Hammerspoon – Powerful automation of OS X with Lua - <AUTHOR> http://www.hammerspoon.org <comment><USER3> I've got a simple USB watching script (with hammerspoon) to lock my computer when I remove my yubikey. I just yank the yubikey and go.

I also have it iMessage me when it's removed. In case someone else grabs it when I'm not near it.

I also have it wake up the screen when I plug it in, combined with Knock I can get in and out of my computer quickly and easily.

<comment><USER4> _Please_ share this? Would love to have something like this for as often as I'm pulled away from my desk

<comment><USER3> Here's the gist: [https://gist.github.com/ojkelly/45dda0a5a7066c6a79a038ece8bd...](https://gist.github.com/ojkelly/45dda0a5a7066c6a79a038ece8bde55a)

In the original post, I left out that I also have a usb LED sign [1] that I also have programmed, so people know when they can and cannot interrupt me. Again controlled with hammerspoon and my yubikey.

[1] [http://dreamcheeky.com/led-message-board](http://dreamcheeky.com/led- message-board)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've written a script for this to snap windows just like windows (consider it a free cinch & sizeup replacement).

\- Drag to the left or right to cover that half of the screen. \- Drag to the top for maximise \- Drag to a corner for corner snap \- Control + Option + Arrow to snap to left or right of screen, maximise or center \- Control + Option + Command + Arrow to snap to corner of screen

[https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/850788a0441e1c5565668a...](https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/850788a0441e1c5565668a35ed9a1dfc)

<comment><USER6> In that vein, you may like [https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle](https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle)

<comment><USER7> Also [https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt](https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt)

<comment><USER5> Don't think shiftit supports mouse snapping

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hammerspoon is awesome, I've been using it for quite some time for just few basic tasks (like move a window from one monitor to another), but those have become irreplaceable part of my desktop experience.

Recently I've made this hammerspoon "plugin": [https://github.com/selectnull/hammerspoon- alttab](https://github.com/selectnull/hammerspoon-alttab)

I would love to have feedback, if anyone is interested (it's not perfect, i'm aware of few bugs, but it solves my problem most of the time).

<comment><USER9> He man. Looks cool.. Maybe I'll extend it to just filter out any applications that have no window in the current space. Cleans up the cmd-tab list a lot

<comment><USER8> Sure, try it. It might work better than my version. I do have some other ideas for this problem (usually, i just want to fast switch between terminal and browser) but I'd like to see what other people come up with.

Let me know if you make something.

<comment><USER10> iTerm lets you designate a key to toggle it. I use (with a resignment by Karabiner) CapsLock which is otherwise wasted space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> God... I friggin' LOVE the name and logo of this project.

"HammerSpoon"

It perfectly conveys what an elegant kludge it is.

<comment><USER12> "When all you have is a Hammerspoon, everything looks like a ___"

Suggestions for filling in the blank, are welcome :)

<comment><USER13> Coconut

<comment><USER14> Oh, that's very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hammerspoon is amazing, and even more impressively, it's amazingly well maintained and its API is incredibly well thought out by its really talented development team. It really is a must-have for anyone who wants ultimate programmatic control over OS X.

Check out the really gentle follow-along tutorial:

[http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/](http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/)

<comment><USER12> You're too kind :)

I think we made some terrible API decisions, but we'll fix them up eventually!

(Also for those following along at home, sdegutis is the author of a long line of OS X automation tooling, up to and including Mjolnir, which we forked to make Hammerspoon. He is awesome)

<comment><USER16> That's right. Sdegutis built Zephyros (Ruby OSX automation, also other Lang support), then Phoenix (JavaScript OSX Automation), then Hydra (Lua based) which became Mjolnir, which is forked to Hammerspoon.

Phoneix lives on as Phoenix 2.2 [https://github.com/kasper/phoenix](https://github.com/kasper/phoenix)

<comment><USER17> I'm sticking to Phoenix. Are there any advantages in using Lua script instead of JavaScript?

<comment><USER16> If you prefer Lua there is. I don't see any advantages myself. Phoneix is a permanent fixture on all my macs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One thing I love about Hammerspoon is the flexibility and power some of the modules like drawing and event spoofing give you. It allows really neat things like the tabs and hints modules (which I wrote) and lately I hacked together a module that lets me scroll pages hands-free using mouth noises (see [https://github.com/trishume/thume.popclick](https://github.com/trishume/thume.popclick) if you want to test it before I try and PR it to Hammerspoon).

It's useful both for general window management as well as system hackery. It's the closest OS X users can get to the power of Linux.

<comment><USER19> This is really, really cool, but:

> _It has a very low false negative rate, but often has false positives._

Seems like it would get triggered constantly around noises like A/C, or wind, or the inevitable coworker who quietly hisses behind you while you've got your headphones on.

(It would be me. I would 100% be that coworker.)

<comment><USER18> It's only succeptible to some very specific false postives. But yes it is annoying (my roommate was having fun scrolling my computer from a distance today).

The answer is that all the false positives I encounter are human-triggered so if you are alone and not doing anything else except reading, they aren't much of an issue.

You can also buy super directional headsets that don't pick up anything else, even other people making the noises standing next to you. I have one and it works great, just not as convenient as the tiny mike on my earbuds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> On Linux, if you use GNOME Shell, the closest thing i can think of for desktop automation are GNOME Shell Extensions [1], one can access everything that is available via GObject Introspection [2]. Demos [3], Platform API overview [4]. The GNOME Shell Extensions site [5] provides nice list and easy install.

[1] [https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions](https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions) [2] [https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection](https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection) [3] [https://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel- demos/unstable/](https://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/unstable/) [4] [https://developer.gnome.org/platform- overview/stable/](https://developer.gnome.org/platform-overview/stable/) [5] [https://extensions.gnome.org/](https://extensions.gnome.org/)

<comment><USER21> I use Cinnamon. Any idea if these would work on it? I love automating my desktop workflows

<comment><USER20> No, sorry, I don't know. I was quite happy moving from gnome 2 to gnome 3, I tried cinnamon once or twice but I am happy with gnome shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks great. I'll have to download it and have a go.

Another seemingly great product for Apple not by Apple. I just downloaded the app Continous to my iPad Pro, and I am programming happily in F# on it. It has cut into my Pythonista time, another non-Apple made app.

Maybe Apple's focus more on hardware, and leaving software a bit behind is working out for them. It seems users are stepping up and creating some really productive software.

</comment><comment> jeppesen-io When I first started using a Mac a year ago I found the UI very awkward to use but then I found this little app. Hammerspoon makes osx great again! Even just moving windows around or maximizing (without going fullscreen) is so useful.

I almost never use Dock, Spotlight or Finder now. It's great!

Wrap it all in a personal Cask, and you're good to go! [https://github.com/Jeppesen-io/homebrew- hammerspoon](https://github.com/Jeppesen-io/homebrew-hammerspoon)

<comment><USER23> You can maximize without going fullscreen by holding down option when you click the green button.

<comment><USER24> That doesn't work on OS X 10.11. Just tried it - Nothing happens. You need a tool like Spectacle/Magnet (or potentially Hamerspoon, haven't tried it yet) - I don't know of any way to maximize a screen using basic OS X 10.11 interface, which is bizarre if you think about it.

<comment><USER25> It works just fine on OS X 10.11 [1]. Holding down 'option' while you hover over the green traffic light icon changes the glyph to a '+'. Clicking it maximises the window.

[1] [https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21894?locale=en_US](https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21894?locale=en_US)

<comment><USER24> It really doesn't. I just did so in Safari. Held the Option key, hovered over the green traffic light, and it first _reduced_ the size of the screen. I clicked on it again, and it filled the screen vertically, but not horizontally. Still need to use Magnet/Spectacle to maximize my window.

