How I got my start in programming - <AUTHOR> http://munyukim.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/how-i-got-my-start-in-programming/

<comment><USER2> If this doesn't convince people of the need for cheap computing resources to be available to everyone, nothing will. Raspberry Pi, OLPC, any program that tries to put computers in the hands of those without access -- more power to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised someone as skilled as you hasn't been able to find a job. Have you considered moving out of Mozambique to a greener pasture?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am working on moving out but it's not easy considering i do not have enough money to live alone in a foreign country.By the way i am from Zimbabwe not Mozambique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not trying to nitpick, but it is very difficult to read with that layout. The entire post is wrapped in a single paragraph wrapper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing it out, i will fix it.

<comment><USER5> Looked fine to me...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's very inspiring! I think it's great that even though you didn't have access to a computer that you pursued your dream and learned how to program - even write your own Hip Hop website.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very humbling that you find it inspiring, it's support from people like you that keeps me going even though it's tough trying to make it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a great opportunity for startups and really anyone with computers to start encouraging/teaching kids how to program. Would love to see companies dedicating one day a week (say Friday or Saturday's) to invite kids out to learn programming. Actual professionals who make a living doing it that can give pointers and guide them toward success.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really believe that great programmers aren't the ones that are the "smartest" but instead are the ones that will work as hard as it takes to achieve a goal.

Thank you for posting this to HN and don't let anyone ever stop you from doing what you love.</comment>


Announcing: LinkedIn Intro - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linkedin.com/2013/10/23/announcing-linkedin-intro/

<comment><AUTHOR> "straight to the Apple Mail app on your iPhone." "all in the iPhone Mail app you already use everyday."

My iPhone? The wording is a tad presumptuous, especially considering that the majority of smart phones do not use an iPhone.

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of older people who aren't keen on modern technology, coming up to me and asking if my Windows Phone or Android phone is "one of dem new eye- phones!?".

Edit: It's been a couple years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can imagine this having great utility for many businesspeople, but I think anyone mildly privacy or security conscious probably already thinks LinkedIn trends to the spammy. Making them an intermediary to 100% of my email is nuts.

On a lighter note, one of the "shared connections" in the blog screencaps is actually Good Girl Gina, of Reddit meme fame. [http://note.io/HfhtzE](http://note.io/HfhtzE)

</comment><comment><USER4> How do they inject their info into the iPhone mail app ?

<comment><USER5> Sounds like they act as an e-mail proxy. You give them login info to your account and they resend a new e-mail with the extra info.

[https://intro.linkedin.com/micro/faq](https://intro.linkedin.com/micro/faq)

<comment><USER6> Incredible. I just went through the FAQ.

I would say this is going to be a really really hard sell for most people. The instructions scare me more than anything else. They are written in such a way that it tries hard to not mention explicitly that LinkedIn effectively another gateway between the email provider and you.

I just don't get it. How do these companies just assume privacy is a non-issue and come out with products that just completely assume people will trust them because they have a cute privacy statement - "please trust us, we will never do anything with your data.".

I'm sorry LinkedIn. This isn't the Facebook crowd. A lot of LinkedIn is IT and I couldn't imagine the average LinkedIn user using this product.

<comment><USER7> People are just so used to the expected email monitoring from their government. So why not just trust everyone with your communications? Abstract thought not required

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also this blog post on the technology behind Intro: [http://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro- doing-...](http://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing- impossible-ios) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600597)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing evil app, with great business value. Every time i log in to web app they want to get my connections from oauth. And now the app will be "see" every my mail and addresses.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could this be why they had a lot of downtime today?</comment>


Hacker Monthly #27 is out - <AUTHOR> http://hackermonthly.com/issue-27.html <comment><USER2> Honest question to help me decide if I pay to subscribe: are there ads in this magazine like just about every other magazine I've ever seen?

Are there ads in the PDF version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. There's ad, but very little (4-5 pages)</comment></comment>


Common *nix commands written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://gcollazo.com/common-nix-commands-written-in-rust/ <comment><USER2> From the ls replacement: "Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?"

Uh, because squinting at blue-on-black text is much more difficult. Human eyes focus best at yellow-green, they see that as brightest, and they don't even have long-wavelength (blue) receptors in the fovea.

I also looked at the alternatives to ps, top, cat, find, and du.

My overall feeling is that these are really not like UNIX tools at all. They are not very scriptable. Output is full of Unicode, color, column dividers, headers, underlining, and pagination. Values are in so-called "human readable" form, like "1.4M" instead of 1474560 or whatever it may be, which is a real pain for scripting.

I also notice some features that seem out of place to me, a long-time UNIX user. The tools waste space on displaying things related to git, docker, and network connections. I would expect the proper tools to be more like "git ls", "docker ls", "docker ps", and "netstat -p". (for those ones that don't actually exist, take that as a suggestion for a coding project) Not all the world is devops on a web site.

<comment><USER3> My distro's ls already does coloring by default. It turns it off somehow if it detects the output is a pipe, so that "ls | less" still works. It also turns off multi-column in that case, so "ls | wc -l" counts directory entries.

<comment><USER4> [https://linux.die.net/man/3/isatty](https://linux.die.net/man/3/isatty) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are sometimes good reasons, usually related to features although sometimes related to performance, to prefer newer utilities like ripgrep over older ones like grep. Implementation language is not one of them.

<comment><USER6> I came here to ask, thought not outright say, what is it with all the "... in rust" stuff that keeps getting posted. It's starting to feel more like a marketing exercise than anything actually software related (happy to be corrected on this though).

<comment><USER7> Consider this. If a program is written in Python, and becomes popular, it is usually a matter of time before it gets rewritten in, and replaced by an implementation in a faster language.

There are fast implementations (C) and there are somewhat safe implementations (Python, Java, ...). If I were to place Rust in this hierarcy - it is both fast AND safe, and there's rarely a good reason to replace it, so you've software that's already at the top of the hierarcy. This means that the particular implementation is likely to be the one that doesn't get replaced.

"...in Rust" has a lot of implications other than being an exercise in marketing.

<comment><USER8> Except Rust isn't a direct replacement for c. Rust's system requirements are perhaps acceptable for what'll be normal in computers five years from now.

We don't need to re-stratify development so that only people with expensive computers with > 4 gigs of memory can compile what they run.

<comment><USER9> You're exaggerating for effect, I assume. Rust compile does not require that much RAM.

Now, by default the "cargo" build uses all CPU threads, so if you have a 32 core Threadripper then yes, running 64 simultaneous "rustc" compiles will use 6 or 7 gigabytes.

<comment><USER10> Last I checked Rust needed more than 4GB of RAM to compile itself.

That's one of the reasons it was rejected in OpenBSD: [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=151233345723889&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=151233345723889&w=2)

<comment><USER11> clang needs more than 4GB to compile itself too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This isn't too compelling a story on its own, I'm assuming this is someone who wrote a collection for themselves and made it public on their blog.

Glad they wrote their collection, but not something I'm excited about.

In general I'd love to hear "this was better in Rust because of X, Y and Z and the tradeoffs I had to make were A, B and C".

But again, this isn't on the author to do, I'm pretty sure I can find other articles on the internet that talk to that.

Edit: most of the READMEs of the projects look pretty good about that on a quick skim.

</comment><comment><USER13> What I would like to see is something like Hadoop, Kafka, Spark rewritten in Rust. Something that will fundamentally change the landscape. Rewriting these Unix cli is only good learning experience

<comment><USER14> Maybe, but consider that security vulnerabilities have been found in SSH and `sudo` / `su`, several times the last few years (and they are not the only UNIX tools, it was just the noisiest news about such vulnerabilities).

Any new programming tech that avoids my SSHD letting anyone get in because of this or that is very welcome by me.

There's Sonic, which is a searching software, although not on the level of ElasticSearch. People are working hard to bring more safety to widely used technologies, every day, we just don't hear much about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> nushell is a better idea though - structured output, no text scraping.

And it's Rust! [https://www.nushell.sh/](https://www.nushell.sh/)

<comment><USER16> Yes this I think should be the future direction shells go

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a nice collection of common CLI utilities that make one's life a bit more comfortable.

The poster is not the author, but the collector.</comment>


Design of a Signage Typeface - <AUTHOR> http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signage-typeface/

<comment><USER2> htw's graphs[1] are a little weird: Frutiger, for example, has an average reading distance that is higher than the "minimum distance" ("minimum legible distance from the sign" makes no sense, but "furthest distance at which sign is legible," which I assume is what is meant, isn't really conveyed by minimalwert).

How can the minimum (or, actually,the maximum) legible distance be _smaller_ than the average?

[1] [http://cdn.ilovetypography.com/img/2012/04/empirical-font- wa...](http://cdn.ilovetypography.com/img/2012/04/empirical-font- wayfinding.png)</comment>


Show HN: Diffmatic – A daily GitHub digest for dev teams - <AUTHOR> http://diffmatic.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, developer here. Made this in my spare time to get reacquainted with django and to learn how to use celery and celery beat. I also love the idea of using data that people are already creating passively in a new way that breathes some more use into it (e.g. using github commits to give a daily status update).

Thanks for checking it out!

<comment><USER2> Hey, this looks cool but I don't want grant write permission to my public and private repos just to get a daily status update. Is it possible to ask for read-only perm?

