Dear Apple, let's talk about photos - <AUTHOR> http://peternixey.com/post/49928526270/dear-apple-lets-talk-about-photos <comment><USER3> I haven't really tried iPhoto personally for photos taken with my phone, since I have an Android. And my girlfriend has an iPhone, but with a Windows computer, so she hasn't either. Because of that, the whole iPhoto ecosystem (and photostream) have never been an option for either of us anyway.

I had gone on the search for a similar service to what he describes, but with the added requirement that I want to own my cloud copy of my photos and not give up my photos to some unknown 3rd party (I'd have no problem letting Apple or Amazon keep a copy of my photos, but other than that, I'd be cautious).

I found the Open Photo Project (<http://theopenphotoproject.org/>), and it seems pretty cool so far. It's an open source app to store your photos on your own S3, Dropbox, Box.net, or DreamHost account, and give you cloud backup and access, and they have an iOS app with an Android version coming soon. And they just launched Trovebox (<https://trovebox.com>) which is their hosted option if you don't want to install Open Photo on your own server. Trovebox already has both an iOS and Android app, and also APIs. I'm just surprised I have seen either one mentioned here.

<comment><USER4> Founder of OpenPhoto / Trovebox here.

Correction, our iPhone app has been out for a year and our Android app for 6 months. Go get them [1][2]!

Somehow this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Even Google with as many integrated services as they have (gmail, picasa, G+) don't look like they're going to really solve it.

If there's one thing people are opinionated about, it's their photos. Some refuse to rely on the cloud. Others refuse not to have iPhoto as part of their workflow. There's about 50 of these...

Our approach has been quite different. We first focused on making sure your photos are portable. Whoever you choose today to store and keep all your photos is probably not who you're going to be using in 10 years. I'm surprised that HN doesn't really zero in on this. Closed systems are just a temporary solution for a problem that's getting exponentially worse.

Using Trovebox you can decide to change your storage provider at any time. We move your photos for you. Your web links, iPhone and Android apps continue to work as if nothing ever changed.

We haven't even scratched at the surface of the problem though. There's organization, sharing, etc. needs which we need to continuously improve on.

The parent didn't link to our source code so I'll include that here, <https://github.com/photo>

P.S. We're funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation (big huge shoutout to them)

[1] <http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-android> or source @ <https://github.com/photo/mobile-android>

[2] <http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-iphone> or source @ <https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios>

<comment><USER5> I just push my photos up to an SFTP on a home server, which also pushes it to an encrypted offsite backup.

This has the advantage of working equally well for code(git repositories and everything being just directories with files), photos, videos, audio samples/tracks... anything which we're used to representing as files on UNIX-y systems.

I really don't understand why we need to jettison the boatloads of wonderful work which has been done to support files on UNIX, in search of a frontend interface difference for people(yes, many people) who don't understand files.

<comment><USER4> Not sure I understand completely. But I'm taking a stab...

For something like photos the interface is a very big problem. The UNIX file system, for example, doesn't help to visually organize tens of thousands of files (photos). There has to be a layer on top of that.

FYI, OpenPhoto supports a variety of "file systems" including the local file system or anything which can be mounted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's ridiculous how un-Apple-like Photo Streams are.

They solve one problem of sharing your photos across all your devices for VIEWING, but not for organizing/editing/deleting. It just creates copies of your photos everywhere. It's not a centralized place where you can keep your "good, sorted, organized, edited" photos with all the bad photos deleted.

Photo Streams actually adds problems. If you want to completely delete a photo you just took (it turned out bad), you have to delete it in TWO places instead of one.

Dropbox does a much better job at the latter (assuming you have enough space for your photos on it; I do).

To solve this problem, you need to create a good "home" for people's photos. Right now, the Camera Roll remains the only viable home, but it has many downsides (unable to be accessed or edited from other devices, can't manually add older photos).

Basically, with Photo Streams, Apple violate the DRY principle [1] and it creates more problems than it solves.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself>

<comment><USER7> One of the original reasons I switched to a Mac back in 2008 was iPhoto. The automatic event splitting by date struck me as brilliant--it was exactly what I wanted most of the time. Multi-day events were easy to merge.

At the time, Apple also had a great online gallery that made it simple to share photos. Flickr was (and still is) overly complicated in comparison. That's been gone for years and is kinda sorta back as shared photo streams.

So your comment about how "un-Apple-like" Photo Streams is so damn true. C'mon Apple, figure this shit out.

<comment><USER8> Kind of amazing that they don't do automatic events on the phone. It seems like an obvious natural thing to group together photos that share a common location and time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So you want: \- unlimited storage for a large collection of images \- additional unlimited storage for an acceleratingly large archive of video \- minimal local caching and, likely, very responsive UI \- to do me the favor of profit at $5/mo

I can't get past the entitlement attitude that one should be able to archive unlimited amounts of 1080p 30fps video for $5/mo. 178MB/min. Average youtube video is 4+minutes. That's >700MB per video.

Even at scale, Amazon s3 is .055/GB, so it'd be over $5 just to store 100GB, let alone run the SaaS platform and related overhead. Sure, that's an Amazon retail price for storage, but I don't see how $5/mo. is profitable once everyone is auto-syncing cat videos and their gangam harlem thrift shop videos.

<comment><USER10> S3 is overkill for this. If its just storing images you don't need all those 9's for durability/availability that Amazon offers. Could easily do unlimited for $60 a year. There's cheaper services that do unlimited for less than half that price like imgur.

<comment><USER9> I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing.

Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video.

When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe 1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem.

This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.

<comment><USER11> I really don't throw in video like it's nothing. What I intended to highlight was that for 99% of users, the perception of what they get should be unlimited even if there are fair-use policies.

I don't expect that a $5/user/month model is going to support Chase Jarvis' needs. However I do imagine that at $5/user/month 90% of users will actually be very profitable for Apple as they'll use way less than the available amount.

The fair-use limits can therefore be relatively high as they're subsidised by the majority of people who don't use that much.

My point about wanting "unlimited video" was not that I expected to store my entire film collection on there - only that as a 90-95 percentile user I want to be able to do the stuff I do every day without worrying about low limits. I don't mind if there's fair-use limit I just want to be sure that I can do a "fair" amount before hitting it.

All of this is also putting to one side the fact that this is a 20 year investment for Apple. Data costs don't seem to fall inline with Moore's law but they still fall crazy fast. It was only 10 years ago we didn't have S3. Even now if the RAW files were stored on an Amazon Glacier equivalent ($0.01/Gb/month) while screen-quality versions were stored in a hot cache you could provide high dataplans with much lower costs than putting things in tier 1 S3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the single biggest technology related point of pain in my life, as well as the lives of many people I know.

Snapjoy looked like it was on track to fix the problem, then Dropbox acquired it and appears to be doing something...

But it really shocks me to see Apple fail to address these core problems in update after update.

The worst part is that if you have a photo in the photo stream and try to import photos from the phone into iPhoto, it warns that the photo has already been copied. Then if you delete it from the phone it's still not in iPhoto, and photos in the photo stream get deleted after a month or two. I estimate that I've lost a few hundred photos due to this boneheaded design.

Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.

<comment><USER13> It sounds like you (and possibly the author of the article) turned off the iPhoto option to automatically import photo stream images to your library. See: <http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2712>

Other than videos not being included (yes, that's annoying), it does exactly what I need. Am I missing some other aspect?

<comment><USER14> Doesn't it require that you plug in the iPhone/iPad via USB cable?

<comment><USER13> Nope. All photos (and screenshots) are added to iPhoto automatically as long as iPhoto is actually running, even if the iPhone is on wifi in a different country, meaning its not just a local sync. Only videos require physical cable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Add a family to this and it only compounds. My wife takes pictures with her phone, I take pictures with mine, we've got a Sony NEX that I took 4,500 pictures with last year (we traveled a lot), not to mention the years of photos from before...

And unlike a "normal" person, I want to review and edit this stuff in lightroom. Perhaps dropbox is the solution, but I've probably got something like 120GB of photos... and only 132GB of space there. Now what... I have to pay still more to dropbox to get their 200GB plan.

I'll be buying a NAS in a couple weeks. This should be awesome, but wait, I want the wide integration that dropbox provides. Is the solution to save everything to dropbox and move it out on a regular basis onto the NAS?

In short, I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby. (And worse, based on this thread, no one seems to have solved it)

<comment><USER16> Learn to delete. Not right away, but go through old stuff at least, and be a snob. Your mileage may vary, but the delete button is my number one photography tool. I now actually have less photos than I had after, say, 3 years; simply because my standards of what I consider a keepers rise. I still totally suck at photography, but I have become very good at deleting, even if I say so myself, so people sometimes think I'm quite decent ^^ Maybe try it out with moving them at first, to get a feel for it.

<comment><USER17> Oh man...that's hard to do though. Deleting photos isn't for the faint of heart.

<comment><USER16> I know.. I never take it lightly. But I also never regretted it either, probably because I really do spend some time on making that decision, and know I would do it again. Excuse the bragging, but by now I can even delete songs! Super crappy "songs", mind you; but it was near impossible for me at first. It's liberating however, and with photos just plain necessary IMHO.

You are not actually killing that person, or destroying that object; you are just deciding which one(s) of the photos of that moment or mood capture it best, and delete the ones which are just slightly worse variations of those.

