Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day? - <AUTHOR> A few days ago there was a discussion about worst enterprise software. What is the BEST one? <comment><USER3> Things that we pay for.

 _SQL Server_ : it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features.

 _Tableau_ : more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though, especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a certain mindset is required.

 _Active Directory_ : it's just there. It's pretty decent.

 _Visual Studio_ : I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C# codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g. solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a ton of guards to help avoid human errors.

 _Splunk_ : it's good. Not the cheapest though.

<comment><USER4> Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?

<comment><USER3> For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain. The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast? Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable to Sumologic.

Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some folks will recommend elasticsearch, but we tried it and it was challenging to set up just right.

<comment><USER5> The minute you say "on-prem" a surprising number of sales people stop talking and just looks terrified.

Running and managing an ELK stack is just a hassle and a managing nightmare conpared to Splunk. Humio is a great alternative, if you need something cheaper, but you have to give up a lot of features.

<comment><USER6> I've managed a full elastic search + graylog cluster. It was very easy to setup and maintain. [https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with- gray...](https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-graylog- lessons-learned/)

By far elasticsearch is the easiest distributed database to setup and scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprised by the answers given here. If I hear 'enterprise', I'm thinking SAP, IBM, Oracle. SAS etc., not some dev environments or niche tools.

<comment><USER8> Yep, RHEL would be an example of open source enterprise software.

<comment><USER9> Borderline. The 'E' in RHEL doesn't imply RHEL itself is an enterprise s/w, more that it's an OS best suited for 'running enterprise s/w on'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Datadog - the amount of observability we have in our infrastructure is insane.

I can find out what's wrong within a few seconds.

<comment><USER11> The tool indeed does a very good job from developer's point of view but when we see the end to end aspects of Datadog then the feeling changes. Previously when I was working as a DevOps Engineer, I remember how much our Head of Infrastructure was pissed with the shady licensing and pricing model of Datadog. Missing of detailed itemized billing, lack of proper access control (allowing who team can use which feature, can publish what metrics, etc.) makes the tool a pain in the long run. We even started to look for affordable alternatives to it.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, amazing, incredible tool but the billing is obfuscated to the point you almost wonder if they're intentionally trying to make it impossible to understand. Though once you realize there are a tons of hacks to abuse their billing methods and pay much less, it becomes apparent that it's just a case of Hanlon's razor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've tried not to be impressed by airtable, but their on the fly API documentation generators for how you configure things still feels like black magic.

Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations.

They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them somehow

Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digital ocean. They clearly have developers who rely on the product. All the elements are there and they work well.

Azure's python libraries I find way easier than AWS's boto3, which for some reason always reminds me of dbus programming. I keep meaning to try Google's bud I haven't yet.

I also have been meaning to write one that somehow transparently uses things like rsync/scp with some partitioning strategy so you can migrate say a personal project costing you $50/month, generating you $0 and used by only a few dozen people to potentially a lot less.

(I've got numerous large scale efforts that _almost_ nobody uses...)

<comment><USER14> what is an on the fly API documentation generator? Is it that you say what your lang and stack is and they tailor the documentation to just the lang and stack you're using?

<comment><USER15> Airtable generates basic REST APIs for CRUD operations based on your database schema. Perhaps that's what OP is referring to.

<comment><USER16> That sounds about right and even makes sense. I would really like to work on something like that, maybe even open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cisco's Duo Security MFA product.

It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working.

It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.

<comment><USER18> Huh I have used Duo for years and had no idea they were owned by Cisco. Agree with you though - I don't spend more than a few seconds a day interacting with it, but it gets the job done painlessly.

<comment><USER19> Acquired by Cisco

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1) Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 2) SnagIt 3) SSMS 4) Microsoft Azure Services 5) Microsoft Azure DevOps 6) Postman

there a bunch of other tools I use/love but I'm not sure they would qualify as 'enterprise', but here they are just in case:

VScode, notepad++, Agent Ransack, code compare, Dark reader chrome extension, Fork (git-client tool for MacOS),linqPad

</comment><comment><USER21> LanSweeper. It's the primary asset tracker/scanner we use for our local network of over 3000 network devices. It can read switch data to even provide a means of finding what port a device is connected to on a switch. Combine with ArcGIS to physically trace thousands of network cables and hundreds of fiber trunks and runs, we're able to have immediate access/knowledge of where any asset is located virtually and physically as well as the entire physical path between each point. These two tools have allowed us to migrate from knowledge only being saved in the memory of a few individuals to being preserved via documentation.

<comment> blaser-waffle We're running into this issue now. It will be at least 2-3 more weeks of having a cable monkey trace everything in our colo's.

How does LANSweeper detect devices? CDP, SNMP, etc?

<comment><USER21> SNMP mainly. It collects installed apps (versions) hardware info, warranty info, and basically everything you could want or need to know and tons of stuff you probably don't even care about. It has an optional built in ticketing system (for helpdesk) and even a deployment service. I've set up tons of automation with it. Auto install virus scanner on systems, install VPN on laptops, script execution to change Windows USB power settings, and other little things. You can setup groups, filters, reports, search by systems running a specific version of software (and then deploy an update for those systems). It's basically an automated documentation tool with extras that enable a new person to jump in and be able to navigate the company's network to find computers and get to work without having to ask where everything is. But that also helps for the people who have been there for years to not have to go through and document things. Honestly the ability for it to trace through the network connections is probably the most game changing powerful feature. And you can even use it to execute backup scripts on network switches.

It's enterprise and comes with that price tag, but the cost of it is covered by the labor hours it saves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love using Tableau. It has completely changed the way I analyze data -- things that would have taken me a minute or two in Excel takes literally seconds in Tableau.

<comment><USER23> What's Tableau's special secret to handling data? Is it doing table indexing, summary, and array manipulation in a smarter way compared to dumb Excel?

<comment><USER22> It's honestly just speed. Want to sum this, broken out by that, filtering out this other thing? Oh want to make it an area chart instead of a bar chart? Add a color code? These things are just super fast and easy to do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1) nimbletext. when clients send me excel sheets with tons of data to import i would generate insert statements in the sheets themselves. this is a painful experience. Then i found out about nimbletext. its pure joy to use.

2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very easy.

3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use.

4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone to be uber productive

5) Autohotkey. got a ms 4000 ergonomic keyboard and binding all keys a journey in itself

I'll stop right here but i have tons of other tools i really enjoy using.

<comment><USER25> What kind of customization do you do to VS 2019 to make it more productive?

<comment><USER26> I'm no the OP, but I suggest to use things like

Extensions:

Roslynator

Codemaid

Productivity Power Tools - pack of extensions

_________

And maybe disable option: Reopen documents on solution load

It's in tools -> options -> projects and solutions -> general

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://datastudio.google.com/](https://datastudio.google.com/)

When you've maxed out on what you can do with spreadsheets.

<comment><USER28> Didn't know this thing existed. Thank you ;)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For me, I have to say it, it's MS Outlook. I do e-mail all day every day and I use VBA macros and all sorts of shortcuts to make it very useful. Love it.

<comment><USER29> That is the first time I hear someone praise Outlook. For an application that gets billions in billing, there are no valid excuses for it to be the same thing as it was 15 years ago.

<comment><USER30> I think there's a solid argument that getting billions in billing while being stagnant is self evidently a valid excuse to be stagnant.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I think there's a solid argument that getting billions in billing while > being stagnant is self evidently a valid excuse to be stagnant.

yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been enamored by Pipedream ([https://pipedream.com](https://pipedream.com)) because as a Product Manager with engineering background, I can quickly hack together prototypes and get good feedback from customers :) . Pretty sure there are other nocode software but this is great for me.

<comment><USER32> What kind of stuff do you use it for? I watched the intro video and I get it would be useful for "monitoring" Twitter and stuff like that, but are there more practical day-to-day uses for it?

<comment><USER31> My team's bread and butter is integrations between enterprise systems. So I can quickly make prototypes of system A and our own software working when a webhook is triggered on A. Quick feedback plus tweaks before we do formal dev keeps us from having nasty surprises at the end of integration

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Two:

\- UltraEdit. What Photoshop is to images, UltraEdit is to text. The weird thing is, it's not a super flashy or even immediately intuitive tool. But once you get the hang of it, it never fails to deliver.

\- Excel. It's insane the breadth of stuff you can do with it. And as a tool, it's equally handy and "oh my God this will save me so much work" for a school teacher as it is for a data analyst and stock broker. It sort of scales infinitely, there is always one more level of complexity/usefulness to unlock.

<comment><USER34> Can you give an example of why UltraEdit is better than emacs? Thanks!

