The Death Row Book Club - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2018/03/27/the-death-row-book-club/ <comment><USER2> For most of my life I wouldn't have seen it this way, but the HN community is sensitive to equal representation of the sexes in STEM fields. This story had only men in it. Does this story not illustrate sexism in the criminal justice system hurting men? All the more that people don't immediately call out the unequal representation of the sexes in every part of the criminal justice system: 100:0 in this story, something like 99:1 in many other parts?

I know there are calls to change the justice system, such as from the Innocence Project, which I support and recommend supporting, but nowhere near the level for working on areas of society that hurt women more.

I'm not suggesting putting more women on death row, but shouldn't there be some effort to approach equality in arrests, convictions, sentencing, and other elements of justice? More importantly on the burdens and social obligations we choose for our society to place on men as opposed to women? If you believe men are simply more criminal than women, do you only believe criminality is the only difference, that men are just worse than women and 100:0 is appropriate, or would you also expect other differences too?

<comment><USER3> This sensitivity only applies toward women and only on favorable topics such as making money or a career in STEM.

No one cares that there's mostly men on deathrow because they are men, and no one cares that there aren't more women doing woodworking because woodworking isn't as glamorous as working in STEM.

The call for equality is not a call for universal equivalence in all things. Never has been, probably never will be.

<comment><USER4> The issue is that we don't need more woodworkers or death row inmates, but we need more programmers. Expanding the talent supply by being more inclusive will be beneficial to the industry and humanity as a whole, though we can definitely argue about how it's currently being done.

<comment><USER3> We don't really need more programmers anymore than we need more woodworkers, or construction workers, or plumbers, but no one is calling for women to enter those other careers.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that is really true. Both of the latter are apprenticed-based but otherwise easy to enter, and we are only having a shortage now because of the housing crash in the previous decade. Tech has been booming almost continuously now since the beginning of the century.

<comment><USER3> But tech work has many force multipliers, unlike those other careers. The right framework, or library, or product can make the work of one programmer feel like the work of 10, and that's what many people do not take into account.

Also, demand for programmers at the salaries programmers want to work for is not that strong. Many companies that want programmers want them for a lot less. This cheaper labor can be harder to find, but can be substituted in many ways such as using an "As a Service" offering or scooping up a pile of Indians from Kolkata.

<comment><USER4> It is never that easy. Frameworks are kind of force multipliers until you want to do something new, then you are stuck.

Demand for programmers is high even at high salaries (depending on experience of course). The average google programmer pulls in around $1 million in revenue, which covers their overhead well enough.

<comment><USER3> What average google programmer pulls in $1 million a year?

<comment><USER4> I meant revenue for the company.

<comment><USER3> Revenue an employee makes for a company doesn't need to correlate with salary, that's based off market demand. If that's what people want they should work in sales on comission.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mini Uber empires - <AUTHOR>

Anyone seeing evidence that "business men" are setting up mini Uber empires?  The process that I have seen involves having some connection with Spanish or French African speaking immigrants.  A phone and help getting a car is provided to the immigrant with clear instructions that the first $400 earned each week belongs to the boss.  The car payments are also the immigrants responsibility.  I actually think Uber is great, but don't like seeing people being taken advantage of. <comment><USER2> I think this is not new: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation)</comment>


Show HN: Go Implementation of Redis MemoLock – Distributed Caching with Promises - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kristoff-it/redis-memolock/tree/master/go <comment><USER2> Nicely done @kristoff_it!</comment>


Google, Oracle, and Red Hat experts join effort to fix http://Healthcare.gov  - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cnbc/status/395981924209942528 <comment><USER2> I get the feeling someone should buy these guys a copy of Brooks' _The Mythical Man-Month_.</comment>


How I exploited TLS-SNI-01 to issue Let's Encrypt certs using shared hosting - <AUTHOR> https://labs.detectify.com/2018/01/12/how-i-exploited-acme-tls-sni-01-issuing-lets-encrypt-ssl-certs-for-any-domain-using-shared-hosting/ <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm the author of the article. As I wanted to point out, I'm not assuming this was something Let's Encrypt did wrong, but rather assumptions in the specification which was not equivalent to the reality. I am really happy how this all was handled by Let's Encrypt.

I've been thinking about this issue with domain validation for a long time. It is not a solved problem yet. There is no standard for it. There are clearly overlapping techniques from the 10 blessed being used in the wild (Google being one) but the adoption has been really slow.

<comment><USER3> Great read, and good catch!</comment></comment>


Selling for a profit is the new free - <AUTHOR> http://econsultancy.com/blog/3231-chris-anderson-reevaluates-the-economics-of-free

<comment><USER2> I yield to no one in the category of "Charge money for value", but I have to agree with Anderson on this one: Non-monetary value can still be turned into money. Its not rocket science.

The simplest case for it is search engine rankings: people like linking to free things. Accordingly, putting free things on your website gets you lot of links. Links get you search engine rankings.

I segment my market into two slices: one which is likely to need my application a lot more than they need their money, and one which is not. The free stuff is designed to satisfy the "I'll keep my money" segment (and thus get links from them) while piquing the interest of the "Please, SOMEBODY, help me" segment. The paid software is worth its price (and then some -- I just bumped prices by 20% and after seeing sales data I might do it again) to that segment.

Github does this really well, too: we'll give you access for free if you're an OSS project (ooh, look, you attract links in spades and don't care that your source is public) and we'll charge for access for private repositories, without which your boss would have a conniption fit if you are developing commercial software.

There are other ways to do it to. Demonstrated expertise (free) leads to perceived expertise (free) leads to consulting opportunities (decidedly unfree). Demonstrated expertise (free) leads to perceived expertise (free) leads to business opportunity (free) to improve your sale of widgets (unfree). Demonstrated expertise (free) leads to perceived expertise (free) leads to employment opportunity (unfree). etc.

<comment><USER3> You demonstrate a big reason why I hate these types of posts/conversations. Realistically you have to create a business plan that meets your needs and looks at your potential market to determine what will be free and what won't. That isn't something that Chris Anderson, Drama 2.0, or anyone else online is going to help much with because each situation is different.

So what's happening here is basically just arguing generalizations which have little consequence in the real world.</comment></comment>


The Coronavirus Outbreak Should Concern Us About Chronic Wasting Disease - <AUTHOR> https://wildthingsinitiative.com/a-disease-turning-deer-into-zombies-is-spreading-across-the-globe/ <comment><USER2> what does this have to do with Coronavirus?</comment>


How to run Google Glass on your Android device  - <AUTHOR> https://awaissoft.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/how-to-run-google-glass-on-your-android-device/ No matter how you view Google Glass, you can't help but be a little curious about how it all works. What is the user-interface (UI) like? How do you navigate from app to app, from page to page? Thanks to this post in the Glass Explorers Google+ page, I found a way for Android users to run what amounts to the Google Glass OS on their Android devices... <comment><USER2> Link to the APK files - <https://github.com/zhuowei/Xenologer>

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok and where/how do I get it?</comment>


Low Power Mode for Mac laptops: making the case again - <AUTHOR> https://marco.org/2020/01/13/macos-low-power-mode-redux <comment><USER2> Just bought it for my MacBook Pro 15-i9. I think my use case is just less noise.</comment>


Ask HN: Will we ever see a touch device that supports hover? - <AUTHOR>

In my opinion, a screen that could "see" your finger hovering over it would help bridge the gap many see in the touch experience. What are the chances we'll ever see such a thing? <comment><USER2> It's the wrong question, trying to fit an appropriate interaction from the WIMP as an inappropriate interaction to WWCH (Whatever We Call Handheld).

The problem is you're looking at your finger like a mouse cursor, and a mouse cursor is always touching the screen, if you will.

The equivalent result could be had easily, with no change or advance in hardware, by introducing a trace mode (choose a better marketing term). Tap a pattern, and a cursor appears on the screen. Now when you drag your finger on the screen the cursor moves around. Other tap patterns can adjust the granularity of cursor movement. If the cursor lingers over an area that has some interaction associated with it, it can now also have a hover effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems unlikely to me.

For one thing, even on a desktop system mouse-over detection requires CPU usage and therefore power. Doing this continuously on a battery-operated system seems like a big waste of power for little potential gain.

Also, even with software to judge whether or not a touch is "intentional" I still accidentally touch things. Hovers seem to offer even more ways to be input unintentionally.

<comment><USER4> As far as I know, some BlackBerry phones do have this. The screen rests on a physical button. A touch to the screen activates hover; a press (registered by the button) activates a click.

<comment><USER5> IMO it feels really unnatural. People who touch screens are used to touching to activate, not touching to hover. I don't typically touch to hover, so touching to hover feels like a totally unnecessary second step added every time I want to interact with my device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's been done repeatedly, e.g. by Wilson at ACM 2004. It just hasn't passed the complex multidimensional optimization problem which is the process of actually pushing such technologies to market.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95.3647&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> I used to work for a company that manufactured touch devices. One line of our devices did support hover (it's probably 5 years old now) but we disabled it in software because it was too confusing of an end-user experience. This was a camera based solution but I'm sure it's the same for capacitive screens.

From my actual experience, I don't think 'normal' users would 'get' hover.

