Pain. Or, Why Learning to Code is like Learning Chinese. - <AUTHOR> http://savemefrombschool.com/2010/02/pain-or-why-learning-to-code-is-like-learning-chinese/ <comment><USER2> The other comments here confirm what I suspected was true about most hackers - we never learned the "basics", or at least not at first (at least not the "basics" that this blog post seems to take as fundamental to our trade). We just became obsessed with the idea of making things, and did so without doing anything right. After enough screwing up and causing yourself headaches, you revisit the basics, not because it's something you feel like you "have to do" to learn to program "properly" (whatever that might mean), but because it makes doing what you wanted to do in the first place easier.

I don't think I know of a single good programmer that learned to code in such a horrible grueling manner. If you're not making shit from the very beginning, then you're never going to learn to love it, and if you don't love it, then you're not going to be very good at it.

One of the most important traits of a good programmer is that while they work hard, they barely consider it work. _Especially_ at the beginning, where the work:play ratio is practically zero. The boring programming grind should only start when you're doing work for other people that you don't care very much about; if it feels like that before you reach that stage, you're doing something wrong. Find a nice easy graphical language to play around with while you learn about functions, classes, I/O, and algorithms; you can start worrying about mastering the LAMP stack once you've realized that the programming part of it is easy and fun, and the LAMP part of it is just another set of technologies whose quirks we learn and put up with in the name of getting things done a bit more easily.

I think the real problem is that the blog post might be right: you do need to know the basics to get very far in programming. But the basics of programming have nothing to do with hard library-specific study and grueling memorization; they involve loving to build things and make them work, thinking logically and experimenting with all sorts of code just to see what happens. The rest comes pretty naturally once you have that down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I agree with you. I think what I did not communicate well in the post is exactly what you said - I have more ideas than I know what to do with and the rate that I think of things to build is exponentially greater than the rate at which I can build them.

I am not someone who will learn something conceptually just for the sake of knowing it.

The point is that, what I learned from Chinese was that if you just suck it up and force yourself to learn the basics for a while (no matter how much you wish you could just get back to building things) that you can actually become better faster. That is the part that's painful - the actual making-of-things part is way fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Being a programmer who's into 4th month of learning Mandarin I didn't really get the analogy. You need persistence and practice, yes, but it applies to any non-trivial undertaking.

I think the conclusion is, hard stuff is hard, and you have to try hard.

<comment><USER4> I think it's more that there can be some complete reorganizations that go on.

For example, if you know Italian and you want to learn Spanish you can translate a lot of your prior learning. The sounds are the same, the sentence structure, and many of the words even. Even English to Spanish isn't that different.

When you know English and you want to learn Chinese you have to learn a completely different way of pronouncing and listening to language.

I think her point is that non-technical people don't realize that there are a lot of fundamentals and basic principles that you need to learn to code well that you can't just pick up in your non-technical life.

<comment><USER3> Well, in fact learning Chinese pronunciation for English (and Western in general) speakers is much easier than for Chinese learning English. Most of the sounds already can be found in English, the tones are perhaps the only hard part. The structure and grammar are incredibly simple (albeit the writing system isn't).

I agree to your point about programming for non-techies though. And unlike with natural languages, you can't hand-wave your way out when you stuck..

<comment><USER5> Are you sure you're not confusing the phonology of Chinese with that of Japanese? Because I have studied both, and what you say is true of Japanese, but most English-speaking people seem to find the Chinese consonants represented in pinyin by zh, ch, q, x and r quite challenging. In addition, the tones have no English equivalent, and are a bit of a bear for an English speaker to keep straight.

<comment><USER3> Well, see e.g. [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Pinyin_Pronu...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_\(Mandarin\)/Pinyin_Pronunciation) \- under 'Pronounciation Basics'. I'm not a native English speaker, but speaking Russian, English and Norwegian I find it generally true.

(And yes as remarked below my first exposure to the language was in Taiwan, but the courses I follow are not Taiwan specific)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know Chinese as a second language. (For many years my occupation was Chinese-English interpreting.) I am still learning programming, even though my first exposure to programming (BASIC on time-sharing terminals) came much earlier in my education than my first exposure to Chinese. Good teachers can make a huge difference.

Any subject is hard as you get deeper into it. Chinese pronunciation is hard from the beginning for a native speaker of English because of the need to attend to phonemic tone. Chinese grammar eventually gets to be plenty hard, although I find it congenial compared to Russian grammar because it is mostly based on word order and function words rather than on inflection.

As for what is hard about programming, I HEAR (but don't know from personal experience) that learning to think recursively is hard. Pointers are hard, I am told, for many people who learn C. Thinking about programming from a functional rather than imperative perspective is hard until one studies a functional language thoroughly (usually).

Whether it's learning a computer language, or learning a natural human language, one has to get out of the world of instructional materials and into the world of actually communicating with them machine or the foreign person. It's the live situations in writing new code or conversing about new topics that really test a programmer or a language learner.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your overall point. I run a Chinese teaching business though (<http://popupchinese.com>) and think the analogy is a bit misleading. Unlike English with all of its irregularities, Chinese definitely gets easier and easier as people learn.

There's a failure of pedagogy in teaching the language. Chinese grammar is trivial if taught properly (we teach "prepositions" and "adjectives" before introducing "coverbs" and "stative verbs" and that seems to work). And while the tones can be tricky, most people don't get nearly enough listening and speaking practice.

As you said though, practice makes perfect. For me recursion was fun but memory management with vectors of pointers was a bitch. Easy to have a conceptual understanding, but the sort of thing you only master when you need to trace stuff through source to figure out where an error is. Then it clicks for good. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Learning Chinese involves a lot of rote learning and memorisation (at least the writing does). Programming is a flowful activity that I enjoy doing. So I don't really see them as a same.

One similarity: actually using the skills practically is incredibly vital for learning. For Mandarin, this is conversations; for programming, projects. Another: there's a few interesting isomorphisms between linguistics (Chinese is the first foreign language I've seriously tried to learn) and computer science. But overall, learning them has been a very different experience.

<comment><USER9> > For Mandarin, this is conversations; for programming, projects

Computer languages are how you translate your project ideas to what a computer/platform can understand, literally it's still a _language_

<comment><USER10> Your computer doesn't subtly dislike you for using the wrong word, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Persistence is probably one of the most important trait of a programmer, if not a great hacker.

Just today, I cracked my recursion homework assignment, which I assume to be uncrackable for mere mortals and after my CS teacher just told me to do it.(I wrote code since middle school!)

</comment><comment><USER12> 1\. learn by doing, not by memorizing theory. 2. find a good teacher. these two things impact how effectively you'll learn hard stuff by orders of magnitude more than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't remember going through this phase when I was learning to program! I got started with C many years ago and I remember savoring every moment. :) I think what may account for the difference is that in my case the interest in programming stemmed from wanting to learn how the computer worked and C's low level nature facilitated this very well. With regard to the author it seems she's more anxious to start creating real useful applications. I get the impression she's more interested in the end product of the programming than the actual programming process.

Currently I do most of my development for the linux platform but I was considering moving to windows to take advantage of some opportunities in that area but I am facing some of the same challenges as the author of the article. The C# language and .NET platform are a whole new world and it feels like I am starting from scratch. It's hard to justify as I can do everything I need to do on the linux platform.

<comment><USER4> I know I went through this phase. It was that point where I had my old 286 and BASIC. I learned how strings are just arrays of characters, how there are different types of numbers, how file handles work, how algorithms work, functions, looping, recursion, etc. It was like being a baby making random sounds to find out what works.

If I had just been tossed into a "Programming in Java" one-week course I probably would have been totally lost because they would gloss over a lot of the basics in an attempt to teach the specifics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I understand correctly, that's probably the stupidest way of learning a language I've ever seen. Even the classic "learn like a kid would" methodology wouldn't suggest that you learn by mastering pronunciation months before even learning how to say a single useful sentence. Mastering pronunciation is very important, especially if you don't want to talk with a thick accent, but it doesn't mean you've got to do it before saying a complete sentence.

I don't entirely get the analogy... is she learning assembly and CPU design before learning 'print "Hello world"'? That's great... unless you want to actually write anything remotely practical.

It is, however, entirely true that learning Chinese is goddamned hard. There's a saying: "After studying Chinese for 5 years, you learn humility."

<comment><USER15> There's also a quote, about that quote, by David Moser:

>> 'Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a little trouble understanding this. First off I've never learned a foreign language. Second, I learned programming early.

For me, programming was never a really difficult problem. I suppose this is because I learned to use DOS and BASIC at an early age. I some basic (pun not intended) programming before I learned algebra. I learned html and javascript when I was 12 and didn't really get the point. Nobody had told me that html was generated.

I didn't use any of my programming skills until I went to college and starting playing around with linux. It wasn't difficult for me to pick back up.

I suppose fluency with programming could be similar to fluency with language. If you start early, it's a lot easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> There have been a bunch of studies indicating that learning languages (and this applies to music as well, I believe) at a young age gives you immense advantages over those who start later. Tons of theories for why this is (but that's going down a brain development/neuroscience rat hole that's a whole other thread).

