Create a web app from scratch in under 5 minutes with Meteor and Mailgun - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailgun.net/post/41958103075/create-a-web-app-from-scratch-in-under-5-minutes-with <comment><USER3>
      if(Meteor.isClient) {
        ...
      }

      if(Meteor.isServer) {
        ...
      }

Does the Meteor compiler somehow split those code blocks into separate files, so that it only serves the client code to the browser?

If not, it seems like a pretty bad practice for delivering fast webapps.

Edit: In general, Meteor.isServer seems like a great way for developers to shoot themselves in the foot:

      Dev: Let me just add my $secret in the server-side block...
      Bad guy (viewing source): Oh, what have we here?
      Dev: PWNED :(

<comment><USER4> "Does the Meteor compiler somehow split those code blocks into separate files, so that it only serves the client code to the browser?"

Yes.

<comment><USER5> Uh, actually, no. And I put together a screencast to prove it.

<http://screencast.com/t/RkImuQ9i>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> $ curl <https://install.meteor.com> | sh

I really wish people would stop giving instructions like this. Despite all the focus on web security and sandboxing, we continue to instruct people to run arbitrary code on their user account.

People should at least give any shell script they download from the internet a cursory look to see if it's doing what it should be doing instead of blindly executing the response from an HTTP request.

<comment><USER7> Meteor dev here.. We actually think this is more secure, or at least does more to raise awareness about security! We want people to BE AWARE that they're running arbitrary code, secured only by the certificate authorities in their local curl install.

Just about every other way of installing software ends up letting the remote run arbitrary code on your machine. The disadvantage of the other approaches is that you don't think about it, so you feel safer than you are, and you are more likely to make security-compromising mistakes.

\- When you download an OS X installer package and run it, it can run arbitrary code during the install. Is that how you installed Postgres or Rails? Hope you downloaded that disk image over http. (The last time you downloaded a disk image, did you check the link to make sure it was https? ... Are you sure you never forget to do that?)

\- OK, so let's say you download a tarball instead, and untar it into /usr/local, and put meteor in your path. Then the next thing you do is.. you type 'meteor', letting the tarball run arbitrary code. There's not much security difference between letting the remote code run at install time, and letting it run two seconds later when you actually start the program fo the first time.

\- OK, let's say you downloaded a Meteor tarball, checked its SHA1-- wait, how did you get the correct SHA1? Did you get it off our website? (Best case, over https, bringing us back where we started?) Or did you call me on the phone.. using the phone number you got off of Facebook.. secured by https? (Best case, and only if you manually added https to your Facebook URL. Did you remember to do that?)

\- No problem, I'll get it out of macports, fink, or homebrew, and hopefully they'll have the correct authoritative hash and validate the download. Well, how do you know you have the real macports? The chain of trust still goes through https and the CA. Arguably this is a little better because presumably many people will notice if the macports download site is hacked, but just as arguably, it's less secure because there's one more potential compromise point (volunteer macport maintainers -- how are they vetted? do they use two factor auth? what if their email account is compromised?)

There's really two separate issues here:

\- Do you trust Meteor enough to run our code? If so, you shouldn't care whether you run curl | sh or whether you download a tarball and unpack it, and then run the program in it. If not, you shouldn't do either. They're equally bad.

\- Do you trust https and the certificate authorities to protect you from MITM attacks, so that you get the authentic bits from meteor.com and not an imitation? If so, then curl <https://foo> solves your problem. If not, you are going to have to find something better than the CA's to serve as your root of trust.

Maybe there is an argument for "defense in depth" -- maybe you should fetch the tarball from one server with one CA, and the SHA1 from a second server with a different CA -- sure, in practice that could make a compromise less likely. But that's a bit much to ask of the random OS X user that just wants to come to meteor.com and install the tools.

Your best option is clearly to come to the monthly DevShop events at Meteor HQ in SF. If you come to DevShop to install Meteor, I will personally confirm the SHA1 for you :)

<comment><USER8> But then how will he _really_ know it's you, Geoff? ;)

In all seriousness, you should consider posting a response like this in your FAQ/Help and linking at the install tutorial. I'm really sick of this knee- jerk security reaction happening every time someone builds an installer like this.

<comment><USER9> While it's ok for Meteor to keep doing what they're doing, it's hardly a "knee jerk security reaction" to criticize their installation instructions.

Story time. I'm at a hotel, connecting to the Web over Tor and using my distro's package manager (Pacman) to install software. I'm also routing Pacman over Tor because I trusted the hotel wifi even less than I trusted Tor. Anyway, Pacman has this wonderful feature of verifying md5sums - <USER2> of the original source code, as posted by the source code author - from source packages before installing any of the code onto your system. If the md5sums on the software you download don't match the author's posted true md5sums, something is probably wrong. You can tell where this story is going. As I'm installing a few packages, which I've done numerous times in the past, Pacman throws a warning: the md5sums don't match. Slightly annoyed, I then download the software directly from PyPi over the hotel's wifi connection, md5sum it and lo and behold, it's the correct md5. It's the exact same software version and everything.

Importantly, the source code must've somehow been modified between the time it was sent from the AUR/PyPi and when it ended up on my machine. Luckily, the md5sum check failed and the software didn't install, but it did scare me quite a bit.

If I had instead been installing Meteor, as per Meteor's current insecure directions, without checking md5sums or signatures, who knows what could've happened. The Meteor team should really consider releasing an md5sum, sha256sum, or better yet sign their packages, because otherwise there's no way to verify the contents of a download.

The Meteor team clearly has the resources to provide this to the inquisitive. It is SOP for all major FOSS. I get that there's something to be said about the ease of releasing packages from GitHub, but imagine if the Linux kernel did this? What Meteor has right now is ok for alpha software. They certainly have room to grow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like there's a certain point where thoughtfulness trumps speed while building something.

Why is there such a desire to do X in N minutes? How can something unique and truly useful come from 5 shell commands?

<comment><USER11> Because accepting an email for a newsletter is not unique and should be able to be built in as little time as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Type this code and run it".

