Senate Votes for Audit of Fed (96-0) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201005111408dowjonesdjonline000510&title=2nd-updateus-senate-passes-amendment-for-one-time-audit-of-fed

<comment><USER2> It's just a dog and pony show with little meaning:

"Audits of the Federal Reserve Board and Federal reserve banks may not include—

transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;

deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market operations;

transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)–(3) of this subsection."

</comment><comment><USER3> Senate votes for toothless, meaningless lipservice. This one-time 'audit' isn't going to accomplish much, unfortunately. I'm glad that this step is being taken, but I'd much rather see the original language restored.

<comment><USER4> I think the one thing saving us from hyperinflation is the _lack_ of political control and influence over the FED. You see hyperinflation in currencies where the ordinary government has control and influence over the central bank, because they just use the central bank's inflationary power to boost spending. The FED is independent from Congress for a reason, and an ongoing power to audit threatens that independence and, by extension, our currency.

A one-time audit for the bailout will accomplish the main objective people have been asking for--accounting for all the bailout--without threatening the operational independence of the FED.

<comment><USER3> So why not have a one-time audit of the rest of the Fed's activities?

<comment><USER4> I don't know if that's a good idea or not. People are mostly worried about the bailout, so auditing the rest of the FED's activities is out of scope. I think the relevant boundary is between accounting for a (legitimately questionable, expressly Congressionally-authorized) bailout and going on a general crusade against the FED.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ''' "This amendment begins the process of lifting the veil of secrecy of perhaps the most powerful federal agency," Mr. Sanders said at a news conference after the vote. '''

Am I mistaken in thinking that "the Fed" is not a federal agency? Or is "the Fed" as a whole generally considered one because of the Board?

<comment><USER6> You're right. The federal reserve is a quasi private/public entity. It's a private organization with the chairman appointed by the federal government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> non-paywall source:

[http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news- story.aspx?stor...](http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news- story.aspx?storyid=201005111408dowjonesdjonline000510&title=2nd-updateus- senate-passes-amendment-for-one-time-audit-of-fed)

<comment><AUTHOR> WSJ showed the full article when I opened it through Google News Search... didn't know even WSJ does the dirty tricks with referrers.

<comment><USER8> WSJ isn't doing it. It's evidence that Google is 'stealing' from Rupert. Google is allowing people to read WSJ articles that are supposed to be behind a pay wall... </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I question why they want to see where the FED spent the money. Is it actually because they care, or they want to get in on all the wheeling and dealing with the banks? I agree with transparency, but what is the true motive of the politicians? I think it will be to line their pockets.

<comment><USER10> Ron Paul is known gold bugs' favorite, so undermining the Fed by any means is definitely going to score some points for him.

<comment><USER4> For the longest time there was a theory called "starve the beast". The idea is that Republicans interested in reducing the scope of the federal government could cut taxes and actually increase spending, forcing a deficit crisis and a sudden paring-back of the government (similar to the now famous Greek "austerity measures") and creating a permanent distrust of big government.

I bring this up because it seems like a similar tactic could be applied to the FED. The FED doesn't hyperinflate because there's no oversight or control by Congress--if there was oversight, Congress would do all they could to get the FED to hyperinflate just to increase spending. Maybe goldbugs want to introduce permanent oversight and control over the FED just to cause that hyperinflation, just so they could turn around and say "Look! Central banks are untrustworthy!".

There are _lots_ of similar examples on the left, whether deliberate or accidental--regulating certain industries within inches of their lives (healthcare) and then pointing to it as a market failure.

<comment><USER11> "Starve the Beast" is a surprisingly bipartisan tactic. For example, it's no secret on the right that entitlement spending has the US government on a course towards bankruptcy. So the right wing tends to think the left wing is stupid when they support even more generous benefits.

But I read an interview with Paul Krugman the other day where he acknowledged the fact that our entitlements are unsustainable. Of course, having a Nobel prize in economics, he would not be so blind as to miss our looming national bankruptcy. But he figures if the public finances get bad enough, then politicians will be forced to raise taxes and/or nationalize health care, i.e. follow the leftist plan. The theory is that if politicians play chicken with global debt markets then eventually they will be forced to swerve.

Krugman has more faith in politicians than I do. I think the politicos are going to drive us off a cliff.

Starve the beast comes in many guises. Even the most shrill critics of it's practice by the right wing (such as Mr. Krugman) practice it themselves. I don't think any such tactics are terribly smart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> about time</comment>


No, Night Owls Aren't Doomed to Die Early - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/smarter-living/no-night-owls-arent-doomed-to-die-early.html <comment><USER2> This is about a study published last year in April in Chronobiology International: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07420528.2018.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07420528.2018.1454458)

News sites have picked it up and produced headlines on the same study with the complete opposite sentiment: [https://news.sky.com/story/nocturnal-night-owls- risk-early-d...](https://news.sky.com/story/nocturnal-night-owls-risk-early- death-study-finds-11327054)

My understanding is from the article that night owls are not doomed to die early in the literal sense, but not being able to work, eat and exercise in the "proper time" still makes them susceptible to diabetes, neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular problems, etc.

So yeah, still doomed.

<comment><USER3> The book, "Why We Sleep" covers this and many other sleep topics at length and in far more depth. It's fascinating.

<comment><USER4> It truly is fascinating. I'd recommend anyone to read this, as he also talks about the evolutionary benefits of morning larks versus night owls. It was, perhaps, the most influential book I read last year.

<comment><USER5> How did it influence you? What are the changes it prompted you to make?

<comment><USER4> I've started turning 'Do Not Disturb' mode on my phone much earlier, and plugging it into charge (facedown) at the same time. Even with a blue light filter, there was still a lot of exposure that would keep me awake. I try (and often fail, admittedly) to shut off my computer earlier too, but I use f.lux which helps mitigate it some.

I also have changed out my light bulbs and use a lamp at night that doesn't emit as much blue light; I'm even considering getting some of the color changing ones and programming them to change for me throughout the day (as well as come on and turn off at a set time, which could be great).

On top of all that, I try to follow a consistent schedule. It's difficult, but if I've been on it a few days, I notice it when I'm off and am quite miserable.

I still could do more, especially wearing a sleep mask. I've noticed that when I sleep in windowless rooms, I sleep a lot better; the same is true with cool rooms (unfortunately, one of my roommates is always cold and refuses to believe we sleep better cool so our house rarely gets below 72 during the summer, and only that cool at night because I turn it down after he goes to sleep).

But, really, mitigating blue light and understanding the importance of sleep are the two main things it's taught me.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response. I just have one remark:

> one of my roommates is always cold and refuses to believe we sleep better > cool

I don't think this is universal, although it is often stated as such. I too sleep best when the room is between 24 and 25 degrees Celsius (during the winter, too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know, back in Mexico, we had school in two shifts, rite? It was a morning shift & afternoon shift. It was a way to fix the problem of "too many students and not enough time".

I always took the afternoons. It was great. Life made sense. I wonder if we can ever pressure the bosses to make overlapping shifts? Or is that even possible? A 6-hour workday sounds like an opium dream to me at this point in our timeline.

<comment><USER7> We don't have set hours at our office and about half the people come in early around 8-10am and the other half come in around 1pm. There's enough overlap for afternoon meetings and plenty of time when the office is quieter because half as many people are there.

<comment><USER8> Can you please clarify? Is it like that in your company or is it the case with all of your country?

<comment><USER7> My company...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > It wasn't the conclusion of the study, or its researchers. But in the > bombastic world of science reporting, it didn't really matter.

This right here is the crux of the whole thing. Science reporting biases towards clicks and shares instead of accuracy. There is still some good science reporting out there, but it doesn't sell like the sensational headlines.

</comment><comment><USER10> Those who are forced to wake up too early, die early.

Those who sleep enough have no extra risk.

</comment><comment><USER11> Alternative hypothsis: People who stay up late have a higher probability of going out, enjoy more occasional drinks, are more probable to smoking or take recreational drugs and have more sexual partners and generally enjoy more riskier lifestyle choices, all of which contributes to the statistics showing a shorter life expectation.

<comment><USER12> Which may also lead to a greater since of community and reduced loneliness which contributes to longer life.

<comment><USER13> Because no one ever found a sense of community from their morning bike ride or running group or being monogamous and having a family... The idea that sexual promiscuity and doing drugs and drinking to lower social inhibition are what creates a sense of community is pretty misguided.

