API--are all SaaS and not very cheap. Maybe the financial incentives to create a viable WordPress competitor that's open source just aren't there anymore...

<comment><USER38> When you say "not very cheap", you're illustrating the problem: people don't want to spend money in their CMS.

Companies spend hundreds (or more) a month on various SaaS services but are looking for dirt cheap for something as critical as their public facing website.

<comment><USER39> I don't think that's it, though. I think the issue is moreso that they have to pay for the CMS and then, typically, for someone to customize it for them to make it what they want it to be. You're essentially paying a very high price for the development and paying another cost on top of that for just the platform might seem excessive to those who don't really know how it all works. People don't mind spending money on a CMS as long as they know how it fits into the project. The issue is that most developers just pick a CMS and don't pay for it because they want to keep more of the money from the client rather than because they know what they're doing and it's the best choice for the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> For anyone who is managing multiple wordless sites and is scared of the amount of work it will take to update and check compatibility of each of them, I strongly recommend trying [https://managewp.com](https://managewp.com), it made my life so much easier with managin our company blogs

</comment><comment><USER41> Gutenberg, and this whole medium.com style look to websites layouts and interactivity just makes me think it is about time for an Apocalypse. Probably starting with silicon valley going down in a sink hole (make it goolag first).. like real soon please.

I'd rather go back to reading sites off geocities with starry backgrounds and little animated gif's everywhere..at least those looked like someone had fun putting them together, than this automated fking pile of readability styled over sized fonts design for people who can't see good shit that is getting spewed out from so called website 'designers' and 'content writers' if you in anyway like this style of a website design and user experience for readers, just kys... I mean at least think about it, perhaps reflect on how awful you are as a human.

<comment><USER42> Imagine getting this worked up about black text on white backgrounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Are they ditching php? Webhosts have the most to gain financially from a switch to node.js powered WordPress.

<comment><USER44> Care to explain how webhosts would gain financially by switching to node.js?</comment></comment>


Bash as a Service  - <AUTHOR> http://www.devthought.com/2012/03/13/bash-as-a-service/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like "root my box as a service."

As one of the commenters there points out, you can just do this with ssh. Which means you're ssh'ing to a machine you probably control, which means you would have had to install the stuff you want at some point on that machine anyway. Why not just do all your development from that machine (or, if you don't want to, why not just install the package on your local machine?).

<comment><USER3> I think the authors idea is that you would ssh to a machine that someone else controls and is providing access to. E.G. For a dollar a month I'll give you shell access to a machine where I've set up ImageMagick, and I'll give you a set of scripts that make running ImageMagic commands on your machine transparently run them on mine instead.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the value here is in 'where I've set up ImageMagick'.

If I have a task that could be made easier by having ImageMagick, but I don't have it on any machine I have easy access to, then I have to deal with the overhead of getting the package, installing the package, configuring the package, and possibly removing the package when I'm done.

Even though I know how to do all things, it would take me some time to get it all done, and then I'd have to waste brainpower in those things, and not the real problem I'm trying to solve.

A lot of that is solved by the "better" distributions, e.g. Debian has nearly everything under the sun.

But not everything. That's where the opportunity might be.

I probably wouldn't pay a dollar a month just for ImageMagick, but I might pay a few for shell access to a machine that has all of the new and shiny things available, things too new to get into the main repositories, and keeps them up-to-date and keeps adding new stuff, so I don't have to handle the sysadmin tasks for yet-another-box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." \-- Henry Spencer

<comment><USER6> How is this reinventing unix, at all?

<comment><USER7> The thread where mkjones is parent explains why mostly.

The issue is that you use remote utilities hosted by other resources but as people already pointed out there are utilities provided already that essentially allow this. What " _ru_ " would potentially be is more of a wrapper or alias to existing commands.

I feel that the quote he references in general would simply state that if users are seeking the ability to execute commands on a remote host then there are security implications. We have secure tools for accessing remote hosts and working but generating a catch-all utility would be an act of "reinventing the wheel"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm impressed that he's managed to come up with a brand new solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist.

