The Boombox Incident: removing bald people from photos - <AUTHOR> https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2019-03-21/the-boombox-incident <comment><USER2> For the actual removal, you could try using conent-aware resizing[1] along with blob detection to give the person to be removed a negative weight.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk&t=3m43s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk&t=3m43s)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how well it works on people who have a skin color closer to their hair color.

<comment><USER4> I was about to suggest it really needs to at least be tried on people with darker skin tones.

<comment><USER5> Or old white people.

<comment><USER6> Or blonde white people.

<comment><USER4> People who aren't in Seinfeld.

<comment><USER7> This comment is outrageous, egregious, preposterous!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Deep learning with a 100 samples can do this completely with the body too. This is a similar project I did: [https://comic2gif.com](https://comic2gif.com) where I remove the speech written on the images, the same technology can be used here.

<comment><USER9> But edge detection is a lot easier on comics than on photos I would think. The background on a comic would also have a mostly solid color background which makes it easier.

<comment><USER8> > But edge detection is a lot easier on comics than on photos I would think

That should be true. But deep learning based models work quite good on natural images as Vgg dataset is mostly natural. This is perhaps one-off usage/application on comics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know this was a joke but I still wanted to see more examples

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hey, author here, thanks for the attention on this post, especially the feedback regarding CV techniques. i wanted to write about some basic computer vision tools in the context of a Seinfeld reference. it was intended as a joke, but i realize it could be hurtful. i'm sorry if i hurt anybody's feelings.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really like that you explained the algorithm and decisions you were making instead of just ploping code some on the page.

Well done!

</comment><comment><USER12> As a photo store clerk I can confirm that this is indeed one of the most frequent requests we get, so this could be a huge timesaver. But you really need to work on the removal part, it's practically unusable as it is!

</comment><comment><USER13> When they apply this to the DVD cover of Die Hard 4, what would the result be?

</comment><comment><USER14> George is by far my favorite sitcom character. His schizo-nuances and paranoia and hilarious! I can relate.

<comment><USER15> Very much agreed. That character is so memorable that it's difficult for me to think of him playing a non-George role. I think the actor had trouble with post-Seinfeld roles too.

<comment><USER16> For me it's the same with characters from Friends. I can't see them in another role (except Jennifer, it's kind of odd to see her in other things but not as much as the others).

That being said, George is an absolutely great character and one of my favourites in sitcoms :) Just reading these comments makes me want to rewatch Seinfeld.

<comment><USER17> I thought David Schwimmer was pretty perfect as Cpt. Sobel in BoB.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, might depend on the movie / series. I did like LeBlanc in "Episodes" as well :)

Overall, seeing them will always remind me of their characters though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now show how to add back a cartoon character drawing of the boss (bald man,) like in the show.

</comment><comment><USER19> So close!

</comment><comment><USER20> As a bald man, I approve!

</comment><comment><USER21> Loosely related video, Star Trek actor talks about being bald: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqm_Iq8rFeg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqm_Iq8rFeg) .

I'm linking it to remind that perceiving baldness as something negative (here: a criterion for removal from a photo) can be a cause of distress and loss of confidence.

<comment><USER15> I do understand why people would feel insecure about baldness. Is it changing for the better though? Loads of "cool" bald people, think Vin Diesel etc. I still have a head full of hair and just turned 30. Not sure how I'd feel as I've had long hair all my life. I do feel that the volume isn't as high as it was in my early 20s..

I hope we make some progress in a cure either way.

<comment><USER22> There is medication that can prevent baldness. It has very rare, but very scary side-effects though. Eventually we might have something that fixes the genes responsible for baldness.

<comment><USER23> I don't feel like baldness is something that needs to be fixed. To me that sounds the same as saying the genes for blonde hair can be "fixed".

<comment><USER24> Blond hair is easy to fix. Hair dye has been around for years. Why shouldn't bald people be afforded the same freedom, in an era where we literally fly through the air on titanium wings just to take vacations?

<comment><USER23> It's the term "fix" that I don't like. It assumes the opposite state is broken.

<comment><USER24> A person with normal hair growth can choose to be bald. Someone with alopecia cannot choose the reverse. If baldness were to appear only by choice rather than as a result of low IGF-1 expression in hair follicles, I would imagine it would be _more_ respectable, not less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Technical aspects aside, this post is in a really bad taste.

Next time you're itching to show off your chops, maybe pick a project that does not involve airbrushing people somehow deemed unworthy of being remembered, based on their looks?

During world war II, the Nazis had the laborious task of detecting Jews among the occupied populations, at scale. Is that also a task worthy of being automated and then writing a post about it?</comment>


Hexagonal Cross Stitch - <AUTHOR> http://isohedral.ca/hexagonal-cross-stitch/ <comment><USER2> Hi Hackers! Thanks for your interest. The site is back up now, but unpredictably so if traffic spikes again. In the meantime, here's a stable link to a saved PDF of the page: [https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hcs.pdf](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hcs.pdf).

</comment><comment><USER3> I like these kinds of scientific/mathematic explorations that relate to craft. The article on mad weave also sounds interesting (unfortunately it's not open access).

The site seems to be overloaded, but there's a Google cache available: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oCEyfys...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oCEyfysa0XMJ:isohedral.ca/hexagonal- cross-stitch/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER4> Google Cache returned a 404 for me, but I was able to locate this on the Wayback Machine: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190325003050/http://isohedral....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190325003050/http://isohedral.ca/hexagonal- cross-stitch/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's strange to think that with all the research that has gone into 2D weave patterns, I have yet to see any real application of it come out of the PCB dielectric industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> One nice aspect of the Shepard sampler is how she uses the same base pattern for all the tiles, which makes the differences between the symmetries very clear even to layman such as me.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, in the end I decided that I didn't have the time or experience to design a single unified theme for the whole piece. To some extent I also don't really have enough resolution in my grid -- some symmetry groups might not have ended up with very many translations of the motif.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The closeup picture of the open hexagonal weave fabric looks eerily similar to a design I cut into the flywheel of a (rejected) battlebot I built.

I intended each straight section to act like a tension element, and a tri- axial pattern with large open hexagonal holes seemed to me to be the most efficient design.

[https://youtu.be/5mnNPMfzap0](https://youtu.be/5mnNPMfzap0)</comment>


Peter Norvig interview about online education - <AUTHOR> http://remotelearningproject.com/interviews/peter-norvig/

<comment><USER2> I found the business model talk to be the most interesting; not heard it discussed before.

When I was first out of school, my first interview wanted to see my transcript, so I gave them an unofficial copy. The hiring manager in charge mentioned that they were not really even looking at the grades, just the classes completed. This was not in the valley; rather, a defense contractor in the US southwest.

One thing I wonder about, though, is the student gets a free ride scenario. That sounds like it would be the worse case for many other universities. If everyone who was qualified to get into Stanford can now go there, why go anywhere else? Will local universities used as local co-working and lab spaces? Will some of them just go away entirely or become hybrid campuses where lab work qualifies for credit at both Stanford and the host campus?

The co-working part is OK with me. I often had conversations like, "Hey, that socket stuff is hard, I keep getting problem XYZ." "It is rough. I got around it with fix ABC." Building stuff together was more valuable than listening to the same lecture together.

<comment><USER3> My sense is they are decoupling the sorting (I am smart by virtue of getting into Stanford) from the education. As long as the sorting is clear, students won't complain about the education.</comment></comment>


Bringing improved PDF support to Google Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/bringing-improved-pdf-support-to-google.html

<comment><USER2> Oh sweetness. I was using this [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhg...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn) but the plugin seems better.

Only problem is that now .doc/.ppt via extension is gone because I had to disable it to get plugin support. Need a rev of that extension to remove pdf support, and then we're saved!

Update: hmm, miss regular context menu too.

<comment><USER3> I disabled the extension, but pdf's just download... I have 6.0.437.1, which should be the dev channel version. Windows.

Ideas?

<comment><USER4> You also need to go to chrome://plugins and enable the experimental PDF plugin.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic news--mostly because of the sandboxing. Once burned, twice shy--I'm not allowing 3rd party plugins in my main browser any more. But I'm willing to trust Google to sandbox these features correctly. (Don't let me down, guys.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant. The idea that loading a PDF won't cause a horrible browser freeze- up then require controls unrelated to the rest of the browsing experience is quite a lovely one.

I wonder what impact this will have on scribd, at least the 'avoid pdf pain' side of their business?

<comment><USER7> > I wonder what impact this will have on scribd, at least the 'avoid pdf pain' > side of their business?

There's a way to answer that. What is their userbase like, and do they run Chrome? If the primary browser is still IE (and it kind of seems to me like 'easing PDF pain' is incongruous with people who have total understanding and control of their interaction with the internet) then scribd will be safe for... how long did it IE6 last? Probably about that long.

<comment><USER6> True, true. Perhaps Google can use this as a selling point to ordinary users? Though of course a large number of these are going to be using computers at work which usually means IE[6-8].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one thing that I've _hated_ about Chrome is now fixed. I never have a reason to go back to Firefox now. See ya, Mozilla!

<comment><USER9> There are plugins both in Chrome and FF where any PDF links automatically opens it up using google docs. Much more faster smoother than native PDF loading. I just tried out this new integrated PDF on Chrome Dev channel (6.0437.1), and as mentioned it doesn't have all the PDF features, it loads PDFs on the left hand corner, instead of center. Much much faster though.

