Scientists stumped as bee population declines further - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.bd2664988112b33ebe7091069cfec28e.8b1&show_article=1

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/1829/buzz-kill>

The article notes that the keepers worst hit are the bigger commercial operations. A major argument is that they tried to industrialize beekeeping like the rest of agriculture, feeding them crap and constantly moving them, except it's a lot easier for bees to say screw you I'm going home.

<comment><USER3> If your home moves constantly, it's only going to be so long before you can't remember where you live and you take a wrong way home.

Bee colonies are fragile. If the bees so much as 'sense' a disease, seeing the bodies doesn't matter specificly because an infected bee generally leaves the colony to die, there can become a mass exodus as they may believe there's disease in the actual colony. This presents a problem if you're continually losing your bees due to moving your colony, because if you get unlucky you could trigger an exodus.

What's more bee's follow a small oligarchy, each of which hold the ability to trigger a swarm. Let's call these 'Simon's' because they're the ones who relay the queen's orders. So what happens when the bee's believe Simon says 'leave' because he went missing? These oligarchs have the ability to trigger a swarm to found a new colony, so losing these few key bees is truly dangerous for a colony.

It sounds rather trivial, but these few bees can control a huge portion of a hive's population. These are the bees a hive needs to retain, just as much as the queen, but they cannot be contained like a queen (IE regular size not fat and need to leave the hive to trigger natural behaviours like gathering). The even bigger problem is that these bees cannot found a new colony, as all the females aren't sexually mature.

Another problem is that a new queen has a mating flight, often multiples. These queens are born to replace the existing queen, which if this queen gets lost (because some moron human moved the hive 50km) it will found a new hive instead of taking over the existing hive. This means if there isn't enough time to prepare, the hive can literally die off because it's incapable of preparing a new queen in time (it takes ~3 weeks from the egg being laid to the mating flights).

Bees are an agrarian society, and if the towns keep moving the farmers will never find it. The problems are really as complex as the questions as to why a town becomes abandoned, so really it's amazingly complicated and we as humans are screwing around with it.

Solution: The best solution is likely to maintain static hives on farmland instead of relying on mobile hives. It may be less cost-effective, however it is likely much more sustainable. I know if I was a farmer, I'd be trying to provide support for my own bee hives to form.

<comment><USER4> Static hives on farms sound like a good idea but still the pesticides will be a problem. We are the problem, not the bees.

<comment><USER3> As the article says, two years ago the entire Florida orange industry used virtually zero pesticides, it is currently a major exception that they are using pesticides due to a disease outbreak.

When it is an exception, you wouldn't be having year-on-year problems of colony collapses.

However you are right for most crops. However pesticides are not the problem, it's how they're used which is the problem. No pesticide should be used when the crop is flowering and it requires pollination, this is just flat-out common sense which is being ignored by the farming industry.

The problem is that farmers are opting for a lower maintenance cost at a major increased risk of full-out crop failure. However, with government subsidise to support farms that have catastrophic crop failures there is little incentive for the farmers to change their practices.

Example: It would be like everyone using candles and oil lamps to light their houses and when a fire eventually starts by one and burns down a town house complex, the government steps in and pays everyone to rebuild their houses. No one is going to stop using the candles and oil lamps until their houses stop being rebuilt for them. This is what happens for many farmers globally. Most of the US farm subsidies goes directly to supporting farmers with failed crops, a fair whack likely of which were caused by improper pesticide usage.

Pesticides can be applied directly to the soil to destroy grubs and mites. They can then be applied during the leafing stages of the plant growth to kill off butterflies and such laying eggs that become caterpillars and such. Next it can be pollinated a month to a few days (for a fast acting pesticide) before the crop flowers. Finally you can pesticide again once the pollination is complete.

The biggest problem with pesticides is that certain varieties infect the food (the pesticide grain size is equal to a pollen grain, so it attaches to the bee and works its way into their food supply). These pesticides can be dangerous for months to bees, but more dangerously can prevent new workers and drones from being born and can kill the hive by attrition.

Static hives for a responsible farmer is the ideal. The farmers would then know more about their crops as a whole by knowing more about the pollinators that support them. It really is a common sense approach, a farmer should know the most about their crops than anyone else and the honeybee is an integral part of their crops in the quantities they want to grow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Article Summary:

Bee populations have continued a precipitous decline since 2006, dropping 32% in 2007, 36% in 2008, and 29% in 2009. This not only effects honey but also the $15 billion in crops depending on pollination by bees. The phenominon is called "colony collapse disorder" in is happening all over the world. The cause is probably a result from many factors and increased use of pesticides is likely a major cause. Pesticide use has increased significantly in the last few years in places like Florida to fight a plant disease hitting the orange crops.

[http://hnsummary.com/2010/04/02/scientists-stumped-as-bee- po...](http://hnsummary.com/2010/04/02/scientists-stumped-as-bee-population- declines-further/)</comment>


Show HN: Idgo – Your local community - <AUTHOR> https://idgo.me <comment><USER2> I didn't understand exactly what it's about or what it does</comment>


CPP Netlib is an embeddable HTTP1.1 server in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib/wiki

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to an excellent hello world program using this framework: <http://cpp-netlib.github.com/0.8/hello_world_server.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> They should be careful about the name. _Netlib_ refers to a collection of high-performance computing libraries, like BLAS and LAPACK.

<http://www.netlib.org/></comment>


Trade war dents Chinese company profits, portfolio inflows - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-markets-trade/trade-war-dents-chinese-company-profits-portfolio-inflows-idUSKCN1VN0TO <comment><AUTHOR> "To offset effects of the trade war, Chinese policymakers rolled out measures including tax cuts and lower reserve requirements for banks, which were pushed to lend to smaller companies."

That lower reserve requirement is going to be their Achilles heel.</comment>


I need your advice on a service that my team is working on - <AUTHOR>

Check sillytrader.com and please tell us what you think. It is a service enabling easy deals between freelance designers (who want to earn some extra money) and buyers (interested in particular service). <comment><USER2> Just a small suggestion. Change "Why to join SillyTrader?" to just "Why join SillyTrader?". It's better english.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that! We're going to change the name anyways ... :)</comment></comment>


Women Under the Spell - <AUTHOR> https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/10/women-under-the-spell/ <comment><USER2> Lots of arguments about whether this is purely historical or disguised opinion. The last paragraph suggests the author's intention is to discredit feminists imo. Note the use of "God the Father", "bravely" and "demonstrates" (the lattermost implying that something is factually true and being proven therein). Sure, maybe this was a part of early feminism. But also, buzz off dude. Don't need this here at least.

> Dr Faxneld provides a most compelling account of how Satanism played a > crucial part in early feminism—primarily between 1880 and 1930—as something > employed to vilify and denigrate Christianity, and transform God the Father > into an oppressive creator and the ultimate enemy of women's liberation. > This book makes for fascinating reading as Faxneld bravely endeavours to > demonstrate the centrality of Satanism in influential feminist narrative > during the period in a way nobody before him has ever dared to do. His most > enlightening book makes a significant contribution to scholarship.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the "God the Father" used to show the maleness of the Chrisitan God?

While I think you're correct the authors opinions do appear to shine through in that last paragraph, it seems that efforts have been made to show this history without framing.

Does the article make the case that an alignment with Satanism is a bad thing? Many modern western values align closely with Satanism. Satanism in its modern form was a deliberate effort by some to oppose Christianaities stronghold on the western world at the time.

Is the opposition to Christianity a problem for modern Feminism? Even an historical opposition?

To me this article simply reads as early feminists rebelled against a society they felt was oppressive to them by adopting what they saw as their enemies enemy as a mascot. I don't think that is particularly disparaging of feminism is it?

Full disclosure, I'm a fundamentalist Christian.

<comment><USER4> > Full disclosure, I'm a fundamentalist Christian.

So is the author. You can't recognize a bias that you share. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.

<comment><USER3> Sorry I thought I acknowledged the author had a bias? Simply that they'd made an effort to write something other than an opinion piece.

I'm trying to challenge the notion that this article sheds a negative light on feminism. That the opposition between feminism and Chrisitanity, especially Christianity at that time should be obvious.

I would like to raise the question; is that opposition a problem for non Christians and if so why?

<comment><USER5> As a non-Christian I find it interesting and not at all a problem if true. I think the same basic thing is common in some punk circles today (partly due to some racist Sweedish metal bands, but that is a different topic, although maybe not coincidence that it looks like the author of the book in question is Sweedish). I don't know anything about the author and maybe it is a interesting book, maybe not.

However, I did quickly get the feel that this article was not what it appeared to be (e.g. "nobody dared to do", which seems an unlikely phrase for actual historians) and after very quickly scanning and reading the last paragraph I didn't read it. I would be interested in a historical look at this topic, but not something written to whip up bigots. IMO this particular article should not be on HN.

<comment><USER3> I agree it's an odd article for HN.

But I don't know if there is an attempt here to whip up bigots.

I don't think it's trying to be impartial either. This is clearly written by someone that disagrees with both Satanism and feminism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another book review. Maybe we need an "HN Reads" monthly thread, there's not much to discuss on an individual book level.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/quadrant- magazine/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/quadrant-magazine/)

<comment><USER8> Quadrant is biased in the same way that Jacobin is biased.

