Pathjoy (YC S10) Offers Affordable Housecleaning With Easy Web Booking - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/16/pathjoy-launch/ <comment><USER2> I use Pathjoy to clean my apartment and I love it. The booking process is simple and the quality of the cleaning has always been superb. Recently a second cleaner came by at the end to check up on the quality of the cleaning, which is something I've never seen from any other cleaning service. It was also a great price, I can't see myself ever switching from it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there are some big problems with this latest round of "TaskRabbit for X", aggregated labor services (Cherry, GetMaid, and others). In the case of Pathjoy, the differentiation they are trying to sell is price. The technology is nothing special unless your idea of finding a house cleaner is Craig's List. Yet, is price the problem to be solved with these services? Is pushing down the price on a service like this beneficial to anyone except the aggregator?

For some TaskRabbit type tasks, especially the last minute or one-off tasks, it make a lot of sense because the transaction may not have happened otherwise. However, for these kinds of specialized labor type tasks, isn't there some harm done to the service market through lower wages for the cleaner and inconsistent service for the customer?

Also, how does Pathjoy maintain customer loyalty? If service is a kind of "on- demand" how can you maintain consistent work for the cleaner? What is to stop the cleaner or customer from doing an "under the table deal"?

I think there could be an opportunity to "Disrupt" these older services but I'm sure lowering the price is NOT the way to a sustained business, even at scale.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there really a problem to solve here?

I have cleaners from a notable SF-based cleaning firm come every two weeks. Sure, I have to call them up if I want to reschedule or whatever but it's really no big deal.

Interacting with a human being who knows me by name isn't necessarily a bad thing, esp for something so personal like cleaning my home.

Thinking about cleaning, the issues I care more about are thing like are they using quality products like Method, are they bringing their own equipment, do they do do stuff like change my bed, is it the same person who comes every time who therefore gets to know my place and what I like.

Whether I can book an appointment on my iPhone isn't high on the list. Unlike something like Uber, I don't see how the addition of high-tech is really helping here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pathjoy might be great, but at this point fluf-pieces from techcrunch about ycombinator companies make my brain turn off.

<comment><USER6> For you this is just another startup, but for the founders this is their big moment. So please show at least enough respect not to dismiss them without evaluating them.

<comment><USER7> He didn't dismiss Pathjoy. He dismissed TechCrunch. And your comment is welcome, but would be even more welcome if you applied it to every company that "launched" to HN, not just the ones you helped shepherd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the trend of YC companies and other startups marrying technology (billing, scheduling, authentication) to old school service businesses. there are a number of stories of individuals doing this making 6 figures a year running these types of businesses. (see g-maids in dallas)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd bet that least 2x more people would use a maid service if someone did it in just the right way. I think the biggest issue to fight is procrastination and fear of uncertainty. Some kind of loss-leader promotion might pay huge dividends.

The front page is perfect and if it only said "First cleaning is on us. No upsells. No commitment. No kidding" or something I bet you'd get tons of people to try it and the LTV would make up for the acquisition costs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of GetMaid... was on HN a week or so ago. Seems to be a similar model. I think GetMaid even used backpacks to carry cleaning supplies in dense urban areas too.

<comment><USER11> GetMaid charges 45US$/hour, Pathjoy only 21US$/hour.

<comment><USER12> Makes you wonder... how is Pathjoy so much cheaper?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure if "housecleaning for the masses" is the ideal message. I'm willing to bet that most people either value time (already have cleaner) or money (clean their own house). You normally need a pretty big price drop to create a new segment - even 2x is not enough in my opinion.

My message would be "a better housecleaning experience, at a better price".

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea of building out a specific vertical of the "hire people for stuff" space. I wonder what's next.

</comment><comment><USER15> No way the $20/hour rate is going to stay that low in the Bay Area, unless they run it as a loss leader.

You cannot get any cleaning person around here for less than $30/hour. I don't think it would be possible to pay people the legal minimum wage and make profit at $20/hour.

<comment><USER16> I currently pay $20/hour (in SF proper) for an independent cleaner who does an excellent job. Language barrier is a major issue tho, and I'd much rather schedule cleanings online. If minimum wage is <$10, why would it be impossible to profit off charging $20/hr?

<comment><USER15> Minimum wage is 10.24 in SF, and rising. On top of that:

* there will be refunds (grubhub gives a lot of refunds for bad food)

* they will need insurance (remember airbnb?)

* there will be legal challenges - like Uber, this kind of startup walks a fine line - if you employ 50 maids, you would usually have to provide workers comp at least, and maids seem more prone to file a claim than lots of professions

* there needs to be a margin for pathjoy

I believe you can possibly scale 20/hour maid service in parts of the country, but in the Bay, it will be at a loss or the price will rise. I really don't see how the math works any other way.

Grubhub's strategy was to raise delivery fees after they got traction, and it wouldn't surprise me if thats what pathjoy does. They will need to differentiate on something other than price though.

<comment><USER3> Great points.

On the topic of working elsewhere. Large urban areas provide the best opportunity for lower cost and more efficient operations. Two things limit growth for this kind of service in smaller less dense areas. Travel and population. Both limit the number of jobs that can be requested or completed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I received an invite from Exec for a similar offering this week. $50/hr for 2x cleaners, reserved online, including pickup/dropoff of your house keys so you don't have to hide or give away a copy of your key.

</comment><comment><USER18> We used Pathjoy to clean our place up last week. Worked great; price was right. We'll do it again soon.</comment>


New features in C# 4.0 - <AUTHOR> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=csharpfuture&DownloadId=3550

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the doc link.

Seeing as C# and Python are my two favorite languages, I'm glad to see C# gaining some of my favorite Python features.

The variance things are totally awesome. Eric Lippart's blog has some more information on covariance and contravariance with respect to C#: [http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/tags/Covariance+an...](http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/tags/Covariance+and+Contravariance/default.aspx)

Dynamic typing when you need it, more powerful and flexible static typing when you don't. Sounds good to me :-)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not ready lol. I need more time with all the bag of tricks thrown at me in VS2008!</comment>


Apple Watch Series 6 - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-series-6/index.html <comment><USER2> So it looks like the difference between S6 and SE are oxygen sensor, always-on display, and 2nd-generation heart sensor? I assume there are case material differences also, but it seems like many people would see the SE as a no- brainer, to save $120.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Original post was returning a 404 at the time and got flagged)</comment>


On Hiring Senior Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/hiring <comment><USER2> This is well written. I've had the same issues with symmetric time investment, especially, and point 3. Referencing this blog post if needed in the hiring process is going to be really valuable.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first part gives a really great description of a senior engineer.</comment>


Ask HN: Which is your favorite source of non Tech news? - <AUTHOR> I'm striving to find a news outlet that has an RSS feed that: - it's not filled with irrelevant news, such as this: https://www.rt.com/usa/366138-harambe-vote-president-us/ - has global view, not just us or a specific country - ideally publishes 10/15 news per day, no more
I'm currently ad Economist paid subscriber, but that's a weekly update.
Suggestions? <comment><USER2> Can't beat The Guardian for solid international and free coverage of important issues.

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

Al Jazeera English can be quite good (though be wary of some of it's Qatar biases), it tends to be excellent on Africa and Asia.

[http://www.aljazeera.com/](http://www.aljazeera.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll try guardian. Al Jazeera very biased.

<comment><USER3> The Guardian is also very biased. They're still useful media outlets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > [https://www.rt.com/usa/366138-harambe-vote-president- > us/](https://www.rt.com/usa/366138-harambe-vote-president-us/)

JFYI, Russia Today is a heavy propaganda TV network, sponsored by Russian government.

<comment><USER5> True. However, it gave a much better view of the election. Wikileaks emails show NYT, CNN, huffpo, The Economist, ect all tailoring coverage for HRC/the democratic party. Knowing this publication is Russian makes it easier to spot bias, than the supposedly more objective outlets. Even polljng data was heavily inacurate.

RT may not be great, but I will never trust the above sources again. I was so disappointed in the coverage of Comey and their united front of pro Hillary bullshit. She rigged the RNC with pied piper bullshit and used leverage in DNC to oust Bernie. All major news outlets were complicit. Except Fox, which is equally shit

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me I try to read state sponsored/official news of several nations in publications like:

\- rt

\- bbc

\- ny times

\- xinhuanet

This gives each countries official position and the delta between them is usually useful info.

I also use twitter for curated feeds, which can be useful.

The guardian and intercept are also pretty good. I no longer trust the economist. While obviously biased, I do like ZeroHedge

</comment><comment><USER6> Jason Calacanis publishes a series of email newsletters that cover US news, tech and dozens of verticals like electric cars.

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

You could ask them to support RSS, I've found them to be surprising responsive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a huge fan of newsletters. Mail is for work. Feedly for news. I wanna keep the 2 things separate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reuters! Light on unblockable ads, reasonably neutral coverage and very broad coverage. It's my go to.

I pay for the Financial Times, I blame reading Chomsky in college for that. Solid international coverage. Only subscription I have.

Guardian is nauseating at times, but I read it. NYT is a silly paywall. I deemed its flowery essays not worth paying for.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure it meets your criteria, but I read IrinNews, which focuses on humanitarian emergency stuff: [http://www.irinnews.org/](http://www.irinnews.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting but no thanks. It is a very important thing, but not the only important things happening in the world today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Twitter and 4chan.

Take both with a huge grain of salt, but nothing else has the same "crowdsourced" coverage of breaking news.

