Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams - <AUTHOR> https://www.droptask.com/

<comment><USER3> Have to admit - from the video and a five minute play I find it very hard to imagine using this for anything.

The information density is very low. Doesn't seem to allow you to easily order tasks beyond dates. Lousy on phones. I could go on.

List aren't boring... there useful. I don't go to my project management software to be entertained - I go there to get shit done ;-)

What I want to know when I go to project management software is what everybody is doing now and what needs to be done next and by whom. This interface seems to hinder not help with that.

<comment><USER4> The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload.

When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything _looks_ the same and _feels_ the same, everything becomes the same importance. And when you have 1000 items of the same importance, _nothing_ is important. This is a design paradigm used on information. I think it works well to describe the problem.

There's no list structure that yet exists that solves this problem. Nothing that brings your list of 1000+ things into a manageable analogue of what is actually important for you to see and do at any given time, in any given context.

I don't think this is it, but it's getting closer. And "lists" are still not sufficient. We can do better.

<comment><USER5> I'm no programmer but I suddenly thought of a possible solution - <USER2> sizing. Depending on the importance, the first few words of the task would appear bigger or smaller appropriately. I'm sure this would work great on the desktop but I have no idea how good this can be designed to appear on a mobile phone screen (3.5-4.5inches).

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'm thinking along those lines. I have a product idea for solving this problem... just no time. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's certainly "prettier" than Trello, but I'm not sure how functional it would actual be in a real world scenario. There's no functional benefit as far as I can see to putting things in fancy-looking circles, and (I'm imagining) the usability of that interface is severely diminished as you start to get a large number of items in any particular category.

A great example of how great UI doesn't necessarily equate to great UX, in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> The circles actually seems to reduce value because there is no intuitive order to each group. In some (many?) use cases for Trello, priority is important.

One thing that the circle metaphor does add is nested groups, which I can see being important for a different set of use cases.

<comment><USER8> Video wouldn't load for me, but I gather that priority is indicated by the size of the circle?

That said, I tend to agree. Trello works at least in part because it's immediately intuitive to anyone who's ever made a "to-do" list or used cards- on-a-whiteboard to manage a project.

The Droplist approach is a cool idea though, and for some things it might be better.

<comment><USER7> I played with it a bit and unless I missed something, the size of the circle is only related to how many other circles are inside it.

<comment><USER9> > I played with it a bit and unless I missed something, the size of the circle > is only related to how many other circles are inside it.

This is true - the group (used to categorize task circles) grows to fit the content. We did play with allowing task circles to be resized to show priority/effort, etc, but couldn't get it to work well. We may revisit it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this could be a great addition to the normal list view. Different people process things better or worse with pictures vs lists vs charts,etc.

I think this could be a great tool for planning or just looking at a snapshot of your day, developer, project, etc.But in order to be a full fledged issue tracker, you need to be able to filter, report,pivot,etc.

Just my two cents.I think it looks great and is promising.

</comment><comment><USER11> Trello really excels as a smartphone app. It is especially clean and functional in that setting. This approach, while pretty in the browser, probably couldn't function on a smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's the coolest web app demo video I've seen, possibly ever! Looking forward to trying it. I actually visualize tasks as bubbles or blobs in my head, so this should be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks useful, beside looking prettier because it gives you a quick overview of everything and lets you zoom in/out on the specific activities, it feels more productive, the only thing that is non apparent is how dependent or subsequent tasks may be clearly visualized with this approach in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like it. It lets me see all the items at a higher level. The best part so far is that I can move groups into one another.

Using it quickly makes me want a couple of features:

\- not needing drag n drop for something (like creating a new task or group - be default putting them in the previous group or top level)

\- being able to add tasks that are at the intersection of two groups. I imagine this would look something like a venn-diagram.

Finally, I am reluctant to support a startup unless I know how you are planning to survive. Is it going to be advertisement? not yet release feature? large teams? Once you do this, I will be more comfortable telling others.

<comment><USER15> From FAQ:

       Is DropTask really free?
       Yes! In the future we plan to offer paid-for business
       accounts and premium individual accounts
       (each with additional features), however the basic
       version of DropTask will remain free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like this concept, and I think it can be improved through some more experimenting with the UI.

Here's my feedback: from an interface perspective a visual process for organizing tasks is very appealing. But things weren't as intuitive as Trello. For example: clicking a task didn't let me edit its name; it brought up a window. Clicking "new task" was my first step, when really, I have a list of groups I want to create (like in Trello)

Speed is really crucial for me in using a system like this.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your comments. Some kind of 'quick-add' for tasks and groups is definitely something we are considering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This might be a bug, or not. If I have 2 groups with different colors and put one inside the other, the inner group changes color. Did not expect this behavior.

<comment><USER9> > This might be a bug, or not. If I have 2 groups with different colors and > put one inside the other, the inner group changes color. Did not expect this > behavior.

This is by design - we simply could not get the visuals to look at all decent with mixed colours for nested groups. The idea is that the one colour applies for the entire category.

<comment><USER17> Ok, that's fine!

Thanks for the clearification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Be careful to not get caught up in making something too pretty. It might help get some initial sign ups, but people will leave quickly if the app is not useful.

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks like a great alternative to Trello. I'd also add the option to have bullseye nested circles to indicate priority. Typically there are fewer high priority items than low, and this metaphor should support that use case. It also helps coax the user that attending to high priority tasks is like hitting a bullseye.

</comment><comment><USER20> It looks really good, and seems very simple and intuitive. You should add Polls or ramifications or both. Imagine if there are 3 options to make a task. You should be able to show those three options, and let the people vote on the one that should be made. Just a thought. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just one thing:

make your modals close on the click action for the actual close button on the modal. Right now, you can dismiss the "edit task" modal by clicking outside of it. This causes you to lose any work done inside said modal via misclick.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for this. I personally like just clicking off to dismiss the modal, but admittedly if we keep this we need to be a bit cleverer in terms of not just losing the changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't really like curved text, that is just hard to read.

While more such project management tools are undoubtedly a good thing, I'd much prefer to have one I can host myself for corporate use (for security/confidentiality/hacking on it).

</comment><comment><USER23> This is nice but miss a way to order tasks and groups (using priority for example). Would be also nice to relate groups to each others with a link (arrow something) to organise your project diagram. Finally the print doesn't work. If you cannot print to provide an overview of all the tasks of the project then this tool is less useful for me as I would like to bring my task split to a meeting room without an internet connection for example. It would be nice to print only a sub selection as well (only the selected groups). Anyway I like the zoom an unzoom functionality that provide a quick way to have an overview of the tasks.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm going to try this for a while since it was easy to start using it with my Google apps domain. Within the first few minutes it has become clear that I need a way to convert a task into a group. I find myself wanting to express task dependencies by dragging things into each other but I can't drag a task onto another task. Annoying.

Edit: Also, a visual indicator of task progress, or more intermediate states (blocked, started, in progress, etc) would be helpful too.

