MSYS2: Arch Linux on Microsoft Windows - <AUTHOR> https://msys2.github.io/ <comment><USER2> MSYS2 makes Windows be less of a special case for C/C++ software development. You can use all your favorite build tools from Linux, and there is a large and growing library of software you can install with the package manager. It's easy to contribute your own packages or improve existing ones by making pull requests to here:

[https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages](https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW- packages)

<comment><USER3> You could say the same about any other OS that isn't GNU/Linux.

Windows isn't the only one non POSIX and even POSIX ones do have substantial differences.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why my sibling comment is dead, but windows _is_ the only non POSIX and UNIX-like still relevant. May be there is a niche non-UNIX OS that I don't know about?

OS X is POSIX certified, and Linux and BSD are obviously UNIX-like and mostly compliant.

Apart from the precise meaning of POSIX, windows is the only OS in widespread use not part of the UNIX-like family.

<comment><USER3> There are the embedded and mainframe OSes, but I guess they might be considered niche.

Not so niche are iOS and Android, which aren't fully POSIX compliant.

Then being POSIX compliant is only half of the story, because each OS tends to be certified to specific versions and there is room for implementation specific behaviours.

For example, Aix used to have Windows like model for dynamic libraries. OS X and its derivatives have Frameworks and so on.

Finally POSIX only applications are constrained to CLI and daemons only, as everything else falls outside POSIX.

<comment><USER5> > Finally POSIX only applications are constrained to CLI and daemons only, as > everything else falls outside POSIX.

That is not a small group, especially as it includes your build environment. In Windows, many times I had a problem that I cannot run ./configure (or worse: the package used a home grown build system that assumed unix-y environment; py2cairo, I'm looking at you), not only because of bash/sed/m4/awk/etc, but also not counting with cl.exe (VS compiler).

Side note: OSX has not only frameworks, but also dylibs. You can treat existing framework as dylib, it will link fine.

<comment><USER3> > That is not a small group, especially as it includes your build environment.

Assuming the build environment is about CLI and daemons as I mentioned.

Anything else isn't guaranteed to work. To pick on your example, Cairo needs more than just POSIX to compile. X11 isn't part of POSIX.

Have you experience with big UNIXes like Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64 and DG-UX?

It been awhile since I used most of them (1994 - 2006), but I clearly remember surprises with those scripts (autotools and friends) when running them outside GNU/Linux.

Maybe the situation has improved there, since like many of us, my UNIX like experience is nowadays constrained to GNU/Linux distributions and Mac OS X.

<comment><USER5> Build environment usually is about CLI. Without daemons, abstracting from distcc and similar tools.

X11 for Cairo is optional. As is OpenGL or Win32 GDI. But yes, POSIX as it is, is a very limited API and for practical purposes, you need other APIs.

Yes, I have past experience with DX-UG/Tru64 and Solaris. At the time when Alpha AXP was a current chip, it was a little wonder to get to compile the same source code with different compilers, as they had different ideas about what a valid C code is. For Solaris, the easiest way to build anything was to get gcc instead of sun studio compiler. I think that Sun's GNU packages were built using gcc too.

Nowadays, I don't know about all other unices, because I'm using only Linux and OSX too. From the commonly used OSes, the most annoying to build something on is Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any way to summon dang to fix a title? This project uses the Arch Linux package manager, but is otherwise completely unrelated to Arch.

<comment><USER7> Just because it is a lot of clicks away, here is the introduction in the wiki for MSys2: [https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20introduction/](https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20introduction/)

Basically it is mostly POSIX development platform for Window based on cygwin, using the pacman package manager. When I was working on a Windows box oh-so- many-years-ago, I would have loved this. It's too bad that this title is here because I assumed this was running Arch in a container on Windows or some such thing. This is _much_ more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Msys2 is amazing, and everyone should know about and support this project.

<comment><USER6> I had never heard of it before this. Does it have updated cygwin libraries? The ones in msys are really old and crufty.

<comment><USER9> It has new libs like new GCC etc. However, it's not nearly as usable as arch. Things like vim configs have differences.

<comment><USER10> You can always update the configuration to better match Arch's and file a pull request against it. Here's the link to the msys2-packages repo for Vim, for example: [https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/tree/master/vim](https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/tree/master/vim)

Same build system and everything, it just requires some finagling and copying of the PKGBUILDs.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, we really want people attached to or passionate about the projects we provide packages for to jump on board. There's loads of interesting work to do, so please consider rolling your sleeves up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How are packages authenticated? I did an evaluation a couple of months ago but decided to drop it when I saw that packages where being pulled over plain HTTP and seemingly no authentication was being preformed.

For software build systems - my use case - this type of security lapse is a deal breaker.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about msys2, but pacman supports gpg signatures, so all they would need to do (and perhaps have done already) would be to configure it for master keys.

The initial download that includes the master public keys ought to be done over https, of coures.

<comment><USER13> Yep. MSYS2 uses pacman's support for GPG signatures. The links to the installers on the website don't use HTTPS, but it looks like they've added checksums of the installers to the website itself, which is served over HTTPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cygwin's got some issues about portability, IMHO. When a Cygwin application is run from a shell & terminal emulator other then Cygwin's defaults it throws up an error like:

"cygheap base mismatch detected - 0x612F7400/0x612FB400 This problem is probably due to using incompatible versions of the cygwin DLL. Search for cygwin1.dll using the Windows Start->Find/Search facility and delete all but the most recent version. The most recent version _should_ reside in x:\cygwin\bin, where 'x' is the drive on which you have installed the cygwin distribution. Rebooting is also suggested if you are unable to find another cygwin DLL. Segmentation fault"

It's almost like they're coupled to some particular shell and some particularly configured terminal emulator (Mintty). Cygwin is the historical leader of Linux on Windows but that limitation is never desirable.

MSYS and MSYS2 don't seem to have such a limitation and that's nice.

<comment><USER11> IMHO you have managed to get into a situation where Windows has been asked to run two different cygwin1.dlls at the same time and Cygwin has detected this. (I recommend using Process Hacker 2 for helping to track down which processes have handles to cygwin1.dll).

This is unfortunately just something you need to manage for yourself.

Cygwin got itself into trouble like this because it never had a good enough package management story (because Windows can't overwrite a currently loaded dll, they didn't attempt a good system package manager, as best I understand it) so developers would end up bundling cygwin1.dll alongside their own executables instead, so there would end up being lots of cygwin1.dlls on a users machine.

The same thing _could_ happen on MSYS2 if you had two MSYS2 environments, however, to get them both in-sync again, you'd just have to do "update-core" in each and that would be that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So am I understanding this correctly, but this is not a compatibility layer where we can run native linux applications on windows, instead it's like cygwin where we can run ported applications, only this one uses pacman for distribution of packages?

<comment><USER16> Correct. The title is definitely misleading. The linked website doesn't even mention Arch Linux at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, +1 for this project. Using it to compile cross-platform software (Heimdall) on Windows. Saves me maintaining two project files. Pair this with CLion and you've got yourself a complete cross-platform workflow.

</comment><comment><USER18> if you already have Linux or OS X running, but just want to compile some stuff for Windows then I'd recommend looking into [http://mxe.cc](http://mxe.cc)

<comment><USER19> What specific stuff does mxe add compared with MinGW cross compiler itself?

<comment><USER18> It makes it easies to use MinGW in Linux and OS X, I guess. I wasn't aware that MinGW worked anywhere other than Windows before I heard of MXE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like there are two gcc versions, one is msys/gcc which is 4.9 and the other is mingw gcc which is 5.3. For a person like me who doesn't know anything about the differences between cygwin/mingw/msys etc. this is a little bit confusing.

<comment><USER19> As far as I understand, cygwin/msys gcc compiles and links against cygwin.dll/msys.dll which is a incomplete POSIX emulation on Windows. mingw gcc compiles and links against msvc.dll which is MS c runtime for MS win32 native application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love this project. At work we had to make our software run on Windows and MSYS2 makes it feel you're not that far from your confort zone.

Maintainers are really helpful when I sent patches and on IRC, and the software has been running stable for over a year now.

Rock on folks!

</comment><comment><USER22> is this actually arch linux or pacman + packages ported to windows?

maybe that's the same thing, idk

<comment><USER11> It's the latter. Arch Linux is Arch Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> More GNU software taking over windows is a good thing. Especially when it painlessly handles package management. If I'm ever forced to use a windows machine for work, I'll make sure to install this first.

<comment><USER11> It's really nice to see the amount of gnome stuff we've got now. And GTK-3 on Windows looks quite pretty I think.

