Bantam-Coffee: A Pratt parser implementation in CoffeeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/breckinloggins/bantam-coffee

<comment><AUTHOR> I was inspired by [http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2011/03/19/pratt- parsers-e...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2011/03/19/pratt-parsers- expression-parsing-made-easy/) to write my own Pratt parser* and I figured the easiest way to start would be to implement Bob's "Bantam" language in CoffeeScript.

I understand why Bob chose Java (as he says, "if you can write it in Java you can write it in any language"), but I think the CoffeeScript version is easier to understand.

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_parser></comment>


Ask HN: Can I store a segment of Reddit pages every minute? - <AUTHOR> I have some experience programming but want to work on a side project that would require me to have Reddit pages stored every minute. I would probably just work with the top subreddits to start.
I basically want the titles, # upvotes, # of commments stored every minute. I want to do this on new, rising, controversial, and hot.
I've done some research and I can only find people have pulled the data at one point in time vs continuously which I need.
Questions: 1. Do any of you know if this has been done somewhere (don't want to reinvent the wheel)?
2. If I were to do this, what languages/resources should I use? (I will be interacting with their API)
3. I would be willing to spend a couple thousand dollars to store the data on the cloud (I have no sense of how much it will cost). I figure if I build and run for one day, I can get a sense but if anyone has any sense before I do, if this will cost way more than that, please let me know.
4. Any other advice is welcome.
Even though I would be willing to spend that money on a server, I don't want to pay someone to do this for me, I want to learn. If the data is somewhere already, in that case I may entertain paying. <comment><USER2> [https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/](https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/)

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API)

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/OAuth2](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/OAuth2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Should have clarified that I know to use their API. But will this just be an absurd amount of data? I'm comfortable with python/R. What other languages should I use? Any database languages?</comment></comment>


The illusion of time - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7 <comment><USER3> I always saw time as a way of applying numerical labels to a state of the universe. In my view, the universe only ever exists in one state, albeit constantly changing at the "speed" of light. It is our biological capability to remember past states and envision future states that project this notion of time into everything.

Time is lodged into almost all of physics because the only way we can do something useful (not being God and not knowing the absolute equations sans- units) is to compare present values to previous-present values. That division sign wedged into every relative unit of measure - kg, sec, meter, etc - <USER2> basically a way of saying "as compared to". Present as-compared-to the- previous-present. What-is-now ÷ the-remembered-now. Universe-at-Planck-Tick #145 ÷ Universe-at-Planck-Tick #144

All of the universal constants come down to comparing a present state to a previous-present state and noticing that the delta between them is a consistent value. I don't think this is really news to many, but it helped to make physics and the some of the exotic math behind it make more sense to me.

<comment><USER4> The thing that is tricky though is that the changes in state are affected by the the state's own state regarding the state of the state change.

Put another way:

My writing this comment is changing the state of our universe. I'm writing it because I perceive the state change. If time is solely illusion then there would be no difference in the state between Tick #145 and Tick #146, but there is and it is this comment, which means that the universe (or at least our universe) is dependant on something that you all say doesn't exist.

I'm not saying you're all wrong, but it is a pretty surprising thing if it's true and modal realism is false.

<comment><USER5> State-change received and confirmed. Thank you for updating the universe.

<comment><USER4> I am the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a fascinating subject. Time is something we all experience and intuitively feel exists, yet is remains so elusive to actually nail down and study.

The Youtube channel PBS Spacetime did some of the best explorations of ideas in this area that I've heard:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GguAN1_JouQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GguAN1_JouQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRqibyNMpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRqibyNMpw)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l1KxgHH2Ek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l1KxgHH2Ek)

</comment><comment><USER7> Time is an illusion, but by the same token so are space and coffee. So maybe that's not a useful way to use the word "illusion"....

<comment><USER8> No not by the same token. Coffee is a physical manifestation. Time is a perspective or measurement.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see you try to define these terms.

<comment><USER8> Coffee is sitting there as a bunch of molecules. Can you point at time as a bunch of molecules sitting there? If not, it's not by the same token.

<comment><USER7> I take your bunch of molecules ("physical manifestation") and squash them into a black hole. Now they have been turned into an aspect of the structure of space and time ("a measurement or perspective").

So no, space and time are not "measurements/perspectives" that are fundamentally distinct from "a bunch of molecules".

<comment><USER8> Ok so you change the situation drastically by squashing them into a black hole, something nobody really understands, and tell me coffee and time are interchangeable. Right.

Also I never said space was measurement/perspective, I said time was. You believe what you want to believe, but maybe stick to a single scenario in the future. I'll say it again, a cup of coffee just sitting there is distinct from time.

<comment><USER9> While I agree that was a poor example for much the same reasons, I think I have a much better comparison:

Duration is as much a measurement/perspective as displacement, this is an observation which led to Special Relatively. If time can be called an illusion, so can position.

<comment><USER8> I guess I don't see the equivalence. Time very much depends upon duration and the terms might as well be synonymous. Does space depend upon displacement? If we froze a single instance of space & time, we would see a universe sitting still. Space and all its fillings would still be there but would time? I believe it quite bold to call space time and time space just because duration and displacement seem similar.

<comment><USER9> You're calling one dimension special because if you remove it you don't get to use the special words you use for that dimension.

If updown was a special named dimension and you took a single 2-space+1-time slice of the universe at fixed radius from the Earth, your argument wouldn't really be different, only words and phrases like "sitting still", which is inherently _about_ the dimension being removed, because it's convenient for us.

And that's ignoring questions like "can particles have momentum if there is no time?" which might actually be important in the unlikely event that I understand what a black hole's singularly does to time.

<comment><USER8> I think what you're saying is fair and I realize it might be pushing it to remove the dimension of time to articulate my position.

Regarding the last question, if I understood forces correctly, it's that they remain in motion until an equal or greater force stops them right? Why do we need time for that out of curiosity?

<comment><USER9> Thanks. Velocity is the derivative of position with regard to time. Does it exist if there is no time? It might be that momentum is the fundamental thing and velocity is just a consequence of it. Or not, I don't know.

Momentum has a direct influence on Einstein field equations, and I don't know enough maths to follow GR (just two A-levels) so I have no idea if that "direct" influence is still present at a no-more-future boundary condition.

My insufficient maths skills are, amongst other things, why I don't trust my understanding that a black hole singularity really is a no-more-future boundary condition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When taking hallucinogens and in a few cases without, I've had instances where my ideas and concepts of time have begun breaking down. It's a very weird feeling, when you begin becoming uncertain about how or if time works. And impossible to "grasp" when you're not experiencing it and are back in a "normal" mindset.

<comment><USER11> If someone were to ask me how long an LSD trip lasts, I would always say: "Exactly one eternity".

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of "The Jaunt"

<comment><USER13> I went and read that today because of your comment. I found it interesting and frightening in a paradoxically mind bending kind of way. However, it did seem a bit unbelievable that 300 years into the technology and there were no safeguards and only ~30 mishaps had happened despite how, apparently, easy it is to torture yourself.

<comment><USER12> Yes, Steven King writes utter bullshit, but somehow he makes it scary like no one else

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The malleability of space and time mean that two events occurring far apart > might even happen in one order when viewed by one observer, and in the > opposite order when viewed by another.

