Krita 4.0 – A painting app for cartoonists, illustrators, and concept artists - <AUTHOR> https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-0-0-released/ <comment><USER3> I'm very much an amateur but Krita is a great piece of software for me and does everything I need so far, for free. Much easier to use than GIMP, seems quite comparable to Photoshop and the development is going strong.

It's also neat that they now include by default a lot of the deevad brushes as it's a broad selection. Keep up the good work Krita team.

<comment><USER4> I like good tools as much as anybody, but I am always impressed with what a little talent and practice can do with existing tools. This story was in the news lately, about a woman that uses nothing but MS Paint:

[https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint- art/](https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/)

<comment><USER5> That's exactly as saying that someone made a full c++ program using nothing but notepad and therefore it's impressive. All I see its someone that made their lives more difficult by purpose.

<comment><USER6> I remember some documentary with Jack White talking about how he tries to make music composition more difficult on purpose. I had a very similar reaction to yours--the example they played under his voice over wasn't very impressive to me and I'm not much of a Jack White fan to begin with.

Now that I'm writing this, I suppose one useful concept is that of constraints promoting creativity by forcing you to come at the blank canvas from a different mindset than you're used to.

I suppose there are some times to struggle and grow but other times, like a competitive swimmer shedding his 'drags', to engage our full unhindered capacity free of such artificial handicaps.

Another musical example for me is the band Amaranthe. They usually make extensive use of modern production techniques but their talent is also very evident when they're unplugged:

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290](https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290)

Music video for the same song: [https://youtu.be/D8lV1To- _fU](https://youtu.be/D8lV1To-_fU)

<comment><USER7> Regarding the "making composition difficult on purpose" I suggest the book "Trust the process: an artist's guide to letting go" ([https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570)) which has lots of interesting material on how to stimulate creativity, and explicit advice about how to use the limitations you have as stepping stones to move forward instead of like constraints that impede your progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you have not already check out David Revoy. He creates beautiful art using only open source tools:

[https://www.peppercarrot.com/](https://www.peppercarrot.com/)

<comment><USER9> Wow, that webcomic is really well drawn and interesting as well. I'll have to keep my eyes on this one.

<comment><USER8> Tipp: When you click on the "HD"-Button you get a really high-res version (2500px wide)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not an artist. Krita, Inkscape, Gimp, Blender is a pretty great combination of tools to wiggle along as a programmer.

Congrats on 4.0. Great work.

<comment><USER11> Gimp and Inkscape are both _extremely_ sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use Gimp for anything mildly complex (heavy usage of cage distort on a high res pic with quite a few layers) it crashed every 10min (though I was told it was the fault of the Ubuntu packaged, it's not acceptable to make a clusterfuck of the versions targetting the most widely used Linux distro!). Inkscape is horribly unstable once you try to draw anything slightly complex that involves heavy usage of masks and your number of paths/shapes get close/over 100. Its popular though since Cored Draw is no longer a thing, and Adobe Illustrator has horrible UX for anyone not using it full-time/professionally.

Linux desktop _desperately needs:_

1\. a good _raster photo editor_ with non-destructive editing capabilities

2\. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on _stabilizing_ it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask (though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around masking to)

If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can produce something _intuitive_ and _stable!_ Not need for tons of features, just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And _using a "hipster" new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new developers..._ few people are willing to hack on an open source project for the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...

<comment><USER12> > 2\. a good vector graphics app

Check out Scribus. I'd describe it as more of a serious publishing app, where Inkscape may be more for artists. Scribus uses less resources and supports multipage documents.

I've also had issues with the cage transform in Gimp, but it's fixed now, so if you're on Ubuntu, just add a PPA with the latest version of Gimp.

> 1\. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities

I think Darktable does non-desctructive editing but I haven't used it myself.

> Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in > usability, Photoshop in both features and stability.

I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely, it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this lack of features by not sharing their code for those.

It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra features. What are those features missing in Gimp? (Gimp _does_ have CMYK editing, if you install the gimp-plugin-registry package.)

> Linux desktop desperately needs:

Those non-free programs you mentioned can probably be run with Wine on GNU/Linux.

<comment><USER11> TL;DR: A program needs either (a) features + good UX/I or (b) rock-solid stability + amazing performance characteristics to compensate for anything else lacking. Gimp has neither, it's some kind of "middle ground" thingy that annoys everyone.

> give up your freedom for a few extra features

Not really, I use like 10% max of Photoshop's features I guess. But those features simply feel _perfectly implemented,_ they just f work. Heck, I even use it for vector graphics sometimes because it "just works" and feels more natural than Illustrator.

And I'm not just used to PS. I actually liked Corel Photoshop more back in the day.

And Inkscape has the same natural/intuitive feel to it after you use it a bit. Starts to crack once the complexity grows, but for starter it just works. Blender has a learning curve, but afterwards it also feels "natural" and "well built".

Gimp is just bad at... _everything:_ (1) performance feels horrible, like doing everything in slow mo compared to anything else (2) UI feels very inconsistent and has very weird concepts about the relationship between layers and selections and stuff like that (like "wtf is a 'floating selection' thingy doing in my layers panel? ...you get used to it, but boy it's weird), keyboard shortcuts don't work in all contexts (sometimes it feels like they randomly stop working) and (3) there's no easy way to reversibly do things like ad an adjustment/effect layer, turn effect on and of on a layer or some groups from the layers panel etc.

I don't care about color space support or even mildly advanced features. And I could put up with a "weird" UI if I could find some logic or intuition for it. But at least stellar performance and stability would be requirements. If you can do things fast enough and things don't crash at 30 huge layers, even non- destructive edits cease to be a "must have" since you can just clone stuff like crazy and always have multiple "versions" of the "same" layer in the same doc. That's how lots of professional graphic designers use PS anyway. I was once handed a 20GB "trashcan psd" from a designer, and I hated every second of touching it, but it miraculously worked, relevant content was extractable, and the job got done.

Honestly, its hard to say what's _wrong_ with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything _fully right_ about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.

<comment><USER13> > Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out > anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe > Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and > unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of > how off things are.

Ugh, this is so true. I've never done professional graphics work, but I've used Photoshop on and off for small projects since they added color in version 2.0. I WANT to like Gimp and I give it a shot every year or so, but it never clicks. I mentally prepare myself for a different experience and try to keep an open mind, all while considering that my comfort will change with use, and I always leave disappointed and frustrated.

I mean, how do they make simply selecting something difficult? Even layers were unintuitive last time I tried Gimp. I've used a lot of janky software, but Gimp is the most bewildering case. You immediately see really good ideas expressed in the UI and then you interact with it and the whole thing collapses.

I thought maybe I was remembering things wrong, so I fired Gimp up for the first time in months (v2.8.22 - I keep it updated with Chocolatey). It took 2 minutes to load (no image) from an NvME drive on a quad core system with a 1080Ti. That's 1.5 minutes longer than any other program I have installed. Probably not optimized at install-time, when the user has time to burn, and instead opts for optimization at first launch, when the user actually needs to use the software. Bad start.

Open image. Select part and adjust brightness. Click OK. Click and drag outside selection... and the brightness dialog pops up? But, wha... B/C is a tool. Weird but okay. Apply filter, click and drag, and B/C again? Undo, wait, no, have to cancel. Alright, let's move this selected area over... Why is the entire canvas being moved? Undo. Trying rotate... 3 icons from the move tool on the same line, but it only rotates the selection. Of course. Rotate selection and hit enter... nothing. Oh, the rotate dialog isn't in focus. No, wait. It is. Enter does nothing. Unfocused? Now Enter works.

Adding a layer. First click on new layer button not detected. Second works. Select background layer and marquee a small part. Ctrl+C. Select newly made layer. Ctrl+V. Probably can't see it because it's pasted on top of the exact same part of the image. Select move tool, click and drag, no, nothing was pasted. Click and drag again to be sure and the part I rotated earlier now moves across the screen. Hide background and 'floating selection' to confirm nothing pasted.

3.5 minutes and about 15 undos/cancel button clicks to do 'all' that. I repeated the above in Paint.NET, including launching, in 15 seconds and 2 undos from one minor quirk.

It's like a luxury car assembled inside out. In theory, you have a luxury car, but in practice you're sitting on cold metal with an engine block obstructing your view of the road. Sure, a bunch of mechanics could take pieces off and attach them properly, but you've been driving the car around town for 22 years and this is the best they've managed so far.

<comment><USER14> I use gimp semi frequently. It's never taken more than 10-20 seconds to start up. 2 minutes sounds like a huge outlier... I'm running on a x230 (over 5 year old laptop with an i5) w/ Fedora.

<comment><USER13> Just ran it again. This time it took 23 seconds. All these on Win 10 x64 1709 using the highly accurate "1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi..." technique.

PC: 6700k OC @4.5GHz, 32GB/1TB NvME (4x PCIE mode), 1080Ti, most background processes off: GIMP 1st run: 90 s. GIMP 2nd run: 23 s. Paint.Net 1st run: 3 s. Paint.Net 2nd run: 2 s. Paint3D 1st run: 2 s. Paint3D 2nd run: 2 s. Krita 1st run: 7 s. (v3.3.3 first run ever) Krita 2nd run: 4 s. Gravit Designer: 6 s. (first run ever) Visual Studio 2017 takes 18 seconds with a handful of extensions.

Ugh, VS2017 update out...

