Show HN: My project for this weekend (with source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.softhyphen.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I work with a lot of online publishing clients, who aren't always particularly tech savvy (you'd be amazed by some of the workflows). Designers would often like to justify text, which can cause some terrible whitespace rivers since browsers don't provide hyphenation. Browsers do, however, support soft- hyphens, which are hints that tell the browser where it _can_ break a word.

Adding these hyphens manually is quite tedious. So I wrote up this little utility that takes HTML and adds soft hyphens automatically.

Background:

\- Took a day to write (started it yesterday afternoon)

\- Written in Python, deployed on AppEngine

\- Uses OpenOffice's hyphenation dictionaries

Source code: <http://github.com/fortes/softhyphen>

<comment><USER2> This is neat. Some possible drawbacks:

(1) Browser layout engines are pretty messed up, and adding a bunch of shy hyphens can lead to really weird layout issues. I wish I had some good examples, but basically it has to do with taking into account the amount of space a hyphen takes up, and using that to compute how long lines should be, but then when the hyphens are in the middle of the line, not showing them. Anyway, as I remember sometimes it can result in text being eaten (i.e. not shown properly).

In other words, I'd try to do specific testing in a bunch of browsers, resizing a window through all reasonable sizes it might be, before counting on shy hyphens to work properly.

(2) This is still going to break search within pages. Pretty stupid that browsers can't do proper search, but so it goes.

(3) This is going to be effectively a line-by-line paragraph composer, because browsers don't do any kind of real paragraph layout. And it still won't do any adjustment of inter-letter space. The combination of these two things means that using justified text is going to still usually end up looking like crap. Better than without any hyphenation, but not all that much better.

\----

In short, this is kind of a half-way stopover workaround for the absolutely stupid lack of real hyphenation and justification algorithms in current browsers. Absolutely stupid because this is a __solved problem __: the algorithm used by TeX and described in one of Knuth's students in the late 70s works pretty darn well (Adobe uses a modified version for InDesign), and on modern hardware should be perfectly reasonably fast, as well.

It's not quite as bad as the lack of real layout in Microsoft Word, given that laying out text is the _only purpose_ of that application, but still.... pretty bad.

<comment><USER3> > Browser layout engines are pretty messed up

Did html5 address this?

<comment><USER2> It's not in HTML5's scope. That's the domain of CSS3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be good if after you entered some text, the sample at the bottom showed the text you entered un-hyphenated and hyphenated for easy comparison, rather than keeping the Article 7 sample.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had that originally, but was worried paranoid about XSS attacks (needlessly?). Will re-enable this week.

<comment><USER5> XSS attacks against what? Unless that data can be accessed by multiple people, there's no opportunity even if I can embed Javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A Javascript project that does this - <http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/> \- with an example -<http://j.mp/bakUUw>

A relavant Reddit thread - <http://j.mp/d8H3Tf>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty cool. My suggestion: create a simple API and a WordPress plugin. I think it would be handy for a lot of WP-powered sites and that would make it easier for people to implement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! I was just about to start it, and decided to do a search in case someone had something similar. This plugin looks pretty good, actually: <http://kingdesk.com/projects/wp-hyphenate/>

<comment><USER8> Actually, I think there's still room for a WP plugin based on your project. I've tried WP-Typography before, and while I love KingDesk's intentions, I didn't like the complexity of using the package (not to mention that it requires XHTML strict and my WP theme is all 4.01, a boat I imagine many WP users are in).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. I didn't realize today's HTML implementations were handling soft hyphens. When I last tried that it didn't work, but that was a long time ago.

<comment><USER2> They sort-of work. It's far from perfect. Do your own testing before you rely on browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool project. Not your fault, but all these soft hyphens really destroy source readability. I also wonder if this could cause keyword/seo problems.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely a valid concern. I can imagine there are plenty of (non-global) search-engines out there that trip over this issue (in fact, now that I think about it, I don't think I -ever- took it into consideration. Hmm.).

I implemented something similar (soft hyphenation related) some years back and ended up looking into just what you're asking about. My conclusion then was: The big ones act nicely, and that's about where I stopped looking.

A quick Google for "soft hyphens and google" will give a good indication or simply search this page for "google": <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html>

<comment><USER12> First off, kickass site, very impressive that you did this, let alone over the weekend. I look forward to browsing through the source.

OK, so general SEO question. Do search engines trip up after this? Why? Are they parsing HTML straight up or do they have funky rules?

FOR EXAMPLE, I have heard that <h1> gives benefit to enclosed text. i have wondered this: but can u just have jquery automatically replace it on pageload and then get credit for arbitrary keywords while actually presenting the viewer with different phrasing. wouldn't that work?

anyway, couldn't you apply my idea similarly? this would be a really simple jquery plugin

<comment><USER13> It's called "cloaking" and Google looks down heavily ([http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769)) on it:

 _Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."_

<comment><USER12> Well I think that if you cater to your users with soft hyphens but show the unhyphenated content to Google, it wouldn't make sense for them to look down on that. But a possible risk is that they do scan for cloaking and automatically deduct for that. Though that would be a rather sophisticated system. Then again, they are Google.

Oh yeah, Google's tech support system sucks btw. Someone would make big bucks if they found a way to make that fun and efficient for their tech support staff. Tech support in general. It's rarely fun to call in to tech support. Shouldn't it be fun? Zappos style. Duuude: SMS text support. Text your initial question, and someone calls you. Kinda like Aardvark except now.

<http://www.facebook.com/Eckharttolle>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lovely!

I actually did something similar..

Last year, I started looking at algorithms to count syllables. It turns out that hyphenation and syllable detection have a lot in common.

Anyway, long story short: one of the approaches I use on Haikuist is a hyphenation algorithm.

I'm glad you built softhyphen.com. It's such a fun idea.

(<http://haikuist.com>: poetic micro-blogging for haiku lovers)

</comment><comment><USER15> You should rewrite hyphenate_html as a walker rather than a recursion, because Python has a stack, and arbitrary input could make you reach max recursion.

[http://github.com/fortes/softhyphen/blob/master/hyphenate_ht...](http://github.com/fortes/softhyphen/blob/master/hyphenate_html.py#L49)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, I'm still a python novice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Copy-paste in Snow Leopard: dis crim in ation (et al)

Maybe also provide a JS listener to remove the gaps before copy?

</comment><comment><USER17> Great stuff man. I recommend you change the sample copy that you used to something more relevant (i.e. programming/web dev related) so your google ads are more relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! I just wanted something inoffensive there to illustrate, and didn't think about the ads at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I started out in Computers over 25 years ago, I got very interested in TeX and LaTeX and read a lot of the literature. One item that impressed me at the time - and still remember it, was that someone wrote a PhD thesis on _hyphenation_.

Frank Liang wrote his Stanford Ph.D. thesis on a hyphenation algorithm that is standard in TeX, and has been adapted to numerous languages. The Thesis is available online at <http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/>

Your application is both useful and well written. It will be very useful though to have the user specify the width of the column in pixels and the font and have a sample that renders the way it should.

</comment><comment><USER19> Due to a bug report of mine, Calibre's[0] ebook reader uses hyphenator[1] to hyphenate ebooks, but it's a useless feature for now because the WebKit it uses doesn't insert hyphens at the ends of lines, just breaks the word in half. Funny, a test just now shows that Chrome works as expected.

[0]: <http://calibre-ebook.com/>

[1]: <http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/>

</comment><comment><USER20> "violation" is hyphenated as "vi-olation", that does not look correct to me. Apart from that this seems fantastic. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER21> nicely done (looks like nice code on github). there's another python implementation of frank liang's hyphenation here, fyi.

<http://nedbatchelder.com/code/modules/hyphenate.html>

cool way to see tries in action. (though arguably a language with duck typing makes tries pretty hard to read.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Typo: "Finish" should be "Finnish". BR, a Finnish guy :)

</comment><comment><USER23> A kid's project. Please post only serious projects.

<comment><USER11> I can't tell if you are sarcastic or not. But the amount of languages supported told me that he took the project that extra mile.

But hey, your mileage may vary and all that.

(PS. As English is not my native language: Did the latter expression ("your mileage may vary...") perhaps stem from the expression "that extra mile"? Just realized they may be related! Oh well...)

<comment><USER24> Taking this WAY off topic ...

"Your mileage may vary" was a disclaimer on car advertisements (because you never achieve the advertised miles-per-gallon).

"Go the extra mile" is biblical: Matthew 5:41

<comment><USER11> _Taking this WAY off topic ..._

One _could_ argue that it's language related! Thanks for your answer.:)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An In-Depth Look at the User Experience of iPhone Safari - <AUTHOR> http://dubroy.com/blog/an-in-depth-look-at-the-user-experience-of-iphone-safari/

<comment><AUTHOR> With the announcement of the iPad, and the claim that it's "the best browsing experience you've ever had", I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at what makes the web browsing experience on the iPhone so great. Especially since the iPad version of Safari seems to resemble the iPhone version much more than the desktop one.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great, timely article!</comment>


Atari Transputer Workstation - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation <comment><USER2> One fine morning I opened the San Jose Mercury News to see that Atari had announced a new Transputer-based workstation.

It was especially exciting because I was working for Atari Corp, and our little engineering team (of maybe 20 hardware and software people) had no inkling we'd been working on it!

This was a project shot out without permission by a group in the UK. They hadn't bothered to tell us.

[I rather liked the Transputer architecture. Bizarre, but very interesting]

<comment><USER3> Funny because I worked at Inmos at the time and we like "ATW, WTF??"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow - this brings back memories... When I was an undergrad, I took a summer job at Perihelion writing demos for the ATW.

