Words, like ghosts, can haunt you forever - <AUTHOR> https://rebeccapavlik.substack.com/p/words-like-ghosts-can-haunt-people <comment><USER2> It's not that every word you say will be memorable, it's that a random sampling of what you say will be remembered by different people and you cannot control (well cannot is a perhaps to strong of a word, but saying you can control it is probably wrong) when and for whom it is memorable.

You build a thick layer of good memories with a person, that random sampling will be better, but it's always possible some random bad memory will stick in someone's mind, and that's true no matter how careful you are. But being careful can help. So...

In a way the OP is right, but I think they push the point too far.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Keep in mind that it's not your place or your job to "police" family members > and it serves no purpose. Don't get caught up in this family game. It's > dysfunctional. Instead, just try being nice.

I don't agree. This is how you get families where grandma can spout the nastiest garbage on the planet to some other family member with no consequence.

I'm not going to initiate a bad exchange for no reason, but stepping in when someone is unfairly being targeted is absolutely required. I assure you, the targeted person will _NOT_ consider everybody staying silent as being "nice".

</comment><comment><USER4> GPT-3 ?</comment>


InfluxDB 1.1: 60% performance increase and new query functionality - <AUTHOR> https://www.influxdata.com/influxdb-1-1-released-with-up-to-60-performance-increase-and-new-query-functionality/ <comment><USER2> I wanted to try it, but the downloads page presents a popup asking for your name and email address, and you cannot dismiss it.

[https://www.influxdata.com/downloads/](https://www.influxdata.com/downloads/)

<comment><USER3> And what is wrong with it? Honestly curious.

<comment><USER2> I understand the tradeoff between them giving me free software and me giving them my contact information—the way they've done it is just so up front and in your face!

I'm pretty sure there is a web dev or user experience best practice about not spamming your users with "subscribe to us" and "like us on Facebook" dialogs immediately when they land on your page. And this one can't even be dismissed unless you subscribe!

<comment><USER4> This is what I usually use sites like [http://10minutemail.com](http://10minutemail.com) for.

<comment><USER5> Or in this specific case, just enter garbage in the form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Currently using internally for production level work. They need to spend serious time making it easier to diagnose issues when they happen.

The log is simply not verbose enough and when I hit issues with telegram, kapacitor and influxdb I have to open up a github issue having no idea what is causing the issue.

Still highly recommended they just need to spend time making it easier to identify common problems. It'll help reduce the number of github issues they have opened too.

</comment><comment><USER7> Performance usually varies greatly with your set up. I have not tried the 1.1 release but earlier relases suffered very badly when authentication was turned on and when data came out of order. Nobody cares about the ideal case, it's never encountered.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tried using in production, failed really badly performance-wise (granted, it wasn't a good fit - cardinality was high). Replaced with PostgreSQL and I'm seeing 2+ orders of magnitude improvement on c4.large vs r4.8xlarge before..

<comment><USER9> Sounds like you were using the wrong tool for the job. Influx is not for high cardinality data.

<comment><USER7> The problem is the definition of high cardinality, the Gorilla paper talks about 2B metrics at FB but the hardware sizing page for influx shows a scary graph which basically kills any series cardinality above a million

[https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.1/guides/hardware_si...](https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.1/guides/hardware_sizing/)

quite a difference!

<comment><USER10> InfluxData is a single server app with zero failover and zero sharding.

There is no "billion" metrics going in there. The architecture (or lack thereof) is not intended for that.

You can try vertical scaling (if you're not in the cloud), you'll squeeze more metrics until you overflow your network cards or your hard drives or your CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have too much data (around 2 years and 500k data points.

I was about to move to another database, because a query to old data or long ranges just consumed all my machine resources for some minutes. I can't use grafana because their reads crashes the server when someone want a different query.

After the 1.1 upgrade, it is really fixed. I can query anything without worries.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm looking forward to trying it out. I used it at home to build a live weather site for my backyard weather station: [https://mhkweather.com](https://mhkweather.com)

The performance went way down when I moved my DB from a ext4 SSD volume to a four-disk ZFS magnetic volume. I expected some slowdown but not as much as I saw. Looking forward to trying 1.1 to see if it improves things.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone verify the claims on their production setup? I'm always a bit weary of these announcements. It's easier to get big numbers like that on benchmarks than in real usage scenarios, has usually been my experience.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sweet. I had some 'getting oomkilled' problems with boundless queries back when I started using Influx for production early in the year, but it has been rock solid and performant since the later 0.1x releases.

> Support for regular expressions on field keys in the SELECT clause. For > example, SELECT /cpu_\d/ FROM cpu

Woohoo! Very nice for making Grafana dashboards.

> The admin UI (port 8083) is now officially deprecated and disabled in this > release

Ahh. I must be the only one using it, it gave kind of a good overview of all your collections. A bit of a pain to do from Grafana but oh well.

<comment><USER14> Before we actually remove the admin interface, we'll have a modern version of it in the now OSS Chronograf. Basically moving that functionality to there so we can iterate on the UI separately from the DB.

<comment><USER13> Cool. However, we're pretty settled on Grafana+InfluxDB and I'm not sure I have any real reason to deploy Chronograf. We'll see though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am wondering the choice of go as language to build a database.

I am a big fan of golang for __some __workload but the GC will kill performance in a database, wouldn 't?

I am not being a brat I am seriously wondering how much GC affect the overall performance.

<comment><USER4> > I am a big fan of golang for some workload but the GC will kill performance > in a database, wouldn't?

Cassandra and HSQLDB are written in Java for example which usually suffer from much larger GC collections/pauses (though you can read a book or two on the subject and tune it). So is Neo4j, a graph database. Or Datomic in Clojure (which runs on the JVM). Then there's Mnesia written in Erlang. A time series database, or a graph database, is quite different from a more general purpose database like Postgres/MySQL and means you need to consider different things.

GC isn't necessarily an issue for high throughput (read or write). A lot of it depends on how much pressure you're putting on the GC (this is true for any type of application). Being aware of how your chosen language's GC behaves paired with the (typical) usage/behaviour of your code is probably the more important thing to consider. Just because something is written in a language without a GC doesn't automatically make it performant either.

<comment><USER4> Oh, and about Go's (1.8) garbage collector: [https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/804355831080751104](https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/804355831080751104). I think it'll be alright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very good to hear that. Started to try influxdb as my tsdb for iot and looks very promising.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nice work by the InfluxDB team.</comment>


Widespread mask-wearing could prevent Covid-19 second waves, study shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-masks-study/widespread-mask-wearing-could-prevent-covid-19-second-waves-study-shows-idUSKBN23G37V <comment><USER2> Germany did the same study and came to same results. Those fabric masks are still only 3% - 10% effective, eg pretty useless against the main infections, 1. direct aerosol via the nose, 2. hand to eye, but even those little numbers sum up in the exponential growth scenario.

They help against flyby droplet infections, help a bit against the aerosol load, and they prevent touching your eyes a bit. Removing caughers and washing your hand is still much more effective though.

And btw. the "second wave" will come for certain in the fall, but it will be another uncertain mix of influenza viri. Vaccination is always a gamble, because you never know what will come. 2018 it didn't work out, with the same numbers or worldwide much higher numbers as 2020.

<comment><USER3> > fabric masks are still only 3% - 10% effective

Where did this number come from? It seems quite at odds with other sources.

<comment><USER4> also, most of the mask studies seem to be done in medical scenarios where the viral exposure is much higher and prolonged than what the general public faces. I suspect that, if a study could actually look at effectiveness in more common scenarios, the masks might look more effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2020...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2020.0376)

The paper itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unless people get tired of it too early. Which they will.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to actually read the paper to see if it is reasonable. Anybody have a link? Having said that (and keep in mind that I'm in favour of wearing masks and wear one myself when I go out in public), I think it's pretty clear (as indicated in the article) that masks _alone_ won't bring the R value below 1.

The article says, "He [Richard Stutt, who co-led the study] said the findings showed that if widespread mask use were _combined with social distancing and some lockdown measures_ , this could be 'an acceptable way of managing the pandemic and re-opening economic activity' long before the development and public availability of an effective vaccine against COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus." (emphasis mine)

Anecdotally, in Japan (where I live) there seems to be a much higher than 50% use rate and there is still need for lockdowns. However, as the article suggests, it appears that the severity and length of the lockdowns might be reduced.

The question I have, though, is if the sheer number of people with the disease in the US and UK may be an issue. In South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, the total number of active cases never really got above 10K -- so the chances of meeting someone with the disease is really quite small. Potentially (as seems to be the case in Japan) you can get away with just dealing with cluster cases and let the stragglers go -- as long as the masks are effective enough to keep transmission rates low in those situations. But if you have millions of people with the disease, many of them in large cities, I wonder if it will be as effective.

<comment><USER8> Masks alone are probably not enough. But they do seem to help when combined with other preventative measures.

My impression in the US is that people continue not to take this seriously, which causes us to be lax in the basic measures that could get this under control. Very frustrating.

On the positive side, looks like the R1 for most US states is below 1 - [https://rt.live/](https://rt.live/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What convenient timing to publish this now!

</comment><comment><USER10> CDC: Influenza and pneumonia deaths by influenza season and age United States 2008–2015: [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/influenza-and- pn...](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/influenza-and-pneumonia- deaths-2008-2015.pdf)

If I wear a mask, it's because I want to. Doing so "for others" is a direct route to supporting forced medical procedures. They can put one on if they want to.