<comment><USER17> There's a saying that if you start learning a musical instrument when you're an adult, "you'll always play with an accent."

I suppose you could also program or seen code programmed with an accent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070545>

I should add that learning to code != learning the LAMP stack. Hopefully she'll take her own advice and learn the fundamentals first.

<comment><USER19> Well, the P in LAMP suggests that learning to code is a part of learning the LAMP stack.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, i am starting with python. the whole stack is my 5 year plan. i am ambitious like that.

but on a different note, as far I can tell (and granted I am brand new to this) does "coding" as a general term necessarily imply a scripting language? can you not "code" a database or is there a different verb for that ("implement")?

<comment><USER20> It means writing code, period.

On your original note, "learn the LAMP stack" is, IMO, not especially ambitious for 5 years. Get a good CS degree (3-4 years) and actually try to learn the material instead of just passing, and learning the specific technologies is just a matter of skimming the manual as appropriate. Yes, it is entirely possible to get such a degree and have no practical clue, but that's a symptom of never doing anything outside of class.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah that makes sense. I have several projects I am working on in tandem which have been insanely frustrating, but once you can actually make something work it's easier to stop doubting yourself. i guess the eventual goal is a complete end-to-end implementation of a large web project. if 5 years is too much time, that is great news.

<comment><USER21> Contributing a good part to a whole might be better and easier. Teamwork FTW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://abstrusegoose.com/98>

enough said.

<comment><USER10> That's what's nice about functional programming. Write the equations, and let the computer deal with the computer stuff.

<comment><USER22> that was, in essence, what i was trying to convey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "In order to truly understand macro trends, it seems like one needs to be familiar with the most granular aspects of the trade."

</comment><comment><USER24> remembered me of Bloodnet. one of the characters used to say "I had to learn Chinese to debug this. I'm not giving it to you for free"</comment>


The Falling Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/ <comment><USER3> "The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

\- David Foster Wallace

</comment><comment><USER4> It's surprising that people would criticise those who jumped. Wow.

A focus on the idealised view of the jumper ("they would never have killed themselves!") blocks people from feeling the sheer terror and pain the jumper must have felt. The focus on some abstract concept like "suicide is bad, m'kay" rather than right-here-and-now burning flames and the terrifying strangle of unbreathable smoke.

The fact that so many jumped despite all our fears of heights and certain death, is proof of a greater horror in those floors. Society skews our perspective so we focus on the trivial, punishing those whose family members were lost, rather than learning something about the situation those poor people must have been in and empathising with their families.

<comment><USER5> My little brother is a fire fighter. He tells me it's involuntary. At a certain point the heat and smoke get so intense that you can't do anything but jump. He's seen his trained collegues do it.

<comment><USER6> I wonder why most business buildings don't have some sort of mechanism on the outside that allows people to climb off? That would have save many many lives.

<comment><USER7> You mean a fire escape? Most buildings do, but some are internal.

Nothing like that would have helped in the wtc.

<comment><USER8> Parachutes next to a window with a hammer. Would have helped some, but of course you could not store enough for everyone. And whilst training may usually be necessary, shoulder and leg straps aren't that hard to work out and a bright coloured mini chute thrown to engage the main chute would be feasible. And of course the perils of crashing into the building etc are still there but for the sort of situations we are talking about you would be almost certainly dead if yiu didn't jump.

<comment><USER9> Good luck. BASE jump without _many, many_ practice parachute jumps before means almost sure dead. Also, parachutes need to folded and unfolded from time time.

<comment><USER8> As I said these are for the situation where you are dead if you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide, stemming largely from the insidious just-world fallacy. It's a comfort to many of us in this fucked-up world, to think that maybe it's not as unfair as it seems. As persistent as that warped logic is, it doesn't withstand suicide. We don't want to imagine we could ever face a truly intolerable situation, so instead we imagine a world that doesn't allow such, and we damn those whose deaths would contradict us.

<comment><USER11> > As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide

A lot of it is religious. It is considered a great sin in popular religions. Even though many don't follow religion it left this ingrained idea in the culture.

Also perhaps is seen as shameful. Part of the desire to censor the images was probably not purely to respect the victims, but also to hide the act, because it is shameful ("don't show this to the children" type thing)

The reason it is shameful is that it is seen as the most radical act of "giving up". And that doesn't jive with the "you can overcome anything with hard work" culture.

You can read this in how people talked about it -- "they were forced out" instead of "they decided to jump". Both are correct at some level. But first seems more appropriate in our culture.

One other level, perhaps even unconsciously we understand there is a possibility of contagion. It has happened and actually has been observed (someone in a high school does, and then usually a string of suicided might follow, the more talk and media coverage the more suicides follow etc). Maybe at some point in that past that fear of contagion got codified as a taboo...

<comment><USER12> I think that the just world fallacy is an enormous contributor to the existence of religion in the first place.

<comment><USER13> I was under the impression most religions don't believe the world is just or fair and that it is people's jobs to attempt to make it more so.

<comment><USER10> The religions I've endured attempt to tiptoe the line. They admit to life's unfairness, but they still pretend that by praying in the right way or donating to the right televangelist one can make it a little more "fair" for oneself. Also there's the whole heaven thing, which has been a great distraction from the ills of this world since its invention. Really, 'sullyj3 has it exactly right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A former colleague was there and witnessed this. He struggles with it for a variety of reasons, including that he would have been inside a few minutes later.

The way he put it, which says it all for me, was that the jumpers were a sort of testimony to the fact there was no way out and no hope for the people trapped up there.

There's lots of cultural stigma to suicide, and one of the reasons for that is there is always reason to hope. The poor souls up there ran out of reasons.

<comment><USER15> The thing that sticks with me beyond anything else was that there was so much horror that day, it couldn't be kept off TV. I grew up with the understanding that you simply don't see death live on TV.

<comment><USER14> Everyone was just gobsmacked and the usual bullshit storymaking aspect of TV coverage didn't happen. I remember all of the volunteers, doctors, nurses, etc heading to one of the hospitals to help triage a flood of injuries -- but nobody came.

I was 150 miles away in Albany. When the state government and banks dismissed employees, people were literally running in a daze to go home. I stood on the corner of the busiest street downtown waiting for my wife to pick me up -- everyone scurried off and the streets were utterly empty and silent at lunchtime. It was literally just me and an art installation statue of a guy reading a newspaper. The silence was eerie and bizarre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've allways found it odd that a culture that so values personal freedom: "the right to choose what to do with your life" so activity denies the right to choose how to end it.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't really though. You have no choice on whether to participate in the market economy, and forming labor unions is restricted. Compared to other developed countries, work hours are long, minimum wage low and holidays short. If you don't work, even if the only work available is horrible and degrading, society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death. This isn't a necessity, but a moral norm we have, that people who don't work should be punished, by death if necessary.

It's interesting that so many pro-market people claim to be individualists, because the view that the market should dictate everyone's life is as collectivist as it gets.

<comment><USER18> "society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death"

This makes no sense.

Society does not 'deny' you almost anything.

That someone cannot or choses not to buy something is not 'denial'.

"because the view that the market should dictate "

???? The market does not _dictate_ anything. The 'market' is just the sum totality of 'individual choices'.

<comment><USER18> I'm not making a moral or ideological statement, in fact, I'm trying to pull the ideology out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One very morbid question I have is were some of the jumpers actually pushed? Some of the pictures you see people crowding to the few available edges, a crush of bodies trying to breath. Wouldn't some of the people on the edges have been pushed by those further inside?

<comment><USER20> It's possible. In this video you can see 8+ people jumping within a couple of seconds of each other from approximately the same place: [https://youtu.be/b9QN3AkydYY?t=344](https://youtu.be/b9QN3AkydYY?t=344)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Falling Man has a name.

Though not officially identified, it is thought to be Jonathan Briley. A lot of people were killed that day. This is just one story. [0] You can view a documentary about this image here ~ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE) (1hr 11m)

RIP Jonathan.

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

<comment><USER22> The source for that Wikipedia article – and the documentary you linked – is an earlier (2003) version of the same linked article by Tom Junod.

Jonathan Briley is discussed in the article. While likely, it's not certain.

<comment><USER23> Which Wikipedia makes pretty clear.

> The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,...

<comment><USER21> _" The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,..."_

The uncertainty, if memory serves me from viewing the above documentary, is at the request of the family for religious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps "depersonalization" can explain the state some of these people were in.

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

</comment><comment><USER25> How can the same link be submitted twice?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708)

</comment><comment><USER26> Why were there no parachutes? It would at least have given them a chance.

<comment><USER27> Or tons of helicopters trying to save those stranded on the roof?

Seriously NYC doesn't have any police/rescue helicopters?

<comment><USER28> " and there were no plans for helicopter rescues from the roof, as the NYPD deemed it too unsafe to attempt due to dense clouds of smoke and rooftop antennas."

