Ask HN: What income can I expect as an online freelance full-stack developer? - <AUTHOR> I've got some years of experience of working in startups, and I'm confident enough to say that I can deliver complex full stack applications at a high quality in good time. I've done full stack development and devops and product work... I'm good with people (clients) and I can follow through.
I'm willing to put in the time and effort needed in marketing myself, applying and looking for jobs, and generally 'managing' myself as a freelancer.
I currently live in Israel, working full time for a startup here, I would earn about 8-9K$ monthly (before taxes of course).
What can I expect to get to as an online freelancer - what's the best case scenario (I manage to keep myself busy with high-paying projects) ?
What's the average scenario for someone with my capabilities ? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how this is answerable.

Best case is essentially unlimited, e.g., $200-500 USD/hr. If you go on a project basis, the hourly rate could end up being very, very high. Or mediocre. Or even low.

Average? We have no idea what your capabilities are, so we can't factor that into the equation. Average is probably closer to $50-125 USD.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ! I think you gave a great answer ! Where did you get those numbers if you don't mind me asking ?

<comment><USER3> He pulled them out of his arse, which is exactly how freelance/consulting pricing works.

<comment><USER2> Yup!

That's how I started billing clients initially; basically making stuff up, estimating project complexity v. time-to-implement, and so on.

Eventually they were reasonably accurate, then I stopped doing it for awhile. I've toyed with the idea of getting back into it again, but I'm a terrible hustler, and don't have the patience for it :(

<comment><USER4> How do you find clients/work? Were you contracting?

I've always been curious about how freelancers make such a high hourly, because freelance websites are full of people charging $15/hr.

<comment><USER5> By delivering quality and focusing on clients that don't care about pinching pennies.

<comment><USER4> But do many of those clients exist on sites like upwork?

<comment><USER6> To find clients that will pay good rates you're mostly going to have to deal with them directly, which rules out most sites that try to act as a middle- man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It depends on where you get your clients from. If you use marketplaces like upwork your hourly rate will suffer. Especially at the beginning. From my experience you need to build a strong profile with 25+ reviews from completed jobs.

I'd stay away from these places and look at me personal network first. There might be even clients who do not consider a freelancer on a remote basis initially, but are happy to try.

Assuming a utilisation rate of 80% you need to bill 10-11.5k a month to match your current state of earnings. Let's say you want to work 40 hours a week, then your day rate should be 62,50 USD+

</comment><comment><USER8> My skills sound similar to yours (full-stack w- devops) and I do freelance development on the side. Before the economy crashed, I had 2 clients. One paying $120/hr USD, the other $60/hr USD.

After the crash, I couldn't find anyone who would pay over $40/hr. Now things are slowly getting better; I have 2 clients paying $40/hr and one paying $60/hr.

I've never done any advertisement, basically these are people saying, "please help me". They have reached out through a friend of a friend looking for someone they could trust.

Since this isn't a make-or-break situation for me financially, we tend to agree on a price that they are comfortable with. These days my starting figure is $60/hr and I go down from there.

To be able to do marketing, advertising, and to be able to build it into a business, I'd probably want to be back in the $100-$120/hr range. With that level, I'd feel comfortable because I'd have the perks of my day job: travel to conferences, hire employees, save for retirement, good health insurance, limitless sugary snacks, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are in the United States it works out to about 1/3\. but that is on profit, so you can deduct your expenses to lower the total number.

I am not sure about the tax laws in Israel

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I didn't understand - what works to about 1/3 ?

<comment><USER9> sorry I miss read. The income tax in the US works out to about 1/3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> a fellow israeli here. living in spain, though. you can invoice US$50-100 an hour if you're any good

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not in Israel, so my answer doesn't contain specific values. I also don't do freelance work online. So...

My "offline" freelancing work quotations are structured like this: Firstly, I have a target of how much I want to make in a month, secondly an idea of how many hours I'm willing to work in a month to reach that target, and finally an indication of the delivery requirements of the project, if any (some quotations ask me to specify by when they could reasonably expect delivery, while others give an idea of when they require delivery). Then, I balance hours vs money vs delivery. So a project that has a delivery of a month (or multiple thereof) and means spending mostly all the monthly hours on that project will attract a rate that means I get out what I intend to for a month. Something that has a shorter delivery requirement with a higher number of hours to be spent (those projects where something needs to be done urgently, for example) the rate is a lot higher since more hours are spent on the project. I also work in a setup cost for each project, which is not billed directly but rather included in a higher hourly rate. I'll typically make more from 4x 1-week projects than 1x 4-week project, but the latter at least getting me to my target. While the former means a nicer "paycheck" at the end of the month, it requires more effort to get right, and it means requiring 4 different projects.

Obviously in practice there's other issues to consider, but such things are picked up over time. For example, projects don't occur one at a time sequentially. Which means sometimes working on 2 or more projects concurrently (your choice completely though whether you accept the extra work and whether you've planned for it). This means when sending the first (and subsequent) quote out, that the 'weights on the scales' have been adjusted accordingly. Then there's the consideration that there might not be work for some period, in which case either the end monetary target needs to be adjusted down for the period without work, or otherwise have an inflated monetary target to begin with, the excess of which caters for those periods (you'll need to determine what is a fair increase and how long it will take to build up a sufficient amount before you can afford to be without work - that length of time is a good indicator of savings needed before starting freelancing). Something else to consider is that a sufficient amount of time will need to be spent on admin work: generating quotes, responding to emails, invoicing, following up with payments, meeting (potential) clients , etc. You'll need to decide how to bill for this time as well.

Aaand I'm almost done with this novel... since you're wanting to do freelancing work online, you'll need to consider most of the above, but importantly, that a) your success rate of landing work is likely going to be a lot lower than what you think, b) the amount of "admin" required increases (responding to and browsing alerts, etc). All factor in on the total you'll make in a month.</comment>


Unlimited Data returning?  What's the real catch? - <AUTHOR> https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/verizon-plan/ <comment><USER2> 4G LTE only. We may manage your network usage to ensure a quality experience for all customers, and may prioritize your data behind some Verizon customers during times/places of network congestion. Not available for machine-to- machine services. Mobile hotspot/tethering reduced to 3G speeds after 10GB/month; domestic data roaming at 2G speeds; int'l data reduced to 2G speeds after 500MB/day. If more than 50% of your talk, text or data usage in a 60-day period is in Canada or Mexico, use of those services in those countries may be removed or limited. Discounts not available.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering if anyone had heard of any more. These things are acceptable to some extent assuming it's not worse than they describe!</comment></comment>


500 years ago, a German abbot wrote a book on communication with spirits (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/jya/tri-crack.htm <comment><USER2> A bit anticlimactic.

TL;DR: A book published 500 years ago contained an obscure message. It wasn't actually "encryped" by modern standards, it was simply as encoded similar to ASCII (i.e. each number represents a character). The numbers were assigned characters in reverse alphabetical order. Converting them to letters again, you get random sentences. No hidden knowlege.

The more interesting part is perhaps that three people discovered it over the years, independently of each other. The first one actually encoded (encrypted? There is nothing said about the method) the solution so nobody could actually check whether he cracked it. More recently two other people also solved it and verified that the previous person also cracked it and wasn't talking nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found it interesting that three people cracked the code independently: Dr. Ernst, in 1996, Dr. Reeds, in 1998, and Heidel, in 1676. But Heidel's work wasn't understood because he encrypted it, and Ernst's work was overlooked because it was published in an obscure journal.

Dr. Reeds' unique contribution wasn't in solving the problem, but in communicating the solution in an accessible way. A lot of successful companies have been the same way -- they might not have been the first ones to solve a problem, but they brought their solution to the masses effectively and accessibly.

<comment><USER4> It's not about who first discovers or invents something, but about who does it last. Ie who communicates so well that afterwards no one else has to go and discover it on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The relevance (to Nash's death): "Books one and two were clearly systems for encoding messages and were the first books written on cryptography, Dr. Reeds said." Very interesting if true.

The joke:

      Trithemius offered plenty of hints, Dr. Reeds said. "He says that
      there are elaborate calculations that you have to do, and he tells you
      that you have to read the tables," he said. When Trithemius said that
      people can send messages without using letters he probably just meant
      they could use number codes instead.

Here's the article describing the solution:

Reeds, Jim. "Solved: the ciphers in book III of Trithemius's steganographia." Cryptologia 22.4 (1998): 291-317 [http://profs.sci.univr.it/~giaco/download/Watermarking- Obfus...](http://profs.sci.univr.it/~giaco/download/Watermarking- Obfuscation/Trithemius.pdf)

The cipher used in book III is very simple, however. Throw out null values, reduce modulo 25, and map in reverse alphabetical order to Latin letters. The first two books of the _Steganographia_ contain a "mind numbing variety" of other encoding methods.

</comment><comment><USER6> Who says the Germans have no sense of humor ?

<comment><USER7> everyone but the germans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get it. Is the book a box which contains a box full of garbage?

