The Amiga Consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://countingvirtualsheep.com/the-amiga-consciousness/ <comment><USER3> After all these years I still remember Amiga original chipset register 0xdff180 is the first palette entry. Or that exec library pointer is at 0x4. And hundreds of other details.

It was amazing to set a copper list that completely defines the display, microsecond by microsecond, scanline by scanline. To setup blitter to decode a raw disk sector on the background. To learn blitter 4-channel minterm [0] logic combinators.

Having fun with Deluxe Paint color cycling. Trying to make some kind of music in Protracker and Octamed and listening all those amazing music modules made by other people. Writing text documents CygnusEd. Having fun with AsmOne assembler IDE.

Playing Shadow of the Beast, Marble Madness, Xenon 2 Megablast, Turrican 2, Civilization, Settlers, Lemmings, Another World, Stunt Car Racer, North and South and all those other amazing games. That inspired to imitate and to learn more.

Watching amazing demos like Phenomena Enigma, Kefrens Desert Dream, Sanity Arte, Spaceballs 9 fingers. Wondering how seemingly impossible effects were achieved.

It was a great machine and taught me a lot. I'd be a different person without Amiga.

[0]: [http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms](http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms)

<comment><USER4> I saved up my summer job money and got an Amiga 500 (with an actual monitor!) - ordered in November, so it was on our doorstep when I got home from my afterschool (probably senior year of high school) job. My dad warned that I should probably let it warm up overnight, to avoid shorts from condensation. It was torture! I woke up like 2 hours before school to set it up :)

It was glorious! It was shocking to be able to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it - like magic!

I was devastated when my parents moved to a new place when I was around 30 and I discovered they had just tossed out my TRS-80 coco, C-64 (and about 3 shoeboxes of disks), and my Amiga :( So sad.

<comment><USER5> _"to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it"_

I haven't ever used an Amiga, but thought its "main display" was its GUI, or that its GUI at least was on par with the command prompt. Am I wrong, or am I reading too much in this statement?

<comment><USER6> In this context "main display" means "whatever display is in the foreground" as you could have, say, a Deluxe Paint screen. It'd take up, literally the whole screen, and you could drag it down by the top bar and see the OS desktop screen behind it, possibly in a different resolution and number of colors.

<comment><USER7> And now fullscreen apps are all the rage, again. In my mind, desktop computing in general has always converged, sometimes in roundabout ways, towards the Amiga experience.

<comment><USER4> I really wish they'd dispatch with the standard "minimize/maximize/close" trio of controls and change them to something more interesting. Close is fine, but I'd rather it be a bit harder to use. I don't need to suddenly close something, and it far more often happens that I accidentally close something. Seeing the Amiga video, a foreground/background button could be cool. Or maybe "make transparent while I hold the mouse button down". Or any number of other things. These days I just maximize my windows, then alt-tab (or equivalent for Mac) through my windows. Only rarely do I do things side-by-side, and would rather have some tiling capabilities rather than having to do it manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near multimedia capabilities Amiga had. Not for the price a kid could afford or bought for (such as an SGI machine). Vivid colors, fast graphics, great sound, all in a small box. Whereas PCs and Macs seemed like several generations behind it.

What made it special was that every kid (and an older person) that used it dabbled with games, programming, music, everything it had to offer. You can still see that core foundation Amiga enabled those users in their everyday work they do today. It's not something that has happened before or since. I wish kids today have something like it. On paper they do. Computers today are beyond imagination a few decades ago, but something is lacking. Maybe the abundance of power? Back then, graphics, sound, interactive storytelling and interactivity were just coming at full force to home users and they were exploring. Today it's taken for granted, so maybe not many care (everything looks the same feeling).

<comment><USER9> I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.

<comment><USER8> Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example).

Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).

<comment><USER10> I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's coffin.

Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of games.

<comment><USER11> Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane and then OR'ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However, doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that!

Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.

<comment><USER12> _They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket._

Never.

You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of 256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000.

All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg)

Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a good game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I highly recommend the documentary "From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years" [http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga](http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga)

The significance of the architecture and Jay Miners brilliance in system design cannot be underestimated.

<comment><USER14> Can you outline the draw for people?

<comment><USER15> The draw, as in the attraction to Amiga? TL;DR: it was a technologically superior product for a while, but never became mainstream. This allowed it to garner a decent, very faithful following. Kind of like if the iPhone had failed, but you still had people swearing it's greatest thing since sliced bread.

I can't comment too much regarding the development side of things, as I was quite young at the time. While I dabbled in coding and have heard many comments about various ahead of its time ideas even on the dev side of things, I suspect what set it aside was in large part the hardware.

For its price, it came surprisingly well equipped. For context, we're talking 1985, so most PCs you ran into would have had CGA (EGA only having come out in '84). On the Amiga, the lower / standard resolutions you could have 32 or 64 colours at a time, picked from a 12-bit (4096) palette. For static images, there was a special hack which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at the same time, which made for breathtaking visuals. There were a set of co-processors (Copper and Blitter), which allowed for specialised, primarily graphical programming. Kind of alike a 2D GPU, but in 1985.

The OS itself had a fairly well implemented true pre-emptive multitasking, which allowed for a number of apps to be run simultaneously. Again, this is 2 years before Windows 2.0, and probably 10 years before Windows had anything better than switch-tasking. Apps could run as a window, or get their own fullscreen mode, but surprisingly the fullscreen mode was stable (sometimes games still crash on Windows when you drop do desktop), and you could even drag the full screen window down, and see half the desktop, half the game, etc. Along with the various co-processors offloading work from the CPU, this meant that the entire experience was very fluid. I still remember playing various simple games by setting them to high priority on the CPU, while a 3D render was merrily taking 100% of the CPU in the background. There was literally no noticeable lag in the game. For various architectural reasons, this just doesn't seem to work on modern machines.

Couple that with very decent audio (again, I suspect it would be many years before PCs routinely outperformed the Amiga), and you have a very decent product. It's very difficult to explain the degree to which this technical lead existed, the market is much more competitive now, and everything is much closer together. But, as an example, it's as if someone came out with a console with full VR capabilities at a 500$ price point. It simply shouldn't be feasible.

Since it was quite different, a lot of in-house technologies sprung up. An example is the AmigaGuide format, which was a kind of hyperlinked text document (kind of like man pages?). I suspect a bunch of these esoteric and quirky aspects gave the Amiga a lot of its flavour and soul.

For various reasons, possible mismanagement by Commodore, possibly the PC's open platform simply being economically superior, the Amiga never became mainstream. But therein lies it's draw - the people who knew it and loved it simply couldn't believe this, and became rather fanatical followers.

<comment><USER14> That's what I was not grasping. We were too poor to have a computer until I was 16 (in the 90s) so I missed that era. Thank you!

<comment><USER15> You're welcome! One of the appeals of Amiga was that it offered all this at a very competitive price (when compared to IBM compatible PCs). Still, I recall a Commodore 64 costing my parents about 4 months of salary, and that was without even a tape drive. This was Eastern Europe, so perhaps we were poorer than most on HN. Commodores, Ataris and other alt machines were pretty popular around those parts, due to their price point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Old computers never die - their users do!

We should definitely not be throwing away old computers. They're just as useful as they were when they were assembled, and can be tasked to do all sorts of things we haven't even thought about yet.

I'm a huge fan of retro computing (Oric-1 Atmos, FTW!) and there is nothing more satisfying than to sit down and download a fresh new app, built this year, to run on a system built 30 years ago. I think this is a feeling that must persist, somehow, so I encourage everyone and anyone who has an old computer in their attic to dig it out, boot it up, and keep it running. Even if you can't find a use for it, there are a million other people out there who could. Give it to the kids and let them learn computing in the most distraction-free environment you can give them... my kids learned computing at the 8-bit level and its already put them way ahead of the iPhone-addicted peers. Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters, an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal ..

<comment><USER17> > Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my > kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters, > an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal

Some kids don't want nor will ever care to put their time to use by programming on an 8-bit architecture. Some won't even care to do it on current gen architecture, and that should be alright.

I could be misreading your tone (hope I am), but some people value experience rather than creation. Creators are not superior to consumers. Putting down others, especially children, because they'd rather play some shovelware mobile release than create something is distasteful. We may be technically inclined, but we aren't gods.

<comment><USER18> Na, creators are superior.

There's nothing wrong with kids playing dumb mobile games. But they gotta spend some time making something. I don't care if it's a video game, a short film, or a bird house. When you're making things, you're learning. And when you're passively consuming, you may not be.

With games like Minecraft, kids today have no excuse. They can be making things and playing a game at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> AmigaOS was, overall, the best OS I have _ever_ used. As little technical as possible, but as much as needed. It was an OS, that would gently make you a power-user. I am not going to rant, but my God, was that a good OS! 10 years ahead of its time!

<comment><USER20> It felt like it was so "feature complete" even around 1990. Add a web browser (and networking )and run it on a modern spec machine and I'm sure it would be perfectly usable.

