HW Hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang on The Setup - <AUTHOR> http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/

<comment><USER2> There. He pretty much summarize what's wrong with the iPhone.

"I'm personally not a fan of the iPhone; the battery life sucks, it is too bandwidth inefficient and the virtual keyboard is pokey and requires you stay in dictionary words, which is terrible for typing borrowed-words in other languages and swear words in my own language. The iPhone is more of a toy for entertainment value and photo management, but that role is already filled by my Nintendo DSi and my camera."

<comment><USER3> Also this part, for those not on unlimited data plans (most of the world, I believe):

 _Blackberry is so bandwidth efficient [...] not exceed the allowance provided by a $25 fixed-rate international data plan. [...] iPhone [...] too bandwidth inefficient_

(I think that's the purpose of Opera-mini, very much misunderstood ...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh. "The most important aspect of this laptop is its display. It has a 1920 x 1200 15.4" TFT LCD." The new 15" MBPs max out 1680x1050 even with the additional option.

<comment><USER5> He almost made me want to buy a Thinkpad. Why can't Apple do 15,4" with 1920x resolution? My dream laptop would be MBP unibody keyboard/frame, Intel 256GB SSD, 1920x1200, extra battery instead of SuperDrive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "well-prepared" does not even start to describe this guy! He has links to all the devices and everything, so now I have to buy some of this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> aka "bunnie", the guy who become famous for hacking Xbox, IIRC.

<comment><USER8> yeah, OP should add "bunnie" to the title, as most people know him by that, I'd imagine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm probably clueless, but can't find any edit handle for this. Little help?

<comment><USER9> You can edit stuff you submit for some amount of time but eventually the edit link goes away. I changed it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _I also carry the ultraslim AC/DC combo adapter that works with every airplane power outlet I've seen to date._

I only travel via plane a couple times a year and mostly try to sleep, but I had no clue that some seats offered power outlets. Now I do! That could come in handy one day.

<http://www.seatguru.com/articles/in-seat_laptop_power.php>

<comment><USER11> Heh. I've flown two times since 2001, both in 2008 on an A320 that had standard AC outlets nearly everywhere.

Until I clicked that link and double checked, I had assumed the same was true of nearly every plane on every carrier in general -- I mean, it's _2010_ \-- and the 757 I will be taking in a month in particular. It isn't. Bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _It seems strange to expend 80 MB of RAM just to play an MP3._

I liked that bit a lot; iTunes is gigantic resource hog.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice. I like 'The Setup' and understand that he's looking for interesting people, not interesting setups, but all the same, I'm a little tired of seeing 'MacBook Pro with 30 inch cinema display'.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the fact that he focuses on protecting his hands. Kinesis keyboard+dvorak layout seems like a very good idea, and hopefully someday I will get to afford a kinesis keybard

<comment><USER15> I just switched to a kinesis from my 1984 IBM AT keyboard, and I have to say I am quite liking it. After three weeks my typing speed is almost what it used to be though I still occasionally make mistakes with the enter/space thumb buttons. I can work hard all day and while my hands are tired at the end of it, they don't hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree with almost everything Bunnie says, except:

1) I use Strawberry Perl instead of Cygwin. I'm scared of Cygwin. The only Unix utility I have on my Windows XP box is wget.

<http://strawberryperl.com>

2) I can't get myself to jump to widescreen Thinkpad. I like reading everything as high up on the screen as I can. I'm worried about my neck!

</comment><comment><USER17> _> I don't personally use gmail, and I never will trust my email to a mail service that actively searches your email and tries to give you ads._

Do the people still complaining about this six years later not use spam filters?

<comment><USER15> I still complain about this, still refuse to use gmail, and SpamAssassin does a decent job of removing spam from my inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hard to believe the VX Nano is discontinued. I love mine, though not everyone loves the convertible scrollwheel. Hopefully the other models are somewhat comparable.

<comment><USER19> You might want to check out the Anywhere MX. I have one and I can vouch for it being a very pleasant mouse. It looks extremely similar to the Nano in form factor, and has the same scroll wheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "my hands are too valuable to waste on a cheap keyboard."

</comment><comment><USER21> Pretty extensive, full of goodies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well informed, full of good sense. Couple of points that stuck:

 _an aftermarket Samsung 256 GB SSD_

I've seen a couple of sneers at those SSDs (which Apple also seems to use) as not the best performers. He may know better or just think they're good enough. (I can wait for the dust to settle.)

 _The only Apple product I use is their tiny USB power adapter_

The one with the KindleDX looks even smaller - barely larger than a plug, my additional US-to-Euro plug adapter is about the same size. The small print says it's made by Flextronics.

P.S. I was straining my eyes to figure if the scope in the photo was a Tektronix. The text says it is.

<comment><USER11> He had a Crucial SSD which died on him, then ended up getting the Samsung part for its size, part for Samsung's vertical integration.

<http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=592> <http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=770>

<comment><USER16> Same thing here. Got another Crucial for free and it's been going strong for about 4 months.</comment></comment></comment>


Frequent Twitter and Facebook Users: You Might Be Narcissists - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/06/12/social-media-narcissism-study/

<comment><USER2> You 'might' be? This is not new news. Of course frequent users are narcissists!</comment>


The Business of Too Much TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.vulture.com/2016/05/peak-tv-business-c-v-r.html# <comment><USER2> The OP has the wrong perspective on profits. You have to look at the personal relationships behind the numbers. Actors are indeed getting paid much much more than in the past, but that doesn't make productions any less profitable. It's that those profits aren't going where the used to.

Hollywood acting talent has moved behind the camera. Those owning and producing content have far tighter personal relationships with those on camera. They are married. The are each other's kids. That's what happens after a couple generations in a business where workers age-out of on-screen work very quickly. The days of studios treating actors like commodities are over. If a production turns zero profits, but everyone walks away with a big paycheck, that's a good day for those involved. The wishes of the stockholders are way far away. (See Goodfellas, a "not profitable" production on paper.)

Remember that game "seven degrees of kevin Bacon"? It wasn't a joke. Every wonder why the same actors end up working together year after year? Throw directors, producers and studio execs into the mix and you diagram extended families, or at least groups of tight friends, moving through the industry.

<comment><USER3> _> talent has moved behind the camera. Those owning and producing content have far tighter personal relationships with those on camera_

Do they also have strong relationships with distribution? The article suggests that studios are losing distribution power to streaming networks who completely own content after production.

 _> you diagram extended families, or at least groups of tight friends, moving through the industry_

In these network diagrams, do clusters of family/friends bypass agents during negotiations?

<comment><USER2> I don't think it extends to distribution. That's a corporate thing for publicly-traded companies. The personal relationships I describe are local. The people on the set or in the meetings all know each other and work for each other. Distribution is handled by thousands of people spread around the world who never meet the people in production. Streaming is just another form of distribution. I doesn't touch the personal relationships that underpin production.

As for agents, sometimes they are just a tax dodge. The ultra-rich are always worried about moving money between generations without taxation. Calling your kid, your nephew, your agent allows you to move a chunk of money to the next gen without worry of estate taxes. It's part of estate planning. A similar tactic works with jobs such as personal assistants, trainers or "producers" whereby a slightly lesser rate is paid to a celeb in exchange for a child being hired on. That money comes into the 'family' at a lower tax rate and avoids estate tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Producing TV shows today doesn't make financial sense.

In the 60s to 70s, the US had 3 networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), few shows, low budgets even for hit shows (think of Gilligan's Island and Brady Brunch), and _massively_ greater viewership than today[1]. And the average American viewer watched 4.5 hours of TV per day and knew the name of every prime time show on TV.

Today, every point above is reversed: hundreds of channels, hundreds of shows, something like one-tenth the viewership per show[1], and people watch much less TV.

To give one example of budgets, an entire episode of Star Trek cost about the same as just the voices on a Simpsons episode. (Star Trek cost $185,000 per episode, or $2.2M in today's dollars; the 6 main voices actors of The Simpsons were collectively getting $2.4M per episode but cut to $1.8M a couple years ago.)

The only conclusion is that TV in the 60s and 70s was _obscenely_ profitable and TV today is a marginal or money-losing business and covertly subsidized by other parts of the company's business.

[1] The final episode of MASH had 125 million viewers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29)

The final episode of Breaking Bad had just 10 million. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Viewership](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Viewership)

<comment><USER5> Like all other forms of content and pretty much everything else in America, there's clearly an excess right now. This is mostly a pissing match between Netflix and Amazon and maybe Hulu in order to push their stock valuation, with the traditional networks trying to keep up. Last I checked, the population of the US is growing at a steady 0.8% per year, and people still have the same amount of free time as they did a few years ago, so there's not enough demand to justify this.

<comment><USER6> It's not just streaming but cable tv networks are doing it too. Not long ago, cable didn't produce its own scripted prime time content. Now every channel is in on it. They all want to be the next AMC.

Part of it was driven by growth in cable revenue. Customers are paying nearly 30 dollars a month that gets passed to cable stations.

I think another part of it was the assumption that netlix and Amazon will payout to get a license to your content later.

But really I think it's the collapse of the broadcast networks. It used to be everyone just watched whatever the big four had on. So now the wealth is being spread.

<comment><USER7> I believe it's also the case that ALL Television advertising (and most ads in general) are incredibly overvalued. Most Marketers already know they're blowing 50% of the budget, they just don't know where the waste is (hint: everywhere). Most large corporations run on high enough profit margins that they can do this, and people are happy constantly spending all of their extra income on consumer goods. I wonder what the future holds...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Between 2009 and 2015, the number of scripted shows nearly doubled, from > just over 200 to an estimated 409 last year

This is probably related to the "reality" TV fatigue. They milked that cow to death. Gimmick after gimmick.

