Ask HN: Raising a friends And family round? - <AUTHOR>

We started developing our product about 10 months ago, and have seen steadily increasing monthly revenue since we took on our first paying customer in June.  We made about $2500 in recurring revenue last month, but we would like my co-founder to be able to quit his job and come on full-time.
Our model is based on direct sales with large customers.  My partner is company's salesman and he believes that if he were selling full-time (he sells only on his lunches at the day job right now) we would be profitable with both of us working full-time in three months.
We have applied for an SBA loan to cover part of our costs for six months of operation and have decided to raise a "friends and family" round for the rest of it.  We've never raised any funding of any kind, so we're hoping that those who have experienced a F&F round on HN could give us some insight.  We are currently incorporated as an S-Corp.
How did you determine your valuation before a F&F round?  This is one of our biggest concerns.
Because a F&F round is pretty small, how did you minimize legal costs?
What did you tell potential F&F investors about the opportunity?  Is there anything that you're REQUIRED to tell them?
How much of your company did you give up in your F&F round?
Feel free to include any resources that you found useful when you were doing your F&F round. <comment><USER2> The stock piece of advice we gave at the technology incubator I used to work at is to consider giving them debt rather than equity. There is a minimum of legal fuss associated with this -- for many friends & family, you can literally proceed on a handshake ("$10,000 loan, 5% APR, 3 year term work for you? Thanks Uncle Jim. My bookkeeper will cut the checks.") and if you want to contractualize it you can have loan docs drawn up very, very reasonably.

Personally, if I were to do it, I'd have somebody like Prosper (but not Prosper) involved in the middle to handle the loan payments/collection/etc. It costs a little extra money but saves on you actually having to calculate loan payments and may well prevent you and Uncle Jim from ever having to have an unpleasant discussion about the tardiness of your check.

Particularly for a concern with actual revenue, loans are a great alternative to equity: they won't entangle any of your activities going forward, there is a built-in way to sever the relationship with both parties leaving on amicable terms with each other (repayment), and they're very, very easy to understand for people who are not in your business, in a way that an equity position in your company is not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait. Can you sell unregistered stock to non-accredited investors, even if they're "friends and family"? Unless your friends and family are millionaires, you need to talk to a lawyer.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question. Certainly, we're not the first company to receive investment from F&F -- how do "normal" small businesses do it? As loans? We want to give our friends who choose to help us out some kind of return on their investment.

Before we do anything we'll talk to our lawyer, but we would like to get a sense for how people normally do this before spend big lawyer $$$.

<comment><USER4> "Normal" small businesses just take the money from the F&F and don't worry about selling securities to non-accredited investors. But presumably you're not a normal small business, you're trying to build a billion dollar company. It's certainly not illegal to sell shares in your company to non-accredited investors, but it can be a problem for due diligence that can happen when raising money, selling the company, or going public. Loans are definitely easier.

[http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/seed-funding/life-is-too- sho...](http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/seed-funding/life-is-too-short-to- deal-with-non-accredited-investors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One approach is to raise the funds in the form a "convertible note", which is basically a loan that converts to equity when you raise your first round of financing. Rather than interest, you give investors a discount (20% is typical) on the conversion. (e.g. If your price per share is $1.00 when you raise your next round, the notes convert by paying on $.80 per share).

One other comment is that, if you can, it's better if your friends and family investors are experienced investors (not necessarily with angel experience). It makes things easier if they understand the risks and have the means so that if they lose their investment, it won't be a hardship for them.

Good luck.

<comment><USER6> Here's a link describing the sort of "convertible note" that gtm mentioned: [http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/financing/startupfinancing...](http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/financing/startupfinancingcolumnistasheeshadvani/article159520.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> An SBA loan must be personally guaranteed by the borrower, so I don't really see a difference between an SBA loan and running up credit cards, except for the interest rate.

Personally, I would try to suffer through the Valley of Death. Here are some ideas I would try:

* Can lloydarmbrust sell for an extra hour by taking a two hour lunch and spending an extra hour at work?

* Can lloydarmbrust sell via email during the workday (assuming he can stay on top of his regular job)?

* Can jnovek can do some of lloydarmbrust's work so that lloyd can get more time to sell and/or survive at his current job?

* Can jnovek learn to sell, at least to the point of identifying prospects? For instance, a lot of lloyd's time may be spent trying to find out the decision maker at, say, the NYTimes. jnovek might be able to offload some of that "find the client" work, even if he weren't comfortable enough to "sell" the prospect he finds.

Finally, $2.5k in monthly recurring sales sounds extremely low for a b2b sale that can add 5-8% to the bottom line. Have you considered raising prices by 10x? If your customer has $1 MM in revs, saving them 8% is $80k a year! You should be capturing a big chunk of that.

Forgive my forwardness, but it's my sense that you don't have a financing problem, but rather, a pricing problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Can jnovek can do some of lloydarmbrust's work so that lloyd can get more time to sell and/or survive at his current job?"

This is a discussion that we haven't had and should. There may be things that I can do to optimize Lloyd's lunch-hour selling.

As far as me doing sales, I am an awful salesman and Lloyd is a very skilled and accomplished salesman. The difference between us is like night and day.

"Forgive my forwardness, but it's my sense that you don't have a financing problem, but rather, a pricing problem."

Keep in mind that we haven't yet developed a novel product -- we are still entering spaces that are occupied by other providers. We have big plans for some novel stuff, but right now we need to cover a few salaries.

While we ARE competing on product quality, most of what makes us competitive is price. Low-price alternatives are very attractive to newspapers right now as their ad revenue continues to decrease steadily. We try to negotiate the maximum price that we think a publication will bear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first thought is, if he believes that, why doesn't he quit and go full time selling the product? Three months isn't that long, but imagine the opportunity to work full time on your own product. With $2k+ already in recurring revenue, that's enough to eat on.

You may not need that F&F round, no dilution, no investor's expectations, no F&F asking where their money is...

Much fewer risks if you don't need it and you may not.

<comment><USER8> I'm jnovek's co-founder. Unfortunately for the startup I have two kids and a WAF to deal with. Honestly you're right that bootstrapping would be easier, but we've been at this for 10 months and working two jobs is really starting take its toll.

<comment><USER9> Your credit limit is probably around the amount of money you would need in the short term though.

<comment><USER10> Suggesting that someone live off of credit cards for a startup is wrong. Given that he has a wife and kids? It's gravely irresponsible. I cannot emphasize how bad that advice is.

<comment><USER11> > Suggesting that someone live off of credit cards...

In one sense, this is obviously correct.

However, the poster/partner is also about to go ask their friends and family to put money at risk to grow this business; yet the poster/partner isn't willing to put N months of living expenses (small N) at risk for it? It could be a hard sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would continue as you are and find a way to close deals part time until you hit break even. I would think your co-founder could take some vacation days over the next six months and get you to break even (figuring that a partial sales effort will take perhaps twice as long as a full time one). This is not a bad outcome.

The problem with F&F is that neither--unless they are qualified investors or have experience in early stage investing--are normally prepared to lose their investment. You will be relying on them for emotional support as well: it can become difficult to talk about setbacks because their focus shifts from supporting you to worrying about losing their investment.

You don't say what your product is but normally an SBA loan will require "hard assets" that a software startup won't have (compared to a restaurant or a bakery or other small retail/industrial business).

If you really want to raise a round I would talk to Angels and other qualified investors who are used to risky investments and who may also be able to contribute expertise and advice along with funds.

<comment><USER8> I'm jnovek's co-founder. The company has about $10k in cash and about $7k in computer equipment--also, they include your incoming receipts as assets. We are only asking for $20k-$30k and I have a CR above 860.

Unfortunately to get to this point I have maxed my vacation and sick days. Our sales cycle in this mode is about 3-4 months because we are B2B sales right now (this will change down the road).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My start up is in a similar place right now and I've been trying to come up with a valuation.

The problem is that so many of the normal methods taught for valuing a company break down for an early stage start up. How do you predict your free cash flow in the future without pulling a number out of nowhere? How do you come up with a meaningful weighted average cost of capital when you have little debt or equity on your balance sheet.

I think what we'll be doing is looking at our earnings and then setting our valuation at a simple multiple of earnings plus assets.

Very interesting to see you guys on here as my start up is very similar. We're focused on selling editorial side products to help college newspaper websites succeed. The plan though is to eventually expand to all local news sites.