<comment><USER6> I'll have to check gtk3 on windows out. gtk2 was sad looking on windows compared to Qt and Tk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Would be nice to have a small section explaining what MSYS2 is on that page first.

</comment><comment><USER18> I tried it recently, didn't work with cmake OOB the way old msys did for me.

<comment><USER11> pacman -S mingw-w64-{x86_64,i686}-cmake

There's you out of the box. You might have tried pacman -S cmake which will have gotten you the msys/cmake package which is used for building the packages in the msys repo (i.e. those linked to msys-2.0.dll). Having to add the mingw-w64-.. prefix is kind of strange, but you get used to it.

<comment><USER18> Nope, cmake that was working OOB was installed separately, from [https://cmake.org/download](https://cmake.org/download)

I'll try your suggestion and report back.

<comment><USER11> Well, we package our own software so we can work around any quirks that our system introduces, but actually generic cmake should work fairly well out of the box.

The difference will the down to path translation. We don't stick to the old MSYS rules precisely as that code was re-written for MSYS2. MSYS2_ARG_CONV_EXCL can be used to prevent specific translations from happening too.

A bug report would be appreciated anyway.

<comment><USER18> Sure, I'll make a bug report, should it go here?

[https://github.com/alexpux/mingw-packages](https://github.com/alexpux/mingw- packages)

BTW thing that I was able to compile with old MSYS + cmake from cmake.org, but can't with MSYS2 and mingw-w64-i686-cmake is [https://github.com/Absolight/pkcs11-proxy](https://github.com/Absolight/pkcs11-proxy)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but you need to be clear that it wasn't our cmake build of course.

Generally get used using, asking for and contributing to MSYS2 packages if you can. That way everyone benefits. It's not the norm on Windows, but it very much should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone give a good rundown what is improved in MSYS2 vs MSYS/MinGW?

<comment><USER11> It's too much, honestly, but I'm biased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> how does this compare to the bash emulation that comes with git for windows? [https://git-for-windows.github.io/](https://git-for-windows.github.io/)

<comment><USER27> But isn't that just Bash and a few other tools here and there ?

This is a more complete suit of tools that intends to be sufficient for building any Gnu/Linux/Posix software on a Windows platform. A much more ambitious goal.

<comment><USER11> Git-4-Windows is a great project, just with a different focus. They contribute a lot to our packages (and Cygwin) too since git (and the shell) drags in quite a lot of stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How is fork() implemented?

<comment><USER29> midipix has real fork. It's in alpha [http://midipix.org/](http://midipix.org/)

<comment><USER19> what is the benefit for midipix comparing with mxe.cc mentioned above?

<comment><USER29> real fork is the benefit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> MSYS2 is really nice, but it fails on bigger projects like compiling Blender.

<comment><USER11> There was a time (around Blender 2.70) when we did provide Blender packages and it did compile (of course, since all our software is built from source) but then llvm dropped JIT around version 3.5 and it became incompatible with OpenShadingLanguage.

We made a choice that we'd rather forge ahead with modern LLVM and Clang (for Rust, Clang-GCC and Julia) than hang back to support Blender. Given our very limited resources, this was still probably the right decision, however, we might have made a choice to create a special llvm35 package at that point, but we had no idea that OpenShadingLanguage would take so long to adapt to MCJIT, which the still haven't done to this day, as far as I know.

The important point here is that MSYS2 is a very open-source, limited resources project. We aren't experts in all packages, so if you are knowledgeable about llvm, OpenShadingLanguage and Blender and are interested to do so, then please help out.

For Blender, getting CUDA support into MSYS2 is probably high up on the priority list too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Msys2 is a fantastic project with a lot of packages. It saved the day when compiling H3D and even Hugin.

It is a pitty it cannot build latest Abiword/Gnumeric yet. But we have Cygwin for this.

In any case it is a very serious addition to Windows ecosystem and people should start rethinking using Visual Studio which provides no pre-compiled libraries or package management.

However, one ca get a descent alternative development environment by using

msys2/tdm-x64 and fedora precompiled packages.

<comment><USER11> I have literally no idea why you would even consider combining MSYS2 with TDM-x64 and Fedora precompiled.

Just use MSYS2. It is all that you need. Can you explain why you would do this?

<comment><USER31> Because I needed libvirt.

I have msys2/mingw64 but for my Golang cgo I have an alternative install

tdm-x86_64 + fedora mingw64 x86_64 packages

I used msys2 to hand compile pkg-config with these packages.

In this respect I have libvirt available to my golang.

<comment><USER11> It seems we have a libvirt PKGBUILD but no released package. Here is the MSYS2 approach to software development, shamelessly taken from ArchLinux. Could you try this:

        pacman -Ss base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
        git clone https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages.git
        cd MINGW-packages/mingw-w64-libvirt
        MINGW_INSTALLS=mingw64 makepkg-mingw -s
        pacman -U *pkg*xz

.. and if it doesn't work file a ticket on: [https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW- packages/issues](https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/issues)

.. otherwise you should have an MSYS2 libvirt.

even if it does work, file a bug asking that mingw-w64-libvert gets packaged.

You really should not mix binaries from different ecosystems and compilers. I do not know how TDM configure their compilers or how Fedora configures theirs (exception models, C++ ABIs) but it is a risky business and I caution strongly against it. All your packages should be compiled with the same toolchain.

Why would you use TDM compilers anyway? MSYS2 comes with its own: pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain gets you the 64-bit version.

<comment><USER31> I keep the ecosystems tightly separated. I will try later today and inform you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A game of Risk - <AUTHOR> https://risk.joshbassett.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's a link to the code from the game, but here it is for anyone who missed it:

[https://github.com/nullobject/risk](https://github.com/nullobject/risk)

</comment><comment><USER2> The mechanics are not clear to me, though I have never played a computer version of the game.

</comment><comment><USER3> The visual design reminds me of the iOS game Strategery. I used to play it constantly.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> The map has too few countries and the games are too short. Can you add some configuration to set the map size, perhaps small/medium/big is enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> The maps are randomly generated. Sometimes they are small, sometimes they are large.

<comment><USER4> I just got map with 7 countries for 4 players. It's too small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks, Josh.

Simple but addictive.

I should really study the code to see how the AI works!</comment>


Scaling PostgreSQL at Braintree: Four Years of Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/scaling-postgresql-at-braintree-four-years-of-evolution <comment><USER2> > _Unlike most applications, we are much heavier on writes than reads._

I think what they meant to say is that unlike most _web_ applications, they are heavier on writes than reads.

Write-heavy workloads -- aka OLTP -- are the bread and butter of relational databases. To the point that people complain they aren't as good at read-heavy workloads.

<comment><USER3> What they probably meant is the do more writes than web applications, not more writes than reads.

<comment><USER2> Which was my point.

Credit card transactions are literally the textbook example of OLTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found this article incredibly interesting, because I've only worked on low- traffic Rails apps so far. I've always wanted to learn about sharding, but haven't needed to, and didn't know where to start.

Now I'm inspired to start up a few VMs and have a play with the gems they mentioned, and try to get replication and failover happening.

<comment><USER5> Do play, but also consider not sharding at all, e.g. [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1509-mr-moore-gets-to-punt- on...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1509-mr-moore-gets-to-punt-on-sharding)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its not scaling if its not chock full of numbers (and maybe even graphs). There's not one mention of requests per second or latency in this. Users/capacity per shard, bottlenecks run into, etc.

<comment><USER7> Scarcasm/trolling aside, it's not four years of scaling because they didn't need more than one server until late last year.

Also, people, _please_ stop trying to do "automatic failover". There is no such thing, in the total sense. You have to have humans checking to make sure everything ok, and lots and lots of tripwires to prevent one of a multitude of catastrophic problems from occurring. Just automate pieces in totally reliable and non-harmful ways and let a human oversee the cut-over.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the first few years, we scaled vertically rather than horizontally. We still went through many rounds of scaling our single server, changing both hardware and software configs.

We were reluctant to do automatic failover as well, since we all hear horror stories about automatic failover causing more problems than it solves. However, we changed our minds this summer for a couple of reasons. One, our traffic continues to grow and people rely on us for payments. If our database server crashes in the middle of the night, we don't want our customers to have to wait for us to do manual failover. Two, we felt a lot more comfortable with Pacemaker and PostgreSQL streaming replication failover than we used to with DRBD. We did extensive testing and tweaking, and we believe we understand the failure scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, DRDB is terrible for write heavy performance. It was probably the source of many of your MySQL issues as well, but it's good that you've found a new home regardless.