<comment><USER25> I think the problem really is Apple's use of the term "maximise" doesn't mean what it does on other platforms, and really it's a misnomer entirely. "Optimise" would be a better adjective, and its behaviour differs slightly depending on the app. For example, in Safari it'll resize the browser window to what it thinks is best for the content you're viewing.

Thankfully, tools like you've discovered address this behaviour and add a lot of other useful window management features anyway.

<comment><USER24> The weird thing is the behavior doesn't seem to be predictable. I just maximized my screen with Magnet (cause window to stretch out both horizontally and vertically), then I option-clicked on the Green Streetlight - <USER2> happened. Then I made the window a bit narrower. Clicked again. Nothing happened. Then I made it a bit shorter. Clicked Again - Window stretched up to top, but didn't change width. Made it narrower. Clicked again. Window returned to previous width. Clicked again, this time returned to the same narrower size as one step previous.

It seems like the Option+Click on the streetlight is kind of like a toggle of the last two previous sizes, but not always - sometimes it stretches to the top, sometimes it doesn't do anything.

I've been a dedicated OS X user since 10.3 - and, despite spending 15-20 minutes at a stretch every year or so (such as tonight) - I've never really understood what the green button is supposed to do. I kind of find it amazing that such a horribly inconsistent user interface control has persisted for 15+ years.

But yet - Magnet (much like Spectacle before it) does exactly what I want. Ctrl+Option+Enter = Maximize window (which is exactly what I bet 99% of people want the Green Button to do)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Saw "OS X", "Lua", and "automation" and immediately assumed Steven Degutis was behind this...lo-and-behold: [https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/blob/master/CREDI...](https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/blob/master/CREDITS.md)

Awesome work! (And if you haven't already, check out some of Steven's other projects. Very fun/interesting code.)

</comment><comment><USER27> I have always lamented the lack of such automation techniques on Linux. Even though Linux systems are open and free software platforms, their desktop interfaces are ironically less programmable as compared to OSX and Windows.

<comment><USER28> There's [http://javauto-lang.org/](http://javauto-lang.org/) and [http://www.sikuli.org/](http://www.sikuli.org/) that work on Linux

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've started writing a Hammerspoon config inspired by Spacemacs if anyone interested. [https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer](https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer)

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice. I recently gotten into playing Dolphin emulator, but it doesn't disable the screensaver and mine is set to turn on after one minute. I was looking for a way to listen for a certain app to open and set the the screensaver to never turn on and reset it to one minute when the app is closed. It seemed like there was no real way to do it aside from polling if the app is still open. I'll see what this can do

<comment><USER30> That was simple: [https://gist.github.com/emehrkay/351a875c96336c530668b31c386...](https://gist.github.com/emehrkay/351a875c96336c530668b31c38639300) seems to work

Im going to change the events to activated/deactived so that I can leave the app on, but only change the screensaver when in use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One thing I don't see mentioned in this thread yet:

You can trigger any action based on app events as well. So anytime an app is launched, quit, hidden, unhidden, etc. - you can then take any other action.

Also, I created a 'modal' set of shortcuts for my machine. By pressing a leader, I switch to 'normal' mode and every letter has a binding. Very powerful.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've been using it for a while. I couldn't tolerate osx without it.

<comment><USER33> Could you give some examples of what you use it for?

<comment><USER32> I have written a custom i3 like window manager that I use for tiling. I use it to catch keyboard shortcuts and open new windows/lock screen/movement commands/etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm using Hammerspoon for fast space switching, placing/resizing/focussing windows on a screen, reconnecting to current wifi network (for the flakey company network), caffeinate (prevent from sleep) and battery notifications (i.e detect when plug gets disconnected).

Here's my configuration: [https://github.com/pstadler/dotfiles/blob/master/hammerspoon...](https://github.com/pstadler/dotfiles/blob/master/hammerspoon/init.lua)

</comment><comment><USER35> Very cool! Is there an equivalent for those of us in the Windows world?

<comment><USER36> Autohotkey[1] has some of the functionality at least:

[1] [https://www.google.com/?q=autohotkey](https://www.google.com/?q=autohotkey)

<comment><USER35> Thanks for the prompt reply! I was looking for more of a you can do things in Lua and get to Windows functions. AutoHotKey looks cool, but it appears to be it's own little language.

I'm pretty fluent in Lua, so being able to leverage ability like Hammerspoon does would be great.

<comment><USER37> AHK is a _terribly_ designed language, but holy hell, you can do some nifty stuff with it. For instance, I like to download music from YouTube and SoundCloud using youtube-dl but I disliked having to open up and manually copy and pasting the URL, etc. I found an AHK script that gets the URL name of the current active Firefox window, edited it a little so that it pipes that URL into a batch file, and now if I find a song I like, all I have to do is hit a hotkey chord and after about 30 seconds, it's in my Music folder. It is a total hack - the kind of thing AHK was made for - but somehow it works!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How are people using this? I haven't automated anything on my OS X machine, but I've also never spent any time thinking about what I might automate.

<comment><USER5> Your computer should be waiting for you, not you waiting for your computer. Any single job you're doing more than once, look at how you can do it easier.

Look at emmet if you do anything involving html.

Maybe setup a process that watches a folder and builds/compiles anything placed in there.

If you need to do a job 10 times that takes 5 hours to do each time and you can automate that job in 30 hours so each job now only takes 1 hour each then you've saved 10 hours of time.

At my work I've made an enewsletter editor app (turned 2 week job down to 3 days job) and a language file editor for the content we output (turned 1 week job into 1 day job)

All that extra time gives you more breathing room between projects, more polish time for those projects or more time to learn new things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Has anyone tried to implement a fully blown list of tests (TDS) for a production Mac app using this ? ( or mjolnir ). In one of my previous assignments, we had to build automation for our Desktop Mac App, We tried AppleScripts and a couple of other open source libraries , None of them worked out we had to settle for manual testing !

</comment><comment><USER40> Something I don't see on the front page, the first few screens of the Getting Started page, or the landing page of the API docs is the version of Lua being used.

Edit: After binding a hotkey to hs.alert.show(_VERSION), it seems to be Lua 5.3.

Edit 2: Oh Hammerspoon has an interactive console. Typing _VERSION in there would have been slightly simpler.

</comment><comment><USER41> My question is, how does this compare with AppleScript? I've had macs for ages, and I used to automate things with AppleScript (I still do, but I used to, too). I imagine there are some things hammerspoon can do that AppleScript can't do and vice versa. Can the two compliment each other? Call each other?

</comment><comment><USER42> This is great. One of my biggest pain points when switching to OS X was finding a good replacement for autohotkey.

<comment><USER43> Touche. Autohotkey can do an awful lot with its custom scripting language, but access to Lua in there would be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Besides the nice Getting Started Guide and the API documentation there is also a Wiki with sample configs [https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/wiki](https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/wiki)

</comment><comment><USER44> Slightly tangential question:

At [http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/#colonsyntax](http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/#colonsyntax) it mentions the following calls are identical:

win:frame()

hs.window.frame(win)

My Lua knowledge is a bit rusty but should the second line not be:

win.frame(win) ?

<comment><USER45> The section in question, "A quick aside on colon syntax", is referring to the code from the section above it, "Introduction to window movement":

        local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
        local f = win:frame()

win is presumable a copy ("instance") of the table hs.window created by focusedWindow().

Meaning hs.window.focusedWindow() returns a copy of the hs.window table.

With that being said, win.frame(win) would just be hs.window.frame(win), so you're also correct. It's just a poorly worded example explaining Lua's colon syntax feature.