<comment><USER9> Seems pretty useful for me. The first couple books were how to write in code. The last book was an example or writing in code. The first code was just a basic letter test. When writing LCD drivers the first thing I do is output color bars, very useful for making sure everything is working.

The second code was a demonstration of how you could have a messenger carry something that they don't know about. It said the bearer is a thief. This is pretty much what modern internet commerce is based on. Communicating in code (SSL) with messengers that internet routers in between can't read (credit card details, etc.).

The third code was Christian prayer, which proved the demonology plain text wasn't something he really supported. The demonology plain text was what made it popular and passed on, however, so even that was useful in that if the book was just all encoded numbers, no one would have printed it.

So the box wasn't garbage and the contents weren't garbage. What makes you think they were?

<comment><USER8> Maybe I did not get the text right but it seemed that he wrote some encryption algorithm and encrypted the text with the brown fox which is meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> totally offtopic, but isn't german really english...from like 5 thousand years ago?

<comment><USER11> As much as English is German from 5000 years ago...

Actually, the ancestor of the English language was most probably brought to Britain by Germanic people from what nowadays would be the region between Netherlands and north west Germany.

Plus, it wasn't 5000, but maybe about 3000 years ago.

<comment><USER12> It was only about 1600 years ago. Plus the region where the Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians lived was quite a lot bigger. From the north of the Netherlands up to northern Denmark. You can still see the similarities when you compare High German, Low German, Frisian and English words.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Chrome Discrimination - <AUTHOR> Someone reported that Google Hangouts couldn't be full screen while using Windows Firefox, so I took out the EC2 instance I used to try to debug, and found that the full screen function was not called at all...
In the end, I look up their obfuscated JS code for a long time and found that the code directly wrote: If it is Firefox and Windows, it will not call the full screen... Simply...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519051#c4 <comment><AUTHOR> related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824)</comment>


Windows 7 borrowed 'look' of Mac - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8358712.stm

<comment><USER2> Well, if they did try to copy the mac in design, they clearly failed.

I love my windows machine, hate my mac, but from a design perspective the mac is prettier than Windows 7. For me, Windows still significantly trumps Mac in usability. Nothing but keyboard shortcuts is so 1980s.</comment>


How to permanently leave Facebook - <AUTHOR> I despise facebook, i don't want to be any part of it. I do not use it for anything other than messenger. Yet it is like a physical reflex... everytime i open up my phone or browser i end up going to the site. Anybody have any interesting way they blocked out this addiction from their life? <comment><USER2> Just uninstall all apps, and log out of facebook did it for me. The act of having to log in would stop me.

<comment><USER3> If that still doesn't do it, change your password to random gibberish that you don't save in a password manager, forcing you to do a password reset to login. If that still doesn't work, set the recovery email to an account you also don't know the password for. But honestly, just logging out should be enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to permanently disable News Feed but still retain the ability to have friends and use Messenger, just unfollow literally all your friends. Every time you go to the FB homepage, it just tells you "no posts to view", but you can use the service like normal otherwise. Saved me a ton of time

</comment><comment><USER5> I just uninstalled the facebook app from my phone, and I don't use Messenger, although I still have to use Whatsapp (which is owned by Facebook) because that's what literally everybody uses.

<comment><USER6> "because that's what literally everybody uses." This exact same statement could be said about TheFacebook.com. How is using WhatsApp any different, if the goal is to disrupt Zuck's data collection?

<comment><USER7> I'd argue the purpose for most people leaving FB is to waste less time and privacy is generally a nice side effect but rarely a primary factor for the general population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One way to reduce the time you are using it, is to uninstall it from your phone as drKarl said. If you still want to be on facebook or messenger to keep a link with your friend, go only with your computer (if you have one) and limit it 15-20 minutes to check news and answer.

Leaving facebook depends also on your friends. If they understand your choice, then they will contact you with messages or phone calls. If they don't, then it might be more difficult.

<comment><USER9> None of mine used an alternative way to contact me, it means I lost contact with many of them since I've deleted my account last year

<comment><USER8> I'm facing the same problem. I still have my account for now.

What I'm thinging is that if I delete it, the ones that will contact me with an other way (messages, phone, email, ...) will be my true friends and not only fb friend.

Of course we will lost contact with John or Sara or Maria who is somewhere else in the world, but concretely what was the last we discuss each other ?

<comment><USER10> I'm keeping in touch with a dozen people via emails. They never had Facebook, and as far as I can tell, they are better off than most people. Our mail exchanges are long form and meaningful, with pictures, links to interesting things, and so on. They can be sporadic, sometimes months go inbetween, but we always come around to write a couple pages to the other person.

Facebook Messenger is a convenience that I have, but the people who do reach out to me usually do so just to organize a night out. They said they would call if they couldn't write.. We have group talks organizing board game nights, because communication is easier, and we have group chats for sharing random cute shit like cat videos. I do not get rid of it because for one specific friend I'd need to use Whatsapp anyway, because he is precious and I understand that he doesn't want Yet Another Secure Messaging App (telegram to be specific) on his phone/desktop just for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah the managing of different messaging apps has become another chore that i despise. Oh my boss sent me a message in skype, my roommate will only call through whatsapp, my very specific group of friends will talk in a group chat in messenger and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have someone set a completely random password on your account, then have them 'delete' the account. The random password is because facebook doesn't actually delete your account and it will prevent you from being able to log in and reactivate it. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER12> You could delete Facebook and use the Messenger app only. In fact I would even go ahead and tell you to use the Messenger Lite version. Uses much less battery and includes almost all the features, except for the shit features.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, I told everyone I was concerned about data collection and deleted it, this was around year 2012. It took two weeks of not logging back in.

There's a difference between deleting and deactivating I think, I deleted mine.

That was it.

<comment><USER14> I believe when people claim you can't delete a FB account, they mean it from the perspective of FB. That data is still sitting in their databases, it's just tagged as "deleted", from what I've gathered.

<comment><USER13> I see, was thinking he meant the "deactivated" thing,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just logging out on all devices has been enough to break the reflex for me. Typing in my email and password, especially on mobile, is enough to prevent me from proceeding.

</comment><comment><USER16> change password to something insanely long and boring to type write it on paper stick it in your draw, log out of fb, clear all passwords Laziness wins most of the time and you wont be bothered to take out your password and type it into the browser that is fjvhcji8987sdhcsl@!j

If you desperately need it, you will. When your out and about you wont have the pass as its in your draw at home

</comment><comment><USER17> _Noprocrast_ on here works great, I have it boot me off for 6 hours after 1 hour on. Why not make something like that.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're on an iPhone, you can use App Limits as a part of the iOS 12 Screen Time functionality.</comment>


Three Important Things Non-Programmers Should Know About Programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/06/12/three-important-things-non-programmers-should-know-about-programming/#294e9ec948c5 <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR:

Experience taught me that there are only three things that non-programmers need to focus on when working together with other developers:

1\. Communicate the technical details to developers quickly and efficiently.

There is no more effective way to explain functionality of an application than showing a developer wireframes of proposed changes.

2\. Things can appear to be easier to implement than they actually are.

Be open to the idea that things that seem like they should be really easy can be much more difficult to implement in practice.

3\. Provide context about why you think things are important.

Explain the why behind the thoughts you have in situations where you're getting pushback from developers — if you do this you'll find yourself working together with them to solve problems.</comment>


Linux Smartphone – Yet Another Librem 5 and PinePhone Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-linux-smartphone-comparison/ <comment><AUTHOR> I think the title of this article could be better, because it's not "yet another" comparison. It's the first one I've seen that goes into all the technical detail of the hardware:

> Comparing the hardware is way more interesting. While a lot of articles just > seem to copy the released spec sheet for the devices I'll be comparing the > specs as checked by the schematics. The nice thing is that both phones have > their schematics downloadable online so things can be fact-checked.

Also there's great photos of the devkits, as always when Martijn Braam publishes something. Well done!</comment>


Small Basic: Programming Is Fun - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx <comment><USER2> Well I started with Sinclair Basic, I know plenty of others that started with some flavour of MS Basic on various 8bit micros. This seems like a sensible step from Microsoft to go back to their roots somewhat with this. imo Apple really needs something like this for their ipad

</comment><comment><USER3> From the getting started guide:

        Here is the first program we wrote:
        TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

        It literally translates in the computer's mind to:
        Write Hello World

Hmm, so why not use 'Write Hello World' instead? Why make things complicated?

<comment><USER4> MSFT tries to introduce kids to programming, not any programming, but Dot Net programming.

TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

Obj.method(arg) is the Dot Net model.

Write Hello World is easier, but is not the Dot Net model.

Learning the first, you'll be more inclined to continue in the Microsoft track ;)

<comment><USER5> MSFT tries to introduce kids to _imperative_ programming because this is what 99% of programmers use. The "MSFT .NET model" also includes F# (printfn "Hello World!") as well as implementations of every language known to man (Ada, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Pascal and dozens of unique languages).

<comment><USER6> I think part of the op's argument was to consider what the best way to learn programming is. Imperative/OO programming is important to learn someday, but it's not necessarily the easiest or best one to start on.