Edit 2: And I've hit an arbitrary three project limit. So much for dumping my task list into this thing. Evaluation concluded.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is visually very interesting. You can tell that there is a lot of care being put into the transitions and all. It's a pretty competitive market out there in terms of "to do lists". With a good UI, it gives you a fighting chance. Sure it might not be for everyone, but that's the point. Segment the market and fight for your share.

How did you find backbone and D3. Do they play well together in terms of overall code maintainability? What worked and what didn't?

</comment><comment><USER26> Does it have dependencies? Team management can't work, in my opinion, if you have a task named "fold shirts" but it appears and is assigned before somebody "buys shirts".

<comment><USER9> > Does it have dependencies?

Not as yet, but this is an early release of the product and we are aggressively adding new features and improvements. This is definitely something we are considering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would a directed graph metaphor add to this? If task circles could be linked in order of precedence, and project circles linked to show resource collaboration, the resulting diagram layout could be visually useful.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Dir...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Directed_acyclic_graph_3.svg/356px- Directed_acyclic_graph_3.svg.png)

</comment><comment><USER28> OK so I don't think I would say, replace Trello right now, but this is really neat service, well done.

I especially like how things are visual and how you can zoom in and out and see this as potentially very useful feature. I will continue to review it and use it.

Also, describing it as Trello killer, I think made us expect way too much of it. So this might not worked the way it was intended.

</comment><comment><USER29> So far it beats Trello on the one issue that bugs me most. When I complete something it actually goes away instead of sitting there forever.

</comment><comment><USER30> It would be interesting if there is a study that comprehensively measures if these pretty tools actually improves productivity in comparison to using simple text editors.

My guess is they don't. My guess is people might find them fancy and pretty initially but eventually recognize that they don't actually improve efficiency or effectiveness.

<comment><USER31> You probably also advocate using shared folders to collaborate on code development too? Those darn kids and their 'innovations' ...

<comment><USER30> Make no mistake, I'm not against real innovations. For example, I've been using git and advocating for it, while many of my peers are still with older CVS systems.

The point is if you masquerade a solution to a non-problem with pretty things, it just wastes everyone's time and energy.

Like I said, it would be interesting if there is a study to find out if any of these pretty task management tools actually increases productivity.

<comment><USER31> Did you wait for a study before you switched to git? Or did you simply start using it cause it made sense?

Let's be realistic here ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's a cool looking alternative. But functionally I know it doesn't really meet my needs. The circles make the calendar view somewhat confusing to look at and I'm not a big fan of not being able to look at my tasks in order that they have to be completed within an individual group.

Cool idea just not very useful for me personally.

</comment><comment><USER33> I like everything except the circles and how I had to drag drop before I can create a task. Droptask should also make a card wall layout and make the circles optional. The circles layout is too polarizing an interface to be the "muse".

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow. It's SO beautiful! And I love the care you took to show me how to use it.

I have no idea if I'll continue use it on a daily basis (Trello for now), but it's fun, and pretty.

Well done, and thank you!

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your comments - much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This looks like a headache to work with. Wasn't a fan and didnt have enough value to try and test out. Will keep on radar but doesnt look promising or a decent replacement to trello

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting tool though right now in our company we use Symphonical.com a lot as it is well integrated with Google+ Hangout and has useful templates to organize and share tasks.

</comment><comment><USER37> Impressive. It's nice to see alternatives out there.

</comment><comment><USER17> What's the stack behind this? Very nice by the way!

<comment><USER9> > What's the stack behind this? Very nice by the way!

The entire app is written in CoffeScript - we're using Node.js on the backend and the front is mainly SVG/D3.js/Backbone.js.

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Will there ever be time tracking? That's one feature I really wish Trello had by default.

<comment><USER9> > Will there ever be time tracking? That's one feature I really wish Trello > had by default.

We are currently considering all feature requests and this is one I've heard a few times. As such, it is definitely something we will consider!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Nice UI! I will give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER40> Boring round lists of tasks.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is their a twitter bootstrap style thing for web apps? Something to make the layout and buttons easier to get just right?

<comment><USER6> Um, isn't Twitter Bootstrap a "twitter bootstrap style thing for web apps"?</comment></comment>


Same as It Ever Was: Why the Techno-Optimists Are Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-06-16/same-it-ever-was?

<comment><USER2> Same as it ever was: articles with the PoV expressed in this headline inevitably have the following sentence, or one nearly identical to it: "Fourth, we may need to redistribute income and wealth on a large scale"

Only problem with this one is that you had to read a bunch of bloviation to get to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The arguments here are pretty well-considered, but I also disagree with almost all of them. The problem is that it is using measurements invented by those who rose to power through the industrial revolution to prove how it was more impactful than recent revolutions. It's as if the author were trying to prove how the first industrial revolution was a disappointment because it resulted in slower growth in worldwide feudalism.

The invention of broadcast television and radio increased instant access to information more than the Internet, but old media only allowed a few broadcasters. As more people gained access, fewer had a voice. This trend continues in recent times. In 2012, 6 companies controlled 90% of the American media, down from 50 in 1982. [http://read.bi/16Yhrsh](http://read.bi/16Yhrsh)

But as old media was consolidating, the Internet was diversifying. People upload 5 hours of video to YouTube every second, up from 1 hour per second in 2012. [http://bit.ly/1gMtN7t](http://bit.ly/1gMtN7t)

The Writers Guilds of America combined have around 25,000 members, but more than 1 billion people across the world use YouTube and can reach nearly any American. The top contributers are more popular with teenagers than mainstream celebrities. [http://bit.ly/1aEn1vb](http://bit.ly/1aEn1vb)

So which has more impact: distributing a single story to many people, or allowing more people to tell stories? The choice of what is measured determines the value of the measurement, and not just in media penetration.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm fascinated by this idea: " It would be possible, for example, for the state to obtain an automatic share of the income from the intellectual property it protects." Why shouldn't creators of IP pay for the protection they receive, beyond the relatively small filing fee they currently pay?

<comment><USER5> The constitution provides for the protection of intellectual property "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," not to extract money from it. Besides, financially successful inventions are already taxed in a variety of ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article does a reasonable job of describing why our current innovations are less significant than previous ones such as the internal combustion engine and so forth, but is much weaker on predictions for the future. To cherry pick: The author claims, without any support, that "Three-D Printing is a niche activity-- fun, but unlikely to revolutionize manufacturing." The reality here is that 3-D printing, by supporting rapid prototyping, is already revolutionizing the development of products. See for example [https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf0050/manufacturing/rapi...](https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf0050/manufacturing/rapid.htm)

<comment><USER7> Yes, but there's been no real singificant growth in the sector in the last ~2 years. See: DDD, SSYS, XONE, etc... All three companies are struggling very hard when the future was so bright. Yes, there are other companies, but these are the market leaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am convinced that people are dramatically underestimating the explosive progress that is going on in basic life science right now. Our ability to understand and manipulate biology is accelerating tremendously.

There is always a lag between the science and the applications, but I expect to live to see revolutions in medicine and biological engineering.

<comment><USER9> It may be more likely that we live to see the rise of Grey Goo.