<comment><USER35> I assume Emacs can be made to do anything under the sun, but UltraEdit comes out of the box with a friendly GUI that exposes some fairly complicated text manipulation tools. On some level it's just personal preference and familiarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> * Looker (most usable BI tool I've come across so far)

* DataDog (distributed tracing is a dream)

* IntelliJ (idea, goland, pycharm, clion, datagrip)

* MindNode (macOS-only mind-mapping software)

Recently started using smart sheets, but on the fence about this one so far.

<comment><USER37> What other BI platforms have you used? We're looking to build out our BI infrastructure as a service for our customers and are currently testing google data studio but have looked into Sisense + Looker.

<comment><USER36> QuickSight, Tableau, Chartio. Disappointed with all of these

<comment><USER38> You should check out Holistics.io if you're disappointed with all 3 options. A balance between drag-and-drop for business users and SQL for data analysts, this is done through a SQL-based data modeling layer.

Disclaimer: I work at Holistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> GrabCAD. It's free, simple cloud-based version control for CAD files. I don't think they actually offer an enterprise (on-prem) version anymore but I would still consider it enterprise software.

The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval workflows.

Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.

Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:

For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards (which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or dvd).

Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices, such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach a state of no control / word documents.

Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion 360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source world.

<comment><USER40> I cannot agree more with this comment. CAD software is still so dominated by proprietary systems that maintain their own version control and feature set. And since all the major players offer a "suite" of tools, there's no incentive to seamlessly interact between products. You spend so much time trying to figure out how you are going work with importing a neutral export (meaning you've dissected the data from its version control), and maintaining any data accuracy.

I was honestly extremely hopeful when OnShape hit the market. Granted it was still a proprietary tool, but felt it had the tooling and integrations to bring CAD systems into the "modern era". Then they crippled their free offering, removing it's discrimination from tools like Fusion. And now with their purchase by PTC, I have no hope in it making any further waves in the CAD space.

<comment><USER39> It's obvious to anyone with exposure to software that the whole industry is 25 years behind in version control. It exists in large companies, but as a JIRA or SAP like system, usually with engineers fighting for the right to work with local files. It does not exist as standard industry practice that everyone follows.

I'm sure many people on HN have experience meeting a one-person self-taught software team in a small company that developed their own version control system called "copying folders". In mechanical CAD, half of the industry is at that level, but it's even worse because your shard libraries may be updated irreversibly and without notification when you don't intend, or not updated when you intend, depending on such factors as the order in which you loaded your projects.

I was sad enough that GrabCAD was purchased by Stratasys, but at least it's plausible that it exists for a while. I didn't know OnShape was purchased by PTC. I was also really hopeful and play around with it about once a year. It's always missing something I need, but was getting close, and some of the features they add are really innovative. They are also honest about what features are missing.

On the other hand, I still have a soft spot for Pro-E since it was my first MCAD package and to this day miss some of its parametric features (but certainly not its interface).

<comment><USER41> GrabCAD engineer here. AFAIK community part of GrabCAD, main website where the libraries, models, tutorials etc located, is planned to be always free.

As for the features and suggestions, could you please writ them to [https://grabcad.com/groups/grabcad-community-user- group](https://grabcad.com/groups/grabcad-community-user-group) where all the PMs and related engineers follow and improve the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> JIRA. It's powerful, customizable, flexible and drives workflows and productivity across millions of companies around the world. It's the SAP of issue tracking. Despite all the baggage, they still try continuously to improve the UX of the software so it stays relevant and relatively usable.

There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger orgs), but come on let's be honest, it's a huge success story and lets orgs do things "their way" with project management and software development.

<comment><USER43> It's crazy how different opinions are on JIRA. I think it's the worst tool I'm forced to use - and have been - at all my dev jobs. It's slow, sluggish, the UX is horrible and it gets in my way. A lot of dev teams that are outside of product/project management claws simply opt for using whatever simple kanban board there might be(Trello, for example).

<comment><USER44> Every problem you mentioned with a Jira is some decision your IT folks made. The same every time I hear people telling me how awful the software is: they complain of autocratic workflows, forms being slow, forms being complex and having so many mandatory fields that they can't get anything done.

It's all due to local configuration, some IT kiddo sees all these bells and whistles and levers to pull, so they turn them all on thinking more features is better.

In the meantime the most efficient workflow I have has six states (planning, execution, UAT, deployment, warranty, closed) and it works just fine and stays out of my way.

<comment><USER43> JIRA being slow and sluggish doesn't really have anything to do with configuration. It's a horrible tool to navigate UX-wise.

<comment><USER45> It's often deployed on completely underpowered servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Trace32 & the Lauterbach JTAG. Expensive, but intuitive, scriptable, and performant.

<comment><USER18> Funny but I had the exact opposite experience with it back when I worked in the space like 10 years ago. The software was clunky and borderline unusable, every bit of the system was proprietary (I remember we had to pay $10K a pop for connector cables, which each came with their own limited license), support was clueless, and there was no ecosystem to speak of (again due to their tight controls).

<comment><USER46> The expense I think is just a side effect of working in this space. Mayne when things open up prices will go down. As for the softwares usability, I don't know how much it's changed in the 10 years since you saw it last, but I really like it. Everything is clickable, the work flow for flashing, symbol loading, fiddling with registers + peripherals, is better than really any other system I've used in the space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think Slack is the only enterprise software that I use every day and don't hate.

<comment> dynamite-ready Definitely. It's much friendlier than Teams. Even little things like your own personal channel are so thoughtful, I use it outside of work as a cross platform clipboard (files and links).

I also am much more likely to prioritize Slack messages over email. It is just Skype with bells on, but it's still very good in it's own right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Any Jetbrains IDE - take my money

Okta - Just works, good UI

Workday - I seem to be in the minority but the clean UI + generally decent tooling allows for a decent deal to be in there

</comment><comment><USER49> Excel, Box, and Zoom. Would vote for Cloudability as well, but that's not something that I use anywhere near every day.

<comment><USER50> Excel is a pain. It's annoying to open - if I already have Excel open and try open another Excel document I often have to click into a cell in the currently opened Excel document for the new document to open.

It's also a pain closing as it prompts do I want to save. Saving as a CSV is a pain, it takes two prompts to save as a CSV.

File recovery is also a pain.

<comment><USER51> I converted to Apple Numbers about a year after it came out, and both Excel and Google Sheets seem completely archaic to me now. I've sent PDFs of my Numbers docs to people and they are blown away. Now that I can share Numbers through iCloud to both Mac and Windows users, I've got some people fully converted over.

<comment><USER39> Multiple tables on one sheet that can be resized is a killer feature. It's just so easy to make nice looking data and output on one screen compared to Excel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Weird but i like Outlook Web, very good replacement for GMail with it's endless "ui improvements".

<comment><USER53> I don't hate Outlook at all, and the mobile app is 1000% better than the Gmail app.

<comment><USER52> iOS app is veeeery good! That's how i eventually moved to paid cloud outlook since it is also so good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Clubhouse for managing the software development. It's really snappy which I love. Sentry.io for handling all exceptions from applications and mobile devices in one place.

</comment><comment><USER55> Confluence. It's so easy to organise information and documentation now for technical projects. Of course its free form so people can be messy with it, but done right, and with the good plugins, like draw.io it's really powerful. Integrates very well with JIRA also.

<comment><USER56> I used to think this as well. But over time, I've seen it devolve into a wasteland of out of date information. This is driven by two factors. First, the search functionality is by far the worst search I have ever seen. This leads to duplicate information as people relearn and redocument things because they couldn't find them. Second, confluence has a very powerful permission system. Once you get past a certain scale, you can end up with little fiefdoms of information. Want to update a common piece of documentation? You need to convince the owner to give you edit rights. Who is the owner? I dunno, start asking around.

<comment> blaser-waffle Seconded. The search is bad, and Confluence feels unstructured, but with tight security.

It was better than DokuWiki, for sure, but DokuWiki was free...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> PagerDuty is generally pretty good, but I haven't used VictorOps or OpsGenie so I can't compare.

<comment><USER58> In my experience, OpsGenie is a huge improvement over PagerDuty.

I've helped manage both PagerDuty and OpsGenie at a certain employer, and while PagerDuty seemed to mostly kinda semi sorta work, there was a lot of klunky aspects to the system. When we switched to OpsGenie, it was like all the things we liked about PagerDuty were still present, but we didn't have any of the pain points. Moreover, there were additional features that made it even nicer.

Imagine how good it feels when you stop banging your head against the wall, and then realize you've been banging your head against a wall for the past few years.

Don't get me wrong, I love the PagerDuty guys and everything they've done as pioneers in this field, but I much prefer OpsGenie.