So Microsoft's motivations might not be clearly aligned with learning. Should or shouldn't they be?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps I was misguided by the insinuation that Microsoft is behind some imperative language conspiracy. In any case, 99% of the code that runs this world was written in an imperative language and most universities (I believe MIT is an exception with Scheme?) will teach an imperative language before any other. It may not be the easiest (I'm biased, my mind mapped instantly) or best to start with, but it certainly _is_ the one most commonly started with and most commonly used.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft's motivations are simply to make the best development environment they can because at the end of the day that's what developers will use meaning more server licence purchases. This is evidenced by the relative freedom their dev techs get and by the insane amount of programming genius they have hired in this area.

<comment><USER6> I think you nailed it: _I'm pretty sure Microsoft's motivations are simply to make the best development environment they can._

But children aren't developers (yet) and learning to program isn't necessarily easiest or best using imperative languages. It's not judgment, it's a difference of goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft claims to respect intellectual property, but they're blatantly infringing on the Tetris trademark in their game example.

Certainly they'd send a cease and desist if someone made a "Linux Halo" so why do they think it's ok to make a "Small Basic Tetris"?

The company that owns Tetris hasn't exactly been shy about enforcing their rights, either: <http://mashable.com/2008/08/26/iphone-tris-app/>

<comment><USER8> Don't be so sure that they don't have permission. Microsoft has implemented Tetris before:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack>

<comment><USER7> That was released 20 years ago (1990), the licensing situation for Tetris has changed a lot since then. There's actually a specific set of guidelines The Tetris Company enforces for a game to carry the Tetris name. They dictate everything from the piece colors to the playfield size:

<http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline>

Aside from that, if they were using it under license, there would be a licensing blurb, similar to what you see in the footer of tetris.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 'Someone needs to make a Small Ruby.' Thats exactly what _why was doing with Hackety Hack and Shoes - in fact, I have no doubt that they got their inspiration from _why. I believe the .net guys helped sponsor the art and code event why spoke at just before his departure from the internet.

In fact... _why, is that you?! No, probably not - there are no cartoon foxes or bunnies.

Here's the current shoes: <http://github.com/ashbb/shoes>

And Hackety Hack: <http://github.com/steveklabnik/hacketyhack/>

And, for good measure, the cartoon foxes: <http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I challenge anyone reading this to explain the pedagogical advantage for children this or any other BASIC has over Squeak Smalltalk and eToys.

<comment><USER11> Two half-decent reasons come to mind.

One is teacher familiarity. Many people have used a variant of BASIC before, whether in 80s home computers, via Qbasic or VB on PCs in the 90s, or via VBScript in Office. This may make potential teachers less intimidated, more confident, and more willing to teach it to kids.

Secondly, I can imagine that some schools use VB.NET for later courses, and this could provide a simple introduction to move towards using the full-blown VB.NET, and being able to easily transfer what they already know.

That said, I don't really see _why_ it needs to have a pedagogical advantage. My initial feeling was that it was just someone looking to scratch an itch for nostalgia's sake, missing the days when every computer came with a BASIC, and a quick look through the blog pretty much confirms that ([http://blogs.msdn.com/smallbasic/archive/2008/10/23/hello- wo...](http://blogs.msdn.com/smallbasic/archive/2008/10/23/hello-world.aspx)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone else notice that they seem to be using a variant of Logo for this project? Complete with calling the things on the screen 'turtles'? I Logo does take out a ton of the work for programmers who just want to get something on the screen as fast as possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone needs to make a Small Ruby.

(Also, who the hell gives a teenager a touch tablet! I want those parents :( )

<comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Because BASIC should be enough for anyone.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anybody else find all microsoft.com domains inaccessible using chrome, or is it just me?

<comment><USER17> just you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool Stuff. Wonder what life would be like if I'd had that as a kid.</comment>


Elon Musk's "Loop" – It's Bad, Folks - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs <comment><USER2> If Musk wants to invest in speedy boring of 14' diameter tunnels, I'm all for it. IIRC, 14' is wider than the subway tunnels in London and Budapest, and only a foot narrower than in Moscow.

Modern subway designers would presumably balk at such narrow tunnels and subway cars, but if 14' tunnels are cheaper by an order of magnitude then maybe we just need to change our expectations and preferences. If they're an order of magnitude cheaper then it could even make sense for some cities with existing rail systems like SF to operate multiple rail systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Video mentions private ownership of necessary land as a problem; but it ignores possible legal solutions, such as compulsory acquisition of property (for public use, with just compensation); or vanilla negotiation.</comment>


Ask HN: What laptop/tablet to use while commuting on train? - <AUTHOR> I may need to commute to NYC from NJ and am looking for a tablet or possibly chromebook to use while on the train. Does anyone have any recommendations? Bonus points for having a real OS and LTE support. <comment><USER2> A 2-in-1 Chromebook (folding form factor) with a stylus and Crostini support for Linux apps may serve you well.

I've been fairly happy with my Samsung Chromebook Pro on BART in the SF Bay Area -- in tablet mode I watch lectures using VLC, read PDFs using Xodo, and take handwritten notes (often while splitting a screen with one of the former apps) using Squid. And I can always flip it into laptop mode and run Linux via Crouton for Vim, Octave, REPLs, and QOwnNotes. (I use my Android phone to create a WiFi hotspot when needed for email etc.) Everything syncs up over Dropbox using Dropsync. The aforementioned Android apps all run quite well for me.

(I probably wouldn't recommend the Samsung CBP right now - it's a bit old, and Crostini support has been rumored for a while now, but never materialized. Especially if you want LTE. But Chromebooks are at this point pretty good as Linux and Android machines, and the styluses work well for note taking.)

</comment><comment><USER3> No real OS but I use an iPad pro 11, mostly because it never fails to work (including it's excellent battery life and fast charging). For a real OS; I am still looking; I found the surface pro annoying after a while (and the one I had had miserable battery life). For now only intentionally hampered devices work for me in commute; either too small (Pocket or Pandora) or limited OS (Android/iOS). All other I tried are either too big or crap battery life; even the big winners like Lenovo X* or T* or macbook pro really do not have more than a few hour battery for my workflow.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am an iPhone user but iPad mini is expensive for commuting about 60mins so I'm thinking to buy YOGA Table. I'm not sure how long does it take to go NYC from NJ, because I'm living in Japan.

</comment><comment><USER5> Get a last gen macbook air 13", they should be on sale/clearance.

</comment><comment><USER6> iPad always worked for me. I usually read books and read other software developers' code while using "moving machines". It should suffice for you too. Happy commuting!

</comment><comment><USER7> Second hand T450, I'm really in love with this machine!

</comment><comment><USER8> Macbook</comment>


PastryKit / iPhone User Guide Demos - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/misc/2009/12/user_guide_demos

<comment><USER2> Looks like apple officially released it?

<http://twitter.com/Synt4x/status/6736462043>

<comment><USER3> And the link to the official release is...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Huh, my title got changed by someone else. How weird...</comment>


Ask HN: What is considered "negative market value" in the jobs market? - <AUTHOR> Can anyone give an explanation for that in this context? Also, is it possible to correct that? <comment><USER2> I have never heard this term. Could you explain a bit what you're talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen it in the sense of comparing individuals that are competing for a job in the jobs market. For example, if a new, inexperienced person is favored for the job over a more experienced person, the more experienced candidate is said to have negative market value for the employer.

<comment><USER2> I would avoid working for such an employer, they're presuming the cost of someone more experienced isn't worth the output. Which means once you've worked there for a while they will try to kick you out for being too expensive, or pay you below market rates.

Plus, they're wrong, experience can give massive boosts to output ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)).</comment></comment></comment>


A dead-simple Jazzicon component for Vue - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/man15h/vue-jazzicon <comment><AUTHOR> Hello hackers, It is the Vue version of the original Dan Finlay's jazzicon project which you can use into your Vue projects. I welcome all the Vue developers to open issues/PRs or provide your valuable suggestions and grow Vue ecosystem together.

You can play with the web version of the project at [https://vue- jazzicon.netlify.com](https://vue-jazzicon.netlify.com). We are also on producthunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vue- jazzicon](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vue-jazzicon)</comment>


The American Room - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/the-american-room-3fce9b2b98c5 <comment><USER2> I see a lot of sentiment against the post-WW2, american, timber-based style of construction on HN and I've never really understood it.

I view modern american residential construction as a model of efficiency. Why build a house out of brick or stone when timber is completely sufficient, and the latter is much, much cheaper to come by? It's not like timber just magically stops working one day - there are plenty of houses in older parts of the US that are 100+ years old. Any argument along the lines of "they don't build them like they used to" is likely ignoring survivorship bias among older homes.

