Dark mode in a website with CSS - <AUTHOR> https://tombrow.com/dark-mode-website-css <comment><USER2> I recently added dark-mode support to a few sites. It took way more time then I thought it would. At first I thought "oh just add a few lines off CSS" but then ...

* Some diagrams had white backgrounds

Solution: remove the backgrounds so they are transparent

* Most diagrams had black lines/arrows which didn't look good on dark gray backgrounds

Solution: use CSS filter:invert for images

* Some images are photos not diagrams so inverting their colors doesn't work

Solution: Use a selector for svg only img[src$=.svg] and a class when manually needed

* Some svg diagrams have their colors referred to like "see the red object" in that text.

Solution: filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg);

That makes the blacks become white but the colors kind of stay the same hues at least

* The are many interactive digrams on the sites.

Solution: All of those had to be refactored to not use hard coded colors but do something like

        const darkMatcher = window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)");
        const isDarkMode = darkMatcher.matches;
        const colors = isDarkMode ? darkColors : lightColors;

And draw everything with the appropriate colors. Its up to you if you want to trigger re-drawing if the user changes their preference

* Some text was color coded for to match the diagrams as in

        x-axis"

But now those colors looked bad on a dark background.

Even 5 months later I still find places I missed.

<comment><USER3> Why mess with content colors? Just leave the images.

<comment><USER4> If you have a lot of images with white backgrounds, that's going to defeat the purpose of Dark Mode.

Some people prefer dark mode because they suffer migraines and bright lights are a problem when they have a migraine. Or homeless people may be using it for both stealth purposes and battery conservation when they have limited opportunities to recharge.

For some people, this preference is not just some minor detail. It's a much more important thing than "I just happen to like dark color schemes."

<comment><USER5> > Or homeless people may be using it for both stealth purposes and battery > conservation when they have limited opportunities to recharge.

Sorry, what? I feel like this is a very contrived reason to support dark mode in your interface, if it even helps…

<comment><USER4> Contrived: deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously. Synonym: deliberate

created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic. Synonym: forced

\----

People can do anything they want with their websites. I'm not anyone who sets global policy on what your website should do.

But there's nothing contrived about the comment. It's an unplanned, spontaneous thought based on first-hand experience.

I spent nearly six years homeless. I'm quite open about that. I still blog about homelessness.

I spent a lot of time online while homeless. This was written about me:

[http://alexandralindelof.com/story- package/](http://alexandralindelof.com/story-package/)

<comment><USER5> I'm aware of that, but images on a website being desaturated or having a dark background doesn't seem like it would help. (I do agree with your appeal to those who are sensitive to bright lights, FWIW. It's just that this one sounds like a bit of a reach.)

<comment><USER4> If you are illegally camped in a dark field and your phone, tablet or laptop is the only source of light, bright white images emit much more light that can give away your position than dark ones.

IIRC, the two primary things we did to conserve battery power were 1. Avoid certain games and 2. Turn down screen brightness.

In ordinary usage, the screen on our tablets was typically the biggest drain on the battery. This was especially true for tablets with a large screen.

I don't have (anec)data specific to dark mode on websites and power usage. I just know that using our devices carefully was the difference being kept occupied for three or four hours until we could sleep or running out after an hour and having nothing to do but talk, which is not a stealthy activity.

<comment><USER6> "As an example, one commercial QVGA OLED display consumes 0.3 watts while showing white text on a black background, but more than 0.7 watts showing black text on a white background, while an LCD may consume only a constant 0.35 watts regardless of what is being shown on screen."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOLED](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOLED)

<comment><USER7> The citation was from 2009. I expect, or rather hope, that things have improved. Interesting link, by the way, and very useful to add to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love dark mode as a user, but as a developer it terrifies me how much complexity is involved in programming in 2019. At a stroke, it _doubles_ the number of possible combinations of:

\- 2 device sizes: desktop vs mobile (e.g. responsive)

\- 3 platforms: web vs iOS vs Android, or web vs Windows vs macOS vs Linux (not even counting cross-browser or OS version quirks), or god forbid all of the above

\- 2 input methods: hover/click/drag vs tap/hold/swipe

\- 2 modes for accessibility: full visual+audio vs screenreader/captioned

\- And now 2 visual modes: light vs dark

That's _48_ combinations to design and test for. I'm probably forgetting some too. But as a developer it makes just the _baseline cost_ of any basic app _so damned high_.

Again, as a user I love it. But the entrance cost for entrepreneurs, or even hobbyists? Man oh man.

<comment><USER9> Conversely, that's what's amazing about the Web, right?

Whenever people introduce any of those things, like when iOS was introduced, they had to decide how to port all the existing content and interactions and widgets to mobile and touch interfaces. As a result, if an entrepreneur or hobbyist makes an app on one platform and wants it to be at least minimally usable on another platform, the Web way, way lowers the barrier to make that jump.

<comment><USER10> The particular methods for making CSS backwards compatible are specific to the web, but the general problems faced by having user display preferences are not. Adding these features to native apps blows up your testing matrix there, too.

In many ways, it's even worse. I've got OS settings here for "increase contrast", "reduce transparency", "use grayscale", "invert colors", and (because areas of native windows can be translucent) even the desktop wallpaper comes into play.

I turned on dark-mode for testing my own app, and I had to turn it off because there's parts of Xcode where the contrast ratio is less than 1.1:1.0. The text is downright invisible. Obviously nobody at Apple would ever intentionally make software like that. They must have simply never thought to test with the same settings as I have.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1kfN6SUcAEwWxq?format=png&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1kfN6SUcAEwWxq?format=png&name=small)

<comment><USER9> And yet Xcode is very successful and well-liked, or at least if it's hated, it's not for the flaw you found.

Doubtless many, many other apps have also made that same mistake, yet I highly doubt it has made the difference between success and failure for even a single one of them.

All of those OS features were introduced to help people, because people wanted them, some even needed them. I don't think we live in a worse world for having them, and I believe that dealing with features like those would actually be even harder in a world without the Web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem is that this doesn't let the user toggle dark mode on/off.

If you want the user to be able to toggle dark mode on your site without changing their Operating System preferences, then you'll need to implement your dark theme as a class (eg. body.theme-dark) since there's no way to dynamically set the media query.

      const darkMode = window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)')
      if (darkMode) {
        document.body.classList.add('theme-dark')
      }

If you have to write your dark theme CSS as a separate class, then there's no sense in duplicating that logic inside the media query and having to override it when the user toggles it. So I ended up using that Javascript instead of putting the styles in the media query.

It's a shame, I would've preferred a pure HTML/CSS solution.

<comment><USER12> Is there anything which allows user choice (i.e. state) that doesn't involve JS?

<comment><USER13> Yes, although doing things without JS is old school web. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any clients that don't support JS in this era.

Anyway, to accomplish this you would split your styles into seperate CSS files and then have a drop-down that does an HTTP POST/GET to a server side script that will then set a cookie on your browser with your preferred choice.

Each time a request comes in from the client you just check that cookie for which style they want and then change the HTML that's sent to include a different stylesheet.

<comment><USER14> There's a number of _end users_ who would like to avoid JS on non-app sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Photographs also looked harsh. It turns out that many people prefer images, > too, to be desaturated in dark mode

This is an interesting choice. While it might be easier on the eyes, personally it feels kind of icky to change colors on images…

<comment><USER15> Yeah that seems bad. If you choose low contrast fonts, reduce the contrast of photographs to the background by making them darker, etc, it's just like turning down the brightness and contrast of your whole site. If the user thinks the content of your site is still too bright with dark mode on, maybe they should turn down the brightness of their device?

By making everything on your site dark and low-contrast, the implication is that the user wants to see other things on the screen in higher contrast alongside your site, like the UI chrome. That seems unlikely - your site is the most important content that they have on the screen at that time and it should probably have the highest brightness or contrast of anything on the screen, not the lowest.

