Mobile is Where the Growth Is - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/mobile-is-where-the-growth-is.html <comment><USER4> One factor assisting 'mobile' right now is that SEO is less pervasive - <USER2> apps are focussed on UX which desktop webapps long ago ditched to get rankings (ramming as much content on page as possible, overusing keywords, reviews, ratings, UGC etc.).

I'm finding many mobile apps simple/clean to use - although the 'responsive design' movement is diluting that.

<comment><USER5> app stores are market-places. search engine are market-places. app stores are search engines.

the optimizations for (native) apps just moved from the app-level to the market-place level.

<comment><USER6> _> app stores are market-places. search engine are market-places. app stores are search engines._

I suspect that sucky discovery is somehow beneficial to Apple. This also makes me think that good discovery in app stores might be the key to Google competing with Apple.

<comment><USER7> Citation needed. How on earth is bad discovery beneficial to Apple? With the size and profitability of their app store, they have the most to gain from good discoverability. That's why they acquired Chomp. Smart money says that the acquisition is going to lead to much-improved discoverability on the iOS App Store.

<comment><USER6> _> Citation needed. How on earth is bad discovery beneficial to Apple?_

Relax. The question was put out there genuinely, not as FUD. If Apple has so much to benefit from app discovery, why has it taken so long?

I suspect that a lot of people at Apple benefit _personally_ by having the power to decide which apps are featured, and which are not. I know devs for which this makes a difference as big as a good middle class salary or more. I am agreed that it's to Apple's benefit to have better discovery, but as well governed as it is, Apple is not a monolithic entity.

 _Smart money says that the acquisition is going to lead to much-improved discoverability on the iOS App Store._

I would love for this to happen. I'm not so sure this is in an area of core competency for Apple, though. Acquiring Chomp was the right move, but acquisitions don't always pan out.

<comment><USER8> "If Apple has so much to benefit from app discovery, why has it taken so long?"

Because it's a hard problem to solve? Because app vendors are excellent at gaming any system for competitive advantage?

Curating apps is tough, whether it's delivered via an app store, or whether it's a publicly available app.

There's a reason it was easier to find apps in the PC era; there weren't that many quality apps. There were 1-2 word processors worth a damn, a few spreadsheets, and a few databases. Development costs were high because the apps were difficult to create, and distribution costs prevented developers from monetizing them easily.

Compare that with today's apps; small, easier coding, far easier distribution. You end up with millions of apps for Android and iOS. And there's no hallowed authority like BYTE or PC Magazine to bless your app;

Somewhere out there, someone is thinking along the lines of Page and Brin, thinking out of the box about how to make app discovery work; and when they do, we'll all slap our heads and think "why didn't we think of that?" And then the SEO guys will slowly adapt and app discovery will end up like web discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mobile is not a single view / Market / technology

The post sort of implies smartphone == mobile, but with African mobiles being used to transfer scrip, Indian phones already having good SMS based payment models, there are multiple models, markets and a lot of cultural sensitivities

The one preditiom I can make is there will be no more global phenomenon - <USER3> website taking off everywhere. Even just tacking on a new tld will not fix the local differences that mobile adoption is bringing

Basically people adopted themselves to the web cos it was so useful and new. But mobile phones get adapted to people.

<comment><USER10> I have to strongly disagree with that claim. India and Africa doesn't matter. Nobody wants to sell to people who can only pay a tiny fraction of what the product could be sold for in the first world.

<comment><USER11> This is super short sighted. There are billions of people in India/Africa combined, it doesn't matter that they can't pay that much individually because combined they represent a huge and growing market. So what you say might be true today, but it's not a good long term strategy. These are exactly the kind of markets that people should be targeting, uncrowded and huge huge potential

<comment><USER12> I don't agree. It is also about cultures: people buying pirated software even if the time spend on that is more than the price of the product. For example, in Argentina people can buy pirated software in the streets and nobody care about original software, even if they have the money to do so.

<comment><USER12> I am tired of downvotes without replies.

<comment><USER12> It repeat itself. Feels like vigilantes on hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wrote a reaction to this article: <http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/>

The gist of it is that APIs will become more important, and that they shouldn't stay as poorly designed as they are today. I try to think about how an API design could look like git's architecture.

</comment><comment><USER14> _"The ads are the default content object (the tweet) and are delivered right in the primary user experience (the feed/timline)."_

True, but this is also why it's annoying.

<comment><USER15> Agreed.

But you could argue that once Twitter (and FB) tweak sponsored content to the point where it's no longer annoying or is actually share-worthy, that they've nailed this rev model.

<comment><USER10> At that point, they will become obsolete.

Why?

Because then the advertising agencies will have a way to make content people want to read and share and therefore they can rely on people sharing it, at no cost to them.

<comment><USER15> True, that's a solid point, thanks for the reply.

However, ad agencies typically get paid more for spending more, so I don't think a "no cost" campaign works well for covering their costs.

Of course there's probably agencies out there that do/will pitch this type of campaign, and charge for the ideation + production. But virality is usually an empty promise.

Alternatively, increasing the k-factor on an already successful campaign is something agencies will want, so I believe they will fork out for these sponsored placements regardless.

All told, I really do think some secret sauce for targeting (aided by Twitter's/FB's data insights) plus some cool content produced by the brands/agencies will win out as the monetization strategy for social networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile._

I don't understand the complaint about Facebook not being mobile-ready. When I was on it, the mobile fb app worked almost as well as the regular website. That's how I'm guessing most users want the damn thing to work, the same across every platform and not fragmented because, well, it's on a phone. I'm trying to figure out why everyone thinks they're a non-entity on mobile.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Great post. I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is payments.

Throughout the history of the web most services and content has been free to consumers and support with ad revenue. But on mobile consumers are much more willing to pay and it is almost completely frictionless.

I wonder if in the next few years we will start to see more and more apps using the subscription model. If Facebook was started today as a mobile first business would they charge for the app outright, charge $1 per month, or use in-app purchase to charge for extra features?

NB: I first posted this comment on the blog

<comment><USER17> It's fun to think about but it wouldn't change Facebook's model at all. The power of Facebook is based upon the number of users it has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This post is great but it speaks primarily to B2C.

B2B market will still be desktop/web based exactly because of the mobile apps being more features than actual applications.

</comment><comment><USER19> "There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile"

what? so these mobile apps do not use the web?

</comment><comment><USER20> Love this post. Monetization on mobile, as shown by Facebook's struggle to do well, is the next code to crack. I agree that as users are on mobile in a very focused state of mind, they are not open to advertisements, in particular not those that are in the way of achieving a goal. Subscription, in-app purchase might be better, also when users become more aware of the fact that if they are using a free service, they themselves are part of the offering being sold to the companies paying the bill.

</comment><comment> joe-mccann I will continue to beat this drum:

Mobile is not _just_ the web.

If you are thinking mobile first, you should be building network applications, not web applications.

Fred Wilson is just an example of someone who get this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Well you can't argue with that. But what says you can't build a successful business around the web? Why can't you build a successful business with a desktop application?

<comment><USER22> You can (build a successful business with a desktop application).

I think the degree or pace of success will be different for a mobile, desktop or web app. I also think that an app that's on all three will be more likely to succeed than one that's only on one or two of these.

A couple or so years ago Microsoft had this vision of being on every screen or something. I'd never heard anything that made more sense as a vision statement from a tech giant. Then cloud came along, and they dropped that vision for the Azure/Office 365 push. That was a mistake.

[Edit] To be clear, Azure/Office 365 weren't mistakes - they were/are good. Dropping that vision statement was the mistake.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, but I find the original post as a little backwards. Not everything makes sense on mobile. Not everything makes sense on the web. So why try to shoehorn it in there?

<comment><USER23> As with the web, it's not the shoehorned apps that are leading the charge on mobile. It's the totally new kinds of apps that didn't make sense until this platform came along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> SEO is dead. Mobile IS THE FUTURE.

I used to create simple websites, do some SEO and get thousands of visit daily and now its impossible. Regular link building its dead nowadays.

So, building freemium apps IS the future.</comment>


How Analog Rituals Can Amp Your Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://the99percent.com/tips/6915/How-Analog-Rituals-Can-Amp-Your-Productivity

<comment><USER2> This sounds a lot similar to how thinking is much more efficient and productive when jotting things down with pen and paper (or marker and whiteboard) than doing it digitally.</comment>


Facebook Graph API exploit that let's you pump up to 1800 'Likes' in an hour - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4prU_9_4OE

<comment><USER2> "This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube's policy on depiction of harmful activities. Sorry about that."

</comment><comment><USER3> It sounds as if you get some real value out of all then facebook likes..

Since I'm the last person (i think) on earth who doesn't use facebook, I probably miss the point but still..

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeap, it won't drive any traffic to your website. But if your visiting an online store and you see a lot of likes under the product then this might cloud your judgement ;)

<comment><USER4> "But if your visiting an online store and you see a lot of likes under the product then this might cloud your judgement ;)"

I give it 12-24 months before the DoJ/FTC deem Facebook `Likes` illegal under antitrust law, for the exact logic you just laid out. It's a clear antitrust violation because it's a way for firms to mislead customers about the quality of their product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just wanted to add, that this hack was verified for external links and pages - it's still to be tested whether it could be applied to FB comments, pages or apps.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some imagery in the video is likely NSFW.

