Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackernewstab.com

<comment><USER2> I don't have a strong opinion on whether you should build it or not (I have a Mac but won't use it, which has almost nothing to do with whether it's a good idea or not), but here's some other admittedly unsolicited advice (and of course I recognize that you may know all of this already):

Remember that most people who think it's a bad idea won't respond, and people who do respond are doing so because they're interested, or think they are. So there's some bias to account for. And secondly people who say they want something can't really be trusted; it costs nothing to upvote you and people are really quick to say "yes, I'd buy/use that" and though they certainly mean it at the time, it's very often turns out to be untrue when it's actually time to download and install it.

Of course, it might work anyway; I'm just saying that I doubt that asking HN whether you should code it is a good predictor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I follow what you are saying.

Reason I'm doing this is, that I come up with a lot of projects and it's hard to know which of them people will actually like.

I'm putting out a feeler here, to see wether people are even interested. It seems so :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Holger, your design has the same issue as every other HN app - it trades condensed view for spacing and typography. The brilliance of HN's native design is an ability to see 20-30 stories per screenful. This is a must have. Otherwise it turns into Designer News [1] :)

Secondly, an app that is merely an alternative view of HN webpage is not terribly interesting. It should really offer something else. For example, an ability to track/follow other users, ability to pick up stories from /new page that might of an interest to me, track my account stats, track replies to my comments and submissions, etc.

If you are going to sink your time in this project, make damn sure there'll be (paid) downloads at the end of the road.

[1] <https://news.layervault.com>

<comment><USER4> I find it kind of amusing that Hacker News is better designed than Designer News.

<comment><USER5> I'd argue that "better designed" is subjective here. Hacker News is optimised for high content density. Designer News has lower content density, but there's more space between posts (and visual signposts in the form of "badges") which makes the front-page easier to scan. I appreciate both approaches.

<comment><USER4> While "better designed" is definitely subjective, I find that HN reads easier and is more visually appealing. Personally, HN feels superior on an aesthetic as well as functional level - many of DN's design techniques feel kind of cliched or tacky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you do, please make it configurable to be a normal app as well as a menu bar app. I don't like menu bar apps that do not actually need to display some sort of persistent notification or control, and there may be others who feel the same way.

Also, we generally shy from "yes" and "love it" type replies here; you can probably assume that 1 upvote = 1 yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input. I'll definitely consider that. Shouldn't be too hard.

<comment><USER7> There is a ready component ([http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/mac- os-x/controls/obm...](http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/mac- os-x/controls/obmenubarwindow)) that you can use to create a menu bar application which can be dragged out to be a regular window. Just remember to keep states and stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't use an alternative HN story reader on OS X. I like the cramped web interface too much.

However I do like (and make![1]) passive alert menubar apps. Make one of those for HN and I would use it (and submit pull requests). Alert for new thread replies, karma, etc.

[1] Shameless plug for Reddit Notifier, on the Mac App Store: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier-mac-os-x- men...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier-mac-os-x- menubar/id468366517?mt=12)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one. I'll definitely look into that. Thanks for the tip.

<comment><USER8> In fact, if you want to do the icons/design and find an acceptable HN API, I could get it working with the Reddit Notifier source pretty easily. Shoot me an email if interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You asked: in my opinion no. The market has already largely abandoned RSS readers and I don't see single site and magazine apps having a fighting chance.

<comment><USER10> What about general utility apps, other than RSS readers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks nice but I don't think I would ever use something like this. 70% of the time I'm on a browser so I prefer to just come to the website. A good app for iPad would be good since tapping the tiny HN links on there is terrible.

<comment><USER12> There's a decent iPhone/iPad app called news:yc in the App Store already.

<comment><USER7> I use HackerNode, a brilliant app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one. What do you like about that one? Seems like there's a lot of people who've downloaded it.

<comment><USER7> @holgersindbaek: I love the quick browsing and general feel of it. I have to admit though, I rarely exit the front page listing & links or use it for anything else than checking up on what's going on in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it's cool, but there are a couple issues:

\- You display the number '8' in your demo -- what does this represent? Stories are frequently added to HN

\- You provide a lot of functionality in the Menu tool (vote, comment), but you don't provide the actual content -- presumably this is opened in a browser? If you look at Spotlight, it provides a preview, though this is probably not readable enough

\- It seems to me that keeping simple is important; for example, keeping to a single rectangle like Spotlight could be a good UI pattern; having multiple rectangles that are locked in places feels very klunky

That said, I think designing this could be very fun and a great learning experience. Someone once told me that the the reason to create tools is to help yourself; if this tool ends up being fun and useful for you to use, you have succeeded (a lot of others call this "dogfooding", though I think that has a bit of a negative ring to it).

Some tips regarding engineering:

\- this could be a useful GitHub project to get started with NSStatusItems (i.e. menubar apps), if you haven't already seen it -- <https://github.com/shpakovski/Popup>

\- it might be very very effective to use Python, at least for prototyping, especially for scraping information from HN; in particular, I am thinking of BeautifulSoup, though similar packages may exist for ObjC; to integrate Python into your app, you can either use something like PyObjc or directly bundle in a python interpreter and read output from it...

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

The number eight signifies that there's 8 stories on the frontpage that you haven't read yet.

You also read the story itself in the browser (I don't wanna go back and forth from the browser). You can see that "functionality" if you click on "web view".

Thanks for the tip :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you can add some smart filtering, e.g. by topic, source website etc, this would be even more valuable to me. Also ability to add to evernote / chrome bookmarks / pocket directly from the app

Last but not least, the HN community is great, but I would design it to support other new sources, if I could get all my content in one location, with filtering, and web preview, I would be a bit happier. (why not google reader? not sure actually, but fact is it's just not doing the job, neither flipboard, or any news aggregator that I know to date feels to me like the perfect solution, but that's just me).

So I'm not sure you'll be able to make a living solely from this app, but I will consider it if it really helps me organize my reading, and save me time.

Edit:

1\. Forgot to mention the design looks great!

2\. Note that not far ago someone posted here a Mac HN app (currently down, here is the cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.hackyapp.com/))

Here is the HN discussion on it, I think this will help you decide.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170182>

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Thanks for the feedback :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks great. I'd be happy to pay $2-$3 for it. Pocket/Instapaper integration would be great i.e. one click and it's saved to read later

<comment><USER16> The Pocket browser widget already injects it's own links into HN, the exact reason I removed the thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love the look of the interface (web and comment view). That said, being a reader of HN, I like to use the "open web" as opposed to apps. I know a good percentage of the population here share my views. And while this may not necessarily describe you're app, it shows the sentiment: <http://xkcd.com/1174/>

But I'm confused when you call this a Mac app. Does that mean it would be for say, my macbook air, which I really have no need for it. or perhaps my iPad/iPhone, which, even though I have the HN page bookmarked as an app, I'm more readily willing to try out the "app", simply because the interface needs enhancing.

edit: All that said, definitely still build it. If only even for yourself, your portfolio, and the learning experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know where you are coming from. I also like to use the open web, but it bugs me when I end up with opening 5-10 tabs each time I go into HN and have to navigate around between them and close them again.

It is for the Mac and not for the iPhone/iPad (might come later).

If you have no need for it, it's probably not for you. Hehe.

<comment><USER17> >> but it bugs me when I end up with opening 5-10 tabs each time I go into HN

haha, too true. I'm a bit of a tabaholic I suppose. It's nothing to have 10-20 tabs in a window, with separate windows open for different stuff (HN window, work window, mail/FB window..) Heck, I'll stumble across tabs I meant to read last week or last month all the time...

<comment><USER18> I'm the same way: I look at the list of stories, open all the ones that look interesting in new tabs, and do the same with the comments for them as well. Then, I have a nice queue of six to twelve tabs to peruse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think one improvement you can make in this design is to make it easy to distinguish different types of posts. There are posts that are news, some are blog posts, some are showcases, others may just be job listings. Currently its not always so clear on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome idea. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does it really live in the menu bar? It's hard enough to fight all the notifications and distractions at work as it is. I would be more likely to use a full screen app (the exact opposite of a menu bar item) for rare, but focused reading sessions.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sure, go on. The hardest part, designing it, is already done! Take a look at HNKit an news:yc <https://github.com/Xuzz/newsyc> for a head start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll take a look at it.

I've already taken a look at some other HN examples (there's a lot of open source ones out there), but not sure if I will go with any of those. Might start from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would try it out. I'm also going to take this opportunity to make a shameless plug: answering the question, "Should I build this?" is precisely the goal of LaunchSky.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one. Just signed up. When are you launching? Looking forward to seeing how the platform will work.

<comment><USER22> Thanks! We plan to go live with our beta in 3-4 weeks, and we're already accepting pitches from our beta list. Email me at email@example.com and I'll send you a beta invite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You should absolutely develop it. It doesn't matter if anyone will use it or other's opinions about it. Here's the deal, from your own post, you have plenty of time on your hands and you could learn a lot from developing this application. It's also yet another project for your resume. Try developing it in something you aren't familiar with, backbone or flask or sinatra, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> Make a web app that has HN Item list on the left column. Right column displays the story/link but also allow quickly switching between that and the HN comments section.

I'd throw money at you.

I don't need/want a mac app for reading stuff that's available on the web. That just makes me bounce between 1 extra app/window if I want to read/learn more about a certain subject.

