Next.js 9.3 – Static Site Support, 32 KB Smaller Runtime - <AUTHOR> https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-3 <comment><USER2> Preview Mode is an amazing innovation!

I work on TinaCMS, a toolkit for building content management into your website, and we just implemented an open-authoring system on our own docs. People can contribute to our docs without ever leaving the website. You just click "Edit this post" and it will create a fork and enter inline-editing mode. Any changes are committed back to your fork and then you can open a PR from there.

[https://tinacms.org/blog/introducing-visual-open- authoring](https://tinacms.org/blog/introducing-visual-open-authoring)

<comment><USER3> This is really cool. Many _many_ years ago, I worked on a project that attempted to provide functionality like this, but with the limitations of browsers (IE 6 was still by far the majority share), libraries and my own talents, it was too ambitious to achieve. It warms my heart to see that vision realized in real products today.

<comment><USER2> Thanks so much! We're really just getting started. There's going to be a lot of advances in the next couple months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used Next.js for the first time about 3 weeks ago to launch a small experiment. It was also my first introduction to react.

I must say, it was a pleasure to use. Great tutorials and the deployment using "now" was easy. Even attaching my own domain to it took less than 10 minutes.

Really recommend trying it out if you're interested in frontend development!

<comment><USER5> or if you're _not_ interested in front-end work, but need to do something quick.

<comment><USER4> Woops yeah indeed, that was my use-case actually!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in the market for an SSG for documentation of a larger project (and therefore I'm looking for something quick and easy to maintain). Hoping to keep it within the JS ecosystem so that would rule out Hugo and Jeckyll. Is Next.js easier to use than Gatsby, or is there an even simpler alternative I haven't come across yet? Ideally I'd be able to point this library to a glob of .md files and generate HTML + RSS.

<comment><USER7> I built my personal website with nothing but Express and JS template strings: [https://github.com/brundonsmith/website](https://github.com/brundonsmith/website). It's so simple to do that I almost question the necessity of "static site generators" in general (Next.js of course does much more than static site generation).

<comment><USER8> Interesting approach, how every page is a JS file that builds the HTML page as a string; structurally it looks almost the same as how React/Next.js do it.

With that setup, I imagine it's fairly trivial to add a "static site generator":

\- Run the local server that serves the rendered pages.

\- Run a Node.js process that will take a given array of all page routes; make HTTP requests to those local URLs; and save the rendered HTML into folders, for a complete static site.

<comment><USER7> Yep, that's what it already does :) And a neat property is that I could freely move different render functions between static, request-time, and client-side if I wanted to.

People tend to think of React rendering and the like as this special, mysterious process. But the only special thing about it is the way it efficiently reconciles and updates an _existing_ DOM to match a new DOM. That initial render is really no different from PHP. Static site generators are just PHP with a prewarmed cache.

<comment><USER8> Ah, I didn't dig deep enough to see that it already does what I described, heheh. So it's a static site generator as well as a server that dynamically renders. I like the sound of being able to "partially compile", having the choice to leave some routes rendered at request-time or client-side.

I heard the analogy (equivalence?) before, that statically rendered sites are _caches that are invalidated at build time_.

Makes sense, and thinking of it as a strategy that can be partially applied - rather than as an all-encompassing framework or tool - is insightful, so it can be mixed and matched with dynamic rendering as needed.

<comment><USER9> What you described here is basically how Next.js works :)

The blog post mentions the 3 APIs that make this possible:

\- getStaticProps (Static Generation): Fetch data at build-time.

\- getStaticPaths (Static Generation): Specify dynamic routes to prerender based on data.

\- getServerSideProps (Server-Side Rendering): Fetch data on each request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks awesome congrats to the team. I'm hoping preview mode will also work with Contentful.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love Next.js! I used it for building a personal finance tracking tool: [https://github.com/nviennot/easy-finance](https://github.com/nviennot/easy- finance)

</comment><comment><USER12> The new `getServerSideProps` function addresses my biggest pain point with Next.js. I found it super awkward that if you wanted to make a website with data from a database, you basically needed two webservers: one to access the database and expose it over the web via a raw format like JSON, and then a Next.js-powered one to take that JSON and make it into HTML. For a lot of projects that separation can be nice, but for small sites or prototypes it's too much effort. Now I can easily have the Next.js server access the database directly.

<comment><USER13> Nuxt.js solved this with asyncData ages ago

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love the team behind it and their outlook on engineering and design. Look forward to using 9.3 and view getStaticProps as a major step forward.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice, with SSG support Next becomes basically Gatsby on drugs.

</comment><comment><USER16> Next.js do is more favorable if you don't want to be locked-in.

That's important to overcome the fatigue learning all the buzzwords

</comment><comment><USER13> Nuxt.js has had "SSG" for a long time

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been interviewing and encountered my first company using that and was my first exposure to it.

Very fascinating project!</comment>


ICE/ISEE-3 to return to an Earth no longer capable of speaking to it - <AUTHOR> http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/02070836-isee-3.html <comment><USER3> I think I see the next natural progression in the open-source movement:

1) Open-Source Software

2) Open-Source Hardware

3) Open-Source Spacecraft

So ... if NASA and the other space agencies aren't willing to make use of this spacecraft, would they be willing to cede ownership to a group of hackers dedicated to helping the hardware continue its mission?

I've got quite a bit of ancient hardware in my basement, and while I was a broad-band RF engineer (in the cable industry), I know the theory behind narrow-band transmission. Anyone think we should start a Github project?

UPDATE:

It looks like the highest bit-rate that would be required would be 2048 bps:

"Tracking and telemetry support have been provided by the DSN (Deep Space Network) since January 1984. The ISEE-3/ICE bit rate was nominally 2048 bps during the early part of the mission, and 1024 bps during the Giacobini-Zinner comet encounter. The bit rate then successively dropped to 512 bps (on 9/12/85), 256 bps (on 5/1/87), 128 bps (on 1/24/89) and finally to 64 bps (on 12/27/91)."

This should be pretty easy to achieve with any UART. Now to find the frequencies used during communication.

UPDATE 2:

I'm currently working at the Pennsylvania State University and just sent an e-mail to a friend who's the Flight Operations Team Lead of the SWIFT Mission Operation Center here ([http://www.swift.psu.edu/](http://www.swift.psu.edu/)). More information as I hear back from those I've contacted!

<comment><USER4> I believe this lady may be particularly helpful in this endeavour: [http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopter.html)

<comment><USER3> That was a great story!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was really annoyed to get to the end of this article and not find _any_ information about frequencies, bandwidth, power, or anything else that would enable a practical consideration of the problem. Not only am I annoyed with the journalist (who I presume has a science degree), I'm even more annoyed with NASA for omitting this basic factual information from their statement in favor of pablum that appears to be tailored to small children.

<comment><USER6> What are you on about? All the relevant information is there. What need is there for details? That would be interesting, sure, but it is not in any way necessary when simply reporting on the state of this mission. Something the linked article does.

Not everything needs to always contain all information.

<comment><USER7> Agreed I've been sitting here trying to figure out what relevancy frequencies, bandwidth and power have to the primary issue which is _cost_. The article described the problem and why there isn't a solution quite clearly to me.

<comment><USER8> So to translate: 'Don't you worry about space communications, let me worry about blank.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It might be a little harder than you think. Satellites typically use some kind of encryption on the command channel, since no one wants to find their satellite has been hijacked. Even back in 1978 that was likely the case. So when they say 'decommissioned the transmitters' what they probably mean is 'threw out the data encryption hardware.' If they also threw out the design files (and remember these are the people who shredded the Saturn 5 engineering plans), there's pretty much no chance of talking to ISEE-3. No matter how many enthusiastic and capable hams try. Radio transmitters and antennas are easy. Yes, hams could do that part. But the packet structure and encryption - <USER2> easy.

It's not a case of hacking a protocol, or breaking the encryption on a given stream of data. There's no data stream. Unless the encryption is correct in commands sent to it, there'll be no response at all.

There might not be any encryption on the return data channel. Nothing anyone can do with that which harms the mission, so why bother adding more circuitry to the satellite?

Give NASA another brown star.

</comment><comment><USER10> Based on the article, the more accurate title would be "ICE/ISEE-3 to return to an Earth not interested in spending money to reenable transmitter to it"

<comment><USER11> I'm not so sure how much it's "reenable" and not "re-engineer". I can certainly understand why it would take many millions of dollars to develop and implement a transmitter no longer in use in 7 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One day, I tacked up a quote from the "Max Headroom" TV show. The dialogue it was from went like this:

Blank Reg: "Here, take this." Kid: "What is it?" Blank Reg: "It's a book." Kid: "What is it?" Blank Reg: "It's a non-volatile storage medium. You should have one." Kid: "Shove off!"

