A pause to refresh the Web? - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/a-pause-to-refresh-the-web <comment><USER2> What does "slowing down a bit" even mean? Sorry, but this just reads like total fluff to me. Where exactly should we slow down? There's no clear problem statement nor proposed solution.

Web development has been improving drastically over the last few years, which is amazing. But you don't have to use any of these newer technologies! Even if it's evolving rapidly, it's also pretty strict when maintaining backwards compatibility.

Another problem I have with this article is that it puts websites and web apps in the same bag. You cannot do web apps without JS. There are tons of applications that are impossible without JS! Progressive enhancement is not feasible for applications. When I have document-focused content, I make sure it works with JS disabled, but I don't think anyone should bother with that when they're building a web app.

There's a lot of tools that are really targeting applications, but they get jammed into regular websites.

What I do think we should do is improve our documentation and improve our communication skills. I don't think this is limited to the web, but I'd love it if people were more up-front about what problems their framework or library is meant to solve. Talk about the tradeoffs that you made when building that framework / library, and explain why you made those design decisions. This is all important in figuring out what tools to use. And talk about its shortcomings as well! Tell me what parts are still rough around the edges. This can help developers decide on whether or not X framework is a good choice for their problem.

<comment><USER3> _But you don 't have to use any of these newer technologies! Even if it's evolving rapidly, it's also pretty strict when maintaining backwards compatibility._

I wish that were true. Unfortunately, thanks to browser developers' open hostility towards plug-ins like Flash, Java and Silverlight, it is no longer possible to build specific parts of a web site/app that need extra functionality using a range of tools, and instead all you get is browser- native HTML5 and JS and so on. When they work. Which they frequently don't. And if they do, they might not tomorrow, because browsers update every six weeks and break non-trivial applications of HTML/CSS/JS and related technologies all the time.

Until we get back to having a sensible degree of standardisation and stability in the platforms and the tools we use to build on them, it will remain impossible to be sensibly productive when building professional-quality sites and apps. You simply can't do that when you're building on perpetual beta- quality foundations and the goalposts are moving literally every few days in ways that can break your entire app or tools set-up, because you will inevitably spend a stupid amount of time on overheads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "In many ways this echoes '90s conversations grousing about why the Web didn't have the same powers as desktop applications."

Um, the web still doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER5> The argument that the web is slowing down seems hinged in the idea that walled gardens will stall it's development. However Google controls about 80% of the market and they are one of the main companies pushing progressive web apps.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but Apple is an example of a walled garden that, while not actively working against the web, is definitely holding it back. One browser release a year with very few new API additions is a problem.

<comment><USER7> Um.... how about Apple do actually take a look a the technology, evaluate it, before adding a bunch of similar API every year?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> or we could do what we do in technology and jump on the next wave...

Someone just has to invent it and people have to start using it. Entropy is going to be pretty hard to overcome, but it has been every other time.

I look at how fun it was to develop on the NeXT the web was invented on and realize its still harder than writing an app on the same NeXT computer.

</comment><comment><USER9> React highlights how crummy the DOM is for performance-sensitive apps and how fantastic JavaScript has become. When devs' current fatigue wears off, I hope they pick up React and see just how different it is.

Browsers need an alternate DOM api with simplified immutable data structures and a tunable subset of CSS before I'd be comfortable with interacting with it directly. There are a zillion beartraps in DOM and CSS.</comment>


Don't Feed the Trolls (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2012/05/31/dont-feed-the-trolls/ <comment><USER2> This is bloody brilliant.</comment>


Inkscape 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php?title=Release_notes/1.0#Inkscape_1.0 <comment><USER3> Other recent discussions:

Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate – [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855357) (710 points, 23 days ago, 157 comments)

Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1 – [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969) (603 points, 7 months ago, 167 comments)

Inkscape launches versions 0.92.4 and 1.0 alpha – [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940568) (299 points, Jan 18 2019, 68 comments)

<comment><USER4> Ha, and for this specific release: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071341)

Including an extensive comment by dang explaining why they didn't have it hit the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Inkscape is one of the most impressive examples of free/libre open-source software (FLOSS). It's developed by a friendly, transparent, well-run community of developers, writers and translators, testers, and designers.

As someone who has used Inkscape for well over a decade on desktop Linux, I continue to be impressed at how nice it is, how well it works, and how much it does. It's really a shining example of not-for-profit software development.

FYI, a short essay on the history of the project was just posted on its website: [https://inkscape.org/news/2020/05/04/roots-and-shoots- inksca...](https://inkscape.org/news/2020/05/04/roots-and-shoots-inkscape- project/)

<comment><USER6> I may be misguided but it was also low on the radar of big graphical applications in the linux world. For years all I saw was gimp gimp gimp then one day a few people started to mention inkscape. Since then it has been a constant improvement.

<comment><USER7> They are very different in nature, and by their nature, Gimp is much more used/needed, hence its popularity. Think Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is much much more popular in brand than Illustrator. And actually, Gimp is to Photoshop as Inkscape is to Illustrator, so the analogy is perfect.

<comment><USER6> gimp is a lot less polished than inkscape, that's what surprised me about inkscape low profile

<comment><USER8> Gimps community was never very inviting nor open when I used it.

<comment><USER6> You know, even then, gimp could have been a technical masterpiece but to me inkscape felt a lot more interesting at many levels.

That said community problems can impede quality obviously.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely, Inkscape has been great and is a great example of open source done right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wonderful to hear that it is now a native application in macOS that does not require XQuartz!

Perhaps related: Inkscape has always felt quite laggy for me, even with my extremely basic needs. I pretty much just make text in boxes and connect them with arrows. So together with all these new lovely features, I hope that performance is improved in this release also.

<comment><USER10> The 1.0 version for macOS is a preview release and it still has performance issues, but performance fixes are coming, according to the macOS download page. Honestly, I'm so blown away with the beautiful native macOS support that I'm perfectly content to wait a bit longer for better performance.

<comment><USER11> Are you sure? I was at 1.0.0rc yesterday, and the brew bumped me up to 1.0.0. Or maybe you are saying that macOS 1.0 version is still sort of "beta"?

Either way, I love Inkscape. I draw all of our apps icons as acts with it and then use it to create all of our pdf icons of iOS and convert to drawables for Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congrats on a v1.0 and thank you for all the hard work. I've used Inkscape & Gimp & script-fu as a professional-grade Adobe CS replacement for a some time, and it works very well. There are some bumps and a lot of DIY, but the experience gets better every year. I am also in the process of teaching my daughter to use Inkscape and Gimp.

I'd love to see the wiki back up, and more v1.0 examples of scripting. Ideally there would be a Inkscape specific Scheme-based language for scripting, with scripts not needing to be packaged as extensions but loaded into a directory. Insert 'I'd do it myself, but..' lame excuses here. I'd love to, but other projects occupy my time.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love Inkscape, and all I wish for it is to take hints from modern design tools like Sketch and Figma, so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005.

Sketch has so many small life-improving tidbits, that combined they make me 50 times more productive when drawing anything, than in Inkscape.

<comment><USER14> > so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005

Please don't do this, or if you do, leave an option for those of us long-term users who are used to the existing UI.

Between the Office Ribbon, Metro/Modern/WinRT/UWP/WinUI 3, Material design, I've up to my ears in flat, wasted space UIs designed to look as empty as possible in the name of 'cleanliness' and I'd hate to have my primary vector editor fall victim to the 2010s UI dark ages.

<comment><USER13> I wasn't talking about visual gimmicks at all, but about capabilities to point the line to center of a pixel, mask layers, grouping, repeat-modes, automatic rulers, etc. Things you don't even see but without which it is damn hard to live without.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just used it to do a job for my company. it was very good!

[https://imgur.com/a/wFxf3jl](https://imgur.com/a/wFxf3jl)

<comment><USER16> OT: is that level difference to baseline in the logo intended?

<comment><USER17> It's pretend handwritten.

<comment><USER15> yes, for a software architect that used inkscape for the first time, I guess that have things to improve, but was a good experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only GIMP 3 release left, to finally ditch GTK 2[1] and Python 2[2].

[1] [https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap#GIMP_3.0](https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap#GIMP_3.0)

[2] [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/4368](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/4368)

<comment><USER19> Oh, so is GTK 2 the reason why we still have Python 2 as the default `python` command on Debian?

<comment><USER20> I don't think it's the sole reason, but all these are changing :)

[https://wiki.debian.org/Python/2Removal](https://wiki.debian.org/Python/2Removal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Used Inkscape for all pictures on my PhD work and the papers. Love it.

<comment><USER22> This right here, I am in the exact same boat. Much better than making them in powerpoint. And even though we have a (sort of) lab adobe CS key, all of my computers run linux and we only have like 5 keys which makes the process quite silly.

Now I just need to finish the figures for this paper so I can update to this newest version. But everyone in my lab is quite excited about it.

</comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi Congratulations to everyone who have made this possible.

Inkscape may not be perfect and perhaps it's not the best tool for graphics professionals but, as a person who is really bad at anything having to do with graphic design, drawing, layout design and graphics programs, it's the only vector graphics program I have been able to learn at a relatively decent level, allowing me to make effective diagrams for slides, papers, etc. With every other vector graphics editor I've tried, the learning curve felt to me like climbing a vertical ice wall.

So kudos for how intuitive it is, and hoping for many new versions to come.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very importantly, Inkscape is also a very successful free software project, which ensures, that Inkscape's functionality will remain free for as long as its license is enforced.