It should extremely obvious to everyone who reads it that it takes liberties when picking and choosing sources, that most of the authors have an axe to grind, and that it's exactly the kind of rag that would publish climate change denial just to be contrarian. It also has a reasonably high standard of writing, cites sources, and digs up some fascinating things in its attempts to wage war on the left. It's an _interesting_ propaganda machine, which elevates it above _boring_ propaganda machines like Breitbart or the Daily Kos.

<comment><USER9> I think it is a mistake to give more credit to sites just because they can engage in sophisticated sophistry, have MAs from reputable old universities, and have their citations done neatly.

Personally, I find the propaganda the Quadrant writers spout rather _boring_. Breitbart at least has joie de vivre.

I don't really think people reading HN should be subjected to pseudo intellectual hate speech like this. It doesn't add to any meaningful debate in society in general or the tech sphere.

<comment><USER8> It sent me down a rabbithole of wikipedia articles about theosophy and satanism, so I like it. The framing of satan as representative of rebellion, personal agency, and freedom in the face of established order interests me, regardless of how much mileage Quadrant can get out of it.

You can find it boring, and that's fine, but you can't make me find it boring.

<comment><USER9> I said that their polemics are boring, not the topic of feminist struggle. It's so tired that they love the idea of feminists being seduced by Satan and lesbianism, but it is also harassment of women, and no doubt offensive to Christian feminists.

Some actual feminist satanists, and how misogynistic the Church of Satan is: [https://thefront.tv/read/holy-hell-jex-blackmores-satanic- fe...](https://thefront.tv/read/holy-hell-jex-blackmores-satanic-feminism/)

Not even the Church of Satan is safe from #MeToo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I LOVE articles like this because they prop up all the worst aspects of an ideology and try to present them as their best aspects.

Have they no self awareness?

According to this article:

* Feminists worship the devil

* God himself is patriarchial and therefore feminism is counter to God's will

* Science is witchcraft

* Intellectual enlightenment and freedom of thought come from Lucifer, and are therefore sin

Have they no self awareness? Do authors of articles like this actually think that aligning themselves with Christianity's representation of evil incarnate helps their cause? Do they think these arguments help advance their feminist ideals amongst Christian's?

It's scheudenfreued, I know, but this might be my favorite article about feminism of all time!

<comment><USER11> > Do authors of articles like this actually think that aligning themselves > with Christianity's representation of evil incarnate helps their cause?

It's a history piece, about feminist movements of late 19th century. What "cause" do you think it's trying to "align" with, exactly?

<comment><USER12> Apple farmers. Big Apple, as it were. We've got the crispiest, juiciest sins... _just don 't tell your husband_.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel SPMD Program Compiler: A Compiler for High-Performance SIMD Programming - <AUTHOR> https://ispc.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Matt Pharr wrote a series of posts telling the story of ispc: [https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc- origins.html](https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins.html)

I found them extremely interesting - highly recommended.

<comment><USER3> That is an interesting read - compiler writers got hung up on creating auto- vectorization where Cuda is essentially manual vectorization. And that's the thing. Once you find ways that writing a massively vectorized program on a GPU makes sense, why would you write a program where you had to _hope_ your program gets vectorized?

That said, as I understand things, vectorization can fail with Cuda if you allocate more kernels than exist on the chip, in which case the chip may run the kernels in serial, producing surprising results.

<comment><USER2> That isn't really a failure case in cuda (or opencl). It's very common to launch more blocks/workgroups than can be resident simultaneously on the GPU.

<comment><USER3> Neither autovectorization-fail nor Cuda executing kernels in serial is a "fail-fail", both are fall-back actions that accomplish a given task in a bit longer than the explicit instructions imply. That said, executing kernels in serial can supposedly create problems if a programmer creates logic that assumes kernels are always moving in lock-step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I only played with ISPC a little bit. What I found is that it is really great if you need to write a large volume of SIMD code and that code sticks to one lane size. Like, 4 32-bit floats or ints. But, if you want switch mid-stream to 8 shorts or 16 bytes, you're gonna have a hard time. Or, if you just need a few instructions, it's easier to just use intrinsics.

<comment><USER5> I would have to see an example of what you mean, but it should be completely possible though might require converting without using vectorization.

Switching lane size doesn't make much sense to me because ideally you would want lanes that are as wide as possible and mostly be agnostic to their size.

<comment><USER4> I had some code that tried to stay 16x8bit, but would occasionally _mm_unpacklo_epi8, _mm_unpackhi_epi8 to 2 8x16bit vectors to keep precise intermediate results during some fixed-point math.

Writing it out like that, it sounds like it should have been easy. Don't remember what I ran into. Maybe didn't bang on it long enough.

<comment><USER5> The original AVX instructions didn't have all the integer operations that the most modern chips have. It might have been haswell that added small integers over the 256 bit lane width.

<comment><USER6> Right. AVX (the original extension) only added 256b floating-point and non- destructive 128b integer. The 256b integer SIMD ops are all in AVX2 or later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would benefit from a comparison with current OpenMP/OpenACC (which supports offloading to attached processors in a standard way for C and Fortran, at least). Also, comparing with gcc 4.2 in the performance examples doesn't seem very useful; it didn't support AVX, regardless of auto- vectorization. (That's not meant to dismiss ISPC.)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's open source, so it should be fine?

But Intel's history when it comes to compilers and applied optimisations leaves this making me immediately uncomfortable.

The sort of PR work that these guys would need to do in order for me to consider them even remotely trustworthy is beyond even their budget.

<comment><USER9> You don't have to guess. The process of upstreaming and the [then] current state of ARM support is described here: [https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/29/ispc- retrospective.ht...](https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/29/ispc- retrospective.html)

Not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but it looks like ARM support was finally made first class this past August: [https://github.com/ispc/ispc/blob/cf90189/docs/ReleaseNotes....](https://github.com/ispc/ispc/blob/cf90189/docs/ReleaseNotes.txt)

I think it might be difficult to purposefully cripple AMD in an open source project.

<comment><USER10> > I think it might be difficult to purposefully cripple AMD in an open source > project.

It's not as explicit as it has been in the past, but the CPUID checks for very specific feature sets aligned with particular Intel models may not match AMD models, producing worse code on AMD models that support featuresets above baseline AVX2:

[https://github.com/ispc/ispc/blob/master/check_isa.cpp#L106-...](https://github.com/ispc/ispc/blob/master/check_isa.cpp#L106-L140)

That said, I don't assume malice here and I haven't investigated thoroughly. Most likely they just want to support their own silicon well and that's what they know. It's possible they would accept similar support for AMD µarchs in the OSS project (or maybe not).

I wouldn't draw too much inference from the ARM example, as I don't see ARM as an Intel competitor. AMD, on the other hand, is currently very competitive with Intel.

<comment><USER11> I've spent time writing CPU detection code for previous projects, and there is nothing that jumps out at me as biased in the linked ISA check. In fact that is really the bare minimum required to split the AVX variants, and will detect AMD support just the same as Intel.

You can compare it to other detection functions - one relatively easy to read, non-vendor biased example that does dig into all the extensions is this Go implementation (not mine): [https://github.com/klauspost/cpuid/blob/master/cpuid.go](https://github.com/klauspost/cpuid/blob/master/cpuid.go)

<comment><USER10> Right, it looks pretty reasonable to me too. Zen2 still doesn't have AVX-512 anyway, so the super parallel paths this aims to really help aren't applicable anyway.

Zen1-2 should land on the "AVX 2 (Haswell)" path in the linked excerpt -- they have AVX/AVX2, F16C, OSXSAVE, and RDRAND -- which is the best ISA without AVX512 implemented in the compiler. That's entirely reasonable on Intel's part.

(I don't know why they look for RDRAND in a compiler, but whatever.)

<comment><USER12> Because it has an rdrand() function.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apache Performance: Disable .htaccess here's why - <AUTHOR> https://haydenjames.io/disable-htaccess-apache-performance/ <comment><USER2> I wrote a small script a while back to collect all the rules from various .htaccess files into one file you can then just include in your main config - might be useful for some. [https://github.com/JMB-Technology- Limited/ApacheHtaccessIn](https://github.com/JMB-Technology- Limited/ApacheHtaccessIn) Can then work with .htaccess files (a lot of third party apps use them) but automatically rewrite them into your main config for performance on production.

<comment><USER3> that's a good idea - thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't the support for htaccess basically one of the only reasons one would use apache in favor of nginx? I.e. that you can provide users some configuration possibilities on a multiuser system?

I run some servers with an apache/php/mysql configuration, we looked multiple times into nginx and that was always the problem: A user wouldn't be able to install any standard CMS without asking the admins for changes to the server config.

<comment><USER5> Did you look at the 'include' directive in Nginx?

I'm not sure about the security implications as I use this just for servers I control, but you can use a (just example naming) nginx.conf file in the website root, and use the 'include' directive in the main config file to read from that.

That's how I use Wordpress with Nginx to automatically write things like Yoast's Wordpress SEO or iThemes Security rules.

Something like:

        include /var/www/domain/htdocs/nginx.conf;

Seems like there would be similar security concerns to using a .htaccess file but I've not looked into that in any detail.