<comment><AUTHOR> Guess I can count you out then.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I briefly experimented with HN in a discreet RSS reader (Feeds App), and I won't let it on my computer outside the browser again as it was too distracting. I also don't keep any of the iPhone apps for HN I've tried around for that reason. Your designs look nice, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliments.

What made you think it was too distracting? Could you see the updates all the time?

<comment><USER25> Yes, HN became ever-present unless I closed the program. And if I did, why have it? When it's in the browser, it's much more optional and I can work all day if I like without seeing any reminders of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ok, so I upvoted it. I like the idea.

But, my Mac is retired for a long time now and, if you really make a Mac app, I won't be able to use it.

You should consider... ummm... air? This way we can all enjoy your app.

</comment><comment><USER27> You should develop it if you want it. But I would not count on making much money or impact with it. Not that many people read Hacker News, and most of them are just fine reading it in a browser.

I understand why people are tempted to build apps around HN...we're all builders, and we spend a lot of time here. But that doesn't mean it's a good business decision.

In general, 3rd party apps for reading a website are a bad idea. They compete directly against the content resource upon which they are totally dependent. See: the fate of Twitter apps.

</comment><comment><USER28> I LOVE how you presented your design. I got it right away. Very slick. I don't think I would use this because it might kill my productivity more than going to HN already does.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks useful. I have a suggestion, keep the width of the webpage and the comments view the same. This way the buttons remain in the same place when switching back and forth.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is awesome: actually taking the time to poll your intended customers to see whether it's even worth building the app, rather than building first and finding out later.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think you're going to get many nays on here, we like HN and that app looks slick.

I just think it a tad redundant since browsers/website are pretty much native...

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking about that as well. We'll see if it's the case.

Think the app could be really nice though and save me some time when I feed my HN addiction. I always find myself opening 5-7 tabs each time I go into HN. Then I have to navigate between them, close the ones I haven't read and such. Can become tedious.

With this app, I'll also have a constant overview of how much of the frontpage I haven't read :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks great, Holger! Have you seen <http://www.guidefreitas.com/hacker-news- menu-tab-app> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one. Like the functionality of having all the posts in the topbar. It's really convenient.

I'd like to read the posts in the app as well though. Don't wanna go back and forth from the browser.

I also want a better view for comments. HN design can become a bit messy :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tangent: scrolling is horrible on my gnexus. I have no idea where I am on the site, and every time I scroll up or down I find myself lost somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER34> I will give you a different angle. Do you want to develop it for fun/fame/experience or for profit? If the former you should do it.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think a great feature would be the ability to filter articles by points (i.e. only posts greater than 100 points, etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice idea.

Do you often wish that you could do that on HN?

<comment><USER36> <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> You designed an iOS app, not a Mac app. That it happens to live in the menubar doesn't actually mean very much ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean that I designed an iOS app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Looks great, HN wrapped in sex, love it!

</comment><comment><USER39> I would much rather want a responsive version, so I don't have to download an app to look at HN.

</comment><comment><USER40> You should develop that, for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys. Let me know if there are any other features or such that you would?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks like a great project.

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes please! :)

</comment><comment><USER43> What tool did you use to design this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Photoshop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There is no reason not to. "Should I develop it" always has the answer "yes".

<comment><USER45> Well, if there is no interest in it, and you could be working on something else. You need to weight these decisions.

<comment><USER44> it is impossible to tell interest until the project is built. Who, having heard the premise of Twitter in 2005, would have said "Oh yeah, that sounds exactly like something I want"?

<comment><USER46> The Twitter equivalent would be asking Twitter users if they'd use TweetDeck given only mockups of the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> nope</comment>


The Day MAME Saved My Ass - <AUTHOR> http://www.ppl-pilot.com/mame.aspx <comment><USER2> [https://web.archive.org/web/20101215174952/http://www.ppl- pi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20101215174952/http://www.ppl- pilot.com/mame.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> MAME saved my ass too.

I was working on a coin-op game for a mid-level manufacturer in Chicago. Let's just say they were the last dinosaur in the tar pit and they didn't have a stellar hardware engineering team. They tended to copy other people's designs and not really understand the architectures, so things like in-circuit emulators and IDEs were scarce or non-existant. You debugged via trial-and- error and, if you were lucky, printf().

So I was working on this title and started working from home a couple of days a week to take care of a family member. That made things hard, and even harder since you tend to have the physical machine next to you while coding. It was frustrating to code for a day, get to work, then find half of it wasn't working.

Then I discovered that the MAME kids had already supported the platform. With a small amount of work I could develop on the emulated platform. I could work remotely _and_ I had access to things the in-house guys didn't even have: hardware breakpoints, live RAM viewing, scripted testing for example.

Without MAME I would have seriously been suffering on this project.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Fortunately, [...] a SpyHunter fan [...] had extracted the sound effects himself and put up WAV files on his web page."

"I wanted to give the guy a game credit [...]. The publisher refused....their legal team were already writing up a cease-and-desist letter ordering him to remove the assets from his fan page."

Guy saves the day and instead of a cookie he gets a CnD letter. Do things really have to work this way?

"But you have to defend your trademarks or they become worthless!" Right, because the publisher would have been so much better off if those WAVs wouldn't have been out on the Internet in the first place.

<comment><USER5> I came here to post about exactly that. My jaw dropped while reading... not because it was flagrantly unethical, or abusing the law, or anything like that, but because it reminded me so acutely of the stereotypical movie villain who enlists the help of some hapless bystander and then impassively murmurs, "Thanks," while shooting them.

I already know this is going to get downvoted because Hacker News (wisely) disapproves of feckless criticism of big corporation business practices, and every time I post something like this, no one realizes that I'm just sharing an observation as opposed to making a hard judgment, but I was so surprised by the similarity between reality and fiction here, and so pleased to see that someone else had made the same connection, that I'm posting it anyway.

<comment><USER6> I was going to give you an upvote actually, but I viscerally hate the phrase "I know I'm going to get downvoted..." Just write what you have to say and who cares about the fools that react negatively.

<comment><USER5> I expressly condone your decision. I dislike it when anyone says that, or when people say "UGH WHY AM I GETTING DOWNVOTED." But, I have noticed that sometimes I will be spontaneously aware of someone's voting patterns, and I catch myself thinking, "This guy gets downvoted for the _same stuff_ every time he says it. Why does he keep posting it?" So I thought I'd put the little explanation down there, in case anyone does something similar. IMHO, "I know I'm going to get downvoted..." is a little less stupid when it comes with an explanation--a pre-emptive, quiet rebuttal to all of the silent downvotes.

 _EDIT_ : Also, I never presume that people who downvote me are fools. Sometimes I find myself downvoting due to some essential gut reaction that I either can't verbalize or don't bother verbalizing. In fact, I think I have done that when people fecklessly criticize corporate business practices. Perhaps it was my initial awareness of "I might downvote the comment I'm writing, if I came across it in the wild," which inspired me to include the explanation.

Every disagreement is an opportunity for learning. By including the explanation, it invites someone to reply and say, "Actually, I downvoted you because _x_ ," and then I will learn something new about the nature of HN commenters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an incredible example of the 'zombie code' problem. You lose the source to something and are somehow expected to maintain it anyway.

Years ago at a previous employer, we had an old xenix system that ran a library book lending system. The company that maintained it had gone bust long ago and noone knew how to migrate the data, in fact noone really knew xenix either. I ended up (as the Linux and y2k guy) working with one of the smartest guys I've ever met to hunt the data down. In the process I learnt xenix and Geoff learnt xenix x86 assembly. Geoff patched the library system to start dumping out csvs. Then he patched an import function, then an extra field to indicate the year starting with 19 or 20 (to solve the y2k problem all we had to do was shutdown for Christmas, bring the box up in January, set the date to 1900 and we'd be fine. It didn't quite turn out that way but that was another story) and after a significant post y2k problem Geoff took over maintaining a defunct piece of software on a defunct platform, for 3 years. The library didn't migrate because they didn't need to, as long as they had Geoff. After I left, Geoff took over xenix admin (to be fair, not a lot to do) and a few years later fell very ill. While the library thought they'd saved money, ultimately they trapped themselves in an expert system that could only prolong the inevitable disaster on the horizon.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tip for next time: Make deliverables relative to the time you get the initial assets you were promised.

BigCo promises you the original source code + game assets.

Instead of promising Alpha/Beta/Release from the signing of the contract, promise X/Y/Z business days from delivery of those _critical_ assets.

(Make sure you have a timeout clause in there too, "Assets will be delivered by BigCo within 60 days of the signing of this contract or we will not develop that title and BigCo will pay a penalty of $X")

[edit to add] Be careful to define what "assets" mean to you. Assume what you write will be read by a lowest-bidder consultant, with active _disincentives_ against showing initiative, and who can barely read. (Not stupid though)

<comment><USER9> This works for me in mechanical construction projects.

Specifying durations from deliverables rather than absolute dates has transformed the way I run projects. So instead of saying "we'll be on site 2 Feb 11", thus setting ourselves a deadline without holding others accountable for their deadlines, we say "we'll be on site 3 weeks after all design review issues are closed, and this list of actions is complete".

It's not a silver bullet. It has worked wonders for controlling risk associated with penalty clauses in contracts, and cuts out the need for a lot of communication (i.e. bitching and CYA tactics). I'm convinced that it justs makes everybody more accountable, somehow.