<comment><USER10> My experience has been that downloading + opening pdfs with a decent pdf viewer is much faster than google docs. I personally use evince, but probably anything other than acrobat would work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The rendering quality is sub-standard compared to Safari on OS X at the moment, but I'm really excited there is another browser vendor trying to solve this problem!

</comment><comment><USER12> I like this so far. On a few experiments it rendered pdfs well, very fast, and didn't feel nearly as clunky as reading a pdf in the browser usually does.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like it's using at least libtiff and lcms from running `strings` on the plugin...

</comment><comment><USER14> Mmmm... Sounds really cool. Waiting on the Linux version.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't decide if Chrome is leading the way, or pulling ahead, but the gap is widening considerably.

I, for one, welcome our small round red-yellow-green-blue overlords.

<comment><USER15> Chrome 5.0.375.70 on Ubuntu Lucid still leaks memory terribly, forcing me to kill processes (tabs). Anyone here with insight on this?

<comment><USER7> I have been running the dev build for a long time (6.0) and I leave it and some particular tabs open for days at a time, never had a problem.

<comment><USER7> I forgot to clarify, running the dev build on Ubuntu. I am using 10.04 right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best sources to understand how GPT-3 works? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> GUID Partition Table ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table)) or GPT-3 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3))?

edit: forgot the question mark</comment>


HOPE X - <AUTHOR> http://xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx/ <comment><AUTHOR> I just posted because the domain is cool. Also, it is SFW</comment>


The dying technologies of 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3020339/computer-hardware/the-dying-technologies-of-2016.html <comment><USER2> There are far more landline users than Microsoft phone users. It's not even close.

</comment><comment><USER3> They couldn't depict the CRT being _recycled_ , at least?</comment>


Microsoft CEO says encryption backdoors are a 'terrible idea' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/13/21064267/microsoft-encryption-backdoor-apple-ceo-nadella-pensacola-privacy <comment><USER2> ...while winking slyly and making a "nudge" motion with his elbow.</comment>


Children Are Hospitalized with Mysterious Illness Possibly Tied to Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/nyregion/children-Kawasaki-syndrome-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> Fear mongering at its best. No causation, just correlation. And the correlation is imperfect, kids who tested negative for covid also had the illness.

<comment><USER3> So they said in January, for all cases.</comment></comment>


Go is moving to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/sckirqOWepg <comment><USER2> I think this is Google quietly admitting that Google Code is all but dead. They will not completely get rid of it, but I would not be surprised if they switch it to read only mode sometime soon.

This is a momentous move for Github, especially with Microsoft moving .NET to Github as well. As someone who loves Github immensely, this makes me happy knowing that my favourite service is going to be around for a very long time.

Kudos to the Github team for well and truly making it as the premier code hosting and collaboration tool for developers and lovers of open source. It only goes up from here.

<comment><USER3> > I think this is Google quietly admitting that Google Code is all but dead.

Well, I doubt that Google Code engineers or project managers had much, if anything, to do with the decision to move the Go project.

<comment><USER4> That they didn't have a say in this matter though, speaks volumes...

<comment><USER5> It would if the whole idea wasn't based on an assumption with no evidence.

<comment><USER4> You mean we need evidence to know that moving Go to GitHub would be against the interests of the Google Code people, and that they would protest such a move?

Being cautious is one thing, being a sucker for being too cautious is another.

There are things like obvious conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google hosting Go on GitHub. Microsoft hosting .NET on GitHub. It must feel like an accomplishment to be implicitly endorsed by these companies.

Considering open source's history, you'd think its primary management tool would be open source as well. I guess it's GitHub's combination of accessible design + performant version control + lack of ads + reliability that made it the premium source for anything open source.

I'm impressed.

<comment><USER7> Am I the only one who thinks some more competition would be nice? I would like to see more code move into BitBucket or similar. New version of Kiln will make it possible to use Git and Mercurial against the same repository which sounds like a great feature (not sure if there is a free plan on Kiln yet).

<comment><USER8> You are not the only one. We finally have decentralized tools only to... put all the eggs back into one basket!

<comment><USER9> Sorta. The eggs you're placing into github's basket are different from the eggs you've decentralized. I'd argue those eggs (merge requests, issue tracking, discussions) have never really been successfully decentralized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a huge compliment to GitHub, for Google to be moving one of its premier open source projects off of Google Code and onto GitHub.

More importantly, though, this is a significant compliment to the Go community, for Go to uproot itself and move to where the majority of its users are.

<comment><USER10> They moved many of their popular Java projects recently: guava, guice, closure tools, gson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The writing's on the wall for Google Code. I don't think I've seen a new feature in several years.

<comment><USER12> I'd love for them to just go read only, a TON of academic work lives on there, but its awful to use.

<comment><USER13> I much prefer Google code defect tracker to the GitHub one. But that's about the only plus of Google code.

(Though, a small part of me wants mercurial to live on, but it doesn't seem like that will happen)

<comment><USER12> That defect tracker is nice. I've never used mercurial so I can't comment on that. Github keeps getting better, I'll bet if people asked for improvements to defect tracking we might get them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think these are two separate issues:

      1) Go is moving from Google Code to Github
      2) Go is moving from Mercurial to Git

To echo another user in the thread: "am I the only one who prefers Mercurial to Git?" In my view Mercurial is on par or even superior to Git, but lacks "Linus made it" fame. Too bad... I have used both Mercurial and Git and find hg command line interface much more intuitive to use. As for GUIs, there really isn't much difference between the two (too bad GitHub only supports git though).

<comment><USER15> I get the impression that people who prefer Mercurial to Git only ever talk about interfaces and not about the underlying model. It seems to me that especially for a tool as important as version control, the underlying model is significantly more important: you can wrap a mediocre interface in a nice one, but if the model isn't very good you're pretty much stuck. That isn't to say that Mercurial's model is bad per se, but it certainly strikes me as significantly less elegant than Git's. (I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong about this - I know Git's model pretty intimately but am only moderately familiar with Mercurial's.)

This problem seems to generalize quite a bit. Emphasis on surface-level characteristics rather than core differences seems to be prevalent in comparisons of databases, programming languages, web frameworks, etc. This seems quite bad, but I have no idea how to fix it.

<comment><USER16> > This seems quite bad, but I have no idea how to fix it.

Most people, when interacting with their database, use SQL (or whatever native command language it provides), and don't need to worry about the underpinnings.

Most people, when interacting with their source code repository tool, use the command set provided by the tool and don't worry about the underpinnings.

I've had problems with my databases before that forced me to learn about the horrid can of worms underneath. Until I had these problems, I didn't care because it was entirely irrelevant to the thing I was trying to do.

I've thankfully never had enough of a problem with any of the repo tools I've used (cvs, svn, hg, git) that I needed to go diving into the data structure itself to figure out or fix a problem. I hope I never have to, because that's not the job I'm trying to do.

You shouldn't need to care how the tool works in order to use it, unless using it is your primary job. My primary job is writing code for my application, not writing code for my database or repo tool.

If going distributed, hg provides a much more sane initial set of commands that make more sense to people with experience using anything that isn't git. This matters a lot, because those commands are the only things most users ever really care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is great to see so many projects moving to git and GitHub in particular. GitHub is incredibly helpful for quickly taking a look at a project and figuring out what areas of a project are still evolving and being actively developed.

<comment><USER18> You could also say that everyone moving to GitHub is leading to a dangerous centralized monoculture that evaluates software quality based on how well it fits GitHub's conventions.

<comment><USER19> git is still git - people don't even need a github account to have full functionality.

<comment><USER20> How many Github projects accept git format-patch submissions? There's functionality beyond the basic DVCS commands.

<comment><USER21> In Go's case, we will be using Gerrit (elsewhere) for accepting submissions. GitHub will _only_ be used as a source code mirror, wiki and issue tracker.

<comment><USER22> Wait wait wait... no pull requests? There's no way you could just hook up PR's to gerrit? Using github just as a mirror seems to defeat the entire purpose of github, which is to encourage more community members to contribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google Code has a really bad user interface. This migration makes sense. I wish they stuck with Mercurial and moved to Bitbucket instead, but Github is still better than Google Code.

<comment><USER24> Google Code needs web and UX designers STAT, or it will die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Now all we need is Jeff Bezos to buy Github :-) That would be funny.

But on the story this is a great move, Github is much nicer than Google Code and more actively supported. I had not heard of Gerrit before and that was a really pleasant discovery. Now to figure out how to get that setup at the office.

<comment><USER26> Gerrit is an absolute treasure of a tool. I shudder everytime I make a pull request in Github because Gerrit's contribution model is _so_ much better for my workflow.

<comment><USER27> It has some hairy points though. I have never liked it's review per commit model (yes, I know you can circumvent this by using merge commits).

I think the Github style works, assuming you have a sufficiently good CI system that can also receive GitHub web hooks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is so sad that Google Code has not been given some love. Their bug tracker is far, far superior to Github. The review mechanism is also quite, quite good (Gerrit I presume). The UX was too, too Sourceforge-ish and could not compete with Github or (what I think is best of breed) Bitbucket.