It takes time though, that is a real cost. Though I think that time is made up for down the road, when you don't have to wade past the photos you deleted, or wait for them to upload/download/backup, etc... even a little bit of self- discipline adds up to quite a bit over a lifetime of digital photography. I think of it as removing weed so the flowers are more enjoyable, and have a greater probability of actually being seen (photographs are kinda useless when they are not seen other than by the bulge they create in the pagination; flickr is like a graveyard where good photos go to get overlooked in that way).

<comment><USER18> I've noticed that I never go back to looking at old photos. If I've been off at a special event - holidays, a conference a wedding etc, I take any photos / video that I took, and edit it into a short film using iMovie. Because the film has been curated and worked, it is generally of higher quality than the raw shots, and as a result I have noticed that I tend watch the resulting films far (two orders of magnitude?) more often than the raw photos.

I've been doing this for a about 5-6 years now, so about 3 years ago I started deleting the raw shots a few months after having finished the film. To date I have not once regretted deleting a photo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love the iPhone camera. I have largely stopped using my other cameras because the iPhone camera is just so convenient.

However, the iPhone Photo App is extremely terrible. Everything exists in the Camera Roll, and you can't physically move them from there, so you have to search through the entire Camera Roll every time. I have 4000 photos and videos, and trying to find anything is impossible, to the point where I have given up. They have Albums, but those are merely pointers, so it doesn't really help organize the Camera Roll itself. Plus, you can't do simple things like see when the photo was taken, or search only for videos. You should be able to pull up a calendar, and see the number of photos on a per day, per month, or per year basis. It seems to be another example of an app that the developers themselves don't use extensively, otherwise they would fix these simple issues.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's true, you can create more albums on the device and move photos to those albums?

<comment><USER21> You can, but they stay in the central photo roll.

<comment><USER22> They stay in the "Photo Library", not the "Camera Roll", which is meant to hold just the photos you've taken since your last sync to iPhoto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Post like these, about Apple's ecosystem, are like a jab in the gut. I know, I know, that I should have not invested time and resources into a closed loop, but it stinks that what I thought was the correct thing to do, is wrong. I have slowly transitioned to using other services. I use Android, and have a Surface RT. I figured that if I own devices from separate ecosystems, it will make me find a better solution for my needs.

For example, using Google + to store all my photos. It keeps them organized and in the cloud. If I so happen to need them, I can download them all or individually. I started using Skydrive for documents, and its been great so far.

<comment><USER24> Because things are better elsewhere? Photos are in my top three reasons for owning a smartphone, so if you have a solution, my aperture is open wide!

<comment><USER25> Well, Windows Phone uploads photos to skydrive and you can sync skydrive onto your desktop/tablet,etc.

<comment><USER26> It syncs nicely out of the box, in fact using a WiFi sync'ing SD card, SkyDrive now even supports my Pentax Proprietary RAW format images. Pretty damned cool, take a photo and when camera is next in WiFi, it appears on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop.....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I could not agree more, the whole iPhone, iPhoto (mac), photo stream situation actually confuses the hell out of me. We're generally smart people on HN and if we don't get, try explaining it to parents and it's a whole world of confusion - normally ending with "You suggested we buy Apple because it was simple to use". My only reply at the moment is "Yeah, I know ... it's complicated".

To anyone making closed ecosystem comments, it's even harder to explain how to do any of this photo management to a parent (the dominant market with disposable income at the moment) with Android and Dropbox.

There really is no way back from "So wait, your telling me Google is IN my phone and so people can search my photos?"

</comment><comment><USER28> Amen. I'm right in the middle of figuring out how to set my mother up with an iPad - as her only computer. No mac, no iTunes sync.

The only problem? She's got an iPhoto library almost as large as the iPad drive, and there's currently no way to store her iPhoto library remotely.

I'm looking at Space Monkey - but it's not clear yet just how it works or if it will be a truly seamless experience. (People like my parents can't be bothered to manually move photos around - it just needs to work.)

NB: In my research, I've noticed that 99% of iPad users think iCloud backs up all their photos on all devices, which of course it does not.

<comment><USER28> Everpix is mentioned in another comment. I tried Everpix last year, and it looks like since then they've made it possible to basically store photos in the cloud (without keeping a local copy). Could be an option...

<comment><USER29> Don't want to keep banging on about it, but yeah Everpix is the solution. Install it on the desktop and Sync the iPhoto library. Install the Everpix app on the iPad, £3 a month, job done.

<comment> brown9-2 From their website, I see no mention of how much quota or space you get to store photos with them. Am I correct to assume that you have infinite space?

<comment><USER29> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This isn't even an Apple specific use-case.

There's real opportunity for Dropbox (if they stopped syncing everything everywhere), or Flickr (if they suddenly made really great native clients) to sew this up.

Google probably hasn't a chance in hell given the neglect that they're showing to Picasa.

<comment><USER31> Isn't Google+ pretty good for photos? You can even auto-sync photos to it. In fact it was one of the very first to do it, long before Dropbox and iCloud.

<comment><USER32> Google+'s photo sharing/storing system is great. Unfortunately, right now you have to use a third-party app if you want your G+ Instant Upload album to automatically sync to a Google Drive folder. I'm surprised Google hasn't added this feature yet. Perhaps they are intentionally refraining in order to try to induce people to share on G+?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm really praying for them to do something about this. I don't know anyone who's happy with the current situation. We're all lost and in heavy "photo debt".

<comment><USER34> Absolutely. I gave both iPhoto and Aperture a spin, but they're really really horrible when it comes to managing copies and eating drive space.

In the end I settled for using the OS X "Image Capture" to transfer .jpegs and .mp4s into my own directory structure, so I can rsync it to my linux backup server or copy them to an USB drive and _see the images are there_, instead of some magic "photo.library single-file-folder-hidden-contents".

And then I settled for Picasa to browse them. I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews.

Unfortunately Picasa still wants to cache thumbnails and it takes up quite some space, but I'm still coming out ahead.

Photo streams are a brilliant idea, but horribly executed. The article hits the nail straight on the head.

<comment><USER35> > _I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture > thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews._

Presumably you know you can turn both of those off and not use any space for them at all, just gen on the fly from the JPEGs own built in preview.

<comment><USER34> I looked around really hard for this option but failed to find it. Where is it?

<comment><USER35> I'm on the road, can't verify where it is, but off top of my head, right click the project, disable generate previews. May also be in File menu when a project is selected. Be sure to turn off auto generate previews on import. There are tons of blogs about this, Google for screenshots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I also tried using the Dropbox backup approach but it's a massive waste of time syncing endless photos to multiple devices. I don't actually want the files on all my devices, I just want them stored somewhere I can access them later.

So I've started using <https://www.everpix.com/> backup from multiple sources Facebook, Flickr, iPhoto, Insagram etc, finds de-duplicates and I don't have to ever worry about running out of storage.

<comment> brown9-2 It's a bit annoying since you have to opt each device out, but you can use the Selective Sync feature in Dropbox to _not_ sync your photos folder to each device that you have Dropbox installed on.

<comment><USER29> Yup, but I'm right in thinking that also prevents you from adding new photos on that device?

Current setup is to use the Dropbox Camera Sync with Everpix, then just cull the start of the folder when it gets over 5GBs / every few months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you find Photostream confusing you don't need to use it. Simple as that. It's not even activated by default, you have to turn it on the first time you try to access it.

If you don't activate it, you phone keeps working the way it used to: you sync to your computer and thats that. There are third party apps that will let you upload to Dropbox and google+ if you prefer those as repository.

Now, the thing is that you want the convenience to have PhotoStream without worrying about space constraints. Ever.

iPhoto automatically creates a folder with all last month's Photostream pictures and I think thats default behavior, unless you purposely turn it off. To me, thats the most "smart" sync can get, unless you want Apple to store every photo you ever took, forever, in their servers. Having around 400 million iOS users worldwide this seems to me a little unrealistic at the moment. Maybe someday.

But for me the key here is just being able to delete your own content. You don't expect the memory card in your camera to last forever, you periodically format it. You don't expect your download folder to hold everything you download forever. Every now and then you go in and clean around. Your phone (ioS, Android or whatever) is no different. Go into that Camera Roll and start cleaning around.

Unless you turn it off the option all the photos are already in iPhoto, ordered by month (something like "Sept XXX Photostream"). If you turned it off, just impoert all the photos before deleting to make sure you don't end up loosing any pics.

I agree on the video, though. Photostream needs to start syncing videos as well.

<comment><USER37> I agree with you. I'm a little confused about the "outrage" about Photostream.

It's basically just a wireless USB cable that automatically imports into iPhoto based on the month. It's actually been 100% perfect for me. When I plug my phone in using USB to transfer the videos over, it tells me that it already has all the pictures, then it imports the videos, then offers to remove the already synced photos and videos from my phone.

Once everything is in iPhoto, I have been curating an album from a vacation then sharing it with myself using Shared Photostreams. That way I have the trimmed down and edited album available on my phone and iPad.

Maybe people are asking it to do something it was never designed to do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 1) Pick a closed ecosystem

2) Have a non-standard use case

3) Beg Ecosystem owners to change to meet your needs

<comment><USER11> Or, for another perspective:

1\. Pick the best (free) iOS management tool for the job at the time

2\. Invest eight years of curation and 70Gb of photos in it

3\. Use the setup with more than one device and the same way that 20M+ other users use it

4\. Expect that I shouldn't have to be a contortionist to continue to do so

<comment><USER39> > 1\. Pick ... iOS ... for the job at the time

And voila, you have found yourself a closed system which wont let you treat your data as yours, just as pointed out in the comment you replied to.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out that Apple has a closed solution here, and that the solution is seriously lacking.

<comment> brown9-2 What are the complaints in the original article about not being able to treat your data as your own?