<comment><USER40> More specifically, hs.window.focusedWindow() returns a userdata, with a metatable where the __index entry is the hs.window table. This means that looking up entries on the returned win object (e.g. looking up win.frame) will end up looking up the same key on the hs.window table. Or in other words, it's not literally a copy of the table, but it behaves like it. It's prototype- based inheritance, similar to JavaScript.

<comment><USER45> I didn't actually look at the implementation of these functions and tables, but yea, I am fairly familiar with Lua and metatables from my days of working on WoW addons.

As for JavaScript, my opinion is that Lua is everything JavaScript should have been: A clean, minimal, sanely designed, language. JavaScript on the other hand is nothing but mistakes piled upon mistakes. It's really disheartening to see JavaScript get shoved into places Lua fits better, like as Gnome Shell's scripting language. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was just trying to write my custom Swift Accessibility Application, but hopefully Hammerspoon will suffice. Then I might get rid of Spectacle and SmartScroll, which are nice, but I do not need all these features.

Then I can just put a Lua file in my dotfiles.

</comment><comment><USER46> Could this, say, automate the conversion of a folder of Word docs to Pages format? Because I've just tried to do this with AppleScript, and cannot, for the life of me, find the right incantation to get Pages to save the open doc.

</comment><comment><USER47> Oh how this tool reminds me of the good old PowerPro for Windows... ([http://powerpro.cresadu.com](http://powerpro.cresadu.com))

</comment><comment><USER48> Currently I use spectacle and magnet for window management and will setup hammerspoon later today. It looks great and the documentation is impressive! Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how easy it would be to tap into the Accessibility API? I would like to create an NLP interface for visually impaired, using intents.

<comment><USER50> It's actually built on the OSX accessibility APIs afaik

<comment><USER49> Aha! Very cool; should look deeper. Don't know if there is any ultimate connection, but the fact that LuaJit and Torch7 go together invites exploration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> How does it compare to mjolnir?

<comment><USER52> Mjolnir is decentralized and modularized, where everything is a plugin. Hammerspoon is batteries-included, where everything is built in. Neither is better or worse, they're just different approaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> There's so many positive comments here. What's going on?

<comment><USER54> Exactly my thoughts.

<comment><USER55> My thoughts - It gives people powerful scriptability over things they couldn't control before. It has been refined down a few products/generations so its molded for more people to find it useful. It is free. Nobody is trying to sell anything or take anything away. So, maybe there is no need for any negativity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Very cool.

Can people give some real world examples of what they are using this for?

<comment><USER57> After jumping through some hoops, I now have caps lock usable as a shortcut button. Here's some things I do with it:

CAPS + 1 = Bring up Bash

CAPS + 2 = Bring up IntelliJ

CAPS + 3 = Bring up Chrome

CAPS + 4 = Bring up Geany

CAPS + 5 = Bring up SourceTree

CAPS + F1 = Chat software

CAPS + F2 = Email

CAPS + F = Full screen the current app (But not really fullscreen - it's like option + green button, except width too)

CAPS + W = Cycle the wifi

CAPS + V = Paste text from the clipboard by typing it in, accounting for tab indentations. This is useful for copying things from Outlook into Confluence. Stupid Confluence.

<comment><USER40> I've always found that mapping Caps Lock to Ctrl is the most useful thing you can do with it.

<comment><USER58> I like mapping it to cmd-shift-alt-ctrl. Lets you add a whole new set of hotkeys that are a pain to press otherwise.

<comment><USER57> That's what I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Pretty excited to try this out! Thanks for sharing!</comment>


FourD.js: A dynamic graph visualization library - <AUTHOR> http://lowrekey.github.io/fourd.js/

<comment><USER2> wish we could move around the viewpoint not just zoom/in/out :)</comment>


Microsoft Launches Outlook for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/29/microsoft-launches-outlook-for-ios-and-android/ <comment><USER2> This is just a rebranded Accompli and not a true e-mail client.

From the privacy policy: "We provide a service that indexes and accelerates delivery of your email to your device. That means that our service retrieves your incoming and outgoing email messages and securely pushes them to the app on your device."

So it basically doesn't work if you're trying to reach an on-premise Exchange server via VPN.

<comment><USER3> Even for hosted email, it would violate most corporate infosec policies.

<comment><USER4> I installed it and was starting to like it. I really, really love Google Inbox and want it so desperately to support our hospital Outlook server.

It never occurred to me that installing "Microsoft Outlook for Android" would mean "upload all your hospital email to some acquihired cloud". When Google abandoned the Email app in Lollipop and forced us all to add our Outlook accounts to the Gmail app, I was concerned (Google does explain quite clearly that this is just a UI thing and that it's not merging the email into the Gmail servers at all) that I would have to go back to those abominations in the Play Store since all the Outlook clients on Android suck and K9 refuses to work with our Exchange server. And here Microsoft releases Outlook for Android and I was all excited for nothing.

Thank god I didn't receive any emails containing PHI while I had it enabled.

<comment><USER5> Try touchdown instead?

<comment><USER4> Touchdown has always been buggy (it loves to go into battery-draining fits) and is extremely buggy on Lollypop. It also hasn't been updated in tech-eons.

It is so extremely frustrating to have to deal with a corporate Outlook server on Android. That's why I was excited that Microsoft finally put out something.

<comment><USER5> Shame this is simplistic to the point of nearly being useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Installed, started and then realized that you have to give them your credentials so their server can download your mail rather than the app doing this. I understand the benefits of these cloud mail checkers but this is just a 'no go' for me. Too bad.

<comment><USER7> They should implement OAuth2.0, then there's no need to give them your password. Meanwhile creating an app specific password might do as well?

<comment><USER8> OAuth is implemented for products that support it, such as Google and Gmail accounts. Exchange doesn't support OAuth. See [https://www.acompli.com/privacy-policy/](https://www.acompli.com/privacy- policy/).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Same interface as accompli. In fact accompli is really good.

<comment><USER10> It is. Microsoft acquired it, so they probably pulled a Sparrow. :)

<comment><USER11> I would add that Acompli isn't on the AppStore anymore so it's probably a pure rebranding of the app.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I didn't even notice that. Looks like the Outlook app doesn't have the bottom buttons with links to e-mail and calendar, which would be a real bummer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> About time. I have bought Nine for Exchange stuff because Outlook for Android just didn't cut it while Nine is basically perfect. I hope this will raise the bar.

Edit : no support for aliases. Well, it's not suitable for me then.

<comment><USER13> I bought Nine for Exchange some time ago and Outlook still is far behind Nine.

The first thing I wondered about was remote wipe and password policy. Outlook does not enforce them... but still downloads your mail to third-party! That's a big no-no. The very nice feature of Nine is ability to sandbox the remote wipe and password policies to app only - very nice, if you are contractor using your own device with account on your customer's Exchange.

Another thing is Calendar - Nine creates calendar provider and the system Calendar app will display it together with your own. Outlook has its own Calendar and you have to switch between them. You cannot see your agenda in single list. Same with contacts.

Nine also allows encrypting and signing messages.

So far, I don't see any reason switching from Nine. It was 8 EUR well spent.

<comment><USER8> Per their security policy, the app and servers respect exchange initiated remote wipes see section 3 "User data retention" at [https://www.acompli.com/security/](https://www.acompli.com/security/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> o0-0o I thought I remember reading that Acompli was developed in China as well. So does this mean that their servers are still in China? Just curious to see if anyone knows. I couldn't find any info on that.

</comment><comment><USER14> That will be a selling point for Windows-based smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER15> Now if only i could access my Outlook.com contacts & calendar from my Mac. If anyone has any solutions I'd love to hear them

</comment><comment><USER16> My family is subscribed to Office365, largely to get OneDrive. I am going to wait a few days for more reviews to come in and then probably try it on my iPad and droid phone.

I have a custom domain name for email and I use gmail. I would think that mapping a custom domain to Office365's email hosting and using gmail separately in the new apps would be well supported.