</comment><comment><USER29> Props on the move, it shows that golang is flexible to make moves for what's best for the community rather than stick it out in google code. I hope this results in benefits to the iteration cycle.

</comment><comment><USER30> I was hoping for this transition for a long time! Github is far more accessive and user-friendly than the Google repositories. Great move.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know what code review system they are using with github?

<comment><USER32> I'm curious what Gerrit gets them that Github doesn't have natively, too.

<comment><USER33> There are a lot of things lacking about GitHub's code review process (pull requests). Off the top of my head:

\- Merging a pull request (almost) always creates a merge commit, polluting the change history. Gerrit will automatically rebase the changes atop the master branch head, leaving a nice linear history.

\- Pull requests require the contributor to create a public fork of the repository they're committing to. I can see how this works for some people, but I find it gross for each contributor to the Go project to have their own public fork. What a mess.

\- Comments on pull requests are sent as soon as they are created. Gerrit allows you to make many comments on a change, as drafts, and then send them all in one go, sending just a single email. This is much easier to manage for a large project.

\- Gerrit has the notion of multiple 'patch sets' for a particular change, and you can see diffs between patch sets, so it's much easier to progressively review large changes.

And there are many other small issues with the GitHub pull request process that make it untenable for the Go project.

<comment><USER34> I'm really curious to give Gerrit a try. Is it like the existing Rietveld system used for Go?

\- I've been using the "apply mail" flow to avoid merge commits and to squash commits when appropriate (based on Nathaniel Talbott's post [http://blog.spreedly.com/author/ntalbott/#.VGVhz5PF_Zs](http://blog.spreedly.com/author/ntalbott/#.VGVhz5PF_Zs)). It will be nice to have something automatic.

\- At least contributors with the commit bit can just create a feature branch and a pull request from there. Some open source projects give out the commit bit almost immediately, but with GitHub there's still that initial fork and pull request to prove oneself.

Interested to see how Gerrit addresses this. GitHub doesn't have any way to disable pull requests. :-(

\- I've completely disabled email notifications for this reason. There still can be a huge number of notifications in app or via third-party mobile apps. Rietveld is a lot more sane, I only saw notifications for things I was actively working on.

\- I usually end up reviewing just the new commits individually. But that requires figuring out which ones I had already reviewed. Not so bad with only a few branches, but I can see it getting out of hand.

I really hope people from GitHub are reading this thread as they are working to improve their tools. :-)

<comment><USER33> We're going to build a bot that replies to pull requests to the Go core. It'll say "Sorry, we don't take pull requests, but here's how to use Gerrit [link]. Thanks!"

<comment><USER35> Not to be flippant, but if you are not going to use pull-requests, what is the benefit of moving to Github? Will you use the issue tracking system?

If not then it just seems like switching to git using the present google code host would suffice from a technical viewpoint.

<comment><USER33> We will use the GitHub issue tracker, which will allow easy cross references between go issues and other projects on github.

<comment><USER22> I have to agree that not using pull requests is missing out on the best feature of github. It's the social, low-overhead way to contribute to a repo.

It seems like it must be possible to hook up a bot to github that watches for pull requests and submits them to gerrit... the Juju team has a bot that does that for our Reviewboard integration. It won't work for more complicated workflows that github doesn't support, like dependent branches or whatever, but it lowers the barrier of entry for initial contributors that just want to submit a simple fix. And the more advanced users can just submit directly to our Reviewboard instance if they want the more advanced features.

Also, the public fork on Github is actually a feature - it means others can easily see what you're working on. You need off-site storage for your personal work anyway, right? You're not going to keep it local on your laptop, so you'll need a branch somewhere regardless.

<comment><USER36> GitHub code review is terrible. I don't blame them for not using pull requests in the least. If not being able to pull is enough to stop people from contributing, how much is their contribution worth?

<comment><USER22> Why even move to github then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think this move is great for 2 big reasons:

1\. This fits better with the workflows I know and are common for Go programmers. I use Github and Git regularly for a variety of things, and I only ever use Google Code and Mercurial for things dealing with the Go source or tool repositories. Along with the change of the much of the compiler source code from C to Go, this will make it a lot easier to get involved with the core of Go.

2\. Simplifies using import paths for Go's tools. There's a bunch of different repositories in Google Code's Go project, and using them is slightly more painful because Go Get then requires mercurial to work. Reducing developer friction is a good thing, especially in odd places such as when a github repository uses a Google code repository and suddenly you need mecurial to import something using git.

</comment><comment><USER38> As someone who uses Ruby as my primary language; I'm totally jealous of this move. While there is a github mirror, it sucks having to use Subversion for the "one true repo" when everything else I work with these days is on git.

<comment><USER39> I contributed to Ruby once by issueing a pull request to the GitHub mirror, it went fine. Is it less handy if you're a regular contributor?

<comment><USER38> You can do pull requests through github, but Subversion is still preferred. Things aren't integrated; so for example if you look at [https://github.com/ruby/ruby](https://github.com/ruby/ruby) you will notice Issues is not enabled; instead you have to go to a separate issue tracker over at [https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-trunk/issues](https://bugs.ruby- lang.org/projects/ruby-trunk/issues).

I still contribute, but the barrier to entry is higher; people have to hunt the ruby home page to find this information which is not ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > _The world today is quite different from the world then._

Not really. Everyone used Git and Github 5 years ago too. That's why it was so annoying that Go chose to use Google Code for everything, although not surprising considering it's a Google project.

<comment><USER41> "5 years ago too"

No, they didn't.

Github only started in April of 2008, or 6 years ago. Your implication is that they took over the world in a year. They didn't. I actually have seen the growth graphs of both before, and what you say is not even close to true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hi Go team,

if you want an alternative for Gerrit code review, you can also use [http://review.ninja](http://review.ninja). It's also open source, so you are welcome to contribute.

Cheers, Mitch

<comment><USER5> Took a brief look at the front page.

\- No side-by-side diffs? Didn't see any in screen shots.

\- The scopes asked for seem very broad. I may be confused, but it seemed like it was asking for write access to all repositories, public and private. I have access to several private repos (but I don't own them) for which this is unacceptable. If the scope is limited to the ones under github.com/me then it's not as big a deal... In any case, the scary scope list prevented me from experimenting.

<comment><USER42> Hi skj!

\- What do you exactly mean by side-by-side diff? Currently you have diff view between the current HEAD of the Pull Request branch by the base commit.

\- Yes, that is true. This is a known issue mentioned by others and there is definitely a need to fix that. ReviewNinja comes from the GitHub Enterprise context, where you usually can trust the internal tool offering, that's why we kept it simple with the permissions in the first place.

Thank you for the feedback!

<comment><USER5> Here's a screenshot of some side-by-side diff action: [https://fr.atlassian.com/wac/software/fisheye/overview/scree...](https://fr.atlassian.com/wac/software/fisheye/overview/screenshot- tour/featureItems/0/featureItems/0/imageBinary/fisheye-side-by-side-diff.png)

Basically, it let's you look at the old code, or look at the new code, or see how they're different, all at the same time.

Inline diffs (github-style) require you to keep a context as you scan through code, and it makes it harder to keep everything in your head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm concerned that it won't get any stars.

</comment><comment><USER44> I guess its official, misogyny is ok in our industry.

Have we forgotten about: [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=github+misogyny](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=github+misogyny) ?

I'm not sure github even experienced a dip in traffic.

There are github alternatives, it took me 30 minutes to remove my github subscription and migrate my repos to bitbucket.

<comment><USER45> I will bite.

How does using Github even remotely contribute to accepting misogyny in our industry?

<comment><USER46> I will bite back.

Github's corporate culture appears to be very anti-woman. There is plenty of available evidence to this effect. There is very little apparent diversity (of any sort) in their large team. [https://github.com/about/team](https://github.com/about/team)

Using Github contributes to the success of this monoculture and encourages tech leaders to revere and duplicate this model. It makes tech more difficult for people outside of that group - the white, straight, male group. It makes tech culture worse.

If I'm aware that you host on Github, I will make sure to consider what your competitors are doing before I use your service.

<comment><USER45> I can see how you could make it a valid argument like that. Thanks for elaborating.

Do you think that not using services from companies with a monoculture is the most effective way of furthering the cause? I'm all for more diversity in the technology and startup sector, but I do believe that the cause should, and eventually will, be solved by dialogue and focus on the issue - not by silently boycutting the companies. Or am I missing some part of the picture?

<comment><USER46> I can't say if this cause is better solved some other way, but I believe that avoiding Github (not exactly boycotting it) and other big monocultures is the right action for me to take. When I use a service, I give it a piece of my economic power. I don't want to give that to Github.

I do believe a capitalist-based ecosystem can only be healthy with an appropriate level of competition and alternatives for consumers. Github's progress in the market is worrying in the sense that it seems to be driving towards a monopoly.

Github can never be everything to everyone - if there is no meaningful competition, it's guaranteed that some people will be excluded.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get a referral code for FBstart application - <AUTHOR>

Facebook's FBstart now needs a referral code by a  VC, accelerator, or incubator.
We are just starting out in India and don't have a referral code. Which VCs, accelerator, or incubators in India are FBStart partners? <comment><USER2> Hi there -

If you're backed by or associated with an organization that invests in or works with startups, reach out to them and see if they have a referral code. While we're starting with a small set of partners, we intend to expand the number and types of organizations we work with. We are especially thoughtful about including all regions, not just North America. If your organization does not have a referral code, have them reach out to firstname.lastname@example.com about potentially working with us to include mobile startups they work with in our program.