If you're referring the 9/11 situation, this is the reason why it wasn't attempted - <USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clark_(September_11_surv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clark_\(September_11_survivor\))

That said, I suspect that had they known the towers were going to go down within 2 hours, there might have been some different decisions made. But that's just hindsight. :/

<comment><USER27> Right it has been so long that I forgot it was a surprise that the towers collapsed that day. I remembered it a as being obvious, which it is in hindsight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure if it is mentioned in the article, but perhaps one of the soothing parts is that most of these people probably didn't even know what really happened that day.</comment>


Goodbye Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://dangoldin.com/2014/03/18/goodbye-gmail/ <comment><USER2> Using the "Why is X" Google autosuggest as proof is meaningless, no one searches for "why is gmail so great" and the same suggestions come up for all popular products and services.

<comment><USER3> Lucky he didn't do a "why is fastmail" search :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha - I just did one "why is fastmail down". Gmail has that as the #2 spot so I consider it a tie =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not yet ready for a switch?

There is still a simple, clean, basic Gmail [https://mail.google.com/mail/h/](https://mail.google.com/mail/h/)

For more light weighted [https://mail.google.com/mail/x/](https://mail.google.com/mail/x/)

<comment><USER5> Yup, I literally _have_ to use /h/. Standard has become so slow I can count the seconds between the end of page loading and the begin of responsiveness (like how Windows used to boot to the desktop, but be unresponsive for another 30 seconds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is misleading on several accounts (as others of its type often are).

\- Yes, initial payload size matters. But where's the true comparison about what each app is loading? How are the features and the UX? Would a power user be satisfied with Fastmail (e.g. search, filters, etc.)? (It looks nice, but none of this was discussed at all).

\- The disparate email count comparison is excused _way_ too quickly. Have you done a similar test with a brand new Gmail account?

\- Anecdata. I've never had the page load problems as bad as described. 2-3 seconds, and I reload once every week or less. "Sluggish" is a weasel word -- what is sluggish? Searches return in ~1 second for me (~7000 emails, I'm not a saver.)

\- You can turn off chat.

\- Switching is never as simple as described, and forwarding is a fairly messy solution (and will only get messy as the author creates new login accounts and further forks his usage).

\- Ugh, the "Google suggest" argument. For the record, the only suggestion for Fastmail is "Why is Fastmail down"

I clicked on "Goodbye Gmail" hoping for some substance or an interesting story but instead got feelings, anecdata and glossing over the problems of a real migration or search for a qualified alternative.

<comment><USER7> From a recent Gmail -> Fastmail switcher, who imported all emails from Gmail

\- Fastmail's UI is far faster to use, viewing emails is instantaneous, loading a folder with 30,000 emails takes a second at most. They have infinite scrolling with native scrollbars, and it doesn't slow down as you scroll. It does break momentum scrolling sometimes.

\- I'm not too sure about search compared to all the Gmail filters, but filters are run via sieve. A real power user can edit the raw sieve commands if they like, but there's a UI on top that's powerful enough for most uses. There's no "Filter messages like these" though, that was handy.

\- Turning off Chat/Hangout did make Gmail use less RAM and start faster, but didn't improve load times once it was active.

\- Switching was fairly easy for me, since I use my own domain. Fastmail imported my old Gmail data via IMAP and I just switched MXs.

\- With you on Google Suggest. Fastmail have had their share of problems, but they report them quickly and write up what went wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have recently made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I couldn't be happier. They don't have all the features (calendars are coming soon!), but they also don't have Google+.

In my experience it's a lot faster, both web and IMAP are extremely fast. While the storage is smaller than Gmail I don't find this an issue.

I haven't used the XMPP servers yet, but it seems to have the same features as non-hangouts GTalk.

<comment><USER8> How are they with spam? I'd just run my own mail, but I can't beat Google's spam filtering. (They have millions of email accounts, real time, as a data source.)

<comment><USER9> Spotless. I've gotten maybe one false negative (i.e., the spam hit my inbox) and no false positives.

<comment><USER10> I have a very different experience. I've had my fastmail account for ~5 years and get 20 new pieces of spam in my inbox daily, while on my gmail account, that I've used for ~10 years, I only get 1 spam per month on average.

Fastmail's spam filtering is atrocious in my experience.

<comment><USER11> Works fine for me. They also have flexibility in how spam is handled, and you could even forward to gmail and back if you really wanted to use its spam filtering. [https://www.fastmail.fm/help/spam_virus_protection.html](https://www.fastmail.fm/help/spam_virus_protection.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having made the switch to Fastmail a while ago, I agree with the comments - mostly.

While Fastmail is fantastic, it lacks the implementation polish of Gmail. Two- factor authentication is there, but not via a popup like on gmail. You have to enter it in the web-form. This is a hassle, because I use LastPass and it's a bit fiddly. Further, under Fastmail you create new logins in addition to the master account password. The new logins can have two-factor, but the master can't. So there is a small vulnerability in that at least one password without the protection of two-factor.

Secondly, the spam filters on Gmail are far better. Fastmail has got a bit better, but it's still worse when compared with Google's offering.

Thirdly, Fastmail costs. While I'm more than happy to pay, I doubt many people would switch services from a free to paid, just because it appeared to be slightly slower.

That said, I really love Fastmail. I'm more than happy to pay and I'm a very satisfied customer. I can't wait for the promised features of a calendar and I hope - one day - there'll be the ability to sync address books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing - I'm only a few days in but have really enjoyed the snappiness and simplicity. I do wish it had better calendar support (for that I'm still on Google) and a bit more polish but so far I'm glad to pay for it.

The spam point is interesting - I plan on using Fastmail for my important personal stuff and gmail with forwarding for everything else. Hopefully that will make for a good tradeoff.

<comment><USER7> I've actually found Fastmail is better at spam filtering. I had a problem with many false positives on Gmail, but Fastmail is doing alright.

You can configure the spam filter to be more aggressive as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Spam filtering in Gmail is a killer feature, now as much as when it first appeared.

These rants always skip that detail, the primary reason I stick with gmail.

<comment><USER5> You can always forward your mail through GMail. Publicly, your address is firstname.lastname@example.com, but that account forwards to another address. Boom, spam filtering. You can even give out your "private" address to trusted parties, and skip the middleman.

<comment><USER14> This negates the privacy benefits of not using gmail, no?

<comment><USER5> Sort of. You give out your gmail address to untrusted sources that will sell your address (Forums? Misc. Websites?) and your private addresses to trusted sources. You can't count on your communications with untrusted sources being secret in the first place; they are untrusted!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't have any of this experience with GMail. Not saying it doesn't have flaws - but my experience is pretty great.

<comment><USER16> Sitting here thinking the same thing ..

Can't say I've ever had performance issues or even a moments downtime whilst using gmail since it was launched.

Is a paid vs. free solution even comparable?

It's also a bit weird to compare the requests made on initial load considering these web pages are arguably meant to be kept open- but regardless, shouldn't the browser be caching these?

I think a more fair & thorough comparison would be to investigate what gmail has that other solutions don't by introducing the larger initial overhead. I'm guessing _a lot_ of cross platform compatibility code and plenty of code to integrate to Google's other services.

In which case, I would say if you are concerned about the initial page load and having more responsive interface (once again, no complaints here) and don't need integration to Google's ecosystem, you may not be the target customer for gmail. Which is okay.

<comment><USER17> I have accounts on both gmail and fastmail, for different purposes.

Gmail has become bloated enough that it's really only usable on modern hardware. I have an older laptop I use when I travel (don't really care too much if it gets stolen, damaged, etc.) and gmail is painfully sluggish on it while Fastmail is still quite usable.

Fastmail has also, however, become more bloated than it used to be. I preferred their UI from a couple of years ago, but have grown to tolerate the current one.

<comment><USER5> I've mostly jumped off the webmail bandwagon altogether. They are _all_ headed that direction (except squirrelmail) so I stick with IMAP access. Outlook 2010 is currently idling on my laptop at an astonishing 36.6MB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have about 12.5k messages in my inbox at FastMail, and another 26k in separate folder. Both inboxes load instantly, and the infinite scrolling is seamless. Jumping back-and-forth between message and list view is equally quick. While they currently lack features like a calendar, they do have a lot of powerful tools -- I have several domains and email accounts conditionally filing mail into several folders, with custom personalities/signatures when replying from each folder. Very happy with it, and the devs take bugs seriously whenever I message them. (To be fair, it's usually just UI edge cases.)

Edit: Just to quickly elaborate on the infinite scrolling: FastMail takes the total number of messages in a given folder and uses that to calculate the size of the viewport. When you scroll to a given position, it fires off a small AJAX request for _just_ the messages that are in view. Since each message is a fixed height, it gives them a lot of flexibility for calculating what to show.

Also, FWIW, they do support message threading.

</comment><comment><USER19> Gmail used to be great back in the early 2000s, but its time has long passed. The metro-ified UI is ugly and clearly only designed for tablets, options are steadily being hidden or removed, and the privacy concerns have only got worse. Not to mention, if you want to use a better client such as Thunderbird, their IMAP is glacially slow and often breaks altogether. The only other alternative is to use POP3 to bulk download all mail and sort through it locally.