And for the record, ceilings over 8FT are not a luxury item in the US. Any major home improvement store sells framing lumber and drywall in a variety of sizes over 8FT long:

[http://www.menards.com/main/c-13132.htm?criteria3_facet=2%22...](http://www.menards.com/main/c-13132.htm?criteria3_facet=2%22+x+6%22)

[http://www.menards.com/main/c-5656.htm?criteria5_facet=9%27&...](http://www.menards.com/main/c-5656.htm?criteria5_facet=9%27&criteria5_facet=10%27)

<comment><USER3> That attitude goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Here's a letter he wrote in 1791:

 _A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree. There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it. Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to is value as well as to its ornament._

Any argument that wooden houses last 100+ years is ignoring survivorship bias :) But even granting that, 100 years is not a very long time - just over one lifetime. If your parents lived in a wooden house, your children will need to build a new one.

<comment><USER4> > There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our > country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the > first moment of seating it.

Maybe this was rhetoric (? who was that letter addressed to, and what was his purpose in writing it?), but I can't fathom the thinking that the entire country's buildings would simultaneously fail, in lockstep, every 50 years.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't have to be simultaneous. If buildings last about 50 years, then in 50 years you're going to have completely different set of buildings. You'll have no influences to draw on from 50+ years ago.

It's from "Notes on the State of Virginia" [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch15.html](http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch15.html) which was actually a book, a collection of essays published by Jefferson.

<comment><USER4> if it's not simultaneous, how does the country ever become a tablua [sic] rasa (a blank slate)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a landlord, I put neutral-beige paint on the walls because it's the least- offensive option. If I had put a strong color on them, even as an accent color, there will be a percentage of potential tenants that would dislike it and rent from someone else. "Oh, that was the place with the hideous apple- green wall by the stairs. I couldn't live with it there."

<comment><USER6> I've rented a bunch of places in my life and rental rooms almost always looked pretty bare. Landlords do not want tenants painting their own colors for those same reasons. Tenants that frequently move each year do not accumulate furniture/furnishings because they are too annoying to move year after year and get damaged. You can only speculate how big a factor rental vs ownership plays in determining if rooms look like this.

<comment><USER7> >Tenants that frequently move each year do not accumulate furniture/furnishings

This is something I noticed a while ago when I was living in a nice apartment complex. It seemed like many residents would just throw away old lamps or small furniture rather than take them to their new place or put them in storage. A good portion of those videos looked like people bored in their apartments or parents basement which would fit your observation.

<comment><USER8> This happens at most colleges every year. It's a goldmine for dumpster divers or even just locals who don't mind hauling it back to their house and possibly selling it.

I've thrown away some perfectly good furniture just because it wasn't worth hauling it across the state or I didn't end up having room in the moving truck I had rented.

Yeah, I could have probably made some money if I sold it on craigslist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read this whole thing, I even continued when he showed a clear misunderstanding of how pinterest works (the columns aren't going to show the same "Gallery Wall" in the same column every time someone clicks your link!) I continued through his careful selection of things that seemed to follow his logic and ignorance of things that argued against it. I hoped and hoped a point would be made at some time, but I was disappointed.

Yes, lots of American homes have similar decor, but those pictures on pinterest that you seem to think are fantasy are not fantasies, they are actual pictures of actual homes. We don't all live in wall-to-wall off-white boxes.

What is the point of this overgeneralization? Is it a surprise that lots of people have similar houses? Is it a surprise that lots of developers always wear t-shirts and jeans? Why is this on the front page of HN??

<comment><USER10> I like the piece. It exposes a melancholic beauty to the ticky-tacky hedge rows and webcam uniformity of the Western existence. Peering past the facades and in to the lives of American suburbanites we see a million people separated by their screens yet united in their droll simplicity.

There's more to life than just the exuberance, progress, and extraordinary creations that we obsess over here in the Bay Area. For every amazing success story there's a thousand people shuffling their feet and walking in circles just to be our customers. On the other side of almost every IP packet is a person sitting alone in a room. It's important for us to realize the implications of our creations. It is important for us to realize what's real and what's just an idealized vision of the future. It'll keep us thinking about a path forward that includes everyone. It'll keep us from thinking that we're special and different and more entitled to life's pleasures. When we turn our heads most of us see the same pale white walls.

Well Frisco's a mighty rich town, now that ain't no lie

Why they got some buildings that reach a mile into the sky

Yet no one can even afford the time just to tell me why

Here's a world filled with people and so many people alone

\- Frisco Depot by Mickey Newbury

<comment><USER9> Well I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma so I'm very aware of what not being in the Bay Area is like. Not everyone on HN lives in the bay area startup bubble ;P

I also think you added a lot more in your commentary than was laid out in the article.

<comment><USER10> Art is as much what you bring to it as what you get from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Walls that are white or beige indicate to me that there is no personal ownership of the room. When I last owned a room, I painted it orange, because I was the only one that had any say in the matter, and I wanted orange.

Now, all my rooms are white.

And almost all of my furniture is crappy, flat-pack, self-assembly particle- board dreck. That's because my preference for durable, quality furniture is overridden by my ever-declining wage relative to my expenses, and my need to move around frequently in search of jobs that allow me to tread water a bit longer at my current standard of living.

I want a nice chair, but I also want something to sit on until I can afford one. It always seems that the price of a chair I could keep until the day I die increases faster than my ability to pay for one. And so I live in a cheaply developed suburban subdivision, in a cheaply built home, on cheaply constructed furniture, using a discounted laptop. And all the while, things crumble around me, and I constantly find myself paying to replace the cheap things that I only have in the first place because I am trying to save up enough to buy the nice, durable things that I really want. And those recede into the distance faster than I can chase them.

My American room is devoid of decoration, because I no longer have any sense of ownership. It makes no sense to personalize a place that is not mine. It makes no sense to invest emotion and effort into something that you feel in your heart to just be temporary.

And in the end, I live a temporary life, plodding through endless mundane todays in search of an extraordinary tomorrow. Everything that I own is junk that I never wanted to keep. Everything that I really want dangles just barely out of my reach.

And all the time, I am angry and frustrated, because all I ever wanted is quality. And I can't afford it. The walls behind my webcam aren't blank, white, and empty. They're covered in the corpses of my dead dreams and aborted aspirations. Those gothy types think black is the color of despair. But it's really eggshell semi-glossy.

I have plenty of decorations to hang up. But they are still packed up and ready to move--again--because there is no longer any wall that I can say is _my wall_. All those white walls out there belong to someone else. All those videos just show that someone else controls the backdrop of your life.

And I just want to get out my brush and paint. It. All. Red.

<comment><USER12> Get a divorce. Quit your government contract job. Move.

<comment><USER11> I thought ramping the angst up to full throttle at the end there would have made it obvious, but apparently Poe's Law strikes again.

<comment><USER13> Could use a few more IKEA and/or Fight Club references ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The fact that the author is trying to make the argument that (I'm exaggerating here) "All Americans must be poor, because the walls in YouTube videos are white" doesn't make any sense. The author even alludes to this briefly in talking about "YouTube Teens." Yes, author, younger people tend to a) rent more and b) not have as many things to hang.

As someone under 30 who moves across states every few years, I have no desire to collect a bunch of stuff to hang on my walls.

</comment><comment><USER15> This struck me as analysis for the sake of analysis. I'm willing to wager many people pick the most bare wall in their house on purpose because it looks best to film against.

<comment><USER3> People pick bare walls because they're imitating each other, and the bare-wall look is easy to recreate. For example, Hannah Hart can make videos like this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzYk2iOZqss#t=242](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzYk2iOZqss#t=242) but when she built a studio, it looked like this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjK2xgolAws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjK2xgolAws) The first one is more engaging, but people have this idea of what a youtube video looks like, and they just keep doing that because it's what they're used to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm immediately reminded of the background Ze Frank has used in his web series, "A Show"[1]. In the videos, Ze regularly places a single white bookshelf with a mishmash of objects on it, mostly books. He either uses the bookshelf often enough to arrange the objects in unique ways regularly, or re- arranges it for every individual episode of A Show he records.

When I see videos like those Ze creates, I know they're staged but can't help but feel like my life, too, should be filled with knickknacks, books, clutters of inspiration.

There's some sense of: "If my environment looks like _that_ environment, I'll be able to act like that person does." I imagine much of pop culture influences how we imagine our rooms and homes should look.

1 [http://ashow.zefrank.com/](http://ashow.zefrank.com/)

<comment><USER17> That's how pretty much all advertising works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My house is 100 years old. The walls are bright green and ten feet high, and full of homemade art. I will never buy or live in a boring beige box again.

I'll never understand why people want to live in such mind numbingly plain spaces. We decorate our cars, we decorate our laptops, we have cute cases for our phones, but the walls of the house we live in _must_ be grey, beige or off-white? I don't mind the architectural sameness. I understand its efficiency. But the lack of color, or any kind of self-expression, that's what I don't get.

<comment><USER19> Most people don't _want_ to. Rentals and often even homes for sale take on these colors because they're the most inoffensive. Everybody wants _some_ kind of color and character to their home, but nobody will agree on exactly _which_ kind of color or character. As a result, those responsible for selling/renting these places have them take on a "neutral middle": something absolutely nobody loves, but you can't really hate either. Inoffensive.