Thanks for your interest! Kevin, FbStart Team</comment>


Show HN: @, a self modifying shell script/swiss army knife - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lmartinking/monkey-tail

<comment><USER2> Clever concept, and it really shows off a lot of shell techniques in one place. The self-modifying aspect is fun to study (e.g. external-add, ext_insert), and the meta functions are interesting too (e.g. require). I may find this useful sometime, and in the meantime it makes me smile.

In my own small way, I too have used self-modify shell scripts, though nothing as far-reaching as what you've done. When I write C code, I use a "build" script instead of "make":

<https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/build>

(Never mind Fexl itself, I'm just sharing the build script here.)

The build script analyzes all the .c files in the current directory and automatically creates another "build" script in the ../obj directory. It then runs ../obj/build. But the next time you run it, it sees that ../obj/build already exists, so it doesn't need to analyze the .c files again.

Again, it's nothing quite like what you've done, but it just illustrates how fun and useful self-modifying shell scripts can be.</comment>


IPad Makes Space in Japan's Tiny Homes by Removing Bookshelves - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-03/ipad-makes-space-in-japan-s-tiny-homes-by-removing-bookshelves.html

<comment><USER2> They charge 100 yen for doing a book conversion. That's only about $1.25 US. I would kill for a service like this. I'm preparing to move in about a month, and I've got some 500 books that I need to move. I would love to just digitize the majority of these and get rid of the physical volumes.

This actually sounds like a fantastic service that the publishers could offer if they were progressive enough. They would prepare a digital copy of the books they offer (if they don't have them already). Then customers could ship them their physical volumes for destruction along with a nominal fee ($1-$2) in return for the digital version.

<comment><USER3> _This actually sounds like a fantastic service that the publishers could offer if they were progressive enough._

How about a startup? Of all people in a position to implement the physical side of this: Half Price Books. They could scan the UPC barcodes and see what books are in a catalog, then offer to give the customer an eBook for a nominal fee. So they would be receiving money instead of paying it out. This would be a way of publishers to be able to make money off of IP with sales that have already dropped off. The publishers would still have to cooperate.

<comment><USER4> A startup would have to battle the legal system the publishers have helped create / abuse. Anyone know what, if anything, might stand in the way of such a setup?

<comment><USER5> Lots of things I'd assume. Without doing any research, here's a twist (still likely not legally wise):

The startup scans your books.You pay a monthly fee for storage of your books at their facility, which is a free-to-use library. You remain the owner of the book and take the scans with you.

There are probably some (many) issues here, such as first sale rights, but it's not crazy.Adding additional businesses could help (coffee-library-book scanning) offset the expense but it's probably easier to try and change the law - someone would be angry enough to make your life miserable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "The home-made e-book market will continue to exist as long as the copyright > situation isn't dealt with and people cannot find books they want in > electronic format"

Sorry this is a bit unrelated, but out of curiosity, are there any legal ways to buy Japanese books in an electronic format? I have been trying to start reading books in Japanese but I don't know enough kanji to make it enjoyable.

I actually came up with my own way around this.. I bought a physical copy of the book, opened it to a random page, did a quoted search ("たとえば") on google for a full, unique sentence and found some plain text copies. I wrote a script to quickly format this in html and used rikaikun/chan to make reading easier (just put the mouse over words I don't know and it looks them up). The problem is that this limits me to reading in a browser on a computer (with chrome or firefox installed).

I've actually been interested in doing some sort of app like this (probably for free). Then adding the functionality to add words I don't know to a word bank that I can practice on my own later. If anyone is interested, please let me know. The biggest thing stopping me is that I don't see any way to get legal content for this (and the fact I do not have a lot of spare time). Does anyone know if some Japanese books/stories are in the public domain?

<comment><USER7> You might look in to the 青空文庫 <http://www.aozora.gr.jp/>

<comment><USER6> Wow, this looks really great. Sounds like there is currently a 50 year limit on copyright. I found a bunch of works I haven't read by Akutagawa Ryunosuke that are public domain.

Thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was essentially my justification for buying a Kindle: it's about the price of a new bookcase.

<comment><USER4> I have 3 full bookcases in my house right now, all of which I bought, new, for under $25 each. And one I got for $5 at a rummage sale. When the Kindle goes to $25 (and opens up the SDK), I'll be ready with my money in-hand. Until then, I'm waiting until they lose some of the _insane_ vendor lock-in.

<comment><USER9> Insane vendor lock-in that can be readily and legally circumvented with Calibre, a free and open-source piece of conversion software that runs on the three major consumer OSs?

<comment><USER10> You can remove Kindle DRM with Calibre? News to me.

(Also, it still doesn't address the principle of the matter: digital music has gone DRM-free, it's time for eBooks to do the same.)

<comment><USER9> Are you aware that there are a great many places to purchase DRM-free ebooks at places other than Amazon? And that programs like Calibre can format-shift these to kindle-readable formats?

You're not vendor-locked with the Kindle with these tools. Your /brain/ might be vendor-locked though, if you think that a Kindle will only ever read stuff bought from Amazon. I bought a Kindle for a friend, and torrented hundreds of ebooks for her. She hasn't paid a cent to DRM formats. When she wants a new book, she can purchase an ebook from somewhere other than Amazon if she wants to avoid DRM, and use Calibre to convert to .mobi format, which the Kindle happily reads.

<comment><USER10> But that's my point exactly: I don't want to torrent books, I want to purchase them legally.

Also, do any DRM-free stores have nearly the selection of Amazon/B&N/iBooks? From what I understand, the DRM-free stores only have independent/self- published books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The comments about the reality of urban housing in Japan has made a lot of things in Japanese media make a lot more sense. In particular, the soundscapes make more sense. I understand why the sound of trains passing seems to much more prevalent in Japanese media: so many people live in small flimsily built urban apartments with little acoustic insulation. In the states, there's more of a mix due to older buildings. (Even more so for Europe.)

<comment><USER4> And there are more trains. Loads of Japanese media take place in the areas around rail lines, because people actually have experience with them. In the USA? Hah! Only a few cities have any, and only a few of those are any good.

For myself, I've lived near a train track my whole life, in well-built, older buildings. Well, 1/2 block away. The train goes by and everyone just pauses conversation until it passes, because it drowns out everything. Because trains _do that_. It's hard to move hundreds or thousands of tons quietly.

<comment><USER11> Makes me wonder: would mag-lev make this situation any better? I've never been near a mag-lev train or heard it pass in real life. Anyone with any experience with them care to comment on how loud they are?

<comment><USER4> Probably pretty loud, for high speeds:

> _In January and February 2008 hundreds of residents demonstrated in downtown > Shanghai against the line being built too close to their homes, citing > concerns about sickness due to exposure to the strong magnetic field, noise, > pollution and devaluation of property near to the lines._ > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29#China>

Though for slower ones:

> _The only low-speed maglev (100 km/h) currently operational, the Japanese > Linimo HSST, cost approximately US$100 million/km to build.[40] Besides > offering improved operation and maintenance costs over other transit > systems, these low-speed maglevs provide ultra-high levels of operational > reliability and introduce little noise and zero air pollution into dense > urban settings._ > [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29#Economic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29#Economics)

[citation needed], but good news.

<comment><USER3> The first bit indicates: Chinese are not smarter than anyone else.

<comment><USER4> Oh absolutely. But that does imply the same will occur everywhere, with special focus on the "noise" and "devaluation of property". And whether _you_ believe in the "strong magnetic field" fear or not is irrelevant if you're trying to sell your house near the tracks to someone who _does_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw this article yesterday and searched out this site: <http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/> with the idea of making one to digitize a few of my bookcases.

Too much going on right now to take that on, so I'm curious, does anyone know of a service around the bay area that will do this without charging fees near the original price of the book?

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder, it's not because of no rooms but simply because Japanese people have more books?

<http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=343>

</comment><comment><USER14> Also handy if you end up moving to another continent. I moved from England to San Francisco. I had a lot of books before the move, I sold some, left some with my parents and shipped the rest.

</comment><comment><USER15> It makes practical sense given the dearth of living space in japan.

<comment><USER16> It could also make a difference on the margin anytime someone moved from one place to another. It's generally cheaper to live in a smaller place, so if you can live in less space, you can trade up to a more desirable location.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Do I Turn Off "This page has insecure content" in Chrome? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
I have Googled this, but fail to come up with an exact answer on how to turn off the pop-up bar warning about visiting insecure pages in Google Chrome.
I am on OS X 10.7
Can anyone give me step-by-step instructions on how to turn this annoyance off from Terminal?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> \--allow-running-insecure-content on the command line.

Although it would be far more useful to fix the site in question. For the stable channel I think we only have it on for google.com so, are, you hitting mixed-scripting on Google sites?