</comment><comment><USER7> non youtube version vimeo.com/50608606

</comment><comment><USER8> maybe not the most correct, but the easiest way :) ... and don't truste likes :)

</comment><comment><USER9> its no longer work

</comment><comment><USER10> any mirror?

<comment><USER7> vimeo.com/50608606

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> very nice

</comment><comment><USER12> mirror?</comment>


document.designMode = 'on' - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sulco/status/1177559150563344384 <comment><USER2> I've had this as a bookmark on my browser for years, you can just click it to turn it on:

      javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';%20document.designMode='on';%20void%200</comment>


Indicators of compromise for malware used by APT28 – UK Intelligence blames GRU - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/alerts/indicators-compromise-malware-used-apt28 <comment><AUTHOR> This provides Snort rules, file hashes and other indicators to help detect compromises - how many folks feel they have the framework existing to just "update" and go and how many just would need to start from the beginning on this?

just trying to get a feel for state of play</comment>


John Carmack on Systems Engineering (At UMKC-SCE in Spring 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHLpKzUxjGk <comment><USER2> I know ab like this lecture a lot. One quote I use from time to time from it: "As with any good engineering effort when you want to improve something, the first thing you have to do is, measure it" – John Carmack

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank god. Finally something from Carmack that isn't posted on [http://facebook.com](http://facebook.com).</comment>


Twitter's Vine source code dump - <AUTHOR> https://avicoder.me/2016/07/22/Twitter-Vine-Source-code-dump/ <comment><USER2> Can you please change the title from "Twitter's Vine Source code dump" to something that does not suggest that there is actual source code available?

<comment><USER3> I don't see any issue with this title. A "source code dump" is usually an act of vandalism, as opposed to a "source code release", or "released as open source". Additionally, there was source code available. It appeared that Vine was/is written in an interpreted language, so by downloading the wwwroot Docker image, the author was capable of reading the entirety of the Vine application code without any weird decompilation or deobfuscation steps.

No, you can't personally go replicate the steps the author performed to retrieve the Vine source code on your own today, but that's the nature of responsible disclosure. Vine was responsive to the vulnerability report and closed that leak, which enabled the author to create this writeup of what happened.

<comment><USER4> Disagree. 'dump' strongly implies that the link is to a source code dump. Just changing 'dump' to 'dumped' would more accurately reflect the content of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If that is true, that is seriously silly on behalf of Vine.

Multiple major security flaws:

1\. Company source code should only be published to private docker images.

2\. You should never store API keys or passwords inside the source code. A better approach is to use environment variables and have the container read those.

<comment><USER6> Be careful with environment variables. I've often seen that on some crashes all environment variables are dumped. While this should not happen in production configurations, it sometimes does. Furthermore, errors, along with the helpful debug parameters, are often sent by email and get into the hands of the wrong people (e.g. into the issue tracker where everybody has access to, including junior developers and interns who should never see production AWS keys).

A better way is to store it into a config file and store them into global variables at the start of the server (while globals are normally bad, it is ok to use them for thinks like configs if you don't plan to change them after initizalization. Environment vars are globals after all).

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that's sufficient reason to say that config files are preferable to environment variables. Presumably the config file would be kept separately from the project code, so it doesn't reduce deployment complexity. Furthermore, environment variables work with basically every programming language and tool you're liable to use without modification.

I don't think using config files is a bad solution, it just isn't categorically better because some programs have been written to dump env vars on a crash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet another comment requesting the title be changed - I went there benignly looking for source

EDIT: Rationale: The title of this thread reflects verbatim the title of the link, but I still think a more informative (less misleading) title should be considered since this is HN and at least 50% of the people who see this will think they can get source.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Title is a bit misleading (there's no dump for me to download), but crazy nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER10> One thing I've learned leading a backend team is that a strong devops culture is necessary at any company that values its security. Engineers (especially non senior ones) will often adopt new technologies without doing all the research on how to use them securely.

Some years back it was people uploading their entire .git folder and accidentally hosting it online because they didn't understand how Git worked. Now its people accidentally hosting their docker images containing all their code publicly.

With each wave of technology its necessary to have devops people whose dedicated job is to understand how to set things up securely, and handle setting things up for engineers to use. Otherwise engineers will make mistakes through ignorance or just rushing to solve a problem without doing all the research. This doesn't mean that engineers can't be responsible for helping set things up or that they are free from responsibility to understand what they are doing, but a dedicated devops team serves as a protection to safeguard against issues like this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Like uploading your .git directory to a CDN.

<comment><USER12> A .git directory with keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, that's some easy money.

</comment><comment><USER14> A co-worker of mine accidentally published a large chunk (well over half) of the backend code for Twitter on their Maven repo one day. It was pretty awesome! Apparently he was the first to notice and no one downloaded it. ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> $10k isn't bad.

<comment><USER16> I wonder why 10080 though

<comment><USER17> Every Twitter's bounty amount is divisible by 140.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bad title, there's no source code to download...</comment>


Ask HN: What do you wish you knew when starting your business? - <AUTHOR>

A friend of mine was contacted by a local chamber of commerce to help put on a "Entrepreneurship/Startup 101" course. Most of these, at least the ones that I've been to, only teach how to raise significant sums of money from VC's a la the 1990's dot com boom and are taught by washed up VC's themselves. In other words, most of these things are worthless.
Which is why I ask: what do you wish you knew early on that would've saved headaches? So far, our list includes: choosing cofounders, rapid prototyping, "hustling" (talking to customers immediately, and selling your product quickly to get cash in the door), and Delaware incorporation. What else?
Our target audience is hackers, so we don't plan on focusing on actual product creation extensively, other than the mindset of gauging need via talking to customers and rapidly creating a simple solution around that. <comment><USER2> How important it is to clearly express my ideas. People can't help me unless I can ask for help.

</comment><comment><USER3> The importance of being able to actually reach potential customers, and how to do so profitably (ie. cost of acquisition).

No matter how well you can covert or how sticky your product is, you need to be able to get to them first. Most hackers I know (and the old me too) think SEO, SEM, display ads and maybe viral/WOM have this pretty well covered. Not every customer is easily reached via search keywords.

</comment><comment><USER4> If your gut say no, trust it over your mind's rationalization.</comment>


Wind Map - <AUTHOR> http://hint.fm/wind/ <comment><USER2> The fantastic thing about this project is that they've open sourced the code [1]. With a little help from NOAA and some work with the GRIB data format [2], I was quickly able to build this into an customized interactive museum exhibit that's in two science centers now.

We could never have afforded to build this from scratch. Open Source to the rescue, once again.

[1] - [https://github.com/cambecc/earth](https://github.com/cambecc/earth)

[2] - [https://github.com/scimusmn/earth-latest- data](https://github.com/scimusmn/earth-latest-data)

</comment><comment><USER3> The stuff done by this duo is amazing (they're currently leading Google's data visualization research group, see the About page).

This particular map was expanded by another dev into an epic global map of different climatic variables:

[http://earth.nullschool.net/](http://earth.nullschool.net/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Check this guys: [http://windyty.com](http://windyty.com)

Wind, temperature and waves.

<comment><USER3> This one is like a culmination of the other two projects. More features and a lot smoother than earth.nullschool.net, I can really see this being useful for navigation.

It's also a perfect example of why open source kicks ass, with the chain of inspiration from one project to the next.

<comment><USER5> No globe though but the mercator projection (awful for a global map like this).

<comment><USER3> Well, this is one of the rare cases where using Mercator as the default projection is justifiable, since this map is most useful for navigation.

An option to switch projections would be very nice, but I can imagine very difficult to implement. earth.nullschool.net has this option, but I'll wager it was only doable because of the the ultra-minimalist map used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The map's creators, Viegas and Wattenberg, gave a talk on how they made the visualization at the Eyeo Festival 2012 -- [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=16m55s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=16m55s) . They show the experiments that took them from static vector fields to the fading brushstrokes analogy: Static vector field: [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=20m34s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=20m34s) | Particles: [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=21m16s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=21m16s) | Particles with geographic outlines: [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=21m47s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=21m47s) | Warping blocks: [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=22m21s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=22m21s) | Static brush strokes: [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=23m16s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=23m16s) | Fading brushstrokes: [https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=24m57s](https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=24m57s)

</comment><comment><USER7> A similar one, but for earth :-) [http://earth.nullschool.net/](http://earth.nullschool.net/)

<comment><USER3> Our coordination was so precise it's surprising we didn't cause some kind of race condition in HN. (edit: No wait, beat me by at least 20 seconds)

<comment><USER7> And your answer shows earlier cause your karma :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/Conus/full_loop.php](http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/Conus/full_loop.php) Radar for cross reference. Biggg giff

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be enlightening to see a time-lapse of this graphic that instead charts the course of a year ... or decade ... or century.

This site is great work - I enjoy rediscovering it on what I suspect is an annual basis.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have recommendations on good toolsets for visualization like this? I'm diving into canvas/d3/raphael but would love to look into other options if they're out there.

<comment><USER11> Hy everyone,

I don't know if you know this technology but is so powerful, [http://threejs.org/](http://threejs.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On these links the commenters have posted there's a cyclone off the coast of Oregon, or at least it looks kinda like one. What's the story with that?

<comment><USER13> There's a big weather system there:

[http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/goeswestpacus.html](http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/goeswestpacus.html)

It doesn't seem to be named. The one closer to Hawaii is Olaf.

