In defense of PowerShell - <AUTHOR> http://www.benwilson.me/2015/08/24/hn-doesnt-seem-to-get-powershell/ <comment><USER3> > I'm willing to admit that PowerShell isn't obviously better as a shell than > something like bash, but it's unquestionably a better language to use for > scripting.

There's a missing "on Windows" here. Sure, PowerShell is clearly a tool designed for the Windows environment. And if you're a Windows system administrator, it has more tools and glue for that environment. You could use PowerShell to replace things that you'd otherwise have to write in Python or similar, not shell.

But that doesn't make it "unquestionably a better language to use for scripting" overall; it makes it a better fit for its target platform, which is certainly true.

And an earlier part of the document made exactly that point: PowerShell on Linux would be as uncomfortable as Cygwin is on Windows. There's an impedance mismatch there.

<comment><USER4> I've lived in both the windows and linux/unix worlds and I will say that powershell is a better scripting language than bash. Bash is ok, but powershell is nicer. Powershell is sort of like python in that it tends to force down a path of doing things in a certain way.

Powershell isn't just "more tools and glue for windows stuff", it's a different way of doing things. In powershell you get named command-line parameters for free, that's a huge win. You get usage messages and simplified man-page help baked into the way things work, that's also huge. In powershell you don't just work with text, you work with objects, which pass along the pipeline. That means that instead of using sed and awk to muck up the output of some other script you can just use simple select, where, and format commands. This is incredibly powerful and an area where linux has fallen behind.

I like linux a lot, but this attitude of sneering down at windows and powershell merely because it's not linux is amateurish and parochial. People should be thinking about adapting the innovations that powershell has made and building on them instead of looking at it as some bizarre alien beast that will never be relevant to them.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sneering at PowerShell because it's not Linux. And I think it's an impressive model. It's certainly a different way of doing things, and it's worth looking at and learning from.

But Powershell people dismiss the bash and Linux model of "everything's a file", too, the same way others dismiss the Powershell model. They're different; neither is "unquestionably" better for all cases.

Personally, once I start wanting stateful objects I can pass around to multiple methods, I switch from Bash to Python or Rust. I don't think Bash fits that use case well either, but that's not the only use case around.

<comment><USER5> Personally I think an interactive shell that works well with objects is incredibly valuable. I love working in PowerShell and I wish there was a good Python based shell that I could use to replace zsh. I spend a lot of time in iPython but it's not quite the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work primarily in a Microsoft environment, although I have Linux shell experience as well, and I totally don't get Powershell. What is a cmdlet? Why does it need a stupid made-up name like that? Why are all the commands incredibly verbose and hard to remember? I avoid using it at every opportunity.

<comment><USER7> As a Unix person, 'Restart-Service' seems a lot easier to remember than 'systemctl'.

Edit: Restart-Service is also easier to remember than /etc/init.d was.

Edit 2 (rate limit): `service` on RHEL is great, but it's a Red Hat-ism. Which is fine, I used to work at Red Hat, but still.

It's also pretty limited: you use service to start/stop/restart, but you still use systemctl to list services, or list /etc/init.d (technically /etc/rc.d/init.d on RHEL) on older boxes.

On Windows, to get services, it's `get-service`

Fun exercise for readers, given that you now know `restart-service` and `get- service`:

\- Guess what the powershell command to get processes is.

\- Guess what the powershell command to stop a process is.

\- Guess what the Powershell command to install a package is.

There's some weird ones - dmidecode on Linux becomes get-wmiobject on Powershell (see the rosetta stone link posted earlier) - but for the most part it makes more sense than Linux and Unix.

<comment> vezzy-fnord It's not like 'systemctl' is the only game in town, though.

<comment><USER8> You say that as if that makes remembering things easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The tab completion in powershell is frustrating to me. I _never_ want to cycle through every available option (especially when many PSH commands have literally hundreds of switches). I want the tab-completion to only show options for which I've started typing the prefix. I want double-tab to print a listing of said options so that I can see them all at once. Is this possible? Right now it feels like there's a major lack of discoverability in PSH.

<comment><USER10> The usual PowerShell guru's response to your complaint is 'This is what PowerShell ISE is for'.

Personally I don't think this is elegant, but that's what I usually encounter in the wild.

<comment><USER11> For what it's worth, Windows 10 enhances the basic command host to support some more things such as nicer tab completion directly out of the box (for both traditional cmd.exe and PowerShell) without having to switch to ISE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Powershell is a nice language.

Here's map/filter/reduce. Golf welcome.

      @(1, 2, 3) `
         | % { $_ + 1 } `
         | ? { $_ -gt 2 } `
         | Measure-Object -Sum
         | Select Sum

You can write a generic reduce like this:

      $reduce = {
        param   ([scriptblock]$reducer)
        begin   { $initialised = $false }
        process {
          if (-not $initialised) {
            $agg = $_
            $initialised = $true
          } else {
            $agg = &$reducer $agg $_
          }
        }
        end     { $agg }
      }

And then use it like this:

      @(1, 2, 3) | &$reduce { param($agg, $i) $agg + $i }

</comment><comment><USER13> As someone who used to use PowerShell rather extensively (back when my dayjob regrettably involved thousands of Windows machines that needed managing and support), I feel like trying to compare PowerShell to, say, bash is folly. To me, PowerShell has more in common with a proper scripting language - <USER2> between Perl and Ruby, but with a nice-ish REPL - than a traditional shell like bash. Both the Unix-style text-centric paradigm and the PowerShell-style object-centric paradigm have their place.

That all said, the most recent PowerShell I've significantly touched was version 2; I've since moved on to greener pastures.

</comment><comment><USER14> I dislike windows (and by extension, powershell) because a solution such as changing the port the webserver runs on looks something like:

        New-ItemProperty IIS:\sites\DemoSite -name bindings -value @{protocol="http";bindingInformation=":8081:"}

[http://www.iis.net/learn/manage/powershell/powershell- snap-i...](http://www.iis.net/learn/manage/powershell/powershell-snap-in- making-simple-configuration-changes-to-web-sites-and-application-pools)

What did I just modify? Is it persisted to the hard disk? How do i back that up? How do I revert the change? How do I move this change (and 20 others) from one server to another? It's three months later, and I want to do something similar, where can I find the current state of DemoSite and mimic it for DevSite?

I like plain text. Clearly companies succeed on microsoft products and people make money administering them. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

<comment><USER15> That example you gave is from 2008. You would use the current PowerShell Cmdlets provided for managing IIS.

      IIS:\>New-WebBinding -Name "Default Web Site" -IPAddress "*" -Port 80 -HostHeader TestSite

[https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee790599.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee790599.aspx)

<comment><USER7> Edit: updated per research.

Wouldn't it be, for his example of changing the port:

        Set-WebBinding -Name 'RadWebServer' -IPAddress "*" -Port 443 -PropertyName Port -Value 4430

I don't have a huge amount of PowerShell experience so maybe that's incorrect or has extra bits.

<comment><USER15> Yes it would be as the OP's question was about changing the binding. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I started off as a PowerShell fan, but my introductory experience has been pretty poor. A little while back, I tried testing the output of a sorting algorithm with PowerShell. I wrote a line of bash to check my results:

      diff <(cat output.txt) <(cat output.txt | sort -n)

Then I wrote the PowerShell:

      get-content output.txt | foreach-object { [Int] $_ } | sort-object | out-file -encoding ascii sorted.txt
      compare-object (get-content output.txt) (get-content sorted.txt)

Yeah, it's a lot longer. It was the bug that really soured me, though. The files compare as identical even if output.txt is not sorted.

You go read Microsoft tutorials [1] and they tell you to use Get-Content (cat) and Compare-Object (diff) like this for comparing files, but what they don't tell you is that order is ignored. Given how often I see the above code cited online for comparing files [2][3], I'm not sure that many people actually understand this.

I still haven't actually figured out how you properly compare files with PowerShell. I call fc.exe now, but its output is pretty gnarly so all I use is the return value.

[1] [https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/Ee156812.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/Ee156812.aspx) [2] [http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2015/04/0...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2015/04/01/use- powershell-to-compare-two-files.aspx) [3] [http://serverfault.com/questions/5598/how-do-i-diff-two- text...](http://serverfault.com/questions/5598/how-do-i-diff-two-text-files- in-windows-powershell)

<comment><USER17> AFAICT, you are just trying to check if a file is sorted? Then wouldn't:

        diff (cat out.txt | sort | out-string) (cat out.txt -raw)

do it?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, actually. Though, I'd still include the cast to int, because I need to sort numerically, not lexicographically.

I suppose the lesson is that if you want to preserve line order, you need to use -raw to prevent Get-Content (cat) from splitting the file into multiple lines. That still ruins the output text from Compare-Object (diff), but it's cleaner than fc.exe.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Equivalent Powershell commands to Linux / OS X / OpenBSD / SmartOS:

[https://certsimple.com/rosetta-stone](https://certsimple.com/rosetta-stone)

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with most of the comment: it's weird.