<comment><USER12> Not what Im advocating. just providing a counterpoint to the argument that the only outcome to staying up late is that you are making choices that shorten life. Staying out late certainly can contribute to the OPs theory, but that isn't the only outcome. Reduction of stress, finding a community/partner/etc is definitely something that hanging out late can provide. the time of day you feel most awake doesn't mean your default is self destruction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect the issue isn't the time you wake up, it's if you're artificially waking up.

(Ex: if you stay up late on weekends then struggle on Monday due to lack of sleep vs simply choosing to wake at 10am daily because you have a flexible work schedule and sometimes like to go to events that are in the evening.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think it's when you sleep, but how much sleep you get on a consistent basis.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really dislike this kind of clickbait. I've never heard anything of owls dying and now I have this condescending headline talking down to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> "...warned against drawing conclusions based on simple correlation."

Can we just do this, in general?

</comment><comment><USER18> Yeah like sugar vs fat studies, this is profound, not.

</comment><comment><USER19> So the choice is enjoy life or drag it out when you're falling apart.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you create product screenshots? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering what people use to create really nice looking web app screenshots?  Especially those that are usually shown on landing pages, embedded in a laptop/ipad image to look realistic.  I'm assuming those aren't just actual photos of the laptop running your product, are they?
You can see examples of what I mean in most of the themes out there: https://wrapbootstrap.com/tag/landing-page
I'm not much of a designer but I'm trying to bootstrap the design, at least for my MVP, and having trouble getting nice looking images.
Any suggestions are much appreciated! <comment><USER2> _Paparazzi!_ for OS X 10.6.8+ (<http://derailer.org/paparazzi/> \- older versions also available) lets you choose the dimensions of the browser (so you can take screenshots of responsive/mobile designs), allows you to take a full- size shot of the page (no fold) and allows you to create Automator actions to do bulk screengrabs or anything else you can think of. You can also interact with the page within the app to show different states/drop-downs, etc. And it's all free :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds great! So once you have the screen shot, you just drop into photoshop and position it over another image of a laptop to get the desired effect?

I have something called Awesome Screenshot for chrome which lets me capture parts of the screen. My issue is that it never looks quite as polished as I'd like. Perhaps I'm just lacking in design knowledge and will never get it as good as I'd like.

<comment><USER2> Yup! I'm not sure what you mean by "never looks quite as polished". _Paparazzi_ is like a little Webkit browser, so you're seeing the page exactly as it would be rendered in Safari. You have to click the little hand icon (bottom left) to interact with the site itself though, otherwise it looks like it's just taking a static image of the URL. The screenshots make it look like it's literally making little thumbnails, but it's really rendering at the dimensions you set.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, see <http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB02634G3> for example, the top images show a laptop with the web app on screen. I've tried countless times to take a screenshot of my app, grab a suitable laptop image and use photoshop to combine them to look good. But it always looks bad.

Like I said before, it's probably just a lack of design skills on my part to get the image to look 'right'. Thanks again for the suggestion, I'll give Paparazzi a try.

<comment><USER2> Ah, so the issue is fitting the screenshot into a laptop. There might be a few things at play here.

Are you using Layer Masks in Photoshop to accomplish this? If not, select the layer of the laptop in your Layers panel and click on the third icon from the left (a circle inside of a square) at the bottom of the panel. It will create a white box next to your layer preview thumbnail. It should automatically select the white box, but if not, go ahead and click on it. Then make a selection around the screen on the laptop and press delete. Place the screenshot of your site behind the laptop layer and adjust to fit within the dimensions of that selection.

For some reason in my version of Photoshop, it will show a bit of the original background behind the mask. To hide this/make it fully transparent, right click on the mask in your Layer panel and choose "Refine Mask". Then under "Adjust Edge", move the "Shift Edge" slider from "0%" all the way to the left to "-100%". Your View Mode should also be set to "On Layers" (which is hopefully the default, but just in case).

If the problem you're having is that on resize, the screenshot looks "fuzzy" or not as crisp, follow these directions - [http://www.missiondata.com/blog/design/372/sharpening- screen...](http://www.missiondata.com/blog/design/372/sharpening-screenshots- in-photoshop/) and tweak as necessary.

TL;DR, open/paste the screenshot as two new images, go to Image > Image Size and set the Resample Image (at the bottom) to Bicubic for one and Bicubic Sharper for the other. Put the Bicubic Sharper image layer over the fuzzier Bicubic one and fade the opacity out as necessary. You may need to apply the Sharpen filter to make it a little more crisp too.

Hope that helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> That is brilliant! Thanks a lot, I'll get right on it :)

<comment><USER2> Just checking in, did any of that work out for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't make a fake image of your product on an image of a computer.

It's a waste of pixels showing a picture of an app on a fake monitor on a user's actual monitor. It's too easy to fudge things in such a way that it wont actually render the way it would on the actual device (because after all, it isn't, actually) and if the user doesn't own the type of monitor you're fudging, well, then assuming what you're showing is accurate, it doesn't really matter to them anyway.

I'd suggest getting an actual screenshot, sans device, and just use those.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I might try both with and without the fake monitor and see how they look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please don't do that. It's sooooooo 'standard'. Everyone does it because it looks 'pretty', but the fact that pretty much everyone does this nowadays makes it look really really cheesy.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you suggest instead? I'm a developer not a designer and so I'm taking design examples from others far more qualified to makes those decisions. It seems the screenshot on device image is quite common but I can't think of anything else now!

<comment><USER4> I would create a nice and simple graphical explanation of how the app/service works. I don't see that nearly as often as I'd like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assuming you use a Mac, here's what I do:

1\. Open up your web app with Safari

2\. Hide navigation and bookmark bars

3\. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+4

4\. SPACE

5\. Click on the window

You now have a sexy screenshot that will look like this: [https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/98681/461852/dcd23422-b44d...](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/98681/461852/dcd23422-b44d-11e2-8ba7-b6abc6a47ba6.png)

Anything in the background will be hidden, you will have a clean image with white background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I'm on a PC however and I'm not aware of similar functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> alt+print screen in windows. It takes a picture of your current application. I use it all the time.</comment>


Ripple and MoneyGram Test XRP Currency Transfers - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/ripple-moneygram-xrp-cryptocurrency-bank-transfers/ <comment><USER2> Discussed yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124235)</comment>


Startups in Montréal - <AUTHOR> http://builtinmtl.com/ <comment><USER2> I moved to Montreal last summer and spring, after years in Seattle and Berkeley. Then I gave up and moved back to Berkeley.

Pros:

        + Bitcoin Embassy Montreal!
        + Really cheap hipster life
          + Wonderful cheap food
          + Walkable city
          + A French culture that values living, parks, & community!
        + Beautiful women, and lots of them
        + There actually is a tech scene!  Woah!
        + It's different

Cons:

        - Less edgy culture.  Less individual extreme boundary pushing.
          People move in largish herds of friends.
        - Racist against people who speak English.  Language racism.
        - Corrupt government
        - McGill and Concordia are nowhere near as good as
          Berkeley and Stanford, and not even UW.

Overall, it has a culture that supports working for a startup or doing tech contracting work, but it lacks that revolutionary west-coast culture that I like to live inside of to take a stab at doing something breakthrough.

And language racism really sucks! On the upside, it's a great way for a white american male to experience being a discriminated minority.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it a bit troubling that you list beautiful women as a plus of a city, as if women were a natural resource like trees or clean water.

I also don't know what you mean about Montreal not being edgy enough. There's plenty of counterculture in Montreal. Did you ever spend a lot of time in Hochelaga?

The language laws have a very good historical basis. Used to be that the bosses all spoke English and the employees all spoke French. That's the reason for the language laws, so that nobody in Montreal cannot access local jobs due to lack of French and that nobody is ever spoken down in English. Seeing how the linguistic majority is French, think of it more as affirmative action than racism. It's about levelling a historically unlevel playing field.

<comment><USER3> >I find it a bit troubling that you list beautiful women as a plus of a city, as if women were a natural resource like trees or clean water.

As a Montrealer, I would say that we have beautiful people living here in general. OP is likely heterocentric in their commentary.

>Did you ever spend a lot of time in Hochelaga?

Not much of a tech scene...but incredibly progressive/beautiful attitudes. Also, very French. If you don't have the language, you're missing 80% of it.

I think a good bit of the incredibleness of Montreal is kept at arm's length through the language barrier.

I grew up mostly with English friends and never spoke French. These days, I spend a lot more time with French friends and I feel much more at home.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I grew up mostly with English friends and never spoke French. These days, I > spend a lot more time with French friends and I feel much more at home.