Silent protest is free speech; clearly facial experssions are too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333873)

Did Reuters post a story/retraction on the sourceless HCQ paper? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222) If so, what metrics are available to the reader to gauge how prominently they posted each?

<comment><USER5> > forced medical procedure

This is silly. Wearing a cloth over your face is no more a forced medical procedure than wearing one over your genitals.

Now adults are going to discuss weather the costs of getting a high uptake of people in society wearing a cloth over their face are worth the benefit that accrues, if any. You may decide you've made your point and leave it at that.

<comment><USER10> The Hippocratic oath is meaningless unless the subject decides what constutites a medical procedure.</comment></comment></comment>


IOS enables 71% of Apple's profits. Platform products power 93% of gross margin - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/25/ios-enables-71-of-apple-profits-with-platform-products-make-up-93-of-gross-margin/ <comment><USER2> Great article. I actually think this could be a severe risk to Apple. The trend in any competitive market is for margins to converge towards 0. In particular, iOS is already facing competition from Android, and RIMM isn't exactly going to die without a fight either. Having so much of the company's margin wrapped up in one product would set off alarm bells for me. I don't care what their current stock valuation says.</comment>


Firefox OS QA Automation Lab - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/eOIeu

<comment><AUTHOR> I really wish there was a video showing all the phone screens rapidly moving around as they run through the test suite.</comment>


Show HN: A Zero Spam Mail System - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Viruthagiri/dombox-the-zero-spam-mail-system-2b08ff7432cd <comment><USER2> Is this related to dombox.com? They may not appreciate you muscling in on their business.

<comment><AUTHOR> No it's not. They just own the domain. They provide the regular mail service to businesses. Mine is a new invention.</comment></comment>


'It snuck up on us': Scientists stunned by asteroid that just missed Earth - <AUTHOR> https://beta.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537941)</comment>


Fighting the (credit card processing) System - <AUTHOR> http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2011/summer/fee-fighters.shtml# <comment><USER2> This is something I feel strongly about.

At my company, we have spent the better part of the past month fighting the credit card system, but not by encouraging merchants to use it as FeeFighters does. We built a new processing network from the ground up (<https://www.facecash.com>) that costs far less per transaction than the standard interchange--and then lobbyists for Western Union, American Express and others changed the law in California to make it virtually impossible to get a money transmission license without $2 million in funding for the California requirements alone. At least well-funded one payments startup shut down in April, several are now risking criminal prosecution by not complying with the law, and only one so far has been able to afford to apply for a license.

We can afford to apply, but because the DFI makes up the rules as it goes along, we are basically guaranteed not to get a license.

Consequently, I wrote this...

[http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Fifty-Days- Payments-...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Fifty-Days-Payments- Innovation-Will-Stop-In-Silicon-Valley)

...and this...

[http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Thirty-Days- Payments...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Thirty-Days-Payments- Innovation-Will-Stop-In-Silicon-Valley)

...and this...

[http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Why-Im-Furious-with- Sil...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Why-Im-Furious-with-Silicon- Valley)

...and this...

[http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/The-California-Law- That...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/The-California-Law-That-Should- Send-The-President-and-Fellows-of-Harvard-College-and-Every-Private- University-To)

I've been in touch with multiple California Assemblymen, the chief consultant to the California Banking and Finance Committee, the staff director of the California State Senate, two people at the U.S. Treasury, and one person at the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

They want to hear from you. If you're interested in voicing your opinion, send me an e-mail (aarong at thinkcomputer dot com) and I'll get you in touch.

Disruptive change requires actually disrupting a system. That's what we've been doing, but as long as it's illegal, the banks will be able to hold the public's money hostage. Given the state of the global economy that is not okay with me anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't it fitting that the comments on a post that's just about plugging the poster's own startup are all just about plugging the commenter's own startup.

<comment><USER4> In fact I deleted my reply now. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is great to see all the new payment processing start-ups sprouting all around. It's definitely time for someone to give paypal and authorize.net a run for their money.

One of my apps, <http://JungleBlaze.com>, tries to democratize selling downloads on the web and make it "as easy as sharing a link".

<comment><USER6> You don't need to turn to start-ups to give PayPal and Authorize.net a run for their money. Merchant e-Solutions is pretty good, and is a big established company, rather than a start-up. Good rates, easy to use API, they support the VISA and MC updater services, and you can use multiple business names on one merchant account (many places require separate merchant accounts for each name).

Edit: why was this down voted?</comment></comment>


Announcing Minecraft: Education Edition - <AUTHOR> http://education.minecraft.net/announce011916/ <comment><USER2> Make no mistake: This will not run on anything but Windows. The FAQ isn't explicit about it but you can infer it from the requirements:

* 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit ( _x86_ ) or 64-bit ( _x64_ ) processor

* DirectX 9 graphics device with _WDDM 1.0 or higher driver_

So this means that Minecraft: Education Edition will most likely _not_ be Java-based like regular Minecraft.

More evidence:

> "Mods are not currently supported in Minecraft: Education Edition."

So kids definitely _won 't_ be modding this version of Minecraft. In that case, what are they going to be doing with it? I'm curious to know because last summer my son went to a "Minecraft camp" of sorts and they taught Java programming/modding to ages 9+. For that they were using Minecraft Forge.

This version of Minecraft is most likely based on the Pocket Edition which is written in C++.

Also note that this is not the same thing as ComputerCraftEdu which is vanilla Minecraft (Forge) + ComputerCraft (special EDU edition). ComputerCraft is a mod that lets you program in-game computers and robots using Lua. The latest Edu version also includes a visual programming interface which you can read more about here:

[http://www.computercraft.info/2015/07/01/introducing- compute...](http://www.computercraft.info/2015/07/01/introducing- computercraftedu/)

<comment><USER3> Specifically, it's probably a modification of Minecraft Windows 10 Edition, which itself is basically a Windows port of Pocket Edition.

A Mojang dev has said that they are still supporting the Java version, that they ultimately hope to have feature parity across all platforms, that they know modding is a critical part of Minecraft's popularity, and that they want to add modding to Pocket Edition/Windows 10 Edition but probably not soon. ([http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-gamers-are-worried- abou...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-gamers-are-worried-about- minecraft-windows-10-edition)) So that's all kind of confusing, and who knows what Microsoft will decree in a few years, but in theory they're trying to do the right thing eventually.

Obviously a C++ version will never be _as_ moddable as the Java version, since modders won't be able to get at the source code, and will require Mojang to add formal mod support to work at all. On the other hand, if all this drives them to actually do that it would be awesome; they've been promising it for years now, and in the meantime all mod development has been shackled by the requirement to reverse-engineer deliberately obfuscated code that breaks all mods with every new version release.

<comment><USER4> Even worse. I bought Minecraft as Linux game, never played it on Windows, and now i have to be afraid that the game suddenly moves on without me. Thats so wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm very familiar with Minecraft -- I still have the PayPal receipt for when I sent 10 Euro to Mojang to get in on the beta back in 2010 (which seems like ages ago).

But, I ask innocently and without agenda, how is this used as a tool for educators? I know kids love it, and I understand why, but quotes like

>Since the introduction of Minecraft to the classroom, educators around the world have been using Minecraft to effectively teach students everything from STEM subjects to art and poetry.

make me wonder what exactly is the benefit of using Minecraft in the classroom from an educational perspective? Are lessons actually being planned around Minecraft, or is it like the video games I played in "computer lab" which were just a convenient way to get a group of 30 second graders to be quiet for 45 minutes? What's the benefit of using Minecraft over traditional teaching tools, other than shoehorning lessons into something kids are already familiar with?

I realize that this comment may sound like it's coming from a place of bitter skepticism, but I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER6> I teach programming at the middle school level and am planning a Minecraft event and some pilot classroom activities around it.

As I've researched what the whole Minecraft in the classroom thing is about, I've found a few ways it is being used, but they all boil down to making the learning experience more engaging to more students. Make it fun and the students will tear off and learn more better faster.

Some activities very directly support the curriculum, for example teachers who have made activities where concepts from quantum mechanics, newtonian physics, and life sciences have made working models in the Minecraft world where students can experiment and more directly experience the details behind these concepts.

Some are just virtual worlds where you can be a virtual tourist and learn about a place or time in history. There is one where you explore Boston during the time of the Boston Tea Party for example, and you have to talk to all of the NPC characters to learn facts you will be tested on later.

Some are very computer-science focused where students make their own mods or just use scripting languages to automate structure creation on a larger scale.

All of these could be taught using more traditional methods. For some learners, just telling them to read a book will be the highest throughput/most effective learning method. Those kids are going to do fine regardless. These new gamified virtual world methods of introducing the material may slow things down for the learners we historically see as highly capable learners, but they promise to engage and light a fire inside some of the other students who otherwise might get left behind.

How much you should or can tailor the experience for each audience is a challenge I face all the time. It isn't easy as every decision seems to involve improving the experience for one segment of the class, usually at the expense of another.

