Rules of a Zen Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.grobmeier.de/the-10-rules-of-a-zen-programmer-03022012.html#.UYZ2a7LjJHU <comment><USER2> I think these rules miss the point of Zen. The primary teaching isn't about achieving spiritual perfection by embodying absolute states of mind. It is about finding a middle road between two extremes. For example, although a gigantic ego makes it difficult to cooperate with others, it would not be possible to survive without an ego. The middle road is to find the connection between your ego and the egos of other people. If you think you are selfless and have no ego, the paradox is that you probably have a gigantic ego, because your identity is invested in being spiritually pure.

The stuff about "shut up", "stop crying", "there is nothing special about you", and "NEVER stay at a company which does take away the happiness in your life" is similarly unhelpful. Zen teaches us that working with emotions is often more effective than working with thoughts, so if you're crying, that's probably important. In terms of being special, a snowflake is both unique and highly similar to all the others at the same time. It's abusive to focus only on the similarity. And if a company is taking away your "happiness", there's a reasonably good chance that it's an opportunity for you to learn something about yourself before you run away from the situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agree with a lot of points and appreciate someone writing it down. Way back in the days, I used to be a pencil and paper type programmer; there used to be very little distractions like social networks or even an online help systems.

As a result, I still have a more comprehensive knowledge of the standard library of a language or the instruction set of a microprocessor. Today, my learning is very need based. While programming, I cherry pick the information I need based on Google searches.

This leaves me extremely dependent on externalities and am faced with too many distractions. Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.

<comment><USER4> >Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.

I spend every day practicing, and completely failing at this art. I've come to accept that I cannot ignore things that are going on around me. I cannot choose to focus on something.

I've only being on this planet 25 years, that's not a hell of allot of time, but in this area I can say I have experience. If you want to focus, change your environment. You cannot learn to tune something out. At least, I know I can't.

<comment><USER5> I think learning to focus and tune certain things out is a skill like any other, that anyone can learn to a degree. Admittedly I haven't made much progress here either, but I think that with practice it becomes easier.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with your idea about changing your environment. This is the single easiest thing I've found that helps me focus. Of course, there's always still the rest of the Internet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think I'll ever forget the 7-day Zen meditation retreat when word had gotten out that I was good with computers, so instead of digging in the garden or peeling potatoes, I spent my work period scraping their old members' registry page into Excel with some Emacs macros and a Ruby script. That evening's zazen had a lot of distracting thoughts about refactoring and extensibility. Back to the practice... Just breathing... Hmm, maybe I could make a convenient web service out of it...

<comment><USER7> As someone who also meditates this made me laugh! Sometimes I find coding and meditation to be complementary, other times not really!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> More and more advice on being a better programmer comes down to being a better, more focused _person_.

<comment><USER9> I recently made a switch from an advertising agency (where I was working on many different website for as many different clients) to a product company where I just work on a single aspect of a single product that has been in development for many years.

We use scrum and I find that the environment and this particular way of programming in a team has made an incredible difference in my ability to focus on a single task. What I mean to say by this, is that sometimes (and for some people) it may help to you change your surroundings if you have trouble with focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Like for example manually copy/pasting stuff from your managers Excel sheet > into phpmyadmin. This can take you days, and it is really boring. You cannot > always quit your job when you got a boring task.

As valuable as accepting inevitable boring tasks is, that seems to leave you not much room to want to automate the task. Does anyone have something deep to say about simultaneously being accepting of your circumstances and seeking ways to improve them?

<comment><USER11> There is nothing wrong with completing tasks the most efficient way possible.

In this case, the copy/paste action was just the most boring task I could imagine. Please replace this phrase with "a boring task you cannot escape at best will". It's not really about Excel to phpMyAdmin.

I actually have seen a guy doing something like this before years. Thats why it came to my mind. This guy was not a competent programmer. I should have used a different example maybe. But it is not so easy to find a "boring task" which cannot be automated in todays dev world.

Disclaimer: maybe nothing "deep to say", but this is the story which came to my mind, when I wrote the post. In my opinion, Zen has nothing to do with fatalism as might be understood with this example. Go ahead, make things better. I am thinking about replacing this example, because it came back to me several times now.

In any case, thank you for taking the time reading it and asking this question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Was there ever a software build twice, the same way? Even if you copy > software it is somehow different._

Only a German could write this. And yes, that's a compliment. (oh, and sorry about the shallow generalism, but that's ok when it's a compliment, right?)

<comment><USER13> what makes this characteristically german?

<comment><USER12> Warning: generalizations and prejudice ahead.

The first sentence because it sounds so simple but is in fact deeply philosophical. Walk around in Germany and talk to people, and keep tabs on how often you hear seemingly simple "by the way" lines that could be considered lovely life wisdoms in their own right.

The second sentence because Germany, for me, is a country of culture, activism and the Piratenpartei (1). Copying something, sec, is basically the definition of not changing it. Saying that it _is_ a change supports the ideas of freedom of culture, sharing, the kopimi movement, and so on. "Hey, it's a copy, so that's kind of like a remix, right?". Other than that, the sentence suggests that a thing isn't really anything at all when seen apart from its context, so copying something indeed very much changes it. That, again, is one such beautifully deep observation said in such a casual way. _tab, tab_.

Finally, if you read it all aloud it just sounds weird. Until you read it with a German accent. It sounds great with a German accent.

Full disclosure: I'm Dutch. The Dutch were once found, in a survey from the German exterior ministry, to be the people most fond of Germans of all countries neighbouring Germany (lost reference, but not making this up). I'm also very fond of schnitzel and currywurst.

(1) I know the Swedes started it, but that's besides the point. Germany is also the country where 4chan users actually go _outside_ , wearing Guy Fawkes masks, to hand out flyers against Scientology. 4chan users. Outside.

Deeply believing in something and standing for it is very common in Germany.

<comment><USER11> I am the author of the blog post. Thank you very much, I take it as a huge compliment.

I am not sure if what you said is to be generalized. I am afraid, the image of germany being a deeply philosophical nation of thinkers cannot stand at detailled observation.

But I can say, two things:

First, I try to write short sentences which are straight. My english skills are OK in conversations, but I am far from being a great writer. It takes me a lot of time to write, and almost in every sentence you can hear the german in me. Maybe this creates a specific atmosphere in what I write. But I cannot judge this.

Second, I am studying psychology and thus have to read a lot of philosophical and cultural text. I enjoy it very much and try to learn about cultural aspect as much as possible. I am also a Zen buddhist in real life (not only saying in the post) and learn a lot from my teachers. It all makes me think.

It honors me that you attribute the deep thinking in what I wrote. Again, thank you very much for your comment, it makes me feel good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> MostAwesomeDude</comment>


Introducing DigitalOcean's Machine Learning One-Click - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-machine-learning-one-click-install-image-on-digitalocean <comment><USER2> A couple of years ago, I used to work for one of Digital Ocean's competitors in the "cloud server" sphere (as a software engineer for their cloud server automation deployment/management stack). Not long after I joined the company, I suggested to the owners and my supervisor that the company should consider moving into the ML space as a new market to explore.

I suggested we build an image for deploying servers with; I also suggested we explore ideas in using multiple servers for machine learning cluster computing, as well as CUDA via on-board graphics cards in the machines that could support them.

The idea was pretty much shot down. About a year later the company was acquired. I moved on...

Glad to see someone doing it.</comment>


Show HN: HonestRepair.net Open-Source Cloud Storage - <AUTHOR> https://honestrepair.net <comment><AUTHOR> So I made an open-source Cloud PaaS like ownCloud, but with file conversions, OCR, and a bunch of other stuff. To help "sell" this free software, I've fired up some in-house servers (fast as hell by my standards) to test/demonstrate the platform.

The side-effect is free unlimited Cloud storage. Go easy on me, as I still have parts on-order to bring me to full capacity.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER2> The list of software used by Honest Repair says "proprietary", but it looks like the Github repos are GPL3. I was confused. It might be helpful to link to the Github from the main page. Also adding some diagrams showing how it all works so people can configure it on their own hardware.

Good luck.</comment></comment>


Cast-Free Arithmetic in Swift - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/richard-fox-casting-swift-2/ <comment><USER2> > _" In Objective-C, we have syntax like this:"_

Not really - implicit casts were always a warning in Obj-C, along with any number of things that other languages consider errors.

My personal opinion is that Obj-C is so loose as a language that, for production uses at least, one should turn on as many warnings as the compiler gives you, and then turn on warnings-as-errors. We've been doing this for a while and it's saved our bacon at least a few times.

 _Floats, doubles, and ints are not interchangeable_. Likewise, _int8, int16, int32, and int64 are not interchangeable_ and IMO should never be converted from one to the other without the explicit knowledge of the programmer.

This seems like a nice convenience, but I'm skeptical if the convenience gained is worth the (IMO substantial) risk of shooting yourself in the foot.