<comment><USER21> People actually do that. You even have multiple browsers to choose from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_Amig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_AmigaOS)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A story: I completed a PDP11 assembly coding assignment in university, on an Amiga. Actually it was an Amiga running a Mac emulator, which in turn was running a PDP11 emulator.

Macs at that time used a variable speed floppy drive, while the Amiga floppy drive was fixed speed. So I was also using a Mac-compatible external floppy disk drive.

The point of the story is that you could use an Amiga as a Mac if you really wanted to.

<comment><USER23> Fusion - a commercial Mac emulator for the Amiga - actually ran _faster_ than a real Mac at the time (mid- to late-nineties).

I sneaked out a couple of ROM images from the Macs at work, set up Fusion, and had CompuServe running on my Amiga back in 1997. Nothing else though - <USER2> 7 and 8 were complex, lackluster, slow, and crash-prone; AmigaOS really blew away the Mac, right up until OSX.

<comment><USER24> RetroManCave on YouTube had an interesting video recently that investigated the performance and capabilities of running a Mac emulator on an Amiga vs. a real 68k Mac, and which actually was faster:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI)

Very impressive stuff. Being able to run Mac software would mean access to Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Framemaker, Microsoft Word and Excel and other business/DTP software that unfortunately wasn't really available natively on Amiga.

I suspect lots of people used Mac emulators to make their Amiga a viable school/work machine, in addition to all the creative fun and games the native platform afforded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One day in maybe 1987 I was working at a computer company that had a mainframe and was full of greenscreen microcomputers like the Apricot and Sirius 1.

One day, I walked into my work area and this new machine was set up and on the screen was this: [http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png](http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png) I was a pivotal moment.

My mind was blown and although I could not afford it I immediately ordered one.

In hindsight a more successful strategy for Amiga might have been to build it as a games console as its primary market position.

<comment><USER26> The Amiga was originally designed to be a game console but the company was forced to pivot after the video game crash of 1983. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_develo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_development)

<comment><USER9> Uncoincidentally, it's most successful market (or one of at least) was the UK where the video game crash never happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _The Amiga, Born a Champion._

 _We made Amiga, Commodore fucked it up._

\- hidden message in version 1.2 of the OS

Computers nowadays feel so boring compared to the raw, crackling _future_ contained in the early Amigas. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking. I'm not entirely sure the boringness is a bad thing; my Mac is a tool for getting work done, rather than a cool thing that nobody really knows how to use right yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you weren't around at the time it's hard to understand just how much beyond every other home computer platform the Amiga was. Yet another data point that "best" doesn't always win.

<comment><USER29> The Amiga was "winning" for a few years but, in hindsight, it is easy to see why it was eventually eclipsed. PCs in the mid-80s were slow, boring, and expensive but the ruthless PC-clone market had lowered costs and increased specifications so quickly that around the early 90s games actually started looking better on PCs.

Although the base Amiga500s were cheap, adding things like hard drives and more memory were always expensive. The bigger and more capable models were just as expensive as their PC counterparts and Commodore were slow to react to competition. In the end it was one struggling company against many PC Clone makers and they just couldn't compete on price or features.

The final nail in the coffin was when Windows95 came out and Microsoft started focusing on the home/school market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I used an Amiga as a kid, and loved it. I am sure it had a profound impact on me. I never identified with a broader Amiga using community, until now. This is so cool, I'm excited to realize that the spirit lives on.

<comment><USER31> My parents got me one, hoping I could use it for school or something. I guess I was too young to really appreciate it beyond the fancy games I could play. Still have it tucked away in the basement though, but the floppies are likely dead by now.

<comment><USER10> Those 3,5" floppies seems to be almost immortal.

Packed up my Amiga 500+ after 20 years in different cellars and attics, most disks seems fine, and my kids are fascinated by the late 80s / early 90s games :)

<comment><USER32> Some 3.5" floppies didn't even survive the walk between the computer and the library for printout. It all depends on what quality discs you could afford. The expensive ones was a lot better than the cheaper ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The Amiga hit the home computer market like a bomb. For a few years there was nothing quite like it on the market at a price that people could actually afford. It was never that big in the USA but overseas it had a huge impact, bridging the gap between games machines and real computers.

I saved up several years of teenage-dollars to buy one when I was 15 and never looked back. Of particular interest to me was the excellent-for-the-time audio chip. I spent many hours making MODs and games for my friends to play. Later, I taught myself C and never looked back.

A sample of the sorts of things a teenager could do in 1991 : [https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.htm...](https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> I had to do (crude) forensics on an Amiga belonging to a suicide victim at university (I was in the computer center, the uni and police asked us to look for a suicide note)

The mod/demo programs were amazing. I was totally outside the mod scene, but I could see why people were attracted to it.

<comment><USER34> That is such a sad event for you to have to perform forensics on. Did you find anything of note about the demo programs?

I really want to ask for more details about the suicide but I feel that would be crude.

<comment><USER33> I don't think the owner had written any/many. They seemed to be shared amongst the digerati for c00lz. Mostly very trippy colormap warping, some of them had sprites doing things over the underlying image, a lot of XOR constructive/destructive interference fringe ideas.

They had two dimensions: 1) be as trippy-cool as possible 2) be written as tersely as humanly possible

The suicide: I can't say. He left no note. I was led to believe he'd found a way to consume a huge amount of time-charged online credit, realized he had accrued a multi-thousand dollar debt, was failing university and was severely depressed. This was back in the 1990s. Computer Crime was new, and the consequences for him was probably jail time.

A lot of other stuff on the amiga was about conspiracy theory, hacking, the usual ascii copy of 'the anarchists cookbook' which almost anyone can stumble upon and hoarde. For somebody in formative years, maybe this was more exciting than in hindsight it reads. (I mean both for me, finding it, and for him, finding/owning it in the raw. I wouldn't have been significantly older than him really, perhaps 10 years at most)

I don't think I helped the family come to any sense of closure, or informed things to help the police or coroner. I did learn that this is a very emotionally stressful job to perform and I am not well suited to either the detail side of logging "what was found" or delivery of the right kind of empathetic response to people in emotional stress. The uni was pretty good about this. They gave me counselling afterward as I recall. I wouldn't be surprised to be told anyone doing this kind of digital forensics nowadays has a pretty solid support structure. Between this, and kiddyporn I think you'd need it.

I think you can learn both skills, but it takes time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> AmiTCP is what got me into being a sysadmin. I was a teenager using slurp and amitcp to get my amiga online the Internet. Learning about TCP and configuration files got me into setting up servers. I started working at an ISP setting up BSD servers for web/ftp/mail/ppp/radius. I've been online on my c64/128D with 300/1200 then finally a 2400 baud modem, then went Amiga 500 and got that Amiga on my local ISP.

But after I started working at an ISP, it was AMD 486/DX100 and was PC since then . with tons of Amiga Emulators and linux boxes

I still sit in an Amiga IRC channel till this day, and still idle on efnet.

Amusing story, an old buddy and co-worker I met on IRC, I got him a job at my work, known him for years, he moved to Finland years ago so he could go to all the demo scenes, and now he is a judge on many of them. Shout out to Sir Garbage Truck and Accession!

</comment><comment><USER20> Just incase anyone hasn't seen it, Ars Technica have been running an excellent series on the history of the Amiga. [https://arstechnica.com/series/history- of-the-amiga/](https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Everything about the Amiga was Magic. Even a system crash was a spiritual experience, with a meditating Guru.

</comment><comment><USER36> I miss `filenote <filename> <note>` on the filesystem level - AFFS :) I'm all emotional now

</comment><comment> EB-Barrington Reading text, scrolling by using the down-arrow on the Amiga in 1988, was smoother than than the Windows 10 laptop I'm using to view this page, here in 2018.

I can't imagine what personal computing would be like in 2018 if the Amiga system had gained market dominance.

</comment><comment> EB-Barrington My first full time job was at a store that sold Amiga's (and PC's). We had a very large range of software - including every game, constantly getting new stock. Once we convinced the boss to purchase a shrink-wrap machine to keep everything looking neat, we started taking games home, copying them, and sharing them with the local community. The next morning, we'd shrink-wrap the games back to their original state, and put them back on the shelf for sale.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure you realise this but that might have been the main reason Amiga got successful in the first place. When my friends bought computers they selected the one where they had easy access to free games. I bought an Atari while they still bought c-64 because copying tapes and discs from other users was easy. I learned programming since there was nothing else to do :-)

<comment> EB-Barrington Oh yeah, I realise! (I bought an Amiga when I was studying Comp Sci at University, rather than the recommended PC - as the games were much better on the Amiga. Fortunately there was one unit with 68k assembly programming, ideally suited to having an Amiga (and I got really good at Speedball II).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Here is an excellent video about the history of Amiga: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o)

There are several other related videos on the channel that are very much worth to watch.

</comment><comment><USER38> To fully understand why the Amiga was great for his time, a good introduction is the book "the future was here".

</comment><comment><USER39> so I've got a (maybe silly, but still) question: why Amiga wasn't successful to this day as a solid competitor to PCs and Macs?

