999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/999-emergency-services-phone-number-80-years-old-anniversary-police-fire-ambulance-telephone-a7815946.html <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of this:

      Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his
      longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.
      But for most of Woz's life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges with
      three matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like
      221-1111. Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Woz
      begin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months of
      scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone
      number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.

      The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong
      numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to
      misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was
      never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or,
      not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a
      television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or
      Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.

      Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman
      say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver
      was snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: the
      hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They
      were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of
      the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep
      beep beep beep."

      The children of America were making their first prank call.

      And the person who answered the phone was Woz.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1lduxa/til_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1lduxa/til_steve_wozniak_was_the_first_owner_of_the/)

<comment><USER3> ...and this reminds me of the time I emailed 'Fred' at 'gmail.com'. Actually 'Fred's' email was 'email@example.com' however I mis-heard the 'email.' part even after verbally confirming the address as it seemed too concise.

So I send expected email, to then get a reply from the real 'email@example.com', this obviously not being my contractor friend. Turns out that this happens all the time - well considered, properly written emails of significance had been arriving in 'Fred's' inbox, each of them having to be politely returned as 'Fred' was ethical that way...

There are downsides to 'ideal' email addresses as well as 'ideal' phone numbers.

<comment><USER4> I have an email address that is email@example.com

I repeatedly emailed myself from my work email address to email@example.com - I kept forgetting the "the." at the start of _my own_ email address. I only realised when the owner of the other address politely wrote back asking me to stop doing this. I hadn't noticed because the emails were just autohotkey script backups and xml files containing machine settings for a laser cutter and I wasn't really paying attention as to whether I had received them or not.

Anyway, I got tired of trying to spell english-word email address to people over the phone, so I registered a domain and now have an unambiguous email address a364 athingy k45j dotthingy com - it's heaps easier to say and write down and _nobody_ has a similar address because I own the domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember a commercial from the 80's for an emergency number described as "dial 800 then keep dialing 9".

</comment><comment><USER6> Why isn't there an app for this?

I live in a country where emergency services are completely unreliable, so my main experience of 911 / 999 emergency services is from television and films, and I've noticed a fair amount of friction in the phone call process, especially when it comes to verbally communicating the address. In addition to the phone number, wouldn't it be useful to also have native apps for this which optionally grant GPS access and camera access at the touch of a button?

<comment><USER7> If you want to learn more about this, then I suggest reading about the several and various initiatives that there have been over the past few years, in the U.K., the U.S.A., and elsewhere, to deal with with the problem of VOIP and mobile telephones. They have included things such as (for example) the idea that the immediately upstream ISP, for VOIP, populates an ESDB/ALIDB with location data that it knows because it knows the physical location of the VOIP connection to its network.

The names that you want to start with are "Enhanced 911" and "Next Generation 911".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is also the subject of the latest "Seriously..."

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05711xn](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05711xn)

</comment><comment><USER9> 999 is the perfect number for germans as nine-nine-nine is homophonic to nein- nein-nein, meaning no-no-no!!!

</comment><comment><USER10> There was an article on Tedium just ~1 week ago about the emergency numbers!

[http://tedium.co/2017/06/20/911-emergency-system- history/](http://tedium.co/2017/06/20/911-emergency-system-history/)

It references the birth of 999, but then continues with the story of emergency numbers in the US. Definitely an interesting read.

<comment><USER11> Yikes, the font on that website is incredibly distracting. Hard enough that I went and downloaded Readability for Chrome just to get through the article.

Reading more than a sentence caused my eyes to sort of glaze over and even when trying to focus I was reading but not grasping. Can't say I've ever had a font do that to me.

<comment><USER12> In cases like this, you can just "inspect" on the text block, find the rule for the font-family and set whatever font you like, no need for extensions :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure I wont be the first or the last to point out that you are clearly too young to remember pulse dialing with a rotary input device.

The whole point of 999 was that a nine was the only number you could guarantee to accurately dial blind on a rotary input device with only your sense of touch and a little knowledge about the device itself available to you.

I'm also not too sure why any other number would be preferable. 999 really stands out whereas all the other emergency numbers across the world do not. I'll accept that because I'm a Brit that I have been conditioned to 999 being THE emergency number might bias me somewhat but I think my point still stands: 999 is far more obvious than any other emergency number.

I do a lot of (modern ie VoIP) telephony work and can only think that the 9 for an outside line plus rubbish dial plans and crap hardware and programming meant that 999 might not work for some systems. I've also explored the "not British" criteria for the number ... 8)

Can anyone explain why 999 is not the best emergency number ever chosen?

<comment><USER15> The problem is the amount of time you spend waiting for the dial to return. At the standard rate of ten pulses per second, you would end up waiting nine pulses three times or (0.9 * 3)s plus the pause (approximately 3 pulses wide) for the dial to return, plus however long it took you to finger and wind the dial three times. Could easily take upward of six seconds.

111 (if it could feasibly be allocated) would be the best three-digit code. You would spend the least amount of time rewinding, fingering, and returning. The minimum time per symbol would be 0.1s for the single pulse, ~0.3 seconds for the pause (that section on the dial between the backstop and the 1 digit hole) and about 0.1-0.2s for the finger and wind (reduced due to Fitts's law, and easier for the blind since it is the first hole from the backstop rather than the second). These factors combined could cut the dial time easily in half.

<comment><USER16> Realistically waiting an extra 6 seconds in an emergency isn't going to make much, if any, difference in the average home emergency situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'll just stick to good old 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

<comment><USER18> Well that's easy to remember.</comment></comment>


OnionTip – Donate to volunteers who are running Tor relays - <AUTHOR> https://oniontip.com

<comment><USER2> There's a discussion about whether volunteers running Tor relays should be motivated by cash reward. During the June 5th ResetTheNet campaign the EFF put up a landing page for beginners to set up nodes and rewarded people with merchandise etc. if they lasted a certain amount of time. But it's possible that many of the nodes that were set up because of this were not long-lasting.

Motivating people with short-term reward does not produce long-lasting relays.

EDIT: It seems like they are, but I wouldn't mind an update on this. [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/tor-challenge- inspires...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/tor-challenge- inspires-1635-tor-relays)

<comment><USER3> The EFF's Tor Challenge reward was really nominal - they offered "a limited- edition sticker if your Tor relay is still running 12 months" later. It was really more symbolic than anything else.

<comment><USER4> For a high-bandwidth relay (>1MBps) you also get a t-shirt!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be the only way the NSA is going to get paid for what they do directly by the users of Tor.

(To avoid looking suspicious the NSA will probably have to list some of their Tor nodes here)

<comment><USER6> They don't need money; they already get millions (maybe billions?) from American taxes.

<comment><USER7> The point the GP making is that the create the air of legitimacy they will list here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the filtering stuff should be hidden by default, it looks like you have to pick a country plus I don't know what an exit vs guard is.

Also bitcoins only is really exclusionary.

<comment><USER9> Bitcoin is perfect for this. Each relay can publish a Bitcoin address, and the subsequent distribution by OnionTip can be confirmed by looking at the blockchain to see who they split the donations between. TOR enthusiasts and Bitcoin holders probably overlap an awful lot.

You could do this without a middleman, though. Can't you set up bitcoin transactions with multiple outputs?

<comment><USER8> Bitcoin is perfect if the goal is that 99% of the world can't donate.

<comment><USER10> It's pretty simple to get bitcoin today. Especially now Circle has launched.

<comment><USER11> Circle only works for ~4.5% of the world population.

<comment><USER12> _Is_ there a method of making donations to anonymous benefactors that more than 10% of the world population can contribute to, that doesn't require having local collection-points in each contributing area?

Now that I think of it, that'd kind of be a neat nonprofit startup: do what the Salvation Army does, putting lots of collectors on lots of corners--but instead of the collection being associated with a specific charity, people would be given a little envelope to put their money in and write what charity it's intended for (with some pre-printed envelopes handy for major ones, likely.) The company would centrally collate donations, and send cheques each month to the recipient charities. A recipient charity wouldn't even have to sign up for this; they'd just start receiving money (sort of like what happens with royalties when people listen to a song on Spotify.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just setup a relay, and was reading up on what to expect. Apparently it won't start consuming any reasonable amount of resources for _several months_.

That seems extremely inefficient and quite bizarre. I understand that each node reports their available bandwidth, and also reports how much bandwidth was actually used the previous 24 hours.

There was a vulnerability where new nodes were misreporting their bandwidth, and taking more than their fair share of traffic and I guess doing nefarious things with it.

So they added a bit of a trust anchor by publishing an additional bandwidth metric as reported by a trusted pool of 'auditors'. But this takes some time to populate.

Even then, there are various mechanisms which will keep utilization quite low for a long time after you publish a new relay.

...so not as much fun booting up a relay without being able to watch the bits start flying by...