I also agree with the author, you don't try enough or don't bother trying.

i LOVE _nix environnements, but i HAVE to work on Windows. And yeah, at first, it 's a pain. Nothing works as expected and you get bunch of errors ... but you have to remember that you're not on a _nix terminal !

You don't expect to master a environnement on a first try, do you ? Remember this is not the term you know and love. And if you take some time to get used to, here is your reward:

you will be able to rocks the term on Windows too, and that's pretty badass.

</comment><comment><USER15> "I think many of the misconceptions I see on HN about PowerShell (and much of the Windows hate in general, actually) are because the typical use case on HN is quite a bit different than that of an internal IT department of a non-tech company, which is more Microsoft's focus."

This, and vice versa that you see in other online communities. Debating your religious position is almost becoming safer than stating your technology choices, which like religion are quite often not your choices to start with.

</comment><comment><USER19> Much of the time that PowerShell is mentioned here is in the context of a discussion about how nun-punchingly awful the Unix shell is, and what could possibly replace it. I have never used PowerShell, so I have nothing to add to those discussions, but the fish-out-of-water nature of much of the commentary about it, particularly the negative commentary, is because of this.

Sadly for those of us who detest the shell, nobody seems to have a good replacement at hand.

EDIT: superfluous "I" removed

<comment> vezzy-fnord _Much of the time that PowerShell is mentioned here is in the context of a discussion about how nun-punchingly awful the Unix shell is, and what could possibly replace it._

Precisely my impression as well. It's the PowerShell promoters who tend to be the ones that bait first.

I'm personally not partial to PowerShell, but I hardly loathe it, either. I think the likes of the Inferno shell and es show the right path to what a modern shell should resemble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have not used powershell so I can't vouch for it. It is mainly because I couldn't find simple tutorials regarding them. Unix shell on the other hand is dead simple to use. However I get all icky if I have to use them on scripts. The outputs are always raw and never structured so it feels like a hackjob everytime. It also leads way to a different kind of vulnerabilities from incorrect parsing of outputs. I think this is the part where powershell from what I heard comes off as superior. The output is structured and you can work straight with the results.

As far as verbosity, its a mixed bag for me. It makes it easy to read at a glance with minimal mental parsing but at the same time seems such an incorrect fit for a shell where it is optimal to have it under a screen line. You can equate it to trying to write a rant on twitter.

</comment><comment><USER21> The real "gotcha" for Powershell, for me, is the huge differences between versions. As the author mentions, v3 is much better than v1. The original version is pretty bad. A lot of parsing cmdlets don't work right. And a lot of the really useful ones aren't included, which also blocks some of the cool cmdlets you can download and install.

Having to port a script from Powershell v5 to Powershell v2 is dumb, but sadly necessary. Usually I'll write a script on the oldest server in the farm to ensure interoperability. But often the workarounds for v2 break v5's implementation of select-string or other parsing tools.

And this doesn't get into remote execution or remote script enablement, which are both separate. Powershell fragmentation is a serious problem that complicates Windows adminstration and use of this powerful tool.

</comment><comment><USER22> Powershell definitely has its quirks, and unfortunately one of its best features - powerful remote administration - is also painful to configure and troubleshoot and is often unreliable and slow.

I wish the team in charge of Powershell would take a page from the Python community and adopt an opinionated, "one right way to do everything" stance. For anyone using or looking in to Powershell, here are a few best practices I've compiled:

\- Concurrency in Powershell is generally ugly and painful. Background jobs are OK if you want to background something while you're working at the command line (although you could just open another window) but they're a pain to use in scripts, plus they're very heavyweight and slow if you need any semblance of performance. There are other ways of doing concurrency but they are not well documented and are fairly messy. Events/observer pattern is possible but weird. If you need concurrency, head for C#.

\- Handling exceptions is way better than it used to be (trap), but still annoying. For your sanity and everyone else's, set $ErrorActionPreference = "Stop" at the top of every script, along with Set-StrictMode -Version Latest.

\- Keep track of what you're outputting to your pipeline - anything that generates output that you're not capturing into a variable gets thrown in the pipeline, which can wreak havoc, especially if you end up with different types of objects being emitted. Sprinkle Out-Null around to avoid this. Combine multiple data fields into a new psobject if necessary (this is also good for scripts that output a bunch of information at the end).

\- Don't use Write-Host - it's not output and thus can't be redirected. Use Write-Verbose frequently, and consider adding $VerbosePreference = 'Continue' in your profile to see verbose output all the time.

\- If you need to access a SQL database, use ADO.NET. Invoke-SqlCmd and the rest of the sqlps module are a mess, at least the last time I looked. You can use sqlcmd.exe too but then you're back to text output.

\- Add this to your profile. With this, any time you run something at the command line, it will be stored in $LastObject. I always forget to store stuff in a variable.

      function Out-Default { $input | Tee-Object -var global:LastObject | Microsoft.PowreShell.Core\out-default }

</comment><comment><USER23> Powershall comes handy when I work with open source software technologies on windows 7

</comment><comment><USER24> I started reading this article not knowing anything about powershell, and finished horrified by the issues he tried to dispel in it. No remoting, no scripting? Are they serious?

<comment><USER11> You didn't read deep enough. Remoting and Scripting are off by default but available. Remoting is not great, but getting better soon (as in now-ish) with SSH support getting baked into PowerShell. (Yeah, that SSH, OpenSSH.) Scripting IS great, you just have to turn it on. (It's off by default because Microsoft didn't want it to be a virus vector for your Grandfather's machine who doesn't need shell scripting and likes to click on every attachment he sees in his email.)

Get-Help about_Execution_Policies # Tells you everything you need to know about

So the first thing I typically do in PowerShell in user accounts I control is:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

After that I can run all the scripts I want to run. (From there it's a quick jump over to Chocolatey for application installs and PsGet for useful PowerShell scripts like PoshGit that adds your friendly Git branch info to the PowerShell prompt.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It worse than that, the misunderstanding that is.

I live and breathe Linux. But Powershell is so far ahead of bash for text and object manipulation, it's not really even a close call.

<comment><USER26> That's an interesting claim, care to back it?

P.S. *nix shell != bash, there's zsh and fish that are light years ahead re: tab completion and other general niceties.

<comment><USER4> Powershell data is not just plain-text, it's all objects. On *nix when you run "ls -l" you get text. On powershell when you run "gci" you get objects. But the objects are nicely formatted automatically for you when they hit stdout so it ends up looking the same.

On powershell if I want to find a list of files that are more than 100k in size I can just do "gci | where Length -gt 100000". If I want to see the top 10 processes that have the most handles open I just run "get-process | sort handles -desc | select -first 10". That way of interacting with things extends all the way through every aspect of powershell and it's incredibly potent. If I want to query a bunch of build jobs from a service I can just create a simple couple line script that talks to a web service and returns queries. Then I can use the built in select, where, format, etc. commands to get at the data I want. I can filter by jobs that have failed, I can filter by jobs of a certain type, or that ran on one machine. All of that is basically free on powershell, it's just baked into the way everything works. It saves you from all the ridiculous overhead of using perl, sed, awk, etc. just to get at the data you want.

Aside from that, with powershell you get things like man-page-style help and usage messages, named parameters, parameter type checking, etc. at very low cost, as just the natural way of doing things.

The Unix philosophy has always been about having small tools that you can use together to get big stuff done, powershell very much embodies that philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Noone gets Powershell.

<comment><USER21> Some of us do, but we've given up trying to expose HN to the shell. The anti- Microsoft culture that built up in the late 1990s and early 2000s has too much inertia on HN to overcome by occasional articles.

<comment><USER19> Keep in mind that much of what seemingly makes Powershell so great on Windows is inapplicable in a Unix shell environment. So there's still some juvenile "M$ hyuck hycuk" nonsense, but there's also some pretty spot-on discussion of the difficulty of trying to move tools between very different systems.</comment></comment></comment>


SoftBank Will Invest $2.25B in Cruise - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/05/31/softbank-invest-billion-gm-self-driving-car-unit-cruise/ <comment><AUTHOR> Cruise strikes me as the ideal acquisition, and a formula others should copy. Kyle Vogt and the rest of the Cruise founding team got personal liquidity; a huge influx of capital to continue R&D; access to GM's marketing, manufacturing, and talent infrastructure; but retain general independence in the pursuit of the ultimate mission of self-driving cars.

Pretty impressed with GM for having the insight to understand that arrangement was best and the flexibility to pull it off. And incredibly impressed with what Kyle and his team have achieved post-acquisition. They clearly remain as hungry to make this happen as on day 1.

<comment><USER2> really? have a friend who interviewed there pre GM acquisition. said it was a colossal joke of a place, engineering wise. and hes worked at some sh*thole startups, so i take his word for it.

honestly, it was 100% luck GM took notice of them. weren't many other alternatives around at that time. GM buying them spurred the explosion of self-proclaimed software/full stack self driving startups we see today.

