Dark Matter Developers != Bad Developers - mat-mcloughlin http://mat-mcloughlin.net/2013/11/26/dark-matter-developers-do-not-equal-bad-developers.html <comment><AUTHOR> " _Just because somebody has a blog or a twitter account it doesn't make them a good developer or expert. It just means they shout louder._ "

Exactly. 99.9% of developers' blogs aren't worth reading. They're full of articles like "I just wrote my first Go program, and here's what you should know about it!" Please, if I wanted to learn about Go, why would I read something that was written by someone who just admitted he knows almost nothing about it? I'd rather go to golang.org and read the tutorials written by the developers of the language.

<comment><USER2> Cool, someone _does_ read my blog :)

I've been feeling like a bad developer because I never write. Then when I try to write, I think wonder why anyone would read what I'm writing (because it's about my first Go program) and I give up. Even when I come up with something relatively novel, I usually just get the info out via StackOverflow.

The point: those useless dev blogs with posts that don't matter to anyone are there because many devs (i.e. me) without much to share, feel obligated to write.

<comment><USER3> That's really weird. Feeling like a bad developer because you never write would be like feeling like a bad racecar driver because you never bike. Totally different activities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the first I've heard the term "dark matter developer", but this type of developer definitely exists. There's probably equal numbers of those who are happy with their jobs as aren't, and who are brilliant as are mediocre. I imagine that the typical dark matter developer is more risk-averse than an "outgoing" developer (intentionally not using the term "regular" because outgoing developers are a vocal minority according to this hypothesis), simply by virtue of the tendency of developers in the startup scene to downplay risk.

I used to be one of these. I never aspired to move to the Valley, or to found a company. I eventually had an opportunity to try it and have never looked back, but the idea simply would never have occurred to me had I not been approached.

<comment><USER5> I am also a "dark matter developer". I go to some larger conferences as an attendee, read up on the tech, learn new things, but primarily watch from the sideline. I respect open source developers and companies cutting the bleeding edge by my risk tolerance is too low to currently deploy node.js in production for example.

I used to be more active in the niche development fields I got started in, work in a lot more startups but as I've gotten older I've simply directed my free time and energy elsewhere.

Edit: This is also the first time I've heard that term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am always amazed that people who blog, tweet etc. a lot think they are somehow "pushing things forward". Actually, it's people who write a lot of working code who push things forward. Maybe they blog too, but maybe not. Tweeting and blogging does not mean you are productive or on the cutting edge of anything meaningful.

<comment><USER7> Fabrice Bellard doesn't have a twitter, doesn't blog, and maybe doesn't go to conferences. But he's done more than most who have, almost certainly.

His wikipedia page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard)

<comment><USER6> Yep, one of my coding heroes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a dark matter developer, I'll tell you why I'm not more public:

I don't have enough time to maintain a decent blog. I could maintain a shitty one, but what's the point of that?

Join a community? I barely have enough time for HN as it is!

Stack Overflow? I contribute sometimes, but once again, it comes down to time. If you have the time, I applaud your contributions. As for me, I'll settle for answering maybe one question a month.

New tech? Sure, that's cool. But I really need to get my software to a working state, and that won't happen if I keep changing the technologies. I'd rather wait for a front runner to emerge before joining in.

Twiiter? No thanks. I get enough aggravation from email.

Meetups & conferences? I've gone to a few, but I've found that I can gain a far deeper understanding of a particular language/technology/paradigm through online articles or books.

About the only thing I leave any kind of footprint with is github, because coding is one creative outlet I can't live without.

<comment><USER9> _Stack Overflow? I contribute sometimes, but once again, it comes down to time. If you have the time, I applaud your contributions. As for me, I 'll settle for answering maybe one question a month._

According to this paper, 95% of the users on Stack Overflow are "low activity" users, but they provide 50% of the answers.

[http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...](http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=computerscidiss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will gladly put myself in this camp. I will trade dark matter devs for ones constantly spouting off all the time about their questionable "innovations" and committing themselves to 70 hour work weeks while they create nothing products and disrupt this and that so that...gah I'm already getting bored writing this.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are also entire dark matter companies. Small tech companies that just launch, run, and make a comfortable living for the employees. They are not trying to be huge, not trying for a huge exit, not trying to make news. Just trying to build and work for a good company and live a good life.

Those of us who are "dark matter" developers really like working for these small, quiet, solid companies.

</comment><comment><USER12> What would you call the middle ground between the two of them? I feel like I spend a lot of time reading, but I just can't bring myself to blog. I've had one for years that has maybe 5 posts. It's a combination of being tired at the end of the day, feeling like I have nothing useful to say (that hasn't already been said), and generally not thinking about it.

It's also a similar story with Stack Overflow. When I think to try and answer questions, they've already been answered by people more knowledgeable than me.

<comment><USER13> Don't concern yourself with labels. Apply yourself, learn new stuff and meet new people who work in the industry :) You'll figure out the rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i just started using stack overflow recently & i've found it's mainly a bunch of people asking very simple questions or fixes to very nuanced quirks.

When faced with similar situations, i've always followed my own judgement through research. I can see how this kind of a resource is useful in certain cases, but a ton of the site is just silly gamification.

Time spent on these sites is time that I could have spent watching a video lecture about Scala, or trying a new library.

I guess github is better in this respect since it's about active coding and understanding distributed projects. But I see a ton of forked repos in users' projects with few (if any) of their own code in them. It makes me realize that many cutting edge devs are just filling out the "digital resume" of a programmer. Yet there are obviously some who are driving the industry mixed into the same sources.

signal to noise is difficult to determine in all systems and being current can be a bad indicator in programming. There are tons of badass devs who just learn design patterns and language nuances for "older" languages who can write much more modular/reusable code than those who learn MVC framework after MVC framework. I think..... a lot of them work for Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is to say, lurkers can be just as thoughtful, as intelligent, and just as competent as those up on stage.

<comment><USER16> I would argue that the original definition isn't even about lurkers. It's about the developers that aren't even reading the latest tech/programming news. They have been using the same IDE/language/environment for the last 10 years and are just happy where they are at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> thanks for introducing me to this term - and also the original blog post. :)

(no, not everybody had heard of it already)

there are a lot of these guys out there - i've worked with some, and whilst the generalisation is poorly motivated it is generally accurate. a good proportion of these kinds are in the job for money, stability, parental pressure etc. and care little to improve themselves or their work. they do a 9 to 5, just like you would if you were stacking shelves in a supermarket.

its a rare person who tries to excel at shelf stacking.

<comment><USER18> I'm wary of equating "care little to improve themselves" with "do a 9 to 5". The two are not related.

<comment><USER17> really? maybe there is an over generalisation there, but i think that people who do their jobs for money often have little motivation, or even reason, to try to improve their skill at work. what they will generally improve at is finding psychological tricks to ease the passage of time, ways to hide a lack of productivity or monopolise the work that they find the most comfortable...

practically speaking they get more mileage from finding a different job entirely... 'working your way up' as a path to success is not what it used to be, their are too many layers and too many automatic promotions for time served.

edit: maybe my meaning of 9 to 5 is not clear, but for me its a term that comes from the fixation on time which comes with having a 'job' vs a 'career'

<comment><USER19> "9 to 5" refers to a salaried position, i.e. regular W-2 work. I'm not totally clear on your connotation, but I don't think it's common.

This seems really presumptuous to me, though. Many people just don't consider anything _but_ regular work like this as an option, as they just haven't been exposed to other things; this doesn't say anything about how much or little they love their work or wish to excel at it.

Some people are just lazy do-as-little-as-possible drones, sure. But assuming everyone who isn't an entrepreneur is like that is more than a little bit nasty and quite baseless.

<comment><USER17> /assuming everyone who isn't an entrepreneur/

i've used the term poorly if you think this - that is clear.

i'm not even thinking of entrepeneurs. i don't consider myself working '9 to 5' even if those are coincidentally my hours... the amount of time i work is much more to do with my desire to fulfil my tasks and deliver.

i've used the term wrongly, but i think of the '9 to 5' mentality as the eagerness to pack up and go home at 5, but yet not wanting to leave early so that you don't get docked minutes in your pay packet.

my point was more to differentiate between those there for survival or routine, compared to those there from desire.

i've met plenty of entrepreneurs who have no passion for what they do and are either terrible or lucky at it... some doing it out of misguided expectation from family or peers. its got nothing to do with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This just seems wrong. You can be a contributer to the community but not the public community. You can contribute within your organization and still use the latest and greatest technologies if you choose. You can talk and collaborate on many development topics.

I work with other developers and we are constantly collaborating on ideas and technology. I don't believe that makes me a "Dark Matter Developer" because I don't share those conversations publicly.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one who thinks that "dark matter developer" does a terrible job of describing its intended meaning? I had never heard of the term and I certainly couldn't extrapolate what is meant by it just based on the name. What's more, it has a built-in negative bias due to the term "dark". As a developer who falls somewhere in between "dark matter" and not, consider me not a fan of this terminology.

