Ask HN: Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams - <AUTHOR>

It has been a while since I last talked about Thymer (www.thymer.com). Based on the feedback we got from our first users we went back to stealth mode and we've given the interface a major overhaul. It's become a one-page-design where all your time-tracking, planning and scheduling happens on a single page. We've noticed that almost all existing time-tracking software either has a terrible interface or doesn't even match the features of pen-and-paper time-trackers. We think our interface turned out pretty well, and it might suit your taste too.
We just entered private beta, so, if you have a few minutes, try it out (key for HN users: NOPROCRAST). Needless to say, we want to know what you think. Don't hold back :)
www.thymer.com <comment><USER2> This is the most intuitive scheduling app I've ever used. The way that you just hover over everything and get to see what different features do without committing to anything allows me to explore your app without much fuss.

Feature requests:

1.) When I add a task, sometimes I'd like to add a really detailed description (or any description for that matter) (i.e. a project spec) and I'd like the ability to do that. The ability to bold, italicize, change font size and format, etc, would be helpful in descriptions.

2.) Attachments. I want to be able to attach files to my tasks.

3.) Keep the above features out of the way. Most of the time I won't need them, but when I do, I really need them.

EDIT: 4.) Just realized that the projects aren't hierarchical. I expected them to be, and it doesn't allow me to be super organized for more complex projects/tasks. An example of this might be Work>Websites>ClientA and another might be Life>Exercise or Life>Clean-Up.

If I think of more, I'll let you know. Nice job so far.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you like the way we try to hide features until you need it, and some good points, thanks!

1 - we use the comments ("discuss") section for this as it also allows for all this formatting, but it might be nice to bring this to descriptions as well

2 - Yep, we also need those. Attaching files is part of a bigger problem - managing, indexing, finding and sharing digital documents. Uploading and finding back attachments can be really frustrating. We're thinking about solving that problem in a more fundamental way, while keeping it really simple to use.

3 - We want to keep the design 'clean'. the interface should not interfere or distract. we also want to continue on this line when adding new features.

4 - Someone else also commented on this, going to look into that.

Right now our priority is fixing all the glitches but we're definitely going to look into this. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.thymer.com>, for people using browsers without copy-paste features ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe create an API so I can update this from my phone(via app) or maybe allow SMS updating. Mobile use is crucial for me, heck even allowing emails to create new todos/projects would be nice.

<comment><USER2> Adding mobile capabilities would be a game changer for me. I'd sign-up for a year and pay you for it if you built a mobile interface and/or sms interface. I'd be willing to pay $10/month if this made scheduling my life as easy as it looks like it could and it included all the free SMS I wanted to send for use in scheduling tasks via mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> A phone version is planned - but we've discovered that most phone browsers are really terrible. Are you looking for an iPhone web version, or for a jar version (like google did for gmail/google maps)? Or do you think something that uses Opera Mobile/Mini would be good enough?

It's pretty hard to get reliable worldwide sms delivery, but -- sms for the USA and Europe we can do, I think.

<comment><USER5> Just for another data point. I purchased the $25 Remember the milk subscription just so I could get the iPhone access. If you made this work with the iPhone I think you will create market share.

Maybe you could make it free for people unless they want the advanced features. The features could be sms/email notifications, more projects than x at a time, or whatever you might deem worth charging for. You will need to tweak the business model but so far the site looks clean and usable. Good job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On your frontpage: there are some graphics under the video which frankly are too small to make out. You may as well drop them - maybe replace with a _screenshot_ tour (I don't usually like watching videos because you can't skim through them).

Also on front page, your tag line ("For individuals ...") is too close to the word "planning" with a big gap underneath it. The tagline could be very much bigger and make better use of the available space.

Your signup page is a bit of an eyeful. I like the narrative on the fields, but maybe put the elements in a table with the narrative in a column on the left (in place of regular labels) and the fields on the right. However, thanks for guessing my timezone correctly (or maybe it was a lucky default ;) and letting me change the date format up-front.

The video is too long at 5 minutes. My (admittedly short) attention span ran out at 2 minutes. In fact, the first two minutes were enough to convince me to sign up based on the look and feel, etc. Someone I know who does marketing told me "give them just enough information to choose you over your competitors. Everything else is wasted." So less is more on the video front.

However, I did sign up and I like the look of the app itself. Judging from your help page, there's a lot to know so maybe you should make those pages into a PDF so people can print cheat-sheets? Looks like each section should fit nicely on an A4/letter page.

Sounds like I'm being critical but it looks like a great app and I wish you luck with it. I'll try to use it some more and post again.

<comment><USER3> You can click to enlarge the screenshots, but a tour might be a nice addition.

We're Dutch, so the timezone wasn't a lucky default ;) (i'll let you think about what time it is here in GMT+1 land :p), but I think in the end small things like the timezone-guessing help a lot.

Thank you for your other suggestions, and I'm glad you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> \-- I think the "D" discussion icon is superfluous. What's the point of marking something for discussion? Why not just start a discussion?

\-- The name did make me think there'd be live timing function. Unless the thing with the broken, blinking _00h00_ is it.

\-- Project naming is broken. You allow projects to be named with more than one word, but things break if you do that: you can't use _@Project Name_ , and todos added to a multi-word–named project are saved incorrectly and only get tagged with the first word of the project, so they aren't added to the project at all.

\-- The projects should not be listed with arrows between: they imply a hierarchy where there isn't one. Also the general design breaks with more than two realistically named projects: <http://imgur.com/Q49W.jpg>

Seriously, everyone should work with _real_ examples. It takes time and mental effort to enter realistic data, but how else will you know how well your product works? _And_ you'll be able to take much nicer looking screenshots that actually show what your product can handle rather than only hint at it and make me figure the rest out myself.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your comments, this is really helpful!

\- Good point, we used the 'D'-icon to show other team members that a discussion was needed before this task could be completed, a sort of specific 'waiting for'. Conversely it would also indicate when there was no discussion needed. We could make this more clear.

\- The "broken blinking 00h00 thing" :) is indeed currently the only actual timer in the app. It counts hh:mm you're currently working on something. So it does time, but we know there's room for improvement there. The name Thymer also fits with the names of other products we're working on, we'll blog about that soon.

\- You're right. Sorry it should be made more clear that the name it meant as a short tag (which you can type fast to assign tasks to it), whereas the description can be used to add additional information and a longer name.

\- True, it's used as a separator with some nice visual touch, but I realize it implies some relationship. I'll look into it, thanks.

Good point about the real examples. That was actually the idea but the tag/description thing is obviously very confusing. It will be fixed.

[edit:layout]

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I tried to register, I got a timeout on <[http://thymerdev.stunf.com/accounts/register/>](http://thymerdev.stunf.com/accounts/register/>):

"The server at thymerdev.stunf.com is taking too long to respond."

But when I tried again, it worked. Is your web server having trouble with load? If so, do you have plans for scaling?

Edit: yes, it definitely could use some more speed. It's decent, but just a little too laggy for my liking. That said, this is the first time tracking thingy I've seriously considered actually using. I wish you the best of luck, and my reasons for doing so are largely selfish: I want Thymer to be great.

If you're serving this from a machine in the Netherlands, that could be a problem for those of us in other continents. The perception of quickness is important, so this is probably something you should sort out soon and then launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> The load is low and Thymer is on a fast server - but our hosting provider reports package-loss and higher latency for a users in our data center, so I hope this is only a temporary problem. Responses are instant here, so we thought it didn't affect us.

If it isn't we can always lease servers in the US, so even if the latency doesn't improve we'll figure something out. Thymer is instant for us, and it should be instant for everybody else. I doubt we'll get around to leasing servers in the US before we launch though -- so please bear with us.

And thanks for wishing us luck. We want Thymer to be great too -- creating passionate users and all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing - I'm a GTD fan, and have implemented on both windows and OSX systems.. tried just about everything out there. I have also played with just about every piece of project management software that seems useful.

First, your interface is very nice, and mostly intuitive.

However, to me, I could never see using the application unless it integrated into my e-mail system. This is a minimum for actually using as part of my workflow. As a bonus, I usually configure my GTD systems to integrate with my calendar (ical and google cal).

A nice web app is interesting, but to me, and I expect most power users, GTD is about managing existing information (e-mail, calendars, folders, files, etc), not for creating meta-lists which indirectly and subjectively modify the information I need to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah My entire company would like to use this service, id say as long as its 90% bug free, launch!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Just making sure it's indeed 90% bug free now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the registration page. But, it would be better if you could align the textfields.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like the idea and how easy it is to add tasks / manage them. Some feedback:

1\. It's confusing to see the equivalent of two checkboxes on the left, one that is an icon and one that is an HTML checkbox. What is the difference?

2\. In general, the icons could be a little more intuitive. I'm not sure what "D" means (discuss maybe? Then why is a discuss button also on the left?

3\. Going to a new page to discuss / comment is kind of annoying. I'd prefer something like FriendFeed-style inline commenting.

Good luck and thanks for the invite!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it.

1\. It is a little confusing, now you mention it. The difference is that the big check box on the left marks a task a done, and the other (small) checkbox is used to select a bunch of tasks so you can do bulk actions. At this point there is only bulk-complete, but adding tags by bulk is something you want to relatively often, so that's why we can't really get rid of the second check box. On the other hand, it is weird to have two check boxes for every todo, so we'll have to think of something.