<comment><USER6> Disagree, there are plenty of problems this solves. For example, this service could allow users of certain platforms to utilize tools that don't compile or are difficult to compile on certain platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would you want to use a remote service instead of just installing the software on your local machine? Most software is quite small and it would be much more reliable this way as it wouldn't rely on a network connection to a second machine.

Seriously why would you not want to install pygmentize? It's Python, so it runs everywhere. The Debian package is 332 kB, so it's not wasting disk space. What possible motivation do you have to pay someone a fee to run it on their computer instead?

<comment><USER10> You cannot, in _general_ , _easily_ install software on your machine. That is, I can find quite a few examples for which a particular version or some particular software won't install on _your_ particular machine/OS combination.

<comment><USER11> Remember we're talking about CLI software. While I don't doubt you can find some examples of CLI programs that are hard to install on Debian, I doubt they're nearly enough to justify something like this.

Even if it's not packaged, 'tar xf file.tar && ./configure && make && checkinstall' doesn't require any particular effort to someone used to the shell, and you only have to do it once for each program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Actually, you can do a lot of this using "heroku run bash". And it's pretty awesome.

My understanding is that their vulcan build system [1] is a similar thing optimized for compiling things.

[1] <https://github.com/heroku/vulcan>

</comment><comment><USER13> Before he got too far into it, I think he might be talking about 0install: <http://0install.net/>

Close, but 0install runs the apps on your local machine.

</comment><comment><USER14> That website without Javascript <http://i.imgur.com/iMnNI.jpg></comment>


Vivaldi now supports Linux running on ARM-based chips, including Raspberry Pi 3 - <AUTHOR> https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-for-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> I think Vivaldi miss the point in their blog post- the average western user probably wont much care about Vivaldi on the Pi 3. It's cool, but it's not groundbreaking. We have smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. But the Pi has traction in countries where alternative portals into the internet are few and far between. It might not be markedly better than Chromium, or other available browsers on the Pi, but another hat in the ring is never a bad thing.</comment>


Serial entrepreneurs and today's Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/serial-entrepre.html <comment><USER2> When I was very young, I thought "well, I'll start a business, retire early, and enjoy my life." Now I have so many ideas that I could split into ten of me and still not see them all come to fruition. I guess I'm destined to be such a serial entrepreneur, for better or for worse.

The best line of the post: "Money, but not just 'I can buy a fancier cashmere car cover' kind of thing - just as often I think it's money as a way to keep score"

So true.

</comment><comment><USER3> "I can't believe Mark Cuban is a billionaire and I'm not"

That thought has occurred to me.

<comment><USER4> ...to most of the enterprising people I know as well...b/c he's just very visible. I bet if some of the richest people in history blogged, a lot of people would feel that way towards a good percentage of them too.

<comment><USER5> No, I think Marc is referring to why in the world Yahoo shelled out $5.7 billion for Broadcast.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Microsoft and Oracle, for example, both needed 10 years of incredibly work to get to their IPOs"

Most people forget than Microsoft never tried to get to IPO. They were FORCED to go public when their ESOP reached 500 employees. Imagine that, earning revenue and going public against your wishes when you already have enough cash.</comment>


Visualizing Rails Schemas with the RailRoady Gem - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.coachup.com/visualizing-rails-schemas-railroady-gem/

<comment><USER2> This is a side tangent but seeing graphviz being used here reminded me of this total boss ruby patch: [http://cirw.in/blog/find- references](http://cirw.in/blog/find-references)

I had spent a week slowly isolating this brutal memory leak until being able to see the whole ObjectSpace illuminated my problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> DataMapper has this as dm-visualizer as well in case you use that over AR in rails. [https://github.com/postmodern/dm- visualizer](https://github.com/postmodern/dm-visualizer)

</comment><comment><USER4> I just yesterday found the rails-erd gem to accomplish the same task. [https://github.com/voormedia/rails-erd](https://github.com/voormedia/rails- erd)

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem I have with these tools is that the diagram it produces is really not that great. I guess it tells you what models you have, the columns they have, and whether a model is tied to another one... but not much else.

