Ask HN: I need a brainstorm on how to collect several thousand quality RSS feeds - <AUTHOR>

Google and Bing aren't doing right by me.  All I'm finding are crappy SEO optimized sites.  As you might surmise, there's a lot of web scraping and natural language processing in my near future, but I need a corpus of decent RSS feeds to start scraping.
What I'm looking for is a way to collect several thousand decent economic and financial news RSS feeds for my startup, Newsley.com.
Aside from gathering these by hand, has anyone found a great directory of RSS feeds?  (If you have a list of a whole lot of economic and financial feeds in your Google Reader account, export the list, email it to me. I'll buy you beer or your beverage of choice. )
Alternatively, I'd love to hear a brainstorm or suggestions on where to find collections of RSS feeds. or ways in which a bunch of RSS feeds could be gathered.
Suggestions? <comment><USER2> I wonder if you could use services like StumbleUpon and XMarks to find financial blogs that users have ranked and then just grabbing their RSS feeds.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. I'll definitely have to check in to that. That's a great idea. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Spider feedburner ?

wget -r google news and see what their sources are ?

<http://www.feedage.com/categories/News/1/4>

<comment><AUTHOR> Feedburner: I've thought about this one, but I haven't been able to find a good starting point. Their vast collection of RSS feeds don't seem to cross reference nicely and lend themselves to an obvious spidering strategy like web pages do. Suggestions on how to start are welcome

karma++ for wget google news. I looked at feedage, but signal:noise ratio kinda sucks.

<comment><USER3> Tread carefully when spidering google, mail me for some more info on this.

Being IP banned from google is not funny.

<comment><USER4> Ouch, the Google ban stick does not sound fun. An alternative for spidering high-risk avenues like that might be 80legs.com, in essence a legal/opt-in crawling botnet =P I've used them when they were in open beta and the service was free -- now you need to pay, although it's pretty cheap for smallish jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you considered using the PostRank Topic API?

<http://www.postrank.com/developers/api#topic>

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bloglines has a pretty decent feed search.

[http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=finance&t=f&ql=en&...](http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=finance&t=f&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m)

plus a top 1000 feeds:

<http://beta.bloglines.com/topfeeds>

<comment><AUTHOR> I had not thought of bloglines. Nice choice. Thank you sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://seekingalpha.com/> syndicates a whole bunch of financial blogs. They don't have feeds for individual contributors and I'm not sure of the quality of their topics feeds, but if you crawl carefully you may be able to find your way to the original blogs of many of their contributors.

</comment><comment><USER8> Marshall Kirkpatrick asked his internet friends for OPML files for his birthday:

[http://marshallk.com/its-my-birthday-you-should-make-me-a- pr...](http://marshallk.com/its-my-birthday-you-should-make-me-a-present)

It could work for you too...

</comment><comment><USER9> Check delicious? I myself sometimes tag blogs I find that only _might_ be useful later, rather than subscribe to them. At first pass I pulled a bunch, with a pretty low false positive rate at least on the first few, using economics+finance+blogs as tag filters.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe Regator?

<http://regator.com/#feedsearch:section:20:0>

</comment><comment><USER11> You might find YQL (Yahoo Query Language) useful for parts of what you want to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> Postrank.com has plenty of feeds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, sir. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Have you tried Alltop.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great collection of feeds. I hadn't tried those. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Follow the Bookmarks of Leading Thinkers and Interesting People - <AUTHOR> http://briarpat.ch

<comment><USER2> Interesting site- if anything it's let me know how disorganized my bookmarks are. I can see how using this app would encourage one to categorize their daily inventory of interesting links to properly labeled folders.

Just a comment on the layout: it's certainly clean and straight-forward however on the feed page I would rather see the link title have more prominence over the user icon. Of course, this preference of mine comes from years of using HN and reddit.

Also, I would like to be able to see all the users that are on the site- is that possible?

Cheers! Hope this works out for you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I have been considering removing the pictures next to the feed. You're probably right about it competing for you attention.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You don't need to register to check out the content. You can see the "hot" bookmarks by going here: <http://briarpat.ch/hot>

Also, you can see top-rated bookmark folders by going here: <http://briarpat.ch/folders>

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea. I think this is a great way to see what people actually read online and not just the random thing that catches their interest for a moment.

Great potential to find some high quality sites and information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We built it to combat the low-quality content problem. There is only one way to get content into briarpatch–through a bookmark. So it provides a new way to discover good sites. (plus you get to see your friends' bookmarks, and follow the bookmarks of experts in various fields so you can stay abreast on the latest and greatest)</comment></comment>


The Unofficial Apple Events App for MacOS with Chromecast Support - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/insidegui/AppleEvents <comment><USER2> Did you reverse engineer the Chromecast protocol ? Or is it opensource now ?

<comment><USER3> It's open source - [https://developers.google.com/cast/](https://developers.google.com/cast/)

<comment><USER2> But unfortunately is only available for "Android, Chrome or iOS app"

So this means other applications like Firefox, VLC etc... would have to reverse engineer the protocol.

<comment><USER4> reverse engineering != porting to an other platform

edit: but is it really open source as said by previous comment or is it just an SDK ?

<comment><USER5> It's closed source. This project uses an open source implementation he wrote himself: [https://github.com/insidegui/ChromeCastCore](https://github.com/insidegui/ChromeCastCore)

> This framework implements the Google Cast APIs so they can be used in macOS > apps. Google provides an official SDK but it is only for iOS and closed > source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There might be a naming clash here. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_event)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahahahaha true!

<comment><USER7> Yes, I went to the link quite happy because I thought it was related to AppleEvents and maybe Apple Scripts. Your app is definitely cool, congratulations on your work but the name got me fooled.

PS: Maybe the HN people haven't used MacOS 9 and AppleScript a lot and will not do the association I did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is nice. Though, I plan on going through the source code later, can you give a short gist of how it works?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know which part you're most interested in, but in a nutshell: the events are fetched from the same API as the Apple TV Events app (found that using a proxy), the Chromecast streaming uses Bonjour to find Chromecast devices on the network and the CASTV2 protocol over TCP to send commands to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've done a lot of cast hacking for my employer-- very interested in this :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Fantastic! Thanks for the continued work Guilherme!</comment>


Comic Grid - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nocturnalmonkey.com/comic-grid/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. I've been trying to use Clip Studio Paint for grids with limited success. You might find this interesting:

[https://screendiver.com/digital-comics- manifesto/](https://screendiver.com/digital-comics-manifesto/)</comment>


The Matrix rebooted: do we want to go down the rabbit hole again? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/08/the-matrix-rebooted-new-film <comment><USER2> I would rather see a Mel Brooks spoof of The Matrix than a reboot.

<comment><USER3> I'd rather see a Mel Brooks _anything_ than a reboot of _any other thing_. Where has all the creativity gone?

In fairness, though, iirc Mr Brooks is in his nineties now, and is probably a bit tired of biz.

<comment><USER4> haven't seen him anything since Zoolander ... that said, his son is pretty good, Max Brookes wrote World War Z (only tangentially related to the movie of the same name).</comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia Age Challenges Scholars' Sacred Peer Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Speaking as both a reviewer and victim of peer review, having only 3-4 reviews for a paper seems to introduce a significant element of luck, so getting more reviews sounds like a good idea. Also, making submissions public can help locate reviewers with very specific expertise (although those people are often competitors).</comment>


Chrome overtake Firefox in Marketshare - <AUTHOR> http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0

<comment><USER2> My initial reaction was surprise that so many people still use IE, then I remembered that my dad still uses it. I'll blame him.

<comment><USER3> Many people just don't care, and Windows comes with IE.</comment></comment>


Wikileaks releases documents it claims detail Russia mass surveillance apparatus - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/wikileaks-releases-documents-it-claims-detail-russia-mass-surveillance-apparatus/ <comment><USER2> The preface to this article is annoying.

> And founder Julian Assange continues to face charges that his 'radical > transparency' organization is a front for Kremlin agents...

The use of the word "charges" here indicates an unwarranted level of severity of these claims. He has not faced any legal charges and the only people making these accusations are those who suffered political fallout from their documents being revealed.

The fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that wikileaks is associated with the Russian government at all and anyone claiming there is is speculating at best.</comment>


The Myth of the Fairer Sex - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_myth_of_the_fairer_sex <comment><USER2> It's annoying how the author equates "being good" and "voting for leftist policies".

"Women have a long way to go. Some of them even still vote _Republican_. The horror!"

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the author's attitude: "Lets do this thing, and empower women, fight for gender equality, and change the world, but lets be realistic about it. Lets own the problems on our side and fix them."

In my experience, anything that begins with "Define X as the agent of good" falls into the trap of "X does $BADTHING therefore $BADTHING must be good", and credibility is lost (it also works in reverse, "define X as the agent of bad..."). On the other hand "Define $IDEAL as the goal" has a tendency to look for good from all directions, and address the bad wherever it comes from.

<comment><USER4> I would strongly prefer "Define $IDEAL as the standard of behavior that is expected", lest we get more cases of "$BADTHING leads to $IDEAL and is therefore good".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This does remind me of an interesting bit of historical trivia.

I've been practicing martial arts for 27 years -- tae kwon do, shotokan, Goju (traditional pre-Japan Okinawan karate), Wing Chun, Aikido, Jujutsu, Aikijutsu (i.e. Aikido for combat), Kobudo (Okinawan weapons)... and Feeding Crane Gung- Fu.

