Show HN: Convert screenshots of equations to LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://mathpix.com/ <comment><USER2> Immediately made me think of a question on the state of handwriting to LaTeX from a few years ago, and all the massive challenges involved:

[https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/what-is-the- sta...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/what-is-the-status-of- generating-latex-from-handwriting-i-e-ocr)

Under API... you're already doing handwriting? This is uh, nontrivial work to say the least. Really impressive.

The endorsements are a nice touch. :)

Made me really curious how far the system goes, what cases break it.

Oh... nevermind. You have a PDF of examples here: [https://docs.mathpix.com](https://docs.mathpix.com)

It's honing in on equations without getting distracted by nearby Hanzi or Cyrillic, or even pictures of dogs. Wow.

I keep going back to dig through your resources and getting more impressed.

EDIT: I guess my only constructive criticism is that you should brag more. I like a simple landing page, but I think you've earned a short list of examples of corner cases you tackle well, if the whole API is packed into that free app, because they're really impressive.

<comment><USER3> The perfection in those examples makes me suspect that they are cherry-picked or part of the training data. Especially the handwritten text is not always clear and could reasonably be interpreted differently. I'd expect a machine- learning model to get at least some things wrong some of the time.

If I wanted to use this in an application, I'd definitely want to see some accuracy figures on validation data as well as a few failure cases to see whether the output remains reasonable even when it is wrong.

<comment> Const-me > the handwritten text is not always clear and could reasonably be interpreted > differently

Digital pen input contains more info than the resulting bitmap; strokes are lost while rasterizing.

That info was the reason how old devices were able to reliably recognize characters written by a stylus. It worked well even on prehistoric hardware, such as 16MHz CPU + 128 kB RAM in the first Palm PDA.

<comment><USER4> In the OCR world this is known as offline OCR (OCR on the bitmap) vs online OCR (strokes information).

Offline is way harder than online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really awesome OP! Thank you for sharing :)

One note I should make: it was not entirely clear (to me) upon a cursory view of the website, that the purpose of mathpix was to convert handwritten text into LaTeX. For some reason (maybe my coffee hasn't kicked in yet) I thought this was strictly intended to take screenshots of equations on an existing pdf document or a website etc and that will be converted to LaTeX.

My thought at that point was "I wonder if they could do this for handwritten text" and then I looked at the docs and facepalmed..

<comment> cup-of-tea "Screenshot" is a very odd word to use in this context.

<comment><USER6> How? "Screenshot" is used correctly by the OP.

For reference:

      screenshot
        (verb) an image of the data displayed on the screen of a computer or mobile device.

<comment><USER7> Their usage does not match that definition. When recognising writing, they are recognising an image of the page, not an image of what was on the screen at some other point.

Also, your definition describes a noun but claims it's a verb.

<comment><USER6> The promotional material shows the application interpreting a screenshot of an equation, not handwriting.

I also meant noun, not verb. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stupid question, how well would this work on a PDF of a latex document?

This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non- accessable, and I have to email authors of papers to get the original latex from them, which is often lost.

<comment><USER9> > This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non- > accessable, and I have to email authors of papers to get the original latex > from them, which is often lost.

Many years ago I "translated" course materials into a form which was accessible to a blind grad student. It was a really interesting job and taught me a lot about accessibility.

I was effectively doing latex, but without all the leading \ characters. It made learning latex comparatively easy.

What interface do you use to read equations? Screen reader speaking the straight latex, or do you have some Middleware to make it more digestible when listened to?

<comment><USER8> I'm not blind, but I have a blind PhD. He seems most happy with just straight latex. I suspect this is because it strikes a good balance between requiring little work for him, or others, as it usually already exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Im curious if the developers are fans of The Big Bang Theory TV series? They were using a smart phone app...and of course was less useful due to it being fiction...

[https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_script...](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv- show=big-bang-theory&episode=s04e12)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow!

What kind of sorcery is this!?

Is this using deep learning or "regular" OpenCV or similar?

I would assume it's a highly tuned deep learning algo, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to distinguish a deep learning algo from a pile of rocks...

Edit: Aha, someone already asked this and got an answer.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16535467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16535467)

</comment><comment><USER12> Suggestion: instead of making me download a pdf to see examples of what the results look like, maybe put them on the page directly. You can have a couple. Then put the details in the pdf.

Great software otherwise

</comment><comment><USER13> This is fantastic!!

Bug report: it appears that multiline summation subscripts are not recognized correctly. For example, Eq. 8 of [1]. These are often created using \substack as part of amsmath.

Awesome tool!

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.01194.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.01194.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Good catch!!! We're working on it, should be fixed by April 1st

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I assume you just got a lot of installs from India, because the large publishing houses contract out many re-typesetting jobs that are basically to take scans of technical texts and convert them back into LaTeX.

I strongly suggest you talk to the publishers about integrating your tech into their TeX.

</comment><comment><USER16> Want a math-ish PDF and some LaTeX source for training on possible edge cases? Think I might get someone (or something) to read my dissertation this way...

<comment><USER17> What's your dissertation about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is awesome work. What's the process of vision -> latex conversion?

<comment><USER19> We published some research on one approach:

[http://lstm.seas.harvard.edu/latex/](http://lstm.seas.harvard.edu/latex/)

Here's how to do it with OpenNMT/PyTorch:

[http://opennmt.net/OpenNMT-py/im2text.html](http://opennmt.net/OpenNMT- py/im2text.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really appeciate the testimonials. All software deserves personality and a soul like this!

</comment><comment><USER21> Any way you could make this available outside the Mac App store? Apple seems to have decided I did something horrible and unforgivable by moving to a different country after creating an account, thus making it impossible for me to use the store.

<comment><USER14> Good to know, thanks for posting this. We'll post the dmg file on our landing page this week or next.

<comment><USER21> Just a reminder, I'm still eagerly awaiting this-- I check your site everyday! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awesome! Is the plan for it to be free forever, or what might the pricing look like? Maybe you would consider open sourcing the model?

Also it would be nice of some info on the process. Does work entirely locally, or is images uploaded to the cloud?

<comment><USER23> from the site: $0.005 per request, first 1000 requests are free

<comment><USER24> Where does it say that? All I see is the (free) MacOS App.

<comment><USER3> It's at the bottom of [https://mathpix.com/api.html](https://mathpix.com/api.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> We used their API to make a simple screenshot2latex tool (select screen region -> puts latex formula in clipboard). From my experience it still fails on a couple of fairly common things like:

\- \mathcal letters (recognized as non-mathcal)

\- long equations (not recognized at all)

\- multi-line equations (not recognized at all)

The screenshot2latex tool: [https://github.com/rmst/screenshot2latex/blob/master/scripts...](https://github.com/rmst/screenshot2latex/blob/master/scripts/screenshot2latex)

<comment><USER14> All three points have seen big improvements in the last week, especially the first too, check again

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's aweson OP. I can't imagine the number of times I've wished for something like this.

Coming from a grad student who hates writing equations in latex. I will probably try this out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there any chance of a Linux client?

<comment><USER28> They have an api. You can write your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was looking for an API that provides math OCR. Great, going to integrate it into our app soon :-) Let me know if you want to add us to your "trusted by" section.

<comment><USER14> sure! send the link to email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Impressive. Any particular reason that you're using

        \left\{ \begin{array} ... \end{array} \right

instead of

        \begin{cases} ... \end{cases}

    ?

<comment><USER14> No particular reason, we were thinking to start returning cases syntax soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mathematicians use operator overloading all the time. It would be nice to have a tool that explains to me what an equation actually means in a given context.

<comment><USER32> You are talking about the semantics of an equation while this tool is already satisfying when understanding correctly the syntax (in LaTeX).

There are actually a number of ongoing research projects to establish standards of semantical mathematical representations. Probably one of the best funded running projects (budget ~10MEUR) which has a work package on this topic is [http://opendreamkit.org/](http://opendreamkit.org/) . Work is going on at [https://mathhub.info/](https://mathhub.info/) from my knowledge. I would like to provide a deep link but the site seems to be in a broken state. Apparently people are working on it right in the moment.

<comment><USER33> I've long had this dream of building a system that would allow for symbolic algebra manipulations, where the representation knows about the semantics. The idea is to replace long and tedious pen-and-paper symbolic calculations, while still having direct control over each step of the calculation. In looking for something like this I've found specialized proof verifiers, which are doing something different. At the other end of the spectrum there's Mathematica, which does symbolic manipulation but doesn't understand enough semantics.

Are these projects aiming at something like what I'm describing? Or are they more about something else like verifying proofs?