I explained this to a coworker, and after laughing he told a story about how, decades ago, a few folks had made a computerized "repository of all human knowledge". Semi-recently, some folks tried to read the data on this massive storage device; technology had advanced and changed so much... they couldn't. However, we can still read "ancient books" like the Gutenberg bible.

Note: The Gutenberg bible was just an example of a really old book; religion was incidental at best.

<comment><USER13> Reminds me of the Domesday Project [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project)

<comment><USER12> That may have been it, I can't quite remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's pretty amazing we have a deep space array that is capable of finding and listening to a signal that weak and far away.

Couldn't we please just swap the NASA and military budgets for one year? Just one.

<comment><USER15> >Couldn't we please just swap the NASA and military budgets for one year? Just one.

No, but we could just give DARPA to NASA, since they should both be doing roughly the same thing anyway, and the gov't probably loses some few hundreds of millions of dollars maintaining a superfluous bureaucracy to manage DARPA.

It would also be nice if the next revolutionary rocket technology were to be used primarily to go to other planets and explore space, rather than to kill peasants in Asia, but that is a secondary consideration.

<comment><USER16> NSF might correspond to DARPA, but not NASA. DARPA's remit is far wider than NASA's is.

For example Solar Designer's work on a password-based key derivation function has a DARPA funding component, but would hardly make sense for NASA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What would interest me: does the comm protocol of (interstellar) satellites include any form of authentication or was it assumed at build time that only government-level entities would ever be able to build transmission equipment powerful enough to reach the probes?

<comment><USER18> They probably have some sort of crypto on the communication, you could could probably break it on your iPhone :) 1978 was a long time ago and security wasn't nearly as well developed as it is now.

<comment><USER19> Even if the security protocol was "append this number to the messages you send me", it wouldn't be very easy to break since you don't have a successful transcript, any information about the implementation, or the ability to cheaply try keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Call up Travis Goodspeed and tell him "Open Season" on ICE/ISEE-3.

I'd bet on successful bi-directional communications within 18 months.

</comment><comment><USER21> _If they had planned for it to still be functioning at this point, they would have maintained the capability to communicate with it._

This is the key point. It completed its mission. Someone forgot to turn it off. Nobody ever expected to do anything more with it.

<comment><USER22> Opportunity had a planned 90-sol mission duration but continues to be useful. Maybe there isn't any useful task this bird could be used for, but I'd be surprised if the wider scientific community can't think up anything.

<comment><USER23> This thing was built in the 1970's. It has no locomotive power. It aint no Mars rover.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The NRAO has telescopes that have been used to communicate with spacecraft. But the are out of money, too.

[http://NRAO.edu](http://NRAO.edu)

</comment><comment><USER25> I am interested in anyone with serious attempts at communicating with this space craft. I think NASA decided they have no interest because they need to focus the deep space network antenna at the craft during data collection due to no local memory on the space craft.

The answer is to launch a cubesat translater to shadow the space craft. However the cubesat translater is only of use if the space craft is headed somewhere interesting. That involves a time window of only a few months. Also the cubesat is only practical if the ISEE-3 still has functioning instruments which are being broadcast.

The combination of interesting places being far enough away from earth that only very large antennas can transmit and the logistics of launching a cubesat mission that can escape earth's orbit which has never been done are why I think nasa is bowing out.

I would be interested in the cubesat mission if the legal aspects of the initial communication and trajectory change are ironed out. If there is a serious attempt within the law I am willing to donate my time as an electrical engineer.

firstname.lastname@example.com

PS I think the only way there can be a legal effort is if NASA and FCC bless it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm mad at politicians and people in power : it seems they always find billions to fund foreign wars or stock market shenanigans but when it comes to great scientific projects that can help understand our universe better, there's not a cent.

</comment><comment><USER27> what is the value in communicating with it? it sounds as if it has very little propellant left. is there any meaningful science that it can do that we otherwise could not?

<comment><USER28> from [http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1697/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1697/1)

Recycling an existing spacecraft that has already completed its original mission makes good sense for a number of reasons. The spacecraft has already been designed, built, and launched in the course of its original mission. These are typically the most expensive parts of any mission. For the price of a little on-board propellant needed to nudge a craft on a new trajectory and a modest amount of additional funding for mission operations and science, an existing spacecraft can sometimes be sent to another target of interest. ... On September 18, 2008, ICE, which had finally begun drifting closer to the Earth, was located and successfully reactivated. It was found that all but one of its 13 instruments were still functioning and enough propellant remained on board for a velocity change of 150 meters per second (320 miles per hour). There appeared to be enough life left in the old probe to perform more useful science. ICE should return to the Earth-Moon system again around August 10, 2014—over three decades after it left. NASA scientists, including a team lead by Robert Farquhar, are considering several options for the future of ICE, including redirecting it towards additional comet encounters in 2017 or 2018. Still other missions are possible for this robust, reused spacecraft before it once again drifts back into interplanetary space and subsequently returns to the vicinity of the Earth sometime in the 2040s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seems like a good place for a kickstarter?

<comment><AUTHOR> If only they'd reached out to the ham radio community two years ago. There has to be some retiree out there someplace who could provide enough info to get volunteers started. But you can't begin to pull something together like this on the current timeline.</comment></comment>


Liberating a X200 - <AUTHOR> https://operand.ca/2018/02/22/liberating-a-x200.html <comment><USER2> Welcome to the bright side. I've been enjoying my Chromebook with coreboot and nerf'ed Intel ME for years. It's not as hard as many of us would think.

By the way, Chromebooks are cheap and is a fantastic platform to experiment with coreboot/de-intel-ME. Acer C720s are $100 right now.

There are 2 spererate tasks: Flashing coreboot and De-blob'ing Intel ME. If you just want to try coreboot with the Chromebook, then you can do it with software and don't need an external programmer. All you have to do is just remove the BIOS write-protect screws - MrChromebox's website is a great resource. If you need to de-blob the chromebooks, then you'd need an external programmer, such as a Raspberry Pi.

As a shameless plug, I have released a tool so one doesn't have to be an electrical engineer and/or a Linux expert to flash many Chromebooks/Thinkpads with a Raspberry Pi [1]. You don't really have to have a breadboard to flash the Chromebooks like you do with the Thinkpad in the article. Also, the cool thing about it is that it prepares the image on your x86 computer so you literally don't have to configure the pi and get/compile stuff afterwards. I didn't know that the X200 needs a patch. I will integrate the x200 support into ezpi4ME so people don't have to manually patch and wait for it to compile on the Pi.

1: github.com/htruong/EzPi4ME

Edit: I noticed OP has a blog post complaining about Acer 720s having problems. It hasn't happened to me, at least with MrChromebox's firmware. I did have problem with John Lewis' firmware builds, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I noticed OP has a blog post complaining about Acer 720s having problems.

OP here - I've since been able to install 64 bit Debian on my C720, still not sure what the original issue was.

I also tried to compile my own C720 coreboot and flash that, but ran into problems. The X200 was way easier :) I may follow up with another C720 post if I get that working.

<comment><USER2> >The X200 was way easier.

I think to most people, the idea that one can have coreboot by just messing with the software seems appealing. From what I understand, one always need an external flasher for the Thinkpad while you don't with Chromebooks. So that's a huge factor in accessibility in favor of Chromebooks.

>I also tried to compile my own C720 coreboot and flash that, but ran into problems.

I actually didn't compile my own version of Coreboot. I guess at some point I'd have to trust someone. But it feels very funny to me that I trust a random guy on the internet nicknamed MrChromebox to do the right thing instead of Intel. But then, even when I compile my own firmware, I have to trust thousands of other people who work on Coreboot to not have performed any underhanded tricks, my compiler to be free of defects, etc. "Reflections on trusting trust" hits home hard. I think all in all it does sound like that "having software/hardware we can control when we want to" (aka Stallmanism) is a more realistic goal than "better security."

For the ezpi4me project though, I tried to make the scripts as simple and easy to understand as possible, so you do see all it does. This is one project that I completed recently that I'm quite fond of, especially given I haven't been very productive and inspired to do things for a while :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Recently did something similar with a Pocket CHIP and an X230. This is a wonderful SPI programming setup: [https://imgur.com/5KEo4Y5](https://imgur.com/5KEo4Y5)

<comment><USER4> Do you have a link to documentation? I have the pokcetCHI@ and the laptop, and would be interested in giving this a go.

