Ask HN: Hackathon tips? - <AUTHOR>

A friend and I are going to spend a weekend hacking in a couple of weeks (and hopefully release something worthwhile at the end of it) and I was curious to know how most people split their time during a hackathon in terms of time spent on tasks - brainstorming, design, coding, sleep etc.<p>Also, what is the consensus on pair programming and whether it would work for a hackathon? <comment><USER2> I've done 2 hackathons with a large group over at UC Berkeley (sponsored by the CS Undergraduate Association and Startup @ Berkeley) but both times worked alone. I also did the overnight hackathon at Chirp, the Twitter Developer conference, last month.

General tips:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

\- Make sure there's enough food & drink. It's very hard to think and keep working when you're thirsty or hungry.

\- Second monitors for everybody involved are a must.

\- Definitely still use version control. I've seen some people avoid this for the sake of speed but the ability to try things out and quickly recover is vital in a chaotic coding environment of a hackathon. Take the time to set it up.

\- Don't keep things in your head for too long. It's faster to express yourself and communicate on paper. Bring LOTS of scratch paper and pencils.

\- Take breaks unless you're in the zone. Get up, stretch out, walk around, get food, talk with others. It'll help re-energize your thinking.

\- Don't sleep. All my hackathons were less than 24 hours and I didn't sleep. I got a good night's rest the night before I started and I stayed away from naps because it's very hard to wake up once you fall asleep.

\- TDD is optional. If it's part of how you already code all your projects, keep at it. If you're not in the church of testing, don't bother. It will only slow you down. A hackathon is not about coverage or whether your code is well- tested, it's about whether you have code that works at all.

Splitting time:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

\- Never hesitate to stop and brainstorm, just don't let a session go on for more than 30 minutes.

\- Leave visual design for last. My goal has always been to build something functional, not necessarily pretty or usable. I can also crank out CSS pretty quickly so I'm comfortable leaving most or all of the visual design for the very end.

\- It's worth sketch out the flows early on. It will help guide and structure your code and other ideas. Just don't obsess over a great user experience in the beginning.

\- Spend the vast majority of your time coding. Iterate like you've never iterated before. Hack, hack, hack, and only refactor if the latency is really bothering you. Get to something that works first and foremost, then worry about code quality, performance, readability, and all the things you're supposed to when you have more time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny you should ask about this when me and 4 others are having a hackathon this weekend.

The plan for us so far is to use fri/sat/sun and spend aprox.. 5/10-15/5 for a total of about 20 hours * 5 = 100. Normally you'd probably opt for longer stretches but I want to ensure we aren't tired when monday comes.

Pair programming: Yes, if it feels right - but I'd rather call it group programming, utilizing everyone. Sit everyone in the same room, face to face and side by side. A ring is perfect. Have a whiteboard and papers in the room.

\-- Time plan Friday: Set up initial plan - what to build Describe initial functionality and spend a bit of time to make a few use cases Discuss and lay out impediments Create something like tasks for what needs to be done Hack, hack, hack till a first iteration Replan after first iteration that solves something - change the path?

Saturday will be all about iterating. If someone feels to brainstorm something, do this right away unless someone is in the zone. Try to include every one in every discussion and keep it under 10 minutes. Decide and try fast. By the end of saturday we should have something working thats about where we want to be.

Sunday will hopefully be for adding sugar coating and the features we thought of during our sleep. Maybe refactor. Final touches. At the end do a summary, get input on how we felt the hackathon went, what have we learned etc. Launch it and blog it. \-- Time splitting We have a dedicated designer, some dedicated backend devs and some frontend so not everyone knows the same stuff - task delegation becomes logical and we dont have to split that much between these tasks.

Focus on function. Design on a non completed function is worthless. A completed function without a design is not (default browser styling) Focus on value.

Regarding breaks I think I will try to take break whenever I'm NOT in the zone. For a hackathon your basically not producing unless your in the zone, you wanna be in the zone every minute you sit in front of the monitor.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've done several hackathons (DayOfMobile, iPadDevCamp) and have been involved in judging and organizing several others (SocialDevCamp, Google Android Eco Challenge Hackathon, I can't remember)

Hit the ground running If you already have a team and an idea, one thing you want to do is hit the ground running. By that I mean, your project environment should be set up, version control, templates etc. If you are wasting time downloading and installing software that the rest of the team uses, that is all wasted time.

Clear division of labor and expectations Nothing is worse than working on the same thing or overlapping things in a hackathon because you just don't have time. Also, make sure you are in agreement as to what the end points will look like. If someone's working on the backend and returning data, make sure that the UI developer is expecting the right payload etc. A good discussion upfront instead of just coding right away will take care of that.

As organizer stuff you want to think about: Make sure you have decent internet connectivity. Power strips. Food - pizza and redbull type stuff Comfy furniture - I don't particularly like sitting at a desk hacking for 12+hours. I might want to sit on a couch or a beanie bag. Maybe music.

I think getting people to cover the hackathon while it's going on is also a good idea. Usually hackathons only get the spotlight when the developers emerge from the cocoon to present. I think its great when you have people from the event taking their flip cam and going around talking to hackers asking what they are doing and just to see the process.

As a judge I'm always more impressed when things work. I've seen entries where it's mostly a mockup or screenshots with no working tech. I've also seen working tech with no UI. Obviously the more you can show, the better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tech Crunch Hackathon on Saturday in NYC I will be there.

Most important rule? Have fun. Pick a project YOU want to work on. Do it. Doesn't have to be helpful to anyone, or even remotely sane. Just something you are excited as hell about doing. Hackathons are meant to be fun.

Club Mate is great for staying awake. Guarana ( Antarctica ) is also great. Coffee, and Jolt are acceptable as well.

Have some munchies. When that dead zone around 3-4 am hits it's good to just munch on some m&ms or twizzlers. The chewing is monotonous and helps you concentrate, and the act keeps you alert and awake.

Bring headphones. There might be times that call for a long coding stretch, and you don't want to be disturbed. Throw on some brainless monotonous music ( such as trance or drum and base ). It'll help you tunnel vision.

Don't be afraid to screw up. You don't have to leave successful. Try to, but don't give up on an ambitious plan just to be on the safe side. Hell you can always finish it up a few days later and still have something awesome to show off.

If you finish early, or during meals / breaks... talk to other people. Tell them what you are doing, ask what they are doing. You never know you might end up recruiting someone who can help, or tying two projects together... or just making a good friend.

And remember, chicks dig hardware hackers. So attach some LEDs and a type R sticker to whatever you do.

</comment><comment><USER6> I got hooked to hackathons recently(most notably on the winning team of the startup bus and on stage after the chirp hackathon). Here's my advice:

50% is Smoke and Mirrors.

Usually you wont be able to release an actual product in two days. You will be able to release something that's ingenious, adds value for some people, looks enough like a product and is packaged so that people will try it and give you feedback.

On coding: Don't write tests, don't review code and just go for it, be super productive. Don't pair program (unless your goal is to solve some very difficult problems in two days. In that case: good luck).

Finally, you'll be surprised how much can actually be achieved in two days :)</comment>


Ask HN: What's Your Definition of Success? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Remaining alive and healthy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't agree more.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MyDeskTour – Show off your desk setup - <AUTHOR> https://mydesktour.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I just realized that this got reposted, so just getting to these comments.

I guess its clear this implementation is quite garbage and doesn't scale - I'm using Apollo GraphQL and polling for updates which is probably overloading the backend. Seems like the pages/content will not even load for many of y'all. Issues might also be from my Google Cloud Platform setup.. Will investigate tonight.

Really sorry to have wasted some of your time :(

Thanks to all giving feedback anyways!

 _UPDATE_ : Now thinking my MongoDB Atlas cluster was the problem. Did not expect many (or any) visits/requests, so I was still at the free tier which only allowed 500 connections at a time. Just upgraded so I'm hoping this solves some problems..

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the Hacker News hug of death. Wishing you the best of luck on this project and hope you are able to repost it after putting it behind a caching layer or two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha hug of death sounds about right. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I created Office Snapshots 13 years ago and naturally like these sorts of sites.

One of the hardest parts will be getting content over the long term. 99% of ours is submitted at this point, but it took years of emailing people to get enough new stuff coming in on it's own. At this point we publish ~15-20 projects per week.

If you could get people to give a quick synopsis aBout why they selected 2-3 items on their desk it would probably help people know why they might want to buy as why as SEO.

Good idea and will keep an eye out for you in the future!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow Office Snapshots looks incredible. Yeah UGC seems to be the big bottleneck initially, as I'm finding out right now.

Do you mind sharing why you initially started Office Snapshots?

I ask because I suspect there was something far significant than "I thought it would be cool." This project is showing me how important it is to really love what you do - otherwise the amount of effort it takes to get something off the ground and self-sustainable is just truly back-breaking. I've probably spent a month on this project and I'm already getting exhausted. Starting to think its mainly because I just don't care enough about desks and desk setups in the first place.

<comment><USER3> It was definitely an "I think that would be cool" type of thing.