<comment><USER32> Well, in principle a CAS like Mathematica (or in principle every mature alternative) allows you to implement such a workflow (i.e. naming mappings or an algebra on your objects). I think what Wolfram is concentrating on since a decade is accumulating "knowledge" into their system, i.e. exactly this kind of semantic information we talk about. However, as an end user I don't really see that, it seems to be more well-groomed behind Wolfram alpha.

On the other hand, there are these research projects which however seem to concentrate on standards rather then actually accumulating semantic knowledge.

I would love to see an adoption of hypertext and semantic mathematical notation in scientific papers. Instead of writing $E=m c^2$ in a (LaTeX) paper, we would instead define the symbols machine readably with a code like

       set E = physics/Energy
       set m = physics/Mass
       set c = physics/constants/speed-of-light

I have never seen actual scientific papers which do this kind of stuff, i.e. which are machine readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is insanely impressive. Great work. Wish tools like this existed when I was still in school...almost makes me want to go back and do some more math :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I tried this on some of my (fairly neat) handwritten physics notes and it was mostly pretty impressive. Failures: a lot of lowercase deltas became 8s and it had no idea what to make of hbar (converting it to n, pi, k, or most often refusing to convert the equation entirely). A fair number of little typos, but you'd want to check all its work anyway.

<comment><USER14> It's not reliable at complex handwritten math yet, it does do printed advanced math pretty reliably, as well as simple handwritten math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks like it could be really useful. Have you considered not requiring billing info to try the API?

<comment><USER14> we do it to protect against spamming... send me a note at email@example.com if you want to try the API

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The Newton quip is a missed opportunity to make a reference to Diamond, his favorite dog who burned up all his papers...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_(dog)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_\(dog\))

</comment><comment><USER38> This is gold, great job. The one clear bug that I've noticed thus far is that it seems to correctly identify \hat{} but not finish it correctly when it also has an index, so that: \hat { y _ { i } } erroneously becomes: \hat { y } _ { i }

</comment><comment><USER39> This changes everything concerning my university life for me. I always was on the verge of doing everything digitally, but it was always cumbersome to type out (La)Tex by hand and convert handwritten notes to digital versions.

Thank you so much!

</comment><comment><USER40> This is something I would have definitely used if I were still a student, although I'm not a fan of it being a Chrome extension. I'm still curious enough to test it out.

<comment><USER41> There's also a macOS app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Very cool! I had this exact idea of a service a few years back, but was one of those things I never found the time or motivation to actually do. The results seem very nice.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is great! it is very useful for writing papers. I tried it with some of my equations! It actually improved it by adding more approrpiate braces than I had.

</comment><comment><USER44> The example on the front page thinks the nu is a v. Still cool, though.

<comment><USER45> Read the text. The example on the front page contains both a \nu (frequency) and a v (velocity), and the tool distinguishes between them correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Gr8! Would love a way to apply this to PDF and web eqns in Windows.

<comment><USER4> What is your use case?

<comment><USER46> I maintain an idea notebook in latex via Lyx and presently, while reading a math PDF I have to paste a screenshot in paint, clip there an equation, and paste the image in lyx. Very clumsy.

<comment><USER4> Can you send me an email? I might have something like that working soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Cool! Any plans to port to Windows and Linux also?

</comment><comment><USER48> Just tried it out and it worked great. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER49> Add code generator to complete the product. ;-p

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm sorry if it's off the topic. The testimonials really cracked me up. " If I had known about Mathpix earlier, perhaps I would have had enough time to work out the Grand Unified Theory. " - Albert Einstein

<comment><USER51> My favorite is Alan Turings quote:

> Mathpix's AI definitely passes THIS Turing test!

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This looks neat. Also, the Testimonials section made me laugh. Well done sir.

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea So I guess I can expect to see more low quality mathematical typesetting. The technology is great, but I don't see how it will help with high quality typesetting.

I can type an equation into LaTeX more quickly that I can photograph it and then go in and manually correct all the spacing issues. And there are spacing issues. The examples PDF has things that just look horrible. No small spacing or negative spacing to space out things like matrices and integrals etc. If I'm going to manually tweak it anyway I might as well do it manually from the start. Typing it up is something that gets quicker with practice like everything else.

But what I can actually see happening is people not tweaking the output manually. Either train yourself to use TeX properly, or let someone do it for you.

<comment><USER53> You may be correct, but your comment comes off sounding a bit elitist.

Typesetting does not _always_ need to be absolutely perfect, sometimes it just needs to work.

For someone who isn't 100% fluent in TeX, making small edits is much easier than having to look up all the syntax and symbol names required.

<comment> cup-of-tea It's not elitist at all. Anyone can learn TeX.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://obfuscurity.com/2012/06/Why-Big-Monitoring-Software-Sucks <comment><USER2> It is easy to beat up on big complicated monitoring software - call it Enterprise Level and then proceed to find flaws. There is a reason it is complicated - because it tries to solve Tough problems: Can these other offerings give me:

1) High-availability with minimal downtime (seconds)

2) I18N readiness & L10n language packs

3) Scale on the order of 10000 or 100K

4) Guaranteed delivery of Alerts and Metrics

5) Easy Deployment and configuration - where the first step is NOT download and deploy Redis and configure it.

Make no mistake I love open source offerings but having worked in this domain for a while, Enterprise software becomes complicated to solve complicated problems with minimal intervention by users - not every IT shop has super- duper DevOps ninjas who Crunch Machine Learning Pardigms for breakfast.

<comment><USER3> Excuse the cynical POV here, but it's from a number of years of dealing with such things. The problems I find with enterprise software as a rule are it solves the above but fails at:

1) Realistic scaling. Just about every piece of enterprise grade software I've seen falls off a cliff when it hits a certain load point. This is ALWAYS enough to sell it to you. When it goes wrong...

2) When it goes wrong, it's a nightmare of maintenance contracts, verification, finger pointing and telephone calls that last hours.

3) It rarely works as advertised. I mean literally 1% works as advertised.

4) Trials and realistic evaluations without crazy constraints are not usually possible (this is changing slowly).

5) Installation is a breeze but when it comes to backup/restore and upgrade, it's a pain in the butt.

Time is money. The difference between "enterprise level software" and "OSS" platforms are the following:

* OSS time is spent up front.

* Enterprise time is spent later on and costs more up front.

I'd rather have one Ninja on the team and lose the enterprise software. Ninjas scale better as well.

<comment><USER4> this.

I do a lot of work in Enterprise CMS land and Open Source land and you've essentially described my experiences working with ALL Enterprise CMS's I've used since the early 00's. I'm pretty convinced that within about 18 months Open Source CMS's will have negated any residual technical benefits that Enterprise platforms offer.

At this point the only competitive advantage Enterprise CMS vendors will have is their reputation and the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" attitude and commercial support.

With many other businesses sprouting up to provide commercial support for open source platforms I can see many Enterprise vendors having to pull up their socks and shaking up how they sell and manage their platforms in the very near future.

<comment><USER5> My favorite aspect of this is that enterprise support is often very bad and unknowledgeable about the product if you try to do something that's the least bit uncommon or outside their script.

You would think people focused on knowing just one product would know something about it.

<comment><USER3> Not at all - they know shit. Unfortunately "enterprise software companies" hire the lowest bidder in the lowest bidding country and they hire the lowest bidding staff.

This is especially true of Microsoft who I've had the pleasure of dealing with their highest level of Gold Partner support with respect to an IE9 bug that broke ClickOnce entirely.

Basically: absolutely fucking useless, blame the client, wriggle out of having to do anything.

That was until they met me. 35 phone calls (I shit you not), 3 heated arguments, spread bad press all over stackoverflow and MS connect, blog whinge and finally a half arsed registry fix that we had to deploy across 2000 disparate clients!

6 fucking months it took and we're a MS Gold Partner. It cost us more than our subscription cost in bad rep, time and support costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could not agree more. This is the approach we've strived to take while building <https://metrics.librato.com> ... API access for everything, integration with popular OSS for metric collection (e.g. statsd, collectd), loosely coupled integration with complementary tools (e.g. Papertrail, Pagerduty), etc.

<comment><USER7> @josephruscio - I was >this< close to going back and giving a quick mention to Librato Metrics. You guys definitely "get" what I'm talking about. I like that you provide well-defined interfaces for easily getting data into and out of your application. You focus on trending and let other (better?) software handle the other stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, what would a "small, sharp" monitoring tool look like that's compelling to customers? Just an agent, and the customer supplies their own notification and trend-reporting services?

<comment><USER9> For example, [http://www.control-alt-del.org/2012/03/28/collectd-esper- amq...](http://www.control-alt-del.org/2012/03/28/collectd-esper-amqp- opentsdbgraphite-oh-my/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To some degree, the best "monitoring software" doesn't even monitor at all - it simply provides a framework for people to add their monitors to. To take one example I'm familiar with (though I'm sure this could be applied to the rest of the great monitoring systems) - Nagios is, at it's heart, a State- Tracking/Notification/Scheduling Engine. The fact that you can add commands like "ping" or "http test" or "Database Schema Verification" to the tasks that you are scheduling and tracking the state on, is almost incidental to the core of what Nagios does.

