Show HN: Multi-room audio with Snapcast and Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://oyvn.github.io/multi-room-audio-with-snapcast <comment><USER2> I use Snapcast and mopidy on a home server with the iris front end. It integrates with home assistant so you can have automations play sounds in all or some rooms.

With covid I've been able to pipe my meetings to snapcast from the web browser (listen only) which is great for restroom breaks and snacks in long unengaging meetings.

I rigged up a AC sniffer circuit and wifi microcontroller to my dumb doorbell which snapcasts a recording of a doorbell chime throughout the house when it's pressed so I can hear it when music is playing.

Snapcast can also stream to a phone, so I can Bluetooth into the hot tub speakers and have it on the whole house audio too.

Open source home automation with home assistant and this tech is really fun if you want to get into it as a hobby. Certainly requires work, but that's fun for me.

I also have it all integrated into a home-brew weather station and an indoor air quality sensor system with co2 and pm levels so I can get alerts to open windows or turn on fans if co2 gets too high. I also get raindrop noises when it starts raining so I go close the windows. Fun times.

Of course there's a security system involved too which arms at night and when the family's WiFi all disconnects. It disarms automatically based on WiFi auth and an openwrt script, so it's totally autonomous. Works very well.

Working on a tensorflow based automation now to have the front door camera detect packages and send email alerts. Does not work at all, yet.

All local, all self-hosted, with a bridged MQTT server on a VPS for communicating with my location tracker and my mom's house (I get alerts if she's on vacation and the furnace dies or basement floods or there's a break in or whatever). I vpn in to my router to control things when out. But if internet dies at home, everything local still works great.

Mopidy also connects to Spotify, of course.

[https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/](https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/)

[https://www.home-assistant.io/](https://www.home-assistant.io/)

<comment><USER3> Can you tell us more about your home brew weather station? That sounds cool.

<comment><USER2> Sure. Here's a write-up on it: [https://partofthething.com/thoughts/weather- and-air-quality-...](https://partofthething.com/thoughts/weather-and-air- quality-monitoring-station-with-esp8266-and-home-assistant/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After kicking around a bunch of these solutions and discovering that none of them work quite right or you still have to spend quite a bit on the hardware, I eventually bent the knee to Sonos recently. The interface is pretty garbage, but it just works and the sound quality is good.

Part of it was that I just don't think I could face the wrath of my family when it didn't work. I guess you get to a point in life when you have kids, and hours for tinkering are reduced so you need to pick your battles.

I like the Snapcast model though, it follows the Linux philosophy. From memory the audio stream is basically just wrapped along with a time stamp. Then you transfer those blocks to another device that plays them at the right time (where they're unwrapped back into an audio stream).

<comment><USER5> I think I'm in the same boat. I have a rpi, installed home assistant before, I do devOps/sysadmin stuff, setting up virtual machines, docker, creating and contributing to open source etc etc...

... buuuuuuuut, having looked at the article, my eyes started to glaze over, and a sinking despair sipped in quickly... I want to love this, but I just can't bring myself to. I guess I'm at this point of giving in and getting a Sonos :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I get that. It's not exactly easy. But FWIW it seems quite stable, I'm not having to SSH in and restart services like i did when i tried a year ago. IMO snapcast, librespot, and hifiberry should all get fully integrated into raspbian so that it's easier to set up.

Regarding cost, yeah i think it's only significantly cheaper than Sonos for the same quality if you can configure some of your existing setups to become clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Volumio's pi OS is a pretty easy way to do this. There's a Snapcast plugin on github along with instructions. Pair the pi with a hifiberry amp and some speakers and you've got your own custom networked audio client.

We've got sync'd audio running in 4 different rooms at home and control via home assistant. Not as easy as Sonos I'm sure but I like that I can use whatever speakers I want.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've recently had some time to go through a spate of "home improvement" (needless tinkering) tech projects.

Replacing alexa and ok google devices with open source ones was on the list. This looks great for the music - though I was mainly stuck for good voice control.

<comment><USER8> Check out Rhasspy for voice control. IMO it's the best FOSS solution available for this atm.

[https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The holy grail for cheap-ass networked audio is a surround-sound set constructed from random (or a set of) Bluetooth speakers and some sort of wireless receiver. I can't tell you how many people came into my old workplace expected that to be possible, and being disappointed that the only options were somewhat expensive demi-audiophile WiFi-based (read: hooked into an app that required an internet connection and sometimes iOS) solutions from Sonos/Bose/B&W/Klipsch that locked you into their platform. IIUC latency and bandwidth are an issue?

This is a cool step in the right direction though.

<comment><USER10> Why isn't that possible? It doesn't sound like it would be that hard.

<comment><USER9> I thought so too, but then, I could never manage it myself. I imagine a solution would be to build a receiver with a Bluetooth antenna for each channel, so that it would be device-agnostic, and a mic port for calibration. Maybe a traditional RCA port for a powered subwoofer.

But if it were so simple, I'm sure someone would have done it by now. There may also be weird licensing issues involved, like perhaps Dolby/DTS don't want to certify such a system, and so access to whatever you need to decode their signals isn't readily available.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure you'd even need separate Bluetooth chips/antennas. In theory one device can connect to up to 7 others. Although, to be fair Bluetooth audio streaming is barely reliable with one device so maybe that is just asking too much of it.

Apparently Samsung phones can connect to two devices:

[https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-connect-multiple- bluetooth-s...](https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-connect-multiple-bluetooth- speakers-4173788)

Here's another one:

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/30/tempow-turns-your-dumb- blu...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/30/tempow-turns-your-dumb-bluetooth- speakers-into-a-connected-sound-system/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Bluetooth is just getting there now, so we will probably see more of this going forward.

[https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/bluetooth- te...](https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/bluetooth- technology/le-audio/)

<comment><USER10> That's Low Energy Bluetooth though, a totally different thing. You can't do audio through BLE at all before this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Snapcast seems to also have integrations with Airplay and Home Assistant. This post is also quite nice, I've saved it to use as reference for whenever I get around to setting up Snapcast.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice article you can hook up studio monitors like genelec 8010 for a very good sounding setup. Monitors will Likely last a lifetime so better for the environment.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks like an interesting project. I found the naming creative: (S)y(n)chronous (a)udio (p)layer.

<comment><USER10> Could have gone with Synaps. Synchronous Audio Playing System.</comment></comment>


Dyson vs. iRobot Roomba: The Home Robot Revolution Starts on Your Floor - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/dyson-vs-roomba-the-home-robot-revolution-starts-on-your-floor-1469638652 <comment><USER2> It would be great to see a home robot revolution finally take hold. We just need that "iPhone" moment with a must-have product and billions in consumer spending to fuel more R&D.</comment>


Ruby Developers Don't Scale - <AUTHOR> http://railsontherun.com/2008/8/27/ruby-developers-don-t-scale

<comment><USER2> Being from San Diego, it appears the writer has more than one thing in common with Ron Burgundy:

"Anyways, I have been quite busy preparing courses for classes I gave to a bunch a great Engineers at one of the Fortune 100 companies based in San Diego. I was also planning my big vacation trip to Europe and wrapping up few projects."

Translates to:

"I don't know how to put this but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a theme I'm hearing from a number of directions these days: namely, that Rails has (deservedly) attracted a lot of attention for web development, and tempted a lot of people from the PHP and Java camps into doing Ruby, but hasn't produced nearly as large a crop of expert Ruby developers as one might hope.

The basic fact is that a year or two of Rails development experience doesn't make you a good architect, systems programmer, or database administrator. Good back-end engineers are much rarer, and should command a premium, if only because such knowledge really does only come from years of hard-earned experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh, I dunno. I think you can get more done with a small group of super-smart guys the you could with a big group of mediocre ones (isn't that already an axiom?)

I think the client in this story tried to staff up the way a big waterfall or java project typically scales up: hire as many cogs as you can and give them each a little module to work on. In essence, they want a big group of mediocre developers.

A bummer, but perhaps a failing of the consultant. With any adoption of new technology or process, you have to prep the client for uncomfortable changes. Like paying more to fewer developers, or starting work without a 300 line mpp project plan, or whatever.

Sometimes in our roles as consultants, that's the most important job.