<comment><USER10> Which accounts on Twitter, though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Try [https://www.breitbart.com](https://www.breitbart.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> None. Seriously, try a low-information diet and see how materially affected your life is.

</comment><comment><USER13> checkout bloomberg's 5 things you need to know today, you can sign up via email</comment>


Tarot Chess - <AUTHOR> http://tarotchess.com/

<comment><USER2> In this game, the pawns always move one step forward. In chess the fist movements is different. From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawn_(chess)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawn_\(chess\))

> _Pawn movement: A pawn can move to the square directly in front of itself, > if that square is clear. A pawn on its starting rank has the option of > moving two squares._

</comment><comment><USER3> All I see is what appears to be some weirdly colored landscape. There is no text or anything to explain what I am looking at, and there do not appear to be any interactive elements on the page or any time-varying content.

Does the site esquire a plugin or something? If so, the author should at least put something there in HTML to explain what is required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just Javascript & recent Firefox/Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> the cards power up the pawns in this game so advancing two squares to speed up the game is unnecessary (it gets hectic pretty quickly)

</comment><comment><USER4> absolute rubbish</comment>


The latest comments on Venture Hacks: Founder Edition - <AUTHOR> http://venturehacks.com/articles/comments-founder <comment><AUTHOR> Some good Friday-morning thoughts in the latest post.</comment>


50 inch monitor. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> My roomate is CTO for a company that builds giant kiosks. Every so often I go in and help him out. The workstation I was at last time had two 42" plasma's and a 50" LCD.

The things are 1080p, so not too shabby, but in general they're just big. My 21" LCD I use has a higher resolution. I'd rather see more data than see the same data bigger. My glasses aren't just to improve my nerd cred.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got a 30" display at work. It's amazing how much better than two monitors it is.

<comment><USER4> I guess you're running OS X? Microsoft might be 'dead', but their crappy OS that was designed around 800x600 lives on :(

<comment><USER3> actually, fedora.

<comment><USER4> Ah. What window manager are you using, and are you tweaking it in any particular way?

<comment><USER3> I've used both fvwm2 and metacity without any special tweaking. Had to abandon fvwm2 b/c for some bizarre reason it just won't display firefox in fedora core 5, and netscape 4 just wasn't cuttin' it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A big LCD HDTV. hook up computer box to it. Hook up a wireless keyboard to it, Next thing you know Reading YC news from the couch.

<comment><USER4> Good, but even full 1080p LCD TVs only have 1920x1080 so it's basically equivilant to a 23/24/26/27" LCD monitor. Not too special for actually working on. I'm running 1920x1200 + 1200x1920 and you would have to pry the second monitor out of my cold, dead hands.

<comment><USER5> Is it the Dell 2407?

<comment><USER4> Yep.

<comment><USER5> Don't you feel the monitor, in vertical orientation, destroying your eyes? It is painful to look at, like an old 15-inch CRT monitor from 1997.

<comment><USER4> No, not at all, quite the opposite. I've used many CRT and LCD monitors in the past and this is by far the nicest to look at. The only caveat (and I presume this is what you're getting at since you mentioned vertical orientation) is that when ClearType or similar is turned on it turns the whole thing into an awful mess since the orientation of the subpixels is different (unless your OS can handle two monitors having different settings). Internet explorer, for example, is totally unusable (well, more than usual) on the right hand monitor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Say Goodbye to the Password - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323585604579008620509295960.html

<comment><USER2> _Eye roll_. I've heard this ~20 years now. I welcome fingerprint readers myself but I doubt they'll get the traction this article implies. Particularly with the privacy-consciousness of the modern user.</comment>


The hell that is filename encoding (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://beets.io/blog/paths.html <comment><USER2> Funny(???) warstory:

1\. Back in the days, we were using a Linux NFS server, with NFSv3, and out- of-the-box locale was iso-8859-1 (latin1). Life was good, except for occasional problems with people with strange non-latin1 names, or documents with non-latin1 names etc.

2\. At some point, we switch to using UTF-8 by default. Telling users to use convmv to rename their files when they are ready to switch to the new defaults. Most people ignored this, of course, but files with now invalid utf-8 were mostly fine, just with the occasional "?"'s in the names.

3\. Switch to NFSv4. Invisible to end users. NFSv4 per se requires that paths are UTF-8 encoded, but in practice the Linux NFS server and client just pass along a bag of bytes, so invalid UTF-8 just worked as fine as it did previously.

4\. Switch from a Linux NFS server to a netapp.

5\. User complains that files are missing. Initial comparison with the old Linux NFS server, which was still online, shows no problems. Problem occurs only on user workstation, not on admin box which has both the old Linux NFS and netapp directory trees mounted. Investigation on users workstation shows that in some cases lots of files appear to be missing, including ones which plain ASCII names.

\- Turns out that the admin box had the netapp mounted with NFSv3, and thus everything appeared Ok there, including the rsync from Linux NFS -> netapp in the first place.

\- However, when mounted using NFSv4, netapp follows the spec and does not like non-utf8 paths. Does it report an error then? Hell no, the NFS READDIR (READDIRPLUS?) message reply just stops returning directory entries when it hits the first one with invalid UTF-8. And thus you get a partial directory listing. GAAAH!

\- So the solution was to run convmv centrally (from the admin box which had the netapp mounted with NFSv3) for the entire directory tree which had been moved.

<comment><USER3> Ah yes, had the same fun problem at a customer's facility last week. Moving 350 TB of data from an old DDP storage server to a Linux one. Mounting with CIFS (no other option available), an copying using "cp -a".

The file names look OK after the copy on the Linux machine. However, when exporting the directory through Samba, the Macs Finder doesn't display files with accents in the names (though they appear correctly with "ls", weird...).

So the user copies the files again, using the Finder. Now I have files with exactly the same name (uhhhhh???):

# ls -l M _mo-1._ -rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 8417218 6 sept. 2013 Mémo-1.aif -rwxr --r-- 1 test test 8417218 6 sept. 2013 Mémo-1.aif -rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 363175 6 sept. 2013 Mémo-1.m4a -rwxr--r-- 1 test test 363175 6 sept. 2013 Mémo-1.m4a

Yes, it looks like two files have exactly the same name, but actually they're different: one as "é" encoded as 0xCC81, and the other one (the "good one") as 0xC3A9. Why is that? Why does one work with the Finder, and the other doesn't? who knows.

<comment><USER4> Most likely it's different normalization. I've seen this before with Mac systems.

Renaming the files to use NFKC normalization fixed it. In python, you could loop through the files and do something like:

      os.rename(originalfilename, unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', originalfilename.decode('utf8')))

EDIT: You'll probably need to do this on a non-Mac system, linux for example should work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > on Windows, _paths are fundamentally text_

They were back when there were less than 2^16 characters in the Unicode standard. Back then each two-byte word in a filename corresponded exactly with a Unicode code point.

Now there are more than 2^16 but well under 2^32, Windows uses UTF-16 in filenames. That is, Unicode code points above 2^15 are obtained by a pair of special Unicode code points in the range 2^15-2^16 called _surrogates_ ; surrogate pairs need to be collapsed into a single code point when decoding the file name. Surrogates are exactly those things that Python uses on Linux to hide bytes that are not valid UTF-8. Here's the problem: it is possible to have unmatched surrogates in a file name (or in other places that Windows accepts UTF-16).

In summary, on Windows, you end up with effectively the same situation as Linux: file names that are supposed to be in one encoding (UTF16) but contain invalid data for that encoding.

<comment><USER6> > Here's the problem: it is possible to have unmatched surrogates in a file > name (or in other places that Windows accepts UTF-16).

NTFS (and Windows as a whole) does not use UTF-16, it uses UCS-2. It is a subtle difference, but surrogate pairs didn't exist in UCS-2.

<comment><USER7> Old versions use UCS-2. New versions use UTF-16. (correctness not enforced) This is also how Java and OS X were updated.

The kernel generally uses the 16-bit equivalent of the old Pascal string, that being a 16-bit count of 16-bit pieces of UTF-16 data. This allows a 16-bit NUL to get into various places that make the Win32 API choke.

<comment><USER8> > Old versions use UCS-2. New versions use UTF-16. (correctness not enforced) > This is also how Java and OS X were updated.

I usually call that ucs2-plus-surrogates, to make it clear that you may encounter unpaired surrogates, and thus invalid paths if you assume proper UTF-16.

<comment><USER9> This is actually kinda painful with NTFS as NTFS doesn't really care what's in a path other than the directory separators it's all binary. This means that different applications using different Unicode normalization will result in odd things happening. To me the right answer is NTFS should normalize all paths the same way internally but they have yet to implement it because it would break legacy systems that have un-normalized paths (I assume).

<comment><USER10> Precisely.

Programs that internally use ShiftJIS, for instance, would stop functioning on UTF-16 enforced compatability or normalization. They're currently "broken" (as in, operating incorrectly) but in a way that works.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain why this would be the case? In theory this shouldn't be an issue because any ShiftJIS conversion to Unicode should be reversible.

<comment><USER11> I think it's not a perfect round-trip due to differences in how the two standards encode certain characters. You will get a correct conversion either way, but the result of a round-trip might not be bit-identical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rust `std::path` [1] has two representations under the hood for Windows (UTF-16 plus lone surrogates) and non-Windows (bytes) for the exactly same reason. Paths are not strings nor texts.

[1] [https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/path/](https://doc.rust- lang.org/stable/std/path/)

<comment><USER13> Emphasis on the "plus lone surrogates" part. Like on Unix, Windows does not require a path to be valid Unicode.

