Two months early. 300k under budget - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtworks.github.io/p2/issue09/two-months-early/

<comment><USER2> Many of us become cynical about technologies that promise big breakthroughs in productivity, so we become overly careful in our choices, but this is a good question for managers to always be asking:

"Why would a large organisation with a mix of technologies and legacy systems want to muddy the waters with a completely new language?"

If you want to make the conservative choice, and stick with what you already have, you should be able to articulate the reasons as clearly as you would if you were choosing a new technology.

This certainly hints at the productivity power that I have discovered via Clojure:

"Could Clojure be used to build the bespoke CMS? Is it too bleeding edge? Would his team get it?"

When Colin Steele wrote about his experience as CTO at RoomKey, he also emphasized the incredible productivity benefits of using Clojure:

"As of this writing, we're on track to having 9 million uniques a month, from zero at the start of 2012. We did so with absolutely no fuss, no late nights, no hand wringing, and a laughably small amount of additional opex spend. "

[http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the- grai...](http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws- clojure-startup)

And in this article Dave Elliman is describing an architecture very similar to what Colin Steele describes, and with similar gains in productivity:

"After brainstorming some ideas we decided to put forward the idea of a Javascript based Single Page App (SPA) with a Clojure back end and a set of small Clojure based micro services sitting on top of MongoDB hosted in Rackspace."

I haven't done the Javascript thing yet, but the Clojure/MongoDb/micro- services approach has worked out very well for me. (I'm using "micro-services" informally, as in "lots of small apps that work together").</comment>


Using JSON to Exchange Data - BetterExplained - <AUTHOR> http://betterexplained.com/articles/using-json-to-exchange-data/

<comment><USER2> JSON really is so so so so much nicer than XML.</comment>


Monstrous Discrepancies - <AUTHOR> http://www.viruscomix.com/page528.html

<comment><USER2> Are we posting comics here now?

Shall we start posting every xkcd too? They're pretty awesome and very much on-topic.

What about Penny Arcade. They're pretty cool too, and very geeky.

<comment><USER3> If it's of interest to the readership then it's allowed.

Whether it's in the form of words, pictures, video, audio, or direct-brain- transmission shouldn't matter.

<comment><USER2> Comics have the bad habit of generating very little useful discussion (this one is no exception) and of being generally fairly shallow examinations of any topic.

If you want to talk about the issues discussed in this comic, how about writing a blog post that links to the comic instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was brilliant. Props to the author.

<comment><USER5> that lifted my spirits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't follow the one on sexuality. Is that angels and demons? What do they represent? And what spectrum do the shades of grey belong to?

<comment><USER3> It's saying that sexuality is usually shown as being black/white, but actually there are many shades of just not grey, but also green, blue, and purple.</comment></comment>


Is Twitter saturated? - <AUTHOR> http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/

<comment><USER2> This is the 3rd time someone has posted something like this (once by the same submitter <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880575>).

It's a fairly useless metric to look at second hand reports of twitter's website traffic. If you have a bump in new users they would naturally use the website, as some of them left and the users who stuck around learned how to use 3rd party clients you would see a drop in website traffic.

Now does it signify that twitter isn't picking up new users at the same pace, perhaps. But when you think about the last 12 months I am not sure how they could sustain that pace (between Obama, Oprah, etc).

<comment><USER3> Where is there concrete evidence that a significant chunk of Twitter users use 3rd party apps?

Desktop apps have horrible conversion rates, and I don't see why Twitter apps in particular have any reason to buck this trend. Whenever there are articles like these about Twitter's traffic numbers, people always bring up 3rd party app traffic making up the difference, but nobody ever provides any references to back that up.

<comment><USER2> [http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api- traff...](http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traffic- is-10x-twitters-site/)

<comment><USER3> That's raw API traffic, not user numbers.

An app that polls Twitter every minute is of course going to generate a lot of requests. But if only 10% of Twitter users use 3rd party apps, the web metrics are still more meaningful than API use.

<comment><USER2> Majority of Twitter users use a third party app:

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_t...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_third_party_clients_they_use.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the one hand, I don't think Twitter numbers can be considered stable at all, because it's not something that people _get_ right away. They also haven't really defined themselves as a company, and the product has so many directions it could go in, any of which could change the growth profile.

But on the other hand, Twitter is something that many people will always find vapid and narcissistic. Facebook has been trying to push people in this direction as well, but they have a compelling feature set that draws people in even if that have to block half of their loud-mouthed friends. Twitter has lots of potential (via their API if nothing else), but even if they can build up their third-party ecosystem to rival Facebook, I don't think you can't capture a mass market with a hodgepodge of tools that user's have to discover and set up for themselves.

Frankly I think Evan and Biz should have sold in the spring.

</comment><comment><USER5> So my startup uses Twitter as an extension of our news aggregator, as another way to distribute links that "go popular" with our users.

Since June, we've kept up our same tweeting frequency and the quality of the stories has even shot up a bit.

But referrals, click-thru's and retweets are down to about half of what they were in August. We were scratching our heads about this for a while. Maybe a lot of the folks living on Twitter over the summer, retweeting our stuff moved on to some shiny new toy once fall hit?

<comment><USER6> Are you using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed, or are you participating in conversation?

<comment><USER7> > Are you using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed

Isn't that what it is? (totally serious here)

<comment><USER6> If you just use it for that, you're missing out on a lot.

Yes, technically speaking, it's a glorified RSS feed. But due to the presentation and the way people use it, it's more than that.

Check out, for example, the Dell Outlet. <http://twitter.com/DellOutlet> Dell made $6.5 million from this Twitter account. Why? Because they actually engage in discussions with their customers. It's an incredibly powerful way to reach people that are buying your stuff. Part of the reason I'm still a Verizon customer is because I got frustrated with their service, complained on Twitter, and within 15 minutes, I got an @reply and then a dm from a rep, who got actual real CSRs to call me, and my stuff got fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not just Twitter. <http://twittercism.com/twitter-growth-nov-09>

Is it "Social Networks"?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this just visits directly to twitter.com? or does it reflect visits via twitter's api?

<comment><USER10> I presume it's direct visits. But looking at the charts for seesmic and tweetdeck, if we assume the cumulative unique visitors to these two services in the past year all downloaded and use the service at least once a month, it adds maybe 5-10m users at a guess.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/seesmic.com+tweetdeck.com/>

<comment><USER11> there are also a large group of people who only use twitter on their iphones/blackberrys, its probably hard to say anything from stats from compete.

<comment><USER12> This is equally true for Facebook, which isn't showing a declining trend.

<comment><USER13> I think it is true that many people are updating their facebook status from their phones, but I would guess that many of those same people are still going to the website be it to look at photos they have recently been tagged in or play Farmville.

I think the original comment was saying that many people strictly use twitter from their phone or third-party app. There isn't much on twitter that draws an established user to the website like there is with facebook.

<comment><USER11> That is exactly what I meant, and that was exactly my point. Twitter wants to become a service provider. It seems it doesn't care so much about you visiting the site as much as it cares about you using the service it provides.

How this translates into twitter making money, we don't know yet, but it seems like it is the direction they are going with Chirp( <http://chirp.twitter.com/> ) and with talk of giving more developers access to the firehose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> fb's pageviews have flattened as well, according to compete.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Why do these numbers seem low..? I checked FB only to find that their monthly uniques were 130 million.. Weren't they recently claiming 350 million active users?

<comment><USER16> If I remember right, Compete is only reporting user in the U.S. which explain the low numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Considering that twitter experienced something like 500% growth in 2009, it's probably for the best.</comment>


Ask HN: Competitor lifted app concept and name and filed trademark - <AUTHOR> We are based in UK and US - CA (not a registered company in either). Competitor looks to be based in CA also.
A friend and I have been building an app as a little side project for a few years. With work and real-life etc. it's been stuck in beta for quite some time, but we were actually hoping to launch this weekend.
Today we discover that a competitor launched with an identical concept. Fine, it's an obvious concept that I was surprised no-one had come up with already, and we lifted a large part of the UI from Tinder anyway. What I'm concerned about is that they also copied the name (changing one letter: Chowder (https://www.getchowder.com) -> Chowdr (https://www.chowdrapp.com)) and filed a trademark.
Is there prior art for trademarks in the US (we have been publicly visible as Chowder since ~February 2016, it seems their trademark was filed in March 2016)? I was able to find some info about the trademark (https://www.bizapedia.com/trademarks/chowdr-87042422.html) - of note is that they have a pseudo-mark for 'Chowder' as well.
While I'm annoyed that this person lifted the concept and the name, I am more worried that they will make a trademark infringement move on us as soon as we launch properly, which we cannot afford to defend against.
If it makes any difference, we have the option to become a registered company in the UK (where I am based), however we planned to launch in the US initially anyway, so I assume this would still classify as infringement?
Any advice would be appreciated. At this stage I'm thinking we should just rebrand. <comment><USER3> My random advice from the internet is to pick a different name, change the product to show the new name and launch. It might even be possible to launch without changing the name and then start changing the name, but I am not advising that just mentioning it as an option.