<comment><USER17> As others have noted, this is a rebranded Accompli. Reviews on Accompli should be relevant.

I find Accompli to be decent and I'm happy to see Microsoft move quickly with it post acquisition. I have noticed a few crashes on my Nexus 5, but in general it works well. I would recommend it over the Google provided Android solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's really excellent to see Microsoft understanding the need for cross platform support. I'm much more likely to trust them as a user, knowing that I'll have support for whatever device I'm on in the future.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is a painful app for me to use. I have a subfolder of people I need to deal with that mail gets sorted into but this I have to drill down to get to it and can't set it as a default view.

This thing is simplistic and horrible.

</comment><comment><USER19> The best feature is that your corporate IT goons are no longer able to remote- wipe your entire device simply because you hooked up to work email. With the Outlook app they can only wipe your email.

</comment><comment><USER20> From the app:

To use this app, your mailbox must be running on

* Exchange Server 2013 CU3

That requirement may hurt adoption.

<comment><USER6> From the app description: 'Outlook works with Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.'

<comment><USER21> And (sadly) that covers 90% of email setups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If your Exchange sysadmin blocks iPhone access, this app won't work. For that reason, I'm sticking with CloudMagic, which works regardless of Exchange device-level permissions.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't CloudMagic collect data in their cloud to offer push as well ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The OWA mobile app for IOS would be an embarrassment if released by a few developers working in their spare time, much less a multi-billion dollar company.

</comment><comment><USER25> I saw the comments here about giving your password to Microsoft, but on iPhone it uses OAuth (at least for GMail and hosted Google accounts).

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if it properly supports shared mailboxes, thats the one thing third party clients never properly support.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am happy to see more high-quality native mail apps on iOS.. Competition is good.

</comment><comment><USER28> Microsoft _Rebrands_ App As Outlook for iOS and Android, would be more accurate.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah. Sticking with K-9 mail, thanks. Some of us try to keep our android devices as FOSS as possible.</comment>


A failed dating experiment – Responsiveness Sort - <AUTHOR> https://tech.okcupid.com/a-failed-dating-experiment/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if they ran any "experiments" (user research) before requiring real names?

[https://gizmodo.com/okcupids-new-real-name-policy-is- dumb-18...](https://gizmodo.com/okcupids-new-real-name-policy-is- dumb-1821535975)

I deleted my account after that fiaso

<comment><USER3> You know you can just enter a fake name, right?

<comment><USER4> great ice breaker, so why do you have a fake name on here—what are you trying to hide?

<comment><USER3> If your name is "Ask Me Later", it's pretty obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So many charts and such a boring conclusion.

Why is the male attractiveness axis flipped in that big blue box? Why is it not mentioned that the turquoise area stretches only on one axis and not the other? Does that mean that super attractive women are more likely to engage with less attractive men than the other way around? I struggle to understand the chart.

Their old data posts (pre-acquisition) were exciting and captivating like short novels with few, but very clear charts. This made me pity professors at uni that have to read uninspired papers and theses at the end of the semester. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER6> This link is a 404 now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Their network seems to literally be on fire

</comment><comment><USER8> > Our network is literally on fire

I'd bet it isn't.</comment>


Bootstrapped GitHub Now Raising a Round from Andreessen Horowitz - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/21/bootstrapped-github-now-raising-a-round-from-andreessen-horowitz/ <comment><USER2> I think it's easy to over-estimate the success and ubiquity of GitHub if you spend all day on HN. The real money-make for SCM is still Perforce, according to schacon at a somewhat recent drink-up in Boston.

These questions about GitHub vs. Pinterest are revealing in that I think many folk on HN don't realize what a relatively small community of developers this is. Relative to the tens of millions of folk on Pinerest. Heck, GitHub's front page reveals they have only 1.6 million users.

I wonder if their growth curve has started to flatten out. I hope they have a great plan/vision for what to do with the money, because running GitHub ad infinitum as an immensely successful small software company would seem to be a dream to me.

<comment><USER3> Well, I'm not surprised Perforce wins the money-making contest... it IS quite expensive, particularly compared to git.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to agree about the apparent popularity of git vs its actual popularity. I don't think I've ever met anybody who's used git professionally, and in fact I don't even know that many people who've actually used git at all. Everybody I meet (though I haven't met absolutely everybody!) uses perforce if they can afford it, and SVN if they can't. SVN supports binary files tolerably well, and perforce supports them fine. perforce keeps working fine even when your depot's head revision (if that's the right term) gets to 300GB. Well... SVN probably doesn't do that. But it's still cheap.

<comment><USER4> As a Ruby/JavaScript developer I find it very bizarre that you don't know anyone that has used git professionally. Pretty much everyone I know uses it professionally and I'm a bit taken aback when someone hasn't even tried it.

<comment><USER2> This is my point, exactly. Just because practically everyone on HN is a Ruby/JS/Python dev doesn't mean the world at large reflects that breakdown. I am a bit taken aback that you can't imagine a C# or Java dev who has never had to touch git.

<comment><USER5> I've met someone who worked at two large and conservative workplaces where his mission has been to set up an internal Git service (a slow task thanks to an archaic IT) so they can move some of their projects to that. According to him, institutionally this company prefers dealing with large vendors with big support contracts, but there's strong demand for Git coming from developers and contractors. The enterprise world isn't completely segregated, and developers would be coming in contact with Git easily enough, for example through the breadth and depth of GitHub projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two questions:

\- How is GitHub worth less than Pintrest?

\- What could GitHub possibly gain from raising money? It's clearly not about money. Is this a liquidity event? Couldn't they just issue a dividend for that, they've clearly got plenty of cash… Or is this about the credibility of having a valuation. In that case, couldn't they have gone public? Amazon went public at a sub-$500M valuation, and look at them now!

Edit: come to think of it, I can see the possibility of wanting to acquire other companies, and not currently having the capital to do so. That's about it.

<comment><USER7> > How is GitHub worth less than Pinterest?

I'll speculate.

Github's fighting a losing game. They are trying to charge for something they are also giving away for free, and their target market is people who are uniquely qualified to replace them. There are plenty of quality Github alternatives around right now. To stay on top they have to continue to be at the forefront development-wise and they have to continue to have the majority of developer attention to reap the network effects. It's precarious.

Compare to Pinterest. They make money, ostensibly, from every product someone pins. People pin lots of products, and the people doing the pinning and the browsing have higher conversion rates than people browsing Google or other sites looking for things to spend money on. Pinterest is also a brand; it will be hard to get everyone using Pinterest to switch just because a better version exists somewhere else. People can collaborate with Git without using Github; the only tangible loss is the pull request feature.

It takes Pinterest less work to convert a byte of bandwidth into profit. Not only do they need less development effort moving forward, they also stand better odds of making money on some random user.

<comment><USER8> If Github is losing sign me up for some of that please.

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying they're losing, I'm saying they're fighting a losing game.

<comment><USER4> How is Pinterest not also fighting a losing game? I can see how it's harder for Github to stay up with competitors because their target market is more savvy and often tries out new tools. But doesn't Pinterest also suffer the risk of some new social sharing site appearing that appeals to users in a better or just different way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised by this. Tom Preston-Werner's talk at Startup School 2010, which had a strong influence on me and many of my friends (we still refer to it often), was very anti-VC.

Here is a link to the talk, and a relevant quote from the introduction:

<http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754>

"But for me, I don't have to worry about these things, because GitHub has never taken any funding, ever. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can avoid this mess of VC, if you so choose, by telling you a little bit of my story."

<comment><USER10> 1- Andreesen Horowitz isn't just any VC

2- They already avoided most of the problems of VCs by getting to profit.

<comment><USER9> You're right. In his blog post about the talk[1], he makes it clear that his emphasis is on bootstrapping to profitability.