I switched from gmail to running my own mailserver a couple of years ago; best decision I ever made about email. It's faster, more private, I can issue my own DKIM keys (and I know my signatures haven't been messed with), and I get sane spam filtering with visible scores that doesn't source its data from other people's email and has a much lower false positive and false negative rate, which only improves via Bayesian learning.

</comment><comment><USER20> Well if we're offering our suggestions for alternatives, I'll throw Outlook.com in the hat. I use it daily and find it as easy to use as Gmail, if not easier. Perhaps it's missing a few features that Gmail's got going for it like the tabs - but that doesn't bother me that much.

<comment><USER21> I snatched up an @outlook.com address back when they were still rolling it out, mostly to use as another junk email account. It sat for a while; but over the past few months, I find myself using Outlook.com more (for business) and Gmail less. The Outlook interface is a pleasure to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've noticed maps is considerably slower and less responsive. Google has become corporatized so I'm keeping my expectations in check.

<comment><USER23> GMail is pretty good. But the new maps is atrocious on any browser except Chrome (surprise surprise). The old version is much faster on all browsers. Same for the Android app, which also destroys my phone battery now too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why wouldn't you just use imap in an email client? I don't see any benefit to using a cloud email service when you can just host email easily on a cloud server..

<comment><USER25> _Why wouldn 't you just use imap in an email client?_

I agree, unfortunately, GMail has a non-standard IMAP implementation. As a result, it doesn't work well with Mail.app (while Fastmail's pristine IMAP does) and plugins such as MailTags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I made the same switch a couple years ago (GMail -> Fastmail) and have had the exact same (pleasant) experience. Fastmail is fast and has sane defaults, a powerful filtering system, and good spam detection. As a bonus, I don't have to worry about Google reading my email to show me relevant ads. I've gladly spent the money to have reliable, fast, standards-friendly email. The only thing they lack is two-step authentication.

<comment><USER26> According to the Fastmail webpage, they _do_ support (optional) two-factor authentication: [https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html](https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I think it's new. That's the first I've seen regarding it.

Edit: come to find out, it's only supported on secondary logins, so the master account cannot have two-factor authentication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I moved off Gmail (more accurately, Google Apps) a few years ago. It was the last thing tying me to Google. Privacy concerns were the motivation for me, not any technical or feature issues.

I closed my account without having a "full featured" alternative ready. Instead, I used the the mailbox feature provided by my domain registrar[1]. I initially set out to only use this as a temporary arrangement, but the quality of service has been so excellent that I've had no reason to move from it.

Keep in mind, because of this move, I'm no longer a "typical" email user. At least, not what has become typical of email. I use it purely as a personal communication tool. Not as an information archive, password manager, file storage or any other (mis)use of the thing that has seemed to become standard these days.

I access it through a desktop client via IMAP, but they also provide webmail access via an instance of the GPL licensed Roundcude[2], which I use extremely rarely.

[1] [https://www.gandi.net/?lang=en](https://www.gandi.net/?lang=en)

[2] [http://roundcube.net/](http://roundcube.net/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Passing judgment based on a "why is ..." auto-complete suggestion seems flawed, as the searches are heavily biased to the negative end.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was more of a fun thing to add - the actual performance is noticeably slower for me. Both loading and navigating take a longer amount of time in Gmail. Probably should have just left that out since everyone seems to be drawn to disproving that particular point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm considering switching from Gmail for similar reasons - multi-second delays when switching to a label are kinda unacceptable. But this is 2014, and if I'm going to switch, it needs to be to a desktop application so that I can have some vague semblance of security - at least supporting PGP mail and accepting messages which happen to be delivered securely with STARTTLS without the possibility of eavesdropping on my end, even if most of my mail is never going to use PGP. Plus, my laptop almost certainly has more CPU to spare than some random cloud server, so in theory searching should be faster, even if the rest of the UI can be equally snappy in a webapp as in a desktop app.

Unfortunately, after trying several candidates, I have yet to find an app whose UI I actually like, so I'm still using Gmail. I think I will try Mailpile once it's ready.

<comment><USER30> If not Mail.app, what about notmuch with one of the supported clients ;).

<comment><USER29> I have tried Mail.app (with Gmail IMAP for now); it's quite nice, but has some issues such as poor expressiveness in search.

notmuch looks interesting. I do use vim heavily, but I'm not sure I want to read all my mail in fixed-width... wonder if the web client is any good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Gmail has definitely gotten... 'heavy'... over the years. I clocked it at about 6 seconds to load my inbox with just 8 messages in it (Firefox 28 on a decently fast machine on a 100MB/5MB connection with low latency). And that's before the pause and the load of the Hangouts widget. Loading the /h/ variant of email is under 2 seconds. My Rackspace mail webmail comes up in about 3.

All that said, I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my primary to all those accounts because a real email client is faster than webmail.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm still using Gmail, but I'm frequently struck that every change they make to it is almost intentionally making it worse.

In fact sometimes I feel that way about a lot of Google's products.

</comment><comment><USER33> This article may be a little biased but as a user of Gmail and Outlook I can agree that Gmail is sluggish to a certain extent. Outlook's interface made managing my email much simpler and straight to the point. I have not come across issues about Microsoft's server not playing nice with email clients. Yes Outlook may not have as many features as compared to Gmail but it does what it says on the tin, and does it well in my case.

I am going to have a look at Fastmail as an alternative to Gmail and Outlook.

<comment><USER5> What do you mean, Outlook has less features than GMail? Sure doesn't seem that way to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I thought I would give fastmail a try and whilst I agree that gmail isn't as slow as the article makes it out to be (for me at least) I do like how fastmail just does mail, it's simple, there's nothing else I have to worry about turning off. It does one thing and it's the only thing I want it todo. I have only just signed up so If my opinion changes then I'll post back here but so far it looks quite nice. I'm yet to decide if I want to make the switch though!

</comment><comment><USER35> Funny, I switched from Fastmail to Gmail a couple years ago. I was used to having IMAP access from my time in college, so Fastmail made sense at the time, but I came to prefer having a uniform mail experience--wherever I was connecting from--via a robust web client.

Gmail's filtering, spam detection, and labeling features are much better and Gmail integrates well with my calendar and file storage workflows.

</comment><comment><USER36> It takes 6 seconds for you to load Gmail? Where do you live? I feel sorry for you bro.

<comment><USER37> For Gmail to reach full interactivity it takes at least 6 seconds for me quite often. Keep in mind that after the interface initially shows up, it's still very sluggish for a few seconds as it loads in Google+, the chat section, etc.

That said, I recently found out about the /h/ option in this thread and it loads instantaneously--faster than FastMail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's a good idea to set up a forward to another account just for redundancy. I forward all my email to Yahoo just in case Gmail has an extended outage, accidentally rm -rf's my account, etc.

</comment><comment><USER39> I use Gmail via Fluid app on mac and it works great independently (doesn't slow down n stuff). But if I keep gmail open in chrome, it sucks up lot of memory over the time.

</comment><comment><USER40> pretty bad post, more evidence of relevant factors would be useful to add credibility. It seems this experience of lag is really not the norm, so why rant about it in such general terms. it's your machine/environment probably Enjoy fastmail or whatever. Gmail remains usable and has grown to support its userbase....and still holds its own from the revolutionary place it launched at in 2004...

</comment><comment><USER41> I use Sparrow. I get the benefits of Gmail, without any of the problems you cite.

(N.B. You don't have to use Sparrow; pick any IMAP client you like.)

<comment><USER42> acquired by google?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> they are trying to make changes to improve. give them some chance to improve. They have moved all the downloading to server side & so downloading an attachment or running a video is much faster now on gmail as compared to earlier

Lets give them a chance to improve before we bid goodbye

</comment><comment><USER44> I bet you this post will let FastMail steal a dozen users from Gmail. Any affiliation, @dangoldin? :P

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha I wish. I'm not even paying for Fastmail yet =) Still have 55 days before I need to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Also works much more reliably in foreign countries where Google services may be slow/blocked

</comment><comment><USER46> slightly off topic but I'm looking to move away from Thunderbird as a mail client. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions. I use gmail but not online but without updates to tbird, thats becoming the bottleneck

<comment><USER47> I'm also interested in any answers to this. I haven't come across anything as easy and usable as Thunderbird.

kmail for KDE seems OK. It's not my favorite, but it feels lighter to me.

Considering using Emacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> reads like an informercial.

</comment><comment><USER49> The real question is how to "Goodbye Email".

</comment><comment><USER3> gmail: free

fastmail: paid

<comment><USER5> Sometimes not banging your head on the keyboard each day is worth $10/year.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but comparing a paid service to a free service and expecting the free service to be as good as a paid service is silly.

<comment><USER5> You still pay for GMail, in the form of being a captive audience for ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> You know Gmail is free? And Fastmail costs $$$?

</comment><comment><USER51> I have gmail open in a couple of tabs pretty much for weeks. Were I to actually close and reopen chrome, the vast bulk of the resources would be cached.

This seems to be optimizing an artificial. Or maybe an irrelevant is a better word. It's like measuring Windows boot times -- as is so common with each iteration -- when recovery from sleep is far more relevant to most people now.