Anyway, I personally would love to see more well scripted shows.</comment>


Chatbot Cost Calculator – Know how much money it takes to build a chatbot - <AUTHOR> https://bothook.com/cost <comment><AUTHOR> We have built a chatbot cost calculator to help people know how much it cost to build a chatbot. The calculator numbers are based on technology implementation

</comment><comment><USER2> looks interesting every chatbot agency should try it out!!</comment>


GitHub turns 10 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ten <comment><USER2> Thank you GitHub for your contributions which are hated and loved by many (though loved by most I think is the general consensus). You've not only changed what we've all come to expect from version control tooling but also you've given us tooling that gave us things like Discord, Slack, VS Code, Atom and who knows what else! So thank you, say what you will about Electron but I find it self evident there is a gaping whole in existing GUI frameworks that was fulfilled so readily by Electron its growing adoption rate is self evident of this.

<comment><USER3> attributing spinoff projects is not necessarily a compliment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People can nitpick and complain about Github but the platform works and Github is now the de-facto standard for both open and closed source projects.

Hats off to Github...but let's also not forget the AMAZING tool underneath the covers that is simply called git!

</comment><comment><USER5> Github is arguably one of the most important and core companies in Silicon Valley. Kudos on 10 years of being the backbone of most tech companies and open source projects, and for being a valuable repository of knowledge and collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER6> congratulations, have been a big fan of the service (free and paid). looking forward to the next few years of innovation.</comment>


Ask HN: do you recommend an OCR product/software that processes paper forms? - <AUTHOR>

I was asked by a colleague if i knew or recommended an OCR product/software that processed paper forms, including multiple choices and so on.
Google Searches have been very inconclusive, so i thought about asking HN.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I have been playing with OCROpus - <http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/></comment>


Starbucks (and Sameness) - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/2009/12/01/starbucks/

<comment><USER2> I think it's a bit presumptive to write off the appeal of locally-owned businesses. Granted, it's easy and attractive to do since some people are so ridiculous about it. (Here in Austin, a neighborhood sued to try to stop a Walmart from coming in. They lost, but the process got delayed long enough for the recession to hit, so now an uglier, less-pedestrian friendly Walmart will be built than what was proposed. Progress.)

There is something palpably different when you're buying something directly from the owner of a business, or at least when the owner isn't too far removed for you to interact with them every once in a while. There's a Mediterranean restaurant I frequent that's run by three generations of a family, and something just feels different when I go there beyond just the quality of the food, which is amazing on its own. Perhaps they're just good at being friendly. I think it's more of a side-effect of properly aligned incentives. The better of an experience they create, the more money they make, and with a stronger, more positive correlation than a waiter has with tips.

Humans are social creatures. There might appear to be an equivalence between transactions with Starbucks and your local independent coffee shop, but there's more going on than just a transaction. It's an experience.

(Then there's the whole argument for keeping money circulating within your local economy, but that seems like it'd have the same problems as protectionism if it became a popular movement.)

<comment><USER3> Yes, there's a distinct pleasure in doing business with someone who is a part of your tribe, notional as that tribe may be.

<comment><USER4> i'm sure most KKK members feel that way!

(incidentally, I don't care about anything other than the quality of the coffee and chairs)

<comment><USER5> How about s/tribe/community/ ?

<comment><USER4> Slightly less offensive, but similar...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want a cup of approximately coffee-shaped liquid in the morning, Starbucks is great because it's the same coffee anywhere. It's not inspiring, but it's nearly always edible. For a very large number of people who drink coffee, this is the goal and starbucks delivers, anywhere, anytime.

If you want a coffee shop experience, with young bohemian college students or starving artists or something, starbucks tends not to deliver. Being standardized lends an air of inauthenticity, and depending on what you're looking for it's a bit too busy what with everyone ordering coffee all the time so they can get through the day. There's usually some people on a laptop, and there are a few that have managed to become havens to the right type of people, but it's less "coffee shop" and more "a shop that sells coffee."

So basically, starbucks is servicing a niche market. Fortunately for them, it's a large niche, and they've self-selected for high-functioning addicts so the business model is sustainable.

<comment><USER7> > If you want a cup of approximately coffee-shaped liquid in the morning, > Starbucks is great because it's the same coffee anywhere.

Which really is the point of branding in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At one point, Starbucks was a local coffee shop. One of the reasons it was successful was because it made its drinks unique-- it puts a tiny amount of caramel into Mochas, which give them a distinct taste that people feel they can't find anywhere else.

The coffee is only just decent, but 99% of people don't know or care about that. Most people wouldn't know what good coffee tastes like. They assume -- and, through the power of placebo, taste -- the coffee is bad because of the undertones about Starbucks in society.

I don't think this is about coffee or brands directly. This is about perception. The perception of localness is what Starbucks was hypothesizing to be powerful. They either failed in their experiment (likely by mentioning that it was inspired by Starbucks) or discovered their hypothesis was incorrect.

<comment><USER9> It also helps that Starbucks coffee is particularly high in caffeine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I haven't seen any real data. I think that Starbucks has the data, and knows to a tenth of a percent how many people would prefer an independent shop, all other factors being equal.

It also seems that the appeal of the independent shop varies by location. Certain demographics will value authenticity, local ownership and funkiness.

We should beware the temptation to generalize from our own preferences, or from those of our friends.

From personal observation, when a Starbucks is near an indie shop, they are usually doing about the same volume of transactions. It may be 65/35 or 35/65, but I haven't seen 90/10.

Has anyone?

</comment><comment><USER11> I go to starbucks because they usually have a clean restroom.

<comment><USER12> Funny, that used to be the reason to go to McDonalds.

<comment><USER13> That's the reason you go to McDonald's, KFC's, and Pizza Huts in China. They're the fanciest and cleanest restaurants around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it interesting that Starbucks would want to throw away their branding and open up coffee shops under a generic name.

That said, this is a negative and contentless rant. Blue jeans are very practical in all seasons. It's not fair to compare a fashion trend to a franchise rebranding.

<comment><USER15> I didn't see anything that said they were operating under a different name - only the interior decor was different and they abstained from putting the logo outside.

<comment><USER16> From the Reuters article:

 _Apparently the experiment isn't working. A former Starbucks insider said that Seattle's 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea – the first of the new not Starbucks stores (its website, by the way, is called www.streetlevelcoffee.com) – is doing only a third of the business of the regular green-logoed Starbucks store that used be at that site._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The comedy bit Matt mentions is by Lewis Black talking about the street in Houston with two Starbucks across from each other.

It now has three (sort of):

[http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2009_479001...](http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2009_4790013)</comment>


Alum Charged With Hacking Into Texas A&M - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-College-Hacking.html?ex=1346817600&en=2b7a3ceda0264fcf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss <comment><USER2> I actually know a few people who go to A&M who discovered similar vulnerabilities. A friend gained access to the Windows LAN Manager passwords and cracked them, getting access to login and passwords of the entire freshman Engineering class. On a separate occasion, he noticed a windows folder share on a server which contained the logs for the Engineering departments student portal. The logs contained every login attempt with the login and password stored in plain text! Not kidding.

So he told the department system admins and they basically shrugged him off.. Maybe now they've learned their lesson?</comment>


How do you handle eye fatigue - <AUTHOR>

Lately my eyes have been getting fatigued after looking at a computer screen. I'm a developer and sit in front of a computer for at least 10 hours a day, more if I can. My eyes haven't ever given me a problem until now, and it's a major problem. I'm not able to look at a computer screen for more than 15 seconds until I have to take a break. Here are some remedies I've found on the internet:
* Special UV eye glasses
* Visine drops
* 20-20-20. Every 20 minutes, focus on an object 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
* Don't forget to blink
So far blinking more has helped, I've been doing the focus trick, but way more often than 20 minutes. I haven't bought Visine or the special UV glasses.
I don't have and don't need glasses or contacts. I sit in a naturally lit office, with a 23(?)" LCD monitor.
Got any other ideas? <comment><USER2> Sometimes I get some pretty bad headaches from staring so intently at the screen. I've found that taking breaks every few hours or so, going outside, taking a breath of fresh air, and then staring at something in the distance helps. Not only do I feel rejuvenated from being outside, but it also helps to relieve the eye strain.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a developer as well and used to have this same problem. Now I make sure to blink more often and I use eye drops, either red eye or dry eye (both work fine) and I also switched to a matte screened monitor. I had a glossy one before and after I switched them up, the problem started going away.</comment>


NYTimes Skimmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer/

<comment><USER2> It's funny, but I'm already starting not to care about the NYT now that they've announced they're going to implement a paywall. I didn't realize it till I saw this headline, but when I read it I noticed I was thinking "Oh, well, news about new NYT features is no longer relevant to me." I'd never made a conscious decision not to pay for the NYT. From their point of view, it was something even worse: I'd never even considered paying. When they announced they were going to charge, I implicitly wrote them off. I took it for granted that once the NYT disappeared (which is how I thought of it), I'd be getting my news from somewhere else.

The funny thing is, paying for the NYT would be no problem for me financially. The reason I'd never considered paying is that it just didn't seem conceivable to pay for content. There's information you have to pay for, like research reports, but buying that sort of thing is a whole different category in my mind. Maybe I could be trained to think of news as something one pays for, but I can't see how. No paywall has done that so far.

