Code Pages, Character Encoding, Unicode, UTF-8 and the BOM [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ComputerThingsTheyDidntTeachYouInSchool2CodePagesCharacterEncodingUnicodeUTF8AndTheBOM.aspx <comment><USER2> This video is about "Code Pages, Character Encoding, Unicode, UTF-8 and the BOM".

I don't know about everyone else, but I had to implement an ISO 8859 encoding to UTF-8 converter in assembly when I was at uni around 8-10 years ago. So this is standard stuff for most developers who graduate from the University of Oslo.

<comment><USER3> Converting to UTF-8 from a simple codepage like ISO is easy. The difficult part is parsing UTF-8 with all its various behaviour changing characters.

Take the BOM as an example.

I work on backend Java projects for large banks. Over the years I fought with BOM on numerous times. For some reason 95% of software that says it is UTF-8 compliant is not. My modus operandi for dealing with it is to remove BOM on ingestion and only add it when the string leaves the system when we know the outside party absolutely requires it (though it should not...)

<comment><USER4> People say if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - but when the only tool you have is a left-handed can opener life gets _really weird_ and that's how we got the UTF-8 BOM

UTF-8 BOM is largely a Microsoft idea, they've got a bunch of code that thinks in UCS-2 (now retrofitted to more or less pretend it knows UTF-16) and so it thinks about byte order when decoding text files, and from there a Byte Order Mark in files that don't have byte ordering seems like a reasonable idea.

If the files actually _mean_ something then a UTF-8 BOM just introduces confusion. Lots of code I'm responsible for processes UTF-8 just fine, but if it handles say files full of key = value pairs and your file begins with a BOM, well, OK then, that first key starts with U+FEFF, weird choice but no reason we should disallow that. And of course that isn't what you wanted and so now Windows users are complaining I'm not "compatible".

<comment><USER5> Shouldn't U+FEFF be whitespace?

<comment><USER4> Sure. So what? Text file formats aren't magically obliged to ignore leading whitespace just because that suits Microsoft. If my format would consider U+0009 TAB or U+0020 SPACE to be part of the key if placed at the start of the key why not U+FEFF ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was really nicely done and a really good initiative. I got in to software development by teaching myself Python (badly) and PHP (badly), and it's probably quicker to list the things I do know than the cavernous gaps in my knowledge.

For most software development jobs you can get by without knowing this stuff but it's great there are things like this to clearly explain fundamentals that are either assumed knowledge or communicated in (to an outsider) gatekeeping levels of dense terminology.

</comment><comment><USER7> See also: _The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)_

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute- minim...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum- every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and- character-sets-no-excuses/)

<comment><USER8> I just read this over and it's a very dated Windows-centric view. Several glaring errors - glosses over the difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16, no mention of surrogate pairs for UTF-16 (thinks only 65k code points), says UTF-8 can be up to 6 bytes (no it can't, this was proposed but never standardized), the idea that ASCII standardization dates to the 8088 (its much older), mentions UTF-7 (don't), no mention that wchar_t changes size based on platform, no mention of Han unification, no mention of shaping, and no mention of normalization.

<comment><USER9> RFC 2279 says: "In UTF-8, characters are encoded using sequences of 1 to 6 octets." That's not technically a standard, but it was widely implemented.

<comment> mark-r UTF-8 was originally designed to handle codepoints up to a full 32 bits. It wasn't until later that the codepoint range was restricted so that 4 octets would be sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Brian Will's video covers code pages succinctly [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM- vnsnLGd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM-vnsnLGd4)

</comment><comment><USER11> That's the first time I've heard about UTF8 files sometimes having a BOM, so that's nice to learn something. :)

I'm wondering if it's widely used.

<comment><USER12> I've seen UTF-8 with a BOM while consuming data when integrating with strongly Windows-centric environments. Relatively uncommon, but does happen. And it is very annoying!

<comment><USER13> It used to and maybe still does cause problems with how google parsed robots.txt files!

Which is why all my robots.txt files have a comment on the first line.

<comment><USER14> > Which is why all my robots.txt files have a comment on the first line.

That doesn't stop a BOM being generated or consumed.

<comment><USER15> BOM is only a problem with strict syntaxes, which robots.txt is not an example of. If the "consumer" simply ignores invalid or meaningless lines, you can avoid issues from invisible characters by not having anything meaningful on the first line of your file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the vscode hex extensions Scott is using?

<comment><USER17> Looks like hexdump: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=slevesqu...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=slevesque.vscode- hexdump)

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r I hate it when a page consists of nothing but a video. I like to take things in at my own pace by reading. There should be a warning in the title.

<comment><USER18> Ok, we've added that now.</comment></comment>


Colorffy: Colors gradients and palettes daily! - <AUTHOR> https://www.colorffy.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Colorffy is a design website. We creates useful gradients and palettes for designers and UI developers.</comment>


What are your favorite Python libraries? 3-5 max - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> At the end of the Talk Python To Me Podcast, the host asks about the interviewee's favorite package on PyPI, or for a package which should be better known.

One common answer is "requests". A couple of people suggested "doc opt".

The podcast transcripts are at [https://github.com/mikeckennedy/talk-python- transcripts/tree...](https://github.com/mikeckennedy/talk-python- transcripts/tree/master/transcripts) . For example, [https://github.com/mikeckennedy/talk-python- transcripts/blob...](https://github.com/mikeckennedy/talk-python- transcripts/blob/master/transcripts/126.txt) says:

> 00:55:14 Michael Kennedy: Yeah, awesome. And, a notable Python PyPI package, > there's over 100,000 of them now. Like one that maybe you've run across > lately that was really cool?

> 00:55:23 Kelsey Hightower: Well for the keynote I actually used the > Kubernetes package. Which allows you to write integrations for Kubernetes > and Python, and that was a very interesting package, mainly because it's > generated from the Swagger API of Kubernetes, so if you've never used > Swagger before, it's a way to kind of instrument your API so that it can be, > you have this machine representation of, hey, here's every endpoint, here's > the input, here's the output, and that Python library was generated from > that, and then the documentation was also generated, so there was an example > for every function you have. And it has pretty good coverage across the > board of doing things in Kubernetes, so that's a well put together package, > and that's what I've been using lately.

Since you're interested in this topic, why not go through those transcripts, search for "PyPI" towards the bottom of the interviews, extract the information, and blog about it/post it to HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking more of getting replies to the question from HN users, based on their personal experience, since I know a lot of us here use Python. I've been doing something like what you say, earlier, for a while, but with the PyDev of the Week series of posts as the source [1]. Mike Driscoll usually asks the same question (as I did here) to each interviewee, and I've picked up a few good Python libraries from that. But it's a good suggestion, I'll check out the Talk Python podcast for similar info - thanks.

[1] [https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/category/pydevoftheweek/](https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/category/pydevoftheweek/)

<comment><USER2> Almost everyone interviewed on that show uses Python, and on average will be more experienced than an HN user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know, thanks. I've listened to that podcast, but only one episode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please limit it to 3 to 5 max, and write a line or two saying why you like it, for each one.</comment>


Misleading charts of 2015, fixed - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/580859/the-most-misleading-charts-of-2015-fixed/ <comment><USER2> I would argue the last "good" chart example, a chart of mass-shootings per president, is misleading as it compares four two-term presidents (Obama, W. Bush, Clinton, and Reagan) to a single-term president (H.W. Bush).

<comment><USER3> Deleted comment as I was talking about the wrong graph....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first one was indeed a bad chart, the others simply lying with data. That might as well have been wrong in written text...

</comment><comment><USER5> There is lies and there is statistics :). For more reading on the subject, I recommend Beautiful Evidence by E. Tufte. He's a classic when it comes to infoviz.

</comment><comment><USER6> So this complains about not including the 0 on the y-axis but then complains about it in the national review global temp chart.

If you have an agenda it will show through, regardless of what you do. Both graphs accurately portray the data, but most of the public doesn't care to interpret graphs objectively.

<comment><USER7> You'll notice that in his 'best version' of the education chart, the y axis also does not start at zero. More precisely, the point he made was that _column_ charts should always start at 0. He makes no blanket statements about line graphs to show trending.

Also technically any graph that isn't numerically wrong is a problem of the public not taking care.