The complaints as I read them are about pain points in syncing and accessing the different photos you have spread across different Apple devices, and how whatever sync features exist today ("Photo streams") exacerbate rather than improve the situation.

<comment><USER40> All of them, I think. If any vendor were allowed to drop photo management software (as a first class citizen) on Apple machines, software that would even be allowed to manipulate their current cloud library through an open API - would anybody be asking Apple for anything?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For me, photo storage had become so incredibly complex that I ditched the entire effort and piece-mealed my own.

Here's my workflow:

1) Take photo from my iPhone

2) CameraSync.app automatically uploads the pictures & videos to Dropbox when I get home (Geofencing & wait for wifi)

3) Computer Automation automatically sorts photos into Dropbox/Photos/YYYY/MM folders (Hazel, DropIt, etc). Videos go into external folder (Outside of dropbox)

4) Manual verification of photo upload & delete from camera roll (unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow automatic deletion of photos)

No huge photostream (only a few small shared photostreams). Not tied to a single platform (Mac/PC/iOS/Android/WinPhone/etc). No slow apps (iPhoto). No databases to corrupt, just folders of pictures. Easy access through the Dropbox app. Easy backup & restoration (Dropbox + CrashPlan).

This system can easily expand to accommodate other cameras too.

</comment><comment><USER42> I've noticed this about iPhoto too. I was a mac user, but recently switched to linux on my laptop when I realized iPhoto/Aperture were the only things keeping me on OS X, and I didn't really like how they worked.

Does anyone have suggestions for a linux photo manager? I'd like an easy way to view/rate/tag/delete pictures, a sane file system storage structure (i.e. not like iPhoto), and a way to make "albums" out of a bunch of pictures that aren't in the same directory. I'm not too concerned about sharing/etc, as there are plenty of other web-based tools for that.

Open source would be nice (and maybe I should write this...), but I'm happy to pay for something if it will do what I want.

<comment><USER43> I'll throw in a recommendation for gPhoto; while old and pretty bare bones, it does sane storage structure (customizable, actually), not some silly database. The album export will create static albums you can then upload by hand (or just have them written out to an SSH mount on your web server).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> For anyone having this problem, check out MyShoebox. It's exactly what Peter is suggesting, plus it works on Android and Windows as well.

1) Full collection in the cloud with access or upload from any device 2) Unlimited backup... for free! Okay, slight caveat, the free plan is downsized, but for $5 a month it keeps original resolution. 3) A merged camera roll across all devices (including old devices) 4) API coming soon 5) Lots of clever auto-sorting. We search and sort on about 25 filters, and use that data to automatically find interesting sets to surface on the explore page

<http://shoeboxapp.com>

<comment><USER45> Unfortunately MyShoebox - even the paid, "Pro" tier - limits photos to 20MB per image. It also only supports JPEG and PNG formats, not RAW. Both of these constraints prevent usage by photographers with modern DSLRs.

<comment><USER46> I don't think they're going after the photographer market. It's more for regular people who take photos with their iPhone, etc. A ton of people don't shoot RAW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> iPhoto is the worst, just a straight up terrible photo management program. Adobe Lightroom is not that expensive and is far and away better - mainly for the fact that it actually allows you to manage your photo files, instead of hiding them god knows where. Also, it doesn't cache your entire collection of photos so I can actually open and use Lightroom with 14k+ photos. iPhoto would shit the bed and crash my computer if I tried to do that.

<comment><USER48> But you still can't do what he wants to do, which is pretty straightforward:

1\. Photos he takes are added to a library automatically (for internet connected devices).

2\. That library exists in the cloud.

3\. He can access that library from all of his devices.

I also have this problem, and I'd add a 4th point: Please let me back up the cloud based library.

You can't do this with lightroom, either.

<comment><USER49> You can get close. Check out Photosmith (<http://www.photosmithapp.com/>).

Btw, Lightroom has a scripting interface using which I'm pretty sure you can roll what this guy wants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Not really sure what he means.

Apple isn't using smaller and smaller drives for the MacBook Air. The current release goes up to 512GB which is the max so far. And 10 years worth of high res photos and movies is always going to take up space. Why doesn't he just buy an external hard drive like a normal person or use Dropbox/S3 etc ?

<comment><USER34> Last time I tried aperture/iphoto, it created ~30gb of worthless thumbnails and previews out of a ~20gb photo library. That hurts on a 256GB macbook air (largest size available about a year ago). Plus, the Apple photo apps seem to go to great lengths to hide where photos are physically stored, as if you're not supposed to think about .jpeg files or volumes.

<comment><USER50> Thumbnails get generated because most cameras are outputting multi-GB JPEG/RAW which take too long generate in real time on low end Macs whilst scrolling the thumbnail view.

And Apple apps don't go to great lengths to hide photos. They are stored in your Pictures folder in a package e.g. Aperture Library. Just right click and your photos are there. Packages are great for inexperienced users since it is easier to backup and less opportunities to mess up the metadata.

<comment><USER34> I thought most camera JPEGs contained a thumbnail in the EXIF. And there's absolutely no reason to store 1024x1024 "preview" versions either, or whatever it is it is doing to to take up so many gigabytes. Last time I looked at iPhoto, there were no obvious ways to move images around volumes (in fact, there were no obvious ways to even have folders within folders) (actually - <USER2> don't think it even supports folders; the "albums" it generated seemed to be only stored in some opaque hidden meta-database? Talk about lock-in!)

<comment><USER50> It is up to individual cameras to support thumbnails and the resolution either way is postage stamped. The large 1024x1024 previews are for the large thumbnail view of your photos/albums (try it in iPhoto and you will see).

And the metadata is stored inside the iPhoto/Aperture library package. For Aperture at least it is an open standard XML file so there is no 'lock in' what so ever.

<comment><USER34> Ah yes, I'll just tell my mom to write an XML-parsing script to move the files around in case she ever changes her setup. ;)

And even Finder quicklook seem to render the full .jpegs just fine and fast enough, so wasting so much disk space on a useless preview/thumbnail feature (to me) is a dealbreaker. I'd even be willing to accept missing or postage stamped thumbnails, rather than having to uninstall applications and remove music to make room for my photos.

<comment><USER35> Thankfully, your deal beaker is accounted for, just turn off thumbnail and preview generation, done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Hear Hear. Currently I just don't bother with curating pictures I've shot, aside from tweeting or facebooking them at the point I take them.

</comment><comment><USER52> In this thread we learn that Apple is really bad at sync. Again.

The problem is that Apple seemingly cannot escape from the users- owns-1-computer-which-is-the-master-to-1-iPod setup from eons past.

<comment><USER35> Apple is not bad at sync. I have run nearly 100k photos through photostreams without a single glitch. I have thousands of photos in shared photostreams (dynamic albums) shared to a dozen family members without a single glitch. Set and forget, just works.

What I learned for this thread is a few people have obviously gathered that all this works great, most have not. So Apple needs a good best practices guide to cover the use cases between casual and pro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> And iTunes... My wife spent hours last night trying to clear PodCasts off her iPhone. There are setting for how many episodes to keep in: iTunes, iPhone Settings, the individual PodCast in iTunes, and on the individual PodCast in the iPhone. How these settings play together, well, who the heck knows!

</comment><comment><USER54> > MacBook Air so that after 10 years of taking high-res photos and videos I > couldn't actually fit them on your my desktop hard drive

The MacBook Air isn't a desktop, and the iPad isn't a remote control for iPhoto. Besides, wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site backup. Also, Photo Streams aren't the only way to get things in to iPhoto, if that's not your flavor. Image Capture will pull the full files off the camera and iPhoto can import anything it understands from anywhere (like, ~/Pictures/ImageCaptureDump). A small change in workflow would solve this guy's problems.

<comment><USER8> >The MacBook Air isn't a desktop

True, barely anyone has a "desktop" anymore, so solutions shouldn't rely on it.

<comment><USER55> The HN bubble cracks me up sometimes.

Yes, most people still have a desktop.

<comment><USER8> Really? I think the HN bubble would lead to thinking _more_ people have desktops than laptops. Many casual computer users don't even have desks to put that desktop on, they just use a laptop on the couch, when they run into something they can't do on their phone or tablet.

<comment><USER40> Agreed. Since the days of the $400 laptop started, most non-techies I meet don't have working desktops anymore. Almost all techies I know have one or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Doesn't the dropbox instant upload already do this (one album\store that all devices have master access to)? I am not sure if it works on iDevices

<comment><USER57> It doesn't really work because of iOS's stupid ban on background processes. You have to start Dropbox and keep it open for it to sync photos ...

<comment><USER50> Dropbox WILL upload in the background for IIRC 10 mins as well as when you move around.

<https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en>

<comment><USER58> It's sad that companies have to come up with these kinds of hacks just to get around stupid limitations imposed by Apple.

I really regret buying an iPhone last year. I had been avoiding them for the longest time but at some point I needed a new phone and gave in because everyone keep touting how awesome and convenient it is. Well, maybe for an average layman but not for a power user.

My friend bought an Android for half the price of an iPhone and his phone feels like a spaceship compared to this fancy looking but ultimately extremely limited device. Apple my ass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Adobe Revel does all this for $5.99 per month. They have a free version for 50 photos a month. it syncs low-res version on iPhone for those out of sync cases.. see <http://www.adoberevel.com/>

</comment><comment><USER60> Funny, Google+ and my android phone do everything he just mentioned. Why not just switch ?

<comment><USER50> Google+ and your Android phone can manage 70GB of photos and ensure that they properly synced to multiple devices including a Mac ?