Now if only I could find a WBS/Gantt chart tool that supports durations and not dates... MS Project doesn't.

<comment><USER10> Taskjuggler supports durations <http://www.taskjuggler.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I especially like the bit where someone else had embedded Mame with a pirated ROM as a "port" to a major console. Especially amusing if you read Mame's license, which includes:

> MAME is free. The source code is free. If you paid for it, you've been > ripped off. If you sell it, you are a thief.

> You are not allowed to distribute X-Mame ( source or binary) and ROM's image > in the same package or physical medium.

> If you distribute the executable, you should also distribute the source > code.

> The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without a written > authorization of the authors.

<comment><USER12> It would depend on the console. I worked on "Midway Arcade Treasures" (PS2, XBOX and GameCube) and none of the emulators in that package was based on MAME, including Spy Hunter.

<comment><USER3> I'm just amazed they could find the source for some of the older Midway games. I think Bally kept really good archives, but I think Williams not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love the bit where he gets the best guy in the office to play through the game with cheats and grabs the image data from the sessions in order to reconstruct the maps.

Perhaps because I've always been an, er, "dedicated" gamer, there's something about a solution involving _playing the game_ which is really satisfying.

<comment><USER14> while this special occasion may be a different thing, doing anything on the job that's fun otherwise may poison it forever.

think of playing wow ... for gold farming. or being a game tester? nightmare of a job.

another example: texas holdem. it may be fun playing with friends in your spare time, but i'm pretty sure it's a brain wreckingly monotonous chore if you have to do it for hours, 4 games open simultaneously at any time. not much fun in that.

assembly line working at foxcon suddenly sounds like a really diversified job.

<comment><USER15> >another example: texas holdem. it may be fun playing with friends in your spare time, but i'm pretty sure it's a brain wreckingly monotonous chore if you have to do it for hours, 4 games open simultaneously at any time. not much fun in that.

No, but writing the bot to do it for you _would_ be fun.

<comment><USER16> Apparently writing poker bots is miserable.

Poker AI that can beat the average human you will find online is pretty trivial to write. Running profitable poker bots involves spending 90% of your time touching up your scraping algorithms to cope with the ever changing DOM of the casino sites, which shifts dynamically to prevent exactly this kind of thing.

With the level of programming skills required you can earn _way_ more money with a legitimate job.

Source: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008kj9m>

That programme in the link can be had for download if you look. Don't worry I've already paid for it, its on me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "but the publisher insisted that we had signed a contract, and that with-or- without assets we were expected to deliver the alpha version on time....which at this point was a week later."

Crazy, yet all too common. We didn't hold up our end of an agreement, but _YOU_ have to. Does this happen in all industries, or just software?

"We didn't provide the plants or mulch or dirt for the garden (which we were supposed to do last week), but you still have to provide a flower bed tomorrow."

I'm assuming there was _something_ in the contract that the original party was required to provide assets for the port. Perhaps it wasn't.

"No... no need to contractually obligate us to deliver - just believe us, we'll get you the files!"

<comment> wh-uws I feel like thats the problem. Well 2 problems actually

a) People really need to watch out for the contracts they sign.

b) if you try and negotiate it seems alot of these people know they can just find some other poor sucker who will do it on their terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sigh: I say we have a new rule that unless the linkee is a major webserving force, that we systemically use Corel Cache.

OB cached link: <http://www.ppl-pilot.com.nyud.net/mame.aspx>

<comment><USER19> I think PG should add a cache link next to the comment and flag links.

<comment><USER18> Or that also sounds like a great Chrome extension idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Stories like this make me thing that we should have some legal basis for telling the suits to fuck off. Professions like aircraft pilots and medicine doctors do this.

<comment><USER21> I think there is, the problem is the severe imbalance of funding power between a publisher and a developer. Also some care has to go into writing the contract. It's possible the language in the contract didn't require the publisher to provide the code.

In this case, the developer should have been able to sue the publisher and renegotiate the contract. But I suspect that wasn't economically feasible.

<comment><USER20> I agree about the importance of the contract but that is not what I had in mind.

No contract can force a surgeon to operate using a self-forget cutlery set. In some countries everybody has the right to refuse dangerous work. My fantasy was about the right to refuse work that goes outrageously against state of the art.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had similar experience with Metal Gear Solid port for the PC.

We did not have the source to the midi/mod library playing the music (they were composed of short samples).

Instead we found .wav files of all music tracks on one of the fan-page sites. We even found the samples to a lot of our sounds. We simply grabbed and used them instead

</comment><comment><USER23> So moral of the story: Making unreasonable demands and threatening to completely cut off funding for related projects works as a way to force a contractor to deliver despite "setbacks" on your end?

Looks like the suits won this one.

</comment><comment><USER24> So why is someone who sounds as awesome as the guy who wrote this article having to deal this sort of nonsense?

<comment><USER25> Probably because he likes games too much. The supply of game programmers is simply too large for there to be decent salaries and working conditions for everyone.

<comment><USER24> Seems to me like the Internet is a wide open place for people to make games on their own. That's what I'm doing. It seems to me like "working for the man" as a game programmer is making less and less sense with all the options available these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Although it was more like "The Week MAME Save My Ass"...</comment>


Integrating WebSockets in Netty - <AUTHOR> http://comoyo.github.com/blog/2012/07/30/integrating-websockets-in-netty/

<comment><USER2> I would strongly advise not to base your push mechanism solely on Web Sockets. Despite advances modern browsers are making with Web Sockets support, the current compatibility is not there yet.

For starters, IE has no support, though that is starting to change with IE10. But the biggest issue is with personal firewalls / corporate proxies. These are unfortunately quite horrible at handling Web Sockets. Many popular firewalls such as avast! and Bitdefender can't handle the WS protocol and completely blocks traffic despite browser support and it being valid HTTP. The socket.io guys did some extensive research on what firewalls are causing these issues. I don't think their list is exhaustive but it features most major personal firewalls out there. Have a look at [https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/wiki/Socket.IO- and-f...](https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/wiki/Socket.IO-and-firewall- software) , it's no reading of joy.

I've deployed quite large installations of Beaconpush (a push server incidentally based on Netty as well). First going from Web Sockets with fallback, over to pure WS and we're looking at going back to using fallbacks once again due to these incompatibility issues. This time we are looking at using SockJS instead of rolling our own (to be fair, there were no open-source libs doing this when we started). I've ported SockJS to Netty (<https://github.com/cgbystrom/sockjs-netty>) and it's working although I wouldn't say it is production ready.

I urge you to have a look at SockJS and socket.io. Personally I prefer SockJS since it aims at emulating the Web Socket interface and nothing more as compared to socket.io (which adds a pub/sub layer). Also, it does not rely on a Flash fallback (which is another story). The socket.io guys are however working on engine.io, which will split the transport fallback mechanisms of socket.io to a separate library. That's a good idea, but it still uses Flash and IMHO a more complex "transport upgrade".

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why Netty isn't more used for this case, if the support is there, the library is mature and optimized, the VM is the faster one we have around...

Perhaps folks that use it aren't the "blogger" kind.

<comment><USER4> I know of a few large production systems that have dispensed with typical servlet containers completely and are based on Netty's HTTP codecs instead, but as you said, the people who do these systems aren't necessarily bloggers.

I think this is a very positive trend towards more minimal software and more self-contained Java servers. Being able to ship (server) software as a single JAR file with everything you need embedded makes life a lot easier. It is very nice not having to fiddle around setting up servlet containers, configuring them, deploying applications into them and then, inevitably, having to restart everything when a rogue application decides to ruin the party for everyone. (And it just gets worse when you try to automate it).

One thing I'm still looking for is a good skeletal project for a REST server making use of JAX-RS annotations, Netty and having support for asynchronous request handling. Something that we could turn into a really skinny Maven archetype and teach new programmers to use.

(Obligatory disclosure and shameless plug: I work for Comoyo. If you find these things interesting/exciting and would like to come work for us feel free to contact us. We're hiring :) )

<comment><USER4> (I see cgbystrom commented further up and kinda hoped he would whip up a JAX- RS+Netty+async request processing skeleton ;-) )

<comment><USER2> Totally agree about having smaller and more contained apps.

I used <https://github.com/cgbystrom/jersey-netty> for a one-off project wiring Jersey together with Netty. But it's not async :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting Closure with Objective-C - <AUTHOR> http://www.macresearch.org/cocoa-scientists-part-xxvii-getting-closure-objective-c

<comment><USER2> Interesting, so Objective-C will also have a syntax for lambdas... Since this is supposed to be a feature of C++0x, we will have two different syntactical ways to express the same concept in C++ and ObjC.</comment>


General Motors vs. Tesla: Software Engineer Pay - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/09/17/general-motors-tesla-software-engineer/ <comment><USER2> A GM engineer works a solid 40 a Tesla engineer works 60. Adjust for for hours worked benefits and col and the GM engineer actually gets paid more

<comment><USER3> You think in the competitive bay area the tesla engineer is working more. I hate to tell you but the GM SW engineer is working more hours for less pay because SW engineers have fewer options for other jobs</comment></comment>


What domain of knowledge does my problem fall under? - <AUTHOR>

My business partner, and I have created a site; http://www.qwertykitchen.com . Its a recipe site. Our main form of search is entering ingredients that you have on hand and you get a list of recipes that contain those ingredients.
We are now looking at doing something more then just full text searching, and keywords. The first problem we want to attack is making words that are basically the same, show up in the search when the other is called.
For example, we have egg and eggs, or milk, 2% milk, whole milk, and skim milk. We want someone to only have to enter milk. If they do enter milk, then the entire cluster should be searched.
My idea of an approach to this problem is this. We search for longest common substring. Then create a directed graph representation. Then when a person searchs for a term, we use a proximity measure and then search for all the terms with in a certain proximity.
So, I was wondering one, does anyone know if their is a name for what I am talking about, and two, does anyone maybe have a better idea of how to do something like this. <comment><USER2> The domain of knowledge you're interested in is "information retrieval" (IR).