<comment><USER40> Bad marketing is a big part of it. Amiga fans will also cite poor management choices in general, though I don't know anything about that.

By the time they were introduced, though, the PC and Mac were already in the market.

The PC was being adopted into offices by then, so it's also possible that the ironclad rep (at the time!) of IBM meant that the PC was already locked into a path to dominance, but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education.

<comment> amiga-workbench >but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education.

Compatibility mainly, being able to take your work home and continue doing it.

There were a few software 8086 emulators for the Amiga that could run DOS and a few productivity applications, and there was a sidecar for the A1000 which had a full blown PC & 5.25" floppy drive in it for compatibility.

<comment><USER39> thank You all for Your responses - it turned out an interesting question for me which I plan to dive deeper into during following weekend :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let's Make a Promo – Creating Videos for Apps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@djfumberger/lets-make-a-promo-d32e15d574b7

<comment><USER2> Wow. Awesome.

Just as a data point for poor indie devs like me - for my own minimalistic app demo video ([http://www.mindscopeapp.com](http://www.mindscopeapp.com)), I created a bridge over my iPad using my kids' Duplos, stuck my iPhone 4S on top, made sure there was enough light, and recorded me using the app for a few minutes. I then edited the video with iMovie on iPad and wrote a quick little doodle on Garage Band as the music.

<comment><USER3> Another data point for poor indie devs - for a project I worked on last year ([http://www.placeunit.com](http://www.placeunit.com)) I contracted my wife as a model. We then shot the video over two mornings on an iPad. Raw video was imported to a Mac and edited with iMovie. We licensed the song for the video. Most important tip: shoot every interaction from multiple angles before moving on to the next one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing effort.

I've already started working with Reflector and ScreenFlow for our app demo, but the tip regarding After Effects and the device model is handy.

<comment><USER5> Worth noting that in iOS 8 you can capture video direct from device, and don't need to resort to something like Reflector (and the lower quality AirPlay stream that that entails).

If you plug an iOS 8 device into a Mac running Yosemite it will show up as an available input in Quicktime, and you can make a screen recording direct from there.

<comment><USER6> Does this require a lightning connection? My iPad 3rd gen (beta 5) doesn't show up in Yosemite (beta 6).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your app is an Open GL game, you can check out the Kamcord SDK, which will allow you to make a screen recording of your iOS or Android game.

[https://www.kamcord.com/](https://www.kamcord.com/)

It won't be as fancy as the videos in the linked article, but for indie devs it's a pretty cheap way to make demo videos.

Disclaimer: I know the folks @ Kamcord.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is turning the screen brightness all the way down not enough to capturing the screen output in a lit environment? If not, finding a thin film to shade it further might work. That seems easier than the solution posted of mirroring all touches to the simulator and recording there.

</comment><comment><USER9> This was awesome. The fact that I kinda want to download the app now probably shows how important it is to have some good videos to promote your app.

</comment><comment><USER10> This page consistently crashes my mobile Safari (iOS 7). Funny given the subject matter.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is amazing work

</comment><comment><USER12> Dammit. Read that wrong. Guess I need a bigger font.

<comment><USER13> We're going to get downvoted (and rightly so, I believe!) but I, too, read the title quite a few times before I realized what's written there.

I don't believe bigger font would help, but different font could. Ie. one which doesn't display "rn" as that visually close to "m". Bigger letter spacing? I don't know, something like that.

Anyway, I got trolled by my own eyes, a funny feeling :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is WSL2 stable enough for devs to switch from MacOS to Windows? - <AUTHOR> For developers who've switched back to Windows, how is the experience like? Is WSL2 as smooth as actually working on Linux? or does it still crap out on random Node libraries at times (like on WSL1)?
I'm in the market for a new work laptop and a lot of people I know are in the same boat - holding onto older Macbook Pros (2015 and earlier) looking for alternatives, but scared to jump from MacOS. Obviously Apple is busy making the next pro devices thinner which is just.. wonderful for them.
Yes, switching to Linux is an option for many. But I also have to use Adobe CC tools which needs Windows (Wine is not a good option). Hence it's either dual-booting Linux/Windows or Windows full time as the two options for me. <comment><USER2> WSL2 is not technically stable yet at all. It's still only in 20H1 Insider ["public beta"] builds for the version of Windows 10 to be released in the first half of 2020.

(WSL1 on the other hand has been stable and available for production versions of Windows 10 for months now. But yes, it has some known rough parts and performance issues expected to be smoothed over in WSL2 depending on your workflows and needs. Some of those have gone away with updates, WSL1 has seen some improvements over the months from some of the earliest horror reports, again all of which depending on your exact use cases.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually docker for windows with docker compose workdir syncing might be enough. Gonna try it over the weekend</comment>


Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/10/urban-airship-brings-easy-push-notifications-to-android/

<comment><AUTHOR> There a couple Urban Airship cofounders that read HN, myself included - <USER2> don't hesitate to ask us any questions. This has been a really, really fun project with some very interesting technology coming out of it.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't find any Android info on your site. I can think of a ton of questions, here are some off the top of my head.

* Are you just doing polling or did you figure out some TCP keep-alive tricks to keep the connection open?

* If doing keep-alive do you try to adapt your pings to compensate for different timeouts on different carrier networks and deal with half-open connections as Google claims they do with c2dm?

* Have you measured your battery usage? What is it like?

* How many connections can your servers handle?

* What is the Android library like. Is it a separate app that you communicate with via AIDL?

* Does your app handle the notification or does it just broadcast an Intent?

* Are the packets encrypted?

<comment><USER4> Another Urban Airshipper here. Just wanted to expound upon the TCP keep-alive issue because I was the most vocal proponent of using them vs. reinventing them ourselves.

The main reason using TCP keep-alives were a non-starter was because in our testing, carriers handled them in "special" ways which usually meant they rarely or never actually reach ed the intended endpoint.

Another strike against TCP keep-alives is how the RFC defining them seems pretty ambivalent on their use. Support is optional, delivery is not guaranteed (ACK segments with no data aren't reliably transmitted), and implementations may vary.

See: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-101>

At the end of the day they're a fine freebie for protocols like SSH to use (although they're spoofable...), but we wanted finer-grained control in order to optimize resource usage on the device, our servers, and the pipes between.

I'd love to hear about others' experiences with TCP keep-alives though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Urban Airship is a great product, we use it and it really reduces a lot of headaches. There's really no reason to try and lay all the pipe yourself, particularly if you're just getting started. And furthermore, Urban Airship picks up where Apple leaves off with a lot of nice features you'll find you need later.

Their team is also super friendly and responsive. We've sent multiple support emails with answers coming within hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That means a lot to us :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't fully understand Urban Airship. I find it really easy to do push notifications, especially for the iPhone. Why would I use this?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been doing this for over a year. We're extremely familiar with all of the quirks of the process around push notifications and, during that time, have listened to what our customers are asking for. We've implemented most of these features and are in the process of implementing more. Using Urban Airship, you get things like autobadge (increment/decrement), quiet time (no alerts in the middle of the night for customers who don't want them), a super easy broadcast feature, arbitrary grouping by tags, scheduled notifications, the ability to hook up an RSS feed to automatically push notifications, and a web UI to send notifications... features like that, in addition to that, we have great support, so if something isn't work right you have a team you can go to get help.

A lot of our customers don't even have any server at all, they just use us.

On top of all that, we also have a great in-app purchase solution and rich messaging through AirMail.

It goes a lot beyond just a simple API to send push notifications. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> OK this is not an actual urban airship - just another website. Disappointing.

<comment><USER4> I think I can speak for everyone at Urban Airship when I say we're all a bit disappointed we don't have an actual airship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Solid! I use Prowl on the iPhone for push stuff. I get around paying for SMS with Google Voice and Prowl.

Will definitely check Urban Airship out.

</comment><comment><USER9> The TC article doesn't mention the In-App Purchase features you offer. It sounds like you offer free-for-the-user updates to applications as well as providing infrastructure for traditional in-app purchases managed through Apple's billing. I'm curious about how you bill for these features if you don't mind taking a moment to explain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure thing.

For in-app content delivered through our infrastructure, whether it's free or paid through Apple's in-app purchase, we charge $0.05/download.

An API call is made to our system when a person wants to download content. If it's a paid item, a receipt is included in that call and we then validate the receipt with Apple. After that, the application can download the content.</comment></comment>


Disney battles DVD decline with digital movie download service - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/disney-battles-dvd-decline-with-digital-movie-download-service-20140226-33gpq.html <comment><USER2> I wonder who will be the first (major) player to offer undamaged MP4 files for download? I'd happily pay for that.

