Show HN: I built FabHomePages so your home can have its own homepage in minutes - <AUTHOR> https://fabhomepages.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea, and executing and launching is _always_ good, but the example website ([https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/](https://luxury- villa.incostadelsol.com/)) looks pretty bad as a tool to sell a €1,499,000 home. The images desperately need some attention as they're blurry on high resolution screens, the design doesn't exactly say "luxury" or "high quality home", and there's way too much animation going on.

<comment><USER3> I agree but it's close to looking decent - some basic design changes (especially typography) will go a long way.

<comment><USER4> The typography on the main site is pretty bad too. Very cluttered with huge text everywhere. Odd changes of fonts in places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Once again thanks to everyone who's tried it out, really appreciate it!!

Rather than answering every single comment I'm going to reply to the points raised in one place.

The main feedback seems to be that it's not polished enough. Completely true and I will work on that for the rest of this week - please have another look next week and let me know what you think.

There are also a few people who encountered server errors. Yes, I'm afraid I underestimated the interest. Not a good time right now to upgrade the server but I will do that before the next bit of promotion.

Regarding the business model, @nogabebop23 points out about working with estate agents. It really isn't a binary decision to sell your home yourself or use an agent. This tool complements either approach and crucially you can start using it before you make a decision on that - I will add more functionality to make that even more so.

I have quickly written a post to explain a bit more about the project:

[https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling- his-...](https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-his-home- during-the-corona-lockdown-7b7cb200f7f8?sk=9b6fecba3a89d6c2ef34058ebc357d10)

Ah, and regarding how long trial pages will be kept. For those who create an account I will not delete them. For those who don't, they will be deleted after 30 days. Sorry, I will update the terms and conditions to reflect that.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a really really great idea.

But the execution shown is a cheesy slideshow with horrible quality images. To be honest I think it makes the home look worse than it would otherwise.

I think your MVP is too rough to even validate the idea. If people don't start using it, you won't know if its because it's not something they want, or if it's because the design is so bad.

I'd look into getting some freelance design help or steal some visual cues from the more established real estate startups out there that have a lot of funding (and subsequently, good design teams).

Somebody who would eventually pay for a website for their house is likely to be in a higher price market segment. So you're going to need to make this feel "luxury" to get those customers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I planned to put my home in Birmingham on the market earlier this year. Terrible timing ;(. Fortunately the lockdown did give me a lot of time to reflect on the process of selling a home. FabHomePages is the result of that.

I used it myself to share the news of my plans with friends and to get feedback. Will soon be adding features to help people plan the process of selling and to connect with service providers.

<comment><USER6> not sure how things work in your jurisdiction, but to sell in our area you basically need to work with an agent to get into the market of home buyers; FSBO just doesn't work. The minute I'm on the hook to pay THAT level of commission, I'm not doing anything in this area; there's so little a real estate agent can do they're definitely going to be responsible for marketing, images, staging etc. From my experience selling anything to real estate agents is a uphill battle. They are understandably extremely cheap. This looks interesting but I think you need to focus on defining your potential market a little more.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I bought and sold in July. We were in a rush to sell as we had made a firm offer and were facing an unknown market with lockdown just beginning to ease. My realtor staged the condo, built a slick site under their domain with a 3d (Cardboard-compatible) virtual tour and detailed floorplan, put it out on social media, bought ads, printed glossy brochures to leave in the front hallway, and of course put it out on the MLS central listing service. We sold for more than identical pre-Covid listings, enough above what we'd have taken to cover both Agents' fees. FSBO would have been a false economy for us.

When I've browsed FSBO property listings they are usually overpriced and/or in disrepair, where the seller has taken a similar level of care with their property maintenance as they are taking with the act of listing it.

I think use of Realtors is an example of a Nash equilibrium. Other buyers and sellers use them, so you have too, even though it would be optimal for buyers and sellers for none of us to use them. When I look back at the five properties transactions I've done, it feels like I've paid a lot to Realtors, but in each transaction using a Realtor was the optimal choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I'm really getting the HN hug of love! Thank you everyone, really appreciate it.

Please, whatever you do though don't post this to product hunt. I'd really appreciate the chance to act on the feedback I get here first.

<comment><USER7> Oh yeah I logged in to tell you that. I was having a lot of fun customizing the details of a page when I met with a 500 error. Love the idea and execution, the best part would be the presentation mode. Are you planning to add an optional background music option in the future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always wanted a home ERP.

Starting from the digitized survey, to ground-penetrating radar survey digitized results to show exact septic layout and the bedrock profile along that layout, to exact DGPS locations of every brush and tree, to precise topology map, to a precise BOM of the house, vendors, pricing, invoices, quotations, Bill Of Tools used for installing each piece, dimensions, wire run lengths, known ratings (like compressive strength of the concrete used), warranty information, product manuals, CAD drawings in an open source format, schematics (electrical, plumbing, HVAC), maintenance cycles, tools and supplies for each maintenance incident, scheduling of maintenance, budgeting of maintenance, lifecycle budgeting, and so on. I'd like to use some kind of combined voice input, AR glasses and scanning from my smartphone to automate the data entry of this kind of information as it passes my hands.

Here's to hoping something like FabHomePages eventually morphs into such an ERP.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks cool, Zillow is similar but it unfortunately makes you sign up first. I like this.

On an unrelated note, how did this link get onto the front page with only 3 points? How does the ratings thing work here?

<comment><USER10> I would guess clicks are a factor

<comment><USER11> How would HN without JS or a URL minifier/redirector know about clicks?

<comment><USER12> Not sure about this particular post but for HN, every action is a HTTP GET request to HN (except when you click on the post's website link itself). So the GET request is pretty much the same as the click on HN. This is just my guess though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh, it's ((FabHome)Pages), not (Fab(HomePages)). Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of a feature on Total Expert's CRM for creating site pages. It's not open access, but there's an overview of it here: [https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single- propert...](https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-property- site-needs)

Total Expert's offering is geared more towards real estate agents, but the interfaces are both pretty similar. The only major difference I see so far is that FabHomePages doesn't take an address and automatically load it with listing images (or at least from what I have seen so far), though that would make sense since FabHomePages seems to be for individual sellers who probably have their own photos to work with.

</comment><comment><USER15> My workplace IT blocks your example website so I just see a scary box in the middle of your landing page that says "Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue".

[https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y](https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reporting this.

I can't quite understand what happened - the error says firefox did not continue because "this website requires a secure connection". Surely the fact that it is a secure connection is a good thing and not a reason to not connect.

I use https for the site and have tested with different browsers including firefox without successfully reproducing.

<comment><USER15> The example page is being blocked by hospital IT using something called "Cisco Umbrella" which on ancient internet explorer will redirect to display a warning saying that it's been blocked by "Cisco Umbrella", but on everything else the Cisco redirect is detected as MitM and you just get security warnings.

Honestly, I'm surprised fabhomepages itself wasn't blocked. I just thought it was odd that one would load and the other wouldn't. So basically what's happening is:

[https://fabhomepages.com/](https://fabhomepages.com/) : whitelisted

[https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/](https://luxury- villa.incostadelsol.com/) : blacklisted

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good luck with this, but I haven't seen traction with any product like this because people just don't care. The real estate market is one of the worst to operate in as a technology company without an extremely large endowment to start you out. Homeowners in general don't care to keep records of their homes in digital format, nor make information about their home public. They say they do but when push comes to shove and they have to pay, no one will pay.

I'm not trying to be a downer but I'm still wearing scars from my time doing real estate tech and can't recommend it to anyone as a start up or business. It's awful and not fixable.