Mostly, nobody cares about the name 'chowder' unless your app is a soup or stew. It's not worth delaying launch or lawyering up over at the scale of a side project.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> mindcrime is correct - you hdon't need to register a mark to have rights to that mark as a trademark in the US. You just have to use it in interstate commerce in connection with the goods/services at issue.

If you were using it in the right way prior to your competitor, you could have rights to block them. (If you haven't launched in the US, chances are you haven't used the mark in the right way.)

Right now, their application has been published for opposition. You could attempt to block the registration by filing an opposition before the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board. You could also sue them for trademark infringement in state or federal court or use your prior use to defend against a claim by them for trademark infringement.

All of this, of course, costs a lot of money. Is it worth it to you to spend a ton of money to protect this name? My guess is no.

Happy to answer additional questions (either on here or you can email me).

</comment><comment><USER5> They did register under the international class 009 FYI, and Right to register and right to use are two different things. And usage may have been amended. Click on their prosecution history tab here: [http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87042422&caseType=SERIAL_N...](http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87042422&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch)

And in there statement of use it says: The mark was first used by the applicant, or the applicant's related company, licensee, or predecessor in interest at least as early as 08/22/2016, and first used in commerce at least as early as 08/22/2016, and is now in use in such commerce. The applicant is submitting one specimen for the class showing the mark as used in commerce on or in connection with any item in the class, consisting of a(n) specimen-a.jpg: Screenshot of "www.chowdr.us" website using mark specimen-b.jpg: Screenshot of Google Play Store using mark specimen-c.jpg: Screenshot of Apple App Store using mark.

So if you used it before august 22, 2016 you should fight it!

</comment><comment><USER6> Obligatory disclaimer: IANAL. Talk to a real lawyer.

That said, my understanding is that, in the US anyway, you gain a trademark simply by the act of using a "mark" in, well, trade. Even if you don't file for a _registered_ trademark, you still have a trademark if you've been using the mark in trade. What I'm not sure about is exactly what counts as "in trade". If your product isn't launched yet, but you have a website up with a a landing page, does that count? I don't know. That's the part where you need to consult a real lawyer.

I'm also not sure if you have any specific recourse to block your competitor from obtaining a registered trademark which is confusingly similar to your own trademark. This is another place where you need real legal counsel.

 _At this stage I 'm thinking we should just rebrand._

Why should you rebrand? Assuming you really were using the name first, you probably have grounds to stop these guys from using it. Go talk to a lawyer who specializes in "IP stuff". Hey, best case, maybe this will be one of those deals where just having a lawyer send a threatening sounding C&D letter to the other group will result in them backing down.

</comment><comment><USER7> For what it's worth, 'Chowdr' was tweeting about their launch in 2015: [https://twitter.com/chowdrApp/status/677252382124670977](https://twitter.com/chowdrApp/status/677252382124670977)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing this out - I couldn't figure out how to navigate Twitter to sort by date. If I was being paranoid I would have said that they picked up on an ad campaign we put out in 2015 to garner interest, however I suspect it is much more likely that the apps started around the same time and both happened to converge on the name Chowder (which is a fairly obvious choice for a food-app).

While I do think it's still fishy that they recently added some features which bare a great deal of resemblance to ours, that is a separate, unrelated issue.

As our app has been available for longer, I would hope that would be sufficient to at least protect ourselves in an infringement case - <USER2> rebranding might just be the most straight-forward option at this stage.</comment></comment>


Seamless Object-Oriented Software Architecture (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bon-method.com/book_print_a4.pdf <comment><USER2> This document includes a section (3.12) giving an idiosyncratic syntax for predicate logic, but it never bothers formally defining its semantics (rules of inference). What's the use of a logic if you can't use it to actually prove things?

</comment><comment><USER3> Seamless

1\. (of a garment) having no seams 2\. continuous or flowing 3\. Perfectly consistent

I don't think any of the above applies to OO software design. Good intentions might be there, but I don't think it delivers.

<comment><USER4> Any approach to representing a complex problem or system in code,is like any tool - only as good as the person using it.

Given a really complex problem domain, functional decomposition and data modeling have their own issues. Other than an object-oriented approach, what else is left? Constant experimentation with procedures and subroutines until anything that can possibly work is discovered?

<comment><USER5> True, but a torque wrench will never be a great hammer.</comment></comment></comment>


Nathan Myhrvold: The Wealthy Should Fund Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428984/nathan-myhrvold-the-wealthy-should-fund/

<comment><USER2> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a patent troll in possession of an enormous fortune must find a pretext by which he might be judged something other than a parasite.

There is a serious argument to be made that very wealthy individuals are the only ones who can fund certain projects. But no one as wealthy as Myhrvold can make that argument seriously. So here are two links. I'm pretty sure that neither author has ever called for a pay-per-click internet:

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/the- history-and-future-of-private-space-exploration.html)

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/01/we-need-the-very- rich....](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/01/we-need-the-very-rich.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know why I ever read anything by this man anymore, it just infuriates me. I honestly don't know if anything he can do could ever offset the carnage wrought by Intellectual Ventures.

>If 20 of us were to try to solve energy problems—with carbon capture and storage, or perhaps some other crazy idea—maybe one or two of us would actually succeed. If nobody tries, we'll all certainly fail.

I love the hubris, if him or say 20 of his wealthy friends don't solve the problem, I mean who could? Because history shows all advancement is done only by extremely wealthy folks.

>Unfortunately, no such technology can completely replace fossil fuels, which provide base-load power all day and night, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. There is no carbon-free base-load power source except nuclear energy.

I admit to knowing nothing of this area, but is energy storage just useless? I always hear the 'what about off-cycle demand' used as a cudgel against things like wind/solar/hydro/etc.. power. Is it really impossible / terribly inefficient to store energy for later use? If so is there no chance of advancement there and thus the only hope is something like nuclear? Honest question.

>There are few technologies more daunting to inventors (and investors) than nuclear power.

I agree investors are more likely to say fund, cat-sharing-social-coupon-web 3.0 venture over say 'long lead new power breakthrough', but something tells me with the sheer buckets of money that would accompany such a discovery that some people are definitely working on it. Whether those people are VC/billionaires or government, something tells me if Myhrvold died tomorrow (please god) that all research in alternative energy wouldn't grind to a halt never to be pursued again.

>Like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I was once a little boy who played with model rockets and aspired to learn nuclear physics.

And then go on to troll the world? One of these folks is not like the others.

</comment><comment><USER4> Myrhvold should put his money where his mouth is, and fund innovation by shutting down IV and its shell companies.

<comment><USER5> Well obviously you don't understand how patents are linked to competition and efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What the hell does Myhrvold know about funding innovation? Dragging innovation back with lawsuits, sure, but funding?

<comment><USER7> TerraPower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bezos and Musk deliver.

</comment><comment><USER9> Or sue to maintain control of it. You know, either way.

</comment><comment><USER10> _The Wealthy Should Fund Innovation_

And how does one get wealthy...Patent troll!

WTF. This theory needs some dogfooding.

<comment><USER11> While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think your argument is fair. He got wealthy via Microsoft. He did get wealthier as a patent troll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> they do</comment>


Making Ubuntu run faster by killing Evolution - <AUTHOR> http://nerdishland.tumblr.com/post/159373181693/how-i-made-my-computers-significantly-faster-in <comment><USER2> Clickbait title, it should be something like "Making Ubuntu run faster by killing Evolution".

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds much better. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Title is clickbait, but I will take this chance to say something that can literally make many if not most >1 year old computers much faster: Clean the dust off the heatsink(s) and fans. This is hardware 101, but almost no one actually does it and the result is that the processor or GPU starts thermally throttling, with zero warning or indication that it is operating in a handicapped mode beyond that it no longer has the speed it once did.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not not the first time I've read about this kind of solutions and processes that get hungry of resources over time, even idle. But this solution gets rid of the symptom not the causes. I'm always curious about this cases and why these happen, I'm not using Ubuntu ATM but I'd look forward for any insights on this.

<comment><USER5> Gnome software seems to be dismal at handling error conditions.

I solved a similar problem with Gnome on Fedora 25 a few months ago by deleting all of my Gnome Online Account entries. GOA and Evolution's data back end conspired to burn 20% CPU by failing to log into Google account servers multiple times per second. For hours.</comment></comment>


'Millionaires for Humanity' - <AUTHOR> https://www.millionairesforhumanity.com/ <comment><USER2> > So please. Tax us. Tax us. Tax us. It is the right choice. It is the only > choice.