Here's a textbook on the subject from some of the top minds in the field: [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...](http://www- csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-book.html)

I am not an IR expert, but one particular algorithm that you might find useful is latent semantic analysis, a.k.a. latent semantic indexing: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis>

</comment><comment><USER3> > We search for longest common substring.

That idea can be improved upon: "length of largest common substring" is not the measure to use. At the least, you want to use Levenshtein distance <[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance>](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance>), but even that can be tweaked to weigh common typing 'errors' lower (for example, colour is closer to color than to clour)

> Then when a person searchs for a term, we use a proximity measure and then > search > for all the terms with in a certain proximity

This is a form of <[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_expansion>](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_expansion>);

</comment><comment><USER4> What you are asking about is fuzzy searching, but the fact that you are asking at all indicates that you ought to read up on searching theory. There's a large body of work out there that you ought to familiarize yourself with.

<comment><AUTHOR> do you have specific suggestions on what to read?

<comment><USER4> Recent issues of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems will bring you the latest research; alternately, if you want to start at the beginning, Knuth volume 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Eggs and egg is an example of stemming, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming>

The milk example as stated could be solved using fulltext indexing and searching.

I think your approach might work, but you could get results much more quickly using existing database fulltext search.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not convinced that just fulltext search would work. Wouldn't fulltext search fail in the case of goat. You have goats milk, goats milk cheese, goat meat. So if someone searched goat all three types would be returned?

<comment><USER6> Well, if someone claims to have a goat, they probably have all three of those, or can at least make them. ;-)

<comment><USER7> not if it's a boy goat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Try reading up on latent semantic analysis. It also uses vector calculus, but works a bit different IIRC. It can be used to identify words that are used in the same context and therefore should be the same. I'm not sure if it is directly applicable for recipes because of the concise language, but you might find interesting related articles.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you identify trends? Where do you look? - <AUTHOR> I'm no soothsayer, but I've been curious about staying up to date with trends among certain communities, such as: streetwear fashion, startups, college students, and technology (a random assortment of interests, I know).<p>I mostly use Reddit, Instagram, and HN to qualitatively look out for trends, but I am struggling with how to apply a more quantitative methodology to validate my own assumptions. I've used Google Trends, but am not sure what the best keywords are, and also don't know of better data sources than Google Trends to look. I've never been an analyst or marketer, so I'm inexperienced in this regard. I greatly appreciate any advice or suggestions. <comment><USER2> What is your goal exactly?</comment>


Ask HN: Have You Ever Migrated from MySQL to PostgresQL or Otherwise? - <AUTHOR> I hear this suggested in talks / on the web frequently enough to wonder if any company has ever successfully migrated from mySQL to PostgresQL, or from database technology foo to database technology bar, without coming close to killing the company or blocking the development team from doing more profitable work? Or is this something that many people suggest but have never actually done?
Just move to a "real" database and all your problems will be solved, right? I don't think so - you will just replace one set of problems with another. And when you're dealing with a schema that is multiples of TB, hundreds of tables, stored procs, triggers, poorly normalised, contains a mass of undocumented domain knowledge, goes back over a decade, then it's not going to happen.
If it does happen then it's probably over a period of years, or effectively a rewrite. Databases are like mortgages, they're technical debt that take decades to pay off.
So, have you ever done the migration? How did it go? <comment><USER2> Just a quick interjection: I wrote a library that migrates between any 2 relational databases. In my case, I migrated off of Oracle and onto MySQL, but the tool supports any RDBMS supported by SQLAlchemy.

[https://github.com/seanharr11/etlalchemy](https://github.com/seanharr11/etlalchemy)

The best way to know is to try! It takes 4 lines of python to get you migrated.

PostgreSQL is a bit more feature rich in my findings, but for the majority of web development there really aren't huge differences. In my experience, MySQL performs a bit better for lots of simple READ queries, while PostgreSQL can handle larger, more complex queries and very frequent WRITEs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I migrated from a custom database to postgresql. I have to say I am much happier in terms of being able to generate complex reports.

The types and jsonb are also very nice.

I have used mysql early in my career, and I still use it for certain existing projects. I liked the simplicity of its command line, but postgresql has caught up, and they continue to add amazing features.

<comment><USER2> I'm trying to give some consult to a company who is looking to store JSON data in MySQL, and they have a Rails app.

Given a Rails web app (i.e. ActiveRecord models), what is the best choice if the JSON column type is essential?

Initial research shows that PostgreSQL stores JSONB more efficiently, and provides faster query performance with indexes, while MySQL exposes and JSON query interface w/o much optimization. Thoughts?</comment></comment>


Venezuela's Chavez calls for Internet controls - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62D05I20100314

<comment><USER3> One trillion dollars over ten years, just in oil sales, have been stolen by unscrupulous thugs who control the three branches of government and do whatever they please with total impunity.

It is such a shame, being the latin saudis, and having brought the country to such a deplorable state.

They had a chance and they blew it, now all they're doing is robbing as much as they can while assuring themselves in power forever in order to avoid being judged by international courts for all the crimes they have committed in all these years.

More than 100,000 deaths at the hands of government-sponsored killers, more than the afghan and iraq wars together.

The perfect definition of Kleptocracy.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Economist has great coverage of what is taking place in Venezuela. There's almost not a week that passes without Chavez closing down a TV station or taking over some private businesses because, f.ex., they raised prices after he devaluated the country's currency by half.

<comment><USER5> It's the classic socialist play carrying itself out -- the ultimate end is death and destruction. Hopefully the Venezuelans will recognize what's going on and be able to stop it.

<comment><USER6> From what I've read (I'm afraid I don't have references, and reports vary wildly, this is just my synthesis, following the news fairly closely, as I live in S America) he's doing about average. The country is seeing gains in certain areas (health expectancy, literacy), but they seem to be (within the uncertainties I listed earlier) about what you'd expect from any country that has a sudden boost in (oil related) income.

I say all that to basically explain that it's unlikely he will collapse any time soon.

He's certainly a populist leader, which I find personally distasteful. And he has little respect for free speech or democracy, which is even worse (from my POV). But I think we're also understanding that the "western model" isn't that great either (articles of evidence: (1) the recent financial fiasco; (2) China).

[Edit: I feel I am not really contributing much except uncertainty here. So here's a more decisive take: the biggest problem facing S American politics is, in my opinion, corruption. The kind of approach that Chavez uses encourages corruption and so should be resisted. On the other hand - <USER2> uncertainty - most alternatives (particularly military law - this is a _big_ lesson from Chile) also encourage corruption. And, wow, downvoted already... some passive aggressive cunt who hasn't bothered to explain why. What a surprise...]

<comment><USER7> I would have up voted you, if you hadn't used the term "cunt".

<comment><USER8> As an aside (and purely for my own interest) is that because you consider that word particularly offensive - or just because of the whole tone of that p.s?

I ask because I'm noticing that while people seem to care less and less about "fuck" in conversation they are caring more about that word.

(this is a genuine interest by the way)

<comment><USER7> I'd not react if someone used "fuck" as an expletive (depending on situation), but if someone called another in the discussion for "fucker", or similar.

In sum: A curse is not high class, but might pass. A general insult to someone, because they disagreed, is much worse.

(And I partly agree with the poster, if someone disagrees I'd like a motivated comment. A vote up/down is just frustrating; what can I learn? [Edit: But to vote up/down to show you're (dis)agreeing is the culture on HN, it seems. So I accept that.])

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, but afaik "cunt" is quite offensive.

<comment><USER8> Gotcha. That makes sense :-)

(and yeh I agree with the rest of what you say)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Chavez is the Kim Jong Il of the Western Hemisphere. Military dictator who runs his country into the ground while talking big, waving his arms around, and thinking he's relevant. It's just staggering that despite all that oil they've got, they've managed to squander most of the proceeds via corruption and mismanagement.

<comment><USER8> I have a really bad anecdote about Venezuelan. We had a guy from Venezuela on our Uni course.

Once at a party one of the girls on our course with communist leanings (an American, as it happens) says to him "don't you think it's so great what's going on in your country at the moment?"

The look on his face was awful (to this day I dont think she understands quite why he was upset)

<comment><USER6> The trouble is that we / you don't have enough context / social knowledge to extrapolate from this. If the guy is in the USA then it's likely he comes from a fairly wealthy background. And that is absolutely not going to support Chavez. S American politics cover a much wider range than American / Western politics, where you are basically choosing between Pepsi and Coke. There really are Maoists and Fascists and everything inbetween.... And also, American leftist supporters of Chavez are incredibly naive, in my experience. So this is just the kind of cultural disaster you could predict - it doesn't really tell us anything new.

I am not criticising you - just trying to explain the general problem with understanding what is happening in Venezuela. It's very had to get a good grip on. So much news is extremely polarized.