<comment><USER3> What's dangerous about converting an int to a wider type?

<comment><USER4> You're bringing just one specific case where probably is acceptable[1] and ignoring all other cases where it's definitively bad (to narrower type, or mixing floats with ints).

[1] and only when you don't care about overhead of converting from one type.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't think of anything immediately Evil for that case and wanted to check I wasn't missing something :) The others definitely have badness if you aren't expecting it.

I'm quite surprised objective-c doesn't warn by default if you try to a potentially lossy conversion without an explicit cast.

<comment><USER4> I think it all depends what you meant by wider. I don't think anything will happen if you convert int8 to int16 (don't know swift so I don't know if it distinguishes between those types), but if you for example do casting from integer to floats and vice versa (the author uses double as the universal type) and do some heavy calculations you can get wrong results.

This is because float/double is not really a wider type it is just a number representation that is not exact and just uses approximations so you actually are losing information.

<comment><USER3> I'd generally limit wider to apply to the same, uh, type classes (there's probably a proper word) int8 to int16, float to double and so on.

Casting between integers and floating point is pretty risky unless you're absolutely sure about your ranges and precision. Anything that does that silently gives me The Fear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand the spirit of exploration and fun that this was done with, however the author talks of using this in "production". This scares me. These types are not interchangeable.

I would love to see a disclaimer and/or a discussion of what can go wrong

EDIT: If I add the floats 1.5 and 1.5 to get an integer, is the result 2 or 3?

<comment><USER6> I use the dot property conversion, not the overloading in general use. I also have such reservations about using overloading for casting in production. What I do use, is the series of extensions for single letter dot property conversions, the extensions without the protocol extending, that I also used in Swift 1.2. Sorry if that was unclear...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Swift patterns Emerging definitely favor explicit conversions over implicit. One of the QA questions begins eluding to some issues with this pattern with under and overflows, but the author also doesn't mention safety around Nan's or Infinity. Last thing I want as a consumer of an API is surprises. There are good reasons why these value types are non interchangeable without being explicit.

<comment><USER6> Good point bringing up over/underflow, I didn't think much about Nan or infinity, but I did consider potential over/underflows. I originally built an overflow/underflow checker(on the github project), but then re-evaluated it and figured it wasn't really necessary since the default action for number types that overflow/underflow in swift is to throw an error runtime. The person asking the question mentioned another series of operators that exist &+, &-, &*,etc that allow for overflow/underflow to occur on number types in swift.. without the error throwing, which is not the default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The case that has bugged me is when I have some integer number of items and I need to compute some CGFloat for drawing something based on it. count * SpacingPixels gives an error, need CGFloat(count) * SpacingPixels even though there is no possibility of losing precision by the up-cast from Int to CGFloat.

It is also slightly annoying to have Double and CGFloat not be the same, but I solved that by just always using CGFloat pretty much everywhere even when not referring to pixels or points.

I don't think I would overload + and *, though, due to possible complications with the error messages as the article suggests. But I might play with more terse Ruby-like ".to_f" as an extension or something ...

<comment><USER9> CGFloat is a different type based on the system, is it not?

<comment><USER10> Yes. It's double precision on 64-bit platforms and single precision on 32-bit.

      #if defined(__LP64__) && __LP64__
      # define CGFLOAT_TYPE double
      # define CGFLOAT_IS_DOUBLE 1
      # define CGFLOAT_MIN DBL_MIN
      # define CGFLOAT_MAX DBL_MAX
      #else
      # define CGFLOAT_TYPE float
      # define CGFLOAT_IS_DOUBLE 0
      # define CGFLOAT_MIN FLT_MIN
      # define CGFLOAT_MAX FLT_MAX
      #endif

<comment><USER6> Exactly, this is also pointed out in the struct definition in CoreGraphics for CGFloat.

/// The native type used to store the CGFloat, which is Float on 32-bit architectures and Double on 64-bit architectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is called coercion — implicit conversion between types.

Numeric types coercion is very basic convenience that is present in many statically typed programming languages. Older languages like C used to allow unsafe conversions, but modern ones like C# or Java are doing it right: for example, adding int and float is allowed, but assigning float to int is not. There is no reason Swift shouldn't have the same.

I suspect is has been given up (temporarily or not) because of type inference. Swift's already giving "expression is too complex" errors in some situations, numeric coercions would surely make it worse.

</comment><comment><USER12> What was wrong with Java type promotion already?</comment>


Jason Calacanis' First New Email Post - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/13/jason-calacanis-first-new-email-post/ <comment><USER2> So his email got picked up and syndicated. How is that not like a blog post?

This sounds like a ploy to get some fraction of his readers to cross-post for him.

</comment><comment><USER3> As much as the guy annoys me, he knows how to generate publicity.

</comment><comment><USER4> Idle speculation -- now in your _inbox_! Wow!</comment>


Venezuela to Close Pumps as Gas Runs Short, Viral Outbreak Grows - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-22/venezuela-to-close-pumps-as-gas-runs-short-viral-outbreak-grows <comment><USER2> Quarantine, and the economic meltdown, will end up being worse than the disease.

<comment><USER3> I'd say that's a bit of a false dilemma. Countries like South Korea and Taiwan have dealt with this problem far better than other countries despite having very few lockdowns [1,2]. Instead they have made use of government funded distribution of free masks and testing and now have a low or declining number of active cases [3,4,5].

[1] [https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health- environment/article/30...](https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health- environment/article/3074469/coronavirus-south-korea-cuts-infection-rate- without)

[2] [https://chinapost.nownews.com/20200317-1094238](https://chinapost.nownews.com/20200317-1094238)

[3] [https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3869320](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3869320)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Taiwan)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_South_Korea)

<comment><USER4> South Korea passed new laws after MERS which allowed them to publicize personal health information. People get alerts telling them someone of a certain gender and age was tested positive and gives their prior activities. I suspect a lockdown would be easier to pull off in the US.

Taiwan has been passing new laws since SARS that allowed them to quarantine people. They also track people on quarantine via their phones.

If anything, I'd say the common denominator in handling this outbreak well is having experienced a similar outbreak recently and adapting to it, at least in part by swinging the pendulum further away from civil rights towards protecting the populace. Both SK and Taiwan's govts were also embarrassed and criticized after those respective previous outbreaks, prompting quicker action next time around.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51733145](https://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-51733145)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a humanitarian crisis. We may weather the storm at home, but this virus knows no boarders and will decimate populations in the most vulnerable corners of the world until we develop and internationally deploy a cure.

The rhetoric of war time may become a stark reality if this continues unabated on our planet.

<comment><USER6> Even if everyone gets infected a virus with a 2% fatality rate will hardly decimate populations. It's not very useful to overdramatize.

<comment><USER7> Around 15% require hospitalization. What do you think happens if they can't get it? My assumption is they die. Decimation (1/10 die) is accurate, if not an underestimation.

Edit: you also have to take the infection rate into account. Also indirect deaths. My point stands

<comment><USER8> We can take the age profile of Venezuela[1] and the estimated hospital rates and general virus profile from the Imperial College report[2].

Assume 80% infection, and assuming that 100% of people who would have needed hospitalization die.

This is 720,000 people, or 2.5% of the population. However, if we just take the working-age population (65 and lower), and assume 50% survival rate instead of 0%, the deaths are just 0.79% of the total population.

So decimation is absolutely inaccurate and the higher-up poster is correct. Developing countries like Venezuela cannot afford to and should not shutdown their economies or societies.

[1] [https://www.populationpyramid.net/venezuela-bolivarian- repub...](https://www.populationpyramid.net/venezuela-bolivarian-republic- of/2019/)

[2] [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/s...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI- modelling-16-03-2020.pdf)

<comment><USER9> A lot more people already fled Venezuela than the virus will ever kill there, that's for sure. Also, as a correction... Venezuela is not a developing country. It is de-developing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Venezuela running out of gas would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. They've got the largest proven oil reserves in the world. More than Saudi Arabia.

<comment><USER11> This is yet another instance of misguided incentives causing systemic failure, much like famines that happen alongside modern farming in developed economies. Keep in mind that most people don't pay for gas in Venezuela, they just go to the pumps and fill up. Institutions handle the rest and those institutions never functioned well and have been breaking down for some time.</comment></comment>


Artificial Intelligence – 20 Years After The Electronic Landmark - <AUTHOR> http://www.saltartists.com/artificial-intelligence-20-years-after-the-electronic-landmark/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not about AI. It is about a music release by the name "Artificial Intelligence" which was historically significant.

Excerpt:

 _The series today still serves as a historical landmark in the ways of electronic music_</comment>


Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live - <AUTHOR> http://heroku.com/

<comment><USER2> I think this is a neat idea to capture all those PHP refugees who saw the outdated "Make a Rails Blog in 15 minutes". This may well be the start a whole bunch of Rails applets.

