Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read - <AUTHOR> http://dbasch.posterous.com/amazon-has-drastically-changed-the-way-i-read <comment><USER2> Anything that gets more people reading more books is a positive in my opinion, but I'm still disturbed by the idea that ebooks are acceptable alternatives to physical books overall.

If the future is one of ebooks and real books coexisting, I'm all for it.

But if the more likely scenario plays out, where publishers use the higher profit margins and control that come from cutting out the printers and stores, and books die as physical objects, then I can't begin to express the sadness and loss I feel.

The joy that comes from holding a book in my hands that I know was read and held by my grandfather years ago is irreplaceable. So is the beauty of a well- designed book, from the paper choices to the typography to the feel of the spine in my hand. And of course, the conversations that flow from seeing the title of a book someone's reading, or browsing their bookshelves at home.

The very lack of technology in a book preserves their integrity against the strong temptations of adding sounds, animations, interactivity, advertising, even video. It's easy to imagine a world in the not so distant future where the idea of reading just words alone is sneered at as primitive and boring.

Is there anyone that can offer any optimism?

<comment><USER3> IMO, the only way for physical books to exists alongside ebooks is by bundling the ebook with the physical book, similar to movies. It baffles me why publishers haven't already done this, but then again...publishers aren't the brightest people.

<comment><USER4> Some publishers offer the ebook + physical book combo for less than buying them separately. For example, you can get the following deal on a particular book from O'Reilly:

ebook: $31.99

print + ebook: $32.99

print: $29.99

Ref: <http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018414.do>

<comment><USER5> > ebook: $31.99

> print: $29.99

The fact the ebook costs more than the print book is just laughable. It reminds me of Ticketmaster's "delivery fee" that they charge when you print tickets at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I refuse to buy a Kindle.

TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service)

Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook or Sony Reader some day. (For now my iPad is a decent substitute.)

Why does the Kindle rub me the wrong way? It doesn't render ePub books. I think the ePub spec, though flawed, is a great tool that generally follows the spirit of Unix. It's just complicated enough to be flexible but is something that you can pretty easily craft by hand. (I'm in the middle of building a library that will make that a one-line command.)

Mobipocket, on the other hand, is an ugly format. It's binary. It's over- engineered. It's _legacy_. Mobipocket represents each book, magazine, or comic book on your Kindle as a _database_ for basically the same reasons that Windows still uses the Registry. I cannot deal with such an ugly format or support an ecosystem that refuses to support better standards.

Side note: I will never invest in a proprietary book "platform" because, I like to own my books. And book "platforms" are the road to RAAS (reading as a service). Amazon doesn't have a great track record for making you feel warm and fuzzy about owning your eBooks [1]. Giving up physical books is something I might do. Giving up the right to read them when and how I want is another.

[0]: <http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header>

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)

<comment><USER7> I own a Kindle and buy books through Amazon, but strip DRM off them immediately after buying.

<comment><USER8> Here's how to do it: [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm- from...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle- e-books-and-others/)

(I haven't tried this method, but it seems extremely straightforward)

<comment><USER7> The method offered at the post urges you to install the desktop Kindle software, and de-DRMs files from its storage. That hasn't always worked in the last year, as Amazon tried to obfuscate the key storage in the desktop versions, and there's been a kind of race between Amazon and the authors of the de-DRMing tools.

I don't know what the status is now, but I want to emphasize that if you own a physical Kindle you don't need to install the Kindle Windows/Mac reader at all. Just follow the instructions on the blogpost linked to in the Wired article and customize the plugin with the Kindle's serial number. To de-DRM, you then connect the Kindle to your desktop and just Add the books off Kindle as a disk drive into the Calibre library.

<comment><USER9> For all you ever wanted to know about removing drm: <http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I completely agree with the OP, at first I thought I would miss having a physical book in my hands, but to be honest I don't really miss it at all. There are so many advantages to eBook reading such as light weight (compared to some hard covers), increased font size, etc. I now find myself thinking of buying a hardcover book as more of a painful inconvenience rather than a benefit.

<comment><USER11> Me three. Avoided buying a Kindle for years because I was unnerved by the idea of my book running out of batteries. In the three months since I acquired one my reading time has probably increased fivefold. The Kindle is a _terrible_ device in so many ways--frumpy UI, 1980s-ish refresh rate, poor resolution compared to printed material--and yet still manages to be enjoyable to use. Makes me excited about the future of reading devices.

<comment><USER12> I bought the first kindle and took it on a month long trip to Africa and re- read the Baroque Cycle on it. I jave a a few new Kindles since. I love most the platform aspect of Kindle and I rarely buy novels or computer tech books in any other form.

However I grew up traveling to Powells books and living with physical books. I find that a good physical book has something that the digital version lacks. The physical form is a symbol for my memories of a book. I can simply pick it up and thoughts, themes and so forth come back to me. A quick flip through pulls out my memories.

For deep study I still find that writing in ad underlining a book increases my understanding dramatically. For awhile I composed notes at the computer while I read but this was time consuming and akward.

Digital books are disruptive. As Carr once wrote though, the disruption doesn't mean something isn't lost... often much is. We need to find the right ways to bring as much as that along with us from the physical world into the digital as we can. Perhaps I am too old already, but I am sure I will be one of the last with physical books as well as a continual user of the digital.

<comment><USER13> What do you think of the note taking on the Kindle? I've never been one to write in books so It's hard for me to say how well it works.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't work for me at least. Part of the value of note taking is to flip through the book quickly and see the notes and then recall the most interesting parts. This seems lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I got a Kindle about a month ago but have since returned it. It seems to be an excellent device for reading any book that should be read serially (e.g. novels), but any type of book that requires "random access" (e.g. reference/technical) doesn't work well due to the small screen, inability to jump to page X (which makes it difficult to use an index since you can't easily jump to it from anywhere), and poor search functionality.

Even if these features were implemented better, it would probably still be annoying as Kindles are sluggish, low-power devices (which is probably a boon for the serial-reading use case as it encourages you to just flip pages and not get sidetracked, as well as providing amazing battery life).

Then again, maybe I'm just missing something as my coworker seems fine using his Kindle for this purpose.

<comment><USER15> Technical books are so HEAVY and I actually prefer the Kindle for them than carrying those books. Also, reading a huge technical book in say, an airport, would bring you lots of stares ( don't say you don't care about them!)

Yeah it is tough to jump around and some books just cannot be read on a 6" screen ( and I doubt that the DX fares better.) but for most books I found that I am good with reading them on Kindle. The benefits far outweigh the cons for me.

<comment><USER16> The DX is fantastic for tech books. Code and diagrams look great.

<comment><USER17> I specifically got the Kindle DX for manuals and other tech books, and it's been awesome. And approximately the same size/weight as an iPad...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them.

i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.

i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.

<comment><USER4> Here's an idea:

Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder "book" on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas.

The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell , and my personal favorite: Earl Grey.

<comment><USER19> > _National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell_

This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve.

I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub- Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read very specific types of books on my Kindle.

Thick classics that are too big to carry around, New York Times bestseller page-turners, interesting books with an intriguing synopsis or something recommended by a friend. Things that I will read once, and maybe twice. Even though the ebook selection is still appalling with my local library, I've found it useful in this.

What I don't buy: textbooks, and the favorites I've probably read at least ten times. Those are the books I want to keep in physical form--eReaders don't flip well, and no amount of slick e-ink and shiny devices is going to have the same soothing effect on my nerves as my much-loved copy of The Hobbit.

Kindle, et al, at least for me, is dramatically streamlining the way I consume one type of book--the ones that before, I would go to the library, read, and return without a second thought. But not a whole lot else.

</comment><comment><USER21> Kindle -> fiction/non-fiction text

Real books -> books needing many illustrations (e.g. art books)

But, I really appreciate the issue of "What do we put on the bookshelves?" my wife and I have bookshelves filling a wall where we have our combined libraries - and that is aesthetically very pleasing for us. What will our children do if they only have electronic format reading material?

</comment><comment><USER19> Did you notice the little girl reading the kindle on amazon? What I wonder about is what happens when you grow up with only limited exposure to codices. Is a book still a book?