</comment><comment><USER17> Based on the useless scrollbar next to the presentation and next to the demo iframe on the website, I'm guessing this was developed and tested on macOS where scrollbars are invisible. Web designers, please enable scrollbars! Not a great look for someone trying to sell a type of webhosting in my opinion.

I'm not sure about the demo case to be honest. If you're trying to sell a villa that's worth a 1.5m euros, you should probably spend some money and invest in something more professional than the Wix of home sales.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really don't get it.

(In the US,) When I sold my home, the realtor did all this stuff. It was all posted on MLS.

Furthermore, why would I do this NOW if I have no intention of moving?

</comment><comment><USER19> Tangentially related: is there a trick to selling a home when you have toddlers? How do you stage and keep it staged? Is there a scenario where I can make a fab home page and other stuff and pass on having an overly staged home?

<comment><USER20> We are in the process of doing that, and we've come to the conclusion that we are selling a family home, so it's pointless trying to create it looking like a showhouse.

We had a big tidy/clean up, for the virtual tour, and then just have a little potter around with the hoover and pick things up before anyone wants to have a look.

When we bought this house, it was nice to be able to see where toys and the kids stuff would actually fit into the house - and that it wouldn't be super cluttered (at least to start with!).

<comment><USER4> Your home will almost definitely sell for more without all the daily life clutter and toys. For example- not all buyers have kids, what you see as a family home may be their new work from home live/office space.

<comment><USER21> Probably true, but this is just an obstacle most people don't have anyway to get around. Moving out to a new home or apartment waiting for home to sale can easily be unaffordable to a lot of Americans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For how long are the trial pages keep live? You will get an huge amount of spam.

</comment><comment><USER23> nice idea - would be good to prompt for my email more. i dont currently want to sell my home but when i do i'd like to have you in my email history so i can look you up and remember you.

<comment><USER23> i just tried to sign up and it failed when i put in my email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up. I can see that a user who's email starts with "mx" signed up but did not login.

Can you describe the exact error you got? And if you don't mind please send me an email (my username at hotmail.com) so I can follow up.

Thanks again</comment></comment></comment>


Where Wal-Mart Failed, Aldi Succeeds (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/business/30aldi.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I'm an Aldi _junkie_. All of my grocery shopping and most of my _other_ shopping that can be done at Aldi is done there and I've been doing that since before they started taking credit cards (credit cards were recently added in March or so of this year).

I switched to this behavior after analysing my grocery bills -- family of 6 -- and discovering that they seemed to be an outsized portion of our budget. Generally, I don't have time to coupon (and I don't subscribe to news papers so finding coupons online was my only option). After analysing a few bills from Kroger, I discovered that basically any item that wasn't purchased with a coupon or wasn't on sale "with card" that month was marked up to "full price". We switch to Meijer (a Wal _mart like chain) and found our bills drop, generally, by about 20% because items, when averaged, were priced lower. I had avoided Aldi because I had the impression that they were "lousy quality", but out of desperation, we tried it. What we discovered was that _everything* we ordered was less than the lowest price we could find elsewhere. Aldi shopping generally involves buying "Aldi brands", which were "hit with a little miss" \-- the kids love the Chicken Nuggets (more than Costco's brand) and we all hated their maple syrup. On produce, though, was where the biggest surprises were. My kids _fight_ over grapes and Aldi carried them at the lowest price, and _only_ carried the small green or small red grapes (we're partial to green). Small grapes are sweeter and these are these taste like candy. That pattern repeated with every fruit, vegetable, and meat (we can't find pork chops this good at any of the general grocers). Some things, like the cheap-o frozen pizzas that I'm partial to, are larger and less expensive (Momma Cosi's brand is $2.50 or less and compares with Tony's Pizza at $3.00 or more but the Aldi pizza is larger and tastes better). I _might_ be able to do better with coupons, but this saves me _time_ and it reduced by grocery spend by 60% without affecting the kinds of food I purchase (the kids _prefer_ their knock- off Coco Krispies and Cinnamon Toast Crunch to the actual brand).

Then there's the shopping experience: some parts of it feel strange to an American ($0.25 deposit to get a cart being the one you notice immediately -- or having to bring your own bags/bag your own stuff[0]), but once you get past those small things, the rest of the experience is great. The stores are well organized and the cashiers are the _fastest_ (they're timed) and check-out is quick regardless of the length of the line. I've never seen more than two employees in a store any time I have ever shopped and I'm convinced they run them on about that many people most of the time, but it doesn't impact service.

Then there's the non-grocery items. The best blender I own was one I purchased for $20 from there. I am currently leaning against a $5.00 pillow I purchased from there and my laptop is sitting on a bamboo "breakfast in bed tray" I got from there for $10. Last year, they carried the Wanhao i3 printer (same as Maker Select v2 from Monoprice) and I picked up two Broadlink WiFi plugs for $5.00/piece on the 50% off rack in January of this year.

[0] If you're a "go green" type and have discovered that those reusable bags require an obscene amount of use before they cover the environmental cost you can do what I do: every Aldi I have ever visited has a storage area for empty boxes somewhere near the front. Take as many as you need and use them to get your things home. They also have no problem with you consolidating boxes on the shelves to get extras. I haven't brought a bag into Aldi in over a year because I find it more convenient to use the boxes -- they fit more, they stack better in the car and make it easier to unload everything when you get home.</comment>


Triolet - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dj-Games-TRI-Triolet/dp/B000KZ5XHA

<comment><USER2> It's not the kind of game that BGG will like, but here's the page anyway: [http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13103/triolet](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13103/triolet)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this because it's an under appreciated board game with simple rules.</comment>


Neanderthal 'make-up' discovered - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8448660.stm <comment><USER2> Shells found with some chemicals on which are used in modern times as pigments.

Archaeologists appear to make great leaps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neanderthals correspond to Trolls, just like Dragons correspond to Dinosaurs.</comment>


Oculus Quest - <AUTHOR> https://www.oculus.com/quest/ <comment><USER2> $399 with optics (600 x 1440 per eye) as Oculus Go and 6dof tracking like Oculus Rift[0].

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/26/17906298/oculus-quest- san...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/26/17906298/oculus-quest-santa-cruz- standalone-vr-headset-price-shipping)

</comment><comment> King-Aaron So forgive me for not follwing along with news on the Quest, but is this basically just a GearVR that comes with (essentially) a samsung S8 (or similar) baked in to it from the factory?

<comment><USER3> Quest uses inside-out tracking (cameras on the device to perform feature- detection and SLAM) to give full 6dof headset and controller tracking. The GearVR and other current stand alone headsets only track rotation via gyroscope, which is much more limited

<comment> King-Aaron Thanks (and thanks to Mindwipe as well) for the answer - I'm only just dipping my toes in VR at this point!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone notice this disclaimer: Game footage captured using a PC. Quest experience may vary.

Still excited though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Picked up an Oculus Go for Christmas as my first experience with VR. I've got to say its really neat.

Really enjoy watching high quality 3D videos or playing some games that quite literally take you away to amazing worlds.

Probably my only complaints would be the small battery (~2 hours use) and I really wish it had a 2 controller setup like the Rift. With ALVR you can wirelessly stream some SteamVR games but not many work and with the single controller the Go comes with, you'll need a gamepad.

Looking forward to trying out the Quest but the Go has a lot to offer at the low entry price of $199.

</comment><comment><USER6> Was considering this but intrigued by the HTC Vive Pro Eye announcement at CES. I expect a hefty price difference but also trust Facebook with nothing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how it compares to the Lenovo Mirage Solo.

Anyone knows if you can access the device storage directly from Windows via MTP?

<comment><USER8> Big difference vs Lenovo Mirage Solo is the addition of two 6DOF tracked hands as well as built-in audio.