<comment><USER8> I suspect that if it was easy to accidentally make Grey Goo evolution already would have done it. Or more accurately, evolution already did, and we are the Grey Goo's descendants.

<comment><USER10> Exactly: Any "successful" gray-too is going to require us to equip it with some novel techniques or biochemistry...

I'd worry much more about us leaking a trait that existing bacteria could transfer horizontally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was up a few days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9748195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9748195)</comment>


Jekyll Static Web Hosting – Deployment Pipeline on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://zoph.me/cloud/Jekyll-Pipeline-CBCD/ <comment><USER2> After I discovered Netlify, I'm kind of thinking "why bother". It's free, I just push to my repo and they take care of all the building/publishing/hosting/CDNs, and they're very responsive for support and have high availability. I'm a very happy customer (or rather leech, as I don't pay anything).

<comment><USER3> We use Netlify and find there are quite often (every few weeks) outages and caching issues.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is fair.

Checking my monitoring logs I have 26 minutes of downtime attributable to Netlify since 03 March 2017. That's about 99.994% uptime.

If I attribute every single outage. That is 43 minutes since 03 March 2017, though some of those were not Netlify errors, but even so, if we are uncharitable/inaccurate and attribute them to Netlify that works out to 99.98% uptime.

Not bad for a free service.

They're also very transparent about service issues:

[https://netlifystatus.com/](https://netlifystatus.com/)

And support is very responsive. I recently talked to them about deprecating TLS 1.0 and 1.1 for instance, or providing the option to force TLS 1.2 if users desired. They were quick to respond and helpful.

So if you are seeing unusual issues, get in touch with them, even if you're a free user they'll still talk to you.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > though some of those were not Netlify errors

For a static site, what else is there to break?

<comment><USER2> DNS outages, network outages, etc.

<comment><USER4> ...and user error :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a nightmare. I'm sure there are use cases for a setup like this, but this is not the system I'd like to maintain. I use Jekyll because of it's simplicity. I edit my site in my favorite text editor and rsync to shared hosting.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't agree more. I love tinkering around with things and building setups just to learn, but for something like a personal webpage I just want simple.

I use hugo and then setup my output folder (where the generated output goes) as a git repo. Generate the site -> git commit/push -> Caddy. Caddy has a feature to pull in content from a git repo so when you couple that with the built-in Let's Encrypt support it makes it dead simple.

<comment><USER7> I also use hugo. In my setup, though, I have everything in one git repo - config files, content files, theme, output, etc. Nginx exposes its output directory.

I stopped using Caddy when I discovered that it didn't support one of the unusual TLDs I had. Maybe I should give it another go, though. That was over a year ago.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean it didn't support a TLD? It's a server, how does it need to "support" TLDs? In my experience, you just specify the hostname and it works.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure. All I know is that when I had a domain name in there ending in ".space," the server ignored that config and served everything else.

I assumed it was because of the TLD, because everything else was otherwise identical to some of the other virtualhosts.

<comment><USER2> Huh, that's really odd. I wonder if it's a regex gone wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I deploy my websites on my own VPS at DigitalOcean, but with a simpler setup then the TFA.

I simply have a Travis-ci.org setup that does an "rsync" after "jekyll build". And in case I'm not in the mood for waiting on Travis, I simply "rsync" from my localhost after build.

Having an automated build system has advantages though - if you get a PR on your website repository with typos and so on, you just have to merge it and the content will get published, so you can do it over your phone. And yes, I had PRs, since I publish 2 project documentation websites this way.

Also folks, you don't need a CDN or Cloudflare, or any of that — you just need a healthy Nginx setup hosted at a decent VPS provider. I've had my websites withstand Reddit and HN level traffic just fine, paying $5 per month for hosting about 4 static websites, plus other stuff.

I also hate Medium, Blogger, Wordpress and any of that crap, I hate their bloat and trackers and I do think having your own website published in a Git repository is worth it. Yes, there is a cost in maintaining my websites, but I do so willingly, because they are _mine_.

PS: shameless plug — [https://alexn.org](https://alexn.org)

<comment><USER9> That's pretty much what I ended up doing as well, albeit with my own static site builder scripts. Each time I build my site[1], the deployment script is just a directory rsync. No mess, no fuss.

You are also right about not needing a CDN. My site has occasionally become momentarily popular and my $5 hosting VM hasn't even blinked on my completely static site. A database is a fine thing but you don't want to be serving web pages out of one. Thats why I finally ditched WordPress.

[1] [https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing](https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing) \- a complete waste of your time.

<comment><USER7> Your blog is acceptable to me.

More specifically, I like the dry humor and scattershot nature of the content. Reminds me of how the web used to be.

<comment><USER9> > Your blog is acceptable to me

That is literally the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my blog.

(Realistically I probably should have started different sites as my circumstances/interests changed, but it's my blog and I'll do what I want)

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah? Well I really like your board games series!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool! I could see why this would work well for teams and collaboration. Here's my hugo+aws pipeline for my personal blog.

Do editing, with hugo in server mode so I can WYSIWYG edit my pages. Then run a bash script:

       #!/bin/bash

       # build site from markdown + template
       hugo ~/sitedir/

       # post to S3 bucket which is a file storage service
       aws s3 sync ~/sitedir/public s3:sitedirbuckket --recursive

       # invalidate CDN distribution so content delivery is nice and fresh!
       aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id XXXXXXXXXX --paths /*

       echo -e "All done"

<comment><USER11> This is almost line-for-line my setup.

I like the CodeBuild solution for the times when I'm editing on my phone or a shared computer. I push to GitHub, and CodeBuild handles:

* build (as above, plus asset processing and minification)

* deploy (s3 sync, plus some fiddling to add 301 redirects)

* ping search engines

I keep a lot of drafts and temporary notes in my local checkouts and doing build/deploy on a fresh checkout helps to ensure they don't slip onto the public website.

<comment><USER12> Hey, thanks for sharing your setup. What's this thing about `ping search engines`?

<comment><USER10> To refresh the crawled cache the search engines have. I've never given it much thought, but I guess it would be refreshed when queried. I will add it to my bash script for funzies.

Here's the implementation in the sister comment: [https://github.com/thom- nic/jekyll-s3_deploy/blob/master/lib...](https://github.com/thom- nic/jekyll-s3_deploy/blob/master/lib/jekyll/s3_deploy/ping.rb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting setup. I found myself looking for a static site deployer a few months back and decided to build my static website with hugo [1] and deploy it from my private GitHub repository with the help of github-bucket [2]. So far it is working fine and I can even move away from GitHub and even AWS with just a few modifications.

The c9 setup is really nice for online page editing and to compile the static pages. I am not quite sure, if I would really use it in my current workflow.

Disclaimer: I am the author of github-bucket.

[1] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/) [2] [https://github.com/berlam/github-bucket](https://github.com/berlam/github- bucket)

</comment><comment><USER14> You can also get a cheap shared hosting plan, or better, two cheap shared hosting plans for redundancy, and just (s)FTP(s) the files ...

<comment><USER15> Dear lord, you need aws, hooks, travis file at minimum.

