Why high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in US - <AUTHOR> http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/411007.html <comment><USER2> It is worth noting that here, as is typical in politics, a focused interest (sugar growers) beats a diffuse interest (the general public). We would all benefit from ending this ridiculous practice. But we would individually benefit very little, and it isn't worth much from us to do so.

But it gets worse. Because there is a second layer of beneficiaries here. Corn growers. And they have great political power, as is seen in the subsidies they get and the ethanol additives that are legally require (which damage engines, and are a net negative on energy once you consider the costs of growing that corn).

Not the least among the advantages that corn growers have politically is the simple fact that they are important in Iowa. Which means that any national politician who dreams of being President, or of working with any other that has that dream, has very direct incentives to keep corn growers happy.

<comment><USER3> Then I'd think it's not a coincidence that Iowa is designated as a swing state, since both parties have to play into this scheme.

<comment><USER4> It's mainly that it's always the first primary election and the presidential primaries are very much momentum-based. If you crash and burn in the Iowa caucus you're basically done.

<comment><USER5> I wonder. Why is it first? Should we randomize the order?

<comment><USER6> > Why is it first?

Because it starts with an 'I'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This debate has come up on HN repeatedly; it is again worth pointing out that HFCS is "HF" relative to "CS", not to table sugar. Table sugar is ~50% fructose, HFCS 55%.

The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not _which_ sugar is being used.

HFCS alarmism probably works to the advantage of junk food companies, who can simply market equally unhealthful products built on table sugar as a premium alternative.

<comment><USER8> Sucrose is _exactly_ half-and-half fructose and glucose; it is composed of one of each, bound together. This is important because it means that it can't be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream. It has to be broken apart first, and the enzyme that does so is in the intestine. This means that its absorption rates and effect on the glycemic index are different from HFCS. Diabetics care about this.

While I can't really argue against you, partially because you're tptacek and partially because you're not wrong here, it's quite irritating to see somebody have a good conclusion and faulty premises.

Also, stop with the scare quotes.

<comment><USER9> While sucrose absorption is certainly slower than pure glucose absorption, the amount of sugar that eventually goes into your bloodstream is equivalent, and the energy yield is also roughly the same (splitting that one glycosidic link isn't really that energy-intensive).

I guess an argument could be made that fast-acting monosaccharides are more problematic for diabetics since their bodies can't deal with spikes easily, but for the rest of us there is really no (scientifically accessible) difference at all. Our food just contains too much readily accessible energy.

<comment><USER10> wasn't there a yale study that tied fructose to appetite regulation recently? I never actually found and read the main study, but i think there have been prior studies suggesting similar things

[http://news.yale.edu/2013/01/04/study-suggests-effect- fructo...](http://news.yale.edu/2013/01/04/study-suggests-effect-fructose- brain-may-promote-overeating)

<http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/88/6/1738S.full>

<comment><USER7> The first article concerns fructose in general, not HFCS in particular. Cane sugar contains comparable amounts of fructose.

The second article says, in its abstract, "However, when HFCS is compared with sucrose, the more commonly consumed sweetener, such differences are not apparent, and appetite and energy intake do not differ in the short-term. Longer-term studies on connections between HFCS, potential mechanisms, and body weight have not been conducted".

<comment><USER10> yup, i read that. that older study doesn't really argue for or against, though.

one thing that really bothers me though is that having grown up in germany i have big problems swallowing hfcs. mostly because it tastes dull, and feels very acidic in my throat. i've asked other people from overseas and they reported similar things.

the only thing I could find though is the addition of sulfuric acid. if you have some information on that, i'd be grateful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The page linked in the article is worth a couple of chuckles: "The US sugar industry is almost as important to our economic vitality as is a steady supply of affordable energy. Subjecting sugar to the unpredictable forces of global laissez faire capitalism would likely lead to 'dumping' by countries whose own sugar industries are much more protected than is ours."

In a sense, this quote isn't wrong. That's exactly what the sugar producing countries would do. The U.S. almost certainly does not have a competitive advantage in sugar production, and if the industry were deregulated domestic sugar production would end, and we'd become sugar importers. And that would be okay, because sugar isn't the strategically important commodity it once was.

But the same reasoning applies to steel and arms manufacturing too. The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas.

<comment><USER12> _> The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas._

I think I know the rationale behind this statement, but I'm always curious as to why we hold on to these beliefs. If we let industries move around based on true competitiveness, stripped of subsidies and other anticompetitive practices, we might find that to be a force for good.

That said, I've come to believe that this is most likely a minority view. Everyone believes in free markets until it starts affecting their bottom line.

<comment><USER13> Think about it like this, lets say we let people make Steel wherever they want and everyone starts making it in China, causing the local production to grind to a halt due to being unable to compete.

Now a year later, China decides it doesn't want to export to us anymore and bans exports of Steel to the US, now we are screwed for at least 6 months, since we don't have the ability to create the product anymore.

The difference with sugar is we do have an alternative available (corn syrup) so the loss wouldn't be as big.

<comment><USER14> There are three good solutions:

1\. Maintain a 6 months (or whatever time is necessary to restart production) stockpile

2\. Have a highly credible policy that, if any foreign country actively opposes free trade of anything important, an ICBM loaded with a nuclear warhead is launched on their main government building or biggest city

3\. Change things so that there is no advantage to producing abroad, if possible (e.g. allow unlimited immigration, remove taxation, remove minimum wages, remove regulations, etc.)

<comment><USER15> Surely you're joking about 2/3 of those being remotely close to good ideas. And you made an account just to post this??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The government-backed sugar cartel in the US simply drove up the cost of (cane and beet) sugar, resulting in a comparative cost advantage for HFCS. I am surprised at how many people think HFCS is a corporate conspiracy, and are wholly ignorant of the government's role in the matter.

Here's a similar article with an interesting graph: [http://mjperry.blogspot.ca/2011/01/big-sugar-cartel-cost- con...](http://mjperry.blogspot.ca/2011/01/big-sugar-cartel-cost- consumers-45b.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> In the documentary King Corn [1] they suggest that HFCS is ubiquitous because of the government subsidies for growing corn. The surplus of corn was so large, they started looking for creative ways to use it all up. HFCS was one of those, as-is feeding it to livestock (which traditionally don't eat corn).

The subsidies are such that a cattle farmer can actually make a profit buy growing corn, selling it (with subsidies), then buying corn back to feed their own livestock.

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/>

<comment><USER13> > The subsidies are such that a cattle farmer can actually make a profit buy > growing corn, selling it (with subsidies), then buying corn back to feed > their own livestock.

I fail to see how this is enlightening, of course growing corn creates a profit. If you are excluding the base profit of the corn, why wouldn't a subsidized market create additional profit?

<comment><USER17> To be able to grow, sell, buy, use and still come out ahead, you must be able to sell the corn for more than you can buy it for, which is nonsensical.

<comment><USER13> That is the way subsidizing works, you get more than just the purchase price. You could subsidize production, but it is easier and has other benefits to subsidize sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read researched this a few days ago.

You have to consider the taste, it tastes nicer because fructose has only 5 carbon in it's ring instead of 6 which leads to more pleasurable experience as it makes it fit better into the sweetness sensing in the mouth[1]

With Corn Syrup you get both glucose and fructose together whereas with sugar you just get sucrose. Another reason would be that more corn is grown in the US than sugar cane which makes it more efficient to produce corn syrup instead.

[1]<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23537367>

<comment><USER19> FYI, sucrose aka saccharose is 50% glucose and 50% fructose ;)

<comment><USER20> It hasn't broken down yet at the taste receptors. That happens in the duodenum, doesn't it?

<comment><USER19> Yes, but it does not really matter. It tastes differently than HFCS, but not that differently and both are sweet :)

In practice, nobody is bothered by very slightly different taste. Coca Cola uses different sweeteners (including artificial ones) in different parts of world and mostly nobody notices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Relevant: The Rise of Mexican Coca-Cola [http://kalinnacheff.com/2012/03/01/the-rise-of-mexican- coca-...](http://kalinnacheff.com/2012/03/01/the-rise-of-mexican-coca-cola- and-why-it-tastes-better/)

An interesting point in the article: "Coke suppressed demand for cane sugar formula because it would cost more to produce and consumers would not pay the extra cost."

</comment><comment><USER22> >Once in a while I come across an animated debate on health benefits of sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is enzymatically produced mixture of glucose and fructose that approximately matches the chemical composition of sucrose, aka sugar. It is not this debate that is my concern;

Why are people discussing what the article specifically says it is not about?

