Space Monkey Dropbox Competitor Wins Launch, Has Already Raised $750K - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/space-monkey-launch/

<comment><USER2> There seem to be several companies in the "Dropbox competitor" space. A few have been funded by VC heavy hitters, so clearly there's something to this. But I don't really get it.

Can someone help me understand this trend? What makes a company feel like they can win here?

It seems like the benefit these companies are offering largely fall into these categories:

        1. peer to peer/distributed storage
        2. "value" more storage at cheaper prices
        3. anonymity / better security

While those all sound good, what I'm trying to figure out is how you make a business out of this. For the sake of argument, I'm going to take the "ugh, don't do this" side.

These aren't pain points for Dropbox users. To each point above, in turn:

1\. Most users don't care about how their files are stored, they just want them to be available. It doesn't matter to them that they're distributed or that its peer to peer. They just want them to show up whenever they click their shared folder.

2\. This doesn't seem like a winnable race by selling more storage capacity. 98% of dropbox users don't use the free 2GB. 2% of them happily pay for more space. Sure "twice the amount for the same price" sounds compelling, but the only people you are going to reach are either (a) users who are unhappily paying [small subset, and the friction of switching services is still high], (b) users who would otherwise go over the free barrier but don't want to pay [small set, again, very high friction of switching services], and (c) people who are not Dropbox users and are comparing the Dropbox vs Space Money/BitCasa/etc side by side and decide to go with the "more space" option [hard to win this initially because Dropbox has rave reviews and you're unheard of, you have to be as good as Dropbox at reaching out to everyone, you probably won't have Dropbox's dead simple UI]

3\. Anonymity / Better security -- Also something that sounds good, but not a pain point for the majority of internet users. The class of users for which anonymous file storage or next level security is an issue is (a) very small, (b) overlaps heavily with the "I'd rather implement this myself" computing class. This market isn't big. Again, there's a fighting shot when a user with no cloud storage compares both services side by side, but you still have to match Dropbox's reach.

Dropbox was selling EASE. They have a really easy process, the product "just works", they are better at reaching their potential customers (more practice/lots of raving fans), support more platforms (I've been waiting for beta access for Linux for one of these for BitCasa for months), and most importantly: _for the huge majority of internet users the additional benefits are irrelevant_. Dropbox's win is serving a huge class of users and making most of them extremely happy. Another note is that the type of users who want to use these services for "infinite storage" are also very expensive users to support. If you're building a business you should prefer to serve the largest base of users who cost you the smallest amount of money but are willing to pay the same amount. Not, "a highly specialized, expensive user class that is highly price sensitive".

750k isn't going to be enough to overcome these hurdles. The only rationale I can come up with for VCs is that they are essentially writing it off as a lottery ticket in their portfolio.

<comment><USER3> _> 2\. This doesn't seem like a winnable race by selling more storage capacity. 98% of dropbox users don't use the free 2GB. _

This is exactly the difference between Dropbox and SpaceMonkey. a few GB vs 1TB. People use Dropbox only for syncing a few files because the space is so limited. Dropbox is essentially a replacement for your USB flash drive. SpaceMonkey is positioning themselves as a replacement for your media server.

So I don't think you can't dismiss the storage space point by saying that "98% of Dropbox users don't use all the space". Because people would use Dropbox for other things if you could store your entire digital library in there.

Personally I'd love to replace my external TB hard drive that holds all my music, photos, videos, etc. with a magic box that keeps it all backed up securely in the cloud.

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree. I've been waiting for Bitcasa, which I intend to use as my media drive, but its not competing for Dropbox dollars for me. I guess maybe i'm just saying "Distributed large data storage is not a dropbox competitor" (the article and other instances I've heard of position these services as Dropbox competitors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As much as I love the idea of a turnkey home server, I can't help thinking that will be Apple's next move. Some of us just won't use iCloud due to legal issues. If the gov't suddenly has an exigent need for, say, photos taken on a certain day, time, and place, their snooping won't be limited to plucking those from iCloud. They'll grab _all_ the photos stored and sort through them afterwards. And that without legally having to serve search warrants to each individual user. I don't want my privacy and rights violated like that. So I'd like "iCloud for the Home," with a Mac mini that is where I put it and where the gov't needs to serve _me_ personally with a warrant to access the data.

Also, despite this company's assurance about encryption, hell, the way Anonymous has cracked open things out there, I'm not about to trust anyone with even fractions of my data, especially since I think many Anonymous members will scoop this up and get busy hacking it.

[typo edit]

<comment> k-mcgrady As far as I can tell all data is encrypted before it is sent out on the network and the decryption key is only stored locally. Nothing is perfectly secure but SpaceMonkey seems to do a good job.

<comment><USER5> If the key was only stored locally, you wouldn't be able to restore the data in case of hardware failure. I would guess that Space Monkey itself has access to the key and the data.

<comment><USER6> > _"Each file is encrypted with a user's private key using industry standard > encryption primitives including AES-128 and RSA-4096 encryption.

> Your data is still accessible even if you are outside of your home and your > home ISP experiences an outage."_

In light of the RSA reference it seems like they encrypt every thing with a user pubkey and a company pubkey. Without the company pubkey there would be no way to access your data when you were not at home.

<comment><USER5> Maybe they could use a key derived from your password but you're probably right.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I follow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A great example of how positioning is everything. It's hard to believe that a startup saying "we lease an inexpensive NAS box running crashplan for $10/mo" would be winning events or getting press like that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Given that it's P2P, I'd expect there to be extra bandwidth and storage cost that is reserved for other users. If it is wholly P2P, then I would assume that possibly only 400GB (1/2 + redundancy for network failure) of that 1TB can be used for your data, if they have centralised backup servers then more. For the former this system would only be reliable if the data is used as a backup for files that don't change that often, and that other peers have a fast enough upload rate.

This service does not seem any different from the other handful of P2P backup solutions [1] except for the included hardware. Maybe the difference is as a standalone network drive it would more difficult to restrict upload rate or switch off the program when you don't want to upload data.

Also it is uncertain whether multiple drives are needed for the thing to work in separate locations, e.g. transferring files from office to home.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_ser...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services)

</comment><comment><USER9> Huh. This reminds me of the FreedomBox[1] effort.

I was always under the impression FreedomBox would never catch on because 1) they don't know how to make the software attractive and enticing and 2) requiring users to have some specialized hardware acting as a server is a big hurdle for most people. Also, and perhaps this is the biggest problem, the alternative centralized and cloud services are good enough for the vast majority of people.

Space Monkey looks cool but I'm not sure they're cool enough to overcome these obstacles. Also peer-to-peer provides its own weird drawbacks (similar with Skype) in that your home network is now being used as someone else's infrastructure. For a backup service data usage is going to be very high.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox>

<comment><USER10> I can imagine a world in, say 10yrs time, where parents warn their kids of the risks of social networking the way I was once warned about 'talking to strangers' (or this generation about 'strangers on the Internet').

Perhaps in that world, families can simply plug a box in the wall at home and that's how they deal with email, photos, shared calendars, with different (private) profiles for each family member. Family members can 'graduate' to their own private box when they leave home (eg Uni) and simply take it all with them.

I can also imagine a world where people don't do any of the above. We won't really know until we get there, but I'm pleased that there people trying different things to find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds exactly like what CrashPlan does, only you don't need to buy a special drive to use CrashPlan, and if the remote drive you're backing up to is a friend or family member, you can do it all for free.

While I'm not saying there's not room in the space for multiple companies, CrashPlan sounds like a more-attractive alternative than being required to buy a special hard drive or pay a monthly fee to use this type of service.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am a satisfied Dropbox customer with the 100 GB service at $20/month. Having my files hosted with this one vendor carries with it enough concern about security. The prospect of having my files spread across a P2P network landing who-knows-where is another matter altogether, and not appealing to me in the least, assurances of encryption notwithstanding. This particular 'cloud' model elicits a _no thanks_ from me at this time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry for adding another comment here, but I just wondered about Pogo Plug. Weren't they offering people basically this, but using their own hard drive?

<comment><USER13> While it is slightly different - it is not dramatically different than Pogo Plug.

All of these similar solution always beg the question, "why does dropbox need to be changed"? It is simple, and just works. This makes it attractive to the masses.

While I don't necessarily subscribe to "if it 'aint broke, don't fix it" I wonder how any company can dethrone dropbox by offering such a similiar service. It will likely appeal to the tech crowd...but the masses? They will have to convince the masses that they are missing something using dropbox. Is this not one of the reasons that sites like Identica will never be as popular as facebook (maybe Identica has never had such lofty goals).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My favorite product, in concept, recently has been the wireless Time Capsule (however reviews don't look so great on the Apple site)

If this product could be used for my time machine backups (ideally with a wireless connected to my laptop), and then be sync'd to "the cloud"...i would pay for it in the blink of an eye.

</comment><comment><USER15> In order to truly compete with Dropbox, they'd have to crack the (extremely tough) frictionless syncing as elegantly as Dropbox has. Anyone know if that's something their software does, or are we just using Dropbox Competitor as a blanket statement for any company offering backup services?

</comment><comment><USER16> "we'll totally revolutionize the storage space! Now click here and buy an exclusive 240 usd device that has no release date, but is very exclusive"

Seriously, am I missing something here?

</comment><comment><USER17> I like how they have an impress.js-enabled site.

