Open-Source Home Automation - <AUTHOR> https://www.home-assistant.io/ <comment><USER2> Just wanted to say that my life as a quadriplegic would be 13.4 million percent more crap without Home Assistant. Being quadriplegic and having something as open as Home Assistant is absolutely amazing, I have automated absolutely everything in the house and home assistant has not choked once.

Couple that with one of the friendliest communities for newbies I have come across in a long time and you have something really awesome.

I've been using it for a couple of years, I have tried all the other open source alternatives but nothing really comes close for me. I'm actually fiddling with my installation right now as it were.

I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously, so I am writing a little automation that will check who is in the house and announce through the speakers my phone needs charging up or send them a text message if I have their phone number when my mobile phone charge gets below 20%.

Totally cool beanz and I am totally serious about how much easier this makes my life as a quadriplegic.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your comment. I came to this discussion with my blinkers on, so to speak, pre -judging how I need less automation in my world, and you give concrete evidence how someone's "meh" can be balanced by untold advantages (13.4 million, in fact) of such a system.

Thanks for making me eat humble pie and broadening my views. Sometimes more tech is helpful indeed.

Ps: The way you're applying it is creative and awesome too!

<comment><USER2> No need to eat humble pie at all! it has been my experience thatEngineers And other reprobates like the ones that haunt can use don't know anything about this stuff, but the second it is brought to their attention I pretty uniformly had positive responses along the lines of "hmm, that is an interesting engineering question" and away we go. :-)

It is one of the wonderful things about this place, who gives a crap about the emotion being quadriplegic (I certainly don't) let's just solve the logistical problems! And as far as I'm concerned all of the problems that disability has introduced into my life have solutions that revolve around logistics, which project/process/company/widget do I need to buy/invent/collaborate on to make this thing work. It's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any discussion of Home Assistant should start with the founder's vision, which I found very clear: [https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect- home-a...](https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home- automation/)

The purpose of Home Assistant is to first observe all data flowing through your house, by connecting all existing sensors, switches, gateways and anything else that has a digital pulse.

The second step is control, having centralized access through a web or mobile app to all moving parts of a home.

However, the power of HA comes from the third step: automation. The best interface is the one you can forget exists.

I've been running HA for over two years. Aside from being lazy about upgrading to newer versions and adjusting to breaking changes, it's been working great and has spoiled me and my wife. We now expect every house we visit to automatically unlock before we reach the door, for the lights to turn on (and gradually off) automatically as we move through rooms, and for our phones to notify us when the best time to open a window would be, to naturally cool during the summer. It's great to have cold light during the day and warm, lower level light as the evening progresses.

Together with the Python environment provided by appdaemon, there's almost no limits to what you can do, provided you instrument your house with sensors and switches as best as you can.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious how you setup "automatically unlock before we reach the door"

<comment><USER6> Motion sensor on patio. When it detects motion, check if your phone joined the network in the last minute and that a few minutes ago you were not in the gps area of your house. Send command to unlock the lock. Send a push notification that it unlocked so you know if it triggered on accident (incredibly unlikely when using motion + gps + wifi).

The motion sensor isn't strictly necessary, you can use the phone joining the network as a trigger. It's just an extra filter to ensure there are no accidental unlocks. It will also prevent unlocks if you come home, park, and then leave without attempting to enter.

That's how I would do it, all easily doable in home assistant.

<comment><USER7> Id want another authentication level like fingerprint in the action so if I drop my phone its not still a key. I like the general plan, but two levels of identification if possible.

<comment><USER8> It's just as secure as keys as it is though. If you drop your physical keys they still work as keys and also can't be revoked.

<comment><USER9> More secure than keys—you can't remote-wipe keys. (And, presuming the network requires a password, remote-wiping the phone would make it not join the network any more.)

<comment><USER10> Re-keying the locks is kind of like remote wiping all the keys at once. Certainly not as fine grained, but will work in a pinch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Back in June an animal chewed through the fiber line to my house. It took AT&T three trips and five days to fix it.

In those five days I became acutely aware of how internet dependent my home automation is. I vowed to no longer invest in home automation that requires non-local access.

This will definitely help accelerate the process.

<comment><USER12> Ever tried to use Plex? Your media's "right there" on your local network but you can't play it without internet.

<comment><USER13> There is a setting in Plex that will allow it to work without authentication for any devices connecting from a defined subnet. So I just set this to my home network's setup and can use it without issue whether I have an Internet connection or not.

I confirmed this when I tested my Plex server on a Raspberry Pi out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and it streamed fine without an Internet connection.

<comment><USER7> ...help a brother out, what is this setting? I can't find it.

<comment><USER14> I believe he's talking about Server Settings > Network > List of IP Address and networks that are allowed without auth

<comment><USER7> thanks I'll check it out

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a pretty big install of Home Assistant. You can see a screenshot of my main dashboard here.

[https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png](https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png)

When I built the house I decided that I was looking for a Home Automation system that was going to be:

a) Open source, or open standards

b) Everything can be done entirely locally

I settled with using the KNX system for the primary actuators for the house, with Home Assistant for automation and control.

One nice property of KNX is that it's distributed, you don't need any central manager for the system to work, so if you press a light switch, then that sends a packet on the KNX network directly to the light actuator. Then there is an IP/KNX bridge to allow you to interact with the KNX network to hack on it.

All the "light" automation in the house is all done using KNX programming. For example, walk into hall, light turns on. You don't need a central authority for that. The motion sensor just talks to the light directly.

For anything more complex, Home Assistant get's involved for all the more "global" automation via the IP/KNX bridge.

And of course you can control everything through it's app. I love how fast and responsive it is since it's local. It's maybe 100ms at most from clicking the button in the app to the light being on.

The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately.

Another thing I'm happy I did is just put sensors for everything everywhere through the house. Here is a screenshot of _most_ of them.

[https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png](https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png)

I actually have more data then this that I haven't bothered to hook up yet since it hasn't been important. Like the motion sensors also provide light levels and so on.

Overall, I would definately recommend Home Assistant.

<comment><USER16> I have over 500 sensors integrated into my home and when all done will have over 1k. I find the biggest problem when you get big is that home assistant has no way to deal with back pressure of updating networked sensors. Once you have issues with say 5-6 sensors it starts cascading.. you hit 10 which could be just ecobee sensors or homekit it can bring down homeassistant.

<comment><USER17> That just seems excessive. Can you help me make sense of what for?

<comment><USER16> Please see my reply below.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Founder Home Assistant here. Thanks for all the wonderful comments.

<comment><USER19> As a disabled person, I couldn't even begin to describe how much of a tangible improvement HA has had in my life. Being able to turn all the lights off from my bed before I go to sleep, or have the heater in the kids room turn on automatically if temps drop, etc etc, has quite literally saved me immeasurable amounts of physical pain.

Thank you so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love home assistant, but find the automation subsystem to be lacking in both ease of configuration and features.

I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1].

It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files.

[0]: [https://nodered.org/](https://nodered.org/) [1]: [https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home- assista...](https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assistant- websocket)

<comment><USER4> If you speak a little Python, you should look into appdaemon, it's a developer's (non-UI) way of doing the same.

<comment><USER20> I hadn't seen that before, but I don't think it addresses my biggest problem with HA automations: it's not a GUI.

When I'm developing my automations I often need to do a lot of testing and debugging when things don't work as expected. I find that Node-RED allows me to do this extremely easily as I can click on nodes and see what values are being passed around, and what state things are in.

Nonetheless, I'll look into AppDaemon :)

<comment><USER4> AppDaemon would be great for that, as the callback methods it requires for listening to state changes or scheduled timer can be independently unit tested and debugged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have been using home assistant for about 6 months now.

Currently I am mainly using it to show what is happening around the home (device detection, adsl data usage, weather from my simple weather station, house power usage etc, local train level crossing state (barrier down/up))

Very impressed with how easy it is to add new items to the overview.

I have one smart plug, the intention is to control the Christmas lights this year. I did do this about 15 years ago with my old x10 system and it would be nice to try something a bit more advanced.

<comment><USER22> You mean like what I'm doing right now on a fair all the time... :-)

[https://twitter.com/annevanrossum/status/1200478825458622464...](https://twitter.com/annevanrossum/status/1200478825458622464?s=19)

This is not the interesting feature of this system by the way. That is microgeofencing, knowing per room where people are. Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not.

Integration with home assistant is on the roadmap. We need a few more people to want it.

Yes, it's a shameless plug. However, there aren't many open source hardware products on the market, so I think it contributes to the discussion.

<comment><USER23> > Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does > not.

I solved this in home assistant by adding sensors to my doors inside the apartment.

For example if the living room doors are closed, and after that there's movement inside, the room is marked as "occupied". It works really well.

Same could be achieved with straight line movement sensors on the door frames, if you're someone who keeps the doors open all the time.

And speaking of open source, my whole smart home setup (from sensors, lights, heating, etc) works offline and using open source software and protocols even if hardware isn't open source itself. Which I found to be a good tradeoff.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, then you've more data. It will work better because even if it doesn't see movements you know the door hasn't opened so the person has to be in there still.