</comment><comment><USER23> See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_failure>.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is an interesting conspiracy theory suggesting that New Coke was released to mask the switch of sugar to HFCS in the then re-introduced Coke Classic.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke#Conspiracy_theories>

<comment> T-hawk A theory that has been roundly debunked. Coca-Cola already had HFCS five years earlier, since 1980. Here's Snopes on the topic:

<http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp>

And the whole category of Cokelore:

<http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cokelore.asp>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> HFCS is almost in the same place as sugar if we look at it in terms of regulation.

Both are victims of price fixing through government subsidies. It doesn't matter if you don't contribute to the purchase of the product, as your tax dollars already fund its creation.

</comment><comment><USER26> I skimmed the article, but I did not see mention of the U.S.'s petro-chemical- based agriculture. Without the outsized contributions that petro-chemicals make to the production process of corn and corn syrup (engine fuel, fertilizer, distillation, etc.), corn syrup and HFCS production would be much more directly (as opposed to externalized costs) expensive.

I guess we should also toss soil erosion into the mix. Productive topsoil is a finite resource, and modern agriculture -- while it has improved somewhat, recently -- is expensive in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER27> Even though too much refined sugar is bad for you (there was very little tooth decay before 1850), I don't like ingesting HFCS because it makes things taste horrible. It doesn't taste the same as sucrose, which has much better flavour.

OTOH the more things have HFCS the fewer sugary products I eat, which is good for my health. Wouldn't work if everybody did that, of course.

</comment><comment><USER28> What do you guys think of Stevia[1]? Has been recently approved in the EU for use as an all natural sweetener and I see products popping up here and there pretending to be based on it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia>

<comment><USER29> I've used Stevia a few times, but am not a fan. While it's definitely sweet, it's a very different sweet compared to sugar. When drinking something (like coffee) with Stevia, I notice that it's sweet on a different part of my tongue, and it's a latent sweet - initially the drink tastes completely unsweetened until it reaches the back of my mouth.

This is just my experience, maybe I'm weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The linked page on sugars.com is hilarious.

"sugar is an indispensable part of everyday life."

"The US sugar industry is almost as important to our economic vitality as is a steady supply of affordable energy. "

They could at least come up with some reasons that don't insult our intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER31> same as Corn Ethanol- the Iowa Caucus

<comment><USER32> Fuel made from food is a terrible idea, in more ways than one.

<comment><USER31> Especially when it can be made from things like Switchgrass or from industrial byproducts like saw dust and wood chips.

<comment><USER32> A field covered with solar panels produces _orders of magnitude_ more energy than same field covered with any kind of plants.

Saw dust and wood chips are not food (unless you're a mushroom).

<comment><USER31> I am well aware of that...why make ethanol from corn, or sugar , when you can use switch grass, which is cheaper, requires less energy to grow, is more resistant to adverse weather than your other cash crops. Or when you can take a byproduct of an existing industry such as from saw mills or cotton gins. Sugar Cane and Corn is very expensive compared to these options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The article says nothing about corn subsidies which affect both HFCS and ethanol.

</comment><comment><USER34> I live in a state where Coke with sugar is widely available. The taste between that and HFCS is like night and day. Too bad the rest of the states do not have that choice.

<comment><USER27> I used to like Coke in the UK but then I think they switched. Night and day indeed. Great news for my health, though!

<comment><USER35> I am not sure what they were using in the UK in the mid 2000s but it was way too sweet for me. Same with chocolate over there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The only thing i can't grasp... If sugar is such a certain deal, why there is even one person investing in a HFCS factory instead of yet another sugar came farm?

</comment><comment><USER37> LiveJournal is still a website? Since when...?

<comment><USER38> In Russia, LiveJournal is popular and serious blog platform.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Add-ons that work anywhere - <AUTHOR> https://addonlist.com/one-click

<comment><USER2> This is cool, although what I _really_ wish for is a standardized configuration API that can be programmatically used to maintain this sort of thing.

We develop apps that depend on a handful of services like these. Each service has its own page for specifying API credentials and for various configuration options which must be entered manually through a GUI; it can't be declared through Puppet/Chef/etc.

Another pain point is that every service needs its own login, very few of them support 2FA, very few of them support team-oriented accounts (ie., where login is separate from the account, and access is delegated to the account; Mailgun and Digital Ocean, for example, lacks this, whereas Scout, Rollbar etc. don't), each has a completely proprietary health status page, etc.

I am hoping someone someday will invent a centralized app (preferably based on an open protocol so there can be multiple providers) for this kind of organizational access. Sort like OpenID, except it needs role-based permission levels.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, thank you for checking it out!

Our tech can put the API keys into your app's env so you likely wont need the GUI you are talking about.

Our App dashboard has SSO login into all the addons. So you dont need to worry about account creds, just click a button and you are logged in.

I think our product is a solution to your problem(s), happy to answer any more questions or give more details.

<comment><USER2> That does sound awesome. Thanks for doing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I sent you an email, I'd love to hear more about your exact usecase.

my email is chris @ addonlist .com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also if you are an addon service company and want to join in ping me at chris @ addonlist . com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We are launching more addons soon! please stay tuned =D

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised the ToS of these services permit automated account registration.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are fully integrated with the services, accounts are setup via an API.

<comment><USER3> Awesome! I wasn't meaning to imply any wrongdoing. It's nice that such an API exists although I shouldn't be surprised given the add-on market in Heroku.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, np.

Feel free to ping me with any questions.

chris @ addonlist . com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just added Rollbar integration:

[https://addonlist.com/products/rollbar](https://addonlist.com/products/rollbar)

More to come, what services would you like next?

</comment><comment><USER4> Very awesome. I love Heroku's add-on market, however don't use Heroku anymore (in favor of Docker+AWS). This is the last missing piece for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very nice! I wonder if Python support is in the works...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! And iOS...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> SaaS as a service.

<comment><AUTHOR> I heard you liked services so...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for companies that mentor junior developers? - <AUTHOR>

I am a self-taught programmer that would like to get a job at a startup. Small startups do not often have the time or resources to mentor a junior programmer.<p>Do you have any suggestions for companies( startups or not ) that have a great track record for mentoring junior devs? <comment><USER2> If you want mentoring, you're better off with a big company. They have the time and resources to invest long-term in employees, and often have extensive explicit mentoring programs in place. I suspect any of the major players will do, but I've heard Microsoft and Google have the best reputation for bringing interns and junior devs up to speed. Facebook gives junior devs a lot of responsibility, but you really have to be a self-starter to succeed there, since the pace is such that there really isn't much time for focused mentoring.

When I was working at a startup, the lack of time for mentoring was one of the parts I hated most. I joined initially because their chief architect literally wrote the book on Java (and wrote curses, and rogue, and worked on vi and BSD UNIX), but he ended up quitting between my internship and when I started full- time. And the CEO offered to train me as a quant when I was hired, but time for such training never materialized because he was always busy with business stuff.

<comment><USER3> Could just say Ken Arnolds.

<comment><USER2> Does everybody know his name more than his work, or do you just have good Google skills?

<comment><USER3> No, I just meant that you could have saved me some reverse searches, since I just want to get to his wikipedia page anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://obtiva.com/> is huge on mentoring apprentices

</comment><comment><USER5> github

</comment><comment><USER6> Serious question, no troll.

Why do so many young developers insist on getting mentoring when there is _so much_ high quality code available to be read?

I can accept the proposition that reading books is insufficient for becoming a spectacular developer. But code itself is so precisely clear about its use and intention, that it's effectively equivalent to peering inside the mind of its author.In addition, reading through changelogs can give an excellent view of how good software evolves from version to version.

I would argue that doing so would be roughly equivalent in effect to actual mentoring.

<comment><USER3> I thought about doing something like this with projects I'd like to understand. Checkout the first version, try to understand that, checkout the diff to the next, etc.

I have some trouble understanding what exactly I'm looking at, at each point of the history. It would be easy if the developer told me, but not trivial to grasp by looking at it.

Also, the value of this early code might be questionable, since it will probably be dumped in the later versions, and you probably won't have access to the insights the author had to dump it.

And I'm not even a young developer. :/

<comment><USER3> I'd love too see a screencast (Peepcode?) where some programmer attempted exactly that. Checkout an interesting project he never seen the code, and "think out loud" while trying to understand it. And don't throw the screencast away just because he can't grasp it, because that's exactly what happens with newbies who try to understand medium-to-large projects written by others.</comment></comment></comment>


Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/plotly/falcon <comment><USER2> Hello HN! Nice to see this up here. Chris here, cofounder of Plotly.

Falcon is open source and works without an internet connection or a Plotly Chart Studio account. Falcon wires together our graphing library plotly.js ([https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/](https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/)), the plotly.js chart editor ([https://github.com/plotly/react-chart- editor](https://github.com/plotly/react-chart-editor)), Electron, and some open source NPM packages for connecting to databases.