</comment><comment><USER3> To author: For how long could you have avoided the need to chard if you would have off-loaded all the read-only queries to multiple hot-standby slaves instead? Your scaling story is almost identical to ours, same pg versions on same years, DRBD, etc. But we haven't split the database into multiple chards yet. I'm hoping to post-pone it for at least a year by off-loading read-only queries to a lot of synchronous slaves.

<comment><USER9> I would imagine given their product they have a very write heavy work load and the read load, while non-zero, isn't a major concern. In typical web app environments however, you can definitely increase your "time to sharding" with read slaves and increased caching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that isn't mentioned which we are currently facing problems with is the change of timeline once a failover occurs. The code isn't yet merged to use the stream to push the timeline update so all slaves must read from the shared archive.

Maybe I've implemented things incorrectly, but this is a frustrating issue for the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be safe, we always rebuild the old master after we fail over to a synchronous standby server. We have capistrano tasks to automate it, so it's not too bad. The async servers merely follow the new server after the IP moves, so we don't need to do anything there.

Edit: We also don't increment the timeline on failover. Instead, we stop PostgreSQL, remove the recovery.conf, and restart.

<comment><USER11> I've got a 3 level setup, with a primary/secondary pair that are big machines, and a tertiary that's enough for an emergency, but not much more. They're all running hot spare.

I didn't feel safe blatting the new primary back to the secondary till we had the third level in there, since once you've failed over, you're at the mercy of that one machine and your latest backup is on the one that you're overwriting.

The third level one will follow the change in the recovery timeline if it's incremented in recovery.conf, and you make sure that it gets the appropriate history file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for the article. What do you use to measure your PostgreSQL performance? Do you use any visual dashboards to track down bottlenecks, etc?

<comment><USER13> If you are lucky enough to be able to use Postgres 9.2, consider running pg_stat_statements _all the time_. It is one of my favorite pieces of work: it canonicalizes queries and can tell you a number of useful statistics on it.

One of the advantages is that it can help you identify queries that are both very short but frequent (and could use a cache, or whatnot), and would fly below the radar of most log aggregations, because most people turn off logging off for very short statements. See also: identifying n+1 query pathologies.

It really blows away log analysis and pg_fouine for all but the most heavyweight tasks, and its approach is a lot more sound than log analysis tools because it uses the semantic representation -- not the syntactic one -- of the query submitted.

<comment><USER3> If you need even more fine-grained statistics, check out <https://github.com/johto/call_graph>

It allows you to get statistics per top-level function, which can reveal abnormalities otherwise impossible to detect, such as a function which is usually very fast, but very slow for a small number of calls relative to the total number of calls. Consider fa()->fx() and fb()->fx(), if fa()->fx() always is fast and you have a million such calls, but for some reason fb()->fx() is very slow, but you only have a few such calls, fx() will look like a very fast function without any performance problems, if you only look at pg_catalog.pg_stat_user_functions, but call_graph will reveal fx() being slow when called by the top-level function fb().

This is only relevant for systems always accessing the database through Stored Procedures though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why do you put audit logs in postgresql? Wouldnt riak be a better storage?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a few different types of auditing information. At that point in the timeline, it was all in PostgreSQL. Today, we keep only the critical auditing information in the main database.

<comment><USER15> Anything special about audit tables? Different machine? (maybe this is sensitive info)</comment></comment></comment>


A Peek Inside Dropbox's Company-Wide Hack Week At Its Big New SF Offices - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/a-peek-inside-dropboxs-company-wide-hack-week-at-its-big-new-sf-offices/ <comment><USER2> Awesome, that's how a hack-a-thon is done.

<comment><USER3> Sure... now if only they cared about security and privacy as much as spideroak. As long as Dropbox sees de-dup as a competitive advantage, they will never offer client-side encryption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shame that the "big new office" is "open concept". What a waste.

<comment><USER5> Why are open-concept offices a waste?

<comment><USER6> This one's been beaten ad-nauseum:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270424> (HN developers prefer private space)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3729302> (A good summary discussion and a blog post about why open plan offices suck)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876261> (Another discussion and article summarizing research into the negative effects of open plan offices).

It's very, very hard to get any kind of real creative work done in an open- plan office with more than a few people in it. The open office plan generates a vast quantity of distractions and doesn't scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I noticed was all of the Dell hardware. I'll never understand why some companies state that they are basically a Mac only company.

<comment><USER8> >I'll never understand why some companies state that they are basically a a Mac only company.

Do any companies with more than 10 people actually do this? It makes sense to offer whatever the employees want (mostly macs these days), but why limit yourself to only macs?

<comment><USER7> Twilio used to say something along those lines in their perks for their jobs pages... but it seems to be gone now.

Edit: Found it on Wayback machine

"We heart Apple Computers, and believe in using quality products to build quality products. Hence, all of our employee boxen are Macbooks or iMacs (or both)."</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Perf-mon – Performance reports - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jacted/perf-mon <comment><USER2> I would possibly consider a different name. Modulo the hyphen, this has the same name as an old but still commonly used Windows performance profiling tool, and it might make looking up your tool difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will try to find a new name, thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER3> Also mention somewhere that this is just a node thing</comment></comment></comment>


Pfizer, BioNTech began human trials of Covid-19 vaccine. Could roll out in Sept - <AUTHOR> https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine-human-trials-20200505-fqdnotkzbzbw7bzfozc2hnw4ym-story.html <comment><USER2> I don't know for the Pfizer vaccine, but at least the Oxford and the Sinovac candidate vaccines have been tested in animals: the former should (according to a New York Post article) send their results for peer review soon, the latter has a preprint on biorxiv.</comment>


Any suggestions for a recurring billing system? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to integrate a recurrent billing system with a small e-commerce web-site. While PayPal is always an option I wanted to investigate if there are any alternatives. We are EU based, so Amazon Payments would not apply ... <comment><USER2> vxsbill.com

They're pretty good. You need a dutch presence though, I hope that's not a problem.

I'm working on a large posting about e-commerce, I hope to have it ready by Christmas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will check it out.</comment></comment>


HN meetup in Chicago - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/hn-chicago/browse_thread/thread/4631336aca743e58

<comment><USER2> So Monday 10/18, 8pm, at Hophaus <http://www.thehophaus.com/> at 646 N. Franklin?

<comment><USER3> Monday is the 19th, but otherwise, yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll go Monday. I'm not a huge fan of Hop Haus, but it is very easy to get people together there; on a Monday night, the dining room will be pretty much empty.

(We do ChiSec every month at Hop Haus).

Hopleaf is D.O.A. for a meetup. It's a madhouse every single night of the week.

I'd love to convince you all to meet at Violet Hour, but I'm thinking $11 cocktails don't match the Chicago startup ethos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Violet Hour would be cool, except that we're trying to keep it close to the loop so that it is easiest for everyone to get there.

Check the thread later, I don't think the monday time is settled yet.

<comment><USER4> Well, figure out a date and let us know here; I'm not sure why Google Groups is a better place to organize a meetup than right here, though.

My advice, after doing ~30 ChiSec meetups averaging ~30 people in the last year and a half, is just to pick something, get people together in a room, and then if the date isn't perfect you can move it next meetup.

<comment><USER3> Agree about the google groups thing. Someone should just register a twitter account for HNchi or YCchi like the Melbourne guys did: <http://twitter.com/ycmelb>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, being a student out in the middle of nowhere sucks, I miss all the cool events in the city.

<comment><USER6> Let me guess, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign?

<comment><USER7> That's where I am. However, there's a little thing called Reflections | Projections this weekend ;-)

<comment><USER8> hey dave, good to see you on news.yc haha (I met you at ACM & HackU) Pity we can't make it monday. It would have been cool :/

<comment><USER7> Could you facebook message me? I don't recognize your username, sorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Security Decisions Conference will be in downtown Chicago 10/21 and 10/22. Any chance the meeting could be held then? You'd probably get a lot of infosec people. See [http://infosecuritydecisions.techtarget.com/infosecuritydeci...](http://infosecuritydecisions.techtarget.com/infosecuritydecisions/index.html) for details.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'll be there, but I'll be late, so don't y'all all pack up and move from there. Besides, I'm already budgeting for the calories of a burger.

<comment><USER11> I'm down. This should be awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice. Thanks for finally getting Chicago organized!

I am both looking forward to and dreading meeting tptacek in real life ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> i'll try to come down from the nw suburbs for this.

now if i could just find a train schedule...

<comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879439></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What percentage of TV commercials can be considered a success? - <AUTHOR>

I watch my fair share of TV and obviously the commercials. Surely a lot of commercials do well, but there must be many that also completely fail. <comment><USER2> "do well"?

How many times did you go buy a product advertized on TV?