If so, maybe you should report that: <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81637>

[http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/06/trying- to-e...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/06/trying-to-end-mixed- scripting.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not wishing to seem rude but this is not a forum for technical questions. You should post on something like <http://stackoverflow.com/></comment>


The Woman Who Can Remember Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1940420/The-woman-who-can-remember-everything.html

<comment><USER3> My father has a similar condition. Given any day he can remember what he was doing on that day and what events happened in the news (global or local). His ability requires voluntary effort though, and I wouldn't say he can remember everything from each particular day (I doubt that this woman can remember _everything_ that happened in each day). My father clearly has an order of magnitude more memories per calendar day than the rest of us. Unfortunately I didn't seem to inherit any of his ability - I can't remember what day of the month it is today.

I don't know about the woman in the story, but it wouldn't take any stranger more than a few minutes to realize that my father is mentally ill (and I don't mean that his ability to record these events is a mental illness in itself).

</comment><comment><USER4> This story keeps getting recycled every 6 months or so. If you read into the details of the situation it's not as incredible as you might think.

People with hyperthymesia tend to obsess over their lives, reinforcing the condition with things like diaries and journals - it appears there is a link to obsessive compulsive disorder. Also, Jill can't remember everything - <USER2> testing, her short term memory is no better than the average person's.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, if anyone had any doubts that the brain's capacity is too limited to support the extended lifespans that we will perhaps be able to sustain with improved technology (200...300..1000 years anyone?), that should solve them. A bit of tidying up, and there's plenty of space for well indexed memories.

Daniel

</comment><comment><USER6> This sounds slightly different than Kim Peek's condition (the "real Rainman"... [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2T45r5G3kA&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2T45r5G3kA&feature=related) ... fascinating video)

He remembers information he reads or otherwise acquires, rather than events that occur throughout the day (or at least that's the focus of his abilities)

</comment><comment><USER7> They talked about her on NPR not too many months ago. She doesn't just recall events, but also the way she felt and even smells. Truely remarkable, but also debilitating.

</comment><comment><USER8> Remembering everything is just quite as stupid as not remembering anything.

Our brain _intelligently_ selects the things that are worth to remember.

<comment><USER9> So the fact that I can much more easily remember the lyrics to some pop song than the differences between the complexity classes BQP, BPP, ZPP, and PCP is actually a sign that my brain selects _intelligently_?

<comment><USER8> I didn't mean it this way (but in a much more abstract way) -- but even here it seems to be true:

If you _really_ would understand the complex things (you mention) the same as the trivial ones (you mention), then you would be able to remember equally easy.

So, the problem here is not the complex thing itself, but your non-familiarity with it.</comment></comment></comment>


First South Americans Were Australian Aborigines (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/430944.stm <comment><USER2> Here are two much more recent papers on the topic:

Nature [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature14895.html)

Science [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6250/aab3884.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6250/aab3884.abstract)

<comment><USER3> That Nature article makes Thor Heyerdahl right even if in reverse. That's ... amazing.

<comment><USER4> All of the following are "right even if in reverse": Columbus started from the Caribbean and discovered Spain in the late 1400s; the Mormons left Utah due to persecution and relocated to the Midwest; Australians convicts in the early 1800s were transported to Britain to work and live in penal colonies; millions of free people were sold into slavery in the Americas and shipped to Africa to work; and the Mississippi flows from Louisiana to Minnesota.

Heyerdahl believed there were cultural similarities between pre-Columbian civilizations of the Andes and Polynesians because the South Americans "colonized the then-uninhabited Polynesian islands as far north as Hawaii, as far south as New Zealand, as far east as Easter Island, and as far west as Samoa and Tonga around 500 AD". (Quoting Wikipedia.) He also believed the current Polynesian population came to the islands centuries later by first going to the Pacific Northwest of the Americas and then to Hawaii before going to the rest of the Pacific.

That can't be so easily reversed.

<comment><USER3> Then maybe I should have said "the Kon-Tiki expedition was relevant even if not exactly in the way we expected". Thor Heyerdahl has proven it is possible to cross this distance by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a small world after all. Interestingly, DNA from Aboriginal Australians suggests Australia experienced a wave of migration from India about 4,000 years ago.

[http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/01/aborigin...](http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/01/aboriginal- genes-suggest-indian-migration/)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-21016700](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21016700)

</comment><comment><USER6> Also Kon-Tiki [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon- Tiki_expedition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition)

<comment><USER7> Kon-Tiki was interesting, but I can't handle the implication of Heyerdahl's beliefs - that the Polynesian people, supreme sailors and navigators who travelled huge distances across the open ocean while Europeans were still hugging the coast, were somehow incapable of sailing to South America and back.

We know that there has been some contact between the Americas and Polynesia, for example, the staple food of the Maori of New Zealand was the kumara, a sweet potato, which are native to the Americas.

His main objection was based, I believe, on predominating currents and winds. However, in an El Nino year, the currents shift and winds shift, and there is evidence that Polynesian migrations eastward coincided with El Nino events.

<comment><USER8> Australians != Polynesians. Polynesian migrations are relatively recent, starting 3000BC ~ 1000BC from Taiwan. They got to New Zealand and Easter Island only about 1200 AD, which is only 300 years before Columbus. I don't recall any evidence that they sailed all the way to the Americas between 1200AD and 1500 AD, the time of Pizzaro's conquest of the Inca Empire.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansion)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I'm well aware of that fact, on account of living in New Zealand. ;) I was directly responding to the person I, erm, directly responded to, who posted a link to Kon-Tiki.

> I don't recall any evidence that they sailed all the way to the Americas

We have obvious evidence of contact between Polynesia and South America before the 1200s, as the Maori arrived in NZ in the 13th century with a sweet potato, as I mentioned.

As for "all the way to the Americas", the distance from Rapanui/Easter Island to Chile is less than the distance from the Marquesas Islands to Hawaii (which was colonised in the 10th century), or from Tuabai / Tahiti / Cook Islands (whichever identity of 'Hawaiki' you prefer) to New Zealand.

So, we have evidence that Polynesians contacted the Americas sometime before the 13th century, and we have evidence that the Polynesians were capable of navigating distances greater than that from Easter Island to Chile in the 10th century.

I'm not aware of any evidence of any similar ocean-going prowess of South American natives, as such, Occam's Razor probably applies.

<comment><USER8> There are two points here:

A. Polynesians are definitely not "first South Americans", regardless at which date the conjectured sweet potato journey happened. Simply because the other South Americans we know of arrived about 15,000 years ago, way before Polynesians even left Taiwan.

B. "The distance from Rapanui/Easter Island to Chile is less than the distance from the Marquesas Islands to Hawaii", true. But since Polynesians reached Easter Island only in the 1200s, their conjectured sweet potato journey must have been either post 1200s, or much longer than the journey from Easter Island.

As of the sweet potato, who knows how it got in Maori hands? Super alternative conjecture, maybe some people during the glacial age, beneficiary of low ocean levels, brought it to the islands, and Polynesians picked it up from there?

<comment><USER7> > Polynesians are definitely not "first South Americans"

Who are you correcting? Certainly not me. I'm discussing which side of the Pacific drove the pre-Columbian contact. The obvious answer is the "sea-faring people who colonised islands across the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean".

> "The distance from Rapanui/Easter Island to Chile is less than the distance > from the Marquesas Islands to Hawaii", true. But since Polynesians reached > Easter Island only in the 1200s, their conjectured sweet potato journey must > have been either post 1200s, or much longer than the journey from Easter > Island.

They only _settled_ Easter Island in the 1200s. There is ample evidence of Polynesian temporary occupation of otherwise uninhabited islands, such as Raoul Island in the Kermadecs, New Zealand's sub-Antarctic islands (Campbell, Auckland in particular), and Norfolk Island. Polynesian colonisation was largely driven by population pressure, so it's quite likely that they had discovered Easter Island long before they decided to colonise it.

> Super alternative conjecture, maybe some people during the glacial age, > beneficiary of low ocean levels, brought it to the islands, and Polynesians > picked it up from there?

Occam's Razor definitely applies, especially when you'd have to drop the sea level by several _kilometres_ to have a lower ocean level make any difference to travel to Polynesia from America. Highest mountain on earth is Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, 9km from bottom to top.

<comment><USER8> The title of this thread is "First South Americans Were Australian Aborigines", just making sure we are all aware that this sub conversation concerns a different population at a different time. Might as well throw in some Vikings ;)

Super interesting point about evidence of Polynesian travel in New Zealand. Now if there were some of that evidence with regard to South America, we'd be all clear. But there isn't as far as I know, which raises even more questions about the sweet potato conjecture.

With regard to the glacial maximum, nobody is claiming the oceans were plains to roam around. But a sea level 100 lower may uncover some new islands and make island hopping a whole lot easier. For example, Baral Guyot is a barely submerged island [https://earthref.org/SC/SMNT-257S-0866W/](https://earthref.org/SC/SMNT-257S-0866W/) along the Sala y Gomez ridge and Nazca Ridge.

Obviously there is no archeological confirmation of the conjecture I made, but that leaves both conjectures in the same uncomfortable spot.

Edit: Here's some actual research on sweet potato: [http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/01/22/169980441/how...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/01/22/169980441/how- the-sweet-potato-crossed-the-pacific-before-columbus). I hereby retire my glacial travel counter theory :)

This places the sweet potato travel around 1000 AD, which matches pretty well our conversation, but it's definitely not evidence for "first americans".