Just FYI - As a company (Plotly), we're spending most of our development effort these days on Dash Open Source ([https://github.com/plotly/dash](https://github.com/plotly/dash)) and Dash Enterprise ([https://plotly.com/dash](https://plotly.com/dash)). Truth be told, we found that most companies we worked with preferred to own the analytical backend. We also heard many stories of organizations running into roadblocks with off-the-shelf SQL or BI tools (Falcon included!). Our approach with Dash is to provide the visualization and application primitives so that you could build your own tailor-made dashboards, analytical apps, or yes, even SQL editors.

If you want to read more about where we're at, here's an essay we wrote last week on Dash: [https://medium.com/plotly/dash-is-react-for-python-r-and- jul...](https://medium.com/plotly/dash-is-react-for-python-r-and- julia-c75822d1cc24)

<comment><USER3> Any reason the Github page advertises Windows and Mac but not Linux? I saw that its built in Javascript and checked the releases page,you guys built a Linux version too. Is it just something that, while possible, you don't want to support officially with more than a build?

<comment><USER4> Just an oversight :)

<comment><USER5> Thx for your pivottable.js, especially the jupyter notebook extension.

<comment><USER4> You're welcome! I'm glad you like it :)

I wish I had more time to work on the Jupyter version but Plotly Express and the JupyterLab Chart Editor keep me pretty busy at Plotly these days!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also see: Apache Superset [0] -- this one looks really like a fully fledged data exploration and visualisation suite, being a possible free and open source alternative to Microsoft Power BI [1]. Using the official / own image can be also deployed as a service running in a local infrastructure.

Would be curious for a comparison between all the mentioned data vis suites in this thread actually.

[0] [https://superset.apache.org](https://superset.apache.org) [1] [https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/)

<comment><USER7> Quick comparison:

1) Redash and Falcon focus on people that want to do visualizations on top of SQL

2) Superset, Tableau and PowerBI focus on people that want to do visualizations with a UI

3) Metabase and SeekTable focus on people that want to do quick analysis (they are the closest to an Excel replacement)

I have been using group 2) for 3 something years, I am not too excited by them, Superset is cool, Tableau and PowerBI value has been blown out of proportion by marketing. Group 3) is very promising but for some reason more niche although because of their pricing structure they scale as well as Excel (i.e. you can have thousands of users building stuff in Metabase no problem). Group 1) not sure what to say there, I guess it would be my favorite but SQL becomes messy after the first join.

The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own. Without a database, data prep and security setup they are more or less fancy toys. Unfortunately very few companies understand how to set all of this up in a way that users can actually work with it. So I keep seeing a lot of half done, super expensive, setups in Tableau and PowerBI that have not delivered what they were promising.

Also, I agree with chriddyp that most companies would rather own their analytics for stuff that is customer facing. For internal facing dashboards the dashboarding BI tools are OK (although I lean more on group 3) than group 2)).

<comment><USER8> Curious where you would consider chart.io to fall in this ecosystem?

I have been using it for its seamless AWS Athena integration to get a handle on load balancer logs when needed. However it is pretty pricey. Would love to move to an open source solution. However my use case feels a little different than what was mentioned above?

<comment><USER7> In theory you are saving some money for not using a database, redshift is also pricey. Have you considered that? The free solution is python + altair in a jupyter notebook, but you would have to decide if it is worth your time to setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also see metabase: [https://www.metabase.com/](https://www.metabase.com/)

We use this to embed some nice dashboards & run queries to great effect. A very powerful tool!

<comment><USER10> Last time we tried to use it there were real problems with date filtering in SQL based DBs and it's a must for big datasets that span over time (this looks like the most common use case to me). Basically metabase would generate WHERE condition that would like `date(date_column) BETWEEN ... AND ...` (or if you were filtering by minutes or years this would be something else). This prevents DB from being able to use an index on date_column and don't even get me started on why adding indexes for all sorts of `date(...)`, `year(...)` etc expressions is not an optimal solution. I ended up fixing this in metabase and opened a PR [https://github.com/metabase/metabase/pull/9860](https://github.com/metabase/metabase/pull/9860) Which was initially welcomed but then was ignored for a few months (we were using our forked version in my company in the meantime), after which was closed because they've fixed it differently and sure enough they did and it was a neater fix architecture-wise. Just that it didn't actually fix the majority of use cases so there's now new isssue opened with the same problem described [https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/11502](https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/11502) And surely it's ignored. Since then we migrated to a relatively simpler Redash, we've found that none of the people at our company who were supposed to benefit from GUI query builder never actually used it and only engineers were building dashboards, and for us it's obviously easier to write SQL. One benefit of Redash I've noticed was that it allows you to schedule dashboard queries to run for example every 10 minutes which means that amount of users of the dashboard doesn't add any load to the DB because they get cached results and those results are relatively fresh at the same time.

<comment><USER11> It's usually easier to write SQL than drag/drop it. For complex joins having a graphical view of the join structure (list? tree? star?) is very helpful if you're new to it, otherwise no. And drag/drop tools don't cover complex stuff like recursive CTEs, and often, simpler stuff too. IME, YMMV. Maybe better graphical tools exist than the ones I have seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I want to find a way to incorporate this into a dashboard for suits. Seems like it would let them solve a lot of their own requests - in theory. In a lot of companies they'd probably still make requests to create the graphs and sql queries for them.

Give a suit a fish and he's happy for a day. Teach a suit to fish and he'll still be back tomorrow for his fish. Who wants to fish when you can get a code monkey to do it for you.

<comment><USER13> I have experience with this. Give a powerful SQL editor to a suit and find your data integrity borked beyond repair.

<comment><USER14> For this, could probably dump/replicate to SQLite for archive/backup/point in time... Or one-way replicate for reports.

<comment><USER12> I've used this strategy with a read only replica. It also protects the database from long running and inefficient queries. Highly recommend doing this if you have the budget for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not to be confused with

[https://github.com/uwdata/falcon](https://github.com/uwdata/falcon)

Another interactive data visualization tool named Falcon.

Both are pretty sweet.

<comment><USER16> Not to be confused with the API framework for Python.

The list probably goes on.

It's bad naming.

<comment><USER17> My initial reaction is the same when I see names like these, but...

This happens everywhere in business/products/mom-and-pops even street names in different cities!

Not sure why we're so sensitive to software names, maybe hits close to home with naming being one of the tough problems along with caching etc (sure everyone knows how the saying goes).

<comment><USER18> > Not sure why we're so sensitive to software names

For tools that install in a machine, you can have things be overridden if you install another tool of the same name. Binaries, libraries, or other assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The funny thing to me is always how Oracle is the odd duck, requiring a specific client install to use.. where as most other databases have established protocols with open client library implementations.

<comment><USER19> We use Oracle at work but I don't use any Oracle clients because you can connect to it use JDBC.

<comment><USER14> JDBC doesn't require the oracle client software to be installed?

\-- edit

Apparently Java is the one platform that Oracle supports without a separate driver install... Though their driver is probably itself written in Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a cool project - however Mac and Windows only...most likely because they are creating the toolchain for this.

I would pay money to get something like this inside vscode - which is an ecosystem that works great on all platforms and provides the hooks to build something like this.

On that note, I think microsoft is making a mistake by not creating an app store of sorts for vscode. VsCode is as good a desktop developer marketplace as the play store is for mobile apps.

I wish that plotly had built this inside jupyter (where their Dash product competes against Streamlit) or vscode. Building a desktop installer toolchain from scratch, does not make sense.

<comment><USER21> Apparently it does support Linux as well. At least according to some of other comments here.

<comment><USER22> It does, I'm running it on Ubuntu.

[https://github.com/plotly/falcon/releases](https://github.com/plotly/falcon/releases)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know if the visualizations are savable/shareable?

I'd love to stop pasting screenshots in slacj

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey, looks great! Can't wait to try it out. I wish I could connect to Snowflake.

</comment><comment><USER25> What command line tools do people use to plot data?

I'd love to be able to write some SQL and pipe to CSV or directly to a tool that will just spit out a PNG or SVG that has the data plotted.

Is gnuplot ([http://www.gnuplot.info](http://www.gnuplot.info)) the thing for this?

<comment><USER25> Here's a thread on the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215040)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are surprisingly few desktop apps for basic sql -> charts, so I was happy to stumble on Falcon. It's similar to their web offering (or Periscope, Looker, etc) and works quite well (regardless of a few UI quirks).

</comment><comment><USER26> For those on Rails, do yourself a favor and add this great engine: [https://github.com/ankane/blazer](https://github.com/ankane/blazer)

Life-changing!

</comment><comment><USER27> No Linux?

<comment><USER4> ReadMe updated to include Linux link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This looks great! I had never heard of Dash either and it seems it is precisely the tool we need at our startup to do data visualisation.

