Jinja live parser - <AUTHOR> http://jinja2test.tk/ <comment><USER2> Is the source code available anywhere? I could actually use this myself. FYI Jinja2 is really powerful and allows you to use lot of stuff from Python (eg. execute heavy math operations, allocate lot of memory, iterate forever...)

Eg. if you paste {% for i in range(10000000000) %}{% endfor %} and press Convert tens of times it will take down your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> The source is at [https://github.com/qn7o/jinja2-live- parser](https://github.com/qn7o/jinja2-live-parser).

(I submitted the story but I am not the developer.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I stopped hosting this site, because everyone started to try "{% for i in range(10000000000) %}{% endfor %}". Stop, please, don't do it. I have not enough time for writing code to check all jinja filters and determine heavy work, if you can do it please make a pull request to original source or my fork [https://github.com/xandr2/jinja2-live- parser](https://github.com/xandr2/jinja2-live-parser) . Originally I created this to help people who need fast check their ansible playbooks with jinja2 template rules. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35407822/how-can-i- test-j...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35407822/how-can-i-test- jinja2-templates-in-ansible/)

<comment><USER4> Two things I recommend you do before hosting it again.

1\. Use SandboxedEnvironment instead of Environment.

2\. Render the template via multiprocessing with a 10 second timeout. This should solve some of your DOS issues.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, I will try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I've added support for Heroku deploy button on my fork: [https://github.com/GetStream/jinja2-live- parser](https://github.com/GetStream/jinja2-live-parser)

<comment><USER2> live here too now :) [https://cryptic- cliffs-32040.herokuapp.com/](https://cryptic-cliffs-32040.herokuapp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's gonna help us for ansible/salt templates work. thanks

</comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone please help me understand where this can be put to use? Few comments have already mentioned some stuff vaguely. Any concrete example will really help.

<comment><USER7> Sure, one use case would be Ansible. Where you frequently use complex jina filters on variables that are passed in via a variable file or dynamically at run time. Debugging these can be time consuming if you have to do run the Ansible playbook every time only to find out there a problem with your filter or templating logic.</comment></comment>


Too many medical trials move the goalposts. A new initiative aims to change that - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21695381-too-many-medical-trials-move-their-goalposts-halfway-through-new-initiative <comment><USER2> We will never be able to enforce this and do productive research. It is all due to mathematicians' fantasy about how research works and researchers' fantasy about how stats work.

Something _always_ needs to be adjusted that is figured out during the study. Focus on testing precise predictions and observing similar results in different studies rather than significant differences. Despite it being much his "fault", Fisher pointed this out nearly 60 years ago:

Fisher, R N (1958). "The Nature of Probability". Centennial Review 2: 261–274

<comment><USER3> The standard that COMPare is aiming to achieve, as far as I understand it, is the following:

1\. Outcomes that will be measured for clinical trials need to be registered and public ahead of the trial (this is already achieved with recent regulation, as mentioned in the article)

2\. If planned outcomes change, the change needs to be reported and explained, with new outcomes being again clearly stated.

I really struggle to see how enforcing this will prevent productive research. This is basic scientific hygiene, not fantasy. No one is arguing that studies shouldn't be adjusted, just that the adjustments should be clearly stated.

Completely changing the goals of a study after failing on your initial goals, and then claiming success without mentioning any of the failures along the way is poor science, because you're masking a lot of potentially significant findings along the way that others can benefit from as well.

Not to mention that these standards have been agreed to by all the largest journals decades ago, with big PR claims of how this is needed etc., yet are never followed in practice. The responses of some journals (NEJM, JAMA that I recall) have been shameful, and contradictory to standards they claim to follow.

<comment><USER2> Misrepresenting your methods is just fraud, so you will get no argument from me there.

However, think about the difference between A) setting a point prediction of your model as the null hypothesis vs B) "two groups are the same and samples were independent, etc" as the null hypothesis.

In the first case there is a very small range of plausible outcomes consistent with the researcher's theory. In the second case there is a very large range (usually 50%). In the case of scenario A, messing up the experiment (either on purpose, or accident) makes it more difficult to claim evidence consistent with your model. In the case of scenario B, the same thing makes this easier.

So researchers using scenario A are incentivized to be as careful and account for as many different sources of error as possible. Under scenario B, the incentive is the opposite, the sloppier the study the easier it is to get results consistent with the researcher's theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't what AllTrials[1] is doing a much better way of fixing medical science?

[1]: [http://www.alltrials.net/find-out-more/all- trials/](http://www.alltrials.net/find-out-more/all-trials/)

<comment><USER5> These are different goals.

All trials is about not hiding when you have done a trial that doesn't produce your desired result. (Publication Bias) COMPare is about being transparent if you change the purpose of your trial while it's happening. (Outcome switching)

Both problems can be countered by good preregistering practice. And both are important issues that need to be fixed. (And by the way: not only in medicine. This is a problem that is widely a problem in science.)

<comment><USER4> Oh hmm, I thought you had to pre-register your purpose with AllTrials as well. Too bad, they could have killed two birds with one stone.</comment></comment></comment>


Working from Home a Guide to Successfully Working from Home as a Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.kablamo.com.au/posts/2019/successful-remote-work <comment><USER2> I've worked from home on a few gigs and largely agree with this article.

A couple things I would and/or modify are:

\- Merge "HAVE A DEDICATED OFFICE" with "CLOSE THE DOORS TO THE ROOMS YOU'RE NOT USING". Once you are done with the workday, "close the door" to your work area just as you would by leaving an on-site office at the end of the day.

\- "WEAR WORK CLOTHES" might be better described as "maintain the same morning routine you would have if going into an office." IMHO, "wearing work clothes" is much less important than the benefit of getting into the mindset of "going to work."

\+ Take the same lunch break you would if at an office.

\+ If you need to do an errand, let your coworkers know just as if you were in an office. Prefer to schedule it if possible.

\+ Establish contact protocols as you would if on-site. For example, just because you might leave your laptop running should not imply 24x7 accessibility. If you need to be available (such as for production support), it should be no different than if you went into the office each day.

\+ Keep a record of your start time, "leaving" for lunch, PTO (such as for errands), and "when you leave." This can be as simple as written notes or by way of a corporate time accounting system. I recommend keeping your own hand- written logs in addition to the latter.

\+ Record work performed outside of the normal office hours as you would if called into the office.

<comment><USER3> I did a brief stint as fully remote (~3 months) so I never got fully into it, but these are all fantastic points, many of which I did to great effect.