<comment><USER22> To play devil's advocate, should the format matter? It seems like the content is the most important thing.

People say, "don't just a book by its cover." Shouldn't that apply to a book's format as well?

<comment><USER19> My reaction to your question might be telling:

      1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic;
      2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle";
      3. I wait 3 seconds;
      4. I re-read Carr's take and mull it over.

Perhaps not fundamentally different from looking it up in the index, but it certainly feels so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been running my old paper books through a scanner and throwing them away. The resulting pdf's are readable on the Kindle or my computer, or even on my ipod.

I've probably done around 500 books by now. There's a looong way to go yet :-)

I don't see much point in having physical books anymore other than coffee table books. I like having my library at my fingertips rather than scattered everywhere.

<comment><USER24> And by throwing away you mean "donating them", right? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love ebooks, but I hate the kindle way that ties me to Amazon and makes it hard for me to share my books. Effectively, I no longer own books, I only borrow them from Amazon.

Every now and then I get weak anyway and buy a kindle book. But often Amazon tells me I first need to switch my account from Amazon.com to Amazon.de. That is the reminder of what is wrong with it. Why does it matter where I buy my ebook? I want to buy my ebook wherever and whenever I want, and just have a device that can handle all my books. I know it is possible to get other books onto the kindle, but it is very cumbersome (I don't own a kindle, so the email transfer does not work). And they won't sync between devices, either, afaik.

I find this very depressing, because it seems unlikely to change in the near future. Everybody wants to own their customer, nobody is going to deliver a reader that is simply a good reader. Not the least because it would also require titanic negotiations with book publishers to make their content available somehow.

<comment><USER26> I believe there should be a law, or at least some economic disincentive to motivate Amazon (and other ebook providers) to export/import collections from their proprietary readers onto competitors. Ereaders should not be tied to a given collection -- it is an insane state -- imagine buying a CD or DVD that could only be played in players belonging to a single company or an appliance that would only run on selected utility systems. Why is this considered a natural and beneficial state for books?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One way my reading habit has changed is that now I read even upto 3 books at the same time ( as in reading them not one after another, but switching between them.)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the most positive outcome of Kindle and other digital reading platforms is the ability you suddenly gain to carry a whole library without effort. It's just there. Also, I find the notes functionality to be a lifesaver (I love taking notes of things I read but hate to write on books, so) and overall the reading experience is just very swift.

</comment><comment><USER16> The killer feature for me is the highlighting. I can fully review a book (technical) in minutes.

Wife appreciates the shelf space.

</comment><comment><USER28>
      When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter
      or read a couple of pages on the phone.

Maybe you should spend these few minutes in quiet contemplation? You can learn a lot by exploring your mind during quiet times and not constantly binging on information.

<comment><AUTHOR> For that I go outdoors. Restaurants in San Francisco are not precisely quiet :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Novels and light non-fiction is easy to read on the Kindle but for non-fiction with lots of ideas that are new I often have to buy the hard copy as well and underline and notate. Still I like the Kindle version because I travel a lot.

<comment><USER12> As a hybrid user who reads many books in both physical and digital forms, I have found that my preference for Kindle is directly related to how much I have traveled in the last month or two.</comment></comment>


Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-9-year-old-pirate-bay-girl-confiscate-winnie-the-pooh-laptop-121122/ <comment><USER3> This is the reductio ad absurdum of current law.

We need to work more actively to make this sort of thing stop. There are a range of solutions. We could try to change the laws. We could develop technology that would make it harder to catch file-sharers. We could attack the labels directly by trying to pinch off the sources of their revenue. I'm not sure which would work the best. My guess is that they're better at manipulating legislators, and the way to beat them is technology.

So here's a question for everyone: What new technology would harm the labels most?

<comment><USER4> Indirect networking much like Tor or I2P.

Translated to BitTorrent, everyone would be using just one extra hop to keep the speeds up but passing around encrypted packages for others would create plausible deniability. You can claim you don't know what the packet that you routed contained, because you can't know that. You can't be held liable for routing traffic per se, much like ISPs aren't liable for routing traffic per se.

Why Tor and I2P don't want to use one-hop connections is that someone with government-level access could deduce the participants by looking at the traffic timing patterns. But MAFIAA at least not yet isn't actively hooked to the major ISPs of the world and can't apply such a traffic analysis. A simple one-layer indirection would hide who's downloading and uploading what. All you see is routing nodes.

If you're MAFIAA and seeding your fake movies and music to this torrent network, you can only see a user's IP address uploading a block to your fake clients. But since everyone is acting on behalf of others and merely routing packets, you don't know who sent the packet and you can't possibly prove that the one who did the last route was guilty. Otherwise merely connecting to the network would mean the user is guilty. The network would of course transfer legitimate files as well, and while downloading a Ubuntu 13.04 image users would also handle these one-hop routing requests of other peers who are downloading/seeding other files.

Interestingly, you would only need to transfer a certain percentage of connections over the one-hop tunnel. You could use zero-hop for the rest. The MAFIAA can't recognize those so it still looks the same as if you acted as the router and fetched a block for another peer.

This could also be implemented as a global free-to-connect IPv6 VPN network. If the IP addresses uploading MAFIAA movies are virtual, nobody knows where they are and who operates them.

<comment><USER5> Unless, of course, the authorities seed Tor with a whole bunch of nodes that log everything. No timing attacks required.

Tor relies on the fact that even if there's one or two bad apples among the bunch logging everything you're probably going to be safe because you'll go through enough routing nodes that aren't logged for it to be impossible to trace.

<comment><USER4> Logging isn't enough. You would need to be able to prove that the encrypted blob originated from the potentially infringing IP address and wasn't just merely passing through it. Because if it was the potentially infringing node couldn't have had any clue about what the packet contained.

If all you can see is routing you can't know where packets originate or are destined to. You receive a packet, open your layer of encryption, see where the packet should be going next, log it, and send it forward. You can't possibly know whether the sender created the packet or forwarded it, and you can't possibly know whether the recipient consumed the packet or forwarded it.

You would need to monitor physical network links to determine patterns how the onion style packets travel around.

<comment><USER5> But with one-hop communications (as suggested by the post I was replying to) then the routing nodes (that could be made to log everything) know both the source and destination addresses as it is the only other hop in a one-hop path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clicked through to the article hoping to see a picture of the laptop. Was not disappointed! :)

On topic though, this just shows how ridiculous the MAFIAA is getting these days. Unfortunately, this episode played out negatively on the artist as well - who probably had nothing to do with the event. So piracy harms the artist, but in this case the MAFIAA hurt the artist even more by prosecuting someone for it [1] ? Not sure if that's justice, but it feels quite strange to think about it.

[1] - The article says that the artist experienced a serious backlash on her facebook page from enraged fans.

<comment><USER7> I'm wondering if the backlash might actually be a good thing. If this sort of backlash becomes common, there will be a disincentive for artists to sign up with records who indulge in such nonsense. Perhaps the system will adapt such that prosecutions like this would be eliminated.

<comment><USER8> > there will be a disincentive for artists to sign up with records who indulge > in such nonsense

Why would a creative person who's primary method of feeding the family are checks from publishers not want their publisher to diligently protect the revenue model?

<comment><USER9> Because they understand that "protecting the revenue model" distinctly different than confiscating 9 year olds' laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't buy music controlled by the RIAA. Just don't. The _only_ way to stop them is to starve them. They're major campaign contributors, so the law will never be on our side until they're gone.

And by the way, don't download said music from sharing sites or friends. Artists need to see that we won't pay them any attention, with wallets or ears, if they associate with known extortionists.

<comment><USER11> A boycott isn't made up out of individuals. Doing this is a waste of your effort unless it's part of a focussed campaign.

<comment><USER12> Where have you been? Many individuals like me have been actively avoiding RIAA and MPAA products as much as possible. [http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/riaa-revenue-reaches- new-...](http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/riaa-revenue-reaches-new- low/051450)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I was a billionaire looking for ways to burn money, I'd set up a legal defense fund for MAFIAA victims.