If at all, they have a negative effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean overall, not just me. Obviously I won't be buying most things targeted at women (as I'm a man)</comment></comment>


A Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes - <AUTHOR> https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-great-norm-shift-and-triumph-of.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> I know quite xkcd is kind of passe: but this diagram of American political representation in the Congress never fails to pique my interest any time I see it. [https://xkcd.com/1127/](https://xkcd.com/1127/)

<comment><USER2> I meant "to quote".</comment></comment>


Upstart matches startup-minded college seniors with wealthy patrons - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/09/24/ex-googler-dave-girouard-gets-his-kicks-jumpstarting-startups/

<comment><USER2> "Girouard himself left a solid gig at Google — something his financial advisor counseled strongly against — to launch this effort with backing from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA and Mark Cuban"

Yeah, seems like a huge career risk. Who listens to their financial advisor for career advice?</comment>


Let's Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women - <AUTHOR> http://www.gurianinstitute.com/blog--newsletter/lets-use-hard-science-to-help-tech-companies-advance-women <comment><USER2> The fundamental problem is, that hard science fundamentally can not do that job. A policy document is a normative document, science produces descriptive accounts. Even if we assume for a moment that we had a full scientific theory of gender, then we would still need to know what to do with that. Should we then optimize for worker satisfaction, worker of female sex productivity, welcoming to female gendered customers, inspiring the next generation of engineers averaged on the likelihood of them joining the company? This is just an instance of the well studied is/ought problem [0], that you can not deduce from a list statements about how the world looks, how the world should look. (And looking through the objections on wiki and sep, they all seem to rely at least on the assumption of a full theory of gender above.)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem)

<comment><USER3> Science might not do that job, but a least it can point out to you the flaws in your reasoning, and, once you have settled on an reasoned objective, help you construct effective tools, techniques and programs to reach that objective. In other words, Science is what keeps you from insisting earth is the center around which the universe revolves, sacrificing virgins to the rain gods in a drought, or investing in gyms to get to the moon by improving the high jump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The number of women studying computer science rose dramatically during the tech bubble and dropped off after the crash. I think we're going through a similar cycle.

When programming is lucrative and viewed as high status, it becomes a target for feminists and they push for more female coders. When it's not high status anymore (when the funding environment contracts again), girls will stop enrolling in CS as much and feminists will stop targeting it as a powerful job that needs more women.

It's my opinion that most women probably don't want to be programmers/ICs deep down, but in a bubble environment many women will gravitate towards CS because it's where the action is in the economy, and affirmative action makes it an artificially attractive choice for them.

We're depicting programming and software as the way of the future in business in order to hype startups, so if most women don't really enjoy coding, that's very problematic for feminists. So there is huge resistance to the idea that most women aren't that into coding.

It's like James mentions in his memo, from a logical perspective it's completely arbitrary to want to move women into software because it's mostly men, just like it would be arbitrary to advocate for more female miners or waste managers. The key to understanding the reaction to his memo is to acknowledge that it's born out of a feminist anxiety that if software is run by men, and the future of business is software, the future of business is still going to be dominated by men. So in context, his memo is really challenging the idea that women prefer economic equality.

<comment><USER5> > It's my opinion that most women don't want to be programmers/ICs deep down, > but in a bubble environment many women will gravitate towards CS because > it's where the action is in the economy, and feminists pave the way with > aggressive affirmative action campaigns that make programming an > artificially attractive choice for women.

Why is this your opinion?

Have you spoken to a lot of women? Have you conducted any kind of surveys or polls? Or are you just making up whatever fits your biases?

> It's like James mentions in his memo, from a logical perspective it's > completely arbitrary to want to move women into software because it's mostly > men

The naivete of HN never fails.

It's perfectly rational for any business to want more women. Or minorities. Or even more children. Every business in the world wants the deepest and biggest talent pool possible.

And of course, this is the real issue. Once programming is demystified and women do enter the field in force it'll be pretty hard for deeply mediocre javascript monkeys to command six figure salaries, won't it?

All the fuss, all the whining -- it's completely self-serving. The idea that women can thrive in law, medicine and hard sciences but they can't master CSS is laughable.

But here's the thing: it's not mastermind feminists who are driving this. It's capitalism. People can whine about feminism and uppity women taking their jerbs -- this is absolutely nothing new. Still, despite pervasive discrimination, the market is going to produce that talent. There was a time when people thought programming was difficult. Only eleet hackers could thrive in Sillicon Valley. Now middle schoolers build Android Apps in a couple of days.

In the end businesses are going to search endlessly for more and better talent, people will gravitate to the jobs that produce the most stable income streams, and everybody is going to strive to keep the market open and fair. You can fight this or whine about fantasy feminist schemes or you can embrace a future where the field has been dramatically opened to all comers.

<comment><USER6> You were right on calling him out with his opinion. But you make the same mistake:

> But here's the thing: it's not mastermind feminists who are driving this. > It's capitalism.

"Have you conducted any kind of surveys or polls? Or are you just making up whatever fits your biases?"

To be honest: It is probably a mix of the societal pressure from feminists, and you are right capitalism too. The hard thing is that this is not hard science, no one can know the real ratio of the two. For me it seems you're stating this like every societal changes root was better productivity ( communism, French revolution ? ).

> The idea that women can thrive in law, medicine and hard sciences but they > can't master CSS is laughable. I don't see women thrive in math, physics, > engineering science, but I might be wrong. Biology is a good counter example > though.

To be honest I think it is perfectly possible that you are right in everything! But I'm also sure that there is no human being on this planet who could say that he understands this problem 100% while being fully rational, and not let the emotions punch trough here and there.

The point of my comment is that: I see one side as "There might be other factors" and the other is "There are no other factors". The second one is a much harder statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish more people could see that if Damore is right about biological variation underpinning sex disparity in tech, this exposes an _opportunity_ for women. In the absence of affirmative action, women who pursue engineering roles will reveal themselves as having above average interest in tech—not only above women generally, but above men too.

My evidence is anecdotal, but it's strong. I first noticed this after months of teaching at a coding school, but I found, with cohort after cohort, women reliably outperform the men. Note they're dramatically underrepresented (15 to 1). The interesting thing is that _whatever_ the reason for their underrepresentation—be it oppression or biology, or a mix of the two—these women self-select into an elite group by braving a predominantly male environment. Odds are they're good at programming.

My point is that if you belong to a minority in a competitive environment, it's important to consider the upsides too, in addition to the real and steep obstacles.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Hostility is, by its very nature, a violent attack on a person or group.

Remember reading about how what Damore wrote was "violence". Wonder what those who suffered from physical violence such as rape think when "violence" is used in such a context...

Then in general it seems like firing him was admitting defeat. Google could have responded by compiling a set of studies to disprove what they claimed were obviously wrong and misguided ideas. Surely they have enough people who know how to compile a research survey.

At the same time I bet Damore knew that this was going to lead to termination. He forced their hand publicly and they responded as any beaurocracy would be expected. There was basically 0 chance they would have said "oh thanks for the research and suggestions we will review and redesign some of our policies after you've publicly shamed us".

It seemed to them on the surface they won that battle but at the same time the admitted defeat too. It is a bit like someone responding to an argument where peer reviewed research is presented with "well, your mom is fat and you're stupid". That ends the argument, for sure, and the person saying it feels they've won the argument. But everyone else sees it as admitting defeat more or less.

The more interesting thing I found was that some "news" outlets like Gizmodo, chose to publish the letter but omitted the research. That seems strange. If one didn't know any better, they might assume they secretly agreed with the points made and did everything they could to promote them further. Few things work as well as deliberate and obvious censorship to make people pay attention.

</comment><comment><USER9> Harvey Mudd had some good success getting their enrollment up: [https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender- bia...](https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bias-and-now- more-than-half-its-computer-science-majors-are-women/)

<comment><USER10> Less than one year after that article, Harvey Mudd's President says the last year was the school's worst ever resulting in a suicide, nearly 10% of the students on suicide watch, and having to simplify the curriculum from hard STEM with more electives.

As someone who nearly went there (accepted but opted for one of their rivals), it's disappointing to see.

Ref: [http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/02/540603927/a-colleg...](http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/02/540603927/a-college- president-on-her-schools-worst-year-ever)

<comment><USER11> Harvey Mudd internal report mentioned: [1]

(That's now inaccessable (403 Forbidden), and the page that linked to it, "[http://tsl.news/news/6611/"](http://tsl.news/news/6611/"), is failing with a Ngnix error (502 Bad Gateway).)

I got to read it before it went down, and it sounded like they'd reached the student workload levels associated with the first two years of any serious engineering school. Their restructured student body wasn't ready for that.