Office design wasn't my passion by any means, and I don't think it is now in the specific sense, but I do have a passion for curating and organizing the largest selection of office design imagery and information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Longer explanation: I originally came up with the idea when I was looking for a new mouse for my WFH setup. There are hundreds of product review sites, but nothing like seeing what other people use. I know there are many popular subreddits like r/battlestations or r/workspaces, and even sites like deskhunt.com, mysetup.co, yourstack.com and kit.co, but I thought it be nice to have a dedicated site for this kind of thing. Not really sure what the differentiating factor is right now, but just wanted to get this prototype out there :)

<comment><USER4> OK, positive part first :)

I really like the concept and it seems you have something interesting for start to see, which is always good. Nice to see a rather clean way to comment on designs.

Could use a nice way to zoom images on site, plus a link to more details if there's some (for example, in the entry about desk found on medium).

Now for slightly less cheery part :(

Please, please change the implementation.

The page is really, really slow on a fscking 300 MBit/s connection, seems to prevent opening specific desks in new tab, and most of the time seems to have no content because some JS code haven't finished whatever it is doing.

It's also non-navigable using keyboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the detailed feedback!

The less cheery stuff is certainly hard to hear, but is what I need to hear, so I appreciate it. There is clearly something really really wrong with either the GraphQL server hosted on GCP or with how I'm fetching it from the frontend. Really need to dig into this.

What do you mean by non-navigable using keyboard?

<comment><USER4> EDIT: Just checked in DevTools, it hangs on query to the graphql server for a really long time. I mean, sure, the page is probably slashdotted right now, but it seems a bit too prevalent - and definitely doesn't have a good UX when doing so.

Maybe server-side generation with cache would help initial load?

Still a problem when I don't remove uBlock.

As for keyboard, there seems to be some unclear to me focus grab which meant that I couldn't even attempt to scroll the page using arrow keys. Mind you, it's not just your site that does it, usually it's related to someone being a bit too fancy with autofocus on a searchbox. Not sure how to help there, web frontend is not exactly my forte :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the problem was actually my free tier MongoDB Atlas cluster which only allowed 500 connections at a time lol. Just upgraded it and I'm hoping it helps these damn GraphQL queries

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The site really needs a loading indicator. I went to [https://mydesktour.com/explore](https://mydesktour.com/explore), saw it was blank, and thought it was because it was a brand new site with no UGC.

<comment><USER6> They are fetching some data from a GraphQL server that takes several seconds to download.

Unfortunately, the server appears to have a write timeout of 60 seconds so it fails after one minute.

Here is an example of what is happening → [https://i.imgur.com/BMsfLht.png](https://i.imgur.com/BMsfLht.png)

      POST /graphql HTTP/1.0
      Host: api-dot-yourdesk.wl.r.appspot.com
      Accept: */*
      Content-Type: application/json
      Origin: https://mydesktour.com
      Referer: https://mydesktour.com/explore
      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) Safari/605.1.15

      {
        "operationName": "DesksByUser",
        "variables": {
          "filter": {}
        },
        "query": "query DesksByUser($filter: FilterFindManyDeskInput!) {\n  deskMany(filter: $filter) {\n    _id\n    date_created\n    img\n    about\n    name\n    hashtags\n    approved\n    likes\n    comments {\n      userId\n      __typename\n    }\n    user {\n      user_id\n      picture\n      name\n      __typename\n    }\n    desk_products {\n      pros\n      cons\n      coordX\n      coordY\n      product {\n        title\n        _id\n        image\n        prices {\n          raw\n          currency\n          value\n          __typename\n        }\n        __typename\n      }\n      __typename\n    }\n    __typename\n  }\n}\n"
      }

<comment><AUTHOR> Tysm for even looking into this! I really need to investigate the root problems :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I noticed there's no newsletter. Showing the desktop setting of the day would be a quick low friction email I would enjoy getting in my inbox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah that's a good idea! If I have time I'll try to set that up

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The images didn't load until I disabled my PiHole. Seems it's relying on GTM to load images. Just FYI

<comment><USER9> Yeah broken for me too (pihole here). I'm guessing even if I turn off pihole, google tag manager is going to get blocked by one of my adblocker extensions also.

Lesson here: Write your JS so it doesn't break completely when things like Google Analytics or Tag manager don't load/are blocked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm... If it's the desk images, they're being hosted on Cloudinary? Otherwise, I didn't know that GTM could block that content from loading

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I usually just pop into r/battlestations when I feel like investigating new desk setups. Be forewarned: it's real easy to spend many a casual hour in there.

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure - was never into reddit but the community there is crazy

<comment><USER10> Pro tip: do it on an iPad and just scroll through the pictures. Less distraction, more visuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see a bunch of emails posted publicly in peoples submissions, not sure if that's intentional or accidental but if possible, should be removed. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah good point. Just pushed a fix Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems to be up now (11/8 4:40 AM GMT). I am able to see the setups under /explore and the charts although charts take up ~1s to load.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! The free tier Mongo cluster was the problem. Thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing showing on iOS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies, but thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I got one question (site looks good btw), which awesome white-speakers-on-wood is in the last pic ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, and I wish I knew haha I was searching for it myself

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Explore link leads to an empty page.

Stats link leads to a page with partially initialized tables with no data in them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies, but thank you for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love this annotating idea on pictures. Solid work, and great presentation!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really like the idea of your website, the execution isn't working... don't u love the web!

Hopefully u are collecting emails, so I can come back.

Regardless of execution, it's a good idea so keep fighting!

<comment><AUTHOR> Tysm! Definitely learned a lot of hard lessons building this and failing in public. Certainly will be a fight, but thanks again for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! Built a site for people to share their desk setups and optimize their WFH experience. Posts, feedback, or bug reports are greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER18> I just see a blank white page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies :( but thanks for the feedback</comment></comment></comment>


Uber rival Karhoo shuts down - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/08/uber-competitor-karhoo-shuts-down-after-blowing-through-250m/ <comment><USER2> I'm not surprised.

They were sending out free credit emails every weekend for £45 (£15 off three separate trips); no minimum spend, no qualification criteria, just free trips. That's well over £150 of free credit some months!

Even with the free credit though, I still used Uber because Karhoo was a terrible experience:

* The time estimates were never correct, no matter which car provider you selected. You were always waiting longer than 15 minutes for a car. * Dial-A-Cab always said there was a car 7 minutes away but that was a lie. You then joined a queue to be assigned a taxi, and that car could be any distance away (I never received a Dial-A-Cab taxi in under 25 minutes). * There was no continuity in the rules between providers. For example, cancellation fees were apparently on a provider-by-provider basis. * The prices were often far in excess of Uber, but for the same cars that UberX uses.

<comment><USER3> Karhoo were trying to do far more than Uber. They were partnering with hundreds of minicab firms around London. Each firm was supposed to report their taxi's locations and availabilities back to Karhoo at regular intervals. Karhoo then aimed to co-ordinate all this information along with real-time pricing for each, and present the user a range of options. And then dispatch a taxi, that actually arrives when they say it will. Without controlling the actual cars.

Most minicab firms in London do not have a server, they have a person sat at a desk with a phone and an Excel spreadsheet. Can you imagine trying to herd them all into use your platform correctly? Karhoo never had a chance.

For a while Karhoo became know as the "Free taxi app!" because of all their giveaways. But no-way would you use it if it wasn't free, because it was so unreliable.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds incredibly stupid. Why didnt they distribute an GPS coordinate sending app to said drivers?

<comment><USER4> They couldn't do that. The cab companies they work with would be worried they're going direct to driver, which is what Uber's doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion many of these startups are not able to compete against UBER on the technology as all.In India UBER's major competitor is OLA (is very well funded and has been around for while) but when it comes to mobile app's usability and features,OLA is not near at all.Simply the algorithms when it comes to features like UBER POOL ,OLA is no where close in my experience.I have used UBER Pool quite a lot and similar service for OLA is very bad.Once they have clubbed another person going in the opposite direction with me and i had to get down in between.How on earth can u share your ride with a guy going the opposite direction ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this rather surprising. I used to work for Hailo, and we failed mostly due to bad business decision (focusing way too much on regulations/instead of disrupting the taxi industry we tried to partner) with way-way less funding ($100 mil in all - at the time less than 25) we built an app of such high quality, almost every driver or passenger we talked to (tens of thousands) said while Uber's network is superior, they wish they could use Hailo's app because it's just faster, nicer, feels more polished and less buggy.

It is not rocket science, really. I don't think it's about tech quality. As our case proved, it's all about the extent of the network - people want a (cheap) ride, if they get it, they are happy.

<comment><USER6> If you have terrible tech there is no way you could succeed. (I am not saying about Karhoo, it is just an example) Think of buggy app, unreliable, slow backend, bad predictions, billing issues and so on. You really have top notch tech to have things running smoothly. What you probably had in mind is excess of features instead of focusing on the core ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not breathing or being dead is surely a disadvantage when starting a company, but just because you breathe and you are alive does not mean you will be able to sell that as a core value. Tech must be only good enough. No customer cares about it unless it annoys the hell out of them. It's not Uber's USP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It remains to be confirmed that they have actually secured $250mil. Very unlikely, you close the business in less than 2 years after securing such amount. Sometimes, loads of startups think success means raising loads of money... hence announcing the news, thinking media will shine on them and then get more investment followers...