</comment><comment><USER5> _[...] you just need to get one or two great ruby guys (who will probably cost you a lot) and find a bunch of smart people to train. You'll end up with an awesome team of scalable rubyists ;)_

Sounds like a good strategy for many endeavors.</comment>


YouTube is deleting videos on Nazi history as part of its hate speech crackdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613644/youtube-is-deleting-videos-on-nazi-history-as-part-of-its-hate-speech-crackdown/ <comment><USER2> Anyone know if they're also deleting other videos like Tiananmen Square?</comment>


Tesla's Biggest Problem Isn't Elon Musk - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/opinion/tesla-elon-musk.html <comment><USER2> "Wall Street is a confidence game." \- Basically this explains the stock price of a lot of companies.

Once a company takes on a lot of debt or VC capital it has to constantly chase its next round of funding above all else; once it IPOs it has to constantly chase a higher share price above all else. The actual profitability of a company seems to rarely a factor in either of these but hype always is.</comment>


Graphics Team ships WebRender MVP - <AUTHOR> https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/graphics-team-ships-webrender-mvp/ <comment><USER2> This is an amazing achievement for the WebRender team, but users should manage their expectations with regard to performance improvements.

The reality is that Firefox's current rendering engine is highly tuned, and switching to a new engine without major performance regressions is impressive. Keep in mind, there may be performance improvements coming down the line.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shipping for Linux is waaay down the list:

[https://github.com/orgs/FirefoxGraphics/projects/1](https://github.com/orgs/FirefoxGraphics/projects/1)

I assume due to driver issues?

<comment><USER4> As a desktop Linux user, I'd guess it's harder to make it work right (because of, among other things, driver issues) and it affects a smaller portion of the user base of Firefox. Oh well.

Fortunately it's easy to opt in to, and in my experience works well on an oldish Intel chip.

Unfortunately, it fails hard with Wayland, putting no pixels on the screen. (In my experience) But I'm using it happily through XWayland.

<comment><USER5> > Unfortunately, it fails hard with Wayland, putting no pixels on the screen. > (In my experience)

It works for me in nightly, at least. Have you tried there?

<comment><USER4> No, only tried on stable. Looking forward to testing 67 when I get the update.

I should clarify that I am talking about the situation when running Firefox with GDK_BACKEND=wayland.

UPDATE: Ooh! Firefox 67 in my package manager! I am happy to report that I am now able to use Firefox with WebRender on Wayland directly. One glitch so far: It leaves a one-pixel row transparent at the bottom of the screen. Weird :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So Windows 10 + Nvidia GPU is only 4%? Huh. I would have thought this demographic would be larger.

I guess most users are on laptops where integrated Intel GPUs are more common.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorta in that 4%, I have an RTX2080 I use for gaming on my home desktop but I'm only in Win10 _for_ gaming.

Hopefully I'll be able to use the RTX with Firefox and Fedora down the line though (stably).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tremendous effort on a very complicated piece of software. I wish Firefox would also catch up on less complicated but needed so greatly features which are present in other browsers, like filling out credit card info and autocomplete=email input fields autocompletion.

<comment><USER3> It's being rolled out:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Form_Autofill#Chil...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Form_Autofill#Child_Pages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article forgot to mention the important fact that it's written in Rust!

<comment><USER10> Naive question: why is it important, compared to the developed features and new architecture?

<comment><USER11>
        <rust-evangelism-strike-force>
            FEARLESS CONCURRENCY
        </rust-evangelism-strike-force>

Rust makes it easier to write bug-free concurrent code. Webrender relies on this and I'm not sure Mozilla could have pulled it out in C++ in the same time frame, if at all.

<comment><USER12> I think that's pretty presumptuous. My experience is that rust's checking is great, but much easier and safer concurrency can still be enabled by some work with data structures and program architecture.

<comment><USER13> IMozilla engineers have specifically said Stylo (Quantum Style whatever) would be impossible in C++, because they actually tried it in C++. Presumably it'd be the same with WebRender.

<comment><USER12> Impossible is a strong word. Architecture makes a very big difference. They can claim it is impossible, but it really doesn't make sense. I'm surprised anyone would just take their word for it.

Trying to use raw threads and ad-hoc futures is going to be difficult, but fundamentally concurrency is about separating data by dependencies.

Dependency graphs that pass data around combined with lock free data structures can be used to isolate parts of the program so that dealing with concurrency is one generic part of the program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hopefully they will rewrite the rest of Firefox in Rust as soon as possible.

<comment><USER15> ... That is an gargantuan task. According to [https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...](https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_summary) they have over 5.5 million lines of code written in C++.

That is an insane amount of code that would need to be rewritten, rechecked, retested and so on. Not going to happen anytime soon, if ever.

<comment><USER16> I'm confused as to why someone would even want them to change the codebase - is this just an example of the "newer is better" problem we have here in tech? Is there something glaringly obvious about Rust that would make the effort worthwhile?

<comment><USER17> Because within that codebase there's an untold number of exploitable memory errors which put users at risk. Browsers have critical security issues all the time.

<comment><USER16> So would Rust remove all the potential exploits?

<comment><USER18> A few of them. It won't stop logic errors (although enums help here) but it will prevent buffer overflows, use-after-free, some cases of type confusion, uninitialised reads, and a few other problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's hoping it is easy to switch off. Firefox has become extremely crashy, running under Qubes, where the GPU is forbidden, despite my turning off attempts at shader use everywhere I can find. E.g., even turning off "smooth scrolling" made a substantial difference. But it still crashes, even just loading a DDG search results page.

Advice welcome. (No, abandoning Qubes is not an option.)

<comment><USER5> Mozregression - [https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/](https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/) should help you figure out where it broke. You can open a bug with the commit you found as "regressed by" \- [https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/UserGuide/BugFields#regressed_b...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/UserGuide/BugFields#regressed_by) to help developers track down how what they need to change to resolve the issue.</comment></comment>


Is LinkedIn Worth $1 Billion? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/06/17/is-linkedin-worth-1-billion/ <comment><USER2> In many ways Microsoft's valuation of facebook is a defensive strategy to stop other suitors buying it/in (now only those with very deep pockets need apply).

It highlights Microsoft's well known insecurities regarding the internet and its strategy/place/online-presence.</comment>


Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain? - <AUTHOR>

I just saw that Radar (http://radar.net/) uses a .net domain and does not own the corresponding .com domain. What is the general opinion on this? Is there a negative value associated with operating from a .net domain? Are most successful startups built on .com? <comment><USER2> No doubt they'd love to own the .com, but generic name like that would be worth a fortune, and acquiring it would be a massive distraction.

Does it matter? I'll give you some real figures from one of our non .coms which is branded "ourdomain.tld"

All figures from Jul 27 - Aug 26.

      Total Visits: 4,702,217

      Type ins: 2,214,766 (47.10%)
      Google (organic): 926,313 (19.7%)
      Google (CPC): 390,382 (8.30%)

And then a very long tail featuring Yahoo (2%), Live (0.6%) and 1000s more.

Now for the interesting bit - of the keywords for those Google referrals:

      38% were for our brand name without TLD e.g ourdomain (in other words, "radar")
      33% were for a variant of our domain name e.g. ourdomain.tld, www.ourdomain.tld, ourdomain.ccTld etc.

So again, does it matter?

Obviously this is only data for one site so it's impossible to say anything conclusive, but my feeling is that by building a strong brand around the domain you own it doesn't matter too much whether it's a .net .

<comment><AUTHOR> So half of all users typed in the domain, even though it was not the .com? That's quite high. What's your firefox user percentage as a way to cross reference (an informal test for geekiness)?

<comment><USER2>
      MSIE: 78.10%
      Firefox: 16.92%
      Safari: 3.84%
      Opera: 0.55%

Now I think about it, although _type-ins_ is convenient marketing/analytics speak - and it's the label for that field in the report - it's a bit misleading as the total would include bookmarks.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good news then, as that's a very non-geeky audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't settle for a .net domain. Just come up with a name. Ideally it should be one or two words and actually mean something.

      Youtube
      stubhub
      priceline

If you can't do that, think of spelling it wrong--

      google
      kongregate
      flickr

or a portmanteau

      startuply

Those are just names off the top of my head. There are tons of ways to avoid the subpar .net domain

<comment><AUTHOR> What about if I have a common word that is quite recognizable, but only own the .net version?

<comment><USER4> Common words are useless for product names; you can't google for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the first time I've seen so many respond and no one is right. Your url is unimportant. Stop wasting brain cycles on it. If you've built something valuable it could be buried in the bowels of tripod or geocities and people will find it. Most of the time when I hear about a site these days, I hear the name, not the url. This has been increasing as companies get more desperate for urls and there's a cleverness war (slap-fight really). I google the name (delicious => del.icio.us, first link) or keywords that I remember get me what I want ('inflation calculator' => westegg).