<comment><USER6> If the included file is writable by the PHP user then I would say that poses a reasonably high security risk; potential privesc, information disclosure, RCE. Of course an attacker would need the ability to manipulate local files as the PHP user, but that isn't much of a stretch.

Under a typical install, e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, etc, nginx parses the configuration files as root thus any exploit of the config parser gains full root access as the nginx master process doesn't drop caps.

Depending on where the include line is placed it may be possible for an attacker to create server blocks allowing them to execute arbitrary PHP by permitting PHP execution from a directory with PHP write access, e.g. `wp- upload`. Assisting exfiltration of data by allowing easy remote access to the filesystem. Possibly proxy all traffic through an attacker controlled script or host. Exposing local services to the outside world.

I'm sure there's plenty of other interesting little attacks possible if given enough time to play around with it.

If at all possible I would avoid permitting unprivileged r|w access to nginx configuration files.

<comment><USER5> > If the included file is writable by the PHP user then I would say that poses > a reasonably high security risk

It wouldn't be, just writable by the ordinary user. That pretty much negates the rest of what you said except for...

> Of course an attacker would need the ability to manipulate local files as > the PHP user, but that isn't much of a stretch.

If that's happening you've got far worse things going on than having a nginx.conf file around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone profiled a before/after for this?

<comment><USER8> Yes. The difference is pretty minor; it's a difference of a couple 'stat' calls per request, all of which are guaranteed to be cached in the kernel. If you're serving a lot of static content, it _might_ start to be noticeable, but at that point you're probably better off using a different web server for that content. (Or putting it on a CDN.)

<comment><USER9> I was thinking the same about OS caching, but since the author didn't actually try that out it's still uncertain and a fairly useless article...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A little inaccurate, .htaccess is disabled by default (2.3.9 and later), so you do not need "AllowOverride None" unless it's enabled somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER11> Also some of the reasons why nginx doesn't support .htaccess files to begin with.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any biochemists in here? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I guess I am a former biochemist. There is actually quite a good core of biochem/ molecular biology trained people here that makes the discussion of science stories worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Me too!

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes.</comment>


Archaic words list - <AUTHOR> https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/archaic-words <comment><USER2> Every time I page up or down the @#*$(&@#% search box steals focus. Tab closed!</comment>


Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://danielmiessler.com/blog/enhancements-to-shell-and-vim-productivity <comment><USER2> "7. Use vi-mode in Your Shell"

Tried this and gave it up. Your shell may be (somewhat) vi compatible but the applications you use mostly are not so you'll have to break out of the vi mindset at all sorts of inopportune moments. That, and modal editing, while perfectly alright for text editing, maps rather lousily to command line operations. You're much better off getting used to some basic Emacs-style key bindings that work consistently across a wide number of applications (including OS X text fields, IIRC).

<comment><USER3> What I did, for example, was that I enabled vi-mode in my shell but also re- enabled __some __emacs-keybindings like CTRL-E and CTRL-A for ending and beginning of a command because I learned them like a lifetime ago when I first got used to the shell without even knowing they were emacs-keybindings.

But that way I am also able to hit ESC and do a / for a search, like within vim, which I am much more used to than a search in emacs. I found that way combines the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER4> I use vi-mode in my shell but the end/beginning Vi commands (A,I,0,$,etc) are the only ones I find myself using regularly. I also use c[motion] and d[motion] on occasion, but that is pretty much it.

I'm not convinced that powerful editing is necessary for the command line, but familiar shortcuts for beginning/end seem very useful.

<comment><USER5> There are absolutely times that powerful editing is mandatory at the command line; I am skeptical that there are times when powerful editing at the command line is necessary but pulling the line into your $EDITOR (v in vi-mode, ctrl-x ctrl-e in emacs-mode) is not the best way to deal with it.

<comment><USER6> but it's not about powerful editing alone. it's about nice things that are just in your fingertips, say using 'df ' to delete a --long- argument=/a/very/long/path from a command...

<comment><USER5> fair enough

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is this article so Mac oriented?

So here's tip 9:

Use a nice Linux or similar machine with a pleasant to use clicky keyboard and a mouse which allows text highlight and middle click paste.

<comment><USER8> You know I don't really get this sentiment. And I just think people hate on the Mac because they want to.

I never saw the appeal of Linux. Yes, it's free, and I can buy a cheap PC to run it on but why would I do that? My Macbook Pro has the best keyboard I've ever used (the 2008 "pro keyboard", not the chicklet keys Apple uses these days) and the trackpad is better than ALL trackpads out there. Seriously, Apple knows how to make trackpads. And on top of that, OS X is as much Unix as Ubuntu or any other distribution of Linux and I can do whatever work I would have done on Linux on my mac. If I don't have a command line tool, I just use homebrew to install it or build it from source if homebrew doesn't have that formula. And you know what I get including those nice things? The wealth of awesome OS X apps, like Textmate, Keynote, iTerm, Kaleidoscope, QuickSilver/Alfred, XCode, Pixelmator, Time Machine etc that are available. So I ask you, why would I use a Linux machine when OS X is supremely better in almost every way?

<comment><USER7> 1) The article has a title making it seem like it's unix shell tips straight from the unix master, then instead is advising to use certain Mac programs.

2) A trackpad can NEVER replace a regular mouse with scrollwheel and many buttons. Maybe the apple.com website triggers _your_ emotions. But the following website triggers _mine_ : <http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice>

3) OS X may be supremely better for you, but not every person is the same, you may be their target audience, other people are not and, _gasp_ , may actually prefer a different design philosophy.

4) Being free or cheap is not usually a reason why one runs Linux on a PC. Can you imagine someone can actually prefer something, independent of cost?

5) Mac OS X has apps. Other OSes also have apps. They all have their selection of awesome apps. Usually one prefers the ones they're used to I guess.

<comment><USER8> 1\. There's only ONE tip out of 9 that tells the user to use iTerm over the default Terminal. I don't agree with many of the tips here and I wouldn't use them to "enhance" my workflow but you have to critique the article on what it actually says, not what it's geared towards. You can't just say "why is this geared towards OS X?" because that's not a valid criticism.

2\. Sure, I never said it could replace a mouse. Only, I rarely ever use a mouse because I don't want to carry around a mouse just for middle click when I can use a Modifier key + single click to achieve the same thing. I also use my keyboard more, even to switch between applications and rearranging my windows using a Window Manager app like Slate. I also never said Apple's website triggers any of my emotions so I don't know where you got that from. I just said Apple has the best trackpads around and you can actually not use a mouse if you don't want to since Apple's trackpad is so good. Also, a Mac app called "BetterTouchTool" further enhances the track pad so you can do almost anything with trackpad gestures, something you really can't do easily on Linux.

3\. Yeah, that was just my opinion. I wasn't speaking on behalf of other people.

4\. Okay, got it. Many of my friends use that as a reason when I ask them why they run Linux though. They say it's cheap and they don't want to pay $2000 for a Mac which is fair enough. They just want a Unix machine and they can run Ubuntu on a VirtualBox without paying a cent.

This may be heavily opinionated, I know, but like I said, the reason Linux never appealed to me is because I can run Linux apps on the Mac since open source usually means I can run it on different platforms. Take any linux app, and I can bet 99% of the time, it's also available on the mac and I can further bet 80% of the time, there's an alternative on the Mac which is better (in my opinion). The truth of the matter is, there are many Mac exclusive apps that are far better than anything available on other platforms. This is just my opinion, that's all. You may view it differently than me, that's okay!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "A commenter mentioned using Dropbox for synchronization as well, which seems attractive, but I'm not sure how clean that would be on headless Linux servers." Dropbox does work pretty nicely on headless Linux servers, you just have a daemon running constantly with none of the GUI extensions. I use it for keeping some code in check.

Nice list of things to try, I don't use vim but I've been putting off doing 3 of them (caps remap, iTerm and zsh).

<comment><USER10> For some (entirely irrational, I'm sure) reason, the idea of constant and automatic deployment of my dotfiles across all my boxes gives me the shivers. I like that extra bit of control I get from doing it with a git repo.

<comment><USER9> Same, which is why I git repo them as well. It's mostly a nice way to keep a few bits of code in check, plus handy for quick private repos without needing all the nice stuff from GitHub/BitBucket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a Vim user, I've always been drawn toward using vi keybindings in bash.

However, as a Mac user, all of the Cocoa text widgets more or less support emacs keybindings, so having a working knowledge of basic emacs movement commands has been very useful.

The emacs bash/readline keybindings also have a really neat trick that the vi bindings don't -- keyboard macros!

Ctrl-( to start recording, Ctrl-) to stop, and Ctrl-x to execute.

<comment><USER12> How is Ctrl- different from using "q" in vi?

<comment><USER13> It's a matter of muscle memory. I used Vim exclusively for several years, and used vi-mode on my shells. Now that I've switched to emacs, my fingers are more comfortable using Ctrl-<key> for commands.

<comment><USER11> At least for me, macros don't work in Bash vi-mode. Perhaps it is only implemented in emacs-mode? Or maybe it is the readline version I have in OSX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One small suggestion (I make this every time vim comes up):

Don't remap "jj" to escape. Remap "jk" instead. All of the same benefits, plus one more - if you get into the habit of nervously hitting "jk" all the time, as most people do in vim, using "jk" means your cursos stays in place. On the other hand, "jj" means your cursor will move.