One additional routine I found most helpful was to have a "going to the office" routine. After my normal at-home morning routine, I would leave the house and go to a nearby coffee shop for some coffee, then return home to work. That was my "commute". Before it I was at home, after it I was working. When I was done working for the day, I'd leave the house, take a short walk, and go back home. It really sounds silly, but having those "commutes" really helped separate work time from home time, even if they were in the same space. It helped that it was over the summer so the weather was beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I find useful, related to the "have a home office" point, is to shuffle up my working location occasionally even though I _have_ that dedicated office -- work at a coffee shop for a week, or at the dining room table, or rearrange my office so the desk is in a different orientation, or whatever.

I find that this breaks up any accumulated association of a given work-space being a place where I've gotten distracted or procrastinated.

I pretty much agree with the rest of the points, though I'm sure some are a matter of taste.

<comment><USER5> I've been working remotely for almost ~2 years now —amen for the coffeeshop.

There's a really good one by my place that I've been going to for years. I very rarely go there and don't become productive. There's something about just changing things up and working from a more limited setup (just my laptop).

<comment><USER6> Are you never afraid your laptop gets stolen when you go the toilet, or do you take it with you then?

<comment><USER5> Depends on the cafe. For the one that I always go to, I generally leave my laptop out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Add a point about your company culture and team communication. This may not apply if you are working by yourself as a contractor or sole developer. But if there's a "home office" (poor choice of words sorry) where all of your other coworkers are face to face, then you need to develop a culture of writing everything down. Build internal documentation of decisions and meetings. If your company is mostly remote or has several locations then it should have this culture anyway (if they're any good).

<comment><USER8> Author here. I'm planning a follow up post on company and team culture that enables remote work. It's a big enough topic to be tackled on its own.

I'm still talking to people with different experiences to me, to understand their perspective on what makes it successful. Thanks for your insight here, I agree with what you're saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always worked from home a few days a week and my productivity has always been above the average. Fast forward 2 years, and I am surrounded by 2 little babies and a cute toddler that likes to have her dad around. Unless I go to the office or work on night shifts, it's quite difficult to concentrate for too long. I felt that I needed to change habits to keep things on track.

I've got an intern to help me conduct some experiments that would demand too much time from me otherwise, and started to go to the office more often than before.

The nice side effect of going to the office is that I get to workout more (commuting by bike) and to conduct more side projects with colleagues. I keep choosing at least one day in the week to work from home, though.

Interestingly enough, there is a coffee shop right next door and yet I never worked from there. Sipping a coffee without bringing work with me has been pleasant so far, but maybe it is worth trying to find for how many hours I will be able to stay there focused on business related activities.

<comment><USER2> Working from home is not for everyone, and that's not a judgement.

In fact, I would submit you have a clear separation between work and home life. And that's A Good Thing.

<comment><USER8> In talking to people about this, I found a number of people who just can't work from home. Whether its not being as productive as they'd like, or something else.

If you're working from home in a team, you definitely need to be aware of those who don't operate the same as you. With good communication and respect this is an easy hurdle to get over.

<comment><USER2> > In talking to people about this, I found a number of people who just can't > work from home. Whether its not being as productive as they'd like, or > something else.

Quite true. I worked with a friend of mine for years who almost never worked from home. The only time he did was during critical production failures experienced late at night.

He had two children and normally would be in the office in the pre-dawn hours.

I asked him why he got into work so early and he told me, "if I leave before my kids wake up, it's easier on them."

Hard to argue with that logic, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been working remote exclusively for 5 years now with several years prior working remote on occasion. I live half way across the country from my job and I remotely operate a consulting business that my day job is fully aware. I also have two kiddos which is the primary reason I work remote and a good motivation for healthy work/life balance.

I definitely find that routine helps, but over time, with discipline, you can adapt to different environments. The most important thing for me is my work system... not so much my work space.

I work on everything from full stack web, low level hardware and electronics, VR/AR, cloud infrastructure and database administration, video games, iOS/Android native, etc. I need something that is portable, powerful, and easily cross platform.

My latest system is a macbook pro with 32GB Ram and an external eGPU graphics card for VR development. I run Parallels as my primary VM allowing me to run a Bootcamp Windows partition as a VM. It is also the only solution that currently supports Metal for graphics intensive applications. I rarely need to hookup the headset, but when I do I can boot to Windows natively for that. I can do native iOS and Android easily from the mac OSX partition. I even run Ubuntu on the VM for testing server setups locally.

When I am home I work from just about any room with my laptop stand, however, in order to ZONE I do need to find a quite spot while the kids are around (or use headphones). I also often work in coffee shops, book stores, libraries, and grocery stores (those with a food court).

I typically spend the day on my day job and evenings when the kids are down I work on contract work, but for me it just seems like a hobby most of the time anyway.

I have slack and google meet installed on my phone and have my calendar and emails synced with my work accounts.

I LOVE GIT! I use git for all of my consulting and side projects and even when a client or day job uses perforce I can use git-p4 to create a much better offline flow.

I know this isn't for everyone and I have deviated in many cases from the points in the article, but it definitely has been working well for my life style thus far.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm in my 8th year wfh. I like it, but I think my mental health needs more human interaction at this point. I'm looking into coworking spaces, although I'm still scared about committing to monthly expenses (it's only my second year of self-employment and my income fluctuates wildly).

I'm not going to lie though: there are days when rolling out of bed and picking up right away the problem left open the night before, without having to worry about anything else, feels super-productive.

</comment><comment><USER12> As a 9-year home worker, to this I'd add:

\- I don't wear work clothes. I much prefer to be super casual.

\- Have a daily exercise routine, and stay out of the refrigerator.

<comment><USER13> > I don't wear work clothes. I much prefer to be super casual.

His second paragraph on "work clothes" makes what I think is the real point, which is not to wear what you slept in. I go pretty casual, too, except I wear gray shirts with a pocket for my phone. I put it on when I start working and take it off when I am done. I find it does help define when I am working.

(Every point in his article is something I've picekd up from HN over the years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very well written article! I'm in a position where I can work from home if I want to but I found out that it's not for me.

Firstly I'm way more productive in the office and no matter how much I tried I couldn't reach the same level of productivity at home.

When I worked from home many days in a row I realized I was missing a human contact. Even though I was with my girlfriend every evening, was around people in the shop and in the gym I felt quite depressed.