<comment><USER8> Wow. Going up against College Publisher? Nice--I wish you well. Maybe there's something we can do together. We hate about 90% of the CMSs that we have to implement our products in and have contemplated building a CMS that we give away just to avoid the hassle.

Currently we are only working with small daily and weekly papers, but obviously college papers would work too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My (bootstrapping) startup took a smallish f&f round. We took the money in the form of a convertible loan, which means that it can be converted to stock or repaid (as a normal loan would) at a certain date.

This got us the money easily, and left it more flexible for us to maneuver in the future.

Yes, it's a little less advantageous to the lender. But the f&f rounds are usually b/c your f&f want to see you succeed, not because they are actually shrewd business deals (although they certainly can be).

<comment><USER8> May I ask the terms? How long ago was it, and how has it served you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Check with your lawyer, but the SEC has some overviews here:

<http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/qasbsec.htm#eod6>

Sounds like a lot of hassle for those 35 non-accredited investors you get with Rule 505/506. I'd also be interested if anyone else used that mode for non- loan investments.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why not just get one of those 0% apr for 12 months credit card offers and use that?

<comment><USER8> Co-founder here. Did something similar for start-up costs (about $18k).</comment></comment>


Codeberg: a free, non-commercial GitHub alternative - <AUTHOR> https://codeberg.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://codeberg.org](https://codeberg.org) uses the [https://gitea.io](https://gitea.io) software for its free remote Git repository service. If you're uncomfortable with non-free software, open-core, commercial underpinnings and/or corporate ownership of Github and Gitlab, hosting your repos on Codeberg — or starting your own Gitea site — are very viable alternatives.

(Edited for typos)

<comment><USER2> I had developed the impression that gitea kept all the project metadata -- bug tracking, PRs, etc -- in the same repository with the project code. Was this impression correct? Looking at the "Comparison" page does not suggest anything, one way or the other.

To me that would be the most important differentiator. Do any of the others do it?

<comment><USER3> Wait, is that something you would _want_? I would find it pretty awful if my git history for my code had all the other things like issues and PR metadata in it. Could potentially see it being useful if it were stored in an "auxiliary" repo that I could pull separately.

<comment><USER2> Of course I want it. History is history. Furthermore, why should PRs, bug reports, and build artifacts not be able to refer directly to source objects and revisions, and vice versa?

A simple way to represent it might be as an ASCII dump of one or more databases representing it all, so you could roll back to any day's state; or as an update-log transcript, so you could roll back to the state after any given transaction. Both amount to successive diffs, so are reasonably compact.

<comment><USER3> > History is history

Except PRs, bug reports etc. can't affect the runtime behavior of your program, only code can. There are many times when I am looking through a dependency's history to see "what changed?" in order to decide if I want to pull a new version, and the ONLY thing I want to look at in that case are code changes.

> Furthermore, why should PRs, bug reports, and build artifacts not be able to > refer directly to source objects and revisions, and vice versa?

I do that all the time in GitHub today.

I certainly understand wanting that auxiliary data to be versioned, and I also understand wanting it to be in a portable, distributed format like Git. I just definitely don't want it cluttering up the history of my code

Also, security is a big deal. I often want to allow pretty much anyone to open a PR or an issue, but I don't necessarily want that now to be part of the repo every time someone clones it.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Except PRs, bug reports etc. can't affect the runtime behavior of your > program, only code can

Are your repos free of docs, READMEs and tests, then?

> I just definitely don't want it cluttering up the history of my code

Separate branch?

> I often want to allow pretty much anyone to open a PR or an issue, but I > don't necessarily want that now to be part of the repo every time someone > clones it.

That is a good point; perhaps solvable by having the webapp frontend provide the GUI but make commits itself? That should give you the best of both worlds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Their half-translated UI (my browser is set to polish) is extremely off- putting.

So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide _much_ better UX to international users.

BTW, Microsoft with their automatically translated MSDN docs is by far the worst offender in this area.

<comment> marten-de-vries That's the case because you speak English. Think about the last time you had to navigate a website in a language you didn't speak (in my case e.g. Chinese or Russian). I remember being very happy with a few (incomplete) clues in English about were to look and what to expect.

By all means, advocate for making it easy to change the language back to the original. But this stance _will_ decrease accessibility.

<comment><USER5> In case of technical websites, you have to know English anyway, because even if there is a broken translation of the documentation, function names, enums and all the cool stuff remains in the original language anyway.

<comment><USER6> > you have to know English anyway

You don't, plenty of developers are getting around having to know English as there are other resources for learning.

I think it's a dangerous assumption that everyone knows English. It's especially true in the Spanish-speaking world, where I know developers who can't have a conversation in English but are good enough to be employable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We are missing the trees for the forest here. I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source, ethical, safe home for open source projects under Non-Profit Collaboration Community. If your repo were ever (even temporarily) disabled by a false or intentionally bullying DMCA take down request, you would know right away why every single word in the above sentence is important. And, hosted in Europe, under EU laws.

This is a nice summary: [https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg- launched.html](https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html)

Suggestions on how to make the messaging of Codebeberg clearer would be appreciated, Codeberg has an issue about this in their tracker: [https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75)

Edit: added link to Codeberg issue tracker

<comment><USER8> > I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way > and my understanding is: to be an open source (...)

But is it? Where can you find the code for codeberg itself? Is it possible to download it all and install it locally on an air-gapped server?

<comment><USER9> Codeberg is a customized version of gitea[0].

They have a repo[1] with the patches that are used on on codeberg.

[0]: [https://gitea.io](https://gitea.io)

[1]: [https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy- gitea](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> See [https://sourcehut.org/](https://sourcehut.org/) for a vastly different source code hosting solution. If you're interested in something other than an open source GitHub clone, then that is more likely to interest you.

<comment><USER11> SourceHut is great, it still missing organizations support though (they promised to add it in a few months). The only problem compared to Gitea is deployment. SourceHut written in a mix of Python and Go, while Gitea in a pure Go. Gitea is essentially one binary. I wish SourceHut would dump Python and rewrite everything in Go.

<comment><USER10> "Everything is one binary", while convenient, just means "monolith", and usually "unscaleable monolith". That has nothing to do with Go. Plus, compiled-in filesystems and runtime-extracting applications are a thing, so anything can be a binary.

Sourcehut is specifically designed to be a composeable set of services, so regardless of language, it's never going to be one binary.

<comment><USER6> > just means "monolith", and usually "unscaleable monolith"

Hm, monolith != unscaleable monolith. Monolith just means you'd have to do vertical scaling instead of horizontal scaling, which arguably is easier and less error prone, as you still are only dealing with one instance and not building a distributed system all of sudden.

I usually try to keep to vertical scaling for as long as possible, until either the performance starts to plateau or the product/project becomes big enough that it needs different backend dev teams working on different things concurrently.

<comment><USER10> I did not say "monolith" equaled "unscaleable monolith", I said that such a setup is _usually_ an "unscaleable monolith".

Thee reason for this is that writing anything at all to be scalable is quite difficult, and larger monoliths _tends_ to reflect a laziness and false sense of simplicity that _tends_ to also be reflected by the internal design. For this reason, I'd consider "large but scalable monoliths" to be in the minority.

Furthermore, I'd argue that if scaling of a monolith isn't a problem, it's simply because its load is insignificant in the first place. Once the scaling game starts, vertical scaling quickly ends up being infeasible.

Of course, that does mean that you can start out and experiment with a monolith while a product is young, but I'd prefer to have hashed out the overall design before I start dealing with production systems.

I'd design components around clearly distinctive areas of functionality rather than the distinctive teams that need to write it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am curious; what does this gitea clone provide over the hundreds of other clones I could be using that are also free and non-commerical?

<comment><USER7> Great question. Let me copy/paste explanation of one of the founders:

Collaboration platforms like SourceForge, GitHub, and GitLab enabled and facilitated the development and organization of free software projects. But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. These platforms are no charities, they operate to fulfill the commercial objectives of their founders and owners, outside of our control. They are valued and sold for billions of dollars. Codeberg is trying to fix that. The nonprofit Codeberg e.V. has been founded as independent non-government organization to launch and build a free home for Free and Open Source Software.