<comment><USER15> I was going to suggest mapping both jf and fj to escape so you could mash the two keys at the same time without worrying about order, but jk and kj would work as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When you have already remapped Caps-Lock as an additional control, why not just use Ctrl-[ instead of the 'jj' remapping for Escape. It saves a bit of Vim configuration, and also works in Bash vi mode.

<comment><USER17> I just remapped Caps Lock as Escape. I use Escape a lot between tmux with vim modes, bash, and vim itself. I do this in OSX and for the linux console and X11.

<comment><USER18> I've also seen setups that somehow let Caps Lock work as Ctrl when used as a modifier key, and Esc when used regularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a full-time Vim user who has never taken to `bindkey -v`. The reason is simple: I'm using insert mode 99% of the time, so using vi keybindings just makes me have to hit an extra key.

However, it is useful some of the time. Since viins is pretty useless by default, you can spice it up by setting custom bindings (e.g. copy emacs') and get the best of both worlds. Furthermore, this may be helpful: <http://www.bewatermyfriend.org/media/vi-mode.zsh>

<comment><USER20> `bindkey -v` puts you in insert mode by default (there's a way to make it not do that, but the default is insert first).

So there's not really an extra key, you get both benefits :).

<comment><USER19> I meant that you have to hit an extra key to actually make use of the mode's default bindings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do people really not use caps lock? I use it every day, when I need to type more than one upper case character in a row. Like, every time I type NSString, not to mention CLOCKS_PER_SEC.

<comment><USER22> Caps Lock is also the most simple way to input Ç, À or É with a french keyboard. Not everyone needs it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> On linux caps lock can be mapped to both control and escape, depending on context.

<https://github.com/alols/xcape>

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. Remap Your CAPSLOCK Key

Another upside to this is that people will gradually stop asking to use your laptop 'for just a minute'.

<comment><USER4> Remapping the arrow keys to switch between Vim windows instead of moving the cursor is a _great_ way to achieve that goal. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Caps remap is my favorite. My pinky is much happier.

<comment><USER21> As any book about RSI will tell you, you should not use your pinky finger for pressing Ctrl regardless of whether it's mapped on Caps Lock or on the default key.

<comment><USER26> Which finger should you be using (with Ctrl in the usual place)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if it makes sense to map capslock to, effectively, ConnectBot's use of the "okay" button on Android - where a single tap is ctrl and a double tap is alt/esc (or vice-versa - it's muscle memory at this point...)

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the issues I have with tmux is that like xterm, but unlike screen, it doesn't reflow text when you resize. I understand doing that probably is not an ideal default, but it would be nice to have the option.

</comment><comment><USER27> > inoremap jj <ESC>

A mapping I've been using for years. I'm pretty sure between this and Ctrl-c, I never hit escape in Vim anymore.

<comment><USER28> I've always used Ctrl-[. It's there in all Vim installs, doesn't conflict with anything else that I know of, and is a quick, no-glance pinky shift for both hands (assuming you remap your Capslock to Control). Edit: Ninja'd by top- level comment!

<comment><USER18> In OSX at least, there's a way you can make Caps Lock behave as Ctrl when used as a modifier key, or Esc when pressed alone. Way better than adding an extra keystroke to every time you want to hit Esc.

<comment><USER29> Do you happen to know a resource that explains how you do this?

<comment><USER30> The way I do it is: map caps lock to Ctrl in System Preferences, then download this tool[1]. The setting you are looking for is 'Control_L to Control_L'. When you hold Control it acts as a modifier but if you tap it, it acts as escape.

[1] <http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/>

<comment><USER31> More details can be found in the ctrl/escape section in:

<http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> echo "set editing-mode vi" >> ~/.inputrc

This will turn on vi mode for anything that uses the readline library (there's a good chance your favorite database command line uses it and any other apps that also use the readline library)

</comment><comment> void-star I tried iTerm for about a year. After getting fed up watching it lag or crash all the time. I definitely went back to stock Terminal and haven't looked back.

<comment><USER8> It's definitely gotten better. I've been running the iTerm 2 beta release and it never crashes. I've literally never had a crash after I began using it.</comment></comment>


Type-safe Datalog in OCaml - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/c-cube/datalog/blob/master/README.rst <comment><USER2> Very cool.

If you haven't tried it implementing datalog is fun!

<comment><USER3> Is the implementation any good? Anyone knows a good implementation in any language?

<comment> c-cube Author here. The implementation is quite straightforward (both for the bottom- up seminaive fixpoint, and for the top-down full prolog with tabling). Good generalist in-memory implementations would be, afaik, [XSB Prolog]([http://xsb.sourceforge.net/](http://xsb.sourceforge.net/)) (by Warren & al., a full prolog with crazy tabling) and [Z3's fixpoint engine]([http://rise4fun.com/z3/tutorialcontent/fixedpoints](http://rise4fun.com/z3/tutorialcontent/fixedpoints)). The point of this (slightly old) OCaml lib is to have an embedded engine, something I needed a few years ago during my PhD.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Create a free photo sharing social network for your Startup - <AUTHOR> Consumers have become numb and cynical of most brands on social media. The constant barrage of highly-curated, highly-targeted, and polished posts are turning people away from these platforms. More people are taking refuge in online communities and messaging apps devoid of ads and self-promotion. So, how do brands reach these savvy and wary consumers in an authentic way on social media?
Authenticity.
Like consumers, brands worry about the content they share with the larger global audience. They must promote photos and videos that appeal to their core customers without alienating or offending others. Needless to say, brands also need channel(s) on social media to share most comfortably. Diverse and inclusive companies are starting to build private communities on social media where they can share more casually and engage their followers. In these private communities, brands are also able to crowdsource customer-generated content and receive feedback from their fans. All of this helps build trust and loyalty among consumers.
Our startup, Pixz, is focusing on building channels for individuals and companies to share together.
Pixz (https://pixzapp.com) is a private photo sharing app for groups and events that allows people to crowdsource photos in real-time without hashtags and uploads.
Main Features:
1. Create unlimited private groups for any occasion and/or audience 2. Take photos that share instantly & privately within group 3. Crowdsource photos from guests at events in real-time 4. Upload up to 5 photos at a time with separate captions 5. Schedule events to limit posts before or after an event 6. Share and download full-resolution photos from group members 7. Comment and like photos people share like other social networks 8. Discover groups and events near you
Pixz is a free download from the app stores.
Email me with questions & feedback: firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> There is very similar product on sale - "Imgur clone - Image sharing social network" \- [https://freelancercv.com/item/1/imguri-v2-image-social- netwo...](https://freelancercv.com/item/1/imguri-v2-image-social-network- imgur-clone)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool app. How do you plan to monitize?</comment>


Go by Example: Timers and Tickers - <AUTHOR> http://mmcgrana.github.com/2012/09/go-by-example-timers-and-tickers.html <comment><USER2> So what I personally find interesting about this code is how it just... asychronously kicks off arbitrary functions. It reads like scripting except it isn't.

I ask out of curiosity: are there other statically typed languages where you can do stuff like this? Java has Futures, but those are far more heavyweight. Clojure has concurrency constructs which are pretty close, but Clojure is dynamic. I only know a little bit of Haskell, so there might be something like this in there.

<comment> throwaway54-762 Rust (another "systems language of the future") has a lightweight syntax for spawned "tasks", I think. But I'm far from a Rust expert.

<comment><USER3> This is true. Rust also provides more compile time safety (a lot more actually), but it comes at the cost of complex semantics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used time.After recently to timeout a net.Dial call if it doesn't connect within 0.1s (it's an intranet app, connection time should be < 0.01s). While that solves my problem of not waiting too long for net.Dial, I wish there was a way to cancel a running go func() call somehow.

I want to read data from a remote port every second, with a 0.1s timeout. Any longer and I can treat it as a failure. If I put ReadRemotePort() in a forever loop with Sleep(1 second), even though the timeout will cause a failure as expected in 0.1s, there will be go func() threads still active until net.Dial has timed out. So at any given time, I could have 180 go func() calls just waiting for net.Dial to timeout at 3 minutes. I still haven't found a way to avoid this.

<comment><USER5> Do these sleeping goroutines add any measurable cost in terms of RAM or CPU?

<comment><USER6> From <http://research.swtch.com/gotour>

_Q. What are the limits to scalability with building a system with many goroutines?

The primary limit is the memory for the goroutines. Each goroutine starts with a 4kB stack and a little more per-goroutine data, so the overhead is between 4kB and 5kB. That means on this laptop I can easily run 100,000 goroutines, in 500 MB of memory, but a million goroutines is probably too much.

For a lot of simple goroutines, the 4 kB stack is probably more than necessary. If we worked on getting that down we might be able to handle even more goroutines. But remember that this is in contrast to C threads, where 64 kB is a tiny stack and 1-4MB is more common._

<comment><USER7> _But remember that this is in contrast to C threads, where 64 kB is a tiny stack and 1-4MB is more common._

Yeah not really. C threads normally have a fixed-size contiguous virtual memory space allocated to them, but the space they don't use is not actually consumed. You can even call madvise() to release memory on returning from a deep stack so you only actually "use" 4k of memory afterwards. The only significant resource consumed is virtual address space, which is effectively unlimited on 64-bit systems (why design a new language around 32-bits systems?). For that matter "C threads" could use segmented stacks as well if they wanted to.