Further, and this may sound overly cynical, posts that proselytize a change should have a HN minimum required period before they can be submitted. Saying "I changed from {x} to {y} this past weekend, and boy is everything awesome now!" are invariably followed by the requisite post detailing how much of a mistake moving to {y} was.

<comment><USER52> Not everyone leaves their browsers open when they're at the computer. I don't, and on a 100/100 connection, from click to inbox open it takes me almost 7 seconds. I tried it twice on all 3 of my gmail accounts with varying results, but none faster than 5.

<comment><USER51> Not everyone, but I would wager that most do: Many office desktops went from having an instance of Outlook.exe open 24 hours a day, to a couple of tabs in Chrome. Which is exactly why Google made it a rich, all-encompassing platform (calendars, contacts, instant messaging) -- it's a conversation dashboard that is intended to sit resident.

This whole discussion sounds like some sort of Fastmail astroturfing campaign. I mean when people complain about Google+ (which in gmail is wholly materialized as a +YourName up in the corner), it sounds like rote talking points.

<comment><USER53> I have a account on both gmail and fastmail. If we are just concerned about speed fastmail wins for me. And there is that whole tracking thing that bugs me so that is another win for fastmail. I just use gmail for signing up on websites I will most likely only visit one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CoApp, package management system for open source apps on Windows - <AUTHOR> http://coapp.org/

<comment><USER2> What about the none open source apps? If microsoft is ever going to be relevant again, they have to make it worth developing software for Windows rather than webapps. Microsoft has some advantage, since their apis are much more powerful than html/css/javascript, but actually getting users to install your program, and dealing with all that crap makes it not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> So right now I have msys + mingw + msysgit + emacs + console 2 on windows 7 and xp for development. It was difficult to set up and I'm happy that it is fully functional. I am actually a bit surprised that I got bash and emacs to a point where I'm happy. I can do what I need to do to deploy my application on windows with nsis. Or since the main part of the program is in python py2exe + nsis.

I can already get to the point where my application is an msi or exe or zip. What is CoApp going to add to the equation?

<comment><USER3> I just finished watching the presentation. I'm not an especially big proponent of open source... but this approach is so wrong. It ignores the solutions that exist and work in favor of new solutions that exclusively use Microsoft build tools and create more work for cross platform developers.

I must still be missing something because it looks like I'll have to maintain another configuration for coapp while still supporting gnu make (including mingwXX-make for other windows developers). Is there any reason that they are ignoring gnu tools? It's almost like they don't want to make the easy decision to just bring gnu to windows. You know... ./configure & make & make install. Windows users could just use bash.

The project style looks like classic Microsoft. I guess that bothers me because he claims independence. XML all over the place. New syntax and new ways of doing things that already work in * nix. A lot of magic and little explanation of the limits that will be placed on these builds.

I support a build system that works on windows. I just don't support some rigid new build system that kicks out pre-built microsoft binaries and requires me to maintain additional build configurations as a cross platform developer. Especially if that means I have to use a completely different development tool chain.

Ideally if I could maintain and update my *nix gnu tools and python using coapp I would use it. But I'm uncomfortable with a build system that isn't flexible. I've run into enough problems building on windows. I don't need another complication to add to the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is exactly what I miss most on my switch from Ubuntu to Windows7. I find the need to reboot on installation/updates especially annoying.

<comment><USER5> I'd trade a reboot for Adobe's retarded "we noticed you have [anything] open, please close it to continue this installation" policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh, how i miss apt-get like functionality on windows. I hope this takes off!

</comment><comment><USER7> It is interesting that Microsoft is involved with this. One of the developers is being paid to work on this project full-time.

Now if there were something like this for device drivers...

<comment><USER8> Windows 7 downloads and installs appropriate (and not generic!) drivers if allowed, even decent video drivers.

<comment><USER9> Yep. I was pleasantly surprised that after I had made it through the initial rounds of Windows Update, I had an Intel icon in my systray.

Of course, the fact that my Broadcom wireless NIC was supported out of the box was also nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also useful is WPKG: <http://wpkg.org/> Though it isn't exactly the same idea (more related to multiple workstations).

</comment><comment><USER11> What does MSI lack compared to CoApp?

<comment><USER12> CoApp may actually use MSI for packaging, but MSI doesn't have dependency management.

The purpose of CoApp is to make open source applications easily installable on Windows. I'm thinking similar to how you can install the GnuWin32 tools but more robust. So maybe a better description would be like Cygwin but more integrated into the Windows ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> what i need is auto update please!</comment>


Show HN: I Am Pickle Rick - <AUTHOR> https://iampicklerick.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

This is a silly site based on the Rick and Morty clip of Rick turning himself into a pickle [1] (because ??? he could). The amusement comes from Rick revealing he is the pickle, so I turned that into a command line 'surprise'. When you type "flip-pickle" into the mock-terminal, an asciiart image of Rick the pickle is shown.

That's it... lol. A simple and silly project. I considered making it more of a text adventure, but honestly two days of dev time is more than enough for this app!

Plus I now know how to use a mock-terminal in React, so I learned something. :)

If you are interested in the tech, this is a single page app (SPA) built in ReactJS using the terminal-in-react [2] library. Deployed with docker-compose on my Hetzner server, utilizing Cloudflare. It has 4 sizes of asciiart for different screen sizes, so it works decently well on mobile and desktop. And the favicon! lol.

But back to the serious work.

[1] [https://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/its- pickle-r...](https://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/its-pickle-rick)

[2] [https://github.com/nitin42/terminal-in- react](https://github.com/nitin42/terminal-in-react)

<comment><USER2> This is wonderful. A silly reference dressed in 'hacker' style. It doesn't boost productivity, it's just joyful. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> You comment is so nice. I keep coming back to it. I'll strive to leave comments like this elsewhere; simple but very powerful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> UX improvement: make it case insensitive. I'm on mobile and it took me a sec to realize that it didn't work because my keyboard automatically capitalizes the first letter in an input box

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I noticed that and found it annoying, too. Will work on it! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Added a quick fix

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aww, was hoping there'd be an old-school text adventure here!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, next time! I keep thinking of ways to tie in education to a text adventure. Trying to achieve what Walt Disney said:

> I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate > people and hope they were entertained.

<comment><USER5> My sole reason for playing Assassin's Creed games is so I can wander around in historical settings and read the flavor text they use to describe the various landmarks and historical events, artworks and people. Honestly, I think Ubisoft should eighty-six the assassin stuff and just make virtual museums.

<comment><USER6> AC Oddyssey and Origins had an educational mode complete with tour guides (or is that what you're referring to?)

<comment><USER5> That is not what I am referring to. The structure of those modes is too rigid: players have to follow a planned route, stop and wait for the guide to finish talking at each station. Too much like a real life tour.

<comment><USER6> Ah I understand, my assumption is you can disable/ignore the tour and walk around as you wish but I'm yet to have chance to try the mode myself to confirm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a fan of Steam Locomotive personally - [https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl](https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, the best part is it blocks control-c so you have to sit through the whole thing or until you figure out control-z.

[https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl/blob/master/sl.c#L93](https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl/blob/master/sl.c#L93)

<comment><USER9> Or Ctrl-\ (SIGQUIT), which most software doesn't block.

There's also [https://github.com/rwos/gti](https://github.com/rwos/gti)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see what you did here. I just don't understand why.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are people upvoting a random asciiart? Flagged.

<comment><USER12> Because it's amusing, nostalgic, and related to code. Have a sense of humor. Flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This might be the post that causes me to never come back to HN.

<comment><USER14> Ya know, sometimes it's nice to just relax and be silly once in a while. Even on a pretentious news aggregator devoted to people trying to suckle on VC money to launch their next 'great idea'.

<comment><USER13> You just openly admitted you're only here to subvert HN because you despise everything about it. Explain why you shouldn't be banned at this point.

<comment><USER14> I was banned a while ago. Way back...I just kept posting and eventually I was unbanned.

To address your post...uhh..well I dunno where to start. If I despised it I wouldn't bother posting here. I was making a light hearted comment about what this place literally is. It's a news website for people who are interested in or are currently applying for funding from YC. That's why hacker news exists. The fact that it attracts people who are uninterested in or unable to apply for funding from YC is ancillary.

Plus, it's nice to remind people here there's a world outside silicon valley. You guys seem lonely and completely disconnected from the world in your silver palaces sometimes.

Sorry, for this low quality, possibly inflammatory comment. I'll keep it at this and not drift any more.

<comment><USER13> You believe you're on a "pretentious news aggregator devoted to people trying to suckle on VC money to launch their next 'great idea'." That isn't lighthearted, it is a spiteful declaration that you look down on HN and everyone involved with it. Your third paragraph in the comment I'm responding to is similarly dripping with hatred against anyone who takes HN seriously. Everything you're saying amounts to a confession that your goal is to push against the spirit of the rules on HN as hard as you can without getting banned.