</comment><comment><USER14> A couple of days ago a colleague received $4 AUD tip share due to a large tip which he thought might've been the 10 BTC tip: [https://twitter.com/BitcoinNews3/status/516097500755668992](https://twitter.com/BitcoinNews3/status/516097500755668992)

</comment><comment><USER15> Honest question, what makes setting up a Tor Delay so prohibitive? What would be the possibility of say buying a few rasberry pi's and then placing them in discreet locations where wi-fi is free and piggy backing on their network? e.g. Every McDonald's restaurant

<comment><USER16> It's not hard to set up a Tor relay. However, to run a _good_ relay, you need a stable internet connection with at least 20KByte/s of symmetric bandwidth. I _think_ that you also need ports to be forwarded (manually, or with uPnP/PMP) in order to run a relay. It's not likely that you'll get stability or port forwarding by piggy-backing on some business' wifi. What's more, I suspect that the Tor community would frown upon this sort of activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Brilliant idea. I made almost a millibitcoin from it the other day when someone donated 10 bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER18> Would it be possible to use this to identify people running Tor relays?

<comment><USER19> It's already possible to identify people running Tor relays. Tor relays are publicly listed in the Tor consensus. They need to be for clients to build paths through the network.

Some relays are used as entry points to the network, and are unlisted to prevent them from being blocked by censors like many American universities, Iran, and China. These are called bridges, and they are not listed in the consensus. Since they aren't listed in the consensus, OnionTip can't be used to donate to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any chance for Dogecoin support?</comment>


Spotify expands free streaming music service - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/11/5199700/spotify-expands-free-streaming-on-tablets

<comment><AUTHOR> While [http://html5.grooveshark.com/](http://html5.grooveshark.com/) has been live for free for all platforms for about a year already.</comment>


Watch The Super Bowl 2011 Commercials On YouTube Ad Blitz - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/user/adblitz

<comment><USER2> Non-blogspam link: <http://www.youtube.com/user/adblitz>

<comment><USER3> It's in the article too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So glad I got out of advertising.. These are the sorriest pieces of footage since "Leave Britney Alone"

Update: I'm into conversational marketing, empowering consumers and integrity in public relations. Emotional branding and entertainment-propaganda are like the greasy-toxic-sweet junk they sell.</comment>


Show HN: Stool – a client-based alternative to jsPerf - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/albertxing/stool

<comment><USER2> How does it work? Can I write my snippets in my own editor?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stool is just a benchmarking utility for comparing JavaScript snippets. For each test case you enter a name and the code you want to run.

You can definitely code in your own editor, and copy/paste the JS into the text box.

Note however the tool is not meant for large amounts of JavaScript (e.g. not for comparing entire files), but rather for comparing specific atomic implementations (comparing sort algorithms, methods of query DOM elements, etc).</comment></comment>


Can a Wisconsin-based social network actually succeed? - <AUTHOR> https://www.getnextt.com/

<comment><USER2> What does Wisconsin have to do with this at all? I can't find a single reference to the state on the site.

I can't help but wonder how the physical location of a social-networking start-up could possibly affect that start-up's product.

<comment><USER3> Rent could. If you try to create a start up in say SF or NYC you are going to be wasting a lot of money on living expenses when it could have gone back into the product itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please do not submit with linkbait titles.

</comment><comment><USER5> _" Nextt is for friends in your offline social network. Remember them?"_

So a social network for the people who don't use Facebook?

<comment><USER6> There are very few of them. I have one friend who doesn't work at Google who decided that he wanted to jump aboard the Google+ train since Facebook already passed him by. Strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like there are a lot of people in this space. I feel like it will probably be hard for them to differentiate but if they can get the critical mass I don't see why being in Wisconsin would stop them. I tried signing up and the on boarding process in very nice but I didn't know what type of event to post.

<comment><USER8> Anything that you want to! So far I've

\- Organized drinks with friends for the weekend \- Planned thanksgiving with my sisters \- Have a running place to make sure my friend in NYC and I pick a cool place to mountain biking next fall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why isn't there an API?</comment>


Node Security Project - <AUTHOR> https://nodesecurity.io/

<comment><USER2> "Audit every single module in npm."

143,000 with 260 more every day, not to mention updates.

Seems like an impractical goal.</comment>


We made a device to save 45% water consumption - <AUTHOR> My father designed a couple years ago a device that is based on Bernoulli's Principle to save up to 45% water consumption (Reduces the water flow, keeps the water pressure intact).
The device has been installed in many Hospitals, Hotels and houses in Mexico for some years now, and we made a website to address the US, specially the drought states, where we think we can make more impact among households.
http://waterpayless.com
Thanks HN! <comment><USER2> How's this different from a standard faucet aerator? Cuts down on water usage but maintains water pressure...can be used in sink faucets, showers, etc..

<comment><AUTHOR> The standard aerator mixes air with water, so it gives pretty much a false sensation on the comfort, while waterpayless reduces water without introducing air in the flow, giving a real sensation of comfort.

Thanks for you question!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > WaterPayless is manufactured with the highest quality materials, using > Polymer 6 – Mirror-Finish, and complains with all the respective norms for > its use, including NSF/ANSI 61.

 _and complies with_

<comment><AUTHOR> WaterPayless has been certified by EMA (part of EPA) approved laboratories in Mexico, and is in the process of certification in US.

Thanks for your question!

<comment><USER4> Viraptor was pointing out a spelling mistake / "typo" on your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks, I thought it was a question regarding that topic.

Thanks a lot!

Manuel

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The text on your homepage's above the fold area is absolutely unreadable, either add fading to the background image or change the image completely. It's really hard to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! will proceed to make it more readable

thanks

<comment><USER2> You can also try adding some text shadow but I wouldn't add more than 1px. You can try this in conjunction with changing of shading/dimming the image.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already did add some shadow to the text, it seems to me its much more readable now.

Thank you again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Lorem ipsum" on the Installation page!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! we're still editing the videos, but i removed the lorem ipsum now.

I appreciatte it!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, great way to get honest feedback here.

I appreciate it!

</comment><comment><USER7> What does water comfort mean?</comment>


Algol 68 - <AUTHOR> https://mraths.org.uk/?page_id=2862 <comment><USER2> I did a Fortran 74 course in 76 and we touched on algol 68 and I was a giant, colossal mind fuck. Call by name, call by value, call by references... Give me back my giant global section and begone!! What is this code as arguments stuff. Recursion? That's the devil's music!!!

I wish I'd stuck with it.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't Fortran have been the better choice long term?

Fortran is still used in the sciences. Algol not so much.

Plus you know, Algol is a gateway drug, who knows where you'd have ended up :P

<comment><USER4> > _Fortran is still used in the sciences. Algol not so much._

That's only because almost everything mainstream today has 80%+ of Algol in disguise. C, Pascal, Python, Java, Kotlin, JS, Go...

[http://wiki.c2.com/?AlgolFamily](http://wiki.c2.com/?AlgolFamily)

Case in point (even if the author has second thoughts): [http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/](http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/)

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but then most modern languages have 80%+ of all pre 1980 languages.

<comment><USER5> Ermm - Haskell and Cobol?

<comment><USER3> Well I did say most!

Didn't Cobol have quite good data structures for the time???

I haven't really used either, so I'm not best placed to make the case.

Having just read the wikipedia page on Cobol. The Cobol metalanguage looks quite a lot like Haskell, so maybe that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _They astounded the attendees – who had made estimates of up to 100 man-years to implement the language, using up to 7 pass compilers – when they described how they had already implemented a one-pass compiler which was in production use in engineering and scientific applications._

It reminds me of the story of how Donald Knuth wrote an early ALGOL compiler by himself, in 3.5 months:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567)

<comment><USER4> And of course today someone can write one (with some modern tools like parser generators and llvn) in a couple of weeks or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From FreeBSD's ports collection: "The Algol 68 Genie project preserves Algol 68 out of educational as well as scientific-historical interest, by making available Algol 68 Genie; a recent, well-featured implementation written from scratch." It's GPL.

WWW: [http://www.xs4all.nl/~jmvdveer/algol.html](http://www.xs4all.nl/~jmvdveer/algol.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/](http://www.cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/)

</comment><comment> open-source-ux I strongly recommend this talk by software consultant and author Kevlin Henney called _Procedural Programming: It 's Back? It Never Went Away_

He talks a bit out Algol 68 and how influential it was on programming language design. Many language keywords we're familiar with today originated in the _50 year old_ language specification for Algol 68: int, bool, skip, void, struct.

Here's the snippet from the talk about Algol 68 - it's brilliant: [https://youtu.be/otAcmD6XEEE?t=554](https://youtu.be/otAcmD6XEEE?t=554)

</comment><comment><USER9> > They astounded the attendees – who had made estimates of up to 100 man-years > to implement the language, using up to 7 pass compilers – when they > described how they had already implemented a one-pass compiler which was in > production use in engineering and scientific applications...The ALGOL 68-R > compiler was initially written using the RRE ALGOL 60 compiler including > extensions for address manipulation and list processing but stripped out of > features such as real number handling which made it more suitable and more > focused on compiling a compiler.