Also see this short SFSCon talk:

[https://www.sfscon.it/talks/codeberg-a-free-home-for-free- pr...](https://www.sfscon.it/talks/codeberg-a-free-home-for-free-projects/)

<comment><USER13> Thumbs up for mentioning this, and thanks for your effort. I've always found it odd (to say the least) that F/OSS projects are happily giving away their dev's and user's eyeballs and clicks to commercial entities when many F/OSS projects advertise altruistic or other ethical motives and licenses. Using github.com (or any other project hosting service) for your project's home page also ruins the web and puts all the power in the hand of very few when regular DNS and web hosting has regulated rules where providers and registrars can be negotiated with, switched, appealed, etc. Not to mention that github.com blocks indie search crawlers, adding to the search monopoly we have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h So compared to gitlab and sourcehut (my other favorite options for free github alternatives), this is librejs complaint (sourcehut has this, don't think gitlab does), and has a github-like UI. It seems to be pushing the privacy angle and is hosted in the EU. Any other big reasons to prefer this over gitlab/sourcehut/self-hosted?

<comment><USER14> > this is librejs complaint

What does this mean/imply exactly?

<comment><USER15> It's a typo of "LibreJS compliant": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LibreJS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LibreJS)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I couldn't find any "about" page. Who owns it? Who are the people behind it?

<comment><USER17> You didn't find it because you didn't look. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Imprint". Quote:

"Codeberg is a non-profit organisation dedicated to build and maintain supporting infrastructure for the creation, collection, dissemination, and archiving of Free and Open Source Software. If you have questions, suggestions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com."

It's a kind of club ("eingetragener Verein" [1]) that is funded by its members and through donations.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_\(Germany\))

<comment><USER18> I think a lot of people are probably unfamiliar with any definition of "imprint" that would cause them to look there. I know I can't explain what it means in this context.

<comment><USER19> It comes from Impressum, essentially a form of identification for publishers, but imprint is the English word used for the German legal requirement.

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

[https://www.privacycompany.eu/blogpost-en/the-imprint- requir...](https://www.privacycompany.eu/blogpost-en/the-imprint-requirement- a-must-have-for-companies-from-outside-germany)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> repo.or.cz — one more free hosting alternative to GitHub, especially for FLOSS projects.[0]

[0] [http://repo.or.cz/about.html](http://repo.or.cz/about.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Finally an alternative go Github and Bitbucket hosted in Europe, great.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone else think Github now has a name recognition advantage? I am not a super ninja developer so I still have to make resumes, and in there I can just put github logo and a username there. Saves space and looks quite professional. I can't do that with newer services. Or am I just being over cautious here?

Edit: And its not just about resumes, its the case for getting traction for your project too. I feel comfortable contributing to a project hosted on github and am sort of weary of things hosted on other places.

<comment><AUTHOR> Having a remote git repo monoculture where it has to be Github or nothing is unhealthy for the software ecosystem.

Gitlab is a good alternative, but why not have more choices? Anybody who might want to hire you can click a link to a Codeberg/Gitea site and see what looks like a very familiar repo. It should be the project itself that is attracting users and devs, not where the git repo is remotely hosted.

For free-software projects, a Gitea site like Codeberg might be an even better choice because of the conflicts involved in using a commercial entity like GitHub that uses closed-source software yet bases its entire business on a free project (Git).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Its mobile UI is broken all over on my system. But I am all in for _getting inspired_ by exact Github UX/UI. They're the main reason I don't want to switch to alternatives even if I hate Github after MS-merger and following "improvements of the service".

<comment><USER24> What changes made after the MS acquisition do you dislike?

<comment><USER23> Personally I most dislike forced deanonymization with 2fa or annoying me with device verification which locked me out of my anonymous account with old expired email (I didn't need it secured and I don't want to prove anything to MS to restore it too). Some people also reported increasing external CI services throttling in favor of Actions, I wouldn't be surprised if they give preferential treatment to Packages too. In the end I don't want power of MS over my code and workflow to grow too much. I know they claim Github is independent but it's not really reassuring.

<comment><USER24> This is quite normal for an enterprise product though, and I agree on the deanonymization part. But I would not expect anonymity on such a platform anyway because GitHub is very often used in the place of a resume or a CV.

Simply put, you are not the kind of user they want. Happily there are alternatives. I started backing up private repos to SourceHut.

<comment><USER23> I would be glad to switch, but I am sucker for good UI. I can even forgive some lost functionality for it. Most alternatives were not to my liking.

<comment><USER24> I'm on the same boat. For now I don't mind because I use a few other Git hosting services point as a backup while still using GitHub. I'd like to move to another service though, it'll be a conundrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is not clear if this is a free software project. Can it be installed locally? I see "open source" written here and there, but no link to the actual code (besides gitea).

<comment><USER7> Yes it is, see here: [https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy- gitea](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea)

Gitea can run locally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ok, so top comment (currently) is about localisation. A really interesting topic, but has anyone tried it out yet and have opinions on the functionality?

<comment><USER26> Yes, I'm actively using Codeberg for my OSS projects (I still have some on GitHub, too), e.g. [https://codeberg.org/hjacobs/kube-web- view/](https://codeberg.org/hjacobs/kube-web-view/)

Some functionality is lacking compared to GitHub, but it does what it needs to do for me.</comment></comment>


Cereal – A C++11 library for serialization - <AUTHOR> http://uscilab.github.io/cereal/index.html

<comment><USER2> I'm one of the co-developers of cereal. cereal is a serialization library much like Boost serialization, but written in modern C++ (C++11) with an emphasis on being easy to extend. It currently supports binary, XML, and JSON serialization and works with GCC 4.7.3, clang 3.3, or MSVC 2013 (or newer). cereal natively supports pretty much everything in the standard library, so getting started with it is fairly easy. If you have been using Boost and want to give it a try, in many cases you can do so by only changing a few lines of code.

The full release notes can be found on GitHub.

[https://github.com/USCiLab/cereal/releases/tag/v1.0.0](https://github.com/USCiLab/cereal/releases/tag/v1.0.0)</comment>


NCEES Discontinuing PE Software Engineering Exam (March 2018) - <AUTHOR> https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/ <comment><AUTHOR> Choice quote:

> Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five > times, with a total population of 81 candidates. Only 19 candidates > registered for the April 2018 administration.

Hacker News discussion when the program was launched in 2013:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621218)</comment>


Animated graphic on why you should shut off your work computer - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/19/animated-graphic-on-why-you-should-shut-off-your-work-computer/

<comment><USER2> Updates are usually deployed overnight. That's why I don't shut off my work computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> There should be options for that too, then. Windows allows you to turn your computer off after the update is complete. I'm not sure how long the updates last, but I'd say, in general, not the entire night.</comment></comment>


Court Denies Petition To Question Zuckerberg and Banks About Alleged Facebook... - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/13/court-denies-petition-to-question-zuckerberg-and-banks-about-alleged-facebook-ipo-fraud/

<comment><USER2> The only question here is who this random law firm is representing, or if they're just some bored lawyers fishing around.</comment>


Show HN: flinch – a tool for async workflows - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bilalq/flinch

<comment><USER2> Interesting module which would be a simple alternative for building a micro services architecture on Node.js as compared to using a service bus or message queue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this is basically something along those lines.

I found that Node fit really well for this task.

<comment><USER2> I have been using Redis within Node.js lately to decouple my system with messages. I however can't block services once they have started although in my use-case I don't need to block. Your use-case sounds different so I can see how your module could be valuable for the purpose you built it for.</comment></comment></comment>


Loggo - Production ready logging for Go - <AUTHOR> http://how-bazaar.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/loggo-hierarchical-loggers-for-go.html

<comment><USER2> Google released glog, which is pretty much the same thing as this, [https://github.com/golang/glog](https://github.com/golang/glog). glog seems a bit cleaner though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had not seen that before, thanks!. The only thing that concerns me about glog is this statement: "The code in this repo is for export only and is not itself under development. Feature requests will be ignored."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good to see some activity there!

I picked up [https://github.com/cihub/seelog](https://github.com/cihub/seelog) some time ago, fits my needs :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what the differences between these two logging libraries are?

I know Tim wrote loggo specifically to solve some logging problems with Juju, which as the largest open source project in go, and as distributed system management tool puts a lot of pressure on getting good logging in place. But I'm less familiar with seelog's history, and the motivations behind it.</comment></comment>


Guns, Suicides and Natural Experiments - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/suicide-firearms-and-natural-experiments.html

<comment><USER2> It has always seemed to me that many of these school massacres were actually a suicide event. Of course it is always hard to figure out the actual intent of a shooter when the event ends in the shooter's death, but the possibility of a connection really makes one wonder if suicide prevention activities would also have an impact on school shootings.