</comment></comment><comment> Y-bar I'm probably not representative of the general dark mode user, I think, but I enable dark mode because I want the UI chrome out of the way to concentrate on the content. I don't want dark content. Is there a way to disable this media query?

<comment><USER16> Ditto. Duckduckgo seems to have added support, but has a preference to keep it light. I enabled light (despite system dark for reason above) but it means any new tab search flashes dark for a fraction of a second, before it reads the lightness preference cookie or whatever.

<comment><USER5> Annoyingly, DuckDuckGo doesn't let me set an adaptive theme if I change the font settings, plus they don't have an easy way to contact them either…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I did this recently for my new personal website! It's quite easy and really satisfying. I love doing as much as possible in stateless CSS instead of JavaScript.

[http://www.brandonsmith.ninja/](http://www.brandonsmith.ninja/)

<comment><USER18> Did this about six months ago over at my site. Was annoying to get it right but glad I did.

Some people find these kinds of sites pointless these days, but I enjoy keeping one even if I rarely update it anymore. Spirit of the web and all that.

[https://rymc.io/](https://rymc.io/)

<comment><USER16> Nice site, it works well on mobile, which is a bit of a pleasant surprise when it happens from personal blogs etc.!

FWIW the Twitter feed from, I assume, people you follow is a little odd though - it's not immediately clear that it's not you, nor about the article being viewed, which it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with, and it includes replies to threads. At the time of writing the top one is recommended reading that's 'racist from the start'.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, it bleeds a bit too much on mobile - younger brother passed away recently and I shoved the site out the door before heading back home to be with him. Desktop view has it more marked as separate content - e.g, that tweet is actually a Retweet with a comment, which is kind of a pain in the ass to handle from Twitter's API. Should find time to clear it up a bit I guess.

Site works well on mobile because I cannot stand sites that don't load quick + layout well on mobile, and considering the general content I post, I'd expect the audience to have the (relatively) same pet peeve.

I open sourced the activity scraper as well, if anyone's interested: [https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/activity- scraper](https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/activity-scraper)

<comment><USER13> Looking at the feed you should see if it's possible to exclude any tweets that begin with "RT" (retweets) or the "@" (replies). This way only posts you write should show in the feed, would make it much cleaner as without the full conversation contexts those other messages make no sense.

The GitHub activity feed is pulling in every comment you make, see if you can filter that to only show pull requests you've created to showcase your work. Maybe also include commits to your own projects if the commit length is more than a certain number of characters to filter out the small updates.

<comment><USER18> Heh, I should be clear: I consider the aforementioned Tweet/RT issue a UI/UX thing, it's otherwise working as designed.

I'm perfectly happy showing my @replies, rando GitHub activity, etc. Nobody is actually reading that sidebar, short of a select few - I like having that junk indexed in search engines attributed to my own domain.

It's free real estate. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now if only Hacker News would implement it!

<comment><USER20> I currently use 'DARK READER' for hacker news and it works quite well using the 'Filter+' theme engine.

<comment><USER21> I use the following: [https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news- dark](https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news-dark)

Works great.

<comment><USER22> I've put an updated version here. This updated version is an UserCSS, which means it can be automatically enabled/disabled based on system Dark Mode setting.

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kristofferR/userstyles/mas...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kristofferR/userstyles/master/HackerNews- Dark/HackerNews-Dark.user.css)

<comment><USER21> Awesome, and I see you fixed the vote button colors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The two best Dark Mode extensions just implemented automatic Dark Mode support (so the web goes dark automatically when Dark Mode is enabled) :D

[https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader](https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader)

[https://github.com/openstyles/stylus](https://github.com/openstyles/stylus) (not built into release yet)

<comment><USER23> I like DarkReader, but it's been a huge exercise in patience seeing Firefox and Chrome getting all the updates, while the paid Safari version languishes.

By the extension author's own admission [1], the majority of the revenue comes from the Safari extension, but he still prioritizes the (I imagine) larger user base of the firfox and chrome extensions. It's frustrating, to say the least.

[1] [https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/1205#issueco...](https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/1205#issuecomment-477282237)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I did this for the KDE wikis {userbase,techbase,community}.kde.org, this was a lot harder than I first thought, because of the amount of user contributed content with white background, hardcoded color in the text.

I wrote about it here: [https://carlschwan.eu/2019/07/12/new- userbase.html](https://carlschwan.eu/2019/07/12/new-userbase.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> I baked dark mode into my css microframework [0], and it's always so satisfying to see people using it !

I didn't do the "dimmer images" thing, but I'll try it sometimes.

[0] [https://concrete.style](https://concrete.style)

<comment><USER26> That's a great micro framework

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I apologize for my ignorance, but could somebody explain the need for dark mode? I know that it's bad to have a phone glow in your face when your eyes are adjusted to the dark, but don't most phones automatically lower the brightness? That seems to work well enough for me. Perhaps a specific dark mode could do it better, if well designed, but most sites have a hard enough time doing one good color scheme.

I know some people would prefer a light-on-dark color scheme in general, even during the day. Is this entirely about what you see in the dark, or is there a component of wanting more "skins" in general?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a good discussion of "why dark mode" in the article that mine links to: [https://web.dev/prefers-color-scheme#why-dark- mode](https://web.dev/prefers-color-scheme#why-dark-mode)

<comment><USER27> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here is another article that goes much deeper into how to actually use CSS to implement the dark mode. While it does not rely on the media query (the article is almost 17 months old after all), it shows many other CSS features you could use.

[https://medium.com/@mwichary/dark-theme-in-a- day-3518dde2955...](https://medium.com/@mwichary/dark-theme-in-a- day-3518dde2955a)

</comment><comment><USER29> If you want to make sure your website is pleasant for dark-browsers, check if it doesn't break with extensions such as [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/)

<comment><USER30> Or similarly for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark- reader/eimadp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark- reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem with all these dark modes is that I end up with 50 shades of grey and things are harder to distinguish because there's no consistency on where to apply the various shades.

It's a testament to how primitive the web is as a platform that it can't do something like apply a universal theme like Windows 3 did.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like good news, and similar to how Emacs handles it; do newer versions of web browsers also change the base/default colours when dark mode is used, by the way?

Still not a complete replacement of global colour overriding (white flashes, or simply switching between dark and light themes often, can be quite unpleasant in a dark environment, and of course all the websites won't ever employ it, and some will use it wrong), but at least from the webmaster side it should simplify the colour theme decisions quite a bit (which were/are hard if you care about that sort of thing: I hoped that major web browsers will do something like that with alternate stylesheets someday, but as a media feature it would work too).

<comment><USER33> > do newer versions of web browsers also change the base/default colours when > dark mode is used, by the way?

iOS at least does not. Perhaps because some sites customize foreground colors but not background colors or vice versa, and they'd break if the foreground wasn't dark or the background wasn't light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Try accomdating for Dark Mode as an email developer...

<comment><USER35> How would you do that?

<comment><USER34> No way as of yet. At the moment the best bet is to ensure that images accomodate for dark mode (particulary in email clients such as Outlook). Hopefully on the future this can be done with a line of CSS -_-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I recently added dark mode support with a new website for myself, using (prefers-color-scheme: dark) by default, but also allowing the user to switch between light and dark mode if they have JavaScript enabled. It also supports switching image sources in dark mode, so that I can use a dark mode screenshot in dark mode, and light in light. (I haven't yet published the draft article I have using this feature.)

I wrote about it at [https://chrismorgan.info/blog/dark-theme- implementation/](https://chrismorgan.info/blog/dark-theme-implementation/).

