No Paint - <AUTHOR> https://nopaint.art <comment><USER3> That's such a dumb way to paint. Great job!

Here's one: [https://i.imgur.com/9efzWaC.png](https://i.imgur.com/9efzWaC.png)

<comment><USER4> This is my masterpiece

[https://i.imgur.com/mhkMxaY.png](https://i.imgur.com/mhkMxaY.png)

"RecursyCat"

<comment><USER5> Seems like we had the same idea almost! 'Recursun'

[https://i.imgur.com/qUfsZMz.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/qUfsZMz.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Here's my attempt;

[https://m.imgur.com/44SffC5](https://m.imgur.com/44SffC5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was fun. I wonder if the code/algo behind this tends towards a certain type of painting or "average".

Reminds me of this video that shows what the youtube codec tends towards over a 1000 reuploads

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4KHfqw- oE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4KHfqw-oE)

<comment><USER8> It's crazy how severe that a/v sync issue is. Is that something with his setup or is YouTube just terrible?

<comment><USER9> His setup is normal. It's a recreation of well known audio experiment [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room)

<comment><USER10> > Lucier said that a performance need not use his text, and that the > performance may be recorded in any room.[citation needed]

I can't help but feel like the "citation needed" should be after "Lucier said". Otherwise, it reads like it's saying that the fact that it could work in any room with any text needs a citation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was posted again so I'm reposting my masterpiece! [https://imgur.com/a/5MDaXqj](https://imgur.com/a/5MDaXqj)

</comment><comment><USER12> Took me a minute to grok what was happening, but once I did it provided around 5 minutes of amusement. I'd love to see it developed further with additional, uhmm, brushes? Not sure what to call the things that actually paint and mod the canvas...

Kudos to whoever made it, though. Very creative!

<comment><USER13> I'm confused, are there controls other than clicking the "No" and "Paint" buttons?

<comment><USER14> Nope. You wait, you press either "No" or "Paint".

EDIT: Apparently, I was wrong. See below.

<comment><USER15> Actually, there are! You can click below those buttons, where it says the name of the "brush," and it will bring up a full on-screen keyboard (looks like it was meant to be used on phones?) and you can type the name of the "brush" you want. There are some cool ones which seem less common than others? I found "Quicksand" and "Recurse", the latter of which I only saw once naturally, but I could deliberately re-invoke it and got a pretty neat effect in my opinion!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I plan to add lots of brushes with parameters so that feature can eventually be used to filter down the stochastic brushes and people can make "recipes" for one another to get interested in both painting and programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was about to say this feels like a Jeffrey Scudder piece. Then I hit the about, and it IS a Jeffrey Scudder piece.

Jeffrey, I love your work, and it's great to see you making more paint tools!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! This is basically a prototype I put together over the last few weeks because I posted the old version ([https://nopaint.org.jas.life](https://nopaint.org.jas.life)) on my TikTok and kids really loved it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I found it very relaxing. Quicksand is great.

[https://imgur.com/a/ZtsGo2Q](https://imgur.com/a/ZtsGo2Q)

[https://imgur.com/a/3PAHGJj](https://imgur.com/a/3PAHGJj)

<comment><USER18> oh, I really like these, well done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's great to see a game made with our web game engine Construct 3 appear on Hacker News! ([https://www.construct.net/](https://www.construct.net/))

For those curious about the technical details, you might be interested to know the game code is running entirely off the main thread in a Web Worker and rendering directly from there with WebGL 2 using OffscreenCanvas (in Chrome where it's supported anyway, it has fallbacks). Nice to see this working out in the wild. I blogged about this architecture here previously: [https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys- blog-2/performanc...](https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys- blog-2/performance-isolation-html5-1512)

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's my fine art. I don't like the "softie" brush.

[https://royalbarrel.com/static/nopaint.png](https://royalbarrel.com/static/nopaint.png)

</comment><comment><USER21> "You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction." [https://i.imgur.com/FoCg80a.png](https://i.imgur.com/FoCg80a.png)

<comment><USER22> You've got a cool part middle left that I think very much looks like street graffiti.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mine just straight up drew a d*ck, thought I was being trolled but maybe I'm just lucky?

[http://imgur.com/a/xqwQTG8](http://imgur.com/a/xqwQTG8)

<comment><USER24> the paint gods smile upon you

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I absolutely love the sounds. Makes the whole thing feel very playful.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not really sure what the point is but here's my masterpiece: [https://imgur.com/4UhleL5](https://imgur.com/4UhleL5)

</comment><comment><USER27> This put a smile on my typically stressed face. I love how lighthearted it is. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> Another masterpiece.

[https://i.imgur.com/Z90o6x5.png](https://i.imgur.com/Z90o6x5.png)

</comment><comment><USER29> Note: it's better with sound.

</comment><comment><USER30> Could be cool combined with something like [https://github.com/deepmind/spiral](https://github.com/deepmind/spiral)

</comment><comment><USER31> Still life (2020-06-17) - [https://i.imgur.com/MhyayTW.png](https://i.imgur.com/MhyayTW.png)

</comment><comment><USER32> Incredibly smooth on iOS Safari, I like the tactile interface and the sound feedback. Original UI design language.

10/10 fun idea, outstanding execution.

</comment><comment><USER33> For some reason it made me feel that this could have been a minigame inside Game Boy Camera... The trippy factor is similar, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER34> I didn't like anything. Have I gotten old?

<comment><USER35> No, I hate mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting, although a bit boring for me, sorry :(

Coincidentally, I recently made a quick experiment in Pico-8 about different ways to paint on a canvas using single pixels

[http://feiss.be/exp/pixelpainters/](http://feiss.be/exp/pixelpainters/)

</comment><comment><USER37> If I had some cocaine money to launder I bet I could get $10,000,000 for my piece.

</comment><comment><USER38> The music/sfx is amazing. Feels super "old internet" :D

</comment><comment><USER39> Fun. At first was confused, but then I figured it out.

I present... "spiderface"

[https://i.imgur.com/NgURDJR.png](https://i.imgur.com/NgURDJR.png)

</comment><comment><USER40> Doesn't seem to work in desktop Safari:

      [Error] WebGL: CONTEXT_LOST_WEBGL: loseContext: context lost

      [Error] TypeError: null is not an object (evaluating 'this.GetMainRunningLayout()._OnWebGLContextLost')

      [Error] Unhandled Promise Rejection: Error: Error compiling fragment shader: null

      [Error] Unhandled Promise Rejection: TypeError: null is not an object (evaluating 'this.GetMainRunningLayout()._Load')

<comment><AUTHOR> What Safari / macOS version? I'll report a bug in the game engine I used to throw this thing together.

<comment><USER40> Safari 13.1.1, macOS 10.14.6.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting it works in my 13.1.1 just fine. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Everything seems to be preferentially placed on the left side.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's great to see all the different results here.

[https://imgur.com/a/iGYKCSm](https://imgur.com/a/iGYKCSm)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, this is an app now, partially thanks to this post. I'd like to make a baby mode for kids. [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/no- paint/id1107427275](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/no-paint/id1107427275)

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://imgur.com/a/iIvMi8p](https://imgur.com/a/iIvMi8p)

This is turning out to a fine modern art generator.

</comment><comment><USER43> I can't tell why but I really love the music, it's really cool and somehow cute. It's overall fun and wish it had more "brushes".

</comment><comment><USER44> That was fun, my creation: [https://imgur.com/a/40Sv94U](https://imgur.com/a/40Sv94U)

</comment><comment><USER45> Took me a while to get past the home screen. I kept clicking 'paint' at the bottom and 'no' at the top.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I would take its being played as one of the evidences that humans have the tendency to do creative activities.

</comment><comment><USER47> Clicking "Paint" kills my Brave tab (on Android). Anyone else have this issue?

<comment><USER48> Ah maybe that's why this site isn't working for me - I'm using Brave - <USER2> Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> good 5-15 minute game for a party with a lazer projector and a lot of booze and acid

</comment><comment><USER50> Wow, that was a waste of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Painting has always been considered a waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It crashes for me, (using Brave 1.10.90 on macOS 10.15.5), then I click the paint button with Error code: RESULT_CODE_UNINSTALL_USER_CANCEL. Works fine in Safari though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It might be related to LocalStorage - thanks for reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I want to see something made by the model when we're done training it. And if you are not doing ML with all those user inputs, I'm extremely disappointed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not collecting any user inputs (yet) because my audience mostly consists of minors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Reminds me of some of the effects in KidPix, sound and all.

<comment><USER54> I came here to say the same thing, the brush sound effects take me back to sitting on my old Macintosh Quadra, messing around aimlessly -- doodling on kidpix.

I think I played Myst on that machine too.

<comment><USER55> Such nostalgia. I remember Kid Pix and Myst on my Mac IIsi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Squarespace: [https://i.imgur.com/aeQ3DKe.png](https://i.imgur.com/aeQ3DKe.png)

</comment><comment><USER57> The lack of spaceships (8===D) is good for work but disappointing from a humorous point of view, I suppose ambivalently.