Although most of the news coverage of school shootings goes to events in the USA, they do happen in other countries and some of those countries might be more willing than the USA, to improve suicide prevention activities, and to include school shootings in their measure of effectiveness. It might take a few decades to gather enough data to be sure of whether or not it works, but long term experiments are still valuable and we need to do more of them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to the peer-reviewed empirical study that is the basis for this blog post by the study author:

[http://elsarticle.com/18AQUBF](http://elsarticle.com/18AQUBF)

Justin Thomas Briggs, Alexander Tabarrok, Firearms and suicides in US states, International Review of Law and Economics, Volume 37, March 2014, Pages 180-188, ISSN 0144-8188.

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2013.10.004](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2013.10.004).

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818813...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014481881300077X)</comment>


What is Objective-C programming language - <AUTHOR>

What is Objective -C and how is it different from other languagers like C,C++and java and what are its main uses. <comment><USER2> It is Smalltalk bolted onto C. Instead of garbage collection one uses reference counting.

While it does have exceptions, they don't unwind the stack as do C++ exceptions. They are commonly used only for fatal errors; I use C++ exceptions for all kinds of things that aren't really errors.

In C++, one calls a member function by dereferencing a pointer to that function from a table of such pointers.

In Objective-C, one calls a "method" by "sending it a message". That message is a small snippet of text. To dispatch to the actual function that implements the method, the Objective-C runtime (libobjc.dylib on OS X and iOS) must match the name of the method that one has targeted, to the name of the method whose implementation is actually just a regular C function.

Of course that would be very slow, but the Mach-O executable format is optimized for this case. Linux ELF and Windows COFF are not. So while in principle one can use Objective-C on Linux and Windows, the same code will run slower than on an equivalent Mac OS X box or iDevice.

Your code can send messages to methods that are not defined at compile time. If you actually call them you will terminate, but you can provide the implementation later.

I think Java can do that as well, but C and C++ do not have first-class language support for such a thing.

It's most-commonly used for Mac OS X Cocoa and iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) Cocoa Touch GUI applications, but one can use it for GNUStep on *NIX as well as Cocotron on Windows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it only run on Mac or it could run on windows.

<comment><USER2> Objective-C can be compiled and run on Windows, Linux, *BSD (ie. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD), Solaris and Mac OS X.

You can run it on iOS Devices. You can't build it but must cross-compile on Mac OS X.

There are two compilers - GCC and clang/llvm. Apple's Xcode comes with clang/llvm, for the others one uses gcc.

There are three main things you need: the compiler, the runtime and the libraries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thanks for helping me.

<comment><USER2> I'll send you my bill in the mail. :-D

If you're on windows, use Cocotron.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha sure... Is there any way i could develop ios application in windows just for learning purpose without hackintosh my pc.

<comment><USER2> You'll need the iOS SDK. That can only be _installed_ on a Mac, but once installed, I understand you can copy it over to Windows.

However I've never actually tried doing so.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LEP had evidence for a 115 GeV Higgs - <AUTHOR> http://www.fisica.uniud.it/~deangeli/test/Higgs.PDF

<comment><USER2> Guys... September 2000...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, hence the "had" in the title. There's a lot of rumours swirling around that LHC may have a 115 Gev Higgs signal. I'm just reminding people that LEP also had a possible signal at this energy, which I think is exciting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Comic-Sans Physics cannot be taken seriously.

<comment><USER4> I saw the slides and that was the first thing that hit me.</comment></comment>


Software Engineering Is Bad, but That's Not Why - <AUTHOR> https://blackhole12.com/blog/software-engineering-is-bad-but-it-s-not-that-bad/ <comment><USER2> Well said, I especially like the part about if you don't like the inherent problems with JavaScript eco system, stop using it.</comment>


Capitalism Isn't Wrong. Crony Capitalism Is - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/capitalism-isnt-wrong-crony-jeff-booth <comment><USER2> The breakdown in society's collective level of integrity likely will end up turning our capitalism into only crony capitalism.

Hopefully something changes.</comment>


Getting a job - <AUTHOR>

I would like some advice. I'm coming from a pretty naive situation. For 2 months from 1st July 2015 to 31st August 2015, I plan to deeply master and have a grasp of C++(including STL), algorithms and data structures. Do you think that if I have mastered the material I can easily get a part time programming job. In particular I plan to master stuff like graph theory. To be specific I plan to use material from Tim Roughgarden and Robert Sedgewick from Coursera. You are welcome to ask me any question about this topic if you find it relevant for the discussion. Thank you. <comment><USER2> Not sure how experienced you are already, but if the goal is 'getting a job' your best bet would be to focus on web or mobile technologies. Not that learning C++ and algorithms would be a waste, most definitely not, but it's not going to open as many doors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have a degree? For all the talk about degree not mattering... A lot of jobs good for entry level people demand a bachelor's. Yes you can find a job without, but it will be a different search path.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a second year bachelor student. It's a Nanoscience, so basically not related to programming.

<comment><USER3> Well, that is still a hard science degree. Hard science degree + a few programming classes makes you look pretty good.</comment></comment></comment>


We must consider secure online voting - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/30/we-must-consider-secure-online-voting/ <comment><USER2> Oregon votes by mail. Why not all states jump on the bandwagon? [https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/all- ma...](https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/all-mail- elections.aspx)</comment>


"I Can Say What I Want" – that's not an argument - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/d12a94d96ca4

<comment><USER2> I hate to use another cliche argument-ender, but this is one of those "get over it" situations. Life is too short to be bothered by columnists writing link-baiting titles and poorly-formulated tweets.

<comment><USER3> But it might only get worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NFC: nobody is told to care. There is all sorts of useful applications and apps have been built to support those use-cases. Do you know of any? No, not with a press like this.</comment>


How YouTube Reinvented Itself for the Next Billion Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/09/youtube-reinvented-next-billion-users/ <comment><USER2> I don't doubt their intentions, but their execution leaves a lot to be desired. The Youtube app used to have a setting where we could make it only show videos only in low-res mode. It's gone now, and family members who are not tech-savvy use up a good deal more of the monthly download limit than they used to.

<comment><USER3> It seems that since the Google+ integration fiasco every single "improvement" YouTube introduces is a step back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised that it needs WiFi in order to share.

If your friend is already on WiFi, why can't he just stream from YouTube?

<comment><USER5> Because a local wi-fi network isn't necessarily connected to the Internet? Or only with a very very slow connection?

You can share things downloaded earlier, through another, faster connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I miss watching all uploads of a channel chronologically</comment>


Ask HN: Where would you go to hire a Python and Django tutor? - <AUTHOR> I'm about two years removed from doing a bit of web development work with a tutor. We built an MVP for an idea I had at the time using Python + Django. The switch to Python 3 and the newer versions of Django are different enough that a tutor would help me a lot again.<p>I'm looking to hire a tutor for 2 hours a week at $30/hour. I'd like to prototype a web application that lets suppliers list themselves, let's users purchase a membership, then let's consumers select options for who they can speak with after they subscribe. <comment><USER2> Have you looked at CodeMentor: [https://www.codementor.io](https://www.codementor.io) ?</comment>


The limits of high-speed rail - <AUTHOR> https://mappingignorance.org/2020/01/22/the-limits-of-high-speed-rail/ <comment><USER2> A richly detailed article that delves into the French TGV speed record, the extra modifications they applied to what was already a high-speed system, and the lesser-known physical phenomena that set a performance envelope for this mode of traction.

Then, in a switch of tone and pacing, admits that profitability potential is likely most important of them all.

This is why networks -- rather than just individual lines -- are critically important. High-speed rail works best when it connects robust local transportation networks that already exist: between cities that they themselves have robust temporal and spatial transport coverage. It works best when faraway cities can be brought within commuting range, or further leisure destinations within daytrip range. Similarly, it works best when it extends the catchment area of an airport, rather than a service positioned to compete against point-to-point flights.

But major infrastructure projects often suffer from messy political and public relations approaches that play up the project's impressiveness and prestige in isolation, while neglecting to emphasize or champion synergistic improvements to other parts of the network. Frequent and punctual "normal-speed" rail isn't as politically energizing, and local transit networks that serve the specific transport needs of a town are hardly exciting to regional audience, but without it, high-speed rail is just an expensive showpiece that doesn't serve a genuinely identifiable transport need. This is a risk with the California HSR as much as it is with ambitious efforts to bring western Europe's successful high-speed services further into the EU's east.

