Swastikas and context - <AUTHOR> http://www.stepto.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=635

<comment><USER3> To be fair, Swastika is considered very auspicious by Hindus.

Here in India, you'll see Swastikas everywhere. Till I grew up and read about Nazis, I never even knew that there was anything negative about the symbol. It's just a symmetric symbol and I don't see any reason for blocking that symbol.

The author might not agree with the political views of the Nazis but that is frankly not a reason to ban a symbol. To use the author's words, no one in the educated world would consider the Swastika as a purely Nazi symbol. Then, why block it for people who have other sentiments attached?

PS: Personally, I don't have any affinity to the swastika or any other symbol. My point is that its just a symmetric shape. Some people have positive feelings, some have negative, others have none at all. As a service provider, your duty is to cater to consumers without letting your personal preference mix.

<comment><USER4> When I was a kid, I came up with a swastika design all by myself. At maybe 6 or 7 years of age. I knew nothing about WW2, and had had no exposure to it in any form.

I carved it on a block of wood because I liked the shape of it. My father saw it and sat me down and told me that it was a symbol that had come to represent an awful lot of Bad Shit(TM).

It is a symbol that you simply can't disassociate from the context it is known for. In India, that context may be different. In the western world, it is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "no educated human on the planet looks at the swastika symbol on a video game service in the year we make contact and says oh, that symbol has nothing at all in any way to do with global genocide of an entire race and, even if it did, one should totally and reasonably ignore that because it's a symbol that was stolen or coop-ted from religions."

Really? no educated human? Well I guess I am an exception or at least was until I came to the US - because you see, I am educated and likely more highly educated than the author.

The author, most likely never having stepped outside the US, has no idea of the diversity of world sensitivities and cultures.

Does the author, for example, know of the Khmer Rouge symbol? I am educated and I didn't until I googled it.. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/79176.stm>

So stop using the word "planet" for the west .

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know, the article seemed so badly reasoned from my perspective - <USER2> very narrow Western view. In my country (and in my religion) the Swastika is seen everywhere and it is no way used in relation to the Nazis at all. Ironically, the fact that it is such a hated symbol, I learned from the Internet. Maybe he's being reasonable because the target audience is indeed Western. Hmm. But from my seat, I find this really lame.

<comment><USER7> He really should have put the TL;DR at the top. He could have worded the entire piece as "You may think our policy is capricious and arbitrary but the internet is filled with a lot of jerks. We hope to be consistent in our rulings; you'll just have to deal with it, as we don't want to spend our time dealing with lame issues. And this is a lame issue."

<comment><USER8> What _is_ the point of putting the tl;dr at the bottom, or the middle, or anywhere but _the very top_?

<comment><USER7> I assume to get people to read the piece. TL;DR at the top is kind of like an Executive Summary, and if I saw something labeled an Executive Summary at the top, or even looked like one, I'd skip the whole thing.

I think the key is to make the entire piece short enough but not too long so that it's quick to read and the TL;DR can be used as a good way to describe the entire piece in other contexts.

<comment><USER8> _"TL;DR can be used as a good way to describe the entire piece in other contexts."_

Absolutely. Perhaps we just shouldn't be using tl;dr within a piece. There's other words for short forms: abstract, summary, conclusion.

Signed, your friendly tl;dr nazi

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but I think tl;dr has a certain, _not necessarily all_ negative, connotation. Labeling it as "abstract", "summary" or even "conclusion" maybe would lessen the chances of it being quoted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So if the Nazis had instead used the Holy Cross as their symbol, everyone (in the west) would be OK with banning it from churches and all forms of public display?

<comment><USER10> I don't think so. Context matters in this case, too. The swastika was a unique symbol in the west, the Nazis had it completely for themselves. If they had used a cross they would be just another of the many, many organizations in the west using a cross as their symbol. (Christians in general, KKK, Red Cross, …) They would never be able to claim complete ownership of the symbol. They wouldn't be able to define or redefine the symbol, they would just add another entry in the dictionary under "Cross".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found it hypocritical coming from an industry that very often relies on the entertainment values of random acts of violence.

"Look, in this game you can shoot people on the face as long as you don't wear any swastikas or call people 'fags' becaus then _that_ would be wrong."

<comment><USER12> Different people are offended by different things, there's nothing hypocritical about not being offend by game violence while being offended by a swastika.

Some people are offended by nudity, gambling, pigs, swearing etc. There's no rule saying that if your not offended by one thing you can't be offended by anything. It's simply an arbitrary personal choice.

<comment><USER13> _Different people are offended by different things_

Certainly true, but this makes the whole exercise futile. How can one try to prevent their platform from becoming a medium for offensive speech, when every viewer can potentially be offended by different, orthogonal, thresholds?

<comment><USER12> They make an arbitrary judgement call about what is acceptable to the majority of their user-base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lets look at this guys arguments closely, shall we.

>It's not political correctness, it's fundamental respect.

It is narrow mindedness. And when you say its respect for some, it is disrespect for others ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#Hinduism> ). So your context is too narrow. In your high seat of judging other people, your views are shallow.

>If you think the swastika symbol should be re-evaluated by societies all over the Earth, I think that's great.

Good, you agree. But it seems you don't give a shit if it is.

>Your Xbox LIVE profile or in game logo, which doesn't have the context to explain your goal, is probably not the right place to do that.

Care to explain why? No. And what is the purpose of the LIVE profile or in game logo? And what if the Swastika actually has entirely different meaning in other places? Oh, places like these: <http://www.xbox.com/en-IN/live>

>And by the way, that doesn't just go for the Swastika, it applies to many other symbols as well that my team does indeed take action on when we see it.

Bother to list some? No. And how do you judge what to act upon? Is there an objective criterion? Or is the subjective criterion explained or listed somewhere?

>Context.

Is unexplained, subjective, narrow minded, dogmatic, force-fed

>Yes we can have the discussion in other venues about the double meaning of various terms, something my team does everyday.

Ah you want to show that you are considerate and well reasoned person. But that belies your shallow views and blind beliefs.

>But for many topics, its kind of a no-brainer.

And this shows me your sheeple traits. No-brain-uh

> _Context_

 _Whatever_

</comment><comment> Be-The-Water There are many theories on this, its pretty well know that the swastika pre- dates Hitler by thousands of years. But some people think that he chose it because of something called the "Aryan Invasion" of India, of which some believe that one of the original ancient religious books now adopted by Hindus was written by the Aryans. There is evidence of the symbol not just in ancient Indian civilizations, but in ancient European as well and is thought to be carried through to India. But no one knows for sure, and no one knows exactly why Nazi/Hitler chose it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Its an avatar for a war game series originally themed on WWII

Now sure, sometimes you can have an angular black swastika in a white circle on a red background in an entirely innocent context, even in Europe in the mid 20th century [http://www.askaboutireland.ie/aai- files/assets/libraries/dub...](http://www.askaboutireland.ie/aai- files/assets/libraries/dublin-city-public-libraries/reading- room/transport/dartry-laundry-van-in-swastika-livery.jpg)

But in a Western wargame? Sure, I'm sure most people wanting swastika avatars are kids trying to be controversial rather than active neo-Nazis promoting an ideology of hate, but I'd be reasonably confident none of them are doing it because it's an auspicious symbol in Hinduism.

Irrespective of whether permitting people to use Nazi symbols actually offends anyone playing a game where the objective is to shoot people, I'm not convinced there's a legitimate freedom-of-speech argument to be made about the avatars a private company chooses to bar from their services. I think censoring a few show-offs is probably an acceptable price to pay for the freedom to operate their services in Germany and it's legal intolerance of Nazi references. Perhaps the counterculture kids can pick hammer-and-sickles or Che Guevara instead....

</comment><comment><USER16> First Amendment doesn't carry any weight on private territory. Business owners can boot rowdy loiterers. pg can ban people from here. I can squash trolls on my servers, and XBL can enforce arbitrary rules at will. You can have your freedom of expression, but you cannot graffiti it onto the side of my car.

</comment><comment><USER13> _It's not political correctness, it's fundamental respect._

I think that's the battle cry of all those who enforce PC behavior.

 _UH OH! OUT COMES THE INTERNET PUNDITS! <g> ... Most of them are just contrarians. They would never dare to wear a swastika openly, but they love to argue about how the world has "misunderstood" this symbol._

The way I read this is as a criticism of people who do not hold a particular belief, but are defending the rights of others who do hold it. This seems completely contrary to the ideal attitude of "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

<comment><USER17> What right are you talking about here? There is no right to use a privately owned service in a way that scares off paying customers, much like you don't have the right to spray paint a swastika on your neighbor's house.

The right to free speech means that the government can't punish you for your speech. It doesn't make it illegal for someone to do otherwise legal things (such as banning an xbox live account) in retaliation for your speech.

I don't understand why so many people view the first amendment as a guarantee that one's self expression will never have negative consequences.

<comment><USER13> _There is no right to use a privately owned service in a way that scares off paying customers, much like you don't have the right to spray paint a swastika on your neighbor's house._

This is perfectly correct, and I never claimed otherwise.

As far as I can see, this part of the discussion was purely abstract, about whether the negative associations of the swastika so overwhelm other uses as to render the latter irrelevant.