Oculus Go allows transferring files via USB so good chance Quest will too.</comment></comment>


Pkgsrc-2015Q2 packages for OS X now available - <AUTHOR> https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2015/07/17/msg021896.html

<comment><USER2> It looks like this is an alternative to homebrew, with pkgsrc providing all binaries and brew doing compilations for many packages (I know homebrew can do binaries using "Cask").

Is one obviously better than the other for a typical dev? Pkgsrc certainly has a long history, but I haven't worked with a *BSD in about 15 years.

The web site makes it sound pretty good[1].

Edit: pkgsrc, no surprise, also let's you build from source.

[1] [https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on- osx/](https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/)</comment>


Ask HN: How to take a CLI app and put it on the web (client-side) - <AUTHOR> So let's say I have a statically linked x86_64 linux binary. It provides a REPL and that's it. What would be the easiest way to compile it to asm.js, emscripten, webassembly or whatever and deploy it. I basically want a process that takes the binary and spits out an html page that I can open that runs the app. I'm not a web dev and have no interest in being one. What's the absolute <i>easiest</i> way to make this happen? <comment><USER2> Try CGI, any input in url[GET] will be accessed by Argc,and Post can be by reading and parsing commandline args.</comment>


SQL Is Dead, Right? - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/sql-is-dead-right/ <comment><USER2> IMHO:

The only thing wrong with SQL is that SELECT statements should begin with the FROM clause so that there could be better support for auto completion.</comment>


Ask HN: Functioning effectively with less sleep - <AUTHOR>

How do you deal with extended periods of time when you get less sleep than usual? Any tips that help you stay alert? <comment><USER2> Stimulants are the classic answer here (caffein b vitamins). But i don't think that there is anything that acts a a proper substitute for sleep. your best bet is to restructure your schedule so you can get more sleep rather than looking for an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER3> Catnaps. I just had a baby, and I've found that taking 10-15 minutes here or there (I set a phone alarm to make sure I wake up) helps me stay alert even though I'm somewhat sleep deprived. Sometimes I don't even fall asleep, but just shutting my eyes and allowing myself to ignore my surroundings does the trick and leaves me feeling refreshed.

<comment><AUTHOR> sounds like something i could try..thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Buy an Espresso machine. Put it on your desk. Drink a double shot every hour or so. This is how I deal with it at least.

<comment><USER2> I love coffee way too much, but i am increasingly finding that this is a bad idea. The more coffee i drink throughout the day the worse i feel in the morning, even when i get a reasonable amount of sleep.

<http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/22/coffee/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Co-q-10 in the morning, about 12 to 14 hours before your usual/planned bedtime. It helps regulate the brain's chemical waking/sleeping cycle. It is the co-enzyme for melatonin and will increase production of melatonin roughly 12 hours after it is taken (for me, it seemed to work best if I took it about 14 hours before bedtime). In contrast, taking melatonin by itself will _not_ increase production of co-q-10. However, if you have any trouble sleeping in the evening, you can also take a low dose of melatonin about 30 minutes before bedtime.

Co-q-10 is something we tend to be deficient in. If you are deficient, you won't sleep as well. This can help genuinely improve quality of sleep and help your baseline brain chemistry with regards to the waking/sleeping cycle. I have used co-q-10 in the morning combined with melatonin at night to quickly alter my sleep cycle by several hours starting three days or so before the needed change (when I had to get up unusually early or something). It works effectively without the issues caused by caffeine.

Best of luck.</comment>


Employment documents that require you to violate company policy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/09/01/10554050.aspx

<comment><USER2> Years ago when I interviewed at Google, upon walking into reception, I was required to sign an NDA which stated that I wouldn't tell anyone about my interview, and that I had not told anyone I was interviewing.

I was kind of stranded in Mountain View unless they schlepped me back to the airport because I happened to be flat broke when they flew me out, so I just signed it, but I consider it laughably the craziest, most paranoid, least binding NDA I have ever signed.

Talk about Duress. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is always good to remember. HR exists to protect the company, not as charity to employees.

<comment><USER4> Same with legal/in-house counsel.

<comment><USER5> This is something that a significant amount of people do not understand. The fiduciary duty in this situation runs to the company not to individual employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I seemed to have read that in such contradictions, these ambiguities are resolved in the favor of the one who didn't draft the documents ie the employee in this case. But i'm also surprised HR wouldn't discuss with their legal counsel.

<comment><USER7> I would assume that signing a (legally valid) variation of your contract would override the company policy - Though it is a shockingly bad oversight on HR's part maybe the CEO ought to put the HR director and or the General Consul on a Performance Improvement Plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't you simply write a disclaimer next to your signature?

"My acceptance of the previous terms requires the following company policy to be waived:

\- Watching pornography at work is grounds for termination."

</comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting to me how many companies expect you to sign an employment agreement that contains terms that you've just broken in the agreement with your previous employer to go work for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is silly. Seeking out and watching porn is not the same thing as accidentally seeing porn because it arrived as spam or whatever.

With this line of reasoning you could say that when person A is caught looking at porn by person B, both should be fired because B happened to see the same porn over A's shoulder.

If you intercept porn and delete it, you're doing your job. If you retain it somewhere and go back to look at it, then you're just looking at porn, violating company rules.

<comment><USER11> You are correct (except possibly about the "silly" part). But if the official policy doesn't make that distinction, then I think there is still a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Youre not wrong youre just an asshole"

<comment><USER13> I know which party I think is the asshole (the HR flack). But I'm not sure which one you think is.

<comment><USER14> It was a quote from The Big Lebowski. Out of context it's odd.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes?item=qt0464814](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes?item=qt0464814)</comment></comment></comment>


Angry Feedback May Boost Creativity For Some - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/health/anger-begets-creativity-100901.html <comment><USER2> The dark side of the force.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe why Microsoft was so successful?

Well, I suppose creativity was not their strong point.

I hear Jobs has a temper...</comment>


Ask HN: What Linux diagnostic tools/commands do you use? - <AUTHOR> I've been writing a basic script (https://github.com/adampie/granscan) and was looking for feedback, what diagnostic tools/commands do you guys use? How should I change the script? <comment><USER2> strace - to see what a program is doing / where exactly something is failing if the error message is bad

ltrace - same as above, if strace is not enough

perf trace - if you don't know the exact process to strace upfront

[https://github.com/brendangregg/perf- tools](https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools) \- to track disk accesses or exec calls

env LD_DEBUG=all - debugging dynamic linker issues

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess it depends what I'm trying to debug, but one thing that seems to be missing from your wrapper is quick logfile inspection. Tailing the last n lines of syslog (or something more specific) is often a good starting point when diagnosing problems.

Perhaps something that performs basic connectivity tests might be useful, too -- pinging the router, an external IP (like 184.108.40.206), and a FQDN (like google.com) would be a good quick test of both internal connectivity, external connectivity, and DNS resolver.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, I will add that in once I figure out a better way to deal with the output; I feel like it needs to be cleaner. Might make it menu driven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have a look on this picture which maps subsystems to tools: [http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Per-process I/O and network metrics are super important. I usually use pidstat (-d flag gives you I/O) for this, or read data from /proc directly.

</comment><comment><USER6> top, ps aux, which, find, ls, rm, cd, cat, echo, touch, pbcopy, ssh

That's pretty much it, otherwise I have a whole lot of cli tools too. Things like git, tmux, mosh, rails.. but I guess they don't count.

</comment><comment><USER7> htop, iftop, ngrep, tcpdump, lsof, strace, wireshark, nc, telnet, ping, netstat, ps, grep, awk, pv, middleman, curl, jq, mitmproxy, tail, tr....

Okay, ok pretty much all of them. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> mostly htop, iotop, pv -d...