"The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness."

[1]: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for- happin...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for- happiness.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An "impressive" 600 or 800 million?

This makes the Instagram deal look even more out of proportion. Github ought to be worth a _lot_ more, it's a profitable huge business with real assets, used by millions everyday for _work_.

But the question is: what could they do with more money that they can't do now?

<comment><USER12> I heard that large companies expect a higher level of "enterprise" support from Github. That's where the real money is, and a small company just cannot scale easily in this respect.

Proper enterprise support requires customer representatives, phone lines, sales people. All that is expensive and requires capital.

Of course, this is just a wild guess. I have no firsthand information.

<comment><USER13> Github's support for Enterprise is atrocious at best.

But we still pay for it, because what else is there? :)

<comment><USER14> <http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/overview>

<comment><USER15> Having used both github and some Atlassian products (though, to be fair, not Stash), my instinctive reaction is: No. No. No, No, No. No, No. No.

That might be wrong, but I'd need to see a lot of evidence first.

<comment><USER16> I can't recommend any Atlassian products. They removed the markup editor from their wiki product; their sole remaining choice -- the rich text editor -- its a piece of shit that is actively hostile to any dev stuck using it. They're doing it to, in effect, crap on developers in order to prefer people who won't use a markup language [1]. It sucks beyond belief for entering code or tables, and is the usual very annoyingly broken rich text experience: tab and enter don't do what you think they will and aren't consistent; they make chrome freeze regularly; and you can't really use it without repeatedly taking your hands of the keyboard to touch a mouse. Just awful.

[1] [http://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/11/why-we-removed-wiki- marku...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/11/why-we-removed-wiki-markup- editor-in-confluence-4/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes sense in a "as go the alpha geeks, so goes the rest of the world... eventually" sort of way.

Git and github-style content-management requires a mental model very different from the mass/mass-enterprise market... but the tech-leaders way of thinking will reach there over time via repeated exposure, _and_ Github is doing a great job of providing the benefits in approachable steps, and a whole package of related modern hosting/distribution/authoring assistance.

Why wouldn't presentations, spreadsheets, and all other forms of writing eventually be amenable to dvcs-style revision control?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised that Github is taking on capital, they must have some pretty hefty goals in mind because my understanding is that they're quite profitable. It's like taking out a home loan after building your own home with your own cash and labour.

What would the repercussions be from taking cash from Andreessen Horowitz? Will the original Githubber's keep their control over the company? I'm honestly a little worried, but at the same time if they want the cash to expand and make Github better, then I am all for it.

</comment><comment><USER19> As the founder of a self-funded startup, I need to be careful with how I spend my savings. So far, my costs are $20/month for cloudflare (ssl), $2/week on AppEngine (still working off that free $50 credit I got for being an early adopter) and $7/month happily paid for Github hosting. More power to them, I've been around open source for a long time now and this is the first company that has revolutionized software development for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Given that they haven't ever taken any VC money, I wonder if they're doing this so the founders can cash out.

<comment><USER21> They had ~ 70 employees. This implies real revenues. What makes you think the founders couldn't cash out?

<comment><USER20> Why else would they be raising money at this point after being so staunchly against it in the past?

<comment><USER22> Acquisitions? There are quite a few developer tools (and the developers of such) that would be useful to the company. For example, things like <https://sifterapp.com/> or even developers of apps like TextMate, Sublime Text 2, companies like <http://www.panic.com/>, time tracking apps, etc - anything that the average GitHub developer would be likely to use, even.

My list might be a bit frivolous, but money would give options, at least.

(Edit: Actually, why not Heroku style cloud hosting too? The code's already on the service ready to roll..)

<comment><USER23> That's exactly what is wrong with companies. You don't need to acquire every whiz-bang app there is. Focus on your core competencies and on improving your product. Acquiring stuff for show and because it's "in your market" seems strategic on the surface but often times (unless for the talent) is the first mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you browse through github's blog you can easily see what happened the last few months:

* github managed to hire & acquihire top talent like crazy

* their UI/UX people really focused on making github's UI more consistent and usable

* they spent time to go native

* the enterprise solution got a lot of love

so they have huge momentum and spend their time very well. personally I think they should look into making jobs.github.com THE resource to hire great talent. In a way github already is very relevant in the hiring process but similar to carreers.stackoverflow there is huge untapped opportunity to disrupt the hiring market.

Anyway I think github has a bright future ahead and I'm very curious about what will happen in the coming months.

</comment><comment><USER25> Andreessen Horowitz is a GitHubber!

<comment><USER26> Blah. I hate those blog posts. I try to keep my RSS feeds extremely light, but I really want GitHub feature announcements. I wish their product "broadcasts" had a feed separate from the company log.

<comment><USER27> For just the features, subscribe to broadcasts[1] rather than the entire blog.[2] I couldn't find a mention of this on the website itself; instead, I just guessed the URL and it seems to work.

[1] <https://github.com/blog/broadcasts.atom>

[2] <https://github.com/blog.atom>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why is defunkt the only listed founder of github on pandodaily?

<comment><USER29> Who cares? Pando Daily is a startup, funded by venture capitalists, that covers startups and venture capitalists. I love how at the end they mention that they are funded by Andreessen Horowitz, feigning journalistic integrity. This is just the silicon valley machine at work.

<comment><USER28> > Who cares?

It's not correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't believe this. Github and Particularly TPW, and their successful bootstrap was the main inspiration for me to startup.

As many has said it, Github > Instagram + Pinterest. I would say at least 5B$.

</comment><comment><USER31> Did they consider a loan?

<comment><USER5> I'd like to think so, but I imagine that as a fast-growing company in a tech niche they are unusual enough that a bank wouldn't be qualified to evaluate their credit-worthiness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> No doubt Atlassian sees GitHub quickly approaching in their rear view mirror

<comment><USER33> They did a while ago; hence buying BitBucket and coming out with Stash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty light on details and it kind of makes no sense. Everyone loves the product and it's a (apparently very) profitable business. What can Andreesen Horowitz do to help them other than come in and do another bubbly ol' flipparoo?

<comment><USER35> It allows founders to take money off the table without selling out to a company who would have interests other than growing github.

<comment><USER36> How does that make sense for the VC though? They're not in the business of cashing founders out.

<comment><USER35> One senerio would be give the founders enough that if they swing for the fences and strike out they still have enough. This aligns incentives and removes risk from founders.

In addition, if founders want to take cash off the table and that is what it takes to make a great investment in github you do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I still remember the founder Tom speaking at the Startup School (2010) and advising around 1000 people on why NOT raise funds. As I still remember the old About page of Github: "VC FUNDING = 0". LOL

Enjoy: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs>

</comment><comment><USER38> If I were to guess, this is probably to help them move off of Rackspace onto their own hosting solution in order to appeal to that enterprise customer segment that keeps getting mentioned.

<comment><USER39> But GitHub's enterprise application is something enterprises can host themselves, inside their firewall. <https://enterprise.github.com/>

<comment><USER38> I'm referring to the use-case where it's something that's truly cloud- based–think more like Salesforce. Most enterprises are (slowly) shifting to this.</comment></comment></comment>


Who Are These Economists, Anyway? (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/Thought_Action.pdf <comment><USER2> For anyone looking for a cohesive macroeconomic theory drawing from the economists mentioned here (e.g. Minsky, Godley, and others at the Levy Institute), I highly recommended taking a gander at Modern Monetary Theory

a brief overview: [https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of- mo...](https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of-modern- monetary-theory/)

A not so brief overview: [http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/06/modern- money-theo...](http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/06/modern-money-theory- primer-on.html)

<comment><USER3> TL;DR: MMT starts by saying that governments that manage their own currencies have unlimited spending ability – they can simply create money when they need it. And that's obviously true, to the extent that people are willing to accept that money in exchange for their goods and services (an extent which is not infinite). Then, building on that premise, MMT basically claims that nobody needs to get hurt when governments create money out of thin air. The explanations for this are pretty wonky and hard to follow, but they amount to saying that the theory generally predicts no harmful inflation of the currency.