2\. Correct, D is discuss. The D button can be toggled so other people can see the todo should be discussed first. Suppose I want to work on a feature, and Wim realizes that it won't work because of X, he can click the 'D' button and add a comment. When I then go to my task list I see the 'D', I check the comments and realize what's wrong. We found that a simple flag that says "hey - wait a second" is a really effective way to indicate a possible problem.

3\. Very annoying. We wanted to fix it, but we couldn't justify waiting any longer with the beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some quick notes on a app that I think I will use in the future to manage the todos for our small firm (just need to convince the CEO/wife :-)

1\. Being a swede I like the date format YYYY-MM-DD

2\. The controls for changing the projects (private, completed etc.) on the bottom feels unconnected to the project. Perhaps you should place them just below the project bar or to the right of it.

3\. The term changelog feels like programmer talk, perhaps you should use reports or history

<comment><USER13> Another thing: I created a team member for testing purposes, now I'm stuck with "him", it should be possible to: * remove accounts * remove a member form the team * be member of more then one team

Most likely something you have under way but wanted to add a quick note

<comment><USER3> Tack. Creating and managing teams is indeed still too primitive now, we're planning on fixing all that during the beta. Good point about the date formats, it's on my list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just this morning I was bemoaning my lack of a simple todo list. I've played with most of the big names, RTM, Tadalist, etc. but this one looks, at least initially, to be much closer to what I need. I'm going to get my girlfriend / brain on it later hopefully to see if we can begin using it for coordination.

I love the plain text entry, reminds me of another of my favorite web apps, 30boxes.com. The calendar I use which manages my entire life :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we know exactly how you feel. I've spent countless hours trying and installing different applications, and they ultimately all disappointed.

Thymer is by no means finished -- but we think it shows promise. If you want to invite your girlfriend to Thymer create an account and team for her via the "settings" link in the upper right corner. It's not intuitive -- I know, this will be fixed in the near future.

<comment><USER14> It may not be immediately intuitive, but it is simple to find and easy to understand. Overall I am enjoying the system, will continue to explore and give feedback as I work with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do I delete or rename projects? I can't find an interface for that anywhere.

When I wanted to edit tasks, I tried double-clicking on them. This did nothing. You can detect double-clicking with the dblclick event, and I think that would make things a bit more intuitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Projects cannot be deleted at this point -- only completed (closed). This is bad, I admit, we're going to fix it.

2\. Double-click for edit - yes, absolutely. It's completely obvious now you mention it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personally, I am not sure why you're in a private beta. Just launch it and iterate as fast as you can.

<comment><USER3> We definitely need to release as soon as possible, the private-beta is really just to make sure there aren't any really big problems we've missed. And I suppose it's partially just launch-anxiety :). Flipping the switch with a product that isn't perfect (sure, it never will) is always hard; but we're definitely not going to stay in private beta for long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> a few bugs I noticed

If I type in @today twice (because it didn't move it to the "today" section), it assigns it to a user called today (I believe, at least that's the same visual language as when I assigned a task to another team member).

Is it possible to access my google calendar? My biz team member probably won't use this, but we share a google calendar. Would be nice to be able to manipulate it through your interface.

Overall, very nice. I'm very, very cheap so I'm not sure what price point I would be ok with, but it's still very impressive. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the bug reports.

1\. We'll fix the @today @today bug. Dropping the second today is probably the right behavior.

2\. No google calendar plugin yet, but we plan to do a lot with extensibility. Since I use google calendar myself it a plugin is on the todo-list.

We haven't decided on pricing yet - but there should be a plan for everybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be nice if you would overlay the help image over the input box instead of forcing me to go to a non-functional page to see it. I don't want to have to "go back" to use what I learned.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great start. A bug:

1\. Create a project with a space in its name "project name"

2\. Add a task to that project and only the first word is tagged as @project

<comment><USER5> autocomplete on the project name would be a nice feature. something like @pro and then it brings up a list of projects that start with pro. You could also do the autocomplete of the other interesting things such as team members and time.

One complaint I hear all the time from people I have worked with is the lack of autocomplete features so this would be a big win for your usability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bug would be I can add items to projects but they don't show up in the project. I can find them in the all tab but not the project they belong in.

</comment><comment><USER19> Any plans on an iPhone app soon ?

This would be the "make or break " feature for me.

(I have signed up and am using the app. Great work !)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like Thymer!

We definitely want to build an iPhone app, but it is a lot of work to make, so we're probably first going to iron out the flaws in this version and then release version 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love this app already.

Guys, if you want to do a Japanese cell phones version, give me a holler. I might be able to help.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oops. The video on your front page is no longer available on YouTube.

[edit] Now it's back. Weird.

<comment><AUTHOR> No video? That's bad. Youtube used to be pretty stable. We probably should put up a mirror of the screencast at vimeo. That's what we're going to do next.

Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, this looks like a really nice app. Very polished.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'm glad the effort paid off. For me to be able to work with an app almost every day, the app's interface, its "look and feel" is important enough to put as much effort in as we did. I'm pretty happy the way it turned out, glad you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe double-click to edit an item for faster access?

<comment><AUTHOR> Double-click edit will is on the todo-list -- will be implemented somewhere in the next week or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> look really promising! but submitting anything but ascii characters gives error 500, like the swedish letters å ä ö..

<comment><USER3> tack! and förlåt, I was pretty sure I tested this, but obviously missed something, thanks!</comment></comment>


Guccifer, The Most Notorious Hacker In The World, Has Been Sentenced. - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/r-romania-sentences-hacker-guccifer-to-jail-2014-06

<comment><USER2> Its the poor man's Edward Snowden.</comment>


How to value your company for sale (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/how-value-company-1.html <comment><USER2> tldr: Different buyers will value your company differently for different reasons, and understanding what specifically a buyer values will help you negotiate better.

I suspect the members of the HN community who are at the point of selling their businesses understand this fairly well.

At then end of the day, before someone within a buyer organization (which are typically larger, fairly structured companies) will have to put together a business case, and as with any business case, it will need to include financials, multiples, valuations, etc. - the CFO will have to be convinced it is a good deal. (Unless you are Facebook, Groupon, airbnb, etc. of course, but note that the majority of exits are not of this size and so valuations will not be as "frothy" (see slide #4 of Mark Suster's recent presentation [http://www.theequitykicker.com/2011/06/17/mark-suster- gettin...](http://www.theequitykicker.com/2011/06/17/mark-suster-getting- funded-in-a-frothy- market/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheEquityKicker+%28The+Equity+Kicker%29) ) Most businesses sold in the US are not anywhere near as sexy as the latest "Tech Crunch reviewed" or YCombinator startup and the reasons for acquisitions tend to be less driven by speculation and therefore financials, multiples etc. will be more examined more carefully. So, understanding the multiples that exist in your industry is very important.

If you are looking to sell your company, one of the best ways to ensure you are getting the best price is by going through a competitive auction process, which are typically led by an M & A firm or Investment Bank. (Boutique firms exist for smaller companies that have not yet achieved the oft desired "2 and 10"). Yes, they will take their cut, but typically you will get a higher price than if you shop it yourself to a few buyers who you think will be interested. Following the "market it yourself" approach may cause you to overlook a buyer who is not obvious to you, but who would be very interested in your business for reasons you never thought of and therefore would be willing to pay what it takes to acquire it. (I have experienced this first hand.)

When all is said and done, your business is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Going through a competitive auction, especially if marketed properly to large buyer audience, will ensure you get the highest price, regardless of the buyer's motive for the acquisition, (which you could only speculate on anyway.)

<comment><USER3> >competitive auction process

Do you have an example here for the rest of us? I. e. companies not on the scale of Heroku and Dropbox?

>Boutique firms

Any examples? And how would they know the market better than the company founder?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ha. I'm currently doing a (hypothetical) study on required revenues and profit margins required for a valuation of £xxx. Using a rev multiple of 4 and p/e of 17.5. Got to start somewhere...</comment>


Show HN: HTML5 port of PC/XBox game with online level sharing - <AUTHOR> http://www.playescapegoat.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> For the curious, you can find some more details on the port and the online features in the slides from my PAX Dev talk: <http://jsil.org/PAXDev2012>

Any questions or feedback are appreciated. This port uses my open source C#->JS compiler that I've posted about on HN previously.</comment>


Is writing torture? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/elizabeth-gilbert-versus-philip-roth-is-writing-torture.html#entry-more

<comment><USER2> Actual link, rather than just where the "More" starts:

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/elizabet...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/elizabeth- gilbert-versus-philip-roth-is-writing-torture.html)</comment>


EngineerBabu, a Startup from Indore Giving Tough Competition to UpWork - <AUTHOR> https://bizztor.com/engineerbabu-mayank/ <comment><USER2> What's Indore?

</comment><comment><USER3> New alternative for top class, highly skilled freelancer at affordable cost.</comment>


Show HN: The Life Insurance "Income Replacement" Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://lifeinsurance.pressbin.com/index.html?refer=hn

<comment><USER2> What did you use to build it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Highcharts for the chart. Javascript for almost all the calculations.</comment></comment>


Show HN: AI programming game - <AUTHOR> https://www.bomberbots.com

<comment><USER2> [https://www.bomberbots.com/#/match/202081](https://www.bomberbots.com/#/match/202081) is very interesting to watch

<comment><USER3> It seems like the bots have a self-preservation strategy when they start out trapped. They will stay stuck until another bot comes near, even though they could escape at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the game server communicates in json why are bots limited to c#?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's limited to .NET since it was easier for me to sandbox those bots. I've planned support for more languages in the future, but anything that compiles to .NET should be fine at the moment ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_languages)).