</comment><comment><USER8> See the verge's latest Microsoft tour or their interface labs. Kinects behind lcds with full hover.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that was cool. Their background music is horrible though</comment></comment>


Show HN: A storebuilder contained in a single text area - <AUTHOR> http://listofthingsforsale.com

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic. Nice and simple, and it does exactly what I want it to as a seller. Great job!!!!!

Be careful about feature creep. The reason why Craiglist works is because it doesn't try to do too much. I think this can definitely have a similar sort of success given how freaking easy it is to use!

<comment><USER3> I use craigslist when I want to sell something, because that's where the buyers are, not because of its simplicity (or lack of futures). And ditto for ebay.

If I were a serious seller, I would want a shopping site with bells and whistles (a detailed admin area, user accounts, reviews, discussions, etc) that might contribute to the selling part.

This site would be a fantastic tool if it worked with craigslist/ebay.

<comment><USER4> This is an MVP. As such I think it works marvelously. Bells and whistles can be added later and if they're added with the same ideology of simplicity first then this could be a real winner of a product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> MVP for YC'12 application. We've been heads down on this for a month now so it seemed like the right time to gather some feedback!

<comment><USER5> It's a cool concept and you could go a lot of directions with it.

My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next.

Not that you asked, but here's some wacky/random ideas off the top of my head:

\- Do Stripe checkout in addition to PayPal (ask for Stripe API key & secret over SSL)

\- Provision a Twilio phone number for each list after registration. Use it as a temporary way for sellers to call the buyer, for notifications, and to add/remove items via SMS

\- For quick mobile integration, use MailGun to post incoming email messages to your app and turn them into listings. That way people can add items & pictures from their smartphone. I've done this and you can literally get it going in < 1 hour.

\- Allow me to sell a digital file. If I add a [d] to a line item in my list, prompt me to upload a .zip file or high-res JPG. BOOM, instant store for selling stock photography, ebooks, or WordPress themes.

<comment><USER6> _My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next._

I agree with this one. There's already a "Now Click Here" button at the start. I'd suggest extending that concept to successive pages until the seller has filled in whatever info you think most pages should have. Sidebar and config come to mind as two that most people will want to fill out.

And perhaps during that first time there should be a stronger visual emphasis on the top buttons so that customers are more likely to link them to the options they're seeing.

On the whole, though, it looks great. Nice MVP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is a great point and is borne out by the stats. Last night we saw 83% hitting the "Now Click Here" button but far far less taking it beyond that. We're talking about a consistent "what to do next" element now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is _terrific_.

Some small comments:

* When I click on "checkout", a few things are not clear: how much is shipping (seems to be free?), how long will shipping take, etc.

* I put something with an "&" in the title into my shopping cart. On the PayPal landing page, it turns into &. Also, the item description is "shopid: x, itemid: y", which is not very helpful, especially if it's two months from now and I'm trying to remember what I purchased.

* The list of item in the shopping cart should be links, not text.

* It's an MVP, so I'm sure this is on your "next steps" list, but it would be nice to delete specific items from the cart instead of having to clear the whole cart.

* There's a Login/Signup link at the top, but it's not clear what the benefits of Signup would be. Clicking on the link doesn't reveal the benefits either.

Again, this is awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers for the feedback, these are all things we need to think about and your suggestions for the cart are spot on. In terms of shipping, we stripped it down in the seller config to just postage is included in prices, with a dropdown to specify where you shipping to. We'll sort out options for postage prices by item/ by order later on.

<comment><USER8> Please do! At the moment it seems only possible to offer different shipping rates by duplicating the product. So Fender guitar for US, Fender guitar for EU, etc. This is a bit of a blocker, other than that I'd love to get something up and running.

Really great effort!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find this quite brilliant. I'm a fan of simplicity and minimalism, and this is a good example of implementing the bare-minimum and getting something useful out of it. I'm actually a bit jealous I didn't think of it first. Good work, and good luck to you!

<comment><USER10> > minimalism > bare-minimum

Hum, I don't think adding a Change your background function should be included in a minimal site.

<comment><AUTHOR> well you've caught us on that point! but a little frivolity is ok too, right? "A little madness now and then, is relished by the wisest men" - Mr Willy Wonka.

<comment><USER10> I did not say I did not like the fact that one could change the background (in fact I like it because it doesn't go in the way), I just noted that the use of "minimalist" repeated twice in parent (now GGP) was not proper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A plus for minimalism, but I don't see who this is for and why they would use it?

What's your market?

It's not ebay or craigslist. You'll never get enough buyers and sellers together; then there is the fraud/scam issue.

I don't think it's existing merchants with websites.

So who is it?

<comment><USER4> How about a small merchant with a bricks and mortar store that wants the most friction less way possible to list goods online? Business people are busy. If it takes 30 sec to set up a store that's a big win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me this seems to hit the same market as Etsy. People who spend their time creating things, selling one-off items, are just going online so that they can put it on a business card, ect would use something like this. I showed this to a girl who I was just talking to about putting her stuff on Etsy, she likes this FAR more, but the only thing she wanted was to use her own domain.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the feedback. We'll be having some kind of setup where people can use their own domain for their site for sure.

<comment><USER14> Yes, this would be key. I have a few friends I'll recommend this service too as soon as this is implemented. Also, how much of a cut of sales do you guys take? Or are you thinking a monthly subscription model?

<comment><USER13> Cool. We're thinking a monthly subscription. We're still working out final pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really nice interface. Kudos there.

Who are your target users, people using Etsy or eBay? Are you competing with other services like those on ease of use alone? For people looking to buy things, will you provide some search across all users or are you just giving your sellers a link they can promote?

<comment><USER16> This is what I'm wondering, too--- does everyone have to do self promotion or will there be a global directory/search capability?

<comment><USER13> At first, to overcome the chicken and egg problem, it will be "bring your own traffic". As we grow, there will be global directory with search, with emphasis on your local shops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow! That is so simplistic and minimal; it just works like you would imagine! Great idea, great work and great result.

I'd see this text field becoming more and more intelligent over time with other functions!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! so far we're working on the following for the text field:

+quantity for multiple item sales, ie +5 #tags for categorising, ie #electronics

further ideas welcomed

<comment><USER18> I know you know this, but just adding my voice to say please don't feature bloat it. The value is in its very simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love the idea. The execution is perfect. Really caught my attention because I'm developing my own store builder.

Works magnificently well for techies because we are all familiar with store admin areas, publishing a site etc. Great if techies are your target market.

For an average Joe it might be a bit confusing. People may not even realise they are building a store, and instead think... 'Why can anyone just add a listing to this page?'

To help with this a guided tutorial may be useful.

All the best.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the feedback. Excellent points. We're going to be doing plenty of user testing with shop keepers and market stall holders in the coming months.

</comment></comment><comment> bill-nordwall Love this!

A few notes:

\- When I click on an item thumbnail on your sample list page, it takes me directly to the image hosted on S3. Having the image appear in a lightbox would ensure that users are kept on the page.

\- The title tag for every page reads "List of Things for Sale". I would populate the title tag with the name of the user (e.g. "Matthias McGregor's List of Things for Sale")

\- Add FB/Twitter/Email to Friend links, which would provide three one-click marketing channels for users to share their for-sale items with their immediate network.

\- Populate the page with Facebook Open Graph metadata. That way if users want to post a link to their store on Facebook, they'll get a nice link description and thumbnail automatically.

\- I like the single-page experience, but I can't help wondering if it would be better if the app would generate discrete pages for each item users are selling. This might make it easier for users to share each item discretely, instead of just point people towards a single store page.

Really nice work!

<comment><USER13> Thanks for all the nice comments!

\- We've debated the pros and cons of lightboxes for a while now. We don't like them and prefer to see the image without chrome, but our users may feel differently. We'll soon see!

\- Excellent point. I'm really looking forward to making loads of little tweaks like this.

\- Yep, totally agree - it's coming.

\- Thanks for the tip. It will be done!

\- Item pages are on our list of things to do, although it's another tension between minimalism and e-commerce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> this is very cool! i love it. Suggested feature: Automatically find a suitable image for the item via google and have it uploaded by default.

<comment><USER20> Or a compromise,

Invite them to upload an image or _click_ to suggest one from a catalog of images (maybe search Flickr for cc/commercial use images).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Love it. The "just email me" option is very appealing — no hassle.

To some extent, though, you are going after the Craigslist market by focusing on one-time sales by individuals. Not easy. I wonder at which point an online store becomes more sensible to users than the classifieds model?

Any thoughts about where precisely in the e-commerce sphere you see yourself fitting in?

<comment><USER13> We see ourselves as a good fit for small shops or market traders who find selling online through existing options intimidating or unwieldy.