<comment><USER3> +1 to this sentiment... I want to use this service, but it requires I give it way too many permissions. I actually couldn't click "authorize" when I looked at how much access it wanted (probably an oversight, and nothing nefarious).

Hopefully it gets fixed, because this is sweet. I'd happily pay $20-$50 a month for my team to get an overview of github activity for our organization.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I wish it was possible. The read/write repo permission is the only way I've found to be able to list all of the private repositories in an org. There's a few other threads in these comments that cover the specifics a little bit better but the gist is that GitHub has pretty coarse grained permissions unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Throw in some git analysis. What I find useful is highlighting files with the most frequent and # of changes. "Hot files" like a controller that is constantly getting logic added and modified it's probably a good target for refactoring and future changes should be more closely peer reviewed.

<comment><USER5> Conversely, I'm also curious to find cold files or files that people are afraid to touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How come the application needs write permissions to repos (private and public)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there isn't any way to specifically ask for only read permissions for private repos. The commit statuses permission doesn't allow for listing of private repos either.

If I'm completely missing something than I'd be more than happy to get a change deployed.

<comment><USER7> I wish GitHub would add more fine-grained permissions. Right now authorizing an app like this is giving away the keys to the kingdom and that's a little scary. For a similar reason we chose to run Hound ([https://houndci.com/](https://houndci.com/)) locally instead of use the SaaS version.

<comment><USER8> > I wish GitHub would add more fine-grained permissions.

Yes, for both API and direct access. You can't allow somebody to _triage bugs_ without giving them write access to the repository itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. Could you add bitbucket support too?

</comment><comment><USER10> Wait, isn't this the same information the github dashboard, repo commit log (on github.com), desktop client (on mac), and cli already tell you? Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's repackaged according to person and repo and in your inbox every day. I'm also working on joining it with other data sources (trello, jira, sentry, etc.) to make it more holistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be really cool if this could give some insight into how much weight each commit made carries. For example it could flag a commit that contains significantly more code changes than that team member typically submits. Or if a section of code has been stable and untouched for a while, if a change comes in that may be able to be classified as a bug fix. Similarly if a bunch of new files are added, that could be highlighted as a feature build.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree! There is a ton of awesome information just waiting to be uncovered. Diffmatic currently just sends out a really raw digest but getting smart about surfacing meaningful and important changes would be huge. I think that incorporating sources like sentry and other exception trackers and correlating them back to code changes in the digest would be very interesting and useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome - I've been wanting this exact tool for the last 5 years on various projects.

Over time, it would be good to have little bits of markup that allows you to highlight things like outstanding questions that need answering by a specific person, pull requests that need review, blocking issues etc

And then have them pulled out in the summary email.

</comment><comment><USER13> Any chance we could get GitLab/generic Git (even just from commit author) support?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to support other providers (BitBucket) and have generic Git support. This is a quick first pass since GitHub comes built in to python-social-auth and their API is really well documented and has good python wrappers.

I think it'd be interesting to have a daemon sitting on devs' computers that could track unpushed commits or even in-progress code. It might be a little bit intrusive but I think that having more insight could be really neat.

<comment><USER13> Commit hooks (no daemon necessary) might work for unpushed commits?

inotify/fsevents watching of folders (for in-progress code) is pretty common nowadays for various things, is it not? I guess some devs might not like having their unfinished code made visible to others?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks Cool... Definitely going to signup..

</comment><comment><USER15> Time is diffmatic.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks good</comment>


FDA Approving Drugs at Breakneck Speed, Raising Alarm - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/money/fda-is-green-lighting-drugs-at-breakneck-speed-and-raising-alarm/ar-BBXRMmR <comment><USER2> This is a good thing. People die, and die sooner, when the FDA cannot adapt its approval process to drugs and tools for patients who sadly have little downside to trying them.

In my own little corner (diabetes) it's been nice to get monitoring tools earlier than they once would have been approved, and for my medical team to confidently plan for equipment changes based on future approvals.

<comment><USER3> Only a fraction of drugs treat life threatening condition in some new way. Painkillers for example represent a surprising fraction of all drugs and generally have a close equivalent. [https://www.drugs.com/condition/pain.html](https://www.drugs.com/condition/pain.html)

Taking enough time to endure a new acne medication or Viagra alternative etc is reasonably safe is very much worth spending some extra time.

Edit: This does seem to be focused on needed medications without close equivalents but that's a fairly arbitrary line.

<comment><USER4> Close equivalent can still be something you can't take. For example, if you're one of the unfortunate people with no activity on your CYP2D6 enzyme, there are essentially 4 pain medications that you can take at appropriate doses once you need something stronger than advil: Morphine, Dilaudid, Oxymorphone and Fentanyl, and there are reasons why doctors prefer other narcotics before prescribing any of those 4. Other pain medications will work, but you'll likely need inappropriately higher doses[0], which can lead to other problems (like overdosing). Likewise if you process faster than a normal person (i.e. you have more activity on that enzyme) you can overdose at normal prescribing doses. Close equivalents for some people can indeed be the difference between life and death, even if the condition itself isn't life threatening.

[0]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100662/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100662/)

<comment><USER3> That's a very good point, but then we are talking about edge cases and a delay measured in weeks to months. So, the benefit from catching 1 bad drug could outweigh the benefits from releasing 100 drugs slightly earlier.

It's not an easy choice, especially when the risks are often hypothetical and the benefits so clear.

It's interesting looking at lists like this and considering where things broken down. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "It isn't that we changed our policies and are saying we are going to > approve drugs faster," said Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for > Drug Evaluation and Research, who joined the agency under President Ronald > Reagan. "The difference now is we are going to see more of those because of > the science. If there are people out there with no options and they have > terrible diseases, we are going to get those drugs to them as fast as > feasible."

> But even as drugmakers, investors and patients cheer on the agency's pace, > patient-safety advocates argue that speed comes at a price. Studies show > medicines approved on a faster time line are more likely to have safety > problems emerge after they become broadly available, while other treatments > offer fewer benefits than anticipated.

Not sure I understand the concern:

\- "studies show medicines approved on a faster time line ...": which study(ies)? And that was the case for previous track records, which says nothing if the FDA is making the same mistakes that they may have done 20 years ago.

\- "more likely to have more safety concerns once they are broadly available while other treatments offer fewer benefits than anticipated", wait, do such studies actually have drugs that are virtually identical in all properties and where the only factor that changed is the approval timing? Because if that's not the case, you are just comparing drugs with different profiles, different indications, and different targets, which is pretty much apples and oranges. Good luck making conclusions based on that.

I am not aware of the FDA or any other regulatory body at this time starting to remove regulatory requirements to speed up approvals. The typical things we see nowadays is an exception for "orphan indications" where there is no good treatment available and people are dying without anything to try. It seems fair that they take in account patients' needs when it comes to expediting the last bureaucratic mile to ensure new drugs can save more patients. At the end of the day, patients are also free to refuse newer drugs (and doctors usually tell them when a drug has just been approved and when there is lack of much safety experience beyond clinical trials) so I don't see how you can frame this whole story in a negative light.

<comment><USER6> I think this is the key section:

_"It's not just speed. The FDA also is approving more drugs, hitting a record 59 new therapies in 2018. Almost three-fourths received a priority review. That, combined with more efficient data collection, is responsible for the faster FDA action, said Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School. Companies are also communicating earlier and more often with the agency, which can head off issues at preliminary stages and help them get products through on the first attempt, he said."_

So as in _any_ field, better communication with stakeholders improved the process and eliminated some issues earlier.

Then, better data collection helps them evaluate studies better. I bet it also reduces the back and forth and the "what does this mean" aspect of the studies after.

And then companies can pay for expedited evaluation.. which if they've been communicating clearly all along and have better data, doesn't seem far fetched.

The next thing you know, someone will suggest clear planning with stakeholders, code reviews, and unit tests will improve code quality and even ship dates! But that may be crazy talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about we raise an alarm when drugs aren't approved promptly? People die when good drugs are held up in bureaucracy.

<comment><USER8> Woah that's quite a claim. Care to expand?

<comment><USER9> There are plenty of example of drugs costing 10-100x what they normally would, which pharma companies get all the heat for, are drugs that would otherwise have plenty of competition but dont due to to backlogs at the FDA.

Including the most famous one: Epipens

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse- voxsplaining-d...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining- drugs-vs-chairs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doc here.

I was at a continuing education course last year. FDA approved a new narcotic very fast. A non narcotic alternative is taking forever to approve.

Its name is Maxigesic. Tylenol and ibuprofen in one pill.

Why?

<comment><USER11> As someone who works in the drug industry, when Maxigesic is approved, please don't prescribe it. Just tell your patients to take one each of the OTC drugs, they are dirt cheap (like $0.02 per pill).

The market is full of drugs that are combinations of OTC medications and usually they are way more expensive. Even if they didn't go nuts with the price, why make a patient pay $0.50 per pill when they could take 2 for $0.04?

<comment><USER12> Some patients have a lot of pills to take, and they would rather pay more to take fewer. Maybe they have trouble keeping track of them, maybe it is just pill fatigue. Maybe they have trouble swallowing for one reason or another. Combo pills could be a good thing for a subset of the population. Sure, it requires doctors to be on top of their game and patients to research what they are taking and ask questions, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to have it available as an alternative.