<comment><USER37> SteamDB also recently added this too, but it also doesn't require JavaScript, as it's based in the cookie. The toggle does use JavaScript if you do have it enabled

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So that's why sites have been annoyingly turning dark lately. In Firefox apparently this can be disabled by creating a new integer preference in about:config called "ui.systemUsesDarkTheme" and setting it to 0.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have chrome updates restricted by my organization and can't use this feature. Instead I'll occasionally use this bookmarklet to invert colors on very bright pages:

javascript:(function() { var tag = document.createElement('style'); tag.type = 'text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(tag); tag[ (typeof document.body.style.WebkitAppearance=='string') ? 'innerText' : 'innerHTML'] = '* { background-color: white !important; color: #444 !important; } html { filter: invert(100%) grayscale(100%); }'; })();

</comment><comment><USER40> > It's recommended to avoid pure white for text, and I chose likewise to avoid > pure black for the background.

This is such nonsense. Pure black is never pure black on a monitor and neither is white. And the link he provides just restates the assertion with no additional reasoning.

See, I get it. If you create work as an artistic statement, you deliberately pick not-quite-blacks/whites because the defaults are not your artistic choices if you just default to them.

However, once you take this as a given rule and you pick some not-quite-white because "it is recommended", that defeats the entire purpose.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does not seem to work in Firefox for Android.

<comment><USER42> Do you have Android's dark mode enabled, and is your Firefox up to date? It's a pretty new CSS feature

<comment><USER43> Doesn't work for me either. Android 10, Firefox 68.1.1 and Chrome 77.0, dark mode activated.

<comment><USER42> Weird. It's supposed to work on Android Firefox 68; Chrome 77 is unclear:

[https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color- scheme](https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How does one enable this setting in Firefox?

<comment><USER42> It's OS-level. macOS, iOS, Android, and I believe Windows 10 will all send this signal now to whichever (modern) browser you're using.

<comment><USER45> As will Linux/Gnome.

<comment><USER44> Any idea how to set this on Ubuntu? I have what I assume is the dark theme - title bars are white text on dark grey background - but this website displays a light theme in Firefox.

<comment><USER45> It depends on your Gtk theme, I think. If it's marked as dark, then Firefox will pick that up and apply the CSS accordingly. I use Yaru-dark.

You can also force Firefox, via an about:config setting to act as if you were using dark mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's not widely available yet, [https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color- scheme](https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme)

<comment><USER47> True, but does it have to be?

The beauty of this setting is that it falls back 100% gracefully. Basically if your OS and/or browser doesn't support it, then you just see the "normal" version of the site.

Because Dark Mode is only available on newest versions of most operating systems, it is also reasonable to assume that the people running a dark mode compatible device would have a modern browser.

So all-in-all, I think compatibility is a moot issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Slightly off topic,

I find it kind of ironic that there's so much debate surrounding the intricacies of dark mode support on a forum with no dark mode support (even though it avoids 90% of the gotchas).

</comment><comment><USER49> Shameless plug: I did the same thing to my personal website and wrote about it with light/dark screenshots: [https://www.reillywood.com/blog/dark- mode/](https://www.reillywood.com/blog/dark-mode/)

I like working in Solarized Dark, so I wanted my website to serve up Solarized Dark. I dim images in dark mode too, but I turn them up to full brightness on hover.

<comment><USER5> I only use Solarized for code snippets on my website, but the benefit of using it as a color scheme is that switching between the two is a one line addition: only the background needs to respond to prefers-color-scheme.

<comment><USER49> Yeah, that would be nice for UIs that can use Solarized Light. I experimented with it as a full UI, but it just didn't look quite right to me – I ended up only using it for light mode code snippets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 One of my (maybe unwarranted) concern with automatic dark mode, is the potential ability of the browser and apps to determine my (very) coarse location based on when the dark mode is enabled or not, as it because another potentially identifying info among others.

Does that kind of CSS allows a script to determine if the browser is displaying dark mode or not, or send back that information to ads servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you could craft CSS to conditionally load an image based on the media query. This would let a server observe the client's setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Naïvely I tried to do this by overriding a few custom properties and using filters. My site has a position: sticky nav, and filters introduce a stacking context, so things which filters apply to naturally go on top of the nav when before they went behind. A minor annoyance, but it demonstrates how introducing a dark mode isn't as straight forward as I thought it would be.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wish more stuff was presented also as a header, so you could serve a specific CSS file for people who prefer dark-mode.

</comment><comment><USER52> Where did this dark mode craze come from?

Don't get me wrong - I quite enjoy dark mode most of the time, but why now and not earlier?

<comment><USER53> To speculate, screens are progressing to display dark mode well. I get eye strain from Jetbrains Pycharm dark theme, the terrible way it renders on my laptop, so I am holding out now. Holo theme for Android may have accelerated the trend from 2012.

[https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2012/01/holo- every...](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2012/01/holo- everywhere.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Doesn't work in Chrome on iOS 13.1.2 for me. Works in Safari though.

</comment><comment><USER55> Not working on Firefox for iOS. Can anyone else confirm this to be the case? Looks as though Firefox for iOS does support 'prefers-color-scheme' media query.

<comment><USER5> I'm quite surprised, as Firefox on iOS should be using WebKit…has Firefox linked against the iOS 13 SDK yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I get that you want to avoid pure white, but why avoid pure black though? It looks gorgeous on an OLED device, blending with the bezels.

</comment><comment><USER57> I would really love a dark mode for hacker news!

</comment><comment><USER58> Can HN implement this one day? A dark mode for this website would be great.

</comment><comment><USER59> Please add IE6 support

</comment><comment><USER60> Wikipedia needs this.

yes yes there's browser plugins, but I'd rather not have some rando plugin potentially reading every site I visit to load a dark mode plugin on the ones it recognizes.

<comment> Volker-E You can try [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Volker_E._(WMF)/dark- mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Volker_E._\(WMF\)/dark-mode) for now. It's a black/night mode at the moment. And (not yet) an official option with some technical acceptance issues like lazy-loading, therefore flicker on load. – I work for the Wikimedia Foundation. This wish has been stated as part of the Community Wishlist survey 2019. [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_20...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Reading/Night_mode)</comment></comment>


[Show HN] Launched our site after about a week of coding (all in all). - <AUTHOR> http://www.ilikeilive.com/

<comment><USER2> So I signed up, but I have no clue what to do...

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh right! The info page might help <http://www.ilikeilive.com/about/>

We put it together after we finished Uni and realised that moving to new areas made it difficult to meet/find people with similar interests.

The goal was to try and make it easier. It's not a dating site, it's not a swap site - it just shows where (roughly) people are and what they like.

Hopefully it would encourage a bit of pedagogy if people were open enough ala "Ooh horse riding, what's that like - can you tell me more".

<comment><USER2> You need to give people something very specific to do or look at, otherwise it's not even interesting or useful once, forget coming back to use it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - well ultimately it would be better defined but in the first instance we wanted to release something.

We can iteratively add features when we have any requests. As it stands it's quite nice to be able to message people and find others around you who like similar things.

<comment><USER2> In that case, at least make it a chat application. If I can talk to someone near me in real-time, that's much more fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> The message notifying stuff is all AJAX driven so it should be near real-time. It sends an email notification if you don't reply/login within 15 minutes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simpler and faster GC for Go - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v4Oqa0WwHunqlb8C3ObL_uNQw3DfSY-ztoA-4wWbKcg/pub <comment><USER2> Slightly off topic, but is there a good (i.e., fast and easy to use) modern retargetable GC for language prototyping/implementation? I've been looking for something like this for a while, but it seems everyone rolls their own.

<comment><USER3> Basic mark & sweep is simple to understand and implement. See e.g. [https://code.google.com/p/tinypy/source/browse/trunk/tinypy/...](https://code.google.com/p/tinypy/source/browse/trunk/tinypy/gc.c) \- 136 lines of C code in tinypy. You'll find more examples if you look at other small implementations.

But you also want fast, at which point you have to accept that fast gc == complicated and tightly coupled to the implementation details (object layout, type/debug info).