From what I recall, things weren't going great, and most of the staff was grumbling about the Atari side of the machine. Since Atari was where the latest funding had come from, there was a strong desire by management to show how the Atari hardware (display, disk interface, etc) was essential to the whole set-up. Whereas from an engineering point of view the Atari front-end was pretty much dead weight (vs. the Transputers that hung off the back).

Less than a year later, Perihelion went into liquidation, and a friend and I bought the contents of the building (boxes like 'Misc Electronics #14' and 'Papers #5'). We spent the following summer holidays using the customer list (i.e. the Papers) to flog the remaining Transputers (in the Misc Electronics)... Fun (though slightly morbid) times!

</comment><comment><USER5> Ah. The transputer. Did my doctoral thesis using CSP converted to occam for the transputer. Fun times.

There's some of my occam code here: [http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i- resurrect-13-year-old...](http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i- resurrect-13-year-old-35.html)

Oxford had some transputers from INMOS. The story I heard was that they'd been manufactured with the die in the wrong way round meaning the pinouts were all messed up. So a bunch (16 IIRC?) had been wirewrapped together to make some hideous but working machine.

<comment> david-given I did some work on a transputer at Tao --- we had a nine-node demo system; eight transputer nodes, and one Pentium node, running as an asymmetric multiprocessing cluster. The demo program drew Mandelbrot images by farming out scanlines to each processor node. Unfortunately, the Pentium was so much faster than the transputers that by the time each transputer node had rendered one scanline, the Pentium had done all the rest...

Later, the transputer metamorphosed into the ST20, which was sold as a single- processor embedded microcontroller, used a lot in the TV and set-top-box market. It actually worked pretty well.

One exciting thing we discovered: on at least on transputer system (and the details are from memory, so possibly incorrect here), if you asked it to do a shift right by 0 bits, the processor would hang. We eventually decided that the microcode that implemented this was doing:

        while (--shift)
          value >>= 1;

So, if you passed in 0, in the first iteration the shift rolled round to 0xffffffff, and kept going; with interrupts off. IIRC we calculated that it would probably take about a fortnight to run. I don't think we ever tried it to see, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Atari has some fun computers during this era that were overshadowed by the (arguably better) Amiga. The Falcon was a favorite of musicians.

Inmos sold a T-400 board when I was in college. It was another example of a stack machine. Occam was an interesting programming language. I still have the book for that.

<comment><USER7> The ST was another musician's favorite, because of the MIDI ports.

<comment><USER8> Arguably the original musicians favorite. (From 1985 until Atari Corporation folded up in 96.)

The Falcon came later and was unsuccessful compared to the ST.

<comment><USER9> > "The Falcon came later and was unsuccessful compared to the ST."

Agreed, though the Falcon was a big step up in terms of audio hardware due to the addition of the DSP.

To hear the difference the DSP made, search on YouTube for 'ACE Tracker Falcon'. This is my personal favourite:

[http://youtu.be/xxXCGSJ9nT0](http://youtu.be/xxXCGSJ9nT0)

I like this one too, and it's probably a better technical showcase:

[http://youtu.be/kXzMkO83jA8](http://youtu.be/kXzMkO83jA8)

In comparison, here's a decent ST chiptune. Musically it's still enjoyable to listen to, but the difference in audio hardware compared to the Falcon should be fairly clear:

[http://youtu.be/RnsMz-vZFHc](http://youtu.be/RnsMz-vZFHc)

<comment><USER10> I never did and never will understand why an ATARI ST family, meant to compete directly with Amigas, had a three channel sound chip on the level of the C=64 SID. What were they thinking?

The AT&T DSP was light years ahead of the rest of personal computers' sound capabilities, and is in fact still competitive today. Amazing piece of work.

<comment><USER11> The C64 SID is generally considered the best soundchip made.

But with a DSP you can do not only sound, but this (Atari Falcon demo) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKRZ8QgH5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKRZ8QgH5o)

<comment><USER9> > "The C64 SID is generally considered the best soundchip made."

Best for the time, I'd agree, but I'd suggest it's been surpassed since. Of course the SID still has its charm, when I say surpassed I mean in terms of flexibility.

IIRC the designer of the SID went on to design some of the early high-end PC sound cards.

<comment><USER11> It was a quantum leap, just like the iPhone was to phonemarket, nothing before or after comes close.

And Bob Yannes went on to found Ensoniq after designing the SID at Commodore.

<comment><USER9> > "or after comes close."

What do you base that on?

<comment><USER11> I refer to the leap in it self, not the actual chip with that comment. There is for sure better things today :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw an Amiga transputer ray tracing in person. It was way beyond most desktop performance at the time.

[http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/prototypes/transputer.html](http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/prototypes/transputer.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ah yes, the transputer. Such an interesting, if somewhat flawed, concept. Inspired a lot of interesting things. Given how cheap small FPGAs are these days, you could easily build a transputer "board" which was probably faster and cheaper than the original boards were. Put together a few dozen and start writing parallel software for fun (and certainly no profit :-)

<comment><USER14> There is a "startup" XMos co-created by chief architect from Inmos (who introduced transputers). XMos microcontrollers share a lot with transputers design and are really fun to play with.

Cores are RISC, there is at least 8 of them, but you can link multiple uC into a single system. Their variation on C, xC, is using channels and guards as in occam transputer language.

You can get easily a cheap dev-kit [1] and play with the tech.

[1]: [https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?product=17441](https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?product=17441)

<comment><USER15> I couldn't find anything on how much RAM it has.

<comment><USER16> It's based on the XS1. For the follow-on, the xCORE-200, the flyer mentions twice the memory. Since the smallest xCORE-200 has 256 KiB, I'm guessing the XS1 _might_ have 128 KiB.

There's a dev kit based on the xCORE-200, for 10 X the price ($150), but it includes a 1 GbE interface which makes it a lot more interesting IMO.

Interesting architecture. Makes a ton of sense for embedded apps (which obviously was the point).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The good old days, when hardware vendors innovated rather than sticking an Intel reference design inside a slightly different case.

</comment><comment><USER18> An interesting read:

It's the story of the UK's attempt to become a force in the emerging microprocessor industry of the 1970s, told by the man who was the driving force behind it.

In the first part Iann Barron describes how Inmos came into being and the thinking behind the revolutionary transputer.

In the second part, which starts at the point when Inmos had just secured its second slice of Government funding, Iann Barron charts the company's decline and fall.

[http://www.transputer.net/fbooks/iandt/inmos_transputer.html](http://www.transputer.net/fbooks/iandt/inmos_transputer.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow - I had no idea that Atari was even in this space. Talking about Transputers, I spent all of 1989 working on a Meiko computing surface with 40 T800 Transputers. Had a glorious time writing code in Occam for the traveling salesman problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yet another wonderful machine killed by the wintel standard...

I wonder if MESS cam emulate it and if someone, somewhere, preserved enough of HeliOS to explore it.

Edit: it looks like someone did [http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/helios.htm](http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/helios.htm)</comment>


In Ecuador, the Frugal Traveler Tries Luxury - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/travel/ecuador-budget-travel.html <comment><USER2> Ecuador is an amazing country - while driving south I thought I would only spend a month or so, I wound up spending 5.

In my opinion it's like 3 countries/climates glued together - you can be on the Pacific getting sunburned at 100F+ for the morning, drive a few hours up into the high Andes and climb a 20,000 foot glacier capped volcano, then drive a few more hours and drop down into the amazon to watch monkeys swing through the trees.

I climbed 20,000 foot Cotopaxi - [http://theroadchoseme.com/cotopaxi- summit](http://theroadchoseme.com/cotopaxi-summit)

Then lived in it's shadow for months - [http://theroadchoseme.com/down- time](http://theroadchoseme.com/down-time)

It's a supremely beautiful country, and the people are very friendly. Highly recommend.

<comment><USER3> What's network access like there? Is wifi widely available?

<comment><USER4> Ecuador is surprisingly well built up. It was definitely my biggest surprise when traveling South America. People who know it mostly from the economic collapse around the turn of the century will be surprised at how much progress they have made.

As an added bonus for US travelers, they use the US dollar as their primary currency. No obnoxious money exchanges to deal with! The only thing to watch out for is change, because Ecuador mints some of their own "dollars" that obviously won't be worth anything in the US.

<comment><USER5> Is it easy to change the local 'dollars' for true US dollars? Is it 1:1 or are they less valuable?

<comment><USER4> I don't know, I avoided them entirely except for a bit of change I kept as a souvenir.

One of the biggest surprises: Walking up to an ATM and withdrawing US cash with no fees at all. Not even the bullshit "you're not a member of our bank, so we'll charge you an extra dollar".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And don't forget the Ecuadorean kidnapping industry. I know a guy who was kidnapped four times (his family owns a banana plantation in Ecuador)

A friend of mine knows a guy in Columbia with no fingernails. He was kidnapped for 18 months, they wanted him to reveal the real owner of some land where his name was on the title. They removed his fingernails one by one.

That puts a bit of a damper on my own enthusiasm for South America. An uber driver from Brazil once asked me how I liked Brazil and I said "it was fun to visit, but what about all the kidnappings?"

And he said "Oh, so you know what's going on"

Yeah I do. Really it's not a region to visit carelessly.

(I travel a lot, I'm in India now)

<comment><USER7> If you are just a tourist who does not own the title to a banana plantation or anything like that, are you still at risk?

<comment><USER8> My experience is that you don't. Ecuador is a lot of fun.