<comment><USER4> It just wouldn't seem right without a sprinkling of .yml files in the mix...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone help explain to me the appeal of static site generators? Functionally it's still a dynamically generated site, just that cache population/invalidation has turned into a user-controlled manual step.

Is this because of people wanting to host on static-asset only servers (GitHub Pages, S3 Website, etc) or is there some other benefit above simply using any standard blogging software? If it's a question of speed, that's what caching does.

<comment><USER4> There are quite a few reasons, if we compare 'self-hosted' setups.

It's simpler on the server as you say, you can serve the files from pretty much anywhere. You also need less resources to do so. I appreciate the cache idea, used to do it myself with wordpress, still do with MyBB, but it's imperfect and there are always misses, espceially if someone is actively cache busting you to DOS your site.

Much less hassle to setup. If you're going to do it 'properly' you're going to want to set up your dynamic site to run in a chroot jail, run the php process under a unique user per site (especially with nginx), setup unique database users and databases per site, secure your credentials, have a version control setup and update functionality and on and on. There's a lot to do. You can automate it (I have) but it's still annoying and requires monitoring.

You can move almost anywhere almost instantly, with just a git push/rsync and a DNS change.

Hugely reduced attack surface. It's literally a collection of text files.

The benefits are somewhat reduced if you get someone else to manage your hosting for you, but it remains simpler to move and usually cheaper to host as you need no database service.

<comment><USER16> In terms of cache busting comment, that's purely a configuration thing. You'd just make your cache objects never expire and fully warm the cache yourself (again, via some sort of plugin). WP itself wouldn't exist to the client it'd literally be a static site.

Anyway, that aside: So it's literally just the desire to have a zero-footprint blog. I can appreciate that notion but I'm surprised this trend came about with brand new tools as opposed to just packaging up the output of existing blog generators.

Sounds like you should build a WP plugin that generates a static/exportable site. You know the space and clearly understand the market dynamics.

<comment><USER4> > In terms of cache busting comment, that's purely a configuration thing

As long as you don't have functionality that relys on it though, like search. I've seen that used to DOS a site before. And pingbacks. Sometimes even comments (though to be fair, you can turn those off for parity with a static site).

Plus you'd probably want to do the caching up a layer and not rely on a plugin, maybe a varnish cache or Fast-CGI cache which adds complexity and cache invalidation etc etc. W3TC and ilk are good, but to get the most from them you need to have good control over the server environment, especially for object store, and you probably want to integrate them with varnish server or something anyway. And before that even just for running the site you'll need to tune php and mysql. Not to mention 'fully' warming the cache on a large dynamic site can take quite a while, if it can be done at all.

Something like Hugo can output thousands of pages in milliseconds. That kind of performance just can't be found in a dynamic site, so warming the cache will always take longer than generating a static site like that.

I guess there's just more to be aware of.

> So it's literally just the desire to have a zero-footprint blog.

I don't disagree but I'd say it _probably_ goes further than that. It's just so _simple_ to go static. If you really dig into hosting a dynamic site there is a lot to do to make it work well under most conditions.

> Sounds like you should build a WP plugin that generates a static/exportable > site.

There are actually a few good ones out there. I just used on to archive a site. Wget was flaking out with converting srcset urls (even when I compiled the 1.19 branch which was supposed to fix it) so I used a plugin to export the site.

Overall, I don't really promote one over the other, they're tools at the end of the day and if one works for a workflow then it's the best!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just created a website for a friends construction business. Gatsby on S3 with Cloudfront.

New thing for me was using Gitlab CI/CD. I taught the 'customer' how to edit on gitlab website and do merges. Now changes are deployed automagically without needing me to get involved.

Best part, no wordpress databases I need to worry!

</comment><comment><USER18> Love publishing (static) websites with Jekyll. If you're looking for more free (open source) ready-to-use (fork) Jekyll themes may I highlight the Dr Jekyll themes listing / directory [1] - a Jekyll site itself ;-). 200+ themes and counting. [1] [https://drjekyllthemes.github.io](https://drjekyllthemes.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone here have an objection to using github pages? You can just point your domain to your github repo and it's HTTPS by default and from what I can tell fee to host on public repos.

Maybe I'm unaware of potential issues for a static site?

<comment><USER20> Github Pages is missing a couple of features, namely:

* Build systems besides Jekyll

* HTTPS for custom domains

...but the second problem can easily be solved with Cloudflare and the first one can be solved with a git subtree push. Beyond this it's pretty fully featured.

<comment><USER4> Standard disclaimer: Cloudflare only secures the communication between the visitor and Cloudflare's network, not between Cloudflare and GitHub Pages when using a custom domain and the 'Flexible SSL' feature Cloudflare provides which you are talking about.

So an attacker can still alter/intercept content between GitHub Pages and Cloudflare before it gets to the visitor.

To some, the illusion of security might be considered more harmful that knowing you have none at all.

For an alternative, GitLab Pages offers HTTPS on custom domains, provisioned by LetsEncrypt I believe.

Netlify does something similar.

Both alternatives also allow any build system you configure.

<comment><USER21> I would like to know why GitHub doesn't do something similar to Netlify and GitLab. Surely it can't be that hard if some what smaller companies can already implement this?

Also, if using CloudFlare on a static site that collects no form data and only has links to external websites, would it matter so much, or is it just as important to remember about the potential harms?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure why GitHub doesn't offer TLS over custom domains. They may have some limimtation in how the Pages system is built that means reworking it to introduce this function might be prohibitively costly at the moment.

The answer to the second question is "I guess it depends".

In one way I think it's more about perception - https should be https and https should be secure. Not https sort of halfway along the connection, then clear and unsecure for the rest over the public internet.

That's what a lot of people have trouble with over Cloudflare's particular popularisation of this 'broken' https model.

Also, all the data hoovered up by NSA et al puts a picture together, maybe about a person, their habits, what sites and content they read etc etc. Thanks to SNI https will likely leak the domain, but other than that it'll secure the rest of the info.

And what if (like I do on my site) I share a PGP key fingerprint? What if that's midified over the insecure portion of the connection? Now any communication by that route might be compromised.

I get that it can be seen as pedantic, but all steps in the connection as a whole need to be secure if https is to remain trusted.

I suppose overall the push is (and should be) towards default encryption and privacy for the visitor. That's something I'd support at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've recently setup a similar system for my personal site (middleman) but opted to use code pipeline - this way I don't need to pay for the EC2 instance.

Terraform config here: [https://github.com/charlieegan3/personal- website/tree/master...](https://github.com/charlieegan3/personal- website/tree/master/terraform)

<comment><USER22> I use a free EC2 micro instance and a custom Node-based SSG, and it feels snappy and is always up: [https://sdegutis.com](https://sdegutis.com) source: [https://github.com/sdegutis/sdegutis.com](https://github.com/sdegutis/sdegutis.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> And I just have a Github webhook run to rebuild the site whenever a push to the rep. Works perfectly and you can't get much simpler.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think there's a much easier way to do this with Jekyll and s3_website. I describe the setup here: [https://www.cannon.codes/static-site-generator- evaluation/](https://www.cannon.codes/static-site-generator-evaluation/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like the / "a" private ssh key which allows pushing to github and trigger the automation thingy which eventually enlivens things needs to live on cloud9 to make this happen.