In fact, OpsGenie is such low-touch that we now have many fewer people who are involved in the day to day management of it, each team can manage the things they really care about, and the rest of us can just get on with our other work.

<comment><USER59> What sort of thing made you run into trouble with PagerDuty? I've only used it in smaller teams and we've basically not touched it after setting it up, save for editing rotations.

Importantly, PagerDuty has (as far as I know) a well deserved reputation for reliability, which is critical in that space. How is the reliability of these other providers? How have you measured it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Odoo ERP. Select the apps (Sales, CRM, Newsletter etc.) you need and profit from great integrations. Gets rid of all those data back and forth between independent applications. You can also create your own apps.

<comment><USER61> Looking at it right now and it does seem to be a wonderful ecosystem with reasonable pricing. Do you happen to know use cases examples that you can share?

<comment><USER62> Another happy odoo user here: we use it internally for CRM, sales, purchases, accounting, product inventory. We also developped modules to make it the back end of our web/mobile shop, and of our mobile apps.

The flexibility is really great, and while I have not used other ERPs, I believe it is easier to develop for, and to use as an end-user. Part of the code is open-source, and you have access to the source of the non-free apps. As a bonus, it's Python!

Regarding the pricing, it sure is less expensive than the competitors, but the cost increases fast when you add new modules, or if you have many internal users (pricing is 100-250€ per module per year + ~250€ per internal user per year)

EDIT: a live demo with most modules installed is running at [https://master.odoo.com/saas_master/demo](https://master.odoo.com/saas_master/demo)

<comment><USER61> Thank you for the feedback. You probably won't be willing to share the site/app, but if you do, would you mind if I get a look?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Autodesk Revit 2020. Although it does have it's quirks, it is a very powerful modeling program.

</comment><comment><USER64> Matlab: Great for prototyping and tinkering.

<comment><USER65> There's a reason Matlab is still around and doing well. It's so much faster to prototype things in, and systems engineers all know it well. Yes, python can do most of the same things, but it's nowhere near as easy and integrated.

<comment><USER66> I thought it was only because it had gotten into universities curriculums.

Mostly joking. I agree that Matlab is quite good to quickly setting up certain things and can even be quite elegant when used by someone who knows it.

I do however feel like it should not get as central of a place in education as it got at my university. I would prefer more open alternatives to be used to maybe inspire more simpler exploration by the students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Lotus Notes. You can build your whole application in it, isn't that just great?

</comment><comment><USER68> Absolutely loved SumoLogic for the six years or so we used it. Threw terabytes of logs at them a month and searches were always fast. Being able to do joins on logs was a godsend. I tried to work there but it seemed like they stopped hiring for a while.

Now I use Loggly... It's okay.

IDEA's IDEs as others have mentioned.

I've built enterprise software I enjoyed using (reputation.com), does that count? :)

<comment><USER69> I wasn't aware of SumoLogic but at $2.5/GB ingested, they seem expensive. I understand that at TB a month of logs Elasticsearch stops being viable, but what made SumoLogic so great except the speed to warrant the cost?

<comment><USER68> We spent a lot of money on Sumo indeed. But when it helps you keep churn down it can pay off.

You can also parse the logs and create alerts and dashboards from the parsed values.

We only retained the logs for 30 days, so you could use Elastic/Kibana and we did for our dev/qa environments. However people hated it compared to Sumo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Splunk is an incredible tool. It is powerful, fast, and just a joy to use. The skill floor is low and the ceiling is high. Only minor complaint is the APIs have essentially no documentation if you want to interact with it programmatically (yes, there is some documentation, but it only covered like 10-20% of the interface last time I looked).

Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they are definitely force multipliers.

I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode, but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better supported in VSCode.

</comment><comment><USER70> Jira. My only pet-peeves are:

* it breaks native keyboard shortcuts. After disabling the shortcut overrides in settings, "/" is a NOP (which is weird, since disabling the overrides worked in Confluence)

* the markup is non-standard (but I can live with it)

* sometimes it will log me out when I want to post a comment and all of what I wrote in the comment box gets lost

</comment><comment><USER71> Superhuman. It's the only software I use at work that I pay for myself because it makes dealing with email so much less painful. To the point that it's actually almost enjoyable clearing out my inbox. The ability to do absolutely everything from the keyboard and being so responsive really makes a huge difference.

</comment><comment><USER55> Vivado. It's for FPGA design, and I while do ASIC design, but I use vivado to visualise my RTL structure. I find it better than any of the major EDA vendors RTL schematic viewers (except perhaps starvision). I know people rag on Vivado for other reasons, but it's visualisation is fantastic!

<comment><USER72> I had to use Vivado once and it was the most miserable experience I ever had with a development environment. Even Haskell has better IDE support. Vivado is super unintuitive, it's slow as fuck, it has none of the basic editing features modern IDEs sport and it has very heavy handed enterprise DRM like you would normally find on CAD tools.

<comment><USER55> I hear this a lot, but I really don't get it. The ide is very responsive, when you are interacting with a design, exploring structure or connectivity, static timing analysis, etc.. Perhaps you are referring to synthesising RTL - <USER2> thst is slow, but thats much slower with ASIC tools. Synthesis and PnR is a very cpu intensive task, and is separate from the GUI really. I'd be interested in hearing the specifics of what you found slow.

<comment><USER6> I have to join the other commenters. Vivado is maybe the worst IDE I have used.

We had new projects and interns stuck for weeks because they couldn't figure out how to make a hello world project in Vivado (blink a led for a FPGA dev kit). There was zero doc and zero help available online because it's too niche. This was only unstuck after a while when one senior guy showed how to use it and wrote an internal 50 pages docs on how to create a project and do anything at all. Every single step is an impossible to figure out wonder.

After the initial hiccups, the IDE and the SoC SDK were abysmal. Couldn't store the software in source control because Vivado had no source control support and it was autogenerating/overwriting garbage files all over the place.

To be fair the tool was functional for routing and HDL development. It's usable professionally if you have time to learn and get trained. This may even be good by some embedded development standards (embedded consistently has really shitty development tools that other developers would never tolerate).

<comment><USER55> Theres loads of docs and step by step tutorials [0] is just one such free set of material with all files, with step by step PDFs and presentations to explain basic digital design concepts. This is just one form this larger list of courses [1], all free. There are also loads of videos showing how the GUI works [2]

[0] [https://github.com/xupgit/FPGA-Design-Flow-using- Vivado/tree...](https://github.com/xupgit/FPGA-Design-Flow-using- Vivado/tree/master/slides)

[1] [https://www.xilinx.com/support/university.html](https://www.xilinx.com/support/university.html)

[2] [https://www.xilinx.com/video/hardware/getting-started- with-t...](https://www.xilinx.com/video/hardware/getting-started-with-the- vivado-ide.html)

Hello World blink an LED can be done in 10 mins flat, I'm afraid you did your intern a disservice by not giving him or her a basic intro and pointer to the docs. Do a goole search for vivado design flow and you'll see all those links I just posted. I lecture in digital design at my local university part time, and I use Vivado and in one lab students are already able to blink the LED, and much more.

I do agree the SDK side is a bit dodgy. My biggest bugbear there is project corruption partly due to being eclipse based. I understand thats been upgraded to Vitis now, but have not used that yet. Vivado is separate from that and is very sold though

<comment><USER6> I was working on that around 2015 if I remember well. Some time after Xilinx was unifying their development tools into Vivado. The project attempted to use Zynq SoC, joint software and hardware development on the FPGA in HDL and on the embedded CPU in C. Not exactly trivial things to do but the scope was very small for a first go.

We found zero documentation whatsoever on the internet. None of the things you linked to existed. Looks like it took 5 years for some tutorials to be written, and it's not even from Xilinx, it's from some guy sharing on GitHub (maybe a university).

Interns were not to blame, more experienced engineers couldn't figure a thing and there was a 3 months deadline. If it were not for one employee who tried the Zynq platform 6 months before and was trained by Xilinx, the whole thing would surely have been canned.

There was lots of issues with the platform and the IDE once got a hello world working (I really hope Xilinx fixed most of them). Basic APIs were not working or were documented wrong, the compiler had issues (modified gcc under a modified eclipse), the IDE occasionally crashed or got stuck (it called a ton of sub processes that got lost or failed).

The SoC IO pins were undocumented (needed info and identifier to do the routing), had to get private doc from Xilinx and they had typo in their pin layouts, so there was a constant risk to misconfigure a pin and fry the board (FPGA don't forgive mixing up input and output and voltage).

Now that I remember about it. The whole thing was pretty insane. ^^

My only question if I had to work on this again would be, does vivado support Git/SVN nowadays?

<comment><USER55> Thanks for the detailed reply, but FYI the github stuff is from xilinx, they just make it open source.