That said, you should always be careful. In Ecuador, particularly in Guayaquil, be careful what taxi you take. Make sure it has a meter, and if possible use a radio dispatched taxi (i.e. call). Beyond that, it's like most places you're likley to visit: Stay away from "bad" areas late at night, be aware of your surroundings, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the bottom of the article:

>Seth Kugel has written the Frugal Traveler column since June 2010. This is his last column. His successor, Lucas Peterson, will start later this month.

Based on the author's experiences and appreciation for integrating into developing culture over being coddled, I can only hope for him that he's leaving to join the Peace Corps or similar.

<comment><USER10> I wonder why they changed writers. I wonder if Seth got expenses paid by employer.

<comment><USER11> I don't know about this specific circumstance, but travel writers I've known got free trips from the tourist agencies, resorts, etc. in the countries they visit. Disclosure is not typical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aside from Ecuador being awesome (which it is), here's the takeaway, buried at the end of the article:

 _But perhaps I simply never learned to travel luxuriously._

It's absolutely possible to get the novelty he's after while living well, but it's not the sort of thing you can switch on or off. Getting comfortable with affluence is a process.

<comment><USER13> >It's absolutely possible to get the novelty he's after while living well

Can you expand on this? I don't necessarily disagree but as a frugal traveler(bike tourer) I can't begin to imagine how I'd have similarly novel experiences traveling affluently.

<comment><USER14> My personal approach to this balance is to stay in hostels/home-stays and use standard local transportation, but still go to expensive restaurants/shows/tours on occasion.</comment></comment></comment>


Mojolicious 3.0 released: Perl real-time web framework - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kraih.com/mojolicious-30-released <comment><USER2> Mojolicious playing nicely with other IOLoops is probably my favorite new feature since 2.0 - [http://blog.kraih.com/mojolicious-hack-of-the-day-more- anyev...](http://blog.kraih.com/mojolicious-hack-of-the-day-more-anyevent-oh) . What would you guys like to see for 4.0?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an excellent example of Modern Perl, more so than the article posted the other day. No magic, very easy to understand, documented, and structured.

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent! Using it on a daily basis with so much fun. :D</comment>


Colorado Supreme Court: Employers can fire for off-duty pot use - <AUTHOR> http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28315953/high-water-closes-chatfield-state-park-boat-ramps?source=infinite

<comment><USER2> Bad link given.

[http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28315256/colorado- supreme-...](http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28315256/colorado-supreme- court-affirms-lower-court-rulings-medical)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wrong link; I'm taken to something about Chatfield State Park instead.

</comment><comment><USER4> wrong link?</comment>


Bitcoin Mining to Use 0.5% of World's Energy by End of 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-mining-to-use-05-of-worlds-energy-by-end-of-2018-peer-reviewed-research-shows <comment><USER2> > "De Vries concludes that as the BTC network currently consumes about 2.55 GW > of electricity and moves towards consuming 7.67 GW in the future (for > reference, Ireland consumes 3.1 GW and Austria 8.2 GW)"

Okay can we all agree that's far too much power to use on a decentralised currency system? It's going to use twice as much power as a first world country. The current proof-of-work system badly needs replacing.</comment>


PLT Scheme Blog: PLT Scheme v4.1.5 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plt-scheme.org/2009/03/plt-scheme-v415.html <comment><USER2> I wonder why people don't use PLT that much. It has libraries, docs and tools, and its scheme(maybe thats the problem?). Its a cool environment, I like it very much.

<comment><USER3> For some reason while I tried it for several months it never felt... sticky? I just never felt like it quite fit for me.

Of course Clojure showing up may be part of the reason for that.

<comment><USER4> You are overestimating the significance and impact of Clojure. The language has potential, but it hasn't stolen mindshare from Scheme or any other Lisp dialect for that matter. People going to Clojure are coming mostly from non- Lisp languages. Lispers are quite happy with what they have; there are standards compliant, mature Schemes for the JVM. Clojure offers nothing to Schemers.</comment></comment></comment>


"Some fish are born great, others have greatness greatness thrust upon them" - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/zach.newman.543/videos/10210007483676150/ <comment><USER2> From the Department of Redundancy Department.</comment>


The Keynesian Revolution: A new biography of John Maynard Keynes - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/jonathan-kirshner-keynesian-revolution <comment><USER2> The treatment of Keynes' post-WWI comments is an apologia that misses the deeper point. Keynes was not merely wrong about the German ability to pay, he misread the strategic situation. The French position was not merely motivated by vengeance.

The Post-WWI situation was simple in a way yet strage. Germany was defeated, yet it remained the strongest country in continental Europe. Britain and France were bled dry, Russia was in chaos and the Western Front was mostly fought on French soil. This left the question of how to settle things so that Germany does not refight the war for the same old objectives.

The French position was a Realist position - make Germany too weak to make trouble. The Keynes position was Idealist, but it needed one condition to be viable in any form: a defence alliance to prevent Germany from making trouble. Which was something that was probably politically impossible in the US, and I don't recall Keynes advocating for it.

So his contribution was to help weaken one option that was politically workable without giving a good alternative; Eventually (years later) helping to lead to an arrangement that merely goaded Germany in the wrong direction. There was a need to ask how to reintegrate Germany, but this was not served well by ignoring the strategic situation.

<comment><USER3> > Keynes was not merely wrong about the German ability to pay

So the Germans were able to pay? I don't pretend to be a historian, yet I've never heard the idea that Germany could pay.

BTW, the Odd Lots had a show [1] about the book recently

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-12/studying- key...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-12/studying-keynes-is- more-important-than-ever-podcast)

<comment><USER4> Keynes' contention about the German ability to pay was and remains controversial: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace#Reception)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Keynes was misunderstood massively like Karl Marx.

Marx said "I am not a Marxist" when he saw his ideas being put into a something bordering a religious teaching.

And later, I think, Keynes was rather unsettled with how his works been used to legitimise a new maxim "government can print money out of thin air," from an inverse of what dominated US economic thinking before him. It was not his idea at all.

Beyond simply affirming that aggregate demand thing exists, and that a lot things in economy spin around it, he did not produce a religious edict on how to run a government monetary policy.

If he saw Keynesianists today, he would feel rather disappointed.

<comment><USER4> It is literally true that the government can print money out of thin air. This is a genuine fact about the world today, so I don't see how Keynes would draw a different conclusion.

Keynes did say

      If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again… the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

which is a more eloquent argument for an expansionary monetary policy than most current economists could produce.

<comment><USER6> I've never understood this. If everyone is doing unproductive "busy work" (digging up money) instead of making useful goods and services, then how could the money be worth anything?

<comment><USER7> Someone has to make shovels, houses, clothing, etc. The people who find the cash also end up spending it on other things. It doesn't matter that the money isn't initially earned for useful work, as long as it gets spent on useful work.

Since it's digging through a mine using drill bits to break up the rocks, you can call the idea "minecoin bitting"

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't much like to trade the things that fill my house for shovels and other money-digging items. How many people can the economy afford to allocate to money-digging before the production of other things that support our current quality of life begins to suffer?

<comment><USER9> "Unproductive money digging" is _exactly_ how this financialised economy operates.

The only difference is that process of production and mining is a little less obvious - to outsiders - than stuffing cash into bottles and burying it.

And of course it's privatised, which is better by definition, supposedly.

Some useful work is a byproduct. But the total of useful work isn't necessarily higher than in Keynes' example - see also Graeber's _Bullshit Jobs_ , etc.

<comment><USER8> I agree that many aspects of the (U.S.) economy are wholly unproductive, and even that such behavior is made possible (if not outright incentivized) by institutions like the Federal Reserve and many aspects of the U.S. military. I'm not sure I'd hold that up as a shining beacon of privatization. You'll have to extrapolate on why you think that's "better by definition, supposedly."

If you're trying to speak solely to the financial sector divorced from the rest of industry, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on whether money- digging would be a suitable replacement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"I modeled this website on the same principles of Walmart" - <AUTHOR> http://skitch.com/obie/d3jj7/fiverr-obie-orders-management-status-of-your-order-no-71497196

<comment><USER2> That's easy: This person has no idea why Walmart is successful. Walmart's success has little to nothing to do with convenience. It has everything to do with economies of scale, being able to apply pressure to your suppliers, and efficient inventory tracking and prediction. The proposed website benefits from none of these...

<comment><USER3> I disagree. In the physical world, a "one-stop shop" like Walmart adds value because it costs time to travel between many different stores. What our author fails to realize is that there are already "one-stop shops" on the web: namely Google and Bing.

<comment><USER4> Even if you have to go through the arduous task of typing a website into your browser's address bar to get from YouTube to eBay, it's still a fraction of the effort required to get from Ace Hardware to Target, no matter how close the stores are situated to each other. The Internet doesn't need a one-stop shop as badly as "real life".

If that was THE website to go to for all of the services they offer, saving a couple seconds of typing might be advantageous. But they're not. Why should people switch? It's not particularly superior, as far as I can tell.

I applaud the effort, but will most likely never use it, and I doubt I'm alone.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure on you guys reasoning, but this could work. You can't get a job on Facebook, or post your classifieds on Google, or Fiverr on YouTube. If it becomes integrated seamlessly with one login and you can do the same things as the other sites then it may work...just maybe, but I don't think this guy really knows what he is doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Checking out the site, it's actually pretty impressive. Not in the well- designed sense, but in the having-an-actual-product sense (even if it's, you know, a blatant ripoff of the sites he listed...<http://www.globalcommunity.me/blog/> feels like it takes the cake in that regard). I'm curious about where he got his funding from.