I went through the same, actually. I "grew up" in the McGill bubble, but when my French got better, it's like a whole other city opened up to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Montreal is not known for its tech scene. Scrolling through this page, I can immediately identify:

\- the "startups" that are a 1-guy team doing "disruptive-PASS-agile-SCRUM" consulting

\- large, partially government-backed monsters where money is burnt and not much is produced

\- the students who just built their first social photo-sharing app, wondering why they can't find any funding

I've heard of them from others or was offered jobs there - there isn't a lot to choose from around here. Salaries are low as the city is cheap. There are also good companies in that list (some great ones even), but I'd say it's pretty inflated.

I work remote for a US company with its headquarters in Europe, it's the best arrangement possible, I'd recommend it for others (paid USD, half-day overlap with coworkers = lots of time for quiet coding, trips to Europe often to catch up with team).

<comment><USER5> Odd that Hopper wasn't on the site. I guess that's because it's located half in Boston.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a great city, especially if you are sick of industry monoculture. Lots of very well educated and open people from all around the world (lots of old- school hippie folks too: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=montreal+tam+tams&t=iphone&iax=1&i...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=montreal+tam+tams&t=iphone&iax=1&ia=images) :))

You might as well download [https://www.duolingo.com](https://www.duolingo.com) and practice a bit of French (seriously, try it - it's _fun_!) if you are too lazy for that a "salut-hi" will usually suffice to break "the ice" :)

IMHO: NYC > MTL > SF

I do miss Montréal though! <3

</comment><comment><USER7> That's great!!

Montreal is the place to be. Open, not so expansive, with easy access to North American market and it's easy to recruit internationally.

Only one real problem: the brain drain to the US

And I'm not talking about subsidies or taxes because that's a similar problem everywhere.

<comment><USER8> I might add that the standard for both coffee and bars in Montreal is quite high, and also priced cheaper than the midwest. Montreal is truly a hidden gem.

<comment><USER9> ok that's enough now. ssssh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favority is [https://www.artstation.com/](https://www.artstation.com/)

So much inspiration.

Hard to beat their Alexa.com traffic growth:

[http://alexa.com/siteinfo/artstation.com](http://alexa.com/siteinfo/artstation.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> Love seeing more prominent Canadian startups.

I'm always impressed when I speak to people from McGill too… they have a tech- focused culture that could rival Waterloo. Miles ahead of the University of Toronto.

<comment><USER5> How does Concordia compare to McGill? Those are the two main Anglophone universities, right?

<comment><USER12> Yes. I've never followed classes at McGill but Concordia was excellent. I mean, anywhere in the world you could be stuck with a sub-par teacher. The facilities (chemistry) were also great. Nothing to complain about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any hot tips on places to apply to for junior mobile developer positions in Montreal? I am graduating in a month from a college in Ottawa with a diploma in Mobile Application Design and Development and need to start gearing up to find a job. I have experience in Objective-C iOS, Android and Cordova and am wrapping up decently large native iOS game for a school client project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gameloft? Not a startup, but they make games for mobile.

[https://www.gamesjobsdirect.com/jobs/3963024/user- interface-...](https://www.gamesjobsdirect.com/jobs/3963024/user-interface-ui- designer.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've heard vague tales of Canadian companies receiving tax incentives to do research, in the form of SR&ED credits. ([http://www.cra- arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html](http://www.cra- arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html))

Does anyone have any concrete experience with the program?

<comment><USER15> I'm working on one of the startups mentioned on the website (although one that's buried way deep in the list).

What I know as a dev : My company pays an outside firm specialized in getting R&D credits for companies. I don't really know how much it costs and how much it brings in. Every quarter, all the devs have to sit down and do a kind of interview with a guy from that firm. We're a pretty standard SaaS platform so it's hard to really know what can be considered R&D from my point of view. During the interview, we go over our work for the last quarter and dig into areas that could potentially be considered R&D. We'll explain in details what are the technical challenges, how what we're doing is different than what's already available out there, if we did prototyping, research, user testing, etc... Then they write up a nice report and try to get us as much R&D credit as they can!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really quite surprised that Montreal lacks the same sort of rent crisis that other cities like the Bay Area (or Vancouver and to some extent Toronto) has. Apparently they've got a surplus of condos for some reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> For better or for worse, Quebec is a nation of renters. The rent laws are thus skewed in the favour of tenants. The rental board enforces the laws very strictly. Tenants can refuse rent increases and have many rights that are probably keeping prices down.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9gie_du_logement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9gie_du_logement)

<comment><USER5> Interesting. How come there isn't a large influx of people moving into the city?

<comment><USER15> Montreal is still expensive compared to the suburbs. Urban sprawl and congestion on bridges at rush hour is a big problem.

Québec is the most taxed province in all of North America too and salaries are lower than most other places. It's all relative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The biggest reason I won't do a startup in Montreal again is the need to make your product bilingual. It's a huge distraction when it's just you and one other person trying to find product/market fit.

So many pitches ended with "we'd pay for your product, but it needs to support French". You can guess what happened next, we wasted weeks supporting i18N, then translating to French, only to discover people didn't want the product, even with French support.

The rent, food, and (most) people were great though!

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd love to work remotely from Maine for a Montreal based company if I could visit HQ once in a while. ;) I love both Montreal and Quebec City, albeit for different reasons.</comment>


Awesome Swift Education - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hsavit1/Awesome-Swift-Education <comment><AUTHOR> Something I put together in an effort to learn Swift</comment>


Infinite Zoom effect using CSS3 Animation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nikesh.me/blog/2010/05/zoomingeffect/

<comment><USER2> Nice, but do you remember <blink>? How useful will CSS animations really be?

<comment><USER3> this particular one can be useful to open new areas iphone-style. it's neat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes absolutely rite...</comment></comment></comment>


Node.js – Listening to the Community - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2014/12/05/listening-to-the-community/

<comment><USER2> I actually didn't know about the fork of node until recently (reading another article)

But it looks like this blog post is a little too late -- people have already gotten annoyed enough to fork off and go in their own direction (which is not necessarily a bad thing)

Glad that Joyent is addressing it though. Though the article comes off to me as "we made a board, it will handle issues like this in the future, nodeJS is not broken/going to implode".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd settle for a "We fucked up, sorry we have been sitting on v0.11.x, maybe we'll consider bumping to 1.0.0".</comment>


FAA slaps down beer-delivering drone after YouTube video goes viral - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/faa-puts-beer-drone-ice-article-1.1596617

<comment><USER2> So guess Pot delivery in Washington and Colorado is probably out of the question :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> By what authority, I demand to know!</comment>


European Extremely Large Telescope given go-ahead - Trey-Jackson http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18396853 <comment><AUTHOR> >Its sensitivity and resolution should make it possible to image directly rocky planets beyond our Solar System.

This is unprecedented, right? I have been wondering for a while if such a thing is or will be possible. I assumed the distances were simply too great.

I see now that it is possible to directly image gas giants, but not to my knowledge small rocky planets.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_imaging#Direct_imaging>

<comment> excuse-me Pretty much yes.

Best wayto image rocky planets is in the mid-IR where they are brighter and their parent star is less bright.

Mid-IR detectors weren't very good 30years ago when todays large telescopes were planed and the mid IR telescopes that have been built were based around poor detectors from 30years earlier and so are small.

Of course what you claim a telescope is for and what is the fashionable topic once it's running can be different. That's the nice thing about telescopes compared to say an LHC - decades after they open they are finding new unusual things with new instruments.

<comment><USER2> Wow. How many photons that bounce of the planet, travel a few lightyears and get caught in this 40m mirror are we talking about here? 1 million per night? Are we close to the limits of detection or what else is possible?

<comment><USER3> A million photons would be overkill for a solid detection. A standard CCD saturates at about 65,000 counts (or about that many photons, assuming the efficiency is high). A source that is detected well enough to do interesting measurements usually has a ~1000 - 20,000 photons per pixel. Spread out over ~15 pixels, a good detection could require as few as ~15,000 photons.

In this particular application it would be more difficult since you not only have to detect the source on its own, you have to block out the glare from the parent star. Usually the main problem in this sort of work is making sure that the source you are detecting is actually a real thing and is not just an artifact from the way you block out the light from the parent star.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How will this compare to the Square Kilometer Array?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array>

<comment> Tuna-Fish SKA is a radio telescope, E-ELT will work with visible light, and as such, they would be usable for very different targets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish the Terrestrial Planet Mapper and Terrestrial Planet Imager had been funded. It was proposing to fly an armada of nulling interferometers in space using optical interferometry capable of imaging planets around other stars at 25x25 pixel resolution.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love these kind of naming conventions. I wonder what the next one in the series will be called and if FLT has been used yet.