[http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/](http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I saw this posted probably here a while ago. Why is Alaska left out still?</comment>


Arduino.cc and Arduino.org have settled their differences - <AUTHOR> https://blog.arduino.cc/2016/10/01/two-arduinos-become-one-2 <comment><USER2> This is huge news. Glad to see a sleazy offshoot reconciling with the open source community. They originally hijacked the name and tried to strong arm a lot of businesses, which seemed to hurt the arduino community.

Even though it was the biggest and most influential hobbyist electronics environment, there have been other mcu based environments popping up. Some were offshoots, such as TI's Energia, which added some innovative elements like an RTOS. Hopefully, the arduino environment moves forward even faster from now on.

<comment><USER3> Sleazy offshoot? Could you give me some examples; genuinely curious about it.

<comment><USER4> For anyone interested in the history of Arduino, definitely read The Untold History of Arduino:

[https://arduinohistory.github.io](https://arduinohistory.github.io)

I think it's really appaling how the original inventor is (not) credited.

<comment><USER5> One of the more interesting side-effects of this is that, because the Arduino libraries were written by someone else, no-one involved in the project had any experience of porting them to a completely new architecture. As AVR has gradually become slow, outdated and expensive, this has had the result that unofficial Arduino-compatible boards like Teensy are often better ports than the newer official boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Presumably Atmel getting bought by Microchip terrified both camps enough that they decided they needed to be unified.

<comment><USER7> Oh wow, I didn't know about that merger... that is way bigger news than the squabbling between the Arduino factions. Arduino hardware is pretty much just a breakout board; you can make one on a breadboard. If the bigger merged company decides it doesn't care about the niche maker market, they could kill off the line of DIP chips that IMHO defines what an Arduino board is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It took only dipping sales and community looking for alternatives

<comment><USER9> Yeah i think the RPi and clones helped a great deal there.

<comment><USER10> I personally think in this space that they experiencing more competition from boards with the ESP8266. You could use the rpi with the gpio pins but for some projects it doesn't make economically sense.

For 4 euro's and less you can buy a board with the ESP8266 and you can even use the Arduino IDE to program it.

<comment><USER11> I agree. I've seen ESP8266 referred to as "the better Arduino", "the new Arduino", etc. for the past several months.

Of course the implicit assumption here is that people will get breakout boards like NodeMCU.

<comment><USER12> It's not that he ESP8266 is fully a replacement and there are still lots of situations where you would lean towards the Atmel chips in the Arduino or others like PIC and STM. E.g. the ESP8266 is pretty limited on IO, not as tolerant of higher voltages, more heat/power, worse for sensitive real-time applications, inferior low-power performance and so on.

 _But_ for a lot uses they are a better fit. The ESP8266 is a right time and right place kind of thing - it has enough IO and wifi to be really useful for the hobby explosion of IoT stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank god, the whole mess is finally over, and we can get back to buying Arduino products if we want them without any hassle.

</comment><comment><USER14> 5.. 4.. 3..

The skeptic in me says that by next year's Faire the alliance will have unraveled.

Both Massimo and Musto are passionate Italians with strong visions... and as the saying goes: too many cooks.

</comment><comment><USER15> So this means the two feuding Auduino sides have made up, or merged?

<comment><USER16> It's a 30 second read; you should just click on the link.

If you really are that lazy; arduino.cc and arduino.org settled their dispute and have setup a holding company to organize device sales using he Arduino brand. In a addition, a not-for-profit company is being setup to run the educational part of the organization.

I'm assuming this fixes all the B.S. that was the "Genuino" fiasco. Good riddance but the brand has been severely damaged by their scorched earth tactics with devices like the Raspberry Pi gaining amazing traction. It will be interesting to see if it can recover.

<comment><USER17> > It will be interesting to see if it can recover.

Ardiunos were fantastic in their time, but the industry has moved on.

Why work on an 8-bit MCU where you [mostly] have to bit bang IO when you can buy something like an STM32 which has hardware acceleration (DMA) for IO, and on higher models even adds things like an RTC?

Arduino has a great community, but there are far better choices available now, which are even Arduino compatible (e.g. Teensy) for the same price, but that use an ARM core instead of AVR.

Arduino now is a dead end. ARM ate the world, and it's now the better choice for new projects. Unless there's a need to support legacy designs implemented with Arduino, I see no compelling reason for people to continue to use them.

<comment><USER18> A lot of more recent Arduinos use more sophisticated cores than the AVR. There are several models that use ARM cores, there are a few that use x86 variants, etc. One of the advantages I can see with the Arduino infrastructure is that the libraries are fairly reasonably cross-platform, so you can use them on multiple projects which use different micros without having to rewrite a bunch of code.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. You can get a board that accepts Arduino shields and lets you program with the Arduino environment, but also natively supports high-speed buses like PCIe, USB, SATA, and Ethernet, and provides a more direct programming environment based on Linux or a smaller embedded OS.

<comment><USER12> I'm curious, what board in the Arduino form factor are you talking about that can do PCIe and SATA? Those require fairly sophisticated processors AFAIK (read: expensive).

Also, for many uses programming in Linux is the exact opposite of direct when comparing to banging out some bare metal C or C++ on a dinky 8-bit micro. Maybe using a RasPi to blink LED or read a temperature sensor is more accessible to some people and that's a good thing, but it's like killing ants with a tactical nuke.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android Team "Laser Focused" On The User Experience For Next Release - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/16/android-team-laser-focused-on-the-user-experience-for-next-release/http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/16/android-team-laser-focused-on-the-user-experience-for-next-release/

<comment><USER2> Hopefully "Making handsets capable of receiving the latest version of android" counts as UX, otherwise this is useless

<comment><USER3> That's up to the hardware vendors and service providers. It's not entirely in the Android team's hands.

<comment><USER4> How do we pressure them?

Phone makers have spent a very long time building a selling phones to telcos. The result is they spent most of their history catering to interests completely opposite to those of their users. I want an unlocked, upgradable phone. Just that. I don't need "social" interfaces or _any_ fancy stuff if that will cause updates to be delayed.

<comment><USER2> Handset makers actually _want to make you buy another phone_. It's completely _not_ in their interest to upgrade your device, they want you to buy another.

That's why I don't get how google thinks their hands off scheme has a snowball's chance in hell of taking off. Handset vendors aren't going to just start supporting the latest version of Android out of the goodness of their hearts.

Now if they can get the specs of the required system down to about 1/2 the cost of what it currently is, then that's less of a problem: We can buy new phones without worrying about them being upgradable. But in the current ecosystem, with the current costs of phones, and the current unwillingness of google to put their money on the line getting manufactuers to update their builds, Android plain loses to iPhone, which is very very sad for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Android Team, which is "laser focued on the user experience for the next release."

Apple, which is "laser focused on the user experience yesterday, now, and forever."

</comment><comment><USER6> "Laser focused" has become a cliche.

<comment><USER7> It never meant anything before. Even a focused laser can be pulsed, diffused, or reflected before it hits its target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let us hope that laser doesn't hit a prism.

<comment><USER9> I think we get what you mean, but technically a laser, which are lightwaves of a single frequency wouldn't be spread out like a white light source hitting a prism. It would be bent but still would be a focused beam.

<comment><USER10> Although technically laser light does have a spectrum due to Doppler effects, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


How patio11 redesigned my landing page in front of a live studio audience - <AUTHOR> http://www.planningforaliens.com/blog/2013/06/02/evolution-of-landing-page/ <comment><USER2> Sean Fioritto was the first person I met at BaconBizConf while waiting outside the doors on morning #1. Confident, smart, and altogether friendly guy. I was impressed the level of demonstrated grit he showed when he volunteered his site for a teardown. He was over there just scratching notes away while they punished him. We could all use that kind of grit. More of us would launch great products if we did.

Pat Pohler had a teardown too. He should share his lessons learned as well... {Pat Signal}

<comment><USER3> It's so weird for me to hear from people who were at BaconBizConf and thought the teardowns were "brutal" or "punishing."

None of us panelists ever said "This is terrible" or anything of that sort, or insulted anyone/anything, or discouraged any of the volunteers, etc. We said "This doesn't work" "That won't work" "That's weak" etc.… and then gave lots of supportive suggestions to make it better. The worst possible thing anyone said is when Patrick said [paraphrasing] "Please don't take this personally, but if your target market is designers, you need to have more of a… design."

Genuinely asking "Why would I be interested in this?" is not only not brutal, it's not even a criticism.

I guess more people need to experience actual brutal criticism in order to see how our teardown was anything but!

<comment><USER2> I guess I did make this overblown using those terms. And yes, when is Patrick ever 'punishing'? Heh.

Then again, there's something to be said for being willing to be scrutinized by your heroes. Therein lies my admiration for Sean.

<comment><USER3> This is true.

I have a huge amount of respect for people who:

A. Ask for feedback. B. Publicly! C. Act on the feedback.

That's why Sean is awesome :) He did a GREAT job incorporating our feedback into something that's 10x better than before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is seriously good stuff. Great write-up and sounds like it was a good conf.

</comment><comment><USER5> The new is definitely an improvement, but both load fairly slowly - I would try improve this next, or at least allow staged loading so visitors have something to start looking at quickly while the rest loads.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is surprising. It's just HTML on S3 with cloudflare in front. Maybe Typekit is slowing it down...

<comment><USER6> Probably a dumb question, what is the benefit from using Cloudflare? If I naively set up a page like this I would have just done S3 directly, right?