<comment><USER3> It is even funnier- the NYT seems to want credit for implementing a paywall without the revenue. The announced the wall goes up in 2011, and in web time scales that is equivalent to "some day in the future." Likely they need some excuse to put a fictitious "anticipated revenue stream" into their income projections (to boost growth and the price of their stock) but even they know the paywall will not work (so they don't want to actually have it up).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> almost sort of works on the Nexus One (links don't have the proper hit states; typography gets bizarre; attempting to zoom in activates an article). Curious as to how it does on the iPhone and given it's sponsored (today at least) by Blackberry, how it does there.</comment>


Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-health-insurance-angry-patients-20190628-story.html <comment><USER3> I have $6,500 deductable. It's insane how much work I need to do to get healthcare.

The biggest issue is price transparency. To get a price, I need the tax-id of the medical office and the procedure code. Often times the procedure code is unknown because I might have any number of different procedures, depending on what the diagnosis is.

So, I take my list of codes to the health insurance company with the tax ID and wait while they look everything up. This whole thing can take 2 hours.

That's if everyone knows what they're doing. Medical offices are so used to patients not asking about price, their back-office has no idea what to do when someone actually asks how much a procedure will cost.

Then there's the insanity of cash price being cheaper than the insurance price. So, I need to decide if I want to pay $600 and have it go towards my deductible or $450 and pay cash.

I agreed to pay $450 cash and no one in the office understood how to handle it. I finally get to pay the $450 cash and I still got a bill from my insurance for $600 because they _also_ billed my insurance.

You get that? I paid cash and my insurance company still got billed.

Then we have billing errors. I got billed for things I never asked for and/or never received. More wasted time addressing that. Of course, back office is not used to patients reviewing their bill, so there's more confusion to deal with.

I also have an HSA tax free bank account that lets me pay for this stupidity tax free, yay! Dozens of more hours were thrown away trying to understand how HSA accounts work, what I can charge to the HSA account and picking a bank to handle the HSA account.

I spent nearly 100 hours in the last few years dealing with health insurance bullshit.

Imagine how many more wasted hours other Americans deal with.

Fuck this shit already.

<comment><USER4> Literally half the country tried to warn against this exact same thing happening before the ACA passed.

<comment><USER5> This pattern of exploding healthcare costs didn't begin with the passage of the ACA (though the ACA is also obviously not the solution). The ACA _did_ increase costs as insurance companies couldn't suddenly refuse service because they are actually sick (preexisting conditions), but what is our healthcare system doing if it's NOT treating sick people?

<comment><USER4> > ACA did increase costs as insurance companies couldn't suddenly refuse > service because they are actually sick

Insurance companies are in business to make a profit. What the ACA did was ensure insurance companies have captive customers. A plan with a $6500 deductible vs pay a fine, nonsense. I should be free to choose between the plan or no fine. If it's all sick people in the plan pool because healthy people opted-out, that's the insurance company's problem, not mine.

Now that the individual mandate is gone, we can watch the deductibles climb ever higher and push people out of insurance.

For many people $6500 might as well be $50k.

I would support a full repeal of ACA and replacement with government payer for all, so long as private insurance is not outlawed and can go back to pre ACA form (I'd like to see more changes, but that's a starting point).

<comment><USER6> _I should be free to choose between the plan or no fine_

That's fine as long as you support getting rid of laws that force hospitals to treat you whether or not you have insurance and you medical bills are not dischargeable in bankruptcy if you don't have insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anger is insufficient. Without consumer choice, there is no mechanism for individuals to impose pressure on Healthcare providers and insurers. They can continue to 'milk the cow'.

<comment><USER8> Just give consumers access to a price list before service is provided. That will go a long way towards helping the problem.

(Not that you are going to price shop for every service--a trip to the emergency room for a broken bone wonte get shopped--but some portion of health Care is discretionary or is deliberate enough it can be shopped.)

<comment><USER9> That's not enough. What the people should do is demand that corporate health insurance be banned _and_ demand uniform/transparent pricing. (Removing the corporate tax deduction and adding a personal one would have the same effect)

That'd lower the cost of the average policy as their would be an influx of (on average) healthier people to the market for insurance.

<comment><USER10> We need to eliminate tax deductions as well. They distort behavior yet only benefit the wealthy.

Families making under $50k aren't paying much in federal taxes as it is. The federal tax bill for a family of 4 making $50k/yr is $2,739. Cutting their tax bill in half gives them back a little over $100/mo.

<comment><USER9> The individual tax deduction is meant to be a temporary bait and switch. A full top line individual deduction of health insurance premium would allow corporations to shift their current contributions to their employees with no net tax consequence (income paid is deductible for the corporation and the premium would be for the individual).

Once that's in place the next step would be making the general populace aware that the majority of the deductions, at higher tax brackets mind you, are going to the top. That would give the political capital to eliminating the "fat cat insurance deductions" and gradually get us to sanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have started going to Mexico for many things. I get better care from a Dr 3 hrs away than I do my primary care doctor and the after surgery care is so good I can call the Dr 3 years after and still get free advice about things.

I cant even get my prescription renewed in the US without a 300 dollar checkup

Screw the US insurance companies and the mess they made of our healthcare

</comment><comment><USER12> All I know is that in 2013 I was able to get insurance in the private market to cover myself. It was ~$80 a month and the deductible was $2000.

Now, there is only one company left in my state that will even offer plans in the private market. The closest plan to what I used to have has gone up ~6x in price and the deductible has tripled.

The prices started going up immediately after the ACA came into being I think the cause and effect are pretty clear.

<comment><USER3> Your $80 insurance was trash. You think you had coverage but the moment anything serious happened to you, you'd get thrown off.

Cancer? Bye.

Heart problems? See you later.

They were a fraud and you were getting ripped off.

ADA put an end to that fraud. Insurance companies could no longer arbitrarily throw you off. That's why premiums went up from $80. They had to actually provide coverage.

Now you know two things.

<comment><USER12> I liked it just fine, I'm aware of the change the ACA brought into effect with regard to the preexisting conditions. I'd rather have affordable options than a single un-affordable choice. Whether the insurance company doesn't cover a pre-existing condition or you can't afford the premiums the out come is the same. I'd argue that no insurance at all is worse but reasonable people could differ on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I doubt the people in this article are middle class. Only one income is mentioned, but $40k for a family of three is below the definition of middle class for most of the USA. Lots of people who think they are middle class are really poor.

We need a Federal expansion of Medicaid to be available to _everyone_ with pricing based on income. Once wealthier people start moving over to it, the private insurance racket will collapse. I'd move over in a heartbeat, even if the costs were higher because the plans I have available to me are garbage and my family can't all see the same doctors because my insurance won't cover my partner's and vice-versa.

<comment><USER13> Poor whites think government is the problem. Wealthy people have private insurance from their employers. We are stuck with the current system, there is no impetus for change. Just a lot of stupid coming out of the white house. Sad!

<comment><USER14> Off topic, but... when you end your posts with "Sad!" like that, you sound just like a Trump tweet. Given your content, you probably don't want that (unless you're trying to parody Trump, and I didn't notice).

<comment><USER13> I don't know about you, but I see Trump tweets everywhere; the very stable genius has made a YUGE impact on everyday discourse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mAEStro-paNDa I used to work at a med school, and often I would be in the classroom. Once the Dean gave a presentation over the _true_ cost of healthcare in the US. What was his final conclusion to the class? _No one_ knows the true cost of healthcare. It's nonsensical.

The situation with healthcare in the US has been beyond ridiculous for quite some time. Often the conversation centers around those without insurance, but being under-insured is just as much of an issue.

We need to decouple healthcare from employment. We need a single-payer system. This would save _everyone_ money on healthcare in the long run.

<comment><USER15> > single-payer system

Why could I not buy my own insurance? Or why can't I self-insure? If I want to pay for the best, I ought to be able to buy it (again, _if_ I will pay).

There's a difference between actual single-payer (in which there is a _single_ entity which _pays_ , the government) and a government health-care plan. For which are you advocating?

<comment> mAEStro-paNDa >For which are you advocating?

A single-payer system, as I said.

>Why could I not buy my own insurance? Or why can't I self-insure?

These are leading questions. There exists healthcare systems that are a hybrid of single-payer/private insurance.

<comment><USER15> These are not leading questions. "Single payer" definitionally means there is a _single_ entity which _pays_ , meaning no insurance or private pay. You're using it like it means a government plan; it doesn't. The reason I'm asking is because some politicians are crazy enough to want to prohibit any thing but a government plan, and I don't know where you fall.

<comment> mAEStro-paNDa They are leading questions. You're assumptions about single-payer, based on what you think "some politicians" said, are baked into your questions. Again, there exists hybrid systems. Take a look at Spain or Australia. Canada almost exclusively works off it's public system, yet private insurance still has a minor role.

Maybe I'm "crazy enough" to think that there should be zero profit-motive in health insurance, but even I can confidently say that a public policy scenario wherein all but a government plan is prohibited just isn't realistic, nor does it reflect what many other western countries have done for 30+ years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Health insurance should be decoupled from employment. Its tax advantaged treatment causes distortions in the costs and coverage offered. I'd rather see people get more of their compensation in cash rather than a health insurance benefit. It would especially help poorer workers who would have more flexibility and choice.

<comment><USER15> More employers ought to do this, for sure. If I'm a young, healthy, twenty- six-year-old man, I almost certainly don't need medical care. If I've got a good job, I can essentially self-insure. I might want to keep _actual insurance_ , i.e. high-deductible protection for catastrophic events, but nothing more.