That is, on Windows, paths are fundamentally sequences of 16-bit words, just like on Unix paths are fundamentally sequences of 8-bit bytes. On neither system are paths fundamentally text.

<comment><USER12> The story then goes on further: every NTFS volume contains a special file named `$UpCase` that has a uppercase mapping for all possible 16-bit words, resulting in an 128 KiB table. This approach has an upside for backward and forward compatibility... unless you eventually need a case mapping for non-BMP characters or complex mapping that expands to multiple characters.

<comment><USER14> I should briefly explain why this is here:

NTFS is (usually) case preserving but not case-sensitive. So the OS needs to be able to tell whether EXAMPLE.TXT and example.txt are the "same" name, which means it needs case conversion.

Not everybody agrees about how this conversion should work. The most famous example is Turkish, but there are others. So there's an actual choice to make here.

If Windows baked this into the core OS, they might get pushback in countries where their (presumably American) defaults were culturally unacceptable.

If they made it configurable at the OS level, everything would seem fine until, say, a German tries to access a USB drive with files from a Turk on them and some files don't work correctly, or the disk just can't be mounted at all.

So, they have to bake it into each NTFS filesystem.

<comment><USER15> HPFS had a similar system some years before.

* [http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Inside_the_High_Performance_Fi...](http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Inside_the_High_Performance_File_System_-_Part_4#Code_Pages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Filesystems seem so fiddly and broken.. is it very difficult to make a small layer over filesystems that provides sane semantics? Like one that handles paths sanely, handles fclose()/fsync() properly, lets you control when things are buffered/flushed etc? Even a broken API with clear, modern documentation enumerating all the fiddly cases would be a huge step forward from digging through random mailing lists on sites with UX from the 90s.

Has anyone tried this? Is it possible with FUSE? I would love to hear from people who know about this stuff - what are the obstacles? Or do you think FSs are fine the way they are?

<comment><USER17> What is sane path handling?

Alone on windows, the maximum path length is 260 characters, except when you use extended-length paths which have a 4 character prefix and a maximum length of 32,767 characters. A sane API for reading files probably converts your paths to extended-length paths. But if you do the same thing for writing files your users start calling you insane again, because most of Windows (including Windows Explorer) can't open extended-length paths. So you would be creating files that only select software can even open, and which the user can't browse without third party software.

(An easier to ignore fun fact is that NTSF and Windows also support case sensitive names if you set the right flags in the file APIs. But nobody uses that, so it's probably save to ignore that (until somebody mounts EXT3 partitions in windows...))

<comment><USER18> > So you would be creating files that only select software can even open, and > which the user can't browse without third party software.

iOS suggests that people are ok with this. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I work on another music file management system, my personal special hell is playlist files. An m3u playlist file is just a new-line separated list of file paths, which can be relative or absolute, and potentially encoded in whatever locale is set on the users computer. Some fun issues:

* Windows and Mac filesystems are generally case-insensitive, so some users will have the file names in the playlist file in one case and the actual file names on disk in another format * Sometimes file paths cross between two different filesystems, because one is mounted in the other with a USB drive or over CIFS or similar. Sometimes these two different filesystems have different case sensitivities * There's no way to know how the playlist file was encoded * HFS+ normalizes file paths to Unicode NFD, but there's no guarantee that the paths in a playlist file will be normalized. Also, sometimes users generate an m3u file on a Windows system and expect it to just work on a Mac. Also, the filesystem nesting problem with network or USB mounts can happen this way too.

<comment><USER20> Sounds a lot like my life a couple of years ago (and intermittently since). I don't get the bug reports any more because I think customer service has learned that file name problems can be fixed by _renaming the files_. Not fun for the user, but a sure fix.

Ya know what kind of file names work virtually everywhere? ASCII ones.

<comment><USER15> This is a mis-use of ASCII. After all, the colon, asterisk, forward slash, question mark, backward slash, and NUL characters are all in ASCII, yet they are _far_ from things that "work virtually everywhere". And that isn't even considering the open and close square bracket and semi-colon characters which are also not anywhere near portable to the extent of "working virtually everywhere".

The kind of file names that _do_ work "virtually everywhere" are _not ASCII_ , but rather are those who only use characters from the POSIX Portable Filename Character Set, which at 65 characters is just over half the size of ASCII (which has 128 characters).

* [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap03.html#tag_03_282)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It misses a even more complex, I'd say insane, encoding problem: on HFS+ (or even APFS now?) filenames are unicode normalized.

<comment><USER22> Not only are they normalized unicode, they're normalized _decomposed_ , and not only that, but slightly non-standard (does not conform to standard Unicode "NFD" form). (Or at least, this was the case with HFS. I haven't followed APFS closely enough to say for that.)

<comment><USER23> NFD hadn't been standardized at the time.

IIUC the reason they did this is that they wanted directories to be canonically ordered on disk, and they thought decomposition would naturally yield better results than pre-composition. I'm not sure that's right, and frankly I don't care either, because the most important thing to note is that input methods (especially for European languages) by and large produce NFC, and most application software does no normalization at all, so disagreements as to form cause problems[0][1].

[0] [https://cryptonector.com/2010/04/on-unicode-normalization- or...](https://cryptonector.com/2010/04/on-unicode-normalization-or-why- normalization-insensitivity-should-be-rule/) [1] [https://cryptonector.com/2006/12/filesystem-i18n/](https://cryptonector.com/2006/12/filesystem-i18n/)

<comment><USER23> I should add that because different locales have different collations, it's not that important that directories be order by name. It's good enough that directories be somewhat ordered, and even that they not be at all. GUIs will almost always let you sort by name and/or date, and the same goes for ls(1), so, really, it doesn't matter at all.

IMO it was a terrible mistake to normalize to NFD on create. Normalizing to NFC on create would still have been a mistake, but a lesser one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "NTFS allows any sequence of 16-bit values for name encoding (file names, stream names, index names, etc.) except 0x0000. This means UTF-16 code units are supported, but the file system does not check whether a sequence is valid UTF-16 (it allows any sequence of short values, not restricted to those in the Unicode standard). "

\- from wikipedia NTFS page [1]

So if you assume that NTFS filename is valid UTF-16 and convert it to UTF-8 there might be a problem. Basically they can be any sequence of 16-bit values.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

<comment><USER23> Doesn't it (or Windows) also disallow the path component separator character(s) ('/' and '\')?

Unix and alike disallow NULs and /, for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER25> There are a number of characters like path separators that cannot be part of a file name on windows. However I am not sure if this is enforced by the OS APIs or by NTFS itself. It is entirely possible that NTFS could allow something that higher layers don't.

<comment><USER23> If the kernel (and SMB, and...) imposes these constraints, it's fine for the filesystem to not also impose the same constraints on file naming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The built-in file system libraries for many languages are total footguns. Using strings as paths is a great example. I've had a few recent bugs around case sensitive vs case insensitive file systems because a lot of code assumes that when pathA != pathB then it must be dealing with two different resources. Not to mention the classic "doesn't work on windows" problem: newPath = pathA + "/" + pathB

<comment><USER27> AFAIK, Windows understands / as a directory separator.

<comment><USER28> Only in some special cases, not in general.

<comment><USER29> Really? I use forward slashes all the time in windows 10. I don't think I've run into a problem yet.

<comment><USER28> Yes. One huge problem is slashes are also used for command-line switches. That can entirely change the meaning of your commands.

For example, compare these two in the command prompt:

      start /Windows/Notepad.exe
      start \Windows\Notepad.exe

I wouldn't blame this on poor parsing or other silly things though. I actually think it makes sense to use slashes for switches, because they are invalid filename characters, whereas dashes are valid, and hence get ambiguous (hence the need for "\--" in *nix). I think it would've made more sense to disallow slashes as directory separators entirely, to avoid this for good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> tangentially: Tool I use to test my stuff when I expect it to handle all valid filenames:

[https://github.com/jakeogh/angryfiles](https://github.com/jakeogh/angryfiles)

</comment><comment><USER31> I found a similar problem with my backups (Ugh. :-)

A year ago I went on a trip and some combination of the humidity, the travel, and the 6 year old Thinkpad resulted in my laptop not booting.

I had been experimenting with Borg to backup the system, and so I tried using Borg to restore the latest copy onto the new laptop. Turns out that I have a bunch of files on my laptop that have names with weird characters in them: rips of my CD collection. I couldn't find any combination of settings and environment and locale that would allow borg to recover or skip these files and recover everything else.

Now, I had 2-3 other copies of the data (my pre-borg backups, the original SSD which was still readable, a few other rsync copies), so it wasn't a big deal.

But, as always, test your recoveries!

<comment><USER32> I think you could have mounted your borg backup as a FUSE filesystem, and then used rsync to restore your files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> now sing along with me children: /none of this matters to me/ because I live in eight dot three/

</comment><comment><USER34> I wrote an essay a while ago about fixing Unix/Linux filenames here: [https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux- filenames....](https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux- filenames.html)

This is a big disconnect between "what most users expect" and "what systems actually do". Usually generally expect that filenames are sequences of characters - and today almost everyone expects that they must be in UTF-8 on a Unix-like system. That is not, of course, what most systems actually do.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wrote about this eons ago: [https://cryptonector.com/2006/12/filesystem-i18n/](https://cryptonector.com/2006/12/filesystem-i18n/) and [https://cryptonector.com/2010/04/on-unicode-normalization- or...](https://cryptonector.com/2010/04/on-unicode-normalization-or-why- normalization-insensitivity-should-be-rule/) \-- these might still be available on [https://blogs.oracle.com/](https://blogs.oracle.com/), though these are from my days at Sun.