Hey, I can teach you the theory of relativity in 30 seconds: type this "e=mc2".

<comment><USER11> This isn't a "learn how to be a programmer" tutorial. This is a "look how easy Meteor makes getting something simple built and deployed".

So instead of the theory of relativity, how about using a calculator to do your taxes.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough. But this is still not teaching me much about actually writing an app in Meteor. It tells me to type the code in, not how it works or what it all means.

To use the calculator metaphor it would like saying: "enter 75345 + 3455 / 4, there's your taxes!"

<comment><USER11> I see. For me, a beginner programmer, this type of thing is really helpful in explaining what you can do with the language/framework and what the structure of build/deploy looks like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Meteor sounded like a really good concept and I wanted to give it a decent shot. However I could not find a getting started project. The ones I found were very trivial and did not go much into details. I couldnt really find a lot of documentation about how to create an app which used 40-50% of the features which will be used by the majority of the crowd. But I will give it another shot and probably write a polls app (ala Django getting started) in meteor.

<comment><USER5>
       meteor create --list

Personally, I think the `parties` example is a good one, so you can do:

       meteor create --example parties

Enjoy.

<comment><USER14> The parties examples only uses a static map (lame), they make no use of google maps or leaflets. Try using an infoWindow. You can't, it's not easy. You're productive will be stone walled with the simplest of integration. (This is a limit of constant regions and how meteor handles controlling a piece of the dom). Working with maps or third party libraries is a common task.

So, given that common tasks become stone walled and meteor promises productive. I'm waiting for 1.0, meteor is all too young.

I do love some parts of the pattern. I'm surprised that it hasn't been done before; like years ago.

<comment><USER5> As much as I dislike the whiny tone of your comment, you have a point: Meteor has problems integrating with some libraries. If a smart-package doesn't exist for it, the odds of it working are slim. (Try getting jquery ui to work...)

Part of this is because the Meteor use of reactive programming is very different.

Regarding the whining: projects like this take time and effort to create. Wanting something "a year ago" ignores the reality that this is what we have now, and for all it's warts, it's good!

<comment><USER4> Lots of non-standard packages here which are easily added like "mrt add jquery-ui"

<https://atmosphere.meteor.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > $ meteor add email

> This package is automatically configured to send emails (up to 300 per day) > through Mailgun

I'm not sure I like having 'email' linked to a specific service. But maybe that's the Meteor way?

<comment><USER16> You can use other things, but if you want to use one instantly with zero configuration, there's this.

<comment><USER17> That's correct. Here is a quote from the meteor blog announcing this feature: " But there's more than just an API. We've partnered with Rackspace's Mailgun team so that every app deployed with $ meteor deploy can send email right away, without any annoying configuration process. These automatic accounts are capped at 200 messages a day, but of course you're not tied to them. You can use any SMTP server (your own box, a paid Mailgun account, or anything else) just by setting the $MAIL_URL environment variables, whether you're using our deploy servers or running your own bundles."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried it, sent email to myself. Never received it. I typed everything correct except I replaced the email with my own email firstname.lastname@example.com there was no error messages as well.

Do I have to install things like sendmail to make it work? If so that needs to be in the documentation.

Yes I did the meteor add email part, I followed every step.

<comment><USER19> Hello,

It looks like you haven't actually deployed the code. Once deployed a free Mailgun account is created for you behind the scenes and assigned to your app. To test locally you need to create a Mailgun account and follow instructions from the "Extra optional step" section.

BR, Sergey

<comment><USER18> That is because I don't have a web site to deploy to yet. I wanted to test it on my Ubuntu box on Apache first before deploying. Why do I have to create an account on some other web site just so I can send email on my local Ubuntu machine?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just curious, how does Meteor deal with concurrency issues where multiple clients are making changes to the same objects? Does last update win? How does this get reflected back to the UI?

Brief example: A grocery list that both my wife and I are editing, deleting, adding, and re-arranging at the same time.

<comment><USER21> They go into detail on this in their screen casts and online documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why does HN _not_ like MongoDB, but _does_ like Meteor. Meteor uses MongoDB if you don't know.

<comment><USER23> MongoDB is pretty popular here. There's just a vocal group of old school RDBMS lovers who like to hate on everything that isn't PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER24> That doesn't seem very accurate. Plenty of "how do I shot database?" people are very anti-mongo too. Some of that may well be because they feel mongo gets more mindshare than their preferred nondb, but don't blame postgresql users for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great tutorial! If only there was an easy way to store the entered addresses in a database? Maybe that could be done in the next 5 minutes? :) I've had a few projects which where basically nothing more than just what was in the article. Meteor's builtin deploy and free Mailgun will fit perfect for cases like that.

<comment><USER26> On the server, add something like:

RegUsers = new Meteor.Collection("regUsers");

RegUsers.insert({email:email});

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "French Meteor Evangelist" is one of the coolest titles I ever heard. Makes a great business card.

<comment><USER26> Good idea! Let's dok it so I'll not forget :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The great thing about Rails (and Django) was that it was born in the wild. It was built in the process of solving a real world problem, and generalized/abstracted from there. Meteor lacks that type of genesis, and I wonder if that's important.

</comment><comment><USER29> Aren't we all scared that some time in the future from now, new kids will have new tools that will make programming a totally customizable and super- performing web application as trivial as for example dragging some component here and there, like for us has been working with new generation programming environments, compared to i.e. coding asm? This is a part of the hidden feeling I guess..

Also that then, our present efforts and knowledge will be culturally relevant but totally unnecessary for developing great new generation apps ?

But...... we have what we have now, and we still code because we like it NOW, so we should accept the passing of time (and all evolutions it will bring) and think that we are still doing what we enjoy doing and that we have the luck of making a life out of it, possibly :)

Only moment to be concerned about the future is when they'll invent a time machine..

<comment><USER30> You're likely being down voted because since the invention of programming the field has been continuously becoming "easier" often by leaps and bounds. However, programmers always remain at the edge of the boundary so there is continuously more work for programmers, not less. Every component of what made things "easy" can be improved by making it more flexible, performant etc. and doing this most believe will always require a skilled programmer.