Awesome work. Will check all this out during the week-end.

</comment><comment><USER29> I tried but can't connect to any of my databases.

Why not just support odbc/jdbc configurations?

Guys, this should be a solved problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks great!</comment>


Ask HN: Where are old historic posts from HN news? - <AUTHOR>

I have been lurking on this site for 6 months now and found very interesting posts.
I would like to know where are historic HN posts though ?
Unless I search explicitly for specific term they don't show up.   What I am looking for is listing of post , as it appears on front page or in ASK HN /SHOW HN categories. <comment><USER2> This post has id=8647773. The comments share the same numeration, so assuming each post has ~10 comments there are ~800000 posts.

Algolia host the official api: [https://hn.algolia.com/api](https://hn.algolia.com/api) (if you are going to scrape the site, remember to read the rate limit at the bottom)</comment>


Shout – A web IRC client - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/erming/shout <comment><USER3> It's neither free nor open-source and it's cloud-hosted, but IRCCloud (irccloud.com) probably deserves a mention. Like I said, it's a bit of a different solution since it's more than just a client, but what I like about it is that it basically solves every problem a typical IRC user is likely to encounter:

\- It stays auto-connected with no configuration.

\- It offers a great desktop (web-based) UI, including embedded images, videos, tweets, pastebins, and more.

\- It offers fantastic mobile apps for both iOS and Android, for both phone and tablet form factors.

<comment><USER4> I got to meet some of the IRCCloud developers last weekend at EMFcamp. It's a fantastic app and a much more civilised way of keeping a persistent irc connection than any mix of irssi, shells or bouncers I've come across to date. The web interface is lovely and the android/iphone apps are extremely usable. Can't recommend enough :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, guys.

Thanks for all the attention! The repository is here: [https://github.com/erming/shout](https://github.com/erming/shout)

It's open source, so if you're looking for a cool new project to work on, feel free to help out!

<comment><USER6> Thanks this is awesome - I would love to integrate it with sagebump.com instead of using freenodes client.

Can I ask why there is a 20 slot limit? How can one increase this?

<comment><USER7> The 20 slot limit being mentioned is just in regards to the demo connecting to freenode. The demo connects to freenode from a single IP address and freenode has limits on how many connections you can have from one IP. It's not something you need to worry about in a normal use-case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another great web IRC client: [http://convos.by/](http://convos.by/)

I still prefer Convos for all its built-in features and great community.

<comment><USER9> Another one built on node.js, just like shout, is "subway": [https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway](https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please let this put an end to the hipchat/slack madness.

<comment><USER11> I love IRC but Slack/hipChat has some features IRC can't provide. Especially, the "formatted"/"preview" (images, videos, URL preview, tables) messages.

Even if the IRC client supports some of theses features, the protocol is just text, you can't add meta/structured data to a message.

<comment><USER12> Along with the image previews, being able to just paste an image into chat (and have it automatically upload to S3) is a _huge_ deal if you're working on anything visual.

<comment><USER13> Limechat shows image links inline, which is good enough for me anyway. In some ways it is even preferable to tying things to one particular storage solution like s3.

<comment><USER14> You have to upload the image yourself, then. In a workflow, this is a time- waster.

<comment><USER15> There's no reason Shout couldn't accept HTML5 copy-and-paste, upload locally or to s3, and the send a link to the uploaded image.

<comment><USER14> Which is what Slack does, the ideal use case I was describing.

The person I was replying to inquired as to why uploading the image and pasting a link was a problem. He said:

"Limechat shows image links inline, which is good enough for me anyway. In some ways it is even preferable to tying things to one particular storage solution like s3."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you prefer something that doesn't force you to go all in, check out Glowing Bear. It's a WeeChat relay client that I've been contributing to. Basically, it connects to your existing WeeChat running on your server, meaning you can continue using that, or use both in parallel. Works great on mobile as well.

[https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear](https://github.com/glowing- bear/glowing-bear)

[http://www.glowing-bear.org/](http://www.glowing-bear.org/)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glowing_be...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glowing_bear)

Why reinvent the wheel when you can let someone else do the heavy lifting? ;)

<comment><USER17> Or just use an IRC bouncer and connect _any_ IRC client to it at any time, and get a lot more features than what Weechat offers. ;)

<comment><USER18> I've never been able to easily configure an IRC bouncer but I found letting weechat run on a Pi (or another server somewhere) was easier.

<comment><USER19> ZNC isn't any harder to set up than installing these web clients. In fact ZNC has it's own web interface for configuring it (and does so with a self contained webserver so you don't need node.js / mojo / etc frameworks).

I'm not trying to take anything away from these excellent projects though. Just saying IRC bouncers aren't any harder to install than these projects

<comment><USER20> There's some advantages to using a web-irc client. You get a clean way of scrolling back through your history. Unread message count is stored server- side. In general the state is synchronised where a bouncer can leave multiple clients out of sync with each other.

<comment><USER19> I've never had that issue with bouncers to be honest. In fact the whole point of bouncers is to:

1: hide your IP (moot point if you're hosting your own bounce though. And a lot of IRC networks hide your IP for you anyway)

2: offer a way of keeping your history

3: store your unread messages server side.

4: keep all your clients and states synchronised

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a web client (in fact I'm tempted to try the one submitted here). But I think there's a lot of misconceptions about bounces too.

In an ideal world I'd use both; have a web client connect to ZNC. So I can log onto the IRC client when a guest on someone's PC (eg cybercafe) but also have the ability to use native clients from the same nick for when I'm sat on my own laptop or on my phone (there's some half decent native Android IRC clients)

<comment><USER16> But WeeChat in a terminal multiplexer + Glowing Bear offers you exactly that. When you read something in Glowing Bear, it is marked as read in WeeChat. You can access it securely from anywhere with any modern browser or smart phone / tablet. When you feel like using the native command-line client, just ssh/mosh into your server and attach to your tmux/screen session. There are other relay clients as well if you want to use those.

(Sync from WeeChat to Glowing Bear and between multiple instances is something we're working towards with the developer of WeeChat)

<comment><USER19> Why do you guys hate IRC bounces so much? You're investing a lot of time trying to convict me that I should ditch my ZNC and replace it with something that replicates its functionality in a longer winded fashion.

I don't want to run my bounce in a detached screen session, I want a proper daemon. It's easier to install and manage if it's a proper daemon. And if I'm going to be using a terminal based IRC client (which I often do) then I'd be running Irssi.

I don't want your stupid halfway solution when I already have a proper IRC bounce set up that does all that and more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are a lot of comments here about how IRC lacks features of HipChat/Slack/whatever. If you want to try going _the other way around_ , here's how to upgrade your IRC to support Jabber (including Facebook chat), Twitter and some other stuff:

[http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html](http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html)

<comment><USER22> > There are a lot of comments here about how IRC lacks features of > HipChat/Slack/whatever.

I really don't understand this. What _features_ does IRC lack that Hipchat has? AFAIK, the advantage of Hipchat is the branding, the packaging, and the support.

The one thing I see ("image previews") is a feature of the client, not IRC itself. And many clients _used_ to offer that, way back - the reason they turned it off was because it was a great vector to (e.g.) goatse someone. In any GUI-based IRC client, this is dead simple.

Most of what Hipchat seems to provide is branding and support, and I get that that's very valuable, but I don't see why that needs to be viewed as an either/or situation.

<comment><USER23> As always, the problem is not technical, it's packaging. Technically IRC can do all that Hipchat does, but Hipchat provides a simple bundle that any team can subscribe to/buy and use for _all_ its use cases. To replicate the same thing with IRC, you'd need bouncers for everyone with full text search capability, a shared history of everything that happened on the server(s) of the network, support for filesharing _for all clients, not just the desktop ones_ , you'd need some serious management of presence and profile information...

Never forget the "Show HN: Dropbox" and its immediate technical rebuttal [0], see where it is now.

Oh and Hipchat seems to do screen sharing, which AFAIK is not possible with IRC.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

<comment><USER24> Hmm, what you are suggesting in the beginning sounds just like Quassel:

It is a Bouncer with full PostgreSQL database of the whole log, full search functionality, a shared history between users of the same bouncer, etc.

There are clients as a website (runs on node.js), for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

So, if someone would add the missing features to Quassel, we could make that one the new new HipChat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks amazing! My IRC server uses a password however, and I can't see anyway if inputting that. I tried using a straight /connect command, but that doesn't appear to work either. Might have a go at a pull-request!

<comment><USER26> I had a discussion with erming about this because I use ZNC. There's actually a /raw command, so you use /raw PASS user:pass to do it, IIRC!

There's also a /quote command.

<comment><USER25> Ah I was hoping that'd be the case, I tried a few commands that work in other ones, but I'll give that a try! Thanks!