<comment><USER4> I look forward to seeing this support additional languages.

I wonder if you have considered creating a remote interface for bots? If they are just sending and receiving json maybe something like websockets would allow for a language agnostic server without the need for you to worry about sandboxing different languages?</comment></comment></comment>


FreeBSD – a lesson in poor defaults - <AUTHOR> https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.txt <comment><USER3> Interesting thoughts. With the HPN-SSH patchset, do you reckon that would be useful to keep enabled for someone using faster than 1GbE hardware?

Only, asking for my home network, as I generally use Infiniband there - <USER2> adapters are super cheap on ebay. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Has Google changed its no remote work policy when hiring? - <AUTHOR> https://scottberkun.com/2014/famous-programmer-leaves-google-because-of-remote-work-ban/ <comment><USER2> Not the title, misuse of Ask HN.</comment>


Ask HN: Correct Abstract Verbalisation for Bachelor Thesis? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys,
English is not my mother tounge, so I need your help to write a correct version of my abstract. Please keep in mind, that the abstract should tell the reader, what was the problem, the idea for solving and the success rate of the project. If you can't find any of this, tell me. If something is written incorrectly, please correct me. If you find American and British English, please help me to find the British pronunciation (my professor was some time in GB).
The actual text: """ The company ticket-web GmbH & Co. KG heads a big step in its evolution. The supplier of technical solutions for selling tickets in any way wants to create a Germany wide web portal to sell tickets of regional events. To measure and increase the success of this web portal, there was created a tool in the time of this Bachelor thesis. It will concentrate on increasing the coverage and conversion-rate of web users and is called ENTREE©-marketeer. Increasing the coverage of web users can be accomplished through Search Engine Optimization, information exchange with web-databases and -catalogues and integration in webcommunities. Conversion-rates can be increased by adjusting the design and usability to the needs of the target audience. Aiming this goal creates the need for extensive and detailed analysis of the users behaviour and therefore for a good measuring. How the marketeer helps ticket-web to create a successful and sustainable web business will be shown in detail in the following chapters. """
best regards erikb PS: An advisor tells me, that the german version might help: """Das Unternehmen ticket-web GmbH & Co. KG steht vor einem großen Entwicklungsschritt. Der  Anbieter technologischer Lösungen zum Ticketverkauf jeder Art möchte ein deutschlandweites Portal zum Vertrieb von Tickets regionaler Veranstalter einrichten. Um die Erfolge dieses Portals messen und steigern zu können, soll im Verlauf dieser Bachelorarbeit ein Tool zur Steigerung von Reichweite und Konvertierungsrate dieses Portals erstellt werden: der ENTREE©-marketeer. Steigerungen der Reichweite werden vor allem durch Search Engine Optimization, Informationsaustausch mit Webdatenbanken und -katalogen und Integration in Communitys erzielt. Die Konvertierungsrate lässt sich durch Anpassungen in Design und Usability an die zielgruppenspezifischen Bedürfnisse anpassen. Um diese steigern zu können, muss das Besucherverhalten auf der eigenen Seite detailliert gemessen werden. Wie der marketeer ticket-web dabei hilft, ein erfolgreiches und dauerhaftes Geschäft im Online Ticketverkauf aufzubauen soll in den folgenden Kapiteln erläutert werden.""" <comment><USER2> Hi Erik,

At a guess you've used Google translate or something similar, and although I can have a guess at most of the meanings, it's really unclear what you're trying to say. Google translate is very bad at translating long and complex sentences.

I have a suggestion. Use really, really short and simple sentences, and feed them into the Google translator. It has a much better chance of coping with simple sentences. The sentences you get out will help us to understand what you mean.

The alternative is that someone here might speak English (first) and German (second) and be able to translate the German into English for you.

</comment><comment>==

I think you've used Google translate. I can have a guess at most of the meanings. However it's really unclear. Google translate is very bad at translating long and complex sentences.

Ich glaube, Sie haben mithilfe von Google zu übersetzen. Ich kann eine Vermutung haben die meisten der Bedeutungen. Aber es ist wirklich unklar. Google zu übersetzen, ist sehr schlecht um die Übersetzung von langen und komplexen Sätze.

I have a suggestion. Use really short and simple sentences. Give them to the Google translator. It has a much better chance of coping with simple sentences. The sentences you get out will help us to understand what you mean.

Ich habe einen Vorschlag. Verwenden Sie wirklich kurze und einfache Sätze. Geben Sie ihnen zu den Google Übersetzer. Es hat eine viel bessere Chance, um in einfachen Sätzen. Die Sätze, die Sie erhalten, Sie wird uns helfen zu verstehen, was du meinst.

There is an alternative. Someone here might speak English (first) and German (second). They might be able to translate the German into English.

Es gibt eine Alternative. Jemand könnte hier sprechen Englisch (ersten) und Deutsch (Sekunden). Sie könnten allenfalls zu übersetzen dem Deutschen ins Englische.

</comment><comment><USER3> Learning a new language is always tough.

"heads a big step"???

"selling tickets in any way"???

"create a Germany wide web portal"

"there was created a tool"

"aiming this goal"

"a good measuring"

PS: I don't think this is relevant to HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi alain,

thanks for your help. I will look to find better phrases, to replace these.

@your PS: Yes and No. I thought maybe for a week about adding this question here. In the end I decided to do it, because:

\- it is about what I hack \- As reviewing code sharpens your coding skills, so might reviewing foreigners English texts to sharpen your mother tounge skills. Thus, it might be to value for you. \- For sure, it helps me. \- It is the way of the student (and all hackers should be students their whole life). Maybe I can never give back to you, what you help me here. But I help foreigners here in Germany since 3 years to translate texts and understand my language. Viewing it from this point, I don't feel too selfish, asking here for your help.

I hope, this reasoning makes sense.

<comment><USER3> I feel your pain. I'm French (my wife is German) and I have been living in Silicon Valley for 10 years now. I am aware of language barriers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi RiderOfGiraffes,

thanks for your harsh critique. No I didn't use any translater but my own mind. ;) If you still want to help me, please tell me, what exactly did you understand until now. Maybe this way I am able to see, where I have to start changing things.

best regards

ErikB PS: hehe, I can understand all of your german sentences. :) Google is much better as I thought (but yes, it sounds really like my best friend from India)

<comment><USER2> Hi Erik,

I'm not really in a position to help you just now - I'm really busy, and this will take time. However, the original comment still stands. Currently you are using long sentences designed to sound right for the context. Unfortunately, they're not quite right, and there is a lot of room for interpretation.

Your English is way, way better than my German, so I don't really have a chance to help. However, if you give a simple explanation, in English and German in parallel, and keep the sentences short and clear, perhaps someone can help you draft a complete English version.

As I say, I don't have time right now, but I think that's your best chance of getting some help. I can put you in touch with a professional German->English translator, but that would cost real money. He is extremely good, and in great demand.

No harm in asking for a quotation.

<http://mussett-sprachen.de/>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> with guidance from HN and friends I have changed a little bit. Hope this is better (but still does not feel good enough):

"""The company ticket-web GmbH & Co. KG faces a big step in its evolution. The supplier of technical solutions for selling tickets in different kind of ways wants to create a Germany wide web portal to sell tickets of regional events. To measure and increase the success of this web portal, in this bachelor thesis an application was created. It will concentrate on increasing the coverage and conversion-rate of web users and is called ENTREE©-marketeer. Increasing the coverage of web users can be accomplished through Search Engine Optimization, information exchange with web-databases and -catalogues and integration in webcommunities. Conversion rates can be increased by adjusting the design and usability to the needs of the target audience. Aiming for higher conversion rates creates the need for extensive and detailed analysis of the users behaviour and therefore the need for a good measurement of this behaviour. How the marketeer helps ticket-web to create a successful and sustainable web business will be shown in detail in the following chapters."""</comment>


Elon Musk's Boring Company Finishes Digging Las Vegas Tunnels - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/14/21257849/elon-musk-boring-company-las-vegas-tunnel-finished-digging <comment><USER2> "Those vehicles will eventually zip through the tunnels autonomously, but they will start off with drivers [...]"

So they haven't figured out how to safely drive autonomously through a _Tunnel_ , with all vehicles running _identical software_?</comment>


Ask HN: Young children age -6 and screen-time before bed - <AUTHOR> What's the most conclusive scientific evidence that watching TV before bed is good/bad for children? <comment><USER2> How about running your own experiment with TV before bed vs no screen time x hours before bed? If you get enough data, you'll have accurate short-term results relative to your own children.

Lots of "experts" will tell you no screen time before bed is the way to go, but I am not aware of any scientific evidence.