Anyone who wants to submerge themselves in low IQ "lighthearted" pop culture references has the entire rest of the internet for that. As you know and everybody else knows, if we wanted to see content such as what was submitted here, we'd go to the appropriate subreddit such as /r/PopCultureGarbageCodedIn5Minutes. No one needs your help to find reddit, especially not people who are "lonely and completely disconnected from the world" to borrow the insult you used against everyone on this site.

I don't know why everyone here is pretending to be unaware that this particular pop culture reference is extremely controversial and inflammatory. This specific meme was a powerful cultural breaking point, evenly dividing people between the 50% who love it and the other 50% who want nothing to do with the people who love it. Many of the latter are lurking in the comment section here but are worried about the consequences of speaking their mind where the former seized control early and planted their flag.

This submission should be treated like a honeypot. Everyone who upvoted OP's submission or posted a positive comment here is actively participating in a subversive attempt to turn HN into something more like reddit. As a consequence of this, they should be permanently shadowbanned from commenting as well as voting. It's the only way to ensure that people using HN correctly won't have their activity drowned out by those who don't.

<comment><USER15> Greetings, new friend!

You seem to have a misunderstanding on the use of Hacker News (henceforth "orange site"). While orange site (or its users) may be characterized as pretentious, it's by no means not a place for low IQ discussion. This can be demonstrated by the use of the upvote system. The goal of orange site is to increase your score and you do so by gaining upvotes. Every user's vote is worth the same so to increase upvotes an optimal strategy is to write a comment (or submission) that most who see it will agree with or like. High IQ content will be definition only appeal to a minority so isn't part of an optimal strategy (unless you can make it look significantly impressive).

Best wishes and happy commenting!

<comment> non-entity I honestly cant tell if this is some attempt at a copypasta or if this entire thread is real

<comment><USER14> Well I choose to believe FriendlyNormie really thinks I'm on a massive campaign to subvert and corrupt hn. It gives my comments far more purpose than just trying to gain a sense of validation when somebody clicks that up arrow and approves of something I say. Makes me feel like a spy rather than just a lonely internet dweller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cute but definitely keep going - I expected to make it through a bunch of the dialogue and thought it'd just crapped out. Super cute though.

</comment><comment><USER17> You're leaving a lot of extra gold stars on the table by not including some Solenya lore...

</comment><comment><USER18> Hire you based on that? ... there might be a tad more to the process than that!

<comment><USER19> I mean, he did turn himself into a pickle. Geez rick, they were right about outlandish requirements in the job market these days. I'm glad I have my 25 years of react experience to fall back on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love it :)) I'm quite sure you could host it for free on something like Netlify. No need for a full VM to host a static webpage without DB needs :).

</comment><comment><USER21> I tried Flip pickle, Flip-pickle, only flip-pickle worked!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Working on a fix. It's currently a bit fickle :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hah that's awesome. I read that in his voice too

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh geez Rick.

</comment><comment><USER24> Haha super cool. Will share with fans.

Accessed from mobile. Capital letter thing is annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I added a quick fix :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am confused, Rick.

</comment><comment><USER26> Beautiful

</comment><comment><USER27> > Rick turning himself into a pickle [1] (because ??? he could)

I feel like most people miss the thrust of that episode. Pickle Rick is an allegory about Rick's drinking problem taken to an absurd literalist extreme.

<comment><USER28> He's literally pickled himself.

This was obvious to me but I love these kinds of things that are hiding in plain sight. It took me 30 years to understand the "chicken cross the road" joke.

I adore the "ohhhhh" feeling you get when discovering them.

<comment><USER29> > It took me 30 years to understand the "chicken cross the road" joke

wait is there a deeper meaning to this joke? now I'm questioning everything.

<comment><USER30> The other side is the afterlife

<comment><USER31> I don't buy that interpretation. The joke is super old, like, baby boomer old. They weren't that dark. They were going around saying things like, "In the year 2000, we're going to have a base.. on the moon!"

There's no way the people of that generation would have even considered the darker interpretation of that joke. Hell, I'm gen-x, and depressive, and that interpretation never occurred to me.

<comment><USER32> Is this comment a joke, or it's the perception that some of my generational peers have : that dark thoughts, melancholy, depression are embodied only by gen x, and only gen x truly know them, to the point that no creative endeavor could reflect those states?

Please tell me it's the first, because I'm afraid of breaking my spine while folding in cringe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How much of R is written in R? - g-garron http://www.r-bloggers.com/how-much-of-r-is-written-in-r/

<comment><USER2> I think both lines of code and number of files are terrible metrics to use to compare sizes of code base across three very different languages. I don't have any experience with Fortran, but as a seasoned R and C hacker, I don't think the two languages could be much more different.

Well written R code tends to be incredibly compact, because the functions available in base R are plentiful and the language is both heavily functional and vector-oriented. The amount of manual memory management and explicit looping required by C easily inflates the lines of code.

A better metric, perhaps, would be to count the number of functions written in each language. Of course, there are issues of style there, but I think that would lead to a more comparable estimate. I don't know of a tool that does that for C - anyone know of one - or should I go the parser route?

</comment><comment><USER3> R is a pretty terrible language for many reasons, and it always surprises me when it rises to the top on HN.

But in terms of code quality within R itself, I was surprised to find that a number of its .c files are actually machine-translated Fortran, so I'm guessing the author's statistics are not far off.

I discovered this when I decided to confirm my suspicions that my (the?) most frequently used function, t(), which computes the transpose of the matrix, was implemented about as naively as possible. If R developers were really concerned with speed, this is probably the first place to start optimizing.

<comment><USER4> Can you go into more detail? I've been toying with learning R for ad-hoc analysis but if there is a better alternative worth learning I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER5> Depends on what you mean by "better". MATLAB and python+numpy will almost certainly run faster than R in almost all situations, they are also far more pleasant to program in (in my opinion).

However R has the advantage that it will have support for every obscure statistical analysis routine you can ever think of. It also has better support for reading in data from all kinds of sources and handling things like missing and invalid data. So if your goal is to quickly read in a bunch of data sets (that are small enough that performance isn't a critical issue) from arbitrary sources, run a bunch of statistical functions on that data and turn those results into pretty graphs, then R is pretty great.

<comment><USER6> Correct. The language R is _just plain weird_ (insane ideas about scoping/binding that seem to be completely unlike anything you've seen in any reasonably designed language in the last 20 years) and not very efficient to boot, unless you hit one of the bits that's just C under the hood.

However, the vast, vast repository of every statistical analysis under the sun - not just 'core R' but every thing that any statistician has hacked up - <AUTHOR> unparalleled.

My 'coping with R' strategy is to do all the heavy lifting data manipulation in C/C++/Python, then do one-shot things in R. I just pass csv files around but there are tighter integrations of R and python if you want to look into that.

<comment><USER5> Just as an aside, "coping with R" would be an awesome concept for a book or series of blog posts.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe 'Living with R', sort of akin to the self-help-book 'Living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome' type genre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.ohloh.net/p/rproject/analyses/latest>

<comment><USER8> Interesting... According to ohloh, Ubuntu has just 4k lines of code: <http://www.ohloh.net/p/ubuntu>

Must be some pretty dense code!

<comment><USER9> seems unrelated to ubuntu, its seems to be this project:<http://code.google.com/p/zecurrencyconverter/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The HN title's typo is very confusing...

</comment><comment><USER11> How R competes with other data mining environments:

[http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/08/poll-languages-for-data- min...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/08/poll-languages-for-data-mining- analytics.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> It is certainly a good thing (for speed) that the majority of lines of R are written in C. I used to work in a shop that did much of our development in R. We always used to joke "R is really fast if you write it in C".

<comment><USER13> R is quite slow, but there are two ways to improve this state of affairs.

1\. Use the functional style stuff rather than loops ( i.e. especially the apply family of functions)

2\. For large data sets avoid the default memory management which involves loading everything into memory all at once. The sqlite dataframe stuff is probably a good default for larger data sets :)

It's still slow though.

<comment><USER14> R has always been a niche language/platform for dataists/statisticians and because of that it really hasn't had the contributions of programming language developers and modern techniques.

It'd be cool to see R evolve more quickly as a language (implementation wise). We're getting hints of it with the new byte code compiler though.

That would be ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why didn't he use cloc ?

<comment><USER16> My usual tool is sloccount (<http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/>), but it doesn't identify R as a language (and discounts it entirely, it appears).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How well R competes with SPSS?

<comment><USER18> In what metric? The GUI of SPSS is better then R (which doesn't have a GUI, though interesting competitors are available like Rcmdr and Deducer). In terms of everything else (performance, graphics, statistical tools, programming language), then from what I understand - R is the winner without a doubt...

<comment><USER17> I learned R some time ago in university. I've heard of lots of newly graduated colleagues that now work doing "SPSS consulting" (whatever that means) for big businesses. But I can't really see how you could use R to parse financial data, becaule I lack the financial background to understand what it means. Maybe that's what SPSS provides, and what singingfish means with "you don't need to know what you're doing".