</comment><comment><USER6> The reality is the best .com (and .net/.org/.tv/etc.) names have long gone. Short of being lucky with a droplist or in the domain aftermarket, you will not get a good one without $$$.

Work with what you have. Build value. Build a brand. The name will not matter as much as the product. If the product is good, people will remember the name, no matter how bad.

Lastly, one good thing about the lack of common names is it forces you to be creative. Perhaps startups should not seek common names or phrases. You want a brand name. Something you can trademark. Something memorable (the way flickr and del.icio.us force memorisation). Something that does not bring up too many unrelated hits in Google (you can dominate for the term, can promote it for cheap due to less AdWord competition, etc. etc.).

<comment><USER7> I (respectfully) don't agree with the fact that all the .com names have gone, but I do agree with creating a brand name. I've registered some great names after doing some serious searching. We created a domain name finding tool to mix and match names and one that does mix and match stuff with vowels and consonants. In addition, we've also purchased some .coms for reasonable money (hundreds of dollars, but not into the thousands) that have definitely been worth it and are memorable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe that users are still confused by the fact that company.com may not be the same as company.net, so it's good to hold the .com domain. Fortunately, these days people seem to Google what they want or use auto-completing browsers, which make specific domains a little less important.

There's also the practice of using .com for the public site and .net for the company intranet, which can be nice for making it obvious what's protected behind the firewall.

</comment><comment><USER9> I own biology.net and I'm developing it very soon; right now it redirects to my other site, biologynews.net, which is #1 for "biology news" on all major search engines. Sure the .com would have been better, but I dont have a million dollar :)

</comment><comment><USER10> .com is the standard.

.net is fine, just make sure to brand and market yourself well. for example, don't refer to yourself in promo materials as "mystartup" -- use "mystartup.net".

i can think of quite a few successful .net companies. the .net won't preclude your success. a .com name will just act as a crutch for the mainstream audience if you want to tap that market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most .net companies have something to do with a network, no?

<comment><USER10> some, yes. that was the intent of the domain name.

but that would be like saying that all the .tv domains are sites based in tuvalu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For what it's worth: we're .net with loads of traffic (15MM+ per month), been around for 4 years now, and never had any problem with the fact that the .com isn't ours.

</comment><comment><USER12> Despite all the negative comments to the contrary, we are having no trouble with a .net name. (buglabs.net), little if any confusion arises. It probably helps that there is just a squatter on buglabs.com, but it is true most of our traffic comes from google and we show up as #1, I don't think buglabs.com ever shows up

</comment><comment><USER13> Ignoring the impending TLD explosion, all of the good domain names are long gone. And regardless of what you pick, Google is and will remain the front door to your web site; the domain name is now effective largely only for bookmarking, for DNS-level load balancing, and to allow you to survive an IP address change.

</comment><comment><USER14> .net is for IT infrastructural plays and .com is for commercial consumer plays. Stick to the formal reasoning behind the creation of each.

</comment><comment><USER15> photo.net seems to be doing pretty well</comment>


Introducing Android 8.0 Oreo - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/android/android-oreo-superpowers-coming-device-near-you/ <comment><USER2> The actual Android 8.0 website linked in the article ([https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/](https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/)) showcases the features much better than the blog post. It's actually a really nicely done page, even on mobile.

EDIT: sorry i inadvertently removed my comment on emojis. I was lamenting the fact that the emojis look so different from iOS, which could lead to misunderstandings. And that I find it crazy that every vendor has to make them so drastically different just to prevent infringing on someones copyright.

<comment><USER3> Well, Apple can update theirs to be less confusing as well, no? ;)

I for one will miss the old blobmojis which at least had some personality.

<comment><USER4> Speaking as an iOS user, the blobmojis are my favorite part of Android. I regularly use them in Hangouts between my wife and I. I'm going to miss them greatly, they had incredible personality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Android 8 is crazy slow. Everything is slooooooowwwwww. I used android since Nexus One. But it makes to sense to wait. It's just a rubbish.

<comment><USER5> It drains my phone battery with the same speed as previous version, but all application are in "optimized cpu cycle", that leads to slooooowwww application opening and switching. Sometime I caught myself with a though to throw my Nexus 5x to a wall. Im observing Android ecosystem for a while and I don't see any good changes - only minor updates that presented as big deal. If Android is unfixable, broken by design, do something: a new operating system, a new way to manage memory and cpu adapted for ARM battery saving from the scratch. It's hard, it's painful, but WTF you're GOOGLE with thousands employees ready to start creating a new amazing stuff.</comment></comment>


Gog.com Now Supports Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_now_supports_linux <comment><USER2> What hardware platforms are supported?

Give it one, three, five, ten or fifteen years. When will these proprietary binaries stop working?

I look forward (probably in vain) to the day when game developers want their games to be playable by anyone on any system, any time, even long after release. Played by everyone. I mean, who wouldn't want his work to be loved by everyone and forever? Why?

Freeing the code is a first, inevitable step.

<comment><USER3> Funny how often, musicians and directors feel the same about their work and encourage people to "illegally" download their products.

I don't think developers are the problem.

I've played World of Warcraft a lot. It's a game that has affected tens of millions of people directly, and hundreds of millions indirectly (through WoW's influence on other games, game models and so on). It has built careers, businesses, companies, and so on.

Yet one day, it'll close down and nobody will ever be able to play it. All that'll be left will be the game files - 3d models - and a lot of screenshots.

Sad.

<comment><USER2> I agree about WoW. I've never played it, but I could imagine loving it. Chances are I never will though.

 _> I don't think developers are the problem._

It depends on the project. So I guess big commercial titles have other problems. Smaller groups though -- whether indie game studios or just individuals making freeware games (Dwarf Fortress, anyone?) -- they're usually what the developers make of it. And it very often is the case that the developers do not care about others' freedoms or portability and all that. It's too much work, nobody uses that platform, we don't care about minority users, whatever. The same old excuses, which are mostly BS.

<comment><USER4> Because you know, the baker, the supermarket, the landlord all accept the said BS as payment.

It is very easy to wave BS to software developers. Now try to earn a steady income from FOSS desktop software.

<comment><USER2> Way to miss the point. Now try to read again and understand.

Giving users the source so they can help themselves has nothing to do with landlords and supermarkets. It can get you more money though, by increasing the user base and making more happy users. It can make your game sell for much longer. Doom still sells, and people play it on the weirdest of platforms. And if the developers cared enough, they'd learn that it doesn't necessarily take much effort at all to make code easier to port. But you do have to care. If you don't, and you write code under the assumption that you won't and nobody else should port it, then the result won't be very nice.

So maybe you could still play Doom on dosbox or in a VM, but I don't think it'd sell much if they hadn't given the source that allowed people to create legal ports for modern systems, with features that make the game more enjoyable. People still enjoy Doom.

<comment><USER5> _> It can get you more money though, by increasing the user base and making more happy users. It can make your game sell for much longer._

Does not follow. There is no evidence that you can make _more_ money by simply open sourcing your project. In fact, judging from the number of popular, widely used open source projects reduced to begging for donations, it's precisely the opposite. You may simply be assuming as true the same excuses that pirates use to justify their piracy, saying "Hey, I'm giving you free advertising!", completely overlooking the fact that 1) advertising in itself does not feed the creators, and 2) they're primarily advertising it to people just like them, who'll also simply pirate the product.

Look at the companies making the most money in software. Then look at the companies making money from open source software. Note: _not_ companies that use open source or open up some of their non-core code, but those whose primary product is open source, such as Red Hat. There's a few orders of magnitude of difference in revenues. This despite Linux running the vast majority of servers on the Internet and in data centers. Why is this?

While open source proponents like to live in an ideal world where everybody shares their code and collaborates, the harsh truth is that the vast, vast majority of the world will take what it can and give nothing back. That is not conducive to building a viable business when by open sourcing your code, you're essentially make your product even easier to be taken for free.

<comment><USER2> Way to miss the fucking point. Now try to read again and understand. Pay attention to the words I make. Note the example I made.

Freeing _the code_ is a first, inevitable step.

This is what id has done with the Doom and Quake series. These games still sell! And we can play these games on whatever platform, with whatever custom features, _because the source was released_ and people picked it up and made it work and improved it.

You're completely overlooking the fact that freeing a game's source code is completely different from making the entire game free. Business continues as usual: they sell the actual game, which people need to actually play it.