We wouldn't have go broke defending everyone they sue. All it takes is a few cases to establish their abusive practices and suddenly courts start looking at them as "vexatious litigants" who file lawsuits in bad faith; abuse court procedure by e.g. jurisdiction shopping; using the court's subpoena power to get names and addresses for the sole purpose of extorting settlements with no intention of actually going to court; improperly joining hundreds or thousands of unrelated cases to save on filing fees.

When they realize someone who has the money and willingness to sue them is looking at these cases very carefully, suddenly the police fall in line and start going "by the book" and following their own procedures: Only taking evidence that's actually needed, only keeping it as long as it's needed, and returning it in good condition. Again, all we have to do is have a few successful cases and we can prevent thousands from going through what's happening in this story.

</comment><comment><USER14> The age of criminal responsibility in Finland is 15. So I'm at a loss at what is going to happen to this 9 year old girl. Certainly downloading music without paying for it is wrong. But there are much better ways of dealing with this than sending in the police.

And justice needs to be public. (With a few rare exceptions). Forcing people to sign NDAs is creepy and weird.

I'd be interested to know what would have happened if the father sent photocopies of the receipts for the music that they bought the next day - <USER2> like to think that would have been enough to call off the lawyers but I understand that it probably isn't.

<comment><USER15> IANAL but I expect they will pin it on the father on the basis that he paid for internet access and therefore responsible.

<comment><USER16> at least over here in Germany it has been ruled that the parents can't be blamed for their children's internet use. If all else fails, blame it on the kids ;-)

<comment><USER17> Until what age would they be considered children for this ruling?

<comment><USER18> Presumably the legal age of responsibility, at which point they become responsible for their own actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since when did this became normal and accepted in society? Whats next, police pulling candy from babies? or are we just going straight back to whip and flails to handle the _dark and evil crime called copyright infringement!_

This is the definition of insanity. What is wrong with the people that was part of the chain of events that lead to taking a laptop from the hands of an 9 year old girl?

</comment><comment><USER20> How do these NDAs work? Can they really demand that you pay them money _and_ not tell anyone?

Seems pretty creepy.

<comment><USER21> You always have the right to refuse though and have the courts sort it out, should they choose to pursue a case.

<comment><USER22> If you or I tried to do this, we'd be sued into oblivion for blackmail because that's what this is, blackmail. Pay us money and we won't tell on you. This world is messed up.

<comment><USER23> I believe that this is a side effect of the corporatist political system we find ourselves in.

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

Some interesting quotes on the subject - <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/corporatism>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just as worrying is the level of IT the people who take the laptop and other IT equipment away actualy have.

They could image the laptop, but no they take it away, leave it in a pile for months and then return it knowing full well that any data is not biometricaly tagged with any individual and as such a good lawyer would stamp all over it. TCP/IP in effect could be deemed entrapment in how it works.

Sad thing is I have music CD's that now over 20-30 years old are rusting a bit and some are unplayable. I would not moraly have an issue of getting a replacement via the internet for the cost of my time and internet. Now I know it is wrong and I should not have to spend my time and internet obtaining what I already paid for and was misold as a undistructable media at the time, but I'm a fair chap. But those that enforce there copyrights are not fair.

I have a file on all my computers called do not open without prior permision, its a realy evil file with compression bomb embeded picture saying "piss off" after about 50+ layers. If somebody investigates my computers without my permission or following the instructions to use my computer then that person will waste alot of there time. OK I now need some illegal mp3's but nobody is perfect and with that this is yet another case of the system being highlighted for what it is, messed up and moraly wrong.

<comment><USER13> It's probably more the police mentality of "they're suspects, they must be guilty, we know if we can't prove it in court they'll get off, so let's do everything in our power to make their lives as crappy as possible."

Including tying up stuff they know the family needs as "evidence" as long as they think can get away with, returning it in as poor a state as they think they can get away with...and the guy's already admitted EUR 600 will put him out of Christmas, they know there's no way he can afford to sue the police, all his money will be spent on his legal troubles with the MAFIAA...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not going to lie, this might be the best headline ever.

<comment><USER26> I hope it's not too off-topic to say that I thought someone sent a TheOnion article to HN.

<comment><USER27> It made me wonder if there were any theonion articles on hn. It turns out, there were a couple of them that even received comments and upvotes, but not much for the last 3 years. My guess is that submissions from theonion are auto-banned.

[1] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=the...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=theonion.com&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

<comment><USER28> That is kinda sad, actually. Many articles on The Onion are more intellectually stimulating than stuff on HN front page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is insane! Using the "law" to get to this unprecedented levels of harassment against KIDS! I mean, for fuck's sake: THINK OF THE KIDS!

I honestly want to see more and more of this, there's an already growing wave of anti-MAFIAA and this kind of abuses will only make it bigger and meaner. The bubble will burst at some point and it won't be pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER30> I imagine the death throes of this dying industry are going to get worse before it gets better.

<comment><USER31> Yes, it's always seemed odd to me, from a moral point of view, that it's perfectly fine for _them_ to copy music easily (and hence make huge profits) but it's not ok for _us_ to copy music.

If you look at the history of the music business, musicians used to not make very much money and only got paid for gigs. If you were good you could ask for more from your punters per gig, and if you were _REALLY_ good you could hold concerts and get paid much more. Seems we should go back to that model - musicians and the music industry get rewarded far beyond what they're worth in my opinion.

<comment><USER32> That is still how it is for nearly all musicians. Even a platinum record will not make as much money as the accompanying tour for many bands.

<comment><USER31> Yes, the problem is not the musicians per-se, it's the music industry that surrounds them. They make a fortune copying and selling music, and get all upset about it when other people want to copy music.

I know there's a lot of effort that goes into creating and producing an album, but that's a pittance compared to how much an album will make. And it's not like they lose money investing in lots of different bands and only a few are successful - if they're not 100% sure the album will sell (say it's a new artist) then they only _lend_ the money to the artists. It's a loan that carries interest and has to be paid back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's amazing to me that in the past 10 years, so much has changed with regard to the music industry (streaming radio, MP3s becoming ubiquitous at mainstream e-commerce sites, everyone with a music player/smartphone in their pocket, etc.) and yet how little has changed (lawsuits, the laws themselves, and the general insanity around the topic.) A glimpse into these same conversations from the previous era:

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/21/73329/8778>

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/31/205359/166>

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/16/163447/493>

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/21/215822/505>

</comment><comment><USER34> I really don't like the sensationalist "pull at the heart strings", vibe in this title. I it feels a bit misleading and over-dramatized just to cause controversy. I get what they're trying to say, I but there has to be a better way to say it.

<comment><USER35> I wasn't sad, I was laughing! I mean, come on. Pirates cause organised crime to flourish and terrorists to be financed, right? What a dastedly 9 year old, with her Winnie the Pooh laptop!

Incidentally, I'm sort of interested where you can get a Winnie the Pooh laptop as I have a 5 year old daughter.

<comment><USER36> <https://www.google.com/search?q=laptop%20decals>

Try not to buy a pirated image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yikes, I wouldn't let a 9 year old go to the Pirate Bay on her own. Unless you're running adblock there are some pretty R-rated banner ads on TPB.

<comment><USER38> You really think you can choose which websites your own 9-year-old browses? Really?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've thought that in Finland the reason to get a search warrant needs that the minimum punishment for the crime is 6mo in jail. When did the punishment for copyright infringement went from fines to jailtime :O Or am I missing here something..

<comment><USER40> When they last revised the criminal law wrt copyright. It's actually a triply evil twist. First (1) new law says that only for the criminal form can you get jail time, and you need to be making a profit to turn it from a minor offense to a crime. Then (2) they the added in the last paragraph of the relevant section that if a computer network is involved and there's "significant damage" to the rightholder, it's also the criminal form. And then (3) the courts made it the sentencing practice that it's "significant damage" even in cases like this.

link (finnish):<http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1889/18890039001#e-53> chapter 49 last paragraph

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The trouble with running an indie label is that you rely heavily on grant money (usually through the government). The major labels are the only ones who can execute non-organic marketing strategies (billboards, commercials etc).