Indeed, the whole discussion would be irrelevant given your context. That is, in a conversation about how a property owner chooses to allow their property to be used, the only relevant point, legally and morally, is "this is how I choose to allow my property to be used". There need be no further explanation.

Since the whole thing is dilatory in that context, the only meaningful interpretation is as an abstract discussion of why one might want to make such a distinction. In such a discussion, the idea of tolerating the thoughts of others -- not just those who might claim offense at seeing such speech, but also those who would like to profess their beliefs -- certainly has a place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am amused by his attempt to correct his info on the history but continuous to be belligerent. Note the symbol in question was the most pervasive religious symbol ever before it was adopted by a political party. If you beleve the cross was adapted from it then all the more respect. Of you remove one religious symbol than ban them all. I dot want to waste my time with this kind of thing but don't make it into am popularity contest. This should be about the game not ego.

PS thismis ome of the first web sites in months I could not read on my web pad due to bugs. What do you guys think this reveled?

<comment><USER7> It's unfortunate that by hiding the symbol because it might offend and increase support issues (the latter of these I actually find to be a legit reason), it doesn't help strip the symbol of its offensive connotation to westerners. It ends up further retarding progress in reducing ignorance.

If the Nazis used a big capital N as their logo, no one would consider the letter N to be offensive. The main reason it has such strong Nazi association is because that symbol is used in few other contexts in western culture, it's relatively rare (which may be a strong reason why it was chosen by the Nazis, it had little modern western cultural baggage, so they could define it). In contrast, one of the major western religion symbols is the t-shaped cross.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> People who get offended by geometric shapes have way too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER20> Are there shapes that are non-geometric?

<comment><USER19> clouds :/</comment></comment></comment>


Should we break up the big tech companies? - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/04/should-we-break-up-the-big-tech-companies.html <comment><USER2> Big banking cartels should be broken up long before big tech is. There's a question of why only american tech companies are targeted for alleged anti- trust violations while chinese groups like huawei get a free pass.</comment>


Ask HN: What to make of UI/UX designers with bad resumes? - <AUTHOR> Recently I've been interviewing UI/UX designers, and there have been some poorly done resumes. Some examples:
- poor alignment between sections
- changing of verb tense within a role description
- difficult to find portfolio URLs
I've asked them about it, and the general vibe I get is that they apply their design sensibilities to digital things, and it never occurs to them to do likewise to their resume.
It seems possible to be an excellent designer but just sort of brick (because of domain specificity perhaps) on the resume, but it also shows some lack of attention to detail.
So if someone has a fantastic portfolio but a horrible resume, how do you treat that? <comment><USER2> If you only need them to perform online UI/UX and they are great at that then you should ignore it. If you need them to be a bit more versatile and help out in other areas then it might be a concern. Your best bet is to just get them to critique their own resume in the interview. You want an answer that indicates they could make it awesome if they needed to do so. If they cannot come up with anything then that is a bad sign.</comment>


Popular Twitter extension for Chrome generates $1.5M in adware revenue - <AUTHOR> http://levels.io/chrome-extensions-adware/

<comment><USER2> Extension clearly states that it serves ads to pay for itself, though: _This extension displays some optional ads. If you do not wish to support us, you are welcome to disable ads in the settings._</comment>


Ask HN: How do prolific programmers go about their daily lives? - <AUTHOR> When I read the interwebz, I see other devs pumping out code to open source projects like food-to-code machines. They manage open source projects, be on top of the latest trends and even drive the hype causing these other developers to follow suit. Part of me wants to become like one of these prolific developers. I want to learn a lot of things, do a lot of things.
However, in contrast, I find myself out of energy after work that I just drop dead in bed only to wake up the next day. People advise me to do recreational stuff instead of writing more code on the weekends. Even my boss advises against writing code even when deadlines are just right around the corner. Forcing myself a few times, I felt like I was inches away from becoming part of the zombie horde.
How do these prolific developers spend their time? How do they work, do open source while staying healthy and awesome, and not become zombies at the same time? <comment><USER3> Honestly until I met my wife, I spent the majority of my time at home building open source projects I knew would save me time later at work, and probably more time overall because the code will be less specialized to the project. This was almost every single night after work.

My wife came along and showed me though that there is more to life than programming and I have to thank her for that. She's a wonderful gruf woman who changed my life. I still code at night on occasion, but not very often. I've got better things to do. I really believe I am happier for it.

All that said, are you entirely sure programming is what you want to do the rest of your life? After a long day of coding I need to be ripped away from its siren song or I'd simply never stop, and I know a lot of developers that feel the same. The job takes a lot from you, imho, and it sounds like you may not enjoy it enough for it to be worth its cost.

<comment><USER4> This is how I feel as well. I used to put more time into open-source and just code in general, now it's more of a means to an end for me, with the odd "passion" project. Life is short, don't waste it all working, even if it's what you enjoy, there are many other things to enjoy and experience. I refuse to work with companies now that put over 8-10 hours a day in, it's just too much, and fosters a competitive environment.

As far as being known, just do what you enjoy. If you enjoy it you'll produce quality work, and if you produce quality work then the rest falls into place. Play your cards right, get yourself into a position at some startup (or your own startup) doing what you're interested in.

I think it helps to be vocal as well, blog a lot, speak at conferences a lot, and so on. I'm not really this kind of person but I've seen others who get really popular from being "thought leaders", possibly more so than for any code.

<comment><USER4> Also, I would say, even if you think coding is fun or enjoy it, ask yourself if that's what you want to be remembered for, or if you had a year to live would you be happy with having blown it all away on software. I'd bet the answer is likely no. It makes me sad when people in the community pass away and it seems that everyone is just talking about their work, there's so much more to a person (and life) than that.

<comment><USER5> Substitute "coding" with "painting" or "philosophy" and suddenly it becomes OK to be remembered solely for your masterpieces.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I disagree with the sentiment of the gp. I wouldn't mind being remembered for my code at all.

> if you had a year to live would you be happy with having blown it all away > on software.

yes, honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm on my computer, essentially, every waking hour. I've been this way since I was a boy. I have two passions in life: programming and playing the drums. If I'm not drumming, I'm programming and vice versa. This is what I enjoy and thus I contribute to many OSS projects, manage an Apache project, consult to two startups and have a full time job.

I do all these things because it's what I'm driven to do. I would go crazy without it. There's no shame in not being like me. Do what you enjoy.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Often people try to guilt me into not be behind my computer so much because 'there is so much more'. I know there is much more but I don't enjoy that as much as coding. And that has been the case for the past 32 years. From the moment I wrote my first lines of code behind my father his luggable (1) I knew this was what I wanted to do and I never got bored of it. Do what you enjoy indeed.

(1) [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Co...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Cordata_PPC-400-25-200.jpg/390px- Cordata_PPC-400-25-200.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for asking this. I have always wondered the same and I look forward to the answers.

I am not as prolific as many of the people you are probably thinking of but I am slightly above average. Here are a few things that WORKED FOR ME:

\- Learn & use GTD - life changing. I use omnifocus but you can do it with pen & paper

\- Automate as much as you can - checkout keyboard maestro and many other tools

\- Use your calendar efficiently - block time for reading, playing, OSS or whatever

\- wake up early

\- excercise (i don't do too much but the days I do, I feel great)

\- keyboard shortcuts for everything

\- look for productivity tips for whatever tools you are using.

\- turn off facebook and distracting material

\- monitor your time - I use rescue time

\- outsource as much as you can. I use fancyhands.com to handle things like calling the phone company, cable company, making appointments and so on. It saved me tons of hours of BS tasks

\- I have had some success with the pomodora technique as well, give it a shot.

\- Don't work more than 8 hours a day

\- Work from home as much as you can

\- don't burn out

\- for side projects, blogging, oss or whatever it is you want to do, i find it better to do 1 or 2 hours a day than try to crank 8 hours on sunday.

\- spend time with friends and family - it's amazing how your productivit improves when you are refreshed

\- take a power nap or naps

\- sleep well

I am married with infant twins so I try to be as efficient as possible with the limited time I have infront of the computer. 1 hour of highly focused work yields more output than 4 hours of distracted, half-ass work.

forgive the self promotion but I think it is relevant. I put together a free ebook about mac productivity tips - might not be as helpful for techies like you but you might at least learn a trick or 2 or find an app that you never heard off - www.bestmactips.com

<comment><USER10> What's GDT?

<comment><USER11> "Getting Things Done" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that prolific devs are the ones who joined a particular community early and were able to ride the wave of success as that particular community grew. They often don't have a day job - Either they have enough savings that they dont need to work or they struggle on a daily basis to make ends meet... Or they are fortunate enough that their employer allows them to work on OSS during office hours.

Being a prolific developer doesn't have as much to do with talent as people might think - Developers become well known by blogging, speaking at multiple conferences or just being in the right place at the right time (whilst making lots of open source contributions).

Also, famous developers tend to own/maintain many (often several hundreds) of different open source projects instead of focusing their energy on just one project. There are rare exceptions like Solomon Hykes of Docker - But if you just made one popular open source project, then that's usually not enough to be known in the community.