<comment><USER7> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope></comment></comment>


Show HN: Heroku Add-On to Integrate APIs Faster - <AUTHOR> https://elements.heroku.com/addons/cloudrail <comment><USER2> Heroku website doesn't work for us as well. Is it just in Europe? More infos about the add on also on [https://cloudrail.com](https://cloudrail.com)

<comment><USER3> It's working here Campbell, CA

<comment><USER2> Now it works here as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "50 million users rely on CloudRail"

Some dubious claims on their website.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like the Heroku website is down

<comment><AUTHOR> which sounds like a bad joke for a PaaS provider

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Penny pinching Heroku, forgot to turn on their own auto scaling

<comment><USER7> Don't be a dick</comment></comment>


FDA says walnuts are drugs.   - <AUTHOR> http://www.fda.gov/iceci/enforcementactions/warningletters/ucm202825.htm "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reviewed the label for your "Diamond of California Shelled Walnuts" products and your website at www.diamondnuts.com. Based on our review, we have concluded that your walnut products are in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) and the applicable regulations in Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (21 CFR)." <comment><USER2> No, the FDA says this company is marketing walnuts as drugs. It doesn't matter if the product is a walnut or a tomato, it's the marketing of something as a treatment for a disease that puts it under FDA purview for the protection of consumers.</comment>


Amor mundi: The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change" - <AUTHOR> http://amormundi.blogspot.it/2012/05/unbearable-stasis-of-accelerating.html <comment><USER2> there might be an argument in there, but it's hard to find amidst all the neoliberal bashing. I'm not necessarily against such bashing, but boy does ideology show through.</comment>


Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> If you're not aware of Nadia Eghbal you should be: [https://twitter.com/nayafia](https://twitter.com/nayafia) \- she is a seriously seriously wonderful human, and I'm lucky to call her a friend. I met her via Justin Johnson from KeenIO a couple years back when she had started her mission. The long and the short of it is that she wanted to understand how to better support software developers who work on OSS however are not being compensated for it. She comes from being a venture capitalist, not purely a technologist, and now works at Github. The report she wrote is excellent and I (obviously) recommend not only reading it, but sharing it with non-technical folks.

<comment><USER3> Seconded. I met her only once (through the also excellent John Komkov of LSVP) here in SF and I was really impressed by her maturity and view of things, despite the relatively young age and no previous experience in OSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate when this analogy is used for open source. It paints an image of these tools being critical but having to be maintained by "other professionals that professionally open source".

The major difference with software is that you as a developer can immensely help! When a bridge falls into disrepair, you can't just start pouring concrete yourself. But when you encounter a bug in open source, not only can you make a huge difference just by filing a detailed bug report, but you can even fix it yourself and possibly for everyone else.

<comment><USER5> This model just doesn't work and that's exactly what the paper linked in the OP is about. Look at OpenSSL, everyone was (is) using it, one guy was maintaining it and barely earning a salary to do so.

Seriously, read the OP, it's well worth your time and makes an extremely solid case. It's both well-researched and well-written.

<comment><USER4> Uh, I think you are reiterating my point. Because people just think that open source is maintained "by someone else", it becomes a tragedy of the commons issue.

If we stop perpetuating the idea that it's something different than regular software that anyone can modify, then maybe we can get more contributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The owner of this website (www.fordfoundation.org) has banned the country or > region your IP address is in (RU) from accessing this website

Well, I don't see any roads or bridges...

</comment><comment><USER7> Surprisingly good reading and very well written.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe Peter Their could influence the Trump administration to provide federal funding for open source projects used in government and private sector projects.

<comment><USER9> I would suggest a simple 5$ / year per machine default donation as the best way for the government to support open source. Direct funding opens the way for a lot of 'waste' and corruption.

<comment><USER5> Donated to whom? There's no central body to receive and distribute these donations. Somebody still has to turn the indirect funding into direct funding to actually get the money into the hands of the developers building the infrastructure; your 'waste' and corruption are just moving out of the government and into whatever body you designate.

<comment><USER9> That's less of a problem than you might think. The most popular oss have associated non profits. Otherwise just keep the money.

<comment><USER5> That's true only of the most popular OSS projects but the infrastructure described in the OP is much more general about that. I strongly recommend actually reading the full paper, it talks about the difficulty in funding these projects because of it's highly distributed nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Will read the whole thing but the excerpts I've read are excellent.

Also slightly off topic but that is one beautiful document from a layout/typography point of view.</comment>


Release of GnuCOBOL 2.2 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2017-09/msg00003.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone knows a job board for people interested to work with COBOL?

I have been interested in this language for quite some time, moved to a different country just to try to find a job where I could learn more about it and build up a career, unfortunately the city that I chose doesn't seems to be have many offers. Most of the jobs require several years of experience doing low level programming, and although I work with system programming languages (C++, Go) I don't have relevant experience working with COBOL which seems to be killing my opportunities.

It's like the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, I want a COBOL job but everyone requires someone with relevant experience, but how can I get experience if no one hires me to work with COBOL? LOL — I am willing to take a junior-intermediate position if necessary, if anyone has a suggestion (company names, job boards, etc).

Thank you in advance.

EDIT: I am in Vancouver, BC, Canada if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER3> > _I have been interested in this language for quite some time_

Out of curiosity: do you mean you find the job prospects interesting, or the language itself? Because I'd understand if it's a money thing, but... I used to work with COBOL and I wouldn't wish the language on anyone.

<comment><USER4> > I used to work with COBOL and I wouldn't wish the language on anyone.

There are worse things. I'd rather work on Cobol than in PHP4, or in a project where I have to deal with front-end stuff done using JS and back-end stuff that relies on the NPM package ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> I vowed to never work in COBOL. Then, a consulting gig in RPG III convinced me otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who miss the 3270 terminals, I made this:

[https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)

Won't turn your keyboard into a beam-spring one, but it still feels cool.

<comment><USER6> Nice!

Not really cobol/ibm related, but to chime in on the retro term theme there is also the GlassTTY font similarly extracted from a dec VT.

My vintage large font green/amber terminal emulator settings for when I'm feeling lazy shall now grow even further :)

<comment><USER7> The fake scanlines on that font make it look like ass unless you scale it to an integer multiple of 20 pixels.

There's a vectorized version of the VT220 font called DEC Terminal Modern which looks pretty good with arbitrary scaling factors.

Oh, and the X11 color "goldenrod" (#daa520) looks pretty close to the amber of amber-phosphor CRTs. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _" After almost 7 years of continual improvement and refinements since > OpenCOBOL version 1.1 and 3 years after the release of GnuCOBOL 1.1, the > GnuCOBOL team is proud to announce the formal release of GnuCOBOL 2.2."_

They took 7 years to go up to GnuCobol 2.2; congratulations for this task. My congratulations are sincere; COBOL compilers are very expensive (MicroFocus, anyone?), so it is great to have a GNU compiler.

</comment><comment><USER8> GnuCOBOL also has the single most comprehensive FAQ in existence. Their docs are amazing. I haven't worked with the tool directly but its helped me solve problem in other languages.

FAQ: [https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io/faq/](https://open- cobol.sourceforge.io/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER9> To those who are curious - Most of the COBOL jobs would be on the Enterprise side. Banks , Insurance , Retails , Automobile , Airlines , Utility Companies , US Government , etc. Mainly hosted on Mainframes

It's not for everybody. You cant do all those cool shit (compared to modern languages and tech stacks) - it has its own stack. One of the main barrier to entry is access to a Mainframe. Sure there are emulators , but nothing beats playing around with the real thing. If IBM really wanted to secure talent , they should really address this. People are willing to pay for access as long as it doesnt burn a hole in one's pocket.

<comment><USER10> Pub400: free *PGMR user profile on IBM i 7.3 mainframe

[http://pub400.com/](http://pub400.com/)

<comment><USER11> IBM i never were mainframes. Being it called IBM i Series, AS/400, or System/38, it were midrange computer systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> le-mark I was always a bit mystified by the opencobol -> gnucobol transition. I vaguely recall reading something about for profit, third parties not playing nice and extending opencobol and then not opening their code or contributing back to opencobol. And opencobol's move to gnu was in part a way to get more muscle for license enforcement. Does anyone reading have more information on that situation? Did I imagine it?

<comment><USER12> That is mostly what happened. Some French company wouldn't play nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> is there a gallery of applications make with gnucobol .. i would like to see how application made in gnucobol can look like

<comment><USER14> A quick search for COBOL applications on GitHub found this: [https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair](https://github.com/azac/cobol- on-wheelchair).

<comment><USER13> LOL .. well, are you sure this is meant to be taken seriously

from the project homepage

"Is it safe?