<comment><USER18> Running Firefox 10.0 on Windows XP, I get this message :

"Your browser doesn't support the features required by impress.js, so you are presented with a simplified version of this presentation."

So I have to say I'm not too impressed by impress.js

<comment><USER19> We had to turn off impress.is for Firefox because their css3 transitions were so slow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How spacemonkey is different from TonidoPlug (www.tonidoplug.com)? They also provide dropbox like sync that can host yourselves.</comment>


C++: Experiments in partition and remove - <AUTHOR> https://iterator.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/algorithms_0/ <comment> Ono-Sendai For bonus points, can someone either write a stable partition that runs in linear time with no extra storage (or maybe just constant storage) or prove that it is impossible?

<comment><USER2> Move all non-matching elements to the end of the list in the order you encounter them, then read the matching elements forwards from the start of the list (as before) and the non-matching elements backwards from the end of the list?

You could even be nifty and return a reversed iterator yourself to hide the implementation detail from the caller.

<comment><USER3> Not sure I understand you algorithm - are you saying to append the items as you see them to the end of the list? Wouldn't that violate the no-additional memory requirement? That would also add a dependency on using iterators that support growing the underlying data structure without invalidating the existing iterators.

<comment><USER2> Swap with the element at the end of the list, not append, and move the swap point one position back each time. Otherwise why would I say you would need to read them in reverse order?

<comment> Ono-Sendai I don't think that works. What if both the element to move, and the element at the end of the list, belong to the right of the partition?

<comment><USER4> I think that's what he's trying to address when he refers to moving the swap point. This is a standard algorithm (e.g. [http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/algorithm/partition/](http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/algorithm/partition/)), but it's not stable, which means it doesn't meet your requirements.

Stable partition with constant storage is harder. I'm pretty sure it's not possible, but I'm not prepared to offer a proof of that. I believe it (at best) turns into NlgN moves (which is how stable_partition performs as well) no matter what exact approach you take.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sequel Pro – Open source macOS native MySQL GUI client - <AUTHOR> https://www.sequelpro.com/ <comment><USER3> Projects like these should be celebrated through donations and this project makes it easy. When's the last time you've seen freeware developer tool for macOS that's not from a corporation with money to spare?

I personally can't think of anything beyond iTerm (utility), Homebrew (utility), ...aaand that's where my list ends.

<comment><USER4> cyberduck, iina, adium, notational velocity, divvy, hex fiend, keka, xee, unicodechecker, textual, …

That's just a subset of what I saw scanning my /Applications, and I don't specifically look out for replacing existing software with free (whether freedom or beer) applications.

<comment><USER5> > divvy, textual

Neither of these are freeware?

<comment><USER6> Textual is open source [https://github.com/Codeux- Software/Textual](https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It hasn't been updated in a very long time. Constant crashes on Mojave. I have transitioned away to TablePlus and DataGrip. Too bad because it was a very good tool for quick edits.

<comment><USER8> I had a lot of trouble with Mojave and the crashing you are reporting is annoying. I've been using their test builds the past couple months with zero problems though.

[https://sequelpro.com/test-builds](https://sequelpro.com/test-builds)

<comment><USER9> That bug is so annoying. Push a release!

<comment><USER10> What bug specifically? What is the symptom?

<comment><USER11> Not sure which the parent was referring to, but everytime I close it, it crashes.

<comment><USER12> In my experience, it's specifically every time you try to disconnect from a server. (I have connections set up for dev and production for a small project, and I try to keep the production connection open only when I need it...but if I open it, I need to keep it open or it crashes the whole app.)

Will try the test build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I loved Sequel Pro and was disappointed when I switched companies and couldn't use it with Postgres. Plug: it's one of the reasons why I built PopSQL ([https://popsql.io](https://popsql.io))

<comment><USER14> sequel Pro is better then pgadmin for me, but pgadmin is very usable

<comment><USER15> Sequel Pro doesn't support PG though... Unless I have missed something? If you can tell me how to use it with PG I will be very happy :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm personally a big fan of TablePlus: [https://tableplus.io](https://tableplus.io)

<comment><USER17> I looked into Table Plus when I found that Sequel Pro crashes more than NASCAR on a Sunday. But it's pricing model doesn't work for the way I work. I'm just one person, but use multiple computers simultaneously, making per-computer licensing prohibitive.

Obviously phpMyAdmin is a tire fire.

I'm still looking for a good macOS-native client similar to Sequel Pro. Bonus points if it has a usable iPad version.

<comment><USER18> I use it on multiple computers - jsut not at the same time.

"If you want to use TablePlus on multiple devices you need to add more seats to your license. The number of seats is the number of devices you can log in to at the same time" [https://tableplus.io/order/extend- seats](https://tableplus.io/order/extend-seats)

So I took that to mean that I can have it on multiple machines, I just can't use them at the same time - which is fine, I can use my laptop or desktop depending on where I am.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the clarification. I'll have to take a second look at it, since I'll only use it on one machine at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> SequelPro is amazing and I used it for many many years.

Now I'm using TablePlus which is a great paid client ($50 I think) and I love it.

I really hope in the new era, we can have paid open source tools with some bounties for important bug fixes and UX improvements.

That seems to be a very sustainable way to develop great software.

<comment><USER20> > SequelPro is amazing and I used it for many many years.

Seconded.

I inherited an old MySQL/Java system and SequelPro was invaluable to understanding how it worked and keeping it running. At least until I added a view to the schema, the export/import facility was also very effective at taking and restoring snapshots of the database state. I could connect it to production, pull down an exported SQL script and then restore exactly that state to another environment. (Including local.)

(And given that it ran in OSX, it also had a plausible subset of Emacs keybidings too. :-) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is my favorite DB tool, but unfortunately it doesn't support MySQL 8 — [https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/2699](https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/2699)

<comment><USER22> I ran into the same issue here too. They've fixed it in their nightly builds which I've found pretty useable: [https://sequelpro.com/test- builds](https://sequelpro.com/test-builds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As others have mentioned, it has not received much love recently from the developer. My guess is that it is due to the pricing model and accepting donations. I have donated $200 back in 2014 but I did not see many supporters back then and none now. There is no incentive for the developer to keep maintaining and enhancing the product. Everyone who used this tool in the past and liked itshould consider supporting it if not with money then with their time and knowledge on github.

<comment><USER24> Can they not just turn into subscription model for something like $10/mo or even $5/mo and get things done instead of floating with nightlies?

I'm sure people cry and scream for going paid but seeing this disappear with lack of recent MySQL version support and likely never support any other DB looks pretty sad too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting... did something happen today that there are 3 posts for db clients at the top of HN?

<comment><USER26> It's a SQL client miracle !

And I'm guessing it was more than DBeaver became popular and everyone felt like it was worth getting some free traffic to help boost sales.

<comment><USER27> Doesn't everybody always up and downvote stories just so related ones are next to each other? It sure seems like it.

<comment><USER24> I thought you can't downvote a story but just ignore it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought they had released the new version... :( crashes on mojave are usual... I know they have fixed them in new builds, but I'm waiting for a stable release.

Such a great client!!!

</comment><comment><USER29> Me and my colleagues have benefitted greatly from Sequel Pro over the years. Recent Mojave complaints aside it's been close to perfect. It's eye opening to think we have paid nothing. Maybe companies should look into implementing 1% turnover to OSS. I'm guessing having bi-annual company votes about how to distribute the funding, and communicating this in the recruitment process might offset some/all of the cost.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have an up to date version running on an up to date macbook pro and it crashes every time I close a tab. Pretty annoying.

<comment><USER31> I do to. The latest Beta build does not have this issue though.

<comment><USER32> Ditto. Tab issue in prod release, Not nightly. I love the app but it's made me look for diff options. I close tabs all day, it's a big bug in my head that should've forced an update. Otherwise monster fan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is this project still alive? they haven't had an official release since 2016 though the commit history shows some recent but unreleased work.

That coupled with a lack of other RDBMS support has forced me to transition to other tools like DataGrip.

<comment><USER17> I liked the DataGrip tour, but I don't believe in subscribing to software. Any other recommendations?

<comment><USER34> Someone else in the comments said that Sequel Pro inspired them to make a Postgres compatible clone.

edit: oh I derped there. I didn't follow the link before I commented and once I did I noticed they're subscription based :\

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 3 SQL GUI tools (Sequel Pro, Dbeaver, HeidiSQL) on the front page at the same time. Has this happened before?

<comment><USER36> And none of them Electron based!

<comment><USER37> You know, Electron is perfect for these use cases:

A table view, a tree view, few buttons, some dialogs.

<comment><USER36> Until you try to actually use more than demo data and need to resort to tricks to sort out unresponsive rendering.

I have no love for Electron. Still remember Active Desktop, MSHTML, XUL and Symbian Web Runtime.

As someone that does both native and Web fullstack, the place for Web technologies is on the browser, with approaches like PWAs.

<comment><USER38> Sequel Pro's query dialog grinds to a screeching halt on my 2018 model MBP when there is more than 1500 lines of text in the box.

<comment><USER36> Naturally being native does not sort out everything if not coded properly.

The difference being that native solutions have better tooling to handle such cases, one just needs to actually learn how to use them.

In a future where Worklets and WebComponents with virtual tables are a standard browser feature, similar approaches can be done in the browser as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> enahs-sf Great product. Switched from MySQL workbench and it was amazing. Haven't upgraded to Mojave though. Apple hasn't been the same since they switched to one year OS release cycles.