Why doesn't this break the rules of causality? I found this answer on Quora ([https://www.quora.com/Is-chronological-order-of-events- prese...](https://www.quora.com/Is-chronological-order-of-events-preserved- for-different-observers)) but I don't understand it.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't break the rules of causality because they arent even related. Let's say I poke a balloon with a needle, the poking event causes the balloon to pop. The pop will never ever occur without me first poking it, irrespective of any number of viewers across all possible distances.

Now for the distortions in time perception, it does matter as to who the viewer is. Everyday you wake up you experience energy that's being radiated from the Sun that's roughly 8 minutes away (at the speed of light).

And yet, there's cosmic events which have released energy that have happened millions and millions of years ago which have yet to reach us because we are so far away. So from our perspective the Sunlight from today is an older event than the truly much older supernova explosion that has yet to reach our planet. That which when we finally detect it, it will be a "new" event which again is much older than our Sun.

<comment><USER16> Your example belies the very core of the argument in the article, in that the sequence you just described as causal is in fact an illusion.

Certainly from the human perspective, these events in sequence look causal. But our perception of time is finite and our mind is constructing the order of those events. But the human perspective is subject to the limitations of our sense of scale, our faulty sense impressions and our faulty logic in reconstructing those events.

At the scale of molecules, the distances between the molecules of air, the rubber of the balloon and the metal of the pin are vast. It is impossible to perceive, looking at a subset of molecules of air within the balloon far from the site of the pinprick, why the molecules of metal interacting with the molecules of rubber have any effect on the molecules of air around them. There is no correlation.

Going deeper, at the intra-atom scale, it is difficult to fathom an incontrovertible connection between cause and effect when two atoms interact, as mostly empty space encounters mostly empty space. That their nuclei are close enough to influence each other is determined probabilistically, not deterministically. The odds that any two atoms interact is quite small. The probability improves with their relative number and density in a given volume of space and gives us some measure of reliability that we treat as causality.

<comment><USER17> Atoms are not mostly empty space, because electrons are not little balls spinning around like planets.

Electrons are more like continuous clouds surrounding the atom.

> The picture of an atom being mostly empty stems from the childhood of atomic > structure analysis, where most of the atom's extension was found to be > transparent for alpha rays, and the early models explained that by pointlike > nuclei and electrons. Similarly the picture of a proton or neutron being > essentially empty apart from three quarks embedded in it arises because deep > inelastic scattering shows that protons are essentially transparent for very > energetic electrons, except when the latter meet an almost pointlike quark. > But both pictures are quite limited: We don't think glass doesn't occupy > space because it is transparent for light.

[https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/topics/touch.html](https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/topics/touch.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The End of Time by Julian Barbour said something similar.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Time_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Time_\(book\))

Its interesting, the but the picture of reality that it conjures up is ultimately a bit of a stretch, in my view. Kinda creating a bunch of new problems just to try and get rid of the time problem. If it was a code refactoring, it would strike you as a questionable one.

</comment><comment><USER19> Based on relativity photons do not experience time. They "hit" something the instant they are created - even if we perceive them to have existed for billions of (light) years.

<comment><USER10> From the perspective of a photon, everything in the universe is happening here and now.

<comment><USER20> Is this _REALLY_ accepted as true? Photons are fast, but they're not instantaneous. They still take millions of years to travel between galaxies. For something to be truely timeless, I'd expect it to be able to teleport. Is this incorrect?

<comment><USER21> Assume a really fast rocket is traveling from galaxy A to galaxy B. Due to relativistic length contraction, the distance between the galaxies is less as seen by the rocket than it is for a stationary observer in either galaxy. So the travel time from the perspective of the rocket (the "proper time" of the rocket) is less than the travel time measured by a stationary observer. And when you work out the math, the rocket's proper time approaches zero in the limit as the speed of the rocket approaches light speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made basically the same argument four years ago:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and- ar...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of- time.html)

It's actually pretty obvious once you understand how entanglement and measurement are related, i.e. the are the same physical phenomenon.

<comment><USER23> > You can remember the past and not the future because whatever you remember > is your past.

Conveniently enough, this direction of time coincides with the one where the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium in the Sun emits radiation (rather than the alternative direction where the Sun absorbs from the space exactly the radiation required to fission helium atoms to obtain hydrogen), the one where separated gases mix (rather than the alternative direction where mixed gases separate spontaneusly), coffee gets cold (rather than hot), etc.

<comment><USER22> It's not "convenient", it's necessary. If the sun absorbed radiation in this way, you would not be able to see it. You can only receive information from photons that you absorb (and hence are emitted by something else), not from ones that you emit and are absorbed by something else. That's why you can never see a black hole.

<comment><USER24> _> If the sun absorbed radiation in this way, you would not be able to see it_

This isn't an explanation, it's just a restatement of the problem. The radiation process itself is time reversible: the case where the sun emits and your eye absorbs, and the case solution where your eye emits and the sun absorbs, are both valid solutions of the equations describing the physical laws. Saying that the eye has to absorb radiation to see it just restates the fact that, in our actual universe, we do in fact see the sun by our eyes absorbing radiation--i.e., that that solution of the laws is the one we live in. It doesn't explain why that solution of the laws, and not the time reversed one, is the one that's actually realized.

<comment><USER22> > This isn't an explanation

Yes, I know. It wasn't meant to be an explanation, it was meant to be a very specific and narrow response to a very specific comment. The full explanation is in the article I linked to above, which is too long to reproduce in an HN comment.

<comment><USER24> _> The full explanation is in the article I linked to_

I'll take a look. I see that it's several years old; if I have comments, should I post them there, or here?

<comment><USER22> As you wish. Comments on old articles get moderated, but they still get posted (I just have moderation turned on as an anti-spam measure). And a fair number of people are subscribed to my comment stream so you may get better feedback there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "When his lifelong friend Besso died. Einstein wrote a letter to Besso's family, saying that although Besso had preceded him in death it was of no consequence, '...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.' "

[http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm](http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm)

</comment><comment><USER26> A good analogy I like to use is 'time legs'. Imagine if you were a leaf falling from a tree, being blown about the ground and air. You would be in 3-space but only experiencing it as a passenger. A leaf as no legs. We lack 'time legs' and if we had them, we would realize that time isn't a special thing.

</comment><comment><USER27> The author's physics might be real science but this seems like semantics to me. In addition, the idea that "time is an illusion" is equal parts physics and psychology. While the author maybe a professional physicist, I doubt they are much more than an armchair psychologist.

</comment><comment><USER28> Time is an illusion, freewill is an illusion, etc. are all attacks on and denials of consciousness. The fact is that consciousness exists and has identity. In the past consciousness was treated as supernatural but the "modern" attempts to deny it are no less irrational.

<comment><USER17> Physics hasn't still decided if our universe is completely deterministic or no, if all the apparent quantum randomness was not already determined (think about a seeded random number generator).

You are trivializing a very deep question: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism)

<comment><USER29> OK, but "the universe is not completely determined because of quantum randomness" != "I have free will", or even "consciousness is real".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we > project sequences of past, present and future.

I wonder if the "we project" part is the author's choice of words or Carlo Rovelli's. It is not explained and therefore has not definitive meaning.