EDIT: ... curl, jq, cat, less, grep, awk, lynx, watch, parallel, xargs, head, tail, sqlite3, rsync, scp...

</comment><comment><USER9> nc, tcpdump, ethtool, htop

</comment><comment><USER10> lsof

netstat

strace

top</comment>


Why let is better than const in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois/javascript-why-let-is-a-better-default-than-const-4c96136c856b <comment><USER2> If the original developer didn't care if the variable will be reassigned, in which situations can it be useful to know of that intent?

>The problem with these arguments is that they tend to fall short of justifying how constraining developers in this way and doing so by default, adds value to either the code or the development process.

If the developer doesn't need to browse through the code to see if the variable is reassigned, it saves time.

I think 'Uncaught TypeError: Assignment to constant variable' should be trivial to avoid since lint-like tools warn of it before the code is executed.</comment>


Can't generate a 404 on paypal.com - <AUTHOR>

You can't generate a 404 on paypal.com: https://www.paypal.com/cant-generate-404 https://www.paypal.com/yc/hackernews<p>What's could their rational be for not following standard conventions? <comment><USER2> Here's the 404 ;) [https://www.paypal.com/cgi- bin/marketingweb?cmd=_home-x&...](https://www.paypal.com/cgi- bin/marketingweb?cmd=_home-x&nav=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the framework they built (or built their site on) automatically renders the homepage when a 404 error is encountered?

<comment><USER4> Seems spot on, but rather puzzling. They may be huge, but I'd have thought they'd still avoid risking duplicate content penalties and just use a 30x redirect for it.</comment></comment>


Mastering the Finer Points of American Slang - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303610504577418660113838998.html?mod=WSJ_hps_editorsPicks_3

<comment><USER2> Gnarly article, radical dudes. I'd say it's mondo choice and totally tubular, even. It's, like, righteous and not even a little bit bogus. Now I'm gonna bail and go check out this bodacious betty...</comment>


Colorado officials say it's too expensive to password-protect business data - <AUTHOR> http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16149416

<comment><AUTHOR> "Colorado officials say putting password protection on corporate data -- where only a business owner or representative can make changes -- is prohibitively expensive. Instead, the state has opted to use e-mail notification any time information is changed to a business' records."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, "Dozens of businesses in Colorado, and probably thousands more nationally, are victims of a new and frighteningly easy breed of identity theft in which corporate information is hijacked and millions of dollars in phony credit purchases are made."</comment>


Blacklist sites you don't want to see in Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/greasemonkey.html <comment><USER2> Since someone wanted an easy way to edit the list of blacklisted sites, I added a little UI to it.

Check out the newer one here:

[http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now- with-u...](http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-ui.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Techcrunch? Valleywag? My rationale is that they're divisive. Those that fall on the side of favouring their style of journalism will probably go to their sites daily anyways. Those of us that can't get far enough away from their content would very much appreciate not having to see their headlines clutter this site.

<comment><USER4> Too much actual news in Techcrunch, and it's not really a very divisive site.

Valleywag we can do without, I think.

And please, someone add 37signals to that list. Really, those guys are contributing nothing positive to the conversation.

<comment><USER5> What are you talking about? DHH and 37signals provide a lot to the conversation, including differing points of view.

If having a different opinion means "contributing nothing positive" then we've fallen a long, long way.

Edit: fixed grammar.

<comment><USER4> I'm talking about his attitude. He contributes nothing because he turns minor points ("hey, you don't _have_ to do a startup; you could just start your own small business" -- OK, and today is Friday) into huge shitstorms by using inflamatory language.

David likes to be a contrarian. That's not altogether bad, but a contrarian who prides himself on his arrogance(1) -- that's poison.

(1) <http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals>

"Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."

Other data points:

\- <http://www.flickr.com/photos/eugevon/130610241/>

\- <http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/why_is_37signals_so_1.html>

\- <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-translation>

<comment><USER6> He may be arrogant, I don't mind. His points are not minor; the choice whether to grow organically or try to make it big on steroids (funding) is a very important one.

I saw almost all of your comments recently have been dedicated to dhh. Most have been heavily downmodded. It's obvious the community here likes what dhh says, why not just ignore him if you don't like him? Hey, I do that with pbs.org, valleywag and Matt Maroon without the need for any software! The point of such software is in arguing what to put in the defaults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd suggest blacklisting my site. I don't want to have to deal with any of you guys flaming me in my comments. :D

<comment><USER8> I don't think the guys will flame you; sounds kinda girly to complain about this.

<comment><USER9> _sounds kinda girly to complain about this._

yes, that's a good point, because anything females do is bad.

<comment><USER8> yeah it's sexist. beats me why it actually got 2 upvotes, and didn't go negative. people here suck i guess.

i only posted it because someone posted ageism and i wanted to see what would get more downvotes (i thought sexism would, lol). major fail...

BTW I'm not sure that sarcasm is a good way to deal with sexism. Why be semi- subtle? Can't you confront it head on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> gilesbowkett.blogspot.com!</comment>


Elon Musk 'Most Deceptive CEO I've Ever Seen' - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestreet.com/story/13675583/1/tesla-tsla-ceo-musk-most-deceptive-ceo-i-ve-ever-seen-stanphyl-capital-s-spiegel-told-cnbc.html <comment><USER2> Twitter and Amazon don't make money either. Doesn't seem to be a problem isolated to Tesla.</comment>


WebSharper - Write F# and Run JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.intellifactory.com/blogs/anton.tayanovskyy/2009/12/8/WebSharper---Write-F!sharp!-and-Run-JavaScript.article

<comment><USER2> Very much like the design tradeoffs Google chose for GWT - with the promise of reducing bugs through static, compile-time type checking. They require an ASP.NET back-end, though, while GWT is independent of the back-end. F# is a much more interesting source language, though.

This reminded me to go check up on Volta, which had promise of bringing this style of development to the .NET world. From the wikipedia page, it disappeared a little over a year ago, however.</comment>


NetflixGraph Metadata Library: An Optimization Case Study - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/01/netflixgraph-metadata-library_18.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. I am giving a talk on graph databases with Python at the net meetup. I will definitely use this.</comment>


Astronomy's Looming Big Data Problem Has a New Solution - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/astronomys-looming-big-data-problem-has-a-new-solution

<comment><USER2> I've ready about a lot of computational biology programs lately. I would think computational physics would be hot too. Or is it just assumed that Physics majors tend to be good programmers anyway? (I see a disproportionate amount in data jobs)</comment>


Richard Stallman: How I do my computing (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html <comment><USER3> I admire Stallman's unworldly, unfettered commitment to his principles. It's difficult to live an ethical life, and twice as difficult to live an ethical life under capitalism. Stallman's manic devotion to assiduously following his own moral compass is, bizarre though its manifestation may be, something we should all aspire towards.

That being said, I'm perpetually frustrated by the boneheadedness of his ethical commitments. They strike me as ineffective and, more critically, unsound: it seems to me like Stallman ad-hoc transformed an (absolutely justified) distaste for closed-source software into a system of ethics by, fundamentally, adopting aphorisms as axioms. Whether this was done as a post- hoc justification for his depth of passion in this area, or whether it was just a gradual metastasis, I don't know.

<comment><USER4> Why is it twice as different to live an ethical life under capitalism? And under what alternate systems is it easier to live an ethical life?

