Ask HN: Best way to render latex equations in GitHub readme? - <AUTHOR> I want to render math equations in a github readme. Github flavored markdown does not support mathjax. My current solution is to write each equation individually, render it to a .png file, and include the .png file as an image in the repository.
This is cumbersome and inconvenient, so I'm wondering if any tools exist to streamline this process. I don't mind including the .png files in the readme, but it would be nice if I could write the latex equations in some kind of intermediate document, then run a script to build it into a readme file and rendered images.
Anyone know of something? <comment><USER2> You can easily convert a dvi to png.

[https://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvipng](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvipng)

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually, nope that doesn't work apparently. I did find two solutions:

* [http://www.r-bloggers.com/rendering-latex-math-equations-in-...](http://www.r-bloggers.com/rendering-latex-math-equations-in-github-markdown/)

* [http://www.sciweavers.org/free-online-latex-equation-editor](http://www.sciweavers.org/free-online-latex-equation-editor) (as per: [https://github.com/github/markup/issues/274](https://github.com/github/markup/issues/274))

</comment><comment><USER3> What if made the readme a restructuredtext file instead of Markdown?

</comment><comment><USER4> It's possible pandoc can do that? (It can take markdwon with embedded LaTeX as input, I don't know if can export markdown + images from that)

If you find something, please report back, it seems like something that would be useful to have documented somewhere

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, you may want to check out [https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math- in-markdown](https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown)</comment>


He's the Michael Jordan of Darts. He Just Has to Prove It - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/sports/michael-van-gerwen-darts-championship.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I have issue with the claim that Taylor was just beating up on inferior competition historically. One way we can measure this is by the 'three-dart average' \- the average score of each player's turn of three darts at the board. Taylor had the televised world record from 1991-2004 and from 2008-2012. He was leagues better than anyone on the planet. Van Gerwen is in my mind a better player now but this article really sells short how utterly dominant Taylor was. He wasn't just better than everyone else, his opponents weren't even playing the same game.

<comment><USER3> > I have issue with the claim that Taylor was just beating up on inferior > competition historically.

As you should - because, even if it's true, it's silly.

Jordan arrived at post-expansion NBA and his early dominance of the game can be directly attributed to that. But we don't downplay his achievements and skill because of that - we take them what they were - incredible for the era.

Taylor has won 216 professional tournaments - 84 major titles and a record 16 World Championships. Taylor won eight consecutive World Championships from 1995 to 2002 and reached 14 consecutive finals from 1994 to 2007.

We're not dealing with the 60s here in Taylor - we're dealing with a man that is _currently_ dominant in the game. Not as much as he _was_ but he's still the man to beat.

Van Gerwen is good - great even - but he's no Jordan yet. He's only been good for 2 years, let me know when it's been 10.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what you mean by "post-expansion", by my reading of the wiki timeline ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_team#National_Basket...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_team#National_Basketball_Association)) Jordan came in during the middle of what would become the longest drought between NBA expansions. (And considering the rest of the league at the time, it's hard for me to get my head around what "incredible for the era" could mean)

<comment><USER3> Jordan's major wins - his 91-93 championship run - and thus a fair portion of his legacy, came post-expansion of the NBA by 4 teams.

It's not a knock on Jordan or the Bulls, but there was a talent drought for a few years. The Bulls took full advantage and Jordan _shone_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Claiming Messi is 20 times better than Maradona at his peak is silly. Just as silly as claiming to be 20 times better that Taylor at his peak. Maybe take the reciprocal, 5% better. Maybe. Incidentally, darts as a spectator sport is borderline at best. Van Gerwen is right, it's boring! I think the enthusiastic fans are really just enthusiastic about the vast quantity of alcohol they're imbibing. It's a fad and it will decline just as fast as it's risen. I think.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_van_Gerwen#World_Champ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_van_Gerwen#World_Championship_results)

</comment><comment><USER7> does anyone actually believe he doesn't practice!? seems like he read 48 laws of power "Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless"

<comment><USER8> I dunno, once you've mastered something practice can become meaningless. It's an incredible skill to be able to hit any point on a dart board, but once you can do it... you can sorta just do it. Some sports require practice to maintain stamina and strength but not darts. And there's only so much variety you can really add to your throw. You can be certain he'd have to practice if he wanted to start throwing with his non dominant hand.

<comment><USER9> A skill in just about any physical competition is perishable. If you don't keep up with it, you won't be as good at it as you once were. I have only casually played darts, but I have to think this isn't much different from hitting baseballs, shooting free throws, or hitting a golf ball. It takes practice to get good, and it takes practice to stay good, especially at the highest levels of competition.

<comment><USER10> Eh, there's no comparison. Playing most sports at a high level requires a massive amount of strength training and maintenance work just to keep your body functioning. I don't play darts, but from a purely physical aspect there is so much less potential for injury and less need to stay in superb physical condition across the entire body. Elite level athletes need to do everything from flexibility work, daily massage / myofascial release to promote blood flow and break up scar tissue, strengthen vulnerable areas like the neck to protect against concussions, careful nutrition, etc. If you don't train and do the work that accompanies training, you won't make it through half a season.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, if he's as good at darts as Michael Jordan is at machine learning, that's really saying something!

<comment><USER12> From a nonparametric Bayesian perspective you're clustering the wrong people with this prior.</comment></comment>


Release Announcement for Racket 6.10 - <AUTHOR> https://download.racket-lang.org/v6.10.html <comment><USER2> > Internally, Racket's intermediate compatibility layer over operating-system > facilities has been moved into its own library, "rktio", so it can be used > in future Racket implementations.

Presumably by "future racket implementations" they mean the Racket 7 move to Chez Scheme: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656397)

Also, this seems like a neat thing for people needing to deploy racket code x-platform:

> Racket supports cross-compilation of executables in more cases, including > executables that depend on packages for foreign libraries.

<comment><USER3> > Presumably by "future racket implementations" they mean the Racket 7 move to > Chez Scheme:

Presumably, it's broader than that, and applies to _any_ new VMs enabled by the Racket-in-Racket effort, not just the expected move to Chez as the primary VM.

<comment><USER4> Is anyone aware of any languages targeting the Racket VM? Any thoughts on whether the Racket VM would be a more pleasant VM target than, say, the JVM or the .Net CLR?

<comment><USER2> The VM itself without the "racket is a language for building languages" thing? Not that I know of. That being said, Racket has a LOT of languages built on it.

For example, this site (Hacker News) is built in Arc, which is built on an old version of Racket.

EDIT: Also worth noting that Racket will move to an even more performant runtime (Chez Scheme) at some point in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anybody use Racket in production? Every time I think about it, the lack of libraries holds me back.

<comment><USER6> Curious too, but mostly about Racket's performances in recent releases, I've always been told it's rather slow.

<comment><USER2> Slow is relative. Slow compared to Java? In some cases yes, and in others not so bad: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=racket&lang2=java)

Slow compared to, say, Python3? Generally Racket wins out commandingly: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=racket&lang2=python3)

EDIT: Normal disclaimers about lies, damned lies, and benchmarks apply :-)

<comment><USER7> I agree. Moreover, like the examples in the benchmargame, usually for code that only crunch numbers Racket is 10x-20x times faster than Python. For code that use a lot of strings or hash-tables, Racket is usually slightly slower, 20%-50%. YMMV.

It's also important to compare the idiomatic version of the code in Racket versus the idiomatic version of the code in Python. If you make a line by line translation, you can get an awful performance.

Also, remember that by default the DrRacket IDE use the mode "debugging" and "preserve stacktrace". They are very handy for debugging but they make the code much slower. The recommendation is to run the benchmarks in the command line. But if you disable "debugging" and "preserve stacktrace" the results are quite good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Students everywhere thank you

<comment><USER9> praise the racket overlords, I'm very grateful for this release also

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's better to link to the announcement page: [https://download.racket-lang.org/v6.10.html](https://download.racket- lang.org/v6.10.html)

<comment><USER10> Thanks! We've updated the link from [https://download.racket- lang.org](https://download.racket-lang.org).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sorry to go meta, but why do people have to mess with the font weight? 99% of the time you should just leave it at 400. (The font is bold on the whole page)

<comment><USER12> complete guess, their doc generation system used this by default, now racket visual identity is tied to it</comment></comment>


Show HN: GICN – Crunchbase for Global Indian Business Leaders - <AUTHOR> http://www.gicn.in/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looking for you feedback and comments...</comment>


The only way to solve the three body problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/06/way-solve-three-body-problem/ <comment><AUTHOR> Flagged by my Google alert on "three body".