In 2015 vivado was pretty new, it's come a long way, so I'd give it another look. There has been a strong push as you can see to make the developer experience much better, so hopefully if you give it another chance you may come to appreciate it as much as I do.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, the HDL tools are decent. There are some quirks but they get the job done (obviously it's professional tooling, not something an enthusiast can pick up over a weekend). I think you're working on the FPGA side?

However the software development experience is dismal overall. I doubt it will ever improve much, hardware companies just don't make good development tools.

The closest experience developers get to embedded might be android development. The IDE are good, source control, auto completion, the platform documentation is amazing, fully documented API with examples, there are entire guides on how the system work, remote debugging on the device (I've developed on Android version 1 a decade ago and it was all there). It's just great. Now try developing for a MCU and half the manufacturers can't document how to read an IO pin or use the DAC. I'm not looking forward to moving back to embedded. ^^

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> \- TortoiseSVN/TortoiseGit make everything a snap when it comes to repository work. I can't recommend these enough.

\- Agent Ransack is a GUI for findstr. Much nicer to use than the one in Notepad++.

\- VS 2019 is incredible. I weep for the parallel universe where we're all stuck using Eclipse for everything.

<comment><USER74> IntelliJ tools are quite good. Most IntelliJ tools are better than most Eclipse equivalents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I'll throw in Nagios. Having had to roll and maintain an in-house solution with similar functionality before, Nagios is a huge breath of fresh air.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is also awesome. I wish we could have 8, but that's not quite in the pipeline yet. The distro is crazy stable. With the Extras, Optionals, EPEL, etc. repositories enabled you get access to almost all of the best software in the Linux ecosystem.

Ansible, particularly Red Hat Ansible Engine, is also amazing for managing all of my Red Hat servers. I couldn't imagine doing half of my job by hand, as nothing would ever really get done. With Ansible you just fire off a playbook and relax.

</comment><comment><USER76> Microsoft Outlook. Seriously.

I can list gripes for days, and I wish thunderbird would integrate with all the features of exchange better, but I don't know how anyone gets by work with webmail. I feel such a lack of control in my personal gmail box.

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm not sure it counts as enterprise software, but Fiberstore is one of the best websites I've ever interacted with. It's clearly laid out, gives recommendations, and is quick and simple. I make weekly purchases and it's always easy.

</comment><comment><USER78> Would be helpful to clarify what you mean by enterprise software (certainly the answers name software that I don't consider fitting that category).

Do you mean Enterprise Resources Planning systems like SAP R/3 v. Oracle Applications?

</comment><comment><USER79> Basecamp. Incredibly thoughtful design, radically reduces stress and confusion.

</comment><comment><USER80> Google CloudSearch against our GSuite data. It's impressive how much better it is at searching our Drive and Docs content compared to those tools' own search. Burrowing into Gmail for results is also handy.

</comment><comment><USER81> Although I don't use it anymore since I've changed jobs, for me it would be Appian. For people not familiar with it checkout my description in this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583081)

Beyond it's shortcomings it's something I'd gladly pay for (if I needed it of course) because it can't really be replaced by something free / opensource.

</comment><comment><USER82> imho.

dynatrace - expensive as hell, but really really useful for large organisations if you are operating your own software and depend on its functionality - read: financial biz etc.

</comment><comment> no-dr-onboard \- Burp Suite Pro: MitmProxy, Postman, ZAP just don't compare. The extensions API and library are top notch and the community is really thriving atm. The only downside that I can think of is that occasionally a release will suffer from what seems like a memory leak. Projects can consume upwards of 15G ram and 100% allcore CPU spikes are not uncommon. Something, something, Java.

<comment><USER83> Yes, it's really worth the money. Otherwise, I only use open source tools

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Algolia - search as a service

</comment><comment><USER85> I love Wavefront for metrics and Sumologic for log queries. They make troubleshooting and monitoring thousands of servers a pleasure.

Both have excellent UIs and they are truly powerful.

Avoid any Graffana based solutions, the only good thing I can say about them is that they are free.

</comment><comment><USER86> A few great security-related products we use:

\- Hashicorp Vault (secret management)

\- Duo Security (2FA)

\- StrongDM (Database authentication and auditing)

</comment><comment><USER87> IntelliJ, PyCharm, and the git to docker deployment service that I built myself for my companies.

</comment><comment><USER88> RStudio, server and connect are such a treat to interact with compared to anaconda entreprise.

</comment><comment><USER89> I have fond memories of SecureCRT as an ssh terminal on windows and Mac. It works on Linux too however.

It was just better than the regular ssh client.

Really worth it's price, if anything because you can create a set of sessions and share them with all your colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER90> Linux. Man I love Linux, but I don't just use it in my enterprise environment. Linux also powers my smartphone, my home server, my HTPC and apparently also my EdgeRouter X so probably even more of my life I don't even know about.

</comment><comment><USER91> There are two tools nobody mentioned yet.

DbVisualizer -> best GUI for databases, you learn it well and use for all databases

Editpad -> fastest text editor I've ever seen with bunch of useful features and terrific regex (see regexbuddy from the same author)

</comment><comment><USER92> Outlook? I'd say Excel but these days I don't use it every day.

</comment><comment><USER93> Excel

</comment><comment><USER94> I had to dig deep for this since I'm a FOSS specialist and advocate. But if you're going to count softwares that I depend on then Active Directory and vCenter come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER95> These days we are mostly collaborating on Microsoft Teams.

<comment><USER96> Do you consider it the best enterprise software though?

I find Teams to be incredibly bad. It's slow, it literally has a typing lag to the point where you type something, press enter to send and then start another message, letters get eaten and sent with previous message. It eats more ram than JetBrains IDE at this point. It has a very bad UX, a lot of (slow) tab switching, pictures do not even load for me most of the time(unless restarted), sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds to mark something as read on the 'Activity' tab which is even more annoying. Insanely bad custom notification system instead of using built in Windows notifications. Add to that terrible API, weird flow of adding apps to conversations and few more things. It grew to become my most hated application that I have to use every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Burp Suite [https://portswigger.net/burp](https://portswigger.net/burp)

</comment><comment><USER97> Only GitHub

<comment><USER98> try Phabricator

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Workplace by Facebook. Not kidding, I like it.

<comment><USER100> It's god awful UI is laggy Chat has no threading Integrations are limited

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> [https://about.sourcegraph.com/](https://about.sourcegraph.com/)

</comment><comment><USER102> Not Jira. Hahahahaha.

<comment><USER103> Is anyone just using Git{Hub,Lab,Tea} issues and being fine with it?

Is the absence of a Kanban board a deal breaker? Perhaps for management.

<comment><USER104> Git-adjacent issue trackers are communication tools for developers. JIRA is a surveillance and control mechanism for senior executives. It just depends on the size of your company.

<comment><USER105> > Git-adjacent issue trackers are communication tools for developers.

So is JIRA.

> JIRA is a surveillance and control mechanism for senior executives.

Never saw it being used like that, though I see how it could be abused.

> It just depends on the size of your company.

The culture probably more than the size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> MS Office, of course (no pun intended).

</comment><comment><USER107> Splunk! If only it didn't cost an arm and a leg. No other solution, open or closed comes close.

Second best: Office 365

<comment><USER108> Have you looked at Sumo Logic?

<comment><USER107> Thank you! First time hearing of it. I just looked it up, it looks similar to Azure sentinel? Is it really cheaper than on-prem splunk?

Good query language (rollup,piping,stats,etc...),visualization and rich function set (eval and stats functions in splunk) is a minimum requirement for me. Tried Kibana,Graylog,Sentinel and a few others I can't mention here.

<comment><USER109> Sumo is cheaper the Splunk from all accounts but still pretty expensive. Think half the price of Splunk perhaps. It's still nice but we ended up spending a lot of time trying to keep out bill down by not sending data to it since the price is based on the number of GB/day you send it.

<comment><USER107> That pricing model is a big turn off. Really looking for something that lets you process events to use a smart approach to pick and choose what to ingest before you get billed for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> JetBrains CLion. It's by far the best C/C++/Rust IDE I've found. Much nicer than Visual Studio (refactorings especially), very capable out of the box, good plugin ecosystem, surprisingly fast (obviously slower to start than vim/sublime/etc but plenty fast once running), and way nicer than the afterthoughts most chip vendors provide.

</comment><comment><USER111> ITRS Geneos for environment monitoring. I just wish they built *BSD binaries.

</comment><comment><USER112> Visual Studio Professional, ActiveDirectory, PrimeKey EJBCA and OpenLimit CC Sign.