As to the question about why it is taking so long at the FDA, I imagine it isn't a very high priority because there are alternatives.

<comment><USER11> I don't disagree that pill burden can be an issue.

The problem is the lack of transparency into cost which results in some drug companies taking advantage.

Combine two pills that cost $0.10 each into one pill that costs $0.15? Reasonable.

Do the same and charge $5 per pill? Ridiculous. Problem is doctors and patients don't know it costs $5 and insurers can't be bothered to push back. Suddenly you've increased the cost of therapy by 50x.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FDA is grossly understaffed. And more importantly, its policies are directly responsible for the skyrocketing prescription drug prices.

<comment><USER14> Could you give some examples? As far as I know, the policies of Congress are what is responsible for skyrocketing prescription drug prices.

<comment><USER15> Same thinking here. I don't believe the FDA is forcing drug prices onto the public; it seems to be a system enabled by congress and abused by the public sector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What party has some sort of vested interested (presumably monetary) in slowing down FDA drug approval? Perhaps I'm being a bit pessimistic here, but after reading the article I don't really see any motivation for the "raising alarm" statement in the title, or even a reason anyone would bother publishing this in the first place.

I looked up the "consumer watchdog" that I'm guessing had something to do with this article, and their front page is just an "Impeach Trump" advertisement. See [https://www.citizen.org/](https://www.citizen.org/). Also, if you click their "About Us" page, a few lines down is: "We don't participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office."

Hmm.

<comment><USER17> We've been hearing for years about accelerated drug candidate discovery through better tech and automation, and anecdotally a boom in clinical trials informatics etc, so not surprising

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Enough gazillion dollars can compress time and expand space.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to create a Saas for passive income while working a job? - <AUTHOR> Have you done it? If so what are the challenges that you faced? What tips do you have for someone trying to do that? <comment><USER2> Yeah I did that. The biggest challenge was wanting to spend every minute possible working on my Saas and dreading being at work.

Also, I know the intent of what you're saying when you say "passive income" but after ~8 years of being obsessed with these ideas I offer a slightly more experience perspective when I say You probably aren't going to earn any "passive income" from your Saas. Let's say you get 30 customers @ 20/month. That's $600/month but you shouldn't appropriate that as passive income if you're still building features, performing service maintenance, etc. Maybe if you freeze the product and don't perform any marketing work, server work, etc. then it's "passive income".

In other words, you should focus on building a business, not a passive income. If you invest money in bonds or dividend-distributing stocks, then that's a passive income. Because you literally do not have to do any work or stress over it if you take an extremely low-risk, highly-diversified, income- producing investment strategy. How do you get the $$ to invest? By building a business and investing lots of energy (the opposite of passive).

Can you build a business while working a job? Yes, it's done all the time. Another tip is to wake up every morning very early and put your best cognitive hours into your project. Then you can go to work, and by the time you're ready to get home you can fully invest in being present.

<comment><USER3> Another way of looking at this is that, in a dynamic world (especially technology), things are constantly changing, and the very term passive implies your product is static. If you leave your Saas product that has <1,000 hours of dev time alone, thereby becoming a passive income, your very dynamic competitors who are always looking for their next revenue source will be building additional features and trying to steal your customers. The only way this doesn't hold true is if you develop some sort of barrier to entry for competitors that keep it from being worthwhile for them to try to compete with you. Oftentimes, the best barrier to entry is building a product that is difficult to replicate, which means more like >10,000 hours of dev time, which is 5 years of work. In the small business/Saas world, you are either growing or you are dying. It is very hard to maintain a static/passive business.

<comment><USER4> _your very dynamic competitors who are always looking for their next revenue source will be building additional features and trying to steal your customers._

Small software businesses are, to borrow a metaphor from DHH, a lot like a local Italian restaurant. Nobody at BigCo wakes up in the morning and says "There is a spaghetti joint in East Phili [+] with revenues of $30k a month? NUKE IT FROM ORBIT IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE."

Similarly, like spaghetti shops, small software companies do not primarily make money because of "features." The notion that software is bought because of features is something that running a software company will quickly disabuse you of.

[+] Edit to add: picked randomly because I happened to just watch a TV show set there, not to be representative of any of the Phili software companies I happen to know. (They're all substantially larger.)

<comment><USER5> > The notion that software is bought because of features is something that > running a software company will quickly disabuse you of.

Can you expound on this? Are you saying that they have loyalty once they have signed up with one provider. Or maybe that they only care about the main feature and tertiary features don't tend to sway them?

<comment><USER4> Most software buyers buy for reasons which have little do to with features, which after all are generally not perceptible at the point the sale is made. General vibe, risk reducing copy on the website, credible endorsements, words from friends, and the moon being in retrograde all probably matter more than the Nth feature at the margin.

Merely having features will not magically cause customers to discover you or convert from your free trial. Customer churn rates in SaaS are sensitive to many things but feature parity with competitors is generally not a dominating factor, because it's so low on the list of concerns. (The rule-of-thumb in low-touch B2B SaaS is that your churn starts relatively high, hits 5% pretty quickly after you work on it, and then you get long road to 2% as you get better at everything.)

<comment><USER6> > Most software buyers buy for reasons which have little do to with features, > which after all are generally not perceptible at the point the sale is made.

I have worked for/with a number of Saas companies, including one that was purchased by a major company for a high eight-figure amount, and based on the sales cycles I observed and participated in at each company, the idea that feature set has little to do with purchasing decisions is a ludicrous claim.

<comment><USER7> Keep in mind this is about low-touch. Typically people stare at a webpage with prices and buttons, and try to figure out if the service solves their problem, if it's reliable, if the UI is comfortable, if support is readily available, if other users like it, or how easy would be to transition from their current solution. Not so much opening a few of them and pulling out a spreadsheet to see which has most features.

<comment><USER8> Service solves problem == feature.

What happens often is that you get a sale because you support some oddball feature.

Your best bet with SaaS is try to do that. Find a cluster of customers (realtors, doctors, train hobbyists) and over support their oddball features and get a good rep for supporting that vertical. Word of mouth within the cluster will get around (person to person, vertical forums, etc) and you will dominate that space. Once you are the big fish in that small pond feature set, branch outwards to other ponds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A little over a year ago a friend and I launched [https://cronitor.io](https://cronitor.io)

Our first paying customer came on July 9th, 2014. As of today we're at about 80 paying customers. As of last month, we have started taking monthly revenue distributions of $1000 each.

I would echo gargaplex's comment that, when building a small Saas product, your focus should be about building a business not necessarily just building passive income.

However, it's easy to become completely engrossed in something you're working on (especially if it's showing a little traction). So, unless you can see a very clear path to your project becoming a replacement for your full-time revenue source, it's important to be conscious of your time investment, and whether you are at the point where additional work will yield diminishing returns.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot with my project lately. I'm not sure if we're there, but, unlike a year ago, when spending 10 hours of time to improve a mediocre product was clearly adding value it's less cut and dry these days.

When I look at what has made Cronitor successful (this is a relative term) this past year there are a couple of things that stand out.

1\. We launched with a _really_ basic version of our product. It had limited functionality, was far from robust, and didn't even include help docs. But, you could sign up and pay money for it.

2\. We hounded our users for feedback. If you signed up you got at least one email from us asking for feedback. Most of the features that exist today on paid plans are because users asked for them. We'd say "sure, we can do that it will be part of plan X. would you be willing to sign up for that?" Not all of them said yes, but getting that validation before investing in features was key.

3\. We took breaks from working on it. For myself especially this has been key. I'll have a feature I want to build, or some part of the infrastructure I want to improve. Tackling this feels just like a regular programming sprint, but when it's done I usually take at least a month before moving onto the next "big" thing. This has helped me avoid burnout, and gets me excited to come back and work on it every few weeks.

Hope that helps, if you'd like to chat further about getting a Saas project off the ground you can email me august[at]cronitor.io.

<comment><USER10> How did you go about getting customers? For me building a product is the easy part. I'm at a loss for how would I advertise this type of service?

<comment><USER11> Posts like this one probably go a long way, considering they're only at 80 users.

<comment><USER9> HackerNews posts have yet to produce a single paying customer :)

OP, I'm hesitant to share that strategy out in the open. Customer acquisition has certainly been our biggest challenge. Feel free to DM me if you'd like to chat privately about it.

<comment><USER11> That's strange, considering I'd expect a lot of your target market to be browsing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been trying to do this for a long time, but I have to admit something rather peculiar about my frustrating attempts to do so.

I started a company with my brother in 2010. It involves websites, and it takes up about 10-20 hours of our time per year. It costs us about $150/mo to run and earns us anywhere from $1000-$2400/mo (probably $1,600/mo average). It's earned around the same income for about 3 years, and before that it earned $400-$800/mo for most of time during the first 2 years.

We could continue working hard to increase the amount our business earns, perhaps until it reaches $8,000-$10,000/mo (very realistic, but would require about 2 man months or so each), but for some reason neither of us are ever excited to work on it. In his spare time, he's busy doing his stuff (completely unrelated work), and I'm busy working on the next big thing (creating an SaaS, or at least trying to determine one to work on). It's really stupid, because we have this boring thing that earns us huge returns on our time invested, and currently pays us nearly $1,000/mo each for doing basically nothing, but we somehow find every excuse to work on something more exciting with little monetary returns, or perhaps simply scratching our own itches.