But "goroutines" _also_ have to be concerned with the _total stack space_ they may use. For example, suppose those 100,000 goroutines were network servers and a hostile client could manipulate the connection to block the routine while it was consuming 400 KiB of stack. Now an attacker (or random confluence of events) can cause your program that normally averages 1% memory to use 100x as much as normal and run out of memory.

Space is almost never a reason to use coroutines over threads.

<comment><USER8> >For example, suppose those 100,000 goroutines were network servers and a hostile client could manipulate the connection to block the routine while it was consuming 400 KiB of stack.

hmm so you're saying a request causes 400KB to be allocated, and an attacker hits your server with 100k requests designed to cause your server to stall? The same criticism could be leveled against... any system where a requestor can allocate memory and stall a handler that is independent of the incoming request loop. How would this be different in a different concurrency model?

>Space is almost never a reason to use coroutines over threads.

I wouldn't necessarily say so. I have a polling service that uses a few thousand standing goroutines. The memory overhead for each individual goroutine is so low that I can just spawn them casually. Each goroutine only actually does work for a few seconds every few minutes; the vast majority of the time, each goroutine is spent sleeping. For this type of problem, I find that organizing things with goroutines and channels makes my code very easy to reason about. That, to me, is the biggest win of Go's concurrency model; that it's very easy to reason about.

<comment><USER4> > I find that organizing things with goroutines and channels makes my code > very easy to reason about. That, to me, is the biggest win of Go's > concurrency model; that it's very easy to reason about.

Absolutely agree. I just wish the net.Dial calls would let me specify a timeout and wouldn't hang around for 3mins in case something is down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> also time.After: <http://golang.org/pkg/time/#After></comment>


Up a Wombat's Freckle - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/australian-slang-humphries/ <comment><USER2> The author, Barry Humphries, is a fascinating character of many careers also known as Dame Edna (now retired).

<comment><USER3> Edna is his most famous character but I found Sir Les Patterson more entertaining and Sandy Stone much more interesting.

"Humphries in his Sandy Stone persona could "reduce an audience of young unbelieving cynics to tears with material that might have been written by James Joyce - delivered with wan, uncomprehending wonderment"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Stone_(character)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Stone_\(character\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The English have twenty-five ways of saying "sorry" and they don't mean one of them."

dinkum

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone from rural QLD, Australia, I feel like we might be losing some of these unique sayings in our vernacular over time. Though we are definitely still hanging onto our diminutives, especially those ending with o, ie and y (E.g. ambo, rego, arvo, servo, barbie, footy).

<comment><USER4> Have you ever noticed that in Aussie people tend to end stuff with 'o' more often? Nobody else in the world calls documentation 'doco' do they? It's not a hard and fast rule, granted. Pokies, blueys, I guess. For the imagery, I always loved 'flat out like a lizard...' or one of Dame Edna's: 'I feel like a shag on a rock' which always makes the poms smile.

<comment><USER6> No-one says doco for 'documentation', but they do all the time for 'documentary': "I saw a doco on sharks last night..."

We're definitely losing a lot of our colloquial terms, but not so much the way we speak. It's the nature of language after all, to change over time. I miss some of the terms, and a while back I intentionally started to use 'crikey' again (though that word itself is not hugely missed). Friends of mine, born and bred here, think it's hilariously quaint.

<comment><USER3> I've used doco for documentation though as you say it is almost exclusively means documentary.

<comment><USER7> for me docs = documentation and doco = documentary

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Of course, the use of the word "mate" is ubiquitous in Australia, and has > slowly lost its old, comradely meaning. Not seldom now it can have a hostile > ring, as in "Whadaya think you're doin', mate?"

'Mate' now usually either implies condescension or social distance (or cultural cringe), at least in the south eastern states. International stereotypes of Australian language are yet to catch up.

<comment><USER6> Jimeoin had a bit years ago where he talked about the three kinds of 'mate' there were. There's the short, clipped 'mate' for when you're pissed off (oh, mate, got a parking ticket). There's the medium 'mate' when you see your friend arrive at the pub (maate, maate, how are ya). And the long 'mate'... for when you're about to ask to borrow something (maaaaaaaaaaayte...) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Holy shit, I was born in the 'rat and had no idea we birthed chunder.

<comment><USER10> In the movie from the article, Barry explains the etymology of the term (coming from the sea journeys of the early settlers) before a performance of _Chunder in the Old Pacific Sea_.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1W0pP6A8BE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1W0pP6A8BE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> mate</comment>


Graph of terror alerts against elections - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/terror-alerts-vs-elections/

<comment><USER2> Author should probably have considered whether potential terrorists are as likely to use election time for attacks (Spain, Iraq, Afghanistan) as politicians are to use election time for alerts.</comment>


Show HN: Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://www.openhunt.co <comment><USER2> I will definitely use this over ProductHunt. I mean, for crying out loud, I signed up for PH just now to leave a comment and the first thing you get is "commenting is restricted to those users invited by others in the community". Yeah, so I have to supplicate myself to some random Internet stranger and beg permission just to comment on your site? Not happening...

<comment><USER3> I signed up for Product Hunt more than a year ago and still do not have commenting access. My product was submitted by someone and featured even! And I wasn't able to respond or interact with the "community" in any way.

<comment><USER4> I'm in the first 3k users and still can't comment. I was able to submit stuff at the beginning but they quickly limited this functionality to some group of users.

<comment><USER5> I asked someone I knew who already had comment access in the early days (my ID is not lower than yours though) and they shared one of their invites. Each of us from that got 3 comment invites to hand out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a bit of background:

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741827)

I've been a Product Hunt user from their initial HN launch and am still a big fan. They've made a very important impact in the tech scene. Open Hunt is an honest attempt at a community run alternative, tailored to giving / getting feedback, and finding very early stage stuff.

Would love your feedback!

<comment><USER7> As the chief complainer about Product Hunt, I appreciate that transparency is out front-and-center, with clear documentation on how your service aims to avoid the same pitfalls.

That being said, it reminds me of another service with the same goals: Ello, who _also_ said they were not going to take venture capital. We know how that turned out.

I mentioned in the threads that a Hacker News/PH competitor may not be better mechanically. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done there, particularly with ranking algorithms.

<comment><USER6> If it gets to the point where it needs revenue to handle the hosting bill, it'll be organized as a non-profit and the community will decide how to handle things (via ads or whatever else).

<comment><USER8> Personally - as feedback - I don't have problems with it being a for profit company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The idea is nice, but cynical me can't escape the idea that Product Hunt is successful in part because it is a mirror of reality, where capital and connections are the reigning currency. If you create a platform where capital and connections are deprioritized, you will not attract the people who have that in real life, making it less useful as a promotion venue.

<comment><USER10> And maybe it is the cynical contrarian in me, but I think the "real world" aspect of Product Hunt it what turned me off of the site before these issues even came to the forefront. It always seemed like an echo chamber were everyone was putting up a facade. Users seemed more concerned with the people behind products and networking with them than actually offering opinions of what was posted.

I find the more internet-like communities more natural. Sure, the top comment on a Show HN is often a critique. However I find that more interesting than the usual "Wow, another great product from John Developer. Signing up now." or the "Wow, great product. Here is why you should use the competing product that I work on." that you usually see on Product Hunt.

<comment><USER11> I hadn't thought of it this way before.

Sure, it's slightly depressing that the top comment on a HN thread always seems to always be a takedown (especially when the post cites data and the comment is 'From my experience..') but the alternative is pretty terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love this! "Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls" when I went to log in with Twitter. Good problem for you to have, I look forward to you working this out so I can participate.

Honestly, I only signed up for Twitter to join Product Hunt. That was a huge disappointment when I found out that having an account didn't mean anything. This will be a pleasant change, it's about time.

<comment><USER13> > Honestly, I only signed up for Twitter to join Product Hunt.

Yeah it's quirky that both sites force use of a Twitter account.

<comment><USER5> Not defending it, but at the time they launched being able to seed from your Twitter social graph was a jetpack for improving the quality of experience, and vital to building relevant notifications on day 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd join this.

It's asking for scary permissions:

> Read Tweets from your timeline.

> See who you follow, and follow new people.

> Update your profile.

> Post Tweets for you.

Please, consider adding more options, or explaining how you use those permissions. (For example, you can do what you like to my facebook wall.)

EDIT: Lack of public posting is an interesting choice. It doesn't feel like much of a community. I can see that public comments risks undue negativity or aggressive feedback.

<comment><USER6> Oops, that's a mistake. We meant to do read only. Fixing now

<comment><USER15> Can we create an account without twitter or FB in general?

<comment><USER6> yep, that's definitely on the table. its a community run project, so please add a github issue and we can start the discussion about pros/cons

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You should take a look at lobsters. They solve a lot of the transparency issues that some have with HN and ProductHunt.