<comment><USER39> Yep, just wanted to add that I haven't seen any of the crashes with Sequel Pro that others have mentioned. But I'm still on High Sierra with HFS+ file system though.

(Though I've since bought a Windows laptop & I haven't found a Sequel Pro equivalent for Windows yet.)

<comment><USER40> Not sure if it's feature equivalent but HeidiSQL was pretty good on Windows

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I used and loved Sequel Pro for years, but interface limitations and crashes finally set me off looking for a replacement after some stressful production debugging sessions.

After trying a few like MySQL Workbench and Navicat, I landed on Querious and haven't looked back since. It's not free in either sense of the word but well worth the ~$50 USD license IMO.

Interface-wise I found it to be easier/more familiar to switch to from Sequel Pro, as compared to some of the alternatives mentioned above - more on the light and nimble side, less on the heavy interface enterprisey-feeling side if that makes sense.

It's Mac native, performant, and very stable. Some very basic features that felt like a big upgrade from Sequel Pro:

\- Arbitrary WHERE clause support in the data view, so you don't need to switch to a full manual query as soon as you need slightly more complex conditions

\- Multiple query tabs - I used to spawn multiple Sequel Pro instances because this was so hard to live without. There's also good management of query history and saved queries.

\- Robust and performant import/export tools

No affiliation with the developer, just wanted to give a shout-out to a high quality piece of software that I've really appreciated using.

<comment><USER24> I tried it years ago but is this still being developed actively?

<comment><USER42> Yes it is. They just released an update as recently as December.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is a really nicely done client.

I've mainly used it from a "let's go in and see what's going on in the database" perspective, and it's been great for that.

I wish I had the same thing for Oracle and sql server.

It crashes on Mojave, but only when closing it so it's more an annoyance than a problem (and the fix is in the works).

</comment><comment><USER44> It is nice it is true. But some time ago SequelPro was crashed on my Mac. Since then I moved to TablePluse. It is much more convinent for me. Contain everyting what I need and I can use for manage another types of database (Redis, Postgres, Mongo..). I highly recomend TablePlus.

<comment><USER45> Is it open source as well?

<comment><USER44> Unfortunately not. But it is worth the price. You can try with free version but it is limited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is a nice client.

I had used Navicat for years on my old iMac, but when I got my new MacBook Pro as my secondary development machine and went to get another licence for it, I was shocked at the current pricing. I am certain I only paid about $50 for a licence years back. When I downloaded the latest version it was something like 25x the price!!

Don't get me wrong - Navicat is a great MySQL/MariaDB client, but I wasn't going to stretch to that price. I hunted around and found Sequel Pro, which meets my needs to a 't' and probably has a slicker interface.

</comment><comment><USER47> It has the best application icon ever. Just everything is right about it.

<comment><USER48> So glad they haven't changed it, beautiful execution and the humor of it has made it instantly memorable even for a product that has a completely generic (but clear) name, googling "sql pancake icon" even gets you to the product.

This is how you brand something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sequel Pro is by far the best SQL client I've ever used. It's really sad that it's available only for Mac. It's the only app I miss after having moved to Linux.

</comment><comment><USER50> After a brief period working with macOS, I missed Sequel Pro when moving back to Linux. In the end I wrote Sequel Joe:

[https://github.com/ohwgiles/sequeljoe](https://github.com/ohwgiles/sequeljoe)

Still, it's light years behind Sequel Pro in terms of features/completeness/quality and probably always will be :)

</comment><comment><USER51> Seriously grateful for the app, I've used it (and maybe taken it for granted) for years. Does what it says on the tin.

</comment><comment><USER52> This looks amazing, and I wish I had something similar for Postgres (which is what I use for my own projects). Kudos!

<comment><USER53> Check out Postico [https://eggerapps.at/postico/](https://eggerapps.at/postico/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Sequel Pro is the single app that makes me come back to OSX every now and then to work with my databases. This app for Linux would be so great. The official Oracle MySQL application for Linux is so unstable, it's mostly unusable for large databases. Never experienced such problems with Sequel.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's ok. I mean, it's great that you put in all this time to give it away for free, but this is not where open source shines. This is lightyears behind professional SQL clients like SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) - <USER2> compared to what SSMS was 10 years ago!

<comment><USER56> Can't comment on Sequel Pro yet, but even SSMS is in need of improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> It's a paid and rather expensive product but I've used Navicat happily for something like ten years.

The latest release was a rewrite and they're still sorting out problems but every incremental update brings it closer to how great the previous version was.

<comment><USER58> I used to love Navicat and have a copy but the UI was so unbearably slow, the only thing I use it for is user permissions. Maybe it's only on OS X, but the app was completely unusable compared to something like SQL Pro and I realized I was only using it because I had paid for it and it should have been not only usable but better. It really isn't. The UI slowness is so bad, the team that maintains it should be ashamed of themselves, especially for charging money. It's a native app after all! They can't even blame electron or whatever fw of the day for this, afaik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> It's a great program and I have used it for years. I highly recommend it to everyone and the developers have done a great job. Currently it has a small bug which can be bit annoying where it crashes when opening and closing connections.

</comment><comment><USER60> Sequel Pro is one of the few reasons why I used to be really, really envious about Mac users, as a Linux user (now I don't work with MySQL anymore). I've never seen any SQL GUI even come close.

<comment> amiga-workbench I put up with mySQL workbench, its java based, clunky and unstable but very well featured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Honestly, I really enjoyed using Sequel Pro but I __had__ to switch to DBeaver because it constantly kept crashing for me. Maybe I'll have to give it another shot.

</comment><comment><USER62> Been using this for years now. Im hooked to it. That simplicity and functionality. Wow!!! Way better than than MySQL Workbench for most of the daily needs.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's my favorite MySQL/MariaDB GUI. I have to build by myself to use with the latest commit for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER64> Have been using this one for years. A rare for a mac only app being leaps better than non-mac apps for similar use.

</comment><comment><USER65> Great GUI for the DB! Far better than softwares like MySQL Workbench! It's simple and people totally like it!

</comment><comment><USER66> FYI, doesn't play nice with exporting/importing virtual columns. Had to switch to MySqlWorkBench.

</comment><comment><USER67> Thank you for reminding me to appreciate this tool I've been using for years, just donated!

</comment><comment><USER68> Which crashes every time you close a tab... Otherwise it's an awesome mysql client.

</comment><comment><USER69> Great tool, would be nice to have INSERT / UPDATE table sql script generator.

</comment><comment><USER70> Great app even though it crashes every time I close a window on Mojave.

<comment><USER71> I have the exact same issue with MySQL Workbench. Since upgrading to Mojave, lots of Workbench is just unstable. Probably crashes 6-8 times a day. I spend most of time in CLI now since it doesn't crash. It has helped me understand the SQL much better since I have to bang it out rather than just "confirming" what the UI decided to do for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is this DB GUI day on HN? :) 3 clients on the front page is amusing.

</comment><comment><USER72> I used Sequel Pro for years but just recently switched to Querious.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hasn't been updated in forever, has me very concerned.

</comment><comment><USER73> Great tool I have been using for many years!

</comment><comment><USER74> This is a great tool, I use it every day

</comment><comment><USER69> :love:</comment>


How to Attract More People to Your Open Source Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/open-source/78643/how-attract-more-people-your-open-source-project <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I would follow all this advice.

As the maintainer of GitX, I have difficulty in keeping some kind of community running. One of the things that I'm definitely _not_ going to do is add more ways of communication (A newbie forum, irc channel, etc). As it is now, communication between people is already somewhat difficult.

My main way to communicate is the mailing list, which is quiet enough to post everything you want to. However, I also have a bugtracker on lighthouse where some people file a bug, to be left there forever. Then some people use the commenting system on github, which also get ignored mostly. Some people send me a pull request through github, which means it just sits in my mailbox without alerting others who might want to review it.

Then there are folks who email me privately. I try to answer everything, but often have to repeat stuff because it's in private mail. Then some folks report a bug on the mailing list, or on the bug tracker, or privately, and I have to figure out what went where. Then there are also duplicate bug reports that I have to track down, and close one of them. There are also some cases of multiple people contributing a patch for the same issue.

There are enough ways to communicate now, and I'm thinking of closing some of those options. I'd like to disable messages in github, but that's not possible. I'm probably going to set an auto-responder to pull requests, asking folks to send mails to mailing list. I might make the bugtracker private, and ask everybody to post to the mailing list.

In short, I don't think it's the lack of communication options, but more that the few folks that do work on a small project are spread across too many different communication systems.

<comment><USER3> I'd probably keep the bug tracker public, make it _the_ place for filing bugs, and immediately copy & paste any bugs reported via other means into a new tracked bug, and reply with the URL for that bug. Bug tracking in a mailing list is messy, especially if that list is also used for general discussion.</comment></comment>


Living Simply in a Dumpster - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/the-simple-life-in-a-dumpster/379947/ <comment><USER2> _We could end up with a house under $10,000 that could be placed anywhere in the world._

Average U.S. construction prices per square foot for apartment buildings start at $130 per square foot, depending on location and material/fixture quality. New York is the most expensive at $230 per square foot.