<comment><USER3> I did this kind of in my spare time, but I'd be happy to write up something quick later tonight or this weekend.

Most important bit is a SOIC8 Pomona 5250 clip and some wires to connect it up properly. I ended up soldering some right-angle headers onto my CHIP so I can do other things besides SPI programming with it.

<comment><USER4> That would be awesome, and appreciated, I would love to give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> AFAIK, almost the same process is used for Bios whitelisting. Meaning, Lenovo(and I guess others) has hardwired in the bios that only secific vendors+versions off e.g. WIFI cards can be used. You would dump the bios, same as described in the article, do some magic, and write it the altered bios back. If anybody can enlighten me on the magic part, I would be very thankful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Notice any problems with the RTC? Mine doesn't work on a T420 after flashing. The clock jumps ahead 50 years every time I power off.

<comment><AUTHOR> No RTC problems seen here.

<comment><USER6> I fixed it by setting the system time (so that "date" returned the correct time), then I ran "sudo hwclock --systohc".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Been meaning to get this task done myself, but past attempts haven't worked out.

This post is making me give it another shot soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here - email me (jwm@my domain) with questions if you want, I can help diagnose problems :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent to see this. My X230 should arrive next week and I will give this a try. I haven't flashed a BIOS like this before so every high-quality write-up like this helps me understand some things to watch out for.

</comment><comment><USER9> Are there any coreboot supported platforms that charge over USB?</comment>


Domain tasting - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting <comment><USER2> ???

<comment><USER3> !!!

<comment><USER2> Pretty much this. I'm amazed somebody would post a Wikipedia page without explanation here.

<comment><USER4> It happens a lot. I agree, I prefer it if people leave a comment to say what they found interesting about the article.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice on arguing with a person who yells to prove their point - <AUTHOR> I had somewhat of an unpleasant experience tonite, I won't get into the details but I was having a conversation with some people at a dinner party and one of them was very argumentative.  I'm not one to stand by and allow someone to get away with making contrary statements backed up by false facts and was easily drawn into an argument.  I tried laying out the reasons for my opinion but was shouted down and spoken over top of every time I opened my mouth. It got to the point where I became so frustrated I began to raise my voice and what began as an intelligent conversation eventually devolved into a shouting match between myself and this other person.  Needless to say this has upset me to the point it is now 3am and I am unable to sleep so I figured I would ask how you folks would deal with this situation as I feel if this had occurred with someone at a work function, it could have a lasting effect on my career. The only thought running through my head right now is a quote "I learned long ago to never wrestle with a pig as you both get dirty but the pig enjoys it!" <comment><USER2> > _I 'm not one to stand by and allow someone to get away with making contrary > statements backed up by false facts_

To be blunt, teach yourself not to do that. If you can't, then, as you surmise, it is likely to damage your career significantly. Having witnessed several such incidents over the course of my career, I never came out of it with anything other than decreased respect for both parties involved.

Some arguments aren't worth trying to "win".

</comment><comment><USER3> At a dinner party? There's the old maxim to never interrupt the enemy when he's making a mistake.

However, any conversation is helped if you enter it with a willingness to listen and hear what the other person is saying rather than starting out with the idea that they're wrong and that you're going to change their mind.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pick your battles, this one is not worth it.</comment>


Model shows civilization collapse is not at all unlikely - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6 <comment><USER2> So this paper uses observations/models of Easter Island and extrapolates that model to the entire planet. It also assumes resource usage stays the same, and that tree-human codependency observed/modelled around Easter Island can be extrapolated to all of the Earth + humanity's future over the coming 100-200 years.

Climate change is real; the risks associated with climate change is real. This paper makes a few too many assumptions and extrapolations to be the one I'd cite in trying to understand those risks and changes...</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage issues/bugs, track features - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, what process do you use to track issues, manage these and keep a list of the most requested features? I'm asking because there are millions of tools out there, all seem to be different versions of a to do list. Does anyone find it really unmotivating to track a list of ever expanding issues? How do you prioritise to stay focused on a few at a time. This adds more complexity when you want to launch new features at the same time. <comment><USER2> On a side-project I'm working with someone else on at the moment, we're using Asana.

I'm the tech/coding part, whereas he has the domain knowledge, so we have a Workspace setup for the project, then have seperate projects within that - ie, at the moment we have a Front-End project, a Back-End project, a Phase 2 project and a Future project.

If it's a bug or something we want for launch it goes into Front or Back-End, for sometime after launch it's Phase 2 and a nice-to-have goes into Future - tasks get assigned to me when there's an action needed, once done I assign it back and once we're both happy then it's completed - we use the Comments to put notes down regarding ideas for how it should work/look etc. against the tasks.

One thing I like that Asana has recently got is sub-tasks, so you can break a task down into component tasks without cluttering your main Task list up.

Works for us, may not for anyone else though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a great flow. We are using trello at the moment. A list each for current focus, bugs and new features for future dev. I can assign issue to someone in trello too but it's not very efficient and seeing lists of issues in a large board can be overwhelming.

We normally get together on Monday to sort these issues. Move urgent ones to the 'focus' list etc. But the main problem is that it's not very motivating to log issues and to solve them. It always looks like there are infinite amounts of work to do.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I've had a quick look at Trello and it seems like I'm using Asana in a similar way - large lists are demotivating, this is why I like the sub-tasks way of working ...

Say we want a new feature to handle processing a file and generating metadata from it after upload - in this case we'd have a high-level task of "Generate metadata asynchronously on upload" then within that I can have sub-tasks like "Create Resque job on upload", "Generate metadata in Resque job", "Update model with metadata", "Mail user on completion" - this way the main task list isn't cluttered with too much detail, and when I'm in the actual task the list of things to concentrate on are fairly small (I like to break a task up into 5 or so discrete parts which seems about right to me)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried Asana quickly before, seemed very similar to trello. But I really liked the inline ':' type to create a new section of issues, very intuitive and fast. Will have another go to see how well it fits our project.

Including all the sub tasks sounds great, means each time you complete a small task there is a sense of achievement. I'll try it out! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm trying out Trac for a side project. I like it because it's both a tracker and a wiki, and your tickets each have a wiki page.

It has a roadmap feature where you define milestones, and you can assign tickets to a milestone for planning and triage.

One thing I haven't figured out is how to block closing a ticket on the closing of another ticket. That's all I'm missing from it so far. Anyone? Is there a feature or plugin for that, or a practice, that I've missed?

Edit: s/to a roadmap/to a milestone/

</comment><comment><USER4> We use Jira.

It includes - user time tracking, bug reporting, you can create Epic issues and add sub-tasks under them. All very useful.

You can also get FishEye to integrate SVN info.

</comment><comment><USER5> We use Trello, Lighthouse, Zendesk and Pivotal Tracker. We hook them all into one stream with www.hojoki.com. This helps us search between them all and discuss what's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hojoki looks great, going to try it out, thanks for the tip! Is it easy to manage what issues to focus on with all these tools combined together?

<comment><USER5> That can be challenging if you have a lot going on. You can use tags and then sort by tags using the search. You should just use the search where you can to narrow down your results until you find exactly what you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea I just tried it out by hooking trello to it. It's good that it pulls in all the feeds from most apps. Makes it very easy to see whats going on. Like a live twitter feed! But hard to manage the focus, will try search and tag

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use Fogbugz and Desk, but most importantly, we use verbal communication.</comment>


Django GitHub migration done - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/django-developers/9--P57ezyBs <comment><USER2> I get not migrating the branches, but not migrating the tags, or at least another way to derive specific versions makes it a tad less useful, does it not?</comment>


Direct localization of a fast radio burst and its host - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v541/n7635/full/nature20797.html <comment><AUTHOR> And PDF on arxiv - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.01098v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.01098v1.pdf)</comment>


MIT Researchers Discover Sapwood is Inexpensive Water Filtration Method - <AUTHOR> http://guardianlv.com/2014/02/mit-researchers-discover-sapwood-is-inexpensive-water-filtration-method/ <comment><USER2> Actually Francis Bacon mentions it 400 years ago in his book titled "New Atlantis". I am glad that MIT is catching up</comment>


Japanese Economic Takeoff After 1945 (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.iun.edu/~hisdcl/h207_2002/jecontakeoff.htm <comment><USER2> Some pictures to put it in perspective: [0]

That country's recovery from being the only nation ever to be nuclear-bombed, to becoming the world's second best economy, while peacefully maintaining some of the world's safest, cleanest and most orderly cities, is one of mankind's most admirable success stories.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/japanpics/comments/59l1am/historica...](https://www.reddit.com/r/japanpics/comments/59l1am/historical_photos_of_postwar_japan/)

<comment><USER3> What does second best economy mean?