<comment><USER8> > So this is just the kind of cultural disaster you could predict - it doesn't > really tell us anything new.

Oh absolutely (you've pretty much described the situation spot on). It was just a related anecdote :)

(incidentally he was fairly poor in Venezuela but had distant family in the UK who managed to pay for him to make it over to university here. The girl was generally extremely naive: but in her eyes was wordly, experienced and a bit radical. You can imagine who was more interesting to hang with - Jose is one of the people that kicked off my fascination with South America)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this news has it's place on HN, just as well as other news on ACTA, net-neutrality, etc.. But some comments are really inappropriate to put so much political polarity on it.

Venezuela is a country relatively "rebel" on US domination: that doesn't make it a devil, but that doesn't make it a angel either: comments on Chavez being a "dictator" seem inappropriate in this thread (what about a previous US president who cheated with voting machines then ?). Essentially, beware of not distorting the perception of things by highlighting many more such facts when they happen in Venezuela than when they happen e.g. in France or Italy promoted by major media companies and securitarian policies. Overall, think about Chomsky...

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not going to argue the political theory of this, although I have a lot to say.

Instead I'll just say that I continue to feel sorry for my brother human beings in Venezuela. They deserve better than this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just like our OUR politicians! Isn't that nice!</comment>


Hipmob Demo - Live chat in your iPad app - <AUTHOR> http://hipmob.tumblr.com/post/33251290809/hipmob-demo-video-live-chat-in-your-ipad-app

<comment><AUTHOR> Ayo from Hipmob here - a few times as we've posted updates in the past, folks have asked for a demo video. I resisted as I initially thought Hipmob would be self explanatory, but that was my mistake. Hope this explains the product a bit better - would love any feedback to ayo@hipmob.</comment>


Buy, sell, donate and transact on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://sellsimp.ly/

<comment><USER2> Maybe this is just my inner angry nerd speaking, but I don't understand this at all. Why would I want to buy stuff via a public broadcast channel? Plus, you still have to setup your credit card, shipping, etc. So in the initial transaction, you're not buying so much as saying "I'd like to buy this, please send me instructions on how to do so." Wouldn't tweeting a link work better?

Aside from the fact (as others have pointed out) that this has been tried and failed, how is this genuinely useful and not the kind of thing that a social media guru would dream up, but normal people would never use?

Why not a platform to let people buy stuff by posting on their blog? When I post "BUY PRODUCT_NAME", their google alert can pick up the mention and then they can leave a comment on my blog telling me how to setup my billing and shipping info. Amazing!

EDIT: To boil all the above down, what problem is this solving?

<comment><USER3> Ryan, Thanks for the feedback. Appreciate it.

First, you don't need a credit card at all.

Second, after authorizing your account you can buy, sell, donate or direct pay all you want. The initial setup is one step. After that it's frictionless commerce.

Third, you'll want to buy stuff for the same reason you want to buy stuff on any other e-commerce channel. Even more so when Brands will be offering special Twitter only deals.

Finally, it's genuinely useful for so many people. Just ask the food cart owner who is using our Direct Payments to collect payments. Or, the Etsy seller who can now sell their goods on Twitter. Just a few examples of current uses.

To illustrate just one problem it solves: Currently, brands list items in their storefronts. Then they go on Twitter and Tweet about it. Then a customer clicks on a link in the Tweet and is taken off Twitter to their storefront. Then the customer goes through 5 more clicks before a transaction occurs. Sell Simply eliminates all of that. The Tweet is the listing and the checkout and the transaction combined in one. One step frictionless commerce. That's a brand solution. There are others.

Normal people are using it, by the thousands. This will only grow.

This wasn't thought up by a SM guru, but by a hacker like yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry but IMHO, this is the classic "product looking for a problem" example. There are several things I believe make products like this tough to succeed, most important of which is this: for a transaction-based model to work there needs to be buyers and sellers who go to a marketplace to buy or sell. Without this focused ecosystem, its really tough to make it work. I understand that one could argue that sellers can broadcast across all channels (twitter, facebook etc.) and create a buyer ecosystem in a distributed fashion. But I feel it is merely good theory and cannot work at scale in practice (barring few examples of flash sales, deals etc which have short shelf life and apt for viral / social spread).

</comment><comment><USER5> A good idea would be to have slightly friendlier tweets i.e. instead of 'Buy!' have users say 'I just bought X from @y'. That way it makes sense when someone checks their timeline, instead of a cryptic one-word tweet.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks similar to what Tipjoy (ex-YC) tried a couple years ago, before they deadpooled: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/08/micro-blogging-meets- micro-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/08/micro-blogging-meets-micro- payments-courtesy-of-tipjoys-api/)

In line with the post that @avichal wrote the other day ([http://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/build-something- peop...](http://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/build-something-people-want- is-not-enough/)): why now?

</comment><comment><USER7> 1-click-payment for anything... Could be a square card-case competitor. Image a café that has tweeted the menu. You go in, reply to what you want, you get it. Could be huge on mobile payments.

<comment><USER8> Could be... or it could be an overly vague idea that boils down to nothing

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the "ability" to do this is cool... but I can't imagine that I'd ever feel the need to actually do this.

Novelty, sure, but practical? Not in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> I read the site but I still cannot figure out, if you're a vendor, what is necessary for buyers to activate their account.

<comment><USER3> You just sign in with Twitter and connect your PayPal account. After that transactions can be made over Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How will you handle chargebacks? If my Twitter account gets hacked, will I be responsible for the cost or will you be?

<comment><USER3> PayPal handles all fraud.

The problem for the hacker is that in order to get paid their fake Twitter account would need to be connected to a real PayPal account which is connected to a real bank account. The entire chain of transaction would be very traceable.

If your Twitter account is hacked you are going to immediately realize you are transacting over Twitter. You'd see pay tweets and transaction tweets occurring in real time. You could then easily just shut off your PayPal connection to Twitter in your Sell Simply account. We do not store any Twitter or PayPal login, password or account data at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been looking for this... pay through twitter. Imagine the possibilities!

<comment><USER13> Running Lean was a book that you could pay with a tweet: <http://www.runningleanhq.com/>

<comment><USER3> Not the same thing. That is the author trading retweets for a book. Sell Simply actually turns Tweets into transactions. You can pay, buy, sell or donate with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly half of my idea previously posted on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2900514>

</comment><comment><USER15> It sounds cool. Then you use it, and it becomes even cooler!

</comment><comment><USER16> This rules. Incredibly easy.</comment>


July 2012: Objective-C Ranked Higher in Popularity than C++ - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/images/tpci_trends.png

<comment><USER2> > C++ is used heavily in large high-performance systems whereas Objective-C is > mainly used in the mobile apps industry.

Try, "Objective-C is mainly used on iOS". If you look at the before-and-after picture of Obj-C, it is painfully clear that the _only_ reason for its popularity is iOS. One must wonder what would be possible on the iOS platform if other languages were given a fair shot at that pie...

<comment><USER3> You can write apps in C or C++ on iOS if you like, but the framework (Cocoa) is everything.</comment></comment>


Total Recall Becoming a reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3208.html

<comment><USER2> I'm just glad this isn't in any way related to the awful new movie. God that was bad.</comment>


Ask HN: Daily Recurring Checklist - <AUTHOR>

Is there an app with a good workflow for a daily recurring checklist?  I'm looking for a web app or something that I can use from anywhere which I can use to establish some habits.  (Stuff like push-ups in the morning, make my bed, go sort my junk mail, etc...) <comment><USER2> I am using the Dayta app on my iPhone for this purpose. It is working. Here is what I do.

1\. Find a small habit to change. (Example: get more sleep).

2\. Find a time/place in my daily routine where this new habit will go. ("Immediately after awakening").

3\. Think (this might be easy or hard) to quantify a change in this habit. "Lose weight" is easy to quantify. "Be happy" is not. (Easy to quantify sleep, and I round to the nearest quarter hour and I'm not OCD about accuracy. I'm "grenade" accurate).

4\. Set it up in Dayta to measure the action daily.

5\. Look at the little graph that Dayta generates.

My experience is that I have fewer of the 5 hour sleep nights and more of the 7 hour sleep nights.

I have added "weight loss" to the morning routine successfully.

The next one I added was $ spent at Starbucks. This one cut my coffee spending dramatically. Good for me, not so good for Starbucks.

Now I've added "Hours spent writing" with a target of 1 per day. This one is not so successful (yet) because I haven't found a time to park this habit.

Before this I used a Google spreadsheet and created an icon on my iPhone for the data entry. This was simple, inelegant, and worked like a champ.

Credits:

1\. The idea for finding a place to park your change in habit during your daily routine came from an article I read somewhere about a Stanford psych prof (I think) who talked about this being a key to effecting changes.

2\. The idea for small changes being successful was from the same source.

3\. The idea for starting with a very small set of changes in the daily checklist/routine came from Sebastian Marshall (thanks @lionhearted).

4\. The idea for using a Google Spreadsheet with (effectively) a roll-your-own mini web app on the iPhone came from Mr. Google somewhere.

5\. The idea of trying hard to not think Brilliant Thoughts but instead accept that other people might have good ideas and I should be humble enough to accept them gratefully came from a friend who is now deceased.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've tried using apps for this, and I've found that the thing that works best is a plain old wall-calendar. Hang that up somewhere visible, and make one box on each day for each of the habits you're trying to build. Put a green tick in once you've done it, and try to keep it up every day.