Dropping any kind of real or float support sounds like a major issue for scientific use; did the users simply have to express everything as fixed-point integers? What else did they simply drop to get their subset/prototype working?

<comment><USER10> I think that refers to the language the new compiler was written in, not the one it implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My informatics teacher was big fan on Niclaus Wirth. Unexpectedly, ~15 years down the line, remembering her functional programming maxims came handy when dealing with Golang. I found languages are sharing some vibe.

<comment><USER12> Just to make sure "functional programming" or "structured programming"?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure myself after those years, but it felt like functional programming.

Golang is not much about functional programming than say JS from my personal impression, but it felt like it had some attempts to follow it in its foundation.

In the end, it failed to realise the original though of Wirth - "with clear separation of functions and inputs, every program turns into a spreadsheet"

<comment><USER13> That does not really sound like Wirth, who never was involved in functional programming as far as I can tell and was not a big fan of spreadsheets.

Wirth always was insistent that programs should strive to be transparent about the computational effort involved in an action, so I can't imagine him being fond of e.g. Haskell.

<comment><USER12> I think wirth did however like to distinguish between procedures and functions. Not functional in todays meaning of the word, but similar in spirit.

<comment><USER13> Yes, there were functions in Pascal, but that's the smallest part of functional programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like the title should be "World's First Algol 68 Compiler".

</comment><comment><USER15> I still have that Algol68-R User's Guide on my shelf and remember to this day the excitement that gripped me when I learned from it about REFs. I went on to implement my final year project in it, which was considered by all concerned to be a crazily risky thing to do.

The only thing that matched it for excitement was connecting for the first time to a "live" remote computer through a teletype and that thing actually typing things back at me.</comment>


Ask HN: Buying a domain with equity - <AUTHOR>

I just reached an agreement with a domain owner to purchase a domain for my startup via equity (the company is an LLC). Does anyone have any documents or ideas that I can use to draw up a contract?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Have you checked <http://docstoc.com> ? They have tons of equity agreements so maybe someone has uploaded something like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Madness. I've paid as much as $1000 for a domain name (and would probably go a bit higher for one that I really felt like I needed)...but I would never give away equity for one.

</comment><comment><USER4> wow, what domain can be that valuable to your business?

</comment><comment><USER5> why would one go to purchase a domain via equity, even the domain is worth millions.

Bad choice.</comment>


Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and Its Usage - <AUTHOR> https://f1000research.com/articles/6-541/v1 <comment><USER2> Nice read. Another article on the rising popularity of scihub.

Hope they live long and healthy like libgen.</comment>


Is Hipchat OK? - <AUTHOR> https://www.hipchat.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://status.hipchat.com/](https://status.hipchat.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> No, cause it still only supports 1 account at a time. BS</comment>


HN Help: Mom wants to censor my blog posts; what should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I am faced with an ultimatum;
1)Remove certain paragraphs of my previous blog posts and run all new posts by my mom before posting, or
2)Loose all of my freedoms I have earned during my childhood (Including confiscation of my house key, grounding, internet access and access to mobile devices, among other things)
What should I do? Should I refuse to censor my posts on principal, or should I give in and agree? <comment><USER2> First off you'll most likely have to capitulate. If your using an internet connection you don't pay for then you have to allow the person that does pay for it to decide how it is used, ultimately it's their responsibility.

You don't say why she wants you to change the posts, but she obviously doesn't agree with what you're posting.

Perhaps you've given away more information about yourself or your family than she is happy with being available to the internet at large, which is perfectly reasonable.

If she is unhappy with the language you are using, such as swearing or vulgar slang, then maybe you can reach a compromise to rewrite the paragraphs with cleaner text. There are no good points that can't be made without vulgarity.

If it's that she doesn't agree with your opinions then you're probably going to have to sit on them. I'm guessing you're still early to mid teens and unfortunately, for a while yet, your parents are still responsible for you, and your actions and opinions still reflect upon them and how the rest of your family and their friends see them. Even if you don't agree with them, until you're responsible for yourself (i.e. paying the bills) it's a harsh truth that you might have to bite your lip to maintain family harmony.

In conclusion you most likely have to play by her rules, and the only option is to try to calmly reason your case with her and hope to find a happy compromise.

If you really feel like what you have to blog about HAS to be said, then you'll have to sneak out and use an internet cafe or other public connection, but you'd better be certain you've got unshakeable right on your side because sneaking and lying invariably gets found out and there's always a price.

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks like you are using _her_ internet access, or at the very least living at her place?

In that case, there's not much you can do since she's technically the owner of the place and should rightly be able to dictate the terms of usage of her house for whatever reason (whether or not they make sense).

Once you are able to afford your own place / internet connection, you're pretty much free to do whatever the hell you want.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go with option 1. If you don't, you lose internet access, which means you won't be able to blog at all. Bide time until the day comes when you can make your own decisions.

Before that though, do whatever you can to talk her out of it. Debate about it. Try to compromise. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Do a completely anonymous blog, blog about things that are in the general interest.

</comment><comment><USER6> how old are you?</comment>


Who came out against Facebook's rainbow flags? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-33313807

<comment><USER2> I'm in the US, but I find it quite disturbing that something that is purely a national event gets pushed down the world's throat.

These companies are highly hypocritical, they claim to be "global" when it comes to tax purposes, but don't hesitate to react to US internal politics.

Did the same thing happen when Spain legalized same-sex marriage? Or when France did it?</comment>


PS3 LV0 Keys - <AUTHOR> http://pastie.org/5102182

<comment><USER2> What is the context here? Are these the keys needed to sign executables in order to run on the PS3? Does this mean that there will be a homebrew scene for the PS3 or that one can run Linux on it again?

<comment><USER3> Hi I also wondered for the context. Found this. [http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2012/10/23/ps3-lv0-keys-...](http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2012/10/23/ps3-lv0-keys- leaked-cfw-released-security-hole-reportedly-unpatchable/)

Clarifies a lot of things. In short: These are more generic keys. More difficult to fix for Sony or even not patchable. Group was forced to do this release after keys leaked.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the link!</comment></comment></comment>


Feds arrest man who juiced Google's 'just be evil' search - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/06/foul_mouth_webmaster_arrested/

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977048></comment>


Why we kiss: To spread germs - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1224249/The-unromantic-truth-kiss--spread-germs.html?ITO=1490

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of the computation via intercourse part in The Diamond Age.</comment>


Fileless Malware – A Behavioural Analysis of Kovter Persistence - <AUTHOR> http://blog.airbuscybersecurity.com/post/2016/03/FILELESS-MALWARE-–-A-BEHAVIOURAL-ANALYSIS-OF-KOVTER-PERSISTENCE <comment><USER2> Wow, that is a nasty little bug! Can't even see the registry keys in regedit because they contain a non-ASCII value in the subkey!

<comment><USER3> Updating regedit probably moved just a tiny bit higher on some engineer's priority list :)

<comment><USER4> I thought regedit had this issue for ages, but it looks like I was thinking of null-terminated names - [http://www.kahusecurity.com/2014/registry-dumper- find-and-du...](http://www.kahusecurity.com/2014/registry-dumper-find-and- dump-hidden-registry-keys/) (Googling shows references to this technique going back to 2004)

<comment><USER5> Fun how they protect this illicit key using permissions. Always nice to see security turned against the user by the malware.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Munich ends its long-running love affair with Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/linux-pioneer-munich-switches-to-windows/ <comment><USER2> Microsoft just moved an office into Munich and now, over the objections of the municipal IT staff, the city is switching to Windows. Interesting.

<comment><USER3> _> objections of the municipal IT staff_

Where? I'd read that.

<comment><USER4> The link is literally in the article... anyways, here you go: [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no- comp...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-compelling- technical-reason-to-return-to-windows-says-citys-it-chief/)

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that this was commentary by the head of the IT staff, Karl-Heinz Schneider. I was thinking a slew of staff (plural, not singular) were raising a clarion call about this, but it's just one guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Love" affair is a bit of a misnomer. Munich forked most of their userland software in '03 and were surprised to find out that handling so much software maintenance on their own is a) expensive and b) leads to poor results.

IMO, LiMux was always doomed to fail, and it's a testament to the slowness of public institutions that it took this long to realize their mistake.

If the same project was undertaken now, with the lessons learned (no goddamn forks of entire desktop environments just because Janice in accounting wants her buttons in a different order!) it would give _much_ better results.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think I can understand some complaints about Linux because I use it as my main desktop OS since many years, but I want to fix two points:

\- "compatibility headaches" is a problem caused by the usage of Microsoft office. Linux has no compatibility problem with itself or with standards.