<comment><USER7> cloudfare will cache your content in much much more locations across the globe unlike plain s3. (cloudfront from amazon does the same thing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very useful information for my own project, thanks. BaconBizConf sounds like a really fun conference too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. I'm glad it helped. BaconBizConf was awesome, I highly recommend it for bootstrappers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great work, thanks for sharing. I'd love to have Amy and Patrick critique my site - I reckon I'll head to BaconBizConf when it's next on.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do you have any stats from your analytics you could share? It would be great to see the business side effect.

<comment><USER11> Would be interesting to see the current version tested against one without all the "Photoshop bashing" too. I'm not sure if that was a suggestion from the talk or another idea you wanted to try, but I feel it would be far more effective if you condensed the many long bullet points down to "Sick of static Photoshop mockups that don't respond like real websites? Feel like you're doing everything twice?" (Maybe the bullet points belong in a blog or FAQ section with the title: "why not just use Photoshop?")

TBH I actually like your first landing page copy (other than it missing an above-the-fold "what's in this book" statement) and the second one also feels like a work in progress, so it'd be interesting to see how they both perform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks good but I wasn't sure what was being "launched". Is it software or the book?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a book. Software soon. I wanted to start with something small that I could do relatively quickly, so I'm writing a book. Then I will convert readers of my book into customers for my software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thank you for sharing this. I've been working and listening hard and anything that clears up conversion tactics (especially when just handed to me) is gold.

Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER13> I haven't read the article yet, but clicking on the before/after links got me to say: "Aha, it's a book!" in the first second after opening the 2nd link.

So even if it's only this (which I'm sure it's not), huge improvement in the clarity of the message.

Do you have data on the conversion rates before/after redesigning the landing page?

<comment><AUTHOR> I only have before data right now, and not a lot. I'll be sure to post data for the new landing page, just as soon as I get some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All looks very sensible, but I'd be interested to see a split-test. You never know what will or won't convert...

<comment><AUTHOR> The funny thing is I agree, but I don't think I'll do it. The old version is just so bad I feel like I'd be throwing away money. I'm not internet famous so traffic is hard for me to come by. Can I justify a split test?

So the question becomes do I trust the experts? I do. Therefore this landing page is my new baseline -- I'll split test from here.

<comment><USER14> Given that it's a lead gen page, you could get some solid split-test data off $100 or so of spend on the advertising platform of your choice. However, I don't know if that's something you could afford. If it is, I'd definitely recommend it, but I can certainly see why you'd be inclined to trust the experts.

FWIW, looking over the "after" page myself, I'd agree that it's a much more solid longish-form sales page. You'll probably be fine using that as your baseline!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction: [http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction](http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction) This should be required reading for every developer.

While the redesign looks better, I'm somewhat turned off because it follows the same design strategies as used by low-quality info products:

* Cheesy book shot. At least it's not a fake "book generator" box. If this will be delivered as a PDF, why not use the Acrobat logo below a thumbnail preview of the actual cover/first page? To me, seeing real content lends credibility.

* Thin column of text with bullet points.

* Periodic bolded keywords.

* The only things it's missing are a "P.S." section and a breakdown of the cost savings over the alternatives.

I have no doubt that the reason these things are standard is that they work. However, for me the site has the same look and feel I've seen in many low- quality info product kind of sites. As a result, I'm immediately more skeptical than I otherwise would be.

<comment><USER16> well, then I guess you won't be a customer. Guess what.. this doesn't matter, the loss is probably all yours (if the actual content is something you can benefit from).

Don't forget, this book is being written to get profit and recognition (I think ;) and loosing a couple of "this looks too cheap for me" dudes is an OK price to pay to significantly increase the readership. And I'm pretty sure patio11 and brennan know quite a bit about this.

So, so long as "it works" I think he's going in the right direction.

<comment><USER15>
      > well, then I guess you won't be a customer. Guess what.. this
      > doesn't matter, the loss is probably all yours

Was this meant to be snarky, or am I misreading it? I completely agree, and it seems like you're arguing against a position I never took.

      > ... is an OK price to pay to significantly increase the readership

As you no doubt noticed, I said these design decisions were likely made because they work. You are agreeing with my statement.

      > And I'm pretty sure patio11 and brennan know quite a bit about this.

Did I claim otherwise? I shared the reasons why I had somewhat of a negative initial impression of the site. My impressions have nothing to do with the experience or credentials of those who were involved with the redesign.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any services that send daily job emails? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for a service that lets you pick certain sites and receive one big job list email based on your keyword(s) each day.<p>Anything like this out there? <comment><USER2> Sites like Indeed, SimplyHired, Craigslist, Dice, etc. let you do advanced searches and then get RSS feeds based on those searches. This also lets you easily filter our garbage like CyberCoders based on keyword.

Getting the data in is easy. Improving the signal to noise ratio requires a bit more work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every site lets you do this - I know that. Im asking if there is a site that lets you aggregate a few job boards and get one daily email.

<comment><USER3> We are working on that for Jobzey.com and have a rough version (about to be pushed live). Were you interested in subscribing to such a service or building something in the space? If subscribe, I would love to chat about some details as we are actively trying to integrate this. Drop me a line at mark [at] jobzey [dot] com</comment></comment></comment>


The span of Common Lisp types - <AUTHOR> http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=1495

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't link this as an example of anything you'd really be interested in doing as a coder of idiomatic CL, but I thought it was an interesting read from the perspective of someone coming from more of a Haskell/Scala/etc. background trying to see to what extent Lisp's programmable/extensible type system can produce something approximating the types seen in those languages.</comment>


Goldman Sachs relaxes dress code for techs in fight for talent - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-technology-idUSKBN19Y17J <comment><USER2> Goldman's been inching away from the "white shoe" aesthetic for some time ---> [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28lloyd.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28lloyd.html)

but there's an important lesson to be learned here about simplicity. simplicity in aesthetic. simplicity in uniforming and above all, simplicity in presentation.</comment>


Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ <comment><USER3> We should all just be grateful they didn't copy the file and drive conventions from TRSDOS which was the operating system for Tandy's TRS-80 line of computers.

Like MS-DOS file names were 8 characters with a 3 character extension however the extension was separated not with a period but a forward slash. Also files could have a password which was separated from the name/ext by a period. Disk drives we're referenced by numbers, 0-7, and separated from the name/ext.password by a colon. For example copying a file from one drive to another could look like "copy ascii/txt.foofum:0 ascii/txt.feefum:1". If you wanted a listing of all the txt files on the current drive the command would be "dir /txt". The file system wasn't hierarchical so there was path separator.

<comment><USER4> Like the article says, hindsight is 20/20\. If it was 1977 and TRSDOS was the only thing that transformed your expensive brick into something capable of copying a file from one drive to another you might be more of a fan.

<comment><USER3> In 1977 the drive on my Tandy provided expensive brick was a tape drive but in 1979 I built a LNW System Expansion which added a floppy controller and TRSDOS became what transformed my expensive brick into something capable of copying a file from one of my newly acquired drives to another.

I sometimes become nostalgic regarding my TRS-80 Model I but it never involves TRSDOS. TRSDOS was a steaming pile. There were other operating systems available for the TRS-80 but they added features or fixed bugs. They maintained compatibility with TRSDOS as far as file naming went.

But my comment really wasn't a criticism of the choices made regarding naming then but more about the scope of issues that would be faced in naming conflicts between a hypothetical Windows based upon the TRSDOS conventions and unix systems today. It would make the "\" vs "/" issues seem like a walk in the park.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is amusing how this sort of stuff evolves over time.

Before Microsoft was doing DOS their big product was Microsoft BASIC for the Altair computer. No OS, just load it into memory (from paper tape or cassette tape!) and start it up. Microsoft BASIC was written in 8080 assembler (Bill Gates once pointed this out to me in a meeting). The assembler that was used was called CROSS80 and it ran on both TOPS20 and TOPS10 (DEC10 operating systems for the DEC system that Bill and Paul used at Harvard when writing BASIC)

The TOPS-10 command line manual is here : [https://livingcomputers.org/Discover/Online-Systems/User- Doc...](https://livingcomputers.org/Discover/Online-Systems/User- Documentation/Tops-10-v7-04/2_Operating_System_Commands_Manual.aspx) and you will see that on page ix in the conventions used, TOPS 10 introduced command options (switches) with the forward slash character (/switch)

The use of / for "options" was a standard part of DCL (the DEC Command Language) here is the document for RT-11 (ftp://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp11/rt11/v5.6_Aug91/AA- PDU0A-TC_RT-11_Commands_Manual_Aug91.pdf)

Microsoft was copying DEC because at the time DEC was the most successful MINIcomputer company and Microsoft had aspirations of being the most successful MICROcomputer company.

As a result command options (or switches) were preceded by '/' and that gave the parser heartburn if you used forward slash for the path. If you read the RT-11 manual you will see that the COPY command took an option /BOOT to copy to the boot directory, and it was written COPY/BOOT not COPY<space>/BOOT. If a directory was involved it would be FOO/COPY/BOOT and how would you be able to parse that? Bell Labs (also DEC users at the time) switched to using '-' for UNIX to indicate a switch or option because it wasn't a path character.