There is no pluggable GC. Conservative GCs (like Boehm GC) come the closest, but they have significant drawbacks (they blindly scan all of memory and can't tell a difference between a pointer and a random number that looks like a pointer, which means scanning&marking phase take longer and they keep objects that could have been freed, which is especially a problem on 32bits, where it's more likely that a random number points inside GC-managed heap).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _GC scanning and marking phase is 10-20% faster for programs with large > number of small objects._

Which is most programs. Hurray, changes in good direction.

<comment><USER5> In Go you avoid allocations for small values and use the stack.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, we do that to avoid GC slowdown issues. If the GC improves to the point where that's no longer an issue, we don't have to do that anymore :)

<comment><USER7> A 30% improvement is nice but nowhere near enough to change programming best practices in go.

A significant algorithmic change in the GC, like a generational compacting GC or something along those lines, would have to be made to alter go programming strategies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> God of Speed _Dmitry Vyukov_.

<comment><USER9> Dmitry is in my personal programmer hall of fame.

<comment><USER10> Ditto, the guy is a real software _engineer_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> debugging performance issues: [https://software.intel.com/en- us/blogs/2014/05/10/debugging-...](https://software.intel.com/en- us/blogs/2014/05/10/debugging-performance-issues-in-go-programs)

<comment><USER12> Profiling Go Programs: [http://blog.golang.org/profiling-go- programs](http://blog.golang.org/profiling-go-programs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pro-tip for google docs: you can use /preview instead of /pub to get a much more readable version of the document (pagination, &c.).

</comment><comment><USER14> No mention of a generational collector. The word concurrent is in there though.

<comment><USER15> In 1.3 the GC is concurrent mark and sweep

<comment><USER16> I thought generational and mark/sweep were orthogonal. That is, can't generational still be mark and sweep? You just don't mark and sweep the entire reference set?

<comment><USER17> Generational collectors can pick any strategy for each of their generations. What to pick depends on language, and what characteristics you want to get easily.

<comment><USER18> Recounting for tenured generations would be awesome!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yitang Zhang's Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Conjecture [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/video-yitang-zhang-discovery

<comment><USER2> That video was rather bad. If you want a better description of the Twin Prime Conjecture I think these guys do a much better job: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMXdShDdtY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMXdShDdtY)

<comment><USER3> Or, if you'd rather read a 1 sentence description instead:

        [The twin prime conjecture] states: There are
        infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is
        also prime.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, no... he didn't solve it. He just got us closer.

<comment><USER5> He was the first to prove that a finite bound exists. This is a huge, huge deal, since taking the answer from immensely large but finite to 2 is much easier than establishing a finite bound in the first place (as evidenced by the rapid decline in the bound from 70 million to somewhere around 250 in the last year). So, I wouldn't call it "just" getting us closer. It'll probably be proved some time in the next decade or so, and the conjecture was first made in the mid 1800s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Renyi entropy, and why this discovery is huge, are the whole cipher / counter cipher structure of modern "Crypto." If we (for a moment) hypothesis that math, itself, is an artiface of culture...then, we see that Lofti Zadeh (thank him for the 'net) and Bart Kosko's math model of the hypercube are still the best proofs.

Eg, to a large degree, Yitang Zhang validated both gentleman's work immensely, as Bart, in particular, first proved that the whole 100% of "Probability," is in fact a subset of continuum theory, aka, Fuzzy Logic. It's the "Probability and the hypercube," model, put forth in Kosk's 90's book. Fascinating reading.

Of course, it could be that, the model is too simple, to elegant to "fly," as we Americans like complex stuff that is far, far out of reach of lay people. It's an academic bias that I, with no degree holding family, simply do not share or partake in. Truly breakthrough discovery can, and does, happen in a lot of places.

One simply needs to know where to look.</comment>


Donald Rumsfeld declares war on IRS - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.marketwatch.com/taxwatch/2014/04/15/donald-rumsfeld-declares-war-on-irs/

<comment><USER2> It's sad that the US had such a simple minded person for a Secretary of Defense. The tax code is complex for a reason: it has to deal with reality, which is itself complex.</comment>


Typical compensation for seed-stage employee? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm having a lot of trouble finding info on what's reasonable for a very early, seed-stage employee in terms of compensation.
The company is currently just starting to raise seed money (currently at <$100k), but has good prospects IMO. There is also no product or anything, just an idea and a rough prototype.
I am moderately accomplished in my field (non-technical with a master's degree), but have no startup experience. They're offering 10% (two co-founders each get 35%), and everyone would take $2k/mo in living expenses (founders included, <1/3 my current salary).
The founders haven't founded companies before but know their industry well, they're basically the ones who know what we're doing in terms of programming, marketing, fundraising - I'd be the "everything else" of the outfit and also help with the marketing/fundraising.
Because I'm being brought in so early, I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out what's normal. Am I being brought in in MUCH earlier than a normal employee, or only a little earlier?
I'd probably still even do it for the experience (good friends, good city), but I want to come in with eyes open.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> This is much earlier than a normal employee. I'd say this is about right, although you should be considered a founding team member and not an employee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! So apart from the issue of founder v. employee, you think this is a reasonable situation? I think the founders are happy to bring me in because I'm generally competent/capable (and we've been friends for 10-15 years, they know I'm reliable), but again, they are the ones with all the industry knowledge.

I've had some people pressing me to push for founder status, but I think that's a bit much.

<comment><USER3> The offer is clearly more like a founder in that you are agreeing to a significantly below market salary in exchange for a pretty sizable chunk of equity. So whether the "title" of co-founder is given or not, they are treating it more like a minor partner/founder.

Given that this offer is equity heavy - you should understand things like vesting schedule, and dilution when additional investment comes in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads-up! My background is legal, so I am actually excited to learn about that stuff. =)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


All of New Relic's open source projects - <AUTHOR> https://blog.newrelic.com/product-news/announcing-new-relic-open-source/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they launched a new website that documents all of their open source projects and contributions.</comment>


Ask HN: How does Apple Maps know where I'm going? - <AUTHOR> This morning I got in my car to go to the gym, and on my phone's lock screen I could see a push notification from Apple Maps that read "15 mins to get to [gym_location]".
I'm very picky when it comes to which apps have access to my location, and Apple Maps' location access is set to "While Using" - but I _rarely_ use Apple Maps (maybe once every 6 months, by mistake). Further, if I ever did use Apple Maps at one time, I always quit any app after I'm finished using it.
So how does Apple Maps know where I'm going? Mind you, while I do tend to go to the gym on Saturdays, this morning was the earliest I've _ever_ been to the gym (by a long shot). If I've never used or had the app open in the background while going to the gym, how does Apple Maps know that I could even be _possibly_ going to the gym? Especially given how early it was in the morning?
I'm quite creeped out. <comment><USER2> It's not a Maps feature but an iOS system feature called Frequent Locations.

If you don't like this behavior you should turn off Frequent Locations specifically under Settings> Privacy> Location Services> System Services> Frequent Locations

PS It may be now called Significant Locations in the latest iOS versions...

</comment><comment><USER3> The Significant Locations feature in System Services.</comment>


Show HN: GrepMed – Image based medical reference for clinicians - <AUTHOR> https://www.grepmed.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm Gerald, a physician and former software engineer. In an effort to fight the problem of text information overload in medicine, we built a free platform for clinicians to share clinical algorithms, checklists, decision aids, guidelines and much more in the form of high yield infographics. Traditional medical reference resources hit you with overwhelming walls of text and we're aiming to be sort of like an IG/pinterest/google image search but dedicated to the medical reference space.

We've curated the largest online libraries of searchable Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) and physical exam clips for teaching bedside diagnostic skills. We also have a growing collection of COVID-19 resources: [https://www.grepmed.com/?q=COVID19](https://www.grepmed.com/?q=COVID19)

We've got a bit of traction (yesterday we crossed 700k image impressions/day), but we'd love any feedback on our UI/features on how we can be more sticky returning users.

