A phone that charges in seconds? Scientists bring it closer to reality - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-11-seconds-scientists-closer-reality.html <comment><USER2> The size of the battery varies from phone to phone, but let's choose 3000mAh as a typical value so the battery is enough for a full day.

If you want to charge it in "seconds", let's use 60 seconds as an upper bound.

So if the charger has a 100% efficiency, then it has to provide 3000mAh/60sec = 3000mAh _3600 sec /h /60sec = 180000mA = 18A.

An USB can provide between .1A and .9A. For comparison, a typical plug in a home can provide 10A. So to charge the phone you will need some big connector, not a tiny microUSB like connector.

But it's worse. From the article:

> "If they were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could > charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it > again for over a week," said Nitin Choudhary, a postdoctoral associate who > conducted much of the research published recently in the academic journal > ACS Nano._

To recharge the phone once a week, I guess you will need a 20000mAH battery, and a few seconds is something like 5, so the connector must survive to 1000A, that is a ridiculous current.</comment>


Show HN: VisionX – Low-code development platform - <AUTHOR> https://visionx.sibvisions.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't get it. If you don't need devs to work on the apps you build then why charge buy the dev?</comment>


Drew Curtis: How I beat a patent troll - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll.html

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. "Don't negotiate with terrorists", or "Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute!"

<comment><AUTHOR> loved it as well!</comment></comment>


Dave McClure is ripping VCs again: They're f***ing arrogant and stupid a**holes - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2012/dave-mcclure-rips-vcs-fing-arrogant-stupid-aholes/ <comment><USER2> He's right, sadly, but I don't see it changing anytime soon.

Props to branding himself as the anti-VC, it endears him to entrepreneurs, and ensures a ton of quality dealflow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two questions or thoughts: i) It's sort of outrageous but not really. Dave is playing to his constituents. His target market are early startups full of developers. "Wearing a suit is like the "stupidest thing" if you are trying to create trust with geeky developers who are trying to start a company. "They are scared shitless of people in sales in suits," he said." What better way to endear yourself to the scared shitless developer than to launch a blistering attack on the dreaded foe.

II) Does this risk any fallout for companies Dave invests in? With later rounds, that might include these VC's, could Dave's ongoing participation impact who might want to invest? Probably not but seems worth considering?

</comment><comment><USER4> Taken on average, I agree. However, there are some really good VCs out there, and they are not all at the big name groups. VCs with a little humility coupled with the same in founders can make a great paring.

On the other hand, I've seen the "average" VC tank projects multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wait -- isn't Dave McClure a VC? (Why do I even know this guy's name?)

Oh, that's right. This is the guy who is very, very rich and who can't write words good.

</comment><comment><USER6> An optimist! I like it!

</comment><comment><USER7> Flagged.

This should not be on the front page. It provides no value unless you want to read a SV tabloid article.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's certainly inflammatory but given who it is and what it's about, I think it is probably relevant to this community. Although, the article itself doesn't quote any solutions or anything like that from McClure so it's not a very education article. I could see it both ways in terms whether it should be flagged or not.</comment></comment>


3 things I learned implementing a common productivity and task management system - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@unnikoroth/3-things-i-learned-as-a-ceo-while-implementing-a-common-productivity-task-management-system-to-e03ac96cf161#.37ce0mfn2 <comment><USER2> Link to app homepage: [http://fluxday.io/](http://fluxday.io/)</comment>


October Amsterdam Clojure, A night out with Uncle Bob - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetup.com/The-Amsterdam-Clojure-Meetup-Group/events/33351892/

<comment> bulte-rs Certainly going to be there! Anyone else from HN planning on going?

<comment><USER2> If it were in Groningen, I'd go ;-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Quickly browse the history of any GitHub file - <AUTHOR> https://githistory.xyz/ <comment> mike-cardwell I wonder how many devs out there are going to basically hand over access to their companies property (private code repos) to this random guy by "signing in with github", without even thinking about what they're doing.

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit sad to see this cynicism at the top of a Show HN thread. This project is a fun way to browse code history and it's done with an interesting visual style. It's also open source.

I would think someone trying to view a private file is aware that they are signing in via Github to share it. Github Oauth also explicitly states that code access is shared. So, I don't think it detracts from pomber's project.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but this is the default attitudes of most HN comments - to criticize or nitpick something small.

<comment><USER4> Giving someone else access to your organisation's private repo is not a small thing in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Seems the project is MIT licensed and written in JavaScript so presumably somebody could package it up in a browser extension so there are no privacy issues when viewing private repos: [https://github.com/pomber/git- history](https://github.com/pomber/git-history) \- He does have browser extensions but they just look like they redirect you to the service.