So Im not as impressed with the achievements so far as I am with the absolute dumb luck these guys have had. Kudos, i guess.

<comment><USER3> I've noticed that when cruise articles pop up here on HN they reliably provoke someone to create a new account express this sentiment.

Previous examples are this account: [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tmpnam1234567](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tmpnam1234567)

and this user _Fricken: [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=_Fricken](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=_Fricken), who based on choice of username seems to actually be impersonating the submitter of this thread.

As to the validity of the criticism I have no idea, but it strikes me as very odd.

edit: Fricken (no underscore) didn't actually submit this, but submitted the same article and is here in the comments.

<comment><USER4> It's all the same person. In addition to having a 'friend' who 'interviewed' at Cruise, they've been an 'engineer' at Cruise, a 'founder' of Cruise, and also the 'cofounder' who left.

We've banned all the trolling accounts we know about and their main account as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Large investments in all the major ride sharing companies + large investment in Cruise, Softbank is becoming, in the background, the future of transportation. By networking all these companies together, preventing cross- market competition and supplying self-driving tech to their players, their market power can be seen to be pretty massive.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget Boston Dynamics... my dream of riding around town on a fuel cell powered BigDog may yet come to pass. Yeehaw!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> GM bought cruise for 1 billion. Softbanks stake would value it at 11 billion. Even if GM put in some money into cruise their return on investment seems pretty good.

<comment><USER8> I think softbank isn't just a regular VC. My speculation is that it may provide other services like dealing with govt(s) that makes this offer even more compelling. Otherwise I don't see why GM would need an investment from softbank.

<comment><USER9> It's not always just about the money. One of the most effective ways to ensure that a long-term project stays alive at a big company as people come and go is to create an external tie-up or partnership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes I wish Deutsche Telekom would go head to head with Softbank in doing these kinds of Investments and Aquisitions.

Not because I think they'd be good at it, but more for the fact that this would give Germany a real chance for a seat at the table of future tech- giants.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did anyone watch GTC 2018?

NVidia has a self-driving software stack that they can drop into a 3D sim. Same stack works in the sim (ie real world has a real camera, sim world has a sim camera, real world has a real lidar, sim world has a sim lidar...) They will drive billions of sim miles with their stack.

Hour 1 Minute 58 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95nphvtVf34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95nphvtVf34)

<comment><USER12> Isn't that what Waymo is doing already?

<comment><USER13> Yes for awhile. They have a virtual state of California they ride in and have more than a billion miles driving.

Would be curious on accidents? Wish Waymo would share?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> GM's head of business development is looking pretty smart right now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Subtext here is that Cruise's driverless product is done. And the cash wont be spent on further R&D. But on go-to-market strategy. Ultimately culminating in the public rollout of a fleet for major markets. Perhaps centered around the Bolt EV 5-door subcompact.

The seismic shift in marketing will be fascinating. From the freedom evoked by taking hairpin curves with the wind tossing your hair about. To a focus on the hardships and hidden costs of car ownership.

As passenger attention shifts from watching the road and scenery. To focusing on windowpane display screens. Expect to see branded partnerships with Disney / Netflix. As well as content specifically formulated to entertain or shop during the 20 minute car trip ;)

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry but I disagree. Driverless cars are a pipe dream at this point. A lot of people are going to die and legislation will catch up eventually. The tech isn't even standardized with everyone taking different approaches. The article about TI millimeter wave radar that's was on the front page shed some light.

I'm sure this won't be popular on HN. The Uber crash gave some insight on the real state of things. Tesla is in full PR mode even getting banned from the recent crash's investigation.

<comment><USER17> I could not agree more. Softbank and the investment community may just be in greater fool mode. Or, to be more generous, perhaps they are taking a long term approach. But anything close to Level 4/5 is a _long_ way away, as even senior technical folks have been admitting recently.

<comment><USER18> Waymo is already doing level 4. Check it out, a Waymo van was on Jimmy Kimmel the other day:

[https://youtu.be/c6twRCBtd-g](https://youtu.be/c6twRCBtd-g)

<comment><USER19> Lex Friedman's team at MIT seem to think that fully autonomous driving is a long way off: there are just too many edge cases to deal with.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06976](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06976)

From the abstract: "Until these problems are solved, human beings will remain an integral part of the driving task, monitoring the AI system as it performs anywhere from just over 0% to just under 100% of the driving".

Now there's room to be optimistic or pessimistic about how much an AI can help, but the academic consensus is that level five will need many more research breakthroughs. There are some good video lectures that give an overview of the field (but not that much depth) here:

[https://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu/](https://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu/)

<comment><USER18> Lex Fridman's team has drawn their highly disingenuous conclusions based on studies of automated (not autonomous) systems from Volvo, Tesla and Range Rover. They didn't study a single product from a company working on an actual autonomous driving system, and of course they can't because those products are all currently in development and not available to study.

<comment><USER19> It's fair to criticize a study but when you start calling an academic researcher 'highly disingenuous', you just sound like you have a horse in the race. Did you found an autonomous driving company or something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For a man on the street to invest in Cruise, would he need to invest in GM? (Or "invest in GM and short Ford" or something?)

It sounds like they're serious business, but I don't want to dilute a bet on self-driving cars with a bet on consumer trucks.

<comment><USER21> Yes, which is up over 10% on this news. The good news is consumer trucks are massively profitable which can fund making autonomous vehicles.

<comment><USER22> All the American car makers only really sell trucks and all of the other Cars don't make up much money on their balance sheet.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is the timing right for energy/cleantech investment vs. 2008? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This comment (not mine) in a recent thread seems relevant: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155334)</comment>


My Man in Japan (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/my-man-in-japan-internet-shopping/ <comment><USER2> We received a toy monkey from a friend when my son was 11 months old. Soon, it turned into his favorite companion.

Being cautious, I tried to buy another one but it was out of stock everywhere in the Western Hemisphere. I finally found it in Tokyo at an importer of specialty American toys who would not ship internationally. They were extremely polite but refused to budge.

Thankfully, via a similar and very cheaply priced proxy service we soon got it. To this day it is still sitting in it's packaging, as the original is still safe and sound.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always wanted men in various countries who could buy things for me in obscure offline marketplaces. Rice cookers from Japan, gold from India, amber fragments from Cambodia, antique ivory from Africa, meteorites from Siberia, rugs from Morocco.

Unfortunately the biggest obstacle to setting up such a network is finding people you can trust.

<comment><USER4> I would've thought that Facebook would have solved this problem already? What is better than a friend within 6-degree separation ?

<comment><USER5> They're even worse because there is a penaltt cost of calling them out if they cheat you that business doesn't have. If they're going to cheat you they don't care about it but you do. There are all of the other grey area actions like "was stolen".

Eg think of anything a shady or just incompetent relative might do, same thing here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this not basically the concept of the J Peterman catalog? :)</comment>


Show HN: Go library for concise, unambiguous and URL-safe UUIDs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/renstrom/shortuuid <comment><USER2> Ran it through an app I maintain, Go Report Card, and it got an A+ grade: [http://goreportcard.com/report/renstrom/shortuuid](http://goreportcard.com/report/renstrom/shortuuid)

I'm actually pretty surprised, as I do this quite often and it's rare that something gets 100% across the board on the first try. Not that it's necessarily difficult, but I find people normally don't use all 3 of "gofmt -s", "golint", and "go vet". Anyway, nicely done.

<comment><USER3> I use gometalinter which runs it through a whole suite of linters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The goals of unambiguous and concise are at odds, and this format (well, the defaults) errs on the side of shorter.

To lessen ambiguity even more, there's Crockford Encoding[0]. Results in longer strings, but there's no case distinction, and the similar looking characters decode the same. Looks like you can get mostly Crockford Encoding using this library by changing the character set (which is why said "the defaults" above). The check digit in Crockford Encoding is a huge win for when these are dictated/transcribed, but may need to be URL-encoded.

[0] [http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html](http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. I will definitely see if I can incorporate it somehow, even if it's just a note in the README.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My Go is rusty, but this look a little error prone:

        // Note that this will create a new UUID each time its .String() method
        // is invoked.
        fmt.Printf("%s", u)  // Cekw67uyMpBGZLRP2HFVbe
        fmt.Printf("%s", u)  // 4pUYNRFHTG3YVgThPZvCgC

Just imagine an user using u directly instead of assigning to a var:

        token := "secret" + u
        othertoken := "app" + u

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Yes, this is indeed a terrible idea! Will definitely fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed in [https://github.com/renstrom/shortuuid/commit/847debec9c7c091...](https://github.com/renstrom/shortuuid/commit/847debec9c7c091fdb85d26bfe9111c0be3dca08)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As mentioned in the README, it's heavily based on the Python version[1].

[1] [https://github.com/stochastic- technologies/shortuuid](https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/shortuuid)

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought UUIDs had to be 128 bits, such as "de305d54-75b4-431b-adb2-eb6b9e546014" (32 x 4-bit characters, not counting hypens). How is "ajLWxEodc6CmQLHADuKVwD" a UUID?

