Ask HN: What does it take for a developer to be a successful founder? - <AUTHOR>

As a web developer, I love learning new things from design patterns to new frameworks such as React and Angular. While I'm passionate about development, I'm equally passionate about startups and creating a successful one.
In the past, I've launched a couple of websites but in retrospect they were more side-projects than anything else. I have no problem building products but when it comes to things like validating the idea, acquiring users, and gaining traction, I get stuck.
What skills should I work on developing in order to put myself in a better position to build a product and most importantly launch it?
In terms of resources, I've read The Lean Startup, Running Lean, Innovator's Dilemma, PG's essays, some of Vinod Khosla's papers, and videos after videos of startup talks.
*Edit for formatting <comment><USER2> It's easy to get stuck, and hard to get unstuck. It's often less about your skills and more about something like fear.

Get valuable feedback and incorporate it. That means build and use your network for helping shore up your weakness. Ask PMs and founders you currently or will soon know how they do the things you are having trouble with. Have them show you how to do it a little so you get the workflow. Look for meetups related to the issues your having (eg a growth hacking meetup or lean methodology meetup where people talk about what works and can help each other get further, stay on track, see things they missed). Also check out the War of Art, an interesting book about blocks and how to overcome them.

tl;dr

Do more, think less. Get help from real live people on ideas you're kicking around or actual prototypes and products. Don't let fear get the best of you- you can do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> My 2 cents: Honestly, you don't have to solve for all your weaknesses. You can find a cofounder and advisors that help you fill in the gaps. It's of course smart to have a rudimentary understanding of go-to-market strategy, but I think one thing you should definitely develop is a diverse network. If you're surrounding yourself with smart people who excel in a variety of fields (not just web development) then you're probably more likely to be able to tap into their knowledge when you need it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the language or plattaform is not the break point at the start.

Just think on what could be useful for people, even if the code is jut 10 lines, if it solves a problem, then it would a sucess.

Just take a look of many projects that solves a simple thing, they are not the super coders, they just solve a problem, the rest is part of the process

</comment><comment><USER5> You sound like you are tooled up, why not just explore/create ideas until one sticks or you die trying? Isn't that the next step? You have all the tools to slay a dragon, now go find one (if you are lucky).

<comment><AUTHOR> Following that analogy, I've tried slaying the dragon but fallen short after the first attack. In other words, the point at which the product is built and needs to be disseminated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would recommend reading 'Lean Startup' by Eric Ries. He gives couple of pretty interesting ideas I found useful when making business.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read his book as well as another book called Running Lean. Both books were very helpful, the book by Ries lays down the concepts and Running Lean shows how to apply them and make them actionable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're overthinking it.

Build a thing, sell a thing, see if it succeeds, try again.

Maybe learn along the way.

<comment><USER8> or you use lean methodology pre-sell a thing, then build a thing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you share videos and pictures with your friends and family? - <AUTHOR>

As the resident technology evangelist in my extended family, I'm eager to find a solution to sharing and storing videos that does not involve YouTube or Facebook.  With our family growing with grandchildren, we are in need of a service that supports uploading from mobile devices as well as consumption on said devices.  This service also needs to be easy for elderly people to use (said elderly people have no problem using iPads at the moment).<p>Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> We have more or less resorted to using Dropbox, but both me and my better half got 50Gb upgrades through Samsung... So we have lots of space to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. This or box (I have 50GB through box as well) may be our last resort.</comment></comment>


Here's the Fastest Way to Defrost Your Car Windshield According to Science - <AUTHOR> http://sploid.gizmodo.com/heres-the-fastest-way-to-defrost-your-car-windshield-ac-1751085019 <comment><USER2> "Defog", not "Defrost".</comment>


Will Doctors Soon Be Prescribing Video Games for Mental Health? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/08/10/430149726/will-doctors-soon-be-prescribing-video-games-for-mental-health

<comment><USER2> In my experience, the only long-lasting change video games produce in the mind is the craving to play more video games. They are certainly addictive, but it's doubtful that they help mental health. Sure, people can use them to escape from the world and as a distraction from real mental health issues, but (again in my experience) that distraction works only while playing the video game and for a very short time afterwards.</comment>


Massive Health's Startling Infographic: Carbs are Killing You  - <AUTHOR> http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2012/01/26/infographic-of-the-week-carbs-are-killing-you/ <comment><USER2> Really good explanation in that infographic, but is that accurate? I think it's missing the part where carbs transform to fat, or is that correct? I've always assumed that.

Also, extra fat usually goes straight through your body. It's weird how it's always assumed that every calorie stays in your body. So it's not necessarily just used for fuel or stored, some of it comes out of the other end.

</comment><comment><USER3> The other key point of an Atkins diet: you can eat as much for the allowed foods as you feel like, you don't have to restrict yourself in quantity, just type.</comment>


How to Stop Negative Thoughts in 180 Seconds Without Meditating - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-stop-negative-thoughts-in-180-seconds-without-meditating-4ef29cda09d1 <comment><USER2> "Tony was not born optimistic. He practiced it. He put in the effort.

You can do the same."

The phrase "You can do the same" already shows that this person has never dealt with real psychological problems. I wish these self-help gurus would just say "Here is something that works for some people. Try it. Maybe it works and if it doesn't work it's not your fault". Instead you have to defend yourself if the well-meant advice from people doesn't work.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's ironic that the people closest to AI, who should be able to see that the brain is a physical organ like all others, often have the hardest time recognizing that cognitive deficits are as real as physical deficits. Some people can't "make themselves feel X" any easier than a quadriplegic can dunk a basketball.

<comment><USER4> The author is obviously saying that line for encouragement not a statement of fact.

<comment><USER2> Saying "You can do the same" is extremely condescending and frustrating for people who have repeatedly tried to solve a problem and failed. It's like some people tell depressed people "Just go out there and have fun". It's not helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Useful framework but the 180 seconds part is false in general. For a typical person with lots of negative thoughts it will take much longer to do the countering exercise at any given time. Once you become good at it though, then it takes no time at all —you counter instinctually and st some you just think positively from the get go. So the 180 seconds part is just the usual title clickbaiting.

Again, useful framework but main problem I have with it is for when the negative thoughts are very real and very deserved. From something small (like you left your dirty dishes in the sink for your partner to deal with) to something large (like you ran somebody and killed them while drunk driving), you screwed up and the thoughts of shame and embarrassment are appropriate. For things you can't truly rectify (to make an extreme example, like bringing someone back to life that you killed), there is often no amount of positive countering that will overcome it. Similar for things like not liking something about your appearance that can't be easily changed like your height. No amount of positive countering can undo the fact. It ends up looking a lot like denial, self deception, and minimization to use this framework in these cases.

<comment><USER6> Your examples don't fit the use-case of the framework, which is for chronic negative thinking, for when you wake up and everything is wrong, or if you're easily triggered by one negative thought which sends you into a tunnel of negative thinking. Most people don't think of negative examples separately-- for example, losing your job is not usually related to how short you are, but most people will vaguely correlate the two, if they're in a bad state, and conclude there might be something inherently wrong with who they are.

When something has gone wrong, one can still think positively about the situation, but the framework to use in that case is to simply ask 'why' over and over again until you've found the true root of the problem. The positive aspect is that you've just been taught a lesson, and you can move on once you've learned that lesson. In the case of drunk driving and killing someone-- obviously you fucked up because you drove while drunk, but why didn't you stop yourself from driving drunk? Why were you drunk in the first place? etc.

For negative thoughts about things that can't be changed, that is simply a matter of perspective. You can put a positive (or non-negative) spin to anything.

<comment><USER5> I think they do though. The drunk-driving-death example could easily lead to chronic negative thoughts about it. How foolish you were to drive drunk. How foolish you are to be an alcoholic. How weak you are to be an alcoholic. How messed up your life will be now for a long time, if not forever. Etc.

So yes, you can spin that or change your perspective like you say, but that gets to my point: it just verges on self-delusion, minimization, and such. How do you know you aren't lying to yourself for selfish relief? Knowing yourself enough to know when you are doing that is where the real skill is. This simple framework doesn't help with that.