<comment><USER8> Technically according to what rule?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Should follow up on the lack of 2008 PP data. Might show up as an abortion peak...possibly why it has apparently been witheld.

Uh..downmods?

<comment><USER10> You're saying a missing report, probably the result of miss filing the data, is a malicious attempt to hide some sort of abortion spike in 2008.

If you find sources you might get upvotes, but given the available information it's probably simply missing.

<comment><USER9> Interesting perspective. What harm do you think occurs by 'hiding' such information? (You'll also note that I did not use the word _malicious_ , nor imply its meaning.)

The source of the data would necessarily need to be Planned Parenthood, yet the data for only that particular year is missing.

Anyway, I'm not here for the upvotes; only facts and analysis. It is simply a fact that only the data for 2008 is missing. The onus is on PP to produce either the data or the reason why the data has not yet been produced.

<comment><USER11> You explicitly said the data was withheld (not missing), and theorized that it was to hide a spike in abortions. You follow it up by explaining that the missing data in the chart must be missing because PP didn't provide it.

<comment><USER9> Found the report: [https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/14436304/ppfa- annual-...](https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/14436304/ppfa-annual- report-08-09-final-12-10-10)

Supports up to 25% YOY change from 2007. Can you find this report on PP's site? Or the breakdown of the absolute values?

<comment><USER12> And yet the report from Politifact in QZ that explicitly shows "year over year change" shows no such thing:

\- 5% in 2007

\- 9% in 2009

\- -1% in 2010

\- 2% in 2011

\- -2% in 2012

\- 0% in 2013

<comment><USER9> Please read the thread. You missed the 2008 report (as did politifact). I linked to the 2008 report which does not show absolute service number breakdowns; only rounded (or, perhaps, truncated [in which case the YOY change could be significantly higher than 25%]) percentages from a total.

Why would PP deviate from their standard reporting practices?

<comment><USER12> I did read the thread. You quoted a report that showed '25% year over year'. With the numbers of this report, there would have to be a 100% increase in 2008 (that reverted back to "normal" levels in 2009) to average out to that level.

Even rounding numbers would not account for the discrepancy between "2% more this year than last" and "25% more this year than last".

<comment><USER9> Its not percent of a percent. It's percent of an absolute change.

1st derivative vs 2nd derivative.

Edit: hmm, maybe I misunderstood your point. I don't think the politifact or qz YOY data from 2009 is based on 2008 (but rather, 2007 [technically not YOY then]). How would they have calculated the YOY without the absolute number for 2008?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hedge fund invests in LinkedIn at more than $2 Billion valuation - <AUTHOR> http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=auVv0Szp.SIo&pos=5

<comment><USER2> When you see deals like this it is often not reported what liquidation preferences or other the investor is getting.

E.g. If Hedge Fund X puts in a $20M investment for 1% it might seem expensive, but not if they have a 3x liquidation preference that guarantees them a profit on any trade sale above $20m in value, and most likely on an IPO.

Similarly it helps LinkedIn set a price point with any future IPO plans.

<comment><USER3> I'm unfamiliar with this kind of math. Would someone please walk me through the steps here to understand what this actually means?

<comment><USER4> He means that if linkedin would be sold for 60 million, they would get the first 60 million. Then afterwards the normal shareholders are served until the initial ratio is reached.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am noticing a trend lately where private market valuations seem higher than what equivalent public companies get. Of course, it is hard to find a public company equivalent of Facebook or LinkedIn, but I would say Google can be a good proxy for FB or LI.

This is puzzling at first: if private parties thought public markets were undervalued, why won't they directly invest in already public companies?

I believe the answer has to be that private parties believe private companies are relatively undervalued compared to what "they should be" in public markets - in other words, they are not undervalued compared to currently public companies, but they are undervalued compared to some notion of what they ought to be as public companies themselves.

This idea is not surprising - after all every start-up investment, almost by definition, reflects the investor's bet that they found something that is "relatively undervalued compared to its eventual public status."

</comment><comment><USER6> Makes some sense to me: LinkedIn really provides a great service, so to my non-business, humble programmer mindset, this equates to value. Personally, I get many times the utility from LinkedIn than from Facebook - no comparison!

<comment><USER7> Can you detail how it benefits you? I somehow fail to get any benefit out of my LinkedIn account. How do you typically use it?

<comment><USER6> Good questions: check colleagues' info at start of new gigs, many people from my working past have contacted me through LinkedIn, and the email traffic on a few interest groups is low volume and of reasonably good value.

I have never used LinkedIn for its original function: finding a contact point in a company through a mutual connection. The reason for this is that it is so easy to simply email someone, introduce yourself, and try to say something interesting enough to them that they will spend a few minutes getting acquainted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are they just pulling these numbers out of the air? Let me rephrase, what goes into the calculation when they estimate the value of a company like LinkedIn?

Sure in the article they say 70 million users + a healthy economy. But $2 billion ? I think I've heard estimates all ranging from $5 to $15 billion for facebook. That's 500 million users.

So the secret formula is:

 _500 million users / 70 million users = 7_

 _15 / 7 = 2.1_ or about 2 billion if you like.

What really determines the value?

1) Amount of users, and loyal users.

2) Amount of cash they are generating

3) Amount of cash they have tucked away

4) Growth

5) If anyone wants to buy them

Any other factors?

<comment><USER9> Valuation is hard, especially for startups. People view Facebook, for example, as an "option" on whatever smart business can be built out of 500 million address books and the world's largest photo-sharing service. FB can tax companies like Zynga in order to extract most of the economic profit those folks make.

In this case, though, it's a lot simpler.

        (Value of shares purchased) / (Percentage of shares purchased) = Market value of 100% of shares.

It's the same way you'd calculate the market value of, e.g., Google. Share price times shares outstanding. In Google's case, the market is more 'efficient' in the sense that it's easier to buy and sell, and there's more information. But private company stocks offer a different kind of efficiency: the amount of research, compared to the size of transactions, is far higher. Ask a typical economist, and that's inefficiency; but ask Warren Buffett, and it's not.

<comment><USER10> I'm going to pick a nit and say its not

"Value of Shares Purchased" but (Price of Shares Purchased) / (Per...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is linkedin really worth that much?

<comment><USER12> The detail gives you a clue:

The purchase, at $21.50 a share for about a 1 percent stake, was from existing shareholders and doesn't represent new investment

<comment><USER13> It is true that existing shareholders might not price the round fairly if they have ulterior motives on the pricing.

However, frequently insider funding rounds are at realistic valuations, or even unrealisticly low valuations, to force all existing shareholders to participate or be diluted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Should be worth more than $2b.</comment>


What happens when private equity buys your competitor? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lightspeed-venture-partners/what-happens-when-private-equity-buys-your-competitor-6095cb3c43#.ixzq1emnw <comment><USER2> So relevant info - I used to work at a Vista Equity owned company, one that was eventually sold to Oracle. Vista was run by a bunch of MBAs that believed that had the best insight on how a to run a software company, including what technology to use.

We were evaluating better tools for version control as we had been using Subversion. We were seriously considering Git, Jira, and Github. Then Vista decided they knew what was best for all of their companies and decided it was Microsoft Team Foundation and Foundation Server. :/

I know Vista has had a lot of success but it certainly is not related to their ability to make technical decisions for the companies they own. They are succeeding in spite of this kind of decision making, not because of it.

<comment><USER3> > We were seriously considering Git, Jira, and Github.

You were evaluating Git, Not VCS and Git? Looks like your decision was already made.

It seems like you were looking for a project management tool as well, and TFS is both similar to subversion(easy transfer of knowledge) and fills that need. Why Vista's decision was obviously bad is not clear to me.

<comment><USER4> Have you used TFS?

<comment><USER3> Yes, for several years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If a PE shop buys your competitor, you should rejoice. PE firms primarily generate returns through (1) debt repayment from free cash flow, (2) multiple expansion, and (3) operating improvements.

Because of #1, PE firms like annuity-like businesses with predictable cash flow. A ventured-backed startup doesn't need to worry about #1, and therefore can focus all their internal efforts on #3. (If multiples expand, then that's even better.)

Here's an analogy. Venture-backed companies are busy building rockets, and rockets either take off or blow up. When PE takes over, your competitor has decided..."F this, let's go build a train instead."