Of them all, Feeding Crane is by far the most violent and brutal style I've seen yet.

It's also the only one developed by a woman.

<comment><USER6> The legend of Wing Chun attributes its development to a woman too, though it seems like the real origin is unknown.

<comment><USER5> Wing Chun is derived from a branch of Feeding Crane -- Wing Chun was, I believe, one of the Feeding Crane designer's descendents -- though it may be rather that she was a trainee rather than actual family.

That at least is based on the geneology that Liu Chang I (Grand Master of the Feeding Crane school) showed us when he was here teaching a seminar on Feeding Crane.

Bruce Lee was on his chart also -- on the Wing Chun branch.

There's some uncertainty in that, of course. Only the Okinawan karate history is actually harder to find than the traditional Chinese :)

(The modern, flashy wire-fu stuff doesn't count, it's not traditional, or even particularly old.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course, the Beast of Auschwitz was female ([http://militaryhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/irma_grese_b...](http://militaryhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/irma_grese_beast_of_auschwitz))

<comment><USER8> But was she the beast she was claimed to be? <http://www.cwporter.com/grese4.htm></comment></comment>


XKCD on user habituation - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/1328/ "Critical update available!!!" - "meh, the last 'critical' update was a typo fix in manufacturer's name" <comment><USER2> I cannot believe it took me so long to realize there is a side-joke in the "title" attribute of each strip's <img> tag.</comment>


Content Marketing and Collaboration for Freelancers [audio] - <AUTHOR> http://www.100kfreelancing.com/0120-content-marketing-collaboration-wbrian-casel/ <comment><USER2> Hey! Chris here - I'm the interviewer in this podcast.

This was a good talk with Brian (I think he posts here as casjam if you want to look him up).

If anyone has questions about the episode, feel free to post 'em up! I'm happy to stick around and answer.</comment>


Emacs is Sexy - <AUTHOR> http://emacs.sexy <comment><USER2> Apropos nothing, WASD bindings for the snake game:

      (eval-after-load "snake"
        '(progn
           (define-key snake-mode-map "w" 'snake-move-up)
           (define-key snake-mode-map "a" 'snake-move-left)
           (define-key snake-mode-map "s" 'snake-move-down)
           (define-key snake-mode-map "d" 'snake-move-right)))

</comment><comment><USER3> See also: [http://vim.sexy/](http://vim.sexy/) (if that's your thing)

<comment><USER4> "Dudebro startups like yours get shit from angry feminists all the time. Using Vim will put a stop to that. Vim donates money to children living in Uganda. You'll look so accepting and humanitarian just by using Vim ... Don't get me wrong: I know you don't actually care about human rights and social issues. All that matters is that you look like you care."

Suddenly, the snark appears!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> According to Wikipedia :

A sexual fetish may be regarded as an enhancing element to a romantic/sexual relationship [...] or as a mental disorder/disorder of sexual preference if it causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life.

Just sayin' ...

</comment><comment><USER6> I had no idea ".sexy" was actually a real TLD. Huh.

<comment><USER7> I'm intrigued. How can vim and emacs share the same tld?

<comment><USER8> They're new! Also .jewelery, .tips, .technology, .cab, many others.

[http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated- string...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-strings)

<comment><USER9> As there is zero real use for these TLDs, I'd be very pleased if Google and other software makers penalize them. If we're just going to do away with TLDs, might as well do it right and just open up a simple global registry so anyone can register ".<whatever>" \-- versus blessing a few silly strings (.christmas, .bargains... .museum .aero).

<comment><USER10> Wrong. Saves time. Gets rid of silly names and allows small businesses to have good tlds. Like Manhattan.bike, which a friend of mine bought for his bike store.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how "Manhattan.bike" is any better than ManhattanBike.com. Or Bike.nyc. Or any other possible similar combination. It's like people think they're gonna bring the Real Name dream back to life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone should make a video of two strangers using emacs for the first time.

<comment><USER12> Three people three editors, emacs. vim and ed.

<comment><USER13> If you are going to include ed then why not TECO? (NB Purely for potential entertainment value)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_%28text_editor%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_%28text_editor%29)

<comment><USER14> Because ed is the standard text editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have yet to see a sexy Emacs. I've found sexy looking vim terminals. But Emacs is just weird

<comment><USER16> Not sure about sexy, but you can definitely make emacs easier on the eyes than its default Xt-in-1994 style:

[http://i.imgur.com/zwY3Ewc.png](http://i.imgur.com/zwY3Ewc.png)

<comment><USER17> Mind sharing some config details? Does that minimap work in the terminal?

<comment><USER18> [https://github.com/Nephyrin/NephScripts](https://github.com/Nephyrin/NephScripts) [https://github.com/Nephyrin/emacs-purple-haze- theme](https://github.com/Nephyrin/emacs-purple-haze-theme)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've started my emacs config from scratch a few months ago to understand it better. Right now it is ~160 lines (not including the plugins).

Plugins have been added for Markdown mode, go mode, ESS (for R and Julia) and Jabber for chat.

If anyone is interested: emacs config file: [https://github.com/pavanky/conf/blob/master/emacs](https://github.com/pavanky/conf/blob/master/emacs)

Run this script to download and install the plguins: [https://github.com/pavanky/conf/blob/master/emacs_plugins](https://github.com/pavanky/conf/blob/master/emacs_plugins)

<comment><USER20> How about prelude [https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude](https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Try out emacs, but naked: [http://bzg.fr/emacs-strip- tease.html](http://bzg.fr/emacs-strip-tease.html) (safe for work)

</comment><comment><USER22> Tangentially related, but definitely related:

[http://rms.sexy](http://rms.sexy)

<comment><USER23> Haha I own that website. I made it as a gag for the IRC channel I go on.

I'm supprised how well my server is handling the strain.

<comment><USER24> My poor neck. The GNU-project really should get to work on creating software capable of rotating images. Hopefully we will get to it just as soon as the Hurd is finished.

<comment><USER23> They should be properly rotated now. Like I mentioned I never expected anyone but a few people to see it

<comment><USER24> This one still need some work: [https://rms.sexy/img/p1000542.jpg](https://rms.sexy/img/p1000542.jpg)

<comment><USER23> done

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Deldo - Vibration Control and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs: "I LOVE EMACS!"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo)

</comment><comment><USER26> For those wishing to dive into emacs with a limited learning curve while keeping the config in their control, I think I have a good starting point here: [https://github.com/pyr/dot.emacs](https://github.com/pyr/dot.emacs)

</comment><comment><USER27> As soon as I saw that the sexy gTLD was out I tried to get is.sexy. That would have been awesome but there's a minimum 3 character restriction.

<comment><USER28> try was

<comment><USER29> too

<comment><USER28> You win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is almost nothing valuable on this web page.

</comment><comment><USER31> How would the people who have used both compare Emacs with Notepad++? I find Notepad++ beautiful, if not sexy :).

<comment><USER32> Forget the fact that you can check your email, browse the internet, run a shell from inside email. In Notepad++ you need to take your hands off the main keyboard and use the arrow keys if you want to move around. In emacs you use C-n C-p C-b C-f. That is enough reason to not use Notepad++

<comment><USER33> Not that I don't take my hands of the keyboard, but what do you really NEED to use the mouse for? You can use the KB to hit any item in the menus, there are tons of shortcuts, and the point and click menus are mostly related to configuration and settings, though those are technically mostly accessible via KB too.

I personally use Sublime Text when I'm not using VS2013/R# these days though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How did I not know about the .sexy tld? Is this recent?

What else is around that's cool?

<comment><USER35> Go to namecheap, click on "new TLDs" they're rolling out every week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> ot: now we see the great fruits of the iana going completely berserk. nobody fucking needs such tld. it doesn't help anybody but only makes money for some.

<comment><USER37> Where is the problem? Does the tld somehow interfere with you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> everyone who posts in this thread is a total nerd. ohwait...

</comment><comment><USER39> This is factually untrue.

<comment><USER40> Speak for yourself dude. emacs has gotten me laid.

<comment><USER39> It doesn't count when you fuck emacs. No matter how many .el files are involved, there has to be another human participating for it to count.

<comment><USER41> Um. It counts. There are elisp packages specifically for this after all. Other humans can even participate via the networked paired programming packages.

Can your editor do this? HMMM?

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo) [http://www.github.com/qdot/deldo](http://www.github.com/qdot/deldo)

<comment><USER39> I stand corrected...I think. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> get over emacs. either vim or sublime

</comment><comment><USER43> Guys, you really have a problem if you find a piece of software sexy... I absolutely love software, software development, and everything about it, but WOMEN are sexy, NOT software! Please don't degrade women with phrases like this!

<comment><USER44> If you mean it using the literal definition of sexy then yes. That might be an issue. But I don't think they mean literally sexy (as in sexually attractive). Haven't you or a(nother) guy/person call a car sexy or something? Seems the same to me.

<comment><USER43> I obviously would'nt call anything else sexy but a women.

<comment><USER45> Are you a native English speaker? I remember being shocked when I learned that in English "sexy" has a popular meaning outside of sexual context. While I wouldn't use a (translation of) sexy in my native language in this context it seems that it's perfectly acceptable in English.

That's actually what's hard when learning foreign languages - words which are similar to the ones you know, but with different semantics. It's even harder when the language you're learning is relatively similar to yours - it was a bigger problem for me to learn Russian than English for this reason.