Edit: The alt-text for his "Blog" image is literally 'scritter'. My co-workers are giving me funny looks.

<comment><USER7> I laughed out loud when I clicked that page. His mascot looks like the Twitter bird on meth.

<comment><USER8> That's actually a free icon from a Twitter icon pack. I've seen it in a few roundups. Nice that he's using a creative commons artistic twitter rendition icon as his mascot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to be overly skeptical, but if you have to pay $5.00 to get someone to give you an opinion, you may not have the critical thinking skills that I see most successful entrepreneurs display. Unless this was some kind of viral marketing seed that went wrong. Then again, it did hit HN so who knows ...

<comment><USER5> What successful entrepreneurs do you actually know? Go back to the Global Community website and did you know that both banners on the homepage are the founders businesses and they both make over 20K per month. Silly as it may seem..the marketing strategies work, and the best part about it is it only cost $5 and they made that back in adsense revenue easily with the 2000 views today. Wait until the website is finished and talk then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like he intends to create his vision by buying a domain, buying a "{x}.com clone script" for each of the sites he mentioned, and installing them each in a subdirectory of his domain. They're not connected in any meaningful way, be it in terms of unified login or design.

<comment><USER6> Did you actually sign up for one? It seems more sketchy than I'm willing to do anything with. Like the next generation of a domain-sitting page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a hint, dear webmaster. If you find yourself saying things like, "I am shocked that no other website has thought of doing this", you're probably missing something.

<comment><USER12> You have a point, but lets be glad Larry, Sergei, Zucker did not let that stop them.

<comment><USER13> There were search engines before Google, and social networks before Facebook- Google had better algorithms, Facebook had a better UX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm having horrible flashbacks to Rentacoder and all of the competitions calling for clones of popular sites. I can't believe someone managed to bring them all together. This is madness!

The only thing it's missing is a Rentacoder clone full of requests to clone this site.

</comment><comment><USER15> From the about page:

 _The Global Community is a content driven social networking site that has the functionalities of most common social networks. It is a place to share with others using pictures, music, and video. It is a place to chat, a place to find a date, a place to sell your goods or sevices, a place to host your photos. a place to buy and sell music, a place for blogging and more. It is not only a social network. It is a place for business. We have made it easy for any size business to benefit from using our site. Businesses can advertise their goods and services, sell goods or services, sell music, post jobs, search resumes, and even schedule events. Businesses can benefit tremendously by using our site by building their brand name right here. We have many things coming down the pipeline that are designed to help your business succeed. We encourage all businesses to be a part of the Gloabal Community. The Global Community is a site to help you connect with others and helps you do the things you normally do while online. Wherever you are in the world, use The Global Community Website to connect with millions, make new friends, search for employment, sell or buy goods, and keep in touch with others. The Global Community is open to everyone 18 years of age or older. The Global Community is your online social network! More than a social networking site. The Global Community is a place for business. We hope you will share in this journey with us. Your World...One Place...Global Community_

Of course if Global Community turns into the next Google+Facebook+Amazon, we'll all look like fools...

But, I'm not holding my breath.

</comment><comment><USER16> Holy hell... I thought I was a scope creeper...

<comment><USER17> Actually, he has come up with an ingenious way of avoiding scope creep...start off intending to do _everything_!

<comment><USER4> I'm sure they have more features planned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Check out the two videos they have <http://www.globalcommunity.me/videos/video/index.html>. "the auction site is better than just about anything out there". Even the speaker can't seem to believe it.

</comment><comment><USER19> OK, I felt compelled to check some of the source. Aside from references to tripod.com and every js library out there, here's what I saw where there were credits:

Auction: Professional Auction Script Software by PHP Pro Bid

Microblogging: scritter

Classifieds: not sure, source credits BearBones.us (which accepts barter: <http://bearbones.us/index.php?p=1_14_Barter>)

Social Network: partuza

Dating: not sure, but seems to be the same script running webtryst based on a quick google search

Jobs: scribble

</comment><comment><USER7> Um, there is an online one stop shop for everything called Amazon. And there's eBay.

... and he's trying to do this on $20k?

... and he wants to have a global consumer-oriented business website without a .com domain?

... and the whole "one-stop shop" concept stops becoming appealing when going to a specialty store takes two clicks instead of driving two miles.

Also, the design of the actual site leaves ... something to be desired: <http://www.globalcommunity.me/>

<comment><USER20> The fact that it takes longer to get to the auction section of the site than to just type in "<http://www.ebay.com> is a warning sign too. I bet he did this on a free server, because it's really slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am sure this is an elaborate joke. One of the ad that shows up on the landing page is this: Arrogant garage - Where customers are treated like friends.

</comment><comment><USER22> The kicker is the classifieds page:

[http://www.globalcommunity.me/classifieds/flashLander/gc_lan...](http://www.globalcommunity.me/classifieds/flashLander/gc_lander.html)

Some people should not be allowed to own a computer.

</comment><comment><USER23> The website actually exists, too:

<http://globalcommunity.me/>

It's worth checking out.

It's almost as though someone built this as an object lesson in the horrors of losing focus. This idea is terrible – and the design tells you all you need. Look at all that. It's like a piñata full of services exploded all over their homepage.

Wal-Mart also has one of the worst customer experiences ever – so we can snark all we want but this guy has succeeded in his goal in at least _one_ dimension.

edit: Also, who is giving this "business" $20k to work with?

<comment><USER24> You can even watch a video from the founder on their "videos" section.

<http://www.globalcommunity.me/videos/video/index.html>

<comment><USER25> <http://www.youtube.com/user/Cedrick751>

More videos about the site in his youtube account. I feel a little bad for the guy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Basically his 'one stop shop' is a website version of the browser favorites toolbar, only where the links take you to a shittier version of your favorite site with no userbase.

</comment><comment><USER26> They even have a micro-blogging service :D <http://www.globalcommunity.me/blog/>

<comment><USER27> Since Live Spaces is migrating their users over to Wordpress, they just got a new #2 competitor. Look out!

<comment><USER5> I don't think the site is finished yet, as it said they would launch soon. I think you guys are wrong here...don't know why but I get that feeling. If they could get a massive user base and people click on ads they should make enough from the Google ads and search. I would list my business page on there and set up shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's like they've installed 10 different plugins (dating site, auction site, etc), each with their own user registration system and interface.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's as if he hired somebody to find the top 12 most mentioned web sites on TechCrunch to form the basis for his business plan.</comment>


A negotiation platform for commercial support? - <AUTHOR> I'd love to get some feedback on this.
I'm thinking of a negotiation platform, specifically for open source project contributors who want to have dealings in paid professional support.
It would tightly integrate several fundamental processes - discussion, contract agreement, code and task perusal, money transaction.
Any thoughts? Here is a short questionnaire along the same lines. Your participation would be awesome. Thanks!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Sz4lgMMNtmkhEYJtC_qTPWyzF1Mp9wq-uej56LVk5AA/viewform <comment><AUTHOR> [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Sz4lgMMNtmkhEYJtC_qTPWyzF1M...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Sz4lgMMNtmkhEYJtC_qTPWyzF1Mp9wq- uej56LVk5AA/viewform)

Your input would be much appreciated.</comment>


Show HN: Levels.fyi, compare career levels across different fields - <AUTHOR> http://levels.fyi <comment><USER2> What is a "career level", exactly?</comment>


Excellent videos to learn driving for beginners - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixMlmdY1xka_KHx1FfQjxQ <comment><USER2> While this might not be HN worthy, thanks for posting regardless! I'm starting driving lessons soon (at last), and while I don't live in the US this might give me an advantage.</comment>


Donald Trump's Speech Generator – Just enter a topic and see how the magic - <AUTHOR> https://see-that.live/ <comment><USER2> Would be interesting to see how this was built - I've been watching the daily Coronavirus task force updates and I think I have a pretty good sense of the various Trumpisms, and I didn't get the same feeling from this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its trump's speeches and the topic is replaced</comment></comment>


How to Analyze Your Negative Reviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMI6f7Y57c <comment><AUTHOR> A short video which shows how you can look at your product's reviews</comment>


The "I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?" guy just sold his Facebook app for $3 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/08/16/biggest-facebook-app-acquisition-yet-tripadvisor-acquires-where-ive-been-for-reported-3-million/

<comment><USER2> This young man aggregated a very valuable demographic in one place. Over 2 Million prime "hosteling" candidates, and travelers all accessible through his user list. As to the question of whether this is real, I am uncertain. It would be understandable however if it were.

What many entrepreneurs realize too late is that acquiring a lot of heterogeneous users quickly is of little value. Acquiring HOMOGENEOUS users is of great value. When all of a sites users are homogeneous, ie travelers, or runners, or 30 year old single women, the number of methods of monetizing them are legion. Monetization of an audience of less than 5 million is more difficult where there is no commonality.

This young man chose the simplest monetization method, sell the names.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is some juicy stuff - Tripadvisor says the report is not true: <http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9761584-7.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> News.com now has a statement from Craig Ulliot confirming that the report is not true: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm dubious about this. There's no source. The Mashable and Techcrunch articles about this simply derive from this one. And yet Inside Facebook isn't claiming an exclusive, despite apparently having one.

It may be true, but there are a lot of fishy signs.

<comment><USER5> According to the app developer's website (<http://www.bigsight.org/craigulliott>):

"Craig Ulliott is a freelance web developer and the guy behind the "Where I've Been" Facebook application that has reached more than 2.3 million users in its first two months since launch. Craig recently sold the application and user base to TripAdvisor for $3mm, which marks the first major sale of a Facebook application since the company opened up their API and development platform."

