Show HN: Brandable domains, right to your inbox - <AUTHOR> http://name2inbox.com/ <comment><USER2> A better question than "Why subscribe?" (though, that's a good question) is why aren't you just openly listing the names you're trying to sell on your site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I have just come across your comment, and I did come to that conclusion as well. I did start to list the weekly names on the site as well. But thanks for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be helpful to include an example email of what you are offering, as that might encourage more people to sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I decided to start including the weekly domains on the front page as well so people can see them if they visit the site. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study - <AUTHOR> https://www.jotaen.net/2e2Ff/sabbatical-self-study-reflection/ <comment><USER2> I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching. I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job, or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills. Though of course, you improve bit by bit everyday just by code review, bug squashing, practicing best practices, do better tests, etc. But mostly these are the mundane tasks.

While you can argue that technical skills have diminishing returns, but I do really want to focus more on it at this point of my life.

I see it in HN, Reddit, everyday people make very cool projects and I wonder what it will take for me to reach that level?

Anyway, I decided to buy the book "Engineering a Compiler" and set a goal to actually finish it. I guess that's my soul searching direction will go for now.

<comment><USER3> > it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills.

This is true, particularly, if you work full-time, and your job is not connected to the subject of your passion. You will have few hours in the evening, but for a hard subject you may not have enough energy.

You can try remote work, it worked for me. Currently, my client allows 2-3 days a week of working from home, and also now I'm looking for my next place for a full remote position. I save 1.5 hours on commute, 20 mins on lunch. So I have additional time and energy to focus on maths, building things, and running.

There is an additional barrier to move into a different or more advanced field: most companies want to hire people already experienced in particular areas. It will be very hard to convince a company that you can learn fast and contribute and also that they can already benefit from your current skills and technical maturity. It looks risky for them, they may have relevant candidates, or do need such expertise right now.

Our industry love talking about fixed vs. growth mindset, how crucial is the latter. At the same time, the hiring at many companies is a vivid example of fixed mindset towards candidates: your current skills matter infinitely more than you potential. The thing is it can also be hard to convince them that you actually can acquire required knowledge fast: you know, everyone says to be a "quick learner" in their CV.

I think your situation is typical and for some people the only solution was to start their own business eventually, and outplay the system.

So, focus on improving yourself in the evening and keep trying to find your way in!

<comment><USER4> The barriers are all in the mind.

The simplest way to upgrade skills is to work with teams working on problems of interest to you, where you have to meet up with them, atleast once a week if not more. The social aspect is what drives learning.

Doesn't matter if you are working full time. Find a subject that interests you THEN find/contact research labs/profs/startups working on it. Tell them you have X hours a week (for 3 or 6 months) you want to devote to it and ask them for an assignment. If you have more experience and skill than the avg grad student they employ, it's easy to find a project.

I have done this with incubators, univ labs and research labs close to me. I am luckily in a large city, where once you start looking, you will find all kinds of interesting characters doing interesting things. Follow their blogs, twitter feeds and github repos. Identify where you want to contribute. Make a small bug fix or document some aspect of their code and the door opens.

<comment><USER3> This is a great comment. We need to keep questioning our internal barriers and self-limiting assumptions. Thanks for reminding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm doing something similar. I got undergraduate degrees in CS and business and worked 5 years for a large corp right out of school. I saved my money and, using a rollover for business startup, I funded my business. I'm lucky enough to have a 2-earner household and a partner that is giving me time to figure out where I want to go next. I've been on "sabbatical" for a little over a year. I've had a couple false starts with respect to the business.

In the last couple weeks I've decided that I too wanted to level-up on my hard skills but away from CS. I've never been too enamored with trying to sell a product or service that had a lower barrier to entry for competitors. Too much convincing and pitching and , uggh, selling for my tastes.

I've always been interested in Chemistry so I decided to teach myself using textbooks. I realized a while ago that if you have an interests in a subject strong enough to keep you reading and working through a textbook, you can learn anything to a high level because hiding in the pages of a college textbook is the knowledge of many decades of human discovery, engineering, and passion as well hundreds of hours of hours of lecturing, teaching, and even tests (assuming you buy the answer manual). Almost any college course you'll ever take will be a watered-down, rushed meander through a couple chapters in a textbook. If you are willing to go through those chapters, in full, and do most or all of the exercises, you can learn basically anything on your own to a undergrad or graduate (MS) level.

And if you're fortunate enough, as I have been, to be able to fund your own company, your lack of degree doesn't matter because you don't need to signal to anyone that you know what your doing because you are doing the hiring. Granted for what I'm trying to do, I will hire a person with a degree to "head up" my labs for outside credibility's sake.

<comment><USER6> Web developer with a background in Chemistry here! Hit me up if you want to discuss Chemistry-related software development :)

<comment><USER7> What sort of stuff do you do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those wanting something a bit less intense, the Recurse Center in NYC is a great place to practice a few months (or now even just a week) of self study with some of the brightest folks you'll ever meet.

<comment><USER9> Anything similar in LA?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice post Jotaen but I feel you are heavily downplaying how well a mechanical engineering degree looks when switching. You have math and critical thinking skills but just needed a little time to get the fundamental computer science concepts down.

Also how does the idea of boredom come into play here? Yes self-studying is important but at what point do feel burned out and want to apply it in a real world work station?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I definitely profit from basic skills that I acquired in studying mechanical engineering, as you mentioned. However, when applying for jobs I didn't have the impression that my prospective employers valued that too much, at least as far as my CV is concerned.

Not sure what you mean by "boredom"? I don't have a clear "definition of done" or a deadline for my sabbatical, that's also why I try to diversify the topics I'm looking at rather than going through them one after the other. I'll definitely need/will start working again in a couple of months, but my hope is that working freelance and continuing self-studying is not mutually exclusive. But I'll need to see next year how this works out then in practice.

<comment><USER11> I'm currently in software but graduated from mechanical as well.

I think one of the biggest drawback of the current education system is the assumption that people should have one major and that it would last throughout their career. In reality, most of the skill learned ended up being not used, the proportion of the major is basically the opposite of what the job market actually need. And the constraint of it actually ruined a lot of people and careers. I've been fortunate to be able to choose whatever class I want in college and discover my love for programming - if not for that I might be in a much less productive place today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I also recently took about 10 months off of work, specifically to focus on learning. It was incredible, and I don't regret it financially. I would often get up at 6 in the morning or even earlier (which I never do) just from excitement about what I was going to learn about and accomplish in the day. Spending my time focused Only on what I was most interested in was incredibly rewarding. It's going to be awhile before I am able to do it again financially. It is a life-impacting hit to the bank account, especially factoring opportunity costs, but I agree with the OP that it feels well worth it as an investment in myself. Can't wait til I get the chance again.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm also on a sabbatical, and to some extent, also self-studying -- but focusing on filmmaking. I'm acting, writing, directing, and producing!

I recently made this hour-long, no-budget feature film about an evil social media company, available on Prime Video: [https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron- Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1](https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce- Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1) Worse than even The Room, but might be the first movie including a realistic depiction of a FAANG interview?

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting. I'll watch it

<comment><USER13> I did say "worse than The Room". You've been warned ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't see how you guys have an appetite for this kind of thing after years of education and full time work. If I take a sabbatical, I'm walking across New Zealand.

<comment><USER15> Yeah there's no way I could have done this five years out of school. I remember contemplating getting my pilot's license just a few years out of school and after looking at now much I needed to study I was like: Hell no.

But 20 years out of school — This was ideal for me. Walking across New Zealand sounds awesome and if my kids were older I'd do it, but honestly I'm really happy just reading books, watching videos, and tinkering with different ways to program.

After decades in the industry I can't say enough about how awesome it is to not have a schedule, boss, meetings, performance evaluations, 1:1s, deadlines, people counting on you to make the right decisions (though I guess my wife and kids would argue that they still depend on my decisions).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm also taking a sabbatical! I guess mine is also self study, although I never quite thought of it that way. I've taken this time to be able to have in-person lunches with many interesting people, work on open source projects, and sit in on seminars at the local university. I think I'm just beginning to learn how to access local resources for learning.

I'm also thinking of freelancing, and have been gearing up for contracts, and also to perhaps start an agency with a friend. I really value the freedom that has allowed me to explore my programming and math (and climbing/yoga/martial arts) interests these last few months.

One unexpected thing about my sabbatical: my social life is better, I have way more time and energy for it :)

<comment><USER17> I love the idea of taking sabbatical. If I were to take time for one, I think the structure would look more like what you're suggesting here. Expanding network of people to learn from and contributing to OSS.

As introverted as I am, I have learned in recent years how much easier and faster it can be to learn from other people than from textbooks alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having done this multiple times myself, I have to say...not everyone is wired for it. I spent a lot of time in coffee shops on reddit and, of course, hackernews.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am 20 years out of college with a CS degree, working in your typical business rules development kind of job. Exactly the kind of job that doesn't need a CS degree, but I'm perfectly decent at programming business rules, so there's that.