</comment><comment><USER5> The slick movement makes it hard to see what the changes were -- a classic diff would be orders of magnitude more effective here.

<comment><USER6> Came here to say the same thing. Having to click back and forth in history to see the changes is time consuming. Function over flash please

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very cool.

One suggestion: The long horizontal sliding animation seriously detracts from the user experience. It makes it difficult to track what changed because areas of the code go briefly blank while the next bit of code is sliding in.

Would be a lot less difficult to track changes if new lines of code simply faded in in-place and pushed code around them up and down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, check this issue: [https://github.com/pomber/git- history/issues/22](https://github.com/pomber/git-history/issues/22), it has links to other versions with different animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Finally! I've been waiting for a tool like this.

If you want a similar tool built into Atom, check out this great plugin: [https://atom.io/packages/git-time-machine](https://atom.io/packages/git-time- machine)

A few years ago I also worked on a similar tool, except it was based on your undo history and was built into an IDE for a visual language: [http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Henley2016VLHCC_Yestercode...](http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Henley2016VLHCC_Yestercode.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is super-slick. Suggestion, scroll to the (top) changed line before the change animation to reveal changes in large files that happened out of viewport. Nice work

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I was thinking in an effect like this: [https://codesurfer.js.org/sample/#5](https://codesurfer.js.org/sample/#5). What do you think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was always flabbergasted github doesn't provide this.

Also basic info that every other file browser in the universe shows, like file size.

<comment><USER11> Been wanting file size info in the file explorer in github for years now, it would make it so much easier to find out where to look first when exploring repos for the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If only GitHub could do this themselves instead of falling over if you try to run blame on any reasonably large repository…wait, hold on, it looks like this website does as well. Aww…

<comment><USER13> Exactly. I have wanted this on github for _so_ long — even the animation is beyond what I'd like, I'd settle just for a 'prev/next' button that takes you from change to change. I'm pretty close to just coding it myself for local use.

<comment><USER14> Vim fugitive makes this pretty straightforward `:0Glog`. I imagine many other git wrappers provide similar functionality

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> YMMV - I'd like to see highlighting of what's changed, as it's difficult to track multiple changes with the animations. The old stand-by red and green for diffs could work, with the old content eventually fading out or some such - probably a more elegant want to achieve that but hopefully you get the gist.

<comment><USER16> Exactly, I don't see this as very useful right now, looks more like fancy animations.

To actually see what happened I found myself triggering the same animations again and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For a similar visualization, but at the repository level, check out Gource [0]

[0] [https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource](https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource)

<comment><USER18> This is a helluva fun thing to run on a nearly 30-year-old repo (in our case, started with RCS, eventually ending up in git).

Takes you right down memory lane and really gives you a feel for how your codebase has evolved, and the place of each contributor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Been looking for something like this for ages. Is there a version that works with local repos?

EDIT: at least for emacs, there's [https://gitlab.com/pidu/git- timemachine](https://gitlab.com/pidu/git-timemachine)

EDIT2: and a different one for Atom with a nice plot: [https://github.com/littlebee/git-time- machine](https://github.com/littlebee/git-time-machine)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but I want to add a CLI for local repos soon

<comment><USER20> Within 30 minutes two people want to give you money to run it on private servers. The entrepreneurial answer to that is: Write to sales at githistory.xyz, we'll figure something out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not to be that guy but: git log -p $file. Works great IMO.

<comment><USER22> That will show you the diffs, but if you want to see the files side by side, you could do something like:

      diff -y <(first_sha1:path/to/file) <(second_sha1:path/to/file)

<comment><USER22> The command should actually read:

      diff -y <(git show first_sha1:path/to/file) <(git show second_sha1:path/to/file)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Feature request: Any chance for `--follow` to track the history of files that have moved?

</comment><comment><USER24> This still needs performance improvements - on bigger files with longer history the transitions between commits get choppy, it shows only the newest 10 or so commits and doesn't load older ones, e.g. [0] has around 2500 lines and a history of around 200 commits. Usability is horrible for such files.

[0] [https://githistory.xyz/godotengine/godot/blob/master/servers...](https://githistory.xyz/godotengine/godot/blob/master/servers/visual_server.cpp)

</comment><comment><USER25> Could you please make a bookmarklet as an alternative to Chrome extension?

<comment><USER26> I just built a simple bookmarklet for myself. I hope you like it!

javascript:(function(l){l.host.match('github.com') && (l.href = l.origin.replace('.com', '') + '.githistory.xyz' \+ l.pathname)})(window.location);

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It would be even more awesome than it is, if:

* A "blame" column could be turned on at the left, showing output from "git blame". * When hovering over a line in the blame column, the main window shows the historical version of the file when the commit was born. Commit message appears on the left (even more left). * When it is clicked, the timeline jumps there.