Outdated version of Photoshop WHILE updating Visual Studio, 1st launch: 17 s. Krita WHILE crypto-mining on 3/4 logical processors (pinned to 100% usage): 4 s. Paint.NET while opening 30 tabs in Chrome: 4 s. GIMP while opening different 30 tabs in Chrome: 25 s. (reduce the chance of cache loads, not scientific, Chrome finished loading first, by about 10 seconds)

On a Surface Pro 3 (Core i7)... Krita while installing Windows updates, 1st run ever: 17 s. Krita 2nd run, updates still installing: 10 s GIMP, no updates installing, clean GIMP install, 1st run: 243 second. Yes, 243. GIMP 2nd run: 17 s.

Tried GIMP again on my desktop, no unusual background processes. 3rd launch: 18 s. 4th launch with mining pinning 3/4 CPU: 23 s.

So, overall, one of the most often recommended FOSS alternatives, even by ME, is a distant last place in these extremely ad hoc, unscientific, off the cuff tests across 2 machines. It also made me hate Mississippi. I was really hoping GIMP would have some trick up its sleeve to surprise me, but it did not. And this is not far from my past experience on Windows.

Maybe (hopefully) it's better on Linux... one sec...

Mint in VirtualBox: GIMP 1st run: 5 s GIMP 2nd run:2 s.

Hahaha. That just tickles me. It appears GIMP is the iTunes of graphics programs on Windows. Down the rabbit hole...

Within Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu with vcxsrv as X Windows server) GIMP 1st run (with some bash errors related to OpenGL): 43 s. GIMP 2nd run (still some errors): 5 s.

It's like they anti-optimized the thing for Windows.

Take away: I'll never recommend GIMP to a Windows user again. Linux? Sure, if the UI doesn't bother you, enjoy! But, it's a miserable experience on Windows compared to every other option and should only be used if a particular function can only be performed in GIMP.

<comment><USER14> Just wanted to say kudos! That's awesome that you did all this. Should relay this to the gimp people some how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Flabbergasting. Krita's development started almost 20 years ago... and it is the first time I ever hear about it.

<comment><USER16> My impression is that the American software community sometimes doesn't pay much attention to what's coming out of Europe. Have a look at other KDE-based programs if you haven't already - IME KVirc, Kile, KTorrent, and indeed Konqueror and KMail are best-in-class.

<comment><USER17> I think a large portion of the problem discovering things here is that they often have very counterintuitive names. Krita is very logical for me as swedish but outside Sweden not so much I guess.

Apache is a webserver? Really? Konqueror is probably a game, right? :-)

<comment><USER18> Well... The project was originally named KImageShop. Not entirely unexpectedly, that ended in lawyerly trouble. Not initiated by Adobe, though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was happy to see Boud create this guide for non-dev contributions recently: [https://phabricator.kde.org/T7842](https://phabricator.kde.org/T7842)

"There are over 1000 bugs and 350 wishes reported against Krita per year, and that number is rising. The Krita developers cannot handle that stream on their own! Please consider helping out by triaging bugs. This document gives some simple guidelines to get started, and some common cases that can often be answered with a standard text."

</comment><comment><USER20> Kiki is still the cutest.

She's more important than she seems - branding is everything, and Krita has one of the best mascots in FOSS, a field in which aesthetics has traditionally not been a priority.

How better to spread a program for artists than with a mascot that begs to be drawn?

<comment><USER21> Actually, for a digital painting program, I would expect it to be the case!

Usually, in my experience, the mascots of FOSS software were quite criticized as having too many features to draw, etc... Not easily recognizable as logos.

I have no idea whether this is valid criticism or not. But when you ask me about Krita, I think about Kiki. I can't tell what the icon looks like on the top of my head.

On the plus side, some say that we are much better mentally equipped to recognize faces than abstract figures. So, maybe this was just something not fashionable in the past few years in the flat corporate/branding/design world?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While it looks very powerful, does anyone know if the miserable light gray on medium gray UI can be changed? I despise this modern trend (Pixelmator drives me nuts too) as I have difficulty reading text with such low contrast. This is terribly unfriendly to people with vision difficulties.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, Krita has themes/skins, here is a few: [http://www.davidrevoy.com/article124/themes-for-krita-and- kd...](http://www.davidrevoy.com/article124/themes-for-krita-and-kde) The top one seems darker. Otherwise you can always edit the `.colors` file of your choosing to be even darker.

<comment><USER22> Cool thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> People compare Krita to Photoshop, and that's fine. There's another space where it shines and people might not know about that. It's animation. Friend and I have been working on a hand-drawn short animation (~10 minutes) for a few years now and it's just about done (final stages of sound editing). We started out in Harmony, but we were extremely disappointed with it. We tossed around the idea to switch over to TV Paint (raster based), but I thought that maybe there's an OSS something for it? Being an OSS fan and advocate, after all. If Toonz were released earlier, we might've tried that (not really, considering years of experience with it). We even considered Photoshop - <USER2> now has a nice animation workflow built-in, but I didn't want to go away from OSS until I explored all the options. So, there was Krita. Let me tell you, not only is it great, it easily cut down our animation time by a large percentage over if we were using Harmony. It's awesome tool for 2d hand-drawn animation with still A LOT of room to grow, workflow-wise.

tl;dr; If you want to animate by hand, give Krita a chance. It's better than Harmony and Toonz (again, for hand-drawn animation).

<comment><USER25> Since you're on the subject of animation another amazing tool, specifically for pixel art, is asesprite. [https://aseprite.org](https://aseprite.org)

Among many other features it has onion skinning, play controls per layer, and looping over custom-labeled set of frames.

I used it for my first game last year and it made everything so much more fun :)

<comment><USER24> I'm aware of this tool, but this project isn't pixel art. Traditional animation. I've tried working in that style several times, but it's so damn consuming! Not that I won't try again.

<comment><USER25> It is really time consuming. But somehow more approachable for a non-artist like myself. I've tried freehand drawing but I wasn't happy with the results... I need more knowledge and more practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Based on the app description and homepage I always thought Krita can't replace Photoshop for the few things I need to do for basic webdesign stuff. But reading the comments here made me reconsider. Has anyone used Krita for web stuff (icons, headers, banners, editing screenshots, etc?

Since the developers are reading this thread: I saw that you have a simple press page [0], if you want something more detailed, I can hook you up with a free PressKitHero[1] account.

[0] [https://krita.org/en/about/press/](https://krita.org/en/about/press/) [1] [https://presskithero.com](https://presskithero.com)

<comment><USER27> Krita is not targeted as a photoshop replacement. It was at one time, but 15+ years ago they realized that many people are willing to pay for photoshop and thus Adobe has a large amount of money to throw at developers (at least some of them good) and so they are unlikely to catch up. They then shifted focus to be the best programing for drawing instead, a niche that Photoshop can cover but it isn't what their customers want and so it isn't well served. Photoshop is mostly used by photographers who need to touch up a photo, this is art but a very different style of art from someone who starts with a blank page and draws a picture.

<comment><USER18> 2010 actually: [https://krita.org/en/item/last-week-in-krita- week-8/](https://krita.org/en/item/last-week-in-krita-week-8/) \-- though my own focus has always been painting, and I started working on Krita in 2003.

<comment><USER27> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm still a _bit_ sad they decided to de-emphasize the photo-editing-targeted features - it was (and still is) miles ahead of GIMP in terms of deep color support.

<comment><USER29> A majority of the advances in Krita come from the crowdfunding campaigns, and those are centered around the painting part. I'm sure if there were a senior dev in the project who had the desire to improve the photo editing parts the foundation would let them crowdfund that independently of the drawing work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder why my Krita in Windows (3.0 - 3.4, also 4.0) has some lag (around 100ms or so) when switching presets. During that, I can't even move the cursor, which is quite annoying since I use switch presets shortcut very often.

I've got no problem whatsoever on Ubuntu though, aside from some random crashes when doing free transform.

That being said, Krita is still my main tool for painting/drawing and some picture editing. The interface is IMHO very intuitive (or maybe just more Photoshop-like) which is nice

</comment><comment><USER31> Just installed Krita 4.0 on my Surface 4 Pro. Like many other software ported to Windows, it can't handle hidpi screens well, all the UI becomes so tiny that the program is not really useful.

Anyone has tips for running Krita on hidpi screens on Windows?

<comment><USER32> Changing the program compatibility setting 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour' may help with this (I haven't tried with Krita yet, but I had a similar problem with Matlab & Simulink which was fixed by this)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really want to love Krita, and I sort of do. The only thing preventing me from doing so is the absurd amount of crashes on my macOS machine. Is this just a Mac problem? Has this been addressed in this update? Am I doing something wrong?

<comment><USER34> This seems to just be a result Apple's poor OpenGL stack. Krita has been very stable on both Linux and Windows for me.

From their roadmap page: "We will spend more time on macOS. Even though Apple's support for the technologies Krita needs, like OpenGL, sucks."

<comment><USER35> Any hope for support of things like Metal at all maybe?

<comment><USER18> No, none at all, I'm afraid. That would need a really dedicated person interested in working on both Qt and Krita. We did have a summer of code project where a student updated Qt's painting code to work with Apple's openGL implementation, though.

And Krita shouldn't be more unstable on macOS than on Windows or Linux, but it doesn't get tested as well, and there are so few macOS developers who want to take a hand. Personally, I develop on Linux but use Krita on Windows, when I find time to work on my own comic. The macbook pro only gets opened to make builds or fix the occasional macOS-specific bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Krita + Gimp is a great combo - I'm extremely happy both exist in the OSS world! Hoping to use Krita more as I start getting into texturing models - it's been great so far for basic images though.