And since so many people either a) Rent and aren't allowed to paint or make significant alterations (e.g. nails in the wall), or b) Move too often to feel it's worth the effort, lots of people don't bother to change it from the inoffensive, dull, soul-crushing middle ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Paul Ford is a magician and offers terrific perspective on subtle aspects of what is typically our American culture. If you're looking for him to beat you over the head with THE POINT about what he insists you're suppose to think, you're reading the wrong author.

</comment><comment><USER21> What this article doesn't mention are the strange carpeted floor everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER22> A blog post about nothing.

</comment><comment><USER23> This whole article feels like the author is trying to pull something from nothing. House-poor seems like a stretch. I would suggest a more plausible theory: people, in general, just aren't that creative, especially when it comes to interior decorating.

<comment><USER24> Yep. I'm sitting in a beige box right now. I own it. I'm not house-poor. I just haven't put the time into re-painting or decorating much, and I just don't have the desire to put my money into things that just sit there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Tangental: did anyone else see that video of the woman talking about a nuclear Jesuit semen bomb (not making this up)? Is she frighteningly schizophrenic or just pulling yarn?

</comment><comment><USER26> I have noticed the American Room in YouTube videos too. Another things is lake of shelfs - things seem to be stored sitting on the floor. No time to move it?

</comment><comment><USER27> At risk of sounding cynical, I would find an entry titled "The Medium Blog Entry" even more compelling.

It is a platform made for entries to be authored quickly and cheaply. The droll full-page lead image sets it apart, the color palette muted and neutral, simultaneously making it exactly like every other Medium blog entry you've seen lately. Many intermix videos and viral media to tether off of other's fame.

The air of grandeur of the platform allowing people to post with pomposity while simultaneously sharecropping. To post judgmental observations by carefully cherry picking the evidence.

Medium. You and your predictable blogs.

As an aside, it's curious that this entry talks about "suburbs" a number of times. Most condo and apartment rooms have the same 8' ceilings, the same muted palette, and virtually identical construction. But...you know...suburbs and temporary workers, or something.

<comment> WD-42 You should definitely write a blog post about your observation with a full- page lead image consisting of a bunch of full-page lead images.

<comment><USER28> And link to it from a social network with a narrow band of interests so they can comment snarkily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> At the risk of sounding like a jerk, why is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER30> Same answer as always: it's interesting to a number of HN readers and got voted up.</comment></comment>


Goto fail - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-55471/libsecurity_ssl/lib/sslKeyExchange.c?search-for=goto_fail

<comment><USER2> If you missed it the 35th and 36th occurance of goto fail that really does go directly to fail.

        if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
            goto fail;
            goto fail;

Compulsory bracing of blocks following if/while etc is a piece of syntax Perl got 100% right. Python also got it right in a different way with whitespace.

C and C++ really don't have an excuse for not MANDATING compiler warnings at a minimum. The use of lack of bracing is "I'm too lazy and much too cool to type 2 characters." This is major fuckup number 4,294,967,294 So that muppets who keep claiming "We need backwards compatibility with brittle and broken code." Should probably spend about a decade in the room full of mirrors HAVING A GOOD LONG, HARD LOOK AT THEMSELVES. (Caps used advisedly, in this case, we need to do a bit of yelling at these standards committee weenies refusing to, you know, fix the damn bugs in the standard).

Edit to point out this how how the NSA MITM'd you when you were using OSX, in case you missed what the file is too.

<comment><USER3> > If you missed it the 35th and 36th occurance of goto fail that really does > go directly to fail

Whoa, that was entirely unclear from the submission that this was the point. But then, I guess I still don't see what is the point. Why post this here and not file a bug or something?

<comment><USER2> Not obvious is it. It's only ssl so it's not like it's important. The non- obviousness of it and the spectacularness of the goto fail is, well, in my view, the whole point. C should not still suck this bad. One line un-braced blocks are a standard bug. Why no fixy? Why? What do we have to do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the point of this post? If you're unfamiliar with "goto fail" in C code... it's a very common error handling pattern.

I'm working on some ffmpeg code at the moment. ffmpeg 2.0 contains 554 occurrences of "goto fail".

Edit: okay, it appears that the point of OP's post is that someone appears to have copy/pasted an extra "goto fail" at line 631, short circuiting the remainder of the SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange function and needlessly jumping to fail. I assume this was the code that Apple needed to patch in iOS 7.0.6 today?

<comment><USER5> Apparently that was it.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/22/us-apple-flaw- idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/22/us-apple-flaw- idUSBREA1L01Y20140222)

[http://www.zdnet.com/major-apple-security-flaw-patch- issued-...](http://www.zdnet.com/major-apple-security-flaw-patch-issued-users- open-to-mitm-attacks-7000026624/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know, sometimes there is legitimate usage of the goto.

This file is one of them: multiple branches that can end to the same leaf.

Another would be break in interlocked loops, or clean failing when the software detect an hard failure and no memory can be used anymore.

For this last case, you can also prepare some error handling frames at the init, and longjump (like a goto, but with already allocated stack memory) when it's time to fail.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is the point of this post?

In the C programming language, "goto fail" is a perfectly acceptable means of (function local) error handling because of the absence of any kind of exceptions (setjmp doesn't count). Just look at any significant C program, and you'll see that this is used a lot. The alternative for "goto fail" is duplicating the clean up code for each and every error condition that happens in the function.

Blindly following advice like "goto is bad" and applying it everywhere is a bad idea. You should try to understand the reasoning behind it.

You should not use goto for control flow if possible, but it's not bad practice to use "goto fail" for cleaning up on error conditions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Two consecutive goto fail statements, but no unreachable code warning in the builds?

<comment><USER9> I'm convinced the warnings are there, but were ignored.

EDIT: The compiler I use( based on lcc ), gives an _Unreachable code_ warning.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if the goto confuses the compiler

> > [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html)

> If I compile with -Wall (enable all warnings), neither GCC 4.8.2 or Clang > 3.3 from Xcode make a peep about the dead code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of the inverse of the goto error pattern.[http://computationallyendowed.com/blog/2012/12/03/ifs-and- an...](http://computationallyendowed.com/blog/2012/12/03/ifs-and-ands-and- plan-9s-source-code.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> patio11 says[1] 'I hereby propose "goto fail;" as a meme for unfortunate security mistakes. (Not singling out Apple -- we all make them.)'

[1] [https://twitter.com/patio11/status/437182770754752513](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/437182770754752513)

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like there should be something obvious here that I'm missing...

<comment><USER12> Search the file for 'goto fail'

<comment><USER3> Yes, then?

<comment><USER13> Upvote!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What does the title mean?

</comment><comment><USER15> how come all the includes are commented out in this file?

</comment><comment><USER16> That's a nice bug pattern for Underhanded C...

</comment><comment><USER17> Goto lives!

<comment><USER18> Long live the goto. and the Fail.</comment></comment>


The Map of Mathematics [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2017/02/the-map-of-mathematics.html <comment><USER2> I found this to be a nice summary of all the themes. I don't understand why comments here are so critical—it's a youtube video not a PhD thesis!

Here is my take on a concept map of math topics: [https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/conceptmap.pdf](https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/conceptmap.pdf) (covers only high school math + calculus + linear algebra)

<comment><USER3> You have to be critical so that the real good stuff gets the attention it deserves. This just makes too many glaring errors to justify its claim to be " _the_ map of mathematics".

I think [http://www.math-atlas.org](http://www.math-atlas.org) was a way better attempt and hope it will come back.

The last copy I could find on archive,org is [http://web.archive.org/web/20150616152045/http://www.math- at...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150616152045/http://www.math-atlas.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ... And then someone more familiar with, y'know, mathematics went and made one: [http://nada.kth.se/~axelhu/mapthematics.pdf](http://nada.kth.se/~axelhu/mapthematics.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I've always like this tree [0] because it shows clearly which subjects are prerequisite for learning others.

0\. [http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe.gif](http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe.gif)

<comment><USER6> It's not a tree ;)

<comment><USER5> Whoops, you're right. Just a DAG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A two dimensional projection of the space might imply too much distance between fields that are otherwise incredibly close; like vectors/versors/quaternions or combinatorics and with CS and optimization.

Maybe one could do an interactive version where the nodes can move in different dimensions like historic timeline, field of use, mathematical area.

<comment><USER8> On some online learning sites there are interactive knowledge graph mapping prerequisites such as:

[https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard](https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard)

[https://www.expii.com/map/0](https://www.expii.com/map/0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related - map of Physics: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZihywtixUYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZihywtixUYo)

</comment><comment><USER10> Any chance of an international treaty whereby all parties agree to stop saying either "maths" or "math"?

No criticism here, I'll agree to either one.

</comment><comment><USER11> "called Godel's Incompleteness theorems, which for most people means that mathematics does not have a complete and consistent set of axioms. Which means that it's all kind of made up by us humans"

Uhh... that's not the interpretation of the incompleteness theorems...