I think the lesson you can take from this (which I clearly haven't learned) is that you shouldn't seek to "create a SaaS", necessarily. Instead, figure out the path of lease resistance to the dollars you want, and don't worry about the "passive" nature of it. You can automate things later, in theory. Worry first about finding easy money. It really is out there.

I know that money isn't everything, but it is pretty important. If you have passive income coming in, you can work on all the fun and world changing projects (or charity, etc.) you want, and all without worrying about going broke.

<comment><USER13> Why not sell it to someone who wants to invest the time and sees the potential?

<comment><USER12> This business isn't the kind of company a VC would invest in, which means it's also not the kind of company that somebody would see and think, "We could blow this thing sky high!" (unless $8-10k/mo is sky high). It does have great potential, but there is no chance of it growing exponentially (like a social network or other highly successful SaaS). Because of this, I couldn't imagine getting more than 3 years revenue for it, and it's such a consistent income earner that it's not something I would want to sell for less than (perhaps) 8 years revenue.

<comment><USER14> I am 100% sure there is someone out there on one of those websites where you sell businesses interested in buying your website

<comment><USER15> This is true, but it is very, very unlikely that anybody would pay 8x yearly revenue for it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If your idea is good, why not hire someone to do the grunt work? If you have the skills to make it yourself, then unlike a lot of people who commission software, you have the knowledge to get a good deal and make sure the work is quality. If it's unaffordable, you probably wouldn't have had time to make it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Patio11 did that, he created Bingo Card Creator while working as Japanese salesman: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/)

He wrote a lot on that subject.

<comment><USER18> s/salesman/salaryman/

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm doing this right now with [http://zencastr.com](http://zencastr.com). It's still in beta so it hasn't made money yet.

Not sure if I'm very qualified to give tips but one thing that has helped immensely is that I work remotely and have a job where I can choose my hours. If I have an emergency with my side project I can usually tend to it immediately. I also don't have to work a full 40 hour week so that gives me time to work on Zencastr.

Sometimes it has been hard to keep things moving on it. It is quite easy to go a week without making any progress. Especially if I am up against a bug that is proving hard to figure out.

One thing that really helped push forward consistently was to make a trello list of todos. Then every day (almost), I make sure to cross something off of that list. It might only be a small copy change, or simple style tweak. As long as I cross something off every day I'm making progress. Typically I find that once I'm making a small change it gets me in the zone to work on bigger stuff while I'm there as well. Then weekends are typically when I really dig in and get stuff done.

We had our first baby right in the middle of all of this as well. Having a supportive partner definitely makes a big difference.

Hope that is helpful.

</comment><comment><USER19> Finding a job where you don't sign off your intellectual right on secondary works has been my limiting factor.

<comment><USER20> As long as you work on your own time, equipment, and ideas, why would this be a problem? Seems like an invalid limiting belief.

<comment><USER21> Many companies require their employees to give away any and all intellectual rights while working for them, even when created on your own spare time and equipment.

You may request an exception, but it'll need to be reviewed and approved beforehand by their lawyers.

Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056)

<comment><USER22> In most U.S. states (even WA) [Law here]([http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140](http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140)). Employers often still make you sign something saying that they own your soul and blah blah but they aren't enforceable.

Now, in some states (WA but not CA or NY) your employer can fire you for moonlighting if they want to but that's about it. You also have to watch out if you signed a non-compete and are arguably competing with your employer.

<comment><USER23> These states seem to be a minority, see Intellectual Property and the Employee Engineer[1]

        California CA Labor 2870 -2872
        Delaware 19 Del.C. s 805
        Illinois 765 I.L.C.S. 1060/2
        Kansas K.S.A. 44-130
        Minnesota M.S.A. 181.78
        North Carolina G.S. s 66-57.1
        Washington RCWA 49.44.140, 150
        Utah UT ST s 34-39-3

[1]: [https://www.ieeeusa.org/members/IPandtheengineer.pdf](https://www.ieeeusa.org/members/IPandtheengineer.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jon-wood Fool I am, I'm doing this on hard mode, by starting a year after our first child arrived.

It's hard work, and not earning me any money so far because I'm still working on the MVP, but I hope to get there sooner or later. Most of the work so far is the odd hour here and there in the evening, and a few hours a week during my commute.

I am however greatly reassured by a colleague who is doing the same thing with an iOS app which is bringing in a reasonable amount of money - he works on it during his lunch break most days.

<comment><USER24> > works on it during his lunch break most days

That is very dangerous thing to do, using company time or equipment would entitle the company to between some and all of the revenue.

Whilst you can claim it's within your own lunch break, a lawyer might argue that it is hard to separate the time. Using the companies Internet access and hardware would certainly constitute using the companies resource.

Unless you have explicit written confirmation from your employer, DON'T do your own projects in their time or at their place of business.

<comment><USER25> You are assuming he is using company equipment. He might not be - may be he takes his lunch outside and uses his own computer to work on his stuff?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do you think it's a reasonable risk to work on my SaaS at work? My context:

I have 1-2 hours of free time each day max, if nothing comes up. This is because I have a baby. The 1-2 hours sacrifices perfect sleep.

My job on the other hand is not always demanding. I might be able to get a good 2 hour block in for myself. In addition, I have private space and my company is not in software, so they are more likely to be unaware.

My SaaS idea is intended to be a personal scale business, so even if caught it's unlikely my company would be interested in it. Totally unrelated to their business as well. There is a slim chance my idea can catch on larger than I expect, but I'm not banking on it.

I also do not come from a CS background, so it takes me triple+ the time of what some of you can hack out a site. I've only created one app and I have to learn new tools for this new one. Thus the time crunch is even more extreme.

I can work on my app through a web IDE and private IP (HTTPS). Will the company be able to detect it? Alternatively I can shell out for a new Macbook I suppose, since I have private space to work.

My idea if successful will need some network effects to keep away copycats, so I'd like to be able to work full bore. However I cannot afford to quit my job.

I'm in California. My employer is not based there. I did not have to sign any IP agreements.

Would you work on your SaaS on the job if you were me?

Thanks.

<comment><USER27> No. I've done my share of stupid/risky things, but I'm simply not going to work on a side business while actually in the office at my day job.

That said, I used to know someone who did exactly this successfully. However, while he was an engineer, his day job had absolutely nothing to do with software development and gave him lots of free time "at work" when he would just have been bored.

<comment><USER26> What is your biggest concern in the risk?

The way I see it for me there are four outcomes: 1) Company discovers and I am fired. 2) Company discovers and has no interest. 3) No one finds out and I have decent side income. 4) The app has good success and I quit one day with a phony excuse before they become aware of it.

In my case, 1/4 is actually bad but the likelihood of discovery is low because my company is not in that field. I'm not likely to be fired without warning and it's not likely to be discovered while the app is transitioning from side income to success (before I can leave, if the app is worthwhile to litigate over).

<comment><USER27> Worst case is company discovers, fires you, and takes all rights to the code. The IP belongs to them and you have to decide if it's worth the legal risk of continuing to develop it commercially. Hint: it's generally not.

It's easier to avoid this problem than deal with it after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yes, I did it with significant monthly profits. I solved a problem many eBay sellers had at that time. Tips from me:

1\. Try to outsource as much as possible and do not try to solve everything yourself. Upwork & Co. is your friend. There are people who are better in coding, designing etc. than you. After a while I outsourced time consuming customer first level support too. Of course you need some money to do it but you will make way more progress if you have a great team. Be VERY careful in selecting the people you work with. There are several good ones out there but a lot of not so good ones too.

2\. Developing the Saas platform is not the difficult part. Winning/getting customers is. Customers won't come just because you published your site.

3\. Think twice before you want to start something where you face a 2-sided- market. Building this next to your job might be very challenging.

4\. Go for it! You (and others) will never know until you built it. Don't let others stop you but consider their feedback.

Good luck!

<comment><USER29> Any tips for hiring workers on thinks like Upwork/eLance/etc without them stealing your idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Passive income often connotes building something once, then sitting back while money pours in. More often than not, this doesn't happen (at least initially anyway).

Most of your time with your side project will be allocated to customer support and marketing. Others on this thread have correctly pointed out that approaching the project in terms of a business is the appropriate mindset to possess. You'll constantly be tweaking and iterating until you hit product- market fit, then you'll have to go out and sell the product.

It took me about a month to build [https://www.onhand.co](https://www.onhand.co) then double that time to reach enough users to sustain the server costs (still not profitable).

Honestly the best advice I have is similar to the advice startups receive, which is first figure out a pain point others are willing to pay to alleviate, then spend time building your side project/business/passive income.

</comment><comment><USER31> IME there are two main challenges

1) Pre-launch: Finding the time while working to create your SaaS (prior to go launch).

2) Post-launch: Ensuring you have the time to support your customers, and resolve issues in a timely manner. (Paying) customers come with the extra responsibility of taking care of them.

The latter can be much harder to manage since you need to react quickly and not push it off until when you have time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes, besides Patio11 a lot of those attending MicroConf has done it!