Of course not! I hacked this together over one night, and without any real knowledge of the language. I suppose the code is utterly horrible."

<comment><USER15> How could you resist running "./downhill.sh"!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is Gnu hosting this on Sourceforge?

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/05/sourc...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer- in-bundle-pushing-adware/)

Also, their ftp link at the bottom of the message is broken.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, can you think of a more appropriate platform to host a _COBOL_ compiler? Google Code maybe? A Gopher site somewhere? Telnet into a BBS to download it?

<comment><USER18> A lot of GNU packages are on Savannah, but it's not required:

[https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Hosting.html](https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Hosting.html)

<comment><USER16> Hm... are there any GNU repos currently hosted on github?

<comment><USER19> AFAIK GNU foundation won't use github because its not totally free software. github isn't open source.

<comment><USER20> [https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria- evaluation.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I keep meaning to find the time to write something useful in COBOL. I've got a few ideas on useful things that would be a good fit for COBOL, but I haven't found the time to do so.

I mainly want to do this for the learning experience. New languages/frameworks/etc are cool, but old ones are special in their own way too.

<comment><USER22> Can you share some things where COBOL still shines today?

<comment><USER21> The obvious answer is banking - A quick search of jobs in Toronto tells me that at least three of Canada's big five banks are running COBOL. It wouldn't surprise me if the rest of the big five were as well, they just didn't have any jobs on the first page of listings.

Whether it shines or not in comparison to more modern languages is another matter.

<comment><USER22> I thought COBOL is being used because of legacy code and technology, not because it's the best option, and new code is written in Java?

<comment><USER23> That's true for the banks that I know of (European ones).

The new stack is sometimes .NET, but it's the same principle you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For download: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/files/gnu- cobol/...](https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/files/gnu-cobol/2.0/) (2.2 is top latest release link)

</comment><comment><USER25> So, 2.2 is out, but the latest docs are tagged as for 2.1 with a note that that was a premature label and 2.1 doesn't actually exist...

[https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io](https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io)

</comment><comment><USER26> Disclosure: Starte career as a COBOL programmer for NCR in 1982.

COBOL is a great language for its intended purpose. As it C, python, Lisp, .....name any language in top 50 on TIOBE index.... These days i think of it as a DSL for business transactions.

To those people having a hard time getting a job the biggest hurdles are in the runtime environments. COBOL is so simple you can learn it in a weekend assuming you know programming basics and concepts well. However....runtimes are a different thing. What the hirers are trying to find is people with knowledge in VRx, CICS, JCS and various other obtuse and arcane environments for running COBOL programs and no books are going to give you that. My observation is that why people with no experience in the language get turned away.

However if you do want to use the language it was one of the very first to embrace the concept of transactions and using queues as an ESB for load balancing and true modular, scalable systems. Modular COBOL systems read next item on the que to which they subscribe, get the message content, and then process it, and putting an output message onto another queue. I remember working with a retail system in NZ in mid 80s and it was doing millions of transactions per hour, using tape reels for and those old washing machine disk drives. So called "modern" tools and architectures struggle with such loads. There are banks, airline systems, finance systems the world over that were built with this stuff, and its still running not just because it works, but because nothing better (when one looks holistically at the system) has come along. Mentions in HN, loads of stars on github do not a failsafe financial system make.

i code in python for own projects and c# at work(Im a product manager so im dabbling not full-tilt product dev) and frequently groan at how modern languages make simple things so hard. Yes I knows its a function of environment but sorry, I was programming systems in early 80s that did more, were more reliable, stored data safely on devices that now look only marginally better than stone tablets, and they worked. Business got done.

Also bemoan my loss of productivity as i got sucked into the change-compile- rinse-repeat mentality that pc brought to the world. In old days i could get 1000 line and up COBOl programs working from scratch(no templates, no COPY) within 4 compiles and couple of days max, just by paying attention to what and how i wrote the code.

End of rant.

Im a huge fan of COBOL, Pascal, C#, Python, javascript, Perl, PHP when used for the right things. I have even been known to write some VB when it was the right tool for the job.

Last comment - best wishes with your job hunt. As other posters have suggested, look as far afield as you need to, be brave, take a plunge, and make sure you know your fundamentals so that if COBOL doesnt work for you, you can switch to another 'dialect' of computing and try again.

<comment><USER27> Late 80s, I started professionally on Unisys 1100 systems and ohmygod. The runtime environment was such a disaster. Like half a days work to set up a runstream to compile your damn program. The printout, which you could pick up 45 minutes later at the central printer. It was not all bad: You _really_ worked hard on avoiding syntax errors, before sending your code off for compilation.

It was also strongly advisable not to forget your (if I emember correctly uppercase, up to 8 characters and numbers) file names. Hierarchical directory structures? That's probably for Sissies.

Anyway, when I moved to VAX/VMS and after writing my first program I asked a colleague.

"So, how do I comile that?"

"Well, you type:"

cobol $program (or COBOL $PROGRAM, VMS is case agnostic)

I thought he was making fun of me after the Unisys experience, but nope. That was it. (Ok, you then had to link it, which wasn't really more complicated).

To this day I think VMS is the best OS I have ever worked with.

Ahh, you bring back so many great and not so great memories... :)</comment></comment>


Zachflower/resume-server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zachflower/resume-server <comment><USER2> I can't think of any reason this really needs to exist - but it's damn cool anyway.</comment>


Printer malware: print a malicious document, expose your whole LAN - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/30/printer-malware-print-a-malic.html

<comment><USER2> Boing Boing publishes big scary article on how your HP Printer is going to own your home, and that article includes this:

"Cui gave HP a month to issue patches for the vulnerabilities he discovered, and HP now has new firmware available that fixes this (his initial disclosure was misreported in the press as making printers vulnerable to being overheated and turning into "flaming death bombs" -- he showed a lightly singed sheet of paper that represented the closest he could come to this claim). He urges anyone with an HP printer to apply the latest patch, because malware could be crafted to take over your printer and then falsely report that it has accepted the patch while discarding it."

Of course, Boing Boing fails to follow up with information regarding which printers are at risk, if updates might be naturally included in a windows update set, if updates might be included with update software from the printer, otherwise where else to get updates, and what to do if there is no update for your computer.

He mentions the latest patch but fails to mention how to obtain it.

Boing Boing fails to discuss any mitigation strategies, for instance, this probably cannot effect you in any way if you are printing out a) your own documents, b) web pages, or c)?

So except for a few dedicated people, no one reading Boing Boing's article is going to do a damn thing about what seems for many to be a very remote risk.

This doesn't seem to me to be a terribly helpful article, just another article warning of how dangerous the world is.

<comment><USER3> I think you play it down too far. Sure its contrived, but consider that most folks would not alert on a PC printing something, so consider the bad guy scenario of drive by sidejack, look for the network printer, download the bogus document to print and print it. Can all be done in the least trusted part of the system. Bad guy now has a foot hold on your network and you don't have any assets deployed against them yet.

I think it merits some scariness in the headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4780.en.h...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4780.en.html)

Appears to have the materials from the talk. Most interesting bit from the researcher's write up:

"We have also unpacked several engine-control processor firmwares (different from the main SoC) and are currently attempting to locate code related to tracking dots. Perhaps we will have some results by December. In any case, HPacker will help the community to do further research in this direction, possibly allowing us to spoof / disable these yellow dots of burden."

In case people are not aware of the background, most printers print special patterns of "invisible" dots on every sheet printed. This allow the printed pages to be tied directly to the printer which printed the dots. Thus, if you are printing something like a political flyer which is inconvenient to your government, the government may be able to tie the flyer to you using these dots.

<comment><USER5> "most printers print special patterns of "invisible" dots on every sheet printed"

I believe this is only relevant to color printers since black pixels would be noticeable. Additionally if you were to copy/scan the document (even in color) you could alter the imaging to yield no yellow dots by exposure or contrast settings (this is common in the printing industry).

Also, this assumes that the serial number of the printer is registered. While it would be possible with an extensive search to locate the buyer of a particular printer even if they didn't register the machine (by tracing to a particular dealer etc.) unless you were committing a major crime (like counterfeiting for example) this doesn't seem like something worth the effort or practical in most cases.

You could also alter the printer to add additional yellow dots to confuse any interpretation.

<http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/>

<comment><USER6> In more recent news, a team in the DARPA shredded document reassembly challenge based one of the hardest solutions in part on correctly placing pieces based on those yellow dots... which they learned about on hacker news :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3368611>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a link to the talk about PostScript hacking, which some people might also find interesting: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqL5P46m_zQ>

</comment><comment><USER8> Yup, computers that run unaudited software (that was probably rushed to market) are dangerous to your LAN. Nothing to see here.