TL;DR, basically, the lack of ability to tag strings in the system call API with codesets means that UTF-8 is the only plausible answer, and the ends (C library system call stubs, filesystems) have to apply whatever codeset conversions. But there's practically zero chance of C library system call stubs (and related functions) performing codeset conversions (can you imagine readdir(3) doing it?), which means that the only reasonable answer is to use UTF-8 locales and be done.

Even shorter: just use UTF-8 locales and be done.

<comment><USER21> You cannot use UTF-8 locales on Windows though.

<comment><USER23> That's OK. On Unix use UTF-8. On Windows use Unicode, and let apps use UTF-8 or UTF-16 as appropriate -- the kernel/NTFS make it right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In which the author takes a long and winding path to what most of us already know, "paths are fundamentally bytes".

<comment><USER36> … but also, sort-of, but not really, text: they get displayed to the user, they get input from the user, and they get emitted in logs, messages, etc. All as text. And that rub between where they're bytes but they should have been text, that's the problem and that's the complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Just dealing with file _extensions_ is enough of a head spin. We stopped trying to differentiate between _.xls,_.xlsx, *.xlst... etc. to show an Excel icon for a file uploaded to our SaaS and just went with a generic file icon in the end.

<comment><USER38> That sounds like the classic example of a decorative feature that someone thought, "oh that sounds easy, add it to someone's sprint." But of course turns out to be mind numbingly complex.

<comment><USER39> Honest question, why is that feature complex? What is the problem in looking at last part after dot?

<comment><USER40> Because Microsoft made their new office extension .xml if that doesn't make your head spin i don't know what else will.

<comment><USER39> I mean, this is only adding another entry to your array of extensions for the specific icon. It's also not a deal-braker if it doesn't work. It really is easy, I don't see what's the problem.

<comment><USER41> Maybe because it is used for all kinds of office documents. You'd have to look at the contents to see if it's a spreadsheet, text document, presentation or not even a non office pain XML file

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IBM's backup software TSM/Spectrum Protect messes this up as well.

If the machine has a UTF-8 encoding (like, say, every modern system), it will try to treat filenames as valid UTF-8 strings and fail to back up files which don't fulfill that assumption. The "solution" is to run the TSM software with a single-byte locale like en_US.

I've seen a number of shops that were silently missing files from backup from old systems because of this problem.

<comment><USER42> I don't think any backup software actually can do the right thing(tm). Some might preserve (or attempt so, anyway) binary representation, others attempt to preserve unicode codepoint-space representation...

... most do neither, but rather do ${complex thing emerging from combination of implementation details of runtime and backup tool, impossible to reproduce in any other runtime, likely platform- and environment dependent; the same backup likely restores in different ways on different machines, and the same source files create different backups on different machines; creating a backup on one machine and restoring it on another does not generally result in the same files; and I have not yet mentioned what might happen if you mount the same source file system from different platforms, because results might vary a lot; also, we are only talking about paths here, not any of the other plethora of things that can and will be different between any element in OSxFSxEnv}.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think any backup software actually can do the right thing(tm).

Sure it can. In this case, I'd say treating the filename as a bag of bytes is the correct way to go, as that's the way the OS treats them. Translating filenames between character sets should not be part of a backup systems job.

There are valid setups where different software on the same machine might be running with different character sets for legacy reasons. In that case there is no correct way to handle the filenames as text. But treating it as a bag- of-bytes will always work consistently.

Also, the one purpose of a backup system is to back up the files on the filesystem. If it can't back up some files that the OS considers valid, it's the backup software that failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> And me thinking that I would see mainframe and other non-POSIX systems, only to see the usual Linux/Windows dichotomy.

</comment><comment><USER44> And a slow black snake slithers out of your computer's USB ports, made of billowed smoke and unrealized dreams. It sticks its tongue out; "typesssss," it whispers, "typessssss."

</comment><comment><USER45> A way to stay sane seems to use Python3 pathlib and drop Python2 development.</comment>


ROBOTS.TXT is a suicide note - <AUTHOR> http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt <comment><USER3> Nothing in their rambling even remotely supports their argument.

Yes, robots.txt is no magic bullet against ill-behaving crawlers (as proven by ArchiveTeam) but it never was supposed to be that.

You choose to ignore my specific wish not to be crawled by you? Fair enough, I'll return the favour and simply block your useragent

      ArchiveTeam ArchiveBot/[DATECODE] (wpull [VERSION]) and not Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/[VERSION] Safari/537.36

In Apache for example

      # Remove the ^ anchor in case text gets prepended
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ArchiveTeam
      RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

and if possible your IP ranges.

<comment><USER4> You're assuming ill-behaving crawlers wouldn't show you a completely mundane user-agent.

I know they often don't... and I wonder why they don't, but there's no reason they should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shoutout to the Last.fm robots.txt, which contains this:

        Disallow: /harming/humans
        Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
        Disallow: /harm/to/self

<comment><USER6> link: [http://www.last.fm/robots.txt](http://www.last.fm/robots.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Currently returning:

Resource Limit Is Reached

The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.

The irony! Cache link:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=h0J3WMKKA4er...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=h0J3WMKKA4erUaechNAI&q=cache%3Awww.archiveteam.org%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DRobots.txt&oq=cache%3Awww.archiveteam.org%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DRobots.txt&gs_l=mobile- gws- serp.3...49570.58026.0.59220.127.116.11.0.0.0.493.8016.3-16j5.21.0....0...1c.1.64.mobile- gws-serp..16.0.0.bEZD95Bj88Q)

<comment><USER8> On the page: "While the onslaught of some social media hoo-hah will demolish some servers in the modern era, normal single or multi-thread use of a site will not cause trouble, unless there's a server misconfiguration"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Absolutely agreed. I work on Wikipedia articles on a specific subject where we rely on a select few web resources. Many of them have long since closed down and we use the archived versions instead. It's downright tragic when we've lost complete websites, perfectly usable sources for hundreds of articles with quality content, all because some domain parker brought up the URL and added a robots.txt that retroactively disabled the existing archive for the site. We need to archive _everything_ , regardless of what the site owner thinks crawlers shouldn't see. Years down the road we might actually wish we had archives of things that many found uninteresting or not meant to be archived. (for example to see how sitemaps were set up or RSS feeds)

<comment><USER10> Isn't this a problem with the archiving logic? Why on Earth would one apply robots.txt rules retroactively?

<comment><USER11> They need _some_ way for people to easily hide archived content, since they have no clear right to publish their copy. You can send them an e-mail instead, but those take comparatively more resources to process and robots.txt at least sort-of indicates that you actually are in a position where you can demand the removal and can be processed automatically.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't then the best logic be to finegrain this system a bit more?

So blocking the archive blocks new content added after robots.txt is made available, and adding a certain few lines in the robots.txt file explicitly hides older content on the domain in the archive.

That way, everyone wins. Sites that really want to remove content for some insane reason can do so, older sites usually aren't lost if the domain expires and domain holding page owners/cybersquatters don't accidentally cause older content to be hidden (since hey, they don't really want to block it, just stop their holding page from being archived).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like a childish rant about why Archive Team don't want to follow robots.txt, which, incidentally, many many crawlers also don't follow.

I think the crux of the matter is found here:

> If you don't want people to have your data, don't put it online.

As much as I agree in principal with this, because of the way web requests work, I don't want to be associated with this group.

You cannot ignore copyright, and robots.txt is exactly what I would use if I didn't want something archived by an organisation I have nothing to do with.

<comment><USER14> >You cannot ignore copyright, and robots.txt is exactly what I would use if I didn't want something archived by an organisation I have nothing to do with.

AFAICT this page is a reaction to an _archive.org_ policy of respecting robots.txt retroactively - e.g. oldwebsite.com runs from 1999-2009, domain expires in 2010, gets bought in 2011 and the new owners add a robots.txt disallowing IA. The archive.org copies for 10 years are now inaccessible.

<comment><USER13> True, but it is archive.org protecting their own work from being shutdown for breaching copyright.

One group has respect for authorship, and one does not.

It may not be the most palatable solution, but hardly a need for a tantrum, and intent to ignore well established rights.

<comment><USER15> Should material be lost forever out of "respect for authorship"?

<comment><USER4> Arguably, if I own the material, I should have the right to deny it to the historical record if I choose.

Then again, Kafka wanted his unpublished works burned after his death - <USER2> the world is arguably a better place for having ignored his wishes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of course they would think it's dumb because some of robots.txt rules are counter to their objective which is to save the internet in all its glory. They shouldn't use robots.txt I agree. At the same time robots.txt is not worthless.

SEO is where robots.txt shines right now. It's not that people are trying to hide something it's because we don't want it to conflict with the content we actually want to promote.

<comment><USER10> Bingo. Everything I remember reading about robots.txt strongly emphasised that it's not a way to hide content – in case one's reasoning skills are lacking – and that it's main use is to prevent irrelevant or infinite content showing up in any indices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is something I simply cannot agree with. People are using ROBOTS.TXT for all kinds of reasons, such as blocking unwanted careless webcrawler or indexing single page application. I mean come on. How can you say something like that just because eliminating ROBOTS.TXT would potentially benefit your business.

<comment><USER18> > ...such as blocking unwanted careless webcrawler...