I understand it would be a lot of work, but it would be a super valuable tool for browsing file history in git.

</comment><comment><USER28> What are people's opinions of this type of diff? Are there certain cases where it's more useful to see it like this than the usual green/red above and below style?

Would be great if there were studies on this. What is the easiest to interpret: in-line, above/below, side-by-side, other options I don't know exist

<comment><USER29> It's not really a diff, it's a snapshot.

If we had the past on the left, and the future on the right, then I'd call it a diff.

<comment><USER28> You're right, it's snapshots with the diff animated between them.

A lot of people complaining here about it being difficult to see the diff haven't understood what this is for then. But then, what is it for? Just to look pretty?

Is it to easily find the state of a file at a particular date or commit? But then it'd be hard to do if there were a lot of commits. Would be nice to know what use case the creator had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think keeping some color coding for the lines that got added / removed (better for the characters added / removed) would be nice (e.g. just an almost transparent background color on the lines / characters like Github does).

Otherwise great idea and I really like the URL-based projects.

</comment><comment><USER31> Granted github access, but always get "GitHub API rate limit exceeded for your IP (60 requests per hour)". This is a free github account, is it normal? Using Chrome Version 72.0.3626.96 (Official Build) (64-bit)

</comment><comment><USER32> Thanks! That is very cool. Definitely will add that to my workflow.

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks amazing thanks! Is there any chance of a vs code port happening? Turns out I thought my current solution was nice but is actually a janky experience compared to this

</comment><comment><USER34> This is really cool.

The animations are great – but I think you should speed em up a bit. The long ease-out period makes it tough to concentrate on small changes. Will most definitely use this!

</comment><comment><USER35> coming to github from perforce due to a job change, i have never gotten back to the point i was at with perforce in terms of expertise, flexibility, and custom scripting. some of it is because of size of team changes, but most of it is github missing features and git being, in my opinion, overly complicated. for example, perforce has a very nice file tracking ui that helps navigate changes, braches, renames, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is amazing! Simple and elegant. This puts any other history viewer to shame. Now I wish this was available for GitHub enterprise for work code.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is nice. Can it be done with a browser extension only, without a web service? (to make it work for private repos)

<comment> mike-cardwell If you try to view a file in a private repo, it asks you to "sign in with github", which presumably gives them access to read your code so that they can show you this UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like this a lot, but every line of text is cut in half in the display for me (Chrome 71).

</comment><comment> hugh-avherald This is really good. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is great. Would be even cool if changes are shown at code level and not line.

</comment><comment><USER40> Pretty neat. Have seen this submitted before I think. But good visualization.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't know if I'll use this much, but that is super cool. Props!

<comment><USER42> My thoughts exactly. It's nice to see and probably very satisfying for the creator. I can also imagine using this in some circumstances especially during presentations or teaching.

For my daily work, one obvious problem is that I can't see exactly what changed between revision n and n+1. That's what really makes diffs + commit messages useful. With the slick animation, I know where it changed but the information on what exactly was modified is lost and with it, most of the reasons why I use git diff at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> maybe have a sidebar, with vertical timeline - dates and profile?

</comment><comment><USER44> Wish there was something like this for magit!

</comment><comment><USER45> Very neat implementation.

</comment><comment><USER46> git-timemachine does it for emacs for those who don't know.

<comment><USER47> I like vc-annotate. (Bound to `C-x v g` out of the box for me.)

Besides showing blame-type information for each like, you can also press 'p' and 'n' to go to previous or next commits; you can press 'l' to view the commit message for the last commit on the line you're at; you can press 'd' to show the diff for the line you're at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> this is very cool, nicely done

</comment><comment><USER49> Posted several times during the last 72 hours on HN without getting any traction:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106499)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106328)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19102828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19102828)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100110)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092802)

</comment><comment><USER50> Nifty, but shouldn't this be an open source app? Who would give you access to their repos?

<comment><USER51> Here's the code:

[https://github.com/pomber/git-history](https://github.com/pomber/git-history)</comment></comment>


Meteor (YC S11) gets $9M in funding - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/scoop-meteor-gets-9m-in-funding/ <comment><USER2> Really awesome. What would be really cool to see is a demo and example code of an app that has authentication, and user-level permissions on the data. These "everyone in the world can update a global list" demos are getting pretty tiring.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't believe this. Really. Meteor is a bunch of open source projects glued together with some of their own libraries. Their package system which is out of npm is completely arbitrary.

Why not funding other good projects? There's plenty of better framework/libraries that are massively used by the community.

I'm, myself, leading a little node.js framework open source project with similar concepts and I'd never accept to be funded. This isn't a project, there's no revenue opportunities there, it's a tool!