<comment><USER3> People still use airports all of the time for regional flights despite the airports having crap local connectivity. The California HSR can still be incredibly successful if it's as easy to get to as the local airports (including the public transit poor SJC).

What will kill it is terminating in places not even convenient enough for an airport location.

<comment><USER4> People IN THE US still use regional flights because all sorts of public transport in the US are literally third world crap. EU and parts of developed Asia use a lot of inter-city trains.

Munich<>Frankfurt (400km) is 3 hours with ICE, much less than going to the airport, wait for check in, boarding, flight, off the plane and to the city centre. It's around 110e too for returns

<comment><USER5> A country in the EU and a state in the US are equivalent (for discussion on transport - in other contexts there are significant differences). Nobody flies between cities in one state, just like nobody flies between cities in one EU country. When going to a different country things change - the distances are now large enough that you fly because it is faster.

Remember, Chicago to New York City is almost the same distance as Munich to Moscow! (Note that rail advocates will tell you that Chicago to NYC is just barely in high speed rail range, anything farther even rail advocates don't pretend to be competitive. Chicago to New York City is not very far on the scale of the US, so of course we fly.

Yes I will agree that our rail system in the US isn't great, but flying doesn't compete with the rail system, driving does. A good rail system in the US would only negatively affect some short flying routes, it would however mean less people drove.

<comment><USER6> > Nobody flies between cities in one state

The second most popular route in the US is LA to SF.

<comment><USER7> LA to SF would be an excellent route for HSR, but sadly modern politics and entrenched land interests make this incredibly difficult.

<comment><USER8> There are two sets of huge mountains in the way: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coast_Ranges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coast_Ranges)

That's the core issue. CHSRA never had a credible funded plan for building _either_ crossing, and instead chose to tackle the easy part in the Central Valley first. Unfortunately, HSR in the Central Valley is effectively useless without a mountain crossing at at least one end.

<comment><USER7> Giant mountain ranges didn't stop the Shinkansen.

<comment><USER9> Japan doesn't have the utterly broken politics and lack of interest in building infrastructure that the USA has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article is great but it fails to address another main issue with high- speed rail in many locations: Having to network with slower traffic.

I recently took a 9.5h train trip from Berlin to Switzerland, and although the train does travel at the top speed of the section at several locations, we never reached the top speed of the train set (280km/h), and lots of times we were travelling at under 100km/h for switching tracks or whatever else. I didn't log it, but I'd guess we spent less than 50% of the travel time over 200km/h.

That's where Japan's Shinkansen was so groundbreaking. Sure, they also used this opportunity to migrate from a smaller gauge, but the decision to build a new network from scratch that doesn't interact with other networks at all paid off tenfold over the decades as trains started getting faster and faster.

<comment><USER11> That's true, but the lower speeds in Germany are also what makes it possible to drop you right in the city center. The TGV approach is to make straight lines, and that means for smaller cities, you get dropped off somewhere out in the country outside the city.

If you've got a comfortable seat, wi-fi, power, and a dining car, spending a few extra hours on the train is not so bad. It beats spending that same time on a metro or regional train with a bunch of luggage. It most definitely beats spending the time going through airport security, walking a kilometer through a giant shopping mall with gates, waiting in a departure lounge, or waiting at baggage claim.

That said, there are reasons for each country's choices. France is much less dense than Germany, so acquiring land to make those straight lines is more feasible. France also has its population concentrated more in bigger cities rather than a lot of smaller ones like Germany, so as long as the TGV goes directly into the bigger cities, most people are happy. Japan is long and skinny, so average trip distances are longer and the speed is more important. Japan also has a big infrastructure budget to prop up the economy, so making straight lines that require loads of tunnels and bridges is not as much of a problem.

<comment><USER12> TGV works just fine on regular lines, and uses them when approaching most cities. In fact classic lines is where most tgv accidents happened. It gets dedicated high-speed lines for the main legs.

Most TGV will stop at city center train stations, if they don't and drop you in the countryside it's often for political or demographic reasons, or possibly because the rail lines were _really_ unsuitable (iirc even at low speed tgv is somewhat limited in its ability to bend).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The most limiting factor is the pantograph/catenery contact; as speeds go up the wire has to be kept at a higher and higher tension to prevent the train catching up to the standing wave it creates in the wire. If the tension is not high enough to prevent this, the train will lose electrical contact or even rip down the wire. This is also why high speed trains can only have one or two pantographs to collect power.

<comment><USER14> I guess it'd be a big safety headache but perhaps the train could be powered through the rails? To avoid accidents the rails could be split into sections that only get powered when a train is directly above them.

<comment><USER15> Changing the current system would be prohibitively expensive. I also imagine that you have pretty bad losses at 25kV AC if your conductors are touching the ground and are potentially wet or covered by snow. It would also be a fire hazard I guess.

<comment><USER7> Plenty of metro rail systems use a third rail today, even outside. Maybe their losses are more manageable because their systems are relatively short compared to long distance rail, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

<comment><USER15> Metro rail runs at a much lower voltage afaik.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While air transport has dramatic challenges to switch to non fossil fuels, if we created vast high speed rail networks we could focus air traffic on the longer distance flights. As the human race approaches peak population (at least for a while) we should figure out what the long term infrastructure should be. Like next 500 years. Once we start branching out to the stars/galaxy, population will start increasing again.

<comment><USER17> > to switch to non fossil fuels

There's no real reason to switch so long as we are using these fuels for anything else. Let air transport be the very last things changed over, we have a ton of much lower hanging fruit that we can work on first.

<comment><USER18> Heard that the cargo ship fleet is a big contributor to greenhouse gasses.

<comment><USER19> It's large overall but tiny per amount of cargo moved a distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article sent me down the rabbit hole reading about the current state of the art – the recordholding L0 series. This eliminates the limiting factor that is the pantograph and instead gets its power through induction: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0_Series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0_Series)

<comment><USER21> And a first line using this technology is also already being built! :-) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The first thing that springs to mind is how amazing smooth the rails were in the V150 test. The lines I use the most, here in the UK, are way too bumpy and that's at a mere 70mph. I understand the legacy of the rail network but it would be embarrassing to get to the 22nd century without any improvement.

On that note, for the price of HS2, I'd rather see:

1/ smoother tracks

2/ a strong, unified, national brand

3/ dead simple smart phone ticketing

4/ tickets checked when you get off the train, not on

5/ tickets purchasable on the train you are actually on, lower prices, and an end to the railcard / discount / split ticket confusopoly

6/ simpler utilitarian rolling stock, again with unified branding, no adverts, and simple monochromatic signing and buttons all following a unified design language

Perhaps a simpler list though would be:

1/ fire everyone

2/ hire from scratch and completely rethink the rail network in terms of being 100% focused on the passenger, instead of an internal market of contracts between infrastructure, train operators, and unions.

("Simpler"!)

<comment><USER12> > The first thing that springs to mind is how amazing smooth the rails were in > the V150 test.

High speed lines are necessarily extremely smooth and with very small tolerances.

French lines come out the factory in rail pieces 200 to 400 meters long and are thermite-welded together after adjustment. They have no expansion joints except around bridges (and even then not necessarily)

<comment><USER7> So how do they handle thermal expansion? Just let the whole system build up huge pressures in the summer? Special alloys that don't expand so much in the heat?

<comment><USER23> I learned recently that rail (especially continuously welded rail) is generally kept under tension (I don't understand how it is secured at the end of the line, though). So when it heats up in the summer, it is simply under less tension.

Unless it heats up too much, and then it buckles and you get derailments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Meanwhile, the sad situation in the States...

Lobbiests for commercial interests who are potentially undermined by effective rail have long managed legal strangleholds on significantly improved rail infrastructure.

A glaring case in point, all passenger rails connecting East and West must go through Chicago -- far north of southern states. (There is one claimed southern line, but it never appears to be available for transport.)

Worse still, the Republican party has bamboozled their members into actually believing trains are not cost effective and therefore just a give-away to the undeserving lazy jobless welfare recipients who use them, because they can't afford cars.

Yes, it's that fracked up here.

<comment><USER25> > A glaring case in point, all passenger rails connecting East and West must > go through Chicago -- far north of southern states. (There is one claimed > southern line, but it never appears to be available for transport.)