<comment><USER17> There's no need to enforce any license. Inkscape is free and open for as long no one takes away the license by force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I absolutely love Inkscape!

Some features I'd like to see in upcoming releases:

\- Calligraphic strokes, and the possibility to convert them to paths.

\- Better UX for filters (e.g. adding a drop shadow and changing the parameters could be simpler)

<comment><USER25> May I ask what (probably commerical) software you are using that already implements calligraphic strokes?

<comment><USER24> Adobe Illustrator already implemented it years ago.

I used AI a lot for creating cartoons. But then at some point I completely moved away from MS-Windows, which meant that I couldn't use AI any longer. I've been missing the calligraphic strokes option ever since (including the ability to convert these strokes to paths).

For more information about why calligraphic strokes are essential for drawing/inking cartoons:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/150671191X](https://www.amazon.com/dp/150671191X)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The portable version for use in cloud folders, USB drives, and machines without admin rights has been posted as well: [https://portableapps.com/news/2020-05-06--inkscape- portable-...](https://portableapps.com/news/2020-05-06--inkscape- portable-1.0-released)

</comment><comment><USER27> As someone who has used Inkscape for what seems like forever, thanks to everyone who has worked on it. Looking forward to tweaking some SVG assets later today with it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Might sound weird but I prefer to use Inkscape for basic image editing over Gimp on Linux because of how user friendly and intuitive it is.

<comment><USER29> I also prefer Inkscape over Gimp, but they have completely different use cases.

Inkscape is for vectors (almost anything created primarily on a computer) while Gimp is for rasters (when your input consists of pixels - eg a photo).

</comment></comment><comment> ainar-g Grand congratulations to the team! Inkscape is an invaluable tool, especially for amateur vexillologists like me.

<comment><USER30> To save other people the trouble, vexillology is the study of flags.

<comment><USER31> The British used to be great vexillologists, clearly: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9W1zTEuKLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9W1zTEuKLY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congrats. In my opinion Inkscape shines in usability (vs Gimp that I could never grasp for example)

<comment><USER33> They don't do the same thing.

Inkscape/CorelDraw/Illustrator/etc. are drawing programs. They deal with vector images.

Gimp/Photoshop/Paintshop Pro/etc. are painting programs. They deal with bitmaps.

They're fundamentally different paradigms. Very little intuition from one carries over to the other. Of course, they've been adding some bridge functionality (Photoshop smartobjects, etc.), if people want to nitpick, but the core UX is designed for something fundamentally different.

<comment><USER34> I agree they don't do the same thing, but I agree with dest that the Inkscape UI is much better than GIMP. I've used GIMP way more than Inkscape, so I should be more comfortable with it. But I end up feeling like GIMP is fighting me in ways that Inkscape would like me to get things done.

<comment><USER33> I personally find GIMP more intuitive than Inkscape. I think most of it depends on what you're using the tool for, though, and I think I just do more GIMPy takss than Inkscapey tasks right now.

Try using Inkscape to cut a person out of a photo, adjust contrast/white balance, and add a vignette...

On the other hand, try making a beautiful invoice template in gimp, with a nicely laid out table, and nicely typeset text....

It's kind of like comparing Word to PowerPoint. Both can place text on pages, and it's possible to write an essay in PowerPoint, or make a presentation in Word, but you'll be hurting to do it.

<comment><USER34> Right. But somebody who uses both word processors and slide programs can definitely cross-compare in terms of UI quality and polish.

To pick a more obvious dimension, if somebody said, "Word is buggier than Powerpoint", nobody would say, "You can't compare them because they don't do the same thing." Bugginess is an abstractable quality across kinds of product.

The same thing is true about UI quality. It goes well beyond intuitiveness. You can look at fit-and-finish details. You can look at number of unnecessary actions. You can look at difficulty for novices completing common tasks. You can compare utility of error messages. How much are key concepts related to a task obvious vs hidden? Et cetera, et cetera.

In my experience, Inkscape is better in that dimension. I think this even though I have used GIMP a lot more, and so normally would be biased the other way, because familiarity makes its UI issues less obvious to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Guess I'm in the minority. While Inkscape is incredibly powerful and a great OSS option for vector editing, the UI has simply never made sense to me. After using Illustrator for 10+ years, every time I try to do something in Inkscape I find myself either lost or frustrated that buttons and options don't do what I think they will. I feel like it's in the same land as Blender was before 2.8 (I'm a big fan of the 2.8 changes for usability).

<comment><USER36> Inkscape seems like a much more natural successor of something like Corel Draw, and as someone who grew up doing things on that program, inkscape has always made the most sense to me. So it's probably just familiarity than anything else. I can definitely attest that inkscape has a very deterministic and thoughtful UX and workflow process.

<comment><USER37> I'll second this assessment. I used a ton of Corel Draw in the 90s thru the early 2000s. Inkscape feels like a spiritual successor. I was productive with it almost immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> seventh-chord I can appreciate inkscape as a tool, but I always dread starting it, because it somehow takes 10 seconds to start up. What is it doing in those 10 seconds?

<comment><USER38> That is definitely abnormal. For me (on an i5-3350P (!) Linux junk desktop from Hell) it starts up in about one second, so eomething is definitely wrong (or you're using an even worse machine than I am, in which case something _else_ is definitely wrong). Maybe one of the Inkscape support channels could help you here?

<comment> seventh-chord I'm on a athlon x4 860k at the moment, which according to benchmarks is marginally slower than your CPU.

Startup times certainly seem to be CPU bound, it pins one core to 100% during startup. This means they somehow are spending something to the tune of 1e10 cpu cycles to start a vector editor.

When inkscape is started up they use around 70 mb of ram. If they just store everything they need in ram in a linear file and load that at startup, the program would launch in a fraction of a second on an SSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anyone else getting a 502 error on this page?

I started using inkscape recently for editing a few svg's and was impressed at how much this free program can do while also being easy to use.

I've been using gimp for a long time now and still get lost in it's poorly laid out UI, with inkscape I can usually find what I'm looking for on the first try.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd still take Affinity Designer over Inkscape any day. Being free is not the only thing that counts in a software.

<comment><USER41> Affinity Designer also lacks features compared to Inkscape, so paying more (than nothing) does not necessarily get you a better product.

<comment><USER40> But a better, more consistent user interface. (This is my personal opinion though.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Excited to see! I had to pick up inkscape over the last month for--of all things--machine embroidery. It has a python extension called inkstitch for creating patterns.

At first it was very confusing, but I'm slowly realizing that where tools like Sketch give a very clean, simple UX, inkscape often has the extra functionality I need!

</comment><comment><USER43> I've seen some really amazing things produced by the Inkscape community. One of my favorite demos was at GNOME Asia a few years ago where I saw a shoe company from Indonesia that exclusively uses open source tools like Inkscape to produce their line of shoes ([https://coscup.org/2018/programs/using- inkscape-to-design-sh...](https://coscup.org/2018/programs/using-inkscape-to- design-shoes/)).

It's awesome to see this Inkscape 1.0 release and it's incredible to think about how much impact Inkscape has had on the open source design tool landscape.

I'm the Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab, btw. Thanks @Inkscape for being part of the GitLab for Open Source community!

</comment><comment><USER44> Inkscape looks to have made very impressive progress.

The one feature I'm missing before I can use it is multipage support, to be able to print a large image across several sheets of paper (which can then be taped together, etc.)

Apparently this isn't in there because SVG has no notion of such a thing?

<comment><USER45> Sort of wonder if this could happen at the system print dialog level rather than inside specific applications.

<comment><USER44> Part of the problem is being able to keep the scale of the original document. That is, I have a document with an image of a ski 175cm long, and when I print it I need it to be 175cm in the real world, as I am using it as a template for cutting material (if only I had a giant CNC machine...). So far I have not found a way to get system print dialogs to do this for me. I can take a PDF or PS file and print them, but the scale management is rudimentary.

Somehow I was able to do these things easier with 1990s DTP tools?

In the end Microsoft Publisher has worked for me. Sort of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nice to see Inkscape continue to grow. I still get a lot of use out of it myself. (And to toot my own tooter, I did some work on the pencil interpolation code. I feel happy to have contributed something to a project like this).

</comment><comment><USER47> I use Inkscape from a long time, and it's generally a very good experience. The only thing I tried to do recently that didn't work was to open an .eps file provided by Google (the official Google Play button - they do not have .svg files, but even Apple has for their App Store). It couldn't directly open the file, I searched for tools to convert it but nothing worked. The only program that could open it was Adobe Illustrator, from there I could export it to .svg. I'd hope Inkscape could open .eps files AND Google to provide a open standard format for their vector files.

</comment><comment><USER48> There are some absolutely huge changes in here. And they fixed my (least) favourite bug, which is that Line Height basically didn't work. Not to mention HiDPI. As a Surface Pro user, it's well worth the upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wanted to love this on MacOS so badly, but it was too laggy for basic usage on a 2020 MBA. I have always found it fine on my less capable Debian box, but, but Affinity Designer has become my go to on Mac.

</comment><comment><USER50> Inkscape is a fantastic product and it can be used for some many unexpected things: editing a PDF, vectorizing an image, creating a pixel perfect resume...

I'm amazed it just reached v1.

</comment><comment><USER51> Inkscape is amazing. I am using it for years now on all three major operating systems. I am a complete amateur as far as graphic design is concerned but I just used it to add a text to cartoon that designer did in...wait for it....Inkscape.

Very user friendly for easy tasks but I am struggling with more complex edits. But that is just because I never upgraded my knowledge since both Gimp and Inkscape provide everything I need.

Thumbs up to Inkscape from me!