Analysis: Hasn't mankind already concluded that governments can't just create and spend money boundlessly without harming the economy and the people who constitute it? I'm looking at Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe right now, where the governments have each created money to finance their spending, and people are truly suffering as a result. And those are just some contemporary examples – human history offers many more, and they're quite consistent. If MMT doesn't predict inflation as a result of arbitrary creation of currency, then it seems we can conclude MMT is incorrect.

Radical alternative theory: Governments should be fiscally responsible, practicing balanced budgets and promoting currency stability. Outlandish, true. But it turns out that historically this has been a very winning formula. More efficient economies, less corrupt governments, fewer innocent people getting hurt.

<comment><USER4> >>" If MMT doesn't predict inflation as a result of arbitrary creation of currency, then it seems we can conclude MMT is incorrect."

That is not at all what MMT says and I don't understand how an honest reader of the MMT literature would arrive to that conclusion.

What they say is that public debt and public deficits are irrelevant (there goes your "outlandish true" of balanced budgets) but they also say that inflation is the most important constraint in public spending.

>> And that's obviously true, to the extent that people are willing to accept that money in exchange for their goods and services (an extent which is not infinite)

In the MMT framework, there is always demand for the currency in what taxes have to be payed. That's obviously true. That doesn't mean that inflation is not a factor.

By the way, most cases of hyperinflation in history, including the infamous Zimbabwe, are due to a supply shock ([http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773)).

<comment><USER5> > What they say is that public debt and public deficits are irrelevant (there > goes your "outlandish true" of balanced budgets) but they also say that > inflation is the most important constraint in public spending.

I heard this story in a debate between an MMT economist and an Austrian economist

Imagine a husband and wife having the following conversation :

 _Husband : Let 's go and buy a new mansion, a Lamborghini and a private jet

Wife : Are you sure we have enough money to do all that ?

Husband : Well, if we don't, I can always pick up my shotgun and hold up the nearby bank

Wife : Are you crazy ? You could go to prison. Or get shot by the police

Husband : Well, I know that. But I just wanted to point out that not having enough money was irrelevant. Going to jail or getting shot was the most important constraint from spending all that money._

<comment><USER6> This misses THE central point of MMT, the fundamental difference between currency issuer (souvereign authority) and currency user (households, firms, regional governments, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For me the sad part of "economics" and their number trickeries is the unsustainable usage of natural resources. I could argue all they really did is inflate current value and allow "loaning" from future resources to boost the current economy. Global warming in this context is the (possibly too late) push back in this systems equilibrium.

<comment><USER8> Regard for natural resources is actually a pretty mainstream idea in economics. The concepts of tragedy of the commons, public goods, pollution as a negative externality, etc. are quite well-established.

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

<comment><USER7> I'm far from knowledgeable on the technicalities of economics (I'm in the software engineering business), but observing the dialogue that takes place between economists and seeing the results, its hard to accept economists actually make effort to factor this in, my experience is that they are only reacting to public outcry.

I find it hard to believe they even have the tools to factor environmental impact into their models. (don't tell me factoring damage due to sea rise as a "tool".)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IMHO the important question is, as consumers of expertise, how do we manage its risk? Can we predict the risk, the likelihood and/or magnitude of failures?

One issue might be our standards of 'success' and 'failure' for economists and other experts. The standard probably shouldn't be, 'predict 100% of economic events accurately', though that's an ideal to strive for. IIRC, some geologists were put on trial in Italy for failing to predict an earthquake; AFAIK there's no known way to do it reliably. Is 'predict 75% accurately' realistic for economics? Too high? Too easy? Is the thing even measurable? I don't know. And when the housing market crashes, saying 'I got the other 3 predictions right' doesn't matter much to people nor is it evidence that you weren't incompetent in this case. Maybe a standard should be, 'no incorrect predictions on critical issues' (i.e., it's better to say nothing than risk being wrong), but maybe that would result in no predictions on critical issues; also, in many situations such as earthquakes, no prediction infers the null hypothesis: No earthquakes today. Regardless, likely any standard should rely on degree of error: The housing market predictions weren't off by a few percent but by orders of magnitude.

Can we create a model that accurately predicts where expertise fails and its magnitude? Perhaps large errors simply occur in unstable systems which have high magnitude variation in outcomes (e.g., earthquake or no earthquake), and thus unavoidably larger errors. Also, I'd expect accuracy to correlate with (high volume of quality research + consensus). If there's consensus based on low volume of quality research, that seems ripe for failure. Based on only a little research, it was popularly said (I don't know if it was consensus of scientists) in the 1970s that there would be an ice age soon; that was wrong. Based on a mountain of research, scientific consensus accurately has predicted global warming. But I'm guessing at the factors involved in predicting the risk of expertise. Has anyone researched this?

<comment><USER10> Why trust expertise as such? If an expert can't give a convincing argument for their claims, why believe them?

<comment><USER9> > If an expert can't give a convincing argument for their claims, why believe > them?

IME, there's weak correlation between an expert's persuasiveness to a non- expert on one hand and the truth on the other hand:

* As an expert in my field, I could convince non-experts of almost anything; they have no idea what I'm talking about: Is it true? Have I omitted key things? Twisted other things? I wouldn't do that, but I've seen others do it. As an example we're all familiar with, U.S. intelligence officials have said, 'we're only collecting metadata about U.S. citizens, not content, so don't worry'. Obviously these experts knew that bulk collection of metadata is just as invasive as content, but it convinced the non-experts who don't understand that.

* In fields in which I'm non-expert, I used to think I could evaluate expert claims based on their persuasiveness. I was wrong - I was a mark, a sucker; I was the kind of person that propagandists, experts in persuasion, count on; my overestimation of my own powers, my ego, was my weakness. Eventually I observed a pattern: Later, when more facts came out or I knew more, what had been persuasive was actually BS. And a key point: It hadn't _become_ wrong; it was always wrong and I had been conned by it. And what about those situations where I just never learned I was wrong, and the con continued indefinitely? In fields where I read a variety of experts and have some minor sophistication, I've learned that newspaper op-eds, which many find persuasive (people love to send them to me to read) are not infrequently dogs-t piled on a foundation of horses-t, with a few grains of truth sprinkled on top.

IME, the general wisdom that most people gain through years of painful experience is that persuasiveness has a small place, but far more you need to learn who to trust with what, who not to, and how to tell the difference. That's the only solution.

<comment><USER10> Obviously that's a risk, but so is blind faith in trusted experts. I don't think your examples really relate to this situation, because there wasn't a convincing expert argument that the housing bubble was economically sustainable, the arguments that it was unsustainable were simply ignored by trusted experts, for the most part. I mean, I think I found Nouriel Roubini through a post by Brad DeLong, but I don't think DeLong ever actually addressed his concerns.

<comment><USER9> > blind faith in trusted experts

C'mon. There is no way anyone could actually read my original comment and think I advocated blind faith in experts.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough. I didn't intend to attack that straw man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because the writing is so excellent that I found it a pleasure to read.

</comment><comment><USER11> One point which I haven't seen made here is that perhaps economics is a reductionist approach to something which cannot be easily modelled in a reductionist way.

Nobody here expects everything we know about Physics to become largely irrelevant tomorrow. But deep within is the assumption that the underlying models we build today will hold true tomorrow. An electron will always be an electron.

