Best way to get domain you want from someone...? - <AUTHOR>

What is the best way to get a domain from someone (how to approach them, what to say) when they aren't using the domain without encouraging them to quote you a high price for it? <comment><USER2> I imagine this is the kind of question that HN sees a lot. I don't spend tons of time here, but considering the responses so far, I think my input is will be not be redundant. I am a domainer with ~$500,000 in purchases under my belt, which means I am experienced but not one of the "big guys."

First of all, there is no single best way to get a domain that you want. There are techniques that tend to work better in some situations than others, but it's good to think of these as tools in your toolbelt rather than the ultimate domain-buying dogma. Unfortunately, confirmation bias can skew less experienced hackers toward confusing the story of how _they_ got _their_ domain with real advice.

Like any negotiation, the first place to start is by assessing all info about both parties. Can you answer the following?

\- Does the seller have true WHOIS visible or is the WHOIS obfuscated by a privacy service? a. If visible, what can you figure out about the seller?

\- Do the domain's nameservers point to anything that could help you identify the owner?

\- Is the domain name a generic dictionary word .com or .net? That is, is your gut feeling that it's worth >$10,000?

\- Is the domain listed for sale at any major venues (sedo, godaddy, afternic, snapnames, ect)?

\- Do you have alternatives or do you absolutely need to have this domain?

\- What is your timeline to acquire either this domain or one of your alternatives?

If you feel comfortable emailing me the domain, I can give you a report of the WHOIS history from <http://whois.domaintools.com/> along with my personal opinion.

Lastly, I would specifically recommend you ignore advice from tuscon and johnmurch. Absolutely no domainer takes estibot seriously and feigning legal threats will not help your situation at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this in depth answer. I would really appreciate your input since you know quite a bit. What is your email so I can send you some specific information?

<comment><USER2> Hey, sorry I thought I put it in there. It is cyruslohrasbpour AT gmail dot com. I have no idea if I can help getting you the domain but I can try to give you some perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey,

First off be sure to email them and say you are contacting them on behalf of a client, be just a proxy in this negotiation. Secondly, focus on getting a price from them first. Even if it's something crazy like 1MM, respond back with I understand the value, but my client can really only go upto XXXX, I wish we could pay that, but this is their offer...

Lastly, if you really want to go after them and it's a name that's branded in a way. Just set a price like, sent an email saying look we don't want to contact our lawyers but be willing to buy for XXX.

Good Luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for your response/advice. I tried doing what you mentioned as I have a PR firm and said I was trying to acquire it for a client but they set a ridiculous amount for a domain that is really not worth anything (not a special name, etc) and when I said my client can only pay XXX they said no. Anything else I can do or just let it go? I gave them a value pretty high (higher than I have seen on auctions for much better/more valuable domains) and they have had the domain for 10 years and done absolutely nothing with it so I am not sure why they think they can get such a high price for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Email the whois contact.

Use an email address that does not show you have a huge wallet (if you do).

Propose a price. Not too low. Not too high. Get a good estimate from estibot.com (or valuate.com, same engine). The estimates are sometimes off but it's the best thing around, and professional "domainers" use it.

If you don't propose a price, you might look like a tire-kicker, and not get an answer. If you do propose a price that is way below the market (ref. estibot), then you might upset the person.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not the original poster, but wanted to follow up...

I want a domain that expires on Nov. 11... What's the best service to use to "reserve" the domain as it's going through the expiration process?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the research we have done places say to backorder on the three biggest sites and you only get charged when one of them gets it so you don't lose anything by doing it on all three but it gives you the biggest chances. The sites are namejet, snapnames and pool

<comment><USER5> Awesome, thanks for letting me know! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Cloud Pricing: An *aaS Backwards Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/07/05/cloud-pricing-a-case-of-developers-being-stuck-with-an-aas-backwards-system/ <comment><USER2> So what happens when you get a bunch of companies that are resource intensive but don't have a lot of users?

Plus, many companies define a "user" differently depending on their goals.

I agree that cloud pricing is unattractive. Keeping in mind however that many startups spend most of their initial time in development mode with low user counts in production could quickly fill the service infrastructure up with a bunch of unsuccessful freeloaders.</comment>


Show HN: Learn Chinese words from movie clips - <AUTHOR> https://pingtype.github.io/movie.html <comment><USER2> Very cool. I am currently learning Chinese and have found it hard to find movie/tv shows that include the pinyin subtitles. This is so much better with the color coding, formatting and dual translations. Thanks for putting in all the work and sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the encouragement! Where are you studying? Are you learning traditional or simplified? Is there anything else I can add to my code to help you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, even though I have no clue about Chinese, this seems like an impressive amount of work. How long did it take for you to build the whole thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you interested in other languages? Maybe I can put another dictionary in, and make a version to help you learn something else.

The keyboard came first; that took about a month, last December. January: I made an AppleScript to split the characters and add colours for the tones, from the Unihan character dictionary. February: word splitting. March: porting to Javascript. April: adding Taiwanese, simplified characters, bopomofo, etc. May: movie subtitles.

Future: restaurant menus, teaching English from Chinese, song lyrics, other languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of the translation is not 100% correct but not bad! It does look like it took a lot of work, you got my full respect for that

<comment><AUTHOR> The translations are from Google Translate, but edited by hand. If there's an error, please tell me and I'll fix it! There's also a dictionary editor built in; click the Edit button and see the popup. You can upload your changes to the server, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The volume on most of the clips is way too low. Please make the clips louder. Otherwise, amazing job. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I fixed the volume now, and uploaded combined clips for each level to YouTube.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUS5dz58-4i1ZQF0qouSaQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUS5dz58-4i1ZQF0qouSaQ)</comment></comment>


"The time has passed for the Twitter API" -Mullenweg - <AUTHOR> http://ma.tt/2010/05/twitter-api/ <comment><USER2> Wow, that's one hell of a header!</comment>


Flip to flop: the pocket camcorder flash in the pan - <AUTHOR> https://www.dpreview.com/articles/3814916753/flip-to-flop-the-pocket-camcorder-flash-in-the-pan <comment><AUTHOR> I actually had one of these and really liked it: [http://jakeseliger.com/2011/05/08/will-we-ever-find-out- what...](http://jakeseliger.com/2011/05/08/will-we-ever-find-out-what- happened-to-flip-video/) . It's a shame that the company was bought and then shuttered by Cisco. Most cameras today still don't do the kinds of sharing activities that Flip was ready to roll out back in 2010 - 11.</comment>


Google's Founders File to Sell 5 Million Shares Each - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-22/google-s-founders-file-to-sell-5-million-shares-each-update1-.html

<comment><USER2> With great power comes responsibility. With a 59% interest, Larry and Sergey had absolute power over Google, and therefore absolute responsibility. Perhaps the move in China led some to believe that this is too much power. 52% enables the remaining shareholders to overrule Larry and Sergey's decisions -- in theory. In order for this to occur, virtually all the remaining shareholders would need to reach unanimous agreement against a decision made by Sergey and Larry -- highly improbable, but _possible_. Without absolute power, there is no absolute responsibility. Conveniently, this also aligns with a liquidation of billions of dollars.

<comment><USER3> Nice idealistic thoughts, but the board of directors controls a company. Share holders can't do much except for vote for whomever they put on the proxy.

<comment><USER4> Within limits, shareholders can elect the board of directors, right?

<comment><USER3> In theory yes. But let's say 80% of company X shareholders wanted a large one time dividend payout but the executives of company X don't want to do it.

At the next board election they simply choose two candidates but both who agree with what the executives want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would Brin and Page sell enough shares to lose their majority vote? Google's IPO, and their insistence on keeping control of the company via two classes of shares seems contradictory to this move.

Obviously they don't need the money, and don't need to diversify their holdings to have a luxurious life. So why do it?

Also, a majority share held by Brin and Page was what was supposed to keep Google from doing evil.

<comment><USER6> I doubt they are losing majority vote. They probably have more shares than anyone else, still. Right?

<comment><USER7> They will have approximately 48% voting power, according to the SEC filing: [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125100...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510011019/d8k.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would cash a few billions too, if I had the chance. It would allow me to do things like Bill & Melinda Gates do with their charity funds. Maybe Sergey Brin plans to eradicate malaria from the world and save millions of children each year? Maybe Page wants to use his billions to preserve precious rainforests by buying the land these forests are standing on? After they made this great company, maybe their ambition is to make great impact on the world, too.

</comment><comment><USER9> GOOG 550.01 -32.97 (-5.66%) Jan 22 4:00pm ET

550(5x10^6) = 2.7x10^9

2(2.7x10^9) = 5.5x10^9

So Google's founders are divesting themselves of their company to the tune of $5.5 billion. I don't know how to understand this at all.

-edit-

In my excitement, I didn't catch that they already did the math in the article.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a smart play to do it now when GOOG news is almost overwhelmingly positive (high earnings etc) so they can say "wealth diversification" and not have people question their motives. . .

</comment><comment><USER11> Chinese fiasco?

</comment><comment><USER12> OMG they are reducing their ownership from 15 percent from 18 percent! FUD!