Companies whose source code is their entire core product are completely different. You cannot make a relevant point by talking about their problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using Linux for work for years (software developer) but my main machine at home is still running Windows 7 because for me, the state of gaming is still kind of horrible on Linux.

Am I the only one who just gave up because of video and sound driver issues? That's for 3d, of course - as stated above, everything in a window manager usually works just fine.

That said, this is awesome news, maybe I'll come around to try dualboot again (after many, many years) because it could be easier to get my Radeon working under Linux than some of the other chips (especially on laptops) in the past.

<comment><USER7> > Am I the only one who just gave up because of video and sound driver issues?

No issues here. I guess you may be running AMD hardware hence the video drivers issues, but I haven't had sound issues in games for years.

<comment><USER8> Nvidia. Installed System Shock 2 (through Steam) on my Linux machine at work. Ran it, cool, left the game and resolution was stuck at a really weird one (on 1 of 2 monitors) and I had to fix a problem.

Same game on Windows, likely no problem to fix.

Issues for sure still happen with Linux gaming. Many games are fine though, of course.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, dual screen setups and games have a history of trouble (even on Windows)

<comment><USER10> I have a dual screen desktop running Arch and I play games a lot, on the radeonSI Gallium driver and Intel driver.

The funny thing with multi-screen gaming on Linux is that the "default" target SDL picks is not your primary monitor, it is the monitor on the left. It doesn't matter what input order its in, or anything else, I can reconfigure my screens however I want but "full screen" always means leftmost panel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note that many of GOG's Windows games will work on Linux under Wine too. The good news is you don't have to figure anything out - use PlayOnLinux which will prompt you for the games setup executable and then do everything else. Start at [http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html](http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html) and scroll down to the ones beginning GOG.com.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised that Papers Please is missing, given that the game has already been released on GNU/Linux release through the developer's website. I wouldn't be surprised if there is other such low-hanging fruit in their catalogue.

<comment><USER7> There are many others. First, many games that can run on DOsBox on Linux (probably several hundreds from their catalog) and many other indie ones. And Witcher 2 (however the port/wrapper used was horrible).

<comment><USER13> It had low performance, but once I figured out that the keybindings were all empty and you had to restore them to default everything kinda worked ok. Low FPS, but playable on my Nvidia GTX760M laptop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's the state of AMD Radeon cards for gaming on Linux right now? I think I'll soon upgrade my desktop computer's graphics card, and I wonder if I'll have to restrict myself to Nvidia only. (Intel's not an option because of performance)

<comment><USER14> The open source version of the AMD drivers have gotten a lot better for very recent versions of the Linux Kernel. Is it better enough? Good question.

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux316_...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux316_radeon_boost&num=1)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I've heard complaints about short support periods, weird bugs and games that just crash, but performance seems as good as Nvidia's from what I've read.

This seems to suggest that Nvidia's drivers are vastly superior on new OpenGL 4 features, though they do come from Nvidia: [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_apite...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_apitest_nvidia&num=1) It's probably cherrypicking benchmarks a bit, but cherrypicking shouldn't have that dramatic results... Seems like I'll be sticking with Nvidia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Flatout s running on Linux for the first time as well with this announcement

</comment><comment><USER15> Can't wait for them to give more of their extensive back catalog the linux treatment.

With this and steam linux edition, the future looks bright for linux gamers.

Playing colonization on linux this evening :-)

<comment><USER16> Pro tip: never trade guns or horses with indians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh man, there goes my time. I remember FlatOut 1 fondly from when I was a kid and was still using Windows (great soundtrack too, I remember sending No Connection an e-mail and they even replied). Now I couldn't resist buying FlatOut 2, even if just to show my support.

I read on the forums they're wine wrappers though (officially supported, but still). Native ports would be the best, of course.

<comment><USER18> The DOS games I've seen are DOSBox wrappers.

I wonder if they've made the games work (if they didn't already) by hacking DOSBox, rather than the game.

<comment><USER19> FlatOut is a Windows game. As for DOSBox, if a game works on it in Windows it will work on it in Linux as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would recommend Normality as an oldie but a goodie. Quirky story and an amazing atmosphere. This was also one of the first games where it didn't feel like it consisted of static sets or levels where you had to solve a puzzle then move onto the next one but you were more or less freely roaming like a Grand Theft Auto game and having to solve puzzles within a larger environment.

</comment><comment><USER21> I will probably keep downloading Windows binaries for backup purposes (I expect Win32 and Wine will still be a thing long after glibc 2.17.3 binaries are no longer supported on any distro), but it's super-encouraging to have a reliable vendor of DRM-free, cross-platform games.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not to minimize the accomplishment, but most of those "first time on Linux!" titles were previously playable via Dosbox, or free software source ports. That said, can't wait for Rollercoaster Tycoon.

<comment><USER18> I don't think it's the technical accomplishment that's significant - more the fact that producers are increasingly recognising Linux as an emerging gaming platform.

<comment><USER22> I agree. I should have said something more like "diminish their efforts" rather than "minimize their accomplishment". My point is the marketing claim that these titles are appearing on Linux for the first time is a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately I don't see a lot of kids games. Not for me, of course, but for my son. As he gets older, these Linux game release announcements will be more meaningful.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why they're using Ubuntu logo in "Works on: X + Y + Z" instead of Tux or GNU symbols?

<comment><USER15> Because they officially support only ubuntu and mint. The provide a tarball for other distros but don't officially support them.

<comment><USER24> But they say "Linux" nearly everywhere, not "Ubuntu" or "Mint" (even though they're the only supported distros and the rest is best-effort tarball). There's inconsistency between iconic and textual data.

Obviously, one can't support "Linux" \- that's abstract shortcut title for plethora of various GNU/Linux-based OSes. Yet, I think Tux is universally recognized symbol for those.

<comment><USER3> I have to ask: Why do you care?

This is great news, why care about the small, completely irrelevant things? Why make it look like the Linux community is blasé, whiny and will complain about _anything_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> i love you gog.

</comment><comment><USER26> you just emptied my bank account</comment>


Ask HN: (Cheap) U2F Tokens? - <AUTHOR> What 2 factor authentication tokens are you using?
I know about the following (open source ones I think):
* u2fzero
* solo keys
* nitrokey
* tomu + the right firmware (which I guess is not really cryptographically secure)
I'd lean towards the solo keys since it's open source, and I haven't seen any criticisms, but tomu is quite cheaper. Also, which one support "cloning keys" at the setup phase so as to have a backup of your key?
What are your experiences? Recommendations? <comment><USER2> Not really an answer to your question but...

I think the main issue here is to find cryptographic chips in low quantities and diy-friendly packages. The f2c algorithms themselves are not exactly rocket science.

<comment><AUTHOR> But are cryptographic chips actually needed for 2fa tokens to be useful. A lot of security risks are already covered by having a physical second factor, no?

<comment><USER2> I think it's mainly for secure storage and secure RNG people use them.

You can of course claim you need neither.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> why would you want to clone keys? the point is when one is stolen or goes missing then the 2nd key is useless anyway and you would need new keys.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it could also happen that your first key simply fails or gets broken, in which case it's easier to just have a backup.

<comment><USER3> well all the keys as stated will not allow you to clone keys, except potentially the solo key hacker version and the tomu (hacker version if there is one), as the whole concept behind the 2FA devices is that you can't read the crypto keys off the device, if you could then a reader/device could grab a copy of those keys and your 2FA is no longer secure.

<comment><AUTHOR> same for u2fzero if it's not locked already, no?

<comment><USER3> probably, however i only know about the solokeys hacker as that is all i own, and even with that what you would want to do is modify the bootloader to only update with your own crypto keys that you then keep in secure offline storage.

As far as i can tell there is not documentation on how to do this but the 5min look i had at it made it look quite easy.

Do the 2fa services you are looking at using allow multiple keys to be configured per user? if so that would be a much better way to do it than cloning keys. they would still have their backup but there wouldn't be the same security issues that are apparent in the process of cloning the keys. If the computer you used to "clone" the keys had been breached prior to you cloning the keys then someone could theoretically find all your 2FA keys and your 2FA would be useless

<comment><AUTHOR> Mmh, I don't have any specific service in mind. Concerning cloning, it's not such an important request, and if people have good reasons to think it's not worth it, I'm OK with that.