<comment><USER11> I agree completely, and I think Nagios does a good job at state tracking, notification, and scheduling. The interface is a bit clunky, but with the nuvola makeover it's completely serviceable. Pair it with something like ganglia or cacti for visualization and you're most of the way there.

<comment><USER12> Take a look at Opsview. It runs on top of Nagios 3 and makes you not edit those pesky configuration files and integrates with MRTG. Pretty neat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I swear I've seen HP OpenView processes using more CPU than Oracle. I have no idea why companies throw away so much money on such terrible software.

<comment><USER11> Monitoring systems that have to execute thousands of active checks every polling interval consume a bit of CPU. I've certainly seen high CPU usage and run queue depth on a busy Nagios server.

<comment><USER13> On a central server, I can understand. These processes were running on clients, though, and consuming as much memory and CPU as they could find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like Sensu (<https://github.com/sensu/sensu>) fits the requirements. It's a small monitoring framework that works in conjunction with Chef or Puppet, PagerDuty, Librato, Graphite, and others.

<comment><USER9> Sensu came up several times in the recent monitoring discussion on devops- toolchain [0]. I'm going to try a setup with sensu, graphite, and collectd soon- like the one Sean Escriva described at ChefConf [1].

[0] [https://groups.google.com/group/devops- toolchain/browse_thre...](https://groups.google.com/group/devops- toolchain/browse_thread/thread/e5dac7a03dfb4fbf) [1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXxtdE-Paco>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice article, whose central message ("don't bundle your tools") is widely applicable to domains other than monitoring. Small, specialized tools that can be combined together is the very essence of the Unix philosophy.

<comment><USER16> The problem is particularly acute in monitoring because you tend to need to monitor many disparate systems and subsystems in a very fine-grained manner. It needs to be reliable and not impact performance no matter where it is run which usually has to be everywhere. The Unix philosophy is definitely useful on a wider basis, but monitoring could be the poster child.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah but does it scale?

Edit: I should clarify, I really liked the article and I like the unix philosophy but I'm truly interested to know what type of networks can be monitored with this approach. I work in the enterprise monitoring space and a lot of the solutions _are_ truly horrible, but on the other hand, I'm not sure this approach would work either when you have 500K managed nodes and dealing with multiple campuses across 3 continents...

<comment><USER7> Yes, it certainly /can/ scale. In fact, a properly modularized monitoring solution /should/ be more capable of scaling if it was designed with this in mind. This is certainly the approach we've taken with our monitoring and trending components at Heroku. We don't have anywhere near 500K nodes, but the principles scale.</comment></comment>


Property managers bring in Alexa to manage tenants - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-plan-to-move-in-to-your-next-apartment-before-you-do-11559361605 <comment> steve-benjamins My wife works in a woman's shelter and Alexa / smart home devices is a common way women in abusive relationships are harassed and monitored...

Edit for clarity: Even if a woman has a restraining order against the abuser, the abuser will turn on music in the middle of the night, mess with the lights, turn the thermostat down etc. If the woman still lives with the abuser, smart devices (not necessarily Alexa) are used to monitoring comings and goings.

One person often sets up the devices and the other person has no understanding of how to turn these things off. Even more often: the harassed woman doesn't even realize what's happening is due to the man controlling smart devices— the harassed is "gaslighted" and thinks they're going crazy ("why does the temperature keep PLUMMETING?").

<comment><USER2> EDIT>> Totally misunderstood the parent post.

<comment> steve-benjamins No, I mean smart devices are used to harass women in entirely new ways.

Men often are the ones who setup the devices. Even if they have a restraining order they will turn music on in the middle of the night, mess with the lights, turn the thermostat down etc. Before a restraining order smart devices are often used for monitoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have I just become a curmudgeonly old man yelling at kids to stay off my lawn? I mean I don't feel old and out of touch, but something is off?

Is everyone else really out there demanding these types of services and technologies be installed in their homes as a prerequisite to even living there?

If you're one of the people who use these kinds of devices, and you don't mind me asking, why is it you guys like these types of devices and services? And do the privacy issues here concern any of you at all?

As a matter of full disclosure, the privacy issues seem obvious and deal breaking to me, but clearly that's not the consensus view.

<comment><USER4> All I want is a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options. Beyond that, I don't want a "smart home", and especially not one connected directly to FAANG. We don't need these devices, and even non engineers aren't exactly clamoring for them. It's more like everyone just likes the novelty of it all, but is generally disappointed when the devices under deliver.

People should reject devices from Amazon. As I have mentioned in other HN threads, I am speaking as someone who quit their job to build a business based on Alexa. You have no real control over such devices, they are prone to flipping on randomly, and most of the advantages are in Amazon's favor.

One day, these tech companies might become our literal governments. I'm not going to help them do this because controlling my house with my voice is a neat parlor trick.

<comment><USER5> The UI of my thermostat is a simple dial showing the heat/cool setpoints and the current temperature. It is completely dumb and that's the way I like it, because its only job is to keep my house at a constant temperature.

Others are often surprised that I work in tech, yet everything else about me has been described as "luddist" \--- but that's because I know about the "dark side" of all these new "smart" things.

<comment><USER6> A constant temp house wastes money and pollutes the environment.

<comment><USER5> ...and all these new e-waste-generating technologies don't?

Also, thermal fatigue is a well-known failure mode: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess I'll be the dissenter. This all seems really cool to me. There's actually an amazon owned apartment complex being built almost across the street from my house (in Tempe, Az), and I had been wondering if they'd do stuff like this.

We have an Alexa in our house, and use it all the time. For the kids moving into these apartments they're building, I'm sure the high-endiness of having voice controlled lights and music everywhere is a big selling point.

Nobody outside of our little tech bubble ever thinks about how this stuff works, and they likely don't care. If they do (like my wife and I) we just treat it appropriately.

I guess it's kindof like the way we all used to look at "work networks" — it was WAY faster than your home connection, but the IT guy could probably spy on you. So use it for fun stuff and think it's cool, but if you ever didn't want the IT guy to have the option of seeing what you were doing, use something else (or in our case at our house: turn it off)

<comment><USER8> > There's actually an amazon owned apartment complex being built almost across > the street from my house (in Tempe, Az), and I had been wondering if they'd > do stuff like this.

 _What?_ Are you serious? It's one thing for Amazon to partner with builders & landlords, but another for them to actually start building themselves. I tried to research this, but came up with nothing except that Tempe does have an Amazon research center. Do you have any other links that would be helpful?

<comment><USER7> It's this complex: [https://www.thelocaltempe.com/](https://www.thelocaltempe.com/)

There were some local news articles about how this was owner by Whole Foods, and the apartments above it were supposed to have some tight tie-in to the store. I can't find those articles anymore though, so it's possible I am wrong, or misunderstood this when it was being written about.

<comment><USER8> I did a little research, and it doesn't appear that the complex is owned by either Whole Foods or Amazon, but rather a Colorado-based developer (non- local, haha).

[https://www.statepress.com/article/2019/02/newwholefoodscomi...](https://www.statepress.com/article/2019/02/newwholefoodscomingtotepeprovidesmoreoptionsforstudents)

Your neighbors are apparently upset enough to spend the time creating an entire faux-site critical of the project! I'm impressed.

[http://thelocaltempe.co](http://thelocaltempe.co)

<comment><USER7> Hahaha that's actually very funny. Yeah my neighborhood has a very vocal group of anti-gentrification folks.

<comment><USER9> Choice quotes:

> _SHOP LOCAL!The Local Tempe

Until We Shut That Shit Down

Along with the transportation woes we plan on inflicting on your community, we will also be building a massive health food store caddy corner from a local farmer's market, certainly giving them a run for their money and more than likely shutting them down. Premium residents will enjoy balcony views of the dirt lot that used to be a small business....

And at $15 per hour, you and 6 co-workers might meet the income limitations we ask for our modest (but intimate) west facing first floor studio size accommodations, with breathtaking vistas of the railroad tracks and a newly remodeled Chili's!_

<comment><USER10> Proper good comedy writing was found in that URL. One for the bookmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm fairly confident there will be lawsuits about this... adding listening devices to your tenants apartments has always been a bad call

<comment><USER12> I was gifted a few of these devices and had to return them. For the bulk of society, they're not seen as invasive listening devices and many willingly pay hefty fees for them and install them.

Unless you're doing your own NLP locally and designed it, I don't really trust it. To be fair, most already have cell phones that can be tapped in similar ways (with additional sensors--it's amazing what you can derive from MEMs alone) but active assistant listening is usually one of the first "features" I disable.