"Some other link aggregation sites are operated by corporate entities which may have significant financial incentive to censor or artificially promote the links and discussion that relate to those entities, their investments, or their competitors. Some of these sites have had moderators of popular sub- forums banned after it became known that they were being paid by 3rd party companies seeking special treatment of their submitted stories.

All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about which moderator it was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions.

All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and does not artificially penalize or prioritize users or domains. Per-tag hotness modifiers do affect all stories with those tags, but these modifiers are made public and usually used to shorten the life of meta-discussions. If certain domains have to be banned from being submitted due to spam, the list will be made publicly available.

If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile will indicate which moderator banned them and why. There will be no hidden or childish "shadow banning" or "hellbanning" of users popular on some other sites.

The source code to this site is made available under a 3-clause BSD license for viewing, auditing, forking, or contributing to. This code is always up to date with what is running in production on this website.

Public stats are available for site requests, comments submitted, stories submitted, and users created."

[https://lobste.rs/about](https://lobste.rs/about)

[https://lobste.rs/moderations](https://lobste.rs/moderations)

<comment><USER7> Granted, the "sign up by invitation" policy also is _the primary reason why Product Hunt has become such an elitist club_. Using an invite-system to counteract that would be self-defeating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So who's going to be the first one to submit this to Product Hunt? :D

<comment><USER18> I does it. So meta. Much huntings. [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/openhunt](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/openhunt)

<comment><USER2> Now somebody should submit ProductHunt to OpenHunt!

<comment><USER19> [https://www.openhunt.co/#open=product- hunt](https://www.openhunt.co/#open=product-hunt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's ridiculous the way they hand out the ability to make comments. These days, the comments are so watered down many of them are mostly useless. "Tell us about your process"..."tell us more about onboarding". Comments are filled with marketers and friend of friends egging things along without substance. It's hurting the site - if they don't see this they are really missing the boat.

That being said, it's sad to see people rip on others sites/ideas blatantly. OpenHunt should quickly come up with an original design and find something unique in their approach.

<comment><USER21> The democratic element is the unique thing about their approach, isn't it? Their view is that by giving the community control, the site will be more interesting than something that is tightly controlled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love the idea. But a positive part abut PH is that I can view the discussion on the product by people (sometimes) more experienced than me, and then decide if it is worth my time to install/test out the product. If feedback on OH is private that angle is removed.

But definitely back the idea - PH has become too undemocratic, and its obvious that if you don't have the right connections your product will never surface. I know people who've reached out to "influencers" on PH to have their product hunted by them.

</comment><comment><USER5> You're #1 on Hacker News and Product Hunt today with an app whose repo was created 12 days ago and your server is not down. That's commendable in itself.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tried to join:

Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls

<comment><USER24> Gotta love an open platform like Twitter....

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Could you please make the description text darker for each listing? Light gray text is very hard to read against a white background.

<comment><USER6> Agreed! tracked via [https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/33](https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/33)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm really happy to see this. As the solo-founder of a bootstrapped start up nowhere near Silicone Valley, things like Product Hunt can make me feel like a complete outsider.

Quick question: PH wants people to sign up with their personal Twitter account, rather than a company one, is that the case here? I never use my personal account, so would prefer to be able to sign up using @bug_muncher

Also, I love the "You reached the beginning!" message at the bottom, not sure why, but it really made me smile :)

</comment><comment><USER27> I also signed up for Product Hunt 1+ years ago and don't have the ability to comment even though I regularly share things on Twitter, purchase products, curate lists and interact as much as possible.

+1 for any alternative system.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you are naming it "Open Hunt", clearly as a jab at PH, you are giving it more attention than you should, given your mission, IMO.

<comment><USER29> FAQ states that Open Hunt is just temporary. Probably to draw people in.

<comment><USER28> Duly noted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is pretty cool - I notice you're building on top of Rails. Do consider using the source code of lobste.rs (which is like HN but open source). It has quite a bit if community development behind it and I daresay can be quickly adapted into the product hunt model.

[https://github.com/jcs/lobsters](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters)

I'm trying to build in elasticsearch support in lobsters for a personal project - it currently uses sphinx. But it could be pretty cool if you can use that as a starting point.

</comment><comment><USER31> Did you consider using [http://www.telescopeapp.org/](http://www.telescopeapp.org/) to build this open version?

</comment><comment><USER32> Without comments it doesn't feel like a community

<comment><USER6> Agreed. We'll probably add comments (in addition to private feedback for product owners). Just need a bit of time. Maybe by monday? ;)

<comment><USER32> Awesome

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I will be using this because I think Product Hunt can't manage their waiting lists. I mean I've been waiting for a long time to be removed from the waiting list. I've also been doing their "suggestions" to get a full membership. But, I get nothing. Hopefully Open Hunt gets a stronger community.

BTW: your api calls for registration has exceeded

</comment><comment><USER34> Great idea and execution; already discovered a super-useful service, Bulk Resize Photos.

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug: when one clicks on the "comments" line, it opens a right-side panel for the current item; if one clicks another comments line, the right-side panel is updated with the new item => so far so good.

BUT, when one clicks on _another_ item while the right-side panel is open, it doesn't update said panel; it opens a new tab to the item's website, but the panel doesn't change, so that when one comes back to OH, the panel doesn't match the last consulted item.

It's probably not an easy fix, because, what should happen when one opens more than one item?

However, since the comments pane is super simple, maybe it would make sense to open it _under_ the corresponding item instead of to the side, so that it's visually related to the correct item instead of being in a generic location?

My 2 cents. Very cool initiative anyways.

</comment><comment><USER35> Congratulations, I hope this gets the traction it deserves.

Disrupting the disrupters.

</comment><comment><USER36> I like the idea. why comments are not public?

<comment><USER6> 2 reasons initially:

\- prevent too much spam, moderation workload

\- encourage honest (harsh) feedback that the product owner can take action on.

also if the same feedback comes in twice from 2 diff people, thats a great indicator. public comments do not allow that (since most people wont duplicate a comment if they already see someone else saying it)

<comment><USER7> Those are both very bad reasons for making commenting private.

1\. A downvote system is sufficient to catch spammers, with explicitly moderation needed for edge cases. (And those edge cases would be applicable even in private commenting)

2\. Harsh feedback is discouraged on Product Hunt _because_ of the elitism. Having comments public will not discourage it. (C.f. Hacker News)

<comment><USER6> oops, i forgot to mention the real reason: lack of time for v1 :)

adding a real commenting system is on the table for sure, ill create a github issue for it and we can discuss with the community about pros/cons

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems that one problem with a purely community-driven site like Open Hunt is that the overwhelming majority of people are interested in publishing to it vs. consuming from it. Sure, you might browse it to see if anything there is interesting, but most of the enthusiasm will come from those seeking a channel for their product. Hence, the audience itself vs the publisher set is limited in comparison to "that other site".

OTOH, the latter site is presumably visited by potential investors and others who have a financial interest in consuming what's published.

Additionally, without "throttling", you have a ton of stuff featured, adding to the skew. Thus, much of what's submitted has only one or two votes. People are primarily posting and moving on.

Or, am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> 100% agree that this is a problem. And no silver bullet solution. Product Hunt actually took a perfectly reasonable approach to this (heavy curation), but Open Hunt exists in order to try to tackle the problem using a different path.

We have some ideas on it already. Possibly some sort of queuing system where you can schedule it to post in the future, with a # of slots reserved every day for the queued up in advance ones.

But this topic will take a lot of discussion, and we're hoping we can get lots of different opinions on the matter before deciding on a course.

In the meantime, pure voting should bring the best products to the top, in a daily list. We'll also give products a chance to resubmit after a certain period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really like how you keep updating the site throughout the day based on the feedback you are getting here. Also, the suggestions made by users going directly to the creator of a project is pretty awesome. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER39> Within a couple weeks, this is going to need curated categorization of products. At the highest level, I'd categorize as: a. physical product b. installed software product c. web service product d. hybrid software+service product

Could be even broader. Or use tagging. You probably wouldn't look in the above categories for performance events, dining out, or phone sex. Must decide how wide a net you wish to cast, and what ontological approaches to use. But this, in my opinion, is where it gets interesting.

</comment><comment><USER40> Where is the feedback shown? I have submitted "Too" and it says one person has left feedback but I can't see it anywhere (I am logged in with the account that submitted).

<comment><USER6> Since anyone can submit a product (not necessarily their own), we are adding a verification step (email to [any]@yourdomain.com). We'll have other verification steps as well to make those feedback items available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> 1) This is pretty cool

2) I think this and Product Hunt can co-exist

3) I'm interested in learning about how other members think Open Hunt can go from "open community" to "sustainable community"?

</comment><comment><USER42> I find myself using it already - great job!

Edit: The subtitle font is way too washed out. i struggle to read it. Also some submissions are not "products" \- is that appropriate?

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm getting this error when trying to sign up with Twitter.

"Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls"

<comment><USER6> fixed now. my fault

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I signed up and submitted actually.

I am curious, why are comments/feedback all hidden? I would certainly like to read those - even if they are made anonymous.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can you please add a RSS feed?