[1] [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/content_link/S4gumhMUSUdKB...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/content_link/S4gumhMUSUdKBJ5MO6vsEF6EiRtQCDE1hBRJCsIlq4fAzL9JryWeOWdWGtmGnTLZ/file)

<comment><USER10> Ha. It's funny that it's gone now. I read it just after I posted my comment. That's just a coincidence.. right?

Also, the first two years at an engineering school is awful by definition. Generally by then you learn to a) prioritize, b) take the right combo of classes, or c) go somewhere else. I opted for a & b but many friends and smart people opted for c.

<comment><USER11> If you go here [1] sometimes you can get the report. They may have a caching server that's out of sync. If the document is too small to read, open its frame in a new window.

[1] [http://tsl.news/news/6611/](http://tsl.news/news/6611/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> By all means, be data driven.

The science is out when it comes to determining a biological basis gender preferences for tech or leadership.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The anti-science bias in this explanation has two faces, both well-meaning > but both untrue. First, the science of gender difference is not gender > stereotyping but, in fact, real, as the sources above will prove to any > executive or person who studies them. Second, even if someone felt like that > gender trait difference constituted untrue gender stereotypes, there is no > hostility in the science. Hostility is, by its very nature, a violent attack > on a person or group. Damore was not hostile nor violent; he was measured > and scientifically accurate. Similarly, Larry Summers was not hostile, nor > were Barbara Annis, my coauthor and I, in Leadership and the Sexes.

The whole idea that we have to dress up a topic in well-meaning white lies because feelings might get hurt is what has been making me less and less receptive to certain messages and points of view.

<comment><USER14> I may be missing something in that quote. What are the white lies in that paragraph?

<comment><AUTHOR> "both well-meaning but both untrue"

The way I understood it is that the paragraph talks about white lies, not that the paragraph itself tells white lies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is going to be somewhat long and heartbreaking but I promise it will converge on an intelligent point at the end.

Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help.

In the richest country in the world, at the very heart of the tech industry...let me repeat this again, we have scores of people living in abject poverty...exactly like animals.

After multiple viewings of this situation, I stopped looking at the homeless people and I started noticing the people walking past these individuals: Staring down at their phones, the residents of Silicon Valley have trained themselves to wear blinders to the abject, deplorable poverty of their fellow men. They are Tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, SnapChatting their lunch.

Solving easy problems. Making easy statements. Liking the right comments and the right posts, retweeting the appropriate social messages. So simple and easy! Click! Like! Done!

As I stood in line at one bodega, I noted the professional and skilled manner in which a white collar worker like myself standing in line completely failed to look at, respond to or acknowledge the presence of a drug addict who was begging him for change.

What a wonderful technique, I thought to myself. I had been doing it all wrong previously by even remotely acknowledging the homeless whenever they hassled me on the street. After observing this man's behavior, I adopted it. I learned: Just pretend they don't exist and they will go away.

So back to my main point:

Silicon Valley is a corrupt, horrible place that has decided it's #1 problem to be solved is the gender imbalance in software engineering. Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them, the entire tech industry has collectively jammed it's head deep, far into it's own anal cavity and decided that the optimal use of all of it's social justice time should be on ensuring that highly privileged women who have attended universities and received educations which fairly guarantee that they will achieve salaries that only .01% of the entire globe will ever achieve are the most pressing concern of the moment.

Every single day I see nothing but a relentless circular pounding on this topic. Women must learn to code! Women must learn to code! Women must learn to code!

The other half of the issue is just as fun: Our #1 issue as an industry is that women who are in the very upper 0.5% of the world must earn slightly more money. About 3%-5% more money. Yes, THAT is the issue we must harp on constantly all day, every single day online.

And the people living like animals on the streets we are ignoring? Yeah, fuck them, lets teach girls to code.

<comment><USER16> "Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them"

That requires ensuring everybody that wants a job has one unless exempted by age or infirmity.

Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option.

And if there is one thing business hates, it's having to compete - particularly for workers.

A society that cannot work out that healthcare should be based upon need, not ability to pay, is already moribund and dying on the inside.

<comment><USER17> > Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in > wage negotiations. They always have another option.

Businesses would never let this happen though, they would just lobby the government to let them bring in more workers from other countries until they have the upper hand again. The third world has virtually an endless supply.

<comment><USER18> It's naturally that they'll lobby the government for that, but it doesn't mean that they should or will succeed in that, after all, the (current) workers have all the votes that politicians want.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Warren Buffett is investing in Electric Car Company BYD - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/13/technology/gunther_electric.fortune/index.htm

<comment><USER2> He used to proudly say that he only invests in businesses he understands.

He seemingly lost his mind with his investment in Concoco Phillips.

I hope electric cars do well too, but this is another lapse in judgment.

<comment><AUTHOR> He makes mistakes, Conoco Phillips certainly was not the first and wont be the last. One could say his first mistake was investing in Berkshire itself.

<comment><USER3> And he's not afraid to publicly admit his fault and accept blame for those mistakes. Rather refreshing, compared to the CEO comments in most of the other annual reports I've read.

I don't like that BYD seems to be dependent on cheap labor to be competitive; hopefully that will be a short term situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it very ironic that a former communist owned car company could be turned around and become world-leading in a short time, simply because it just adapted to free market principles : make something the people want, and can afford. This guy soundsm more like a 21st Century Henry Ford than anyone currently based in Detroit.

All the while the rest of the world are pointing and laughing at the seemingly poor build quality and lack of 'badge', this company will sell millions of cars and gradually reinvest the R&D to make them better. This is what the Japanese did 30 years ago, and what the Koreans have been doing for the last 20. It's a much sounder business strategy than taking the same old rubbish and updating the styling every year, then trying to move it with special incentives and deep discounting, all while using advertising to evoke the memories of a bygone era, and lobbying the government for more handouts. GM will go the way of British Leyland, and BYD will go the way of Toyota.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't know Buffett invested in BYD. Also, I didn't know BYD makes electric cars.

BYD produces tin-can cars. They are made of crap and have no safety. Technologies and design used by Chinese car manufacturers are stolen from other manufacturers (except for some engines, which are licensed from Japanese car makers).

<comment><USER6> Most people who just want a cheap electric car probably won't care. And that's their great strength.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> * Why Warren Buffett is investing in Electric Car Company BYD * Because the electric car got backed by gordon brown and perhaps other governments. Tis a fascad, you don't get innovation from the expected.</comment>


Is Angular the JS frameworks for hobbyists? - <AUTHOR>

I have been playing and trying to built stuff with Backbone and ember few times.
JS is the language of web and it needs to be known but alas (or luckily) I'm not a daily JS developer and code most of the times in python so I'm far from mastering it.
My main issue was that I was hitting the learning curve every times I was coming back to my backbone or Ember code. Why? probably the lack of experience in JS, the amount of boilerplate code, the lack of structure/guidance (too agnostic for an hobbyist)
Recently I gave a go to Angular, it feels good! Clear codebase, very explicit and so very easy to come back into it after few days.
I'm not starting the debate which is better or not. But I thought that it was maybe just a very well suited framework for people like me who develop backend most of the time WHO ARE JS HOBBYISTS ...
Any feedbacks ? <comment><USER2> Yes, but it's also suitable for "real" applications.

I write a lot of hobby/side projects just for experimenting and learning, and Angular has become my framework of choice. You can just get stuff done so quickly and easily, particularly after you've been using it for a while.

Angular has a sort of jagged learning curve. It's shallow for quite a while, and you can do a lot of work in that shallow half. However once you need to start writing your own directives, the curve steepens. It's not the steepest curve, but there's definitely a transition. This is when you hear people talking about Angular being difficult, citing things like transclusion.

I've made it to the other side of the curve, and I love writing directives and services, it's become fairly intuitive to me. With the modular architecture, if you there is a large library of available modules/plugins, even people who don't want to write a lot of JS and understand Angular to it's core can do some amazing things. That's why I built <http://ngmodules.org> , so that people can share modules, and AngularJS can be accessible to more people.

<comment><AUTHOR> No doubt that you can built real application with it, why I choose it.

My point was more that it's reachable framework and once you got the logic, it starts to make sense. About the learning, I started some little wall when I have to write first directive or didn't the route event was not fired when you don't have a view element.

I realized that learning angular is going to be a long road but it seems to be at least enjoyable.

Btw, I meant hobbyist not in the bad way but more highlight the opportunity to build modern web app for people like me who are not hardcore JS developer.