... it's just that I hate writing code in the browser. No vi shortcut keys. Plus all those other little tools I've accumulated in the past couple years.

<comment><USER3> You don't have to use a browser to write the code.

<comment><USER2> If I don't use the browser, I might as well use the rest of the development suite on the laptop. If I don't use their editor, I assume I'd have to upload the files somehow. The whole reason I'm using git now intsead of Subversion is because I cannot guarantee my internet connectivity. And I hate to admit it, any little interruption like that often serves as an excuse to not work on code.

If I use their import functionality to update the app, I can do it quicker by typing 'cap deploy' on the command line.

Don't get me wrong -- I think this is a pretty neat idea, particularly for folks who don't have much time or money invested in their own equipment. With the Facebook and Google social APIs out, I can see this as the preferred tool for sketching out an idea, and getting some users.

But for someone like me who has the infrastructure setup already, it would have to be insanely better than pounding away at my laptop, using my own version control system, the various versions of Rails I can use it with, running tests, the occasional need for BackgroundRB apps. Yeah, it does make me feel as if I weren't keeping up with the times, but then again, I have a hobby of finding gems in obscure ruins of antiquity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool idea - I am sure everyone has thought of this a few times. Cool that someone actually did it.

I could see something like this working even better with pure javascript web frameworks (what with there being javascript in the browser). But they aren't as popular as rails (yet).

</comment><comment><USER5> If it works smoothly, this will be awesome. I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

However, I suspect there will be a lot of growing pains and bugs along the way. But it's a great idea and I'm looking forward to their release.

<comment><USER6> > I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

I can do that now. My laptop has my development environment. No latency, no fears of dropped connections while editing. Local commits using mercurial, and my customized gvim rig.

And running "cap deploy" is pretty easy.

This seems aimed at people are are not quite ready to call themselves developers. But at some point, if you want to build Web apps, you are going to have to learn to install software and set up a database and really learn to use a code editor.

<comment><USER5> Well, what I meant was I could be wandering the streets of Beijing and going to work would be as easy as hitting up the nearest web-bar/internet cafe. As far as I know, they don't have them nifty EVDO cards in Beijing...

<comment><USER7> Based on the fact that they were testing them in 2004[0], I suspect they do.

[0][http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_1600...](http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_160054.html)

<comment><USER5> I couldn't get one when I was there in Jan...anyone else in Beijing know for sure?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This will make little apps -- restaurants, dance studios, newsletters -- insanely easy to build and deploy.

I doubt it will do much for bigger ones, though. Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration -- precisely the matters that Heroku takes out of your hands.

<comment><USER3> "Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration"

I think Heroku would say that that's exactly the point.

<comment><USER9> My understanding is Heroku is primarily a development environment. If you want to make a full-blown gajillion-user app, you'll probably have to move it off Heroku's servers -- i.e. I don't see any way to edit DNS entries / use your own URL.

Maybe they'll allow you to update your account if you want to use them for hosting.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tavern, Next Generation Bulletin Boards/Forums (Product Idea) - <AUTHOR> http://tavern.asleepysamurai.com <comment><USER2> Those slides are horrible, they are too fast for reading and worse, it seems that manual clicking on the arrows do not reset the timer.

Not sure if I'm particularly slower than others at reading or something, but I closed the page after 3 "slides" when the site made it abundantly clear that it didn't want me to read its content.

One note though: you should use mockup pictures for the visuals rather using screenshots from existing websites, as it is now it sort of give a "Chinese knockoff" feel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I did not really spend too much time on the visuals, since this was just to gauge-interest. If I make an MVP, it'll definitely not feel 'knock-offy' :)

EDIT: I've also slowed down the slides by four seconds each. Please do visit again and check out all the slides.

<comment><USER2> The thing is, I quickly had a very negative opinion of it, and it had nothing to do with the actual product, only its presentation. With a better slider system, you would surely get a lot better reactions as people would focus more on what you are talking about rather that "wait, what, why doesn't it let me read this".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For the love of god, turn off the auto-slide, it is completely broken and made me ragequit the browser never to look at your idea again even though I actually might find it interesting if I could tolerate the presentation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Based on what I've read (the screenshots are just of reddit and Facebook) this sounds like it would be a genuinely irritating service to use and be a part of.

• If there's any place for a 'social' button, it's certainly not a discussion forum. Typically the content you would be talking about on a forum would be separated from what you might want to post on Facebook (see pseudonyms).

• People love pseudonyms, there's no escaping that. One of the large attractions of discussion forums is that you can be pseudo-anonymous if you are so inclined. If Google Plus failed to convince people to give up their real information, I can't imagine a forum suite would either.

• Profile photos make page loads long and make the information on the page less dense. They add absolutely nothing to the conversation, which is why I presume HN and reddit (large influences in this) don't have them.

• "Flame war control" will just obstruct constructive conversation. Speed and depth of posting isn't an indicator of malice, and will just make users discouraged to contribute.

• A hosted service isn't a feature in this case. I can go and read forums that I was a part of in 2005, but there's no guarantee that a hosted service will be around next week. If the service disappears, so does the content.

• "Banhammers Galore" isn't a feature, see the current attitude towards StackOverflow's moderation.

There's headway to be made in bulletin boards, but I feel you've missed the main issues with the current solutions (vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is really a list of features, not a product. Basically if you execute well and create great forum software it may become popular, otherwise it won't. That's pretty much a truism.

</comment><comment><USER6> Signatures? One line is still to much for me, all forums need the option to turn off displaying signatures.

Real names? Hmm. That kills basically all but talking about pets or whatever. No forums for whistleblowers, abuse victims, with alternate sexuality and/or religion and the problems arising thereof in certain areas of the world, no place for really nutty art. It's also trivial to make a fake facebook profile I'm sure, so in the end it might offer a false sense of security more than any actual security.

The "flamewar control" stuff.. Yup, definately too nosy to me. Wouldn't know the difference between flaming and a burst of creativity and all around merryness, either. Have you ever been member of a really _wild_ forum, I wonder? Why seek technical solutions to social problems?

And then comes "tagging". Just to increase user engagement, because that's useful for the site owner, not because it's useful for the users :/

I don't mean to be negative though; built it, it's bound to be useful for someone, just not me. If anything, it would make for a neat "facebook-like" forum (facebook, last time I checked, was completely broken for complex discussions, and the forum apps are ugly and slow). All the complaints I have about this forum I would also have about facebook, so they shouldn't be a negative to "that crowd". I'm simply not the target market, but I _am_ a forum user since I'm a web surfer, and I do care about them a lot, so I have to ramble.

A next generation forum of _my_ taste would have complete moderator action transpareny and accountability. How's that for a radical new idea? Or hey, how about making page views and ad revenue visible to the people providing it? Maybe allow users to tag and organize content like they want it, with a bayesian filter suggesting stuff they might like. My next generation forum would focus _LESS_ on real-time and "current" and "popular", and make all that just one of many factors. It would be not for ants to pass the time, but for ants to build weird little palaces over time, with many twisted passages, and if they so choose, to refactor and straighten out the bits that turn out to be most useful, to build a library; be it of knowledge, fun, friendship or anecdotes.

Instead of more tools to use _on_ the users, more tools _for_ the users.

And of course, it can't be hosted; gimme the source or I'm not interested in the least.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Signatures? One line is still to much for me, all forums need the option to > turn off displaying signatures.

Ofcourse, there will be an option to completely disable all signatures.

>Real names? Hmm. That kills basically all but talking about pets or whatever. No forums for whistleblowers, abuse victims, with alternate sexuality and/or religion and the problems arising thereof in certain areas of the world, no place for really nutty art. It's also trivial to make a fake facebook profile I'm sure, so in the end it might offer a false sense of security more than any actual security.

The real name is not for any notion of 'security'. It's a psychological thing, to remind users to be civil to each other.

>The "flamewar control" stuff.. Yup, definately too nosy to me. Wouldn't know the difference between flaming and a burst of creativity and all around merryness, either. Have you ever been member of a really wild forum, I wonder? Why seek technical solutions to social problems?

Believe it or not this actually exists on our very own HN (and discussions here do get 'wild' once in a while). And if it works for HN I don't see why it shouldn't work in other places.

>And then comes "tagging". Just to increase user engagement, because that's useful for the site owner, not because it's useful for the users :/

Actually, this would be very useful to users in conjunction with notifications. There have been many times when I have posted on a particular thread and then forgotten all about it, and so I miss it when somebody responds to me. This has happened annoyingly often.

>And of course, it can't be hosted; gimme the source or I'm not interested in the least.

Why (just curious)? A hosted version is to make it easy for your regular Joe Forum-master. I suspect not many of them would want to learn to manage a VPS.

<comment><USER7> > Signatures?