Are there any printers that run a Free Software (or at least open-source) firmware? Are there any peripherals that do?</comment>


Tell HN: Meet Cloudomatic, an easy way to discover SaaS apps. (StartupWeekend) - <AUTHOR> http://cloudomatic.com/

<comment><USER2> This is beautiful and navigable. Well done. A few product suggestions:

* Accounting is really important; Meetings less so. Think about your main headers. * Make it clearer what the order is you're listing the apps: alphabetical, by rating, newest, etc. and let users toggle between them * Have curated lists of apps for various startups and small businesses: freelancers, web apps, consulting firms, bakeries, dentists, etc. * Have "you might also like" or "consider these" apps on any particular app's page

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Myself, Andres(cofounder grooveshark), and many others made it as part of startup weekend here in Miami, so its a very very rough first version. The startups listed are there due to the generosity of everyone on HN yesterday, so thank you thank you thank you. We're planning some pretty cool things to make discovery better for end users and most importantly solve a big problem I used to have: improve customer acquisition for SaaS startups. Looking forward to feedback, which we'll implement over the next week.

ps- another thank you to the people that have been pushing me to get off my ass and do this since I brought it up here on HN last August.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting how a similar service just announced their launch a day earlier on HN also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207187>

Looks like we have ourselves a nice little competition!

<comment><USER4> <http://www.kingapi.com/> for anyone who wants to go direct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious, how does this differentiate from the armies of spam directory sites that already exist to game search engines?

<comment><USER6> I guess we have to look at the vision for this project:

<http://jasonlbaptiste.com/misc/my-next-startup/> (see #6)

which is to become the defacto platform for SaaS application marketing and distribution, including a billing system (partnering with a company in this space like Braintree or Aria Systems might work well?) and [I'm guessing] sharing data, single sign-on across applications (NEC ApplicationsNet does some of this: <http://www.applicationsnet.com/>)

Congratulations on pursuing this idea, Jason. I've been watching this space eagerly since your excellent discussion and subsequent post on "disruption and my next startup"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cloudomatic looks great.

startup weekend with multiple teams seems so much better and more productive than the original version, which was simply chaos the first time in sf. there were literally dozens of developers all going their own way and one thing produced was absolute crap implementation of a crap idea

Turns out the democratic process fails when creating useful applications.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks good. One problem: it was very difficult to actually find a link to each app's website. The little "Go to app" doesn't even look like a link. I suggest making the site link much more prominent, underlined, and perhaps use the URL of the site to make it even easier to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. We were playing with different styles earlier. It's in the to-do list on basecamp, but I'm not sure where it is on the queue (ie- next hour or next day).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wait, BitBucket is on there but Github isn't?

.......

<comment><AUTHOR> thou ask and thou shall receive: <http://cloudomatic.com/collaboration/github/>

(stupid oversight on my part. there's a LOT more for us to add. we tried focusing on the obscure over the obvious fan favorites for day 0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> SUBMISSIONS DON'T WORK: </comment><comment>=

This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at [http://socialatomgroup.wufoo.com/embed/m7x3k1/def/embedKey=m...](http://socialatomgroup.wufoo.com/embed/m7x3k1/def/embedKey=m7x3k1690705&secure=false/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/?type=form#public) has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm, works for me. when does it redirect upon load OR upon clicking submit? browser details?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations. Very impressive work keeping in mind it was developed over just one weekend. How did you populate the site in such a short time?

How are you planning on getting business owners or managers to use your site? I am a business owner myself, and I don't see why I would like to go to your site other than to read reviews of the applications.

</comment><comment><USER12> Your site is vulnerable to XSS attacks.

[http://cloudomatic.com/?s=<script>alert(1);</scr...](http://cloudomatic.com/?s=<script>alert\(1\);</script>);

(Tested on Firefox 3.6)

Please fix it.

</comment><comment><USER13> The categories right now is very limited. You should add the option for people to enter a new category when they submit their app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying to figure out the balance between categories and tags. If you get too many categories then they themselves become sparse. Any specific example? I agree with you as a whole, we do need to add some more categories. WE might change the submit from a dropdown to a just plain text field. We can categorize there after.

<comment><USER13> I added my startup Guestlist (<http://www.guestlistapp.com>) which is event registration. I added it to meeting, but that is really not what it is at all.

I guess my point is that categories are a bad idea. You put MailChimp in sales, but it should be in marketing. Then again, what is the difference between marketing and sales? Productivity is really a subcategory of all the others. You could have a productivity app that focuses entirely on client management, but then that would be called a CRM.

Don't really have a solution, just found it confusing as it currently is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Suggestion: I would make the "Go to app" link bigger because it took me some time to find a way to access the app I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great work Andres and the team. Did you built all of the webapp during one weekend?

<comment><USER16> Thanks Alejandro, we built it over the span of 54 hours</comment></comment>


Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26384712 <comment><USER3> The usual saying is that "the adjective is the enemy of the noun," but on this issue, you shouldn't think about "practice" except in combination with the word "deliberate." What Dan McLaughlin, the amateur golfer who is trying to become an expert golfer, is doing is testing out the idea that sufficiently structured and systematic practice with a coach can turn a moderately interested, not particularly talented average performer into an expert performer in the domain of playing golf.

The research base that developed the term "deliberate practice," (and, for that matter, more rigorously defined "expertise") comes from K. Anders Ericsson[1] and colleagues who contributed to the _The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance_ (2006), a book[2] summarizing research in many domains of human performance.

There are a lot of popular books on these ideas, but only a few take care to distinguish deliberate practice from playful engagement or routine performance by an amateur, and only a few look carefully at the definition of "expert" performance. What's rigorously defined as "deliberate practice" (with coaching and monitoring of fine details of performance) is very hard to do long-term for more than four hours per day, which is why the "ten-year rule" was the original expression of some of the earliest findings on the development of expertise. Your sleeping hours don't count (directly) for development of expertise, nor eating nor hours spent on other daily activities, so it takes years to accumulate 10,000 hours of deliberate practice with necessary rest and play in between sessions of practice.

[1] [http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html](http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html)

[2] [http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cog...](http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/cambridge- handbook-expertise-and-expert-performance)

<comment><USER4> From the article: _Maybe talented people just practise more and try harder at the thing they 're already good at - because they enjoy it?_

There's a profound implication here: that you can train yourself to enjoy something you originally didn't. And even if it's no less hard of a problem than it is to make yourself a 10,000-hour expert in something, it's one with a broader impact.

<comment><USER5> I recently wrote a book on this topic[1][2], and you're quite right - <USER2> people seem to get wrapped up in the status that surrounds the idea of expertise when the real value of this research is what it tells us about how to go about acquiring new skills for personal or professional use.

As you mentioned, practicing to the point of enjoying the skill is the most effective strategy. If you can reach the point where practicing is fun, you're much more likely to continue leveling up.

Adult learners typically find the first few hours of practicing a new skill extremely frustrating, and a very low percentage will complete even 2-3 hours of deliberate practice if the skill is complex, ambiguous, or challenging. Somewhere around hours 3-10, however, you start to see clear improvements, and pushing through frustration is much less of a factor. That's the point where you start seeing clear results.

In my research/experience, the threshold for acquiring new skills for personal or professional use is somewhere around 20 hours. That's not "expertise" \- it's being able to produce a desired result or enjoy the experience. In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to be an "expert" to derive value from practicing new skills.

Since most people have a hard time pushing through the early frustration barrier, 10-20 hours of strategic, deliberate practice will also give you a surprising level of competence compared to other people. All it really takes is having a smart strategy that ensures (1) you invest those early hours of practice in acquiring the most commonly-used sub-skills, (2) you alter your environment to make it as easy as possible to remove distractions, sit down, and do the work.

[1] Book: [http://first20hours.com](http://first20hours.com)

[2] Overview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 10,000 hours (or thereabouts) of practice is one prerequisite. But you have to practice the right things. And for most people that means there needs to be some structure to their practice, some feedback from existing experts. Otherwise, how will you know what needs improvement or re-adjustment.

In the fantastic book "Lessons on the Fundamentals of Go", Toshiro Kageyama addresses this very topic in the introduction saying, "Of course one cannot make progress in any discipline without effort. 'There is no pleasure without pain.' Pleasure is progress, and pain the pain of effort. Study in the wrong way, however, and the result may be just pain with no pleasure at all. One must, without fail, learn the correct way to study."