<comment><USER6> good suggestion! I'll create a github issue for it

<comment><USER45> Thanks! I didn't know OH is on Github, otherwise I would post an issue myself :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Will be interesting to see the quality of products from both sites. Will definitely be using Open Hunt from now on, then go over to PH to see the discussion on the products. I have no idea why they made the comment section private. That's the only downside I see to the site. Everything else I like.

</comment><comment><USER47> Make sure you guys get a daily newsletter going out asap. I don't have inside information, but I'd guess it drives a _ton_ of PH's daily returnee traffic. I for one know I won't be checking this every day, but I would read something in my inbox every morning (same with PH)

<comment><USER6> agreed! tracked via [https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/16](https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/16)

<comment><USER29> Don't do daily... or atleast let people sign up for daily/weekly/monthly. The PH daily emails were too much. I already get enough crap I don't read, it just makes me resent the site if I feel they are spamming me too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> For those who would like to launch their own version of HN or PH, would love for you to check out HelloBox - something we've been working on for awhile.

[https://www.hellobox.co](https://www.hellobox.co)

[Now that I think about it, I should put this on the OpenHunt!]

</comment><comment><USER49> Getting stuck on "Completing login..." screen, with the URL of [https://www.openhunt.co/login/callback](https://www.openhunt.co/login/callback) \- just sits there and nothing happens. Using stock iPad.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, looks like a bug. I'll log it in github issues and try to repro. Can you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com? I'll reach out with questions if I hit snags trying to repro it.

Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Uh oh: Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls

<comment><USER51> [https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/15](https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/15)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> For upcoming PH excluded startups, this is amazing, good job jaques, live long and prosper!

</comment><comment><USER53> Hey, this is really cool! Any chance you could add a daily summary email (like PH and some other similar sites have), or am I just missing it? That's a really easy way for me to keep up with what's been featured.

</comment><comment><USER54> Problem will be number of posts per day. There is gonna be huge number of products everyday and some gonna buried down not because of there are not good but there are not so visible - timezone problem.

<comment><USER55> What about a system where, if a product gets a certain amount of upvotes, it gets pinned to the top. So maybe there could be 10 or so products that get pinned to the top each day because they hit a threshold of upvotes, with the rest battling for a spot on the pinned list every day

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It should have paid as well as organic otherwise there's no business model and it's just a small rebellion that might be abandoned for lack of income.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. Can you elaborate?

We'd like to build something sustainable, and to start that just means building the community. Monetization concerns would be an open question that I think the community could decide on later.

Would love to learn more about what you have in mind.

<comment><USER56> Just the same as google. Organic is what you have. Paid ads on the side or above - for startups who want their company name to remain in the limelight beyond their one day of organic listing.

FWIW I think the name is pretty ordinary. "OpenHunt" just means "copy of ProductHunt" and "open" means nothing except to try to have a position against PH. What you have has no identity of its own.

<comment><USER6> Agreed! As mentioned in the FAQ ([http://openhunt.co/faq](http://openhunt.co/faq)), we intend to rename the site (and use the community to decide on the real name).

<comment><USER57> Take this with the caveat that I don't know much about how OSS works.

I think you should step up and make OH in _your_ vision. This wishy-washy stuff on name, public comments, etc being up to the future community--I think _you_ need to set the standard there, and then have it open to modification later.

<comment><USER56> I agree. There's "fixing the PH democracy issue" and then there's going to far down the "hippy free love everything is a community all decisions are joint and open and everyone's opinion counts". The hippy path is a recipe for stagnation and failure - vision is needed and decisions, not abdication of responsibility to "the community".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Just tried emailing you at the address listed on your site and got an undeliverable. Definitely interested in helping contribute.

</comment><comment><USER59> What platform are you using behind this?

<comment><USER6> ruby on rails - take a look at the source: [https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt](https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> nice alternative to PH, i believe its a good chance to smaller projects to be on spotlight.

why OpenHunt is good for PH;

\- It will be a PH's moderation app, every nice project can be submitted by PH's trusted members. \- PH can get valuable feedback from this thread. \- PH can integrate every feature from OH

</comment><comment><USER61> I don't like that the comments aren't public. I'm finding it way too easy to be short.

</comment><comment><USER54> Interestingly, no news coverage yet for Open Hunt. May be, conflict of interest with Product hunt.

</comment><comment><USER32> Disappointed by the twitter only sign up but I am still going to join because I like the idea.

</comment><comment><USER62> Please fix the modal on mobile -- ios9 it seems impossible to get rid of the modal :)

<comment><USER6> fixing this ASAP. thanks for the heads up

tracked via [https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/13](https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/13)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Good ideas in retrospect always seem so obvious at the time. Love the idea OP.

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow, love it!! Hope you guys kick the producthunt mafia out of existence.

</comment><comment><USER65> PH team's reactions must be like :

Day 0 : Yeah other 'PH is crap' HN/blog/medium post

Day 2 : Oh so someone 'anonymous' is building a competitor.. They are having a Google form.. How noobish

Today : haha Oh look they copied our design . how original

Future : oh we need to pivot

</comment><comment><USER2> And just to make things even more meta:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/openhunt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/openhunt/)

(If somebody affiliated with OpenHunt wants control of that sub, just message me).

</comment><comment><USER66> My suggestion for a name: "Gather"

or some iteration thereof...

</comment><comment><USER67> Great job.

High time you add pagination on the landing page now. :)

</comment><comment><USER68> tried to sign up and got this after twitter auth:

Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls

<comment><USER6> fixed now

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Nice, but will wait until comments are public

</comment><comment><USER70> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER71> I wish there was RSS feed.

<comment><USER6> Great suggestion! We're planning on it: tracked via [https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/32](https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt/issues/32)

<comment><USER71> Good news! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> how long did it take you to put the site together?

<comment><USER6> ~48hrs across 3 people.

coincidentally i help organize a 48hr hackathon called nodeknockout.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It was about time

</comment><comment><USER74> how do you plan to filter spammy links?

<comment><USER75> Isn't that what upvote and downvote is for? Spam gets downvoted and good products upvoted. Automatic spam detection can help too, there are plenty of tools that can help here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Will ProductHunt shutdown OpenHunt with power of law?

</comment><comment><USER76> +100</comment>


How Linux was born, as told by Linus Torvalds himself - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2015/08/how-linux-was-born-as-told-by-linus-torvalds-himself/

<comment><USER2> I remember reading a book called "Just For Fun" that I think he and a reporter wrote together. It was a long time ago, but I remember it being one of the things that really got me into using linux even more than I had previously.</comment>


Cash is for criminals: Why we should scrap big notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-21/world-awash-with-cash-fuels-illegal-activity/7933250 <comment><USER2> Basically, he's mandating the adoption of electronic currency adaption for every business, no matter how large or how small. Want to open up a restaurant? Better accept credit cards and the 1-2% haircut they take off the top of every sale.

It's also every authoritarian's wet dream.

If everything can be tracked, everything will be tracked.

"Oh, we see you've been buying quite a bit of ice cream on your trips to the store. Your health insurance rates just went up. In addition, we'd like to chat with you about the 3 gun magazines you've just bought."

EDIT:

And restricting the denominations of notes doesn't seem to stop cash transactions. It just makes things into a gigantic pain in the ass. Look at Venezuela. The highest denominated note is worth ~10 cents, and most transactions are in cash.

<comment><USER3> It's already like this. They just want more. Because you really can't have enough control. You want 5,000 in cash? Well let us just report you to a government agency that will monitor you for the next little while to make sure you're not doing anything nefarious. Each time I visit A&W and then quit, they send me coupons to get me back. Same thing with the liquor shop and I drink a single Crabbies every month.

<comment><USER2> You're missing the point entirely.

> You want 5,000 in cash? Well let us just report you to a government agency > that will monitor you for the next little while to make sure you're not > doing anything nefarious.

Bullshit. You can easily change/withdraw money in casinos to your heart's content, up to either 6k or 10k dollars PER transaction, if you remove more than that, paperwork gets involved

> Each time I visit A&W and then quit, they send me coupons to get me back. > Same thing with the liquor shop and I drink a single Crabbies every month.

Yes, do you pay with cash or credit card, and do you use a rewards card? If you pay with credit card or use a rewards card, that's exactly what you're complaining about. I pay in cash for most minor transactions like that, without a rewards card, and nothing of the sort has happened to me. How would it? They have no information about me.

If you're voluntarily using a credit card or rewards programs to save a few bucks or build up airplane miles, yeah you kinda made the trade off.

A cashless society legislates the tradeoff for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Singapore has the largest notes in circulation, last i checked (S$8000).

People who want to ban cash don't care about crime. They care about control and management of things that are (by definition) not their business.

To these people, i say: ban bitcoin and gold, and then i might care what you have to say.

<comment><USER5> Your point about the anti-correlation of large denomination notes and crime is described here by Sovereign Man:

[http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/an-interesting- perspectiv...](http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/an-interesting-perspective- on-the-war-on-cash-20526/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great news for those holding gold reserves. If all the illicit transfers of funds have to shift to gold then people will have to buy gold in order to do that, thereby increasing demand and also price.

Unfortunately, a rapidly rising gold price would cause more investors to put their money in gold rather than other investments, like venture capital, so in the long run, the net effect of getting rid of large currency bills would be to hurt the economy itself. This is why FREEDOM is always the best policy. When governments try to "engineer" a specific outcome they always screw it up, because they grossly miscalculate the knock-on second order effects of their policies.