I think you will run into trouble if there are more people in your household though. But it's a smart idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've switched a lot of my existing light automation over to esphome [0]. I flashed it on various cheap LED Wifi bulbs that have been 'liberated' via tuya convert [1]

After going through zigbee and zwave, I feel like I finally arrived at a solution that allows me plenty of reasonably priced selection and extreme customization (e.g. just using the warm/cold white LEDs on a RGB+white bulb).

Great experience so far and completely automated integration within homeassistant.

I hope that the esphome-configs project [2] will grow over the next little while and provide more and more copy+paste configurations for various hardware.

[0] [https://esphome.io/](https://esphome.io/)

[1] [https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert](https://github.com/ct- Open-Source/tuya-convert)

[2] [https://esphome-configs.io/](https://esphome-configs.io/)

<comment><USER25> Another excellent firmware is ESPurna ([https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna](https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna)). It covers zillionsof devices (including the WiFi bulbs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any discussion of open source home automation should include Mozilla's "Things": [https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/](https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/)

<comment><USER27> I greatly prefer Mozilla's solution. Home Assistant seemed to have some critical issues when I used it for my two switches and one light bulb. Even turning them on and off on a schedule was dubious. It would forget a device or two and leave it as-is indefinitely. I found it odd that Home Assistant would not alert me to a lost device. Not only does WebThings work for me but it also has a UI that has some thought put into it instead of just spitting its API into a Material interface. It is much easier to use on a small mobile device because of its intentional responsiveness. Maybe it just did not play well with my devices but Home Assistant felt like an MVP that was not up to the task of dependability.

<comment><USER28> When did you last try home assistant? It improves very rapidly and the new "Lovelace" interface is insanely customizable along with being excellent on mobile.

<comment><USER27> This was over the summer that I tried it and traded it in for Mozilla's WebThings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I absolutely love HA. Using Z-Wave mesh network to control most things, especially lighting and fans. From automating your smart TV, alarm and CCTV, HVAC, garden watering, etc.. It's pretty limitless and there seems to be an integration for everything.

You can get really smart about things by tying actions to complex combinations of states. I now often 'forget' to hit the light switch when entering rooms in other homes.

<comment><USER30> What are you using for the watering? I've got a deep distrust of automation combined with mains pressure water which I'm trying to overcome.

<comment><USER29> Yes so it's a Z-Wave valve which has been connected to a split off of the cold water line to my kitchen sink. Typically this valve could be used to control your mains but I'm just using it to feed some drip lines. Basically one small garden and then a few runs to individual planters with an adjustable dripper on the end.

I have automations to limit watering if it has rained recently, and also to increase watering if the day has been extremely hot. Still looking to make it even smarter but this has already been a great improvement.

<comment><USER31> Do you have a make/model or link for the valve? I went all-in on Z-Wave and am similarly interested in controlling drip-lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A thread from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373)

2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521743)

</comment><comment><USER33> I used OpenHab2 in the past. But its quite heavy, and bulky. However it works well... What i did notice is z-wave commands where slow on the raspberry pi..

I moved to Home Assistent and i'm not moving back. I did like the more plugin- like architecture & technical design of openhab better... But that makes it bulky. Openhab feels more mature, but also has a lot more legacy... HA is just movign faster...

<comment><USER34> Z-Wave is a bit slow/delayed even when interacting directly with the zwave open API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I started with home assistant then moved to node red. Both have rich communities and plugins. If you want to do more javascript, use node red.

<comment><USER36> I've really enjoyed using node-red together with Home Assistant. Home Assistant manages the connections to devices and allows me to set up a nice UI, while node-red allows me to do more complex automation logic.

node-red is available as a hass.io add-on [1], with the Home Assistant node- red plugin pre-installed

[1]: [https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node- red](https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red)

<comment><USER21> I think this is exactly the point of the developers,

First seal to see Then seal to control

Home assistant is the "see" bit. Then you use it (or something else) to control the process

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If I want something simple that either passes power through or triggers a switch in response to a configurable/trainable voice command that _isn't_ net connected, what's my best bet?

<comment><USER38> What about [https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/](https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/) ?

<comment><USER39> How would that help? It appears to provide a subset of Home Assistant's functionality.

<comment><USER38> I thought it provides simple alternative (as asked) with voice commands. But when reading the details the voice processing is not offline (as asked).

\---

Note that in the 0.8 gateway release, browser-based voice commands are processed using Google's voice assistant API, so the audio strings are processed in the cloud. The speech-to-text result is passed back to your gateway. If you instead type a command into the text field of the smart assistant screen, those commands are processed locally and do not require a connection to the Internet.

[https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-user- guide.html](https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-user-guide.html)

EDIT: But hopefully they will move to something like offline Common Voice in some future release.

<comment><USER39> Home Assistant's Almond/Ada integration does the same thing (without sending anything to Google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Last year I gave a talk about my setup in Gothenburg: [https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e4bab8ef- be61-4036-b165-76890...](https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e4bab8ef- be61-4036-b165-76890c30bfc1)

</comment><comment><USER41> I found that home assistant does not appear to have native integration with Google home the last time I looked? I ended up using openhab which has native Google and Alexa integration, although I am not a fan of openhab as it feels ludicrously over-complicated for even the simplest of things.

My lesson learnt after several years going through smartthings, home-brew stuff with raspberry pis, home assistant, demoticz, and openhab using ZigBee or zwave is to make sure your core infrastructure (i.e. things you want to control) is MQTT-based running over wi-fi/ethernet and all your plugs/lights/etc are independently controllable via sending raw MQTT commands on your home network.

If you need to rely on a working internet connection, or too many third party things (e.g. IFTTT) you are going to have a bad time when things inevitably break/change/have an outage/become inexplicably slow/get shutdown etc. Once you standardise on MQTT you can switch out HA/OpenHab/others with minimal fuss, and you have great controll and backup options. WiFi just seems rock- solid Vs ZigBee or z-wave that just seemed so troublesome and unreliable.

Tasmota (1) + mosquito running on a RPi has finally given me a reliable set up after years of struggling. It is some rock-solid MQTT compatible firmware for ESP8266 devices.

1 - [https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota](https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota)

<comment><USER42> Z-wave/Zigbee are complicated but a necessary evil since wifi and batteries don't play well together.

You might want to look into [https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt](https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt) and other projects like it to give you the nice mqtt control over zwave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> We are a manufacturer too with a new product that brings home and industrial equipment online (smart hub and stuff). Only heard of openHAB but this looks awesome. We shall implement. Thanks HN.

<comment><USER28> Pull requests for integrations are always happily accepted. Just fork the project, follow the contribution guidelines, and send a GitHub pull request. Thanks!

I got started as a contributor to home assistant by sending patches to the Sonos integration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Tangential to this -- anyone have a good resource for selecting smart devices that are private and secure?

<comment><USER45> Yes - would really like a good doorbell camera that I can host at home. Seems like the Amazon and Google are the best unfortunately.

<comment><USER46> Check out doorbird [https://www.doorbird.com](https://www.doorbird.com)

<comment><USER28> Can confirm. The doorbird is great. I use it with home assistant

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> One of our clients is using Home Assistant in a 10000+ apartments deployment with Rockchip + esp32 hardware we made.

<comment><USER30> Is there are write up of this anywhere? This is truely massive and must have some unique problems and solutions.

<comment><USER47> > Is there are write up of this anywhere? This is truely massive

Massive? Samsung has been building smart apartments for over a decade now. Those are way bigger

<comment><USER30> I didn't know this, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> If you're interested in a similar solution (albeit closed sourced and managed) that works in a non-cloud, fully off-line (re: internet) environment. Take a look at [http://www.hubitat.com](http://www.hubitat.com). It supports zigbee, zwave and wifi devices and has strong compatibility with the smartthings ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER49> Need a bit intro as even state of union seem to need to watch a video. The problem is it said open source then there is here and there Alexa. Do not want to go into Apple and amazon and google ecology sphere as long as I can. It is my home. Not want someone listen to mine. Not to mention we do not know what authorury can get hold of given in a police state here

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it possible to adopt this as a manufacturer? For example, can we deploy easily new functionality? Can we push security updates?

<comment><USER36> Check out the existing hass.io infrastructure and HassOS open-source project, which among other bits assist in pushing security updates:

* [https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/](https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/)

* [https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos](https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos)

<comment><USER50> I looked at using hassOS as a base for my rpi project but I struggled with how exactly to do that. Looking at the readmes in that repo it doesn't look like anything has changed on the documentation front.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I spun this OS up as a VM and it does not detect my Wemo smart plugs. However, I'm also not able to detect them from my current phone (running v1.24, I believe, of the app). However, my former phone, which is still running v1.23.1 of the app, _is_ able to see them and connect to them.

Anyone else experiencing this same thing?

</comment><comment><USER52> If only it was not so painful to package.