<comment><USER4> They mean second largest GDP, which Japan was for a while before being overtaken by China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in this sort of subject, Thomas McCraw's book _Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions_ gives excellent overviews of how the economies of Japan and Germany operated before, during, and after the war.

One interesting and counter-intuitive fact I learned is that both countries came out of the war with a significantly greater industrial capacity than they had beforehand. Despite the enormous devastation, the wartime build-up was even more immense, and left both countries poised for recovery.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a very good article[1] by William Gibson on post-Lost Decade Japan. It even reads like the first few chapters of _Neuromancer_.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2001/09/gibson/](https://www.wired.com/2001/09/gibson/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This article fails to mention the vast amount of money the US poured into Japan to make Japan a base of US influence in Southeast Asia. Domestic peace, maybe, but the other side of the whole international story is a less happy picture

<comment><USER8> Why is it so difficult to simply give credit where it's due? There are plenty of countries that take huge amounts of assistance that fail all day long. Would you also attribute American success to the spoils of war, colonialism, Manifest Destiny and African slavery, etc.?

<comment><USER9> Absolutely, wouldn't you?

<comment><USER8> It's not incorrect but it's dismissive of the thoughtful, hard work that's necessary to pull off a success. Every big opportunity doesn't equal a big win. Also, it's easy to take a hard-won effort for granted as an inevitability.

<comment><USER10> It's only dismissive if you think of events as having a single cause.

America's success relied, absolutely, on African slavery and on the removing the indigenous populations that were in its way. There are many other countries that engaged in slavery and population removal that didn't succeed to the extent America did, yes; you are correct. But there are _also_ many other countries that simply had Enlightenment ideals and a democracy and didn't succeed to the extent America did, and many more that simply had thoughtful, hard work and didn't succeed at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > After the war, they were taught to redirect their devotion to the nation > from its military expansion to economic expansion. _They were constantly > exhorted that they were a homogeneous people and superior to all other > Asians, and superior even to the whites._ To establish their national > position in the postwar world, they should not be very concerned about > individual well being, thus should not mind the high cost they have to pay > for consumer goods that cost less abroad.

It would be nice to have a shred of evidence for claims like this. "Constantly exhorted ... that they were superior to all other Asians" is almost certainly pure fiction.

<comment><USER12> _> "Constantly exhorted ... that they were superior to all other Asians" is almost certainly pure fiction._

It's not.

      The Japanese race is a unique isolate, having no known affinities with any
      other race. In some extreme versions, the race is claimed to be directly
      descended from a distinct branch of primates.

      "First, they implicitly assume that the Japanese constitute a culturally and
      socially homogeneous racial entity, whose essence is virtually unchanged from
      prehistoric times down to the present day. Secondly, they presuppose that the
      Japanese differ radically from all other known peoples. Thirdly, they are
      conspicuously nationalistic, displaying a conceptual and procedural hostility
      to any mode of analysis which might be seen to derive from external,
      non-Japanese sources."[1]

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

<comment><USER11> Saying the words "It's not" then quoting an almost entirely irrelevant Wikipedia article is not an effective way to convince me that I'm incorrect.

<comment><USER12> You stated that the claim of a Japanese narrative of their own superiority was fiction. I linked to an article that directly demonstrated the existence of, and examined the effects of, that exact narrative.

Given that you consider that "irrelevant," I agree that I will not convince you of your incorrectness, since there is clearly no good faith or intelligent discussion to be had with you.

<comment><USER11> > You stated that the claim of a Japanese narrative of their own superiority > was fiction.

I did not.

> I linked to an article that directly demonstrated the existence of, and > examined the effects of, that exact narrative.

You may have linked to an article that directly demonstrated that, but since I did not state that the claim of a Japanese narrative of their own superiority was fiction, whether or not your article demonstrates that is irrelevant.

> Given that you consider that "irrelevant,"

It is irrelevant since I did not say that "the claim of a Japanese narrative of their own superiority was fiction". I did not even say anything remotely similar to that.

> I agree that I will not convince you of your incorrectness

You will not be able to convince me of my incorrectness in saying something which I did not say. Since I did not even say the thing that you claimed me to have done, it is very hard for me to become convinced that I was or am incorrect about what you claim I said. The only logical way out of this conundrum is for you to go back to what I wrote, and notice that I didn't say what you seem to think I did.

> since there is clearly no good faith or intelligent discussion to be had > with you.

Now, if you have a new-found desire for an intelligent discussion, the jumping off point for you, to try to make your future discussions more intelligent, is to actually read the words the other person has written, then respond to them. If you respond to something the other person has not written, that will not result in an intelligent discussion. The failure of intelligence here is not the failure of the other person to say something intelligent, but a failure of yours to read the other person's words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What was the impact of management and efficiency of operation, production process, and improvement process within these companies? Surely not none. In the decades post WWII they were simply able to produce better product faster and with more predictability and consistency—that was not an accident, nor was it simply capacity, world economy, or internal policy.

"If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcG_Pmt_Ny4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcG_Pmt_Ny4)

The opportunity still exists to make a sea change in industry through the widespread improvement of the management of people.

</comment><comment><USER14> Princes of Yen: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY)

Rise then neoliberal fall.

<comment><USER15> It really was a great way to run their economy.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and the neoliberal way is dire, except for the rentiers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the main reason I decided to learn Japanese and then live there for a year of college.

</comment><comment><USER17> They just re-focused all their effort from being a militaristic power to being a trade power.

<comment><USER18> Oh yeah, they _just_ did that. Simple as pie.

<comment><USER17> Let me rephrase it:

They took their existing mindset/hard work, stopped spending it on military (in part due to a paradigm shift and also restrictions imposed by foreign powers) and started spending it purely on industrialization, technology, infrastructure, trade, education, science... a self-reinforcing effect that made them incrementally more productive.

<comment><USER18> No disagreement on the first part.

I remmain to be convinced that Japanese demography will prove of any negative consequence whatsoever in the long run. globally, population neds to shrink. The Japanese are showing us how to. The West how to not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Princes of Yen" ( 円の支配者) has a more cynical view of things. I'd definitely recommend it, if you're the "conspiracy theorist" sort.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY)

Some of Richard Werner's and Karel van Wolferen's lectures might be interesting too.

Our society is inclined to attribute success to some intrinsic nature (race, culture, language..). Japan's successful ? It must be Zen. China not ? Must be Confucianism, shame-based culture. Now China is ? Ah it must be Confucianism, collectivism. India is not successful ? It must be Hindooism. They have Sanskrit ? Ah it must be the Aryans. The Native Americans died out ? Ah it must be their immune system. The play is clear.

Japan's success is likely due to the way MacArthur normalized its war-economy, and because of how it was guided in the post-war years. Ditto with Korea/China/Thailand/ and now Vietnam/India (and other SE countries). I haven't seen a tick of anything "native" at the heart of it, even though nationalism dictates that the citizens be deluded into believing these things.</comment>


Breakthrough: Scientists have built a fully-functional mouse heart - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/researchers-have-re-built-a-beating-mouse-heart-from-hu-1134672119 <comment><USER2> The title is misleading; what was achieved here was the repopulation of decellularized mouse hearts with human cells, which is very different from building a fully-functional mouse heart.

<comment><USER3> That's io9 and "they come from the future" so they know better than you :)

io9 is just another science tabloid, I would not trust what they write too much in the first place. I doubt most of their writers have any academic knowledge of Science, but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER4> I wish hn would just go ahead and ban io9, extremetech and any other site that feels it's necessary to claim a game changing scientific breakthrough happens every single day

<comment><USER5> Second that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also a good one: Scientists grow teeth from human urine because why the hell not [http://io9.com/scientists-grow-teeth-from-human-urine- becaus...](http://io9.com/scientists-grow-teeth-from-human-urine-because-why- the-963290464)

</comment><comment><USER7> I envision a future where people would be able to buy organs off the shelf in hospitals.

Not just people who need transplants, but athletes for example could go an upgrade to a bigger heart for more endurance.

I don't know if thats scary or exciting, but we'll see.

</comment><comment><USER8> The WHO predicts that by 2050 suicide will be the leading cause of death in the West, as we will have conquered heart failure and cancer, but not depression. It got a bit of ridicule - but seeing this, it seems WHO is rounding third base.