This file doesn't "block" anything, it simply asks the robot to do something, which implies that it is probably being abnormally careful: truly annoying, unwanted, careless robots might follow these guidelines, but that seems like a stretch. In reality, this file exists so that _extra careful_ robots are able to get feedback from websites that have extremely narrow bandwidth availability or extremely high generation cost... concepts which this article makes a pretty compelling argument for "that doesn't make sense". In practice, this file then makes the owners of websites sometimes think "I can build something weirdly broken (such as a procedurally generated content tarpit, or mapping anonymous GET requests to database insertions) and just rely on this file to explain what I did along with enforcing rate limits and boundaries"... and then an "unwanted careless webcrawler" comes along and causes them serious issues. It is akin to having your entire webserver crash if someone sends you a non-ASCII character in a form field, but thinking "this will work out: I have a little flag in my HTML file that makes it clear I only accept ASCII". If you absolutely feel like you need to block something, then _actually block it_ : any robot gracious enough to pay attention to this file is also going to send a useful user agent, and you can use that to return a legitimate 403.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Strange advice. Not sure if I understood what they mean.

One important use case to exclude sections of your website is to not pollute the sitemap which Google crawls or to be more precise--the daily crawl volume Google allocates to your site. If you let every page be crawled more important pages get crawled less. Example: In the past, you created a content category which didn't turn out successful. Before you remove this category with plenty of links which would result in crawl errors it would be smarter to exclude them in the ROBOTS file and focus on your core categories.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am sorry but I can't agree with, if you don't want your content to be archived, don't put it online.

This is very similar to, taking photos/videos of people on street without their consent, and archiving and publishing. Even more, like taking photo of someone and publishing, who is wearing a t-shirt saying please don't take photo of me.

Sorry but if you will use my server resources, you will be bound with my rules.

<comment><USER21> Are you familar with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) ?

If anything, a robots.txt would _encourage_ archiving because people would be annoyed with the asocial attitude.

<comment><USER20> I understand, but don't you think people should have option to opt-out from archive team archiving their stuff, or google indexing their site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I only use robots.txt for pages that already issues 403. Something like this:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /secret/

</comment><comment><USER23> The code 508 that i currently see on the page is interesting and worth preserving. I think it validates their stance.

Archived at

[https://archive.fo/http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?titl...](https://archive.fo/http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt)

</comment><comment><USER24> Once upon a time I had to manually disable ROBOTS.txt parsing in one crawler just to stress test a staging machine for a friend.

The lesson from this is that ROBOTS.txt works as long as everyone follows a line set in sand.</comment>


Can internet access be made free around the world? - <AUTHOR> What are the issues with making internet a free resource around the world and making sure Governments pay for internet? <comment><USER2> Internet connection is really low priority in some governments. Especially in those who doesn't have good shelter, health-care and education for all citizens.</comment>


Ask HN: Any tips for a shy person who wants to do sales? - <AUTHOR> I'm shy and I feel weird talking to people, looking into their eyes. Talking to a group of people will make my voice shaking and I feel inferior and less confident whenever I talk to people.<p>But I want to do sales. How can I do this? <comment><USER2> Some ideas (in no particular order):

1\. Start lifting weights and training Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

2\. Join a Toastmasters chapter and start doing as many public talks as you can.

3\. Go to all the various events you can, that involve mingling and talking with people... yes, it will be painful at first, but condition yourself to get used to it. Go to the various "mixers" put on by the local Chamber of Commerce, and similar events. Or just all kind of Meetups that might interest you.

4\. Hang out with other sales people and model their behavior.

5\. It's maybe a bit extreme, but you could try "rejection therapy".[1]

6\. It's a bit "out there", but honestly, one of the things that did wonders for my self-confidence and assertiveness was the time I spent as a volunteer firefighter. When you put yourself in an environment where you routinely deal with literal "life and death" situations, it's hard not to develop a more stoic / detached mindset, and to learn a "feel the fear and do it anyway" approach.

7\. On a related note, there are a bunch of books on this topic, including one titled "Feel The Fear, And Do It Anyway" (by Susan Jeffers). I have it, skimmed a little bit of it, but never actually read it. It came highly recommended though, so it might be worth a look.

8\. It's become a bit of a fad lately, which makes me hesitant to mention it, but the Stoic philosophy has some appeal that might be relevant to you. Reading some classic, or contemporary, works on Stoicism might be worthwhile.

9\. Read and study as much material on sales techniques / strategy as you can. I have found that in some contexts (like my firefighting days) confidence derives directly from training and the associated knowledge. Crawling inside a burning house is scary, but it's less scary when you know how your protective equipment works, when you understand how to recognize potential signs of an imminent flashover, when you know you can always follow the hoseline back out if you get lost, etc., etc. Know your techniques and tactics extremely well, and you should find it easier to be more confident.

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

<comment><USER3> " 1. Start lifting weights and training Brazilian jiu-jitsu."

Are people more likely to buy if they're afraid you'll attack them or something?

<comment><USER2> Of course not, and learning BJJ has nothing to do with attacking people.

<comment><USER4> Why would learning BJJ help in sales?

<comment><USER2> _Why would learning BJJ help in sales?_

It probably wouldn't. But that isn't the question here. Look at what the OP wrote:

 _I 'm shy and I feel weird talking to people, looking into their eyes. Talking to a group of people will make my voice shaking and I feel inferior and less confident whenever I talk to people_

That isn't a sales problem, that's a basic, fundamental issue of confidence, self-assurance, "frame of mind", or whatever you want to call it. If you can't even look at people and talk to them, you're not "doing sales" yet.

What weight-lifting and jiu-jitsu _can_ help with, in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, is that "confidence, self-assurance, etc." stuff. The stuff that's a prerequisite before even getting to the actual sales part.

<comment><USER3> Since I don't live in a dangerous area or work as an MMA fighter that stuff wouldn't help me. Frankly my opinion of what's scary about people is self- centeredness, social connections, whether they have willingness to throw me under the bus for their benefit, etc. No help from jiu-jitsu unless it makes them bond with you. Or maybe a (my opinion) small but noticeable positive benefit looking athletic can give you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's say you're selling a CRM. There's lots of CRMs out there and yours might not even be the best.

But out there, someone is hacking together a CRM on Excel and it's just not good enough. Someone out there is afraid of doing sales because they'll worry they'll drop someone or double schedule a meeting. Someone out there is struggling to pay their staff and can't raise wages because they can't make enough sales. They've got a good development team, but just have trouble taking their product to market.

If you don't sell to them, they might never know how you could help. Or they might go to one of the many inferior CRMs. I worked with a CRM company once and we used to run experiments on production, code had no tests and was highly unstable. Some bought it to "support local businesses" and later on lost trust for all "local businesses". So even if you're not selling the best product on the market, it's unlikely you're selling the worst.

Don't rely on charisma. Don't charm them. Some people hate those kinds of salespersons. A shy salesperson can build trust.

All you have to do is try to help them solve their problems. You're not trying to convince people of anything. You're just explaining your product to the people who already want to buy it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would recommend join Toastmasters.

Toastmasters has apparently helped a lot of people develop their public speaking skills. Their meetings also have impromptu questions, which help members develop fast thinking before responding.

I joined them recently. So far I am really enjoying their meetings.

EDIT: I see a few more people have recommended Toastmasters. I will expand a bit and say that Toastmasters should be first step. Reading books, meditation, working out etc are all good options but they help you with public speaking/shyness indirectly. But Toastmasters will help you with public speaking immediately.

It is free to attend their meetings as guest for as long as you like. You can try different clubs until you find one that you really enjoy.

After a while, you will get to know your club's members and it will get easy for you speak in front of them. But then you can join local competitions where several local Toastmaster clubs compete together. So you get to speak in front of larger and different audience and continue improving your public speaking skills.

</comment><comment><USER7> You need a shift in perspective in order to drive the behavior you want. It seems like past experiences have given you the mental lens of "I am inferior to others / I don't have anything that other people want." This is going to give you a cognitive bias every time you interact with people. The brain is uncomfortable being wrong and will actually look for evidence that is not there in order to confirm a flawed belief that it thinks will "keep you safe".

To change this, identify what beliefs may be limiting you. Can these be boiled down to a more simple idea / level? Then challenge those beliefs in two ways: first with logic (does this actually make reasonable sense?) with the aim of inspiring doubt, then with daily controlled exposure with the aim of creating a library of small experiences that your brain can weigh against past evidence and form a new belief.

Action < Thoughts < Beliefs < Experiences

This is why most people suggest working out, taking a martial art class, going to bars, or other things because all of these help create that different point of reference- which is everything. There's many things you can do and only you really know what they are. More than likely, they're the things that you think about but feel hesitation over, and as I mentioned, there are a lot so by the simply fact that it's occurred to you it's likely relevant and worth trying.

I'd recommend seeing a counselor; it's great. Bonus points if they have a sense of humor... and try brazillian jujitsu.

And remember, you're not trying to sell things to people: people want to buy things from you and they need your help, and you're offering a service. If there's resistance, it's because they don't understand the value.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> Sales is all about listening. Listening to your customer and their needs and solve their problems with or without your product. That's it. But first just listen.

<comment><USER9> That's good advice. You can direct the conversation to pains they may have that your solution/product solves, but essentially a salesperson is there to identify pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't tell you exactly how I got out of that situation because it was a gradual change. But one thing you should do is practice. Practice being funny, practice body language, practice following the thread of a conversation, practice being interesting. Practice this with other people, and catch every bit of feedback that you can: try to infer what their faces tell you, if they're comfortable with you or not, what do those people like and dislike. Try to stay away from other awkward guys, you can't learn anything from them unless they're sociable, which means they're not totally awkward. You'll also find that a great deal of people will try to take advantage of you. Try to stay away from people that ignore you when trying to talk to them, or don't hold what you say as important. If they dismiss you, then you must have the courage to dismiss them.