Now let's look at biology: a frog today may not be a frog two-hundred years ago. Microbiologists are finding new species that simply didn't exist 50 years ago. But there's a shred of something fundamental there at the physical level: a reaction involving biological building blocks can be deemed to be as true as hundred years from now; whether or not organisms develop more stable sets of chemical reactions.

Psychology and social sciences are changing because people are changing and their environment is changing. Pretty much the only thing that remains constant is that people have fundamental needs. As people become aware of cognitive biases, and more are exploited by them, suppressing them becomes not just an issue of utility but of survival.

Yet somehow, we expect economics, which in many ways is the study of a very dynamic system which builds on social sciences where the underlying rules are changing and the very reductionist terms we are using are changing, to yield results which are accurate and work at all times. Can we build better macroeconomic models? Almost certainly. Will they be valid in 100 years time? That depends.

If we think to Physics, Thermodynamics gives a field that seems to be universally true -- if you come up with a model that violates the second law of Thermodynamics, it's fair to say your model is wrong. It doesn't matter if you're studying distant stars or subatomic particles. At the same time its predictions are somewhat vague -- we can derive upper and lower bounds on things, and say with an almost certain degree of belief what cannot happen and use this to derive models that are consistent.

We don't seem to have much like that for economics, although if we focus on resources we can clearly see there is a physical upper bound. That seems like it might be a better direction to approach the problem in than from the end were even the idea that employers employ people to create more value than the money they pay them cannot be taken to be universally true.

Of course, nobody has any incentive for denying most Physics, with the exception of the 2nd law of thermodynamics -- because there is immense money to be made by charlatans promising infinite energy in exchange for lots and lots of money. Given economics deals with matters that can have direct implications for those with lots of money, we would be naive to not assume the same to have happened there.

</comment><comment><USER12> Mainstream macroeconomic theory -- both in its "freshwater" and "saltwater" traditions -- has become mainstream because of a variety of reasons. The OP quotes Keynes:

"That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."[a]

That rings true: New macroeconomic theories can become mainstream only if they earn the support (for example, by favoring the vested interests) of educational institutions, governmental institutions, and -- last but not least -- the business establishment.

[a] [https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/co...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/complete.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> As an economics neophyte, I found this engaging, if a little beyond me. Can someone explain it in 5yo terms?

<comment><USER14> Economists have more in common with priests than scientists.

<comment><USER15> That's the vibe of the article, but of course it's nonsense.

Economists' objective is to collect observations and use that to build predictive theories. Therefore in intent (and largely in method, depending on the area of economy) they are exactly like scientists. Whether they are successful at it or not is another question.

In practice economists guess a lot, as do priests and research scientists, and many other people. (Clarification: I use here "research scientists" to distinguish them from people who have been trained as scientists but in their day-to-day don't really occupy themselves with questions with unknown answers. Of course, those people don't guess at all. They are usually either teacher/professors or engineers.)

<comment><USER16> what's not nonsense is to view humans as rational beings, and the free market as the perfect system.

What it says is that economists should include more psychology and less mathematics in their theories.

<comment><USER15> > what's not nonsense is to view humans as rational beings, and the free > market as the perfect system.

> What it says is that economists should include more psychology and less > mathematics in their theories.

Those are some really groundbreaking ideas, I can't believe no one has thought of that before.

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

<comment><USER16> Of course some people thought of this. That's explanained in the article

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The academic side of economics pushes towards norms like Math and Physics (that's what gets you prestige). AKA you come up with something like the Black-Scholes model and you've got yourself a Nobel Prize [1].

Which is cool, but skips over the aspects of economics related to unpredictable bags of meat buying things that are more like psychology/sociology and other "soft" sciences [2]

On that note: one thing I didn't see mentioned in the article or the discussion here was prediction markets. Prediction markets are interesting as its a meeting point of the two sides. "Think your model is better? put $50 in and we'll see in a month". I really wish they were more widely used/officially accepted, but the stigma of "betting" has pretty well killed them.

1 - [https://www.investopedia.com/university/options- pricing/blac...](https://www.investopedia.com/university/options- pricing/black-scholes-model.asp) 2 - [https://xkcd.com/1520/](https://xkcd.com/1520/)

<comment><USER18> Never mind that said Nobel is the ultimate insider price, given out by the Swedish national bank and set up long after Nobel was dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a rating agency for economists and their predictions?</comment>


Ruby On Rails Security Guide - b-man http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A very nice list. Readable, explanatory, and _full_ of good suggestions. Almost all focused on session / injection / xss attacks, but that's probably the biggest threat you've got. I wish I'd seen it sooner; _most_ I've seen before, but the regex one in particular was new to me, and it really only takes _one_ , doesn't it?

Anyone know of anything notable they missed? I'd love to know, and it could be useful to get it added to the list too.

</comment><comment><USER2> The regular expression surprised me. I'm really used to using ^$ in php and it works as intended but apparently in Ruby the correct delimiters are \A\z.

<comment><USER3> ^ and $ also work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of my rails apps was hijacked via xss injection last week. I wish I had read this guide sooner. I highly recommend for any rails admin.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks. I've read this before, but it's always good to reread it.</comment>


DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Sources, Costs and References - <AUTHOR> http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2011/03/diy-scanning-electron-microscope_26.html

<comment><USER2> First time I heard of anyone having an electron microscope outside of a lab was DirecTV hacking about 6 years ago. While this is amazing, the examples of amateur scientists being able to compete with the complex nature of modern science would make Ben Franklin I think rather upset. That being said, amateurs are doing amazing things in the fields of radio, astronomy, and perhaps as always math.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does privacy matter? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Could you provide your bank details please? Passport or other photo identification would be nice. I'd also like a copy of your browser history for the last 5 or so years, full records of your sexual history, transcriptions of any embarrassing, controversial, or regrettable conversations or interactions you've had, your home address, annotated photographs of your house keys, any vehicle registrations, and uh, you don't happen to know anything about nitroglycerine do you?

You can reply here, in response to this post, I'm okay with that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Things that are fully legal today might not be tomorrow. Things that aren't taboo today might be tomorrow.

Without privacy you can be persecuted at any moment for anything you might have done in the past.

</comment><comment><USER4> Privacy creates a 'safe space' for experimentation and self expression. Destroying it would lead to self censuring and have a chilling effect on personal development. When the only private space is inside your head your freedom (your options) are severely affected, normal life looks more and more like prison. A large, open prison, but still a prison.

That's what it felt like living under communism before 1989 in Eastern Europe when your neighbour, your teacher or your friend could be a state informer ratting you out.

</comment><comment><USER5> There was this recent thread that had a pile of good answers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066101)

</comment><comment><USER6> Good answers here: [https://teachprivacy.com/10-reasons-privacy- matters/](https://teachprivacy.com/10-reasons-privacy-matters/)

</comment><comment><USER7> There are two main reasons I can think of:

1\. If you don't have privacy, governments can collect a psychological profile of you, which can be used to manipulate you at an individual level if they need to, or as a data point in a large data set to manipulate the society as a whole. It's still in it's infancy, but I bet governments are using AI exactly for this kind of thing