<comment><USER9> Any link? Couldn't find this study.

<comment><USER8> Embarrassingly neither can I - It was a newspaper infographic from a few years ago, but the main call was the expectation we could beat heart disease and cancer and just be left with self-harm, at least in the "west"

The projections here : [http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/projecti...](http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/projections/en/)

are for 2030, but show self-harm is ranked 16 globally behind, and I summarise badly, 7 heart + diet diseases (incl diabetes), 2 sanitation diseases (diarrhea), 4 cancers, Aids and cars.

So if we cure heart diseases and cancers by 2050, self harm will leap to the top for a modern Western world. So I am guessing I did not hallucinate it, but no, sadly, I do not keep a good bookmark list.

I will try and find the original article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally I don't have to buy batteries anymore for my mouse.</comment>


Where Death Lies - <AUTHOR> http://www.themorningnews.org/article/where-death-lies <comment><USER2> I'm Scottish and thus was brought up on entirely cooked food.

Fish was bread-crumbed or battered, and was invariably cod. And deep fried. It was always filleted, no bones, and was either a fully filleted piece of quality fish, or fish fingers.

In fact I can't remember a time where I had to eat any kind of meat which was raw. Also, we didn't really eat any kind of shellfish - or at least, I had an aversion to shellfish ever since I was given boiled winkles (sea snails) at a young age - around 4 or 5. So I got fussy with my food - no shellfish, no "sea bugs" \- prawns, lobster, whatever wasn't filleted and bread-crumbed or battered fish.

You can imagine the comedy after I married a Japanese woman. The Japanese love raw fish. And me being set in my ways, and 100% stubborn, usually refused to eat raw fish. The only time I've eaten raw fish was after a good few doses of sake, when my inhibitions were lowered. Otherwise, it's a case of "Nope!"

I also decided that moving to Japan was a Good Idea (we had lived in London for 12 years, which as a Scotsman I hated vehemently), and ripped our family (by then we had a son) out to Japan, where we lived and I worked for 6 years - in Koriyama city, Fukushima prefecture, until the magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent Drama made for a less than perfect life and which was the trigger for me to drag my family over to my native Scotland where we now live, and where the ground is reassuringly Very Ancient and Doesn't Wobble So Much.

So, living in Japan had plenty of comedy. There were the inevitable Family Get-Togethers, and in Japan this invariably involves copious amounts of raw fish, which, if you're me, is "Totally Awesome </sarc>". It means there's 15 plates filled with raw fish sushi and sashimi, and then one plate filled with salads and chicken kari-agi (chicken nuggets for the uninitiated ;) ).

Yep - pretty stubborn and fussy eater all right. The point of this monologue? My motto is "I eat to live, not live to eat".

<comment><USER3> > _Fish was bread-crumbed or battered, and was invariably cod. And deep > fried._

Well, that will kill you too. Just much much slower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Each year, the Japanese government expects dozens of people to die from > eating ill-prepared blowfish

My reading of that is, at least 24 Japanese die every year from eating ill- prepared fugu.

But then comes the following paragraph:

>Chefs undergo rigorous training to receive fugu accreditation and yet, the Japanese government projects that 30 to 50 people will be poisoned each year due to ill-prepared blowfish, and several have died in the past decade.

"Several have died in the past decade" means in 10 years, less than 12-10 have died, which translates to about 1 death every year.

That does not compute with the first quoted paragraph, or did I miss something?

<comment><USER5> The headline and one line summary at the top were probably written by an editor, not the author. The editor probably skimmed over the piece, saw the line "the Japanese government projects that 30 to 50 people will be poisoned each year", and didn't realize that most poisoning victims recover. Or didn't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Homer Simpson once consumed poisonous fugu fish. He thought he only had 22 hours left to live. (Fortunately for us, he survived): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fish,_Two_Fish,_Blowfish,_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fish,_Two_Fish,_Blowfish,_Blue_Fish)

One very well done bit is how quickly Homer progresses through the five stages of grief; it takes him about seven sentences: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701195/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_tr...](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701195/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu)

</comment><comment><USER7> > My family is Chinese-American … A Japanese waitress stood by, smiling, her > pen poised over her notepad. It was obvious I was a foreigner from the way I > was dressed and from my company; but still, I felt some wild instinct flare > up inside of me, an urge to acknowledge our shared ethnicity …

Y'know, there are a huge number of both Japanese & Chinese who would disagree that they have any shared ethnicity at all …

</comment><comment><USER8> "I raised a piece up, too, examining the gauziness of the meat draped over my chopsticks. I placed it in my mouth—there was next to no flavor though the texture was delicate, like a fine sweet film. And while the skin had great bounce, it was basically flavorless, too."

So, if the flavor is nothing special, is the danger posed by the dish the whole point of consuming fugu?

</comment><comment><USER9> Isn't there a simple chemical test for the toxins, which a chef could use?

<comment><USER4> I think a chef's main task involves carefully removing the parts of a fugu where the toxins are known to be concentrated.

<comment><USER10> Of course, but if they're not always successful, their secondary task should perhaps be to test their food to make sure it's safe.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I feel like science and some test strips would do the job. But eating blowfish to begin with is ridiculous, and based solely on tradition. Testing for toxins could be seen as disrespecting the tradition.

<comment><USER3> > _Yeah I feel like science and some test strips would do the job. But eating > blowfish to begin with is ridiculous, and based solely on tradition._

Citation needed. They ate it centuries ago too, before they even had a tradition of eating it.

It's more bravado than tradition. They don't eat it because "our ancestors ate this too", but because they like the challenge. Who with any sense of bravado wouldn't?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Vim as a writing environment - <AUTHOR> http://timotheepoisot.fr/2014/01/01/vim-writing-environment/ <comment><USER2> I'm working on a book talking about how to write effectively using Vim ("Writing With Vim"), sign up for updates at: [https://leanpub.com/vim-for- writers](https://leanpub.com/vim-for-writers). I need a few more weekends and it should be good to go. It's at about fifty pages right now and covers philosophy, basic customizations, things that are built into Vim as well as plugins, and will cover some publishing workflows.

<comment><USER3> 50 pages? Ship it already!

Seriously, though, if you think it'll save someone some time or effort, it may be worthwhile to hit the publish button instead of waiting.

(I'm a cofounder of Leanpub, so I'm kind of biased, and being flippant here. Feel free to ignore me if it's not ready)

<comment><USER2> Actually, I appreciate your comment. I (tell myself I) was not able to commit to publishing previously because I could not make much time to provide updates. However, I think 1) this was probably a cop-out 2) the next couple of months will be more open. I am going to remove some interim text and/or comment it out and then publish for half price or something like that. Thanks for the push!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think I've written far more ordinary prose in Vim than I have code: two books, a dissertation, a dozen articles, probably sixty talks, letters, notes, thousands of email messages . . . you name it.

I mainly use it, though, as an editor for LaTeX which, I think, is really using Vim precisely as it was intended (that is, as a code editor).

</comment><comment><USER5> Although I write all of my code in Vim, I have always found it to not be great environment for text. The main annoyance comes from dealing with long lines or automatic line wrapping that never seems to do what I want it to.

Does anyone have other plugins that they find useful when writing in vim?

<comment><USER6> Reed Esau creates a bunch of vim plugins for writing, I've found them to work very nice:

[http://wynnnetherland.com/journal/reed-esau-s-growing- list-o...](http://wynnnetherland.com/journal/reed-esau-s-growing-list-of-vim- plugins-for-writers)

<comment><USER7> Thank you for this link. vim-wheel is just pure gold, I needed that for a long time...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Author mentions having vim display greek letters and math symbols to replace the TeX input: other plugins supply the highlighting commands to do this as well, but I prefer setting LaTeX up to deal with Unicode symbols directly. I just like having actual integral signs, etc. in my source. Mainly because it freaks people out when you send them the source to your paper.

<comment><AUTHOR> how do you input those symbols efficiently? (without using a character map)

<comment><USER9> vim has good support through digraphs, :digraphs will list them, and then to enter, either C-K <char1> <char2>, or <char1> <BS> <char2>

for example ö is C-K o : or o <BS> :

see [http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html](http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html) for more details

<comment><USER10> Despite knowing vim digraphs I personally use XCompose for that these days. It's easier to configure and I can use the same shortcut for _every_ program, wich makes memorizing vim digraphs useless.