<comment><USER43> No, I'm not, and WOW, I didn't knew about that, I'm somewhat shocked also! :D I hit the dictionary and found that this word is also used for something "exciting". We never-ever use it in this context, there is no such thing in Hungarian language that anything else than woman or men is "sexy".

That's why I read HN, to learn every day, thank you!

p.s. It still feel strange to me naming a women and also a text editor sexy, so I will never use it, but now I understand, it might not be that stupid than I thought. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Outliners & Programming - <AUTHOR> http://davewiner.userland.com/outlinersProgramming

<comment><USER2> Yeah, well, it doesn't do much good in 2009 if you are on Windows (or if you have to use Windows at work). I used ThinkTank and More all the time in the 1980s (yes, I used a Mac back then - and I still do now at home at times). Now, I'd love to use an outliner like OmniOutliner (true outliner with multiple columns), but there isn't anything I can find (by the way, I want it as a desktop app, not on the web, sorry). It's a shame because my brain thinks in hierarchies a lot. It seems so strange that there are many good outliners for Mac, but none for Windows. Why is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> MS Word has an outlining mode, and since it dominates the Windows ecosystem, there's very little economic incentive to build a world-class dedicated outliner.

I still love MORE as well :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dave Winer's recollections of inventing an entire new category of software while embroiled in Silicon Valley's early startup culture.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use TreePadLite[1] on Windows (and JreePad[2] everywhere else) whenever I need to make a simple hierarchical document to serve as input to a template engine or code generator. It's not open source but the interface is intuitive and the document format is trivial to parse and transform.

1 - <http://www.treepad.com/treepadfreeware/>

2 - <http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/></comment>


Sitting more than 6hrs/day increases likelihood of premature death  - <AUTHOR> http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=665

<comment><USER2> I post this every chance I get: America seems to be a third-world nation when it comes to office environments. Here in Denmark (and the rest of Scandinavia seems to be the same) I have never worked in an office without motorized desks that you can stand at while working if you so desire. This is across scores of companies from smallish startups to big corporations, and it isn't limited to IT companies. I have also never seen a cubicle in any company I have worked at (except one built from cardboard boxes by a visiting American consultant who was distracted by the open office plan).

I have no idea why the U.S. is so backwards in this area. But I can say with emphasis that I would never work in a cubicle, and I would need some seriously good reasons to not get a motorized desk. I just put this in my own office at home: [http://www.conset.dk/product/prodone/4105/Serie-501-19-bredd...](http://www.conset.dk/product/prodone/4105/Serie-501-19-bredde-120-cm-100-kg- Sort)

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess 18 hrs a day is kind of bad then :)

The problem for programmers is that you are never so productive as when you get into a flow state, and can stay "in the zone" for long periods that pass in what seems like seconds.

So breaking off flow states has a heavy negative impact on how much you can achieve.

<comment><USER4> Go and get a drink every so often

<comment><USER5> Or keep a pitcher of water on your desk, and you'll have to go to the bathroom every once in a while.

This is one of the reasons staying hydrated is recommended on long flights - it forces you to get up and move at some point.

<comment><USER6> But still no matter how much water you drink, you're not going to average more than a few minutes an hour going to the bathroom (unless you have a medical condition). That is not going to make a noticeable dent in the 8-10 hours of sitting you're doing.

<comment><USER7> But still, no matter how long your snorkel, you're not going to average more than a few breaths of fresh air per minute. Will that make a noticeable dent in the 8-10 hours of snorkeling you're doing? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently "constructed" myself a standing desk out of about 20 reams of cheap printer paper and it actually works quite well and is easy to adjust. The monitor is on one stack, the keyboard on another, and the mouse on a third.

Also, I'm unlikely to run out of printing paper anytime soon.

<http://drp.ly/kwP>

<comment><USER9> Do you have a lot of earthquakes around there?

<comment><USER10> Pardon me, but was that a pun?

<comment><USER11> Not if I'm understanding correctly. Russell is just making fun of the fact that the setup looks incredible unstable.

<comment><USER12> Or his user name being "tectonic".

<comment><USER8> :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think it's so much standing versus sitting so much as how much movement one does throughout the day. A person could be standing in a fixed position which would be far more unhealthy than a fixed sitting position. I remember reading a quote from an extremely old man who said the secret was simple to "keep moving". Movement seems pretty clear to me the most important activity, since it keeps your cells active and fluids flowing. Any state of immobility will eventually put strain on whichever body part is taking the most pressure or work.

</comment><comment><USER13> According to the study, there are actually people that sit 3 or less hours in a day? Apologies if I missed a key element in the article, but how is this possible that out of about 16 hours of waking hours that only 3 are sitting? I literally cannot see how a complete 13 hours can be spent otherwise.

<comment><USER14> Surgeons. Interventionalists. Possibly construction workers and other manual laborers.

<comment><USER13> Even they have to sit down to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then at home, what are they doing between the hours of 6pm to 10 or 11pm that they're not doing some form of sitting with their family? And even at work, the professions you mention, I have to believe are sitting at the very least half an hour throughout their work day, not including lunch. So that plus meals is already one and a half hours minimum, meaning at home at night, every night, they're spending 1.5 out of about 4.5 hours sitting. And remember this is every day. So what is a person, after a full work day doing for those 3 non- sitting hours. And if you say goig to the gym, even gym rats are sitting a considerable amount of time during workouts. And I didn't even include the possibility of sitting while driving, though I guess you could give the possibility they are standing on a bus or train. But really, in all honesty, I cannot imagine but an incredibly rare number of people with an extreme non- sitting lifestyle would exist.

<comment><USER14> How many surgeons that you know are getting home at 6pm? I'm not saying that they never sit for X hours in a given day, but I'm saying that there will be plenty of days when they don't. Remember, this is in response to a question about who (if anyone) might go for a day without sitting 3 hours. There are a few realistic options-that's the extent of the argument I'm trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do want to buy a good, adjustable standing desk. Any recommendations?

<comment><USER16> I use the FREDRIK desk from IKEA. It is adjustable, it is a standing desk, and does not look like it should fall apart anytime soon - what more could you ask for?

<comment><USER17> I switched to a FREDRIK after the previous HN discussion on standing desks. In general, I am quite happy with it, but some notes from my experience:

You cannot adjust the height of the shelves without taking most of the desk apart. The increments are fairly course, so it may be difficult to get the height right -- I had to dig up the riser which came with my Microsoft Natural keyboard.

I use it with an IKEA bar stool and often switch between sitting and standing a few times during the day.

picture: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuno/5053375629/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm confused by their graphs. The horizontal axis is labeled MET-hours/week, but given that sleeping consumes 0.9 MET-hours; I'm unsure how someone do < 24.5 MET-hours in a week.

<comment><USER19> I'm guessing from the text that they have ignored time spent sleeping (i.e considered it to be 0 MET-hours)

<comment><USER18> Much more than that. Almost any waking activity >= 1 MET

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When people who have stiff muscles sit for long periods, cortisol levels increase, as muscles need to work constantly to keep them in position. Sustained high cortisol levels has a lot of negative impacts on health.

But if flexibility and good circulation are restored to these muscles and the sheaths around them, the muscles can easily handle keeping a person upright and cortisol levels are normal.

</comment><comment><USER21> _During the follow-up period, 11,307 men and 7,923 women died._

FROM WHAT ?!

Sheesh, I re-read the article twice and I don't understand what they died from.

I have been thinking about getting one of those "walking desks". Can they be used with coding or is it too much of distraction?

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting Hacker News Discussion about standing instead of sitting (around 5 month ago): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311857>

</comment><comment><USER23> I disagree.

In economies which are predominantly _Services_ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition)

the _life expectancy_ is better. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy#List_by_the_United_Nations_.282005-2010.29)

</comment><comment><USER24> As I've been slowly recovering from back injury/surgery over the past few years, I've been unable to sit for long periods of time. In order to be able to write software at all I've had to construct a laying down desk where I look up through a glass table at the monitor.

I wonder, does this improve my odds wrt to the article? Or rather, is it that 6+ hours of waking inactivity increases the likelihood of premature death? (either sitting or laying down)

<comment><USER25> I guess, laying down is by definiton a kind of waking inactivity, too. So it will have those adverse effects similar to the sitting with one exception (obvious): In laying down your back is under much smaller stress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Considering driving a vehicle or taking the bus/train is usually a sitting activity, to get down to the 3 hours or below mentioned in the article you'd basically have to have

a) a standing desk

b) a job that doesn't involve sitting

Has anyone proven, by the way, that a standing desk actually solves things?

<comment><USER27> Most people that I know who work or have worked in the service industry say that standing around is much more uncomfortable than actively moving about. I can't find the source at the moment, but I do remember reading an article essentially stating that humans physically aren't meant to really just "stand still" for extended periods (hours) - we should be moving about.

<comment><USER28> You don't really have to stand still, you can fidget around. Stand on one leg, switch to the other. Shake a little to the music, etc.. Switch to sitting from time to time. If you're hardcore you can even get a treadmill to go with it.

<comment><USER29> Get a bar-stool height chair for your work station and place it slightly too far away from your desk for sitting, encouraging you to 'perch', which is good for your posture, but may also allow you to switch more stream-lessly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does this mean it would be a good thing to shorten time spent in school? I hated those 6-7 hours in the classroom, most of it was wasted and I wish that the next generation doesn't have to go through it too.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just to add, the authors themselves note that "this is an observational study and cannot establish cause and effect."</comment>


McDonald's and other restaurants are offering daily paychecks - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-trying-to-appeal-to-millennials-with-daily-paychecks-2017-10 <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I worked at fast-food as a kid, used to live on multi hectokilo USD after university and live on just under 1 decikilo USD now.