Thanks and be safe!</comment>


Prismatic Hopes to Create a New Category of Social News - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/prismatic-hopes-to-offer-a-new-category-of-social-news/ <comment><USER2> As a recent daily user, prismatic is awesome.

The way they leverage twitter is pretty interesting, mixing in "endorsements" to articles from both people close to you, famous people, and random people, in a way that keeps it interesting.

There's also fairly heavy machine learning going on behind the scenes, in a way that is non intrusive. Congratulations to those guys.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, Alex. What do you mean about the non intrusive point - something about the ongoing interactions within the product or things like bootstrapping interests from twitter?

<comment><USER2> By non-intrusive I meant that I have no idea what kind of ML is really going on behind the scenes. In this sense it's very different from interacting with, say, Netflix's recommender, or youtube's ad predictor (a friend "liked" a vodka ad once and is now assumed to be an alcoholic), where you really do need to build a mental model of what the ML is doing to effectively use the site. With prismatic I don't seem to need to care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only thing about it that I really dislike is that there's no option to delete or cancel your account (a trend with startups). I don't fall to the silly excuse that it's in beta or that they'll have such options "soon". This should be there since day 1. Shows respect for the user/tester and sends the message that your information/data is yours to keep/remove whenever you want.

Keep in mind that this is not a criticism towards Prismatic (which is really cool and well done), I just used them as an example to a common startup practice.

<comment><USER3> I agree, and we're on it. We're only just now allowing more people into the product and it's still a long way from being openly available publicly.

With young companies and products, it's tough to balance all the constraints with the goals. We've spent a lot of time to learn what our users really love about the product. We agree that we need to get a profile out very soon, but we're happy we've put the core of the product first from the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yay, go Clojure! Hopefully we can get video from Bradford Cross's keynote from Clojure/West up on the web soon.

</comment><comment><USER6> The first 10 people to email firstname.lastname@example.com with their twitter handle will get an immediate invite to our early access.

Edit: gone -- but if you sign up at getprismatic.com you should get an invite soon.

<comment><USER7> This is so great, thank you so much! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Prismatic is what I read in the morning when I'm waking up and drinking a cup of coffee. I think it has the potential to change the way we consume not just social news, but news in general.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love prismatic - its completely replaced Google reader for me. I find that it consistently shows articles that are really relevant to me, from sources I've never even considered. Often, I'll find highly relevant things on prismatic a few hours before a friend emails me the same article that they found through some other source.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suppose it's up to me to be the "Debbie Downer" on this one.

First off, I like the recommendations, and the learning algorithm seems decent. However the UI continues to give me nightmares. I setup a list similar to what I have in Zite or Flipboard. For some reason only Chrome will let me actually go to the list and scroll it. For everything else (IE, Firefox, Opera) I can see the list, I can click on the list, but I can't scroll the list.

While I like the recommendations, I would also like the ability to have more control over sources, and to control the refresh rate. Yes I "get" they think that isn't needed if they are doing this right. I just respectfully disagree.

Just my .02 worth. I wish the team well, and hope they have an Android App version of this eventually as I would love to have the pretty on my Sony Tablet S...

<comment><USER3> Hey Edwin,

We agree and we're actively working on all the issues you bring up. Stick with us, it's really a big endeavor and it will improve quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Signed up last time this popped up but didn't jump in (bad timing).. Just kicking the tiers, the suggestions are really hitting the right spot. Just a suggestion - I'd really like another button - read - with an action like the "dont like" button, so I cam just sit there clicking next next next without scrolling down (that said, the vim keys to jump between stories is awesome!!)

</comment><comment><USER11> I use Prismatic daily. It does an amazing job of crawling the web and curating news articles that are aligned with my interest. Many of these articles I would normally not see and have no idea that they even exist. Prismatic is my primary method of news consumption now. There is a feeling of serendipitous discovery every time I use it, which keeps the delight factor high!

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, these are some rave reviews! Email me and I might give you an immediate invite (have two)!

<comment><USER13> Two to give away as well. Prismatic is excellent.

<comment><USER13> It looks like I need your twitter names as well. My email is in my profile if you don't want to post them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to Aria and Bradford. Knowing Aria and his work, I have little doubt there is some fantastic engineering under the hood at Prismatic.

</comment><comment><USER15> Any way to sign up without using a Twitter account? Or is the service so tightly integrated with Twitter that it would be pointless to do so?

</comment><comment><USER16> I actively use it for last 3-4 months and it's definitely my nr1 tool to receive news!!

give me a heads up on twitter if you need an invite @zappika ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> Prismatic feels simply magical when you use it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using Prismatic for a month or two and really like it--it brings up interesting and relevant stories every time.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hey Bradford, congrats on launching!

</comment><comment><USER20> Before you sign up, Twitter asks you to give Prismatic permission to "Post tweets for me", why?

<comment><USER6> We only use that permission to allow you to share stories you find with Prismatic. We'll never tweet unless you ask us to.

<comment><USER21> I finally got FB since that's where the party is, but I'm not over 45. Why should I get twitter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Any invites or such for HNers?

<comment><USER2> Tweet at me (atpassos_ml) and I can spend one of my three invites on you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Prismatic is the next Google.</comment>


Ask HN: Need for freelancer website for developers in emerging markets? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if there is a need for a freelancer website targeted at developers in emerging markets? With sites already outthere like elance etc. would that be something to help people find work in those countries? For sure there are talented developers in lets say Africa or in the Middle East. But I just can get my head around it if would be a smart idea to build. What do you think? <comment><USER2> Focussing on a niche works sometimes. But in this case it might be a tough fight. In any marketplaces your fighting fires at two ends, the buyer and sellers.

Here your basic problem would be to get sufficient number of jobs for providers to signup. That'll be hard given elance and others already do that and they've already taken care of one-click payments across the globe). Infact most of the devs on elance are already from 3rd world countries, and the first world people find it hard to compete with lower pricing.

Infact going the other way might be lucrative(hypothesis!), i.e. cater to a projects in niche domains, or setting a lower limit on the project/hourly price. This way you're not competing on price, and focusing on quality. There's a dearth of those marketplaces right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aren't odesk and elance already mostly popular amongst emerging countries?

Maybe you should focus on the opposite niche: European freelancers, American freelancers, Australian freelancers...

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Always felt like it's the other way around. Most of those freelance websites are overflowed with people from emerging markets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you guys for answering and you are totally right! A site like Coding Made in the US or Coding Made in Australia or Coding Made in Germany etc... would sound just great. I also agree that this is an uphill battle.</comment></comment></comment>


Garry Tan moving on from Posterous and joining YC - <AUTHOR> http://garry.posterous.com/moving-on-and-thanks

<comment><USER2> Congrats, Garry! Could you please make the arrows here on HN bigger? I keep clicking the wrong one. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> And 2x bigger than that on the iPad please :)

<comment><USER4> I would pay money, right now, to be able to get a version of HN that would somehow solve the IOS interaction issues on the iPad/iPhone. It's always an incredibly painful dance to pinch open the screen so I can figure out how to click on the four elements - "Comments" vs "Article" and "Upvote" vs "Downvote" - I'm not sure how it can be fixed, but boy would life be better if it could.

I should track how much time I spend over a month, heck, sometimes over a day, I spend doing that pinch open, pinch open, click dance.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried <http://ihackernews.com>? I use it on my Droid and it works extremely well.

<comment><USER4> That's pretty darn close - amazing that I'd never heard of it before. I'll send some feedback - it Doesn't let me upvote on comments, and the UP and Down arrows are still pretty close to each other - but it's worlds better than trying to do it through news.ycombinator.com. Very nicely done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very deft career move, Garry. You'll have more access to more people, see more fresh ideas, and have a much larger megaphone.

Y-C's gonna be awesome for you, but I _really_ can't wait to see what comes next. =)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm super happy for Garry, but for selfish reasons, I'm bummed out.