</comment><comment><USER37> FYI, the killer feature of krita 3.x was per-layer frame animation with onion skinning!

I'm wondering if it works well with the new svg vector layers in this release?

</comment><comment><USER38> I introduced my gf to Krita. While she generally has to use photoshop to work with others, but she loves Krita generally.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh god, I love that russian accent in their demo-movie... I don't know why, it's just so... adorable...

<comment><USER40> The linked page has a video on showing off the new features with the worst choice of music I think I've ever come across - it's like a dirge. I had to mute it; and usually I listen to anything.

Imagine an old, barrel-chested, brusque Frenchman smoking galoise at a roadside café; "merde" he says under his breath ... then they used that as a sample, and inspiration, and created a piece of music from it ...

<comment><USER18> We had two videos this time! I always give people who volunteer a free hand, but I have to admit, my computers are always muted. They should be seen, not heard, so I never listened to the music myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I recommend checking the Wikipedia's table of KDE applications; there are some gems to be discovered: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:KDE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:KDE)

</comment><comment><USER42> The best free app for a meme making. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER43> This is a much better tool for artist than GIMP thanks to one thing: Krita handles CMYK, much better for printed jobs.

</comment><comment><USER44> Let's not forget to thank the developer for the amazing windows port and the integration with the windows store!

</comment><comment><USER45> Wait, since when does Krita support Windows? Did they finally yank all the weird KDE dependencies so I can run it in an xfce environment? That would make me so happy...

<comment><USER29> Almost every KDE app for the last 2 years has been portable to other desktops and OSes since they broke up the kdelibs into frameworks and moved to Qt5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Scary music for such a colorful video.

</comment><comment><USER47> Does this have color blind mode yet?

</comment><comment><USER48> not running in browser? (via wasm)?

<comment><USER49> Not running in the browser is a feature.

<comment><USER50> Pretty much everyone is shoving everything into the browser that is one of the problems.</comment></comment></comment>


A simple and secure email service which respects your privacy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/root-io/vmail

<comment><USER2> "If you think that you have found a security issue in vmail.me project, please don't use the bug tracker and don't publish it publicly.

Instead, all security issues must be sent to support [at] vmail.me."

</comment><comment><USER3> It really needs to be said that email, even though it seems to have an inherent mechanism of persistence, is a really very high, thorny, technical load to assume. As someone who cut his teeth on email-server administration in the early days of Sendmail, I'm still kind of puzzled at the lack of coherent solution to this problem - it still seems as though the cognitive load behind setting up and maintaining a functional mail server on todays Internet hasn't changed much since the days of !uucp!myfoo!me .. but is this really the case?

</comment><comment><USER4> A screenshot would be helpful. It sounds like an alternative to Roundcube webmail.

Their recent twits ([https://twitter.com/vmailme](https://twitter.com/vmailme)):

"Our project will become open source, stay tuned" \-- 30. Aug.

"The reason why we temporarily closed the registration is that we have real difficulty fighting spam and get a good sender reputation" \-- 26. Aug.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't bother…sign up disabled.

<comment><USER6> This is a github link - you can self-host if you choose to - but agreed that submitting while the example site is down is an odd choice</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you believe that mind and brain are separate entities? - <AUTHOR>

I always get into this debate of mind vs. brain (mostly with non-techies). Being an AI/Neuroscience student and researcher, I am fairly convinced that mind is nothing but a physical synonym for the working of our neocortex. Does anyone in this community believe that  mind is formless, non-physical, separate from the brain and thus can never be completely simulated? If yes, why? <comment><USER2> " mind is formless, non-physical, separate from the brain ", well it can be reduced and explained in terms of the functioning of the brain.

"Functioning" is not an object and cannot be encountered, to assume the mind is _substance_ is the category mistake made, and why people leap to something non-physical: if it must be a substance it cannot be physical, for sure.

As for "completely simulated", I do not believe that computers - as we now use them - are capable of "simulating" a mind. The mind is much more than _symoblic processsing_ : it attaches meaning to information, creates relations between itself and the world, (amongst many other things). These phenomena are not information processes and cannot be achieved by Linear Regression (to characterize Machine Learning accurately enough).

It is important to point out that any scientific explanation of consciousness is going to be unsatisfyingly reductionistic. Science significantly reduces experience to a "substance model" where everything can be modeled as substances in motion ... and thus the mathematical edifice which results is completely devoid of the vast majority of information which one acquires: the sound of the cannonball as it his the grass, its colour, significance, etc.

The vast majority of our experience which we may hope to explain is discounted (necessarily so) in order to be scientific (predict what our next experiences will be like).

There will be an increasing number of "explanations" of various aspects of mental functioning based on the structure of the brain, I doubt any of these will provide anything more compelling than what we have currently.

There are "brute certainties" (brute facts) which are undoubtable and _the starting point_ for _all_ investigation, scientific or otherwise. This brute fact is experience, or more accurately, the world of signficance, relations, awareness, etc. in which the self as well as everything else is embeded within.

Explanation proceeds as generalization, taking one aspect of Experience and generalizing to some general property of Experience: pens fall, all objects fall, all objects in gravitational fields fall.

There is nothing we can appeal to in accounting for Experience itself: there is nothing else available. Explanation has to end somewhere, and that is the final - and only tenable - reply to the question of our conscious experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> From what you say, you seem to hint that we will never be able to produce a human-perfect unsupervised learning rule that can handle all modalities we perceive and make inferences. As far as classical machine learning is concerned, many learning rules are domain specific and training/learning heuristics changes with modalities. However, we are seeing an emergence of neuroscience informed machine learning, which is slowly uncovering importance of vital structure within the brain such as hierarchies within the visual cortex and its actual impact on learning. As far as consciousness is concerned, it is again tied with the problem of solving learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Brain is hardware. Mind software that runs on brain. None has any use without the other. (personal unscientific view)

I would like to read about this where to begin?

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason I said it's one is from the perspective that the software is a combination of spiking potentials and chemical reactions. If you haven't read "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, you should. Though his results/theory may not even be close to the real explanation behind our brain, it sets a good stage for the topic.</comment></comment>


Signs Your Team Is Suffering from 'Burnout Debt' - <AUTHOR> https://www.usehaystack.io/blog/3-signs-your-team-is-suffering-from-burnout-debt <comment><USER2> It is so much easier to burnout when you are working from home. You take less breaks, spend less time shooting the breeze with coworkers, and almost every interaction is very formal. If you aren't careful you never get a chance to decompress between tasks. Also there is the temptation to constantly multitask. During long meetings it's easy to listen in while working on something else.

Finally there is a feeling of insecurity since you aren't being seen working. A lot of the stuff you do is invisible to everyone else if they can't see you working on it. Also since managers don't see you working they assign way more tasks than usual.

This is without the additional hours you may be working. Add that to the above and you are on an express train to burnout.

</comment><comment><USER3> you can burnout just by working at full throttle for a normal working day as well. Skipping breaks and just hyper focusing.</comment>


Risk Assessment and Prioritization for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ox9mwO7aCfwXUw1pllKTKCpiEJi3oIW6KHrXfNtrIXQ/edit#slide=id.p <comment><USER2> This blog post from the author of the linked presentation is better online presentation of their ideas:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23310400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23310400)

</comment><comment><USER3> To add: Choosing which risks to tackle should definitely be weighted by difficulty, impact and available resources.

Also, this feels like it's forcing an external portfolio manager view on the internal operations of a startup. Nothing wrong with this - it's just odd to me.

<comment><USER4> My interpretation of the presented material that no, difficulty doesn't matter, "available resources" too, "impact" \- well, the impact you should strive to is exactly the reduction of the most critical risks.

Using the example from the linked material: surely if you can't swim, learning may be quite difficult.

<comment><USER3> Impossible to prioritize which risks to address without considering difficulty and resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are too many risks to think about. I doubt many successful founders had them as "risks", maybe can be called as an "issue". Apart from product market fit, are others really big of a risk?

<comment><USER6> I work in risk management. What you do is time box for risk assessment where you come up in an hour or so with all kind of risks. Then you tackle things that have high chance of showing up or things that have high impact. Ideally things that have high chance and high impact are priorities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Derisking business too early can be dangerous as well. Volatility unlocks opportunities. A little bit of noise in the system is the secret sauce.

<comment><USER8> Closely related I think are intuition and creativity. You can't always with your conscious mind put words on what you actually know.</comment></comment>


Google Exec Quit His Job To Work In China – And He's Been Totally Blown Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/what-the-chinese-tech-industry-is-like-2014-1

<comment><USER2> Very interesting, makes you wonder how much longer before this kind of world starts to majorly influence american culture & laws. Much of what we do in the united states is also replicated directly across the pond in the Europe. But the reverse is true with china, they do everything on an incredibly different scale, and much of what they do is difficult to replicate because people in most of Europe and USA don't speak Chinese like they do English.</comment>


Open Core Is Bad For Your Software Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=3047&blogid=41

<comment><USER2> What matters is the _union_ of the monopolizations of the various parts of the software stack you depend on; parts with no monopolization can be ignored. "Open Core" is irrelevant and neither bad nor good, what matters is the required non-open part on top.