Even the deals that people are signing these days aren't in their best interest. Often a band will sign only to never have anything released by the label. The kicker is that the label still owns anything that band (even as individuals) make for a period of time. You're essentially treated like a movie script.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is pretty disturbing given that she only downloaded one album a year ago (or at least thats all they seem to be pinning on this family).

</comment><comment><USER43> What I have to say. Play your own music. Create it. Educate your kids how to drum, and what to do with the piano. Never sell your own music, let people listen. They'll be the most grateful.

</comment><comment><USER44> Piracy law is getting absurd.

Imagine if this girl simply shoplifted the music, its entirely reasonable that if she was caught that shed get a slap on the wrist and if anything, no where near a 600 fine.

</comment><comment><USER35> The original title was much better. Why was it changed?

</comment><comment><USER45> Remind anyone else of Terry' Gilliam's Brazil?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay0TDQuq7XI>

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm listening to the album in question now, the artist has definitely come out of it ok :)

<comment><USER32> I'm not listening to it right now. They are totally screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> if Anonymous want something useful to do they should start hounding these lawyers...

</comment><comment><USER48> Where the hell is the world going?

</comment><comment><USER49> That's some unfortunate grammar.

</comment><comment><USER50> They should execute this filthy pirate. She is clearly single-handedly responsible for all poor music sales in at least the last 15 years.

Wait, no, this is utterly irrational and harms the MAFIAA's cause. I say bring on more lawsuits against neonates, foeti and octogenarians - they'll scupper their own cause pretty swiftly as they lampoon themselves.</comment>


Ask HN: Prototype Week 2 – Get Leads From Social Networks - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN Community,
I recently posted another entry on HN to get feedback on a quick prototype we built, to get genuine leads for businesses from social networks. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927274)
That version was a very basic prototype with rough data, UI and was show casing the concept of the product. We got really got good and important feedback from a so many of you on the HN community and also got a lot of feedback from other places.
So we are thinking of taking the help of the vast community we have on the internet, to actually help us build this product, by taking weekly or bi-weekly feedback.
We did some improvements for our next iteration and made an actual working prototype of the concept. The changes we implemented in this iteration:
1. We included leads from twitter.
2. Modified the homepage a bit to help understand what the product does. 3. Added a video preview on the landing page to encourage people who are sceptical from signing up. 4. For each lead, we have a detailed view where the lead message is mentioned, about the person enquiring about services, and a status of the lead saying how many people are contenting for it. The user can reply from within the dashboard itself.
We would love feedback from all of you. If you can help answer questions like, what problems do you generally face while looking for leads on twitter? What other features would be useful while looking at leads? What other details would be useful? Any other feature which particularly helps you in getting more leads and increasing business.
Product Link: http://leadify.in/
Looking forward to your valuable comments :)
Thank you so much!
Sumeet <comment><AUTHOR> Reference Links:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927274)

[http://leadify.in/](http://leadify.in/)</comment>


Sugar is behind global explosion in type 2 diabetes, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/27/sugar-obesity-type-2-diabetes

<comment><USER2> There hasn't been much doubt about this fact for some time.</comment>


A way to charge pacemakers using the heart's own muscle - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/03/23/a-way-to-charge-pacemakers-using-the-hearts-own-muscle <comment><USER2> Just wondering why wireless charging isn't used? A pacemaker seems to use little energy so one overnight charge cycle should last for months if not years?

<comment><USER3> As said previously, they used to use these, but having an induction loop means you can never have an MRI as this would superheat the coil. I'd rather have the option of an MRI should I need it, and a daycase procedure to change my batteries.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I see the problem. If the pacemaker kept the coil shorted except when charging, then even a fairly large AC field shouldn't transfer much power or induce a problematic voltage. And an MRI is mostly a DC field, which seems mostly harmless.

<comment><USER5> Shorted, it would still create heat.

<comment><USER6> The AC fields in an MRI aren't that large.

You also don't have to short it. Leaving it open circuit with a charging circuit that can withstand large voltages is a much better bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't this subtly sap the energy from the heart, making it just that little bit harder perform every beat do due the resistance of the piezoelectric strip? 10 microwatts seems little enough, but then how much does it take for the heart to beat? What % increase is this over normal functioning?

<comment><USER8> Google is your friend:

The heart has every other muscle in the body beat by producing between 1 and 5 watts

<comment><USER7> Thanks, so I guess that's basically smaller than the margin of error if you were sampling that</comment></comment></comment>


One VC Wrote an OS for Her Life - <AUTHOR> https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/one-vc-wrote-an-os-for-her-life <comment><USER2> Is this an operating system? It looks like MacOS, and she mentions using Bear, which is only available on Apple devices.

This seems like it's just the list of tools that she uses within MacOS.

I was wondering how exactly one would leverage a custom OS to optimize your life; most of the OS functionality seems too low level to have any appreciable benefit on your ability to manage your life.

<comment><USER3> It's a bit clickbaity in that sense. She didn't write an OS as the term is understood. What's being described in the article would be better called her productivity stack.</comment></comment>


Wine 1.0 is finally coming out, 15 years after project started - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/20/wine-1-0-nearly-ready-pouring <comment><USER2> Although I've run apps over Wine for awhile now...I still find myself thinking "ooh, ahh" when I launch a win32 app in Wine and it just works.

Cheers to the Wine dev team for all their hard work.

<comment><USER3> _I still find myself thinking "ooh, ahh" when I launch a win32 app in Wine and it just works._

It's not just you. Even my professors think it's pretty cool that I can fire up Windows apps inside Linux while all of my terminals with their garish Vim syntax highlighting continue to stare at them :-)

Great project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wine has, over the past two years or so, become quite usable for a couple of things that I used to have to reboot (or boot my lappy) for. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 run well under Wine, which makes cross-platform testing websites much nicer. It's not perfect, as ActiveX controls don't work, but it does allow one to check to be sure your HTML and CSS and JavaScript is IE bug-compatible, though I sometimes still worry whether I'm seeing a Wine bug or a bug in my own code, when things don't work right (usually it's in my code).

I also use it to play Dwarf Fortress. It, unfortunately, doesn't do very well with any of the other Win games that I occasionally play.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, Safari for Windows doesn't appear to work properly in Wine. It might be possible to wrangle with it sufficiently to convince it to work, but I eventually just went with installing XP in a VirtualBox VM.

<comment><USER4> I usually just test in Konqueror and periodically test on my girlfriend's MacBook. Since Konqueror shares lineage with Safari for HTML+CSS+JavaScript, it at least looks similar most of the time...I think WebKit has actually been merged in recently, so the closeness of the two may get better.

So, it's a problem, but it's not as big a problem as not being able to test quickly and easily on IE. IE is the bitch that never works right...at least Safari's deficiencies are relatively well understood and rarely hateful (they're usually just limitations and not-quite-there standards support, rather than horrifying rendering bugs that conflict dramatically with the standards).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone who has both used Wine and run Windows under virtualization on Linux comment on the trade-offs between those approaches? It seems like virtualization works more reliably, and with at least reasonable performance.

<comment><USER5> Virtualisation is definitely more reliable, but if you need just that one Windows app, then the overhead and interface discontinuity can be annoying.

Wine also supports OpenGL, so if your app (or game..) uses that, Wine easily beats any VM solution I've tried. It also implements part of Direct3D on top of OpenGL, but that's substantially slower. Still better than no D3D support as in most VM packages, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, I only boot into windows for CS:S and Excel anymore.

Maybe it's time I installed wine.

</comment><comment><USER8> June 6 = D-Day. Nice.</comment>


Bootstrap 4's mobile-first flexbox grid system, now used by default - <AUTHOR> https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/layout/grid/ <comment><USER3> BS 4 has only very recently gone all-in on flexbox so what's the expectation towards a 4.0 GA release date? A major benefit of Bootstrap is that it's really well tested on all kinds of devices (something that's difficult to achieve with your own CSS). But now that it's using flexbox for its grid doesn't that mean that testing has to be restarted all over?