<comment><USER3> I want to be careful here to avoid asserting that there is a system that is known to be ultimately more ethical than capitalism under current global conditions. (Social democracy may fit the bill, but I'm not prepared to argue that here.) That, however, doesn't mean that capitalism is ethical, or makes it easy to live an ethical life. The mechanics of capitalism are fundamentally exploitative -- again, even if they are less objectionable than many alternatives -- and participation in a capitalist economy makes you party to this. Nearly everything that I do is inflected with some sort of abuse: my laptop contains lithium ion batteries that use cobalt mined in insane conditions, my commute uses oil that, in turn, funds the malignant gangster- kings of Gulf states, my sweater was sewn in factory conditions that endanger the lives of people whose only mistake was being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And this is to say nothing of the tremendous misery that occurs /within the United States itself/.)

Again, I am not here proposing an alternative to capitalism. But -- even if it was the best system around -- its abuses are monstrous.

<comment><USER5> > _The mechanics of capitalism are fundamentally exploitative_

No it's not. The mechanics are capitalism are fundamentally about mutual benefit. I give you money because having your product is worth more to me than having the money. You give me the product because having the money is worth more to you than having the product. Mutually beneficial exchange is the cornerstone of capitalism. At the end of the transaction, we are both better off.

That's not to say that there's not problems around monopoly and violence, but the latter is the failure of the state, not of the market. And monopoly is not exclusive to capitalism. Under alternative systems, _everything_ is controlled by a monopoly (the state).

<comment><USER6> Mutually beneficial exchanges can still be exploitative. You give me money, I don't shoot you, we're both better off. Whether or not capitalism is "fundamentally" exploitative depends a lot on definitions, but the issue of violence isn't limited to state actors, and the market can definitely coerce people.

<comment><USER7> "You give me money, I don't shoot you"

That's not capitalism by any definition.

That's extortion and it was a well known practice thousands of years before we invented (or at least understood) capitalism.

I'd argue capitalism is not even an ideology, it's just a simple understanding of comparative value and how to go beyond zero-sum economics.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I know; my point was that the principle of mutually beneficial exchanges doesn't preclude an overall negative outcome. I don't know if capitalism is an ideology, but it certainly stems from a certain ideological framework (it's hard to have capitalism without belief in property.)

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure that by definition it _does_ prevent a negative outcome, since "mutually beneficial" generally means that each person is better off than before the trade, meaning there are positive payoffs on both sides - I'm not sure where exactly you get a negative from there.

In the example of "give me what I want or I'll shoot you", you could argue that "X prevents Y from being shot" and "Y gives X what he wants" is a benefit for both sides, but that ignores the first part, "X puts Y in a position where he is going to be shot" is _not_ mutually beneficial, so the salient part of the example (the threat) is not actually an example of mutually beneficial exchange.

<comment><USER6> Again, my point was that even if every exchange, in and of itself, is mutually beneficial, the overall society can still be unpleasant. But it should also be noted that mutually beneficial exchanges do _not_ prevent negative results even directly, but merely improve the outcomes for those who are agreeing to the transaction; two parties can agree to an exchange that leaves them both better off than they were before, but harms a third party. Which doesn't even bring up that these exchanges are based on _perceived_ benefit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or > its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming > language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what > is lacking in most other languages.

Then:

> My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 > I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to > do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects. As a > result, I have not had time or occasion to learn newer languages such as > Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby.

<comment><USER10> ...or Java or C# or Scala or Haskell or Rust or OCaml or...

There's a whole lot to the programming world than disproportionately popular dynamic languages.

What is so great about Lisp that other languages don't have? Macros? Simple syntax? I mean, that's basically it, right?

This is just fanboyism for a language he has nostalgia for. Nothing else.

<comment><USER11> It's hard (if not impossible) to pick a single attribute of 'Lisp' that's shared by all the languages that are part of the Lisp family of languages. There are Lisps without macros, there are Lisps without the simple syntax, there are Lisps without dynamic typing, or lexical scope, or any of a dozen other features that are present in at least on Lisp.... so I think reducing Lisp to a handful of features and calling that 'basically it' is a good way to miss the point. (Not to belabor the obvious

One of my favorite points about Lisp was made by Kent Pitman back in 1995: [http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html](http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html)

In it, he describes through a though experiment what it means for a language to be defined by its community and how that impacts its development and use. It isn't as much about the specific features as it is the approach that led the language to get to have those features in the first place.

Just to illustrate, the simple syntax is a good example. It's not immediately obvious why simple syntax is a good thing... in fact, given the fact people prefer infix and a big part of the backlash against Lisp is due to the syntax, you might argue that it'd be better for Lisp to drop the syntax entirely. (As was tried in Dylan and Logo) That, you'd lose a lot that's not necessarily obvious. There's a real value in having a concrete syntax for your language's core data types and then defining the language in terms of those data types. The simple syntax isn't the point as much as what it enables you do accomplish.

<comment><USER12> >It's hard (if not impossible) to pick a single attribute of 'Lisp' that's shared by all the languages that are part of the Lisp family of languages.

homoiconicity

<comment><USER11> Dylan. Logo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I don't agree with his stance on a number of things, I find the consistency and unapologetic nature of posts such as these refreshing. _This is the thing I believe. You don 't have to, but here's why I think it's wrong not to._

A case can be made that they're too set in stone, with no flexibility - <USER2> isn't that what makes them principles? They are _core beliefs_ and in absence of fundamentally view-altering events, they seldom see changes after we reach maturity. IMO if you find yourself rationalizing your way around your own principles, then what you have are a set of things you'd like to believe about yourself - which is quite a different thing.

For as many years as RMS has been in the public eye, I've never seen him rationalize away his principles for the sake of convenience. Agree with him or not, that's a rare thing and I can't help but respect it.

<comment><USER14> How is that refreshing? This has basically been the natural state of human thinking until maybe around the enlightenment. People used to just say things like "all is water" or "all is fire" in very principled assertive ways all the time.

What I find refreshing is the tiny tiny tiny percentage of people that treat their beliefs like a probability distribution that they update very frequently with new empirical and analytic information.

<comment><USER13> But we're not talking about a mis-evaluation of facts or insufficient data to form a proper conclusion. The core belief here is along the lines of "data should not be constrained, and my access and usage of data is nobody's business but mine".

People say things like, "all software should be free" but continue to pay the bills by working for a non-free company. They say, "I think DRM is wrong" but many will still buy DRM'd content when they want it badly enough.

Coming across someone who holds a firm, clearly defined belief (again, regardless of whether I agree with the belief - that's not related to the point I'm trying to make) and who also adheres to that belief in all aspects of life - that's the refreshing thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dear HN - at what point does the proclivity towards a philosophy transition to insanity? Is it when an FSF zealot refuses medical treatment demanding the source code of the firmware used in his life-saving medical device? Is it when he refuses to use the roads paved by _insert paving device here_ running closed source software?

<comment><USER16> I think this part of his notes would be relevant:

>I firmly refuse to install non-free software or tolerate its installed presence on my computer or on computers set up for me.

>However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's license, or make me responsible its being present in the computer, or make me the possessor of a copy of it, so I don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of course, I explain to the local people why they should migrate the machines to free software, but I don't push them hard, because annoying them is not the way to convince them.

>Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then. (I do consider what those machines and their owners might do with my personal data, but that's a different issue, which would arise just the same even if they did use free software. My response to that issue is to minimize those activities which give them any data about me.)

>That's my policy about using a machine once in a while. If I were to use it for an hour every day, that would no longer be "once in a while" — it would be regular use. At that point, I would start to feel the heavy hand of any nonfree software in that computer, and feel the duty to arrange to use a liberated computer instead.

While his views can be seen as extreme, there's a hint of open-mindedness scattered throughout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > I skimmed documentation of Python after people told me it was fundamentally > similar to Lisp. My conclusion is that that is not so. `read', `eval', and > `print' are all missing in Python.

Maybe I'm getting lost in the semantics but doesn't Python have a REPL a la the interpreter?