<comment><USER13> The basic devices are like $40. Hopefully most people that pay more than that are doing so for reasons like a better speaker.

<comment><USER12> I have a friend who has around 20 of these scattered around his house, on the side porch, etc. He uses them as speakers to play music in different sections of the house and likes the added feature of having the Google assistant.

If you only get one or a couple I suppose it isn't too expensive. My parents aren't tech savvy and are quite old and they have 3 themselves in a very small house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Honestly, this makes a lot of sense. Key sentence:

> _It also means being able to add other Alexa-controlled devices, like > speakers, smart plugs and lights, more easily._

A lot of my friends who live in newly constructed buildings have speakers built-in to their apartments. In small NYC apartments, honestly it makes sense to speakers built into walls/ceilings to save space and control from your phone with Bluetooth. It's a genuinely nice amenity.

I know so many people with Alexa anyways that it makes sense for them to have it integrated. And if it's an extra option to control the lighting, even better.

 _Obviously_ if you have privacy concerns you can just keep it turned off or ask maintenance to unplug its ethernet. (You still have physical lightswitches, nothing essential will break.) And nothing's preventing you from using your own speaker/Google Home/etc. instead on your counter.

But from an apartment amenities standpoint... this is pretty convenient. And like I said, you can always unplug its internet. It's an option, not something being forced on you.

<comment><USER15> you can have built in speakers without alexa

<comment><USER14> The point is using Alexa to control your lights is an amenity _like_ built-in speakers... and also makes obviously sense to integrate _with_ built-in speakers.

Nobody's saying speakers _require_ Alexa... I think that's pretty obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "For Amazon, the appeal is obvious: Adding millions of new users to its services and gaining access to data like their voice-based wish lists and Alexa-powered shopping habits..."

It's okay folks. There are no privacy concerns here as they only want your voice-based wish lists and shopping habits data. Once again people just love exaggerating on these topics. /s

<comment><USER17> I remember when we didn't need a /s we assumed everyone got the joke. I took it seriously until I hit the /s but never would have years ago.

When did sarcasm stop registering? I was watching a webseries from the early 2000s and everything had that tone.

<comment><USER18> > When did sarcasm stop registering?

[In 1983][0]:

> 8\. Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.

> Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication > these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely > accepted on the net as an indication that "I'm only kidding". If you submit > a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to > you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.

[0]:[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.announ...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.announce/8CsYPJuZ4Hg/8em44sgCCVYJ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm one of the fools who uses one of these spying devices. I know and accept the risks.

I'm in the Google camp. They are a less trustworthy company, but difference in reliability and interoperability is anything but subtle.

I'd be pretty pissed if I found out that my place was hard-wired to the inferior product on _move-in day._ My Google Play Movies account is pretty extensive, I use other things that don't work with Amazon (because they emulate Apple's walled garden). This needs to be disclosed up-front, not only for people who wisely avoid these devices, but also those who prefer the competition.

</comment><comment><USER20> You could leave a computer playing synthesized speech at Alexa all day just to fuck with it.

<comment><USER16> This is probably the best strategy. One obviously cannot stop them monitoring you since there are just so many different surveillance techniques nowadays. Therefore the best way to deal with it is by constantly throwing garbage and useless data into the pipeline so that it may confuse their algorithms and stop them from profiling the individual.

<comment><USER21> So they profile you as a person that messes with Alexa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use Alexa nearly every day to tell me the weather while I'm getting dressed and to play music on spotify. I ask it the occasional math problem, trivia question, etc.

Paranoia aside, what's my exposure level?

<comment><USER23> Counterpoint: I use my iPhone to do the same, it takes an extra few seconds to tap to look at the weather and queue up a couple podcasts. Why raise my exposure to save 5 seconds?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Semi-OT: I suspect that Amazon is going to end up with the lion's share of the smart home assistant market.

I see a lot of Amazon advertising on television for Alexa and their devices. I don't see much for Google, and I don't think I've ever seen a TV for Apple's device.

Furthermore, I'm now seeing Alexa being mentioned outside of Amazon ads. For example, Frito Lay has a TV ad that is a variant on one of their earlier ads for their variety pack of snack sizes bags of potato chip. In the variant as the mom in the ad leaves for her daughter's soccer game, taking the variety pack with her to provide snacks for the kids, she calls out to Alexa to order another pack, and a text overlay shows the exact phrasing for this order.

I don't know if Frito Lay added the Alexa bit on their own, or Amazon paid them to do so [1], but either way if this starts happening with other products I think it will really give Amazon a boost.

[1] I can see it going either way. I can see Amazon paying to be included as a way to promote Alexa. But maybe Frito Lay makes more on the sale if you buy via Amazon than if you buy from your local store, and so they did it on their own.

</comment><comment><USER25> Aside from the privacy issue, all these cloud-connected devices become bricks when the manufacturer goes bust, discontinues the "service", or decides you need to buy a new one because they've deemed yours obsolete.

<comment><USER26> Yes and no. Yes for the smaller manufacturers, which is why I never buy cloud- anything from them. For the larger ones, they never go bust, but they do cancel. They have enough of a user base that things get rooted and custom solutions are available after death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What surprised me was that the article didn't mention anything about the ability to deactivate the use of the system. Why wouldn't the reporter have asked about that detail?

</comment><comment><USER28> For a second I thought they were moving into real estate/housing as the next market to disrupt. That would've been fun.

<comment><USER29> Same! Another industry they could play monopoly with

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's that noir short story where the guy is trying to bargain with his smart pay-per-use door to open up?

</comment><comment><USER31> [http://archive.is/lar6t](http://archive.is/lar6t)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link without paywall: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-plan-to-move-in- to-your...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-plan-to-move-in-to-your-next- apartment-before-you-do-11559361605?mod=rsswn)

<comment><USER32> Can you share how you got that non-paywall link?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can append ?mod=rsswn at the end of WSJ urls to get non-paywall links. I submitted the story with this param but for some reason it's missing. Maybe I made some mistake in copy/pasting. I learnt about this trick from a HN comment in the past.

<comment><USER33> Any similar tricks you wanna share for other soft paywall-heavy websites?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd love to read this but their paywall is effective. Could someone sum it up?

<comment><USER35> Try Googling the article title and then clicking on the article from there. The Google Referer header should disable the paywall.

<comment><USER36> That never works for me for WSJ, I think they disabled that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is up with all these links to paywalled websites? Can't read any of this garbage.

<comment><USER38> Subscribe?

<comment><USER34> I do subscribe to one major newspaper. I'm not going to subscribe to twenty.

Subscriptions are a very inefficient payment mechanism, when we're reading just a few articles each from lots of different publishers. If I could click a button and pay a little bit per article, I would. It'd be less work than getting around the paywall.</comment></comment></comment>


Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On? - <AUTHOR> http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/02/22/zero-sign-on-with-client-certificates/

<comment><USER2> This isn't "better" than Single Sign On; if anything, I would call it a complementary, not competitive, technology.

A client certificate is a statement of trust for a particular _machine_ , not a user. They can be very useful when you want to do the equivalent of IP- address restrictions for access to a service, but want to support mobile systems and/or need stronger guarantees than simple IP checking provides.

The biggest problem with client certs, in addition to the "multiple users sharing a machine account" gotcha mentioned in the article's comments, is that there is no "logout" mechanism. I can't let someone else use my machine without logging out of the local account and in to another guest account, because the cert is always going to be presented.

<comment><USER3> If someone would just do the signing-dongle thing in a user friendly way, maybe plugging/unplugging that is closer to authenticating the user ('something they have': the dongle, 'something they know': a passphrase to activate the dongle on plugin). Then the browser could use that as the signer/verifier.

I do something similar with a standard usb drive and pageant + portable putty/winscp.

<comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114861>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This title really confused me... it looked like a really strange math question, as in:

      0 sign on -1 better or infinity better than single sign on [what?]

At least, that's what I saw at first. But I'm probably the only one.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best basic phones for hckrs in US? Which phone do you use? - <AUTHOR> This is a re-post of this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261955 Which I submitted this past Saturday, it got 8 up-votes but unfortunately no comments. Since it was Saturday, I figured most of the techies most likely enjoying their weekends outside of the HN feed, will try to give this question one last chance:
I'm having a hard time finding a good basic phone (not smartphone) with great battery life that is available for use in US. The kind of phone that would be perfect for zombie apocalypse (battery, radio, walkie-talkie mode, radio etc) and for 2factor text-base auth.
Great battery life is a major factor (4.5Ah and up with at least 1 month stand-by).
Another factor that goes hand-to-hand with battery is security and control, should be "hackable" and powered by an OS other than Android (iOS is obviously out of the question).
My search started a couple months ago with Nokia 3310 relaunch, which I think is just ideal basic phone i would buy immediately if it were available in US (1 month battery in stand-by is priceless!)
There is a limited selection of some very great looking options (Cectdigi T19 and Easyfone No.1 on Amazon for example) but unfortunately all those as well as new Nokia 3310, mentioned above, are not compatible with US carriers, these are bound to 2G which is non-existent in US (AT&T shut down 2G in Jan 2017 and T-mobile is shutting it down by the end of 2020)
Any advice? Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I am not a US resident, so I can't really help you. But maybe nobody is responding because there are not good solutions.