<comment><USER6> Why is "(1) debt repayment from free cash flow" appealing vs VC growth? I'm not familiar with that term. A quick search only gave me pages filled with even more finance jargon.

<comment><USER7> Leveraged buyouts: you borrow a bunch of money, buy the company with it, use any stored cash to pay that down, and saddle the company with the debt you used to buy the company in the first place. Then you repeat this a couple of times to buy up portfolio of related companies that might be better together than competing, reshape them and put them back on the public market at a profit.

Debt repayment from free cash flow is appealing because it's comparatively less risky. Startups building products have no free cash flow to speak of and require regular VC cash infusions to balance the books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One aspect missed is that the government is getting juiced by leveraged PE deals, so a good chunk of PE returns are the tax deductions from the interest on the debt that gets split between debt issuers and PE firms. Why isn't everyone becoming a PE firm then? They did at some point in the 80s (re-watch Pretty Woman), when there was a plethora of private companies with lots of "fat" cash reserves on them and management that would rather spend that on private jets than return them to shareholders.

Well-off corporate executives inspired PE activity. Well-off PE managers drained the market of cash cows and tightened corporate rules. The funny thing is in the real world, if you advertise how successful you are, you attract competitors, which is why I find it quite puzzling that the first thing startup founders do is advertise on TechCrunch when they've raised a big round. It's like saying "Look how much money is in that pot of gold over there, we are running for it." Does the value of the signalling increase the risks/damage from it? Would love to get your thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Ping Identity, for instance, disclosed a 40% annual growth rate in its acquisition announcement. That's below the average growth rate for a 9 year old public SaaS company"

Wow. It's crazy that 40% annual growth can be considered too low.

<comment><USER10> in that same paragraph the author says 15% quarter over quarter growth is slower but it is in fact 75% annualized growth.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I should have been more clear. 15% is the most recent quarter vs the same quarter in the prior year. So it's an annualized number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's definitely true to an extent that when the founders doesn't have any control or motivation, the outcome tend to be subpar. Also, the post highlights the obvious difference between PE and VC that PE mostly looks for min guarantee return and companies which are predictable to get them returns through either a sellout or IPO. What i wonder though is, why would founders in general go for this buyout(apart from the obvious reasons like money). Is there any reason companies are sold to PE investors in general?

<comment><USER12> One could certainly interpret a PE buyout as an "exit".

<comment><USER13> This was true with my employer. The first PE transaction was the owners/founders cashing out. The company was about 40 years old at the time (and the founders, while on the board, were no longer part of the executive team), so not quite the same as a start-up doing a PE deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this is more about distributions than it is about expected values. If VC and PE generate roughly the same returns to their investors (say 20% to 25% IRR), what does this mean for the companies they invest in? Fred Wilson notes ([http://avc.com/2009/03/what-is-a-good-venture- return/](http://avc.com/2009/03/what-is-a-good-venture-return/)) that with a five year average horizon, he expects roughly three buckets of outcomes:

1\. 1/3 of investments go to zero, i.e. blow up and lose substantially all of investors' money.

2\. 1/3 return 1.0x to 1.5x (on average across the bucket).

3\. 1/3 return 7.5x (on average across the bucket).

That is wide distribution of outcomes. In PE, on the other hand, you'd get a much tighter distribution of outcomes around 2.7x returns. A single investment (much less 1/3) going to zero would destroy the fund, so PE funds want to prevent that from happening. The conclusion is that Vista is pretty sure it can get a 2.7x outcome or better, and it's also pretty sure it wont zero its investment.

So should Ping's competitors rejoice after the Vista buyout? It really depends on how quickly they're growing and how much market share they think they can win. Do they believe that either [1] Vista will fail in 2.7x-ing Ping, or [2] they can succeed even in this 2.7x world? If they believe either of these things, then the buyout is probably good news for them; if they don't, then it's probably bad news for them.

</comment><comment><USER15> I read this as "when PE buys your computer" made more sense the second time I read it.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Founders are special people who somehow glimpse a vision of the future that > few others understand, and then go build it.

Ughh, more founder-worship. What's more believable is that lots and lots of people can see glimpses of the future all around them. Out of that larger set, the ones that are lucky enough to have access to the capital and connections needed to start up and run a company are the ones that end up as "founders".

<comment><USER17> Even worse is when someone's founder mythologization (if that's a word :) reaches the point where they always capitalize the word "founder" and talk about founders (sorry, Founders) as if they were some unique species distinct from all other humans for their vision and bravery.

I'm convinced this comes from a combination of extremely stressed-out people psyching themselves up, plus VCs wanting to psych up the fresh meat. If you're going to give someone a bunch of money on the off chance that they might turn it into more money, it helps if you can convince the people you're giving money to that they are courageous superhuman visionaries creating the future, rather than people who are about to ruin their lives for a few years in exchange for a small chance at a big payout.

<comment><USER18> >mythologization (if that's a word :)

The term I have heard used is mythicizing or mythization[1] but its not only a problem in the public sphere, it has a significant impact on entrepreneurial research and understanding/teaching entrepreneurship.

[1] Ogbor, J. O. (2000). Mythicizing and reification in entrepreneurial discourse: Ideology-critique of entrepreneurial studies. Journal of Management Studies, 37(5), 605–635. [http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00196](http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00196)</comment></comment></comment>


Battleship - <AUTHOR> http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32011/index.html <comment><USER2> Their ruleset differs from other implementations I've seen.

In the original Milton Bradley rules, a player must confirm a sinkage upon the fatal hit on any ship.

Also, in the print version in newspapers (e.g. in the bimonthly Puzzle Brainia insert), ships are not allowed to touch (which makes sense, since that can't happen on the open ocean).</comment>


Google Chrome running on OSX and Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/

<comment><USER2> I tried it and it renders the fonts really poorly. It's actually makes it unusable.

Either way, it's probably easier to find a windows box to try it on then use this.

</comment><comment><USER3> V8 and webkit can surely be compiled under varies os. CodeWeaver just wanna promote its commercial wine....

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not native, but it's pretty darn good. I like it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A discussion of what it took to do it: [http://www.codeweavers.com/about/people/blogs/jwhite/2008/9/...](http://www.codeweavers.com/about/people/blogs/jwhite/2008/9/15/fire- drills-and-proving-a-point)

</comment><comment><USER5> Edit: Flagging this for duplication; the other link's title isn't so misleading.

Wow, I was running Chrome from day one using VMWare Fusion. Between Fusion and Parallels, us Mac users are pretty much covered. I still have nightmares about Wine, though...

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty crude... lots of widget flickering, font issues, spurious scroll bars etc but it works and you can test your site in it without starting VMware/Parallels. Definitely not suitable to be used as a default browser but it's great for quick testing.

But most of all, this is a great example of advertising your product by latching onto some new fad.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently started using a small, lightweight, linux umpc for all my internet usage and development work. The one thing I missed was Lotus Notes [Notes- haters just hold your tongues!] To my very pleasant surprise I could run it under Wine and it's as fast as running it on my Vista laptop (and the Vista laptop has twice the ram and twice the processor power). I hadn't looked at Wine for maybe 5 or 6 years. It's come a very long way.

</comment><comment><USER8> Works great in Parallel's Coherence mode too:

<http://tlrobinson.net/skitches/Skitch-20080915-154041.png>

</comment><comment><USER9> Mine is crashing every 5 min! :( Anyone else having problems? Looks like a great attempt though, but I cant wait for a native version, hopefully that's on the way soon.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm running this on Hardy and it runs... OK. More of an interesting POC than anything else. However, I think it forcefully demonstrates one of two things:

1) Wine is amazing.

2) Wine is a mess.

I dunno. Maybe both. I know, I know. It's Codeweavers. Still, that's Wine.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm sorry, I was yawning. Are we still talking about browsers that don't matter and never will?

<comment><USER12> It matters to me. I use Firefox mostly, but I honestly use Chrome religiously to play Weewar. It's like night-and-day difference in speed for playing that kind of an ajax-heavy game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's running under CrossOver, which is basically a paid version of Wine/Darwine.... which means it doesn't really count.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what "count" means in that context. It's real software you can run, and it's really running on OS X and Linux. So it does what it advertises.

But yes: this is basically advertisement. Google released a big piece of notable windows software with an open source license, and Codeweavers took the opportunity to show how you could get that source base running on other platforms in a matter of days using their product.