Will it be helpful to throw more money into the giant pile that's overwhelmingly spent on weapons and such?</comment>


Ask HN: Just learned PiCloud will be gone, alternatives? - <AUTHOR>

I've been heavily invested in PiCloud building my app for the past few months. Namely the Unique IP provided by s1 instances was a killer feature for me.
I decided to check their blog today and was shocked to learn they are going to be shutting down!
Where am I going to go now?! The PiCloud environments and unique ip per instance and queue to run parallel jobs in python was why I went with python.
I can't wait until February for the new company to come into effect. I need an alternative today.
It has taught me the lesson of depending too much on a single vendor. It really doesn't matter if they open source the picloud platform because my project hinges on the unique ip per instance and the ultra low pricing.
I feel totally devastated. All that hard work will now need to be modified with a new provider. <comment><USER2> I'm a founder of PiCloud. If you reach out to me at ken AT picloud.com I can go over your use case with you and help you figure out your options.</comment>


PulseAudio has been removed from dports - <AUTHOR> http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-August/313010.html <comment><USER2> 2000: Audio on linux sucks. If you are lucky you can have two applications generating sound at the same time. You can't hotplug audio devices. You can't have per application volume. You can't move audio streams to different output devices.

2016: Pulseaudio sucks because.. reasons.

<comment><USER3> It's an easy target. It sucks far less all the alternatives, but it's an easy punching bag for people who want something to hate.

I lived through the days of horrible sound support on Linux - I think it was my main desktop until my first Mac around ~2007. Playing video or games was a crapshoot. Hot-plugging audio wasn't even in the realm of possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a love-hate relationship with PulseAudio, and it seems others do too.

It makes sense to have some user-space audio layer. Software mixing, sample rate conversion, and a few other things just make sense in user space, and we can expose only bona fide hardware capabilities through the device interface. Of course, most desktop audio chipsets have hardware mixing, which means that most people think that you can just use OSS (or ALSA on Linux), and it will work. It just doesn't work on everybody's hardware.

In short, there's a hardware jungle out there and software layers like PulseAudio smooth over the differences. It's a shame that it doesn't always work well, and most people think PulseAudio is the source of the problem because most people have hardware mixers.

By comparison, if you just use OSS (or ALSA on Linux) on my computer you might see that incredibly basic features _like volume control or the ability to play audio from multple apps_ don't even work without PulseAudio.

</comment><comment><USER5> PA is pretty painful, but credit where it's due: Now that linux's OSS support is pretty much dead and buried, it's pretty much the only way to do cross- platform sound on the unixes. Even if it is a baroque, overly complex mess (it is), it has helped to increase portability across systems.

Not that it matters, as Wayland and systemd slowly eradicate all cross- compatability in software complex enough to care.

Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it...

</comment><comment><USER6> Vast amount of revisionism in this thread.

Lots of comments saying ALSA doesn't do mixing. This is false. ALSA has always supported mixing through dmix, and it's enabled by default.

Lots of comments saying ALSA doesn't do hotplugging. This is also false - hotplugging works like any other hardware on Linux. Plug it in and it shows up. To configure that card as the default requires changing a configuration file. You can make this happen automatically with udev.

Lots of comments saying ALSA doesn't work with bluetooth headsets. Google "bluez-alsa" folks. FFS.

Now, that's not to say that all of this worked seamlessly. Configuring everything through /etc/asound.rc or .asoundrc was a pain, in large part because there were no GUI tools to do so. And because applications read .asoundrc on startup, there was no way of _switching_ a playing stream to a different card, live. THAT is the use case that a userspace daemon solves.

The upsetting thing is we already had two userspace daemons, aRts and ESD [KDE and GNOME respectively], that more or less worked fine. Instead we suffered with years of broken audio.

</comment><comment><USER7> Understaffed BSD fork can't maintain notoriously complicated and finicky user- space audio daemon, decides to drop it instead. News at 11.

Honestly, I'm surprised DfBSD even supported PulseAudio (or vice-versa) in the first place.

<comment><USER8> If it works on FreeBSD it will probably work on Dfly. They're still pretty close in terms of userland, and I don't know this for certain but they probably take many FreeBSD changes and vice-versa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Look at sndio if you want to see how sound should be done. Excusing the horrible mess pulseaudio is with the horrible state of Linux Audio doesn't cut it, when OpenBSD has been offering a superior and simpler alternative for years!

It doesn't reinvent the wheel and for anything more complex you can always use JACK, like if you really want to go low-latency.

<comment><USER10> > Excusing the horrible mess pulseaudio is with the horrible state of Linux > Audio doesn't cut it,

The problem is that most people complaining about Pulseaudio don't offer realistic alternatives. Saying Pulseaudio sucks and that everyone should use ALSA is a joke. Pulseaudio does a plethora of things that ALSA does not handle. Not to mention that ALSA is a low-level system, and PA actually sits _on top of_ ALSA.

In all of the vitriol that people spew about Pulseaudio, this is the first time that I've seen anyone point to sndio. I think that says something about the "pulseaudio complainers" crowd.

That said does sndio provide the following features:

\- Support for bluetooth audio devices

\- Support for streaming audio over a network.

\- Support for user-land mixing of audio sources (i.e. don't need root).

\- Mixing of multiple audio streams at the same time (e.g. Can your system play an alert sound without interrupting your music?)

\- Per application volume settings

\- Per application input/output source settings

<comment><USER11> I realize I'm replying to a 2 weeks old comment, so nobody will read this ever, but from your list sndio supports: streaming audio over a network, user- land mixing of audio sources, mixing of multiple audio streams at the same time, and per application volume settings.

> Per application input/output source settings

No, but the input/output device is selectable per application via the AUDIODEVICE environment variable.

> bluetooth audio devices

OpenBSD has no bluetooth support, so no. I'm also wondering why the kernel wouldn't create audio devices from these that the userland daemon can then just transparently use? Does an audio daemon need special support for bluetooth audio devices?

The sndio daemon has more features. Give the man page a read if you're interested: [http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD- current/man8/sndiod.8](http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man8/sndiod.8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Honest question, why would one need another layer of PA in linux if alsa does mixing just fine. I've heard PA is useful for bluetooth devices. Any reason why it's needed beside that?

</comment><comment><USER13> Removal is the best fix, always. Who needs features anyway.

<comment><USER14> >Who needs features anyway.

Can you name a single feature or use case addressed by PulseAudio that isn't addressed by ALSA?

<comment><USER15> On the flip side, if everything can be done by ALSA, and PA is seemingly objectively worse, for what reason are people building their software against PA? Why is it being included anywhere at all?

<comment><USER16> Except ALSA _cannot_ do everything that PA does. ALSA is low-level Linux sound API that PA builds on. Read the post above, it explains the difference.

Basically, if you want multiple sounds playing at the same time (e.g. music + desktop notifications) and you don't have hardware mixer (many common sound chips don't and rely on Windows drivers/sound system to provide the functionality), you are out of luck (no, the ancient dmix plugin is not a solution!). Bluetooth audio (headsets) doesn't really work without PA.

Configuring apps to use different devices (music should go to speakers and video conferencing to a headset ...) is a pain without PA - most applications don't let you select the input/output devices.

And many other things. ALSA is good, but without PA the sound support on a modern Linux desktop would be stuck right in the late 90s. Is it necessary? Not strictly, but it is one heck of a convenience that most don't even realize they have.

Here is a good post from 2008 explaining many of the issues PulseAudio solves and addressing some of the old FUD:

[http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/jeffrey- stedfast.html](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/jeffrey-stedfast.html)

Unfortunately, there are tons of people with strong opinions about both PA and systemd but very little actual knowledge about what these components do and what issues they address in a modern Linux/Unix system. But that doesn't prevent them from spreading BS FUD and conspiracies about this or that group trying to dominate the market or take over the competing Linux distros.

<comment><USER6> >no, the ancient dmix plugin is not a solution!

Given that that's exactly what it's for, why isn't it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lavatory Laboratory: How sanitation is following the cell phone model - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/lavatory-laboratory

<comment><USER3> We used compost (sawdust) toilets in our house for a few months before we had indoor plumbing. Before I read "The Humanure Handbook" I thought the very idea was some kind of awful hippie bullshit. However now I have realized something that is really obvious when you try it:

Some machines and designs have been perfected for centuries. The toilet however is not one of them! Because it took us so long to discover how germs make us sick, our toilets were really horrible things.

In fact, it has taken us so long to understand sanitation, composting, and the environmental impact of using fresh-water flushing toilets, that the entire human race has become used to an activity (flushing toilets) that is astoundingly wasteful (you're not only wasting drinking water, but you're wasting excellent nutrients in your own shit which is then lost to sewage sludge, which itself takes huge resources to purify)

The thing is, you can totally recycle all human (and food) waste without much of an inconvenience and really no smell at all. Yes, let me repeat that - <USER2> smell at all. You crap in a bucket of sawdust, cover it completely with more sawdust, and the bucket _does not smell_.

The fact that our civilization has taught itself that flushing our shit away with drinking water is "the right thing to do" is really very troubling and wrong once you realize the _vast_ resources that could be saved by some very, very basic stuff like sawdust toilets and composting.

I am aware that achieving this on an urban scale would be a challenge, but it can certainly be solved.....