We think there's also a gap in the market for one person companies who want customers to visit them in person. List could help them sell to existing customers, who are most likely to buy something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How about letting the user change language? If you have some interface or something I could help with Swedish. I really can't wait for this to be more complete (+Quantity is what I am referring to)

Also I have a bug. If I write "iPhone 3GS $70" it does not show. If I add a description it shows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the offer, that would be superb! There's not contact details in your profile, so if you fancy droping me a message at email@example.com we could talk more about this. Additional languages and currencies will be great for this site - we can geo-locate users when possible switch to the right one. Really looking forward to hearing from you. Cheers for the bug report too, we'll get that sorted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is beautiful. I signed up for the purpose of receiving updates from you - I have many friends who will adore this and cannot build their own sites. Do you have plans to do more with this? How are you monetizing? _Ok, I just went to publish and it tells me._

</comment><comment><USER24> You should pre-populate the images with stock photos found on google images. Removes one more barrier if I'm going to use stock photos anyway. (Obviously clearly mark it as "stock photo", still make it easy to upload my own). This is really cool by the way.

<comment><USER25> _You should pre-populate the images with stock photos found on google images._

That's copyright infringement. Just because they're available on Google Images doesn't mean you can use them on your own site.

<comment><USER26> You can ping Google images for images filtered by licenses.

<comment><USER25> That's useful as a tool for a manual search, but you can't trust it by itself, since sites can tag any image as CC. In fact, you can find very well known -and definitively not CC licensed- photos on that search, like World Press Photo winners or Leibovitz's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You might consider using the placeholder tag for the textarea so I don't have to remove the text to enter my own (or at least a graceful fallback version). On click, you could simply put the same text in a notice below the textarea for usage reference.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the nice words and the feedback. We just ran out of time on this. We'll be spending a lot more time on making this text area easier and nicer to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What a fantastic idea. I would/will use this.

</comment><comment><USER29> Brilliant. Needs a mobile app that lets me take a pic then post it as a listing. Then I'd spend an afternoon clicking pictures of everything in my attic.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. I'm really excited about building a native iOS app for our site and it's one of our important milestones.

<comment><USER30> TBH i think the email method mentioned up-thread is more awesome, but wtf do i know. you could do that more quickly, it would seem to me.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. It's definitely way less effort (and I speak as an Objective C coder) but doesn't have the ease or slickness of taking the photo then starting to sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't know what your pricing model will be, but might I suggest a way for users to create a one-off online store.

I have a lot of books I'd want to sell to my friends/networks, because they'll pay me more than Amazon or EBay. While a monthly subscription wouldn't be feasible for a user like me, I'd gladly fork over $10-20 to set up a one-time- use online store.

I really, really like it. Excellent work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jason, that's an interesting idea. We've talked about payment models that charge incrementally for actual usage, like Tarsnap does - which would be a good fit for alot of different use cases. I think the issue though is that a flat rate per month is much more easy for people to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really well executed. Simple, clean, elegant. This was a lot of fun to set up the first time! I know it's the mvp but I wanted quantity support on listings & adding to cart, and I immediately missed the ability to define a per-item shipping cost separately from the price of the item (keeps perceived pricing lower). Great first pass, and with a little polish could be a pretty excellent tool.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ahhhhh this makes me sad because I've had something very close to this idea months ago and have been slowly picking away at it. Great job though.

<comment><USER34> You should still do it This is a big world, and there is lots of space for people to take different whacks at similar ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really like this! Great work. The best part is your 'listing' on your own store never expires or gets buried by other listings.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is really great - I love the simplicity of the ui. One suggestion: a link that says a bit about your company/who built it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I clicked on "Now click here!" and it gave me the shopping cart, then I click on "List" to edit it, and it showed the text box again. Once I click "Save", then it doesn't show the iPhone. If I click on "List again to edit it, it still does show it.

It is very cool though, I am loving the interface of it.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the the nice comments and the bug report. The text area is currently very buggy, something I'll be fixing very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fantastic!

You might want to mention that users can drag and drop images as well... that was a nice surprise.

</comment><comment><USER38> How are you going to track stock levels?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on adding (minimal) inventory control. You'll be able to put +Quantity on a line, ie +5 if you have five to sell. The site will then track stock level, and you can edit the quantity in the list at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I found a glitch while creating my store.

I couldn't add more than one item, even when I copied and pasted your code from the front page (sample) directly.

<http://listofthingsforsale.com/pleasereturnme>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting us know, looking into it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is really cool, but what's the benefit of using a textarea instead of a list of small forms?

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Love the concept of this app. I'm assuming it will eventually let me sell things in £'s or €'s?

<comment><USER13> Indeed it will. And longer term, many other currencies too. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Cute, I like it.

One thought: although the text area is cool for us geeks, what value does it add for the typical user over a more structured data entry approach? I think the text area leaves too many ways for the user to make mistakes.

<comment><USER13> This might be the case. We're going to do lots of user testing to see what issues typical users have with it.

If we detect the user is making a lot of mistakes, we'll fall back to showing them a traditional form with fields.

<comment><USER42> Maybe you could use an excel like table as well if the textarea makes a lot trouble. (I like it though..) Nice job!

<comment><USER13> Thanks. That's a nice idea. Long term, we're going to format the text area so people can copy any paste any list format from almost any source - word, excel, csv, tab delimited etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great stuff, only problem: I couldn't figure out how I GET money from customers

<comment><AUTHOR> If you click Config there's a small payments panel. So far you can enter a paypal address to receive your payements and it will integrate with the cart, or you can simply accept your orders via email. We'll integrate with further providers later on, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is slick. My mom could figure this out in less than a minute. Amazing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> YC Application Video: <http://listy.posterous.com/74768699-97655> 1 minute long / we talk about purpose and target market.

</comment><comment><USER45> Nice job, but it needs error handling for price entries. Invalid entries are skipped with no notification. $0.99 works, but $.99 doesn't. Only handles $ prices (e.g., no euro).

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the nice words. The text entry area is pretty buggy right now. But we do store invalid entries so people can go back and edit them.

We'll have warnings showing to users when a line can't be parsed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Really nice job. Have you considered auto-posting to craigslist?

</comment><comment><USER47> Very well done! This is awesome.We have an inventory management system (bizelo) and we'd love to work with you. Drop me a line!

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish it would crawl images.google.com to automatically add pictures of the things in my list .. that would make it terrific.

</comment><comment><USER49> Matthias. This is pretty badass. How do you envision implementation? Props on the build.

</comment><comment><USER50> How are you going to deal with fraud? (And you _will_ have fraud)

</comment><comment><USER51> Can I pass also an image url in the single text area for each item?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Federico, that's an interesting idea - we'll have a think about it. We're keen to keep a good balance between adding options to the text area and keeping it lightweight. Your input is much appreciated.

<comment><USER51> Thanks. Mostly I take photos with my phone, and those are synchronized with the cloud, so my images are already in the internet and I would not have to download and re-upload those again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Very nice work Matthias.

</comment><comment><USER53> Wicked. Could your regex include £ as well as $? :]

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, additional currencies are a high priority for us. And we live in Glasgow, so £'s will come next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How about costumizeable row/column-sizes?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an interesting balance between keeping the interface very simple and giving pro users the flexibility they require. Possibly in the future we could find a way to make it skinnable (ie upload custom css) without losing simplicity, but we'd be very wary of overcomplicating things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Awesome work. Love the simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER55> awesome love the concept, but breaks if you use £ instead of $ :(

<comment><USER13> We switched it from £ to $ just before we posted onto Hacker News. The text area breaks very easily right now, which we'll be fixing in the coming days. Thanks for the catch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the catch. I'll check the logs and find out why it's doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I think you have something interesting here. Elegance and simplicity are far more important than previously thought. Clearly this is part of the legacy left by Steve Jobs. Fantastically engineered products wrapped in beautiful design. Elegance and simplicity...it just works.

<comment><USER58> So now Steve Jobs gets credit for everything well-done? :) Instead, I will give credit to the two guys who made such an easy-to-use service. Good job on this!

<comment><USER57> No, not credit...but the fact that elegance and simplicity is clearly a trend where complex and expansive functionality was the trend in the past (think MS)</comment></comment></comment>


Larry Ellison On Sun Ex-CEO: Blogging Was Silly Diversion - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/05/larry_ellison_o_1.html <comment><USER3> Ellison: _The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. "The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case," he said._

Meanwhile, I've never encountered an organization with more perverse sales incentives than Oracle had when I used to deal with them, back in the early 90s. Salesman were fired if they missed their sales quota for a single quarter, so we used to get phone calls at the end of each quarter begging us to buy something, anything, and return the item and cancel the invoice after the first of the month. Et cetera.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure this wasn't simply a sales tactic? Or did you know this sales person personally? I generally don't find sales people to be the most honest and trustworthy individuals.

<comment><USER5> Firing salespeople that don't make their quarterly projections is fairly common afaik.

<comment><USER4> Maybe so, but a sales person guilting a customer into making a purchase in order to save his job would be something a bit different.

<comment><USER6> You would think that one would follow from the other. In fact you could guess that the very point of threatening to fire someone is to drive them towards tactics that people with a secure job wouldn't countenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full interview here: <http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034>

<comment><USER7> ^^ Go straight to that. Skip the InformationWeek crap. Who even reads InformationWeek any more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I quite dislike Ellison (read about his excesses in _The Silicon Boys_ ). He's one hell of a pusher, tough, which is what you need in times of distress.

From the article linked from the post: >In typical Ellison fashion, he took a hands-on approach to the integration, choosing to meet directly with technical managers at Sun as often as four days a week to diagnose its problems, rather than delegating the work to underlings.