I'm not rushing off to download it, but still: this is a good hack, and a great piece of marketing IMHO.

<comment><USER15> Except for people with PowerPC OSX systems.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitch acquires gaming database site IGDB to improve its search and discovery - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/17/twitch-acquires-gaming-database-site-igdb-to-improve-its-search-and-discovery-features/ <comment><USER2> Serge here, parf of RAWG's team, which is a somewhat competitive product to IGDB.

First off, that's some great news, of course! I sent my congrats to IGDB today's morning. A very logical acquisition with lots of synergy potential. Surely though, Twitch will find find many other interesting ways to incorporate the data into their product apart from "better search" which is funny (Twitch under Amazon can't make a sufficient search? Really?). I'd expect more fancy products on Twitch utilizing the data—from reco engines and discovery algorithms to creator and company pages.

We at RAWG also noticed much interest concerning multiplatform games database when we launched our own free API. Each day I reply to one or two letters from students, aspiring coders, startups, non-profits, researchers and international corps. Turns out there are not so many places where you can find good data on all games. And products from small bots on Reddit and Discord to huge search engines like Yandex are happy to use our API to provide better experience.

I think the market needs an easy-to-use solution to build new services and enrich existing ones. The deal between Twitch and IGDB shows that the market does not only need it but also actively seeks opportunities to get a hold of such data first. Let's hope that when IGDB releases their Pro-tier API for free in the future it will stay for a long while, so that a lot of other products can benefit from it.</comment>


Ask HN: A felon has offered to invest in my startup, what are the implications? - <AUTHOR> I'm in a friends and family round, and a long time friend with a felony drug conviction from 15 years ago has kindly offered to invest in my business. This person never served time, rehabilitated himself and is a small business owner in a very legal and interesting profession.
I'm in the process of taking on funds for my own business and I really need money, but I don't want to screw up anything down the line.
He will not have a board seat, will not actively participate in the business.
Do investors care about backgrounds of other investors if the F&F have no say? <comment><USER2> I would third what you have heard here. A person that never served time for a felony that was not financially focused (e.g. wasn't a crime of dishonesty) would not be excluded from participating in a round of friends and family. Especially with no voting or board seat.

If you are exceptionally concerned have the individual invest via a LLC or separate company, but I doubt any future investors will care either way as they will only be focused on your ability to deliver and as long as that isn't compromised you are good.

There are some restrictions on a felony conviction in the SEC rules but I do not believe you would trigger them by taking funds from the person. IANAL but I believe they only become a factor if the person has a material interest or has a voting/board position in the company.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL, but there is nothing illegal about an investor with a felony record, and there is nothing illegal about having an employee or board member that has a felony conviction. Now with that said, in the case of moral turpitude charges (i.e. fraud, theft, etc..) there could be some push back from investors or the board if the individual is going to have a say in operations or a seat on the board. There could also be pushback if the charge was business related (i.e. they stole from a previous employer, were involved in a investment scheme).

In this case though from what you say, a drug charge, no convictions since, with that much time since conviction, I personally wouldn't even worry about it. If you know the individual well, are willing to go to bat for that individual, and it is a problem for someone else, that is their problem and probably not worth your time fighting over to convince them otherwise. At the friends/family stage though, this level of concern is even further reduced in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> From my experience, old (>15yr) convictions that didn't require time served are a non-issue. Especially given the recent small business operation.

Investors do care about the group they are investing with. I think you can make a clear case that this party is a low risk.

</comment><comment><USER5> Investors invest to make money. As outlined, it doesn't sound like it would make a difference beyond providing an excuse. For what it's worth Robert Morris of Morris Worm fame is a YC partner.

</comment><comment><USER6> 15 years is a long time. Don't hold it against him.</comment>


Cray ARMs Highest End Supercomputer with ThunderX2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/13/cray-arms-highest-end-supercomputer-thunderx2/amp/ <comment><USER2> Looks like far more results will be presented at GoingArm workshop at SC17 (ref: twitter) Can't wait to see. I wonder what other vendors will be presenting too, looks like Arm is finally arriving at SC17.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can the link be changed not to show the AMP page?</comment>


Ask HN: Can we get a "Show HN:" section - <AUTHOR>

Seems obvious that people would like to showcase their launched product (including me). I am thinking that once a "Show HN:" post got enough upvotes it would be added to the possible front page pool of links. <comment><USER2> Yes. We're planning to put a "show" link at the top alongside "ask", and it will point to a list of Show HNs. We're also going to publish rules about what does and doesn't count as a Show HN: basically, it has to be something you made that people can play with. So things like email signups, landing pages, and fundraisers won't count.

Implementing this, along with dozens of other things we want to do, is currently bottlenecked on my not having any time to write code. I'm going to have to pull back from moderation somewhat, or these features will never get built. (Besides which, moderating HN never has been and never should be anyone's full-time job. But I digress.)

Finally: please re-read the HN guidelines. You're supposed to send requests like this to email@example.com, or post them to the feature request thread. You're _not_ supposed to post them as stories, because (as should be obvious) they're not intellectually substantive. Unfortunately, the strange fascination that is Meta causes them to get lots of upvotes, and then they sit hogging space on the front page that they don't deserve. I'm going to bury this one now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I realize that this may not be exactly what is being requested, but in the mean-time, you can get nice results via search. Here are some non-exhaustive examples:

1\. "Show HN:" in the last 24 hours

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/last_24h/...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/last_24h/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22)

2\. "Show HN:" in the past week

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_week...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_week/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22)

3\. "Show HN:" in the past month

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_mont...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_month/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22)

4\. "Show HN:" in forever

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22)

5\. "Show HN:" points>1000 in forever

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22%20points%3E1000)

* * *

Finally, there are "Advanced search syntax" options:

Use " to match a particular sequence of terms "search engine"

Use - to ensure a word won't appear in the result set 'search -optimization'

Use author:USERNAME or by:USERNAME to filter by author

Use story:ID to filter by story

Use points>NUMBER or points<NUMBER to filter by points

Use date>TIMESTAMP or date<TIMESTAMP to filter by date

<comment><USER4> Or you can do site:news.ycombinator.com "Show HN" and use Google' search tool to filter results based on time.

<comment><USER5> Or you can write a web crawel in logo fetch, sort and regexp the 'Show' articles :-)

The point of the post is to make it easier, since the 'Show' tag is used more often than not!

I like the idea, would make the frontpage clearer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd absolutely love "Show HN" being a link on the top bar. Many of us are here because we love making things, because we want to get inspired and because we want to learn.

\- It might increase the quality of discussion here since these are likely to be more technical. Even more so if the "Show HN" work comes with source code.

\- I don't think a separate app on another domain will work. There will be no community around it.

\- In the long run, maybe YC will fund a few startups which started life as a link on Show HN.

sama, pg and others, please do consider this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been looking for something like a combination of these for a while:

\- Show HN

\- Beta List

It would be great to be able to submit products and get the collective feedback from those reading Hacker News. This is something that Product Hunt is trying to solve but it's still early days. Another interesting inclusion would be Product Hit as they try to crowd source feature requests.

[http://www.producthunt.co/](http://www.producthunt.co/)

[http://www.producthit.io/](http://www.producthit.io/)

</comment><comment><USER8> 100% agree, pumpkinattwelve (btw, awesome username, sir/ma'am).

I started Product Hunt ([http://producthunt.co](http://producthunt.co), essentially a "Hacker News for products") and the popularity of "Show HN" is one of the signals proving people love this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> I built ShowingHN. It doesn't do voting since that would require polling for updated tallies all the time, and because most good Show HNs don't typically get that many points. Perhaps a dedicated section on HN would fix that. If there are any specific changes you'd like me to make on ShowingHN to make it more useful, let me know and I'll see if I can implement them.