<comment><USER6> The framework in the article isn't about knowing yourself. You have to know yourself to create positive thoughts, and you have to create positive thoughts in the process of knowing yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article begins with a rather dubious "citation":

> According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about > 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are > repetitive thoughts.

There is no link to the alleged NSF work (as a funding organization, it is unlikely they'd be doing this sort of research), and despite the claim being repeated around the web, there is apparently no legitimate source for it: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/th...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/the-70000-thoughts- per-day-myth/) .

<comment><USER8> Just to note, a day has only 86400 seconds in it (and 28800 of them belong to sleep).

It is also a funny coincidence that seconds-per-day is a multiple of a 14.4k baud rate.

<comment><USER9> 86400 - 28800 = 57600 ≈ 60000. This looks fairly realistic if you ask yourself about just how much time a day do you maintain perfect inner silence and equilibrium. I really doubt it's more than about the 400 seconds for the majority of the people who don't practice meditation (and even these 400 seconds are usually just the unconscious moments). Also ask yourself about how long do you usually maintain concentration at one single atomic thought contiguously without switching to random related and unrelated thoughts for even a moment.

<comment><USER8> It is tempting to say that I spend many time in conscious-inactive mode, but then it heavily doesn't add up with what you say. What is a distinct thought exactly? Do people experience a constant caleidoscope of inner images/sounds/etc? For me thinking is retrieving conceptions from subconscious and lining them up on 'internal board' to produce results. Another notable mode is simply recalling events (including feelings) and turning them into speech. This usually takes many seconds. Can fragmentary distractions in these processes count as thoughts? If yes, then I should agree, but I'm not sure if it's a fair definition. That's interesting.

I never meditated, but I can easily stare at wall clock or cursor blinking for few minutes, not experiencing inner visual or acoustic 'things'.

Edit: btw, I began to do that after reading Colin Wilson's "Spider World" in '00s, where mind control was described in a scifi series. Didn't know it, but now looks like consciousness problems are his main interest.

<comment><USER9> You're cool, dude! Definitely not an average person. What you describe is a meditation of a kind (there are many) actually. Have you tried the next level? Given you can silence your inner dialogue/monologue/etc while maintaining awake conscious mind and concentrated attention, "turn around" (your attention) and try staring at the still space that is the background to where endogenous mental stimuli (verbal/conceptual thoughts, images, feelings etc) normally appear, try to find where the point of "you" hides from which you look at all the images thoughts, stare in this direction rather than on a physical object or a thought. It sounds crazy like a camera filming itself without a mirror but it's possible in this realm and feels awesome once you succeed.

<comment><USER8> Well, thanks! No, I never "turned around", nor do I think that what I described is particularly cool, since it puts some ~ consequences on the way I communicate, like e.g. I'm falling off conversation for few seconds before an answer emerges. But is this next thing safe and pragmatic? Any good read on that? Asking out of curiosity and because I'm not really into that... 'spiritual' thing that accompanies many mind-related areas.

<comment><USER9> If you feel like looking at your self may be unsafe for you then it probably is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Step 1: Take out a piece of paper or open a writing software on your > computer or mobile

Instructions unclear, ended up spending the day wallowing in a feedback loop of negative thoughts that has now only been amplified by noticing I'm so useless that I can't even open up vim to write about it.

There are lots of ways to potentially "stop negative thoughts", sometimes taking a caffeine pill can be enough ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28455046](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28455046)) and sometimes forcing your brain to slow down by writing things works. It's the very first step though, taking any action that has any chance to move you out of the loop, that seems the most insurmountable when you're inside the loop. I'm not sure anyone's figured out a way to make that easier, just ways to avoid falling right back in (ideally indefinitely, such as reliably noticing (easier said than done) you're falling early enough you can take action to right yourself before it seems an insurmountable effort, which is where this/meditation/periodic medication/etc. come in).

</comment><comment><USER11> Meditating isn't magic, and it's not hard. It's just practicing exercises that can have an effect on your mental state, when you do them often enough you can end up training yourself to have more control over your mental state. You don't have to "get meditation right" to be able to be doing it. When you meditate your mind will wander, that's normal, when you meditate you may not become relaxed, that's normal, when you meditate you may not be able to let go of anxious or panic inducing thoughts, that's normal. The trick to meditation is doing it anyway and not having expectations about it, which, ironically, is how you get better at it and you get better at letting go of unwanted thoughts and at settling your mind into calmness, etc.

This article is nothing but a description of one way to meditate. If you are turned off of the idea of meditation because of some preconceived notion of what it is or how it works I would highly suggest you re-evaluate and look into it again, it's one of the most helpful life tools that anyone can have, and absolutely anyone can do it.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any suggestions of where to start off?

<comment><USER13> Headspace is a nice app that does some timed guided meditation - you can start by aiming to do five minutes each night. It's free for some level of use, I don't remember the restrictions but the free version is definitely enough to begin a decent meditation habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow." Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. Thinking does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape." ― U.G. Krishnamurti, Mind Is a Myth

</comment><comment><USER15> I believe that it's not too bad to let negative thoughts pass through our stream of consciousness everyday. I mean, it's part of being human to have different kinds of emotion, right? The intervention is necessary ONLY IF one feels like negative thoughts are occupying too much of his/her mind space and is debilitating his/her day-to-day functions.

Other than that, we may sometimes be happy, be sad, be angry, be disgusted, be afraid and so on. Just don't linger on one for too long (know that time will help us forget) and that's a good enough approach to manage the emotional flux.

</comment><comment><USER16> _> According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts._

What does any of this even mean?

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/th...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/the-70000-thoughts- per-day-myth/#.WwHi7r1v_qA)

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's one trick to get out of a "suffering state" and get to a "beautiful state":

Silently in your head, send blessings (joy, happiness, love, inner peace, etc.) to people that you encounter in life and people that are playing a part in your thoughts. Do this whenever you feel the oncoming of an unnecessary negative emotion.

After 30 to 90 days, a new habit will be formed. And, probably, a new default peaceful internal state.

<comment><USER18> For more of the science behind approaches like this check out the first four chapters of 'Hardwiring Happiness' [0] and try the exercises listed in the book. It sounded like fluff when I first came across it but so far it's helped me relate to perhaps unsavoury mind states in more healthy ways.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385347316/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385347316/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the suggestion! I've added it to my Audible queue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm just going to leave this here [https://youtu.be/w1tDGtfwZtw](https://youtu.be/w1tDGtfwZtw)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is called "Cognitive Reframing". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reframing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reframing)</comment>


Australian opposition announces National Broadband Network plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-09/conroy-hits-out-at-coalition-policy/4618232

<comment><AUTHOR> For those unfamiliar with the current state of Internet service in Australia:

The current government has founded a company called NBNco (National Broadband Network Company) to connect 93% of Australian homes via fibre. The remaining will be covered with a fixed-wireless and Satellite.

This comes at a cost of $44b and completion date of 2021.

The opposition party has just announced their plan, which is to connect 22% of households directly to fibre, 71% via fibre to the node, utilising the existing copper network for the last few hundred metres, 4% via fixed wireless, and ~3% via satellite.

This comes at a cost of $30b and completion by the end of 2016.

What it comes down to is, should the Australian people be spending an extra $14b and five years to connect 71% more of the population directly to fibre?

A lot of the discussion revolves around whether people really need > 100mb/sec (FttH), or whether >25mb/sec (FttN) is suitable for the next "x" years of technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried to write the above comment as un-biasedly as possible, just to give you the info and what the arguments are about.

For what its worth, I think that the 50% extra price to connect an extra 71% of homes directly to fibre is worth it. I like to use the analogy of the rail networks being built in the USA, or the interstate highways, or even the light rail in Calgary. Each is a massive project, which costs quite a bit of money, but in the long term, repays the investments many times over in the things they enable.

The opposition is guaranteeing that nobody will have less than 25mb/sec, and the government is touting a maximum speed of 100mb. But they seem to shy away from the fact that 100mb is just the speeds you will get with todays technology in the exchanges. I'm not too familiar with networking hardware, but it seems that increasing the speed of a FttH network is much easier than the FttN network, because it involves replacing hardware in the exchange. Whereas with FttN, you are fundamentally limited by the copper connections to the houses.