Here's the thing: I already know how many models I have (I just look in app/models) and which columns back them (I just look in db/schema).

The thing I often want that 1) ActiveRecord doesn't give me and 2) I haven't seen in any tool yet is a diagram of the relationships. So I have two models, A and B, and A has many B. How do you diagram that? Typically I've seen arrows: B points to A, with the words "has many" written next to it. The thing is, if I have 30 models in my app, I'm not going to be able to read this at a glance. Words are too small. Diagrams are meant to be rough pictures.

The way I visualize this in my head and consequently diagram this on a whiteboard is, multiple instances of B point back to A. It's easy. If you have a has_one instead, then only one B points back to A. Makes sense right? No one does this. I often wonder why.

</comment><comment><USER6> I prefer rails-ERD. annotate_models is also great.

<comment><USER4> Instead of annotate models, I have a function in my .irbrc/.pryrc that will print out the columns for me when I'm in a rails console (I usually have one open almost all of the time). I prefer this to cluttering my model files.

      [6] pry(main)> c Account
      Columns for 'accounts'
        id                              :integer
        created_at                      :datetime
        updated_at                      :datetime
        address                         :string
        city                            :string
        state                           :string
        zip                             :string
        phone_number                    :string
        last_ip                         :string

      # Print formatted column names and type info for ActiveRecord models
      def fields(model)
        puts "Columns for '#{model.table_name}'"
        width = model.columns.inject(0) { |max_width, col| col.name.size > max_width ? col.name.size : max_width }
        _columns = model.columns.collect do |c|
          "  %-#{width + 2}s :%s" % [c.name, c.type]
        end.join("\n")
        puts _columns
      end

alias :c :fields

<comment><USER7> Do you keep the rails console running constantly? It seems more inconvenient to start and stop the rails console than navigate files for your schema, which is also searchable by virtue of it being written down.

<comment><USER4> Not really, it's just usually when I'm trying out different queries in the console that I have the, "oh crap, what did I name that column" moments. If I need to search for something in particular, I just search schema.rb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> RubyMine has this features built in and provides nice tools to manipulate the end diagram.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rubymine comes with such a feature built-in. However, I found that my model diagram was too complicated to really be useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you use MySQL, planning with MySQL Workbench provides similar results to what was shown (table to table relations).

</comment><comment><USER7> DbWrench for Mac along with PgAdmin is another good alternative for doing this with a Postgres database.

<comment><USER11> pgModeler is also very good.

[http://www.pgmodeler.com.br/](http://www.pgmodeler.com.br/) [https://github.com/pgmodeler/pgmodeler](https://github.com/pgmodeler/pgmodeler)</comment></comment>


Women candidates for tech jobs did worse when their voices were masked as men's - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/320747/gender-masked-for-tech-job-interviews/ <comment><USER2> Have you heard a woman's voice in this "masked" state? It still sounds extremely feminine because of the manner of speaking. It's very odd. You can even hear it in this short clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s)

That alone gives the observation questionable merit.

<comment><USER3> I was going to ask this. It's quite difficult to make male/female voices sound like either with just audio filters/modulation, so I immediately wondered how convincing the effect could really be.

I think that the clip you linked to sounds more like a stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent if male at all, which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Changing pitch or modulating doesn't change things like pacing and diction and word choice.

It'd be like saying 'Men in pink jeans do worse in bars than women in camo dresses'.

<comment><USER5> Besides the speaking patterns you mentioned, women's voices and men's voices resonate in different areas of the vocal tract which you can also hear. Women's voices tend to resonate near the nose and mouth while men's tend to resonate in the chest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bullshit title.

from the original blog post:

> masking gender had no effect on interview performance

> it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better > than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did > a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren't > statistically significant

<comment><USER7> Not statistically significant already says you cant say much about the observation.

But here is a thought, what if woman already get preferential treatment (contrary to what many feminist would have you believe), and when their voices are masked as a mans, that preferential treatment falls away. And vica versa for when mens voices are masked as a womans.