Not that there's a need to rush it; I really appreciate Bootstrap's "it's ready when it's ready" stance. Personally I also like that the BS devs had the balls to rewrite their grid system based on flexbox this late in the development cycle, rather than hanging on to something you're not convinced of and focussing on getting a release out the door.

To those criticizing Bootstrap, here are my reasons why I like Bootstrap:

BS was incredibly useful for getting me back into contemporary/responsive CSS after a longer period of absence from webdev. I ended up overwriting many things, but that's why it's called "Bootstrap" after all I guess.

Bootstrap is also very useful as a baseline CSS in larger projects with multiple teams developing a uniform-looking web site.

And you can get a ton of themes for relatively little money (though not everything on offer is great of course). You can also contract an agency or freelance designer to make a BS theme for you, with a straightforward workflow.

Also, you can get relative good and targetted StackOverflow etc. advice on your daily CSS problems.

And, when BS4 finally is released, you don't have to redo your complete site to take advantage of it (or at least I hope so).

<comment><USER4> Upgrading from bs3 to bs4 is as close to a complete rewrite of your front end as you can get. Just the fact they switched from less to sass means that if you use less as well to extend and build upon the bs components you need to completely rewrite everything.

I use bs3 and love it, however my plan is not to upgrade to bs4, it's to slowly pull out and replace anything that could be modernised over time. The risk of breaking something is too great.

<comment><USER5> "Upgrading from bs3 to bs4 is as close to a complete rewrite of your front end as you can get."

That's slightly hyperbolic. I don't think they intend for the primary use case to be for people to upgrade in place, like updating a nightly Firefox, but rather to start new projects with the new version. But previous big upgrades have been largely a bunch of search and replaces. There's various tools that people have written to automate this. Again, I wouldn't blindly run it and expect everything to work, but it's far, far less than a complete rewrite.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree, wasn't intending to be hyperbolic. My intention was to indicate to the GP that upgrading an existing project from bs3 to 4 would be hard and mostly unnessasery. And clearly not the main intention of the bs team.

We all do tend to do a redesign of our sites and apps eventually and that the correct time to make the transition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now I can use CSS like I was using tables 15 years ago.

<comment><USER7> To be fair you've been able to do that with display: table-cell etc.

I do love seeing
 around the place. Sigh.

<comment><USER8> Not exactly, you couldn't get colspans or rowspans with that.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, they really dropped the ball on that. Being able to specify vertical and horizontal layouts this way would have solved a lot of problems that now require flex and soon CSS grids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For someone who doesn't really like CSS and has little design "sense", what would be your most recommended CSS Framework? I'd like lots of built in features, and a grid/layout system that makes the most obvious sense in usage.. ie, if it invents custom terminology for what is a row or column, or perhaps has lots of "always use this class with a new row" style rules, that is stuff the developer needs to learn. Lower barrier to entry means it's easier to pick up and "get shit done" for side projects/etc. Less looking at documentation.

At the moment i'm plain (non theme'd) SemanticUI. The UX/etc makes a lot of sense, the only downside is i'm using the plain CSS so i don't get a theme - but that's not a big deal. I can always add a separate build step for the css.

<comment><USER11> Bootstrap served me well. I'm a developer. I'm OK with CSS but I have little design "sense": I can tell if something is ugly or beautiful but I can't make something beautiful. Ugly yes. That's where Bootstrap came into help: it gave me reasonable defaults that customers without designers are OK with.

Customers with designers often end up with a custom Bootstrap theme. I can't remember the last time a designer sent me a totally custom layout not based on some framework, usually Bootstrap.

<comment><USER10> I'm really liking SemanticUI, but i'm thinking of switching to BootstrapV4 in the near future. The main reason being that Bootstrap has such a long history of tons of developers using it. Lots of devs mean lots of themes, documentation, etcetc.

My only concern is going with V3 or V4. I'd like to use V4, but that puts me at a lack of themes/etc, which is basically the same spot i'm at with semanticUI.. feels like a no gain then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bootstrap V4 introduced spacing utility classes (like a class m-t-1 to get margin-top: 1rem!important), which inspired others to create this great universal.css project: [https://github.com/marmelab/universal.css](https://github.com/marmelab/universal.css)

<comment><USER13> I was terrified for most of the way through that page that it was serious.

<comment><USER14> The first time I saw this project I went on an emotional roller coaster from shock & horror, through to laughing until tears fell out of my eyes :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Which was announced over a year ago and the project is still in alpha... Not to mention v3 is no longer officially supported.

<comment><USER16> Where do you see v3 is no longer officially supported?

This is from their blog when they announced Bootstrap 4

"When we shipped Bootstrap 3, we immediately discontinued all support for v2.x, causing a lot of pain for all our users out there. That was a mistake we won't be making again. For the foreseeable future, we'll be maintaining Bootstrap 3 with critical bug fixes and documentation improvements. v3 docs will also continue to be hosted after v4's final release."

<comment><USER17> [https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/20631](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/20631)

Essentially they've stopped working on v3. I don't think they used the words "no longer supported", but that's kind of what has happened.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure "no more forward feature development" translates to "no support".

<comment><USER19> It seems that V3 is mature enough to not need daily PRs to fix bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Suggestion: Change headline from "Bootstrap 4.0 includes a powerful mobile- first flexbox grid system" to "Bootstrap v4a6 uses flexbox by default".

I feel this much better conveys the meaningful change that HN is discussing here and that's otherwise not mentioned clearly on the current link to the docs (vs the blog post linked by another user below).

<comment><USER21> Ok, we've added "now used by default" to the title above.

<comment><USER20> Thank you, dang!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you're using flex - particularly if you're using flex by default, what does bootstrap get you, asides from putting a bunch of visual styling:

into your HTML?

<comment><USER5> An ecosystem of attractive looking templates, devs who know how to use it, various tools that integrate or output it, examples and tutorials to learn from, code samples to re-use etc.?

There's also a justification for the type of classnames you're railing against here:

[http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-html-semantics-front- end-a...](http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-html-semantics-front-end- architecture/)

I believe Bootstrap adopts many of these ideas. So it's not just a mistake, but an intentional decision as part of a different paradigm. Feel free to suggest that it's not a useful way to build websites, but don't be fooled into thinking they've accidentally broken a rule they intended to follow.

<comment><USER22> I'd argue more developers know how to use flex than bootstrap right now. And many developers would spend additional time researching how to do things the bootstrap way. If you don't have developers and want templates, use Squarespace, bootstrap is a poor fit.

I've read the article, but I still don't see why, to change the login box, I need to modify two places (HTML and SCSS) rather than one (SCSS).

<comment><USER5> There's a wide range between using Squarespace, and building an entirely custom website from scratch. It's a big 'ole niche that Bootstrap and other similar systems have been filling for a while. There's even a reasonably sized trend of big apps who think they're too good for Bootstrap but basically implement an internal clone of it.

[https://design.atlassian.com/product/components/buttons/](https://design.atlassian.com/product/components/buttons/)

As to your question, if you have an actual design system in place then you can change all primary buttons on your site by only changing the SCSS, and if you want to add a new primary button, or a small button, or a small primary button etc. you can do so by only changing the HTML. And when you do need to do both, it splits some of the responsibility in ways that make the code easier to manage and develop.

If it really comes down to just wanting to do stuff in one place, then there's a bigger picture that's being missed. Think about distribution of responsibility and letting junior staff add buttons, while more senior (or just those with different kinds of expertise) staff control the styleguide. If they each re-invent the wheel then there's not going to be consistency or re- use.

<comment><USER22> > There's a wide range between using Squarespace, and building an entirely > custom website from scratch. It's a big 'ole niche that Bootstrap and other > similar systems have been filling for a while

Good point.

> There's even a reasonably sized trend of big apps who think they're too good > for Bootstrap but basically implement an internal clone of it.

Everyone should have a set of rules implemented in SCSS. They just don't need to implement them in HTML.

> As to your question, if you have an actual design system in place then you > can change all primary buttons on your site by only changing the SCSS, and > if you want to add a new primary button, or a small button, or a small > primary button etc. you can do so by only changing the HTML.