Exactly! I've seen some CEO's who don't know the location of their R&D Lab better than the janitor closet. This is how it needs to be done. Dictatorships are awful, except when the dictator knows the right direction to go in hard times.

<comment><USER9> This is a flat lie. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Oracle changed quite a number of things at Sun without understanding what they were or what the ramifications could -- and in fact turned out to -- be. This ranges from buying incompatible kit for servers because they didn't know and didn't ask, to shutting off services and causing all kinds of problems, to rolling software that was in a testing queue to production and wondering why other deployments were held back dealing with the sudden incompatibilities.

Oracle may have some inspiring qualities but good communication, management involvement "in the trenches", and solid corporate infrastructure are not among them.

Ellison is right about one thing in that Sun's sales and marketing completely destroyed many decent products. Their executive team took care of the rest.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, seems like I was misled by the PR spin (not an uncommon occurrence). I hear you, we are a big company going through a split and we had many stories of our CEO, god bless his soul, doing similar things, e.g. grabbing a list of people and cutting randomly, cutting off crucial teams in the process. And we did have a Sun alumni who totally blew our company with his cool but ineffective sales mumbo-jumbo.

As much as I agree the wrongness of these decisions, I also see that some circumstances present a no-win scenario (Captain Kirk be damned), whatever you do there will be mistakes, but the important thing is to ACT! As far as I can see Ellison at least did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ellison is an arrogant douche but he's absolutely right about Schwartz. Schwartz's high-level corporate strategy, as near as I could determine it, was to try to get people to like him by giving everything his company used to sell away for free and by doing "cool" things like blogging. The problems started before his stewardship, but he greatly accelerated them. Schwartz and his fellow execs should be ashamed at how much money they lost sitting atop one of the world's most valuable repositories of technical talent and intellectual property. An Ellison enema is exactly what Sun needs, or needed. Unfortunately it's about 5 years too late.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ellison: "The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed. Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure the direction at Oracle is far better. That must be the reason Gosling et al are leaving Oracle as fast as they can.

<comment><USER12> If Oracle winds up making more money with Sun's assets than Sun did, would that necessarily be a bad thing?

I'm not saying losing the likes of Tim Bray and Gosling is good but having them didn't help Sun much either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good big picture stuff. Clicky to the print version of the five page article the blog leads into: <http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034>

Couple of quotes/notes:

 _Schwartz declined comment as did Sun co-founder and former Chairman Scott McNealy._

Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money.

 _... Ellison was known to mock advisers who recommended that he consider acquisitions, saying "we write software, we don't write checks." But he changed gears ...._

They're also investing in Linux (pushing btrfs, etc - <http://oss.oracle.com> ). Smart enough to figure it's shared infrastructure they can leverage profitably.

P.S. Ironically, just noticed the 'Blogs' section in that OSS page, e.g. Virtual Box blog at <http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/> (Hey, good news: "May 10, Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released ... Supporting new platforms such as Ubuntu 10.04 ...")

<comment><USER14> "Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money."

Or consider that they don't want to have anything to do with the transaction anymore. If someone is trying to throw up all over you, you don't stick around and wait to see if he succeeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Larry Ellison might not be a role model for anyone on the Technology side but he is one hell of a Salesman.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting, though, that so many of Sun's software engineers are leaving Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER17> "His first [hardware] appliance was developed as engineers found that hardware bottlenecks slowed the pace at which computers could process information stored in Oracle's database software."

Are they sure it wasn't the poorly written software?

Is it really easier to design hardware nowadays than to optimize a huge mess of enterprise software?

<comment><USER18> The Exadata stuff is _really_ good. It's to data processing what a GPU is to graphics. Think compiling SQL and running it on the storage controller. It's not a matter of the database finding the right blocks on the disk any more - the database doesn't even see the blocks that don't match the SELECT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Help me beat Oracle" blogs James Gosling who apparently doesn't like Oracle salesdroids much.

<http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock>

<comment><USER20> There is a certain irony that this comes as a blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's a lot to dislike about Oracle and Larry Ellison (especially as a person) but there's something to be said of a CEO who used the word "permgen" (in reference to HotSpot's generational garbage collector) at the first speech after an acquisition.

Having been at Yahoo at the times of Terry Semel, it's incredibly refreshing to see a CEO of company take a hands-on approach to technology (even if Oracle is primarily a sales rather than engineering company).

<comment><USER18> It's a bit more subtle than that. Oracle's product range is _vast_ , and there's lots of overlap between products, and sometimes they'll have 3 different products that do the same thing! Why is this? Because Oracle builds stuff then figures out a way to sell it. That's in part why the salesforce is so hypercompetitive - they have to be just to not get drowned (it's also why Oracle has so many consulting types). It's not as free as Google perhaps - <USER2> if you can find your niche, it's not a bad company to be an engineer at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> But pursuing the America's Cup wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well of course Tony Stark can do everything better.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ellison will definitely make more money than SUN did with its own assets.He is going to put price tag to anything that boots. But SUN represent something much much bigger how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!

<comment><USER25> > how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!

Not a fan of oracle, but <http://oss.oracle.com/> isn't entirely empty. Btrfs and OCFS2 certainly come to mind as interesting oracle projects.</comment></comment>


Adjusted age-specific case fatality ratio during the Covid-19 epidemic in Hubei [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v1.full.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Submission Comment: This is one of the first papers I've seen that combines data from China and the Diamond Princess to account for delayed mortality, under-counted cases and asymptomatic cases. Link to the data and code on Github: [https://github.com/jriou/covid_adjusted_cfr](https://github.com/jriou/covid_adjusted_cfr)</comment>


Ask HN: How much equity to grant an "Advisor? - <AUTHOR>

My company is bringing on a very key advisor and I wanted to know if anyone has a formula or a personal anecdote on how to decide the level of equity to grant this person. <comment><USER2> 0.1 to 0.25% is normal. I'm an advisor to several startups and have equity in this range in the form of options. I advise a few startups without having an equity stake and don't mind that I don't have a stake. I find that most startups that do offer equity are doing it to make it official and so they can tell the investors they're courting rather than because they want to motivate their advisor. Often advisors are brought on board for the social proof rather than out of any strategic need.

</comment><comment><USER3> To venture hacks: <http://venturehacks.com/articles/advisors>

<comment><AUTHOR> Big Fat Gracias

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> pg says, "Be careful about getting advisors. An advisor is just somebody who doesn't believe in you or your idea enough to invest in it."</comment>


What's so great about Reducers? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guillermowinkler.com/blog/2013/12/01/whats-so-great-about-reducers/ <comment><USER2> This would be a fun time to talk about the power of `Monoid`s.

`Monoid` is a popular Haskell typeclass because the algebraic model for it, the monoid, is simple, pervasive, and powerful. A monoid is composed of three things: a type, a combiner, and a null value.

        Monoid = (T, <>, e)

And it must follow the laws that the null value (`e`) is the zero of the combiner (`<>`) on both sides and that the combiner is associative.

        e <> x == x
        x <> e == x
        x <> y <> z == x <> (y <> z) == (x <> y) <> z

Examples include (Integer, +, 0) or (Integer, *, 1) or (List, append, []).

The trick is that if you are trying to fold up a law-abiding Monoid of any kind then you know two things (a) you have a default value which you can insert wherever you like to no effect and (b) you can reassociate your expression (rotate your evaluation tree) to be any shape you like at all.

        ((((1 + 1) + 1) + 1 ) + 1)     -- left
        ==
        (1 + (1 + (1 + (1 + 1))))      -- right
        ==
        ((1 + 1) + (1 + 1) + (1 + 0))  -- parallel

By encoding these laws into the type system, you provide information to the compiler which it could theoretically use to rearrange and optimize your computations on the fly. To my knowledge, this isn't done anywhere yet, but knowledge of those laws does allow you to confidently build efficient parallel algorithms. For instance, we know that a dictionary full of monoidal values is itself a monoid.

        instance Monoid v => Monoid (Map k v)

We take the empty dictionary as `e` and let our combiner be the union on keys where values are combined using their own monoidal combiner. This forms a really nice basis for a large class of map-reduce algorithms where the mapping step results in some kind of dictionary-like summarization of values.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the really powerful things about functional programming is Higher Order Functions, like Map, Reduce, Filter and ZipWith. This style of programming is inherently scalable. This is seen in Google naming its distributed processing framework MapReduce.

You can see a presentation about Clojure Reducers by Leonardo Borges here: [http://www.slideshare.net/borgesleonardo/clojure-reducers- cl...](http://www.slideshare.net/borgesleonardo/clojure-reducers-cljsyd- aug-2012)

The application of these ideas is used in Big Data scenarios. In Clojure we can leverage frameworks that use Hadoop to apply ideas about Higher Order Functions:

* Cascalog [http://cascalog.org/](http://cascalog.org/) (Expressive queries in datalog over the Cascading library)

* Parkour [https://github.com/damballa/parkour/](https://github.com/damballa/parkour/) (Hadoop MapReduce in idiomatic Clojure)

</comment><comment><USER4> I really don't want to write this low-level code, or decide whether parallel or sequential implementations work best. Compilers targeted at particular environments can do this better.