\- "apps and hardware that absolutely needed Microsoft's platform to run, and those were destined to stay". Since 2003, these products are 14 years old. It is hard to believe most of them could not have been renewed without this dependency.

I think that acceptance of Microsoft office proprietary format is the main cause of failure.

<comment><USER7> _Linux has no compatibility problem with itself or with standards._

Linux in general has huge compatibility problems with himself: right now I'm building binutils because RPM from RHEL6 encodes dependencies into the SRPM that are not backward compatible. Then there is NFS V4 as another example of incompatibility with reference implementations. Then there is ss versus netstat, yet another incompatibility, this time architectural. There are many, many such examples which desktop users and developers aren't even aware of but system and kernel engineers and system administrators suffer on Linux daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stunned silence ensues while reality sinks in (:-D)

Can't wait to read n-gate's take on this.</comment>


Compare your viewpoints with the presidential candidates of Election 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.twosides.co/election2012

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, we're launching a new way for you to compare your viewpoints with the candidates of Election 2012 on TwoSides, a social debate platform. This launch also coincides with us opening up our beta to the public. Would love to hear any and all feedback you guys have, as we're always looking to improve!

</comment><comment><USER2> Wonderful!

Upvotes, upvotes everywhere!

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unclear to me why I would want to (or have to) create an account in order to play with this, at least initially. No thanks.

<comment><USER2> It's unclear why would need an account in order to interact with other users?

This isn't Reddit or 4chan, this is a site where views and opinions are being exchanged. User accounts have been a way to monitor interactions and store data relative to a certain person almost since the Internet was created.

edit: TwoSides is for constructed, meaningful interactions, from what I've gathered. Reddit is pretty great but far from what TwoSides can achieve.</comment></comment>


Betty – English-like interface for the command line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pickhardt/betty <comment><USER2> I wonder if the author of Betty has taken a look at one of the existing Inform ([http://inform7.com](http://inform7.com)) interpreter variants used for Interactive Fiction games (what we used to call "text adventures"). They have progressed a lot since the old text adventures of yore, and are now capable of parsing pretty complex English sentences (instead of just "take sword", you can write "examine sword, then take it and give it to the wizard", and the interpreter will even ask you about ambiguities, such as "which sword? the magic sword or the long sword?").

Then again, I'm unsure if the precision needed from command line interfaces can ever be improved with _natural_ language. Natural language is imprecise, ambiguous, redundant, and confusing even to our human interlocutors. Why would we want to interface with computers in English, instead of using a synthetic and concise made-up language? I'm talking specifically about the command line, which is for power users anyway.

(A perfectly valid answer is "because it was fun to write Betty, and that's its own reward", of course).

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I wasn't aware of that, but that is interesting.

Betty just grew out of my cheat sheet of commands. I was tired of repeatedly looking up things in my cheat sheet or Google, and decided to make this.

The current project has a limited number of commands, but I am hoping that by making it public, others will issue pull requests with things they'd want to use.

Its current state is command line only, which is for power users. But thinking ahead, on the roadmap I wrote that by the time it reaches v1.0, I'd like it to be extensible. This means it can be used from text-to-speech apps or whatever. Some futuristic use cases: I'm sitting on my bed, with my computer on my desk, and say "Betty: next song" and it just works. Or I'm running on my treadmill, talking aloud: I'd say "Betty: open the New York Times in Chrome" then "Betty: read me this article" and it just works. That'd be cool. I don't know specifically how to do everything I'd want to do, but those are the sorts of far future things that would be cool. In its current implementation, it's mainly for not having to keep looking up commands or options.

<comment><USER2> That would be cool indeed and I hope my comment didn't sound too negative. And you should definitely take a look at Inform (and similar), it's amazing what they can do. I think some interpreters are open source (edit: it seems it's not, I remembered incorrectly).

<comment><USER3> Ironically, with version 7, Inform itself switched to natural language syntax. The following is valid Inform 7 source code:

`The iron-barred gate is a door. It is north of the Drawbridge and south of the Entrance Hall. It is closed and openable. Before entering the castle, try entering the gate instead. Before going inside in the Drawbridge, try going north instead. Understand "door" as the gate.`

However, what makes a command like "examine sword, then take it and give it to the wizard" complex is not the parsing, but the world model. What if examining the sword reveals an engraving saying "Never hand this to a wizard"? What happens to giving if taking fails? What if the wizard himself is holding the sword? What if he attacks anyone holding a weapon? Etc.

Writing a natural language command line interface seems a lot more straightforward.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, as I understand it, while the "old" v6 toolset is open, the "in" tool that takes "regular" text and turns it into v6 "code" is gratis, but not open sourced:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.int- fiction...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.int- fiction/PuQHYwtX77c\[1-25-false\])

Some more on how inform7 differs from more traditional interactive fiction systems:

[http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/08/inside- inform-...](http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/08/inside- inform-7.html)

As for this tool: I like it. I like the idea that it's simple, and that the author didn't let details like it being difficult to do "well" or "better" stand in his way. I've thought along the same lines many times, not so much "how did I do _ (solution often involves awk, sort, uniq et al) -- I'm too familiar with the command line for that, but rather: Jeez, you've got a smart phone. The _one_ guaranteed interface that works is audio in/out. How hard could it be to deploy solid limited domain voice control coupled with a dead simple state-machine for doing stuff like "next song", "stop", "play", "accept call".

I wonder if these projects (there must have been projects, right, ever since the first uptake of mp3s) get the first part working, then some moron suggests that the user will expect to be able to do "play song such-and-such by such- and-such" \-- and then it's no longer (strictly) limited domain, and that doesn't work, so the scrap the whole thing.

[edit: Some more on "newstyle" inform vs traditional IF:] "A Comparison of TADS 3 and Inform 7" [http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/tads3andi7.html](http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/tads3andi7.html)

<comment><USER5> Inform was my very first programming language. Now that I code in Ruby all day, I'd probably find something like TADS less frustration prone, but Inform is incredibly powerful for its domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every natural language interface eventually will be required to generate a new program. For example, if you say my parser supports query like "count number of words in file X", someone would want to issue a queries like "count number of words starting with character a and at most length 3 in file X" and so on.

Natural language interfaces eventually fall on its face not because parsing is really hard but rather because after you parse, how do you generate a program on the fly to solve the user's problem.

<comment><USER7> It is indeed a hard problem, but there is some research going on in this area [http://people.csail.mit.edu/nkushman/papers/naacl2013.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/nkushman/papers/naacl2013.pdf)

and the application is definitely worth it, because it lowers the barrier for doing "complicated" stuff for people that are not very computer-savvy

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Crazier alternative:

1) Install howdoi [https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi](https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi)

2) Write commands like the following (all work as expected):

        howdoi get time in bash | sh
        howdoi clear bash | sh
        howdoi find current user bash | sh
        howdoi restart computer bash | sh
        howdoi fork bomb | sh

#YOLO

<comment><USER4> It might be worth mentioning that howdoi is just a wrapper around a google (essentially a "I'm feeling luck"-search as far as I can tell)?

It's hardly the same as a curated set of specialized pipes. Nor does it work offline (howdoi configure eth0/enable wireless...).

<comment><USER9> It actually uses StackOverflow.

<comment><USER4> Indeed it does, I only read to around:

        SEARCH_URL = 'https://www.google.com/search?q=site:{0}%20{1}'

and didn't look much further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really interesting program, although, as Andrew has said, seems kinda limited. That's not your fault at all; any early project will seem limited in scope. Given some popularity and extra effort, something like this could be the Siri of the command line.

Which gets me thinking -- is stuff like Siri and Google Now really just like this? Core set of pre-set commands surrounded by regex magic to recognize said pre-set commands? Interesting.

Begs the question : is it possible, using current knowledge in machine learning and NLP, to create a English-like interface for #{some_device_or_program_here} that _learns and self-develops_ the English commands from the user? Sort of like how Bayesian spam filters ([http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)) don't have core preset hardcoded set of Spam-Related Words and classify them accordingly, but instead takes an initial corpus and then learns and self- develops from the user after that.

<comment><USER4> I think having a prefix (be that "betty" "b" and/or some "mode" for your shell) that signals you want to use natural language (with all it's ambiguity) is a good idea. The zsh way of suggesting "did you mean" rather than simply erroring with "command not found/invalid syntax" drives _me_ nuts -- but a lot of people seem like it. Having a prefix allows you more freedom at "learning" \-- ambiguity isn't so terrible if the user expects it (and the simple idea of just listing alternatives that betty uses seems like a great interface. Not as sexy as "I'm feeling lucky"-style (super-)high scoring wins, middling scores ties and asks user to pick -- but I think it may win on the principle of least surprise).