Also, where you live makes a difference. Your odds are much better if you live in Silicon Valley. I know a developer who created/maintains about 5 projects each with 2000+ GitHub stars and he is still not well known because he doesn't benefit from network effects like devs who are living in the US.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe you could make some life-style changes to improve your overall energy level and/or cure your tiredness. How do you eat? Do you eat right before you go to bed? Do you wake up with an alarm clock? Do you eat a lot of greasy, processed foods? Soda? Do you exercise?

Other than that, maybe you could try pulling back the number of hours you're at work. I've felt myself getting stuck in that cycle of work, eat, sleep in the past, but I am currently pretty happy with my routine.

If you want to make some life changes, I'd recommend starting small. Pick one thing to improve this week (don't eat less than 2 hours before going to bed). Then next week try adding another thing. Before you know it, you'll be doing these healthier things without even thinking about it.

<comment> bad-joke Here is my go-to motivator for getting in at least 30 minutes of exercise per day:

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

It takes a few months for the flashy effects to kick in but you get a grab bag of other goodies in the meantime. I know some people who schedule morning time because they feel energized during the day, and another who does it after work to unwind.

Me? I just like having an excuse to take hot showers at lunchtime :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure if he comes here, but Sindre Sorhus[1] is quite prolific. The answer, though, is not satisfactory: He doesn't work. He moved to Thailand and lives off savings.

Here's the answer you are looking for: [https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama/issues/167](https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama/issues/167) and you can search more related questions in the issues.

[1] [https://github.com/sindresorhus](https://github.com/sindresorhus)

<comment><USER15> I'm Sindre. I actually spent more time on open source when I did work. Some people cook or bicycle as a hobby. I code. I'm totally addicted to making things on the computer. I used to spend work lunches coding on open source projects. I lived in a remote place (Lillehammer, Norway) with few people around and not much happening, so I had a lot of free time after work. It definitely is tough working up energy to code after doing it all day at work, but it's different. Open source coding is the most exciting thing I've ever done. I'm so glad I accidentally got into doing open source. It changed my life.

<comment><USER16> Hi Sindre. You have me blocked on GitHub and I'm not sure why. As far as I'm aware I've never interacted with you directly. I tried to submit a bug fix to one of your projects, but I wasn't allowed to even fork it. I also tried emailing you but I got no response.

I hope that if I said something offensive in some other context that gave you cause to block me, you'll give me another chance.

-andrewrk [https://github.com/andrewrk/](https://github.com/andrewrk/)

<comment><USER15> Just looked at your GitHub profile and you're not blocked. Couldn't find any email from you either. Don't see why I would block you. Can't remember us interacting before.

<comment><USER16> Well, that's good news. I found the email and forwarded it to you again for your reference, but it sounds like whatever happened is fixed. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> After reading all the comments I have a few questions. How long have you been programming and what are you running from? Prolific programmers are running from something. Loneliness, low self-esteem, etc. while programming you don't think about life. GTD sounds like a miserable existance to me. I've heard/read countless articles on how to become a better programmer while reading the same amount of articles explaining burnout. How many CEOs practice being a CEO when they get home from work. How many mechanics are being a mechanic for fun when they get home? Programming is a job. Every time I hear learn a new language a year I puke a little in my mouth. How many of you remember your code 6 months down the road. Please don't push being a workaholic on the OP. The OP is normal and all the people trying to convince him/her otherwise are dillusuonal.

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe relevant to watch this video for a first hand report of burnout from a coding rockstar: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os)

From personal experience think that programming pretty much crashes and destroys your personal life when you really, really want to go above the rest.

       Everything changes, except you and your computer.

That's how I feel anyways. Don't sleep much and pass every waking hour on and off solving some coding problem.

I remember when there was no computers. Existed more beer, fun and happiness. But at the same time didn't felt as happy as getting something epic solved.

Maybe one day it looks as it is all worth. Maybe. Enjoy your life OP, you only get one.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love programming, really and since i was 6 and now i'm 38. I work as a freelance developer and i love it. My job is passion and then a job. But i know life is not just this so i won't give my life to computer programming: 8 full hours (really full ;) ) a day are enough to be a talented developer, work and create something really important in your job.

But life is not job or software development and you shouldn't sacrifice it to computer programming even if it is a passion and you love doing it.

One day you will leave this world: will you regret you should have worked more or will you regret you didn't live your life?

</comment><comment><USER20> Sometimes, I get the same urges as well. To contribute to as many open source project as I can; to learn the a new language and be proficient in it; to attend conferences to talk to other like minded folks.

However, I came down to the realisation of several things very quickly.

1) Something in my brain causes me to grasp new concepts quite slowly, no matter how interested I am in the subject. So it takes me longer to work through things.

2) I also enjoy my family life, so it comes down to searching for time after the family has gone to sleep or before they wakeup to do some tech stuff. Kids are still a bit young to do tech stuff together.

3) There are only 24 hours in a day and I wont get any more days after I dead. I want to allocate some of the hours away from tech and experience humanities.

Sorry, I am sorry that this does not really answer your question, but I think that this side of the coin is important as well.

My advice is to find a job that you really, really enjoy doing. Once you have reached there, give it all you have got during the working hours. Your social life will thank you for it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been coding since we considered 8 bits a luxury and I'm still at it (I'm 47 now). I do it because I enjoy it and because I'm pretty good at it, plus it affords a decent lifestyle.

There are a couple of important points I've learned along the way that might help you:

1) Some people can code productively 24/7, but those are very few and far between. For starters, they have the skill to concentrate hard for a long time and work in an environment where that is feasible. It's not feasible if the next cubicle over has a sales person in it who spends ten hours a day on the phone. Second, most of them tend to do it in bursts as it's extremely hard and draining to sustain that level of concentration and effort for hours and days on end. What you see is often the output from the bursts, but you don't see that they're then spending a fair amount of time doing different things so they can recharge their brains.

2) It's easier to do this when you're young and pull a couple of all nighters a week. This makes you a hero, especially in places that thrive on hero-based development, but you have to realize you're burning the candle at both ends. As you age and build up experience, you tend to be more productive simply because of your experience, but you're also not necessarily that willing and suited to pulling 16 hour days for extended periods of time.

3) Most importantly, your brain is a muscle. Exercising it improves its function much like exercising your body improves its function, but it also needs rest. If you look at the way top athletes train, they push themselves hard but they also allow for sufficient rest periods. It's the combination of exercise and rest that leads to the improvement. Take one or the other away and you either overextend yourself (and injure yourself) or you don't grow as much.

Yes, I read about programming and play with languages during my off time, but I try to satisfy my need to build things (which is what initially drew me into software) by working on physical things instead. Things like building/restoring a car or motorcycle, gardening, working on the honey-do list etc. Oddly enough they're not too dissimilar from programming as you still end up solving problems.

TL;DR - find a way to switch off, be it through meditation or whatever else works for you. Get enough rest and exercise the other parts of your body. Learn to recognize the signs of burning out and stop the journey before you get there.

</comment><comment><USER22> I do not have advice on how to manage your time so you can be prolifically productive, but I do think you've touched upon motivation being one of the main factors for deciding to continue on projects after work, projects that may even become your work. But discipline is the hardest yet simplest piece: you may not always be motivated, by discipline / consistency ensures exposure, ensures you apply yourself to your project(s) very frequently.

I suggest you read _Coders at Work_ if you haven't already. It is a good compilation of interviews with living legends of computer science and famous software projects, and the interviews give insight into how each approaches his/her life. You might find some of it inspirational and insightful.

[http://www.codersatwork.com/](http://www.codersatwork.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> If you don't feel compelled to code outside of work, it's probably because you don't love what you are working on enough. I find that programming itself is not enough for me to want to work constantly--I have to legitimately love what I'm building.

<comment><USER24> > it's probably because you don't love what you are working on enough.

This is worded, negatively, but I think the positive formulation is more meaningful: If you aren't coding outside of work, it's probably because you love doing something else more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've automated large chunks of my life.

I have a JIRA for everything I do with customized workflows, and among many other projects I built this:

[http://hnalert.tk](http://hnalert.tk)

to mail me when subjects interesting to me come up on HN.

I recommend reading 'Getting Things Done' and working at your own pace. Focus on the things you're motivated to do, not what you think you should be doing - that's what a paid job is for!

<comment><USER26> I'm getting an internal server error when I try to set up an alert on [http://hnalert.tk](http://hnalert.tk)

<comment><USER25> Fixed; apologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One trick you can do is get a part time job or a consulting job where you can work fewer than 40 hours per week. Then you'll have time where you're not exhausted to work on open source stuff.

Exercising is for sure a net gain in time. It makes you feel healthier, happier about yourself, and helps you think more clearly.

Here's me: [https://github.com/andrewrk](https://github.com/andrewrk)

</comment><comment><USER27> We don't spend our time on HN

<comment><USER28> I found that I can skim HN without getting sucked in hours. Reddit however I have had to block in /etc/hosts .

<comment><USER29> largely the same (also have twitter and facebook blocked in hosts file, if I want to check them I use my phone, it's less convenient so I end up spending less time on either).

I think it's because HN only has "one" frontpage which changes relatively slowly rather than each subreddit I track, some of which change very rapidly.