Seriously though, why would you want to leave it all tied up in there and be a billionaire just on paper. Well unless you're Warren Buffet who has never sold a share of BRK except to gift to the Gates foundation... Or Ellison who just takes multi billion $ loans out against his equity pile.</comment>


Textmate 2 - Alpha this year - <AUTHOR> http://blog.macromates.com/2011/whats-next/

<comment><USER2> Hell must be freezing over.

10 June 2011: Duke Nukem Forever released - [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Development_o...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever#Gearbox_revival.2C_2010.E2.80.932011)

12 July 2011: PuTTY 0.61 released - [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.ht...](http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html)

20 July 2011: "Signs of life from GNU Hurd" - <https://lwn.net/Articles/452296/>

28 July 2011: GNU Emacs developers discover that Emacs has been violating the GPL since 2009 - [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2011-07/msg01...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2011-07/msg01155.html)

26 September 2011: Textmate 2 Alpha announced

I joked about this on my blog earlier this year, but wasn't expecting it to happen.

<comment><USER3> 20 September 2011: The Diablo III Beta Is Now Live

<comment><USER4> For "friends and family", however.

<comment><USER5> The friends and family beta was earlier in the year. This one is the real deal.

<comment><USER6> No, the F&F beta started a few weeks ago (two or three) and is still happening. The general beta has started, in theory, but they've given access to so few people it's almost as if it hasn't.

<comment><USER5> Semantics, I suppose. The friends and family test did begin earlier this year in an alpha state. They just didn't identify it as either an alpha or beta phase at the time.

I know a lot of people who have made it into the closed beta.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also got hooked on vim, and couldn't thank Textmate's inactivity more for I may have never been pushed in the right direction and discovered the wonderful efficiency of the vim paradigm.

If I were to use Textmate now, it would need to be just a faster vim, with a less clunky vimscript, and it'd need to embed in a terminal, as vim made it possible for me to do everything on the command line and truly use working directories as my sole division between contextual workspaces.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's good to hear, but it'll have to be pretty damn impressive to retake the ground lost to Sublime Text 2 and vim.

<comment> dorian-graph Sublime Text2 is really turning out to be fantastic. So many 'little' features that make it nice to use.. though as nice as they are I wouldn't use it without vi key bindings.

<comment><USER9> Sublime Text2 has vintage mode, it's vi mode editing package. <http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html>

<comment><USER10> Sublime Texts vintage mode doesn't feel like vim at all. Even basic things like ':x' are missing.

<comment><USER11> By the same token it would be a great way for new users to learn vim while maintaining the comforts of ctrl-c ctrl-v and tab indents etc...

<comment><USER12> MacVim is great for that (if, of course, you are on a mac). It has all the great vi stuff along with the core OS style commands that everyone is familiar with. I believe gVim on Windows does the same but I'm not positive on that.

<comment><USER13> See :behave mswin

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Too slow! I moved to Emacs back in 2007. I don't think Textmate could win me back at this point. I've taken the red pill.

<comment><USER15> Know any good explanation and comparison of find-in-project features in emacs?

<comment><USER16> textmate.el is decent. <https://github.com/defunkt/textmate.el>

<comment><USER14> Funny :)

But, it illustrates that in Emacs you can always steal another editor's best features.

<comment><USER17> <http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TextMate still has the best find-in-project functionality. Sublime Text 2 doesn't compare if you want to rename something throughout the app.

As for vim, it's nice when you're in a console, but I don't think it's as pleasant to use.

The delay with TextMate has been rather absurd, though. Version 1 goes largely unmaintained (still no full-screen functionality for Lion). The last update was in November of 2010. Before then it was November of 2009.

<comment><USER19> > TextMate still has the best find-in-project functionality

You must not have very big projects. TM's find function totally breaks down (spinning beach ball hell) on anything except really small projects.

Fortunately, the solution is AckMate (<https://github.com/protocool/ackmate>), which integrates seamlessly with TextMate and has a very clean interface; and it's lightning fast.

AckMate is really the only thing I miss in Sublime.

<comment><USER20> I think the OP meant the Command-T functionality of switching between files. I have never heard anyone praise TextMate's project wide search, which as you mention is beach ball city.

<comment><USER21> Both PeepOpen and CommandT for vim offer superior file switching functionality (by fixing a problem with Textmate's version whereby it does not take the directory into consideration, which can really help narrow down a search).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think everything has been said that can be said about the ridiculously-long release cycle of textmate, but I still don't get what is so great about sublime. The only thing it seems to have over textmate is split panels and the code overview (which looks cool but has never been very practical, at least for me). Am I missing something?

<comment><USER23> 1\. python console for easy plugins (but Python env is way too stripped down unfortunately)

2\. it's fast

3\. very good ctags support (jump to definitions between files)

4\. go to anything (jump to files)

5\. vim-like cursor position stack

6\. vertical tabs

7\. decent multiple-syntax highlighting (javascript/css in html pages)

<comment><USER24> What does "Go to anything" offer versus TextMate / ST2's Command-T file jump feature? As far as I can tell the two do exactly the same thing.

<comment><USER25> Go to anything allows you to go to methods/functions, do a find in file and go to the line in a file. For example, if I know I want the getWidgets method in Widgets_Controller, I can type Widgets Con[stop typing when the right file is at the top]@getWidgets. To find, replace the @ with a #, and to go to a line, replace the @/# with a :.

I don't if TextMate does this or not, to be honest.

<comment><USER24> Ah, thanks, that's a combination of the TextMate go to file / go to symbol. I've been using Command-T/(Command-R/Control-G) in ST2 since the magic syntax for symbol or line navigation wasn't obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Switched to Sublime 2, a lot more releases + it's on osx, linux windows, meaning I never have to worry again.

Not sure if textmate2 is too late, but it certainly feel like it is, I do not see myself going back there.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'll believe it when I see it. Hopefully it doesn't turn out like Duke Nukem Forever did. Also, I really sincerely hope that they'll open source the 1.x version, although if they do ever release 2.0 it might make that more unlikely.

<comment><USER28> > I really sincerely hope that they'll open source the 1.x version

Why? So you can use 6 years fixing it, for free? Or did you have someone else in mind doing that for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So what's everyone's "bloodline"? I Can't be the only one who went Coda -> textmate -> macvim -> vim

<comment><USER30> What did going from MacVim to vim buy you, exactly?

<comment><USER7> Terminal integration. Which is invaluable as it's a big waste of time cross referencing your projects acroess different parallel contexes.

What's MacVim give you? I never got the point. Everything I've seen also existed in the terminal with a few simple vimrc config. Mouse/trackpad, clipboard integration, OSX commands.

<comment><USER31> MacVim (and GVim on Linux) have better color scheme support. Solarize is great.

MacVim also works with PeepOpen, which was just a jaw-dropping upgrade from tab-completing all my file paths from the project root. It practically reads my mind.

I'm thinking I will give FuzzyFinder a try soonish, though, since it would also work on Linux.

<comment><USER32> About MacVim vs vim and 'color scheme support' and 'solarize': Actually the issue is with Terminal.app which has some weird setup where changing the background is either impossible or always looks horrible.

Also it's particularly difficult to get Solarized setup in a terminal using 256 colors rather than manually resetting the 16 colors of your terminal to custom values.

If you have a sane terminal, vim works fine with 256 color support. A lot of people on OSX use iTerm 2 which I hear has fine 256 color support. I just use gnome-terminal on Linux that's had support forever and dropped solarized since the maintainer is not interested in making any setup work besides gVim/MacVim it seems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been using Textmate since 2006 and I'm still very happy with it. I'm still learning new tricks. Bundles allow it to keep pace fine for me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wonder how that works out. It's not just that people are waiting quite a while for an upgrade, it's also about regaining trust that once you get your beta (or even 2.0 final) out, the next pause won't be as long…

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't see this as different than from the last time the developer said "Hopefully an alpha version will be ready before too long..." back in 2009. I hope he proves this wrong, though.

</comment><comment><USER36> Given that 2.0 is labelled as a free upgrade to 1.x users and that the market for TextMate is already saturated (TM users have probably already bought a license and given how poorly TM has been supported, I doubt there are many people switching _to_ TM), I wonder how long it'll be until a paid 2.1/3.0 ships with critical bug fixes and the features 2.0 left out in order to get it out the door.

<comment><USER37> I think that TM probably made a big mistake by offering a free upgrade to 2.0. Especially given the apparent ambition of the rewrite.

Assuming it has some nice new stuff, I, for one, would gladly fork over more money for a 2.0 release.

<comment><USER38> Maybe it's their way of saying "sorry for the delay"? Rewarding dedicated users with a free upgrade seems like a good idea to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Too late. Hooked on Vim.

<comment><USER40> I'm a total vim junkie now. Its available on every OS and sees a lot more development efforts. The only downside is the learning curve but I've already put enough time in that its no longer an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Did we just run out of things where everyone though they'd never be released?

</comment><comment><USER42> The discussion at this thread only convinced me to give a try to Sublime Text 2 (currently using Textmate). Never stopped to take a look at it. The vim mode looks nice.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone using Vicoapp? If MacVim and Textmate had a lovechild it would be Vico. TM2 is going to have to be pretty amazing for me to switch.