And this whole rickmarol is about achieving equal outcomes (even distribution of women to men in tech), and not about equal opportunities or the removal of bias / prejudice.

<comment><USER8> 'Not statistically significant' means you can and should say nothing about it — it just as likely happened by chance as any other theory and, as such, you should leave it that: it happened by chance.

In terms of analysis - it might as well not have happened at all and is only worth mentioning if you had expected something significant to happen.

<comment><USER9> > it just as likely happened by chance as any other theory and, as such, you > should leave it that: it happened by chance.

That's wrong. That's _very_ wrong, and it reinforces the confusion already surrounding 'significance'.

p=0.05 means that there was a 5% chance of obtaining results at least as extreme as measured if the null hypothesis was true (i.e. there was no difference to observe). p=.06 is a 6% chance, and p=.04 is a 4% chance.

None of those are "as likely as not", which would be 50%, or p=0.5. Nor is p=.05 an inherently meaningful cutoff - it's an arbitrary threshold on a continuum of possibilities, and indeed 'significance' is often set at p=.01 instead. Overemphasis of a cutoff leads to p-hacking, and treating significance as binary promotes bad studies (p=.04 is _not_ as meaningful as p=.00001).

This article is too credulous to an unproven result, but saying that all results >.05 are "as likely by chance" or not worth discussing is intensely wrong. The original blog post responded quite legitimately by indicating an unexpected-but-unproven result, and suggesting further study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can imagine that we do not just perceive someone's gender by the sound of their voice, but the way in which they present their opinions and what they say in general.

So lets assume we have a biased recruiter who secretly, perhaps unknowingly, prefers to hire men. The recruiter subconsciously hears a women (man with modulated voice) say things in a way that men would, he might actually prefer this candidate over a 'real' woman. Another candidate, who sounds like a man, but is a woman then says things that the recruiter's subconscious picks up as female might then not be considered at all.

So what does this say? Nothing much I think.

<comment><USER11> I think that's a lot of it; There are definitely masculine and feminine communication styles, and I think that like a lot of other things, feminine communication styles are devalued. The people doing it in most cases probably aren't aware of it, but I'm sure it does happen.

It seems like even just this factor alone could be enough to account for the other discrepancies- a man speaking with with a female-modulated voice may fair better than men in general because, they benefit from having a masculine (e.g. "good") communication style while also benefiting from any factors that may work in favor of women during an interview.

On the other hand, women whose voices are modulated to sound like mens may have it a lot worse, since they would be affected by both the fact that their communication style would be worse, but also the fact that people tend to have strong negative reactions toward men who are seen to be in any way feminine.

<comment><USER12> The thing is that communication style is not a mere decoration: it's an important skill for an engineer.

And that's bad news for women if they really do speak less confidently than men. I want a colleague who is confident in his or her own ideas and able to pipe up and explain them to others. I think it is also easier to be clear if you are first confindent.

Admitedly, some acquaintances (all of them men), take it to the opposite extreme; they try to drown out everyone else, in a contest of nerd-machismo.

But in new hires -- of either sex, timidity is the more likely vice.

<comment><USER13> Why do you assume tre difference has anything to do with 'timidity'?

<comment><USER12> The original story talks about women being more easily discouraged than men -- this is in line with other new stories I have seen in the same genre. _If_ all that is true, then one might suspect that men talk more confidently while women talk more diffidently.

In my book both confidence and diffidence are virtues. But taken to extremes, they become the vices of machismo and timidity. And in my experience, new hires of both sexes are dangerously close to the timid end of the spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> tl;dr study shows, in a statistically insignificant way, that interviewing is biased in favor of women. author manages to find a way to fit contradictory results to her preexisting view that women are being treated unfairly.

</comment><comment><USER15> The reason why there are so few women in tech (particularly in computer science) is because software engineering is still culturally seen like a "Man's job" and fewer women enrol for IT or Computer Science degrees at university.

Most of the computer science courses at my uni had only 1 female per 20+ males. Even among women who do want a career in engineering, many tend to choose areas such as chemical or environmental engineering over software engineering.