People making less have a hard time affording a baseline of basics. So marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is higher for those inelastic demand costs. It's also harder to get a bank account, keep good credit, get discounts like coupons or shop at big-box stores (eg some areas only have convenience stores) and there's less social pressure to save and shop wisely.

Also, when you have only $20 and have to choose between food and gas, it seems impossible to look at a smartphone app like GasBuddy when data is prohibitively expensive.

</comment><comment><USER3> The demand for this service isn't modern. (That's just a hook by the journalists.) A key advantage of a waiter/bartender jobs has always been the immediacy of tips: you have cash in your pocket the very first night.

<comment><USER4> It's amusing how they threw 'millennial' in there too. We probably should start downweighting the M-word.

<comment><USER5> _" Basically, their life is real-time," Barha told Business Insider._

<comment><USER6> Because "living hand to mouth" doesn't sound good...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> with crypto like eth and setting up a smart contract, a company can pay its employee down to the second they work.</comment>


ClusterScope: Discover outdated images in your Kubernetes cluster - <AUTHOR> https://www.replicated.com/clusterscope/ <comment><USER2> Great tool, used it before. Simple and straightforward. I'd like to use it for internal image repos, upcoming feature?

<comment><USER3> I'm not submitting my running cluster images to a rando website, sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> ya, this doesn't install anything in the cluster, you run the command on your cluster, sanitize the private image info out of it, then paste in the public image names & SHAs

<comment><USER3> Still no.

<comment><USER4> No-one is forcing you to. I hope you have implemented a similar mechanism to check your images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice tool. I get it's mostly a way to promote the company, but I could see my company paying a small fee for an API endpoint (so we could just pipe the command to curl and get a formatted report).

Small bug: If the image is not in the official registry and doesn't have a version tag, it's reported as "Up to date" (try just inserting a random string).</comment>


Show HN: Wasp Inspector – conditionally generate web-app with a debug layer - <AUTHOR> https://wasp-lang.dev/#wasp-inspector <comment><USER2> I like the inspection feature! The natural question is: could this also support editing, rather than just inspecting?

I guess reconciling that with regular in-file edits might be a problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey smiljo, thanks for the question! You are right, it might be cool to be able to edit code as well from this interface, not only inspect it.

We are still pretty early so at this moment it's hard to say how would this exactly work. But I believe we could also make it a part of the git and CI workflow. E.g. changes would get applied to the .wasp files and committed and the new revision would get deployed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started? - <AUTHOR> I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started? <comment><USER3> Having worked at the largest-small ISP in the US (>250k subs). Very ambitious, and I think it can be done, however your biggest problem is in the over-build. What that means is you will have to engineer and deploy your own HFC (hybrid fiber coaxial) network first. If your original intent was to lease space on an existing provider's network, and potentially buy some frequency on their coax you're in very steep uphill battle. Even if a provider did happen to let you do this you're beholden to them at that point and they, bluntly, have you by the nuts if you start to threaten them. Meanwhile overbuilding where there already is infrastructure isn't very efficient as you have to plan and engineer (if you have no experience with this think civil + RF + data engineering collaboration plus legal hoops for right-of-way and licensure into actually laying fiber and coax). Add to that along the way you'll piss people off for digging in their yards.

Sure, you can sell channels a la carte, however say you purchase 5 channels - and you have 50 customers. Say every person of the 50 only chooses one to subscribe to, now you only have a ratio of payment for 10 customers per channel. This will likely put you in the red right there since each channel has a pretty steep licensing fee for distribution. Once you get to scale - this could work, but it would almost be easier for you to go in and buy out a small customer base instead of starting from scratch.

On top of all these considerations realize if you're offering Internet and/or phone you need CMTS and phone switching systems plus the engineering clout to run them. If you plan on spanning multiple cities then you have to deal with leasing or running your own fiber and then building out transport back-haul (Infinera is an awesome company for DTN platforms BTW).

Long story short - you need a lot of smart people to help you design and build this out, and if you've never worked with any ISP engineering verticals you've got a ton to learn. Keep in mind this equipment is pricey and the only way to make a good profit is to own your networks end to end (we were turning up 1 & 10 Gb circuits like hot cakes after we installed a new 1Tb system and since we owned all the infrastructure we were looking at tacking on another Tb right behind it to keep pace with demand - but keep in mind all the Tier 1 connectivity you need to support this as well).

Good luck!

<comment><USER4> Not to mention that many of the channels are run by the same network. It's unlikely they would license one channel to you without all of their channels unless you have massive financial clout to effectively shut out their other/useless channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could I suggest something a smidgeon less capital-intensive and ambitious for your first business? In addition to a successful outcome making your cable bill irrelevant to your personal happiness, the experience may demonstrate how far an innovative charging model and a viable business idea are from each other.

P.S. If insanely ambitious ideas are within the project scope, your plan should probably be closer to YouTube/Spotify/etc for TV rather than actually running a cable company, because owning wire has little to recommend it if your primary concern is ability to negotiate Extraordinarily Favorable (TM) licensing terms. Buying $200 million of copper would make 0 progress to that goal.

<comment><USER6> This brings up a good question. Why hasn't anyone tried to undercut cable providers by creating a "TVoIP" service that piggybacks on Internet connections the way VoIP services have done to undercut phone companies? I imagine the requisite Internet speeds are there, since Netflix works for most people.

<comment><USER7> A major point is that the content sellers do not want you to undercut their cable partners (cannibalize their sales), so they will charge you more than the cable companies. In essence, expect that if they are getting $x from subscriber that is getting 10 of their channels from a cable package, then they will want you to pay at least $x for the same subscriber. It is not in their interest to allow the subscriber to get less channels for less money, so they can simply disallow it.

VoIP service providers are creating and selling their own "goods". Cable companies and "TVoIP" companies are resellers of something that is owned and controlled by others, and it's not a commodity. If a channel owner decides that they don't like TVoIP (or your particular TVoIP) for whatever reason, tough luck. You might convince them with a lot of money - but even Netflix and Hulu are not really enough for that.

<comment><USER6> > A major point is that the content sellers do not want you to undercut their > cable partners

Why not? By reducing my costs (by piggybacking on existing internet infrastructure), I could pass on (part of) the savings to the content sellers. So it would be a profitable decision for them.

<comment><USER7> The big question is, can you? The cable TV delivery costs are not that big compared to content costs. Can you really offer a substantial markup for the content even if you halve the delivery costs, and still offer a competitive solution that customers would want?

And internet delivery is far from free. If you want live TV, the bandwidth and jitter requirements are enormous, the burst requirements for fast channel switching are a pain. We launched a small IPTV project last year, and IIRC our delivery costs were actually higher than those of a comparable cable operator - the benefit was flexibility and extra features, not cost.

<comment><USER6> > The cable TV delivery costs are not that big compared to content costs.

I was under the impression that infrastructure buildout was very expensive and was the main reason why it took someone of Google's size to create a new fiber service.

> If you want live TV, the bandwidth and jitter requirements are enormous, the > burst requirements for fast channel switching are a pain.

Netflix seems to be pulling it off OK. Do you mean that the costs are high for the business (in terms of bandwidth spent delivering content) or that the costs are high for consumers (in terms of getting a fast enough connection to make this realistically possible)?

<comment><USER7> The reason it took Google is that this is an economy of scale industry - <USER2> doesn't make financial sense to do anything small, you invest either a lot or nothing. That's what "barriers of entry" mean.

I am speaking about the technical bandwidth burst + jitter requirements on the whole channel from your [caching] servers to the settopbox or equivalent.

Netflix is not available where I live, but as far as I know, it's not a TV service, it's a completely different animal. Launching a movie is trivial because it's done once. For TV, imagine a person on a couch with a remote pressing the 'next channel' button, browsing through 10+ live TV channels in one minute. It is a major pain to get this experience to feel pleasant on an internet TV setup.

Movies can have a small buffer for better viewing experience, but a live football game needs to be, well, live - so that you see a goal before getting a tweet or SMS about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Print a sell sheet of the channels you want to offer in various packages. Go door to door and ask if anyone would be interested in switching.

Once you have a decent number of potential customers in a small area phone the content providers and find out how much it is to license the channels.

If you're still profitable you'll then need to estimate costs for building out your headend, source a location for your satellite dishes, call centres, etc. Find out costs for this. A lot of cable companies, especially Rogers in Canada outsource a lot of their infrastructure / install work, you should be able to find out from their builders rough estimates of build out costs.

Write a business plan and then find out if you can find someone to fund it. When you find someone to fund it, go build it, then sign up your customers.

But seriously the trick to this plan is to figure out how _NOT_ to build out cable infrastructure, I'd look at piggy backing on LTE / Internet in the same way that hulu/netflix/youtube do.

You'd be far better off spending $50 million figuring out how to build synthetic aperture recievers / transmitters and figuring out how to transmit data over the wifi spectrum within the power limits outlined by the FCC rather than building $50 million in 1990s cable infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER9> First figure out how you're going to get the content to people.