Sorry, XD</comment>


Twitter kills international SMS notifications - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2008_08_01_archive.html

<comment><USER2> "When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times—that's because we've been footing the bill."

Awesome business model there...

Thankfuly the UK doesn't charge to receive SMS, which is presumably why the issue has arisen. The bill is firmly with Twitter for sending so many messages, not with the people receiving them.

while(twitter.wontScale() && twitter.features.length>0) twitter.features.pop();</comment>


Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/12/16macworld.html <comment><USER2> This really shows that Apple is changing as a company. Rather than waiting for an event to announce things, they just announce them when they're ready. Their product cycle gets dictated more by the technology available than what might give them a boost at an event.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sad to see it go, I was think of going for the first time this year but I just don't see the point. Macworld just doesn't matter anymore, the conference that matters for Apple is WWDC.

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly is there a reason, besides nostalgia, that technology companies need to do trade shows any longer? It wasn't the internet that killed the trade show, it was Digg/Reddit/Slashdot/HN/Youtube/rumor sites...in other words, viral marketing FTW!

<comment><USER5> Well, from a personal perspective, trade shows are a great place to meet people. If you go to niche trade shows year after year, you get to know the other people who go. I've made some good friends in the trade press who have really helped me out in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this more evidence of Apple shunning anything they didn't invent and don't own? That hasn't worked for other companies. What do you think? Will it work for Apple?</comment>


Show HN: RecruitT – Post your resume and let recruiters reach out to you - <AUTHOR> https://recruitt.me <comment><USER2> I like the idea. Now time to provide some feedback. Your landing page is confusing and I cannot tell what you do exactly. For example "Recruit Talent" is too broad and needs more clarity. "recruit the great to give you the best" probably is not a good choice of words. Doesn't sound like proper English (I am not a native speaker myself but I felt something weird reading that).

The question is who do you want to attract more: recruiters or candidates or both ? Obviously, it is a two-sided platform where candidates have to create their profile while recruiters have to come and search for them. So the landing page needs to be clear that this provides value to both parties.

For candidates, I would say something like "Make it easy for recruiters to find you instead of you finding them". Something like that.

For recruiters, it could be something like "Great profiles at your disposal to find talent that match your needs". Something like that.

Remember that YOU know what your platform or product is but people who somehow come to your landing page need to learn the same within a few seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the very detailed feedback. I got that advice twice, so I will definitely rethink the landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

While browsing a lot of remote jobs, I saw that I waste a lot of time applying and interviewing. I build this website because I thought there should be an easier way to get through. And the idea is quite simple: you just create your resume once, and then recruiters looking for remote work can reach out to you if they think you would be a strong match. It is the first time I actually launch something, so please be nice. Any constructive feedback is appreciated!

Thanks, Cosmin</comment>


Ask HN: As a Python developer, what am I missing for not using Ruby? - <AUTHOR> Over the last couple of years I have been programming in Python almost exclusively (and some JavaScript, Bash and Go for some specific tasks, easily chosen for the task at hand instead of Python).
What I found with Python is that it is a great platform for doing my things, like web services, data transformation, general Linux automating, infrastructure monitoring, and so on.
As it is good enough for 90% of my needs, I settled down on it and now I feel that I am missing opportunities of being more productive and getting more knowledge from other languages.
I looked at Ruby and found some interesting aspects (as a former Perl programmer), with its expressiveness. I learned a bit of Ruby, but I keep doubting myself if Ruby language and platform would bring me more value or that would only bring fragmentation on my projects.
I do not look to replace Python, but want to know if there would be some clear decisions points to take when choosing between Python and Ruby for my next projects, or both are more or the less a tool to solve the same problems.
If any of you worked or work with both languages, sharing your experiences would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I'm a mostly Python / occasionally Ruby web developer.

There isn't much you're missing. About the only use-case I can think of where Ruby has a clear advantage is in creating a DSL.

Other than that, there are differences in what already exists in the two ecosystems, but (at least for web development) generally there are equivalents available (eg. Nokogiri vs. BeautifulSoup). The Rails and Django frameworks are roughly comparable, for example, with Rails being more 'magical' vs. Django being more explicit. Which one is better for you may just come down to your personal tastes.

Now, outside of web development, Python has a clear advantage in areas such as scientific computing, game development, machine learning, and many other areas in which Ruby doesn't really have much of a presence. This isn't due to any inherent quality of the two languages, just historical contingency, as Ruby's emergence from obscurity was a result of Rails taking off, whereas Python grew a large and eclectic user community (of which web development was a small part) more slowly, but starting years earlier.

<comment><USER3> > About the only use-case I can think of where Ruby has a clear advantage is > in creating a DSL

Yep. Chef and Puppet (machine configuration tools) are written in Ruby.

<comment><USER4> Ansible is written in Python and they didn't have to invent a DSL to make it work ;)

<comment><USER3> Ansible is written in anything that generates json

<comment><USER4> Ansible itself is written in Python, but yeah, the plugins can be written in pretty much anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a python programmer for over 15 years, you will be better served by learning a PL from a different paradigm

* Erlang/Elixir -- concurrency

* OCaml/Haskell -- static typing etc.,

* Typescript/Elm/Purescript -- better Javascript

* You get the idea ...

more so than Ruby. Ruby lives in the same neighbourhood in the galaxy of programming languages. You are not missing much by ignoring Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're going to learn another language, learn something from a different programming paradigm, or one which is lower level.

Learning Ruby would be an absolute waste of time.

This isn't a hip or cool answer, but I'd suggest learning Java. It's one of the most popular languages by a large margin, and knowing it will help you speak the object-oriented lingua franca. If you only write Python, you're probably mostly writing procedural code. Learning OO is a good idea.

<comment><USER7> This is so wrong I don't even know what to say.

Python is a beautiful object oriented language. Very much so.

Java is not different at all, I'd say go for Haskell or similar to get something really truly dif

<comment><USER8> Python has all of the constituent parts of an OO language, save explicit types, but it is never written in an OO style.

Using classes != OO.

Generally, Python programmers treat objects as structs with associated methods, basically the Go model. Python programmers rarely encapsulate at all. At best, they use a bunch of accessors (which is not itself OO). Implementation details are rarely hidden.

That's because dynamically-typed languages, the interpreter, and the Python culture, lend themselves more to exploratory programming, rather than a UML- design, with objects that relate to real-world entities, that are implemented after careful planning.

If you can show me a Python program where objects are really encapsulated, and aren't chock-full of accessors, I'll stand happily corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been a Ruby (not rails) developer for 10 years and use python when hacking together hardware projects.

Generally speaking Ruby has a better standard library, the major libraries (gems) seem to be better built with nicer APIs and unit tests.

I think the best example of Ruby at it's best is the Sinatra web framework.

Having said of this, I don't think that Ruby is the language of the future.

In my humble opinion the language combination of the future is going to be Python as my interpreted language of choice + Swift* (for when I want a more strongly typed / functional language or when I need things to be fast).

* Swift could be my only language if they had an interpreter.

<comment><USER10> Hi Marcus, have you ever taken a look at Nim? It's quite similar to Swift in several respects, but it has a primarily Python-like syntax (including indentation by blocks rather than braces) with bits of Ruby & others mixed in.

Useful links: [http://nim-lang.org/](http://nim-lang.org/) , [http://nim- lang.org/docs/tut1.html](http://nim-lang.org/docs/tut1.html) , [https://nim- by-example.github.io/](https://nim-by-example.github.io/) , [http://nim- lang.org/docs/manual.html](http://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html)

At work, we use Python as our interpreted language & Nim as our fast, strongly-typed, compiled language. We created Nim-Pymod to enable Nim code to be compiled into Python modules: [https://github.com/jboy/nim- pymod](https://github.com/jboy/nim-pymod)

There's also a web-framework in Nim called Jester, which describes itself as "a Sinatra-like web framework": [https://github.com/dom96/jester](https://github.com/dom96/jester)

<comment><USER11> > At work, we use Python as our interpreted language & Nim as our fast, > strongly-typed, compiled language.

You most likely didn't mean to, but your sentence implies that Python is not strongly typed.