I heard the opposition communications spokesman yesterday on the radio, talking about "What will the average person possibly need with 100mb/sec?", but then you could ask the same thing for their 25mb/sec connection: "What will the average person possibly need with 25mb/sec?". I know right now, that my mum, sisters, brother, etc would not be able to utilise that bandwidth. I think that by conceding that 25mb is the minimum suitable bandwidth for the future, they are conceding that faster networks will be required in the future. So why limit it at the arbitrary value of 25mb and say "This is all we will need".</comment></comment>


Why not have scheduled bookmarks for scheduled web browsing? - <AUTHOR>

It would be sort of like a calendar app, but with bookmarks instead of events. <comment><USER2> Off the top of my head: because it would require too much effort to enable any sort of productivity.

</comment><comment><USER3> a "to do" bookmark folder would do, with visited pages automatically archived. maybe u could throw in a star (quick) rating system to set straight the priorities</comment>


Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mattbierner.com/10-years-stack-overflow-learnings/ <comment><USER2> I've never needed to ask a question on SO since its inception, but I have found a few answers. I guess by the time I adopt a technology it's already at the appropriate place in the hype cycle where all of the easy questions have been asked and answered.

SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I've found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.

On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I've gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary "locked in" goodness, is our company's business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for "something is wrong" (never had an issue) but as an "easy button" when I just don't want to waste any more time trying to figure something out.

I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company's competency, paid support would be a godsend.

On another note: I guess that's another reason I don't do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.

<comment><USER3> It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users.

For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.

<comment><USER4> > and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.

Tangentially, every time I google/ddg a problem, it's almost never taking me to good blog posts addressing the substance of my issues. I usually find those after two or three clicks, like e.g. an article mentioning a blog post.

And it's sad because there's a myriad excellent blog posts out there, somehow unreachable at least without 10 minutes of browsing the search results pages.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, half the "blog posts" take me to Medium.

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with Medium? I find lots of good tutorials there. It helps me with going from 0 understanding of a framework to having some boilerplate I can build on.

<comment><USER2> The content is good. From a user side you have to log in to view content. From a content creator side, why would you want your post to be under the control of Medium instead of your own domain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stopped participating in Stack Overflow and Server Fault a number of years ago. Something happened on the way to its popularity, especially on Server Fault. Questions were being asked and a number of highly rated users were closing them down as "not related to SysAdmin". I don't remember the exact nature of the questions, but one that I do remember was related to mobile phones. I argued that the question was valid because a lot of Sys Admins also had to manage phones in their environment.

There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.

<comment><USER7> I was the top-rated user on Server Fault from 2009 to 2014. I participated less and less in 2013, and eventually stopped nearly "cold turkey".

The tenor of the questions changed in the last couple years I participated. Early questions were more of the the "I'm having this strange thing-- here's what I've tried already"-type. These were a lot of fun to research and answer. They ended up sending me down rabbit-holes that helped in my work later on. (There were also "explain xxx concept" questions, which were tremendous fun to write for but there are only so many of those that can be asked.)

I was never one to "vote to close" because something wasn't "sysadmin- related". That's likely because I've been asked by Customers to "sysadmin" virtually anything electronic. A number of my answers ended up migrated over to "Super User" as a result. The migration of questions to other sites didn't bother me, because that wasn't killing the question out-right. The "community" closing legitimate questions, however, made me sad.

I did "vote to close" on questions more of the "Can I get some free labor" vs. "I'm having a problem, here's what I tried". The former seemed a lot more common towards the end of my participation. I never saw closing these questions as lacking in compassion. Often there were plenty of existing questions the posters could've used as reference. It was clearly easier for them to ask another question rather than research.

I hold myself to am unreasonably high standard w/ respect to researching before asking anybody a question (at least, anybody who I'm not paying for it). I tried to relax that standard when it came to answering Server Fault questions, but there was still a lower limit. It was hard for me to be "compassionate" in the face of such apparent laziness and disrespect for the donated time of others, particularly when there were so many good resources right at the poster's fingertips.

<comment><USER6> I'm in the top 2% on ServerFault to this day. I remember interacting with you on numerous questions. I'm GregD on the Stack sites.

I totally understand the limits that had to be set on the low bar for quality content. In those early days though, it seemed to me that when people asked questions about managing mobile phones for instance, because it was only newly related to being a sys admin, they'd get closed as not related.

Granted, in those early days, there weren't as many process "rules" in place to guide users to ask better questions and perhaps that's still so. However, a quick perusal of the site indicate this has gotten better and more friendly towards new people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I'm not sure what Stack Overflow should do about this.

SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.

While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.

<comment><USER9> I never thought about that. I actually think this is a great idea. One big issue is a lot of people would be upset at the idea of their reputation getting smaller. Maybe have a new "influence" or "helpfulness" score along with reputation that takes into account the decay you are talking about. Or maybe just have a different scoring mechanism altogether based on how knowledgeable and helpful your are to the SO community.

<comment><USER10> I have noticed that it is common among the high rep users to say that _the reputation doesn 't matter_, so this would put their claims to the test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established "gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people only strengthen their stranglehold...

<comment><USER12> I guess I'm the only one who doesn't seem to have any problems with wiki[1] or SO.

Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling.

Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example.

 _So I 'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge._

[1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.

<comment><USER13> These were literally the first 3 questions on my review queue:

* [https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615](https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615) \- A question by an absolute beginner, trying to do something that they have no clue how to start with. Already closed.

* [https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242](https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242) \- A question about parsing a JSON response with jQuery. Two votes to close. The asker clearly does not know the word "parse".

* [https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318](https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318) \- Someone trying to figure out an error message they're getting with kubernetes. This is exactly the kind of thing you get at the top of your google results when you hit the same error, and with one more vote to close, it will be forever locked with no useful information. Some asshole even downvoted the one answer that is there without adding any comments.

None of these questions are _good_ , but they could be made better, and they all represent people with real problems that deserve help. Getting mad at people for "being lazy" (because if I, the expert, could easily find the answer to this, then why didn't you?!), is not productive.

Here's what I don't understand about all these SO deletionists: how is closing the question helpful in any way? If you don't find the question answerable, then don't answer it! But why block other people from trying to help? It's not like you're somehow "teaching" these people how to ask by blocking them. The user from question 59344615 (which got closed) did not post another question with better details. They just left the site, one more developer that doesn't have anywhere they can ask newbie questions. It sucks.

<comment><USER14> First one was aptly closed IMHO, much too vague. SO is not the right tool for absolute beginners to seek guidance when they have no idea what they're doing: the format asks for a reasonably specific answerable question. Would be nice if upon closing the asker was given pointers to beginner-friendly resources, though.

The other two are better, and (aptly) not closed. Of course you'll get inappropriate votes to close, but I hope they are correctly offset by other votes the (hopefully vast) majority of the time.

Now about this:

> how is closing the question helpful in any way?

I suppose it's to stay focused. When googling I quite often get useful SO results (& upvote those), and I'm happy not having to sift through tons of useless questions.

<comment><USER15> All 3 are closed now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information. I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....

<comment><USER17> > no one answers any difficult questions any more

New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything.

This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.

<comment><USER18> _while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone._

Why does rep have anything to do with this? People answer questions they know how to answer, and want to answer. Having upvotes doesn't obligate you to learn other things so you can give free help on topics you aren't interested in.

Rep isn't a promotion at a company where you get more responsibility and earn more money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's an idea. Instead of a two stage question and answer format, add a third stage. First is the question from a regular user like me. Second stage is someone with more knowledge re-phrases the question. Third is the answer. This would create a growing body of well-asked questions and good answers.

<comment> mark-r The problem is that stage 2 is impossible. The thing that makes the question unanswerable is missing information, or a genuine misunderstanding on the part of the asker. It's very rare for phrasing to be the problem.

<comment><USER20> And it is terribly annoying when someone changes the question and it no longer leads towards an answer that is useful for the asker.