Also half the stuff on the frontpage isn't relevant or isn't something I'm interested in so I tend not to disappear down the rabbit hole so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> John Carmack brought along a workstation on his honeymoon so that he could keep coding. I can't find the exact quote, but I recall him saying that he spent so many years coding every day that he was worried he might suffer from withdrawl if he had a week away.

I think the lesson here is that some people put their craft at the center of their life and make it the focus of every single day.

<comment><USER31> From the perspective of someone with the opposite problem to burnout - <USER2> been stuck on where to get started for literally months - this is a really inspirational anecdote.

I definitely want to hear more about how the marriage situation worked out in this case though. I expect I could learn a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> To be a prolific programmer requires time, effort and dedication. You can still be a prolific programmer if you are married and performing your family duties but the level of time and effort to do it would be less. It would require you to work smarter and have a solid-foundation that is built and have learned the fundamentals, before you are trying to dedicate your time to being prolific while slicing your time between work, family, personal, etc.

It is best for the single and young because it requires you to immerse yourself to learning, to solve problems and face difficult failures, it requires routine, and dedicated energy to learn, requires energy to go to the workshops/meet-ups/groups and be updated when new learning opportunity arrives. It requires spontaneity to still be interested in other things in order for you to refresh your energy.

</comment><comment><USER33> A) Some of them do that until their body gives out and they suffer burn out.

B) Look to your health. If you want to be more productive without "paying for it" later, you fundamentally need to increase your ability to produce. Eat right, exercise, practice good sleep hygiene, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> The importance of habits appears essential in order to maximize the available coding time. The modular food idea in one of the replies is indeed a great one that I do apply. Getting enough quality sleep is a must, especially when learning new things. Add at least an hour. Taking 20 min naps works wonders. If course, nothing beats putting in the hours, provided the above is taken care of. One useful thing I do is walk the dog daily without any music/podcast. Looks like it puts my brain in a kind of freewheel that helps me a lot in figuring out solutions. I do that when it is dark outside, stars, moon, night noises seem to have an impact. An additional noon walk doesn't hurt. Being part of an open source ([http://pharo.org](http://pharo.org)) community makes me aim for higher than I would on my own. These people are very inspiring and deliver awesome things. So I want do to it too as I see that it is feasible. I am married and having a partner who understands the peculiarities of the line of work helps. We have a huge wall calendar to schedule it all.

</comment><comment><USER35> I find that for me, coding and writing docs during the work day is enough. I used to spend my evenings coding on my ideas also, but now, married, my wife is not technical so we do a lot of other things. I actually really enjoy a lot of the things we do. I am less stressed and I can give a solid days work the next day.

On weekends, I experiment with making music, reading, playing in the snow, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> Three tips come to mind:

1\. Get enough sleep. You've only written three paragraphs and there are already a lot of suggestions that you need more ("I don't feel as productive as others", "I just drop dead in bed" when well-rested people usually take 15-30 to fall asleep, "I felt like I was inches away from becoming part of the zombie horde.")

Coding pretty intensively uses your short-term memory: "I need to take this query which I prepared above and execute it on those variables, wait, this key from the database gets renamed to that on the front-end, okay, test it... dictionary does not have the right key on line 189? What's over there? Oh, I forgot to do this critical preprocessing step, jump back to my code, 3 lines before, add the function call, test again -- what the crap is that, switch back to editor, aha, missed a semicolon here...". Each of those actions requires you to not be overwhelmed by the number of details you have to remember, whether it's where your tool for testing is located, or what the preprocessing function was called, or what have you.

When you're even a little sleep-deprived, your short-term memory decreases dramatically -- if most normal humans can only juggle 7 balls (7 big details or crucial tasks occupying their memory), missing a few hours of sleep brings it down to 4 or 3. So of course everything looks two times bigger.

Sleep deprivation also causes you to lean on substances like sugar and caffeine, and those substances tend to cause procrastination "I'll browse Reddit until this kicks in" \-- until their effects wear off and leave you right back where you started with a bunch of nothing done. You can mitigate this somewhat by giving yourself a short task to do before the caffeine kicks in, even if it's an asinine one like "write down what you want to do today." Speaking of the which...

2\. Write shit down, set alarms, otherwise use harebrained tools.

Those 7 balls that you can juggle need to incorporate just about everything that is happening in both personal and professional life -- not just code. If those things are in the mix, then you're not as effective. Just like how you should set an alarm for "time to start brushing my teeth and getting ready to go to bed" so that you can get enough sleep, you can set an alarm for "at this time I need to stop everything and call the couch company to send someone to fix the couch at home." Write those things down somewhere, set an alarm to look at that list and do the things on it.

3\. Kill context-switches. Either lie your ass off about them or say "no" up front or be honest -- whatever is necessary to kill them.

Take your hands, open them in front of you, spread out your fingers, interleave them. That is 8 work tasks spread out over some distance L. Maybe it's 8 hours of the day working on two projects, Right and Left. One gets concluded at 4pm, the other at 5pm. We'll assume you got started at 8am and ignore an hour for lunch.

Now separate your hands and collapse your fingers. Put your right hand above your left hand, touching. Still 8 fingers in a row, but now you notice that your Left project is released at 12pm before lunch, while your Right project is still released at 5pm after. You just improved your average time-to- completion by 2 hours with no stress, and no improvement in efficiency: you just rushed one project out, then focused on the other.

Now interleave your fingers again and remember how each of those switches between projects feels. You've got 7 in there, yes? Each one doesn't feel good, does it? Because you've got to stop juggling one set of balls, put it all down, and slowly start juggling this other set of balls. Each context switch eats up mental energy. (It also eats up time -- if you need 15 minutes to really get up to speed, then the 7 context switches eat up almost 2 extra hours of your day. So there _is_ an undisclosed efficiency gain here.)

If management forces on you to be working on the two things at once with constant status updates, strongly consider lying your butt off. (Of course, first show your boss the trick with the fingers, it usually convinces them.) Because if management is asking you to do worse work slower so that they can be polite to two of their separate clients, then management has failed. They're supposed to buffer you from all of that crap.

If you can't lie and you can't convince your management, try a firm "no." Just say "I'm on this high-stakes Project Left right now, I can't take on Project Right right now, maybe when Project Left is over I can. Fortunately I think Project Left will be done by end-of-day today, possibly before, so if you really can't find someone else, I may be able to start Project Right today." A "no" always goes better with a nice timetable that suggests that the task will still get accomplished in a timely manner.

Similarly, ignore those "trends" when you're coding. Trends are another project with another context switch. Don't interleave it with anything else.

</comment><comment><USER37> As others have been saying, the "prolific programmers" have a passion to program that doesn't get satisfied by coding from just 9 to 5. Personally I tend to have waves of intense programming around the clock followed by a cooling down period with either part of the cycle lasting days to weeks. Sorry for the shameless self plug but you should start small and try making a "One Hour Side Project" [http://kolodny.github.io/blog/blog/2015/03/03/the-one- hour-s...](http://kolodny.github.io/blog/blog/2015/03/03/the-one-hour-side- project/)

<comment><USER38> Your comment glosses over the fact that many open source developers do this for a living. It's not some side project that they just do after work. Sure, they could put extra hours in, but open source is not just a hobby

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't know about that. It sounds like the OP is specifically asking about people who contribute to OSS as "just a hobby"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> When it comes to making headway on important projects, there is no substitute for putting in the hours. It requires extended periods of uninterrupted time. Unfortunately, you only have a few hours a day available to you in which your mind is firing on all cylinders.

The answer, then, is to find a way to work on these projects in the course of your job. That's what I do, and my best guess is that that's what the people you've heard of do as well.

Find some project that your employer really, really needs, get permission to open source it, and spend your most productive waking hours on it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm a relatively successful coder and entrepreneur. My one tip for you that can change your productivity by an order of magnitude:

Stop wasting your time reading/posting/liking on sites like HN, Facebook, etc.

<comment><USER41> How do you keep up with what's going on in the community?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> You either have to grind it or love it. If you love it, then you don't feel the grind.

Exercise helps like everyone is saying.

Recently I read a book called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Great tips in there.

</comment><comment><USER43> \- Work only on what you want, when you want to (as a rule, exceptions have to be made) \- No TV, no (general) news \- No kids, no girlfriend \- Socialize mostly around projects (not neccesarily dayjob related) There are some tradeoffs to the above, one could say. Staying healthy is also a challenge.

But don't worry about 'being one of those people', just try to do what like/love. And if you don't know what that is yet, find out!

<comment><USER43> But there are some simple tricks without much drawbacks. One of them is to write/publicize everything you do. Don't consider something done until you've released and documented it.

</comment></comment><comment> antonio-R I would recommend reading the 4-hour workweek book from tim ferris. [http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape- Anywhere/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape- Anywhere/dp/0307465357)

Great advice for time management, works well for IT positions.

</comment><comment><USER44> I measure my coding time in hours I'm truly concentrated and that's about four hours a day. My main focus is to use these hours as effective as possible and fill the rest with easy tasks. This way my mind stays fresh every day.

And exercise, best way to clear your head!

</comment><comment><USER45> I am at university and in most part of the year I can't spend how much time I would like to programming. My mind is too tired after several hours of studying, especially during final sessions. Am I the only one?