Cable delivered via wire is considered to be a natural monopoly that in the united states cities (or other sub state level groups) grant one company the rights to string cable i.e. the Cable Franchise Fee. Running a second set of wires is expensive, and simple economics are going to have every existing cable company keep you out of their system. Google's fiber is the one set of to the house pipes that MIGHT let you use them. So unless you have lots of money doing it the "industry standard way" isn't going to be possible.

So long as you're tied to using wires cable systems are local monopolies and capital intensive, figure out a good way to bypass this any you may have a good business.

Go look at Comcasts financial statements if you want to see what the cost structures are. Note they're spending 13% of revenue on Capital expenditures. In 2011 they spent 40% of revenues on Programing ($19,625 in video revenue,$7,870 on programing).

<http://www.cmcsk.com/earnings.cfm>

Second, figure out if the content providers will even let you have the content.

Cable is a big market, a business that could disrupt it would do well.

<comment><USER10> Nice. A direct link to the 2011 10K with parent's figures is at: [http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/CMCSA/2210267075x0x56...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/CMCSA/2210267075x0x561695/79426950-eb48-4e46-a761-f999d155a226/BookmarkedComcast10K.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> First I recommend looking at the groups on LinkedIn, please don't dive in there and ask stupid questions, but read and perhaps ask a well placed question. Give context and you'll find the experts there mostly willing to help.

There are different types of cable companies, but things you need to know are: 1) Coax costs more than fiber optics You might think this is a stupid statement but when you are rolling out over a wide area you will find this. Look at GPON technology, even small community cable companies in Spain are using this advanced technology. 2) You either use digital TV or IPTV technology to deliver the channels. Digital TV (like DVB-C), will allow you to use a lot of legacy technology but it will leave you stuck in a legacy quickly. IPTV will require using all new hardware but that hardware may be cheaper to invest. 3) TV networks often need heavy constraints on content security (encryption and DRM), don't think that you can change the world, the Hollywood/MLB/NFL/NHL/Premier League lawyers won't budge and even the TV networks have to bow to the rights holders. If you don't have security built in then you will fail to get content, poor security will result in you having to do a major swap out which could bankrupt you. 3) IPTV should be multicast in order to reduce the costs of delivery on the network. 4) You will need a _big_ internet connection. 5) Employ some people who know what they are doing already, there are lots of semi-retired engineers who can help you achieve what you want and they needn't cost you the earth. Again, check LinkedIn for this.

</comment><comment><USER12> If I were doing this, it would be a high-quality IPTV (VOD, streaming) and customized network configuration for hotels. i.e. I want my 2000 room conference hotel to let people have ethernet ports in room and in attached conference center booth on effectively the same VLAN at least. I'd also like to offer 30-50Mbps down and 10-20Mbps up to hotel guests.

You'd have a lot easier time going after LodgeNet, etc., with far lower engineering costs, and still have a chance of doing innovative licensing, than as a cable company doing residential service. After that, you can expand to IPTV for public exhibition (bars, etc.). Maybe partner with someone like Sirius who does radio for those environments and offer a video and vod service.

Several orders of magnitude less capex, a much smaller minimum feasible size (you could be profitable on ~20 big city hotels, I think), easier licensing, and far less regulation (at the local government level).

</comment><comment><USER13> You would need to start by raising a large amount of capital. Tens of millions, if not hundreds.

Now, you have two choices. "Easiest" is buying an existing, up and running cable company. There are quite a few: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_television_compan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_television_companies#Detailed_list), and if you've got a hundred million or two in cash, I'd bet you can find a seller.

Much, much harder is finding at least one municipality willing to give you franchise rights. That's going to take a lot of time and a lot of lawyers. Franchise rights aren't cheap, and generally require an "OK" from a city council. Once you've got that, you'll can start running cables. Even more time, and plenty of that capital. Figure on a couple of years to get to the point of actually being able sign up your first customer.

</comment><comment><USER14> Cable companies are beholden to the content providers, who have contracts that say if $CABLECO wants to carry channel X, they also need to carry e.g. these 5 other channels.

However... if you want to start a cable company... the easiest way to make a million dollars is to first start with a billion dollars.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate that, I really do, but I would find it hard to believe some of the smaller cable companies wouldnt be at least in part willing to play ball if I am willing to pay them more than they are used to.

Also, the easiest way to make a million dollars is by doing what you love, nobody ever said losing 999m is easy.

<comment><USER7> The current smaller cable companies have strict agreements on what packages, what distribution channels and for what time they have licenced their channels. If they have a licence to transmit HBO over their cable network, they most likely are not allowed to transmit HBO over public networks (i.e., Internet). If they have a licence to include a sports channel in their basic package, they most likely are not allowed to take it out of the basic pack and offer it a-la-carte.

All the service terms are detailed before they get the channels, and if you convince them to really change their mind, then they can (try to) negotiate these new rights for their next content term, which comes up every two-three years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> After reading your blog, I just asked a friend who is a cable company director (and one of the owners) how you could do that, the answer:

Build a cable company (there is local regulation about how that's done, you are not creating a 'new' thing, cities and states might already have guidelines and/or legislation on that subject - and the tech is already there) Sometimes that's not possible, because those services are state regulated that the spots are auctioned every zillion of years. A mile of cable coverage can cost more than 10k USD and it's not guaranteed that you will make any sales on that specific mile.

A single company usually owns many channels, they want to sell them all to you (based on your subscription numbers) those prices change based on your performance. You need to invest money to receive their signal, so it's usually better to receive the 'whole package' they are offering anyways. This is more or less how it works.

Our take on this (over a beer):

A pay-per-hour-view cable company. Using your alien negotiation skills you will convince all companies to give you all the channels and you will log what viewers are watching. You will charge viewers based on how much they watched. Prices would vary per channel and every ad watched would generate a 'credit'. You and the channel would split the revenues.

</comment><comment><USER16> not that i have any experience starting a company, but wouldn't it better for you to find a job at a cable company for a time and get to know the industry first? i don't know much about cable tv industry, but it seems to rely quite a bit on connections..

<comment><USER17> This. It would be better for the author to understand the legal requirements and the legal history of cable TV. The technical side is only a small part of the equation here. He would be dealing with regulations at local, state, national, and international levels.

<http://www.fcc.gov/guides/regulation-cable-tv-rates> [http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/evolution-cable- television#s...](http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/evolution-cable- television#sec7)

So I guess the real answer to his question 'Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?' is here.

<http://www.fcc.gov/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is something my friend brings up all the time and every time I have to explain to him why cable companies operate the way they do.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been kicking around and researching this idea for literally years. There are a few huge roadblocks to success, some of which are mentioned in the replies here. I'd be interested in talking to you more if you'd like.

<comment><USER20> It might be helpful for you to post a lot of your ideas here. Big cable companies aren't going to steal them and people here may offer improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is your planned transport mechanism? Do you plan to build out an entire town with coax cable, amplifiers, and headend? Do you have a franchise agreement in place with a municipality?

</comment><comment><USER22> In Australia things have headed towards cable consolidation over time. There are huge upfront infrastructure costs in cabling, if you are allowed to go out and cable at all. It might be completely different where you are but here it seems like current providers are incentivised to maintain a monopoly over delivery.

If anything you are probably better off trying to build out something over the internet with many more potential customers now having the bandwidth to take advantage of.

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems like it would be pretty hard to get investors to back a cable company. Cable television is dying and its for the same reasons you are mentioning. Most people don't watch half the crap they are buying when they pay for cable. That's why so many young people don't even have cable anymore, just Netflix, Hulu, or The Pirate Bay.

</comment><comment><USER24> As others have said, you likely don't want to build a cable company, and probably couldn't anyway.

Google for terms like "unbundling" and "a la carte" in relation to cable. You'll find that some cable operators are in favor of it, but enough cable operators and content providers oppose it to prevent it from happening.

</comment><comment><USER25> The traditional firms are actually trying to divest their interests in cable. For example, a few years ago Verizon sold off landline buildout in some rural areas to Frontier Communications

<comment><USER26> Yep. The future isn't in cable. It's in FTTH/FTTN like what is happening in Australia right now.

Which means any opportunity for disruption are going to come from platforms like Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Vimeo, YouTube, CollegeHumor etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The simplest way to get into this would be to create a Roku channel. You could design your channel's content around viewer types.

</comment><comment><USER28> Combine Netflix with Google Fiber

</comment><comment><USER29> Start with a 100 million dollars* ...

* Size of Hulu's A round

</comment><comment><USER26> Okay so three things.

Firstly I don't think you understand the business you are trying to disrupt. YOU may not watch particular channels e.g. Fox but others do and they help to subsidise the unprofitable channels. So trying to break apart the channels will be impossible without a deep understanding of the economics of each individual channel and how that relates to your ability to sustain a profit.

Secondly it is widely rumored that Apple will be building a TV that offers an a la carte model. So something to be mindful of given how well their products sell.

Thirdly if the top two don't faze you then there is the fact that you picked a problem that is extremely high cost, low margin and with players who seem to get a kick out of destroying competition through financial and legal means.

But hey by all means give it a try. You learn more by trying and failing than not trying at all.

</comment><comment><USER30> You're asking such a generic question, it means you don't really understand what you are planning to do.

Is knowledge really your main problem?</comment>


So, this is about the word "so." - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22iht-currents.html

<comment><USER2> The idea about assertion of logical continuity is interesting.

 _The rise of "so," he said via e-mail, is "another symptom that our communication and conversational lives are chopped up and discontinuous in actual fact, but that we try in several ways to sew them together in order to create a continuous experience."_

I hear it a lot in radio interviews, like..