Edit: wait, that's for password protected channels, right? I need to pass a password through on server connection otherwise my ircd boots you off and kills the socket :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are SSL connections to the remote IRCd (usually via port 6697 or 9999) supported?

<comment><USER28> Interested in this as well. Wasn't able to get it working so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Fantastic! I am now running it locally and works very well for me out of the box. (Using the shout-irc.com doesn't seem to work)

Feature request: Make it work with quassel core. Currently there is [https://github.com/magne4000/quassel- webserver](https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver) but I don't like the UI as much as yours. [https://github.com/magne4000/node- libquassel](https://github.com/magne4000/node-libquassel) might help you with quassel connectivity.

<comment><USER29> Also desktop notifications :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not as pretty but [http://kiwiirc.com/](http://kiwiirc.com/) is a more mature web irc client that you might want to check out.

</comment><comment><USER31> Related question; anyone got a decent IRC desktop client for Windows? I'm using HexChat now, but loved Limechat wayyyy more on OSX. So much simpler/clean.

<comment><USER32> Use Quassel, open source and cross-platform.

[http://quassel-irc.org/](http://quassel-irc.org/)

<comment><USER33> I second quassel. Not only is it an excellent client, it has an awesome core/client architecture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I really like the looks of this! Great work! Might start using it instead of/together with wee chat for the ease of use.

A suggestion - (I know I can just use my own CSS but,) there are low contrasts in the default theme. I usually have very good vision but for me it's pretty hard to distinguish the green from the white background. Maybe you could edit the default colors a bit?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm using it now on freenode, so I guess I'm one of the fast 20. My first thought is that this is a really great and simple interface. I'd like to be able to hide the join/part messages, though.

I'll be forking shortly. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice work. Out of curiosity, allowing someone to connect to a service via your servers could open you up to malicious activity. Do you rate-limit users from quickly and constantly opening and closing a connection?

<comment><USER5> Well, my idea when I started this project: A self-hosted and password protected IRC client that runs in your browser.

However, I added "public" mode, where anyone is allowed to connect. And the demo server is currently running in this mode.

So right now? Nope. I'm not limiting anything. I guess this will be up to the person running the server to decide.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If only WebSockets allowed for raw TCP/UDP requests in the browser - <USER2> bypass the need to connect over a third-party server..

<comment><USER16> True, but you would only be connected while your browser is open. I think it is preferable to have a client running somewhere on a server and connecting to that. Even better if it's not a third-party server but your own. In the end, what's the difference between attaching a screen session and connecting a web client? I use WeeChat in a terminal multiplexer and connect to it with Glowing Bear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is beautiful. Is this open source at all?

<comment><USER39> The repo is at [https://github.com/erming/shout](https://github.com/erming/shout)

Looks pretty neat - even setup to work decently on mobile devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Aren't web-based IRC interfaces just ripe for abuse and DDoS, even if they are closely integrated to the network?

<comment><USER41> This is just the demo page for the software. I believe you are meant to host this on your own server (and IP/HTTP-auth restrict it if necessary).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've been looking a great way to get into network stack programming in javascript, this looks perfect.

</comment><comment><USER43> I really liked it, very clean.

</comment><comment><USER44> Looks fancy and very simple usage. Looking forward to make a testing deployment.

</comment><comment><USER45> Looks nice, but I'll stick with "M-x irc".

<comment><USER21> Upgrade to "M-x erc". Or try "M-x weechat" :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Looks nice, you cannot close a channel in firefox though.

<comment><USER5> Hey, thanks. That's a bug! I'll fix it when the HN madness ends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Seems slower than qwebirc. Anything it does better?

</comment><comment><USER48> TapChat is similar, has web and Android apps: [http://tapchatapp.com/](http://tapchatapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> HN Mods: Could you change the url to [https://github.com/erming/shout](https://github.com/erming/shout) instead?</comment>


Google's New Cloud Boss Targets Old Issue: Selling to Big Firms - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/google-s-new-cloud-boss-targets-old-issue-selling-to-big-firms <comment><AUTHOR> OT: Why is Thomas Kurian's tie so long [0]?

Attaching a substantially lengthy strip of flappy silk snugly around one's neck seems generally dangerous.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/Ku9cAa8.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Ku9cAa8.jpg)</comment>


Ivan Sutherland: 6 Legged Walker: CMU 1982 and 1983 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrMfU2FtSBk <comment><USER2> Memories! I actually scanned the video several times to see if I was in the background on the stairs. I remember seeing this being put though the paces in this space (those were CS offices in the background, I don't think this drive- through exists anymore.) Not sure that I saw Ivan driving the hexapod though.

There should be a Robotics Institute technical report about it, I recall Claude Shannon wrote a whimsical poem about the the hexapod.

[edit] some context: Ivan was a founder of Evans & Sutherland, a groundbreaking developer of computer graphics systems. From the wikipedia page: "Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark, who started Silicon Graphics, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, John Warnock of Adobe, and Scott P. Hunter of Oracle."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_%26_Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_%26_Sutherland)

He is also known for Sketchpad, perhaps the first graphical user interface:

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

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that's the Hammerschlag Hall faculty parking lot and the staircase in the background is the one that goes up to Porter Hall.

<comment><USER2> This is adjacent to the current lot, the stair in the background is not the current one. There used to be this paved area that went underneath the steps to the entrance of Hamerschlag. There was also a loading dock there where I assume this hexapod made it out from wherever in Wean Hall it was constructed. This area is now occupied by lab space and from above is planted with grass.

<comment><USER4> It lived in a garage under the bridge, on the Wean/Porter side, between the cut and Hammerschlag.

<comment><USER3> Lived as in, you never left the lab or actually lived?? I spent more time in that building than almost anyone during my day, so 'lived there' is a loaded term :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, that thing. That was mostly Sutherland having fun.

It was followed by the OSU Adaptive Suspension Vehicle.[1] This may have been the first walking machine with active computer control. Despite the claims of off-road capabilities, it could at best handle a dirt road with a slight slope. They got it to walk over a log, but that was with 5 legs locked and the operator managing one leg with a joystick.

[1] [https://youtu.be/DIiD1JimBXQ](https://youtu.be/DIiD1JimBXQ)

<comment><USER6> There is some progress...:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coincidentally, the grad student who programmed the thing, Marc Donner, is now director of global tech sites at ... wait for it ... Uber!

</comment><comment><USER7> What is that on the ground that rolls by it, stops by sewer grate, and then rolls some more?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrMfU2FtSBk&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrMfU2FtSBk&feature=youtu.be&t=167)

<comment><USER2> I don't remember exactly but there may have been a small crab apple tree by the entrance. This was below and in front of Hamerschlag Hall that I believe is now filled in. The offices behind connected to the library floor of Wean Hall.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, the old parking lot around Hamerschlag became the new fab / nanotech lab when Scott Hall was built (finished 2016) -- they connected HH C-level to Wean 4, a major boon to winter-time indoor connectivity. Google Streetview has a pretty good view of it:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-79.9460873,3a,75y,3...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-79.9460873,3a,75y,309.93h,82.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sw74WDtIey5XjBbKZYoSbCQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Dw74WDtIey5XjBbKZYoSbCQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D359.47006%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a short video. Everyone should watch it. Not necessarily for the walker, which is somewhat primitive, though probably state-of-the-art for its time. Watch the video for the accompanying commentary.

Ivan has such a simple, elegant way of explaining things. In just a few sentences he clearly explained all the key elements of the walker.

That's a wonderful pedagogical talent. Another person with such a talent was Richard Feynman.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, it's taken us so long to get (something like) this thing going. 37 years now, and Boston Dynamics is only now in the final steps of productizing v1.

<comment><USER11> Boston Dynamics' CEO, Marc Raibert, was a professor at CMU at the same time, and Marc and Ivan are good pals. Little-known fact: Ivan convinced Marc to start doing work in legged locomotion! So, in a way, Ivan is responsible for modern legged locomotion by 'seeding' the field with a genius like Marc Raibert! Here's some of what was going on at CMU at the same time as Ivan's Walker: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG_ZKXo6Rlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG_ZKXo6Rlg)

<comment><USER12> This video was extremely cool. Thanks for sharing! Legged robots are so endearing.

<comment><USER11> Glad you liked it. Boston Dynamics is an overnight success only 40-ish years in the making... !

See also this Scientific American article of theirs [https://www.academia.edu/28215739/Machines_That_Walk](https://www.academia.edu/28215739/Machines_That_Walk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that they tried to design the walking motion from scratch and ended up with a jittery, jerky mess with each leg moving one by one. I wonder how they would've done if they tried to replicate the walking motion of real six-legged creatures.

[https://i.imgur.com/tinN5vA.gif](https://i.imgur.com/tinN5vA.gif)

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks and sounds like the retro back story side sequences in Lost (with the Japanese professor)!