</comment><comment><USER58> That was silly but very fun. Are you using ML algos to generate the paint based on the user input?

<comment><AUTHOR> No it's a novelty based approach and the only learning that takes place is inside you at the moment. It's just a MVP because I thought the idea of a one handed painting app could help people who fell out of doodling get back into the fun of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Seems like the perfect way to train an agent to learn to paint things that people like.

</comment><comment><USER60> It's like Tuxpaint creations of a two year old, similar sounds too.

</comment><comment><USER61> the first time kind of confused but then i keep going on [https://imgur.com/gallery/3ETezat](https://imgur.com/gallery/3ETezat)

</comment><comment> o-o-o thanks so much for making this! I saved it on my homescreen (ios) and can't save images anymore. Also any chance of bringing Elliot's Blur back?

</comment><comment><USER62> This is dumb, I love it.

</comment><comment><USER63> Swipe right all day long

</comment><comment><USER64> Brilliant work. Might turn off the sounds though. Great idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can type 'Mute' in the command prompt at the bottom while painting. And thanks so much for the compliment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> How can you reset to a new canvas?

E: Answered - type "Reset"

</comment><comment><USER66> Mario Paint-esque feel with the sound effects. I dig it.

</comment><comment><USER67> 10/10\. No Pant.

</comment><comment><USER68> I love this!!!</comment>


The Cold, Hard Math Says Netflix Could Crash 70% - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2019/08/06/the-cold-hard-math-tells-netflix-could-crash-70/ <comment><USER2> But I won't subscribe to all the other streaming services just to watch one show on each one. Netflix isgreat because I can watch everything in one place. When this changes, pirating shows will be more comfortable again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Solution: Have Disney buy Netflix.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best Android-only app you have used? - <AUTHOR>

I have seen a plenty of iOS-only apps which are appealing enough to buy an iPhone/iPad just for the app-power. But hardly I have found such appealing Android-only apps in Android. <comment><USER2> Tasker - <http://tasker.dinglisch.net/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Acar.</comment>


Ask HN: Best C#/.Net resources? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I'm about to start on a project involving C# and .Net. I've worked with these technologies in the past but it's now been many years since I last touched them. Now trying to orient myself around the best practices, tools, etc.
Anything you'd like to recommend? Favorite books, screencasts, courses? Awesome tools & libraries?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I've been using C# and .NET for about 18 months. Here are some of the books and other materials that I have found helpful.

Framework Design Guidelines - how to design libraries that anyone from Jon Skeet to Mort can use successfully. The focus is on library design but I have found it valuable for day to day coding.

Effective C# - how to implement the usual idioms properly.

CLR via C# - this is a dry read but has answers to many questions I would have never thought to ask.

C# in Depth - excellent coverage of language features from C#1 to C#5.

Writing High Performance .NET Code - the title says it all

Pluralsight courses:

[https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/csharp- applying-...](https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/csharp-applying- functional-principles) \- excellent coverage of the functional core/imperative shell approach to program design. If you know Haskell you can probably skip this.

[https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/csharp-design- st...](https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/csharp-design-strategies/) \- Jon Skeet implements the GoF patterns.

Visual Studio addins:

ReSharper - the diagnostics are quite valuable

SpecFlow - support for the Gherkin DSL for BDD testing.

Tools:

PerfView

</comment><comment><USER3> The Scott Allen series on MVC 5 is excellent if you are looking to jump on MVC (which is also free): [https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/aspdotnet- mvc5-fundament...](https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/aspdotnet- mvc5-fundamentals)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're looking at dotnet core just keep in mind that its been evolving quite a bit and can be a little frustrating when major changes happen. Though I think its starting to settle down a little. There's a lot of good documentation for it here: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/articles/core/index](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/articles/core/index)

Hanselman always has good posts on his blog: [http://www.hanselman.com/](http://www.hanselman.com/)

Outside of that, we'll need to know a bit more about what you're looking at to give you better advice.

</comment><comment><USER5> What kind of application is it?</comment>


Is This The Future of Advertising? - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/01/24/is-this-the-future-of-advertising

<comment><USER2> Absolutely not.

The future of advertising, such as it is, should _absolutely not_ involve intrusive content of _any_ kind. This includes what the article states as "It does not give me five different messages, it gives me one message. It is actually asking me to do something." I do not want to be asked to do anything. I want to see what I've asked for, and no more.

Users do not want popups, inline ads, redirects, overlays, or anything that gets in the way of the content they explicitly request. The arms race mentioned in the article, where users constantly find ways around ads and advertisers have to find new ways to push content to them, is going to continue. There will always be ways around intrusive content, and finding new ways to intrude is not going to solve the advertising problem. Rather, finding new ways to intrude is the same thing as finding new ways to annoy potential customers. Sure, it'll increase brand awareness, but wouldn't it be better to do so without them thinking "Oh come on not another freaking ad" in the process?

What _will_ work, and _has_ to work for advertising to remain relevant and continue into the future, is to integrate marketing into content that I explicitly request.

In practice, this means that companies should make products that are liked by people I respect, so that when they mention it on twitter or facebook I pay attention. This does _not_ include "share and like this", because I hate that stuff, and it's obviously a stunt.

As a distant second place, I'm also happy to see ads that consist of well- crafted and entertaining or educational content. This is very difficult, and is what we know as "viral marketing". However, it's such a common trope these days that it's easy to see a viral ad as an ad, and that feels like it's cheating. The article says "The very best ads are very emotional and funny. If you make advertisements that one can relate to, that changes the ads. People will allow it." While that is true, it's also true that they're still seen as ads, and that provides a psychological hurdle to people who have grown to dislike advertisements for what they are.

Rather than advertise blatantly, provide some sort of supported content that I want to go to see that _happens to include_ product placement or a demonstration of features as an _incidental_ characteristic of the content, rather than as the key point.

In short, to get the attention of future customers, give them content that they want to see so much that they _explicitly request it_ , and don't intrude on other content.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. Advertisements are trying to be more and more subtle whilst still being noticeable. The advertisements demoed in that video are no better than pop- ups.

And God almighty, if I hear another startup video with a ukulele playing as background music, I'm likely to go into a homicidal rage.

</comment><comment><USER4> No.</comment>


Show HN: A different approach against online censorship - <AUTHOR> http://unblock.us.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like some feedback about the idea and implementation. If you've got any ideas to make it better, I'd love to hear them.

The code is also on Github: [https://github.com/SGrondin/unblock.us.org](https://github.com/SGrondin/unblock.us.org)

<comment><USER2> Impressive idea!

So you say that you ever aspire to have enough bandwidth to tunnel youtube for a whole country? That's quite a pledge. Or you trust that only a small enough part of the population will ever use the service?

It sounds great. Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tunneling the Youtube webpage and flash player is tiny, tunneling the video itself isn't. The video is loaded from googlevideo.com and the Turkish government forgot to block that one...

But yeah, if it becomes popular enough I'm ready to look into ways to pay for more servers and a whole lot more bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Even a VPN does not work in China, how can this one help? refer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN_blocking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN_blocking)

<comment><AUTHOR> According to my traffic stats, there's a few people in China using it and tunneling "stuff" over it. I don't know which sites, but I know that it's being used there successfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Won't countries that censor the web just sensor the DNS requests?

<comment><AUTHOR> VPN traffic and VPN providers aren't even seriously targeted in pretty much every oppressive country I can think of. The authorities know that there'll always be a way to pass data through short of scealing the whole country off the internet. The goal is to lower the entrance cost by making a service that combines the speed of VPNs with the no cost aspect of TOR.

If it ever gets enough traction to end up on some government's radar (and keep in mind that VPNs and TOR are hugely popular and mostly left alone), then I'm hoping there'll be enough people running their own servers with the code I open sourced to mitigate that.

<comment><USER5> When I was in China my university VPN stopt working after a while. Don't know what happened, but they seemed to have blocked it.

<comment><USER3> China use DPI(Deep packet inspection) to detect vpn and block it. refer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN_blocking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN_blocking)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> what if "they" just block DNS access to "18.104.22.168" ? (this needs to get very low-profile to work under the radar)

<comment><AUTHOR> Read my response to willvarfar. If you have ideas and suggestions on how to deal with that problem, I'm all ears!

<comment><USER6> I think, if you are against a powerful opponent, it would need something like controlling the hardware infrastructure..

One idea that is organic and can work with simple Wifi routers is something like mesh networks.. so the people with wifi routers next to limits of a free neighbor country would have access to routers with internet..

Of course, to build such a network, some sort of incentive are needed.. maybe creating some sort of bitcoin for mesh networks would do it?

This would also help in war times.. anyway.. at least you are giving something back, a starting point.. maybe this will end in a org for you.. and you will have the means to achieve more?

Congrats for the attitude.. it may mean a lot for people who really need it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think [http://www.blockaid.me/](http://www.blockaid.me/) has been doing this, too, and I believe there were others.