Sounds "just fine" for your own personal blog, sure…

</comment><comment><USER26> Shameless plug: While you're at it, get a theme at [https://jekyllthemes.io/](https://jekyllthemes.io/)</comment>


Show HN: Verelo website monitoring - <AUTHOR>

We've been working on Verelo website monitoring for just over six months now. Our project was created out of frustrations with existing monitoring tools while working in the DevOps team at our past employer.
We consider ourselves different to what's out there today for a few reasons:
- Our main goal is to provide a monitoring service which can truly help you meet and prove your SLA. This means a few critical enhancements from what's out there today.
- We provide sub-minute checks. You can use us to check as regularly as every 5 seconds (for paid accounts, free beta accounts can only do 60 second checks).
- Notifications are not an "add-on service". They should be part of the core product offering, and not something that can "run out" because you have not pre-paid far enough (or forgotten to renew). We include notifications free, with the service paid or unpaid.
- We're currently working on providing a means of making your SLA known by the application. Put in basic terms, our reports should not require adjustment when you hand them up the chain of management or to a customer. This means we know about your maintenance and release periods, and adjust what we report based on the additional information you provide us.
We're allowing a limited number of signups per day right now, so don't delay! We will also be approving additional accounts throughout the days to come, so jump on over and signup for a beta account and we'll work to approve it for you as quickly as possible!
http://www.verelo.com <comment><USER2> Hi,

I'm a competitor of yours (although I concentrate on server monitoring) and we both compete with PingDom who are the leader in this market.

I'm not sure sub 1 minute monitoring is that big a benefit and you'll need a key differentiator to attract clients.

I think you'll find it very tough to earn revenue in this space, there are plenty of free options out there already and Pingdom does 5 websites for $5 a month with 1 minute monitoring.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> I agree, site monitoring is a commodity it seems. I use Pingdom and am happy with it. One thing I do need that no monitoring service has provided is the ability to monitor/alert for potential automated scrapers/bots(that aren't search engines) that visit my site. Would not be trivial of course, but it would address a pain.

Also, I would love to have an easy way to view my current memory, hard disk space, CPU load in my Amazon instances. I KNOW there are ways to do so but just after 10 mins of Googling them, I get a headache.. I want something less painful.

<comment><USER2> For a view on CPU, memory and disk space take a look at <http://status2k.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just signed up for an account. Only thing that surprised me was that my password was sent via e-mail in cleartext- I didn't expect that.

<comment><USER5> Hey tommccabe, we're very sorry about that. We don't store your password in clear text (irreversible salt & hash combination) However we have been provided with feedback that this isn't something people appreciate and its already fixed on QA.

Our next release addresses this issue, should be out in the next 2 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clickable link: <http://www.verelo.com></comment>


PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning - <AUTHOR> http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/hw_performance/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Proper tuning involves keeping as much database information in RAM as possible while not adversely affecting other areas of the operating system."

The section on write-ahead logging is informative.</comment>


San Franciscans raise $46,000 to stop homeless shelter in wealthy area - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/28/san-francisco-gofundme-homeless-shelter-embarcadero <comment><USER2> We're heading for a showdown in San Francisco between the homeless and residents.

For those of you not from this area, it'd be hard to believe just how bad the SF homeless situation really is, and how it's tied to drug use and mental illness.

SF has a lot of resources for homeless people, so functional homeless folks who want help can get it. Shelters and low income housing up and down the peninsula don't allow drug use, don't allow people with criminal records, and some don't allow men. Cold weather shelters make exceptions, but those are very temporary. Those conditions exclude a lot of the homeless who would like to use them. Then, you have the issue of the homeless who are heavy drug users, mentally ill, or simply don't want to be in a shelter. These three groups are most of the homeless you see in the streets. San Francisco (and San Jose's) big homeless problems are exacerbated by the fact that peninsula cities crack down on homeless people by buying a bus ticket to SF or SJ, whichever is cheaper, and police escorting them to the bus.

So, as someone who's lived in the area for over twenty years, I'm sick of San Francisco's lack of action on this problem. On one side you have shelters, but on the flip side is utter lack of enforcement of loitering, since being on public land isn't illegal. These people need help, rehab, or even institutionalization, but you can't force that, and nobody's willing to pay for it. It's a mess, and the more money SF throws at homeless people in the form of food, shelters, and safe injection sites, the more homeless people it "hires" from abroad.

edit: That article is disingenuous. The homeless on the streets of SF are not due to displacement by tech, though I'm sure that contributes. They come from all over for the perks. The weather is mild, food is available, police turn a blind eye to minor crimes and shooting heroin on Market street, so as far as being homeless goes, it's not the worst place to be.

<comment><USER3> > Shelters and low income housing up and down the peninsula don't allow drug > use, don't allow people with criminal records, and some don't allow men.

So they're explicitly designed to not shelter the majority of people needing them, that seems counter-productive. Is smoking crack in the shelter somehow worse than doing it in the street? Are they supposed to work out their addiction problem while they've got no where to live and no job?

If you're going to run shelters like that then they're just a feel good measure to make people think there's help available and nothing more.

<comment><USER4> > Is smoking crack in the shelter somehow worse than doing it in the street?

Certainly it is going to be a lot worse for the politician who approved/backed this shelter, once this is packaged into a nice little media story like "X pays for smoking crack".

There are not many politicians out there willing to do the right thing and being prepared to handle the expected uninformed outrage.

<comment><USER3> True, but when I said "feel good measure" I was referring to the voters that will be swayed by that sort of crap. It's a societal problem not a political one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> NIMBYism in its purest form.

Navigation Centers are far more than homeless shelters. They take people in as they are (pets, belongings, partners, etc.) and provide on-site services. Unlike traditional shelters, occupants are not forced back on the streets in the morning just to wait in line for a bed that night.

I have one in my neighborhood. I took a tour with a few other neighbors last year. I can't imagine how you can argue that it would be better for the people I saw to be living outside on the streets.

Every district in San Francisco should have at least one Navigation Center.

<comment><USER6> Oh I'm sure everybody agrees that they're fantastic and the there definitely should be more of them. Just, not right here. Over there would be a much better place for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The headline is click-baity and tailored to create outrage.

If you don't live here, you probably don't know that the Embarcadero area is, as the article says, right by the bay bridge. Heavily tourist-y area. The "wealthy people" of San Francisco actually live a mile or so away, in Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, Lake District (by Bakers Beach) etc. Embarcadero is also right by the FiDi / downtown area where Salesforce, Affirm, BlackRock, Lending Club and several other startups and major Corps have offices. So it's also a safety concern for the workers in downtown as the homeless population in SF is generally more aggressive than in the rest of the country.

A lot of homeless people in San Francisco also are drug users. It's not common to walk in downtown and step on a used needle. So building the housing in the downtown, touristy area is only going to deter people from coming to San Francisco, and deter companies from holding their conventions[1]. There's already 1 such example of a major medical convention cancelled from Moscone cos they were concerned with safety of their attendees due to homeless person crimes. That area has a lot of homeless people around there, many of who are quite aggressive, mentally ill etc.