Thanks for the link

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sure. Also check out Meteor (which will blow your mind, but is very opinionated about what else you can use alongside it) and Derby.</comment>


Silicon Valley's $585B Problem - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/silicon-valley-tech-ipo-market/ <comment><USER2> Is it really that surprising? IPO is based on what the real value should be... is it surprising that they settle in close to that value? For companies that are barely, if as all breaking even, who are planning on investing any intake into additional marketing rather than shoring up their platform and staffing costs better.

It doesn't surprise me in the least... It does surprise me that seasoned investors wouldn't understand this better. But that's the stock market.</comment>


Show HN: New platform for creating interactive data maps (datamaps.world) - <AUTHOR> https://datamaps.world/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here you can find published interactive map of Unicorn startup companies by country [https://datamaps.world/projects/unicorn- startups](https://datamaps.world/projects/unicorn-startups).

Let me know if you would like to get trial access. I would be also glad to send a discount code for anyone interested.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those interested in the tech stack. I built it with Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, React and Next.js. Backend is hosted on Heroku and client app on zeit.co.</comment>


Ask HN: Do companies actively hire self-taught/bootcamp developers? - <AUTHOR> When companies hire developers, do they look at self-taught/bootcamp devs as a benefit or a liability? <comment><USER2> My data is small and dated, but the bootcamp devs we put through the normal interview process did not come close to passing. They had only went skin deep on a bunch of different stuff -- probing further into any specific area usually brought more questions than answers.</comment>


The Role of Composition in Computer Programming (1995) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98.3105&rep=rep1&type=pdf

<comment><USER2> How helpful of the author to begin with the word "Iverson", showing an astonishing level of respect for other people's time.

<comment><USER3> Huh? What do you mean?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: 2 page simple term sheet and 100+ page contracts. What to do? - <AUTHOR>

We received a very straight forward term sheet which we completely agree upon. However, after signing the term sheet we received 100+ page legal document. What should we do?<p>1. Engage a law firm which will take time. 2. Try to find someone who has hands-on experience
3. Read it ourselves and figure it out. 4. ??? <comment><USER2> 100 pages is a lot, but there are absolutely no circumstances under which a non-lawyer should finalize an equity round of finance without legal representation.

Even if it you don't care about yourself, or any future employee who might be saddled with the currently unknown 'gotchas', you will still be screwing friends/family investors and your spouses and children. Seriously, get a good attorney.

It's an accepted and expected part of finance that you will incur some legal costs getting a round of financing done.

All that said, if this is an angel round, that document is too long. A good angel or group will want to keep it simple, and leave the major lawyering to a Series A. But overall, a) congratulations! and b) suck it up, and go get the best lawyers you can find.

<comment><USER2> p.s. You should also ABSOLUTELY read the entire thing yourself. A basic part of business ownership -- welcome to it.

p.p.s. Drop me a note: email@example.com if you need to talk it over with someone who doesn't have a vested stake in it, I'd be happy to chat about it with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depends how much money the investment is for. If it is for 100K or more, I would have a lawyer look at it. You do not need to hire a large expensive firm, and a good lawyer should be able to stay within reasonable cost constraints (just make sure you negotiate an acceptable cost estimate before you start work).

<comment><AUTHOR> any suggestions for new york area?

<comment><USER4> I've used the New York office of Gunderson Dettmer for this. They're not cheap but they will explain everything to you perfectly and will get the details right. In my opinion, money well spent.

<comment><USER5> Seconding that. Gunderson rocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sit on it and say "we're reviewing it" and in the meantime keep the other party interested and excited, then tell them after reviewing it that you've been advised that it needs to be reduced.

<comment><USER4> 'Advised by whom?' they'll ask, so they can put their counsel in touch with your counsel to swap back and forth redlines. And then what are you going to say, Hacker News? Get a lawyer, that's just how this works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I would hand it back and ask them to reduce it to less than 10 pages. There's nothing to be intimidated about legal documents in general (reading through them you can make any changes before signing) but 100 pages just isn't fair in a business relationship.

<comment><AUTHOR> Their logic behind it is the efforts of raising subsequent rounds will be highly reduced with not much changes in the documentation.

<comment><USER8> That's probably true. Read it yourselves over the weekend, and sit down with an attorney next week - call a few different ones to see who you feel comfortable with. This phase could go on for a while: don't take any contract provisions personally, as right now they're no more than an opening negotiation position.

Cautious congratulations, by the way - this must be an exciting time, even if it's a bit challenging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Both the length of the term sheet and the funding docs are in line with ones I've signed. This is why you need counsel.

</comment><comment><USER9> Get a lawyer. The complexity of the docs is the reason term sheets exist in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER10> Read it. Take copious notes. Highlight areas of potential concern.

This should help keep your legal costs down, as the attorney can focus his or her time on the issues most important to you.

EDIT: My brother practices this area of law with offices in NY & NJ; if you want to keep costs down he could probably put a junior person on your case. You can reach me at my user name neuenhaus.org

</comment><comment><USER11> Do you trust them? Do they have a reputation to protect?

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot. They have a huge reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1.

Better to take your time than to take your money.

<comment><USER7> Engage a law firm will take your time and your money.

<comment><USER8> So does surgery, but procrastination is usually the most costly decision of all.</comment></comment></comment>


Swine flu: Twitter's power to misinform - <AUTHOR> http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/25/swine_flu_twitters_power_to_misinform

<comment><USER3> I'm not a big Twitter fan but pretty much this article is claiming "Twitter allows people to post what they might otherwise say in general conversation. People are saying things that can cause panic and so people who take what others say at face value without confirmation will also be panicked."

The most alarming statement in this article was "The question of whether we need to somehow alter our global information flows during global pandemics is not a trivial one". Fight fear with education, not with censorship.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that education about the current situation is not reaching them very well. The author suggested that health organisations put updates online as soon and as often as possible. Injecting education into the online information stream if you will. Maybe directly into Twitter even. If some (hopefully recognised) experts were to start Twittering "pork does not kill you", the fear would be culled.

Anyway, I doubt this mass hysteria will really be all that huge if things don't get worse. The current situation is still pretty new.

<comment><USER5> That article could not even quote any severely misinformed tweets. Is it being misinformed to be worried a little bit? Also, the article focused on tweets of scared users, there might be zillions of tweets by users who are not scared.

I think if anything, the whole issue might make people reflect more on things they read and hear, which would be a good thing. Other than that, the same kind of articles have probably written years ago, if you replace "twitter" with "internet" or "wikipedia".

While I don't panic, I find the whole thing interesting because I have never actually witnessed a pandemic. My first epidemic I witnessed last christmass, when the whole family suddenly had a vomitting virus. That was a bit scary. A global epidemic would therefore be really scary. Since few people have experience with this, worrying seems like a sane reaction. Or would the appropriate reaction be "I am sure the government will handle it fine, and if anything serious was going on, they would surely warn me on TV"?

<comment><USER4> It _is_ misinformed to say that you shouldn't eat pork, yes. But I don't blame the misinformed ones, as you seem to imply. I'm just thinking of solutions to help people grasp the situation better. Being afraid is - currently - <USER2> an overreaction if you don't live in Mexico City. Not eating pork is probably healthy, but completely misinformed if used to ward of the pig flu.

You have a point though, when you say the article focuses on one side. Maybe there are very informed tweets and maybe people are corrected if they say something stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nobody ever said Twitter made you smarter...

</comment><comment><USER7> I was testing this last night... The twitter search was interesting because after your first query, it dynamically updates a display with how many new results would be added if you refreshed the search. The trend for swine flu kept rapidly mounting.

I could see this alarming the average person especially if Twitter was to distinguish their brand as the ubiquitous "realtime" search.

<comment><USER8> You can see the chart for the trend here:

[http://twist.flaptor.com/?gram=swine+flu&table=0](http://twist.flaptor.com/?gram=swine+flu&table=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> i think the author didn't really mean censorship; altering is also possible on a micro-level with users adopting a higher level of editorial standards...

<comment><USER3> This is twitter - that's like asking people to have a higher editorial standard on SMS messages to their friends.

<comment><USER9> well - how about stop sending messages if you can't trust the information you are spreading? that's what i meant by editorial standards. so yes, it's censorship of sorts, but it's more like self-censorship - or self-restraint to be more exact.

<comment><USER5> Twitter users are still capable of using google. So if somebody tweets about a pandemic, the next reactions of twitter users would probably be to google it. I don't think they are stupid sheep who just do whatever their twitter-friends tell them.

It is still useful information to hear that worries about a pandemic have arisen, no matter if the advice for actions is right or wrong.

<comment><USER9> well, as we've seen, many people were re-tweeting false advice ("don't eat pork") without bothering to check anything on google...

<comment><USER5> Ah, I didn't even notice that some people seem to think it is transmitted via eating pork. But did they get retweeted a lot?