Some other approaches I've seen are based on Namecoin somehow. DNSChain for example uses a custom "regular" DNS server to resolve .bit domains. So in works in a similar way, but in a much more distributed way, I think, because you can also create your own DNSChain server, and then be able to visit all of those .bit domains, once you use a DNSChain server's IP.

[https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain](https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain)

Then there's the FreeSpeechMe Firefox plugin that when installed also allows you to view .bit domains.

[http://www.freespeechme.org/](http://www.freespeechme.org/)

My favorite right now is DNSChain, because it's federated, but ideally, both Firefox and Chrome would have support for .bit domains built-in. Then as long as you'd be using these browsers, nobody could censor those .bit domains.

I doubt they will do it anytime soon, though, so until then the only browser that will do something like this seems to be the upcoming browser from ThePirateBay, which is meant primarily to save TPB from global censorship, but any website that's compatible with their protocol will work within their browser, and while it won't get the customer base of Chrome or Firefox, it should be a few million strong.

[http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat- cen...](http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-censorship- for-good-140105/)

<comment><USER8> Some more info on what DNSChain does (it goes a bit beyond access to .bit, it also provides a RESTful and securely authenticated HTTP API to the blockchain, currently reading but writing is possible):

\+ *.dns metaTLD (blockchain agnostic): [http://blog.okturtles.com/2014/02/introducing-the-dotdns- met...](http://blog.okturtles.com/2014/02/introducing-the-dotdns-metatld/)

\+ whitepaper that gives overview: [http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf](http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf)</comment></comment>


Introducing Exclusive Features to GitLab.com Bronze, Silver and Gold Plans - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/01/gitlab-com-paid-features/ <comment><USER2> Mandatory heads-up for those that haven't come across them: gogs [0] and its fork gitea [1] are zero config, download-and-run, self-hosted alternatives to GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab that won't suck the life out of your server, are efficiently written, and very fast even on underpowered (read: RPi) hardware or shared VPS nodes.

0: [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

1: [https://gitea.io/en-US/](https://gitea.io/en-US/)

<comment><USER3> Ironically, gitea is not even hosted by gitea. They are using github..

<comment><USER4> Maybe that's just because of GitHub's overwhelming popularity, hosting their code there is probably the best way to get attention and lots of contributors as they build up the product.

<comment><USER3> I can get behind that, but they should at least keep a mirror with gitea to demonstrate the product.

<comment><USER5> [https://try.gitea.io/teepot/teekanne](https://try.gitea.io/teepot/teekanne)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fun plot twist about at least self hosted Gitlab..

You are charged per user. When you install on your own server, it automatically makes an "admin" user. And then you get billed for this user. Despite never using him or doing anything with him, apparently a shell of a user costs a $4 licensing cost per month.

They really need to clean up the setup workflow, I have literally never used a piece of software that charged for a default account no one uses.

Fun plot twist: They let you go over your license count, and if I am reading billing correctly will bill you when you do a yearly renew for a full YEAR penalty for any user that went over, even if you added that user on the last possible day of the year. So day 364 of license.. add 1 user over license... your next license will have a penalty of 1 full year for that user. You need to go and add a user manually on the website which does some kind of weird proration to not pay this penalty.

Send feedback but not too hopeful it was heard, so always the post to hacker news plan...

<comment><USER7> I typically make the default user my account, but you can also delete that account if you like I believe.

<comment><USER6> But opps you went over your license count by 1 when creating your user, so your next renewal you will pay a penalty for that admin user.

<comment><USER8> I understand that this is a flaw, and indeed a billing-related flaw at that, and I agree it merits fixing and maybe even some refunds/discounts to make up the difference.

But at the same time, you seem to be super-concerned about what is essentially a one-time overcharge of (apparently) between $4 and $48, and I feel like I would struggle to muster the emotion you seem to feel over that. If you're posting this at work you may have just wasted more than $4 worth of your salaried time making these posts and reading the responses.

I get what you're saying, but I raise my eyebrow over the vitrol with which you say it, and wonder if perhaps there's something else you're not telling us?

<comment><USER9> Not only that but I'd be willing to bet the $48 that if an email is sent regarding what happened that they would adjust the bill and all would be well.

It's a silly flaw but I don't think I'd rake them over the coals for it.

<comment><USER6> I sent an email. I was told I could use or delete that account. No offer was made to adjust a bill, which is rage inducing.

<comment><USER10> Did you ask for an adjustment? I guess they can't read your mind, and thus they don't know that you're hoping to get that reduction. If you gently ask them, they can consider your direct request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like unlimited private repositories, Gitlab Pages and even some CI minutes (2000/month) will continue to be available in the free plan. Gitlab continues to provide such phenomenal value to free users that I struggle to find a reason to upgrade for my own projects. :)

That said, if I were running a business the extra workflow management tools in the bronze plan ($4/user/mo) and CI minutes in the silver plan ($19/user/mo) make total sense as useful upgrades.

<comment><USER12> Except for the fact that you cannot use gitlab.com for anything business related because it has abysmal performance and okay reliability. Basically they use gitlab.com to stress test gitlab.

<comment><USER13> We've been spending a lot of effort making GitLab.com more performant over the course of this year. We still have some ways to go, but every release includes performance enhancements based on performance data from GitLab.com.

We no longer see GitLab.com as a mechanism to stress test GitLab and we're certainly pushing hard to improve performance and availability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Public projects will still have free access to all features and unlimited > CI/CD, as part of our continued commitment to open-source software.

</comment><comment><USER14> God bless you all. I was on the verge of setting up a Gitlab CI instance on a local box for our projects since we're about to outstrip the free tier. Upgrading will be _way_ less expensive for my client and me.

<comment><USER15> Happy to hear so! GitLab.com should be able to offer all the features you need if you wish not to self-host!

Happy GitLabbing!

<comment><USER16> Super! That's really super, and awesome! Happy internetting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been using gitlab for a one person company for the last six months or so. The free plan is good for me. There are private repos, CI/CD Integration (pipelines). I am not using Issues or wikis etc. I use pull requests though. I just need git hosting and a decent CI/CD pipeline system.

I don't mind paying gitlab though to avoid the hassle of hosting things myself. But the Bronze plan does not add any value for me, as there is no increase in the CI/CD minutes compared to the free plan. The silver plan is not affordable to me.

Are there any other FOSS tools that HN readers know that provides out of the box support for git hosting as well as CI/CD ? This is just a backup planning in case gitlab decide to reduce or stop the CI/CD minutes.

<comment><USER18> You can install gitlab-ci-multi-runner on a machine you control, and you will have unlimited CI minutes.

I actually prefer this method because this lets me also write pipelines that depend on internal infrastructure and weird software (or not so weird - need a mac to build iOS projects with xcode, for example), and my code never touches random cloud VMs where the host is shared with other people (think guest-to- hypervisor escape exploit)

It's also super duper easy to set up, with the runner client being a self- contained binary available for most operating systems thanks to being written in Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This makes me slightly worried.

I'm fine with paying for a service like Gitlab's hosted instance (and will start paying for it), it's a pretty good service. The UI isn't amazing but the tools are better IMO than GitHub's.. last time I checked, anyway.

What worries me is that as a heavy user of self-hosted CE, I see frequently that many features that I would like are enterprise (EE) only. Something like doing an IP whitelist/banlist on your server in the nginx config is surprisingly difficult unless you are an EE customer. It's a common use case that shouldn't be EE-only.

This change on their values (the very generous free private hosting) makes me wonder what the future holds.

<comment><USER20> There's a configuration option in the omnibus CE config file to add additional lines to the built-in nginx configuration, it seems pretty straightforward to me - although we use a different web server so that we can integrate with our SSO, so I haven't tried it.

<comment><USER19> You are correct! The implementation is strange, however. I'm not able to directly override any of the nginx settings already set. As there is no route overriding in nginx, this makes things real tough in trying to allow/deny access by route.

The hacky workaround is to create a more specific regex to override any existing routes. So "Location /" becomes "Location /(.*)"

Other alternatives like running your own nginx configuration or apache2 is possible, but no current documentation exists (some is available, but it is outdated and following steps results in a landslide of errors). Plus I don't like the idea of using a different configuration as far as new updates breaking my instance goes.

This is just one example as well - and one I chose because simple IP allow/deny IMO is not an enterprise feature, but a very common use case for anyone running CE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use GitLab for private personal projects, and in general I'm supportive of most of these changes.

Some paid features that I think are still useful to teams under 3 people:

* Block secret file push

* Various merge options (squash, rebase, etc...)

* Export issues as CSV

<comment><USER22> I think squash and merge is absolutely essential!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have been using the free hosted plan for about a month now, which includes the "Silver" tier features. I'm really happy about their Early Adopter program! They are keeping my current Silver capability for free for another 12 months.

I have to say, I really like gitlab.com. The UI is slick, and you get a ton of features right out of the box (for free). Bravo gitlab.com, keep up the good work!