</comment><comment><USER3> In any case, use f.lux or similar app to limit blue-light exposure.</comment>


The Effect of the iPad on PC and Netbook Sales - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110113/ap_on_hi_te/us_pc_sales

<comment><USER2> The article could easily have been titled "Analysts Predictions Wrong: Blame iPad" and still drawn hits because it contains "iPad."</comment>


Should Matt Cutts be Fired for the Penguin Update? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newfoundnames.com/should-matt-cutts-be-fired-for-the-penguin-update/

<comment><USER2> "For the record, I don't think Matt should be fired but something needs to be changed" . They why do a headline bait?</comment>


Ask HN: Junior devs, what frustrates you the most at the recruitment process? - <AUTHOR> Self-taught web developer here. I would like to see more interviews for cultural fit. What about you?<p>Feel free to embrace debate. <comment><USER3> The main issue with 'seniority' labels is that they are contextual - <USER2> on the hierarchies already in place in the existing team. In simpler language, what is a 'junior' developer changes depending on who is already there. The main manifestation of this in the recruiting process is a misalignment of expectation between the candidate and the employer. And all kinds of bad things can happen from this: under / over sold jobs, job title 'inflation', incipient turf wars and so on.

It's not an easy problem to solve and we've wrestled with this on Workshape.io (matching platform for Software devs). The formula we've come up with is a 4 level hierarchy based not on experience or times served but on the role you play within the team.

Entry - you are competent, but need guidance / supervision / mentorship. Your code will be reviewed before deploy

Mid-level - you are competent but do not lead or manage

Senior - you are still hands on, but do lead and manage others

Lead - you may still be hands on but managing / leading / deciding are the most important things you do.

Its still our categorisation though and we know it's not perfect at all

<comment><USER4> I've got well over a decade of experience, much of that as a team lead, and I still think everyone's code including my own needs review before deploy.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's kind of nuts. No one is above review.

<comment><USER6> Who has time for that?

<comment><USER7> I've worked in places that didn't bother with code reviews. In the end, they didn't have time for it because all their time was spent desperately trying to keep the mass of poorly-designed, inconsistently implemented legacy code (which included code written the previous week - "legacy" doesn't mean "old") working.

There comes a point where there's no time to stop and start making things better, and you just watch the inevitable disaster come hurtling down the track as people are forced to continue churning out legacy code to keep it going _today_ , knowing that they're just ensuring the final crash will be that much more destructive.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. The question ought to be "who does NOT have time for that?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Requiring a CS degree and asking coding questions that boil down to if you've memorised BFS/DFS.

When we were hiring, I noticed people couldn't look past non-CS degree, and so we were effectively turning people with 3+ years of experience and great Github profiles/real world experience away. Because we "wanted the best".

Or having people fail shitty coding "challenges" because they couldn't remember breadth-first search of the top of their heads. Never mind that they knew where to look the algos up, or the role was pretty much full stack web developer.

<comment><USER6> Than there are clearly enough developers to pick from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I was a junior dev trying to get my first jobs, what was frustrating was the range of what 'junior dev' meant. Anything from knowing what JavaScript is to having 2+ years of experience with a JS framework, and having a Github full of interesting side projects.

The latter style job posts were very disheartening to read, and I sometimes wondered how I would ever get enough experience to get a job as junior dev!

<comment><USER11> I couldn't agree more! I looked at junior dev jobs that wanted people who contribute often to open source, had awesome side projects, etc. Sounds like they wanted midlevel but only had budget for junior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a little bit more senior (4 years experience) than a new junior and not a developer per se (work in marketing tech) but my biggest gripe are the hurdles you have to do to reach the hiring manager (or how drawn out some of these processes are). Some of these I've experienced are:

1\. Cover letters - I'd rather someone from HR screen my resume and give me a 3 minute call about why I wanted to apply for the job.

2\. Take home exercises/psychometrics before having an in person interview

3\. Interview with junior staff before an interview (good experience for the staff but I've found them to be a bit unsure of what to ask.)

4\. Vetting from HR or recruiters that don't really know the topic but are just looking for keywords which indicate competence (i.e. "SQL","Reporting", "Project Manage","Agile") or want to know why you want to work at the company specifically when the careers website has poor information.

My ideal process would be (for a large company): Apply with Resume (ideally one-click apply) -> Short Chat with HR on phone -> In person interview with hiring manager -> Interview with senior manager (more on cultural fit and long term fit) or short take home (ability) -> Offer

<comment><USER13> Let's say you the one paying for the ideal hiring process you mentioned above. You're the owner of a bootstrapped business, or you're in a large company and have a fixed budget with which to work. You advertise a 10 junior positions, and get 100 applications per position (let's assume 1000 total unique individuals). In this situation, would you make any changes to your ideal hiring process mentioned above?

<comment><USER14> You throw out 900 resumes between step 1 and 2 because they didn't manage to submit one without tens of spelling mistakes?

I agree though that having everyone write a cover letter, that they can write in their own time, and that you can read in your own time is preferable though.

Better yet, just leave off on the cover letter requirement.

<comment><USER15> What jobs are receiving 900 resumes?

When we looked for a Django dev we got two applicants, and the good one of the two only wanted to work freelance. Admittedly we were looking for some experience.

<comment><USER13> A lot of it is situational. A company in San Francisco hiring a junior Rails dev will probably get a LOT of recent bootcamp grads as applicants. Last I checked, most bootcamps were still focused on teaching Rails. So that's on factor. I was recruiting for Rails in SF, so that's part of it. You learn to optimize for challenges you have.

<comment><USER12> In that case would you throw out all the bootcamp grads? Would degree > bootcamp?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably when you're interviewed by some mid-senior manager who isn't capable of writing any code and his sole purpose is to "keep you in line" so tries to assert a bullying authority from the outset.

Extremely typical in big corps. Makes me wonder what purpose they serve other than being glorified messengers between the board and real works.

<comment><USER17> Pretty much this :- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo)

I love that film.

<comment><USER7> The irony of this being that a decent requirements person, who can actually get out of the customers what they actually want and present them meaningfully to the software engineers, is extraordinarily valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who has been unemployed since graduation....

Getting no feedback, not even a rejection, after an onsite.

Trivia games

Getting rejected because of the lack of keywords on your resume. Example: I was interviewing for Walmart. Recruiter said I must've applied to the wrong position, since I had no Java framework keywords. This was for a new grad position.

Companys not asking any algo questions, not even STAR ones, and me still getting rejected.

Lots of lying by the recruiters that revolve around salary.

<comment><USER19> >Getting no feedback, not even a rejection, after an onsite.

This happens all the time even when you are senior (10+) years like me. It's maddening and I think one of the rudest things an org can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In reality culture fit means "do I like you or not?". To get disqualified on culture fit, all you need is one single interviewer that will not feel %100 comfortable working with you. You can get discriminated on anything really, if you seem smarter than the interviewer, if the interviewer is having a bad day, your voice, the way you look, your laugh, etc. In other words, it's nearly impossible to figure out the exact reason why you'd get disqualified on "culture fit". It's in the interviewer's brain only. He or she will obviously never share the real reason why. Sometimes it's not even explainable on paper, it's just a personal feeling, you haven't connected with the candidate for no particular reason. So you can't write an official feedback based on culture fit. Interviewers will never share their personal tastes because it doesn't seem professional. That's why 'we' use algorithm questions :)

Speaking of "technical" questions - the good news is that there's absolutely no difference between Junior and Senior dev nowadays. Questions are identical so you can learn it once and re-apply for life. Everything you've learned in college is what will get you a job, even 10 years down the road so forget about your professional experience. Majority of interviewers have no skills interviewing candidates. They apply the same evaluation whether you're a tech lead or fresh out of school. If you happen to have 10 years of experience or at least one project on your Resume, they might fill up the blanks by asking you a few questions about your previous projects. But the goal is to jump straight into the basic CS questions (algo) because this leads to a YES or NO answer. That's what interviewers use to make a decision and let you go to the next round or not. You can't fail answering questions like "tell me about your project XYZ, what was difficult, how did you solve it". Though if you can't reverse a linked list because you forgot to google it prior to the interview, you will get disqualified right away since it gives the interviewer a solid feedback to write down that will never get challenged by the hiring manager.

To answer your question - what I just wrote is what frustrates me the most in the recruiting process in the Software world. I've been dealing with this thing for years... as an interviewer and interviewee. Things are getting worse in 2017 because I see 500 applicants per job. You get disqualified on questions like "do you use a new line for curly braces?". The trick is to not answer right away and to return the question back to the interviewer - "good question, what do YOU use?". Then just say "me too"... safe bet.

<comment><USER21> >Speaking of "technical" questions - the good news is that there's absolutely no difference between Junior and Senior dev nowadays. Questions are identical so you can learn it once and re-apply for life. Everything you've learned in college is what will get you a job, even 10 years down the road so forget about your professional experience.

That isn't even close to true. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding. Could you elaborate on this a bit?

>You can't fail answering questions like "tell me about your project XYZ, what was difficult, how did you solve it".

This is the most important question I ask, and you can absolutely fail it. I use it to gauge interest in the field. If people give me a ho-hum answer, I know they are in the field because they heard it paid well and will probably have no incentive or drive for excellence. Even passionate introverts will perk up when this question is asked. I can't overstate how important passion is to future personal development.

On a side note, I haven't had to deal with a recruiter (for my employment) since 2001 (dot bomb) and that didn't even help me. I used a recruiter for my first and second job and haven't since (in 20 years). If you do good work, people will remember you when time goes by and your co-workers are at a new location looking for talent.

I think you are sharing your perspective from large companies. Small and mid sized companies are often more competent in interviewing (and fun to work for) because they aren't shackled by some pre-determined interview "process."