</comment><comment><USER46> "like food-to-code machines"

Great phrase - I'll be using that !

<comment><USER47> A related quote you might also enjoy: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems" \- Paul Erdos</comment></comment>


The world's oldest axe shows the cut and thrust of academia - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-axe-shows-the-cut-and-thrust-of-academia-59228 <comment><USER2> The story in the news:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/10/oldest- known...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/10/oldest-known-axe- discovered-in-australia-claim-researchers)

[http://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2016/05/11/world_s- ol...](http://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2016/05/11/world_s-oldest-axe- fragment-found-in-australia.html)</comment>


The Next Financial Calamity Is Coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/12/business/the-next-recession-financial-crisis.html <comment><USER2> While I agree we're all taking on a lot of debt with these low interest rates (which I believe was the idea), I have to love the twist ending with "hackers" and cybercrime causing the next financial crisis, even more than geopolitical risk.

That seems a bit insane to me. I'm trying to generate a list of things that could cause a financial crisis, like hacking the markets or maybe some trading bots, and making them do crazy things to tank the market? It doesn't seem like a big data dump/exposure would cause a financial panic to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of this can be blamed on interest rates being artificially low due to political meddling. Exactly the same as Gordon Brown's insane policy prior to 2008.

<comment><USER4> i dont know why you were down voted. low interest rates definitely is playing a role in the amount of money sloshing around looking for risky investments. i think the fed should have started raising interest rates a few years earlier than they did. and as for right now, it seems they're continuing their ramp up.</comment></comment>


Australian regulator says Google misled users over data privacy issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-australia/australian-regulator-says-google-misled-users-over-data-privacy-issues-idUSKCN24R0VQ <comment><USER2> prior discussion on this - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23961881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23961881)</comment>


Show HN: Noact – React-like Virtual DOM library in 70 lines of TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ms-jpq/noact <comment><USER2> The idea of React is good - declarative, stateful, reusable components, etc. While the bloat of React and it's toolchain (and npm plugins) has become a mess. When you have 2^100 different plugin combos to do something, you have 2^100 imperfect solutions and no experts in any of them, rather than one elegant and simple standard that can be optimized.

This repo is great proof that React is over engineered. Vanilla JS has WebComponents[1] and Templates, and a vDOM is easy to support (it existed long before React) and the DOM was the original place to store state in custom properties that you could manipulate internally with 'this'. What's missing is the ecosystem of Reusable WebComponents (primatives) based around this simple approach.

That's why this is so great to see. As more of a purist, I would try to make this a Vanilla JS lib instead of TS and remove one more build step. But the idea of 60 lines of code that use primatives (thus making this hyper extendable) is perfect.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components)

<comment><USER3> These are react's dependencies:

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/react](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react)

This repo is proof of nothing and I'm tired of reading those knee-jerk takes. You can't say "react's toolchain is a mess" and "prove" it with a repo that has zero toolchain, no JSX, etc. It's a bit saying "vlc is so bloated!" to someone showcasing "a video player in 30 lines of QML" with no play/pause button.

Not to detract from the rest of your post, the core concept and primitives are great. Would you like them served up in a NPM micro-dependency, maybe? You'll just … add JSX, babel etc separately, will be missing half of react's features like hooks etc and will still have as many dev dependencies as before.

<comment><USER4> This is not the whole story though react is kinda useless without its tools. A fair argument would be if create-react-app had so little dependencies. But i agree with you react itself is not bloated but in general the whole webtooling is.

<comment><USER3> If react is useless without its tools then what is this submission for in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's weird how in the JS community rewrites of react are common in the CLJS community using React as a runtime is more common:

      - https://reagent-project.github.io/
      - https://github.com/day8/re-frame
      - https://github.com/tonsky/rum

And my favourite \- [https://github.com/fulcrologic/fulcro](https://github.com/fulcrologic/fulcro)

Hosting your work on top of another ecosystem, such that you can still use the underlying ecosystem, gives you a lot of leverage out the gate

</comment><comment><USER6> Totally a tangent, but I found the explosions typing gif super distracting.

</comment><comment><USER7> The wheels on the bus go round and round

To the author: check out Mercury (2014), Hyperapp (2017), Choo (2018)

<comment><USER8> Inferno... Preact... the list goes on and on.

<comment><USER9> htm and vhtml from @developit.

[https://github.com/developit/htm](https://github.com/developit/htm)

[https://github.com/developit/vhtml](https://github.com/developit/vhtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're already using typescript, why not also .tsx? It's easy to map to your own components.

</comment><comment><USER11> But does this actually have "reactivity"? If I was to update variable, would that state propagate to all its dependants in the DOM automatically?

</comment><comment><USER12> What in the JS ecosystem promotes such posts and up-votes them to first page? These 50line / 100x faster micro frameworks 'never' reach 1% in core functionality and aren't usable beyond building 10 lines of demo app.

I don't see similar posts for Java/.Net/Go ecosystem. Spring in 500 lines or 100x faster ASP.net!!

<comment><USER13> It's because there's a very big difference between the state of the JavaScript ecosystem and the ecosystem for nearly any other language you can mention. And for a very large percentage of the development community worldwide, the JavaScript ecosystem is not something that anyone enjoys. That's why it gets upvoted.</comment></comment>


The Ultimate Guide to Writing and Publishing with Markdown - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ghost.org/markdown/ <comment><USER2> A nice summary, thank you. Yet given Markdown's history (Aaron Swartz and John Gruber) any "Ultimate Guide" should perhaps include some sort of open- source/linux subsection under the Editors and Apps list, (with currently over 80 Debian packages directly related to Markdown management)

</comment><comment><USER3> Remember LaTeX? It's back... in web form!</comment>


Searchcode: A source code search engine - <AUTHOR> http://searchcode.com/ <comment><USER2> Neat project, thanks for sharing!

We've been working on another code search engine for open-source: [https://sourcegraph.com/](https://sourcegraph.com/). Our approach is a little different -- we parse and index things at a programming language level. This has the benefit of being able to list usage examples of a function or jump to a definition (i.e., smart IDE-like behavior). Obviously, one drawback is having to implement language-specific support; right now Sourcegraph just supports Python, Javascript (node.js) and Go.

Would love to hear people's feedback on either approach!

For other examples of code search, check out: Ohloh: [http://www.ohloh.net/](http://www.ohloh.net/), Krugle: [http://opensearch.krugle.org/](http://opensearch.krugle.org/), and Google code search (or what remains of it) [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I have been watching sourcegraph.com for a while. As you say you do much deeper and expensive parsing of the code, which is not really feasable at the moment for searchcode since it has 90 languages. Its also a constraint as I don't have the hardware to support this (searchcode is very lean).

My goal was to provide codesearch for sources other than Github as there is so much code out there to find. Github does an excellent job indexing and I am certain that Bitbucket will be following with their own implementation soon.

I too would love to know what people prefer, a deeper analysis of the code with IDE support or more bredth. I can see both being useful.

<comment><USER3> Maybe a merge?

<comment><USER4> Don't --force it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you compare these two search results:

[https://searchcode.com/?q=MongoDBObject+find+lang%3AScala](https://searchcode.com/?q=MongoDBObject+find+lang%3AScala)

[https://github.com/search?q=MongoDBObject+find+language%3Asc...](https://github.com/search?q=MongoDBObject+find+language%3Ascala&type=Code&ref=searchresults)

I find Github much, much more digestible, and to the point than search code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, thats my fault. Whats happening under the hood is searchcode is trying to match "MongoDBObject find" exactly, where as Github is going for a looser but phrase heavy search.

Its something I am going to change based on feedback as clearly what I am doing is not what people are expecting. I will however make it an option, so you can chose exact match (current) or loose.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, would be great to have searchcode up to par with Github's search.

I would pay special attention to the yellow highlights. It's only confusing if the technique is overused.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am modifying it now to be a little more like github's.

I had planned on removing the highlights too, its going to be modified to just affect the portion where the match occurred. Its mostly there as a hangover from when I was not actually highlighting the actual match and just the line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Handy! However, this seems to do fuzzy searches by default, and I don't see an obvious way to disable that.

I tried searching for "xcb_connect", and got a pile of results for "xcb_connection_t". However, unlike with other search engines, I can't quote the term to force an exact match, because it'll search for the quotes literally (which I'd otherwise appreciate when trying to find a string).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. That's actually a very good point. I need to have a think on how to allow forcing exact matches, perhaps an advanced option which does this for you. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER6> As a first pass, a "match whole words" checkbox should suffice. Eventually you might want a syntax that allows more flexibility, whether full regexes or something more scalable, but "match whole words" would solve a large fraction of the problem. (You might even want to make that the default, and have a checkbox for "match partial words" instead; for code search, I'd bet that most of the time you _want_ the whole word matches.)

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds reasonable. I will probably go with that. Added to the queue and thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a very interesting project.

I've been working on another tool, [http://crossclj.info](http://crossclj.info) focused on cross-referencing a large parte of the open-source ecosystem for Clojure and ClojureScript (some 3600+ projects).

You can browse both the source code (jumping to definitions across projects) and the auto-generated docs of the whole codebase.