</comment><comment><USER52> Lots of love expressed here about Inkscape and GIMP.

I am curious - does anyone here use Krita? How does it compare to either? What is its place in the graphics toolbox?

<comment><USER53> You can use Krita if you want to create illustrations or drawings not by modifying vectors (like in Inkscape) but by drawing with a digital brush. It's pixel based like GIMP, which can also do digital drawing but with less ease and sophistication I imagine than in Krita. Whether it's useful to you really depends on your illustration style, it's probably less suited for a flat and vectory look. It's more for things like storyboarding or other forms of digital painting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I really like Inkscape, it compares favorably with Affinity Designer. My only wish is that it was written for the browser. A tool like this would actually be a great starting point for SVG web apps, IMHO. Plus interactive SVG drawing has been implemented about 3000 times, and it would be great to see some best practice libs become standard.

</comment><comment><USER55> Well that server didn't last long

</comment><comment><USER56> I really like Inkscape. I've been using it since the first release in 2003. I do all of my illustration with it. If I need to print, then I will bring the artwork into Illustrator and adjust the colors. Compared to Illustrator, it's very fast and lightweight.

<comment> mark-r Why do you need to adjust the colors in Illustrator?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> amazing work - remember sodipodi and then inkscape first coming out - <USER2> forward to trying native quartz and of course on linux

side note - anyone know of an mspaint style 'simple' raster image editor? use gimp currently but sometimes I just want the simplicity

<comment><USER40> Krita maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Inkscape is outstanding. Thanks for all the hard work.

My one and only complaint is, for very large drawings, selecting a large number of elements and moving them is very slooooooow. It would be great if, going forward, performance improvements can be made.

<comment><USER59> Hopefully since this is such a sudden and severe regression in canvas performance, it is related to a shallow bug rather than an architectural misadventure.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please try another link (if you are getting 502 error) [https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.0/](https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.0/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Congratulations! I've been using you for at least a decade, been more user friendly for me than Illustrator with as many features and only getting better. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER61> I created the Remarkbox logo with Inkscape. Was a lot of fun to learn (watched a few hours of YouTube to get an acceptable amount of understanding)

</comment><comment><USER62> Mirror?

502 Bad Gateway

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)

<comment><USER63> [https://archive.li/mMN8K#Inkscape_1.0](https://archive.li/mMN8K#Inkscape_1.0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I am getting 502 Bad Gateway.

</comment><comment><USER65> Is this good for professional work, Illustrator seems more solid? Great FOSS still though</comment>


Crud-bones - Boilerplate project to kick-start your Node.JS/Mongo/MySQL CRUD app - <AUTHOR> http://words.alexeypro.com/crud-bones/ No, it's not an another framework. Chill. All this code is basically the template which I use to jump-start with new project. It has simplistic Model and DAO (MySQL and Mongo - which are interchangable), and all the usual set of Node.JS modules I like to use (I gathered them from across many forums, as the most stable and reliable). So, it saves me a ton of time. I clone it, and go from there. You can get simple CRUD right away, just change the model (yeah, it's very "opionated"). And if you feel like you need something more sophisticated just change the code! <comment><USER2> Is MySQL a common choice with Node.js? Don't see many people talking about SQL and Node.js. Anyone using this combo got something to say about their experience with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard to say if it's a common choice. I've had few projects where Node.JS was the choice of backend, and MySQL was the database, because our frontend was PHP/static HTML/CSS/JS stuff. DB is not really important. Node.JS shines on the backend, and it doesn't really matter to what it talks to. MySQL _can be_ decently fast, but you can as well use Node.JS solely with, say, Riak or Mongo, or just Redis? In this "crud-bones" project I am use Redis as a cache layer, but you can use it as "storage" as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting code. Have you thought about automatically creating the models by using SHOW TABLES + DESCRIBE? Might save you some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely something what I _don't want_ to do. Not that it's bad, or something.. just it defeats the purpose of this app. The goal is to have some skeleton or base to start your own stuff. There is no reason to make it so flexible so it'll generate all that stuff. Besides, as you can see, my app works with Mongo or MySQL DB by simply changing ONE SINGLE LINE of the code. Which is kinda cool, I think. No ORMs, no special "preparations". A little bit work on the model class, and you are done.

Besides, I mentioned that already, we all _know_ we are going to change this code for our own needs. So it needs to be simple, straightforward and interchangeable. That was my goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work!

Do you use any ORM for MySQL?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I don't -- I am trying to keep the app extremely simple, and straightforward. I don't want new Rails app, neither want Java-style- framework. All of us are going to cut it back and forth to make to suit our next project needs, so why bother?

The switch between using Mongo and MySQL -- is just using different DAO -- [https://github.com/alexeypro/crud- bones/blob/master/src/api-...](https://github.com/alexeypro/crud- bones/blob/master/src/api-rest.js#L9) I kept the "interfaces" (yeah, not interfaces but contracts, 'cause JavaScript has no interfaces, but you know what I mean) same, and that makes the switch EASY.

In short-term plans I want to update README as for the deployment instructions to other Node.JS hostings, and probably throw some simple caching layer on top of Redis, and definitely some unit testing. Then it should be all set. Just basics to get me up & running with new backend effort :-)

Frankly, even those things are _not_ necessary. They will make the app more complicated, but let's be honest -- we use Node.JS because it's lightweight and minimalistic approach, so why create an ugly-beast-which-does-it-all-its- own-way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There should be something like this for every language. I've recreated this so many times in so many languages.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am just getting in to node.js, I will have to try this and see if it makes things any easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope it will make things easier, or at least would server as a collection of code snippets "how to" :-) Let me know if you have any questions, or would like to have something beyond what you see there. Feel free to email me (<http://alexeypro.com>) or just simply contribute to the project. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just in time!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am glad if you found it helpful, and happy I didn't sit on it.. yeah, it's far from been all shiny and polished, but the intention is to get basic Node.JS CRUD project up and running, so you can focus on actual project's goals, not (while simple but still time-wasteful) basic implementations. Especially if you need to wire together DB connections, Express, EJS, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks. This is a huge help for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you think it can be improved. I am happy to make it easier. :-)</comment></comment>


Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions - <AUTHOR> https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html <comment><USER2> I can't say that AFC excites me: [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf)

Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use.

It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.

<comment><USER3> Surley the FCC could just publish a data file that clients download and lookup their frequencies.

<comment><USER4> They tried the honor system, it was called DFS. According to Wikipedia: "Prior to the introduction of Wi-Fi, one of the biggest applications of 5GHz band was the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. The decision to use 5 GHz spectrum for Wi- Fi was finalized in World Radiocommunication Conference in 2003; however, meteorological community was not involved in the process. The subsequent lax implementation and misconfiguration of DFS had caused significant disruption in weather radar operations in a number of countries around the world. In Hungary, the weather radar system was declared non-operational for more than a month. Due to the severity of interference, South African weather services ended up abandoning C band operation, switching their radar network to S band."

TWDR is a high-resolution doppler radar that measures winds on airport approach paths to detect wind shear and microbursts. It's a life-critical system. It would be nice to use the bandwidth for WiFi, and the FCC made every opportunity to allow it, but WiFi vendors didn't play nice.

<comment><USER5> And yet here we are, lives still.. living?

The FCC needs to do this much more, radio spectrum is a massively valuable limited resource and you either demonstrate technological excellence or you get out of the way of those who can. We can't have GHz worth of spectrum untouched because people don't want to upgrade their 1960s hardware and/or technology.

<comment><USER6> And behind the scenes, engineers were working quickly to identify and fix problems on what was previously reserved spectrum for a life safety system. It's also a quintessential public good; saying that it should be taken for private use is absurd and extremely short sighted.

Further, TDWR was developed in the 90's and has undergone upgrades since then. Don't dismiss it as some Apollo-era PDP-11 sitting in a closet somewhere just because you don't know what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a really helpful guide to understand wireless networking. For in-depth reviews, I like to check out SmallNetBuilder [0] as they feature thorough tests and sometimes teardown of the wireless routers. Most "reviews" these days are pretty much just regurgitating the marketing spiel from manufacturers, which really doesn't help much.

Recently, I also stumbled upon a Chinese site [1] which does similar teardowns, but only in Chinese.

[0] [https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/](https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/)

[1] [https://www.acwifi.net/category/information](https://www.acwifi.net/category/information)

<comment><USER8> I highly recommend SNB portal, for all WiFi related stuff - current industry state and news (relevant to buying APs/routers), in-depth reviews, comparison reviews. I only wish they would ease off on Captcha usage, I sometimes need to click for minutes on bicycles and street lights over and over again.

I used it to upgrade from my overheating and low range Linksys to a strange rare but efficient Synology router and it was a very good buy in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is so awesome!

I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones only have 1x1 802.11ac, which is about 433 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.

Some more expensive Android phones and all iPhones support 2x2 MIMO which gets you up to 867 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.

Some phones have a buggy implementation of VHT80 client, so on 80MHz the PHY rate drops to <100 Mbps, so in those cases I recommend 802.11n 40MHz on 5GHz band.

The AP/Router/Modem combo that all the ISPs give in my country is very much capable of fast WiFi. It has 4x4 MIMO at 802.11ac with 80MHz + 2x2 MIMO at 802.11n up to 40 MHz (I always tell people to avoid 40 MHz on 2.4GHz band!).

On a good phone, this gets you around 600 Mbps with 867 Mbps PHY, on a cheaper device, between 250 and 290 Mbps on 433 Mbps PHY. Devices with 4x4 can get 1.7Gbps PHY, but I do not have any.