What was your experience with the solo keys, then? I gather they haven't implemented SSH and GPG key "management" yet: is that right? So for now it's just U2F it seems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stripe updates policy: free refunds and chargebacks - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/a-pricing-update <comment><USER2> This is great. I've never actually had a customer dispute a charge through Stripe, but if it happened, I wouldn't be able to challenge it before (I only charge $10 at a time, so it would have been cheaper to just accept it). This always concerned me because it left the possibility that a customer could go back and dispute the last year's worth of charges and there's nothing I could do. This happened once when I used Amazon FPS to process payments, and I was forced to just let the customer take $120 from me. I know it's not much money, but it's really discouraging when you do everything you can to be up-front about billing, (monthly payment notifications, no-question refunds, easy cancellations) and then you have to accept frivolous chargebacks which is basically admitting to the bank that you did something wrong.

<comment><USER3> Just FYI, with most CC processors, chargeback fees are in addition to reversing the original charge. So you would be out $25 if you were to get a chargeback. And if you won you would get the $10 back but still loose the $15 chargeback fee putting you at -$5 overall (that's not even including transaction fees that stack on top of everything).

Most CC companies have a 90 day limit on charges that can be contested. Amex is the only one that I know of that goes further back (1 year IIRC but it may be longer).

Stripe has decided to change that and will refund the $15 if you win. It's a nice change but in my experience the vendor rarely reverses chargebacks.

<comment><USER4> I've gotten Visa chargebacks as far back as 7 months after the fact. It was a surprise when it happened as I had thought 6 months was the limit, since 180 days appears quite often in merchant account agreements as a hold period for various issues.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's something like 270 days now.

<comment><USER6> ah the power to unilaterally change terms, knowing your customers have essentially zero alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stripe's old approach was quite direct: the CC companies charge us (and don't refund) for refunded payments and chargebacks, so we pass those on to you.

Quite reasonable, but the new policy is taking advantage of the fact that they have the rare ability to fix this broken interface instead of just passing it on.

Refunded fees for refunds encourage easy refunds to dissatisfied customers. Offering refunds without crazy hoops to jump through is generally just good customer service (especially for service-related businesses where you don't have to worry about lost inventory!) -- it can quickly put a problem into a realistic context (and customers can realize "well, it's not perfect... but it's actually still worth keeping"), which makes them less frustrated.

I offer a refund _first_ to a lot of tech support questions (i.e., "this isn't working on my computer"), and hardly anyone actually wants one, but it comforts them. Knowing that my fees would be lost make it less pleasant for me to offer... this is psychological pain (the actual cost is minimal), but I always appreciated PayPal's policy for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are customer standards increasing to accommodate this? Will it attract the wrong kind of customers, resulting in a need to change standards in the future?

Besides those questions I see this policy as assuring new ecommerce application builders who aren't used to the risk of chargebacks and refunds. I really appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER9> THANK YOU! We moved from Paypal to Stripe this year for the lower rates and better interface but were bummed to find out that refund fees weren't returned as they are in Paypal and other payment services.

This change makes Stripe a total win.

<comment><USER10> Don't get me wrong, I love Stripe and despise PayPal, but Stripe is definitely not cheaper. It is at best the same price, but with high volume of sales is a decent amount _more_ expensive than PayPal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The tough bit is still getting a chargeback in your favor as a merchant.

Refunded fees are nice, don't want to know how much money we have lost due to half fee refunds on PayPal.

<comment><USER12> We launched much improved dispute management recently as well, enabling you to better handle chargebacks: <https://stripe.com/blog/better-dispute-management>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its rare to see an updated policy that isnt filled with dread let alone something that makes your customers happier.

</comment><comment><USER14> The idea of a flat charge back fee is weird[1]. If I think about a store where I sell things for $1, it means if I exceed a 7% chargeback rate, my business is no longer profitable. Is that really all there is to it?

Edit: [1] Not weird as in weird on Stripe's part, but weird as from the perspective of someone who does not sell online, just seems like this one- size-fits-all approach probably makes a lot of low-margin selling really hard.

<comment><USER15> 7% chargeback rate?

Out of ~2500 orders I've had one chargeback and it was our fault for not processing the customer's refund sooner. I'm not open to disclose what we sell but I can promise you that I have some very angry customers.

Maybe you're confusing refunds with chargebacks?

<comment><USER16> I've experienced a lot of chargebacks, unfortunately. For some reason some gang of people from Vietnam keeps using my site to verify stolen credit cards work. Originally this all happened through a third-party service which I had no control over (I couldn't preemptively block suspicious transactions). I switched to Swipe and eventually saw the same fraudulent transactions coming through (one was 50 charges with the same card with a minute of each other).

Sick of it all I finally got minFraud setup and working with Braintree as the payment processor. So now, I use Braintree to authorize the card, then do a fraud check through minFraud. If the fraud level is low enough, I submit the payment for settlement, otherwise I void it.

Since putting minFraud in place I haven't had any chargebacks.

<comment><USER17> Why not do the minFraud check before auth? Won't that save you some auth fees?

minFraud is a very cost effective service. We have them as one of the solutions in our platform.

<comment><USER16> There's no fee for an authorization. That's just the check if the card is valid. The fee comes from submitting the charge for settlement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I will continue to beat this drum whenever Stripe post anything about anything: Please launch in the UK soon.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I hope they launch in the UK so I can start beating the drum for Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll have to rethink my Paypal vs. Stripe decision.

I'm actually setting up a store right now and I'm going with Paypal just because it's so much easier and cheaper.

With Paypal:

\- After a sale I can buy and print out USPS labels and postage in 2 clicks and send the tracking and shipping info to my buyer in 1 click.

\- I don't have to pay to integrate it into my site or buy a module ($27), the Paypal module is already included, and with Paypal I don't need SSL encryption (which can cost $50+ / year / domain).

 _1 way Stripe can remedy this is to make free Stripe Payment modules for major e-commerce stores._

I want to move to Stripe eventually because they don't try to get my users to sign up for a paypal account by hiding the credit card payment form beneath the paypal login and registration form. And I don't like Paypal's "side with the buyer even if they're a scammer" policy, not to mention the whole "your account funds have been frozen for 180 days while we investigate".

5 years from now I really hope Stripe branches out to cover a lot more than just credit card processing. Once they master that area I'd really love to see them become a small business e-commerce solutions provider. I'm sticking with Paypal until I get screwed over and have my funds frozen because in the short term, I'm saving so much more time and every dollar counts.

Hey Stripe, one day if you work on a store for small businesses I'd love to chat. The current options (WP E-commerce, shopify, magento, ebay, Amazon, etc...) are a pain in the ass (I've tried them all) and no one, ==> NO.ONE. <== , has made a proper packaging backend and USPS shipping calculator that doesn't screw either the buyer or the seller. Ebay comes close but even they fail terribly at package dimension calculation for multiple quantities ordered.

<comment><USER21> I'm CEO of Shopify. What's wrong with our USPS Calculator?

<comment><USER22> Many many many things, least of which is that it's not programmable. We can't set items that can go in flat rate boxes. We can't have "Free Shipping*" shipping, which is free shipping in the US and the equivalent discount in other countries, and other programmable shipping rates.

<comment><USER21> For that you don't even need their rate APIs. All your rates are flatrates which you can simply set?

APIs for building your own shipping system are actually coming some time next year but as you said, it's all about free shipping.

<comment><USER23> Why does Shopify charge a % off each transaction... when they are not the payment proccessor or gateway or issuing bank or aggregator??

<comment><USER21> we don't. It's capped at $169 a month which is nothing given what Shopify does. There is a transaction charge on the lower plans but this may change.

<comment><USER23> Hi Xal, I'm on your site right now and it says you charge a transaction fee. <http://imgur.com/eXbZp> \- So essentially I'm getting dinged ~2.9% from Stripe and another 2% + software fees from Shopify... effective transaction fee ~5%.

Cant wait till internet tax + state tax takes effect. :)

<comment><USER24> His point is that you make it seem like there is no choice but to pay a fee. As your own screenshot shows, this is not the case, the premium plan offered for $179/mo charges no transaction fee. The cheaper ones do because, duh, they have to pay their bills one way or the other. The exercise is left to the reader as to which plan makes the most sense economically for your company based on the amount of business you're doing. But you're guaranteed to never be paying more than $179/mo in transaction fees unless you suck at picking the right plan (and I assume they're easy to switch between).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> WePay has had free refunds since the start. I'm also still on their 3.5% flat rate which is better for my business which generally has <$50 items for sale.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm a very very happy Stripe customer for some time now. We're operating a marketplace and Stripe made it really easy for us to charge our customers' credit cards.