Governments will always screw up monetary policy of every kind. For example, the only thing that should set interest rates is the market. The federal reserve has conjured so much money into existence by artificially keeping interest rates low, that we now sit on a $20T of debt in his country. It's inter-generational theft plain and simple. We are spending money that doesn't belong to us. It belongs to the next generation of americans, and you are complicit in the theft if you voted democrat. Thank god you dems lost the election you blithering ass hats.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm rather astonished at seeing this from Rogoff. Certainly cash does facilitate crime, but it appears he's overlooking the costs of a society where anonymous or casual transactions are impossible, or basically saying that the economic value of privacy is $0.

</comment><comment><USER8> Upvoted due to strong disagreement, to try to draw more attention to this view.

<comment><USER7> Likewise. Delegitimizing possession of cash would be an extremely dangerous step for any government to take.

<comment><USER9> The United States is already uncomfortably close. To pick a news article at random: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/25/how-o...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/25/how- oklahoma-cops-took-53000-from-a-burmese-christian-band-a-church-in-omaha-and- an-orphanage-in-thailand/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Beyond the more heinous crimes of human and drug trafficking and terrorism, ...

So prostitution and drugs. IOW, black market stuff. Things we are not supposed to be doing. Social problems that we attempt to resolve through law enforcement. Oh, and terrorism, even though that doesn't really make any sense.

> ... some earners hoard their money to avoid tax.

That doesn't really make any sense either. You need to use cash to do transactions to avoid sales tax and get paid for work in cash to avoid income taxes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ah, this is the same Ken Rogoff of the Reinhart-Rogoff fraud. The guy just doesn't know how to stop being wrong, does he?

</comment><comment><USER12> The day the easiest way to buy anything will be electronically, is the day cryptocurrencies will prevail.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm more concerned about counterfeiting. The benefit of new, counterfeiting- resistant notes is severely limited if you keep accepting the old, now-easily- counterfeited notes for eternity.

</comment><comment><USER14> The real reason governments would ever adopt this: to remove the cash-in-hand economy.</comment>


Software Development Automation with Scripting Languages - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/software-development-automation-scripting-languages <comment><USER2> Summary: "Yay Perl! <throws up pom-poms and kicks up one leg>"</comment>


Louis Gray Joins Google as Product Marketing Manager - <AUTHOR> http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/08/google-1-more-im-joining-google-monday.html

<comment><USER2> Great work recruiting from Google.</comment>


Interviewing with YC [2005] - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001679?repost

<comment><AUTHOR> This had been submitted before, but being as it was 985 days ago, I thought it was worth repeating.

I find it interesting to compare this interview, when YC was first starting up, to the most recent set of posts about YC interviews- It's a much more casual, less institutionalized environment. This was also back when YC ran Boston offices ;)

<comment><USER2> Interviews used to be enormously long. I think Jessica said they were 45 minutes, though I'm not sure I believe that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Man, so much has changed since then.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there any explanation for calling Jessica 4 of 4? Is that a Seven of Nine reference or something?

<comment><USER5> She was anonymous among the YCers for a long time.

<comment><USER6> Why?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Swivel – easily create an appealing and embeddable careers page - <AUTHOR> https://getswivel.com/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I'm one of the co-founders of Swivel. We noticed that small companies usually don't have an appealing careers page, but it's the first point of contact for most job seekers. Companies can use Swivel to quickly create and embed a careers page right into their website so they can provide an appealing brand to prospective employees. Please let us know what you think, thanks!</comment>


CGDL: Compact Gradient Definition Language - GradientServer.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.GradientServer.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something that I just put together, the result of about 6 months of mulling over the concept. This site explains just what CGDL is, showcases the gradient server rendering engine (all the gradient color fades are generated from CGDL), and incorporates a CGDL editor that lets you create and edit CGDL strings.

Please check it out and let me know what you think. And if you look at the source, you'll see some other clever tricks that you might want to discuss as well.

I am also considering the application of CGDL to print, video, flash, desktop apps, OSs, etc. Pretty much anywhere you can use a gradient fade.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Flash/Actionscript does have good gradient support, and I know that Actionscipr allows for expressing the details in code, but, what I'm thinking of is something more compact and portable. For example, you come up with a gradient, and can then easily use it in Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, or another program.

Colors are very portable when in hex notation. This is along the same lines. Something that you can email to someone and they can just paste it into their editor and use it.

Thanks for the question!

</comment><comment><USER2> Why? Flash has adequate gradient support.</comment>


Show HN: MazeBattles.com – Race to solve generated mazes - <AUTHOR> http://www.mazebattles.com/ <comment><USER2> Love the idea! Execution could be much better:

1\. Don't make people watch the generation of the maze. Why on god's green earth do I need to wait a full minute to play the game? It takes less time to solve the maze.

2\. Allow for random matchmaking

3\. Let me hold down a directional key to move multiple steps in the same direction. Feels like a lot of button mashing without this functionality.

Hope to see this grow!

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, carefully watching the maze generation helps while trying to solve it. SO I'd actually leave that, it's part of the game

<comment><USER4> I think it helps too much, so I vote to remove it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would like it if the arrow keys worked, in addition to WASD, and if holding a key down would continue to move the avatar.

That said, nice project!

<comment><USER6> Yes, WASD is great if you have a QWERTY keyword, not really if you have anything else.

<comment><USER7> Qwerty is the standard. Especially for any type of game. I don't think it's constructive to try to get developers with limited time to cater towards a minscule portion of the population who has self selected into using nonstandard layouts. Also most people in that population have the knowledge to adjust their settings to work with was.

<comment><USER8> Qwerty is not the standard of anything except the US. In fact, qwerty is not even a standard, there are many different qwerty layouts.

Do you know that UK and US keyboards are completely different, for example they have all the punctuation characters in different places.

By the way, people don't select their keyboard layouts, they just happen to have whatever they have and I guarantee you that hardly anybody knows how to change settings or want to.

<comment><USER9> Yes. For reference:

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

[https://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml- mua/test/kbd-...](https://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml-mua/test/kbd- all.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maze generation animation in Chromium takes multiple minutes. It was almost bearable in Firefox but still longer than it needs to be. Seeing the generator "solve" the maze and then having to wait multiple seconds while it generates other branches doesn't seem right.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure if it was just my particular game, but I did find it very very simple. There weren't a lot of avenues to 'mess up', so to speak, and the algorithmic generation of the maze, while sorta cool to see, could stand to be sped up (if possible). Perhaps there was a way to skip it I didn't see.

Overall, though, pretty cool! :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This was ok but as a single player the maze generated was mostly about wasting the user's time rather than make the player make significant choices; Red herrings need to be more challenging imho.

Also having to press multiple time to head in the same direction was painful.

Quit took me to localhost:3000 ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the feedback :D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice project, enjoyed a quick game!

Heads up, when I clicked quit, it redirected me to localhost:3000, might not be the intended behavior?

</comment><comment><USER14> I could create a maze much more quickly on a Z8000 in the 80s. How can this be so slow? I remember I used the maximum spanning tree algorithm because I had to learn it. Not optimal for this problem but it yields nice mazes.

</comment><comment><USER15> From a previous submission I see it's open source (under ISC license) [https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com](https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> This pretty neat. I liked the visual aspect of the maze generation but how annoyingly long it is depends on random chance. For me it was just a little too drawn out (Firefox). Anyway this is a good implementation of a cool concept. Matchmaking over socket would be cool but I have a feeling that's not what you're trying to show off here.

Good work, I'd be very curious to see the code.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool concept but when you see the maze being generated you get to see the path drawn between start and finish right in front of you? So it's less of a maze and more of a memory exercise to me

</comment><comment><USER18> I clicked "single player", watched "generating maze.." screen for 10 seconds, closed the tab. Not willing to wait that much just to try something out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not sure what's up for me...on Chrome and ended up only being able to use W+S. A+D didn't work, so I wasn't able to try the entire game out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The github repository is: [https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu](https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu)

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com](https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Add a python interpreter. Let me code-solve it. haha!

<comment><USER21> What's an open source python interpreter you can add in this case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> D key doesn't work on my Pixelbook. W and S work as expected, moving up and down, but D does nothing.

<comment><USER22> Never mind, it works flawlessly. A Chrome addon was causing the problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's the average completion time of a singleplayer maze?

</comment><comment><USER24> Share it on /r/WebGames, they enjoy games like this.

</comment><comment><USER25> These DFS-type mazes are pretty easy to solve...

</comment><comment><USER26> click quit -> [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000)

</comment><comment><USER27> This is great. Thank you!</comment>


Tesla Co-Founder Sues CEO Elon Musk For Slander And Breach Of Contract - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/11/tesla-founder-sues-ceo-elon-musk-for-slander-and-breach-of-contract/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a good example of why you need to think twice about getting investors. The guy suing him was actually the founder of Tesla, the Musk dude was just an early investor who hijacked the company and threw out the founder over an engineering disagreement.

<comment><USER2> _the Musk dude was just an early investor who hijacked the company_

didn't he hijack paypal, too?</comment></comment>