<comment><USER8> What do you base your assumptions on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > We'd been hearing for about a week now that times were tight at the company, > with employees skipping paychecks as times got lean.

Interesting. I wish there was a name for a company that is recruiting while at the same time unable to make ends meet.

<comment><USER10> Ha ha ha, did you interview with them, too?

<comment><USER9> No, but I now wish I had. It would make for a hilarious blog post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used Karhoo on a few occasions for airport trips and found the experience better than going direct to a minicab company, but only marginally. As other people have said, it didn't offer the same level of timing accuracy as Uber and it took quite a long time to get quote information from providers. Still, sad to see them go. Really only leaves Uber as a viable option for London.

</comment><comment><USER12> These competitors are trying to do too much. Someone should instead build infrastructure similar to Amadeus or Sabre. Not an amazing business, but probably good enough to make a profit. It's The Right Thing and likely better for both the general public and transportation providers and drivers.

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems that they started little less than one year ago. Crazy how much money they spent in a little than a year.

</comment><comment><USER14> Karwho?

I anticipate Postmates & Lyft to cave within the next year also.

Uber seems pretty unstoppable now, I think government regulation is the only thing that can really slow them down.

</comment><comment><USER15> Kar-who?</comment>


The History of Email (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-email/ <comment><USER2> > This is absolutely hilarious if your coworker happens to be using a > graphical tool like vim...

Don't get me wrong - I love the CLI. The vast majority of my time is spent there, and about the only reason I start X is for Firefox (if elinks won't fit the bill).

Did make me smile to see vim referred to as "graphical", though. I like it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Despite being quite young, I've used mutt (and to a lesser extent mh) during most of my life. I am now transitioning to some combination Gnus and notmuch do to its excellent integration with org-mode.

If you hang around lkml or any other big free software mailing list, you will see how a big chunk of people are sending emails with either mutt or gnus.

I hate seeing how email is slowly degrading by HTML-only messages, incompatible with many clients, or people moving to walled gardens like WhatsApp (which is ironically a slimmed down version of XMPP, arguably THE Internet chat protocol along with IRC).

<comment><USER4> Well you need to follow some trends your circles follow. WhatsApp is not really like IRC as it's mostly messages between two peers, and for many it's impractical to not use it.

I receive lots of HTML mail, most of them spam or newsletters I follow, and then there are those where Gmail, GitHub or whatnot adds a text/html version automatically. I just view it in the browser if it's a newsletter I expected (and there are quite a bit of them exclusively in HTML).

We can't shape the outer world, but we can transform it a bit to fit our needs. Gnus and Emacs helps quite a bit. I wish sth. similar existed for WhatsApp, but they don't have APIs AFAIK.

WRT Gnus, you should use Gmane to view mailing lists if you don't already, and with Gnus Agent you can make sure articles are available offline. Also, if you split your e-mail carefully into relevant mailboxes and use the topics mode, notmuch or alike become less necessary. I just work with Gnus and isearch, and haven't yet needed any other search tool. And my favourite line of configuration for Gnus is:

      (add-hook 'gnus-summary-prepared-hook 'gnus-summary-hide-all-threads)

<comment> unkown-unknowns > they don't have APIs AFAIK

They don't have _public_ APIs you mean. With a bit of effort you could reverse engineer what their app is doing. The real pain is maintaining it, keeping up with changes. Hence why nobody bothers.

<comment><USER4> Yeah certainly what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> JoAnne Yates' "The Memo as a Management Genre" traces the origins of business writing, including the emergence of standard fields -- "From", "To", "Subject", "Date", and "In reply to", which actually predates the other four -- go Mutt and threaded discussion! The influences on subsequent communications formats, particularly Email and Usenet, aren't mentioned, but are obvious.

Letter-writing itself, as a widespread practice, is fairly new, it relying on post offices, stamps, and paper, and above all, literacy. The forms of letters written in the 19th century were very much defined by guidebooks and conventions.

Business writing itself is also highly formulaic, though it dropped much of the verbosity (and social grace) of earlier forms, discussed in this essay.

Messaging-as-technology, the protocols, conventions, forms, usage, and economics, are all mentioned, in particularly the induced demand created by easier communications, storage, and retrieval (or reversal as practices were limited or discontinued).

[http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989....](http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> _" Unix machines have a command called write which can be used to send messages to other currently logged-in users."_

This kind of implies that "write" was a precursor to e-mail, but that's not true. The very first Unix system I ever used (around 1980), Version 7 Unix from Bell Labs, already had a "mail" command which let you send e-mail to users on the same system. It kept your unread messages in a file called /usr/spool/mail/ _userid_ , and your saved messages in $HOME/mbox. "write" (or "wall", which wrote to all logged-in ttys) was only used to warn people that the machine was about to come down.

<comment><USER7> The first "mail" command that I'm aware of was for the MIT CTSS timesharing system, implemented in 1965:

[http://multicians.org/thvv/anhc-34-1-anec.html](http://multicians.org/thvv/anhc-34-1-anec.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A previous discussion was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12205364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12205364).

</comment><comment><USER9> Long live the email!</comment>


A struggling Rust Belt city pinned its revival on a self-chilling beverage can - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/youngstown-chill-can <comment><USER2> Why are these "promises" not drawn up as contracts, so the city can sue when they aren't met?

Edit:

> Under these so-called enterprise zone agreements, delinquent companies can > face penalties, including repayment of taxes and the termination of > incentives. But in Youngstown, they rarely do. Officials have canceled 25 > agreements over the past three decades, usually the result of the business > closing, relocating or failing to move forward with a project. Records > indicate that the city sought back taxes from an errant firm on just one > occasion, although it's unclear if authorities ever collected; city > officials did not respond to questions on the matter. As a result, dozens of > private businesses have profited from public subsidies in a city that can > scarcely afford them.

Unclear what the reason is

Edit 2:

> Now, Youngstown's approach to economic development is coming under greater > scrutiny as the city's former finance director and a prominent developer > prepare to face trial on public corruption charges. At the heart of the case > are allegations that officials steered taxpayer funds to favored projects in > exchange for bribes.

Ah. Yep.

<comment><USER3> They are. But then the city just ignores the "stick" half of the carrot/stick framework. Or they "lose" the contract[0]. Or they lost the sophistication war with the company's lawyers, and get loop-holed out of their penalties.

It's all very slimy or amateurish, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the principals involved.

What strikes me the most from this article:

> _A consumer twists a knob at the bottom of a can and activates a cooling > apparatus. In about 90 seconds, the beverage temperature drops about 30 > degrees._

That's it? 30°F? So if my can is at 90°F, and I'd like a cold one, I can wait a minute and a half and get a lukewarm 60° beverage. I mean, that's kinda cool maybe, but I can't imagine it's worth whatever this costs.

[0] " _In response to public records requests, Youngstown provided cost projections for just 30 of the 94 agreements it granted since 1991, saying it could not locate many of the early contracts._ "

<comment> kube-system A 30 degree drop sounds completely reasonable of a use case. That takes a can from room temp to an acceptable refrigerator temp.

<comment><USER3> But these are sold for outdoor use, like at the beach, or hiking, etc. If my can is room temperature, the I am very likely indoors already, with a refrigerator nearby. I'm not going to spend money on single-use chiller cans for typical day-to-day beverages. I'll just buy the normal ones and stick 'em in the fridge.

Sure, there's some scenario where I might find myself in a temperate climate, and want a cold drink, and don't have an ice chest or fridge nearby. But does that happen often enough to make this technology viable? I just don't see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Stretched for resources, officials took part of the money from Youngstown's > water and wastewater funds, which had been earmarked for sewer and water > projects. They also approved massive tax breaks for the property. And they > spent an additional $360,000 to purchase and demolish the homes of roughly a > dozen residents who lived within the footprint of the future Chill-Can > plant.

That's not going to come back to haunt them.

> More than three years later, Youngstown is still waiting.

I wonder what's the hold up?

> Infrastructure problems, such as aging utility lines, have delayed the > project...

Ah, there it is!

If there is a better definition of stupid I'm not sure what it is. It's been a consistent story of towns shorting the budget to cover tax breaks, usually at the expense of the school budget, to entice companies to migrate there. Then when they do they find out the workforce isn't educated enough for the tasks, or the infrastructure is in terrible shape, or it's simply a scam.

<comment><USER5> It's because they're trying to paper over a problem that has no solution - sufficient number of people who can generate sufficient economic activity don't want to live in Youngstown, OH.

They have to pay people to get them to live there, but they can't simply write them a check for obvious reasons, so this is the way it happens.

This is true of many, many cities with flat terrain, hot and humid summers, and cold and salty winters.

<comment><USER4> I wonder at what point do they turn to the Sicilian town model: Towns with a shrinking demographic sell city-owned homes for $1 as an incentive for new residents.