<comment><USER4> Is that his site?

<comment><USER5> hmmm, I guess I didn't really do my homework: it looks like bigsight.org is a people directory, and Craig's entry is open to public editing (<http://www.bigsight.org/directory/501/edit>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, and this is one of those ideas at least two different people have suggested to me in conversations. I guess it was just waiting for the right platform. And no, none of them are mentioned in this article.

That's a good argument for keeping ideas like this in a journal or outliner or something so you can review them when a new-platform gold rush like this comes around.

And, as anomalous as this deal seems, I have to say it: it's also more support for the "get popular first and worry about profitability later" school of thought.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe this deal is so anomalous because it's fictitious. I guess I was being too naive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's uh... well I'm happy for him.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note to self: avoid management team of trip advisor at all costs.

<comment><USER9> <evil> Or _maybe_ somebody who's investing in facebook is also somehow involved with the acquisition. get one of the apps an exit => facebook's value shoots through the roof again. </evil>

<comment><USER8> Either way, I'm safe if I avoid them altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042> for reference

</comment><comment><USER10> My gut tells me TripAdvisor can't expect to make back that money on the users themselves over the next few years. If they shift the app to include advertising to achieve that level of revenue, it's going to lose out to whatever copy cat is still ad-free.

<comment><USER11> why? they wouldn't have to put ads on user profiles just put them on canvas pages in an unobtrusive way, you can potentially target them A LOT better than google does no?

<comment><USER10> And who would click them? There's no such thing, btw, as an unobtrusive ad.

<comment><USER11> so you don't believe advertising works on the web?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Great source to find APIs or Developer SaaS Tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no affiliation with these guys. I just found some useful data there and though others might like it too.</comment>


Tilt is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tilt.com/ <comment><USER2> > You can also initiate withdrawals for any collected funds to your bank > account through the Tilt platform until June 12, 2017.

I highly doubt that is legal. If you hold third party funds you can't just make some arbitrary statement or the money is yours.

They will have to make a reasonable effort to reach the affected parties and they will have to give them ample time to withdraw their funds.

<comment><USER3> Why would someone reading this assume that they will do something illegal? Why is that the conclusion that _anyone_ jumps to?

Considered, if possible, that if money isn't out by the deadline that they will do… some other legal and responsible thing with the money. Hand it over the the governing jurisdiction as "unclaimed property"? More pro-actively reach out to people?

Nothing in this statement says they are going to do something illegal. There is no "…or we'll keep it". That line isn't in there. Your mind had to fabricate it.

I don't understand the desire to actively interpret things in the worst possible way. When I read stuff like this my entire emotional reaction is "…okay". My mental model for the state of the world has been mutated, fine. Some people seem to read stuff and want to fight with whoever wrote it. It's a press release. It was a mildly important three hours of two people's day. They do not have time to deal with people who set out to misinterpret their intentions. How does anyone have time for this? Why am I still typing!

<comment><USER4> I don't understand the desire to assume other people's interpretations are the results of them desiring to interpret things that way rather than having just interpreted them that way naturally.

<comment><USER3> This is entirely fair. I think when someone's take differs from our own, it's easy to assume that it took effort for them to get there. You're right though. It was probably just what jumped into their mind.

When I do have a negative interpretation of someone's words, and I'm sure I'm less good at this than I like to imagine myself, I like to think that I at least try to imagine how they would have liked me to interpret those words. This sounds kind of, moral platitude-ish. I don't mean it in that way. Attempting to interpret someone charitably is a self defense. It's for me. I need to think this way to keep myself settled. If I don't, I end up angry at everything.

I think you're right and I appreciate the insight. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 2 weeks to withdraw your money ? That's just ridiculous. Some people are on holidays, some are sick, some are just unable to do it in such a small timeframe...

<comment><USER6> There's a chance their customers were told earlier. I assume they'd also make an effort to reach out to people with balances as the deadline approached.

<comment><USER7> Thats a whole lot of assumptions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's amazing how many of these services I find out about in their "shutting down" announcements.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was a huge fan of Tilt and used them for multiple campaigns (mostly social fundraising things, like if a bunch of my friends were going camping we'd dump the bar tab on there, and it was fantastic for burning man camp fundraising).

I have to say I'm super disappointed in Airbnb buying and then destroying this company, especially with the shockingly small amount of notice. Between their new logo, their ill conceived muni advertising, the ability for their platform to facilitate racism, and their handling of this I have to wonder why they haven't hired a better marketing and PR team (or if they're just ignoring the team they have). Sometimes it seems like they actively hate their own brand.

<comment><USER10> > the ability for their platform to facilitate racism

Hunh? Care to elaborate on a) what specifically AirBNB does to facilitate racism, and b) what you'd expect them to change about their 'platform' to stop people from being horrible?

<comment><USER11> In regards to AirBnB, there were a lot of concerns that people were simply not renting out to certain races.

Stuff like a black male tries to rent for a certain date, gets denied, and then an hour later a white female tries to rent it for the same date and is approved by the owner.

I believe in the example I'm citing the person affected actually created the second account of the "white female" and tried to keep the language very similar when they booked, so this example was pretty egregious.

There were also cases, although this probably fits in the category of mentally ill and just really mean, of people sending messages like "sorry no Asians" after denying a renters request.

AirBnB did respond though. One of the changes they made was how the profile picture was displayed during the booking process. Either they made it smaller or removed it completely if you were an owner approving people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> pretty abrupt email went out to some (not all) Tilt users, stating that after today, no new campaigns can be created, and after June 4, no more funds can be collected from existing campaigns. it had the feel a rude landlord booting you out of your apartment that you've spent thousands of dollars on, with 1 week's notice

</comment><comment><USER12> Today is a bad day, so many startups going down.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it traditional to announce startup shutdown on Friday (this & Sprig) just like layoffs?

<comment><USER14> PR 101: announce bad news on Friday. Fewer people will hear about it.

<comment><USER15> If the company is completely shutting down anyway, what's the point?

<comment><USER16> Announcing bad news as a founder is pretty heartbreaking. The less discussion about it the better, I would imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow. That's some incredibly short notice. One would think given the much larger company that acquired them, they'd be able to give a reasonable grace period before shutting it down.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very glad I took a _pass_ on interviewing and working with Tilt, shame they couldn't keep it together.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like how the homepage says "The Social Payments App of the Future". Apparently not.

</comment><comment><USER20> Another shutdown</comment>


How should approach learning DevOps (AWS)? - <AUTHOR> TL;DR . What path should Rails dev(6years) should take to learn AWS DevOps.
I have a lot of free time and decided to use it to expand my skill in DevOps. I'm a web developer using Ruby on Rails (6years) & React(2years) primarily in my day to day job. We are small shop and have 3rd party consultants doing some work for us. Generally my company hasn't been happy with their work and will be looking to switch soon. This is appropriate time for me to get hands dirty, since it can be useful pretty much immediately.  I decided to get a better grip on managing our rails app in cloud, AWS particularly since this is what we use.
For context our app is Rails, MySql, ElasticSearch, Redis.
We are in process of switching to docker from deploying to EC2 using capistrano gem.
I tried to get AWS certified before but it was extremely boring and not really helpful. It seems like they want me to know everything about every service they offer, how pricing works and little details that are really difficult to remember if you don't actively use them.
So I've decided to ask you guys for some advice on how someone with my skill set and experience should approach this?
I assume I need docker. I took a course on Udemy about a year ago, going to work through it again.
What AWS certifications, if any, would you suggest?
Can you recommend some online classes?
Can you help me develop list of 'must know' apps/tech/things? <comment><USER2> There are multiple different sites you can go to for training on AWS, and training towards getting the various AWS certifications. AWS has their own training, but outside of that probably best known is acloud.guru, and there are many others.

In your case, I would start with the AWS Certified Developer path (see [https://aws.amazon.com/training/path- developing/](https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-developing/)), and then look at the Operations path (see [https://aws.amazon.com/training/path- operations/](https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-operations/)). But the training and the certifications are only part of the picture. Speaking only for myself, I don't really learn something until I have to do it for real, and especially if I then have to teach it to others. So, I would encourage you to try to find ways to actually use these tools in real-world scenarios.

In my experience, AWS doesn't do a whole lot with Kubernetes. Sure, you can use it on AWS, but the more native AWS solutions are Lambda functions, and if you want to go with more classic containers, then you'd be looking at Fargate if you don't want to manage your own container management system, or ECS if you do want to manage your own container management system. EKS is the AWS flavor of Kubernetes, but is not as common.

</comment><comment><USER2> Note that I have recently taken and passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, and am currently studying for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam. We're doing study groups at work, based around the material from acloud.guru, which is available to us for free thanks to our employer. I'm leading the AWS CCP study group, and a co-worker of mine is leading the AWS CSA-A study group, which I'm also in.

Yes, it's a lot of random stuff to remember, much of which doesn't seem to have a great deal of bearing on the AWS technology that we use on a daily basis in our real work, which I've been doing for years. But I am still learning a lot, and I'm convinced that there are important gaps that are being filled in my education, thanks to the classes we're taking and certifications we're getting.

I do find that I can listen to the video class material at 1.5x normal speed, and still follow along. It helps things pass along quicker. But for the CCP exam, my first time around I got about halfway through before I gave up and just took the exam cold, because I kept falling asleep during the videos. This second time around, I have to pay more attention, because I'm leading the study group, and I have to help teach this material to others. I did pass the exam the first time, but I plan on taking it again, because I want a higher score.