Strangely I had some weeks when I was the only one working in the coworking space and I didn't feel like this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hate to admit it, but I'm a massive proponent of remote work (and other work/life balance-friendly initiatives), but my productivity on average is a lot lower than if I'm in an office.

I still wfh every day, but days where I work out of a coffee shop or anywhere public, I'm a LOT more productive. I think it's just the idea that at any time someone can see my screen, making me less likely to pull up Netflix or a game or something equally distracting.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been working remotely as a contractor (low-level mobile and platform embedded development) for over two years now. I find that engaging in sports activities regularly in a group setting helps with mental well-being. Diversifying work locations also helps. My preferred places are the public library, and a local coffee shop.

</comment><comment><USER17> I regularly work remotely (whenever I'm not at a client) and have occasionally had stints where I would be 3-4 full days in a row fully remote (usually around Summer or other holidays when clients take breaks), and every single one of the points in the article ring true:

\- My home office is, by far, the most productive place I've ever worked in (large monitors, relative quiet, decent natural light, a desk and chair that suit me, etc.)

\- Investing in a decent conferencing setup is a must (my iMac has excellent speakers and mics, but I added a 4K webcam because the one that ships with it is atrocious in low light). I also have a headset and a Plantronics portable speaker for when I decide to do a little work elsewhere.

\- Time management and sticking to a schedule are critical. When I finish dressing for the day I switch on my machines, brew a cup and am at my desk and available at 9AM sharp (often earlier). I make it a point of taking proper lunch breaks (most of the time) and often leave the house to have lunch near (or with) my clients, which minimizes the hassles of dealing with traffic or the risk of being late.

\- I always dress for leaving the house even if I don't have scheduled appointments or do actual VC (most of my business conferences are actually audio and screen sharing). It's both about setting the mood and also because I might have to leave and go to a client at a moment's notice.

\- Finishing work has to be a physical action. I shut down everything at the end of a working day, sit with the kids, have dinner and _then_ I might noodle about in the evenings (usually on my laptop and not the office).

\- Even though I have a lot of hobbies and use my office for those as well, that only happens on weekends (unless I really need a bigger screen). Again, work, "play work" and pure play need to happen in different settings/contexts.

Big benefits for me:

\- I have a very stable, ergonomic work setup (I need a higher desk than usual, love my dual monitors, have a decent keyboard and mouse, etc.)

\- I am insanely more productive because interrupting me (via Teams, call, etc.) requires a lot more effort and requires forethought from other people.

\- Meetings tend to be very focused (company culture in some parts is completely aligned in this point - great respect between teams since we all coordinate this way at some point)

(I'm at Microsoft, by the way, and work as an Azure Architect)

\- I get to work and listen to music (a HUGE mood booster, especially Bach) without headphones (which give me headaches) whenever I want.

\- When I'm really lucky, I am home when the kids return from school (disciplining them is also a big part of being able to work remotely after mid-afternoon, but entirely feasible).

Caveats:

\- Some people (clients or your own peers) still think "being on-site" is the only way to show commitment or deliver quality work (especially old-school consulting and sales folk who prioritize "face time" and "touching the flesh"), and often there is no real way around that kind of charade.

\- If you work remote in any capacity, you're off a number of social loops. I minimize that by visiting the office regularly, having lunch or dinner with friends/colleagues and being available for questions (which invariably turn into chit chat) every now and then.</comment>


Why Public Employees Are the New Welfare Queens - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/76884/why-your-fireman-has-better-pension-you

<comment><USER2> Here in England:

 _Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector, a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.

Official figures show that staff employed by the state are enjoying bigger pay rises, working fewer hours and receiving pensions worth up to three times as much as those in the private sector._

[http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sect...](http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/public_sector/article6974029.ece)

An important factor is, if the public sector faces a cash shortfall, it can just jack up my taxes. If _I_ am short of cash, I don't have the option not to pay my tax...

<comment><USER3> in australia public sector is generally paid less then private (and state public paid more the commonwealth public). generally hours/conditions are reasonable... but i'm currently working 9+ hour days (with no overtime) in a public sector org, so as always YMMV.

i can't remember the last time any one just "jacked up my taxes" to pay public servants more. in fact the only tax increase was the introduction of the GST (by the conservative Liberals) and that was largely spent on middle class welfare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The sad truth is that private retirement savings schemes have been a total wash. The only lasting effects of these plans were the stock and real estate bubbles that effectively transferred the wealth accrued during the Boomers' prime earning years to Wall Street. Only the lucky few with defined-benefit pensions are going to retire in the conventional sense. For everyone else, it will be a return to the world before the New Deal where most people worked until they were physically unable to work, then died in penury if they didn't have relatives to support them.</comment>


Unhosted - Freedom from web 2.0's monopoly platforms - <AUTHOR> http://www.unhosted.org/manifesto.html <comment><USER2> Nice, seeding a cryptographic! PRNG with math.random(). I'll not comment on the rest of the code, as I'm having trouble following the Javascript here, but I'm not entirely convinced this can create more than one RSA key either...

Also, that browser plugin that's mentioned on the page but not in the tarball? Kinda important. Letting the server supply you with arbitrary Javascript code to execute doesn't really get you away from trusting the server.

Crypto-in-Javascript is kind of a red flag, and the results so far don't look promising.

Oh, and aside from the implementation issues: why'd anyone ever run a server? If you want open source, servers will have to accept data from any application, which pretty much cuts out any way of making money except charging for data storage/server access. And good luck getting people to pay. (Altruistic hobbyists won't cut it for Facebook-scale projects...)

<comment><USER3> "Letting the server supply you with arbitrary Javascript code to execute doesn't really get you away from trusting the server."

BINGO! That is the biggest problem with current web technology today. We need to have some kind of mechanism for delivering STATIC content, content that can be verified by independently downloading a hash from somewhere that you trust, and making sure the file is the same. This download has to happen through the browser itself, and not be initiated by javascript.

<comment><USER2> Do you have a proposal? Something like "code signing" for HTML/JS would be doable in theory, but where do you get the keys from? If you re-use the certificate authority infrastructure, you've only complicated things; a web- of-trust may work for some early adopters, but look at PGP's lack of mainstream success to see how that would work out...

<comment><USER3> Yes, I have a proposal.