<comment><USER60> Yes, I don't have 70GB yet, but my Google Drive account currently has 100GB of allocated space in it. I can get up to 1TB If I want. I can access all of them from the gallery app on my phone ,and a web page on my desktop. I can print them via any number of services. Also if I use ChromeOS I have essentially filesystem native access to them.

<comment><USER61> With this setup, however, do you end up with local backups of the files? Whatever picture solution I choose, it's important that I have all the files local (because I still consider it a distinct possibility that Google will cancel my account someday ... accident or not).

<comment><USER60> No you don't which I count as a feature, but I understand the opposite side. I can export my photos locally, but already my photo collection is larger then the storage space on my phone, tablet or Chromebook so a syncing solution wouldn't help on those platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I switched over to picturelife.com for photo storage a few months ago, and it's the first photo management service I've been happy with in years.

It'll store your photos in your own S3 bucket if you want, and it'll automatically pull in photos from iPhoto and any other photos on your computer, as well as most popular services you might have photos on, like Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Also has nice iPhone and iPhoto apps, that will auto-upload photos from the device, and allow your browse and manage your library without requiring you to sync your entire library to your device [I believe].

</comment><comment><USER63> I just wanted to join the choir. I think its pretty clear that photo management has not been solved yet, which is quite surprising given the cultural importance of memories via photos/videos.

I actually think the same discussion arised 265 days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388242>

My story: I used to keep everything in iPhoto since it is quite intuitive and allowed me to manage my photos (60 Gig, videos take a ton of space). However, since there are more and more devices, I have been looking for a more future- proof solution. It didn't help that the export opportunities (metadata-wise) diminish with every version of iPhoto.

So right now, I have returned to folder-hirachy where the metadata is saved in the open iptc standard. Lightroom makes it really easy to keep your assets as future-proof as possible. Which is one of my biggest pet-peeves with most of the mentioned providers/solutions. They just don't have sufficient export options, and we ought to realize that any of them could die any day. Or video support is lacking which I cannot understand in the 21st century.

What I'm now looking for is a solution that allows me to backup my folder structure (I'm heavily leaning towards AWS Glacier), as well as allowing me to access them from a variety of devices. Like even a simple web-inferface would suffice. If someone could help me with my single biggest technical problem, I'd be forever in your debt.

</comment><comment><USER64> I guess this a little bit of a hacky, complicated way to do it, but I think it might solve part of the problem.

Setup a cheap VPS/Dedicated server to host all your images. A good example is BuyVM Storage VPS ($7/month for 250gb) or Kimsufi (10€ /Atom dedicated with 500gb HD).

From what I see, people don't want to sync their stuff so much as it's keeping a copy on their computer, but they want a on the fly solution to edit, modify pictures etc.

1\. Setup OwnCloud. Unless someone can think of a better solution, it's probably the easiest and there's already a iOS/Android app, so you sync all your pictures and what not.

2\. Setup Samba/AFP. This is pretty easy, it's a bit harder to setup Bonjour for Mac people, but it's not really necessary.

3\. (Optional) Setup a VPN, OpenVPN AS comes to mind as its simple as typing apt-get openvpnas (Debian guy here).

Now you would have your own private cloud for under $15/month. Of course if your outside Europe/USA like me the upload speeds are gonna be pretty crap and probably not good enough for Lightroom editing and whatnot, but if you are I reckon the speeds would be fine. I have both a BuyVM VPS and Kimsufi dedicated, and I can easily hit over 10mb/s download/upload on both instances.

<comment><USER65> Very complicated. That's why the OP went with an Apple solution, that he expected to "Just Work". Sadly, in this case, it doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I am going to go a little further and suggest that Apple's entire iCloud + iTunes + backup + synchronization strategy/system/product/code is a disaster.

Why? Simple: You cannot trust it. You need to be able to trust such software. I'm sorry, but you just can't in this case.

I won't go into all of the details, links and examples here. Do a little searching and it should not be too hard to find hordes of people who have lost calendars, contacts, notes, photos and other valuable data thanks to Apple's wonderful software.

I have personally experienced loosing all of my contacts, appointments, calendar items and notes. Of course, being that this ain't my first rodeo I had backups of the backups. I always go into data storage situations with zero trust for what is being offered. It took some work to get the data back but I recovered.

That is not the point. The first three rules of any piece of software that users entrust with their data are:

      1- Thou shalt not loose user data
      2- Thou shalt not loose user data
      3- Thou shalt not loose user data

Notice that cool hippie user interfaces are never mentioned there. My data (and your data) is far more valuable than their cool icons and "beautiful" design. Far, far more valuable.

Go ahead, Google it. The stories are horrific. From people loosing contacts to students loosing semesters worth of notes. Auto-magically.

I even went to my local Apple store to consult with a "Genius" about this. The guy was clueless. And, in fact, right in front of my eyes, he proceeded to accidentally delete all of my calendar entries --something that should be darn-near impossible to do. Again, I had my backup at home so I didn't blow a fuse. But, please.

I explained that it was not reasonable to blow away someone's data if their email service provider changed. If you go from Google to Yahoo all the shit that was being synchronized with Google goes poof. Really? Why? I would love to hear from someone at Apple on this. Why it is even remotely reasonable to blow away all of my contacts, notes and calendar information?

If you close your email account and you are no-longer able to log-on it seems iOS will attempt to synchronize, fail and then blow away your data. My wife has had cases of constantly disappearing notes and appointments due to failed synchronization sessions.

The greater point is that you should not have to be a programmer or IT worker to have your personal data be safe on iOS. She is not a technical person and without my help she would have descended into data loss hell. Grandpa and Grandma have no hope.

Anyhow, now iCloud and all forms of automated synchronization are turned off on all of our devices. Manual backup is still the only way you can be sure your data will not be lost.

<comment><USER67> Syncing all devices is fundamentally _wrong_ and broken. Apple won't get it right until they drop the concept.

Try controlling what music from your vast library is currently on your tiny iphone. It's a god damned nightmare. Apple wants to "sync" which is just the wrong paradigm.

My phone is not synced with my itunes library. It's just contains a very small subset of it. If I were to draw a Venn diagram of "all the things" it would contain my iphone5, iphone4, ipad3, macbook, other icloud data, plus data on Apple's servers about what apps and TV shows I own but currently do not exist on any device in my possession. Each circle in the diagram has varying degrees of overlap with all the other circles. Not a single one is fully contained in any other. To proclaim that all of these devices are "fully synced" is just plain wrong.

<comment><USER68> This is where Google's Play Music works much better - your music is in the cloud by default, but you can "pin" specific albums to have them stored on the device.

If you play some song that's not on the device, it will be streamed and then cached for some time till space runs out.

<comment><USER69> This is how iCloud works already, if all your music was bought from iTunes or if you're using iTunes match

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> hippee-lee I recently went through this as well. My wife and I shared iPhoto libraries for ~10 years and then they got to big.

So I started splitting them into multiple libraries. Then the libraries (with dslr video) filled up the hard drive and my wife had trouble finding pictures she knew were there (but not in the current library ) After this a a couple of other things I settle on out current strategy:

All old and new iPhoto libraries on an external HD connected to the home network. Aperture - I'm still learning how to use this so I can show my wife but it lets multiple people access multiple iPhoto libraries on multiple computers. The hard drive is wet her by the Crashplan daemon and everything gets backed up.

As for phones and tablets, I'm pessimistic when it comes to photo stream: I see it as nice but ephemeral and regularly import the device images into the libraries. We will see how it goes as I learn more about Aperture.

<comment><USER61> I found network access to an iPhoto library to be rather slow. Can you describe your setup? Is everything wired or wireless?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I think this is a much bigger problem than photos -- there's massive fragmentation in personal data storage. The thing is we all have online storage to put the photos in and there are companies that will give us more for a fee on the scale you're talking about (GDrive, Box, Dropbox). It's just tricky and a lot of overhead for developers to connect that storage to their apps.

We're working on this problem right now at <http://stashkit.co/>. We're trying to solve it by building a drop in cloud file browser where saving and loading file is just 2 lines of code and users can see all of their data in one place.

</comment><comment><USER71> I have over 20k photos in my iPhoto library. The problems he describes here are real. For me, it's more of a problem of retrieval. I want to search on more attributes than just date, location, face, and a flat tag structure.

Examples: show me... \- all of the photos of people from my uncle Harold's side of the family (cousins, etc.) \- all of the photos containing the blue car I used to own. \- all of the photos containing both person1 and person 2.

This would require a significant expansion both in the complexity of metadata as well as automated tagging. I wish Apple would make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER72> And don't even think about going down the path of multiple users sharing an iPhoto Library across multiple devices, because you know...I want/need a separate photo library than my wife.

</comment><comment><USER73> The solution I found for my photo workflow is that I've installed AeroFS on my computers and I store my latest photos from the last several months in that folder. It syncs across all of my computers, that way my wife and I can use Picasa or Lightroom and the photos load fast since they are on our local drives.

Since we store folders in a /year/month/ file structure we can easily move those to an external hard drive.

The whole thing backs up to CrashPlan. My entire collection is over 1.5 TB of photos.

</comment><comment><USER74> I took one look at how iPhoto stores the pictures years ago and said "no way" (same with storing my music in iTunes). My SMB network share has been working quite well for me, connect all my Windows and Mac computers and my Android phone and tablets to my share.. backed up to another USB drive. Has been working well for over a decade for me. iTunes and iPhoto are primary reasons I don't do Apple products.