Anyway, it does seem that most proof-of-concept voice-control (as opposed to text-controlled) systems use a prefix too "siri"/"glass"/<microsoft had one, can't remember which, also they have "xbox". The idea is that if the mic is always on, you don't want your drones to blow something up, just because you jokingly told a friend "kill it with fire" in a voice call. Context is hard to get right for such systems, I expect the kinetic and similar systems can do better (if user looks at computer, listen. If user is already speaking "in conversation with" to computer, listen. Otherwise ignore, unless user asks for computer by name).

As for you question, I think it should be relatively easy to train, say a music-player app to understand stuff like "next song", "accept call", "repeat" \-- in _any_ language, using simple statistical methods. Not sure how far you could take it though (example, dictation software still makes (AFAIK) enough errors that it's not really a viable option if the user already can type reasonably well (or hire an actual stenographer)).

<comment><USER10> Stuff like "next song", "accept call", etc. can be done with extensive knowledge in machine learning and some clever work.

The really tough bits will be stuff like,

"Siri, check if PBS Idea Channel has uploaded any new videos, please."

How will Siri know you mean the YouTube app? How will Siri know what "check if X has uploaded any new videos" means? How will Siri know you mean "PBS Idea Channel" and not the channel called "PBS Idea"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Other than being fun; I can't quite see the benefit of making my shell more verbose. I'm sure I am not the only one who can get by with the regular commands through mnemonics.

And to further my point; if this was such a good idea, then why has nobody aliased 'ls' to _list_ , 'cp' to _copy_ , (etc.)? Or, while we're at it, _' list files'_, or _' list files in current directory'_. Maybe someone has and I just didn't meet them yet.

I do see the point of a programming language to be a bit more verbose, since it makes sharing between humans easier, as understanding old codebases – but even there, people are split (Java is too verbose! Ruby is natural! Lisp is too much abbreviated! etc.). But _using_ a shell, issuing _commands_ , is fundamentally different to _programming_ , in my opinion. Consider the analogy of a crane (just to avoid cars for once), what would you prefer: Waving your finger around in thin air, or using levers? And before you answer that: while the former seems way more cool, it doesn't work well. Getting rid of mechanical controls has been tried experimentally by the Air force (I read that back in the 90's; sorry no link to a source now): They were able to interpret commands from the pilots brainwaves, but manual control was _consistently_ faster. We humans just evolved this way: _Thinking_ of moving a plane into particular direction is slower than moving your hand accordingly to yank a stick – it seems to have a higher more mental load for us. Do you picture your arm moving your mouse? I bet you "just do".

But I digress; though the fundamentals in play are the same. My fingers are fast; why should I slow down the whole thing by making them type more?

Of course, a shell using of single-letter commands would be equally useless to an overly verbose shell. The sweet spot, in the end, might be a personal preference and dependent of daily usage and experience. In my case, that's a bit more than the POSIX command set, and – to exaggerate a bit – not writing essays on the command line.

<comment><USER12> It becomes interesting when you can tell Betty to do things you don't otherwise know how to do. (How do you tell iTunes to skip this song from the cmd line? I don't know, and I'm too lazy to look it up.)

<comment><USER13> Do you mean skip it once, or skip it forever?

The first is really an "advance to next track" command.

The latter is a "mark current song as Never Play and advance to next track".

I'd be surprised if there was any kind of interface with iTunes that doesn't have at least one of those capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Natural language interfaces can be _very_ frustrating when they (inevitably) don't recognize (or worse, misinterpret) your input... I'd rather have commands that are easy to remember (i.e. simple and consist).

</comment><comment><USER15> A cute tool, but seems incredibly limited. Why would I use any of these commands more than once if I can just alias them? While some of them might be useful I really just don't see myself using a tool like this.

<comment><USER16> And just for the kicks:

function genie(){ query=`printf "%s+" $@` echo $query result=`curl -s "[https://weannie.pannous.com/api?out=simple&input=$query"`](https://weannie.pannous.com/api?out=simple&input=$query"`) echo $result say $result 2>/dev/null } alias hey=genie alias how="genie how" alias what="genie what" alias when="genie when"

me:~$ what is the root of pi It is approximately 1.7725

me:~$ how old is obama Barack Obama is 52 years old

<comment> hidden-markov A PR implementing that for Betty: [https://github.com/pickhardt/betty/pull/4](https://github.com/pickhardt/betty/pull/4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's great. However, I don't see an end to capture all the ambiguity of language and especially misspellings... can this be contained in a reasonably fast running script?

      ~/tmp betty my ip
      Betty: Sorry, I don't understand.
      ~/tmp betty my ip adress
      Betty: Sorry, I don't understand.
      ~/tmp betty whats my ip address
      Betty: Running curl ifconfig.me

</comment><comment><USER18> This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it has much use outside of proof of concept. Most people don't need to use the command line, and those who do don't find it that difficult.

In fact, for the most part the command line is very usable once you've learned the philosophy behind it. I remember reading something about the BSD flavors of UNIX along the lines of "BSD is very user friendly, just not for inexperienced users". I see the command line as being similar. It's very powerful when you understand it, but a bit opaque when you're learning it. Fortunately, you can learn the basics in an afternoon.

Now one useful aspect of this is that it makes commands that would require a long command line much simpler than they would otherwise be. However, I find that whenever I have a long command line that I use repeatedly I just write an alias for it and add it to my .zsh-aliases file. I like this solution better because it is more customizable for my workflow.

<comment><USER4> Well, an argument could be made for having the alias-file be something like:

        alias ll="ls -l"
          doc = """List files -- long list format"""
          natural_match = "list all files long size date owner group"

And have:

        "list all files by size"

match this (as betty does now: running ll "docstring". Then, when you realize that "list all files by size", really is "ls --sort=size", possibly with "-l", you could just add another definition:

        alias lss="ls -l --sort=size"
          doc = """List files -- sorted by size, long list format"""
          natural_match = "list all files sort by size long format"
          natural_exact_match "list all files by size"

And now have:

        "list all files by size"

Score higher for lss than for ll (the scoring function is assumed to be some combination of tag count, proximit match, substring match etc, a so-called hard problem, but only needs to match over defined aliases -- and trying hard to first match the "exact_match" part...).

Of course, it should all be paired by a define-command or something that autmatically saves these monstrosties to a file or other db. So that you could do:

         # Lots of head scratching and experimentation, until:
         nmcli dev wifi list |sort -k8 -n # list wifi access points by
                                          # signal strength

         # define prev as "list wifi access points by signal strength"
         > displays commmand and prompt for tags etc, then on "y" at y/n
           prompt saves definition to "alias" file.

Come to think of it, it's a little like mandating/recommending users to _document_ their aliases, and to have the shell automatically suggest from the docstrings. I guess zsh actually does a bit of this already (I'm still sticking with bash, it's gotten good enough for me over the years, and I'm always terrified by something, that if it isn't posix/ksh also isn't bash -- as that just makes scripts brittle...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems like this could be handled more like the Symbolics Genera command line, which offered extensible intelligent commands with context-sensitive completions. Here's a demo by Kalman Reti: [http://youtu.be/o4-YnLpLgtk](http://youtu.be/o4-YnLpLgtk)

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting project. I know for us geeks the short obscure commands are sometimes easier but something like this can ease people into using command line more.

I applaud the author because typically I don't have the courage to even attempt solving problems like this. And I wonder what the author is going to do about this.

Because well ... natural-language processing just isn't there yet, you can kind of "fake" it a bit by looking for keywords and patterns and regex but it only goes so far.

So beyond a certain point, you end up needing to solve the natural-language processing problem first, so that you can then build Betty.

</comment><comment><USER21> Betty looks pretty interesting. Adding tab completion would certainly cut down on the amount of typing with the length of the commands. Do the commands also accept short variants? Such as i for iTunes?

</comment><comment><USER22> Why are all computerized natural-language "assistants" all modeled as female? (Siri, Cortana, Betty...) A remnant of the view of women's role as "secretaries"?

It's interesting to see that this applies to real-world products, which are still kind of "dumb" or single-minded (as in default voices for GPS navigation assistants), while in fiction, when computers are smarter than its owner (HAL, Jarvis) they more are often than not represented as male.

<comment><USER23> I think you can find quite a few counter examples of a female AI, not least of which Cortana. It's possible to imagine S'Jet as an example, though perhaps much closer to Transcendence (movie) than AI.

Really, I think it simply has a lot to do with the voice. I'll be darned if I can recall the source, but it seems that women can usually be understood more clearly and easily than men; that claim may be only over a lossy channel, but it seems to jive with my experience (listening to podcasts on a motorcycle, women tend to be easier to make out over the noise, and even Google maps' female voice is clear over a highway's roar).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems like a recipe for disaster.

When you're at a command prompt you should always know exactly what the command you're inputting is going to do. Since Betty necessarily obfuscates your command this seems like a good way for unintended consequences.

The obvious solution to that is make it so Betty never does anything that actually matters. So then the question is; why bother with Betty at all?