Last year, I've been on a learning binge myself, due to the fact that I want to understand the underlying workings of the technologies that are shaping our near future. In this interest, I have taken what little time I have (with a job and two children) to relearn the baseline college mathematics that I've lost from my apathy towards serious continuing education. I first completed the course "Learning How to Learn" and applied the practices within to courses in Calculus and Physics. I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT.

I was never a great student, and it could be just because, as I think I've discovered, I'm just a slow learner. My early educational talents and successes were due to a lot of early reading that I did, but it's clear to me that it takes a lot of repetition before I start to understand a subject, and I often have to go back over lectures, then read the associated notes, and run through a ton of practice problems (which I then put into anki) before I grasp a subject. Due to this my learning has been slow (along with the two kid situation), but I'm certain now that I have a much better grasp of the subject matter than I did when I was twenty. I'm not suggesting I'm smarter with age, what I am suggesting is that I didn't have study habits that allowed me to flourish.

Clearly, the current educational models that we are using in our schools are failing students like me who get a good head start due to early reading, but can't learn fast enough to keep up in a classroom environment. It is clear from what I've learned about the learning process from Barbara Oakley and others that the actual processes that we put in place are further suboptimal for the learning process, but the ways that we set up our education system are not the result of experimentation. If I were to surmise their source, I would say that they are explicitly designed to fail, so that we can excuse reduced spending in public education systems.

Still, these self-study courses are great for people like me, as long as you are permitted to study at your own rate. This is important as I'm going to guess that perserverance is as important as intelligence when it comes to advancing to the point where you can aid research teams. I predict that nations that automate educational models (as well as hiring a broad staff of educators, lecturers, and tutors) that are successful will have a much larger impact on the future of the information age than they did in previous eras.

<comment><USER20> > I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT.

It's probably too late for that course, but IMO MIT's courses on edx are much better structured than on MIT OCW or whatever it's called.

<comment><USER19> I've done edx, Coursera, now mit ocw, khan academy, and plan on continued experimentation. The best tool overall I've found is Anki.

I've also tried to keep my learning carried with lots of reading. The most academic book of the year I had was"energy and civilization".

I would strongly recommend learning how to learn to help formulate a learning plan and making sure you get the right level of challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thinking back on all the subjects I've ever studied and books I've read, I've lost a lot of familiarity with many of those subjects (although I do find myself picking up much faster when I come back, even years later).

I dream of taking this kind of sabbatical too, it is just a bit scary to do it without some kind of framework that would allow me to plan my week, and annotate, structure, accumulate, and review the things that I learn. I feel like I should focus on finding / designing that system before planning on taking the sabbatical.

</comment><comment><USER22> I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I suspect it will work out well.

I've been in an "involuntary" sabbatical. When I left the company I'd been at for over a quarter-century (mostly as a manager, but very technical), I immediately ran into "Go away, old man. Nobody wants you."

It was pretty jarring, insulting, and humiliating, but what really happened, was I got upset.

When I get upset, I get busy (paraphrased from "Back to School").

Fortunately, I have the means to set up my own company (I actually have 2), and I have spent the last couple of years ferociously focused on working full- time to write software, using the most modern and relevant techniques for my chosen direction (Apple tech -I've been writing Apple software since 1986).

It's working well. I haven't lost a thing, in over thirty years of software development. In fact, I seem to learn much faster, these days, than I ever did, when I was younger. I suspect that all the context I have makes picking up new stuff easier.

I've been building (actually, just organizing and adding to) a HUGE portfolio, with six figures of lines of code, in dozens of repos, spanning at least a decade (although I also reference my first engineering project, from 1987), hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of articles and essays, and a number of deployed and shipping solutions.

I've learned to work alone very well, indeed (I spent my entire career in HUGE heterogenous teams; spread around the globe). That was one of the things I was afraid I wouldn't be able to master.

The difference in productivity is staggering. I often get more done by 8:30AM, than I used to get done all day as a corporate software developer (I get up early, and close my green ring by 6AM).

I tend to be all about "Get Stuff Done." I like theory and experimentation, but I've been writing shipping software my entire career, so that's the direction I've picked. I heard a guy once say "The #1 feature of the project is SHIPPING."

Working alone has forced me to keep the scope humble, which has worked out, after I learned to adjust my project plans. The biggest coefficient for me has always been quality. I like to think of myself as a craftsman. I get special joy from writing high-quality software.

One of the biggest lessons that I've taught myself was how to be very, very flexible (I call it "ultra-agile"). My corporate background was Victoria Falls (REAL Waterfall). I have been yearning to break free of that yoke for decades.

Working alone has allowed me to explore an evolutionary design and construction process that has, so far, worked fairly well.

The story is still very much unfolding, and we'll see how it goes. I still have a lot to learn, and I like it.

More Will Be Revealed...

<comment> AA-BA-94-2A-56 Very cool commnent mate, look forward to hearing about what you'll do in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was hoping for more details as to what you have been doing and how it has been.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can anyone tell me what's the font used in the article? It's beautiful.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the "Input" font family by David Jonathan Ross.

[https://input.fontbureau.com/](https://input.fontbureau.com/)

<comment><USER24> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Painting with Math Formulas in Google Sheets [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnCkF62gkOY <comment><USER2> This is so amazing!! Is there more of this math-driven animation or design on the web? I constantly need to do math for web animations. And even though I learned this in middle and high school, I struggle to translate to real world problems.

<comment><USER3> Check out Shadertoy. By the same person (Inigo).</comment></comment>


Fotonauts Is a Gorgeous Photopedia  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/10/tc50-fotonauts-is-a-georgeous-photopedia/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I don't think it was till I saw this that I realized how full of it Scoble is.

<comment><USER3> "Flickr done right"? For any X in "X done right", X better be "twitter".

<comment><USER2> Haha, well stated.

Frankly, that comment was slightly offensive. Flickr is seriously one of the best put-together sites out there. I would rank it with Vimeo in terms of aesthetic beauty and pure functionality. Probably higher, even.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Flickr is a great example of a decent, attractive UI that doesn't get in the way of the actual features and utility of the website.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prints - <AUTHOR> http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/08/prints.html <comment><USER3> Data that stays "live", that people are interested in, remains accessible - <USER2> a torrent stays seeded, it doesn't matter that it's now on SSD rather than magnetic hard disk. And digital media makes copying really cheap. When I meet up with my friends for a LAN party we sync photo libraries - even the most prolific photographers only have a few gigabytes, so it's easy for everyone to act as a backup for everyone else.

If there are some pictures you care about, save your own copy, or several copies of them.

Pictures that no-one cares about? They may die, but that happens to any data that no-one cares about. The same kind of "photos at the bottom of a drawer" phenomenon can happen with digital too - I've read stories of family photos accidentally packaged into software releases, or of people discovering unexpected things in a backup of a backup of a backup that was just copied around for years without anyone looking inside it. But the vast majority of physical photos are lost, just as the vast majority of digital ones will be.

</comment><comment><USER4> These personal memories already are often not valued by children and grandchildren. A lot of photos, diapositives and super-8 or hi8 films end being disposed every day after someone dies. And there is no museum or collector interested in conserving them either. So, there is no guarantee that physical media endures time.

I'd even argue that todays digital photos and videos capturing a "greater value for society" are more likely to survive because they are often already archived and published on the web.

Todays normal users are taking way too much (bad) photos and selfies nobody will be interested in in 10 months, much less in 10 or 100 years. Some pictures might be worth posting to Flickr or Facebook, but they don't have enough longtime importance to make physical prints from them. And most likely my children after my death won't browse in excitement through the 454 photos I've taken with my phone on my latest trip to New York, nor the tens of thousands of pictures rotting on my hard drive.

<comment><USER5> >Todays normal users are taking way too much (bad) photos and selfies nobody will be interested in in 10 months, much less in 10 or 100 years. Some pictures might be worth posting to Flickr or Facebook, but they don't have enough longtime importance to make physical prints from them.

Who gets to decide what should be saved? Who gets to decide historical worth? My guess would be archaeologists and historians, and how do you know what will be interesting or useful to them 100s of years in the future?

<comment><USER6> > Who gets to decide what should be saved? Who gets to decide historical > worth?

Even if someone tries to decide what should be saved or what might be worth something, it's really hard to figure out what will be rare/unknown in the future -- if you can figure that out, you can probably make a fortune hoarding something like Beanie Babies to resell down the road.

There's a collection of random snapshots that someone took in a mall in the early 90s [1] that pops up on imgur and reddit every now and then. They were originally taken to compare malls across America, but now they're actually interesting from a cultural/historical perspective.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/TkLmh](http://imgur.com/a/TkLmh)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is one of the reasons Camlistore exists ([http://camlistore.org](http://camlistore.org)). Its storage format was designed with digital archaeology in mind. If you can preserve the bits themselves, the format of the data should be self-evident.