So at 36 square feet, this dumpster home would end up at what... $270 per square foot? That's way more expensive than an actual apartment building, and that's before appliances and shared spaces such as bathrooms/laundry rooms/kitchens, not to mention the shipment costs which have got to be significant.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't necessarily tell the whole story of the house for under $10,000. Technically, yes, it might be more expensive per square foot, but you also have to account for the self-sufficiency of the house in not incurring other costs. Furthermore, as far as I know, you can't purchase and own housing in quantities of 36 square feet, so you end up paying for more space even if you don't require it. I think owning a fully functioning living space for under $10,000 definitely has it's merits, though it's definitely not for everyone.

<comment><USER4> It's not a fully functioning living space. It's a small bedroom with underfloor storage. There is no toilet, no water supply, no perishable food storage, no washing station.

And in its current incarnation, you have to have air conditioning or a roof that's open where you have to be constantly on the lookout for rain.

It's a cute project, but it's not a fully-functioning living space.

Edit: Also, introduce a second person (most cultures are into pairing off as a social norm) and you need to pretty much have the entire floor as a bed, meaning no floorspace to store the bookshelf or plant, and having to move the bed every time to get at storage. Maybe some sort of sliding bed/couch thing, but those aren't particularly cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We really should have a lower limit for housing. Meaning if you're "homeless" you get given something about the size of this to live in that will at least keep you alive until you can find something else.

Currently we have people building "homes" literally within the suspension beams of bridges, in shop doorways, and we have hundreds of people freezing to death out of the streets yearly. When we could build a basic "home" for under $150, it seems completely avoidable.

I think, counter-intuitively, the biggest roadblock to doing something like that might be regulations (e.g. building codes). They define what a "home" should and shouldn't be, but ultimately set the bar very high (and we wind up with the current situation).

Maybe there should be a new set of regulations for "emergency accommodation." Nobody should be literally homeless in 2014 in the Western world, particularly as it would cost less than an iPhone to house them for a year (assuming only a roof and basic electric space heater, nothing else).

<comment><USER6> Building codes don't need to be thrown out to construct low cost housing, and low cost housing doesn't need to result in slums.

Salt Lake City recognized the total cost of a large homeless population was significantly higher than building permanent homes paired with services to accommodate them. Reducing the chronic homeless population increases capacity of emergency services, saves the community money, improves quality of life for both homeless and those living/working in an area with a large homeless population, and creates a setting where support services (health, wellness, education...) can be more efficiently and effectively provided.

The 2013 report goes into detail: [http://jobs.utah.gov/housing/documents/homelessness2013.pdf](http://jobs.utah.gov/housing/documents/homelessness2013.pdf)

Some highlights:

Salt Lake City has 779 permanent housing units for supporting chronically homeless. On a random night's count, 87% of the homeless population was sheltered.

Chronic homelessness decreased 9% from 2012-2013, and has decreased 74% since program start in 2005.

2005 - average annual cost for emergency services and jail time for each chronically homeless person was $16,670. The cost to house them and provide case management services was $11,000 per person.

Over half of those housed by the program moved on to permanent destinations. Only 8% returned to homelessness.

<comment><USER7> What a super project. Besides the fact that it was even more economical (I think if there had been a surcharge it would still be the right thing to do). But it also seems to have been instrumental in providing a stable base from which to return to a more normal life.

Wonderful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> New rule: If a place doesn't have a toilet, you can't say you're "living in it". This guy is living partially in a dumpster AND partially in a gym (where he uses the bathroom.)

<comment><USER7> That's a 'no true Scotsman' argument. After all, if he installs a bathroom you could say: "Yes, but it has no kitchen". So he adds a kitchen and then you go: "but there is no shower" and so on. There is always going to be one reason left why living in a dumpster does not make it the equal of living in a house. The final argument will be that it isn't at least 400 square feet.

The thing that should matter most is whether or not he spends the majority of the time in it that other people would spend in their homes while not living more time in another home or equivalent.

And by that definition he's living in it right now.

<comment><USER9> OK, I live on the street.... but I poop and eat and sleep in a house I bought.

The point is that if you can't get through even a single day somewhere (given some time to prepare and stock up), but you rely on access to some other private property, you don't live (only) there.

<comment><USER7> Plenty of student houses have shared dining rooms and toilets, he _definitely_ sleeps in the house.

<comment><USER10> Shared toilets are fine. You live in the building (and associated sheds in the case of an outhouse) rather than the single room. Dining might be in another building but you don't have to go there if you don't want to. 'kitchen' is just a name for a room, you can put a rice cooker in any room.

It's not a no true scotsman. The 'can I comfortably spend 48 hours there' test is a pretty good one. Once he adds the bathroom it'll qualify, though it'll be a few more square feet.

And yeah some way to bathe is probably necessary. He'll have that on the dumpster house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No kitchen, toilet, running water or insulation? It's about as livable as a kid's tree house. Plus, it probably violates about half of the building code. This is simply a publicity stunt.

<comment><USER7> > It's about as livable as a kid's tree house.

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_copRHv93JEI/SrlhWCKPSVI/AAAAAAAACf...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_copRHv93JEI/SrlhWCKPSVI/AAAAAAAACfw/DKRPvBKrexY/s400/tree- house.jpg)

Not exactly a kids version but quite livable. And I think this house is meant to make you think, it's a reductionist view on living rather than a complete replacement for all the amenities that we take for granted.

Running water, toilets and insulation are not present in plenty of the houses in the country where I currently reside and I can see a kitchen added in there or in very little extra space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty cool.

This guy was living in a dumpster before it was hip:

[http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/brooklyn- dumpst...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/brooklyn-dumpster- home-sweet-home-article-1.1422854)

Also check out the film "Tiny" about people who build/live in tiny houses.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am a fan of small houses, though perhaps this dumpster is a little too minimalist (for me) in its current form (the article states they are taking the time to work out what is truly beneficial in a small house, and it looks like this investigation is far from over).

The most desirable small homes I've seen so far are from dwelle, they seem to strike a good balance between compactness and practicality... [http://www.dwelle.co.uk/](http://www.dwelle.co.uk/) If anyone else has some small home projects they were impressed by, please share, I'd like some further inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'm a big fan of living modestly and I'd love to see more progress towards modest homes, in terms of both new technologies and new cultural norms (try to find a well-constructed 750 sq. ft. home for sale in a safe neighborhood).

On the other hand, I didn't see anything in the article about how this scales to relationships, marriages, and children. Considering how commonplace (and even economical!) various forms of cohabitation are, I wonder if this isn't another spherical cow experiment. Or am I missing the point?

<comment><USER15> I went to a talk by Jeff Wilson a couple of months ago. He's testing the hypothesis that you can have a fulfilling existence and actually experience more freedom through minimal living. While even he acknowledges that a 36 sq. ft. dumpster is on the very extreme end, he hopes that the experiment and the conversation around it will help us to to find practical ways for technology and culture to progress towards being more minimal.

By the way, his talk was much more interesting/enjoyable than I'd anticipated, and you can watch it here: [http://creativemornings.com/talks/prof- dumpster/1](http://creativemornings.com/talks/prof-dumpster/1). The Q&A part was pretty interesting too, but unfortunately it looks like that didn't make it into the recording.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is reminiscent of the teacher and philosopher Diogenes [1], who lived in a large tub in the Athens marketplace. Alexander the Great is said to have been so impressed by Diogenes' minimalism that he remarked "if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope)

<comment><USER17> Sometimes I hang out here too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to see the office where he keeps the rest of his stuff, like books and other tools he needs for work, paperwork, etc...

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm a fan of all these small-living endeavors. I'd personally build a somewhat larger passive-solar-optimized structure out of more appropriate materials.

The gotcha is always land. Try to find an affordable plot near enough to community and services. It's going be way more than the cost of the building.

</comment><comment><USER20> No mentions at all of food or meals, nor cold weather. Great way to live if you can afford to eat out 3 meals a day, and it's warm enough to just sleep outside anyway. It's really not living simply... it's just outsourcing the complexity to his wallet.

<comment><USER21> "No mentions at all of food or meals, nor cold weather."

From TFA: "He keeps all of this in cubbies under a recently installed false floor, along with some camping cooking equipment."

That setup is fine for cooking which only requires boiling water. The lack of refrigeration is probably the biggest limitation for food preparation. Fresh meat and veg is feasible but only if you buy in small enough quantities for a single meal or two. I wouldn't try anything fancier than stir fry, stew, or pancakes.

Regarding weather, this is Austin.* It is a pretty rough winter if you go below freezing at all. Add longjohns to his wardrobe and the cold will be manageable.

* [http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Texas/Places/austin-te...](http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Texas/Places/austin-temperatures-by-month-average.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sounds perfect for that Google employee who spent three months living in his car.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks like we might have a solution to Sydney's sky high house prices.

</comment><comment><USER24> Did anyone else catch his Oscar the Grouch mug in the photo? I laughed.

</comment><comment><USER25> No access for the handicapped.

</comment><comment><USER26> I see Mumbai is going to become more chic.</comment>


1981: U.S. Postal Service announces E-COM email - <AUTHOR> http://stampsjoann.net/E-COM/E-Com-Mail.html

<comment><USER3> There is still a USPS product today which does this net-to-junk mail gateway. It is a usability cluster flop, but the core value prop is good: why print 10 million pieces of mail in California to deliver to St. Louis when you can have a computer in St. Louis do the mail merge and save literally a ton of freight?