<comment><USER6> The name 'Youngstown' has some built-in branding too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's also a self-heating can startup.[1]

Self-heating cans have tried many times. Either the reaction isn't energetic enough, and most of the can volume powers the heating, or it's too energetic, and there's a safety problem. Or, after dealing with those problems, the can costs too much.

Starbucks has accustomed people to paying $5 for a coffee. So there's a self- heating can of coffee in market test.[2] With enough hipster adjectives and color choices, they think they can charge $5 per can.[2]

[1] [https://www.poweredbyheatgen.com/](https://www.poweredbyheatgen.com/)

[2] [https://www.fox29.com/news/la-colombe-develops-innovative- se...](https://www.fox29.com/news/la-colombe-develops-innovative-self-heating- coffee-cans)

<comment><USER8> I bought a coffee beverage in a self-heating can at Walmart... La Colombe I think. It was pretty good and nice and hot. It was a couple of bucks I think.

<comment><USER9> I remember buying a hot chocolate of that brand from Walmart. There was a plastic/foil thing on the bottom of the can, you pressed it inwards, and the can would heat up inside a minute or so. I remember taking one of those with me when I had to work outdoors, it was quite nice.

Only saw them for a month or two. I wonder what happened?

<comment><USER7> Maybe Walmart isn't the right distribution chain for $5 cans of coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yo, they have AI [https://chillcan.com/ai/](https://chillcan.com/ai/)

<comment><USER11> Amazing

> The Joseph Company has plans in the very near future to implement many > facets of Artificial Intelligence into a variety of business applicatins

typo

and then later

> Using the AI subset of Deep Learning, the Joseph Company will enable robotic > arms capable of performing partially supervised learning to the pint of > needing only minimal human interaction

Another typo... and sort of the exact opposite of what they promised the town (jobs).

And then a font with horrific capital letters

<comment><USER12> Also...

> _By Matteo J. Joseph Director of Technical Operations and alumni of Stanford > University School of Engineering Class of 2020_

So their "Director of Technical Operations" hasn't even graduated college yet? Hopefully it's just a puffed up title and he's not actually in charge of anything. Not that you need a college degree to be a good technical leader or that young people can't be good leaders but I don't understand how he could really be in charge of tech ops if he's been busy at Stanford.

<comment><USER13> Stanford is on quarters, so they could have graduated at the end of the winter quarter in early April.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ProPublica's president tweeted that this happens to be the 2nd self-chilling- can story/scandal he's lawyered – the first being a 1986 WSJ investigation into a "bogus company" promising a self-freezing can [0]. I've never even heard of such a thing, and as a techie, I immediately think "Scam Kickstarter/As sold on TV junk". But even reading today's story I don't understand how Youngstown (pop. ~65,000) could do better due diligence with today's Internet.

To be fair, a google search for "self chilling can" doesn't bring up stories about the decades old scam. And there's no obvious fraud in the story – I mean, the company apparently have an Irvine headquarters, which the city lawyer visited when he was out there, as well as production prototypes. But the novelty of the idea, and lack of actual market research (since they haven't really mass produced it yet) makes this as crazy as $1M to slick but ephemeral Indiegogo campaign.

And I guess I really have no idea how hard it is for Youngstown – suffering a massive population and jobs downspiral for the past few decades – to attract any big employer to the area, with any amount of incentive. It's not like they can attract the likes of Foxconn (which incidentally, also has failed to live up to promises in Wisconsin) or Amazon, especially with a budget too stretched to offer more than a few million in tax breaks.

[0] [https://twitter.com/dicktofel/status/1259788560917581829](https://twitter.com/dicktofel/status/1259788560917581829)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/01/business/sec-cites- stock-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/01/business/sec-cites-stock- fraud.html)

<comment><USER14> Small towns and cities need to look at other means to survive than to try and bring in some large employer or factory. Those can be boons, but banking on industrialists or some keystone sort of solution is a sure way to fail.

I grew up a few minutes from Youngstown. These areas should focus more on small businesses, agriculture and other things that make a lot of sense with what is left there. Met with a ton of corruption at the local level, I don't see much of anything happening without a real and renewed interest in participation and accountability in our politics.

</comment></comment><comment> seph-reed Looked it up a bit: [https://chillcan.com/](https://chillcan.com/)

From 10 seconds of research, it seems to use depressurization. Actually a sort of cool idea... not sure why it didn't work out.

<comment><USER15> Does Guinness still do the nitro in a can device? My recollection is that it only reduced the temperature a few degrees below room temperature, which is more or less the 'correct temperature' for Guinness anyway.

Soda, not so much.

<comment><USER16> Yep, but I'm pretty sure that is just to get the nitro mouthfeel more than anything temperature wise. The entire website looks absolutely terrible and straight out of the 1990s. Whatever politicians allowed this were either in on the take or should be booted for sheer incompetence.

Also isn't Youngstown the same city that had the big hubbub with Trump and GM, and is still shutting down and being outsourced overseas?

<comment><USER10> A lot of folks in the rust belt are really desperate for work. Personally I think it's a good place for electronics manufacturing, the people are hard working and have high attention to detail, procedure and process.

<comment><USER17> The problem is rarely the workers.

There are two problems here. Infrastructure and local business owners.

Infrastructure can probably be overcome.

Most local business owners, on the other hand, can basically die in a fire and nobody will mourn them. The problem is that local business owners don't really believe in _deadlines_. So, those business cards you needed before flying to the conference? Yeah, not done yet. That vehicle repair that needed to be completed before the end of the week, yeah, not really. I can go on and on.

And then shitty winter weather just adds extra uncertainty to the mix.

So, you wind up outsourcing to non-local companies that actually hold their deadlines. At that point, why are you located where you are?

<comment><USER15> "This place is a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!"

I suspect that when you are too far off the shipping lanes it sort of sucks the motivation out of you to be fast because anything you do will take either n hours ± 3 days. Busting your ass to do n/2 hours ± 3 days barely accomplishes anything. Best case you get it to 2 days because you can get an order in to your supplier before the daily cutoff.

The only thing that does reduce the uncertainly dramatically is having a relationship with other companies in the same space that allows you to borrow inventory back and forth, but one freeloader or egotist in the mix can screw that up.

Point is, I wonder if perhaps the ethos hasn't caught up with the expansion of overnight and 2 day shipping. Or was the over/under a scapegoat and something else is really to blame.

<comment><USER17> It's actually somewhat logical. Mostly it's lack of customer money.

The small town areas have gotten used to the fact that 99.99% of their clients care more about shaving off $5 than getting something done on a deadline.

Well, you get what you incentivize.

The _problem_ is that when someone shows up on a deadline, the systems can't adjust to accommodate.

For example, I have been in the situation where a dealership was going to hold my car for a week for a mistake that they made simply because they were going to wait for their normal parts shipment because it would cost an extra $20 to get that shipment in tomorrow from the next biggest city. Well, that's ducky, I have to be at the airport 48 hours from now, and it's a 90+ minute drive. Uber isn't an option--so I'm renting a car. Well, I'm probably willing to pay that $20, but the system can't accommodate it (not entirely true--it can--if you're big and loud like I am--but I'll still waste several hours yelling to pay them $20 instead of simply paying $20 immediately and getting back to work).

If you get enough of these annoyances piling up, the friction is simply too high. Car repair is sluggish--you need to own an extra car. Cell connections are erratic--you need local cell boosters. Internet connectivity is poor--you may be trenching a lot of fiber to connect to somewhere useful or carrying an expensive, wimpy satellite plan simply to cover outages. etc.

Business are hard and the default is failure--you don't need extra friction on top of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> According to the website, in 2015, a case study was published: [https://chillcan.com/harvard/](https://chillcan.com/harvard/)

It seems inaccessible now. Is there a way to read it?

<comment><USER19> Internet Archive link[1]

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20190927072318/https://chillcan....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190927072318/https://chillcan.com/harvard/)

<comment><USER20> That contains all of the info linked above, but not the actual HBS case study.

<comment><USER18> Indeed, the actual case study is here: [https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=49194](https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=49194).

But it seems unavailable to purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "Whenever you mention self-cooling cans, people's eyes raise to the ceiling > and they say, 'Oh Lord, not again,'" John Nutting, editorial director of > Sayers Publishing Group Ltd.

My sentiments exactly

<comment><USER22> A self-cooling can is a luxury product but canned drinks are not.

It either needs to be super cheap or you need to somehow sell it in the high end luxury segment or else it's unlikely to make money. (I think).

<comment><USER22> I just found out that there _is_ a way to produce them not to expensive, but it's also not very effective wrt. cooling. Given that as far as I know people in the US tend to drink their soda quite cold it still not likely to work. (IMHO)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> These are the same kinds of communities are just being ravaged by brain drain. Their brightest students And their college graduates are being driven out of town from lack of opportunity.

Those are the people who businesses want to hire. Instead, Youngstown's best chances of a brighter future are moving to Columbus nearby or the coasts to places that already have plenty of advantages.

Remote work could change this. But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback.