</comment><comment><USER31> There was a post on the 13.7 blog at NPR. It said that it is ok incorrect to think of time as an illusion or an emergent property and that scientists are doing a disservice by doing so. Time is real it said. I looked but couldn't find that article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Happy to see my passing thought "How can time be real?" is actually being given serious academic study.

If you take reality to be right here, right now (what else _could_ it be?), time cannot exist, it just helps us map change.

<comment><USER18> So how does change happen?

<comment><USER8> One reaction at a time in a chain of reactions. If you lift your arm up, are you asking me how did that happen? Muscles fired to go from point A to point B. I'm confused by your question to be honest; are you telling me change occurs _because_ of time? Or trying to tell me change depends on time? Then yes, but change is just a perspective as well. There's only ever going to be right here, right now.

<comment><USER18> What I mean is, if there is only ever right here right now, that is a frozen timeless state, and how do you traverse from that to some other different state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have always been perceiving time just this way. What the article describes seems just obvious while fitting in the common model of time an schedules is rather hard and always very stressing for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> It may be that time does not exist, but the universe certainly does have states, which are deployed simultaneously (hence time is an illusion). But this means the universe is 100% deterministic.

</comment><comment><USER34> While I can understand the basic concepts behind theories like this, I much prefer to live in my very human bubble of ignorance. I just don't feel like dealing with the existential dread.

</comment><comment><USER35> That's why I need a 48h long day? 24h seem too few for me

</comment><comment><USER36> If time did not exist in some fashion, then change would be impossible. Remove time and everything is simultaneous or eternal. What we say _was_ or _will be_ exists along with all we say presently _is_. Naturally, this leads to a contradiction. Imagine something moving along a trajectory that was at position p1, is at position p2, and will be at position p3 is now in all three positions. Add another object on an intersecting trajectory. A collision occurs when two objects are at the same position at the same time. Without time, these objects are both colliding and not colliding.

<comment><USER37> Draw two crossing lines: the lines are mostly not touching except at the point they cross, so they are both touching and not touching depending on where you look. Is this a contradiction?

<comment><USER36> At the POINT of intersection. Those objects are both at the point of collision and not at the point of collision.

<comment><USER37> The same is true for the crossing lines: they are both at the point of crossing and at all the other points along their length.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is strangely reminiscent of the part of Saint Augustine's Confessions I found the most trying to finish.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wish all mobile sites were as beautifully designed and spaced as this one.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the duration of "now"?

<comment><USER5> Seems infinite so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The past is a faulty memory and the future is an illusion of ego.

<comment><USER29> So if I had a good memory, there would be no past? I don't buy it.

Or, _all_ memory is faulty, and that's all we've got of the past? In that sense, this might be true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.

<comment><USER43> Very deep. You should send that in to the "Reader's Digest". They've got a page for people like you.

<comment><USER44> It's a quote from Douglas Adams.

<comment><USER45> That is also a quote from Douglas Adams. It's literally the following line from the original quote.

<comment><USER5> He was riffing - the 3rd line is "It's a quote from Douglas Adams."

At least, as it appeared in the comments on HN.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Driving versus Flying: The Debate Is Settled (1998) - <AUTHOR> https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debate-is-settled/ <comment><AUTHOR> As it turns out, both driving and flying have almost the same risk when going by seat hours.

I imagine even with the improvements in safety these days, they're both still very close in risk.</comment>


$5/month WordPress Hosting on AWS with Lightsail - <AUTHOR> https://cloudconfusing.com/2018/09/05/how-to-cheap-wordpress-hosting-on-aws-with-lightsail/ <comment><USER2> This setup seems to be missing IPv6 support (hello significantly worse performance due to CGNAT on all mobile devices!) and you get harsh CPU & I/O throttling from Amazon.

If your going to use a VPS (which is what Lightsail is), go with companies that focus on that as their core offering. You'll generally get more features and higher limits at a lower price point. As an example: [https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/151580/impact-vps- nvme...](https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/151580/impact-vps-nvme-kvm- launch-seattle-50-off)</comment>


Ask HN: Software Engineer looking for work – Any suggestions? - <AUTHOR> Dear HN members,
I am a Software Engineer with 10+ years experience in low-level middleware frameworks(not kernel or device driver) using C, EC++ (some C++) on Linux based platforms (mobile and desktop). You can see my CV here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5_wVHETBRUKaVI2bUlUTlJuNFE/view?usp=sharing . I have been unemployed since last 3.5 years due to some family reason(details below). But now I am available to take on work. It will be okay if I am not paid for next two-three months(I won't mind if I get paid for my work though) because I will have to take one month leave in January to attend to the family issue again. The obvious question you might ask is, why can't I wait for next two-three months and then apply for jobs and in the mean time do some personal project? Well, if I start a personal project I will get sucked into it and I don't want to do that because I will have to take on paid work by January as I am on the verge of bankruptcy. Another reason is that, if I am anyway going to start paid work, then why not give my future employer an opportunity to try me for two-three months. That way it will help the company understand if I am a match for their requirement. I am ready to work remotely and travel or relocate (but the company will have to bear the cost of travel and/or relocation). And after the trial period(2-3 months) I expect a paid long-term contract or permanent position, obviously only if the employer is happy with my work.
You will be wondering what got me into the situation that I am in today. Well, I wrote the details here but HN submit-form refused to allow more than 2000 chars hence I am writing the rest of the message in the document here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5_wVHETBRUKRlNNQjFEMU9SZk0/view?usp=sharing . Let me know if there is any work available that I can take on now which can be extended after 2-3 months as a contract or permanent position?
Thanks and kind regards,
Ajit <comment><USER2>
      > if I am anyway going to start paid work, then why not
      > give my future employer an opportunity to try me
      > for two-three months.

Because you should instead spend those extra weeks looking for an employer who can derive enough value from your skills to pay you a fair market salary. Inviting employers to "try for free" will invite those who may not really know how to turn your effort into money. You say you're near bankruptcy, so now is not the time to screw around with getting paid.

      > I am a software engineer with 10+ years experience...

Yes, but how does that help your employer make money? How does your programming effort:

        * get a product to market faster?
        * make customers buy more?
        * increase referrals?
        * decrease support calls?
        * etc.

Your employer has to make money so they can pay you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry to hear about your situation. But it looks like you havent started looking yet. Whether you are in India or in the UK, someone with your skills will easily find a job. Just start contacting your team at Intel and ask or you know you can easily look on Intel site and start applying. There are many open positions and since you were not fired, there is no reason why a new manager or your previous manager wont consider hiring.

And start working your contact network, start sending CV. But I suggest you do this now with an availability date of Jan. If the hiring team likes you, they will wait or they will try and find a place in the company for you.

Large companies typically dont take on temp workers directly. So I would avoid proposing that. Just say you are taking care of family and need the time to settle things so you can focus your energy on the job, come Jan.

good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the suggestions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where can you work? You have a good CV (certainly the bits I read) and some good experience. I wouldn't recommend working for free though. If a company needs your skills they should be willing to pay from the start.

<comment><AUTHOR> @thorin Where can you work?