</comment><comment><USER25> That there is masterful copy.

I'll be honest, I have a general software test called "StonerTesting" \- if you're high as fuck a lot of your cognitive function is distorted, so successfully using a piece of software (even its website) means you're software is in fact quite easy to use.

I'm thinking of offering it as a service.

</comment><comment><USER26> Chance for my Plug: I'm using similar approach with cloud management at [http://webservice.management](http://webservice.management). It allows you to manage VMs and run tasks across them in english. (Create a small vm with node.js or build lamp stack on vm1 and so on)

</comment><comment><USER27> Upon seeing the list of commands, I immediately thought "this is great! I could alias betty to b and then maybe a few more aliases here and there. I could take "betty next song" and make it 'b n s'!"

and then went "oooooh, so that's how this all started."

</comment><comment><USER28> isnt the whole idea of a command line for impatient little people like myself that dislike guis and inefficiency? this sort of defeats the whole purpose, i'm now typing sentences instead of shortcuts

<comment><USER29> To some people this might be an easier and more efficient way to wrap their head around the CLI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it compatible with fish shell?

edit: answering my own question, it seems to work just fine

</comment><comment><USER31> Between this and bropages Linux is finally taking shape as a viable contender to MSDOS! :)

Curious how many man hours have been put into Betty so far. Good work pickhardt, looking forward to taking this for a spin. Hope you put in some umask command support in this, I keep screwing that up...

</comment><comment><USER32> COBOL was supposed to be English-like too wasn't it?

</comment><comment><USER33> CLI in Ruby, ok.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like this idea a lot. But why on earth it is written in ruby?! - I know the answer and it is "ok". But it is probably the reason why it won't never gain huge momentum, prove me wrong :)

<comment><USER35> What language would you write it in?

<comment><USER34> c :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ability to search source code still not implemented in BitBucket after 3 years - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2874/ability-to-search-source-code-bb-39

<comment><USER2> I find Atlassian's product offering to be incredibly lackluster. For a company that doesn't focus on having a sales team, with a $3bn+ valuation, where is the engineering resources? They have many tickets that have been outstanding for years requesting simple features like these. For example the Jira restful api doesn't support bulk editing of tickets. I'm going to learn Java so I can just write the damn plugin for it myself. I also have to say the Jira restful api could be better... custom field names return as 'customfield_22939', seriously?

</comment><comment><USER3> ?!? Why?

<comment><USER4> "git grep" is easy enough? Of course it defeats the point of having a git repo website... That said, even if they add it, these are the folks responsible for JIRA's search -- don't expect it to be intuitive. At all. ;-)</comment></comment>


Facebook F8 Live - <AUTHOR> https://f8.facebooklive.com/

<comment> k-mcgrady Normally there's some build up in the press to these events but I wouldn't even have known it was happening if I hadn't seen it on HN. They've announced some pretty big changes at F8 in the past so it'll be interesting to see what happens.

<comment><USER2> I saw a comment on Secret saying Zuck is growing a mega-beard for the event. That alone makes it worth watching. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> "Thank you for joining us. The stream will be returning shortly."

<comment> k-mcgrady It begins in a minute or so.</comment></comment>


University finds free online classes don't hurt enrollment - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/university-finds-free-online-classes-dont-sap-enrollment.ars

<comment><USER2> Well of course. The vast majority of students are there to get the piece of paper that they can then staple to their resume. You don't get that by auditing open course ware.

<comment><USER3> yup, i hope this encourages other universities to invest in opening up their resources too. it doesn't at all dilute their 'brand', and it helps spread free education to people across the world who can't afford to attend in person

<comment><USER4> What about people that can afford to attend, already know the material, but need a piece of paper?

<comment><USER5> There's a few "competency-based" universities that don't test you on your ability to sit in a classroom for four years but instead test your actually competencies in the field. Western Governors University is the one I'm most familiar with. There are many people who've been working in a field for some time that can get a bachelors degree in less than a year by just taking the required tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought the standard argument was that online courseware doesn't reduce class enrollment, but attendance. Not that either is a good reason to stop putting course materials and lectures online.

<comment><USER7> Is reducing attendance really a problem for Universities though? Universities get paid by enrolment, not attendance. I don't know if there is any drawback for individual lecturers if attendance to their lectures drop, but if there is then online material is the perfect incentive they need to up their game.

<comment><USER6> I'd say it would be a problem if half the class just doesn't show up, figuring they can just watch the lecture online later. Some professors think this will make undergrads lazy about showing up to class, and more likely to fall behind.

<comment><USER7> How is that really different from half the class not showing up, figuring they can just read the lecture notes and text book later? If it makes the students lazy and they fall behind and fail, then those students have learned a valuable lesson for next time they take that class.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China shuts Apple's film and book services - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36110425 <comment><USER2> ..and this is the country that Zuckerberg idolizes.</comment>


Mangaki, an Open Source Manga/Anime Recommender System - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/4C5sSgSZNf0 <comment><USER2> [Next time remember to submit the youtube.com version instead of the youtu.be, because youtu.be is autokilled.]

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be this: [https://github.com/mangaki/mangaki](https://github.com/mangaki/mangaki) and [https://mangaki.fr/](https://mangaki.fr/) . French only, and sadly I don't know French...

<comment><USER4> Hi! One of the core contributor of Mangaki here.

We want to move from the French usage in our issues, code, stuff and let everyone contribute (we also want to translate Mangaki in English and Japanese translation!)

But feel free to dive in the code which is mainly vanilla Django, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to open issues!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Social Networks users actions flow charts & wireframing - <AUTHOR>

A long time ago(at least 2 years), I remember I saw a website that published the different actions that the users take on websites like facebook, twitter, linkedin, flickr, etc The guys made this possible using flow-charts and illustrating everything.. It was a kind of wireframing & prototyping of the whole process of the users on the before mentioned social networks..
for example, with facebook: The visitor signup the form on the website, then it adds personal information (birthdate, educaction & interests), then it logins trough his email(gmail, hotmail, etc) and search on his email contacts for friends that are currently registered on facebook. After that, it adds their contacts as a friend on facebook, and with the contacts that they don't have facebook, he can send them an invitation to become a member and share information on facebook.
I know, the things that I wrote it seems like pretty obvious.. but these kind of information it was very useful to me when I was developing a web application on differents sheets of my notebook.
And when I saw that website, I remember that I added to my magnolia bookmarks ..but last year magnolia lost all the bookmarks of their members, so I lost that website... and I can't remember the url
So you know some website that currently it's online and that it publishes the kind of information that I'm looking for? or at least, some similar content ?
Thanks a lot.. any suggestion it's greatly appreciated <comment><USER2> Probably one of these: <http://patterntap.com/> <http://ui-patterns.com/> <http://quince.infragistics.com/> [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/15/40-helpful- resour...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/15/40-helpful-resources-on- user-interface-design-patterns/) <http://www.uipatterns.net/> <http://www.patternbrowser.org>

<comment><AUTHOR> that urls don't have the exact thing that I want, but are very near of the kind of content that I'm looking for.. thank you so much!

<comment><USER2> Then its most likely this: <http://productplanner.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> that was the website I was looking for!!!!!!!!!! thank you so much!!! If I could give you 1000 of karma I will do it!!

If you have twitter, please follow me @cleiva so I can help you in any way.. once more, thanks!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://konigi.com/tools/omnigraffle-wireframe-stencils>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the url... I hope someone else could remember the url of the website that I forgot</comment></comment>


Open source LoraWAN based pager - <AUTHOR> http://www.snaponair.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea though a Brief look at the site, hackaday and github does not show the schematic or source code.

Lora is interesting for projects such as this I did a similar data capture project which I moved from WiFi to lora ([http://rodyne.com/?p=844](http://rodyne.com/?p=844)) and achieved a massive increase in range and battery life thats why I was keen to peek at the innards..

<comment><USER3> Would Lora work for game/motion cameras? Moving ~20-100mb per day?

<comment><USER4> No. LoraWAN is silly slow - that's the trade off it makes for super low power useage.

And the fair access policies with it restrict you to a max of 38Kb per day of data.

<comment><USER3> Whoa, glad i asked! I'm seeing these lora/wifi/ble combo boards for ~$20, maybe the move is to use lorawan for signaling and wifi for the data transfer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the avantage of a pager compared to a smartphone in 2018? I don't see any. I'd rather just use my phone and email/Slack/Telegram.

<comment><USER6> Ease of separation between critical and non-critical functions? I.e at night smartphone should have notifications disabled, but pager should not (when on duty). And smartphones are so power hungry that keeping them charged can be a hazzle, especially in a stressful environment where one might want paging.