At the end of the day the desire to be like DEC was what gave us both devices with colon's on the end (LPT: anyone?) and logging into the "active" directory. And DEC used slash for options in their DCL so that is what Microsoft used.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft's "BASIC-80 (MBASIC) Reference Manual Appendix D BASIC-80 with the CP/M Operating System" [https://archive.org/details/BASIC-80_MBASIC_Reference_Manual...](https://archive.org/details/BASIC-80_MBASIC_Reference_Manual/page/n135) shows it used "/" for options.

The "Microsoft BASIC Compiler, Version 5.3 July, 1981" manual [https://archive.org/stream/BASIC_Compiler_v5.3_1981_Microsof...](https://archive.org/stream/BASIC_Compiler_v5.3_1981_Microsoft/BASIC_Compiler_v5.3_1981_Microsoft_djvu.txt) says: "The compiler operates under the CP/M operating system" "6.3 COMPILER SWITCHES ... must begin with a slash (/)" "MACRO-80 ASSEMBLER ... 2.2.2 Switches ... must be preceded by a slash" "4.2.1 LINK-80 Switches ... must be preceded by a slash (/) . (With the TEKDOS operating system, switches are preceded by hyphens . See Appendix A.)" "5.2 LIB-80 SWITCHES ... are always preceded by a slash"

(The "TRS-80 Manual: BASIC Compiler" [https://archive.org/stream/BASIC_Compiler_19xx_Microsoft/BAS...](https://archive.org/stream/BASIC_Compiler_19xx_Microsoft/BASIC_Compiler_19xx_Microsoft_djvu.txt) says: "3.2.3 Command Line Switches ... Switches are always preceded by a dash ... -Z-4-T" "Filename extensions must be separated from the filename by a slash mark (/) ... /BAS Basic source file" and does not mention CP/M.)

"Microsoft FORTRAN-80 Ver3.4 Users Manual" [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftc0Ver3.4Users...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftc0Ver3.4UsersManualNov80_12630629/page/n17) also says switches "must be preceded by a slash" for CP/M, but for TEKDOS (Section 4) "the switches are delimited by commas or spaces instead of slashes"!

"Microsoft FORTRAN-80 Users Manual 1977" [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftc0UsersManual...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftc0UsersManual1977_972526/page/n5) also already says "Each switch should be preceeded by a slash (/)". "Section 5 Operating Systems" says command lines are supported on "CPM" and "DTC Microfile", but not on "ALTAIR DOS".

"Microsoft COBOL-80 1978" [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftc978_6774127/...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftc978_6774127/page/n135) says: "Each switch must be preceded by a slash (/)" (1.1.2 MACRO-80 Assembler, 2.1.2 LINK-80 Linking Loader) "switches are always preceded by a slash" (3.2 LIB-80 Library Manager) "Section 4 Operating Systems" Command lines are supported on "CPM", "DTC Microfile" and "ISIS-II", but not "Altair DOS".

<comment><USER5> Great collection of links!

What I see when reading this set of links is that _Microsoft_ really likes slash the the option separator. And while they ran on CP/M neither the CP/M commands[1] or the ISIS commands[2] (both operating systems that Gary Kildall supplied from his company Digital Research.) Used the slash character for options. And that tells me that it wasn't Gary's idea to have slash as an option introducer.

And as mentioned previously, it was DEC's idea to use slashes for options in DCL, which may have been inspired by IBM's Job Control Language (JCL).

[1] "CP/M Operating System Manual" \-- [http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/cpm22-m.pdf](http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/cpm22-m.pdf)

[2] "ISIS-II User's Guide" \-- [http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/intel/ISIS_II/9800306...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/intel/ISIS_II/9800306-06_ISIS-II_Users_Guide_May81.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It should be noted that Windows can use either forward or backward slashes nowadays. In fact, even File Explorer allows you to use an unholy mix of the two.

<comment><USER8> Interestingly, "unholy mixes" of slashes only always work properly in _old_ Windows paths! I found this out when debugging an open source project where '/file.txt' (hardcoded as a forward slash) was appended to a "\\\?\" path.

Microsoft introduced "extended paths" to accommodate Unicode and paths longer than 260 characters (i.e. "C:\<256-char string>"). These can be prefixed by "\\\?\", which sadly does not support slash mixes. Rust's standard library `canonicalize` function, for example, returns "\\\?\" paths!

(* EDIT: I originally wrote some historical inaccuracies, see ynik's reply below for the corrections. Thank you ynik!)

From the docs: "File I/O functions in the Windows API convert "/" to "\" as part of converting the name to an NT-style name, except when using the "\\\?\" prefix." \- [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/FileIO/nami...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/FileIO/naming-a-file#maximum-path-length-limitation)

<comment><USER9> The "\\\?\" extended-length paths have existed for a long time; I think since Windows 2000 at least. The Windows kernel and NTFS have always supported paths up to 32k characters; only the Win32 path normalization logic was limited to MAX_PATH. The "\\\?\" prefix skips the normalization logic, thus allowing apps to use the full path length.

The Windows 10 change in 2016 is something different: if an application opts in (via manifest) AND the LongPathsEnabled registry key is set, long paths will be supported by some (not all) Windows API functions even without the "\\\?\" prefix. These new long paths support a mixture of slashes just fine.

<comment><USER10> To be extra pedantic, it's 32k code units, so some characters take up two.

<comment><USER11> Pretty sure all of Microsoft's own stuff is using UTF-16, so all characters take two bytes, regardless.

<comment><USER12> Only characters from the Basic Multilingual Plane. If you put an emoji in a path, for example (allowed), it will be 4 bytes.

<comment><USER9> Except if it's a compound emoji, which takes multiple codepoints -> more than 4 bytes. So really the takeaway is that "character" is highly ambiguous nowadays and shouldn't be used anymore, use one of these instead: * UTF-n code unit * Unicode code point * Grapheme Cluster * Extended Grapheme Cluster For the latter one also needs to specify the version of Unicode they're talking about, since every new compound emojis changes the definition of "Extended Grapheme Cluster".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting path component separator trivia:

Classic Macs actually had one despite not having a command line interface, it was ':', with '::' meaning "parent directory" and ":::" meaning "grandparent directory". RISC OS used '.' as a separator, with '@' meaning "current", '^' "parent", and '&' "home"; I can hear the "everything should be POSIX" crowd screaming in agony. RISC OS could also address drives by letter or name.

<comment><USER14> And for this reason you still can't name your file ":" in Finder today.

<comment><USER15> $PATH breaks under most implementations even under Linux or BSD with that. It shouldn't; though.

<comment><USER16> Fish shell gets around this by using a list for it

<comment><USER15> Yessir. (fish core dev here ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, it actually DOES make sense to use separate characters for directory-delineation versus option switches.

There was no way of knowing in 1982 that UNIX was going to take over the world. That everything from corporate mainframes, to desktop PC's, and even _phones_ would rally around the conventions of this largely academic OS.

<comment><USER18> Unix wasn't academic. It was pragmatic from the start. A first-hand account: [https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o](https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o)

<comment><USER19> Also, Bell Labs wasn't a university, and Thompson and Ritchie were not tenured lecturers. They wrote assembly code, not papers.

<comment><USER20> They wrote papers too (Bell Labs was, after all, a research lab), took sabbaticals, and lectured at universities. I think one of the group (Kernighan?) took a sabbatical at Berkeley that was one of the events that gave rise to BSD?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why the "Checking your browser" part? Seriously, its a wordpress blog.

<comment><USER15> It's because CloudFlare gates access to half the internet and get to decide whether you're considered a good actor deserving of access to a website (someday, they hope, the internet) or not.

<comment><USER22> Aparently I'm a bad actor, because the "checking" page never redirects to anything. Guess the author doesn't want people to read his site. I'll comply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is almost correct, but MS-DOS derives from the DEC small systems line (the PDP-8 and PDP-11), not the large systems line that ran TENEX, which took the name "TOPS-10" in the DEC Witness Protection Program (the PDP-6 and PDP-10). TENEX's only real descendant in modern computing systems is the command-line editing (and filename completion?) in bash and zsh.

Much to my surprise, it seems to be true that CP/M did not actually use / for flags, even in PIP, although other incarnations of PIP (like that in Heath's HDOS) did use /. The CP/M 2.2 manual is at [http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/cpm22-m.pdf](http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/cpm22-m.pdf) and documents the command lines of all the standard utilities, including the assembler, PIP, and the text editor. (It also, in passing, documents the full 8080 instruction set and OS API.)

TENEX was born in 1969 but grew up in the 1970s, but the use of / for switches in DEC-land predates it; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concise_Command_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concise_Command_Language) is somewhat confused, but it currently describes how the PDP-6 monitor program used / for switches in, presumably, 1964.

DEC operating systems like the ones CP/M aped used / liberally for switches, and third-party programs we used on CP/M certainly did use / for switches. This was not limited to the PDP-10 large systems operating systems; it was also true on OS/8 for the PDP-8, as described in [https://www.pdp8.net/os/os8/index.shtml](https://www.pdp8.net/os/os8/index.shtml) (though, as you can see, some commands used - instead, like the later Unix). The PDP-8 shipped in 1965, but OS/8 might be more recent than that.

<comment><USER23> You've conflated TOPS-10 and TOPS-20. TENEX was developed externally by BBN, took advantage of BBN-built add-on paging hardware, and was quite different in both look and feel and its internals from TOPS-10, which had originated on the PDP-6 and was simply called "Monitor" at first. The name TEN-EX referred to its ability to run TOPS-10 executables in compatibility mode, as BSD variants could once run Linux executables. When TENEX was brought in-house by DEC, it was renamed "TOPS-20", since the Monitor had already been renamed "TOPS-10". The only difference between the PDP-10 (or DECsystem-10) and the DECsystem-20 computers was the color scheme and the OS supplied with it.