<comment><USER13> Think about the consequence for society as a whole if everyone did what you did.

<comment><USER15> 1\. I act in the interests of society, rather than my own. It's the issue of the prisoners' dilemma; I'm not going to be the sucker.

2\. I honestly don't know what you mean here. I will almost certainly not draw much in the way of health expenses; this is _exactly the way insurance is supposed to work_. What is wrong with not billing every thing to insurance and not paying for the privilege? If every one did this, consumers would be price- sensitive and costs would drop.

<comment><USER13> I am not sure what you are describing is "exactly the way insurance is supposed to work." If you have an open mind about it, you might want to read about the three-legged stool[1].

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20170716081909/https://www.nytime...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170716081909/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/opinion/obamacare- repeal.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem here is that years of abusing "insurance" \- billing regular prescriptions to something intended to be used for catastrophic events - <USER2> led to prices being raised without the consumer feeling the net effect, _right away_. It was a band-aid, nothing more.

There was an article a few months back about an indian gentleman who was essentially industrializing health-care. This is what we need. Maybe some one who does routine carpal-tunnel surgery does not need a full MD? Some how, medicine was one of the few industries which never industrialized. By doing this, we can go back to looking at insurance the right way: something for _catastrophic events_. Regular health care is expensive, and no system can realistically have the balance of its members taking out more than they put in long-term.

</comment><comment><USER17> 1\. Give employees a statement showing how much the employer paid along with their full year comp and other benefits 2\. Detach health insurance from employers 3\. Create price transparency for services

<comment><USER18> "Give employees a statement showing how much the employer paid..."

Box 12, code DD on your W-2 reports "the cost of coverage under an employer- sponsored group health plan" as required by the ACA [1] (includes the premiums you paid, but you can subtract those out).

[1] [https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care- act/form-w-2-reporting-o...](https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care- act/form-w-2-reporting-of-employer-sponsored-health-coverage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So much of the existing system could be simplified if providers were required to charge every customer the same price. It would be dead simple to implement- add to the Medicare regulations that if you accept Medicare, you can't charge any customer more than you charge Medicare. The massive subsidy that the privately insured provided to Medicare and Medicaid would be diminished so those prices would rise somewhat, but there would be no inefficient haggling with each individual customer. We would all effectively get the Medicare/Medicaid price for all health care. In-network out-of-network would go away. The differentiation on insurers would be how much they reimburse for particular procedures, not what price they happen to have negotiated with the provider closest to your home. The providers could have different prices from each other, but one provider could not charge a different price to each customer.

Instead, under the current system, we let the providers lose money on Medicare and Medicaid patients, while they soak the privately insured and uninsured for massive profits. Everyone coming in the door should pay the same published price.

"Most workers blame drug companies and health insurers for high healthcare costs" How did the hospitals and doctors pull this off? The number one driver of higher health care prices in the US is the provider cost, but everyone wants to blame insurance.

<comment><USER14> That would probably bankrupt Medicare.

Now, I'm not in favor of Medicare paying less than cost. It's a dishonest hidden subsidy. But be careful of how you fix it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would like to know why, in the past ~20yrs, health insurance premium costs have nearly quadrupled ([https://www.kff.org/report-section/2018-employer- health-bene...](https://www.kff.org/report-section/2018-employer-health- benefits-survey-section-1-cost-of-health-insurance/attachment/figure-1-10/)).

I don't understand the push for price lists. Forecasting is hard enough with software, I can't imagine what it's like for medical procedures where every person is different. Hospitals treat patients regardless of ability to pay, and attempt to recoup losses for patients who can't pay. Why shop around on price if it's unpredictable due to the nature of the system, shopping around on quality of care would seem more important to me.

</comment><comment><USER21> Healthcare is turning me into a single-issue voter.

</comment><comment><USER22> but all Dems promised free health care to illegal immigrants. is it going to be a surprise when Trump gets reelected?

<comment><USER23> Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. It's off topic here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> USA needs an NHS

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if the "you can keep your private health insurance if you want it" is a dogwhistle for "we won't blow a hole in your stock portfolio."

The only people I know who like their health insurance are union members, government employees, and people on Medicare or medicaid.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have a high deducible plan and think its a good idea that everyone gets one. It means you're much more aware of costs and much more careful. One of the reasons the total US healthcare bill is so high is that many/most people get lots of unnecessary tests, lots of marginally useful procedures and lots of expensive emergency work instead of trying to be healthy in the first place.

Finally having people feel the sting of the bills will hopefully pressure people to change the system that is both very inefficient and overpays doctors, drug companies and hospitals.

<comment><USER27> With employer based insurance and lack of price transparency there is almost nothing the patient can do to reduce costs. You can't get any upfront pricing, it's hard to evaluate whether a test is needed, you can't change insurance.

You are giving the patient responsibility for something they have almost no chance to understand.

<comment><USER3> On top of that, it's impossible to shop around for some of the biggest purchases.

Broke your leg, now what? Start calling local hospitals to see who offers the best price?

It's impossible to be an educated consumer with healthcare. Impossible.

<comment><USER14> Worse: One hospital charges less. Will I get equally good care there? Or is their rate of complications higher? Will I suffer consequences down the road, maybe for the rest of my life? Do I really want the less expensive hospital in that case? How much money is a lower chance of complications worth?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DjangoCon Europe: tickets, talk submission open for registration - <AUTHOR> http://djangocon.eu

<comment><USER2> I am really interested but not sure if it is for me. I currently do lots of Django work but due to contract reasons contribute little to Floss projects and I don't know a lot of other Django hackers personally. Also I would have to pay for myself. Hmmm.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unrelated.. but I really love the look of the site.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks cool, gonna pitch this to the rest of the team and see about going.

</comment><comment><USER5> I went last year and its a blast!</comment>


Alibaba shares jump 7% in Hong Kong debut, in world's largest listing in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/alibaba-shares-jump-more-than-6percent-in-hong-kong-debut.html <comment><USER2> Found it strange. Given hk is so bad ass lately why they still come.</comment>


Deis v1.0 – Production Ready - <AUTHOR> http://deis.io/deis-1-0-production-ready/ <comment><USER2> Let me preface this by saying that I'm a huge fan of Deis and the team. I went through the process of setting up a cluster a few months ago and they were incredibly helpful and responsive in IRC. Highly suggest, would love to work with the project again.

That being said, I'm a little confused as to how Deis can be considered production ready when the underlying infrastructure (Etcd and Fleet from CoreOS) aren't. Both are making great progress, and I wouldn't worry too much about using them directly, but "production ready" abstractions on top of something maybe-not-so-production-ready makes me cringe a tiny bit.

[https://github.com/coreos/etcd/blob/master/Documentation/pro...](https://github.com/coreos/etcd/blob/master/Documentation/production- ready.md)

<comment><USER3> Your point is taken: some of the underlying technologies we use are still under active development. That said, we've worked with enough production Deis deployments to know that etcd and fleet (for example) run much better than some might think.

As early adopters of these technologies, we have strong relationships (and often formal L3 support) with the teams involved. We are often the first to report issues as well as the first to test fixes. You can view this announcement as a vote of confidence in those projects and our ability to roll out fixes as bugs surface.

Hope to see you back in the #deis channel soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Project creator here. It's been a fun 16 months getting to this point. Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER4> Great work! I played around with deis a few months ago and it was the first PaaS I was able to get up and running and actually, you know, deploy an app to!

Couple questions:

1\. What about storage? I know you use ceph for the Docker registry, etc. Is that exposed so that apps can somehow use it?

2\. When I tried it, performance was kind of lacking (for things like pushing apps and making config changes). Was this just a limitation of my setup (I used 3x2GB DigitalOcean nodes) or something you guys are working out?

Thanks again!

<comment><USER5> Hi, I'm also a maintainer :) to answer your questions:

1) we expose ceph in the router, so your apps could use it. This will have to be managed by you however as we don't have a user story for plugging apps into backing services asides from `deis config:set`[1]... Yet.

2) Performance is still something we're working on. When you deploy an application using a Heroku buildpack[2], your app is compiled into a container which sits on top of Heroku's cedar stack, which is around 800MB[3]. It's a beefy stack so fleet will take some time deploying that image. This should only occur the first time it's scheduled onto a new host as future images will just use the cache for that image, significantly speeding up deployment times. If you deploy an app using a Dockerfile and it's been optimized correctly (we have an app sitting under 5MB for test purposes)[4], deployment times should be very speedy.

Hope that answers your question!

[1]: [https://github.com/deis/deis/issues/231](https://github.com/deis/deis/issues/231)

[2]: [http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using- buildpacks/](http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using-buildpacks/)

[3]: [https://github.com/progrium/cedarish](https://github.com/progrium/cedarish)

[4]: [https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/deis/example- go/](https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/deis/example-go/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After reading a bit through it and i am wondering what the limitations are. I am a bit "scared" that deis talks about heroku so much and about HTTP. From the documentation it seems that the containers can ONLY use one port and that must be HTTP. Is that right? Also, the external storage is mentioned everywhere but not exactly what it is. I have read that Postgres is a database for the applications. What about plain files? Can my apps persist files on the external storage?

If this is only about pushing the next Go-based Todo web app to some servers, i'm disappointed... :(

Usecase: Is it possible to run mail servers on it?

<comment><USER7> Yes the Deis router only supports HTTP at the moment, sadly no TCP. I hope/think it's something they are going to work on after v1 is stable. It also has no persistent storage; the database you are referring to is for the deis application itself. You could use it, but it's not wise. Realistically you should use something similar to Amazon RDS or Rackspace cloud databases, as each deis node is ephemeral.