<comment><USER4> Yes, the sawdust-compost toilet works, but is it a viable option? I'd like it to be, but whenever I come across something like this, I put myself into the imagined mind of whoever is the pop-tart of the day (say, the One Direction kids or the girl who hates streaming...can't think of her name). Are they going to go through with the sawdust-on-poo ritual? Probably not.

Any solution that displaces the modern toilet will need to be _at least_ as easy and thoughtless to operate as the current setup. I think a half-way solution is to outfit houses with a greywater circuit that could be used for the toilets. That would make a tremendous cut into the amount of drinking water that toilets are using.

<comment><USER5> There's commercially available composting toilets which automate much of the required work. My parents use a compact Sun Mar toilet which is compact and very low maintenance. It looks like a really oversized toilet. The same company build larger units which do most of the composting in the basement - these look very similar to normal toilets.

[http://www.sun-mar.com/prod.html](http://www.sun-mar.com/prod.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only problem is these Alternate methods are qute good for small low desity vilages but tend not to work very well at scale like the rapidly growing cites in china and india.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am sure there is no way to bypass infrastructure development. You could bypass building phone infrastructure by a mobile phone, but that won't work for broadband internet (too little bandwidth in the air physically for everyone to have a decent connection). You will have to dig ditches and lay fiber optic cable, and have government, law and order, and institutions well- developed enough to allow for that.

Same with sanitation, whatever your toilet is you can't really get rid of disease without running water. Having running water it is straightforward to build sewerage using same underground collectors.

It too much reminds me of futile attempts of commies 100 years ago to build communism by killing all capitalists: there is no shortcut here, you've got to have per capita GDP high enough to have communism first (so far, 100 years later, we're still not there), then it comes naturally and you don't have to kill anyone.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read a PopSci article about a design firm that had created a pet waste disposal reactor at a public park, as it digested the poop it lit a park light. We saw how successful the 'gravity light' was (and its recent big brother is making news) so why not human manure digesters? [1] Sure we don't produce as much as herbivores but it seems like you set up a "power station" at a village, collect peoples donations and dispense tokens, and then can take tokens to enable an outlet where they recharge their phones. Or perhaps just provide a lighted area?

[1] [http://www.mda.state.mn.us/renewable/waste.aspx](http://www.mda.state.mn.us/renewable/waste.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am an MEP coordinator. Poop keeps me awake at night.</comment>


What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? - <AUTHOR> https://zge.us.to/counterfactual.html <comment><USER2> "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

\-- Douglas Adams

<comment><USER3> To go even further:

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

\-- Douglas Adams

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was what Ted Nelson wanted. He called them "Silverstands". Visualize a cross between McDonalds and Google. Or Starbucks, with built-in machines.

The Berkeley Community Memory Project did it, though. They had dumb terminals in coffee houses and such, connected to a bulletin board system. Free to read, you had to put in a quarter to post.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how well the pay-to-post mechanic helps mitigate spam, trolling, and other misbehavior. Does anyone know of modern systems that work in a similar way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _On a local or communal level, all residents would have access to computer systems, and persistent accounts_

Reading this line, I'm reminded of being in University, having written some coursework on the shared computer system, and having a peer use their network contacts of older students to lift my work from my account and copy it, without me ever knowing how. At least with my personal computers, the bits I don't understand simply sit there being mysterious, they aren't other people's playground by default.

It's quite possible that was a formative experience which set me on the path of current strong dislike and distaste for cloud computing and SaaS subscriptions.

" _These local computer spaces would be maintained by a staff of people both serving as administrators and educators._ "

read: would be gatekept by Alan Kay's high priests of a low order. It would be a real achievement if this could be arranged so such people came to be seen and respected more like librarians than like IT Crowd characters.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like thought experiments like this. Sort of along these lines, I've been wondering more why we don't make displays that just connect to a cloud hosted VM instead of PC's -- the end user never has to know what or where is powering the images in front of them. Assuming its just network bandwidth issues preventing this, but eventually this could make more sense than having an actual machine in your home. Would be a lot cheaper, there would be hosting economies of scale, etc.

<comment><USER8> If I'm thinking about this correctly, isn't this essentially what a Chromebook does? Google Sheets, for example, shows me a picture of a spreadsheet that's being generated on a Google server, not my machine. A Chromebook is just a display with a keyboard - and the Chrome browser is just the software that passes the images from the server to my display.

<comment><USER9> Chromebooks are full laptops, with a full OS, running a full browser, windowing system, notification system, device drivers, network stack, etc.

You can even run Android apps, or linux native apps under chrome://settings.

You can edit that spreadsheet locally, just click on offline editing.

Sure when you click save it saves to the cloud, but that's about the largest difference between Chrome OS and Linux, they are running the same kernel after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many people want to create a better Facebook. Open source software, by itself, won't get you there. A piece of the puzzle is missing.

Forget the article's focus on the PC. I think the real question they're reaching for is this: out of all the ways the Internet could have ended up, we arrived at this broken model for online services. The exploration is interesting, but in the end it seems like a cry for help or a call for action.

We need to make the jump from code based projects to service based projects which are done entirely for the public good and not for financial self- enrichment. In most cases, the basic mechanism which allows you to scale your own service is missing... unless you're willing to bill your customers up- front or help exploit them behind the scenes.

So here are the questions: Can we graduate from code based projects to service based projects? How do we contribute code _and operate_ an online service for the public good, at scale, and without compromising our users in the process? Is it possible to make this an easily repeatable process? Is this a significant cure for much of the quiet exploitation behind many of today's "free" Internet services?

</comment><comment><USER11> This stuff is usefull when you have moar than 1 pc. In fact systems like that already exist and sone companies use them. But you need professional sys admin to call to setup all that stuff at least. Most people can't browse internet without bringing viruses.

Lots of people are fine with 1 pc and don't need more.

</comment><comment><USER2> See also: If everything was entirely different, then things... might be different.

>If we were to assume that there is always at least one responsible third party

>the administrators interest would be to advance the knowledge the users

So the US government enacts the largest socialist policy of this century. No one ever thinks to send or view pornograpy over the internet. Cloud computing is solved in the 80s. Cyber security is never a problem (because surely SysAdmins can never be phished, and software would never have bugs in it). No one realizes they can take this (now dirt cheap) simple terminal out of the public space and into their home...

I know people have different ideas of Utopia, but you really need to bend over backwards to get to this. Are there any _humans_ in this world of free software?

</comment><comment><USER12> halfway in it describes Urbit. But i don't think net cafes were very social, the same way cinemas weren't ever a great place to meet new friends.

<comment><USER13> (deleted)</comment></comment>


A Programming Language for Games (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ <comment><USER2> You can watch[1] one of the lead programmers from CD Projekt Red joyfully give an overview of where Jai is at now.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1vbvikDiI8&list=PLhEuCycbde...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1vbvikDiI8&list=PLhEuCycbde- vyFoSBJbdKjw-AVTdQRE5g)</comment>


Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN - I left my job at reddit about a year and a half ago, and a few months later decided to try starting a non-profit and work on building a new site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I felt were hurting online communities.

I've kept it very quiet until recently, but have started telling people about it and inviting them to the alpha over the last couple of weeks. The site's still very minimal at this point (imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects), but you're definitely welcome to invites. Since HN doesn't have private messaging (Tildes does!) please send me an email if you're interested in an invite, and feel free to ask questions here.

<comment><USER4> Are you familiar with metafilter.com and their moderation model?

They charge a one time $5 membership to join, and it's heavily moderated, and they don't tolerate trolls or jerks very long before banning them and returning their money. They're a small scale site, and have a handful of moderators, but requiring someone to lay out actual cash to post seems to deter a lot of the behavior you see at reddit where anybody can create as many sockpuppets as they want with no problem.

<comment><USER5> I thought they kept the money from banned people? Surely that's the point?

<comment><USER6> That's how SomethingAwful worked as well. While money isn't an equitable solution, and it gives the forum a financial incentive to ban users, I think the idea of forcing users to somehow put some skin in the game is a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's been fascinating to watch every online environment almost inevitably turn to mush over time.

Of particular interest to me are Wikipedia and StackOverflow, where the pedantic rule-following, rule-enforcing insider group eventually squeezes all joy and then all productive life from the the system.

Actually, I have little hope for Wikipedia's solving the problem, due to their governance model and political structure, but StackOverflow has economic incentives to solve the problem, so I follow them with interest.

Reddit seems to remain vibrant, albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit…

Add Tildes to the list of projects I'm watching with keen interest. I believe the question of how to keep a massive online community healthy is actually a key problem of our times.