Glad to hear there will be an option to turn off, but it wasn't in your slidedeck so it wasn't an "Ofcourse" [sic] when @PavlovsCat made his comment.

> Real names

@PavlovsCat highlights several areas where user 'security' trumps psychological civility reminders. Personally, I won't use systems that require real names for this reason alone. If someone wants to use their real name, good for them. But systems that require it aren't for me.

> "flameware control"

Sounds like some other systems I know that get in the way of actual conversation (e.g., I'm trying to respond to individual posts individually, and manage to do so too quickly). If the controls aren't too aggressive, I can see the benefit, but if they're too aggressive I feel like I'm being punished for being able to touch type, and subsequently avoid those forums. (I haven't hit any such limits in HN, so if they're here, they're a good gauge for not too aggressive.)

> "tagging"

I happen to be a big fan of tagging. Although some systems do limit to existing tags, which I'm not a big fan of.

> hosted versus source

As an end user, I use both. When I'm setting up a system, open always gets preference over closed. There are several packages that have hosted service as their primary offering, but if you read through their FAQs they still have their source opened on bitbucket, github, or an accessible self-hosted system. Such dual-offerings provide the ease of hosted, with the myriad of benefits that come from open sourcing the code.

<comment><USER6> I understood "tagging" more in a sense of "tag, you're it". Like some bloggers do, "I got tagged by Person A to answer these questions", I'm pretty sure I've seen that before. Maybe I got it wrong, but I thought was like what you just did, @mentions :P

As for tagging with words (and maybe even more than just one taxonomy), of course, it's the best. Tag first, tag lots, and find uses for the tags later I say :D

<comment><USER7> When I viewed the slide presentation, I only noticed the @mention type of tagging. But I had had a hard time going through the slides, and since your starting comment seemed more in line with the folksonomic type of tagging, I was kind of hoping I had just missed that in the hurried presentation.

In this day and age, I haven't seen any reasons not to support the @mention type of tagging.

The folksonomic type of tagging can absolutely be overdone or restricted into absolute uselessness. But when done properly, they can be extremely useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One obervation: if you're really that adamant about Real Names, you're going to be regarded as just another privacy reaper. I suggest you implement some form of locally-registered aliases if your concern is accountability, because there are entirely too many real reasons for limiting exposure surface on the Internet. Of course, if it _is_ all about the tracking...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, maybe a system of display names would work for this. But the thing is you have an entirely different mindset when you are responding to 'shadowfaxx12' rather than 'Martin Carpenter'. It's more to remind people that there is another real human being behind that particular comment, and to be civil to them.

<comment><USER9> _But the thing is you have an entirely different mindset when you are responding to 'shadowfaxx12' rather than 'Martin Carpenter'_

I don't think this is necessarily true. People may be quite willing to be uncivil to "Martin Carpenter" as well... after all that's one of the points of 'doxxing' someone on a forum, to humiliate them with their real identity, and troll their real-life friends and family.

Plus, how are you going to tell whether "KRapp" is my real name, a derivation of my real name or my account name is just a pseudonym that corresponds with _a_ real name? You could guess it from my email or my facebook account. In my case (and probably most cases) it's quite easy, but if you're serious about using real names, I think you're still adding some minimal effort on your part to have to validate them.

Maybe my real email is "somethingotherthanmyname@gmail" and my real name just happens to be "Jango Fett." How 'real' does a name have to appear? Google's already running into problems trying to enforce this, and they already _have_ all the data, because 'real names' don't necessarily map as logically as people assume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ok, it seems that this is just to measure the interest, as such product doesn't exist at all yet.

Some comments:

1\. Reddit/HN style threads (sorting function by time and score) are great for news or current issues, not for topics that are continuous. That's why reposts and duplicates are actually needed. Old threads on HN and Reddit are forgotten quickly.

2\. Upvoting mechanism / community moderation requires a sizable community to provide any value.

3\. Real user names do not provide any value, usually it actually reduces to quality of discussion. Anonymous/throwaway accounts serve their place. Community moderation already solves the quality/spam/troll issue to some extent.

Most of these 'features' should be configurable, as there seems to be no clear thought of why this configuration would be good for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER11> At first i was thinking this was a parody, but it seems that the idea is well ... serious.

Popular stuff on top, unpopular stuff at the bottom makes me think of downvote squads and paid upvoters.

Social logins. What when they go down? See facebook login last week. What about people that don't want to log in with their social account?

The flamewar control seems that it might hamper legitimate conversations. Imagine 2 or 3 people discussing something civilised, and each time they post, they have to wait 5 minuten or more. I know I'd stop talking pretty quickly.

The other points are mostly standard stuff. Notifications, mentions, ..

Perhaps I'm not the target group, which might explain my answer :)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Popular stuff on top, unpopular stuff at the bottom makes me think of > downvote squads and paid upvoters.

Anti-gaming measures would obviously be part of the system as in HN and Reddit.

> Social logins. What when they go down? See facebook login last week. What > about people that don't want to log in with their social account?

Local logins are also an option. However, social logins do indeed provide an ease of use. Perhaps some sort of backup login system might be used as well? Like get the emails when people first sign up and if your login provider is down send a temporary login link to the users email.

>The flamewar control seems that it might hamper legitimate conversations. Imagine 2 or 3 people discussing something civilised, and each time they post, they have to wait 5 minuten or more. I know I'd stop talking pretty quickly.

Have you ever been discouraged from a lively discussion on HN? Believe it or not, this same feature exists on HN, and it works rather well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will it be hosted only or will a leased version be available? Any thoughts given to design or branding customization?

<comment><AUTHOR> If this does get built, then we could probably allow people to use custom themes to design their site. As for branding, there will be no TavernBB branding on any forum. All forums will carry their own branding.

Also, it would be available only as hosted. If there is demand for a self- hosted version then maybe it'll happen.

<comment><USER13> I don't like this trend. A modern self-hosted forum is badly needed. We've moved away from the time when any self-hosted web software had to be written in PHP now that many turnkey web hosts support Ruby and Python (and VPS hosting is cheaper), but the software hasn't caught up yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tend to disagree. A lot of shared hosting providers still support only PHP. The ratio of providers who support Ruby to those who support PHP is staggeringly small. So, practically the only way to self-host something _not_ written in PHP is to go for a VPS.

While a VPS is quite cheap these days, the skillset needed to operate a VPS is quite different from that needed to install vBulletin on a shared host. This is why I wish to keep this as a fully hosted offering.

<comment><USER14> Seriously, running a VPS is not _that_ difficult.

The "ratio of providers supporting Ruby to those who support PHP" is quite irrelevant: just pick one of the providers who do support Ruby. There are enough of them.

No, it seems more like you (as the software author) only prefer shared hosting because that would allow you to retain control and make profit.

Also, from your slides: "security comes standard", "Builtin protection against CSRF, XSS, SQL Injection and a multitude of other attacks" -- what?! If the source isn't available, how can one be sure? And do you think the developers of the existing forum solutions _wanted_ to make the mistakes that lead to their software being vulnerable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are the screenshots used from Reddit, Stackoverflow and Facebook comments or do the show the actual 'product'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they are just screenshots from other sites. This post was simply to gauge interest for such a product. The product as such does not yet exist.

EDIT: I have updated the submission title to reflect that it's just an idea.

<comment><USER16> Could you please be explicit about this in the thread title and the webpage itself? This comment is the only thing besides the lack of screenshots of the product itself that indicates that Tavern doesn't exist yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So what's the difference between <http://www.discourse.org/>? I think discourse implement it clearly, I didn't figure out any difference.

</comment><comment><USER18> Would be interesting, if built.

You should slow down the speed of the slides, though :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've added four more seconds to each slide's display time.</comment></comment>


Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/splunk-acquires-cloud-monitoring-service-signalfx-for-1-05b/ <comment><USER3> Does anybody know if employees will end up actually making any money from this massive acquisition, or if yet again board and investors found a way through some shenanigans to distribute all the wealth just to themselves?

EDIT: I'm being downvoted, but I've been increasingly hearing a shady Silicon Valley practice where, upon successful acquisition, the board will vote to emit a large number of new shares (think 5-10X the total pool), which will be redistributed just among execs and investors. So, if you are an employee who held on to your 0.1% (which, on 1B, might be worth 1M), you might find out that after the acquisition you are going to be diluted maybe to 0.01%. And this is after all the other "healthy" dilutions that have happened to the company over the years, as part of their financing rounds.