I used the customer-facing version to send letters to banks when cleaning up credit issues. (For a variety of reasons, paper works better for this.) It actually worked out to being more expensive to have the Post Office print and deliver 20 PDFs than to do it myself and airmail them 6,000 miles each, but it saved me a trip to the post office.

<comment><USER4> _the core vale prop is good: why print 10 million pieces of mail in Calif. to deliver to St. Louis when you can have a computer in St. Louis do the mail merge and save literally a ton of freight?_

At first glance it may make sense to have mail originate from twenty proximate, regional post offices, rather than one point in California. There are scale issues here though, and believe me, nowhere but the print shop are your costs so affected by scale - it is the #1 factor by a long shot. Printing 10 million pieces in one place then mailing around the country, surprisingly, is very often cheaper than printing 500,000 pieces in 20 places despite not having to mail the stuff as far.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly correct, assuming you're printing offset rather than digitally (e.g. on an Indigo.) Offset printing has tremendous economies of scale, making it FAR cheaper in most cases to print once and drop ship to various SCFs than to print multiple times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recall at one point that AOL would do this - I guess enough clueless people tried putting a mailing address into the "To" box that they decided to just go with it instead of dealing with one more class of bizarre support call.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cached: <http://stampsjoann.net.nyud.net/E-COM/E-Com-Mail.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I also seem to remember seeing the Automated Postal Center machines (the vending machines for stamps and scales and things) in post offices long before I saw automated cashiers in grocery stores everywhere. There's a lot of things going against USPS right now, but finding extremely usable technology that's casually ahead of its time doesn't seem to be one of them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ha, is that a VT100 terminal?

With all the women shown in mainframe/miniframe ads, you think more women would have gone into programming back then. However I guess there aren't too many women in autorepair today despite all the car tool calendars, ahem.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cached (other cache is down too): [http://web.archive.org/web/20080905140834/http://stampsjoann...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080905140834/http://stampsjoann.net/E-COM/E-Com- Mail.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> A reminder that we should be thankful for the academic orgins of the winning Internet standards. We could live in a world of fragmented protocols and pay walls at every turn. Instead we live in a world where the hacker standard prevails - that everything should be free unless it is truly a unique value add.

Imagine if Linux or BSD had been positioned such that they won the consumer OS war. Now imagine if AOL won the war for consumer Internet standards. Some may argue, but I believe this could have happened had TCP/IP and HTML not landed full force with as such an open, powerful, and stable alternative - <USER2> due to years of academic and scientific influence.

AOL failed to adopt the way Microsoft did, and the open Internet was already compelling as a consumer experience, so they would have had a more difficult time competing - but it might have happened.

Had the same occurred for consumer OS, we could live in a different world of open desktop standards. We appear to be headed that way 30 years later through the browser, but it's going to take at least another 5 or 10 years to supplant proprietary desktop OSes.

We do have a similar battle going on for the mobile platform. I'm an avid Apple user and fan, but I'm rooting ultimately for HTML5 as the standard for developing apps. Let's just hope it's good enough to compete.

</comment><comment><USER12> Back in Germany: <http://www.epost.de/>

absolutely no spam, free fax, free and secure mail, free sms when you get a letter, no letter will ever get lost, perfect authentification, perfect encryption, any email can become a registered mail; including pdf files or for businesses even DVD and CD-ROM, perfect for e-government &banks, backup for all documents and if you are blind services are for free. The catch? You need a mobile phone, because if you change password, your profile or anything like that you are sent a TAN. If you log in you are told when you logged in the last time including your IP.</comment>


Ask HN: Did a search bar just appear? - <AUTHOR>

I'm sorry if this is a really stupid question, but is that search bar at the bottom of the page new? I've never seen it before. <comment><USER2> Been there since early June 2011.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110606191817/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110606191817/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think nobody scroll to the bottom of the page unless they're seeking something particular..

</comment><comment><USER4> Wtf, I never noticed that either, duh?

</comment><comment><USER5> I never noticed that before too!</comment>


Cool Arduino Hack to image thousands of floppy disks  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5lkxSY7QsI

<comment><AUTHOR> More details in this blogspot on why and how he did it: [http://dwellertech.blogspot.jp/2012/02/converting-all-my- ami...](http://dwellertech.blogspot.jp/2012/02/converting-all-my-amiga- disks.html)</comment>


Selflessness vs Selfishness - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/selflessness-vs.html <comment><USER2> _"And we know that congress is susceptible to being lobbied successfully by people, institutions, cities, states, and corporations. So I'm quite worried that this $550bn is not going to get spent in the right ways because it's seen as a big pot of money to get your hands on."_

There is no historical precedent that I know of for government ever redistributing large amounts of money in a way that was good for the economy. The "New Deal" helped extend the Great Depression for 10 years rather than a shorter term if the govenment had not taken such a heavy handed approach.

The idea that a few in government can actually accurately determine the needs of a vast quantity of people economically makes no sense. We're talking about trillions of transactions. Central control was tried by the Russian Soviets, and it failed miserably. Japan recently suffered a decade of decline after their attempt at a "New Deal" infrastructure spending plan. Why are not more people complaining about the foolishness of trying this again given the track record of abject failure in the past?

<comment><USER3> WW2. Nearly all the prosperity of the last 60 years can be traced back to innovations done because of the war. You have: computers, encryption, microwaves, radar, jetplanes, sonar, foreign oil sources, rockets, synthetic rubber, silly putty, many plastics, nuclear power, and widespread use of penicillin. In many of these cases, the technology existed before the war but was not cost-effective or reliable enough for general use. The war spurred development on these fronts enough that it opened vast new consumer markets after the war.

The irony is that the government was not trying to help the economy with WW2 spending. It was try to blow shit up, and avoid getting blown up. It just so happened that many of the innovations that were good for blowing people up were also very good at improving their quality of life later. So once we were done killing people, we had 60-80 years of prosperity.

We just need another genocidal maniac, and a few tens of millions of people to die. Then it'll be all better.

(Irony aside, a similar effect happened after the civil war: many innovations like railroads, oil refining, trench warfare, steam engines, steel-hulled ships, etc. were commercialised because of the war, and then led to 60-80 years of prosperity afterwards.)

<comment><USER4> Another big change: FDR stopped villifying and prosecuting business. If one studies investor surveys, the change in attitude and the corresponding measures of investor confidence are clear. That probably did at least as much if not more to bring the economy out of depression. The government may be big but it cannot match the spending power of several hundred million people.

<comment><USER5> Well it can, but it can't match the collective intelligence of them, and that's what ultimately matters. It's not how much you spend, it what you spend it on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah. Democracy. It sucks. It is worth considering Lessig's approach to changing Congress as a way to mitigate some of these problems:

<http://change-congress.org/>

Lots of worthwhile and related stuff on his blog: <http://www.lessig.org/blog/>

<comment><USER7> I would like to see lessig produce a wish list of hacker projects he needs done. I would sign up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think its misguided to say that greed got us into the current economic mess and that selflessness is the solution. It's a nice happy theory but it flies in the face of almost everything that we know about human nature.

The real interesting question is how we can tweak our economic system to better manage greed.

<comment><USER9> This article is advocating a economic plan made possible by taking money from people, and worrying the plan will fail because people will want to improve their own lives instead of further sacrificing their lives for the sake of the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sifting out the right/wrong places to spend government money is not the responsibility of those asking for it. It's the government's job.

The problem is not vendors, it's the lobbying system.

<comment><USER9> The problem is that the government even has the ability to take our money and spend it as they wish. We need seperation of economy and state, for the same reasons we seperate church and state.

<comment><USER11> Or we should at least separate goals from implementation. I.e. use democratic processes to agree on specific goals and how much resources to devote to these goals. Like 'Reduce unemployment to at most 5%' using no more than 10^10 $. Or 'Raise the literacy rate of people over 10 years to at least 99% in our nation.' for at most 5*10^9 $.

Then the government puts the allocated funds into escrow and auctions off zero-coupon bonds that pay off when the goal has been reached. Of course the bond holders will do what they can to achieve the goal. Or do something that makes the goal easier to reach, thus the price of the bonds rises and the original holder can sell them at a profit.

(The above is a description of Social Policy Bonds.)

<comment><USER9> I disagree. That's just allowing people to vote other people's money away. The point of having _rights_ is that my property is mine and the majority can't vote it away. In your system, where does it end? The US is a republic (nation of laws), not a democracy (nation of people) - democracy is a good mechanism for electing the government and, hopefully, keeping is relatively clean.

The bonds you describe may be a smart improvement to less-controlled taxation, but it's still having the state control the economy. Using the analogy to the church, that's like not outlawing other religions or atheism, but using state funds for one religion of preference - that's still a lot of control and weight the government shouldn't have.

I think of it this way: the government has the guns (and rightfully so), so everything they do is ultimately by force. Therefore, we need to severly limit what they can do, leaving the rest of us with freedom.

<comment><USER11> My proposal was meant as a practical interim step. Selecting ends democratically works better than selecting means. While people can agree in a democratic fashion that certain goals shall be reached, the market fares better at choosing the method to execute.

In the longer run though, I would like to fund public goods using dominant assurance contracts (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contracts#Variants>). They solve the free rider problem of voluntary funding. And they allow private provision of public goods --- for profit. (<http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf>)

Of course, dominant assurance contracts and social policy bonds complement each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is money inefficiently spent domestically (next 4-8 years) better than money spent inefficiently internationally (last 8 years)?? I think so.