<comment><USER44> I've played with Vicoapp but it just didn't work for me, for some reason there was just too much of a disconnect with commands I was used to in vim not working as expected. I haven't tried it lately, might have to give it another go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's a bit too little too late but I'm curious what they'll bring to the game now with so many people converting to Sublime Text 2.

</comment><comment><USER46> I recently stumbled across the RopeMate bundle for TM. For Python it gives you intellisense/code-sense style autocompletion, and also a nifty 'refactor' command (ie. pull the selected code out into a new function which accepts any referenced variables as arguments), replacing the existing code with a call to the new function.

Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've always just used Coda since I got a Mac 5 years ago. I haven't had any problems, so I haven't been compelled to switch. However, I keep hearing people talking about Textmate and Sublime. Why should I switch (I've been holding out for Coda 2, but I'm starting to lose hope)?

</comment><comment><USER48> This is indeed good news, but I made the switch to vim a couple of months ago.

<comment><USER49> Same here, I switched to vim when I realized that TextMate 2 was basically the "Duke Nukem Forever" of text editors.

I don't think I'll switch back, but I will play around with it and see what was so awesome that took that long to develop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> TM-1 was wonderful, so TM-2 should be fantastic. New users will _love_ it, I'm sure. As for the original TM-1 users, they may just have moved on, after the long wait for their favourite features.

<comment><USER51> I think a healthy amount of skepticism is good. Just because TextMate was initially good doesn't mean that TextMate 2 will meet everyone's expectations. And like it or not, TextMate 2 will have to live up to everyone's expectations... you can't pre-announce a new version three years in advance and expect everyone to ignore their own expectations.

Shipping is important.

<comment><USER52> Three years? Make that five.

And every additional year makes your point even more relevant — I can understand, even if it is just subconsciously, that one cannot fit all the things I expect in a 6 or 12 month release cycle. I cannot accept the same for a 60 month cycle, even though I do know that that's not how software development works (cf. mythical man month, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Anyone using Kod? (<https://github.com/rsms/kod>)

I love the interface, although it's still in beta and lacks a few handy features.

<comment><USER54> My issue with Kod is that it hasn't been updated in months. Rasmus is simply too busy to keep the project alive.

I've moved to Sublime Text 2 for the most part but you should also look at Chocolat. It's coming along nicely for basic editing.

<comment><USER55> Several people here mention Sublime Text 2. I can't see code folding (which I really like in TM).

<comment><USER54> As of a few days ago, code folding was added to Sublime Text (albeit, not too intuitively, yet).

[http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime- text-2-buil...](http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime- text-2-build-2126)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> In the last year I've moved from TextMate to RubyMine and there is very little that I miss about TextMate, while RubyMine (at least for Ruby) offers so much more.

</comment><comment><USER57> Hard to believe that I bought my TM license on October 19th 2006. It's been 5 years! I'm looking forward to another 5 years with TM2.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, as others have mentioned, Sublime Text 2 has won me over.

</comment><comment><USER58> After years and years of waiting they decide to tell us something... At least there is hope

</comment><comment><USER59> I predict an Oct 22nd alpha release date, what with The Rapture booked in for the 21st.

<comment><USER60> I'll go for a Dec 25th release :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> ah I remember when I was excited <http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on- it/> :-)

Hope the alpha will all make us forget the release time. The bar is very high though.

</comment><comment><USER62> Will it finally be available for Linux? If not, I'll stick with Sublime Text 2

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't believe it.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is a truly great troll.

</comment><comment><USER65> I'll never understand why everyone loves TextMate so much. I mean, its a nice text editor but there are much better ones out there. Maybe I'm inexperienced or maybe I work far differently than TextMate users but Espresso is where it's at for me. Actually now there's Chocolat (<http://chocolatapp.com>). The alpha is shedding bugs quickly and it's shaping up to potentially be my favorite text editor of all time.

</comment><comment><USER66> mind = blown

</comment><comment><USER67> <http://www.sublimetext.com/2>

</comment><comment><USER68> Notepad++.

<comment><USER69> ...runs exclusively on Windows, whereas the existing TextMate runs exclusively on OS X.

Different platforms and different audiences, mate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Everyone I work with is a former textmate user. Seriously, at least a couple dozen people. I know maybe 1 or 2 who are dumb/crazy/lazy enough to keep using it. Not a good retention rate.

It was good software, and had great longterm potential. But Allan's personality destroyed it (he's an artist, not a coder). I'm sure there's a great story behind how the project fell into the toilet, I'm looking forward to the book.

<comment><USER71> Why are people dumb/crazy/lazy for continuing to use it? Some of use just want a clean text editor with syntax highlighting and a few other features. Some of us also do not follow Internet drama and know nothing about Allan's personality.

<comment><USER70> Agreed, but then you decide to... _gasp_ open jquery.min.js and your text editor decides to crash. Better luck next time.</comment></comment></comment>


Five Myths of HTML5 (vs. Adobe Flash) - <AUTHOR> http://radleymarx.com/2010/02/five-myths-of-html5-vs-adobe-flash/

<comment><USER2> While I'm always glad to see articles created by non-famous people on Hacker News, it sucks when the article turns out to be utterly worthless and riddled with inaccuracies. Seriously, a random Slashdot post is more worthwhile than this, yet it is the #1 story. This also pretty much proves that either the Hacker News voting system is flawed, the author is gaming it, or the community is no longer as tech savvy, or doesn't read the content. Any of those possibilities is sad.

Myth 1: the video tag will replace Flash video

The video tag won't replace Flash video? Has he missed the memo that YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion have already rolled out HTML5 support? It is not perfect, but it is clearly going to happen. Whether this hurts Flash, is another story: but HTML 5 video is already here and has replaced Flash for many people.

I'd like to see a good analysis arguing why this trend might not continue -- not an apologist stick his head in the sand.

Myth 2: HTML5 is here, Flash is dead

Flash obviously is not dead. However, HTML 5 is here. See WebKit, Firefox, the iPOS platform (his invention), Google Chrome OS, etc.

Myth 3: Canvas is good for artists

He doesn't really expand on this point except to give a few minute examples of things he doesn't like about it. For example, you can't use fonts that didn't come with the browser. Pardon? Has he totally missed the web font module of HTML5?

Canvas doesn't provide interactivity and it is impossible to make a game with it? What? I have personally played Contra with an HTML 5 Canvas NES emulator. <http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/>

Myth 4: HTML5 will solve all the problems associated with Flash

He goes on to argue that most of the problems with Flash (splash pages, high cpu usage, etc.) will continue with HTML 5. This is true, and his only good point, although I have never heard anyone actually say this...

However, HTML 5 will provide a much better, open sandbox for these problems. E.g. you can modify the DOM to block an ad, or detect a script that has gone into an infinite loop, etc. See Google Chrome or various ad block or Greasemonkey scripts for some creative uses of this fact.

With Flash, at best, you can simply kill the plugin.

Myth 5: Adobe is not scared of HTML 5. In fact, Adobe is pushing HTML 5 forward even harder than Apple?

I was about to write up an angry rebuttal to this, but seriously, it's not even worth responding to. After reading this last one, I kind of feel like I've just been trolled hard.

<comment><USER3> One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption. Penny-arcade had a strict policy against such ads, but when 99% of ads requests became flash based even they changed their tune.

That short-content, user generated video hosting sites have experiments with the video tag does not signal imminent shift in the platform.

<comment><USER4> _One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption._

Near-universal adoption on the supply side is irrelevant if there's no demand on the consumption side.

<comment><USER5> Users don't "demand" ads of any sort, let alone Flash ones.

Advertisers demand Flash-based ads, because they can do stuff like animation and sound, but more importantly because they can use Flash's full tcp/ip sockets to send arbitrary tracking information home (e.g. how long was the ad displayed for, any mouse-over events, browser and os information, etc).

<comment><USER6> You can do the same with an embedded <iframe> sourced from your own adserver

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Myth 1: the video tag will replace Flash video_

The format issues over graphics formats in the 90's ended up working themselves out in the end; even though there were patent concerns, everyone wound up supporting GIF, PNG, and JPEG due to market pressures (though PNG support in IE took a while to actually work correctly). It's not going to be easy, and it may take another couple of years of wrangling to get something fully settled, but it will happen.

Of note, Google, one of the biggest and most powerful proponents of web standards, the largest provider of video content on the internet, the author of the third most popular web browser, and the main financial support for the second most popular web browser, has bought On2, the company that produced the original codec that became Theora, and which has much more advanced codecs that are currently available in Flash only. Now, Google is still in the process of going through all of the regulatory hurdles of purchasing On2, and so has not yet said what they plan with it, but given that information, I think that there's a fairly sizable chance that we'll see some movement on the codec front within the next six months or so.

 _Myth 2: HTML5 is here, Flash is dead_

This is correct. Most of the new features introduced in HTML5 (and other modern standards, such as CSS3, SVG, and the like) are not done yet, or are at a "public preview" level in terms of compatibility and completeness. Canvas has been around for a while, and is fairly well supported portably, including a compatibility mode for IE, so it's pretty much ready to use, but some other features are not.

Right now, it's time for geeks to start playing with HTML5, building tools to make authoring with HTML5 easier, pushing it to its limits to discover where they are and fix them before everything gets set in stone by backwards compatibility limitations and inertia in the standards process. If you need to deliver interactive multimedia content to a broad audience in a month, or in six months, it's not yet time to switch from Flash to HTML5.