<comment><USER7> "de305d54-75b4-431b-adb2-eb6b9e546014" is simply an encoding of a 128 bit number. This standard hex UUID representation requires 8 bits/character * 36 characters == 288 bytes == 2304 bits. This encoding only requires 22 characters or 1408 bytes, almost half the size.</comment></comment>


Yes, React is taking over front-end development. The question is why - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/yes-react-is-taking-over-front-end-development-the-question-is-why-40837af8ab76 <comment><USER2> Because JavaScript developers like churn?</comment>


How Chinese Apps Handled Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> http://dangrover.com/blog/2020/04/05/covid-in-ui.html <comment><USER2> Except of course nobody believes they actually "handled" it. In the absence of a vaccine, even partial lifting of restrictions would lead to thousands and thousands of infections daily, if the number out of China were actually real. Which they are not.</comment>


Show HN: I made tailzilla – A online code editor for Tailwind CSS - <AUTHOR> https://tailzilla.app/ <comment><USER2> Very cool, my only suggestion would be to use a mono-spaced font in the code- editor. Looks a bit weird with a serif font.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's awesome! I am very excited</comment>


Vanity Fair reporter freak-out - <AUTHOR> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJcOw_MJ:www.langner.com/en/2011/03/10/vanity-fair-reporter-freak-out/+Vanity+Fair+reporter+freak-out&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com <comment><USER2> This is a good example of why specialists shouldn't talk to the media. Generally, the interests of (for example) the New York Times are opposed to the interests of (for example) a particle physicist. The incentive structure of mainstream dead-tree media is aligned against producing accurate summaries of specialized information. There are some good parts and some bad parts to this. The bad parts, though, are sufficiently bad that if manipulating the media isn't your actual job, you're probably better off outsourcing that task to a trusted third party. This is basically the same as talking to lawyers and the police: they will lie to you. There will always be some technical exception so that they can tell themselves and the people higher in their authority structure that they weren't _really_ lying, but no, from the perspective of a layperson, they're liars. They lie all the time. So you need to either be the sort of person who can cope with that and tell them the lies in return that will get something resembling your actual views and statements into their publication, or you need a specialist - just like with talking to lawyers - on your side to do that job for you.

Never count on a reporter to act in good faith any more than you would count on that from the police or from a lawyer. They will disembowel you.

This advice is much less applicable, happily, to technical publications in your field, or to 'citizen journalism,' but you still have to be cautious there. The major difference is that with technical publications or citizen journalists, you may have some actual leverage, and they may have some idea what you're talking about. You have no leverage, as a specialist, over the NYT, so they don't care what harm they do to you - what the heck are you going to do to them? And the average reporter for, say, Fox News, doesn't know what the heck, say, Bruce Schneier is talking about. They are worse than laypeople, actually, because they have an incentive to misunderstand.

Don't talk to the mainstream media. They will lie to you, and they are not your friends.

</comment><comment><USER3> My absolute favorite example of a reporter willfully twisting words is the following.

A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said, "It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."

Remember, it is the job of the media to get a compelling story out there. They don't care about the truth. They don't care about informing people. They want to create interesting stories that suck people in, and punish people who fail to give them access to information that they wanted (whether or not they had any right to pry).

When we see subjects that we understand misreported in the media, we invariably cringe. When you see subjects you don't know anything about reported in the media, your default assumption should be that if you knew the subject better, you _would_ cringe, and the only reason you're not cringing is that you don't know better.

<comment><USER4> _A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said, "It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."_

Honestly, whoever did this is a failure at their job. This can't be a common practice because it's so blatantly wrong. Even Reddit commentors don't get upvoted for crap like this.

<comment><USER3> I have no idea how common that is. However that incident taught me why people say, "No comment" to the media. Short. Sweet. Can't be misquoted out of context.

<comment><USER5> Ah, but they have a way around that as well.

Journalist: btilly, would you ever rape a child?

btilly: No comment.

Headline: _btilly refuses to rule out raping children_

Next week they'll ask whether you're running for president, and if you don't comment on that then the cover of Time will be a picture of your face with the caption "Is America Ready For a Child-Raping President?"

<comment><USER3> Ah yes. The Glenn Beck approach.

I'm very glad to have never had to deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the graf in the VF piece that has Langner so upset:

 _"If I did not have the background that I had, I don't think I would have had the guts to say what I said about Stuxnet," Langner says now, finishing his second glass of wine during lunch at a Viennese restaurant in Hamburg. Langner studied psychology and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Berlin. He fell into control systems by accident and found that he loved the fiendishly painstaking work. Every control system is like a bespoke suit made from one-of-a-kind custom fabric—tailored precisely for the conditions of that industrial installation and no other. In a profession whose members have a reputation for being unable to wear matching socks, Langner is a bona fide dandy. "My preference is for Dolce & Gabbana shoes," he says. "Did you notice, yesterday I wore ostrich?" Langner loves the attention that his theories have gotten. He is waiting, he says, for "an American chick," preferably a blonde, and preferably from California, to notice his blog and ask him out._

This looks bad in isolation. But the piece is enormous; more than 60 grafs long. Langner's complaint makes it sound like a hit piece. It's not; it's simply using those (apparently misleading) details to add some color. The article is ostensibly not even about Langner, even though it quotes and discusses him warmly throughout.

I don't want to sound like I'm defending bad reporting, but the VF articles has _substantive_ concerns about Langner as well --- for instance, his prevalence as a authoritative source for lots of other journalism about Stuxnet --- and one way to dodge that is to redirect attention to stupid stuff like what kinds of shoes he _really_ prefers.

<comment><USER7> Is "graf" an actual term for a paragraph? Or is this some new Californian thing I haven't noticed?

<comment><USER6> Google [graf hed lede]. I use them, as I think many other people do, because they're very easy to type, and you knew what it meant without being told.

"Tk" also another great journalism shortcut; it's like "XXX" in code --- easy to search for and fix later.

I'm in Chicago.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, I'd never heard of anything like this. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren't many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. I should write a separate post on this at some point.

It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.html)

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, if you hang out with journalists you'll start to see it from their side as well.

They've got some short deadline to write a few thousand words on some topic they don't really understand and don't really care about, either... and the consequences for rushing out a just-good-enough article are pretty minimal.

Sound familiar? It reminds me of high school, and dashing off some crappy just-good-enough essay on the night before it was due. Journalists (or the vast majority thereof) are stuck in an endless loop of having to write two crappy high school essays on different subjects every day. I don't envy them.

<comment><USER9> Your idealist view of the perfect article is something that quickly goes out the window, when you begin to write for a magazine or newspaper.

The character limit on articles alone is enough to break the hopes of many people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This mirrors the story of McChrystal's treatment by _Rolling Stone_ ([http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway- genera...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway- general-20100622)). In both cases reporters pull specialists who are unaware and unprepared for the perils of such interviews to uncharted territory and then benefit from the results. I bet they can't pull such a fast one to one who's seasoned, e.g. Lady Gaga.

</comment><comment><USER11> Google Cache -- English roots of langner are returning blank pages: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJcOw_MJ:www.langner.com/en/2011/03/10/vanity- fair-reporter-freak-out/+Vanity+Fair+reporter+freak- out&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

<comment><USER12> That page comes out black in my browser, but the text is there, just with the wrong color. Select parts of the page and you will see it.

<comment><USER11> Text-only version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJcOw_MJ:www.langner.com/en/2011/03/10/vanity- fair-reporter-freak-out/+Vanity+Fair+reporter+freak-out&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've seen similarly bizarre malfeasance by a reporter from one of the most famous newspapers.

Their fact checking _is_ completely useless. They don't check _any_ of the most important or fundamental claims, only the very trivial. Editors apparently don't care or are incompetent.

In the case I'm intimately familiar with the reporter made no claim or attempt at impartiality. He was actively hostile and came close to threatening. He was on a witch hunt and continued his vendetta over a couple years of trumped up articles until he realized no one else bought his bullshit.

I pray for the day when shitty journalists can't hide under the umbrella of a "respected" brand like Vanity Fair. It's too much power with no effective checks or balances.

</comment><comment><USER14> For future reference: If you think you're being set up in an interview, in many cases you can legally record the interview using a voice recorder app on your phone without telling the other party.

The only US states that require all-party notification of a conversation being recorded are:

California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.

All other states allow you to record a conversation without notifying the other party provided you are party to the conversation. If the conversation crosses state lines, Federal law applies which only requires one party to know the call is being recorded.

<http://www.rcfp.org/taping/>

<comment><USER6> I'm struggling to see how that would have helped this person. The VF story is in fact not a hit piece, and involved what appears to be a multi-day interview. The audio recording required to shoot down the tiny fraction of this story Langner objects to would be very boring listening indeed --- because, of course, you'd have to trawl the whole thing to verify that he didn't crack wise about California blondes or D&G shoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> We rag on PR people a lot, but this is definitely a case where a tech company needed a good PR person or good PR company to back them up.