<comment><USER7> > The title of this thread is "First South Americans Were Australian > Aborigines", just making sure we are all aware that this sub conversation > concerns a different population at a different time. Might as well throw in > some Vikings ;)

Fair enough.

> Super interesting point about evidence of Polynesian travel in New Zealand. > Now if there were some of that evidence with regard to South America, we'd > be all clear. But there isn't as far as I know, which raises even more > questions about the sweet potato conjecture.

It would be rather easy, presumably, for the evidence of transitory usage to be destroyed or at least rendered indistinguishable by several hundred years of settlement. We have that problem in NZ - Maori legend speaks of the greate explorer Kupe who found New Zealand (Aotearoa) and returned to Hawaiki to bring people back. Nearly all Maori tribes claim to descend from an original migration canoe (waka) from Hawaiki - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Māori_waka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Māori_waka)

However, archaeologically, we can't really tell where they, or Kupe the Great, specifically landed first - we can date earliest settlements, but how would you distinguish evidence of temporary occupation from evidence of permanent occupation?

So yeah, I would speculate that any travel to South America from Polynesia would probably have transited via Easter Island in the first instance - especially as it used to have dense forests before the Polynesian induced deforestation - thus making it an ideal staging post for resupplying by fishing and hunting, and providing materials to repair your canoes.

> With regard to the glacial maximum, nobody is claiming the oceans were > plains to roam around. But a sea level 100 lower may uncover some new > islands and make island hopping a whole lot easier. For example, Baral Guyot > is a barely submerged island > [https://earthref.org/SC/SMNT-257S-0866W/](https://earthref.org/SC/SMNT-257S-0866W/) > along the Sala y Gomez ridge and Nazca Ridge.

That is a very good point, I was only thinking Bering Sea-esque 'land bridges' and didn't consider seamounts becoming islands.

> Obviously there is no archeological confirmation of the conjecture I made, > but that leaves both conjectures in the same uncomfortable spot.

The chicken DNA hypothesis needs more investigation IMO. Although it still leaves the question of the 'navigators' vs the 'navigees' unspoken. Who knows, maybe I'm manifesting extreme modern privilege and ignorance by assuming that seafaring was extraordinary to the Polynesians in the 10th century. It may well have been that contact between Polynesia and South America was driven from both sides mucking about in boats and having a great time. I guess I'm being a bit defensive of the Polynesians who were summarily dismissed by Heyerdahl - I hesitate to call him racist, but he overlooked what I consider to be an extraordinary amount of persuasive evidence that the Polynesians could easily have made the trip.

> This places the sweet potato travel around 1000 AD, which matches pretty > well our conversation, but it's definitely not evidence for "first > americans".

It's an interesting time for it to arrive - Hawaii was settled in the 900s, so we can speculate that population pressure (or perhaps food pressure?) drove a wave of exploration and migration from Polynesia. Tying it all together :D Some of those explorers found Hawaii, and some of them found kumara and Mapuches. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The dating method sounds very unreliable:

"The style of the art means it is at least 17,000 years old, but it could be up to 50,000 years old."

Art style? Yeah, right..... I call bull. Until carbon dated, I call this false.

If i draw something today in that style, it would not make it 50000 yrs old.</comment>


The Homely Mutt - <AUTHOR> http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/

<comment><USER2> My dotfiles are online if anyone wants to take a look at the actual configuration I use:

<https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/>

<https://github.com/sjl/dotfiles>

<comment><USER3> Good post, thanks!

Do you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) have any insight on how gmail -> imap works with labels when a single message has multiple labels? For example an email may be tagged with "clients" "$JOBNAME" and "receipt". Does it put multiple copies of the message in the local cache, or does it do a hard link, or ...?

<comment><USER4> Gmail's IMAP is unfortunately broken; they implement labels as folders, not tags. This means that the same message in "All Mail", "Inbox", and "Notifications" are three different messages that happen to have the exact same content and _almost_ identical headers/metadata.

So, by default, you're going to be storing multiple copies of each message. It's not a difficult task to use hardlinks instead if you want, but mutt can't make this judgement by itself, because not all of the metadata is identical, and mutt is designed for the general case, not specifically for Gmail.

Note that this is a Gmail issue, not strictly a mutt issue; other IMAP providers don't all have this awkward behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Mutt certainly isn't the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it's got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."

Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it out, and there are other tools that do it better, I'm out.

<comment><USER6> "We" (meaning not you, apparently) are still doing that kind of thing because we know we'll spend _thousands_ of days using the tool, so a few hours spend leaning it seems like a bargain. I could just as easily ask why "we" (meaning you) are still getting confused between "discoverability" and "usability" after decades of silly arguments like this.

Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justifications. ( _edit for full disclosure: I don't use mutt either, having to deal professionally with enough unreadable-in-plain-text mail that it makes more sense for me to do everything in Thunderbird._ )

<comment><USER5> I put time in when I feel like the tool may solve an issue or problem I have and when I think there will be a ROI for the time I spend doing it.

This seems like a pretty reasonable justification to me. Having spent a lot of time authoring emails in different tools, I'm comfortable with what I have. If what I have does what I want and the other tool that people are telling me is better has a disclaimer like the above, then what exactly am I doing wrong?

I'm all for trying out new tools and I spend hours doing so every week. I have to pick and choose what it is that I utilize. I wasn't arguing that the tool might not be valuable for some folks, just that it did a very good job of un- selling me, very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The weekend has _just_ passed and you submit this on a Monday? Really? Now I'm going to wake up tomorrow, heavy with sleep after spending the wee hours tweaking my configuration and trying out "contacts", "offlineemap", and the sidebar patch (that I thought I didn't want).

Thank goodness I already have mutt installed and configured (almost) to my liking.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is exactly the sort of article I want to see on HN. It's thorough, and instead of dropping a pile of dotfiles on github and saying "here you go", Steve goes through everything and explains what's what and why.

<comment><USER9> "Coming Home to Vim" is a pretty good post too from Steve:

<http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/>

<comment><USER10> That's just awesome. My vim just got a hell of a lot better just from reading that (which probably tells you something about the level I've been operating at for the last 15 years or so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sparrow is still getting small updates on both iOS and OS X. Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years. I'm not sure one is more dead than the other.

Also, one app became loved because it has a really innovative UI and the other is an app that eschews a modern UI. I'm not sure many people will logically make the leap from Sparrow to Mutt. More likely, people will gravitate back to to gmail.com, which should be getting a lot of improvements from the Sparrow team in the future.

<comment><USER2> > Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years

<http://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/> says two months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rather than using your gmail password with offlinemap, albeit protected by keychain, I suggest creating an application specific password for offlinemap. See [http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=1858...](http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=185833). This is actually required if you switch to two factor authentication and still want various apps to access your google data.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then.

Mutt:

\- gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email.

\- could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank

\- gave up on mutt...

Alpine:

\- did actually covert html emails to text fine, most emails are readable

\- no key rebindins (sic), I have ^T bound to new-window in tmux, too bad that's the _only_ way to run spell check in alpine is to press ^T

\- lose connection to IMAP server causes already downloaded mail to no longer be displayed on the screen

\- quirky LDAP lookups, I can't type peoples full names, only their login names, then it resolves them fine

\- tried to put my IMAP folder first on the list in the config file to make it faster to get to my inbox, crash

\- tried to have it startup in my inbox using the startup key sequence, crash

\- if there's one letter in my drafts folder, it asks me every time if I wan't to continue it when I compose a new message

\- asks me every time if I want to reply to everyone, and if I say yes, it includes me(!?) so I get a dup email

\- has pine's legendary inconstant key bindings (or is that a feature?)

\- sending a message hangs the whole client until it's been sent

\- no real concept of a deleted folder, just puts a D next to it and leaves it displayed on your screen, so you have to expunge manually if you don't want it to clutter your screen

\- all in all, alpine is usable though, but there's plenty annoying things in it we used to think were normal back when pine was popular.

<comment><USER14> I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings.

\- Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup.

\- I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being fist in the list.

\- Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has always worked for me.

\- Reply all does not include me in the Cc. Have you tried setting up alternate addresses field in the settings.

For HTML emails, I have set w3m as my html viewer. w3m works better with complex layouts in html.

<comment><USER13> \- LDAP: it's a corp AD server, cn, name and sn are all set correctly from what I can tell.

\- Maybe CentOS 6.3 ships with a bad build or lib that causes it to crash. I'm using alpine-2.02-3.el6.x86_64.

\- Setting the alternate address fixed the replying to myself issue, thanks!

\- I'll give w2m a shot too. ;-)

EDIT: I suspect the crashes when going into the mailbox are due to it requiring me to enter a password.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wrote an emacs-based e-mail client "mu4e"; see e.g. [http://emacs- fu.blogspot.fi/2012/08/introducing-mu4e-for-ema...](http://emacs- fu.blogspot.fi/2012/08/introducing-mu4e-for-email.html)

Its user-interface is a bit mutt-influenced, but it's fully query-based and very fast, and of course you can extend it using elisp. A fairly young project, but it's near-fully documented, and the manual has instructions on how to set things up with Gmail.

<comment><USER16> I'm going to dive in here and give a huge thumbs up to mu4e. I spent a chunk of time with Gnus and Wanderlust and both feel so much slower. I can't make the switch yet because I'm too lazy to research how to get the multiple mailbox/index configuration I have with mutt (if it's possible?) but hopefully will soon.