<comment><USER22> Pretty sure that the idea came from this article [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)

at least the current discussion anyhow

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This post makes me think of an article about "the guild of the silicon valley", "guys" you won't see in social networks or events spotlights but make things done and help startups and companies scaling and reaching success. I think it's just a matter of communication skills, anyone with less com skills won't mean he is "bad" and not helping the community moving forward, and vice versa, anyone always on stackoverflow or github won't guarantee he's a rockstar programmer. And personnaly, I prefer having a "dark matter" developer or black hole programmer, call them what you want, who's focused on a long term vision than anyone always chasing for the latest trend. Experience shows that so called dark matter developers are most versatile by knowing deeper how things work and how to build/extend/improve apps. But advice for "dark matter" peers, improve your communication skills, because it will make you a great developer !

</comment><comment><USER24> I fall into this "Dark Matter Developer" in more than one way.

On the social front: I go to, on average, one half of one work-related conference per year (real world, I go to one conference every other year). I have no use for twitter, facebook, linkedin, or any other "social network", preferring instead old-school forums and the occasional aggregator like HN where the signal-to-noise ratio is quite a bit better. I have a personal blog, updated every few months, that rarely touches on anything tech related, and is read primarily by friends.

On the tech front: I write code, in part, for decade+ old systems, and the rest with old-fashioned, plain-jane java. I write code that will never be used anywhere else, in languages that are neither new, "cool", or "hip" in any way. I keep somewhat up-to-date with big-picture new tech, but I see no reason to delve into any details if it doesn't relate to my work. I enjoy what I do, and the problem solving that goes into it.

I have, perhaps, fallen out of love with the field, and the industry. Perhaps I never had a passion for writing code, preferring instead the theoretical challenges I found while pursuing my degree in computer science.

What I do have: A life away from work, and away from computing. I'm in the middle of a multi-year "bootstrapping" of my own "start-up" \-- one that has absolutely nothing to do with computing, and instead has everything to do with my love of woodworking. It should, with effort, provide a secondary source of income for as long as I wish. If I'm extraordinarily lucky, I may be able to make it my primary source of income at some point. There will be no VCs, no big-payout exit. Yet I consider myself just as much of an entrepreneur as any of the silicon valley crowd -- simply one with different goals and a different market in mind.

<comment><USER25> Tell me more about this wood work startup. Does it have a website? I am genuinely interested

<comment><USER24> It's just a small, local signmaking business. No web presence; currently relying on word of mouth to keep the workload low enough that I can still meet expectations -- quality and deadlines -- while working out of my garage and working my software development job full-time. I'm also, slowly, getting into wooden canoe & kayak building; if I can successfully turn that into a profitable product line, I'll be thrilled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The interesting thing is that when I was being loud and focusing on driving traffic to my blog to showing off my shiny new things, I was probably producing my worst and most unimaginative work.

Now, as a 'dark matter' engineer, I don't have the time to write technical blog material nor do anything that would classify me as a 'matter' engineer. The great tragedy is that I'm producing my best work with real world impact.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ok, lets keep this astronomical cosmological perspective.

You're are coding on a small planet orbiting a small star that will burn out in a few billion years, taking your planet and all of your code with it.

Is it _really_ of any universal consequence if you're producing VB6 during business hours or building a disappearing <whatever> app at an overnight hackathon?

I think not. Code on dark matter developers, wherever the hell you are.

</comment><comment><USER28> This whole article is written from the perspective that dark matter developers are by nature worse than the alternative, with the exceptional one amongst them.

"They can be just as capable as you."

It has been my experience that those with the loudest voices are rarely the best at what they do. Far more often it's the people who prefer to spend that time experimenting or learning from others who are the best.

</comment><comment><USER29> substituting "dark matter dev" with "introvert" i think we'd get to the very old and standard discourse.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is just passively-aggressively implying that dark matter developers aren't bad because they're inferior at coding, they're bad because they're inferior at being social.

Maybe I don't need to go to every Django convention ever to be a good programmer. Maybe I measure myself by different standards.

</comment><comment><USER31> I find developers with a github account admirable, but I never did contribute to open source at a day job, and while I'd like nothing more than give everything I do for myself away for free, the goal is to sustain myself stand in the way of that.

</comment><comment><USER32> You can map them by using the curvature of github and the relative speed of development. Is too early to say, but there is also some indication of some kind of dark flow control, possibly as a result of dark energy drinks.

</comment><comment><USER33> Who thought that if a developer doesn't tweet that they are a bad developer?

People thought that? WTF.

</comment><comment><USER34> my co-founder is one such dark matter developer... but, sometimes i feel its good... cause it actually keeps him more focused on working than hacking for fun !!! But, yeah..it does bring in a lot of demerits

</comment><comment><USER35> This same monicker can be applied to designers.

</comment><comment><USER16> >They may still know the latest design patterns, tools and techniques just as well as you do. They just choose not to talk about it.

I don't think this was the original "Dark Matter Developer" definition. If you read the original article ([http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)), you will see that he specifically says they don't keep up to date. They just do what they know, go home at the end of a day, and live a life.

<comment><USER36> Not true. I'm a "dark matter" developer. I don't blog, I only use Twitter to keep up on sports, I only use Facebook to keep up with far away friends and family. I post something programming-related on Facebook about once a year.

However, I know (and know that most of my fellow dark matter peeps know) the latest and greatest out there. We discuss it, take a look at it, and usually come to the conclusion of "been there, done that, not mature enough for our system that handles billions of dollars in transactions annually".

Also, one thing that's bothered me recently with developers is the focus on greenfield development. I've done both green- and brownfield, and find brownfield to be tons more stimulating than greenfield development. I know that a lot of my fellow dark matter folks do too. Constraints are more thought-provoking than "I can do anything".

That's why you don't see us caring about some new javascript framework or RoR or Azure, or any other "new" (and usually unproven) technology. We're too busy kicking ass and finding beauty in mature, established languages and frameworks that actually have all the features (and then some) of "newer" technologies.

<comment><USER37> >That's why you don't see us caring about some new javascript framework or RoR or Azure, or any other "new" (and usually unproven) technology. We're too busy kicking ass and finding beauty in mature, established languages and frameworks that actually have all the features (and then some) of "newer" technologies.

Comments like these saying 'Oh you are a stupid hipster using node/ror whatever' are basically in the same spirit as 'Oh I'm cooler than you because I use this and that and you are using Java' just the other way round. Thanks for your childish negativity and adding to unneeded stereotypes in the tech community. If you are one of those 'wise' devs that use what is mature and stable and whatnot instead of chasing new trends you should be smart enough to preach that all technologies have their use case and people should use the best tool for the job etc etc… but hating is fun, isn't it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Person A just works job.

Job is paid by other person B(a creator)

Person A dies, person B just hires a replacement. World is the same.

Person B dies, company/idea dies, world loses something.

I think hackers want to be the person B and make their mark. It doesn't have to be bogging, running a charity for free part time also counts but it has to be something.

People have this strange idea working a job is contributing, but no it's just breaking even. You just swap work for money <=> not creating.

<comment><USER39> > Person B dies, company/idea dies, world loses something.

Well, actually, world loses nothing. It doesn't care. Humans care, maybe, but you only think they matter because you are one.

<comment><USER40> Bleak, nihilistic and true.

Would upvote again :)</comment></comment></comment>


JQuery 1.4 Alpha 1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jquery.com/2009/12/04/jquery-14-alpha-1-released/ <comment><USER2> Congrats on getting closer to a new version!

Minified size, non-gzipped is almost 90k (up from 57k) -- will it stay this large?

Any news on the lite version?

<comment><USER3> We're checking out the Closure Compiler - it looks like with the simple compile options on it takes it back down to about 64KB minified, 21.6KB gzipped (a very modest increase over the last release, about 2-3KB).

(Un)fortunately we've been doing a ton of refactoring in this release. The internal structure of jQuery was a bit convoluted and needed some serious love. Needless to say things are much better now: We have cleaner code, consistency in variable names, and a better internal structure. All of this is leading towards a two-prong goal: Cleaner, more readable, code and the ability to dynamically load portions of jQuery, targeted toward mobile development.

jQuery 1.4 is the first step towards jQuery being the best possible JavaScript library for doing both desktop and mobile development - expect more details here soon.

<comment><USER2> Good to hear about the refactoring and cleaning. There was definitely some cruft in there that made it hard to track down issues / learn from at times.

I'm very curious about the mobile announcement. I've been doing some heavy coding on top of jQuery for a soon to be released project. I've come close to ditching jQuery a few times due to the non-iPhone cachable size of the main script (a real dealbreaker for this project).

Keep on the great work. The alpha has passed all but two of my internal unit tests -- I'll track them down and submit bugs as necessary when I get some time over the next few days.

<comment><USER4> iPhone 3.0 devices can cache minified jQuery just fine - I've done some testing with an HTML5 offline app and they appear to have greatly increased the limits.