WAY more triple homicides than physics articles, but every once in awhile something good like this shows up!</comment>


Does Japan get enough sleep? - <AUTHOR> http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2016/08/27/lifestyle/japan-get-enough-sleep/ <comment><USER2> No one gets enough sleep in my opinion. We should all embrace the 6 hour work day and give people more free time for creativity and relaxation. If everything indicates that the curent work day is not good for people why aren't we changing anything? Oh right... we are all slaves.. that's why.</comment>


'Mundane' blogs could help train artificial-intelligence computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.canada.com/news/BLOG+CHRONICLES/2715796/story.html <comment><USER2> I had a similar idea a few weeks ago: I wondered if, given enough blog posts/tweets by a given person, could you create a close approximation of a their personality as an AI.</comment>


What Hollywood's Power Players Can Teach Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/10/5-things-hollywoods-power-players-can-teach-entrepreneurs.php

<comment><USER2> The book "Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success" shows how similar Hollywood and software business are. [http://www.amazon.com/Hollywood- Management-PRO-best-Practice...](http://www.amazon.com/Hollywood-Management- PRO-best-Practices-Microsoft/dp/0735625697)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugh. If you're dealing with more than a few thousand bucks (or more than you care to kiss goodbye), spend a little dough and have an attorney draft the _right_ document for you. Far too many of these do-it-yourself contracts go sour because, well, they're do-it-yourself.</comment>


Eleventy – A simpler static site generator written in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/11ty/eleventy#eleventy- <comment><USER2> If the goal of this project is related to simplicity, the README makes it look like anything but that.

<comment><USER3> I know rite?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What makes it simpler?

</comment><comment><USER5> Simpler than what?</comment>


Ask HN: Two-factor authentication and other extended security measures - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to add two-factor security to our web app. This could be based on YubiCo's YubiKey -- a nice open system and cheap compared to RSA's token, or possibly text messages sent out with a one-time code. Does anyone have experience with either?
YubiKey is nice, but has an acquisition and processing cost (get hardware from Sweden, reprogram with a new private key, collect postal addresses, send out to customers, deal with customers losing keys). SMS messages can be almost universally sent, but require some third party provider or modem to send worldwide (is there a good third party service to send out a SMS message to any cell phone reliably?)
We don't store e.g. PCI (payment) data or other highly sensitive data where there are some laws requiring additional protection, but still have somewhat sensitive data. If you look at the questionnaire from http://www.sharedassessments.org/ (warning: annoying registration required) how does your security stack up? This may not be something you run into if you do B2C or B2B for small companies, but a large company may have a vendor assessment programme which will require you to go through this. That happened to me and just going through that questionnaire may leave you rather concerned.
Here are my security discussion topics -- while security occasionally comes up as a topic, I think a practical discussion might be useful:
1) What do you do for account security of your web app? There are the obvious issues: XSS, CRSF, sql injection, hashed (bcrypt or similar) passwords. Do you require SSL? Do you train users in understanding MITM attacks and not accepting invalid certificates? Require strong passwords, require password changes? Do you apply different standards to staff users (using SSH or some higher-powered web app login) vs client users?
2) Do you use two-factor authentication? Do you have an open SSH port or restrict SSH access to only certain hosts or even only terminated VPN connections? Do you allow users to restrict their logins only from certain IPs or perhaps use client-side certificates?
3) What do you do with potentially sensitive data of your web app? Disk encryption and other symmetric encryption seems to protect only against the unlikely case of hardware theft; if you're collecting some data you need to access later encryption does not seem useful.
4) How do you sell higher security to your users? Unless your audience is technically savvy or has a good IT department how do you convince them to e.g. buy a hardware token or start using SMS one-time passwords to login? They might ask "So you want me to buy this hardware token, are you saying my data is insecure now without it?"
5) Do you use any other security measures? E.g. mod_audit to try to stop some XSS attacks; tools like snort or tripwire to analyze traffic and server integrity?
6) How do you get to higher security? Following some good checklist? Hire tptacek or a similar well-reputed security company to go over your code and practices? In-house scans with Nessus? <comment><AUTHOR> I'll answer some of my own questions on security measures:

1) We encrypt password using bcrypt, so in case of a database theft they are not easy to crack. We require SSL any time any authentication action is required -- cookies are sent with the secure option so over HTTPs only, and login/password must be entered over SSL. When you create an account your email gets a link that you have to follow and only there enter your password, same if you forget your password. No user will have an email sent nor can he even ask support what his password is. Of course this requires he can securely access his email account without anyone else snooping.

1b) We leave password strength up to customers and very few (1%) of them care to enable settings above basics (e.g. requiring password change every X days or password consisting of both numbers and digits and special characters). So while the feature is there technically, it's a failure socially.

1c) CSRF is handled by generating a token when generating a sensitive form; that token must be used when submitting that form. XSS is prevented by quoting of untrusted user input when displaying it.

2) Our SSH ports are wide open, but brute password cracking from a single IP is prevented by fail2ban which blocks IPs that repeatedly try to enter bad usernames/passwords. This does not protect against distributed password cracking which is why I like two-factor authentication. Many employees from roaming IPs access our SSH port so we can't easily firewall them, but I have a solution in mind where users can enable IP access via the web app (which uses different usernames/passwords).

3) Backups are encrypted, but that's it. If you collect fact X that may be sensitive, how do you protect that fact on disk if you have a rich web UI that uses that fact X for various reports?

5) We use mod_audit with some cut down rules and a few additional custom rules; an external company runs a Nessus-like scan. I've installed various toolkits to check vital binary integrity (rkhunter), have automatic updates from a good vendor (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

6) I have started getting nightmares around about thepiratebay.org hosting a giant mycompany-complete-data-hahahahaha.set torrent, thus this posting :-)</comment>


The Rage to Master: The Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts (1996) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www2.bc.edu/ellen-winner/pdf/talent_in_visual_arts.pdf

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure their paper establishes it, but I'll given them the point that hard work _alone_ is not enough to reach the highest levels. However, the paper seems to jump directly from that point to the conclusion that "talent is the _decisive_ element", which of course does not logically follow.

I will give them that talent is one element, but they didn't need to write a paper to convince me of that. And as far as disentangling the relative importance of talent as compared to hard work, I would say the paper does nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a particularly good article.

It provides no statistical evidence. In addition, we know that many people who claim to be engaging in "deliberate practice" are not.

The Bulletproof Musician blog (warning: it's attempting to sell a method) is full of stuff about this. Quite often, there are significant differences in execution and strategy.

For example: [http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/the-two-most-efficient- an...](http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/the-two-most-efficient-and-two- least-efficient-memorization-strategies/)

While I might argue that talent matters at the very highest echelons, _very_ few people actually put in enough time to get to the point that it matters.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm unfamiliar with this domain, but this stuck out to me:

"By talent, we refer to an innate ability _or proclivity to learn in a particular domain_."

Is this redefining "talent" to include people's _taste_? Ie, does "natural talent" as defined above now include the fact that someone likes/is drawn to something, and thus decides to spend time on it?</comment>


Citizen Science Effort Seeks to Survey the Entire Great Barrier Reef - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/massive-citizen-science-effort-seeks-survey-entire-great-barrier-reef-180973367/ <comment><USER2> interesting

</comment><comment><USER3> Thats a looot of reef!</comment>


A micro-communist utopia in Spain with no police, no mortgages and full employment - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/marinaleda <comment><USER2> FTA:

> Life has not been entirely utopian for the villagers however. As the 2008 > financial crisis developed, Sanchez-Gordillo lead his Pueblo on several > raids of national supermarket chains in neighbouring towns. As a result of > these raids, several Marinaledans were arrested for stealing foodstuffs to > distribute amongst the village poor. This gained Marinaleda national and > international notoriety, and earned the former mayor the nickname of the > "Spanish Robin Hood."

Well, it's easy to live in an utopian communist experiment if whenever your economy collapses you simply ransack and pillage neighboring capitalist ventures and rely on them to stay afloat, and ultimately flee your collapsed society to take refuge in the cozy mist of capitalism.