See also the Halting Problem

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a great visualisation. And quite instructive to find myself mostly operating on the Pure Math side. Maybe that explains the gravitational pull I feel in the direction of FP and the like.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a followup to the Map of Physics [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZihywtixUYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZihywtixUYo)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wikipedia's version: [http://i.imgur.com/zGcdMVl.png](http://i.imgur.com/zGcdMVl.png)

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

</comment><comment><USER15> I watched the video and it definitely does not paint an accurate picture of mathematics. Additionally, there's a heap of misinformation (e.g., "fractals are scale invariant", "group theory is about groups [of things]", "Gödel's incompleteness theorem leads to a mystery of why math is even useful", all of which is not true whatsoever).

The most beautiful part of math wasn't explained at all, which is _how the fields relate_! How do geometry and algebra come together? How about algebra and topology? How about prime number theory and complex numbers? Many of the most influential, important, deep, and illuminating theorems of mathematics are precisely those that make such bridges.

Instead, the video gave extremely high-level mathematical "buzzword soup" with artificial boundaries and an explanation that seems to be derived after the fact.

I'm all for educating the masses on the magnificent landscape of higher mathematics, but I think it's a disservice to do it non-factually.

<comment><USER16> These are the things I found I would have known to be wrong at the end of high school:

The complex plane doesn't usually have the imaginary on the x axis.

Real numbers are not the only ones that have infinite digits, think 1/3.

e is not called 'the exponential'.

Also, why the hell is probability applied math?

<comment><USER17> 1/3 is a real number, did you mean irrationals?

<comment><USER15> The video described real numbers (beyond rationals, hence irrationals) as ones with non-terminating decimal expansions.

<comment><USER18> I have not watched the video, but for people reading only comments let me clarify.

Numbers go naturals < integers < rationals < reals. Reals are the union of rationals (quotient of integers) with irrationals.

Rationals may have an infinite decimal expansion, like 1/3 has, but it has a repeating pattern at some point. Irrationals have an infinite decimal expansion and has no repetition of that kind.

This characteristic of irrationals does not depend on the base, it is always the same way. The finitude or infinitude of the representation of a rational depends on the base, but if infinite, there is a repeating pattern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great video, one mistake I spotted: he did include the number 1 among the prime numbers.

<comment><USER20> Because 1 is not a prime: "A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself." [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Prime_number](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Prime_number)

<comment><USER21> Funner definition is "positive number with exactly two divisors". This reduces the amount of special casing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's the map in case you don't want to watch the entire 11 min video:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/95869671@N08/32264483720/in/da...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/95869671@N08/32264483720/in/dateposted- public/)

I wonder if there are a set of features and distance metric that could describe each field well enough to do hierarchical cluster analysis -- maybe through scraping keywords from enough mathematics journals, etc?

</comment><comment><USER23> Tangential, but what tools do people use to make such videos?

<comment><USER24> It really depends on how much effort you want to put in, and your existing skills. I personally use Final Cut Pro. YouTube also has built-in editing features for stitching, cutting, and possibly overlaying videos.

Final Cut Pro is quite high end so I only use 5-10% of the features to make this video: [https://vimeo.com/73754523](https://vimeo.com/73754523)

It took a few hours of storyboarding and editing once I had the footage.</comment></comment>


Tesla autopilot prevented car from hitting a pedestrian - <AUTHOR> http://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-prevented-serious-injury-pedestrian-dc/ <comment><USER2> We will see both good and bad with Tesla's autopilot. I would have liked for Musk to come out strongly after the last accident and reassure all of us that he will double down on autopilot and will improve it's safety by 10x.</comment>


CasparCG at BBC Scotland - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XN8rovqzA0 <comment><AUTHOR> I've just stumbled across this - CasparCG is an open source software originally developed by a Swedish TV station to render on screen graphics, and has now grown to quite an involved piece of software.

It's open source, and getting widely adopted. It's very niche, but with a big impact - millions of people see graphics rendered by it every day, but only a few dozen use it.

I've used it in my student days at the student TV station - no budget means free is pretty much the only option, and I thought it was incredible that it's just rendering any HTML to make it look so professional - here my own football client from a couple of years ago [1]. And now the BBC does that same.

[1] [https://github.com/xtv-online/football-graphics](https://github.com/xtv- online/football-graphics)</comment>


MMO EVE Online gets DDOSed - down for 12 hours and counting. - <AUTHOR> http://eve-offline.net/

<comment><USER2> That is the most impressive downtime summary I have ever seen.

Opening say the monthly summary for `Serenity', we see a spiky chart, is that world day/night global user/maintenance, or -I hope not, regular DDOS attacks?

EVE Online must suffer much downtime to build such a nice front-end, and it must be a great game if the users understand DDOS and accept it.</comment>


Writing scalable App Engine applications - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golang.org/2011/11/writing-scalable-app-engine.html <comment><USER2> I always thought that choosing a language shouldn't get in your way and impact performance in the long run. I thought languages could be abstracted enough from implementation so that services like App Engine would let them be performant no matter what language you choose. But I guess this isn't the case.

When you start a new project you'll have to dedicate a good amount of time in choosing the correct language if you care about performance... too bad... hopefully one day we won't have to worry about the language getting in the way of our performance.

<comment><USER3> This depends on the cost model of the underlying resources and/or the scale you work at. For Facebook the 20% overhead of PHP of thousands and thousands of machines is significant. On GAE where startup time is expensive, Go's quick start up time is cheap. Most languages have not been created for fast startup times. They load lots of libraries in the beginning with the assumption that the app will run on forever. That's why we went from CGI to app server in the first place. With a shared resource model and dynamic load management, this is not the case anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With the new pricing, using Go on app engine is likely to be costly until they add concurrency support.

I'd think they'd do that soon given Go's built-in concurrency, but last I heard Google wasn't making any promises.

<comment><USER5> [http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/managing- resources...](http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/managing- resources.html) says _Note: All Go instances have concurrent requests enabled automatically._ then says their Python is not ready for concurrency.

A note I'd make about Go: if error handling is idiomatic Go, there should be some effort to make it less prominent, it's boilerplate.</comment></comment>


Best Papers from 27 Top-Tier Computer Science Conferences - <AUTHOR> http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html# <comment><USER4> This is an awesome compilation. Thanks!

Few comments:

\- Take the institution ranks (except the top 10) with a grain of salt. In theory conferences (eg. FOCS, STOC, SODA), the order of authors is alphabetical.

\- Best student paper has a different meaning for theory vs systems conferences. In theory conferences, it is given to a paper who's all authors are full-time students. In systems conferences, it is given to a paper who's first author is a full-time student. So best student papers in theory conferences are particularly good reflectors of an institution's merit and should be included.

\- A thought/idea: Most top conferences in CS tend to have inner cliques. So if you rank institutions merely by their program committee membership/chairship in these conferences, the resulting ranking might look very similar to this list. The differences between the two lists might be one way to bring out "rising star" institutions.

<comment><USER5> _In theory conferences, it is given to a paper who's all authors are full-time students._

But the theory community does not place a student's advisor's name on the paper as a matter of course, correct? While in the systems community, the advisors name will usually be on the paper, listed last. With that in mind, the two classifications of "student paper" represent close to the same thing.

<comment><USER6> Unless the advisor's name goes first, due to alphabetic order... I guess having a surname starting on 'M' can harm my academic career :/

<comment><USER5> As dude_abides says, alphabetical order is common in theory. But in systems, author ordering typically indicates contribution and/or status.

<comment><USER6> Well, my team publishes in both, and the team-wide rule is to always put alphabetical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was watching tptacek talk on crypto/pen testing and he mentioned that a flaw published 15 years ago, is still being put into the wild by general web developers, in big companies who should know better.

And I was also reminded of the checklist manifesto - where the Boeing (?) flight safety team analyse each crash report, and produce checklists for pilots that are pushed out around the world and actually read

so here is a silly idea

A kick-starter that funds a group to guide writing of real actual best practise in software engineering - broken down into silos like realtime or web or os. It can be updated and informed wiki style but is aimed at spreading actionable, immediate choices, with the background reading to educate later on,

Maybe I need more (or less) coffee

<comment><USER8> > A kick-starter that funds a group to guide writing of real actual best > practise in software engineering - broken down into silos like realtime or > web or os.

There are enough reasonable guides to writing better code (security and otherwise). How would this effort be different? And more importantly, why would Random J. Programmer go there if he didn't go to any of the previous ones?

A good answer for that will cause me to chip in (even though I'm not a fan of the "kickstart everything" craze)

<comment><USER9> What's easier and more plausible to happen - Random J. reading a long processing-cycles-demanding guide or just following a checklist?

Random J. seeing a link to/start of a guide: "that seems long and intricate... I don't have time to grok this and it seems like that kind of thing that to apply you need to grok and understand."

Random J. seeing a checklist: "ah, just following the steps. I can do this."

Maybe it's an inconvenient truth, but such checklists would be an overall boost to software security. Having straight-forward checklist to mechanically follow > Having no checklist.

Me and you would want to go behind that. Random J. Programmer wouldn't.

<comment><USER8> > or just following a checklist?

Well, OP didn't suggest a checklist (he did refer to the Boeing one as inspiration, so he might have thought about that).