The jQtouch guys have been experimenting with this as well and have reported success: <http://code.google.com/p/jqtouch/wiki/OfflineSupport>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As happy as I am with jQuery, I'm really excited to see the following:

-append, prepend, etc. have been heavily optimized

-find, empty, remove, addClass, removeClass, hasClass, attr, and css have been heavily optimized

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a lazy bastard. So, has anyone else done some benchmarks for me?</comment>


The Old New Thing : lock-free algorithms (part 3) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/15/10154245.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't miss the action packed previous parts (though they can be read separately), too:

part 2 : opportunistic cache [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/14/10153...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/14/10153633.aspx)

part 1 : update if you can [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/13/10152...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/13/10152929.aspx)</comment>


Why Not MySQL? (Tekpub) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PoFIohBSM4

<comment><USER2> This is very timely. I'm migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL just to try different technology (DBMS).

But I'm wondering, AFAIK, why universities are teaching MySQL rather than Postgres?

<comment><USER3> Dude, its 2012. Use Google, go to github or something, steal some code and hack away, if you rely on universities to better yourself then you really have no business in this field. They only teach you what you need to know to do your job, if your job requires to use Microsoft Word, I'm sure they'll open a class for that one too.

Most people just use what others use, years ago everybody and their dog uses MySQL. Nowadays, no one deserve to learn about database with MySQL as their primer.

While you're at it, have a look at Firebird SQL (<http://www.firebirdsql.org/>) too. With the kind of use-case and hardware that most people use MySQL for you can use Firebird instead.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just realised how bad MySQL is.</comment>


Hospital patients who refuse transfusion actually do better than other patients - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22751620 <comment><AUTHOR> The report cites Clinical Professor James Isbister from the Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney. "Professor Isbister said Jehovah's Witnesses were given better treatment by doctors trying to preserve their [the Witness patients'] blood. As a result they had better survival rates, and shorter hospital and intensive care stays than people who received blood transfusions during surgery," reports the paper.

[http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/surgeons-urged-to- avoi...](http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/surgeons-urged-to-avoid- transfusions-20121001-26vgf.html)

<comment><USER2> I don't see how they could limit the conclusion to just blood transfusions. JWs tend to live a very healthy lifestyle in general (diet, activity, community).

<comment><USER3> They briefly describe their statistics in the abstract:

 _We used propensity methods to match patient groups and parametric multiphase hazard methods to assess long-term survival._

Looking at the full text, they matched the Jehovah's Witnesses with patients that had similar health profiles prior to the procedure.

I am not qualified to say anything about whether what they did has any validity.</comment></comment></comment>


The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale - <AUTHOR> https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2015/02/04/the-realities-of-installing-ibeacon-to-scale/ <comment><USER2> Personally my experiences with iBeacons have been horrible. For an app of any real scale, you want to control your own messaging, but most of the vendors in this space want you to use their messaging platform (otherwise, what would be the point in partnering with them?). Unless you go all in and do it yourself, you're potentially setting yourself up for a very fragmented user experience and fruitless campaign.

Additionally, for iBeacons to work you basically need the stars to align (or for you to have some of the most trusting users in the world). You need:

* the user to have a data connection (likely and reasonable)

* always on location permission (depends on your app, possibly difficult to justify)

* the users bluetooth to be on (somewhat likely)

* access to send the user a push notification (in most cases, without this beacons are fairly useless as you're using them to message the user in response to their location)

In my experience, getting a few of these isn't hard, but getting them all requires a lot of story telling and justification (and rightly so!)

This is much worse on iOS than it is on Android, but with Android 6.0 you're going to see the same issues for iBeacons are you now need to ask permissions as opposed to simply getting them as part of the installation process.

Essentially, in my limited experience with two different beacon installations, beacons are great in concept, but in practice difficult to turn a profit on.

<comment><USER3> The only permission you need to ask for for beacon scanning on Android 6 is "coarse location". Fairly reasonable I think.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I agree that is reasonable, but the other non-requirement based requirements still exist, which add to the level of success you're going to have when executing a project using beacons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do have to say that some of their pains could be alleviated by choosing the right vendor(s). We started with a few Estimote beacons (they are fantastic for small site/Dev work and really are a great company), but we met with and found many solutions to management, security, etc. Estimote beacons are VERY simple. Choosing another vendor allows remote management, health monitoring, rolling identifiers, a whole host of other solutions to the problem.

We even went to a Meetup where Nordic Semiconductor wound up sending us some of their Dev kits and WE created our own beacon OS. There are so many more options available for really big installs.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the Nordic chips are really great. I've created a device that is both an iBeacon and a normal BLE device, and another that is as many iBeacons as you want in one.

I did try spamming hundreds of random iBeacons to see if it would crash any phones (apparently that used to crash old Android phones) but it didn't really do anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reality of posting a popular article on HN ;) Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&r...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2015/02/04/the- realities-of-installing-ibeacon-to-scale/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER6> What do museums get out of using these instead of, say, QR codes for visitors to get informations on exhibits? Do these require users to install a custom application?

<comment><USER4> Having used them for a number of different applications, I can tell you that they are way better than QR codes from a 'just works' perspective to the user. Now, the dev/site team knows darn well that the hardest part of using beacons is getting the distances/interference measured and dealt with, but at the end of the day the user shouldn't have to do anything other than walk around and have your app installed on their phone.

That is key, they have to have your app installed (and allow the correct OS permissions). After that you can (on iOS at least) pop up alerts, passively track how people are moving through your space, see what the most popular spaces are, change your app context to show them details about where they're standing, give them directions, etc.

<comment><USER7> I don't know how accurate beacons are but I recently visited the Greenwich museum in Greenwich, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels, In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, and Casa Mila in Barcelona. All of which had audio tours using numbers (punch the number on some device they hand you) and all of them were fairly crowded and dense. If they were using beacons and the beacons had a range or more than about 1 to 1.5 meters I'd imagine a lot of conflicting inputs. I suppose good UX design could mitigate that showing all the options from all nearby beacons. I guess it just has me wondering is this a solution in search of a problem.

Reading the article it also sounds like lots of poorly designed software. The author complained about pairing being a chore but it seems like with some good software you'd just put up any beacon, scan it, then pick what it corresponds to. If that beacon disappears or breaks just pick any beacon out of sack of beacons, place, scan, pick what it corresponds to. That seems like it should be a trivial 5 second operation. Am I missing something? I shouldn't care what the id is. I only care that it's unique to every other beacon (which the software can tell me the moment I scan it). I don't care about major or minor numbers. Just put any beacon anywhere, scan, pick what it corresponds to. Done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Batteries: an unfortunate weakness of ibeacons. I would recommend a six month schedule of preventative battery replacement. Someone at AnDevCon recently showed how to replace Estimote batteries though it might be less work to just go with Sticknfind or another maker that allows battery replacement.

Range: use the SDK to set power to a lower value, to avoid overlap.

Installation: maybe install small (white) plastic boxes to the wall with screws, then can easily place or remove beacons. Color becomes less of an issue as well.

There's a product "BluFi" or something like that, plugs into a wall socket and utilizes both ble and WiFi. Might solve several problems in one blow. I have no experience with this however.

Android prior to KitKat has some problems with BLE including inability to clear the device table without wiping and reinstalling the OS.

I agree that BLE doesn't scale that well. Currently it's something of a solution in search of a problem, but future potential is good.

<comment><USER9> checkout BeaconOutlet:[https://www.beacongrid.com/index.html#technology](https://www.beacongrid.com/index.html#technology) I think you'll be happy. (disclaimer: i've been working on this for about 2 years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Full disclosure: I work for an audio beacon startup (in bio).

It's great to see this article getting attention. I also shared it two days ago in a comment on a story about audio beacons ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563134)).

Mainly my goal was to remind people there are some realistic use cases where audio beacons >> BLE beacons. For some reason audio beacons seem to be often forgotten about as a viable alternative.

</comment><comment><USER11> "What should be an easy and quick process is a mess of pencil erasing on a floor plan combined with trying to track changed numbers."

I found this collision between thousands of year old tech vs modern tech intriguing. In the business world, it never fails that no matter how high tech an individual product is, it always relies on paper and pencil and human operated accounting at some point.

</comment><comment><USER12> Site is not responding. "The Realities of serving static HTML with Wordpress"?

(I'm assuming its wordpress and a static blog at this point.)

<comment><USER13> Yup, seems to be Wordpress. View source includes "wp- content/plugins/portfolio-slideshow/css/portfolio-slideshow.min.css" etc

There's a google cache

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Absolutely true! It might come across as an ad, but our solution is especially created to remedy these problems. We're using SLAM from robotics to get beyond basic triangulation. And we have them behind power outlets to get rid of battery and management issues. See [http://crownstone.rocks](http://crownstone.rocks).

</comment><comment><USER15> > If we can sneaker-net a problem

I think from context the author means something closer to "hack" than "sneaker-net". Sneakernet has a useful and more precise meaning.</comment>


AmigaOS 3.1.4 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/index.php/where-to-buy/direct-downloads/188-amigaos-314 <comment><USER3> Already bought and tried in an emulator.