2\. If you have something to hide This doesn't need to be anything necessarily illegal or bad, it can just be embarrassing. This actually happened to me. When I was really young, 8-9 years old, I had what psychologists call "play sex" with some cousins. We didn't know what we were doing, but it's enough to mess you up as an adult. Over a decade ago I was dating a girl and things were going south. I thought maybe she thought something was off about me, so I decided I should try to tell her. But I was too embarrassed to tell her in person, so I emailed her telling her what happened when I was young. The relationship pretty much ended there, I kept the email as kind of a way to come to terms with what happened. I never talked to anyone about it before. A few years ago I ended up in a very strange situation. I had graduated with a CS degree from a very good school, but I had trouble landing my first job. After a year of job searching, my grace period for student loans were running out and I had to find anything I could fast. I had a ton of debt. I was taking an online algorithms course to improve my whiteboard interview skills, I asked someone there who lived in a different country whether their company was hiring, he said he'd ask them. After a completely dry spell, the next day I had two recruiters call me and said that their client companies wanted to interview me badly and that they move quickly in hiring. I scheduled the interviews back-to-back. The first company's interview went well, and it was strange because they wanted to hire me immediately, said that I had to accept immediately as I was driving to the next company for interview. It was a low offer but I accepted it, though I went to the second interview anyway to see if I could get a better offer. I went to the second interview, got a much better offer, and they wanted to hire me immediately. The second company was a foreign company, something didn't smell right. But I just shrugged it off, I assumed that sometimes things just line up like that for jobs. So I took the second job and I told the first job that I won't be joining them. I went ahead and arranged everything, rent, transportation, etc. I arranged to ship my car to the new city where I'd be working. Two weeks in I had to call the car place to arrange for where to pick up my car. Instead of getting the car place, it went to some other hotline and an automated voice responded with something like: "You've reached the incest survivor hotline. Congratulations, you're the [X]th caller and you've won a 2 week vacation..." I thought it was odd, I called again. Same message. I waited for the automated voice to end so I could talk to a person, some hispanic guy said it's the incest hotline. I went back to look at the number I needed to call, it was the right one. I called a third time to the same number and I got the actual car place. Someone was trying to threaten or blackmail me, and they obviously managed to hack my email account because I never told anyone else about that. Still I even shrugged even this off as a coincidence, because sometimes weird stuff just happens. But it became very clear over the course of working for that company that I was marked, but I have no idea what I did wrong. It escalated into a very serious situation, I'm surprised I'm still alive today.</comment>


The grid system for London that never happened - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35418272 <comment><USER2> > "A series of public squares, and in the middle of each one a church and > churchyard. It can be extended over and over again - it's a perfect grid > plan"

Wow - I have been extensively mapping Senegal on Openstreetmap and this is a typical pattern there - only with mosque !

<comment><USER3> What brings you to Senegal? I did notice over the past few years that OSM improved significantly in Dakar, although I didn't get to contribute much.

<comment><USER2> I just like Senegal and I have quite a few Senegalese friends in Paris. My Openstreetmap activity there started with cycling there with no usable maps at all in 2008... Some time after coming back I discovered OSM and began making the maps I would have liked to have - also it was a way to remain connected to Senegal. A few years later, with almost 400k changes in 750 commits, Senegal has turned into the main nexus of my mapping activity and I'm now in touch with some of the local mappers. Open JOSM and look at the changelog of just about every object in the Dakar region and you'll likely find my name in half of them !

I'll be in Dakar at the end of the month by the way, for a couple of week with four of my daughters and I intend to join some OSM meetups there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > But Charles II was not keen. He had Knight arrested for suggesting that the > king might benefit financially from such a calamity.

..aaand this kind of thing reminds me why democracy, for all its imperfections, ain't so bad...

<comment><USER5> Counter point, from the wiki article on Charles 2

>Charles attempted to introduce religious freedom for Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence, but the English Parliament forced him to withdraw it

If you want examples of monarchy being worse than democracy, you certainly have plenty of examples with the 2 Charles (There wasn't a civil war for no reason), but there are plenty of examples of democracy being worse than an autocratic system

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say the Parliament of the 1600s was very democratic.

<comment><USER7> But to be fair, if it was more democratic it would have been even more reflexively anti-Catholic at the time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The future-looking photos of the architecturally designed floating houses in Nigeria (bottom of the page) are really interesting.

I imagine that people build floating shantytowns because there is no where else to live, not because they prefer to live on water.

But given those constraints it's neat to think about what engineering and design can do to improve the housing available in those circumstances.

<comment><USER9> The floating houses remind me of China Miéville's novel _The Scar_ , with a floating movable city constructed from thousands of ships lashed together.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "All images subject to copyright."

You shouldn't be allowed to claim copyright for works in the public domain.

<comment><USER11> I believe in the UK you can hold the copyright to the scan/photo of an artwork or image that is out of copyright. So the digital versions of these images are relatively new and the copywrite would be held by the person making the copy.

<comment><USER12> That is an interesting concept. So is it possible to create multiple copyrighted versions of an artwork or image that is out of copyright?

<comment><USER13> It's possible to create multiple derivative works of an out-of-copyright work, each of which will carry its own copyright. E.g. modern Sherlock Holmes stories. The question that matters is whether the scan involved enough creative work to qualify for copyright in its own right; as the sibling says, a simple scan won't, but a thorough restoration might.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What amazes me is how small London was then compared to the huge thing it is today. What constituted "London" in Wren's plan is like a small bit of one part of the city today. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it, but it was just surprising to see it visualized.

<comment><USER15> London itself, as in the City of London, is still only a square mile, it's even called 'The Square Mile'. And the City of London is more-or-less based on the borders of the old Roman city of Londinium. Parts of the Roman city walls are still around today.

Greater London is an amalgamation of the neighbouring boroughs that grew and merged into the London metropolis today. Eg, Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, Camden, etc.

You can see which borough you're in by looking at the street signs.

<comment><USER16> Funnily enough Westminster is it's own city as well, so London consists of 3 cities really.

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

<comment><USER15> Greater London consists of many boroughs or 'cities', way more than three. Each is its own municipality, just like Westminster.

The City of London happens to be one of the smallest, and least populous.

Edit - on rereading this, I realise you may have been referring to the fact that Westminister has 'City' in its name, whereas most others boroughs use the word 'Borough'. I'm not aware of other boroughs in Greater London that are also 'Cities' in that respect.

<comment><USER17> By _far_ the least populous. In the 2011 census it had a population of 7375.

<comment><USER18> Also interesting, those people live only within 4 electoral wards, whereas there are 25 total electoral wards within the City.

Within the remaining 21 electoral wards, votes are controlled by businesses (mostly banks and the like), and the amount of votes that each business receives depends on it's size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A similar thing happened in Detroit, after the fire of 1805. Augustus Woodward designed a plan for the city which was partially implemented, especially in the large avenues leading out of the city center. [1]

[1] [http://www.metrotimes.com/Blogs/archives/2015/06/01/the- detr...](http://www.metrotimes.com/Blogs/archives/2015/06/01/the-detroit-that- never-was-how-the-woodward-plan-died-197-years-ago)

</comment><comment><USER20> Surprised they don't have anything about the rebuilding of Christchurch. 45% of the CBD was destroyed and the rebuild is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you are interested in grids / city planning check out the new book "City on a Grid" about NYC.</comment>


Scientology as a way of marketing your product - <AUTHOR> http://www.maximusklein.com/2007/05/31/scientology-as-a-way-of-marketing-your-product/ <comment><USER2> Scientology is a cult, and methods that they use should not be used by any god fearing person. It's all just trickery and real value is not created by trickery.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but real value can be _delivered_ by trickery.

<comment><USER4> Sure, if you assume that the end justifies the means.

Hint: It almost never does and you will lose more than you gain with the outcome.</comment></comment></comment>


Google has run away with the web search market and almost no one is chasing - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/239332/google-has-run-away-with-the-web-search-market-and-almost-no-one-is-chasing/ <comment><USER2> It's just a matter of time before Google become just another tech company. It happens to everyone. It's taking longer for them since they have more money.

It will be a good day when a company comes along and dethrones Google from search. No one company needs or should have the power that Google wield. It's unsavory at best. I swore long ago that I would never use "free" services because they are not free. You are the product. There are too many good email services out there that cost less than a couple of cappuccinos a year to use crap like free email. I'm a customer, not a product. No for-profit ads, no making money from my information, just a great service for very little money. Who is this great email company? Fastmail.</comment>