Now it might be good for the _vendor_ by letting them and their competitors avoid some duplication of work, but this isn't about the vendors...</comment>


PyPy: A Faster Python Implementation - <AUTHOR> https://www.pypy.org/index.html <comment><USER2> I've heard PyPy's JIT described as "meta-tracing - instead of tracing your code, it traces itself as it interprets your code".

Is that accurate? What are the pros & cons of this approach compared to a normal tracing JIT, e.g. LuaJIT?

<comment> andrewl-hn About 15 years ago there was a series of papers by Andreas Gal (then future and now former CTO of Mozilla) about precisely this aspect of JIT-compilers design.

If you have a program and represent it as a series of VM instructions, and you try to jit them individually the kit compiler has very limited ability for optimization. Plus, after each such instruction the execution comes back to the piece of the interpreter that selects the next instruction to execute: essentially a giant switch statement that makes branch prediction on CPU very difficult and inefficient.

The alternative is to not only jit the instructions but also embed pieces of the interpreter between them so that the compiler can see how those instructions are connected and generate the code for the whole sequence of them. This the compiler can make better assumptions about the code and optimize it a lot more.

This work eventually made it to all sorts of virtual machines. Adobe used it for Flash, Mozilla for their SpiderMonkey javascript engine, Google used this design for early versions of Android Dalvik VM.

PyPy uses it, too. That's why they call it a meta-compiler. It compiles pieces of your code and pieces of its own interpreter together to produce the more optimized binary.

<comment><USER3> If you're interested in trace based compilation then the origins go much further back than Andreas Gal's work and into research in the 1970s into compilers for VLIW architectures [1]

It's not the dispatch to the next instruction that's expensive in most virtual machines. It's the sheer complexity of each instruction as it maps to the underlying assembly instructions [2]

Just getting rid of the dispatch loop doesn't help much and in many cases the increased pressure on the instruction cache makes performance worse.

I'm trying to help with this problem at the moment for the CRuby JIT compiler.

SpiderMonkey, LuaJIT and Dalvik record the trace in the bytecode interpreter. There's no generating baseline JITed code with additional trace recording stuff.

What PyPy does is quite different. PyPy is a Python virtual machine written in a language called RPython and has an interpreter and trace compiler for RPython.

It adds a whole layer of indirection compared to traditional trace compilers which makes it harder to do some optimizations but makes it easier to implement some more basic parts of trace recording and compilation and crucially, makes it somewhat re-usable for different languages.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/optimizationofho00fish/mode/2up](https://archive.org/details/optimizationofho00fish/mode/2up) [2] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106610...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571066109004617)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> PyPy is fantastic, it rescued a project I had where a massive amount of json needed to be parsed before an absurdly short heartbeat. Not even some of the fast json libraries could do it, but with a drop-in PyPy replacement, it worked, and still does, wonderfully

</comment><comment><USER5> I love PyPy, just wish that they had more community love.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is stopping PyPy from getting more widespread adoption in the Python community? Surely it isn't that everyone is using the latest version of CPython; it's been years and many are still using 2.7.

<comment><USER7> The startup times are a fair bit worse, and the memory requirements are a fair bit higher. Despite everything else python does tend to be fast enough, and the worse startup/memory usage isn't necessarily worth it.

Also it doesn't speed up things that rely on external C libraries, so code using numpy/scipy/tensorflow/etc doesn't generally run appreciably faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" The geometric average of all benchmarks is 0.23 or 4.3 times faster than cpython"_ (see [https://speed.pypy.org/](https://speed.pypy.org/))

If we put this figure in context with the CLBG (see [https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...](https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/which-programs-are-fastest.html)) we're somewhere between Racket and Dart.

Is a further speedup to be expected? Why is it still slower than V8 after so much development effort?

<comment><USER9> I suspect that the development effort that V8 has seen has been X orders of magnitude greater.

<comment><USER8> I have no detailed information. But the development of PyPy has been going on for 20 years and was partly sponsored by the EU. If you compare that with LuaJIT which was developed by a single person in a shorter timeframe and a performance even faster than V8 I would assume that maybe the conceptual approach taken by RPython/PyPy is less suited or Python is just that much harder to speedup. I would guess the former because also the performance of other RPython based implementations is not insanely impressive.

<comment><USER3> V8 became faster than LuaJIT quite some time ago now but LuaJIT is incredibly simple compared to V8.

<comment><USER8> Are you sure? I did a cross-comparison recently and found LuaJIT still to be factor 1.3 to 1.5 faster than V8 in geometric mean (I used the Node.js implementation on the CLBG).

<comment><USER3> V8 8.0 is consistently faster than LuaJIT 2.1 on my machine even on heavily numeric benchmarks like Fannkuch or n-body.

Anything more realistic involving actual object access, not even allocation, and V8 wins by large margins.

time luajit-2.1.0-beta3 nbody.lua 50000000 real 0m8.437s

time node nbody.js 50000000 real 0m5.065s

<comment><USER8> I assume you would get another result running all CLBG algorithms and comparing the geometric means. I also run benchmarks including (hashed) table/field access and was virtually as fast as the same program when compiled natively, see [https://github.com/rochus- keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase...](https://github.com/rochus- keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Hennessy_Results). Of course there are parts where LuaJIT 2.0 is slower than native, but there are also some opposite cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So if I want to start using this. Do I just make a change at the environment level in virtualenv? And then all of my Python code will run faster?

<comment><USER11> More or less. It really depends on what your code does and how frequently in calls into C modules such as Numpy. The Python side is JIT-able while the C side is not. PyPy3 currently implements Python 3.6.9 so you'll be missing out on any 3.7+ features (e.g., built-in dataclasses but a backport is available from PyPI).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> pypy is great. what makes me sad is "they just stay behind cpython 1 or 2 versions"..

<comment><USER13> 1-2 versions minor versions is pretty great. Most Linux distros that are deployed are the same!

<comment><USER14> PyPy claims to be compatible with CPython 3.6.9 ([https://www.pypy.org/compat.html](https://www.pypy.org/compat.html)). CPython 3.7 is currently the most common Python version. The project I work on since last year depends on features introduced in CPython 3.7. The migration to CPython 3.8 in already underway on many Linux distros (Fedora is already on it). So PyPy is unfortunately too far behind.</comment></comment></comment>


Updated Debian 7: 7.6 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.debian.org/News/2014/20140712

<comment><USER2> A significant change in this release is that Apache now supports elliptic curve crypto, which gives you forward secrecy without having to resort to the slow discrete log Diffie Hellman. It also lets you achieve an A+ on SSLLabs' server test.</comment>


2012 Salary Guide for Creative and Technology Professionals [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/TCG_SalaryGuide_2012.pdf

<comment><USER3> One great takeaway regarding local variances for the people who are fortunate enough to be able to benefit from it: If you're able to work remotely, you can do work for companies in the ~130% areas (e.g. San Francisco, New York, D.C.) and make those wages while living in an area where most people can get by on ~90% of the national average.

<comment><USER4> Not always. Most employers will likely realize the differences in cost of living and try to get you relative to your local market. One of the benefits of remote employees for an employer is around being more cost effective.

I've also been in the situation working for a remote employee who tried to pay comparable CA wages (wasn't in the Bay Area), but didn't understand the true cost of living differences. Also been on the flip side, in office in SF and looking for people in cheaper markets.

<comment><USER5> Also, there is likely more supply opening up to remote workers, which can drive down rates.

On the other hand, top developers can pretty much ask what they want no matter where they are working from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Typical of the undermathed professions* : they provide high and low salary numbers, but no median! This makes this salary guide vastly less useful than it could be.

* This phrasing is an attempt at humor

<comment><USER7> Judging by the ranges, it's my guess that these are not extremes, but possibly 25/75 quartile marks.

The methodology isn't clear, so we don't know how the data were aggregated/culled, but it seems that +/- 3 SD data, at least, were stripped in creating these tables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> More salary guides from the same company <http://www.rhi.com/SalaryGuides> (covers legal, tech, and others)

<comment><USER9> Garbage

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a really solid Salary Guide from Modis (Tech-focused, low|high|average, multiple levels).

[http://www.modis.com/clients/salary- guide/downloads/2012-sal...](http://www.modis.com/clients/salary- guide/downloads/2012-salary-guide-for-it-professionals.pdf)

<comment><USER9> More junk.

<comment><USER11> You do realize the ideas you're pushing are here essentially indistinguishable from a conspiracy theory, right? Not only do multiple sources show similar results, but everyone here says, "Yep, that seems about right in my experience." But because your experience is different, you think everybody must be lying or totally hoodwinked, and you're the only one who knows the real truth. The more likely conclusion is that your experience is below average, not that everybody else is falsely reporting the same above-average working conditions.

<comment><USER9> Both sides cite multiple sources. If all it was one company, then it would be just "a bad company", except that I'm not just referencing one - I'm referencing several.

Let's suppose I've managed to find the absolute worst of companies - fine, I can accept that.

Then why are recruiters/HR/managers so apprehensive to disclose what the cost control measure are - what are the plans, policies, procedures, practices, and processes, what are the duties and scope, roles are responsibilities ........ ?

I honestly don't think that getting vending machine tokens from HR daily for can of free soda, or whatever "gourmet sandwich" is the vending machine is impressive.

Impressive would be 401K plan sponsored by the company that allows you to rollover the 401K's from previous employers, and allows you to roll it over into some other company when you leave. Or a 401K that stays with you as you move from project to project within the company.