This does not stop people from complaining about the free modem they get, demand it is put into bridge mode, buy an ASUS router for >400€, and get the same result. Some (smartly) return the router they bought right away, and request the ISP put the device back into routing mode, but some keep the useless and expensive trophy of stupidity...

<comment><USER10> I'd rather have that ASUS stupidity trophy than a backdoored router, which pretty much all of them are when from an ISP. Not many of them (none?) even care to update regularly.

<comment><USER9> You can pretty easily disable the backdoors with the backdoor admin account I discovered by extracting the firmware from the TR069 ACS server, and posted on my blog.

You have a TR069 interface that operates on a VLAN, you can disable that interface and it does not have the ability to contact the ISP or be contacted (this is not DOCSIS, I'm talking about GPON or xDSL).

In general all ISP combo devices are firewalled off from the WAN side, don't reply to pings and no open ports. If there was a kernel network stack bug, you can't bypass that with your own router, unless it's xDSL in which case you can buy ANY compatible modem and use it with the PPPoE login you can extract from your ISP combo device using instructions on my blog.

If it's GPON you can't do anything, it's a full Huawei system (ONT and OLT) and it needs to authorize with a serial number over OMCI, which you cannot replicate cheaply.

You can use a MikroTik router and a Huawei SFP+ transceiver, but that is too expensive to justify it for moderate-level geeks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article strongly suggests that modern hardware reviews for consumer grade routers have become mostly useless. This has a wealth of practical knowledge in it the likes of which you never see in a review of a router. So much of the modern internet for product reviews is really advertorials.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like the specs are largely useless for ranking consumer routers, but crowdsourced user reviews are still useful.

A couple of years ago I bought a Netgear D7000v2 VDSL modem/router and it was a piece of junk. It took minutes to start up after power-on, any attempt to use the USB drive sharing functionality would lock up the router requiring a power cycle, one firmware upgrade broke its ability to sync to VDSL (luckily I still had an old firmware binary handy, so I could revert it) and when I finally threw in the towel on it and switched to the $1 bundled modem that came with my new broadband service, suddenly I was synching at 25% higher speed. Never buying another Netgear product again. They used to be good, dammit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Superb article, high on info, low on confusion!

For my own home, I used to try to optimize the hell out of it (regularly switching channels, trying new routers etc.)

Now I "installed" a TP-Link Deco M9 system. I have 250 Mbps coming in, and at the worst part of my house, my iPhone will still get 100 Mbps from that. That is more than enough even for streaming 4K. So I have now arrived at the "why bother tinkering with a good enough system" stage of WiFi, which is a huge relief.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're interested in learning some networking, I recommend Ubiquiti. If you want to save money, I recommend used Ubiquiti.

My rationale for buying used is that basically normal consumers typically do not buy Ubiquiti enterprise products - so anyone who does is someone who has experience with technology and will take care of it well.

I haven't had a chance to test this out yet, but I hope it works!

I picked up an Edgerouter X SFP for $40 on FB Marketplace (retails for $99), the guy selling it is a mobility architect. It came in great condition. After I bought it I found an Edgerouter PoE5 ALSO being sold for $40 - this retails at $275. I don't really need it, but I've thought about buying it since it's so cheap anyways. I'm also going to purchase an AP AC Long Range for $50 - this retails at $109.

The Edgerouters do not come with an AP built in, so you have to buy one separately. I don't mind doing this since I think it's easier to mount an access point than it is to mount a router since you have to worry about less wires (just ethernet if the ap can be poe'd).

For about $90 total I'll have an enterprise router and AP that'll work much better than the cheap sagecom router I'm renting from my ISP.

<comment><USER15> > I picked up an Edgerouter X SFP for $40 on FB Marketplace

Be careful buying second-hand electronics, particularly networking kit!

You should re-flash the device's firmware. The OpenWRT website should be able to guide you to stock firmware images for most modern SOHO devices.

<comment><USER16> You should do that regardless with any new equipment where possible. At the very least, it'll be up to date. Networking gear makes it especially easy to flash new firmware so it's just a few extra minutes of setup.

And in the case of some of Ubiquiti's gear, you have to reflash to just get started unforunately (my UDM Pro couldn't complete setup without a reflash and my Unifi Switch 8 couldn't be discovered by the new UDM until a reflash). That's a real fun software issue from Ubiquiti.

<comment><USER15> It's probably best to avoid the built-in update utilities for the first re- flash. Uboot can load a kernel via TFTP over serial.

What you are worried about is backdoored firmware.

If this is too much work, just buy new kit in sealed packages. Saving a couple hundred bucks just isn't worth the risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting that the he says in the guide that it's definitely worth getting a 4x4 MIMO AP/router:

> It is easy to overlook and miss, but beamforming and diversity are the key > reasons why you want a 4×4 MIMO router even though most clients are still > only 2×2 MIMO. The extra antennas are actually used and offer value (a > stronger signal, which translate to better connect speeds for some users)!

Having been a keen user of the TP-Link Omada series of APs I went to check what their capability was. No wonder they don't mention anywhere on the site - it's only 2x2 (for the EAP225). I was able to confirm this by using their maximum speed and the access speeds table in the article.

I don't know how much I'm actually missing out on, but I'm going to stop automatically recommending these products now.

<comment><USER18> EAP330 goes up to 1300 mbits/s...[1]

[1] [https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/ceiling- mount...](https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/ceiling-mount-access- point/eap330/)

<comment><USER17> Yes, which must mean it's a 3x3 (same as the EAP245). Of their upcoming HD620 and 660 Wifi 6 models the former is 2x2 and the latter 4x4[0]. And there is an somewhat oblique reference to this with the marketing copy talking about "4 streams". The article did say to hold off from purchasing wifi 6 equipment however.

[0] [https://www.tp-link.com/uk/business-networking/ceiling- mount...](https://www.tp-link.com/uk/business-networking/ceiling-mount- ap/eap660-hd/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome reference! Looks like someone took notes over a nice span of time and compiled them into a tech guide for WiFi.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, this is really cool. WiFi hardware is one of those things that I find even a lot of more "techy" people like you'll find on HN view as a black box. It's awesome when someone aggregates a bunch of information and then shares it so that we can all develop a better understanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article's comprehensiveness is amazing and worth a read.

While I love WiFi for my mobile devices or occasionally when my laptop isn't at my desk, I can't recommend to people enough to prefer actual network cables for their devices which are in "fixed" locations, for example your normal work area for your laptop, or where your TV is with consoles or something like an AppleTV.

Once you move at least mostly to wires, you'll find that most (if not all) your network problems just go away.

If you're worried about aesthetics, my laptop has power, networking, screens and everything working through a single USB-C port, so my desk is quite pristine. Around TVs and their connected devices it's pretty much always super easy to hide wires.

Wireless is a shared medium with everyone in range who is also on wireless, it just can't scale like individual wires (very inexpensively) at 1Gb/s speed EACH. So put everything you practically can on wires, that way your airwaves remain largely open as they're only used by things like mobile phones or light browsing on laptops.

I understand that if you're renting then it may not be possible to do wires. My hope is that in the same way that most houses started being built to accommodate cable tv / telephone points, in the future they'll be built to accomodate network points by at least TVs.

Offices trying to be all wireless are almost certainly never going to be able to provide high speeds to everyone for the foreseeable future. Employees at their desks should use wired connections and wireless should only be used for mobile phones or people not at their desk for some reason (like being in a meeting).

</comment><comment><USER22> Buy a router that supports flashing openwrt. It is very transparent to debug and supports lots of features in addition to adblock, monitoring, etc at the router level.

<comment><USER23> I also like ddwrt. But I didn't see it mentioned in the long article, which is mostly about the wireless channel. Can you recommend a recent router (or brand) that supports ddwrt?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice article!

However, roaming support is entirely missing. Handover between access points is really important in my experience. It would have been nice to have an overview on the current situation in WiFi.

<comment><USER25> I don't think you'll find a system with automatic access point adjustment to maximize handoff quality.I think the basic best practices for overlapping wifi access points are something like this: -set each to a different channel -adjust power settings to reduce coverage overlap (some is necessary; too much is bad)

<comment><USER24> [edit: re-read your post; you're well aware what handoff is, so sorry for the overly vivid explanation]

That's 'cell planning'. Roaming is different:

Let's say you're moving from your bedroom to the kitchen. The bedroom AP's signal suddenly drops. Your smartphone needs to find the kitchen AP, re- connect, and re-transmit all the packets that might have been lost.

Mobile networks assist the smartphone: it tells the smartphone that the kitchen AP will soon be in range. It already allocates and configures resources at the target AP. Then the handover is more seamless.

In theory, WiFi can do this too. But last time I checked, it seemed a vendor- specific mess.

<comment><USER26> >In theory, WiFi can do this too.

WiFi actually can't do this. It's a shame, but fully network-directed roaming is not a thing in 802.11 yet, and I don't know when it's going to bother to show up.

The major protocol extensions you can use are 802.11k, 802.11r, and 802.11v. They have a compounding increase in roaming performance in roughly that level of significance.

802.11k is a pure win. It should always be used.

802.11r is hit or miss. When it works, roaming can take under 10ms. When it doesn't, you disassociate entirely and reconnect. I have an SSID with it enabled but never use it.

802.11v is a pure win, but not very well supported.

I use Cisco hardware specifically for this feature set, but I can't really say I recommend it. I kinda hate the controller software, and it's licensed separately. Cheap hardware on eBay though.