It's still really early days, I have seen a few mentions on their github page that outlines the features you're wanting, and I can't wait for them myself.

<comment><USER5> yes, tcp support in the router is something we'd like to work on but is not there yet for v1.0.

<comment><USER7> Good to hear! Any plans for supporting databases in the future? That's the main deal breaker for me at the moment. Keep up the awesome work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can somebody explain what the use-case for this is? The site says it is a "PaaS that makes it easy to deploy and manage applications on your own servers".

Most apps I've been making follow a similar recipe: run single ubuntu instance on digitalocean, use nginx for http to serve static content for single page app (ex. angular project), and nginx proxy to gunicorn to serve a python flask API that stores and retrieves data to/from mongodb.

Where in that picture would something like Deis fit in? Or is this not for me?

<comment><USER9> Pretty much the same as Heroku. As a developer, I want to deploy my application as quickly as possible without setting up nginx, gunicorn, etc. per service. I have a front-end service, three API services, and some daemon services. I'd like to be able to scale eventually.

With Deis, you first allocate the number of machines you want to be your cluster and install Deis on them. Think of the cluster as a large physical machine that can run many services. You might have a production cluster (7 machines), dev (3 machines), staging (3 machines), etc. Now, deploy your apps to that cluster via a git push for each.

Need to boot a new front-end server to handle load? Just run an extra container in your cluster. Same with API.

How would you do that with your current setup? I'm guessing provision an entire second machine (or VM, same thing) and put them behind a load balancer.

With Deis, each cluster is exposed behind a single load balancer and each app/service is exposed as a subdomain on that loadbalancer. Deis handles the internal load balancing.

Cluster getting full? Just add a new machine/vm to it.

So, if you like the idea of Heroku, you might like Deis, especially if you'd like to use your own hardware/VPC or want to use Docker locally and in production.

<comment><USER10> How long was the install process for you? Was there much involved?

<comment><USER9> In the beta, it took me a while to get the cluster up and running. I'd say on the order of a couple hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Deis must make it simple for ops folks to publish a set of reusable backing services (databases, queues, storage, etc.) and to allow developers to attach those services to applications."

What are some projects focused on implementing these *-as-a-service components in a cloud-agnostic manner? Rancher is one that came up earlier today on HN.

[0] [http://www.ibuildthecloud.com/blog/2014/11/11/announcing- ran...](http://www.ibuildthecloud.com/blog/2014/11/11/announcing-rancher-dot- io/)

<comment><USER5> rancher is a bit different. It's based on lower-level APIs which allow your containers to hook into a certain cloud-provider features like Amazon's EBS, ELBs and VPCs. Deis uses the docker engine to ship and run applications, providing an easy developer workflow. We're similar to other PaaS solutions like Dokku[1], Flynn[2], and Cloud Foundry[3].

[1]: [https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

[2]: [https://flynn.io/](https://flynn.io/)

[3]: [http://cloudfoundry.org/](http://cloudfoundry.org/)

<comment><USER11> I think you misunderstood my question.

I know that Deis is focused on running 12-factor apps and does not try to provide a platform on which to implement backing services. There are proprietary implementations of backing services that are tied into specific cloud providers, such as Amazon's RDS. There are open-source implementations of backing services that are tied into specific cloud implementations, such as OpenShift's Trove. What I am asking is this: what projects are attempting to implement open-source backing services in a cloud-agnostic manner?

Put another way, if I choose to run Deis right now, I have the benefits of a PaaS without lock-in. However, I still have to either accept a degree of lockin to a service like RDS or attempt to roll my own automated database management. What projects should I be watching or contributing to that are trying to change this for databases? For queues? Etc.

I mentioned Rancher because they included creating clones of EBS and RDS in their goals, but surely they're not the only project biting this off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are the main differences between Deis and Flynn?

<comment><USER13> Flynn co-creator here.

Short answer: A lot. At Flynn we're building solutions to what we see as the big problems that developers will face in the next few years. Deis seems to be solely focused on Heroku-like featureset.

Flynn runs anything that runs on Linux, including stateful services like databases. In fact, we package major open source databases as "appliances" that run within the Flynn cluster for ease of use.

Deis has historically required users to use very specific technologies (initially Chef, and now CoreOS). Flynn does not rely on a specific Linux distribution or configuration management system. In fact, Flynn was designed to be modular to give users the greatest possible choice of components (Deis uses a few components we created for Flynn).

Flynn is designed to be a single toolkit that lets you run everything, not just twelve-factor stateless webapps.

We have created a lot of new technology where necessary but we also use off- the-shelf components like CoreOS's etcd, which Deis also uses. Neither we nor CoreOS consider etcd production-ready, and we don't consider any platforms (including Flynn) production-ready until etcd and all underlying components are stable (Deis also depends on the CoreOS alpha channel).

When you see a "1.0" release from Flynn it will come with our full confidence in the stability of all of its components. We also aim to go well beyond what's possible in Heroku today.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the insights!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We've been using Dokku for a month or so for deploys on a project and aside from a few initial minor bumps it's made the deploying as simple as Heroku for me and taken a ton of the pain out of devops.

Deis/Dokku are great tools for developers looking to abstract away a lot of the pain of getting an app into production.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, my dokku server has been up for over a year and has only gone down completely once, due to a third-party plugin. Very satisfied so far!

EDIT: I was thinking of switching it over to Deis, but it needs a minimum of 2gb of ram, with a suggested amount of 4gb...not a great fit for my 512mb DO droplet :(

<comment><USER3> This is exactly why we sponsor Dokku: [http://deis.io/deis-sponsors- dokku/](http://deis.io/deis-sponsors-dokku/) Go Dokku! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can I use Deis with only one CoreOS node?

<comment><USER3> No. As a PaaS designed to run enterprise workloads with high availability, Deis has a 3-node minimum.

If you're looking for a similar workflow but with a smaller footprint, Deis now sponsors the Dokku project: [http://deis.io/deis-sponsors- dokku/](http://deis.io/deis-sponsors-dokku/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations, @gabrtv. And thanks for all the hard work. I've been following this work weekly since we spoke over a hangout in the latter OpsDemand days. I've tried out a couple beta versions, but I can't wait to try out the real deal here at KnowledgeTree.

</comment><comment><USER17> Correct me if I'm wrong.

Deis = heroku-like interface on top of your own private cloud which must be running CoreOS and certain other things like Ceph distributed filesystem, but can be set to run on a variety of third party commercial cloud providers' infrastructure.

So basically, if you only ever want to use these features, and you are happy with a heroku-like interface to your infrastructure, Deis is useful.

OTOH, if you might want to run a non-Linux node, a specific filesystem or node-local configuration for performance, security or other purposes, or have infrastructure that is not feasibly manageable with a manual process, Deis is not currently useful.

That said, neither are most of the latest-gen infrastructure solutions.

<comment><USER5> > Deis = heroku-like interface on top of your own private cloud

There are a few things like Dockerfile deployments and a `deis pull` workflow for importing your docker images from either DockerHub or an in-house registry as an app, but for the most part you have the right idea. Open-source Heroku has been the general elevator pitch but there are a few docker goodies in there.

> and certain other things like Ceph distributed filesystem

That's an implementation detail of the platform itself, not a hard requirement that you need to set up yourself. We spin up a containerized ceph cluster for database, docker-registry and logger HA.

> if you might want to run a non-Linux node, a specific filesystem or node- > local configuration for performance, security or other purposes, or have > infrastructure that is not feasibly manageable with a manual process, Deis > is not currently useful.

We're quite receptive to suggestions and proposals such as compliance, security, node-local configurations et al. We're always happy to discuss changes in either the mailing list or in an issue in order to make the platform work for a range of environments, so it is definitely possible to bridge these two sides together :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why should I use this instead of Cloud Foundry?

Not trying to bash, just curious.

<comment><USER5> I used to work on Cloud Foundry for a while. I eventually left the project and became a core maintainer of Deis and have never looked back. Why?

The community is absolutely amazing here. I have had pleasant conversations with everyone from day 1. The OpDemand folks were very welcoming to my suggestions and they really helped me get started in the early days. _everything_ is done in the open. Not a single feature goes by without a fair trial or a discussion from the community.

Hacking on Deis, getting started and tuning it to your liking has always been there from the get-go. Cloud foundry... not so much.

Cloud Foundry provides the application deployment workflow, but they're missing a few core features, most notably application rollbacks and zero- downtime app migrations at the router level. There is also no scheduler tag support so you cannot control what node your apps will be scheduled to.

They use forks of heroku buildpacks, making them heroku-incompatible in some cases. Their java buildpack is specific to cloud foundry. Hello vendor lock- in.

In-place upgrades work beautifully. I've been dogfooding a running Deis cluster for about a month now, testing upgrade paths from version to version. Just stop the components, bump the platform version and boot them up again. Boom, v0.14.1 to v0.15.0. Cloud Foundry's upgrade path is to basically stand up a second production cluster, migrate your data, app slugs, cluster config and cut over DNS records to your new cluster.

If you have any more questions on Cloud Foundry vs. Deis, Gabriel or myself would be more than happy to discuss with you over IRC or email. My email is email@example.com

<comment><USER19> CF user here.

While I agree tag support would be cool, complaining about CF buildpack incompatibility is a bit disingenuous, no? I mean, you generally can use a Heroku build pack on CF, but if you have unique requirements, that's why there are CF-only buildpacks. The general reason is that some CF deploys don't have internet access and therefore need a completely offline cache of the binaries.