But to play devils advocate, if we were to create true artificial intelligence (I guess it would just be intelligence at that point) then not only would programmers be obsolete, but all of humanity would be obsolete. We'd all just be WALL-E style mouths to feed. This seems difficult to imagine, but we already see it happening in some ways. Unemployment is high almost everywhere and there's no fundamental economic law that every human on the planet can contribute sufficiently to match said human's consumption.

Essentially what this means is we have two pretty rough options. First, all of these people fall under the welfare state. The homeless and hungry all get what they need through governments, NGOs and charities. The other is the Darwinian approach, nature's great equalizer. Both of these options suck pretty hard, but that may be the world we're looking at until our robot overlords turn us into batteries (although it's more likely we'd become pets if anything at all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Amazon SES is similarly easy, and it works with any language over SMTP

</comment><comment><USER32> Good job to Vianney... our French Meteor Earlyvangelist!

<comment><USER26> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> two questions: is it easy to get started? is it easy to customize according to my needs in advanced later stages?

<comment><USER26> Get started to Meteor? I never create web app so quickly! For the customization, it depends what are your needs. Meteor is clearly cool to make collaborative web app;

If it's about Mailgun, you can get started for free without any configuration and if you want to send more than 300 emails/day later, you can create a mailgun account and easily integrate your own SMTP credentials into the app using the steps outlined in the blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> whats the difference between mailgun and sendgrid?

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I am the OP and work at Mailgun

This is tough for me to answer objectively, but I'll do my best.

Both services offer many of the same features and eliminate the pain of managing your own email server. Both services will achieve better deliverability at scale than managing your own server unless you know what you are doing and most people aren't interested in diving that deep into email.

Mailgun is very focused on serving developers and that guides our product roadmap. Therefore, we don't offer features like WYSYWIG newsletter creation tools. We build everything API first and we strive to make them RESTful, intuitive and well documented. Admittedly, our GUI / control panel is not the strongest part of the product. We also focus a lot on incoming email and we are pretty proud of our inbound email parsing through Routes. Mailgun is owned by Rackspace (acquired in Aug 2012).

Sendgrid is definitely the largest transactional email sender in the market. I recently read they do something like 7 billion emails monthly. They have more tools for non-developers like newsletter creators and support language wrappers that some developers prefer. They also offer inbound through their Parse App. Sendgrid is an independent, private company that has raised $27.4mm in funding according to Crunchbase [1].

My recommendation would be to try both - the docs are all online and both offer free plans to test with.

[1] <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sendgrid>

<comment><USER35> Mailgun sounds like a really good fit for me. I'm running a couchdb server, and I want to set it up to POST to my DB. Dump straight into my document store, life is good.

I did a quick try at it and ran into a 415 from couchdb, which means mailgun didn't send json. Is there a way to configure a route to do that? If not, I'll have to write a custom _update handler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey pfraze, we do not have a json option for Routes.

<comment><USER35> Ok, cool. Custom _update handler it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great article from Vianney , easy to read, easy to understand

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone who says "5 minutes implementation" to me, get's a nice and sound "GO FUCK YOURSELF"

EDIT: Usually it's the business monkey, UX snake oil guys and product leeches that say "Hey, that will only take like 5 minutes, right?"

<comment><USER38> Why is this getting downvoted so much? Just the language I hope. because there is a point there.

Everytime I see a meteor post, I get the feeling the article is telling me I'd be a fool to use anything else.

Assuming that's so, can we start talking about things like PCI compliant meteor apps. And what the security landscape looks like since you can interact with the data store via your browser's javascript console.

<comment><USER39> "And what the security landscape looks like since you can interact with the data store via your browser's javascript console."

By default, Meteor is in a "development" mode where all the security is off while you get the app doing what you want on localhost. The security is implemented later by turning off the autopublish feature and using authentication at the pub/sub level in the "model" component of the MVVM stack. At this point, when you try to do what they do in the demo, and change data from the browser console, it will make the change in the client for a split second, but that change is rejected at the model level, and the client resyncs with the model and the change is undone in the view.

BTW, I only "learned" (i'm not at all an expert) Meteor a few weeks ago (although I've been following the project since they first announced it 10?? or so months ago.) It's actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. But it is unmistakably a BIG FRAMEWORK in the Rails sense, whereas everyhing else in the Node world is truly modular in the Node fashion, with full transparency into what's going on. For people who like that, check out Derby, and it looks like there is some more stuff in the pipeline with Rendr by the dudes at AirBnB.</comment></comment></comment>


What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets - <AUTHOR> http://kunststube.net/encoding/ <comment><USER2> See also: Joel Spolsky's "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Just recently our company started developing WEB version of our product and our testers keep writing tests to verify that UI controls can correctly display unicode characters. Does it make much sense to do that if all our control if they are all HTML/JavaScript based?

<comment><USER4> You should ideally channel all character/encoding handling through one channel which can be tested and validated once. If there's a chance that every single page and widget may behave differently with regards to encodings, you have a bigger problem. You want to nail encodings once, then concentrate on other problems.

Having said that, more tests are hardly ever bad. Only if you start obsessing about and testing the same thing over and over I'd start to worry about some root causes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For python people, I found this 30 min talk by Ned Batchelder extremely helpful: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHbC6udIqc>

</comment><comment><USER6> Excellent and at times amusing review. Thanks for this.</comment>


Astronomers Worldwide Are About to Make a Groundbreaking Black Hole Announcement - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/the-event-horizon-telescope-is-about-to-make-a-hyuuuuge-announcement <comment><AUTHOR> OP here - The URL is admittedly off-putting & the date of the announcement is odd, but it appears legit:

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/02/black-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/02/black- holes-first-ever-photo-should-unveiled-next-week/3343250002/) [https://interestingengineering.com/will-we-actually-see-a- bl...](https://interestingengineering.com/will-we-actually-see-a-black-holes- event-horizon-next-week) [http://www.newser.com/story/273418/no-ones-ever- seen-a-black...](http://www.newser.com/story/273418/no-ones-ever-seen-a-black- hole-pic-that-may-change.html) [https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann19018/?lang](https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann19018/?lang) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Dr20f19czeE) (live stream)

Could be an elaborate joke but from what I understand it is a set of images from the Event Horizon Telescope [https://eventhorizontelescope.org/](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/) capturing Sagittarius A (the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way)

</comment><comment><USER2>
      https://www.sciencealert.com/the-event-horizon-telescope-is-about-to-make-a-hyuuuuge-announcement

That url is foolish.