<comment><USER75> Yeah, I had the same heartburn with iphoto years ago. I was still in the mindset of wanting to do file management myself. Now I'm buying in to the principle of letting the app manage the files in a DB. Or just generally taking file management away from user, but no one has really cracked the nut of how to that across multiple services and multiple devices.

<comment><USER76> You really do have to get over that psychological block about managing files to enjoy using iPhoto and Aperture.

Personally, I don't mind it, because it's one less thing to think about. I would prefer to buy a bigger drive than to worry about the placement of my photo files beyond the iPhoto/Aperture library package.

On the other hand, I know people with that file management mentality that hate, hate, hate iPhoto and Aperture's way of doing things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Iam a huge fan of apple, i got ipads, iphones, apple tvs, apple express, but i was only one time, disapointed for this lovely fruit.

In winter 2012 i go back from thailand with my ipad full of one month of photos and videos taken in those beautifull beaches. I lost all of it. My 16gb ipad took an update and erased everything. Only recovered the last backup before my one month trip, and some loaded in facebook. Sight!

</comment><comment><USER78> Smugmug.com is what you are looking for.

For $5 per month,($60 per year for a Power account), you get unlimited storage for photos and video. With third party apps -- SmugFolio on Android. I'm sure there is a similar if not better app for iOS -- you can manage your web-based portfolio using your phone, automatically upload photos to your account, and rate them. You also get access to great printing and other services.

Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER79> Snapjoy seemed to be taking the right approach to dealing with this issue. Dropbox bought them, so maybe this will end up a solved problem - though the last thing I want is to be able to 'sync' photos out of existence which is why Dropbox itself is a bad solution to photo storage. Agree that right now it's surprisingly hard to keep all your photos in one place.

</comment><comment><USER80> Anything called "synching" makes me cringe.

Synching to me means that there's a 50% chance it'll add the data, or delete it. And I've seen "synching" things delete things.

The only way your data can survive decades, is in a file system, with a backup disk, moving from machine to machine as you upgrade. Imho at least.

</comment><comment><USER81> Thank you! Hear, hear! And well put. Exactly. We've struggled with the same issues, not to mention the confusion added by iTunes sync. (My bad: should've kept iTunes' little sneaky fingers out of it.) Lots of duplicates, and over the years, quite a few MIAs.

</comment><comment><USER82> And I would also add... please give us the possibility to write plugins for iPhoto officially and give us some API for iCloud.

We love Apple products and we love the "just work" philosophy, but you should allow people to get out from the walled garden when they feel to.

</comment><comment><USER83> I have a high DPI monitor and need to zoom the text to 150% to make it readable. But on that website the text gets zoomed into the right margin in Chrome and off the screen in FF. Works fine on my iPhone. Something wrong with the CSS?

</comment><comment><USER84> I've stopped messing with iPhoto for the most part.

I now use the Image Capture utility that still comes on every Mac to transfer my pictures to the computer. That way I know where they are and I can import them to iPhoto myself if I feel the need.

<comment><USER85> Look into a referenced library for iPhoto. You can organize your photos on your hard drive as you see fit. And iPhoto will reference those files in place without duplicating the files when you import.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> UbuntuOne already solves those problems.

You can sync only the folders you want.

This is the list of clients:

      Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7
      Mac OSX 10.6 and higher
      Ubuntu
      Android 2.1 and higher
      iPhone & iPad iOS 3.1 and higher

</comment><comment><USER87> Apple mobile devices were never intended to be about being creative, it was always designed to be a consumer device.

The creative devices are the MacBook and iMac.

It's this reason you can't organise your songs on your iPod without using iTunes.

<comment><USER88> How is organizing your music "creative" and not a part of its "consumption"?

<comment><USER87> It's as simple as "doing" (creative) vs "using" (consuming).

It's the difference between, say writing notes (creative) and watching TV (consuming).

It's my understanding that this is the view that Steve Jobs took when creating these devices.

<comment><USER89> Your logic is wrong, because iPhones and iPads are creative devices where photos are created. Therefore, your understand of Steve Jobs intentions are wrong.

<comment><USER87> Yeah sure they are trying to play catch up now, as they underestimated how they would be used, but bare in mind first gen iPads did not have a camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> This sounds a lot like the problem we're trying to crack with our photo app suite 'unbound':

Http://www.unboundformac.com/dropbox.html

All your photos on Dropbox and synced to all you iOS devices and macs.

</comment><comment><USER91> Charge? Isn't everything free on teh interwebs? _haha_

On a serious note: you're completely right! iPhoto should be the next product that works exactly like you describe.

</comment><comment><USER92> Don't people have the same problem with other types of content, content produced by other tools, by other people, or in different social networks?

</comment><comment><USER93> Ah, when the firmly closed ecosystem turns against its master. That or Apple sucks at programming, I never quite know.

</comment><comment><USER94> I feel like the dmedia library made by the Novacut team solves exactly this use case.

Alas, it's tightly integrated with Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER95> Very well written - great read!

Maybe a nice side project to reverse engineer the process of uploading photos to the cloud!

</comment><comment><USER96> It's like a classic John Siracusa criticism, but without the eloquence. Can't disagree.

</comment><comment><USER97> That's it, keep walking, come to the Android side Peter.

</comment><comment><USER98> A-fscking-men.

</comment><comment><USER99> Apples price gorging on disk space is a complete joke when PhotoStream is needlessly duplicating all my photos.

</comment><comment><USER100> Do what everyone else does when they run out of space, buy an external HDD.

<comment><USER101> There are two problems with this. One, it's another physical device to manage which is a pain in the ass. Two, what happens if the external HDD breaks?

<comment><USER102> It reduces the triplicate pains in the ass caused by trying to manage three physical devices bought from Apple....

However, note that if you just move all your photos to an external hard drive, you don't have a backup.

<comment><USER101> No it doesn't. You still have those devices. They don't go away. Now you have expend time manually copying your photos to the device.

<comment><USER102> You can use backup/sync software to copy stuff across automatically. Otherwise, I didn't say your pain-in-the-ass idevices went away, I just said you could reduce their pain-in-the-assness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> True that!

</comment><comment><USER104> Hate to say it (not really, I love it), but "see, we told you so". This is what you get with closed platforms.

<comment><USER105> I'm not defending closed platforms, but... What open platform does it better?

<comment><USER106> People in this thread have had workarounds and solutions that would work but would not work on an iPhone. Such as leaving drop box syncing in the background. If you could change the background app policy...

Its not as much that another ecosystem is better, but that if yours is closed you will hit limits.</comment></comment></comment>


DNC was 'intimately involved' in development of troubled Iowa caucus app - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents-224407455.html <comment><USER2> As if people needed more reasons to believe that the DNC is going to manipulate the primary again[0].

[0] - [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/reminder-dnc- lawyers...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/reminder-dnc-lawyers-to- court-we-do-not-owe-voters-an-impartial-or-evenhanded-primary-election.html)

<comment><USER3> It would be helpful if you can tl;dr that article. It's very inside baseball.

<comment><USER4> It's inside baseball for the tinfoil hat crowd. The article is a conspiracy theorist's ravings about a hypothetical argument provided by the DNC's lawyers recorded in transcripts from [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/08/25/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/08/25/florida- judge-dismisses-fraud-lawsuit-against-dnc/). The claims of actual rigging have no evidence backing them whatsoever, so they cling to these hypothetical arguments as if what they describe actually happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just throwing the term "conspiracy theorist" around doesn't lend your comment any weight or value. The article is mostly a summary of a DNC lawyer's _own arguments_ that the DNC is not obligated to conduct a fair or transparent primary election to select the Democratic nominee. It's _their_ perspective, not a "conspiracy theory."

<comment><USER4> I didn't just throw the term conspiracy theory around. Pretending that the DNC's lawyers explaining the fact that the DNC can just choose its candidate in backroom dealings is equivalent to admitting that the DNC actually did choose its candidate in that manner and then manipulated election counts as the article and its commenters claim _is_ full-blown conspiracy theory.

Likewise, insinuating that the DNC rigged the Iowa caucus in some way merely because it drew up the contract for the voting app is also conspiracy theory. You can simply look at the contract and verify that they did not ask for rigging or the ability to change the app, only the ability to test the app and access its logs.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You can simply look at the contract and verify that they did not ask for > rigging or the ability to change the app

Hahaha. Anyway, most of the reaction I've seen to this is less of the "conspiracy theory" variety, and more, "wow Tom Perez and the DNC leadership are totally incompetent and need to be fired yesterday." Whether we reach that point through the "conspiracy theory" door or the "incompetence" door, it's obvious they need to go.

<comment><USER4> > Hahaha.

What part did you find funny? I wasn't joking. The article includes the contract.

> Anyway, most of the reaction I've seen to this is less of the "conspiracy > theory" variety

That is most of the reaction I have seen in this very thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see the problem at all here. Can someone tell me what the outrage is all about.

Suppose DNC didn't draw up such a contract. The company developed a product under tight wraps, its internals unknown to anyone else. All the n-1 candidates who didn't win would scream about transparency and vote rigging. The voting history of everyone on that dev team would likely be dredged up by someone or the other.

The DNC did the right thing. It is not to say that they don't find devious ways of promoting an inside candidate, but I think that in this case they had no other choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is, the fact that they had oversight and input into the production of such an absolute disaster of an app (meant for such a crucial vote as the Iowa caucus) means the people responsible should be summarily fired and replaced.