They work really well

</comment><comment><USER104> Phabricator

<comment><USER5> Enterprise indeed, I had to use it when working with a client, it's was ... different.

No intergration with something like Jira, no support for pull-requests/merge- request, navigation is pretty terrible.

<comment><USER104> What? Tasks (unit of work) and Diffs (unit of code review) are its two central entities. Which parts of it were you using, if not those?

<comment><USER5> Sounds like that may not be Phabricators fault in that case. I was under the impression that you'd need Arcanist if you wanted to do reviews of diffs.

The problem may have been that we where only allowed to use the Git part.

<comment><USER104> Ah. Arc is just a script for submitting the patch from your working copy to Diffusion (like emailing to LKML). Technically you could paste "git diff" into the web UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> gitlab, metabase, graylog, TICK (telegraf, influxdb, chronograf, kapacitor)

<comment><USER114> Metabase is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> Gramerlie

<comment><USER27> It took me a second... #LOL

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Everything pivotal

</comment><comment><USER117> BigQuery, Snowflake and Splunk for data analysis.

</comment><comment><USER118> We use Dremio for queries on S3. Years ahead of Athena.

</comment><comment><USER119> Fastmail and Trello.

</comment><comment><USER120> Roadmunk - fantastic, simple roadmapping tool

</comment><comment><USER121> asana, looker, google sheets, vscode

</comment><comment><USER122> Sisense (formerly Periscope)

</comment><comment><USER123> Node.js

<comment><USER98> troll

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> Probably gitlab on premise

</comment><comment><USER125> Windows 10

</comment><comment><USER18> TL;DR developers like developer tools.

</comment><comment><USER126> hubspot, zendesk.

</comment><comment><USER115> gramerlie

</comment><comment><USER127> Jetbrains IntelliJ. I use it for html, JS, CSS, Vue, node.js, Python, Java, SQL, etc. I've tried visual studio and some other IDEs, but find intellij to be superior in every way.

<comment><USER128> You know, I just don't get the love for IntelliJ. I used to use Eclipse (or more often than not Spring Tool Suite) and I rather liked that. More and more I'm obliged to use IntelliJ and in comparison it just seems ... okay.

Its suggestions stuff is nice, and it works reasonably well. In particular it supports multiple languages much better than Eclipse's motley range of plugins. So I can see why your list of uses makes it the superior option there.

But for primarily Java development, which is where I encounter it and the most vocal love for it, it lacks a couple of key features (or non-obvious configuration to enable them I guess?)

* You can't run code unless the whole project compiles (poor for quick sanity check, test driven development, and refactoring breaking changes).

* You don't get the "problems" view of compilation issues (and optionally analysis output like findbugs) so as often as not I'll try to run a test, building the whole shebang, when the end result will be needing to fix a trivial syntax error. Eclipse tells me that _first_.

* It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the same explorer view.

It also, anecdotally, feels slower than Eclipse, and seems to enjoy popping up focus-stealing windows more often than Eclipse (though I guess I can cuss Gnome just as much for that one).

I don't hate it, but I do miss Eclipse.

Edit: I should add that it supports Gradle rather better than Eclipse does, but since I _really_ dislike Gradle I'm not sure how much of a plus that is!

<comment><USER129> > It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects > simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets > you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the > same explorer view.

That's a common confusion about IntelliJ.

Eclipse Workspace -> IntelliJ Project

Eclipse Project -> IntelliJ Module

In IntelliJ create an empty Project and import all your Maven or Gradle projects as Modules. Everything in one window :)

<comment><USER128> I will try this and report back :) thanks for the clarification!

Edit: Ok, report.

It's... close enough. I don't really like the need to create a new project to contain the "IntelliJ droppings" :) but honestly that's not that different from Eclipse's workspace directories.

Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Beyond Compare.

I find this tool very very useful when you have lots of integration job. If you have an enterprise version, then you can do stuff like compare and merge files across two servers, compare PDFs, ZIPs, JAR, and obviously plain text files. This is a tool for which I definitely ask for an Enterprise Version license whenever I join a new organization.

<comment><USER130> beyond compare gets bonus points for having special features for diffing and merging tabular data. for example, if you're comparing a couple of CSV files, you can mark some columns as unimportant to help focus on diffing and merging differences in the remaining columns you deem are important. this can be quite helpful if manually regression testing tabular output from some report generating tool, where most of the output is deterministic but the tool pollutes one column with timestamps or ids that differ every run.

the ability to compare and merge directories is also nice (although a number of open source diff and merge tools also support this -- e.g. kdiff3, meld)

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> I don't know if it counts as enterprise software but I use Jetbrains' products everyday. Goland, IntelliJ and PyCharm are great tools.

<comment><USER132> Why use 3 different ones when IntelliJ can do all of the features of the listed editors? PyCharm is IntelliJ locked with Python plugin, etc.

<comment><USER131> I've heard that before but I'm skeptic about if it's exactly the same.

<comment><USER132> The only one that is different is Rider, since it has much deeper C# integration (might be others such as DataGrip, but never used it). PyCharm and GoLand are just plugins (same as WebStorm, PhpStorm, etc)

<comment><USER133> technically resharper is way diferent as well but whether you'd call it a ide is "questionable"

<comment><USER134> Rider runs ReSharper underneath

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> Does VSCode count? That's the first IDE to make me switch from Vim. I was reluctant at first, but now I feel lost without it.

For saas, probably Workday. I really enjoy it compared to what we had used prior.

<comment><USER136> Does a free open source code editor count as enterprise software?

...no

Just because Microsoft wrote it doesn't make it enterprise

<comment><USER137> If it's used across the enterprise, it's arguably enterprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> I mostly use Sage Business Cloud X3 software which is one of the best enterprise software.

</comment><comment><USER139> Salesforce

</comment><comment><USER140> None, pretty much everything that has enterprise in its name is a nuisance to me.</comment>


A new way of profiling asynchronous code on Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sumerc/yappi <comment><AUTHOR> Profiling of coroutines in Python have been problematic in nearly all profilers of Python. Yappi takes a different approach to address those issues and show profiling results of coroutines just as they are regular function calls. You can see details here: [https://github.com/sumerc/yappi/blob/master/doc/coroutine- pr...](https://github.com/sumerc/yappi/blob/master/doc/coroutine-profiling.md)</comment>


Web of Trust: Firefox add-on for increased security - <AUTHOR> http://www.mywot.com/

<comment><USER2> I don't see how this does a better job at increasing security beyond the built in anti-malware/phishing stuff in Firefox.

Sure, you might have more people reporting stuff but you don't have credentials for any of those people. If they went to 20 sites in the last hour and now have some malware, are all of them going to make the correct decision on which of the sites it came from?

After reading this from the privacy page:

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

Background information such as age or gender is used to provide statistical information about website preferences. This statistical information is stored without any personal information.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

I think that someone might be selling website demographic data...

I can't think of any other reason why you'd write a Firefox extension that competes with a built in feature of Firefox, especially when the data coming in isn't vetted in any way.

<comment><USER3> WOT covers more than just malware or phishing. Measuring vendor reliability, for example, is something automated systems won't be able to do. The rating system is meritocratic, meaning not all votes are equal. Users must prove themselves trustworthy before their votes are given any weight. No, we aren't selling website demographic data. Finally, the project was started in 2005, before Firefox had even phishing protection.</comment></comment>


Some tips when writing an API in Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jalada.co.uk/tips-when-writing-an-api-in-ruby-on-rails/

<comment><USER2> Out of interest, what's the standard "Railsy" way to secure an API? I know that Devise comes with support for PSKs and basic auth, so is that pretty much what everyone does as a first step?</comment>


Someone copied our site (again) but it's OK - <AUTHOR> https://www.domcomp.com/blog/someone-copied-our-site-again-but-its-ok.html

<comment><USER2> You could use the X-FRAME-OPTIONS in response headers to block people from iFraming your site: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/X-Frame-Op...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/X-Frame-Options)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. It's really refreshing to see a company take such a such a positive approach towards a problem that most would react harshly.</comment>


Ask HN: Cryptocurrency naturally pegged to cost of hashing - <AUTHOR> Price volatility is a major obstacle to cryptocurrency adoption.
Here's a solution: set the mining reward equal to the expected hash count for mining a block.  The value of the coin will naturally gravitate to the cost of computing one hash.
Why hasn't this been implemented yet?  My best guess is that the Ponzi-scheme-like nature of most cryptocurrencies is a "feature." Most crypto enthusiasts are in it to make a quick buck, not for ideological reasons.
Where can I find a community of crypto-idealists to start building the decentralized utopia of the future? <comment><USER2> Vitalik wrote about this years ago but I guess no one paid attention: [https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable- cryptocur...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable- cryptocurrency/) There's plenty of work on complex stablecoins (which have all seen virtually no adoption other than Tether) but no one besides us cares about simple volatility dampening techniques.