</comment><comment><USER3> The anticipation is nice, I suppose, but... telling us that there's going to be an announcement? Why don't they just, you know, make the announcement? Or, if they're not ready yet, then why don't they just not say anything yet? Announcing an announcement... don't bother. In particular, don't waste my time.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/02/black-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/02/black- holes-first-ever-photo-should-unveiled-next-week/3343250002/)

It's the 3rd, so probably not a joke. I have to assume this is going to either be incredible or incredibly disappointing. But I'd love to hear some more informed speculation than my own.

</comment><comment><USER5> April fools article? I seriously doubt this is actually happening.

<comment><USER6> It's happening.

<comment><USER5> Ok. Any other source you'd like to add? I couldn't find any, I'm assuming you had better luck. Otherwise, I'm still calling shenanigans.

<comment> m-p-3 [https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann19018/](https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann19018/)

The posted date worries me, but I doubt ESO would make a prank on something that significant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Helsinki's solution to homelessness - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness <comment><USER2> I don't agree that every solution Finland or Iceland comes up with can be replicated to the rest of the world. These are ethnically homogenous countries with a small population and the majority of which is centered in a small area. Swedens perfect approach to education in the 2000's has now been debunked and even the swedes are telling everyone not to do what they did! I think the same would be true of Finlands "solution".

The US by contrast is a continent in its own right with a vastly diverse set of people and cultures. My own experience of the bay area is people are extremely giving and donate a lot of money and time towards homeless efforts. However I feel the latest backlash is born from fatigue towards no solution in sight. If homeless refuse to accept help or seek alternative options to sleeping on the street why would you want to keep helping? I am still stunned that the tiny city of San Francisco had a $300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. Thats $60k/homeless person, this is greater than the per capita GDP of every single country on earth except the US.

Anecdotally I have a guy living in his car on my street that is filled to the ceiling with trash, he refuses to move or get into a shelter despite us trying to help him. Sadly the neighbors on the street are starting to sour towards him after 6 months of having social workers reach out to help and various charities try to assist.

<comment><USER3> Man am I tired of hearing "the US is too big, too different, too whatever" when it comes to social policies. Social policies don't have to be implemented at a federal level.

SF is doing it wrong? Fine. No one has to do things like SF. But there's no reason not to try a Finnish policy at a city, county or state level if it'd been demonstrated to work.

<comment><USER4> The fact that you can just move to SF from Alaska does make difference. Here in Europe we have sort same problem and the poor Romanians and also the people taking advantage of anothers countries social system was definitely one factor for Brexit. A lot of countries that are in the EU are slowly being even allowed to work in different countries, the integration didn't happen overnight. So I'm sure similar problems apply.

People here say a lot of homeless like to move to SF because of climate too?

<comment><USER5> There's nothing that California can legally do to stop someone from Alaska coming over and staying. But there's plenty that EU countries can do to stop exactly what you described - free movement does come with a range of limitations, like the fact that after 3 months you either have to be employed or have private health insurance to continue "exercising your EU free movement rights". If you don't then you can be kicked out. It's just that no EU country is actually enforcing this law - but it could have done if it wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's unfortunate that the culture in the US is so deprived of compassion and so focused on the "punish first" reaction to anything outside of the ordinary that it will be difficult if not impossible to get anything like this solution adopted.

It's plan to see, even in the comments in this forum so many are really quick to jump to "but mental illness..." "but drugs..." etc...

It makes me sad to realize this is unlikely to change during my lifetime.

<comment><USER7> The data disagrees. It can happen in the US. It _did_ happen in the US.

"Utah reduced chronic homelessness by 91%. Here's how"

[https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced- chroni...](https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic- homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how)

<comment><USER6> I'm glad to learn that. It's also not a surprise it's been tried in Utah of all places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article's "solution to homelessness" is giving homeless people homes.

The article says they have to pay rent or they get kicked out, but doesn't explain how these homeless people can suddenly afford rent.

<comment><USER9> It's a classic problem of mistaking the symptom of homelessness for the problem. If a person simply has a life event that wipes out their finances and they get evicted, okay sure - providing cheap housing just for people in their situation is great. But as much as we don't like stereotypes, a lot of homeless people do actually end up in that situation because of behavioral cycles that still need to be broken. What makes it worse is that homelessness changes a person - and sometimes they are unable to be a part of society right away for more reasons than money (and sometimes they don't even want to). My family operates a hotel that will sell off excess hotel rooms to various homeless groups in the winter - and many times the homeless don't _want_ to be complete inside, so they open windows, etc. and only be as "inside" as they absolutely need to be to survive. That _does_ cause problems if you share infrastructure with other people.

<comment><USER10> No, what you're saying is a fallacy. After the housing bubble popped around 2008, millions of people around the world found themselves homeless. It can happen to anyone at any time for almost any reason, but often for things like healthcare costs or work accidents leading to unemployment and even bankruptcy. And it will happen again, and still nobody will remember, because of this mantra that homelessness is a lack of personal responsibility.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that your labelling of homelessness as a behavioral problem is the cause of homelessness. Repeated all around the world by countless people and politicians.

If we really want to solve poverty and homelessness, we need to start by separating the financial aspect from the behavioral aspect.

The financial aspect involves everything from vast wealth inequality, to lack of urban planning, to the divergence of wealth and automation, to regressive taxation and extortive healthcare programs. This is basically represented by 40 years of trickle down economics and complete disregard for externalities like environmental damage or displaced populations.