</comment><comment><USER3> Docker is good. Jenkins is a must. Start with AWS Certified Developer and then take the AWS DevOps Engineering. Next I would take on Kubernetes. I would also learn Ansible and Terraform. When you finish with the ELK stack, you have some basics.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out qwiklabs.com. A former employer gave us credits for it to refine our AWS knowledge and we enjoyed it. Their lessons and exercises walk you through real AWS interactions and give you some relatively meaningful tasks to accomplish. They have a wide variety of lessons too, so I'm sure you could find a lot to gear yourself up for DevOps work.

</comment><comment><USER2> With regards to CI/CD on AWS, the tools are CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, etc.... Sure, you can run a Jenkins server on AWS, but that's not the AWS-native way to go.</comment>


The "$15 Billion" Nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/10/the_15_billion.php

<comment><USER2> That's true enough. Of course, it applies to every other stock, too: Google's ~$200 billion market cap is based on the price of the last trade, which for all we know was a 100-share buy that mostly constituted an investment in smugness. Since there are so many small investors, and since large investors have lower turnover, the vast majority of investment transactions are non- representative, but they're still the best information we have.

It wouldn't be especially surprising if MS overpaid -- but I don't think that's what Facebook wants. Companies usually like to IPO at their peak valuation. Investors very rarely want to buy discounted goods during the IPO (which is why many startups would _under_ value their early venture capital investments: if they were funded at $.25/share in January, got another round at $5/share in July, and were going public at $20/share in December, they give new investors a comfortable trendline to look at. Swap the last two valuations, and you start scaring people).

<comment><USER3> The whole point is that microsoft is not really an 'investor' in terms of a general market. Microsoft would have competitive reasons for buying a stake in Facebook that go beyond a direct return on investment, which is all a normal investor is looking for.

If Microsoft has a 98% of a map to buried treasure, but a critical 2% is missing, that 2% is worth a lot to Microsoft, but nothing to anyone else. Unless MS is willing to buy it from you, that is. If 1.6% is all they really need of Facebook, the rest could be worthless.

<comment><USER2> That's true, but that's irrelevant. Is an investor really going to be snooty enough to turn Microsoft down, if the most valuable thing that can happen to Facebook is a sale to MS?

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying that MS might buy all of Facebook.

Some of the fine print in the 240 million dollar deal might be all they were ever looking for to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why aren't people looking at this deal and saying "$240m is the price to secure their ad revenue deal?" If they paid the same amount and didn't get the equity, would FB still we worth $15b?

Paying $240m to secure their ad relationship may have been a good deal in and of itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, I think the point is that Microsoft gave Facebook $240 million in exchange for a few things. A "strategic alliance", 1.6% equity stake, an advertising deal for Facebook ads outside the US, etc. Now, it's not correct to just multiply those numbers to arrive at Facebook's book value, but the deal certainly values Facebook very highly: as a company that Microsoft is willing to essentially _give_ $240 million to at a very generous valuation. So while Facebook aren't a $15 billion company, they're a company that can raise $240 million in exchange for a small equity slice and an ad deal -- which is a very highly-valued (overvalued?) company indeed.

</comment><comment><USER6> I agree with the blogger's reasoning, only now there's a rumor of a $500 million investment from two NYC hedge funds (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72562>). The hedge funds would be making a financial, not strategic, investment so the straight-line extrapolation approach would be supported.

</comment><comment><USER7> The point is this post is nonsense. Facebook's current valuation IS $15 Billion. Because of Microsoft's stupid investment we now have to live in a world where Facebook has a $15 Billion valuation. Thanks M$!

</comment><comment><USER8> Does this mean new engineers who join facebook will get stock options with a strike price reflecting the $15B valuation? Won't that make it harder to recruit people?

<comment><USER9> Yes. Which is why this deal might end up being much worse for the facebookers than they might think it is right now.

They've basically created a 2-tier employee system.

<comment><USER10> If they can legally do it, I'm sure they'll re-issue options to avoid that very problem. Not sure what the restrictions are for private companies.

<comment><USER10> On second thought, it might not be that simple... :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SEC filing suggests MoviePass' time is running out - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332188/moviepass-helios-and-matheson-sec-stock-price <comment><USER2> > When the company changed those rules to limit subscribers so they could only > see a given movie once, no matter how long it runs in theaters, a support > ticket stated, "we hope this will encourage you to see new movies and enjoy > something different!" It turns out that was a blatant effort to cut costs, > with today's filing explaining that the move "enabled us to reduce our cash > deficit during the first week of May 2018 by more than 35 [percent]."

> There are a lot of ways to read that percentage, and in MoviePass' defense, > the company has also said that the goal was to prevent people from using > MoviePass to buy tickets for friends who aren't subscribers. But either way, > a savings of more than a third represents a radical shift. Couple that with > the fact that the most popular movie the first week of May was Avengers: > Infinity War, whose astounding box-office performance is driven by repeat > visits, and the connection seems clearer — MoviePass is openly trying to > save money by limiting features its customers actively use. It isn't a > "test" or an "experiment," as the company has claimed in the past; it's > intentionally making the subscriptions people have already paid for less > useful because its business model is unsustainable.

Getting rid of repeats saving 35% seems to point to some pretty widespread abuse. Who are these people seeing the same movie multiple times during its initial theater run?

<comment><USER3> I've seen 3 movies in theaters in the past year - Star Wars, Greatest Showman, and Avengers.

My wife, a Moviepass subscriber, has been to the movies some 60 times since December. She typically goes 30-40 times a year, it's one of her and her friends' favorite hobbies. You might go to coffee or the bar, I might go to the park or the gym, she and her friends love going to the movies. It's just a thing to do for a couple hours on a weeknight.

There was no 'abuse' in the sense of sharing her pass among friends, or buying tickets and not going to the movie. She does like a frozen coke sith her movie, and she buys the $35 free refill popcorn bucket 3 times a year, so there was quite a bit of profit for the theater, but she was not profitable to Moviepass and they might feel that normal use for her was abuse.

She would not be profitable unless (a) Moviepass can negotiate <50-cent tickets with the theater with kickbacks for concessions, or (b) she convinced enough people close to her (like me) to buy a moviepass and buy fewer tickets than the subscription costs.

The problem is, it's super easy to do the math on whether or not you would have spent more on tickets than moviepass.

<comment><USER4> > The problem is, it's super easy to do the math on whether or not you would > have spent more on tickets than moviepass.

This is the crux of the problem, I think. People who see one movie a month are not going to buy it. So they need to be profitable for high-usage customers. Unless they are getting incredible discounts... just not going to work.

For it to make sense, there need to be some restrictions -- e.g., only Sunday through Thursday nights (times when fewer people go to the movies... whatever they might be). But then a lot of people like me, who are too busy to go at that time, will skip it.

If you want me to over-pay for an option, it needs to have some intangible value. For example, if buying a moviepass gave me X times a month that someone else could come "free"... I might value that above market cost, because I could tell others "don't sweat it, it's free" and get friends to come along without feeling I'm pressuring them to spend a lot of money.

<comment><USER5> It's a good point. Also, with many subscriptions, the choice is between buying a subscription or doing without. You may or may not get value from the subscription but there's no a la cartel alternative to compare against.

This seems much closer to simply comparing dollar costs of two different purchase alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the Netherlands we have our own "MoviePass" (called Pathé Unlimited) started by the country's biggest theater chain (Pathé) since the early 2000s, so the concept is definitely not new to us, I was actually surprised to learn that Cinemark didn't have their own subscription model when I moved here since it worked really well in Europe (both for customers and for Pathé).

The reason why the model works for Pathé and not for MoviePass is because of 2 reasons:

\- Pathé owns their own theaters, so they can run the subscription program at a loss, but make the money back with condiments sales because of the increased flow of visitors

\- Pathé owns the most theaters in NL, there's always one closeby. The subscription program is usable by the majority of the population because of physical proximity.

So for this to work in the US, the big chains basically need to offer this themselves. I hope that Cinemark will learn from MoviePass's validation of the market (clearly there's a huge demand) and undercut them by offering their own program. #lastmoveradvantage

<comment><USER7> S/condiments/concessions? Thanks for the take, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe movie pass will be bought / cloned by a theatre chain here.

<comment><USER8>
        s/condiments/confections

Why buy them out though? Implementing a subscription on top of an existing service isn't _that_ hard, is it?

<comment><USER9> The userbase would be worth something. Buying the moviepass user database gives whichever theatre chain first crack at converting a bunch of frequent customers before their competitors can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That filing did hurt, the stock's gone from 1.35 at the open to 0.94 cents now. Heck the short sale rule is in effect for them now.

Now they have to convince their customers to use the service less, while trying to increase the number of subscribers they get reoccurring revenue from .

That's an almost sisyphean task.

Even harder will be convincing one of the chains to buy them.

I'm guessing that if we don't see an announcement of a sale to one of the movie theater chains in the next week they'll end up bankrupt and one of hte major theater chains will by at least their data at that point.

How do you go about convincing a company to buy you when they know that you'll be there in bankruptcy court to buy at a cheaper price.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wasn't there some article a while back about how MoviePass was trying to have a big enough market-share in terms of movie-goers (read: popcorn and soda revenue for theaters) to be able to start pushing theaters around? In other words, they could say to theater companies "hey, maybe you should think about giving us tickets at a discount so you don't lose out on that sweet sweet concession money." Or maybe even play one theater brand off against another?

I wonder if theaters have figured this is a waiting game and they can just let MoviePass die and go back to business as usual...