<comment><USER24> > _But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers > and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback._

Lot easier said than done. Famously, Racine Wi tried to get legions of white collar workers. The result was similar to what we see outlined in this article. Only instead of spending millions to get blue collar jobs, in Wisconsin we spent hundreds of millions to billions to get white collar jobs. End result was the same, basically, a predictable crash and burn.

Here's reality. These places are a tough sell. And until these places are willing to accept the fact that they are a tough sell they will continue to be easy pickings for slick corporate attorneys in dark suits.

<comment><USER25> I'm still angry about that.</comment></comment></comment>


Just-in-Time Summoning of Unikernels (v0.2) - <AUTHOR> http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/08/17/jitsu-v02/

<comment><USER2> New in this version of Jitsu is support for Rumprun unikernels and Irmin. Jitsu can now also control unikernels directly with libxl, as well as with Xapi or libvirt.

<comment><USER3> The Irmin support means that the DNS/unikernel state is stored in a Git- compatible format. Tried pushing it to GitHub via cron to see what happens? :-)

<comment><USER2> Not until now :) Online here: [https://github.com/MagnusS/jitsu-demo- data](https://github.com/MagnusS/jitsu-demo-data)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like how it pulls up the DNS so quick it looks like it was already there. Neat stuff.</comment>


Mpemba effect: warmer water can freeze faster than colder water - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect <comment><USER2> I have no idea what this has to do with HN, but, one of the best "life hacks" I've ever learned was from my Iraq tours: evaporative cooling.

If you're outside on a hot day and your drink is hot (in our case, it was palettes and palettes full of bottled water), get a wash rag or a skivvy shirt wet, wrap it around your drink container, and let it sit out in the sun. In a little while, voila, cold drink.

Apropos of nothing.

<comment><USER3> It works better in the shade, and best of all in the shade exposed to a breeze. You don't need to warm the water in the rag to evaporate it. It will evaporate in the dry air, even if cool. Putting it in the sun raises its temperature as the evaporation lowers it. If there's a nice breeze, evaporation will still win, but it will get cooler if you don't add energy at the same time you are removing it.

<comment><USER2> That's it, it's been awhile (6 years... wow). Thanks for the correction. Heat + breeze (even if the only breeze is warm).

<comment><USER3> +1 thanks for your service

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And nobody understands exactly why.

The British Royal Society offered a 1,000 pound prize recently for an explanation, so far this is the winner, though it's not complete:

<http://www.rsc.org/mpemba-competition/mpemba-winner.asp>

</comment><comment><USER5> I can perceive this as nothing but a horrible, horrible failure to account for unseen variables.

<comment><USER6> AKA, every unsolved problem in science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Didn't they prove this happens only if the water is impure?

If the water is purified, ie. steam distilled, the warm vs cold effect disappears?

</comment><comment><USER8> Back in my high school chemistry class this effect was noted and explained in the following way:

Ice needs to form a particular crystalline structure when it freezes. This is what makes ice float in water. The molecules in warm water are moving faster and therefore have a greater chance to wander into this correct formation. The cold water molecules are moving more slowly and simply take more time to find the correct alignment.

There wasn't really any proof to this theory, but it was followed with a bunch of anecdotal evidence, like Canadian's washing their cars with cold water, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> Newton's cooling law can be written as t = -ln(T(t) - Te)/k + ln(To - Te)/k. T(t) is the object's temperature at t, Te is the surrounding environmental temperature that's assumed constant, To is the object's starting temperature, and k is a constant scaling factor related to the material of the object in question. Since this effect is contrary to that law, the law is wrong, i.e. too simplistic. It's not hard to imagine that the surrounding Te is changed by the object or that k of water+container can change depending on its temperature or purity...

<comment><USER10> I don't quite follow your reasoning of why the law is wrong. You say yourself "Te is assumed constant", yet you imagine that converting the Te from a constant to a variable could affect the result. However, if you change Te from a constant to a variable, Newton's Law of Cooling is null and void, because a simplification is that Te is constant, and that allows a lot of /dt's to cancel.

The law is correct for when you can assume a constant Te, for example an object within a fluid flow (like an airplane wing during flight). The problem is, for stagnant situations, convection plays a _huge_ role in heat transfer within the air. Controlling convection is really really hard, and even harder in a scientific setting that needs to be reproducible. Also, when dealing with transition temperatures, various things need to be taken care of, such as supercooling. This can literally stop working if your beaker is slightly dirty. So the problem is there isn't a way to universally control the conditions for this experiment. However, I did find that the winner of the RSC paper had a suitable explanation that involves the presence of supercooling for the colder sample of water. Essentially, if the colder sample supercools, it will take slightly more time to freeze, because while it should have frozen, the ice does not have a nucleation site. On the other hand, the warmer sample does _not_ supercool, and freezes upon reaching 0 C. This experiment only works if the temperature difference is slight, probably within 15-30 C. Quite ingenious really!

Edit: After reading the rest of the comments, air bubble/filtered water/de- ionized water all have great effects on ice nucleation and supercooling, which for me supports the winner's paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The controller/thermostat on a stabilized freezer turns on and off in a steady state as it reaches setpoint and then drifts away from it when the motor is off. Filling your ice cube trays with hot water forces the thermostat on sooner, makes it stay on longer because of hysteresis in the controller settings and so freezes faster. That is the only demonstrable reason I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER12> Warm water has less disolved gas, and provides less bouyancy so particulates that would lower the freezing point settle to the bottom. These two factors make the water freeze faster.

This isn't "unexplained" unless you never took a college level physics course, which is pretty typical of the people who edit WikiPedia pages.

<comment><USER13> Then why did the Royal Society create a contest to explain it?

<comment><USER12> RSC 1000 GBP contests are to encourage youth to develop science experiments. Did you think that amount was enough to finance a study? The 1000 GBP contests are all things for which RSC already has answers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A friend of mine swears that if you're making say a gin & tonic, filling the glass with ice will result in less ice melting and therefore your drink will be colder but less watery.

<comment><USER15> That makes sense - the ice cubes are below freezing, so it will take less melting to reach melting point equilibrium temp. In this case you are simply using the heat storage of ice rather than the phase transition energy required to melt the ice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I recall correctly, ice frozen after being heated has fewer air bubbles. I wonder if there is a correlation.

<comment><USER17> The explanations I heard were that heating the water drove off trapped gases or the warmer water took _longer_ to freeze giving them longer to escape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is clearly madness.

<comment><USER19> All the best science is.

Sadly, most of the worst pseudo-science is too, which makes it largely useless as an indicator.

Ah well.</comment></comment>


All You Need to Know About Programming - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/UTiRk.jpg

<comment><USER2> This just helps to highlight the actual level of understanding most none tech- skilled people have, I'm sure it goes a long way to bridging the gap between the average Joe and the web developer, but a large portion of it is incorrect and probably harms the industry as a whole. It's a shame that the author didn't go further in his research.

It really does point to a major flaw in the education system. Some basic coding needs to be taught in high school to all students.

Everyone knows you spend 5% of your time writing code and 95% of it debugging, anyway.</comment>


Spotify's EU antitrust complaint could be a serious threat to Apple - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/apples-in-app-purchase-rules-could-violate-european-competition-law/ <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical that fruitful discussion will ensue here, given that previous threads about this topic have mostly devolved into whether Apple has a monopoly or not. I won't go there.

Instead of debating that, as an American who has seen the US deal with monopolistic stuff (Microsoft) but never watched the EU do similar, how does the EU typically look at things like this? Are there any precedents of similar cases where the EU has either explicitly not taken action, or has intervened? The article mentions that the EU is likely more receptive to the complaint than US courts would be, but (unless I missed it) doesn't really back that up with precedent (perhaps because there isn't any yet?)

<comment><AUTHOR> The competition commission pursues a lot of cases but most of them are not discussed in the media that much: [http://ec.europa.eu/competition/ecn/statistics.html](http://ec.europa.eu/competition/ecn/statistics.html)

There are some recent cases that are getting public attention because they are directed against large US conglomerates. For instance:

Commission sends Statement of Objections to Google on Android operating system and applications: [http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-1492_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-1492_en.htm)

European Union vs. Google: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google)

Microsoft Corp. v. Commission: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission)

Commission fines Mastercard €570 million for obstructing merchants' access to cross-border card payment services: [http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-19-582_en.pdf](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-19-582_en.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The core here is that the app stores of phone vendors devices bypasses competition laws by being a form of monopoly where the device vendor dictates the terms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law) "Abuse of dominance" "(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;" [https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/](https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/) " Does Uber pay it? No. Deliveroo? No. Does Apple Music pay it? No."

"(a) directly or indirectly fix purchase or selling prices or any other trading conditions;" 30% commission to Apple is a form of price fixing. A lawyer could argue that is anti competitive.

"Price discrimination[55] Arbitrarily charging some market participants higher prices that are unconnected to the actual costs of supplying the goods or services."

"(d) apply dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;" It sounded by Spotify that for example Uber had been given a different deal.