<comment><USER5> I agree. But incompetence and shadowy machinations are two different things. The DNC may well have both, but this episode doesn't prove the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a clown show. This is going to be 2016 all over again.</comment>


AngelList Braces for Rainy Days as Startup Seed Funding Falls - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-15/angellist-braces-for-rainy-days-as-startup-seed-funding-falls <comment><USER3> > Investors can buy a share of the fund, called the Access Fund, for $100,000 > or more.

This is really interesting to me, but I wish it were at a $10k level. That would be a no-brainer shift for me to move some money going into Vanguard into this, but I'm in that weird spot where I'm not rich enough to have $100k to toss around but am maxing out a Roth IRA and looking for more upside.

<comment><USER4> You can't really max out a Roth IRA (that's an illusion). Backdoor contributions are unlimited.

<comment><USER5> Weird, i thought its 5500/year. That's what you can do with betterment at least....

<comment><USER6> It is. All a backdoor Roth does is it gets around the income limits for Roth IRAs. If you make more than ~$130K per year, you aren't allowed to contribute.

With a backdoor Roth, you contribute to a normal, post tax IRA, then convert to Roth. However, if you have a rollover IRA, then you can't do it without taking a tax hit.

However, I have heard of people putting more than $5500 per year in a Roth. Search for it on the Bogleheads forum. I can't remember the details, but your employer needs to be on board as you contribute to a 401k, then do some conversion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Weird article. AngelList is raising money to make new investments and reports an unrealized 46% IRR, and that somehow makes for a gloomy story.

<comment><USER8> The real story is 46% unrealized returns on 2013 syndicate investments. Which is in the upper top quartile of VC.

And A-List, a premium recruiting product for busy companies. That complements our free recruiting product with 180K active candidates.

Down markets are a good time to invest, but we're not anticipating one.

[http://angel.co/returns](http://angel.co/returns) [http://alist.co](http://alist.co)

<comment><USER9> Care to elaborate on the methodology for how you pick companies? Does AngelList act like its own VC internally?

<comment><USER8> The fund invests in a subset of syndicated deals. About half of them historically. The investment team consists of experienced investors including Naval (my co-founder). Details here [https://angel.co/access- fund](https://angel.co/access-fund)

<comment><USER10> That's a nice advantage you have going -- normally access to the best deals is hard to come by, but by providing the tools by which stand out individuals can achieve leverage in their own deal making through syndication (you're both a technology provider and a channel marketing partner to them), you get their deal flow in return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The boom/bust assumption undergirding this Bloomberg article is belied by what AL is itself doing –– creating instruments that allow the private tech capital market to expand and contract in a fashion that is smoother and less stepwise.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to make a prediction. This isn't going to be popular, and it's only my opinion and doesn't constitute advice:

This fund will not earn its investors a positive return.

<comment><USER13> Not a great prediction unless you give a time window, too. 50% within a month? Six months? a year?

<comment><USER9> And the short term doesn't matter... 8–10 years, or whenever every company fails, sells, or IPOs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> this is absolutely ridiculous. there is next to no seed funding in existence. Let me tell you how the seed market for startups is: imagine you had a orchard, right, but instead of apples it grew dollar bills, and you just had to water them or they wouldn't grow. Under this scenario a guy with acres of dollar-tree bills could not get funding to water them with some kind of farm equipment. That's the state of the startup world.

You read all those PG essays about not dying? About bootstrapping? Well because it turns out the only way to capitalize a typical startup is to stand in front of your dollar-bill tree and urinate. Or organize some kind of free sporting event with the side effect of making people go piss on your trees. Then 97% of your trees die except the 5 you pissed on, but you can take them to the bank and next season repeat. That's how bad startup seed funding is.

You could not literally fund money growing out of thin air.

I sometimes think that the government should step in and fund these things (after all, even Tesla got gov't grants.) Because the private market sure as #@$% isn't.

EDIT:

 _This is already at -2 but I am keeping it without altering a word, because the downvoters are wrong and uninformed (or don 't understand the analogy), and I am right and well-informed, also it's a good analogy. It's not even close. Here is an example of someone in Europe describing this precisely:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883)

Notice the words "With a product like that, the second thing that we didn't expect was that we tripped the "too good to be true" sensor everywhere, raising doubts." (you might have to click parent from the comment I linked.)

It's not as bad in silicon valley as it is in Europe. But it's not that far- off either. There is next to no seed funding in existence. This is a fact. Downvoting me won't change it. Now at -3 after posting this update. Still right. Still not changing a word._

<comment><USER15> Your claim is ... what exactly? I'm not disagreeing - I'm just not following. That revenue is hard to come by for startups? That seed money for revenue-less company is getting more difficult for startups to raise? If so, where? In the US? In California? In Europe?

I've never dealt with any structured seed funds, but high net worth individuals that like to kick-start startups still appear to be active in the US...

<comment><USER14> >Your claim is ... what exactly?... That seed money for revenue-less company is getting more difficult for startups to raise?

That there is next to no seed money in existence, for companies, regardless of whether they are making money, and anywhere in the world (including California which by a large margin has the best funding climate for seed rounds.) That if you sum up the total amount of seed money it is next to nothing.

As an exercise you could try to add up the sum total yourself, and you will see it is next to nothing.

<comment><USER15> I guess you're mostly right. From a 2014 point-of-view. Seed funding in 2014 was abnormally high. Amateur hour levels of high. 2015 didn't pulled back much from that. I think that the market is showing some prudence given that we could well see the apocalypse of the unicorns any day now.

The various data sources I have access to (CB Insights, et al), tell me that it's down, but not gone. The fact of this article (AngelList's rainy day fund) means that people are starting to prepare for stormy weather. A storm that has not hit yet - but people are skitterish.

Tactically, on the ground, I haven't seen much pull back, but I'm not in CA or NY. And I prefer to get cash-flow positive ASAP, so I might be a little less sensitive to it than others.

Thanks for your response: you raise interesting points (esp. your linked EU funding scene thread - that was interesting) and digging into this will provide some necessary weekend diversion.

<comment><USER14> I was not making a year-over-year relative statement. 2014 levels also were next to zero. (Every year is next to zero.) I am making a much wider statement.

I asked you to sum up all seed funding in existence: what number did you get? (This is the number that I call next to zero.) It doesn't matter what year you pick.

<comment><USER15> Fair enough.

Since the rise of of on-demand data centers and software eating the world, Series A is the new Series B, and they expect some commercializable prototype (MVP) and customer traction before they'll talk to you.

So, even though Series A used to be called "Early stage" financing, I'm not sure it's fair to include it in what we used to call early stage any more.

So, to your question: sticking with angel/fund/corp seed, I don't know - <USER2> $10B or so in the US? You're right - that's pretty tiny. VC as an entire asset class is pretty tiny in the grand scheme of things (certainly very tiny for the amount of press it generates).

I'll take a look into the data this weekend, but I would guess that I'm in the ballpark of a binary order of magnitude with that guesstimate. Close enough to zero to make scrounging for it painful, I agree.

<comment><USER14> So I would agree that $10B in seed funding is next to zero, and yes, that is my point, however I think you are overestimating it by a (decimal) order of magnitude, and that is worldwide. I think worldwide there was less than $1B in seed funding in any year. That should be easier to falsify if you can do so! I would be interested in your data sources or methodology if you succeed in showing this.

<comment><USER15> That's an interesting claim!

I will go see what I can see. As for a starting point, I'll probably dig around CB insights, pitchbook, angellist, and the Center for Venture Research at UNH (New Hampshire). Then go from there.

If you are right, that's a very very interesting result.

<comment><USER14> all right! Definitely please don't include series A but personally I'm not sure whether I should consider kickstarter and co to be seed rounds - maybe? I am very curious about what you find in the sources you've already mentioned (without including series A rounds), though, and hope you will give an update!

<comment><USER15> I hadn't even thought of including kickstarter-and-friends, partly because the companies aren't selling equity. I'm not including any sort of corporate spin- out either.

The lines have gotten so blurry compared to 20 years ago (entrepreneural creativity in action?), so sorting out the wheat and chaff is harder. More data - less definition.

<comment><USER15> The thread is deep (as you say in this comment's sibling), so I will email the longer commentary...

Briefly, most of the published analysis is top-down and less is bottom-up. People seem to bundle Seed+Series-A in most places. There's a lot of talk about medians without a deal-count. There are counts for numbers of deals with a size exceeding some threshold, but that doesn't give us what we're looking for.

Here's a chart - US only: \- [https://files.pitchbook.com/images/Angel.Seed%20Activity.png](https://files.pitchbook.com/images/Angel.Seed%20Activity.png)

At about a thousand deals at about a million bucks, that's bumping the $1B mark, but doesn't break $2B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel like AngelList is a specialized social network with maximum utility ~10 years ago and for people who already know each other or are clearly in the same network, who basically use it as a less-spammy LinkedIn. I've had zero luck communicating with people over it and have frankly given up in favor of raising domestically here in China.

<comment><USER17> "less-spammy" is not how I would describe AngelList. Unfortunately, if you, as a user, allow it to access your email addressbook, it then starts regularly (days apart) spamming each address.

<comment><USER16> Good point. It's amazing what companies do under terms of service in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Meanwhile, AngelList is adding new ways for people to get into private- > company investing. With some 600 startups expected to raise money through > the website next year, AngelList said it's creating a sort of index fund for > young companies that will hold shares in 100 to 200 startups. Investors can > buy a share of the fund, called the Access Fund, for $100,000 or more.

This could be interesting. I wonder if it will be restricted to accredited investors or offered to the layman?