Apps are easy to ignore. A wall calendar is harder to forget about.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. But if you want to go digital, Remember the Milk works fairly well for me, and just printing out my tasks works wonders too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote this app some time back - <http://www.dailytodo.org/> \- that might help.</comment>


Show HN: LogCroc – Status dashboard from servers logs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mpolyak/LogCroc

<comment><AUTHOR> I created LogCroc to monitor visually for server exceptions at the company I work for.

It was handy to have a visual dashboard running on a TV in the office that gave everyone an overview at a glance of what's going with our servers.</comment>


Cisco Security Advisory Cisco ASA RCE and DoS Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180129-asa1 <comment><USER2> Cisco left AnyConnect open on the external interface by default. This guy found an RCE on it with a fuzzer. Jesus. [https://recon.cx/2018/brussels/talks/cisco.html](https://recon.cx/2018/brussels/talks/cisco.html) This was announced a month and a half ago, fwiw

Fun stuff: [https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and- events/b...](https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and- events/blogs/2017/september/cisco-asa-series-part-one-intro-to-the-cisco-asa/) [https://github.com/nccgroup/asatools](https://github.com/nccgroup/asatools)

<comment><USER3> AnyConnnect is on by default because the ASA is used for VPN in 99.99% of the cases it's effectively Cisco's VPN appliance more than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the reason to use these boxes? "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"? It seems that vulnerabilities are much more common than in the platform VPN (ipsec/ssh/openvpn etc) implementations shipping in server operating systems, why not just just terminate at a server box?

My favourite recent one was the slapstick Fortinet one, [https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/10/23/attack-o...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/10/23/attack- of-the-week-duhk/)

(Same goes for terminating TLS at load balancers)

<comment><USER5> For businesses without very strong tech teams but with a need for lots of VPN accounts, cisco webvpn has long been popular, as it does all the things well that the things you mentioned don't:

It has good stories around user management and access control. There are literally millions of people able to configure it well enough to work. It has an excellent reputation for stability and security among it's client base (which is not the same as actually _being_ very secure, mind). It has good (albeit expensive) commercial support. It works well with most desktop and mobiles OSes. It's easy for non-technical users to use it. Etc, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> CVSS scores range from 0.0 to 10.0 so this one, at 10.0, is "as bad as it gets".

The advisory says:

> _The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of > public knowledge of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory. > Cisco PSIRT is not aware of any malicious use of the vulnerability described > in this advisory._

... though I'm guessing that will change in the very near future.

Time to go reconfigure and/or update some firewalls...

<comment><USER7> CVSS scores are like Ouija boards; you can make them say whatever you want them to say. I wouldn't take them too seriously.

That's not to say that this isn't a severe vulnerability, but rather that plenty of vulnerabilities that don't get a "10.0" are just as bad.

The pragmatic, conservative way to look at these kinds of announcements is:

* Assume any vulnerability that refers to memory corruption (really, "memory" of any sort not qualified by "reading", which is itself a pretty bad vulnerability) is remote code execution.

* Assume potential remote code execution is remote code execution.

* Assume remote code execution or denial of service is remote code execution.

* If the announcement doesn't clearly indicate that the vulnerability requires authentication to exploit, assume it's pre-auth.

<comment><USER6> If you have an ASA, WebVPN is enabled, OOTB.

If you have an ASA that hasn't been updated today, you are vulnerable to DoS and RCE vulnerabilities.

That is, as far as I'm concerned, about as bad as it gets (we've got, I dunno, several dozen of these).

I realize that, like everything, CVSS scores aren't perfect. But as a general "how bad is this?" indicator, I do think it's useful and, in this case, the 10.0 does the job of pointing out, "It's bad".

<comment><USER7> Right, I'm less perturbed by the 10.0 these bugs got, and more by the huge number that get lower scores. I don't think CVSS works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This has, similar to Meltdown and Spectre, been broken earlier than expected. As far as I am aware this wasn't supposed to be released by Cisco until Wednesday, but anonymous reports started to circulate yesterday and today. This isn't a great sign for the industry when stuff can't be kept under wraps until an agreed date.

Edit: Credit to the folks at NCC Group - they've picked up a few ASA vulnerabilities now.

<comment><USER9> Maybe it's not a bad sign for the industry - maybe it's just a sign that the industry really thinks that embargoes like these are a bad idea. Or at least some members of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> just a small sample of impacted devices: [https://www.shodan.io/search?query=cisco+asa](https://www.shodan.io/search?query=cisco+asa)</comment>


Show HN: An IDE Called Vim, a Book on Using Vim as an IDE - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/anidecalledvim/ <comment><USER2> If we forget for a moment that Vim lacks almost everything needed for being an IDE, the free sample is not very appetizing:

\- the home row post-facto rationalizing of 'hjkl' is unnecessary and simplistic

\- 'o', 'O', 's', and 'cc' are missing from the insert mode table

\- still in the insert mode table, 'i' and 'I' should be "insert", not "append"

\- and 'C' changes "to" the end of the line, not "at" the end of the line

\- '%' is not called anything except '%'

\- there is nothing "automatic" in the behavior of '%'

The author should have enlisted a technical editor.</comment>


Software is Reorganizing the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/

<comment><USER2> As someone who took (and really benefited from) Srinivasan's MOOC course, I definitely enjoy his written style. I like the links-as-evidence, and I think he does a great job of weaving a narrative out of seemingly disconnected parts.

That being said, I think he goes a little too far here. It seems like there's a fundamental disconnect between his two most important contentions, namely that:

"The future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant."

"We are rapidly approaching a future characterized by a totally new phenomenon, the reverse diaspora: one that starts out internationally distributed, finds each other online, and ends up physically concentrated."

If location is increasingly unimportant, why would the natural next step be for people to coalesce geographically? Why do people that share common interests online necessarily need to live close together?

<comment><USER3> Great question. The short answer is that there are many social goods which are only available when people of like mind are in the same physical location. Among other things:

1) Walkable communities where everyone has some things in common are extremely popular (e.g. college).

2) By contrast, today many of us live corridored lives in anonymous apartment complexes, knowing more people at work than at home. Just from an efficiency perspective, that is a huge waste of time and life. Every single person there has to do a commute (or get on the internet) to meet people they know.

3) The specific location that people end up concentrated at is unimportant. But being located near someone else will be extremely important for the foreseeable future; among other things: you can't read body language, you can't yet easily collaborate on physical objects, and people can't yet reproduce over the internet :)

4) In more detail, it's a bit like dinner. Whether you meet your friends at place X or place Y doesn't matter. What matters is that you meet your friends in person. You could be more technically precise and say only the variance in location matters, and not really the mean (the specific spot on the surface of the earth).

Anyway, I have a much longer version of the essay (really, a short book) that I had to edit down which went into this and related qs. I'll post that at balajis.com soon.</comment></comment>


Brotli Compressed Data Format - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-alakuijala-brotli-01 <comment><USER2> It looks like the authors just looked at DEFLATE and tweaked it mainly by better engineering and taking into account modern hardware specifications (larger window size, ...), but largely ignoring the theoretical research that has been carried out on LZ77 in the last few years.

For example a paper from last SODA [1] shows that by using a better optimization algorithm and just simple universal codes instead of Huffman, it is possible to beat zlib in space and compete with Snappy in decompression speed (and I'm sure that the decoder can be further optimized). This is just the last one on the topic but there have been quite a few.

Caveats: compression is fairly slow (but can be improved with heuristics) and the datasets used in the experiments are big and very repetitive (so it is not clear how it performs on small files), but still I think that many ideas should finally find their way into modern compression formats.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3872v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3872v1.pdf)

Disclaimer: the paper authors are from my CS department.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a bit strange: this seems to come from Google, who already invented another general-purpose compression scheme called Snappy[1], which is also usable in streaming. TFA mentions gzip and deflate but not Snappy. Brotli seems to aim for better compression whereas Snappy aims for more speed, but they're both based on LZ77.

Brotli has something else in common with Snappy: a lack of a specified framing mechanism. When Snappy first came out it did not have one, so if you wanted to write Snappy-compressed data to a file, you might invent your own header to frame the compressed data. They later added this to Snappy, but by then it was too late: implementations had already come up with their own, mutually- incompatible framing. The same mistake seems to be being made again with Brotli.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/snappy/](https://code.google.com/p/snappy/)

<comment><USER4> You're right about the aims of snappy and brotli: snappy has compression ratios worse than deflate, because it's only LZ77: there is no entropy encoding (eg. Huffman) afterwards. Brotli is similar to deflate in that it does LZ77 first and then compresses its output stream by an entropy code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little disturbed that

        onclick="javascript:

was common enough in their corpus to end up in the dictionary.

Readable version: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f66f6206afe40bea1f06](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f66f6206afe40bea1f06)

<comment><USER6> The corpus seems oddly constructed. I have to wonder where they got the English text from -- it seems to have a very academic bias, with lots of strings containing "University", for instance. There's also a lot of redundancy; for instance, I see some near-duplicates including:

        12010. "University of"
        12129. "University of "
        13106. "the University of"

        13227. "Oxford University"
        13534. " Oxford University"

(I'm sure there's other similar duplicates; I just happened to notice them while looking at all the "university"-ies in the corpus.)

<comment><USER7> It's really strange standard. For those that didn't analyze: It's part of the "static dictionary given in Appendix A" which has to be present in any implementation.