I can work in UK without constraints. But I am also ready to work remotely and travel or relocate (the company will have to take care of the travel and relocation expenses though)

<comment><USER4> If you can work in London I'm sure you can find something through an agency/jobserve/linkedin without having to work for free!</comment></comment></comment>


Things I learnt after quitting Google for a job at a hyper-growth startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/ten-learnt-quitting-google-job-hypergrowth-startup <comment><USER2> I can tell the author of this article comes from Google, because all those horrible things they list as being the woes of a startup are like dream scenario for those of us that work in normal startups.

Feature idea being backlogged for a quarter? Ha, I'm used to backlog dates in four digits and they all start with 20.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty interesting. I haven't worked in Google, but from my experience in a startup, I totally agree at least with some of your points (my experience wasn't that great, so perhaps the other points were what was missing)</comment>


VR story for chernobyl 30th, presented by NetEase - <AUTHOR> http://flv.bn.netease.com/vr/vrplayer/WebVR_01.html <comment><AUTHOR> Just show their ambition on webvr, it gonna be a vr year, I guess</comment>


The Web Time Forgot - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> How do you scale knowledge?

What you store, is as important as how you store it. Luckily, the Nazis (or any authority) can't easily destroy bits.

How do we organize _anything_ more intelligently?

 _Everything_ you try to improve, is an attempt to organize matter more intelligently.

This is the most fundamental activity. And we'll continue to do this in new and strange ways.</comment>


Why Power Users Hate Fancy Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25973/?p1=Blogs <comment><USER2> Headline is wrong, it's not about "fancy web design," nor is it about "power users." It's about how MacWorld.com's users don't seem to mind their headline- feed front page.</comment>


My Google Summer of Code Experience: Part 1 – The Application - <AUTHOR> https://kayali.io/blog/gsoc-part-1/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author of the article here! If you have any questions about how GSoC has been so far, feel free to ask here.</comment>


Ask HN: How startups manage their operations? - <AUTHOR>
 Hey everyone, we are two guys with no tech background in need of some help understanding how successful startups managed their first hires, interviews, new leads, first paying customers, invoicing, customer communication, to do lists, who's working on what, customer bookings, feedback, change of schedule, how to analyse customers needs to offer more services and all the data that all of this creates?
For a sense of scale and what we do, we have 100 paying customers, we sell a service, think at home haircuts, so we have 8 hairdressers and need to hire 2 more today, then we need to keep track of all the families and manage their bookings, one family might have 6 members, 2 parents with weekly haircuts at 2pm and 4 kids with haircuts from 4 to 6pm every two weeks all good until one kid can't make an appointment and need to reschedule, so now we need to organise a time the kid and the same hairdresser are available, this happens quite often. But the biggest pain is matching desired customer time with available hairdresser schedule with lots of back and forth through emails and calls, then the next school term the school changes after school activities and we are back to zero, so this won't ever be fixed.
Then we need to invoice every family, gather feedback, changing hairstyles, hairdresser notes, parents notes, kids feedback, parents goals, our goals, reviews, wom recommendations, new leads, book trial haircuts, trial feedback, etc…
On top of that we have all the CVs we are getting, interview notes, how to quickly find a past CV that wasn't perfect but we are desperate so let's interview them again and offer some training, book training, book trial haircut, invoice, get trial feedback from customer and hairdresser, analyse trial feedback, review, hire, etc..
Could go on.. <comment><USER2> The question is quite broad. If you're new to HackerNews check [https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade](https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade) Many services are SaaS with monthly pricing and there's a lot of promotion (startups adding themselves). The HR section seems relevant.

I'd say the majority starts simply to lots of Excel/GoogleDocs spreadsheets, then add chat tools for the website, then messaging tools for the team to manage one mailbox ([https://frontapp.com/](https://frontapp.com/), [https://missiveapp.com/](https://missiveapp.com/) and such), possibly [https://calendly.com/](https://calendly.com/) to let user add themselves to calendars, sales tools like [https://close.com/](https://close.com/)

High growth might then require consolidated data with tools like Salesforge, [https://www.hubspot.com/](https://www.hubspot.com/), [https://segment.com/](https://segment.com/) To integrate and finetune those can be a full-time (engineering) job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, how could I make the question more specific?

I had a quick look at the ToolsOfTheTrade, we are currently using Trello to organise who's working on what and to do list, an industry specific service for invoicing, gmail for team communication, Hubspot for new leads and several spreadsheets and gdocs.

I've researched quite a bit about the tools but I'd like to hear from first hand experience how people are implementing this as I can see that the setup we have today is about to stop working, it's getting harder to find and track what's going on and I'm afraid to choose a wrong tool now that could be tougher to change later on. Or that there's a smarter simpler way to do things that I'm now aware.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can students with no work/intership experience stand out? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently in my third year of computer science (major Canadian university) and I've been applying to internships but haven't been getting any responses.<p>What do you look for in students with no prior experience? How can I stand out? <comment><USER2> Q. What direction do you want to go in with your career?

I think you really need to think through where you'd like to be when you get out of school. Do you want to work at a big company or a startup? Is there a problem space that you have a passion for (this can be anything from finding a cure to cancer to videogames)? Are you into a certain language or a certain platform?

The people who stand out are the people who have a passion for something. If your obsession is stock picking then you want to bring that passion to an investment bank. If your obsession is self driving cars then you want to work for a tesla or uber.

There's the old Woody Allen phrase "half of life is showing up". In a humorous way you can envision a slacker who shows up for school and manages to pass, but in reality it's showing up and hooking up with the people or projects that you want to work on.

By the way I trick I use is this: If I gave you several million dollars and no conditions, what would you do with it? Would you buy a house or start a startup? By the way don't buy the hype and be honest with yourself on that answer. Many people are selling startups, but there's a world of people doing other things out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> make a portfolio from volunteer projects

i.e. build a website for your friend who is a DJ

or create a small open source project to solve one of your own problems

or find something that bugs you about a famous product and design a prototype that shows a better way

then blog about it</comment>


What Is Psychological Consulting? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dremilyanhalt/what-is-psychological-consulting-1c91dbc596#.rz3qcg3f6 <comment><AUTHOR> Love the idea of a more psychologically minded culture. I've gone through an acquisition, and thanks to my own personal therapy, I was able to keep a level head through the process. Would have loved to talk openly with my peers though..."excited" seemed to be the only emotion we could share.</comment>


Crime, conservation, and corporatization in Paw Patrol - <AUTHOR> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1741659020903700 <comment><AUTHOR> Twitter is not a big fan of this research [https://twitter.com/search?q=liam%20kennedy%20paw%20patrol&s...](https://twitter.com/search?q=liam%20kennedy%20paw%20patrol&src=typed_query)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> full text pdf via sci-hub [https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1177%2F174165902090370...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1741659020903700)</comment>


Show HN: I built a mockup/prototype/wireframe editor in ten weeks - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, After watching a lot of Show HN's here, it's finally my turn to show something. This is the first real project I have shipped, so it is extra special to me.
For those who will inevitably ask why I made yet another mockup editor I covered it on our blog (http://blog.mocktailsapp.in/why-build-yet-another-mockup-editor-tm). Not all the features mentioned in that post have been implemented yet. As such Mocktails is pre-beta software and very minimal. It does not even have user accounts or any actual server side component at all for that matter (yet)!
Our intention is to build Mocktails into a first-rate mockup editor within the next six months. Please visit, provide your feedback and spread the word.
Thanks!
Links: Mocktails - http://www.mocktailsapp.in Blog - http://blog.mocktailsapp.in/ <comment><USER2> Great implementation.