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

Do those extensions require client support, and if so, is it supported by consumer devices?

<comment><USER26> Yes.

iOS supports them all: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202628](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202628)

Mac OS doesn't support any of them (much to my chagrin).

On Windows, it has to be implemented by the driver. I suggest using Intel: [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000021562/network- and-i-o/wireless-networking.html)

With Android, it's hit or miss. All modern flagships support them AFAIK. Going back in time, it's limited to premium vendors. I'd expect the majority of devices to support 802.11k, although they're quiet about it. You'd have to check logs on your AP (if available) to determine if it's in use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I went through so many routers until I bought two Ubiquity Wireless AC's.

Definitely not consumer friendly to configure using a java webbased application but I never had to reboot or change anything.

They just work day in and day out and the family is happy.

</comment><comment><USER28> > 650 → 390: MAC efficiency > there are 'housekeeping' packets that MUST be > sent at the SLOWEST possible modulation

True, but it's actually the slowest _supported_ / _enabled_ modulation, which can be increased. In a crowded 2.4GHz environment (1Mbps min. modulation), raising it to 12Mbps or more can cut 50+% fluff (SSID, ARP, data broadcasts..) down to <5% fluff.

> 2166 → 1083: Client MIMO > You must use the minimum MIMO common to both > devices

MU-MIMO should enable the router to split its numerous MIMO channels to multiple devices with less MIMO channels. I have no idea whether it actually works.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nice article. I find that 5Ghz bands are entirely useless in my house though. Old solid walls and heavy floors mean that I'd need an AP in every room at 5Ghz. At 2.4 I can get away with two good access points.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great resource! I've been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP's out there?

<comment><USER10> Something made to have open source flashed safely. I use OpenWRT on my access points and router. Maybe not as easy but on the other hand nothing comes close in functionality (unless you buy products made for big business).

<comment><USER30> Thanks! Can you recommend a particular model?

<comment><USER31> For 802.11n, choose something with the ath9k driver. For 802.11ac, there's unfortunately nothing with an open firmware, but it seems ath10k and mt76 receive the most attention by developers working on bufferbloat reduction etc.

For 802.11ax, not sure there's anything available in the openwrt or mainline kernels yet. You might end up with something with a binary blob and you can't upgrade your kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very informative.

I use a TP Link 1750AC cheap router($60) that seems work perfectly fine for the whole house for streaming and surfing.

My internet is about 20mbps down and 6mbps up.

I never felt the need that my bandwidth is too slow somehow. What's the super 1Gbps wifi + ISP for? I never need it, maybe until I'm doing VR on Internet some day.

Transfer large files inside the house over wifi is the only time I felt wifi is not fast enough, but that happens once a year, for huge size files I can do USB transfer anyways.

In short, $60 router suffices for me. I see no needs for wifi6 yet for 99% of the households.

</comment><comment><USER33> Great article, what we come to hacker news for.

Edited to add: I'm starting to think that wireless communications were–on balance–a terrible mistake.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wi-Fi 6 looks promising for people with really fast Internet connections that are not capped. For capped internet connections it's almost irrelevant. In my experience, it just reaches the cap quicker and ends up in charges or having to carefully manage things to not reach the cap before the end of the month. I downgraded my connection from 350mbps to 200mbps as I was breaching the 1tb cap too quickly (Comcast). I can't imagine having a 1gbps connection with a 1tb cap. It might last a week or two before getting hit with massive overages. It's been nice not having this problem the last few months, but I don't expect to upgrade my router anytime soon. There's simply no service here that would warrant it as Comcast has a monopoly.

<comment><USER35> For a large majority of consumers the amount of data they use per month is only slightly correlated with their internet speed.

They have a certain amount of data they want to use in a month. If their speed goes up or down the amount of data they want to use stays about the same--the speed just determines how long they have to wait for downloads.

You might look into Comcast's XFi Advantage plan, which includes unlimited data. The cost varies by location but I think it is around $15/month in most. You also have to be renting their modem, so add another $10-14/month. You can add unlimited data to any plan, but that's $50/month. Doing it via XFi Advantage is about half of that.

<comment><USER36> >For a large majority of consumers the amount of data they use per month is only slightly correlated with their internet speed.

This will change once the cable boxes go out and all media comes through the internet pipe. I don't know anyone in my network (mid 30s and below) who subscribes to television service. Even the old people in my family have been setup with iPads or Apple TVs or whatnot so they can watch everything on demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is an excellent reference about the WiFi side. It would be even more awesome if it included software setup -- for my lazy self that's "make sure it runs OpenWRT and does firewalling quickly enough".

</comment><comment><USER38> Very good information to get great performance. It would be nice if it explained how much to go for for a given WAN speed and LAN requirements. The links I have are 100Mb/s symmetrical so spending 250€ on the recommended router would probably not help compared to the 70€ Archer C7/AC1750 I've installed in a couple of places already.

It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to get based on WAN speed and OpenWRT support. Add some affiliate links and it could be a nice income stream.

<comment><USER39> > _It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to > get based on WAN speed and OpenWRT support._

FWIW, OpenWRT has a "recommended routers" page [0].

\---

[0]: [https://openwrt.org/toh/recommended_routers](https://openwrt.org/toh/recommended_routers)

<comment><USER38> I know. Unfortunately that page doesn't actually recommend any routers as that section is no longer maintained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Living in the place where the list of "available networks" can never fit to a single screen of anything, I like the major point:

"15\. How to improve speeds

Use Ethernet whenever possible"

</comment><comment><USER41> In my experience all in one routers with WiFi at a consumer level will fail after a year, or have other problems. Typically it only fails on the wifi side, so I turn them into ethernet only and hook up an ubiquiti AP. They're configured through a phone app and a QR code, haven't had to worry about it ever again.

<comment><USER36> I have not had to touch my AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule since first plugging them in, ~6 years ago. Maybe there was a software update once or twice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow, thank you so much for sharing this fantastic resource. Saved me a ton of time, and hugely increased my confidence in how I'm setting things up in my "new" home.

</comment><comment><USER43> The article is really great, but I hoped it would touch more on extending the wireless range. Are there any good comparable articles out there?

<comment><USER44> He talks a bit about the channel width/range relationship in appendix H: [https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the- us.html#channelwid...](https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the- us.html#channelwidthrange) There's some more in appendix I

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This talks about performance. What about security? Many newer routers come with WPA3. Does it offer substantial benefits over WPA2?

</comment><comment><USER46> Great Articles. Jotting down some notes as I am reading it.

>Greatly complicating a decision is that Wi-Fi 6E is just around the corner (early devices expected late 2020) that will require (yet again) new hardware -- existing Wi-Fi 6 devices will not support Wi-Fi 6E.

We _could_ technically have WiFi 6 devices working with WiFI 6E as long as they were designed as such. I recall one of the ASUS engineers said their router would work, the problem is compliance and passing FCC certification and if Upgrade were _allowed_. Yes may be practically we need to buy new hardware. ( Profits )

And I could rant about WiFi 6/ 802.11ax for hours. Basically either buy a decent WiFi 5 or wait for 6E in hope they fix their mess.

MacBook Pro - As far as I know All 2016+ MacBook Pros has 802.11ac 3x3 WiFi by default. Giving you a "marketing" speed of 1300Mbps. Older Generation MacBook Pros has 3x3 for 15", 2x2 for MacBook Pro 13". All non-pros MacBook has always had 2x2 WiFi.

The reason is simply because only Broadcom make WiFI Client chipset that support 3x3. May be at the request of Apple. And the notebook market is basically an Intel only game. You get incentives and bundle pricing from Intel CPU for using Intel WiFi. And Intel doesn't make 3x3 WiFi ( Or they did but only in _Centrino_ era... ) . Not in 802.11ac and likely not in 802.11ax.

Since demand for 3x3 802.11ac continues to be a niche, PC vendors fail to market better WiFi speed as added value. And Intel doesn't want to do a custom WiFi controller just for ~5M unit of MacBook Pro annually. And why innovate when there is no competition? Intel has 90%+ of Notebook PC market shares anyway.

In case anyone is wondering, there is an Broadcom 3x3 WiFi 6E client chipset announced last year. Hopefully you will see this in the next MacBook Pro Upgrade.

One reason people may have heard about the rumours of Broadcom selling their client WiFi business late last year. Their WiFi PC market is limited by Intel's domination, Smartphone market is a similar situation with Qualcomm. And Broadcom's Client WiFi business is primarily an Apple business. For nearly 4 years I have been anticipating Apple doing WiFi on their own before doing 4G/5G Modem. Considering they use more WiFi unit than Intel's current annual WiFi shipment. But so far only ultra low power chip W3 is being used in Apple Watch.

Samsung S20 is also an 2x2 Devices. May be worth an update in the WiFi 6 table.

>The AC#### naming ......

Those naming are confusing, but one way to look at it is the number represent the theoretical maximum _capacity_ of the WiFi network. Those were never intended to be speed. But of course marketing is working is way. So _hypothetically_ speaking a higher speed router gets you faster speed when you have multiple client.

Nice! Turns out all of my 802,11ax Rant is included in the its own Section.

>(1) 802.11ax is not even expected to be made an official IEEE standard until "Sep 2020" (source),

It should be noted the date is _prediction_. And that date has been moving up a quarter for every meeting since 2018. Draft 3.0 was suppose to be the last Draft, then Draft 5.0 and now Draft 6.0......

> 160Mhz

It should be noted none of the current Mobile Devices ( Or basically Non Intel Wifi 6 devices irrespective of their form factor ) supports 160Mhz ( 160Mhz / 80+80 ). Both Samsung and Apple are on 80Mhz only. This will likely change with WiFi 6E.