As always, of course there are no guarantees in startup returns, but spread over that many companies... well, I'm not sure what to expect. I guess it all depends on the returns and how they decide to pick companies. It could be a cool new take on index investing. Then again, I became wary of most things "cool" and "new" in investing.

<comment><USER10> You'd need to register the securities with the SEC of your going after non- accredited investors. I wonder if Angellist is going to go through that trouble.

One big advantage of only having accredited investors is that it allows you to not have to make such regulatory filings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is seed funding or seed funding through AngelList falling?

<comment><USER19> This link is just e-commerce, but chatter is the phenomenon is across the board:

[https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/e-commerce-deals- drop-q2-201...](https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/e-commerce-deals- drop-q2-2016/)

It's effectively Q4 of 1999 and I couldn't be happier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a startup and want to raise money. It just feels like listing on Angellist won't do anything, and I'm better off doing "offline" (emails) traditional way of raising. It just feels like good deals are done through emails and meetings not through a portal. At least for now</comment>


Elliptic Curves - <AUTHOR> https://math.mit.edu/classes/18.783/2015/lectures.html <comment><USER2> I've seen a few links to resources on elliptic curves on HN, but I don't understand their importance or why they're trending with folks here.

Can someone give me some context?

<comment><USER3> Ignoring many important details ...

Many algorithms for crypto and similar can be phrased elegantly and abstractly not in terms of the actual numbers, but in terms of what are called "Groups"[0].

A group is a set of things, and a binary operation that satisfies certain rules.

At first glance a group appears to be pointless abstract nonsense, but most of the properties of numbers that we use in, say, RSA, or Diffie-Hellman-Merkle- Williamson, or in factoring via Pollard P-1, use the fact that the numbers we are using are an example of a group.

The groups being used are usually:

* For DHMW, the integers modulo a large prime, or

* For RSA, the integers that are co-prime to the product of two large primes.

In each case the operation is multiplication modulo something.

So then we can ask if the same algorithms work if we use a different group instead, and whether the result will have better or worse characteristics. The answers to that are (1) yes, the algorithms work in other groups, and (2) it depends on the particular group or groups used.

So given an elliptic curve, it turns out that the points can form a group if we define a particular operation[1]. Then it turns out that the rational points form a group. Then we can convert that to work modulo a prime, and we end up with a finite group.

And that's exactly what we need to use some of our algorithms.

The question of whether this group is better depends, and is too long to fit in a single HN comment, but the main point is that there are many possible elliptic curves to choose from, and many possible primes to use, and so we have more choice. That alone makes it worth considering.

But the answer turns out to be yes, some of the algorithms have better characteristics on these new groups. For example, using elliptic curves we can use smaller keys for RSA or DHMW, and the elliptic curve version of Pollard P-1 is now the third fastest known factoring algorithm, and probably fastest over a certain range of sizes.

I would be happy to answer any questions, either here or by email.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_\(mathematics\))

[1] And augment the points, and avoid certain pathological curves

<comment><USER3> As to why they are trending ...

With recent(ish) leaks about what the NSA is doing in terms of breaking widely-available crypto, the question has arising about what weaknesses might exist in current classical techniques. RSA and DHMW have been around for a long time, and much is known about specific weaknesses. Some primes need to be avoided, for example in DHMW one should avoid primes P where (P-1)/2 has lots of small factors.

But all the elliptic curve cryptography is comparatively new, and weaknesses are still being found. It's plausible that there are simple things to avoid when choosing an elliptic curve, and so perhaps we should just use the elliptic curves recommended to us by security experts.

But after Snowdon, _etc.,_ people are becoming wary of trusting experts, so they want to know more about the implications of their choices, and what options they might have. This is an on-going issues, and now, as people are starting to understand the mechanics of implementing systems that use elliptic curves instead of just Z_p, so articles are being written aimed at the non- security-community people.

And so articles appear that are readable and relevant.

Just my $0.02

<comment><USER4> I'm going to push back a little on "new" and "weaknesses still being found". The underlying theory of curves and their hardness has been pretty stable for awhile --- since well before 2000, I think. More progress has been made against conventional multiplicative group Diffie-Hellman than has against curves.

The complicating factor isn't the curve problems themselves, but rather _implementation details_ , some of them particular to specific curves.

<comment><USER3> That's a reasonable point and I agree with you, but I think you've read into my comment something that's not there. I said:

>> _But all the elliptic curve cryptography is comparatively new, and weaknesses are still being found._

It's the elliptic curve _cryptography_ that's comparatively new, and the weaknesses are being found in the _full crypto package._ That includes, and in many cases is primarily in, the implementation.

So actually I think you're not pushing back, I think you're clarifying exactly what I said.

Of course, I may yet have misunderstood you, so feel free to add more. You certainly know more about this than I do, and I'm happy to learn (or have it clarified further).

<comment><USER4> Sure! I think we agree.

The whole field of misuse-resistant cryptography is very new, relative to the field as a whole. We didn't even have a usage model of cryptography that was sound until the later 1990s, when the connection was made between authentication and indistinguishability. It's only in the last few years that we've begun to prioritize constructions that make implementation bugs harder to blunder into.

Which is a long way of saying, that's true, but also still an issue relevant to RSA and DH and DSA.

I think the primary reason we read a lot about elliptic curves today is that the field has, at least to the extent that it's not directly promoting post- quantum algorithms, pretty much coalesced around curves as the best modern way to implement asymmetric cryptography.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the profusion of posted slides on the internet is a detriment to researchers everywhere. so many times i've googled something technical (CS, math, engineering) and what percolates to the top are lecture slides, which are almost useless for actual in depth learning.

edit: spoke too soon - only the first link is slides.

<comment><USER6> It believe mathematicians will continue to favor boards. Sitting in the audience I greatly prefer this; however, such lectures have less chance of being posted at all.

For this topic we are lucky to have Silverman's book [1], which everyone seems to like.

[1] [https://www.math.brown.edu/~jhs/AECHome.html](https://www.math.brown.edu/~jhs/AECHome.html)

<comment><USER5> can you explain to me why an elliptic curve over C is a quotient manifold (like the torus on page 7 of the first set of slides)?

<comment><USER6> I would expect him to spell this out in lectures 15 and 16. It does take work. What is surprising is that despite their all looking the same -- certainly they are the same as real manifolds -- there are tons of elliptic curves. The difference is in the complex analytic structure.

<comment><USER7> They (the space of complex points on any elliptic curve over C) are the same (homeomorphic) as topological spaces. However, they are not the same as complex analytic manifolds, which is a stronger condition (requiring an analytic isomorphism, not just a topological one).

<comment><USER6> I should have said real manifolds; I thought that was what the parent comment had in mind but the brevity wasn't worth it.

Of course, I've learned a lot about these things from your writings.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is your company Linux friendly or not? - <AUTHOR> As a developer who is on the lookout for a new job, one of my criteria for accepting a job offer is, "does your company support/allow Linux OS for developing on?"
Alas many of the responses say "No" followed by the phrase "We only support Mac, why would you develop on anything else?"
I find it strange that in an age of LXCs and Docker containers, we have many companies (big and small) who are not offering Linux PCs to their developers.
This is anecdotal on my side, but out of the 10 companies I have interviewed with 9 said they wouldn't or couldn't provide me with a Linux machine. The other one offered a Windows laptop which I could hack away till my heart's content.
For me a Macbook is a terrible piece of hardware and software combined; it overheats, has a touchbar, weird keyboard symbols (Alt and Ctrl key in particular), and uses 4GB of RAM just to run OSX.
I can't choose my desktop environment and have to configure my shell through a series of awkward steps.
The retorts from recruiters and devs about why they don't support Linux normally fall into one or more responses below:
* It makes security easier to have all machines the same
* Linux is hard to support
* We don't want 20 different people running 20 different distros
* Company policy, we buy Macbooks in bulk at unit price
* Why would you want to use linux?
* Our VPN and other tools are licensed only for Mac / Windows
* Macbooks are cool, why do you want a Laptop/PC
Most of these seem to be out of laziness, ignorance or corporate bureaucracy.
So HN, does your company support development on Linux? If not, why? <comment><USER2> > laziness, ignorance or corporate bureaucracy

I get that you're upset that you can't use the OS of your choice, but this is not a fair assessment. There are very real, valid operational constraints that lead companies to restrict what machines can be used.

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine a constraint that would lead to restrict the use of Linux over Windows/MacOs unless is bureaucracy or ignorance like OP said. The only exceptions I can think of is they do development with tools only available for those systems, in which case I assume OP wouldn't apply in the first place since he uses Linux, and second having a deal with Microsoft or Apple which is not really an operational constraint.

<comment><USER2> The major reason is going to be software support (e.g. MDM, endpoint protection, etc). Having a deal / set procurement process seems like a pretty real operational constraint to me. At the end of the day, it's going to cost them tens of thousands of dollars to support 1 Linux machine. If you were on the other side of the table, does that seem worth it when most folks are happy to take the machines you already offer?

<comment><USER4> > tens of thousands of dollars to support 1 Linux machine

I think you're several orders of magnitude off here, but let's assume for the sake of argument that this is even closer to accurate.

(Last place I worked gave us the choice of having a Linux desktop. I'm pretty sure the admins only touched my box twice during 5 years: the initial install, and the upgrade to CentOS 7.)

Searching for another qualified candidate will cost them even more tens of thousands of dollars, plus an unspecified but surely significant amount of both wall-clock time and man-hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My small company is Linux friendly. My workstation is Linux-based. There are maybe one or two others here that use Linux as well. The rest are mostly Mac users. There are some Windows users as well.