<comment><USER14> Yes, that's why I thought OP's idea of explicitly separating the derived "better" questions interesting, instead of allowing anyone to edit the original question and steer the discussion in a different direction. This is an interesting format that leaves room for multiple directions to explore… which SO does not want to do as they insist so much on focus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related: How to ask questions the smart way [http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

<comment><USER22> A rebuttal:

It's okay to ask 'dumb' questions. People that get upset about them are jerks.

<comment><USER8> Very few people have a problem with so-called dumb questions, especially from someone who genuinely wants to learn. They take issue with low-effort, unresearched questions, and those from people with no interest in the subject, who just want someone else to do their research (or homework) for them.

<comment><USER22> There's no need to know where you should start before asking a question.

Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com

Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:

\- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.

\- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?

\- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.

Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!

<comment><USER24> SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors.

If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.

<comment><USER25> Those low effort questions are often extremely popular though, which would imply that they are useful to a lot of people.

<comment> why-oh-why "Where is babby come from" would be a pretty popular question too, but it's not the right forum.

I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A little OT as I am not specifically talking about SO - when people ask me some technical question my expectation is that they would have done some upfront research and put some effort into it. Often I find people don't do that. I tell them nicely that I would be happy to help them but they should be prepared to answer the following -

1\. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find?

2\. Tell me what all you have tried.

3\. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be.

It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so.

I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.

I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.

But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. "Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.

So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.

<comment><USER28> There seems to be a disconnect between the effort that you expect goes into a question and that SO expects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's an idea: free to read and answer questions, but $0.10 to ask questions. This would eliminate a huge chunk of low-effort content by making the amount of friction to ask a question higher than the effort required to ask your TA or RTFM (or textbook, in the case of high school and CS 101 students).

</comment><comment><USER30> I personally have used stack overflow in all my projects and the community helps in stating the questions correctly.

The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection.

P.S: I am a big fan of their yearly survey.

</comment><comment><USER31> One lesson I've learned from 10 years using Stack Overflow is that its moderation is obnoxious. Eventually, in 2013 I started jotting down links to questions that were closed despite being well-written questions with thoughtful answers, whenever I encountered one in the normal course of my day to day work. I'm well past 20 at this point. And that's not counting the Serverfault article I just saw the other day where a user had a question about compiling php (a technical question that received a correct answer). The question was closed for being off-topic. Compiling web server software is apparently off topic on a site for system administrators, confirmed by multiple mods.

Stack Overflow's content is good because:

1\. The site design is high-quality.

2\. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.

The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.

</comment><comment><USER32> My personal policy on SO: (Almost) never downvote a question immediately; always explain first why something is missing or inappropriate - and also warn that downvotes are likely if it is not addressed because criticism on the site is harsh.

If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote.

That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(

</comment><comment><USER33> This was great.

Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets.

I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers.

This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers.

Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence.

Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score.

That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO.

As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such.

I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice.

I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.

</comment><comment><USER34> Funnily enough years ago I asked a question on StackOverflow:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i- reload...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload-emacs- after-changing-it)

: at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked

</comment><comment><USER32> > I almost never ask question on Stack Overflow

> ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I'll > find that someone already asked the exact same thing...

I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution.

So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.

<comment><USER29> 80-100 questions a years seems WAY too high. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry, but I'm a working professional on embedded linux systems and I find I only need to ask a question maybe 3 times per year. I consume probably 500 answers per year though.

<comment><USER32> I am about balanced in my number of questions and answers, to put things into perspective.

But - it's true that I'm not a typical user; I'm often curious about "But why is it like that?" and "can we do something better than..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me how the hardest thing in science is to find the right question to ask nature...

</comment><comment><USER36> Add to skill set:

Staying under the radar of nazi-moderators that are trigger happy to close relevant, valuable and interesting questions under lame excuses.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds to me that AI could play a big role in this.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's elitism like this that made me hate so. Is asking a question a skill? Please tell me more.

<comment><USER39> Sure it is. Asking a question has several dimensions along which to afford skill. General social skills aside, question-asking specifically has the extra challenge of "get someone to give me the information I need", and some people are demonstrably much more effective at this than others.

I've certainly witnessed people who really needed to know something and were completely unable to express what they needed. If you're talking to a skilled question-intuiter then this is less of a problem, but if you're not, then you need to be correspondingly better at asking your question so as to get an answer that is useful to you.</comment></comment>


Why Desktop Linux (Still) Sucks. And What We Can Do To Fix It. - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/file/3538476/ <comment><USER2> The audio situation is a total debacle. n-1 of the sound systems need to be killed so we can focus on making the remaining one work really well.

It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i) could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in 12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.

<comment><USER3> It is hard to believe that sound can be so broken, after all these years (and looking at the huge strides other parts of the desktop have made).

If Ubuntu wants to be the uber-friendly, runs anywhere (just works!) distro, they need to avoid these types of regressions from one version to the next. I know they're not in charge of all the upstream work, but they are the ones that make the decision on what version of pulse audio to use (or X version, or whatever). Instead it seems that Ubuntu always tries to stay on the bleeding edge, which is inevitably going to be broken for some people.

<comment><USER4> But it's not that simple : often, the bleeding-edge fixes others annoying bugs and it's really hard to have an estimate of the affected population. Maybe they should add an extra step to their installer that would allow to send anonymously data about your hardware configuration to Canonical ?

<comment><USER5> I think you're both right. What I think would made a real difference is making some cruel-but-kind decisions about deprecation.

State officially the other mechanisms are broken, then drop everything that doesn't use pulse from the repositories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-zed The major advantage of "Desktop Linux" (that I've been using happily for quite a few years now) is that it's utterly unlike Mac OS X or Windows. We use Linux not because it's free, but because it's more comfortable, the UI is better and friendlier, and developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier.

Everything Gnome, Ubuntu and this sort of people do work against these advantages. We use Linux because of its differences - these differences to other systems need to be accentuated (zsh, the suckless project, etc), not fought against (Ubuntu, network-manager, HAL, etc).

By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and less comfortable to use. This needs to stop.

<comment><USER6> Not me. I use Linux (among other OSes) because it's Open and Free, and I think that it's important to have an alternative to proprietary systems.

I don't consider it to have a better UI or to be easier to develop for and I feel more comfortable with Windows.

<comment> k-zed Then you need to try the following things: \- vim or emacs \- tmux or screen \- tiling window managers \- zsh

Each of these things result in a massive usability increase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The easiest problem to tackle is .RPM vs .DEB debate that should have ended about 3 years ago. If the LSB had said .DEB it might have happened, but since the "official" standard and the actual majority are diametrically opposed it doesn't want to happen. And of course the filesystems don't perfectly match across distros.

<comment><USER8> The .rpm vs .deb debate is a fallacy. The _real_ issue is that when packaging for say debian and RHEL you have to care about different glibc, different compiler versions with potentially different ABI, different filesystem conventions, different scripts for post install, etc... The format in which the files are packaged is the least of the issues compared to that. For example, packaging for opensuse once you have a package for RHEL is as much of a PITA than packaging for debian, really.

Once you standardize on what makes packaging difficult across distro, you basically end up with the same system. I think systems like the build service from Suse, etc... are much more useful than wishful thinking on packaging format.

<comment><USER9> Meh, from a source point of view, once I have a debian/ directory, with a properly set up rules file, building becomes trivial. Then it is matter of generating a package per-distro/version with the right environment. This could be very well done in an automated manner and a few vms.

<comment><USER8> Which is exactly what the build service gives you...

<comment><USER9> My bad, I was under the impression that it was an RPM only thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish talks like these had transcripts. I listened to the first half, but don't have the time for the whole thing.

<comment><USER11> tldw? Anyone?

 _sigh_ It's so annoying when you have to sit through a hour-long video for what would otherwise be a 5-10 minute read.

<comment><USER12> Might get something from the Mozilla Drmbeat project in a few years; maybe Google's speech recognition subtitles will be able to e port as transcript when it's properly live, too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think what Linux really needs is to embrace some way of getting software outside apt/yum. Having to go through the package managers forces you to be an administrator to install software, and the developer and user have no say in which version of the application you get.