 _The leading HTML5 browsers, Safari and Chrome, make up less than 20% of the desktop market._

Er, I'd consider Firefox to be a leading HTML5 browser as well, and it commands ~25% of the market.

* Moving on, the Flash Platform today provides a far more complex level of interactivity that the HTML5 digerati can imagine, including skinnable components, embeddable swfs, movieclips, native apps w/ native processes, video and microphone input, peer-to-peer communication and file transfer, the Text Layout Framework, shared whiteboarding, and multiplayer games …and that's just the off-the-top-of-my-head stuff.*

Some of this is bogus (skinnable components? How about CSS?), and some of this stuff that belongs not in the browser itself but in a library on top of it, using lower-level functionality (shared whiteboarding, multiplayer games), and some of this represents genuine limitations that HTML5 does not address (video and microphone input).

But the excitement about HTML5 is not simply about what HTML5 itself provides. It's that standards based web development is actually moving forward again; standards that meet real needs are being written, and implemented, by browser vendors. There was a long dead period in browser development; from about Netscape 4 until the release of Firefox 1 and Safari 1, when Microsoft had so much market share it was inevitable and Microsoft had actually ceased browser development altogether, and when the standards bodies went off the deep end with crappy XHTML based standards that no one really cared about. And until around version 3 of Firefox and Safari, and the release of Chrome, they were still to small in market share to make much of a difference. But now advanced browsers, with much faster JavaScript, support for SVG and canvas and Web Fonts in an open format and, support for video and audio and more are reaching 30% market share, and it's now becoming a serious platform.

 _Myth 3: Canvas is great for artists_

Some parts not true (all major browsers support some form of Web Fonts by now, and technologies like Cufon can convert fonts into paths that can be rendered on a canvas even without native web font support).

The tools are still not here yet, this is true. As I mentioned above, HTML5 is now at the stage for hackers and geeks to play with it, push the boundaries, and start writing those tools that will allow artists to do great things with HTML5.

 _Myth 4: HTML5 will solve all the problems associated with Flash_

Well, this is a pretty uncontroversial statement. There are never any silver bullets, that will solve all of your problems. However, HTML5 does offer the ability to solve many of the listed problems.

 _1) CPU hogging – yes, Flash pushes CPUs. But so does HTML5, even with really simple apps._ _4) Crashes – this one is harder to clearly refute except to say that Flash Player 10.1 is far less resource intensive than the current version because it's meant to work on mobile devices, which is no small effort. In contrast, HTML5 is brand new and therefore untested. As people start to experiment with complex canvases, we're going to see CPUs pushed just as much as Flash, if not more._

The advantage HTML5 provides is that browsers can compete on performance and stability; as no content is locked in to a single vendor's proprietary rendering engine, there is actually opportunity to provide something better than one Flash can provide.

 _2) Banner ads – HTML5 won't kill Flash banner ads – they'll just be done in HTML5, but now you can't ignore them with a Flash-blocker (note to HTML5 developers – you can have the banner market. Please. Take it.)_ _3) Splash pages – we finally defeated Flash-based splash intros, only to see them reintroduced for HTML5_

Sure, and banner ads and splash pages existed before Flash, too, and are still done with Flash today (when did anyone defeat Flash-based splash intros? I still see them all the time). Advertisers will annoy users with whatever technologies they have available; but having it all in one format that is standardized easily navigable by DOM will make it easier for the authors of ad blockers to selectively block content.

 _Myth 5: Adobe is afraid of HTML5_ _The fact: nobody is doing more to support HTML5 than Adobe (not even Apple)._

Wow, this is a bold statement. Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Opera have dedicated many engineer years to implementing HTML5 in the browsers. They founded the WHATWG, the group that originally wrote the HTML5 spec (later adopted by the W3C after it realized what a failure XHTML 2 was).

 _Adobe pushed for SVG integration but was ultimately won over by the flexibility of Flash._

Beyond the fact that SVG is not HTML5 (yes, I realize that people use HTML5 as an umbrella term for all modern web standards), it's true, Adobe was one of the early supporters of SVG. They did a crap job of implementing SVG as a plugin, though, and ended up simply buying Macromedia with its much better Flash plugin instead, and abandoned SVG. They haven't really shown much of a commitment to SVG, HTML5, or any other modern web standards since then, though, devoting the majority of their effort to promoting Flash and Flash based platforms like Flex and Air.

So yes, Flash had many years to pull ahead. It will take some time for the browsers to catch up, and become ubiquitous enough to depend upon. It will also take some time for tool vendors to produce tools that can compete with Flash. The disadvantage of it being done in standards is that the process is a bit slower, and it can take longer to wait for the stragglers to catch up (beyond the long head start Flash got due to the implosion of the browser market and standards process). The advantage is that the browsers can compete on stability, performance, and all of those issues that Flash is notorious for not addressing; by using open standards, your content is not locked into an engine provided by one vendor only.

<comment><USER8> Regarding "CPU hogging," there is nothing wrong with a graphics-intensive program using the CPU -- in fact, this is necessary to continually refresh the screen.

It only gets out of hand if the software does not give time to other applications who request it. In Chrome, if you minimize the window or switch tabs, then the CPU usage returns to normal. So, I do not classify this as "hogging." It would be interesting to see what happens if a second CPU- intensive task is running simultaneously, but note that here different users will have different preferences on priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"Bottom line (and greatest irony): the only company we can actually count on to make HTML5 successful will be Adobe."_

Uhm. No? Where did you get that idea? Microsoft has the majority of the market. If Microsoft suddenly forced an update to all browsers which supports html5- well gosh. html5 would instantly be a huge success just because almost everyone is forced to use it! I'm not going to go into other examples where other companies could also make html5 a success because I already disproved your point; however, I will say that I don't believe the success of html5 is up to adobe.

</comment><comment><USER10> I could write and write about all the problems with Marx's arguments, because there are many, but it's just not worthwhile.

 _To those less informed on the whole situation:_ The simple fact is that Flash isn't going anywhere for a long time, but at the same time, implementation of HTML 5's features is quickly going to become far more pervasive (we're already starting to see this). You, of course, have people from both extremes arguing both sides ("Flash is dead!"; "HTML5 will never get anywhere!"), but if you're really listening to just these opinions, you're only going to get a very polarized view of the situation.

Sit down, read the HTML 5 specs, keep up with the latest HTML 5, Flash, and major browser updates, and you'll get a better picture of the situation. Listening to people like this Radley Marx really does not give you an informed or balanced view of the whole situation.

</comment><comment><USER11> _The problem solved by Flash video wasn't can I show a video? Instead, Flash solved can everyone watch my video? HTML5 video doesn't provide this solution; it just adds another approach to the incompatibility pile._

Isn't support for codecs built into browsers that support the video tag (rather than requiring external software to be installed, when embedding)?

<comment><USER12> Why are you forgetting that codec's themselves are "external software", the only difference would be that the browsers themselves would be shipping them.

One could kind of argue the Ogg Theora would not be "external" just because it's open source, but in reality all codecs are external, especially the proprietary ones like H.264.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I posted a much more comprehensive and correct summary here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101588></comment>


"Ready Player One" is the worst thing nerd culture ever produced - <AUTHOR> https://www.heypoorplayer.com/2017/07/28/second-opinion-ready-player-one-worst-thing-nerd-culture-ever-produced/ <comment><USER2> Books that are cringe-worthily bad in every possible way are sometimes, unaccountably, wildly successful and make their authors tons of money. It's frustrating if you're a) an author, and/or b) care about the genre or topic of such a book, but that's the way the world works and it exhibits no signs of changing any time soon. I don't get it either. No amount of pointing out how superbly awful they are ever seems to help.

<comment><USER3> > Books that are cringe-worthily bad in every possible way are sometimes, > unaccountably, wildly successful

Actually, it's quite easy to account for it: not everyone has the same tastes as you.

<comment><USER2> I don't mean things-I-don't-like—there are _lots_ of things I don't like that aren't bad—I mean books that are the literary equivalent of some of the worst films that make it on MST3K or Best of the Worst succeeding in a field of direct competitors, many of which are in every way superior, and not on the strength of any kind of cult following or reading-ironically or whatever, but for... some unknown and perhaps unknowable reason. It's like Cry Wilderness outperforming ET at the box office, and its fans not seeming to be in on any kind of joke, but sincerely preferring it. Just baffling.

Or if Titanic, to deliberately pick a movie that's not gonna win the hearts of many film snobs anyway, had had every single shot nigh-comically misframed, weird scene transitions right in the middle of significant speech or actions, a CG Titanic that occasionally floated _above and out of_ the water for no obvious reason, extras playing all the speaking roles, and so on, had still performed just as well and been popular among ordinary audiences, who betrayed, in interviews, no apparent awareness that the film was totally and obviously messed up in fundamental ways that ruined any kind of story or message it may have been trying to convey. But that actually happens sometimes with books. And then the critics go "wait... what? Did you... actually read it? It's very, very bad. I mean, you _did_ notice that, right?" and the fans say "you just hate fun! Get your head out of the clouds! People like different things!" It's very confusing.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe this happens with books and not with movies because movies—especially those with any hope of popular success—pull you through the story rather by the nose, so it's more jarring when they entirely fail than when a book does. Maybe some people are so much better than me at getting lost in books that they're seamlessly replacing dialog, entire paragraphs of text, whole scenes, plot lines even, with things that don't suck, not even realizing they're doing it. I guess that'd explain it, if they're unconsciously live-fanfictioning the thing in their head to make it better.