A PR rep being in the room during the interviews never would have let this get out of hand in the way that it did, and they would have framed the interview better to suit the tech company. This is just a case of an unsophisticated tech guy being trodden on by an experienced journalist in order to suit the journalists goals for the story.

PR might be 90% useless now, but there are good PR people out there who could have helped in this case.

Btw I am a huge fan of VF but I thought the Stuxnet piece was weak. I am surprised that some of the more experienced tech journalists are not all over the story releasing articles, books, touring lecture, etc. the mainstream mass market would eat up this story in a hurry (movie deal!)

<comment><USER6> The Atlantic put Mark Bowden (for crying out loud) on Conficker and turned in a clunker. I think the problem is that a narrative journalist's instincts and pressures aren't compatible with stories like Stuxnet and Conficker.

<comment><USER15> I remember that - it _was_ terrible. I was thinking more like Steven Levy for Wired or even Bruce Sterling. Wired have yet to do a feature on Stuxnet

or Clive Thompson for NYT Magazine - his tech writing has been excellent, particularly the Netflix prize[1] and his coverage of privacy and security issues[2]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?pagewanted=all)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article in question, _A Declaration of Cyber-War_ :

[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-2...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-201104?printable=true)

And its HN submission (1 comment):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284385>

</comment><comment><USER17> There have been times in the distant past where I was contacted by people from the mainstream media for interviews or TV appearances on well known shows. I always politely turned them down, because I feared similar exaggerations and distortions to those described in this article. Anything connected with AI or robotics tends to be reported on very poorly and in a highly sensationalised manner, and I didn't want to end up being misrepresented or be portrayed as a crude stereotype.

</comment><comment><USER18> There is a good book, Mediasmart,

[http://www.amazon.com/Mediasmart-How-Handle- Reporter/dp/0964...](http://www.amazon.com/Mediasmart-How-Handle- Reporter/dp/0964042908)

by a reporter whose work I used to see on my local TV news, explaining how subjects of news stories can turn the tables on reporters by understanding more of the news business. The tips in the book are frank and useful-- including sometimes declining to be interviewed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the article formatted in ViewText: [http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebcache.google...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebcache.googleusercontent.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3AtPFggJcOw_MJ%3Awww.langner.com%2Fen%2F2011%2F03%2F10%2Fvanity- fair-reporter-freak-out%2F%2BVanity%2BFair%2Breporter%2Bfreak- out%26cd%3D1%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus%26source%3Dwww.google.com&format=).

</comment><comment><USER19> More interesting (in my mind) is - why are we reading this out of the google cache? The original site doesn't seem to be up. What's the back-story there?

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a remarkable amount of "dramablogging" on HN lately.

<comment><USER6> New here, are you? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how commonplace this is across media outlets.

</comment><comment><USER22> gotta be a little oblivious to think that vanity fair is interested in stuxnet

<comment><USER23> It sounded like he was just hopeful that he could get the word out about Stuxnet. Plus, he mentions that Vanity Fair wasn't even available on German news stands, so perhaps he didn't know what to expect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How gross of Gross.

This is what happens when the "perception is reality" maxim gets to people's heads.

Vanity Fair: Fact or Fiction?</comment>


Show HN: Dictate Me – Make Computers Notate What You Sing - <AUTHOR> http://dictateme.songminseonk.com

<comment><USER2> This is a really neat application! Since seeing the fourier image analysis on HN a couple days ago, I've been looking into in-browser DSP.

On my laptop it felt pretty responsive, but I notice that you have a disclaimer not to sing a note faster than 80bpm. Is that a limitation of browser processing power?

Also, I'm curious what you thought of VexFlow? Were there any drawbacks you noted when using it to render notes, and did it play well with angular?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is because the application will start skipping notes if you start singing faster- I have aggressively filtered entered frequencies which made the dictation speed a bit slower. VexFlow's notation is a little handful to say the least, I had to tweak it a lot to make it work for me.

<comment><USER3> Cool, great work! Please do post your changes back to the main project, assuming most of them will be generally useful to VexFlow -- 0xfe/Mohit seems quite active and good about responding to pull requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like it has promise, and is a neat idea, though the accuracy seems like it needs a lot of work.

I started off by whistling, then humming, then singing (da da da...) the theme from 1812 Overture and it never got close for me. I also sang a scale and it was not close there either.

I will say though: if this worked well, I would use it a lot! A lot of times I have melodies in my head that I find hard to transcribe, so, this would be great!

</comment><comment><USER5> Forgive my ignorance - is it possible to make this work for chords (ie play a piano and have it transcribe)? Or does that already exist somewhere and I didn't know? Because I would love to have something like that - play piano, and have an application transcribe what you're playing, perhaps automatically detecting key and meter.

<comment><USER6> What you've described is a Very Hard problem. :) Dozens of researchers around the world are trying to tackle it, with varying results.

Piano is actually one of the easier instruments to automatically transcribe, in part because the notes decay in a predictable way and there's (generally!) no vibrato or changes in tone once a note has been struck. Unlike, say, a clarinet or a guitar, where pitches can be bent after the initial note onset.

Context: I run Soundslice ([http://www.soundslice.com/](http://www.soundslice.com/)), an interactive sheet-music site, and I've investigated this deeply over the last few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too bad, singing was the only thing that could get past the NSA's automatic transcription service.

</comment><comment><USER8> pretty cool. there are a handful of similar things that people were working on like this while in school [http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/](http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool!</comment>


Making ASDF more magic by making it less magic - <AUTHOR> https://fare.livejournal.com/190738.html <comment><USER2> > ASDF, the Common Lisp build system

<comment><USER3> It goes on

> In the spirit of the original Lisp DEFSYSTEM, it compiles and loads > software...

ASDF stands for Another System Definition Facility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Off topic, but my first thought was 'omg, a livejournal link. people still use that!?"

</comment><comment><USER5> _The upside of the Unix way is greater parallelizability, which allows for greater speed on newer multi-processor machines_

Why is this true? Because parallel/shared memory access is hard to get right?

<comment><USER6> The UNIX way doesn't involve shared memory in that sense, unless multiple processes are modifying the same files at the same time (known to be a bad idea). Instead it's more akin to go's channels and go procs. Use text between unix processes.

<comment><USER5> I was asking about the Lisp, way, which it said was harder to parallelize because everything was held in memory.</comment></comment></comment>


Europe tying traffic fines to income level - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/01/10/international/i081053S37.DTL&tsp=1

<comment><AUTHOR> My first response to this was "money grab!" (and I'm normally on the bleeding- heart-liberal side of things). But, after reading the article, I'm more in favor of it. It's reacting to the very real problem in Europe that millionaires can afford to simply ignore smaller traffic fines, and tend to drive haphazardly.

<comment><USER2> In Denmark there's a three-strike system to prevent that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I believe that in Norway in addition to stiff fines, you will lose your drivers license if you are caught driving 25 km/h above the speed limit, whether you are rich or not.</comment>


Personal Website for Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Naresh1318/Topaz <comment><USER2> Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view.

If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look _personal_ \--- not "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub and changed the names and details to mine."

<comment><USER3> > Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make > for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with > the same obviously distinctive style of site

> If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not > "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub

To me that seems petty and I feel you'll end up isolating a good portion of the talent pool. Anecdotally, I can only recall a handful of personal sites that appeared to be truly personal (by your definition) and not all may have been.

For whatever reason this reminds me of: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/67e0hl/whenever_i_ge...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/67e0hl/whenever_i_get_a_stack_of_resumes_i_throw_half_of/)

<comment><USER4> I don't think that parent comment means "you need to spend hours slaving over a personal website for me to look at". A unique site could be raw HTML with some links to projects. Or you could just not have a site and let your GitHub/LinkedIn/resume speak for itself. A cookie cutter site like this is arguably worse than no site because of how generic and uninspired it is

<comment><USER5> Exactly, and it is actually the content, i.e text, that matters, not the design (unless the person is a designer, at which point the homepage should be really good).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the point is that it's not necessary to have a _static_ website to achieve reasonable simplicity - point taken!

From a graphical point of view, it looks a little off to me (I'm not a designer, so take with a grain of salt). The whole website is flat while the boxes have these little shadows. Too many things are centered: the menu on the left, the boxes on the right. The headers on the right side are too close to the left-hand menu.

Also I can't see where the links are pointing by hovering on them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it. In fact, you can modify the entire home page if you just want to keep the grpahQL and database part.

<comment><USER7> > Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure > about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked > aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it.

This thinking can be dangerous. Aesthetically pleasing != good design, too often it can be the opposite. You definitely need to understand the "psychological effects" your page or app has on its users. First, you have to put yourself in their mind, then can you start building, then go back and iterate.

I know this may be a hobby project without much budget, so find a designer friend and bring them on board. It's very difficult to do this in a vacuum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use Hugo. It's easy, static and there are large number of themes. Also writing content in Markdown is great.