<comment><USER7> <These new gamified virtual world methods of introducing the material may slow things down for the learners we historically see as highly capable learners, but they promise to engage and light a fire inside some of the other students who otherwise might get left behind.>

Well said...there is a segment of the population which will likely never be exposed to STEM, or the methodology associated with critical thinking skills, any other way...I applaud your grasp of that concept...that's one of the primary differences between "teachers" and "educators"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Existing customers will be offered one year of Education Edition for free" (where existing customers refers to those who bought MinecraftEDU licenses)

Therefore we may surmise that Minecraft: Education Edition will be a subscription-based licensing model. Kind of a bummer but I get it, teachers are pretty resource-intensive to support, and the value comes from building up the community and resource/lesson/world sharing, which is an ongoing cost.

The school where I teach had literally just last week decided to take the plunge and purchase some MinecraftEDU licenses. I'm just glad we will still have them in perpetuity (whatever that is good for in the constantly changing world of software!) along with the full retail copies that come along with it.

Really I hope this will deliver on the promise of Minecraft in the schools. MinecraftEDU was a fine first step but it is clear that it will benefit from having the full resources of Microsoft behind it. Currently it is still a bit of a "throw the software at the community and hope something good comes of it" approach, which is very hit or miss. Teachers are making a lot of great lessons and activities using Minecraft, but many of them are very localized to exactly what that specific teacher is trying to accomplish and are difficult to generalize to "all 4th grade teachers can use this". I would liken it to what Scratch offered for coding in the classroom ("here's the toolset, have fun!"), as opposed to what Code.org brought to the table with more of a complete packaged lesson plan and hand-held guided experience through a coding activity using Scratch.

<comment><USER8> $5/student/year with volume discounts available, according to the NYT piece.

<comment><USER6> a change to per user pricing is a huge change over how MinecraftEDU licensing works. $5 per student per year as opposed to the $18/license MinecraftEDU is priced at. With MinecraftEDU licenses if you are only going to have 30 licenses in use at one time (one classroom) you only need 30 licenses. 30 MinecraftEDU licenses runs a little over $450, one time cost. For a 500 student school under Minecraft: Education Edition you could be looking at $2,500 per year.

That's making some assumptions about how they will restrict the license usage.

I doubt many schools will see the benefit of having to buy a license for each individual student. The reality is that very few teachers are equipped with the skills to deliver a lesson using Minecraft, so mostly you will see a handful of teachers (at best, more likely zero or one) in a school embrace this.

Another important question: will you still be entitled to a separate full retail Minecraft license for every education license purchased? That is a significant component of the current MinecraftEDU licensing. It enables school events and lessons using any mod or plugin, with self-hosted servers.

I don't see this as all negative. I am hopeful that with the increased $$ flow will come better curriculum that is more generally applicable, as well as new features that might enable teachers who are novices with Minecraft to successfully use it in the classroom. Currently I would say only 1 out of 20 teachers has the skills required to pull this off today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://minecraftedu.tumblr.com/post/137614333771/minecrafted...](http://minecraftedu.tumblr.com/post/137614333771/minecraftedu- minecraft-education-edition)

Microsoft bought MinecraftEdu, but not TeacherGaming, which will continue to work on KerbalEdu

</comment><comment><USER10> Idiotic. What Minecraft needs if you'd like it to be educational is an official server programmability API accessible from multiple languages. Right now kids have to use hacks such as Craftbukkit and Spigot to write and deploy plugins, and Mcrosoft took down Craftbukkit through a cease and desist. There is such an enormous opportunity here to get tons of kids genuinely interested in programming, yet Microsoft is continuing to sabotage it.

<comment><USER11> CraftBukkitwas never taken down by Microsoft, it was taken down by one of the developer that used the GPL license to take it down.

You can see the DMCA notice there: [https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-09-05-CraftB...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-09-05-CraftBukkit.md)

<comment><USER10> Did not know. But the end result is the same: kids have to break the law to learn programming with Minecraft. And they do, in droves.

<comment><USER12> How exactly do they break the law?

<comment><USER10> By downloading unlicensed modifications of proprietary software whose distribution is prohibited by DMCA as well. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure a lawyer would find half a dozen ways to make the parents liable.

<comment><USER12> Huh? Who would the parents be liable to? What would they be liable for?

Mojang ABs customers aren't magically going to become liable for their violations by using their software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish they could upgrade Minecraft Pi Edition, which hasn't been updated for more than three years.

[http://pi.minecraft.net/](http://pi.minecraft.net/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think Minecraft will be a great digital lego for those right-brained youngsters. I remember when I was a kid, I would spend those rainy days in the computer lab with Kid Pix.

</comment><comment><USER15> No volume license? Not seeing the upside here.</comment>


How we built our HTML email editor using liquid, wysihtml5 and premailer - <AUTHOR> http://customer.io/blog/Email-wysiwyg-editor-inspired-by-jekyll.html

<comment><USER2> Great work guys! I think you hit the nail on the head with the template style being the best approach for easily putting together emails with clean code. HTML email editors are in a terrible state and that is why I have created Sendicate (<http://sendicate.net>)

For more reasons why you should ditch the traditional WYSIWYG style approach have a look at:

1\. [http://www.chadyj.com/post/21569743980/content-sections- as-p...](http://www.chadyj.com/post/21569743980/content-sections-as-poetry-an- email-wysiwyg) 2\. [http://www.chadyj.com/post/21158280879/die-wysiwyg-die- lets-...](http://www.chadyj.com/post/21158280879/die-wysiwyg-die-lets-focus- on-content-instead) 3\. [http://www.chadyj.com/post/20729167319/email- newsletters-are...](http://www.chadyj.com/post/20729167319/email-newsletters- are-broken-there-has-to-be-a-better)

</comment><comment><USER3> Out of interest, is that using <https://github.com/jhollingworth/bootstrap- wysihtml5>?

<comment><USER4> Hey James,

This is John at Customer.io here. We are absolutely using your work. It was a joy to use.

Thanks so much!

<comment><USER3> Awesome! I'm glad you like it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you handle the problem that there might be HTML tags between "{{" and the keyword "content", or between "content" and "}}" ?

<comment><USER4> John at Customer.io here.

When a customer attempts to save a layout, we perform several validations including verifying valid liquid templating (<http://liquidmarkup.org/>) syntax and the presence of the "content" liquid tag.

If there are HTML tags between the "{{"'s, we'll present a user friendly error message.

Cheers!

<comment><USER5> Okay, thanks for the reply.

I myself had done the same thing for some clients.

The clients were quite confused when they saw the error message after pasting text from some external rich text editor that littered everything with <span>s.

I wonder if there is a better way...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What service do you use to send the emails?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm trying really hard not to scoff. This is pretty much a standard way of doing any sort of embedded content in any templating system or language that has ever existed. Ever.

I'd recommend running the child HTML through some sort of validation to clean up the markup or otherwise ensure it doesn't alter the content that follows it in the template.

Also, depending on your userbase, it may be easier, or actually recommended, to use something like Markdown instead. It won't let them shoot themselves in the foot like HTML or a rich text editor will. I've seen content that was heavily formatted and styled that looked atrocious in the template, do to the template's parental styling or just poor user taste.</comment>


Car Finance Company Basics - <AUTHOR> http://biz.edesktopworld.com/?p=1567&sms_ss=hackernews <comment><USER2> Hard to tell where edesktopworld stole this content-free dross from, since it appears in (so far as I can tell) basically identical form on 129 random pages across the web, with various (fictional?) author names. Perhaps all 129 sites are run by the same people hoping to make money from advertising, or something.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most frustrating thing about Software/Web Development? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Having to struggle through a boredom of implementing the thing after all the interesting challenges are solved.

This doesn't necessarily apply to an entire product, could be a separate feature or even pieces of features.

 _With great product comes great boredom_

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool kid developers cargo culting flavour of the week technology; and/or front end developers changing their libraries/frameworks/tool chains more often than they change their underwear.

<comment><USER4> Why is this an issue though? Just ignore the new technology that isn't much better than the old one.

<comment><USER3> It's hard to ignore something when a client decides to use a technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scrum isn't designed to make work more productive for the developers. It's mostly because development is a chaotic process, and it forces everyone on the team to sync regularly. The overhead for scrum is high, and gets in the way of flow. It's good for menial work, the kind where a dev doesn't have to think over a problem for several days and just ticks things off a checkbox.

</comment><comment><USER5> Poor project management. It's very rare you see a company/team come up with a plan and stick to it, without deciding to randomly overhaul a bunch of stuff or add more features/complexity midway through.

Then again, it's a close one. I'd say also one of the following may take it:

How the site/app/program always seems to fall apart whenever the boss looks at it, or how the developers struggle to replicate said issues when testing it later.

How in web development, every browser seems to have its own half assed idea about which features to implement and how to implement them, rather than just sticking to the damn spec and keeping it consistent with other browsers.

The flavour of the week stuff, with developers constantly wanting to use the latest shiny framework.

Or perhaps how many designers seem to act like they're making a painting rather than an application, with zero thought put into how it scales between sizes, how things may fit in a grid, how various conditions (like errors) work etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having to stick with established, popular languages, frameworks, etc.

From a biz standpoint it makes sense to use what's well known, time-tested, stack-overflow answered, and easy to hire for.

From a developer's perspective, it's older, boring, and less effective than newer ones. Probably much less so in front-end as there seems to be much more rapid adoption.