Tools help to develop projects which then make a revenue...

Some investors have very poor judgement.

<comment><USER4> I really don't understand the negativity. They have an awesome team that's built an awesome product. No, it's not finished (hence the money to hire more engineers) and yes, there are competitors (competition proves market need).

I don't know much about how VCs structure their portfolios, but recognizing a need in the market and betting on a badass team seems like a pretty solid strategy to me.

As for me, I'm happy for them. I hope they succeed. I hope them and their investors make a ton of money and it encourages other teams to build more awesome products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As brilliant a business model as Heroku has, trying to do the same with one specific and not-yet popular development language/library/framework seems really unlikely to work out in a way that will justify the 9 million investment. If VCs have this much capital to throw at projects like this, perhaps this is a sign that there would be a market for a startup that makes it easy for VCs to find startups with good potential and for startups to find funding more easily. Incubators are the only attempt I know of to solve this problem, but I'm sure there are larger scale solutions waiting to be thought of.

<comment><USER6> I disagree with your comment in 3 ways:

1) Great developer tools are difficult to build and valuable. If they are popular enough and the business execution is good enough, they can give birth to successful and potentially large businesses. A few examples: Springsource, JBoss, MySQL, Wily, MongoDB, Atlassian, New Relic, Github. Note the diversity of business models, eras and hype factor. VCs know this and are making informed - if risky - bets.

2) I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that Heroku's business model is brilliant. To my knowledge they haven't published any revenue numbers, and they no longer operate as a standalone business.

3) Speaking from experience, I doubt they will end up making money by providing hosting. They are a developer tools company and if they are smart they will remain focused on the developer experience, and let partners worry about uptime, support, SLAs and other unsexy things like that. That doesn't make them any less interesting as a business.

(disclaimer: I work at a platform-as-a-service company)

<comment><USER5> 1) I don't disagree that funding the development of powerful open source tools can have a very positive effect on the success of future businesses, but how does the investor in this tool's startup profit from said businesses? I assume the main way they intend to make money is through enough people and businesses paying Meteor to host their site, and I can't imagine that will be as successful as a host that supports a range of popular languages/libraries/frameworks instead of one that may or may not attain popularity.

2) I don't know anything about Heroku's revenue numbers, but the idea of their business model is a brilliant idea. Offer web startups free hosting until they get traffic (i.e. until they can afford to pay you), and then sell them good enough performance for that amount of traffic. It's essentially a financial abstraction on top of Amazon. Almost any idea that involves giving someone a free service that allows that someone to make enough money to then pay you (when they couldn't have before) is probably a really good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was it ever "officially" announced that Meteor was part of YC? I've followed the original launch post but can't remember that mentioned. (I looked back and didn't find anything either)

I find it interesting to see this project as well as Diaspora (S12) and LightTable (S12) be part of Y Combinator, since they're all companies built around open-source projects (IIRC). (with two of them who "started out" on Kickstarter)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am pretty curious on how they are going to compete against other open source 'realtime web' solutions such as derby.js?

Especially since derby.js is distributed with npm and can be used in conjunction with the thousands of existing node.js libraries. Any node developer can integrate derby.js into his existing web app with a little effort and make it 'realtime'. With meteor, not so easily.

<comment><USER9> Not everyone who can run a node.js server wants to ( _raises hand_ ).

Think about Mailgun: obviously I'm capable of running a mail server and parsing incoming mail. But they can do it better, at a price that's cheaper than my time, and give me high availability without my paying a sysadmin.

Its an easy sell.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's a stellar analogy. Email is a very ancillary part of a web service's business while the data management, analytics, business logic, etc are the very core.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always been interested in building developer tools, I did it at the beginning of my career, 4 years ago, but I've always thought it was a "bad market", a "small one", "there's no money in it".

I've been, secretly, working on a tool while working at a startup and bootstrapping my own startup (my hours are 8am to 4-5am), for the past couple of months, but it has always been kind of a disappointment when I try to think on how to create a business out of it. With these investments - Meteor, 10gen, and the Github rumor - I, definitely feel more encouraged :-)

The plan is always bootstrap - of course - since I don't have a track record, I'm not a ex-facebook employee, nor went to a top CS school.

Since, I'm not from the valley, or any tech hub by that chance, I haven't been able to understand the "industry". I think I get it now, it doesn't matter what you make (money) and the fools that ask "What's the monetization strategy?", you just need to create something very cool that you and other people find useful. I might be wrong but that's my observation.

<comment><USER12> "you just need to create something very cool that you and other people find useful."

No. You need to convince investors that whatever you have is "cool" and "useful", even if it burns money.