Similar to how we have <https://> blabla, and the user agent warns us if the server's certificate is not trusted, we should have httpc:// blabla to indicate constant files. Sites all over the world can download urls from httpc:// and store hashes to them in various formats, and your user agent can trust one or more of these authorities. When downloading, it would compare the hashes against the ones downloaded from these authorities, and if there is even a small deviation, it would give you a warning just like <https://>

I can see this being used in app stores for the web (curating apps and various versions of apps, like Apple does) and also for secure logins. I would like someone to make guarantees that my password is not being sent in the clear to the server that I am connected to. Currently with web tech it's impossible to be sure you aren't revealing sensitive info to the server. This simple change would make possible a variety of applications that we haven't even thought of, besides these two.

<comment><USER2> I don't really see how httpc:// would make HTTPS logins work better. Can you explain?

Some sort of "distributed checksumming" like your first example may be useful for myapp-1.0.0.dmg or jquery-1.4.4.js, but how would you handle upgrades?

<comment><USER2> EGreg - if everyone will have to re-establish trust for each new release, what's the advantage?

<comment><USER3> what is the advantage of magazines having to review every new version of software?

httpc:// would be used for logins and distributing software. People already publish checksums, this would just be an automatic way of verifying every file that the server claims is constant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "Download Code" button just downloads a .tar.gz of code? Doesn't link to the GitHub repo? I mean, either actually describe what 'code' is in this sense (it's a short, simple PHP script, for the curious) or link to the repository. The page itself is hopelessly broad and altruistic without giving any details of the solution, and I'm pretty unimpressed with this code if it aims to be anything more than a proof of concept.

<comment> mich-unhosted i updated www.unhosted.org/manifesto.html to include some more info on how it works.

the code does _not_ claim to be anything more than a proof of concept. As you say, it's a silly 100-line php script, nothing more than that. it is also not very well-written, especially the unhosted.js and hutch.js files (i didn't have any JavaScript background when i started the project, nor did i try, at all, to write production-grade code). But we hope it does, as it were, 'proof the concept'.

i will make the link to the github page (as opposed to the tarball) more prominent, sorry for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the big idea behind this project. Ever since the cloud has started to come into its own I've thought that the trust problem is going to be a big one to solve. That being said I think the approach here is all wrong. To me the cloud isn't the cloud if it is just storage, it needs to store and do the heavy computing.

I think the best way to fix the trust problem is to find a way to make the user the one who owns the server. In other words the cloud software should not run on Google's, Apple's, or Microsoft's servers but on a server owned by the user.

Of course users will not want to manage their own server, lease the data center space, etc. So the trick will be to abstract that away for them to make it as simple as managing their own desktop or notebook computer.

I could imagine a time where you install cloud apps on your own server by licensing them just like you do local software.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is similar in spirit to the CouchApp platform we've been building into Apache CouchDB. More info here: <http://couchapp.org>

</comment><comment><USER7> > No server-side processing.

You lost me at hello. While it might seem like a cool P2P idea to remove the central authority of the server, its removal leaves a vacuum of responsibilities. How do you prevent cheating (setting personal bank account to $1,000,000.00), how do you coordinate events (send DM/Notification to clients when a resource changes), how do you handle transactions?

Maybe I'm out of date and all those distributed techniques are known, but I don't think so.

<comment><USER8> It seems a little preemptive to dismiss this idea and frankly I don't think you are looking at this in the right perspective. Trust could be built over time between both the people and their account.

I for one welcome a future where my social interaction isn't a product or service owned by anyone else but myself.

Why so fast to dismiss it?

<comment><USER9> Projects like this never take off. Code first then announce. Also, it solves a problem no one has.

Also the idea of owning a social interaction yourself seems silly and inconsiderate to others. If you don't like facebook just delete your account

<comment><USER10> The code is on github, they link to it from the page.

And personally, I do have the problem this attempts to solve. Whether this is the right solution to it I don't know. But the problem does exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My, how times have changed for FLOSS. The project aims to "help keep Google, Facebook and Apple in check" with Microsoft making not so much as a blip on the radar.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm planning on incorporating something like this, but it's wayyyy in the future.

Right now I am working on a distributed social network, where you own your data. That means if you are hosting it and your machine goes down, then your non-public data is inaccessible to others because your machine is the master source of authorization for who can see it and who can't.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you just want to build a client app why not build a native one that saves it's data to the cloud instead of restricting yourself to the HTML stack and jumping through all kinds of crazy AJAX hoops? The first step on this project should be creating the storage/permissions protocol that all apps can use. The data is what's important here, not the client app, you have to trust the client app developer if you're going to use his app.

<comment> mich-unhosted Communication between app and unhosted storage node is over HTTP, yes. In the current version. But the unhosted storage node wouldn't care if it's a browser or a desktop app / phone app / tablet app that's talking to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think he's hit on an important idea. I'd say take it even further - create a distributed datastore amongst all the browsers running on the internet. My laptop has gigabytes of extra storage i could easily part with, and a low priority background process would be unnoticeable. The internet connection speed would be the bottleneck, also peer discovery is a hard problem.

<comment><USER14> That's what DHT's like Kademlia were invented for, used by P2P systems such as ed2k (eMule), BitTorrent decentralized tracking, and "web-scale" software such as memcached and friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I believe this is very interesting, even perhaps the way of the future for SaaS business apps.

Consumers and small businesses are more easy going about having their info hosted elsewhere. But medium to large businesses, maybe because of the competitive nature of the activity and the huge amount of resources at their disposal, are more wary of having their data stored where it's "out of their control".

Although many businesses have adopted "the cloud" for certain activities i believe most computation is still done in-house, even if there are some disadvantages to it. A platform that enables them to keep the information to themselves while taking advantage of better infrastructure providers would certainly accelerate the adoption of "cloud" technologies for new applications.

There still remains the problem of legacy systems, which through virtualization will be more easily transported to a "cloud" provider.

So let's see what happens, good luck on your enadeavor.

<comment> mich-unhosted I hadn't even thought of that angle! i guess businesses also have civil rights online. :) and mainly: it might help us bootstrap the ecosystem. thanks!

it means we should write the unhosted storage node in AWS, GoogleApps, etc, because that is what these businesses will want, right? should be trivial, i'll put this on the tasks list :)

<comment><USER15> Well, i´ll tell you as a SaaS provider to small bussinesses and web software provider to large enterprises. The main reason we sell to large enterprises an on premise solution is because they basically don´t trust us or our platform providers (aws, appengine) with their info. Just look at github firewall install and other on premise solutions, they are available because of a fundamental and justified lack of trust on third parties. Good luck on the civil liberties (rights) angle, i believe it´s not such a utopian but more of a practical concern who you trust your info to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'll go out on a limb and declare the proposed scheme wacky. Why? It ignores so much of the way software brings value to my life.