Secondly,

> they're missing a few core features, most notably application rollbacks and > zero-downtime app migrations at the router level

I'm curious why you think this? For example:

[http://blog.pivotal.io/cloud-foundry-pivotal/case- studies-2/...](http://blog.pivotal.io/cloud-foundry-pivotal/case- studies-2/case-study-how-pivotal-network-does-zero-downtime-deployment-on- cloud-foundry)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm interested in hearing pros/cons of Deis vs Kubernetes.

The primary disadvantage I can see for Deis is that it can only deploy single Docker containers (vs Kubernetes pods). Given the Heroku-style setup it makes sense, but it is limiting for more complex applications.

On the other hand, the simplicity of Deis is attractive. I kind of _wish_ I could use it, but I feel like it just isn't feasible for a full suite of microservices + dependencies.

Regardless, congrats on 1.0!

<comment><USER3> Deis and Kubernetes are solving different problems. Deis is a PaaS that provides a developer self-service capability a la Heroku. Kubernetes is a declarative container manager that provides lower-level orchestration features. Both are complimentary. For example, Red Hat is using Kubernetes to deliver their OpenShift v3 PaaS. We've explored a similar integration with Kubernetes but are currently more focused on integrating with Mesos a next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm still not grasping the concept of Docker and such...

Can I use Deis (albeit in a much smaller scale) to quickly spin up lightweight VM-ish entitys for prototyping new webapps/backends (i have an unused box at home), or am I coming at this from the wrong end :) (Link to a _good_ explanation of Docker, preferably a video ;), would be gratefully appreciated)

<comment><USER22> The way I think about it:

Docker - specify a config file and boom you have a VM with the system, the language, the libraries preinstalled

Deis/Dokku - gives you tooling to deploy/stop/access apps on your VM with an easy cli

<comment><USER21> Ok.. But if I push 5 docker containers based on say Ubuntu 14.04, will they take 5 times the size of an Ubuntu 14.04 base install, or will they share base install?

<comment><USER22> A little Docker example I keep coming back to:

[https://github.com/radekstepan/im- runnable](https://github.com/radekstepan/im-runnable)

It creates a little service that lets you run code (like Python, Node) in Docker sandboxed environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I already use CoreOS/etcd/fleet to manage a cluster of apps and services. What does Deis do that I can't already? Does it have solid automation for service discovery and the like? I want to be able to quickly add and remove nodes depending on demand. Does Deis make this easy?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a big fan of Linode but I see Linode isn't amongst the supported cloud providers. Is there some fundamental issue here or is it just lack of time / resources to develop support?

<comment><USER25> Deis supports custom providers.

[http://deis.readthedocs.org/en/rtfd- org/components/provider/](http://deis.readthedocs.org/en/rtfd- org/components/provider/)

<comment><USER5> That's ancient documentation -- v0.3.0!

That being said, we support any provider which runs CoreOS. Deis is just an platform which utilizes Fleet, Etcd and Docker. The best place to start would be to take a look at the Quick Start documentation: [http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/installing_deis/quick- start/](http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/installing_deis/quick-start/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm really struggling to understand what this is. I've looked at it a few times and never really get a good grip on what it is.

Also, how does it fit in with Ansible?

</comment><comment><USER27> are there any deis with ruby or rails application tutorials? I didn't see any, but for getting people from heroku, it would be great to see some tutorials so people can easily migrate.

on the minimum cluster of 3 nodes with 2 gb each, what is the minimum amount of apps that could be run?

<comment><USER5> we have a bunch of sample applications which we run nightly integration tests against. As for application tutorials themselves, we have the buildpack[1] and the dockerfile[2] workflows.

[1]: [http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using- buildpacks/](http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using-buildpacks/)

[2]: [http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using- dockerfiles/](http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using-dockerfiles/)

I can't give you an answer on how many apps you can run on a 3x2GB cluster. It really depends on how much memory/clock cycles your apps require.

<comment><USER27> how many small 50 mb sinatra ruby apps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone have any feedback from using this? Would be interested in hearing how it went.

<comment><USER29> Spent a couple days attempting to deploy using Rackspace tutorial. Wasn't able to get it to work. I will be taking another look, hopefully deployments have been worked out.

<comment><USER5> Just a quick note, Rackspace has been notoriously slow with getting CoreOS's latest images up, so we've had to work around that with noting that you have to update your machines first before deploying Deis. They just updated to v494 though so it should be good to go IITB now :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Freelancers how do you keep clients informed about cost? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I run my own consultancy shop (http://www.wilcoxd.com), where some of my work is hourly work on smaller projects (think 30-80 hours of work).
I want to make sure my clients know what the state of their project is in regard to the budget: how much money have we spent already, and keep them informed so they aren't shocked when the final bill comes in.
This is one of the ways I try to honor "collaboration over contract negotiation": the client can keep their eyes on the budget and reprioritize things when they get nervous.
My current approach to this is to log my hours in my time tracker app (http://getharvest.com) THEN send an email to the client as to how many hours I worked today, and how many univoiced hours have been accumulated so far.
But there's got to be a better way. What methods / sites / tools do other contractors use, here on HN?
TL;DR: How do you keep clients informed about what the final bill will be, or do you just surprise them with an invoice? <comment><USER2> Basecamp per client project works effectively because:

1) They can respond via email to anything in Basecamp without ever having to login to Basecamp (after the initial registration)

2) Basecamp makes your consultancy look better if they ever do login, as it is a pretty good looking simple project management system.

You do not necessarily have to use Basecamp, the key point is that the system you use has email integration.

Weekly status calls (or meetings in-person, if possible) go a long, long way to reassuring clients that you are on the same page, while at the same time not making you

</comment><comment><USER3> 12 years full-time, self employed in consulting, contracting, freelancing has taught me this.

Customers just don't want surprises of poor estimates. If you can build trust and a track record of that even the most neurotic customer will find some peace and solace in you.

The goal for you and the easiest way is to learn:

1) When you quote, say "Up to X hours". 2) Provide updates 3) Don't go over

While you get accurate enough to do that...

Learn to understand it's about trust, and value. If you generate more value than what you're paid (2x to 10x more), the client will never, ever care. If the good things you say, happen, you will have a track record and leeway.

Learn to work Value based instead of hourly. To get good at it take your estimate, and add 30-40% to it as a guess (on the side) to see how accurate you are.

My formula is this to estimate any project:

TOTAL HRS = (estimated hours) * (number of unknowns) * (complexity of unknowns) * (the percentage I'm usually off in my estimates) * (pain-in-the- ass tax)

(ESTIMATED HOURS) - This is your best, educated, guess of what you KNOW and have EXPERIENCE in ESTIMATING regularly.

(number of unknowns) - I use this as a multiplier in tenths. Ie., 2 unknowns makes this = 1.2

(size of unknowns) - For each unknown sometimes its a small thing with a deep possible impact, or a lot of unknowns all over the place with small impacts. Either way, I have to put a multiplier to it in tenths. So, if each of my 2 unknowns was a small but deep item, I'd give it a .3 and the other item was small and something I can stumble my way through, I might give it a .1 for a total multiplier of 1.4

(accuracy adjustment) - Some people are always 5-30% off consistently in their estimates, for each person, put in their estimate

(pain-in-the-ass -PITA tax) - Rarely used, but for high maintenance clients who take up more time than they should. The more updates, talking, arguing and convincing you have to do, it's billable time because you're working for them, about their project. Factor it in as a multiplier.

My formula in this case could look like this

Total hours = 20h estimated * 1.2 (unknowns) * 1.4 (unknown impacts) * 1.1 (accuracy adjustment) * 1.2 (PITA)

Total hours = ~ 44 hours

And that's how a project ends up taking twice as long as you thought :)

Tools to use: I use a mix of Freshbooks and a case manager like Fogbugz. Freshbooks ought to keep you sorted how you need.

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr: never surprise. Keep the communication going at all times, even if it's one-way. Deliver the agreed upon and hold them to their [financial] responsibilities. Never, ever work without a signed contract or billing authorization.

It's been my experience that clients come in many shapes and forms, levels of availability and interest along with disparate motivations to pay or not pay their bills. There's no one answer to client as they range from laid back and easy to completely schizo, but my practice has been to over-deliver in both the product and the project administration side. It doesn't always work out they way one would hope, but small improvements over time can lead to less project-related headaches in the future.

Scope is probably the most important part of freelancing. What am I building, how long do I have to build it and what are the assumed costs involved? Each of those items needs to be hashed out prior to the start of the project and the quicker you do that, the earlier the work starts.

Contract. Never start work without a contract. Not even with family. Without a legally binding, signed agreement, you surrender most of your rights, and work, to the client. Aside form the scoping of the project, which is usually unpaid, not a lick of work starts.

Milestones. Establish achievable milestones with the client prior to starting the work. If it's 80 hours of work, milestone what you can achieve at 30 and 60 hours and make sure the client is happy with the work being done and if not use the contract and scope to keep the work on track. Generally speaking, clients have no imagination and will only remember details or think of new shit once someone else has started the work. Much like a product manager. Treat them as such: yes you want that, but it's out of scope for this release; write a story and put it in the backlog.

Documentation. You need to document everything. Every email, phone call, tweet, design or requirement that the client sends you. Summarize all conversations you have with the client over the phone or in person, write them up in an email and ask the client to confirm your assumptions. It takes five minutes here and there, it's billable time and it keeps everyone honest.