A: And it was around that time that you discovered that 8 is greater than 7?

B: So, next we started looking into relationships between single digit numbers, which...

It's like a disguised sense of alarm that the partner in the dialogue may have ruptured the narrative (which is what interviewers are paid to do, politely) and that continuity needs to be reasserted. It's necessary with technical subjects where if you don't introduce concepts in careful sequence then the meaning completely breaks down.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will sometimes compose an email, then while editing realize I've started most of the paragraphs with "so".

And if you weren't already aware of this tic, you may become hypersensitive to it for a while. :-)</comment>


Show HN: Live streaming SVG plot microservice that just works - <AUTHOR> http://plotti.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Andrew and I had this stupid frustration: in order to have a live streaming web plot in my page I am required to either read 10+ pages of JS integration docs, or pay $20+/mo, and usually both.

In the world of HTML5, EventSource and all the modern infrastructure that shouldn't be so complicated!

So I crafted this microservice in a couple of days to solve this unfairness.

It generates an SVG image that does everything automatically, you just need to do some GET requests to feed your live data. It is in early stage testing, so be free to post what you think of the idea and the code, I will be happy to discuss!

p.s. my microservice is currently hosted at scaleway ARM microserver and I am very excited about pushing it to the limits!

<comment><USER2> I do web dev for a living and I'm slightly embarrassed that this is the first time I've heard of the EventSource API. Why would I use it over Websockets, though? It appears that it does the same thing - keeps an HTTP connection open - but without the ability for the client to send anything back.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't, EventSource isn't supported by IE yet[0].

[0] [http://caniuse.com/#search=EventSource](http://caniuse.com/#search=EventSource)

<comment><USER4> I've been using this polyfill for years in production with success: [https://github.com/Yaffle/EventSource](https://github.com/Yaffle/EventSource)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not usually a fan of plotting tools. I prefer instead to make custom plots in D3. Usually plotting tools are too simplistic to be useful for significantly valuable use cases. This however is an example of a "simple" plotting tool bringing lots of value. Kudos. This is great.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fun gizmo Andrew! So much cleaner than the one I wrote that pretends it is an animated GIF. Next up you'll want some sort of reflection UI so that user's can mouse over the graph and have it pop up the values from the colors at that point (that feature is in most (if not all) of the plot packages out there. It does look a lot easier to just plop in and go for simple live displays, excellent work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! More interaction should definitely be on the roadmap! Not everyone likes too heavy plots though.

btw, I updated the front page with short snipptes of how it can be used for server monitoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So is this a service or is this open source? Can I set up my own Plotti instance?

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/grandrew/plotti.co](https://github.com/grandrew/plotti.co)

[https://github.com/grandrew/plotti.co/blob/master/evsvg.py](https://github.com/grandrew/plotti.co/blob/master/evsvg.py)

Open source, yes.

It is AGPL v3 so depending on your environment Legal may tell you No. :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ouch. I didn't knew that I can just put a <script> into SVG and it would just work. Nice, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is one of those rare things that seems so obvious and simple yet awesome that I immediately slap myself in the face for not thinking of it already. Great idea :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm getting "Internal Server Error" each time I try to connect. Marketing something as "just works" is asking for trouble on a beta release :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is ;-) Now fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure marketing something as just works is good, especially when none of the plots worked for me at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will be very pleased to hear what browser/OS do you use

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Should maybe the endpoint for feeding data into the stream use POST instead of GET?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am adding HTTPS and (some minimal) POST support soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You need something more like value-based instead of cost-based pricing for this kind of service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, just had no time to invent anything else yet! Thank you for suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Umm the page literally jumps up and down when viewed from my phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> What OS/version do you have? Will be interesting to investigate!</comment></comment>


A Quiet Defense of Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://brooker.co.za/blog/2015/01/25/patterns.html <comment><USER2> _" This school of thought then claims that the patterns at their scale and above are not indeed patterns, because they have no use of patterns.

This thinking is flawed in two ways. The glaring flaw is in the restrictive definition of patterns. The more subtle flaw is in not recognizing that they have patterns of their own at similar scales to the ones that were rejected. Abstraction is extremely powerful, but operating at higher levels of abstraction doesn't appear to imply higher productivity or reduced needs for patterns as a medium for sharing context."_

The reason we don't get a boost in productivity with higher abstraction is because (a) we have to build such abstractions out of a great number of smaller pieces, so that 'greater abstraction' means 'more work', and (b) it is just very difficult to map our mental models into reusable abstractions. Not very many people can do it well.

Yes, every language has 'patterns', but we call those linguistic structure, syntax, or grammar. "Design patterns" refers to something else, (or if it doesn't, it is just a confusing domain-specific renaming of the above.) The problem with design patterns is that they are ostensibly _solved problems_ , and thus people shouldn't be implementing them except pedagogically.

Take arrays for instance. There is no "Array Design Pattern", and we don't ask people to implement arrays every time they want to employ them. We ask them to use existing array structure. Yes, you should understand how they work. You probably should implement them once or twice and know how to recognize them. But you do not say "Oh, just use the array pattern here. Start by rolling your own array, since our language doesn't have array syntax."

We build arrays into the language so that they are easy to recognize and the pattern becomes a primitive tool. If you have to keep rolling your own, you'll never get past that. It will never become primitive, and you will stagnate. That is what those who object to design patterns object to: by thinking of them as elements of design -- the work of day-to-day programmers -- we won't provide linguistic abstractions that allow them to become primitive tools. We'll be stuck re-rolling our own arrays because people think that this is what programming is all about. Tedium.

<comment><USER3> > Yes, every language has 'patterns', but we call those linguistic structure, > syntax, or grammar. "Design patterns" refers to something else, (or if it > doesn't, it is just a confusing domain-specific renaming of the above.) The > problem with design patterns is that they are ostensibly solved problems, > and thus people shouldn't be implementing them except pedagogically.

Well, except that the whole reason for documentation of design pattern implementations is that, in the languages for which they are documented, they generally do not admit of a reusable library implementation because of limitations in the abstractions available in the language. That's why people (slightly inaccurately) say that certain languages (Lisps are frequently cited here) don't need design patterns -- the kinds of things documented as design patterns with implementation recipes for Java/C++-like languages can often be implemented in library code in lisps (to a certain extent this is also true of many dynamic OO languages, like Ruby, and sometimes in static functional languages, like Haskell), so the kind of recipe-style presentation and fill- in-the-blanks implementations seen in Java/C++ patterns just aren't applicable in some other languages.

(Sure, you can address design patterns by building each one into the language individually, the way you discuss with arrays, and that will shift _which_ patterns the language needs at the expense of a bigger base language. You get more bang for the buck building languages which are expressive enough to allow you to reusably implement a broad array of "patterns", so you instead of implementation recipes you just need libraries with API documentation.)

<comment><USER2> I think part of this problem is that people want to invent compact, 'small' languages, and leave the rest to libraries. This kind of thinking is what makes it hard to move up, because it is just a variation on "our language is ASM, if you want fancy stuff, just write it as a library in ASM."

Language design should be about saving the end programmer from having to do extra work, not minimizing your core language and deferring the savings for later. Of course, there is some push-and-pull here, because we want to make languages small so that they are comprehensible. So what we want are the smallest possible languages that can express a broad array of powerful abstractions with minimal effort.

This is why I hate the "no language is the best" line of thought. (Which is similar to "ever language uses design patterns.") There is no theoretical reason why there can't be a best language. All we have is a history of languages that suck to look at. You can't infer that all possible languages suck at something from our short history of terribleness. It is 2015. What kind of languages will people be using in 4015? How about 14015? Are they going to be saying "It doesn't matter what language you use?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Programmers by and large don't seem to understand the power of language primarily as a communication tool and the lessons around communication we ought to understand. We think in solitary terms as if it is of primary importance how we write code individually instead of how we communicate with each other (and the machine).

Patterns if done well give us a language to solve problems in sensible ways as teams.

Instead, we worry about how patterns are named and argue over minutiae. We let things like "exceptions should only be used for exceptional behavior" distract us from effectively communicating with each other.

Our industry sees things like FP, OOP, Design Patterns, etc. as an exercise in taxonomy when building software is an exercise in communication. It's like we are writing a novel, but we are more worried about the names and families of characters than the actual plot itself. That doesn't make for a good book and it doesn't make for good software.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my experience, design patterns encourage two big problems:

\- Deciding on a solution before having explored the problem. "I have a pattern for that."

\- They act as shared context only on the surface; all the details and subtleties of the pattern as an implemented artifact are rarely shared, and communication suffers.

In practice, they tend to make the easy stuff easier, but the hard stuff harder.

<comment><USER6> That goes for any mis-applied tool. If you approach the world with your toolbox ready in hand and you refuse to adapt your tools to the problem then you get this mismatch. Tools were created to solve repetitive problems, if your problem is not one of those then you should improve your toolset, maybe come up with an entirely new tool or maybe you should adapt an existing one until it works better for your application.

<comment><USER5> I agree, my point is that in practice, patterns encourage that kind of mis- application in many many programmers, and not just the bad ones. The reasons why they do are part of years-old and still unsolved debates.