The behavior aspect centers mostly around mental health issues like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and yes addiction. Things which are all present in the wealthy but properly managed by therapy, medication and a large support network made possibly by the possession of money. There's absolutely no reason we can't offer treatment to the poor. And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US:

[https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald- re...](https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-reagan-and- the-federal-deinstitutionalization-of-mentally-ill-patients/comment-page-1/)

Personally, I vote to maintain the separation of church and state in the US, which means that the government shouldn't have a say in what appropriate personal behavior is. Which means as a culture, we have a responsibility to pay into a system which is concerned with the care of people who need it.

Churches can still feed and house the homeless, but they shouldn't be the only ones tasked with that responsibility.

For anyone reading this, if you haven't thought about how your personal moral and religious beliefs play into the problem of homelessness, now is the time.

<comment><USER11> _And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US_

This is such a worn out trope.

No, Reagan did not single handily defund mental health.

Institutionalization became a dirty word - people held against their will. The thought was that these people could be more integrated in the community, hence institutions were defunded.

Reagan was just doing what everyone else was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I live in Salt Lake City and we were doing a pretty good job with this approach. Unfortunately, a change in the police chain of command and in the local government led to scaling back of the housing program and a switch to a more traditional model (arrest, choice between jail or rehab, various support programs, housing at the end if you make it through all that).

This new system (which is really the old system come full circle) is much less effective as is clear to anyone who walks around the city. We have a beautiful public library downtown, which is completely unpleasant to visit because it has turned into the place where the homeless stay during the day. About half the times I go I see someone either being arrested or in active withdrawal.

Like most social problems, the solutions are simple, but politically hard to sell, and even harder to maintain once they've been put in place.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cold and harsh winter is actually what makes homelessness not an option around here

<comment><USER14> Homeless people die every winter in San Jose CA, so I guess this program could have wide appeal.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but the weather is mild enough that I bet many don't fully realize the risk. In Helsinki, spending the winter sleeping outside is obviously not an option.

<comment><USER16> You'd be surprised what homeless in Poland pull to just sleep inside during harsher winter.

Forging keys, breaking and entering into garbage disposal or basements and of course trespassing and squatting are some of the things I've personally witnessed and that's not the end.

Yes, there are some facilities but apparently not enough and with conditions not acceptable to some of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One problem of applying this to the American cities that have a homeless problem is that housing in those cities is prohibitively expensive.

Go to a city like Seattle and a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density. (The city doesn't have enough land to build enough tiny houses at 30k or so a pop, so fixing the entire housing problem that way isn't doable.)

<comment><USER18> The other problem of applying this to American cities is that these homes will be used for criminal activity and trashed.

<comment><USER19> While I agree with you, in most cases that's only because they won't be policed... which also makes it a terrible place for all the other folks who need housing, when bullies move in. There are real on going labor/maintenance costs with providing housing to many homeless... even beyond the standard social services that are required.

<comment><USER16> I suspect these homes would be more policed even than any general "rough area".

In fact, this might cut on crime in general, much like honeypot stings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone here think markets alone could solve this problem? Or do you see that coordinated group action is necessary to practically solve problems markets can't fix?

<comment><USER20> Markets clearly haven't solved the problem. They've certainly had the time.

<comment><USER21> Markets partially solved this problem a more than a century ago - the solution was "really shitty, cheap, shared housing". As a society we decided that such housing was unacceptable and banned it without providing a replacement.

"This enormously regulated industry doesn't yield outcomes we like for the poor! Obviously markets cannot solve this problem!" is a disturbingly common argument.

<comment><USER22> They were called "Rooming Houses" and we should bring them back.

<comment><USER23> The beautiful thing with democracy is that these housing solutions that provided an actual solution to homelessness where banned, are still illegal, and thus won't be "brought back" even if they make perfect sense, were preferred by the people who used them, are a free market solution, and much cheaper than the alternatives.

See San Francisco as an example of what happens when more money is poured in the "modern" solutions - very little reduction of the problem, if any.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the surface this kind of solution is easy to dismiss as an expensive socialist extreme; a cost to the taxpayer that there is no political appetite for in other countries. Yet counter-intuitively this is likely a saving for the taxpayer, as hospitals and prisons often end up filling this role, at a much larger cost than simply housing people.

<comment><USER6> Said bluntly, who gives a shit about the taxpayers. Some things are to be done because they are right, not because they save money, even if they end up saving money.

The ROI-first perspective when talking about social policies has created the monstrous society the US is now.

<comment><USER24> For better or worse, taxpayers give a shit about taxpayers, so it's important to recognise when arguments made in their name, and against people who are suffering, are actually a false economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Comparing other countries'policies to our own is like saying "but it works on _my_ computer". There are too many differences in culture, rights and laws to just pretend that if something works over there, then it should work here too.

<comment><USER26> This annoys me to no end; so is this intended to make sure no one does anything about a serious problem with this Whataboutism? Or is it intended to make us care less?

What exactly is the purpose of this kind of comment? Why on earth wouldn't it work?

<comment><USER25> The literal foundations and functions of government are different between the countries, as are the rights that the residents have. It's like trying to copy a Windows program into OSX. You can't just use the .exe, the best you can do is rewrite the entire thing and hope the new OS will even support needs of the software. Personally, I'm really against the idea of just giving folks free stuff as a benefit. I grew up poor and my parents are on all the social programs you can think of, and none of them help in the way they're intended to. The government turns everything into an expensive cluster-f and doesn't ever fix the root problem. No, simple band-aids are not the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The solution to homelessness is {drum rolls} giving people homes.

Who knew? I am not partial to 'handout' economy, but one wonders where did capitalism go wrong.</comment>


End Times - Can America's paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/new-york-times

<comment><USER2> This is old news. Since then, the NYT Co has gotten itself a financial lifeline by taking out a 250M loan from Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire.