I think Linux distributions should be platforms which developers can develop applications for which they can distribute however they wish. Then users can choose which applications and which versions to install and does not have to go through the AppStore like package management system.

I also think applications should be stand alone. If they need anything outside the platform, these dependencies should be delivered as part of the application.

<comment><USER14> Every binary distro I've ever used (SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and Fedora) came with a little GUI that let you install packages without going through a repository. Just download the .deb/.rpm and double click on it. This is how a lot of projects deliver their latest builds. If you're talking about a unified package format (it doesn't seem like it) then thats a completely different issue.

As for 'stand-alone' applications, that doesn't make much sense for open source stuff, but there's nothing stopping you from distributing your software that way. A lot of commercial software for Linux is delivered that way.

<comment><USER15> But everything packaged that way still demands to be installed as root, linked against their depgraph of ancient fucked-with libraries, and split apart into pointlessly separate packages.

<comment><USER5> It asks for your own password (ala Mac - that said, it could simply ask you to confirm ala Windows).

End users don't do linking or worry about dependencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it boils down to what he was talking about at the end: Linux users need to be willing to buy software, and Linux software developers need to be more business savy.

<comment><USER17> The open question is why anyone would buy software for Linux. The key differentiating factor for _most_ people who use it is that it's free (as in beer). There are two other operating systems that for most people work better than Linux. It's hard to see how you can ask people to pay for software now in the hope that it will eventually be good. I'm sure some people will buy software because it's the Right Thing To Do, but considering the population that selects Linux and their reasons, it's hard to picture a big enough market there to draw really good consumer software developers.

An interesting business question.

<comment><USER18> The differentiating factor for me is that it's just what I've used for 12 years and what I'm most productive in.

Serious Linux users use it because it's the only thing that fits the way they work. Linux has all the interface and programs I'm used to, so of course I'd be more likely to buy software for it than any other OS. What holds me back is that there isn't any software I need that I don't have...

<comment><USER19> Same for me I guess.

One problem that I do have is that if I pay Canonical, for example, to make the whole OS better, it would mostly still crap out because I made the mistake of buying at AMD/ATI graphics card. Not sure who to blame at that point. The Ubuntu people say its from ATI/AMD and ATI/AMD say that there's not enough money in the market to justify better work on the driver(that or technical problems with the differences between distros). So what then? It would still have the same result.

But, in general, I do vote with my dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If the camera person for that video reads this, I suggest placing the speaker in the bottom-left/bottom-right corner of the video frame and keeping the slide visible at all times. You can pan around when people ask questions, but keep as much of the slide visible as possible and move back when the question is done.

</comment><comment><USER21> The blog post from the speaker has a link to the slides: <http://lunduke.com/?p=1075>

</comment><comment><USER22> So much of Linux is designed and modified by committee, so change is slow and painful. Apple managed to get a seriously hot UI onto FreeBSD in a (relatively) short time. Linux has everyone and their dog bartering to make changes, so the UI goes nowhere.

Stop copying Windows, already. Start menu sucks. Dump X.

<comment><USER23> Did you listen to the talk? :) X.org is quite an advanced graphic system mostly doing what you want it to do. Throwing it out and trying to make something new (for what gain?) means wasting so much resources that it's not even nice. (And how is X related to some start menu?)

<comment><USER24> You say advanced as if that's a good thing. I think a lighter system that considers hardware acceleration and multiple monitors from the ground up may be a good investment in the long run. Not to mention audio, and vector graphics and so on.

Multiple X sessions (one for each monitor + one for each vnc session + virtual X sessions for whatever reason) has to be combined with Xinemera and with graphic drives and with a KDE/Gnome desktop environment... and all the parts have to fit together perfectly for the system to work. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

The whole concept of X clients and X servers... it's just too much. X was created back in the 80s, and it still doesn't get the basic usecases right. The requirements for desktop computers have shifted a lot in the last 30 years, so this kind of thing is to be expected.

Starting over every 30 years? I think that's reasonable, especially when it's holding Linux back. We've learned a lot since, and X isn't going to last until 2030... so why not throw it out now?

<comment><USER23> X.org considers hardware acceleration, with XRender, for example. Quite too often, buggy and incomplete graphic drivers and other problems makes it even worse than no acceleration at all. I don't really see these problems as X.org specific, is there any evidence that they are? I think it's more likely caused by very limited resources that are available, incomplete or proprietary (ati and nvidia tends to lag months behind new X server releases, would they ever catch up with a completely new system?) drivers, and other problems, and throwing out X means throwing out all effort spent to solve this problems.

But that doesn't mean that it is not a good idea to explore other possibilities and experiment with another systems in parallel. Like Wayland, for example. Of course it is. Just, don't hurry with burying X11, it's the best what you've got, and likely to remain so for a long time.

<comment><USER24> You kind of have to bury X, otherwise you're going to end up with two competing projects and then you're even worse off. See: Linux audio.

If X were to disappear from the face of the earth open source programmers would scramble to get something new into place, and that would in all likelihood be better at dealing the realities of graphics today.

Just because it's the best we got doesn't mean it's good enough.

(I'm not advocating we actually should bury X... just making the general point that sometimes it's worth it to stake a step back to take two steps forward later. I realize it's often not politically feasible.)

<comment><USER23> Well, I was hoping for many more than just two. I don't really see any other way than many competing projects, one eventually killing all others.

But it shouldn't be that painful. As you've said, it's mostly about toolkits, and it's easy to simply run X server atop of the new system (Mac OS X does that, Linux does that in some ways, Windows can do that, so anybody can). I guess that the terrible mess of Linux audio can be avoided (after all, you don't have X11 applications locking whole graphic system for just themselves, as is often the case in audio).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's one suggestion: adopt the drag & drop software installation model of OSX.

<comment><USER26> Don't agree. Installation of distribution supported software on linux is very easy already. Drag and drop will just cause a lot of issues with software that actually requires more complicated installation, as well as libraries, etc.

<comment><USER27> That is pretty much the problem. The only software that installs easy (in most cases) is the "distribution supported software" (in the version(s) currently used by the distribution that is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If history is any evidence, nothing. :P

<comment><USER28> Actually, as someone who has used Linux as desktop software since 1996, I would say the exact opposite: it's making rapid progress compared to where it was once. Perhaps it still hasn't quite caught up, but I'm relatively certain that soonish, it will be 'good enough' for an ever-larger segment of the population. It's already 'good enough' for a lot of people.

<comment><USER29> it will always "soon" be ready for large-scale adoption.

But it never will.

<comment><USER28> Until it is. In 2006 we had Ubuntu on all computers at the company I worked for, because most of the people were either 1) developers and used it anwyway or 2) didn't really need more than a browser and openoffice anyway, and were thus perfectly content with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sell Ubuntu (and other apps like OOo, Gimp, etc) for a nominal $9.95

Give two options in the download area of your software, one green button with a $9.95 download and one blue button for a free download. Both pointing to the same package.

If you want to contribute to open source, click the green one.

Also sell it on best buy and walmart for $9.95 to reach the non-tech-savvy audience.

Even if they drop it on the trash can when they get home. At least some money goes to the pockets of the open sourcerers, which is better than none.

</comment><comment><USER31> Linux on Desktop is offering _too many options_ for users to install and configure apps.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does somebody know who is the speaker? Didn't see it on the blip.tv page.

<comment><USER32> Bryan Lunduke - sorry I saw it on the video now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I gave up on Linux. Not fodder; ^ if you agree.</comment>


Wikipedia Map: A web app for visualizing the connection of Wikipedia pages - <AUTHOR> https://luke.deentaylor.com/wikipedia/ <comment><AUTHOR> A tool someone pointed me out on a group dedicated to the Zettelkasten organization method. We had been talking about ways of visualizing connections within the Zettelkasten and someone showed us this tool.</comment>


Show HN: Share-this: Medium-like text sharing - <AUTHOR> https://maxart2501.github.io/share-this/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only person absolutely hates this feature on websites? I highlight where I'm at on the page in the event I get pulled away for whatever reason so I know where I was at in the page. Any JS interaction there drives me insane and I wish no sites did this. If you're going to ask me to share the text, at least make that show up _outside_ the text I'm reading, please.