Recommended reading: El Che Guevara de Marinaleda abandona la alcaldía y deja un pueblo en la ruina

[http://www.periodistadigital.com/andalucia/sevilla/2014/11/1...](http://www.periodistadigital.com/andalucia/sevilla/2014/11/13/el- che-guevara-de-marinaleda-abandona-la-alcaldia--sanchez-gordillo.shtml)

Taken from the newspiece:

"In spite of its small population, Marinaleda is now the sixth most indebted village in the province of Seville - 105 municipalities - with a debt of 1,020 euros per citizen. Unemployment is 22% and the average income per capita is only 9,273 euros. His anti-capitalist legacy also leaves other gaps."</comment>


The Allegory of Treo - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/11/the-allegory-of-treo/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm blown away by this. I lived through those days as a Windows Mobile and Palm developer and had this weird feeling of deja-vu when the Nokia-MS news broke. Now I know why!</comment>


API Documentation and the Communication Illusion - <AUTHOR> http://jamescooke.info/api-documentation-and-the-communication-illusion.html <comment><USER2> Hey guys lets write documentation first, it will be great and clear everything up.

Isn't this how waterfall development was/is supposed to work.

<comment><USER3> Based on organization structure, and your timing, there's a point where it's necessary.

If you have separate teams designing the client and server, you'll eventually get to a point where you need to agree on the messages passed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might find this project interesting: [http://swagger.io](http://swagger.io)

We use it to document services by reflecting docs off of the implemented service. Upside, no drift!

</comment><comment><USER5> Of course you write the documentation first. Both provider and user need it so they both talk to the same interface.

Here's an API document I wrote.[1] Comments?

[1] [http://sitetruth.com/doc/sitetruthapi.html](http://sitetruth.com/doc/sitetruthapi.html)

<comment><USER6> _Here 's an API document I wrote.[1] Comments?_

You asked, so:

The organization can be better. Usually when I am looking at an API, the first question I have is, "What is this API, what can I do with it?" There's one sentence about that in the header, but it's not very clear. Then you jump right into low-level protocol details. Your pictures are good, and help to understand, but they come way late.

The broad organization should be something like: 1 "Here's what you can do with this API" 2 "Here's how to use it" 3 "Here are the fine details" and maybe (4 "Legal garbage")

Nice quote at the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out [http://apifortress.com/](http://apifortress.com/) I believe they do the exact testing your looking for.

<comment><USER8> Looks interesting! Thanks.</comment></comment>


NodeConf Argentina Call for Speakers is now open - <AUTHOR> https://2016.nodeconf.com.ar/call-for-speakers.html <comment><AUTHOR> Organizer here, thanks for proposals, shares, feedback, and upvotes! :)</comment>


Larry Page Wants Earth To Have A Mad Scientist Island - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/15/larry-page-wants-earth-to-have-a-mad-scientist-land/

<comment><USER2> I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...

Rapture.

A city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small.

―Andrew Ryan

So - you know - a lighthouse in north atlantic is a good place to start.</comment>


Rails 2.2: i18n, HTTP validators, thread safety, JRuby/1.9 compatibility, docs - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/11/21/rails-2-2-i18n-http-validators-thread-safety-jruby-1-9-compatibility-docs <comment><USER2> An extra collection of Rails 2.2 release related links:

[http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-22-released-27-links-and- res...](http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-22-released-27-links-and-resources-to- get-you-going-1354.html)</comment>


Show HN: I built a more Indie Hacker friendly version of Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://thehackstack.com/?ref=HN <comment><AUTHOR> I don't dislike Product Hunt. I visit it multiple times per day and have done for years. However I do think it lacks in some areas and that lacking seems to be increasing as time goes on.

I built this for mainly the Indie Hacker community but obviously anyone can submit anything.

Love to know what you think.

The Stack's refresh weekly just now. If traffic ever merits it they'll refresh daily.

<comment><USER2> Nice! Thank you and will bookmark it! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot :-)</comment></comment></comment>


NSA 'engaged in industrial espionage' – Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/25907502

<comment><USER2> This should be a known fact acknowledged by everyone by now, from his leaks, but I don't think it is, and it's good to have him still being able to speak up about these things, instead of being locked up in solitary confinement without being able to respond to the governments' continuous lies.</comment>


Falling for a Hells Angel - <AUTHOR> http://narrative.ly/gangsters/falling-for-a-hells-angel/

<comment><USER2> The people in this story (including the author) seem insane to me. It's crazy enough to ride a motorcycle (let alone without armor), but that's a footnote to the real issues: the violence, needless aggression, and treatment of women as chattel.

What's worse is the author spares no effort rationalizing her abuse. For example: After Jack hits her, he quickly says he's sorry and comes to her aid. That was not an example of how much Jack cared about her. That was Jack scared of her calling the cops and sending him to jail.

I can't find a single good decision made by the author of this story. Had Jack not broken up with her, she'd probably still be in this abusive relationship.

<comment><USER3> Riding a motorcycle is not crazy. It is a risk/reward decision. The risk can be mitigated by always riding with gear (ATGATT - All The Gear All The Time) and making smart decisions about how & when you ride. For me the reward of being on a bike far outweighs the risk.

<comment><USER2> Humans suck at estimating risk. From the Wikipedia article on motorcycle safety[1]:

 _Per vehicle mile traveled, motorcyclists ' risk of a fatal crash is 35 times greater than a passenger car._

In 2012, the US had 23 fatalities per 100 million miles ridden. If you do the math, riding 4,000 miles a year for 40 years gives you a 4.2% chance of dying in an accident. That's just death. It doesn't include getting crippled or having permanent brain damage.

You would be crazy to ride in a car that gave such a high risk of death. In fact, any car that dangerous would not be allowed on the road, and any excuses about mitigating risk would be laughed at. It is an accident of history that society allows motorcycles. If they were invented today, there would be zero chance of them being allowed on streets.

Paradoxically, the only sane place to ride a motorcycle is a race track. With no obstacles, large run-off areas, trained riders, and plenty of armor, injuries are minor.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety)

<comment><USER3> _riding 4,000 miles a year for 40 years gives you a 4.2% chance of dying in an accident_

No, it doesn't give _me_ a 4.2% risk of dying. That 4.2% (assuming your math is correct) is a figure for the entire population which doesn't say much about an individuals level of risk.

It is possible to ride in a low risk fashion that will put an individuals risk at a significantly lower rate. There is a reason my insurance rates are drastically lower than a 16 year old on a super sport.

<comment><USER3> I would be highly interested in knowing what the risk is for a population of mature riders, who wear proper gear all the time with 50000+ miles experience is. I'm sure my insurance company has the numbers on file...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 504 Time-out. Here's a link to the Google Cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CIBYb2V...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CIBYb2VoTdYJ:narrative.ly/gangsters/falling- for-a-hells-angel/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty good read from a woman's perspective. I don't know why I find M/Cs fascinating.

<comment><USER6> Do the relationships described in that story not seem deeply unhealthy to you? From my (male) perspective the women seem to get treated like property.

<comment><USER7> Finding something fascinating and finding something deeply disturbing are not orthogonal; the relationships seemed deeply unhealthy, the men inherently violent and the women second class (don't disturb to club members while they're talking)—and still it was very interesting, very well told.

<comment><USER8> ... And yet, any geek gets irritated if interrupted while deep in code, or even a game.

<comment><USER9> By anyone, not just by a woman? The misogyny was being pointed out I believe.

<comment><USER10> It's actually considered rude for any non patch-holder to approach two patch- holders having a private discussion. Gender isn't important in this instance. I'm not saying there isn't a ton of misogyny in the MC lifestyle. There really is.

<comment><USER9> "Any"? Including family? Doesn't your wife or girlfriend constitute a very special category? If not, then then are indeed messed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> W. T. F. Why am I reading pulp romance novel on Hacker News.</comment>


Tell HN: Vesting Schedule Advice - <AUTHOR> In the event you accept equity when hired at a startup, you'll most likely encounter the typical 1 year cliff/4 year vestout agreement.
Ensure that your agreement stipulates that if your role materially changes (your role is eliminated/no longer exists), your vesting accelerates to immediately vest you out.
EDIT: Otherwise, you can lose your equity (which you've most likely accepted for lower dollar compensation) through no fault of your own. <comment><USER2> Hi Toomuchtodo.....I saw a comment you posted on a separate thread and this new submission. I'm actually a writer trying to research how employees being paid with equity can actually take some power back from companies . Have some stuff I wanted to share and was hoping to chat with you. My cell is (847) 380-0751. If you text me I can share more details about who I am and what I'm working on. And you can tell me to buzz off if you like.