<comment><USER20> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/06/24/wh...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/06/24/why- is-the-dos-path-character)

<comment><USER25> Heh, I guess it is still also seen as an escape because the title of this blog just has double quotes with no backslash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow, this is a great revelation, and I feel like the lede is almost buried here, namely that DOS seems to have been influenced by TOPS-10 to such a great amount. I wonder how many other DOSisms were in reality TOPS-10isms that had been replicated.

<comment><USER20> No, the author is wrong about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> ...and ofc cloudflare gets in the way and forces you to turn on js

</comment><comment><USER28> So this is very interesting, but doesn't go into the next obvious question: why did TOPS-10 use forward slashes as command switch?

<comment><USER29> That was a general DEC-ism, not just a TOPS-10 thing.

<comment><USER30> So let's follow it to the end. Who first started using slashes that way and why?

<comment><USER20> You probably want to read [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20007305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20007305) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20007259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20007259).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Because DOS used the slash as a switch specifier, aping popular DEC operating systems of its day, but did NOT adopt DEC's approach to specifying paths and subdirectories, opting for a more Unix-like approach in DOS 2.0.

And Windows inherited a lot of DOS baggage.

<comment><USER32> CP/M had nothing to do with DEC, and digital research had nothing to do with DEC either. What was the DEC connection? Did VMS use backslash for paths?

<comment><USER20> Intergalactic Digital Research's CP/M was a very close copy of DEC RT-11, though not quite as close a copy as MS-DOS was of CP/M, so CP/M had a great deal to do with DEC.

VMS, which came later and is therefore irrelevant, used . to separate directory names in paths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Now Windows is embracing Linux with WSL and of course URLs use forward slashes. It would be so great if they switched to forward slashes.

<comment><USER34> afaik Windows has supported forward slashes for a very long time (I want to say at least since WIN 2K).

Discussion here: [https://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/23123-when-did- window...](https://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/23123-when-did-windows- start-accepting-forward-slash-path-separator)

<comment><USER20> Since MS-DOS 2.0, when MS-DOS added a hierarchical filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> We killed it - [https://web.archive.org/web/20190524202002/http://www.os2mus...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190524202002/http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why- does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/)

<comment><USER35> Not usually one to plug stuff - but the Wayback Machine browser extension is very useful for "This is down, would you like to see a snapshot" (or "This is up now for now, would you like it snap-shotted"... or my favourite "I can't believe they put this up, let me ensure this is preserved for evidence if somebody decides to re-write history")

<comment><USER36> I use it, but I've been considering uninstalling it due to frequent false positives where I get redirected to the archive when the original is not actually down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's hard to imagine a time before hierarchical file systems.

<comment><USER38> It's from a time when the media was so small there was no need to categorize anything because the entire directory listing fit on a single screen in most cases.

Stuff ended up being characterized by what disk it was on (floppy labeled "homework" vs. "games") rather than where it was in a filesystem. Directories were only necessary once Hard Drives appeared and you could centralize your storage.

<comment><USER39> And now we're kind of coming out the other side, where storage is so large and can contain so many items that organizing it all into a hierarchical structure is a full time job in itself.

MP3s can mostly sort themselves, but your _pictures_ ... and then you have the N-layer-deep "old computer" directories, where you copied all the files from your last computer to your new computer.

<comment><USER38> These days every desktop environment integrates an increasingly featureful fast search feature front and center because they know you aren't going to be able to keep up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I might actually upset some folks by saying....who cares, it's just a character?

I've worked with many OS's that didn't even have a directory structure, and those that did were only one level deep. And there wasn't a lot of "slashing" going on....DG RDOS for example. Some other OS's had colons (perhaps VMS - <USER2> can't remember now.

We're talking about a time back in the depths of history where OS's had their own specific quirks. To assume that folks bumping into computing way-back-when encountered Unix regularly and "used slashes" is based on a deeply flawed presumption. Back in the early 80's (and into the early 90's) cheap computing was to be had by the use of CP/M and MSDOS, not Unix because it was too bloody expensive for non-academic use. I used to look after a bunch of SCO 86 boxes in my time (pre-Linus), for the customer these licenses were not cheap compared to say MP/M.

My first encounter with Unix and the "forward slash" was in fact in 1986, running on a NCR Tower box (and that's some minor exotica I could go on about...) and to me it was just another thing to remember.

So glorifying Unix over its choice of "/" as a directory separator. Really, who cares?

I enjoy Unix and Linux, but this hagiography over its greatness ("/") seriously makes me wonder about how folks choose an OS these days to get work done.

<comment><USER41> ...did you even read the article? Nowhere does it claim greatness of one over the other, it's simply an interesting piece about a bit of computing history that plenty of people love to learn, because we LOVE trivia.

<comment><USER40> > did you even read the article?

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

 _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can't seem to find it now, but I recall reading somewhere that Paul Allen said it was the worst decision he made in the early days.

</comment><comment><USER43> Done to avoid errors, then we proceed to put the "\" key directly above Return/Enter and incur errors for decades to come. :)

Early in my career I did this from the command prompt while typing a recursive remove command and basically auto-torched a much higher directory tree thanks to my backslash-equals-return typo.

<comment><AUTHOR> And that's only if you're lucky to use a qwerty keyboard layout. On other layouts, the backslash requires a combination of keys to produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Remember that one time Linus (Linus Tech Tips) criticized the Apple Mac because it uses slashes as path separator?

<comment><USER38> Oldschool Macs used colon ':' as the separator. It was not ideal for commandline use because you need to hold shift to type a colon, but in the strictly mouse oriented world of old Finder it wasn't an issue for end users.

<comment><USER45> Heh, in the Finnish layout ':' is actually the easiest of the three to type. Still requires shift but at least you don't have to reach or use both hands. The layout (like most European ones I guess) is pretty horrible for technical work of any sort, there's so much reaching to the number row while holding shift or AltGr...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> People constantly use 'backslash' when reading URLs out loud for no reason! It's just a slash!

<comment><USER47> My guess is they're using the technical sounding word when they're reading a techy URL thing.

Out of curiosity, if we're describing the two characters, which would logically be "down slash" and "up slash"?

<comment><USER48> For languages that read left to right:

Downslash \

Upslash /

<comment><USER47> Oh, good, that was my intution as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> ... and why did TOPS-10 start using / as the option separator?

<comment><USER50> Ultimately it's essentially an arbitrary choice, but the reasonable set of characters would exclude letters and numbers (too widely used for filenames already), be already available in the character sets of the time, and not too awkward to type nor look at. That means it'll be one of the special and non- paired (like parentheses) characters, and beyond that any single one would do. Beyond that, any one is as good as the others.

We could've just as easily ended up in a world where options are introduced with \ and path separators are commas, or any number of other combinations. It's a little funny to think that the TOPS-10 developers probably spent less than a day in total deciding on the character, far less than the time spent by everyone else since then thinking about why they did it that way.

<comment><USER51> I doubt it was a day. I'd be surprised if it was more than a minute or two.

TOPS-10 subdirectory separators were commas, but the path was enclosed in [] so it was always clear which part was a path and which part was something else.

UNIX and DOS/Windows made a big mistake by removing the enclosing characters, and TOPS-10 was a 6.3 file system that never used them to their full extent.

The (back) slashes and switches weren't the biggest problem. Spaces in file paths were - and sometimes still are - hard to deal with.

A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic, and would also have allowed almost all other characters to be used without problems.

<comment><USER52> > A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of > unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic

Windows allows you to enclose paths in double quotes, which deals with the space problem.

Off the top of my head, I don't recall if Linux has the same behaviour?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I used to work on PDP-11 under RSX-11M and it used forward slashes as option separators. For example the equivalent of ls:

pip /li

</comment><comment><USER54> And who decided it makes sense to list the parent's name first?

<comment><USER19> Thompson and Ritchie, who carried it over from Multics to Unix. They worked on Multics, and that OS introduced the hierarchical filesystem.

DOS just copied Unix, right down to the | piping, and < > redirection, and . and .. directory links which are fake.

Navigation of a path requires that the parents be traversed before children. For instance resolving /usr/bin/ls means we locate the root directory node, then navigate through usr and bin, finally resolving to ls. The components are written in order of traversal, and that order is left to right because English is written left to right. When /usr/bin/ls is passed to the kernel, it's in a character string which is referenced by a pointer to its beginning: it's pointing at the / in /usr. It is natural to process it in that order: visiting the characters in / u s r / b ... order just requires incrementing the pointer byte by byte from the starting value.

There are other reasons to have the most major part near the beginning. A telephone number's country code and area code details coming first allows the network to begin make appropriate switching decisions before the dialing is complete.

Imagine you had to dial someone's "extension 42" before the company phone number. That extension would have to be stored somewhere, until the company's PBX picks up the call, because that extension only makes sense in the context of that switch.

Also, if we collect the absolute path of every object in the file system, and then sort it lexicographically, the parent to child order means that things in the same directories end up nicely listed together.

<comment><USER54> The computer can easily traverse in either direction. I don't know see any technical reason to list identifiers in that order. No linguistic reason either. We don't do that for addresses in the real world. We don't say "United Kingdom, London, Westminster, Downing Street 10."