Buttons are an easier case because they already exist. Anything else - <USER2> images, login dialogs, etc, are an argument for not using Bootstrap (or BEM, or other HTML based systems)

\- Making a design system in SCSS only: to change the login box, change the SCSS for .login-box

\- Using bootstrap: to change the login box, add and remove whatever HTML visual classes bootstrap needs for your new login box look (is it '\--grid-l4-left-blah-shiny') then modify the SCSS

(Edited this a lot while I wrote it, kind of thinking aloud and have trouble reading in monospace)

<comment><USER5> Regarding --grid-l4-left-blah-shiny, bear in mind that some people, say users of a corporate CMS maybe, simply do not have access to the CSS for the page they are designing. For those people, very granular visual styles have an important use case. This is however something that can be abused, and I've seen people who don't "get it" create problems for their future selves by not understanding when and where to use those kind of classes.

On the other hand, your login box is a box, and presumably you have other boxes, a sign-up box perhaps. You may well want them to have some similarity, even on an infrastructure level that is invisible to the user, like consistently only having margins on the top or the bottom. That kind of thing can be provided by the design system out of the box, letting the person who's hooking up the login on the backend have something functional and ready to go with no delay, to later to be handed off to someone who makes it bounce around on mousover and look snazzy. And if other priorities get in the way, then you'd still have a basic foundation level box that wouldn't embarrass you until you get around to redecorating.

<comment><USER22> > some people, say users of a corporate CMS maybe, simply do not have access > to the CSS for the page they are designing.

Agreed, but that's an edge case caused by mismanagement. People who need to style things should be able to edit styles.

> You may well want them to have some similarity, even on an infrastructure > level that is invisible to the user, like consistently only having margins > on the top or the bottom. That kind of thing can be provided by the design > system out of the box

Sure, but you can make consistent margins on your boxes with a SCSS mixin. It's the same difficulty to set up than moving your site to bootstrap, and much less difficult to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always built interfaces by hand, but for a recent project that is going to be heavy on the use of selecting options/button/etc, I was considering Bootstrap for the first time. However, looking at the source, and the sheer amount of "stuff" in there, I'm just not too keen on it. Is there a much lighter alternative, that satisfies quick standardized UI creation? SemanticUI i saw mentioned in here.

<comment><USER24> I agree but still use Bootstrap. There's too much well-thought out stuff to ignore or attempt to reinvent.

I don't include bootstrap.min.css though. I wrote a custom LESS (I'm still using v3) stylesheet to replace bootstrap.less, which pulls in just the bits I want. I also use this to customise and theme the whole thing.

I also don't use Bootstrap's classes in my HTML. These are replaced in my custom version by semantic and descriptive things that work very well on a site-by-site basis for keeping markup low.

And this can be kept just-about-separate-enough from Bootstrap to make upgrading it not too traumatic, as long as you stay within the major version and don't edit the original files (just override or replace them).

Wrapping up just the bits of the Bootstrap JS is the harder challenge IMO but this can also be done. I have a plaintext file that lists the files (in order) that I just cat together, minimise and compress.

Here's my personal blog as an example: [https://thepcspy.com/](https://thepcspy.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Flexbox is great but auto adjusting/sizing columns are a real PITA if responsiveness (@meda query) is tied to the viewport and not the parent container element.

Would be really cool if Element Queries were a normal thing.

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

</comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps I'm a "bad web citizen" for not wanting to go mobile first with responsive design, but most of the work I've done over the past 5 years for clients has been "desktop first", fixed-width web applications (with native mobile apps or separated mobile views if applicable). It's hard to do responsive right and it costs real time and money for what is, sometimes, only a theoretical use-case.

And for that, the Bootstrap grid has become slightly worse ever since v2 as the media-query stuff gets more and more exposed on the public API.

<comment><USER27> Check your analytics. Many sites are now seeing more traffic from mobile devices than desktop devices - the switchover for your sites may have happened in the last six months. Desktop first is making less and less sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find that foundation's flex grid system is much more simple and powerful to use...

I think bootstrap stagnated too much and they just trying to play catch-up now.

<comment><USER29> Could you elaborate on that? I've used Foundation before, but never got to use Bootstrap, but the latter seems to be more popular so I considered using it for a future project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is this at the top of HN right now? It's still in alpha. It's a good alpha and I've been using it on some projects, but I think some people might be mislead that this is the final release with the "4.0" in the title.

The most recent version is alpha 6, and it sounds like they are shooting for their first beta version next: [http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2017/01/06/bootstrap-4-alpha-6/](http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2017/01/06/bootstrap-4-alpha-6/)

<comment><USER31> > Why is this at the top of HN right now?

Because since being posted, it's averaged one upvote every 26 seconds and one new comment every 2 minutes, and that's more or less how the ranking algorithm works?

Relax, it's HN... it'll be gone in a couple of hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am using bourbon.io for the flexbox grid system. My final css compressed is less than 4k for the whole site.

<comment><USER33> They will have a SASS API, you can use the Bootstrap mixins and have a similarly small footprint.

<comment><USER34> You can just include the grid system alone [1] right now if you want to right now:

      @import "path/to/bootstrap/scss/bootstrap-grid"

[1] [https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/scss/bootstrap...](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/scss/bootstrap- grid.scss)

[https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/scss/bootstrap...](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/scss/bootstrap- grid.scss)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is it a good choice to use this for layout in a React web app?

I'm just now ramping up on React and have noticed two schools of thought:

1) Flexbox abstractions are great and make things easier

2) Flexbox abstractions are bad because they just hide the real flexbox and prevent you from learning an important widespread standard.

There are React flexbox components out there with both of these viewpoints. Personally I'd like to find out whatever is most canonical for React, so my code can be widely accepted.

</comment><comment><USER36> I will shortly be starting a new project and was hoping to use Bootstrap 4. The problem is that a big component of the Bootstrap value proposition is the themes and controls - both commercial and open source. And the frameworks are built on top of these themes and controls. It will likely be many months before this long dependency chain has migrated to V4.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you want to try a flexbox grid system today you can use Picnic CSS, we've been including it for a couple of years now:

[http://picnicss.com/documentation#grids](http://picnicss.com/documentation#grids)

The syntax is slightly different from Bootstrap though

</comment><comment><USER38> Obviously the most important question though. Will it work in IE8?

*sarcasm intended, with some unfortunate seriousness

<comment><USER39> Let it die.

Btw they dropped IE9 also

>It comes at the cost of dropping IE9 support, but brings significant improvements to component layout, alignment, and sizing.

<comment><USER40> Sadly some companies still have to support IE8 for the sake of some of their... umm...

...less technologically enthusiastic customers.

<comment><USER39> I wish More had "Courage" to say 'we don't support IE8'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Here is the alpha 6 release blog post from a few days ago

[https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2017/01/06/bootstrap-4-alpha-6...](https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2017/01/06/bootstrap-4-alpha-6/)

</comment><comment><USER42> What exactly is the benefit to the grid system in Bootstrap 3? Looks the same to me.

<comment><USER43> Simplified answer:

Biggest one benefit is the ability to align vertically and center vertically

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> One might write their own grid system while waiting for bootstrap 4, a year now...

<comment><USER45> To be fair: Versions up to 4 also had a grid system.

<comment><USER44> flexbox based grid I mean :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ok looks good but what if I don't like to use Sass but want use Stylus?

(Serious question)

<comment><USER33> You are toasted. It's like asking what if I like wordpress but I don't like PHP? Can I use wordpress with Ruby?

<comment><USER46> I thought Bootstrap is about frontend being backend-agnostic or what do I miss?

<comment><USER47> I think you have some things mixed up, Bootstrap is a front-end layout framework built with a CSS preprocessor, in this case SASS. It's got nothing to do with backend.

You are asking if you can use a different preprocessor, for which the answer is 'no'.

<comment><USER48> I think the answer is "yes" for those willing to use a fork. If your favorite preprocessor is popular I bet someone already made one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does 4.0 still depend on jquery? I've wanted to use bootstrap for a while, but every time I mix jquery with react, I end up with a buggy shit sandwich.