Let's take Mint.com as an example. One could certainly build a Quicken-style application with the Unhosted platform which would perform its processing on the browser but save all data to a server in an encrypted form. Users would be able to access their data from any browser. What's broken is that a core part of Mint's value proposition is that it watches out for you and proactively tells you important stuff. Did you know that your credit card bill is due tomorrow? Mint.com sends you an email. If Mint.com did not have unencrypted access to your data, it could not provide you with this service. You would be back in the dark ages of Quicken when you had to remember to use the application to get such information.

The in-the-cloud services which provide the most value to me could not exist without being able to process my data in the background. A more interesting idea to consider is whether the ownership of the hosted software could be decoupled from the hosting provider. There seem to be a few open source projects out there which aim to provide AppEngine-like frameworks which could allow hosting of one's application as-is by a bunch of cloud hosting services. Think AppEngine with choices. What if someone produced an open source, GMail- like appliance bundle built for one of these frameworks? It could be deployed by an individual/company/whatever to a hosting provider's cloud. Included in the project would be easy ways to migrate from to another hosting provider, data export, etc.

Although such solutions would solve the background processing requirement problem, they would still require me to think about my email platform. Is it time to upgrade? Which provider should I use? Etc, etc. The likely market outcome would be that hosting providers would offer "managed" hosting of these open source appliances. What's the difference between this state of affairs and the current GMail/Hotmail/etc. landscape? Probably little more than an open standard for data interchange along with an easy way to export one's data.

The problem with such SaaS concerns is the same as with Java in 2004 when Stallman wrote about "the Java trap". Most people (me included) saw Sun as a benevolent dictator and didn't worry much about what could go wrong. Now that we've witnessed Oracle's apparent power, we know to be afraid. Perhaps there are some small examples of SaaS gone awry, but it's not like SalesForce.com has doubled its prices and throttled data export to keep users from running.

Today, no one thinks to demand complete data export capabilities along with a contractual agreement to continue to provide them. What if customer demand made such features commonplace? An upstart Mint.com competitor could offer Mint.com data import to reduce switching costs. Would such a state of affairs appease the majority of SaaS lock-in concerns?

I personally don't see what all the fuss is about. Whenever humans work together in any form to better their lives, they give up some control and risk that others will not act in their interests. The risk and uncertainty are a matter of degree rather than kind. The guy who plows my driveway could decide to run off to Vegas, and I wouldn't know until the next major snowfall. Wouldn't I be better off to operate my own plow so that I have the control? By this same logic, I would be better off running my own servers and maintaining my own applications. With the snowplow guy, the magnitude of my risk is capped -- if he doesn't show up, I can call up a competitor and have him take over the contract. Similarly, smart humans assess the risk of trusting others and make sure that their agreements do not provide too much power to the counter- party. The issue is that we as humans have learned over time what kinds of risks are inherent in various sorts of transactions, and the invisible hand has responded with defacto standards for agreements which constrain these risks to acceptable levels. It is that SaaS is so new that most people are unable to assess the risks of various offerings, so those which transfer power to the provider in extreme ways are not so obviously evil.

<comment><USER17> As far as your mint.com example goes, such notification could still be provided without the server knowing that your credit card bill is due tomorrow. The client can tell mint.com when notice is due, and provide an encrypted blob of data to be sent as the notice. Essentially mint.com would just need to provide a cron service to the client.

<comment><USER16> When I thought of this example, I had imagined Mint.com querying my credit card company to ask what the due date was and whether or not I had already paid the bill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Without server-side processing you can't do progressive enhancement on HTML and make your work a usable contribution to the world-wide web of hyperlinked resources. I can't advocate a scheme which will only result in more silos of broken javascript-only crap out there, especially when we still don't have any javascript sandboxes that warrant the trust people put in them.

</comment><comment> mich-unhosted We updated the page this links to, but added a link to the previous version for reference.</comment>


The flying taxi market may be ready for takeoff: study - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/the-flying-taxi-market-is-ready-to-change-worldwide-travel.html <comment><USER2> We have flying taxis. They're called helicopters and they're pretty much exclusively used by very wealthy people for commute-type scenarios. What is yet to be shown by any of the "giant drone" prototypes I've seen to date is a realistic cost projection showing a ~10x reduction in comparison to a helicopter with similar safety levels within the next 10 years. I have also yet to see how these aircraft will deal with FAA regulations - a flying car is great in theory until you're subject to all the same rules as normal aircraft.

<comment><USER3> To be thoroughly honest, I said the same thing about Tesla 10 years ago and the technology did in fact get wayyy cheaper. New economic realities are upon us.

But like you said, safety is harder when you are airborne. Can't imagine what NYC would be like with 1000 helicopters in the sky.

<comment><USER4>
      New economic realities are upon us.

I don't see anything about tesla that wasn't reasonably perceivable 10 years ago, or anything like a new economic reality. People have been saying for decades that electric cars will work well if and when we can get the battery cost down a bit.

We haven't seen the kind of reduction above poster is positing in electric cars yet, and that's beyond the 10 year window (and we aren't going to, as drive train isn't enough of the cost).

<comment><USER5> Yeah, electric cars are all about battery cost which is coming down rapidly due to economies of scale. Tesla was great in taking the initial cost and that together with $7500 tax rebate made them feasible in the beginner.

It looks like they are here to stay, but I would warn they still make a lot less cars at a lower profitability than most major car makers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They need to start making zones of quiet/loud at this point. I travel the country and I can't believe the number of places where you just hear airplanes, __all__ day long, including after 1am. Sometimes it's a helicopter. It gets really aggravating that the helicopter (on flight radar) turns out to just be a private owner, at 1 am.

Basically having their fun at your expense and about 2000 - 20000 other people that have to hear it.

It's getting worse. I feel like the flight school things is extremely out of control. It used to be a few flights a day at specific airports. Now flight schools are operating out of pretty much any city with greater than about 15000 people, and what is worse they flight right over the town, and then up to 200 miles out. Then they reach their loop area and just loop. You end up hearing them pass over about 30 times an hour when they do this.

So I just cringe when I see comments in here about how the sky is mostly unused space, why don't we just cram it full of noisy shit.

<comment><USER7> Heaviside is trying to directly attack noise pollution of their electric plane. I think it was 38db at 1500ft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was recently coaxed into clicking on a fake company's web site that was clearly just designed to collect data on feasibility of flying taxis. Under several monikers, I very much exaggerated my willingness to take them at very high prices in hopes that I would help bring this industry one step closer to reality. I apologize to whatever VC now thinks I will pay $150 each way for a Fresno-SF air taxi.