Especially if we know it's supposed to be used to compress the fonts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think using a static dictionary is a bit of a "cheat" since it's not truly "compressing", but just moving some of that data somewhere else, i.e. the compressor/decompressor increases in size. It also makes it less general. Compare this with e.g. pure LZ77 or Huffman, where all the data in the output is coming from the input itself and not somehow embedded in the algorithm.

Incidentally I really like LZ77 and its variants; it's my favourite compression algorithm, due to its incredible simplicity (a decompressor is just a bit over a dozen instructions) and intuitiveness. Thus I've always considered it odd that Huffman's paper was more than 20 years before LZ's - the Huffman algorithm is rather more complex. Perhaps the LZ algorithm was well known already, and considered too trivial to write a paper about? I do know that many have rediscovered LZ independently, without ever studying data compression theory.

</comment><comment><USER9> TLDR: _Stream-oriented, resource-conscious, lossless compression algorithm to replace gzip /deflate, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods and which decompresses much faster than current LZMA implementations_.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't miss the point here, which is this:

 _Can be produced or consumed, even for an arbitrarily long sequentially presented input data stream, using only an a priori bounded amount of intermediate storage, and hence can be used in data communications or similar structures, such as Unix filters;_

It's supposed to be a _safe_ compression standard.

<comment><USER8> That's pretty common for compression algorithms - for Huffman the only thing needed for decoding/encoding is the code table and possibly some adaptive overhead on top of that, and with LZ it's a buffer the size of the sliding window. At the moment I can't think of any others that need unbounded space growing with the size of the input - maybe some of the ones based on Markov chains?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some actual source code here, inside a font compressor:

[https://code.google.com/p/font-compression- reference/source/...](https://code.google.com/p/font-compression- reference/source/browse/#git%2Fbrotli%2Fenc)

</comment><comment><USER4> The following two sets of slides describe the format and in what ways it shall be better than deflate:

[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webfonts- wg/2013O...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webfonts- wg/2013Oct/att-0008/Brotli_Compression_Algortihm_-_motivation.pdf)

[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webfonts- wg/2013O...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webfonts- wg/2013Oct/att-0008/Brotli_Compression_Algorithm_- _outline_of_a_specification.pdf)

EDIT: They are from October 2013, so they may be inaccurate.

</comment><comment><USER12> Context: rev 2.0 of the Web font standard was going to use LZMA, it had issues (IP, decoding speed, clear spec for independent implementations), so Google proposed a new format.

WOFF report on Brotli: [http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF20ER/#candidateb](http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF20ER/#candidateb) (and #candidatea says what they thought of LZMA)

Reference code: [https://code.google.com/p/font-compression- reference/](https://code.google.com/p/font-compression-reference/) (this aims for very slow but good compression, like their zopfli zlib encoder)

Google's presentation: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aigINmRR7fw_ml8rz0rJ...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aigINmRR7fw_ml8rz0rJ3NTv08Qb3n6lZ_qvmxo8CzQ/present)

To the authors, I suspect it was a feature that it's 'just' DEFLATE with 4MB windows + more context for entropy encoding + tuned-up coding + a static dictionary + some other stuff--the WOFF spec mentions similarty to DEFLATE as a benefit, and they would like to keep it easy enough to for others to write decoders.

I kind of wonder if it was derived from something Google had been using internally. If you decode the static dictionary in the spec, it has a bunch of words and phrases from the most-used languages as you'd expect, but also some things that look like common code fragments from Web pages, which would be right down Google's alley. And that's not stuff you need for font compression in particular.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks like (yet another) NIH type of work from google.

</comment><comment><USER14> Presentation announcing the format, and discussing advantages/disadvantages compared to existing formats:

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aigINmRR7fw_ml8rz0rJ...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aigINmRR7fw_ml8rz0rJ3NTv08Qb3n6lZ_qvmxo8CzQ/present)

</comment><comment><USER15> Brotli.. I wonder where the name comes from. It sounds almost like the Swiss German word 'Brötli' (= small loaf of bread) - but I can't find any relationship to Switzerland.

<comment><USER4> This is not the only compression related piece of software/spec from Google named after a kind of bread: there are also gipfeli[1] and zopfli[2].

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/gipfeli/](https://code.google.com/p/gipfeli/) [2] [https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/](https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/)

<comment><USER15> Heh, I knew I've seen this naming pattern somewhere before, thanks for pointing it out. Well, maybe at least CS people will come to know some Swiss German words other than Muesli ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is its Weisman Score? :D

<comment><USER17> hah first thing that came to my mind as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pied piper.

<comment><USER19> check the rfc author.. clearly hooli :-)</comment></comment>


I'm a verified Twitter user with 11k followers. Here's why I'm quitting the site - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kellyellis/im-a-verified-twitter-user-with-11k-followers-here-s-why-i-m-quitting-the-site-76e48d2d5e26 <comment><USER2> So here's the question:

* Can this be fixed?

If someone were to create a Twitter replacement that avoided this problem, what would it look like? How would it work? What would be different?

Or is this problem too difficult to solve?</comment>


Easily send Dropbox attachments with Mailbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.mailboxapp.com/blog/?p=1#easily-send-dropbox-attachments-with-mailbox <comment><USER3> This seems like the most basic functionality db could add to mailbox - <USER2> wonder what's next. Maybe automatically storing attachments sent to you in db as well?

</comment><comment><USER4> How about the ability to save drafts?</comment>


Show HN: Wish - A command line enhancement for Windows (Kickstarter) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20258791/wish

<comment><USER2> Are you aware that the name wish already refers to the wish shell that comes with tcl?

<http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl7.6/UserCmd/wish.1.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> $25,000 for an editor? Am I too skeptic?

<comment><AUTHOR> The funding will primarily be used for developer time. I'll admit it is difficult to come up with a good estimation for what your time is worth, but I felt $25,000 was a fair price for the time investment required.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I made a site where students can create and share flashcards and notes - <AUTHOR> https://barbra.io/ <comment><USER2> Nice looking website, but may I ask: are these tweets legit? There's no username or permalink, and a quick search didn't return anything… I'm always concerned by products endorsed through fake testimonials. I'm all for asking friends to help out, but disguising it as legitimate user feedback seems a bit disingenuous.

<comment><USER3> They are friends of mine, but their feedback is legit :) Maybe we should be more explicit about it?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I think you should at least display them as what they are: testimonials from friends, not tweets from happy users.

Whenever I see a collection of (legitimate) user tweets, it gives me reassurance that a) the product is liked b) the product has been around for a while c) the product is popular. A company will always praise its own product. But if users start to do it publically on Twitter, it's an honest recommendation that is worth a lot in my eyes. It's like a grassroots movement. But if you fake it, it feels like astroturfing.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. We are changing that now. Thanks a lot for the feedback. Will rectify this.

<comment><USER3> Update: we removed it, and are replacing it with feedback people tweeted at us (not friends), and feedback we got from here and Reddit :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Similarly to many here, I can't get the website to work, but I'll still ask a question:

How is this different than Quizlet and Anki? (Obviously with Anki sharing isn't as straightforward but is possible (there's even a website hosting Anki flashcard sets))

<comment><USER3> We are live again finally. Sorry for the hiccup.

In Barbra the main difference is that you can take notes and have your flashcards in one place. I noticed I often had to transfer my class notes from Evernote and copy them into Anki. That was a huge hassle.

Another point is that in Barbra sharing flashcards and notes is the default. You invite people, set goals together, and then collaborate on everything. I noticed we always sent photos of notes on Whatsapp to others before tests, and that was a hassle as well. So we built thinking of these 2 things.

<comment><USER5> This sounds great! That always bugged me about Anki. I knew it could be done so much more conveniently.

I would suggest redoing the intro video, with better acoustics, less "umm" and "so anyway...". The site and product look really polished so it kinda sticks out.

<comment><USER6> Anki supports creating cards from LaTeX notes via an add-on[0], and for importing from a plaintext-based format there is a command-line tool[1]. After that, one can use Anki's accompanying shared decks feature to make a deck available to others[2].

Admittedly, all of those options aren't entirely hassle-free or discoverable.

[0] [https://tentativeconvert.github.io/LaTeX-Note-Importer- for-A...](https://tentativeconvert.github.io/LaTeX-Note-Importer-for- Anki/#orgheadline1)

[1] [https://metacpan.org/pod/Anki::Import](https://metacpan.org/pod/Anki::Import)

[2] [https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/](https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It takes 100 add-ons to get this to work. We just wanted to make it so that I can highlight a text and say "create a flashcard" and then it is all done.

We also offer more tests options as you can do Memrise-like multiple choice test or an Anki-like card-flip test.

Is that something that you find useful? :) I know some passion are avid Anki- ers so I would love to get your take on it.

<comment><USER6> I value integration flexibility and want to control or at least know exactly the spaced repetition algorithm I am using. Additionally, I believe a hosted service without trustworthy end-to-end encryption is a no-go for personal knowledge management. So far I'll stick with org-drill and Anki, it works for me (not using any add-ons).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks, When our classes went remote, I struggled to stay motivated; the tools we used didn't not play nice with one another. It was lonely. So I built Barbra to give students all the tools needed to study together in one place. I wanted to get the best parts of Anki, Notion, and Duolingo and just make them work for all learners. The tool is free. And you can find it at [https://barbra.io](https://barbra.io) At Barbra, students have their notes and flashcards together. They can also set a daily studying goal, and hold each other accountable to it by competing for streaks. The tool is pretty bare-bone and doesn't work so well on mobile, but I would love to hear your feedback. What do you think?