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839786](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839786)

</comment><comment><USER53> Great to see this thread. Was thinking about getting into this just some days ago.

What hardware are you people running the system on? Raspberry Pi? Or something more beefier? Or less?

I think they recommend a RPi 4 for the latest release...

<comment><USER54> Can anyone comment on pros and cons of running it virtualized on a Linux host? I have capable hardware and would like to run it on that rather than on a separate Pi device.

<comment><USER25> I use the official HA docker version (not Hassio). It exactly replicates a manual installation of HA.

Works great, I use it in network host mode because I did it by mistake initially and suddenly discovered a few devices which joined via broadcast (my Logitech Hub especially).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Can anyone recommend an affordable temperature/humidity sensor?

<comment><USER56> I would flash it with Tasmota, but these sensors are cheap/awesome: [https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Temperature-Humidity- Controlle...](https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Temperature-Humidity-Controller- Appliances/dp/B075FSHKQ5/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?hvadid=78134099057334&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=sonoff+th16&qid=1575083424&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExUFVKQTFCSTRDTjZLJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwOTUzNjQ2MVYwRVY5NUlWQzg4UyZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwNTI5ODQzMVhNOFJPSDlBNFhTUSZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm using Home Assistant to join all my IoT devices together, and Node RED to provide a graphical programming layer for automation. It works really well.

</comment><comment><USER58> How does it compare to openhab?

</comment><comment><USER21> I do not have home automation

However I use Home assistant.

Why, because it shows me what is going on....

Its a dashboard for my house.

</comment><comment><USER59> HASS is amazing, my entire house runs on it. Could not recommend it more!

</comment><comment><USER2> EditedTo Add: well, that was meant to be a minor comment and request for pointers but turned into somewhat of a rant. My apologies HMN, my apologies. This kind of dashboard really does have the possibility of reducing the overdoses I am subjecting amongst any number of other mistakes brought about by lack of clear and understandable documentation. And once we have fixed it for me, well from THEREON IS WHERE WE TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

On a slightly related note, does anybody remember that about a year or so ago somebody posted his "Personal Analytics Dashboard" I think he called it. Basically it detailed every aspect of his life. it was things like heart rate, steps walked, miles run, cycles cycled along with all manner of other nutritional input.

The thing that marked it out for me was that it took all those desperate threads of information and display them in one easy to understand and beautiful layout. But I cannot for the life of me find it!

At the moment I want to get to the state that when one of the nurses comes on duty, she can get the iPad out of the server cupboard (after first pressing her flic button to login) and see on one or two pages things like but not limited to:

* Is the catheter turn on or off

* What is the bosses current heart rate (BPM)

* What is today's resting heart rate and how does it fit in over the week, the month and the year

* Which of the doors and windows are open and are they locked or not

* Did the boss get into his wheelchair today, and if so for how long and how far did he travel

* How many doses of his medication has he had today, and how many does that leave him with for the rest of the day

* Have there been any incidences of Autononmic Dysreflexia[1] or any other life-threatening shenanigans other parts of the team will need to know about

And on and on and on, so it would need to be expandable. It may be possible to skin home assistance with something simple enough but I am not a designer.

I've lots of this data coming in already from lots of different sensors, I am however just struggling with a way of turning those data into information that non-technical users will not be put off by. Because if they are put off by it then they will not use the system, and as this is going to be one of the systems monitoring medication and my health et cetera I would really like them to use. Non-technical users make up the huge majority of people who will be using this system.

And to pre-empt what I know one of you will mention because you care about me, I do not ever put my life in the hands of anyone person, process, widget or anything else! It's nice to know you care. <3

I also hate spreadsheets. I mean, I will continue to use them obviously because there is no choice. Just thought world should know that I hate them.

So yes I am pretty much totally comfortable purchasing sensors and and getting my work PA to install them, I'm also having enormous fun creating new sensors but what I am not enjoying is being quadriplegic and trying to draw out nice designs.

Have a feeling it is not necessary and that there will be a simple way for me to plug in all of my data streams and be given a very shiny dashboard that I could maybe put on the wall of my office on some 17 inch screen something similar.

\</comment><comment>--- I've included a couple of links describing autonomic dysreflexia, but be warned it's not a nice condition and it is not fun having one of these episodes. Not happy reading, just put them here for completeness

[1]: [https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with- paralysis/healt...](https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with- paralysis/health/secondary-conditions/autonomic-dysreflexia)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia)

</comment><comment><USER60> Oh god... Hass = Hate in German...

<comment><USER61> Consider it a little gift.

<comment><USER60> "Gift" meaning "poison" German is quite fitting ;)

<comment><USER30> When the smart switch loses its connection and the coffee machine doesn't start at 6am, this is exactly correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Smelvetica – Helvetica the way it was intended to be - <AUTHOR> http://tholman.com/smelvetica/ <comment><USER2> Ever since seeing Sans Bullshit Sans ([http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/](http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/)) I've always wanted to pull a font-related prank at the company where I work.

<comment><USER3> Needs a blockchain & co update

<comment><USER4> Oddly, it didn't censor "leveraging".

<comment><USER5> It censors "leverage" though. It's funny how universally "bullshit" these terms are considered to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those of us outside the graphic design bubble, the author's top-level post[1] briefly explaining his madness.

[1] [http://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/](http://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/)

<comment><USER7> I am a font snob and was about to leave a strongly worded comment for suggesting this font. Your comment saved me for making a fool of myself.

<comment><USER8> The XKCD quote was a pretty good indication of the author's intent. I like it and will be using it in place of comic sans for all my inter office punnery. As much as I like graphic designers, the ability to give them an occasional seizure is hard to pass up.

<comment><USER9> There should be a fixed with version of Smelvetica for programming, where each character is artistically justified within the character cell.

<comment><USER8> The fun of this font is sharing it with others. Fixed width fonts are mostly used in personal/personalizable settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you liked that, you'll love Comic Papyrus!

[http://www.barthandco.com/blog.php?i=5](http://www.barthandco.com/blog.php?i=5)

<comment><USER11> I want to remove my eyes now

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always spell it "keming".

<comment><USER13> Fans of typographic humor may enjoy Liz Crain's ceramic work. One of her specialties is ceramic pieces that look like old rusted metal cans. And her husband is a retired typesetter, so the cans often feature typographic themes.

After buying her Interrobang piece a while back, we asked her to make a Keming can to go with it. Here they are together:

[https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb/A](https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb/A)

I love the way she made it so you can see both the "m" and the "rn".

[http://lizcrainceramics.com/](http://lizcrainceramics.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hellvetica.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like how it makes me angry. Finally feeling something again.

Thank you for making this world a better place.

<comment><USER16> I love how a font can inspire this kind of deep, primal anger. Like smelling salts for the feels.

<comment><USER17> Yes. My other half hasn't got over the 30 minute rant and regular random explosions about it to this day when we hired a plumber and his van had comic sans and clipart from Microsoft office on the side. This was 15 years ago.

<comment><USER18> While we're on the pedantry topic, I'd like to put in a word for proper sentence structures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At first I was not sure whether the web font was maybe not properly loading.

</comment><comment><USER20> Strange how the italic version seems much less bad.

<comment><USER21> less bad? To me it's awful with the different thicknesses (not sure, perhaps something is broken with how it's rendered here).

[https://i.imgur.com/e3KUUuY.png](https://i.imgur.com/e3KUUuY.png)

<comment><USER18> Doesn't look like that on Mac. Seems like a bad case of disabled ClearType, aka subpixel anti-aliasing. Dunno if the font also contributes to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is the kind of thing I'd put in a CSS stylesheet on April Fools Day.

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh god

Serious: Neue Haas Grotesk is Helvetica the way it is supposed to be: [http://www.fontbureau.com/nhg/](http://www.fontbureau.com/nhg/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The quick brown _fox_.

<comment><USER25> Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the _evil_ Queen _and Jack_

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > This project began by pulling the original "Helvetica" font from my system > files, and making a copy of it. From there I opened it in FontForge, which > is a brilliant open source font editor.

Pretty sure the license won't allow you to do any modification to the font installed on your system.

<comment><USER27> I suspect this might qualify as a work of satire or parody.

<comment><USER28> His readme on github claims copyright and uses the MIT licence. Hmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> heh, I've seen so many layout and rendering issues with custom fonts in the browser, I honestly couldn't tell whether this was a joke or a glitch ;)

</comment><comment><USER30> To quote Slipknot: "I push my fingers into my eyes It's the only thing that slowly stops the ache"

</comment><comment><USER31> This seems to be the font that Rational DOORS uses. Also Rational ClearQuest, but only in IE.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wait, isn't that just Arial?

</comment><comment><USER33> I must inform the OpenBSD team!

</comment><comment><USER34> Omg kerning

<comment><USER35> It's unbearable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This makes my anxiety so bad

</comment><comment><USER37> photoshop 4, all over again

</comment><comment><USER38> OH GOD MY EYES

</comment><comment><USER39> Still a better love story than twilight.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't get it. Helvetica is a perfectly okay font.