<comment><USER8> > albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit…

I'm more concerned about the opposite effect -- that the default subreddits have become pointless and boring, focusing mostly on "funny" images and cat gifs. Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

At the same time, I think the useful content often falls victim to Gell-Mann amnesia, giving votes to anyone who sounds like an expert. It's hard to identify when someone is really an expert or whether they're merely writing like one... The worst I saw was an explanation of laminar and turbulent flow that was 100% wrong, but highly upvoted until a few hours later people pointed out why it was wrong

<comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't seen yet, reddit itself is also tilting heavily towards prioritizing funny/quick content (even more than it did before) as well. The new desktop redesign that's in progress has infinite scroll, auto-expanded images and auto-playing gifs/videos, and so on. They also added a new default frontpage sort (that you can't change) that tries to hide any posts you've seen before every time you load it, which kind of destroys the ability to have an ongoing discussion thread.

<comment><USER9> The whole redesign has been painful. At first I liked it, but some of the things you've mentioned here as well as the lagginess of the site have really soured me on Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Over the years, we've seen reddit increasingly turn into an echo chamber. I've been personally voted down for telling people in a general subreddit that the anger they feel about ${Political Party A} is the same way that the opposition feels about ${Political Party B}.

What mechanisms are you planning to implement to, for lack of a better phrase, increase exposure to and improve tolerance of different points of view? Is strict moderation the only way to keep groups, or entire sites, from becoming friendly to only one point of view?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely one of the most difficult aspects, and already something that we've had some good discussions about on Tildes. There are some people involved already that have been moderators of some of the really divisive subreddits, and I've also had a lot of conversations over the last year with mods from subreddits that work very hard to promote civil discussions even on controversial topics - places like /r/ChangeMyView and /r/AskHistorians.

In terms of pure mechanisms, there are a few things. Tildes doesn't have any downvoting, so that alone takes a lot of the "conflict" out of interactions. Also, for the foreseeable future, new groups won't be user-created, so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies. We've also been talking a lot about a sort of trust/reputation system ([https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics- future](https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future)), which will make it so that if people get banned for being an asshole, they can't just create a new account and immediately carry on doing the same thing.

<comment><USER11> >so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies

On the other hand, reddit's ability to have user-defined sub-groups has given rise to good communities. To come at this from a personal perspective (though I believe it to be true from many other perspectives), there are a whole bunch of communities on reddit centered around various facets of being transgender. I think in a lot of ways, this kind of community has replaced the old siloed bulletin boards we used to have ten, fifteen years ago, and there's both advantages and disadvantages to that - but either way, I think the point I'm trying to make is that user-defined sub-groups can be a legitimately useful feature that benefits people's lives in a meaningful manner.

What reddit might get wrong is making it _easy_. Have you considered a system like stackexchange use, where setting up a new site is a big deal that requires use cases to be drawn up, example content, users who pledge to partake and maintain the site in accordance with the network's standards, and so on?

<comment><USER12> Tildes plans on opening up group creation at some point, deimorz just didn't want to do that to start since it has hurt other similar startups by doing so, e.g, imzy. Open community creation to start fractures the user base too much and as a result most wind up as ghost towns.

One of the primary ideas with group hierarchy and tagging on tildes is to give us a way to judge interest level in subjects and allow new communities to form organically from that. However Deimos has also said he is not opposed to others ways for communities to form, such as a few trusted users simply saying "hey, this would be a good idea for a community to add" or even a petition from users.

The other nice thing about group hierarchy is that if a new subgroup spawns but after a few months is inactive it can simple be merged back into its parent. E.g. ~music.metal.numetal forms but is dead after a few months, it can just be merged back into ~music.metal. And if, further down the line, more users join and show an interest in Nu Metal it can be given its own community again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Genuinely curious, can you expand on how you will achieve the middle-ground between safe space and hate speech?

I would assume you are aware of Voat.co and think everyone would agree they are suffering from the "paradox of intolerance", how can you draw the line without stifling legitimate conversation? For example I can't even post an honest question about the Israel/Palestine conflict on numerous subreddits due to the inflammatory responses that usually accompany them.

<comment><USER14> I don't know if this is a sentiment others share, but I feel like at some point from 2003-2015 (thinking in terms of 4chan's history) the Internet went from having people who said really crazy shit just being weird people from the Internet to people who said really crazy shit distinctly being far-right and far-left people. Or, they were labeled as such, when in the past, they wouldn't have been.

<comment><USER15> It's a shift in culture, with an added heap of laziness. We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in order to dismiss or demonize, because it's easier to do that than challenging ideas (someone else's or your own).

We went from one identity in the US (American) to putting ourselves and others in boxes (black, white, man, woman, whatever) to the detriment of us all. Identity politics: a curious game... the only winning move is not to play.

<comment><USER16> > We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in > order to dismiss or demonize

As opposed to exactly what time in the history of humanity where this was not the case?

<comment><USER15> Maybe I phrased that poorly, because you're right that we've engaged in this 'otherization' since the beginning of time (for good reasons and bad). Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES into boxes, which increases the polarization of discourse (because now WE identify as a group and not a whole, and those OTHER groups aren't US so clearly they're wrong/bad/etc).

This ebbs and flows throughout history (or rather the US and THEM changes, based on circumstances). There are plenty of unifying events in US history that lead to more of an 'American' identity (wars, 9/11, generally dangerous times or shitty events drive unification out of necessity). Those aren't the times we're in now, but it's cyclical. Some day we will be again, then not, ad infinitum. The pendulum always swings.

<comment><USER16> > Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES > into boxes

Tribal identity is also not new. If there is anything new, it is the existence of a situation where identity tribes can be maintained while being geographically diffuse and intermixed with other identity tribes, which makes it less likely for conflict between identity groups to be quickly resolved to a more stable state by the losing group being excluded from a geographically region with residual members being expelled, forcibly converted or voluntarily assimilated into the locally dominant group, or killed.

Arguably, this is in many ways an _improvement_ , though it does make ongoing inter-group invective worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> http-teapot I find the Technical Goals page particularly interesting and debatable: [https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals](https://docs.tildes.net/technical- goals)

Accessibility and i18n aren't mentioned which is unfortunate.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of the docs pages are still very scattered and incomplete, but those are definitely things that I should add.

Accessibility is definitely important to me, and luckily a lot of it comes naturally because I'm doing things in a very "old school" way like... actually using semantic, hand-written HTML instead of building it as an SPA that outputs unaccessible div-soup.

I've done at least some checking to make sure it's decently accessible, but I know there's a lot more that I can do. I'm hoping to get some people involved that are more familiar with screen-readers and other assistive tech to help me figure out things I need to change. And of course, once it's open-sourced (should be in the next couple of weeks), if people want to help contribute accessibility improvements that would be hugely appreciated.

As for i18n, it's not something I'm planning in the immediate future. Since one of the main goals on the site is keeping up quality, it's necessary for me to be able to understand what's going on in all the groups. However, it's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy.

<comment><USER17> > _However, it 's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization > of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, > where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy._

Finally a Reddit spin-off with a hierarchy! It should do marvels for discoverability, which is dreadful on flat Reddit-like sites.

In my dreams, I'd like an even more Usenet-like system:

* allow each base hierarchy to follow its own set of rules and govern its sub-groups;

* a decentralised system, where each server is free to select which hierarchies it wants to relay or not.

But anyway, even with a single server and single root system, having a hierarchy is already a big 'plus' in terms of organisation.

And if someone really disagrees with the official tildes server governance, since the code is open-sourced, he can launch his own server with his own (disconnected) root hierarchy.

PS: after writing this, I see that the decentralisation matter has a FAQ entry :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've mentioned this for other projects, but why not do the work in the open too? Why not just make the code public as you work on it? It's hard to believe openness and transparency are the goal if there is none during development (even if the code is ugly and you have to turn away too-early assistance/suggestions). No invites, nothing hidden.

Also, wrt AGPL, as a contributor I would personally prefer a "commitment" the other direction. That I can contribute without putting restrictions on the recipient. I think in our current times, preventing commercial and closed source use has little value as people just go elsewhere. I don't want this to devolve into a pros/cons of copy-left discussion, but in general the fewer adoption restrictions the better I'd say for projects like these.

I will say I agree with almost all of your other goals (except some of the stack :-).

<comment><USER12> AFAIK it's literally just a matter of not yet deciding on the license yet which is why deimorz solicited advice about it on the announcement. He already has gitlab set up and we are using it internally. Open Source is coming very soon, we promise.

[https://gitlab.com/tildes](https://gitlab.com/tildes)

<comment><USER18> Cool, it's OK to start code without a license and still let people see it. Similar to other "open" things, to be truly open you don't have to wait until things are set just right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm intrigued, but I think it could use some sort of a demo or something to get an idea of what to expect. As it stands I don't know if I really _want_ an invite, because other than the ideology, which is great, I don't know what is there. (I get that it's a Reddit derivative, but still, I like to play with things before committing to them).

<comment><USER20> I find it strange. They openly advertise it being open source, yet have no way as of yet to access the source code. Even if they don't want people playing with their instance yet, it would be nice if I could host an instance myself (or at least glance at the code). This is especially egregious as one would hope open source to mean not just availability of source, but an open development model (involving the community in important decisions), which this sets a bad tone for.