My main takeaway from this is that most programming languages still fail at allowing the programmer to specify _intent_ where a particular implementation is not desired - I cannot use the mathematical sum notation for the accumulator example and let the compiler choose the best implementation, instead I need to implement a particular array traversal or partitioning. And in situations where high level language constructs would allow a certain flexibility w.r.t. implementations and parallelism, usually this isn't taken advantage of by the compiler/interpreter and programmers even rely on that fact (e.g. map in Perl could work on list elements in any order or in parallel, but all hell would break loose if it actually did at some point because people are now used to sequential processing).

<comment><USER5> Actually, I think what you're really asking for is the ability to write sequential code and have the compiler work out if it could be parallel. It's true that the reducers implementation runs in parallel, but the API is actually agnostic.

Reducers also provide higher level constructs like filter, map, cat (concatenate), take-while, and of course reduce.

<comment><USER4> > _what you 're really asking for is the ability to write sequential code and > have the compiler work out if it could be parallel_

Not really. I don't care how I have to specify the desired computation, as long as it isn't excessively verbose and doesn't require me to nail down implementation details I don't care about - for example, a for-loop (from 1 to 1 million as in the accumulator example) specifies a particular traversal (index 1 to 1 million in ascending order), but for an implementation of "sum" I only need "for each element" (no particular order) semantics. I don't want to even think about whether by using such an (overly specific) loop, I'm making the code difficult or impossible to parallelize (in the presence of some side effects, for example in C, it will likely be).

<comment><USER5> Actually, no, for sum you need three things: how to start (0), how to accumulate (plus) and how to combine two reductions (plus again). This is exactly what fold doe

Equally, for filter, it's empty list, conj or not and concat. (Just to demonstrate that sometimes the combine is different from the accumulate stage.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is good about insisting that the two combine functions be binary? And what is good about forcing a specific method of forking (evenly sized chunks)?

The more fundamental idea seems to be to use three steps: a method which takes a collection into sublists (fork), a method which takes any number of parameters and reduces them in a single thread (reduce), and a method which takes some number of reducer results and combines then (join). For something like string concatenation, non-binary can help avoid the need for an intermediate linked list. For something like matrix multiplication, or something that might require spacial partitioning, explicit forking is really important, as size and order can have have a major performance impact respectively.

Then again, this is a decent default approximation for many cases.

</comment><comment><USER7> Relevant: [http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation- articles/ar...](http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation- articles/articles-whitepapers/opencl-optimization-case-study-simple- reductions/)</comment>


GitHub is down - <AUTHOR> https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/tq7pm7mn9b1k <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499070).

</comment><comment><USER3> see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499070) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498983)</comment>


Ask HN: What to answer to users which are "surprised" that your SaaS is not free - <AUTHOR> As many other SaaS, we also receive emails from users saying "I was not aware that this was a subscription service...", "why this is not free", etc.<p>What is the best answer to these kind of inquiries? Are there some tricks to convert these users to paid? <comment><USER2> This might help:

[https://www.allbusiness.com/how-to-respond-to-customers- who-...](https://www.allbusiness.com/how-to-respond-to-customers-who-want- your-work-for-free-18762-1.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the key here is to take this as feedback for how you can optimize your product.

e.g. You need to improve the user journey or add better copywriting to your website to prepare them for the fact that this is a paid product. OR you need to offer a short free trial so they can test out the product and then pay for it.

If you get many people wondering why it's not free, addressing this as product improvement feedback will lead to higher conversions and more revenue.</comment>


Is this a change in the usage of the term "coding"? - <AUTHOR> Originally as a comment elsewhere, but I thought I'd ask more generally ...
I've been involved with the internet, and its predecessor, for a long time.  Before the web existed, "coding" meant writing computer programs.
When the web was invented, and for some considerable time after, writing HTML was not called "coding".  It was called "writing HTML".  This, of course, preceded the time when pages contained PHP or Javascript.
Now pages do contain programs, or fragments of programs, intended to be executed at serve-time or render-time, and writing those parts of the page are clearly "coding" in the original sense.
Now I'm starting to see people referring to writing plain HTML+CSS as "coding" as a matter of course, even if it has no PHP, Javascript, or similar, and it feels, thereby, that usage has changed.  Just as "hacker" used to mean something different and now is used by people at large to mean "breaking into or otherwise doing nefarious things to computers and computer systems", is this a usage that has changed?
Does "everyone" now think of writing HTML+CSS as "coding"?
Please note that I have no skin in the game, and to some extent I don't really care, I just want to know what the current general feeling and usage is.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I think I've been talking casually about "coding" HTML or CSS for many years. To me the word can mean any process of converting your ideas into "computer codes". However, if someone says "I'm a coder", I assume they mean they work with programming in some kind Turing-complete-ish language.

<comment><USER3> That's always a bit of a dodgy metric, because of two issues: The simpler issue, that people are more likely to bring up, is that you need infinite memory (or, if you're a member of the Church of Church, you need to be able to represent infinite symbols). The tricker problem is that, since all computers are analog while all theoretical formulations are discrete and symbolic, Turing-completeness is a good-enough-is situation. You can't really build a finite state machine or a lambda applicator, so what it means for something to be a computer isn't as theoretically robust as you'd hope. It seems that, in practice, a computer is something a computer scientist regards as a computer (i.e., relative to the things they expect to be able to do with it, and the ways they expect to interact with it).

I say this because of the weird question of whether CSS is Turing-complete. On the one hand, it seems that existing proofs of concept (e.g., [1]) require the user to play tippy bird with key inputs. On the other hand, real digital computers require a clock to play tippy bird with register commits. To what extent does the clocking of a digital computer have to be "out of sight, out of mind" for people to agree that it's a computer? Also, of course, CSS has to enumerate memory positions (i.e., DOM elements), but then a digital computer has to do the same, so the extent to which one cares about infinite memory is put in the spotlight.

[1] [http://eli.fox-epste.in/rule110-full.html](http://eli.fox- epste.in/rule110-full.html)

<comment><USER2> If it turns out that someone is indeed constructing logic gates out of CSS selectors, I'll happily consider them a coder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To someone who isn't a "coder" it may be difficult to tell the difference between someone cranking out landing pages with HTML and CSS, and someone building the checkout flow for a different part of the same app. If you were uninitiated and saw both colleagues working with text editors (with fancy syntax highlighting) and the command line, you'd probably call them both coders. Superficially, the work looks similar. The semantic change you've noticed could possibly be attributed to the tremendous increase in web development in the last decade.</comment>


DOJ Denies Gag Orders Against Tech Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-sides-with-technology-firms-in-case-over-justice-departments-gag-orders-1463175983 <comment><USER2> Title here slightly misleading depending on which definition of "deny" you use. The article's actual title is "Judge Sides With Technology Firms in Case Over Justice Department's Gag Orders".

<comment><USER3> Or, typo: denies -> denied

'S' and 'D' are QWERTY adjacent :)</comment></comment>


The Wonderful World of Keyboards - <AUTHOR> http://blog.atom.io/2016/10/17/the-wonderful-world-of-keyboards.html <comment><USER2> If you want to see how this sort of stuff is handled by software not living inside the dystopian future of 199x Netscape, look at libxkbcommon: [http://xkbcommon.org/doc/current/md_doc_quick- guide.html](http://xkbcommon.org/doc/current/md_doc_quick-guide.html)

<comment><USER3> If some of these native toolkits had a decent track record of producing not- hideous and usable cross-platform apps, maybe we would. That devs with real cross platform needs have been using solutions like Java Swing, Flash, Electron, etc since the 90s should be a pretty big hint.

<comment><USER4> I may be misunderstanding the top-level comment, but xkbcommon is not a cross- platform toolkit — it's an implementation of keyboard layout, derived from X11 XKB, so it's in contrast to other system-level layout systems like those of Windows and OS X. (Personally, I think XKB is an over-complicated product of the second-system effect applied to X11 keymaps, and the NeXT/Apple approach is the least bad of the common ones.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, yeah even more applicable in this case - Electron is not perfect, but hand-crafting Atom for every native platform and toolkit is not feasible.

<comment><USER5> > hand-crafting Atom for every native platform and toolkit is not feasible.

Somehow both emacs and vim exist, and run on more platforms than Atom!

It's not a bad thing that Atom exists, although I think it's sad that folks who care about extensibility and flexibility don't just hack on emacs. But I think that if they wanted to, they could support as many platforms as emacs and vim do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have frequently encountered the fallout from the problem the article mentions with the way that osx handles alt-character input.

Specifically with emacs style character manipulation modifiers -- alt-b and alt-f. In older versions of OS X -- I think pre snow leopard although I can't remember the exact version which first included the change -- the alt-b and alt-f characters were bound by default system wide (I think this mechanism is part of CoreText maybe?) to emacs style forward-word and backward-word. At some point OS X changed to turn all these alt-key combos into Unicode characters for the given keyboard language. This made the forward word and backward word behavior no longer available system wide at all text editing points.

OS X allows customizing the keyboard handling to invoke this operation (~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict). Meanwhile Applications (mainly those targeting programmers) layered on their own way to provide this familiar behavior within their own text editing context -- and Things break down in a variety of application specific ways. Workarounds to get back the closest thing to the old universal binding become irksome to find and maintain compatibility across applications ...