[http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display...](http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003934640)

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't mean the NYT is going to suddenly become profitable though, we'll see if $250M more is enough burn for them to figure out a new business model.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which laptop is best for writing? - <AUTHOR> For the past year or so I've had a lot of ideas for blog posts/articles but never seem to have the time to sit down and flesh them out. Between client work, family time and house maintenance there's just so many hours and so much energy to go around.
However, I do have two 25-minute holes in my schedule a day - sitting on a commuter train. I've been using this time to space out and/or listen to podcasts, but could easily use it to write instead.
Here's the problem though - opening up the laptop (which belongs to the client) takes me straight into job-mode, knocking me out of any flow I might've had.
I'm therefore looking for a laptop that's:
A) light B) good keyboard C) fairly inexpensive
It seems like an impossible trifecta. Prove me wrong? <comment><USER2> How about an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard case? I wrote the bulk of a masters thesis on one. Worked fine for me and my 40k words.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've considered this, however Bluetooth cases seem like a huge hit-and-miss swamp. Can you recommend any in particular?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> HP makes laptops with very decent keyboards even in their cheapest tiers -- starting around 200-300$, Celeron, fanless, 4GB RAM, plenty for writing; they have several light but sturdy 11 inch models, and they play nice with Linux too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Define light, and define cheap.

I'd go for a Thinkpad X250 or later with a light Linux distro. Or a Thinkpad X1 Carbon if one of the earlier ones (4th or 5th Gen) fit the budget.</comment>


Create a Password Management App Using Ionic Framework and Firebase - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/ionic-framework/posts/ionic-firebase-password-manager

<comment><USER2> I can't believe you made a 1.38 hour long video for this post - how long did it take you to come up with the idea and then create all the content?

<comment><USER3> Your comment leaves some context to be desired. Are you disgusted or impressed?

<comment><USER2> Super impressed! Sorry for being unclear!

<comment><USER3> No worries, I was just trying to get a gauge. While I'll allow him to concrete this, a video that long would like take a 8-12 hour investment building the content along with the video and editing. Interestingly enough there would have been additional time involved with transcribing that into the blog post.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Engineer.ai claims to automate app making but just uses humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20805676/engineer-ai-artificial-intelligence-startup-app-development-outsourcing-humans <comment><USER2> Just a typical Concierge MVP :-)</comment>


Ask HN: What tech problems would you glady pay $25 a month for a SAAS solution? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked this question wanting to know what day to day issues people struggle with, what tasks they repeat a dozen times a day, what 20 process step can be reduced to 3 or even better completely automated.

Thank you for the answers so far!

</comment><comment><USER2> From validation. It's a pain to write validation code and to do it cleanly, give me an ajax service that I can hand the validation off to. I just want to be able to say field x is a number, field y is an address, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm I think trying to convert such a task into a service will always introduce some language to describe your field and it's constraints and then you might as well write it yourself.

Also with such a critical part of your system, getting information from your user, if the service is slow or down you will run into troubles.

What specific programming languages and/or frameworks do you require a solution for? Please let me know if I missed the point completely. Thanks for your answer!

<comment><USER2> Well I was imagining some kind of ajax thing that validated fields on the fly as the user filled them in.

Validation is non-trivial for many fields. For example almost no-one implements email validation correctly as per the RFC because it's hard to get right, and most people just use a hacky regex that ends up accepting invalid emails and rejecting valid ones.

Or with credit card validation, many places don't validate credit card numbers (i.e doing the validation checksum, checking if the card is a mastercard that it's got the mastercard prefix) before sending them to the card processor site. If the card processing services rejects the card and the user has to re- enter the card details, chance are they won't bother and you've lost yourself a sale. If you validated for obvious mistakes on-the-fly (i.e user sees error immediately) you wouldn't lose as many of those customers.

You could also do things like supplementing the user supplied data, say the user supplies an address you could automatically geocode it and put it in a hidden field for the website.

<comment><USER3> So you mean client side validation correct? I mean to validate form submission that needs server side information, you would still need to build something on your own.

<comment><USER2> Yes. Normally a user filling in a form is the last step before conversion (signup, purchase, etc) so any users you lose at that step are horrendously expensive, good client side validation can make a significant difference.

Validation for the purpose of having clean data in your database is obviously important too, but less so. But obviously if you had a service for providing the first it wouldn't be hard to offer it as a server side services as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but it is tech business related.

Currently frustrated that highrise does not timestamp tags, or allow tags to be sorted by a timestamp.

If you could add that feature as a plugin or via their api I would gladly pay $25 per month.

Haven't looked extensively for a solution, but it's certainly a pain point at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd want a SaaS that when given a URL of an article or piece of content I just wrote... gives me a bunch of related Twitter followers, potential LinkedIn Groups, bloggers, etc where I can pitch my content to. Content marketing tool, so to speak. Hard problem, but hey, that's why I'd pay a lot for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> $25/month is kind of an ambitious price point for small teams or individuals. That's like implying that your service would be more valuable than Basecamp or Github.

<comment><AUTHOR> Surely it depends on the problem being solved though? If I was making a new project management or source code hosting service I would have to think twice about charging the same or more than my competitors alternatively I need to compete on something other than price. Also if a you need a solution to problem X how can the price point be compared to an established company solving problem Y?

I'm curious, are you a developer?

<comment><USER6> > _if a you need a solution to problem X how can the price point be compared > to an established company solving problem Y?_

If problem X and problem Y both cost $25/month to solve, they should be roughly equal pain-wise. By starting at price point of $25/month, and working your way backwards to find problems, you should expect to be tackling Github- or Basecamp-sized problems.

> _I'm curious, are you a developer?_

Yes, I'm a developer/consultant.

<comment><USER7> I think that's non-sense. Just because X and Y cost the same to solve doesn't mean they are equal pain-wise. It doesn't take into account any of relevant factors like market size. I've seen a lot of services that are trivial in comparison charge a lot more because it's a much smaller market and/or the value of a very specific tool is worth far more for people in that niche.

<comment><USER6> If X and Y cost the same but do not solve the same amount of pain, one of them is underpriced.