I find it annoying the rom doesn't include workbench.library, and the provided one in LIBS: isn't romable.

It'd only be proper to provide a 1MB rom image with it, or a limited functionality version.

<comment><USER4> ROM space is very tight for this release on account of the much larger mass storage drivers (SCSI, IDE) and the integrated OCS/ECS/AGA graphics.library.

Commodore was already pushing the limits for the 1994 Kickstart 3.1 in the Amiga 1200 ROM, and it only got worse. The Amiga 4000T ROM would no longer contain workbench.library either (in 1994) because the graphics.library and the SCSI driver took up so much room.

There is no room for workbench.library and icon.library in the 512 KB 3.1.4 ROM. Going back to a previous set of workbench.library/icon.library versions is not an option because these do not fit either.

1 MB ROMs are not viable solution at this point. Only a select few models support these, and the point was to make the 3.1.4 update available to all desktop systems.

Besides, a 1 MB ROM would require retooling of the build process for the operating system, which we did not attempt. The last 1 MB ROMs were built in 1994 (for the CD32) and very little documentation survives on how this is done, and how the ROM images need to be prepared.

We were already quite busy with the desktop systems and chose not to spend the time on research and QA work necessary for the 1 MB ROM build.

<comment><USER3> >There is no room for workbench.library and icon.library in the 512 KB 3.1.4 ROM.

Unfortunately. Understandable.

>Only a select few models support these, and the point was to make the 3.1.4 update available to all desktop systems.

Nobody is telling you to ditch the 512k rom. It's just it sucks not to have workbench.library and icon.library, when using a system that does maprom with 1mb support.

>The Amiga 4000T ROM would no longer contain workbench.library either (in 1994) because the graphics.library and the SCSI driver took up so much room.

And roms with workbench inside were proudly released recently. Meaning both there's interest, and that you understand this interest.

>We were already quite busy with the desktop systems and chose not to spend the time on research and QA work necessary for the 1 MB ROM build.

It's good if there was at least consideration.

Maybe try and release romable versions of workbench and icon library? The community will take over from there, with tools.

<comment><USER4> > Nobody is telling you to ditch the 512k rom. It's just it sucks not to have > workbench.library and icon.library, when using a system that does maprom > with 1mb support.

The next best thing is to load both the workbench.library and icon.library using the LoadModule command (which is part of the AmigaOS 3.1.4 update, if I remember correctly) and reboot your machine. Both libraries will then remain in memory as if they had been in the ROM. They will survive subsequent warm reboots, but they will consume RAM.

Loading the libraries in this manner can be handled by the Startup-Sequence, for example.

> Maybe try and release romable versions of workbench and icon library?

Both libraries are technically "fit" to go into ROM, if there were enough space available for them to fit ;-) They are "romable".

<comment><USER3> >They will survive subsequent warm reboots, but they will consume RAM.

As long as it's fast ram, it's pretty good for a next best thing. I wasn't aware.

>Both libraries are technically "fit" to go into ROM, if there were enough space available for them to fit ;-) They are "romable".

That's great news. I'm not sure where I heard they weren't. I'm hopeful tools to do that will pop up on Aminet :)

<comment><USER4> > As long as it's fast ram, it's pretty good for a next best thing. I wasn't > aware.

The ROM changes which shipped with the AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 updates all exercised the same mechanism by which operating system modules loaded into RAM whose contents would survive a warm reset would supersede the contents of the ROM image.

If I remember correctly, the same tool (LoadModule) had been used then.

Documentation for these technical aspects has always been somewhat lacking I'm afraid... Not everyone wants to trawl the Amiga forums for hints on what is possible and how.

This time, however, there is an official FAQ on the web site of the company which sells the product and further pointers to more information on Amiga forums which cover the AmigaOS 3.1.4 update.

> That's great news. I'm not sure where I heard they weren't. I'm hopeful > tools to do that will pop up on Aminet :)

You might want to have a look at Christian Vogelgsang's [https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools](https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools) collection.

<comment><USER3> > You might want to have a look at Christian Vogelgsang's > [https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools](https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools) > collection.

Good stuff.

>AmigaOS 3.5/3.9

Never been a fan of these. I'm glad 3.1.4 took a different direction.

>LoadModule

Was not aware they could load workbench/icon.library, that is all :-)

>This time, however, there is an official FAQ

I read the one in the downloadable archive whole. It's still quite early and i'm sure there'll be much more info everywhere soon :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is it delivered? How would I install it on my 500 or 600?

<comment><USER3> There's going to be a physical version at some point, but summary:

1\. Buy A500/A600 download version, or A1200 if you've got a Vampire accelboard.

2\. Get adf into Amiga floppies by whatever means (serial cable, pcmcia nic adapter, flashfloppy-enabled floppy drive emulator)

3\. Boot workbench disk or installer disk. ROM patches will be loaded by loadmodule @ startup-sequence.

4\. (Optional) Flash into (E/EE)PROM chip or (more sane) into A500Flash1M or similar such rom switcher solution with a flashrom in it.

Note you'll want at least 2MB RAM total for this, at least 1MB of which being CHIP RAM. If you don't have this much, don't even bother.

<comment><USER6> And where could one get a compatible ROM flasher and WORM chips?

<comment><USER7> If you are looking for an affordable solution you can use this: [https://gglabs.us/node/2038](https://gglabs.us/node/2038)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Remember "Diskdoctor"? It earned its PhD and is now ready to reliably rescue data from your floppies or hard disks."

Remember the cool old "AGA - time to upgrade - AGA" slogan in some of the demos? Now it's

ZFS - time to upgrade - <USER2>

...it's the 21st century, and AmigaOS doesn't even have software RAID, let alone ZFS yet. We still have to check filesystems for metadata corruption, and checking them for data corruption is still science fiction. And nobody bats an eyelash, like it's the most normal thing in the world. Meanwhile, the capacitors are leaking like crazy, modern PC-bucket power supplies don't deliver steady 5V, the clock crystal loses or gains up to 5 seconds per day, even the newest accelerator hardware doesn't support ECC memory... what could possibly go wrong with one's data?

<comment><USER3> You could use OFS (Original File System, before FFS) which has checksums in every block!

Note blocks are <512byte because of that (ouch) and everything else about OFS sucks.

<comment><USER4> Smaller than 512 bytes? I beg to differ. The file system data structure layout requires a minimum of 512 bytes per block.

The Amiga OFS/FFS, etc. file system data structures scale with the block size (block sizes of 512, 1024, .., 65536 bytes are possible).

At 256 bytes per block, for example, the directory hash table size would shrink so much that you'd have so many hash collisions that it would be morbidly funny...

Anyway, the data blocks in OFS have to account for the checksum and some metadata which aids in recovery. So you are correct that the payload (488 bytes for a 512 byte block) is smaller than the raw block size.

<comment><USER3> On a separate note, as I understand there's e.g. library updates, are you releasing a NDK and/or documentation for 3.1.4 development?

<comment><USER4> The focus of AmigaOS 3.1.4 development work was on fixing bugs, integrating code which so far had been separate (e.g. the mass storage drivers last updated in AmigaOS 3.9) and generally making it easier for Amiga hardware developers to make use of the operating system (e.g. adapt the operating system rather than force the developers to twist their designs).

The AmigaOS 3.9 NDK ("native development kit") is still relevant for the AmigaOS 3.1.4 update.

The 3.1.4 update added new API functionality, but these changes are few and could (= will) be covered separately.

<comment><USER3> I'm looking forward to that. Never been too fond of 3.9 as a target :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why 3.1.4 and not 3.9.1 ?

<comment><USER4> The AmigaOS 3.9 code was largely unavailable for development work. What remained and was availabie is material which was licensed for inclusion in AmigaOS4.

What we got here is a mix of the AmigaOS 3.1 code (bug fixes galore, plus enhancements), the 3.5 update, the 3.9 update plus completely new software such as Disk Doctor V2.134 (written from scratch to support large storage devices and all Amiga file system flavours descended from the 1986 default file system; this is not your father's Disk Doctor any more).

The other reason why it's 3.1.4 is that we realized early on that we could not continue development of the 3.x line anyway, so we joked it would have to be an irrational version number instead, perhaps one digit at a time.

<comment><USER9> Good old "PiVer", the TeX approach to versioning: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#TeX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#TeX)</comment></comment></comment>


Some more tidbits from ex-Codemasters employees - <AUTHOR> http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice to see this has gone big enough that I don't have to submit my own story. :)

Thanks again for all the support. Hacker News was responsible for about 30% of traffic I received on Friday, eclipsing the contributions from the various games news sites.</comment>


NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #9 + Demos - <AUTHOR> http://anyvite.com/1nd2g9q2i5 <comment><AUTHOR> We changed the location this time around as well as modified the structure of presentation.

As always, we're looking for feedback as to the location (first time at Forum) as the meetups are getting larger and larger each month. It's tough finding good spots here in NYC!