<comment><USER13> Thank you for the kind words, we've been working hard on improving the UI (have you tried the latest update in [https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new- navigation](https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new-navigation)) and have tried to make our free offering as valuable as possible as well as treating our existing free customers respectfully.

<comment><USER24> Question: why does it take about 5 seconds to load the list of projects when clicking on the dropdown arrow on the top left of the screen? It's even slower than loading the whole GitLab.com website, which includes a list of those projects.

I find this a frequent annoyance and often choose to go back and load the full projects page just to change project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been using Gitlab free for all my personal projects and mostly I'm totally okay with this change. I was afraid of being forced to pay for some basic functionality in a year but honestly most bronze/silver features are for slightly bigger projects than personal.

Just one small thing: pretty much the only 2 features I use from the Bronze plan are Issue Weight (I can live without them) and Milestones. I would like to see Milestones in the Free plan because for me it is just a convenience to create more structure in my issues. I wouldn't pay for just that feature and the alternative is more labels which would have the same result but more messy.

<comment><USER26> Just to clarify, milestones for issues are available in the free please, issue boards filtered on a milestone are a paid feature [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#boa...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#board- with-a-milestone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pricing feedback: Like kcorbitt said you're providing a lot of value to free users but here's some super weird stuff in the silver plan that I don't think should be there:

\- Block secret file push

\- Fast-forward merge with option to rebase

\- Squash and merge

\- Multiple assignees for issues

\- Issue Boards with Milestones

Aside from the first one those are all features provided by free from Github which also don't make a lot of sense to paywall.

<comment><USER13> Hi there, those features are all available for free for public projects, it's only for private projects where we limit some functionality.

<comment><USER28> From the pricing page:

> Public projects get all paid features and unlimited CI/CD for free.

I think this needs to be more obvious. ;) Perhaps the price tiers should be separated out into a Private Repo-only section?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We're evaluating source control right now (have repos all over the place) and I'm wondering if anyone can comment on the Github $25/mo plan vs. Gitlab's and Bitbucket's comparable offerings. It seems like the built-in CI is an advantage for Bitbucket and Gitlab, but I wonder what gotchas we're not seeing right now.

<comment><USER30> If you're looking for the hosted version, there's lots of complaints about GitLab.com's performance. Bitbucket is quite excellent and integrates well with hosted JIRA too - I'd say it's arguably a better option than GitHub in many cases.

I've had good luck with self-hosted GitLab's performance in my small group, but I've heard tales of others who haven't, so try before you buy if you're doing that. The CI integration is really nice though and GitLab has put good work into that flow. It can also be the cheapest option and keeps you self- reliant if that's something that appeals to you.

<comment><USER15> Hi, GitLab UX Designer here. I would like to add that GitLab has put tremendous efforts in optimizing for performance lately. These performance optimisations optimise GitLab instances big and small. These improvements were triggered by having literally millions of users and projects on GitLab.com which is our hosted solution.

For self-hosted GitLab instances run on a smaller scale, there should not even be a chance of performance hits :).

Just to give a good overview of what GitLab is offering for both self-hosted as well as our hosted solution of GitLab.com please look at [https://about.gitlab.com/features/](https://about.gitlab.com/features/)

I am happy to hear that the CI/CD integration, which is our native solution for CI/CD and beyond is being well received! We want to persuade not force users to use our native solutions.

<comment><USER31> GitLab frontend engineer here. Also wanted to add that performance improvement is a big part of our OKRs for our Q3 and are viewable at [https://about.gitlab.com/okrs/](https://about.gitlab.com/okrs/)

<comment><USER32> I'm glad that it's such a priority that it's an OKR now, but there are public Gitlab issues talking about performance for the past 2 years. We did a full migration to Gitlab 3-6 months ago and had to migrate out into Bitbucket only a couple days later, as basic browsing operations proved to be way too consistently slow and was extremely aggravating.

It will take a lot to prove to us that hosted Gitlab is actually good performance "for reals this time".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacking Starbucks for unlimited coffee (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://sakurity.com/blog/2015/05/21/starbucks.html <comment><USER2> These incidents are always infuriating to hear about. Every company in the world (whether they are writing software or not) needs a bug bounty program.

Although Starbucks is on HackerOne now, so hopefully things are better.

As an aside - "would easily make me a couple of millions of dollars" is definitely not true. Discrepancies even in the thousands of dollars would be caught pretty quicky by their accounting software, so please don't be tempted to try this.</comment>


MS Donates to Charity if you upgrade to IE8 - <AUTHOR> http://browserforthebetter.com

<comment><USER2> I want to hate IE 8, but this promotion is actually pretty cool.

I love this part: "we will double the donation for people upgrading from Windows Internet Explorer 6". That's music to my ears.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, it's probably the cheapest way to drive adoption. It isn't just web developers who want the change.</comment>


Formspring prank story plagues Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.inquisitr.com/66425/formspring-to-reveal-users-private-data/

<comment><AUTHOR> We use Formspring for our business so when we saw this story floating around on Twitter we got worried until we noticed the telltale signs of the prank. This was the only story I could find on Google News about it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187327></comment>


Be: Fundraising Misadventures - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-16-be-fundraising-misadventures-23c566b82085 <comment><USER2> This quote from the article stands out to me:

"A Pro invests as much money, as many times, for as long as required for the situation to attain Clarity. This Clarity allows only two outcomes, Dead or Liquid. When a Pro declines the invitation to invest in a follow-on round, it means they've reached Clarity: In the eyes of the Pro who declines to invest, the company is Dead, their initial stake is worthless. Write it off and move on, no tears, no recriminations."

<comment><USER3> I don't know much about VC, but it seems like this can't possibly be true. Aren't there times when a VC invests, and then declines a followup round because they still like the company but don't want any more exposure to their industry or country? And if a company is doing a follow up round valued at $X, any estimated valuation between $0 and $X-1 should be low enough that the VC doesn't invest in that round. There's no reason to assume it's always $0.

<comment><USER4> I feel like the situation JLG is talking about is specifically a down-round

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually worked at Be, in 2000. I signed up knowing full well they were in trouble: they were no longer selling BeOS as a standalone consumer product, and had pivoted to "internet appliances."

At the time, I figured: yeah, they seem to be in a bit of a pickle, but they've been in business for 10 or 11 years now. They will find a way to get through this, like they have so many times before.

Seven months after I started, the company went out of business and I got laid off. Shows how much I know!

<comment><USER6> I loved my BeBox and BeOS. Had I been braver at that time in my life I would have relocated and taken a job there.

<comment><USER5> well, i have to be honest and say that, if be had _not_ been on the ropes, i would never have been hired. in the early days, the company was able to attract the best of the best of the best. i am a pretty decent programmer, but not at the AAAA level of the early guys. by the time of the internet appliance pivot, the superstars had all left for greener pastures.

by the time i got there, the company was pretty much dead. we were working on the Sony eVilla, which nobody believed in. it was a massive failure.

after that, i lost my taste for "the big leagues." i am not willing to go through the standard "implement a b-tree on a whiteboard" interview, and i always want to work remotely, so no google, microsoft, facebook, amazon (etc) jobs for me. i have been working in small shops since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The point of the article seems to be that spending your own money and raising from friends is bad, and that professional investors are good.

But I didn't fully understand the justification for that, was it in the article and I missed it?

Is it just that:

\- friends get annoyed with you if they get diluted,

\- and that eventually the money runs out and you'd want to have investors with basically unlimited funds so you can go back to them for future rounds?

Or were there other reasons?

<comment><USER8> The kicker is towards the end. Be gets saved, but the terms are usurious from the early investors' viewpoint. And there's not much the latter can do about it since their own pockets aren't deep enough. Ergo, better go straight for the deep pocketed Pro, and stay friends with your relatives as a bonus.

His point on Clarity is also spot on:

> A Pro invests as much money, as many times, for as long as required for the > situation to attain Clarity. This Clarity allows only two outcomes, Dead or > Liquid. When a Pro declines the invitation to invest in a follow-on round, > it means they've reached Clarity: In the eyes of the Pro who declines to > invest, the company is Dead, their initial stake is worthless. Write it off > and move on, no tears, no recriminations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> old retrieval of be memos [http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/ab...](http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/aboutbe/benewsletter/Issue57.html)

featuring steve horowitz

<comment><USER7> I loved BeOS, I bought a copy in 1999 or thereabouts.

I would have loved BeOS to succeed, but perhaps that memo shows a lot about why Be failed.

That note does seem totally cool on a technical level, but I wonder, was the thing that Be needed (as a company) most, at the time that memo was written, the things in that memo? I mean having "live drag" of folders is nice, but is that the sort of reason someone choose an OS or a computer?

I mean, I reckon, when developing a product, you need to focus on the "critical path" from where you are now to having a product everyone wants to buy. Live folder dragging, while nice, isn't on it I reckon. Maybe MIME content-types instead of file extensions isn't either. And while your developers are working on things that aren't on the critical path, you have the opportunity cost that they could have been working on something that was on the critical path.

What do you think?