Until then we had to rely on PayPal and that was quite a pain in the ass. The only thing that was really positive with using PayPal as our CC processor is that they always reimbursed you the fees in case you wanted to refund the payment.

We have a 14 day money back guarantee - what it means is that you can request your money back if you have a valid reason and we'll refund you. Since we want to really delight our customers (much like Amazon does) we always accept refund requests and that means we had to cover the costs of the fees paid to stripe. Granted this isn't much compared to our overall gross revenues but I can see how in certain cases for certain individual (selling high value products) that could mean losses.

What I'd like to see tho and I haven't seen it yet - is the ability to get the chargeback refunded in case I decide not to fight it. I know this usually involve some work on both sides, however I think this should be automated and the chargeback lifted if I decide to make Stripe's life easier.

I also understand this could be potentially abused by potentially allowing every "fraud" attempts to pass and not fighting back the chargeback would mean you don't have some skin in the game and not motivated to stop these fraud attempts. Which is why I think these chargebacks should be refunded only if they don't exceed a certain threshold.

The biggest problem is for marketplace who are selling intangible goods, whenever we get hit with a chargeback - it doesn't really matter and I usually don't fight it even if I know the customer really paid for it since I know they're doomed to fail. So winning a chargeback is out of question anyway, however I'd love to get my chargebacks covered by Stripe in the event the chargeback was made by either a legit customer (and for some reason didn't ask for a refund) or slipped through my fraud prevention tools but I decide not to fight it back.

If a publisher would see too many of these chargebacks (and thus showing he's making no effort to prevent fraudulent charges), I think the chargeback protection should be cancelled and maybe Stripe should charge for these chargebacks retrospectively.

Anyway - great news Stripe!

<comment><USER10> Sorry, maybe I'm not understanding you correctly, but if you accept a chargeback why would you get that money back? Isn't that essentially _Stripe_ refunding a customer because that customer says _you_ shouldn't have charged them in the first place?

<comment><USER26> I'm not asking for my money back but I'm asking for the fee charged for the chargeback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Stripe is awesome, I build a SaaS service where Stripe is the only payment gateway I support. When convincing my customers(who are all non-tech savvy) to use Stripe. The biggest push back they bring up is the 7 day wait period for transfers.

Does anyone know if there is a plan for this 7 day transfer wait period to be reduced just a bit?

This is the sole reason, why I am eventually planning to integrate with another option like Braintree even though Stripe has all my use cases well covered.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some companies just keep doing the damn right thing! Competitors, dodge this!

</comment><comment><USER29> Sweet! That was one of my main gripes with the old policy: I should not be charged $15 for a chargeback ruled in my favor. Stripe has finally won me over fully. Keep up the great work.

</comment><comment><USER30> You know what I would like to see? Better fees for Micro Payments. Amazon Payments has exactly the same fees for transactions >= $10 of 2.9% + $0.30 (and has always refunded fees for refunded payments), but adds a much more reasonable micro payment fee of 5% + $0.05 per transaction < $10.

Check out:

[https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/helpTab/Checkout-by- Am...](https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/helpTab/Checkout-by- Amazon/Creating-Managing-Your-Account/Amazon-Payments-Fees)

<comment><USER30> Oh, and the volume discount schedule is MUCH more reasonable on Amazon Payments (starting at $3k per month vs. Stripe's $1m per year).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Thats great, but I'm a bit doubtful that the chargeback is going to be that great for any user. Granted the sample size on my side project is small, but I've never had a chargeback go my way even with logs of ip addresses, email exchanges, phone numbers, etc.

Absolutely love Stripe though, makes figuring out payment stuff a no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER32> How often can you actually successfully challenge a chargeback for an online purchase? From what I've seen, the bank usually wants to see a copy of a receipt signed by the customer. As an online seller of a downloadable product, we never have anything physical signed by the customer.

<comment><USER4> It's really up to whoever reviews the case at the bank. They know there's no signature for card-not-present transactions, and enough evidence can convince them to close the chargeback in your favor. I've supplied copies of e-mails and phone call records from an automated order verification service showing that the phone # registered to the customer was called and answered after ordering and had quite a few wins that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> And the best game in town just got better. Score!

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice to see a company updates policy, which actually helps the users. I haven't seen this kind of policy updates in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great job guys - really impressed with where you are and where you are going.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does a good stripe-like service exist for Europe today?

</comment><comment><USER37> Hell yeah!! Time to move to stripe.

</comment><comment><USER38> Stripe:Paypal :: Firefox:IE.

</comment><comment><USER39> Stripe FTW!

<comment><USER40> You guys are doing amazing!! Just wish your % cost on transactions was competitive with some of the big guys.. At a certain processing level I am forced to work with dinosaurs that take weeks to integrate but in the long run save me allot of money.. I am sure your high % is temporary cant wait to one day use your service on all my projects

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Super! :)</comment>


Golang Proposal: Just Use GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21956 <comment><USER2> Kinda scary how de facto Github has become, that external tooling is discouraged. Github is a bad issue tracker, a bad code review tool, an ok wiki and a bad distribution platform. Still, one has to mostly use the whole package to get contributors.

(Github has other strengths, though)

<comment><USER3> BitBucket is plenty popular as well, I run into projects that are on there instead of GH for Python. I kind of prefer BitBucket to GitHub the only thing GitHub does right is their "Explore" section which I don't think BitBucket has (or GitLab?) but that's about it for me. I don't care where one hosts code, as long as it's not some obscure server.

<comment><USER4> For a long time BitBucket was the only one with the protected branch feature that could prevent history rewrites on a branch by branch basis. Github finally added it after the force push that blew away so many critical repositories.

BitBucket also has free private repos.

I only use GH for projects that are open source because that's where people expect OSS to be.

<comment><USER5> I use Gitlab and just have it push to Github, then disable issues/wiki/whatever else I can there, and add a link to the Gitlab repo in the description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If one cannot figure out how to setup a development environment (with detailed guides), how can one be expected to actually make a meaningful contribution in a much more difficult domain like compiler development? For this purpose alone I think the current approach is something that Google will not get rid of.

Moreover, why on Earth would Google want to create an external dependency for code-hosting and development like GitHub, that may go down anytime, making them lose a lot of time and money, especially since their own system is much more reliable (at least for internal usage) and they have all resources they need to maintain it?

Finally, it is somewhat really silly to think that a giant corp like Google will develop something truly free and opensource, without their own interests above anything else, which obviously will become an issue sooner or later with the truly freedom spirit.

<comment><USER7> _> If one cannot figure out how to setup a development environment (with detailed guides), how can one be expected to actually make a meaningful contribution in a much more difficult domain like compiler development?_

Because those are two unrelated fields, and one is distinctly not productive. From the issue:

 _> I ran through the contributing workshop at Gophercon 2017. I even had gone through half of it before. I still needed help from one of the guides. It was still arduous. I speak as someone who has written Go professionally 40 hours a week for over 4 years - the contribution workflow deters me from contributing to the Go project. Even after signing up. The fact that it's so different from my everyday workflow just makes the hill to climb too steep._

And comments (from current contributors no less):

 _> I've been writing Go for over five years and contributing in various forms, and I have to say I agree. go-contrib-init makes things better, but the barrier to contributing to Go is a lot higher and with a different workflow from almost any other project that uses Go._

 _> As successful as the contributor workshop at Gophercon was, it is an embarrassment to the language that we had to do it at all. Why did we need an entire seminar to teach hundreds of developers who already contribute to many other open source projects how to contribute to Go?_

Also, not every contribution to Go involves mucking with the compiler.

> _why on Earth would Google want to create an external dependency for code- > hosting and development like GitHub_

Didn't they move to Google Code to GitHub, which is the live repo, Gerrit being used for code review only? If so, the dependency is already there. If not, why is it on GitHub at all?

> _Finally, it is somewhat really silly to think that a giant corp like Google > will develop something truly free and opensource, without their own > interests above anything else, which obviously will become an issue sooner > or later with the truly freedom spirit._

I think somehow this is tackled by the issue author, and is a canary of sorts:

> _Let 's show the OSS world that Go really is a community-run project_

<comment><USER8> >Because those are two unrelated fields, and one is distinctly not productive.

Each of your examples is something like "I've been writing go for x years". Using a programming langauge does not make you a compiler hacker. Countless people have been using Linux for years but wouldn't be able to make a meaningful contribution to the kernel.