Ultimately there are so many obstacles to adoption that it's not clear that solving one or two of them will be noticeable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link and your opinion!</comment></comment>


Helping Handset - <AUTHOR> http://www.withgivesafe.org/ <comment><USER2> Here is the idea; while I see some benefit, it also seems problematic:

* Old way: I give cash to homeless person

* New way: I see homeless person, use an app to make an electronic payment to GiveSafe, and GiveSafe distributes something (what exactly?) to a local institution which gives something (what?) to (the? a? this? all? any?) homeless person.

...

My concerns:

It adds friction; cash is much more efficient and easier, with less overhead. It's a brilliant technological feat: Full faith financial trust in a piece of paper.

More importantly, it takes away yet more autonomy and liberty from the homeless person, who already is very vulnerable to the state and other institutions. Under this program, even to get the little bit of cash I want to give them, they are in the power of an institution: They have to register, carry this electronic device, collect the money from the institution, only spend it in certain places, etc. Should they displease the institution, they are screwed. Should there be any corruption in the institution (don't imagine those institutions are different than others), they are screwed. And they have very little power to protect themselves: They have no access to courts, they have no political pressure to bring to bear, no pocketbook/consumer power, and because they are homeless, nobody will take them seriously anyway.[0]

They already are powerless; I don't know if I want to make it worse.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-wasnt-crazy-a- homeles...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-wasnt-crazy-a-homeless- womans-long-war-to-prove-the-feds-owe- her-100000/2016/08/22/3913e4c2-6541-11e6-8b27-bb8ba39497a2_story.html)</comment>


The blind man who taught himself to see - <AUTHOR> http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see/print/ <comment><USER2> "Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster," he writes. "Pain is part of the price of freedom."

 _Pain is part of the price of freedom._ That's a truth that could use to be applied more widely.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he'll never get the opportunity._

Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?

<comment><USER4> Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet".

If he got the K-Sonar approved as a medical device, I think he'd be able to get paid from deep-pocketed insurance companies too.

Improving the range (and doing research on inner-ear microphone implants) could be done in later versions (if mainstream blind customers really are interested in playing tennis, which I am skeptical about). If v1 makes people more independent, that's a huge deal already!

I bet he could get pretty far just by reallocating his existing $200k/year budget to commercializing the technology, which has the potential to be embraced by a lot more people than the blind people he is introduced to (only 10% of whom even get good at echolocation-through-clicking).

<comment><USER5> Part of it involves surgery - which might be tricky to do incrementally.

It also doesn't sound as though he knows much about startup methodology or has the personality or desire to solve the bootstrapping problem. He's seems like a domain expert but not an entrepreneur.

I guess that means a lot of blind people will have fewer opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a teenager who could do the same thing: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4>

The video is from when he was 14, he died from cancer at 16.

<comment><USER7> I saw Ben's story on a documentary or news program a few years ago, and it was the first thing I thought of reading this article. I had no idea he had died - a sad note to a series of uplifting life stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Daniel Kish was featured in Derren Brown's 'Misdirection' series. The clip here shows him using echolocation to describe the shape of a car and ride a bike: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcvixIRxs>

'You might think of it like being in a choir or an orchestra... The world is like a living symphony... This car is kind of like an instrument, except that, instead of making its own sound, it's reflecting sounds I'm making.'

Extraordinary.

<comment><USER9> Indeed! Unfortunatly we will never be able to practice Echolocation. Imagine if we are able to give him back vision.... What will he be able to do from there !

<comment><USER10> Why won't we be able to practice echolocation? There's nothing stopping you (apart from the fact that it's not very useful when you can see)...

<comment><USER9> Well when you grow up without any vision, your other senses develops at a much faster rate, especially the hearing. Because we grew up with vision, we know what it is to see and our ears will never have the capability to develop the same way.

<comment><USER11> The article mentions that he has successfully taught echolocation to someone that lost sight at 14 years old, so you seem to be underestimating the powers of the human brain.

<comment><USER9> Then it is a field that we must take advantage of. We are barely using the full capacity of our senses; we're too lazy with our eyes. It's something we should consider in the future, try to develop the human senses.... I'm sure there's a little budget for that in the 3 trillion they spend on military ventures!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He's not the only one. Here's a documentary about a boy who uses the same technique <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA>

I have once seen tests in some popular science tv show. They blindfolded a few people and let them walk in front of a door (or sth like that) to check if they'll stop before they reach it, and somehow they managed to do it. We can use echolocation by nature, we just don't develop this skill.

<comment><USER13> you see Daniel Kish in the doc as well: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Px- aPnk4ZU>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please please please don't link to pages that open the print dialog :(

<comment><USER15> It's probably the only all-in-one-page version of the article.

Although I do agree the dialog popping up at the beginning is annoying, it's only one click (or key) to dismiss it; I prefer that to having to click on several "next page" links.

<comment><USER14> Then surely it makes sense to link to the root page which has a (single-click) link to the print page?

<comment><USER16> Which then opens the print dialog, so actually two :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "He's tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to home..."

Kudos to him. It's amazing how people have the ability to reprogram their bodies in order to break their handicap.

Reminds me of a story "Blind Teen Gamer Obliterates Foes" <http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/07/68333>

</comment><comment><USER18> I really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences:

"We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right.

"We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.

<comment><USER19> We can hear true 3D. There are actually a couple of ways in which we can sense the direction of sound. One is loudness, which obviously only works for left- right. This is loudness only in the sense of sound-gets-more-silent-farther- from-the-source.

Another is the phase difference of the sounds in both ears. Phase difference comes from the fact that sound arriving at one ear had a longer way to travel than sound arriving at the other ear. tells a more complete story of direction than loudness and is very precise.

Thirdly, there is frequency response. Both our head and our ears absorb different frequencies at different angles. Also, there are some reflections from our shoulders and chest.

Taken all that together, normal people can detect the origin of sound sources to about one degree of precision.

But, there is more. Close your eyes and have another person talk while turning his head in different directions. You can clearly detect the direction he is talking to. At the same time, you can roughly sense the size and type of the room you are in. Also, you can do this while being in really noisy environments (say, a car in traffic with the radio playing and the kids in the back).

Talking about seeing vs. hearing: The response time of the ear is about 10-50 ms. It usually takes 200-500 ms to make sense of something you see. The human ear has a frequency resolution of about one Hz (at <500 Hz), a dynamic range of about 120 dB and a frequency range of about 10 octaves. The eye can only detect a very small dynamic range in comparison, and about one octave of wavelengths. But most importantly, the eye can only detect averages of three distinct, fixed frequency ranges (red, green, blue; red and green overlap 90%). The ear has floating detection windows and uses an arbitrary amount of different windows at any one time. That is, the ear can detect _any_ spectral distribution with great precision, while the eye only detects three distinct spectral windows.

So in a lot of ways, the ear is physically way more precise than the eye. Of course, signal processing makes all the difference and the amount of signal processing going on in our acoustical and visual brain centers is just staggering. There is nothing in the technological world that even comes close to that.

<comment><USER20> The eye ends up taking in a lot of information from every point you look at though, whereas the ear is always listening in every direction at once. Because of the kind of processing in the eye and brain, our three types of cone cells actually end up capturing most of the information encoded in the different reflectance spectra of the kinds of objects that naturally occur in the world (most of the variation occurring in typical objects in the wavelength range we can detect): today with synthetic materials and various lighting sources metamerism is noticeable in special edge cases, but just wandering around it usually doesn't matter too much. After all, a decent percentage of males get along just fine as dichromats, and many don't even realize they're missing anything until adulthood (because even with two sensor types there is a lot of variation to pick up).

I think it's pretty silly to argue that hearing can pick up more detailed information about the world than vision can: from vision, we can figure out shape, orientation, distance, texture, gloss, material, lighting, direction and speed of extremely tiny motion, etc., and we can do it for fine details of everything we look at, thereby constructing a tremendously detailed model of our environment without needing to directly touch every part of every thing. Anyway, both hearing and vision are extremely sophisticated. The two gather quite dramatically different kinds of information. Neither should be underestimated.

<comment><USER19> Of course, this is completely true. But note that I did not talk about the amount of information but the precision of information. Also note that every cone cell is equivalent to one hearing cell in the cochlea, of which there are plenty, too. (Only in the eye, they are distributed spatially while in the cochlea, they are distributed by frequency)

But all this is really not as important as the signal processing that makes sense of it. There are interesting connections between hearing and seeing. If you watch TV and someone at your side turns his head to you in order to speak, you will notice and shift your attention to him. You will think that you saw his head movement in the corner of your eye. But truth is, many people wearing hearing aids will not notice the same situation, for the simple reason that you actually did not _see_ his head movement, you _heard_ it.