<comment><USER7> X and Y can cost the same amount and solve different amounts of pain and both be priced accurately.

How?

Amount of Pain X Solves < Amount of Pain Y Solves

X solves a problem for a small market where the consumers are still find it worth $25 to solve the problem and have less options.

Y solves a massive problem that a lot of people have (big market). Prices have been driven to $25 by many competitors.

Different amounts of pain, different amounts of complexity, same price. Y's price has been driven down to 25 by competitive factors. X's price is higher because a lack of competitors. All this requires is that one is under-priced relative to value delivered but not to the market's competitive forces. Therefore neither is under priced given the reality of both sides of the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> social network api where user can login via different networks and import contacts/friends/following. Must be able to have different types of users. and add extra fields like hobbies etc. on sign up form. Must have a javascript widgets I can drop on a screen and cusomtze look and feel or api I can call with backend. Tracking of user. User can share/post message to friends followers etc. mobile sdk also.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good automatic accounting that can handle multiple accounts and multiple currencies. In fact I would pay $100 a month for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> By automatic do you mean it should hook into your accounts and automatically categorize various items as expenses and provide an income statement and balance sheet every month?

<comment><USER9> Yep, as automatic as possible. It could try and auto categorize items and allow the user to fine tune the categorization. But basically doing what an accountant normally does automatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Document to Document conversion API. eg: docx => pdf

should be secure, auto detect formats, etc.

<comment><USER11> There are a lot of guys out there that do this - are they lacking in some way that could be improved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> full featured photoshop alternative. full featured 3d max alternative.

</comment><comment><USER13> Smart monitoring tool that would automatically check:

\- Front end web site availability

\- APIs available

\- Back end processes are running

\- Database up

\- Disk space available

\- Error logs for important issues

The database checks would include referencal integrity and sanity checks on volumes to warn of potential issues eg a failed module or abuse by a user.

Daily and weekly reports by Email, RSS, Twitter, web tool. SMS for emergencies requiring immediate action.

Option to have support from a Sys Admin/DBA automatically trigger to fix minor issues.

<comment><USER14> I recently came across <http://amon.cx/> which does a few of the things you mentioned, and it's a one time purchase (with a free basic version) rather than a SaaS. Might be worth taking a look at.

<comment><USER15> Wow thanks, I need that. Can't believe it's only $25.</comment></comment></comment>


FUV: A Real programmer's editor - <AUTHOR> http://secretgeek.net/fuv_intro.asp <comment><USER2> I stopped reading after "is an excellent replacement for vim.". You guys know that there's no such thing as an excellent replacement for vim :).

On the side, good joke!

</comment><comment><USER3> This was featured three days ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2192664>

As I commented then, the fact that this is a Windows-only program hosted at Microsoft's open source outreach site only makes this funnier.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to read the source to this on it's codeplex page, but don't seem to be able to scroll down... [http://fuv.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/9e0aaba...](http://fuv.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/9e0aabadc831#fuv%2fForm1.cs) I had no idea people even used codeplex, and seeing this, I have to wonder why _anyone_ would.

(using firefox 3.6.13)

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia says that the projects on that site focus on ASP and other Microsoft-centered products. That may be why you've never heard of it.

<comment><USER4> I've certainly heard of it, I just haven't heard of people _actually using it_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the command line, but I find this to be hair-shirted fetishization of the command-line aesthetic.

If we're to have an advance in programmer's editors, what we really need are more powerful and convenient ways of dealing with our _working sets_. By working sets, I mean working sets of definitions, methods, classes -- code entities and not files.

Right now, we're fudging this using virtual screens, multiple screens, groupings of windows, working sets in git/Mercurial, tabs, buffers, code folding, etc... The only tool I've seen that deals directly and cleanly with working sets is _code bubbles_.

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3854>

That looks nice, if Eclipse is your thing. What about a lightweight tool that's an add-on to vim that deals directly with working sets? What about a Textmate-like editor on OS X with explicit working set support? (This should be integrated with code folding, so that you can quickly delineate a working set, save it, then later restore it, with only the entities in the working set unfolded.)

<comment><USER6> It's a joke.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. Specifically, it's a lame gag in the vi/emacs holy war.

<comment><USER5> I don't find such interesting. Please look at the LtU post and consider what I said about working sets.

<comment><USER7> 1) I've already seen it.

2) You might look into making comments that have better relevance to the posts and comments you're replying to. Doubly so if you don't find them interesting.

<comment><USER5> The post is about editors. It's the joke I don't find interesting.

<comment><USER4> No, this post is not about _'text editors'_ , it is about _'a joke about text editors'_.

Nobody really cares if you don't find it interesting. Flag it, maybe make a comment to that effect, and buzz off. Just don't veer off topic.

<comment><USER5> If you reflect for a moment, you'll find that both the posted gag and my humorless comments are actually getting at the same underlying idea.

<comment><USER4> No, it's pretty tangential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the screenshot is priceless

</comment><comment><USER9> A real programmer uses whatever editor he damn well pleases.</comment>


Say hi to Curse, the newest member of the Twitch family - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitch.tv/twitch-and-curse-8ae2b20acf91 <comment><USER2> For those of you wondering "why would/did Curse make a chat app"?

A: It's a niche chat app for gamers to use while gaming, in order to communicate as a team.

From my understanding, it was meant to be a low resource alternative to skype. It's hard to play games like League when skype is eating up your resources/bandwidth/etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, when did Curse go from an addon manager and a community around sharing mods to a Skype/Discord clone? Was it always that, or is this a relatively recent development?

It's interesting how Twitch doubling down on its 'this where gamers go' audience. I wonder what the corporate owner, Amazon, has to gain from this. It's true that gamers respond well to ads about high-margin computer parts, but do their motives go beyond ad serving to actual community building?

<comment><USER4> The Curse Voice product was being internally developed in early 2014. I believe the planning/thoughts for it were happening before then, but it has been long enough that I forgot some of the details. I would have to ping the project lead for additional clarification.