<comment><USER9> I switched to Hugo from WordPress. Best decision I made this year so far. :-D But I still need to look into theme development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The design is broken, on desktop below a certain width the menu disappears, and there is no hamburger menu either so once you're in a section you're stuck. Also the links are not links, you don't know where they are going and the url does not get updated which makes it impossible to have incoming links other than to the root of the site. It also behaves unusually, if you drag a link it just behaves as a click.

Honestly if I came across this site in the wild I'd quickly pass to something else.

</comment><comment><USER11> The demo site ([https://naresh1318.com/](https://naresh1318.com/)) doesn't work without javascript loaded from CDNs, it just renders some empty (moustache?) templates.

Is over complicating simple web pages the impression you want to send?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am working on removing on all the CDNs and also reducing load times. CDNs over here get vuejs and other libraries that make my work easy. I was planning on getting something working rather than spending time optimizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I hover over some of the "links", my FF 67 doesn't tell me where the link points to. I don't really like clicking on links if I can't tell what they're doing. Too spooky for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol. Thanks for pointing that out. I have fixed it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thinking about this, I think designers have it easier when it comes to personal website branding

Web Designers can show the full range of skills by designing their website well.

Web Developers can't exactly cram all their elegantly designed components into one website.

<comment><USER14> You don't need to show everything in order to show you're capable. A handful of great components demonstrates ability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The hamburger menu opens automatically on mobile, which is a little jarring as it blocks all content.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on fixing that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The live example loads 25 megabytes of resources. Why?

<comment><USER17> Looks like it's mostly from one `ui_gif.gif` file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Resume" and "About Me" overlap on my cheap Android phone.

Other than that, I think this is nice, clean and attractive. Devs aren't all designers and shouldn't be expected to be.

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently made a super simple personal website in Rust ([https://github.com/martingallagher/website](https://github.com/martingallagher/website)) it's basically just a markdown renderer. I think markdown input with some CSS provides a nice balance in terms of simplicity and aesthetics (subjective of course).

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for posting this. I think it's good to learn from others work.

</comment><comment><USER21> Look like spotify desing but colored

</comment><comment><USER22> Ummm....shouldn't a programmer make their own? Dumb question I know.

<comment><USER23> The website isn't representing their work, the portfolio within is. There's the opportunity cost of the construction vs pre-built. I write smart tv applications for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, etc. I'm not a web dev nor do I pretend to be one. However, I would like videos and descriptions of my work displayed in the nicest way possible, like this. If every dev had to only use the code which only they created, this entire industry would grind to a halt. All of these criticisms about looking down on people using the same theme for a portfolio site just sends up all kinds of flags about their understanding of the software industry in general, and their hiring practices / company culture. I'm guessing many of you "can't find good devs" or keep devs for very long. It's like judging a job applicant on their tie instead of their resume.

<comment><USER24> Yes! You made my point, but much clearer. You want employees who can and will use every available resource, instead of making everything from scratch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Showcasing my personal website here: [https://purohit.me](https://purohit.me)

I'm going for a very minimalistic look and it's still a work in progress, but I'm aiming to keep load times fast, minimal JS, etc.

Features I'm thinking of adding - a links page showcasing interesting links on the internet

Also checkout my 404 page :)

<comment><USER26> I don't see anything but your name and three external links. Your 404 page shows your e-mail as base64, but it's cut off half the way (or rather bugged out) because of the CSS. From the JS my first guess would be some relation to LGBT. All put into 328 kilobytes. The cert is from Symantec ... and soon to be distrusted by all major browsers. It uses Google Analytics (yuck). Mixed script tags in body and head. No CSP present whatsoever. Same for HSTS. And more things. At least the TLS related problems I would get sorted out first before going online, even for a work in progress.

<comment><USER14> This is an unnecessarily aggressive response. That's not how you give good feedback.

<comment><USER9> I don't find it aggressive. It's honest, without any digressions or trying to be more than a list of mistakes and bad decisions that were made.

<comment><USER14> It's very opinionated, it offers no help or pointers about how to fix any of the problems, and it wasn't asked for.

<comment><USER9> > it wasn't asked for.

Well, it was kind of "public" to begin with, so you have to expect that people will tell you what they think about it. I don't see anything wrong in that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I do not have too much time to search for information, so I wrote it. - <AUTHOR> http://it.dailly.co/

<comment><USER2> How IT works?

<comment><AUTHOR> it.dailly.co looking for most popular IT news on social media.</comment></comment>


WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/73/play/wechat-is-watching <comment><USER2> I would highly recommend following @0xDUDE on twitter, he always posts surveillance leaks in China. He found out that WeChat conversations are sent to the local police depending where the user is, and there are employee farms manually reading the conversations... The same way factory workers in China are paid 2 dollars a day, employee farms for conversation/data reading are doing the same...

1\. Link for @0xDUDE is: [https://twitter.com/0xdude?lang=en](https://twitter.com/0xdude?lang=en) 2\. Link for a great thread regarding China spying: [https://twitter.com/docligot/status/1111293482629398528?lang...](https://twitter.com/docligot/status/1111293482629398528?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER3> A few things worth being aware of Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay. It does not have any access to WeChat data.

So far the "social credit" on seems to be mostly based on how much you buy and it only seems to give you discounts to massively overpriced products (similar to a credit card reward system).

You don't really download apps in Wechat but rather add a link more like a Facebook App (JavaScript & HTML).

Chinese people tend to like one app that does everything. Most of the services talked about in the article as separate services that you can open in WeChat but you can also open most of them in AliPay or Taobao or access them directly on their own websites. This is what Facebook tried to do but failed...

What I find fascinating is that a lot of older people that use WeChat in China are illiterate apart from numbers. They do everything by remembering the pictures and other people help them to set up their account. That is part of the reason why they want a single app that does everything. You don't need to read since you can just send messages, look at pictures and iconography.

Also, everyone in China still accepts cash but you generally need correct change.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. I just found out my sesame-credit score is 622 (not that it does anything...)

<comment><USER4> > You don't need to read since you can just send messages

How can illiterate people send messages?

<comment><USER3> There is a button that you hold down and it sends a voice message (up to 60 seconds). They generally just send voice messages back and forth.

There is also a + for extra features like: * Sending a photo * Sending a short video * Calling * Money * Location

You don't need to be able to read to use any of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find WeChat and its aggressively centralized model fascinating, and something to keep eyes on, but this article falls into the familiar trap of playing a bit loose with the facts when it comes to how the Chinese government surveils its citizens.

For example, this is from article:

>People are regularly arrested for messages they send in supposedly "private" group chats. In 2017, two people were arrested in Nanjing for separate instances of making satirical comments referring the massacre in the city by the Japanese in 1937.5

But if you read the original source: [http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001901/more-nanjing- massacre-...](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001901/more-nanjing-massacre- miscreants-detained-by-police)

>"Nanjing is a pit," Wang wrote. "We should let the Japanese come slaughter again." Local police were alerted to the incident after screenshots of Wang's messages were circulated on social media, and they arrested him two days later.

Clearly, a bit of a different story than what's implied in this article. I can easily see someone being questioned by police in almost any country if screenshots leaked where they joked about repeating a violent historical atrocity, like 9/11 for example.

It's not clear to me why folks tend to advance the notion that Chinese citizens are under constant 1984-style 24/7 surveillance by their government. That's not quite how it works over there, at least, if people who live and work there are to be trusted.

<comment><USER6> I'm fed up with those people who think they understand China simply because they have read a sci-fi novel written by an Englishman before modern China has been founded. China's system is so complicated and so far from a heavy-handed police state.

<comment><USER7> I am neither American nor Chinese, but there is a qualitative difference.

In the USA, i can say whatever I damn please. In China, I can not talk about certain topics. Whether or not both CCP and FBI bug my phone, I do not know. However, China is super oppressive when it comes to freedom.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like you have never been to US or China.

<comment><USER7> I have been, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why isn't anyone worried about TikTok?

Yes, WeChat is largely contained to China, but TikTok/ByteDance is global and a top 10 app in the U.S. It would be naive to think that there isn't a backdoor to that app. And it's video.

There's also precedence for this e.g. the U.S. forcing Grindr's Chinese owner to sell.

<comment><USER10> It seems you don't have a good idea about what a backdoor is. A tiktok app can't spy on your email or Facebook message.

It's reasonable to worry about whatever data you give tiktok, but you should probably worry a lot more about Facebook or google which collects far more private data.

<comment><USER9> You can DM people on TikTok just like most other social networking apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook, Google, and Apple would all do the same thing WeChat/AliPay did if regulations in the West moved faster and were more accommodating.

Nobody mandated the author to order delivery, follow social media, buy movie tickets, do online shopping, pay rent, use bikeshare, call cabs, etc, etc, etc. through WeChat. They are, for the most part, services owned by companies other than Tencent. WeChat just compiles a giant menu for users to link their accounts from these services into WeChat. These gateways exist because consumers find it more convenient than quitting WeChat and opening another app/website.