This is not a case of NIMBY. It's far more complex than that.

I'm just calling it as I see it.

[1] Major medical group cancels San Francisco convention due to safety concerns => [https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/3/17531240/convention- moscone-c...](https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/3/17531240/convention-moscone- center-homeless-crime)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I buy the whole "homeless person crimes" angle. I've lived here for about four and a half years, in a _real_ sketchy part of the city (SoMa, south of mid-market) and I've never had a problem with homeless people. Yes they sleep in doorways or in tents on the sidewalk, and yes you see people shooting up without trying to hide it. Sometimes they yell at night when I'm trying to sleep and it's annoying.

But I have a real hard time making the mental leap from "these people are an eyesore" to "I think we should force these people to leave." They're just living their lives, trying to make it day to day. They're people. I pass the same homeless people on the way to work and back every day. They're as much a part of the community as I am.

The crime angle seems transparently like dog whistling for people who are really concerned with property values, or for people who turn up their nose at the powerless and wish they'd go be someone else's problem. A few decades ago "crime" and "safety" were euphemisms deployed against urban youth who made middle-class white people nervous. It's depressing to see another generation of the same prejudice, now applied to a different marginalized group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find a lot of criticism and hate of homeless people in our tech world. Which I kind of don't get because a lot of tech people are quite liberal. I would expect a softer heart to follow as well as concern for these (and all) people.

<comment><USER10> There are different types of homelessness, and different levels of visibility and effects on the community.

On one end of the spectrum, temporary homelessness typically garners the most sympathy, and brings the least trouble in terms of drug use and other petty crime.

On the other end, the chronic homeless are harder to deal with. My ex who worked with the local metro homeless population was frustrated by these, who through mental illness and / or drug use were simply not capable of dealing with the responsibilities needed to maintain a home or apartment; things like getting a job and not getting evicted for various bad behavior reasons. The hardest to deal with were those who refused to get help; no medicine, no job training program, no finance management couse, nothing accepted but food and cash.

These are the ones who are often the most visible- defecating on sidewalks, drugs, harassing people who are just going about their day.

You can have the biggest heart in the world, and you still won't be able to help them short of bringing back forced institutionalization, which no one wants either.

<comment><USER2> A good start might be a requirement to be an SF resident, homeless or otherwise, for some period of time, say 1 year, before being eligible for homeless benefits. It'll keep the area's homeless from flooding in from less generous cities.

<comment><USER10> It's an interesting idea, but I have no clue how to establish a person's residence when they don't have a street address to receive mail, utility bills, etc. Practically by definition, the homeless _do not have residence_.

People who recently have become homeless would qualify, assuming they could provide mail or something from a year ago, but even that seems like a stretch for most people, I think.

Also, I don't know about SF, bit quite a few of the services provided here in the Midwest are privately run (I.e. in association with churches or otherwise non-profit), and I don't know that such a ban could be imposed on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unpopular opinion: there are a lot of other locations than the heart of the SF waterfront.

</comment><comment><USER12> _...the father of a two-year-old who lives two blocks from the proposed site ... against the project out of concerns for his family's safety._

"Family safety" has to be the most overused euphemism for "property values".

<comment><USER13> Not true. Family safety is much more important than property value and is not a stand-in for "property value". I'm surprised to hear you claim that it is not being legitimately used.

<comment><USER14> Easily proven by asking people who have small children but are renters, not property owners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am truly surprised by what's happened to San Francisco.

It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. I imagine the city will either find a way to return to greatness or descend into further dystopia. Which will it be? How will it be accomplished? Truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to see someone with social media skills ramp up a campaign in "solidarity" with these residents and "help" them hit 10x their stated goal.

</comment><comment><USER17> Makes sense. One of my personal rules is to only give money to the homeless in other people's neighborhoods.

</comment><comment><USER18> Absolutely disgusting. How can someone be so cruel as to spend money to stop a project meant to help people and save people's lives? It's just unbelievable how cruel and nasty people with even a little money can be towards others. There should be a way for state governments to counter such nimby actions when it's in the best interests of society. This also includes local zoning and all the other stupid nimby shit that makes the bay area unlivable.

<comment><USER12> The state needs to step in a lot more. Hopefully this is starting.</comment></comment>


The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/guides/2011/03/the-linux-graphics-stack-from-x-to-wayland.ars <comment><USER2> I am the only one to think that X network transparency is a great and very useful feature ?

I don't see the point, if I ever need a Windows like operating system, I can just use Windows.

<comment><USER3> X sucks at network transparency, supposedly its one redeeming feature. RDP is better. X is slow (xlib requires too many round trips) and doesn't forward things users care about like sound and local devices like printers, USB sticks, cameras, etc. But worst of all, it's simply ridiculous that you _still_ can't move an X client between servers without terrible hacks.

<comment><USER4> You are mistaking idea with implementation.

RDP is, ultimately, a bitmap transfer protocol, with some goodies like compression and transfer of only the changed parts.

X11, on the other hand, provides both bitmap and raster transfer. It's up to the application to decide which parts of widgets are drawn pixel by pixel and which are drawn as shapes. With raster transfer, you can get the smallest possible footprint. Also, X11 is asynchronous in default configuration, so round-trip times is not the problem in general case.

As far as anecdotal evidence is valid, I've been using X11 version of Acme [1] over Ethernet for about two years. It was pretty much undistinguishable from running it locally -- virtually no latencies. Granted, the server was just a few switches (perhaps also a router) away, but that's the business case for X11 use.

As for USB, sound etc. transport -- not in X11 itself. But it's available in NX [2], which is X11 with some extensions.

I'm worried X11 protocol could become a `second-class citizen' in POSIX GUI stack. As soon as just one serious application starts depending on screen being on the same machine as the process, others will follow soon and we'll be _screwed_.

EDIT: you may also want to have a look at DXPC [3] -- it works surprisingly well over medium-latency, low-bandwidth links like ADSL (with <50kbps upstream). NX is said to be built on top of that.

\----

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)>

[2] <http://www.nomachine.com/>

[3] <http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/>

<comment><USER5> Afaik, both GTK and Qt (and probably most others) are drawing anyway pixel by pixel.

<comment><USER6> Nowadays, both GTK (through Cairo) and Qt (through QPaintEngine) use XRender and/or OpenGL, which leaves the pixel-level stuff to the GPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally I also use X network transparancy a lot, and I would be very sad to lose that. Apparently some constructive people feel the same way, because looking at the wayland-devel mailing list there there are apparently some people hard at work right now adding network transparency to Wayland.

<comment><USER8> >Personally I also use X network transparancy a lot, and I would be very sad to lose that.

Taking network transparency out of the core, where it has no business being, does not mean you have to lose it. It would simply need to be implemented in libraries or somewhere at a higher level, with the advantage that the vast majority of us who never use it don't have to "pay" for it.