I know Vimeo and VHX are doing it but I haven't seen any "AAA" releases from them.</comment>


How We Made Github Fast (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://github.com.sharedcopy.com/blog/8a00227f0d320fa18a49c9500039d315.html

<comment><USER2> Why not link to the original page: <https://github.com/blog/530-how-we-made- github-fast> , instead of some random website with lines drawn all over the article? What exactly is sharedcopy adding to this article?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing the original page which I did know before.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Found security vulnerability at work. rebuked. was I wrong? - <AUTHOR>

Obviously this is a throwaway account.
OK, so I have a question about security testing and whether or not I crossed a line...
I work at a very small company and we have a test environment running on virtual machines firewalled off from the rest of the network running under another devs desk. I have to jump into another server first to get into this environment and the only sensitive data is our source code (all customer data has been wiped from this replicated environment).
When I read about the following vulnerability I decided to test it out on our environment:
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Oct/257
I know I'm acting like a script-kiddie because I only understand some but not all of the vulnerability but I decided to try it anyways and lo-and-behold it worked.
I e-mailed my manager and let him know of the issue and told him about the mitigation strategies mentioned in the bulletin. I was hoping to get some credit and maybe a pat on the back (even though this is a relatively low concern - requires ssh access). Instead I was told that I risked termination and I should tell someone first.
My manager did not realize that I told him it was our dev box that I tried it. Once I pointed that out again he said it didn't matter. This is on a box we are told we can test anything on because we can just roll back to an old snapshot of the machine.
Was I being too brash? Am I a total idiot for trying this? I should point out that I have sudo on every server in our environment... I was not breaking into something I am not authorized to be logged into. Security is supposed to be important at our company. I thought I was doing the right thing by finding a threat we are theoretically exposed to, reporting it, and finding a mitigation strategy. <comment><USER2> It _wasn't_ smart of you to run an exploit you didn't understand on a box you didn't control. In this case, there was virtually no risk that you could have destabilized the machine. But for many of the last several years's Linux privilege escalation bugs, that isn't the case; they involve corrupting kernel memory and while the odds of them going seriously awry are remote, they aren't nonexistent.

To put this in perspective: assessing the security of app servers is my day job, and I would typically ask before running a privilege escalation exploit on a box I had gained access to.

Your boss overreacted, but unlike the rest of this thread, I don't think there are tea leaves to read. Had you done this on a prod server, your boss might have even been right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I was hoping to hear from you on this thread. You're absolutely right, of course.

I would never have run this exploit on a production server, but considering that I didn't ask permission to do it at all, he has reason for concern! His main point was that I should at least let someone know so it is known that my purposes aren't nefarious.

Thanks for the input and giving me perspective on the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Two points;

1) Most distributions will have patches for this in short order, so unless your customers are running on unsupported versions they will be fine once they update. If the aren't on supported versions, if you roll your own version, if ssh access is something your clients provide, if they are high profile targets, if they have staff with poor password hygiene then you may have a problem.

2) Given your manager's response, you may want to give serious consideration to moving to somewhere that rewards initiative and forethought.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's time for you to move on to a place where your dedication to the job is more valued.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would hope that the experience of Randal Schwartz[1] would teach all presumably well-intentioned people to always obtain clear and explicit authorization before doing _any_ security testing in a work environment.

1- [http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042534/intel- hacke...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042534/intel-hacker-has- conviction-expunged)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think your manager is wrong. If you get pushback about it and are not getting anywhere with your logical argument, you could always counterattack by asking why there isn't a clearly defined security policy in place already (I assume there isn't, but of course you should check that before doing anything else).

</comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately, this is a common response from upper management.

In larger companies, one way to get around this, is to go to Human Resources instead of your chain of command. Let them anonymously handle this issue. If your company doesn't take action then you can continue discussing the matter with HR until it's resolved.

If the company isn't large enough to have an employee handbook and HR then could report to an officer of the company and note that you wish to remain anonymous and that you're genuinely concerned about company security.

You could also consider requesting a meeting with officer+manager or HR+manager and disclose to both at the same time.

I don't see any company in their right mind firing you if you do this -- and are genuinely concerned for the security of your employer and it's clientele.

<comment><USER2> I would definitely not take this issue to HR. HR is not there to help you. Mostly, they're there to screw you out of a little bit more of your health insurance benefit every year. Escalating this above your manager is really just an opportunity to brand yourself "high drama".

You really ought to just have a conversation with your manager where you acknowledge that you have just learned that he doesn't want you testing the dev server for security vulnerabilities, and then you ask him what the most effective way is for the company to channel your interest in security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds to me like you were being proactive.

Get 5 minutes with him, bring up the topic and ask him why?

His reaction was probably symptomatic of another issue. By talking to him you can either figure out what you did wrong or hopefully get to the bottom of the issue that caused the reaction.

</comment><comment><USER9> If your job isn't to handle security, this may be slightly overstepping your bounds (ie taking time away from whatever you do to toy around with the latest exploits).

Probably better to give it to the people in charge of security.

If that person is your boss, then you have a dilemma. Either your boss doesn't fully understand what happened or perhaps the bug you found undermines his security work and he viewed your testing it as a sign of insubordination.

I'm sure your company is open to this sort of thing, but send it through the proper channels. If there aren't any proper channels, this would be a good time to ask around to see if something can be created to handle situations like these when they come up.

</comment><comment><USER10> Finding security vulnerabilities can be helpful for an important system.

It sounds like this is just a test/staging box inside the network. What's the threat to a system like that, that it's worth your boss or your time?

I agree with other commenters that running privilege escalation exploits on a system that DOES matter would be even worse, due to the potential for side- effects and damage.

Good curiosity and energy, but you can find a lot of better ways to channel it.

</comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't sound like your manager understands what you did.</comment>


The Machard Knot and its 16-year-old inventor - <AUTHOR> http://www.summitpost.org/the-machard-knot/936995 <comment><USER2> I learned this knot as the GRB - "Guide's Rappel Brake" and also as an autoblock. There are several entries each year in "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" that describe failure to properly use a mechanical belay device. I recall no accidents as the result of a faulty autoblock knot. This knot is aligned with the KISS principle from software engineering. It is remarkably simple and effective.

Interesting to read this story of its origin.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that you mention "Accidents in North American Mountaineering". This is the climbing equivalent of the Startup Post-Mortems story that was posted the other day. They publish them every year and they're a great read. Like startup failures, they tend to cluster around a few common mistakes-- typically failure to anticipate weather conditions and overconfidence in one's abilities. Definitely worth checking out if you enjoy climbing and mountaineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's called an "autoblock" by climbers today in the US: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoblock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoblock)

<comment><USER5> That appears to be a slightly different knot. The final stage where the bottom loop goes through the top isn't done for an autoblock.

<comment><USER6> > The final stage where the bottom loop goes through the top isn't done for an > autoblock.

That'd be the french knot which only blocks in one direction. The Machard knot which blocks in both directions does not loop through itself, the karabiner goes through both loops to close the knot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sailors have known and used "jamming" hitches like this for centuries. It's the basic principle behind a sheep shank for example. Marseilles is of course a port city, so I wonder if he found some inspiration along the waterfront.

<comment><USER8> This was not the first jamming hitch used in climbing--that would be the Prusik, which is still used today.

The Prusik is trickier and slower to tie than the autoblock, and tends to stay tight once it is tensioned. The autoblock runs looser and is easier to loosen up once it has been tensioned, which is why it's generally preferred over the Prusik as a rappel backup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> An alternative to this is the mechanical ascender / 'jammer'. I've used the Petzl version when caving: [http://www.petzl.com/en/Sport/Ascenders](http://www.petzl.com/en/Sport/Ascenders)

They're practically bullet proof, although they can take a little longer to bite when coated in mud :)

<comment><USER10> As a third hand for your rappel, a toothed ascender seems like a bad idea. Petzl makes another device called the Shunt which is more suitable to third hand use. Although in the case of icy ropes, maybe teeth are a hard requirement.

<comment><USER11> The Shunt is great, but there are some potentially dangerous gotchas in its operation. Never use it with ropes of different diameter. As a rappel backup, the shunt can fail if you place it above your belay device. The risk is that a panicked operator will hold the device open. In the correct mode of operation, you place the shunt below your belay device. If you're disabled, the shunt will lock off. If you panic and hold it open, the force you apply to the device will arrest your rappel.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it's applications are very specialized, this is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh, I remember using the Braid variant even it's a little more difficult to make with one hand.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool. Never used it before. A prusik seems easier, especially since I learned the one-handed technique. I wonder what the trade offs are of each.

<comment><USER14> One difference between the two it that the Prussik is much easier to release after it's been jammed.

<comment><USER15> If a knot is the only thing between you and a very long fall, "easier to release" might not be a feature.

<comment><USER2> Not true. It is called the autoblock for a reason. You tie it by wrapping it around your rope. To descend, you simply apply a slight amount of downward pressure to the top of the knot. This is the easy to release part. If you remove that pressure, by just moving your hand off the knot, it instantly grabs and stops all downward movement. A Prussik will retain most or all of it's tension, making it difficult to use in ascending or descending. I only use a Prussik in a situation where I want no movement at all for the duration, such as a backup to an anchor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This knot seems to work by friction. Is there any knot with the same application that works without friction?

<comment><USER17> All knots work by friction. Try to imagine any knot working with friction-free rope (which doesn't exist).