It's perfectly healthy to be concerned about the impact of centralized tech giants on our daily lives but so far all I'm seeing is fearmongering about this ever-more-elusive "dystopia" which coincidentally seems to only exist in a place that's easy for the English-speaking world to hate on.

<comment><USER12> If every one of my friends and even my employer used an app to conduct business and I refused to get it no matter how much they tried to tell me to because I was concerned about my privacy I'd be ostracized. This _did_ happen to me with Facebook to an extent, and Facebook isn't nearly as much of a mammoth as WeChat. Stop pretending it's a choice.

<comment><USER11> Why did you assume I "pretended" it's a choice? It IS a choice and it has always been. Most people just decided the trade-off of being denied employment and other opportunities is not worth preserving whatever privacy these tech giants are trying to "steal" from you. Market economies rarely cater to the few. That has always been the exception and not the norm.

<comment><USER13> By that line of reasoning, I have a choice of whether or not to hand over my wallet when someone mugs me -- I've just decided that the tradeoff of getting a knife in my stomach is not worth whatever money is being stolen from me.

What you're proposing is an interesting philosophical argument, but not a particularly useful way to think when building a society. We're trying to limit Hobson's Choices, even if we can't completely eliminate them all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Going to China soon and everybody tells me WeChat will help me a lot over there. However, I cannot create my account without a "voiceprint". It wants me to read some numbers to fingerprint my voice. Apparently I cannot skip this step and I am not very comfortable with that.

<comment><USER3> I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.

<comment><USER15> Can you set up Alipay with a non-Chinese bank account or card?

It works great for Chinese people and foreign residents of the PRC who have a bank account. However, my experience as a tourist was that it was impossible to link my US credit card using the PRC version of the app downloaded while in China.

<comment><USER16> Yes I tried recently and it seemed impossible without a bank account. You can link a foreign card but not actually use it for normal payments. You may be able to use it only on tabao or something. WeChat pay is not usable at all without a Chinese bank card.

<comment><USER3> I think you are right. I only used a foreign card for Taobao. I don't think it works for normal purchase...

I'll try it tomorrow and see if it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a great Polish sci-fi novel - Paradyzja (~/Paradise/) (wiki: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradyzja](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradyzja)) which describes ever-eavesdropped society. In the end, the society develops a metalanguage ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang)) to evade automatic systems which record and analyze all written and spoken communications (even at peoples' homes).

I wonder if WeChat users already developed something similar.

<comment><USER18> It's definitely getting closer to that point - for example winnie the pooh is a popular meme used to make fun of uncle Xi but it's hard to police given that it's a children's cartoon. It hasn't stopped the aggressive censoring of pictures of winnie the pooh (no joke) but it has definitely presented a challenge. Using vague historical anecdotes and rarely used imagery is a traditional Chinese mode of communication - in modern days you can see it in action via the aggressively close reading people do of CCP mouthpiece newspapers - the use of certain terms signal a greater ideological shift which people will then try to adapt to/guess at. Personally I'm curious about how this mode of communication will evolve given the current development of automated policing algorithms which will undoubtedly take context into account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is the Chinese government with regards to IT quality?

I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software.

With the government holding so much critical information, it seems a very obvious and valuable target for hackers.

<comment><USER3> WeChat is a private company owned by Tencent.

<comment><USER20> I mean.... the govt can check whatever they want on the WeChat logs. And the populace is pretty accepting of this for security reasons (if you aren't going off the "government can be corrupt and abuse it's powers" principle its actually kinda hard to make the privacy argument!)

<comment><USER3> I didn't say anything about privacy just that it is a private company.

It doesn't seem that different to the US government with AT&T.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att- has-employees-embedded-govt-providing-near-realtime-searches-nearly-every- phone-call.shtml)

<comment><USER21> It is different because in China I doubt there would have been any investigative reporting about the government and AT&T.

And while AT&T doesn't seem to have done this, other companies such as Apple have enacted privacy measures which directly contravene the stated wishes of the government - but which are legal.

In China, I believe the way it works is, whatever the government wants becomes legal. The US is far from perfect but the rule of law exists here to some degree.

<comment><USER3> One of the biggest and more interesting difference is that the US government wants to keep these things secret and investigative reporting finds them.

In China, they want this information public because they want people to know that they know and self regulate - Panopticon.

The cynic in me looks at the US as a country controlled by companies while China is a country that controls companies. I don't know if it makes that much of a difference any more now that companies are almost the same size as countries.

<comment><USER22> The only optimal solution for the little guy is complete privacy, or complete transparency, where everyone has equal access to all information. Complete privacy is evidently not achievable, therefore the only option left is complete transparency.

Either way, the current reality of some lucky individuals having all the access to everyone's information, whether it's Chinese government or companies or US government or companies is the worst situation to be in if you have little power, i.e. 99.9999999% of people who aren't billionaires/nation state level diplomats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I go to China often but it's been two years now. I don't look forward to the next visit for this very reason—I'll need this to pay for any and everything. I'm not going back.

<comment><USER24> Cash still works exactly the way it always has, (almost) nobody is going to turn down your business because you don't pay by an app.

<comment><USER15> I was in China (Beijing and Wenzhou) in April. I had NO success finding a taxi in Beijing—the only way to get a ride was to use an app like Didi Chuxing.

I was able to install and use it just fine. The problem was that it is impossible to link a non-PRC payment method to it. The same is true for WeChat Pay or Alipay—you've got to use a Chinese bank account or card as a source. I was not able to find a way around this despite over an hour of experimenting with the apps.

In contrast, it was easy to get taxis in Wenzhou. The drivers all initially asked for electronic payment, though, so it's probably only a matter of regulation that is preventing them from going cashless.

<comment><USER3> If you want to get a real taxi use Baidu maps. It is in Chinese but you can just drop a pin where you want to go and ask for a real taxi instead of a Didi.

A Chinese person can show you the buttons to press then you can pay with cash.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure I tried this—I think the prompts were even in English, if I'm remembering correctly. However, I gave up after several tries of it looking for a taxi and not finding one while I was standing in the rain on a dark street corner. It would sit and look for minutes and appeared to be a broken feature.

I ended up taking a BRT line to get back to my hotel and it was great. All of my experiences with transit in Beijing were excellent. I just wish taxis or car services were an option for tourists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So compared to this Google looks like a mom and pop shop when it comes to data collection..but now think about the frame here. It is done in China not in the /free/ world..

<comment><USER26> yes.

nobody complained when US (and everyone else later on) required online forms for visa requests. full of google Analytics tags and all.

<comment><USER27> This is not true at all. There was an incredible amount of dissatisfaction and anger about this decision. In my own household, we discussed the implications of that decision. Please read through the comments on these 2 posts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > If it wasn't for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the > great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I > could go entire days without leaving WeChat.

I wonder what VPN people use in China to access Google. When I was there last month, I couldn't find a single one that worked for more than a few days.

<comment><USER29> I've been to China a couple of times and ExpressVPN works most of the time for me. However the most reliable way to have a decent connection was Algo VPN deployed to AWS. It was far superior both in terms of reliability and in terms of speed.

<comment><USER16> I tried this recently (Algo with wireguard) and it was probably the most reliable way, but still blocked very quickly on some ISPs, for example it never worked through my China Telecom phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >WeChat knows what I am reading. It would discover I am doing research for this article.

Hate to say it, but this is the same with Facebook. The only difference is the government aspect. I think all social products ultimately aim for this. I can definitely see Facebook heading this direction very soon.

</comment><comment><USER31> > It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.

I was under the impression that Face ID does not leak such information to whatever app is using it?

<comment><USER32> This has nothing to do with FaceID, which isn't mentioned in the article.

WeChat has its own face recognition system.

<comment><USER31> Ah ok, i thought the author meant FaceID in the passage:

> I have my WeChat linked with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone

was not aware that WeChat has its own system. They don't get to use the "special" FaceID sensors/scanners though right? Just the camera?

<comment><USER33> It looks like depth data can be accessed through the AVFoundation framework provided by Apple.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/camer...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/cameras_and_media_capture/streaming_depth_data_from_the_truedepth_camera)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What's better... being in China knowing that everything you do is being watched, or living elsewhere and just suspecting that everything you do is being watched by some three letter agency?

> (Tencent declined to comment for this article)

More likely: (I didn't dare to request comment from Tencent or my social credit score would have plummeted).

</comment><comment><USER35> A while ago I ran a thought experiment, Facebook could also track things like this. If my phone spent the night not at home, it can probably surmise that my relationship with (person who I've been exchanging FB/WhatsApp messages with increasing frequency the last few weeks) has progressed to the next level. Especially if it can see the phone spent the night connected to their SSID, but with both of us having zero interactions with FB apps.

Is there FB analytics built into Netflix? Then they could even say what we watched on Netflix that night.

A machine learning bot that can write just the right thing to a potential date is probably doable, albeit creepy. It's even easier if the bot can see their entire social media and IM history...

<comment><USER36> Where there's a way there's a will.