But I know what I saw: fresh off my love affair with the Lakos C++ book, I though GOF was the next cornerstone of OOP and a must read for everyone. Over the next few years, design debates and proposals where design patterns featured more and more prominently, started turning into bizarre minutiae and half-explored problem discussions. Again, simple and noncritical pieces of software seemed easier to describe and even develop, but the hard stuff became harder to manipulate, overabstracted, took longer to be truly finished (although it got to MVP state faster), and usually much less performant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To me patterns have always been incredibly useful as a book of problems that have been solved, somewhat like a chess playbook. Would I ever implement them directly? Maybe, if they were directly appropriate. Often I find that my solutions are pattern inspired, "factory-like," "observer-like," "strategy- like" etc. Even more frequently my solutions are a hybrid of multiple patterns.

That's where I see their value: they are extremely good blueprints. Like every tool, they are incredibly powerful if used correctly. They are most often misused, especially in the case of verbatim use.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author suggests a common opinion on patterns, that I have seen violated a billion times:

> Two people with a common set of patterns find it easier to communicate [...] > than those without one.

> [...] writing down our shared context lowers the barrier to entry.

In my experience this is often not the case. Patterns come along with labels and the labels will be put everywhere in a codebase. Assumptions get made and replace discussions, leading to a diluted codebase. For example Repositories will become synonyms for "thing that does database access", and will then be reduced to stupid GetByID wrappers [1]. Even worse, some patterns make entry really hard.

I used to work with C# and ASP.NET MVC. There, a view is the thing that contains markup, the thing controlling the input is the controller. Then I started using Flask and was utterly confused, since there the functions with the @app.route decorators, which are run on the server and then return markup rendered via jinja2 templates, are called view functions. In Django this is understanding is the same.

I was really baffeled. I could not reapply my understanding of the patterns across these domains. This is just one explicit example that I wrote about in my blog [2], but I really made the general experience that patterns replace or inhibit discussions, rather than improving communication and understanding.

[1] [http://philcalcado.com/2010/12/23/how-to-write-a- repository/](http://philcalcado.com/2010/12/23/how-to-write-a-repository/)

[2] [http://www.cessor.de/on-patterns](http://www.cessor.de/on-patterns)

</comment><comment><USER9> Would patterns exist if we had no name for them? In my opionion, definitely yes. So giving them a name doesn't change the nature of patterns. Problems arise when a, now named, pattern gets misused. The misuse is therefore _always_ commited by the developer. The two main critic points I've read in the comments were:

\- Developers try to find a problem to use a pattern they know

This error is mostly commited by people who learn the first time of patterns and are giddy to use them. I wonder if this was less likely to happen, had the GOF included a warning about this in their book.

\- Developers keep using the wrong terminology and this causes patterns to become squishy

Just stick to the GOF terminology and your good to go.

In my eyes, the patterns discussion is just an indicator for a greater "problem": Anyone can become a software developer. I won't elaborate on the positive aspects of this. But it's clear that areas with a higher entrance bar, like law or health, have a greater professionalism and, among other advantages, a standardized terminology.

</comment><comment><USER10> > The critics may be right that it devalues the craft, but we would all do > well to remember that the craft of software is a means, not an end.

I don't think that patterns devalue the craft.

Also they helped me get a better understanding of what I do. For example in Python you can create a Singleton by simply accessing an instance which is instantiated directly in its module. The pattern is built-in and very easy to use, but I only started making heavy use of it when I learnt the Singleton pattern. It was then that I realized how much value this simple language feature provides.

> "In a functional language…you end up programming in concepts that eliminate > design patterns all together."

I saw lots of ad-hoc patterns which have to be understood to understand the code.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was a bit confused whether the author argues for patterns as Platonic idea, patterns as popularized by GoF or patterns as popularized by Christopher Alexander.

The most vicious arguments I have read were about GoF not keeping the spirit of CA. One example is GoF being a sort of disconnected catalogue, while CAs patterns are supposed to generate the world. I don't see these referenced in this article.

</comment><comment><USER12> I disagree. Patterns are often just used as a way to work around the limitations of expression in a given langauge. Sure, they can be useful. But in the long run, they are not the goal, they are the unfortunate means to an end.</comment>


Amazon is eating the software (which is eating the world) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@swardley/amazon-is-eating-the-software-which-is-eating-the-world-738888fb9e82 <comment><USER2> Interesting (and scary) but frankly I don't have enough knowledge to assess this theory.</comment>


Show HN: JungleFlip – A bot that saves you money on Amazon products - <AUTHOR> http://www.jungleflip.com <comment><AUTHOR> This is a tool I've been working on for a while. It constantly scans Amazon and finds the best open-box deals. Products are 30% - 95% off. Most of the items have damaged packaging and can't be sold as new, so Amazon sells them at huge discounts.

<comment><USER2> Wish it was for .fr also!</comment></comment>


There's a simple solution to tech's gender imbalance – Hire more damn women - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/08/theres-a-simple-solution-to-techs-gender-imbalance-hire-more-damn-women/ <comment><USER2> An all-female recruitment cycle could also be called a no-male recruitment cycle, but I suppose that wouldn't sound good.

Direction from the top of the company followed by accountability from everyone will probably move toward any desired outcome, but I contend that the main issue is that most companies secretly don't believe that "percentage of female engineers" is a goal worth pursuing to the exclusion of hiring as much top talent as possible.

My guess on this experiment is that the company didn't hire as much talent as they could have otherwise because of such strict quota measures, and that this isn't something most companies are going to jump to do. Most companies just want to succeed.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree with this, and I don't think there's anything wrong with the notion of companies wanting success, and they should be allowed to pursue that.

The increased female applicants seems to show that many still don't believe they're capable in the field due to their gender, though, and it seems like a great case for more female-only code camps or lessons. This would likely draw more female applicants as well, and thus entice more into the field while still hiring by talent.

Hiring should be purely meritocratic, though, both for company success and often societal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This particular anecdote isn't particularly useful.

It doesn't generalize and in many jurisdictions (in the US and elsewhere) would expose companies to accusations of gender discrimination (against men).

It also elides significant context: there just aren't as many women with tech backgrounds (be it education or experience). So one company's gain in this regard is others' loss, in some sense. The root causes for this gender imbalance are varied in kind and complexity.

Discrimination that starts early in students' lives discourages female participation in STEM. That is, in my view, the most pernicious and significant problem. A generally sexist culture that is cultivated in tech by "adults" certainly compounds the issue and is in some measure an extension of the discrimination that starts early.

I'm skeptical that the article's "supply side solution" will actually resolve the more severe and widespread problems that serve as barriers to having an equal representation of women in technical roles.

</comment><comment><USER5> > We started conducting all-female recruitment cycles and suddenly things > really started to change

> I then made the percentage of women hired a KPI of the Director of > Operations for every office

Wouldn't that (especially the quota stuff) be considered illegal gender discrimination in the US?

<comment><USER6> You would think so, but it passes muster rather often. All female hiring sessions for civil service positions (police/fire) are not uncommon at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 13 out of 15 senior positions are men.

[https://andela.com/about-us/meet-the-team](https://andela.com/about-us/meet- the-team)

<comment><USER3> Not sure why you're being downvoted -- this seems perfectly relevant, either against Andela's claims or as further representation of the fact that, even if women have an advantage getting in the door of companies, they have a much harder time moving up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >On all measurable indicators — technical skills, professional soft skills, and psychometric profiles of what correlates with happy clients — our female developers compete, and many cases out-compete, with their male colleagues.

This seems to be going beyond the null hypothesis that female engineers are identical to male engineers in expectation, and claiming that in some areas in expectation they were better. Although I know it's not the focus of the article I'd like to see that expanded on, and would be very interested to know about what areas those were, and by how much the females exceeded males.

As for the meat of the article, I'm supportive of such experimental practices as the all-female hiring cycles to change the applicant pool. If there is a wealth of untapped engineering talent out there then it's in humanity's best interests to find it.

</comment><comment><USER3> However ideal it would be to have more female representation in the tech field, I don't see this specific story as a 'success.' All-female recruitment cycles just seem more drastic and worse than quotas, although the increased female applicants is a positive and shows many don't even apply out of feeling intimidated or inadequate in the tech world due to their gender.

Only interviewing females definitely lacks meritocracy, but we could test this gender-exclusivity at an earlier age to encourage more female applicants to apply into a fair, meritocratic job application process.

The increased engagement of female applicants in this has definitely affected my opinion (positively) on the usefulness of female-only code camps and things of that sort.

</comment><comment><USER9> Other approaches could help too, like Women who free code. There are literally millions of jobs to be done in the free and open source world and it would improve everyone's lifes.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is this flagged?

</comment><comment><USER11> seems like a "simpler" and more egalitarian solution would be to just encourage more females to be interested in science and technology from an early age in the first place. quota hiring is never a fair system to anyone.</comment>


On Richard Stallman - Miguel de Icaza - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Sep-23.html <comment><USER2> This whole post was quoted in the earlier article on this that made the front page so it contributes little other than opening up the debate again without any framing.</comment>


Why Windows 8 tablets will beat Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/116505-why-windows-8-tablets-will-beat-android

<comment><USER2> I don't buy this argument. About half of it is that Microsoft will be able to leverage it's dominant desktop market share, but if that were the case why have all previous MS phones and tablets failed. This isn't like it's Microsoft's first foray into another form factor and the article has nothing about that.

Considering Microsoft has pretty clearly failed every previous time in the last decade, the real question should be "what's new in Windows 8 that will change this" and the article has nothing on that. If the article's argument were valid, Windows on tablets and Windows on Phone would already be a dominant force.