<comment><USER4> I meet a lot of people who share this perspective. They're the ones who remember one line from Harry Potter that repeats a word or who think the Da Vinci Code was the worst-written thing that year. I always think that these people must not read very widely, because these books aren't actually poorly written. Were you to read ten randomly published books in any year, you would understand that, actually, there are tiers and tiers of writing that are actually bad. Typically, the books people target for cultural derision have prose that is workmanlike at best but which have met with success due to tight plotting or pacing, which is difficult to construct, or because the subject of the book taps into something in the zeitgeist and expands some conversation society is having with itself (Gone Girl or Fifty Shades).

The only NYT bestseller in recent years that comes close to your Titanic analogy is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that sold on its title alone and which I would not be surprised to learn not a single person has read, including the author. Most successful books of the stripe you're describing are more like a singlecamera situation comedy--they stick to a basic but largely innocuous set of prose conventions that won't win awards but allows the author to focus their efforts on elements their audience cares more about.

<comment><USER2> Eh, I wouldn't put Harry Potter or a lot of other Juvi Fic in the "total disaster" category, certainly. Hell, I thought The Hunger Games was occasionally pretty good, and in a few cases almost managed to be _very_ good (she kept managing to belabor the point on something that could've been left sublimely understated—cutting just a couple dozen sentences from the first book, at least, would've done absolute wonders) and I was pleasantly surprised that its particular themes and story arc, through the last book, were so popular with its target audience, though I remain confused by the "Katniss is a badass hero with a bow! Yay girl power!" form in which the work entered the popular imagination—did I accidentally read different books? See my previous post's theory that perhaps some readers heavily rewrite things they read, as they read them, without realizing it.

However, having participated in read-alouds from Fifty Shades for the LULZ, I'd dispute its being good for any purpose other than comedy. No, not even _that_ purpose. Those scenes are some of the worst of an already hilariously bad lot, reading as if they were written by someone with a weak vocabulary describing LEGO set instruction manuals. They'd be unacceptable as free Internet writing of the sort (ahem, one supposes). They're damn funny though.

> The only NYT bestseller in recent years that comes close to your Titanic > analogy is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that sold on its title > alone and which I would not be surprised to learn not a single person has > read, including the author.

A friend of mine read and _enjoyed_ it, in fact, though he likes (some) bad fiction in a haha-I-can't-believe-this-got-published sort of way. He's also the one who got us in to the reading-aloud-from-Fifty-Shades activity.

<comment><USER5> >They'd be unacceptable as free Internet writing of the sort (ahem, one supposes)

Well, they started as Twilight fanfic...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I loved about Ready Player One was that it was an unapologetic celebration of obsession and nostalgia. It was a plot contrived to create a setting where those qualities were what was needed to save the world. It's not particularly deep outside of that, and I don't really mind.

Geekdom is becoming more popular in popular culture, but RP1 does it in a special way that I can appreciate. _The Big Bang Theory_ does standard sitcom stuff and plays a laugh-track when recognizable "geeky" thing happens like a character having a Nintendo 64 on-screen for a moment. RP1 has an infodump about an easter egg and a glitch in a specific arcade game (... not entirely different than some of the type of nonfiction I like) and then works it into a contrived but fun plot point. It paints a world where many characters are driven by obsession, and that this isn't a spectacularly weird thing they do. (Yes, the book does take it to some amusing extremes.) Maybe it's the likely asperger's syndrome in me talking, but I feel like obsession is a big thing in my life, and it's fun to find a story that actually embraces that.

Yes, I know that the way the character often interacts by trivia-dropping is grating outside of scenarios where trivia saves the world, and possibly still a bit grating within those scenarios. I never thought those parts were being portrayed otherwise. Yes, there's common problems with fandoms about gatekeeping and lack of inclusion, and no, I don't think it's unforgivable that RP1 doesn't address these. _RP1 's popularity is not a dismissal by society of these issues._

No, I never thought it would be a good idea for human culture to stop creating new media and cling to 80's stuff, or felt like the book pushed for that at all. Maybe others read it differently, but I figured that the setting was like that just so the book could focus on 80s nostalgia specifically with no other media to get in the way while also having futuristic VR.

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone forgot to have fun.

Yeah, it's trash, but trash can be fun! I think getting out of your head and just enjoying something is important without needing to critically analyze it. It seems this book was pretty polarizing, like The Last Jedi.

<comment><USER2> There's plenty of competently-written trash to choose from, though. Most of the better genre fic falls in that category, and there's no shortage of it.

Incidentally, I think it's fair to describe The Last Jedi's polarizing effect as having _very different causes_ from something like RP1.

<comment><USER8> Diametrically opposite causes, even. TLJ is a story about moving on from and getting over the past. RP1 is about obsessing over it and clinging to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought the book was a really outstanding trip down nostalgia lane, and a great way to bridge the past with the future. However, that being said, I think the movie (from the trailers at least) appears to push things too futuristic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Site is overloaded ... here's the direct youtube link: [https://youtu.be/BcTxIT6RyGc](https://youtu.be/BcTxIT6RyGc)

</comment><comment><USER11> I listened to the audio book. Didn't seem like the worst book ever, seemed like a book made to guarantee a bunch of royalties. Wasn't the worst thing I've heard/read. I've read Ayn Rand which was definitely worse, but is still beloved by many. And here we are. Different people enjoy different things.

<comment><USER12> The claim in the headline isn't that it is the worst thing ever, just the worst thing produced by nerd culture.

The Ayn Rand comparison seems off the mark, because while they may have been embraced by a segment of nerd culture, they are not products of that culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those who have seen the trailer, consider this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Lz14wu1uw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Lz14wu1uw)</comment>


Digg v4 Launch Story - <AUTHOR> https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ <comment><USER2> A really interesting take on what was going on. Also, it isn't surprising at all that Python's default handling of object arguments could lead to disaster. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> For anybody who doesn't know, this is recapping history from about 8 years ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Redesign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Redesign)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use VaultPress or other WordPress backup tools? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering signing up for VaultPress for my site, but am holding back because of the price. The cheapest plan is about double what I'm paying per month right now for DreamHost hosting, and it really seems odd to pay more for backup than hosting!
I've used BackupBuddy for WordPress before, but it was way too intensive on my site and ended up doing recursive backups (by the time I noticed, it was trying to upload a 25Gb backup to Amazon S3 from a site that was only about 500Mb large at the time…). So, I killed it, and currently download a backup via FTP and push it to S3 manually every so often.
Does anyone here use VaultPress or another WordPress backup solution? Could you share your experiences with it? <comment><USER2> Have you considered a cron job running mysqldump plus an incremental tar command on the WP directory?</comment>


Show HN: The coolest little calculator you ever did see. - <AUTHOR>

A spent a few days designing and programming a calculator app that I thought would be intuitive and simple. It utilizes a single gesture control as well as shake detection. It's free for iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/numbrs/id517346105?mt=8<p>If you download it, let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> Really cool!

Are you thinking of adding new features because you could add sine (and sine-1), cosine(cos -1), square root, tangent (tan -1). This could have a lot of potential.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you think it's cool! I had it priced at a buck but didn't get any downloads, so I decided I'll just use it as an experiment to see how the gestures and accelerometer feature play out. I originally had those options, but I felt they took away from the simplicity. I'm not sure how I would fit them onto the screen without taking away from design.

I thought it had a lot of potential as well. I guess I'll have to work harder at contacting app review blogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would save the last computed value so that you can repeatedly do a function. i.e. 10*5 = 50 = 250 = 1250 = and so on.

</comment><comment><USER4> This may be the wrong time/place to mention it, but I was looking for an online calculator some weeks ago and could not find something that met my needs. I wanted a calculator that would fill in the missing field so I could vary time, interest and principal. For example: How much per month do I need to save at 5% interest to have a million dollars in thirty years? How much if you make more interest? How much to do the same thing in twenty years?

Anyway, best of luck/just tossing out ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does that not exist already? Sounds like a neat weekend project. I can see it already - savvr, the savings calculator.

I'll let you know when it launches :P

<comment><USER4> If it exists, I could not find it.

Looking forward to the personal email advising me of your launch. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dayta – data tracker for mindful living - <AUTHOR> https://dayta.app/?hn <comment><AUTHOR> I had been using Google Sheets to keep track of some of my daily activities. Google Sheets is a feasible solution but the UI is not optimal for this use case, so I built this web app and released it on the first day of 2020. Hopefully Dayta can be a useful tool for those who are pursuing a mindful life.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the one thing that keeps you up at night? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I wonder if the economy is truly on firm footing. Since the industrial heartland has been stripped starting in the seventies and excessive financialization of what remains from the 80s on wards. After the collapse of 2008, the only thing that keeps the economy up in any meaningful way is the global central banks infusing play money into the system and building an illusion.