<comment><USER3> I really hate this anti-pattern. I can't be the only person who highlights text as he reads to follow along...

<comment><USER4> I actually sometimes just copy the text from medium into a text editor so I can continue doing this. I'm addicted to highlighting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please consider releasing this as a Cloudflare App [1], it would make it easy for non-technical people to use it, and it would be an awesome app.

1: [https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I actually used the sharing functionality provided by the library to post this link here.

Suggestions are well accepted.

</comment><comment><USER6> It appears totally broken to me, it might be the adblocker though (I also block social media): [https://imgur.com/a/bB017](https://imgur.com/a/bB017)

The same thing on Medium appears perfect without any social media link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using Firefox, perchance? It has a "bug" (not sure about that, but surely it's the only one that shows that behavior) relating to SVGs, so it used to size incorrectly the fouth icon. I worked it around some minutes ago and it should be fine.

The first icon should be Twitter, so maybe it's really Adblocker. I've tested it with uBlock Origin and it shows the same behavior but, honestly, I don't want to tamper with that.

In fact, the sharers that are provided are meant to be _examples_ , and not part of the core library. I guess simply changing the name attribute of the sharer would end up in showing the button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You probably need a new name - [https://www.sharethis.com/](https://www.sharethis.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, someone already pointed that out on Reddit :( Let's see how it develops.

<comment><USER8> Don't wait to see how it develops, just change the name. The sooner you change the name the better.

Besides the old repo URL will still redirect to the new location after you've renamed the repo on GitHub by going into settings and changing it there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to deal with npm and bower too, though. I guess I'll have to release a new package and deprecate the old one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like the way Medium creates a "screenshot" when you share highlighted text to Twitter. I thought that's what this was going to be - although this is pretty cool, and it looks like this library makes it really easy to extend and add something like that.

<comment><USER10> Does anyone know how they do this?

<comment> modish-minimum imagemagick on the server with custom fonts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks interesting! Getting some odd skipping around testing on mobile (iOS / Chrome), where holding on a word skips to the bottom of the page, to an unrelated selection.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. The selection itself isn't handled by the library itself, rather than the browser/OS. The library only reacts when a selection is made.

Does it happen to you in other cases as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm afraid you may be violating Medium's copyright on their design, sir

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure there's a lot of prior art for their "design", so I'm kind of safe there.

Edit: unless you were referring to the whole aspect of the page. In that case, it's just a presentational page for an open source project, so it has nothing to do with blogging platforms. That should be ok, I guess.</comment></comment>


Google integrates restaurant menus in search - <AUTHOR> http://www.techienews.co.uk/977250/google-integrates-restaurant-menus-search/

<comment><AUTHOR> How is this legal? All the menus I checked have a no scraping, download only once for personal use clause in their user agreement. How could Google side step this?</comment>


A better Java: Scala or Xtend? - <AUTHOR> http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/2012/09/30/a-better-java-scala-or-xtend/

<comment><USER2> I think it depends a lot on what you're wanting out of the language.

If your primary goal is Java sans pain, then Xtend, Kotlin, or perhaps Groovy should fit reasonably well and have a gentle-ish learning curve. Both Xtend and Kotlin seem to be designed particularly for this niche, with a dash of Scala-is-too-complex mixed in to their marketing materials.

If you're wanting an interesting new language that goes beyond traditional Java thought patterns, however, Scala (or Clojure) seems like a much better option. Both Scala's type system and its deep and insightful fusion of OO and functional thought make it a far more interesting language to think about and work with.

IMO, YMMV, etc. of course.

<comment><USER3> Scala to me feels like the C++ of Java. There's a billion language features and each time I try to learn a new one, I run into gotchas and inconveniences. I'm not convinced an average or even above-average programmer can keep all that stuff straight in his head, cognitive energy that's better spent on actual programming.

For instance, what the heck is the method

GenTraversableLike.++[B >: A, That](that: GenTraversableOnce[B])(implicit bf: CanBuildFrom[List[A], B, That]): That

? That is all one method definition. Famous Java-isms like Enum<E Extend Enum<E>> are tame in comparison.

Things like this are the #1 reason I haven't embraced Scala, despite this constant itch I have to learn strongly typed functional programming. And who knows if they might capriciously change Scala tomorrow, like the time they decide to break binary compatibility of type signatures in compiled Scala classes, after which I spent an hour trying to figure out why the heck my IDE was reporting type errors everywhere.

<comment><USER4> The method ++ adds one collection to another. The specific type signature you are looking at is for the most general possible _parallel_ collection. Obviously in that case the type signature will be complex - it needs to enable the compiler to determine the type of (Set(Superclass()).par ++ List(Subclass(), Subclass2())).

In practice, type signatures written in application code rarely look like that.

Don't get me wrong - Scala is complex. If you don't need the JVM, Haskell is far simpler and cleaner. But you are exaggerating the complexity of it.

<comment><USER5> > _Haskell is far simpler_

I disagree. If anything, both Scala and Haskell are comparable to C++ in terms of complexity. Haskell is in fact, a bottomless pit.

During your descent into madness, you may encounter functors, monads, comonads, free monads, higher ranked types, arrows, zippers, existentially/universally quantified types, GADTs, kinds, and the other 300 extra compiler extensions that people use on a daily basis.

Documentation is provided in the form of academic research papers.

Not that I'm saying it's not an exciting journey, but it is a long journey.

<comment><USER6> C++'s complexity stems from the fact that it's one big leaky abstraction on top of C with a ton of warts, not because it derives from complex academic or conceptual depth.

I'm not saying Haskell is _easy_. I'm just saying they are categorically different kinds of complexity.

<comment><USER2> Yes, not all complexities are created equal.

Haskell, and to a bit of a lesser extent Scala, have a lot of their complexity arise from combinatorial explosion of interactions of simple features.

Also, relentless abstraction (particularly in Haskell). Yes, you _can_ think of lots of things as arrows. But does it necessarily make it easier to write a particular problem to do so, or does the cognitive load required to maintain the abstraction <-> problem mapping outweigh the benefit of casting it as the abstraction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to use any of the alternative JVM languages out there.. However, as someone who already has a great deal of code in JARs, it seems like it would increase complexity for little benefit.

What I am saying is that I don't like the costs of investing into a whole another ecosystem (say Scala or Clojure), with an unproven future, and a smaller market (compared to pure Java). Of course, you can call any JAR from Scala and Clojure, but it seems to me that a Scala/Clojure JARs are not equally callable from Java (or other JVM languages). You start getting into runtime JARs and the basic "impedance-mismatch" of different language abstractions. (For example, for languages with traits, what do those correspond to in Java -- interfaces, abstract classes?)

Ideally, I would like to have a language that can compile a Java class that seamlessly interacts with other Java stuff. The problem is that it seems to me you don't get any of the benefits of Scala, Clojure, in that setup, because the runtime adds a lot of value. Most that you could get are nice syntax for lambdas (which are a bit verbose in Java, but not really a problem for me), but those are anyways coming in JDK 8.

Have people on HN thought about this? People who use alt JVM languages, I am curious about your opinions. Honest question, I am not interested in language flamewars.

<comment><USER8> > Ideally, I would like to have a language that can compile a Java class that > seamlessly interacts with other Java stuff.

Groovy fits the bill.

<comment><USER9> Groovy has a lot of interop issues. The dynamic resolution of overloaded methods being just one example. Xtend is much more interoperable as it binds at compile-time just like Java does and uses the exact same type system.

<comment><USER8> > The dynamic resolution of overloaded methods being just one example.

That has never caused an interoperability issue for me. If there is concern about which method would get picked then use explicit types.

> Xtend is much more interoperable as it binds at compile-time just like Java > does and uses the exact same type system

You can enable this in groovy 2 using explicit types and @CompileStatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am a polyglot programmer even though I try to concentrate on languages that I need to get stuff done. I am really enjoying Martin's Scala class <https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun>, I use Clojure a lot on customer and my own projects, and (J)Ruby is so often my go-to language. And, I use Java a lot, but less than these other JVM languages.