As an economist, I will reiterate: never trust surveys. Even disguised ones.

</comment><comment><USER9> "The flying taxi market may be ready for takeoff" just like how Level 5 autonomous cars were "just around the corner" 4 years ago.

The moment it causes a death, the dates will be pushed ahead by a few years, and VC money will dry down meanwhile.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a fun read, but:

1) Urban areas have a lot of towers and wires to fly low

2) A single accident with pax will kill an air-taxi business

3) comfortable 4 pax helicopters are $2 million each, so aerospace and affordable don't go together. Eclipse tried to make a cheap jet using "friction-stir welding", so that was the gimmick last time around.

4) FAA has "one level of safety" \- there's no exception for wannabe "disrupters"

<comment><USER11> On #4, the FAA actually has multiple levels of safety. Small airplanes, including even some small jets, are certified to part 23 standards. Airliners are certified to part 25 standards, which are more stringent.

Even operationally, a part 121 operator (schedule airline) has the strictest requirements, followed by a part 135 operator (on-demand charter), followed by a part 91 (private, not for hire).

<comment><USER12> You didnt even mention the experimental/ultralight folks which is pretty much a free for all. Though they cant flyover populated areas.

<comment><USER10> Those are not allowed to be used in commercial operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whenever I read about air such ideas this the question is can the costs be lowered enough enough for wider usage. Before we even get to the operating and purchase cost of the air craft. All these taxi ideas seem always over look one the largest costs.

The biggest problem short taxi like air travel tend forget about is the infrastructure. Your going to need a lot of landing and take off locations for it to be any use. You just can't land anywhere unless you have pilot that can see areas clear of cars, power lines, and people or other hazards. So any autonomous system is going to need lots landing and take off areas. Even with a pilot they probably would still be needed.

The next largest costs of an air-craft is generally initial purchase. Then the required on going maintenance to ensure the air-frame remains safe. While an all aircraft electric may reduce the mechanical complexity. It does nothing to reduce the labour cost per hour required to inspect an air-frame, and repair. Also unlikely traditional aircraft a battery pack is more complex than a fuel tank, any problems with it can be dangerous for any aircraft that do not use a fixed wing design.

Also with a completely electric air craft energy density is even more important than a car. This effectively limits them to short distances. While energy costs may be lower than fuel. Fuel for small aircraft is cheaper than a lot people realize.

Lastly, while getting rid of a pilot for routine flight is already in our technological grasp. Unsurprisingly any failures or sudden problem are going to be hard to handle. For instance how would an autonomous air-craft choose a safe landing location if it detects problem that requires landing right away. A busy street would be less than ideal where as a human could easily see less occupied areas. It also would need to make sure that there are not tree branches or power lines are crossing any part of it's chosen landing zone. It would also need to detect that it's not landing on anything like a car or anything else.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just feel obligated to post two articles, from 2004 and 2006, about the imminent proliferation of air taxis. This isn't to disparage the author, Rich Karlgaard, who was (is?) simply very optimistic and enthusiastic about private air travel. But the history of the companies he discusses -- Adam Aircraft, POGO, DayJet -- demonstrates that the viability of air taxis is highly, highly questionable.

[https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0816/037.html#f6e57154f3a...](https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0816/037.html#f6e57154f3a4)

[https://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0918/043.html?partne...](https://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0918/043.html?partner=yahoomag)

</comment><comment><USER15> I already have a lot of helicopters flying over our place. Unless they solve the noise problem I sincerely hope flying taxis won't take off. I really don't need more noise.

<comment><USER16> Gonna guess that at large speeds they are quieter than a car...

<comment><USER6> A single car driving on the street only affects the homes that knowingly bought a car on the busy street. A helicopter, or 1000 of them per day, affects about 90x more homes on a single pass.

<comment><USER16> Depends how high they fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Regardless of a myriad of safety, insurance and licensing questions: how much more energy will it use (that will just add to climate change) than ground transportation?

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the problem is air traffic control, not so much flying taxis?

<comment><USER19> Most helicopters fly without air traffic control, under visual flight rules. [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/new-york-city- helico...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/new-york-city-helicopter- problem.html):

 _"One might imagine that the Federal Aviation Administration is fully in charge of Manhattan's crowded airspace. But the agency isn't even aware how many helicopters hover over the city on a daily basis. The FAA doesn't generally monitor chopper traffic, which operates under Visual Flight Rules (VFR): Unless pilots approach an airport, they're required to communicate only with other pilots in nearby crafts, and not with air traffic control. This means that depending on where a given pilot is, they may not have to speak with anybody at all."_

Presumably, these would, too (until too many accidents occur)

<comment><USER10> > Most helicopters fly without air traffic control, under visual flight rules.

So that's a strangely-worded statement. Let me unpack it ...

Almost all helicopters are not IFR-equipped or operated under IFR (including EMS), so they must fly under visual meteorological conditions using VFR rules.

And although they can fly without ATC facilities in some airspace, usually they use ATC for takeoff and landings to airports, and arrivals and departures to airports, and for position reports.

So what you meant to say was, "Almost all helicopters fly under VMC conditions using VFR rules, and communicate with ATC except when they are in an airspace where they're not required to.

But they do broadcast Mode-C and ADS-B at all times in airspace that requires it, which goes to ATC:

[https://www.rotor.org/resource?ArtMID=493&ArticleID=1061](https://www.rotor.org/resource?ArtMID=493&ArticleID=1061)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Better to be a Specialist or a Generalist as a CEO? - <AUTHOR>

I've been doing some self-evaluation recently, mainly as a consequence of talking with some very smart people about coming onboard with me on a new venture. I realised that I am very much a generalist potential CEO - I know a reasonable amount about marketing, sales, technology, finance, operations, business law and contract law - but can offer no deep, astonishingly insightful commentary on any of these.
What I seem to be able to do is tie these functions together coherently, run a team of smart people and get them pushing hard in a given direction and communicate a vision, or a strategy, or an idea, or a requirement in terms which appeal to the person on which I am focusing my attention.
But is that enough? What does the broader community think? Would my soon-to-be-real company be better served by having a specialist (Ops, Technical, Marketing) in the CEO chair? Is there a natural lifespan before either the generalist or specialist founding CEO needs to step aside? <comment><USER2> Neither.