<comment><USER4> I was part of a smaller acquisition Splunk made. My existing options at the original company were worthless at the time the deal closed. Instead Splunk and our management agreed to pay us out in cash that was lower than the value of what Splunk paid. In turn Splunk slapped on the golden handcuffs for those they wanted to keep and bumped up our salaries and threw the standard four year vesting RSUs at us with everyone starting at day 0. The rumor was our founder took the lion's share of cash on acquisition. Once I was in Splunk it was, unfortunately, what I feared. Beyond a lot of mediocre mid-level management and everyone calling themselves rockstars I asked about how a specific prior acquisition had gone. Most Splunkers were pretty candid about how poorly that had gone (it was their UBA acquisition, I was part of the SOAR acquisition). I saw the writing on the wall within a few months and left money on the table. It just wasn't worth it to me to stick around as I had been in a similar size Valley security company that was equally as bad.

It's unfortunate this is what the landscape has become. On one hand I'm happy for the SignalFX founders to have made it and hit pay dirt. But everyone else... Yeah, they're all going to get swindled on the deal. Sure you'll make some money but not nearly as much as a select few and even then there's a good chance anyone who tries out Splunk internally runs into the same wall myself and a bunch of my peers did. Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, IBM... They're all are done innovating. These companies buy relevancy and then are proud of their accompliments in changing the world. Or that's what they tell their prospects, customers and themselves. So much great technology and brain power are getting locked up in these non-R&D companies who are at a stage of run rate revenue but still think they're a startup that will continue to pull 50% growth YoY. It's absurd.

Splunk isn't good at acquisitions. I've seen it first hand. I'd never go back there willingly. I hope the SignalFX crew ends up better. But at the end of the day you're working at Splunk.

<comment><USER5> Well you got RSUs at Splunk + salary bump which is like ok deal?

Granted - your payout at acquisition didn't work to your expectations - <USER2> it's typical in SV - but after dust settled you been offered something not that bad in a company that is really not a lagger after all...

<comment><USER6> Umm, I've never worked in a startup, but if I do, a huge motivation would be make money. Risk is startup failing, not it getting acquired for good money. In the end, if all I'm getting is standard RSUs and salary bump, I might as well will join the established company at first place. I understand some people really do love to work for startups, but I think many don't and regardless potential to make money much more than standard job in future is always a motivation.

<comment><USER7> On average, the problem with being an employee in a startup is that actually it is easy to over-value your shares/options. However, there are still lots of cash-out stories as well, where the employee has made nice bonus on top. But to me it seems that for each cash-out story, there is like 9 or 10 stories where the options/shares have turned out to be worthless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good for them! I've been a huge fan of SignalFX since they launched. It was the closest commercial product I could find to Netflix's internal monitoring system. I mention it often when people ask for a recommendation of a monitoring system.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. SignalFX is great! I'm happy for them.

But also, dammit. Splunk will destroy it.

<comment><USER10> Why do you think Splunk will kill it?

<comment><USER9> Cause that's how acquisitions always work out. It might not be as obvious as "We are shutting down SignalFX." But they'll want to turn it into a feature of another product which is aimed at a different market, or move it to Splunk's infrastructure, which was designed for something else. Or maybe it's about adopting a common UX, which ends up being worse than what SignalFX has now.

Think of Microsoft buying Skype. It's still around, but it's not good anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems like a really impressive number, based on the 170% compounded annual growth rate referenced in their last funding round[1].

Huge assumption but if they started at 1,000,000 ARR in 2015 (which seems generous if sales just started then), 170% yearly growth over 4 years is ~$8.5 million ARR today. Over a 100x multiple!

1\. [https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2019/06/12/186761...](https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2019/06/12/1867619/0/en/SignalFx-Raises-75-Million-to-Fuel-Demand-for- its-Cloud-Monitoring-Platform.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't see the terms on that Tiger capital round anywhere online (very cursory search tho, so I'm open to being wrong!), but they raised $75 just 2 months ago. I wonder what the terms on that round were and what this acquisition means for the older shareholders.

Seems unlikely to be a bad deal, given that they _just_ raised, so I'm curious why a sale happened so soon after closing a round.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps the addressable market on their own was too small (or so the team at SignalFx felt), thus now is a good time to sell.

Splunk already has Enterprise and B2B sales down cold, adding a supporting product is an easy in-sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Splunk's existing cloud service is a disaster they are desperate to make it work but due to lack of experience in the cloud field they think they can buy credibility by acquiring a SaaS company to make it work and it will only get worse.

Splunk is forcing customers to sign on to it's cloud service by ending all perpetual licensing by November 2019 and forcing subscription cloud and term licensing to make it affordable to customers. It will take them an extra 5 or more years to break even as their cloud service has been in existence for 6 years. There is no guarantee of success as they haven't been known for their execution with poor leadership everywhere in the company.

The SignalFX exec management team will make money but no one else will. They will only be there for one year as they realize they've been put into subservient roles reporting to incompetent SVP and VP Splunk managers.

The regular employees will soon find out that Splunk is a chaotic and terrible environment and that no one is held accountable for their mistakes or lack of competence. Their stocks will be reset to what splunk will dole out for new employees and they have to vest for 4 years all over again.

There is no joy to this it's a brutal reality and Splunk will eventually be purchased by a legacy tech company like Cisco or a private equity like Thoma Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats to the team.

I used Signalfx at Yelp years back. It was a fantastic product - I miss it to this day. (Same with Splunk).

Both products set a ridiculously high UX bar, but they definitely charge accordingly for it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what this means for Datadog's soon to be IPO

<comment><USER17> I also wonder if New Relic is an acquisition target as well.

<comment><USER18> New Relic's stock is down 42% on the year so I don't see them doing very well. An acquisition would make sense.

<comment><USER19> Really... is there a reason for that?

<comment><USER20> they missed targets and told everyone that a new dashboard with existing features (newrelic one) was a new sale-able product?

<comment><USER19> I was wondering how NR1 worked out. Seems not great to me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tiger Global led the Series E round in June at a $500m post-money valuation. That means they get a 2x in a few months. This looks like it will be a fantastic exit for employees too!

</comment><comment><USER22> So the days of "Splunk for logs and X for monitoring" will change to "Splunk for logs and monitoring"

</comment><comment><USER23> Curious to see what comes of this from a product perspective... any speculation as to what they might be able to pull off in practice as a joint entity?

</comment><comment><USER24> Proof that the cyber security industry is an overlooked dark horse, full of opportunities.

Too bad it gets overshadowed by AI, cryptocurrency, VR/AR. I guess it's unsexy and not necessarily new. But there's a lot of money in it.

<comment><USER25> From the inside of the cyber security industry, it certainly doesn't feel that dark horse-like. It feels quite crowded actually.

There are two big things going for it though:

1\. There's an adversarial relationship that drives up demand for products.

2\. It's stupidly complex, so there's a lot of potential value add in anything that can simplify the problem.

The main thing going against the cyber security industry is that while it's sexy to subject matter experts, it's not really sexy to boardrooms, Silicon Valley tech startups included, many who see it as a cost center and something that slows down product development and thus do the minimum necessary to _look_ secure. Speaking from anecdotal evidence.

In the context of big companies, Krebs on Security had a great article in the wake of the Equifax breach which pointed out that there are very few CISO's (or equivalent) who report to the CTO or CEO. For the most part they report to the CFO, to the head of IT, or to the head of legal.

<comment><USER26> Concur, also from inside the industry. The reality is that almost every C-Suite executive I talk to sees security as a cost center, and rolls it (and IT even) into the CFO, or the COO.

We focus on helping an organization make security an enabler. Yet even those customers who get it - really only care when there's a breach, or if someone's bacon has seriously been saved.

Suffice it to say, I find the industry troubling, to say the least.

<comment><USER27> Lots of things are cost centers. SRE is a cost center. OPS is a cost center. Companies still pay a fortune for services that optimize these areas.

Hell, why do you think Splunk has 1 billion dollars to burn?

<comment><USER28> >Lots of things are cost centers.

Agreed. If you boil it all down, the only things that are "profit centers" are either Marketing or Sales. Everything else is a cost.

When a company I work for begins putting its employees into boxes like that, I look for a quick exit. It's only a matter of time before the C-level staff start reducing those "cost-centers" to a few overworked, underpaid staff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oops,

Just found 2yr old email from SignalFx asking if I interested in a Director position :)</comment>


New GitHub Terms of Service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2314-new-github-terms-of-service <comment><USER2>
        Solely to allow us to provide the Service and to host
        the Content you upload to the Website without violating
        any rights you have in it, you grant GitHub and our
        successors a nonexclusive, worldwide, transferable,
        fully-paid and royalty-free license to use, reproduce,
        display, modify, adapt, distribute, and perform the
        Content in connection with rendering the Website and
        providing the Service.

This appears to let Github take any software repository hosted there, and use it under this license to provide features to the github website. So they could take AGPL licensed software and modify and use it without complying with the source disclosure requirements of the AGPL because they have been provided this other more permissive license. It's essentially a free BSD license to everything on Github, for Github alone.

Also, "the Service" is defined as any product or service Github provides, so this could be expanded into any business.