Three points though:

1\. "Move one level up" / "Move to top" -> they sound strange to me.

=> use "Bring Forward/Send Backward" (for one level up/down) and "Bring to Front/Send to Back" (for moving all the way) _( <\- copied shamelessly from Keynote.app, because I really like it)_

2\. If my mouse is over a box or "thing", when I drag I want to take that "thing" with me - why do I have to _first_ click on it (to select it) and then be able to drag it somewhere else?

3\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842530>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Thanks for taking the time to checkout Mocktails and for your suggestions.

1\. Yes, 'Bring Forward' does sound much more obvious than 'Move one level up'. I'll change this soon.

2\. Another good point. We are deviating from normal drag behavior and that is not good. Thanks for pointing this out.

3\. I have replied to that comment directly, but to reiterate, it's a good idea, and I'll see if we can implement it, without sacrificing simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice. Congrats on shipping.

Why the subdomain blog.mocktailsapp.in?

You're building a product which is already established as a thing people need. You can almost be sure people are searching, right now, for 'mockups with version control' (or some other benefit which differentiates your software from the competition). Your competitors pages are too established for a newer domain like yours to easily out rank them on terms like 'mockups', but since they have little to no reason to talk about things like version control, you can easily out rank them for something like 'mockups'+'version control' or 'collaborative mockups', etc. You should try your best to concentrate your page rank (and links) into a single domain as early as possible to give yourself the maximum advantage.

Search isn't great for the discovery of many apps out there. Since it could be for yours, take advantage of it!

I'm really looking forward to seeing this go forward. Again, great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words and for using Mocktails.

As for your question: I subscribe to the belief that if a company has a product page at 'www' subdomain or at the root domain, then it's blog should be located at the 'blog' subdomain. That was literally the only reason for putting the blog there.

You are correct in that we dont rank very well for mockups, and your points on SEO are quite apt. However, I do not know much about SEO, so I wonder if the benefits accrued by moving the blog to the 'www' subdomain would be outweighed by placing enough links to the 'www' subdomain in the blog posts.

Also, for now, I would like to focus on just building the product, especially since the much-vaunted version control _doesn't actually exist_ yet. This would prevent a ton of support tickets from people who came in searching for 'version controlled mockups' and then dont find the feature anywhere.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you should focus on learning the many facets of SEO while trying to deliver a product but there are some quick, actionable pieces of advice which are undisputed enough that you can pretty much blindly implement them.

A great place to learn about seo (especially as it pertains to software products and marketing them) is patio11's blog. A particularly relevant, however short, article is [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/10/02/object-lesson- on-bloggin...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/10/02/object-lesson-on-blogging- for-your-business/) which speaks specifically to this point.

Also, I would recommend getting as many support tickets as possible. Not only are they feedback from users about what the product needs (you're probably aware of how important this is considering it's the mantra of every notable writer in the startup/saas domain) but they represent people who a.) are interested enough in your product to complain that they can't use it yet and b.) have implicitly given you permission to contact them. A simple, "This will be implemented soon. I'll email you when it's ready." makes the immediate problem disappear while creating a list of users primed and ready to start breaking your software for you when it hit beta and beyond.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm... Again you're pretty much spot on. I guess while we should primarily focus on building the product for now, there is no real reason why we cannot make some simple changes to capture more mindshare and search engine ranking. I'll look into some basic SEO tonight and make some changes ASAP.

Once again, thanks a lot for your advice, especially since it's in an area I don't know much of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fricking impressive, dude. I tried it and can immediately see the value.

Some constructive criticism: the scroll bar for the toolbox is too narrow for _my_ personal taste. Gmail does this and it drives me crazy trying to actually grab it. Why not make it a nudge or three wider?

Otherwise, hats off to you for shipping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind words and for trying out Mocktails.

I personally found 10px width to be quite usable, but if you are having trouble with it then I don't mind nudging it up to say 15px.

If you have any other suggestions or feature requests, please do not hesitate to let us know. You could do this at our feedback forum at <http://mocktailsapp.uservoice.com>

<comment><USER5> You could do what Mountain Lion does - 7px standard scroll bar, which grows to 11px on hover. It actually has a 15px clickable area on hover when you include the 2px margins. 15px visible all the time is a bit of overkill.

But don't make the mistake of implementing every little feature request or trying to fix everyone's problems (no offence to the op here). That's how bloat happens. Let uservoice do the talking to find out what the majority of people want, and focus on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I don't really think 15px would look terribly wide, so rather than unnecessary complexity by expanding on hover, might as well always have it at that width. And you are absolutely correct that we cannot implement every single feature request. We'll most definitely be letting our users decide on uservoice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clickable <http://www.mocktailsapp.in>

</comment><comment><USER7> First of all, congratulations for shipping :)

Looks nice :) .My first question when I opened it - does it warn you when you're nearing your localStorage quota?

On the points you mention in your blog - are you certain other wireframe tools don't have collaboration?

Points 2 and 3 are pretty important (especially point 3). If other services don't have version control, and yours does, it's an important one.

The rest of the points don't seem that important to me, but I've barely used any mockup tools.

Lastly, how do you plan to monetize?

Good luck and congrats :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Thanks for taking the time to play with it. As for your questions:

1\. It does not warn you if you are nearing localStorage quota limits. AFAIK, there is no browser API to check your remaining quota. However, this is a pretty good idea, and I'll check to see if it can be implemented in any way.

2\. There are some tools that have collaboration (Mockflow is the only one that I can remember right now). Unfortunately they dont have the other features I needed. The main advantage of Mocktails as I see it is that you get all the important stuff in one nice neat package.

3\. Glad you agree on publishing and version control. These two have bit me in the ass so many times.

4\. Monetizing will be based on number of projects per user for individual accounts and users per organization for enterprise accounts. I haven't worked out much beyond that for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Impressive, but be very careful going up against established players such as Balsamiq because you will have a difficult time competing. I am not sure if you want to one day make this a paid app, but if you do, think about developing and marketing it to the needs of a specific niche. Remember, there are thousands of similar "projects" and clones of existing software that died a very slow and painful death because they were not profitable enough to continue developing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to play with Mocktails. You are correct in that it's difficult to compete in this space. As of now, we are thinking of having our marketing emphasize our strengths such as publishing and built in version control.

To be quite fair though, the day where we have to worry about marketing is quite far away. For now, we just have to buckle down and keep building the product.

<comment><USER9> You should worry about marketing BEFORE building the product :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great app, very impressive indeed.

No one else has mentioned it, but I am not seeing the effect of the grid toggle. Selected or not, I don't see a grid.

Also, I'm curious as to how you are going to implement an export feature. I know several other web-based mockup editors put exporting behind the paywall as a premium feature. Good for them I suppose, but I immediately switched to a different editor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking out Mocktails.

1\. Yes, the grid toggle is not working. It's a bug. Thanks for bringing this to my notice.