I think you want to be "angular", which (not surprisingly) is what the Ivy's are looking for too.

Angular means having a few elements of true specialization and mastery, but being a reasonable generalist everywhere else.

<comment><USER3> That answer could also be phrased as "both".

And I agree. You need to be ok at most things and really amazing at a couple.

My specialties are technology/coding and writing, but I'm also a competent consultant with the associated skills in management, negotiation, presentation, networking and business analysis, and since quitting my job have also acquired decent skills in online marketing.

Not everyone in your company needs to be competent in so many areas, but I'd suggest the CEO needs to be. At the same time, there needs to be at least one thing the CEO brings to the table that others aren't as amazing at as he or she is. Later on, when the company becomes larger, who the CEO attracts to work at the company becomes more important than what skills they bring in, but at the early stage everyone in the company needs to be amazing at something, and be involved in using that skill to create an amazing version 1.0.

Daniel

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been a Founder/CEO for the last fifteen years which in my experience is different from being the CEO of an established company. Founder/CEO for a startup is an entrepreneur whereas a CEO is a professional manager. But I assume entrepreneurship is what you have in mind and the following is what I wrote in my post.

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html>

"Anyone can be an entrepreneur but they must not have the mindset of a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor.

First of all, there are always more than two sides to an issue and often the right place is to be is in the middle - an option that a lawyer does not have. Also, there is not always an answer to every question; or if there is an answer, it might not be unique. So waiting for perfect data to arrive at a perfect solution is a luxury that I don't have as an entrepreneur. If that bothers me, then I should go back to being an engineer. Finally, as an entrepreneur, I often have to shoot my patient (and I have)."

So my experience is that it has a lot less to do with skills and a lot more to do with mindset. In the end, it is about attracting people (a good Founder/CEO is one who is a "talent magnet" regardless of his/her professional training). Hope it helps.

<comment><USER5> Is that url nsfw? lol - I'm scared to click a link to "LoveMyTool.com"

<comment><USER4> Sorry about that. I get this a lot. The primary site (which also hosts my own personal blog) is my new startup which is an online marketplace for network TOOLs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you have to look at it in the context of a team. If you are hiring folks for your management team, select people with skills that will complement you, i.e. people with great depth in Technology, operations and marketing in your case.

If you are getting hired, understand the gaps and fill them accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER7> This isn't really an answer to your question, just food for thought: Two of the most successful entrepreneur CEO's, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, both started out as specialists in engineering who eventually (it seems) realized that they weren't and would never be the best engineers. Their strengths have been in finding the best ways to apply existing technology, not inventing it or writing its code. So, they slid into leadership roles by finding the best engineers who weren't necessarily interested in management (Steve Wozniak is a great example) and giving them room to be brilliant.

Meanwhile, someone like Richard Branson has never been a specialist in anything specific to his businesses. He's basically a professional manager who has a crazy ability to find and retain the best people in various fields. His original strength (according to his book) was that he was willing to do anything to succeed, including bluffing, lying, and (on one occasion) breaking the law. (Most of that was ultimately harmless, except the last part!)

He also works really, really hard.

I've worked with people in various leadership positions and seen all sorts of examples. I've seen a well-paid manager of a programming team voluntarily step down from his leadership position because he wasn't comfortable telling people what to do. I've worked for a well-known duo in the game industry where the charismatic designer became the manager and the programmer had no interest in doing so (with a team of 30 while I was at the company, probably 40 now).

So maybe the specialist/generalist question doesn't matter as much as your mindset. Successful people work hard, seek out information, and are willing to take risks. Some CEO's are more respected for their abilities than liked for their personalities, but obviously if you're just putting a team together and not starting from scratch you've got no room to be unlikable.

Whew, long rant.

</comment><comment><USER8> Given the other posts, there's a mix needed, and a startup CEO might need to be very different from a scaling company CEO.

In a startup, who's on your team matters. Are you a two man show? You (the generalist) and your co-founder/CTO (techie)? The two of you alone probably don't have what it takes to promote/market your product after it's built. However, if you're good at managing teams and can pull in people who can fill gaps (marketing, sales, etc.) and coordinate all the people in the initial phases to make things hum. However, if you can't find these people, you may need to be kick-ass (a specialist) in biz-dev to get things going.

In a scaling company, your curent skill-set may be perfect. There may already be enough boots in your team to fill all the critical roles, and you, as a generalist can both coordiante AND help out in any one area, as needed.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: your confidence in your self.

You're already a generalist, and though it sounds unintuitive, becoming a generalist is not something that's simple--people tend to become good at just one or two things (coders, carpenters, paineters, etc...). Do you have the passion for the idea? Are you willing to work hard to get from a startup phase to a growth phase? Given that you're asking the question above to a forum, you're probably already thinking about these questions--and these questions are good ones for you to ask.

</comment><comment><USER9> Specialist people don't _always_ make the best CEOs. If you are able to create a kick-ass team ad share the vision, make things happen, and get things done, then I am sure you will be fine and do well.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't believe one is necessarily better than the other, though different businesses at different stages of their lifecycle will definitely need different style CEOs.

Broadly, I tell CEOs I deal with that there are only three things they need to focus on:

Managing in Context (ie, the bigger purpose)

Coach don't Play

Managing the Energy in your Business

</comment><comment><USER11> You sound like you are natural CEO material. The daily life as CEO of a startup doesn't require you to be deeply immersed in any one particular subject (unless the company is so small that you have to do a lot of stuff yourself) but it does require you to have a broad overview and an operational knowledge of a lot of disciplines.

Good luck mr. CEO.

</comment><comment><USER12> The skill that you must be a specialist at is leadership. You can hire finance specialists, IT specialists, legal specialists, etc. The ability to lead during the peaks and valleys of any business, not just a startup, is what you are being hired for as a CEO.

</comment><comment><USER13> "can offer no deep, astonishingly insightful commentary"

So what?

Can you ask "deep, astonishingly insightful questions"?

I thought so.

You'll be fine.</comment>


The voice actor's strike is underway in video game business - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/21/the-voice-actors-strike-is-underway-in-video-game-business/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder how the industry will react, like really, I do. English language and speaking techniques aren't exactly just an "anybody can do it" proposition, at least in my opinion. I'd be really interested to learn if there are other international hot-spots for US English Voice Actors abroad, because if outsourcing CGI by Hollywood is any indication, I figure the big industry players would look into it. But, again, I kind of get the feeling it might not exist.