Communication. Don't disappear off the radar and surface weeks later with a working prototype. Chances are requirements or timelines have changed and clients don't like to be ignored. Send daily updates until they tell you to stop, then send two during the week and one on Friday summarizing tasks accomplished. Ask for their input and approval as you need constant buy-in. Clients get excited in the early stages of a project but then get bored/confused and may decide they no longer need or want the work, becoming reluctant to participate or pay. Keep selling them the project every day.

Bill them on time. If you're on time with your code, then you should be on time with your billing and be firm about it. I use Freshbooks (<http://www.freshbooks.com/>) to keep the clients up to date with all of my tasks and hours and I know if they've looked at the current invoice or not. If they've already paid for most of the project and don't look at the final invoice, I don't worry too much. If they're in arrears and aren't looking at the invoice, chances are they have a pile of unopened bills on their desk. Negotiate this part diplomatically, but don't deliver anything until payment milestones have been achieved from the client.

Always be delivering. If the client has no/weak technical background, get ahead of them by under-promising and over-delivering. A client that can get ahead of you will [reluctantly] become your boss. A client who is always one or two steps behind you but awed by your production will want to be partner and that makes for a better client experience and future work.

Be human. Ignoring the agenda that they client may have in relation to the project, keep in mind that the client is human and will have fears, anxieties or misplaced excitement or expectations related to the outcome. In some cases, a client could be asking you to build them something that they think will eliminate their position. That's very scary to a lot of people. You'll need to get into their mindset to visualize what a success for them will look like and then strive towards that, reassuring them that together you're going to succeed. That's collaboration over contract negotiation.

On a small project you won't need to dedicate much time to these activities as long as you're able to consistently communicate a good attitude. On longer projects you might as well pretend you're a partner and lifelong friend as the client will often look for you for support. And then tere are some clients who are just jerks, but knowing that you're only going to be giving them 80 hours of your time will help assuage your heartburn.

I hope this rant helps you or anyone else reading it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Pretty much gold right here. It took me years to figure most of this out.

So I'm guessing you, like me, keep the client informed about "Today I worked N hours, making the total amount for this milestone M hours"?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's like sending a scrum update to a teammate who's working from home. It's routine and matter of fact after awhile. If they bitch about the amount of communication, I just make sure the invoices are all up-to-date and send two-day and weekly summaries. Following up with a phone call if they don't respond to requests. If anything, at least they'll think you're diligent.

It took me years to figure out as well. It's like being a silent, technical co-founder for a short period of time. Having some experience in the particular business domain is good but not always required as in the case of a marketing site, but I find it better to not try and outsmart the client and just fulfill the business objectives that they have with a solid, appropriate technical solution.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What could be putting limit on user engagement? - <AUTHOR>

My SaaS product extracts data from pdf files. Free trial gets users 10 free extractions. Paying users get 100 jobs. User logs into dashboard, uploads pdf, and downloads the extracted data. That is one job.
While observing 50 users so far I notice that the user engagement seems to terminate after they run the job for the first time. Even if it is successful. Some users run it a few more times but the result is the same, they leave and never come back or they come back run a job and leave again. Another observation is that 30 out of 50 users never created any jobs (they must label the pdf using the web app before extraction can happen, I explain how to do it in the demo video).
Even reaching out to all 50 users asking if I could help them, I got one reply. Here's what one of my user said
"Give that your subscription packages allow customers to run a certain number of jobs, it'd be important to me as a customer to know that I don't waste jobs trying to figure out what data are captured every time and refining the same job until I get it right. "
Is limiting the free trial to 10 jobs per user be the cause of engagement terminating after running a few jobs? I reached out to the user to see how they would respond to having no limits.
Are people having trouble with just figuring out how to use the tool evidence by a over 60% inactivity? Whats more frustrating is that they do not respond to my email queries where I ask them if they need help.
I would like to study more about user engagements and creating a business model that will get users to engage with the product in order to reach a key activation metric to find value in the product. <comment><USER2> This sounds like you'd be better off without a free trial at all. Charge a reasonable fee for unlimited use for a day or two. That way people would feel like they're going to be able to do whatever they need because its unlimited, but you get some renumeration. Just my first thought. i hope you figure something out. Best of luck to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> you mean like charge a $1 for 2 day trial of unlimited use?

or give 14 day trial before card is charged.

<comment><USER2> nobody is going to put their Cc in to pay you one dollar. charge $20 for two days. no trial. charge up front. but honestly, you probably shouldn't be listening to me, i'm just thinking out loud

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this a service that people need on a regular basis, or is it just a once in a while thing? If it's the latter, that would explain it, people got what they needed and left. If they need this on a regular basis, they probably should find a way to get the data before it is put into a PDF rather than relying on extraction.

<comment><AUTHOR> some people just need it for one time job others more regular. I guess for one time usage I should charge and for regular users require a credit card...but they will cancel it and extract as much as they want in the 14 day trial....

or I was thinking if it's a huge pdf file, charge per row of data extracted.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Z shell configuration, zsh startup files, when they load, what they do - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SixArm/sixarm_zsh_config <comment><AUTHOR> This repo README may be helpful to people who are new to Z shell, and want to know the load order, and what's good to put in each file.

I'm the repo maintainer and I welcome constructive feedback.

<comment><USER2> OMG Thank you!

I've only read the first quarter, but excellent job... the extreme clarity is hugely awesome!

"What goes in it" and "what does not go in it" thank you thank you thank you thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really don't care what shell I use as long as it's POSIX compatible, so I just go with the default, which means either bash, ksh, ksh93, FreeBSD sh (which I think is an older version of dash?), or zsh. (I use a mixture of Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris/macOS, and occasionally other systems as well).

I have some semi-elaborate dotfiles that work with every shell, but each shell uses different startup files, some shells don't have a distinction between login and interactive, etc, so I made a single idempotent config file that sets everything, and every shell-specific config file just sources that (which means some shells will source my config file twice, but that's ok).

Worked well for me for the past ~15 years.

If anyone cares: [https://github.com/4ad/dotfiles](https://github.com/4ad/dotfiles)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish more software were to use ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME} or similar instead of just putting stuff in $HOME

<comment><USER3> I hate that.

Dotfiles that I didn't create myself are bad enough, but now they become even worse because they are harder to get to.

XDG_CONFIG_HOME is just putting the trash under the rug and claiming you cleaned the house.

Of course, because now dotfiles are harder to get to, it encourages software to create even more spam.

One possible useful function of the XDG variables would be to set XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR to $HOME. That never seems to work for me.

It's bizarre to me that other people like these hierarchies. I prefer everything to be as flat as possible. I used to keep all my source code in $HOME/src (everything, C code, Go code, GCC, the Linux kernel, etc) and I wish I could have kept it in $HOME. I couldn't do that because of GOPATH, but now with Go modules I finally can!

<comment><USER4> I like the fact that I can put ~/.config under VCS more easily than I can put ~/ under a VCS.

OTOH, I've recently (months) started to use yadm[1] and seeing that it maybe doesn't matter and all I needed was a tool to make managing my home & configurations in a simpler way.

[1]: [https://yadm.io/](https://yadm.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tangential, but I recently got a massive speed up in my zplug-based load time with a simple `touch $ZPLUG_LOADFILE`. More discussion here: [https://github.com/zplug/zplug/issues/368](https://github.com/zplug/zplug/issues/368)

<comment><USER6> If you want even better startup speed, try `zplugin`[0]. It can load plugins asynchrously after your shell starts up, or after you type the first few characters of a command.

[0]: [https://github.com/zdharma/zplugin](https://github.com/zdharma/zplugin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If something like `export PATH="aa:$PATH"` is written in `.zshenv`, as the file is sourced even for nested zsh sessions, a new `aa` will be prepended for each zsh level. Consider protecting that kind of expansion (if you use it) with `if [[ $SHLVL == 1 ]]; then ...; fi`.

<comment><USER8> 'typeset -U path' would be a more simple alternative.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I like this in zsh:

        # Only allow unique entries in the PATH variable
        typeset -U path

        # Easier to read PATH variable modification:
        path+=(
          "${JAVA_HOME}/bin"
          "${GOPATH}/bin"
        )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apart from the clever .d directory support, doesn't this mirror bash (in theory)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes in a way; we work with both bash and zsh, and have a similar repos for config files.

We are experiencing many developers switching from bash to zsh because of the recent macOS Catalina OS upgrade, and we want to show how bash and zsh can be configured similarly.

We want to easily clone a group of shell helpers (aliases, functions, etc.) that can use our preferred conventions and abstractions, and can run on a wide range of systems.

<comment><USER11> For zsh, you'd be better off handling functions via the function autoloading mechanism rather than defining them all from .zshenv. It is common to create a directory named ~/.zfunc (or similar), add that to $fpath and autoload the contents. This is rather more efficient than predefining them all as you would in bash.

That said, looking at your functions, a function which just runs rsync with a bunch of options and "$@" should either be done via an alias (which preserves zsh rsync completion) or as an rsync alias in ~/.popt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent, thank you for the constructive advice! I'll start in on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How London Transport Is Preparing for Life After Lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-london-cycling-streetspace <comment><USER2> This is probably going to be tricky. I don't see how the 2 meter rule (or variant thereof) can be enforced on the underground trains at peak times. On a slight tangent, given that everyone will be required to wear a mask doesn't the risk of spreading/catching the virus diminish thereby eliminating the need for the distance rule?