<comment><USER12> Just in case anyone else is tired and drew a blank and needs to google that, the confusion was that of strong vs weak not dynamic vs static. Strong vs weak applies to explict vs implicit type changes. Dynamic vs static applies to run time or compile time type assignment.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11328920/is-python- strong...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11328920/is-python-strongly- typed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like what a friend of mine who went from Ruby to Python said... "Python is easier to understand, harder to love."

For me personally:

* I like Rubygems & Bundler more than Pip

* I find the split between Python 2.x and 3.x to be obnoxious

* Python whitespace indentation bugs me a lot

TL;DR -- Python isn't much different than Ruby in terms of what it can and cannot do. Personally, my new favorite language is Elixir, which does a whole bunch of stuff neither Ruby or Python does particularly well.

<comment> xkcd-sucks I hate whitespace indentation on principle (and practice of copypasting code written in a different editor). But after spending too much time trying to parse endless )})})}}} in JavaScript, the Python approach seems like a much better way of doing it.

It seems like pure C programmers are pretty well behaved with their curly braces through.

Any radically different blocking paradigms besides indentation and parenthesis-like things?

<comment><USER14> The same indentation Python uses in lieu of closing curly braces, can help your issue, so instead of:

        [].map(function (foo) {baz(bar(foo))});

You could write:

        [].map(
            function (foo) {
                baz(
                    bar(foo)
                )
            }
        );

Alternatively (or in addition to that), use a decent IDE, which will highlight matching parenthesis, curly braces, allow code folding, etc.

I've never heard a builder say "I don't like screws, nails are better because they work better with my hammer".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From a practical point of view, I'd agree with others: you're only missing a checked box on your resume.

From a non-practical point of view, you're missing out on the pure joy of writing Ruby. Everyone should try it at least a couple of times to see just how expressive and fun programming can be. As someone who programs regularly in Python, Go, JavaScript, and Java, Ruby blows them away in FUN points.

As a side note, it would be awesome if someone wrote a Ruby -> Python compiler. I would love to be able to call NumPy from Ruby code. I would even be happy with a (generous) subset of the language. I think gluing together Python libs with Ruby would be a pleasure, and people could start using DSL magic to implement better APIs for existing libraries.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was a Rails dev for a few years and have now moved to Python, but only because I now do more data analysis and little web dev.

You're not missing much...in terms of practical benefits, you're missing out on putting Rails on your resume. In terms of programming experience...you're missing out on the meta-programming and fun monkey-patching that Ruby's syntax invites. And multi-line lambdas.

As someone who loves Ruby, I could not argue that learning Ruby is an optimal use of time for the Python programmer...you'd be better off focusing on something lower level, like Rust, or highly differentiated in paradigm, such as Elixir. FWIW, a notable number of well-known Ruby devs have left the fertile life of Rails dev to pursue those two languages.

<comment><USER17> You basically have multi-line lambdas in Python, it's just not anonymous anymore -- you can define function bar inside of function foo and then pass it to another function or return it from foo. I've used this to make a function that builds functions for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use Python whenever i can, but had some Jobs where i was doing mostly Ruby on Rails.

For me some of the differences are:

* gem > pip

* Ruby on Rails is much more mature than Django. The framework itself and the surrounding gem ecosystem... it's like its 3 years ahead of Django. Don't get me wrong, you can get anything done i either framework, but Rails just gets it right more often and is better suited for modern web development. You get a testing/dev/production setups, a asset pipeline and a lot of other stuff right out of the box, where as in Django you find yourself fidling with third-party packages of varying quality. * you can build very neat DSLs if you are into that

On the other hand:

* Outside of web development; Python seems to have a broader selection of high-quality libraries (especially in the analytics/datascience category)

At the end of the day, i think both are pretty much equal suited for most tasks.

</comment><comment><USER19> IMO Ruby and Python are two sides of the same coin. They have their differences but whatever you can do in one you can usually do in the other. I'm a Python programmer myself and I find the "magic" of Ruby code I've seen slightly unsettling at times, explicit is better than implicit after all ;-).

One of the main disadvantages to Ruby, based off my limited knowledge of Ruby, is that if you are making a web app with Ruby you are making a Rails app. With Python Django is probably the most popular but it's far form the only one (Flask, Bottle, Falcon, Web2Py, CherryPy, Pyramid, Zope, etc.).

If you are interested in learning another language I would suggest Go. The syntax is easy to pick up if you are a Python dev and it can do a lot of really cool things with a pretty small amount of code.

DISCLAIMER: I have only done the most basic of Ruby tutorials but none of them have inspired me to learn more.I also hate ``end``.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ruby can be used the same way as perl when building commandline tools that use repl and regex. ($~,$1,$2, etc.)

You can also add new methods to classes and you can override callbacks such as method_missing to respond to method calls at runtime.

You also have a choice between lazy and non-lazy versions of map/reduce/select.

You also have a rust interface to create gems that run native code.

You also get an extensible build tool called rake.

You also get RoR5 if you enjoy that kind of thing.

<comment><USER21> You can write Rust extensions to Python as well, though the higher-level interfaces aren't quite as far along in Python yet. There was a talk about it at PyCon last year.

<comment><USER20> Ah, I actually forgot about the rust-cpython package. The project is alive and it works with python3, too.

That brings me to another point I want to make. There is no community-breaking divide between ruby versions. People usually pretty easily port their 1.9 gems to newer 2.x APIs without breaking much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tokens insread of strings as keys. Ruby has :tokenname instead of "tokenname" as option for key like parameters

<comment><USER17> Possibly the Ruby feature I miss most in Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's on beautiful thing you're missing at the language level: method_missing. So much of ruby's power is derived from this one feature.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm in the reverse position of knowing Ruby but not knowing Python. What am I missing out on by not knowing Python?

It seems machine learning is one thing, that is much better supported from Python, but anything else?

<comment><USER25> There is a wide range of scientific computing libraries for Python. I'm fairly sure none of them have been ported over to Ruby.

If you're not interested in that not much.

I'd say the only thing that's different between the two languages is when you ask "How do I write fast Ruby" the people who work on the VM and libraries yell back "Here are N fixes that improved the speed of the runtime two fold."

When the same question is ask, but as "How do I write fast Python" there is a resounding "You write C/++, not Python."

I think that's, in my opinion, the biggest differences between the languages: their community's and their community's attitude to optimizations.

<comment><USER26> > When the same question is ask, but as "How do I write fast Python" there is > a resounding "You write C/++, not Python."

Cython and PyPy get you pretty far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only thing I've ever felt I'm missing in Python, in comparison to Ruby, is the 'unless' keyword and much nicer metaprogramming.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am on Win/.NET, am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER29> Thick rimmed glasses and a bushy beard.</comment>


Ask HN: Simple way for service to pay money out to users? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering building a service where users can collaborate on a work, and then share the revenue that it generates.  I'm looking for options for handling the pay outs for such a service.
If I require users to have a paypal account, I could use that to make payments.  But, rightly or wrongly, I've seen enough negative reports of paypal customer service to make me leery of not having at least one other option lined up.
Anyone else doing something similar, or have some suggestions for a service that could handle that sort of thing with a minimum of registration requirements for the user?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> We use PayPal to pay the freelance transcribers who work for us using the MassPay API. Till now, no complaints. We have a requirement that our transcribers should have verified PayPal account.

Also, have a look at PayPal Adaptive Payments API.</comment>


How to Run a Meeting Like Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/sep2006/sb20060927_259688.htm <comment><USER2> In the book Jack Welch wrote after leaving GE, he noted that the executive staff would often meet to "wallow" (his term, like pigs in mud) about difficult decisions. They didn't have some formal, "actionable" (my quotes because I don't like the word) agenda. Their goal was to collectively think through the problem and make sure they understood it well before making a multi-billion dollar decision. This is the opposite of the meeting style described in the article.

There are times and places for highly-structured, decision-oriented meetings, but I often get the most value out of the least structured ones. Let's say marketing has a vague idea for Feature X -- "Make the homepage skinnable." What's it mean? What are everybody's goals? How muck work is involved in different variations of the idea? There's no way to seek truth though a pre- arranged agenda and a linear discussion with a timer. An outsider might regard such a meeting as chaos, but the change in collective understanding is usually immense.

Why are Americans so obsessed about structure, time, and faux efficiency? I'm all for getting stuff done when the definition of "done" is inclusive of everything important. However, making arbitrary decisions quickly so one can pat himself on the back for his efficiency is hardly an efficient path to just about anyone's definition of "done".

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. The issue, though, is this—

 _What's it mean? What are everybody's goals?_

You still need a strong leader (whether formal or not) to actually ask these questions, maintain the right level of depth, and stay off irrelevant tangents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Headline should be "How to Run a Meeting Like Marissa Mayer"

I've heard that she is hated within the company for things like this. Maybe that's a minority view, but the article is still way too positive overall.