The ideology itself seems to be a series of blind nuances, without commitment. They profess to want to balance allowing free speech and having a safe space, yet they don't say where they fall on the spectrum, what criteria they use to determine something being over the line, etc. It's very easy to say you care about these sorts of things, much harder to do so in practice.

<comment><USER21> Imo one approach is not going to work for all communities. A project like this which wants to satisfy the entire spectrum on various criterias should cede control to its users. Let the communities decide on every parameter that affects them. Decentralization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this project trying to do anything to solve/improve manipulation / disinformation by large entities?

That's my largest concern in the modern era - information is very difficult to ingest not due to discovery, but trust. One finds it difficult to ingest information from a non-educated domain. Disinformation has made this problem infinitely worse.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER23> We don't have a 'how to' for solving that problem, but yes, everyone wants to stick to fact-based discussions and informed opinions as much as possible.

The site will remain invite-only for a very long time, possibly forever. Tildes tracks who invites whom, and the behavior of the people you invite will reflect on you. If a group of spammers (or stormfront etc) gain a foothold, their entire invite chain can be excised, and they'll be looking for invites again.

Bans matter. Everything on tildes must be earned through the trust system on a per-community basis. Young accounts will not have access to a lot of the site's features, and will only gain access by participating in good faith and getting good feedback (in the form of votes and other metrics) from other users. If the account is banned, they have to re-earn all of that trust.

One of the benefits of not being focused on 'growth at all costs' to please investors is the ability to be more decisive about what users you allow to use the website. The only guideline for that is simple - remain civil. People who behave in a civil manner won't have problems. People who don't, won't be users for long.

This should make it a hell of a lot harder for spammers, trolls, and shills to game the site. Figuring out how to do all this is one of the most active areas of discussion on the site.

</comment></comment><comment> DC-3 In a strange event of serendipity, my frustration with the reddit redesign boiled over today and I paid a visit - as I do once every few months - <USER2> /r/RedditAlternatives. Not two hours previously, this site had been posted - and from my initial skim-reading of its ethos page onwards I have been blown away by how well engineered it is. I've spent three years building up a mental model of the perfect community site, and it's just turned up out of the blue as tildes.net.

<comment><USER23> Tildes is, in a way, built by /r/theoryofreddit and some awareness of past social media and forum history.

The ideas aren't new, not really. We've been on reddit bitching about reddit for 10 years. All tildes is came out of those bitch-fests about what reddit and other sites lack, how they should operate, why can't we have nice things, etc etc etc.

Since reddit refuses to evolve, here we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What will be your policies on adult content? And I don't just mean porn. For example, the BDSM community counts as "adult" but it's not necessarily pornographic.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something I think we'll definitely need to discuss more to try to figure out a good definition (and I know it's not simple at all), but in general I'd love to be able to have groups that support "adult" _discussions_ , but not ones that are just for posting things for sexual gratification, if that makes sense. So for example, a BDSM discussion community would be fine, but not one solely for posting links to BDSM porn.

It's not that I'm opposed to porn or anything, but I've seen how many issues (legal, spam, etc.) can be attracted by directly supporting porn, and I feel like it would push in a very different direction from my main objectives for the site. There are plenty of other places people can find porn on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For those hunting for a sign up link, it appears to be an invite only alpha.

How do you plan to handle scoring? Visible up/down votes? Upvotes and flags? Time based with no scoring?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some information about the current voting mechanics on this page: [https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics](https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics)

"Upvotes and flags" would be the closest, though the "flags" aren't necessarily a bad thing, for example you can flag things as a joke.

I'm also trying to make sure that there are good time-based sortings so that people have predictable feeds - at the moment, there's both a "newest" sort that's just chronological, as well as an "activity" one that works like a forum, where active threads keep coming back up to the top. There's a bit more info about my feelings about that here, as well: [https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make- their-o...](https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make-their-own- decisions-about-what-they-want-to-see)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We're trying to do that too with IRC for a community of people interested by programming ([http://dailyprog.org/chat](http://dailyprog.org/chat)).

</comment><comment><USER27> > The site's still very minimal at this point (imagine a slightly-more- > functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects),

Maybe then you'd be interested in this project I'm doing:

[https://www.talkyard.io](https://www.talkyard.io)

It has features from Reddit, & Reddit like sub communities, groups & permissions, ... + Slack like chat, StackOverflow Q&A. There are improvements over HN: [https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be- improved-...](https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be- improved-3-things). — I'm wondering if it is further ahead than what Tilde is currently, and maybe can time be saved if using it? Then you & I could add features to Talkyard that Tilde needs ... (open source)

... Or maybe, since you've been coding for half a year? you've come a long way already ... and it's too late to consider using something else?

</comment><comment><USER28> I would love to see a federated platform for reddit-like use. Sort of like what Mastodon is to Twitter. Of course I'll admit that it would be probably orders of magnitude more difficult to create, but federation would be a major differentiating factor. Personally I think federation is the only sound architecture for internet systems.

<comment><USER23> There's been some pie-in-the-sky chatter about that. When the tildes identity system (with the trust and reputation and karma decay) is fully cooked, it might be possible to extend that by setting up a mastodon instance. That's not going to happen for a long time, though. The site itself has to come first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This looks interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical of the revenue model. I have a hard time believing a general purpose discussion site can survive on donations. Especially one with a moderation policy. If you see any success, you're going to end up at a point where you need paid moderators - <USER3> moderators who are only motivated by the tiny bit of power they have been granted are a big part of the problem with toxic discussion sites like reddit.

If you have no revenue, you have no guarantee of trusted community management. And thats assuming that you can somehow collect enough donations to cover hosting, which also seems unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great to see a new alternative opening up.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sorry if this is due to my own ignorance, but what's the pronunciation of this? Is it plural "~"?

<comment><USER23> Technically, it's supposed to be 'till-duh-s' but we've taken to calling it 'till-dees' (rhymes with Arbys) because that's just more fun to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, what is it? No screenshots, all talk. The world doesn't need another Digg clone, it needs something brand new. We have enough ripoffs already. Are you going to implement up and down voting? If so, why promote a voting model that empowers the 51% and silences 49%?

Sorry this isn't a popular sentiment, but downvoting my comment proves a point. I have a valid concern, but repeated downvoting on HN leads to a situation where I'm afraid to comment on anything and never provides me the ability to downvote comments myself.

Edit: Hah, what irony [https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#lack-of- downvoting](https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#lack-of-downvoting)

<comment><USER23> If you want screenshots, here you go. [https://imgur.com/a/qit6zPk](https://imgur.com/a/qit6zPk)

The jury is back on downvoting, there's enough science to prove it has a negative effect on community dynamics. While tildes doesn't have precise 'downvoting' it will have tagging that will apply negative effects to those comments and submissions. Think of it as contextual downvoting - and if people abuse tags like 'troll' and 'flame' and 'joke' they will lose their ability to use those tags.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are signs of a startup being bought out? - <AUTHOR> What should internal engineers look for that indicates the company being put up for sale? <comment><USER2> Are you concerned that your company is about to be bought out?</comment>


ApplePy - Apple ][ emulator in python - <AUTHOR> http://jtauber.com/applepy/

<comment><USER2> Was expecting rather huge project and got 650 lines of python. Impressive.

<comment><USER3> was impressed as well. a very nice work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seawolf!</comment>


UK vaccine trial volunteer says she is 'doing fine' after online death rumours - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/uk-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-subject-doing-fine-online-death-rumours-elisa-granato <comment><USER2> This is the sort of unverified dangerous rumours that proliferates sites like Twitter and Facebook, however the bad actors using their platform are free to do it unfortunately.

Maybe you can try not believing everything you read or hear on the internet? I'm sure that is one of the greatest advice given from the early users of the internet which definitely applies to everyone, even beyond social media sites.

So I take almost all such content with a grain of salt.</comment>


Comics printed on Bananas to teach children healthy eating - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LNaL4sehIY4

<comment><USER2> interesting</comment>


Ask HN: Reasonable equity to ask for - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I joined a startup about 8 months ago as a software engineer. I was the only developer on the team at the time until we hired someone to help me out around 2 months ago. The founders have been working in the company for almost a year before I joined but on a separate product which didn't generate much revenue and wasn't a huge success.
I have been getting paid for the past 2 months at a small fraction of my normal salary (2k where I can easily make 8k a month) as the company got accepted to an incubator. I put in ~100 a week in the past 2 months and ~40 for the past 6 months. I didn't sign any contracts with them though so the IP rights of the code remains with me.
The founders have been mainly idea people and focused on business aspect of the company. They promised me equity back when we started but we never put into writing. They each have invested 15k of their own personal money in the company though.
I brought up the equity and they didn't like the idea and they said they have to analyze different things.
I'm wondering what is a reasonable equity demand? I'm expected to take the role of CTO in the company. I have the following options:
- Go without equity which is ridiculous
- Demand for equity and if they didn't give it to me, I'll quit and continue working on the project on my own. (they don't have any access to the code and I'm not under contract; also they don't have enough money to take legal action)
- Stick with whatever equity they offer although I'm not sure how much I should ask for.
I think anything below 25% is not reasonable.
UPDATE
- If I quit that is going to delay the launch by at least a year.
- There is another developer on the team (he is not receiving any equity) and I can easily convince him to quit and help me out. <comment><USER2> 1/(number of founders) is approximately what you should get. Any lower, leave. If you can get more, do.