I feel like a band i really like was in the studio working on a new album, and a songwriter just left.

I guess i was waiting for another shoe to drop in terms of the realization of the Posterous vision.

Anyway... congrats to Garry. I saw his TWIST interview a while ago, and thought he seemed really nice and had really interesting ideas.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great. I hope that 2-3 years from now we see large numbers of "designers in residence" at VCs and incubators.

See also Jason Putorti's gig (now over) at Bessemer:

<http://www.bvp.com/team/Jason-Putorti.aspx>

<comment><USER9> I agree. It's very interesting to see. Andressen Horowitz is following a similar model, too.

I'm starting a greentech incubator and intend to have engineers/scientists in residence. A certain kind of person just love the technical issues at hand during the inception of a project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean posterous isn't doing well?

<comment><USER11> While I think he is a great add to YC, maybe also Gary acknowledged Posterous lost the battle vs Tumblr?

Anecdote: for our Quantter blog, we chose Posterous first. But then Marco Arment (busy) advisor of us, just told us: sthg like "Posterous?? those guys keep on trashing us (ie Tumblr)". While 1st impression preferring Posterous product, the switch to Tumblr was easy because of Posterous aggressive attempt to "poach" another startup users. That was not good karma.

<comment><USER12> _While I think he is a great add to YC, maybe also Gary acknowledged Posterous lost the battle vs Tumblr?_

Huh, what? What evidence is there that Posterous has lost any battle against Tumblr? Just because you chose Tumblr after being advised by one of the founders of Tumblr doesn't mean Posterous has "lost a battle"...

<comment><USER11> Traffic, users, unique visitors?

<comment><USER12> Evidence? And alexa data is pretty useless, since a large amount of traffic to both tumblr and posterous is not on their home domain.

<comment><USER11> if for both Posterous & Tumblr a large portion of the traffic is hidden, all conditions being equal, on Quantcast & Compete Tumblr is way above Posterous.

<comment><USER12> They also have almost a year and a half of headstart...

<comment><USER13> Tumblr's become a youth phenomenon. In high schools and colleges it's everywhere.

Posterous is prolific, but it's not omnipresent. And I doubt it will ever become omnipresent, because it doesn't offer enough to differentiate itself from Tumblr and because it's nowhere near sexy enough to capture the vast audience that only cares about things being sexy.

<comment><USER12> I'm not arguing that Tumblr isn't successful or that Tumblr doesn't have more traffic (that would be a stupid argument!). What I am arguing against is this suggestion that somehow Posterous has "lost" and it's time for them to throw in the towel or something. Posterous is a fairly young service that's seen great growth and is, as far as I can tell, going places, and fast.

The suggestion that Garry Tan is leaving because Posterous isn't working out is unsubstantiated, and that's what I'm arguing about. This is like pointing at Facebook when they were much smaller than MySpace, showing that such-and- such person just left, and saying it's because Facebook has lost the battle. It hasn't. The battle is still raging, and who will win is definitely up for grabs.

<comment><USER13> That makes sense. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, congrats Garry and have fun!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm a Posterous user - I personally enjoy the features and layout. I don't necessarily use it for the community aspect, so I can't really compare it to Tumblr in that respect. I have no use for the email function, so I'm glad they incorporated many other aspects that would appeal to me personally.

I was also surprised at how quickly I got a response via a customer service request. Nice.

Congrats to Garry Tan - I always equated him to Posterous since I saw him on This Week in Startups. Hope to hear more about his newest endeavors.

</comment><comment><USER16> Congrats Garry! Looking forward to more awesomeness.

</comment><comment><USER17> Garry reached out to me for an interview with Posterous. Although, I didn't get the position in the end I was stoked about the fact he even contacted me in the first place. Thanks Gary! And good luck on your future endeavors with YC!

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats Gary! Woo!

</comment><comment><USER19> Good move, I think!

I'm glad you'll be able to provide high impact work to many startups.

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember Garry, like me, arrived early at the Y Combinator pre-party. He had long hair, kind of like every other Asian friend I had so I figured he must be really smart. Stanford smart.

I shook his hand and he introduced himself as getting an interview slot too. Naturally we conferred and compared notes. Mine was something weird, a scheduling software--we haven't decided yet. His was a photo blog. Well like a photo blog, but easier, the kicker is you only manage it through email.

Oh, I said. That sounds... interesting. Since I was young that was go-to answer for any pitch. The less he explained the more compelling it was. Blogging for your grandma, blogging that anyone can do, blogging that's accessible. I remember asking how long he's been working on it, he said for a few months. I smiled and said he's probably going to get funded.

I didn't, it was my fifth try and became my last.

Throughout the years Posterous' engineering skills, design skills, and marketing skills have made the platform really awesome. Reading his blog, learning his thought process, and seeing the passion he puts into his work, it's inspiring. Very inspiring.

Blogging for grandmas is such a good idea, it's carved a great niche amongst giants WordPress, Blogger, and Tubmlr, and it's growing as a company.

Our career paths took really drastic divergence but seeing what you've done in the past three years is one of the examples of the immense potential working in our little crazy world.

Congrats and good luck.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the note Jerry. I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a good move. I think Posterous has plateau</comment>


The Military's Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-top-secret-plans-if-coronavirus-cripples-government-1492878 <comment><USER2> What are these people even leaking these days?

I want to know what happens when the telcos and internet go down? Do we still get Netflix through Army satellites or not?

<comment><USER3> Nah, through the Postal Service.</comment></comment>


Why Full-Time 9 to 5 Jobs are Risky - <AUTHOR> https://adambader.com/posts/why-full-time-9-to-5-jobs-are-risky/ <comment><USER2> The obvious fallacy is that this is comparing a stable, successful, established business to a risky job. He's also assuming it's difficult to get a new job, but ignoring the difficulty of establishing a stable single-person business.

Successful, stable businesses with multiple diversified clients don't come easy. It's rare to have a single-person business with a product that scales to many customers. Once you scale it, you likely need to bring on employees, which means you now have significant financial obligations to make payroll every month. That's hardly low-risk.

If you're the type of person who can build a successful single-person business with multiple customers, it's not exactly difficult to find a high paying job doing the same work for someone else.

You don't start a business because it's easier or less risky than a day job.

<comment><USER3> >The obvious fallacy is that this is comparing a stable, successful business to a risky job.

Hmm... the point being made is that all jobs are inherently risky. There are factors beyond your control.

You can't work harder or smarter to keep a job when the world turns against you.

The economy, a new manager, changes in structures, business direction and so on can leave you high and dry. Your previously secure middle managers job can vanish over night.

It's happened to me and many people I know.

Further to this, there is no such thing as a career at a company. You don't have anything. A job title is temporary and once you are out, you are out and that's that.

You might never get a decent position in a company again. You just don't know... full-time work is risky!

<comment><USER2> > Hmm... the point being made is that all jobs are inherently risky. There are > factors beyond your control.

You don't control all of the factors in your own business, either. You listed the economy as a risk for full-time employment, but it's an even bigger risk for small businesses. Big companies tend to have large war chests to ride out recessions, or even take advantage of recessions.

With a small business, the company's bank account isn't that far removed from your personal bank account.

Being in control of everything also means that everything is your problem. That's a two-edged sword.

> You might never get a decent position in a company again.

That would be extremely uncommon. Moreover, if you're not qualified to get a job in the industry, I don't see how you're going to be successful running your own business in the industry.

Running your own business is more difficult and more work than getting a job in an industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Since most full-time jobs involve a single employer — it's a one single point of failure — meaning, you just need your employer to fire you to lose your income.

With a business, you usually have more than one customer and in the majority of cases: tens, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of customers who are your revenue source"

This claim is so overly superficial that it's not helpful. The percentage of businesses that fail is way higher than the percentage of people that get laid off in any given year, typically. And it's not like businesses haven't struggled to survive during COVID-- just as much as any employee has lost their job. Losing 20% of your customers can be the difference between the company surviving or not, it's not like that just means you lose 20% of your profit.