</comment><comment><USER2> The demo's last time were pretty amazing, and finally there's a good place to meet people working on interesting things as opposed to the usual biz types and service providers!

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope people check this out. H+F is my favorite startup event in NYC. Followed closely by the NYC lean startup group.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll be there. This will be my first H+F meetup. Looking forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER5> Nothing to demo here at the moment, but I'd love to see what folks are up to; I'll probably swing by.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of these weeks we should have a H+F Jelly-esque internal hack day</comment>


Justifying 1 Billion Dollars for Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://dickbrouwer.com/post/20911933152/justifying-1-billion-dollars-for-instagram

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a highly plausible scenario for how the price could have gone from a more sensible $300M to $1B if Instagram said no to a sale and raised a round instead.

<comment><USER2> It's a case of put your money where your mouth is

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems plausible, but this tiny article is mostly speculation.</comment>


Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly-world-of-private-garbage-collection?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1515042948 <comment> cbm-vic-20 Not that type of garbage collection.</comment>


Show HN: I built this to document the Latest Code Syntax of frameworks and langs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ngduc/syntax.codes <comment><AUTHOR> I plan to add more languages or frameworks this weekend (latest Angular, Python, Go).</comment>


Metro: Track Defect Deleted from Inspection Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollcall.com/news/metro_track_defect_deleted_from_inspection_report-243409-1.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is about human error, not malfeasance. A more detailed explanation is in this news report.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/repo...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/report- metro-derailment-occurred-after-technician-disregarded-rail- defect/2015/08/28/d714ccbe-4d86-11e5-84df-923b3ef1a64b_story.html)</comment>


Atomic Force Microscope measures strength of chemical bonds - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/atomic-force-microscope-measures-strength-of-chemical-bonds/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one of those steps needed toward figuring out how to make really cool materials that are possible in theory but nobody knows the recipe. Imagine being able to stop at each step of a chemical transformation process, image the intermediate product to give guidance on what you needed to do next to achieve the molecule or polymer you wanted to end up with. Just amazing stuff to me.

</comment><comment><USER2> > the extremely precise control could allow researchers to inject electrons or > probe chemical conditions at specific points in a single molecule.

Wow! I wish I had something better to add, but "wow" is all I can manage at the moment.</comment>


Dr. NakaMats: The World's Most Prolific Inventor - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/3/3/dr-nakamats-patently-strange-the-world-s-most-prolific-inventor <comment><USER2> "Starving your brain of oxygen makes for better inventions" - I have no idea what to make of this. I think he's trolling.</comment>


Russian troll factory paid US activists to help fund protests during election - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/17/russian-troll-factory-activists-protests-us-election <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite line: ""The task wasn't to support Trump," one of the factory's employees told RBC. "We raised social issues and other problems that already existed in the US, and tried to shine as bright a light as possible on them." The employee said that because Clinton was part of the current regime, she was also a target."

</comment><comment><USER2> One wonders how much of this is still going on - both the disinformation campaign, and the paying US activists. In fact, it could explain a fair amount about why things have been so weird lately...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - in light of the fact that Russia isn't advocating for a particular political outcome in the United States... they don't want the US to step back from the Crimea, or stop criticizing their conduct in ex-Soviet states.

They just want to divide & conquer. They don't have a preferred outcome in mind, they're happy in any future state in which the US is weaker.

<comment><USER2> I think it's a bit more than that. Russia (or Putin, really) is terrified of color revolutions. He's afraid that people will rise up against the sham that passes for democracy there, and throw him out of power. To avoid that, he wants to discredit democracy elsewhere (particularly in the US, since it's held up to be the model for the world).</comment></comment></comment>


Roamer: A Plain-Text File Manager - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/abaldwin88/roamer <comment><USER2> It's really nice to see that the author includes detailed instructions for installing without root. It's pretty much how you'd expect it, but a lot of software these days assumes you'll give some random library root access or worse pipe curl to bash:

[https://github.com/abaldwin88/roamer/blob/master/doc/faq.md](https://github.com/abaldwin88/roamer/blob/master/doc/faq.md)

<comment><USER3> As a python package developer, I'd assume that being able to install with pip in user space or in a virtual environment is a standard technique. Why duplicate the dozens of tutorials on the internet?

<comment><USER4> Not every potential user of roamer is a Python package developer.

<comment><USER5> But every potential user of roamer does need to have pip installed, and know something about it...

<comment><USER6> Seems like a reasonable use-case for a brief tutorial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your EDITOR is already emacs, just use 'wdired'.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Wd...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Wdired.html)

<comment><USER8> wdired was a revelation on what an editor can do with capable and imaginative developers on it.

<comment><USER9> Emacs mostest problem : too many features unless you spend 5 years in it

I liked that roamer has a similar idea, the name/hash lines seems very straightforward. Also a bit of acme in it where text as a bit of meaning.

Maybe it will give wdired ideas too.

<comment><USER10> Yes, like 'M-x calc' which gives you a very decent RPN calculator.

<comment><USER9> oh calc is way more than that. it's a cute CAS. And a nice RPN calc. (which I think is simple-calc-mode actually)

Emacs also has bindat, a nice DSL to create bytes structures (for network packets or FFI)

And that's just the vanilla distribution.. Anyway lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For things like renaming files, I use a similar utility called "qmv", from renameutils.[1] It is super useful, and one of my most-used commands in the terminal.

For many other file-related operations in my terminal I use Midnight Commander.[2]

I've tried emacs' dired-mode, but I didn't see it being particularly useful compared to Midnight Commander without a ton of time spent on configuring it to work the way I like. I might do that sometime, but until then, Midnight Commander already has so many useful features without any of the time commitment or pain of virtually rewriting much of the same functionality in emacs.

[1] - [http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/](http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/)

[2] - [https://www.midnight-commander.org](https://www.midnight-commander.org)

<comment><USER12> A lot of the pain with renaming files can be mitigated using brace expansion in e.g. Bash:

      $ mv path/to/{orig,dest}.foo
      # expands into
      $ mv path/to/orig.foo path/to/dest.foo

<comment><USER11> Your tip is appreciated, but that pales in comparison to what you could do with vim or emacs and a tool like qmv when renaming files.

You could, for instance, rename by regular expressions, easily do block selections and substitutions, use complex macros, etc. The sky is really the limit.

Then there are unlimited undo features of modern editors, and even branching undo histories where you can get back to a state that would be unreachable with linear undos.

Finally, tools like qmv do sanity checking on your renaming plan, so that if you (for example) wind up renaming two files to the same name, it'll warn you and safely let you rename the original files and try again.

As a result of the power and safety these tools provide, I no longer rename directly using my shell's renaming features (like the ones you describe) except for the absolute simplest and foolproof situations. For anything more complex, I use qmv.

<comment><USER12> I appreciate the clarification. My comfort with shell (which is one of my primary languages for countless tasks) makes it a more viable option for me and blinds me to the issues many people have. That's definitely not the case for many people.

I can certainly recognize the power of what you are describing. Perhaps I'll give it a try in the future.

Out of curiosity: what do you find are your most compelling use cases for the tool(s)?

<comment><USER13> Hey Mike, I'm not the original poster, but I'm a good candidate to answer since I'm reasonably comfortable with the shell and I've been looking for a tool like Roamer/qmv specifically because of shortcomings in shell renaming (or my knowledge thereof). My most common case for this is renaming a batch of files to a different naming scheme. For example I was recently renaming 15 or so files that were named like "08/30/2017 John Smith 478939da-b172-4952-b428-d77c4f4f6674.doc" and I wanted them all to be named like "john-smith.doc". I did end up renaming them with the shell but through doing something like `for i in *; do { mv $i \\`echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | tr ' ' '-'\\` } done` (I don't have the final script anymore). Which is slower to write and less elegant than the Roamer/qmv approach. But I'm very curious if there's a better approach to this problem on the shell.

<comment><USER14> Emacs (w)dired can do that in a snap.

<comment><USER13> Yup, agree 100%! Using `wdired` was my introduction to "editor-based file- system editing". Maintaining an emacs setup for this feature is overkill though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm hourly user of Midnight Commander on linux, bash.exe, cygwin, mingw, whenever it comes.

And staunch FAR Commander supporter for Windows. I sometimes call mc from FAR and back and forth (okay, very rarely :))

Long time ago there was PC Tools, and a program called.. yes "File Manager" for DOS - both were single-column, yet very powerful - browsing megabytes of text files effortless on 286 :)

back then, there was a tool that allowed direct directory manipulation - renaming, copying, but nothing like the tool demonstrated. Thank you!

<comment><USER16> Not to be a negative nelly, more just curiosity, but why would you use a different file manager in windows?

<comment><USER15> Because you have the command-line + browser at the same time. You can quickly copy, view, move files. Change quickly to folders remembered in history. Go in archives, copy, view from there to outside. Sort by various things. Execute directly files.