The trick, of course, is making sure the bits are preserved. I hope that one day each of my descendants will keep an enneff.tar.gz somewhere in their files—much like the shoebox in the cupboard—so that future generations can see how cute my rabbits were.

<comment><USER8> The Camlistore storage format is self evident, however, most blobs you put in Camlistore are not. Maybe you can reverse engineer the Matroska container you keep your movies in, but can you reverse engineer h.264?

Even jpeg would be very hard to reverse engineer.

Presumably you can add instructions, or even source code, for decoding pictures, sounds and movies. But then you get into technical problems and there's no guarantee the average grand-grand-children of the future will have the skill or time to use these information.

<comment><USER7> I doubt our great grandchildren will forget how to decode JPEG or h264. We haven't forgotten how to read Latin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post really resonated with me. As someone born in the 70's, all of the photos taken of my childhood were shot on film and displayed and preserved as prints. Over the years, my parents selected ("curated") the best of those prints and put them into a photo album that is a physical record of my childhood. Sure some of the older photos are somewhat faded and discoloured, but they're still a good record of the occasion, and, more importantly, as a physical vs. a digital artifact, my album needs no technical expertise to store or view.

By contrast my eldest son was born in 2008 so all of the photos I've taken of him, and his brothers born since, have been digital. Every week my wife and I go through the photos we've taken (on our increasingly cumbersome DSLR and two smartphones) and post the best, with brief comments, to a private family blog. In many ways the blog is superior to my childhood photo album, but I'm also thinking about how to best preserve it in physical form for my own sons so that when they are my age they will have a tangible record of their childhoods even if blogspot.com is dead and gone.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm far more confident of the longevity of JPGs than your average inkjet photo print. You need to spend upwards of $1000 for a pigment printer, use acid-free fiber paper, use acid-free mat board, and place it behind UV-filtering glass to give it a good shot at multi-generational longevity. No mean feat.

<comment><USER10> The problem isn't the JPEG file format, it's the media the JPEG files are stored on. If your child finds an old CD or USB drive of yours 50 years from now, they're not likely to be able to retrieve any data from it (just like you can't read a DECtape today). And the on-line services that you store your photos on today are not likely to be around in 50 years either. For your JPEG file to survive, you'd have to actively keep on transferring it from one medium or service to another.

<comment><USER9> > For your JPEG file to survive, you'd have to actively keep on transferring > it from one medium or service to another.

Or go through all of the steps I outlined above. I'm hoping to do both. Well, actually, I need to upgrade to a pigment printer. I have Canon's prosumer Pro-100 right now, and would love to pick up the -10 or -1 at some point.

But the images I _really_ care about are all shot on medium format black and white film, Fuji Acros 100, which I develop, scan, and print[1] from myself.

[1] i.e. both silver gelatin on fiber in the darkroom, and inkjet on fiber as needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> If the images exist only as a digital image file, the answer is almost certainly, "No".

Hrm I don't quite understand. Right now just about every important element of modern history is being saved in raw formats, as well as jpegs, pngs, psds and the like.

Are we assuming that a hundred years from now we'll have completely lost the ability to view these images and videos?

London 1970s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPIaG644jsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPIaG644jsI)

London 1990s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84k4Tkj6wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84k4Tkj6wc)

London 2000s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSTh80Aybjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSTh80Aybjs)

In a hundred years we'll lose the ability to view all of this and only physical copies will survive? How are we even supposed to store video then? You can't print it out, and if you burn it to a CD it's just as useless.

Not being able to plug your 40 year old USB memory stick into whatever-magic- future-technology exists is one thing, but there's no reason whatever-magic- future-technology wont be able to run a little virtualized system that can display it for you.

I'd say the opposite. In a hundred years 3d printers would have gotten to the point where they could just make some sort of peripheral on the fly to view old CDs, records, and even tape drives. In the future if you're browsing the thrift store and you come across a pristine CD of Silpheed I bet you could walk into your local 'maker' shop and they'll print you out a Sega CD to play it on.

<comment><USER12> No, what will happen is that sometime in the next 50 years a DMCA request will coming for removal of those films due to images or music on them. One is entitled "Rush Hour" so will probably be caught up in a sweep for copies of the Jackie Chan film of the same name.

Or youtube will go out of business (like the original google video). Or in 5 years the people who posted the videos will pull them down as their business model changes.

If you want to see it already on youtube create a playlist of videos especially music videos. After about a year 10% of them will have been removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have strong opinions about this. I think the skills needed to maintain a "digital archive" are actually fairly advanced. For example, my cousin had many photos of their children growing up on an old computer. The computer crashed and, they lost all the photos. I think this is actually a very common story.

</comment><comment><USER14> The most important point that often gets lost is to curate your photos. You should have a collection of the best of the best, which can easily be copied everywhere all the time. I have about 500 or so from the last 15 years of digital photography (my kids, mostly) that rise to this status, and about 50-60 on top.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure this translates. If it was that important, couldn't they have reversed engineered the format and built a new (even basic) system to read it?

Furthermore, if you have digital copies of the data and old versions of the software, you can virtualize/emulate the software to recover it.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't help when the bits have literally fallen off the tapes.

<comment><USER16> That is an argument for better digital storage. Not cumbersome and expensive dead tree storage.

<comment><USER17> I don't think it has to be one or the other. Why not both?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favourite example of digital archaeology from recent years is [http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/source/](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/source/) \- saving the Prince of Persia floppies.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8)

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyway, almost nobody is actually making backups and keeping them around in obsolescing file formats on rotting media.

They are uploading everything to facebook or google or apple, leaving all the details of long-term storage and display to them. Where will those services and that user content be in 20 or 100 years?

</comment><comment><USER19> We know next to nothing about the historical architecture and culture of tropical countries because they made house out of bricks and straw, and wrote on clay tablets. Historians lament this fact and descendants like us have little to lean on and build upon culturally.

</comment><comment><USER20> Instead of finding shoe boxes in the attic, in the future we will run data mining scripts that find information in the crazy wide ocean of information out there - like our grandparents Facebook profiles.</comment>


SWIFT takes over Golang in latest TIOBE ranking - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2017/03/10/apple-swift-programming-language-popularity/ <comment><USER2> Swift and Go aren't competitors. Different realms, different audiences.</comment>


Krill: A terminal feed reader supporting RSS and Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/p-e-w/krill

<comment><USER2> As an existing solution, newsbeuter [1] is an excellent and fast terminal reader with many features. I have settled with it for a while after trying many alternatives. If you are too much into e-mails and using a terminal reader like mutt, sending new feeds as e-mails with rss2email [2] is also an option.

[1]: [http://newsbeuter.org/](http://newsbeuter.org/)

[2]: [https://github.com/wking/rss2email/](https://github.com/wking/rss2email/)

<comment><USER3> I'll put in another nod for newsbeuter.

rsstail and multitail allow for a true console-mode feed-as-stream. Quite useful that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have been through a fair few FOSS feed readers since Reader went away. Currently settled on Newsbeuter but it doesn't get as much use as it should. I see this being scanned much more frequently, particularly due to the live stream view which for RSS and Twitter searches is very cool. Had played with the CLI Twitter client t but didn't stick with it. This might have enough varied content options under one roof to keep me visiting.

Nice one! Fwiw I also like the README emoji usage and dig reading articles in the terminal. I just like and want the text. Most times the rest is noise. Apart from these emoji.

</comment><comment><USER5> RSS feed readers can be fun. I have one hooked up to a Teletype machine from 1926.[1] It usually follows the Reuters top news feed. I've tried feeding it from Twitter, but the banality of Twitter is just too painful to watch at that speed.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14](https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14)

</comment><comment><USER5> What can you get from Twitter without credentials any more? I used to have a Twitter reader with spam filtering, but it's useless now.

<comment><USER6> You can go to, e.g. [https://twitter.com/nagle](https://twitter.com/nagle), and read some dude's tweets.

<comment><USER5> Does Twitter block you if you poll that too much?

<comment><USER6> I'm sure there's a point at which it becomes too much, but that's basically how I browse Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Totally knee-jerk—I've merely scanned the github page—but shouldn't this be called "Baleen" instead? :-)

<comment><USER8> Both krill and baleen whales are filter feeders (i.e. eat what they find filtering water). Baleen sounds like a good name for PyQt GUI to krill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What differentiates this from every other feed reader, aside from a million emoji in the README?

I'd like a feed reader that has low memory consumption, marks things I've already seen as read so I don't see them again, and which defers actual display of HTML feeds (such as RSS) to other software like a web browser.

<comment><USER8> For Atom/RSS canto should cover your needs, provided you are looking for a terminal based reader. It runs as a daemon with a ncurses interface. [http://codezen.org/canto-ng/](http://codezen.org/canto-ng/) Newsbeuter should be interesting, but I've never used it.

<comment><USER9> I tried it, because although it doesn't let me keep using my web browser to read RSS-syndicated feeds (which often has pictures that don't do well in the terminal), I couldn't tell from the website if it remembers what you've read. It does, and I'll have to look at the logic it uses for that if I ever break down and write the software I'd like to use. I'm not sure what the right combination of timestamps and post url/content make up the right signal to prevent post edits and site reorganizations from mucking things up.