>Not all wifi clients are DFS capable!

Wow. I was always under the assumption DFS is a router problem. This sucks.

Such a great site that explains so much what is wrong about WiFi and its industry as a whole. And how it seems no cares about the user experience. There are increasing amount of people who just want to use a simple and working 4G/5G connection than their WiFi.

This is such a great resource I wish I could pay the authors some money as gratitude. It also reminds me of the Internet in the 90s where people spend their time, heart and soul into making something. It is not for SEO, or Ads Revenue. Simply wrote out of passion. ( or may be anger )

Thank You.

<comment><USER47> I was actually idly curious about why the latest iPhones got WiFi 6 but the MacBook Pro 16" didn't, from your (fantastic) comment I guess it's because Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset out and I guess whoever does the iPhone chipset (iFixit identifies it as "Apple/USI") doesn't have a 3x3 version?

<comment><USER46> > iPhone chipset.....

That was Broadcom as well.

>I guess it's because Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset

They did, as per iPhone. But Broadcom didn't have a WiFi 6 3x3 implementation then, and I guess Apple doesn't want to compromise to WiFi 6 2x2 ( 80Mhz ) implementation on 16" Macbook which would actually be slower ( On paper ) than its previous 3x3 WiFi 5 / 802.11ac.

All these is on the assumption Apple wants to continue with 3x3 WiFi. They could wait for WiFi 6E and call it a day. A 160Mhz on WiFi 6E gives you 2400Mbps on paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Thanks!! this is easily the most awesome, comprehensive guide I've ever seen for routers

</comment><comment><USER49> Can someone TLDR and tell me what the best router is for $75-$150?

<comment><USER50> Netgear R7800 or ASUS AC86U. Both are good. Netgear supports OpenWRT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Yup. Haven't managed to get a single device to actually utilize WiFi 6. It's such a minefield

</comment><comment><USER52> It's amazing that OpenWRT praises themselves as performance oriented router firmware yet I can't find any mainstream router model that can reach practical limit of 3x3 speed...</comment>


5G researchers manage record connection speed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31622297 <comment><USER2> "We need to bring end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond"

The incredible bandwidth is surely great but they don't mention how to improve latency here, they forget to tell what was the latency of this 100m transfer from an antenna to a receiver.

One of the big issues with today apps is latency, this is easily frustrating. It also prevents apps such as real time multiplayer games to be viable.

<comment><USER3> As a user, my impressions is that the latency involved with routing mobile data around is a lot higher (more like a second, even with LTE) than the latency involved with the physical transmission. Mobile data connections are generally more reliable than WiFi, but usually there is a significant lag before results are returned. Is that not correct?

<comment><USER4> This matches my personal experience with tethering being my main internet connection outside of work/office internet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Latency, latency, latency. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant at this point.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a simulation [1]. The claim is that the technique is applicable to center frequencies below 6GHz and the 1Tbit/s used a bandwidth of 100MHz (for a spectral efficiency of 10^7 bit/s/Hz???). I'm guessing that whilst the technique might be applicable below 6Ghz, the 1TB/s rate isn't.

There are fundamental limits on the information capacity of an antenna using the EM spectrum [2], based on the surface area of the volume of space it occupies, in units of wavelength. (Related to the Holographic Principle?) I haven't done the calculation, to see if the claimed rate is within this limit, but a spectral efficiency of 10^7 bit/s/Hz is about 5 orders of magnitude beyond what others have reported (less than 100bit/s/Hz [3]). It will be interesting to see the details!

[1] [http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/02/university- of-s...](http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/02/university-of-surrey- claims-1tbps-speed-over-future-5g-mobile-tech.html)

"UPDATE 25th Feb 2015

We've been finding the 1Tbps claim a little difficult to digest and so have been prodding Professor Rahim Tafazolli for further details, specifically a greater clarification of how the performance was achieved.

According to Tafazolli, the new class of Detector (a completely new approach) was tested through computer simulations (these simulated a real mobile/wireless environment) and were found to achieve the 1Tbps rate claimed. In our view that's quite a bit different from conducting a practical test.

Next year Tafazolli said that his team would work to implement this in a proper hardware/software platform and test it in a real environment in the 5GIC outdoor testbed. Hopefully they will be able to announce the performance in 2017."

[2] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701055.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701055.pdf)

[3] [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6381034)

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't even get 4G speeds almost ever. Bandwidth is always massively oversold. Often I can't even successfully load a random web page when I have 4+ bars of "4G".

<comment><USER8> [http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1154366377](http://www.speedtest.net/my- result/i/1154366377).

Just posted 22/9 40ms ping in DC Union Station. It's 7pm and the place is packed with people playing on their cell phones while waiting. Maybe blame SF NIMBYs for not letting the cell companies put up enough towers or run enough fiber backhaul?

<comment><USER9> To be fair, I've seen ISPs give special treatment for packets coming from speedtest.net. I'm looking at you Comcast.

<comment><USER10> Yes I've noticed the same thing. I ended up rolling my own test just to verify. I wish I was surprised comcast does this, but they totally do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if we'll still be stuck with our puny data caps when this arrives. Blowing through your monthly quota in a minute might be astounding from a technical point of view, but it only takes one broken page with an ajax infinite loop to get you.

<comment><USER12> If you look out to 2020, and assume 5G will be ready, what you'll get in production is nowhere near 1tbps. You might see 500mbps - 1gbps commonly deployed across the US and Europe during the 2020-2025 time frame. Deploying the initial infrastructure was very expensive, but now it's in place. That's part of the reason why the US was able to transition relatively quickly to 4G LTE, there was no need to build 200,000 towers again.

Data caps will rise substantially over the next five years. By 2020x, they'll be commonly at several hundred gigabytes at 5G speeds across the US and Europe, with unlimited data at lower speeds as a universal feature. No doubt numerous carriers will offer variations of unlimited data.

<comment><USER13> You're entirely optimistic, I fear:

"One of the new AT&T plans will cost $25 per month and offer two gigabytes of data per month, which AT&T says will be enough for 98 percent of its smart phone customers. Additional gigabytes will cost $10 each."

This is in 2010.

Today that $25 will actually get you HALF the data it did in 2010, five years ago.

<comment><USER10> This is why I buy phones outright to keep my unlimited data plan from verizon. I tether it for my home internet as well, usually use between 80-100gb/month.

I'm waiting for the day they just take it away.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free Distributed-Software Timing Program As Good As an Atomic Clock - <AUTHOR> http://freshscience.org.au/?p=2013

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept, but frustrating in that NTP is only mentioned briefly. So what is the difference?

More technical detail, please.</comment>


Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html

<comment><USER2> There is an inaccuracy in this article. Musk did not launch Tesla. He was an early investor in the company, and actually took a little while to become CEO.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-the-origin- story-2014-1...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-the-origin- story-2014-10)

<comment><USER3> Interesting article!

From the Wait But Why article:

      Then, in 2004, as that "project" was just getting
      going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the
      second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all
      time: an electric car company called Tesla.

I think this refers to the initial funding of Tesla, led by Musk as an investor and chairman of the board...

A timeline from the text of your Biz Insider article:

      July 1, 2003 - Tesla Motors incorporates.
      April 23, 2004 - Musk leads funding round, becomes Chairman
      November 2004 - First development mule
      February 2005 - Series B funding
      July 19, 2006 - Roadster launch party
      .
      .
      March 18, 2008 - Production begins
      October 15, 2008 - Musk takes over as CEO

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm actually quite looking forward to the bio that Urban mentions: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062301233/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062301233/)</comment>


Ask HN: Share your tips for mastering API's - <AUTHOR>

How do you uncover, learn, understand, and remember all the functions/methods available to you across multiple programming languages?
I have a hard time remembering the exact methods/functions I'd need to use to accomplish something. My process is basically live in the google search bar:

  search: ruby api iterate through hash
  search: mysql create new user
  search: parse yaml file
  search: ubuntu remove directory recursively

 Because I understand the concepts involved, I get the answers right away, it's just a matter of proper syntax. But this is pretty inefficient in my eyes. Lest I remember every API I work with, I will continue to require google to remind me.
Do you guys have this problem and if so what is your solution?
I've never used an IDE but I understand it has auto-completion.
Doesn't that still require you to memorize the functions specific to a language. For example say I want to "strip string from end of string" in ruby. For the IDE to help me, I'd still need to start typing str.chomp. However a google search turns up the ruby string docs where I'll be reminded of my friend "chomp". Does an IDE do something else I am not aware of?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Noting that each tends to have its own standard...

I found a good place to start to remember different computer languages was to quickly see if the chosen language is case sensitive, and if so are the methods upper/lower and does this depend on them being static/instance, I know you already understand this

It follows, check for variations between classes and methods...

eg C#.NET will GetKey, python will get_key, ecma/java/action script will getKey, VB.NET doesn't give a crap if you GetKey or getKey.. or even GeTkeY...

seeing as all the above (except VB, WTF V'f'n'B!) are case sensitive, so you can start to guess, this is the stuff you need to memorize right off the bat, intellisense is often case sensitive and context senstive (static v instance)

I expect you know this, but,

"javascript", id's are often cased Id not ID, but HTML not Html - document.getElementById('Id').innerHTML

".NET", myDogIsAnInstance.WithAnID, MyDogHasFleas.AndIsStatic()

So you condition yourself, you say, I'm in javascript, that's a lowercase d on Id, I'm in .NET so the acronyms Html, Dns. not as in JS where they are HTML, DNS

The answer to the memory/IDE question, yes you still need to use your memory, but I find intellisense moves the memory task from which method name, to which bit of the framework/namespace, i.e. in .NET was that Base64 function in System.String or Convert.ToBase64.. or System.Text...