For example, if I need to run one exe, not in my PATH over some file, I have them both in left and right window. I go to the left, type "Ctrl+F" \- e.g. get me the full name (in this case executable), then go to the other window, type "Ctrl+F" again - get me the file to become first argument on the executable and run.

Ctrl+O (in midnight commander too), switches to almost fullscreen command-line - so in a way it's always better than just a command-line.

Search in Files, compare dirs, and many other features (there are tons of plugins).

Also checking SMB shares, FTP, System Processes (though I prefer SysInternals ProcExp.exe there)

I use the Windows Explorer (the file manager) only for very few things - certain context menu items, some forms of preview. It's always there by typing "explorer ." from the current folder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're into plain-text file managers, and vim, you might like Ranger[0]. Like Roamer, it's written in Python.

[0] [http://ranger.nongnu.org/](http://ranger.nongnu.org/)

<comment><USER18> Ranger includes the fantastic `:bulkrename` which allows you to safely edit the marked files with _your editor of choice_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like Ranger[1] as a TUI file manager. It's quite full featured (supporting previews of most things -- even images with libcaca) and has a vim-like interface. It also has `:bulkrename` to allow you to rename a set of files with whatever $EDITOR you want.

[1]: [http://ranger.nongnu.org/](http://ranger.nongnu.org/)

</comment><comment><USER20> this one has a ton of features [https://github.com/FedeDP/ncursesFM](https://github.com/FedeDP/ncursesFM) well written and commented C code.

full list of features: [https://github.com/FedeDP/ncursesFM/wiki/Getting- Started](https://github.com/FedeDP/ncursesFM/wiki/Getting-Started)

just to name a few advanced ones:

* Search support: it will search your string in current directory tree. It can search your string inside archives too.

* Basic print support through libcups.

* Extract/compress files/folders through libarchive.

* Powermanagement inhibition while processing a job (eg: while pasting a file) to avoid data loss.

* Internal udisks2 monitor, to poll for new devices. It can automount new connected devices too. Device monitor will list only mountable devices, eg: dvd reader will not be listed until a cd/dvd is inserted.

* Drives/usb sticks/ISO files (un)mount through udisks2.

* Distro package files installation through packagekit.

<comment><USER21> That file manager might be excellent, but did you look at the link? This FM uses your text editor to manage files, which is totally different from a ncurses interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> vidir is another one of these. Despite the name it works with any EDITOR.

[https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir](https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir)

Seems like the main difference compared to Roamer is that it just uses numbered lines instead of hashes.

<comment><USER23> vidir is included in moreutils which is packaged for pretty much every distro out there.

[http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/](http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/)

<comment><USER4> [https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir](https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir) looks like a fork of moreutils' vidir.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Quite a dangerous tool.

What happens if I copypaste some random text into the file and press save, by mistake? Are there mechanisms to limit the damage?

Also, when I remove a hash and save, the file is gone permanently, even if I paste it elsewhere, right?

<comment><USER25> No more "dangerous" than any other file manager, because that's what it was designed to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does it work with Sublime Text? Its multi-cursor abilities would be useful here.

<comment><USER27> I don't see why it wouldn't -- you might need to use the '-w' flag to make Sublime block until the file is closed (i.e. "export EDITOR='subl -w'")

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wrote my own one of these too (in 30 lines of shell):

[http://dnr.im/tech/articles/mvdir/](http://dnr.im/tech/articles/mvdir/)

(for renaming and deleting only)

</comment><comment><USER29> I love stuff like this. I'm a fairly basic linux user -- mainly basic server stuff. Since I moved to OSX a few years back (from Windows) for my main system, I've been trying to go CLI with as much as possible. Fortunately, brew has almost everything I've wanted to far.

Renaming a lot of files is something I do on a regular basis, so this is another piece I can ditch the trackpad for.

</comment><comment><USER30> Emacs Dired mode is my go to here

</comment><comment><USER31> This is similar to hg histedit, where the "ui" is simply a text editor.

</comment><comment><USER32> vifm works for me.

<comment><USER33> thx for the tip. just tried it .. very vim, very nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Midnight Commander is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER35> Anyone else having issues with EDITOR=code ? It seems to open the files blank.

<comment><USER36> maybe it's because the code binary is exiting right after it starts the editor, and roamer deletes the file

try EDITOR="code -w". It'll open a new instance, in the foreground

<comment><USER35> Well that sort of worked, however it seems to wait for the whole VS Code process to end which obviously is a pain if you have a bunch of stuff open, which is a shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> reminds me of Oscar's Renamer [http://www.mediachance.com/free/renamer.htm](http://www.mediachance.com/free/renamer.htm)

</comment><comment><USER38> Better or worse than ranger?</comment>


PhantomJS Alternative?  How to "Compute" JavaScript Manipulated HTML? - <AUTHOR> Is there a headless browser (or equivalent) that can render out HTML after 3rd party JS's have added their images/text? (ex. ad sense)<p>I've tried PhantomJS, CasperJS, and SlimerJS but none can seem to evaluate HTML after JS from an iframe has been called. <comment><USER2> give [http://www.nightmarejs.org](http://www.nightmarejs.org) a try, it's based on electron.</comment>


I use the new mymail.my.com client.  - <AUTHOR>

I wanna know how the programmers did some of this polish. You can choose the attachment size when sending, e.g. when you send an email it gives you the choice of several sizes for your attachment. Pull to refresh - if you drag the message list down, the arc indicator is drawn dynamically, depending on how the list has been pulled.
How is this implemented? <comment><USER2> Why would I need to choose an attachment size? What possible purpose would that serve, other than to add random extra padding to fit a container?

That seems like really lazy coding to me. Just grab the file size when it's attached if the program needs to know that for user reporting. Email in general doesn't care what size the file is, though hosted services might care a little since larger files means more bandwidth used.

Pull to refresh is nice for mobile. Most asynchronous applications use it by now, though Android browsers seem to lack that. (I think I see a fun coding project ahead!)</comment>


Why Does Inflammation Seem to Underlie All Sickness? - <AUTHOR> https://elemental.medium.com/why-does-inflammation-seem-to-underlie-all-sickness-64a2bef84f99 <comment><USER4> Not all inflammation is bad. Supercompensation can't happen without it. In fact, taking anti-inflammatory substances during training can reduce the efficacy of training[0].

[0]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023714/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023714/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks I've actually wondered about this for sometime!

<comment><USER6> It depends, there are several different form of inflammation. Curcumin seems to have little effect on muscle growth post exercise.

<comment><USER4> Do you happen to have a source for this? I've been avoiding turmeric after lifting for this very reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see a reference to cancer below, I recently started looking into this, it's actually fascination.

There is actually some research being done on non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs such as celecoxib or diclofenac for treatment of leukemia.

Since Leukemia is actually related to an increase of white blood cells which are produced in response to inflammation/infection I was curious if there's any relationship and immediately found articles such as the following one:

"Celecoxib suppresses autophagy and enhances cytotoxicity of imatinib in imatinib-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia cells"

There's also a bunch of initial research on herbal medicinal herbs and their effect on certain cancer cells. And a lot of them actually were used for their anti-inflammatory properties.

(Personal matter related to a case I have in the family)

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5029099/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5029099/)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4720497/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4720497/)

[3] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002364380...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643803002147)

<comment><USER8> It is important to look at the overall body of research available on the matter.

What you have linked has no placebo-arm to compare to. In addition, only cells from 6 patients were tested. Furthermore, this is for extremely resistant CML patients who do not respond to imatinib (first line treatment).

However, the introduction of second generation TKI inhibitors is now the standard of care in imatinib resistant CML patients.

I haven't referenced any particular pubmed entries since there are 6 or 7 second gen TKI's, however, this reference by the American cancer society gives a good summary of available options.

[1] [https://www.cancer.org/cancer/chronic-myeloid- leukemia/treat...](https://www.cancer.org/cancer/chronic-myeloid- leukemia/treating/targeted-therapies.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article is lacking in substance. It's conclusion is basically that there are two types of inflammation - one designed to attack parasites (worms, etc.) the other to attack bacteria and viruses.

The theory it proposes is that because humans have basically eradicated parasitic infections, that part of the body becomes over active and leads to autoimmune disorders.

0 link to sources. I've never heard of this "dual inflammation system". Not saying it's false, just saying, show me the research. Further, show the research that somehow links the under-activity of one to full blown autoimmune disorders. Seems like a weak link.

<comment><USER10> >It's conclusion is basically that there are two types of inflammation - <USER2> designed to attack parasites (worms, etc.) the other to attack bacteria and viruses.

No, the article doesn't say that. It says there are many types of inflamation, it mentions several types of inflammation including in response to injury,and also autoimmune diseases, and it ends with a discussion of the possibility one of the many reasons inflammation goes wrong today is an imbalance between two particular types.

<comment><USER9> I'm just saying that the way the article is written, it comes off as similar to 16th century theory of imbalance of humors [1].

It's just a very surface level explanation, lacking in substance as I said. There's something more concrete going on and this article didn't even attempt to illuminate it.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting to learn that inflammation is just like saying cancer. While the different types share the same base descriptor, they can be entirely different things.