So say US has interest on country X, can you 100% guarantee that none of the following data could be used to target some individuals of said country: \- Facebook social graph \- WhatsApp conversations \- Skype voice and video chats \- Google location history \- visa credit card transactions

IMHO it's just a matter of how big is the interest. Maybe it wouldn't happen to use this data for personal reasons but it would be very strange to imagine an army leader citing foreigners personal data protection when the country is at war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I posted a bunch of pictures from the Hong Kong protests in the past couple days.

It shocked me that all of my posts were blocked immediately, people can see my old posts but not those new posts with the "sensitive" pictures.

I downloaded those pictures from bloomberg, so I am sure the wechat / tencent is running some web crawler and ML to identify the news picture from the online sources and block them automatically. Still there is some way to get around, by assembling a group of pictures together and adding some noise (adding words, etc).

What's more, the regime is not only monitoring wechat or weibo, it's monitoring non-domestic social medias like twitter as well, for example here's a pictures showing a huge screen, where a lot of tweets are being process my some NLP algorithm, and outputs a result showing whether the tweet is positive, neutral or negative towards the regime [1].

This is how a totalitarianism would apply technology, it uses everything it could to control the people in order to survive.

China is now going full throttle to become a nazi + commie country, it's THE CANCER for everyone else who loves freedom and democracy.

There will be only two possibilities in the 21st century, either the Communist China crashed like USSR, or a war will happen between the China and the west. Hong Kong is literally the frontline of the battlefield.

[1] [https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/09/%E3%80%90%E7%A...](https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/09/%E3%80%90%E7%AB%8B%E6%AD%A4%E5%AD%98%E7%85%A7%E3%80%91%E8%80%81%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E6%AD%A3%E5%9C%A8%E7%9C%8B%E4%BD%A0%E7%9A%84%E6%8E%A8%E6%96%87%EF%BC%9F%EF%BC%81%E8%AF%B7%E5%A4%9A%E5%8F%91/)

<comment><USER37> I think it will take a long time for the west to really stand up against china, because of the economy interest, the lack of transparency and culture / language barrier. Until china hits the pearl harbor, it will get worse and worse.

Disclaimer: I am from china, living in the US now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 'It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.'

The iPhone does, WeChat doesn't.

<comment><USER39> Nope, in this case the camera is run by Wechat and they have their own biometric database.

<comment><USER40> FaceID or TouchID 's information is truely own by IPhone,Wechat use camera can only take photo or video,but when u login, speak six number to wechat,this is own by Wechat.

<comment><USER39> Both Alipay and Wechat Pay have those fancy terminals now in coffee shops, where you need to smile to the camera to pay. No iPhone involved. To set it up they use the same database as for the account verification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> BTW do Chinese phones let you turn GPS off? I never turn it on except when I actually need it so apps probably don't know where I am.

<comment><USER42> They can still track you to some extent from cell towers and wifi.

</comment></comment><comment> La-ang what about Wechat tracking you even though when not using its features? I don't think CPC would patiently wait until you launch the app to start logging your behavior.

<comment><USER3> Why bother? They already have access to cell phone location data and meta information. I'm sure in China it is direct access. In the US it is a two-step process. Not that it would make much difference in practice.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att- has-employees-embedded-govt-providing-near-realtime-searches-nearly-every- phone-call.shtml)

There was a great article in Australia about this a few years back: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-16/metadata-retention- pr...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-16/metadata-retention-privacy- phone-will-ockenden/6694152)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > At 9:27, once I've brushed my teeth, answered a few messages, and wiped the > sleep from my eyes, I order a coffee through WeChat. There's a payments > window on the app, and when you click on it you see various options, some > proprietary to WeChat and some which are independent apps that run on > WeChat's platform. I open the Meituan delivery app and scroll through all > the coffee options around me. I order an Americano. I have my WeChat linked > with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone; when I pay, I just hold my > phone up to my face and a green tick flicks across the screen. Seven minutes > later, I get a message telling me the coffee is on the way, with the name > and number of the delivery driver. It arrives at 9:53.

Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind.

<comment><USER44> Uh... What?

It's the reason Starbucks exists. People are on the go, and they don't want to make their own coffee.

This is literally the same as going to the corner coffee shop to buy a Frappuccino.

<comment><USER45> If the corner coffee shops took 26 minutes to get me a cup of coffee I'd probably have to give it up entirely if I was really too lazy to spend the 90 seconds of effort in my kitchen that gives me a cup of coffee in about 5 minutes.

<comment><USER46> > It arrives at 9:53

If you can count on that arrival time (within minutes), you can just time it so it coincides with you getting out the door. No need to worry about forgetting the pot on the stove, or noisy grinders, etc. It's more likely you'll make a mistake in the morning especially if you're not a morning person and you're still half asleep and in a hurry.

There's something for everyone.

<comment><USER47> This is why coffee machines with timers were invented.

5 min before I go to bed, all I have to do is prepare the coffee and pour water, then press the button to activate at the preferred time interval. At 7:15 am the machine will start and there we go, coffee ready. The machine also turns itself off within 45 min, so you never risk leaving anything running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow looks exactly like fecebook to me

</comment><comment><USER48> Not to be confused with WeeChat. The curses terminal irc client.

<comment><USER49> Would anyone really be confused by that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What an unintended consequence. Was there any way to have seen it?

<comment><USER51> Is this comment a joke?

<comment><USER52> They are more like intended consequences.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tools of the Trade, 2020 Edition - <AUTHOR> What are your favorite tools of the trade in 2020? <comment><USER2> Ember Octane Edition

VS Code

Web Components

Postman

Tape testing framework

Puppeteer/Headless Chromium

Firefox Nightly

Blue Yeti mic for remote pairing

\---

Svelte is pretty cool but I can't say it's a tool of my trade yet.</comment>


Lisa Pascal Development in Lisa Workshop - <AUTHOR> http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/post/87007024545/lisa-pascal-development-in-lisa-workshop

<comment><USER2> The Lisa UI looks clunky and ugly to modern eyes (akin to though not as bad as other early GUIs like Windows 1.0 and OS/2 Presentation Manager), while the original Macintosh still looks clean and well thought out.

Goes to show you why you shouldn't kick Steve Jobs off of your project.

<comment><USER3> > Goes to show you why you shouldn't kick Steve Jobs off of your project.

Does absolutely everything related to Apple have to turn into a Steve Jobs memorial wank?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Now, you have an object file, but to run the app you will need to link it > first. Press 'L' at the Workshop prompt (it's a hidden option)

Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pascal? The Horror of It All! Good riddance.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is so bad about Pascal? I never used it too much, but it seemed like a neat language.</comment></comment>


A simple text editor written in bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sidd-dino/bte <comment><USER2> As a professional C++ developer, I'm always amazed when I see something like this implemented in bash. Cos why the fuck not indeed! Good stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This really looks like a project developed with great passion. Kudos.

<comment><AUTHOR> thenk :')</comment></comment>


Your tips and hacks for learning from online materials - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Can-you-describe-your-step-by-step-process-when-you-trying-to-learn-something-online-Im-finding-it-difficult-as-there-is-so-much-choice-and-I-would-also-like-to-be-more-organised-Keen-to-hear-your-tips-and-tricks?share=1 <comment><USER2> Essentially you'd need to know what is it that you want to learn or what are you aiming to achieve. learning everything is great but not always necessary. Finding information on certain technical topics should not be that hard as there are many collections on various subjects that you can download altogether. Lets say that you are trying to learn something that has 3 different sub-classes. You may want to break it down into 3 sets of 2-day learning of each sub-class, that way you will learn what you need without missing out on certain information that has to do with other sub-class. Always take down notes of your understanding of the subject so you can track your progress. Its basically the same as learning from offline material depending on what the subject is. Diagrams and charts are also good materials to help you memorize your information.</comment>


How I Turned My Love of Whiskey into a Business w/o Tech Skills & Cheap WP Theme - <AUTHOR> http://www.mackmcconnell.com/2012/07/31/tasters-club-whiskey-of-the-month/

<comment><USER2> > Also, another thing I'm particularly proud of is that getting this thing up > was completely free.

... By pirating the one thing you could have bought. I don't know if I'd be bragging about that, bub.

I'm happy you're excited. It's great, really, but as someone who makes money off of web development, I extend some hearty profanities for being the kind of person that figures it's better to leave someone like me without food on his table this week so he can start a pet project all the while _bragging about it_.

<comment><USER3> I didn't see the post before he edited it. Did it originally say that he pirated the Pluto theme??

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Said he downloaded it from a site that I don't remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea! I'm a whiskey guy too (www.whiskeynotes.com) and I might be interested in this, but need to know what level of bottles will be sent. For example, I don't really need any Old Overholt, but some Jefferson's Presidential would be nice...

I found the UI a bit confusing and slow to load. I like the concept though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there! I'd love to follow up with you and chat. I guessed your email and was wrong. Shoot me a note when you get a chance - firstname.lastname@example.com - and we can take it from there.

Mack

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So since you launched last week I'm guessing the testimonials are bunk?</comment>