Still not convinced that it is worse than email, for example - like those meme-viri that keep spreading via email.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite programming font? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Adobe Source Code Pro: [https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code- pro](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro)

<comment><USER3> Seconded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hack [https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/](https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/)

<comment><USER5> Hack is great, it's been my default since I found it a couple years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Consolas and Inconsolata. Unfortunately, I use Intellij idea currently and Inconsolata is rendered horribly in that ide even with infinality and intellij Specific configs.

Ubuntu mono is also not bad.

<comment><USER7> Consolas is the absolute best. It has such a firm shape. You can read/write it days long and your eyes don't get tired. A+ job from Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Currently my favourite by far is [Iosevka]([https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/](https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/))

<comment><USER9> Likewise. I tweak it a bit (lower underscores, dotted 0, different @ symbol), but the custom build system makes tweaking it a breeze.

Also build a custom version for IntelliJ as its font rendering is a shitshow and you cannot get consistency with the rest of the OS with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fira Code [https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode)

<comment><USER11> [Hasklig]([https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/](https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/)), which is derived from Fira Code, and brings some nice (properly spaced) ligatures useful if you use functional languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Terminus

Some OSes and programs it doesn't look good though.

[http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/](http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/) [https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/](https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The default font in Xcode and Sublime. I am one of those that doesn't really care enough to change it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Used fantasque sans mono for a long long time. It has a certain character, yet is legible and accomodates more lines of code than most other fonts.

Now using fira code, for a change. It has good legibility too.

Dejavu sans mono is anotherfont that has good readability but I have not used for an extended period.

</comment><comment><USER15> Luxi Mono, monospaced with serifs, very readable for code and text. [https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi- Mono](https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi-Mono)

</comment><comment><USER16> Inconsolata [https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html](https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> PxPlus VGA9: [https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc- fonts/fontlist/](https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Pragmata Pro [https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/](https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Dina [https://www.dcmembers.com/jibsen/download/61/](https://www.dcmembers.com/jibsen/download/61/)

</comment><comment><USER20> APL385 Unicode is by far the best font for programming. It is so much better than anything else that I now get a visceral reaction looking at Menlo, Consolas or even Source Code Pro

<comment><USER21> I like it! Thanks!

[http://www.apl385.com/fonts/index.htm](http://www.apl385.com/fonts/index.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anonymous Pro [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Anonymous+Pro](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Anonymous+Pro)

</comment><comment><USER23> Whatever the default font is for my editor. I've never found font to be a barrier for me. I'm currently using Atom, so I guess Menlo or Consolas.

</comment><comment><USER24> Iosevka [https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/](https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Monoid: [https://larsenwork.com/monoid/](https://larsenwork.com/monoid/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Roboto Mono. I use the Roboto family as my default font in Ubuntu and Windows.

</comment><comment><USER27> Default font on Macbook (Sierra and above) - SF Mono

</comment><comment><USER28> on macOS: Menlo

on Windows: Consolas

on Linux: Adobe Source Code Pro or DejaVu Sans Mono

</comment><comment><USER29> Misc Fixed (size 7 / pixelsize 9)

</comment><comment><USER30> Consolas because I love Microsoft

</comment><comment><USER31> Hack, consolas, deja vue mono.

</comment><comment><USER32> hack

</comment><comment><USER33> GoMono and Ubuntu Mono

</comment><comment><USER34> DejaVu Sans Mono

</comment><comment><USER35> Overpass Mono

</comment><comment><USER36> IBM Plex Mono

</comment><comment><USER37> Ubuntu mono.

</comment><comment><USER21> DaddyTimeMono, for dogfooding purposes.

</comment><comment><USER38> 6x12

</comment><comment><USER39> monospace

</comment><comment><USER40> Consolas

</comment><comment><USER41> Comic Sans. To remind yourself to be humble at all times

</comment><comment><USER41> Courier Prime because it doesn't look like a "programming font"</comment>


Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2014/12/smart-startups/ <comment><USER3> The article mentions some interesting things, but I have a few quibbles:

> But even with today's modern communication tools, both customer experience > and lawyer workflow have remained stagnant.

At a large firm, legal practice is unrecognizable compared to even 10-15 years ago. Everything is electronic: filing and docketing, document collection/scanning/OCR, legal research, document management (DMS + version control). Everyone communicates almost exclusively via e-mail, and remote work facilities are ubiquitous.

To the extent that technology is available that's not getting adopted, it's because it's not good enough. Predictive coding can be very helpful, but it also has a fixed setup and training overhead that makes it less efficient for smaller matters. That's why arguably the biggest shift in discovery in the last 15 years hasn't been to automating it, but outsourcing it to contract lawyers.

In the area of research, Westlaw and Lexis still rule because of their completeness and accuracy. If I need a copy of some statute enacted in 1873 I can not only find it, but I can get original scans so I can verify the text is free of OCR errors.

Moreover, things that are easy on the rest of the web are not easy when it comes to legal (or scientific) research. PageRank, for example, works great when everyone searching for "skiing near Tahoe" is looking for the same popular pages. But when you're doing legal research, a lower-court case that directly addresses your issue but isn't widely cited is much more valuable than a highly-cited Supreme Court case that doesn't address your issue. And computers still don't really understand either what issue you're looking for or what issue a case is about. So ancient technology (search for this word near that word) still rules the day.

> There are good reasons for this, as law firms tend to be cost agonistic > (since they pass costs directly to their client)

This is oft-stated, but economically fallacious. Price is a function of supply and demand. The client cares about total cost for a particular legal service; she doesn't care about how that cost is broken down. If the client's budget for a matter is $300,000, every dollar that goes to costs is a dollar that doesn't go to the law firm. This is true even if you're billing by the hour, because in the long run, a firm will raise rates until hours x rate = client budget.

<comment><USER4> One lawyer I talk to says that every single filing he makes at court has to be paper. He bought a wheely suitcase to carry all this documentation around to court.

If everything is electronic, his firm and the judges they deal with didn't get the message...

<comment> Brian-Puccio This is jurisdiction-dependent.

I work for a very large company with three dozen law offices across the US. Listening to what is considered "normal" in other offices is always interesting. I am, unfortunately, in an office that practices in courts that are paper-dependent, even though there are rules that allow for electronic filing and service in many circumstances, all it takes is one litigant (or the judge!) to say "eh, I'm not comfortable with this, we're going to do this the old fashioned way" and we're done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Four Areas of Legal Ripe for _Automation_

Automating these aspects of legal practice wouldn't disrupt the way that industry functions. It would just make a lot of paralegals and young lawyers obsolete (and make legal services a lot cheaper).

<comment><USER6> Thank you for pointing this out. I get annoyed when people use the term "disrupt" improperly. A true disruption, in the sense that Clayton Christensen used it, would be a cheaper but poorer AI replacement for lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I currently write software for an e-discovery company. Most tasks that our software is expected to be able to perform are simple-sounding tasks, at first glance, such as ...

1\. extracting documents from within other documents (attachments out of an email, files out of a zip, embedded excels out of a word doc, images out of a powerpoint, etc)

2\. convert all said documents to some kind of standard media format so that the native viewing applications are not needed (all said document types to png, or pdf, or tif)

3\. allow full-text searching across all electronic files

With these kinds of tasks available as an automated feature, the real product would just allow a bunch of attorneys to review the documents and apply tags or labels to them. Once they've gone through all the documents, there is generally an output from the system that summarizes their work and provides the relevant documents, notes, etc.

Over the years of writing this kind of software, we've encountered a never- ending amount of complicates with file types, feature requests, etc. The real complexities with this kind of software is making your software work for a large number of customers. Every customer probably has a different idea about what they want this kind of tool to do for them.

<comment><USER8> Feature requests in e-discovery bloat your original software out of all proportion. Nevermind getting past the original part of effectively searching large troves of data in different formats.

<comment><USER9> Amen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am quite interested to know more about Judicata. It was cofounded by Blake Masters (coauthor of Zero to One). Anyone have any info on it?

<comment><USER11> Last I spoke with the gang---unfortunately, some time ago---they were working on legal search. Great group of people. They've been stealthy of late.

FYI, Blake also blogged the notes on Peter Thiel's start-up lectures at Stanford.

<comment><USER12> _> Blake also blogged the notes on Peter Thiel's start-up lectures at Stanford._

Which became source material for Zero to One.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This paralegal I know told me 2 years ago "I wish someone would automate discovery because it sucks right now". I wish I knew absolutely anything about it.

<comment><USER14> I know some about it. As it stands right now, law firms need to find, trust, and pay forensic investigators. The firm has to leave some data collection up to the investigator, and then have some data turned over. By data, I mean hard drives, images of hard drives, images of network shares, email exchanges, etc.