<comment><USER16> > Try to imagine any knot working with friction-free rope

Yes that was my question :)

<comment><USER17> Ok, well in that case the answer is 'no'.

<comment><USER16> You mean: "I can't imagine it". That is something else :)

<comment><USER17> I can imagine lots of stuff that doesn't exist (interstellar spaceships with earth as their origin, pink elephants wearing tutus, time machines and so on). But when I limit my imagination to those things that can be constructed using the laws of physics as we currently know them knots without friction drop right off the menu along with the items above.

So if your question was serious then I consider it answered, if you want to seriously know whether something that can't exist can be imagined then the answer is yes, you can imagine it (and so can I), but I can't imagine _making_ one because that would violate the laws of physics somewhere along the line.

You could tie a knot in frictionless rope easily enough, but it would come apart without any work at all and it would not hold anything and you wouldn't be able to grip the rope on either end to tie the knot in the first place. Friction and knots go together unless you're living in a mathematical ideal world, which we don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can it be that I've seen fishermen use the same to tie a hook to a line?

<comment><USER19> If they're tying it to the _end_ of the line, they're probably using the improved clinch knot, which has visually similar wrapping: [http://www.netknots.com/fishing_knots/improved-clinch- knot/](http://www.netknots.com/fishing_knots/improved-clinch-knot/)</comment></comment>


Introducing Vulkan-Hpp – Open-Source Vulkan C++ API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp <comment><USER2> Enjoying Vulkan so far in the recently patched Doom, which netted me a minimum 10% increase in frames per second. I really hope this gets adopted / patched into current games, and those on the horizon. Seems like a big win for cross platform development.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that Vulkan isn't so much a replacement for OpenGL as it is a library that you can use to write OpenGL in the first place, it's another layer removed, and hence requires quite a lot of work to integrate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So hold on. Assuming that I understand C++ linking right, you're saying that I should include this 17000-line file in every single cpp unit in my application that uses Vulkan APIs? And people wonder why C++ programs compile so slowly.

<comment><USER5> >And people wonder why C++ programs compile so slowly.

People have been aware of this problem for some time. It's one of the reasons the C++ community is trying to develop a proper module system (or was the last time I checked, which was a while back).

<comment><USER6> By the time C++ has a working module system it will be as relevant as Fortran is now.

<comment><USER7> There's an experimental module system already in Visual C++, and I think in clang as well. It will be in the 2019 standard at the very latest.

I like Rust and all, but C++ isn't going away in the next three years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The new Vulkan C++ API from Khronos is based on vkcpp. Here's examples for vkcpp to give an idea how code with the C++ API looks like:

[https://github.com/jherico/Vulkan](https://github.com/jherico/Vulkan)

Here's a basic tutorial with comments for the Vulkan C API. Vulkan is a _very_ low level API, so there's a lot of code. It should be straightforward to port the C tutorial to use the C++ API.

[http://av.dfki.de/~jhenriques/development.html](http://av.dfki.de/~jhenriques/development.html)

<comment><USER8> Do also look at the recently released [http://vulkan- tutorial.com](http://vulkan-tutorial.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is what was previously the vkcpp project from Nvidia, which seems to have been transferred to the Khronos group.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of their "improvements" could be done just by using C99 designated initializers.

<comment><USER10> And why are they claiming C doesn't have type-safe enums?

<comment><USER11> Because C doesn't have type-safe enums.

edit: for the downvoters, I'd LOVE to be happily corrected with a link to documentation about C language support for a type safe enum.

<comment><USER12> It isn't type-safe in the sense you're used to in C++. But common pitfalls can be avoided if you don't destroy the type information by assigning through a vanilla integer.

        enum a { A };
        enum b { B };

        static enum a a = B;

$ clang -Wenum-conversion -Werror a.c

        b.c:4:19: error: implicit conversion from enumeration type 'enum b' to different enumeration type 'enum a' [-Werror,-Wenum-conversion]
        static enum a a = B;
                      ~   ^
        1 error generated.

<comment><USER11> The easy ability to assign it to a vanilla integer or cast it implicitly (through an arithmetic operator or comparison for example) is what I mean when I say they aren't typesafe. A warning is also a fair bit weaker than a flat out compile error, although I'll grant that compiling with -Werror (a really challenging thing for most companies) alleviates that.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it isn't real type safety. That said, don't assign enums through vanilla integers if you don't have to. :-)

Our engineering organization of 300+ people builds the majority of our code with -Werror (and a bunch of warnings enabled). Just an anecdote, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whoa now that is cool! Are there any games out there that currently use this C++ API of Vulkan? Very curious to know if there are any major issues with using it versus the direct C API.

I'm not very knowledge regarding Vulkan so hopefully that isn't a stupid question but I want to brush up on my C++ skills and play with this!

Also how similar is Vulkan to SDL? I used to use SDL quite a bit back in the day and it was awesome but I'm assuming Vulkan is far more comprehensive?

<comment><USER14> > Also how similar is Vulkan to SDL?

They are not. You use SDL to create and manage your window and handle input, and use Vulkan or OpenGL to draw to that window.

<comment><USER13> That makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any scene graph libraries that use Vulkan?

<comment><USER16> Unreal Engine 4 supports it.

[https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Vulkan](https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Vulkan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a game developer I'm pretty excited about this. There is really no reason to use DX12 backend anymore in the future game development, because of the ease of development, performance and multiplatform features of the Vulkan.

<comment><USER18> Except the little detail that there is zero Vulkan support on:

\- iOS

\- macOS

\- PSP, PS3, PS4

\- Wii U, 3DS

\- XBox 360, ONE

\- any Android version < Android 7

\- UWP

<comment><USER19> And there is DX12 support for those?

<comment><USER20> Metal, on the Apple platforms, is similar.

<comment><USER21> Metal is inferior to Vulkan.

<comment><USER22> Metal is and will always be exclusive to apple platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Vulkan is an NVIDIA gpu api. [https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/](https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/)

<comment><USER23> Whoa holy smokes yeah I missed the mark on that one. So Vulkan is a replacement for openGL, essentially a new api to gpu's in general? Is that closer to it? In the future I'll phrase the statement as a question if I'm not 100% clear on it. Sorry for the noise.

<comment><USER24> > In the future I'll phrase the statement as a question

after you google it first, please.</comment></comment></comment>


Tricks That Make You More Attractive to Clients - <AUTHOR> http://freelancefolder.com/5-tricks-that-make-you-more-attractive-to-clients/

<comment><USER2> Hmmm. The number 1 thing that worked for me (I refuse to call it a trick) was being attentive to what the client actually _needed_.

A lot of consultants want to walk in the door and propose all sorts of fancy / flashy solutions. Many times, that's not really needed.

Almost all of my clients (it's been a few years since I've consulted) told me that the reason they always called me back was because they knew I took the time to first understand the problem that they needed to have fixed and that my only interest was to find the right solution for _them_.

Sometimes that meant I had to spend weeks working in Access or VB, but that's what the right solution was for them.

It's easy to get a big head when you're consulting; you know everything that there is to know and people pay you serious money just to hear your advice. I have seen a lot of consultants who insist on only using bleeding edge everything for every solution they write; some of them even do it with great success.

I guarantee you that none of them have the same kind of word-of-mouth marketing you get by proving to your client that you care about their problems, and that you're going to find the solution that fits them the best. I closed up shop 3 years ago, and I still get referrals from my old clients on a weekly basis to this day.

<comment><USER3> Good advice. If you don't mind me asking, why did you decide to stop?

<comment><USER2> My favorite client was losing their only full time developer and made me an offer that was basically impossible to refuse to come work for them full time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live and die by #1. I have a last in, first out policy when it comes to requests via email. If you want something done, and you email me about it, it gets top priority over whatever else I'm doing. One of the biggest comments I hear from people who are referred to me (which is the only way I've taken on work in the last 3 years) is the speed of my support.

<comment><USER5> Like he says though, you have to be careful with this. I once had a client who would constantly email me with support questions, many of which I answered multiple times but I guess it was easier for him to just email me instead of searching his email logs. I would always answer back right away, which would mean he would write me back with another question, and the cycle would repeat itself indefinitely. It basically became instant messaging with a 20 minute delay, and totally killed my productivity while making me hate this person.

Also, I try to be as honest with my billing as possible, which means that if each support question takes 5 minutes out of my day, I might only bill this person for 30 minutes, even though the true cost to me is much greater because of my lost productivity.

My solution was to ask him to either send me support questions in batch unless they were real emergencies, or pay me to set up a bug/feature tracker.

<comment><USER4> When this happens to me, and it has several times, I just get real honest with the person and ask them to try and be a little more organized with their questions. Most people become real apologetic when they feel like they're abusing you... especially when you've built up a track record with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone say a little more about how to "actively attract and screen for good clients"?