I'm firmly convinced that having to learn something as straightforward and well documented as golang's contributor flow is a pretty good litmus test for potential contributors.

>Didn't they move to Google Code to GitHub, which is the live repo, Gerrit being used for code review only? If so, the dependency is already there. If not, why is it on GitHub at all?

Git repositories are distributed. It doesn't really matter where the upstream is, that has little bearing on project governance.

<comment><USER9> > _Each of your examples is something like "I've been writing go for x years". > Using a programming langauge does not make you a compiler hacker._

Becoming an expert on whatever custom commit process a project has does even less to make you a compiler hacker.

<comment><USER8> Correct, but the inverse is typically true - not being willing to learn anything but GitHub is a pretty good indicator for not being able to hack on compilers.

<comment><USER10> I am able to hack on compilers and have spent much of my career doing so. I am also able to learn new development workflows involving idiosyncratic tools which must be installed and configured; I've done it over and over, at many different jobs. You know what? It's a lot of work, and it's all basically a waste of time. I'll do it if I'm paid to, but I'm not interested in spending my free time that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunately the epic comment thread, very talky, none of the key stack holders involved, largely irrelevant chatter...

Is a case in point of why github isn't the answer for everything.

<comment><USER12> Wow, a proper use of the word "epic".

I thought the original meaning was gone.

<comment><USER9> I doubt the GitHub thread was "a long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the past history of a nation"

<comment><USER12> You're confusing a noun with an adjective.

As an adjective it's something that's "extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope".

<comment><USER9> epic, adjective

      1. relating to or characteristic of an epic or epics.

      2. heroic or grand in scale or character.
      "his epic journey around the world"

You were saying?

<comment><USER12> Citation needed.

Here's my source: [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/epic](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epic)

<comment><USER9> Mine was OS X dictionary IIRC, but here's dictionary.com:

adjective, Also, epical 1\. noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style: Homer'sIliad is an epic poem. 2\. resembling or suggesting such poetry: an epic novel on the founding of the country. 3\. heroic; majestic; impressively great: the epic events of the war. 4\. of unusually great size or extent: a crime wave of epic proportions. 5\. Slang. spectacular; very impressive; awesome: Their burgers and fries are epic!

So if (4) is what you mean, it's not exactly the first definition for the adjective either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The tyranny of GitHub. GitHub pull requests are one of the most cumbersome ways of contributing to OSS.

What people really like is:

a) The paper trail (I can show to my career manager that I've done some work).

b) The constant distractions that feel like work.

c) Minor issues seem like major contributions.

d) Self promotion.

<comment><USER14> This is insane, considering the process before github was "send a patch by email".

Hundreds of thousands of people, including me, have started contributing patches because the Github process has a much lower barrier to entry, is standardised, and effortlessly teaches you how to do it when you browse around a project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "just use GitHub" mentality is harmful groupthink. How about being open to learning other tools? Locking yourself into a single ecosystem and bothering otherwise productive people who don't buy into it is how we get SourceForge.

<comment><USER15> > is how we get SourceForge

SouceForge was never a particularly good site, and once a better one came along everyone moved off it fairly easily.

Seems like working as intended. If Github goes evil like SourceForge did I don't imagine it will be a huge amount of effort to move to another site. In fact it can probably be automated for most projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's true that Gerrit's workflow is a bit unusual, but even though I had no experience with it, I managed to setup the environment and create a review request for Golang in under an hour. When it comes to contributing to a programming language, I think this is pretty friction-less.

CLA was very painless too.

<comment><USER15> An hour is pretty bad don't you think? Pretty sure it would be quicker with github.

<comment><USER16> Sure it would be. Mostly because I use Github every day. The first time I tried to create a pull request it probably took me almost as much time to figure out how Github works.

But compared how much time is saved for reviewers by having a better tool, I think 1 hour for each new contributor is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my experience, there are no debates so fraught and vicious as those over version control platforms.

Questions of more open governance for Go really ought to be separated from Github specifically. Moving from googlesource to Gitlab or Bitbucket would achieve the same thing. Which is actually not much: just because a project is on a given commercial hosting platform doesn't portend a change in how decisions get made over project direction, as many projects hosted on Github (and Gitlab and Bitbucket) illustrate.

</comment><comment><USER18> > When Google keeps the canonical git repo in googlesource, and uses a google- > run gerrit instance for code reviews, it does not make the project feel like > it's open source. It makes it feel like it's a google project that they let > the rest of us look at from afar, and participate in if we're willing to > hike up the mountain.

I hate to break it to ya', but I think this isn't just what it feels like.

The sooner people realize that "Open Source" is different than "Open Development", the better. That said, I think it's a stretch to assume that Go is contributor hostile just because it hasn't gone all-in on GitHub. Just off the top of my head: Ruby, Python, Javascript, Lua, Clojure, C++, and Java are all languages that haven't embraced the "GitHub Workflow". Indeed, the only language I can think of that has is Julia. Actually, I just checked, and it looks like Rust is also bought in to the GitHub Workflow. So that makes it: 2 for, 7+ against.

<comment><USER19> Ruby historically has not wanted to move to GitHub because core prefers svn to git.

That said, [https://github.com/ruby/ruby/](https://github.com/ruby/ruby/) exists, and committers will (in my understanding) take PRs from it and merge them in, see [https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/1661](https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/1661) for example.

This has happened because the same kinds of discussions have come up with Ruby for years, especially since GitHub came out of the Ruby world, and the Ruby community overall has used GitHub longer and more than most as a result.

There are things that we in Rust find annoying about GitHub, but they're mostly addressed through things like bots; there's no significant push by anyone to move away from GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've contributed a small patch to Go not that long ago and it was quite straightforward, I don't get why it has to be changed. Plenty of people have used the current workflow for years now...

</comment><comment><USER21> Possibly off topic, but this prompted me to take a long overdue re-peek at git-appraise (distributed code review tool, written by google in go). I notice there is now a git-appraise-web. It looks pretty nice (exceptionally minimal :-) ), but their demo lacks any comments to see how it might work in collaborative form.

Does anybody use git-appraise (and especially a web client) and have any comments?

</comment><comment><USER22> From the comments on the page:

jimmyfrasche commented

The language spec is easier to read than the contribution guidelines

</comment><comment><USER23> Suggestion: Follow the OpenBSD project's lead and end this debate with blanket adoption of CVS.

Also, a "Comic Sans" website makeover would severely cut down on the golang community's hipster ratio.

</comment><comment> dis-sys the proposal is cute and funny, basically the author argues that to make the contribution and governance process more open, everything has to be done on github to be more closely aligned with what project X,Y,Z are doing.

that is not open or free, that is the exact opposite of being free and open.

<comment><USER9> Open as in actually welcoming and convenient for people to participate.

Not in the religious/GNU sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If one wants to see the merits or at least the experiences of a major language from a commercial entity going open source on GitHub, where all discussions, language features, issues, and code itself is in that one place, take a look at Apple's Swift.

Edit: Looks like Swift doesn't use GH for issues any more.

<comment><USER25> Swift doesn't seem to be using GitHub's issue tracker, wikis or anything except the code hosting really.

<comment><USER24> Well they use code files for discussions, so it's a bit different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if Google really loves Gerrit, or if it's just a legacy NIH attachment and some of Google's graybeards just refuse to let it go.

Having worked with Gerrit in the past, I can say without a shadow of a doubt, it's an abomination and I'd lop off a limb rather than voluntarily use Gerrit again.

<comment><USER27> Do you really think Google can really put their whole development and review infrastructure into the hands of a relatively small company named GitHub?

The same platform where you see "GitHub is down" on HN every couple of months?

<comment><USER9> > _The same platform where you see "GitHub is down" on HN every couple of > months?_

Because Google's internal and external services don't go down?

Ever tried GAE?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ah, the joys of a distributed version control system: let's put all code on GitHub and depend on it for everything.

<comment><USER29> The joy of decentralization to my mind is not a total avoidance of centers, it is resilience against those centers becoming obnoxiously or harmfully authoritative.

Because Git is already thoroughly decentralized in its architecture, I'm not particularly afraid of GitHub, though I rely on it daily. I know that I can migrate from it without any fundamental problems. Development workflows are decoupled from their servers in a robust way. Commit hashes and GPG signatures mean that GitHub is not really a trusted central point, but a useful hub.