Imagine if Internet domain names are arranged as file paths. To reach the BBC web site, I'd have to type in "uk.co.bb" before the computer can auto- complete. As it is, all have to do is type the letter B.

<comment><USER55> But we do say "May 24th at 18:50".

I could technically say "10 to 7 in the evening on the 24th day of May" but everyone would look at me like I'm nuts.

<comment><USER56> > on the 24th day of May

Most European countries follow that order of precedence. Intriguingly so did technical reports for the US DoD, dropping the ordinal suffix for clarity even when spoken: 24 May.

And then ISO says 2019-05-24 18:50

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> we use forward slashes just fine. It's great when you're doing code in python, java, etc and in a cygwin/cmd/powershell environment

</comment><comment><USER58> better question: why does my Ford navigation use backslash as the alternate street name separator? _unbelievably_ irksome to me.

<comment><USER59> Because Windows has made \ so common that many normies now consider it _the forward slash_. In the encounters with them I fail to evade, I often hear them referring to the slashes in URLs as "backslash". _Shudder_.

<comment><USER60> I thought normies considered \ to be the "computer slash". (Which basically explains all the verbal misuse)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I always thought it was so that file names could have dates in them: BUDGET_09/12/1982.XSL

<comment><USER62> I don't recall a time when you could use / in Windows file or directory names.

<comment><USER63> So Windows forbids other characters in names besides the directory separator?

EDIT: Apparently:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1976007/what- characters-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1976007/what-characters- are-forbidden-in-windows-and-linux-directory-names#31976060)

<comment><USER64> IIRC, different APIs in Windows handle special characters for filenames differently.

This was probably around the Windows 98 timeframe, but I remember several instances when extracting zips (probably WAREZ) where the file that was written contained characters that Explorer couldn't handle correctly. It wouldn't allow moving those files to the Recycling Bin, but would typically allow renaming the portion before the extension. I had a collection of `zzzz.???` files for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> It would be nice if they would allow one to view the text instead of showing:

      Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page.

<comment><USER66> It would also be nice if we didn't have to read complaints about being unable to view websites from users that disable browser features that they clearly understand will break a lot of websites.

<comment><USER67> No, you should not intentionally hide text from those who prefer to disable JS. Disabling JS improves site load speed and reduces memory consumption. As a side effect, most of ads and trackers also stop working.

<comment><USER68> My organisation has a requirement that we build to work without JS. If we need to use JS for something then we also need a non-JS alternative, the result may be less pretty/fast/require an extra call but it works regardless of your JS choices

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Iirc Aaron Reynolds said it was done simply to be distinct. A way to reduce the chance of lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER70> Because "/" was already used as the command switch character in DOS 1.X which didn't yet have folders ((boggle)).

Source traced back to DEC TOPS-10, which MS founders were exposed to. Then a conservative manager (piece blames IBM) chose backwards compatibility over consistency with Unix, thereby dooming billions of regular folks to need an explanation what a backslash is compared to a slash.

<comment><USER71> I know we all love bagging on Microsoft, but insisting on backwards compatibility with the system you're directly replacing is not an unreasonable decision, especially since changing it could well have made DOS 1.1 scripts silently destroy data when run in DOS 2.0.

<comment><USER70> That's what the lesson here is about, I believe. That a reasonable decision in the short-term can be unfortunate in the long-term.

Taking lumps for a few months when the userbase was miniscule compared to what it is today sounds more reasonable now.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Buy Bitcoin right now – y/n? - <AUTHOR> simple as that. curious what the hive mind thinks. <comment><USER2> Bitcoin valuation is pure speculation with no underlying value to revert to (that's the optimistic scenario, at least — the pessimistic scenario is that the underlying value it could/should revert to is basically zero).

As all financial products it has the bizarre property that they have opposite elasticity compared to ordinary goods & services: while for most stuff, quantity demanded rises as price drops, for financial assets the demand rises as the price rises (and demand will drop when price drops).

It's pointless to ask whether $4000 is "a lot" for a bitcoin or not, it's basically impossible to estimate whether in the near or medium future the price will be higher or lower... ask yourself instead how many people you think will be willing to give you more than $4000 for your bitcoin in the near future. Why would they want to? If you think there are, go for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who knows? There is no logic behind btc valuation other than speculation. It is essentially a gamble.

I sure as hell wouldn't buy and hold though - as soon as major western nation decides to ban or regulate it, the price is going to plummet.

This is just tulips all over again.

<comment><USER4> People have been calling Bitcoin tulips since 2011. It's still funny now as it was then too.

<comment><USER5> Wait for it ... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Buy low, sell high

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd wait for the dip below $4,000, but in terms of TA (Elliot Waves) as well as Fib levels, we are most likely headed towards $5,000.</comment>


Show HN: Simple analytics for restaurants. Feedback on launch page? - <AUTHOR> http://flourcast.com

<comment><USER2> First, you just launched, so congrats!

Second, I do have some feedback:

-You don't state the problem you're fixing. You have to make the prospect aware of a problem they're having before you show them the light. And even if a prospect visits your site knowing they have the problem you're trying to solve, reiterating it in very clear terms will only make them more encouraged to buy your service.

-You need visuals, like images of restaurants, dishes, happy customers, happy owners, etc, stuff that'll elicit an emotional response.

-Given the nature of the product, I would include a very simple graph to visually convey the concept of increasing revenues.

-You need testimonials or case studies. As a restaurant owner with a lot on my plate already, I need to know your product actually works and is worth implementing. A case study about how X restaurant discovered some hidden trends in their customer behaviors and tripled revenue in a year will make me more likely to pull the trigger.

-Your hook needs work. "The best way to forecast for your restaurant" doesn't present a problem or a solution. Something like "Easy sales forecasting that'll keep your customers full, and your wallet fat" might be a little better. (That could be _a lot_ better, but I'd need a few hours).

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER3> >First, you just launched, so congrats!

There is no site behind this that is publically available. It looks like a glorified contact form to me.

<comment><USER2> I was making a funny about them launching unintentionally by making this submission.

<comment><USER4> Which is unfortunate, cause a site demo would be great to see when everyone has their interest piqued. Hopefully we'll see another Show HN when they actually launch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First, some (unsolicited) feedback on the product: Itemizing & inputting your sales per item is a pretty hefty thing to ask if the restaurant isn't already doing it. If they are, what makes this solution better than Excel or Google Docs? Integration with a POS or other system that automatically tracks sales might be necessary to make this feasible from a "how much extra work does this force me to do" perspective.

As for the site... 1) "Try now" doesn't let me try it now... not a good start. 2) The site as a whole is pretty dry and unappealing, and gives me no idea what the product would be like to use. Typical best practice for something like this tends to be human imagery + shots of the interface in action. See: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab- tes...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing- part-3-final) 3) If you're going to promise plans and pricing, give us plans and pricing. If not, "learn more" or "hear about us when we're ready" is more honest.

<comment><USER6> Your first paragraph makes an excellent point. No one is going to type all that in each day. And more importantly - you'd have to type in every ingredient and the quantity for each menu item in order to get the 'better inventory control' that the website suggests.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're looking at integrating with POS systems but that isn't very easy. It will only require to enter the quantity of sales for menu items. Most POS systems will produce an overall daily count but won't be able to provide smarter analytics.

<comment><USER7> _We 're looking at integrating with POS systems but that isn't very easy._

[http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats on getting something out there!

One thing I'm always most cautious about this is what do we really know? I can give you some advice about what I think you could do better, but I don't run a restaurant, and those are the conversations that really count. Maybe they'd prefer this page be brown with a yellow comic-sans font. So take this with an enormous grain of salt.

1) The lede concerns me. Is that how restaurant owners talk? They want to forecast better? If so, great. I have a feeling though that there is a different language they use. I don't know what it is though. If you do, than great keep going. If you don't you need to figure out what this language is. Find a restaurant owner and figure out what he has typed into google. Is it "how to increase restaurant sales" might be a more common question on their mind that you could fit into.

2) You need to show some social proof. Some testimonials. Someone somewhere has said something nice about you and/or this project. If not, that is step 1. Get whatever this is in front of someone that will say, "this is great".

3) I'm nervous self-service SaaS for restaurants might not be the right business model. I've talked with some restaurant owners. Many seem like their top of mind problems are keeping their employees from stealing or their glassware from chipping or their produce getting delivered on time. They don't seem like they have a ton of time figuring out a software system to help them. (I believe Opentable started by basically holding these restaurants hands and giving them the computers systems and everything they needed)

I have a feeling you'd have more luck getting a quick meeting in a booth at the back of the restaurant between lunch and dinner than getting owners to this landing page.

4) There's a great program in Chicago, called Inspiration Kitchen, a non- profit to help homeless people with things like training to work a kitchen to help them get jobs. There's other programs like this in other cities where non-profits are running kitchens and restaurants. If there's something like that in your area, and you volunteered with them for 2 hours a week, I bet you'd get some really nice connections and insight on how you could help them with software like this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey! Cool concept.

My overall comment would be really drive home the problem(s) that you're trying to solve, whatever they might be. I would lead with those. i.e.

\- Fed up of wasting perfectly good ingredients? \- Want to make smarter purchasing decisions? \- Take the guesswork out of your next specials \- etc etc

What you have at the moment is _mostly_ the solution, I'd pitch up the problem like I mentioned above, then a few points on your products magic.

It shouldn't be too tough because even from just seeing your current page I "get it".