But yeah, likely going to be specialized situations this fits for.</comment></comment>


Obama: The US 'will Respond' to the North Korean Attack on Sony - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/19/7423183/us-will-respond-to-north-koreas-cyberattack-on-sony

<comment><USER2> China is the country with known cyber attacks on the US(according to our government, but hey we are accepting the FBI's answer that this was NK). China has also been posturing with Japan in the surrounding waters(Sony is a Japanese company no matter what legal wrangling they use for Sony Pictures Entertainment). China is also a border country of NK, how inconceivable is it that a North(or South) Korean/s was working for China?

But apparently NK was bothered enough by another comedy movie making fun of their backward country that they executed a sophisticated months long cyber attack and then released the spoils of war for free with only some anonymous postings detailing their motives.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming it really was North Korea, I hope they will come up with a sensible response. Maybe another funny movie. Or just suck it up and be better prepared next time. But not something as disproportionate as the 9/11 reaction.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any excuse to initiate any type of attack on another country. This is getting ridiculous and blown out of proportion like everything else does outside the US.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Proportionate" retaliation means releasing emails from one of NK's top commercial film studios?

<comment><USER6> "Proportionate" doesn't mean "identical", particularly when the two parties involved are not otherwise similarly situated.</comment></comment>


Microsoft fixed critical vulnerabilities in uncredited update released in March - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/purported-shadow-brokers-0days-were-in-fact-killed-by-mysterious-patch/ <comment><USER2> Why are my taxes being used to fund the NSA exploiting our software instead improving it?

<comment><USER3> Probably because "your" enemies use "your" software as well. If it makes you feel any better it looks like the NSA shared the vulnerabilities with Microsoft a month before they were leaked.

<comment><USER4> I think the NSA spying/surveillancing harder on "us" then on "them" (the enemies).

<comment><USER5> I don't know who the "us" and "them" are here, but fact is the NSA is into global spying and mostly does industrial spying and "business intelligence" so the USA gets and maintains an edge over the rest of the world.

But it also spies on US citizen to be sure to control dissent and shut people down.

<comment><USER4> > it also spies on US citizen to be sure to control dissent and shut people > down.

Yups. Shut dissents down, in an undemocratic way, to keep an undemocratic gov't from receiving public scrutiny. In the mean time keep up the appearance you're fighting (inter)national terrorism. Yeah for "National Security".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I feel is awful is the lack of information stored against each update.

It's all just "security" or "reliability" and possibly a link to a KB which says the same.

Some large organisations still have stalwart IT managers who insist not to apply updates unless they know it affects a specific issue that they have. And now that this information is unpublished they apply nothing. It's lost on me how they keep their jobs.

Oh well.

<comment><USER7> Why is that necessary? Ive run Windows on the desktop for probably 10 years and I have never had an update break anything. Seems like people just trying to make themselves useful if you ask me.

<comment><USER8> It never broke anything you noticed.

What if you are a bank, an airline or a hospital, with thousands of networked Windows machines, and one update breaks a specific networking feature (remember [1]) and that crashes your most vital piece of software?

1- [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/968920/windows- vist...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/968920/windows-vista-and- windows-server-2008-dns-clients-do-not-honor-dns-round-robin-by-default)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft is a broken shell company with awful PR

</comment><comment><USER4> MS has a long history of broking in zero-days. Could not find an article with sources quoted, but a lot of cases have come to light:

[https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-evidence-for-backdoors- in...](https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-evidence-for-backdoors-in-Windows- or-other-client-software-for-the-NSA-CIA)

<comment><USER10> That Quora post is pretty bad. Actual evidence is requested, but the top answer is a list of wild conjecture.

The responder prefaces most of their comment with "it is widely believed that" and "it is likely that", states without any explanation that the Malicious Software Removal Tool is somehow a backdoor, and that "everyone who knows about [the backdoors] is under NDA", with no evidence to support that statement either.

<comment><USER11> Undisclosed "1-day" is real and has gone on forever. A popular set of tools is binary diff tools such as the now defunct Zynamics acquired by Google. There is evidence. The amount of tooling around examining MS patches should convince most.

[http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/OH/BHUSA09-O...](http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/OH/BHUSA09-Oh-DiffingBinaries-SLIDES.pdf)

[http://www.phreedom.org/presentations/reverse-engineering- an...](http://www.phreedom.org/presentations/reverse-engineering-and- security/reverse-engineering-and-security.pdf)

People built businesses around this.

With so many eyeballs on release diffs, undisclosed vulnerable were often discovered (and still are). With the number of experts on file observing this it should not be controversial at all.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree with you on this.

I was responding to the Quora link (where the question was "is there any evidence for backdoors in Windows or other client software for the NSA/CIA?")

<comment><USER11> Got it. Quora post is suspicious. That said windows is a lot of machine code. It is more than plausible. NSA is known to have an active relationship with Microsoft.

If 9/11 == inside job is say 2/10 plausible this Quora speculation like 7/10 plausible IMO.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's more important in the InfoSec industry, a degree or certificates? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Neither. Experience. Let me re-phrase, it depends really what aspect of "Info Sec" you want to go into... happy to talk further if you'd like was in this predicament a few years ago too

</comment><comment><USER3> Skills? Aren't lots of InfoSec pros self-developed hackers?</comment>


Electrodacus: Open-Source Solar Battery Management System Introduction and Setup - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCspxDLZR9U <comment><USER2> This is awesome! Some background for those not familiar with the space. A BMS is used to keep Lithium Ion batteries charged property.

When building a large Lion battery, you typically do it by stringing a bunch of small ones together. You can do this easily at home. But chaining lithium ion in series is dangerous without a battery controller. Overcharged cells especially.

This limitation has really hampered the DIY solar and EV communities. Solar equipment and EV parts for small vehicles like scooters are readily available. But there's no affordable BMS for using lithium batteries. The cheapest ones are around $1000. That's why this project is so important.

Used lithium ion batteries with plenty of life left are becoming common on the grey market as EV market penetration increases. The battery packs from hybrids are the perfect size for solar backup power in vans and RVs. Tesla packs are also great because they're built subdivided into conveniently sized modules that run about 24V. This is a great voltage for using existing RV power equipment.

The problem is, these battery modules have BMS integrated with the vehicle electronics. They won't work without one, so until now the only option is to pay $1000 for a commercial unit. Since the packs themselves cost less than that, it's not viable to reuse EV batteries.

Automotive batteries are otherwise perfect for solar and RV use. They're about 5 kilowatt hours for hybrid packs and tesla modules. This is enough power that you can throw a bunch of panels on the roof and run your whole RV solar 24/7 in sunny places. Even the AC. Car modules also support extremely high charge/discharge rates. So you can run big stuff like toasters without worrying about damaging the batteries. Tesla EV modules are about 6X lighter than the equivalent traditional RV batteries, and can handle maybe 30X the current. And they're half the cost.

100% solar RV's are finally realistic with used EV cells. Heat pump, AC, induction cooking. You can supply all needs except food and water with solar. An affordable BMS is the last barrier for me to use EV cells, so it looks like I'm going to have a fun project coming up :)

The author of this video is a brilliant guy with a ton of other videos on off grid power.

The site for the new BMS [http://www.electrodacus.com/](http://www.electrodacus.com/)</comment>


Coinbase releases iPhone app - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id588530550?mt=8 <comment><USER2> One thing that I dislike about native apps over web apps is there is no way to tell how securely credentials are being passed over wifi or a mobile network. With websites you can make sure the connection is HTTPS from the browser and be pretty sure no one who can sniff your network traffic can see what you're doing.

I'd hope that in this day and age every native app, especially those of a banking nature, is using HTTPS where appropriate but (without sniffing your own network) there is no way to tell.

</comment><comment><USER3> Early comments:

"Can't actually send money from this app"

"I can't add funds or send anything."

<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id588530550?mt=8>

<comment><USER4> Well, that's the way it goes. Apple won't approve bitcoin apps that are actually useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this real? There's no mention on their blog:

<http://blog.coinbase.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Pulled from the App Store in 3, 2, 1...

<comment><USER7> why?

<comment><USER8> Apple has rejected every app that has anything to do with Bitcoin (aside from graphs and stats) thus far.

Examples:

<http://www.bitpak.com/?p=34>

<https://blockchain.info/wallet/iphone-app>

[http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5386/why-isnt- bit...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5386/why-isnt-bitcoin-qt- or-any-other-bitcoin-related-app-on-the-app-store-for-mac)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/13/why- apple-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/13/why-apple-is- afraid-of-bitcoin/)

<comment><USER9> The Coinbase app doesn't allow trading, so I don't really see the issue. That's what they've objected to in the past.

<comment><USER10> no they objected to the entire idea of bitcoin as an 'intermediate currency'

<comment><USER9> There's a lot of similar apps on the app store that let you view accounts / exchange rates, just not take part in transfers. It seems they are allowed, just not ones that allow trading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even though I use Coinbase for buying/selling, I would not trust them to store my moderate balance of Bitcoins.

Their hot-wallet dependency and my storage of coins at a central location simply does not give me enough assurance my coins will be safe there for a significant amount of time.