<comment><USER20> I agree with what you said even though it seems a bit outdated. I made a general statement looking at the evolution from 2005 until today. I switched employers many times, worked for small, medium and large companies. I got to interview a lot of candidates for the last 10 years collaborating with other colleagues to make hiring decisions. I'm aware there are exceptions out there, totally agree with you! Though, it changed since 2005. It seems that most of the tech companies are now following the google model by putting CS principles at the center of the technical screening. It doesn't matter if you applied for a Web, Mobile, Backend position, if you're a junior, senior, staff, etc. You'll have to go through it and it's usually a 30 minute question within a 45 min to 1h interview. So I call it the main technical evaluation for engineers. Versus a 2 minute question going over the technology you used and how you tackled some of your challenges. I personally dig into those questions but most of the interviewers don't want to hear about anything else rather than their own voices. They need to make a "valid" decision at the end of the day so they better get a solid justification. Like I said, it's easier for them to ask YES/NO type of questions rather than engaging in a design discussion for 30 minutes. Some do but most don't.

Right now the market is saturated by people applying everywhere at the same time. Some recruiters get handed multiple choice questions and get involved in the filtering right up front. If you use a referral these days you still have to go through the standard hiring process, again, there are exceptions. I got hired by an ex-collegue from another company a few years back, where he got promoted to manager. We worked together, coded together and were both engineers at our previous employer. He had an open req in his team and contacted me personally. I still had to go through the standard hiring process and crack a few algorithm questions with other engineers. He bumped up my rank though to the max when he hired me, which is where the referral boost came into place. Not during the hiring process, I was just a regular candidate for other engineers.

Anyway, back to your points, algorithm questions are the main topic of conversation during tech interviews in 2017, minus the exceptions. It all comes down to writing code on a whiteboard or in a notepad. When I say code I mean palindrome, dykstra, doubly linked list and all this crap. I say that because it's the hardest problem you can ask to a candidate with or without experience. People know you'd feel comfortable talking about app optimization, scaling an infrastructure, common problems in a multi threaded system, etc. They use it for architect positions where they know the person won't write a line of code. There's just a big misunderstanding because interviewers aren't trained to evaluate candidates. They'd rather go for the generalist route and hire the "smartest" algorithm guru over someone who has a deeper knowledge of the field.

<comment><USER21> >It all comes down to writing code on a whiteboard or in a notepad.

Thanks for elaborating but that's sad news. I thought we had all collectively decided this was a horrible way to interview people. If a company absolutely must have code written, assign all interviewees a programming task and have them submit it through GitHub or on your site. Something that shouldn't take more than 30 minutes for a moderate developer. Anyone who doesn't complete it gets filtered, and you get a good example of their thinking, style, sloppiness, comment habits, etc. If you think they nicked it from the internet, have them make a slight change.

I've always considered the ability to be able to design a piece of software or module from nothing to something complete in a moderately elegant way was way more important than if someone had memorized how some algorithm works without ever having the need to implement it.

It's akin to asking a painter how to build various types of brushes and how to harvest paint, or an author how to make pens. That ability isn't useless, but certainly don't make that the focus of your interview.

I want experienced software designers, they can learn anything they are lacking with whatever stack we use in house in just a few weeks. I'll just stick to using my methods and wait until the industry catches up. :)

<comment><USER20> What you're describing is the perfect way to evaluate a developer. That's exactly what I promote to my employers. That's what I ask at the last step of the hiring process if we still have a doubt. we should use this evaluation only and get rid of the extras. Then we should talk about life and work in general for an hour rather than a stupid algorithm question just to make sure the candidate isn't a d*ck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Being quizzed on specific language syntax during in person interviews when they knew I didn't have much experience in that language was annoying.

Also, any mention of a cover letter was frustrating. I think hiring managers have enough info to decide if a phone interview makes sense with just a resume/Github, especially for a technical role.

Also, having to spend 20+ minutes creating an account with all my personal info just to submit an application stopped me from applying to multiple positions. That time adds up during a job search and makes it extra stressful, not to mention you end up feeling like you just dropped your resume into a black hole where it will never be seen.

</comment><comment><USER23> For me it used to be the fact that everyone required at least 1 year's worth of work experience. They would hardly grant you an interview without it with all open source projects in the world. Recruiters don't even know what open source is and employers might have assigned the hiring to a legacy guy who's never done open source either.

You can't get work experience without working so it was 6 months of constant searching before I got a job.

</comment><comment><USER24> If the company is not a startup or otherwise very young, then a lack of training or mentoring.

I'm expected to be a cheaper version of a mid/senior dev, perhaps just a bit slower.

</comment><comment><USER25> Companies that give opportunities to some one just because he got a degree from premier institution</comment>


White House will not sign on to Christchurch call to stamp out online extremism - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/15/white-house-will-not-sign-christchurch-pact-stamp-out-online-extremism-amid-free-speech-concerns/ <comment><USER2> From the article: "U.S. concerns that it clashes with constitutional protections for free speech". That's a good thing to hear from any White House spox.

It's too bad that journalism doesn't espouse including any context around what government spoxpeople say. It would be interesting to see some kind of stats around citing free speech concerns, and around waving off others' free speech concerns. That sort of context would help all of us understand a lot of what any government's spoxpeople say. Concerns that some might have, like "they're just citing free speech because it's convenient" could be immediately dispelled. Other times some government's use of a general principle ("small government", "individual freedom", "freedom of association") could be seen as cynical exploitation, and we could all evaluate the current situation more intelligently.</comment>


IPhone Mock-up Creator - <AUTHOR> http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch/

<comment><USER2> Balsamiq Mockups recently added iPhone elements, I think I prefer it:

<http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=957>

Nicely made for a webapp though! :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a cool app but why not just muck around with the iPhone App interface builder that comes with the SDK. It is basically a much better version of this web app.

<comment><USER4> Two reasons:

First, those mockups are not supposed to look "real". The idea is to give somebody something that very obviously is not anywhere near a finished product so as not to give the wrong impression of how "finished" the product is.

Second, it's easy to share my mockups since you can simply share the URL, and all changes will be synchronized live. So you can collaborate over the phone and see each other's changes (which is why I've made the thing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> \+ Uses Canvas + Javascript \+ Loads faster than flash based solutions ( balsamiq or IPlotz ) \+ I like the hand-drawn look \- not enough tools such as align , snap.etc \- no multiple pages

Really nice work though!

I've been looking at these mockups tools lately and none really does 100% of what I want. Maybe I'll write one.

<comment><USER4> I've been putting this together for myself in a few hours, so there are not too many features yet. Automatic snap-to is certainly something on my to-do- list, align probably too. Not sure about multiple pages since it's easy to just create additional mockups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A more low tech way:

<http://graffletopia.com/stencils/437>

<comment><USER7> I highly recommend Omnigraffle Pro to anyone trying to diagram their app ui's, flows, etc. It's way better than Visio. The site cyunker is linking to is a goldmine of stencils.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A pencil and some sheets of paper are all I need to do my mock-ups... Still don't get these services :/

<comment><USER9> Especially when you're manipulating something that looks like you drew it with a pencil anyway.

<comment><USER10> As a designer, I couldn't agree more, it's absolutely essential to get your thoughts down visually as quickly as possible (when you've got an idea for a UI and need to capture it) or even more importantly, to work out your ideas in the first place.

Also, paper is a very shareable medium. Both in terms of being able to pass around, whether in the office or by scanning in, and also because it's so amenable to collaboration, which is _really_ important for me and getting participation from a wide range of people. No one's going to be intimidated by some sketches on a piece of paper, so it's great for creating conversations with programmers, marketers, etc.

If anyone's interested in a longer explanation, I gave a presentation on prototyping at Adobe last month and a good chunk of it was about how much I love paper:

<http://tr.im/gMJ9> (slideshow + audio)

<comment><USER4> You're absolutely right, and for people in the same office, I'd use paper, too. But I have to collaborate with people who live far away from me, which is why I created this web version of pen and paper for myself.

The idea is that several people open the same mockup and move stuff around on the screen while they're on the phone, talking about the mockup, similar to what you would do with plain old paper when sitting next to each other.

<comment><USER10> I like that you're trying to tackle the specific problem of real-time remote collaboration and made a tool to address that - that's great! The difference for me is that I rarely see value in it, compared to just scanning in a quick sketch and then collecting input via IM or email, or even with getting other scanned sketches back in return.

For example, here's a quick sketch by Jason at 37signals to get across the overall layout of their new home page:

[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1629-preview-of-the- new-3...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1629-preview-of-the- new-37signalscom-launching)

<comment><USER4> We do the "moving sketches around" way of collaborating, and it works, but it tends to be a bit slow. There are some ways to get around the slowness: plasq's skitch makes it easy to share the things on my screen with other people, for example, and sometimes we just skype psds to each other. And I'll certainly keep using those tools.

The iPhone mockup tool I've created is a very specific tool for a very specific issue I have: I'm thinking about the layout of an iPhone screen and I want to quickly throw some ideas at somebody who's far away, and let them give live input. I don't even think that the mockup tool is the best solution for that specific problem, it's just the first idea I came up with :-)

I find it useful, but I can totally see how it's not for everyone.

<comment><USER10> What I like more than anything is that you're 1) creating your own tools for collaboration and 2) trying to solve design problems. It makes me think of 37signals and how basecamp was born, and also makes me a bit jealous because I fall into the mindtrap that programmers have more fun problems that they can hack on.

So yes, even if it's not for me, well done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great way for them to steal your great next killer app idea. I would never use a tool like this.