<comment><USER4> Ummm... you do realize the public spending on international projects is miniscule, ~5% at most. If you want to attack spending, go after SS, medicare, and medicade. These programs just by themselves eat up ~50% of the US federal budget and more on the state level. If you are talking about military spending overseas, then note the fact that just medicaid uses up as much money _every year_ as the war in Iraq has used up in its entire duration.

<comment><USER12> That 50% is a big number. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport & the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment in the Netherlands spend 13.8% + 23.9% = 37.7% of the federal budget. Maybe SS+medicare+medicaid is more than the 37.7%, but I think that social services and healthcare is more extensive in the Netherlands than in the US. Why is there such a big difference in spending?

<comment><USER4> Government rationing. Difference in population. Differnce in perfornamce: If you want a hip-replacement, in the US, you can scheule the surgery on the same day, in the UK, you need to wait at least a week. The Chances of surviving cancer in the US are drastically higher than in the US. Most drug research is carried out here in the US. Our medical system may be expensive but by some counts, its worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's good to see someone who has seen as much of the business world and thereby human nature as Fred still maintain a sense of idealism and duty to do the right thing. Unfortunately, most people are not like him and the pigs will be lining up at the trough for their cut. It sucks but that is the world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER14> How To Build a Successful Nation?

We need both Socialism and Capitalism to build and sustain a great nation.

(1) Prevent race to the bottom aka Socialism

Affirmative Action, Subsidy, Basic Income Guarantee, Stock Options to prevent Wage Slavery, Free Public Transportation, etc

(2) Promote race to the top aka Capitalism

Incentives,Free Markets,Extrinsic motivation,Appreciation,Awards, Rewards etc

<comment><USER11> Incidentially basic income guarantee has some libertarian arguments on its side.</comment></comment>


Shutting down FTP services - <AUTHOR> https://kernel.org/shutting-down-ftp-services.html <comment><USER2> This sentence struck out to me:

>>The protocol is inefficient and requires adding awkward kludges to firewalls and load-balancing daemons

I have always been aware that ftp across firewalls can be wonky, but never stopped to ask why.

[http://www.ncftp.com/ncftpd/doc/misc/ftp_and_firewalls.html](http://www.ncftp.com/ncftpd/doc/misc/ftp_and_firewalls.html)

>>The primary problems that the FTP poses to firewalls, NAT devices, and load- balancing devices (all of which will simply be referred to as Ârouting devices and not "routers" since gateway machines generally aren't problematic) are:

>>Additional TCP/IP connections are used for data transfers;

>>Data connections may be sent to random port numbers;

>>Data connections may originate from the server to the client, as well as originating from the client to the server;

>>Data connections destination addresses are negotiated on the fly between the client and server over the channel used for the control connection;

>>The control connection is idle while the data transfer takes place on the data connection.

What a protocol.

<comment><USER3> The control/data connections are actually pretty neat, and for the era (actual working Internet) it was a good idea that worked quite well. I understand it looks "hacky" today - but that's largely due to far worse hacks lower down the stack.

NAT came along, and everyone broke everything. Now you can't make up neat protocols like this any more - everything must be user-initiated TCP or server based. I do wonder how much development and innovation this has held back. Even games back in the day had far more interesting network models - that were more sustainable long-term.

NAT was likely the first major crack in the wall of the open Internet, making it much weaker and the users more compliant than it previously was. I strongly believe that's one of the major reasons why we have what we're left with today.

<comment><USER4> Thank you, guys. You prompted me to learn a bit about the protocol. I want to share what I learned after skimming over the RFC.

A typical session looks like:

        $ telnet ftp.kernel.org 21
        Trying 22.214.171.124...
        Connected to ftp.all.kernel.org.
        Escape character is '^]'.
        220 Welcome to kernel.org
        USER anonymous
        331 Please specify the password.
        PASS
        230 Login successful.
        PASV
        227 Entering Passive Mode (149,20,4,69,119,142).

Then I was baffled. What does 149,20,4,69,119,142 mean? Okay, 149,20,4,69 looks like an IP address for ftp.kernel.org. But what do they want me to do with 119,142? Turns out it's a port number divided into two octets. Basically they are asking me to connect to port 119 * 256 + 142 = 30606.

So, on the second terminal I run:

        $ telnet 18.104.22.168 30606
        Trying 188.8.131.52...
        Connected to 126.96.36.199.
        Escape character is '^]'.

Back to the first one:

        LIST
        150 Here comes the directory listing.
        226 Directory send OK.

And I get the listing I requested, on the second terminal:

        drwxr-xr-x    9 ftp      ftp          4096 Dec 01  2011 pub
        Connection closed by foreign host.
        $

Instead of using PASV, you can request the FTP server to connect back to you, with PORT. First, you need to start listening on your WAN interface (if you have one; if you don't, you are out of luck) with `nc -l your.ip.goes.here 2560`. Then, request the server to connect by typing `PORT your,ip,goes,here,10,0` (NB: use commas, not dots). Of course, don't forget to replace your.ip.goes.here with your real WAN IP address.

Cheers.

<comment><USER2> This was cool! Thank you for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FTP may look crufty today but it was an excellent protocol _for its time_ , and offers capabilities you can't really get with any other current protocol.

Really, the problem is that NAT is a terrible idea and screws up the idea of a fully end-to-end Internet.

<comment><USER6> > FTP may look crufty today but it was an excellent protocol for its time, and > offers capabilities you can't really get with any other current protocol.

This is some weird astroturfing of the FTP protocol's goodwill, but it was never particularly good. Even for its time it's a curiously conceited protocol that is remarkably complicated without _doing_ very much that a similarly intelligent RMI-style interface couldn't have worked with.

And in practice, many FTP clients basically left the control channel concept behind and began to use it as if it were streamed RMI, opening up multiple connections for transfers to help users deal with even 1980's network environments.

It stands out as complicated for its time.

<comment><USER7> This is tangencial but I don't think gumpy's comment could be considered "astroturfing".

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Almost all downloads these days are over HTTP or native apps. Probably for the better that we let FTP go. If we do a custom one, its should have benefits the popular solution doesn't have. Maybe performance (eg Tsunami, UDT) or security (stuff with TLS). Ton of solutions for availability with existing stuff so I leave it off.

<comment><USER9> The big thing we seem to be missing (likely because "everyone" is using some kind of _drive service) is uploading.

<comment><USER10> HTTP does support uploading. But even that aside, there are plenty of better protocols for uploading than FTP. Eg SFTP, p2p, heck even cloud storage services if you want something easy for the layman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _while kinda neat and convenient, offering a public NFS /CIFS server was a > Pretty Bad Idea_

\\\live.sysinternals.com\tools says Hi

<comment><USER12> That's WebDAV, not CIFS. You can also access WebDAV paths with the UNC notation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I pretty much avoid it, even on sites that need it for wordpress you can use SFTP instead with the use of the wp sftp plugin

</comment><comment><USER14> Why can't you run FTP on a CDN?

<comment><USER15> FTP uses multiple connections that need to coordinate. It only works if these connections are from/to the same machine which is difficult to guarantee using a CDN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kinda sad, as i often fire up ftp urls when looking for tar-balls of source releases.

</comment><comment><USER16> IMHO stupid decision. There are many mirrors, that will be affect. FTP has it's place.

<comment><USER17> Mirrors almost universally use rsync, not FTP.

<comment><USER16> I mean FTP mirrors, that offer an 1:1 FTP directory mirror.

<comment><USER18> Literally no one does that. rsync-over-SSH is often used for this, sometimes plain rsync, sometimes custom stuff running atop SFTP (which is a completely different thing from FTP(S)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 1998, was so long ago. I was 8 years old! The Kernel was released the year I was born. Then, in like 2011 I first heard of Linux and downloaded Ubuntu 10.

<comment><USER16> Read the whole paragraph, the 1998 was about mounting public NFS share.

Now they want to discontinue FTP. Two different things.</comment></comment>


Why Singapore has yet to produce a truly innovative startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/talk/innovation-where-art-thou <comment><USER2> there was creative..and that popiah skin manufacturer?</comment>


Scala.jsFiddle: TodoMVC - <AUTHOR> http://www.scala-js-fiddle.com/gist/9362801

<comment><USER2> I have to say this seems like an extremely elaborate hammer for a tiny nail. The question is: If you have an application that is much less trivial than this one, will the complexity scale accordingly or will it only increase gradually?

The X-to-Javascript tools work best if the language actively embraces the Javascript roots (TypeScript, CoffeeScript, etc) instead of trying to hide it in abstractions. Sure, it's convenient to be able to use Scala collections but do you really need to? Granted, this can be said of anything ("Do you need to use C when there's asm?") but whenever you'll do something complex in a language like this: At some point you'll have to debug, and that's the point where you need to somewhat understand the underlying abstraction.

<comment><USER3> > The X-to-Javascript tools work best if the language actively embraces the > Javascript roots

I don't think this is true. X-to-Javascript tools work best when they are well-designed to fit both the norms of the original language and to solve the problems of building user interfaces. JavaScript does that, so embracing JS gets you lots of libraries, patterns, and design experience for free.