<comment><USER3> Masks are not 100% effective even when worn properly. Think of it like an airliner: smoking is banned, but they also have smoke alarms AND flame retardant fittings.

<comment><USER4> [https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/05/29/feds-seek- incentives-...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/05/29/feds-seek-incentives- to-encourage-driving-which-will-accelerate-the-other-pandemic-traffic- violence/)

"Japan, which has the third highest rate of transit ridership in the world, found no infection events linked to commuter trains after performing rigorous contact tracing on almost 17,000 confirmed cases."

<comment><USER3> On the surface I can't see why no instances of infection being traced to travel on Japan's commuter trains has any relevance in a conversation about London's strategy for decreasing infection risk.

From the article you linked:

"Oshitani says riders are usually alone and not talking to other passengers. And lately, they are all wearing masks. "An infected individual can infect others in such an environment, but it must be rare," he says."

Tokyo has benefitted from both a fall in the volume of passengers on the Metro, and an infection rate of 0.5 per capita. The virus is more than 500x as prevalent in the UK as a whole, and more than 600x as prevalent in London.

<comment><USER4> The point is, in Japan's case masks appear to be 100% effective, or very close to it, in eliminating transmission on public transport.

Do you have a reason to believe greater prevalence of the virus is linked to lower mask effectiveness in this specific context?

<comment><USER5> Wearing masks being 100% effective is utterly impossible. The most positive studies show them being more like 85% effective.

There simply are no infected people on Japan's transit, due to the country's intensive, early quarantining procedures. (same with Korea and Taiwan)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think they forgot the bit about withdrawing free transport for school children and pushing it onto the local councils to pay for instead.

<comment><USER7> The national government has withdrawn free transport for children, not TFL

<comment><USER6> That's a fair description. It was part of the terms of the bail out.

<comment><USER7> A bailout required because the national government ordered TFL to operate in the way it did (80%+ service) while the customers had dropped to 10%.

While private firms were bailed out with no conditions, TFL wasn't, because the national government wants to make the mayor (who's from the other party) look bad for the next election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like the London subway carriages are a lot smaller than subway carriages from other parts of the world; e.g South Korea. In addition, I'm not sure how good the air circulation is in the tube as it doesn't have the best reputation for having a good AC system. Hope this emboldens the British gov to make the necessary changes to the tube.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they are smaller, but north of the border in Scotland, the Glasgow underground system runs carriages that are smaller still.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think support for public transport will be one of the major casualties of this pandemic. In general, with this pandemic combined with the civil unrest, I think you may start seeing a lot of people fleeing the cities for the suburbs.

<comment><USER10> There's no civil unrest in London, a few marches and protests in the city centres

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The tl;dr seems to be that capacity will be 13-15% of the norm (the norm is 9m people per day, so 1.17m-1.35m), and with double decker buses only able to ferry 22% of their normal load around, and tube carriages only carrying 7% of their normal load if 2m social distancing is maintained.

(Wouldn't put it past Bloomberg to have just added the 7% + 22% = 29% / 2 = 14.5% to arrive at their implied 13-15% range.)

The mayor is temporarily placing traffic restrictions in certain areas and widening cycle lanes and pavements to encourage more bikes/pedestrian transit.

</comment><comment><USER11> More than 50% of people drive to work in NYC? That is completely bonkers.

<comment><USER12> No. The map in this profile has the area Deloitte considers "New York" for the index: [https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/4...](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/4331_Deloitte- City-Mobility-Index/NewYork_GlobalCityMobility_WEB.pdf)

That it's _only_ 57% for that entire area speaks to how many people in it commute into the City for work.

Here's the source for all their profiles: [https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/future-of- mob...](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/future-of- mobility/deloitte-urban-mobility-index-for-cities.html#google-map)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like doing this would completely eliminate the environmental AND traffic benefits of public transportation -- you're effectively distancing people at the same amount they would be if they were driving cars.

I don't have a solution, unfortunately, but I just hope that a vaccine will allow us to break the 2 meter rule eventually.

<comment><USER14> There's an unpopular option: herd immunity.

NYC is 1/3rd to 1/4th there. Would you trade 3-4x the deaths to get it over with, completely? It's not an easy decision. It's hard to say yes.

But what if it's Q4 2021 and there is still no vaccine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, the animations on that page are not only annoying but prevent you from actually focusing on the illustrations.

Whoever "designed" this needs to think about usability next time.</comment>


Keen IO releases API for /dev/null - <AUTHOR> https://keen.io/blog/46856249197/keen-io-releases-api-for-dev-null

<comment><USER2> Did someone flag this? Curious how it dropped from #28 to #58 in a matter of minutes.

</comment><comment><USER3> April fools!</comment>


Proper diffs with ODF files in Git or Mercurial - <AUTHOR> http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/opendocument/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool.

Would would be even better would be if:

a) Git diff/merge gets ability to look into zip/archive files, treating them as sub-trees of files. diff should be not too tricky. Merge is more awkward, because you have to create a new zip/archive which is compatible with the format of the parents.

b) Git diff/merge gets ability to work well on XML files, and be XML-element- based, not line-based.

With those, full version control with branching and merging of ODF files, plus many other interesting file types, falls out almost "naturally".

<comment><USER3> git diff/merge on xml files would be really great. will think this over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if odt2txt puts paragraphs on one line, or flows them. But either way, if you change a single word in a long paragraph you can get large-looking diffs. For version-controlled documents it's good to use a word-based diff rather than a line-based diff.

I use wdiff (although it's slightly kludgy) with documents and colorize the output: <http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/cwdiff/>

<comment><USER5> 'git diff' already supports --word-diff natively.

<comment><USER4> Great! Thanks. I now see that git also has a built-in --color-words option, and I've added that to my notes. (I don't have a git setup to quickly try whether that would still work in conjunction with an external diff tool like oodiff though.)

In the mean time I'm using my (trivial) cwdiff wrapper in place of diff in tools that don't have a built-in option. I think it could be called from the oodiff utility here, where it would work equally well with any versioning system.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Google is shutting down all these, so grab them ASAP - <AUTHOR>

I put some old JavaScript libraries up on Google Code for posterity and research reasons. Some of it is old code, but a nice snapshot of the web in the DHTML era when DOM based Javascript widgets and libraries were all the rage. Take a look before Google Code is sunsetted!

    http://code.google.com/p/retrojs-oldskool-js-dhtml/
    http://code.google.com/p/webfxwidgets/
    http://code.google.com/p/asmscroller/
    http://code.google.com/p/js-bezier-functions/
    http://code.google.com/p/1kdomlib/
    http://code.google.com/p/3dhtml/
    http://code.google.com/p/innerdiv/
    http://code.google.com/p/assembler-mirror/
    http://code.google.com/p/domapi/
    http://code.google.com/p/beehive2/
 <comment><USER2> "DHTML era when DOM based Javascript widgets and libraries were all the rage"

Serious question (I've been rather out of touch with web programming): What era are we in now?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would hazard a guess at a sort of post-post web programming era where a lot of the pain of creating a website has been solved. I am very certain one shouldn't toil over cross browser inconsistencies anymore. A lot of these libraries are cross-browser libs made for consistent behavior in MSIE/SAFARI/FIREFOX. We have come so far in terms of the choice of widgets and 'bells and whistles' we can use that I don't care anymore. I stopped collecting JS plugins like this years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Surely you could easily migrate this to GitHub?</comment>


Expresso: A simple expressions language with polymorphic extensible row types - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/willtim/Expresso <comment><USER2> This is amazing! What I really want on top of this language is the ability to take protobuf or cap'n'proto definitions and be able to use them seamlessly in this language, and then spin up AWS lambda or GCP functions that use this language + proto service definitions to communicate with the outside world.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get that the name references "expressions", but the coffee cup and the misspelling of "espresso" really bothers my inner pedant. :)

<comment><USER4> It's also already the name of a popular tool for designing regular expressions[0] (and may be infringing on their trademark)

[0]: [http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm](http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> I would think the domains are different enough that trademark infringement shouldn't be a concern.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but I think they both belong in trademark class 9 (Electrical and scientific apparatus). Ultimately a court of law would have to decide. But why even take the change?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish there were more statically typed embeddable languages that weren't functional. I mostly make tools for developers and that audience doesn't especially find the functional syntax or paradigm to be very helpful.

<comment><USER6> Developers don't find functional languages helpful? Do you somehow believe that only Java programmers are called developers or what am I missing here?

<comment><USER5> > what am I missing here?

Java isn't the only non-functional language and by virtually every measure, functional languages rank lower than other language paradigms on just about every index (e.g., TIOBE doesn't have a single functional language in their top 20). If I had to guess, people find the spartan syntax hard to read and gratuitously unfamiliar, especially considering there are many highly-ranked languages which borrow functional concepts but retain the more structured (and probably more human-readable) syntax.

<comment><USER6> > functional languages rank lower than other language paradigms on just about > every index

Because what is popular isn't what is best.

> but retain the more structured (and probably more human-readable) syntax

There is nothing more structured or readable about C-like syntax.

<comment><USER5> My target audience is developers generally, not functional programmers specifically, and developers disagree with your assessment. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there any good starting places for learning the necessary type theory to understand this stuff? I really like the idea of extensible row types, but struggle with trying to understand the research papers.

<comment><USER8> Types and Programming Languages by Pierce. Available online if you search for it. Expresso appears to be, more or less, an extension of the toy language implemented in that book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lovely. Great work! I've been waiting for a language with ergonomic records using row-types.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool! This is perfect as a little scripting language for Haskell.</comment>