And while they might be a hundred times more likely to follow a checklist, a hundred times (almost zero) is still (almost zero).

Let me re-iterate the question/problem:

> Random J. seeing a checklist: "ah, just following the steps. I can do this."

The question is: why would Random J. see the checklist? This is the crux that needs to be addressed. The content and existence of the list, while important, is a much easier problem to solve.

<comment><USER9> It's true that there are people not being aware of the information now and they'll be people not aware of it in the future. But I think[1] there's a large group of people who are aware that the information exists, but are just ignoring it as they deem that info too complex/time consuming to learn. Enabling better security practices for this group would be an overall net gain.

[1] Based on my past experiences, YMMV :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These "best paper" lists are almost comical and a very poor way to find important papers. Have a look at citation statistics for the older "winners", they are only marginally better than the average for the venue - <USER2> nobody still reads them today and they've had hardly any impact all.

To find _important_ papers you want at least 5-10 years of hindsight - <USER3> for those that are still being cited a lot correcting for citation rings, dubious journals/conferences etc. As a side benefit, these can almost always be found online on some course website without requiring IEEE / ACM subscriptions.

<comment><USER11> What's happening to hackernews? While there's still a handful of insightful comments and submissions, the culture feels like it's starting to shift with everyone having their noses in the air. I'm starting to use this site less and less, and it's a shame. Oh well.

<comment><USER12> Your rant is relevant to the insightful parent --which also provides arguments for what it says--, how exactly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research. Is being backed by companies with strong monopolies the only way to do world class research outside of academia?

Supposing it is true that in the future, higher educations collapses to a currently unrecognizable form and large companies become untenable, what will drive innovation? Who will fund say building a quantum computer?

<comment><USER14> Bell Labs had a monopoly, as part of Bell Telephone, which was (AFAIK) granted exclusive right to provide telephone service. Microsoft does not. AFAIK, Xerox never has had a monopoly.

Having a large amount of marketshare != a monopoly.

Lots of people insist on using the term for both things. I don't know why. But even if you are one of those people, surely you will see there there is a fundamental difference between those two things.

For the sake of this discussion, it would be necessary to differentiate between them.

<comment><USER15> Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.

<comment><USER14> And that conviction was immoral and improper. Microsoft did not have a monopoly in the proper sense of the term, only in the sense used by anti- business people who want to twist the term to suit their own purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It will be interesting to see how those papers compare with the Most Influential awards which, at least for SIGPLAN conferences, are given 10 years later.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGPLAN>

</comment><comment><USER17> None of these were about garbage collection, which surprises me. Is GC considered a solved problem?

<comment><USER18> www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf

"In particular, when garbage collection has five times as much memory as required, its runtime performance matches or slightly exceeds that of explicit memory management."

Yep. Like most problems in life, it's 'solved' if you have the money.

<comment><USER19> That's talking about throughput. Getting good pause times _and_ good throughput is still hard. Even if you have 100x as much memory, you still get the same pause times (albeit less frequently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish there was some way to express meta data like 'best paper' from trusted sources into the web crawler space. This is an excellent compilation, and I've added a half dozen papers to my tablet for later reading, but its a _human_ compilation. My thought is whether there might be an opportunity to flag something such that a web crawler could automatically compile this sort of list.

Challenges I see to that would be spam injection and author spoofing.

<comment><USER21> Actually, when you "search" for papers on a paticular topic, you need more information that what was best paper; the "best" paper for a topic is probably not distinguished in a conference that cover multiple topics!

Citation rank is one way to evaluate a bunch of papers on a paticular topic, and its definitely one of the best way to find related papers in the first place. However, citations are fairly easy to game (cite yourself, get your colleagues to cite your paper) and therefore are not a great indicator of quality/influence/impact. Next, the venue of the conference is important; an OSDI paper will probably be pretty good given their low acceptance rate. But you can find lots of noise even at the best first-tier venue; its not that hard to get published (in CS) and many rising academics will flood the system with papers to make their tenure case stronger (where the tenure committee is not composed of peers, sheer numbers + conference rank are very important).

Sometimes you'll also find a gem in someone's dissertation 10 years back who didn't really focus on publishing: if you don't pursue an academic career, you don't have too much motivation to publish broadly. Or a good paper that was never cited at all on some topic that was then just emerging or way before its time. The quality of my own papers (as judged personally and subjectively) are inversely related to their citation counts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting! But each article costs 30+. How could a poor startup afford?

<comment><USER23> More than a few are freely available. But, FWIW, the IEEE and ACM are notorious for charging ridiculous fees to access their papers, if you're not a member. However, individual membership in both organizations is relatively inexpensive (it's journal subscriptions that quickly drive up the price), and can be worthwhile if you find yourself accessing a lot of academic papers of this sort.

My take is that ACM, IEEE and AAAI are all worth maintaining memberships with, especially if you want to stay up to date on what's going on at an academic level. Maybe the biggest advantage of being a member of these orgs, other than access to archived papers, is that subscriptions to their journals is _much_ cheaper if you're a member. YMMV, of course.

On a related note, at least one of IEEE, AAAI or ACM have a discount program for journals published by other outfits, like Springer. Some deal like "join ACM, and your subscription to $FOO from Springer is heavily discounted." If you like to subscribe to journals and what-not, check out all these offers, as they can bring the prices down to where an individual can actually afford them, whereas normally you'd find the price to be so high that only an institution could really justify it.

<comment><USER24> This is a nice service the ACM offers, though authors have to take advantage of it for it to work: <http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer- service>

<comment><USER5> I see it more as an appeal from the ACM to authors to keep the ACM in the loop. Personally, I see it as a hassle, so no thanks.

If the ACM removed the paywall, I would link directly to the proper page for each of my papers - there's excellent meta information on those pages, like who we cite and who cites us. As well as author links which link to other papers written by those authors.

I really want to somehow lobby the ACM and IEEE to remove their paywalls (I am a member of both), but I have neither the time nor the knowledge of how to be most effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Next time he should just add a torrent with all the papers included, that way we won't need to hunt down all the free versions of each paper.

</comment><comment><USER26> Too bad it doesn't include posters... I would have made the list :(

</comment><comment><USER27> HCI guy here, surprised UIST is in the lot but not SIGCHI/TEI.</comment>


PipelineDB 0.9.7 – Delta Streams and Towards a PostgreSQL Extension - <AUTHOR> https://www.pipelinedb.com/blog/pipelinedb-0-9-7-delta-streams-and-towards-a-postgresql-extension <comment><USER2> Oooh, making it a standardized postgres extension (rather than its own compiled fork) is suuuuper-compelling. I've toyed with pipelinedb here and there, but the mental overhead of maintaining it separately from postgres is a little heavy. Even if the benefit is largely psychological, I think this is a great move.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello! I'm Derek, one of the PipelineDB co-founders. The way using PipelineDB _feels_ to users has always been a principal consideration to us and how we make design decisions, so a psychological benefit isn't a second-class citizen in our minds. With so many different tools to choose from nowadays, any friction at all (technical or non-technical) can be a showstopper. We've always strived to make PipelineDB as easy to use as possible, and the extension refactor is the grand finale of that continual effort as we approach 1.0.

Thank you for your input, and we hope you you'll find great success with PipelineDB in the future!

<comment><USER3> When this ships as a PostgreSQL extension, it looks like it could very handily solve a problem for which we're currently pilot-testing logical decoding.

I look forward to trying it, and would happily explore whether beta testing in a large scale environment (half a million concurrent users) is something my management chain and internal customers would be open to.

Thank you for your work!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're open to sharing, I'd love to hear more about your potential use case. Please email me!

<comment><USER3> Your email isn't listed on your profile. Mine is, though. Please do get in touch.

<comment><USER4> His GitHub profile has it: :)

      https://github.com/derekjn

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I signed up for stride; but didn't hear back. I saw reports from others that they'd signed up 6 months ago and not heard anything yet.

Could you provide an update on the status of the project and accepting beta users?

<comment><USER6> Jeff from PipelineDB here. We have been rolling Stride out in developer preview in waves, prioritizing the strongest use cases and customers with the biggest need and immediate budget for their projects. We've had a pretty massive backlog of demand for Stride so apologize for the delay in getting everybody who wants access involved in the developer preview. We will keep you updated via email and hope you understand that we are also working hard on the open-source development of PipelineDB and supporting PipelineDB Cluster customers while we continue to improve Stride.

We apologize for not communicating better about the Stride timeline and will do a better job of that moving forward.

Feel free to email me at jeff (at) pipelinedb (dot) com with specific questions or to discuss this further.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding here.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Researchers/academics, how do you deal with brain-information-overload? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering how you manage thinking about many different not-well-formed ideas in your research process.<p>I find the academic research lifestyle highly variable: at times too dense with ideas and things to do, at other times less so. During the dense times I sometimes have trouble lingering on the few high-value ideas with increasing returns to time-spent-thinking-about-them. <comment><USER7> Put your notes in OneNote, and divide them into 4 or 5 high-level categories (1000,2000,3000, etc). Then split those thousand groups into hundreds groups, tens groups, etc. Something magic happens to your brain when you start using numbers to group things. Not sure what it is, but overtime you'll find yourself using the number and not even saying the title anymore. Also having dedicated buckets for things relieves a tremendous amount of anxiety. It takes a while to build and it's incredibly an unintuitive thing to build out, but it really helps. Check out schemes and the top level pages on wikipedia, or maybe various classification systems.