Really appreciate the work, djcb.

<comment><USER15> There can be only one database (index) per mu4e/emacs instance, but you can store multiple maildirs in one database though, and there's support for multiple accounts (esp. in the upcoming 0.99; there are some recent ML-threads about this).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you don't want to store your mail locally, but want nice search functionality, for Google Mail users there's this patch:

[http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt- patche...](http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt- patches/patch-mutt-gmailcustomsearch.v1)

It'll do search server-side, which means that you have Google's full text search without storing mail locally.

</comment><comment><USER18> I switched back to Mutt a few months ago after trying Mail.app (filtering wasn't up to my requirements, would hang often) and Thunderbird (bloated and slow under load). It's been a champion.

urlview.sh is pretty awful, mis-parsing urls constantly for me. I then discovered extract_url.pl[1], which is much, much better.

offlineimap likes to hang randomly - mail just stops coming in and the process never stops, requiring me to remove the lockfile by hand, then kill the process. I haven't found a replacement for it, unfortunately. Definitely open to suggestions on this front.

The linked view_attachment.sh file has problems, for example, with files with multiple dots in the filename (among others). I have made a few tweaks[2] to it to make it more robust. It still has a few issues, but I've found it to work better for the most part.

msmtp is probably unnecessary nowadays if you have a typical setup. For GMail, add the lines:

      set smtp_url            = smtp://email@example.com@smtp.gmail.com:587/
      set smtp_pass           = mah_password

to .muttrc and you should be ready to go.

I also wrote a very small, crappy applescript launcher to launch an iTerm with mutt from the OSX dock[3]. It won't open a second copy if already running, but I haven't been able to figure out how to display a badge on the dock to denote unread mail. It may not be possible.

[1] <http://www.memoryhole.net/~kyle/extract_url/>

[2] [https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mailcap/view...](https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mailcap/view_attachment.sh)

[3] [https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mutt/mutt- it...](https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mutt/mutt-iterm.scpt)

<comment><USER19> I had the same problems with Offlineimap while running it as a long-lived background process, and wasn't able to find any clean way to resolve them.

Nowadays I have a cron script that kills any existing Offlineimap processes, and allows a new one to run through once. Works perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> for those on linux, here's a simple .mailcap that i use:

        text/html; w3m -M -T text/html %s
        image/*; feh -F %s
        application/pdf; okular %s
        application/msword; oowriter %s

(i also use procmail, with procmail-lib, to filter into monthly mailboxes, and the wonderful mairix <http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/> to provide fast search. in fact, for me, mairix is the most important part of all this if you want useful, fast email - but i haven't used notmuch so can't compare)

</comment><comment><USER21> I use maildir-utils instead of notmuch as an indexer; notmuch had odd failure modes for me that weren't worth trying to debug.

mutt can also use IMAP/SSL directly, and I do that for some accounts, where I don't want to have local storage.

<comment><USER22> I second the suggestion of maildir-utils/mu[1].

Here's my setup for that, in case anyone is interested: <https://gist.github.com/45e318c68eb5a52e1646>. It's essentially a cronjob (LaunchAgent on OSX) that calls a shell script to update the index periodically, plus a few macros to make searching from within mutt easier. To use this, you'll need to create a "Search" folder for maildir-utils to store results in.

[1] <http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The day I need to make this sort of power-over-interface trade-off for reading email is the day I stop using email.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a great post about a very finely tuned Mutt setup. I always enjoy reading about high customized environments. I am someone who would love to use Mutt but I get so much HTML only email it's sadly impossible for me to do so. (Newsletters and misc friends who think large HTML footers are cool.)

<comment><USER21> In your .muttrc:

auto_view text/html alternative_order text/plain text text/html

That presents plain text first if it's multiply-encoded, but makes html available. In your mailcap:

text/html; /path/to/browser '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html

displays HTML in a browser window for you. mutt launches this when you choose to look at the html version.

But instead, your mailcap could have this:

text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html

which mutt interprets as "filter this through lynx and display it in the terminal" which will solve 98% of your issues. It's fast, too.

<comment><USER24> I'll give lynx a try with this, I can't use a full browser as it would be on a remote computer setup. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use a similar setup, but I've been bitten by having Mutt and OfflineIMAP accessing the same Maildir concurrently. So instead, I run a local copy of Dovecot to expose a local IMAP server that both Mutt and OfflineIMAP talk to my Maildir through. This also means that I can trivially set up things like Thunderbird or MacBiff, using the same local IMAP server. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

<comment><USER26> I do the same, run dovecot, for essentially the same reasons.

It's not Rube Goldberg, it's separation of concerns: dovecot/imap for message serving and storage, and $CLIENT for mail access and processing.

Every so often I get pissed off at my mail client, run up the black flag and start slitting mail client throats[1]. In fact this article started me off on my biannual "doesn't _anything_ not suck" tour, this time looking at claws, alpine and mutt. Anymore though, I just don't give a meh for intricate configuration.

 _One_ thing would make me want to spend a day in feverish configuration: if mh ("ah, mh") would do imap. I _loved_ mh back in the day, when there was virtually _no_ interface, just a collection of command line programs. Unfortunately it's pop-only and plain text only, far as I can tell. I have this fantasy of finding the source and ...

[1] <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34585.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I do almost exactly the same thing except I use getmail as my MRU and I have it checking many different email accounts (gmail, work mail, other work mail, etc). mutt is the best email client I've ever used. I like taking control of my email, using my own paid-for smtp service (tuffmail) and in general not relying on hosted email providers. procmail or maildrop are very handy too.

</comment><comment><USER28> I doubt I have the need to customize GMail to justify doing this amount of work...but this was a very well put-together guide that goes beyond just "how- to-replace-Sparrow" to showing the underpinnings of how e-mail works and the thought process behind a hacked-together interface and service. I'm bookmarking this as an example of a thoroughly useful and informative guide. Thanks for making this.

<comment><USER29> Yes, very well written.

I do prefer offline e-mail and I actually use Claws under Linux, an X11 port is available for Mac OS

Seems to provide similar functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love mutt! Unfortunately, I often write emails while looking at another one, which I couldn't make work with mutt. Any ideas?

<comment><USER31> You could use a terminal multiplexer (tmux, screen, etc) to just split-screen your terminal.

<comment><USER32> Don't forget to launch any secondary instances of mutt with -R, or you'll encounter conflicts.

I've been searching for the right way to launch the editor in a new tmux pane, although apparently getting that to work smoothly would take a patching effort.

<comment><USER33> I launch innumerable copies of mutt without -R, and have never had any conflicts.

Like the original poster, I'm using offlineimap and maildir's entirely.

What kind of conflicts do you get?

<comment><USER34> Default / typical behavior is for mutt to update the mailbox message state (new, unread, read, replied) when closing the mailbox. Using the -R flag prevents this behavior.

Forgetting to do so is more an annoyance than an End of the World Event, but it's an annoyance which can be avoided with a really simple flag use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tried mutt, but I never really liked.

Nowadays I use 'Sup, but I might go (back) to Alpine, because its best feature - the indexer - is also its major drawback, since it hits the disk pretty heavily, which my VPS providers don't care for.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have spent hours and hours configuring my `mutt`, `offlineimap`, `putmail.py`, but I have since grown disenchanted. In my experience, `offlineimap` is annoyingly prone to crashing without any indication. Thus, checking mail within `mutt` becomes unreliable. However, my favorite aspect of `mutt` has been and remains being able to send e-mails very quickly and easily through Terminal.

        echo "Hello World!" | mutt -s "Test E-mail" -a "file.txt" firstname.lastname@example.com

Therefore, I now use `mutt` exclusively for _sending_ mail and using Gmail.com for reading and searching mail.

<comment><USER37> Worse than that, offlineimap can be plain destructive in the right circumstances. I've had it arbitrarily delete thousands of messages due to the local cache being in a strange state.

<comment><USER38> You might try a similar program, mbsync (<http://isync.sourceforge.net/>). It's worked well for me during the past half-dozen years.

mbsync does not watch or poll for changes, but you can run mbsync in a loop from your shell. Or, if you are running Linux on the mail server and client and use Maildirs, you can run mbsync from mswatch (<http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/>). (Disclaimer: I'm the author of mswatch.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This was great. I'm a big fan of mutt. For all the advances in GUI software, my favorites remain at the console: mutt, slrn, newsbeuter, links, and so on.

I wrote a guide to Mutt as well. It's geared for the less-tech inclined than your typical ycombinator - but if you know any Linux/BSD noobs interested in getting their feet wet, my Woodnotes guide will give them a gentler splashdown than this advanced guide to setting up Mutt. <http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/98/>

Well done, Steve - great work on this article.

</comment><comment><USER40> There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text, not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render.

As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker. It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s? Why does "modern" have to be at constant odds with "simple and functional"?

<comment><USER41> MIME html emails will have a plain text part that will be displayed properly. For pure HTML, you can always have mutt open them in a web browser.

<comment><USER40> A terminal still can't render images. Unless you're doing some level of framebuffer shenanigans, that is, but I'd wager most people work on a GUI with terminal windows, not full screen terminal VTYs.

We've got this wonderful invention called the graphical user interface.. why not leverage it?