That said, I was having a quiet think while walking in the wilderness recently (I live in the mountains) and I asked myself the tough question: would I have accomplished more in my professional life in the last ten years if I simply always used Java? I honestly don't know the answer but I suspect that the answer is that in some absolute metric of both money earned and productive work for society, just sticking with Java would have been the better call. In the past I have had the same quiet think about just using (J)Ruby.

The big win of being a polyglot programmer is reshaping one's mind to think about problems in different ways, and I don't know if it is worth it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Groovy and now Xtend. Going to be interesting to see what languages win out in what niches on the JVM.

<comment><USER12> Well, recently i started learning clojure, and i am surprised by the size of the community and ecosystem ... its big ... and active

i wanted to learn either scala or clojure and decide to pick the language with tighter java libraries integration (the language that makes it easier to use java lib), and according the the reviews i read, clojure won in that area

if the level of activity around clojure continues at this rate, i believe it will easily outshine the competition

also dont discount jRuby, it has a nice following

<comment><USER13> Nothing against Clojure, but I'm curious what you read that made you think Clojure has better Java interop than Scala?

Using Java code from Scala is literally the same as using Scala code from Scala. Same thing if you replace Java with Scala and Scala with Java (with the exception of some Scala constructs that aren't present in Java).

This is not true of Clojure..

<comment><USER12> a bit late but this is the link where i read it

<http://codemonkeyism.com/clojure-scala-part-2/>

looked trust worthy to me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Which ever has the best IDE support.

Approximately nobody codes in Java, rather we code in Eclipse, Netbeans or other Java. It is great because we can still ship the Java code as it is still Java, so I kinda miss things like lambdas and closures, but most of the pain is gone and a lot of things that are still difficult in other languages, such as finding a specific method or class are really easy.

But if you aren't used to program this way, it can take some adjustment.

</comment><comment><USER15> Java + lambdas

</comment><comment><USER16> meh, not sure what the "pain" is if you code like a god on eclipse. scala or xtend is java for pussies.

<comment><USER17> Every line you don't have to write is a line which can't contain bugs. Lack of semicolons makes for better readability. Pre-included functions like map() enable programmers to use best practices, allowing for even terser code. You might have noticed that as a programmer you spend about 80% of your time reading code (if you are lucky, it's your own), so let's not pretend there is no merit to code readability and shortness.

<comment><USER18> "terser code" is not an end in itself. It is neither a sign nor a goal of well written programs.

<comment><USER6> No, but all else being equal, code which is shorter and clearer is better than code which is longer. The latter is far more likely to contain bugs. It's the difference between composing a map/filter/reduce pipeline and writing every single loop out by hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Scala.</comment>


Silicon Valley Layoff Watch: Is eBay Next? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/silicon-valley-layoff-watch-is-ebay-next/?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> "eBay has been laying off all year. Only this time it is their employees and not the sellers on the platform finding themselves out of work."</comment>


Worse is worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807 <comment><USER2> The money quote for me:

> The rest of the paper is an excellent analysis for why Lisp lost out to C as > a programming language, even though Lisp was a superior language. Or at > least superior on the grounds that Dick found most important. But this > doesn't necessarily show that Lisp was in fact superior to C; it can just as > easily be taken to show that the metrics that were cited in the article were > not the ones that were taken to be most important by those choosing a > programming language. The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to > master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware > were not considerations that Gabriel found important. But others did. On > those metrics, the dominance of C as a programming language was an example > of better is better, not worse is better.

I think the problem is that some people thought "better" was defined as "more elegant design". And that wasn't the metric of "better" that mattered in the real world.</comment>


New MacBook Pro with Touch ID sensor and OLED mini screen is coming soon - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/10/new-macbook-pro-with-touch-id-sensor-and-oled-mini-screen-is-coming-soon/ <comment><AUTHOR> While I get the delay on refreshes, it seems like Apple should be able to push out some speed bumps on more frequent basis. I still think the MacBook Pro should have an RJ-45 port instead of having to buy a dongle. Use that extra space to put a bigger battery in the thing. HDMI is not going anywhere and think dropping that port is a mistake. Or is there a new AV port that is going to take over our TVs?</comment>


A massive, pointless link chain has taken over Twitter – here's how it ends - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/a-massive-pointless-link-chain-has-taken-over-twitterheres-how-it-ends-2014-2

<comment><USER2> This is how the world ends

This is how the world ends

Not with a bang

But with a 404.</comment>


Amazon Echo Acting Strangely – Thoughts on Alternative? - <AUTHOR> https://snips.ai/technology/ <comment><USER2> Vote and comment collusion will get your accounts and site banned on HN. Please don't.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mostly a lurker here but thought I'd post for some advice. About 2 days back I noticed my Echo kept waking up randomly to volume spikes from conversation between my wife and I before we headed to work. I figured it could be a faulty microphone but then it sorted itself out.

Around 8pm as I was playing some light R&B and it would wake up randomly again (it's in the living room). It really got to me when it had began playing my phone messages. I switched it off immediately. I'm guessing this is a terrible case of voice squatting.

I had literally bought this about less than a month back, and I can't put my finger down if this is just a mic problem. I read about the case of a family's conversation that was recorded and sent to a stranger and i'm starting to think that my device is recording more than what I bargained for.

Are there any ways I can test for this?

I went about to search for a more secure voice assistant and came across Snips in this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373). Seems to be a 'private by design', open source, decentralized voice assistant app. I really like what they are proposing with decentralized data generation campaigns. It looks like they are placing incentive models to their program? I'm looking to obtain their maker kit next week.

Does anyone have experience with Snips and could advise whether it's worth looking into?

<comment><USER3> I did heard about snips, however, from slightly different perspective. My best friend is a real geek (developer) and he is obsessed with playing around with different sdk. So for the past couple of months he has been talking about snips all the time. However, hadn't heard that they are privacy solution, will have to do some reading then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, they are privacy-oriented, don't send any data to the Internet and all that jazz</comment></comment></comment>


Elites keep ruining America - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/08/15/elites_ruin_everything/

<comment><USER2> He almost had me with him until he claimed that deficit cutting isn't really necessary while simultaneously taking shots at social security spending and medicare. Other countries spend more on these while having far smaller deficits. Admittedly, not being involved in a couple of wars at any given time does help with the bottom line.

The big problem with the U.S. elite is that they are more concerned with making decisions that benefit U.S. corporations than the country as a whole. By that rubric, the U.S. performed admirably throughout the 2008 financial crisis. Goldman Sachs is doing better than ever! It's a shame you can't buy stocks in cities though. If anyone on capitol hill owned stocks in Detroit the city would probably have been bailed out by now!

<comment><USER3> There is actually at least one city that has created an index fund of local businesses. I think the focus is on residents investing, but there's no reason why everyone couldn't do it. I heard/read of it within the last few weeks, but I can't find a link now.</comment></comment>


Billionaires haven't earned all they have - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/billionaires-take-more-than-they-make-2019-02-07 <comment><USER2> I don't necessarily have a problem with a person having a billion dollars. I do have a problem with the influence of money in the U.S. political system. Moving to federally and state funded election would be a start. That and a tax on wealth, not income, that would erode the accumulated assets over a generation would lead to greater equality.

<comment><USER3> I agree that changes need to be made, but a lot of the "wealth tax" discussion that has been going on lately would directly impact most people's retirement plans (in the US), which are based on 401ks and other investments. Since we don't have pensions anymore, and Social Security isn't sufficient for a lot of people, building wealth is one of the only remaining options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are basically 2 ways to make money. You can provide value where people are willing to voluntarily trade their own labor for that perceived value, and taking it by force. Bill Gates is an example of both. His contribution and a lot of the money he earned was because the value of his product was worth far more to people than the asking price. He received a fraction of the value he created in the world. He also got the government to give him a monopoly on the ideas that were implemented, preventing others from implementing those ideas with violence. I'm in the camp that says the latter is inexcusable in a society. I suspect gates and most billionaires would not be billionaires if it weren't for the monopoly protections enforced by government. Where would the rest of that wealth have gone? To anyone who was able to compete against the ideas.

<comment><USER5> That's definitely possible. But it's also possible no one would have spent the time to come up with the idea if they knew someone else could build on their work and release the same thing for cheaper.