Anyway, awesome work, and amazing to see how long we've been thinking about this stuff IRL</comment>


Standing out in the crowd: OSCON Keynote - <AUTHOR> http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/

<comment><USER2> The article was quite neutral. I think women tend to be better collaborators and I fully expect the open source explosion to be lead by females.

Good process and interaction can be developed by anyone regardless of gender and other genetic factors. Nonetheless, it does seem that women tend to be aware of and do the actual 'house keeping' of project accessibility and comprehensibility for other developers (docs, overviews, diagrams). This is huge.

</comment><comment><USER3> An excellent discussion of how the open source community often tends to (unintentionally) exclude women, and what individual projects can do reverse that trend.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Video of the talk: <http://blip.tv/file/2400597></comment>


Tech Companies Are Hiring Economists - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2016/01/28/from-hoodies-to-heuristics-techs-rebels-are-hiring-economists <comment><USER2> Econometrics is pretty valuable for any of the data-mining operations. Most econ majors I know are really good with stats and enjoy digging into datasets almost obsessively. I'd certainly hire them. Good economists also have a well structured way of reasoning through problems.

As the article says, Varian, author one of the more mathy econ intro text (imo haven't sampled all) has been at Google for quite some time now. So yeah...why not?

</comment><comment><USER3> Many economists are applied mathematicians and the microeconmics crowd is specifically focused on understanding consumer and firm behavior. This checks out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like tech companies are normal companies after all. The ebay example is pure finance/controlling and while the analysis might be convoluted and involve some statistics, I bet the driver of that kind of thinking is finance, or pricing, or basically a department that would be very normal in more established companies.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU I wonder if they give a technical interview.

<comment><USER5> They do.</comment></comment>


Italy gave China PPE to help with coronavirus – then China made them buy it back - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.us/italy-china-ppe-sold-coronavirus/ <comment><AUTHOR> The report is disputed, see the following thread: [https://twitter.com/amber_athey/status/1246520453847449600](https://twitter.com/amber_athey/status/1246520453847449600)</comment>


The Saddest SaaS Pricing Pages of the Year - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/192297/The-Saddest-SaaS-Pricing-Pages-of-the-Year <comment><USER2> At least they HAVE pricing pages. Quickest way to lose a potential sale (and all future potential sales and references) is to not provide pricing information because you're stuck in the sales-rep model where I have to call/email/otherwise contact you when all I want is an estimate so I know if I'm looking at a trivial-dollars-a-year or a reorganize-the-entire-budget-to- pay-for-this product/service.

<comment><USER3> Either everyone that does this is an idiot (unlikely) or it actually works for their markets and increases their bottom line (likely).

I once worked for a fairly big (500m-1b market cap) company that worked this way. Pricing was customized for every client. They, like many companies, made a ton of money doing this.

One down side, however, was that this business model can trap you. Once you've sold customers at lots of different price points, you can never go back and publish pricing, since those customers that are overpaying will be upset. You could set your prices high, but that would turn off many new customers who need a lower price point. So, while you can make a lot of money doing this, give it some thought before committing to it.

This is why Google Adwords is so genius. It's both dynamic (charging more for bigger pockets) and it scales, which is hard balance to strike.

<comment><USER4> > Either everyone that does this is an idiot (unlikely) or it actually works > for their markets and increases their bottom line (likely).

Yep. I've been in start-ups where via simple pricing we drained the well for all other players, grabbing everything for ourselves. I've also been in start- ups where we found out that simple come-to-us pricing simply does not work and they needed an active sales rep process for the majority of the customers. (And if the majority need it, sorry, we can't just display prices. Losing the sale to you is worth keeping the other 90% of our sales.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know. As a SaaS buyer (occasionally) I have to take strong disagreement with some of the points. For instance the first two sites links-- first bad, second good. Both show pricing structure, the "bad" one shows a feature list with a bunch of check boxes. I wish more vendors did this. I look at it and I know what I'm getting with the basic plan. I know what each increment buys me.

I look at the second example--the "good" example--and the basic plan looks like it gives me---nothing. So now I have to go to some other marketing page, read the description, then, in my head, subtract all the great things that higher tiers give me to figure out what exactly I'd get with the base tier. Having it all in one place is preferable to me. The second problem with the "good" site is by summarizing feature each plan comes with, rather than being more specific, they are assuming that they know what is important to me. What if I could care less (and this has happened to me several times) about some big picture feature, and just need the version that provides database X integration? More clicking, and more likelihood that I buy a higher specced plan that I actually need.

And that is where I think these come from. Not a desire clearly layout what you get for your money, but a desire to obfuscate just enough with requisite marketing to push you towards more expensive options.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://i.imgur.com/LjJhc2Q.png](http://i.imgur.com/LjJhc2Q.png)

Anyone here ever been to Santana Row in San Jose? They have a GUCCI store in there; no prices are displayed for anything.

 _" If you have to ask, then we're too expensive for you."_

It's like how most of us can generally walk into any Target Store or even Macy's(well, some of us) and just buy what we like without looking at the price.... or maybe this is just me.

</comment><comment><USER7> I spoke to a friend the other day with a SaaS and they are aiming at the long- tail of sites as their customers, and they chose 1 price plan, regardless of how big the customer sites were. Their advisor said simplifying would reduce fear in customers, especially small businesses.

I've been considering a similar approach for a simple SaaS we run, which we have had trouble with getting traction for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. It really depends on the product/customer. The big thing here is that you don't have to have a perfect pricing strategy out of the gate (or ever); it's iterative.

Look at the Hootsuite example for instance - at this point with 8 million users they should really have more than one plan because there are several different personas in the mix.

Buffer on the other hand had a mono-price schema for a long time, because they wanted the simplicity while they were getting traction (to your point). Now that they're solid, they've been iterating the product and the pricing into their business plan.

Big points:

\- Each customer persona = a pricing tier \- Price based on the customer willingness to pay = talk to them about pricing \- Iterate - your pricing should change as your product and customer do

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is amazing, huge thanks for the analysis of our pricing page Patrick! Will go ahead and work on that for sure, some great pointers, you're right, there's so much power in the new analytics and we're not conveying that very well at all.

<comment><USER9> Yep, thanks for including Buffer here (I designed this pricing page) - there's lots of improvements to be made here which will be coming soon :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good. Check out that ebook if you want a good survey of the land of pricing pages. Feel free to reach out too if you want a sounding board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like Dyn has changed theirs; [http://dyn.com/email-delivery- express/](http://dyn.com/email-delivery-express/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. This just happened, as I took the screenshot very early this morning. Not a big fan of the change in terms of clarity, but there's improvement in the product marketing around why their solution is better than Maildril, Amazon, etc.

Biggest thing I'm curious about from a data perspective concerns the science behind the thresholds they've set. You want to see where the break in usage or value is and make sure you capture 95% of that group. Power users of that plan are then pushed into the next plan accordingly.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, I got to that page by clicking "Email Delivery Express" via their dropdown from their homepage - [http://dyn.com/](http://dyn.com/)

If you click the link in the article it still is the older version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> @StackMob there is no price and call to action button on your "pricing" sub page [https://www.stackmob.com/pricing/](https://www.stackmob.com/pricing/) . I am confused.

[https://twitter.com/daniel_sedlacek/statuses/415108372422094...](https://twitter.com/daniel_sedlacek/statuses/415108372422094848)

</comment><comment><USER12> What does HN think of my pricing section on [http://wesawit.com](http://wesawit.com) ? Any feedback?

<comment><USER13> Random, non-target-customer opinion: The slider is nice. However, it's not obvious how the venue size it selects (and the corresponding pricing tiers) affect the service offered. For example, what happens if I'm dishonest?

It seems like you're trying to tier the pricing based on a customer attribute (their venue size) rather than actual customer usage (ie their interest in value-added features, increased quota for certain features, etc). It seems hard to enforce, and also harder to upsell (ie if I'm a smaller fry, I'm never going to buy your premium plan). But I'm quite a bit out of my league here..

<comment><USER12> Good points; thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish the blog had "fixed" each of the poor examples to show what they would have done.

<comment><USER15> And leave money on the table?

If it were my blog, I would have included a link to _" Pay me to show you what I would have done differently"_, or some other equally organic and not-too- weasely way of selling exactly that service: Reporting on best and worst examples is one thing, relatively LHF, but working with a company to improve is something they should be rewarded for!

Not to mention that doing so may require a company to completely overhaul sales and marketing. Or culture. Or both.

LHF: Low hanging fruit, easily obtainable item.