Unfortunately, most people make important life decisions based on social imagery created by the media and society instead of doing what they really want.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious. Why is the lack of women in software development seen as a more urgent issue than the lack of men in school teaching or nursing, or the lack of women in blue collar work eg garbage collecting?

This _isn 't_ meant as 'whataboutery'; it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed... but what are the reasons that tech is getting the focus?

<comment><USER17> > but what are the reasons that tech is getting the focus?

Because you're not looking for the projects in those other areas, and so you don't find the projects, and so you think there's a focus on tech.

You follow tech news, you read HN, you see all these tech-related programmes.

It's a fairly simple cognitive bias.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure about this. I read general purpose news(the us section of csmonitor everyday, and google news almost everyday). I see stories about the lack of tech diversity in regular news, but I haven't seen anything about nursing or teaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a feeling that speech styles matter. A style that comes from a male socialization, sounds confident rather than self deprecating, and assertive rather than conciliatory.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is interesting and all...but wouldn't it have been easier all around to just modulate the voices of both genders into a single, gender-neutral tone, or even better yet, perform the interviews solely through text? Something about the way the whole thing was implemented just feels...gimmicky to me.

<comment><USER21> There is no gender neutral tone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The previous submission got removed from HN home page...

<comment><USER23> There was a huge amount of discussion of the actual post yesterday - but I dunno where it's gotten to. Somebody must have brigaded it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673)

<comment><USER24> It might have triggered the HN flamewar detector, which automatically pushes things down the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If these results are being interpreting correctly, it could be that there are just many more talented men being churned out of schools, and the problem is the pipeline to the interview. This is consistent with my experiences hiring software developers at a Fortune 500 where there is already tremendous preference to hire women to overcome the typical ratio, but very few applicants to choose from.</comment>


Inside the bad math that lets Coca-Cola say it gives back all the water it uses - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/31/17377964/coca-cola-water-sustainability-recycling-controversy-investigation <comment><USER2> The article talks about water as if it's an exhaustible resource, but it's not. What's the big deal if my quarter pounder requires the flow of hundreds or thousands of gallons of water, it's all released to the atmosphere at some point, right? I could understand if they were talking about the power needed to pump water (assuming artificial irrigation), but they don't mention that at all.

<comment><USER3> I've never really understood the outrage over this point either - in my country, at least.

I could appreciate the criticism if we were discussing livestock in the Sahara or Golf courses in Nevada - but when its aimed at grass-reared cows or chickens in Britain, one of the rainiest places on Earth* , it doesn't compute for me.

* only a slight exaggeration

<comment><USER4> My understanding is that this water needs to be produced, that is taken from a source, processed, cleaned, pumped into pipes, etc. It means that you eventually have to divert and dry up rivers, lakes, or underground reserves to produce the water. This can destroy ecosystems because they're not getting the water anymore. It is possible to use more water than comes it and thus empty the buffer.

The other issue is that it displaces water. For example, California has a water problem. Most of the water used to grow vegetables is then shipped away in the produce to far away where they're consumed: the water will never make it back to California. It puts even more strain on an already tapped out water supply.

Finally, used water becomes polluted. Some chemicals are very hard to remove from water (some fertilizers, antibiotics, antidepressants...) and so the water is not exactly as it was, it's degraded.

<comment><USER3> Nice answer, thanks - although as I say, I mean more when the argument is raised here in Blighty. Where we're concerned, farm run-off is a problem, but an understood and solvable one.

I wonder if, in the future, our trade might increasingly become more of a dualistic swap between Northern cold and wet countries and their water-based product, to more equatorial countries, dripping in solar energy. Atoms for electrons.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to recover from 'programmers burnout' - <AUTHOR> http://devbanter.com/2015/10/08/how-to-recover-from-programmers-burnout/ <comment><USER2> If you're burnt out, you're gonna need more help than "Eat a good breakfast". See a therapist, don't let it become depression, take some serious time off.</comment>