<comment><USER41> It's a joke.

<comment><USER40> Obviously it's a joke. But I didn't get it. I thought this was making fun of Helvetica, but as was pointed out elsewhere, apparently its not. This is basically "poorly kerned Helvetica." Which was the part I missed.

<comment><USER41> If you knew it was a joke, you could have asked for an explanation instead. ;)

<comment><USER40> I thought that was implicit in "I don't get it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm so tired of Helvetica everywhere that this is actually an improvement. Once upon a time it was a great way to make an modernist artistic statement, like "Ill" should be three straight lines. Now Helvetica is a meaningless default choice.

<comment><USER43> Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other "boring" font.

I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.

<comment><USER44> I don't agree about Verdana. Boring typefaces are fine; typefaces designed for the 640x480 displays of the 1990's have very little space today.

<comment><USER45> One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that would be used in meetings on a projector.

So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man's eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn't learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I'd say mission accomplished.

Corporate tools at headquarters didn't like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a "normal" font. Apparently I'm still upset about this.

<comment><USER46> I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good readability even at the back of the classroom and it's capital I, lowercase l, and number 1 are all distinct. You'd be surprised how common students are confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.

<comment><USER9> You could make your presentations more "multimedia" so the people at the back of the room can smell the difference.

<comment><USER44> I think the word you are looking for is multi _modal_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Library of iOS Custom Controls - <AUTHOR> http://cocoacontrols.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice, but needs more Mac controls.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I haven't had a chance to populate the Mac side yet, since I just built this yesterday and today. Please feel free to submit some!</comment></comment>


Berkeley Mystery Walls - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/berkeley-mystery-walls <comment><USER2> This is a sensationalist article that plays up the "mystery" and old ideas that have since been proven false ("ancient civilizations!"). There has been modern research into these walls, and they date to 1850-1880 when the rush of European settlers arrived clearing pasture for livestock.

[1] [http://m.newser.com/story/230029/the-east-bay-walls- continue...](http://m.newser.com/story/230029/the-east-bay-walls-continue-to- confound.html)

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

<comment><USER3> That was my first thought too. There are "walls" like these all over New England.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think we can safely say the builders were not from Yorkshire, where the workmanship is of far higher quality: [https://www.ydswg.co.uk/](https://www.ydswg.co.uk/)</comment>


I am my Web Host - <AUTHOR> http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/07/i-am-my-web-host/ <comment><USER2> Note: despite the title, this is not actually about hosting sites on a box out of your basement; it's about VPS hosting. (I was looking forward to seeing what kind of bandwidth he had at his residence and how much it cost...)

<comment><USER3> Same here.. I actually host my own calendar and file server. I was wondering what kind of bandwidth hit I'd be in for if I hosted my mail and sites too.

<comment><USER4> It's not so much the amount of bandwidth you need as it is the type of bandwidth and equipment required. You can get cable internet with a 2 mbps uplink speed, but the equipment won't handle the levels of concurrency that you need to serve pages with any reasonable degree of responsiveness. My developers are located in various places around the US, and at various times, we all run dev servers coupled with DynDNS so we can preview what's on someone's dev branch without a push and deploy. Even with fast connections (+2 mbps up) in metro areas (few hops), the serve stats are ridiculously slow. And what about an SLA? Your cable provider doesn't care that your sites are down when your lawn man cuts your cable with his edger. You need a T1 or better with a good router and switching equipment to do it properly.

Couple that with the fact that bandwidth is only part of the equation. How much downtime can you afford? Do you have redundant power? UPS? Generator? What about environment? Do you have sufficient HVAC?

To implement all the required facilities for a server or two is just ridiculously expensive, especially in light of all the quality VPS providers available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tried to leave a comment on the blog but it wouldnt permit me. If the author sees it here....thanks for the Gandi tip, was looking for a VPS solution that was affordable.

Do you know if they permit you to upload your own VM?

<comment><AUTHOR> The comments do get throuhg (sometimes). Something destroyed Wordpress on the last update :( must fix it.

r.e. VM's the answer is "no not currently", however it is on their list of things "in development".

<comment><USER5> Ahh right. Seems Linux is well supported everywhere. But when it comes to Windows reasonably priced solutions are much harder to find.

I have a VM of my own running Windows server that i really wanted to stick on the cloud somewhere. Amazon EC2 works out a little too expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What the hell man; a MySQL backed DNS server which has a PHP web interface? Just learn djbdns already!

<http://www.lifewithdjbdns.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> My favorite resource about this is <http://lowendbox.com> (I am in no way affiliated with it).</comment>


Brain Uses Left Side for Lyrics and Right for Melody - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/02/27/810049050/how-the-brain-teases-apart-a-songs-words-and-music <comment><USER2> That's interesting.

Where is rhythm processed?</comment>


Ten years later, insiders press a different view of Enron - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/story/2011-12-03/enron-10-years-later/51592092/1

<comment><USER2> The former Enron people in the article claim the company had great, hardworking people in it and ready-to-implement software.

I see no inherent contradiction between a company having fraudulent, criminal leadership and hardworking, well-meaning people in it. Nor in a company having sellable products and a bankrupt business plan to implement it.

I doubt anyone has any problems acknowledging Enron had tens of thousands of well-meaning, hardworking employees, ignorant of the disaster its decision- makers were fomenting. Everyone knew the company had salt-of-the-earth employees among the criminals -- they were the ones who lost their retirements.

The article didn't change my opinion of Enron.

<comment><USER3> It's USA Today. I think this is a story that began its life as a hook ("let's find someone to stick up for the worst corporation ever") and backfilled it with whatever crap they could find.

I didn't flag it because personally I find it interesting that the worst corporation ever also tried to start a CDN that many people in the industry found credible at the time. But it's a terrible news story nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had a funded streaming media startup from '99-'01. We built overlay multicast software --- the kind of middleware code that Enron is accused not to have had to back up their CDN.

What I can add to this thread is, Enron very much was talked about in '00 as a real CDN player. Not just in our own internal meetings, but in bizdev discussion with other large media and CDN companies.

That doesn't mean Enron-the-company wasn't a giant fraud (EBS was a tiny portion of Enron as a whole), but I plausible the idea that some senior guy at EBS could truly believe Enron was a legitimate enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER4> _One demonstration from 1999 narrated by Yeager appears to show an early concept of cloud computing, in which a user could access online applications or "apps" through an Enron network_

A user accessing applications via a network is an innovation in 1999? Try 30 years earlier with Telnet, and probably many other examples.

 _And yet another presentation from 2000 includes a demonstration of an on- demand movie service similar to those available on most cable TV systems today_

The Wikipedia article on VoD cites existing _commercial_ services already having launched in 1998.

I don't doubt that there were a lot of smart people at Enron; but whether they were ultimately producing value is in doubt. These examples don't seem to provide much evidence.

<comment><USER3> I guess I take your point, but "cloud computing" today is very much not the same thing as "cloud computing" in '00. To build a streaming testbed network in '00, we had to buy _physical colocations_ in data centers around the world, and we were a tiny company.

Everything has precedent in something else, but that doesn't make everything a CICS mainframe.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but the super computer crowd had long separated most of the physical hardware and even data center that something runs on in 00. Compared to that even EC2 is still a crappy service that forces you to micromanage things. There are plenty of awesome services are built on top of EC2, but 'modern' cloud computing infrastructure still sucks from both a cost and stability standpoint.

<comment><USER3> I'm just saying "cloud computing" connotes something more than just having servers attached to networks.

<comment><USER5> I am referring to automated billing of arbitrary computing resources based on usage from a large pool spanning several computer architectures and computing locations. Now it's not LINUX boxes, but that's because they focused more on latency and bandwidth than 'modern' cloud system providers do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, the key problem here is that these are very peripheral insiders indeed. Here's my company's study of the Enron corpus:

<http://blog.lumino.so/2011/11/07/enron-evil-versus-football/>

Just look at all that orange at the top of the first image: that's traders talking to each other about trades. Energy trading is what the company was about, not the tiny internet company that they may have spawned or the HR department. Those people don't deserve to have had their reputations ruined by the fraudulent hedge fund blowup and C-suite malfeasance, but that doesn't mean their parochial views are the correct overall view.

</comment><comment><USER7> _"...a small but increasingly vocal group of ex-Enron employees"_ This _'group'_ consists of two people who's reputation is tied to Enron's demise.

Most of the people reading this article will have seen the thoroughly researched 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'. I don't think anyone who's seen that documentary is going to be swayed by a couple of consultants crying foul.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 What a shock that those with a reputation to protect or untarnish would wish to push an alternate narrative.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting story. Even so many of the tales might be misrepresented it is still fascinating how winners and looser try to construct different narratives of the same "facts".

<comment><USER3> This narrative is probably orthogonal to the corruption narrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> you know the only bad thing about Enron?