<comment><USER19> Actually, I read his comment as meaning that SPSS was more useful for the sort of "cookbook stat" usually taught in business schools.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I learn about deploying production environments? - <AUTHOR> I've recently taken over the role of Technical Lead at a small startup and I've been put in charge of our server deployment.
I was wondering what the best resources are for learning about best practices for server deployments, security, redundancy and such.
I have a good background in all these things from my degree (I graduated from university a year ago), but I want to expand and improve my knowledge. <comment><USER2> As a sysadmin, I recommend Tom Limoncelli's "Practice" books:

\- [https://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network- Administratio...](https://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network- Administration-Second/dp/0321492668)

\- [https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Cloud-System- Administration-...](https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Cloud-System- Administration-Distributed/dp/032194318X)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll give these a look!

<comment><USER2> Great, you are welcome! :) I have a complete program for training sysadmins at [http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to- make-a-...](http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-make-a- novice-system-administrator/)</comment></comment></comment>


Future Of Webapps London expo videos - <AUTHOR> http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

<comment><USER2> It's not up yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing my co-founder's talk! (Francisco Tolmasky, 280 North).</comment>


UK phone network TalkTalk has received ransom demand after attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/23/talktalk-cyber-attack-company-has-received-ransom-demand <comment><USER2> Pastebin message reported to be from the hackers [1] contains Islamic State references/language and some samples of the data breach.

[1] [http://pastebin.com/HHT4BxJA](http://pastebin.com/HHT4BxJA)

Edit: added some clarification to contents.</comment>


Astronauts may have to abandon International Space Station - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/space/30nasa.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder how impractical it would have been for NASA to keep a shuttle around (until there is another agency providing redundancy) for emergencies such as this and just stop the scheduled mann spaceflights.

<comment><USER3> The shuttle costs half a billion dollars per launch and the Soyuz has been rock solid in terms of reliability, present issues excluded. I don't think there was anyone seriously proposing keeping a shuttle around as a backup for the Soyuz.</comment></comment>


Micro Listening Device Pinpoints Origins of Sniper Fire / Aircraft in Battle - <AUTHOR> http://www.psfk.com/2010/03/micro-listening-device-identifies-any-sound-in-battle.html

<comment><USER2> How can it "measure the movement of individual air particles"?

I'm guessing that it measures the phase shift of received signals between measurements across the device and uses this to triangulate the origin of the sound. Their website doesn't give much insight.

<comment><USER3> From <http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/super-listening.php>

> At its heart are two platinum strips, each 200-nanometers thick (about 600 > atoms across) by 10 micrometers wide. They're stretched parallel across a > gap and heated to 200 degrees Celsius when operating.

> Air particles flowing past the strips cool them unevenly. The pattern of > cooling and heating is analyzed by signal-processing software, created by > Microflown, in a compact PC, such as the CompuLab fit-PC2.

They've got a couple cool images of the device on that page, too.

<comment><USER2> thanks, those pictures were pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A "battlefield" is an extremely noisy environment. I've worked on bots of such nature for a living and while the concept they describe makes sense at a modelling level, their process has very little field application (Dedicated IIR-ESP when you're getting shot at?). As far as pinpointing the location of gunfire goes, you are trained in Target Detection (TD) and have mounted systems like Boomerang on HMMVs. Trust me, when you've been out there long enough, you don't need a gadget to tell you what kind of gun the shot was fired from or the sort of aircraft approaching.

Cool concept nonetheless, I hope they publish more details.

<comment><USER3> According to the press release, it can pick out & identify sounds from inside cars at a crowded checkpoint, or allow a soldier to act as an air traffic controller in zero visibility. I'm not sure if it'll live up to the hype, but it seems useful.

<comment><USER4>
       allow a soldier to act as an air traffic controller in zero visibility

I read that on their website. Having had Marine Forward Air Controllers embedded in my unit, the claim sounds very dubious. Again, there isn't much technical or otherwise literature on this out there; I can only judge by my past experience with the gadgets I used in the military and as a bot engineer today.</comment></comment></comment>


It's Time to Defund Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-defund-social-media <comment><USER2> In the most general sense it seems like people are complaining that outrageous views have a chance to get heard. In their next breath they say the views are unpopular and held by no one.

No one minds wearing masks so why do we hear from people who don't want to wear masks?

I think there are two things going on here. The first is that there's a feeling that allowing someone to make a point is tantamount to expressing agreement with it. If you really disagree with it you make sure that the statement isn't even made.

The second thing is that while the author isn't taken in by the argument there's a belief that other people are less rigorous in their thinking and will be convinced by a poorly made case.

I think the root problem is that we're all in a room full of strangers and there's a loaded gun on the floor. I don't want to shoot anyone but just the same I'm going to make sure I'm the one to pick it up. I'll also wave off anyone who's coming near me. I'd like to have some brilliant idea to get rid of the gun entirely but I don't see that happening.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope this story goes viral!

</comment><comment><USER4> Social Media are sponsored by goverments?

<comment><USER5> >Calls to defund the police provide a helpful analogue. Until we fundamentally reimagine what law enforcement means and does, lasting change will not be possible; all the injustice baked into the system will continue emerging from that system. Something similar could be said of social media: Until we fundamentally reimagine our information ecosystem and our respective roles within it, we'll keep repeating the same patterns over and over—not as a bug of the system, not as a feature of the system, but as the system itself.</comment></comment>


'Reading Rainbow' Reaches Its Final Chapter - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561

<comment><USER2> _Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do._

 _"Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read," Grant says. "You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read."_

Seems to me that if more kids had a love of reading, they'd pick up the rest themselves, and the government wouldn't have to focus so much on cramming basic phonics down their throats.

I attribute RR as one of the reasons I had such a high reading level as a child. It made me want to read, so I did. And the more I read, the better I became at it.

<comment><USER3> It's also a troubling reminder of how when government gets involved in educational programs things can change and potentially for the worse. I have no idea if "Reading Rainbow" is better than things like "Word World" or "Super Why!" (outed myself as a parent no doubt) but it seems as though people could have decided that for themselves.

I don't really care for the new shoes that teach kids how to read though I think that "Curious George" is fantastic. For those who aren't aware it's a trial and error approach to learning where George learns things by experimenting and no one gets yelled at for being wrong.

I think in the end that every time period has hits and misses in terms of shows that actually reach children. Maybe something will come along to replace "Reading Rainbow" when it becomes obvious that a show like that is needed again.

<comment><USER4> Reading Rainbow was _created_ via government intervention...I'm not sure that's a good example of how government should stay out of education. It seems like government can do a very good job of education sometimes!

<comment><USER5> Just because it was created for PBS I don't think it's fair to say it was created via government intervention. They get roughly a third of their funding from the state, a third from the private sector and a third through public pledges. It's not like the government has any direct impact on the show.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we please try for less inflammatory titles? Protocol on here seems to be to copy the title from the source.

<comment><USER7> Please, please, please don't let Hacker News approach the tone of reddit's front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What utter sadness! I too was inspired to read in mass quantities as a child thanks in large part to this show.

Focus on teaching the mechanics of reading? Not unlike how mathematics is "taught" to kids, draining all of the beauty out of it, only to be replaced with misdirected memorization? No thanks. As dmpayton mentioned, imparting the desire to read is important... the mechanics will be learned with much more joy when there's a purpose in it.

And sure, we can have educational programs about the mechanics; some viewers may need that. But please don't trade one for the other.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why did you change the headline?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a valid question. I changed it because my point in submitting it was to draw attention to this part of the article:

 _The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading, like phonics and spelling._

<comment><USER10> So I guess the question is... is this due to a reduction in kids' ability to read or is it that we've just realized now that we're focusing on the wrong thing?

HN is a pretty specialized group so the fact that RR inspired a lot of people here isn't great data.

<comment><USER9> _HN is a pretty specialized group so the fact that RR inspired a lot of people here isn't great data._

Very good point.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great. Now I'll have that song stuck in my head just like I did for _years_ as a kid.

</comment><comment><USER12> Theme song. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6j8EiWIVZs>

</comment><comment><USER13> I read voraciously as a child because I respected and modeled my parents and _they_ read voraciously. As single-income, lower middle class Americans we couldn't afford a lot of popular luxuries but they would never turn down buying a book--the only exception being cases where a used or library alternative to a new book were readily available.

So, from my point of view, one thing missing from the equation is a focus on increasing adult literacy. Parents who sit around watching TV all day tend to have kids who sit around watching TV all day. Parents who read and write tend to have kids who read and write. And the associated creative and mental talents are sorely lacking in modern middle management in a way that I'd really appreciate seeing corrected over time. And there's room for both liberals and conservatives here: regardless of the argument as to whether government should promote such behavior or it should be entirely a private initiative, everyone can agree that maybe it's a good idea either way.

Sorry if that came off a bit snarky. Sore subject for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the Harry Potters and Twilights show that kids DO love to read, they just have to have a reason why. When I grew up, no one directed me to any of my favorite reads like 1984 and Catcher in the Rye. Honestly, the whole reading for a grade thing is so stale I can't believe it still exists.

College is much the same way. I just had a class where we read the novel "Pattern Recognition." In this lovely novel they get all excited about some artistic video someone posted to the internet, as if it was worth spending millions of dollars to find out who posted it. Thus, I can understand how kids might feel like some of the shit they have to read is just that: shit.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sad. It was always a treat when the teacher would put one of these on in elementary school.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article hinted at the decision being motivated by data, but was not specific.