The best case scenario would be solving a problem in-house then open-sourcing it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The industry does not agree with me that boilerplate is a pure waste of human lifetime, and a language that's either more powerful or more domain-specific would pay off very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Smartphone compatibility, display and usage. So many different browsers, OS versions and screen sizes make it a minefield.</comment>


New Funding for Automattic - <AUTHOR> http://ma.tt/2014/05/new-funding-for-automattic/ <comment><USER2> Can a VC or a money guy please explain why a company that is so critical to web valued less than Tumblr ?

<comment><USER3> I have no idea -- this is just a thought. Perhaps it's because Tumblr as a platform controls its entire user base while WordPress has an OSS variant that allows anyone to work with their code beyond Automattic's control.

When you value Tumblr, it's everything. When you value Automattic/WordPress you're valuing their hosting and paid packages but perhaps aren't putting a figure to their OSS offerings?

I agree that it doesn't seem to make much sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure why ma.tt didn't hyperlink the word Automattic in his post, but he should have, for people who don't know what the company is:

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

</comment><comment><USER5> I just spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out what Automattic is and does. I gather they are in some way connected to wordpress, but beyond that I am baffled.

<comment><USER6> They are Wordpress, and wordpress.org. Also Akismet, Gravitar and Polldaddy.

<comment><USER7> Not WordPress.org, WordPress.org is a separate open source project supported by the WordPress Foundation ([http://wordpressfoundation.org/](http://wordpressfoundation.org/)).

Yes there is some overlap in people involved but Automattic / WordPress.com and WordPress.org are separate things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know that Wordpress as a platform touches a ton of people, but I'm curious to see what sort of revenue Automattic must be doing on the paid side to justify a $1B+ valuation.

I guess it's possible this has little to do with the company's earning potential, and everything to do with reach and influence.

<comment><USER9> I would argue that compared to it's competitors, WP has a more solid business model and actual revenue. See Tumblr for an example of a highly valued service, with great reach and "influence" but no revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _It was also only a year ago I said "Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there's no need for the company to raise money directly — we're not capital constrained."_

 _I was wrong, but I didn't realize it until I took on the CEO role in January._

Find this to be really odd.

And it leads into this, which is at odds with the previous statement that they were growing as fast as they can. Did they discover any new avenues for growth that required a whole new raft of capital?

 _..and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster_

I love the company and Matt. Met him briefly in India many moons ago when he was attending a Wordcamp here.

</comment><comment><USER11> It'd be nice if they poured even a few million of this new cash haul into their IntenseDebate blogging-comments service. That, or shut it down since support there is non-responsive.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sorry, is this the OBD2 dongle-dependent app or a different Automatic? I dug around the blog looking for a link but found nothing obvious.

<comment><USER13> Automattic (Mat _t_ as in Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress) is the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Exit strategy?</comment>


International Space Station computer gets a heart transplant - <AUTHOR> https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/International_Space_Station_computer_gets_a_heart_transplant <comment><USER2> So fun to read. In my early career I used to think that replacing memory in servers used for production was risky. What if I could not get it done in time? Chaos!

Later I worked in a refinery when replacing mission critical items could seriously mean injury or death if mishandled. What if I made a mistake? Chaos!

Now, I realize what I was doing was child's play!

<comment><USER3> Do it wrong and the life support systems for you and your friends up there go out and you all die. Also, this entire $150,000,000,000 international investment may lose guidance and altitude control and burn up in the atmosphere, or maybe even rain down debris on some unlucky city.

No pressure!

<comment><USER4> Iirc, mission critical aerospace computers have triple redundancy since like ... forever.

So I can't believe the ISS computer doesn't have some sort of redundancy in place to prevent a catastrophe when there's so much money and lives at stake.

But I liked your joke.

<comment><USER5> Did you read the article? If you did you'd know that they run two computers. If one fail, a third automatically activates and the faulty is disabled. They also keep a fourth to swap out the failed one.

But it still doesn't change the fact that swapping out with a completely new specification can have unintended consequences. They waited until a computer failed to swap, so if it did not work, they'd run at reduced redundancy.

<comment><USER6> _Did you read the article?_

From the HN guidelines:

 _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From my days as a repair techie, sounds like just another board-pulling call- out job, I could do it for $343 (per hour) including VAT. But NASA would have to provide transport.

<comment><USER8> Does your business insurance cover equipment valued at $100B, though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what kind of hardware and software (CPU and OS) we're talking about here.

<comment><USER10> It was remarkably difficult to dig up any specifics on this. But I finally found the linked PDF below. It says this about the DMS-R:

"Another example is EADS DMS-R, a computer board based on ERC32 (Atmel TSC695) processor, and a fault-tolerant TMR version using 3 boards for the ATV of the ISS (Autonomous Transport Vehicle of the International Space Station)."

I looked up the Atmel chip and it is a radiation hardened implementation of the SPARC v7 architecture. I was a little surprised it wasn't a RAD6000, since I saw elsewhere that BAE was involved. Their RAD line of hardened Power PC processors is quite popular in spacecraft systems.

[https://webee.technion.ac.il/~ran/papers/SurveySpaceProcesso...](https://webee.technion.ac.il/~ran/papers/SurveySpaceProcessors.DASIA2012.pdf)</comment></comment>


What's the deal with Heroku? - <AUTHOR>

Can someone please explain the advantages of Heroku to me? It seems like one of those in-the-know companies. I'm not sure I understand how their scaling works and who they are targeted at. I currently host my apps in Rackspace, and would love to try something new, but don't necessarily understand the advantages. <comment><USER2> Heroku makes the most sense if you aren't running your app and your database on the same server. It's particularly easy to scale if your app doesn't contain any state in and of itself - just spin up a few copies that point to your database (which you can also scale up with a paid provider like MongoHQ).

For an example, I have a single-server app running on Rackspace with a same- server MongoDB. I pushed the web app to Heroku, now all I need to do is set up a connection to MongoDb (either via MongoHQ at $20-50/mo or with a hand- secured connection back to my existing database) and now I can stop worrying about Nginx and Apache and whatnot. If my load grows I can spin up extra web server instances or increase the resources allocated to my DB server.

<comment><USER3> 5 days late, so hopefully someone answers -- If you run your web stack on Heroku, and your database in another provider, doesn't that introduce a ton of latency for your DB queries? I thought that you should strive to host in the same datacenter to minimize the latency.

<comment><USER4> They're in the same data center, because they both run on top of EC2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> saiko-chriskun the advantages are that it requires /zero/ effort to host and scale. takes server admin out of the equation. my main beef with 'em is that their downtime is pretty bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is your app?</comment>


Blinq enhances your favorite Messaging Applications with extra information - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/30/blinq-enhances-your-favorite-messaging-applications-with-extra-information/

<comment><USER2> DISCLAIMER: I am one of the founder. Our vision is to become the core service for social context on the mobile/internet.

I will quote a blogger and one of our early users: "We've seen this same concept before, either built on top of your browser email client (like Rapportive) or your phone dialer (like Contacts+ and CallApp), but Blinq takes it a step further, implementing it where it makes even more sense: on your phone, with your chats, where you probably do more than 80% of your everyday communications already. None of the aforementioned apps ever appealed to me, but I had to install Blinq as soon as I heard about it. It didn't disappoint."

</comment><comment><USER3> All the social updates of your friends in one place. No need to look in many timelines of many platform. Blinq is all in one.</comment>


In Dieting, Magic Isn't a Substitute for Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/nutrition/q-and-a-are-high-protein-low-carb-diets-effective.html

<comment><USER2> Bastards - the "back" button in my browser just loads the page again, or does something equally useless.

People - don't do that. You'll confuse people who don't really what's going on, and those who do will get really annoyed. I'll certainly think twice before going to the NYTimes site again.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the thermodynamic school in dieting. If it works for a combustion engine, than it is a perfect model for the human body.</comment>


Ask HN: what URL shortener do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I need a shortener to get links into text messages we're sending. There's like a zillion shortener services. I need one with a decent API. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> <http://dev.bitly.com/>

It is robust and well documented.

<comment><USER3> yes, it's probably the mostly widely used one though it had an outage last Sunday. Unless you want to invent your own, you should try bit.ly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bit.ly. I used it before any others and I've never had a reason to switch. _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER5> bit.ly</comment>


Gitsome: A supercharged Git/GitHub CLI, now with Enterprise support - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/integrations/gitsome <comment><USER2> Recently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658444)</comment>


Show HN: Cheddar - a simple task iPhone app with markdown syntax - <AUTHOR> https://cheddarapp.com/

<comment><USER2> This look really neat. well done!</comment>


UTF8 support in SMTP gone mad? - <AUTHOR> https://halon.io/blog/email-santa/ <comment><AUTHOR> Is it good or bad if we go down this road? Should SMTP stay ASCII at the expense of the majority of the world? Is there any other protocol which has gone UTF8?</comment>


The path to high GNSS accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://galileognss.eu/the-path-to-high-gnss-accuracy/ <comment><USER2> My opinion is that autonomous vehicles shouldn't rely on GPS or GNSS so much as those do today. It should be only one possible location information system, not the ultimate authority as it seems to be with many systems today. Lack of satellite navigation shouldn't prevent the system from functioning reliably. If it does, the system is fundamentally flawed.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you keep your energy at a good level? - <AUTHOR> I feel like a device running in power save mode because my battery is always low. I love my work, I love my family, but I struggle to be more productive and more active. So, a question to you: food? medicine? sports? what's been working for you, please?<p>Thank you all! <comment><USER2> Have a good rest time. Good sleep makes miracles. Take a 'holiday' off your usual life. For hours, day(s) as often as you can afford. Getting 'out' of routine can be hard, but once you step 'out' you will appreciate.