But it's also possible to create good designs in other ways. I'm quite fond of ClojureScript, with its immutable data and pure functions. But using it with the mutable DOM patterns forced me to choose between speed and writing idiomatic Clojure. Now that we have ReactJS, I can write my interface as a mostly-pure function over data, and have React do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to update the DOM quickly.

This was a much longer route to get to a good design, but I think it's a much nicer way to build web UIs.

The problem with Scala.js is it doesn't seem to have this same level of design inspiration. It has the nice parts of Scala, and the warts of the DOM, and the two don't even fit together the way that JS fits the DOM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a Scala contractor I fear the day I turn up to a job and get presented with a frontend layer that looks like that. The notion of a DSL in LanguageX -> JavaScript is an interesting research project, but if the outcome is not only way harder to read than LanguageX but also JavaScript it is perhaps a dead-end street in terms of actual anything good coming out of it.

JavaScript really isn't hard, trying to avoid writing it by writing a more complex language which gives you more JavaScript than you would have had anyway really can't ever be a win surely?

<comment><USER5> Yeah this is really a waste of time, and it will never pick up. CoffeeScript is the only language with a shot right now due to popularity.

<comment><USER6> I'd say TypeScript and Dart are contenders as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is amazing! Scala right now doesn't really have a good story in terms of user-facing apps - it's not impossible to piggy back on Swing and Android, but that's about it for now. Definitely looking forward to seeing this mature!

As for the haters, there's no real reason at this stage to worry about "why would you use this for that" \- people said the same thing about Java server- side (it's slow and on servers, cross-platform doesn't matter), Javascript server-side (it's single-threaded and clunky and people only use it because they are forced to), C# for iOS development (but it's from Microsoft), etc, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> What next? A React integration layer to match Om, perhaps?

<comment><USER9> As much as I love idea of Om, I'd still like if there was a JS only version of it.

<comment><USER3> I think this is pretty possible. You could use Mori [0] or another set of persistent JS data structures. And you'd need to monkey-patch them to all support being used as cursors like in Om. That'd be pretty cool for those of us who can't sneak Clojure in at our day jobs.

[0] [https://github.com/swannodette/mori](https://github.com/swannodette/mori)

<comment><USER10> What is it that's missing in just using plain React (with Mori or any alternative)?

In my mind, what Om is bringing to React is idiomatic state management with Clojure semantics. In js I think the local state model promoted by React is reasonable.

<comment><USER9> Mostly immutability and the ability to update DOM on real changes, I assume. The immutability comes with nice ability to easily undo things, at expense of memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Got some performance issues compare to others examples.

</comment><comment><USER12> Webforms anyone?</comment>


What is Java technology and why do I need it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002496.html

<comment><USER2> How is this on the front page with 5 up votes?

There's nothing interesting here...

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Perhaps it's just an echo of people's sentiments towards Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ouch I upvoted it too early, what a shallow article. Java is much more than applets.

</comment><comment><USER5> And the fear mongering continues.</comment>


Show HN: Initial release of the distributed TensorFlow runtime - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/core/distributed_runtime <comment><USER2> Congratulations to the TensorFlow team on this massive step!

It's also hilarious that using distributed TensorFlow in Keras is a trivial change[1]. I honestly think high level libraries with transparent backends will be the future in the same way that cross compilation is the rule not the exception for compilers.

What's most impressive to me is that Google are incrementally open sourcing large parts of their internal infrastructure. Protocol Buffers, gRPC, Kubernetes, TensorFlow ... Given how cross dependent many of their internal dependencies likely are, extricating them is a major achievement.

Most importantly, it seems the more that's extricated, the easier it is to release more.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/703268754105376768](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/703268754105376768)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!

Can we now pretty please have it easier to build on systems commonly used for HPC?

Bazel won't compile on glibc that's used by RHEL6/CentOS6 or SLE11. Even if you do get that going, TensorFlow has an odd requirement for a very specific beta version of Protocol Buffers:

REQUIRED_PACKAGES = [ 'numpy >= %s' % numpy_version, 'six >= 1.10.0', 'protobuf == 3.0.0b2', ]

Pretty please? Our researchers want to use it, but it's a major pain (translation: impossible) to get it going for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Incredibly excited to see some creative implementations of this. ML for all is the future of prediction.</comment>


GNU Hyperbole 7.0.3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/bua5ex/gnu_hyperbole_703_is_released_and_ready_for_action/ <comment><USER2> Wonder what this is for? [https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole/HY- WHY.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole/HY-WHY.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm still unsure what to make of that. It sounds similar to `org-mode` which markups and structures text, and also enables links to other files (local, ssh, http).

Is there something that `org-mode` cannot do that `hyperbole` can?

<comment><USER4> You're not the only person with that question and it is answered on the emacs wiki: [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Hyperbole](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Hyperbole)

<comment><USER3> So paragraph tags have hierarchical names, and there is a contacts manager. Two main reasons to go with hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. I've used Emacs for a while and yet I've never heard of this tool. Will definitely check out.</comment>


VMware has open sourced their client for virtual desktop - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.eweek.com/permit_deny/content001/virtualization/vmware_vdi_open_source_client_released_for_thin_client_makers.html Code is hosted at google-code.
http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/
which indicates something brewing between the two. ? <comment> tsetse-fly The title is misleading. I get the feeling that everyone who upvoted this submission, did so reflexively without ever visiting the article.

VMWare is open sourcing VMware View, a product intended for thin client manufacturers.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this software isn't that exciting; it looks like rdesktop with a few added features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there any reason to check this out? I've been using virtualbox for a while and can't think of any reason to stop.

<comment> tsetse-fly Did you even bother to read the article?

They're open sourcing VMWare View (formerly called VMWare VDI) not VMWare Workstation. View is thin client software for remote desktop delivery.

<http://www.vmware.com/products/view/>

<comment><USER3> No I didn't, which is why I asked the question I asked. I guess I didn't know that vmware made stuff other than virtual machine software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> VMWare's brands within brands within brands continue to confuse me.

I'm hoping at some point this leads to a client for OS X and/or X11 that can talk to ESXi and VMWare Server. At the moment you have to manually configure each VM to expose a VNC-compatible server, or run the VMWare Windows client inside _cough_ a VM.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure VMware has been studying netscape vs microsoft with a very good spyglass and they've decided to let this trial balloon go up to see if they can harness the oss community to help them out.

It's very much appreciated that they did this, let's hope that they will do more!

<comment> tsetse-fly No, FOSS developers will not help much because the product is VMWare View. It's specifically for thin client makers.

<comment><USER5> yes, I realized that. I see this as a 'trial balloon', if it works for them I would hope that they will release more.

<comment> tsetse-fly This is not in anyway a trial with open source software. FOSS developers work on software that they're familiar with. I doubt very many of them own thin client hardware. They also don't like proprietary software and on the other end of this client is VMWare's closed-source server software.

VMWare is open sourcing this product because thin clients tend to run on exotic hardware and they want to allow manufacturers to easily port and install their client. That ensures that they'll be locked into VMWare's server product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have experience with this? How much does this overlap with the BaseShield ( <http://baseshield.com/> ) offering?</comment>


India's Mars mission crosses half the distance. - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/indias-mars-mission-crosses-half-the-distance/articleshow/33503166.cms <comment><USER2> The last 20 Km of missions like these are the hard ones, once you're off the pad. It's roughly 1/3rd between failure to launch, failure to arrive at the destination planet and failure to land (the latter not applicable here since it is an orbiter).

60% of the missions fail, which really isn't all that surprising given the complexities of a project like this.

Great to see it got this far, hoping that it will complete the interplanetary travel part of the mission around September of this year.

Lots of data here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The Rs 450-crore mission intends to explore the presence of Methane in the > Red Planet with the help of five scientific instruments on board the > spacecraft._

That is roughly $75 million.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that dirt cheap for a trip to Mars? Like, much lower than NASA missions to the moon?

<comment><USER5> Apart from the economic differences (outlined in Robert Frost's Quora post), ISRO also practised "frugal engineering"[1] by making use of their existing technologies/framework while building spacecraft. For example, MOM is based on ISRO's proven I-1K spacecraft bus[2], and its onboard propulsion system is based on their apogee kick motor[3]. Payloads are completely new and developed specific to the mission.

ISRO's Moon mission Chandrayaan-1[4] cost around $64 million back in 2008. It's relatively "costly" compared to Mars mission because ISRO had to do some groundwork to support such deep space missions. For example, Indian Deep Space Network[5] was built at that time to track Chandrayaan-1; and now it's being used to track MOM as well.

[1][http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-10-31/news...](http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-10-31/news/43561612_1_moon- mission-chandrayaan-i-isro)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-1K](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-1K)

[3][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apogee_kick_motor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apogee_kick_motor)

[4][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1)

[5][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Deep_Space_Network](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Deep_Space_Network)

<comment><USER6> I hope the frugal engineering works out for them. In 1990 I spent a semester working at GE AstroSpace as an intern, and one of my tasks was a small role on the Mars Observer(1) probe. It was also a frugal, based on an Earth-orbiting satellite design that was repurposed for a deep-space mission to Mars orbit. It apparently blew up when it got there, likely due to a failure in the fuel system. That's where I come in.

In early 1990, there was a weight problem with the spacecraft, and the engineers were looking for ways to eliminate mass. I was working with the propulsion team, and my task was to go through all of the blueprints, count components, and document their mass. The team was going to use that to determine which components were redundant (for safety) and how much mass could be eliminated by removing them.