A top accounting firm got destroyed for nothing..</comment>


Show HN: Podely – Convert your YouTube channel into a podcast - <AUTHOR> https://podely.com <comment><USER2> Flagged because this is a sales page, not a Show HN. Please read the rules:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Regarding the sales page itself: If you had a list of podcasts created this way, I would definitely look at it. Because I am a big podcast fan.

If your product has not been used yet, I would start by contacting youtubers directly and work with them to build an initial portfolio of podcasts created with Podely.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with it?

"Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread."

Looks like you can try it out so not sure why do you think it's not good for ShowHN?

<comment><USER2> All you can do on that page is sign up. Sign-up pages are explicitely listed as a type of page that can't be a Show HN.

This sign-up page especially rubs me the wrong way as it uses a dark pattern: It grabs your email address first and _then_ tells you that you cannot proceed without entering your credit card details.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll say that's more incompetence on my part than a "dark pattern". At this time you can only have 1 channel per account, and I need to check the email is unique before sending the info to Stripe, that's the way I came up to solve that, presenting that form before payment.

My product has not been used yet, just put it live yesterday. My idea here was just to get general feedback, like yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a cool idea but I don't know about that pricing. Many podcasts I listen/watch to are just over the hour mark per episode. Since this is geared towards people getting started, I doubt many are even making enough to cover the subscription cost alone.

I think charging by the hour is a bit weird in general since I would assume you're just grabbing the audio track with youtube-dl and not actually processing anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I calculated the price based on how much people upload on youtube on average, I've seen most type of "vlogs" are about 10 min, and the average upload is once per week, so that's 40 minutes per month.

I agree about the price, by my calculations the biggest cost will be bandwidth, my rationale was that charging by bandwidth is less "user friendly" than charging by time. And I've seen other major podcast hosters charging by time also, like Buzzsprout. Hope that makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I made this web app to convert Youtube channels into podcasts.

The app will try to search and replace the Youtube metadata to make it "fit" more as a podcast. For example, by default it will replace "video" to "episode" in the description, among other things. This works automatically, so when there is a new video, within minutes a new episode will appear on the podcast feed.

Any feedback is more than welcome.

<comment><USER5> Could you include the github repo? I'm curious how it works and if it's customizable.</comment></comment>


Dropbox moves to Ireland for all customers outside of North America - louis-paul https://www.dropbox.com/help/9063 <comment><AUTHOR> Title is wrong, this is just a tax minimization move and has nothing to do with data housing.

<comment><USER2> Ireland often gets a lot of flak from the US and the EU about being a "tax haven" with similarities drawn to the Isle of Man or the Cayman Islands.

Irelands corporation tax rate is 12.5%, in the US the rate is often cited as 30% and similarly with France and Germany. However the "effective" corporate tax rate is actually lower than Irelands in many cases because there are many write offs and loop holes that mean companies rarely pay 30% and much closer to 8%. These writes offs and loop holes aren't really as available in Ireland and subsequently mean Irelands tax scheme is more transparent in the sense the perceived value is closer to the actual value.

It's just a competitive and transparent tax policy that has been in place since 1960's. A lot of people here and in the media will use this as evidence that Ireland is a tax haven. I'll concede measures like the Double Irish were a step too far -- a 12.5% rate isn't. If Dropbox really wanted to I'm sure they could find plenty of write offs in the UK like Starbucks did. There might be other factors influencing this decision too though e.g. avoiding the UK because a Brexit is on the table. Ireland has a better climate for data centres compared to say the Cayman Islands.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is some good data on this [http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/countryefftaxrate...](http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/countryefftaxrates2015.xls)

By the way companies have 6 years to change their structure so the Double Irish still exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This post[0] in the Dropbox forum points out that Dropbox is suspected of the intention to minimize tax payable.

[0]: [https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/203737955-Transfer- of-business-services-to-Ireland)

<comment><USER4> Remember "tax minimization" is legal, prudent, and a fundamental duty of company officers in these times of "maximise shareholder value" being the primary and legally mandated goal of a corporation.

"Tax evasion" is crossing over a not very well defined and continually shifting line - and is illegal.

At the moment, at least from where I see the world here in Australia, all the "global tech giants" (and mining/resource ones too) are doing a significantly better job of navigating the shifting tax rules across various national tax jurisdictions to minimize their tax obligations - than the governments and bureaucracies are doing of collecting "fair" taxes from them. Our local popular press is full of stories of FaceBook/Google/Apple paying zero tax in Australia because they can structure their invoicing/payments to and from different parts of the same global corporate entity – in entirely legal ways that result in zero tax owing in Australia.

I'd think less of Dropbox's senior management and advisor team if they weren't trying to take advantage of the same loopholes.

It's "Modern Corporation 101" grade stuff - "Maximise shareholder value by whatever means won't put the company directors in jail. Don't talk about ethics or fairness or duty to society (except in the Marketing Department and advertising). Talk about duty to shareholders and what's close enough to technically legal that our lawyers will sign off on it."

<comment><USER5> You're exactly right. While we look at this stuff as despicable, because it really is, we can't blame the companies. Except ... we can, right? They're the ones who have manipulated the tax codes, right? They're practically writing the laws, right? Ultimately though, the politicians are the ones who are passing the laws. They're the ones who are being bribed, excuse me, funded, by corporations and the wealthy. To blame corporations for taking every advantage of the system, to manipulate it in whatever way possible, is silly. Capitalism rewards innovation. It rewards plugging the holes that cost money (and taxes can be quite a big hole). These can be great benefits to everyone to some extent, but they also eventually lead to buying out competitors which reduces competition, which can result in big, lazy companies who'd rather legislate than innovate - I'm looking at you, Cable Company and Telephone Company, or the Media conglomerates. That's what we have the world over.

Maybe it's just me, but for me, the problem is our political system - it's not designed to withstand these corrupting forces. Some countries deal with it slightly better, but barely just.

I like competitive capitalism. I like democracy, and even the idea of a representative democracy. But they don't play well together when you have the capitalists ultimately deciding who gets to represent the people, and then those representatives bending in every which way to make things easier for their funders. When you have a system that rewards bribery, or has in its place a revolving door between legislators and business, you're going to have these effects. The solution to this I think is really rather simple, but I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

<comment><USER6> Why is tax minimization despicable? Countries should compete on all levels including economic efficiencies. Lower taxes is higher efficiency and an admirable achievement for a government.

What is despicable is that we all pay more taxes than our governments should actually need if they spent the money they took from us wisely.

<comment><USER7> Countries don't just compete on taxes by providing the same service more efficiently, but also by providing a _worse_ service to their citizens. It's a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps it's worthwhile to have a mild counterbalance to the tendency to spend an ever increasing amount of other people's money.

It's not like "better service" is a driving force behind any government, ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The clear point of this is not to protect from NSA/US Courts but to minimise tax. I'm not sure why they never setup out of Ireland in the first place, every other US company with international revenues has already.

In addition unless Microsoft wins its appeal US courts have ruled that a US company eg: Dropbox can be forced to provide any data they have even if it is outside the US

<comment><USER10> Right. I mean, Condolezza Rice is on the board of Dropbox. If there's a company that is going to have pressure from shareholders to make data available to the government it's going to be Dropbox.

<comment><USER11> If she doesn't work for the govt. anymore why would she do that?

<comment><USER12> Money,

<comment><USER4> I doubt it - I'm reasonably sure 50% less or 1000% more money wouldn't make a substantial difference to her or her families way of life - she'd notice, but mostly in a "using dollars to keep score" kind of way.

I'd suggest "ideology" is a much more powerful motivator here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't say it moves the data, just that the legal entity providing service is the Irish subsidiary.

<comment><USER14> In terms of alternatives, AWS WorkDocs provides data storage in Ireland (and the US, Singapore and Australia).

<comment><USER4> But since Amazon has offices in the USA, the NSA considers all AWS hosted data in whatever country the Amazon operated data center is located in, to be under US jurisdiction.

I had a client who pulled all their (encrypted) data off the Ninefold cloud (Ninefold were at the time a fully Australian owned and hosted company) when they leased data center space and opened an office in CA – due to data sovereignty concerns.

<comment><USER15> Isn't Dropbox also entirely aws-hosted?

<comment><USER4> Yep, and has exactly the same "company officers residing in the US" exposure to the NSA and any of the agencies fighting the war on [drugs|terrorism|pedos|political-rivals] getting closed or open court warrants with or without gag orders.

In fact Dropbox is doubly at risk, law enforcement or national security could target either (or both) Dropbox themselves - go straight to Amazon to get access at hypervisor level to their entire infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As an Irish person I'm happy about this. As others have already mentioned, we've got a massive number (relative to our country's size) of fortune tech companies setting up camp here for a number of reasons.

12.5℅ corporation tax. We're not a tax haven, our rate is just at a sweeter spot. This policy was introduced by an taoiseach (prime minister) Sean Lemass during the 60's to stimulate economic recovery from one of the worst recessions we ever faced. The goal was to attract foreign investment and in particular from American companies that wanted to get a foothold in Europe. This guy is sort of revered in Ireland and everyone that takes Junior Certificate History (ages 12-15ish) learns about him. He's a pretty interesting leader because he was almost singlehandedly responsible for developing our country into a modern, global economy through various policies, plans and schemes.