</comment><comment><USER7> One more important thing is to

1)share your experiences of your work via blog

This helps you in increasing the trust with your potential clients and to find new clients by means of inbound marketing see below link:

[http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/10807/Startups-How- To-B...](http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/10807/Startups-How-To-Build-A- Barrier-To-Entry-With-Inbound-Marketing.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice writeup, but how did the word "tips", mentioned 4 times in the article, become "Tricks" in the title? They're not the same thing. "Tricks" implies something devious, underhanded, or hidden, and there's nothing like that in this article. No one likes to be tricked and these days, no one _can_ be tricked for long.

Customers want you to be open, honest, and trustworthy partners and all of the "tips" in this article are great for doing just that.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing it was just their marketing - tips suggest something you'll need to work at, tricks suggests it's magic in some way, that you'll get a surprising return on your [time] investment.</comment></comment>


Amazon: We're no Apple - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20120906/amazon-were-no-apple/ <comment><USER2> "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

Apple made money both ways, on device sale and much more so when they used the devices, and bought mp3s, and movies, and apps...</comment>


Clozure CL (formerly OpenMCL) - <AUTHOR> http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html

<comment><USER2> I'm in my nth effort to learn (Common) Lisp, and this is the implementation I've chosen, mostly because its portability (read it as I could run it in Windows, despite not being my preferred environment).

The only thing that may worry me a little at the improbable case of using it for production code is: strings are encoded in UTF-32!! That's 4 times more memory than necessary for my usual use cases...

<comment><USER3> From my limited experience, Clisp also is a fine option for running on Windows in case you are looking for an alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just installed Clozure on a new Windows laptop (yes, I know, but it has 4 cores, and was inexpensive). On OS X and Linux I was used to running SBCL (or Franz).

</comment><comment><USER5> So which came first: Clozure, or Clojure?

<comment><USER6> A more interesting question than I expected!

Clozure's more or less official announcement was on October 19th, 2007. ( <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.mcl.general/2593> )

Clojure was released on October 17th, 2007. ( <http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/16fec21eb1fff8aa> )

Of course Clozure is much older if you look at the code and not just the name.

<comment><USER7> Clozure Asssociates was founded in 2000.</comment></comment></comment>


Survey says Facebook still in use by young, but Snapchat/Instagram are real - <AUTHOR> http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-data-says-s <comment><USER2> Anecdotal evidence: I had never messed with Instragram until I got a girlfriend whose peer group used that exclusively over Facebook. These are all in the 28-32 age range. It seems they were all eager to use a system that just focused on sharing photos and didn't want all the 'bloat' associated with Facebook. In addition to preferring the focus on photosharing, there was a sense of just wanting to be back on a network where they just dealt with the few people they cared about.

Obviously Instagram falls under the Facebook umbrella, but it did serve as a wake up call to me about there possibly being a group of young professionals that is more than willing to completely ditch Facebook proper for something that better fits their social networking goals.

<comment><USER3> It is amusing that there's less friction to move to a new network than to clean up the old one. Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook) is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook friends than simply stopping using FB much.

But eventually it seems like the same people will move to the new network of choice, and try to contact you there, and you've got the same problem all over again? Or you drift out of touch with that new network...

<comment><USER4> > Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook) > is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook > friends than simply stopping using FB much.

I've muted hundreds of people in my friends list, and they are none-the-wiser.

<comment><USER5> Hundreds? As in > 200?

Maybe the list shouldn't be called 'friends' anymore? That list is bigger than my list of Outlook + GMail contacts.

As a prime example for a very different use of social networks: Can you explain to me how adding these people to your account (friends, acquaintances, whatever you name the list) adds, especially if they are muted and don't show up in your feed of social stuff (tm) anyway? Fascinating.

<comment><USER6> Based on what I've seen, refusing to add someone can be seen as a social snub in many circles. Simply adding and muting someone avoids a lot of social hassle of people wanting to know why you refused to add them when you did add some other person.

<comment><USER7> This is one of the things Google+ got relatively right: Perceived "friendship" are not in any way symmetric. Even close friends will often have different ideas about the depth and importance of their relationship. Facebook has tried very hard to ignore that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't want to come across as rude, but I am fascinated how easy people are buying into these numbers. From my perspective the survey is in its current form far less informative than the original anecdote.

There is absolutely zero information on the data source he or Survate was using. The population seems to be selected based on the single factor age - meaning they might be getting the data from the easiest, cheapest accessible data sources available. In the end most of the responses could be coming from 30 y/o guys in India clicking on random answers to earn their 5c on mTurk.

In contrast to that, the original anecdotal evidence had the full story, provided the exact context on why and how the data was generated. But data without context is no data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Survata is a survey-wall -- meaning you have to answer a survey before you see a given article. They have about 20 publishers signed up, and they're all non- spammy content. Users are all US-based, which can be verified via geo-ip, and there's little reason for people to spoof that here.

I never claimed to have more anecdotal evidence -- the whole point is to try to validate the claims via some form of data collection. It was cheap and fast to do.

<comment><USER9> (Survata co-founder here)

Garry's explanation is a good one. The data for this survey was collected via surveywalls (example at [1]), which let visitors access premium content online for free in exchange for answering a few questions. All respondents here have US IP addresses and self-report age in the 13-25yr range. We generally see honesty rates of 90% or higher to questions for which we can verify the answer (e.g. "Which OS are you currently using?" or "Who is the President of the US?").

1\. Example surveywall: [http://www.hyperink.com/So-You-Want-To-Be-A- Programmer-b1559...](http://www.hyperink.com/So-You-Want-To-Be-A- Programmer-b1559a9))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see many parents who forbid their children from using Facebook, but they are barely aware of what Instagram is and have never heard of Snapchat. Needless to say, those children are all over Instagram and Snapchat.

The first thing every adult says when I explain Snapchat is "oh, it is a sexting app!"

<comment><USER11> Lots of truth in this one. My uncle took away my cousin's phone a few months ago, and it didn't even phase her since her iPod had better communications tools than the dumbphone. She was texting via Kik (I thought it had died), Instragramming and FaceTiming. Talk about punishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am so happy to see someone make an effort to do more than tell a story of how their girlfriends cousins dog said something and so obviously facebook/college/everything is totally over. Anecdotes are for color, data is for predictions and analysis.

<comment><USER13> People are beginning to preface anecdotal evidence with "this just anecdotal, but ...", as if there is some loophole to the fallacy.

It's really annoying when people confuse humility and an acknowledgement of a scarcity of evidence with jumping head-first into making a useless, fallacious argument.

Personal stories are fine[1], but it's worth keeping in mind that one of the pre-eminent unironic peddlers of anecdotal evidence as proof is Thomas friggin' Friedman.

[1]: For spotting "black swans", for instance.

<comment><USER14> In discussion forums I'm okay with the preface, because I read it as something like an implicit request for more information, "I think I've noticed [x] but don't have any real data, anyone know something further?" But I wouldn't write an article (not even an essay-length blog post) based on that premise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would be hesitant to wonder about the data on Snapchat and what it provides. Think of how the app works: You take a picture, add a caption, and draw on the picture if you please. Then you select friends to send it to and you're done. That can be accomplished in < 30 seconds. Viewing snaps sent from friends is at MAX 10 seconds per snap. Unless a user is sending and receiving a lot of snaps, I would doubt they reach ' used regularly (defined by several hours per week or more, multiple answers OK)' threshold.

<comment><USER16> Thinly veiled, Snapchat is for sending nudes. In that sense I suppose it's more incentive to send photos, given the premise that the photos won't be seen by a third party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> On a related note, this article is interesting: "What The Tech World Looks Like To A Teen"

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/joshmiller/what-the-tech-world- looks...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/joshmiller/what-the-tech-world-looks-like- to-a-teen)

It got marked dead on submission. I'm not sure if the domain is marked spam, or I'm banned from submission, or what.

<comment><USER18> It's usually best to submit the original article instead of a syndicated (AKA "blog spam") post: <https://medium.com/product-design/d8d4f2300cf3> (previously on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982850>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No one seems to be mentioning the incredibly high usage of Tumblr in that survey. I have to say I'm really surprised.

</comment><comment><USER20> Usage of Tumblr looks surprisingly high (at least for me), according to that graph. Even though that stats are exclusively for the younger segment of users, they don't seem to correlate at all with overall data I've been able to gather. For example: \- Facebook's unique visitors ~160M [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/net-us-facebook- us...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/net-us-facebook-users- idUSBRE85J1L020120621) \- Tumblr unique visitors ~24M [http://blog.compete.com/2012/10/10/pinterest-surpasses- tumbl...](http://blog.compete.com/2012/10/10/pinterest-surpasses-tumblr-in- unique-visitors/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The most striking thing is the across the board drop from one age group to the next. That to me is the more interesting story here.

Curious about Survata' methodology. Neither the author nor their website go into a great deal of information about this. (I mostly want to know who crafts the questions, as it's easy to inadvertntly skew survey results).

As an aside, linking to Survata's homepage not just once but three times in a ~600 word post makes this thing, aside from its casual observations, feel like an 'advertorial.'