Just my 2 penneth :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think we'll add a point to state the current pain point as you said. Really the goal is to help restaurants better understand their customers' behaviors and patterns.

<comment><USER9> Hey, yeah I totally get it. Just drive home the WHY, WHY do you need to help them understand their customers' behaviour patterns? What are the benefits? Honestly I can't say that enough :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like an interesting concept for a product. I don't have much experience selling to restaurants in particular so I can't comment on the business model, but I can offer a couple pieces of advice regarding how to sell software to small businesses:

1) Good job emphasizing "increase revenue". Software is an _incredibly_ tough sell to SMBs if you aren't helping them decrease costs or increase revenue, so the more you emphasize the practical implications of your software the better.

2) The homepage is a little sparse on details. If I owned a restaurant, I'd want to see at least a bunch of screenshots, if not an interactive demo. Telling me that the product gives me happier customers is fine, but I really need to see what I'm going to be working on.

3) On the pricing page, a general tactic is to put real prices and see who clicks on which tiers. That way, you can see how many people would actually be willing to pay for your product and how many are just mildly interested.

4) When you get the emails, make sure you talk to them within a day. I've found that most potentially leads go down the toilet if you wait much longer, so you're going to want to engage them while they're interested.

Shoot me an email at the email on my profile if you want to talk more!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, will send you a note to chat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To the people asking about Excel, the obvious answer is: __most non IT literate people don 't know how to use it __. My Uncle always asks me to knock up very basic charts to track how his business is doing because he doesn 't know how himself.

1) More information - I want to know what kind of statistics you can show me (ideally in layman's terms), something like a graph. Then some more details on the technical info - what do you mean by trend? Can you predict sales in the future?

2) Do you actually have any usage data from a restaurant for this?

3) It would be nice to see your personal background - why did you invent this? Did you have a problem that needed solving that was hard with conventional software?

Basically what I'm getting at is I don't really understand what I would get from your product. I can see a table of things I sold and a rainy icon. Great, but if I'm a restaurateur presumably my till will dump something like this at the end of the day?

I get the impression that at the moment you're selling an answer, not the answer to a posed question. People need to look at your site and immediately think "Yes, I always wondered about that and I can see it would help!"

</comment><comment><USER12> Your competitor is Excel. How are you better than it?

<comment><USER13> I think screenshots would help here.

What do I actually get that I don't get out of the box with Excel? I imagine the trends and the charts but seeing it visually would go a long way for me to solidify it in my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tell the audience why they want it. Not what it does.

And be specific. "Make smarter decisions and increase revenue!" does not mean anything. You could literally say that about anything. What does your product specifically help them with?

Also, the exclamation mark seems condescending, like it's a service for kids. But that's just my personal taste.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll be brutally honest for you, since I would want the same: this is crap. You shouldn't have put this up yet. Here's a list of things wrong, I really hope you fix them because I like to see people make nice things :)

1\. You're using minimalism as an excuse to not build a landing page. What is this!??!?!?! I _sort of_ know what it is, but have no idea what the software looks like (is that a screenshot?)

2\. I hate giving others design directives, but comic sans-ish fonts + spreadsheets makes very little sense. You can be "cute-sy" on other parts of the site, but when it comes to numbers you want things to be readable.

3\. please preload any rollover images you have, seeing a button blink when i hover over it is so 90s.

4\. The "Try now for free" should be right aligned, forreal.

otoh, the logo looks nice, except you should consider better aliasing on the font (or a css3 web font!) :)

<comment><USER16> Wow. Way to be a dick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Past performance is not an indicator of future results. If you want to look at the future, you need to combine previous results with possible future scenarios. Is business to a particular restaurant different based on the season, are there cash flow problems to consider? Regression or historic modeling is not that great - this includes where it is frequently used such as network analysis, stocks, etc. However, some of the drill down type things might be useful to monitoring food cost or helping to do future modeling. It depends on what features you have when you are near an MVP.

I am also not sure what this dones that a spreadsheet template couldn't do at this point. For the rainy day scenario, are you asking them to put this in, or will you take their location with weather data to automate this analysis?

</comment><comment><USER18> You should probably ask people who manage restaurants rather than people on HN.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some feedback:

\- _sales on rainy days_ -> This is insight, not trends or analytics. (that's not to say it's less or more important)

\- _Simply record your daily sales in Flourcast._ -> Why is this any easier than having my cashier put this in an Excel spreadsheet and do a pivot table?

\- _The best way to forecast for your restaurant._ -> As others have pointed out, this needs some work. Forecast what? Sales? Inventory? What problem are you solving and why is your product any better than the competition?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd say the real value is in the statement "Make smarter decisions and increase revenue".

I'd concentrate the focus of the page on walking them through a concrete example of what insight would lead to what actions which would lead to what increase in revenue.

If you make a compelling case for that, that'll give them the motivation to sign up and input the data. Motivation is the single biggest determinant of conversion.

</comment><comment><USER21> My first impression would be to change the font and preload the hover-image for "Plans and pricing" (when you hover over it now, it shows the image loading)

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know much about the space but I think the biggest thing you can do is to both make it easy and convince me that it's easy before I sign up to do the manual entry of data.

Assuming this is a real problem (I imagine it would be) then I think easing the data entry will make/break your retention.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Most larger restaurants are sold massive POS systems which aren't easy to extract data from. We're obviously looking into this too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks interesting, but I can't see who is behind this project (no company/developer info on the page), so I won't share my email address.

Also "Try NOW for free" is misleading, as there's no product behind it yet (so I can't try it).

</comment><comment><USER23> This sounds like a potentially useful thing, but putting up an ugly webpage with two links to a box asking for someone's email is the opposite of useful. FWIW, "firstname.lastname@example.com" will receive their spam.

</comment><comment><USER24> The two links "Try now for free" and "Plans and pricing" are making promises about what waits on the other side. You should always keep promises.

I see no reason why "Plans and pricing" is an image.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. This was bad late night judgement on my part. Will change this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not gonna lie...it's pretty bad. For starters, the call to action is off the page on the right. Unforgivable.

Since your design skills are limited, you might need to find someone to do it or at least look online for some templates.

Here's what you're up against: [http://www.ex-pos.com](http://www.ex-pos.com) [http://www.averoinc.com](http://www.averoinc.com) [http://euclidanalytics.com/product/qsr](http://euclidanalytics.com/product/qsr) [http://restaurantsciences.com/](http://restaurantsciences.com/)

This one might be within the range of your skills: [http://www.tapastech.com/analytics](http://www.tapastech.com/analytics)

<comment><USER26> He was probably going off of Joel/Buffer's example landing page: [http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers- in-7-week...](http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks- how-we-did-it)

<comment><USER27> Swiping stuff you don't understand will land you in a world of pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Rather than having a "sign up" link and a "Plans and Pricing" link, I think it would be better if you had just 1 page, and had the signup form be the focus of the site (the call-to-action).

</comment><comment><USER29> Plans & pricing button disappears when I rollover. Moments later it shows back up. its because you lazy load an image. No need for an image, do it with pure CSS.

</comment><comment><USER30> On my iPad in landscape the green button isn't visible without scrolling.

Best wishes with your venture guys.

</comment><comment><USER31> Good work! I think you should checkout how your site looks on mobile and smaller resolution screen (It breaks).

</comment><comment><USER32> So what are we suppose to evaluate exactly?</comment>


Ask HN: Are social sites really dead? - <AUTHOR> Hey folks, I've been wondering about this. I'm building a cool community over at www.learnsearch.xyz, but people continuously tell me that having any faith in a website built on human curation is a fools errand. I think there's value, and so do my 30 users so far, but honestly, is it really futile to build social web apps today? Everyone seems to be focused on mobile or ar/vr, but to me it still seems that the most stable platform for learning would be on the web. <comment><USER2> I say go for it. I'm not remotely interested in mobile or ar/vr.</comment>


An Empirical Study of Implicit Type Conversions in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/08/04/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-an-empirical-study-of-implicit-type-conversions-in-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Under "Threats to Validity" the authors note that "some" of the code studied is generated, and that they tried to deobfuscate this code so they could understand it. I think this understates the danger to their results.

I would expect most of the code on the top 100 websites to be generated/minified. I would further hypothesize that minifiers would only make transformations that are correct, but do not necessarily make code more readable, thus skewing these results towards correct type conversions that humans would not tend to write.

It would be interesting to see these tests run over the minified and unminified jQuery source to see if there's any difference.</comment>


It's official: EFF's Certbot goes 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-releases-certbot-10-help-more-websites-encrypt-their-traffic <comment><USER2> Will have a play around with this for my personal site. It will be interesting to see how easier/harder it is compared to LetsEncrypt</comment>


America's 50 Richest Paydays - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/50paydays200804?printable=true&currentPage=all <comment><USER2> This article is fundamentally mistaken. Most of these weren't increases in anyone's bottom line, but merely converting one form of asset to another.

</comment><comment><USER3> They are missing John Paulson ($3 to $4 billion) and John Arnold (possibly). And if they use the cash accounting method they seem to be using, anyone involved in finance is going to look good. A derivatives trader with 100% daily turnover could manage a $1 million portfolio that gave him $250 million in gross cash flow ($1 million in turnover X 250 or so trading days). Terribly flawed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also consider the tax implications and the biggest payday goes to the Department of the Treasury. So, even though there was a transfer in asset categories, it wasn't one-for-one.</comment>