P.S. I also added an RSS feed output recently: [http://showinghn.com/feed.xml](http://showinghn.com/feed.xml)

<comment><USER10> I don't know if HN supports this, but would it be possible to display the HN scores next to each item (should be, see hckrnews.com), and to allow upvoting, if logged in to HN (guess: requires capabilities not supported by HN)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Check out r/SideProject. It's a subreddit I created to share and get feedback on side projects and startups.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject](http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject)

</comment><comment><USER12> My iOS app doesn't necessarily aggregate them into one area, but it highlights them in the main list. I believe that the Show HN posts are actually the best part of this community, so I wanted to visually distinguish and highlight those within the app. It's free, so you can check it out if you have an iPhone.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news- yc/id592893508?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8)

ShowHN Highlighting screenshot:

[http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple/v4/8e/8e/cc/8e8ecc01-c1...](http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple/v4/8e/8e/cc/8e8ecc01-c11b-6834-bc57-1bd20282d26d/screen568x568.jpeg)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd really like this.

I've been reluctant to post things I've worked on (mostly open source projects, some commercial) that I think some people might be interested in because I don't want to add to the noise ratio for others (I've set a high threshold for posting, which seems appropriate, and most of those things are early stage and I don't think they are quite there yet).

It would be great if there is an area for products - including non-profit open source / vanity projects - where it felt a little less disruptive and intimidating to post new projects - particularly early life ones.

</comment><comment><USER14> producthunt.co is kind of like that, but I agree it'd be great.

</comment><comment><USER15> We are experimenting with a new feature on cdnjs.com where our users can submit the projects -> cdnjs.com/news

</comment><comment><USER16> There used to be SkimHN which was awesome: [http://skimhn.com/](http://skimhn.com/)

It hasn't been working for a while now, but when it was up you could quickly find the top stories in topics of your interest.

Would be great if it got resurrected.

<comment><USER17> hi bigredtech, we whipped together something for ourselves: [http://www.panabee.com/show-hn](http://www.panabee.com/show-hn). it lists "show hn" posts from the last 24 hours and also offers a daily email. mind trying it? thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a feature request link at the bottom of the page for this sort of thing. The guidelines, rightly or wrongly, consider meta discussions about features to be low quality.

</comment><comment><USER19> One of the things that has ever made this site truly special. Companies have gone from launch on HN to being worth $10+ billion. Let's see more of that. Of course.

</comment><comment><USER20> I personally very much like having everything on one page. How about a general homepage and specific pages for "Show HN" and -"Show HN"?

</comment><comment><USER21> There was hnshowcase.com but seems to be down ATM.

<comment><USER22> There's also

[http://showinghn.com/](http://showinghn.com/) [https://twitter.com/JustShowHN](https://twitter.com/JustShowHN) and [https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily](https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You could read every book on Amazon about feature creep, but nothing beats a real-world example like this.

<comment><USER24> It's not really feature creep--it's adding a hard-coded and easily-accessible filter for content that the site was originally about, which is to say stuff hackers find interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Now that I've got paid hosting (a first time for me) I'm wary of posting a "Show HN:" out of fear that a possible surge of traffic will knock out my site, or even cost me extra cash for the bandwidth use hike (Assuming that the "Show" is a popular one.).

<comment><USER26> Assuming you want what you've built to eventually be successful, you need to put aside that and all related fears immediately.

<comment><USER27> Indeed, that would be a short-term spiked cost. Best case scenario is your product or service page is ready, tested and optimized so it has the impact on viewers that you want. And if your bandwidth persists in being higher then that's a good problem to have.</comment></comment></comment>


37signals Releases Backpack Financial Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/863-the-new-backpacks-first-24-hours <comment><USER2> if you're really determined to figure out their revenue, work your way backwards from their 9 employees. Most software companies take in $100,000-$200,000/yr per employee per year in top line revenue.

<comment><USER3> Excellent point. My guess is that they could be a bit higher, up to 300K per employee (that would be a somewhat exceptional, I grant you). $300K estimate would give $2.7 million per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> my random guesses for their revenue:

\- basecamp: $550,000/yr

\- signal vs noise (jobboard + deck): $200,000/yr

\- backpack: existing + new customers = $100,000/yr

\- highrise: $100,000/yr

\- campfire / writeboard / ta-da list: $75,000/yr

\- get real book: $75,000, span of its entire publication run

37s is at least a 1 mil a year company

<comment><USER5> I think Basecamp makes boat loads more than we realize. That's why they're so secretive about the numbers.

<comment><USER6> Or quite the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading title. They only shared the numbers from yesterday.

<comment><USER7> Well, they are financial numbers aren't they?

<comment><USER8> Misleading by omission.

Should be"releases financial numbers... for yesterday."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 37signals / basically the google of the SAAS model.

<comment><USER10> Isn't Google the Google of the SaaS model?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Finished MVP for my side project – send SMS reminders - <AUTHOR> https://www.scheduly.app <comment><USER2> Looks slick! I've used Google Calendar to achieve something similar in the past but this looks better.

Minor suggestion would be to remove the unlimited text messages from the plans. It's harder to change later when this takes off, is ripe for abuse, and (to me) makes it feel unsustainable: everyone know unlimited is not actually unlimited. I'd reserve that for for the "call us" enterprise pricing options.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just some feedback:

\- Show me your product. Maybe it's just me, but before I sign up for anything, I certainly like to see a glimpse of the Dashboard, a video, or an animated gif showing what your service actually does. Your site just has a bunch of fancy stock images.

\- When I click on Free Trial, you take me to the login page, requiring an extra click. If I'm going for a free trial, wouldn't you want me to register for an account? Just put a login link on the menu bar so any users of yours don't have to click on a free trial link just to login.

"Free Trial" => new customers only, "Login" => not new customers only.

\- Not sure if it's "just the day before", but consider options -- most people don't even remember the day of when they get a text the day before, so consider reminding an hour before or something like that if you're not going to offer options for the user to choose

\- For any business or product or service, it's always good to write out a Privacy Policy or Terms of Service, especially where money is involved. I even write them out for my free products -- basically telling people not to abuse my service and just how much information I have (always good to be GDPR- conscious)

\- Consider the font colors on your side where they are a "lighter effect" -specially under How It Works. For headings, certainly #000, but you still want your points to stand out, so rather than making it look dark like the headline, try something like #121212 because while gray is good... some shades can be too light for the eyes

\- "Click Try Now and sign up to get 15 days for free." I'm not here to tell you what to do, only think about the words of "click here..." but it might look better with something like this:

>Nowadays, life is hectic. We spend all day on the go. Sometimes, we may not even answer a phone call. We might be in the middle of a meeting, talking to a friend, ordering food, etc. The world demands a new way of reminding customers about appointments. Surprise your customers and friends with a friendly reminder via text message. Free up your time to do more meaningful work rather than calling every appointment to confirm.

>Sign up and get 15 days for free! No commitments! Give it a try today and see what you've been missing in your life!

If you wish to do anything, just trying to help. If not, it's just my own opinion. We all have those! :)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your average per-customer cost for your SaaS product? - <AUTHOR> This includes hosting, and labor.<p>I'm trying to figure out what is the least amount I can charge my customers, so that my product does not fall below a threshold that leaves it cashflow negative, requiring us to shutter our services. <comment><USER2> Unless you're deliberately operating a not-for-profit (trying to cover expenses and nothing else), value-based pricing generally makes more sense than cost-based - particularly for SaaS where the marginal cost of a new customer is low. Lots more: [https://www.google.com/search?q=value- based+pricing+saas](https://www.google.com/search?q=value-based+pricing+saas)

Regarding your exact question, since there's no average number of customers (denominator) or average total expense (numerator), there's also no use in an average cost-based price. About as close as one can get is to look at the average gross and net (ie, overall) margin of existing SaaS companies. That's interesting but not a great way to set prices, since prospective customers don't know or care. They care what your thing is doing for them and how much that benefit (time savings, pleasure, etc) is worth to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen many use $5 per user per month used very commonly across monitoring/alerting solutions as an entry point.</comment>


John's Combinatory Logic Playground - <AUTHOR> http://homepages.cwi.nl/%7Etromp/cl/cl.html <comment><USER2> I didn't want to leave this with just a vote. Thanks, this is fascinating and just the kind of thing I love HN for!

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured after three days of mostly climate and business related stuff it was high time for some bits...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You really can't say too many good things about John Tromp's remarkable paper.</comment>


Tips for Remembering and Organizing Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://workawesome.com/productivity/organizing-ideas/

<comment><USER2> Absolutely no content here, maybe except the usual advice to write everything down because otherwise it's going to fade away.</comment>


Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification - <AUTHOR> https://www.hnchat.com/ <comment><USER2> Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username.