2\. We haven't thought about the specifics of a free plan yet, but I'm pretty sure we won't be paywalling specific features (except for collaboration maybe).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great work!

One Suggestion: When I have a bunch of objects selected and I choose to align them I think it should probably keep the selected elements relative position to each other and apply the alignment to the entire set of elements vs applying individually to each element causing them to smash up if they are on the same horizontal or vertical axis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying out Mocktails.

To get the behavior you desire, you could group all the elements together and then move that group. The alignment option is specifically for aligning all individual elements to one particular baseline. Like for example if I am building a form and want to align all the fields in the form to each other, I would select the fields and then align them to selection left.

If I have misunderstood your comment, could you please elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER2> Suggestion: You can put a checkbox on the alignment list, for example above "Selection Left" that's off by default. If it's on, you do what parent said (i.e., align them like they're a group). If it's off, you align them individually.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to introduce unnecessary complexity, but your suggestion would be quite usefull, especially if people get confused like this. I'll look into integrating this. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Superfast issue: Selecting a color in the label popover, and closing the popover does not close the color popover.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying out Mocktails and reporting this issue. This should not be happening as there is code in there specifically to prevent this. If possible, could you check if there are any javascript errors printed to the console? It would be of immense help to track this and fix it. Thanks!

EDIT: Also, what browser (with version) and OS (with version) are you using?

<comment><USER12> Mac OS X 10.8, Chrome 23.0.1271.91 (latest)

The scenario is in fact trapped, at first when tried again I couldn't reproduce the issue. Actually it's a little edge case:

1\. Create an object (tested with a label and a button) 2\. Click on it [properties popover opens] 3\. Click on a color picker [color popover opens] 4\. Click on the object [properties popover closes, color popover stays open]

From this moment on if you try to open another color popover it will result in an empty popover, with buttons and header but not the color picker.

Pressing clear or cancel on the original popover (still opened) causes the following:

        Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'color' of undefined paper.min.js:1
        paper._changeProperty paper.min.js:1
        paper._changeColor paper.min.js:1
        (anonymous function) paper.min.js:1
        p.event.dispatch lib.min.js:1
        g.handle.h

The empty popovers are created without event delegation, and buttons act as links (anchors).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for this detailed bug report. I'll look into this ASAP. If you would like me to keep you updated on the status of this bug, please let me know your email (or any other way to communicate with you in private). You can mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com or to email@example.com.

Once again thanks a lot!

<comment><USER12> Thank you for your responsiveness. You're doing a great work on and around your app.

I'll propose it as the next standard tool in my company if it stays alive for enough time ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Thanks for having so much faith in us. We'll definitely try to live upto it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic! I've seen a lot of these apps and this one looks really promising. Please, carry on :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your kind words and for your time. Really glad you liked the app.

If you would like to be informed of updates please hit the 'Sign up for updates' button or follow @MocktailsApp on Twitter. We promise not to spam you, or use your email for anything other than sending you updates. We'll also provide one-click unsubscribe methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice. I used to use Balsamiq, but this looks like nice (flash-free!) alternative. Grats on shipping, it's the hardest part. Can to share some details? What framework did you use? What's the backend look like, etc..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking out Mocktails. Competing with Balsamiq is going to be hard and we'll use every strength we have (of which no-flash is primary :D).

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to reply to the second part of your comment.

The entire app is at this point solely HTML+JS+CSS. The only framework used is Bootstrap. There exists no backend except for nginx serving out the static files. This will ofcourse change in future and we will probably write a blog post explaining our stack some day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats on shipping your first product! It looks very clean and awesome so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! All the credits for the good looks should really go to Twitter Bootstrap. I'm a pathetic designer and if left to me the app would have looked like this (<http://imgur.com/YYogy>). All I can say is: thank heavens for bootstrap :P

<comment><USER15> Haha, I know how you feel. I'm a developer that has a horrible eye for good design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks good.

That's another example: <http://fatiherikli.github.com/mockup-designer/>

<comment><USER5> Would be handy to have a snap to grid feature

<comment><AUTHOR> Do not know exactly whom you were addressing but we'll be implementing this in a future release. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very Cool!

Just a tip for a small change to make look better, put icons in the top menu (i think bootstrap has it already)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for playing with Mocktails.

I should have put some icons in there, but there were a lot of buttons that required icons (esp. in the properties popover), so I decided to ship it and beautify it later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Have you thought about providing an export function? (Just plain HTML - so one can attach custom CSS)

I can imagine myself (and others) clicking together a complex form within 30 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> There will be an export function in future, but I highly doubt it will include HTML. The challenges with generating clean HTML from a mockup are quite painful. For example, all the elements in the mockup are positioned absolutely. I doubt this would be viable for people who wish to export HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like it. Saved for later use. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you liked it :) If you would like to be informed of updates please hit the 'Sign up for updates' button or follow @MocktailsApp on Twitter.

We promise not to spam you, or use your email for anything other than sending you updates. We'll also provide one-click unsubscribe methods.</comment></comment>


Hamburg Residents Reject Bid to Host 2024 Olympics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/sports/olympics/hamburg-residents-reject-bid-to-host-2024-olympics.html <comment><AUTHOR> Big chance rejected?

<comment><USER2> Big risk rejected? As far as I see it (German, but not from Hamburg), the concepts weren't very convincing. E.g. the promise that it would only cost Hamburg 1.2 billion € and that the federal state would pay the remaining 6.8 billion. Which is nice, but they didn't actually manage to get the federal state to agree to that, much less to covering any extra-costs. Or unfinished plans for reuse of the built infrastructure. Add general mistrust against the IOC and you get a result like this, even after a massive pro-olympia advertising campaign.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, honestly, I agree. Hamburg is my birthplace. Looking at the architectural plans for the olympic village, I must say, I like what I see. But indeed, professional sports has such a bad image currently. Too much money involved. It is not only doping and the supposed soccer corruption of the fifa. Last year I read the autobiography of the olympic champion Ian Thorpe and it is depressing what can become of a world champion after his active time is over. There is a lot going wrong with sports these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Man living off Groupons for one year breaks a New York start-up's website - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/03/21/stuntmans-zest-for-groupons-breaks-a-new-york-start-ups-website/

<comment><USER2> This was really hard for me to understand, so I'll post my summary in hopes that it helps someone else:

CityPockets is a website that helps you organize your coupons and vouchers. You import your coupons and CityPockets will plot the deals on a map and display their expiration date. This should make you more efficient with your coupons.

Josh Stevens is "The Groupawn", a Groupon customer trying to live off of Groupons for an entire year. What this means is that he has no cash, but a year's supply of vouchers from Groupon, provided to him for free as a sort of publicity stunt.

Josh Stevens broke the CityPockets website by trying to import thousands of Groupon vouchers onto CityPockets, a site whose average load is nine vouchers per user.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "At first, we suspected that it was a scam, until we Googled the guy's > name."

What does this even mean? "This guy sure is trying to import a lot of data. Clearly he's trying to scam us."

<comment><USER4> What's strange about it ? Any unusual behavior can be suspect. Also "suspected" implies possibility, pretty much the opposite of "clearly".

<comment><USER5> Agreed. We were just surprised, since our highest user at that point only had 85 vouchers (It's 149 now), then this guy comes around with thousands. We thought it was a fake account, but it turned out to be a real user.