<comment><USER12> Actually your "side" never cited a source. Again, looking at your comment history, I see you telling a lot of vague stories and criticizing other people's sources, but you never provide a single source of your own. In your entire history, you reference exactly two distinct urls neither of which has any salary or benefits information at all.

Multiple times in this thread and others, you link to a list of large government contracting companies: [http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011....](http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011.aspx)

And then, a long time ago, you linked to a dice posting in order to ridicule it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3072172>

> 5 years experience with SQL Server 2008

> > [http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...](http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302&dockey=xml/1/f/1f41f0c6321a299ae013cefef6b25b7b@endecaindex&source=19&FREE_TEXT=5+years+sql+2008&rating=99)

If your job is as bad as you seem to imply, then I certainly hope you heed people's advice and find another. But I'm beginning to suspect that you're being intentionally misleading for some other purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it just me or are the highs in developer salaries kind of low? I know people who make $250k+/year at Google and other companies. If I took full salary as a mobile developer (rather than leaving it in our company's reserves) I would make about $300k/year.

<comment><USER14> These are the average _starting_ salaries.

<comment><USER13> Starting salaries for various tiers - i.e. 1-5 years, 5+ years, etc. Even still, I know a college grad that entered Kaiser as a developer at $150k. It does not seem to say how they define "high" and "low" though (right/left bell curve average, median, etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. I'm severely underpaid as a web developer w/ 2 years experience. That was a depressing read. :(

<comment><USER16> Would it be better to be poorer in ignorance? If you're worth more go out and get it.

<comment><USER15> Your right, I will!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a similar guide for software developers? I'd pay for it

<comment><USER18> [http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_SalaryGuid...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_SalaryGuide_2012.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Those numbers are in line with what I've seen from other sources such as glassdoor, the BLS, indeed.com, and various postings on HN.

edit: interested parties can find the US Gov's Bureau of Labor Statistics giving salaries for a number of different positions. While they break down job titles in odd ways sometimes, these numbers appear _entirely_ in line with it. Mid-70s is about the average number for starting salary as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER9> And each one of those has been found to fluff salary data.

<comment><USER12> Could you please provide some evidence?

A glance at your comment history reveals a pattern: anecdotal examples of wildly low salaries ($40k-$50k), and unsubstantiated claims that every possible source of salary data (aside from your examples) is inaccurate.

Just a couple of examples:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3978058>

>That's worse than the OP's link.

>If any company paid that much there'd be a line at the front door every single day of people wanting to be hired.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3953590>

>You're "facts" are far from that.

>The developers we have onsite with the customer (Department of Defense with Top Secret clearances) are paid roughly $40-50K/yr USD.

>If there were companies that actually paid the salaries you're quoting there would be a line of people at the front door every morning wanting to get hired.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959410>

>Your reference is like citing Ms Cleo - pathetic actually.

>If companies actually paid those amounts listed there'd be a line of applicants at the front door every single morning wanted the job.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3344467>

>If there were developer jobs paying that much, there'd be a line of people at the front door every day wanting to get hired.

>Quality people are easy to find, a quality company is not.

<comment><USER9> Yup - I hate the HR hype (you're HR right) that "OMG LOOK @ WUT WE PAYZ!!!!111".

I've spent the past 10+ years as a defense contractor working cleared programs. I've seen all sorts of sleazy work done by HR and management to push salaries down.

\- Justify your position - done 2x yearly

\- Switching you from one project to another that has less benefits associated with it (this means the company doesn't have to pay their portion, so it's a larger profit margin for them)

\- Not reimbursing for directed travel

\- Full Time Employee required to pay for hardware/software to do the job

\- Assigned a primary health provider closest to work so as to minimize out of office time; or assigned one on the other side of the state; in this scenario it would have meant a 2+ hour drive one way

\- Bait and switch with employee referrals (suddenly not qualified for the bonus because a recruiting subcontractor had contacted them 2 years ago - <USER2> documented contact, but let the employee prove otherwise)

But who do you think fills out those salary surveys - HR/management. Do you believe that they'd be honest. They have a vested interest in stacking something like Glassdoor - prospective clients use it. Clients want a workforce that's "happy". They'll pay more for it because the perception is better output and low turnover. So the company has ensured a good payday for themselves, low employee expenditure rate, and the work is still being done. Of course with one project I worked the turnover was a killer (140%+ at the 30 month mark, 6 program managers, 5 deputy program managers, least amount of time someone was here before they said f*ck it was 22 hrs) - but profit is profit.

So keep believing in your vision that companies, managers, and HR speak the truth.

<comment><USER20> Have you even tried to get out of the defense contracting world and work at one of the non-shitty jobs that commenters here keep futilely trying to tell you exist?

<comment><USER21> That can be exteremly hard, if you're not writing code. Not all the roles and responsibilities directly translate to the world of private industry. For example a Systems Engineer in defense is loosely a product manager/ architect. However, it's impossible to get show all the responsibilities translate. Try explaining that to a recruiter... It tried for months.

<comment><USER22> I was in that boat for ~2 years (got out of it a little over a month ago). My problem was reduced in some respects, while amplified in others, because on my program systems engineers were developing signal processing algorithms[0] and implementing them in real-time signal processing software, in C. This caused all sorts of partial mismatches and misunderstandings, but ultimately the software piece got me out of there.

[edit] I would like to add that not being able to discuss what I did in meaningful detail was the most serious hindrance to my job search.

[0] This bit caused its own problems with a few companies, who saw "algorithms" and thought something else.

<comment><USER21> Yea, I'm pretty much a pure systems engineer. I'm working on teaching my self some code but it's not going to get me out of there. It's rough... I'm close though. Hopefully in a few weeks life will change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well done guide. I will definately pass this around at work.

<comment><USER24> To underscore ckluis' comment, take a look at the document. It's not a scribd even though the title says so. It's a pdf, but well designed. Even if you don't care about the salaries you might find it's an enjoyable read.

It appears to also be a subtle ad/recruiting effort by The Creative Group (TCG) but if so, it's well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> HackerNews auto-appends the scribd link to PDF URLs. If you click on the scribd link, it brings you to the same document via their site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is the difference in variance between SF and Boston really so low? 135.5 (SF) vs 132 (Boston)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm confused by the term "starting" - do they mean starting fresh out of college? or a newly hired employee starting in that company (might have 5 yrs experience)? or starting out of high school?

<comment><USER27> It means starting out of college. For your next job, you ask for more than you were making at your last job. (Why else would you leave?)

<comment><USER22> To get out of a crappy, dead-end situation. I took a pay cut to get to a better company without having to relocate. The reasons are somewhat complicated, but my reply to grumps above explains a good portion of why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It would be interesting to show the salaries as a ratio of average cost of living and then compare it to Madison Ave salaries in the 80's... my bet is average has gone dowwwwwwwn.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is beautifully designed. But I didn't quite get the cover. All [something] is a matter of belief. What's the something? Money?

<comment><USER30> Yep it's money. It's a pretty well known quote by Adam Smith. Money, fiat or otherwise, only works as long as people believe they can conduct their next transaction with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wish there was a guide like this for Canadian cities.

<comment><USER18> The tech guide referenced in the other comments has a much larger Canadian section.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Certainly strike that from the credible list.</comment>


The Fjord – Surfer Magazine - <AUTHOR> http://www.surfermag.com/the-fjord/

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the best web multimedia presentations I've seen - perhaps as good as 'Snow Fall'.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't PG do a responsive version of HN? - <AUTHOR> Reading front page on phone devices and reading long comments on laptops are fairly inconvenient. Doesn't PG himself use his phone to visit HN and see this pain? <comment><USER2> Good question - the answer to which is probably that he doesn't have to since others have filled in the gaps.

I find hacker news illegible and not very user friendly. So I use this on my Android phone:

<http://hackerwebapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading long comments on laptops is a problem? It's not on any that I've used (including the old 11.6" netbook.)

And, heck, even on my iPhone 4, reading and writing comments isn't particularly uncomfortable (it's what I'm writing this comment on.

HN, IMO, doesn't need the overhead of a specialized mobile presentation, whether provided by a responsive layout library or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, the website is kind of a pain on mobile. I recommend the Hacker News 2 app, if you're on Android.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksoftware.hackernews&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5haXJsb2Nrc29mdHdhcmUuaGFja2VybmV3cyJd)

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://ihackernews.com/> or one of the many apps.

</comment><comment><USER6> because he doesn't have to</comment>


The Making of Freeciv WebGL 3D - <AUTHOR> http://play.freeciv.org/blog/2017/05/the-making-of-freeciv-webgl-3d/ <comment><USER2> I've gone through my Freeciv spurts over the years, and I must say the developers of this project deserve serious credit for continuing development and innovating. The art has been a bit lacking, but the new 3D version is looking pretty good and getting better. The real success with the game is the immersive detailed game play, the devs. have been smart to add a wide range of features and detailed management while not going over board.

<comment><USER3> >I've gone through my Freeciv spurts over the years

Is it still really, really hard unless you use the "one true strategy"?

<comment><USER4> I used to love playing Freeciv, but whenever I touched it in the last few years, I found that it has become ridiculously hard. It feels like after a few rounds the other civilizations are already building King Richard's Crusade or whatever about 1000 BC, and a few rounds after that they get upset for no diplomatic reason, declare war, and wipe you off the map.

I'm sure some people like the challenge, but when I play games I do like to get a chance at winning :-)

So yes, it's really hard, which would be OK if there were settings that make it easier, but I for one can't find them.