"Second, Article 102 of the Treaty prohibits firms that hold a dominant position on a given market to abuse that position, for example by charging unfair prices, by limiting production, or by refusing to innovate to the prejudice of consumers."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890) "price discrimination between different purchasers, if such discrimination tends to create a monopoly"

"A Section 2 monopolization violation has two elements:[16]

(1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market; and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident."

One could argue that the app store is a form of monopoly where Apple dictates who gets to sell and who dont and at what commission level.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apple's predatory behavior is a _serious_ threat to competition! Hence the complaint!

> Apple only controls 20 to 25 percent of the European smartphone market

But controls 70% of revenues and profits generated from apps. People LOVE talking at cross and mis-characterizing Apple's monopoly status. The market in question is NOT smartphone sales, but apps! For instance, in-car accessories, though requiring compliance from the car manufacturer, cannot be blocked by the manufacturer. I should be allowed to use Bose speakers in my car without seeking Toyota's blessing, given how I OWN the car after paying full price.

What apps I run on my iPhone is not something I want Apple to control. And I certainly do not want Apple artificially inflating the cost of my favorite apps with anti-competitive behavior!!

BTW, Apple is also in litigation in the US [1] on related matters.

[1]: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17479480/supreme-court- ap...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17479480/supreme-court-apple-vs- pepper-antitrust-lawsuit-standing-explainer)

<comment><USER2> > _What kind of hit-piece is this?_

Who did you interpret was getting hit by this "hit-piece"? It seemed to mostly just summarize Spotify's argument, which leads me to think you are defending Apple saying it's a hit-piece against them, but the rest of your comment would be a total non-sequitur then.

<comment><USER4> Agreed - On initial reading, I felt the article was trying to make excuses for Apple's claims, but I realize it was merely summarizing US vs EU rules. Edited it</comment></comment></comment>


Adobe Abandons Linux Flash Builder - <AUTHOR> http://java.sys-con.com/node/1543947

<comment><USER2> Without the release of Photoshop and the other pieces of the tool chain, it was destine to fail. Why they would ever think it would succeed without the rest of the tool chain is beyond me. If they fooled themselves with the fact that developers could use a virtual for photoshop etc. Then it makes no sense to purchase a separate licence for linux, I would just buy the licence for the windows virtual.

It amazes we that whoever is in charge of this decision does not have the capacity to understand that. I would question their competency in their role. If they have no intent of releasing a full Linux tool chain then it make sense to kill it off as it will never gain traction without the other tools that developers of flash applications use.

I am just floored that they would have ever though it would succeed without the other tools and then to blame the economics of Linux as the reason for failure shows a firm denial of the understanding of reality. If I used as PC platform, I would run Linux, I prefer Unix operating systems because I cut my teeth on them so I always feel comfortable on them the thing that would stop me from using it would be the absence of the Adobe suite. One of the major reasons I run OSX is due to the fact that it is the only Unix OS that runs the Adobe suite.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... And this is why proprietary formats (not software) are evil. Once the owner decide to kill the tools, the format and the corresponding documents/applications are dead also.</comment>


"Profilers don't help you find memory leaks, they just make your app slower" - <AUTHOR> http://www.plumbr.eu/blog/solving-outofmemoryerror-memory-profilers <comment><USER2> You don't have to know only the tools to use, but to know how to use them. Looking only at histograms only tells you what fills the memory, not how it does it. Exploring the object tree in the heap dump and thread dumps are way more useful.

Last month we used VisualVM to get rid of the OutOfMemory errors and to decrease the run time of an application from >110 hours to 40 hours. We found that a big 3rd party library was keeping some kind of undocumented "undo history" of every action, that could not be flushed.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more. In a garbage collected language, object retention graphs and call stacks are everything when it comes to object lifetime. The garbage collector looks at them to figure out when it's time to clean up an object, so you need to be looking at them if you want to figure out why the GC isn't cleaning up that object.

If those features aren't being used then there's a good chance that the problem is in the chair, not in the profiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What? I'm sorry, but what? The point of profilers is to find memory leaks and performance bottlenecks while disregarding the performance of the app with the profiler running.

Who cares if the profiler is making the app run slower. You aren't going to run it all the time in production!

If you can't find the memory leak or performance bottleneck, either you are doing something wrong or the profiler is not giving enough information. Getting a stack trace of where those byte[]'s are being created would be a good start.

<comment><USER5> This was my thought as well. While memory profilers tend to be fairly useless in my experience, disregarding them simply because they degrade the performance of your application (and really, 3-4x in the case of YourKit is astoundingly good) is silly. Heavy use of a debugger will also degrade the performance of your application -- should we not use debuggers, even when they're the right tool for the job?

<comment><USER6> _memory profilers tend to be fairly useless_

In my own experience I've had quite a bit of success with the valgrind family of tools when I was debugging memory leaks in a GSM message codec (written in C, not a managed language) I wrote a few years ago. I guess it depends on the nature of the code and memory leaks.

I've also had _some_ success tracing memory use with VisualVM for the purpose of finding out where memory is allocated so it could be used more efficiently (both for performance and do prevent leaks).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably worth noting that this guy develops/sells a tool for finding Java memory leaks.

</comment><comment><USER8> > In all described cases only instructions in "Getting started" or demo video > were followed, as every newcomer would do. It is quite possible, that there > are some more advanced techniques, which lead to more satisfying results.

From experience in other languages, profilers are perfectly capable of pointing the source of leaks. It's what they're for. They can do so by displaying a weighted object graph (drilling from byte[], in this example, using back references), and by taking stack snapshots of some percentage of allocations.

<comment><USER9> Profilers will not show you any back references. Memory dump analyzers will do. The point of that blog post was to show that profiler alone will not help you. You need that memory dump and back references and dominators etc.

<comment><USER3> Any halfway decent memory profiler analyzes memory dumps and shows back references.

A quick look at their websites confirms that all three of the profilers mentioned in the article do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> AppDynamics advertises "Built for production environments: < 2% overhead". Has anyone given it a try? <http://www.appdynamics.com/products-why- appdynamics.php>

<comment><USER2> I tried it for WebLogic monitoring. It looks good and has nice features (like transactional support), but we could not trust it for the PROD environments. It requires a java agent to be installed on the JVM, and we were not prepared to retest the environment at that level.

We ended up using JMX monitoring for most of the needed metrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not quite sure what planet that guy is on, but I found tools such as Instruments and valgrind invaluable when working on a port of an app to iOS.

<comment><USER12> This guy is on Java planet, so Instruments and valgrind doesn't quite apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> if you do not know how to use a tool then the tool is not useful.</comment>


Twitter Guys: We'll Still Be Running This Company in 5 Years - <AUTHOR> http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/

<comment><USER2> big risk, big potential returns.

Kudos to them if they can do it - & I hope they do!

<comment><USER3> I've been on Twitter for a year, and I'll stay on Twitter if doesn't get bad.</comment></comment>


Going Global with Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/going-global-with-your-startup/ <comment><USER2> One thing I would love to know more about is how European SAAS startups handle invoicing and taxes. Afaik the tax situation in Europe is super complicated and you have to charge the tax of the country the customer is from.

I am in Europe and want to start a SAAS service that caters to individuals and small companies. I wonder if it is feasible to do so in Europe. Do I really have to ask each customer where he is based, if he is an individual or a company and then tax him accordingly? Do I have to create invoices?

US based startups seem to simply not care. Even big companies don't. They just ask for your credit card number and thats it. For example I used Amazon Mechanical Turk recently to outsource some work. And there simply is no way to get an invoice from them.

Do European startups have a big disadvantage in this regard or am I missing something?

Are there services that abstract that away? Deal with all the invoicing and tax issues?

<comment><USER3> Running a Germany-based SaaS startup at some scale, so I feel confident to chime in.

To put it bluntly, you're right. We have to do more work just to get started accepting money than our American counterparts. Yes, the insanely complex EU- VAT rules actually need to be followed. Yes, a lot of your customers will want to pay via bank transfer and not through credit card. Yes, the American folks will still want to pay in USD and not in EUR.

We use ChargeBee ([https://www.chargebee.com/](https://www.chargebee.com/)) to abstract away most of the pain. I would greatly suggest using such a service (Recurly and Chargify are more enterprisey alternatives). We had a selfmade implementation before switching to ChargeBee, and one EU rule change caused us to have to re-issue all customer invoices for one quarter. Not fun. ChargeBee prevents you from doing the biggest blunders in taxation, and also allows you to keep track of invoices paid through credit card or through bank transfer (and specify the Dunning rules accordingly). Overall, I'd greatly recommend it.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the info!

I tried your site and I saw that it adds the VAT when the user selects their country. Since the order page makes network requests to ChargBee, I guess they provide all that functionalilty.

Would you say ChargeBee is also a good solution for small one-time-payments?

When you say it abstracts away 'most of the pain' \- what pain is left?

<comment><USER3> I think my sibling comment's experiences are somewhat dated. Running one-time payments has been absolutely no problem with ChargeBee for us. It's obviously geared toward subscription businesses, but it has full support for one-time charges as well. No need for any hacks or weird work-arounds.

Regarding what pain is left: I'm approaching this from an end-to-end perspective, so answering the question "Even when using ChargeBee, what additional work do we have to do compared to a similar business based in the US?":

\- You still have to code in UI-level support for multiple currencies. ChargeBee handles the backend.