<comment><USER5> As someone who has been in meetings with Marissa I'd say that the reason she is ... not universally loved within Google (to put it mildly), is the fact that she isn't a particularly nice person or good leader.

She might see herself as rational and efficient, but to a lot of people she comes across as rude, insecure, and worst of all: horribly inconsistent.

She practices a sort of "off with their heads" style of management and loves the sound of her own voice. She will often interrupt people before they have had the chance to communicate even a fraction of what they have prepared for meetings, often spewing forth cascades of unpleasantness as she argues against what she thinks the messenger intends to say.

Very often the upshot of a meeting is that people are more confused as to what her intentions are than they were before the meeting.

She often sends teams in one direction, and then later, yells at them for going in that direction and sends them in a new direction. She seems to have very weak memory for what decisions she has made in the past. People rarely (if ever?) point this out to Marissa.

She also seems to be quite terrible at managing her staff. She is unable to delegate meaningfully, and if something is OK'ed by one of her reportees you essentially have nothing: there is a complete disconnect so you need to get it from Marissa directly. You also need to verify with her frequently to make sure that you catch it when she suddenly changes her mind.

Due to her foul mood, people rarely, if ever, speak up and tell her when she is being an ass or that she is contradicting herself. Again. The reason is that Marissa will have people people removed if they annoy her. I've seen this happen. I've seen people get thrown off projects just for saying something that annoyed the cupcake princess in a meeting.

<comment><USER2> >She is unable to delegate meaningfully

That she supposedly schedules 70+ meetings/week is sufficient evidence of this. I suppose this is one definition of a "flat" organization though.

<comment><USER5> It would also account for the fact that she has no memory of past decisions and frequently gets upset about teams doing what she said in the last meeting. And as mentioned: nobody has the balls to stand up to her and point this out since she has a habit of screwing over people's careers for no other reason than her being annoyed by them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google's obsession with data-driven decision making results in successful products that have no soul.

<comment><USER6> Why the downvote? Disagreement? Do you think GMail actually has soul?

<comment><USER7> what are some examples of software products with soul?

<comment><USER8> Unix?

<comment><USER9> A demon's soul, maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe somebody should just forward this thread to her mailbox so she knows that people have problems with her.

</comment><comment><USER11> The writer misused the word "actionable" and my eyes rolled back so far in my head I couldn't finish reading it.

<comment><USER12> Good for you, but your muscles must get a lot of work that way.</comment></comment>


ARM Macs are coming, three years after Apple's attitude change - <AUTHOR> https://www.macworld.com/article/3529428/arm-macs-are-coming-three-years-after-apples-attitude-change.html <comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406216)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22410918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22410918)

</comment><comment><USER4> I very much doubt it.

This is nothing like the transition to Intel, which offered a huge benefit to the 95% of users who were trapped in the Windows ecosystem.

In the last 8 years or so, Apple's big ideas for the Mac have been complete duds (the trashcan Mac Pro, their entire laptop lineup from 2015 to 2020...)

Mac OS X recently dropped support for 32-bit software, and this should have freed up their OS engineers. Instead, the most recent release of Mac OS (10.15, Catalina) is widely viewed as one of the worst releases in recent memory.

I don't want an ARM Mac. I want Apple to refocus on the basics of Mac hardware and software.

<comment><USER5> Moving away from Intel sounds like a huge benefit to me due to the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades. I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation. That doesn't even touch on all the security issues.

<comment><USER6> > I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops > and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation.

This is an extraordinary claim. Don't get me wrong, I love ECC, but it has a very real cost associated with it. Why would any alternative to Intel change the pricing dynamic?

<comment><USER5> We can't know, because choosing ECC or non-ECC based on price vs features isn't a choice most Intel consumers get to make. I do personally think the benefits would have proven themselves worth the cost over the previous couple of decades if The Market wasn't artificially constrained by an intentional limitation in the processors 99% of people use. Prices would come down with additional volume too.

<comment><USER7> The memory controller supports ECC if Apple cared about it they would've forced Intel's hand a long time ago it would not be particularly difficult for Apple to request a custom SKU with ECC enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really enjoy working with the Mac and am very productive with it, but this would most likely represent the end of the road for me to use it in a professional capacity.

One of the tools that I require to do my job, a development environment for an ERP system, is a Windows application. It's a closed-source commercial application. The likelihood of it getting ported to MacOS is zero, so it's always going to require me to run Windows in some capacity in order to use it.

There are three ways I see this tool working on an ARM-based Mac:

* MacOS emulates enough of the Intel instruction set that VMware still runs. And doesn't kill it in the next version like they did the PowerPC emulation after the Intel switch.

* VMware runs but gives me a virtual ARM CPU which runs an ARM version of Windows which emulates an Intel CPU. I'm not sure what the ARM virtualization story is, so this may not even be a thing,

* I keep an Intel machine under my desk and use RDP. This is somewhat cheating and it's unlikely that work would be willing to pay for two machines.

On the flip side, Windows 10 seems to be getting really good, so switching actually wouldn't be that bad. WSL will basically give me all of the command- line tools that I need, Hyper-V can meet my virtualization needs (though I won't require it like I do on the Mac), and all of my other tools are available on Windows.

<comment><USER9> I think you're missing a fourth option: VMware or some open-source tool doing dynamic binary translation to run Windows on an ARM CPU.

As far as I know, qemu can do this today.

<comment><USER10> Note that this is somewhat slow.

<comment><USER11> I doubt performance is a major factor for an ERP. Emulation should work just fine.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, and this is just the IDE for writing code for said ERP and some other development tools.

If anything network performance is more important than CPU performance - <USER2> IDE is very chatty when it talks to the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Despite the headline this is still just speculation. _But_ it is a pretty obvious bet at this point. The iPad pros are so fast, and have serious physical limitations compared to laptop and especially desktop computers.

I'm excited to see what Apple's processor team could pull off with the higher budget, better heat dissipation, and much larger battery capacity that comes with a MacBook Pro housing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I've thought for quite a while that Apple should/could put multiple ARM processors in a laptop and turn them on/off depending on need and power supply. This is the best of both worlds, in my view. Doing lots of heavy computing (gaming, etc.)? Turn on all 6 ARM processors! Working from the library and remoting into your server? Only turn on 1 ARM processor.

I could even see being able to choose the number of processors when you buy the machine. Trying to save money? Get the single processor option. Need to compile Rust code daily? Get the 6 processor model. Or get a low end Mac Pro today and upgrade it tomorrow with processor cards. There are a lot of options when you control the complete system; Hardware, Firmware, and Software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing that worries me, and this is possibly unnecessary, is that Catalina is paving the way for the appification of OS X, turning into a version of iOS on the desktop, complete with sandboxes and silo'd apps; more like an iPad with built-in keyboard than a general-purpose laptop.

Jobs did not want iOS devices to create content, only to consume it, and with Apple's focus shifting to services, I worry that they will continue this push for ever more consumption, to the detriment of all else. We see it in their overtaking of and reported indifference to independent developers. We see it their push to create an all-encompassing media empire, like Disney, but with a watch and handhelds. We see it in their push to develop ever.more expensive hardware that doesn't have commensurate increases in functionality.

I still use Apple and love it, but the hardware and software hasn't yet moved away very far from what it started out as after the switch to OS X. But I can also see the end of that in my lifetime, perhaps in the next 15-20 years. By that that time, I can see development limited to a few approved vendors with deep pockets for expensive licensing, but the bulk of it coming from Apple.

<comment><USER14> _I still use Apple and love it, but the hardware and software hasn't yet moved away very far from what it started out as after the switch to OS X._

You do realize Mac OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001. Here are the specs of the early 2001 iMac: It featured a 500 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, a 20 GB hard drive and a 56 kbps modem,was available in Indigo, Blue Dalmatian or Flower Power, and was priced at $1199 U.S.

So yeah, we've come a long way.

 _I can see development limited to a few approved vendors with deep pockets for expensive licensing, but the bulk of it coming from Apple._

I doubt this will happen; there's no point. The recent release of Swift Playgrounds [1] for the Mac has the potential to create a new generation of Mac developers.

Apple wouldn't have created Catalyst to increase the number of apps for the Mac by giving a path to iOS developers to bring their apps to macOS.

Darwin isn't going anywhere; you'll still be able to run all of the Unix stuff, with the vast majority just needing to be compiled for ARM.

Not to be pedantic, but sandboxed apps on macOS goes back to the 10.5 days. I just checked on my Catalina machine; most GUI apps are sandboxed, but none of the Unix apps are. By definition, sandboxing has to work differently on the Mac than it does on iOS.