<comment><USER5> I haven't played Freeciv in a while, but the AI only respects strength. Build lots of ranged units and a few mele units and a lot of mounted units to capture cities. AI is not smart enough to compete with a human player so they give it a lot of bonuses like more science points, etc. AI therefore cheats with rigged bonus points on dice rolls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Trying to play Freeciv I have this "what am I suppose to do in this game" feeling. Not everyone has grown up with this kind of game and there´s no real onboarding. It's a bit sad because I'm sure I might enjoy it

<comment><USER7> To be honest, that is how the original civilization games feel like. Very sparse and unfriendly onboarding.

<comment><USER8> Civ2 at least had a tutorial game (explained in the paper manual!) and auto "help" ("this looks like a good place to build a city"). The game is pretty hard until you get the hang of it, especially in the version where the AI hates humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its almost like the game has become _watching the devs keep making the game_ , and to be honest that part seems much more interesting and fun then trying the learn and play the thing.

Long ago I lost the ability to find mindless enjoyment, what I look for in games, in management-type sims such as this. They stress me out too much with the endless options and tweakings.

<comment><USER10> I played through all civ's. This is probably a game that ate most of my gaming time. And i think it's because of the same thing as for you, that you are building a most efficient system for your goal. Recently i discovered "Factorio" and i think it will take over the civ for me. And steel even more of my time :(

Edit: be warned, it's really addictive...

<comment><USER9> Hey it looks pretty awesome...thanks for the heads up I'll give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The invariant of Civ games is that they need to create an immersive experience related to the historic period you are in and around each civilization.

Commercial Civ games achieve this using a combination of graphics, music and sound effects. So I think the challenge for FreeCiv is that, is to become more immersive in this way.

e.g: In commercial games you have accompanying music, you have sound effects and unit sounds for each language, each period looks very distinctive from each other.

But don't get me wrong though, I think it is a fantastic project, and have had fun playing it over the years. Same with FreeCol.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, I thought it didn't look that impressive and judged by late 2016 but it's already looking far better/mature and suited for actual gaming. Some traction there! :)</comment>


The Strobe Team is Moving to Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://blog.strobecorp.com/?p=304

<comment><USER2> Any thoughts on what this means for SproutCore?</comment>


Facebook Saves All the Stuff You Type, Even If You Never Post It - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-saves-everything-2013-12

<comment><USER2> This article and title are super misleading—the title appears to be a flat-out lie, in fact. It spends five paragraphs ranting about the issue until it finally concedes:

> "...Das and Kramer claim to only send back information to Facebook that > indicates whether you self-censored, not what you typed. The Facebook rep I > spoke with agreed that the company isn't collecting the text of self- > censored posts."

In any case, the fact that Facebook is, or wants to be, slopping up every ounce of data about its users is no surprise.

EDIT: Viewing the actual study[1], it appears this article is _even more_ fluffy. This "self-censorship" feature appears to only have been in place for a small segment of users for 17 days:

> "We collected data from 3.9 million users over 17 days and associate self- > censorship behavior with features describing users, their social graph, and > the interactions between them." [1]

Yikes, Business Insider. Come on.

[1]: [http://sauvik.me/system/papers/pdfs/000/000/004/original/sel...](http://sauvik.me/system/papers/pdfs/000/000/004/original/self- censorship_on_facebook_cameraready.pdf?1369713003)</comment>


Flourish: A developer-friendly PHP library - <AUTHOR> http://flourishlib.com

<comment><USER2> This looks really useful. It's nice to see libraries that try to do just a few things really well without taking over everything else.

I have a couple minor quibbles about the crypto though (although, IANAC so take this with a grain of salt):

In your symmetric encryption routine, you include an HMAC of the encrypted IV and the ciphertext by computing HMAC_k($encrypted_iv . $ciphertext). This is problematic because an attacker can shift data from the end of the IV to the beginning of ciphertext without being caught immediately. Presumably it will garble the message in a way that will be noticed, but that's not a great assumption to make. At the very least it lets the attacker cause the script to spew warnings by passing an empty IV.

Using Triple-DES to encrypt an IV for AES also strikes me as a little weird. If you include the IV in an HMAC, you don't gain anything by encrypting it (since the entire point of encrypting the IV is to prevent someone from modifying it in transit).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to check it out, it is encouraging to see positive and constructive feedback.

I'll be sure to change the hmac to use a separator for the iv and ciphertext, that's a subtle vulnerability that you articulated well.

I think you are also correct about encrypting the iv being worthless. Thinking back to when I wrote this, I believe that I originally added the encryption for that purpose exactly, to prevent modification during transmission. I later added the hmac to prevent modification of the ciphertex, but I ended up adding the iv in there too. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a PHP 5 library I've been developing over the past year and a half. It's not an MVC framework, but rather a modular collection of classes to help with common PHP usage patterns and security. More like the Zend Framework than something like Cake, but at the same time simpler and lighter-weight than Zend.

I've spent a good amount of time on documentation and trying to make the code and the site as usable as possible. I'm looking forward to getting some feedback!

<comment><USER3> At first glance, it looks really useful. And great job on the documentation. I know from experience taking a passion project and turning it into something other people can easily utilize is a lot of work. Thank you for making the effort and taking the time to share it with us!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love it. Don't get discouraged by the lack of comments here! I'll be giving it a shot next time I need to do a small marketing site. Looks like it'll cut my hours sharply.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks awesome!

Glancing at the documentation I can tell it will easily solve a lot of the reoccurring issues I usually deal with on small projects. I'm definitely going to give it a try.

Thanks!</comment>


How are Google adwords affordable? - <AUTHOR>

Most of the keywords i've seen on the keywords tool are priced at around $1-2 per click.  If a decent conversion rate is .5-1% then each conversion is costing $100-200.  Since all of the products I've been researching are well under $100 (more like $20-30) how is it that companies can afford this advertising? <comment><USER2> First the keyword tool pricing is just an estimate and many times the actual cost of the click is way less.

Second, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. So if your ad is shown 1000 times and you have a 1% clickthrough (very high percentage) that would only be 10 clicks. Assuming you are paying a $1 a click that is only $10.

With that said, while an Adwords campaign can be setup and left alone, you will find yourself spending more than you hoped if you do not continuously monitor and adjust. Your results and conversions will be much better with long-tail keywords too. For example if you were to select the keyword "web design" you are most likely going to spend more than if you were to select "$YourState web design" or something like that.

There is an art and science to running an Adwords campaign and sadly it does take a little money to get it just right. It also takes time. But if you monitor and adjust accordingly, over time you will find that you are paying less and less for each conversion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, The long tail keywords is something i'll definitely try out.

I was originally referring to my site's conversion rate. About .5% of visitors buy my product for $25.

<comment><USER2> Taking any fraudulent clicks from Google out of the equation, you can generally assume that everyone that clicks on your ad is a "qualified" lead. They are interested in your product or service because they searched for it. You may also want to do some A/B testing with your site as well, including adjusting pricing. You may find that you can increase your conversion rate dramatically and spend less on your Adwords campaign.</comment></comment></comment>


Poll: Why Are There So Few YC iPhone Stories Today? - <AUTHOR>

My friends and I are very excited about it - are people ambivalent, or busy downloading the SDK and writing apps? <comment><USER2> Started the app last week, downloaded the SDK yesterday, commented on one iPhone SDK article on Hacker News.

I think maybe everything that needs saying has been said. It is an early beta, it lets you do a lot of things very easily, it won't let you do somethings, and you contractually agree not to do somethings which are technically possible.

Now get out there and create some value.</comment>


Interview with Alan Kay - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442

<comment><USER2> What an interesting read.

I'm glad there are incredibly smart people like him challenging the programming status quo.

My favorite quote:

"I always do, not just dynamic stuff when I give a talk, but I do stuff that I'm interacting with on-the-fly. Because that is what the computer is for. People who don't do that either don't understand that or don't respect it."

We have major issues with creating "dumb" and "dead" programs and systems.</comment>


Ask HN:Who else is getting Repository unavailable on all Bitbucket repositories? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> They have updates on their status page, but down for me as well - [https://status.bitbucket.org/](https://status.bitbucket.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It appears this is still not fully resolved per their status page, but at least for one of my team's repos, we're now able to access it via the Bitbucket site (and view PRs, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER4> god I'm glad I'm not the only one I was starting to panic and I came here just to see if I was the only one... I was about to push to prod but I guess i'll have to delay

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope that bitbucket will not rollback as last time gitlab did. Fortunately last time I had just toy projects in gitlab.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm still getting the same even though the status page indicates all repos are back.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has been down since about noon UTC.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's up again! (Y)

</comment><comment><USER8> me too, panicking

</comment><comment><USER9> I had several deleted files after the clusterfuck, I am sure I didn't drink so much to delete them</comment>


Google threatens to delist Chrome extensions installed by deceptive tactics - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-threatens-to-delist-chrome-extensions-installed-by-deceptive-tactics/ <comment><USER2> Could this be a way for them to get rid of ad blockers? I recall ad nauseum getting temporarily delisted for not having a concise enough description</comment>


The Rise of the "Game Mechanic in a Box" - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_rise_of_the_game_mechanic_in_a_box.php

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the basic service we are building right now. The interesting part for me was the revenue model the author mentioned, where the whole thing is paid for by advertisers. We have currently been exploring primarily driving revenue by charging the site owners.