<comment><USER10> Be fell victim to anticompetitive practices by Microsoft. There was a PC made by Hitachi that dual booted beos, and the deal was that the user was supposed to be able to choose windows or beos. Microsoft then forced Hitachi to single boot windows and the user effectively wound up with a hard drive that was literally half inaccessible to the OS because beos was there - it was difficult to activate the beos partition.

Honestly my feeling as a developer is that go to market is really hard. I know how to solve technical problems. I don't know that there is a consistent and reliable way to get customers. Be's problem was that, plus more, because of Microsoft. Microsoft is very much a different company now.

<comment><USER9> I wonder how much of the world comes back to this. The winner is the one who is willing to cross the line just enough to do so.

<comment><USER11> A potential winner can't cross the line successfully unless they have leverage. Microsoft had a heavy hammer: put up with us or lose access to the mainstream market.

Disrupting such a market is of course the goal of any small innovator who needs cooperation from the other market participants.

Hmm. Not sure this comment of mine advamces the conversation here. But anyway "willingness to be a thug" is perhaps necessary to create a singularity like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, but not sufficient. And I'm not sure it's even necessary.

<comment><USER9> You're right, at least partially, they did so when in position of power.

But even then, their IBM deal was almost a scam (exagerating of course). They sold something they didn't even have at the time.. high risk gambling mentality. It's a bit similar to roughing competition up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not sure I understand why would a VC be suspicious of self-funding?

<comment><USER13> Roughly, "is this company so bad that they can't get any real investors?"

Sorta like a self published book, it looks like a vanity project more than a thing that can survive in the world independent of its creator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Without more context, this reads as failing upwards/humble bragging. All these powerful people helping something that seems so tenuous? That's not a common outcome.</comment>


Ask YC: Telecommuting startup teams? - <AUTHOR>

I've been finding for our development, marketing, etc. that is matters almost nil where we're located. It's just so easy to do things remotely using Skype, IM, good source control, etc.
What are you finding? How many of your startups are entirely made-up of people who come in and sit in the same place together?
What kind of problems do you foresee for a small distributed team? <comment><USER2> I work on a distributed team. We aren't a startup however. Using SVN, IM, con- calls, Confluence, JIRA, and an excellent project manager we are able to work very effectively from all over the country.

It was key that we all got together for the project kick-off for a week or two and got to know one another a bit. Being able to picture someone, and having a sense of how they communicate, how their sense of humor works, etc... can make non-face-to-face communication later much easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> My team and I used the standard IM, email, source control, etc. But Skype could just _never_ replace a good old fashioned meet-up.

My co-founder and I have been friends for a long time, and the chemistry we have makes work both fun and extremely productive when we're in the same place at the same time. Over the net, it doesn't really happen. Admittedly, we waste a lot of time in person just bullshitting, but I think it's worth it and it makes the time enjoyable.

For a time, everyone on my team had to drive a half-hour just to meet somewhere between where we all lived -- due to school, job changes, etc. In my opinion, this was one of the biggest things that led to the team eventually falling apart. Simply put, when people moved apart, the fellowship was broken. :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> My co-founder and I worked each in his own home for about 8 months, meeting face to face one per week or two. That worked OK, but it was obvious that we'd be more productive if we both worked in the same place. Recently we stared hiring more developers (3 so far), and it became clear that we just have to have a central place where everybody spends at least some of the time. We keep the hours flexible, and anyone can work from home as much as they want, but still, getting face time with each other a few days per week is priceless. You can't really coordinate a team's work efficiently when you're completely distributed IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's our CEO discussing that very thing:

Please scroll down to "The Virtues of Virtual..."

<https://spideroak.com/blog>

<comment><USER6> <https://spideroak.com/>

Flash intro?! REALLY!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're distributed and for the most part it works fine. We get together once a year at SXSW to work/learn/party.

Right now we're at most 5 hours apart in time, which isn't bad, but when we tried going fully "global" by trying to hire someone in Germany we discovered there's an outer bound to how far apart you can be.

We use irc, email & skype.

</comment><comment><USER6> I honestly think being in the same room at least a few days a week is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to know the answers to these too, they're relevant to my, ah.. interests!</comment>


Predicting the next 5000 days of the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYCf4ONh5M&feature=user

<comment><USER2> I predict that people like Kevin Kelly will continue to make predictions that are backward-looking. He indicts himself: Wired's predictions were all about "TV, but more so". And now his prediction is, "The web, but more so." And then he projects forward into this fantasy-fulfillment scenario of harmony and unity among all devices, as if these machines aren't going to be owned and operated by squabbling humans, and as if data can be meaningful to all devices in all ways.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really don't think its possible to predict ANYTHING that far ahead. Look at how far we went in the first 5000 days.

<comment><USER4> On this topic, it doesn't sit well with me that he mentions the explosion of change in the first 5,000 days as justification for whatever predictions he wants to make about the next. Using that logic, I could say all kinds of things about the universe are likely _now_ because so much crazy stuff happened during the big bang.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mind blowing. The end sounded creepily religious.</comment>


CSS3 Transition - a simple slider demo - <AUTHOR> http://grenlibre.fr/demo/css3/transition/slider/

<comment><USER2> So, basically, you have a main css class with "transition-duration: 1.5s;", another class with left: -275px; and after you change to a class with left: 0px; and it animates itself without javascript (it is used only to change classes).

That's cool, exited about new CSS features, wish they did added these earlier..

And it reminds me a bit about Adobe Flash IDE, you can do animations without actionscript just by using their IDE.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great degradation (meaning that the animation doesn't work in my current latest-but-non-beta FF 3.6.3, but the hard image switching still does).</comment>


Ask HN: Where to put links of your Minimum viable product? - <AUTHOR>

As a Startup company we created plenty of MVP's. But after every MVP there was always a question.
Where should we put links so a MVP can get as much users as possible?
Facebook.com Twitter.com Pinterest.com Reddit.com http://news.ycombinator.com
...
Where was your "getting users" media? <comment><USER2> I'm working on a little community where people with projects and mvp's can showcase their links, progress, mix with others working in their space.

There would also be a lot of opportunity for people to test each others projects so it could be really useful.

There will also be regular blog articles looking at progressing products on the site & the achievements/challenges the team building it faces.

Hopefully the blog will be a good resource for early tech adopters to learn about new things to try and will be a good source of genuine users!

We've had quite a lot of interest so far, especially from teams that didn't make it to YC this cycle but are carrying on regardless.

If you think this would be interesting, let me know. Feedback on it would be appreciated and I can be sure to drop any of you a mail once it's time for folks to sign up!

<comment><USER3> This sounds interesting to me. Where and how did you gather feedback on your idea? Please contact me, jasna at hekovnik.si when you have landing page up or will be able to sign up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are over-thinking this. Seriously.

What does your product do?

Who needs it?

Let's say you product allows cats to tweet. Your customer would be cat owners that are tech oriented.

You think of ways to find this people. Hmmm... you could try youtube viral by doing a video of you cat Dr. Evil tweeting. Or you could go to the local pet shops and give a free "seminar" on how to teach your cat to tweet.

Point is that you need to get out there, outside of your comfort zone and sell the damn thing.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> While you probably get a lot of traffic with HN and reddit it really depends on your product.

For example: if you build a managing app for landlords I doubt any of the sites you mentioned will bring you paying customers.

Maybe some people spread the word about your MVP but I'm not sure if a MVP has enough impact to make people spread the word.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here and Reddit so far, though I really should investigate Pinterest more (I'm targeting families). Twitter has a really low pickup rate for me, probably because I'm not that popular. Facebook is a little better as friends are more easily blackmailed into testing things ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm interested in this too, Paskulin, perhaps we can swap notes? wahyu at symbol picocrew.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, no problem. I will send you mine this week. I don't have a lot of them, but still some can be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> adwords. just make sure you have a business plan.</comment>


Contributors do not save time - <AUTHOR> http://www.drmaciver.com/2016/07/contributors-do-not-save-time/ <comment><USER3> This is very much untrue. I manage several open source projects and contributors save me _tons_ of time. You have to mold contributors into the productive team members you need them to be to save you time. I often receive pull requests from first time contributors that are not immediately mergable. I don't take the approach of just merging it and fixing it myself - I do invest the time in coaching the contributor into making their pull request a strong candidate for merge on their own. This often produces returning contributors who get it right more and more often on the first try and can be trusted to write larger and more important swaths of the code. Bonus - <USER2> contributors you've worked with will often start to get in and help review entry-level pull requests, too, which reduces your workload even more for onboarding new contributors.

Contributors rock! More of them would help me get my projects done _so much_ faster.

<comment><USER4> You reference those here and there. Curious what projects you work on, esp OS- related?

<comment><USER3> Check out my Github: [https://github.com/SirCmpwn](https://github.com/SirCmpwn)

The pinned projects there are groomed.

<comment><USER4> "I make unoriginal projects with better code than the thing they rip off."