I would say this is not uncommon for small companies in my area. The past 3 I have worked at all took the position that devs could pick their setup, but would be responsible for making it work. I can use Linux, but it is up to me to make sure I can do my job with it. There is no internal tech support.

I will say that there is a common mentality that Macs are the default choice for development. (This is probably not the case if you are in a .NET shop, for example). At my last job they purchased a Mac for me without asking my preferences. After I told them I'd prefer Linux, they said I could switch, but I decided to stick with that Mac for that job, actually... and I liked it! But not enough to stick with it long term. I also value being able to customise my system to a degree that is difficult on a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER6> One potential workaround - don't sign on as a permie employee, instead arrange to work as a contractor where you bring your own tools instead of using whatever standard machine the client would otherwise give you. You may be able to bring your own linux laptop and configure it to work with the client's systems.

Downsides of this approach: what you are doing is not officially supported by the client's infra/network/vpn/bureaucracy, so if you run into trouble getting it to work or it breaks after the client changes something you will not get any help, so you are just wasting your own time & money or the client's time and money by going against the grain and doing something the client regards as unusual and unsupported. In many businesses the client may require that contractors do not use their own tools and instead use machines supplied by the client, so this isn't even an option. Also, the whole contractor <-> permie tradeoff (no benefits, no job security, but maybe higher pay - depending what kind of a labour market you're in).

I have seen highly competent contractors successfully use linux in a huge old conservative bureaucracy with lots of legacy tech & half-broken network infrastructure that only officially supports windows & half-heartedly supports mac. But the starting position would be that you're the kind of person who can single-handedly triage and fix random network/vpn/authentication issues, perhaps by writing or patching software as necessary, and that you're happy to spend your own unbillable time on this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Current company: yes, but I also need the stupid IT Windows laptop because the company is full of Windows-only software, including internal websites that only work on very old IE (!!). They've been trying for years to migrate away to Google Chrome, but it's not done yet.

But keep in mind that "yes" as an answer does not mean good things. Keep reading.

Previous company: also yes, but I was forced to use the development environment they chose. And that was Eclipse for C++ programming, including an SVN plugin for Eclipse. When the manager saw I was editing files on Vim he explicitly asked me to not do it again and stick to Eclipse. I was in shock. I was also told do not use svn commit from the command line and use the Eclipse stuff.

A few months inside the company and I figured out why: most of the developers (except for me and the lead guy) were people with Mechanical or Electrical Engineering degrees who only took a 6-month course in C programming, some extra training and then were trying to be programmers (that included the manager). They mostly had no idea what they were doing: Eclipse was trying very hard to keep the codebase following a single coding style, but they often managed to commit wrong stuff. Build artifacts were in every single SVN repository. One of the most senior employees (7+ years developing C++ for them) once told me he was "not so sure what g++ did when it converted a signed integer to unsigned". The salary was great for everyone because the company had some very juicy government contracts. And we were rewriting the main system (basically the product of the company) from scratch because the previous one was too buggy to be maintained (according to them). I was the person who told them about the existence of Valgrind. Fun times, I can say I learned a lot :)

Thanks for reading my rant lol.

</comment><comment><USER8> I work for my state government, so the Enterprise-y Microsoft environment rules over everything else. I would guess most of the developers in my area (50+) aren't even very familiar with Linux. Heck, we even run most things on Windows servers as for whatever reason they are cheaper for us to provision than Linux servers.

</comment><comment><USER9> So our devs are given macbook pros by default but we are able to get linux laptops if we want but that means we are really on our own to figure things out that don't work. A guy on my team made the switch to linux but then ended up switching back to a macbook as there were things that just didn't work right (or he couldn't get to work) that we need in our day to day, though I don't know exactly what those things were that were causing issues. Our non- devs have to run windows as the main software we use as a company is windows desktop client only.

</comment><comment><USER10> We pretty much only do Windows. We've only started allowing Mac for some UX or UI developer people, but it looks like that went well and could expand in the future. These are all company devices. We have a fairly strict personal device policy not even allowing any personal device with a LAN port to be on campus.

We don't have any network capable Linux devices for end-users. We have Linux servers and a couple air gapped devices in experimental labs.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, new devs get to choose laptop or desktop (err, at least before quarantine they did...), and their choice of OS. We're probably 60/40 macOS/Windows. There might be one developer using Linux as the host, but most of us just use it in a VM when we need it.

</comment><comment><USER12> My company was in the process of allowing people to use Linux laptops. I was one of the people in the "Testing Group" and most issues were solved. If it was not for some key people on this project leaving the company and the pandemic we would have had them by now.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can only imagine one useful reason to force a software developer to use a particular ecosystem: Eat your own dogfoot.

But even there it is helpful to see what other software is around.

I would not accept a job where I am not free to choose my tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you mean "Eat your own dog food"?

<comment><USER14> I like dogfoot better ... it illustrates that if there's a bug that results in you eating dogfoot rather than dog food, you'll have some visibility to that.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for refurbishing my typo :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At Google essentially everyone develops on a Linux desktop. These are mostly VM's running in Google Cloud now. There's even an internal distro gLinux based on Debian.

<comment><USER16> I've always wondered how this worked at Google. What protocol are they using?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can pick whatever platform (and, within reason, hardware) I want, and use a VM or remote access for others if needed</comment>


The Haskell Road to Logic, Math and Programming (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://fldit-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/~peter/PS07/HR.pdf <comment><USER2> The book says that the source code of the exercises is available on their website, however the website doesn't appear to exist anymore. Is there an official location where that can be found? Same with the solutions - it says they are available electronically.

<comment><USER2> Ah, never mind - I hadn't typed the book's url correctly. Source code available here: [http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jve/HR/](http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jve/HR/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried this when I was just starting out with programming and there were a lot of logical jumps in the exercises. Especially early on, I would check the solutions after a tough one and find syntax that I was not familiar with (and wasn't previously introduced). I ended up having to combine it with other resources and then just hobble through.

Still, it seems like a good idea for a book.

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah, this is not a book to use for learning Haskell. I personally recommend Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell or Real World Haskell if you want to learn Haskell. Hutton's book focuses more on the principles of the language while RWH on its applications but still covers principles well. RWH is a significantly larger time commitment.

I know a lot of people wax on the virtues of Learn You A Haskell but I found its explanations sufficiently full of inferable minutiae that my brain switched off safe in the knowledge that thinking is not required and I stopped learning. Maybe this is just me though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since when was Haskell "a member of the Lisp family"?

<comment><USER6> They're probably saying that because haskell was originally implemented in lisp and the optional parenthesis make it look a lot more lispish (though I still wouldn't call it a true lisp)

<comment><USER7> I have a C compiler on my Lisp Machine. C uses curly braces. Does that make C a member of the 'Lisp family'.

There was a Haskell compiler written in Lisp - Yale Haskell - others were and are not written in Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not quite legal.

</comment><comment><USER9> C'mon, you'd have to know a lot of math for that book!

<comment><USER4> The first part is all about logic and it tells you everything you need to know. You have to approach it like reading a big academic paper though. It's not like you'll be flipping through the pages rapidly but it is definitely understandable. Can't comment on later parts because I stopped reading. I might start again one day though. I quite liked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Breaking news: the Haskell Platform exists.

Stop teaching noobs to use Hugs, ffs.

<comment><USER11> The book in the link is almost 10 years old. Perhaps you could mention what you think is a better starting point rather than Hugs?

<comment><USER12> It's the Haskell Platform ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Platform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Platform)) -> GHC(i).</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Autopilot Full Self-Driving Demonstration - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long <comment><USER2> Great to see that. It looks like the Google video from 2012.

I'm wondering about what the Google self driving team has been working on for so many years. They don't tell much about what their challenges are and what they managed to achieve yet. Have they stumbled into problems? What problems?</comment>


Ask HN: Where all do you post when you launch? - <AUTHOR>

Like HN I am sure you must be posting somewhere else too when you launch your product/website. Which are the different sites you post at? <comment><USER2> I think that Twitter is the best place to post updates about a startup. I've tried Killerstartups.com but the traffic from there isn't that good anymore (I think). Other sites I've found are: <http://productivewebapps.com/> <http://www.appvita.com/> <http://betali.st/> <http://startuplocation.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on purpose and product

What is your product and purpose?

<comment><AUTHOR> www.pajamalabs.com

<comment><USER4> [http://iterin.blogspot.in/2012/03/list-of-places-to- submit-y...](http://iterin.blogspot.in/2012/03/list-of-places-to-submit-your- startup.html)</comment></comment></comment>


How To Make Yourself (And Everyone Around You) Miserable - <AUTHOR> http://www.dumblittleman.com/2009/05/10-ways-to-make-yourself-and-everyone.html

<comment><USER2> Good food for thought. I'm just as guilty as the next guy when it comes to doing some of these. But seeing them written out like this makes it easier to keep a mental checklist of miserable habits unchecked</comment>


Ask HN: Best place to learn GO? - <AUTHOR> What has been the best resource you have found when learning GO? <comment><USER2> Do you mean the Board-game or the programming language?</comment>


Show HN: Wall of Books [Goodreads login required] - <AUTHOR> http://xuanji.appspot.com/goodreads/request

<comment><USER2> I find it kind of awkward to hide a "Show HN" entry behind a login wall, without any explaination what to expect there.

The given "static" URL is some help, but still just shows a page filled with book covers, without any explaination what this is all about.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you don't have a Goodreads account, here's what this looks like with mine:

[http://xuanji.appspot.com/static/books.html](http://xuanji.appspot.com/static/books.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for making it easier.</comment></comment>