<comment><USER9> (Survata co-founder here)

Survata has a DIY survey creation tool, but we review and suggest wording changes to avoid biased questions. We also advise on how to arrange (and randomize) answer choices to allow us to calculate and compensate for answer biases like always clicking the first or last option.

Responses are gathered on surveywalls across the web, where visitors answer short surveys in exchange for free access to premium content (e.g. ebook or video).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What this post doesn't describe is usage numbers per person. I wonder how many Tumblr users are also Facebook, Snapchat, etc. users...? Also, how many respondents chose none of the options?

</comment><comment><USER23> it would never cross my engineering mind to develop app like Snapchat. If you pitch it to anyone who played with iOS for a moment, they will laugh at you and say: no fun, I can hold two buttons and take print screen and the purpose of your app - dissapearing photo - is gone. But yet SC managed to raise $8MM. How on Earth is that?? Is it possible that those who took photos have no idea holding power button and clicking menu button with take a print screen??

<comment><USER24> Don't underestimate the power of defaults. When you send someone a photo through most systems the recipient has to go out of their way to delete it, so they wind up keeping (and re-sharing) things they didn't even intend to. If you want to circumvent Snapchat's retention policy you have to actually care enough at the moment to do so, which is a much bigger barrier than any technical one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We have too many companies offering "free" products to demographics with very limited purchasing power... I'm glad I'm not in the boat of appeasing this fickle group.

</comment><comment><USER26> 1,000 people is a very small sample...

<comment><USER27> Not true, at least if the sample is truly random.

It gives a confidence interval of plus or minus 3% (regardless of the size of population being surveyed!)

[http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/best-estimates-guide- sampl...](http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/best-estimates-guide-sample-size- and-margin-error)

 _For example, if 50 percent of a sample of 1,000 randomly selected Americans said they favor recycling laws, in 95 cases out of 100, 50 percent of the entire population in the U.S. would also have given the same response had they been asked, give or take 3 percentage points (i.e., the true proportion could be 47 percent or 53 percent). The bigger the sample, the smaller the margin of error, but once you get past a certain point -- say, a sample size of 800 or 1,000 — the improvement is very small._</comment></comment>


Fidelity now allows clients to put bitcoins in IRAs - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/12/11/fidelity-now-allows-clients-to-put-bitcoins-in-iras/ <comment><USER2> Oh my god, is that ever inaccurate. It's a trust available only to accredited investors that happens to invest in Bitcoin. By that logic, you can put just about anything in your IRA.

Here's a random Google result about the variety of bizarre funds out there: [http://money.usnews.com/money/personal- finance/articles/2009...](http://money.usnews.com/money/personal- finance/articles/2009/12/02/the-10-strangest-mutual-funds)

edit: corrected my mistaken categorization of SecondMarket investment vehicle.

edit: invest in fine art (sorry, no funds open to new investment) - [http://www.thefineartfund.com/index.php/en/products-and- serv...](http://www.thefineartfund.com/index.php/en/products-and- services/funds/)

edit: invest in vintage wines - [http://www.wineinvestmentfund.com/index.aspx](http://www.wineinvestmentfund.com/index.aspx) ... and so on.

<comment><USER3> The ability to borrow art from the Fine Art Fund sounds like a fantastic benefit of being an investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I once rode in a taxi where the cabbie regaled me with his retirement plan; each time he'd saved up enough money, he'd go on a trip to Atlantic City and try to win. He was fairly certain that this was a good idea.

Please don't play with more than you can afford to lose. It's bad for bitcoin, and a crash might be bad for you. If you can't afford to retire, society may compel others to help you. Please be responsible.

I'm not a tax lawyer: The tax-free nature of Roth IRAs might render some of the questions of bitcoin taxation less of a concern?

<comment><USER5> > Please don't play with more than you can afford to lose.

When considering investing in something like bitcoin, draw out a table of what you expect the outcome to be 10 years from now. Rows can be bitcoin price ranges (each row having what you believe is a roughly equal chance of happening), and columns can be how much you invested in it. Rate your expected happiness (use some scale -100 to 100?) from each result in each square. Keep in mind that if bitcoins reach a high number like $100,000 and you didn't invest, you will feel like you lost that money. (I feel this way now, from not investing previously - and it kills me. Happiness -25 maybe.)

The only logical thing to do, at this point, is pick the column that results in the highest happiness.

It turns out that for those of us who believe there's a reasonable likelihood (25% or greater) that bitcoins will be very high ($1 million or higher) over its lifetime, the logical thing to do is actually to put the vast majority of our savings into bitcoin. Nearly all of it, in fact.

<comment><USER6> Holy hell, this is some crazy advice.

If you have a sizable savings that you have been building for 5 or more years then the vast majority of your savings shouldn't be invested in any single asset.

<comment><USER5> It's only optimizing for happiness, based on expected outcomes. The only thing that might be crazy are the numeric expectations.

<comment><USER7> > It's only optimizing for happiness, based on expected outcomes. The only > thing that might be crazy are the numeric expectations

The craziness is doing it _with one asset_ and trying to maximize happiness based on assumptions about that asset and not _with all possible alternative assets_ and trying to maximize _overall_ happiness.

Well, one part of the craziness.

Really, what you should be doing is considering (1) overall returns of competing investments, (2) overall risk of competing investments, and (3) the degree to which those risks are independent, and (4) your own sensitivity to risk, and then combine assets and allocate investment funds among them so as to, achieve the maximum expected return possible with enough diversification to acheive a risk profile you are willing to accept.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I agree. The difference is no other asset class that a non-accredited investor can put their money in has even remotely close to the same growth possibility as Bitcoin. IRAs, 401ks, stock indexes, and other asset classes don't do much other than protect you from inflation. You can pick specific funds or companies, but their value is more or less correctly priced and you're just gambling if you try to pick and choose, because you don't have inside knowledge.

Bitcoin (cryptocurrency) is different, because it hasn't been priced yet by investors who truly understand the technology or its implications. It's like the stock market for web companies in 1995. As an analogy, we're maybe in 1996 or 1997.

<comment><USER8> It's like that yes except that you don't know whether bitcoins are like Amazon or Pets.com. Investing in anything as volatile as bitcoins is straight up gambling

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> SecondMarket's BitcoinTrust appears to still be limited to accredited investors, though.

Wealth tests ought to be just as illegal as other forms of discrimination.

<comment><USER10> It's a test that's defined by law [1], ostensibly to protect the non-wealthy from being scammed easily. [2] AFAIK, the intent is to prevent scammers from directly selling highly risky investments to the average Joe without explaining to them the complete depths of the risk.

[1] [http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm](http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm)

[2] [http://www.institutionalinvestorsalpha.com/Article/3214072/S...](http://www.institutionalinvestorsalpha.com/Article/3214072/SEC- Commissioner-Walter-Says-Accredited-Investor-Standards-are-Too-Low.html)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, well, it also fucks over an intelligent but average-income Joe from being allowed to invest in deals that have as high of a return.

For instance, I know right now that I'd like to invest a chunk of cash into several VR companies. I can't, though, because I'm not accredited. I have to wait for their IPOs, which will happen _way after_ everyone already finds out how much it's all worth.

<comment><USER6> The good of accredited investor laws far outweigh the bad. People who don't have a lot of money are much more likely to not have good money management skills than people who are able to hold on to lots of money for long time periods.

Without accredited investor laws you would just pour tons and tons of dumb money into the system and the volume of scams would go way up.

This is not to say there are not rich people being conned, but when that happens it often does not bankrupt them because they are less likely to go all in on a single asset. Something people with poor money management skills want to do all the time.

<comment><USER9> True scams aren't much slowed by accredited investor laws. Scammers just move into the areas - gambling, real estate, amateur high-frequency-trading, under- the-table offerings - that escape SEC control. And people with poor money- management skills can already put _all_ their money into legal things that go to zero - like lottery tickets or leveraged real-estate or Enron or pre- reorganization GM.

And, 'dumb money' mainly gets smart by trial-and-error, and observing the lessons of peers. Locking all non-millionaires out of private investing prevents that process from even starting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> for the non-Americans: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_retirement_account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_retirement_account)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I almost thought this was about some cult trying to finance armed Irish groups using Bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> It was an unfortunate choice of acronym in the legislation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like most mainstream coverage about bitcoin is in the context of an investment instead of a currency.

I wonder if this is hurtful in the long run -- thinking about bitcoin as something to stock away for retirement rather than a useful tool in transactions. Great for prices in the short term I guess.

<comment><USER15> All currencies are also investments. Investments that have additional properties that make them useful as a medium for exchange. Like divisibility, portability, etc... Btc is so volatile that it probably is, for many, better as an investment for the time being. Once there's less risk and more confidence, we could see that change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Now for the crash ... (the retirement accounts are usually the last ones holding the bag)

<comment><USER17> yeahhhhhhhh... first thing i thought when i saw this: "this is dark"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am super-pro bitcoin supporter, but somehow I have a horrible feeling about this...

<comment><USER19> Why?

The more mainstream investors come on, the more people will have a stake in BitCoin, the less single individuals can influence or manipulate the price, the more points of failure there are, the more stable it will be.