Love that line. That's what we high-assurance people keep telling developers to do to all the established stuff. You said it better, though. Might remix that in some way with your permission. :)

<comment><USER3> Of course, feel free. I enjoy reinventing the wheel :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the author misses a key point.

The article begins by laying out a premise that not all work is equal, in the sense that contributors will contribute work that maintainers aren't wont to do for one reason or another.

But what follows is the claim that this creates an additional work burden for maintainers, in terms of review. But what is each contribution, and how does it contribute to future work by maintainers and contributors alike?

Projects with a lot of attention benefit not just from "work" but from advancing design and efficiency where, as the author says, "each contributor brings fresh eyes and experience to the project". Simply counting hours worked doesn't account for this, because a tremendous amount of work may simply be avoided by this kind of contribution.

</comment><comment><USER6> My feeling is that this is actually a problem with github and the "pull request" method specifically. All of the back and forth, waiting for the contributor to update commits is a huge time sink for me. It takes 10x as much effort to merge a small pull request than to actually write the code myself.

The solution I see, is to make it so that rather than commenting on pull requests, I "adopt" the pull requests. I merge them into a private branch, fix the spelling errors and the "bad" variable names, and then I push the bundle. For some reason, most contributors want to have a clean commit history and don't like this method. I agree that it is messy. I think that my "solution" points to the need for a better solution. Either one implemented by github or one implemented by a competitor which destroys github.

<comment><USER7> I often do this. I will merge the PR with my fixes, and leave a comment for the new contributor letting them know the fixes I made (so they can do it themselves next time before making the PR).

<comment><USER6> I do this too. But it just doesn't feel natural on github. I feel like I'm doing something that is "unusual".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, the writer is correct: dealing with a contributor increases your own workload. But...maybe we could use the interaction to turn an occasional contributor into a maintainer? Although that's tough, hopefully the contributor grows into that role and, over time, reduces your own workload as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> For fixing simple stylistic / spelling problems, I really like the take taken with `git am`: [https://blog.spreedly.com/2014/06/24/merge-pull-request- cons...](https://blog.spreedly.com/2014/06/24/merge-pull-request-considered- harmful/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think what the author writes is true if you want to maintain absolute control over the project.

However, in this post ([http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request- hack.html](http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html)) and the related HN discussion ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417)), we see that by empowering and trusting contributors we can often get surprising and unintuitive results. I've tentatively tried this and been pleasantly surprised in my own projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> I disagree. I recognize that the author is writing based on their experiences, but that should not paint all contributors that way.

I'm involved in two projects (Rust, Servo) which have _immense_ numbers of contributions from volunteers. Both have mentorship programs (Servo's is more evolved, Rust's is getting on its feet). In Servo we spend a lot of time mentoring people. In return, once every few new contributors we get someone who sticks around, and perhaps even works on major things. This saves ton of time. I haven't ever measured this formally, but by eyeballing it I'd say contributors save more time than the review process and mentorship take.

I also have a personal project, rust-clippy ([http://github.com/manishearth/rust- clippy/](http://github.com/manishearth/rust-clippy/)). It started out as my own thing, and I merged with another similar project and got a co-maintainer. It was mostly the two of us working on it. We could have gotten it to the stage which it is at now, but it would have taken forever. At one point I started tagging issues as easy/medium/hard, and wrote some documentation for newbies wanting to contribute. I advertised this a bit in the appropriate forums, and now I have tons of contributors; three of which have become maintainers (they still contribute a lot), and a couple others who frequently contribute. I don't have much time to work on this project these days, but it has grown _so much_ without me needing to put much time in it at all. These days I mostly review PRs and take part in discussions, but rarely write code for it. The project is now a tool with more than 150 lints which most of the Rust community uses and loves. It would not have gotten there without the contributors.

If you'd like your project to be mroe receptive to new contributors, I have a blog post I once wrote for this: [http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/01/03/making-your- ope...](http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/01/03/making-your-open-source- project-newcomer-friendly/). Many of the tips there don't require much effort -- it's either a one-time thing you have to do, or a change in process that doesn't make the process longer.

Aside: Often a distinction between "contributor" and "maintainer" is made, and this is cropping up in this thread too. In clippy this has never really been a thing. We have maintainers, but when someone becomes a maintainer they don't really do anything different -- they don't take on more responsibilities. Rather, most of the contributors I have ramp up from working on individual issues to reviewing and doing maintainer-y things, and once we think they've got the gist of it we give them merge powers. In Servo/Rust we also have a similar continuum -- we have folks who take part in review without having review access ("review access" is the ability to tell our autoland bot that something is reviewed and ready to test/merge), and at some point they are given reviewer permissions. So there is of course a difference in the powers available to contributors and maintainers, but in the projects I work on the most there's not much of a difference in what they _do_ ; maintainers don't have additional responsibilities, they just have powers which help they carry out what they were doing as a contributor anyway.

<comment><USER11> Rust is particularly good at it. It makes bugs finding easier as language forces good habits and eliminates whole classes of bugs, tests are easy to add and check, ecosystem has established ways of dealing with CIs, reviews, good autoformatting tools, there's `clippy` for good style, etc.</comment></comment>


The EU's new internet rules will hurt the continent's startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21677175-eus-new-internet-rules-will-hurt-continents-startups-multi-speed-europe <comment><USER2> I don't understand such articles, maybe someone can clarify the issue for me? If a company can do Harmful Things X and Y, and then a law appears that bans it from doing X but for some reason does not cover Y, then how is the rule _hurting_ the victims of that company? How can reducing but not completely eliminating harmful things actually be actively hurting?

<comment><USER3> Its all about loopholes actually. Lets take for example a simple law that says all employers must give their employees health insurance. No sane person is against people having health insurance, its just the ways companies might get around this law that is the problem. For instance, lets say this applies to fulltime employees, well then the company might lay people off, hire more contractors and part-timers, then those same people have less job security, perhaps lower wages because other laws regarding fulltime employees dont apply, and still no health insurance.

That is essentially what this EU law boils down to: a law with lots of loophole room for companies to exploit.

<comment><USER4> >Lets take for example a simple law that says all employers must give their employees health insurance. No sane person is against people having health insurance

Given that in many countries apart from the US, health insurance is provided by the government and/or private sector, I'd posit that there are quite a few sane people who don't believe having employers be responsible for providing health insurance is necessarily a good idea.

An example found by some quick Googling: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/05/12/how- emp...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/05/12/how-employer- sponsored-insurance-drives-up-health-costs/)

<comment><USER3> I do not live in the US, I chose a specificlly US example because most people are probably familiar with the US system here. Regardless, if you read my statement, it has nothing to do with whether a company/govt should or should not provide insurance, just that "no sane person is against people having health insurance". If someone thinks, in general, people should not have health care services I think there is something wrong with them i.e. they are not being sane.

A better example could have perhaps been rent ceilings in large cities, since there are many classic examples of this loophole behavior in economics.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I assumed from the sentence preceding it that you meant that no sane person would be against employers providing health insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The main problem with this argument is that "net neutrality" is a poorly defined term.

What it has come to symbolise in the states is the lack competition, and the ability of At&t verizon and timewarner to stifle competition.

For example: the netflix fiasco.

Comcast wanted money for peering directly with netflix.

In the UK and most of Europe that sort of dick waving is very very difficult to achieve.

Firstly because there is competition in the UK, holland, france etc., there is more than one provider of broadband in most areas (and very very tight rules about what the monopoly can charge.)

That means that if netflix is slow because a certain company is playing hardball, customers will leave. So deliberately slowing down a key legal service is going to loose you customers. Doing so in an effort to boost your own rival will also lead to successful prosecution (unlike in the states)

Secondly here in europe, peering is cheap and easy. Places like LINX, LONAP and the european equivalents means that peering centres are co-owned by all the people peering. Not a Big ISP. There are still peering agreements where money is changed hands.

Thirdly ISPs here are more than happy to have Edge caches. why? because it cuts down on the need for peak bandwidth to non local traffic. It also cuts down on bandwidth going other third-party connections(which again cost money).

Crucially, Not all traffic is treated the same. For the last 10 years QoS has been applied to virtually all domestic connections. You literally cannot have cheap broadband, with full connectivity and no traffic shaping _and_ it be usable. To make sure that your domestic internet is usable the ISP would have to provision your full link speed in the backhaul, to all upstream networks.

ISPs may say that they don't traffic manage, but they are 100% telling porkies. In the UK, all ISPs have a fair use policy. This states that certain types of traffic will be slowed during peak hours, _or_ that if you use too much bandwidth your whole connection will be slowed.

Traffic management is universal.

</comment><comment><USER6> With "special services" insufficiently defined, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Just today, Deutsche Telekom announced that "According to our [Deutsche Telekom] ideas, they [startups] pay for it as part of a revenue sharing of a few percent. That would be a fair contribution for the use of infrastructure."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472765)

With "video conferencing, online gaming, telemedicine automated traffic control and self-steering cars up to integrated production processes in the industry" as examples of users needing to pay, this goes a lot further than what has always been argued for by the commission.