<comment><USER12> Oddly so is the word fish there is no ocean creature that is a "fish" each is vastly different. It would be like referring to everything not in the ocean by a single name like "terreseta". Even though a camel and a snake are vastly different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's perfectly intuitive to me. Taking things further, anxiety could be seen as inflammation of the mind and social unrest as inflammation of a society. Each, in the right amount, serves as an important corrective mechanism for dealing with threats. But in excess, each becomes a gradually destructive force.

Anxiety and physical inflammation are even directly correlated, and social unrest and anxiety probably are too.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I don't know that sounds entirely too logical.

<comment><USER15> Because it's not. It tries to make biological truth out of an analogy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article does not really support the implicit thesis from the title - <USER3> lists some diseases that are caused by bad inflamation, some items are maybe surprising - but it does not mention diseases that obviously have different causes like infections. Overall clickbait with no content.

<comment><USER17> Even in infections, it can be the inflammatory response which causes the damage. I had myocarditis following a flu infection, but it wasn't the influenza virus that screwed up my heart muscle, it was the white blood cells going apeshit trying to kill it.

<comment><USER18> If someone pushes you, and you start swinging your arms wildly to balance yourself, but end up falling in a different direction - why did you fall?

<comment><USER19> If you took falling lessons as a kid, and you knew how to properly respond- following the push to a controlled fall, roll, or other redirection- you'd be fine. Sometimes the overreaction is the problem.

<comment><USER20> What are falling lessons? Judo?

<comment><USER21> Judo is good for learning to fall, otherwise not that much IMO.

<comment><USER22> I disagree. I was by far the smallest kid in my grade, but I took a couple of years of judo when I was 7. It was really useful as I grew up. A big equalizer for me. It does give you an intuitive sense of how to move and a shift your weight in your favor. Even if you fall, you end up falling on top of the other kid. As an adult and for personal defense I think Judo comes right after BJJ and wrestling.

<comment><USER23> Judo definitely helps. Any full contact martial art will, and Judo is the one with the most contact (at kids level) and lowest chance of serious injury. Wrestling too, but Judo typically covers more.

Lots of close contact will mean you're far less likely to panic in a fight situation. Most people have never been in a fight let alone hit.

Plus the fitness of course. Judo helps enormously with core strength.

BJJ borrows a lot from Judo, particularly the grappling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why does pain seem to underlie all sickness?

Inflammation is likewise usually a symptom, not the cause. And in the case of muscular injuries, it is generally helpful to the healing process.

The kind of imbalance mentioned in the article isn't really a culprit in most instances of sickness.

<comment><USER25> Inflammation underlies sickness the way police underlie crime. I mean, you always see police around when there's been a crime, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isn't it part of the body's response to sickness? Why does screaming tend to underlie all stabbings?

<comment><USER27> Screaming doesn't worsen stabbing wounds, directly. But inflammation does often (in all the examples I've read) worsen the triggering illness.

<comment><USER28> Chronic inflammation worsens chronic illness.

Acute inflammation is generally good. Ice should only be applied when the swelling is cutting off blood flow

<comment><USER29> Acute inflammation severely increases damage after moderately severe ischemic stroke [in rats], which can be prevented by blocking the acute inflammatory response. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5257154_Interferon-...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5257154_Interferon- Beta_Prevents_Cytokine-Induced_Neutrophil_Infiltration_and_Attenuates_Blood- Brain_Barrier_Disruption)

<comment><USER28> Generally being the operative word. There are certainly cases where it's harmful.

<comment><USER29> And I thought it was interesting to provide such a counter example :-) HN generally appreciates factual knowledge

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a thing called the "Cell Danger Response", where individual cells react to detecting danger _to themselves_ in a somewhat selfish way, by inflaming and emitting purines (the chemicals cells also release when they lyse apart during apoptosis.) By the fact that other cells detect danger _using_ these purines, this response is usually cascading in a local area. It lasts a long time; sometimes cells just _never_ go out of this "red alert" mode once in it, because they've isolated themselves well-enough that they can never perceive the environment again to see that it's all-clear.

This Cell Danger Response is thought to be responsible for some large amount of the "harmful" inflammatory response in our bodies. It is being suggested as a cause for syndromes as widely-ranging as metabolic syndrome and autistic spectrum disorders. (Not because it seems like a neat fit; but rather, because experiments to fix/disable CDR in tissues seem to ameliorate the symptoms of this cornucopia of syndromes/disorders!)

The Cell Danger Response is "selfish" because it protects _the cell itself_ from onslaught, but it hinders higher-level functions of the body from eliminating the problem that is causing the cell to react in the first place. The CDR is a bit like when people run screaming to the exits of a building when a fire breaks out: an individually-useful strategy if you don't know the context you're in, maybe, but very suboptimal from a bird's eye view of people being jammed together and trampled upon.

The CDR is very much the way you'd expect cells to react to threat if they were independent unicellular organisms within a colony, rather than cells in a multicellular organism. And, given what we know of the evolutionary history of multicellular life, we might very well have some highly-conserved DNA coding for organism-level responses by individual cells, retained from an era when our cells _were_ their own organisms.

The important thing to realize is that these responses aren't what the body "wants" in a global sense. They're optimal for the cells in some game- theoretic way, maybe, but—given that you have a nervous system, and an immune system, and a few other things that all link up to let your body know where damage is and send a lot of just the right type of cell there to fix or fight that damage—the CDR is more harmful than it is helpful. Our immune systems don't _complement_ it; they _obviate_ it, and its lingering presence actively impedes the immune system's work. The immune system has its own methods of triggering tissue inflammation, entirely separate from the CDR, and it only deploys these when there's a _global, top-down_ reason to do so.

Picture our immune system as security in a mall, trying to get people to file orderly out of the mall during a fire, and you won't be far off. Their job would be a lot easier—and more successful!—if the people didn't freak out and run randomly away from the fire, but instead just kept about their business apart from following announcements to head toward specific areas of refuge at a measured pace. And while this "human danger response" might be a bad trigger of an otherwise-sensible response to fear, that is useful in more situations than not, the CDR is— _as far as we know_ —useless and counterproductive in 100% of the kinds of dangerous situations cells will encounter in the context of a multicellular organism. (Okay, the CDR _might_ be advantageous _outside_ the body, like if you're a spermatozoa or spore. It also might be advantageous if you're a [live] cell in direct contact with the environment, without dead tissue or mucous in the way. But that's actually really rare in higher animals!)

———

And that's just the _least_ useful inflammatory response our bodies have. We also have a bodily-level whole-immune-system response to suspected parasitic onslaught, that's pretty counterproductive now that we have a super-bodily- level response to parasites involving bathrooms and hand-washing and food- washing and anti-parasitic drugs.

The parasite immune response serves as a useful contrast to the CDR: while the parasite immune response would become helpful again in the event of a cataclysm that sent humans back to the Stone Age, the CDR would _still_ be counterproductive for us even then. The CDR would only "become useful" for human cells that regress all the way back to being unicellular life-forms. (Sort of like the HeLa cancer cell line.)

<comment><USER17> I had never heard of this "cell danger response" before, and there's something about your description that does't smell right to this former cell biologist.

It's worth noting that so far, this seems to be a theory being advanced by one scientist:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22cell+danger+res...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22cell+danger+response%22)

This is not to say it's not true. But let's be careful here.

<comment><USER30> The jargon term is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purinergic_signalling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purinergic_signalling).

Personally, I find "Cell Danger Response" useful as a term to specifically reference one _type_ of purinergic signalling. One which, yes, the author you link to is investigating, and invented the "Cell Danger Response" term for; but one which was already known as a type of purinergic signal (and an interesting, unique response to said signal) before their work. Their contribution is mostly in the disease linkages, not in providing evidence that the purine signal+response they call "Cell Danger Response" happens.

So, in other words, even if they're P-hacking, the worst setback science might see is that these syndromes don't turn out to be ameliorated by CDR-inhibiting enzymes after all.

However, I would note at least one distributed experiment by another "author": the nootropics community has adopted [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulforaphane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulforaphane) as a seemingly-effective treatment for the symptoms of autistic spectrum disorders (to the point that, with only their interest, it has become a common supplement with many available brands.) While we don't understand sulforaphane very well, various journal papers suggest it has a role in modulating purine metabolism; and so the amateur biologists of the Internet have hypothesized that it is likely "cleaning" purinergic signalling molecules out of affected tissue for long enough for the cells to "relax" and stop screaming at one- another.

<comment><USER31> Do I understand correctly that sulforaphane could reduce the amount of purines released into the bloodstream? Is it a potential treatment for gout and other hyperuricemia conditions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Every disease has some agent that causes inflammation. As already mentioned, not all inflammation is bad. Acute inflammation helps the body eliminate the agent and thus heal. When you're talking about inflammation that underlies all sickness, you're talking about chronic inflammation. This occurs when inflammation doesn't subside which leads to your body attacking itself. This is such an interesting topic. I've actually just written an article about leading diseases that are caused by inflammation, if you're interested: [https://www.iamliesa.com/inflammatory-diseases- inflammation](https://www.iamliesa.com/inflammatory-diseases-inflammation)

</comment><comment><USER33> Dave feldmans theory was very intriguing. Haven't read the article cuz of sign in.