The article reads like Windows 8 on tablet is Microsoft's first attempt into this market, not just their latest.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'll be their first attempt with any hope of success. I'm thinking Kinect on a tablet, among other things. I don't think people were ready for tablets during Microsoft's initial offerings. Touch interfaces just hadn't come far enough.

<comment><USER3> Did you see thedaily's take [1] on kinect for laptops? The reason you won't see kinect on a tablet anytime soon is this one observation:

" _It murders batteries_

Devices in the field must be plugged in whenever possible since the Kinect technology drains juice in a hurry..."

Laptops generally have much larger battery capacity (for example my current laptop has 94Wh while an iPad2 has 25Wh), and if Kinect kills laptop battery, forget about mobile for now.

[1] [http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/31/013112-tech- kinect-l...](http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/31/013112-tech-kinect- laptop/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there's hurdles to overcome before it's a reality. Even if it's limited capacity, I think we're ready for gesture-based computing and I think Microsoft's closer to making that a reality than anyone else.

<comment><USER3> I disagree with your assessment. "ready for gesture-based computing" indicates more than just public acceptance (which is likely there) - it requires the hardware power and capacity, form factor, and killer-app software use cases.

This mindset of "build the OS, the apps will come" is no longer valid anymore, not when competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple are building out destinations and ecosystems, selling consumers on direct apps and tools rather than platforms that promise... especially, in Microsoft's case, when those promises have failed to pan out repeatedly in prior years.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you fail, keep trying. Microsoft was bound to have some spaghetti stick to the wall eventually. I think the hardware is here; I really do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The low end of the tablet market is now filled by Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is an Android fork. How can Microsoft compete with a device sold at break even? Furthermore China will manufacture Android tablets at below $100. They do that by using a free operating system - Android.

The article's sole point is that Microsoft is a known brand in desktop and laptop devices. But up to now Windows Phone has been a distant also-ran, and that's a good indication of how Microsoft's brand has failed to carry through in the mobile marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've got a good feeling about Windows 8 tablets, because I kind of feel like I've used it already, and I really like it.

The XBox 360 Dashboard was recently redesigned with a "Metro" look. The tiles work really well for teasing you with what's behind each one, and there's a high level of convenience provided by their ability to display active content.

Prior to this update, I never spent much time in the XB360 Dashboard. It was "just another menu" I had to make my way through to get to what I really wanted -- my games. With the most recent update, I find it so pleasing that I actually explore it. I think that bodes well for Windows 8 tablets. if they can translate that feeling, I'd _want_ to sit around and use their tablets.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm looking to buy a Windows tablet with a Wacom pen (for drawing), but at the moment they sell for $2100 in Sweden. I'm hoping there'll be more competition when Windows 8 is released.</comment>


Google maps and Events on one page. Our project. - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherusc.com/events/?

<comment><USER2> is this taking rss feeds from different event websites and listing them? would be cool if you guys talked about the creation of this

</comment><comment><USER3> your search looks pretty fast ? What have you used for search

</comment><comment><USER3> nice job! looks pretty good</comment>


CouchDB merges in BigCouch - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/welcome_bigcouch

<comment><USER2> I think CouchDB is vastly underrated as a hacker database for toy projects. We're talking about an incredibly simple database, with powerful replication abilities, with brain-dead administration, and one-click offsite backup and synchronization, that requires no real client libraries to work with. It makes it comically easy for me to hack on toy projects on the road, then sync them right back up afterwards when I'm done.

I know CouchDB sometimes gets some flak for not performing as well as other NoSQLs. Anecdotally, that feels as if it's gotten a lot better over time, and this BigCouch merge may improve things further, but sometimes there's a case to be made for using something just because it's fun and easy to work with.

<comment><USER3> Why not use the community edition of couchbase?

<comment><USER4> Here is why:

* No _changes feed. (TAPs won't do here sorry). I mean that is uber killer feature of CouchDB. Otherwise, just pick any other key value store.

* HTTP interface to DB : you can use CouchDB to store both your data and your code. That is very cool.

* Futon : that is the web based db and document browser and viewer. That is killer. Being able to see what is in your database and debug before that data is used by some other part of the system is invaluable.

<comment><USER5> We working on a new version of Futon. Adding a ton more features. Will be out later this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I built BigCouch from source and played with it a few years ago. Cloudant is a cool company, and good of them to open source a big piece of their infrastructure.

I am taking a fresh look at CouchDB. I have always had an aversion to JavaScript, which is what CouchDB views are written in, but lately I have been getting into JS more because of Meteor and Ember.js. Off topic, but I find using a subset of JS, and keeping JSLint running in IntelliJ makes for a nice dev environment.

<comment><USER7> Take a look at chewbranca's work on Fauxton in the master branch of couchdb, and some of his personal riffs at [https://github.com/chewbranca/mr- turtles](https://github.com/chewbranca/mr-turtles). The idea is to use tools like you mentioned to run JS in browser, on server, and in the database.

<comment><USER6> Thanks - I just bookmarked that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is incredibly good news. CouchDB is a fantastic database that doesn't get the attention it deserves. The best part about this merge is that CouchDB will get the scaling benefits that BigCouch offers. The load balancing and clustering of BigCouch is going to be incredibly useful for scaling CouchDB.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone familiar w/ the CouchDB community, can you describe how well it's working? From afar it seems to be a bit rudder less, but I could be misinterpreting the situation.

<comment><USER10> Yeh the 3 founders essentially being pulled off the project to a competitor definitely took its toll.

However one founder has returned full time to the project, and while I would still describe it as 'in recovery' its definitely looking promising, there have been more contributors than ever this year, theres exciting work in progress in the works including this bigcouch merge and fauxton, as ell as couch related project like hood.ie and (forgive the self promotion) pouchdb.com

So its looking up, this email definitely sums up the current enthusiam for me - [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb- dev/201307....](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb- dev/201307.mbox/browser)

<comment><AUTHOR> Dale, did you mean to link to this:

[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201307....](http://mail- archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201307.mbox/%3C3CD8BEDD- email@example.com%3E)

<comment><USER11> I found Jan Lehnardt's vision for CouchDB very compelling. It allows CouchDB to be the feature-rich core of a large, complex ecosystem, yet retain a ruthless focus on being the best multi-master replicating database available.

<comment><USER12> Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm just using CouchDB right now for my side project. Cloudant is offering really great service although they don't provide multi-tenant service in Japan. But I'll go for Cloudant unless latency between Japan and Singapore matters.

By the way, I posted another link three days ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088443)

</comment><comment><USER14> page isn't accessible at this time. does anyone have a short copy or something?

<comment><USER15> From [https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/welcome_bigcouch](https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/welcome_bigcouch) via [http://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/](http://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/)

THURSDAY JUL 25, 2013 Welcome BigCouch

Good news! Cloudant has announced the completion of the BigCouch merge. This is a huge step forward for CouchDB. So thank you to Cloudant, and thank you to the committers (particularly Robert Newson and Paul Davis) who slogged (and travelled the world to pair with each other) to make this happen.

What does this mean? Well, right now, the code is merged, but not released. So hold your clicks just a moment! Once the code has been tested, we will include it in one of our regular releases. (If you want to help us test, hop on to the dev@ mailing list!)

What's new? The key accomplishment of the merged code is that BigCouch's clustering capability, along with the rest of Cloudant's other enhancements to CouchDB's code base, will now be available in Apache CouchDB. This also includes improvements in compaction and replication speed, as well as boosts for high-concurrency access performance.

Painless replication has always been CouchDB's biggest feature. Now we get to take advantage of Cloudant's experience running large distributed clusters in production for four years. With BigCouch merged in, CouchDB will be able to replicate data at a much larger scale.

But wait! That's not all! Cloudant has decided to terminate their BigCouch fork of CouchDB, and instead focus future development on Apache CouchDB. This is excellent news for CouchDB, even more excellent news for the CouchDB community.

Here's the original press release:

Cloudant Contributes Database Scalability and Fault-Tolerance Framework to Apache CouchDB™

And here are some highlights from the press:

Sofa, so good ... BigCouch relaxes into comfy Apache CouchDB (The Register)

Cloudant pitches one CouchDB for all (GigaOM)

Cloudant Merges BigCouch Into Apache CouchDB (eWeek)

Cloudant Breathes Life Into CouchDB - Merges BigCouch into Apache Project (CMSwire)

CouchDB Gets Cloudant's 'Super-Size Me' Scaling (InformationWeek)

Cloudant Merges BigCouch Code into Apache Open Source Database (The WHIR)

Cloudant Merges BigCouch Database into Open Source Apache CouchDB (The VAR Guy)

Cloudant merges distributed BigCouch code with Apache CouchDB (JAXenter)

Cloudant contributes database scalability and fault-tolerance framework to Apache CouchDB (SD Times)

P.S. Cloudant is also hosting a party at OSCON on July 25 to celebrate the news. (They're booth #305 if you're at the show.) And if all that wasn't enough, stay tuned for news about a CouchDB conference that we should be announcing shortly…

Posted at 06:26PM Jul 25, 2013 by Noah in News | Comments[0] |</comment></comment>


The beauty and power of 3D sound - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@snidhi/the-beauty-and-power-of-3d-sound-b77f10def72d <comment><USER2> Never thought that shape of ear could be used to personalize audio. That's a novel idea! Looking forward to try out this innovative tech!

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Introductory Lectures on String Theory - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.0663v1.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Scribd conversion doesn't seem to work with this file.</comment>