</comment><comment><USER7> a UK conservative magasine against an EU action, so surprising. To them, even if EU cured cancer it would still be wrong. Why do we see so many links of this website here actually? Like most UK people they hate the EU, and they are only part of it for subversion.

</comment><comment><USER8> 'Internet' and 'rules' in the same sentence is a contradiction in terms. The web was not designed for the kind of draconian oversight you see in the EU and elsewhere. Anything that resembles some form of rigidity will be made less rigid and force startups to 'think differently' and more fluid. It's a form of present shock (as Rushkoff has coined) which people are not used to that you see in bustling Shoreditch and other tech melting pots. You actually have people who look like The Internet in those places with USB flash drives as necklaces...

</comment><comment><USER9> Completely unrelated to the topic, but did anyone notice that the article is from the future? Has Oct. 31st as publication date.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been saying that Net Neutrality was a bad idea from day 1. Nobody would listen.

There you go.

Regulation is always a bad thing.

<comment><USER11> Did you read the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yet another reason why I live in Switzerland, which is NOT in the EU. Read my story here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland (to work in IT)": [https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i- moved-t...](https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to- switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90) If you are interested in coming to Switzerland, just shoot me a mail.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's why any startup that wants business will make an Inc in the US.

It's legally much simpler to do so, and leave your offices in the cheap EU. US Inc can employ your offices and at the same time have no people working in the US.

US is saved by ruthless capitalism. When I see what politicians from my country voted on I'm realizing that journalists, political science majors, historians, spanish/english/lang language teachers, philosophers, artists and bunch of other social scientists know much about nothing - maybe it says something about our national universities, maybe about these science areas as a whole, who knows. But for some reason they think they are capable of having a career in politics, and it works.

<comment><USER14>
      That's why any startup that wants business will make an Inc in the US.

      It's legally much simpler to do so, and leave your offices in the cheap
      EU. US Inc can employ your offices and at the same time have no people
      working in the US.

      US is saved by ruthless capitalism. When I see what politicians from my
      country voted on I'm realizing that journalists, political science
      majors, historians, spanish/english/lang language teachers,
      philosophers, artists and bunch of other social scientists know much
      about nothing - maybe it says something about our national universities,
      maybe about these science areas as a whole, who knows. But for some
      reason they think they are capable of having a career in politics, and
      it works.

Eh? Did you read the article?

It states that the US has _more_ stringent and complete controls on net neutrality than the EU. The EU has loopholes, therefore less controlling and protectionist (consumer) than the US.

If you want to take corporate advantage of lax net neutrality protection laws, then you are better off utilising "ruthless capitalism" in the EU (for this particular instance), and not in the US.

You argument is backwards.

<comment><USER15> And each EU country implements the directives as it sees fit and can vary widely compare how TUPE is handled for example.

So you can expect some EU countries to play favorites with there ex PTO or Powerful Media interests.</comment></comment></comment>


How much caffeine do you drink each day? - <AUTHOR> http://coffeealternatives.com/ <comment><USER2> I buy four bags at a time from BrewSouth which last me about 2 weeks per bag, so 6 mugs per pot per day. Guess I am addicted.</comment>


Setting up OpenVPN on Amazon's EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://holgr.com/blog/2009/06/setting-up-openvpn-on-amazons-ec2/

<comment><USER2> If you just want a quick and dirty VPN to tunnel your TCP traffic through, it's probably easier to launch a random EC2 image and run shuttle [1] on your client.

<https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle></comment>


Show HN: Changes – "Make Better Life Decisions with This App" - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/0ox-sIFc-sc <comment><USER2> The idea is great. You have a very strong character to quit drinking. Hope this app helps other people become happier too.</comment>


If your iOS 11 device unexpectedly restarts repeatedly on or after December 2 - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208332 <comment><USER2> You know what would help shit like this?

Letting us downgrade iOS.

I get it. It means potential security exploits.

But at least let us make the choice wether we'd prefer those to shiny new, and different issues that seem to be growing in number.

Please? No?

Fine, I'll wait for the jailbreak and collect the goddamn SHSH blobs or whatever, if that's how far you'll make me go.

My, how lucky you are that GarageBand iOS has no peers (namely its integration with Logic), or I'd downgrade to a dumb phone and start carrying a palm pilot again.

<comment><USER3> Are there any operating systems that offer an seamless, out-of-the-box downgrade option? When I first upgraded from windows 7 to 10 I remember wanting to go back and finding out that it was an incredibly convoluted process. Although I guess with iOS you just can't downgrade, period.

<comment><USER4> Some Android manufacturers provide "factory images" allowing you to completely wipe your phone and reinstall any version supported on the hardware. Google is probably the best, maintaining an archive of every version released for the phones they sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not one word of apology from Apple! The workaround involves turning off notifications individually for every app, and then turning them on after the update. If this were any other manufacturer, they would be burnt at the stake. But we somehow let Apple get away with it.

<comment><USER6> Would we? We didn't burn LG at the stake for bootloops. We don't burn Microsoft at the stake for updating Windows 1p in the middle of work. Plenty of Android phones have had problems. If anything I feel like Apple gets more flak for every little thing, it just so happens this week they've had two genuinely really bad ones.

<comment><USER7> Let's not forget that other than people being a bit mad, all those bulging battery packs from Samsung seems to be largely, and quickly, forgotten. I even saw a review of the new one that had a "Doesn't explode" in the Pros column.

<comment><USER8> Nobody made excuses for Samsung, which finally couldn't market its way out of being regarded as one of the poorest quality Android phone manufacturers that sells in the US.

I'll put the reaction to Apple's screwups on the same level as the reaction to LG's when I see a class action lawsuit.

<comment><USER9> The Verge just named the Samsung S8 the second best phone you can buy right now, after the iPhone X:

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/15914934/best- smartphone-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/15914934/best-smartphone- apple-ios-google-android)

<comment><USER8> Two of the worst quality phones available, as we all now know. This only reflects poorly on The Verge.

<comment><USER10> Please name the phone that is in your opinion the _best_ quality phone available, to calibrate this statement.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWiSIxVlI7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWiSIxVlI7w)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is happening at Apple? I'm honestly worried for them. Is their QA department in disarray?

<comment><USER13> Could it be that the amount of bugs have exploded with the ever-growing complexity of their software combined with an unsustainable pace to guarantee solid, reliable software?

It seems like a house of cards right now, and it will only get worse as they keep having the next crunch time just to deliver on an arbitrary management deadline...

<comment><USER14> Most of the iOS ui SpringBoard bugs are due to them rewriting the codes in Swift. Many Autolayout bug. Music app can't even align the play button at center. Also Craig Federighi is busy with Siri, and busy shooting down Note 8 in social media. I was annoyed when the text replacement bug took one beta to solve, where the Calculator bug took 5 or 6 releases to solve. And the third reason is they expect users will actively test iOS for them. With so many bugs surfaced in media and in released version, my guess is no one is telling them the bugs during beta. Another reason is iPhone X is iPhone fragmentation with different home screen UI. You're are right this will introduce complexity to the code base. I'm thankful for the touchbar in MacBook Pro and the notch design in X, both I dislike. This make me realise the many good points in other platform. Sort of like bursting my Apple fanboy bubble.

<comment><USER15> Curious to know more about your claim that rewriting stuff in Swift causes a lot of bugs - got any sources on that?

<comment><USER16> Rewriting _any_ mostly-working code in _any_ language—even the _exact same language_ —causes bugs.

It's been that way since the 1960s.

It "has to be done" sometimes, but put that day off as long as possible.

<comment><USER15> That makes sense I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Damn it... I literally just wiped my iPhone completely because of this problem and am now restoring it from scratch. I wish I had read hacker news first!

<comment><USER18> Did it twice! Lost data too. Apples software quality has taken a very noticeable dive the last year or two. Being an iOS developer used to be very comfortable. It's now become a real pain in many ways. Xcode being the worst.

<comment><USER19> Xcode 9 is definitely an area where I feel like it's going in the right direction.

<comment><USER18> Xcode 9 promised a lot, but for me it has been a big disappointment. SourceKitService still ends up in an endless loop allocating memory and needs to be kill -9'd every 10 minutes. Switching git branches with a storyboard open often trips up Xcode and just now crashed my Mac completely. Apple software quality is not what it used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A similar bug (not as serious) is happening on macOS: [https://robservatory.com/month-13-is-out-of- bounds/](https://robservatory.com/month-13-is-out-of-bounds/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Fuuuck. So sorry time. A few years ago I had an iPhone. I liked the iPhone. One day in the middle of the night the iPhone started flashing its screen at me. I woke up and tried restarting it. It didn't work. The iPhone was in a loop of some kind and restarting it sent it back into the same state. Being as it was my only alarm clock, I tried to do what I could to fix the iPhone. Restoring it to factory settings via iTunes helped, by restoring from backup brought the issue back until it suddenly stopped a few hours later. This happened with some regularity every few months. Then my ex's iPhone started doing that too. Then her iPad. Than our upgraded phones. Apple support had never seen it. And nobody else had either. Eventually I filed a bug with Apple and also reported it on StackOverflow. The issue was that one of my calendars was an Exchange calendar and it has some weirdness about representing events that repeat forever. iOS did not handle that situation well and it sent the kernel into some sort of panic state. After I actually talked to a support developer at Apple, they released an update that ended about a year of misery for me.