<comment><USER50> Yes, it does. In the Grunt config file they use to build the package, they specify jQuery version >= 1.9.1 and less than 4.0.0.

Source: [https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/Gruntfile.js#L...](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/Gruntfile.js#L46)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It may be just me, but none of my browsers actually seem to render the example grids correctly... (Chrome does better than Firefox)

<comment><USER52> What problems are you facing? It renders correctly in my latest Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The pages doesn't tell how it differs from other flexboxed based css frameworks?

<comment><USER54> It's the manual, not marketing copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> what's the size of Bootstrap4? is it smaller than 3? is it more modular?

If it was half the size, or more modular, I'd be sold even without new features :)

<comment><USER56> Download the bootstrap source, open /scss/bootstrap.scss, comment out the features you don't want to use, and rebuild it. Completely customisable and much smaller.

<comment><USER55> Good point.

Does this integrate well with tools like Webpack?

For example, if I want to use a container class, can I do something like:

        require('bootstrap/src/container.sass')

and be done with it?

I guess I would probably need to require some core sass files somewhere at the top of my application, but besides that, is it possible?

<comment><USER57> Yes, it does. I'm currently using. It's a little tricky as you have to use postcss-loader as well (along with sass-loader).

<comment><USER55> Very cool :D

What's the tricky part?

I would probably simply get the bootstrap npm package, sass-loader and try to check which sass files of bootstrap I need to require.

<comment><USER57> I did exactly what you suggested, and the tricky part was figuring out postcss was needed as well.

<comment><USER55> for what exactly?

<comment><USER57> For adding prefixes to older browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Bootstrap is useless except for simple static websites. I am not here to start a flame war but I think Bootstrap has no future unless for beginners and very simple projects. For jQuery based frameworks, I recommend Semantic UI.

<comment><USER31> The thing is... I would say that UIkit is better, and there's some other guy at the bottom of this thread getting downvoted into oblivion for saying the same thing about Material Design.

Momentum is a pretty powerful thing.

And at the end of the day, ALL of these frameworks are pretty much limited crutches for appdevs who aren't that great with CSS. They have more in common than they have separating them.

<comment><USER58> With Semantic UI, you can control every single parameter, remove useless components, and you can add/override rules without messing with/modifying its files.

<comment><USER31> You know what else can do that? Writing your own CSS in the first place, no more complex than it needs to be. :)

I tend to rank these things on a balance... of having the functionality that I'm likely to use, versus simplicity and learning curve of the functionality that's there.

So I like UIkit for side projects because it has a lot of built-in components that Bootstrap makes me find external plugins for (e.g. datepicker), and doesn't have a lot of Bootstrap crap that I never use (e.g. jumbotron, wells). It looks great, doesn't have any kind of complex "build system", and takes a few hours to learn. If I wrote a webapp that turns into the next big thing, then I'd have a real web designer redo the static stuff anyway.

<comment><USER58> Of course you're right, I was talking more about serious projects run by a very small number of people (1-3), and under very limited timespan and budget. Companies won't need css frameworks anyway in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Material design is better. This project is not needed anymore.</comment>


Startup Scene in Singapore Not Quite Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/250993/startup_scene_in_singapore_not_quite_silicon_valley.html

<comment><USER2> "chief executives typically make less than US$9,000 a year"

Is that correct? It seems unlikely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was refering to Southeast Asia in general. In countries like Indonesia or Myanmar the average pay of CEOs of small companies might be quite low, especially if non-software ventures are included.

Another possibility is that's the monthly salary. I lived in Asia for many years and people's salary was typically quoted by month, not by year.</comment></comment>


10 profitable business opportunities for women in big cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.startupguys.net/10-best-small-business-ideas-for-women-in-big-cities/ <comment><USER2> That sounds disgustingly sexist. 'Some innocent and unprofitable things these sub-humans can do while we make all the money'. Shame!

</comment><comment><USER3> And why are the business opportunities for women any different from those for men?

This article is disgustingly condescending.

</comment><comment><USER4> ? Engineer? Doctor? Lawyer? Scientist? Software development company? Building? Security? Transport? Restaurant? Produce delivery?

No? Sigh...

</comment><comment><USER5> "Though there's no such difference between a woman and a man when it comes to entrepreneurial drive"

[citation needed]</comment>


Show HN: Mini JavaScript WebGL lib for loading and animating textured 3D models - <AUTHOR> https://minigl.pro/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an experimental, plain ES2015 JavaScript WebGL library for loading and animating textured 3D models. Somewhat raw. Very much value a few upvotes and social shares if it's of any interest.</comment>


The Identity Crisis in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/comer/essay.cs.identity.crisis.html <comment><USER2> There are two theories that can be applied to any discipline to evolve it past existential problems, edge theory and refinement. These concepts both have loose associations to psychology and biology. However, you have to view these as anthropocentric and not abstractly.

The first, edge theory, looks at what you need to survive. If you had 0 resources to do what you do, where would you go? You would be breaking down the doors of other departments to look for funding, and as a corollary ideas as well. This isn't just about bridging disciplines, its about breaking down doors. CS is now spearheading quantum programming, not physics, CS is now at the forefront of processor architectural security, not chemistry, and so on. Being a leader not only means taking responsibility for creating problems, but being able to solve them as well.

The second is refinement. To have refinement you have to have the raw materials. So what does CS look like in the wild? Simply, you have someone that tinkers at home, builds their own hardware, infrastructure, creates programmes, breaks programmes, has an innate understanding of mathematics but works hard to provide proofs, plays video games. This is the box most CS programmes set, but what do you not see? How about chemical clocks, or storing information in DNA, or using fungi as computational solvers, or using planetary science as a calendar? I guess my point here is that if you want to advance the breadth of your field, its easier to start with someone, already at the fringe.

There is a curse on these ideas, so please contact me if you want to use them elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> > There is a curse on these ideas, so please contact me if you want to use > them elsewhere.

I've added my own curse, so also contact me if you need a license to use them. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't the creation of the internet achieved via significant government funding?

Once the funding dries up, it's natural for academics to turn inwards toward more "intellectual" (i.e, inexpensive) projects.

If new CS projects are pitched via Silicon Valley style marketing, maybe it's because that's where the funding comes from now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we just be honest here, CS is not the same as REAL science. It borrows some basic concepts of science but it so far removed from the rest of the scientific community it would be better served to not have the word "science" in its name.

Its seems like it would be better categorized as a type of abstract mathematics.</comment>


Senate Votes To Let Military Detain Americans Indefinitely - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/senate-votes-to-let-military-detain-americans-indefinitely_n_1119473.html

<comment><USER2> Can this be reversed immediately by the next president/Congress if it passes now?

<comment><USER3> Theoretically, yes. In practice, repealing a law is harder than passing its inverse (no idea why), so it would never happen. Once a law is passed, your best hope is the courts (edit to add: which have a poor track record on handling the 'terrorism' excuse).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How often do you use inheritance? - <AUTHOR> It is widely taught in Intro to CS and Software Engineering classes, but how useful is it? <comment><USER2> Inheritance is a great way to allow your newly defined class to interface with the language syntax or system environment features in a useful way. Doing something like inheriting from a dictionary in Python allows for you to extend a very versatile tool that already exists, that has been optimized for use in the language.

If you are going to bother inheriting from a class, then you should weigh the cost of your code complexity against it. It is definitely worth it sometimes

If you wrote both the class and sub-class, then you're likely over engineering the problem (unless you have a sufficiently large program you're working on)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have used inheritance twice in the past two years. Here is the most recent example. The code is from an iOS application written in Swift. The task was to write a quiz application. I used a combination of a protocol and a base class to avoid duplicating the code to advance to the next question. All view controllers implement the Scorable protocol and the view controllers for individual questions all inherit from ScorableViewController.

// Scorable.swift

import Foundation

      protocol Scorable {
        var totalScore : Int {get set}
      }

// ScorableViewController.swift

import UIKit

class ScorableViewController: UIViewController, Scorable {

        //overrides here...