European Law, I'm no expert in law but as far as I know our data protection laws are well established. Let's put it this way, our own government definitely isn't trying to keep track of your visits to the toilet. Although we're paranoid that the US probably is, or at least they want to!

Climate - funnily enough our famously terrible weather has an upside. The cost of cooling a data centre is cheaper. Our country isn't incredibly cold but it never really gets hot here either. Temperatures throughout the year are relatively stable.

As a CS student with only 1 year left to graduate I couldn't be happier with the 'mini tech bubble' we're experiencing. It's practically the only sector that's seeing significant growth and wage increases in the last few years. The economic crash in 2008 had a severe effect on the country as a whole. Fast forward to today - employment in software development, engineering and other related fields is being created quicker than they can find suitable candidates. I'm happy knowing that while so many other young people are being forced to immigrate, our tech sector is so saturated with jobs that CS grads like myself are being headhunted.

</comment><comment><USER17> No data is moving at all, just a change in company to Ireland subsidiary.

</comment><comment><USER18> Twitter did the same a few days ago as announced on their blog.

[https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172527#](https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172527#)

</comment><comment><USER19> My assumption they funneling money through Ireland through knowledge based capital tax breaks, after Ireland said they abolishing double Irish last year which many large fortune 50 companies utilized in past

</comment><comment><USER20> Great. Since there is no international tax-agreement between Ireland and my country, now my startup company has to start paying 7% VAT for Dropbox in their place. (In addition to 7% VAT we already pay for Facebook ads and Adobe Creative Cloud, which recently moved to Ireland too)

Gee, if only Microsoft OneDrive would have a decent Linux client.

</comment><comment><USER21> The user data is absolutely not stored in Ireland.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, its up in the clouds. Seven miles up to avoid national legal issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I couldn't help thinking BIGGEST RSYNC EVER. And, what is the bandwidth of a 747-8 full of 4TB disk? (140,000kg/0.6kg = 233,333 disks, downrate to 200,000 for packaging, 800,000TB. Approx flight time 10h SFO-DUB, load/unload, say 15h; 86400s. ~9TB/s. So pretty fast.

<comment><USER22> Come on, a down vote for trying to bring the conversation back to something technically interesting instead of angst about NSA snooping and tax avoidance? For shame, you should have your geek badge confiscated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Its strange that they don't give a reason for the move.

<comment><USER18> EU privacy laws, taxation.

<comment><USER24> In that order?

<comment><USER18> One would hope...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how this will affect speed and latiency if you're on the other side of the world (like NZ and Australia).

<comment><USER4> Apart from that point that so far as I can tell, this is purely about what country code is used in a billing database record and it's tax implications, rather than any large scale network reconfiguration changes - but I doubt many people have a use case where the difference between 50ms or 300ms latency for Dropbox would make any difference at all. For most people I'm pretty sure the speed of "the last mile" is the fundamental limiting factor for their bandwidth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I doubt this anything to do with privacy. I'm already in the process if moving to Spideroak.</comment>


Codebrag – Daily code review tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/softwaremill/codebrag <comment><USER2> How's this better than Github's review? Must be a pretty big reason to add a new tool to our team's flow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Original 'Show HN': [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772085)

</comment><comment><USER4> Where I work we use Bitbucket for code reviews. Their code review setup works well for us. We especially enjoy the "like" button that Codebrag also seems to have. It doesn't seem like Codebrag is very much different from this though.

A big way to differentiate for me would be if you could create "groups" or "teams" of reviewers. Say we have three teams sharing a code base. We could create a group for each of those teams. Then when someone opens a review I add the groups I need to look at it instead of the individuals on those teams.

One question I would have too is what is a "commit" in Codebrag? Is it literally review commit-by-commit, or is it more like a Pull Request in Github/Bitbucket terms? If it's the latter, I would rename it to not make the terms confusing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Has there been a recent update with Codebrag? I try to keep an eye on the available code review tools and this one was last updated a while back. The last release/commit/tweet was last June.

<comment><USER6> Have you seen this too ? [https://rhodecode.com/blog/123/rhodecode-460-release-new- app...](https://rhodecode.com/blog/123/rhodecode-460-release-new-approach-to- code-review)

<comment><USER5> Yea I saw that was recently updated. I'm excited to see tooling be updated for Mercurial. I was hoping the recent updates and re-release as open source of RhodeCode would spur some updates from the Kallithea project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks about the same as GitLab's merge request / code review feature to me. The being able to dismiss a commit is different, but I'm not sure I understand that feature.

When I'm doing a big review, I copy the list of files into a text document and check them off after I finish each one. I've found that especially useful when the order of the files requires a lot of jumping around to follow the flow. I'd like to see this feature supported by a code review tool.

<comment><USER8> Reviewable supports per-file (and per-revision) check-offs. :) (Disclosure: I built it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this overlaps a lot with what github is already offering.

In github you can start a code review from a comment, mark a review as blocking, require at least an approving review prior to merge, etc... You can also add hooks for automated tests, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really needs a screencast or similar; I get what the tool is for, but it's really hard to see why or how it works without investing time and effort in setting it up and running it myself.

<comment><USER7> There is one, but it's several clicks away.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ahIZCBzr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ahIZCBzr8)

<comment><USER11> That video would be much more compelling to me if it had narration, and explained why the basic concept of their product is better (for at least some cases) than the built-in code review features on GitHub and similar services. Or maybe their target audience is teams that aren't doing any code review, in which case they ought to explain how it would work for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does this compare to Phabricator? What's the best open source tool for code review these days ?

<comment><USER13> How about gerrit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does non-blocking work? I'm interested in this, but didn't find much info.

<comment><USER15> You do not review pull requests, but stream of commits. The code author then gets a stream of reviews.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Verbr – Reddit between friends - <AUTHOR>

www.verbr.com
My vision for verbr is a social network full of great content. A place where I can go to discover and share the content on the web... Without having to read a status update or 140 characters about what people in my network did on the weekend, or how much they love their cat.
A content only social network.
Like Reddit, people can only share on Verbr when they paste a link (we allow them to add a 60 character caption, to add context to their post).
Users each have a Verbr score (Think Reddit Karma) which shows how much people liked their content.
As a co-founder, I should probably say that Verbr is a complete game-changer that will revolutionise social media...
The truth is that it is not. I do however feel that it is a great product that could provide a much needed service to a lot of people.
Feel free to sign up and have a look around.
James <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, genuinely had to go to the hospital...

Email sign-up. Don't know what happened here, but we are sorting it asap... thanks for pointing it out.

Re: permissions - We went for the overarching permissions API so that users don't have to approve MORE permissions once in (You still have complete control of whether or not Verbr will post to your twitter/FB etc once in).

Re: User demographics - I disagree here. I do not broadcast how I am feeling as I feel uncomfortable doing so, however I do like to share links to news articles, videos, music that I think my peers find interesting.

If you have a look through your FB feed, I am sure you will see connections that simply share links as opposed to their feelings.

Quite a subjective thing I guess.

Thanks for the feedback and Q's. Sorry for not replying sooner.

J

<comment><USER2> > Re: permissions - We went for the overarching permissions API so that users > don't have to approve MORE permissions once in (You still have complete > control of whether or not Verbr will post to your twitter/FB etc once in).

That kind of defeats the point of having this granularity of permissions. I'm sorry but I don't want other apps to have this level of permissions on my other social websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1.) I also have not received an email

2.) I would sign up with twitter but I do not want to give you the ability to tweet on my behalf. Can you use a lesser privilege?

3.) Keeping (1) in mind: What prevents users from posting permalinks to their tweets?

4.) In my opinion the problem is not the social media sites, it's social media users. The same kind of people who want to spend time collecting and posting things to a site are the ones who will inevitably want to talk about themselves or share their opinions on said postings. I am doing it right now in fact! How would your site work with this exact hacker news post? (also keeping in mind that I couldn't register)

edit: What if I don't have any friends?

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is that I have to register with email address after authenticated via twitter?

</comment><comment><USER5> Tried to sign up by email - nothing came through. Cannot register.

<comment><USER5> Well it's been 4 hours since I posted. I haven't been waiting and hoping, just came back to read the updates. After all, a post to Show HN would be watched pretty closely for feedback, yes?

No reply? No interest.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Concurrent vs. Registered User Ratio? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any numbers they could share on the number of registered users (or active ones), vs the number concurrently using the system at peak times.  I'm trying to estimate the size of the production systems I will need. <comment> t-dub I think that this is somewhat dependent on the _sort_ of site you're looking at. Total user engagement and usage patterns are going to be different on a news site is going to be different than on a social networking site.