There's no doubt that Apple has to do better; the 10.15 Catalina release was way more buggy than we're used to seeing. Apple seems to have a lot of balls in the air, with macOS 10.16 coming in a few months at WWDC, plus new iOS, watchOS, tvOS and who knows what else.

If the transition to ARM is going to happen about a year from now, that means there are alpha versions of macOS running on prototype ARM Macs _right now_.

Hopefully, the Catalina release was a wakeup call for them to get their act together; guess we'll know soon enough.

[1]: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift- playgrounds/id1496833156](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift- playgrounds/id1496833156)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't think this will happen. I believe (but do not know) that a RISC emulation of a CISC processor is much harder than the reverse.

If AMD had died and Intel's top of the line enthusiast CPU was a 10 core; I wouldn't blame Apple. They would be leaving a lot of performance on the table that they could get from TSMC.

AMD has made the x86 space much more competitive and likely saved x86 in the long run in the server space. Same with gaming enthusiasts. Some of them dual boot to use Windows software/games while keeping the mac in that creative space. It would just be much easier to source AMD parts. Especially since both of them use TSMC.

It is a lot of software effort at a time when the quality control of Catalina is buggy mess. A lot of software work to emulate and optimize a new CPU. I am seeing, at least youtubers, consider other platforms. Snazzy labs recently moved to Linux because they couldn't afford a Mac Pro, risk a Hackintosh, or use Windows 10 because their 10 gig networking didn't work well on Win10.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2dACq3F_W4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2dACq3F_W4)

If Apple does switch over they better have the CPU horsepower to justify it. Their brand new Mac Pro is only 18 cores and AMD's 3000 16 core can match it on Windows. AMD is very strong right now and Intel has had fire lit under them for the past year that may cause them to respond soon.

<comment><USER16> It's easier to emulate CISC with RISC than the other way around. CISC instructions break down into RISC instructions but detecting which RISC instructions can be added together into a complex CISC instruction is much harder (though I'd note that RISCV attempts to fuse certain instructions as an optional optimization).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bad news if you develop in Docker on a Mac and then deploy in the cloud. You probably are taking great advantage of the fact that your binaries work fast both locally and on the majority of cloud servers. There are ARM servers but they are still fringe and seem to be unsupported by other fun platforms like Google Cloud Run and similar stuff.

It really would be quite a drag.

On second thought, most web dev tasks aren't very CPU intensive and would work under emulation pretty much fine. And we all expect code to run faster in prod than on dev anyways!

</comment><comment><USER18> In the 1995 movie 'Hackers' there was a scene ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL9yCWv7NS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL9yCWv7NS0)) where they're talking about RISC being the future. The hype about RISC was strong at the time but a few years later that scene seemed dated. Now here we are in 2020 and ARM keeps taking over more and more of the world.

<comment><USER15> That is because they were on the PowerPC RISC platform. They moved to x86 when they realized Intel's lead had grown too much to ignore.

<comment><USER14> Motorola and IBM said they could keep pace with Intel but hit all kinds of technical challenges.

The last Power Mac G5 with its 9 fans plus water cooling just to get two dual- core PowerPC G5 processors to run reliably was the last straw: [https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/specs/powerma...](https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/specs/powermac_g5_quad_2.5.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd buy a arm based Macbook as a companion media/email/word/excel machine if it was extremely light and portable with long battery life for travel.

An Ipad / laptop cross, I'd guess you could call it a "Surface Pro x" clone. The IPad pro comes close if the OS was a bit more powerful.

I'd still need a real x86 machine for work. I deploy on x86 so need to develop/test locally on x86.

</comment><comment><USER20> While not mentioned here, I have seen speculation that if this were to happen Apple could offer an intel co-processor that could be used as a compatibility layer for old intel apps.

Does anyone with better computer arch knowledge know if something like that would be reasonable from a price and performance perspective?

</comment><comment><USER21> "But this week, reliable Apple supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple plans on releasing a Mac with an Apple-designed processor in the first half of 2021"

I'd buy one of these, but it'd probably be priced in line with the current Macbook lineup

<comment><USER22> I suspect it'll start with the Air, as many others have predicted. Then later the MacBook while the Pro is Intel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would ARM macs have some emulation or nativeish support for all the existing software out there?

I remember my first intel Mac having support for PowerPC apps was really important to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Jesus Christ...They finally put the escape key back and potentially sorted the keyboard. While I'm sure there is a consumer market for such a thing, this would really make a mess things as a developer's laptop. The battery is already maxed out for what you could carry on an airplane. They need to use some of that space they saved by welding all the components to the mainboard and cool the i9 so it does not throttle itself. (Crazy talk to even hope for RAM slots... cause who wants a system you could expand...)

<comment><USER14> The ARM performance per watt is so much better than mainstream Intel processors; battery life would noticeably and perhaps dramatically improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just want a powerful arm linux laptop that supports multiple monitors with different dpi. Nice trackpad and nice keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER26> That's better late than never!

It's good to see ARM spreading as a cheap alternative to traditional CPU for personal computers.

<comment><USER27> Cheap? We're speaking of Apple here, it will likely be in machine costing 4 digits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having been through the 680x0 to PowerPC to Intel transitions, this doesn't surprise me in the least.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wouldn't switching to ARM break all currently installed brew packages and virtualization using VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox?

<comment><USER10> Yes, unless they add binary translation, which would fix the first case.

<comment><USER6> uhh.. most brew shit is built from source, for which prebuilt binaries are often available. You'd just brew as usual building from source or prebuilt arm packages would be provided as usual.

<comment><USER10> > Wouldn't switching to ARM break all _currently installed_ brew packages

(Emphasis mine.) Most Homebrew programs are _not_ installed from source; and they'll require recompilation for the new architecture by the Homebrew team and a reinstall of all packages (to fetch the new packages) to work.

<comment><USER29> If you're switching to an ARM Mac, it'll be a brand new machine; there won't _be_ any currently installed brew packages.

<comment><USER10> I think a lot of people use Migration Assistant or Time Machine when setting up a new Mac.

<comment><USER29> I've used Migration Assistant, but I don't think it carried over brew packages. Does Time Machine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could it run RISC OS?

</comment><comment><USER31> AMD Semi-Custom?</comment>


Lymbix Emotional Spell Check  - <AUTHOR> http://tonecheck.com/beta

<comment><USER2> I would happily pay for this if it allowed me to check the tone of _any_ text. Limiting it to emails (and only in outlook) seems extremely artificial. I write text to lots of people, for lots of reasons; is there a special property of email that makes it easier to computationally identify tone?</comment>


Ask HN: "Backoffice" to mean admin area of a website? - <AUTHOR> I have a question. Something that's bothered me for a while.
I work at a web agency work in France. We work in French but often use English words like "wireframes", "benchmark", "reporting" or "responsive".
The admin area of say a Drupal website is usually referred to as the "back office". I find this odd and claimed, admittedly based on anecdotal evidence, that this is a uniquely French usage of this term. Or at least that it's very uncommon in the anglophone world.
I realize that "back office" is common in finance but do people use it in your region to refer to the admin area of a website as well? Have I been been away from an anglophone region for so long that I've somehow missed this?
Please answer with at least a Yes/No and country. <comment><USER2> I have a client in the US (Illinois) who calls their custom admin panels the "back room" or sometimes "back end". For example, they will say something like "We'll just create the account in the back room". We always work in English. I cannot say I have encountered "back office", but it doesn't sound too awkward. I wouldn't be surprised by an admin panel being called the "back office", although personally I usually use the term "admin panel" since it's quick and less ambiguous.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Back room" \-- I like that! I suppose the general idea is that there's this place somewhere out out "back" where the client can't see it where you administer things.

I usually call it the admin area but I have no idea why I'm bothered by the use of "back office" (English words) in a French language environment, when the term is not too common in English in this context. (Or that's the hypothesis I'm trying to test/challenge).

<comment><USER2> In the physical realm, perhaps the "front office" is where the public visits while the "back office" is where the behind-the-scenes decisions are made. The front office is public relations while the back office is more like administration. These business terms can then be applied to the Internet to distinguish between public-facing and internal-administrative.

Those who grew up thinking digitally are probably more likely to think in terms of internal versus external (or public and private), rather than back and front. At the same time, there is a certain nostalgia to renovating olde terminology in moderne times. "Back room" does have a cozy feeling to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think I've only heard that term while shopping for a car (the salesmen kept saying he'd have to clear the deal through the "back office")...he was lying...but anyway...

No, in terms of websites/apps, I've never heard that term used. If I encountered that term on a site I would assume that the copywriter wasn't from the US.

</comment><comment><USER4> I work at a agency in the UK and like you, I was surprised first when I heard that word, But yeah its an easy word for clients to understand.</comment>