Don't go without equity, and make sure you have an air-tight contract that strictly defines how you get your salary, even if (whatever BS reason). A startup is still a company, and if they're trying to waste your time I suggest you leave.

Give them a short timeframe to decide. Don't negotiate on it (within reason). Let them know you're not messing around.

If they're just "idea people" who are "just looking for someone to implement the idea", you hold all the cards.

<comment><AUTHOR> they are using the grunt fund model and based on that argue they should receive more equity based on the money/extra year they have put in. So you're saying I should ask for 33%? I have told them if it doesn't get solved by Friday, then I'll move on.

<comment><USER2> You have a year's worth of code with you as well as another employee. It sounds like you're pretty valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If a startup is a marriage, do you really want to marry these people? Do you see this as a quick exit (acquisition) or a longer slog?

If you want in, get a lawyer who specializes in startups (partnership agreements). They will tell you what your rights are regarding IP (varies by state), advise on how to negotiate for equity, and determine if your cofounders have committed any crime. For instance, if they knowingly misrepresented themselves to the accelerator in order to gain funding (keeping in mind IANAL) they may have committed fraud (regardless of what they call it).

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a bad situation. What incubator invested in them when they didn't own the IP of the tech they are building? I think you _should_ be considered a co-founder from your own description of the work put in, but good luck negotiating that when they are treating you like a contractor (but not paying you like one).

<comment><AUTHOR> founders tricked the incubator and me that I was a co-founder

<comment><USER5> If "tricking" is a thing your founders do regularly, then you should probably get the hell out.

<comment><AUTHOR> well they call it not taking risks but I agree

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You're definitely a co-founder at this point. Equal split.</comment>


Elixir v1.3 released - <AUTHOR> http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2016/06/21/elixir-v1-3-0-released/ <comment><USER3> I use phoenix and elixir, I agree with the statement that Elixir is awesome. But don't drink too much cool-aid - Elixir might be dangerous as well.

It is essentially a big pile of macros, so sometimes number of keywords that you have to keep in your head is staggering. Also, Elixir is a pretty big language - I knew Erlang before diving into it - so the barrier and number of concepts that you have to get familiar with is huge. Don't get me wrong - <USER2> these concepts/design patterns are necessary (I am thinking about BEAM and OTP here). Erlang (and therefore Elixir) is complete as development environment, that's where the amount of knowledge is coming from.

Cool intro to erlang/BEAM: [http://www.slideshare.net/BrianTroutwine1/erlang- lfe-elixir-...](http://www.slideshare.net/BrianTroutwine1/erlang-lfe-elixir- and-joxa-oscon-2014)

<comment><USER4> I use elixir (and phoenix) as well, and this is my biggest gripe with the language.

When reading (and reviewing) code, sometimes you can't logically follow what's going on since most of the code is hidden behind macros.

It's ok if I'm on my IDE that helps expand macros to quickly check the flow, but when it's on a webpage or in a gist somewhere, you're on your own.

<comment><USER5> Which IDE do you use? I have been messing around with alchemist on emacs but the learning curve is pretty steep (i'm not an emacs guru).

<comment><USER3> I can recommend: Atom with [https://github.com/msaraiva/atom- elixir](https://github.com/msaraiva/atom-elixir)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're looking for a reason to migrate from a stack like Ruby/Rails to Elixir/Phoenix you should check out my RailsConf talk on that exact subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhTQdcieQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhTQdcieQE)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for all the work you and the good folks at Dockyard put into Elixir Phoenix and Ember.js, my entire stack nowadays is run with Ember in the front and Phoenix in the back, so I very much appreciate all the great addons, packages, talks, etc., you guys have given.

<comment><USER6> We love to reinvest in the open source community. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great! We're busy rewriting a part of our Rails app that we are having difficulty scaling in Elixir. So far what I've seen is phenomenal. Coming from Ruby/OO, it's a bit weird sometimes, but the code is very readable and it's insanely fast. Really the first language since Ruby that I'm quite happily riding the hypetrain for.

<comment><USER9> We're busy rewriting (a part of our Rails app that we are having difficulty scaling) in Elixir

or

We're busy rewriting a part of our Rails app (that we are having difficulty scaling in Elixir)

I assume the former, based on context, but like they say... you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone here switched from a statically typed functional programming language (Haskel, OCaml, F#, Scala...) to Elixir? How would you describe the experience? What do you miss? What do you like/love? Overall, would you recommend taking that step?

<comment><USER11> I switched from Ruby to Scala, and I have had an absolute blast. Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet.

Reading about Elixir is cool sometimes, but then I look at Dotty, and I feel confident that I made the correct choice.

I've also been keeping an eye on Crystal (statically typed Ruby-esque language, LLVM), but they aren't making great PLT choices so far. Maybe they'll get it together later. Scala-Native will blow it out of the water most likely anyways.

Sort of the opposite of losing statically typed programming, but I've really enjoyed the journey and it's improved my work a lot more than I thought it would. I know Ruby pretty well and I used to feel really dumb all the time when things would break, and it took some time for me to realize that it was a language problem. Looking back and reading some of the Ruby that I ported, it was impossible to reason about, and very difficult to make guarantees for. Nothing was solid at all, and runtime errors could hypotehtically stop the show at any time. With Scala there's a much sharper baseline of what will definitely work or not work.

Types make a LOT of things so much easier, in exchange for making a few things SLIGHTLY more tedious. After doing it, I'd make that trade ten more times if I had to.

<comment><USER12> > Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a > future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet.

Where does this impression come from? The BEAM VM is maintained by Ericsson, we get new "major" releases every year. In the last years we got the maps data type, the new scalable timer API, better tracing facilities, dirty schedulers, and so on. Lately, at ElixirConf Berlin, we heard about the current efforts on scaling the Erlang Distribution to thousands of nodes out of the box (it is already possibly today, just not by default).

They are also plenty of research projects, mostly in Europe, about improving the VM, development experience and scalability in different ways, such as [http://release-project.eu/](http://release-project.eu/), [http://www.prowessproject.eu/](http://www.prowessproject.eu/) and [http://paraphrase-ict.eu/](http://paraphrase-ict.eu/). That's not including the usual suspects like Chalmers and Uppsala in Sweden, which have been exploring different aspects, specially in the testing area with property-based testing, concolic testing, systematic concurrent testing, etc.

Companies like Adapteva (behind Parallella), Basho, Erlang Solutions, Plataformatec, and many more are investing in the ecosystem too. If there is one thing I am not worried about is the VM and the runtime bright future.

In my opinion, the simple fact we have a runtime with preemptive light-weight processes from the ground-up (instead of tackled on top as a library/framework) with per process garbage collection and inter-node communication taken care of is enough to hold the VM for the next handful of years, even if all development ceased today.

<comment><USER13> I would argue that Elixir's success will further guarantee BEAM's future. (Not that it would die otherwise, but it doesn't hurt.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've never really looked into Elixir. I'm a Python guy and readability is the first thing that makes me love or hate a new language. Considering I've always found Erlang fairly obtuse visually I am surprised by how easy on the eye Elixir is.

I found this quote very telling:

> "Elixir is simply the first language since Ruby to really care about code > beauty and UX of the language, libraries and ecosystem."

(found here: [http://ruby2elixir.github.io/posts/2015/12-29-what-makes- eli...](http://ruby2elixir.github.io/posts/2015/12-29-what-makes-elixir-so- attractive-for-some-developers.html#qertoip) )

(Of course they meant 'Python' instead of 'Ruby' but hey ;-) )

<comment><USER15> I started out learning Erlang before Elixr had really crossed my radar. I have to say I prefer the Erlang syntax to the ruby-inspired Elixir. Maybe just a matter of what you know, I could see a RoR developer finding Elixir more appealing (I've never really used Ruby or Rails at all).

<comment><USER16> Agreed. The syntax and benefits would certainly appeal if I were a Ruby developer, but coming from a different perspective, I don't get the reason for all the love.

<comment><USER17> What about the pipe operator in Elixir? Isn't it tedious and less readable to apply the same logic in Erlang?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Super excited for this release.

I have to say that learning and using Elixir has been more pleasant than any other language I have ever worked with. Code is easy to follow due to the functional nature of the language, and the community is one of the best out there.

The applications I've written and deployed have been more stable and fault- tolerant than anything else I've ever done, and I've yet to have any performance issues with the language in production.

<comment><USER19> How hard have you pushed Elixir in production?

Snide aside, it's not this mystical technical panacea. As for community... it has had a large upswell of Rails developers... for better and for worse.