Derby is cool. Express is cool. Knockout is cool. There are so many cool, free, open-source libraries. It has become crystal clear that getting investment is about being on the inside, having a hip website, and valley celebrities saying good things about you.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention the allstars behind Meteor itself. <http://meteor.com/about/people>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Parse, Meteor, and Firebase are all YC companies and all of them are working on this.

<comment><USER10> And <http://derbyjs.com/>

<comment><USER15> I realize that Derby also helps build real-time applications, but I haven't heard anything about Derby being in YC. Has there been a public announcement that they are?

If we're just listing frameworks that help build real-time systems, Pusher would be another example.

<comment><USER10> My bad...missed that it was YC companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why do they need 9 million, really? That's about 10 programmers for 5 years, with a competitive salary and benefits, plus office costs.

<comment><USER17> To employ 10 programmers for 5 years with a competitive salary and benefits in an office of some sort?

<comment><USER3> Yes, to develop a tool which will get no revenue after? This is completely pointless.

<comment><USER18> Red hat/ MySQL etc model I guess.

<comment><USER19> It's more likely to be the offer-hosted-version model rather than the Redhat/MySQL model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> #1 issue is security #2 issue is this:

[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Meteor+is+an+ultra- simple+environment+for+building+modern+websites%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

Doesn't have this page on it:

<http://docs.meteor.com/>

</comment><comment><USER21> Out of all these "real-time" JS frameworks, to me, Meteor seems the most promising. Looking forward to how it evolves. Congrats and good luck to the team.

</comment><comment><USER22> Speaking about meteor, can someone tell me if there is any way to protect the database from the user fiddling with a javascript console? In all screencasts they show how powerful it is by changing the DB with some mongodb-like commands on Chrome Developer JS Console, well, I don't want my users doing that. Anyone knows better?

<comment><USER23> I asked the same question on #meteor. Apparently security is coming in the next 2 months.

But currently... it's pretty insecure.

<comment><USER24> Maybe I'm being overly pessemistic, but projects that don't start with security as one of their primary design goals tend to not have the best security track records. Security isn't really something you can trivially bolt on at a later date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Between Meteor and 10gen (which makes MongoDB, which Meteor uses heavily), $50M was just invested. If both companies use their money wisely this could pack a powerful punch!

</comment><comment><USER26> Didn't even know that Meteor was a YC company. Does anyone know what their original product was?

</comment><comment><USER27> Hmmm, security model is vaporware and VCs are deciding that we (developers) will really love this library before anyone is even using it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I understand, that YC have no choice, but to invest in competing startups, simply because the large number of startups being accepted in Y-Combinator. They backing many Realtime Messaging companies, such as Firebase, Meteor, Flotype/Now.js, Simperium, Parse, etc.

EDIT: apparently Flotype pivoted from Now.js to something very different from what Meteor and the rest of the gang do.

<comment><USER29> I work at Flotype, and I'd like to clarify that. Flotype and Meteor are completely different.

We saw the need for something like Meteor two years ago and built NowJS, but we decided to move away from RPC over websockets (NowJS) last year and work on a new technology called Bridge. Data model syncing is done nicely in Meteor, but we decided to pursue a different problem with Bridge (more details in the coming months).

While the vision behind NowJS and the current vision behind Meteor might share similarities, Flotype the company and Meteor the company are working on very separate things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> whats the monetization strategy?

<comment><USER31> Clearly it starts by getting someone to write you a $9M check to develop your Javascript library (excuse me, "platform").

This gold rush is so depressingly familiar. But that's not to speak ill of Meteor-the-product, which looks pretty nifty (albeit not $9M of nifty).

<comment><USER12> I hate to be so negative but I have to agree. I know many people (including myself) who've already written libraries similar to Meteor (derby comes to mind).

This is ridiculous. Meteor hasn't even gotten any real adoption and it has _no_ business model. Why create a business when you can just get investment on promises alone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congrats Meteor. That's awesome!

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice, that pure tech ventures get high fundings of well known VCs but thinking a little bit more about Meteor I come to following conclusion:

First, we do not really know the first payment/milestone, maybe it's just $1M.

Meteor itself is an amazing technology, very well marketed by obviously smart guys—their Marketing pitch few weeks ago was just awesome and far beyond any other new JS framework. And I understand that Meteor gets very positive feedback here on HN due to their great communication skills and YC affiliation

But it has severe drawbacks:

=> While employing Node as core they surprisingly ignore the well established npm package manager which is one of the best package managers around. This is bad and there's no excuse because it leads to fragmentation of the still young JS server-side landscape dominated by a lean and modular-driven Node which is just the smartest way to establish a real ecosystem—the one-size-fits-all approach is aged and that's Meteor. I assume they did their own package manager due to their upcoming business model (which will be introduced very far in the future if their ecosystem is once established), maybe they'll take license fees or demand support fees or whatever of everyone who wants to actively participate as contributor in the ecosystem. They couldn't do this with the npm. And by choosing this path the can lock out competing frameworks: if Meteor would just be a package in the npm ecosystem the opportunity costs of changing to other realtime frameworks in the npm world wouldn't be that high because changing the framework wouldn't mean changing the entire ecosystem.