EDIT: PCCAMPBELL was replying at the same time as me. I like their reply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! Well, I didn't want to be completely blatant. A lot of our content tells you how to solve the problem, but yes - we do have software and tech services to help you. Work with folks like New Relic, Insightly, Wistia, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I work at Wistia. Glad that we made it to the list of __good __pricing pages!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! We're big fans. :)

Tell Brendan to stop grinding his coffee so loudly.

\- Patrick

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for the feedback on the Qualaroo pricing page, Patrick.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries. Love the product!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> fotbr - nice observation. In my opinion, illusive (or non-existent) pricing pages only frustrate prospective customers and serve as a barrier.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. Not having a pricing page is an easy way to turn off prospects who want to remain silent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Sell me this pen"

<comment><USER21> "Oh, you don't have a pen anymore. Supply and demand, bro."

<comment><AUTHOR> Noooooooooooooo. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Speed Mentoring for Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.growthclub.online/speed-mentoring <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Next week we launch our first pilot for this concept - Speed Mentoring. How it works is that you meet 4 random founders in 4 10-minutes lightning sessions to get 4 different perspectives on your challenge / problem. Sometimes it takes only a new pair of eyes to see a way out of the situation. Speed Mentoring is designed to do just that.</comment>


Ohayo Sneak Peak - <AUTHOR> http://breckyunits.com/ohayo-sneak-peak.html <comment><AUTHOR> Also, in case you couldn't tell by the rough cut of the video, I should mention that I am not starting a company around Ohayo or TN or ETNs. This is a passion project for me and I have saved up enough to work on it full time for a while. Don't expect polish in the early days, or you will be disappointed. But DO expect a great, useful product in a few weeks time!

Thanks!</comment>


Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-steve-jobss-next-over-my-beos/ <comment><USER2> Gassée is just full of shit here. I was a die-hard BeOS fan even before R5. It really was a remarkable operating system, way, way ahead of its day.

But Gassée fumbled it when courting Apple [1], and then sold it to Palm, who promptly killed it. It has taken years for a dedicated group of followers to rebuild it from scratch, and by the time they finished doing that, computer hardware had advanced so much that there was very little demand for a high- performance operating system in the desktop market.

So, I guess he can claim to be glad that his baby died a lonely and ultimately unremarkable death thanks largely to his own mishandling of it, but it sounds like sour grapes to me.

[1]: I remember reading an article a while back about the meeting between Amelio, Gassée, and Jobs. Reportedly, Gassée thought BeOS was a shoe-in, despite asking an astronomical figure for the sale, so he showed up to the meeting completely unprepared. Steve, in typical Steve fashion, showed up fully prepared and blew Gassée right out of the water. I've spent fifteen minutes searching for that article, and I can't find it [2] -- and it might be apocryphal anyway, according to a post on Slashdot ([http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129504&cid=108...](http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129504&cid=10804161)). Still, Gassée and Jobs have had an uneasy relationship in the past ([http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Handicapped.txt)).

[2]: Woo, found it! <http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml>

edit: aside from that, it was great to see and hear Bill Atkinson, and Gassée had some funny quotes.

<comment><USER3> > computer hardware had advanced so much that there was very little demand for > a high-performance operating system in the desktop market.

That was kinda the problem. BeOS was built around the 1990s mentality that PC hardware was quite limited, and a light fast OS was more important than security, robustness, etc. It ran like greased lightning, but really wasn't a whole lot more advanced than other contemporary consumer OSes.

Next, on the other hand, was always intended to be a workstation OS (with 'enterprise frameworks') and was a much better fit for the hardware of the 2000s. With MS moving to the NT line, it would have been a huge mistake for Apple to adopt a single-user OS like Be.

<comment><USER4> Well said.

Back in the day, I actually used both the NeXTcube and a BeBox (although neither as a primary environment)

The NeXT environment enamored everybody who was introduced to it... for a day or two. Them almost everybody moved away from it because it was so... damn.. slow. The base cube only had 8MB of RAM (a decent amount in those days!) which wasn't nearly enough for the big heavy frameworks it used. NeXT had to retrofit all of the cubes with 40MB SCSI drives _just for swap_. The display postscript system was elegant (it provided a common display engine for both the screen and the NeXT-brand laser printer, for instance) but ate up precious cycles of the 68030. The magnetic-optical drive that supposedly was the future of personal storage had horrible performance (although the drives mercifully gave out after a few years anyway)

In short, the NeXTcube's we had were the machines everybody loved but few wanted to actually _use_.

The BeBox by contrast was nothing if not zippy! There were too many missing bits for it to really be my main environment, but you really felt that you were using the future of operating systems. After years of using UIs that always had at least _some_ lag the BeBox's instantaneous response was almost a shocking experience.

When Apple was quite publicly looking for an OS to buy I was certainly rooting for Be. It seemed to fit their needs perfectly: it already ran on PowerPC and its responsiveness would have been great for the multimedia creators that were Apple's bread-and-butter. When they went with NeXT instead I thought it was just another of Apple's classic missteps. I couldn't see why they were hitching their wagon to an OS that was last decade's news.

Clearly I was wrong, even if you ignore the Steve Jobs factor. The hardware advances underway quickly made the amazing responsiveness of BeOS moot; now every OS feels like the snappy BeBox did in 1995. As memory sizes grew the NeXTstep frameworks came into their own (probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)

To put it simply, Be built an OS in 1996 that was perfect for 1996. NeXT build an OS in 1989 that was suited for the 2000s.

I don't mean that last bit as a pure complement, by the way. The "too far ahead of its time" is a cliche about failed tech products. Building something that only works with hardware 10+ years in the future is hardly a recipe for success. It's only through the accidents of history that NeXTstep got its chance to shine years after its original failure. 99% of products in that position only get to be footnotes.

<comment><USER5> "(probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)"

That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long.

NeXTSTEP was quite nice with a 16MB 25MHz 68040, and a decent hard drive, as seen in the NeXTStation from 1990. Even the price was competitive if you didn't mind the 2-bit greyscale monitor.

NeXTSTEP 3.3, running in color on a Pentium Pro (or better), or even better a 1994 HP PA-RISC workstation, was SWEET.

<comment><USER4> > That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long.

And rightly so. But given that the hardware was built (at great expense!) specifically to run that OS, I think it's fair to consider their performance together.

Certainly the gap between "the hardware the OS needs" and "what is readily available" shrunk as time went on. The slabs with more RAM were substantially better than the cubes had been. I think calling NeXTstep with 16MB "quite nice" is still being generous though - my recollections of 16MB NeXTstep was "swaps less". With 32MB it started to get pretty reasonable but, gosh, that was $1000+ of RAM back then.

I knew people who ran NeXTstep on Intel but they tended to turn into early linux adopters. X11+fvwm (or, later, AfterStep) was more responsive on their hardware.

By the time NeXTSTEP 3.3 came out (and NeXT basically left the OS game, instead focusing on OpenStep and WebObjects) the performance gap was a lot smaller, at least if you could afford a really nice computer. When it reemerged as a product 5 years later as OS/X 10.0 that gap had evaporated. Suddenly it was living in its moment, 12 years after its debut.

And hell, now the OS that I used to curse for its unreasonable hardware demands comfortably runs on my cell phone. Technology is funny that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I, too, think that getting Steve back was the right move, with NeXTSTEP as an added bonus. I'm just sad that BeOS died an undignified death - a few years ago I bought a BeOS CD off eBay and was very impressed with the OS. It was more responsive on a 100MHz machine than Windows XP was on a 2GHz machine. Yes, I know there's Haiku, but they're really just catching up to where BeOS was 15 years ago. Imagine what BeOS would be like today if it continued to be developed and improved.

<comment><USER7> I too miss the alternative OSs. It'd be great to see what BeOS could have been, along with OS/2.

<comment><USER8> Haiku shows a lot of promise despite how few developers they have. You should really give it a spin, especially when they hit beta.

If they finish their Wifi implementation (it works, even with WPA2 now, just doesn't have a complete GUI), bring their Webkit browser up-to-date, and get a bit more stability it would be a pleasant system to use on a day-to-day basis.

I honestly think if it had the momentum of a larger community, it could easily be open source's triumph on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I loved Gassée's Freudian slip at 0:10:44:

"... now I'm a vulture capi... er, venture capitalist."

His story of getting himself fired from Apple by Scully a bit prior to that was also quite amusing and revealing of his frank nature.

I also loved Bill Atkinson's story at 18:17 paraphrasing Steve Jobs convincing him to drop out of med school and join Apple:

"You know how fun it is to surf on the front edge of a wave? Now think about the poor guy dog-paddling on the tail end of the same wave... it's no fun! You go the same distance, you know, but this guy's just eating the back of the wave; this guy's surfing. Come to Apple and surf!"

And finally, for those wanting to skip the bulk of the video and go straight to the part with Gassée discussing NeXT and Be, it's at 58:22.