I'd really like to see apple add a new key to the keyboard specifically for system-wide implementation of operations that "invoke commands to manipulate text buffers/selection while editing text buffers" \-- and perhaps include an extension point to allow new functionality to be defined for manipulating text buffers system wide. The mechanism for defining bindings from keyboard to action for this setup should be an abstract statement about the relative physical position of the modifier and target key -- so that the same muscle memory works (or approximates working in a way that preserves universal muscle memory) for all keyboard input languages.

A whole lot of text editor functionality is about muscle memory around character manipulation -- as a programmer I want a system-wide mechanism for allowing muscle memory to most efficiently enhance text manipulation in as many text editing contexts as possible ...

Solving the problem this way would create a single uniform-across-languages keybinding space for the most frequently used keyboard shortcuts. If this idea were implemented many of the most annoying problems with keybinding inconsistency across applications would eventually go away I think ...

<comment><USER7> " _Specifically with emacs style character manipulation modifiers -- alt-b and alt-f. In older versions of OS X -- I think pre snow leopard although I can 't remember the exact version which first included the change -- the alt-b and alt-f characters were bound by default system wide (I think this mechanism is part of CoreText maybe?) to emacs style forward-word and backward-word. At some point OS X changed to turn all these alt-key combos into Unicode characters for the given keyboard language. This made the forward word and backward word behavior no longer available system wide at all text editing points._"

I don't believe that was ever the case. ⌥B and ⌥F were never bound to an Emacs-style forward-word and backward-word, even back in the pre-Leopard days (from what I remember). You may be confusing it with ⎈B and ⎈F (⌃B and ⌃F), which move backwards and forwards by one 'character', respectively, and still work even on the newest versions of macOS.

If you actually do want to move between words, then the keyboard shortcuts ⌥← and ⌥→ have always done that, and work across every app that uses Cocoa text fields.

<comment><USER6> It definitely was bound to that behavior in some version of OS X -- may have been even older, I think it changed around 2008 or 2009.

I used the binding all the time in mail and safari until the default binding changed. And it drove me so crazy to lose the capability that I had to figure out the (incomplete) workaround. The left and right arrow keystrokes also always worked however require moving hands from keyboard and are less efficient to intersperse with other key strokes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had no idea the situation was this bad. Many years ago I got used to apps (usually games, especially DOS) that assumed en-US layout regardless ('#' on shift-3 etc), but I thought this had gradually gone away.

I just gave Atom a quick test, and happened to choose a file with DOS line endings and a UCS-2 LE BOM. It duplicated the newlines and left the BOM in the document. Obviously not such a common case - everyone rightly hates UCS-2 - but Notepad++ gets this right.

</comment><comment><USER9> What about Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew?

Can definitely be handled /somehow/ with native code - but I'd bet it gets even more interesting then... you would need to decouple the map from assumptions about modifiers I think...

</comment><comment><USER10> I was really surprised by the lack of support for internationalized keyboard layouts when I first tried to run atom under windows, it took quite some hassle to get going prior to this update...

</comment><comment><USER11> Little anecdote time.

Once upon a time I was writing a little terminal-based text editor (fun experience), and wanted to handle some additional keys for editing capabilities:

      - Arrows Keyps (up, down, left, right)
      - Delete Key
      - Backspace Key
      - Page-Up/Down

I do not remember the other special keys, but the point is that events for these keys are provided to your terminal using escape sequences (just run $ infocmp). In particular I did not want to use curses, so I parsed the raw escape sequences to find out the keys pressed. This worked reasonably (if you are OK to only support a subset of terminals), but was incredible more complicated than I thought, as there are subtle differences between xterm, linux-console, urxvt, minix, etc.

Running a terminal under X, as I understand the path of key events (on Linux) is a little bit like that:

      0. User-Key-Press
      1. Some-Magic
      2. Keyboard-Interrupt
      3. Keyboard-Driver
      4. Linux-Input-System (see /usr/include/linux/input-event-codes.h)
      5. x11-event
      6. xterm-terminal-emulator
      7. escape-encoded event at e.g. /dev/pts/{n}.

The escape sequence events at the end are harder to parse than the intermediate Linux input events.

The funny thing is, that the Linux input system knows _exactly_ what key you pressed and exposes a fantastic API (/usr/include/linux/input.h), but it is actually harder to find out reliable for user-space applications. E.g. I built some basic mouse support (for positioning) for the editor, and this use case is actually not supported; Although it is possible to activate mouse support in your terminal (this might be xterm specific), this does not work across terminals (and is limited AFAIK to 255 rows/cols).

So I built a prototype using /dev/input/{...} (it's part of the Linux input system) and it was a breeze and _just worked_. This is obviously system wide, requires root privileges and ignores your WM, but from a dev point of view it was absolutely the best system to work with (both for keys and for mouse). In the end I went back to parsing escape sequences (a text editor should be usable by non-root users obviously), but it was an interesting experience (the abstraction making the API _worse_ ).

/edit:

Although this was just for fun and more of a learning experience, I wondered what is the best way to handle mouse in a terminal, and sadly concluded that there just is _no_ sane way across terminals (at least you want to support xterm, urxvt, st and linux), as far as I understand. If somebody knows how to solve this issue (mouse-support across the mentioned terminals), I would be glad to hear or know what has to be done. In a perfect world I would like to have /dev/input local to my window - that sounds like a sane ... plan?</comment>


The Deal Is Simple. Australia Gets Money, China Gets Australia - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_37/b4194044972388.htm <comment><USER2> I worked in the Pilbara for one of the big miners in an 'automated' laboratory for a couple of years after graduating. AMA.

Couple of quick points for anyone tempted to make the move: As an employee you get to interact with some pretty amazing tech, but most of it is created by other firms. Direct employees typically end up operating, maintaining and fixing things when they break. It's a great place to get hands on experience solving problems under time pressure. If you want to work heavily in the code base of automated robots/ trucks / trains, find a firm that does the contracting work to work for.

Secondly, don't do it just for the money, the job becomes your life. The article wasn't really about employee benefits but they did mention a salary without saying exactly what it was for.

Michael, after 35 years earns 145,000 p.a. including superannuation.A typical truck driver on a FIFO (fly in fly out) roster will fly up to the mine and work 7 12.5 hour day shifts, followed by 7 12.5 hour night shifts, and then fly back to the city to recover for a week (6 1/2 days). This is repeated about 17 times a year.

14days * 12.5hour shift * 17 stints = 2975 hours. $145, 000 / 2975 = approx AU$48 dollars per hour, including super. For that 20 year old on $92,000 it works out about $31 an hour, assuming the same roster. getting that job is not exactly easy either. The money is not bad, especially since you have nowhere to spend it on while at the mine, but the guys who do this long term have it in their blood and live to work at the mine.

Your social and dating life ( if you have one at all) gets fairly messed up on that roster, and fatigue from night shift can get to you after awhile.

Fun Fact: The mines tend to prefer female truck drivers as they are more gentle on the equipment.

<comment><USER3> Hi nicko. Do you have an email address I could ping you on. Would love to quiz you about your experience :)

<comment><USER2> No probs, I just updated my profile with my email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The geopolitics are interesting, of course, but this was _really_ interesting to me:

 _He now oversees a test project of driverless Komatsu trucks that cart out 300 tons at a time, moving 80,000 tons over two 12-hour shifts. When the drilling is good, he says, they can shift 120,000 tons in 24 hours. Without drivers, the trucks are more reliable, with radar sensors stopping them from crashing. They roll 24 hours a day._

<comment><USER5> some drill rigs are semiautonomous, with GPS. The control systems were priced around $120k the last time I looked about 10 years ago. Any HN'ers want to disrupt this? I know some drillers out this way.

<comment><USER6> They have similar technology for farming, too.

If you wanted to disrupt this, I suspect you don't want to make it cheaper (the mining companies have plenty of money), but to do a better job somehow.

(Where are you?)

<comment><USER7> > They have similar technology for farming, too.

This is called "Precision agriculture". Tractors and equipment enabled with this can throw the precise amount of fertilizer/seeds at specific points. Probably quite a hot topic in farming... Go to any farming show and you will see this.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first page of the article uses various journalistic tricks to make the Australians seem like nice homely people, while the Chinese seem like faceless big corporations.

</comment><comment><USER9> Alternative Title: Chinese (amongst others) companies make money on Australian soil. Also known as "Multinationals _multinationing_ "

<comment><USER10> Alternative Title: Capitalism at work, trade instead of war, each got what they want.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's that simple. Consider, for example, that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, lost his leadership largely because mining companies were upset by his plan to tax them further. From the article:

      Economic and diplomatic advances, however, have not
      fueled a warm national glow. Australia's proposal to
      increase taxes on mining became a national issue,
      precipitating a three-month barrage of anti-government
      campaigns paid for by the mining industry, which in part
      led to the removal in June of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,
      a Chinese-speaking former diplomat. In the August federal
      election, the ruling center-left Australian Labor Party
      lost its majority due in large part to massive swings
      against it in the resource-rich states of Western
      Australia and Queensland. Supporters of the tax argue
      that the resources are not coming back and that Australia
      should participate more fully in the outsize profits.
      Those against include the mine operators and the many who
      work in the mines; mining salaries are, on average,
      Australia's highest, according to the Australian Bureau
      of Statistics.