The "transferable" in that also might let Gihub contract with some other company to provide part of "the Service" \-- perhaps in an entirely unrelated business than the current Github website, and transfer the license to any free software they like to that other company.

I don't know if it was intended to be used this way, and I am not a lawyer so I could be misinterpeting it, but I will not be hosting any software on Github if they adopt this TOS, without consulting a lawyer.

(The current TOS has nothing like this in it.)

<comment><USER3> No. Like it says, the license is solely to allow the service to function and display what you have uploaded to it.

Virtually every website that allows users uploads had a provision like this so that you cannot upload a copyrighted work and then turn around and sue them for infringement.

<comment><USER2> Except Github is hosting software, and this license allows them to modify and use that software in any way they like, without complying with the software's normal license.

<comment><USER4> > this license allows them to modify and use that software in any way they > like

Only "in connection with rendering the Website and providing the Service", i.e. they can display it in the web UI and syntax highlight it and whatnot.

<comment><USER5> > and providing the Service

This is the wording that concerns me most, because the Service is defined as:

> The "Service" refers to the applications, software, products, and services > provided by GitHub.

Thus, GitHub could legally use this to use any software hosted by them, so long as it entered their stack at some point.

Contrived example:

They could use a modified Linux kernel at the bottom of their stack, and refuse to give anyone access to the source. Breaching the AGPL, but it doesn't apply. Simply because the Linux kernel is mirrored on GitHub.

<comment><USER4> > They could use a modified Linux kernel at the bottom of their stack, and > refuse to give anyone access to the source.

Sure, if they wanted to risk billions of dollars of valuation for no good reason. After such a thing was discovered, how long do you think folks would continue hosting their private proprietary projects there?

<comment><USER5> As I said, contrived example.

Doesn't change the fact that the wording is troubling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > You may scrape the website for the following reasons:

> Researchers may scrape public, non-personal information from GitHub for > academic research purposes, only if any publications resulting from that > research are open access.

> Archivists may scrape GitHub for public data for archival purposes.

> It is prohibited to scrape GitHub for spamming purposes, including for the > purposes of selling GitHub users' personal information, such as to > recruiters, headhunters, and job boards.

How about a level of indirection?

Alice the Archivist scrapes GitHub and compiles a compendium of names / emails. She then publishes this information in bulk for anybody who'd like to use. Alice's cousin Roger the Recruiter downloads the archive and does what he does best. Alice isn't selling anything, she's just providing the information bundled up. Roger isn't getting it from GitHub, he's getting it from the public feed (say via Bitorrent or a public data set posted somewhere).

<comment><USER7> what makes someone an archivist?

<comment><USER8> archive.org, etc...

<comment><USER9> Or software heritage

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a bit ironic that GitHub proposes new Terms and conditions and there is not an easy way for the user to run a simple diff

<comment><USER6> It says "DRAFT — NOT YET EFFECTIVE" so it's possible they'll have that when it's official.

<comment><USER11> Could've did it on a wip_newtos branch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Section D, rule 7 seems like it could use some work:

> GitHub employees do not access private repositories unless required to for > security or maintenance, or for support reasons, with the consent of the > repository owner. [...] If we have reason to believe the contents of a > private repository are in violation of the law or of these Terms, we have > the right to remove them.

So, basically, GitHub says that there's a possibility for them to remove a private repo because of a hunch that it violates ToS, without actually looking at it to make sure?

<comment><USER13> It says "reason to believe" which means they will have evidence (the "reason"). You might need to sue them in order to see it, but that's usually how these things go.

If they wanted to give themselves free reign to remove repos they would say something like "we have the right to remove private repos at any time, for any reason, at our sole discretion."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Default Contributor License: To address growing confusion over licensing and > contributions to others' projects, we added a simple default contributor > license. If it does not suit your needs, you may add your own Contributor > License Agreement to your repository.

That is much needed. Does anyone know what the new default contributor license is?

<comment><USER15> "Additionally, unless there is a Contributor License Agreement to the contrary, whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms."

It makes me _so_ unreasonably happy to see that added to the terms of GitHub..

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm in the process of moving all of my repositories hosted on GitHub to fossil scm instead. Unlike GitHub it is open source[1] and with a simple cgi script[2] I am able to host all of my repositories on my own web server. After knowing git, fossil wasn't very hard to learn and it comes with ticketing and wiki built-in and accessible via a web UI locally on any machine I'm using.

One of the benefits in addition to being able to read fossil source code and being able change/style the web interface however I want is that I don't have to worry about staying up to date on Terms of Service changes I really have no say in.

Edit: failed to mention fossil can import/export to/from a git repository[3]

[1] 2-clause BSD license: [https://www.fossil- scm.org/xfer/artifact/f99187d1905883d3](https://www.fossil- scm.org/xfer/artifact/f99187d1905883d3)

[2] cgi script: [http://fossil- scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/server.wiki#cgi](http://fossil- scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/server.wiki#cgi)

[3] import/export git: [http://fossil- scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki](http://fossil- scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki)

<comment><USER17> I'm almost in the same boat. I'm putting all new repos in Fossil.

I like being able to have complete control over the web interface. I like that it's lightweight, unlike say Gitlab, yet provides a full website. I like that the bug tracker is part of the repo rather than part of a company's proprietary infrastructure.

The biggest advantage, by far, is that it's not Git. I agree that Git is good for a lot of projects. It's an unnecessarily complicated beast for small projects with a couple of collaborators, neither of whom are willing to spend hours dealing with weird commands to handle a repo that got messed up for unknown reasons. Fossil, unlike Git, is version control that others are willing to use.

<comment><USER16> I agree 100%, I'm a lot happier with it for personal projects especially once I got the hang of it, and you get a lot of web tools that are baked into it nicely. The only concern going into it was knowing that I couldn't change/undo previous history but since using it I actually think that is a version control feature you want (assuming you don't slip in a password) so you don't risk losing previous data, you just have to be more thorough in looking at what you are committing.

<comment><USER17> > assuming you don't slip in a password

You actually can delete a password using shunning, but it's not a regular part of the development process. (I only mention that because many potential users are scared off because they misinterpret not being able to change history.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious about this topic. How do you write such documents (ToS, Privacy Policy, etc)?

If you release a side project or a startup and you can't afford a lawyer like GitHub probably does, what are the solutions?

<comment><USER19> Do what a lot of people do, find your favorites, cobble together your own and go from there. Of course a lawyer is best, but until you can pay for one and at least while things like privacy policies are important for SEO, fake it till you make it.

Of course you should actually abide by your own policies. You can even search for common phrases[0] to see how many templates are out there.

0 - [https://www.google.com/search?q="We+use+regular+Malware+Scan...](https://www.google.com/search?q="We+use+regular+Malware+Scanning")

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I'll probably do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's disappointing that they don't allow a user to have two accounts.

I don't want to take my personal github credentials to work, and my employer doesn't use paid github services.

The effect is that if when I'm at work I come across a bug in a project hosted on github, I probably won't report it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Section K.3. is very problematic - it is (essentially) the same as the previous TOS. It states that github can restrict/delete your account for any reason, at any time, without warning. This may be fine for trivial projects, but if you're running a business and relying on github for actual revenue, this is completely unacceptable. I have asked people about this, and their answer has essentially been, Cross our fingers and pray it doesn't become a problem. I won't use github for anything remotely serious until this substantially changes.

<comment><USER22> What would be better wording?

<comment><USER5> A warning, and a appeal process, would remove much of the worry in this area, at least for the businesses I've worked with.

<comment><USER22> That sounds sensible. Hopefully @nsqe is reading this and responds. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chad-autry The new license grant to others is nicely explicit on what permissions are granted on an unlicensed repo vs the old vague "you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories." Note that you CANNOT legally edit your fork of an unlicensed repo. That would be violating the original repos copyright.

[https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service- dra...](https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service- draft/#5-license-grant-to-other-users)

</comment><comment><USER23> they really should've done this as a pull request...

<comment><USER24> Against what repository? There's no github/github.

<comment><USER25> Yes there is, but it's a private repo so we see a 404. Beside the point.

<comment><USER24> Right, sorry, I meant to say 'public'. And I don't see that it is beside the point, because there's no other relevant and public repository that I can identify - no github/terms or whatever.

<comment><USER25> I was saying my own comment was beside the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm really curious if new "Scrapping" terms apply to API usage.

<comment><USER22> "Scraping" is when a person downloads a full HTML page.

eg project repo page

Using the GitHub API (as intended) wouldn't be scraping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would assume Github, of all companies, would provide a git commit with a diff. Alas.

Here is a diff:

[https://github.com/lgommans/terms-of- services/commit/32e5aef...](https://github.com/lgommans/terms-of- services/commit/32e5aef37853ae8f2aa054f33236051c13d84b58)

<comment><USER28> We didn't provide a diff because the new Terms were not an iteration of the old Terms; they were written from scratch.