This is a matter of geography. Your main eastern market is the DC-Boston corridor--as populated as all of the other states on the Atlantic seaboard combined. So that means that you're mostly looking at terminating there, no matter where on the West Coast you originate. If you start in the Northwest, you have to cross south of Lake Michigan to reach the NEC, so Chicago is en route. If you're in Northern California, you'll emerge from the Front Range near Denver, and you can pick whichever hub you want--might as well pick the one everyone else is using and choose Chicago. Even as far south as Oklahoma City, going to DC via Chicago only adds 100-200 miles to your route. It's not until you get to Dallas that reaching the NEC via Atlanta/Charlotte/Raleigh- Durham makes sense.

Historically, by the latter half of the 1800s, the railroad industry already settled on using Chicago as the main termination of every major railroad, and thus the major transshipment point. Geographically, the logical point is bounded by the southern tip of Lake Michigan and northern bank of the Ohio River (as you have prairies to the north and hills to the south). In principle, a city like St. Louis or Indianapolis could have grown up to be the major transshipment hub instead of Chicago, but you'd still be complaining about the lack of southern East-West lines in that scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> tl;dr HSR can go up to 570 kmh as evidenced by French testing, but limitations such as the wheel, power delivery from the overhead lines, and changes to the track mean that meeting or exceeding this limit would be very difficult.

<comment><USER27> Magnetic Levitation can exceed this speed limit. From the FTA:

> a Japanese maglev had set a speed record at 581 km/h. The French managers > considered it pointless as well as prudent to force the experiment to exceed > that speed, as they could have entered a kind of "international race" that > they did not have much chance of winning. Time would prove them right: in > 2015, another L0 series maglev reached 603 km/h on the Yamanashi test line.

Chinese maglev seems to run at 431 km/h and brings in losses of more than 1 billion RMBs[1]. So these trains may not be economical.

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

<comment><USER28> The Chinese maglev is just impractical: it doesn't go into the city and it's quicker and about as cheap to just take a cab to the airport.

The Japanese maglev is going to be a full blown commuter alternative to the massively successful tokaido Shinkansen.

<comment><USER29> China is also build new low-speed maglevs:

[https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless- maglev-t...](https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev- trains/index.html)

There are many places where 100 mph is sufficiently fast.

<comment><USER28> The Changsha HSR-airport maglev is actually useful, but is very much a local transit option. It still doesn't go into the city, but I've had to make that connection before. The Shanghai maglev doesn't connect to anything more than a subway station.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great. In general it is a great acheivement as a lot of people can move a lot quicker cheaper and easier. Going through airline ...

But as china situation unfold, the arrangement of such ease to connect has a price to pay. Even airline would have the same issue one may say. But in 2003 when sars did it's tolls it is mainly via airplane and slow train.

The speed one held the current chaos. No one can stop progress. But are all progress great. Wonder.

Some just minor but important barrier. The join border of the high speed between hk and china meant when the case is found (or at least high temp symptom) instead of sending the patient or blocking him, he comes the index patient in.</comment>


The impromptu Slack war room where companies unite to fight Spectre-Meltdown - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/the-impromptu-slack-war-room-where-net-companies-unite-to-fight-spectre-meltdown/ <comment><USER2> Well, with enforcement of these things moving to the FTC instead of the FCC, perhaps we'll get some antitrust action on this.

The big tech monopolies were probably trying to do the right thing, but communicating privately and locking out other companies looks an awful lot like monopolists using their monopoly power to increase the reach of their monopolies.</comment>


Simple Kubernetes targeting for chaos experiments - <AUTHOR> http://gremlin.com/blog/simple-kubernetes-targeting-for-your-chaos-experiments/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Even your strongest Android pattern lock is worse than a 3-letter ASCII password - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/delight-im/AndroidPatternLock

<comment><USER2> After 5 incorrect tries, my phone makes makes me wait 30 seconds. If someone tries to brute-force even a simple 4 dot pattern, 1624 combinations would take at least 3 hours of waiting alone, plus the time to input the patterns and check the list of patterns. This is of course assuming the 30 second wait doesn't increase and there is no max number of incorrect tries before the phone requires a pin. I should be able to notice my phone is missing and perform a remote wipe before someone can guess my pattern.

<comment><USER3> Unless someone steals your phone, grabs the lock pattern 'hash' (not sure on implementation details...), and brute forces it on a computer in a few seconds.

Guess I need to go read how that's implemented now.

<comment><USER4> If they could dump the phone's content already then why even waste the effect? Just perform a full backup, factory reset it, and then restore only the user's contents you want access to.

However if you have debugging disabled and no third party bootloader, you cannot access the filesystem while the phone is locked. So being able to crack some kind of hash is a moot point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To my knowledge Android phones can have security settings turned on which either lock out or delete the phone's data after multiple incorrect attempts. In which case, a brute force method wouldn't be feasible to break into the phone.

</comment><comment><USER6> The pattern lock actually tells you its insecure... so I dont see the gripe?

I use it to keep my toddler from messing up my phone while letting him play with it (and hes happy just playing with the pattern)

You can crack it most of the time by just looking at teh screen smudges...

</comment><comment><USER7> I like using the pattern lock because I can unlock it while quite drunk.

Though maybe that's not the best idea...</comment>


Field Experience with Annex K – Bounds Checking Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1967.htm <comment><USER2> I find it slightly amusing (and slightly terrifying) that C is still struggling to figure out the safe way to do even the most basic tasks, such as copying strings. Contrast this to Rust, which has guaranteed memory safety by default.</comment>


Ask HN: Product launch ideas.  - <AUTHOR>

Our product is genuinely affordable due to lower cost structure and we know we have a better & polished product in the making. Lot of thought based on our experience & study has gone into building it.
How do I position myself & convey that it is a "cheaper & better" version without sounding off as a "cheap" product, where I am passing on the benefit of cost to customer.
We are market followers & not leaders, though we have implemented everything ground up after studying market players & our experience (40+ yrs of building products collectively). But we have some really good ideas in roadmap that we intend to implement. Yet, I don't want to come across as just cheap alternative.
Need inputs to position ourselves as a brand that is passing on the benefit of cost to customers with a great product offering. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Take inspiration from Ikea: they don't sell cheap furnitures and home accessories, they "democratize" design. Make it AFFORDABLE, not low-cost ! How to do it? Don't sell a product, sell/tell a story, become an experience. And, most important, find yourself an enemy - e.g. a competitor, bad design, unreliable products, high prices, copycats, etc.

Regards, Andy Cavallini - <http://www.gaia-matrix.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your idea of identifying the enemy for something to target. Never considered picking high prices or no price guarantee while changing prices (a problem with competitors) and deriving inspiration from Ikea. Thanks for the inputs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you create diagrams in documentation? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If you want a diagram you can embed in text and check into source control, take a look at GraphViz. [http://www.graphviz.org/](http://www.graphviz.org/)

You can even embed it in other things, like Wikis. [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz)

</comment><comment> alok-g Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

Sometimes Excel when diagram could be made by drawing borders around cells and resizing rows and columns as per need. This helps when unplanned non-linear horizontal and vertical scaling is needed while making the diagram.

The SmartArt concept they introduced was quite promising, though I find the current state of it lagging. I am sad that it never picked up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had started with using MS Visio at my job. Though I had absolutely no experience in making diagrams, Visio was quite easy to get started and become comfortable in quick time.

The downside of course is that it is not free.

I would also like to know open source alternatives to MS Visio. I can see that Ubuntu 12.04 comes with Libre Draw, but I haven't tried it yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried UMlet? It's limited but great for nailing UML diagrams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> LibreOffice Draw is reasonable if you are coming from Linux.

Otherwise there is GIMP too.

+1 to all the other open source solutions mentioned here.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Dia: [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I quite like Gliffy. More often than not, we take photos of whiteboards and email them round the team.

</comment><comment><USER6> Give www.draw.io a go. I have used it a few times at work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gliffy(www.gliffy.com) works great for me.

</comment><comment><USER8> Blockdiag

</comment><comment><USER9> Balsamiq

</comment><comment><USER10> Inkscape</comment>


Conventions for modifier keys in keyboard shortcuts - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelschreifels.com/writing/2012/conventions-for-modifier-keys-in-keyboard-shortcuts/

<comment><USER2> That was interesting. I've often wondered if it would be possible to ditch the current keyboard layouts and start from zero.