I have a fidelity IRA with risk spread across very risk-averse mutual funds with dependable year after year growth. For me, this will just be one more thing I can add to my already fairly stable IRA, shielded from taxes, which is great...

<comment><USER20> >> the less single individuals can influence or manipulate the price

972 people control half of all bitcoins, right now.

What makes you think things will get better?

source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the- bi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the- bitcoins-2013-12)

<comment><USER21> I'd say that's on par or better than most corporations...

<comment><USER22> So? Corporations aren't pitching their stock as a currency. A currency isn't something that's meant to be hoarded by a few people. That causes deflation and deflationary currencies are poisonous to the economies because they discourage spending.

How many people do you think are spending their coins vs how many are holding them hoping they will be worth more?

<comment><USER23> At least more people are buying coins, and more and more merchants are accepting bitcoins. This is going to be a very long and gradual process to critical mass where it then becomes a viable currency. Right now it's a speculative investment. Perhaps that is a viable route towards becoming a currency, who knows. This is Darwinian and no one can predict what will happen and no one can know how it "should" happen. All we know right now is "something is happening" and you're either on board or you're on the sidelines watching.

In my opinion the word "currency" is about as stupid as that thing in your pocket people still keep calling a "phone". It's best approximated legacy words we have to express ideas about something which it doesn't entirely fit. More interesting, for me, is a comment I read on HN a few days back where someone said "I could be carrying a million dollars on this thumb drive and no one would even know.", a distributed ledger, the script language in the bitcoin protocol, etc. these things transcend the word "currency" as we ordinarily use it.

<comment><USER21> I like your phone analogy, it rings true

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I could not find XBTFUND symbol (or any other search with the term "bitcoin") when I went to Fidelity.com

Anyone know the symbol?

</comment><comment><USER24> In fairness this isn't directly storing bitcoins in a fidelity wallet, there is now an EFTish fund that is bitcoin-backed accessible to fidelity customers.

</comment><comment><USER25> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the end of Bitcoin? It was created to keep us independent from Wall Street and governments and now when Big Money is interested in (profiting from) it, it's Game Over.

<comment><USER26> But at least it would have served its purpose of redistributing some wealth from Wall Street into the pockets of first adopters and programmers. ;-)

<comment><USER25> True, but those who will join late will be the big losers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a great idea to offload the high prices to the last mile. Now there just need to be a major push on news about Bitcoin and it be a perfect slaughterhouse.

</comment><comment><USER28> I see all these ways to spend the mythical BitCoins, zero ways fro me to create some.

Is there any feasible way to get any BTC when I only have my home couple of machines (none of which are GPU giants)?

<comment><USER29> It isn't what you mean, but you can get some by buying them.

Mining bitcoin without special purpose hardware is pointless. Your best bet would be to predict whatever copycat was going to get popular and have mined some of it before that happened (but this isn't a simple prediction to get right...). Then you can probably trade those for bitcoin.

<comment><USER30> At this point there's almost 200 "the new thing" alt coins. Everybody wants to be in on "the new thing", which makes them all just pump and dump economies. It's a futile idea.

<comment><USER29> I was sort of trying to not make it sound like a good idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with south.by domain (think sxsw.com) - <AUTHOR>

I have the domain http://south.by.  "South by" is commonly used to refer to the South By Southwest music and film festival.  Any ideas of what I should do with this domain? <comment><USER2> Sell classifieds that promote events and appearances related to SXSW. Distribute submitted ads to other outlets that take event information for free locally and beyond. You provide a one stop shop for speakers, companies, musicians, etc. who want to get information out about their appearances and events in a cost effective and convenient way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any use that plays off, and thus introduces a potential for confusion with, official SXSW sites risks running afoul of trademark law. The bottom of every sxsw.com page reads:

 _"SXSW" and "South By Southwest" are registered trademarks of SXSW Inc. Any unauthorized use of these names, or variations of these names, is a violation of state, federal and international trademark laws._

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. So where does this leave me?</comment></comment>


Do you know this guy? Great Ad for IE Haters :) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lD9FAOPBiDk <comment><USER2> So, after decades of near-monopoly power, ignoring standards, breaking compatibility, "embrace-and-extend", dirty tricks and worse, now that they're eating their just desserts, their response is to attack the developers who suffered under their mess?

Pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure that the message really has sunk in. The way to a good reputation is to be good and exceed people's expectations. Not complain that the world isn't a good judge.</comment>


Lead Honestly – One-on-one questions to actively engage employees - shay-howe https://leadhonestly.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This seems really similar to 15Five[1]. What is the main difference between the two of them?

[1] [https://www.15five.com](https://www.15five.com)

<comment> shay-howe Thanks for the question!

The most immediate difference is that Lead Honestly communicates and works directly with a manager, and by extension their employees, where 15Five works with all parties. As a result Lead Honestly is able to be applied however a manager wishes, and is offered at a much lower price point.</comment></comment>


Google Code Search team says Goodbye - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/group/google-code-search/browse_thread/thread/fa2e2908c47df068?pli=1

<comment><USER2> It's worth pointing out that although the Google code search service is going away, RE2, the regular expression engine built for code search by Russ Cox, is open source (<http://code.google.com/p/re2/>). RE2 is also the basis for Go's regexp package (<http://weekly.golang.org/pkg/regexp/>).

See <http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html> for the original writeup from Russ.

<comment><USER3> What does rsc have to say to jwz about using regexes to match a language?

<comment><USER4> What's the problem using regexps for _searching_ stuff? It's even quite common for lexing, it just gets ugly if try to _parse_ stuff with it (brace matching etc.).

(And IIRC, the quote originated from a piece of code where jwz actually _did_ use regexps quite a lot, if just to get enough performance out of elisp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to see the note about ChromiumOS/Android...

"There is something of a silver lining. googlecode.com will take over search for their projects, and also take over hosting the Chromium search page. (If ChromiumOS or Android are important to you, reach out to whatever contacts you have at Google _now_ and let them know!)There is something of a silver lining. googlecode.com will take over search for their projects, and also take over hosting the Chromium search page. (If ChromiumOS or Android are important to you, reach out to whatever contacts you have at Google _now_ and let them know!)"

<comment><USER6> Does anyone know the reason for referencing Android and ChromiumOS in such a context? Surely they are not implying that Google's considering shutting those projects down. Are there perhaps some ChromiumOS/Android specific search systems?

edit: I assume they are referring to this [http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#uX1GffpyOZk/core/ja...](http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#uX1GffpyOZk/core/java/android/)

<comment><USER7> [http://codesearch.google.com/codesearch#&exact_package=c...](http://codesearch.google.com/codesearch#&exact_package=chromium) is a specific instance of codesearch for Chrome code. It even cross-references code to its users/implementations, something that it doesn't do for other code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google Code Search is the only search engine that indexes GitHub repositories. I find that almost all open source projects are in GitHub in one way or another, and GH doesn't let you search the actual code

I use it, and I know other people do, to find software exploits. For eg. here is a search to find open source software that trusts the X-Forwarded-For HTTP request header:

[http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%22X_FORWARDE...](http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%22X_FORWARDED_FOR%22&type=cs)

[http://koders.com/default.aspx?s=%22X_FORWARDED_FOR%22&s...](http://koders.com/default.aspx?s=%22X_FORWARDED_FOR%22&search.x=0&search.y=0&la=*&li=*&scope=)

I hope GitHub implement their own code search now

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was really happy to see an honest reaction from the team in a public way. I do think that in the long run Page's streamlining of Google's products is a good thing for the company, but I do hate to see something I used go away.

<comment><USER9> Likewise, I thought code-search was invaluable. I used it often while coding.

The plus side is that the team could reflect honestly (and in public). At some companies, commenting publicly would be a career limiting move.

<comment><USER10> And you really think it isn't here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This really surprises me. Code Search is an engineering-centric tool. I'd think Google would want to keep it just for their own internal code base. What are the Chromium folks going to use now?

</comment><comment><USER12> _netcraft confirms it ..._

I can't help but feel that this is part of a bigger reaction which itself will slowly kill the company as Google loses its way.

Was a public reason ever given besides "streamlining" ? If Google's business is getting eyeballs, you'd think an already built service would be a no- brainer to keep in maintenance mode. I can't imagine it used so many resources as to make it a net-negative, but perhaps I'm wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think streamlining was ever even public ally mentioned. It just became know that's Jobs said that to Page. More to te point, they weren't /getting/ enough eyeballs. Their revenue is more or less through ads, and since the main listed reason was financial...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pathetic google.

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

My arse.

With source code becoming increasingly available and important, and already in a structured format, this goes completely against the above statement.

</comment><comment><USER14> koders.com has most of the features of google code search, minus the regexp searching.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but with less relevant results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are these people being fired? Or reassigned into different roles? The email makes it seem like they're being let go...

</comment><comment><USER17> Code _search_ is going away.

<comment><AUTHOR> My mistake - typo. Fixed the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That is the second big search task I switched to duckduckgo..</comment>