<comment><USER12> There were other factors at work with Rudd's removal. The mining tax was the last act in a long play of dropping promises, reneging on commitments and policy backflips.

The mining tax was a disaster and, in it's original form, was reverse nationalism by stealth. The government was going to tax profits above 6% with a 40% 'super tax' - terminology straight from a Marxist script. They were then going to reimburse Miners for losses on projects. In reality, with the government participating in 40% of the profits and 40% of the losses, it was a part-nationalisation by stealth.

The reason the mining tax was so rejected, particularly by the mining states, was that it was to replace state-based mining royalties with a Federal mining tax. So instead of individual states receiving royalties for mineral wealth - as per the constitution, the tax money would be funnelled to the Federal government, which would then have power over where it was spent. The mineral states stood to lose power over their own revenues, and the non-mining states stood to gain income from activities that took place entirely outside their borders.

The tax was beloved by pro-government tax-raising types and lovers of economic theory and hated by pretty much everyone else.

<comment><USER6> _There were other factors at work with Rudd's removal. The mining tax was the last act in a long play of dropping promises, reneging on commitments and policy backflips._

I agree with this

 _The mining tax was a disaster and, in it's original form, was reverse nationalism by stealth. The government was going to tax profits above 6% with a 40% 'super tax' - terminology straight from a Marxist script. They were then going to reimburse Miners for losses on projects. In reality, with the government participating in 40% of the profits and 40% of the losses, it was a part-nationalisation by stealth._

I agree the mining tax was a disaster, but it wasn't as bad as you are making out. The 40% thing was always something that got the headlines, but as you point out it isn't as simple as that because it would have reduced state based royalties.

 _The reason the mining tax was so rejected, particularly by the mining states, was that it was to replace state-based mining royalties with a Federal mining tax._

This is true.

 _The mineral states stood to lose power over their own revenues, and the non- mining states stood to gain income from activities that took place entirely outside their borders._

This is also true, but not necessarily a bad thing. Australian urban centres are a long, long way from the mines and some form of distribution probably makes sense.

 _The tax was beloved by pro-government tax-raising types and lovers of economic theory and hated by pretty much everyone else._

I don't think the tax was loved by anyone except Rudd's kitchen cabinet (and possibly only by 3 out of them too, judging from how quickly Gillard backed off it).

But the goals of the tax are perhaps more broadly backed. The original article touched on the fact that many mining companies avoid investing in the communities (as you'd expect from a profit making entity), and this has caused some issues. From the article:

 _One of the local councils in the Pilbara, Shire of Ashburton, recently refused permission to Rio Tinto to expand its camp around the Tom Price mine. Instead the company has been asked to invest in facilities that will remain after the mine is closed, to spend $247 million on housing, an air strip, and other infrastructure at the town of Pannawonica. This kind of investment, and the employing of locals, is the only move that is going to convince skeptics like Tony Wiltshire.

"We were at a town meeting the other day when a representative from a mining company said, 'Come on, we're all up here to make a dollar.' The locals in the room looked at each other and thought, 'What?' We live here. We can cope with the hot summers. We're here for the long term. We are actually better for the multinationals than the contractors they fly in and fly out. We just need them to wake up to the fact that they, and we, are all in it for the long haul."_

The idea of the tax was to formalize this kind of investment. The way they went about it was probably the worst planned example of domestic politics in Australia since WW2, though!

<comment><USER13> The tax was a great idea, and only hated by mining companies and people who happened to believe everything they see on TV. Most other big mining countries (Canada, Brazil, etc...) are also thinking about bringing in a mining tax like this.

All Australians deserve returns from the investment, not just the tiny number of miners, who earn ridiculous sums of money.

<comment><USER14> If more people were willing to do those mining jobs, they wouldn't make so much money.

<comment><USER6> I think he meant the tiny number of mining companies which make all the money - not the small number of employees who make good but not outrageous money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's pretty interesting to see how intertwined China is with Australia.

If you ever want to short China, your best bet is to target Australia which already has a bit of a property bubble, mining companies that are dependent on Chinese demand, and a currency that is buoyed by commodity prices.

If China is indeed a bubble (at least in the medium-term) Australia is going to experience a world of hurt.

<comment><USER16> I don't see how China's demand for commodities could be a bubble.

They are building in huge volumes, but they have a huge volume of people. There is a middle class developing. Check out Hans Rosling's talks about it.

There may be a temporary bubble in the stock market, but China is undergoing an incredible shift towards becoming North American in every way. Beijing is the best example of this - the entire city has been bulldozed and redeveloped in a North American big box way. Shanghai is even further 'ahead'.

Traditionally Chinese have been very conservative with spending, preventing quick economic growth. Credit cards are almost non-existent. You pre-pay your bills, even electricity! But for some reason - perhaps the Internets media influence, perhaps the one child policy, people are now spending money quickly. Starbucks is extremely popular and more expensive than in Toronto, NYC or SF! For the price of a coffee you could easily get a great meal with a few drinks, yet coffee shops are filled.

If all of it is a bubble - it is so firmly entrenched at ground level that the momentum of this bubble will burst through and last for decades. New industries are developing rapidly. The insurance industry was almost non- existent a decade ago, and is growing quickly in different ways there.

One thing is part of what is fuels the growth is international companies spending a lot of money trying to establish new business in China. These companies are risking money and bringing expertise into a really unknown market and often losing money. China in the end benefits as they just sit their with their vast market and allow foreign companies to try to create new industries. If anything starts doing really well, the government could always regulate that industry and take it over themselves.

I don't see anything stopping both China and India both developing a large middle class. That will snowball growth for decades. Premium brands will likely dominate - these folks want iPhones and Mercedes.

I think this Australian iron ore example is just the beginning of the scale at which we will see commodities shifting to China. I expect timber to happen at an enormous scale as their foresting practices seem quite unsustainable.

<comment><USER17> The first problem that China has right now is that government policy has made it easier to bring money in than to take it out. This has caused a significant asset bubble. If that asset bubble pops, it will be painful. That's exactly what happened to the Japanese juggernaut that everyone was scared about 20 years ago.

The longer term problems are demographic. The one-child policy means that the upcoming generation is smaller than the previous. Their work-force will soon be shrinking. Furthermore many parents chose to abort girls to make their one child a son. But a generation with a significant surplus of men is bound to have interesting social problems.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that 30 years out we'll be hearing more about India than China.

<comment><USER18> _30 years out we'll be hearing more about India than China_

I have that bet on, and in good size

Everything we know about top-down vs. bottom-up design says that China is supposed to appear to be doing better than India, until eventually it suddenly becomes clear that it is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The key issue for me here is that Australia's not getting the same infrastructure projects that China's African resource partners are getting (eg roads, schools, hospitals.) Australia's probably getting more money instead.

For example: "Abuja — The Chinese government has concluded arrangements to spend about $50 billion on development of infrastructure in Nigeria through SINOSURE, the Export Credit Guarantee Agency of China." <http://allafrica.com/stories/200803310705.html>

"Of some 900 projects China built in Africa, more than half are aimed at improving local people's livelihoods." [http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2010-07/04/content_20416315....](http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2010-07/04/content_20416315.htm)

<comment><USER20> Why would you think that Australia would have the same demand for basic infrastructure that Africa does, considering the relative economic positions of the vendors in each instance?

<comment><USER19> _Unpredictability brings anxiety and hope in equal measure to the 8,000 Aborigines in the Pilbara, who hope their third-world living conditions might be raised by the China boom. Tony Wiltshire, an indigenous mechanic who runs a guild of Aboriginal businesses and tradesmen in the Pilbara, says the mining boom's benefits could sidestep the local population._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know this is not exactly a new phenomenon for those who live in mining areas (northwestern Canada, Australia, etc.) but I found it interesting when going on a trip in the Outback that 3 of the men with us were miners (one from Canada, one from the UK, one from Australia) who do the tough mining tour of duty for part of the year and then travel for fun the rest of the year, rinse repeat.

It's an odd life.

</comment><comment><USER22> Honestly this kind of article annoys me.

It's split across 5 pages (more page views anyone?) and meanders through largely meaningless anecdotes without ever really getting to the point.

The whole stream of anecdotes style of journalism is one I abhor. It's lazy, can easily be abused (you can use anecdotes to prove anything) and is often just cheap theatre to try and humanize something otherwise without substance.

<comment><USER23> Blame Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson. Those guys sold a ton of their books (airport books) and now their style is creeping into journalism.

The stories are not used as supporting evidence, references or as facts to build an overall conclusion to some new idea - but rather as infotainment, where the anecdotes are the whole point of the story and there is no real firm conclusion or over-arching theme that is proven.

The anecdotes are easy to digest and repeat, which helps not smart people sound smart when they tell the same stories to a group of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure of what the point this article is trying to raise? Is it that Australia is not in recession? Is it some sort of suggestion of xenophobia on the part of Australians?

Australians have all seen this before in the 1980's when the Japanese were buying real estate, companies and generally splashing cash around. I think this time around most people are more relaxed about it, and a feeling of 'make hay while the sun shines' is probably the most prevalent.