But it uses more RAM than my window manager, (GTK-based) text editor, taskbar, or shell, just to load the stock 3 feeds. And then canto-curses takes half a second to open (on hot cache, so it isn't waiting on mass to scoot anywhere, but it makes about 3000 syscalls interrogating the disk for all its dependency libraries), waits for a full second to do nothing while closing ("select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {1, 0}) = 0 (Timeout) <1.001081>" in strace), and uses even more RAM than the daemon--with an entire additional python interpreter.

Thanks for the recommendation, though. I'll let you know if I find what I'm looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Once hacked tw.sh [1] to read read tweets in newsbeuter or liferea RSS reader. Translates displayed URL into href to not redirect via Twitter (would be nice for Krill, too). Too much scraping may get you locked, though.

[1]: [https://gist.github.com/gnuarch/4e698aba900a2693d545](https://gist.github.com/gnuarch/4e698aba900a2693d545)

</comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare with Rainbowstream as a Twitter client?

[http://www.rainbowstream.org/](http://www.rainbowstream.org/) [https://github.com/DTVD/rainbowstream](https://github.com/DTVD/rainbowstream)

<comment><AUTHOR> Rainbowstream is a full-featured Twitter client while krill merely displays tweets. Rainbowstream uses the Twitter API, krill parses Twitter's HTML and therefore requires no Twitter credentials at all.

<comment><USER11> I'll stick with Rainbowstream then, Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment>


Democratic leaders simulate secession from the US if Trump re-elected - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/business/media/election-coverage.html <comment><AUTHOR> My other post was flagged for sensationalism, so I slightly modified the title. This title actually does describe what is actually in the article (at the end).

<comment><USER2> I believe you should be using the title from the article as is, when it fits. Anything else is editorializing and frowned upon on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually I do that, but in this case the title was almost meaningless ('How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong'). I wanted to highlight the bit I found interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to convince my boss to use Angular.js - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I work for a Brazilian mobile ad network that has two major Rails application and a lot of old school jQuery-based JavaScript that could be refactored into a Angular.js to improve code quality and maintainability.
I wanna hear from the Angular.js developer and enthusiasts, what reasons could I use to influence my boss into accepting Angular.js into the projects?
Thanks <comment><USER2> The first step would be to understand his/her priorities.

Talk to your boss, make a two second statement like "I'm excited about Angular.js and I think it can help improve our business. However, rather than just pitching a technology to you, I'd like to learn more about your priorities and the priorities of our team so that I can focus my energies on improving our business."

Then sit back and listen.

Business priorities will trump a change in technologies. Also, if you want to be taken seriously, then you should know both the pluses and minuses of switching to Angular. What browsers do customer use? Are they supported? What is the skillset of the team? Will training be required? And so on. Be ready to discuss these topics objectively.

What benefits do you think Angular will bring? How will that help the company develop faster at a lower cost, provide a better user experience that'll increase revenue, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://andrewaustin.com/an-overview-of-angularjs-for- manager...](http://andrewaustin.com/an-overview-of-angularjs-for-managers/)

I wrote this to convince my boss to use AngularJS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are these applications doing? Do you want to turn these applications completely into Single Page Applications or you just want to have some clean JavaScript instead of the old school jQuery?

<comment><AUTHOR> have some clean JavaScript instead of the old school jQuery?

In our particular case the JS code is quite a mess, which of course could be fixed without getting rid of jQuery, but I really want to use all the features of Angular.js

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://coderfactory.co/posts/top-sites-built-with- angularjs](http://coderfactory.co/posts/top-sites-built-with-angularjs)

show him this

</comment><comment><USER6> Create a "prototype" i.e. don't ask permission. If time prioritization is a problem then spend a few hours after five making it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Create a reusable directive that you can embed anywhere in the app and just enough API's to drive it.

</comment><comment><USER5> jst ask him to follow this thread ....m sure he would be enlighted .:)

</comment><comment><USER8> honest question: Is JQuery considered old-shool?!

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it is just that when the application grows too much, it is interesting to have the JS organized in a more standardized way, the MVC feature and two-way binding is very attractive to me.</comment></comment>


Scalable Image Processing Using Hosted Cloud Services - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iron.io/2012/05/best-practices-scaling-image-processing.html

<comment><USER2> I just use chunky PNG for my image processing needs. ImageMagick is too bloated and contains features I don't really need. I call chunky to resize avatars and pictures uploaded once, and then use a delayed job to resize them into other formats that won't be needed immediately.

</comment><comment><USER3> What would be the advantage of using this vs using Resque + S3 + heroku worker auto-scaling?

<comment><USER4> Presumably: cheaper, easier set up. Sounds a lot like PiCloud.com

<comment><USER3> The way I understand their pricing (.05/hr, .10/hr, .15/hr based on minutes jobs get pulled off queue), I'm essentially paying 3x more for priority queuing that I can bypass by setting the INTERVAL=3 in Resque. Hm. This an expensive way to set a variable.

<comment><USER5> IronWorker is billed by the second so if an image takes 5 seconds to process, you only get billed for 5 seconds of the hour. No need to deal with auto- scaling heroku workers to keep your costs down.

And priority on IronWorker has a much different meaning than setting it on your own private Resque instance so comparing that based on price isn't really a fair comparison.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why MongoDB is a bad choice for storing our scraped data - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scrapinghub.com/2013/05/13/mongo-bad-for-scraped-data/ <comment><USER2> I really don't understand why people use MongoDB.

It seems like it's a elegant technological metaphor (lets use mmap, the OS is our cache and we can overwrite in place in RAM) that in practise turns out to be a terrible idea. Overwrite/mmap cannot be made reliable, requires blocking write-locks, wastes disk, and causes problems shuffling data around as it grows. Add other bad decisions (keys aren't interned, seriously?)and it's just a terrible limping monster.

Abandon it, walk away.

<comment><USER3> Because when you're not operating at significant scale, or have certain specific use cases, it's a fantastically elegant solution and one that's very quick and easy to set up.

I have used mongodb for a number of smaller projects, and I have had an excellent experience. It's not "a terrible idea in practice". It might be a terrible fit for what _you want_ , but that doesn't mean it's bad technology.

<comment><USER4> _"when you're not operating at significant scale, or have certain specific use cases, it's a fantastically elegant solution and one that's very quick and easy to set up."_

When you're not operating at significant scale, you can use a relational database. They're easy and fast to set up, have nice write-safety guarantees, are more flexible than a key-value store, and will scale well beyond anything that mongo has ever achieved. You can even use them as a key-value store! The downside, of course, is that you have to a tiny bit of knowledge about set theory, and that's a deal breaker for most "developers" today.

The whole point of the GP was that Mongo _isn't_ elegant or easy...it's just naive and short-sighted, and the architectural mistakes within it are fundamental and probably unfixable (at least, not without killing the speed advantages they claim). The real reason that people use mongo is that most webapp devs don't have a very good understanding of how computers work, and want everything to look like Javascript, because that's all they really know.

<comment><USER5> You lost me when you quoted the word "developers".

Edit: And this is downvoted for calling out the fact that people on HN can't discuss a freakin' database without hurling insults.

<comment><USER4> I quoted "developers", because we need a term to distinguish people who know basic computer science from people who know just enough to install software and piece together APIs. The latter group tends not to realize that things like overwriting your working set in memory and global write-locking lead inevitably to consistency and throughput issues.

The primary problem in software today is that we've confused the ability to build something with actually knowing anything of value.

<comment><USER5> In the real world though, both groups still need to use what works in practice. It's entirely possible for MongoDB to work sufficiently well for a certain group of people in a reasonably cost effective way. Exaggerating its problems (as bad as they are) doesn't add weight to your agrement. For example, global write-locking will not _inevitably_ lead to consistency or throughput unless the write frequencies are sufficient to cause and require that. Lots of data problems aren't "big data", they're barely a medium.

I'll agree MongoDB is not a terribly well engineered database however I don't agree that SQL is always the best alternative in these simpler scenarios. There are lots of things wrong with using SQL to solve every data problem. I also don't agree that knowing SQL is equivalent to understanding "set theory". I've known plenty of DBAs who don't know the first thing about set theory and really just know just enough to install the software and piece together the APIs. The fact that one has chosen SQL doesn't make them good at working with data any more than choosing MongoDB makes someone bad, or implies they don't understand "set theory".

What concerns me mostly though isn't the MongoDB issue but that we can't discus the issue in a professional way, without elitism and distain dripping through. You seem to have confused "computer science" with "anything of value". I happen to believe there are more things worth knowing that are of value to practical software development than just the computer science (not to minimize that of course).

<comment><USER6> SQL isn't the alternative, it's the standard and noSQL databases are supposed to offer extra value to cause you to migrate. According to these articles, MongoDB doesn't offer any real additional value, thus you shouldn't use it.