Just 2 cents

</comment><comment><USER3> Exercise at least 3x/week. Going to be early enough to wake without an alarm and be well rested. Eliminating alcohol consumption. Eliminating caffeine, sugar, and simple carbs and the concomitant crashes.

</comment><comment><USER4> More productive than what or whom? What is your baseline?</comment>


Show HN: Delete Facebook "friends" you don't actually talk to - <AUTHOR> http://DusterApp.com

<comment><USER2> No I'm not granting an app with no details on how it works from random strangers access to my FB

Also I think you misunderstand how some people use facebook. I use it as a long memory, address book, and passive way to keep in touch with a wide crowd. It's value is in that when I met people I can just add them and forget about it until even years down the road I might be like "oh I know a person" and then have easy access to get in touch with them (and even passively gotten to know a bit about them)

<comment><AUTHOR> How Duster works: [http://dusterapp.com/privacy](http://dusterapp.com/privacy) (Sorry that page is really hacky)

<comment><USER2> I can infer from that that I get presented with a choice, but it's not clear (especially on the main go page which is the scariest) that if I click that button it won't just start deleting my friends. You need to make it insanely clear that I'll be presented with a list and I get final say. You are just a recommendation engine, you won't take action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because Facebook is the only way to communicate with your friends? If anything, I'm closer to people whom I don't interact with on Facebook, because I am more likely to interact with them in real life. FB is the last resort of interaction.

This reminds me of when Facebook used to put up notices like "You haven't talked to [wife] in awhile! Click here to post on her wall!"

</comment><comment><USER4> Facebook already has functionality to hide people you don't interact with often on the site:

[https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize](https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize)

This also has the advantage of avoiding the social awkwardness of "why'd you unfriend me".

<comment><AUTHOR> Duster doesn't tell your friends that you removed them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. But that one extra click is killing me.

I'm sure there's a reason for it, but if clicking "dust" would actually remove them instead of bringing up the page where I could remove them, this app would be about 100x more valuable to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. Unfortunately, there is no API call for defriending someone (there's only one for _adding_ someone). So this is the best we could do. Stupid facebook

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just installed this on my personal Facebook account. Really don't get how the algorithm works. It showed me one friend where I know I commented on his pics at least 2-3 times in the last week. Noticed at least 10 other people I talk to all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you only interact with people in private messages and not wall posts, photos, etc, than the algorithm won't pick it up ( because we don't get permissions for that)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not going to use this app but I will keep it in mind should an awkward situation arise due to my constant cleaning of my friends list.</comment>


"Twitter" in 1935 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/04/30/robot-messenger-displays-person-to-person-notes-in-public/

<comment><USER2> Key difference: "the user drops a coin into the slot".

Twitter missed that part :)

<comment><USER3> It would have miserably failed if they did not "miss" that part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They even had a business model from day one! (it was coin based)

</comment><comment><USER5> It even has location-based technology: it lets you know when your friends are near!

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's another view of it: <http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3359446/Hulton- Archive>

The Popular Mechanix article says the message will stay in view 'at least two hours', while the Getty Images caption says 'up to two hours'. By the looks of it the latter seems more likely - pump enough coins into the machine and you can make earlier messages roll out of view!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a message to location service. There is no broadcasting to all Notificators in London simultaneously, and each requires a coin for each message sent. The message is only up for two hours, and is not tied to a user. The intended purpose was for a specific person to be present at the destination.

How is this analogous to twitter any more than say, the classifieds of a newspaper?

<comment><USER8> You are totally right. Also, here you are writing on a piece of paper instead of typing in a text box. The viewing interface is also totally different as one is a either a monitor or a mobile device, and another is a crude bulletin board thing. And don't even get me started on ...

Lighten up!

:)

<comment><USER7> The interface hardly matters. I apologize for thinking about this too hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the way the post on the blog is under the category "Useless Tech".

I wonder if there was a patent for the machine.

</comment><comment><USER10> No wonder Twitter is so popular in London. We've been tweeting since 1935!

<comment><USER11> London was also known for its pneumatic tubes. Though not as extensive as Paris, there were many messages carried via pneumatic tube transport.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube>

<comment><USER12> The Internet is also known for its series of tubes.

<comment><USER8> Which are made of cats

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8VTeDHjcM>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmm... I wonder if it had a 140 character limit.

<comment><USER14> _writes a brief message on a continuous strip of paper_

Sounds like maybe they were handwritten?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool. I wonder how widely used it was.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wonder what this does <http://www.notificator.com>

PS: It's does Twitter searches.</comment>


A $35 keyboard for children transformed me into a novelist - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/this-35-keyboard-for-children-transformed-me-into-a-novelist-436a55370ee5 <comment><USER2> The Japanese have modern devices like this - this one is about $250 and had a E-ink display and a folding keyboard. You can put the keyboard in English mode - a few keys are in odd places but bearable. It's increased my output by several orders of magnitude.

[https://www.kingjim.co.jp/pomera/dm30/](https://www.kingjim.co.jp/pomera/dm30/)

<comment><USER3> There is also the Freewrite, its a little expensive but is targeted to English speakers: [https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

<comment><USER4> Beautiful, but $400 is steep for a monotasker. I'd gladly let students use these in a class, though, as an alternative to notepads.

Which probably says something about the rise of keyboards and the fall of handwriting; I get that ASCII is more useful than paper, but $400 buys a lot of luxurious pens and paper.

<comment><USER5> Produces a lot of lost pens and paper in waste bins though!

<comment><USER6> Check out the fountain pen thread from last week.

<comment><USER7> Link please ? :)

Granted I'm a huge user of fountain pens and note books already :)

<comment><USER6> There you go:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497259)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a very special place in my heart for the AlphaSmart brand. When I was a kid in the 90's I had atrocious handwriting. No one could figure out why or how to fix it. In middle school, one of the counselors had been given an earlier model of the AlphaSmart as a demo unit and let me use it. It also turned me into a writer. Instead of my teachers glossing over my chicken scratch, they were able to read my typed assignments and offer me real feedback. My confidence as a student and an intellectual returned. All because I had a little keyboard to type on. Pretty crazy.

[Technical side note: Back in the day, to transfer what you typed you used to plug it into the PS/2 keyboard port on a computer and press "send." It would then recreate each keystroke for the computer, regardless of what program you had open so if you hit send before opening up a word processor it would be chaos until it finished transferring.]

<comment><USER9> Lucky your teachers actually cared about you.

<comment><USER10> And had the resources to act on that. I've had the impression a bunch of my teachers did care when kids were struggling, but didn't have a lot of options to help really.

<comment><USER8> I agree. I think that teachers are relatively powerless/underpaid/underappreciated/overworked (during the school year) and that makes it so hard for them to help kids that are struggling. Let alone help the kids who are struggling without interrupting the rest of the class. It reminds me of the season of The Wire where it shows just how many systemic issues there are in the education system.

My teachers were frustrated and sent me to the counselor, who lucked into a solution for me. Combined with the fact that I was lucky enough to have a computer at home to use, parents who supported me, and teachers who wanted me to succeed was what made it work. Most people aren't as fortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is a worthy read because it looks a computing product from a user's perspective instead of a engineer or an MBA. Multi-function everything devices with the addictive potential of nicotine may be engineering marvels and business rockstars, but this person wanted to write without distraction and needed to reach into the past to find a product that met their needs.

And it's a fun exercise to take this user's need and whiteboard out a new product for them. How are those ergonomics; could we hinge the display or project it somehow in a way that will let them type longer without discomfort? How's that LCD's readability; would eink be better? Should the device be doing incremental backups to the cloud? Should it offer dictation?

<comment><USER12> _Should the device be doing incremental backups to the cloud?_

I think one of the key features would be no network connection.

<comment><USER13> So a Linux machine (like an old laptop) booted into single-user mode seems like a good approach here. Single shell, single application at a time, no GUI.

<comment><USER14> I have an old Linux laptop (an old iBook G4) that boots into a non graphical environment and starts emacs in text mode on login with no network connectivity by default.

It's my go-to for focus.

<comment><USER15> This is so good. Can you please share how it can be done?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's wild what constraints can actually open up for your creativity. I love making videos but ran out of the time I used to have to spend on it. And so largely gave up trying. But I decided instead of complaining about it or trying to find more time to pile on some constraints:

\- only film AND edit on my phone \- only create a movie as long as a single song track. don't edit the song track besides muting clips of the song. \- only spend < 60 minutes on editing the video \- publish daily

So now there's little workflow pauses waiting for files to transfer. It's now impossible to spend too much time in a rat hole of an edit. Of course this limits things I'd love to achieve with it, but on the other side, I get to publish so many more ideas and feel insanely more creative with it.

Feeling stuck? Probably need a good dose of giving yourself what seems like arbitrary and ridiculously limiting constraints.

<comment><USER17> I've been getting into making electronic music and figuring out a workflow that balances these constraints is really challenging.

The most powerful, expressive, flexible, and affordable way to make music, by far, is to do everything in a DAW inside a computer. Ableton + a few software synth plug-ins is a _ridiculously_ powerful platform to make music in. You could produce albums for the rest of your life and never run out of inspiration. And the user interface for Ableton is just an absolute delight.