<comment><USER2> By the way, so you know, I'm at the Wall Street Journal. You can see I'm legit here: [http://www.wsj.com/news/author/6578](http://www.wsj.com/news/author/6578)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Is Send.Firefox Unavailable? - <AUTHOR> I was about to log into send.firefox.com this morning, and noticed the service is unavailable.  Anybody have any more info than the notice on their page? <comment> xlab-si [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox- send-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-service- while-it-addresses-malware-abuse/)</comment>


Philly-Based Incubator DreamIt Ventures Graduates 14 Startups - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/philly-based-incubator-dreamit-ventures-graduates-ten-startups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> Incidentally, GiveLoop (one of DreamIt's graduates) looks like a great service. I would actually like to donate more money than I do, but I often don't precisely because this kind of transparency and feedback are typically absent.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to nitpick, but why is that incidental?

<comment><USER4> Confusingly, "incidentally" isn't always used to describe an action as being incidental. Consider the following definition from a Google search of "define: incidentally":

Used when a person has something more to say, or is about to add a remark unconnected to the current subject; by the way

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any graduates on HN? Just curious if we can get an inside perspective.

<comment><USER6> Not a graduate, but I met one of the founders of Postling at PR Camp last year and he spoke very highly of the program. It was a while ago, but I think he was saying that compared to YC there was more of a focus on business advice, and there were more contact hours with the mentors. I'm not sure to what extent that is true, but it certainly seems like a quality program that was run this way would be useful to some founders. Obviously different founders have different levels of experience and skills, so there probably isn't one best model, at least from the perspective of the founders.

<comment><USER7> This is my second year as a Dreamit mentor, and I really like the program. All the startups work in one big room, which fosters collaboration. And the partners really try hard with the mentoring portion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested to see AppNowGo (private beta, so I can't see it yet). That's something I've thought about building, but it seems like a very hard problem.

Any solution that's doesn't require programming is going to have constraints. So even if the platform is fine for building v1, if they keep adding to it, eventually they're going to hit a wall where they must add feature X, which is impossible to do with the programming-free platform. And then what? They'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, I guess. And somehow get their data.

So I think you pretty much need to let them export their data. Better yet would be letting them export the actual app they've built where they get PHP or Rails code. But then you stop making money off of that person. I guess you could charge for the code export so that you at least get one last lump sum before they leave, but it seems dirty to charge people to leave your platform.

Another option would be to somehow allow programming as an advanced feature in such a way that they could do almost anything, but that would be pretty difficult to do, and you'd need some kind of sandbox to keep them from breaking your servers.

<comment><USER9> Hey all, I'm one of the developers at AppNowGo.

All good points here. In the short term we're focusing on servicing customers with simpler data-driven app needs, e.g. member directories, job listings, knowledge bases, recipe books, etc. Applications in this class don't require any custom programming to fulfill their requirements and most of the customer discovery we've done so far indicates these are the types of apps that most people are looking to build. It's the old 80/20.

Data exporting is going to be available at any time; you'll be able to export data from the application in a variety of formats (spreadsheet, csv, xml, etc) and even re-import it with new/updated data to update your apps. We've also kicked around the idea of exporting an application's entire schema in some sort of format that other "application builders" could presumably read. Openness and portability are important to us.

The front end of AppNowGo that you'd use to build your applications is built entirely on top of our APIs and we're dedicated to making them very powerful. It's possible a lot of the custom programming needs power users might have could be solved with some creative use of the APIs; if anyone would like to chat more about what they'd like to see along those lines I'd be happy to start a dialog.

If anyone in here would like to check out the beta, fill out the form here: <http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/> and mention hacker news; I'll make sure you get an invite ASAP. Also, please feel free to email me at mike-at-appnowgo.com with any questions or comments.

<comment><USER10> AppNowGo is stunningly amazing. I played around for about 15 minutes and built a simple app to keep track of my textbook sales. It's like Wufoo on steroids with a dash of Smartsheet.

Suggestion: add support for select APIs. For example, you could let creators add a button for submitting a book as an Amazon listing. You could also support the twitter api and let creators pull in tweets into their applications.

I see a ton of potential here. Just my $0.02.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sqoot seems to be identical to a project that a HNer just posted.

On another note: These look pretty impressive. I'm particularly interested in what MatchLend will be like.

<comment><USER12> That's actually the one - they changed their name from "86." Pretty sure they incorporated a lot of HN feedback in their last few iterations

<comment><USER11> I think I'm thinking of something else, that guy posted it just earlier this week

<comment><USER12> Was it phrased as "aspirational 4sq"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, another non-SV based startup funder. If talent and funding can come together, there is no reason we should have to move to SV.</comment>


The Harder You Work, The More Likely You Will End Up Being Fired - <AUTHOR> http://robbieabed.com/the-harder-you-work-the-more-likely-you-will-end-up-being-fired/

<comment><USER2> That happened to me once too. It was a low-paying summer-job I had while I was in school, but I still felt like sh*t after it had happened since it's never fun to waste your time! #lifeshardlessons

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an anecdote. I have conterdotes that suggest the opposite is true. None are proper data.</comment>


EDUSAT: First Indian satellite built exclusively for the educational sector. - <AUTHOR> http://www.isro.org/Edusat/Page2.htm <comment><USER2> Somewhat ironic that a website about satellite internet has giant PNG files on it.</comment>


Ask HN. Are we doing it all wrong? - <AUTHOR>

We had an alpha version of our personal finance app last week and released it on HN/Reddit for review. Based on the feedback, we have redesigned it and are now looking for feedback from some real users who are motivated to use the functionality of our app.
To that end, we have been following few related blogs and adding genuine comments to posts and in the process mentioning our app with url to get some traffic. We put a link to the app in our signature while posting our comments as well. We get some traffic from those efforts.
Are there better ways to reach a targeted audience? The ideal scenario would be for them to give us feedback also about the app besides using it. How do we find such "real" users?
Any advice on how to go about this? <comment><USER2> 1\. Communicate your ideas with people who are people's people. Those people you know who got great networks who can pass off word about your application. 2\. Cold calling prospective clients and offering your software free trial for a couple of months. 3\. Get as much feedback on the usability of your application, and implement concepts which you know would make your project better. 4\. Write a blog and tell the concept of your application.

Since you identified already that your app would be targeting people on a more personal basis, I think you have to be a bit more proactive in promoting what your project can do for the bottom line of your customers/consumers.

HTH.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't give up on your current strategy it will probably just take a little time.

Another alternative would be to try some ads on google, facebook, stumbleUpon, etc. If you do this it is probably worth it to keep your budget really low ($5 a day) until you get a feel for the keywords that get you real users for the least amount of money. I believe IMVU did a great job of this in their early days.

Also you probably already know this but be sure to e-mail your existing users. I got an e-mail from a Cloudkick co-founder about 2 days after signing up for the service that added a personal touch and showed that they actually cared about my feedback.

</comment><comment><USER4> A good place to promote your app would be here! Ask us for advice on improving your app and who know we might use it ourselves or know someone who needs it. Paste your link here:

<comment><AUTHOR> Website link: <http://caniafforditnow.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Find them through your contacts ("Do you know anyone who x and y?"), then email/call them directly. Don't wait for them to find you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you suggestion. We have posted in facebook and buzz. Also called few friend personally. It is financial app and we ask for some data to make the decision. Since they are not users they don't feel that motivated to provide all the information. So we started targeting the financial blog to get real users.

<comment><USER5> If you can't find even 2 or 3 real users through your network of friends and acquaintances, you might be in trouble.

I'm trying to say: you should contact your first users personally. Find them. Ask them if they mind using it. IM them. Call them. Don't just rely on some blog comments.</comment></comment></comment>


It's nearly impossible to afford a cup of coffee in Venezuela - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/venezuela-hyperinflation-economic-crisis-coffee-cash-3c78a2e4-5d2f-4b91-b774-1dfbcf3c4cfd.html <comment><USER2> How are people paying for coffee (or anything else for that matters) in Venezuela? I doubt many people carry bagd full of cash, especially if, as written in TFA, bank withdrawals are very limited.

<comment><USER3> Probably the same thing that happens anywhere that currency is unavailable or useless:

\- informal systems of credit \- barter \- alternative forms of unofficial currency (e.g. Using food stamps or the equivalent for currency; using something like poker chips for currency) \- using foreign currency

This does put a damper on commerce, but prevents essential small-scale day to day transactions from grinding to a complete halt.</comment></comment>


Send nudes: Facebook asks users for naked photos to combat 'revenge porn' - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/409161-facebook-revenge-porn-australia/ <comment><USER2> Fake news?