Show HN: Phishing with fake browser error pages (PoC) - <AUTHOR> https://error.lazuritelabs.com/ <comment><USER2> Fuck, that totally got me, I just thought the page was down. I can totally see someone who doesn't know that the Safari error page doesn't ask for an email address filling it in.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is terrifyingly almost perfect.</comment>


Charging for things on the web - <AUTHOR> http://dcurtis.me/2011/10/06/charging-for-things-on-the-web/

<comment><USER2> A somewhat off-topic rant, because the site is down, but hear me out:

What I wouldn't give for a decent micropayments platform. One that would allow me to pay $0.50 a month for an ad-free social network. Facebook currently averages around $0.25 a month in ad revenue per user, so it'd double that income. Let me pay $0.25 a month to subscribe to a blog. Let me pay $1.50 a month to subscribe to the New York Times. Let me tip $0.10 for an article I like, or pay $0.75 for lifetime access to a forum.

We've heard a lot about how "if you're not paying, then you are the product." Well, give me the option to pay, and never have to see an ad, or have my data mined and sold to advertisers. I would pay gladly.

I looked into different ways to do this, and the tech would not be hard. It's really more of a business and legal issue than anything.

But I really think it would change the web, and for the better. Sometimes, really cheap is better than free. As in beer, anyways.

<comment><USER3> It seems like one of the prerequisites for a workable micropayment system is an overhaul of interbank payment processing system or establishment of a new one. I have absolutely no knowledge of the current system but I'd be shocked if the same system that manages $100k+ transactions and the risks associated with that can cost effectively process transactions in the <10c range.

There was a comment on the same level as this one referring to flattr.com which seems to be one attempt at a micropayment system. Does anyone have experience with this service or failing that an idea why that comment got absolutely buried under downvotes?

<comment><USER2> I have an idea on how to handle it in bulk payments, as opposed to individualized transactions. But really, this is not the kind of space where a startup could compete. You'd need someone with the legal and financial backing the size of Google to make it happen.

<comment><USER4> Flattr does exactly that (bulk payments). It's just not well adapted for payments since you don't pay a fixed amount to each website but a fraction of a certain fixed amount divided by all the buttons you've clicked on that month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Charging for things forces you to be better. That's the right kind of pressure.

</comment><comment><USER6> I often struggle with this as well. It is just so much easier to give something away than charge for it, and if you want your products to be used, you try to limit the pay barrier.

Dustin is absolutely right that people will pay, but you have to make it easy for them.

I always look at the success of iTunes as the prime example. There is no shortage of free music (even if you don't include stealing), and yet people have happily paid to buy their music because it doesn't ask very much of them at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a topic I'm quite interested in. I've had many product/project ideas that I think have merit, and a few that I think could be a viable business, but I simply cannot get behind the idea of giving something away for free for the ad revenue. To me, when I build a product, my personal ethos (and this is personal to me, not a moral judgment by any means) is that I want to build something for my customers that they will love and pay for. If that means I have fewer customers, then so be it, but dammit I want my customers to be my customers, not _my product_.

</comment><comment><USER8> My Chrome Web Store app has 4000 users, in a couple of months. The previous pay version has about 15. Charging for stuff on the web works if you have a massive reach that comes with things like being on TechCrunch.

This project also benefited from being a vanity purchase.

</comment><comment><USER9> Stripe is cool. There are other quick ways without much programming. Slap up a PayPal button, and connect it with E-Junkie, and you can be selling a download product today.

</comment><comment><USER10> Design is really well done. Over what period of time did it take you to develop the site? I know you said 400-500 hours but was that over 3 months, 6 months, a year?

</comment><comment><USER11> That's really great. Over how many months, did you make that money?