<comment><USER3> While I understand that it's suspicious - as in, out of the norm - but what kind of a scam would it have been?

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL - "scam" is probably the wrong word to use. More like a "prank" or some sort of DOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't brag about a simple import breaking your site.

<comment><USER5> We just found it intriguing because our system wasn't optimized or configured to show thousands of vouchers for a single person (imagine thousands of pins on a map or how long it'd take to load a page). Never thought anyone would have so many vouchers! But we've managed to fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Josh is awesome! He has almost 3000 vouchers from across the US and loves that our map function maps it all out for him, categorizes it and sorts by expiration. ~Cheryl Yeoh (Founder of CityPockets)

<comment><USER7> What about the import caused the site to crash?

Is it a repeatable problem?

<comment><USER8> It's probably related to Google Maps and their geo-code limitations. You can only query about 2500 in a 24hr period, and even then you can't do bursts without being blocked for a 24hr period. What you should do is query in intervals, store the resulting geo-code information in your database, then use that information rather constantly query Google's geo-coding services.

I'm not privy to any information, but this is likely what happens as we had to advise some of our users that were having a similar issue with Google Maps.

<comment><USER7> Good info, thanks for the thorough response.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Breached elasticsearch servers leks millions of records (fresh report) - <AUTHOR> https://spyse.com/blog/cybersecurity-research/breached-elasticsearch-servers-leaks-millions-of-records <comment><AUTHOR> Report includes: 1\. companies that exposes data 2\. types of data 3\. methods of finding such databases</comment>


Review my startup: vistrac.com - <AUTHOR> http://vistrac.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to give you all a little background: This business originally started under another name, Tapefailure, but unfortunately, I had to shut it down due to major problems with the way the analytics were condensed (PHP caused major problems). However, I was determined not to let this idea go...

So, I've spent over a year re-planning and redeveloping the entire thing from scratch. This service will analyze everything from where users click, to where they pay attention when scrolling. It takes the concept of sites like UserFly one step further and breaks down the data _for you_.

I just launched today, so please let me know what you think.

<comment><USER2> The site and intro slideshow look amazing. The demo is nice and the FAQ is helpful.

I'd sign up, but it's down now :-(

<comment><USER3> Any idea how the slideshow was made? It indeed looks completely amazing.

<comment><USER4> from a quick look at the source: <http://www.electricprism.com/aeron/slideshow/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice, and very appealing.

Some impressions from the demo:

Resolutions appear to be backwards to what I'm used to seeing -- I'm used to 'width by height.'

Demo page says I've received 0 visits. Maybe make the demo page some live data for vistrac or something -- that reads strangely.

Oops, can't click around more right now... looks like your site went down.

(shameless plug, I run <http://sitecanary.com/> \-- check it out :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Getting a "502 Bad Gateway".

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems the server had a little case of stage fright. Sorry, everyone! (And it should be fine now.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. Nice to see some other options in this field. I have used userfly in the past and was not very impressed. I am currently using CrazyEgg and think this is more of a competitor to that than to userfly. The site looked very clean and well organized. I think CrazyEgg has you one-upped a bit with its confetti view showing referrers w/different colors but I imagine you're aware of that and considering adding it.

I would also like to invite you to add your app to my site, launchly. Launchly is all about getting feedback and attention for new web apps like yours. We track all aspects of your launch to help you see how you are doing and decide what changes to make. <http://www.launchly.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats on your persistence. I like the homepage - clean. I also like the freemium model packages. I have never seen the form metrics before and looks quite useful.

Was that a feature based on feedback?

<comment><AUTHOR> The form metrics feature was, in fact, based on feedback. I had some very basic form analytics in Tapefailure, but got a number of requests asking for more. I gave it a lot of consideration and came up with the current version as my initial solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks good. However, I think there are a couple of features missing:

* referrer: web sites, direct access, search. Make a list of website referrers (with the exact page), percentage between direct access/search/referrer, and where they land

* time spent of each page

* path people are taking: 60% page A, them 30% page B + 60% pace C + 10% left

</comment><comment><USER10> The pricing seems really high for such limited amount of sessions/users tracked.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks nice; I think a lot of people (myself included) have wanted some kind of all-inclusion analytics package for a long time. The pricing seems rather high, though.

</comment><comment><USER12> Consider using something other than Lucida family for Windows visitors. It looks rather sloppy when rendered compared to Arial or other native OS fonts.

</comment><comment><USER13> It was looking interesting... now I'm getting 502 Bad Gateway errors. Looks like whatever FastCGI was running behind nginx went away...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I'm having a few minor problems that didn't pop up during testing; nothing that can't be fixed with a process restart, but will be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> what kind of data portability features are there (I can't see any)? Would love to know my data can be ripped as .csv and taken with me should i choose to, especially on the paid plans.

cheers.

</comment><comment><USER3> endtwist, I have been exploring pricing options for my behavioral targeting and optimization startup (<http://www.wingify.com/>) and was wondering how did you arrive at this pricing. Did you test the pricing? Or did you took an idea from your competitors' pricing and upped it a little bit? I am curious because your competitors (ClickTale, CrazyEgg, etc.) have a more affordable pricing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compared with CrazyEgg and ClickTale, I think the prices are actually very affordable.

CrazyEgg, while great for click analytics, does not offer scroll or form analytics.

On the other hand, ClickTale does, but they price by Page Views (individual pages), not Sessions (all pages browsed by a single visitor). If you do the math (assume 2 pages/visitor @ 20,000 page views for $99/month is equal to only 10,000 sessions), ClickTale is actually more expensive.

Of course, I'll have to let my potential customers decide the pricing, but I tried to choose prices that fit within the current market.

<comment><USER15> It might be a interesting idea options other then subscription.

For example, many someone might want to use this to audit a site. You need a data collection period (maybe collect data on x visits and then stop) then access to the analysis tools.

You could price that as a one off package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My first thought was: "How is this different from Google Analytics?" I imagine that's the 800 lbs gorilla you're dealing with, right? So, it might be worthwhile to just throw that in my face right when I show up. Tell me why I should pay money for something I can already get for free.

(Note: I'm not saying your site isn't worth the money, just that I was unable to immediately determine what differentiates you.)

</comment><comment><USER17> When looking at the pricing page, my first question was, "How exactly does this site calculate a visitor session?" If I visit a site on June 1st and then go back on June 7th is that one Visitor Session or two?

Maybe put an asterisk next to the term Visitor Session and then define how you'll calculate that metric in the paragraphs below.

</comment><comment><USER18> i signed up for a free account and saw "email (username)" and immediately just put a username. after submitting the form i just got the plain text error "bad email" with no other explanation. you may want to make the error messages friendlier and show the user the form data again, not just a white page with "bad email".

also, after receiving the script code and then clicking through, i was prompted to login again. not sure if that's an error or intentional but it seemed weird.

i put the script code on a couple sites and will see what kind of data it produces over the next few days.

the new _vt_* cookies sent by your script caught me by surprise when loading my site. i guess _vt_* reminds me of the old microsoft frontpage extension junk (_vti_bin, etc.) which triggered some bad memories.