<comment><USER11> I'd mostly agree, but vim's digraphs are kind of essential when using gvim, since GTK+ seems to have an inexplicable vendetta against custom .XCompose files.

<comment><USER10> I don't know what to say. I _am_ using gvim and my .XCompose settings seem to be fine. And I don't remember me having any troubles with that so I would have to fix something ever…

<comment><USER11> As it turns out, you're completely right. Oops.

In case anyone else happens to have the same issue, I solved it by sticking

      export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim

in /etc/environment .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For any other Vim & reStructuredText users out there, I wrote a plugin to improve the reST writing experience:

[https://github.com/erisian/rest_tools](https://github.com/erisian/rest_tools)

[http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing- restructure...](http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing- restructuredtext-in-vim/)

</comment><comment><USER13> >and things like replacing LaTeX greek letters by the actual greek letter,

You can actually do that with conceal:

[http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/11/06/vim-conceal-for- ruby.ht...](http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/11/06/vim-conceal-for-ruby.html)

[http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#conceal](http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#conceal)

[http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'conceall...](http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'conceallevel')

<comment><USER14> That's precisely what vim-pandoc-syntax (the newest version of vim-pandoc's syntax file) + vim-latex use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sublime Text 2 + Vim mode + Markdown Plugin is amazing. It's like iA Writer except with VIM and all the fun Sublime Texyness.

</comment><comment><USER7> vimroom (mentioned in the article) is really great.

</comment><comment><USER16> How about navigating filesystem in Vim? NerdTree ?

<comment><USER17> I generally use NerdTree or Ctrl+P[1]. It's nice to be able to hit Ctrl+P and then type 3-5 chars + enter and be exactly where I want.

[1]: [http://kien.github.io/ctrlp.vim/](http://kien.github.io/ctrlp.vim/)</comment></comment>


Repurposing Old HDD Components - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2012/07/12/repurposing-old-hdd-components/ <comment><AUTHOR> Observation: Here we have an old HD, and we're able to look at it at the signal level. Oh sure, because the case is removed there's air in there so we won't be able to read/write stuff at a super-high/super-dense bitrate. But does it matter? Couldn't we use the HD as a low density/low bitrate device? The purpose? I'd love to try building a classic platter-based hard drive from scratch one day...</comment>


Show HN: Janus Workspace Desktop - <AUTHOR> https://janusworkspace.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hiya

Janus Workspace Desktop is a desktop application for Linux, Windows and Mac that takes on a different approach to browsing. It allows you to open as many windows as you like in every tab and navigate easily between them.

All windows opened within Janus Workspace share the same session. Meaning you can log in with a certain account once and use the same login in Janus. If you want a separate session, sort of a persistent Incognito you can open such windows as well. It is really useful for monitoring several ad campaigns for different profiles. It supports a huge amount of regular browser functionalities and shortcuts -> [https://janusworkspace.com/#features](https://janusworkspace.com/#features) You can find Janus Twitter account at [https://twitter.com/JanusWorkspace](https://twitter.com/JanusWorkspace) and here is a simple usage example [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSucYy58TgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSucYy58TgQ)

If you want more lightweight and limited version of it you can check out the chrome extension version of it - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/janus-workspace- ne...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/janus-workspace-new- tab/ibjjadloomfnfbkpdbeiddncgdepdhin) One user account works for all Janus versions.

If you want to try it out - I have added a special user for Hacker News - username is HackerNews and password is hackernews.

No usage statistics are kept in the application. The only user data that is being kept in it is your registration info. All login details that you use in it are out of Janus's reach. Google Analytics statistic is anonymous and can be stopped from the settings menu.</comment>


Show HN: Network: Podcast App for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/network/id723422355?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some promo codes for the app:

[http://tokn.co/wyjnqc2v](http://tokn.co/wyjnqc2v) [http://tokn.co/ahkz4pz9](http://tokn.co/ahkz4pz9) [http://tokn.co/z4fuhq3f](http://tokn.co/z4fuhq3f) [http://tokn.co/epds24dd](http://tokn.co/epds24dd) [http://tokn.co/rzm2zyvm](http://tokn.co/rzm2zyvm) [http://tokn.co/pghfmfnq](http://tokn.co/pghfmfnq) [http://tokn.co/c6am8bfr](http://tokn.co/c6am8bfr) [http://tokn.co/3fnayqpg](http://tokn.co/3fnayqpg) [http://tokn.co/9237f4ay](http://tokn.co/9237f4ay) [http://tokn.co/6szkpy57](http://tokn.co/6szkpy57)

Update: looks like they are all gone now, here are a few more

[http://tokn.co/uju8afkj](http://tokn.co/uju8afkj) [http://tokn.co/5nbewbhk](http://tokn.co/5nbewbhk) [http://tokn.co/auhwrkaa](http://tokn.co/auhwrkaa) [http://tokn.co/sygcw65n](http://tokn.co/sygcw65n) [http://tokn.co/dhyqj9k3](http://tokn.co/dhyqj9k3) [http://tokn.co/7d7n6yhz](http://tokn.co/7d7n6yhz) [http://tokn.co/4wjz4xeu](http://tokn.co/4wjz4xeu) [http://tokn.co/q8kp3kjb](http://tokn.co/q8kp3kjb) [http://tokn.co/kkp4dq6s](http://tokn.co/kkp4dq6s) [http://tokn.co/03v5s948](http://tokn.co/03v5s948) [http://tokn.co/nr4tgy74](http://tokn.co/nr4tgy74) [http://tokn.co/8terxfte](http://tokn.co/8terxfte)

Looks like they are all gone now, hope everyone enjoys the app, if you missed out follow on twitter [http://twitter.com/Network_App](http://twitter.com/Network_App) I'll be giving away a few more

<comment><USER2> I used the last one - [http://tokn.co/6szkpy57](http://tokn.co/6szkpy57)

I wasn't very satisfied with purchasing a popular 3rd party podcast app in the past, but this one looks promising.Is there a syncing desktop app in the horizon. I imagine that would make this app more enticing :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is definitely the long term plan for the app

<comment><USER2> Cool. I definitely dig the minimalism. Do you have a website/email or something where I can leave some constructive feedback in return. The app store review might not be the right place to leave it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, feedback is always much appreciated, firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> After years of running with iTunes, I settled with Instacast when iOS 6 came out and Apple removed podcast support from the music app.

Instacast for me has three killer-features:

* you can double-tap the headphones/microphone button to skip 30 seconds which allows me to skip ads without having to take the phone out of my pocket.

* you can sort the unlistened playlist by time ascending (so many clients only allow newest first) _and_ you can change it to sort by podcast order first, so new releases of podcasts you like more can preempt the general older->newer order.

* instacast also has a mac app that's synchronized with the mobile apps. One of my most favourite past-times is playing Minecraft and listening to podcasts at the same time (wanting to get both the game audio and the podcast over my headphones). Being able to sync play position between my phone and my mac is very handy.

It's crazy one person's killer-features are likely not that interesting for the vast majority of other people.

<comment><USER4> It also uses some of the iOS APIs to download podcasts when you are not using your phone for extended periods of time. I listen to podcasts on my way to classes, and new episodes are already downloaded when I wake up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, iOS podcast apps really are the new to-do list or Twitter client. Seems like a new one every week. And this is in a market with two entrenched players and a free first-party app.

I wonder if they were all thinking, "I can make it iOS 7 and make a shiny new UI and use background fetch and all the other new features and take over the market!"

<comment><USER6> I'm building one because none of the existing ones (including this one) do exactly what I want.

Might aswel release it..good practice.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like you're planning on making it free. Any chance of an open-source license?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure everyone hits you for feature requests, but if someone would make a podcast app that made it very easy to start at the least recent episode and continually download more recent ones so I could 'catch up' on a older podcast, I would be very happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea, I'll have to think about that one

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At first I thought that this was about a iOS dev oriented Podcast (due to finding it on HN + tunnelvision). But that it is not. Does raise the question whether there are any (free or reasonably affordable) (iOS or other) development related podcast.

<comment><USER2> Mostly iOS related podcasts from my subscriptions -

Build Phase, NSBrief, Core Intuition, Debug, Iterate, Accidental Tech Podcast, Edge Cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can you compare/contrast this with the Apple Podcasts app? Why is it worth manually reimporting my entire list of subscriptions? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use OPML to import, you can export the list from iTunes or most other major podcast clients. The aim of the app is make things simple, so you don't have to worry about refreshing or changing settings, the app just gets new episodes, downloads them and has them ready the next time you want to listen and hopefully I made things look and feel good to use as well :)

<comment><USER10> Sadly, that isn't enough to convince me to switch from the Podcasts app. (I also don't have a Windows or Mac box to run iTunes.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The app doesn't download/fetch podcast episodes, does it? It's only a player/streaming app?