<comment><USER8> Very Neat! Fast search of src code is also a personal itch of mine - I also work on site/webapp at let you search source code with mouse click.

[http://www.srcmap.org/s/sl.htm/p=about#c=ABOUT](http://www.srcmap.org/s/sl.htm/p=about#c=ABOUT)

It cross reference of any strings in any text files inside a project.

I indexed the linux, bsd kernel, android AOSP (JB), openstack, golang, raspberrypi_userland, elasticsearch, nodejs and few other projects with it on that site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use sourcegraph occasionally and mostly rely on Gihub search. I wish the search has all those advanced refinement options that grep & Sublime Text search has. Some examples would be to use regex, search a word within a scope of lines, search within search results etc. Additionally, it's very useful to be able to sort the search results by stars/forks. Sometimes I just want to see how popular projects have implemented a certain feature. A keyword based search isn't enough for that.

I guess these features are very expensive & slow to implement but it would be super useful if it can be achieved. Source code search is for geeks so it is probably fair to say that a _truly_ advanced & complex interface won't turn away users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like what I want to achieve with searchcode. I am working on most of what you have listed there. If you want to email me with your ideas on how these features should work I would be more then happy to add them. My email is in my bio and listed on searchcode

<comment><USER9> That sounds great. If I have something useful to contribute, I'll get in touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is nicely implemented, however like for most code search engine I'm wondering what is the exact use case? When I want to search for a function, I usually try Google and find sample codes on forums, GitHub or Stack Exchange sites along with detailed information and discussions about them. What additional feature would searchcode provide?

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally I use it quite a lot when looking for implementations. I also used code search before searchcode as well to do this, so it fits into my workflow.

However I also use DuckDuckGo, and a !code redirects to searchcode for this so there is that.

Possibly it depends on how you learn and use things. I find examples useful. For instance when looking at how to do things in Python's Fabric I would rather see some examples then read about how someone else doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sphinx and searchcode: [http://www.boyter.org/2014/06/sphinx- searchcode/](http://www.boyter.org/2014/06/sphinx-searchcode/) (by Ben E. Boyter, searchcode.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the search engines and discoverability. My own project - much, much smaller - is for embedding search into the Javadocs themselves (along with some SEO improvements, like iframes and better meta-info).

The search is driven by Apache Solr and can be seen at: [http://www.solr- start.com/javadoc/solr-lucene/index.html](http://www.solr- start.com/javadoc/solr-lucene/index.html) . I use custom doclet to generate the actual Javadoc, which is an interesting challenge all by itself.

</comment><comment><USER13> GWT is not on Google Code anymore (well we were, but it's old code). We're at gwt.googlesource.com.

I imagine you'll want android.googlesource.com and other googlesource.com repos.

Also, ranking is really important. My usual test is to search for java.lang.String and see what comes up. If the first result isn't the String class from some version of the Java SDK, something is wrong :-)

Also: CrossSiteIframeLinker finds the right file on the first page (though not at the top), but CrossSiteIframeLinker.java has no results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll update the details.

The reason you aren't seeing string from java is it actually be default goes for files using the string class, rather then the implementation. Its something I need to work on though as I agree it should pop near the top, or possibly appear in the documentation listing at the top.

As for CrossSiteIframeLinker, I don't index the filenames, although I am considering it for these sort of cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We'll. They don't break tokens on '_' which is a plus (trend searching for pthread_t), and they seem to prioritize definitions over declarations.

This could become a useful code search option.

I would request that relevancy should take into account provenance. Meaning a search for pthread_t would return pthread implementations over uses.

This obviously can't make use of traditional tfidf for scoring.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yes, all characters are acutally indexed, with some logic to split intelligently when required. It will always go for the most exact match first though.

I have started looking at ranking the main implementation over usage, but found the results were less useful generally. This may have just been me though, as I wanted to see usage rather then the implementation, since if I know that I will just go to the source.

Perhaps an option to request that the orginal source is given greater weight on an advanced search page would solve this.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps simply an info box which points to the implementation, set off from the usage results. No reason to give the results equal screen real-estate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know details on the API - what is the request quota? Will there be api-keys, or just anonymous users to the api?

I am interested how does it work with Github search - their API allows something like 5 unauthenticated req/min and 20 req/min if authenticated (at least the search API)?

Congrats to @boyter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi tsnkov,

There is no request quota at the moment, although if I discover any abuse I may end up rate limiting per IP address (which I really do not want to do as I don't currently track IP's). No API key is required either. Neither of these are likely to change.

I only ask for a link back to the site and that you don't spam it. I want to operate by the motto "Be excellent to each other".

If you want to pass a referrer in the GET request so I know who's using the API that would be nice, but not required.

searchcode has no integration with Github search at all. I am unlikely to add it either as I belive they do an excellent job, hence the link on the right hand side to be redirected to Github search.

Thanks! Hope you find a nice use for the API. If so, let me know as I am always happy to hear about usage.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. This is an awesome plan. I might be using the api through a desktop app, so eventual limit per IP would work far better than overall.

About the link back to the site - I don't see anything in the API results to link back to and just a link to the site will probably get a lot lower rate of clicking than a link with context to the search... Perhaps, it will be a nice idea to add a link_back_url (just url?) for every result, so people can navigate to "searchcode.com/codesearch/view/n"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to go nuts.

Ah that's a good point. I meant just link back to searchcode itself, but that make sense. Added for you. It should appear on new searches, and all once the cache falls off (don't want to flush it right now while its getting so much traffic).

<comment><USER15> Awesome. Thank you. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a code search engine wave a few years back which I thought was a decent idea but they apparently never gained much traction (Google Code Search, Krugle, Koders come to mind). One thing I don't recall seeing which is a good call are the real world examples.

</comment><comment><USER17> A similar (proof of concept) application: [http://bitshift.it/](http://bitshift.it/) Demo video: [https://vimeo.com/98697078](https://vimeo.com/98697078)

</comment><comment><USER18> I made a site that dedicated to Ruby developers. It's mostly about searching a RubyGem's source code. RegExp supported.

[http://rubycodesearch.com](http://rubycodesearch.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> Congratulations! Excellent usability. The user interface is pretty nice too. It would be nice being able to use it for a regular intranet search engine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually you can if you set your default search provider in your browser. All DDG bang searches are supported so its actually possible to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> just tried searching for a few obscure things I can find through Github and the site couldn't find anything. meh... not much of an index then

<comment><USER21> I tried searching for: eval($_GET

No results.

Same search on GitHub gives over 100 000 results for PHP. Doh.

[https://github.com/search?q=eval%28%24_GET&ref=searchresults...](https://github.com/search?q=eval%28%24_GET&ref=searchresults&type=Code)

<comment><AUTHOR> Howdy. Thats mostly because searchcode is trying to match exactly "eval($_GET" and currently has none in the index. Looking at GitHub it seems to come back with only 4 results which are exact and the rest as loose matches.

I am seeing a pattern that most people would prefer the loose match over exact to get back more results, but with the exact matches (if any) at the top.

I will take this onboard and see if I can improve things.

<comment><USER21> If you search for an exact match you still get almost 600 results, see:

[https://github.com/search?q=%22eval%28%24_GET%22&type=Code&r...](https://github.com/search?q=%22eval%28%24_GET%22&type=Code&ref=searchresults)

I would definitely expect the google pattern of doing exact match when in quotes. Throw in a regexp engine as well, because I tried using wildcards and that didn't do anything.

For example, if searching for vulnerabilities I would like to be able to do something like:

      eval(.*$_[(GET|POST)].*)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bit off-topic. But are there any open source projects like this that can be self-hosted, working on a largish local directory of projects?

<comment><USER11> It's called Desktop Search [1] or Enterprise Search [2].

If you want to create your own solution, the easiest way is using _Sphinx Search_ [3] (searchcode.com uses it too [4]) and a bit more advanced with Lucene [5] (and its related sub-projects) or Xapian [6].

If you want your personal _Google Code Search_ [7] with its powerful scalable Regex functionality, Russ Cox published the related code [8].

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

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

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_(search_engine)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_\(search_engine\))

[4] [http://www.boyter.org/2014/06/sphinx- searchcode/](http://www.boyter.org/2014/06/sphinx-searchcode/)

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

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

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

[8] [http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/](http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can do regex based searches of Debian here:

[http://codesearch.debian.net/](http://codesearch.debian.net/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Ty so much, I've be waiting for something like this since when they ruined koders.com!

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem at all.

I actually think the new koders (code.ohloh.net) is an improvement over the old coders in many ways, but wanted a leaner implementation.

Also while ohloh was working on the new version koders was becoming stale hence starting my own. Lastly I thougth that this sort of service should provide an API which ohloh sadly does not (hopefully this will change).

<comment><USER25> Ooooh, good point. I'm an engineer for Black Duck and in charge of Ohloh.net. We have an API for most everything available on Ohloh.net (Organizations, which is still in Beta, is an exception and we're going to fix that real soon).

We're working on an improved code search and I want to leverage this new infrastructure, which should start being available for our internal development in the next few weeks, to make code search a top-level citizen within Ohloh. For example, searching for key phrases within a project right from the Project page.