<comment><USER7> I think the saying goes

\--Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. My musician son practices a new piece slowly, deliberately, speeding up as he gets it down. Takes a day or two for a piece that way - no wasted time unlearning/reworking early screw-ups that became routine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, one of the best examples of "practice leads to excellence" is given by the story of Lazlo Polgar:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r)

> László is an expert on chess theory and owns over 10,000 chess books. He is > interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that > "geniuses are made, not born". Before he had any children, he wrote a book > entitled Bring Up Genius!, and sought a wife to help him carry out his > experiment. He found one in Klara, a schoolteacher, who lived in a > Hungarian-speaking enclave in Ukraine. He married her in the USSR and > brought her to Hungary. He home-schooled their three daughters, primarily in > chess, and all three went on to become strong players.

Their three daughters:

Sofia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zs%C3%B3fia_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zs%C3%B3fia_Polg%C3%A1r)

> In 1989, at the age of 14, she stunned the chess world by her performance in > a tournament in Rome, which became known as the "Sack of Rome". She won the > tournament, which included several strong grandmasters, with a score of 8½ > out of 9. According to the Chessmetrics rating system, her performance > rating was 2735;[3] one of the strongest performances in history by a > 14-year-old.

Susan: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar)

> On the July 1984 FIDE Rating List, at the age of 15, she became the top- > ranked woman player in the world, and remained ranked in the top three for > the next 23 years. She was also the first woman in history to break the > gender barrier by qualifying for the 1986 "Men's" World Championship

And Judit: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r)

> Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is by > far the strongest female chess player in history.[1] In 1991, Polgár > achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, the > youngest person to do so until then.

<comment><USER6> Hard to separate nature from nurture when you school your kids on your own area of expertise. Had he tried to make them into expert musicians or downhill skiers, his experiment might have more weight.

<comment><USER10> But isn't the idea behind the 10,000 hour idea that you need constant high quality feedback and training?

<comment><USER8> Nope; just that you've been at it, studying and trying. The (Gladwell) examples are of folks in groups that learned together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put together a good sentense.

Heck, an awful lot cannot even distinguish between you're and your.

<comment><USER12> _Let 's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put together a good sentense.

Heck, an awful lot cannot even distinguish between you're and your._

I once wrote (coined? invented?) a law which says that one cannot point out errors of grammar or spelling in another's writing, without committing embarrassing errors of one's own.

<comment><USER13> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

<comment><USER11> Well, the situation he described is not really Murphy's law.

It might be a case of "something gone wrong" (and in that sense covered by Murphy's law too), but that's overly generic, and he was going after something far more specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've had mixed feelings on this.

On one hand, I believe that "practice" in this sense is greatly misunderstood. This word normally implies a kind of deliberate action, that you _intend_ to practice for an hour or so. In reality, most of our productive practice comes from the times that you probably don't know you're practicing. For example, when you sing in the shower, you are exercising your vocal chords and making them stronger. That's practice. When you drum the beat of the song on your desk, or even write a new one, and comprehend the rhythms...that's practice. Simply _hearing_ a song could be considered "practice" for a composer. When I was in school, and later in conservatory, the teachers always gave us hard minimums for practice: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour...every day. This seemed like peanuts to me, because how could anyone really not practice for that short of a time and still feel as though they are interested in music?

On the other hand, I do believe in what these people say. Talent is an illusion. It's a way other people describe the long and arduous work you've done to get to this point. In many ways, when people say I am "talented" at something, I find it slightly demoralizing...because it rejects all of the intense hard work and thousands of hours that I put into my craft in order to get to _this_ point (and I don't even believe I'm really a good enough programmer OR musician to be talking from any kind of pulpit). But I don't get too bent out of shape, because I know that deep down, they do understand what "talent" really means.

</comment><comment><USER15> This guys [0] is trying this with gold. He should hit 10.000 hours at December 2016. I read about it a year or two ago and put it into my calendar.

[http://thedanplan.com/about/](http://thedanplan.com/about/)

<comment><USER16> Uh, that's the same guy the article mentions.

And it's not gold, it's golf.

And it's not guys, it's guy's.

But apart from that, you're spot on.

<comment><USER15> Oh, sorry about that. I just came home from a looong bus ride when writing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> my experience has been that you can get pretty close to becoming an expert with practicing on your own.

but a lot of times i reached a point where i needed support to break a certain barrier. when i say support i mean an expert. someone that can help make things better.

sometimes though, this is not true. sometimes too much invalid practice lead to the expert saying i don't like to deal with this sort of stuff. "i have make you unlearn a lot of the mistakes you learned before."

this is extremely true in society. while you might argue that the following is not practice and expertise, it's classic case of mental practice from invalid societal patterns [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645)

</comment><comment><USER18> It can. 48 hours might also make you an expert, or a lifetime, or you may never become an expert, or you might be born an expert. I was born an expert in screaming very loudly and getting lost, for instance. It depends on who you are and what you are trying to become an expert in.

</comment><comment><USER19> You can't become an expert without staying in "the Beginner's mind" (as in the Zen meaning of the phrase).

</comment><comment><USER20> You are a little over a year old 10000 hours into your life and you are hardly and expert at that point :P

<comment><USER21> At that age most babies are experts at getting their parents to do everything for them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "An expert is someone who's far away from home and gives advice"

      -- anonymous

</comment><comment><USER23> There is a difference in practicing for 10,000 hours and practicing for 1 hour 10,000 times.

</comment><comment><USER24> Gladwell's over-simplification is a curse on us all.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think that deliberate practice is both better and worse than actual practice; you need both.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is kind of sexist. It suggest anyone can become expert in a few years, yet women are clearly discriminated everywhere.</comment>


How to Be Original - <AUTHOR> http://30sleeps.com/blog/2008/03/09/original-ideas/

<comment><USER2> > [Reading:] The more ideas you consume, the more you have to cook with.

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." \--Albert Einstein

<comment><USER3> Sure, there's probably a point of diminishing returns. But at what age and volume of reading is it reached? Probably varies by person and profession. Mark Cuban seems to attribute a lot of his early success to voracious reading habits (trade pubs and technical manuals, though. Probably not what Einstein was referring to).

<comment><USER2> > what [...] volume of reading is [diminishing returns] reached?

I think the volume is pretty damn low if you limit your intake to dense, high quality sources. The key word here is _actionable_. How often do you come across something that actually changes your plans or the way you're doing things? It's really very rare, in any field. It certainly doesn't require a daily investment, and probably not even a weekly investment.

A few time I've either been traveling or in crunch mode for a few weeks and been unable to waste time perusing the journals and feeds I usually do. When I finally had a chance to catch up, I found that I could rapidly skim the pile of stuff I would have wasted many hours reading and pick out all the salient information in under an hour.

It's also important to remember we live in the google age and finding information is easy. There's a tendency to suck down information thinking it might be handy later, but a JIT approach to reading and research is probably a lot more efficient. When what to do isn't obvious you can find what's been written fast. Remember that you probably have access through your library to lexis-nexis and other databases that allow you to search pretty much everything that gets published.

People like to procrastinate by reading blogs and "news items" and pretend they're actually doing useful research. In terms of real applicability they'd usually do just as well reading Seventeen Magazine. I'm as guilty as anyone, of course.</comment></comment></comment>


Learn Emacs: Keyboard Macros - <AUTHOR> http://rawsyntax.com/blog/learn-emacs-keyboard-macros/ <comment><USER2> There have been various times in my programming career that I've wanted an emacs macro with arguments, so that it would do things like concatenate a number in each line. Things like this in C:

      #define a 0
      #define b 1
      ...
      #define l 10
      #define m 11

Usually I take that as a sign that I need to write some other program to generate the lines of the C program, but for some tasks that's overkill and I want an automated way to create a list of sequential things so I don't have to type 1 down 1 down 1 down 1 down 2 down 2 down 2 down...

Surely this is a solved problem.

<comment><USER3> You should check out the EmacsWiki macro tricks page:

<http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyboardMacrosTricks>

From there:

        If you want to produce this list:

        test1
        test2
        test3
        ...

        Do like this:

        C-x r n q           (store the number 1 in register q)
        C-x (               (start macro recording)
        test C-x r i q      (insert contents of register q)
        C-x r + q           (increment register q by 1)
        RET                 (new line)
        C-x )               (stop macro recording)

<comment><USER4> The easy way I do it is to make however many copies of "test0" I want, then make a trivial throwaway macro where I move my cursor to the number I want to increment, and hit M-x rolling-increment-number-at-point. (Of course with autocomplete...)