\- ChargeBee gives you a nice UI for keeping track of paid and unpaid invoices. Nonetheless, for payments via bank transfer [which your EU business customers will want to use], you still have to manually confirm in ChargeBee that you've received payment.

\- You still have to supply quarterly MOSS tax returns to your local tax authorities (though ChargeBee does all it can to make that process quick).

<comment><USER4> AFAIK there is no other work-around for one-time charges that have variable pricing. The $.01 quantity add-on is what's recommended by their support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Snail mail is your friend

Not only it is cheap, 1 week deliveries are some times possible on Finpost, Singpost, Swedish Post and most well known, HK Post.

Establish small warehouses in those countries.

2\. Do not have legal presence in as many countries as possible. Countries do not tax purchases of their citizens abroad (no VAT, hooray)

3\. Be secretive (or at least until you can afford to do things the way "big co." do)

4\. If you 100% need to have physical presence in the country, you are doing something wrong.

5\. If you 100% need to have a team meeting in person with an ability to rent an office for work for some time, only consider no hassle visa countries. Singapore was once super hospitable to internationals: hire whom ever you want, from where ever you want, but now they did a U turn. They also largely cancelled their legendary high income individual visa (a de facto residentship permit given just for agreeing to live and spend money in Sing.)

Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, PRC, Pakistan have no problem at all giving out long term business visit visas to all and everybody. For as long as you get your body on their side of the border, you are free to do whatever you want for the duration of the visa unless you do something really stupid.

6\. If you are really insistent on having a single physical workspace, consider places out of beaten path: look for countries that are cheap to live in, yet fancy, and without bureaucratic culture. For example, say Kazakhstan (their capital ranked 1 in Economist's list of cheapest megacities to live in) or Pakistan (they have an actually working FDI assistance and protection program.) There, locals are ready to almost worship the few foreigners who want to spend money in the country, plus they are the kind of countries where you can buy anything for money including the disposition of authorities. Also check for possibility to do split tax/salaries legally in the country (pay base in the country, and a project premium/stand alone consulting payment to a proprietorship in their home or third countries.)

7\. Consider the fact that the majority of world's middle class lives outside of the West today and that you get more opportunity for the money in markets that are not yet as mature as in the West.

8\. Middle class outside outside of the West is easier to cater to: in the West, you gave a plethora of different classes all qualifying as paying middle class, with their own subclasses, and vastly varying demographics. Compare this to Central and South East Asian middle class: age 25-35, 90% technical professional occupation, %60-%70 with families/couples, highly geographically clustered, employed full-time, mid to high property ownership, mid to high light vehicle ownership, almost all with higher education and second language knowledge.

9\. P.S. Pakistan has fabulous 200GB 4G data plans for only ~$90 a month.

<comment><USER6> Price and cost is not the single overriding factor one should consider. Other factors might be more important:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _5\. You're going to need to get on an airplane sometimes_

Yes, this is very important. There's still nothing like human contact. I use video calls constantly all day, but still fly a tremendous amount because so much communication happens non-verbally or with higher fidelity than video provides.

<comment><USER8> Especially so with your high-profile customers. There's nothing, NOTHING better than meeting your customer personally, shaking hands, visiting their office or having lunch together.

Humans are, by nature, social beings. Even though, as a civilisation, we've come a long way and have created ways of communicating across huge distances, we still feel like the personal contact is so much more powerful.

Never underestimate personal contact, especially when running a business.

<comment><USER9> There is a very simple reason for this, you always get more information in person.

If you're interacting with a text-based chat interface you get one thing, pieces of text, not only that's all you have to make decisions, but you have no idea how much effort and time went into designing those messages for you, this translates into the simples human interactions.

If you are talking on the phone, you get words and maybe a tone of voice, you get more timely information, but that is all.

If you are doing video chat, you get to see the persons expressions, which is a plus, but not much more(and how many times have I seen audio/video data issues).

But, if you are meeting in person, you get all of that and then some, plus it signals commitment and effort to allocate time to physically attend a meeting considering how much other options you have. These do not have precise metrics, but it drives people gut decisions.

<comment><USER10> In a startup sales/bizdev context, the point you make about signaling commitment and effort is particularly important. "The founder (or CEO) showed up in person" can make a lot of things happen more quickly than they otherwise would.

<comment><USER8> That's a very fair point. Might be that to a certain degree people feel in debt with the person who offered them their time, thus making a positive business decision easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I run the US office of a German startup. I'd add the below:

1) Issuing employee equity across countries is difficult: There are good US solutions to prevent employee equity/ option holders from needing to pay taxes before liquidity, and similarly for good German solutions to the same problem. Getting these two systems to "play nice" with each other is challenging.

2) Time zones: If possible, I'd think about time zones when expanding internationally. SF->Europe is brutal (8-9 hours), which is a major reason we put our US office in NYC. I wake up at 6, check email, and have half a day to work with the Germans during their work day. If I were to be on the West Coast, even by starting at 6am it's already 3pm in Germany.

3) Visas: A good option for international companies expanding to the US is an E-2 "investor" visa- these make it easy for employees of the foreign HQ to come over to the US for a few years as long as the foreign company is investing substantial money in the US organization (I think over a couple hundred $K is enough)

</comment><comment><USER12> There is some nice advice in comments and articel

I had a few more things that helped with a platform that I built that went global:

\- Internationalization - bake it into the bread from the beginning, the cost is marginal, relatively speaking. Internationalize the UI for sure, and make design decisions relative to having reasonable multi language support for any user type content. It won't be perfect out of the box, but you will have a huge head start when you have to optimize rendering of languages.

\- Localization: The forgotten sibling of internationalization can be critical when going for an experience to show a native experience that is local and inviting to the user.

\- Equality for the international user: Consider your browser configuration globally and not just North America, which is typically better equipment, higher screen resolution, faster internet connections, the latest browsers, etc. This doesn't mean avoiding using the latest and greatest, but consider it. As much as I like React, lighter libraries like Vue can be a little less heavy. Lean, mean, and fast go a long way when you have a user on an off-shore platform needing to access something required to do his job.

\- Mobile first - the world is mobile first, North America is a mix. For many people, depending on the country, the mobile is the only device they have, through which they have to accomplish tasks that others may complete on tablets or laptops. Consider this in your design and also try using only a phone for a week to do what you do normally on a laptop - it can be eye opening.

Thanks to folks who have reccomended services like Chargebee - sharing current resources that solve neccesary problems like this help a lot. It's great to be able to take money in any form rather than force a user down a particular path.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a side comment on the ideology of going "global first", startups from smaller countries (with smaller markets) are almost forced to adopt this mindset from day one.

Many advantages from going US only first: same currency & language, homogenous culture, huge market, etc. The main disadvantage though is that you don't learn how to operate in an international environment until later in the business life cycle, at which point the institutional DNA is harder to change.

Your competitors will be taking a global-first mindset, so it's something to think about.

</comment><comment><USER10> Original author here. Happy to answer any questions or talk about other things related to working across national borders.

</comment><comment> edouard-harris Practically every pain point listed here is a startup waiting to happen.

<comment><USER14> Or possibly a startup that's already happened but hasn't scaled yet :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good stuff. You can easily get surprised. We had not even thought about "going international" to any meaningful degree, and then out of the blue a prospect from Canada calls us. At that very moment, I had NO idea what would have been involved in doing a deal with them... taxes, payments, etc., etc... all totally beyond my ken.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just a heads up that the YC blog spits out far more data than it should when it errors out. I received a 503 and encountered this:

        Service Temporarily Unavailable

        The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

        Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

        Apache/2.2.24 (Unix) mod_hive/5.5 mod_ssl/2.2.24 OpenSSL/1.0.0-fips mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/188.8.131.5235 mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 mod_fcgid/2.3.6 Server at blog.ycombinator.com Port 80

<comment><USER17> Is this really problematic from a security perspective? Presumably anyone malicious is already running a script-kiddie package that is actively probing for vulnerabilities, so would it even help such an actor to know what library versions you're using?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been running my company as a globally distributed business for awhile now and I'd also emphasize #2 and #5.

Also, managing a 40 person team across many time zones created interesting communication issues. Be prepared to dial in processes far earlier than you would expect to need them and learn how to manage / archive conversations that happen in chat effectively. I've found that voice / video chat is still very challenging due to time zones, varying internet connections, and spoken accents vs text.

I definitely expect to see much more of this going forward though. Asian markets are on fire right now and many US companies, large and small, are focused on growth there.

<comment><USER19> #7? The list only goes to 5.

<comment><USER20> Linear extrapolation?

<comment><USER18> Haha I meant #5. Edited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I run an international Startup as well and we ship stuff around the globe too. It sounds like the author has good experiences with DHL. Unfortunately that has not been the case for us. Too many delayed packages, customs trouble and general incompetence made us switch to FedEx a long time ago. Haven't had a single problem since then.

Although I'm German I can't recommend DHL to anyone in good conscience.