I'll add some stories to the back log to see what we can do to make the code search itself API accessible.

You mentioned "leaner implementation"; could you expand on that a bit? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good to me. An exposed API is a big boon, and the lack of one is one of the main reasons I started searchcode.

Sure, just email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and ill be happy to discuss. Mostly it comes down to not overcrowding the UI and running on minimal hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> grepcode.com seems to be good for Java/Android. I'm a little annoyed they have a generic domain for a language-specific search but oh well.

</comment><comment><USER27> Did you abandon your .de domain?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its still active, but just as a redirect.

Google does not like .de domains and moving over to .com gave a massive boost in search results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does this also sort gists?

<comment><AUTHOR> No it don't sorry. If you want to send me an email with some details on how to implement this I would be happy to though.</comment></comment>


Shutting down public FTP services - <AUTHOR> https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2017/msg00001.html <comment><USER2> The only reason I ever remember preferring FTP over HTTP in the 1990s was because FTP usually meant that I could resume large downloads if my connection dropped mid-download. That was a big deal when it took several hours to download something. That benefit largely disappeared for me as broadband got faster and the connections became more reliable.

<comment><USER3> Also disappeared when http 1.1 added range requests around 1999

<comment><USER4> FTP has been obsolete since 1999 thanks to ssh/sftp.

It should have died along with RSH, but people insisted on keeping it alive.

<comment><USER5> SSH/SFTP is mostly for authenticated access. The submission is explicitly talking about "public FTP servers" (i.e. anonymous access).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Echo the good riddance comment.

Psst... Someone tell CPanel Inc and all the millions of horrid cPanel shared hosting providers which still promotes this nonsense as the default way to manage files. It is somewhat sad when you meet a new young fresh developer where deployment = filezilla.

<comment><USER7> filezilla supports SFTP just fine (nothing to do with FTP)

<comment><USER8> It also comes with bundled malware, so be careful.

<comment><USER9> Not entirely true. Sourceforge bundles things with their installers.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8849950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8849950)

But you could always get a normal installer even then, and I think (don't quote me on that, I never really used SF) Sourceforge stopped doing that after their acquisition ?

<comment><USER10> Sourceforge stopped it, filezilla did not. And Filezilla explicitly defended the sourceforge practice when it was still in place. They're a very shady project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Public FTP servers were where I downloaded most of the software for my computers, back in the 90s. There's nothing really like it anymore - you can't have anonymous sftp.

But perhaps we don't care anymore. The web is gradually consuming all that came before it.

<comment><USER12> >There's nothing really like it anymore - you can't have anonymous sftp.

Strictly speaking there's nothing stopping someone from writing an anonymous sftp server that lets anyone log in as a 'guest' user or similar - it's just that nobody has (as far as I'm aware).

<comment><USER13> "Unauthenticated SSH" is basically what the git:// protocol is. I wonder if you could use git-daemon(1) to serve things other than git repos? Or you could just convert whatever you want to serve _into_ a git repo, I guess.

<comment><USER14> Please use IPFS instead.

<comment><USER13> IPFS requires a stateful thick client with a bunch of index data, no? Would it be _efficient_ to, say, build a Debian installer CD that goes out and downloads packages from an IPFS mirror? Because that's the kind of use-case anonymous FTP is for.

<comment><USER14> Many many years ago I was on the team that managed the compute cluster for the CMS detector at the LHC (Fermilab Tier-1).

When we would perform a rolling reinstall of the entire worker cluster (~5500 1U pizza box servers), we would use a custom installer that would utilize Bittorrent to retrieve the necessary RPMs (Scientific Linux) instead of HTTP; the more workers reinstalling at once, the faster each worker would reinstall (I hand wave away the complexities of job management for this discussion).

I'm not super familiar with IPFS (I've only played with it a bit to see if I could use it to backup the Internet Archive in a distributed manner), but I'm fairly confident based on my limited trials that yes, you could build a Debian installer CD to fetch the required packages from an IPFS mirror. No need to even have the file index locally. You simply need a known source of the file index to retrieve, and the ability to retrieve it securely.

<comment><USER15> And a day or two to wait for the installer to finish fetching packages...

<comment><USER14> Such pessimism! Bittorrent started with only a few nodes too. It is now a majority of internet traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> kernel.org is shutting down their FTP servers, too:

[https://www.kernel.org/shutting-down-ftp- services.html](https://www.kernel.org/shutting-down-ftp-services.html)

<comment><USER17> Almost the exact same wording was used in the deb announcement. And it's all true.

I'm a nostalgic kind of guy, but FTP is terrible through firewalls and nowadays, bittorrent or http are just as well.

<comment><USER18> What has changed in HTTP over the past 10, 20 years? Was there ever a clear benefit of using FTP instead of HTTP?

Just wondering why suddenly everyone is in agreement FTP should go away ..

<comment><USER19> FTP was older and had more widespread client support in the 90s, so you were more likely to have at least a basic client preinstalled. That's obviously moot by now since just about everything ships with a web browser and/or something like curl.

FTP has a standard way to list directories. Using HTTP that way would require you to either have a well-known index file or parse HTML looking for links which don't return text/html responses.

The downside is that FTP still has issues with firewalls – I had to troubleshoot that earlier this month, actually – and is another service to maintain if you are already running an HTTP server.

In the case of either single-file downloads or something like a Linux package manager, the URLs are well known so directory listings are irrelevant. HTTP has a number of good options for CDNs and caching, so if you care about performance or reliability that's a turn-key service.

In the cases where directory listings were more valuable, people usually wanted a richer UI than just a file listing, too, and there are tons of options for that in the web world.

<comment><USER20> FTP has a standard for way to request a directory listing but the format for that listing is not specified and impossible to parse reliably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks, Russ!

[https://research.swtch.com/glob](https://research.swtch.com/glob)

> but if you have an anonymous FTP server accepting glob patterns, there are > two more fundamental questions to ask: Do you really need to run an > anonymous FTP server anymore?

<comment><USER16> HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14184528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14184528)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good riddance to FTP. I've wasted enough time troubleshooting it in my career.

</comment><comment><USER23> In the old days we had Windows and wanted to install Netscape or download Linux we used anonymous ftp servers. Now Windows has a web browser installed that we can use to download anything we want.

Anonymous ftp servers are outdated now. Like Gopher was when web browsers teplaced them.

<comment><USER24> Gopher had a lot going for it over the early web. But its death knell was University of Minnesota wanting to charge a licensing fee for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's really nothing stopping FTP from working on CDN's and proxies. For public distribution Bit-torrent is far superior though. I still think SFTP/FTP/FTPS is the best way to upload files, is there any better free alternatives !?

</comment><comment><USER26> There are a fair number of businesses in old industries that "went digital" 10-20 years ago still have the same tech running, including FTP. I work with a company that requires uploading files via FTP into a co-mingled directory (everyone uses the same password). Company is a major player in my industry, too.

I would be curious if some government services were still running FTP, judging by the number of Y2K-era government websites I run into.

</comment><comment><USER27> But not offering [https://](https://) services, huh?

</comment><comment><USER28> yesterday, I have received a link to download some tutorial from china: [http://pan.baidu.com/s/1sl993lV](http://pan.baidu.com/s/1sl993lV). I have performed the download using firefox, but the connection is so bad, there are many failures. I have tried with curl that fails also. A real nightmare. All these problems would not exist if it was a simple ftp link: filezilla is perfectly optimized to work around shitty connections.

And today I learn that ftp is falling in oblivion. What a sad time.

<comment><USER29> Curl is perfectly capable of resuming a download over HTTP unless the server is doing something stupid. Blame Baidu if you like, but HTTP is not the problem here and there is no benefit to FTP.</comment></comment>


GenRL: PyTorch-First Reinforcement Learning Library - twm-as https://github.com/SforAiDl/genrl <comment> twm-as RL research is moving faster than ever before. In order to keep up with the growing trend and ensure that RL research remains reproducible, GenRL aims to aid faster paper reproduction and benchmarking by providing the following main features

PyTorch-first: Modular, Extensible and Idiomatic Python

Tutorials and Documentation: We have over 20 tutorials assuming no knowledge of RL concepts. Basic explanations of algorithms in Bandits, Contextual Bandits, RL, Deep RL, etc.

Unified Trainer and Logging class: code reusability and high-level UI

Ready-made algorithm implementations: ready-made implementations of popular RL algorithms.

Faster Benchmarking: automated hyperparameter tuning, environment implementations, etc.

We want to make RL a more accessible field and would love to hear feedback on how we are doing so far!</comment>


Seeing France's Wild Mountains Through a Clouded, Classic Windshield - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/travel/cevennes-france-drive.html <comment><USER2> I have a friend that has just left France to drive to Mongolia in a Renault 4L (Lovingly pronounce "Catrelle" in French) - loosely a "sister car" to the 2CV.

We spent a few weeks driving around the French and Spanish Pyrennees in it. I'm not at all a car person, but fell in love with. Its quirks and personality make it a pleasure to drive. The time you spend broken down is balanced with the people you meet who all have a story about this car.

Buzzing around the mountain trails and getting jealous looks from ferrari drivers are all part of the perks.

There's a huge passion behind these cars - they even hold annual rallies for pushing these cars way beyond their intended limits.