<comment><USER5> It is also misleading because a lot of businesses, especially small ones, do have a single point of failure: Get banned by your payment provider or payments frozen for some reason and you are done. Get dragged into a lawsuit by a customer, done. Have your restaurant fail a health inspection, done (well, far too rarely, but happens).

And COVID-19 also shows that larger businesses can be more resilient to unforeseen catastrophes, although I would hope something COVID-19-like to be rare enough not to matter too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe this is why people park themselves in Silicon Valley in spite of soaring rents and other issues?

When your employer lays you off there, you simply go get another one.

When this happens in, say, Pittsburgh, PA, your options aren't quite so numerous.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with this mostly but to play devil's advocate: If you are good enough to build a product that people are willing to pay for, would it be really that hard to get a new job if you lose your current job?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many people view businesses as risky when in fact it is not entirely true. I wrote this quick piece to explain my thoughts on why 9-5 jobs aren't diversified and are in fact riskier

<comment><USER4> Do you think you might be understating the probability of failing in business, and overstating the odds of getting laid off? It's not like many businesses haven't closed their doors during the COVID pandemic.

I also doubt the percentage of startups that fail in a given year would compare well against the number of people that get laid off in a given year.

And having 100 customers doesn't help if losing 10 means the business is no longer profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've taken a couple not-entirely-unsuccessful cracks at running a small business and worked for others in the same vein and can tell you that, at least for a software business, the dirty secret is that a lot of businesses out there are totally dependent on 1-3 large clients.

Established businesses, on the other, hand often do have a diverse customer base and other means to overcome economic headwinds, and they can be seen as a mechanism that bundles those things for you and gives you a portion of that security.

<comment><USER9> There are even publicly traded companies that, for instance, build their business entirely on say, customized solutions for Microsoft software. They might have diverse customers, but they are very dependent on the ecosystem that is controlled by another company.

<comment><USER8> Or the App Store of course!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't have this problem where i get laid off, run out of savings, and cannot find a new job ever again. Some businesses close down for good. You can accumulate enough liabilities to prevent yourself from doing business again. You can still get a job afterwards though..

</comment><comment><USER11> "With a full-time job, you might be fired due to external circumstances (such as COVID-19)"

Many businesses went under. External forces affect you perhaps more as a business owner but have some control over the response.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems to ignore the costs of acquisition

Getting one source to supply 100% of your income is easier than getting 100 sources to supply 1% each. Eventually the cost of management outweighs the benefits of distributed risk.

</comment><comment><USER13> Taleb wrote an analogy to this in "Antifragile" when he introduced a banker and a London cab driver to illustrate a similar conclusion. It was (for me) one of the key insights I took from that book.

<comment><USER14> Yes! This is where revelation came from for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The difference is that to succeed at getting a new job you need to be skilled at one thing. To succeed at starting a new business you need to be skilled at a dozen unrelated things.

</comment><comment><USER16> Obviously the people who work in your company should then quit and create their own stable businesses.

</comment><comment><USER17> One pays you $5, the other pays you $100k

<comment><USER14> Not always true. Depends on the product.

There is a lot of Indie Hackers who make more than a 100k a year on their products (check out indiehackers.com for case studies)</comment></comment>


Dbxfs – A Dropbox-backed file system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rianhunter/dbxfs <comment><USER2> See also: [https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer](https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer)

Run a normal filesystem on top of S3! (Non-shared.)

In theory it might have really good performance due to your kernel caching blocks and files, and 25Gbit throughput to S3. Dependent of course on your instance being in EC2 and in the right region and having a big enough instance to get 25Gbit network.

I tried AWS EFS and found the performance very sad. Like 100Mbit even with a 25Gbit instance and the highest-specced EFS filesystem.

<comment><USER3> EFS performance was tied to how much storage you were using (at the rate of 50KiB/s per GB stored… with the ability to burst to 100MiB/s based on a credit system. A file system storing 256GiB can sustain 12.5MiB/s and burst to 100MiB/s for up to 180 minutes per day.

If you like, you can now specifically provision throughput for EFS at the rate of about $6 per MiB/s (8Mbps) per month.

<comment><USER2> I provisioned throughput on the EFS filesystem to the largest allowed value and still got crappy performance. Maybe it was the access pattern of the data, but large bulk file transfer performance was no higher than 100Mbit on a 25Gbit instance...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After Dropbox stopped supporting filesystems besides non-encrypted Ext4 I've dropped it entirely.

I now use SpiderOak One, which doubles as E2E encrypted cloud backup in addition to folder sync.

<comment><USER5> I switched to Syncthing with the main desktop backed up to S3 with zbackup (encrypted). Syncthing works really well (and faster!) when keeping laptops and desktops in sync for my case.

<comment><USER6> The one killer feature I wish Syncthing had was untrusted peers like Resilio has. There has been an issue[0] open since 2014 but I guess there are still major challenges to this feature.

It would be great for me to be able to specify a certain node as encrypted and read-only like I can in Resilio. If a friend wanted to store his files on my machine and vice-versa, we could do so without being forced to give access to each others plaintext files. Likewise, if I wanted to spin up a VPS and host an untrusted node to help facilitate syncing but didn't want my unencrypted files to be sitting on the disk, I could do so easily.

[0] [https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109](https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109)

<comment><USER7> can you please explain what scenario this applies....whatis...node/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this work for mounting Dropbox for Business folders? If so, this solves a significant problem for Linux users of Dropbox (whose official Linux client does not support account switching).

<comment><USER9> If you are talking about having multiple Dropbox accounts on Linux here it goes. You may not see two systray icons but Dropbox daemons works in background.

[Dropbox Wiki]: [http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/run-multiple- inst...](http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/run-multiple-instances-of- dropbox-simultaneously-on-linux-or-mac-os-x)

[Arch Wiki]: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/dropbox#Multiple_Dropbo...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/dropbox#Multiple_Dropbox_instances)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll just note that you can mount Dropbox as a file system with rclone ( [https://rclone.org/](https://rclone.org/) ) using the rclone mount subcommand.

rclone mount also works with the 20 or so cloud providers supported by rclone (s3, gcs, swift, box, dropbox, b2, etc).

rclone runs on Linux, Windows, macOS and quite a few other architectures! It is written in Go.

<comment><USER11> Fwiw Dbxfs seems to be a lot faster than rclone

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In light of what Storj.io is about to bring to market, I'm curious to see if this could be modified to work with it. I'm a huge fan of Dropbox and have used it almost every day for the past 7 years, but if a decentralized option comes along with feature parity and comparable pricing, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER13> CloudMounter was pretty easy to setup and use. Provides encryption too...

[https://cloudmounter.net/](https://cloudmounter.net/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The author should think about applying to Dropbox ;)

<comment><USER15> Isn't the author a Dropbox employee? Not sure if he's still at Dropbox but I believe he's one of the first employees.

<comment><USER16> That was the joke, newhouseb used to be in charge of the sync team at Dropbox :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Waiting for someone to implement dropbox-based deployment of a PHP site.