<comment><USER33> Is there an European equivalent of MicroConf?

<comment><USER34> Yes: [http://www.microconfeurope.com/](http://www.microconfeurope.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Yes, look to my profile for proof.

Do you have anything specific in mind that would cause you to believe otherwise? Possibly I can offer up my experiences.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that I believe otherwise but challenges and realities of trying to do so that I can think of:

1\. Being able to contribute to expectation / well at work while trying to do so.

2\. As a developer, you will likely have to retain a deep domain knowledge so shifting between the domain of your own creation and the one of your employer isn't going to be lossless.

3\. Having the discipline to ship when you are the only one working on it and not keep on building because you can.

4\. Technical skills aside, doing the marketing work to get buyers for the product. Marketing tends to be a shot if you don't have a pre-existing audience to pitch to in the dark until you test and tweak down to the the source that converts the most while keeping you profitable. Where do you even start? etc.

5\. Keeping yourself motivated though to completion.

6\. Not burning out and managing your emotional well being while making your product as well as doing your job. How much of your free time are you okay with spending on this idea?

All of this for even a simple product is not a trivial undertaking. All things considered, technical skill is only one of the many requirements for someone to be able to pull this off. Technical skill may be just a very tiny portion of what you will need to succeed.</comment></comment>


Guest Post: Why schools should refuse iPads  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/guest-post-why-schools-should-refuse-ipads

<comment><USER2> Yeah, buy "open" Android tablets instead, then spend another couple million on support and throw them away in 2 years.

On his school experience: Windows software is also proprietary, but you can run Linux on a Mac, and open-source software on OSX or Windows too. He is completely mixing up open-source software with hardware/OS vendors.

> I strongly recommend your students become broadly educated computer users > [...] so they can maximize the effectiveness of their computing and be more > employable because of their high ability to adapt to whatever computer > platform their employer may be using

Sure using Linux will do that... what's the difference? Students won't learn how to use Windows or OSX either if they don't have contact with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> > what's the difference?

In general it is a good philosophy if the school are not under the influence of economic forces, like Apple or Windows ...

* If school would use GNU/Linux instead I thing the students would get a much deeper understanging of the OS. * A lot more peaple would use Linux and thus GNU/Linux would have a much wider spread. * The school wouldn't have to pay for the OS.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Cleanicons.com - <AUTHOR>

This new years one of my goals was to make money on the internet. So here is my attempt!
I have been making and tweaking these icons for the past 2 months and have put a site together!
I would love any feedback you guys have or icons you would like to see!
http://cleanicons.com
List of icons: Camera, Cloud, CoffeeBean, Cog, CommentBubble, Computer, Credit Card Front/Back, Arrows in all directions, Eye, FastForward, Folder, Garbage, Smile, Heart, Home, LightBulb, Link, List, MagnifyingGlass, Minus, Pause, Pen, Pencil, CellPhone, HomePhone, Pin, Play, Plus, Present, Printer, Rewind, RSS, Frown, Screwdriver, Screwdriver and Wrench Crossed (settings), Star, Tag, Target, Ticket, Video, Wifi, Wrench, X <comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://cleanicons.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You may have a hard time competing with <http://thenounproject.com/> which provides icons for free (licensed as either PD or CC). But I certainly wish you the best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah the only problem with the noun project is that you have to attribute each icon to the creator of it. [http://blog.thenounproject.com/post/12554806140/the-noun- pro...](http://blog.thenounproject.com/post/12554806140/the-noun-projects- attribution-requirements)

With mine you have full use with no attribution. These would come in handy on commercial applications.

Adding the License Agreement today

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The icons look very clean, simple layout yet effective layout, and quite glad to see such a reasonable price :)

I noticed only 49 icons are showing on the front page image, yet the site says 55 though?</comment>


Formalizing Text Editors in Coq - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03525 <comment><USER2> This looks more like someone proved some trivial lemmas about lists and wrote the simplest possible DSL to do some list manipulations rather than anything close to resembling a serious piece of work on formally verified text editors.

This is first-lecture-learning-Coq level stuff to be completely honest; it's interesting if you've never seen Coq before, but it's not really what it claims to be at all. The amount of work to go from this to "formalizing full- nlown text editors, such as vim" is enormous.

If we remove the proof scripts (and duplicated statements of Lemmas/Theorems in Gallina _and_ mathematical notation) since these would never be included in a published paper (only as an accompanying artefact unless a novel tactic/proof scripting method is the actual topic of the paper), the length of the paper almost halves and the amount of substance becomes clearer.

<comment><USER3> _> ...the amount of substance becomes clearer_

IMO this attitude is why formal methods based on proof assistants never took off.

That entire PL theory research community seems to think that implementation work is unimportant and not even worth a few page "tools/casestudy" workshop paper. Even a tiny four page write-up gets a "why isn't this a homework assignment" style response.

That, by itself, is I guess not terrible. But POPL proceedings for 20+ years have been littered with 2 pages of substance and 18 pages of greek-letter- masturbation. Most of those papers build insanely complex calculi to capture a simple idea that every junior engineer can understand in half a day. And this complaint always fell on deaf ears. At least, as long as the author was able to say "logical relations" or "linear types" or whatever the hell keywords y'all are applying your elimination rules on these days.

The only thing that will ever push that field forward is _shitloads of working and well-explained /documented code_. But hacking out some lines of ocaml/gallina (or, god forbid, Python/C++... if I have to listen to an SML acolyte complain about parallelism in Python one more time...) isn't valued as much as hacking out lines of \Gammas and \vdashes. Taking the time to explain short code examples gets you "that's a homework problem" responses. As if explaining a digestible piece of code concisely is some sort of admission of intellectual impotence. Smart people realize this quickly and either get out (if they want to have an impact on the world) or learn how to write 1+1=2 in a super complicated way (if they just want that piece of paper).

Anyways, you're right. The paper is a far cry from "formalizing a text editor in coq". But the "your implementation work doesn't deserve my time or attention" attitude is a big reason why this research community hasn't really had much impact even after several decades of outsized investment. IMO.

<comment><USER4> This. This is the problem with academia in a nutshell.

I get mercilessly downvoted whenever I point out that it makes _zero_ sense to use Greek letters in computer science papers. There is no rich history of Ancient Greek computer science that is being referenced for consistency with the new research!!! It's 100% intellectual wankery, nothing more.

I experienced the same thing first-hand with AI research. Nobody is going to get published for using a straightforward numerical approach like Automatic Differentiation in a paper, so they spend 90% of their effort symbolically differentiating the formulas and end up with something that is numerically unstable but oh so pretty and impressive looking when laid out with LaTeX.

Publishing in science is now all about showing off, and not at all about the advancement of science. It's politics, not practice.

PS: Go back and compare CS papers published in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s with stuff being put out now. It's night & day!

<comment><USER5> Yes and no.

Yes, a major from my many years in academia is sophistication is valued over simplicity. A bunch of fancy symbols and equations = important, so much of what is published appears, at least to me, to be much more complicated than it needs to be.

No, in that the sophistication, in the good cases, is because there is a multitude of subtletly and complexity in these subjects, as well as a formal framing of the issue so that it can be analyzed in an unambiguous manner. So, there is a reason for the obfuscation, although it mostly ingrown overkill at this point.

The best papers can both deal with the great complexity and sophisticated formalisms, while boiling it all down to an accessible delivery.

However, such papers are few and far between.

<comment><USER6> In Coordination2019 here is a lovely paper (W Kokke, J Garrett Morris, Philip Wadler. Towards Races in Linear Logic) that uses emoji as formal notation. Maybe it could be the way to go? Like, if your formal language describes cars and buses, why not use and instead of alpha and beta?

<comment><USER6> (The above comment ended with "why not use :car and :bus instead of alpha and beta?". Apparently HN does not support emoji?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to contrast this with [1], which works on formalizing _rich_ text editors (for HTML).

1\. [https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is- terrible-1...](https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is- terrible-122d8a40e480)

</comment><comment><USER8> Neat! It would be great to have a universally agreed-upon standard for how text editors behave (especially with regard to embedded / structured content, cursor position, etc.) and which operations they should support.

I recently came across ProseMirror [1], which seems to be a fantastic step in this direction. I've been experimenting with using it to build a Markdown editor with better support for math and pre-defined HTML blocks (for e.g. stating theorems, corollaries, etc. in math notes).

[1]: [https://prosemirror.net/](https://prosemirror.net/)

<comment><USER9> Indeed, ProseMirror is highly regarded by its code quality, just as its older sibling, CodeMirror. It even raised quite a bit of money on Indiegogo.

Are you planning on open-sourcing your editor? I'd love to use something like this on a project of mine. (I currently use the much less ambitious EasyMDE [1], which is based on CodeMirror.)

[1]: [https://github.com/Ionaru/easy-markdown- editor](https://github.com/Ionaru/easy-markdown-editor)

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's the plan! I've long lamented that editors like Typora and Roam are closed-source, preventing users like me from tweaking them to my specific use- case. So I'm hoping to build something that others can modify if they need to.

My priorities are math support, citations/wikilinks and the ability to define custom document structure (theorems, etc.). I basically want users to be able to specify a ProseMirror schema with CSS to go along with it.