        '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('')

I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fnph.png) (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of green)

<comment><USER3> I like the idea, although I'd probably choose a palette of, say, 30 colors, and hash the username mod 30 to determine the color. That way all the colors should be sufficiently contrasty.

<comment><USER2> My IRC client does this, but I find it too jarring when multiple people are talking and they have the same color.

Sometimes it rolls a yahtzee and the three people talking all have the same color and the same length of chars in their name.

I figure that even if the people talking luck out and have a shade of green like in my screenshot, it's still better than if they all fell into the identical green bucket.

<comment><USER4> It could choose two or three colors and split the name in half or thirds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ng-user It'd be cool if it showed the number of anonymous users creepily watching the conversation too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another chat app with mostly arbitrary ways to communicate? No thanks. I understand this is for HN community, but with XMPP, ICQ derivatives, IRC, etc I already have too many spaces to keep up with.

Its nice though, I like the profile key integration.

<comment><USER6> username checks out

<comment><USER5> Sorry about that I don't mean to shit on your project; honestly its pretty damn cool. I like the usage of django/daphne for a single page app...it came out nice.

I just don't see the usability cause I already have multiple messaging/chatroom services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is secretly a way for op to harvest IP addresses of usernames! /tinfoilhat

<comment><USER8> And then...?

<comment><USER9> Step 1. Harvest IP Addresses

Step 2. ????

Step 3. Profit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been idling in #hn on freenode for years now, and sadly it's consistently been dead, activity wise. Eager to see if hnchat can change the game.

<comment><USER11> Come over to #startups

We are an international bunch of tech entrepreneurs and the channel is usually pretty active.

<comment><USER12> ...But what if you're the rare HNer than doesn't actually _care_ about startups?

<comment><USER13> still a nice group of irc people

<comment><USER12> Well, yes, there is that. Unfortunately, IRC channels have enforced topics: those of us who are on HN more so for the cool tech stuff, and less so for the startups cannot contribute to the forum: This is why things like HN Chat are useful: the enforced topics, if any, are broad enough for the HN community to all be able to talk. Although, once again, they would do well to be more integrated with established communications technologies (IRC, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, the thing is, this needs some kind of IRC bridge, with auth. If you're an HN user, IRC is probably your usual mechanism for realtime textual communication, and I gather many would rather use their very rich tooling built on IRC than check another website.

<comment><USER14> Why do you assume your preference for IRC is everyone's preference?

<comment><USER12> I don't. I see a lot of IRC users on HN and other forums. Slack seems semi- common internal to orgs, but IRC seems to be by far the most active realtime communication medium used by devs externally.

People liking IRC is a reasonable conclusion to draw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice app, but reading the unfiltered drivel of tech executives in real time is truly more than I can handle.

<comment><USER16> I too enjoy signalling my superiority over others!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only problem you have is that people are leaving all their comments on the chat group instead of in here... :)

<comment><USER18> A lot of comments don't need to be here. As someone who's perennially on the rate limit list, I'd much prefer to take lengthier discussions off of here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh gosh and it's already devolved into tabs vs spaces and two vs four, what else should I have expected? ;-)

Nice, I'll login later and check it out!

</comment><comment><USER20> App version for android: [http://forty7.org/tmp/hnapp/hnchat.app.arm.apk](http://forty7.org/tmp/hnapp/hnchat.app.arm.apk)

I'm making a website tool to convert website to Android apps, so was using this as a test.

If anyone got an x86 android device, I also generated x86 version of the app: [http://forty7.org/tmp/hnapp/hnchat.app.x86.apk](http://forty7.org/tmp/hnapp/hnchat.app.x86.apk)

<comment><USER21> The x86 version works well, but isn't 70MB too much for such an application?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like that I can login without providing my credentials.

</comment><comment><USER23>
        Forbidden (403)

        CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

        You are seeing this message because this HTTPS site requires
        a 'Referer header' to be sent by your Web browser, but none
        was sent. This header is required for security reasons, to
        ensure that your browser is not being hijacked by third parties.

Erm...

</comment><comment><USER24> I really dig the login system!

I thought it should be vulnerable to 1\. find hash on victim's profile, 2\. login using the hash + username

But it seems the hash is never actually submitted to the server, neither through the login form nor later on by cookie. That is good news! The implied hurdle is that you'll need to update the hash on each login.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been saving a similar idea of getting people to authenticate with custom text in their bios. Would be clever if the app tricked you into verifying a third party account on keybase too.

</comment><comment><USER26> Good stuff!

The "Login to chat" should link to the login page.

</comment><comment><USER27> someone called for this on another site recently: [http://www.newschoolers.com/forum/thread/845014/NS-MEMBER- CH...](http://www.newschoolers.com/forum/thread/845014/NS-MEMBER-CHAT-)

\- maybe some way to have minimum karma to join, or at least a way to only see messages according to certain metrics, eg acct age, karma, avg post karma -- or else have those users in different colors, including being invisible

\- ability to block people

\- message replying

\- toggle message storage, either for user or admin

\- pausing

\- users can make comments in another user's chat profile, with ability for underlying user to reply

\- highlight another user's conversation, or have different conversations in different colors

\- this might actually work for instagram, where any user can keep a chatspace for their followers - perhaps a new url is provided upon each new photo, that way the users have to view the underlying instagram account, and the chatspace is cleared regularly (GramChat.)

</comment><comment><USER28> `Add the following token to your HN Bio` on login screen. What means `HN Bio` ?

Sorry, for dumb question.

<comment><USER29> Looks like you figured it out, but for anyone else following along.. Click your username and you'll be taken to a page like [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=indirpir](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=indirpir) where you can place your token.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm getting a 500 from Heroku.

btw, care to share the tech stack this is using?

<comment><USER6> Seems it's Python/Django/Daphne.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Neat! I love it!

What's it written in and can I host something similar myself?

</comment><comment><USER32> What I liked the most is the fact that it creates a kind of hackernews oauth. Using this mechanism, you can have something like "Login with hackernews" apps. Cool!

</comment><comment><USER33> Would be nice if it had a list of top articles that drill down to open in new window | chat (creates a private room for that article | and view comments/threads.

</comment><comment><USER34> It would be nice to have tab completion for typing usernames.

</comment><comment><USER35> HTTP 503 Service Unavailable "Request queue full."

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm using this on mobile and the scroll is very sluggish, you could add this you your scrollable div:

      -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

</comment><comment><USER37> Aaaaand we broke it.

<comment><USER6> yep. should've implemented rate limiting. and probably memcached. and not heroku free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha definitely a work in progress. Will fix this all soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Add the following token to your HN bio: hnchat:p2z9iJCaT5ZXWlWp5Vua

Smart idea to verify users

</comment><comment><USER39> Makes me wonder if I should modify RaspChat (yes it was posted before [http://beta.raspchat.com](http://beta.raspchat.com) ) to actually play well with HackerNews.

</comment><comment><USER40> I love this thing

</comment><comment><USER40> please add a mute feature, tga is annoying

</comment><comment><USER41> WOW Hackers :D

</comment><comment><USER42> But how do I downvote the chats?</comment>


Tell HN: I'll compare the note apps you tell me to, within the next 24 hours - <AUTHOR>

Tl;dr - let me know if you want me to compare some tools for taking notes. And if you have a preference, which tools should I look at?
I want to write something to help people choose.
So what should I include? This question is intentionally broad - it could be suggestions on how to structure the guide, note applications or use cases you want me to look at, suggestions on what to call this guide (chooseyourapp.com?), etc. <comment><AUTHOR> Currently, what I will be looking at is:

\- Evernote & Springpad

Other apps will be subject to suggestions, though I'm considering:

\- Springnote, Backpack, Memonic, Ubernote, Simplenote, Catch (formerly snaptic), Synotes, org-mode, OneNote, Google Docs, Zoho Notebook</comment>


2 Men Rejected NBA's $3M Offer. That Decision Made Them $800M - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/40-years-ago-two-men-rejected-nbas-3-million-offer-that-decision-eventually-made-them-800-million.html <comment><USER2> Website doesn't work, there's a flash of a title then it whites out.