</comment><comment><USER10> 15 years later and he's still trying to spin his terrible negotiating into a positive.

Company worth $80 million.

Buyout offer at $125 million.

Hold out for $275 million.

Get nothing and go out of business.

<comment><USER11> This isn't completely accurate is Be Inc. did successfully IPO in 1999 and won a lawsuit against Microsoft.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, even the investors who didn't cash out at the IPO did eventually end up with $35 million for the company: $11 million from the 2001 asset sale to Palm, and $24 million from the 2002 settlement with Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you're curious, here's the HackerNews homepage and a few sample apps on Haiku, the operating system inspired by BeOS: <http://bit.ly/sTLZne>

<comment><USER14> Link redirects to [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2038028/public/Screen%20Shot%202011-...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2038028/public/Screen%20Shot%202011-11-12%20at%203.53.45%20AM.png)

I personally don't like going to sites without knowing their address. To expand shortlinks, try <http://longurl.org/>

<comment><USER15> Alternatively you can append `+` to the end of any short url and get the same information.

<comment> X-Istence Is that true for ALL short URL services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Remember too, NeXT didn't just have a desktop OS, it had an enterprise application framework, which Apple used to build the Apple Online Store. That may or may not have been an important factor at the time, but given the inroads Microsoft was making in enterprise backoffices at the time, it was probably a consideration for Apple's board and management.

</comment><comment><USER17> I loved BeOS back in the day. Such a beautiful and clean interface. I loved the philosophy behind it, and the disdain for 'cruft' as they called it. I still have the discs lying around somewhere...

<comment><USER18> BeOS's idealism also held it back. They didn't want any ported apps; everything was supposed to be written from scratch. So no Mozilla, no Java, etc. Unfortunately, the BeOS market was never large enough to justify writing large native apps, so they just never happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I keep hearing that Apple acquired NeXT over Be because of every reason aside from quality of the technology.

Was BeOS worse than NeXTSTEP?

<comment><USER20> There is a lot of emotion people have in a question like this.

I think the best answer is BeOS wasn't as complete as NeXT. Specifically it had a fairly poor network stack (it was being retooled around the time BeOS became part of palm, no idea if it was finished)

It lacked the kind of print support MacOS and NeXT had. It lacked the same caliber of internationalization. All fixable stuff but also all stuff requiring some investment.

It also remains to be seen how well BeOS would actually scale, it was an RTOS with a UI, it could absolutely do sexy stuff on low powered machines of the day, that doesn't mean it could run a 12core dual i7 machine well. Maybe it could, we really don't know.

<comment><USER21> iZ Corporation's RADAR runs on BeOS. It's a DAW system of exceedingly high quality. We can only guess how well it'd scale, but Be looks to me not to be the sort of software that helps sell hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> BeOS was missing one important thing that NeXT Step had: Jobs Control.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am at this point in the Steve Jobs book. Apple was considering using Windows as well. Bill Gates was furious when Apple bought NeXT, he really wanted Apple to run windows.

<comment><USER24> They where not considering it, the CHRP Mac's had a PPC version of NT that ran on it, I know because I installed that abomination one time just to see. It was probably the buggiest version of windows I have ever seen.

<comment><USER25> No CHRP Mac ever shipped. The closest anyone ever came was Motorola with the StarMax 6000. The CHRP spec evolved into the New World ROM architecture used from the original iMac to the end of the PowerPC era, though.

There was indeed a PPC version of NT that was designed for CHRP. But, separate from that, Apple also seriously considered using a custom version of NT with a Mac-like GUI to replace the Mac OS. It was one of many options under consideration along with Be, NeXT, and Solaris.

<comment><USER24> Sorry my post does look to reflect that they did, but yes the full CHRP never shipped, but the portions that allowed NT to run on the PPC did. There was a working version of NT that ran on Apples and the clones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Didn't apple choose NeXT largely in part of beOS notoriously hard to skin nature?

<comment><USER27> hard to skin nature?

<comment><USER28> I think hard to change the visual look and feel is what he means.</comment></comment></comment>


The Golden Scale: A Collection of Norwegian Folktales - <AUTHOR> http://oaks.nvg.org/norwegian-folktales.html <comment><USER2> Some fun facts about these tales:

"East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is the original source material for Disney's Beauty and the Beast, being the inspiration for La Belle et la Bête.

Collecting Norwegian folk tales was a result of the national romantic (you could say separatist) movement during the 19th century; Norway was a part of Sweden at the time.

Most Norwegians haven't read more than a few of these. They are perhaps best known as stop-motion/puppet films by the director Ivo Caprino: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dMbxrspfoU&list=PL6B529FE04...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dMbxrspfoU&list=PL6B529FE04E509754)

Here are the ones that I think are most entertaining/recognized to such a degree that they are worth reading:

\- The Three Billy-Goats Gruff \- The Ashlad Who Ate a Match with the Troll \- The Ashlad and his Crew (the film above) \- East of the Sun and West of the Moon \- The Husband Who Was to Mind the House \- The Boy Who Went to the North Wind \- One's Own Children Are Always Prettiest \- The Ashlad Who Made the Princess Say "That's a lie!" \- Soria Moria Castle \- The Giant without a Heart in his Body \- The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain

<comment><USER3> Minor correction: Norway was not formally a part of Sweden. The arrangement was a "personal union of the separate kingdoms of Sweden and Norway under a common monarch and common foreign policy", see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_between_Sweden_and_Norwa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_between_Sweden_and_Norway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, old stories. From a different time. Dreaming of the basic assumption of a common, shared experience, of everything relating back to the group, the individual justifying himself to others. Everyone that exists in this place _counts_. You give and get in return. That's the world I believed in before the internet, before smartphones. The people sitting with you on the train, those could be protagonists of my very own Norwegian Folktale.

All of it in stark contrast to today's individualism, where, surprisingly, people are not selfish or cold, but still have boundaries; primarily it's not about the group, it's about yourself. Maybe we can relate. Maybe I can give, but I don't have to. Maybe I get something in return but it would be foolish to rely on it. Instead, why don't I try and go alone, use the modern tools and reach heights impossible in an earlier age. No one in the collective is holding me back.

Took me a while to adapt....

</comment><comment><USER5> A (deceased) artist named Theodor Kittelsen [1] has made quite a few illustrations [2] for many of these tales (and other Norwegian stories and fantasy creatures).

He lived not far from where I live and my famly and I often visit the combined cobalt mining and Kittelsen museum called Blaafarveverket [3] (the blue colour plant or the plant that makes blue colour)

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

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTU0K-nvPmY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTU0K-nvPmY)

[3] [https://www.blaa.no/en/](https://www.blaa.no/en/)

<comment><USER6> His most known work: _Soria Moria_ , is amazing.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soria_Moria_Castle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soria_Moria_Castle)

<comment><USER7> This is probably his most well-known work among metal fans:

[https://uploads4.wikiart.org/images/theodor-severin- kittelse...](https://uploads4.wikiart.org/images/theodor-severin-kittelsen/op- under-fjeldet-toner-en-lur-1900.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This collection of fairytales is beautiful but, in general, I want to say that this website is full of gems. It's an example of how I'd like the web to be: accessible, full of knowledge, independent, with personality.

</comment><comment><USER8> Those who like this site may also enjoy this [1], which has illustrations from many classic children's and fairy tale books.

[http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/illustrations/index.html](http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/illustrations/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if/where this collection is available in Norwegian (preferably in Bokmål)?

<comment><USER10> Haven't verified that [http://folkeeventyr.no/](http://folkeeventyr.no/) has all of them, but seems to have a lot and at least the first one and plenty of Ashlads, kings, princesses, trolls, foxes, men, old ladies, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Number 50, Two Stepsisters, is the source of my favourite expression in the Norwegian language:

"You haven't sucked this out of your own breast!"

</comment><comment><USER12> When I was a kid, at one time, I had access to a lending library which had a series of books with titles of the form "X Fairy Tales", where X had values like Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, etc.

Many of them were very entertaining. I don't remember the name of the publisher but a google may find it, for anyone interested in it for themselves or their kids.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a reminder of what the web should be about - publishing great content in an accessible format.

</comment><comment><USER14> It says "slightly modernised to make the reading easier" \- what exactly has been modernised?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm charmed. I'm dizzy!

</comment><comment><USER16> good fairytales in a very unattractive package.

on my display this website looks like this: [https://paste.pics/6ac21e4b7357bd608ac7903a24eb3d79](https://paste.pics/6ac21e4b7357bd608ac7903a24eb3d79)

huge white areas devoid of content. css, where art thou?

<comment><USER17> Do you really want enormously wide text columns? Having a max-width is nowadays considered courteous because most people find it easier to read text where lines are roughly the same length as on a printed page.</comment></comment>