<comment><USER18> Yes. Also, there absolutely are all three functions. I don't know what the hell he's on about. [https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html](https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html)

<comment><USER19> The point he's stuck on is that the versions of 'read', 'eval', and 'print' in Python aren't the same as the ones in Lisp. In Python, you read a string, eval that string into a value, then print that value. The intermediate representation is a string -- just a bunch of characters. In Lisp, you read a data structure, eval that data structure into another data structure, then print out its form -- nested lists and atoms that you can inspect and manipulate, rather than characters that you need to parse to do anything useful with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A perennial favorite. I never get enough of a person stating their opinions in such assertive terms.

<comment><USER21> As I've grown up, I've realized that "such assertive terms" tend to translate to "I have an unfettered view of the inside of my ass, and I'm positive what everything looks like in here".

<comment><USER10> I once read that those who are prideful (i.e. arrogant, conceited, pompous) are universally despised, because those who are humble recognize and abhor the ugliness of this vice, and those who are prideful can't stand the thought others thinking they're better than them.

<comment><USER22> but then why are many assertive, pompous people successful, but that I don't think that describes Stallman though. He seems pretty down to earth

<comment><USER23> Being successful does not imply not being despised. In fact, it often seems the two are positively correlated. Success is often shorthand for wealth and power, and there's a lot more to life than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to > display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix > streaming was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its > use under any circumstances whatsoever.

RMS is a very principled man, but I think he may have misunderstood "Netflix and chill".

<comment><USER24> RMS on "Netflix and chill": [https://twitter.com/gexcolo/status/637383659318734849](https://twitter.com/gexcolo/status/637383659318734849) I don't know if it's really him, though.

<comment><USER18> What's with him and birds? Let's not address why I had this saved though: [http://imgur.com/a/iGMmb](http://imgur.com/a/iGMmb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > An explanation of the concept of designing a "user experience" which also > shows why I find it loathesome. This is why I want stallman.org to remain > simple: not a "user experience" but rather a place where I present certain > information, views and action opportunities to you.

A lot of what user experience has become is trying to induce users to do what you want them to rather than "how do I make it easy for the user to do what they want." That, along with a tendency towards what I perceive as "over- design," makes this viewpoint refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER25> > After a few years I found out that this was due to the hard keys of my > keyboard. I switched to a keyboard with lighter key pressure and the problem > mostly went away.

My experience as well. I'd been using Apple's keyboards for years, and was experiencing hand pain. I switched to a nice mechanical keyboard that activates with a click part way down so I don't need to bottom out the keys. The hand pain went away and I can't stand typing on those "chiclet style" keyboards now.

<comment><USER26> Every coder should take the time to find the keyboard that suits their body best once funds allow it. I can't imagine doing serious (development) work on a laptop for more than an hour or so without a decent keyboard (currently using a DasKeyboard with Cherry switches), a well-positioned monitor, and a good mouse (a left-handed Razor Deathadder now).

Still I see a lot of developers just pop open their laptop on a desk and work like that for the rest of the day…

<comment><USER27> I end up working on a laptop a lot of the time, but nothing feels quite as good as my Unicomp Model M. And Unicomp stuff sells for cheaper than a lot of the Das stuff, plus it's nicer IMHO (but that's just me).

I never much saw the point of a good mouse: You're not going to be using it all that much (emacs user), you're not getting much in ergonomics out of it, and you probably don't need the sensor accuracy. Am I wrong about where the money goes, or something?

<comment><USER26> I do like having an accurate mouse for drawing diagrams and web browsing (and a lot of other things).

<comment><USER27> Oh. Well, that explains it. I don't do a whole lot of drawing, and even in FPS the loss of accuracy is negligable, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I admire Stallman. I think he's crazy, or at least a little weird, but I can respect him: he's extremely talented, he has his principles, and dammit, he sticks to them.

It's like Randall puts it: This is a man who believes in something.

</comment><comment><USER28> The free software movement is blessed to have such a soul as Stallman

</comment><comment><USER29> > `read', `eval', and `print' are all missing in Python

don't you get a REPL when you type "python" in a terminal?

<comment><USER30> Also, Python has "eval" and "print" functions that are even _called_ "eval" and "print". One could argue that Python eval is different from LISP eval, but I don't understand what RMS means by "missing"!

<comment><USER31> > Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects. As a result, I have not > had time or occasion to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python, PHP or > Ruby.

What he means is that he skipped the languages that have it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Basically he lives in a way incompatible with most of the western consumers. I do wonder what he does for fun.

<comment><USER33> Fun use of words given the context, consumers.

<comment><USER34> I think it's redundant. Who is not a consumer? You need to consume food, water, etc to live, so to live you must be a consumer.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but you'll agree that's not the common acceptation. Anyway, I guess it was a typo for costumes. I found interesting the implication that you need to "consume" to have fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A good programmer is measured by the programs that he does. Sometimes you can win the day by programming in visual basic, if works and its efficient then why not?.

</comment><comment><USER36> "A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix streaming was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever."

When you refuse netflix and chill due to ideological conflicts with the key distribution model, just stallman things

</comment><comment><USER37> I find it amusing that the line:

> I edit the pages on this site with Emacs ...

has a formatting error.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm often amazed at what we've done with programming languages. They're perfect examples of accurately and concisely communicate information in a small space

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd like to live my life with strict principles like that. Non-aggression principle style. Unfortunately, other statists don't let me. There is one other small thing too, I like Microsoft products.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just imagine how scary it would be if this guy had any real power

<comment><USER41> He would make every piece of code free of cost and community driven. Does that scare you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's weird that he devotes all of this time to not being tracked online and then shares this one bit of info:

> "I have a Twitter account called rmspostcomments, which I use to log in on > other sites to post comments on articles."</comment>


Implementation of various string similarity and distance algorithms in Java - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tdebatty/java-string-similarity <comment><USER2> This library is implemented for some use-cases. It calculates how many different characters or changed character on a string.

String similarity and distance algorithms are different with semantic similarity (knowledge-based). It calculates the similarity based-on relationship of word to another word (hierarchy/tree). So, If you need a library that can calculate semantic similarity instead of string and distance in Java, I would recommend this [1].

[1]: [https://github.com/sharispe/slib/](https://github.com/sharispe/slib/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, I just started working in Java at an internship this summer. With mvn, the package manager is fantastic. I was naive and thought things like `npm` were unique in their philosophy, but realized it's very similar. I hate debugging Java in an enterprise environment, but I have to say that it's really elegant to code in Java and use the standard library.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with debugging java? Between reliable remote debugger attachment, mvn + IntelliJ's support for automatically building and distributing sources, decent decompilation in case that fails, JMX, and tools like VisualVM, it seems to me that Java is head and shoulders above most "trendy" languages in the debugging department. Is there a cool new tool that I'm not aware of that hasn't made it to Java yet?

<comment><USER5> Yes, Java is a superior dev env. And then some says something like "We need DI aspects with our annotated IoC!"

Spring (and others) is an exception (stack trace) obfuscation framework.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. And with the bean configuration XML files, the error messages suck if there is anything wrong with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Similar library for Python: [https://github.com/jamesturk/jellyfish](https://github.com/jamesturk/jellyfish)

</comment><comment><USER7> Good job! One question though. In cases like this when there is generally no state, isn't it better to make the methods static?

<comment><USER8> Static method calls in Java code is a nightmare when testing.

<comment><USER9> Am I missing something? I regularly write static methods and test them with JUnit.

<comment><USER10> > I regularly write static methods and test them with JUnit

Implementing mock objects which return "unexpected" results is impossible with static methods.

The standard 1 interface + 1 impl pattern in Java is just so that the Proxy.newProxyInstance can create a decorated or mocked object for testing.