There are many more examples where things like this happen. What you perceive is different from what your senses detect. All these intricate combinations of sensual information are the really interesting part.

Another fun thing about hearing: The human ear can detect very low sound pressure levels. Actually, it will detect a displacement of the eardrum of about the diameter of an air molecule. In a way, this is saying that the ear can detect the impact of individual air molecules on the ear drum (not really true, but in the ballpark). That is freaking amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How do you "explain" to someone who was born blind that he is "blind"?

<comment><USER22> Beautiful question.

You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.

<comment><USER8> '...dreaming is a gradual cognitive achievement that requires the development of visual and spatial skills and other forms of imagistic skills as well.'[1]

Those who've never seen, or who were blinded very early, have auditory dreams. (They dream in sounds.) Those who were blinded after the age of around seven -- when the ability to form mental images necessary for dreaming develops -- are able to dream in pictures.

[1] <http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This, along with sign language, are things I as a sighted, hearing person want to learn. (Even with fully operational eyes you can't see in the dark, or in smoke. Even with fully operational ears you can't hold a conversation beyond shouting distance.)

</comment><comment><USER24> my great grandfather gone blind years beofre i was born. when i was 5, he pointed out the birds by kind in flight and distance, and built all kind of house furniture, home repair. strangely to me, he was able to somehow 'see' the tape measure, maybe just he had a keen sense of measures. a few years later, his sight started coming back he said, then he passed. this is not such a great story, just an example the human brain and personal encouragement can go a long way. hats off to mr kish.

</comment><comment><USER25> Higher frequencies, as bats use, give finer resolution. This seems impossible for humans, but since we have cochlear implants, there's no reason they couldn't respond to a shifted audio spectrum. Or, just have an external hearing aid that frequency-shifts the sounds (and cancels out the original), together with a higher-frequency sound source.

OTOH, eye implants are probably not that far off.

> Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the > entire brain of a bat.

This really startled me. It seems plausible that we could do as well, with early training etc. Plus, I imagine that some of the higher-order processing of the occipital cortex would also be seconded.

<comment><USER26> If you're interested in reading more about pushing the limits of remapping the human brain, check out The Brain That Changes Itself by Doidge. Fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Others, like a commenter on the National Federation of the Blind's listserv, consider him "disgraceful" for promoting behavior such as tongue clicking that could be seen as off-putting and abnormal.

Appalling. Forcing people to be cripple because solving it might be "off- putting" or "abnormal" [1]. Blind people being able to do all the things the sighted can do (and more in some cases) is worth hearing a few clicks now and again.

[1] I say "solving" because Kish doesn't seem to be at a strict disadvantage. He has disadvantages and he has advantages in areas we don't (e.g. finding the way out of a car park, "seeing" around corners, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER28> I know I've only been thinking about the problem for about an hour, but seems like you could hack together a solution involving a kinect processed to do audio output for a lot less than $15 million. The kinect's range isn't 1000 ft (i think more like 10, tops) but it's a "the future will inevitably upgrade" part. Audio output would be in normal hearing ranges, no surgery required, and could be adaptable to different users.

</comment><comment><USER29> He's Daredevil!

<comment><USER5> For those who don't know - Daredevil is a comic book character who is blind but has trained his other senses to compensate.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics)>

Not an amazing contribution to the thread but relevant and hardly worthy of punishing with downvotes.

<comment><USER30> _Filtering_ non-contributions with downvotes is part of how Hacker News is supposed to work. Punishment is beside the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty amazing. It is quite difficult to understand echolocation since we are able to see, but it is also difficult for him to understand vision since he can't. I think that vision is the lazyiest sense we have, it's too easy and the body have a great potencial to use our senses to the max; we're just not using it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is it possible to learn echolocation without being blind? as a kid, my doctors were worried my deteriorating vision would leave me blind, so I learned Braille (that never happened). I wonder if I could have learned this skill with vision (if your auditory senses weren't compensating for loss of sight).

</comment><comment><USER32> What the ? How is this even possible ? Am I the only one doubting the story ?

<comment><USER33> It's a pretty well-documented phenomenon.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've read such a story about somebody else before (I think it was somebody else - younger, and colored). So it seems the same trick has been invented several times by blind people.

Still very cool.

</comment><comment><USER35> Amazing that his mind adapted so that he in fact sees (the echo as a flash of light). I don't think this is a fake story since what we see happens in the mind, not in our eyes.

</comment><comment><USER36> No more print articles, please. I'm tired of print dialogs popping up, un- asked-for. Use Readability if you don't like the layout.

[http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught- himself-...](http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to- see)

<comment><USER37> It was probably done to get the article onto one page, not the five that the normal article is.

<comment><USER38> Incidentally, I think readability attempts to get the whole article onto one page via js.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wow. What an incredibly uplifting story.

<comment><USER40> Indeed! If only he got more mainstream support, could be expanded to more people

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not sure why he wouldn't use this, this seems vastly superior to the system he uses:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=player_embedded#at=12)

<comment><USER6> I don't know about that. While that system is clearly easier to use, from what I've heard about echolocation it provides much more detail than that system.

If you look at my other post, I linked to a video of a kid who used echolocation. He could distinguish objects - he walked past two garbage cans in the street, and said "Is that a car? _clicks his tongue several times_ No, it's a garbage can."

<comment><USER41> I used the software I linked to above (I'm not blind), you can download it to a laptop, plug in a webcam and earphones. I could tell the difference between a car and a garbage can with no practice at all. Can he click with his tongue and tell if the picture on the wall is a picture a square or a circle? No, this software can enable him to do that.

I'd like to get his opinion of this: <http://www.seeingwithsound.com/>

<comment><USER6> I stand corrected. It's hard to tell from the video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> So incredible. I would love to learn to do this myself - seeing the world with sounds must be so different. If I were a billionaire I'd pay invest that $15M and hope I could learn.</comment>


What Is It Like to Be a Bee? - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bee <comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlrsqGal64w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlrsqGal64w)

Half a bee, philosophically, Must, ipso facto, half not be. But half the bee has got to be. Vis a vis, its entity.

</comment><comment><USER3> I never noticed those hairy ocelli in bee pictures.

Seems like they are for detecting wind direction so they can stay on course in windy conditions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google of "what is it like to be" returns curious results:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22What+Is+It+Like+to+Be%22+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22What+Is+It+Like+to+Be%22+-bat)

Anyone have suggestions for further notable research on the topic?

<comment><USER5> I'm not seeing Thomas Nagle's "what is it like to be a bat", that's an interesting philosopher's take on these type of questions.

<comment><USER6> There's a negative filter for bat in the query.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These are the types of articles I like to see on HN.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article cites and links to a video of a bee learning to move a ball into a goal that's pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER9> It feels like a never- ending rave, with different phases of dancing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm always amazed that this needs to be said, but yes, there are other creatures with consciousness who see from "first-person perspective". Do we imagine that only humans can do that, and every other creature, with their range of similar and not-so-similar brain structures are just automatons that don't have experiences, but instead just produce outputs for a given set of inputs? That's almost as arrogant as thinking that since other people differ in their anatomy and brain structure from you, you're probably the only person who is consciously experiencing life from first-person (everyone else is just a flesh robot).

<comment><USER11> If I weren't a militant solipsist, I would be offended by what you said about my assumptions!

<comment><USER12> Hey now! The reality that confines a singular, isolated perception can still incidentally offend its sole sentient entity without motive.

You're being selfishly stoic, and that's somewhat repugnant, even for a solipsist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 10-6 This reminds me of "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" by Nagel.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F)

</comment><comment><USER13> The question of what it's like to be someone or something else is much more immediate with all the youngsters who claim they feel like the opposite sex and have done so their whole lives, despite of course not having any frame of reference for those feelings. And based on those feelings alone we're told they are to be injected with life-altering chemicals and have life-altering surgeries.

<comment><USER14> > despite of course not having any frame of reference for those feelings

the question hinges on whether they need a frame of reference for those feelings. You seem to be implying that it's obvious that they do. Why?

Perhaps it is like the feeling that you're hungry, that it's some sort of innate reporting that doesn't require an external frame of reference. Or like the feeling that you're attracted to either males or females, or both. That seems to be just there, coming from inside.

Personally, I don't know the answer. I don't know if there's any relevant research, but on the face of it at least, it's not obvious that it should be one way or the other.