<comment><AUTHOR> No it will automatically download new episodes, using iOS7's new backgrounding features</comment></comment>


Researchers Find 'Impossible to Trace' Spyware in 32 Countries - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/researchers-find-impossible-to-trace-spyware-in-32-countries <comment><USER2> Title is somewhat misleading: "impossible to trace" refers to FinFisher's marketing claims for the spyware they sell, which security researches have found to be not so true after all. The way the title is worded, one would assume the discovery being reported is a new unknown and "impossible to trace" spyware infecting computers around the world.

<comment><USER3> Yeah! I was hoping that this was a discovery of NSA malware, something that only a nation-state could put together. I mean, we've all heard of Stuxnet and Flame and Duqu and the Equation Group, but there's still some nagging doubt that those were really NSA malware.

<comment><USER4> They probably already did: plenty about Equation Group points in their direction.

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/02/the_equation_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/02/the_equation_gr.html)

Its methods are quite sophisticated and careful compared to most. Like the Snowden leaks plus with some of the same specifics. There should be no doubt on Stuxnet at this point: it was a joint US and Israeli attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr: Proxied FinFisher boxes serve up google.com when opened in a browser. Actual IP address revealed by entering the query "what's my ip".

</comment><comment><USER4> What a BS title. Not even reading it tonight for that. Someone tell the writer to come back when he or she is writing on one whose cloaking and obfuscation techniques deserve the claim.</comment>


Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261 <comment><USER2> This highly corroborates Charles C Mann's book 1491: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus)

From wikipedia: The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.

<comment> 52-6F-62 This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn't we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth's surface as possible?

Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don't race to do more?

I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians.

There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-historical claims that might be put to rest (or less likely, cause a revolution in human self- knowledge). Eg: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims)

I would also love to see plots like Cahokia (and others like it) scanned: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia)

<comment><USER3> LiDAR collection is pretty dense from a data perspective. When I was working with helicopter collection teams we would regularly collect 1TB of point data per day at around 120 points per square meter. Based on the density of the canopy in Central America, the teams are probably using a density greater than that, and are using "multiple return" depth mapping so that they can see through the forest.

Processing LiDAR data is also quite expensive in terms of the hardware required and expertise of the people needed to correct the data back at the office. Typically LiDAR processing workstations have around 128-256 GB of RAM and a large RAID array of SSDs to quickly perform corrections interactively.

After the initial correction, most of the data is thrown out or "filtered" down to just the points of interest to save on space. Since it's quite easy to end up with hundreds of TBs worth of point data within a few months of collection. If the team is using colorized LiDAR, orthographic, and oblique images then that can take up even more space.

So the short answer to why more of the world hasn't been mapped with LiDAR techniques is money, time, and storage space. But with self driving cars now making LiDAR more prevalent, and storage space becoming more affordable every year, mapping whole regions with LiDAR is a more reasonable task.

NOTE: One of my former jobs was working with aerial LiDAR collection teams to manage the data and processing of the collected assets. This was around 2012 so some of the numbers may have changed since then.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Thanks, this is the kind of information I was curious about receiving in a concise digest.

So ultimately it sounds like I have to wait a decade or so before we can really proliferate, and to speed it up need a few more eccentric billionaires to get into funding some cool projects.

I'll use your information as jumping points to find out more.

<comment><USER3> My hopes lie with the open sourcing of in-vehicle processing hardware and software that is being used within self driving cars. As of today my understanding is much of that is part of the "secret sauce" of companies like Waymo and others.

If it were possible to apply kinematic geo-correction along with point filtering and feature detection during collection then a lot of the "heavy" data could be reduced down to what is just needed for human verification.

If you want to start your investigation with existing projects you could have a look at what the United Kingdom is doing with their government LiDAR data sets[0][1].

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency- uncove...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency-uncovers- landscape-with-laser-mapping)

[1] [http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/](http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Brilliant! Thank you. I wonder now if Canada has any projects remotely similar occuring

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciate the efforts and tech used to map the area and create the graphics but I've been to Guatemala and I suspect that these scientists didn't "discover" near as much as they claim here.

Mayans still live there, and they know every nook and cranny and tree and rock in those forests. If you ask them, and then shut up and listen, they'll tell you all about it and answer any questions you might have.

I did ask one about what was hidden in the forests below us that I met on the top of a pyramid in Belize. He pointed out the locations of about a dozen pyramids in Guatemala that we could see in the distance and told me about the roads and platforms and other structures hidden in the forests around us. I was astounded with what I learned from that man. He was a Forest Ranger who grew up there. His family had been living in the area forever.

I also asked him what they thought about scientists from foreign countries who come there and then announce to the world they've "discovered" something. Suffice it to say this piece would probably irk him because it pretends none of them knew anything about most of what scientists claim to have "discovered". He also opined a bit on how their culture has been depicted as being violent and bloodthirsty and offered a much more tempered version.

But, it is nice to know that Guatemala funded the project and have the data. That part is cool as can be and I look forward to hearing more about what they learn from it.

<comment><USER5> Most professional archaeologists/anthropologists do ask the indigenous people and do listen. Sure there are always some people who are attention seekers, but the majority do good science and leverage indigenous knowledge. That said, you overestimate how much the people can know. They don't have ground penetrating memory, and the Maya people have always been far from one united nation but closer to a collection of city-states with some shared cultural traits.

Furthermore, most of the classic Mayan sites were long ago abandoned so it isn't like there are indigenous people hanging out around Ti'kal or Calak'mul that can just spill the entire history.

Any competent Mayanist would have told you the same as that person in Belize. It is no secret the landscape is dotted with unexcavated ruins, but the scope is unclear which is exactly why this research is so useful.

<comment><USER4> "They don't have ground penetrating memory,"

No, they don't.

I'll point out that the article mentions they "remove the dense tree canopy to create a 3D map". It does not say "they used ground penetrating Lidar".

Seems to me you underestimate what they know and overestimate what you know and that is exactly what I was saying they found irksome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the recent finding that the Amazon River basin was much more cultivated in the ancient past than was thought:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its- now-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear- that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/)

<comment><USER7> Which in turn reminds me of Richard Feynman describing the Mayan Calendar in his famous lectures on quantum mechanics, as an example of how the Mayans understood how the planets moved by looking, that they even figured out a number of patterns and predictions, but that they still did not know _why_ the planets moved as they did, his point being that current understanding of quantum mechanics is very similar to this[0].

At the end, he tangentially mentions that we only know about this calendar because it is described in one of the _three_ surviving books of their culture, out of thousands[1]

> _" Just imagine our civilization reduced to three books, just the particular > ones left by accident, which ones... So eh.. anyway, I get off the > subject..."_

The genocide of Native Americans is of course horrible by itself, but somehow this remark made me realize what "genocide" means beyond people being killed _en masse_. So much culture and knowledge was lost.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g&t=25m28s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g&t=25m28s)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g&t=32m26s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g&t=32m26s)

<comment><USER8> This is why liberals are sometimes using the term genocide more broadly in a way conservatives don't like. They reference things like "black genocide" and conservatives get mad because the actual slayings are too few to be considered "genocide".

Yet in terms of lost culture, putting a high enough percentage of individuals in prison, and confining enough of the others to ghettos, while driving them out of historical cultural centers, has an equivalent result to genocide in some ways.

Essentially, a percentage of the people can be alive while also having "the culture" be as dead as dead can be.

Of course the culture is born again in a different form, as Native American culture endures today, despite "genocide". And rendering that invisible is just a continuation of that genocide so I certainly don't want to intimate that such culture is truly gone.

<comment><USER7> > _Of course the culture is born again in a different form, as Native American > culture endures today_

Well, _a_ culture is born again; culture just tends to happen if you put people together, it's in our blood. The question is whether it _flourishes_. I am from Europe so cannot say this for certain, but I get the impression that all over both American continents, Native Americans are still very much an ethnic minority whose rights are being trampled over.

<comment><USER9> In Guatemala, they're an ethnic majority whose rights are still being trampled over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm reading "Lost City of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston right now. It's been a highly entertaining first-hand account of (what I think was) the first use of LIDAR for archaeology in the jungles of Central America, and the ground exploration that followed. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in this story.

[https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01G1K1RTA](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01G1K1RTA)

<comment><USER11> You might also be interested in "Breaking the Maya Code" which is a great historical account of the decipherment of Maya script.