</comment><comment><USER12> Mirror?</comment>


Bitcoin is for nerds - <AUTHOR> http://skroob.com/2011/06/bitcoin-is-for-nerds/

<comment><USER2> Wasn't Bittorrent just for nerds 10 years ago? You'll find that many things that were for nerds 5-10 years ago, are now being used by mainstream. The Internet itself was once "for nerds".</comment>


Show HN: Our new app Just Because lets you send the gift of startups - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/07/give-the-gift-of-startups-just-because-lets-you-give-freebies-to-friends-from-the-startups-you-love/

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love some feedback from the Hacker News community on the app and how we can improve it!</comment>


JavaScript XM Player - <AUTHOR> http://www.a1k0n.net/code/jsxm/ <comment><USER2> Don't miss the very interesting blog post [http://www.a1k0n.net/2015/11/09/javascript- ft2-player.html](http://www.a1k0n.net/2015/11/09/javascript-ft2-player.html)

<comment><USER3> Since the blog post contains the player just the same as the current link, it would probably be better to change the link to the blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, modarchive has a new, JavaScript base player since September:

[http://modarchive.org/news.php?13841](http://modarchive.org/news.php?13841)

It uses HTML5 for audio output:

[https://github.com/deskjet/chiptune2.js](https://github.com/deskjet/chiptune2.js)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's awesome. I spent years on fasttracker in the late 90s. Some time ago I uploaded two xm tunes, converted to mp3, to here: [https://www.soundcloud.com/derFunk](https://www.soundcloud.com/derFunk)

I used to have a Gravis Ultrasound Soundcard with 4MB of RAM attached. I did over 300 tracks and was a member of a group called Stoned Brain Recordz. If I wouldn't have switched to coding, I would still make music today :)

Nice to see this project, keep it up.

<comment><USER6> Wasn't the GUS limited to 1024k RAM though?

<comment><USER5> To be precise, it was the GUS PnP. IIRC it could handle up to 8mb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 9 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538791)

</comment><comment><USER8> Two similar projects:

[http://mod.haxor.fi/](http://mod.haxor.fi/)

[http://www.cyrilpereira.com/modplayer/](http://www.cyrilpereira.com/modplayer/)

<comment> s-macke And here an online player for SID files:

[http://simulationcorner.net/Sidplayer/index.html](http://simulationcorner.net/Sidplayer/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That is serious coolness.

Could you wrap all this code to have something like <audio> tag playing XMs? Having same API/events as <audio>? In particular I would like to see playbackRate.

I was working on music game and tempo effect was considered. I was wondering at a time if usage of tracker modules would give advantage. Especially ease of changing tempo and maybe automatic conversion of beats to levels.

Now is there HTML5 Tracker?

<comment><USER10> Non-working (UI prototype only), but here's something I put together a while ago to test my homegrown JS framework[1] with the intent of adding an audio engine someday:

[http://busfactor1.ca/bin/tracker](http://busfactor1.ca/bin/tracker)

[1] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/px2](https://www.npmjs.com/package/px2)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your startup's stack? - <AUTHOR>

What does your startup do, what is your stack, and why did you pick it? <comment><USER2> Market Research/Customer Interviews Linux, Apache, Nginx, PHP+Yii, MySQL, Redis, Memcache, jquery+plugins, fontawesome.

The code is least common denominator, wide access to talent. Loads of existing well known tools for test, performance, scale &c. Stable foundation

</comment><comment><USER3> PHP / MySQL / CentOS / Googlefont

probably about the most boring stack out there</comment>


Ask HN: Best 1 resource and tool for remote teams? - <AUTHOR>

What one resource (book, guide etc) is the best guide to managing a remote team?
What one piece of software is the best for connecting a remote team?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I love Trello for collaborating. It is free and runs on just about every device. I don't know how complicated your projects will be, but is is very flexible and the api is a dream to work with. If you go the Trello route, you can review time spent on tasks in many ways at reportsfortrello.com. (I created the site.)

I would also recommend google hangouts if you aren't using it already.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Skype. Leave a group chat open all the time. Use video conferencing often.

So far as managing - treat them like your own employees (assuming outsourcing here), and over-communicate. Every time there's a hallway discussion, forward the results onto them.

</comment><comment><USER4> A web browser? ;)

I can do Google Hangouts (covers voice, IM and text messaging) and email in the browser. I can do a lot more as well. Or do you consider each web app to be a different piece of software?

</comment><comment><USER5> Basecamp seems to generally be the company to beat in terms of managing goal- facing productivity...</comment>