As long as the world is willing to go along with this illusion, it's not a problem. But once that confidence is lost, I dread to think what will happen. I think that once the baby boomers enter into retirement en mas and start impacting on pension plans that are not likely to return to its participants what they were expecting and health services and selling their real and financial assets(stocks, bonds etc..) to finance their retirement life, real valuation will implode.

People living in cities are especially vulnerable as all their daily means of existence relies on outside sources. Water, food and every other essential is trucked into cities. Anyway, it may take 10 to 15 years but I hope there is a way out this mess.

</comment><comment><USER3> My insomnia.</comment>


Context Free: a program that generates images from a grammar. - <AUTHOR> http://www.contextfreeart.org/

<comment><USER2> Structure Synth <http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/> works similarly in 3D. I've used it with SunFlow <http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/> to make some pretty neat images relatively easily:

<http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/111770/1/grfx?h=7e3f2e> (view full-size for best effect).

</comment><comment><USER3> Since _why is in the news today, here's an interesting post about a similar context-free graphics generator: [http://hackety.org/2008/12/04/theFrustratingMagicalAspect.ht...](http://hackety.org/2008/12/04/theFrustratingMagicalAspect.html)

(He's also a fan of Context Free, and has written about it elsewhere.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've spent many an hour on that and related sites, I've also found that Flickr is a good source for inspiration: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/contextfree/interesting/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I got into this a while back. One of my.. things was used for the splash screen.

<http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/view.php?id=207></comment>


Life Extension: More White Men - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/309831/life-extension-silicon-valley-dystopian-future/ <comment><USER2> > "Most Americans aren't interested in clinging to life at all costs, and most > of us don't want to live much longer than we already do."

I suppose most Americans believe in an afterlife because of the irrefutable evidence supporting it rather than desperately wishing it to be true.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree that immortality among white men raises a lot of hard question. And I intend to discuss them for as many millenniums as it takes.</comment>


Ask HN: Financial Sector Shrinkage Good? - <AUTHOR>

I will try to state this as succinctly as possible:
Over the past ten or more years, the percentage of the S&P500 that financial service firms occupied, as I understand it, rose from ~5 to ~20.
My opinion is that these firms (IBanks, Hedge Funds, etc.) don't really add useful innovation (even if they do add jobs), but rather they skim money from the system in the form of fees, at their most legitimate, and CDOs and CDSs at the more shady end of the spectrum.
What do you think? Will we be better off after these organizations get beat down, and there is not so much money out trying to make a quick buck, but instead is spent trying to add real value to our lives? <comment><USER2> I agree with this hypothesis. Furthermore, advances in computers and communication and electronic record keeping should have allowed fewer people to be employed in the industry, shuffling much larger amounts of money.

I think much of the current economic "crisis" is actually a necessary shift or adjustment from certain industries to others. It was the veiw of many that the "panics" that occurred at the end of the 1800s railroad building boom were simply a necessary adjustment, society had employed many in building railroads, which were done now, so period of unemployment might be necessary as lots of people shifted to doing other things.

I think the collapse of the housing market had that as a factor. The number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and square footage per capita had increased a lot, as people's standards increased. It may be that many people feel they have enough house, or maybe even too much, and are shifting to other things. Such a shift of course exposes the shakiest business practices first, such as sub-prime mortgages and so on.

I believe that there are two other industries that are also due for some shrinkage, and they are education and health care. Both of these are, like housing, heavily intertwined with the financial industry through loans and insurance.

</comment><comment><USER3> its a multifaceted problem. while the financial services firms multiplied, yes, it is also a byproduct of the fact that the global pool of money also grew by a similar factor over that time period.

the things that the institutions did to break the economy were definitely bad, with their poorly planned investment vehicles, but i don't _think_ that the number of firms reflects anything beyond the existing wealth. there became enough money and interest to support more firms.

</comment><comment><USER4> IF all they did was skim money, then the economy would have simply routed around them (just as discount execution-only brokerages did to traditional stockbrokers, or Internet banking did to branches on the high street). That it didn't suggests that they _did_ create value, and that the premise of your question is flawed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am saying they occupied a disproportionate size of the economy relative to any potential they had to add value.

Yes, they may have sold investments to those who wanted to invest, like the first commenter said, but that's just filling a need, not adding value to people's lives.

<comment><USER4> How does fulfilling a need _not_ add value?

<comment><USER2> Take the lottery, for example.

The economy hasn't routed around that, and it clearly does not add value to the economy or society. Yet it "fulfills a need" in the sense that people willingly seek it out, and in fact seek out illegal "numbers game" lotteries were no official one is allowed.

<comment><USER4> But it blatantly does. The National Lottery funds all sorts of stuff ranging from arts to athletics and provides a form of entertainment in and of itself. People who don't wish to participate don't, yet it is still very popular.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trello Get Serious About Big Businesses as It Passes 1.1M Daily Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-get-serious-about-big-businesses-as-it-passes-1-1-million-daily-users-and-triples-sales/ <comment><USER2> I don't think you point to the right link.</comment>


Ask HN: If you did a CS related bachelors, what was your final solo project? - <AUTHOR>

Also interesting to note would be what happened to your final project/dissertation once you completed your degree. <comment><AUTHOR> I'll go first. I made a prototype/proof of concept tool that could detect if multiple authors had contributed to a project dissertation that should have been written by a single author. I got the idea when I met a final year student who was far off from finishing his project with just a few days to go. He explained to me that someone else (a friend) was writing about four chapters of his dissertation for him.

Even if lecturers read and realised the obvious stylistic differences between the chapters written by the student and those written by his friend, a simple "gut feeling" would not suffice as proof to accuse said student of plagiarism. Thus I built a tool that would statistically analyse the writing styles of the students and spit out a probability/certainty report that said which chapters were almost certainly written by someone else.

It worked at a very basic level for long form texts. I never ended up making it an actual product simply because I've lacked the time and determination to collect and organise (especially organise) the material required to train a system into being a real usable product. I had big dreams for it, including usage in forensics and courts of law (answer to the question of was the witness/accused/victim forced to write the letter? Did the witness/accused/victim actually write it him/herself.. etc).. Ah well. Someday maybe.

<comment><USER2> I am currently interested in stylistic and stylometry. Do you know of good resources on this topic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, there was a TON of research on this topic. I'll try and dig out the paper that was the foundation of my dissertation. Till then I can tell you what I did to get my own reading. I simply googled for stylometry research papers and then like a wikipedia article I searched for each paper referenced by that paper. Stylometry is just a very vast topic so I might be able to help further if you could say what kind of way you want to apply stylometry. Plagiarism? Long form document authorship verification? Email verification? Writing assistance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A bit of back-story; during my second year of university I picked up C# after a summer internship at a local company. I was purely taught Java at university, but was keen to learn other languages as I wanted to expand my knowledge past what Java would offer me. Sure, Java to C# isn't a huge paradigm shift, but after playing with LINQ I was sold on .NET.

For my final-year project, I built a search engine from scratch using C# that would rank websites based on "how they looked". This involved looking at the various data structures required to store and retrieve this information, alongside figuring out how to rank pages on both content and their looks. To handle the looks, I took a screenshot of each page, reduced the size to around 100x100 and scanned the colours of each pixel to see if text would contrast. Alongside this I scanned the CSS of the page to check text colour and see if it matched the pixels; if it did, do a comparison against this. I can't remember the exact algorithms I used, but if you used dark text on a dark background you'd get ranked down, and vice versa, alongside some other metrics.

The result was very crude, and looking back on it now the code was terrible. I had implemented the data structures myself, had a semi-decent crawler set up, and could sit all the tools alongside each other to crawl the Internet. Most importantly, it worked so I ended up getting decent marks! While the code makes me cringe, my write-up was fairly impressive, and I felt that writing 40k words over a year helped my writing ability considerably.

</comment><comment><USER4> I made a electronic voting system. Nothing too fancy, it was 85% documentation and 15% code (because very little of the final grade was about code anyway).

It was an attempt at reproducing proctors into an electronic system. Namely interested parties could sign up to receive the votes in real-time. It had two kinds of distinct databases/receivers (vote tallies, and a list of people who had voted).

The two databases were designed so that they were auditable but went to pains so the two couldn't be merged later trivially. So discovering who you voted for was non-trivial. This was done in part by delivering the votes in real time (no caching) and delivering the people who voted in big dumps and randomising them continuously (so that the order they voted wasn't deterministic). The voter database didn't even store which terminal they used, only which location (since that is needed to check it against the paper list later).

Essentially it was four pieces of software: A voting station, a vote receiver/database, and a voter receiver/database, and a "vote designer" which just set up the voting station's config (which was XML).

It was originally meant to have a piece of software so that people could register themselves to become receivers/proctors but it was never implemented and I had more than enough to talk about with the design and what was implemented (and it also left me something to talk about in my areas of improvement section).

After I graduated it was never touched again and I don't even know if I still have the code...

</comment><comment><USER5> My was composed by a dissertation and a project. I went extra mile, it wasn't required. In my dissertation I "leisurely" verified that the general problems of collaborative filtering did appear also in a specific music dataset (that for the sake of secrecy I'm not going to reveal,but you can consider a music dataset as big as the one available in iTunes Store 5 years ago). My point was, if you like A and B, and another user like A,B,C, is not necessary true that you have to like or be exposed to C as well.