        //This class exists to share the following code.
        var totalScore : Int = 0
        var currentChoice : Selection? = nil

        final var choseOption : Bool {
            get {
                return currentChoice != nil
            }
        }

        final override func prepare(for segue: UIStoryboardSegue, sender: Any?) {
            precondition(choseOption, "must choose option before proceeding")
            precondition(segue.identifier != nil, "identifier is nil")
            precondition(!segue.identifier!.isEmpty, "identifier is empty")
            var dest = segue.destination as! Scorable
            dest.totalScore = Selection.add(score: totalScore, selection: currentChoice!)
        }
    }

</comment><comment><USER4> Constantly. My company uses a popular framework that supports complex behavior defined largely in a declarative manner using inheritance; with method overrides for customizing business logic.

I also frequently use multiple inheritance and what are called "mix-in" classes in python to make more complex customizations reusable.

<comment><USER5> MixIn is just multiple inheritance rebranded.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Mixins are a particularly handy and slightly less dangerous form of multiple inheritance than multiple inheritance from two fully-fledged and usable classes (which IME causes more problems than it solves). I didn't intend to imply they weren't multiple inheritance. Would it have been clearer to have said "with" instead of "and"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Inheritance is helpful when the domain is well-defined and the underlying problem is broadly similar enough to fill-in differences across what's being abstracted.

Some hand-picked examples of well-implemented inheritance in open source:

An example of where inheritance makes great sense is Django CBV (Class-based views), [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/topics/class-based- vi...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/topics/class-based-views/), as well as Django REST Framework class views ([http://www.django-rest- framework.org/api-guide/views/](http://www.django-rest-framework.org/api- guide/views/))

An example of where inheritance in the form of _runtime metaprogramming_ makes sense is SQLAlchemy declarative and Django ORM.

An example where inheritance in the form of _mixins_ make sense would be Django ORM, such as TimeStampedModel in django-extensions [https://github.com/django-extensions/django- extensions/blob/...](https://github.com/django-extensions/django- extensions/blob/365e7cf/django_extensions/db/models.py).

An example where classes make sense in standard libraries would be (impure) interfaces such as csv.Dialect ([https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6aee6fb/Lib/csv.py#L2...](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6aee6fb/Lib/csv.py#L24))

An example of where inherited classes make sense in abstraction would be types ([https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/blob/master/lib/sqlalch...](https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/blob/master/lib/sqlalchemy/sql/sqltypes.py)) and dialects in SQLAlchemy ([https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/tree/master/lib/sqlalch...](https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/tree/master/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/postgresql))

As a closing note, It works a lot better when the use of inheritance symbolically represents actual standards (SQL, HTTP, and/or standard libraries API's) that developers already are familiar with, rather than abstract concepts meaningful only to the writer.

</comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, very rarely. Interfaces have been far more useful to me in my career, as far as major OO concepts go. If I'm extending, it's usually because someone brought in a new requirement after a products launch that requires very similar, but not quite the same, behavior as existing work. For example, we process data feed A already, and data feed B will be very similar. Rather than modifying the existing A processor, its often easier to lift out an abstract parent class and implement A and B as extensions of it. I almost never find myself extending concrete classes.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's usually a bad idea, and often you have no choice because of library design.

<comment><USER9> Some APIs work really well with the pattern, but I've only used 2-3 that were "wow, that's really neat!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use inheritance only if the model satisfies the Liskov Substitution Principle and if the language has strong OO primitives. Functional languages accomplish similar goals with different abstractions, e.g., type polymorphism, pattern matching, functional composition.

<comment><USER10> As an example, working in the payments business, we often model credit cards and bank accounts as different subclasses (or types) of a common superclass, given that these objects share a lot of semantics, i.e., they both send and receive payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Never. Only plain objects in JS and structs in C++.

IMHO OOP is a trap.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're an Android developer basically most of your work is extending existing classes.

</comment><comment><USER13> In iOS development, all the time. I subclassed UI components like UITextView and other things so I could customize its appearance and add functionality.

</comment><comment><USER14> In my web development career (with python) it is usually only simple mixin- like inheritance, mostly because I can't stand code redundancy.

In game development though, it is way easier to develop a full fledged class hierarchy. I think it is because OOP is supposed to model a physical world of objects, which is generally what you'll be simulating in games too.

</comment><comment><USER5> You use inheritance when a library provides an interface that you want to use. Other than that, you're probably better off not using it. Certainly not in the idiot Programming 101 "lets design a restaurant" OOP way.

</comment><comment><USER15> Over time you'll get a better sense of which methods or properties ought to be overloaded, and how/when to invoke super(). So it's best to think of polymorphism as residing in gradations, best applied infrequently.

</comment><comment><USER16> It is kind of a necessity in some domains. For instance, I could cite Android applications in Java, or using Qt in C++.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just once in the past 5 years. But I hear its very useful in dummy, trivial applications with no real life purpose.</comment>


The Educated Have failed Rural India - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mankybansal/we-the-educated-class-have-failed-186de436c7c1 <comment><USER2> Wow. Word for word could apply to the US:

"The educated class in India is living in a bubble. In India, we quite often forget that the majority of our citizens are in rural areas."

<comment><USER3> Except that not even close to a majority of Americans are rural. More like 20%: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_areas_in_the_United_St...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_areas_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article. I am half Indian and this article was spot on</comment>


Ask HN: Good books to read about failures of human systems? - <AUTHOR> I've always found the failure of large or complex systems failing to be interesting (e.g., the 2003 blackout of the Northeastern U.S. [1]). Are there any books you've read that detail failures like these and explain how/why they happened and what was done to correct the mistake(s)?<p>[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 <comment><USER2> The 9/11 Commission's final report ([https://9-11commission.gov/report/](https://9-11commission.gov/report/)) is very good.

Also good is Edward Tufte's "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science" ([https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=...](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1)), on how NASA's deck-centric systems of internal communication led to the loss of the space shuttle _Challenger._

</comment><comment><USER3> If you haven't seen it already, start with Feynman's appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster: ([https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...](https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers- commission/Appendix-F.txt)). Pretty much any of the reports put out by the NTSB would fit the bill. They do a lot of what I like to call 'full-stack debugging' of engineering (both of products and culture), where the stack spans all the way from material science to management science. It's rarely the case that there's a simple mechanical engineering explanation for the big failures that they investigate. It's the confluence of multiple engineering and cultural failures that causes catastrophes.

For a better look at the politics of investigations, try this article on the Columbia disaster, which was on the front page here earlier this week: ([https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbias- last-flight/304204/)).

Alternatively, since you mentioned the blackout, there's a lot to learn from analyzing the government response to Katrina, say, something like ([https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Hurricane-Katrina- Homeland-S...](https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Hurricane-Katrina-Homeland- Security/dp/0805086501)).</comment>


The journey of programming: for the young tech ladies and men in Miami - <AUTHOR> http://miamihackergirl.tumblr.com <comment><AUTHOR> Just started this to show a Gen Y view of my journey into CSE. For people of all walks of life in tech. You're not alone!</comment>


How GoDaddy came back from the dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1792417/how-the-founder-of-godaddy-brought-it-back-from-the-brink

<comment><USER2> I thought it was because of the SuperBowl advertisement for their new hot lady.</comment>


Why Are There No Decent note-taking applications for the iPhone? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/the-wiredcom-te.html

<comment><USER2> Because the built-in support for text views are pretty lame, editing-wise, and to recreate all that Apple provides and more (to make a decent editing app) is a lot of work.

I'm thinking about a Google Docs serious editor that uses touch gestures more than has ever been done before, with pinch and zoom gestures to change margins, font sizes, etc. Or (para-mode) drag a whole paragraph left or right to move from <p> to higher levels of header.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love my iPhone, but I still yearn for a device that will let me take notes as fast as pen and paper. By the time a note-taking application opens, I'd already have my note written down. (Application launch times already take iPhone apps out of the race.)

Though that's a little orthogonal to what you might have been trying to ask.

</comment><comment><USER4> A keyboard would help.

</comment><comment><USER5> They might be out there, just not in the app store.</comment>