<comment><USER15> I don't have the feeling I am a man. I am a man by the definition we all(used to) work with. It's not a word encompassing a set of feelings or doings. If one wishes to use the word "man" for something else, question is: why the same word? If someone with a vagina and breasts says she is a man, I have to ask: how do you know? I don't know what the man next to me feels like or thinks. I could not possibly identify as his way of being. Let alone a biological woman.

And seems that no one really cares about the theoretical issues we, transphobic people, have in accepting such views. We're just that. And problem is if our daughters or sons will come one day saying they're transgender, they will have no arguments, but just hurt feelings and the requirement to accept them as they are, or believe to be. We, as parents, may do so out of love. But others will not. And we, as parents, will have to accept the high risk of suicide for a view that has no sane arguments behind.

<comment><USER16> > And we, as parents, will have to accept the high risk of suicide for a view > that has no sane arguments behind.

This is a risk of depression as well, and refusing to accept that someone is depressed does not make them any less likely to commit suicide.

<comment><USER13> > refusing to accept that someone is depressed

The depression is not what's being contested. The claim that they belong to the opposite sex just because they say so is what's being contested.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TwitTornado: Real-time Twitter using Tornado - <AUTHOR> http://twittornado.com/

<comment><USER2> I've open sourced the code here

<http://github.com/godavemon/TwitTornado>

A bit more about TwitTornado

<http://twittornado.com/about>

It was a fun and short project. I highly recommend Tornado to anyone needing a push framework.

<comment><USER3> You should be able to get near-instant updates by using Twitter's streaming API: [http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API- Documentation#statu...](http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API- Documentation#statuses/filter)

I just updated Tornado's httpclient to include a streaming_callback parameter which allows you to process data as it arrives (the param was somehow lost when httpclient was extracted from the FriendFeed code).

To use it, just do something like:

        http_client.fetch("http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json?follow=IDS...,
           cb, streaming_callback=self._handle_data, auth_username=...)

        def _handle_data(self, data):
            lines = (self.prev_linepart + data).split("\n")
            self.prev_linepart = lines[-1]
            lines = lines[:-1]
            if not lines:
                return

            for t in lines:
                try:
                    tweet = tornado.escape.json_decode(t)

<comment><USER2> Awesome! I'll try to integrate this soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I click "Sign in with Twitter", give it my u/p and click "Allow", then it takes me back to the exact same starting page ("Sign in with Twitter").

<comment><USER5> Yeah, same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it only me or it doesn't work?

<comment><USER2> Twitter seems to be pretty dodgy at the moment with the increased # of requests going to it. Its giving 503's. Refreshing a few times (brute force!) eventually gets you through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "There is no need to refresh. Your stream is automatically updated with the other non-TwitTornado tweets in 30 second intervals."

30 seconds interval? So, it is "near-realtime". Anyway, you have a really nice product up there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tweets from other TwitTornado users are in real time (via Tornado). Tweets from non-TwitTornado users are polled on the interval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see this built own. A live-updating, clean, and light weight web based twitter client doesn't exist. I'd subscribe for a few bucks a month to use it.

<comment><USER9> This's exactly what I want. I also built a web based one with PHP but the performance is not good enough for real time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error from nginx

</comment><comment><USER11> The throbber going constantly is annoying.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, though that's only for certain browsers. Hopefully either those browsers fix it or some hack around it is established. What browser are you using?

Until getting any push/real-time features is going to come with that.

<comment><USER12> Many hacks around it are established. Take a look at the Orbited project, <http://orbited.org/>, or come talk to us in IRC (in #orbited on freenode) if you want help figuring out how to avoid the UI side-effects.</comment></comment></comment>


Pixel Perfect: Fingerprinting Canvas in HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/papers/ms12.html

<comment><USER2> Great, now everyone will start disabling or blocking WebGL code.

<comment><USER3> And Canvas 2D.</comment></comment>


New Bill Seeks Basic IoT Security Standards - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/new-bill-seeks-basic-iot-security-standards/ <comment><USER2> > that vendors ensure the devices are free from known vulnerabilities when > sold. > Under the proposal, an IoT device has a fairly broad definition, > being described as "a physical object that is capable of connecting to and > is in regular connection with the Internet;" and one that "has computer > processing capabilities that can collect, send or receive data."

What is the exact definition of "known vulnerability"? With very broad definition, that would likely prevent them from buying any computers equipped with Windows for good part of the year as while Microsoft is preparing a patch for some vulnerability (which may have been internally discovered).

With even more broad definition, it could prevent selling with Linux as well for similar reason (as one of the tens of thousand packages is likely preparing a patch).

If it means vulnerabilities where there's either 1) exploit 2) patch 3) detailed information available, it would likely be enough.

<comment><USER3> > What is the exact definition of "known vulnerability"?

I believe the OMB's job is to fill in the details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The headline seems a bit deceptive. No basic standard is set for IoT security, the government just started demanding a certain quality for their own purchases of IoT devices (i.e. not buying just any old IoT device):

> The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017 seeks to use the government's > buying power to signal the basic level of security that IoT devices sold to > Uncle Sam will need to have.

</comment><comment><USER4> If a large swarm of autonomous cars were taken over because of a software vulnerability, and were roaming the streets threatening people for charge-ups, would we hold the car manufacturer liable?

We're experiencing this with IoT devices, except that "threatening" for a rogue IoT device means a denial-of-service attack (sending information over a network connection).

<comment><USER5> If the vulnerability was a result of gross negligence, then oh yes, absolutely.

<comment><USER6> (now I actually agree with you but). . . Good luck proving that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I only scanned the article but couldn't see whether it mentioned voting machines. How would this Bill affect the procurement of new /or maintenance for already purchased/ voting machines if at all?

<comment><USER8> It affects every internet-connected device purchased by the federal government. Since states usually handle their own voting, I don't think this applies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > For example, the bill would require [...] that vendors ensure the devices > are free from known vulnerabilities when sold.

This seems... logistically challenging. It kind of also seems like an invitation to release new, high-priced "only the government will buy these" devices frequently, since (a) new devices don't have known vulnerabilities yet, and (b) older devices do have known vulnerabilities, so the government won't be allowed to buy them. But the security of those new devices will be _much worse_ than the security of older ones.

<comment><USER10> Ah, I'm not sure I understand your last point. What about selling a "new high priced" item to the government because the engineering team spent some cycles fixing up the known vulnerabilities and re-released the product with those issues fixed. This seems like it would be more secure than a new untested product.

<comment><USER11> The argument is that companies would not fix the software, but instead release "new" products that don't have any "known" vulns. Basically, it would be cheaper to re-brand every year or two than spend the cycles to actually fix any bugs.

<comment><USER12> But then any competitor could just find the old vulnerabilities in your "new" code and make them public. The re-branding effort would be completely wasted if you don't actually fix anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks like a solid bill. It doesn't force the market's hand; it just guides it using the government's purchasing power. (The CFAA fix for good- faith cybersecurity research is a welcome add-on, too.)</comment>


Philip Pullman: professional writers set to become 'an endangered species' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/06/philip-pullman-society-of-authors-open-letter-fairer-terms-for-writers <comment><USER2> Only 11.5% can now make a living wage because there are more writers, on more platforms, but with total reader's remaining roughly similar. And a lot of these writers are using self-publishing platforms like Amazon.

Nobody is forcing writers to use traditional publishers. If they're only giving you 25% of the ebook revenue then move to Amazon who do either 35% or 70%[0].

I will say I WISH creative types (artists, writers, etc) all made a living wage, but unfortunately the market is too saturated since the barrier to entry is low-ish (although the barrier to success is higher).

[0] [https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8](https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8)

<comment><USER3> Something to think about when suggesting that killing jobs by robotic automation will just drive people into more creative endeavours. The demand for everyone to do creative labor just isn't there.

<comment><USER4> You are thinking about things incorrectly I think.

Lets say that ubiquitous automation reduces employment in many manufacturing and service sectors. Prices will fall in those sectors, abundance will increase. People will need to spend less of their income for these goods and services. The additional income will be used for other things. Some of the other things will be things like books, music, etc.

If you doubt what I say, think about how spending patterns changed when the economy went from 90% employment in agriculture to 2% employment in agriculture. Prior to this transition, something like 70% of wage was spent on food. Afterwards less than 10% was spent on food.

In the future, something like 10% of income might be spent on all non-digital goods and services, and 90% of income might be spent on the virtual economy (games, books, music, film, etc.)

<comment><USER5> Would you happen to have a link, or a few keywords, that would aid in finding the agricultural employment percentile shift?

<comment><USER4> [http://ourworldindata.org/data/food- agriculture/agricultural...](http://ourworldindata.org/data/food- agriculture/agricultural-employment/)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There will always be a well-remunerated home for terrible writers at the Grauniad.</comment>