Later on I decided to try out and implement a better solution. In short it was on paper a behavior driven solution for matching preferences, with an underlaying layer of audio analysis and a collaborative fallback. If I look back at it, honestly talking, the implementation was a mess and probably biased towards the dataset.

I did a Master in ML + AI applied to Multimedia with a focus on audio signals. I went trough the same idea, this time with a more scientific approach. Graduated. Patented part of the algorithm, sold to a company, hired by the same company, integrated in their system, and moved on :)

In other words, pick something that you are passionate about, it maybe turn into a shortcut into the work world and give you a starting position much higher than any other grads.

</comment><comment><USER6> For my High School final solo project I made a few computer vision applications, using OpenCV and C. Using the webcam you can "play", you can draw, etc. using the color tracking method; I made a simple head tracking and motion detector too. You can find it here: [https://github.com/dlion/ExamProject](https://github.com/dlion/ExamProject)</comment>


"Respect Explorer's Heritage" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/we-need-an-invert-selection-button/

<comment><USER2> If the design turns out to be a Microsoft blunder, it just opens the door for someone to build a better file explorer. The ability to do this has led to many great products in the past. The file explorer in Windows is optional. It's there. It's free. Use it. Or don't.</comment>


Distribution of the 37M users on Ashley Madison - <AUTHOR> https://tecnilogica.cartodb.com/viz/56e702fe-4693-11e5-8f79-0e853d047bba/public_map

<comment><AUTHOR> Geographic profile maps which are basically Internet users maps [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a touchy subject and my statements are merely conjecture to kick off a discussion:

Given the greater proportion of males to females using the service, is it fair to infer that men are more likely to cheat, or more likely to premeditate the act of being unfaithful?

If the latter, and we assume both sexes are just as likely to cheat, for women it's more likely to be an impulsive act - one of passion - whereas for men it's a planned behavior.

<comment><USER3> Another hypothesis: men looking to cheat try all methods they can think of, including this, whereas women looking to cheat probably have success with the first method they try.

Because the top most attractive men may get a large percentage of all the women in a situation where relationships don't matter, so there are more men who can't find a match.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So in 3rd world countries there is pratically no cheating.

<comment><USER5> No, there are basically no people cheating on the Internet. Emphasis on the "people" and "Internet".</comment></comment>


My experience with Unity VR editor - <AUTHOR> https://skarredghost.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/unity-vr-editor-review/ <comment><USER2> Huh, my experience with the Vive and a good rig (i7, 32gb ram, gtx1080, etc) has been fluid and easy to use. More useful for tweaking props in my levels than "creating" things, but there are serious opportunities (and some good starts) to sane VR user interfaces. Even if they can just nail using twirl gizmos for fine tuning integer inputs would ripple out and be useful in the 3DS Max / After Effects / video editor / whatever VR software of the future.</comment>


Show HN: Nectar – A modular MVC framework for PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.nectarmvc.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting. I like the modular approach the author seems to be taking. Keep the core small and extend with modules. However, there are some things I don't get about Nectar:

\- it is meant to reduce the barrier to entry, but from what I've experienced, Laravel does a very good job at lowering it, \- it seems like the framework doesn't come with Composer [1] support built in, which means you can't import all sorts of awesome packages out of the box, \- other frameworks are modular, namely Laravel, Symfony, Silex and a lot of others: what does Nectar provide that these well established and battle tested frameworks don't?

I'm not trying to hit on Nectar, but I'm not sure I see its added value (yet).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! My main goal here is to recreate the workflow I'm used to with Zend (with a bunch of customized stuff I've added over the years) without all the bloat of Zend. Its more of an experiment than a finished product (started it wednesday of last week). I plan to add more tools and composer is definitely on the list. :) I guess this really stems from me not liking how ZF2 works, but not wanting to give up a workflow that works really well for me (from ZF1). I think that there are a lot of developers in the same boat as me, and I really just want to build on it and make it better.

<comment><USER3> I definitely see the ZF1 influence here. Disappointed to see that application.ini made the jump--ini's are a really annoying format to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't mind ini's. What format do you prefer? I thought about going with YAML for the configs instead since I'm already using it for the database schema...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Problems that warrant Docker orchestration - <AUTHOR> https://railsadventures.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/docker-orchestration-the-full-story/ <comment><USER2> What's the advantage of switching to containers in this example setup?

If you're only using ~3 machines, why not deploy "by hand" and have a text file that maps containers to machines. If you're using a ton of machines, presumably the marginal machine-waste is minimal and you should just stick to the role-per-machine setup. It's way simpler.

I'm questioning the necessity of all this added complexity.

<comment> erez-rabih The advantages of switching to containers are numerous. They provide isolation, portability, quick boot times, consistency, application + dependencies in one package and a lot more. It totally refines development- production similarity when working on a software system. The same container that runs on the developer's machine will run in production. When working with Docker, your delivery pipeline is a lot more consistent and reflects better the code that runs on production later on. Docker has all the advantages VMs have, but with some major improvements: they are a lot more lightweight both on boot time and when moving them over the network, they share host machine resources and more. A quick search in Google will yield more than you can read about this topic :) I agree it is more complicated managing Docker containers than managing VMs, but I don't think of Docker as a new way to run things on production, this is just the side-effect. I think of Docker as a better, more consistent, way to develop and deliver software projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > No matter how you twist it, the same port cannot be occupied by two > different processes on a given machine

Is that not what SO_REUSEPORT is for? (Serious question). Not that it would solve this problem necessarily

<comment><USER4> No it is not. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14388706/socket- options-s...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14388706/socket-options-so- reuseaddr-and-so-reuseport-how-do-they-differ-do-they-mean-t)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sold on the title of this article. It isn't about Docker Orchestration at all (an example of an article about orchestration would be [https://blog.docker.com/2015/02/orchestrating-docker-with- ma...](https://blog.docker.com/2015/02/orchestrating-docker-with-machine- swarm-and-compose/))

This article is just about the problems that warrant implementing an orchestration solution. It is only at the end that they hint about talking about how orchestration is actually accomplished in a "Next time we'll talk about..." teaser

<comment> erez-rabih Thanks for the comment ecaron.

As this is the first post of a series, I wanted to present the problems we're dealing with when running Docker containers on production. It was also important for me to specifically touch the major shift of mind and new challenges that Docker has brought to our production infrastructure.

As I see it orchestrating Docker isn't about a certain tool or a framework. It is an abstract problem that is being solved in many different ways/frameworks.

That's why I do think that Docker orchestration is an appropriate title for the article, but I can see where you're coming from :)

The next post in the series is going to be much more specific to ECS and Kubernetes.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the write-up, this is really helpful to get the big picture. Looking forward to your next posts.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How I host my blog on AWS and ci/tooling - <AUTHOR> https://dizzy.zone/2018/08/15/How-I-host-this-blog-CI-and-tooling/ <comment><USER2> Agreed about DynamoDB being awesome but why the need for three different database types (mysql and sqllite too) for a blog?</comment>


Bare Metal Solution: Enabling Specialized Workloads in Google Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/bare-metal-solution-enabling-specialized-workloads-in-google-cloud <comment><USER3> This is essentially just a co-located box, that you connect to your virtual network over a VPN/interconnect. Why is it not inside the virtual network? Why is the pricing hidden behind a sales person? That seems like the first cloud instance to have hidden pricing...

<comment><USER4> Given the vagueness of the announcement, one may wonder if it's custom consulting masquerading as a product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They don't call it out in the announcement, but this was published in the same week as the "Supercomputing" conference - GCP hasn't had an answer for HPC workloads thus far, so maybe this is their attempt.

<comment><USER6> It's not a proper answer for HPC without an actual low-latency low-contention RDMA fabric. Typical HPC systems have a large fraction of materials science computation that really needs it. There's an example of scaling cp2k (I think) on Azure, but I've not used Azure to be able to say how well it works compared with an actual HPC cluster where you can also monitor the fabric (which is quite important).

<comment><USER5> Fully agree, but the announcement is pretty bare-bones so no reason to think that adding InfiniBand is totally out of the question, particularly since this offering seems to be pretty far from a standard GCP experience.

Having experimented with IB on Azure, I can comfortably say that the problem is not so much the fabric but the general usability of Azure itself - <USER2> garbage doesn't do it justice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if it's competitive with Rackspace and similar, or if they are charging a premium and/or things like egress.</comment>


A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.cvaieee.org/html/humor/programming_history.html

<comment><USER2> I was amused that the author parodied pg's use of footnotes, but I'm wondering who else's writing style I'm missing because I don't read their work.</comment>


Is one programming language more secure than the rest? - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/most-secure-programming-languages/ <comment><USER2> Since the number of errors found is not normalized by the number of projects that are consider for the study, the number of % are worthless.</comment>


Google's headcount shrunk in 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.footnoted.org/buried-treasure/a-first-for-everything-google-shrunk-in-2009/

<comment><USER2> So do their Gmail performance...God...it's terribly slow on my Mac Safari. Google please do something about it...it's been like this for a long while now!</comment>


Website helps people divest their money from gun stocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.springwise.com/website-helps-people-divest-money-gun-stocks/ <comment><USER2> Technically I can invest into guns more with this site.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow too much work.</comment>


Someone pursued my electronic puzzle idea - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/338502/magic-cube-heralds-the-future-of-gaming-and-human-interfaces

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the Hacker News discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93647></comment>


3-D Printer Company Seizes Machine From Desktop Gunsmith - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/3d-gun-blocked/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WiredDangerRoom+%28Wired%3A+Blog+-+Danger+Room%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> What a dumb project.