I did my task, and went on to something else so I don't know how the system was modified. But from what I've read about the loss of the spacecraft, a leading theory is that one of the valves in the propulsion system failed and that led to the explosion. The valves were designed to be opened very soon after launch, once the satellite reached Earth orbit; they weren't designed for the deep-freeze of a two-year trip to Mars before being opened. I beleive that not only did the valve malfunction, but its redundant backup had also been removed based, in part, on the task I performed. If there hadn't been a weight problem (which may also have been to frugal engineering to reduce fuel requirements), the explosion might not have happened.

I've never felt any responsibilty; my task was to provide information, not decisions. But it would have been nice if I was involved with a more successful mission.

(1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing your anecdote!

In fact, ISRO's Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 ended prematurely due to overheating of star sensor and power supply unit (inadequate thermal protection!). They underestimated the amount of radiation from the Sun and that reflected by the Moon, at an orbit of 100km from the Moon[1].

For MOM, ISRO has "hardened" their satellite bus with better thermal protection, larger solar panels, redundant subsystems, redundant fuel lines, FDIR system etc.[2] Hoping for the best :)

[1][http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/48921.aspx](http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/48921.aspx)

[2][http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/pdf/pslv-c25-brochure.pdf](http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/pdf/pslv-c25-brochure.pdf) ("Major Challenges" section)

<comment><USER6> Cool. Another of my jobs at GE AstroSpace involved writing software to help with the analysis of thermal system modeling. At its heart, thermal modeling is basically the same as one of the approaches for lighting models for 3D graphics: every surface within the spacecraft is radiating and absorbing heat from every other surface that it faces. This is similar to the way every surface in a 3D model visualization is emitting, reflecting, and absorbing various frequencies of light from every other surface it faces in the model.

The math is the same, but in the thermal model you're calculating an equilibrium state to figure out the final temperature of each surface, or cyclic variation in the case of a rotating spacecraft with the sun and other emitting bodies around it. That tells you if temperatures are within the tolerance range of the components over the mission lifetime. If not, you have to add thermal protection and rerun the simulation.

This probably all goes a lot faster today than it did on the 1990's era VAX minicomputer I was using. There's probably real-time visualization now, which I'll bet is pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MOM is ISRO's first inter-planetary mission. I've been following ISRO MOM since its launch - those orbit raising manoeuvres and Trans-Mars Injection were a nail biting experience :) Wishing them best of luck. Eagerly waiting for September 2014, for Mars orbit insertion.

Here's a nice interactive animation of NASA MAVEN and ISRO MOM spacecrafts. It fetches real-time data from NASA JPL HORIZONS ephemerides:

[http://sankara.net/mom.html](http://sankara.net/mom.html)

By the way, for space/rocket enthusiasts out there - ISRO will be doing a sub- orbital test of their next gen "monster rocket" GSLV Mk3[1] in June. It will carry a Crew Module[2] as payload. This will be interesting.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle_Mk_III)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Orbital_Vehicle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Orbital_Vehicle)

</comment><comment><USER7> In highly developed countries there is a lot of discussion about the large disparity between the poor and the rich, but India seems to dwarf just everything by orders of magnitude. Every time I read about India's space program I am just unable to comprehend how a nation can at the same time fly to Mars and have a large part of their population live in slums.

UPDATE: I just want to clarify - I don't want to judge this as good or bad, I just want to express that I am unable to bend my mind around that.

<comment><USER8> Response to having a space program while having poverty: [http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission- Pove...](http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission-Poverty-and- Closet-Racism)

Please scroll down a bit because the awesome part comes after the subhead: Why India needs a MARS program.

<comment><USER7> Is that supported by the majority of the population? Naively I would expect that people would prefer immediate improvements over long term benefits.

<comment><USER9> India does have a lot of domestic and economic policies to bring people out of poverty. The said policies however are at the mercy of politicians who are corrupt and do not deliver.

India spends 0.2% on space exploration and 12% on defence. If you want to complain about misaligned priorities complain about our defence that takes up the most resources but does very little indigenous development rather than our space program that costs next to nothing but develops a lot of indigenous technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India)

</comment><comment><USER11> > _India 's national space agency ISRO would be the fourth after agencies in > US, Russia and Europe to have undertaken a successful mission to the red > planet._

Good to see this among all the political slugfest going on in India at the moment.</comment>


Ask HN: Is This Normal? - <AUTHOR> I find myself truly interested in a lot of programming concepts, but invariably when I start  investing serious effort into them (whether at work or in side projects), I'm quickly (over a couple of weeks max) becoming less energetic and can barely keep up with the effort, while vegging out in misery for the remainder of the day. In other words, the 4-5 hours of logical thinking per day is enough to completely drain me. I'm 39, in ok-ish shape, been in tech since college (took a lot of breaks between jobs because of exhaustion), don't have kids. I wonder if this is how grownup life feels to a lot of people or I am just unlucky to have a low energy constitution? <comment><USER2> > In other words, the 4-5 hours of logical thinking per day is enough to > completely drain me.

Sounds normal to me! I spent years composing classical music hours every day, which was great fun, but after about 3 hours writing in the morning I'd be utterly, totally exhausted. Sometimes much later in the day I'd do more, but not usually. I've heard from various places that that's not uncommon, being worn out after a few hours of totally focused work.

I read somewhere recently that Michael Phelps (I think it was) swam for a few hours each morning then had a sleep, doing more later in the day. I never thought of doing that, not being a napper, although I like the idea of napping, but maybe I should've. I imagine relaxing by reading online or chatting or something doesn't have the same restorative effect napping does.

I get a lot of ideas when I go out the back and stare at the trees while having a smoke. Most of my good ideas. I think it's the sitting there, letting your mind do what it wants, absorbing whatever you were just working on. If that was a problem, often the solution just comes to mind. But that doesn't happen unless you have breaks like that.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like a great idea. Effectively fitting in two "days" in each 24 hours. Then you're swimming every other "day" and the days in between you can do your other activities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The question that first springs to mind is, do you have a goal to learning new programming stuff (either a real intellectual goal, or something professional)? Is it helping you?

Maybe you really like learning but need to pick up something else, to give your brain a break. Maybe you need to do something with your body instead of your mind. Burnout is real, and people need to change in order to grow. (We're close in age.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > The question that first springs to mind is, do you have a goal to learning > new programming stuff (either a real intellectual goal, or something > professional)? Is it helping you?

Yes, definitely. In job, I was just thrown in a project that uses a lot of hot new tech that I do not know - learning it allows me to not be fired (job pays way above market, so it makes sense) and is also keeping me in the loop tech- wise. Between jobs, I studied more math-based, quite intense areas of programming with an intention of switching from what i'm doing right now to that field (hasn't happened yet).

> Maybe you really like learning but need to pick up something else, to give > your brain a break. Maybe you need to do something with your body instead of > your mind. Burnout is real, and people need to change in order to grow

I'm close to FIRE in terms of money, so I'll be able to take as many breaks as I want soon. I'm just trying to find a way to both enjoy tech work (something that happens naturally for me) without exhausting myself and feeling miserable, so that I can stay in tech even after FI. Right now, I feel like I some kind of mental invalid, where the work leaves me too tired mentally to even go outside for a walk... That is no way to live long-term.

Also, people who know me tell me I need to learn to relax. Maybe if I could learn to turn off my brain for a couple hours a day, I wouldn't burn myself out. Right now I'm trying to do that with moderate alcohol usage lol, but obviously it's not a solution. The problem is, my brain always wants more stimulation. Perhaps I need to do some meditation or dopamine detox (I'm on a screen for 80-90% of my waking hours). The problem with that is that sounds like misery as well... I guess the eastern wisdom that life is unavoidable suffering no matter what you do is right on the money.

<comment><USER4> "I'm on a screen for 80-90% of my waking hours" — I've been there and it can be really destructive to mental health and also basic thinking.

That's a good place to be in your career. Learning complex subjects is much more about quality than quantity (there was a recent HN article about effortful repetition, rather than mere repeated exposure, being the trick). So even if you want to really learn this stuff, learning to give your brain a break might be just what you need to both process the information and find pleasure in it.

Meditation is for real. But you might also be in danger of approaching it as "a task"—I did. What I do when I sense that my body just needs to relax, now, is I lay on a yoga mat on the floor and sort of stretch without trying and gradually feel my breath and slow down. Sometimes it becomes a real work out, but I never do it with that intention. Just a suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have too much advice to offer unfortunately, but concentrating for 4-5 hours should be enough to wear many if not most people out. If that doesn't include breaks and maybe some less intense tasks, I wouldn't be too concerned about being tired after that. If it does, I guess it depends a bit on how much of those 4-5h are in concentration, but it sounds like you can still get serious work done.

</comment><comment><USER6> 4-5 hours of quality thinking time sounds about the right limit to me. if anything, it's impressive. I can churn out 10 hour days but about 7 hours will be mostly "operational" stuff i don't need to think deeply about.</comment>


Chinese Electric-Car Startup NIO Undercuts Tesla with Debut Model - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-17/chinese-electric-car-startup-nio-prices-debut-model-at-67-783 <comment><USER2> Here come the "Tesla-killers" (that never were).

<comment><AUTHOR> The model is pretty expensive at $67K</comment></comment>