<comment><USER12> If you still think it's all about a "killer app idea" and not timing, execution, marketing and a million other things, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER11> Of course there is more to it. But every app starts with a (unique) idea. Think of it as a stealth startup. We do that for a reason too ...

<comment><USER13> 'Killer' ideas don't necessarily have to be unique. Just better, so they disrupt the existing market enough to get ahead.

[edit - removed extra word]</comment></comment></comment></comment>


2001-2011: Technology under Presidents Gore and Romney - <AUTHOR> http://erehweb.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/2001-2011-technology-under-presidents-gore-and-romney/

<comment><USER2> God dammit, I woke up in the wrong universe again.

<comment><USER3> I hate when that happens ... It's almost as bad as losing that loving feeling ;)</comment></comment>


All your cloud costs in one place like Mint.com for Clouds - <AUTHOR> http://cloudability.com/ojznq

<comment><USER2> It's amazing how quickly cloud costs can get out of hand with ephemeral dev servers, sloppy application code, and the like. At one job, I found a bad query that was costing us ~$112k/yr in excess EC2 costs and nobody had noticed the impact because nobody outside of finance was really paying attention to the costs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very neat service. Falls into that "Why didn't we have this already? category. Excited to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a tool we can really use to get our S3 costs manageable.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would use it to see if I could get a better deal on hosting.

</comment><comment><USER6> I need this. Please release soon. (And let me beta too!)

</comment><comment><USER7> Clear need for this. Glad to see it launching.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looking forward to trying it out!</comment>


Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence--In Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1769468/scientist-discover-the-oldest-largest-body-of-water-in-existence-in-space

<comment><USER2> _Researchers found a lake of water so large..._

 _...the water vapor is the finest mist..._

Calling it a lake is totally wrong then. I was really disappointed when I discovered, reading further down, that this isn't a humongous blob of solid water, a space-lake, after all... :( Not sure if even qualifies as a "body" of water, more like an "atmosphere" of water vapor...

<comment><USER3> Even more like a "vacuum with some water molecules here and there". Even the densest of molecular gas clouds in space are still harder vacuums than anything that can be achieved in an Earth lab.

<comment><USER4> No it's 12 BILLION light years away and its enough to supply trillions of earth lille planets

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as
      desolate and desert dry, but it's turning out to be pretty
      lush.

Why did "we" (who?) think this? Hydrogen is everywhere, oxygen is common, they bind easily, there must be quite a lot of water out there. Although 28 galaxies' worth of water all in one place is still impressive.

<comment><USER6> _28 galaxies' worth of water all in one place is still impressive_

Sure, if you want to use bullshit mathematics to get that "28 galaxies" number I guess you can make it sound impressive.

The amount of water in all the Earth's oceans is a miniscule proportion of the amount of water in the solar system, though. The Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, the moons of the outer planets -- all these solid bodies are made up largely of water ice (mixed with ammonia and methane, plus a bunch of rock). The _real_ wet spots of the solar system, though, are the giant planets themselves -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Uranus and Neptune are ice giants, made up _mostly_ of the water-ammonia-methane mixture that we lazy scientists just call "ice". Let's estimate it at something like five Earth masses worth of water in each planet. Jupiter and Saturn consist basically of huge seas of hydrogen-helium which accreted around an initial ice-rock core; a much lower share of their mass is water, but a good handwavey estimate would be something on the order of five Earth masses' worth of water in each of those, too. [Left out: a bunch of details and caveats.]

So we're talking roughly 20 times the mass of the Earth of water in the solar system. (The Oort Cloud, Kuiper Belt, all the icy moons, and the Earth's oceans themselves are a rounding error.)

Now, let's recompute. Total amount of water in this particular object is 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth's oceans, which comes down to about 28 billion Earth masses' worth of water, or enough to form about five billion Neptunes. Latest estimates suggest that Neptune-like planets are extremely common, so there is almost certainly far more water in Neptunes just in our own galaxy than in this big cloud.

Still, quite a lot of water.

<comment><USER7> Do you know of any references on the behavior of molecular water in space? Specifically whether or not there is a mass value which would be a modestly stable liquid?

So nominally in a vacuum water sublimates into vapor, but at very low temperatures it stays ice. So you've got these icy bodies in the Kuiper belt which become comets when their orbits take them past the Sun. Typically, a comet is 'solid' but solar insolation causes it to evaporate/sublimate giving it the characteristic tail (correct me if I'm wrong here on this).

So what I'm wondering is, could you have a 'water' planet which was basically a blob of water surrounded by presumably a CO2/NO2 atmosphere? Could it be liquid all the way through or would its 'core' always be solid?

<comment><USER8> It's not going to occur naturally, but you could have a liquid planet.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point>

Edit: The center of the earth is 350gph and 5430°C water would probably be a liquid at that temperature and pressure but I don't think it's been tested. Still, a smaller planet could be possible and stable on the scale of a few million years. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_core>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But it was only 40 years ago, in 1969, that scientists first confirmed that > water existed anywhere besides Earth.

Could anyone tell me more about this? Couldn't find anything relevant from a quick Google search.

<comment><USER6> Try "water detected 1969" and the first result is <http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1969Natur.221..626C>

Still bullshit, however. Comets have been known to contain water since the first spectra were taken in the mid 19th century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this upvoted? The news is months old.</comment>


Hacker News 20/50/100 RSS feeds are down – Who manages them? - <AUTHOR>

"Hacker News 10/20/50/100" feeds really helped in avoiding the overload.
While their twitter bots (@newsyc20/@newsyc50/etc) are still active the feedburner feeds are down since 13 March! (http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc20)
Is the author (Jeff Miller according to [1]) still active on HN ?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057036 <comment><USER2> If you're looking for an alternative, may I suggest giving [http://hnrss.org](http://hnrss.org) a try?

I built it to scratch an itch, but I love seeing others use it.

Add "?points={10,20,50,100}" to activate the points threshold (e.g., [http://hnrss.org/newest?points=50](http://hnrss.org/newest?points=50)).

Also has feeds for stuff like Ask HN, searches, user comments, etc.

<comment><USER3> Amazing, thanks for this! I'd been trying to get by with using [http://twitrss.me](http://twitrss.me) and @newsyc150 but the lag was bugging me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like the old twitter v1 api supported RSS response format, but not anymore. That's really unfortunate. Anyone know of a generic twitter-to-rss conversion tool/app/service?</comment>


WWDC10 videos are here and are available free. - <AUTHOR> http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2010/

<comment><USER2> I seem to recall that wwdc videos were a for pay feature in previous years (I was at wwdc 07, 09). But what's interesting about this is that this year I went to google I/o which is in it's 3rd year, had 5k+ attendees and it goes without saying that google would release all the videos for free.

Apple is feeling the pressure of competition.

<comment><USER3> Apple would do well to drop the $99/year dev tax as well (I'd consider paying to be in their market, but paying to just developer for my own hardware seems off).

<comment><USER4> Eh. Call it a bozo filter. The dev forums are quite filled with people but they are all actually discussing. I can't remember ever seeing spam.

<comment><USER5> Right. I'd rather they increase the subscription fee.

<comment><USER5> I was serious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Overwhelmed by traffic now. I don't think Apple has yet absorbed just how big it is: the iPod explosion didn't affect the dev side of the company, which subconsciously still has Mac assumptions in place.

This isn't "102: Moving from CodeWarrior to Project Builder" any more, Toto.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1) Log in (or create an apple account) 2) download from itunes

i guess providing video over the internet is hard for apple (especially using html5, that they grandstand from the stage)

<comment><USER8> Funny, they actually timeout your authorization after a fairly short time. I downloaded a bunch when this was first posted, then went back to grab one more and got redirected to the sign-in page, then got rejected due to heavy traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least something good came out of Apple-Google rivalry.

<comment><USER10> Doesn't something good come out of most corporate rivalries?

<comment><USER11> Yes, unless one of the rivals has a monopoly.

<comment><USER12> I'm curious: Was this facetious? or were you serious?

<comment><USER13> If you don't assume that he's talking about Apple (or, for that matter, Google), which is implied in neither his, nor the parent post, then he's entirely correct and the downvotes are totally unwarranted.

<comment><USER14> What's the connection between monopolies and corporate rivalries? That comment just doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER13> People are talking about corporate rivalries as a special case of free market competition. Price wars and innovation races benefit the consumer in these cases.

In the case of a monopoly a potential corporate rival gets bought and shut down, or locked out of a market, or has their price undercut until they go out of business and then the price goes back up even further to compensate. Basically the consumer loses.

So corporate rivalry, no matter how fierce, is great for the consumer as long as both are forced to fight fair.

<comment><USER14> Uhm, yeah, but the consumer doesn't lose, either? Either way, it's a idle fact with no relation to the discussion, except if you wanted to suggest that either Google or Apple have a monopoly. Which is obviously bullshit.

<comment><USER13> Are you arguing that monopolies don't hurt consumers? There's valid arguments that could be advanced in that direction but since we live in a world where the common understanding is that monopolies are bad for consumers, it would be helpful if you were less oblique about your meaning.

Mentioning monopolies in the context of the benefits of competition doesn't seem irrelevant to me, quite the opposite, and perhaps as a result I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that it was an attack on Apple or Google or anyone else.

<comment><USER14> Uhm, no. That's not what I said at all. Monopolies are bad but companies competing against a monopolist won't make it worse.