So you can test the methods directly, but you can't write failure-inducing methods (like a connect exception throwing one) which test the methods which use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A nice variety of approaches. Any plans for implementing others, e.g., Smith- Waterman and mutual info. similarities?

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks, really useful.

Any plans on including this in Apache Commons?

How does it compare to StringUtils in Apache Commons?

<comment><USER13> Apache Commons Lang has some string distance algorithms. But we started another project in the sandbox for text/strings, as [lang] was getting a bit overcrowded with so many things.

You can take a look at the current project here [https://commons.apache.org/sandbox/commons- text/](https://commons.apache.org/sandbox/commons-text/)

Source: [https://github.com/apache/commons- text](https://github.com/apache/commons-text)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slightly offtopic, I'm still looking for a good 3-way merge algorithm for strings and structured data in Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER15> What is the meaning of the dot in the big O notation there? like O(m.n)? Should it rather be O(m*n)?

<comment><USER16> Dot is a multiplication symbol (in mathematics, that is; one of several). See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct) ; the choice between dot and cross as multiplication symbols is further taken advantage of in vector multiplication (dot product vs cross product). Etc.

<comment><USER15> That's actually a middle dot, not a regular dot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the examples might show better if they were in the form of assertions

very nice variety and good readme! good job</comment>


MongoDB Interview: 4 Questions with 10gen CEO Dwight Merriman - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/02/15/mongodb-interview-4-questions-with-10gen-ceo-dwight-merriman/

<comment><USER2> " High on the roadmap are faster aggregation capabilities, full text search, better concurrency, and easy large cluster setup and administration. A general focus right now is assuring the product is suitable for mission critical production applications."</comment>


London Stock Exchange to abandon MS Windows - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform <comment><USER2> What the hell? So when a driver of a Toyota car crashes into a tree it's Toyota at fault as opposed to the driver?

I have no idea why the author has decided to crowbar their own bias on platform preference into this article. There doesn't appear to be any information that states its the platform at fault.

<comment><USER3> LSE's trading platform, TradeElect, was written by Microsoft and Accenture.

[http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system- goes-...](http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes- live/843/Default.aspx)

Microsoft used TradeElect as a centerpiece in their "Get the Facts" Linux bashing campaign.

<http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx>

Microsoft should get a share of the blame, but it sounds like a borked implementation since NASDAQ runs on Windows.

<comment><USER4> Did Nasdaq get rid of the hp/tandem nonstop backends then? I don't think they did. As of 2008 they were still running them. They might have windows frontends and middle ware, though.

<comment><USER3> You're right, I misspoke when I said "NASDAQ runs on Windows".

The information dissemination system runs on Windows, the trading system run on Tandem.

[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=285...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28572825)

<comment><USER4> My first job in the Silicon Valley was on the Himalayas doing QA. They were awesome machines. QA meant pulling drives and cpus in the middle of processing, browning out/cutting power, etc.. it was wonderfully destructive :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TradElect was launched at the same time that BetFair, a big internet betting exchange, announced its own FlyWheel platform. FlyWheel took 2 years to develop internally (apparently with two different dev teams initially competing against each other) at a cost of around £1m. It runs on Oracle/JBoss/Linux/x86 on £25k worth of kit, and does up to 1m TPS (compare with TradElect's £40m to achieve a target of 68k TPS, which apparently it never achieved).

<comment><USER6> I heard about this. It's a real shame that BetFair's system isn't being implemented for the LSE- i hear it far out strips any 'real world' use cases and can handle it all really well. Sounds pretty awesome to boot. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article doesn't seem to indicate that LSE will be dumping windows -just dumping a third-party product that happened to run on windows. It is unclear what platform the new vendor will be using. It is also unclear that the trouble outlined here was the fault of the OS or just a poorly-coded program running on top of it.

<comment><USER8> Programmed by Accenture. There's your problem.

<comment><USER9> There is a great comment in the article from a person who worked at Accenture...

"I finally quit after walking out of a berating meeting from a boss who reckoned I'd done a project too fast and produced an executable that was too small. "We quoted them three point two million for this. We can't give them a 500 Kb executable after a week and say it's done"

<comment><USER10> I'd be annoyed if that's all I got.

For 3.2 million, I'd hope for some good documentation, guides, and some fanfare, preferably some evidence of the QA procedure it's been through, too. You can't put ten thousand dollars+ of polish on a project in a week, can you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lots of diggs for someone who doesn't proofread his articles. I'm guessing he relates well to their user base.

<comment><USER12> He tells bigots what they want to hear. That's a true success formula.

(disclaimer: I use Windows, Linux and OS X and I'm not enthusiastic about any of them)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> hmm... I was surprised several years back by the announcement when LSE (London Stock Exchange) moved to MSFT server products, since people in banking mostly tell me that Java/Unix is standard.

<comment><USER14> There is no "standard". In any investment bank you'll find everything from MUMPS to MATLAB, VAX Pascal, APL, Haskell. The result of a) many acquisitions and mergers and b) a culture of if you need something, build it yourself, out of whatever you have to hand. I've seen NeXTStep and OS/2 and even an Amiga on trading floors.

<comment><USER13> Wait a sec, that's not infrastructure there running in individual trading departments. Major transactional backbones in banking almost all run on Java/Unix as I understand.

<comment><USER14> For the really mission-critical systems there's more COBOL, C++ and even VAX Basic (I'm not kidding) than there is Java, and there's a lot of mainframe and VMS too, and weird Unixes like Dynix. A lot of it is stuff that people outside the industry will never even see anymore.

One project I worked on in fixed income was C++ based, it could handle a few hundred trades per second on modest kit. When I left I think the J2EE rewrite was up to 6 trades _per minute_...

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the insights! Yes, my friend's dad in Munich used to program the main software handling Hypo-Vereinsbank's transactions and it was all in COBOL (a previous programmer had introduced a small rounding error, which resulted in havoc... good story).

Very interesting to see this diversity of systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My painful discovery of the day was the sad revelation that in 2009 Microsoft still has not yet moved on from case-insensitive filesystems. I'm sorry, but if your operating system cannot distinguish between ['ass','Ass','ASS'] then it is a toy and not a tool.

Modding me down does not erase this painful truth.

<comment><USER14> A case insensitive filesystem needs to convert everything into a single case before doing any string comparisons. The _only_ reason Unix doesn't do this is because they couldn't spare the CPU to do it in the original implementation. So not only are you offtopic, but you have your chronology backwards.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, but a filesystem that doesn't preserve exactly what I put into it is broken.

And the only chronology I mentioned was my _surprise_ that Windows is still broken, even in it's latest iteration (Vista).

I am glad that I only have to deal with Microsoft product on an extremely occasional basis. I feel sorry for people who are so emotionally invested in their operating system that they can't see that OpenBSD is the answer... ;-)

<comment><USER10> Windows does preserve exactly what you put into it, it will never change the case of your files. It will not let you call two files the same name (with different case) and it will not care if you reference a file with the wrong case.

This is utterly brilliant behaviour. Case is a pain to remember and a pain to communicate with other people, it doesn't fit well with our language. You only need to try and read a password to someone to see that. There's also no pleasant way to remember that two files are the same name but different cases.

One of the first things I do when installing linux is set bash to case insensitive tab completion, and vim to case insensitive searching.

You may as well ask for an OS that preserves the speed you typed a filename and wont let you access it unless you match the speed again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, this is not entirely true. If you use a program called PAX, which is like unix tar, you can get two files with the same case-independent name with different capitalization. This is necessary for posix.