<comment><USER12> What are you talking about? Coinbase proudly explained their internal safety precautions, explaining that most of their coins are stored in a cold wallet, not hot wallet.

<comment><USER11> I should have stated I don't trust my coins in the hands of others.

Bitcoin, unlike other currencies are irreversible. You have one, and only one chance to keep them safe.

I rather be content with the loss of Bitcoins in my possession, _knowing it was my fault_, than losing them to a thief holding Coinbase's staff at gunpoint for the offline wallet's private keys.</comment></comment></comment>


Berliner: Sinatra like Framework written in 16 lines of CoffeeScript. - <AUTHOR> http://berliner.jcoglan.com/

<comment><USER2> For those who wish to see the non-minified source:

The code has not been minified, except perhaps for the replacement of the (carriage return+indent) by semi-columns. Most variable names are semantic.

For sure, the 16 LoC thing is misleading, but the whole thing weights around 3.5 KB, which is impressive for the amount of functionality packed in it.

Let's take the first two lines:

        [J,M,duc,euc,n,e,w]=[JSON,Math,decodeURIComponent,encodeURIComponent,((p)->p.replace(/\/*$/,'').replace /^\/?/,'/'),((d,s)->d[k]=(if d[k]instanceof Array then d[k].concat v else v)for k,v of s;d),(s,c)->s.split(/\s+/).map c]
        [http,url,qs,fs,async,WS,E,haml,ejs,mime]=w 'http url querystring fs async faye-websocket vault/node/aes haml ejs mime',require

For iOS readers, you can scroll the code box using two fingers.

So:

        [J,M,duc,euc]=[JSON,Math,decodeURIComponent,encodeURIComponent]

is quite obvious. So is the second line except perhaps for the use of the w function. It splits the input string on spaces in an array and maps the callback passed as second argument (in this case, require, if you didn't scroll til the end of the line). We'll come to its meaning later.

        n = (p)->p.replace(/\/*$/,'').replace /^\/?/,'/'
        # normalize?(path??) not sure about his one.
        # p is also used elsewhere as a generic name.

        e = (d,s)->d[k]=(if d[k]instanceof Array then d[k].concat v else v)for k,v of s;d)
        # extend(destination, source)
        # k and v are obviously key and value.

        w = (s,c)->s.split(/\s+/).map c]
        # w(string, callback)

In Ruby, w%foo bar baz% is a shortcut for creating an array of strings ["foo","bar","baz"]. The w method here is enhanced version of this, and a nod to _why, who often used it to require a bunch of libraries at the top of his scripts. See for example [https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/ddea5760289a4de3c270...](https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/ddea5760289a4de3c27047c17475fd1165256664/lib/camping- unabridged.rb#L31)

For those who don't know about him, _why is the author of Camping, the grand- father of golf Web microframeworks. The current version doesn't use the w trick anymore because the reduction of dependencies made the normal method shorter. Here's the code (possibly NSFL for some...):

[https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping.r...](https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping.rb)

and its heavily commented (but as terse, codewise) version:

[https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping-u...](https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping- unabridged.rb)

Camping used to be the go to ruby microframework until _why's disappearance. Then dev stalled for a while and Sinatra took its place. It has since been revamped and is actively maintained.

Neither Camping nor Berliner are meant for professional use, obviously.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry, but I don't get this part:

        something.replace /^\/?/,'/'

I'm a little sleepy, so maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't it replace a possible '/' at the beginning of some lines with '/'? Isn't that just a waste of CPU cycles? It effectively does nothing.

<comment><USER2> The key is the question mark. The regexp also adds a slash if none is present initially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sixteen disgustingly ugly minified lines don't count.

<comment><USER5> He, I was about to say the same. I could probably compress the worlds entire JS libraries into a single line.

<comment><USER6> But you can't do that with Coffeescript due to the lack of semi-colons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny that so many commenters don't recognize trolling of CoffeeScript developers/frameworks

<comment><USER8> "original" [https://github.com/rkh/almost- sinatra/blob/master/almost_sin...](https://github.com/rkh/almost- sinatra/blob/master/almost_sinatra.rb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm disappointed that this is mostly a joke. I really like the docs and have been looking for something along these lines lately.

<comment><USER10> ? What's wrong with express?

<comment><USER9> Do you know how much boilerplate crap is required before you can do hello world with express?

<comment><USER11> >Do you know how much boilerplate crap is required before you can do hello world with express?

This much:

var app = require('express')(); app.get('*', function(req, res) { res.send('hello world'); }); app.listen(8080);

Hello world probably a bad example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those that don't see the context: This was written at eurucamp, where we had a talk about a minimal Sinatra in 8 lines. (Almost Sinatra)

</comment><comment><USER13> Wait, how's this different from Express?

The whole "in X lines" makes a lot more sense in the browser context (as it needs to download the script), not so much on the server side.

</comment><comment><USER14> This was written in response to a talk at Eurucamp over the weekend, about re- writing Sinatra in as few lines of code as possible.

While somewhat tongue in cheek it was as much about being creative with the language as it was about obfuscation and writing 'bad' code.

<https://github.com/rkh/almost-sinatra>

</comment><comment><USER15> It's just minified. There are some half-decent ideas in there, it appears to be a half-hearted, lame joke.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you prefer synchronous server side JavaScript, I would recommend also checking out Stick, a CommonJS compatible Sinatra like framework that can also be used from CoffeeScript: <https://github.com/olegp/stick>

</comment><comment><USER17> 16 lines, not really, 16 x 80 characters = 16 lines.

Otherwise, cool project.

</comment><comment><USER18> well, at first i was excited because i would love an express like router/framework with a code base that i can grok in <15 minutes.

then i saw the code [https://github.com/jcoglan/berliner/blob/coffee/berliner.cof...](https://github.com/jcoglan/berliner/blob/coffee/berliner.coffee) and think this is just lame.

would like to see the real code.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can we see the real source please?

</comment><comment><USER20> Will real, lasting apps be built in this?

I'm not sure why languages need to put on a programming pageant.

If it works for you, great, use it to build something cool. I've regularly used about a dozen languages in the last decade. End user Customers don't care what I code in as long as I make their life easier, not just my own.

By taking the time to learn what I'm using for yourself these kinds of comparisons would be a lot more productive than trying to build up the coolness factor. Many Languages were made in the 90's. Even more frameworks come and go, most aim to do similar things, over and over. Maybe it's just me, bulls something for the world.

</comment><comment><USER21> Umm, "lines"?</comment>


(New) Font Awesome Website - <AUTHOR> https://fontawesome.com/icons?d=gallery <comment><USER2> Scroll is super jumpy. Are you using some kind of SPA framework to render a list on components?

Also looks like you're doing some kind of an infinite scroll implementation that doesn't work out so well.

<comment><USER3> They do but the main issue is that the browser has to render hundreds of .SVGs

<comment><USER4> The [https://fontawesome.com/cheatsheet](https://fontawesome.com/cheatsheet) page works fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>

Oi. You need to enable JavaScript.

The Font Awesome website relies on JavaScript. Enable JavaScript and then we'll get you going.

nice

</comment><comment><USER6> Barely showing 2000 icons, and it brings a modern PC to its knees...

The page looks way better than it used to, also the tagging is done well, but the page performance is so bad it alone can keep me from purchasing a license.

</comment><comment><USER7> Strange they've updated the main docs to 5.x yet their master branch is still on 4.x without a 5.x release.

[https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font- Awesome](https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome)

<comment><USER8> They're probably trying to sell the Pro version.

I bought it and it was the worst purchase I've made in a while.

They took some pretty idiotic decisions with v5.

<comment><USER9> Could you go into detail, please? I was close to buying it, would like to know what annoyed you about it

<comment><USER8> First of all, they got a lot of money from the Kickstarter campaign, and they're pushing the pro version way too much.

The thing that annoyed me the most was that they changed most of the classes, making the thing incompatible with previous versions and forcing you to relearn everything. They did this to consolidate the code, but as users we don't give a damn about the code, just that the thing does what it's supposed to.

I tried using their SVG version, and it works completely different from the font version: no inheriting of font color, incorrect size compared to font, etc. (Font version is fine).

No CDN. Loading the thing is a pain in the ass.

I'm on mobile and can't write a lot, but you get the idea. It was still in beta and it's a product that I've normally gotten for free so I probably had high expectations for the paid version, but if I wasn't lazy I would've gotten a refund.

If your client is buying it, go for it. If it's your money, take your GF to dinner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're still using V4 you can get the old docs here: [https://fontawesome.com/v4.7.0/](https://fontawesome.com/v4.7.0/)

</comment><comment><USER11> There might be an issue with the icon Id's displayed. E.g. I see "chess-board" 3 times.

</comment><comment><USER8> Trying to click on the footer links on mobile is the new Tetris.</comment>