<comment><USER12> That's addressed toward the end of the article - basically the AMC CEO calling the pricing Moviepass wanted 'ridiculous', and saying it's not sustainable.

<comment><USER13> He's not wrong

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that even has a chance of being profitable... The only reason to join is to save money on tickets, the only way they make money is if people spend more on membership fees than the tickets they buy.

<comment><USER2> I could easily imagine myself signing up for a service like this and then forgetting about it for a month or two at a time.

<comment><USER5> You've pretty much described my usage of Netflix' DVD rental plan and HBO streaming.

<comment><USER2> Yeah... I'm not speaking from pure conjecture here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of Classpass and it's business model evolution. Sounds like they have transitioned well after spending significant capital.

[http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/01/technology/classpass- credit-...](http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/01/technology/classpass-credit- model/index.html)

<comment><USER16> If they had the same kind of investment support, hype, and customer satisfaction as Uber, they might be really successful. But it doesn't sound like they have any of them.

Uber is getting support from _everyone_ to subsidize the cost of rides. And the ploy is to wait until self-driving cars are viable. I guess the market is saying that movie theater chains can hold out against bargaining for longer than that.

<comment><USER17> ...and last I heard, Uber had a very high (>90%) annual churn rate in drivers, so if their flow of new victims slows (like a virus up against too high a percentage of the population with immunity now), they may not turn out as well in the end. It might suggest why Uber is maybe pushing to get self-driving cards as fast as possible; they may know they don't have all the time in the world before the current model stops working.

<comment><USER15> curious where did you see that >90% driver churn data? many drivers I speak with have been driving with uber / lyft for years (in SF)

<comment><USER17> I believe I first saw it here: [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/20/only-4-percent-of-uber- drive...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/20/only-4-percent-of-uber-drivers- remain-after-a-year-says-report.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence I like my movie pass, and it has gotten me to the theatre more than I would have in the past... I aim for at least 1 movie a month, because a movie ticket costs 20 cents more than my movie pass subscription.

If I go twice in a month I can skip a month and not feel bad.

I don't buy concessions though, so theres no money to be made there.

Only being able to see a feature film once, not something I am entirely happy about because I'd have liked to see the new Avengers twice, but I can live with it. It does allow me to go to a movie I wouldn't usually see just because it's "free".

</comment><comment><USER18> File this under: DUH!!!! This service never had a chance in hell at becoming profitable. Pretty sad that so much money is thrown at obviously trash ideas like this. I'm pretty sure that money would be better spent funding companies that are working to solve real problems.

I'm just sad I didn't sign up to blow through some of that sweet, sweet free VC money myself.

</comment><comment><USER19> ... I was somewhat expecting this to be possibility so we frontloaded our movie watching to get our money's worth but also bought through the Costco deal as we expect Costco to cover if they did go out of business given that Costco has a generous return/satisfaction policy.

<comment><USER12> Did you pay up front for a year? If you're just paying month to month, I don't understand teh concern, or the expectation for Coscto to 'cover'.

If you expected it to fail, it seems that going month to month would have been a better plan than expecting a third party to eat a loss at your gain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think I would subscribe for this - good movies are seasonal and if the movie isn't good the theater would need to pay me to go, maybe $250 would be a good fee for me to go to a movie of unknown quality.

</comment><comment><USER21> MoviePass sorta feels like the insurance game - it makes sense from a business perspective if you can sell to enough people of varying interest in going to the theater to watch a movie...

</comment><comment><USER22> I get my money's worth out of MoviePass. I'll milk that membership until it dies or the ROI goes negative.

I love you MoviePass, but you are not bright.</comment>


Show HN: Before I was a Software Engineering I was a 3D Artist - <AUTHOR> https://victorribeiro.cgsociety.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here's what code looks like when it was written by a non programmer:

[https://victorribeiro.com/universe/](https://victorribeiro.com/universe/) (old demo I made long time ago, before start going to college for my SE degree)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found another one.

[https://victorribeiro.com/three/sofa.html](https://victorribeiro.com/three/sofa.html)

This one is the first next gen model I was ever able to get working with three.js. The girl is not my model, just the sofa.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just stumbled upon this old portfólio of mine and decide it to share with you good folks.

I still love computer graphics but know I know a fair amount of how they work. I hope in the future combine this two passions of mine.</comment>


Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/ <comment><USER2> Without a package manager, I really can't see myself using this. Cygwin + apt- cyg is just easy.

<comment><USER3> Can we go together and convince the stubborn Cygwin-devs to PLEASE integrate this into mainline? I've tried a couple of times to convince them that we need something like apt-cyg, and lots of people keep trying, but they just won't budge.

See the discussion here: [http://groups.google.com/group/apt-cyg- discuss/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/apt-cyg- discuss/browse_thread/thread/aba973fd559cdfd)

<comment><USER4> Like 10 years ago, I was poking them at the idea of having some command line support for package installation instead of having to go through the brittle setup.exe to install/update packages... You can make an educated guess at the answer to anything related to non-retarded package management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As others have pointed out, Gow isn't really a Cygwin replacement; it offers over a hundred *nix apps compiled as native win32 binaries. A similar project from yesteryear - might be of some small use to one or two people (max):

The Berkeley Utilities - 40 unix commands ported to DOS [http://web.archive.org/web/20090304003628/http://openetwork....](http://web.archive.org/web/20090304003628/http://openetwork.com/berk.html) "The Berkeley Utilities follow rigorously the unix System V syntax and include all the options found on any unix system plus a few carefully chosen ones. They used to sell for $200 and are now free." Great documentation, but sadly no source.

<comment><USER6> I'm using MSYS <http://mingw.org/wiki/msys> heavily, it has bash and all file and text processing utils. It's also distributed as a part of Git port <http://msysgit.googlecode.com>.

Lots of other utils can be also found in GnuWin32 <http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html>.

Btw, the sed in Gow would deserve update from 3.0.2 ;) <https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> again? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3312009> I don't see any major updates on Github since the project was uploaded in 2010.

Cygwin is meant to be complete POSIX system, so GOW seems to be rather an alternative to MSYS from MinGW.

<comment><USER8> So it's been posted again, 186 days ago. So what? Not everyone visits HN every day, and not everyone's been here since the beginning. Reposting useful stuff for those who might have missed them is a good thing in my book.

<comment><USER9> This is how everyone defends reposts, but for an experienced engineer that's been reading HN for a while it means the front page is often full of uninteresting links.

<comment><USER10> But to prevent reposting, the poster -- who doubtless missed the original posting -- would have to search somehow for previous HN posts about the URL. But there is no search facility on HN. You can't blame the poster.

<comment><USER11> _But there is no search facility on HN_

Odd--there is on mine, at the bottom of the page, labeled "Search".

<comment><USER10> Oh, thanks. Downvoted for not knowing that. Way to build community HN.

Anyway, it's too much trouble to search any time you want to post something, just to avoid setting off the blowhards around here who get annoyed.

<comment><USER12> Stating that there is no search box on HN is a.) incorrect and therefore b.) adding nothing to the discussion - so it seems to fit the criteria for downvoting.

Downvotes don't have to indicate "I'm punishing this user", they can simply be "this comment is low-value".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> BTW, Windows PowerShell includes a bunch of unix aliases including ls, cat, cp, mv, rm, pwd, more, ps, man, mount, echo, diff. It is also very customizable, it became my standard windows shell when I discovered posh-git <https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git>

<comment><USER14> If Microsoft had wanted to do the Right Thing, they would have adopted the bash shell, and created a set of utilities providing access to services it doesn't provide.

Currently, Bash (or something very bash-like) is The One True Shell for all Unices, Linux, MacOSX, and even (rootkit ant terminal app) Android. As well as zSeries and numerous other platforms with appropriate compatibility kits.

Microsoft are ghettoizing themselves. It's a large, well-populated ghetto no, but I see a downward trend.

<comment><USER15> There is "SUA", but it's only available for the Enterprise & Ultimate Windows editions. (And supposedly going away entirely after Windows 8.) Shame it wasn't better integrated and packaged.

<http://www.suacommunity.com/sua.aspx>

<comment><USER16> There is also UWIN which emulates a full Unix environment for windows. It includes KSH. Its cc comand can work with a number of compilers including MinGW, and Visual C++.

<http://www2.research.att.com/~gsf/download/uwin/uwin.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I fail to see how this is interesting. There is already a well known alternative to Cygwin: MinGW/MSYS. Also, anyone looking for such a thing can find it with five minutes of googling.

<comment><USER17> Don't fret - I found it interesting.

I've been using GNU-Win32 for years; it's generally solid, and the CHM docs are nice, but there are some issues with it. But last time I was looking for a replacement, I couldn't find one! Gow looks like it might be just the ticket.

As for MinGW/MSYS, last I looked, MSYS looked a bit incomplete for my purposes. I don't have any interest in or need for the MinGW gcc and autoconf bits, which tools looked to be its main advantage over GNU-Win32.

<comment> j-kidd I thought the same. Then I found that Gow is shipping way older versions for many binaries compared to GNU-Win32, and its patch.exe causes UAC prompt for non-administrators.

GNU-Win32 is solid, integrates natively, and is good enough for deployment purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's great! But it seems it's more like GnuWin32 rather than Cygwin. Cygwin provides very compatible POSIX system call API (through Cygwin DLL) in terms of Win32 system calls.

</comment><comment><USER19> so what's the advantage over cygwin? is this intended for people with really small disks?

<comment><USER20> Cygwin goes to heroic lengths to try to turn Windows into Unix; from what I've heard, it even splices a DLL into every process on the machine; if you want a less intrusive solution that just gives you a Unix utilities under Windows, Gow looks good.