If I had to do that, my initial approach would probably be letters + a certain number of modifier keys. Each one would roughly correspond to a "level": System/OS, application, content, text... So hitting "System+x" would make your OS do something (like killing the application), "App+x" would make your application do something (like opening a new tab), "Content+x" would make your content do something (web apps would probably use those). Of course, in real life, after two years it would basically be "all combinations that make sense are taken, so grab whichever is still available", but oh well, in the end you have to memorize them anyways so it's no use trying to enforce specific rules.</comment>


Hook-up Truck: A modern dating solution for safe sexual adventuring - <AUTHOR> http://hookuptruck.org/

<comment><USER2> > Hook-up Truck™ is a registered trademark, in case you hadn't figured that > out yet.

I'm having my doubts about this statement purely because they're not using the ® symbol that actually means registered trademark. However, searching the trademark database actually does reveal that it is registered[0].

[0][http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:5h6...](http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:5h6y08.2.1)

<comment><USER3> I suppose Shaggin' Wagon was already registered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A van would be more appropriate. Perhaps a Volkswagen Van.

<comment><USER5> Clearly when they expand the service into the 'nostalgia' market, maybe an optional '69 Impala, the one where the seat back could be leaned flat back. (A favorite of salesmen and drive-in movie goers)

Seems like a great tool to facilitate prostitution (I suppose that is one form of sexual adventuring)</comment></comment>


Finnish startup creates the TV of the internet - <AUTHOR> http://neverthink.tv/ <comment><USER2> Erm... What? What the heck is this?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://neverthink.tv/](http://neverthink.tv/) was created so we and you never need to think about what to watch online again, you know, like when you're working, cooking etc. and don't want to bother with searching the internet for interesting videos.

We call it "Distraction On Demand".

Some important facts:

Neverthink.TV collects the latest videos in each category in REAL-TIME, it is NOT a playlist site.

Neverthink.TV channels are all LIVE, meaning that everyone sees the same video at the same time in each channel (Try it out with a friend, it's pretty cool!).</comment></comment>


Is Usability on Mobile Getting Worse? - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2015/11/12/usability_on_mobile_getting_worse/ <comment><USER2> In a word: no.

The horse this author decided to whip in support of his cause célèbre is 3D Touch. Perhaps you could argue mobile usability is getting worse but 3D Touch is hardly a good example to pick.

Comparing 3D Touch to adding a 'right-mouse button' is at best a faulty comparison. 3D Touch does not replace already-learned interactions; it does not require the user to learn something new. It simply adds new ways of interacting for people that know its there or those that discover it by accident.

How can that be making usability worse?

The beauty of mobile devices is there are so many ways to interact with a touchscreen in an intuitive way, the complexities are easier to hide. Apple have added yet another way, but it is entirely optional.

Perhaps the author would care to explain how if usability on mobile is so bad, how does my 2 1/2 year-old intuitively and effortlessly navigate children's programs on an iPad without any instruction at all? She'd need to be at least double her age in order to do the same thing with a mouse and keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER3> If someone never discovers force touch shortcuts, does it make the phone less useful? On the other hand, almost 8 years after multitouch, even people who are not tech savvy inherently understand pinch and expand so eventually it will become second nature.

My bigger issue is that I think it will be confusing to people thinking that long touch doesn't work when they are pressing their screen to move icons.

Even more confusing is the home button. Double press to go the home screen, double tap to activate reachability, and long press to activate Siri.</comment>


"Why the German Startup Scene Isn't Doomed" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@oemerax/weekly-blog-1-6c74d517da57 <comment><USER2> The German startup scene isn't doomed because you get awesome entrepreneurs like Sebastian - episode 153 of The App Guy Podcast [http://www.theappguy.co/the-app-guy- podcast/2014/10/5/tagp15...](http://www.theappguy.co/the-app-guy- podcast/2014/10/5/tagp153-sebastian-winklerfile-sharing-appprivateannonymous- sharingapp-storeberlin-startup)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds very interesting Paul!</comment></comment>


Not All Practice Makes Perfect - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/not-all-practice-makes-perfect <comment><USER2> I think I will require all of my piano students to read this.</comment>


How important is user experience when you are still finding your product market fit? - <AUTHOR>

As a very young startup who is into our third complete revamp of our product, we are constantly facing a question - how much time should we spend on the UI?
The first couple of times we optimized the UI, it was all wasted, as it proved to be the wrong product from a high level point of view. Now on our third iteration, we find ourselves optimizing the UI too, because it is hard to get good feedback with a sucky UI.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> if you have excellent product-market fit, your early adopters will struggle through your terrible UI to get the incredible benefit they see from your product. If that's not happening, it's probably not the UI's fault.

Do an in-person usability test, where you can explain to the person exactly how to use the product (violating all the normal rules of usability testing). If they still don't like the product - either they are not a target customer or you don't have any customers out there. Do the test again - if the same thing keeps happening, you know it's the latter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Eries, thanks! Do you have any examples (whether it is yourself or someone else) with this experience?

<comment><USER2> Oh yes, many many times. It works, if you have the stamina to stick it out (it's painful).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you are on your third revamp of a product and you don't know what your "market fit" is, you have a serious problem. Why do you have a product with no understanding of your market? Maybe you don't have a market. But, wait, you have a product. Hmm. Looks like the cart before the horse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm.... i am not sure if that is a fair statement to make. Most startups spend lots of time developing their product, and do not find a market at the end.

We know there is definitely a market - the problem is that it is not easy to build a product for it, hence we are trying to re-iterate to the right product-market fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> you should know your market and have good predictions of uptake before you start coding ...</comment>


Hermit: a font for programmers, by a programmer - <AUTHOR> https://pcaro.es/p/hermit/

<comment><USER3> Repost from a year ago, link to existing discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354396)

Including the comment I was about to type before I realized it had already been written:

"I hate to say this, but a font by a programmer makes as much sense as a database library by a font designer. Good font design is not about calculations or following principled rules; it's about what looks good to the eye, and it takes a tremendous amount of skill and experience. And to my eye, at least, the font is incredibly difficult to read. It literally looks like a font designed by an engineer for a plotter, not something designed for the human eye or legibility. Good fonts follow intuitive rhythms, they focus on word shapes (not just letter shapes), natural curves, there's a tremendous amount of subtlety that goes into achieving a proper sense of balance between letterforms, and a lot of things are actually different between letters/curves/etc. so that they look the same to the eye in the end. Even with "utilitarian" fonts like monospace ones. "Carefully planned and calculated" is a great recipe for building a bridge, but not for building a font, unfortunately."

<comment> a-nikolaev Just curious, what would you say about this font sample: [http://i.imgur.com/DSXqMCZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/DSXqMCZ.png) ? (It's a modification of Terminus, with smaller letter height to have a bit more whitespace between the lines)

<comment><USER4> Individual characters can be made out, but words are hard to read. Not enough separation between letters and symbols, so constructs like "(pred=%i)\t" are harder to visually parse. I'm also not a fan of aliased pixel fonts -- it really exacerbates the picket-fence effect while reading.

Here's what your code sample looks like in Source Code Pro:

[http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png](http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png)

Smaller font:

[http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png](http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png)

Notice how all letters take up the full horizontal width so words clump together. It's easy to see that a space is a space, and not just an "i" next to an "l"

It's also worth noting that I had to try 3 separate OCR processors with your sample before I got one that didn't output complete garbage.

<comment> a-nikolaev Thanks for such a great analysis! You pointed out some things I did not really think about. Especially the way Source Code Pro handles "i"s and "l"s.

I will try to add 1px of horizontal space between letters. The goal was to make the font vertically compact, but still legible. The size is small and it feels quite clumped though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it supposed to look this bad? [http://d.pr/i/XCGR](http://d.pr/i/XCGR)

<comment><USER6> Please, use [http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html](http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html)

my eyes hurt :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tip for the one who created that font, display the font samples in an image or sample text immediately. All I care about is the looks. Did not immediately see where I could see an example so I just moved on to writing this feedback comment, and now I'm done with this post. Next!

<comment><USER8> You literally have to scroll down to the "Samples" section to see font samples. Then you come in the comments to tell everyone how lazy you are.

<comment><USER9> No, you literally have to scroll down to the "below-the-fold" Samples section, read the terse description, and click in and out of several links to see samples.