I don't know which is true, although I have suspicions, and unless you've revolutionized the discipline of economics (and decided to inform the world in Internet comments) your certainty is unwarranted. You could have at least acknowledged that counterarguments to your thesis exist.

<comment><USER4> I think Linux is a counter example to that. A lot of commercial companies have contributed to the evolution and made a lot of money competing with each other delivering support for public projects. Linux has added a ton of value to the world yet there are no companies or people approaching the value of MS. The wealth was distributed via competition and a lot more of it stayed with the customers than othwerwise would have.

<comment><USER5> Open source is a good example of people not acting for immediate monetary gain, you're right, although legally the licenses rely on copyright law.

I absolutely didn't mean to say the comment I replied to was necessarily wrong, I wanted to point out the commentator made a confident claim that completely failed to address any of it's well-known counterarguments. I meant to criticize the commentator for failing to acknowledge that reasonable people have argued against their case; if I had used that to make a case that their argument was wrong I'd have succumbed to the ad-hominem fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stopped reading at "Most wealth is created, maintained and sustained by extracting unearned rents from the rest of us" because that is a description of a zero-sum situation; it is impossible to _create_ wealth that way, one can only redistribute it. Bill Gates for example created a company that was valued by the market at many billions of dollars, billions of dollars of value that did not exist prior to Microsoft. He did not "trick me into paying more than necessary for something out of ignorance" (asymmetric information), but instead created a tool worth thousands of times its cost to me (a software developer).

</comment><comment><USER7> Saying that there's something bad in 'rents' is a hypocrisy. Every income which is not a job, is rent. Profit from every business, economically, can be split into rent and (real and/or virtual) salary of the owner (with small business usually being wholly or mostly "salary"). You can tell there is some non-"salary" component when you can sell your business for the price higher than liquidation price of it's physical+financial assets. That price is a capitalized cost of the rent. There's nothing morally wrong with it.

<comment><USER8> no, rent is (non-value-creating) income from simply owning capital. capital put to productive use, along with labor, generates profits, which is compensation for value creation.

<comment><USER7> But owning capital comes about when you have a competitive advantage. Basically, if you make some profit but can't sell your company, you are just working your ass off: it's a job (say a typical software dev agency is). With maybe a modest premium for risks. Goal and only point of business is exactly rent-seeking, this is what capitalism is: profit you get on a capital is rent.

And yes, rent isn't value-creating. You created value when you well, created that capital which gives you rent. Value is the capital, not rent. Then yeah, you just sit on your ass and milk it, or just sell. Every capital is a monetary expression of the value of the unfair, rent-creating advantage you got. There's nothing wrong with that.

<comment><USER9> > And yes, rent isn't value-creating.

Some rents create value.

Say that I am a construction company and I need a huuuuge crane to complete a building. I can borrow money to buy the crane (rent goes to the person who lent me capital) or I can lease the crane (rent goes to the person who lent me capital in the form of a crane). Either way, no rent no new building. Someone values the building otherwise I wouldn't be building it. Hence, rent creates value.

Suppose I am a working stiff and I need a huuuuge house to raise a family. I can borrow money to buy a house (rent goes to the person who lent me capital) or I can lease a house (rent goes to the person who lent me capital in the form of a house). Either way, no living space no family. I value my family otherwise I wouldn't be building it. Hence, rent creates value.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Page of HN links - <AUTHOR> http://hnlists.pen.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this up after the earlier discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2496527> It's nothing fancy, but I figure it might be a nice reference.

Let me know if there is any pages/links you want added.</comment>


An Interview with Karsten Nohl, Cryptography and Internet Security Expert - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exit-interview-im-a-cryptospecialist-working-to-secure-the-internet-for-a-billion-people

<comment><USER2> _India is on the verge of finally becoming an internet-connected country. There's already millions of Indians on the internet, obviously, but it's still a tiny proportion of the population.

They have 950 million phones–almost a billion phone lines connected–of which only 5 percent are connected to the internet. So there's a billion people ready to jump, as soon as you give them a smartphone, and a little bit of money to pay for the internet plan. They will be the next big cohort on the internet.

I didn't have to worry about phishing, and I clicked on every email because I didn't receive that much. There was very little spam, and certainly no phishing. I grew into the internet as the internet became more and more evil. As such, I can now behave in more or less secure ways.

Somebody entering the internet for the first time right now does not have that luxury, especially somebody who's illiterate, or mostly illiterate, who can barely use a tablet computer._

This is a really good point he's making. I sometimes joke with my computer illiterate friends/family that I don't know how they survive in the world these days. But seriously, it's so easy to take for granted that many of us have had the experience of growing along side the Internet and having the time to adapt to it as it became more "evil". Being throw into the "evil" Internet today without that background would be pretty scary/risky. Having entire large chunks of developing countries doing it en masse is just scary/risky on an unprecedented scale.</comment>


Coders at Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.codersatwork.com Is Jessica Livingston going to write a second book?

<comment><USER2> The popularity list is very top-heavy with language dudes. Also, 'created' is a better term for language creators, except for perhaps a really select few who can claim to have truly invented something completely new, and even then... I'd still say creator.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is Jessica Livingston going to write a second book?

<comment><USER3> _"... Is Jessica Livingston going to write a second book? ..."_

In a podcast interview (microISV show #16, 45min) JL mentioned a second book was in the planning. You can listen to the Interview here ~ <http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=296058></comment></comment>


Pure Css Data Chart - <AUTHOR> http://cssglobe.com/post/1272/pure-css-data-chart <comment><USER2> The Google chart API is also handy. It'll return a chart in response to a url -- very easy to use. Only drawback is they could theoretically pull the plug at some point.

<http://code.google.com/apis/chart/></comment>


Ask HN: Is open sourcing my side project a good way to get traction? - <AUTHOR> So I've been building something and thinking that open sourcing it might be a good way to get more traction. I've followed the progress of Ghost and Wordpress and they both are doing well. There are also a few other tools that I use which have become open sourced recently.
Personally, I'm more inclined to be interested in an open source project than a closed sourced one, even if I pay for it to be hosted elsewhere.
I'm curious if anyone here has had experiences with this. Has anyone noticed if open sourcing projects helped gain traction? <comment><USER2> I think if you want _traction_ , then you should focus on marketing your project first, and make it very easy to try it out and say "wow".

Open source can be a strategy in your marketing plan, but just having code on github won't get you users. If you can share more about the project, maybe the community can give you more ideas on the marketing strategies.

A Show HN is a good start and, for example, you don't even link your project in your hn profile.

<comment><USER3> Agree with ecesena's advice above.

While there are lots of benefits to open-sourcing your project, there are also additional considerations to note. Generally, in order to create a successful open source project, you'll be adding a ton of additional work to your plate and greatly increase the scope of your side project. This is a non-exhaustive list, but off the top of my mind.. You'll want to add documentation your code/flows, set some general rules around contributions (code style, pull- request formatting, etc), be responsive to developers who jump in to help and have questions. Also, try to make your README as detailed, instructive, and organized as possible. Couldn't hurt to share some call outs for areas where you're looking for the most help as well.

Some other general advice: show why/how your project is a better solution to a given problem than other options in the market. It might also help to identify potential customers and help them integrate your project - see if they'd be willing to contribute and/or sponsor some development.

Good luck!</comment></comment>


100 years of turbulence // the role of patent pooling in the 20th century - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> (although it does leave out Otto Lilienthal)</comment>


A/V encoding images for Voyager's golden discs (1978 Modern Electronics) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/modern-electronics-july-1978/page/n53/mode/1up <comment><AUTHOR> This had the only details I could find anywhere on the Internet about the actual _encoding_ of the images (4-sec video still -> audio signal). Plenty of stuff on decoding, but nothing except this that has primary sources that I could find.

Was doing research for the latest issue of Orbital Index (orbitalindex.com).</comment>


Make your own custom Map of the World - <AUTHOR> https://mapchart.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> I needed a map for a video edit, and after a quick duckduckgo search, I found this site. It made prepping graphics for the edit so much easier than other options I had. Just felt like it might be useful for others as well.</comment>