So for example btw:

1000 - Liberal Arts

      1100 - <USER2>

      1200 - <USER3>

2000 - Natural Science

      2100 - <USER4>

3000 - Applied Science

      3100 - <USER5>

      3200 - <USER6>

        3210 - Mechanical Engineering</comment>


Last Doolittle Raiders make final toast - <AUTHOR> http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local/last-doolittle-raiders-make-final-toast/nbnpF/ <comment><USER2> It totally amazes me that Hollywood has never remade the movie about Doolittle's Raiders. It has all the elements of a great movie:

1\. A crazy idea by a White House staffer leads to the mission

2\. Doolittle needs clearance by FDR to be allowed to fly

3\. Doolittle's search for the best pilots leads him to recruit some total misfits

4\. They're forced to launch early after being sighted by the Japanese picket boat

5\. The raid over Tokyo so shocks the Japanese that it leads them to overreact to the threat, pull a carrier group back to defend the home island and the disaster of a decision by Admiral Yamamoto to attack Midway

6\. Japan kills 250,000 Chinese civilians looking for the Raiders

Its probably the best story about America's greatest generation in WWII yet is unknown to many young people.

Here's some actual footage of the raid:

[https://archive.org/details/Doolittle_Raid_Launch_Footage_19...](https://archive.org/details/Doolittle_Raid_Launch_Footage_1942)

</comment><comment><USER3> I first heard about the Doolittle raid from the movie Pearl Harbor. Despite that movie's, ahem, flaws, it was an impressive story of fearlessness, ingenuity, and focus.

Fast forward a decade, I visited the USS Hornet ([http://www.uss- hornet.org/](http://www.uss-hornet.org/)) in Alameda, CA, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that's now a museum, and found out that the Doolittle raid launched from the Hornet! (They also picked up and quarantined the Apollo 11 capsule and crew). Very, very worth a visit.

<comment><USER4> There were two U.S.S. Hornets in WWII: CV-8 and CV-12 The Doolittle raid was launched from CV-8 a Yorktown class carrier. CV-8 was sunk at the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands in 1942. The name was resurrected for CV-12 in 1943. CV-12 served until 1970.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just trying to imagine how it must have felt to be in one of the B-25's, just before the launch straight into the heart of an enemy - it boggles my mind

<comment><USER6> I am very glad we did. And yet I also hope we may never have to again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't help feeling that as these events "close down" and things like the death of Harry Patch [1] that it really is the End of an Era. I realise that phrase is completely overused but there will be a time during my lifetime when there are no WWII veterans alive, and a lot of knowledge will pass out of the world.

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

</comment><comment><USER8> Those guys are and were courageous and competent and deserve recognition, but I have to ponder at making such a spectacle of celebrating people who dropped explosives on people, people who are now our allies. We are an incredibly militaristic society.

<comment><USER9> If you're looking for examples of "an incredibly militaristic society", you might want to start with, say, Prussia under Frederick the Great, or Imperial Japan circa 1942. Once you've familiarized yourself with at least those two, you'll be better equipped than you are now to recognize the risibility of using that phrase to describe the United States in 2013.

<comment><USER8> Better equipped than I am now? You assume to know quite a bit about me from a simple sentence.

<comment><USER9> Not at all, and no assumption is required; from the sentence in question, I conclude merely that you don't know what "an incredibly militaristic society" looks like. Otherwise, you wouldn't have mistaken the United States in 2013 for anything of the sort.

<comment><USER8> Maybe we don't all go around wearing uniforms or worshipping the emperor, but our police is becoming more militarized, and we definitely are people who celebrate war. Finding me "risible" based on a harmless observation probably means you are quite emotional on the topic so I'm not inclined to respond to you any more.

<comment><USER9> It was (and is) the observation I found risible, not the person who made it. And of course we celebrate war! Who, having examined the public reaction to our recent outings in Afghanistan and Iraq, could possibly draw any other conclusion?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Include markdown files into other markdown files with C style syntax - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sethen/markdown-include <comment><USER2> Not to take away from this (I'd probably use it if I used markdown), but RestructuredText has file inclusion out of the box.

[http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html...](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#including- an-external-document-fragment)

      $ for f in main.rst include1.rst include1.1.rst; do
        echo "$f"
        cat "$f"
      done

      main.rst
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====
      Demo of RestructuredText inclusion
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

      .. contents::

      First include a file
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

      .. include:: include1.rst
      include1.rst

      This is the first included file
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

      Which includes another file.

      .. include:: include1.1.rst
      include1.1.rst

      And this is the last included file
      ..................................

      Fin.

      $ lynx --dump main.html

      Demo of RestructuredText inclusion

         Contents
           * [1]First include a file
                + [2]This is the first included file
                     o [3]And this is the last included file

      [4]First include a file

      [5]This is the first included file

         Which includes another file.

      [6]And this is the last included file

         Fin.

      References

         1. file:///home/aaron/tmp/main.html#first-include-a-file
         2. file:///home/aaron/tmp/main.html#this-is-the-first-included-file
         3. file:///home/aaron/tmp/main.html#and-this-is-the-last-included-file
         4. file:///home/aaron/tmp/main.html#id1
         5. file:///home/aaron/tmp/main.html#id2
         6. file:///home/aaron/tmp/main.html#id3

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am not the author of this library, but I've found it to be incredibly useful putting together documentation for GitHub/GitLab repos. If you're working with JavaScript, this library combines really nicely with jsdoc-to-markdown [1] to completely automate API documentation in the README.md (see [2] for an example).

[1] [https://github.com/jsdoc2md/jsdoc-to- markdown](https://github.com/jsdoc2md/jsdoc-to-markdown)

[2] [https://github.com/sparkeditor/piece- table](https://github.com/sparkeditor/piece-table)</comment>


Which language is the future of web development? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-the-future-of-web-development?share=1 <comment><USER2> I've been programming for 49 years. Languages come and go. The future will constantly change.</comment>


Show HN: Kipplr – Draw abstract images in seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.kipplr.xyz <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I made this opensource single page application to master javascript language and in general programming. I had really much fun experimenting with capabilities (and limits) of canvas with this project. This is the source code: [https://github.com/gioblu/Kipplr](https://github.com/gioblu/Kipplr)

After a lot of testing i found this tool able to render 10.000x10.000px (or more with certain browsers like firefox) abstract pictures in seconds. Images before impossible to be created by hand with photoshop or illustrator now can be rendered with Kipplr!! So can be used to generate huge unique pictures (1mx1m) in seconds! I hope you will like!

<comment><USER2> What does the name mean?

<comment><USER3> The 'INFO' button on the app says:

'Kipplr's name is inspired by Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and by the concept of "Kipple"'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A useful option would be tiling: if a polygon crosses the frame edge, draw the rest of it on the opposite edge. This would let me use the tool to generate repeating patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ciao flashman this is a really intelligent suggetion I never took in consideration I will immediatly estimate the code effort to make it as you say

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could you add an option to edit each value as a number as well as a slider? Sometimes you want to get the same value again, and you can't get the slider in the same position as before.

Loving the app :D</comment>


Advice to First-Time Founders - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/Heres-the-Advice-I-Give-All-of-Our-First-Time-Founders

<comment><USER2> Good stuff about having a North Star, something that gets you up in the morning, why you're doing this in the first place.

I've worked on too many projects that were very tactical just because it sounded like a good niche opportunity at the time.

When time comes to doing the boring and difficult work (and it always does) you don't want not to be passionate about what you do. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it's true.

When you run a website for making gift certificate templates and you frankly don't give a damn about it, it's hard to get up in the morning and keep writing these articles, reaching out to small business bloggers or the million things you need to do to promote a website.

So choose your North Star wisely.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Even if it's a $100 million business, if the company is not growing things > will stall. People will start to leave. It'll be over.

I think it's time we (the people actually spending the sweat equity) start considering alternatives to these unreasonable expectations we blow up our companies to make them worth BILLIONS. That's an impossible task for all startups to accomplish and making it seem that it's possible is not good advice, IMHO.

Besides, people leave when they are ready to go, even in a successful startup. If you look at older companies, the founding teams left long ago because they got bored or rich, or both.</comment>


Ask HN: Do You Use Google Apps Script? - <AUTHOR> If so, what for? Particularly interested in whether tech companies use it instead of using 3rd party tools like Zapier or writing custom (non-GAS) code to link apps together. <comment><USER2> I work in building design and we produce a lot of documents common to every project. The industry still really loves their paper. I use google apps script to track project information in spreadsheets and autogenerate the necessary documents, then auto email them to the right people. Haven't been doing it for long, but so far so good.</comment>