In any case, on a fledgling social media (i.e. focus on sharing/remixing audio/video/images) that I built for a client, the current user registration is just shy of 2,000. The number of users who have posted _anything_ is ~700. The number of users who have posted in the last 30 days is ~350. The number of users who have posted 3 or more items in the last 30 days is ~100. The number of users who have commented on a post in the last 30 days is ~150.

<comment><USER2> > usage patterns

Session duration will greatly influence concurrent usage. If people use your service for less than five minutes per day then 100 daily users would mostly have the system to themselves. This means that you could have thousands of registered users and grossly inefficient code without load issues.

Stop fretting about your hardware and get thousands of registered users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I expect my sessions to be longer (30 minutes?). And if I were only expecting hundreds of users, I wouldn't waste my time. I'm hoping to hit at least tens of thousands of registered paying users. I do expect to have portions of "grossly inefficient code" (much faster to implement in some cases) initially that I plan on solving (when they become the problem to solve). My product/site will be highly collaborative (I know, everyone thinks this, but, I think my idea is different (I know, everyone thinks... ())) and with a larger than normal communication component.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My site's still pretty small but I've got 1800 registered users, an upper limit of around 300 active ones, and 10 to 15 using the site at peak times.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most of the sites I've worked on top out at 1% of registered users online at any given time.</comment>


US manufacturing still tops China's by nearly 46 percent   - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/02/06/made_in_the_usa/ <comment><USER2> While it is true that North America still manufactures great quantities of luxury and high tech stuff, that isn't what is pissing off the populists. They couldn't care less if our manufacturing doubled in terms of dollars of output. What they really want is a return to the highly paid, unionized, tradesperson.

To them robots making Chevy trucks matters just as much to their lives as nerds writing software. As productivity increases continue, demand for noncerebral labor declines as a ratio for demand of cerebral labor. Even if the average tradesperson is better of today than 40 years ago (they have cars with AC, for example) they want their _relative_ standing to increase. They used to be paid, say, half of what the engineer made, now its a fifth. That really, really pisses them off, so they take it out on China.

Combine that with the fact that 40 years ago "mom" stayed home, converting (tax free) raw ingredients into delicious food, as well as watched the children and mended the clothes. Now they buy less healthy instant food and need to find a way to pay for daycare, as well as a second car to get to work, and if they are American, substantially inflated healthcare costs.

I'm not envious of their position.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this sounds slightly kooky, but...

I believe there is no 'solution' to their plight. The timeline until singularity is too short for a complete retooling of the economy. However the pace of development at the higher end is fast enough and explosive enough that we can afford to keep on subsidizing the lower classes with bread and circuses until we reach sentient AI, at which point we will be able to provide everyone with robot servants and who knows what else.

Just think about the current web 2.0 economy. If a nineteen year old is able to write a piece of software and execute on a plan that makes him a billionaire in a few years, that's... really quite amazing. Yes yes I know, some people are going to call bubble. Whether or not it's true, I think it's evident that the pace of innovation has sped up more than most people realize. Things like this will continue happening and happen quickly. We're at the beginning of a fantastic time when the pace of wealth creation will increase exponentially, with the internet as the great enabler.

<comment><USER4> That really does sound awfully like the kind of hyperbole more associated with the nuttier Christian sects rather than technologists.

As Ken MacLeod put it "the Rapture for nerds".

<comment><USER5> Haha - if you're going to have a "faith" - having it in humanity's ingenuity to make amazing things is still a good bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of people don't understand this. I'm an English grad student, and one of my more, uh, politically-minded professors said in a seminar that the U.S. doesn't manufacture anything anymore. I sent him this e-mail:

When I mentioned the bit about the U.S. continuing to manufacture a lot of stuff, I wasn't just trying to be a pain, as it's actually true; see Dept. of Labor Data on the subject here: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/MANEMP.txt> or a post on the subject here: <http://blog.american.com/?p=8593> ("Amazingly, if the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate country, it would be tied with Germany as the world's third-largest economy."). CNN even points out that "China's manufacturing sector is on the brink of passing that of the United States, according to a report released Monday," ([http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/21/news/economy/china_us_manufa...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/21/news/economy/china_us_manufacturing/index.htm)) but that it hasn't yet.

What has happened is that the U.S. manufacturing sector represents a much smaller part of the overall U.S. economy—mostly because the rest of the economy has gotten so big.

When you stop believing in polemics and conventional wisdom and start trying to look at what really is, you'll find a lot of unusual stuff.

<comment><USER7> It's not necessarily good though. A multi-billion $ weapons system built in America for the US taxpayer, even if it is never deployed or even abandoned, counts as a $Bn manufacturing output.

As a famous economist said - from a GDP point of view the ideal person is someone undergoing cancer treatment during an expensive divorce

<comment><USER8> And many of those components going into these products come from elsewhere. A manufacturing company I worked with bought parts from all over the world and had few US parts. When I tried to increase the number of parts they were using from the US they said good luck and I failed because nothing was available and no one wanted to make what I wanted (for example I wanted 1,000 metal tubes bent, to make them into legs... there were plenty of places that I visited could do it but they didn't want to so it ended up being done in Mexico).

<comment><USER7> From a macro economic point of view it doesn't matter

If your stealth bomber uses $100 parts made in the USA or $10 parts from china with the difference going in the CEOs bonus - doesn't make any difference when the taxpayer is billed $1000

<comment><USER8> Which is part of my point, for that $1000 in value sometimes our only task is putting the pieces together. It can't last, China wants to do that too.

<comment><USER7> That was sort of my original point, much of the US high value engineering (defense/transport/infrastructure) is for the US government. Which means that the more the taxpayer spends on overpriced defense contracts and cost overruns the better US industrial output looks

<comment><USER9> I keep seeing this, but never a citation. Looking at the best data I could find:

<http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/prel/pdf/table1p.pdf>

Total output: 436,031 Excluding defense: 424,680

Making defense, at least how it's defined in this report, merely 2% of the total output. I'm not sure how much of that 2% is going to the U.S. government as these defense contractors also produce quite a bit for other countries.

That probably doesn't cover the total of it, but I just can't find any substantiation that the government is buying up a significant amount of the manufacturing output. Does someone have a source to help me better understand this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am skeptical of this article because I just looked up this data a month or so ago -- opened the UN's Excel document and everything -- and found that China had recently surpassed the US in manufacturing output.

Unfortunately I am limited to the iPhone right now, so can't re-investigate the data myself until later. I have no interest in diminishing the American economy nor in over-valuing the manufacturing sector, but facts are facts and I'm legitimately confused now.

<comment><USER10> OK, I am back at my computer. My source is the following website, specifically the second link listed: <http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp>

If you open that up, scroll down to the United States, go to the Manufacturing row, and scroll all the way over to the right (2009) you will find $1.78T dollars. If you search for China and do the same, you will find $2.05T. You may also note that China, with its high rate of growth, only first surpassed the US in 2008.

The next highest country after China and the US is Japan with $1.05T.

Edit: Interestingly, the corresponding spreadsheet for "2005 dollars" shows the US at $1.68T and China at $1.48T in 2009. Now I'm even more confused. Shouldn't the difference between 2005 and "current" dollars scale proportionately?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was reading about how the US now considers McDonalds hamburgers to be part of US manufacturing output, whereas in the past that was credited as service since it was a restaurant.

So we must ask. Does the claim made by boston.com include hamburgers?

<comment><USER12> That's nonsense. This never happened. If you are going to make an extraordinary claim like that, take a moment to find a source.

<comment><USER11> Citations:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/20/politics/main60133...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/20/politics/main601336.shtml) [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/business/in-the-new- econom...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/business/in-the-new-economics- fast-food-factories.html)

I await your apology.

<comment><USER12> No where in those articles does it state that making hamburgers has been treated as manufacturing.

In fact the cbs article says "The report does not recommend that burger- flippers be counted alongside factory workers."

There was a report that discussed definitions and how they affected things like tax breaks. The news articles had fun speculating how it would help labor statistics if they did start counting these as manufacturing jobs. But it was just speculation. Wild speculation.

<comment><USER11> "According to a White House report, new manufacturing jobs might be as close as your nearest drive-thru." is somewhat telling, as is the message in the report that if you agree you are a manufacturer, you get tax breaks.

It's had an effect in what has been since classified as manufacturing. Here's a slide show regarding McDonalds' operations in India.

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/27447277/MC-DONALDS>

Procurement of raw materials: •Vegetables from Ludhiana (Punjab) •Chicken from Mumbai (Maharashtra) •French fries from USA •Valla Mine fish from New Zealand

PROCESS The food manufacturing process at McDonalds is completely transparent and the whole process is visible to the customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A commenter in the original article said it better than anyone: "We don't get to qualify as a manufacturing giant just because the defense department gets suckered into paying billions of dollars for a fancy piece of equipment that is built by a small number of folks in a few isolated pockets of the country."