As you can see from that diff, comparing the documents in diff form was just confusing, so we didn't try.

We hope to provide future updates in PRs with a diff.</comment></comment>


Facebook forms PAC  - <AUTHOR> http://powerwall.msnbc.msn.com/politics/sept-27-obama-wows-in-hollywood-and-facebook-forms-pac-10860.gallery?photoId=45507&gt1=28135

<comment><USER2> money = free speech

lol cats = money for facebook

lol cats enable free speech.

any one who doesnt like lol cats must also dislike america.</comment>


Ask: Reducing web app barriers vs comment spam? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I'm building a new app that will have your standard cold start problem. In previous ventures I have witnessed people (through analytics) clicking to participate then bailing when they find they need to create an account.
What should be taken into consideration when designing an end user web application to reduce participation barriers.
A few options are.
1) Let anyone contribute anonymously in the beginning but monitor all messages for spam.
2) Do #1 but take an email address on good faith so I can attempt to get them to register a a later date.
3) Rely on facebook, twitter, oauth? There is still a price for this from the user's perspective.
Any other options I am missing? <comment><USER2> The answer to this will really depend on what you're building. If you're asking this question, then I assume community really important to you.

The best communities are pretty good at moderating themselves. Take hackernews or reddit for example. The barrier to entry is actually very low in each of these but the community decides what gets seen. Although ubiquitous, Facebook is actually another example because everyone is the moderator of their own community. eg: I wouldn't friend a spammer.

I'd suggest you'd think more about how you build a strong community than how to moderate spam. The community is the big picture. Spam is only a symptom of a weak community.</comment>


What is Uptime as a Service? - <AUTHOR> http://info.senseye.io/blog/what-is-uptime-as-a-service <comment></comment>


Intriguing properties of neural networks [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cs.nyu.edu/~zaremba/docs/understanding.pdf

<comment><USER2> A good overview of the paper is given by Ran Bi:

[http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/06/deep-learning-deep- flaws.ht...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/06/deep-learning-deep-flaws.html)

And a previous discussion of the results can be found at:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916877)

</comment><comment><USER3> The concept of "intrinsic blind spots" sounds like from a spy thriller. How can I very slightly alter my face to mess up face recognition software? The paper describes how to calculate "blind spots" that should hold for various different neural networks (even if they are trained on different data sets).</comment>


Understand contracts before you sign them - <AUTHOR> https://www.lawgeex.com <comment><USER3> As a lawyer, I am always excited to see innovation in the legal space. This seems like an interesting concept: using an algorithm to summarize a document (contract) and to flag unusual clauses. Put the document in, and out comes the legal blessing.

However, I am a little concerned about the viability of this concept in terms of producing a valuable analysis. A true analysis considers the context of a document. For instance, a one-year term is a common residential lease clause. However, what if the tenant was under a 6 month employment contract and needed to change locations? The algorithm would not know this and would not flag the clause. Or what if the tenant was 17 years old and couldn't legally sign contracts in the first place?

Sometimes interpretation of a contract comes down to the exact wording of a contract. Most boilerplate language is the result of years of evolution and precedent. A summary might subtly change or obscure the meaning.

Finally, you are getting very close, if not into, the unauthorized practice of law. I recommend contacting your state bar association for feedback.

That being said, I input my email address into your website and look forward to monitoring your progress.

<comment><USER4> Fellow JD here.

I have to disagree with you re: viability. Not only does most of our work lend itself well to automation (discovery, researching precedent, and predicting case outcomes), but this particular startup is aimed squarely at the most obvious domain where humans mostly aren't needed anymore: formulating contracts. Translating boilerplate legalese into natural language and running both parties through checklists of essential elements seems like an obvious solution to an expensive problem. I really don't see why 99% of contracts can't be automated outside of high-level practice.

Nor do I really understand your examples. I can't recall the last time anyone I know hired a lawyer to sign a rental agreement, nor do I see any reason why contract software wouldn't first check that both parties are legally competent.

Finally, I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea that "if you automate our profession, our protectionist guild will go after you." You're not wrong, and it would be wise for LawGeex to stay wary -- of all trades, the lawyers are going to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant -- but startups like LawGeex or RocketLawyer are clearly far more in the public interest than our ludicrously expensive middleman services. We may as well ban self-driving cars because the Teamsters want to keep dangerous, error-prone human truckers.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you would have to have some sort of questionnaire for the user to complete, along the lines of the TurboTax wizards or legal document assembly software, with questions based on the algorithm's analysis of the contract. I didn't see anything like that on the website, but it is certainly doable. At the moment, the website is only accepting residential real estate contracts which is why I used them as an example.

As a member of the State Bar of California, I can only wish it acted as a guild protecting my interests. Quite the contrary, it has an adversarial relationship with its members from overseeing the attorney discipline system to enforcing continuing education rules. It is more about consumer protection than attorney protection. I see your point, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We have the ability to calculate a rough estimate of the time required to read a given text. This means we can create a law that states that for a contract to be valid, each party must be given at least 80% of that time[1] for the contract to be considered valid.

Don't want to give the necessary 30-60min? Don't write so long of a contract, or figure out a way to do without.

[1] 20% is to remove any margin of error in the calculation; the exact amount is configurable

<comment><USER6> There's no need for such a law.[1] If you haven't read it, or if you don't understand it, don't sign it. Problem solved.

If you don't have the confidence to ask for time to consider or seek advice about a contract you've been asked to sign, that is a different problem.

[1] In some jurisdictions there is a statutory 'cooling off' period for particular classes of contract (eg five business days for the sale of residential property) during which the purchaser can decide not to proceed, but there is no such need in relation to commercial transactions generally.

<comment><USER7> Have you read and understood the T&C for Hacker News? How about your ISP? The captive portal in your local coffee shop? Your computer's/phone's OS upgrades? Your car's ECM (it's probably buried in the user manual)?

We encounter too many of these on a daily basis, on things required simply to participate in modern life, to read/understand the vast majority of them.

<comment><USER6> The proposition that it is impractical to read and understand every contract we enter into does not present a need for a law invalidating or avoiding every contract where insufficient time to read and understand it is not given. I think the only consequence of the proposed law (if that proposition is correct) would be to destroy contractual certainty for a time; the premise denies that anyone would actually use the period of time for its intended purpose.

I also only referred to contracts that are signed. Signatures are important: as a general rule, you are taken to have read and understood the terms of any contract you have signed. If you agree to the terms of a contract without signing (eg many of the examples you mention, or oral acceptance, or clicking a button) there is generally no such assumption. Whether that will afford you any greater measure of relief if you later want to get out of the contract depends on the individual case, but there are circumstances in which it will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm always shocked by the number of people who don't read the contracts they sign.

It's one thing if you have hundreds of pages of legalese in front of you - <USER2> can see the value of a service such as this, or hiring your own lawyer for such cases - but for a few pages, five minutes of your time max, I just don't understand why so many people don't take the time to do so.

One habit I've noticed in highly successful people is that they don't skim over bits of contracts (something I'm certainly guilty of); everything is read _in detail_.

Does anyone have any anecdotal stories about successful people _not_ taking 10 minutes to read a contract?

<comment><USER9> I think there are two things at play here.

1\. People perceive they don't have a choice. For example when you visit the doctor and you have to sign 12 different form/contracts. Most people believe they either sign them or don't get treated.

2\. Fear of not understanding. They think they wouldn't understand they legalese even if they tried, so why even bother? Personally I don't blame them. I've read contracts that were so wordy and had so much legalese in them you'd be convinced the lawyers wrote them that way just so everyone involved would need to hire as many lawyers as possible simply to understand the darn thing.

<comment><USER10> I think a grossly underutilized tactic is learning the art of quickly reading and red-lining a contract. Meaning you go through line by line and cross out particularly nasty lines or clauses, or make quick edits, and then initial next to the changes. Then sign at the bottom and hand it back.

It's a habit I picked up from being in the music business for years, specifically being a concert promoter in my early 20's, where it's absolutely standard and normal practice to get a contract, red-line or change the stuff that doesn't apply or doesn't work for you, and return it. A good example would be striking language like "or for any other reason" at the end of a cancellation clause, or changing terms from perpetuity to 12 months, stuff like that.

I've since done it at doctor's offices, when renting or buying things, when signing a simple freelancing contract, and many other contexts. It's much less confrontational, after all you do sign it and hand it back to them, putting the onus on them to deal with it if it's a problem. I recommend this approach highly if you're the type to care.

<comment><USER11> Don't they usually contain things like. "Any changes to this standard contract have to be approved by the CEO of LargeCorp in writing, otherwise it is invalid". And every change has to be initialed by has to be initialed by both parties.