It seems likely that as televisions have become more common, younger children and those from poorer families are watching, and have different educational needs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Until it's squashed out of them, children are born learning machines. They'll quickly gravitate to whatever input stuffs them fastest.

If that's not authors any more, then it's up to the authors. Not to the TV.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't imagine that quantifying the success or failure of a program like this is even possible. All you can quantify (and quite easily) is its popularity, and so that's probably why it's being dropped.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's too bad. If the show succeeds, kids will read, and it will lose popularity.

<comment><USER10> I don't think thats true. If a show inspires you to love reading, then (as a kid) you'll associate reading with that show and keep enjoying it.

Plus, a show like Reading Rainbow isn't really going to long term viewers, its going for the current generation of little kids.

That being said, if kids love reading before seeing Reading Rainbow, then it will lose popularity, but thats okay because its goal is being fulfilled anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a shame they didn't have the budget to continue the show and produce more directly educational programming. The sad part is I think they're spot on with the assumptions about childhood literacy. I am not at all convinced it's simply an issue of access to education. There are bigger social issues at play. Access to education is only as good as your motivation to learn and that's what we're missing. Even at <10 years old so kids are already developing a horrible sense of self-entitlement and a backwards culture worship of ignorance.

<comment><USER20> Going through school I attended two high schools growing up: one was the one of the best public high schools in the nation, the other was one of the worst. The biggest differences between the two schools were not the teachers, facilities or funding. It was hands down the parents and students motivation and commitment to learning. Schools and teachers can only motivate their students so much. The parents and the students themselves must be the ones that drive the commitment and motivation to learn, regardless of the age of the child. When attending the "bad" school teachers devoted significant and resources to the minority of students that were motivated to learn because they were allowed to do so.

Now being a parent with Every Child Held Behind (ECHB), teachers can't afford to spend time with the motivated students to push them even higher. They must dedicate all their time to the kids and parents that have no commitment. My daughter has been in two elementary schools and both have treated her similarly; she can pass the test without help so she's a low priority student. I can't imagine where I would be without extra time spent by my teachers to push me further.

Both of my sister-in-laws are elementary teachers and both have considered leaving the field because of the constraints of ECHB. They can't teach the kids that want to learn, because they need to spend any time they have with "Johnny". When his parents actually bother to show up to a teacher conference, they accuse the teacher of not educating their kid. Ignore the fact that Johnny randomly shows up, is disruptive, is high on sugar and god only knows what else, and exhausted -- that's not their fault. Johnny can't be moved to a special school or class, because that would hold him behind the rest of the class.

Does Johnny deserve to have access to education and assistance to address his issues - definitely. Does the rest of Johnny's class deserve to be held behind because of Johnny's issues, no they don't. Please can eliminate the failed policies of Every Child Held Behind.

PS - Any failings in my English are my own fault, not the teachers that I had as a kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I loved RR as a kid.

However, that being said, can we keep in mind as we reap our scorn on the powers that be that this is a _tv show_ that talks about _books_.

There is a much easier way to foster a love of reading in a child. Here's only one of many starts: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottes_Web>

</comment><comment><USER22> For those of you looking for a possible explanation as to why our education system is such a failure, I suggest Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's book, _The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America_ <http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.sml.pdf>

<comment><USER23> I believe you have been modded down for two reasons:

\- The PDF you linked to is massive

\- The book, and the sites its homepage links to, seem very conspiracy- oriented

<comment><USER22> Sorry, should have mentioned it is a ~7MB book. As far as conspiracy goes, can anyone offer up a mainstream explanation as to why public education is such a massive failure? If there is such an explanation, surely it would have led to reform by now. On the contrary, as public education spending continues to increase, literacy continues to decrease.

<comment><USER24> I want to echo the other reply -- I've discovered in my life that whenever there is something wrong with a system, it's never a cabal deliberately undermining it. It's always some perverse incentive for a group to act badly. Look for the underlying perverse incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Demographic changes do have consequences.

</comment><comment><USER26> In other news, 'Gravity's Rainbow' is no more; Pynchon no longer assumed erudite.

(I grew up with Reading Rainbow and look what it got me: bouts of graphomania, a lifelong addiction to reading and a sinking feeling when I'm exposed to contemporary long-form writing.)</comment>


LiveReload: Reflect CSS Changes Instantly, with No Browser Reload - <AUTHOR> http://livereload.com/

<comment><USER2> Sigh, these sorts of things always force you to change how you develop and don't really work for mobile web dev. This wheel seems to been re-invented far too often.

Alternatively:

      sudo pip install watchdog
      watchmedo shell-command -w -c "make" -i '*/.*' -R

Where "make" is either for a makefile or some other build script.

And then just put live.js (from <http://livejs.com/>) as a script inside your pages.

This works anywhere with basically any stack (i.e. if you had some strange alien CSS preprocessor as long as it can be processed with a command you can use this), integrates into your normal build system and requires no browser plugins or proprietary binaries.

<comment><USER3> LiveReload should works on every browser that supports WebSockets. It should work on modern WebKit-based mobile browsers.

Live.js uses polling. It sends XHR HEAD request every second.

LiveReload monitors file changes using FSEvents (on Mac OS X) and inotify (on Linux). When the file modified, it pushes its path to the browser and reloads immediately.

<comment><USER4> > Live.js uses polling. It sends XHR HEAD request every second.

The horror!

<comment><USER5> It is horror when you forget about it, and push it up to production

<comment><USER4> Has nothing to do with Live.js then. Isn't really even about a developer's forgetfulness when pushing to production. It would be about failure to set up different production and development environments, which can cause problems much worse than a wasteful AJAX call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a mac, but prefer to use just Guard and the browser extensions. Fortunately, that info is still available:

<https://github.com/mockko/livereload>

After all the time that's been put into the free version by others I wish livereload.com would have a prominent link to it. But I'm glad that the gem, which I don't use because <https://github.com/guard/guard-livereload> is easier to install, and the browser extensions are available under the MIT license.

<comment><USER6> +1 for Guard. I recently switched to Mac and couldn't get stock livereload to run with my rvm'd 1.9.2 system ruby. I'm happy to have found Guard, I'm running it with livereload and compass and love the streamlining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another alternative is <https://github.com/mape/node-hotcode>

Has page reload and doesn't require any project specific settings.

It is open source and works (web app using an iframe + path to watch) without altering development habits.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't get it... how freaking hard can it be to hit F5?

I'm not trying to be snarky - I'm just genuinely surprised that no one has posted that they consider the need for "live refresh" to be wholly unnecessary.

I come from a background in C++ development where compile times range anywhere from a minute to a day, so I'm truly thankful for "instant compilation" of CSS and HTML via a single click of a keyboard button..... but I wouldn't ever dream that my need to hit the F5 key was hindering my development ability!

<comment><USER9> Genuine answer is that you might want to try a tool like MacRabbit's CSSEdit first, which applies your changes without even saving. You get used to seeing the result instantly.

My motivation for building LiveReload has been to get the same instant feeling, but with compiled languages like LESS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The technology that drives this is undoubtedly very interesting, but what does this truly offer? What would be the practical application of this?

Are there droves of people who could benefit from constantly changing css?

Perhaps I'm just missing something rather obvious. If so, please help me.

<comment><USER11> Quickly switching of themes is one reason why you would want to make it easy to change css: <http://xavi.co/articles/jquery-ui-css-themes-hosted-on-cdn>

I can also be quite useful during development. One cool trick to achieve something similar is to add a contentEditable attribute to a style tag: <http://css-tricks.com/8618-show-and-edit-style-element/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could just use Google Chrome and test your changes with this file:

C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css

Every time it is saved the changes are reflected on all open webpages instantly.

<comment><USER3> You have to reload the page then. Also, copy the changes from this file to your stylesheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey! Woke up this morning to find LiveReload on HN home page. Ask me anything, I guess. :)

<comment><USER13> Hey Andrey, it's pretty awesome that you support Stylus. Do you think you can make this work with VM-based development? I'm working in VirtualBox Ubuntu but viewing my site locally in Chrome (OS X).

<comment><USER9> I'd love to add GUI support for that, but there are more important tasks that would help many more people (like, polishing the Mac ver and making a Windows one).

For remote server use cases, I recommend guard-livereload. It uses my browser extensions and works really well on any platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Epiphany (web browser bundled with the Gnome desktop environment) has supported a reduced version of this functionality for a number of years now. It's fairly easy to implement with the dnotify functionality of the Linux kernel.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have good luck with using Chrome's CSS editor, then right clicking and hitting "Save As". You can keep working without reloading, and periodically save your changes back.

<comment><USER3> <https://github.com/NV/chrome-devtools-autosave> You might find this useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Look cool, let me know when there's a PC version.

<comment><USER4> There's an open source version that's in ruby and runs on the command line, and likely works on windows.

<https://github.com/guard/guard-livereload>

<https://github.com/guard/guard> (has windows instructions)</comment></comment>