But the idea was that inflammation, for example cholesterol is transporting energy to any place where it's needed. If you have a cut the body activates inflammation and the cholesterol is taking fat and protein to the place where it's needed.

</comment><comment><USER34> Inflammation can be a result of heart disease [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate)

</comment><comment><USER35> Could it have to do with early humans being scavengers? I heard there is some scientific support for this hypothesis, and I can imagine this may have had a profound (and evolutionarily recent) effect on our immune system.

Could someone with more expertise shed a light?

</comment><comment><USER36> Because we haven't learned to treat systemic diseases yet, where more than one factor needs to be shut down or modified to stop the progress.

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://outline.com/BXdFKX](https://outline.com/BXdFKX)

</comment><comment><USER38> Correlation is not causation.

My best understanding is that inflammation is a two street: It both promotes health problems and is, itself, _caused by_ health issues.

Until we have a clearer handle on this dynamic, we are kind of stuck in our current "Jim, don't leave him in the hands of twentieth century medicine!" morass.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is a paywall work around available?

<comment><USER40> Incognito mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines) I guess the grammar would need to be fixed, but otherwise it still works great!

</comment><comment><USER42> Fighting inflammation has worked out much better for me than targeting any specific type of issue. As an example, bromelain, curbs sinus inflammation which reduces the number of sinus infections in some people.</comment>


Let's Deep-Six Facebook and Do Open Source Social Networking Instead - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Lets-Deep-Six-Facebook-and-Do-Open-Source-Social-Networking-Instead---Pro-Evan-Prodromou-70256.html?wlc=1277232213

<comment><USER2> You first.

And while we are at it, let's deep-six Microsoft Office and have a perfectly compatible replacement (down to the VBA level) that is completely open source.

I mean, if we only have to _say_ it, then we may as well get all our other good-sounding but completely unrealistic statements out in the open too.

<comment><USER3> Having a perfectly compatible open source MS Office replacement is a laudable goal and I'm extremely glad people have attempted it. I'm not really sure what point you're making. Nobody is saying we only have to say it and it will happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All of these distributed model guys keep disregarding and not addressing the fact that people simply don't want to deal with hosting their own web server, no matter how simplified it is.

I've seen a couple of people on this forum talk about (and Prodromou talks about it as well) "volunteers" who will run these micronetworks and host their friends and family. The idea just doesn't make sense.

For one thing, how many of us constantly are forced to be the "tech guy" in our friends/family circle? It SUCKS. Now imagine what you have to deal with when you're hosting a node...where do I sign up...

Now add that that to the facts that normies on facebook etc. simply don't notice or care about the privacy issues, the network effect, the ability for facebook to pivot their privacy settings, the fact that all attempts at distributed social networking to date have failed, and the conceptual issue of explaining what exactly the difference between distributed and non distributed social networking is to a non educated population who (again) doesn't know that they have a problem in the first place.

Prodromou also talks about "simple protocols" that these different social networks could use to talk to each other. I'll just leave that one at "devil in the details."

Finally he says, "Nobody keeps a global database of blogs, yet if you're trying to find, say, Doc Searle's blog, it's not very hard to do." in reference to not needing a global database of who belongs to what networks. So the issue here is that this creates the need for a Google-like replacement to index these social networks (why is it so easy to find Doc's blog? oh right.) and we are right back at square one: undistributed.

In my opinion this is a gross misunderstanding of the consumer, and reality.

<comment><USER5> Even if people were willing to host their own, people wouldn't keep their installs up to date. Then they all get hacked like all those self hosted WP.

<comment><USER6> This seems like a fairly small problem; while we're boiling the ocean we might as well make Chrome-style auto-updating the default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why don't we just go to the bar for a glass of _something_ with our friends instead?

</comment><comment><USER8> > An open and distributed model gives users and organizations a chance to > choose their social networking platform

First fail is easily seen in the leading sentence. Most people don't really want to choose what social networking platform they use. They just want to be on the best social network and have it work for them.

</comment><comment><USER9> check out <http://crabgrass.riseup.net/> open source social networking which works.

<comment><USER6> "Crabgrass currently consists of a solid suite of group collaboration tools, such as private wikis, task lists, file repository, and decision making tools."

I see the point of Crabgrass, but it's hardly an alternative to Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Foursquare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Naturally, preceded by a Flash ad.

</comment><comment><USER11> What ever happened to FOAF?</comment>


Build your business strategy around things that aren't changing - <AUTHOR> http://www.theequitykicker.com/2013/09/12/build-your-business-strategy-around-things-that-arent-changing/ <comment><USER2> Really the sweet spot for consumer web is applying new technologies/innovative approaches that are changing to people's desires that are not changing.

People will always want to socialize + internet = social media

People like sharing photos + everyone now has a camera & internet on their phone = Instagram

People like to travel + internet sharing economy = Airbnb

This is a very similar observation as one from a recent post by Sam Altman [1].

1\. [http://blog.samaltman.com/electrons-and- atoms](http://blog.samaltman.com/electrons-and-atoms) with a HN discussion here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291934)</comment>


The Story of BuiltWith - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3bbc17c239f <comment><USER2> Great story! Being a solopreneur myself, I still don't understand it.. Looks like a BuiltWith is a classical "You build, they come" example? No marketing, no validation or customer development. Can we call it "big luck", then? I'm really interested to hear about early days and motivation of founder to run it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping the article would cover what happened to UnderTheSite.com and how it came to redirect to BuiltWith.

UnderTheSite was built so that members of the community could contribute fingerprints to detect previously undetected technologies. This seemed to work pretty well and had the advantage that it was one click to see the code of the fingerprint responsible for detecting that technology in order to debug false positives.

I'm not surprised BuiltWith would diminish the story of how they profited from volunteers' work without compensating the volunteers, but it does strike me as lacking class that they completely remove this part of their story.

Also it would be nice to have a better sense of "Why could this idea _not_ succeed as an open source project?" (Eg., in an alternate history where UnderTheSite did not sell out to BuiltWith...)

</comment><comment><USER4> _Gary's take on metrics was that if it didn't change his behaviour it was only a distraction._

The problem with that line of thinking is that it only works in hindsight. You need metrics to know what you're doing right as much as what you're doing wrong.

<comment> andrew-rogers I agree in principle but BuiltWith is quite different to most startups/business which warrants different behaviours. It's good to know what you're doing wrong but it still has to past the "does it change my behaviour test".

Significant flow of ideas and feedback of which only a few are executed.

<comment><USER4> Metrics that don't change your behaviour _are_ a distraction, but you can't know which metrics fall in to that category unless you gather as much as possible. To paraphrase John Wanamaker's famous line about advertising, "Half the metrics you gather won't change your behaviour; the trouble is you don't know which half."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN has a Xerox machine effect and I'd guess a copy machine or two will be silenced by this post. Not so much the revenue numbers as the comments about copycats.

<comment><USER6> there are already 2 well funded competitors. Regardless of whether it's a good business model or not for a solo/small company, you probably can't compete with businesses that don't have to make money for many years.

<comment><USER7> Can you please let me know which these two competitors are?

<comment><USER6> datanyze, not sure the funding

similarweb, $40m funding

<comment> martin-adams Just looked at similar web and tested 3 sites I work with. They are pretty accurate on their traffic estimates. Anyone know how that is calculated?

<comment><USER8> Estimated using samples gathered with analytics through third-party browser plugins.

[http://support.similarweb.com/customer/en/portal/articles/13...](http://support.similarweb.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1384438-how- does-similarweb-calculate-estimated-visits-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Andrew: What programming language is BuiltWith written in?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://builtwith.com/BuiltWith.com](http://builtwith.com/BuiltWith.com)

<comment><USER9> It's not that obvious. The site tells you what technologies a site uses—not which programming language. ASP.NET includes a lot of languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does BuiltWith decides which sites to crawl? assuming it is too complex to crawl everything.

And how is the data/queries being sold without compromising it...

<comment><USER11> I believe that they started via user submission of URLs to crawl. I used to submit tons of sites that I was curious about and eventually got their Chrome browser extension so I could find out the tech behind a site by clicking that little button.

Not sure if this is how they scaled out to the volume of sites they now cover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Whilst running Anchor I realised that we could accurately the which hosting companies"

"Realized", and they accidentally a word.

<comment><USER13> In Australia, "realised" is the preferred spelling.

<comment><USER14> Not so much the preferred spelling, rather the correct spelling. Source: Am Australian.

It's also the correct spelling in the land that invented the English language.

<comment><USER15> It's not so cut and dried

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

I'm Australian and I prefer using the Z, otherwise what's the point of having the bloody letter in the first place?</comment></comment></comment></comment>