<comment><USER19> any chance of a reference for "splices a DLL into every process on the machine"?

<comment><USER20> Afraid not, I forget where I heard it. I ran a Google search just now, though, and found a few pages such as <http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070> which suggest Cygwin is innocent of such behavior and what's really going on is Cygwin needs a fixed DLL address (only for programs linked against it) and this is not compatible with some of the more intrusive antivirus programs that do inject a DLL into every process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The best lightweight cygwin alternative I could suggest to Windows users is... uhh... VirtualBox and Ubuntu!!!

<comment><USER8> Opening a native console is notably faster and lighter than booting a VM. Interacting with real system files, network ports, etc. is also much more convenient and less error prone than setting up shared folders and other trickery.

<comment><USER21> If you're doing any real work in a console on Windows then you're in a world of hurt. The console itself is just awful compared to what you have available on a real, POSIX-compatible OS (Linux, OSX, etc).

This extends to SSH apps, too. Putty? Seriously? And implementations of tabbed and paned shells (the few you can choose from on Windows) are terribly ugly and clunky.

Windows 7 (and presumably 8) is a fine OS. I really had no beef with it. But as an engineer I spend far too much time at a command prompt to ever consider going back.

Also -- you don't boot your VM every time you want to use it. You keep it running in the background. Allocate 256MB of memory to it and forget it until you need to use a real shell.

<comment><USER22> Putty feels much lighter than Gnome Shell etc though.

<comment><USER21> Lighter in what way? I don't necessarily disagree but when I think putty i think:

No tabs and No panes so you're limited to using the OS window manager, and if you want to achieve multiple usable sessions at once you're going to have to arrange and resize these windows yourself or you'll have to use another 3rd party app.

No integrated private key authentication. You have to use like 3 GUI screens (wha?!?!?) to set this up and then you have to run a 3rd party app like pageant.

I had many other gripes before I switched (to a mac in my case) but I can't remember them anymore.

<comment><USER22> The "redraw" seems faster to me - that might be because of Windows.

I hate not having tabs too. About running Pageant, isn't that the Unix way? "Do one thing and do it well"? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I do have Cygwin installed but anyways I have been using Gow for a couple of months already. Thanks to it I can still run `grep` and `less` when I am using a normal DOS terminal (or even 4nt) for example when I need to run a build script.

There is still some grasps with the shipped versions of the tools i.e. missing some parameters and not having `awk` is a bummer.

<comment><USER24> I don't understand. I put cygwin in my path, and I can run grep/less from a normal DOS terminal.

<comment><USER14> No issues with terminal handling?

I've always found the DOS terminal to be very dissatisfying. I recall when I first encountered WinNT40WS, which a colleague had billed as "a multiuser OS with a full shell", that, other than the lack of a full shell and useful utilities (I rapidly discovered MKS, UWIN, and Cygwin, followed very shortly thereafter with Linux, which supplanted the original OS a few months later), was the absolute crap terminal support.

That this is still the case (from my relatively minimal experiences/exposure to Win7) can just be piled on top of the large heap of embarrassments Microsoft have produced).

When installing Cygwin, among the first things I do is create a shortcut using the rxvt (non-X) client, with a command to launch a log-in shell session, with appropriate font and color settings. You can even run Windows commands and shells within this, though of course, _they_ will also break in some full- screen instances.

Mostly I just avoid the whole problem. Pretty successfully for months at a stretch these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this allow you to run GCC or anything compilers on Windows?

I thought that was the main draw of Cygwin.

<comment><USER26> Check out msys/mingw. It's a challenging setup, minimal and supports gcc. Key difference with cygwin: no attempt at posix compliance.

<http://www.mingw.org/>

<comment><USER27> MinGW: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/> Console2: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/>

MinGW comes with an installer that gives you GCC. Make sure you install MSYS as well (comes with bash, etc). Add the bin directories to your %PATH% when you're done. Then set Console to use bash as your default shell, and you have a pretty close setup to the command-line experience of Linux/Mac.

<comment><USER28> Indeed, that setup works pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've long had poor feelings about Cygwin being slow and a poor solution. I wanted something that didn't try quite so hard to completely distance itself from Windows.

So, instead, I've been using MinGW's msys project. I don't think it is quite as small, but it does offer a package manager.

One small thing in msys that I particularly like is that I can do thins like: cd //server/share/some/directory I never saw powershell or cygwin do that. On Solaris I can configure automount to do that which is good enough, but just working is also nice.

</comment><comment><USER30> _Shell window from any directory: Adds a Windows Explorer shell window (screenshot) so that you can right-click on any directory and open a command (cmd.exe) window from that directory._

Hmm... but.... why would I wan't to do that? If it opened a window running bash that'd be interesting, but I never ever want to run cmd.exe if I can possibly avoid it. Perhaps that's just me though... can anyone comment on how this compares to cygwin, generally? I see that it's smaller but I don't find cygwin's footprint especially troubling.

<comment><USER31> Windows provides this feature natively, since Vista or 7 (I don't remember which): when you shift right-click in an explorer window, the option 'Open command window here' appears.

<comment><USER32> I'm not seeing that on this fairly fresh Windows 7 "Pro" install.

I have added the feature to numerous Vista and XP machines, it is easy enough to add manually though there are many utils that will do it for you, but I can't say I've never seen it present by default.

<comment><USER31> I had 2 people check for me, one with 7 Home Premium, one with 7 Ultimate, in addition to my own 7 Ultimate; all had the feature I described; none had added it manually.

<comment><USER32> Strange, I'm definitely not seeing it here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Gow is great because the install time is much, much shorter than Cygwin. Cygwin is a beast.

However, I don't see that Gow has been updated since the last time it was featured on HN.

</comment><comment><USER34> I miss andLinux and coLinux. Since using a 64 bit OS they no longer work, but they natively emulated the whole Linux kernel and offered a pretty integrated solution. Not lightweight by any means, but just what I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER35> No mention of UWIN? Shame on you HN.

<http://www2.research.att.com/~gsf/download/uwin/uwin.html>

</comment><comment><USER36> Can it run sshd or rsyncd as a windows service?

<comment><USER33> Nope. :(

<comment><USER37> Have not tried - but it's on my todo list at work - turn rsyncd into a user- defined service?

See Article ID: 137890 here: <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Git integration? I have git bash but I'd like to have more unix stuff than what is offered there

</comment><comment><USER39> does it have fork(2) support?

if it doesn't, then it's rather alternative to MinGW, not Cygwin

</comment><comment><USER40> no cron, no thanks

</comment><comment><USER41> 1\. There is already cmd.exe integration in Explorer. Hold Shift as you right click.

2\. This doesn't look much like Cygwin. At best it's like MSYS with MinGW compiled tools. Either way, no package management, no auto updates.</comment>


Startupindex.ca - Free our data, free the community - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/29/startupindexca-free-our-data-free-the-community/ <comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure why stuff like this bothers me, but it does. Why would I, as a startup, want to attract this much attention for something that offers so little in return? Part of the competitive advantage of being a startup is that you're only known to the people that really matter: your customers. By the time any competitors figure out who you are, you are a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, and a lot wiser.

If you want media exposure, you're much better off picking up the telephone and calling up a newspaper. But this; this is just an easy way for VCs and competitors to keep a close eye on you. That makes me a bit paranoid.

<comment><USER3> One thing we (CrunchBase) offer is search engine rankings. We rank pretty high on startup keywords (try 'facebook' or 'scribd'), and so we find it's worth 5 minutes a month to keep the data relevant.

StartupIndex has some good stuff going on, particularly the geography features.

<comment><AUTHOR> We want to create really useful regional pages. That is one of the things about Canada. People don't just pick up and move to one particular city (ie: the valley for tech) -- we tend to stay in our own towns and cities and make a go of it from there., so we want to support that in some cool ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the idea, but you have some work to do.

Your filter to lookup by region is not working correctly. If I select Calgary and Edmonton company comes up. Also Cambrian house that is located in Calgary and is in the Database, does not show up.

Also the filter usability is a bit strange. You add a filter and you can see all the pretty AJAX do it's thing, but the fucking thing does not change the results until you click filter...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah,. we are going to work on getting the filters right in our next iteration. They even confuse me ;)

It might have been smarter to leave them off alltogether, but we didn't.. we'll get to it quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool and great for Canada. Good work guys

</comment><comment><USER6> The idea is neat! Do you think you would eventually extend it and create a listing with relevant startup jobs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah,. We are going to add some form of job postings. At a minimum, we will let startups add an RSS feed of their job listings. What we don't want is job listings from big companies that are just aimed to pick people out of the startup community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your 'Regions' list ends at Montreal.

You're missing out on an odd 750-1000 miles of geography (and a lot of Canadian startups).

<comment><AUTHOR> I am from the East Coast,. Atlantic Canada wasn't left out, there just aren't any entries in that region yet. It is available to be added to however.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity (as an East Coaster and StartupNorth reader), where on the East Coast are you originally from?

<comment><AUTHOR> Charlottetown -- Grew up and started my first startups there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great idea! We'll be adding our startup on there soon enough too :)</comment>


Call with Current Continuation Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/PLoP2001_dferguson0_1.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is very nice---it catalogs a number of standard continuation tricks in a manner clear enough (I think) to enlighten those who barely know what continuations are in the first place. As a bonus, the devil/angel/milestone idea is new to me.

It's a (very small) shame that _dynamic-wind_ doesn't get any coverage.</comment>