The law firm has to pay for the data collection, the disk space to store the data, the transmission of data back and forth (investigator found something good, buys external HD, ships it via the mail), the data analysis, the investigation and reporting, and then sometimes the expert witness.

Sometimes, the law firm does not know what they're looking for, in other words, there is no smoking gun piece of data. Sometimes, the goal is to find something, anything, that would hint, point, or prove a goal.

What this means is that a retainer can either be here is 10hours worth of analysis/investigation to find the email we know was sent that contains this particular text. They do not plan on the analysis and investigation to exceed that and usually the result is we found it/didn't find it and we did it in the time allotted or under the time.

It can also be, "we're looking for evidence that this type of event has occurred". This is where the billed-hours start stacking up. Its hard enough digging through other people's emails, documents, and pictures looking for something, let alone digging without having something in particular to look for.

The point is, I believe that they, the law firms, want to, and need to, bring this in house. This greatly improves the process. But now they need security, real security, because its not their data being stored, it is their client's client's data and so forth. It becomes very sensitive.

They need infrastructure. They need to be able to forensically acquire data. Forensically store data. Forensically analyse data. Forensically share data. The infrastructure needs to be fast, easy, and effecient. We're seeing 6TB hard drives now... shares of much, much larger size. And they do not want to be storing their client's data in someone else's cloud.

Then they either need technicians and investigators or the ability to hire and grant access to their data on their network to the tech/investigator. They need technicians to provide solutions to the inevitable problems run into (i.e. how can I acquire each of the 2 drives in this FusionDrive raid and return to the lab and build the raid on something other than osX?) And they need investigators experienced at honing in on relevant data while digging through vast troves of data.

<comment><USER15> I'm a computer forensics and eDiscovery guy. The forensics part of eDiscovery is really overblown. It's the bogeyman, and not much more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No mention of Smart Contracts?

<comment><USER17> Doesn't look like it. Perhaps you'd like to fill us in on it? If my guess of what it sounds like is anything what it actually is, then I'd be really curious about knowing more.

<comment><USER5> You can use a bitcoin-like system to build an agent that holds money in escrow and then automatically delivers it when a condition is met[1]. This is the simplest form of a "Smart Contract."

Most contracts are credible because their terms can be enforced by sanctioned violence. "Smart Contracts" are credible because they are enforced by distributed verifiable cryptographically-secure automation.

[1] For example, when the DMV database confirms that a certain car is now registered in my name, you automatically get 4 bitcoin.

<comment><USER18> What happens if the DMV makes a mistake and incorrectly changes the car registration to your name? Do I still get to keep those 4 bitcoins forever?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hear [http://thoughtly.co](http://thoughtly.co) moved into e-discovery for visualization and summarization. Are there any other machine learning startups in the space right now?

<comment><USER15> There's a long history of search/knowledge management/AI startups recognizing that eDiscovery was their last, best hope for revenue. Recommind is one example (founder invented latent semantic indexing), and Autonomy (yknow, the folks who cratered HP) is another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be interested in seeing an IDE for contract drafting. Or something like an Excel mapper that can show me how all the provisions and definitions in a contract are interrelated.

<comment><USER21> Definitely interesting, and in a few cases I have built this internally for myself before and it generally is useful (key phrase) when it can be built. I did this primarily to keep track of (1) defined terms (each place a defined term is used, and when a defined term includes another defined term), (2) section references (where any section is referred to elsewhere in the document so that if that section changes, what other things need to be impacted) and (3) payment mechanics (a spreadsheet that uses the defined terms of payment mechanics and allows you to plug in real numbers to see how the money flows). This is helpful to understand a specific concept or mechanic.

Usually though, the moment you move into a transaction of even medium complexity, while this might be helpful it can't be ultimately relied on - <USER2> you were to track a defined term or a section reference, a change to that term or section reference would impact not only the places where that term or section reference is specifically used, but also where a concept depends on such term or section reference. A basic example of the change of an actor from singular to plural (originally there was one purchaser, now there are two purchasers) - then, every pronoun and verb would need to be changed to plural form. This is why you sometimes find contracts wonkily sticking with a plural defined term when really there is just one entity/person described by the term, or vice versa.

This mostly points to what I always say about the challenges to true legal disruption: common law, statutes and contracts all depend on language subject to interpretation (and in the case of common law, interpretation IS the entire name of the game - see every supreme court case of the past 30 years to see how much interpretation varies), and unless I am missing some major breakthrough, we have not come to a point where language is understood systematically enough to truly "hack" complex legal concepts as currently drafted (aka. using language).

I could, however, imagine a new legal system that depended entirely on data, numbers and systems instead of historical language, but it would first require us to all agree that the system would govern and agree on the rules (or lack thereof) of interpretation, which given the vested interests most of society has in the current system, would be pretty challenging to implement.

That being said, you can see how this spectrum works by comparing the common law system (like US/UK, which relies heavily on interpretation of judicial opinions) and the civil law system (France, Korea, etc., which relies heavily on a more formulaic interpretation of statutes) - way more costly litigation and more politics in common law systems when compared to civil law systems. The trade off is that common law is (arguably) more dynamic (judges can overturn statutes unilaterally - civil rights, etc.), whereas civil law systems require legislatures to make changes to statutes.

Full disclosure: I used to be a lawyer, so I am biased.

<comment><USER22> I'm intrigued by your idea of a new legal system dependent on data.

<comment><USER21> I think an interesting place to start would be trying to break the UCC down into a numbers/data based system.

Similarly, it would be interesting to try and take a relatively conventional transaction (incorporation documents, convertible notes, Series A) and place the key economic terms in a spreadsheet, and then incorporate the other legal boilerplate (indemnification, securities exemptions, etc.) by reference to a standard T&Cs-type document - I know some incubators already do this by having the key terms as a "fill-in-the-blank field (I think AngelPad does this..). The agreement would then just be a spreadsheet-like form, with the other terms incorporated by reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> eDiscovery is _not_ ripe for disruption. That ship has sailed.

eDiscovery has largely been solved for most corporate environments. There are tools to collect data in a defensible manner, to "process" (i.e., index) it, and to review it. There are even some products that aggregate these functions together, however, it must be well-noted that each of these functions has a different user/customer and occurs at a different timeframe in the discovery process.

Many of the dominant tools do have their warts. But the money that was once in this space--the eDiscovery collection product I wrote sold for a couple million to its first customer--is no longer there. Prices have dropped dramatically and its now a commoditized market. So you'd have to work very hard for very little gain to displace any of the dominant players.

Note that TFA was written by investors in a new eDiscovery startup and TFA seems mostly like latent marketing for them. I don't know anything about them --good luck and all that--but I'm very familiar with the space and I don't envy them.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's hard to get excited about software for lawyers, and I think that's why Disco has flown under the radar a bit, but I think these guys are going to be huge. They've made exponential improvements in e-discovery software.

<comment><USER24> Having worked in e-discovery for many years, "exponential improvements" is a huge overstatement. What they have is in pretty much any e-discovery product on the market.

And they are missing a huge piece--predictive coding and advanced analytics (email threading and near-dup are EXTREMELY common). If you are in NLP, ML and/or IR, the legal industry is probably one of the most exciting places to be. Huge datasets, available annotators and tons of money. It's a red-hot lab of state of the art techniques being tried in the real world instead of on the Reuters, 20-newsgroups, Enron, and other "canned" datasets.

<comment><USER15> On the research end of things, NIST's TREC has a legal track, and that's probably the best place to look for what's happening in the "applied research" space of the field.

<comment><USER24> TREC HAD a legal track. It's a shame it hasn't been done in 3 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> PlainSite ([http://www.plainsite.org](http://www.plainsite.org)), which I run, is tackling the research end of things.

</comment><comment><USER26> How many people are going to be put out of work by this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Still seems quite a challenging disruption here. For one, you'd need to know some aspect of the lawyer's daily job and two you'd have to know how to sell to lawyers. The thing that scares me most is that these people also hold a trigger to suing the crap out of you because they can. It's exciting and scary at the same time.</comment>


Dark Series: Network Graph of the Family Tree - <AUTHOR> https://dark.saitama.solutions/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

I just finished watching Dark and out of curiosity, I wanted to see how the family members are linked to each other since its not the typical family tree. I used a network graph visualization for this and each node is clickable and opens up the character detail from the wiki. [Warning] If you haven't seen season 3 then I would advise not to click on the link as it contains spoilers</comment>


Readme.io is down and all its customer's docs too - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> It was a major outage, taking many Docs offline, but now it's back online.</comment>