[https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Maya-Code-Third- Michael/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Maya-Code-Third- Michael/dp/0500289557)

<comment><USER12> I loved this book! I think any software engineer would enjoy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The is one thing I don't understand. The article reports the use of lasers to map the ground, yet they mention the presence of foliage _in situ_. Assuming that they use optical or infrared lasers, foliage should be completely opaque at these wavelengths. How did they manage to map the asperities and characteristics of the ground?

<comment><USER3> LiDAR wavelengths are returned at various depths from within the forest canopy. In order to get a return on the ground you simply filter the returns down to the last value.

Sometimes however you want to keep the other returns and so you filter the values down to say 10% of all returns from a given depth, with a constraint between the depths of say 10cm so that you can see the density of the layers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You see overgrown mounds all over central america, and not all of them are volcanic. There's an immense amount of undiscovered history there.

<comment><USER14> Yeah i think we are heavily underestimating how quickly nature can retake cultivated land.

<comment><USER15> This is something that has always fascinated me - just how do the processes which cover a landscape with, say, layers and layers of sediment - or jungle cover - really work?

I mean, I get it - you leave something out, a few weeks later its going to get covered in a layer of dust/sediment. But how is it that entire cities get buried under 10's of meters of dirt? I'm sure geologists have this all figured out, but it always amazes me that our world changes like this so rapidly.

In this case, I'm sure the answer is 'the jungle eats everything' .. but there are places in the world, buried under meters of sand and sediment, that I just wonder .. how does this happen ..

<comment><USER16> It's not _that_ complicated. Humans tend to build in flat areas. Flat areas tend to be flood plains. When flood plains flood they leave behind sediment. There are additional ways that sediment builds up such as airborne deposits and importantly from growing plants leaving behind biomatter, but in a lot of cases flooding explains the substantial depth of sediment deposited.

<comment><USER17> It's one of those overlooked facets of Nature. Much of the Great Plains sits on the Ogallala Aquifer. This is an underlying terrain, to depths of hundreds of meters, filled in by sediment from the Rockies ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#General_cha...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#General_characteristics)).

The greater part of the LA Basin is a floodplain which consists of hundreds of feet of sediment from the San Gabriel mountains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are two NY articles worth reading: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/06/the-el- dorado-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/06/the-el-dorado- machine) and [https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-ancient-city- emer...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-ancient-city-emerges-in-a- remote-rain-forest)

</comment><comment><USER19> The better link for Americans is here on National Geographic: [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser- lidar...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar- guatemala-pacunam/) It lists a special including the Lidar discoveries on Feb 6 on National Geographic.

</comment><comment><USER20> The NatGeo submission was a good read too:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16286230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16286230)

Direct link:

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser- lidar...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar- guatemala-pacunam/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Is that possibly a meteor crater seen on the right of the second LiDAR picture?

<comment><USER22> You mean the left side?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The link below may be interesting to look at (or laugh at?) since the LDS church's famous book claims to be about 3 civilizations that lived somewhere in north,central or south america. As far as I understand, one or more LDS leaders years ago decided (for arguably valid reasons) that all of the Book of Mormon events occurred between 600 BC to about AD 400.

This has made it more difficult for the church to say "look, we were right!" when discoveries like this are made because the timeline in several cases doesn't align with 600 BC to AD 400.

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

<comment><USER24> The Book of Mormon never claims that everyone died in the Americas at AD ~400. Nor does it claim that its account of the peoples there is comprehensive. In fact, it says the opposite: that splinter groups settled elsewhere, that there were other bands of people in the land, and that after the destruction of the Nephites, the _millions_ of remaining Lamanites continued to sprawl over the land.

<comment><USER25> And it also says things like horses, chariots, steel, and other anachronistic things existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. There is no evidence (to date) to support any of those claims. You might want to look into the history of NWAF and Thomas Ferguson. Michael Coe, a renowned expert in this field and also mentioned on this post, was friends with Ferguson. It's an interesting history.

<comment><USER26> > And it also says things like horses, chariots, steel, and other > anachronistic things existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. There is no > evidence (to date) to support any of those claims.

 _Horses_ definitively existed in (far enough) precolumbian America. The dominant belief seems to be that they died out (perhaps due to human hunting) at or shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, ca. 10-12kya, but there is some evidence there may have been some populations around as late as ca. 3kya, IIRC.

EDIT: of course, one must keep in mind that the horses of precolumbian America were _much_ smaller than Old World horses, so it's not really plausible that they'd be being ridden, pulling chariots, or generally being used like Old World horses even if it is (just barely) plausible that they were around at the right time.

<comment><USER25> I should have qualified that with "during the Book of Mormon timeline".

<comment><USER26> 3kya is just about at the Book of Mormon timeline.

<comment><USER25> Just about is fair but still short by ~400 years, unless you count the Jaredites. They purportedly fled the Old World around the time of the Tower of Babel (~2000 BCE IIRC?).

EDIT: I wasn't sure if the Book of Ether even mentioned horses, but it did, along with elephants. [1]

[1] [https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/ether/9.19?lang=eng&clan...](https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/ether/9.19?lang=eng&clang=eng#p18)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A 500M-year survey of Earth's climate reveals dire warning for humanity - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/500-million-year-survey-earths-climate-reveals-dire-warning-humanity <comment><USER2> This might be / likely is trollbait (that I will not engrave in discourse on), but it looks like we are in the bottom 15% of what's been figured as the range in the last 500 million years. Is it too aggressive to suggest humans have _more_ impact that zero plants or routine catastrophic volcano eruptions? Get over ourselves a bit? I mean, earth ruined its own atmosphere enough times, and certainly can ruin us without too much effort really. Eventually it will. Maybe we speed it up by N years or whatever, but the eventuality is earth kills us or the sun immolates us or Andromeda collides with us. Either way we are fucked. Let's ride it out as long as we can, but this is not a permanent home, and I doubt the human race is resilient enough to be considered permanent by any stretch. Maybe go party this weekend?

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking at the chart on that page, it seems like the 'low' temperatures we have now are an anomaly rather than the norm.

<comment><USER4> True, but on a shorter time scale, we're at a peak, and due for another ice age: [https://opentextbc.ca/geology/wp- content/uploads/sites/110/2...](https://opentextbc.ca/geology/wp- content/uploads/sites/110/2015/07/Glacials-and-Interglacials-.png)

<comment><USER5> That chart you give is especially misleading to understand what is going on now:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg)

Note where the year 2100 temperature is going to be (that is, _if we do something to limit the emissions_ , otherwise it even higher) and when the last time it was that high. Also note how fast it changes in the last 100 years and the scale of possible changes we can produce.

Also note the changes of the orders of magnitude in time in different sections of the graph. The rate of change we are experiencing now is unbelievably fast compared to what is known about the previous times.</comment></comment></comment>


Does ProtonMail have a major security flaw? - <AUTHOR> http://neltnerb.tumblr.com/post/153577347711/does-protonmail-have-a-major-security-flaw <comment><AUTHOR> Well, I won't go so far as to say that I found the issue, but I have found that through some mysterious set of conditions somehow my laptop learned my mailbox passphrase. I use lastpass, but lastpass doesn't have a record in the database with it (I would never intentionally have it save such a passphrase). I disable browser password saving on any system I use. I've only ever typed that passphrase on the protonmail website to decrypt my mailbox.

This is very strange. If I tell lastpass to autofill the password on the mailbox decryption page, the password fails. But somehow it starts out filled in with the correct one. Honestly totally at a loss, but probably not an issue with ProtonMail and more likely some accidental thing I must have done to put it into memory. No clue what I did wrong.

</comment><comment><USER2> Can't duplicate the steps they mentioned. Only my mailbox decryption password actually works to decrypt my mailbox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! OP here, I'm not sure what the deal is.

I just created my account last week, I wonder if they made some change to the key generation algorithm... I wish I knew enough cryptography to guess what could be going on. How can two passphrases both work unless they both happen to hash to the same value?

I literally had never yet typed the mailbox passphrase on this computer and somehow didn't need to in order to log in. I submitted a note to their security email address, but I'm really confused/concerned that something is up.</comment></comment>


What tools do you use to keep track of job applications? - <AUTHOR> If you're looking for a job and have several applications/interview processes going at once, how do you keep track of the state of each one, what you need to do next, etc? <comment><USER2> Last time I made a simple kanban board of application stages on trello and moved one card per app through the stages. Worked well.</comment>