<comment><USER13> I think it's the monopolist "competing" against the other companies that we're worried about. Where by competing I mean doing all those things I listed a few posts back that reduce consumer choice and competition in the marketplace.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but that's not surprising. Isn't it obvious that the concept of "competition" doesn't make much sense when talking about a monopolist? And it's also obvious that it would be stupid if the monopolist didn't try to crush any possible emerging competition. It's logical, it's obvious, it's not worth mentioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a ton of sessions... can anyone recommend which are not to be missed?

<comment><USER16> Application Frameworks: "Designing Apps with Scroll Views" (awesome thought process of engineering UI code)

iPad and iPhone User Interface Design (excellent design principles and examples)

Advanced Performance Optimization on iPhone OS, Part 1&2 (tips and tricks galore)

Using the Camera with AV Foundation (What FaceTime is built on)

Can't find it yet - but: Building dynamic server-driven user interfaces

<comment><USER17> > Can't find it yet - but: Building dynamic server-driven user interfaces

There are slides for Session 117 - Building a Server-driven User Experience under Application Frameworks, but no video posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI, the videos are generally the video-out of the Keynote presentations with a voiceover. So the HD versions are not particularly worthwhile IMO, and the files are really pretty small. Random ones include video of the stage though, so those are massively larger.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought the sessions were under NDA. Only for a week?

<comment><USER18> I thought they were too. After logging in, I see I can download over 200 hours of presentations from WWDC 2010 in iTunes.

<comment><USER19> Your Apple developer account came with an NDA in the terms and conditions.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I guess this is "information disclosed in connection with Apple Events" which makes it "Apple Confidential Information". Since you need a developer account to access it, it is not available to the public which would remove the Confidential part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could anyone post the list of session titles for the curious without an Apple developer account?

<comment><USER21> You can create a free account.

<comment><USER20> This seems to involve handing out my name/address/phone/company and that's only step 1 of 4.

Yes I'm being an awkward git but I hope you understand.

<comment><USER22> And giving you information on them if you're _not_ a registered developer would involve whoever is doing it breaking a NDA.

<comment><USER20> Forget it then. Good day everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any recommendations of good talks? A session number is enough info to avoid breaking the NDA.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's behind a registration wall. Why isn't there an iTube?

</comment><comment><USER25> Free? Wow, if they're giving their marketing material away for free they must be desperate</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most beautiful language in your opinion? Why? - <AUTHOR>

This may have been posted before (I couldn't find a similar post), but I'm curious and looking for some reasoned opinions. Of course, there is no real right or wrong answer.<p>I'm asking also because as a bit of a side project, I've been making a simple interpreter for a very basic scripting language (that I'm making up as I go along) in JavaScript. <comment><USER2> I like English. It gets a bad wrap because of all of the exceptions and corner cases, however it's extremely expressive and easily lends itself to many different oratory and literary styles.

It's easier in many respects to romance languages because when conjugating verbs you don't have to also conjugate possessive personal pronouns which you do with most other languages of European origin. And yet, in my opinion, it is more expressive than languages such as Chinese which don't have proper pronouns at all. Because of its rich vocabulary, it is also very easy to express ideas that may be difficult to express in other languages.

Oh, and Python is rather nice too.

<comment><USER3> And the "library" ecosystem. Most science, technology and other things of worldwide significance are conducted in English. Reading that stuff in other languages feels like using a crappy wrapper library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do not evaluate languages in terms of beauty anymore. Instead, I try to identify its niche, where it beats all other languages.

For all major languages, there is a niche, where you should use it above all other languages. For toy languages, the niche is usually something like "the single author enjoys developing it". For academic languages, the niche is something like "showcases concept X concisely".

You want to design and implement a small scripting language? Look at Lua, TCL, Forth, Squirrel, sh, Scheme, Javascript and IO.

</comment><comment><USER5> Haskell for its unrelenting purity and take on laziness. Clojure because Rich Hickey's take on lisp and functional programming is beautiful in both concept and execution. Scala's type system (given its limitations from being on the jvm), traits, and pattern matching also are deserving of a mention.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is going to get guffaws, and spit-takes, and incredulous stares.

All that matters not, it's a language I love, however it fares.

With postconditionals, and heredocs, and references to unfurl,

my answer is simple, the language is _Perl_.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. When written with care it's a very elegant and expressive language.

Perl does gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself with though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Furthering the analogy, PHP gives you several miles of rope and a noose already done.

<comment><USER8> That won't snap your neck, but it might break your legs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd vote for Scheme.

It's so compact, that when larger blocks work, it's almost magical. It's really a wonder to see a great Scheme/LISP hacker do their magic.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would have to select French. It's a very musical and sensuous language. Years ago after walking into a convenience store I was asked by a beautiful French girl to help her with a confusing copy machine. Here we are talking about paper feed and an errant machine and I am mesmerized by the sound of her voice and expressive hand gestures. She was speaking in broken English and mixing French words when necessary but the lyrical tone was undiminished. My heart beats a little faster just thinking about it again.

As far as talking to a machine I would select Ruby. A deciding factor in recognizing the presence of beauty is the alluring attraction to interact. Ruby's language makes the odds of scoring on your first date with her a real possibility.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm trying to learn Lojban, because I think it might make a good general interlanguage between people and computers.

I've also heard interesting things about Sanskrit, for the same purpose.

</comment><comment><USER4> Arabic typography is beautiful. Esperanto is nice for its mathematical purity.

Oh, and Python is rather nice too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have really made this a bit more precise, shouldn't I?

<comment><USER10> You've done fine. A post that might have become dry and academic has morphed into something that is eclectic and beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Smalltalk — because of a simplicity in sending messages between parts to create structure. As a signal propagates through various distinctions in a carefully crafted information space, a result emerges.

The LISP family also rather elegant.

</comment><comment><USER13> Visual Basic! Haha .. just kidding! My favourite is Ruby. It is simple enough that you don't need a 500 MB tool to edit your code ;-)

</comment><comment> workhere-io Python - because of its simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER14> CoffeeScript: it blends some of my favorite parts of Ruby, Python, and JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ruby. Idiomatic syntax combined with an object model that makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER16> Are we talking programming or literature?

</comment><comment><USER17> java - if you think it's too slow, update your toolset

<comment><USER13> Java? Really? The JVM is kind of cool but Java as language not at all. There are other languages much more simple and beautiful. That's at least my opinion.

<comment><USER17> I have some bias from having started on it like 15 years ago... the key thing to me is the toolset : eclipse and maven and code generation templates and mylyn and all this stuff just makes it so easy - now sure you can do that in other languages, but the toolset is very mature, written in java primarily and also a lot of the really cool speed tricks are tough as heck to do with a dynamically typed language

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Coq</comment>


What Content Dominates on YouTube? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pex.com/what-content-dominates-on-youtube-390811c0932d <comment><USER2> Great to see this posted to HN. I'm the author of the article. Let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER3> The "Distribution of content by category" graph would be better as raw numbers rather than percentages. It's hard to tell if the non-gaming categories are shrinking in real terms or just crowded out by Gaming.

<comment><USER2> It's hard to do it as the numbers of videos are growing quickly year by year.

BTW it's the latter</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft's Azure Accelerator In China Debuts Inaugural Class - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/04/microsofts-azure-accelerator-in-china-debuts-inaugural-class/

<comment><USER2> hey plz vote for my link</comment>


SCO and Novell square off at oral argument: Groklaw weighs in - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110120171030983

<comment><USER2> I can't decide whether SCO's argument is brilliant or awful…</comment>


Learn about other YC Summer 2014 Applicants - <AUTHOR>

I would love learn more about other YC summer '14 applicants, so I've watched a few founder introduction videos.  Anyone want to post info on his or her start-up?
My company, CallRed, allows users to quickly message top-tier support at a number of businesses including Comcast, AT&T, USPS and Time Warner.  We were featured in lifehacker last week and they're doing a follow-up article tomorrow (shhh).
http://lifehacker.com/callred-gets-you-help-from-companies-terrible-at-custom-1561087994 <comment><USER2> I'm working on [https://writeyourrep.org](https://writeyourrep.org)

We mail a real letter to your representatives in congress. The growing disconnect between congress and citizenry is disconcerting. We make it easier to have a voice in policy.

We've partnered with a few groups for letter writing campaigns and see a little organic traffic as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm building Quill.org, a web app that provides interactive English grammar lessons.

<comment><USER2> This is really neat. What powers the corrections? I was stunned by the results of the paragraph about Shackleton.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! The errors are manually seeded into the passages. We've built approximately 30 hours worth of lessons at: [http://www.quill.org/lessons](http://www.quill.org/lessons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone received an interview/rejection email yet?

<comment><USER5> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593830). They will be sending stuff out after 7PM.</comment></comment>


Abusing Linux's firewall: the hack that allowed us to build Spectrum - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-spectrum/?a <comment><USER2> I built an HTTP service that listens on all 65535 TCP ports and tells you which port you connected to (very useful to diagnose which outbound ports are firewalled by ISPs or by Wifi networks):

[http://open.zorinaq.com/](http://open.zorinaq.com/)

The folks at Cloudflare have done it with an iptables TPROXY rule (which requires the socket to have the IP_TRANSPARENT option) which is how I did it too. But there is another way to do this in Linux: you can use an iptables REDIRECT rule, and the userspace program can obtain the original destination port by doing a getsockopt() call to read SO_ORIGINAL_DST.