It's not about elitism, it's about making good decisions. That said, given all the hype with companies that hire, protesting loudly might not be the best short term personal decision. Meh.

<comment><USER7> These articles are just one side of the picture which gets heavily upvoted on HN.

And of course it is about elitism. Listen to yourself. "It's about making good decisions".

I mean who are you to judge from the outside what technology a company should use for a specific use cases ?

<comment><USER6> I wasn't specifically talking about the articles, just in general point that'll I'm happy to stand behind. I'll happily repeat it: unless you have a specfic use case, RDBMS is the default and it should be so. Now if you have a specific use case, fair enough, but the aforementioned examples don't honestly seem to be valid reason to throw our the advantages of RDBMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested in hearing what the author's new storage system is. What would be compelling is to hear if the same hardware and storage with the new storage system performed better than mongo with some semblance of concrete metrics. There are a lot of complaints here about mongo -- all of them not new -- but no hard numbers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Whenever I see the "You don't need Mongo DB, use an SQL database" and then in the flaming back and forth, I never see my key problem mentioned:

MongoDB makes it easy to scale out (replica sets and sharding), where is the "easy to setup replicated and sharded open source SQL database?"

I mean, I know that Postgres has replication (via Slony? honestly, it's been awhile since I looked at their solutions) but I don't recall it being as dead simple to set up.

For me, setting up replication needs to be easy because we redistribute the store as part of our product and we need scalability (both replication for redundancy and sharding for scaling).

So I'm honestly asking here, where is the easy to use sharded and replicated open source SQL store that I've been missing?

<comment><USER10> That "easy to scale out" is a misnomer. Replica sets and sharding work in the technical sense, but the implementation isn't anywhere near what I would qualify as production ready.

For example, today my entire production MongoDB database was running 3x slower because a single replica in one shard was down, and their buggy PHP driver kept trying to talk to it despite it being marked down. I really enjoyed waking up at 2am to deal with that.

It relates back to the "easy to use" nature of their marketing. It really is super easy to use and develop on, but the minute you need to do anything important or serious, it breaks down.

You aren't doing yourself any favors going with it except as a proof-of- concept.

<comment><USER9> But Mongo DB being buggy isn't a reason to need to use an SQL database vs. a NoSQL store. An SQL database could be buggy as well (I still use Postgres and comparing anything to that quality-wise is just going to bring sorrow for the thing you compare it to ;) ).

FWIW, it's been spotless for us so far. Our needs aren't web scale, but they're big enough to need scaling features.

<comment><USER10> The main issue with MongoDB is that it's so easy to use and seems like it scales, but soon you're invested in it to the point of refactoring being a serious engineering effort, and you're stuck with something that doesn't actually offer real scaling features.

So, it's less "nosql vs. sql" and more just "don't use mongodb".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's like people started complaining about MongoDB just for the sake of it. I guess it's the new trend?

\- Ordered data and skip / limit: These would run just fine on any database system. Given that you have appropriate indexes. It does not matter if there are a trillion items total, as long as you are seeking over an index and the result set is in reasonable size.

\- Restrictions: A lot of software has restrictions. Filesystems has file name limitations. RDBMSs have table / column name limitations. It's a fact of life. Why is this a con for MongoDB?

\- Impossible to keep working set in memory: It is a fair argument that MongoDB has shitty memory management because it just delegates the responsibility to OS. However, this is a concern with any DBMS. Also, given that there are appropriate indexes, you don't need to keep the entire database on memory. This comes back to indexing problem.

\- No transactions / lack of schema / no joins...: I don't remember mongoDB claiming to have such features. My car can't fly. I'm not complaining. (Well, sometimes)

\- Locking: Fair point. Better I/O performance might come handy (like an SSD) or eventually sharding.

\- Poor space efficiency: Fair point about fragmentation and field names. Compression can be achieved on the filesystem level. There was an article about that a couple of days ago. I'm not sure about pefroamnce though.

\- Too many databases: This should not be a big issue. Mongo does not go ahead and allocate a couple gigagbytes for each db, it uses incremental file sizes.

\- Silent failures: Yep.. There it fails miserably. Recent versions are better though.

<comment><USER12> Why are you taking this personally? They're just listing reasons why it's not a good fit for them. Useful information to others who are trying to pick a database for similar applications.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry if it looks like I'm attacking the criticism. Nope, I would not use MongoDB ever again, after a year and a half with it. I have my reasons for this decision.

I just don't like people bashing something without valid reasons. It might just be a perfect solution for similar applications, this is not a good way to evaluate.

<comment><USER13> >I just don't like people bashing something without valid reasons

That really doesn't seem to be the case here. Like you, the article's author(and several others here) have had issues with it for their particular use-case, and the reasons are clearly listed in a well organized paragraph by paragraph summary explanation in the article. Others here who've had a similar experience at least stated they had issues with it as well, even if they didn't go into much detail about it.

And speaking of the lack of _valid reasons_ , to be fair, many relatively new technologies like these often get significant _praise/hype_ without many valid reasons as well, other than [X]startup/company is using it, so it should be able to work for me, or it must be an awesome technology to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> you lost me here

""" Ordered data

Some data (e.g. crawl logs) needs to be returned in the order it was written. Retrieving data in order requires sorting which is impractical when the number of records gets large. ""

it requires _indexing_ and is quite feasable as I do it every day with stock ticker logs ( also required to be retrieved incrementially )

There are a few other flags that make me wonder about the exact limitations you found, but I will be anticipating your follow up post to see what your fix was since some of those issues are very common.

<comment><USER8> Also, mongo has natural ordering which would do what the author wants without sorting.

<comment><USER15> No mongo natural order is just order on the disk. It is not always in reverse insertion order

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Now the interesting thing about this post is this, I can see why they wanted to use mongodb, and I can see why it bit them in the arse.

What interests me is why they would want to keep _everything_ in the database? I'd assume that they need to aggregate and curate the scraped data. After the initial scrape the majority of actions surely are going to be on the metadata of the scraped content? (where is said data, when was it scraped, how big, relationship to other data, etc) This data is much smaller and can be stored in relational database, as its proper structured data with relationships.

This allows the nasty unstructured data to be kept on a plain boring filesystem. After all filesystems are exceptionally mature, universal, multilevel key-value stores.

Now people will say that filesystems don't scale, well that's not really true. ext4/ntfs on a single system won't scale, but something like lustre/gluster(although not as neat)/gpfs scales linearly with the amount of nodes you apply to it.

<comment><USER17> This approach (scraped data on FS + metadata in DB) works well for storing scraped data. It was the first thing I prototyped when we started the project to move away from MongoDB. We've worked on similar designs in the past where the data is in S3, it's a common pattern.

We'd need to code the searching, filtering, paginating, (distributed?) job management ourselves while being careful to keep the DB & metadata consistent. It works best if each file is a reasonable 'chunk' of data (not too big, not tiny). None of this is a problem, and it scales very well as you said.

In the end, we went with HBase for crawl data in the new system. Of course, you can look at this as files on a filesystem (HDFS or others) :) It does a lot of what we would otherwise have to code ourselves and it's a good fit for applications we want to build on that data in future (e.g. storing other crawl datastructures, processing with hadoop). I'll provide more details on that in the next post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quote from the original author in the comments. TLDR: it was human error that got us into this situation:

"The lack of joins & transactions of course did factor into the original decision. My point (which perhaps could be clearer) was that MongoDB ended up being used outside of the area in which we originally intended to use it. There was some reluctance to add another technology when we could get by with what we had for what was (initially) only a small use. Additionally, some limitations were not always well understood by web developers (who were new to mongo and enthusiastic to try it). I see this as our mistake. With hindsight, it's clear we should have introduced an RDBMS immediately and kept MongoDB for managing the crawl data."

<comment><USER19> Databases almost always grow outside of their original scope, much more so than applications. And there is a good reason: data is more valuable when it's combined with other data.

So I think it's reasonable to be cautious about using a system that can't effectively grow outside of its initial special purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use Mongo for storing a fairly large amount of scraped data and it works great. Some of the data I store is results from bike races that I want to display on my website in a better way than it is displayed elsewhere. The columns change which makes Mongo a great fit, but the data is pretty static.

The real issue here is that it feels like the author has just 'discovered' these problems as if Mongo was hiding them all along and after a long time using the system he just found them. The reality is that all of the things he brings up are well documented. It is fascinating to me how people pick a buzzword database and don't bother to think about how their application might run poorly on it over time.

<comment><USER21> Every time there is a mongodb retrospective or experience report posted to HN, the top comment is one along the lines of "Well, these issues are all well documented."

Firstly, the fact that some drawback is well documented does not excuse the fact that it is a drawback.

Second, while some drawbacks are documented some implications of these drawbacks are nuanced and only become obvious with experience. A good example of this is the implications of "schemaless" databases (more accurately: databases that do not check data against a schema). Not having to migrate tables is a boon for lots of development. It's also a giant pain if it turns out that bugs cause data integrity issues.