That said, I've had a wonderful experience with all the places I've used Elixir in production or soon to be in production.

<comment><USER18> Quite hard, in fact.

My own personal experience doesn't matter much, though, because ultimately Elixir _is_ Erlang and obviously Erlang has been pushed extremely hard in production (Klarna, Heroku, Riot Games, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Elixir 1.3 and Ecto 2.0 are now both released. That means Phoenix 1.2 will be released ASAP.

Definitely give the Programming Phoenix book a read if you haven't already. The Elixir/Phoenix stack should be ready for most production environments now.

[https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming- phoenix](https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming-phoenix)

<comment><USER21> Is there a good guide to Ecto? Aside from OTP, it's the part I have the most trouble with in Phoenix/Elixir.

<comment><USER20> Somehow I've never heard of "sectors" and google isn't any help.

Is there a different name for this concept used in Elixir/Erlang world?

<comment><USER21> Autocorrected from "Ecto" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awesome! Elixir is quickly becoming my new go to language for the web apps and more.

Come for concurrency, stay for metaprogramming. :-)

<comment><USER23> > Come for concurrency, stay for metaprogramming. :-)

hehe. I've only done a bit of Elixir, but coming from a node and Python background that's pretty accurate:

\- It should be the VMs job to take care of concurrency, not the programmers

\- Although functions having different signatures is common in the front end JS world (mainly due to jQuery) metaprogramming is a nicer way to do it.

Also 5-10ms response times for a basic Phoenix web app is pretty rad. If I wasn't building a startup and thus had the time, I'd love to do more Elixir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> `mix test --stale` sound like a tremendous gain in productivity, can't wait to use it.

Is there a way to have `mix test` just call --stale steamlessly for me in my terminal?

The other updates to testing in general signal how important testing it to the Elixir core team, and should be a flag letting you know how robust this language and it's tooling is. Take a look for sure, it's a great language.

<comment><USER25> You can set aliases in mix.exs...

Search for aliases on this page:

[http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/mix/Mix.html](http://elixir- lang.org/docs/stable/mix/Mix.html)

<comment><USER24> Oh that's nice, will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> l used to be/still am a ruby on rails developer. I wrote a very naive web crawler in elixir within a week while learning elixir and I'm blown away by the performance. It basically maxes out my 2011 macbook air's cpu while staying under 200MB of RAM (and maybe another 500 for multiple postgres connections). It basically runs in the background on a computer that can barely handle Firefox with multiple tabs open. The only real bottleneck of my crawler is bandwidth (my internet speed). The performance you get out of the box is insane. And my app really sucks (individual database inserts, saving the entire html to the database, etc).

The transition to a functional language is not exactly a cakewalk and I honestly still miss ruby's ability to be able to hack through arrays (no way to easily get the nth element of an array, it's all head|tail recursion) and hashes (nothing like hash[:key]) to make something "work" but the pipe operators and pattern matching are addictive. The eco system is not "opinionated" at all aside from the constraints of erlang. Documentation is crystal clear. Most of the phoenix stack can be used as stand alone libraries/dependencies. There's a lot less magic and most of the "magic" comes from macros which are much more transparent.

I'm honestly excited for web programming again after being burned out on legacy rails app development and deployment. Mix is like gems/bundler/rails {console, server, etc.} in one neat package done right and minus the headaches. Jose Valim and Chris Mc Chord are brilliant but are very approachable and all around nice people to interact with. In my short time with Elixir/Phoenix I'd say the "hype" actually understates the true potential of BEAM for web development and tiny startups. Also there's also LFE (lisp flavoured erlang created by one of the creators of erlang) you can add to the mix (similar to what you have with Scala/Clojure + Java only with concurrency and multicore out of the box with a tiny RAM footprint).

Learning Elixir was one of the best investments of time I've made in learning a new language and made programming a "hobby" again for me. Being able to write a naive implementation/prototype of an app and not dreading a "real" deployment (pulling out a bag of deployment tricks or stringing together a slew if external libraries/dependencies) is the most liberating experience I've had in a long time.

<comment><USER27> Not that you should do it too much since traversing arrays (lists) is expensive, but [http://elixir- lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/Enum.html#at/3](http://elixir- lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/Enum.html#at/3) gives you the ability to grab arbitrarily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am working full time with Elixir and Phoenix for more than one year now and worked with Erlang before that. It is great to see how well thought out all the abstractions are (both in the language and in the framework). I saw couple of companies cautiously introducing Phoenix in their stack and then going all in. One of such stories will be presented at Erlang User Conference: [http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2016/ben-marx](http://www.erlang- factory.com/euc2016/ben-marx)

Comparing to Ruby: Phoenix promises to be as productive as Rails, but more performant and it keeps the promise if all the libraries you need are already ported to Elixir. Even if not, people consider writing them from scratch.

Comparing to Erlang: Elixir fixes a lot of problems like encoding or inconsistencies in standard library. It introduces many new concepts borrowed from Ruby so it might be a little overwhelming for Erlang developers (Erlang is really small and simple language - the hard part is OTP).

Learning Elixir is like learning to touch type. Initially it slows you down, because you have your habits. You need to learn new abstractions, because old solutions just don't work. After short period you are as productive as before. After a month you can deliver hight quality code quicker which is the ultimate goal of every programmer :) And it magically scales on more machines or at least utilizes all of the cores.

</comment><comment><USER29> The diffing in the tests is absolutely beautiful!

Congrats.

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks great. Any clue when this will be up on Homebrew?

<comment><USER31> Another nice option is kiex, Elixir version manager: [https://github.com/taylor/kiex](https://github.com/taylor/kiex)

<comment><USER32> I'm using asdf - it has the added advantage of being able to manage ruby, erlang, node, and more :) [https://github.com/asdf- vm/asdf](https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf)

<comment><USER30> Oh, cool. I've never heard of that, but it looks nice. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How are the resource usage and performance for Elixir/Phoenix compared to Ruby/Rails and even something like Java/Spring Boot?

<comment><USER6> Significant. You can see some data in a RailsConf talk I recently gave: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhTQdcieQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhTQdcieQE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is Elixir/Erlang/BEAM a good fit to write small command line programs (the kind of programs you could write in Python or Go for example)?

I have three specific questions about this:

\- Can you make your program executable directly from the command line, by using a shebang and building an executable binary?

\- What about the startup time?

\- Do you need a lot of "boilerplate", or can you put everything in a single file?

<comment><USER35> Yes, _kinda_ \- you can compile to an escript, and mix makes that super easy. _But_ it needs an Erlang environment - you can't easily compile to an executable that will work anywhere, so it can be limiting. If you're happy with that limitation, yes and yes to the latter two questions. Otherwise, I'd stick with what you're using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Without digging into it, the Calendar stuff looks like a strict improvement over Erlang's tuply handling of dates, times and timestamps, which are all tuples with three numbers. This can be confusing/problematic, and something that would benefit from typing to avoid mixing up Dates with Timestamps, say.

Can anyone who knows both confirm?

<comment><USER18> Yes, it absolutely is an improvement over erlang-style tuples IMO, and it also vastly improves the interoperability story between the stdlib, date/time/calendar libs, and database libs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Thanks Elixir team!!

</comment><comment><USER38> This is good news, since a few tooling improvements have made it back to the Erlang ecosystem in general (and to lfe.io in particular, which I prefer over Elixir).

</comment><comment><USER39> Any best practice guides for running Elixir in production? How do you handle deployments, hotfixes, multi-node scaling, etc. in an automated way?

<comment><USER40> This doesn't answer all of your questions, but it was the fastest way I found to get an Elixir app into production:

[https://github.com/boldpoker/edeliver](https://github.com/boldpoker/edeliver)

It handles all the basic things I needed to get an app up and running, and supports hot-code upgrades. It supports multi-host deployments, but I think if you want auto-scaling you'll need to do some more work.

One thing to be aware of is that if you're deploying any NIFs or any native- compiled code, not BEAM, then you can't deploy directly from Mac to Linux servers, you'll need to use VMware or VirtualBox or something to actually do the builds. This includes any packages you use which are using natively- implemented code, which I'm pretty sure includes packages that do password hashing and such.

<comment><USER39> Thank you. I hadn't run across that... it looks amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> With hot code reloading, high reliability and fault-tolerant of BEAM, I feel that writing web apps is like writing carrier class applications.

</comment><comment><USER42> Building my first project with it now and loving every minute of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The proper announcement can also be found on our page: [http://elixir- lang.org/blog/2016/06/21/elixir-v1-3-0-release...](http://elixir- lang.org/blog/2016/06/21/elixir-v1-3-0-released/)

It is slightly better formatted and contains images from the graph commands and ExUnit diff format.

<comment><USER43> Thanks! We updated the link from [https://github.com/elixir- lang/elixir/blob/v1.3/CHANGELOG.md](https://github.com/elixir- lang/elixir/blob/v1.3/CHANGELOG.md).

<comment><USER12> Perfect! :D</comment></comment></comment>