Then again, the numbers (that seem to be incorrect, go check the commments in the original) are however about the money it is made from the manufacturing. Then this is even more worrisome for USA, because that would mean that China has been growing steadily at 9-10 per cent each year, while USA makes MORE money from manufacturing but all it does is barely grow, and produce the biggest debt the world has ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER14> "The growth of productivity — output per unit of input — is the fundamental determinant of the growth of a country's material standard of living."

<http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Productivity.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> Gee I remember when it seemed the US's manufacturing output was orders of magnitude beyond China (and Japan seemed like it was where China is today). Good for China for bootstrapping their economy so effectively, but no one would claim that the US trade deficit was irrelevant to the process either.

Even if you believe that China's output is now approaching parity with the US (46 percent is nearly equal on the long term graph), is it not reasonable to ask at what point they're going to start buying some of our stuff in return?

Or if they're not going to spend their dollars with us, the least they could do is let their own currency valuation happen in open markets.

<comment><USER16> _Even if you believe that China's output is now approaching parity with the US ... is it not reasonable to ask at what point they're going to start buying some of our stuff in return?_

They have bought 20% of the US Debt...

Edit: 20% of the US debt owned by foreign countries

<comment><USER17> And the Federal Reserve recently surpassed China as the largest buyer of US Debt. China has stopped buying as much as the US government will print.

Well, there's your problem.

<comment><USER18> The Fed may have surpassed China as the largest buyer of debt, but it may not be the largest holder. Where do you think all the money in the Social Security trust fund went, eh?

Hint: It's somewhere in the blue part of the pie ;-)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Estim...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Estimated_ownership)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Measuring manufacturing in $$$ might be a bit misleading. If China makes 4 $10 business shirts for every one $50 business shirt the US makes ... ?

<comment><USER20> How else could you possibly compare them?

<comment><USER21> Purchasing power parity in local currency?

<comment><USER22> You didn't answer ars' question, you simply deferred the answer to whoever is defining PPP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Measured in constant dollars, America's manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s."

What's a 'constant dollar'? Is that nominal or inflation-adjusted? Over that timespan the two could mean very different things.

<comment><USER24> "Constant dollars" = inflation-adjusted.

<comment><USER25> However that raises the larger question of whether these inflation-adjustments are accurate.

See: <http://www.shadowstats.com/article/primers_intro>

<comment><USER24> You can say that about any statistic. The purpose of statistics is to abstract away a large amount of raw data into a summary that people can understand at a glance. Of course it's going to throw away information - some of which might be important - in the process.

But those errors are as likely to be on the upside as on the downside. I never would've guessed as a kid that I'd be able to take a phone with me anywhere, with 4G of storage, and a built-in GPS, and the collected information of humanity at my command, for a day's worth of wages for the phone and an hour per month for the service. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed far more quickly than inflation, but it's also never been easier to learn things yourself through the Internet and then demonstrate to potential employers that you've learned them. Health care is far more expensive in constant dollars than it was a generation ago, but that's largely because for many of the most expensive treatments today, the alternative back then was "Die".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some would disagree "The US remained the world's biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production." [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2219cc-7c86-11df-8b74-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2219cc-7c86-11df-8b74-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1DEyzhNBC)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think it's great Americans have a healthy fear of the Chinese. Keeps them from resting on their laurels.

<comment><USER28> Why can't they have a healthy respect for them instead? One nation's people fearing another rarely leads to good things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I forwarded this on to my father who did some excellent source fact checking. I just had to share with HN.

 _An interesting editorial and comments. I think the Boston Globe is a legit publication, but I was not familiar with Jeff Jacoby. Although he writes well, I became wary at his first reference to the American Enterprise Institute, so I did a little research.

I must admit that my suspicions were confirmed. The sole purpose of the AEI, and similar type organizations on both sides of the political spectrum, is to espouse and promote an ideology. The introduction (Message from the Chairman and President) to their 2010 annual report state, "AFI is showing that liberty, opportunity, and entrepreneurship are not only good economic principles, but moral imperatives." I have learned to beware whenever anyone claims to know the Truth and talks about "moral imperatives" Such rhetoric has been used to justify the worst atrocities and most hateful acts of terrorism in human history.

I was also unfamiliar with Mark Perry, one of the moral authorities cited by Jacoby. In addition to being a "visiting scholar" at the AEI, Perry is a member of the Board of Directors of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an orthodoxy right-wing "think tank" based in Michigan.

According to the Michigan Education Association, "The role of the Mackinac Center is to change public opinion and move public policy toward the political right. The Mackinac Center does not conduct neutral or objective scholarship. Rather, it provides the media and government officials with publications designed to promote and advance its conservative agenda." If any doubt remains about Jacoby's objectivity or the reliability of his sources, a visit to the AEI website reveals their Board of Directors includes none other than The Honorable Richard B. Cheney.

Based on what little I was able learn, Jacoby, a rightwing taking head who was recruited by the Globe to add balance (or the appearance of balance) to their otherwise liberal editorial page, would feel at home in the company of the former VP. In fairness to Jacoby, he is neither a journalist nor a social scientist. His writes editorials that express a point of view. His job does on included conducting scientific research with the intent of objectively depicting reality._

In other words, consider the source. There's nothing more that the captains of industry would like to peddle more than American manufacturing is great. The real story is the jobs have been sent over seas and the executive pay has been increased at the top for efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting enough - but what's the trend? Is growth in US manufacturing growing at the same pace as China? Or is it continuing to decline, and will cross at some point.

</comment><comment><USER30> I thought, that a large percentage if not the majority of US 'manufactoring' is actually agriculture.

</comment><comment><USER31> Small companies create jobs within America. Big companies create jobs in China/India. Hence Govt must break big companies into smaller companies.</comment>


Why we shut down Newsberry Part 2: Why we didn't sell  - <AUTHOR> http://wildbit.com/blog/2012/02/20/why-we-shut-down-newsberry-part-2-why-we-didnt-sell

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I don't believe it.

I think they never would have gotten past due diligence. They claimed to be generating $75k "in profit", but had no F/T devs on the project. Combine that with self-proclaimed stalled growth, and the company's a loser. I'm going to guess that a huge slice of that $75k was due to parasitic hosting -- they probably put it on infrastructure belonging to (or at very least subsidized by) their other "real" projects, so even $75k is a stretch.

Next, the codebase is hacked together (as they say in the "why we're not open- sourcing it" paragraph). People buying entire companies in a packed market like this are looking to buy something that's basically running on rails. Newsberry isn't this. Hacked together is fine for a bleeding-edge idea, but this thing had been going for 7 years.

A buyout would have landed somewhere in the 4-figures. If I were in their shoes, I would have turned it down, too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Follow up post to questions about shutting down our $75k/year profitable product: [http://wildbit.com/blog/2012/01/26/why-we-shut-down-a- produc...](http://wildbit.com/blog/2012/01/26/why-we-shut-down-a-product-that- was-75000year-profitable/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd find it more interesting to see how a company such as this got to the point of getting an offer. Not trying to be rude, but I find articles like this a little too trendy.

<comment><USER4> What do you find trendy, not selling?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ever considered something like flippa? it addresses all your concerns and is nearly impossible not to know about it if you do business online (and read HN)

<comment><AUTHOR> From TFA:

>> It's not like we were going to put a For Sale sign up. We had active clients who we didn't want to scare off. We were still actively supporting the product and we also wanted to sell a profitable service, and for that you needed customers.

<comment><USER5> and that's taken care of by flippa if you want: you can do private auctions, you can hide names and urls until people sign an NDA and stuff like that

RTFM

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any word on why this was [deleted] until a few minutes ago? Inquiring minds want to know.

<comment><USER7> we'd love to know too, actually.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: DragonflyBSD – Do anyone use it in production? - <AUTHOR> I've been watching this project for a number of years and its always interesting to see where a fork goes, Hammer and a number of other interesting choices have made this version of BSD stand out. But does anyone use it in production ? If you do, what was the primary reason ? <comment><USER2> Use it as a gateway, a web server (shiningsilence.com), and a music machine at home. At work as a host for a few software packages (Mediawiki, though not since a switch to Confluence, Request Tracker, and a few smaller web services) I'm using it both on hardware and as VMs.

I have never had resource problems other than filling up Hammer volumes because I didn't set the right clean rate relative to disk activity. e.g. I can give it a piddly amount of RAM and CPU and never notice.

I'm the person behind the DragonFly Digest ([https://www.dragonflydigest.com/](https://www.dragonflydigest.com/)) so it's not a surprise that I would use it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never used it in production, but I switched to it in the FreeBSD 6 era until FreeBSD 8 came out. I switched to it because FreeBSD 5 was a dog and couldn't stand it. I used it more recently on my x220 because they supported my Intel graphics card where as FreeBSD didn't yet. Even more recently I tried it for a client for their little-of-everything server. I didn't use it because they wanted some ZFS features (send/recv). Dragonfly got much better performance for things like NFS and their rather large MySQL databases, though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Late to the party, if you have not yet read it, this is pretty interesting: [https://bsdmag.org/siju_george/](https://bsdmag.org/siju_george/)

"Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System?"

He uses it in his company</comment>