Can I ask about your specific use case? Any features you've been really missing? No promises they'll make it in, but I'm curious :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be interesting to prove an implementation using gap buffer, against the same specification.

<comment><USER11> Gap buffers are zippers, which makes this particular case really easy: they arise as derivatives of the list functor, and so for generic categorical reasons they are isomorphic to a list plus a position in it. This means you can prove things about lists-with-positions and basically automatically transport them to statements about gap buffers.

The specification in this note is not an ideal top-level spec, though: it just says there are a series of editor commands that can change one string into another. This is just a basic sanity check, but you can't do much more than that here because the editor state is too impoverished -- it's just the current string.

However, there is an interesting line of attack in (1) enriching the state enough to easily model richer things like command history and undo (eg, by making the state be the whole history of documents and commands), (2) giving each update command a semantics in terms of simple whole-state changes on the enriched state, and then (3) showing that a more efficient representation correctly implements the simple whole-state semantics.

About five years ago, Conor McBride taught a course on dependently-typed programming in Agda in which one of the projects was implementing provably correct text editors, using zippers/gap buffers and interaction via Mealy machines. The link is: [https://github.com/pigworker/CS410-15](https://github.com/pigworker/CS410-15)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there any open source libraries that implement this in practice?

</comment><comment><USER13> Is Emacs vs. Vi decidable?

<comment><USER14> As someone who saw the war happen back in early 2000s, vim conceded almost immediately (because it was the efficient move). And people still can't get over the fact that users continue to use vim anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish arxiv could be more like a blogging platform with standards and less a PDF repository.

<comment><USER16> Arxiv is a pre-print platform for scientific publications, not a blogging platform. Other platforms are designed for this, such as medium.

You can use [https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/](https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/) to convert papers to HTML and read them in the browser though.</comment></comment>


5 Algorithms Every Web Developer Can Use and Understand - <AUTHOR> https://www.gitbook.com/book/lizrush/algorithms-for-webdevs-ebook/details <comment><USER2> This is just a thinly veiled advertisement for Algorithmia. Which granted, does look like an interesting product. However, as a side effect the "Math" in this "Book" is very light and all the code examples are just API calls to Algorithmia.

I think both the terms "book" and "understand" are used very loosely here. Understand the concept enough to use, maybe. I guess my bar for understanding is higher.

I don't mean to be harsh, just I prefer the title to tell it like it really is. After all, "5 algorithms web developers can use today on Algorithmia" might still get up-voted.

Also, as a side note, the "PageRank" algorithm is slightly misleading as it has nothing to do with Google PageRank which some web developers might be lead to believe based on the name.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a lovely book about practical applications of useful algorithms for web developers: PageRank, Language Detection, Nudity detection, Sentiment and Term Analysis.

Free ebook in very accessible language with plenty of examples. Thank you so much!</comment>


Take a look at my my new app and tell me what you think.. - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/phi-colors/id444067320?mt=8

<comment><USER2> #1) Take any money you can and hire a designer ASAP.

iOS customers are heavily influenced by usability and polish.</comment>


Ask HN: Naive question about indexing website content - <AUTHOR>

Is it legal to scrape sites and store them and server them up on my site (of course with a link to the actual site as well)? I see for example Fandango shows movies and move times for theaters all over. If I am working on something like that for another vertical will I be breaking some kind of copyright law? <comment><USER2> You know how every site has a "Terms of Use" link at the bottom? That's where it says "You agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Web pages or the content contained therein without prior written permission of an authorized officer of Fandango."

Also, there are restrictions on linking to Fandango; you may only link to their homepage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I was hoping may be there was some court ruling that would let me do that :)

I was referring to Fandango because they already index and show all the movie times for various shows. So does that mean they get permission from cinemark and other companies/sites?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Which jurisdiction are you targeting? The laws are very different depending on what country you are hosted in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I forgot to mention that. Its in the US.</comment></comment>


Running TensorFlow at Petascale and Beyond - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/02/04/running-tensorflow-at-petascale-and-beyond/ <comment><USER2> Petascale used to be a buzzword 10 years ago. I think it's outdated for many years now.

Case in point. A gaming GPU from a few years ago, GTX 1080 Ti, easily does more than 10 TeraFlops. So you only need 100 such GPUs (about $70k worth in January 2019) to do PetaFlop computation. This doesn't even include high-end GPUs especially upsized for deep-learning computation. Furthermore, those DL GPUs are dwarfed by what ASICs like Google TPU, and nVidia's DL ASIC can do (more than 100 TeraFlops a board I think, though arguably those ASICs are mainly for inference not learning).

DeepMind routinely utilizes a few PetaFlops for its cutting edge DRL systems (AlphaGo, AlphaStar, etc).

IMO, In the next 5 years or so, and somewhere between 0.1 and 1 ExaFlop, we'll probability hit human-level AI.

<comment><USER3> Traditionally the HPC community means double precision when they talk about FLops, which consumer GPUs are not super great at (somewhere around 400GFlop or the GTX1080 Ti). The V100 is better at 7 or so TFlops, but also an order of magnitude more expensive. The smaller of the two machines in the article (Cori) is a ~20 PF (Float64) scale machine. However, even then it is quite challenging to get anything close to peak performance out of these systems (a bit easier if you're doing DL will is more amenable to hand-optimized vendor libraries).

Of course for DL, people routinely use reduced precision as you have alluded to. There, we're looking at exascale at the moment. The second machine mentioned in the article (Summit) has ~3EF of Float16 performance (of which their application reached ~1EF). For comparison (and assuming about 50% MXU utilization - which is about the maximum I've seen), you'd need about 200 TPUv2 pods (at $384/hour/pod for the general public) to reach the same scale on this problem. Now Google does have that scale, but it's certainly non- trival.

Half-precision petascale is fairly routine these days. You can get that on the cloud for < $100/hr and I do routinely spin up such systems for ML training. However, petascale fp32/fp64 and exascale (b)f16 as discussed in the article are still fairly rare and usually preceded by months of planning to make sure things go right and the computer power is used usefully.

Disclaimer: not involved in the work, but working closely with the folks who are and I've used both the mentioned systems myself.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the additional info.

And I don't disagree with anything you said. However, for any concerns with computation between 10 and 800 Petaflops, I would consider them "super"-petascale (with below 10 being Petascale, above 800 being Exascale).

Summit is clearly an Exascale machine. I looked at Cori and I was surprised to find out that it has no mention of GPU in the specs, despite the project starting as late as 2015. I personally think trying to scale up CPU-only supercomputers in a super-Petascale era is a losing battle, but that's just my 0.02.

<comment><USER4> cori uses Knights Landing Xeon Phi accelerators, not GPUs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got interested in what parameters they were computing, I guess cosmological constant or anything space expansion related.

Anyways, cool stuff, wish they had a peak in the results.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ok so they are running huge amounts of data through tensorflow.

I am more interested in what the data is and what can be gained by using such a large amount. I was under the impression that the benefits of training data plateaued off after a certain amount.

<comment><USER7> Sure for a fixed dataset, more training plateaus after a while. However with more power we can work on different types of data. For example instead of using 2D CNNs on images, we can now use 3D CNNs on high resolution pointcloud data. Also as the speed of data acquisition grows being able to train a given model on a given type and size of dataset to a fixed 'level' as fast as possible becomes even more important.</comment></comment>


FTC to block Edgewell's $1.37B acquisition of razor startup Harry's - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/3/21120169/harrys-ftc-acquisition-edgewell-schick-gillette-dollar-shave-club <comment><AUTHOR> Link to FTC press release: [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2020/02/ftc-f...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2020/02/ftc-files-suit-block-edgewell-personal-care-companys- acquisition)

Link to FTC administrative complaint: [https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/public_p3_c...](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/public_p3_complaint_- _edgewell-harrys.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> Not Gillette. Title is wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, fixed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Chair advice for the short, and fused spines - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a chair for someone who is around five feet tall, and weighs maybe one hundred pounds.  This person also has a fused upper spine.  Budget tops out at $1000.  Of course, cheaper is better.<p>Being both much larger and having a normal spine, I don't know much about either of those things.  I know HN likes the fancy chairs. any advice? <comment><USER2> frankly, i'd ask them to help you out, not us. doubt many people here will have the specific experience you're looking for.

ask the person to help you out since you want to make sure they're comfortable and unsure if a standard chair will fit their needs/situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah. Yes. well, that's what I will do next. ask them to go to stores and sit in chairs. this person has used a standard, cheap office chair forever, and thinks back pain is normal. (which it might very well be, but this person hasn't spent much time on ergonomics yet, so I was looking for guidance from the chair enthusiast crowd here.)

<comment><USER2> righto, but, i mean, we can tell you good chairs, or you can look them up in past threads. good chars for people without spinal injuries/issues. i don't think anyone's going to have much experience with chairs for people with those problems. best bet is to likely ask the person what they think.</comment></comment></comment>


People On Things They Couldn't Believe About America Until They Moved Here - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtcatalog.com/michael-koh/2013/11/16-people-on-things-they-couldnt-believe-about-america-until-they-moved-here/

<comment><USER2> Step 1: Find a popular quora thread

Step 2: Be a dick and cut and paste everyone's comments into your shitty blog post

Step 3: Profit!