Point is: the very first thing anyone going to that page to see that font is going to want to see is _that font_. Most are going to expect the text of the page in that font, or at least a suitable sample _first_. As is, the text seen is in some non-standard (AFAIK) font which piques interest as the reader studies its subtleties, wondering how code would look in it ... then after a nontrivial time reading, discovered the links to samples, and is startled to see something completely different (and, IMHO, kinda "squashed").

A newspaper doesn't put the #1 headline on a page referenced below-the-fold.

<comment><USER10> I see this issue a lot when people try to show off their projects. "Check out my new gui/platform/product/application/plugin - If you are interesting in seeing it visually, simply fork my repo, step through the install, and get it running locally."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The phrase "A font for programmer, by a programmer" is a disservice to the many fine folks at Adobe and elsewhere who manage to not only be type designers, but also programmers. There's a lot of code that goes into making a good font. (Little known fact: Just van Rossum, type designer and programmer, is the brother of the Python BDFL Guido van Rossum.)

All that to say, Adobe's Source Code Pro could also be called a font for programmers, by programmers.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you are interested in seeing a long list of monospace fonts ranked by votes with samples on one page, please check out [http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best- programming...](http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming- fonts).

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks horrendous according to the sample images.

<comment><USER14> Sample images should be the _first_ thing you show when talking about a font. Instead it's just text?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find the rounded r's and n's a little bit difficult to negotiate, especially at smaller point sizes - while aesthetically pleasing, it makes the font harder to read. When I program, I want all my neurons available to coding. Also, the horizontal bar in f is on a different height than the one on the t. This makes it noisy.

Having said that, I applaud a developer committed enough to make "the perfect editor font" just as much as I applaud those who, via their config scripts and plugins, shape vim or emacs into their own perfect text editors.

Also, he managed to make his font work on WIndows. I never did it with mine ([https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font))

<comment><USER16> I don't think the r in this typeface is aesthetically pleasing :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every time I learn about a new programmer font, I try it for a day. It makes me sad that I apparently will never find one I like better than Inconsolata.

<comment><USER18> I had the same thing, until I found Source Code Pro from Adobe. [https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro](https://github.com/adobe/source- code-pro)

Yes, that's right. An open source font by Adobe. It's absolutely gorgeous!

<comment><USER16> I switched to Fira Mono from Mozilla. It's kinda similar, and I like Source Code Pro too, but I like Fira Mono a bit more :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pages about fonts should be written in the target font. On that note, what font is the page about the font in? I wish there were a fixed-width version of that font.

</comment><comment><USER20> I admire the effort that went into this. As anyone who ever tried creating a font knows, it's really tough putting it all together.

It's not _that_ bad at 12pt, but all that's wrong with the font really shows with smaller sizes. Stroke weights are inconsistent, eyes too small. The font was meant to be "clear, pragmatic and very readable". Right now, it's none of these.

Technical problems can be solved, and the font will look good to some. I don't like it, but that's just a matter of taste. Layman's opinion on aesthetics can only have statistical value (and it's questionable if professional's opinion should be valued more).

What really bothers me is pretentiousness of the first paragraph. Basically, "everything was meant to be great, so it is". That - along with a todo that says nothing about fixing flaws, but dreams of having cyrillic, greek, unicode - is the biggest problem of all.

Fixing that first would go a long way toward making this a newsworthy item and a font to keep an eye on.

</comment><comment><USER21> It probably took a lot of work to do so I'm not going to bash this... But somehow I feel that the letters are not round enough for my eyes to easily flow from one letter to the other. But then again I don't have the best eyes either so hopefully it's useful to some other devs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks, it is always nice to see a monospaced font available. I especially like the light version. I also like the fact that symbols that look similar (e.g. "1lI") are very distinct from each others.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not exactly the best name for changing the programmer stereotype...

</comment><comment><USER24> I struggled for a long time to find a font that looks good even when it's tiny and subpixel smoothing isn't very effective. I've pretty much settled on tamsyn: [http://www.fial.com/~scott/tamsyn- font/](http://www.fial.com/~scott/tamsyn-font/)

It's not "pretty" but I find it the most useful and visually appealing. The only downside is that not everything works properly with bitmap fonts.

</comment><comment><USER25> While I like this (for reasons that others have already mentioned), the lack of an italic version is a bit of a killer for me, along with the lack of full latin-1 support.

If you haven't seen it yet, Fantasque Sans Mono (formerly Cosmic Sans Neue) is my current favourite. It's worth checking out. [http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans- mono](http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono)

</comment><comment><USER26> Because to my eyes aren't trained, I really can't tell any font better than any other. I am mostly used to visual studio's default but I adopt to others equally efficiently without any real hindrance to my work.

So, anyone care to explain why a font is better than another or is it just a "feel" you get that you like one over the others?

<comment><USER27> Easy to read at small sizes so you can have a lot of code. 1 and i are not similar. 0 and O are different. Looks good as white on black (or bright on black anyway). Spacing between the letters is correct for use in code. Etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems to me that he has gone to enormous lengths to use consistent pieces to make letters (as befits a programmer -- DRY design), which makes them all look very samish, hurting readability. I think a better approach would be to figure out how to make the glyphs seem more distinct without being inconsistent or ugly.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm using Yosemite on Mac and I'm loving the Osaka font.

Screenshot: [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/3a95a8a8-978a-4371-8411...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/3a95a8a8-978a-4371-8411-5a4044ce071b/d00f2e11db79f6940b148e0df3717845)

<comment><USER5> That font size is so big! Am I alone w/ preferring 9pt [http://d.pr/i/NDUU](http://d.pr/i/NDUU)?

<comment><USER30> Nice theme. You mind sharing?

<comment><USER5> Sure.

[https://github.com/daylerees/colour- schemes](https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes) it's "Frontier Contrast"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The one thing that jumped out at me is that I find the parentheses too strongly curved, so much so it may be difficult to distinguish between '(' and 'C'.

It's hard to tell because there are no 'C's in the samples; more upper case and mixed case text would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER32> I know that a sans-serif font looks all slick and modern, but those serifs in Courier New help your eye identify the character more readily and improve readability. Any monospace font without serifs is automatically a no-go for me when it comes to programming.

</comment><comment><USER33> Thanks, but I will stick with Terminus Font:

[http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html](http://terminus- font.sourceforge.net/shots.html)

<comment><USER34> Same, I use Terminus at 8pt as my terminal font, and it's fantastic - <USER2> yet readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> First I scrolled past the Samples section and thought where can I see the font. I suggest to show a sample right at the top, there is enough space right next to the table of contents.

</comment><comment><USER36> source code pro and Bitstream Vera Sans are my favourite

screenshot [https://mediacru.sh/ce42e42abe27](https://mediacru.sh/ce42e42abe27)

</comment><comment><USER6> Good to know the author intends to add Greek characters. Until then, for me it's a no-no :-(. Since VIM is my default editor, I need Greek chars in terminal.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why author choose to make it look like this?

For instance, I prefer Menlo font and find it much better looking than Hermit.

<comment><USER38> Menlo is my favorite too. :)

Tried others (including this one), but keep coming back to it. I have it set to 14pt in Sublime Text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I recommend PragmataPro. Once I found it, I knew I didn't have to look for another programming font again.

<comment><USER40> For those looking... [http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm](http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It has an interesting look, but it's not something I'd personally use on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER42> A bit old-fashioned. Easy to read. I like it (just switched my Eclipse to it). Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER43> I ll stick with Consolas.

</comment><comment><USER44> Looks kind of blurry.</comment>


A Princess Is Making Google Forget Her Drunken Rant About Killing Muslims - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/889kyv/a-princess-is-making-google-to-forget-her-drunken-rant-about-killing-muslims <comment><USER2> I didn't realize Germany had royalty or nobility or what have you in this day and age. Or is there some different meaning behind "German princess"?

<comment><USER3> It's a hereditary title, essentially part of the family name. It doesn't guarantee any additional privileges, and most nobles are probably not particularly wealthy. I once met a prince who worked at a call center, and the only thing his title was good for was trolling customers who asked for his full name when they wanted to complain to his boss.</comment></comment>


The joint mobile operating system: A risible idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2010/09/the-joint-mobile-operating-system-a-risible-idea.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The best quote of all: And then it all went wrong. Mobile utility providers became mobile operators. They decided they knew what their customers wanted. They turned into the electricity company trying to sell us toasters.</comment>