Edit: this bizarre story has been picked by other news outlets, so maybe there's something to it.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/facebook- revenge-porn-nude-photos)

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-06/facebook-now- wants-...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-06/facebook-now-wants-your- nude-photos)

</comment><comment><USER3> It is so obvious that it's just a misleading title.

They are not asking to send them your (new) nude photos. They are trying to say that if a person has some old nude photos AND they think they are leaked online, they could send copies to aid in searching who is sharing them.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not how I read it:

> asked any Australian who fears that intimate images of themselves may be > online to send a nude photo of themselves via Messenger.

So yes, they are asking you to send your nude pictures. Whether new or not it is not the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "sending nudes now a hallmark of our society"

rip humanity

<comment><USER5> > rip humanity

Why? People like looking at naked people. Lots of people like other people looking at naked them. I'm pretty sure this is how it's been for several thousands of years...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Website / GitHub for shaming websites that do not work in Firefox? - <AUTHOR> Is there a list similar to Dumb Password Rules[1], but for websites that do not work in Firefox? The idea is to publicly shame companies for not testing their software across common browsers.
Live example:
Open Firefox 69 on Windows 10 1803+.
Set the web browser width to 1250+ pixels.
Open https://www.lmcu.org
Click "Online Banking Login"
Observe the orange "Login" buttons are pushed down slightly.
[1]: https://github.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb-password-rules <comment><USER2> > buttons are pushed down slightly.

When I worked in banking, we'd get similar complaints about things of exactly as much importance as that complaint. We even frequently had people who would email such things directly to our CIO, and he would come downstairs and ask us about it. And we'd say, "Yep, that is a legit problem. Do you want us to drop all the mission-critical priorities to fix it?" He'd say, "No.", and go back to his office.

By all means, send them a bug report. But shaming a company because your bug report doesn't become their #1 priority? No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh please there are so many offenders. Even IT vendors that charge a fortune for their product explicitly state they only support Chrome. What a sham, I wish DOJ would at least regulate Chrome so that it does not implement interfaces that give it a unique advantage to further dominate or lock-down users. Clearly anti-competitive.

A lot of times Google is to blame,I can understand how _some_ people simply lack resources to support multiple browsers.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not just Firefox. I notice sites not working on Safari (both mobile and desktop). I remember it happening with Edge as well when I tried it. It seems that Chrome is the new IE these days.

The most common symptom I see is buttons that don't do anything when clicked.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, it's built right into firefox. Press the `...` in the URL bar and select "Report site issue", or visit:

[https://webcompat.com/issues/new](https://webcompat.com/issues/new)

</comment><comment><USER6> Have a look at this graph [1], Firefox is definitely not a "common" browser today in most countries; Chrome, Safari and their many siblings are. Unless your company's website is only targeting a country where Firefox somehow leads the pack, your company would be much better served spending precious developer time on supporting Chrome+Safari+UC Browser (probably the 3rd most popular browser in the world?).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser#/media/File:Web_br...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser#/media/File:Web_browser_usage_share_StatCounter.svg)

<comment><USER7> With Edge going away the only 3 "real" browsers to test are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The rest are just UI remixes on slightly older versions of the listed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are also frequently sites that only work in Chrome.

Because they're now functionally IE

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea, but I'm not seeing that particular example. FF 71 (Nightly) on Win10: [https://imgur.com/a/Ux5QkZV](https://imgur.com/a/Ux5QkZV)

</comment><comment><USER10> Similar to [https://github.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb-password- rules](https://github.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb-password-rules)

<comment><USER10> Woops, "didn't read", will delete later

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you need to use their service more than they need you, they won't care. Best course of action is to switch to another bank that care about UI.

</comment><comment><USER12> Similar to SSL Server Test[0]? I like the idea.

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest)

</comment><comment><USER13> Our users are 70% chrome, 20% Safari, 3% Samsung browser, and then the rest. Good luck shaming our site, it'll affect our priorities about 2%.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I use lmcu as well and never noticed that. Of course, now I can't unsee it.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love this concept. Start it.</comment>


Noise Contrastive Estimate and It Is Being Misunderstood by the Public - <AUTHOR> https://leimao.github.io/article/Noise-Contrastive-Estimate/ <comment><USER2> Interesting use of the phase "the public"</comment>


Apple's $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://misfra.me/2017/12/12/apples-9-dollar-engineering-marvel-no-one-wants/ <comment><USER2> I have non-anecdotal evidence that people definitely buy the Lightning to headphone adapter. We sell them in our stores and it's one of our biggest accessory sales.

You know why people buy them all the time, though? Because, frankly, it's a terrible design. It's tiny, easy to lose or forget, and they break easily. _That 's_ why it has such terrible reviews in the Apple store site--it's not a good product for what it is.

I deal with Apple products on the daily, and the removal of the headphone jack is still one of the things that irritates me most about Apple.

The others would be: the whole battery scandal where Apple slowed down older phones without explaining that the battery, a replaceable component, was the issue. And the 2016-2018 MacBook keyboards, which are an absolute travesty.

The headphone to Lightning adapter may be a "marvel of engineering", but it was a completely unnecessary one. It doesn't create more room inside the phone, and Samsung had water-resistant phones with headphone jacks. It's basically designed to force you on to more expensive wireless headphones.

<comment><USER3> Apple didnt "slow down phones with old batteries", they capped the power output to the cpu of batteries that couldnt deliver reliable peak power anymore, so the phone didnt panic and crash as the cpu usage redlined. Their actions are much preferred to the alternative.

<comment><USER4> I applaud what Apple is doing. I prefer airpods any day over their 3.5 mm jack counterpart and I appreciate a waterproof phone. Sure it is annoying that they can run out of battery and lightning is unnecessary now USB-C is here; but I guess it is a transition.

<comment><USER5> The idea that the elimination of the 3.5mm jack has anything to do with waterproofing is a complete misdirection, as evidenced by the list of waterproof Android phones with USB-C and 3.5mm jacks.

Also, any modern phone with bluetooth is just as capable off running airpods or any other wireless headphones whether or not it also has a 3.5mm jack.

Lastly, eliminating the 3.5mm jack has nothing to do with making the phone thinner either. My jackless iPhone 7 is actually a few mil thicker than my older yet nearly identical iPhone 6 which has a 3.5mm jack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is an impressive engineering feat, and certainly better than the Android ones that just pass analog through the USB-C jack, but it's worth noting that this DAC performs worse than what it replaced [1]. Dynamics have less range, there's more THD, and output impedance is lower, so it's harder to drive heavier headphones. I noticed a difference in clarity using Audio-Technica ATH-M50s and Beyerdynamic DT 990 250Ω. Specifically, the Beyerdynamics could be driven "good enough" for me with the iPhone SE jack, but I wasn't happy with how they sounded on the Lightning dongle.

[1] [https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter- teardown/](https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/)

<comment><USER7> The link to the measurements from your source:

[https://kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio- qualit...](https://kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-quality.htm)

According to those measurements the adaptor's DAC is fantastic, especially for a $9 part.

And in the spirit of anecdotes, the old iPhone DACs were notoriously hissy and weak, and if you're buying high impedance headphones you have no business plugging that into a phone's headphone jack... spend the $20-50 on an amp/DAC and call it a day. Just a bigger dongle.

<comment><USER6> Sure, it's not a bad DAC and I'm happy with the sound on wired IEMs. It's just that I could drive my high impedance headphones straight from an iPhone SE and I can't with an iPhone 8. I lost functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An engineering marvel necessary because of product design stupidity.

One can neither use the same headphones for a Mac and iPhone, nor charge an iPhone from a Mac using the cables that come with the devices.

I barely use that crap adapter because it's inconvenient. Thank goodness Macs still support headphone jacks.

<comment><USER9> I use the air pods now, so it works on every machine except my nintendo switch :(

<comment><USER10> Can you tell me why I'm always seeing AirPod users with only one headphone in their ear?

<comment><USER11> In my case, I lost one of them.