<comment> jerome-jh Starting "Try to stay away from other awkward guys", sounds like you are explaining how to handle sales people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure shyness is a problem. Some of the most effective and big dollar- earning enterprise salespeople I ever met were quiet introverts. They were successful because they took the time to listen, understand customer's problems and genuinely try to help. They also had deep product and domain knowledge.

<comment><USER5> I second this. All the top salesmen I knew, even the charismatic ones, were really introverts.

Part of their charm was practice, part of it was excitement for the product, part of it was some kind of inner fanaticism to help the customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You have to read this book "Flip the script" by Oren Klaff. This book describes basically how you can make a sales script for your business like Jordan Belfort had during his cold-call telephone sale in the movie "The wolf of Wall Street".

It is a killer to read and will redefine how you look at sales in way that will come completely natural to you as introvert.

[https://www.amazon.com/Flip-Script-Getting-People- Think/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Flip-Script-Getting-People- Think/dp/052553394X)

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's what my mentor taught me when starting: (1) Learn about the product you are selling. (2) Use the product you are selling. (3) Don't sell, but rather expose others to the product.

If you do not know or use the product, then it is difficult for a new salesperson to help the customer.

When you expose someone to a product, be sure to give them a way out by letting them know it is okay if they want to pass up the opportunity. There doesn't need to be any pressure when presenting opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ensure that you understand the pain points of your customers and strive to figure out solutions. People tend to buy from people they trust, not from people they like. Ensure that they trust you.

</comment><comment><USER15> Practice empathy. Concentrate more on other people's states (emotion, thoughts, motivations) than your own.

</comment><comment><USER16> imagine them naked is the classic go-to solution.

practice, practice, practice. Toastmasters would be a good start.

but also, realize that not every job is for every person. find your strength elsewhere and don't look back!

<comment><USER17> I've never understood the "imagine them naked" thing. That would be more awkward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Listen</comment>


Prima donna engineers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/02/the-prima-donna-engineering-effect/ <comment><USER2> I should have stopped at "Jimmy Wales", instead I made the mistake of reading until ""Working hard" is rolling into work at 10:22 am and wanting to leave by 4:50 pm because you're tired".

Seriously. What if the guy is in the office 1 hour less than the normal "9-to-5" if he delivers? Do you pay him to fill a seat or to deliver working software that solves business problems?

</comment><comment><USER3> Jimmy Wales, lol.</comment>


Namecheap's VPN offering - <AUTHOR> https://www.namecheap.com/vpn/ <comment><USER2> How has this made it on to the home page?

<comment><USER3> I don't see why not - when Amazon releases a new product, it's usually featured here. Namecheap is one of the leading registrars, and their moving into this space is newsworthy.

I'd even say that the rise of easy-to-use VPN services is newsworthy in and of itself, as it signals a greater awareness of privacy concerns and an increasing level of sophistication for the general public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is no link to just download openvpn config files for *nix users. Does it even use openvpn?

<comment><AUTHOR> They dont mention support for OpenVPN anywhere on the page, so my guess is they don't.

<comment><USER5> No OpenVPN + the price is a little bit below ok -> they will disappear soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I mean the market is filled with VPN Service providers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It might be not a good decision for DO to provide VPN services. The reason is there are many DO users from China. Providing VPN services may cause China block all DO IPs and consequently force China users to use other hostings.

<comment><AUTHOR> DO ?

<comment><USER7> I feel like maybe they thought the site was for digital ocean...?

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh! Somebody didn't read the title or the article at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know if namecheap is an American company?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes they are an American company. Wiki: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Keyword Search Volume for a Healthy Sized Market? - <AUTHOR>

What kind of search volume for my set of keywords is indicative of a healthy market? <comment><USER2> You're picking the wrong indicator, because not all keywords demonstrate the same level of intent.

Also without knowing how you conducted your research, what your product is, or what keywords you have selected, it's not possible to meaningfully answer your question.</comment>


Saturn storm: Cassini spacecraft pictures of monster storm dying out - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/01/saturn_storm_cassini_spacecraft_pictures_of_monster_storm_dying_out.html <comment><USER2> This is absolutely amazing and has some great photos!</comment>


Can your boss force you to write a Glassdoor review? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/can-your-boss-force-you-to-write-a-glassdoor-review/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone with any actual legal expertise comment on this?

I do not, and will never live in the united states, I just don't understand how this idea could be even close to legal.</comment>


Top YouTubers Give Tips On How To Become Popular On YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX6ZWPzDpdY

<comment><USER2> typically i've noticed YouTube popularity either involves juvenile humor, or cleavage.</comment>


Why Does My Remote Control Need to Know My Location? - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/02/why-does-my-remote-control-need-to-know-my-location/ <comment><USER4> At least they acknowledged it, responded to the feedback and fixed it.

Unfortunately I have a Sonos system which became effectively bricked unless I signed a new user agreement allowing the collection of data. There are no physical controls on Sonos so the system becomes useless without accepting.

They used to sell dedicated controllers/remotes years ago but these were also bricked as part of an upgrade about a year or two ago. Unhappy owners were offered a voucher (worth less than the value of a single controller - <USER2> users owned multiple in order to fully support multi-room - <USER3> [https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers- software-228995/s...](https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers- software-228995/save-the-cr100-6800510)) for their next Sonos purchase rather than allow them to continue to use the hardware they had purchased and used happily for years.

All concerns, requests to be allowed to downgrade, etc. are met on the official forums with a passive-aggressive dismissal of users' concerns by staff backed up by a few cultist fanatics.

I've tried to avoid any further updates (and deny Sonos access to my listening habits) by having it run on a disconnected network but if anyone accidentally updates the app on the old ipad we use as a controller, your forced to update everything. I just wish I had the same system which I originally bought which I use exclusively to play my ripped CDs from a NAS.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone know of a good (from a privacy and usability perspective) alternative to Sonos?

I plan to buy 5-6 of them sometime later this year, and for what that costs, they have no excuse to data-harvest me.

<comment><USER6> Quite a few people run systems with a Raspberry Pi, a high-quality I2S DAC+amp, and a set of (normal, non-internet-connected, firmware-free) speakers. There's a tiny industry of producing hardware and software for this situation.

"Usability" means very different things to different people (after all, the reason Sonos asks for location access is to improve usability), but maybe look at [https://volumio.org/](https://volumio.org/), [http://www.runeaudio.com/](http://www.runeaudio.com/), [http://moodeaudio.org/](http://moodeaudio.org/).

Or just install MPD and Pianobar for that old school experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I designed and built a wooden remote control[1] so I know a bit about why this is.

My iOS app asks the user for location permissions because without it the remote control app won't know when to attempt to connect when you walk in the door with your iPhone but your remote is sitting at home, waiting for you to hit it to turn on your lights or play music on your Sonos. If you hit the button and nothing happens, that's a horrible user experience!

I used to have location set to Always even though I don't store the location (and I'm explicit about that, even going so far as to open source the entire app ecosystem[2]) but then Apple pushed back and said that always having a location was against their ToS for remotes. I then switched to a geofence, which is still a location based permission but takes less battery life.

For Apple the tradeoff was not privacy but battery life. If I were to store your geofence information on my servers (which, ick) that would be OK as long as it was in teeny tiny text in my privacy policy. So while other remote control products are happy to take that information and sell it I decided to not double dip since you already pay once for the product. This is similar to my news reader which also has competitors that sell users' data. The tradeoff for me is that I earn a lot less than I theoretically could, but again, I don't double dip. Benefits of indie technology vs. venture-backed technology.

[1] Turn Touch: [https://turntouch.com](https://turntouch.com)

[2] iOS source code: [https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch- ios](https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios)

<comment><USER8> Hi!

You might be interested to know that the Turn Touch homepage starts playing audio as soon as it is opened. This was enough for me to close it and never come back, and I think this sentiment is reasonably widespread.

I'm genuinely curios about the reason some people decide to add audio (or video for that matter, but audio is way worse) on autoplay. Do you enjoy when web pages you visit do it? Did you see from some kind of metric that it increases your sales?

<comment><USER7> Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS.

I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.

<comment><USER9> Not only that, but the fake popup made me NOPE out of the site.

I'm not going to fight reading a bloody advert with an annoying "GIMMEE EMAIL" advert. That pattern needs to die in a fire.

<comment><USER7> I kinda agree in that I also dislike it. But I just disabled the exit intent pop up so you won't see it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and > WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for > location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is > probably near Y.

It's not an "excuse", it's a fact. If you allow an app to scan SSIDs you _are_ allowing it to know your location. No amount of sarcasm on the part of OP is going to change that.

<comment><USER11> Um, no, that's not correct. SSIDs aren't tied to geographic location. The mothership might _infer_ location by looking at the list of SSIDs and checking it against a geotagged list compiled by a mapper, but that's a completely different thing that saying if you let an app look for an SSID you are allowing to it to know your location. You might as well say that by giving a camera the ability to know the time, you are allowing it to know your location, as someone could look at the sun's shadows or weather and infer location.