Edit: oh I see now the blog post does mention the REDIRECT & SO_ORIGINAL_DST option, but criticize its performance... which makes sense given its dependence on conntrack.

There is a typo in Cloudflare's blog post: s/SO_TRANSPARENT/IP_TRANSPARENT/

<comment><USER3> neat. but why do you need a service at all to detect blocking? you can use timing to also do it easily without the need for any server component at all.

perhaps this works poorly for firewalls near to the service but you declared the problem to be one close to the client. AIUI

<comment><USER2> When an ISP blocks certain ports by dropping the SYN packet, the client sees a time out. There is nothing to "time" that can prove it's the ISP dropping it.

<comment><USER3> yes there is. When you don't get a RST back at the expected time (say *2), you know SYN was dropped. Are you arguing that it could be packet loss? You address that by taking multiple samples, and by comparing against loss to ports that you get ACK back from.

<comment><USER2> « _you know SYN was dropped_ »

But you don't know who dropped it: the ISP or the remote server. In order to show it's the network between the client and server dropping it, you need a server that behaves in a known way, hence open.zorinaq.com I used to work in the InfoSec industry, running port scans from various locations, and open.zorinaq.com was incredibly useful to ensure there was no random firewall preventing us from finding certain open ports. That was the primary motivation why I built the service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author here. TPROXY module is pretty special, it really would have been hard to handle any inbound port without it. I guess it shows that there are benefits in keeping firewall and network stack code tied close.

<comment><USER5> This is great, thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the downstream proxy process (i.e. ::1234) and how you scale it and balance load across multiple instances of the process. You can't really use iptables to load balance your processes as either the DNAT or REDIRECT mechanism will modify the destination address, right?

Ex. # TPROXY directs all traffic to :1234, and these rules load balance to 4 different processes

iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -o lo --dport 1234 -m state --state NEW -m statistic --mode nth --every 4 --packet 0 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:8080

iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -o lo --dport 1234 -m state --state NEW -m statistic --mode nth --every 4 --packet 1 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:8081

iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -o lo --dport 1234 -m state --state NEW -m statistic --mode nth --every 4 --packet 2 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:8082

iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -o lo --dport 1234 -m state --state NEW -m statistic --mode nth --every 4 --packet 3 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:8083

<comment><USER4> We have a single Accept queue for all the ports. For TCP it doesn't create any problems - the new connection rate is rarely significant.

For the accept-queue load balancing see these blog posts:

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-sad-state-of-linux-socket- ba...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-sad-state-of-linux-socket-balancing/)

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the- wild/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the-wild/)

<comment><USER5> Wow, these are some great resources. Thanks for sharing! I have a call with one of your colleagues in 5 minutes ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure the headline is accurate: surely these kernel mechanisms were invented specifically _to_ allow this functionality? Therefore there is no abuse. More like "we found a mostly-forgotten netfilter feature designed to do the thing we're trying to do, so we used it".

<comment><USER7> Not exactly. TPROXY is designed for transparent proxying, but by way of the mechanism it works, can also be used to approximate binding to all TCP ports. The latter use case is a bit different.

<comment><USER8> but they are binding all TCP ports to implement a transparent proxy, no?

<comment><USER9> Transparent _reverse_ proxy, which very likely was not the originally intended use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TPROXY is totally amazing. We used it to modify nginx to create a transparent SMTP proxy that scales. Using TPROXY, we can pretend to be millions of ISP subscriber IPs at once in a single process.

<comment><USER11> In the near future, I'll need to do something likely very similar to what you did (albeit, probably on a smaller scale). Are there any technical details about this that you can share or perhaps just some pointers to relevant and/or helpful documentation?

(N.B.: I won't even be starting on this for probably a month or two so I haven't even begun to look into it. If there is documentation easily/readibly available via a Google search (i.e., I'll find 'em as soon as I Google for 'em) then just ignore my request. Thanks!)

<comment><USER10> There is a TPROXY mailing list where you can easily get questions answered by the community if not the original author of the patch.

This Python example sets up a transparent HTTP proxy which will show you the basic socket stuff you need to get going.

[https://github.com/erijo/transparent- proxy/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/erijo/transparent- proxy/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Discussion for the Spectrum product: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16820631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16820631)

</comment><comment><USER13> What happens to this once NFTables takes over? I'm still using iptables in production, but I'm wary since my understanding is that iptables is sort of deprecated in favor of NFTables

<comment><USER14> nftables doesn't support TPROXY.

<comment><USER13> Right, TPROXY is an iptables module (which implies that without someone to port it (assuming porting is even possible due to architectural differences), it isn't going to work on NFTables).

To clarify my original question, what will cloudflare do if/when iptables finally goes away? Has thought been put into it? Will they implement their own type of TPROXY? Will they continue to support iptables themselves? There's quite a few paths, and I'm interested in which one they deem most optimal because I respect their opinions a lot.

<comment><USER14> actually, TPROXY is very very lightly coupled with iptables. In fact, you can directly use TPROXY without iptables.

here's a 50 line kernel module that uses TPROXY to do the samething without touching iptables.

[https://pastebin.com/uxUf6MFS](https://pastebin.com/uxUf6MFS)

looking at the nftables code, I think the only reason nftables doesn't support TPROXY is that no one wrote some of the config parsing / seralization stuff.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like cloudflare might want to start trying to submit some nftables TPROXY support now, so it's there in the vanilla kernel when they end up needing it. :)

<comment><USER16> It'd expect someone to eventually submit such a patch, though I don't know how urgent this issue is. Iptables isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so Cloudflare can continue to use this method on the edge nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's the problem with SO_ORIGINAL_DST? Could you please explain a bit why the code is not encouraging? The author of TPROXY also mentioned somewhere else that SO_ORIGINAL_DST is racy, but I'm not a kernel developer and don't understand why. Thanks!

<comment><USER17> Digging deeper, I found more explanation on StackOverflow [https://stackoverflow.com/a/5814636/184061](https://stackoverflow.com/a/5814636/184061) (seems to be written by tproxy author Balazs Scheidler judging by the username).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hope this eventually becomes available to everyone (even if in a limited fashion).

Being able to setup a Gitlab/Gitea server behind Cloudflare without having to hack around the SSH port limitation would be fun.

</comment><comment><USER19> > For completeness, there is also a sysctl net.ipv6.ip_nonlocal_bind, but we > don't recommend touching it.

Any any ideas for an explanation of this recommendation?

</comment><comment><USER20> > _Well, we can 't ever know what the world looks like through another > species' eyes_.

s/species'/person's/</comment>


I tried 'Kakeibo': The Japanese art of saving money - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/08/how-this-japanese-method-of-saving-money-changed-my-lifeand-made-me-richer.html <comment><USER2> First off, please don't take anything I'm saying out of context which is in terms of regular people that make enough to pay their bills. Lower income types struggle with these things so I wholly recognize they're in a different type of game.

However, this whole article sounds like some pretentious westerner who thinks because they opened their mind to some sort of zen meditation that their problem became easier to solve. Also this same person chants the praises of writing things down and decrys the usage of software because you can't meditate while typing in stuff. It's literally no different than writing something in your checkbook.

When you have multiple accounts at different financials, have a 401k, and other assets, paper management gets complicated and time consuming incredibly fast, especially if you entered something in wrong. Can you imagine adjusting a ledger for a whole year because you transposed a number? Sure reconciling the difference can fix it, but it's sloppy and isn't right. Software takes all the hard work out of it and turns it into very simply data entry. You can also back it up too.

Budgeting is a problem with the individual. People who inflate their worth with the things they have tend to blow their money away on the latest and greatest or on literally anything they want as soon as they can get it. These people don't adhere to those stupid questions this meditative system says your supposed to adhere to. These people don't associate spending money as a bad thing. It is an instinctive behavioral pattern and not something taught. How many people actually know how to read over loan docs and understand proper debt management? A lot of people know "Pay your bill" which, yes, is very easy. But how many people actually factor in their interest in the cost of the thing they buy? People ignore the incremental costs, and forget the total cost in the end.

Remember that the reason a large majority of the economy works is because of suckers like this. Impulsive people would rather buy something at a quoted low price than risk never having that sale again. They don't look for trends or remember the costs of things down the road. They also don't factor future costs for things they need like car repairs (which is why lots of people max their loan amount for a vehicle, only to end up not being able to repair it when a serious issue occurs).

Honestly in my life, I've just become incredibly apathetic to other peoples financial situation. The few people that actually do know a solid means of budgeting truly know the value of the dollar and time. They aren't perfect, but they learn from their mistakes. They forgo spending $5 on a cup of starbucks and instead opt for $5 of a can of folgers. Instead of Rolex, they get a Seiko. If they see a 50% off sale, they consider the final price, not the fact that it happens to be 50% off. Also impulse buying is a big one. Being able to deny yourself something long term is one I rarely ever see among people without money.</comment>


Learning More Vocabularies Using My Own Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> https://dnote.io/blog/learning-vocabularies-using-my-open-source-software/ <comment><AUTHOR> I recently taught myself more vocabularies using a hack while reading two books in three months. Here are some statistics and observations from the process.</comment>


USB inventor admits that the plugs are annoying / Boing Boing - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/06/21/usb-inventor-admits-that-the-p.html <comment><USER2> The USB logo is supposed to be on the top of the plug: so with this knowledge, one can get it right the first time, almost every time.</comment>