But it's _so_ powerful that it takes me forever to get anything done. It's easy to spend three hours tweaking reverb settings and never finish anything.

The other approach is to do everything in dedicated hardware with real synthesizers. It's expensive to buy gear and a hassle to wire everything up. Decide that you want delay on your bass instead of the lead? That's five minutes of futzing with cables versus a single drag-and-drop in Ableton. Want two different reverb settings for the pad and the clap? Better shell out another $300 to buy a second reverb pedal. Undo? You're lucky if your sequencer supports it.

But because the set of options is so much narrower and the cost for rethinking choices is higher, the hardware environment pushes you forward and makes you want to finish things.

The tricky part is that, to a listener, the music made on hardware often just isn't as good in many ways as that made in a DAW. Listeners today are used to lots and lots of layers and very surgical production and mixing. That's easy (but time-consuming) in a DAW, but very difficult (and expensive) in hardware.

Finding the right balance here is hard.

<comment><USER18> That is totally my experience with my hobbyist music making endeavour too!

I thought owning more plugins and getting better gear would mean I'd make lots and lots of music.

When I started out 9 years ago, I had Renoise, zero paid plugins (only free vsts like Synth1 and friends) and a cheap pair of earbuds. I didn't even understood basic things like translation, gain staging and etc, and I'd always wonder why my tracks wouldn't play correctly on other people's speakers (channels would clash frequencies, elements would downright disappear and etc).

Yet, my most creative, layered and musical (data amount, transitions and overall creativity) time was at that period. And I typed it all in using the computer keyboard. In a computer in the middle of the living room.

Now I have a huge desk with a pro usb audio dac, Yamaha Hs8 Monitors (excellent, btw), all plugged in with proper balanced xlr cables, 2 midi keyboards, an ATH-m50 pair of cans for when I can't be noisy in the Study (small kids), lots of paid plugins like Sylenth1 and Serum, a plethora of sample libraries scavenged and assembled painstakingly through the years... only the good stuff, categorized, ready to double click and peruse.

....It's been two years since the last time I actually used all this stuff

You guys are right. I need to get back to the basics.

What use is to be able to put 80+ tracks in your software because now you have a good pc that can handle that many if you can't even write the first part down because there are soooo many options and you're lost tweaking knobs.

"tweakititis" is a thing in music making.

One of my tracks, btw, if any of you got curious at what kind of music I make: [https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu- kid](https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid)

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm 100% with you. I've finished two tracks using Reason and Ableton with dozens of unfinished things laying around. And those two tracks took weeks.

Meanwhile, with my little Electribe 2 and a couple of guitar pedals, I finished three tracks in like a tenth of the time and _enjoyed_ it a hell of a lot more.

But, on the other hand, those two tracks I made on the computer are, I think, much better songs for someone to listen to.

So a big part of this dilemma is how much do I optimize for _my_ enjoyment of the _process_ versus the _listener 's_ enjoyment of the _product_? The two are not purely orthogonal. It's hard to make something people like if you're miserable doing it. But they aren't entirely aligned either, as can be witnessed by all of the many many ambient modular jams that I'm sure were fun for the artist to make but are just pointless boring noodling to the listener.

 _> One of my tracks, btw, if any of you got curious at what kind of music I make: [https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu- kid](https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid) _

I like it! The filter sweep on the drums is <chef's kiss>. The overall structure is really cool. So much electronic music just has nothing interesting going on in the arrangement.

I first got into making music like, uh, 20 years ago using PlayerPro on a Mac. I was way more productive back then. Trackers are fun. But also my music was a lot shittier, so there's a trade-off. Have you talked yourself into getting a Polyend Tracker yet?

Here's my stuff:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSMJ0iRwAhIFYSpntOEtn2g?vie...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSMJ0iRwAhIFYSpntOEtn2g?view_as=subscriber)

I like putting it on YouTube because that feels less formal and less like a "release" to me. Though the downside is having to make some kind of video for each thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use the Alphasmart, also. FYI, there's MacOs software for transferring the text that works great. It needed a PR and Xcode, so I bundled it into a dmg and am distributing it here: [https://glassdimly.com/blog/tech/macos/alphasync-macos- catal...](https://glassdimly.com/blog/tech/macos/alphasync-macos-catalina- download-and-install-appdmg)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the pointer. Do you use yours for prose or also for more technical (or even research) text?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My partner is a novelist and owns two of these. She's been drafting with them for a little over a year and swears by them. She says the appeal is that you can't go back and read more than a few lines so you just kind of go and then edit later. I also think the appeal is the keys themselves. Similar in feel to an old Thinkpad.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't go as far, the typing feel isn't as good as old Thinkpads and the keys are definitely more fragile. Can't replace them, either. A device of the same form factor, even display, with an Arduino for tinkering and mechanical keys would be a godsend.

<comment><USER23> I use an Atreus [1] as my daily keyboard, and Phil has been experimenting with various forms of "cyberdeck" based on that [2,3]. Something like that, with a minimalist emacs config like [4] would be an awesome portable writing device.

1\. [https://atreus.technomancy.us/](https://atreus.technomancy.us/)

2\. [https://atreus.technomancy.us/decklog](https://atreus.technomancy.us/decklog)

3\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/d2rwp1/atreus_de...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/d2rwp1/atreus_deck_mk4/)

4\. [https://github.com/rougier/elegant- emacs](https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It reminds me of the TRS-80 model 100. I seem to remember reading a story linked here a while back regarding the 100 and how popular it was for journalists to write stories on, and maybe be uploaded via modem to the editor when completed? (I might be remembering this incorrectly)

<comment><USER25> You are thinking of this [http://wayne.lorentz.me/This_TRS-80/](http://wayne.lorentz.me/This_TRS-80/)

<comment><USER24> yes, thank you. I'll have to read over it again and refresh my memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My dad used a Tandy Dreamwriter for many years to write on while working as a travel journalist, well into the 2000's.

Small, Z80 based, with a few lines of text on the screen and powered by AA batteries. Other journalists used to laugh at the 'old guy with the Fisher Price computer', but the instant-on and distraction free typing was a definite advantage. Pretty nice not having to worry about a fragile, expensive laptop while out in the jungle or whatever, too.

<comment><USER27> Oh cool. The Dreamwriter was based on the Amstrad NC100:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_NC100

A very cool little device, at the time. I borrowed one as a kid and it seemed very exciting to be able to type things wherever I was.

I'm kinda nostalgic for that less connected era, where life moved at a slightly slower pace. Like all nostalgia, I'm leaving out the bad parts.

<comment><USER28> You make the link unclickable when you format it as code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am not a novelist. The problem isn't the device, it's my brain. But when I have a creative block, I take a page from the novelists that just works.

I close my eyes and start typing.

In fact, Iv'e closed my eyes just now as I write this. Touch typing obviously helps! But it allows me to hyper-focus on my writing and not on anything else. If I wanted to, I could turn off all notifications. or just turn my sound off completely with "mute". No big deal. Granted, this isn't very portable, but I could do this with my laptop. The only thing I lack is the huge battery life.

As I open my eyes now, I re-emerge into the Real World where there exists more than my writing. I fix the typos, make an observation, and click "add comment".

But not before I add one more thing: You don't need a device to write. You need a process, and you need to get out of your own head.

</comment><comment><USER30> Although the author mentions using outdated and unsupported software to transfer the text, it isn't actually required.

These also have a mode where it just "types" the text into the program of your choice, via the usb cable. No drivers required and works with any OS that can recognize a usb keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER31> I believe we'll see a return to more single use devices. They won't supplant smartphones.

For one, I've thought a lot about having two separate computers: one for writing code and a second for googling when I need help / slack / email / HN.

And then keeping the two devices in physically separate places.

I could accomplish this with software and accounts, but I know for myself it would be less effective.

<comment><USER32> I have that, I have a work laptop, that i dock into a displaylink set of screens to run my work dev environment. And then sitting on the desk next to me is my personal laptop. Totally different uses and the seperation is really important because i never worry about typing the wrong thing into the wrong context because the full size keyboard is attached to the work computer.

It's worked really well for me for about 3 years now. And i hardly look at my phone.

<comment><USER10> I do pretty much the same, but I have my phone sitting next to me with an external bluetooth keyboard. I'd use an iPad, but there's no Whatsapp for those currently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seems similar to this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88)

The Cambridge Computer Z88 is an A4-size, lightweight, portable Z80-based computer with a built-in combined word processing/spreadsheet/database application called PipeDream (functionally equivalent to a 1987 BBC Micro ROM called Acornsoft View Professional),[1] along with several other applications and utilities, such as a Z80-version of the BBC BASIC programming language.

<comment><USER34> I bought one of these new when they came out and it was life changing. The BASIC was surprisingly good and I got almost as much out of the spreadsheet as I did the word processor.

One area that was a disappointment is _really_ doesn't like x-ray machines (or maybe the other bits in the scanning process — magnets?). I asked for hand inspection at LHR, they refused, and putting it through the scanner corrupted what was stored in memory. Only upside is doing something again is usually quicker and better than the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like any laptop booting a minimal Linux distro straight into a similarly simplistic text editor should be able to provide the same experience. Could be carried around on a USB stick, effectively turning any available computer into an AlphaSmart.

<comment><USER36> I've always liked WordGrinder. It runs in the terminal/console!