<comment><USER12> SSID's pretty much ARE tied to geo, and those that aren't tied are easy to identify. The basic tech is known to both major players [1,2]. First you crowdsource as much of the data collection as you can: various apps can collect both SSID, BT, etc. sightings and report them with GPS. So you have a giant DB of locations vs network IDs. Then you tag any network ID which appears at differing locations: it's somehow mobile for whatever reason. The untagged ones are not mobile and probably dependable indications of location to within a few dozen meters. If they do move, they get tagged at your next sweep.

1\. [https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android- skyhook-l...](https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook- lawsuit-motorola-samsung)

2\. [https://xconomy.com/boston/2010/08/04/skyhook-wireless- digs-...](https://xconomy.com/boston/2010/08/04/skyhook-wireless-digs-in- touts-location-patents-after-apple-drops-technology-from-iphone/)

<comment><USER13> _SSID 's pretty much ARE tied to geo, and those that aren't tied are easy to identify._

I bring an AirMac (Apple Airport Express) with me to hotels when I travel. I guess this is why my Android phone gets so confused about where I am if it's in airplane mode with wifi enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The coarse permissions and alarming text from the OS is a problem with both Android and iOS. Often, an app wants something fairly innocous, but has to ask for more, because it's grouped with other things in the same permission ask. Then, the OS message shifts all the blame with scary messages about what the app wants to do.

<comment><USER15> Two problems with this assumption per the article: 1) the app previously worked fine without the location information 2) the app no longer works at all without location information.

The only legitimate use case for location I can think of would be to pull down cable/tv/radio channel/station listings. But this shouldn't be a requirement since the user could easily manually enter in the ones they want. My guess is that something like this might be used as the pretext for requiring location. However, if the app continues to _require_ location to function longer term (i.e. that this wasn't just an oversight which gets corrected in a future update) then I would assume that the real use case is something that has nothing to do with helping the user.

<comment><USER16> The problem here is that they don't really want location, they just want a list of the surrounding Wifi networks, it just happens that such information is easily converted into a location, so Android requests that permission.

<comment><USER15> Android doesn't request the permission, the app does (via the app manifest) While that is the stated reason, that really isn't a legitimate reason for a remote control app to _require_ location as it might not even work in all network scenarios. (i.e. the device in question may not be using a wifi network the phone can see/use)

Keep in mind that many things including trivial flashlight apps have a history of wanting location access. There's usually a pretext in the form of some questionable/marginal feature that's used as a justification for the permission. Often after some digging the real reason becomes apparent in the form of data collection or an included ad serving library.

For example, I have a 'smart' thermostat which has an app that requests location access. I deny it and it still works. There's at least one feature they use to justify requesting it but I suspect that if there weren't other uses (having nothing to do with benefiting me) for location data that the feature requiring location data probably wouldn't even exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All these stories give me a though choice. Should I auto update apps on android?

Clearly the answer is Yes because of security updates and bug fixes, and maybe the occasional interesting feature. Besides, once in a while an android developing HN poster will complain about all those pesky users that just don't update, and I know their pain very well.

Clearly the answer is No because I have no idea if the app will continue to work tomorrow after the next update? Will it start doing something sleazy, causing a worse security problem than just being hacked? Will it break because I happen to use an edge case which will be buggy.

I could manually update after a few days have passed, so I can make an informed choice. But finding detailed info for 1 app is challenging, and there are 40 or so on my phone. That's about a full time job, and my parents and neighbors have smart phones too.

I mean, I love my radio. You push power, you get music. Easy. I' pretty sure this will happen tomorrow, just like it did the last 20 years. It's not going to decide one day to start walking around and sell a map of the house to ikea or whatever. Now why can't I ask from my phone, being a personal organiser and extension of my mind, to be as trustworthy as this?

For now, my personal compromise is to auto update firefox, manually update the OS, and firewall the others and never ever update them when they work well enough. I trust firefox and HME(OS, zombie Nokia) not to fuck up too bad and fix things reasonably fast. I wish i could trust the ecosystems more and just auto update everything, but today? Not gonna happen.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think Google is the culprit here. Not just for wifi scanning, but also for Bluetooth, Google demands location permissions.

In last 5 years or so, I have had a Garmin, a Fitbit and now a Garmin watch. I never used to have to enable location with my first Garmin tracker untill I upgraded Android os. After that point onward all my fitness trackers now ask to enable location in order to connect to my phone.

<comment><USER19> For good reason! There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is.

Yeah, the message could be made clearer about what's actually being allowed, but in the end I'm glad it's there. Maybe a generic system for when you request a permission being able to provide an explanation string or something. I know some apps made a pop-up before the prompt but I found that rather verbose especially when it was incredibly obvious why they needed the permission.

<comment><USER20> > There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much > know within 100M where someone is.

Somewhat ironically because Google went and made that dataset, then publicized it.

<comment><USER21> Google is far from the only one to have that dataset. Apple has one, too, for example, as does Skyhook. And Mozilla ( [https://location.services.mozilla.com/](https://location.services.mozilla.com/) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Funny. Usually I have the exact opposite problem. Where the hell is the remote?

<comment><USER23> If you only enabled that location tracking you wouldn't be in this problem.... :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I recall ditching a relatively high-end router a year or two ago after a firmware update required me to accept that in order to use most of the advanced features supported by the router, essentially all of my household's web activity would be sent to a 3rd party data collection service. Thanks but no thanks.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could Google enable this feature without harming user privacy?

What if they allowed you to name SSIDs such as 'Home' or 'Work', and then when the app scanned for networks in your house it would only see 'Home'?

</comment><comment><USER26> > Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and > WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for > location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is > probably near Y.

There's a reason Apple Maps says "enable WiFi to improve location accuracy".

I'm incredibly annoyed that phones don't report themselves with randomized Mac addresses. WiFi tracking is pervasive.

<comment><USER21> > I'm incredibly annoyed that phones don't report themselves with randomized > Mac addresses. WiFi tracking is pervasive.

You've got it backwards. The phone isn't being tracked, the phone is the one doing the tracking. The phone is looking at all the wifi APs it can see and then looking those up in a database.

Nobody sees the phone's MAC address. It isn't broadcasting anything at all.

<comment><USER26> Phone probes contain their MAC address. Although the internet tells me iOS 8 did add randomization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fitbit does this as well: if you want to sync your 'steps' to the app (on android at least) you have to enable location services... wtf?

<comment><USER28> four or five sig figs of internal pedometer step counts is rubbed up against four or so sig figs of phone-gathered GPS distance data after formal activities in the fitbit app to fine tune your stride length. In my case my stride length is about 75.821 cm per step. Then it can use that calculated stride length to estimate distances when not doing official activities. As if my hiking boots are identical to five sig figs to my urban walking shoes or my sandals, LOL. Well, in theory, at least, its a good idea.

Fitbit UI, weirdly, explains what its doing but refuses to provide the actual numeric result.

To some extent its overkill... from my experience orienteering as a civilian and in the military, your average stride length might vary up to 5% based on conditions. You can't use dead reckoning alone to do land nav on foot for long distances, you need a map (or GPS). Which I guess is kinda the point of the fitbit needing GPS access. Doing theoretical calculations to 4 sig figs means at least on average its not too far off, and frankly most athletes use the same boring path every day with the same shoes etc so averaged track data is going to be more accurate than a wilderness land nav course anyway.

I have not decompiled the fitbit code or done anything illegal but IF I were to implement this I'd include GPS/map based ground slope data as a correction factor because I know that has a major impact on stride length. I have no idea if fitbit does that, but they should.

<comment><USER29> I don't have a Fitbit, but I do carry an iPhone which includes a pedometer in the "Health" app. It's notion of stride length is interesting. I exported my daily step count and distance walked, and divided that later by the former to get the stride length.

I plotted this data.

step counts: [https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0TPU.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0TPU.png)

distance: [https://i.stack.imgur.com/sufma.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sufma.png)

Both quite reasonable looking.

Inferred stride length: [https://i.stack.imgur.com/giz7V.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/giz7V.png)

Note that it breaks down into 5 distinct regions, with very sharp boundaries between them. Within each region the stride length has a fairly level average but a lot of variation around that. When you cross a region boundary, same patter but the average shifts down (sometimes dramatically, such as the shift in early 2016).

I have no explanation for any of these shifts except that last one and maybe the small one around Oct 2016. The last one, in the middle of 2018, corresponds to my changing phones from in iPhone 6 plus to an iPhone x. That small one before that matches up with when we switched to full time work at home

The earlier shifts were all on the iPhone 6 plus, and as far as I can tell do not correlate with iOS updates, or with anything in my life that might change my stride size such as seasonal changes (I probably take smaller strides in winter) or getting new shoes.

I asked about this on apple.stackexchange.com, but it got no answers or comments, a down vote, and was automatically deleted as a dead question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Android app with Bluetooth/Wifi scanning ability needs Location permission to perform the task, that's GOOGLE policy. :/

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there a virtualization app/service that can sit between the OS and an app that allows me to see or restrict what an application actually sees? For example I may allow it to see my public contacts rather than _all_ contacts. Or, I may provide it with a location once rather than whenever they request it.

<comment><USER28> Some google searches for old custom roms for Android would help. I recall stuff like this in non-commercial 2.0-series android custom roms.

For a very specific example of the genre, pdroid and its numerous clones (some of which were trojans as I recall) from around 2011 seems to almost perfectly match your request.

You know you're in deep when you have to root your phone, install a custom rom, then patch the custom rom, just to limit how much you're getting spied upon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> When Slacker Radio decided it wanted my contact list, out it went. Sorry, but that information is NOT YOURS.

These days, if any important-to-me app is slated to be updated, I first run a backup in case ridiculous permission demands, feature removal, or other such f*ckery comes with the update.