<comment><USER12> maybe you could connect them with something, so you cant loose them. A cable would work for that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not everybody agrees about the sound quality, compared to the jacks on iDevices:

\- [German] [https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/iPhone-7-nachgemessen- Audio-...](https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/iPhone-7-nachgemessen-Audio- Adapter-liefert-schlechteren-Sound-3325932.html)

\- [Summarising the above] [https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/256241/45492](https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/256241/45492)

\- Another test: [http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of- lig...](http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-lightning- to-3-5mm-headphone-jack-adapter)

\- [https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter- teardown/](https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been using Mac products since I was a child (thanks, dad) more or less happily and the removal of the headphone jack and the requirement that you have these adaptors has been the first thing to make me seriously consider going elsewhere. I probably won't, due to years of lock-in, but to rephrase it's the worst experience I've had with anything Apple in my lifetime. I've had three adaptors, two Apple ones that broke in separate ways (one would keep firing commands randomly from the control buttons on my headphones, the other lost the right channel entirely) and a crappy third party one that just fell apart. Even when the adaptor works, having a dongle sticking out of your pants pocket is a total pain that nobody really asked for. It solves no problem, it's in no way better than the previous alternative, and it really just reads like a massive "fuck you, pay me" from Apple to their customers.

I settled on non-Apple bluetooth headphones, which have their own set of problems but at least I can reliably listen to music during my commute (for the most part).

</comment><comment><USER15> HN hug of death? "503 Service Unavailable"

Here's the Google Cache link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmisfra.me%2F2017%2F12%2F12%2Fapples-9-dollar- engineering-marvel-no-one- wants%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmisfra.me%2F2017%2F12%2F12%2Fapples-9-dollar- engineering-marvel-no-one-wants)

<comment><USER16> Author here. Sorry, resizing my droplet now.

<comment><USER17> Just wondering if you can share your stack and what kind of traffic did you get (in terms of requests/second)? Always curious as to how much traffic HN really brings and why some sites stay up and others die.

<comment><USER18> Some stats from my front-page a month ago:

      - Time on front page: 15 min
      - Views in first 15  min: ~5000
      - Views in first 60  min: ~7000
      - Views in first 600 min: ~11,000
      - Views over the next 5 days: ~5000

HN front pages bring a bunch of users quickly, but it isn't a scale that will cripple moderate hardware with some basic performance tuning (directly serving assets, for example). The tail is also great, fully 3/4 of my post-front-page views come from click-throughs on social.

<comment><USER19> I saw similar numbers on my server. About 10,000 views over the course of an entire day (derived as total data transmitted divided by the size of one full page load), with the bulk concentrated in the first two hours. My nginx served it without breaking a sweat. Peak CPU usage was at 5% and network load peaked at 1 Mb/s (data at 60-second resolution).

My stack was just nginx serving static files, on a 1/1 VM that also hosts half a dozen other services (XMPP, Gitea, Matrix, Mumble etc.).

It is my belief that everyone who encounters the HN hug of death is doing something wrong.

<comment><USER20> I used to have a blog that ran on Wordpress (3.0 was I think the current version at the time, this was a while ago) with the APC plugin, served via Apache. An article hit HN and it fell over.

Some time later I had migrated to blogofile and nginx and made it to HN again, the server barely noticed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This doesn't replace the fact that I never wanted my headphone jack taken away in the first place. They broke a perfectly good thing in the name of $200 wireless earbuds.

<comment><USER22> They broke a perfectly good thing in the name of _water intrusion_ , didn't they? IIRC Apple said the headphone jack was the single biggest source of damage.

The first device to ditch the jack was Apple's first device to hit IP67 rating. [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT207043](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207043)

<comment><USER23> Plenty of other companies make or made IP68 waterproof phones with exposed headphone jacks. It's not an issue.

<comment><USER22> It's entirely possible that Apple doesn't like/trust the way their competitors approached waterproofing.

<comment><USER24> Given all the many hardware problems Samsung has had -- exploding batteries!! -- if there was a flaw in their waterproofing don't you think it would have been publicised by now? I haven't heard any such reports.

If doing it "the Sony way" would involve making the phone 1mm thicker, okay, I can easily believe Apple would decide they need to rip it up completely and do something different.

Samsung and Sony phones aren't exactly chunky, though.

I would have been really happy with just a waterproof iPhone 6. Then maybe they could follow that up with an iPhone X with a headphone jack. Still do AirPods, just market them as a completely independent product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Personally, I'm amazed whenever I use it but I always wonder for a moment, > "what if Apple just made what people wanted?"

"What people want" is pretty slippery. For every person I've heard complain about needing the dongle, I've known at least one or two others who exclusively use the wireless ear buds and wouldn't go back. YMMV.

<comment><USER26> Give it a few years I think most people will look at this like removing the CD. The wireless audio experience is mostly better. Airpods for example connect and disconnect effortlessly. Being able to walk all over the office while on the phone has done wonders for my pacing.

<comment><USER27> It's already been a few years and people are still annoyed by it. Airpods are great, but they're also expensive. Saying wireless is better isn't a fair comparison either, because wireless is an option even with a headphone jack, and most people still use wired headphones anyway with a much less convenient connector.

<comment><USER28> I would be willing to take a bet that if you stood at one of the entrances to Times Square for 24 hours and tallied wired vs. wireless headphones, wireless would come out on top.

NPD had wireless overtaking wired in sales (obviously this doesn't account for people using bundled earphones) for the first time back in 2016: [https://qz.com/745108/wireless-headphone-sales-just-hit-a- ti...](https://qz.com/745108/wireless-headphone-sales-just-hit-a-tipping- point/)

<comment><USER29> When wireless is much more expensive, this is unlikely.

<comment><USER28> Even _before_ the iPhone lost its headphone jack, NPD already pegged the share of wireless headphones under $50 at 30% of the (again, already larger) wireless market. The demand has only grown since then, and the market has responded.

The most popular pair of bluetooth headphones on Amazon is waterproof, has 4.5 stars, and only costs $20: [https://www.amazon.com/LETSCOM-Headphones- Waterproof-Sweatpr...](https://www.amazon.com/LETSCOM-Headphones-Waterproof- Sweatproof-Cancelling/dp/B07DXQTCQL/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is just another entry in the "Apple: a Dongle Company" narrative. Apple has long had a philosophy of designing things their way and making the consumer adapt to their whims, rather than accepting standards or designing for the way people like to use things.

If you're charitable, you can say that they design with the future in mind. If you're not, you can say they know they can squeeze out more revenue via dongles and be indifferent to consumer wants because they have the size and market loyalty to get away with it. Depends on how you feel about Apple, I suppose

<comment><USER31> "Apple makes money off of dongles" is such a ridiculous argument though. And to imply that they would make major changes to their flagship hardware just for that is way on the wacky end of conspiracy theories.

These decisions are based on focus groups, user analytics, and reducing manufacturing costs. Nothing more.

<comment><USER32> Apple has a long and rich history of making their customers buy dongles to interact with technology.

<comment><USER31> I have yet to disagree with one of their format changes. Lightning was miles better than Micro USB or the old 30-pin dock connector, and USB-C allows me to dock my laptop with a single cable.

Got any other examples?

<comment><USER33> Other companies that make USB-C laptops still manage to include USB A ports, ethernet ports, and HDMI. Some USB-C laptops even have more esoteric stuff like RS-232. Docking my MBP at my desk is great, but it's a pain in the ass when I need to go _anywhere else_ and use multiple video outs and multiple network connections

<comment><USER31> If you want RS-232 on your laptop, you must realize that you belong to a vanishingly small demographic that Apple will never even pretend to cater to.

<comment><USER33> Definitely don't expect Apple to bring back serial ports, just pointing out that if Laptops _smaller than_ a MacBook _Pro_ can have HDMI, serial, USB A, USB C, ethernet, and VGA then I don't buy any arguments about getting rid of ports to keep the device small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have one. I had to buy it as my 8 didn't come with it.

I think the louder supporters of the 3.5mm jack removal are a bit disingenuous with how simple BT is. I have several iDevices. As does my wife. If we turn on a BT speaker, we don't know which device it will connect to. Sometimes the last one, sometime whichever one responds to the speaker faster[0]. My BT headphones? Same thing; will it connect to my work phone? My personal phone? My iPad? My laptop? Who knows? Here's what I _do_ know, A 3.5mm jack with always[1] connect to the device I want it to connect to.

[0] I'm sure someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong. Whatever, a 3.5mm jack still wins here.

[1] For most definitions of always.

<comment><USER35> I agree... BT is finicky, specially if you use your headphones on multiple devices. When I want to use my headphones with my TV I have to make sure BT is turned off on my phone and iPad before turning my headphones on.

If wireless headphones are the future we need something better than BT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wired headphones have better sound quality, are cheaper and easier to repair (considering the same headphones wired vs wireless), do not need to be charged, and the battery does not degrade over time.