Issue tracking is centralized on GitHub, and that's the biggest problem with it. Maybe that's a lock-in strategy from GitHub the corporation, although the APIs do allow migration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hi PCJ!</comment>


FTC has cleared Google - AdMob deal - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/working-with-admob-to-move-mobile.html <comment><USER2> I am curious as to what the FTC would have done with this had Apple not introduced their own ad platform. Do you think this deal would not have been allowed?

<comment><USER3> I am by no means an authority on this subject but does the whole concept of a 'monopoly' (or such) on _advertising_ not strike anyone else as as bit... silly? As in, to advertise one only needs some sort of property and then no one could stop you using it to host advertisements.

I suppose you could say the same about any industry - if you own property then you can _attempt_ to enter the market. But something strikes me as different about advertising, can't quite put my finger on it.</comment></comment>


VR company announces Dungeons and Dragons debut to virtual reality on Monday - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoblizzard.com/the-blog-smog/dungeons-dragons-makes-its-debut-in-virtual-reality <comment><USER2> [http://svdictionary.com/words/vr-critical-mass- prison](http://svdictionary.com/words/vr-critical-mass-prison)</comment>


Brunch Is for Jerks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/opinion/sunday/brunch-is-for-jerks.html

<comment><USER2> First world problems. So many people work long hours in NY that brunch is the only time to socialize for many. Long live brunch!

</comment><comment><USER3> Never been to a brunch in NYC, but Oakland has a ton of places offering a great brunch, and this article certainly isn't going to stop me from visiting them.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article slowly transformed into a parody as I read through. Even if not the original intention, this piece was hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER5> Never mind, I stopped at "white people".</comment>


FCC asked six more ISPs, content providers to reveal paid peering deals - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/fcc-asked-six-more-isps-and-content-providers-to-reveal-paid-peering-deals/ <comment><USER2> I call shenanigans. The FCC demands paid peering contract details, for the stated goal of providing "transparency" and "answers" to the U.S. public ... but when Ars sends an FOIA request, it's all "hey, this is confidential stuff, we can't release it" ...

How much you wanna bet someone at the FCC has close friends at L3, Comcast, or even the entities involved in these deals? And somehow these secrets will find their way into their hands ...

Nah, a government agency would never share your valuable secrets with your competitors / enemies. Oh, wait.

<comment><USER3> That kind of sharing doesn't even have to be explicit. Once this information is in the FCC's hands (and who does that mean exactly? Wheeler? Wheeler's assistant? His gold buddies? His wife? Last I checked the FCC is not full of spies with top-secret clearance, but rather a bunch of ex-telecom execs), it will slip into the hands of the big companies without anyone even revealing it intentionally. Just by knowing the data, people at the FCC will slip up in conversation with cable execs, accidentally saying just enough to imply the details of a peering deal. e.g. "That's all Netflix is offering you for that level of peering? I'm surprised, seems much less than average." A sentence like that is all it would take for a Verizon exec to infer that Comcast is getting a better peering deal from Netflix than him.

All that said, personally I don't see why these deals shouldn't be open. If you ask me, peering should work the same as ad-serving. That is, there should be an open marketplace for BGP routes where companies can submit real time bids to each other. Anyone with sufficient routing, whether Netflix or a small startup, should be able to participate in the market. Let supply and demand determine the deals.

<comment><USER4> _Let supply and demand determine the deals._

In other words, let ISPs' stranglehold on their customers run totally unchecked.

<comment><USER3> Or, put another way, allow companies other than ISPs and massive content distributors to build scalable networks by negotiating bandwidth at a fair rate, instead of absurd prices like $0.10 per gigabyte transferred.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hello P5.js Web Editor - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/processing-foundation/hello-p5-js-web-editor-b90b902b74cf <comment><USER2> Medium is such a garbage site these days. So I open this article in Safari 12 on Mac, and I am unable to scroll. Nothing floating above the content that I can see, but it just wouldn't scroll. I wish people would stop using this shite. There are much better alternatives out there.

The absurd is, a few years ago Medium was seen as a hope for change in a sea of bad sites. Now it's one of the most glaring example of bad sites.

<comment><USER3> Was it never a garbage?

I really don't get the point of it.

<comment><USER2> There was a time when, at least to me, it represented a clean way to read high quality articles. Now, whenever I open an article, I wonder if I'd be bombarded with float shit, or something else non-functioning, or general slowness (it's a text site that crawls). These issues didn't exist in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Processing got me into programming in University while studying design and kicked off my (too-long) transition to full-time software-development. It's an awesome tool and I'm happy to see it is still going strong. To somebody looking for a little more advanced, but still approachable variant, I can highly recommend OpenFrameworks, which is C++-Based.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is excellent! Processing was definitely my introduction to graphics programming, and I think it's still the most effective tool in teaching certain programming concepts. The visual feedback loop is _huge_ for getting people off the ground.

In 'creative coding' classes, I think a big missing piece is an easy way to collaborate on and share scripts, and this is a perfect tool for that.

Many congrats to the creators!

</comment><comment><USER6> Proce55ing (remember its original name?) is today's LOGO.

It's a fantastic way for people to approach programming in a very visual and progressive way.

When P5.js first came out, I was skeptical. But today with the power of javascript, I think it's just as fine for most applications.

<comment><USER7> Seymour Papert just rolled in his grave. Processing is great but it's far far from actually designed to teach programming. It stumbles into that rather than purposely gets there.

This paper goes over just some of the things wrong with Processing. Skip all the cool stuff on that page and just concentrate on the critiques of Processing

[http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

<comment><USER8> This is a really interesting critique that is hard to disagree with. But, what would be an interesting alternative that doesn't have such problems?

<comment><USER9> There isn't... as much as I love Bret Victor's work, Processing is out there today teaching people how to code so I take any criticism of it with a very large grain of salt.

Until someone puts the work into implementing some ideas from Learnable Programming, Processing is one of the best we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of OpenProcessing which has similar support for "playing with Processing" in an editor and hosting your projects. You make an account, and then share your projects, view others', play around, etc. OpenProcessing appears to currently do more to facilitate teaching and educational projects using Processing.

\- [https://www.openprocessing.org/](https://www.openprocessing.org/)

All in all, it's great to see the community around Processing and p5js keep building and continuing to be a positive force to make programming, focused on creative design, more accessible.

<comment><USER11> That's a cool site, and some of those top sketches are insane, but does the editor really not let you code and preview side by side? I can't even find a quick shortcut to switch between the two. While that site looks a lot cleaner in general, that alone is a no-go for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there any context sensitive help, tooltips, etc ?

Seeing two function definitions, my first inclination was to run them on the next two lines, via

      setup();
      draw();

So that was wrong.

Ok, so the functions run themselves automagically.

Guessing that there must be line and circle functions, I managed to get those running.

How do I discover new stuff?

Shift - Tab is not doing anything over function signatures(Jupyter can do that in the browser sort of ok).

What would a total newbie do next without going over to Help tab?

</comment><comment><USER13> It has a lot of great features but for some reason people seem to consider this primarily a beginner tool.

Is it just the fact that it's easy to use that makes it only for beginners? Surely there are some people who are serious about visual or interactive programming that could take advantage of it?

<comment><USER14> I've used it for a few professional freelance projects back when I was just starting out during high school/university. The projects typically involved communicating with an Arduino running some physical hardware and displaying some info on a screen/doing very simple control flow (an interactive installation in a conference).

It's great for that kind of a simple thing, but starts to fall apart when you need to do more advanced user interaction - you have to build a lot of stuff from scratch, or at least you had to back then. Also I feel that a lot of the primitives have been optimized for ease of learning rather than what's best for professional code.

It would still be my go-to tool for similar Arduino based projects that just need a quick simple good-looking interface.

</comment></comment><comment> james-mcelwain Awesome. Always good to see new stuff from the processing crew.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does the latest versioning of P5 support webgl2? I really love the project, but had to move away some time ago due to lack of support.

</comment><comment><USER16> hmm, so this or glitch or codepen? Good to have so many good alternatives I guess...

<comment><USER17> Processing is a programming language specialized for producing visual art. Its standard library includes functions for drawing 2D and 3D objects as well as taking user input.

P5.js is a JavaScript port of this standard library, allowing one to use similar syntax as Processing but in the context of a <canvas> element.

P5.js Web Editor is a web editor to allow one to create using P5.js without downloading anything. Therefore, this is more like Codepen, but for the specific purpose of creating visualizations and not normal webpages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Love the accessibility features even though I don't need them. Yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> the main page at p5js.org uses a tonne of CPU, might want to have a look at that</comment>