[http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html](http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html)

<comment><USER35> That's what I use! It's pretty minimal by modern standards but might still be too full-featured for AlphaSmart simulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Makes sense. Single-purposes devices are kind of cool. It's why eBook readers have a place in a world where tablets exist.

I don't know about AlphaSmart though - the screen is too cramped. I suspect after the initial euphoria of finding another way to write wears off, the author will get tired of the limitations and go back to writing on a tablet or PC. Having said that, maybe there is a market for a writing-only device, similar to a read-only eBook reader.

<comment><USER38> I've been using one for long-form writing for about a decade now. Haven't gotten tired of it yet.

<comment><USER37> Cool. I'm not a writer so I don't know what works and what doesn't. If it works for you and the author - great!

<comment><USER38> Sure.

The other device I often use is a Thinkpad A20m running Linux. The only web browser on it is lynx (which I mostly use or Wikipedia).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For people wanting something like this, there are still plenty of Apple's EMate devices available on EBay: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300)

</comment><comment><USER40> These people have a somewhat modern alternative with mechanical keyboard and eink screen. It has wifi and that's it. From watching the reviews I understood that a major drawback is that no editing is possible on the device itself and it is very expensive (600$)

[https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

I personally use occasionally an android based ebook reader with a bluetooth keyboard (Onyx BOOX Poke 2 with logitech k380). Distraction free writing is a thing.

<comment><USER27> This feels like the sort of thing people buy to kid themselves that the problem with their writing lies outside their own brains.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a dedicated writing device but, for me as someone who writes pretty much for the entire working day, inconvenience is the biggest bar to writing other than lack of sleep. If I can't edit on the device, or find the text in my usual GSuite/Office 365 spaces, then maybe I'd be better off with a $40 dictaphone and Rev.com.

<comment><USER41> > This feels like the sort of thing people buy to kid themselves that the > problem with their writing lies outside their own brains.

I posted elsewhere in this thread about this, so to summarize: I've been at a cabin using LTE tethering, and am consciously turning my Internet connection off and on.

I fully realize that the problem is in my brain, but putting up just _that tiny_ of a barrier is enough of an effective "hack" to change the way I work in a positive way. Because there's no connection most of the time I'm working, there's no HN, there's no email popping up, there's no Slack notifications, and there's no "falling down a rabbit hole searching for a solution". I'm spending way more time writing down/rubber ducking the problem I'm trying to solve and coming up with the solution myself (which generally results in a much better understanding of the problem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Sometimes I wonder how often these "productivity tips" mask a deeper feeling of indifference or rejection of the task entirely. People spend hours finding the right tools for a task thinking it will make them want to do it instead of examining the task itself and their feelings around it.

<comment><USER43> To a certain extent I agree. If you were really passionate about something like this you would make it happen regardless of your circumstances. Think about kids who grow up in impoverished island nations who make it to the MLB through sheer perseverance.

The difference is unless you're already wealthy or talented, you _need_ to write effectively to compete in the modern 'white collar' workforce.

Writing something that people want to read is very hard. People don't read for the sake of reading, they read to learn something or feel something. It can take years of consistent practice to evoke anger, sadness, or laughter through writing. Think about how many books, workshops, and college courses there are on writing itself. It is sort of like programming, it is a skill that anyone can learn given enough time and it has very little barrier to entry. This makes it extremely competitive, so a lot of people need to exploit whatever edge they can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I still remember as a child playing on a 1980s word processor that my mom had. It had maybe a 4 line display, with an ugly greenish backlighting and no battery whatsoever. It did however have a hinge mechanism so that little text only screen would fold over the keyboard.

<comment><USER45> These dedicated word processor devices were quite popular and cheap. Built-in printer and floppy drive, shaped somewhat like a typewriter.

We had two in my house, even though we also had general purpose computers. I think they were still in use into the early 90s for school reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> For the mechanical keyboard lovers out there, there is a Cherry MX compatible AlphaSmart 3000 PCB: [https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=91504.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=91504.0)

</comment><comment><USER47> One of my writer friends accomplishes a similar workflow by just having a writing account on his laptop, where everything is disabled except a text editor.

</comment><comment><USER48> I was given a first generation Alphasmart in middle school and told to use it for all my assignments since I had such terrible handwriting. At the time I thought it was incredibly cool, but in retrospect I wonder if I fell prey to some ill-thought _technology in the classroom_ program. Perhaps it would have been better if they had just helped me fix my handwriting.

</comment><comment><USER49> Alphasmart HN thread from 2017 here, with comments by co-founder Ketan Kothari and Freewrite's founder too:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836866)

</comment><comment><USER50> Given the amount of work going into custom DIY mechanical keyboards, it's surprising that there aren't DIY solutions out there. All you need is a $5 MCU (think ESP32) and a cheap display. Would make a fun side project :)

<comment><USER50> One problem is that cheap LCD displays are not easy to source. E.g., the largest old school lcds I find are 4x20 characters, which is a bit confining.

There seem to be tons of TFT options out there on the cheap, but they're probably not great in terms of eye strain and power consumption.

If price is no object, then e-ink displays seem a great choice, e.g. $70 for a 7.5'' display: [https://www.banggood.com/Waveshare-7_5-Inch-E-ink-Screen- Mod...](https://www.banggood.com/Waveshare-7_5-Inch-E-ink-Screen-Module-e- Paper-Display-SPI-Interface-For-Raspberry-Pi-p-1365278.html)

<comment><USER51> Many of these larger epaper displays are meant for very low refresh speeds - I'm talking 5 seconds plus. This one takes 6 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Outline link: [https://outline.com/PzjuRt](https://outline.com/PzjuRt)

</comment><comment><USER20> The Psion series got some legendary status for its attention to detail. The Psion 5 had backlight, was running on batteries (25-35h battery life) and it has a slot for Compact Flash Cards. The keyboard is foldable. If you find an adapter for the CF cards they can still be used today for writing similarly to what is described here with the AlphaSmart.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5)

<comment><USER34> Loved that thing! Batteries lasted forever and the LCD was perfect for the job of being focused. My hands are almost too big to touch type on it so notes often needed editing when transferred to a desktop. Typing on it is kind of like writing with Graffiti on a Palm, it takes some practice and then all of a sudden you're pretty good at it.

If you liked the Psion you might like its successor the Gemini from Planet Computers ([https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini- pda-1](https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1)). Same awesome keyboard.

<comment><USER20> Oh, I really fancied the Gemini. A tiny Linux computer the size of a Psion 5 sounded pretty awesome to me as a former Psion lover. I'm not unhappy that I did not buy it in the end though - battery life, and it comes with all the smart phone distractions - the Psion 5 used to be my distraction free writer, not a terminal access device.

If you need to frequently do admin tasks (e.g. config file and script editing) it's still a pretty interesting choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Who's tried coding on one? Own up :-) You could bang out 500 lines of JS without stopping and then upload it to your PC and see if it runs...

</comment><comment><USER54> To maximize focus I've used the "One system user per project" trick. It works well because now everything in your desktop has to do with your project (files/notes/calendar/bookmarks/etc)

I've been able to ship a few projects using this trick.

Not sure who was (Maybe Seth Godin?) who recommended using a different computer, which may even work better.

</comment><comment><USER55> Along these lines I've been thinking a nice device would be an e-ink reader that _only_ loads Wikipedia. (You know, for kids!)

<comment><USER56> Similar idea: [https://youtu.be/R63x2TXm0s8](https://youtu.be/R63x2TXm0s8)

It's a raspberry Pi, with an e-ink screen, and battery to provide an 'offline' repository of information, including Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> [https://www.osnews.com/story/131180/the-alphasmart-dana- in-2...](https://www.osnews.com/story/131180/the-alphasmart-dana-in-2019/) has a few more technical details of the device for those interested.

It runs PalmOS!

<comment><USER26> > I found a free text editor specifically written for the dana's wide screen > (SiEd, dana version) on SourceForge in alpha, and left abandoned 4 years > ago. That editor will sometimes crash the whole system...

Nice to know my crappy code is still causing problems all these years later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I use Amazon Basics keyboard ($13), super comfortable for coding. Bought it just for fun after reading this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20866319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20866319)

</comment><comment><USER59> On a related note, I've been imagining this product idea, as an educational toy that would help kids practice typing and spelling: A small physical keyboard with a small (but larger than the AlphaSmart's) attached color display, which does nothing but present a single picture of the thing that you've typed, and show nothing if the current input is misspelled or otherwise not found. I'm thinking that it would have an internal (no internet connection) visual dictionary similar to the one that comes with the Scribblenauts game and would be rugged enough for 3 year old kids to play with.

Do you happen to know of any existing product like this, or the feasibility of building one?

<comment><USER60> I don't know if they have something specifically like what you want, but VTech has a whole range of educational toys with keyboards and assorted phonics and spelling tutorials.

If you do a search for "vtech abc" and variations you'll find a huge number of different types of devices.

<comment><USER61> Wow I didn't know they were still around. My first PC was a VTech XT clone!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I wonder if creating a different OS account on the same day-to-day work laptop with limited access to app, games and no internet would trigger the same "Pavlovian response" the article talks about. Did anyone tried this approach?

</comment><comment><USER63> Reminds me of the Radio Shack portable:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100)

There were also a few simple word processors by Brother I think.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is a very vintage & romantic way of going at it.