Third, this experience report is really useful since poorly structured scrape data is one of the areas that I would have considered to be ideal for mongodb.

Most people don't have perfect foresight. I don't fault the author on his lack of omniscience with respect to how mongodb would turn out for them. His original reasoning (given in paragraph 1, sentence 1) does not seem stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> People aren't complaining just to complain. When you can't even ctrl-c out of the shell there is a huge issue. It's a known bug, around since v1.8, 'minor' priority. Yeah, thanks for trapping me in the shell.

<comment><USER23> Apparently this is the ticket being referred to:

[https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2986?page=com.atlassi...](https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2986?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all- tabpanel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I read the whole post waiting to see what they ended up using as we are having similar issues, only to find that it's another post I have to wait for..

<comment><USER25> We went with HBase. Cassandra would have been suitable too, but we already use Hadoop for data processing so it was a natural choice within the infrastructure ecosystem. We will write a followup about that.

<comment><USER26> Clouderan here! Glad to hear you guys went with HBase, I'm looking forward to your follow up post. Will you detail your key design / architectural setup?

Did you guys roll your own HBase environment or did you go with the CDH? If you're using the CDH version and have any questions, feel free to shoot an email to cdh-user.

<comment><USER25> We are using CDH4.2 and have had a very positive experience so far.

Cloudera has in fact been an inspiration for us to follow, you guys have really struck the right balance between open source and commercial support. We follow the same philosophy with Scrapy (an open source web crawling framework), as you do with Hadoop and its ecosystem.

<comment><USER26> That's really awesome to hear, thanks for your kind words. I'm looking forward to the follow up blog, depending on your key design you may be able to take advantage of Impala for ad-hoc queries using SQL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why you people hate MongoDB? It is great to start with NoSQL, and for new little projects.</comment>


Dumping/Backing up Mysql Databases (Innodb) without locking tables. - <AUTHOR> http://phyxius.posterous.com/dumpingbacking-up-mysql-databases-innodb-with

<comment><USER2> Try XtraBackup, it takes a little time to set up but its great and can be automated.</comment>


Show HN: First Touch friendly Platformer - <AUTHOR>

No one enjoys virtual controls for a platformer.My game "Rubber Boy" tries to solve this by using only touch gestures to control.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.solvevolve.flubber
Basically, flick to jump and tap to stop. Personally I find this scheme much more practical and I have been able to go through some tough levels easily.
I tried my best to incorporate most challenging and interesting levels only.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVlA2HBsT1Y
I am planning on open sourcing the code sometime soon( let me know if you would be interested). The game has no Ads, no IAPs its completely free (The network permission is to log level finishes).
P.S. I am looking to get into the gaming industry. Let me know if you can help me. <comment><USER2> What technologies were used in the creation? When would you post the source?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have used libgdx and box2d. I am thinking of making it open source (have to check if there is any bits of copied code). Will make the source available in a couple of weeks.</comment></comment>


MPAA: We Shut Down YTS/YIFY and Popcorn Time - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-we-shut-down-ytsyify-and-popcorn-time-151103/ <comment><USER2> This is a bad time to be a pirate, DMCA requests via IP address to your ISP, taking down sites that allow you to download movies. Paying for a VPN connection to hide your IP you might as well pay for Netflix and other movie streamers and wait for the movie to make it there.

<comment><USER3> > might as well pay for Netflix

Strange suggestion. At least it is now available where I am but it doesn't sell anything I want.

I am sad to see YIFY go. They produced quality products.</comment></comment>


We launched a startup community web app - <AUTHOR> https://unibubble.co.uk <comment><USER2> Still digging into the site, but my immediate first impression was that without someone showing me a link to this site saying "We launched a startup community web app" I'd have no idea what it's doing.

When you click into the search bar, it becomes a little bit more clear, but not fully clear. I feel like at least a little blurb explaining what you guys are is necessary here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! We have just launched a web platform as a international directory of startups, we would love to see some of you over there.

It's completely free to list your business, we are just trying to get businesses connected and trying to give your businesses more exposure without paid ads etc.

If anyone has any questions just let me know! Hope to see you there:)

<comment><USER3> Besides the search utility, what features does the site have?</comment></comment>


Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/06/14/snellintosh <comment><USER2> I think the way to think about all of these Apple products is through the lens of what I believe their long-term strategy to be.

Apple wants to onboard people into the _new_ Apple ecosystem, which is iToys and backend services. They believe this will be better for you, not just for them. They control the iOS-based world in a way they could never control "computers". They're trying to get as many people as they can into their new Disneyland-ish ecosystem, where everything you do is approved and monitored and everything you buy is bought through them.

The low-end Mac seems to only matter now as a source of low-end users, who need carrot and stick to move them off Mac and onto iOS, so low-end Macs won't get better but low-end iOS devices will. I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon, and that will signal the end of low-end Macs.

The high-end Mac users have a better story, because Apple needs developers for their ecosystem, and those people need good tools. I can't imagine Apple being interested in developing dev tools that run on non-Apple devices, and I think they'll want an absolutely guaranteed source of computers with whatever features are needed to develop the best stuff for their ecosystem, so I think a high-end Mac product line will live on with each new version being a bit more iOS-like. If they want to keep the lockdown on iOS while retaining full power to develop for it, they will probably have to keep the less-locked-down macOS going for dev machines for a long time, but things like the Mac Mini have no place in this picture.

<comment><USER3> > I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon

Seems unlikely. From a 2016 interview:

> MacOS is meant to be operated with a mouse and keyboard. Apple says it > doesn't make sense to lean forward to touch your Mac screen. An iOS-powered > iPad works best with fingers, which means you can just lean back while using > it.

> "We did spend a great deal of time looking at this a number of years ago and > came to the conclusion that to make the best personal computer, you can't > try to turn MacOS into an iPhone," Schiller says. "Conversely, you can't > turn iOS into a Mac…. So each one is best at what they're meant to be — and > we take what makes sense to add from each, but without fundamentally > changing them so they're compromised."

\--[https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/does-the-mac-still- matt...](https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/does-the-mac-still-matter/)

<comment><USER4> The split view of 'producer' vs 'consumer' often seems like a good yardstick for this kinda stuff, rather than high/low end.

For situations where you want to be productive on a device, mouse and keyboard, desktop, big screen, proper seat all very important. For situations where someone consumes on a device, touch input, portability, small screen, headphones connectivity.

That seems to match the philosophical split for MacOS vs IOS, and maybe future developments can be best predicted by applying that lens.

<comment><USER5> Why is that a useful framework, though?

I've never met people that fall squarely into "producer" or "consumer", everyone you talk to has a creative hobby or three, and might be either a "producer" or a "consumer" at different times of day, or different moods, or as inspiration strikes.

It's a wide, diverse spectrum turned into a strange false dichotomy that leaves us with weird pseudo-categories like "prosumer" (and "conducer"?) middle grounds.

Maybe there is something about enforcing that dichotomy in leaving them to different contexts, different devices it forces you to switch hats in a physical visceral sense. Certainly studies say that such a forced context switch can be good for the brain to know it's time to X where X is produce or consume (or "prosume"?). Yet that seems a strange reason to force that on users. Is it anything more than an equivalent to "It's good for you, you must eat your vegetables before dessert?"

I naturally flow between consumption and production use cases, so why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?

It's an interesting philosophical split, but I'm curious how useful it is in the real world. Microsoft's "everyone can be a creator, everyone should be a creator, your devices should support you whatever you decide to do on the creation/consumption spectrum" reaction marketing seems the better approach to me, philosophically. I'm not defined by a "consumer" or "producer" 'gender', and I don't see why I should be.

How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?

<comment><USER4> >Why is that a useful framework, though?

>why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?

Mostly because, in my opinion, every attempt to create a device that does that has resulted in failure, and those failures are due to fundamental opposing priorities with each 'mode'.

I may of course be wrong, in which case you're right this framework should be junked. But so far nobody's cracked both use cases well with a single setup, and the model holds. IMO.

>How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?

For a brand that's betting so heavily on the walled garden, ecosystem-based sales and marketing methods, having an 'answer' to every consumer need is essential to is to not have an answer for one of your customer's needs, ecause that opens the door for that customer to adopt something outside your ecosystem. Keep them within the curated suite of products you offer, and keep them happy, or you'll see attrition. Note all of the noise about the latest MBP devices and how they're no longer meeting the needs of many content creators, to see how tricky this can be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Geekbench is pretty much useless, especially across architectures and OSes. It claims a maybe three-watt iPhone CPU can beat a 40-watt Ryzen 1200, which is plainly ridiculous. Apple makes a good CPU, but you'd have to be crazy to think they have beaten the competition by a factor of ten in power consumption with no compromise. When you see something incredible, be incredulous.

[https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2051](https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2051) [https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/50](https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/50)

Does anyone know of a decent iPhone benchmark? I'd be very interested in comparing their hardware to other CPUs, but none of the benchmarks I know run on iPhones. And the people who know what they're doing, e.g. Phoronix, don't test much mobile hardware.