<comment><USER3> Works here on iPhone</comment></comment>


Tell HN: What I like best about HN is no captioned pictures with latest meme. - <AUTHOR>

I like my Facebook friends list a lot, because it includes actual friends, and their interactions with one another are quite interesting. But Facebook turns me off compared to Hacker News much of the time because my FB home page still has too many friends posting cute captioned pictures with flat-wrong factual statements. So I just posted to my Facebook wall, "Memo to all of my friends on Facebook: cute photographs with captions are not a sufficient source of knowledge of the world. To form your opinions on public policy, please read actual books, and travel to places other than the place where you usually live and work." That's producing some thoughtful (and funny) replies, by the way.<p>So I'd just like to express appreciation to the HN community for mostly linking to actual thoughtful articles that have some verifiable (and even verified) facts and some balance, even if the submitted articles aren't the last word on the subject. All of your comments, and especially the comments of those of you who live in places where I have never lived, are very helpful for broadening my perspective and being more aware about what's left unsaid on the latest cute photograph on Facebook. Feel free to check my facts and ask for sources any time. <comment><USER2> "That's producing some thoughtful (and funny) replies, by the way."

Care to share some of the best?

</comment><comment><USER3> what I think is the best part: no spam! hardly have I seen hard spam threads.</comment>


Hadoop and NoSQL: Interview with J. Chris Anderson - <AUTHOR> http://www.odbms.org/blog/2012/09/hadoop-and-nosql-interview-with-j-chris-anderson/ <comment><USER2> Very nice!</comment>


China Aims to Retool Its Manufacturing Industry with Robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544201/china-wants-to-replace-millions-of-workers-with-robots/ <comment><USER2> "China is laying the groundwork for a robot revolution by planning to automate the work currently done by millions of low-paid workers."

Any ideas about what China has in mind for those 'millions of low-paid workers'?

<comment><USER3> Educate them and turn people into scientists, engineers, doctors, medical researchers, lawyers, computer programmers, etc?

China's population growth is slowing. Doesn't sound like they'll have the extra people. Better to educate them and move upmarket.

[http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2010/09/china- pop...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2010/09/china-population- wang)

<comment><USER4> > Doesn't sound like they'll have the extra people.

When automation wipes out 99.99% of jobs, nearly all people will be "extra" people. Globally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting thought on automation from Bob Work, who heads the Pentagon's long-range planning for robotics and automation on the battlefield. I don't know that it's true or how broadly it applies, but it's something to think about regarding how automation is conceived of in different cultures:

 _I will make a hypothesis: that authoritarian regimes who believe people are weaknesses ... that they can not be trusted, they will naturally gravitate toward totally automated solutions. Why do I know that? Because that is exactly the way the Soviets conceived of their reconnaissance strike complex. It was going to be completely automated. We believe that the advantage we have as we start this competition is our people_ [1]

The Pentagon's research and current planning is that human-computer teams are much more effective than either alone, in many situations.

[1] [http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/12/pentagon- nervous-a...](http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/12/pentagon-nervous- about-russian-and-chinese-killer-robots/124465/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It would have been a lot easier to simply take the blue pill, if anyone honestly believes this does not all come to a head I wish you the best in your blissful ignorance

</comment><comment><USER7> how about their workers? a lot of people will loss jobs because of robot</comment>


XPS 13 2018 review: Dell's improvements propel this laptop forward - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/review-improved-dell-xps-13-laptop-holds-its-own-against-other-ultrabooks/ <comment><USER2> I hope they fixed the awful coil whine. I had one so bad it was practically unusable.

<comment><USER3> Both my 9333 and my recently purchased 9360 have this damn coil whine. That means this issue has existed for over several years and several product generations. How in the world is Dell ok with this? Does anyone at Dell actually use their products?

<comment><USER4> I didn't observe that whine with my 9350. But the touchpad is essentially useless. In fact, I should reimage it with an OS where mouse use isn't necessary. It's that awful.

My best theory is these machines are meant to be seen on a desk attached to a big monitor and usual desktop setup.

<comment><USER3> I run Linux (exclusively) on mine, and use tmux + i3wm + qutebrowser for pretty much everything so my hands never have to leave the keyboard! Maybe that's why I've never noticed the quality of the touchpad.. but now that you mention it, yea this is pretty awkward.

<comment><USER4> The touchpad is downright user abusive in windows. After a google, it looks like most people have to uninstall the default driver and install another driver - just to get it to usable. Two finger scrolling never seems to work right, amongst other things. i.e. sometimes it'll keep scrolling after I've lifted my fingers - other times it wont register at all.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that sounds terrible. I don't seem to have any of those issues on Linux with the libinput driver, though I seem to recall that something wasn't quite right with the touchpad a few years ago when I got the 9333 when using the older (now deprecated) evdev driver.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PubSubHubbub - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

<comment><USER2> Is there something new here? PubSubHubbub has been out for a while.

(Not trying to be a snob...just seeing if I'm missing something...)

<comment><USER3> According to the google code updates page (<http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/updates/list>), nothing new has happened since January 3rd. So no, nothing new looks to have happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That looks quite complicated and the only benefit I can see is not having to wait 5 minutes for your RSS client to poll the source. Could anybody explain what are the true benefits over our current RSS/Atom polling systems?

EDIT: I also fail to see how this would reduce the load. It just transfers the load to the "hub" node. If a big website runs its own hub node to serve its content, then there's no gain (you just had a layer of indirection and complexity).

There could be big external hub, but what would be the point for them? Man-in- the-middle-ing the streams and inserting ads? Doesn't sound really great.

And if a bazillion micro hubs emerge, then the overall load on the providers will pretty much remain the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many many fewer HTTP requests.

<comment><USER4> I suppose webapps such as google reader query only once the source for all the users subscribed to a certain feed, effectively reducing the number of HTTP requests on the upstream provider. Isn't it a simpler and well tested solution to this problem? It basically makes the google server the Hub and your browser the subscriber to use the website's terminology.

<comment><USER5> You might say that Pubsubhubhub is the logical extension of the Google Reader concept. It allows you to "read" those feeds programmatically and enables the content site to notify Google Reader of updates so they get there quicker.

Also, anyone can choose to be a hub, not just Google Reader. There's your simple and well tested solution wrapped in a standard for anyone to implement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love PuSH and we are using it on feedr.embed.ly. It was pretty simple to implement and the code is tight. The only thing that would save us a lot of work is if RSS feeds provided canonical links. We need a canonical link to match RSS feeds to our link metadata properly.

</comment><comment><USER7> _yawn_</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News for electronics enthusiast? - <AUTHOR>

I like HN very much, I like the discussions,the people, the ideas and .... that's maybe all there is to HN. But the discussions here are mainly oriented towards computer science, web dev, computer languages etc. I would like a more electronics oriented discussion. So, can anyone direct me to some place where I can get people like you all but talking more about circuits, radios and robots? <comment><USER2> Have you tried the forums at <http://www.nutsvolts.com/> ?

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://electronics.stackexchange.com/> is like StackOverflow for electronics.

<comment><AUTHOR> That seems something like I want, but are the people there as good as HN?That I will have to figure out. Also as it is hosted on the StackOverFlow code, it looks familiar.</comment></comment>


FTC Should Fine Itself for False Advertising for Promising You $125 from Equifax - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjg84/the-ftc-should-fine-itself-for-false-advertising-for-promising-you-dollar125-from-equifax <comment><USER2> I have a problem with the article calling the settlement "free money". The money is not free: it's a holy inadequate compensation from a company that leaked literally _all_ of the information used by companies to verify consumer's identity.

Having done this they offered a tiny amount of money, and a "free" service that most consumers already have, that costs them nothing (they're one third of the companies providing the monitoring and I doubt their paying the other companies market rates).

That credit monitoring they offer? That's literally a service where you pay them to tell you when they've started making fraudulent claims about you. You are still required to do all of the work.

No this fine was nothing, the settlement is a scam, none of the executives responsible has had any consequences except maybe that one who made insider trades, eg. Not because of mismanagement of your data.</comment>


The Human Cost of your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://sharepowered.com/see-the-human-cost-of-your-iphone-and-it-will-shock-you/#

<comment><USER2> This is only one step in the chain. As sad as is it -- it gets much worse on the far ends of the process. Collection of raw materials and disposal (read: "recycling") of old electronics are much worse.