If you don't have a way to acquire one of these devices, a similar solution can be implemented with a Bluetooth keyboard (Like the Logitech K480,U$D 35 @ Amazon, and has a slot for tables or phones) and a tablet or your phone (Or _a_ phone).

You'll need an app for that, and my current choice for writing in my tablet is Joplin [1] that has apps for all the OSes and phones, and can be hooked with different ways of cloud storing for your files (Like Dropbox or NextCloud)

[1] [https://joplinapp.org/](https://joplinapp.org/)

<comment><USER65> You missed the main point of the OP: the AlphaSmart lacks the distractions (temptations to procrastinate) of a smartphone or tablet.

Do you never find yourself using your smartphone or tablet to procrastinate after intending to use it for a productive purpose?

<comment><USER64> Yes. That's actually why my tablet (That I use mainly for reading) doesn't have my main Gmail account linked to it, plus I always use it on airplane model.

My take was that not that many people will have the choice to get their hand on one of these devices (I, for one, can't).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I use a Hermes Rocket (typewriter) for similar reasons: similar form factor, does not require electricity, saves your work to paper rather than electronic storage. About $50 used.

The keyboard is mechanical, as is the rest of the device.

</comment><comment><USER67> That thing looks kind of like a TRS-80 model 100

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100)

</comment><comment><USER49> Requisite HN comment but also a genuine one too: Is there any chance any of these Freewrites, Alphasmarts or machines from Japan support, or could be hacked to support, emacs keybindings?

<comment><USER68> There's a guy who reflashed Pomera DM200 to run XEmacs, though at that point it's just an ARM laptop with no mouse

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've recently bought a handful of these (the more basic Pro and 2000), with the aim of replacing the insides with an ESP32, but otherwise do the same job. There's a community of people, weirdly on Flickr, who provided enough motivation to buy one.

[https://www.flickr.com/groups/alphasmart/](https://www.flickr.com/groups/alphasmart/)

</comment><comment><USER70> The Alphasmart! We did typing class with that back in the early 00's. The IR beam to the printer felt like science fiction back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER71> We had these in school when I was young. I loved them. I could carry one around the playground and write a story. When you got back to the classroom, you transferred it to the computer by hooking it up as a keyboard. I've been dreaming about getting one for a while. The passive matrix LCD works well in sunlight and the batteries last a long time.

</comment><comment><USER72> In the very late 80s, a co-worker of mine, a corporate-productions scriptwriter, gave up his Mac and started using a Neo2-like device -- it looked very similar and used AA batteries. I remember him crowing about how it was a game-changer for him, and that it made him a much more productive, and better, writer.

I also recall thinking he was nuts.

</comment><comment> 5- tangentially related, i've been playing a bit with a brother ep-44 (see, e.g., [https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/serial- termi...](https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/serial-terminal- with-benefits-brother-ep-44/)).

i've mostly been running it as a linux tty, but in spite of being designated a 'personal electronic printer', it has some memory and editing features so could pass as a portable word processor.

unfortunately its keyboard is quite unsatisfactory, so i'm considering acquiring a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700) also for use as a tty.

i would be interested in further suggestions along these lines.

</comment><comment><USER73> Why use medium.com with this login-wall?

<comment><USER74> Probably because it's free and easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This reminds me of the Tandy 100, which was widely used by news reporters even into the early 80s.

</comment><comment><USER76> That device looks fantastic for what the author wants. Another approach if you need a little more flexibility in the software might be using a deliberately limited old laptop. (I'd rather type in emacs, for example.) Battery life would be a lot worse, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER77> I own a neo2. They are nice for first drafts or noodling with words. There really is something in the idea of dumbing down tech to get things done. I have written quite a bit on it but three things have held me back from being a power user:

1\. It uses a dated, proprietary cable to transfer your writing to a computer. Worst part of this is that the AlphaSmart re-types your writing so if you've written the 50000 word max then it will take some time to save it. The process is just annoying enough to trigger procrastination.

2\. If the battery comes out then you've lost everything. This isn't such a dealbreaker since I want a dumber word processor to get out of my way but I think it makes the keyboard a little too dumb.

3\. Honestly, it's not sexy. It's huge, too. And people with no interest in writing just don't get it at all. The looks people give me when I've used it in the public are like "what insane Jesus cult stuff is this guy writing on that??" Nothing crazy here, just hunting bugs on TempleOS.

I see a market for a machine like this but done better. The just write or whatever branding they are using checks a lot of boxes but the price is insane.

I think I'll just rig up Atom to work a little bit more like Scrivener.

<comment><USER78> [https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

I remember something like this being announced a few years ago called The Hemingway. This is what I found when I DDG'ed The Hemingway typing machine.

<comment><USER77> Yeah these are the guys I was referring to when I wrote Just Write. Their prices are still insane. Plus are they ever going to release the traveller? I'm pretty sure it's been listed as presale for 2 years now. My neo2 was $40 CDN with shipping. Paying like 20x that for something which is just a tad bit nicer is kind of wrong. You've either got to be a working novelist to justify the cost or like someone whose been sitting on the same handful of story premises for 20 years but never finished anything you know like I'm gonna throw down $700 on this thing because I'm actually really very serious this time about writing a book. No thanks. Laptop will do here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> This is interesting but I wonder whether no fewer and fewer folks remembers the pleasure of writing by hand with a nice fountain pen in a nice notebook. Not being able to edit also forces one into a different writing mode.

<comment><USER80> I've never had good handwriting, and I find the process makes my hand tired pretty quickly, so for me there is nothing to remember.

<comment><USER79> I hear you but this is true of typing on a keyboard for some:RSI. Last time I was doing a lot of hand writing was in college and my writing has gotten way worse since because of lack of practice. But, I remember not having to think much about writing, my hand had a brain of its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> GRR Martin still writes in DOS with WordStar: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502)

</comment><comment><USER81> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100)

</comment><comment><USER82> A very similar productivity trick, to having a separate 'office space' when working at home. Triggers the mind to enter work mode, and minimizes distractions.

<comment><USER79> Of course it does but for many the problem is affordability so I'll take it as a nice to have luxury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> How safe is your text on this? What if this thing breaks or has some glitch? Is there some form of cloud backup? I'd be terrified of losing data to this thing.

<comment><USER45> If you read the article, you'll learn the only method of getting data off the device is via usb connection to a host computer.

<comment><USER83> You caught me, I didn't read the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Are there any OS projects that would turn a computer into a word processor like this? Seems like a nice way to bring an old laptop back to life.

<comment><USER84> Answering my own question: [https://raymii.org/s/blog/Vim_as_PID_1_Boot_to_Vim.html](https://raymii.org/s/blog/Vim_as_PID_1_Boot_to_Vim.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> ThinkPad X40 is the perfect machine for this. I'd love to see a dedicated disro with only writing + simple local and/or network backup.

</comment><comment><USER86> for similar reasons, I swear by my Remarkable tablet.

</comment><comment><USER87> The keyboard in question is a 1993 AlphaSmart device

<comment><USER88> The author is using a 2007 model from eBay, but it is cool to see the technology from my childhood classroom almost 30 years ago persist. I definitely wrote a few elementary essays on these in my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> My first thought when looking at this thing was neck pain.

Personally, I would be in rough shape if I used this thing for more than 15 minutes.

<comment><USER77> I actually don't look at the screen when I'm typing on mine. I'm like zoning out when I use it.

I write my first drafts on my MacBook in a similar way where I turn the screen off and type away.

<comment><USER89> Wow that's pretty cool insight to a writer's process. I'm not sure that ever would have occurred to me

<comment><USER77> If you're thinking of trying it, I recommend having soft targets for scenes or chapters. Some kind of direction. Also it takes a bit of time for the engine to start running. At first it's kind of weird and you'll be prompting yourself with like "what's next what's next" anxiety but if you tough it out for about 15 minutes then the dream logic kicks in. All these cool things float up from the subconscious. Lots of typos,too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Serious question: does anyone writing professionally or as a hobby use voice input as main input device? Why?

</comment><comment> kalium-xyz I wonder how you could modify one of these to be more suited for writing code.

<comment><USER79> Upgrade to a laptop, boot up into a stripped down verison of your OS

<comment> kalium-xyz Not what Im looking for, a laptop is both too overkill and to underkill on the battery life

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> similar devices [https://www.are.na/laurel-schwulst/free-writing- devices](https://www.are.na/laurel-schwulst/free-writing-devices)

</comment><comment><USER92> Tired of links to paid content, pay walls, Admiral anti-ad blocks.

</comment><comment><USER93> Hardware is a useful abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER94> Digital minimalism!

</comment><comment><USER95> Posting paywalled-articles in HN should be highly discouraged...

<comment><USER96> [https://outline.com/PzjuRt](https://outline.com/PzjuRt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I think folks here might enjoy the idea of cyberdecks

reddit.com/r/cyberdecks

<comment><USER10> Am I doing something wrong, or is that subreddit essentially empty?

Also, aren't cyberdecks the complete opposite to these devices? They strike me as a multi-purpose device like any laptop, but in a different form factor and maybe a bit more optimized for hardware hacking?

<comment><USER97> I linked to the wrong sub, there shouldn't be an s on the end

I would say that cyberdecks can be whatever you want. I've seen some single- purpose form factors like network testing or radio telemetry before</comment></comment></comment>