Really, what is the mobile industry thinking? Apple was the first but everyone else is following.

<comment><USER36> >Really, what is the mobile industry thinking?

The obvious. All the pros you are listed are cons when you are concerned about profitability uber alles.

<comment><USER35> Because... ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> From the comments I've read here, I guess a contrarian take:

If the purpose of the decision was to get people to move to wireless headphones, then specifically for myself and my network of folks, this seems to have worked.

Initially I had the Oppo Wired headphones. Soon after removing-3.5mm-gate (and dealing with the adapter), I'm exclusively on wireless: the Airpods and the latest Sony over ear headphones.

Honestly, at the cost of sound quality (which used to be important to me), but gaining noise-cancelling and not having to wrangle with wires, it's such a convenience. Apple was right, and I imagine the trend will largely be towards wireless. That being said, experience still has a ways to go (connect, battery), and die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.

<comment><USER38> I don't see any reason wireless can't be identical to wired as far as audio quality goes on a phone.

If we were talking about wired vs. wireless headphones on a home stereo listen to LPs, then yeah, there might be something to talk about. There you have an analog source, and with wired the signal stays analog all the way to the transducers in the headphones. Going wireless will introduce an ADC on the stereo end and a DAC on the headphone end.

But with a phone you have a digital source, going to a DAC, and then to the transducers. The difference between wired and wireless there is that wireless puts the DAC closer to the headphones, and the digital signal goes over a wireless link.

I'd expect die-hard audiophiles to actually prefer wireless in theory, because with wired you are relying on a DAC and amplifier provided by the phone manufacturer. With wireless you are using a DAC and amplifier from the headphone manufacturer, which allows in theory for the headphone manufacturer to use a better DAC and amplifier than the phone provides.

<comment><USER39> Because Bluetooth simply cannot deliver what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In the years that have passed since switching to an iPhone without a headphone jack, I have never once needed to use that dongle. Bluetooth more than covers my use cases. So the article is correct, I don't want it, but I also don't need it.

<comment><USER41> > Bluetooth more than covers my use cases.

That is great for you. But when Apple designers decide that everyone should be forced into your category, they are actively deciding not to have empathy for the users for whom Bluetooth does not cover their use cases.

Good product design starts with empathy for every user. Apple has written off entire categories of users. I assume it is not because the don't know how to gather user data, it is because the actively DO NOT CARE.

For me, someone who: a) still has their hearing, b) has been listening to classical music for decades, c) has a collection of carefully and critically chosen wired headphones, the lack of a headphone jack is a gigantic FU.

<comment><USER42> _Good product design starts with empathy for every user._

And this is how you end up with the HomerMobile.....

<comment><USER43> Not even close.

Also these are features that are already proven to work.

<comment><USER42> As was the floppy disk, the CD Drive, ADB ports, SCSI, Nubus, 68K processors, PPC processors, etc.

<comment><USER39> Because of this attitude wired headphones will still be relevant in 3 years. No, wireless isn't good enough. Fix it. Then we can talk. The fact that people still write articles about it should tell you something. [0]

[0] [https://www.soundguys.com/ultimate-guide-to-bluetooth- headph...](https://www.soundguys.com/ultimate-guide-to-bluetooth- headphones-20019/)

<comment><USER42> From the article.

 _However, most people won't be able to hear the difference_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It wasn't "free" in terms of money. Neither were the tires that came with my car.

It's also not free in terms of time spent thinking about them. Like all dongles, I have to remember to bring them wherever I go in case I need them.

They're an engineering marvel, no doubt about it. I just wish I didn't maybe need it.

</comment><comment><USER45> As an Android user, I am still regularly annoyed by Apple removing the headphone jack because it gave Google the "courage" to do it. And that has negatively impacted my life regularly in the past couple of years.

The main problem I have with Bluetooth headphones is that it's so much effort to switch them between devices. I have 3-4 things that I regularly listen to headphones on, and after repeatedly loosing my dongle, I just gave up and bought a separate set of Bluetooth earbuds for my phone.

It's the same in reverse with shared Bluetooth outputs like Amazon Echos and my wife and I's car. They always want to connect to whichever phone was _last_ rather than whichever phone I'm trying to connect it to right now. I literally turn off Bluetooth on my phone whenever my wife wants to connect hers to the echo.

With the car, I previously used the aux input and let Bluetooth be exclusively for her. Now I just listen to audio through the phone speakers and don't use the car speakers at all. My car audio experience is significantly shittier than when I had a phone with an headphone jack. Thankfully, I don't drive very much.

I know there are workarounds for this, but they're all significantly more complex and expensive than a simple headphones jack.

That and, of course, it's one more battery to charge.

</comment><comment><USER46> I am pretty convinced that this greatly degrades audio quality on my aux headphones. Bluetooth quality is normal, but with this cable, I can hear the difference. When plugged into an amp/speaker the grain is so abundantly obvious (compared to a BT or AUX connection)

<comment><USER47> [https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio- qu...](https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-quality.htm) seems to disagree. Could it be a question of the higher quality output (in comparison to BT) highlighting a lower quality source signal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > But guess what? No one wants it

With 794 reviews, clearly some people want it. The bad reviews tell us more accurately that; "no one likes it".

<comment><USER49> i think the point is that people have to buy it, not that they buy it because they want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I would've preferred a headphone jack as I've already lost mine.

<comment><USER51> I've lost like 4 of them by now

<comment><USER52> [https://www.amazon.com/Dongle-Dangler-Keychain-Accessory- Com...](https://www.amazon.com/Dongle-Dangler-Keychain-Accessory- Compatible/dp/B01MSYT8HH)

I keep mine on my keys, haven't lost it yet.

<comment><USER53> Semi serious question: but where do you keep your keys?

(When I don't have a bag, I find my current keyring bulky as it is...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's weird that this much quality went into the guts, but they couldn't make the cable on it a little more sturdy. I use mine sparingly, but it feels like it's going to break if I look at it the wrong way, and I've read that some people have to replace it every couple months.

<comment> d-sc I understand where you are coming from. I have a couple of these of my own.

Apple probably doesn't want to make these stronger than the things the connect to: eg headphones or the phone. Within certain load profiles the weakest component will suffer most of the wear. Would you rather the connector broke on the $9 adapter or the $1500 phone?

<comment><USER43> It's not the connector that breaks. Making the actual cable thicker shouldn't cause anything else to fail first, and the nature of a short piece of cable connected directly to a phone is to get horribly bent all the time; it needs thickness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter that amazes me. That little $29 thing is a full PCI-e device --- there is a PCI-e interface and a FireWire chipset built into the housing. And the little cable has a huge number of individual cables inside of it.

[https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple- thunderbo...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbolt- to-firewire-adapter)

<comment><USER43> It's just a repeater chip[set]. For something that competes with USB it's a pretty bad price. You can get pretty powerful CPUs for half that or less.

<comment><USER56> No, it's just as the parent describes: A Thunderbolt-to-PCIe bridge chip, a short PCIe connection, a PCIe Firewire host chip, and a microcontroller to coordinate.

<comment><USER43> Thunderbolt _is_ PCIe.

I have fixed my post to not imply it's only a single chip. It being multiple important chips should cause the _opposite_ of amazement. It means that the product wasn't important enough to get a dedicated chip, which is probably the main reason it costs $29 instead of also being $9.

<comment><USER56> And Firewire is not related to PCIe at all, so the adapter clearly is not just a repeater. If you want to say something along the lines of"it's just a Firewire host adapter chip + some conversion, doesn't have to be expensive", then say that.

<comment><USER43> It's shoveling bits through basically unchanged. It's a repeater with a different electrical standard on each side. 90% of the effort is in the transceivers.

<comment><USER55> Here is a teardown of this little $29 device. Take a look...

[https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-thunderbolt-to- fi...](https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-thunderbolt-to-firewire- adapter-teardown.1428004/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> If only Apple had put that phenomenal technology in their actual phones instead of making it a $9 dongle.

Like, I'd be more tolerant of Apple's decision to drop the 3.5mm jack if it had coincided with Apple migrating iPhones to USB-C connectors, since at least that has the opportunity to play nicely with the rest of the USB-C ecosystem (which is growing pretty extensively) and could be a good way to push USB-C as "the" new standard for audio device connectivity (especially since USB-C directly supports analog _and_ digital audio; the standard seems to advise rather strongly against using USB-C as a 3.5mm replacement outright, but a bit of "Courage™" from Apple could shift the tides such that such a prohibition is excluded from USB-C implementations). Their failure to do so makes it clear that Apple would rather make money on accessories tied to proprietary connectors than actually make good and useful products.