<comment><USER3> At least he's not making me register for an account...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> could a helpful indian hner please explain what EMI means? (Triya Bhattacharya, 3rd point)

also, one thing i didn't read that surprised me when i stayed in the us for some time (in new haven) - the strength of the correlation between wealth and skin colour.

<comment><USER5> EMI means credit. Credit cards paid via "Equal Monthly Installments." Financing with monthly payments towards a loan or product purchase. Consider that businesses like Best Buy and Victoria's Secret offer financing on their own store-specific credit cards.

The clue is in the context from the article:

      It's like the people there live on EMIs. Cars, phones,
      everything. And even the lower middle class can afford
      this stuff. It's like everyone has an iPhone.

Also, my personal favorite:

      Grinding. The dance form.

...honestly, I'm an American, and I can't believe that one either.

<comment><USER4> ah thanks. exactly the same happens here in chile. even at the supermarket, they ask if you want to pay in installments.</comment></comment></comment>


VLC now renders subtitles in South Asian scripts - <AUTHOR> https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/vlc-now-render-subtitles-in-south-asian-scripts/ <comment><USER2> Working with different character sets and character encodings is one of the most frustrating areas of programming so congratulations to the VLC team.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anybody know if this update includes handling ruby text?

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

</comment><comment><USER4> The real news are that this didn't happen until the end of 2015...

<comment><USER5> It's a pretty specific skill set required, plus not all VLC developers will need these languages supported. When you have that kind of feature and no corporate backing, it's going to take a while.</comment></comment>


Shunning Facebook and Living to Tell About it - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebook-and-living-to-tell-about-it.htm

<comment><USER2> A couple of months ago I installed RescueTime (<http://www.rescuetime.com>). After letting it run for a week it sent me an email with a summary of what I had been up to. My heart sank. I had spent about 15 hours a week actively using Facebook.com. 15 hours! That did not include all the times I would check the iPhone app. I was well-and-truly Facehooked and I decided I had to quit.

Whenever my Dad puts down the morning paper, he asks himself: What have I learnt? I started asking myself the same question after a session of Facebooking and soon realised the answer was: nothing. Facebook openly admits that it allows you to maintain more 'friendships' than should be possible. I used to think that was a good thing. Now I do not.

I also realised that the main reason I logged into Facebook was not to check up on other people, but to check up on myself. Had _my_ status been liked? What photos had _I_ been tagged in? Which events was _I_ invited to? Facebook was not really about others, it was about me. It encouraged me to navel-gaze far too much. At times I felt like it was an anti-social network. Whenever I did look through other peoples' profiles the emotions were often negative: jealousy, lust, disgust and sometimes horror. These things I want to experience less, not more.

What amazes me most about Facebook is how it has changed the way people think. I have genuinely overheard someone say: 'Get a sick photo for Facebook!!!' on a night out - I was that person. I was that idiot. Since leaving Facebook I have caught myself thinking: 'I wonder how this will look on Facebook?' - those thoughts are slowly subsiding.

I think Facebook's mission, to get everyone to relentlessly share everything with everyone goes too far. Life is about curating, about choosing, about doing millions of opportunity-cost calculations and picking what you want and rejecting what you do not. Friendships take blood, sweat and tears to maintain. They take time, they take work, they take effort on both sides. They are not easy but that is what makes them so great. For me, finding a group of real friends is about sifting through the thousands of people I meet and clutching onto a precious few who bring out my best side and who will be there when the chips are down. Every hour I sink into browsing the updates of people I do not really care about could be spent having a conversation someone I love. Facebook allowed me to attach meaningless digital tendrils to hundreds people and keep semi-acquaintances on life-support. I used to spend a ridiculous of time scrolling through these acquaintances' status-updates. That had to stop.

I like Twitter for two reasons:

1.) I know it is public - When I used Facebook I could never figure out whether I had checked the right tick-boxes or slid the right sliders or placed the right people into the right lists and so I was always wondering who could see what. At times that could make me paranoid and scared - especially when I was tagged in some annoying photos. With Twitter I know that everything is public and I shape my tweets accordingly. There is no confusion.

2.) It reflects the true asymmetry of human relationships - In the real world some people are 'liked" or 'followed' more than others. When somebody follows me on Twitter who I am not particularly interested in I do not feel compelled to follow them back. With Facebook I felt so worried about rejecting friendship requests that I always accepted.

Another thing that really scared me about Facebook: it had become my address book. It took two weeks' work to get the Skype-names, email-addresses and home-addresses of some of my _closest_ friends and greatest acquaintances - that is awful.

I think socialising through technology is great. Skype, email, SMS and phone- calls all share one commonality: they are, at their core, services that facilitate one-to-one or one-to-few communication. That is how real social interaction happen. They happen two people or just a few more. Somewhere between a pair of people and a body of a thousand, groups form; people coalesce; people _choose_ who they like to spend time with and do so. I _like_ choosing.

Anyway, the biggest thing I have realised since leaving Facebook is this: leaving Facebook was not a big deal.

PS - If you would like to follow me on Twitter I am: <http://www.twitter.com/ricburton> ;)

<comment><USER3> This - "Twitter... It reflects the true asymmetry of human relationships."

What I loved about Twitter is that it gave me the onus of choice to include or ignore people that may have attended school with me, may have worked with me at one point, etc... but for one reason or another I no longer wanted involved in my personal lives. (Yes, I know Facebook has privacy walls but we all know how permeable they haven proven to be, nevermind their disconcerting rewording of the Terms of Service).

Twitter is also more inclusive and consistent with the 'whole character' of a person. On Facebook it is easy to be typecast or become monofocused among one group.. family, college classmates, frat buddies, whatever.

On Twitter I can lament my horrible Redskins every Sunday and talk affiliate marketing, code, or fishing in Alaska without breaking a stride.

Not to mention, I think the barrier to communicating with people we identify as 'out of reach' is much lower on Twitter than any other medium. Name an author and with effort you can probably exchange with them on Twitter.

Getting them to friend you back on Facebook? Probably not.

For the record, I am: <http://twitter.com/phillian>

<comment><USER4> I like Twitter because it is simple[1]. 140 char messages, reverse chronological order. _That's it_.

[1] I use Twitter for Mac, the website is kind of a mess actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few thoughts that probably buck the trend around here:

'"I knew all these things about her, but I'd never even talked to her," said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. "At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy."'

Honestly, why is that unhealthy? I think there's probably more to this story, but it's not like it doesn't happen in real life without facebook. You hang with your friends, you exchange stories about someone you don't know, and then one day you meet them and someone mentions "by the way, this was the person we were talkin about when we said bla bla bla". Yes, facebook probably makes it easier, but I don't find this to be "unhealthy" in the least.

'"I wasn't calling my friends anymore," said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. "I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them."'

I've heard this before. Honestly, I think it's because we're in this transition stage where somehow this feels less real than a phone call. I would argue that this _is_ a real connection. These pictures and updates often communicate more than you necessarily would remember to in a phone call. The purpose of a phone call is different, the interactions there are different. It seems like if you're worried that you're not calling your friends anymore… You should start calling your friends again.

I know I feel like I am exposed to more articles and jokes and opinions via facebook than I would if I weren't on it. I interact with people I'm not super-close with, and that's fine. To me, it's like HN, but with a different set of people posting stuff to it, people who are close to my interests in a way completely different from HN. It's more personal in some ways, and I feel more free to be myself in some ways, while I feel more constrained in others. It is, in short, the very definition of a different medium of interaction. I won't say the same things on facebook that I do on HN, and I won't say the same things on either of those that I will with my friends when we're having a drink.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to shun facebook at all. But I think there are some common complaints about facebook that simply stem from a strange concept of what it is. Then again, I suppose if you're using it in a way that's harmful to you, and you can't figure out how to make it less harmful, it's probably a good idea to leave it altogether.

By the way, I probably spend at least 15 hours a week using facebook. That fact doesn't particularly bother me. In the past, I've noticed this goes down when I have other stuff to do. Facebook is just something that happens more often when I have more spare time. If I really wanted to do something different with that time, I would (though there's a decent argument here for death by a thousand papercuts—or facebook visits).

<comment><USER6> "I knew all these things about her, but I'd never even talked to her,

I don't think it necessarily unhealthy, but I guess it depends how you interpret 'talk'. I actually read that line as that Blacomb hadn't _communicated_ with her at all - for example, I've got a whole bunch of 'friends' on FB whom I used to interact with at College, but we've gone our separate ways and now never speak to each other and all I see are their FB updates. In that sense, I think it is unhealthy if you associate that passive one-way comms as 'friendship'.

However, if you take his stament of 'never even talked to her' as literal voice communications, then I agree that I think it's perfectly fine. If theyare exchanging two-way comms on FB, I don't see it any different to a long distance relationship of old where people wrote letters to each other.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady For me Facebook has become essential. Using it for hours and hours everyday is a choice though. You can benefit from having a Facebook account while only checking it for a few minutes a day. I use it as an address book, event planner, and messaging system.

I use the FB Messenger app on iOS largely as a replacement for SMS. I check FB.com for details of events I am attending and to receive invitations I wouldn't otherwise (unless they were small events with a few close friends in which case I would receive a phone call). I also sync my Facebook contacts through the iOS app to my phones address book which helps keep my contact info up to date.