<comment><USER7> The transistor count of an A11 is 4.3 million, the Ryzen has about 4.8 million depending on the type. And x86 is a bit wasteful in terms of what it does effectively with those transistors because the front-end required to translate x86 instructions.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about A11 but Ryzen transistor count is 4.8 billion, not million.

<comment><USER7> You're right, can't edit anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "But the striking thing to me is just how much smaller the Intel NUC is."

Add the volume of the NUC's hideous and ungainly power supply brick. Then make your judgement on size.

If you've taken a mini apart, you'd see that the easiest way volume could be significantly reduced is by replacing the space for two 3.5" drives with space for one modern NVME gum stick - a trick which the already NUC does thanks to its being developed more recently.

The mini has Thunderbolt and and digital audio in/out. The NUC has neither of these.

If you compare the interior of the mini and the NUC, the NUC does not stand out as an marvel of engineering or miniaturization.

Anyway, whose desk cannot fit a mac mini?

<comment><USER10> I really don't understand how people can put up with these huge power bricks. Just because you can hide it under a desk it doesn't mean it's not there.

And speaking of all in ones, the iMac doesn't have a power brick either. If you screw your NUC to the back of a monitor/tv you will end up with _two_ power bricks if you're unlucky. They may fit under the desk, or the cable may be too short and you'd have to keep one or both _on_ the desk. I don't see the advantage.

Apple has other, significant problems right now, but the devices not being mini enough isn't one of them.

<comment><USER11> Every Mac I've every seen can message with a huge power brick, often integrated directly into the plug.

I can't plug my MacBook in under my desk because it's one two-pronged and it's super heavy so it falls down.

I don't care if it has a power brick or not, just make it easy to plug in. Bonus: a cable material that is designed to withstand years of use not months; their cables are no better than the competition and they have a crazy failure rate.

<comment><USER12> Those Mac wall-wart chargers are awful. You essentially have to buy the extension cable, and voila, you have a bulkier version of the power adapter every laptop comes with.

And how in the world do they not have a grounded plug?

<comment><USER13> Because they're double insulated, so no need for ground. Also with UK plugs (The superior plug type) the apple chargers are pretty great, no way they're falling out the wall then. With the US plug they're pretty annoying though. But I have to say I do prefer the extension (which I luckily have from previous Macs).

<comment><USER14> I (resident in the US) have replaced all my outlets with universal sockets, and routinely use the U.K. style plug on my Apple power supplies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > I don't expect that Apple would make a box quite this ugly—those two USB > ports on the front of the case would be the first to go

That's what's annoying about Apple hardware and great about PCs in a nutshell: the constant need to put facile design looks above actual usability. Why should I have to fiddle around the back every time I want to plug or unplug a usb device?

<comment><USER16> There's a bit of a bet going on in Apple's mindset. For most people, USB drives are no longer a thing (Dropbox, mail-to-self, etc.), so why put ports in the front? If they're in the back you can set up your keyboard cable or w/e nicely and keep those out of the way.

_If_ your USB usage is not 'often plugging/unplugging stuff into the port', then having the ports in the back is better for usability and the like.

Of course this doesn't work if the bet they make is wrong (see MBP dongles)

<comment><USER17> Because there are a zillion things other than USB drives that people plug into those ports. Phones (both to charge and occasionally to sync), headphones, 2FA authenticators, cameras, gamepads, printers--the list is long and it isn't getting much shorter over time.

<comment><USER18> None of these things inherently need to be plugged in. Wireless and battery technology need to continue to improve.

<comment><USER19> Most 2FA USB devices do not support NFC to make them wireless. Even if you do have an NFC enabled 2FA device, Macs don't have NFC. So, wireless is not an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't understand why Apple doesn't make a fanless Mini. There's a respectable market for fanless NUCs, and the original Mini was a great machine. Plus, it's a cheap entry level to the Apple ecosystem.

<comment><USER21> "Cheap" and "entry-level" are two terms Apple is particularly unfond of, however. The reason why the Mac mini is no longer being updated may be because it's simply too cheap.

<comment><USER22> The $329 iPad is pretty nice. It's cheap and fairly powerful.

<comment><USER23> That's still 4x the price of many tablets. Which gives Apple room for high quality and a healthy profit margins.

<comment><USER24> 4x the price of some vastly inferior tablets. Don't get me wrong, the margin is still high, but the entry level iPad is well above the specs and build of the Kindle Fire

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My main work and home "PC"s are Mac Minis running Ubuntu.

They are fantastic, beautiful and small machines that have worked reliably for 6-7 years. (as has Ubuntu!)

At the time of purchase the Mac Mini was the best combination of small size and still fairly decent CPU/GPU firepower.

I also have upgraded them to full SSD and 8gig ram.

Of course, I will get a NUC whenever they need replacing, but I don't see that happening anytime soon...

</comment><comment><USER26> > Apple TV 4K is tiny compared to a Mac Mini, but judging by Geekbench scores > (Mac Mini; iPad Pro, which uses the A10X in the Apple TV) it's a slightly > faster computer than even the maxed-out Mac Mini configuration. Apple TV 4K > probably has better GPU performance too. In addition to all the performance > problems stemming from the fact that the Mac Mini hasn't been updated in > three years, it's also inarguable that it's no longer even "mini". You could > arrange four Apple TV units in a 2 × 2 square and they'd take up the same > volume as one Mac Mini.

Hadn't thought about that. Would be awesome if it would be possible to run arbitrary software on that little TV box, e.g. use it as a real, powerful (for the size), cheap general purpose personal computer.

<comment><USER27> If one could:

\- run VM's on Apple TV it would be great.

\- use multiple ATVs, you mighe be able to get around not having 16 GB of ram.

Still, 32 GB in an Intel NUC is very attractive.

<comment><USER28> I'm cool with just getting Linux on it. Would be like a raspberry pi on steroids!

<comment><USER29> That would be cool, though it's worth pointing out that if you just want a more powerful single-board ARM computer, those exist.

Sorry for slideshow, but [https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/want-a-more- powerful-r...](https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/want-a-more-powerful- raspberry-pi-choose-from-these-20-alternatives/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the list. The link above had a single page link: [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/raspberry-pi-not- powerf...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/raspberry-pi-not-powerful- enough-check-out-these-20-beefy-boards/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You want a mini-device that you can also take on the go? [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gpd-win-2-handheld- game-c...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gpd-win-2-handheld-game-console- for-aaa-games--2#/)

It's about the size of a 3DS, has an Intel Core m3 Kaby Lake dual core 2.6Ghz CPU with integrated GPU, 8GB of RAM and a swappable m.2 SSD. Plus built in screen, keyboard, game controller etc. Has an HDMI port, USB and so on so you can connect it to more comfortable I/O devices when using it from a fixed location.

Runs Windows 10 so you can probably get a Linux prompt on it.

Weighs 1 pound and can run GTA V at playable speeds, ~$700 or the same as a mid-tier Mac Mini. The same manufacturer also produces a few other pocketable- portables.

I think it's important to understand that a no-name manufacturer can do this, Apple should be able to do it as a rounding error in their sleep.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is sad I still await the Mac Mini being properly updated. Please Apple do not disappoint...

<comment><USER32> I'm still using my 4-core, mid-2011 Mini. Aside from the poorly supported graphics hardware--video playback in Chrome, etc has inexplicably taken up more CPU over the years, I guess because lazy developers increasingly depend on more modern CPU and GPU features--I have no reason to upgrade and nothing enticing to upgrade to. It seems my mini won't be supported for macOS 10.14, and I have no idea what I'll do.

I'm also still hanging onto my Macbook Air, which to me is the epitome of laptop design.

<comment><USER33> I'm still rocking my mid-2012 Mini that I upgraded to 16GB RAM and an SSD, luckily I'm getting 10.14, but otherwise I also see zero reason to upgrade my desktop Mac atm. This machine has been more than powerful for most tasks I've thrown at it, and it still runs like a dream.

If Apple were to actually upgrade/update the Mini with new CPUs and a smaller form factor, I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade finally. Those Intel NUCs are starting to get real appealing to me, but I'm not ready to jump to Windows or Linux for my home machines...

<comment><USER27> Mind sharing which SSD you used? I'm on the fence of updating my 2012 mini like yours or move to a NUC but not be able to upgrade it.

Might be worth just riding it out until the next Mac mini that runs on A* cpu's instead arrives.

<comment><USER34> I upgraded a 2012 Mini with a 240GB SanDisk [0]. It wasn't too bad, but watch the YouTube videos first. (And, as noted above, the 2014 may be trickier.)

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M8ABEIM](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M8ABEIM)

<comment><USER27> Thanks! Seems like a good way to get some time out of this. Just have to keep in mind when Apple may EOL the MacOS/Security updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've got an 2011-era Mac Mini that I've loved for developing - updated to 8GB of RAM + an SSD, it's been a great Xamarin machine for years. However now I'm looking for a replacement as Mojave won't support the hardware. With the dated Mac Mini and reports of many keyboard issues on Macbook Pros I'm looking at a Mac Air for a new development machine - and even these are getting a bit long in the tooth. Not really sure what Apple is up to these days.