<comment><USER18> you would need a webserver for that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> check this one out: www.lucidlink.com

more than s3 sync

</comment><comment><USER20> We've come full circle from the original dropbox post on here</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know a regular Twitter user? - <AUTHOR> Hello
Twitter seem really big here in France: every tv show pushes some hashtag, a lot of big companies provide support throught twitter, and you can't here some news without an hashtag. Policitians announce everything on twitter. (Negative) social trends and riots have their roots on twitter.
This is understandable: Twitter is showing really big numbers for audience. And lots of advertising and communication companies are showing the same. However, they all profit from these numbers. So far, so good: Twitter is the ultimate media!!!
But... I own 2 twitter accounts: I published 2 pictures on the first one, created 3 years ago, and created another one last year to talk to some customer service (no publication). I follow almost nobody. In fact, I just don't like the Twitter way of communication (short, definitive and mostly basic sentences without any interest). I sometimes have a look to some tweets through links found on HN. No friend of mine is on twitter. No colleague either (i'm working in IT). My teen daughter and her friends are not on twitter (but on insta, snap, and co).
So, I'm wondering: is there anybody really using twitter, except people selling ideas (politicians) or advertising?
I guess that - for Twitter - I'm considered as an "active user", because I have 2 ghost account and sometimes read a tweet (even if it's because I'm following an outside reference and not because I found the information on twitter). But, as a matter of fact: twitter could desappear today that it wouldn't change the littlest thing in my life.
So I'm wondering: despite the huge numbers, how many users are really "active and engaged" on Twitter (meaning tweeting and reading tweets from the platform at least once a week)? How many real person are really engaged (because I guess that a lot of people have 2 or more twitter account)? I couldn't find "hard" numbers, only "advertising" (so biased)... Any idea ? <comment><USER2> I worked at Twitter for 5 years before starting PhotoStructure.

I was originally on the ads team, then went to growth and timelines.

I didn't use Twitter before working at Twitter. I didn't get it until I watched how "good at Twitter" people used it.

I heard this a bunch, and it's still true: other social networks are about your friends. Twitter is about your interests. (You can certainly follow your friends, but you can also mute them if they're kind of terrible).

You have to invest some serious time in tending to who you follow before your timeline will become relevant. It's like gardening, seriously.

Think of it like an rss feed of your favorite podcasts and bloggers; but that people publish about 50 % (or lower) good stuff, and the rest of the content is, meh.

The "who to follow" can help, but also looking at other people's follow listing (not who follows them, but who they follow), especially if it's between 150 and 1000 accounts, ish. If they blindly follow back every account that follows them, that's noise.

There will be golden, delightful accounts you find.

The NBA mom that tweets during games.

The HK people on the street, documenting what's actually happening.

Others you'll probably want to unfollow, because their tweets aren't great.

Also, be aggressive with the terms you add to your timeline filter. I suggest adding political names, to start.

Also, holy crap there's a lot of shouting and offense and rancor. Mute that too.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> I attend a yearly national digitalisation conference in Denmark, which is aimed at public sector digitisation. Basically it's an event where all the CTOs, architects, project managers and politicians meet with the heads (and sales) of our most prominent IT-businesses to tackle our most pressing issues. The first few years the organisers attempted to use twitter as a way to handle questions to speakers questions. I've been to auditoriums with more than a thousand people, all top of our digitisation industry, and no one asked a single question on twitter. Eventually the event switched to a web-based questions "app", where you could simply load a web-page, type in your name and question, or upvote other question, and suddenly hundreds of people participated in the question asking. I think that says a lot about how little twitter matters in some areas.

I say this as someone who actually knows a couple of hefty twitter users. They are all journalists though, and on the flip side of things, they can't comprehend how I can do my job in digitisation without twitter.

Heh.

</comment><comment><USER4> > is there anybody really using twitter, except people selling ideas > (politicians) or advertising?

In the UK there is a community of healthcare providers (nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, psychologists) and patients who talk about aspects of healthcare from national policies, to law, to implementation of small change. Sometimes these are tied in to people and organisations that know about QI methodology.

I find it pretty useful in my work in suicide prevention and patient safety in English NHS settings. I get to ask questions to people across England about what they're doing, or what problems they're having.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am a sometimes twitter user but only two other people I know regularly post. I have very few actual followers myself. I follow a few people to see updates to their podcasts and blogs but have notifications turned off so I only see things when I remember to.

I see twitter handles and hashtags on websites and posters everywhere but do not know anyone that actually uses them.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am from France as well, I use Twitter every day

Twitter is the only way I have to get informed and mingle with people interested in solidity/Ethereum development (eg; Defi/makerDao/Kyber protocol...)

The only people I know that use Twitter every day are working within the blockchain dev community

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a look at Mastodon / Riot and it looked like there was quite an active community there too

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Strangely, I don't know! Everyone I know might be regular Twitter users but I don't think I have ever discussed it with anyone. I have never told anyone I know that I use Twitter, and vice versa. I hadn't thought about it before but it seems strange now.

</comment><comment><USER8> I know at least 5 actual twitter users in my close social circle/family. Some users don't want people to know about their twitter life and use @handles that don't match their name. Maybe there are more people using twitter around you than you think.

<comment><USER9> Makes sense! People generally carry different personas for different people and situations. The persona twitter might be fighting for justice, but you are no ready for your uncle to know about it and then berate you to your dad as a made up example. Or you don't want your non geek friends to read your Linux related joke posts. Etc. Twitter is public multicast as the only toy. Facebook has connections, more targeted messages etc. but I also feel there is a chilling effect there because you are not anonymous, so holiday pics and cat photos and other safe stuff it is on the most part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sports are huge on twitter. It is how I primarily use the platform. I have met up with fans of various teams I support when seeing them play. I'd be really sad to lose twitter and the interactions I get from there.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a consumer only user. Almost no interactions. But I check the news on twitter instead of news sites...</comment>


Taking job you do not love is like saving sex for old age - <AUTHOR> "There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn't that a little like saving up sex for your old age?"<p>It's really great quote and I am staring it for 30 mins and it really feels hurt. Hmm come out of your comfort zone and pursue your idea and make a startup is really scary when you yourself not sure about it. <comment><USER2> It must be wonderful to be so highly educated, so highly skilled, and so highly experienced that you can have any job you want.

<comment><USER3> While being highly educated can be a factor there are plenty of scenarios where it has nothing to do with it. A lot of places make jokes about the PhDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of things that people love doing don't pay enough for them to survive on. For example, if you'd really love to be a musician or an actor, you probably need a day job in an unrelated field to put food on the table until you become successful in your chosen field.

<comment><USER5> heh, _until_

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You take jobs you don't like because you have to do things like 'eat' and 'sleep under a roof'.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. Totally true. BUT is that the only thing we want in our life. (Sorry but feeling not good.)

<comment><USER6> You might want to read up on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

<comment><USER7> Alternatively, [https://levels.io/reset-your-life/](https://levels.io/reset- your-life/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job > that you love.

Sure, that works, for some people, with certain preferences.

Sometimes, though, you do what you want -- the things you love -- and take a job that you merely _tolerate_ so that you can afford to do the things you love. Its silly to think that the things everyone loves _must_ also be, exclusively, jobs.

</comment><comment><USER9> > come out of your comfort zone and pursue your idea and make a startup is > really scary when you yourself not sure about it.

I was reminded of the Steve Jobs quote... "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Do you know what that (idea or job) thing is for you?

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/10/17/five- danger...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/10/17/five-dangerous- lessons-to-learn-from-steve-jobs/)

</comment><comment><USER10> >There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want.

That is true but it has to be strategically orchestrated though otherwise the consequences can be disastrous.

</comment><comment><USER11> "From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce." \- Thomas Edison

</comment><comment><USER12> Imo it is about overcomitting in life style, it is about getting used to something you never have. Be hungry at young age, do once for all!

</comment><comment><USER13> Who said that and in what context?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not in some context but it is general quote. www.goodreads.com/quotes/380769-there-comes-a-time-when-you-ought-to-start- doing</comment></comment>


Spammers using CSS to bypass image blocks - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/cLw6E9y.png <comment><AUTHOR> That image is made up of a 50 row table, with each row containing a single 100px wide and 2px high cell.

Each cell has 50 "pixels" set using CSS gradients.

</comment><comment><USER2> It says "in:spam" at the top though.

I looked at my gmail spam and didn't find any of these.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes still got marked as SPAM.

But I was just surprised to see an image there. It's clever.</comment></comment>