<comment><USER12> In that case the entire contract is invalid and _neither_ party is bound by it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think a sample report (from a fictitious but plausible contract) would be helpful to clearly explain what the service does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the idea. We were thinking of adding a short video or screenshots when we release the updated Beta version of LawGeex

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really hope this (or something like it) will succeed. There are so many situations, where a lawyer would be helpful, but is too much of a hassle to get involved (often because they are expensive).

AI lawyers giving plain language information and indicating areas where you want to get a real lawyer involved sound pretty neat.

@lawgeex: Your Headline with the Register-Button is weirdly aligned to the left in my browser (Win+FF), not sure if this is intentional. It looks wrong, as all the following sections are well centered.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had you analyze the monster 37 page lease I just signed for a new apartment. It looked mostly boilerplate to me with several addendums attached. I'm not sure your engine was able to process the PDF, it just sort of spit back a page of "issues" that were garbled text and weird characters. I can't seem to get back to the page I was on now either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Thank you for trying to upload your monster 37 page lease :) I apologise that LawGeex didn't work. So that we can figure out why it didn't work, I would really appreciate if you can email PDF to email@example.com so that our tech team can take a look at it. Many thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting premise. I often wonder about liability issues in these kind of intermediary cases. The tenant signs agreement on basis of plain English summary. Landlord seeks to enforce agreement. Subsequently it turns out there is an error in the summarisation process and an important clause was missed or incorrectly summarised. Yes, the tenant will be liable to the landlord but a cause of action may be available against the intermediary.

Clearly the intermediary will have various disclaimers in their terms of use but that doesn't greatly assist the tenant and reduces the value of the proposition from the tenant's perspective. Certain disclaimers may be unlawful under consumer protection law also.

I tried to upload the following as a .docx document but got the 'Unsupported document' error.

      RESIDENTIAL LEASE

      Landlord permits you to stay in the property for 6 months from 1 January 2016.
      In consideration you agree to provide Landlord with your firstborn within 30 days of his/her birth, or in the absence of children prior to 1 December 2020, $1,000,000 no later than 1 January 2021.

      ………………………………….
      Landlord

      ……………………………………
      Tenant

As an aside, as a site extolling the virtues of plain English in agreements, I would have thought you could have put some effort into providing plain English terms of use.

Finally, any stats on the territory breakdown between the 60k documents that have been uploaded? Would be fascinated to see this!

</comment><comment><USER17> > Currently, Lawgeex only supports residential lease agreements

Sadface.

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel like this would be great from employment contracts and nondisclosure agreements where the asymmetry of the situation is rather large and, depending on the company, the contract may actually be long enough to warrant a professional analysis. Of course, collecting multiple contracts from the same employer would help with pointing out what is actually unusual/normal (for that particular employer).

Residential leases seems like one of the worst contract markets to start off with. Firstly, because what is legal and illegal to put in a lease varies from place to place. For instance, in Ontario, it is illegal to collect a security deposit (a deposit may be collected but it can only be used towards last month's rent). Secondly, what is normal and what is unusual will also vary, most likely on a much finer grained level (ie: by city/town rather than by state/province). Thirdly, you'll have to deal with leases from less-than- professional landlords (e.g. using a lease drafted according to the rather different laws of a different province/state). Fourthly, the lease will vary a lot depending on the landlord (ie: large property management company vs small property manager vs individual owner-landlord) and the accomodations (ie: house vs condo vs apartment).

Lastly, few residential leases need to be more than about 5 pages long, including all the things the landlord has added over the years after being burned by various bad tenants. If there is a problem, the landlord and tenant will either resolve it or: if the landlord wants the tenant to move out, either it is easy to evict or it is difficult to evict but nothing in the lease will change that that much and if the tenant wants to move out, they will break the lease and good luck to the landlord suing the tenant trying to get the money back (the tenant risks very little by breaking the lease if they are not going to rely on the current landlord as a reference for future landlords). I doubt there is a special clause which can be put into a residential lease which will make it more difficult for the tenant to break it.

Then again, I rarely find legalese which I can't parse (although sometimes it seems written in such a way that it will take me a full five minutes) so perhaps I'm not in the target market for this kind of service.

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried to upload a PDF and a TXT file and it said they were both unsupported :(

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a GODSEND. Legalese has long been used to irritate and take advantage of customers who don't have time to read every contract. Short of rewriting the laws to require plain english overviews of contracts, this is the next best thing!

Great work guys!

Note: I didn't click on the link the first 3 times I saw it because (of the title) I assumed it was an article telling me I ought to read contracts ;-]

</comment><comment><USER21> I clicked on Register Now and got a 404 page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi I am sorry that you experienced a 404 page error message. Our tech team is investigating the problem.

Thanks for reporting the problem

<comment><USER22> It's caused by (some) ad blockers because you call ga() (google analytics) in your javascript which loads through google tag manager which is blocked from loading by default with uBlock for example. This all causing the modal window to not show, leading to a catch error forwarding to your 404 page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for bringing this to our attention. You are 100% correct and we fixed the problem

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting. NOTE: With cookies disabled, a 404 page is displayed. That's very confusing.

</comment><comment><USER24> > @2015 LawGeex. All Rights Reserved

Not sure if that's a typo, but I like it. It's different.

</comment><comment><USER25> Tried a PDF and a .docx and got an << Unsupported document type >> error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi thank you for uploading a doc. Currently we only support residential leases. If you were uploading a residential lease and got this message, i would appreciate if you could email me the doc email@example.com so our tech team can investigate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just the title of this is along the lines of "check if the crocodile is real or plastic before sticking your head in its mouth."

</comment><comment><USER27> looks a lot like what I built with NLP months ago:

[https://freelancers.legalsifter.com/](https://freelancers.legalsifter.com/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/legalsifter-helps- designers...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/legalsifter-helps-designers- and-developers-read-their-contracts/)

</comment><comment><USER28> "LawGeex compares your legal document to thousands of others in our database" They should start selling those as well.

<comment><USER29> Probably cannot. Many databases of this type are constructed with confidentiality agreements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just have tried to register, got this:

Server Error in '/' Application. The resource cannot be found.

Firefox/Mac.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Our tech team will look into this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I tried to register and was taken to a broken page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Apologies for the error message. What browser/OS are you using and have you tried registering again? thanks a lot

<comment><USER31> Chrome/Manjaro, both at the latest.

I haven't tried registering again, the contract I wanted reviewed expires in a few hours so I picked a different method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Register seems to be crashing under load.

<comment><USER33> Same here...</comment></comment>


Show HN:Become the Hackerman![Atom syntax theme] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mr-ubik/atom-ubik-neon-syntax <comment><USER2> Looks awesome! Will there be support for Sublime or Vim?</comment>


How we built Bertha, a large format camera that will shoot 1.1×1.1 metre slides - <AUTHOR> https://www.diyphotography.net/how-we-built-bertha-a-large-format-camera-that-will-shoot-1-1x1-1-metre-slides/ <comment><USER2> I've been inside a similar camera at Edinburgh's Nelson printworks which used to print maps 1:1 from the hand drawings. (Back in the seventies) It was a walk in room for the negative. Nelson printed jam labels when the map trade was quiet. Smaller artwork!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know much about the mechanics of such cameras, but wouldn't they need to get custom lenses and custom film of that size? I would imagine it is prohibitively expensive to get one-off manufacturing done like that.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our application - TweetPort - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, we are developing Twitter application called TweetPort. http://www.tweetport.net
It is a personal Twitter summary report. We use a special algorithm to determine which tweets are the most important based on link popularity. Tweeted links then show up in your report, organized by relevance. The algorithm is calculated using Twitter friend retweets, total Twitter tweets, popularity on other services,… The report comes once a day, weekly or monthly. When you sign up, you choose exactly what time you receive the report.
It would be nice if you could take a look at TweetPort and give us feedback :) <comment><USER2> I just tried it, and signed up. Process was painless, went from the homepage, to the "how does it work" button, to create an account, paypal, and back.

Once I registered I felt a bit let down because there really wasn't much to look at. It would be nice to see examples of other people's twitter feed summary. Show me a screen with 12 faces of popular people I can click on. So I know what to expect.

Can you try mine? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2689356>

</comment><comment><USER3> Agree with voide_2, people are more likely to sign in via twitter.

Is there an opportunity to rate tweets that tweetport send me ?

For e.g. if you send me a tweet report with your algo, I didnt like it do I have a choice ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, now you can't rate tweets. It might be interesting feature :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://tweetport.net>

* People are more likely to click "Sign in using Twitter" than "Create an Account", especially if you are using Twitter sign in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we will consider that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 3 dollars per month? I suggest you to hike up that price.. I know it sounds like people would be more willing to pay if the price is lower, but I can tell you that at 3 USD, you will never be able to grow your business or market it effectively.

</comment><comment><USER6> In IE8 I don't seem to be able to see the styling</comment>