I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about the approach of using it as a extended ad model.</comment>


Kubernetes 1.1 Performance upgrades, improved tooling and a growing community - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kubernetes.io/2015/11/Kubernetes-1-1-Performance-upgrades-improved-tooling-and-a-growing-community.html <comment><USER2> In case anyone from GKE is around -

Is there a timeline for 1.1 availability on GKE?

Does this address some of the reliability issues with "unable to open ssh tunnel" or "no kube-ui running"?

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

We don't have a specific release date on GKE being on 1.1, but it should be on the order of weeks.

Can you say more about the two issues you're referring to? Kube-UI doesn't run by default, and ssh tunnels should run fine, what are you seeing?

<comment><USER2> Sure thing,

Kube-UI runs when a new cluster starts but I've seen this pop up on some of my clusters,

"no endpoints available for "kube-ui" "Error: 'empty tunnel list.'"

And kubectl status return all the running pods with "GeneralError"

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! Have you by any chance submitted these to GitHub or Stackoverflow? Our community tries to be really responsive there - I would have submitted for you, but I couldn't detail through the debugging steps you have gone through. Please let me know if you need any more help!

<comment><USER2> Np. I do have support cases open with GCP support, they pointed me to some open issues on GitHub; I'll follow up on the cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations to the Kubernetes team! That blog post read like a wish list come true (Ingress: swoon). I can't wait to kick the tires on the new release.

</comment><comment><USER5> If anybody is interested in working on a k8s based data science platform, drop me a line email@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER6> Implressed: "Kubernetese running thousand node clusters, and running over a million QPS against a single cluster"!</comment>


The boring front-end developer (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://adamsilver.io/articles/the-boring-front-end-developer/ <comment><USER2> Yes, 100% this. I've been trying to articulate the annoyance I have with modern front-end development and this hits the nail on the head.

Does anyone know SF companies that take this attitude? I've been interviewing all over at startups and large companies but I always feel misaligned when discussing front-end tradeoffs. I'm in the process of realigning my career away from full-stack dev nowadays because the state of frontend dev is so horrendous in my opinion. But I'd rather just work somewhere that isn't trying to turn every little thing into an SPA.

<comment><USER3> Why not find a project somewhere that truly calls for an SPA? Those are the fun ones.

<comment><USER4> Because those are almost non-existent. There are many web-apps that need a fair bit of interactivity but a full SPA is overkill. I'm thinking things like JIRA where the interactivity of the kanban board is good but most of the time I'll just middle click to open a task in a new tab anyway, being a full SPA is a net negative. Most of the rest deserve to be a real desktop and/or mobile app.

SPA's aside web dev hasn't changed much in a decade, it's just been framework churn.

<comment><USER3> I've spent most of the last decade working on data-intensive web applications which definitely deserve to be SPAs. There's lots of opportunity, especially if you're willing to move away from the "retail" public-facing web.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by data intensive? I'm thinking something that looks like a bloomberg terminal, complex tabular data or complex visualizations. Those are cases that should never be a web app at all, even with recent improvements HTML is a document format and horribly suited to those use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 2014, when this was originally written, I'd totally agree - but it was 4.5 years ago and a lot of things have changed in the meantime. At the moment I'm dealing with one jQuery old-school project and while on one hand it's really a nice feeling to debug code without constantly waiting for webpack to finish compiling the code, most of the time I'm really in pain. After years of working in Vue and React it just feels ugly and messy and it's much more complicated to understand and refactor. To quote on one of my fav Stephen King's books "the world has moved on" since then...

<comment><USER6> There's not much meat here to the assertion that it is easier to develop and use.

<comment><USER7> It's been probably 2 years since I've seen a front-end dev listing that doesn't list experience with a SPA framework as mandatory. I'm not going to question that hybrid and traditional apps exist in the wild. I maintain some myself. That being said, I think it's pretty clear that at the very least the world is moving on. We are asking for more out of the web than what it was designed for, and it's difficult to meet the expectations of modern users without modern tooling.

By way of example, I do a lot of freelancing and have quite a lot of clients that I think would be better served by a traditional web app (much faster to develop, though not nearly as rich interactions dollar for dollar. Also a lower infra bill generally.) Many of them refuse though because they've been conditioned to expect the kinds of features that SPA's provide.

I write a lot of business automation sorts of apps for SMBs. Something I see requested a lot is wizard style workflows (on a web app.) This is trivial in a SPA and a major annoyance at best in the context of a traditional app framework. I totally agree that the world might not have moved on yet, but I think it's pretty clear which way the wind is blowing. Users are expecting rich SPA interactions as the new normal.

<comment><USER6> Sorry I miswrote. I recognize the mindshare shift, but not entirely convinced on the makes dev easier part.

<comment><USER7> I didn't mean to say that SPAs were easier at all. They're not. I think they're under most circumstances much harder than traditional webapps. That being said, my experience is that users and in my case clients are starting to expect SPA features and it's harder to try and coax extensive SPA functionality out of a traditional web app than it is to just write a SPA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the Indie Hackers community and mission of the site, but I can't understand why on earth the site is so JavaScript heavy.

Almost everything on that site could be server side and there is no need for a loading screen that takes 2+ seconds to load!

Again, love what they've done, love the community, don't understand the tech choice.

[https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com)

Edit: I think javascript and dynamic stuff is great to use where it really speeds things up like a comment popup etc. I think of it like seasoning. Use it sparingly to make a site really great in the places that a full page reload would be a bad experience.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, in my ETL work we call things like this bugs. I've never understood why this is acceptable on the front-end. Users seem to have been conditioned over the years that it's just "slow internet" I think and are willing to wait for an app to load

<comment><USER8> Yeah. And how much code has to load?

Given that I can get 100k image in a few seconds!!! Ie Why would it ever need more than 100k JS after compression and thus < 1s to load?

Even if it is a big size why not cache and be instant on load?

If the answer is it needs to use Ajax to load data after loading the js, then why not include that data on initial load?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> this is my definition of a boring programmer:

\- makes code that works

\- solves people's problems

\- doesn't care what other programmers think

edit: the truth is a boring programmer won't even read this, just doesn't care, doesn't read hn, just does stuff

<comment><USER11> If the code only works but isn't maintainable (simple and extendable), then you've got a very interesting programmer, just havn't realized it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9879172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9879172)

This should also have a 2014 in the title.

<comment><USER13> Added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone that has been developing fe code in the past few years felt that the pace of change has been overwhelming? I think weve finally settled down on a few tried and true frameworks for frontend development.

<comment><USER15> I'm working on something new and and the whole frontend ecosystem makes me nervous. The last time I did any kind of production-level frontend work was 2004.

It feels like I woke from a coma and am trying to adjust to a new kind of world with flying cars except they don't really fly.

I mean, I feel insecure for writing CSS by hand, not using webpack/roll-up or a whole frontend build flow. I do like Mithril.js and Svelte though so perhaps I'll start using bits of that in my new project.

<comment><USER6> The important part is shipping, not what tools you use. Facebook and many others were started in PHP. That said I still lint my code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> But some of us do work on front-end applications where even modern frameworks are scrutinized. I've started to dream of a maintainable application with no runtime on top of the browser itself (no vDOM)

IMO frameworks nowadays don't give you much more than a rope to hang yourself with, it's up to developers to recognize this. But some applications do need these patterns in order to build front-end applications with dozens of developers on the same team. The unfortunate reality is that too many people think they need use the same tech for a landing page; and too few people with front-end skills seem capable of profiling (in Chrome! nevermind trying to figure out where your GC pressure is coming from in IE11)

But this article is pretty boring. I can think of some concerns that the applications I work on need solved:

* Maintainable (TypeScript helps a ton with this)

* Stylizable/Themable (emotion/JSS, etc.; pick your poison)

* Reusable (presentational components in React; I imagine Vue could work for us as well)

* Asynchronous, reacting to events from user input/websocket/timers/local+remote storage appropriately

* Accessible via keyboard

<comment><USER17> > I've started to dream of a maintainable application with no runtime on top > of the browser itself (no vDOM)

I believe the answer is Svelte.

<comment><USER16> I am currently looking into it :) So far the theming does not appear to be fleshed out; I'm about to compare some performance metrics with some of our animated components. I'm also not sure what the state management solution looks like, but I only spent a couple of hours setting up today

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also: the boring front-end developer recognizes that large single-page apps can have significant front-end performance issues, which is why so many "modern" web apps are unbearably slow & memory-intensive.

</comment><comment><USER19> I so tired of the excess tooling and incompetent reliance upon it. You don't need layers of frameworks and 150mb of dependencies to build a tiny web app. Without all the helpful bullshit in the way I can get the job done 10x faster. The excess nonsense isn't there to help clueless users. It's there to prop up clueless developers.

When I start interviewing next month I am going to dive into this immediately and if I don't like the answer I am walking out. Interview over. They can hire somebody else to write tiny react modules.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate these kinds of posts. It's all useless to talk about unless you talk about _what_ you're trying to build. Not everything that runs in a browser is cut from the same cloth. My job would be miserable without a UI framework, it's a trade-off I've consciously made. I've lived through PHP and Ruby and jQuery/Backbone/Knockout/Closure and my current stack (React + TypeScript) is the only thing that makes my job actually enjoyable. The most important skill is to be able to identify when and where building an SPA is a good idea (hint: it's not your blog or your company's home page). If you really do need an SPA, great, pick a UI framework and a few preprocessors/transpilers and get hacking. If not, also great, just use server-side templates and jQuery. Whatever way you go just remember to leave the zealotry at home.