</comment><comment><USER58> A related tip - if you've got a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with its awful internal headphone audio, try Apple's USB-C To Headphone dongle. It's a cheap but effective audio upgrade, and the competition (like the M-Audio Micro-DAC) is about 4x the price. It even adds support for Apple inline headphone volume controls too.

</comment><comment><USER59> For the lazy: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://misfra.me/2017/12/12/apples-9-dollar- engineering-marvel-no-one-wants/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Does it mean that if I buy it and an female lightning to male usb adapter I'd get a good DAC for US$10?

Would be a bargain.

<comment><USER61> If you have USB-C you can skip one adapter: [https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c- to-35-mm-...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm- headphone-jack-adapter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I curse Apple every time they make me pull out a dongle for something that used to just work. I used to love Apple before they became a dongle company. Don't get me started on them killing off MagSafe.

</comment><comment><USER63> Why hasn't Apple just switched to USB-C already? Then we can have a wealth of DAC/amp options. To make iPhones thinner still or keep the garden walled.

<comment><USER64> I think they'll do it eventually.

They took a lot of flack from folks when they tossed out 10+ years worth of 30-pin cable support on the switch to Lightning, so they'll likely take a good long while before they switch the phone to USB-C. I think it'll be the last device they produce to make the switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I always enable the "product improvement" analytics for companies I trust. And as it happens, I don't care about losing TRRS audio jack, losing the SD slot on Macs (I only have micro SD-using devices these days anyway), Type C (yay! -- and I don't carry _any_ dongles), etc. Since I happen to be happy with these changes I obviously never complain about them.

Apple is famous for not doing market research (though I know they do a lot) and I wonder really if they don't probably know what they are doing with a lot of these changes. As far as demographics go, my kid (20) and my gf's kids and their friends (11-16 yo) don't seem dismayed by _any_ of these changes.

I'm not saying that these are "get off my lawn" complaints, but the phone is the most mass market of mass market devices and every design decision affects some subculture positively or negatively. As for headphones specifically: iphone volume is high enough that the fact that lightning headphones haven't taken off suggests the headphone market isn't as big as one might think.

There are no shortages of boneheaded moves by Apple (I happen to like the feel of the butterfly keyboards but am _not_ happy about how many I've had replaced: _4_ since 2016) so this is no apology for a big company that can defend itself!

</comment><comment><USER66> I've learnt it has a DAC after watching Strange Parts take 1 apart and put the components inside the iPhone 7 so he could have the 3.5 jack: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA)

</comment><comment><USER67> Isn't the point of all this that Apple wants you to migrate to AirPods?

</comment><comment><USER68> I use it almost every day, to listen to my iPhone at work with the studio- grade headphones I've trusted for years (Beyerdynamic DT770). It works great and hasn't failed yet.

Marvel indeed!

</comment><comment><USER69> site seems down. google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ckxU-A...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ckxU- AKUcgAJ:https://misfra.me/2017/12/12/apples-9-dollar-engineering-marvel-no- one-wants/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER70> If the idea to revoke the eighth-inch headphone jack is such a great idea, why not make it USB-C like the rest of the donglegate devices?

</comment><comment><USER71> Hug of death - archive link: [http://archive.is/rQqtB](http://archive.is/rQqtB)

</comment><comment><USER72> If they made a USB-C version of this, they could sell them for 3 times that price and probably run out of stock.

<comment><USER73> They do, and it also costs $9[1]. I bought one after I realized (the hard way) that the new iPad Pro doesn't have a headphone jack…

[1]: [https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c- to-35-mm-...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm- headphone-jack-adapter)

<comment><USER74> Especially interesting since Apple doesn't make USB-C headphones. I can tolerate the iPhones shipping with Lightning headphones. For the iPad Pro I guess the only official solution is AirPods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Might be worth adding a [2017] tag.

</comment><comment><USER76> They're $9 now. I wonder what they'll be next year.

<comment><USER77> They've been $9 for a few years, I'd expect them to stay at that price until they're discontinued or significantly changed.</comment></comment>


Angular 2 First App Post-Mortem - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@MikeRyan52/angular-2-first-app-post-mortem-b2b2b3618828 <comment><USER2>
      I leveraged the Flux architecture powered by the
      immensely popular Redux library. For a cleaner
      integration with Angular 2's injector and TypeScript's
      type system, I wrote a class-based wrapper around Redux
      that exposes state changes using RxJS observables.
      Consumers can subscribe to these observables and use the
      Store class to dispatch state-changing actions.

This reads like a Markov chain generated from a pool of top voted Hacker News Javascript submissions.

<comment><USER3> Hah. Just the other day I was swearing about the Javascript trend that there is always an obscure thing X that solves obscure thing Y. And then there's huge hype about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to be cynical, but reading an article like this makes me chuckle to myself thinking about how much vitriol is still spewed at Java for its over- engineering dark ages.

I start to have flashbacks when an innocent sounding article like this has so much word soup that it has to be cross-referenced against half a dozen other technologies.

For Javascript's sake, I propose we skip the phase where we implement Enterprise JS Beans, and go straight to Spring JS so we can all finally get some work done.

<comment><USER5> "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of abstraction...except for the problem of too many levels of abstraction." [1]

BTW, if you want less framework-ness. Try a lightweight vdom lib. I worked with Mithril [2] for a while but after a few projects decided that MVC was poorly suited for front-end components. I'm writing what IMO is a great vdom view layer that's extremely fast, ~8k min, flexible (imperative/declarative), pure js and pleasant to use [3]. Feedback welcome :)

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

[2] [http://mithril.js.org/](http://mithril.js.org/)

[3] [https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm](https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm)

<comment><USER6> I like it!

Can you add a comparison section to mithriljs and/or infernojs (the current leader in vdom performance)?

Also an example for routing would be nice.

Keep up the great work!

<comment><USER5> perf is 2x mithril and 1x inferno at high mutations and "only" 0.5x inferno at low mutations. "only" because domvm gets 70/s vs inferno's 135/s on my i5 cpu on dbmonster at 1% mutation.

however, domvm views support isolated redraw and even granular node-level patching. so you can optimize much faster if needed

see here: [http://mathieuancelin.github.io/js-repaint- perfs/](http://mathieuancelin.github.io/js-repaint-perfs/)

no routing yet, but some plans are brewing...wip :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uh... I'm relatively new to JS but why the heck are you mixing Redux and angular?

<comment><USER8> Redux can be used in any javascript app. Its a pattern, not something stuck to react.

<comment><USER7> True, but with redux and angular, now you have two things where state could live.

<comment><USER9> You have 2 possibilities yes, but afaict Angular 2 doesn't push you to use 'its way', unlike the early days of Angular 1 where 'the way' to do state was $scope.

So I could see how you could comfortably use Angular 2 with Redux as long as your team was on-board to always do state the Redux way.

<comment><USER7> Give a developer an inch and they'll take the football field. Maybe that's an acceptable risk, but I wouldn't take that risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As somebody who has been writing an Angular2 app in ES6, it kind of saddens me that Google has gone all-in on Typescript despite it's glaring departure from future web standards.

Specifically, the parameter annotation syntax they use is much different from that proposed in the future ES7 spec.

I really like Angular2 but it's hard not to feel like it was created as a promotional tool for Typescript adoption.

Types in JS are mostly 'window dressing' to protect devs from themselves and allow for better autocomplete support. They come with a performance overhead so they'll be disabled in production anyway.

Anyway, it's very interesting that Op went with Redux. Redux is pretty game changing in terms of reducing the feedback cycle between changes. Hopefully, better Redux support in NG2 is forthcoming.

<comment><USER11> Types come with a performance overhead and will be disabled in production?

Sorry, I don't understand that. Typescript transpiles to plain JS, so there are no types at runtime no matter whetzer you are developing or in production. And therefore there is also no performance overhead. The only overhead I can think of is if you are transpiling code at runtime instead of build time using some JSPM plugin - but then the overhead is not related to types but to transpiling (it would also be there for typeless coffeescript transpiling).

And I also thought that typescript decorators are explicitily following the most recent ES7 decorator proposals and are even marked as experimental in TS to be able to react to changes if the ES7 syntax changes.</comment></comment>