And yes, this is very odd, and apparently not well known. Just as is the fact that from the C-level api, you can use forward slash instead of backslash to separate file name and directory name.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Calacanis: Lions and lambs in the post unicorn era - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2016/04/21/lions-lambs-in-the-post-unicorn-era/ <comment><AUTHOR> This really resonates with what I am seeing here in Michigan with local startups.

PG had a tweet awhile back saying if startups spent 90% of their time on product and 10% on pitches it would be fine but instead they spend 90% of their time winning money at pitch competitions.</comment>


Pope Francis urges Catholics to give up phones and trolling for Lent - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21154340/pope-francis-ash-wednesday-lent-speech-internet-insults-phones <comment><USER2> "Do onto others..." for 40 days and then it's back to the cafeteria plan!</comment>


Global availability of Microsoft Teams - happy-go-lucky https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-teams/ <comment><AUTHOR> All of the file-sharing features are tied into "OneDrive For Business," which isn't OneDrive and is just some Sharepoint garbage. The new sync client helps a lot, but it doesn't work for the _sharing_ part at all, which is what Teams uses. It's a huge liability for Teams until Microsoft can make OneDrive For Business not terrible. And when I evaluated it, it was missing any kind of snippet support, which I consider a dealbreaker (some workflows may not think this way, which is fine).

<comment><USER2> They will probably fix it over time, and also closely integrate with everything else, like LinkedIn, O365, Word / PPT / Task Tracking etc..

<comment><USER3> I highly doubt that, the yammer, SharePoint, onedrive, O365 etc... integration is abysmal and every product seems to get worse as they seem to tie them together with silly string behind the scenes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for Business, Slack and Teams.

Skype - Actively getting people to move away from this, fairly easy as new people in to the business don't setup accounts, everyone has experience with Skype, it's not a business tool.

Skype for Business - Clunky, conversation history is there, then disappears, sometimes it appears in your Outlook (in our case in a folder), sometimes it doesn't. Feels like a half-baked platform, but as my office is very Office365/MS-in-the-cloud they force it upon us.

Teams - Better than SfB, but still not usable. It tries to do everything, such as integrate planners, to do lists and so on. It dresses up as a business tool, then it has 'make your own meme' generators, which makes it seem a bit of a confused app. My biggest bug bear is when you're viewing a conversation, if someone replies to an old message, the entire message thread then appears as the 'newest'. I've missed countless conversations because of the funky ordering of chat.

Slack - Awesome. A bit memory hungry, but a really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect, as does mentioning and so on. You can apply themes, tons of plugins and extra stuff.

Whilst Slack is everyones preferred app, the business refuse to pay for it as they pay for Office365. wORK are, for that reason, promoting both Teams and SfB, because Teams has planners and so on, but SfB has somewhat usable VOIP. Anyone slightly technical uses Slack though on the free plan, it's just a lot better and features like Code Snippets are great for tech teams.

There are a subset of us that are thinking of moving to IRC, which has the added feature that PMs and managers can't figure it out.

<comment><USER5> I still don't get why everybody is hyping slack so much. I have used MSN, skype, hangouts, MS office messenger thing, IRC, hipchat and slack in my professional life and it is really all the same. You chat, you send files, you make calls. Nothing stands out really. What is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it?

<comment> vertex-four Everybody is going nuts over it. That's what's "great" about it. As you say, it was done several times before.

<comment><USER6> Slack does what it needs to do. SFC can't even keep messages in sync across devices. Everyone is going bonkers because they didn't go crazy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just keep adding to the sludge! More proprietary protocols and islands! The biggest problem with "Unified Communications" in business is effortless federation with your vendors and customers. Teams just makes a bigger mess, but then so does Slack and Cisco Spark. So add a Web conference tool or two (I have WebEx and Skype for Business conferencing), but the audio is annoyingly poor on S4B business. Don't forget our phone system, SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer. And while you are at it, have you kept up on LinkedIn and Twitter? To communicate with international colleagues, you will also also need Whatsapp. Perhaps you are working at a company with Google Apps with Hangouts, and may your deity of choice help you if you have Salesforce Chatter (A torrent of mental diarrhea) Of course bots are the future because I always wanted a text interface, or better yet, an ASR/TTS interface because I like practicing my English with a 3 year old.

This is a cluster and it is quickly getting worse. None of these companies are actually trying to help. So far as I can tell, they just want to grow their adoption numbers, try to preserve some revenue as long as they can and maybe kill the PSTN, but I can't even make a phone call between any of these systems. Then, with one small blip an entire system goes down, so I have to call you and send a email with the file you need.

XMPP is dead, SIP/SIMPLE isn't appropriate for IRC/Slack type apps. WebRTC is great for clients, but what about the backend, and federation? I love what I see with Riot, and I appreciate Google trying to move forward with the IMS replacement of SMS (Good luck explaining that one to the public, let alone market it...)

While all of these companies will babble on endlessly about being open and committed to international standards bodies, real time communication applications are where they are at their worst.

</comment><comment><USER8> Meh. I've tried to use it, but I quickly filed it in the "totally useless" bin: the amount of windowdressing vs actual content is staggering. I'm not exaggerating that in a 1680x1050 window, I get maybe 6 lines of content, the rest is spacing and navigation.

Then there's the abysmal threading features: conversations are collapsed by default, and are not kept in chronological order. When trying to read back a conversation, you're constantly working the mouse to click folds or scroll back and forth.

The icing on the cake was its memory and cpu usage: it got so bad (with only 4 teams joined) that my entire laptop slowed to a crawl. I uninstalled it and told my colleagues to just send me e-mails if they really want my feedback. I'm dreading the day my company makes its usage mandatory.

</comment><comment><USER9> We've had preview access at work. It seems nice enough and I'm looking forward to playing with the APIs. It does still rely on the other o365 components for features, which just shows up how janky lync and sharepoint can be.

we've had slack and irc and hipchat. honestly I don't care which chat system we use as long as internally we can all come to some kind of agreement. That speaks more to our er diverse user-group than the quality of any given chat system though.

I haven't been able to log in from a linux system unfortunately. The browser user-agent detection barfs on both chrome and firefox for me.

</comment><comment><USER10> So Teams is clearly Microsoft's answer to Slack. But, how does it relate to Skype for Business (Lync)? It doesn't seem to interoperate much.

<comment><USER11> Teams will snipe any incoming Skype for Business IMs that you receive before you can accept the toast on your real Lync client, which is always fun...

It's either got the Skype for Business Web SDK or raw UCWA jammed in there to log you into Skype, deal with presence, and handle messaging.</comment></comment>


Robotic penguins swimming and flying - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16996-bionic-penguins-take-to-the-water--and-the-skies.html <comment><USER2> yes, but does it run linux? (tm)

<comment><USER3> It _flies_ Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> flying penguins with glowing eyes...they need to reshoot terminator.

</comment><comment><USER5> these are incredible.</comment>


Obama, Surveillance, and the Legacy of the March on Washington - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/obama-surveillance-and-the-legacy-of-the-march-on-washington.html

<comment><USER2> I have a dream that one day law abiding citizens will be able to go about their business without being under constant surveillance - without having every telephone conversation, every email and every other electronic communication recorded in secret data centers around the nation and analysed by the a government immune from oversight or any remnant of constitutional restraint.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The moral arc of the universe is long, and it bends toward irony." Ouch.

<comment><USER4> While that is cute, MLK's original quote still stands. The arc bends towards justice, it's just that this is the internet age so we demand total justice, instantly with no effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's okay, though, because he won the Peace Prize, and is the first African- American in office, and he's going to fix healthcare and shutdown Guantanamo Bay.

Ron Paul for Galactic Emperor 2016--failing that, let's see what Hillary does. :(

EDIT: Lest you get the wrong impression the entire lineup of Republican turkeys probably would've ended just as repugnantly.</comment>