>Apparently some constructive people feel the same way, because looking at the wayland-devel mailing list there there are apparently some people hard at work right now adding network transparency to Wayland.

This misleading sentence made me nervous that Wayland was just going to be another useless reimplementation of the (IMO, obsolete) X protocol. But [1] seems to clearly indicate that this is not the case. What are you referring to exactly?

[1] [http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland- devel/2011-Feb...](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland- devel/2011-February/000722.html)

<comment><USER7> Instead of working the way X does, the intent in Wayland is to do all rendering client side (the way things are done in practice under X these days anyway). Did you see the big thread on the mailing list about "Finishing the network protocol"?

<comment><USER8> >the way things are done in practice under X these days anyway

Sans the round tripping, which was the main point of this project.

>Did you see the big thread on the mailing list about "Finishing the network protocol"?

Yea I saw that thread, it was just about the protocol they're using. Has nothing to do with X-style network transparency.

<comment><USER9> > Sans the round tripping, which was the main point of this project.

The "main point" of Wayland has nothing to do with eliminating the (trivial) overhead of network transparency; rather, it's to finally get rid of all the legacy cruft that's accumulated in the X11 protocol over the years.

Much of X11, such as fonts, graphics primitives, and color palettes, is completely unused by modern clients (even remote ones) -- it makes sense to simplify the protocol by dropping such legacy features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's good to see Linux finally address one of its biggest (if not _the_ biggest) weaknesses: the display stack. Interesting that several groups have tried this same thing [1] but it wasn't until Wayland that it got traction. Still, I'm happy to see it happening at all.

[1] e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectFB></comment>


Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kikabink.com/news/are-all-successful-entrepreneurs-slightly-deluded/

<comment> j-g-faustus I think that almost everyone is slightly deluded.

The natural state of mind of healthy (i.e. not clinically depressed) people is to default to think that they are important and good at what they do. So you get things like 70% of drivers saying that they drive better than average. (And I saw a psychologist post somewhere online claiming that they had asked 500 people how good they were in bed, and exactly one person out of the 500 thought they were below average.)

At the level of subjective reality "I'm important" is obviously true in general, as you are presumably the most important person in your own life.

At the level of objective reality you have things like "you are one random individual among 8 billion, all of you living on a small rock on the outer edges of an insignificant galaxy, and the lifetime of the entire human species is hardly a blink of the eye in the timeframe of the Earth".

Although objective truth has the advantage of being objective, it is also somewhat depressing.

Terry Pratchett (of the Discworld series) has the concept of "knurd" ("drunk" spelled backwards). The idea is that people normally look at the world through rose-tinted glasses as if they were slightly drunk, being "knurd" is the state of being hyper-sober, stripped of all comforting illusions and seeing the world in all its harsh reality.

I certainly believe that this story is fairly close to being true, although I have no scientific studies to back it up :)

Although most people are slightly delusional, it may be more visible in people that are successful somehow somewhere, since they have an external story to collaborate the internal story: "I feel important, and this proves that I actually _am_ important".

We also have hubris as one of the three virtues of a programmer ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_program...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_programmer) ), I have no reason to think that this is less true for entrepreneurs in general.

In short, I think a moderate amount of delusion is quite healthy, and possibly even essential :)

<comment><USER2> If you don't act like you're slightly delusional, you stand out as a minority.

<comment><USER3> _If you don't act like you're slightly delusional, you stand out as a minority._

You mean mentally ill -- depressed. Being an entrepreneur seems like the opposite of being depressed:

extremely overoptimistic vs. overrealistic (depressed people are less overoptimistic than non-depressed people)

emotionally resilient vs. easily emotionally drained

able to derive satisfaction from drudgery that will (probably) not pay off vs. unable to derive satisfaction from rewarding, constructive, fun activities

feelings of self-worth unaffected by failure vs. feelings of self-worth unaffected by success

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man._ \- George Bernard Shaw,

</comment><comment><USER5> The NYTimes just covered a similar idea, in an article titled "Just Manic Enough". An interesting quote from the article, which I think sums it up fairly well, was "You need to suspend disbelief to start a company, because so many people will tell you that what you're doing can't be done, and if it could be done, someone would have done it already. There are six billion human beings on this planet, we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, we're a couple hundred years into the industrial revolution — and nobody has done what you want to do? It's kind of crazy."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19entre.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> How was that person deluded when they ultimately reached their goal? Isn't that the opposite of deluded? They simply didn't give up, and they have their high confidence to thank for keeping them motivated.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes. But make that ALL entrepreneurs are slightly deluded. Success is not part of the delusion.

</comment><comment><USER8> How do you measure confidence and delusion quantitatively?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. To go from a purely conceptual model such as this to one with real empirical substance you would have to be precise about such concepts as confidence and success and how they are quantitatively measured. I think a group of smart psychologists could pull it off, as long as they were open about their definitions and quantitative scales, so people could accept or reject their thesis accordingly.

<comment><USER9> Good point. There are founders that have valuable inside knowledge of their industry (domain expertise, etc) who can be more reasonably sure of their success in some B2B venture than a YCombinator project that wants to be the next Twitter. Can we say that if both examples are equally confident of their success, that the former is less deluded than the latter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> of course. what's wrong with that? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> The Scvngr Chief Ninja is the real deal. <http://goo.gl/fb/UdZzx> He is absolutely right about the gaming layer as the next big thing after social.</comment>


Subpixel vs. Greyscale Antialiasing - <AUTHOR> http://cantina.co/2012/05/18/little-details-subpixel-vs-greyscale-antialiasing/ <comment><USER2> We faced this issue when building WPF/Avalon ~7-8 years ago.

One key here is that subpixel rendered text can't be easily composited. You essentially need RGB alpha channels so that you can blend each channel independently. Because of this if you want to build a compositing tree with bitmap caching it is very hard to do blending in hardware.

One of the lead engineers did some experiments at the time where he put together blind test of cleartype vs. high quality sub-pixel positioned, gamma correct blended grayscale text. I don't think anyone could really tell the difference. These will only get closer as resolutions increase.

The lesson is that the big 'wow' factor when cleartype was introduced was the fact that glyphs were now positioned on subpixel boundaries (instead of pixel snapping the glyph origin) and use a gamma corrected blend. The tri-channel blending was only a small part of the picture.

But -- cleartype was a unique differentiating feature and was shipped anyway.

<comment><USER3> Wow, I'd love to hear more about this!

It seemed that plenty of folks (myself included) found WPF text to be rather unusable until they fixed it years later (after the VS 2010 blurry text editor thing). I can't use IE because of the 'smoothed' text, but Chrome still seems to get it "right" (snaps to pixels, like in Word). Are we talking about the same thing?

At high DPI it does look fine; unfortunately high DPI didn't actually happen like Microsoft thought, just like 6GHz CPUs (both predictions at PDC 2003). Although, now that the iPad3 shipped a high DPI screen, maybe other OEMs will get their stuff together.

<comment><USER2> You can probably blame me for this, to some degree. We were really trying to build for the future with WPF and as such wanted to be truly resolution independent. As such, we (I) locked a px to a 1/96th of an inch. The end result is that things animated smoothly but that you got blurry lines and poor edge interaction under lots of circumstances. Text exacerbates this.