=> As long client-side JS is delivered unprotected to the browser you will never have the one-code-base-or-name-space-covering-front-and-backend approach. This approach doesn't provide any security—client code could do any shit to the server side—and others who tried made great products too but couldn't get any traction (nowjs i.e.). You will need always to separate both. They promised to come up with solutions like authentification or signed data, but then we have again more communication overhead than we would have if just separated those layers. This drawback isn't as huge as the first one, it's a technical challenge and thus, I appreciate any efforts to solve this problem.

Meteor was at the beginning a great tech demo, now they want to get serious and I doubt (and hope) that they won't succeed. Mentioned drawbacks are the main reasons I won't use, support and even advise against Meteor (as much as I like these guys and YC but sorry). They do not seem to contribute in any way to a great and existing ecosystem called Node but using it as their core to build a new competing one with monetization reasons in mind and a severely flawed architecture. Now, they obviously need and will use the money for PR and paying/incentivizing devs building the ecosystem and this competition between ecosystems (pure Node/npm vs Meteor) which is basically about winning the best devs will lead to further fragmentation and at the end no large ecosystem could be established and server-side JS failed. No, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER33> $9M, wow. Enough money to become the next Rails.

<comment><USER34> Rails didnt have the pressure to be a $45 million dollar company (investors expect a 5x return don't they?).

Although, thats what Google paid for Android.

<comment><USER35> $9M was the total raise, not the valuation. Presumably the exit would have to be much higher than $45M for a 5x multiple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Congratulations, guys.

</comment><comment><USER37> Congrats! Meteor this is awesome, glad this will help them move along faster. Right alongside the mongo funding this week.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow, pretty awesome that YC is getting great companies like this.

</comment><comment><USER39> Congratulations indeed!</comment>


GraphQL CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/braposo/graphql-css <comment><USER2> what is the problem solved by this solution ? i can't understand the use case of this...

</comment><comment><USER3> but does it uses serverless blockchain technology to attract business scale?

</comment><comment><USER4> But why

</comment><comment><USER5> can't tell if satirical</comment>


An editor is an editor after all Isn't it? - <AUTHOR>

Just re-starting on Lisp after a gap of 18 years. Worked on AutoLISP, now moving to Common-Lisp. Never used Emacs before, but see it being recommended by CL grey-beards. Is Emacs mandatory for CL programming? If yes, why? Shouldn't Vim with syntax-highlighting and indentation rules be good enough? <comment><USER2> The simple answer is that Emacs has fantastic support for working with Lisp code. Have a look at this page for a more detailed explanataion: [http://cl- cookbook.sourceforge.net/emacs-ide.html#Slide-2](http://cl- cookbook.sourceforge.net/emacs-ide.html#Slide-2)</comment>


Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-down-leaks

<comment><USER2> I read through the article and thought that pretty much all the activity taken by the Apple Security team sounded reasonable. If I'm not mistaken, everything described was taking place in the work place/work systems/etc...

The sketchy companies go a little further, and start doing this with people's _personal_ lives. I'm thinking about when Patricia Dunn (HP Chairman) hired a private investigator to start hacking into people's Cell Phone Bills to find out who they were talking to - Not just from the office, or on office equipment.

There is a reason why you see so many Silicon Valley people carrying two laptops, two cellphones, etc... - One of them is for work, and is to be used in the workplace, and is handed over / searched / subject to surveillance / carries confidential company material. The other one is for personal stuff.

If there was a material leak from my organization, and it was jeopardizing my livelihood, I would darn well _hope_ company security would have its act together and would track down the leak in a professional manner.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't you have to relinquish your personal laptop/cellphone is such situations too?

<comment><USER4> If you bring your personal laptop into a high-security area and refuse to submit to a search, then, without calling the police, and unless grellas shows up to school me because I am not a lawyer, all your employer can do is fire you.

<comment><USER5> What about my underpants?

I could hide a usb key in there with vital information. Since I'm bringing my own personal underpants can they search it to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is wholly-fabricated nonsense. I worked at Apple for 5+ years and, besides for knowing what actually happens in these situations, there are a couple of dead giveaways that "Tom" was never an Apple employee (or, at least, not in Cupertino).

<comment> brown9-2 Such as?

<comment><USER6> "They don't ask for cameras because there are no cameras at Apple: Employees are not allowed to get into the campus with them."