One of the main reasons to use an IDE is debugging, the ability to set breakpoints visually and single step though the code, real coders use the debugger to actually debug, not as a code crutch

IDEs give rise to the concept of projects and structure, and several have awesome version control plugins. The source code highlighting is 'usually' heaps better than TextMate/Emacs/Notepad or whatever

IDEs often allow for click navigation to a given class/method (ctrl click)

IDEs often help you find references to/or obsolete bits of code

IDEs often automagically format your code (shitty indentations, tabs v spaces) this can be viewed as good or bad

IDEs allow for templated solutions, i.e. eclipse can set you up well on the way to a django google apps project, without any typing, the file/editor based alternatives involve copy/paste reuse...

Lastly you just practice and get it wrong a lot of times until you remember and thenyou get it right.

final thing on new programming languages, is it dynamically typed...

oh = "yeah", var oh = "yeah", oh:"yeah"

or strongly typed

string oh = "yeah", oh as string = "yeah"

If you know how the language is meant to behave and learn the suggested naming conventions for the given language, then remembering the method names becomes a whole lot easier

<comment><USER2> And finally - really, really finally... if a call is hard to remember, wrap it up in your own method with a better name.

def getNote(): return some.dark.and.really.obscure.namespace.to.get_one_note_by_googling.for_an_answer_function()</comment></comment>


Swift on Linux Newsletter - <AUTHOR> http://swiftsandbox.io <comment><AUTHOR> Interested to hear about Swift projects that are "Linux ready" \- those projects which don't link with any platform specific libraries.</comment>


RubyConf India – Hospitality was anything but pleasant at The Lalit Goa  - <AUTHOR> http://ajeygore.in/rubyconf/the-lalit-goof-up.html

<comment><USER3> I've run events like this for over 10 years now, a couple pointers;

* Negotiate payment terms that require a deposit, but for which the balance is paid after the event.

* Always have a meeting with hotel management pre-event, review the contract, make sure everything is correct.

* Double Check your BEO's as part of the setup process - again, verify to contract.

* In the event of a dispute, have a copy of your countersigned written contract at hand, and hold them to it, with all the yelling, screaming and waiving of arms required - and by all means, escalate, escalate, escalate (to the most senior person the hotel can muster).

Make them stick to the contract terms, I've had hotels many times try to change the game before it was done being played, I've had 10k plus credits to us before.

<comment><USER4> @Aloha \+ The minimum room requirement amount (as per contract) was paid a week in advance to the hotel already. So, we held good on the contract terms - this was 28.4 Lakh INR!

\+ The actuals, incidentals and additional costs (which were about 8.45L) would have been done via RTGS settlement after the event. However, Hotel refused to let us even check-out! After paying 28.4L, to be threatened for the balance is ridiculous!

\+ The Hotel double-booked events - they admitted it was their fault as asked us for our help. Once we had extended our help to save them from a huge liability, they simply shunned us away - we should have been duly compensated for this mess (not to mention the inconvenience at the conference - <USER2> drums, lunch in the hot sun etc.) But they refused to even MEET us the next day, the moment we helped them avert the disaster!

#Fail #Fail #Fail - we were treated as mis-creatants instead of guests!

<comment><USER5> Dude - I can't believe they held your family and wouldn't let you leave! I was shocked at the way they treated Zak and I when we left, but never expected anything of this magnitude.

At least you pulled off an amazing conf despite all the following bullshit.

<comment><USER4> yeah man - cannot risk any confrontation with family around! I heard about your checkout and their goof-up in billing. Jokers had the audacity of telling me that our attendees were rude and abusive!

Glad you had a great time. I wonder when I am going to say - "Hey we nailed it - the conference was successful without a hitch" ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was one of the speakers at this event and I have to say that the organizers really made a heroic effort to ensure we had a good event. Anyone not talking to the organizers did not even realize the stress they were under...they did an amazing job covering up the failures of the hotel. I am friends with many of the organizers, and the looks of pain on their faces when these problems came up really hit me hard. I applaud the organizers for taking such good care of us speakers (even to the point of going through our hotel bills individually) and the attendees (going to bat to ensure they were unaware of the problems).

I had an amazing time...thank you for your hard work.

<comment><USER7> Agree to @headius fulliest. Hats off to organizers covering up failures of hotel, for taking care of all attendees and making conference a success. Really sad that they had to suffer because The Lalit goof up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do this:

1) Approach a good lawyer to send a legal letter to the hotel putting in all the problems and demand a huge compensation.

2) File a case in the consumer court of Goa, if no proper response from the hotel.

3) If the lawyer finds no issues then approach local and national news/press agencies and get your story published there. Anything that comes in the news papers has a far greater impact and makes such businesses get down on their knees.

4) Do not delay in filing the case. Do it ASAP.

I wish you get a decent compensation though Indian courts are not known for that.

<comment><USER8> 5) Do not delete any mail/written communication you or your peers had with them. Do not give the originals to anyone except the court no matter what reason they give.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, here are a few things-

1) Put it on facebook also on their page.

2) Give them a solid ripping at all online boards like tripadvisor that you can find.

3) If you want to really, truly fuck them, register a case with consumer court. Indian consumer courts are very vigilant and they will make it worth your while by ass fucking Lalit resort.

In most cases merely the mention of filing a case in consumer court gets them at your feet.

I really feel for you. I know how it feels to pay through the nose and still get treated like shit.

</comment><comment><USER10> My experience was amazing this year, good organization, good service, and luxurious facilities! This time it was far better than the previous year's conf held at Hyatt, Pune. But when I heard that organizers of conference faced so many issues because of management at LaLit, I really felt sad about whatever bad happened there. We should have other good options instead of such nasty hotels, IMO.

Ruby community is with you, fellas!

<comment><USER11> I didn't make it this year, but I really enjoyed RubyConf India last year. Everything went super smooth. So it sucks to hear it was so hard for them this year. :/

<comment><USER4> So, the conference was bigger and better -- even with an improvised stand-up comic making up for an electrical failure (yeah - electrical failure for a paid-for banquet hall hosting 400 ppl).

Beach party rocked - the community really "met" each other at length. Everything was awesome, till the management showed their true colours after we helped them resolve their mess with a double-booking!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I sympathize with you and hope the story reaches more ears. I can believe how unprofessional hotel staff can be despite their own mistakes. That's especially true for hotels that are run as a family business and lack corporate culture & ethics. They'll throw around the word 'sorry' freely but they rarely mean it. I'd suggest you to take the legal route, or atleast get plenty of press coverage on this. Let's also hear out what they have to say.

</comment><comment><USER13> For future reference: would there be benefit in hiring a reputed event management company, if so what would be the overhead?

Reasoning is three fold. The event management companies: (i) know which places work, (ii) they give repeat business, so less likely to be brushed off, and (iii) their boss (even if not onsite) has been in such situations before & knows what to do.

<comment><USER4> An event management company would definitely have helped.

However, since this was the first time we were handling accommodation in the tickets, rooming etc. we could only guess the numbers but had to give the hotel an upfront minimum room guarantee! Next year - we will surely outsource the effort to an event management company.

Lesson learnt but unfortunately - the very very hard way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great work at organizing an amazing event @IndianGuru. I still cant believe that a renowned hotel like 'the Lalit' can take a risk to upset an online community. They probably have no idea of the power of ruby/internet community. Let's submit shit loads of reviews on tripadvisor and other places that teaches them a good lesson.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ah so much of white text on black background. Is there a web app I can paste the url and it will make it readable for me?

<comment><USER16> Add this as a bookmarklet:

javascript:(function(){_readableOptions= {'text_font':'quote(Palatino Linotype), Palatino, quote(Book Antigua), Georgia, serif','text_font_monospace':'quote(Courier New), Courier, monospace','text_font_header':'quote(Times New Roman), Times, serif','text_size':'18px','text_line_height':'1.5','box_width' :'30em','color_text':'#282828','color_background':'#F0F0F0','c olor_links':'#0000FF','text_align':'normal','base':'blueprint' ,'custom_css':''};if(document.getElementsByTagName('body').len gth>0);else{return;}if(window.$readable) {if(window.$readable.bookmarkletTimer) {return;}}else{window.$readable= {};}window.$readable.bookmarkletTimer=true;window.$readable.op tions=_readableOptions;if(window.$readable.bookmarkletClicked) {window.$readable.bookmarkletClicked();return;}_readableScript =document.createElement('script');_readableScript.setAttribute ('src','[http://readable-static.tastefulwords.com/target.js](http://readable- static.tastefulwords.com/target.js)? rand='+encodeURIComponent(Math.random()));document.getElements ByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(_readableScript);})()

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There should be easier procedure to file cases at consumer courts. To prevent such things from happening again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or maybe [http://www.core.nic.in/](http://www.core.nic.in/)

<comment><USER12> They are dysfunctional & your complaint would go down a blackhole. Never to be seen or heard again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They must be made to regret this bullying behaviour : file a case please.

</comment><comment><USER19> fuck u lalit for treating a community like a shit ... how can we sue them .. im really feeling bad for our organizers :(</comment>


PyCharm 2017.3 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/whatsnew/ <comment><USER2> New http client is great. I prefer to write the request manually instead of using a GUI.</comment>


Common Ember.js Developer Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.toptal.com/emberjs/the-8-most-common-ember-js-developer-mistakes

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty great enumeration of some common gotchas in Ember 1.x. Much of the effort ahead of Ember 2.x has centered around addressing precisely these gotchas, so I love how thorough your "Ember.js Mitigations" sections are.