<comment><USER7> Consider changing the grid texture and re-recording your videos. Depending on the level of zoom, it creates an unpleasing effect: [https://send.firefox.com/download/f3465be7ff20fc88/#Ebv76l6w...](https://send.firefox.com/download/f3465be7ff20fc88/#Ebv76l6w7c1WgjlGMzzfDw)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ughh, that looks nauseating. We will definitely fix that and replace it with auto-playing videos. We shouldn't have used gifs there, its a compression artifact I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consider a simpler page as index, 15Mb javascript only is a tad too much, both for you and your visitors

<comment><USER3> Agreed. We will optimize it. The website should be live now again by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me a bit of Quizlet (search functionality on Quizlet was amazing) but looks like a nice cohesive product.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Quizlet is definitely an inspiration. Our benefit is that you can write notes and flashcards in one place and share them easily in study groups. And the study groups motivate each other through visible daily goals. Quizlet only offers flashcards.

<comment><USER10> If I recall, you can pretty easily share decks on Quizlet, at least years back when I used it. Is the difference with this that theoretically if I were in a study group we could work on editing them together, and then sort of 'compete' with each other to achieve daily goals (sort of like Memrise)?

<comment><USER3> Exactly right. It is not only about sharing a final product, but rather about creating it together. And then competing to see who shares and learns the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Props to the designer for creating a really clean interface :) I can really see this becoming like slack for schools vs. a Quizlet. I was a harcore Quizlet user, but for me it always lacked the opportunity to group study. I think you guys are onto something

</comment><comment><USER12> Hitting "enter" instead of clicking the button in registration form does not work. Unsubscribe link in registration confirmation E-Mail does not work. Login does not work (gives 404). But landing page looks nice.

<comment><USER13> This is just a beginning of your jurney of not working features, unfortunately. I've played with this for few minutes, and basically this is not even beta :(

I am rooting for this, but this is just too early.

<comment><USER3> What wasn't working? Sorry your experience was negative. We want to fix everything soon.

We truly just started, but brutal feedback helps, so thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You should have a "TRY DEMO NOW" button where I get to play with a demo sandbox. I just want to click around for a bit and I'm too disinterested to make an account.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. As soon as I see a page asking me to create an account, I nope out of there immediately.

<comment><USER3> You can try it with a dummy account for now. It is ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Blank page and flashing logo. What's wrong with plain HTML?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, it is soon back up. We didn't expect this much traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is neat and like the intro. If you don't mind sharing what is your front- end ui stack (for example, for building the user interface, navigation, panes, etc).

<comment><USER3> Thank you :) no worries.

We are using React.JS, Apollo and GraphQL.

For the text editor we are using Slate which is pretty good. And other than that we use emotion for styling :)

Our backend is Go, Postgres and Couchbase.

<comment><USER18> What did Couchbase offer that you found Postgres not a good fit for?

<comment><AUTHOR> We started with Couchbase and then switched to Postgres. So it's actually the other way around. We needed ACID transactions.

<comment><USER19> Do you see yourself phasing out couch base, or do you see a reason to keep both?

<comment><USER3> We are thinking of leaving Couchbase. Most of the new code is PostGres. What was your experience with NoSQL like so far?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Promo video looks very promising. As others have noted getting blank pages more often than not. Google oauth registration doesn't seem to complete

<comment><USER3> :) thank you. The website should be up now. We were down for a half hour sadly. We managed to scale up our resources now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you want me to agree to your TOS or PP on the sign up page, at least provide a link to them THERE.

Also, when returning from "Sign up" or "Sign in" via the back button, the logo and both "Sign up" and "Sign in" buttons and the footer with the links to TOS and PP are missing, need to refresh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback. We will fix that asap.

<comment><USER3> Update: fixed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I shared this link on social media: [https://barbra.io/](https://barbra.io/)

Shows nothing on social media. Consider adding some meta data and og and twitter data so it'll show more data and an image when shared.

<comment><USER3> Will do today! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I signed up and then got a bit confused when I had to create a hub. Might be a good idea to have an example image or video on the right side of the form to illustrate what it is and how it's going to look after I create it.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, we want to remove the Hub thing altogether for normal users. We recycled the permissions system from something we were working on last year, and that is why we have it.

Hubs work well for schools (e.g. harvard.barbra.io), but doesn't feel very useful for individuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is the benefit of using this site over the cost free, open source, repetition spaced, multi platform Anki ecosystem?

<comment><USER3> Our tool does everything Anki does, plus it let's you organize your notes and decks in one place and create them collaboratively with others in a group.

It also lets you set a daily learning goal to hold you accountable to learning.

<comment><USER24> So it does spaced repetition?

<comment><USER3> Yes. SM-2 algorithm just like Anki.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bug: I have loaded once before, but at times it get stuck (with show blue logo showing at top/middle of screen).

<comment><USER3> Thanks for letting us know. Weird. Just tested and it worked here. We just scaled up more resources, so maybe it should be better now if you hot reload. Are you logged in? :)

<comment><USER17> Was using chrome. When I last checked again, it is working again. Keep up good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We should be online again now. I am sorry for the inconvenience. We hope we can still get your feedback.

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks great, unfortunately stuck on pulsing loading logo after initial Google log-in (OS X Safari)...

<comment><USER3> Can you please hot reload? Our server almost crashed. We just scaled it up. Should be back any moment now

<comment><USER26> still down.

<comment><USER3> Should be up now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi guys, Barbra co-founder here too. Would love to hear your thoughts on the tool as well.

<comment><USER27> Tool looks great! Out of curiosity, are you planning to monetize? If so, do you mind me asking how?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for asking. Yes we are, but we want to always have a super generous free-tier. We were looking into charging educators for using Barbra in the classroom with more features (like tracking, permissions, etc), and also charging power-users (people with a lot of flashcards and notes) a small subscription fee of around 5-8$ a month.

What do you think? :) is it fair?

<comment> barry-cotter > charging power-users (people with a lot of flashcards and notes) a small > subscription fee of around 5-8$ a month

Don't charge that little monthly. Maybe $30 a quarter for more than 5,000 text flash cards or $50 for that plus photos and videos. No one has yet made a success of flash cards with a real big company. Anki is one guy. Remembr.it focuses on Chinese vocabulary. Memrise needs to figure out a way to make real money because they took VC.

Good luck. Counting to $40,000 a year in $8 increments is really hard. Don't handicap yourself by charging so little.

<comment><USER3> That is true. Thank you. We want to empower ourselves enough to invest back into product and make it awesome.

Specially during Covid we need to figure out how to stay alive without necessarily fundraising.

<comment><USER19> Personally I strongly favour building a sustainable business - but surely you can raise funds despite (because of! Given your market) the crisis?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> tryed, saw hotjar & lots of blocked resources by blockers and a near empty screen

<comment><USER3> We should be live again now. Let me know if it works. I would love to get your feedback!

<comment><USER7> You still have GTM, Hotjar and Fullstory included by default, without opt-in and no way to opt out. This significantly reduces your trustworthiness for me, as well as my willingness to try out or recommend to others what looks like a pretty useful tool.

Consider if you really need all that analytics, and whether it's worth the invasiveness (edit: and GDPR breach, you being located in Germany). Page hits, sign ups, created flash cards and other usage is something you have available without any of those tools.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for letting us know. We are removing Hotjar. And we don't use GTM (we forgot we had it) so that is also gone. We use Fullstory just to track bugs and it helps us a lot – I hope that is ok.

<comment><USER7> That's great to hear! I'm not too familiar with Fullstory, so I recommend reading up on their GDPR docs[1] and judge for yourself :)

[1] [https://www.fullstory.com/resources/gdpr-and- fullstory/#how-...](https://www.fullstory.com/resources/gdpr-and- fullstory/#how-think-about-gdpr-and-fullstory)

<comment><USER3> Update: removed Hotjar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where did the name come from?

<comment><USER3> It was the name of a great primary school teacher I had. Well. Her name was Barbara, but then we changed it to Barbra to make it sound more like a company name... The good thing is we can rock to the tune of that Barbra Streisand song.

<comment><USER29> Edit: the original = [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4HHaNhcgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4HHaNhcgU)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhtcU4-xAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhtcU4-xAM) this one? :)

It's the first thing that came to my mind as I read the title

<comment><USER3> Exactly. How great is it to rock to that tune?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can't create an account, a graphql request is pending

<comment><USER3> Hi I'm so sorry. We are fixing it right now. Our DB was down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any plans for spaced repetition functionality?

<comment><USER3> All flashcard you create are tested with SM-2 Spaced repetition, so we already have that :)</comment></comment>


Startups: "I Have No Idea What I Am Doing" by Buffer's CEO - <AUTHOR> http://open.bufferapp.com/no-idea/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Looking back to when I started Buffer, even though I had learned a lot from my past startup experiences, I truly didn't know what I was doing and I approached everything with that mindset. I was out there to learn and I knew that the only way I was going to progress was to adopt a very open mind. I'm writing this post because when I stray away from this mindset, I lose out as a result." Joel speaks almost for everyone. I feel sometimes the same and I am not in any way as accomplished as him.... Am I alone?</comment>