<comment><USER42> There's an unexamined assumption underlying your comments: Namely that because something is terminal-based, it's 'not modern', and that the GUI unambiguously represents progress on all fronts for all uses.

But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine.

I think it's at least worth _considering_ the possibility that you're asking for is the equivalent of wondering why you can't just have a lighter-than-air balloon made out of lead; the possibility that GUIs might represent progress along some axes (discoverability and approachability) while fundamentally constraining you along others (power, functionality).

<comment><USER40> >But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine.

That's exactly my point though - why do most email clients suck so bad? Slow and bloated are the most common adjectives thrown around (Outlook, Thunderbird), and if not that, then there's the weird UI's (Eudora, The Bat) - and then there's the terminal clients, while very nice, very fast, very functional, completely ignore all progress made in user interfaces over the past 20 years. (Pine, Mutt)

It's like you have a choice: Modern, Fast, Functional. Pick any two.

This is something I can imagine coding . Give me something like Pine or Mutt that works in a GUI and can render HTML and images, but still "looks" and runs like Pine or Mutt. Imagine it in your head for a moment - the same UI, but instead of html strewn about everywhere, you have actual rendering of html and images (via choose-your-favorite engine, leaning towards Webkit) in the same window.

I don't think that HTML rendering, speed, and functionality are mutually exclusive goals.

<comment><USER14> I use alpine and have set w3m as the HTML reader in my mailcap file. w3m also displays images in HTML. Alpine is able to display most HTML emails just fine, but when it fails, I simply press V (which shows different mime parts of the message) and Enter (by default the focus is on the 2nd part, which is text/html; Enter launches the default html browser, which is w3m that displays the message). This gives all the benefits of alpine, with the option to display html+images in the same terminal if I need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> may i suggest mu <http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/> for indexing?

i use it with these macros

macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>mu find --clearlinks --format=links --linksdir=~/Mail/search " \ "mu find"

macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/Mail/search<return>" \ "mu find results"

</comment><comment><USER44> Great article and very timely for me, I just got Mutt working this weekend with my Gmail account. Picture of setup (showing Spam folder).

<http://i.imgur.com/l4atq.jpg>

I haven't added all the features the author pointed out (like server-side search) so excited to make it even better.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would also recommend people look into notmuch.

<http://notmuchmail.org/>

<comment><USER46> Tried notmuch a while back, ended up going back to mutt. If you're an emacs user the notmuch mode may work well for you. The notmuch.vim plugin, OTOH, leaves a lot to be desired.

More promising is this fork of mutt that adds notmuch support:

<https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz>

<comment><USER47> "Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP or IMAP support). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all)."

notmuch doesn't replace mutt, you use it with mutt/offlineimap etc as your mail indexer, which makes _massive_ mail archives instantly searchable.. (and does this extremely well)

I suspect this what the grandparent was referring to, it's not intended as a mutt replacement, so to complain that it doesn't replace it well is a bit unfair

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What are the advantages of using gmail as your server rather than, say, installing your own postfix server on some linode?

<comment><USER49> Gmail has largely solved the spam problem. Configuring spam filters and the like is still a PITA with your own server.

<comment><USER50> Yep, collabrorative filtering works very well. It's very rare I have spam in my Gmail inbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I would miss HTML formatted emails after a while.

A promising alternative is Muttator (<http://www.vimperator.org/muttator>).

Muttator is from the same team that made Vimperator, a Firefox add-on that changed the way I browse the web.

<comment><USER52> Muttils[1] makes it easier to deal with html email in mutt, and has a bunch of other goodies as well. I hit one keystroke and I'm looking at the html message in my web browser.

[1]<http://lee-phillips.org/muttheaven/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I recommend mu (<http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/>) to search emails. It can be integrated with mutt. But if you are an Emacs user then it even provides a mail client (mu4e).

And you can write scripts for it in Guile.

</comment><comment><USER54> Anyway to make mutt(or any cmd mail reader) use the Mail.app database, stored in ~/Library/Mail? I already have Mail.app configured, and it has downloaded all my gmails accounts into the plain text emlx format? Also have 10gb+ of mail, and rather not have two copies of it.

</comment><comment><USER55> > Now that Sparrow is effectively dead

Sparrow 1.6.4 was released on September 11, 2012. Mutt 1.5.21 was released on September 15, 2010.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

<comment><USER56> As when Knuth stopped releasing new versions of TeX because it reached a point where it was "done", software that has been around for long enough can eventually mature to the point where there's nothing left to add without expanding the scope of the project beyond its original definition.

Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't really say that there are any features that I want that it lacks. Of course, I can't speak for everyone on that point; for instance, some people actually want to send and receive HTML email, and Mutt can't easily deal with that. But for some of us, lack of HTML support is itself a feature, and when you really have to, piping a text/html MIME part to a browser for rendering is really easy to accomplish.

I know essentially nothing about Sparrow, but I suspect that it is a much newer product than Mutt, has had far less time to mature, and as such simply requires a more frequent release schedule than a project with Mutt's long history.

Basically, a comparison between most recent release dates doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.

<comment><USER55> I knew if I made this joke I'd get a wall of text explaining why I was wrong; thanks, HN — you delivered!

On a more serious note, I use Sparrow every day. About the only quibble I have with it is some of the icons aren't retina versions (hardly a dealbreaker). Otherwise I'd say it meets my needs very well; doesn't that also make it 'done', rather than 'effectively dead'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Steve, I was just looking at Mutt this weekend. Thank you so much for this blog post. It will give me the push to just go and do it. Learn in the process too. How can one say no to that?

</comment><comment><USER58> if you want to use your CardDAV address book with mutt, you might want to try out pycarddav <http://lostpackets.de/pycarddav/> . If you want features like write support, try the write_support branch from github <https://github.com/geier/pycarddav/> (you can not really edit vCards just yet, but you can add email address directly from mutt)

</comment><comment><USER59> I like nmh, myself.

<comment><USER34> How-to article?

<comment><USER26> <http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/>

Jerry Peek's MH book, free to read. How-to times ten.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I think the very idea of pitching mutt to Sparrow target audience is brilliant. Getting out of your comfort zone may be gainful :)

</comment><comment><USER61> I've been waiting for this post since you first hinted at it. Looking forward to reading it, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER62> "...it's got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."

The advantages were never enumerated. Most of the article was spent teaching you how to program ^H^H^H configure the thing.

What are the advantages?

<comment><USER63> _What are the advantages?_

One advantage: you can configure mutt to behave just like vim (as far as shortcut keys go).

If you don't use vim you won't understand. If you do use vim, having mutt use vim for editing combined with vim-ish hotkeys makes for a very powerful, simple, and enjoyable tool.

<comment><USER62> "If you don't use vim you won't understand."

Well, thanks for your insight but that was kind of a dick way to put it. What do you think is so hard to understand about the advantage of common key- bindings between applications?

Great trade-off though. You are such a cool hacker. Too bad you have to jump through hoops to view modern HTML formatted email. Hey you've got some _vim key bindings_ though. Totally worth it.</comment></comment></comment>


Setting Up a Modern JavaScript Stack for Beginners (ES6, React, Webpack, ESLint) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/verekia/modern-js-stack-training <comment><USER2> Stepping back for a second, we all appreciate this is an insane state of affairs right?

<comment><USER3> Going by many of the comments at [0], I would say the community is divided and not everyone thinks so.

Myself? I truly wish Netscape had gone with Scheme instead of the weekend hack that became JavaScript, as they'd talked about.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628921)

<comment><USER4> The everybody would just complain about Scheme now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Beginners". How long will this take to learn compared to just vanilla JS and maybe a basic framework. Obviously a bit longer. Try explaining some of the benefits to the beginner.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the need of gulp for the Webpack set-up? I am talking here about "9-Webpack" project, we can achieve that without the gulp just by setting up the Webpack with relevant packages, right? I am not a big fan of combining Gulp + Webpack. It's already complex and what is the need to make it more complex adding one more to the mix. I appreciate your insights.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here. The goal for Gulp - even in the Webpack chapter, is for back- end transpilation. Webpack is great to replace Browserify for client apps, but Gulp is better suited for back-end stuff in my opinion. I also wanted to show people the specific part that Webpack replaces (the Gulp 'build-client' task) to give them a clear idea of why we introduce it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Server side rendering?

</comment><comment><USER8> As a beginner I would have gawped at this curve of learning when starting out. What happened to 'hello world' :)

<comment><USER9> `alert("Hello World")`

It's still there. But as always, "hello world" is not even remotely close to what a real-world project would look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's cool, but what exactly is the purpose of this stack? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

</comment><comment><USER11> What about Google Polymer and Web components? Arent they coming in ES6?

<comment><USER9> Fun fact: Web Components are completely oblivious of ES6 imports/exports and all PRPL examples basically assume modules are dumb JavaScript code that can be loaded from script tags, completely ignoring the trend towards JS modules JS has seen over the past five years.

I wouldn't touch Web Components with a ten feet pole until the dust has settled and someone has come up with a convincing solution that is more workable than bower's "version conflicts are verboten" approach to conflict resolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> meteor looks like a better way for beginners to learn es6 and not to confuse by the whole build process.

</comment><comment><USER13> Section 10 coming soon?

</comment><comment> proto-n also do a chapter about testing please!</comment>