Here's my definitions:

      (defvar *rolling-counter* 0)

      (defun rolling-increment-number-at-point ()
        (interactive)
        (incf *rolling-counter*)
        (skip-chars-backward "0123456789")
        (or (looking-at "[0123456789]+")
            (error "No number at point"))
        (replace-match (number-to-string (+ *rolling-counter*
                                            (string-to-number (match-string 0))))))

      (defun clear-rolling-history ()
        (interactive)
        (setf *rolling-counter* 0))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Each time I consider trying another IDE, I turn on the sometimes available "use emacs keybindings" feature.

Then I quickly remember I use the macro feature constantly and back I go to Emacs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Long-time Emacs user here. (When I search for a string, read, send or reply to an email, or set a timer to tell me when my eggs are ready, I use an Emacs command I wrote.)

I just want to say that if you plan to learn how to write commands in Emacs Lisp, you do not need to learn how to define or use keyboard macros. In my experience, it is always easier just to write some lisp.

<comment><USER7> Ditto. I've had emacs in my fingertips for 17 years now, but virtually never use macros. Repetitive editing stuff in my world is generally easier in perl.

Or more generally: repetitive structure in any text file (especially a program) is generally a sign of bad design, and should be factored out in whatever way is appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the tangent, this may be the 10th article of this kind i've seen, the 1st time it was nice to discover macro shortcuts, now I feel something is wrong.

Emacs documentation is large and well written, yet we discover features with google, it's not even centralized, let's avoid duplication of efforts and reinforce emacswiki. Maybe integrating emacswiki with the standard emacs distribution in some way ? (if it's not done already.. which would render this little rant finally funny)

<comment><USER9> I'm sure you know this already, but Emacs actually contains its manual in a convenient form: C-h r opens it. There are other help commands that provide plenty of information as well.

The issue isn't a lack of information built-in--Emacs is _self-documenting_ , after all--but that its difficult to prioritize features. The real value in blog posts like this is when they describe features the author really likes coupled with his actual use cases for it.

Ultimately, the author is just a curator in a special Emacs exhibit--he brings out the real gems (from his point of view) and gives us some background on them. I think something like that could be integrated into Emacs--but should it?--by having a "tip of the week" or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> disclaimer: I'm the author

Any suggestions for other emacs topics I should blog about?

Thanks for your interest.

<comment><USER10> Something on code navigation & smart code completion.

I am going to echo a reply elsewhere on this thread and say you should contribute to the emacswiki if you can as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I'll be digging into this topic, and making a post on it soon</comment></comment></comment>


Automated Algorithmic Trading for Only $1 per Trade - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantconnect.com/blog/1-dollar-per-trade-tradier/

<comment><USER2> Now that is interesting.....</comment>


Ask YC: Business books actually worth reading? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious if fellow YCers can recommend business books that they found were worth reading (whether focused on startups/entrepreneurship or more broadly).<p>Given the vast swamp of business literature out there, it is hard to tell the signal from the noise (and it is definitely mostly noise). <comment><USER2> The ones that I have rated highly here:

<http://www.squeezedbooks.com>

The problem is that there are many that are good books by smart guys with good ideas - just that the ideas are really something that could be summed up in a few pages.

I would second the recommendation for 'Growing a Business' and 'Founders at Work', which is impossible to really summarize because it's full of interviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> Life Entrepreneurs (Christopher Gergen, Gregg Vanourek)-- the title sounds gimmicky, but the content is excellent and gets you thinking about how to create the life you want, not just the business you want.

The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur (Mike Michalowicz) -- solid, practical advice. Goes beyond the usual business-book cliches.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To get the list started, "Founders at Work" was outstanding -- by far the best business book I've read.

Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start" was okay, but it was too superficial / trite for my taste.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Thou Shall Prosper" by Rabbi David Lapin. One of my favorites.

"Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. Yeah, really. Both this book and the author have been the recipient of a good amount of criticism, but this book help me a lot to increase my thinking beyond a 9-5 job as the primary way of making money. That said, the book is more inspirational and vague than a concrete plan on how to do anything in particular.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore

"Classic Drucker", edited works of Peter Drucker

</comment><comment><USER6> How to Win Friends and Influence People -Dale Carnegie, definitally one of my top 10

</comment><comment><USER7> Hackers and Painters Go It Alone How to get Rich - Dennis Felix

</comment><comment><USER8> Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill

</comment><comment><USER9> Books by Paul Hawken, like "Growing a Business"

[http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Business-Paul- Hawken/dp/067167...](http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Business-Paul- Hawken/dp/0671671642)</comment>


AWS CloudFormation adds drift detection - <AUTHOR> https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/using-cfn-stack-drift.html <comment><AUTHOR> No blog post yet, but the functionality is there

<comment><USER2> [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-cloudformation-drift- de...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-cloudformation-drift-detection/)</comment></comment>


Should district be allowed to demand middle-schooler's Facebook password?  - <AUTHOR> http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/13/10657012-up-against-the-wall-should-district-be-allowed-to-demand-middle-schoolers-facebook-password

<comment><USER2> Won't people just start creating 2 accounts. One with only "approved" content, then a second account where all their real friends are also connected via their second account.

It will make it even harder to keep tabs on them.

<comment><USER3> Kids already do this, so parents have learned to ask for the password to the Facebook account... and the password to the other one. If the kid says he only has one then he gets grounded. (Like in the movies when the bad guys are interrogating someone who really doesn't know anything.)</comment></comment>


Backpage.com taken offline as part of an enforcement action, officials say - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/backpagecom-taken-offline-as-part-of-an-enforcement-action-federal-officials-say/2018/04/06/47bb93de-39d0-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776932)

200+ comments

</comment><comment><USER3> Like it or not - this is how the slippery slope starts... With fanfare.</comment>


Code in Motion - <AUTHOR> http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/

<comment><AUTHOR> Beautiful Code has some really good chapters. I was leafing through my copy recently and realized the chapter on code readability is online, as well as the source code to DiffMerge, discussed in the chapter.

Direct link to chapter: <http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/Code_in_Motion.pdf>

Direct link to DiffMerge source: <http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/diffMerge_code.html>

I am personally a fan of 80-column lines, and there is a reasonable defense of it in the chapter:

 _Book and magazine text is composed in columns, usually in columns far narrower than the page. Why? Because narrowness reduces the back-and-forth scanning our eyes must do as we read—reading is easier when our eyes work less. Reading is also easier when what we've just read and what we're about to read are both within our visual range. Research shows that as our eyes change focus from word to word, our brains can take cues from surrounding, unfocused shapes. The more our brains can glean "advance warning" from shapes within the visual periphery, the better they're able to direct our eyes for maximum comprehension._

 _Research also seems to show that, when it comes to line lengths of text, there's a difference between reading speed and reading comprehension. Longer lines can be read faster, but shorter lines are easier to comprehend._

 _Certainly we need code to be understandable when we read the source files directly. We also need the code to be understandable when we encounter it in diffs, merges, patches, debuggers, code inspections, compiler messages, and a variety of other contexts and tools. […]_

 _When working on code that changes as often as DiffMerge (it has been changed 175 times since it was first written), programmers spend considerable time looking at it in diff and merge tools. What these tools have in common is that they restrict the horizontal view of source files, and they add a certain amount of clutter of their own. Code like DiffMerge's is readable even in these conditions. In command-line diffs, its lines don't wrap. In graphical diff tools, we don't have to fiddle with the horizontal scroll bar to see the bulk of its lines, […]_</comment>


Magic with WebSockets and CSS3 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/outsystems-engineering/making-magic-with-websockets-and-css3-ec22c1dcc8a8 <comment><USER2> Accelerometer data has for sure been taken into account for the real card effects depending on the mobile position. Also, not shown the initial sync of devices to start communicating, which, by the way, could be achieved with a QR instad of handwriting the URL as [http://www.blingbling.money/](http://www.blingbling.money/) does</comment>


Show HN: Make Tweeting simple again - <AUTHOR> https://tweee.co/ <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, why do you need permissions to:

\- Read Tweets from your timeline.

\- See who you follow, and follow new people.

\- Update your profile.

Also, Twitter asks authorization for "Tweet.li App" while the actual website is called Tweee.co, I found that a bit confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> All good points. Initially i wanted to make more than what it is now, there is absolutely no code that would require that functionality i assume its just the default settings from omniauth.

I change the app name, and also sorry for the late answer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have this running for a while now and use it for a lot of different stuff. Please dont abuse it, but feel free to integrate it where ever you need it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can u schedule tweets, dms?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late answer, no we dont do that. Its really just that. You can tweet but without all the bullshit twitter forces on you to use their API today</comment></comment>