Disclaimer: I work for Curse.

<comment><USER5> Did you work in the San Francisco office? I was also a Curse employee at the time.

<comment><USER4> Nope, only in Huntsville.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slack, Curse, Discord, Rocket.Chat...all these new chat apps feel like clones of each other. They're all web/electron-based apps with very similar interfaces and design and they only seem to differ by maybe one or two features, if at all

<comment><USER7> I use slack at work. Apart from a few special clipboard paste types (like images and other file type sharing), the app seems to offer almost purely only written communication. Integration to other systems might be its strength (via its app directory).

By looking at "curse vs discord" feature list at the bottom of [https://www.curse.com/](https://www.curse.com/), both curse and discord seem to have much more to offer than slack.

I had not heard of rocket.chat. By quickly looking at its features, it seems pretty similar to slack.</comment></comment>


Kali Linux 2.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.kali.org/releases/kali-linux-20-released/ <comment><USER2> Their site is down. Can someone post the magnet link?

EDIT found the link on reddit: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:66fc47bf95d1aa5eca358f12c70af3ba5c7e8f9a&tr=udp://tracker.kali.org:6969/announce&tr=[http://tracker.kali.org:6969/announce](http://tracker.kali.org:6969/announce) (torrent at [http://images.kali.org/kali- linux-2.0-amd64.torrent](http://images.kali.org/kali-linux-2.0-amd64.torrent))

<comment><USER3> Site is back up but cheers for the magnet!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > At the request of Rapid7, we have removed the Metasploit Community / Pro > package from Kali Linux and now host the open-source metasploit-framework > package only...

> In addition, the Rapid7 team no longer maintains the Metasploit package in > Kali...

Seems they had a problem with metasploit company.

<comment><USER5> It is likely in response to this: [https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2015/...](https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2015/06/05/availability- of-metasploit-community-metasploit-pro-trials-outside-us-canada)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Kali Linux is Now a Rolling Distribution" \- finally!

<comment><USER7> I seriously thought that was the goal when they changed names from Backtrack to Kail in the first place. Oh well, good that it's now one at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR Kali Linux is now a rolling distribution, which pulls packages from Debian testing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else getting a weird sha1sum on the Torrent?

I've downloaded twice and I'm getting a34527e9178e7185eebbca0730d825a7c78fcca4

Kali's website (and sha1 file) says aaeb89a78f155377282f81a785aa1b38ee5f8ba0

I'm getting from http now, but its slow as sin.

</comment><comment><USER10> It took awhile to figure out what happen to backtrack seeing this Kali Linux I was curious about Backtrack.

Kali Linux is the successor of Backtrack but on Debian.

Interesting, they should have kept the brand sheesh.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is about Kali that sets it apart from other Linux distributions?

<comment><USER12> It is a distro built specifically for pen testing.

<comment><USER11> What exactly do you mean by " _built_ "? I mean if it's, like other users said, just a bundle of pre-installed tools, how does it differ from Ubuntu?

<comment><USER13> I believe every network protocol and outside connection is disabled by default. It's supposed to be setup so that it can be booted invisibly, on an existing system via live USB so that you can simulate a real intrusion.

<comment><USER14> You should doublecheck this with wireshark yourself before finding yourself in a potentially bad situation. Kali is not so silent as advertised.

<comment><USER13> Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone seen a list of what tools have been added in this release?

<comment> at-fates-hands Here you go: [https://www.kali.org/releases/kali- linux-20-released/](https://www.kali.org/releases/kali-linux-20-released/)

They've added a ton of stuff as well as removed metasploit pro package due to Rapid7 asking them to remove it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> kali.org's SSL cert shows as invalid due to a subject mismatch. Is that on purpose?

</comment><comment><USER17> Kali is a pretty poor distro. Merely a fork of debian for no other purpose than to create clickable icons/menu items for cli applications that require sudo. So 99% of the security apps they install are presented in an unusable form. Nothing you can't do with debian and a few runs of apt-get.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't Kali default to having you login as "root", for pretty much this exact reason?

<comment><USER17> So run everything else as root. Real secure. "Make everything setuid 0!"

<comment><USER19> Running as root in a lot of ways is to further nail home that this is a tool that is not for your day to day computer usage. You'll pull it out for testing, use it, and then toss the environment. With the environment as disposable as it is, running as a regular user gains you nothing, except a potential case of carpal tunnel from typing sudo over and over again.

<comment><USER20> Kali is much less of a live CD than backtrack was.

Also, most of the people Kali is targeted towards would use it every day.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WWSJD? - <AUTHOR>

What would todays presentation would have looked like if Steve Jobs was still around?
-There would have been fewer leaks before the big unveiling.
-There would have been fewer features mentioned in the presentation.
-There would have been fewer features in the product in favor of a faster ship date.
-There would have been fewer choices in terms of colors, straps and models.
This is a totally unfair comparison, especially as I don't work at Apple and have yet to wear the device.
But I think we are all wondering, can Apple continue to innovate as successfully without Steve around? <comment><USER2>
        Fewer Leaks

[http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next- iphone](http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone)

        faster ship date

[https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09Apple- Reinvents-t...](https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents- the-Phone-with-iPhone.html) \- "MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO—January 9, 2007—Apple® today introduced iPhone...it begins shipping in June"

        fewer choices

[http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1,166649,166665](http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1,166649,166665)

        we are all wondering

I'm not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good response.

Individually, none of this is a big deal.

Together, it made for a disappointing presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who cares?

<comment><AUTHOR> As a stock holder, I care.

I have a taxable account that holds individual stocks.

AMT means I shouldn't sell unless I see Apple underperforming the index by a significant amount.

<comment><USER3> No, I mean who cares what Steve Jobs would do? He's gone. It doesn't matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> A simple presentation is like a simple product.

If they can't keep the presentation simple and elegant, how can they keep the product simple and elegant.

<comment><USER3> That's a ridiculous statement. The product and the announcement are completely disparate. They could make an amazing presentation about a mediocre product (and have been known to do so).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>