I mean, really, come on. That's just laughable.

<comment><USER7> I can also confirm that Apple does not have a "no camera" policy on campus.

Or a "gestapo". The security is very well run, however.

<comment><USER8> While Apple employees aren't subject to that, if you're just wandering around as a visitor taking pictures, security will ask you to stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know how people who work in large companies expect to have privacy on the company premises anyway: most of those companies make you sign a set of rules that basically says you forfeit your rights. Same concept in the military, you don't have a right to privacy because (they say) it would be to difficult to manage privacy and check for spies at the same time.

<comment><USER10> In more sane countries, they expect to have privacy because there are reasonable worker protection laws. Something of this sort would be illegal in most western countries.

As an American that's been in Germany for the last 8 years, it often blows my mind what's actually taken for granted as being acceptable in the US. Searching through employees' mail is illegal here (as would be searching an employee's personal belongings, drug tests, the whole shebang).

<comment><USER4> How is it "sane" for companies not to be able to control and monitor their own Internet connections? People clearly do abuse those connections to violate IP, confidentiality, and insider trading agreements.

<comment><USER10> People also use their home internet connections to violate IP, confidentiality and insider trading agreements. Using the purported Apple-logic from this post, Apple is (indirectly) paying for that too, so shouldn't they be able to monitor those connections as well?

A utility argument here, I don't believe is the way to approach this. There are all sort of "useful" things that companies could do that most folks would agree cross the line into invasion of privacy, in the US or elsewhere.

I think there are two important assumptions I'm working with:

\- People have a right to privacy in personal affairs

\- The work place being only for work is an idealization that in practice does not exist

My argument won't make sense if you don't agree on those two.

Employment is one of the fundamental elements of the social fabric, and the rights of employers and employees are participant to a more general social contract. There exists a line at which a company must sacrifice some utility to uphold its end of that contract (e.g. they can't make people work 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, even if they think it'd boost output), and as employers have an imbalance of power in negotiating employment terms, the government, in the interest of the people, lays down some guidelines for what the minimum boundaries are. Every developed country has this. The only variant is the extent of those stipulations, not their existence.

I believe the right to privacy is important enough that it's something that an employee _should not_ be obliged to forfeit it in an employment contract. And since it's clear that personal and professional spheres overlap in the workplace, no, I don't think the company should have unrestricted access to an employee's data or actions in the workplace or through work-provided mediums. I don't think there should be microphones in every room; I don't believe that all thoughts discussed in the coffee corner are thusly entitled to the company. Even if they did buy the coffee and the chairs and are paying you at that time. And for me, and the legislators of many (most?) western countries, that clearly extends to internet access and company cell phones.

<comment><USER4> Scott, employees generally are only able to use their home Internet connections to violate confidentiality _because_ their work computers and connections are poorly policed.

And, it is as a direct result of rampant abuse of company resources that companies are now deploying draconian security controls on worker machines, locking down USB connections and intercepting and parsing Word documents in the OS kernel. I've been involved in several deployments of these products (not a fan), and I can tell you that it's not an abstract concern that is driving their adoption. Bad stuff is routinely happening on company networks, and companies need to be able to protect themselves.

People have a right to privacy in personal affairs, but people need to make arrangements for their privacy when they're at the workplace. The idea that a Dell desktop that a Fortune 500 company provides you with becomes a bastion of personal privacy just because you decide to use it to check your GMail is untenable. Companies need workers to be able to handle sensitive information, and they need workers to be able to use computers and networks to do their job, and they cannot be expected to grin and bear it as their confidential information walks out the door and onto Yahoo Finance message boards.

Germany has powerful computer privacy laws. It is also not a great epicenter of tech entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER11> _It is also not a great epicenter of tech entrepreneurship._

Perhaps a stable society where people are protected from overbearing authority is more valuable than making a couple of extra dollars today. It is definitely more valuable than a slightly smaller cell phone or a website where you can share 140 character messages with your friend.

There are bigger risks to business than some employees posting a few internal word documents to Yahoo Finance. The worldwide financial crisis was not due to inadequate monitoring of employees' personal e-mail, after all.

<comment><USER4> I simply disagree that privacy on workplace computers is worth more than money or smaller phones. I see no greater good being traded for the drag on businesses. If you want workplace privacy, you can provide it for yourself, and you can avoid jobs where intense monitoring is a reasonable condition, such as R&D on the industry's most secret products.

I don't know what the worldwide financial crisis has to do with this, but intensive workplace privacy laws would have hurt the investigation and wind- down of fraudulently priced contracts, not helped it. Hey, you brought it up.

<comment><USER11> _If you want workplace privacy, you can provide it for yourself, and you can avoid jobs where intense monitoring is a reasonable condition, such as R &D on the industry's most secret products._

Can you? Can the majority of people make the right decision here?