While the imagery of large parts of Australia being dug up forever are evocative, it's not very realistic for anyone who has visited this part of the world to think it's all going to run out soon. It's a massive, virtually uninhabited area and the ground you walk on is literally red from iron ore.

<comment><USER24> > make hay while the sun shines

If only we were actually making some hay, or put some of what we do make in the barn instead of gorging on it. I think a better analogy is "let's party while the champagne is flowing".

Instead of long term investments in permanent infrastructure and educating our citizens we are largely just padding out the middle class with spurious welfare benefits. That's almost worse than just throwing the money away because it is creating an enormous future liability and false expectation among average folks.

<comment><USER12> I mostly agree with this. While I don't think we should increase mining profit taxes, I do think some of the mineral wealth should be locked away into a sovereign wealth fund - the type that can't be gotten at by sticky fingered politicians of any persuasion. The wealth fund could be used for apolitical purposes, like education funding (scholarships?), national dual lane freeway construction, large-scale water projects. But only after it reached critical mass and was throwing off a couple of billion per year in investment returns.

<comment><USER25> Actually wasn't the it called mining 'super' tax becuase it was to fund superannuation? I know there was to be some increase in funding but I'm actually not 100% sure because the govt did such a poor job of selling it.

Anyway I think this may be one of those cases where the XX cents we typically get back from each dollar the govt taxes could be worth it to slow the party down.

<comment><USER12> It was called the MSPT or Mining Super Profits Tax.

Super Profits is a Marxist term (don't know if Marx coined it, or it just became part of the canon) to reflect anything above a 'reasonable' rate of return. In this case it was set at the government bond rate. Which makes you question why any rational investor would invest money into a highly risky mining venture when they coudl get the same returns from government bonds. I suspect they thought they could kick off a nasty class war - which people seem to have forgotten now that Swan was muzzled by Gillard and Rudd deposed. But at the time Swan and Rudd were talking about 'evil foreign rich miners'. But it backfired with some good PR from the mining companies, and a higher level of awareness among the Australian people when someone is being deliberately obtuse.

It was sleight of hand to link super profits tax with superannuation. In reality the two have nothing to do with each other because employers pay for employee superannuation out of their bottom line. The only superannuation the government pays is for public service employees. The reason they did a poor job in selling it was because if you actually looked at the details, the tax and the superannuation actually had nothing to do with each other. Lindsay Tanner actually quoted as much before changing his tune to the party line.

>slow the party down.

Imagine how much you would be upset if they decided to start taxing you extra because they thought you were doing too well. It's the ultimate definition of unfair. The miners struggled for decades - have a period of prosperity and are whacked with extra taxes. That is not only unfair, it raises sovereign risk and ultimately reduces foreign investment. You don't improve the economy by knobbling your best performer.

<comment><USER24> > Imagine how much you would be upset if they decided to start taxing you > extra because they thought you were doing too well. It's the ultimate > definition of unfair.

Umm, have you ever noticed how people are actually taxed? It's called a "marginal" tax rate and it's a feature of just about every tax system in the world, precisely because it is considered a "fairer" system to have people who can afford to pay more share more of the tax burden.

One might even argue that the "super profits" tax is fairer than marginal tax rates because it takes account of the amount of capital you have deployed to achieve the result (to relate it back to people, if I have a family of 10 people to support I don't get a lower tax rate ... but a company with 10,000 people to achieve the same profit as one with 1000 people will get that taken into account).

<comment><USER12> I take it by those comments you've never actually invested any money? The number of people employed has zero to do with making decisions about investment returns. But that's been the problem all along - people with very little idea about how capital markets and mining investment works deciding they want some of the pie, and coming up with all types of justifications for it.

I'm not talking about marginal rates - I'm talking about - hey you! You're making too much money, I want some of that! Here's an extra 40% tax for you - no consultation, no transition period, no questions asked. Would you defend this tax if it was applied to technology startups because they made too much money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "A 20-year-old off the street can come up to the Pilbara and earn A$92,000 a year," says Boxy. The median household income in Australia is A$67,000.

Talk about inflationary pressures.

<comment><USER6> Those jobs are well paid for a reason.

They are in the middle of nowhere (unless you've been there you have no idea how isolated the Pilbara is), and the climate is less than ideal:

 _The climate of the Pilbara is semi-arid and arid, with high temperatures and low irregular rainfall that follows the summer cyclones. During the summer months, maximum temperatures exceed 32°C (90°F) almost every day, and temperatures in excess of 45°C (113°F) are not uncommon. The Pilbara town of Marble Bar set a world record of most consecutive days of maximum temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius) or more, during a period of 160 such days from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924.[5]_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara>

In the non-open cut mines, many jobs are underground and a lot of people don't seem to cope well with being 1km underground.

A few well-paid jobs don't create inflation on their own. The inflation rate remains a steady 3%.

<comment><USER26> I'm not saying they're easy jobs but two weeks on one off with no expenses for the two weeks on makes for a lot of disposable income even without those salaries.

Inflation remains a steady 3% with a cash rate of 4.5% way above comparable economies, with a high chance of further raises. People not in the mining industry can't expect to compete with the salaries they're earning and the high interest rates and Australian dollar are hurting households and other exports.

Housing prices in Perth: <http://reiwa.com.au/res/res-salesgraph-display.cfm> Does that look sustainable?

<comment><USER6> Our rates aren't high by Australian historical standards: <http://www.loansense.com.au/historical-rates.html>

Regarding the house price graph, I think you are being misled slightly by the scale.

If you magnified the 1978-1993 graph it would look very similar - a HUGE ramp up in the prices in the late 1980's, and then stagnant in the early 1990's.

Compare that to how the current graph looks: HUGE ramp up in 2003-2007, and then stagnant.

I agree with what you are saying about the inequalities of mining salaries and the problems with the crowding out effect. I think that contributes more to the stratification of society rather than inflation, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was struck by this quote (in regards to Rio Tinto): _Until last year, China was trying to buy more of the company_

As far as I know "China" does not buy things. Their government, maybe. I'd like to know if a Chinese government entity or connected company was truly involved in this. If not, the reporter is speaking carelessly...

</comment><comment><USER28> Exporting all your resources, particularly a staple like iron, seems like a bad plan for Australia in the long run. Particularly because it is a raw material.

</comment><comment><USER29> It is better to say - Australia gets all those Treasures (American debt) and China gets Australia - resources. It is really a good deal!

</comment><comment><USER30> A less sensationalist title: Australia gets Chinese Money, China gets Australian Ore.

</comment><comment><USER19> _"My total salary and superannuation is A$145,000 a year, and when I'm in the Pilbara I don't have to put my hand in my pocket. I have a house in the city and an investment property and a 1972 Falcon pickup. I couldn't have had this life without mining."_

and devastating the environment (and human and animal health) with all the land-clearing, power consumption, water consumption, massive pollution and toxic waste that comes with this and connected industries.</comment>


IndexedDB or WebSQL... why not both? - <AUTHOR> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011AprJun/0032.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There's considerable discussion going on over at Public Web Apps over shortcomings in IndexedDB and the possibility of Mozilla exposing an embedding of SQLite. SQLite is the world's most widely deployed database. It would be hard not to call it a standard.

SQLite is a stellar implementation that provides working database primitives: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webapps/2011AprJu...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webapps/2011AprJun/0031.html)

But it's too early to tell if the same would be true of IndexedDB.

It would be great if more web developers would get involved in these discussions. It would be healthier for the Web to have two competing APIs.</comment>


Middle-earth Thehobbit - <AUTHOR> http://middle-earth.thehobbit.com/

<comment><USER2> Some of the UX interactions here are brilliant, switching tabs fades the music in and out, swipe to control video playback, transition animations are sweet</comment>


Tracking the World State with Recurrent Entity Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03969 <comment><AUTHOR> TensorFlow implementation: [https://github.com/jimfleming/recurrent-entity- networks](https://github.com/jimfleming/recurrent-entity-networks)</comment>


US pulls out of Cold War-era pact with Russia - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49198565 <comment><USER2> The only thing worse than being in an arms race is losing an arms race. There's no point for NATO to follow the treaty if Russia refuses to do so.</comment>


Belief in the Singularity is Fideistic (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/SB_AB_PB_sing_fideism_022412.pdf

<comment><USER2> This seems like a report someone had to do for school but wasn't actually interested in. I'm not sure the authors even considered what people mean when they say they believe in the singularity. For many folks, it's just an expression that they believe computers are capable of such a thing...</comment>


Cidco MailStation as a Z80 Development Platform - <AUTHOR> https://jcs.org/2019/05/03/mailstation <comment><USER2> Hah! I've been on HN for a long damn time, and this may take the cake as the single coolest thing I've ever seen posted here. I just ordered myself a Mailstation (found one for $15.00 on Amazon), and am champing at the bit to get my hands on this thing.

I'd started a project to build a Z-80 based retrocomputer a while back, and frankly got stalled out due to being busy with other projects... so the idea of a nice, inexpensive Z-80 computer that I can (mostly) just plug in and play with is _very_ enticing. That it has a full QWERTY keyboard is just icing on the cake.

And truth be told, for something that old I'd say it's pretty attractive stylistically as well. Whoever designed this thing (from an industrial design viewpoint) did a really nice job.</comment>