You could build a single-use .22LR pistol out of ABS, sure. The barrel would have to be three inches thick to contain the pressure, there'd be tons of propellant blowby as the barrel warped under pressure, it'd only work once, and the total lack of rifling would give you pathetic accuracy.

It would "work", but be totally impractical, as well as expensive. (Printing giant blocks of solid plastic on a FDM machine is spendy) It's like the actual goal of this project is to get the ATF to take an interest in regulating 3D printers.

<comment><USER3> The printers might get better?

Also, is it conceivable that new gun mechanisms could be invented, optimized for plastic guns? Would the strain be less if you shot plastic bullets?

I don't know anything about gun physics (as is probably obvious).

<comment><USER4> The strain is caused by the explosion of the powder in the round. There really isn't anyway around it. If you are going to accelerate a projectile to speed, then you are going to get equal but opposite force on the device(per Newton's law of physics). You might be able to print a low speed, low weight projectile item like a b.b. gun.

<comment><USER5> Or you could print most of the parts and use a steel or FRP barrel and hammer assembly.

<comment><USER6> Keltech at Home!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stepping up just slightly from the fact that this is about a gun, this is really just part of the movement to get access and production closer to people, with fewer intermediaries. Linux and other open source. Servers. Personal assistants. Music, books and other media production and consumption.

(And in that vein, if companies are intent on getting more done with fewer employees, then I'm fully on board with getting more stuff from fewer companies. But that's another rant.)

In the US, we have the unique atmosphere of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, and so this is also a way to make it easier for citizens to exercise their rights.

Finally, 3D printing and its effects have shown up here on HN a couple times recently. HN'er cstross's <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34_%28novel%29> is a great novel that features exactly that idea as a sub plot. I really enjoyed the book.

</comment><comment><USER8> The guy on the video seems like a sociopath. I think his goal is to raise his profile amongst gun-rights activists. Politician in training.

Thank god there isn't a 3d printer for viruses. (yet)

</comment><comment><USER9> Shouldda used a RepRap...

</comment><comment><USER10> The main issue with restricting availability of 3d printers is an economic one. The potential for engineering improvements, cost savings, insanely tight development cycles and mass bespoke manufacture-to-order would seem to strongly favour the society with the least regulation on this.

Is not as though it is really going to widely cut the cost or massively increase the availability of handguns however.

The economics of established mass manufacture of simple mechanical items will have an edge over 3d printing for a while yet for any items that derive negligible economic benefit from uniqueness or short runs.

There is little economic benefit in 3d-printing basic guns, in the same way as there is little economic benefit in 3d-printing paperclips. People who really want guns can get them dirt cheap already. I think grips will start being 3d printed however and the existing high-end market for bespoke crafted guns will start using technology like metal laser sintering, if it doesn't already.

I am just hoping that a few idiots won't manage to completely hijack the public perception of this technology, just to play the violent-paranoia politics of gun rights, when there are far more interesting uses for this tech than adding more guns to a world that already has a massive surplus of the bloody things.

<comment><USER3> I live in Germany and I have never held a real gun in my hands. I am not sure where to go to get one. I think there are some shops, but a gun permit might be required to buy one.

Printing one at home would lower the bar, I think. Not that I need a gun, but I mean in general. What about kids, for example?

<comment><USER10> I grew up in the UK and did some cadet training, so I learned to shoot a small caliber rifle there. I also know some farmers, some professional hunters, and some folk who go on pheasant shoots so I know a few people who use guns professionally and for sport. Legal guns are pretty widespread. On the other side, there is an illegal gun market in most large cities, where prices are shockingly low. In the reports of the recent killing of police in Manchester, both guns and grenades were claimed to be being sold on the street for between £50 and £200.

As for the argument about kids, if your kids have easy access to bullets, then there are already problems long before they start trying to 3d print a gun.

<comment><USER3> Good point - I guess somehow there has to be a way to print the bullets, too...

Not that I am eager for the time when everybody can print themselves a gun at home. But I guess it will happen.

Also, I have no idea how to find such a black market. Perhaps asking on Twitter would work? Otherwise I can only think of silk road, the BitCoin market. Never checked it out as I don't do drugs, but perhaps they also do guns?

Not that I want a gun atm, just curious out of principle.

Actually I would like to have a gun in case there is some kind of apocalypse. But I don't want to have a gun around (I think statistics say that you are much more likely to be killed by a gun if you have a gun). There should be some way to hide it somewhere safe :-/

<comment><USER10> Guns are pointless defensively for anything barring a very narrow range of situations. If you are really that worried, get a big stick, it is far more likely to be useful and you aren't going to get arrested, shot, or accidentally blow off bits of yours or other people's anatomy. Better yet, cheer up and stop worrying about the possibility of some kind of apocalypse, and if it does happen, and you have a 3d printer and a load of material, may I suggest you start with water filters and simple pumps rather than weaponry.

<comment><USER3> Good point :-) I didn't actually think "I need a 3d printer so that I could make a gun". If I was seriously worried, I'd try to get a gun the official way.

Not saying I am not worried, but I don't seem to get round to building that emergency package.

<comment><USER11> The problem with serious stockpiling is that you make yourself a target for anyone who didn't, if the worst actually happened. A stockpile of weapons might help protect you, but if you're sitting on years and years of food and survival equipment in a wasteland of thousands of starving and desperate people, chances are most of your weapons will just be one more thing looted from your corpse after a less well prepared and more desperate person gets lucky.

That's why you need to stockpile something which will be extremely valuable after an apocalypse, but not worth killing you over. Something which is cheap now, but that most people with a little extra food stockpiled might be willing to trade you for. Something you need and will use daily anyway: toilet paper.

Plus, any accidental death resulting from your toilet paper stockpile is probably going to be _hilarious_.

<comment><USER12> Or something valuable that clearly requires your personal knowledge to operate. Like a fancy radio.

<comment><USER13> This is an excellent reason to be a bicycle mechanic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That will surely stop him (and others).

<comment><USER15> surely not

although, I don't see the point to use a 3d printer there. an advanced CNC routing machine will make better gun parts.

<comment><USER16> If this is about the affordability of 3d printers, couldn't a desktop CNC machine do something similar? You can buy one on amazon.com for $350-ish:

[http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Toolworks-CNC-Carving- Machine/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Toolworks-CNC-Carving- Machine/dp/B002ARTLUG%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-z-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB002ARTLUG)

I don't know if it would be adequate, but it has a working space bigger than some pocket pistols for sale today. Guns are relatively simple machines with forms existing for a century still sold new today. Such as bolt action rifles.

<comment><USER2> 1.) That's about a thousand dollars short of a functional CNC mill.

      NOT INCLUDED - This is just the CNC machine with motors. You will need
      a 3 Axis Stepper Motor Driver to manage each motor, a spindle/cutter
      (a Dremel would work) and a DC power supply for the driver. You will
      also need a computer with a standard printer port and CNC software. -
      You will also need a way to mount and secure the spindle/cutter
      tightly to the Z-axis plate on the machine.

2.) It can't mill metal.

3.) A mill's the wrong tool for a barrel. You'd use a lathe for that, and even then it'd be smoothbore, without the tool to cut rifling.

<comment><USER15> re 3) the only regulated (in US) gun part is the lower receiver which looks like this: <http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11669>

A mill is the right tool for that (though, it's tricky and some manual work will be required)

A barrel is available for online purchase (in US) No problem here.

For other countries, with stricter gun regulations, like Russia, making a barrel would be a problem, but it's usually solved with a Deep Holl Drill (using a steel rod or cylinder as a source)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 'Meek' Shall Not Inherit the Earth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-meek-shall-not-inherit-the-earth-the-shepherds-will-54d355a7754a <comment><AUTHOR> I heard this podcast as well. It appears the author combined this with some other ideas that are somewhat similar. I read Gladwell's book he references, it's a good read. The other book he references sounds interesting too. That quote from the Greek resistance fighter really stuck with me.

</comment><comment><USER2> Jordan Peterson talks about it sometimes. I bet the podcast the author was hearing at the time was one interviewing Peterson... But is a nice idea</comment>


Ask HN: How do you learn new english word? - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone,
I want to develop an app for learning new english word. I make some research but i need further. If you are not native speaker, can you write how you learn new english word and do you use a web app for learning english word?
Thanks everyone! <comment><USER2> Check out Urban Dictionary. They add new words daily plus they have word of the day and lot more, but the words are just too kind of, UHMMM... Well, they don't make much sense. To me they just don't seem so genuine and usable in daily conversations, anyway check it out yourself. - [http://urbandictionary.com](http://urbandictionary.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for answer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any body else?</comment>