Between the elimination of controllers (and therefore singleton controllers), and a reshaping of the `model` hook around a simpler "attributes for the top- level" concept we have coming, I am hopeful that most of these gotchas will be a thing of the past for anyone starting out in the Ember 2.x era.

We love seeing thoughtful, detailed lists like this, as they help to drive our priorities for improvements. Ember community: keep them coming!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, Yehuda!</comment></comment>


Why Japan Makes Cooler Jeans Than America - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/prep-yourself-1452890984 <comment><USER2> I found this narrative about how pivotal this one moment in the 60's and the centrality of preppy fashion to be more than a little forced. And some parts bordered on misleading like:

> _The Japanese helped fetishize vintage Levi's in the 1990s, just as > Americans were chopping them off to make jorts. Then, when the clothes they > wanted became too expensive, the Japanese started making their own selvedge > denim,_

I picked up 2 pairs of Edwin jeans last month in Japan, they're great but the company has been making jeans since the 50's and using high quality selvedge denim since the early 60's.

<comment><USER3> Hi I'm the author of Ametora.

From everything I have researched, Edwin appears to have fudged their timeline quite a bit, claiming to do a lot of things years before there's any proof that any Japanese makers were doing it. I wrote something here about trying to reconstruct the exact timeline: [http://www.heddels.com/2015/10/who-made- japans-first-jeans/](http://www.heddels.com/2015/10/who-made-japans-first- jeans/)

They may have imported some (low quality) selvedge denim in the 1960s because a lot of denim was still selvedge (at least on one side of the cuff), but no one made the slubby, selvedge denim Japan is famous for in any sort of serious quantity until the late-1980s. No Japanese companies made jeans-grade denim at all until 1973.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply and very informative link, I hadn't considered that the Edwin corporation marketing department might just be full of crap!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminded me of this story I read on HN which also talks about how Japan refined American culture: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7580032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7580032). Very interesting subject, especially with regards to how we equate foreign with hip, and how the old becomes new again.

</comment><comment><USER5> The top result should be accessible without sign in [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=Prep+Yourself&oq=Prep+Yourself&gs_l=news- cc.3...284.284.0.6184.108.40.206.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1ac.2).

<comment><USER6> Is there an alternative for those who keep google out of their internet ?

<comment><USER7> Spoof the referrer header, so as to pretend you were sent by Google. I use the "Referrer Control" extension for Chrome (which probably isn't an option for you, but I'm sure there are similar extensions for Firefox) with a permanent rule to spoof the referrer header for wsj.com. Works like a charm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please don't post articles that require sign in.

<comment><USER9> This question is settled on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989).

Articles behind paywalls are ok as long as the paywall has a workaround. Comments helping people read an article are ok. Generic paywall complaints are off topic.

<comment><USER10> It's not settled. These links are annoying.

<comment><USER9> I didn't say everyone agreed—that's clearly not the case. But we've made the decision and you can read about our reasoning at that link.

Yes, the paywalls are annoying, but HN would be much poorer without any articles from those publications, and that's more important. Hence the site policy is: (1) if there's a standard workaround, then posting them is ok, (2) flagging them for that reason alone is an abuse of flagging, and (3) comments generically complaining about this are off topic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: LiveForm – Form endpoints with reCAPTCHA support - <AUTHOR> http://docs.liveformhq.com/recaptcha/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am the founder of LiveForm (and [https://getsimpleform.com](https://getsimpleform.com) before this) and would love to hear feedback from the community :)</comment>


Stack Overflow is down - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/?down=16022014

<comment><AUTHOR> Million of developers worldwide stopped "writing" code

<comment><USER2> I can't believe you said "million", do we really have millions of developers?

<comment><USER3> There are more than 9 millions of people that write code

<comment><USER4> Facetious, or an actual figure? If the latter, can you point us to a ref please?

<comment><USER3> I think that was this talk. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ) Joel says that according to MS study there are 9mln people that write code. [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk/products/listings](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk/products/listings)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://xkcd.com/1185/](https://xkcd.com/1185/)

"StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted."

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm, it is all creative commons licensed, right? Where is the local, daily updated, blazing fast to search offline application? :)

<comment><USER7> You could go grab the copy we put on internet archive a few weeks ago.

[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

Pretty sure we'll have this worked out with our provider before you can finish downloading though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> ...so you can get a taste how it felt writing code in 2000

<comment> vezzy-fnord There's plenty of other sources to get code snippets and solutions, besides SO.

This isn't really that debilitating of an issue, although I guess copy-and- paste code monkeys will find it highly inconvenient.

<comment><USER8> I personally find SO to be really great compensation for given technology vendor's crappy documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems to be their network provider: [https://mobile.twitter.com/StackStatus/status/43513035754625...](https://mobile.twitter.com/StackStatus/status/435130357546254336)

</comment><comment><USER10> Just search on google, click on the arrow next to link and next Cached. Voilá

<comment><USER11> blazing fast it isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> too bad they can't start a thread asking for tips to bring it back online

</comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, I am able to connect to SO when I VPN into the Southwest, but not from the Northeast. Availability zone-specific downtime?

<comment><USER7> New DNS records propagating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> ...and i've just collect my first +15 this week. Great. :)

Doesnt work in Europe either.

</comment><comment><USER15> I realized this when using howdoi:

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/howdoi](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/howdoi)

</comment><comment> J-H That was fast; seems to be back up now

</comment><comment><USER16> BACK UP!!!

</comment><comment><USER17> i was hoping this would be most trending here and here we are !</comment>


C Function Arguments - <AUTHOR> http://ziviani.net/2012/c-arguments

<comment><USER2> Nice tutorial. Ziviani also has other nice brain dumps (tutorials) on his site as well.. Like how to create an apache Module -- image refs are dead though...</comment>


The real problem with "The cloud" - <AUTHOR> http://morning-robot-1445.herokuapp.com/the-real-problem-with-the-cloud

<comment><USER2> Unrelated: an observation I keep on making is that convenience and security tend to be inversely proportional. A both convenient and secure solution (e.g. passwords) is the best solution to large-scale auth because it makes devs worry less and users do less.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say that's unrelated but it's definitely true. I think that if more 'normal' people cared about security we would come up with a convenient and secure system already. For example, would two factor be such a big deal if everyone had an authenticator already? Probably not.

<comment><USER2> Free start up idea, everyone: super-convenient 2-factor auth.</comment></comment></comment>


Doodle.js: Canvas Animation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/biilly/doodle-js

<comment><USER2> Here's a direct link to some demos, as the book progresses you'll get better eye candy: [http://biilly.github.com/doodle- js/doc/demos/making_things_m...](http://biilly.github.com/doodle- js/doc/demos/making_things_move/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really great lib -- nice work! Interesting to see the lessons learned from Flash applied to JS/HTML5.

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent resource! Thanks for this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very impressive.</comment>


Profession: a thought provoking Asimov short story on education - <AUTHOR> http://www.abelard.org/asimov.htm

<comment><USER2> great story would surely appeal to all HN readers

</comment><comment><USER3> This story was in a compilation by Asimov titled "The Last Question".</comment>


Twitter releases the code for the messaging system they use across their clusters - <AUTHOR> http://rubyforge.org/projects/starling/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that its own server (starling) uses the Memcached protocol. From the readme:

      Starling - a light weight server for reliable distributed message passing.

      = Synopsis

      # Start the Starling server as a daemonized process:
      starling -h 192.168.1.1 -d

      # Put messages onto a queue:
      require 'memcache'
      starling = MemCache.new('192.168.1.1:22122')
      starling.set('my_queue', 12345)

      # Get messages from the queue:
      require 'memcache'
      starling = MemCache.new('192.168.1.1:22122')
      loop { puts starling.get('my_queue') }

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone actually looked at this code yet? Documentation?

Wish they'd put up a SVN browser so I don't have to download it to see what it looks like.

<comment><USER4> I looked at it very briefly. The codebase is actually pretty small. It appears to depend heavily on memcached.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yay! Finally... Blaine was talking about releasing this for months; glad he finally got around to it :)</comment>


Ask HN: What are other good sites to read like HN? - <AUTHOR> Namely involving tech, entrepreneur, stuff like that.<p>I browse the technology section of the news, browse Reddit, and Hacker News. What are some other good places? Mashable is okay but I'm curious what other sites you guys go to, to catch up on latest news. <comment><USER2> The Register is an excellent site for what's going on in tech. [http://www.theregister.co.uk](http://www.theregister.co.uk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks will check that out

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked at it, man it's not mobile friendly haha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I subscribed to Inside's Daily Brief ([https://inside.com/daily- brief](https://inside.com/daily-brief)) which is actually twice a day for the major world news. Inside.com also has many other newsletters that cater to a specific subject. I recommend you give them a shot.

I also subscribe to Forkast.com to get a weekly email on major upcoming things ([https://forekast.com/weekly](https://forekast.com/weekly)). It seems to be mostly tech, though nowhere near exclusively.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good info on major deals and news happenings on this new LAUNCH Ticker site/email [https://www.launchticker.com/](https://www.launchticker.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It is pricey, but The Information www.theinformation.com has excellent tech reporting.

<comment><USER6> Do you pay for that personally? Similarly to the Financial Times, it seems like a price that's meant to be employer-expensed.</comment></comment>