One of the things that I had been working on when I left Microsoft was to come up with a comprehensive 'pixel snapping' system that would start to address these issues. I was looking at taking ideas form the autohinting systems used in the font rasterizers. At the time that WPF shipped, it appeared that no one had picked up that work. I haven't tracked it since then so perhaps things have been improved.

<comment><USER3> Well, we can just hope high DPI becomes a reality so things look good again. WPF has fixed its problems by doing the pixel snapping, but other engines like whatever powers IE9's rendering (and FF, I think) have regressed and prefer "accuracy" over readability :(. MSFT even admits around half of the users dislike it, but the justification is that "everyone else is doing it". Oh well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The way to resolve this issue is to start out with greyscale antialiasing on > the element.

no. The way to resolve this is to leave font rendering alone and hope for WebKit to fix the issue with 3dtransform so that at some point, it'll be able to use subpixel antialiasing everywhere.

And even if you insist on forcing grayscale on me, even though I find the subpixel one way, way more readable, then please use the official way to specify antialiasing (-webkit-font-smoothing) and don't rely on a bug by using transform3d.

<comment><USER5> Actually, his method is optimal.

When the bug is fixed in Webkit, the translation will become a no-op, and you'll get sub-pixel AA everywhere.

Meanwhile, the font rendering is consistent in animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have often wondered why Quartz and other renderers don't support subpixel rendering at a lower level. All you have to do is oversample everything by 3x horizontally (actually, even 2x works pretty well) and then pass it through a relatively simple scaling filter after final compositing. It doesn't make much diference for natural images, but anything vector with hard edges looks noticeably better with subpixel redering, and horizontal animation looks smoother regardless of the type of image. And if it were done at a low level like that, there would be no notion of switching smoothing modes during an animation.

I suppose a major problem is that this would require all programs to support the notion of non-square pixels, and it's late in the game to expect that. And once we have retina displays everywhere, the whole point will be moot.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of Anti Grain Geometry.

There is a nice article on text rendering at [http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html#FONT_RASTERIZATION)

</comment><comment><USER8> In Chrome 19 on Linux the linked demo does not exhibit any changes in aliasing when clicking the boxes. Does anyone experience different results in Chrome on Windows or OS X, or perhaps Safari?

<comment><USER9> Linux Chrome attempts to follow your system settings for subpixel vs not, which means the behavior in this area is system-dependent.

(I write "attempts" because the rules are complicated: <http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/fonts/> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was trying to create a website that used Lucida Sans/Grande as body text, and no matter what I tried it didn't look as good as it is on Apple's website.

Fired up web inspector and I was surprised to find they use body {-webkit- font-smoothing: antialiased;}

</comment><comment><USER11> By the way, Mac OS seems to turn of subpixel AA on a lot of external monitors (it did it for me on a Dell Ultrasharp), making text look really bad.

        defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

To fix it.

<comment><USER12> As a quick (not particularly educated) guess, they might be doing that because they don't know what the pixel configuration is on the external display. On their own monitors, they know exactly how the subpixels are arranged.

Randomly, I happen to have a picture of the subpixels on a Macbook Pro display. <http://cl.ly/1D034736323N2f29191c/o>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I ran into a similar problem with the Google Mobile AdSense animation on iOS Mobile Safari. Basically when you put an absolutely positioned element with higher z-index over the iframed ad, it'll trigger greyscale antialiasing. Here is a demo (see it in Mobile Safari): [http://newtonapple.github.com/frontend_tidbits/mobile_safari...](http://newtonapple.github.com/frontend_tidbits/mobile_safari/iframe_animation_text_rendering_bug/adsense_bug.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Are some of the boxes supposed to say "This box is using greyscale antialiasing"? They all say "subpixel" for me.</comment>


How to Motivate Employees to Go Beyond Their Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/09/how-to-motivate-employees-to-go-beyond-their-jobs <comment><USER2> leadership and inspiration. But that's dumbing it down</comment>


Ask HN: How Many Of You Track Personal Data? If So, Have You Seen Benefits? - <AUTHOR>

Lately, I've been slightly fascinated by this trend of personal data tracking espoused by people like Tim Ferriss and sites like "Quantified Self".  I'm curious about how many people here at Hacker News indulge in this practice. If so, how have you found it to be helpful?  Do you have any tips to impart to the community? <comment><USER2> I have a journal / everyday book where I record probably way too much data: what I eat, where I go, when I sleep, what aches and pains or health issues I experience, where I drive, what I spend and how, what dreams I have, odd number sequences I notice, when where and how intensely I exercise, and really, another couple dozen intensely personal things that I started tracking because I wondered about the trends.

While I started tracking everything because I was hit with a bad migraine that came out of nowhere and I couldn't trace back to my normal triggers, I expanded what I track because I find the data incredibly fascinating and very handy to have. When I go to the doctor and he asks, "When did this start?" I can look it up. When the scale goes up, I know how many calories I've eaten, how much exercise I've had, how much sleep I've managed, and where most of my stressors are. A low protein diet can trigger depression, so I look for enough protein in my nominally vegetarian diet to make sure I'm getting enough, and adjust as needed.

I have a low-tech approach, but think about moving to a digital version so that I can integrate other data (fitbit data and sleep quality, in particular). The key to consistency is motivation. Once you've been doing it for a while, wow, not doing it is uncomfortable. Find something that works for you (phone app, moleskine, etc.), even if it's just an index card that you jot notes down to scan and OCR them later. Whatever you use, you have to have it with you at all times to be effective (which is why a phone app might work best for most people).

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally, I haven't tracked my time as I find it very frustrating to be "clocking" every step. That said, I've seen quite a few people using <https://www.rescuetime.com/> on daily basis; supposedly it helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that some of these services can be tedious to use. I think that's part of the reason I'm curious about the potential benefits of dedicated use. In other words, are the specific numbers important enough to warrant the investment of time it takes to track your habits with such granularity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use Rescue Time, and I've seen some benefit. Specifically, I closed my Facebook & LiveJournal accounts after I saw how much time I was spending on them. But you don't need RescueTime to figure that out ;)

Vitamin-R for Mac ( <http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/> ) has tools for tracking concentration levels throughout the day/week. Currently it's showing that my concentration is worst on days when I exercise. That was a surprise.

Tracking data is interesting, but it's easy to spend too much time looking at the data instead of deriving value from it.</comment>


The Article Is Dead. Long Live the Feed - <AUTHOR> http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-the-feed/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. I've personally been reducing my "feeds" (aside from HN of course!) because I realized they lowered my attention span, so to speak. I was not able to read a long article all the way through, and now I am.

That said, I do like some of these points. The Web is indeed not paper and we could use more archives and better ways to access information about news and data.</comment>


Apache Airflow - <AUTHOR> https://airflow.apache.org/ <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/astronomer](https://github.com/astronomer) [https://astronomer.io](https://astronomer.io)

Open source ecosystem and commercial support. Awesome team!</comment>