Oh and some of you may remember the time that non-recurring alarms just stopped working one day on all iOS devices.

I still have an iPhone for reasons. But damn, I'd like to have one version of iOS that doesn't have quite so many bugs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Jeebus.

I love Apple but Tim has got to tighten that ship.

<comment><USER23> Can the Vasa be "tightened"?

<comment><USER24> They could try shutting the cannon doors...

<comment><USER25> New iOS11 bug: Firing cannons introduces stability issues.

<comment><USER26> You are holding them wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not to get all "when I was your age we walked uphill both ways and we liked it," but I really do think the frenetic pace of software updates across the whole industry these days is insane. In web software I see companies releasing multiple times per day at the extreme, once a day being more typical, but still nuts. Things like iOS upgrades are obviously less frequent than that but still seem so hurried. Why all the rush? It's like the whole industry is on a massive coke bender. Seriously, let people _use_ your software. The constant updating just creates a shifting sand under people's feet. I don't need every product I use to change every week or month, and in fact I find it quite irritating. Just let me use the product!

<comment><USER28> Sadly, the momentum has already built up and people are addicted to the rapid changes. I don't see this practice stopping any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A lot of people so ios 11 is no more buggy than previous versions, but i honestly disagree. iOS 11 has just been a mess. They say, wait till the .2 or .3 release and it'll get better. Sooo... that's 3 to 6 months of using a bug riddle OS just for it to get good. We're just supposed to put up with that?

I guess we are supposed to.

</comment><comment><USER29> Calculator bug is reproduced on iOS 11.2

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15838308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15838308)

</comment><comment><USER30> Every week I have another reason to be thankful that I didn't upgrade to iOS 11. But those bastards keep downloading the update to my phone and then telling my that I'm running low on free space. Cannot stand the way Apple treats users.

</comment><comment><USER31> the problem is even with how crappy iOS11 is Android phones suck more. I wish there was an better alternative.

Apple still won't let us change the default browser from Safari to Chrome/Firefox for links clicked in Mail or iMessage. Its very annoying.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think I'll just hold my breath until the next Apple embarrassment.

</comment><comment><USER33> I was just fixing this problem for my dad about an hour ago. He called me asking what was wrong. A resetting of settings was able to fix it as well without messing with any data or apps.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interestingly, I copied and pasted the blurb in the newly released Amazon Comprehend and it detected a negative sentiment with 0.94 confidence (0.0 positive, 0.06 neutral)

</comment><comment><USER35> Seriously? I'm really _really_ pleased that I waited before updating to iOS 11. Apple, what are you doing?

</comment><comment><USER36> Welp, time to sell! What a house of cards.

<comment><USER37> How about short? ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> They finally fixed the damn calculator.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't get all this anger towards "Apple". Ultimately, this and other recent bugs are human errors and we all make mistakes in our work - most likely due to a lack of time to do their job properly. I think that is the real issue.

<comment><USER40> Because when you pay 700 euros for a phone there is a certain level of quality expectations.

<comment><USER41> I agree. When you pay the premium for a high end X, whatever X happens to be, you expect it to be _right_. Probably the main reason I get so stroppy with these kinds of issues is that I'm time poor and the time I do have I don't want to spend faffing around dealing with them.

 _Perhaps_ I have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement (genuinely: there is no irony or sarcasm intended here), but one reason I pay for a premium object, device or experience is to avoid hassle and friction, so it's pretty frustrating when that's exactly what I get.

<comment><USER42> _but one reason I pay for a premium object, device or experience is to avoid hassle and friction, so it 's pretty frustrating when that's exactly what I get._

It's the whole fucking reason I started paying extra for Apple products to begin with. If I were willing to put up with this kind of sloppiness, I have a variety of options for less money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Happened with me yesterday and deleted all of my Chrome tabs:(

</comment><comment><USER44> Apple has officially jumped the shark.

</comment><comment><USER45> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15830149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15830149)

</comment><comment><USER46> Oh Apple :(</comment>


A better C++ assertion library which also prints a debug message - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/amallia/better_assert <comment><USER2> A way to do this with regular assertions is to chain a C string with the expression using &&, as in:

assert((x < 2) && "too many items");</comment>


Facial Recognition Is Accurate, If You're a White Guy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> Caucasian skin type reflects more light.</comment>


HackRSS - browse HN posts visually - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackrss.com/ <comment><USER2> Visually appealing, but needs longer titles and link to HN comments. I usually find the comments more enjoyable to read than the source articles.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the recursion when it reaches the "HackRSS - browse HN posts visually" post in the feed :)

Any chance you could include more of the title text and the link to the comments?

<comment><USER4> I wonder if with a few more upvotes we'll see the Droste effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little competition for <http://hn.embed.ly>? Heh. We think rich data makes much better previews then screenshots. What does HN think about this site vs. hn.embed.ly?

<comment><USER6> I think this would benefit greatly from some sort of collapse feature. The nice thing about browsing titles-only ("vanilla") HN is that things that I don't want to read take up very minimal screen space. With this, I had to work too hard to scroll past this entry: <http://i.imgur.com/Z9t67.png>

<comment><USER7> You can navigate using keyboard (j/k).

<comment><USER8> You can also fold the article with 'd', and show the top comment with 'c'. Shift+C opens the comment thread too. Pressing '?' will bring up a box that lists all the shortcuts:

       j or →    Select next article
       k or ←    Select previous article
       c         Toggle Hacker News top comment
       shift + c Open Hacker News comments page in a new window
       d         Toggle article content
       enter     Follow the article link in this window
       shift + enter Follow the article link in a new window
       ?         Show this keyboard shortcuts dialog

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This kind of UI would work well on other HN-like sites, e.g. links to pretty web designs, but the nature of HN links means the screenshots are almost all the same thing: an article, a possible image, some ads or links on the side.

Because of the extra space taken up by screenshots, the most important thing - link title - has to be truncated, and it's not showing vote/comment counts.

It's always good to experiment with UIs, but in this case, I think the experiment shows the UI is more suited to other kinds of links.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very well done. I would like to also see this done for various news feed (maybe most popular links on Twitter/Facebook). EDIT: Happy user of URL2PNG.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think url2png is really cool, but I was a bit pissed when from one day to the next they went to a subscription model and added sign-up links to all screenshots. Their fair right, of course, but no fun if you just started using it.

<comment><USER12> Just send us an email, we'll help you out.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, will do! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a search experience for you, same idea: <http://hnsearch.heroku.com/> :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Quite cool, but the titles shouldn't be cut.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. This is more of a proof-of-concept / demo of the url2png api. If the post _looks_ interesting to you, just hover over the image thumbnail to view the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I usually enjoy visual browsers like this, but here the previews are too small for it to click for me. Just to provide a counterexample, this one is pretty cool and along similar lines: <http://news.peepcode.com/>

<comment><USER12> Ask and ye shall receive bigger screenshots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excellent! And I love the browsing and picture in picture recursion: HackRSS -> HackRSS :-)

<comment><USER17> all I can see is a gray box for the hackrss screenshot

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is this useful? I agree with bgraves, it is more of a proof-of-concept of url2png.

</comment><comment><USER19> I worked on something similar to this a couple of months back: <http://hackernewsbot.posterous.com>. Never finished it though.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool. I would love to be able to scroll through this using the j and k keys, like Google Reader or <http://ffffound.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER21> very cool. I've always wanted this.

and now that we have this, I realize that the end result is that I will now end up reading articles that have nice designs. i.e. judging by the cover.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love the concept, but I'd rather have the links open in the same window. Just change your target attributes and I will switch over to this solution permanently.

<comment><USER12> Agreed and done. Be sure to bookmark it though. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nicely done but I find the default view much easier to navigate. A JavaScript- switch between default and with pictures would be nice though.

<comment><AUTHOR> perhaps a Google Instant Preview style extension where you hover over the default view link and a screenshot is displayed on the side? That would be a great browser extension!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, I looked. It was not obvious how to view the comments, so I probably won't ever go back. Sorry, them's the apples.

</comment><comment><USER25> Kudos for Droste effect of HackRSS showing the HackRSS post showing HackRSS showing the HackRSS post.

</comment><comment><USER26> Could not fork. The repository's default branch is empty.

<comment><USER12> Somebody let the cat out of the bag a bit early. Watch the repo and you'll be notified when we commit v1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can we have a place that lists all the HN related sites? Or maybe PG can create such a page and link it at the top/bottom. That would be useful instead of them getting lost in the old posts and people who haven't seen the posts missing them.

<comment><USER28> <http://hnresources.com/> is one.</comment></comment>