<comment> gm-conspiracy It is really sad there is no equivalent for a 7 year old device.

Is a Hackintosh an option for Mojave?

<comment><USER36> People usually have success in getting newer OS versions running on formally unsupported macs.

<comment><USER37> I doubt this will work for Mojave, since I believe everything was written using Metal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've just finished doing something similar. My mac mini was from 2011 and the harddisk had just died. It was an awkward year in that an SSD can be fitted to replace the mechanical drive, but it would be limited to half-speed on the controller.

The replacement is a NUC from last year (NUC7i5BNK), but there did not seem to be any point installing macos on it - over the years Apple seem to have crammed in a lot of stuff that I don't like and made it much worse as a small cheap unix workstation.

It's running FreeBSD instead and the difference in size / performance / efficiency is remarkable. It's sad that Apple have let the mac mini line die such a slow protracted death, but unless you are determined to be walled inside Apple's ecosystem there is very little reason to get one.

</comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't this all feed into the idea that Apple is ditching x86/x64 and going full ARM?

It would make sense that the Apple TV is so much more powerful considering Apple pours so much into custom ARM chip design and OS development. MacOS doesn't work on ARM, and it doesn't seem like Apple is interested in porting it. Seems more likely the new Mini, if there ever is one, would be ARM based.

<comment><USER40> I would be shocked to an extreme degree if Apple hasn't been maintaining a version of macOS for their A-series chips for several years now. There's precedent — they kept the lid sealed on their x86 OS X build for half a decade before the Intel transition was announced.

So while I agree that updates to the Mini are being held back by a pending ARM transition, I don't think it'll run iOS. It'll run macOS for ARM.

<comment><USER41> _> they kept the lid sealed on their x86 OS X build for half a decade before the Intel transition_

Do you think they're still the same Apple though?

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't be surprised if there were builds for Mac OS X on ARM ever since iPhone came out.

<comment><USER42> If you read the Walter Issacson biography, it also implies this.

<comment><USER41> I have this sitting on my shelf a long time and I'm so embarrassed I haven't read it yet.

Again, I think that Apple is a very different beast even since then ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This will come across as nit-picky but this:

      > Calling the Mac Mini "mini" is absurd in 2018.

doesn't make much sense. Mini is not an absolute unit of measurement, and the mac mini is still the smallest mac you can buy.

The rest of it I agree with though and am patiently awaiting for a new mini or a better pro.

<comment><USER44> The writer didn't say it was absolute. A huge part of the piece was comparing to Apple TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> He could have rewritten the last sentence from "They just seem to have lost any interest in making one that runs MacOS." to "They just seem to have lost any interest in MacOS.".

</comment><comment><USER46> I think I have about about 20 Mac Mini's for various roles around my office. Probably the most used computers / servers in our entire environment. They're starting to show their age though. One by one they are being retired.

</comment><comment><USER47> > "They just seem to have lost any interest in making one that runs MacOS."

Sadly, I believe that this statement is true not just for Mac Mini, but for the whole "pro"/desktop line of computers.

</comment><comment><USER48> I (might have) had a similar experience to the author, but instead with an earlier skylake model of the Intel NUCs. The only issue I (in theory) had was the predictably slow graphical performance due to the lack of a GPU.

Ultimately I chose to keep using an older macbook pro as my main driver and installed linux to run things that were too slow for Vagrant/VMs.

[Edit] Upon reflecting on this article and my (theoretical) experience, I'm going to do a little reading into how well supported AMD APUs are (i.e. Ryzen 5 2400g).

</comment><comment><USER49> The thing that annoys me most is that Apple won't say that this product is dead, or if it is not dead then I'm even more annoyed at how long it takes to update.

<comment><USER50> What does dead mean? You can buy one, and it will be supported for several years. The lack of a new one doesn't make the old one dead.

<comment><USER49> It's dead if it is not a product that will be updated.

That's the definition of dead for any line of computer products - sure you might be able to buy one now, but if there are no more iterations coming then the product (line) is dead.

<comment><USER51> As old time MS-DOS loving Never Appler, I don't get this. Every few years, if I need a new computer, I look at the options and then I buy or build one that meets my needs.

What does it matter if the vendor is going to, or not going to, offer a similar-but-updated one in a few years?

<comment><USER49> I was a die hard Microsoft lover for many many years.

OSX is a much better operating system than Windows.

So Im stuck with buying from Apple and Mac Mini was their entry level cost machine, that's why it matters.

<comment><USER51> Nitpick: I always hated Windows, I've used Linux for the last 23 years.

But I still don't get it. Suppose in two years time, Apple axes the Mac Mini; but today the mini meets your needs. In three years time, you will have to shop around for whatever MacOS supporting computer meets your needs then, but you'll have to do that regardless of which Mac you buy today.

Now it _might_ matter if you are considering switching OSes. I.e. you fear that in a few years time, MacOS will support _no_ computers that meet your needs. In that case, you might consider making your peace with Linux (or even Windows!) today.

<comment><USER49> I've tried all operating systems that took my interest.

For my purposes, and by my personal measures, OSX is far and away the very best OS out there. I therefore will buy whatever computer I must to use that OS. Nothing else matters to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> As much as I like to think apple is really fuct and what not (I mean, I relish seeing them suck lately), fact is they are mere inches away from fixing all of the recent complaints people have had with their products. I'm seriously looking forward to this years macbook refresh, (less so the mini, but its still a cool piece of kit).

</comment><comment><USER53> apple desktop lineup is such a mess..

<comment><USER54> Eh. No one every really complains about the iMac, which makes up most of their desktop offering.

<comment><USER55> Do you have a source on that? I never hear about iMacs, which makes me assume nobody uses them.

<comment><USER56> I've just looked at some statistics from update checks from Postico, a database app used mostly by web developers.

\- 93% of my customers have a laptop

\- 70% of desktop users have an iMac

Graphs: [https://imgur.com/a/H0N0BZy](https://imgur.com/a/H0N0BZy)

<comment><USER50> Those graphs are missing the scale. 70% of nothing is nothing.

<comment><USER55> Context is everything. We're talking about desktop computers. We already know laptop users dwarf desktop users these days. My question implied I was curious about what percentage of desktop users use iMacs. 70%, even for a product that isn't widely used, is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The low end Mac isn't about the hardware. It's about being the cheapest possible entry level thing required to get the macOS developer experience, ie being able to compile iPhone apps, run Selenium over Safari or whatever.

At the end of the day, they aren't really selling it for the hardware. Otherwise it'd be like 6mm thick, half the footprint and three times as fast.

</comment><comment><USER58> I would love to use my old Apple TV as mini computer, but there doesn't seem to be a way to jailbreak the 3rd gen Apple TV.

</comment><comment><USER59> Man, in the last couple of years I've been counting myself lucky in that I bought a late 2012 Mini with the fastest i7 offered. It appears to be downhill for the Mini from then on.

</comment><comment><USER60> I haven't read Gruber in a while. Is this as uncharacteristically critical and disappointed as it seems based on my recollection?

Or has the ardour been fading on a longer time scale?

<comment><USER61> You may have thought of him as overly positive but I never saw that. He has always liked some things and disliked other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This guy said this thing 2 month ago, and I said it last year too, so here's an article where I stick those two old posts together. Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER63> Translation: Apple is going to release a smaller mac.

</comment><comment><USER64> The Mac Mini is Maxi because they didn't bother to change the chassis much after removing the optical drive.

</comment><comment><USER65> Can someone explain why Apple computers seemingly only have a 2-3 year lifespan? I've had the "opportunity" of owning three Macs in my life and none of them have lasted more than a couple years.

Sure, they work. I gave me Grandma my old iMac and she uses it to this day. But it's impossibly slow, as is my 2015 iMac that I'm writing this on.

Restarting this $2500 computer takes several minutes, opening applications takes similar period of time. The computer lags when you open ANY save dialog. Even opening finder takes about 1 second.

Meanwhile I also have a five year old Windows PC I built myself, restarts in under 15 seconds. As soon as I see my desktop I can launch any application instantly.

I like using OSX but it's fucking slow.

<comment><USER66> Does the iMac possibly have a HDD rather than an SSD (which your custom PC probably has)?

The SSD makes a huge difference in response time. It's the only reason I'm still using my 5 year old MacBook Pro which has a PCIe SSD and I have no plans to upgrade other than to maybe get TB3 support.

I actually do real development on it, running multiple applications, running Xcode builds, the lot. It does everything I throw at it like a champ.

I'm not sure where you're getting the 2-3 but that's definitely not what you should be getting from a modern PC/Mac, especially if they have an SSD.

<comment><USER65> Yeah that's correct, the Windows machine has a SSD and the iMac does not. Perhaps I've just forgotten how intolerable HDDs are.</comment></comment></comment>