Using these functions I get lots of benefit and don't waste a lot of time. I can waste time if I want but that is an active choice and not required to benefit from the service.

I think Facebook is going to start becoming more and more essential. It is becoming much more common that I meet someone new, and rather than exchanging contact details we just ensure we are both on Facebook and connect that way. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> Many of my closest friends adhere to the "A2K" philosophy (Amish 2000) where they try not to use any tech released more recently than 2000. They fail as often as they succeed, but social networking is one area that they have largely succeeded in staying away from. In a stunning revelation (and a large dose of sarcasm), they found you do not need Facebook to remain close with your friends.

I left Facebook a year ago because of THEIR haranguing; if my closest friends refuse to use it then my news feed is just filled to the brim with useless noise from high school (non-)friends and distant cousins.

Don't extrapolate anything from this or try it at home; this is what happens when you go to school for computer science and work at a silicon valley tech company yet every single one of your close friends was an english major in college.

<comment> wes-exp I haven't heard the term "A2K" before but it's ingenious. Is there a process for granting exceptions to the timeline restrictions? Even real Amish have exceptions like, "it's okay to use a gas-powered engine to harvest crops as long as it's not providing locomotive force".

I'm fine with no Facebook (glad even), but smartphones are another matter. What's the policy on them?

<comment><USER7> Most of them grudgingly bought smartphones within the last year and now wouldn't give them up. I yell at them about it but they do fail as often as they succeed. On the other hand, one of them is doing a home birth... so there is that, I guess.

<comment> wes-exp Actually there are some compelling arguments for home birth aided by a midwife. There is a documentary about it: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_of_Being_Born>

I think it's interesting that we've mitigated naturally occurring risks (such as disease) to such an extent that technology itself now poses risks of often similar magnitudes. Take preservatives: on the one hand keeping food fresh prevents various ills, but on the other hand continually ingesting chemical preservatives can cause disease itself such as cancer. The pushback against vaccines is kind of a manifestation of this... or perhaps the _perception_ of risk as I think the science doesn't bear out the fears in this particular case. But in general, the idea that technology is always better seems to be increasingly challenged; often with a legitimate scientific basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think my view point is a rarity, but I really don't give a crap about social networking (I did have a FB account until last year). I can't say my life was any better because of it, and as the article points out, it can be a huge time waster. And although I can trust institutions, I don't trust corporations. I'm not saying FB is any worse than any other, but the idea that we're getting something for free is just plain false. They use our data for profit and I choose not to participate for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER9> I somehow fail to understand why people make quitting facebook a story.

<https://www.google.com/search?q=why+i+quit+facebook> About 45,000 results

<https://www.google.com/search?q=i+deleted+my+facebook> About 3,440,000 results

<comment><USER10> Does Facebook tell your "friends" that you have deleted your account when you leave? If not it seems like the sort of thing many people would want to announce somewhere.

<comment><USER11> Look up "Burger King Whopper Sacrifice" for the answer to that question.

<comment><USER10> While interesting, I'm not really sure how "de-friending" 10 people in order to get a mediocre hamburger has any relation to what happens when someone deletes their _account_.

<comment> k-mcgrady From what I have seen it depends. I don't think it is ever announced that you leave. Sometimes you disappear from friend lists. Other times you remain but when someone tries to view your profile they get a message it doesn't exist. I think the reason they leave you in friends lists is because you can re- activate your account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> FTA >"I knew all these things about her, but I'd never even talked to her," said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. "At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy."

I agree with this, but I think it says more about how one USES Facebook. I use it for organizing events and as a digital replacement for a rolodex. If I wasted my time flipping through a rolodex, learning details about people who were only acquaintances, I would consider that unhealthy too.

<comment><USER13> One is designed to grab and keep your attention for as long as possible. One is designed to make it easy to keep track of contacts.

<comment><USER14> I think that's an unfair statement though because Facebook can do a lot more than a Rolodex. I think we need to know more about how people spend their time on Facebook.

If they're spending time on games like Farmville, that's quite different from spending time looking at photos/profiles/statuses

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I quit Facebook 4 months ago. The relationships that are important to me have improved(even long distance ones), my productivity is up and my depression is down (not sure how that works or if it's related).

I encourage you all to give it a try.

<comment><USER6> There has been studies done which show that the 'keeping up with the Jones' aspect of facebook can increase depressive tendencies. So the improvement of your depressions could be as a result of this.

The study was mentioned in this article in Slate:

Is Facebook making us sad? [http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_antisocial_network.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've never really understood the whole Facebook and Social 'thing'. From a business perspective, yes I see a point. I put myself and my clients up on all the major sites to give them a) backlinks and b) a presence there (and done right, some new leads!).

But other than that, I believe one person already mentioned this: "I don't get all these 'I left facebook' articles/posts". I really don't get it.

I'm a geek and a nerd through and through, though everyone I know knows that if I'm online (to chat via AIM or whatnot) then I'm free to 'chat' to. If they have something more serious to talk about, they call or SMS. And most of the time we talk about things IN PERSON. Share pictures, IN PERSON.

Sure I post to FB/TW here and there, but 10/15/20 hours of social media sites and you're not getting anything from it and you think it's 'horrible' and 'evil' and you should do it less? WTF?

I don't get people. Spend 20 hours on social media if that's your thing, god speed. Don't go whining to the rest of us when you find out your wasting your life there.

I just don't get it ... at all. I understand the 'omg I just quit FB, this is how I'm "dealing" without FB' ....

Completely biased rude opinion: I think it's pathetic.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I don't bother with the status updates. I don't look at peoples profiles. I put the bare minimum info on there that I could, I locked down all of the privacy settings. I purposefully made my profile difficult to find.

I friend my friends on Facebook and do very little else with it. The only reason I have an account is so to make it easier for people to include me when they organise events through it.

Works for me.

<comment><USER17> I do the same, the only reason I keep the account is so people can include me in events organised via Facebook.

The only other time I go on it is when I get an email notification saying someone has sent me a message.

I don't bother with status updates or reading what other people write. If its interesting they will tell me when I see them. Unsurprisingly when I do see them I don't hear about 90% of the crap they put on Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I quit Facebook recently. Besides the fact that I don't trust Facebook to know everything about me, my main motivation is that __I don't think it's about real friendship __.

The Facebook mentality is "many friends". But one has limited attention. I'd rather spend my attention developing a few deep friendships than many shallow ones.

The Facebook mentality is "never lose touch". I think losing touch with people is healthy. I'd rather make new in-person friendships than maintain every acquaintance I've ever made.

The Facebook mentality is public communication: my comments to you are public to everyone. I think real communication needs privacy. A one-to-one phone conversation feels completely different than a public wall post.

I love friendships. But I don't think Facebook is about friendship. It's about the monetizable illusion thereof. As someone else has written, it's a hangout spot created by marketers, rigged with microphones and cameras and advertisements.

Friending < befriending.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've had a facebook account for several years but my overall sentiment toward it has become rather guarded. A young lady with whom I was friends in elementary sent me am unsolicited friend request. She was someone I'd been quite content to never hear from again. So I put my settings as private as I can and remove my profile from google. Then about a month ago, facebook suggests a friend who shares no mutual friends with me, whom I've never mentioned, and who I hadn't even seen in years. How did facebook know I knew this person? So now, I view facebook as a Rolodex. If I need to contact someone, I'll go there, but that's it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have never had a facebook account, and likely never will.

The amount of pressure I came under to sign up, at various stages over the last year, from peers is sometimes astonishing. It's like you can't be a real person if your not listed.

My friends and family have stopped nagging me to join now, and people I knew in highschool have mostly stopped asking my sister what happened to me.

<comment><USER21> It does get better. People get used to contacting you through normal channels again, and they also learn that facebook is another 'in-crowd' and not everyone is on it - you can talk to 'facebookers' on it, but not 'everyone'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't use it, although I have an account to appease my other friends' need to 'friend' me. How silly is that sentence?

</comment><comment><USER23> Strange, recently posted elsewhere on a similar topic. This quitting thing must be catching on and may soon become the in-thing.

This month I completed a year of deactivating my FB account. I have signed into Twitter only thrice in the past three months and don't miss it much. Deleted my Google+ account too a little while back.

What did I learn from all of that? It is that these platforms amplify you. If you are prone to making bad use of your time (which is my chronic problem), these platforms will take it to a different level. If you are making good use of your time, these platforms can help you make use of it better.

I have made the transition from blaming the platform to seeing for myself that I am the problem and I am still working on fixing that.

</comment><comment><USER24> My response would be something like this:

"Oh my god! I can't believe I just quit Facebook. I can't wait to update my status so that all my friends can see what I just did ... _oh, crap_... what now?"

Seriously, though?

If FB (or anything else in your life) works for you, do it until it doesn't work. Then change it. No big deal either way.

</comment><comment><USER25> Meh, a lot of stories about people who make it sound as if it has to be all or nothing. I used FB a lot in the early days like all new sites. Now I take a look around once a week then get back to work; you can too. Keep the valuable contact list but don't waste so much time.

</comment><comment><USER26> The correction footnote seems eye-opening: Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates 16 percent don't have cellphones.

<comment><USER27> I don't have one, nor do I have a Facebook account. Still not seeing the point.</comment></comment>