</comment><comment><USER33> It does not. If a device requires your location to work, it is not a remote, it's something else.

</comment><comment><USER34> Once again, this stuff won't stop until it becomes impossible for apps to tell whether private data is enabled or not. And the way to do that is with a data- spoofing layer controlled by the user below the API.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think the obvious glaring flaw here is deciding to have a remote control for an amplifier run Android. Why on earth would that be necessary?

<comment><AUTHOR> To clarify. The amp does have a physical infrared remote. It also has an Android app I can run on my phone.

I always know where my phone is, but the regular remote likes to hide in the sofa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Quite a few "smart home" devices use location information to determine when the sun rises and sets.

</comment><comment><USER37> In a similar fashion, why does Google Play needs access to my Contacts each time I want to use Maps?

</comment><comment><USER38> > Perhaps I should find some AA batteries for the physical remote instead

We have a winner!

</comment><comment><USER39> There are days when I am glad when most of my things are old and stupid.

</comment><comment><USER40> I would blame lot of this sort of thing on various frameworks / sdks / libraries and whatnot. Many of them demand all sorts of permissions like this. If you dont want to write everything from scratch then u are stuck with this sort of crap.

</comment><comment><USER41> Isn't the answer always the same? To optimize performance and offer services individually tailored to the user. Privacy is a myth from the past.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not for nothing, but: apps as remotes for stereos kind of suck, don't they? It's way faster, IME, to pick up the physical remote and use it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Do we even need to ask this question?</comment>


The Genius of Winding Paths - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/10/the-genius-of-winding-paths <comment><USER2> When I moved to NY a few years ago I read a book about Olmsted. He made a truly remarkable contribution to America as we know it today.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Olmsted was thirty-six when his plan for Central Park was accepted, and he > had no formal training in landscape architecture. Nor had anyone else, for > at that time, parks were laid out by architects, gardeners, or surveyors.

Seriously, first landscape architect?

Not sure that Capability Brown would be pleased to hear that:

Lancelot Brown (born c. 1715-16, baptised 30 August 1716 – 6 February 1783),[1] more commonly known with the byname Capability Brown, was an English landscape architect. He is remembered as "the last of the great English 18th century artists to be accorded his due", and "England's greatest gardener". He designed over 170 parks, many of which still endure. He was nicknamed "Capability" because he would tell his clients that their property had "capability" for improvement.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> Local legend says that Birkenhead Park was an influence to Olmsted:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkenhead_Park#Influence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkenhead_Park#Influence)

</comment><comment><USER5> "How can one evaluate a landscape architect whose greatest achievement was to create the profession of landscape architecture itself?"

Sorry but I found the Hyperbole above a bit too much. Capability Brown was around a century before, and as such might well have been an influence when Olmsted toured England. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Brown)

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the pleasures of visiting Louisville, KY (or living in it) can be visiting the wide diversity of its Olmsted designed parks. One of the remarkable things Louisville did was ask Olmsted to help develop a design for a complex system of city parks.</comment>


Anyone coming to Pixel Hack Day? - <AUTHOR> http://pixelhackday.com/ Anyone wants to come build some cool stuff? <comment><USER2> Yep I am, just hoping they accept web applications...mobile applications is one of my lesser strengths

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> awesome see you there!</comment>


This $1,300 Connected Tea Infuser Has Raised $5.1M - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/teforia-funding/ <comment><USER2> Teabot? I'll stick with a non-hackable teapot.</comment>


Show HN: Hire a Top Developer in Under 7 Days. Guaranteed - <AUTHOR> http://talentdraft.io <comment><USER2>
        rahim@localhost:~$ curl http://talentdraft.io/
        curl: (6) Could not resolve host: talentdraft.io
        rahim@localhost:~$ curl http://www.talentdraft.io/
        curl: (6) Could not resolve host:
        www.talentdraft.io
        rahim@localhost:~$ nslookup
        > server 188.8.131.52
        Default server: 220.127.116.11
        Address: 188.8.131.52#53
        > set type=A
        > talentdraft.io
        Server:		126.96.36.199
        Address:	18.104.22.168#53

        ** server can't find talentdraft.io: NXDOMAIN
        >

<comment><USER3> [https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/talentdraft.io](https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/talentdraft.io)

> Is talentdraft.io down? It's not just you! talentdraft.io looks down from > here.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9d958oyuvs&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9d958oyuvs&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER4> Your website doesn't work with mobile screen sizes. The text is cutoff.

<comment><USER5> Check back in 7 days. If it is fixed then their claim is true.</comment></comment>


Right-wing group launches campaign against Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2016/11/22/elon-musk-right-wing-trump-propaganda-campaign-against-tesla-spacex/ <comment><USER2> I love that pie chart. So crony-capitalism subsidies paid to Standard Oil in the 1930's mean that its Elon Musk's turn to get federal loans and rebates. "It's his turn" people!

The huge federal tax payer funded rebates on Tesla automobiles is absolutely a subsidy for his company. To not count it towards the 4.9 Billion dollars in Federal aid is absurd. There's no reason someone shelling out $100,000 for a car should get a $20,000 rebate from the government. That's not 'helping the environment' thats rich people stealing tax money from the poor and middle class.

<comment><USER3> > There's no reason someone shelling out $100,000 for a car should get a > $20,000 rebate from the government.

The fact he's single handedly building out a nation-wide electric car charging infrastructure counts for nothing?

<comment><USER4> Hold on. Who elected him entrepreneur-in-chief? If he manages to pull that off, he will have a large stake on a successful company. Let him play by the same rules as everyone else.

<comment><USER3> > Who elected him entrepreneur-in-chief?

Nobody.

> Let him play by the same rules as everyone else.

He is. The building of publicly accessible next-gen infrastructure should be rewarded, especially when the government isn't willing to do it.

> If he manages to pull that off, he will have a large stake on a successful > company.

That's the point. He's also taking the risk that he's sinking millions (billions?) of dollars into an infrastructure that might go the way of the betamax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The transcript[1] from a secret recording[2] of seasoned propagandist Rick "Dr. Evil" Berman, laying out his strategy for smearing environmentalists and muddying debates on behalf of Big Oil at a Western Energy Alliance[3] summit (in 2014) was an eye opener for me, in regard to this type of enterprise.

Among other gems:

> You want to get people to say, one of my north stars is to get people to > say, "You know, I never thought of it that way before."

> Because, if you can get people to say that, here's what you get: instead of > getting the 'he said, she said debate,' what you will get with the factual > debate, often times, you're going to get into people get overwhelmed by the > science and 'I don't know who to believe.' But, if you get enough on your > side you get people into a position of paralysis about the issue.

> We're not experts and so you don't want them trying to be experts. But if > you put enough information out there and say, "Well, it could go to $10.10 > but ou could also lose a lot of jobs, the Congressional Budget Office says > you can lose a lot of jobs." And again, we got a lot of ads on this thing.

> You get in people's minds a tie. They don't know who is right. And you get > all ties because the tie basically ensures the status quo.

> People are not prepared to get aggressive and in moving one way or another. > I'll take a tie any day if I'm trying to preserve the status quo. "

But for a fuller insight into this type of PR mindset, the whole transcript (pdf below) is worth reading.

1: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1349...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1349204/berman- at-western-energy-alliance-june-2014-doc.pdf)

2: [http://boingboing.net/2014/10/31/secret-recording-of- corpora...](http://boingboing.net/2014/10/31/secret-recording-of- corporate.html)

3: [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Western_Energy_Alliance](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Western_Energy_Alliance)

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it hard to respect an article that links to it's own previous work 4 times more than anything else.

In the spirit of fairness, i think people should understand this is just as "propagandistic" as anything attacking Elon.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those interested the site they are talking about is located here: [https://stopelonfromfailingagain.com](https://stopelonfromfailingagain.com)

The about page says the following about the intention of this particular website:

"Stop Elon Musk from Failing Again is an initiative launched by the Sunlight Project, under Citizens For The Republic, to root out corruption, fraud and abuse of taxpayer of[sic] money in major corporations. Elon Musk has defrauded the American Taxpayer out of over $4.9 Billion in the form of subsidies, grants, and other favors. We are challenging not just Elon, but the entire culture of corporations making billions of dollars off of the American people for almost zero return to the consumer. CEO's like Musk are taking advantage of Americans, and it is our intention to end their free ride.

StopElonFromFailingAgain.com is a collection of sources and news meant to inform and develop an understanding of Elon Musk, Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX. Unless stated, articles are not our content but that of those around the web. We do not take credit for any article unless stated."

<comment><USER8> Is the name "Sunlight Project"[1] intended to confuse people with the "Sunlight Foundation"[2]?

Funnily enough, when you click through the Sunlight Project website, they claim to oppose government waste in several industries, but the only thing they seem to write about is Elon Musk.

[1] [http://www.cftr.org/the-sunlight-project/](http://www.cftr.org/the- sunlight-project/) [2] [https://sunlightfoundation.com/](https://sunlightfoundation.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most of the industries are subsidized. Even Apple is basically reusing without paying for it (taxes paid lightly in Ireland), research paid for by other public or private entities.

Given that you're seemingly incapable to set up a purely libertarian economy, would you be able instead to set up a simulator of such, to see if it is at all possible?

</comment><comment><USER10> he's a private citizen not sure why he wouldn't sue them into next week.

<comment><USER11> He's a public figure in the eyes of the law.

<comment><USER12> I think I detect more than a whiff of actual malice here.</comment></comment></comment>