</comment><comment><USER19> If I change the number variable in this line in the script:

VisTrac.SetAccount(number);

to a different number than what was assigned to me, will I be messing with other people's stats?

Other than that, it looks good. I like it. I think I may use it.

</comment><comment><USER20> For me signup failed. I get a near blank page (it says 'None'), however, the url shows "bad_email". I think it doesn't like email addresses of the form email@example.com - which is a valid email address and in common use, as in firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like an nginx error at the moment. Probably to much HN traffic ?

</comment><comment><USER22> Great signup flow, incredibly fast. Very happy I could setup my account without having to confirm the email.

Its running on a client's site now, looking forward to seeing some data.

</comment><comment><USER23> Its awesome. Love the vision and execution. Wish I could afford it.

<comment><USER24> Yes, that's expensive. The free version is, but a very simple demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> <http://vistrac.com/register/create>

Got a message saying 'none'. Would have loved to try it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sorry that I can't really add anything of substance, but I want to mention that I hate moving parts on a home page. Looks good and useful otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER24> I won't repeat what everyone said: It's great!

One thing: It's not SEO optimized and uses lot of pictures instead of text

</comment><comment><USER15> I can only see the summary report in the demo.

</comment><comment><USER27> pretty cool, you'll probably get a call from Google in the near future

<comment><USER3> Instead, I think the next version of Google Analytics would put a lot of companies out of business

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks really smooth!</comment>


Compromised EC2 image includes root access SSH key - <AUTHOR>

A friend just forwarded me this e-mail he received from the Amazon EC2 Security Team.
http://pastebin.com/q1VH4rmF
Looks like a public Ubuntu EC2 image was available that included an SSH key to allow the publisher to log into any instance that is using this image as root. <comment><USER2> Hi there, I originally made this AMI and I would like to apologise to anyone who's instance has been taken offline because they used this image.

Through inexperience I left my public SSH key in the AMI, which I failed to appreciate the implications of despite a blog comment highlighting that I'd done so.

For the record I'd like to state that I didn't use my unintended powers of root at any point for good or evil.

This post stands as a good education of why it's worth checking images of unknown provenance and how to check your public key store for credentials.

This issue will mainly affect anyone who wanted an AMI to check out Amazon's free tier which has a 10GB limit on EBS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response.

If I was building an image for the first time I no doubt could easily make the same mistake. It'll definitely be something I make sure of I ever decide to make my own image in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow! my instance was running this AMI. I am glad that this was not intentional. Kudos to the aws team for looking after it's customers.

</comment><comment><USER4> paulofisch - are you planning to make a replacement ami that does not include the security hole, for those of use who still want to use ubuntu 10.04 server?

<comment><USER4> ok, never mind. i see that ami-3e02f257 can be used in place of the compromised one.</comment></comment>


Top Hacker News Submissions by Category: 2006–2015 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/hackernews-top-submissions-by-category.md <comment><USER2> The Tech [0], even though it's hosted on mit.edu, is technically independent of the university:

[http://tech.mit.edu/about/](http://tech.mit.edu/about/)

[0] [http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html](http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Beside C language Arrays and Pointers, what else? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently learning C language and I have spent my time over and over studying Arrays and Pointers. Now, I would like to study other advanced concepts. Please send my links or pointers to other advanced concepts. I would very much prefer pdf version. <comment><USER2> you may study how data structures can be represented in C

for example from this book:

Ashok N. Kamthane Introduction to Data Structures in C" [http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/c/978813171...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/c/9788131713921/introduction- to-data-structures/sect1_4)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not in the same sentence. If you want to learn advanced concepts, try lisp or haskell rather.

</comment><comment><USER4> You've discovered most of C then. Look over how macros work, then just Google stuff. C is a very basic language that almost anything can created from. pick a project and start building or join an open source project in C

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://eternallyconfuzzled.com/jsw_home.aspx](http://eternallyconfuzzled.com/jsw_home.aspx)

Everything on this site.</comment>


Amazon is now copying shoes with its house brand, unveils Allbirds clone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allbirds-shoe-clone-copy-sneaker-206-collective-private-label <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the boundary is when it comes to "copying" shoes.

The last time I bought a pair of Nikes, there were Adidas, Nike, and other brands who had shoes that are basically the same fabric style on top and similar base with different logos or color variations. Having seen that, this looks far less egregious, although I'm providing a moral defense.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had almost exactly the same shoes .. in ~1992, ~$5 made in China.</comment>


The Super-Rich Are Being Scammed on Their Private Jets - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-07/scammed-at-40-000-feet-opaque-market-costs-the-jet-setting-rich <comment><USER2> >One jet owner found himself charged 4,000 pounds ($5,300) for 240 sushi boxes apparently served on board his jet while it was empty, _according to My Sky, a company whose software helps scrutinize and manage private-jet costs._

Seems like their main source may be a bit biased, no?

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like a submarine article for a product called MySky?

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is the worlds smallest violin? Fraud is bad... Sure but I've got no tears for the billionaires getting scammed a few thousand dollars because they aren't vigilant. I think we have more interesting topics to discus on HN.</comment>


NMOS IC Reverse Engineering (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wdj-consulting.com/blog/nmos-sample.html <comment><USER2> Although CMOS FETs now completely dominate the (mostly digital) crystal Si wafer manufacturing, simple NMOS and PMOS are still predominantly used in the display industry. They are different because the TFT substrate (usually glass) is of course non-conductive so there is no "body effect" of a surrounding P/N well.

Both a-Si (amorphous) and poly-Si (poly crystalline) dominate their respective TFT (thin film transistor) manufacturing technologies. For large scale displays (TVs) a-Si is typically used due to lower cost structure (no laser crystal annealing of the poly) while for smaller displays (mobile devices) LTPS (low temp poly-Si) is used due to higher mobility (smaller transistors). Typically NMOS is used for poly and a-Si (again for mobility reasons)... interestingly there is relatively little CMOS TFT manufacturing.

Due to layer stack-up and processing yield for mobile OLED, PMOS LTPS is dominant there (both for rigid and flexible). That makes analyzing the relatively simple (2-3 metal) and larger geometry (2-3um) layouts of displays so easy and interesting for an amateur... the challenges are in figuring out all of the parasitic couplings and layout constraints that drive their design. Conveniently, old displays are free and easy to get and relatively simple (compared to de-capping a plastic package) to deconstruct and examine with a cheap microscope. Figure out how that high resolution flashing light box really works!

<comment><AUTHOR> _Due to layer stack-up and processing yield for mobile OLED, PMOS LTPS is dominant there_

In the late 60s/early 70s, PMOS was also dominant because it was less affected by impurities than NMOS. The quite common LM8560 alarm clock IC was an example of early PMOS and is apparently still in production today. A distinguishing characteristic is the odd negative supply voltage.

[http://www.decodesystems.com/clock- ics.html](http://www.decodesystems.com/clock-ics.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting. He could do this in KLayout instead of Inkscape, and have access to EDA tools to check connectivity and other things.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why this guy was trying to look at ROM inputs as binary bus trying to figure a truth table. AFAIK, they are selection lines from decoder, hence only one of the lines can be active at a time, i.e. depicted ROM is only 5 words of 10 bits each.</comment>