</comment><comment><USER20> Heh, I just built my new blog with zero client side scripting. It's so fast (shameful plug: [http://blog.winricklabs.com/](http://blog.winricklabs.com/))

No real content yet, but there will be regular content about my side projects.

</comment><comment><USER21> This seems like an appropriate time to invoke [http://boringtechnology.club/](http://boringtechnology.club/) \-- more thoughts on why to avoid the flavor of the month when you're trying to build useful software that doesn't _need_ dependencies on shiny new stuff.

<comment><USER22> Of course, once everyone does this, tech innovation grinds to a halt and we end up using the suboptimal tools we have forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where I work, we're still using jQuery. Why? It works and everyone on the team understands it, even the backend guy who hates doing UI stuff. We looked at React and Vue, and they're great, but it would be a nightmare to get everyone on the same page and wouldn't solve the problem of keeping our front end lightweight.

<comment><USER24> You would be surprised. After a couple tutorials I imagine, at the very least, your backend developer will thank you. That's been the biggest migration in the react world -- backend developers to the frontend, because the frontend suddenly "makes sense" due to it being declarative and predictable, rather than imperative.

As far as lightweight goes, jquery is much heavier than Preact, a React clone designed to be lightweight. Only 16kb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> ok since I worked at a place last year where compile times were hurting things I can understand that part but in general I have to say really bad decisions need to be made for compile time to even be noticeable.

<comment><USER26> I'm working on a 1.6Ghz CPU and compile times are a frustrating several seconds.

<comment><USER25> The place where I was working was pretty big and had probably 10 big teams handling different parts of their site, to compile your project you compiled the whole site. Furthermore it did stuff like compiled images every time although image assets were hardly ever added. Compile times at times could be in the minutes. Not to mention that their gulp file was badly written.

A redesign of the whole compilation process was undertaken - assets that were global were compiled through a different process and you pulled the precompiled results, assets that were hardly ever touched in the normal development flow were not automatically compiled instead you had to call the process to compile them, only paths or asset types that had been changed were compiled - thus if no sass files had been touched no style compilation happened, and finally you no longer had to compile everybody's subsection of the site only your own. Compile time was generally less than a second for our part of the site on my machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Damn I am a cool front-end developer and that's not a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER28> That was a very boring article.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I don't think we really need a hundred Modern Frontend Bad articles every week

<comment><USER14> We have 3. React, angular, and vue. Angular isnt even recommended anymore so its really only react and vue.

I dont think there has been much change in the javascript world in the last few years that hasnt been strictly beneficial. The biggest paradigm shift is probably the widespread use of typing on the frontend with typescript and flow.

<comment><USER30> Job boards seem to have (a lot) more Angular than Vue work posted: [https://medium.com/zerotomastery/tech-trends-showdown- react-...](https://medium.com/zerotomastery/tech-trends-showdown-react-vs- angular-vs-vue-61ffaf1d8706)

<comment><USER14> I am not suggesting that vue is in more widespread use than angular. People are reading too much into my comment.

<comment><USER30> Ok. What did you mean by _" isn't even recommended anymore?"_

<comment><USER14> That the default recommendation is react not angular

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> loll

</comment><comment><USER31> The boring front-end developer is trying to build for the web, not trying to build shitty "apps" that just happen to run in the browser.</comment>


How Obama's BlackBerry got secured - <AUTHOR> http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-obamas-blackberry-got-secured.html <comment><USER2> [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1JZg_2laiQo/UWjEB7NNODI/AAAAAAAAAL...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1JZg_2laiQo/UWjEB7NNODI/AAAAAAAAALA/gU4-tSSuCfI/s320/obama_phone_20081201.jpg) shows him using a Nokia E61 (or E62), actually.

[http://www.backbonemag.com/files/Images/novtek5.JPG](http://www.backbonemag.com/files/Images/novtek5.JPG)

</comment><comment><USER3> That US presidents are willing to completely give up email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) seems pretty shady. I could see if they were mob bosses running a criminal organization but "public servants" \- really?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability)

<comment><USER4> Not one tech company in the world publishes all (or really, any) of the work emails of their executives, and that's exactly what the records act does to the President.

<comment><USER3> Access to presidential records is actually quite restricted including a 12 year delay in most cases[1]. I think the article is incorrect that a FOIA request could force the president to produce an email.

And unlike tech execs and anyone else the president is not subject to search warrants or subpoenas in many cases due to "executive privilege"[2].

The PRISM program, which captures a huge fraction of world email traffic, is "the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief" according to the NSA[3]. Reading other people's email on a regular basis probably makes you cautious about your own email habits rather than being worried about FOIA requests you can probably ignore.

Despite all of these protections our presidents still feel they have to take the extraordinary step of not using email at all. Very shady.

[1] [http://www.archives.gov/about/laws/presidential- records.html](http://www.archives.gov/about/laws/presidential-records.html)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_privilege](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_privilege)

[3] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us- intelligence...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence- mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret- program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story_1.html)

<comment><USER5> I think the logic goes along the lines of "better safe than sorry". They can make do fine without email, they have really smart people with good memories that can make this all happen in non-record-producing conversations, so why create the paper trail?

It doesn't even mean they're being shady, I mean they are, but 99% of the time we're talking about routine conversation. What if you had a bunch of people trying to do a hatchet job on you, ready to take any sentence out of context and leak it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > This would mean the White House Communications Agency has to carry such a > secure base station wherever the president goes.

If they're already doing _that_ , the rest of this seems a bit silly. Why bother with a cellular-modem connection at all, if you're just going to route it (presumably using a 4G picocell) back out over IP? I can understand the custom encryption, but you can do that just as effectively over wi-fi.

<comment><USER7> because cellular data connection was written in the approved requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Incredible how the whole thing just shout inefficiency and huge price tags all over the place.

What is wrong with securing the device with a VPN or something and then using the same services that the entire government already use on desktops?

<comment><USER8> You don't want to use the same VPN everyone else is using. You don't want to take critical security updates, because you need to have CIA analysts do a thorough source code audit of any software provided by untrusted parties. This isn't tin foil hat stuff either - it's entirely likely that if the president used off-the-shelf VPN software that a foreign government would get an operative into Cisco or wherever and slip a backdoor in.

So either you convince Cisco that they need to fire any non-US nationals involved in packaging/bugfixes/security and have everyone submit to security screening, or you build your own.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why so much weight is given to the difference between US and non-US nationals. And in my experience, it's pretty common to see the US assign a pretty high amount of trust by default to US citizens.

For example, a few months ago I visited a friend there, and I got to tour the SpaceX factory. Since I'm foreign, he had to jump through some hoops and there were parts of it the factory that were off-bounds for me.

I know there are very tight controls on space-related industries and I can understand the no-pictures policy, but I don't know why it makes such a big difference whether I was born elsewhere.

<comment><USER10> Because you are a foreigner. My government has done horrible things to many people in many countries. They are afraid of blowback.

In all honesty, if you are an intellectual, go elsewhere than the US. We're slowly turning technological backwater because we do not cater to smart people who were born in (gasp) other countries.

As for me, I'm stuck here, due to family ties and money. I wish you the best, wherever you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Basically they asked the NSA which knew how to tap the blackberrys and other mobile devices of 35+ other world leaders.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thank you so much Blackberry team. I was waiting this app. It is really great user friendly and smooth.

<comment><USER13> Please post the following comment on the new BlackBerry Messenger Android APP. Thank you so much black berry team

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't it funny that Obama uses a Canadian phone?

<comment><USER15> I hope that they put a backdoor in it so that they can learn about European secrets...

<comment><USER14> And since the parts of todays phones are usually manufactured in China, the Chinese officials should be informed very well too. Since the Russians seem not to be a part of the chain, it seems to be obvious, why they need Snowden. :)

<comment><USER16> seems that everybody has opportunity to plant datacollecting backdoor somewhere along digital data road. Android/iOS/Windows, intercontinental data cables, PC/phone manufacturer firmwares, asian chip foundries and harddrive makers, wifi routers, cellular stations, USB flash producers, etc. Everything from data storage to network equipment has some kind of arm-controller with megabytes of RAM. enough for logging and calling home. Surprisingly, this makes all major countries happy rather than disappointed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some parts of the UK Government (principally the Foreign Office) use an OS called Firecrest for their secure systems. As I understand it Firecrest is built on a fork of Windows Vista

<comment><USER18> In this Foreign Office memo [1] from April 2006 "Firecrest is the FCO's IT infrastructure; it sits on the desks of our staff around the world. Firecrest is a globally-networked desktop system that provides users with a standard suite of Microsoft office products including Outlook email, web browsing, Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. Firecrest was developed in 1997 and in 2003 the FCO completed the roll out of the current generation of the system."

Whilst the timing is slightly out (Vista wasn't released to the public until 2007?) it may be possible that Microsoft provided them with a version forked from a much earlier build.

However, the memo does go on to say that the Government were planning a third generation of Firecrest due to be rolled out autumn 2006 with support from HP. This might be the version that is forked from Vista?

[1] [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/c...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmpubacc/813/6011209.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All this because he couldn't give up his blackberry. SPOILED!

</comment><comment><USER20> What, they didn't use WordPress?

<comment><USER21> They were too busy using Drupal.</comment></comment>