It does bring to mind when the studio thought they could just replace Bo & Luke Duke with two other guys, because the car was the star of the show, and, um, it didn't go well.</comment>


Why/How would Verizon track down my new phone numbers with T-Mobile? - <AUTHOR>

Had a very surreal experience yesterday.
My wife could receive phone calls on her new phone with her new T-Mobile number fine but was also receiving phone calls on the same phone from our cancelled Verizon number as well. This despite never ever mentioning to Verizon what our new numbers would be (we didn't want to or try to port over the Verizon numbers to T-Mobile)
I call T-Mobile (new company) and they say to check with Verizon. Verizon says that someone put in a call forwarding setup with our brand new numbers.  Here's the thing, I anticipated some shenanigans with Verizon (for other reasons) so I have a recording of the phone call when I cancelled with them.  Not only do I clearly remember but b/c I have proof I very clearly did not order a call forwarding setup.
Somehow Verizon tracked down our T-Mobile numbers and continued service with a call forwarding setup. Of course I have this second conversation recorded as well and the rep went from "You must have ordered this" to "I can't see in the system when it was setup" when I pressed for more details.
Has anyone else had this happen? <comment><USER2> Was it an iPhone? Did you deregister the number from the Messages app? I don't know that that's what's happened here but that's one route.

<comment><AUTHOR> nope, two different Android devices involved</comment></comment>


Language complexity, measured by how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jiahao/8b19775cee3a6d51706acf0a8c0ec376 <comment><USER2> I love these metrics that are 99% meaningless but you still want to know how your language compares. Like average identifier length, source tree directory depth, etc.

<comment><USER3> If you are into novelty metrics, you might find the following interesting:

[http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm](http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm)

It shows how actively the gitignore files are modified.

<comment><USER4> "Novelty Metrics" \-- I kind of want to put that on my resume just to see what happens with it. Or, I could imagine an entertaining blog existing solely based on that premise.

<comment><USER5> You might really enjoy the Strange Maps[1] section of bigthink.com. There are some real wonderful ones in the past entries. I have this in my feed, but look at it far too infrequently for how interesting it looks.

1: [http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange- maps](http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-maps)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A more accurate way imho to see this data is: "Tooling support, measured by how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has"

<comment><USER7> exactly. tooling and framework config files. for 'pre-compiled' languages also build dirs but that doesn't necessarily mean the language is more complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This measures the number of rules in .gitignore files, not language complexity.

<comment><USER9> In Github's .gitignore template, too.

For example, most of the entries in the Python one are utterly inane, and won't apply to your project. You can easily trim that file to 1/5 it's size. It includes the ignores for a bunch of directories I've never see any project ever have, two unit test frameworks, two web frameworks, pip's files that are already better covered by virtualenv ignores, _four_ different ways of naming your virtualenvs…

This isn't measuring language complexity; this is someone trying to pre-cover any potential case generated by any popular-today third party library.

<comment><USER10> The visual studio one seems to cover just about every way you could use VS, and every plugin made for it. This measurement comments more on the neatness of the IDE(s) than any kind of language complexity.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. VS supports dozens of languages across web, desktop, mobile, etc. C#, VB, F#, C, C++, JavaScript, T-SQL, Python... and that's just what I can list off the top of my head. Even with single languages in the list it's not apples-to-apples. "Language complexity" should be removed from the link title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh my dear... That's so pointless... It's like judging your intelect depending on the amount you dump every day.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, though especially for the entries in the list that are frameworks, you could conceivably just bury all of the ugly stuff in a `framework` folder, and have only one ignore.

<comment><USER14> Visual Studio seems to be moving in this direction: I've noticed a .vs folder and the .suo seems to live in it for now. I guess more and more will be moved into it as time goes on, but considering the .gitignore contains VS6 ignores we'll probably be stuck with the large file forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not at all surprised Magento is number 3. I've never seen anything so simultaneously overly- and poorly-engineered.

It's like someone combined the worst parts of 10-year-old Java (XML configurations over conventions, AbstractEntityBeanFactory-style classes) and PHP (no namespace, autoloading override plugins) into one awful mess. Throw in the use of EAV everywhere, and the "schema" is a nightmare to decipher.

Maybe version 2 fixes some of these issues, but Magento 1.x is awful.

<comment><USER16> Magento 2 fixes the "no namespace" issue. Everything else is still there, and some parts are taken to eleven.

A while ago, I ran PHPStorm's code inspections against Magento 1.x core code, and the result wasn't very encouraging: [https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR](https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> TIL visual studio is a language.

<comment><USER18> Most developers don't know the difference between IDE, language, library, framework, platform and technology.

<comment><USER19> You got downvoted for your sarcasm, but you have a point. Some people think that Ruby classes are instantiated using the _create_ method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Looking at them, half of the files makes sense, the other half is really project and dev env dependent and they don't seem to be made for the same environment. Hardly comparable.

[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Ruby.gitigno...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Ruby.gitignore)

[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Rails.gitign...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Rails.gitignore)

<comment><USER21> > Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Is there really a > difference between 25 and 23?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why no JavaScript ?

<comment><USER23> There's really no common patterns of just plain JavaScript files being ignored (to some extend, other cases are mostly covered by the `node` file).

<comment><USER24> Looks like a similar situation with Apache Groovy. Only "grails" and "gradle" are in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What a useless exercise. It seems to me that we're seeming more and more of these irrelevant posts hitting the front page.

<comment><USER26> Be the change you want to see in this forum.

<comment><USER27> How do you propose he prevents inane content from being upvoted by others?

<comment><USER26> If oneloop doesn't like the submissions that have been made, oneloop (who appears to have submitted a total of "2" links in their posting history) should submit more of the kind of things they feel is appropriate.

<comment><USER25> Sure, if everyone submitted lots of good stuff it would be less likely that we'd see this garbage on the front page. But for me individually to make a difference I would have to come up with insane amounts of stuff myself. I don't have time for that. If I find good stuff sure, I'll share it. But if you're suggesting that I should spend more of my time looking for good stuff around the web for the sole purpose of helping out the quality of an aggregator website, you got another thing coming.

<comment><USER26> You seem to be ok with spending more of your time complaining about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> at least it has a nice power-law distribution. otherwise pretty useless...</comment>


Bootstrapping - the secret (family friendly) work week - <AUTHOR> http://devlogic.com.au/blog/bootstrapping-the-secret-family-friendly-work-week

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the way I bootstrap with my kids.

How do you guys do it?</comment>