<comment><USER22> Seconded, I used to ship a lot of stuff using DHL and have transferred all our business to FedEx or the US bound stuff and other carriers locally and within Europe. DHL caused us no end of trouble with breakage (more so with packages marked fragile), lost packages, late packages and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> On the shipping front there is a nice expression that you only air freight the 2 Fs "fresh flowers and f __* ups". I would say though that shipping large goods internationally is easier in my expiernece than small individual orders, for that amount of shipping cost it is far easier to get a good service that can keep things moving than for an individual order.

</comment><comment><USER24> So , tax accounting and immigration paperwork are areas ripe for innovation. There is an unjustified amount of effort and time going into accounting, which should be automated in western countries.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Anywhere you have employees, you need an accountant and a lawyer. This one surprised me."

Really?

That's pretty much business 101. Doesn't need to be one person exclusively, there are offices that combine both services, but yeah.

Unless you're subcontracting them.

Oh and "work visas are complicated", they are, but H1Bs are much more complicated than the average (and abused by big players as well).

So overall, it's a nice writeup, but pretty, pretty basic.

<comment><USER26> I understand the surprise given that many companies these days hire full time "employees" as "contractors" in other countries. These employees are sometimes not really "contractors" (they have a fixed salary, they get benefits like paternity leave or paid time off, they have performance reviews, they can be promoted, etc.) but on paper they are "contractors".

Personally I know various companies that have employees all over the world but DON'T have accountants and lawyers anywhere. These "employees" are both "contractors" and "employees", depending on which angle you look from.

<comment><USER27> That's true, but the reality is that lots of small start-ups are "doing it wrong" and will be caught eventually [0]. Most jurisdictions have firm differences between a temporary worker (contractor) and an employee. Generally, companies have responsibilities to pay things like payroll taxes for employees and not for contractors.

While management and team members might consider them selves BOTH employee and contractor. The legal and tax situation is that those are different employment states and you can't be both. For a recent example see Uber in the UK.

It's somewhat a tech industry thing the idea that employees can wander around the world and work from wherever they want - the tax and legal system isn't quite as fluid.

[0] statistically the chance of being noticed by the tax authority is pretty small at the start which is why it doesn't happen that much. But, if you start 'employing' tens of people in a jurisdiction and don't have company tax affairs in order then it gets increasingly risky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Over the course of several companies, I have noticed something special regarding China (in the context of expanding there, from a western country):

1\. You inevitably hire a local person to handle this market.

2\. Because of the combination of language issues and timezone differences, communication suffers. All of your communication is via your one local person.

3\. Your Chinese country manager decides that the Chinese market is significantly different from every other country in the world, so your product needs to be rebuilt to address the local market. Fortunately they can hire lots of people very quickly and relatively cheaply. You don't really have any insight to say whether they are right or wrong.

Comment: I feel this tends to be a combination of a) empire-building strategies and b) ignorance of the rest of the world, and a specific assumption that China is special in some specific way, which often turns out to be false.</comment>


Covid-19: New SafeGraph 'Foot Traffic Patterns by State and Industry' Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/618139886819721216/safegraph-foot-traffic-dashboard <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://www.safegraph.com/dashboard/reopening-the-economy- fo...](https://www.safegraph.com/dashboard/reopening-the-economy-foot-traffic)

This site is trapping back-arrow navigation; not recommended.</comment>


Google Tests an Interface Optimized for Infinite Scrolling - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-tests-interface-optimized-for.html

<comment><USER2> I hate infinite scrolling. With pagination at least you get a feeling of having completed something, of having got somewhere. With infinite scrolling you are stuck, scrolling forever.

The nice thing about Google Images infinite scrolling is that they combine it with pagination.

<comment><USER3> I think the title is misleading. If I'm not mistaken it's not actual infinite scrolling, the only change is the search bar and search tools remain in a fixed position. It's a nice change.

<comment><USER4> >The new interface seems to set the stage for a fluid design that removes pagination and replaces it with infinite scrolling.

The key phrase in the article is "setting the stage". Google hasn't switched to infinite scroll yet, but with a fixed header it seems most likely for them to do so soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The navigation bar, the search box and the search options sidebar have a fixed position"

I see this as "the revenge of designers" -- having anything permanently taking up the vertical space was pushed from "designers" for years and it always reduced usability for me. I'd prefer to see the results, not immense fixed space that doesn't contain anything. The picture is telling -- the permanent menu bar and the huge empty space around the search box and logo.

<comment><USER6> I despise frames. And let's call these fixed elements what they really are: frames. In addition to reducing the usable screen area (which is awful on my netbook's 1024x600 screen)[1], frames also break the page metaphor. Part of what makes the web easy to use is that interacting with each website works more or less the same. That is to say, the scrolling behaviour of web pages mimics a real-life piece of paper. If the entire website no longer scrolls as one uniform page, when visiting a new site, the scrolling behaviour is unpredictable with each site doing something different. My terminology is clumsy, but perhaps it is clear enough to understand what I mean.

[1] <http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/1748/screenwaste.png>

<comment><USER7> Would you design for the 90% or the 10%? While it sucks that your experience is diminished on a netbook with a small browser viewport (which can be helped if you were to switch to Chrome instead of Firefox), this is only a problem for a very small percentage of the user-base with tiny screens. The rest get a very pleasant and improved site experience.

Does it suck for those in the ever-decreasing minority? Yep. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

<comment><USER8> > this is only a problem for a very small percentage of the user-base with > tiny screens

No, it's not. <http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please, please, never use recursive examples. They are confusing, distracting, make any presentation look poor, plus they show the author's lack of imagination. In this particular case I didn't quite get why Google appears on the right in the video until I saw that the guy was demonstrating Google Search by searching "google search".

</comment><comment><USER10> "The most important change is that most navigation elements continue to be visible even when you scroll down. The navigation bar, the search box and the search options sidebar have a fixed position"

Strange that "position: fixed" hasn't found its way to popular websites before now. It's been supported by major browsers since the early zeroes (or late nineties?), the only exception being IE (for which you can easily make a fix).

Here's a page from ten years ago (!) describing "position: fixed": <http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/menus>

<comment><USER5> <http://derstandard.at/> has fixed pieces of the interface for at least a few years but I really, really don't like it. Try it yourself. It looks good as long as you're actually _not_ interested in the material inside. Unless you're designer of the site showing the features of the site to the boss, you're not likely to use the menus inside of the fixed areas. But this also explains why some sites end up having such interfaces. In my view, this is a sign of Google turning soggy inside as in:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2776046>

<comment><USER10> Like all features, "position: fixed" can be applied in useful ways and in not so useful ways. I agree that Der Standard's way of using it isn't too good, but overall fixed positions are an excellent feature if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is very distracting to me. It usually is jerky causing me to look at it each time I scroll. It also takes a second for me to realize where I jumped to if I used page down, because I can not tell as easily where I am relative to where I was, visually. This is partly due to loss of relative distances but also because my eyes have momentarily followed the jerk.

The only fixed that I can handle is a fixed background if there is a large difference in contrast between the page background and main content background.

I hope this does not become a norm.

</comment><comment><USER12> The "Preview" GMail theme has a variation of this, keeping the toolbar in a fixed position as you scroll. It's not infinite, though, as each inbox "page" contains 50 messages.</comment>


Why Yahoo's announcement today won't get as much hype as Google's - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/04/why-yahoos-announcement-today-wont-get-as-much-hype-as-googles/

<comment><USER2> This has radically altered my thinking about my launch. I'm going for the web "old-school", not for the the early adopters, but why should I deliberately lock them out. I can provide a couple of shiny things for the EA to find, use, hack and adapt.

The ground swell propagation of usage is probably best accomplished by getting an EA excited, so help them to help you, even if they're not your intended actual market.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK Robert Scoble makes a point or two here but you can't help feeling that the sub-text is "If I can't have the shiny new toy on the first day then the toy is not worth having."</comment>


Android browse that can hide users' real access to IP - <AUTHOR> https://www.iwebshuttle.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> WebShuttle a Android browser with encrypted tunnels that can hide users' real access to IP

<comment><USER2> why not use VPN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Compared to the impact of a VPN on a device's global network settings, it just works in the browser and has no impact on other apps.</comment></comment></comment>


Using Puppet + Rspec to recruit DevOps/SysAdmin [Toolkit] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zalora/automated_sysadmin_screen_test

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not like to give theoretical/artificial problems in interview sessions, I like to provision challenge environment which resembles day to day work of Operation Engineers. This tool is of a great help

<comment><USER2> This is really cool, thanks!</comment></comment>


How Facebook is Pushing Engagement in Relationship Status - <AUTHOR>

Shame the URL mustve busted.  Working one below.<p>http://www.andrewmachado.com/blog/how-facebook-is-pushing-engagement-even-when-it-comes-to-relationships/ <comment><USER2> Clickable link: [http://www.andrewmachado.com/blog/how-facebook-is-pushing- en...](http://www.andrewmachado.com/blog/how-facebook-is-pushing-engagement- even-when-it-comes-to-relationships/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for posting. I wonder if I should just resubmit it.</comment></comment>