[https://www.4ltrophy.com/](https://www.4ltrophy.com/)

<comment><USER3> The only car I ever saw with a manual transmission where the shifter is a steering wheel stalk.

<comment><USER4> I learned to drive "three on the tree" in a 76 Ford Maverick.

<comment><USER3> <insert rant about Ford discontinuing sedans in the US including the manual shift-only Focus and Fiesta STs...>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Writer Edith Wharton (of "The age of innocence" fame) traveled across France by automobile in 1908. She wrote her experiences in "A Motor-Flight Through France" [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57347](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57347) which is a good read.

> The motor-car has restored the romance of travel.

> Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage > to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the > area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given > us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty which enlivened the way of > our posting grand-parents. Above all these recovered pleasures must be > ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways > and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past > time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of > railway embankments and the iron bulk of a huge station. Then the villages > that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train—the unseen > villages have been given back to us!

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like beautiful and great drive. One of things in my bucket list is to drive on Lofoten scenic route [1].

[1] [https://www.lifeinnorway.net/lofoten-road- trip/](https://www.lifeinnorway.net/lofoten-road-trip/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this is all I really want in life.

</comment><comment><USER8> Brings back memories! We had one quite a few years ago, and the recurring problem we had was that the ignition timing would drift (worn cam), so we always travelled with a packet of cigarette papers for setting the points gap. Of course, the _other_ problem was that the points box was directly behind the engine-cooling fan, which meant removing it before maintenance and running the engine without while tweaking the timing. Great "fun" :)

</comment><comment><USER9> First car i owned, bought it for 100 gulden in 1979 with over a 100k on the clock. Great fun.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ironic title considering there's not a single photo through the windshield. :]

</comment><comment><USER11> Romantic, unforgettable, and a great conversation starter, but from a practical point of view it's very worrying to travel on dangerous roads in an antique car with a long list of mechanical shortcomings.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great car, the French Honda Civic of its day. Turn a corner a bit too fast and the doors opened.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd likely choose the BMW, but sounds like great driving indeed!

</comment><comment><USER14> this car is the worst to drive... sounds like a hipster bad idea</comment>


Ask HN: Python open source projects i can contribute to - <AUTHOR>

I would like to boost my programming skills by contributing to an open source project in python. I can say I'm at an intermediate level of programming(wow, still loads to learn).Not a web developer but wouldn't mind contributing to parts that don't require a deeper knowledge of web dev. Thanks <comment><USER2> Come visit us at [https://github.com/saltstack/salt](https://github.com/saltstack/salt)! We love new contributors

</comment><comment><USER3> have a look at openhatch.org.</comment>


New Design Tool - <AUTHOR> http://tribaloid.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting to note:

>> Former Application Architect/Developer Relations for Adobe Fireworks Alan Musselman has been working on a new open source design tool for web designers and developers that will not be dis-continued.</comment>


Riot.js 3.0.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://riotjs.com/release-notes/#november-22-2016 <comment><USER2> This js framework deserve more love. I tried vue, react and others and I stay with Riot.js because it´s really easy to learn and you can have something working quickly.

Play with it [http://riotjs.com/play/](http://riotjs.com/play/)

Vue.js example in riot.js [http://txchen.github.io/feplay/riot_vue/#markdown](http://txchen.github.io/feplay/riot_vue/#markdown)

and a HN clone in riot.js [http://txchen.github.io/riot- hn/#news/1](http://txchen.github.io/riot-hn/#news/1)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Thanks for the links.

In the case of TodoMVC I count 186 SLOC for Riot, 192 for Vue, 235 for jQuery, 346 for Polymer, and 451 for React (all of which implement routing).

GitHub SLOC is a bit flawed but it's a good first-pass estimate of code complexity.[1]

This analysis is almost a year old but I don't think any of the implementations have changed. Which is concerning, actually.

[1] [http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/10669678292/size-is-the- bes...](http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/10669678292/size-is-the-best- predictor-of-code-quality)</comment></comment>


Facebook's Secret iPad App Exposed [Pictures] - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/25/facebook-ipad-app-pictures/

<comment><USER2> As an aside, this is the most ridiculous pageview-inflating image gallery I've ever seen on a tech-tabloid site. It's not even possible to advance from one image to the next, you have to always go back to the main article!

<comment><USER3> I was just going to comment on this. I was curious to see what the new Facebook campus looks like, and it was the same way. "For sure, this is just that writer doing her job wrong," but no, MG's article does the exact same thing. How can you do a complete redesign, in this day and age, and not provide a _usable_ image gallery?

<comment><USER4> Sadly, _usable_ is not their primary goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I am just not getting it, maybe I am in my sceptic mood or maybe I am getting sensationalist news fatigue.

It's an iPad app yes, so what? Where someone expecting that FB wouldn't do an iPad app? Why is it secret? Does it do anything remarkable?

It seems like this is news because it's FaceBook not because the app in itself is interesting.

<comment><USER6> I agree. It is not even that good a re-release of the iPhone app. I was hoping for something to keep them relevant with what google has done. This is nothing special or groundbreaking at all. I expect better from a company that has such resources both in financial as well as people.

<comment><USER7> Have you actually used it?

I am right now, and I couldn't disagree with you more.

<comment><USER5> Care to explain?

<comment><USER7> I would think it obvious: it actually _works_. The interface is thoughtfully laid out, navigation is leaps and bounds better than the iPhone application, and it's actually pleasant to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just tried it out now and it has almost everything that the website has, but in a better and more enjoyable package. Other than for business purposes (ads and managing pages) I see no reason to use the website anymore.

Here's how you get it:

1\. Jailbreak your iPad

2\. Install OpenSSH and Installous through Cydia

3\. Download <http://fileape.com/dl/avaCHTLpuYmtodJi>

4\. Connect through SSH or SFTP to the IP of your iPad with user root and pass "alpine"

5\. Transfer the .ipa you just downloaded to /var/mobile/Documents/Installous/Downloads

6\. Open Installous, click Downloads and then you should see your Facebook .ipa without an image. Click and Install.

<comment><USER9> Hmm...installing OpenSSH but leaving your root password as the default "alpine" is a security problem, downloading copied app files from the web is sketchy, and I also wouldn't trust adding the extra repository to get Installous _or_ installing Installous on my device.

Here's a simpler and safer process:

1) On your iPad 2 running iOS 4.3.3, or your iPad 1 running iOS 4.3 through 4.3.3: open up Safari and visit jailbreakme.com for a one-click jailbreak that also installs Cydia. You can learn more about this jailbreak at the iPhone Dev Team blog: [http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/7295551750/jailbreakme- times...](http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/7295551750/jailbreakme-times-3)

2) Open up Cydia, and on the right side of the Cydia for iPad homepage you'll see a link to FullForce, which is a free "tweak" by a reputable developer (<http://twitter.com/rpetrich>) who has updated it to enable the Facebook for iPad app. Install FullForce and configure it in your Settings app to apply to the Facebook for iPhone app. (I'm assuming you already have the Facebook app on your iPad. If not, you should get it from the App Store.) That's it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the screenshots, you can see the photo viewer displaying a scrubber view (row of thumbnails). This strongly suggests that this app is built using Jeff Verkoeyen's Nimbus framework. If you're building (or built) apps using Three20, it'll probably be good idea to follow the Nimbus framework on Github.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/25/facebook-ipad-app- pictures/...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/25/facebook-ipad-app- pictures/photo-gallery/)

[http://jverkoey.github.com/nimbus/interface_n_i_photo_scrubb...](http://jverkoey.github.com/nimbus/interface_n_i_photo_scrubber_view.html)

<https://github.com/jverkoey/nimbus>

<comment><USER11> There is a plist file called Three20 in the Applications folder for Facebook. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks to TechCrunch, Facebook no longer needs a marketing department.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe someday they will refresh their Android app. The existing one is an ugly trainwreck.

<comment><USER14> It's not even that. The app is buggy and doesn't even work well. The Messages, Events, and Chat are all horribly implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not exactly secret. Just disabled.</comment>


The Pentagon's Bottomless Money Pit - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/ <comment><USER2> Incredibly illuminating. I'm not an American, but anyone who decries government waste should be forced to read it.

Sure, money gets wasted on benefits programs and other government departments.

But - if the article is true - these are _dwarfed_ by the absolutely galactic amounts of money that seemingly disappear into the US military black hole. The amounts are staggering. Any discussion about government waste which does not include wasted defence spending is intellectually hypocritical.

Given how political it is, the problem won't be easily solved. But surely this is the type of challenge that has a technical solution (and no - a military- wide ERP does _not_ qualify). I guess there were some vaguely promising ideas around blockchain-based solutions; presumably these died on the vine for the same political reasons that shared ERP systems wouldn't work - the solution can't assume cooperation between branches/departments.

</comment><comment><USER3> A must read!

"In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries."

""What kind of an organization," Andy asks, "doesn't keep track of $20 billion in inventory?"

</comment><comment><USER4> On the one hand this is appalling. However, if I A. wanted to obscure the the size shape and scale of covert programs, and B. Had little faith in the ability to secure such a spralling inventory system for adversaries, this might be the solution</comment>