It's illegal to sell your child to someone. Why is it legal to sell your privacy?

<comment><USER4> Because that is a stupid analogy.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it is. People will often trade something for money that they really shouldn't. If a person has $a and wants $b, and someone will give them $b in exchange for $a, people will often give up $a regardless of the long- term consequences.

Apparently selling children was a problem for society, so it is generally not legal now. People made the wrong decision, and it hurt society, so now making the wrong decision is no longer an option, and our society is better for it.

I think selling your privacy for a salary is detrimental to society in the same way, so it makes sense to use the legal system to remove the option. Then employees can't be tempted into making bad decisions with respect to their privacy by their employer, or rather, by the threat of non-employment. Plus, people that care about their privacy will no longer have to be off-the-grid wackos, and their value to society is increased as a result.

<comment><USER12> So you think people are stupid enough that they cannot decide whether selling their privacy is a good decision, therefore the government should make this decision for them?

How about health..we _know_ that people are so stupid that they will sell their health for food (eat cheap fast food that is horrible for their health). Should we ban fast food?

May be we should let people decide what people are comfortable with.

<comment><USER11> _May be we should let people decide what people are comfortable with._

The problem is when people stop caring about privacy because so many others made that decision for them, and the choice completely disappears. I would want to ban fast food if all healthy food became unavailable as a result of its popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like due diligence to protect shareholder interests.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - overheard in an interview somewhere.

<comment><USER5> And if I'm not a criminal, I shouldn't be treated as such.

It's a tad selfish, if you don't mind me saying, of you to automatically assume it's OK to give away my rights in addition to yours.

<comment><USER7> This is Apple, not the Government. If you don't like the legal terms of employment, California is an at-will state. Quit.

That said, this article is total ridiculous bunk. Gizmodo has been trolled.

<comment><USER14> Even with the government: you don't _have_ to obey laws. You can go live in jail. There's always an alternative option. Freedom is about having fair options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure people are in fact allowed to bring cameras onto the Apple campus, and, from what I can tell, there are no metal detectors or bag searches of any sort there. My knowledge is secondhand, but I'm inclined to believe that much of this article is BS.

<comment><USER15> In Israel, because there is a fear from terrorists, before you go into any shop, restaurant, mall, or university, your bag is searched (for ~30 seconds) and sometimes a metal detector is used (a hand-held one). I know nothing about Apple HQ, but it would be trivial to set something like this up.

Unrelated, but they (Gizmodo) shouldn't have used the word 'gestapo' or anything else related to nazis.

<comment><USER16> And it's not just one off-handed comparison - the article goes on and on about it. It really trivializes the hardships of people who _couldn't_ just leave and get another job, and where the stakes involved torture and death.

<comment><USER4> Not only that, but people opt to work at Apple, some of them not just in spite of the secrecy but because of it; Apple is super-sensitive because what their people work on tends to really matter in the marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sweet . . . I wish I worked on something so important that the secret police would interrogate me about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> How long until someone needs medical attention during one of these lockdowns, and they are fired for leaving to go to the doctor, or feel that they must endure the problem (and risk complications) in order to keep their job?

Not long, I bet, and I imagine that this practice will remain legal for ... oh ... about 3 months after that first case.

I hope Apple increases the frequency of this practice so that it attracts the attention of legislators sooner, and so that their brightest employees seek employment elsewhere. The beginning of the end is near.

<comment><USER4> I think it's pretty ridiculous to imply that Apple would accept _spectacular_ corporate liability by dissuading someone from seeking emergency medical attention during an IT investigation. So my guess as to the answer to your question is: it will never happen.

Apple's brightest employees (on the high-security projects) have been aware of extreme security measures for many years now, and positions on those teams are sought after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The reason why they need these draconian measures is that employees feel disenfranchised and expect to gain more by leaking secrets than by contributing work and sharing in the rewards. Steve Jobs himself would never leak anything - he has a stake in the outcome that the leakers believe they don't.

</comment><comment><USER19> A quick Google reveals no references of any Worldwide Loyalty Team before this Gizmodo "expose". I call bullshit on the entire article.

</comment><comment><USER20> Those Nazi comparisons sure are so funny.

<comment><USER9> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _They don't ask for cameras because there are no cameras at Apple: Employees are not allowed to get into the campus with them. If the cellphone is an iPhone, it gets backed up onto a laptop. "In fact, at the beginning they used to say that the iPhones were really their property, since Apple gave every employee a free iPhone," he points out. All the employees are asked to unlock and disable any locking features in their cellphones, and then the special forces will proceed to check them for recent activity._

ROFL. Gizmodo.com has been trolled.</comment>