Years ago me and some friends just did back of a napkin calculations about the number of human deaths that could be attributed to our consumption of devices and materials -- and it was sobering.

Sadly, not sobering enough for me to do anything about it. I try to minimize my possessions now, but not for a cause -- it is more of a lifestyle thing and I enjoy it.

The problem is so huge and stark and overwhelming it is hard to know where to start in our society governed by large state actors. I do donate to efficient charities, try not to be evil -- but that is about the net of my efforts on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't take into account the future Apple is trying to push with iOS where they have control over what you are a'allowed' to run on your phone. Loss of freedom is an important issue and without competition to keep them somewhat in check the future would be quite bleak

</comment><comment><USER4> Like they say in the video, ultimately only the big brands will be able to solve this problem. However, it's up to us as consumers to to put pressure on the brands who's products we buy.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is something that concerns me greatly... does our high standard of living require others to be miserable to maintain?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there is new for greater awareness about this ... when we enjoy a great product, it's greatness should not at the expense of others ... there is a need to create a great products without damaging the lives of those who make it possible</comment></comment>


The Global Time-Wasting Epidemic: Stop the Meeting Madness - <AUTHOR> http://www.business.com/management/the-global-time-wasting-epidemic-stop-the-meeting-madness/

<comment><USER2> What I love is the meeting timer app: [http://teammeeting.co/timer/](http://teammeeting.co/timer/)

Try running it in front of your whole team at your next meeting already today.</comment>


The Complete Guide To Freemium Business Models - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/04/complete-guide-freemium/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> This is something I struggled with for a long time in regards to my own company. I did ultimately though end up with going with a "Freemium" model though. The article does a good job pointing out the strengths of freemium, and I think for any sort of social network based company (I believe he used linkedin as an example) you would be hard pressed to find a pricing model that works as well as Freemium.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Guess what? Because of declining hosting and bandwidth costs, for most Internet products the marginal cost today is practically … zero."_

That's not really true at all. I remember reading an analysis of Google's costs somewhere (sorry tried but can't find the link) that each search costs something like 70c.

Even if it were much less (1c or 2c) that's still a hell of a cost for the "paying" customers (ie. the circa 10% of people that actually click on google ads) to be covering.

<comment><USER4> _each search costs something like 70c_

Even two years ago, there were 3 billion Google searches per day. I think it's safe to assume this figure has gone up a bit since then. [http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs- facebo...](http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs- google-buzz-36709)

I also think it's safe to assume that Google Search doesn't cost a trillion dollars a year to run.

<comment><USER3> Yeah a trillion is a little high ... damn I wish I could find that article though it had this really good analysis of googles profits vs. number of searches and then inferred the cost per search. Mabye it was 0.7c :)</comment></comment></comment>


The Billiard Ball Computer - <AUTHOR> http://jameslin.name/bball/tutorial/ <comment><AUTHOR> I first ran into this in one of AK Dewdney's books (probably "The Tinkertoy Computer") when I was in high school. I actually took some classes with Tommaso Toffoli as an undergrad but I had totally forgotten that he invented this, so it was only years later when I came back across it that I made the connection.

I've always enjoyed mechanical implementations of digital logic.</comment>


Traccar – Modern GPS Tracking Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.traccar.org/ <comment><USER2> I stumbled onto Traccar via Home Assistant, which offers Traccar as a plugin. Ultimately I wanted a boolean sensor for whether I'm at home or not, and Traccar (as installed by the HA plugin) provided that to HA without configuration.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the tip! Hass user here too. I was reluctant to use GPS based detection but traccar seems like good private solution. I still have to check whether I must spin my own instance or if the traccar server is running automatically on (my) Hass server.

<comment><USER2> I'm also looking into client-side geofencing, e.g. an app that reports an event to HA when a fence is crossed, compare to Traccar collecting all the locations and inferring the crossings. My goal is tiered presence detection.

<comment><USER4> How about Owntracks. It can do geofencing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. I wish I had a fleet of vehicles to use this with.

<comment><USER6> Seems the server is 50 USD/month for 50 clients. Since it is FOSS, I suppose you can self-host?

This seems shady:

"* In addition to standard version available on the Google Play, Traccar Client for Android comes in a special hidden version. It includes modifications to make the app less visible to the phone's owner. Name is changed from "Traccar Client" to "Device Settings". Default Android settings icon is used as an app icon. After first start, the app removes itself from the launcher. To open it again dial 8722227 (TRACCAR)."

I highly doubt that's GDPR complaint. Then again, it is a Russian company who sell their server capacity in USDs.

<comment><USER7> They probably meant "user" here, and a lot of companies would want to be able to track their phones without the user deleting it. I think it's fine if the phone is company property.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a Russian company selling online in USD if they want to hit a higher market. As someone from Pakistan, I wouldn't price my SaaS in PKR either if my market includes people from outside the country.

<comment><USER8> > They probably meant "user" here, and a lot of companies would want to be > able to track their phones without the user deleting it. I think it's fine > if the phone is company property.

There is no reason to try and hide such an app, though. Phones that are company property will be under MDM which can ensure a given app is installed and prevent uninstallation.

These features, presumably, are to target the shady "spouse spying", domestic abuse and similar adversarial tracking markets.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I can see how they'd be used like that and I don't condone it. At the same time, the optimist in me hopes they're trying to make it less obvious to the employees that the phone is being tracked. Like when you don't necessarily need a glowing red camera to remind workers that big brother is watching.

But I certainly see your point. I'm just hoping they're a legitimate vehicle tracking solution that's letting you add an accompanying hard-to-remove client app on a spare phone to use as a easy vehicle tracker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know of a GPS device that sends data to a server via a simple HTTP post request? I have trouble working with sockets.

<comment><USER10> I have an old Sanav CT-24. It sends HTTP requests with a NMEA protocol payload. It's been a long time since I used it. I created my first Rails application to receive its data back in 2005/6\. It uses GPRS (yes) and falls back to SMS. I'm sure there are more modern models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does it look like? Can I say it's like Google Maps + moving pins (e.g. tracked vehicles) for the server-side, and SDK/client library for GPS devices?

Also, what Android/iOS got to do with this? A "viewer" (dashboard) for the server?

<comment><USER12> It does look like Google Maps with moving pins, but it has a lot of extra functionality like geofencing, various reports, notifications and more. You can also view history for one or multiple devices.

There are two mobile apps. One app is basically for tracking your phone (Traccar Client) and the other one is the viewer (Traccar Manager).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks pretty nice! Does anyone know of a device that uses data (not SMS) and that I can put in my car to track it in case of theft, but that won't kill my battery? I suppose I should wire it to only run when the car is on.

<comment><USER14> Many cheap gps trackers support "vibration wake up", they go to sleep after a while they've been still and wake up when you start the car. They run in sleep mode at least a week on an internal battery so charging them only whole the car is on is not a problem.

Traccar supports many protocols so you are usually able to buy a random tracker and reconfigure it to work with your traccar instance.

<comment><USER13> Vibration wake up sounds very interesting, I'll look into it, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would someone be able to provide a comparison with OwnTracks?

<comment><USER16> GRPS and older layout if memory serves me correctly

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually just ran into this a few days ago. Has anyone used this with a DIY device? How does it perform? Have you used it on your cars/bikes?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The submission time of this post must have been changed, I posted it yesterday.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder why the admins on this forum feel like they should control/change everything? Was that you Daniel G.? dang... god mode enabled

<comment><USER16> It means they found it interesting and gave it another chance

<comment><AUTHOR> They should let the next submitter get the karma or change their ranking algo... I was not even awake at the time that I supposedly submitted that link.

<comment><USER16> No, your history should display the correct date.

It's not sure that it gets submitted again, this is the best alternative.

It's just temporarily to show it in the front page. They mentioned it somewhere.

As long as it works, there's no problem</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How algorithms shape our world - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2011/07/29/how-algorithms-shape-our-world/

<comment><USER2> Previous submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791565>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793205>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2796291>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798214>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798498>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812563>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2830149>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2854737>

None of them have any discussion - perhaps this will be the first.

</comment><comment>==

ADDED IN EDIT:

Actually, this is just a thin veneer over the link originally posted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793205>

To quote from <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

        In Submissions
        ...
        Please submit the original source. If a blog post
        reports on something they found on another site,
        submit the latter.</comment>