It's hard to have an unusual name in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/dispatches/its-hard-to-have-an-unusual-name-in-china <comment><USER2> Every time I enter China, I have to go to a separate special terminal at customs because their regular systems don't have my Chinese character in their character set.

Even worse is if you try to apply for a bank account in China as a foreigner. Their systems are designed for 2-4 character logogram names, so if you are using a 15-30 character alpha numeric name, then good luck. My English name attached to my bank account has gone through a half dozen permutations over the years, with spaces, without spaces, in the wrong order, etc. I've given up trying to fix it and now am content with a name that is not quite my name, but is close enough to pass passport checks when I go to the bank.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like the inverse of what some Asians, who have 2-letter surnames like "Ng", have to put up with when systems expect last names to be 3+ characters. Though I don't think that minimum restriction comes up in major govt systems.

<comment><USER4> My previous boss had a single letter last name. Turns out most airline ticketing system have a 3 letter minimum so he just entered his single character name 3 times to purchase the ticket. But this meant that every single time he got to the airport he would get stopped because his ticket didn't match his passport.

<comment><USER5> I ones met a man named Jo Å. Have started to use that name when testing names in it systems.

People named Null also have a hard time: [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that- brea...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-break- computer-systems)

<comment><USER6> Having NaN as a name must be even harder

<comment><USER7> At least it's the truth

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm in the process of proposing 7 new Taiwanese/Minnan characters to the Unicode IRG.

They're in the 1996 Bible and 2009 Presbyterian Hymnal. In order to print those texts, the church uses inline JPGs or Private Use Area codes with special fonts.

There's more in the Hakka Bible and hymnal, which I plan to study more this weekend.

<comment><USER9> That's interesting - what's the process there? Do you have to provide proof that they are used? Let's say they are accepted, do you then have to convince someone to create the glyphs? Do you have to add them to a current font or do you create an entirely new one?

Is this an area you work in or is it a hobby project?

<comment><USER8> My first draft was based on the Unicode Power Symbol project. It turns out that was overkill - they just need a Word document with a table of glyph/source/radical/stroke count.

[http://unicodepowersymbol.com/we-did-it-how-a-comment-on- hac...](http://unicodepowersymbol.com/we-did-it-how-a-comment-on-hackernews- lead-to-4-%C2%BD-new-unicode-characters/)

[https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17204-uax45-additions.pdf](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17204-uax45-additions.pdf)

They also need a font. I tried to find the original, but in the end just asked Andrew West from BabelStone Han to redraw the characters for me.

It's a hobby project. Finding characters was a side effect of trying to scrape data for Pingtype [https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) (my Chinese learning program). When I tried to scrape characters from the Taiwanese Bible, I found inline JPGs and thought "that can't be right..." which led me down a rabbit hole ending here, exchanging emails with Richard Cook, Ken Lunde and John Jenkins (the world experts).

[http://www.lingshyang.com/bible/taiwan_Bible/2ch/2ch14.htm](http://www.lingshyang.com/bible/taiwan_Bible/2ch/2ch14.htm)

If you have access to a Chinese-language paper library, please try to help take photos of some characters. Search "please contact" on the BabelStone list for some urgent ones. For example, "U+F2DD Alternative character for Db (Dubnium)" and "U+F2E2 Alternative character for Rf (Rutherfordium)" could be easily found on a periodic table, I guess.

[http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/PUA.html](http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/PUA.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to have an unusual name anywhere really. Whether it's from unusual characters, or a name that doesn't fit cultural expectations.

I wrote Alphanym to help encourage an interface pattern which preserves the natural diversity found in people's names, and to hopefully help mitigate technical issues like these.

[https://www.alphanym.com/demo](https://www.alphanym.com/demo)

<comment><USER11> Is this 'just' the front end part (in quotes because it's such a hairy issue, I imagine you have lots and lots of 'special case' code)? How do you suggest people structure their databases when storing this information? Does your product help with the full 'processing chain' of working with names?

<comment><USER10> Alphanym is a full-stack solution, and can help anywhere you need to use people's names.

For storing names, I'd suggest two very long Unicode string fields. At least 1024 characters or greater (some names actually get that long). One field being a full name field, the other being a "betanym" field (the name used anywhere you'd use a persons "first name" normally). Use the full name in billing/idiomatic contexts, and the betanym when addressing customers directly (or if you need a shorter name for UI reasons).

The full-stack UI is there to encourage user feedback, because names are surprisingly ambiguous. Though in more lax contexts like ML/NER, direct API calls without feedback may be adequate.

>Is this 'just' the front end part (in quotes because it's such a hairy issue, I imagine you have lots and lots of 'special case' code)?

There's surprisingly little special case code on the backend, because it primarily relies on ML to generate name interpretations. So most of the special casing is embedded in the ML models. However I am introducing more special case code to refine the ML models with a cleaner dataset.

Using names is ridiculously complex in the general case, seeing as it's a proper subset of NLP. So the API relies on user feedback, which is stored by Alphanym so it can offer more accurate interpretations in subsequent requests. The `name-uncertain` field allows clients to bypass the confirmation if the API has encountered the name before, so at no point does the system assume anyone's name. Yet most of the time people will only have to fill out a single form field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone whose first name is spelt in a way that's uncommon where I live, I can appreciate to some degree how frustrating this is. Most places spell my name wrong thanks to people "helpfully" correcting the "mistake" when I submit forms or other such things.

</comment><comment><USER13> In America we have a similar problem but related to length instead of special characters. I have two middle names. My name lengths are 6 7 6 6, but apparently 28 characters is just too many for some databases (or maybe the extra space).

I've had a lot of trouble over the years, especially when my name needs to match in two places (like getting TSA pre -- I had to sit down with a TSA agent to figure out exactly what to type where when buying airline tickets so it would match and give me precheck).

<comment><USER14> Clearly they didn't follow the guidelines that popped up [1], in this great thread [2]. It turns out that assuming almost anything about people's names is probably incorrect.

[1] [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13637102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13637102)

<comment><USER15> It's probably not so much that they believe names never get above a certain length, as they have to physically fit on some form of paper tickets.

Similar issue with drivers licenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Koreans' full names usually consist of 3-4 syllables, thus, a large number of databases in Korea simply were not designed to store long [western] names. It does hurt sometimes. For instance, my company uses the first 3 characters of my _given name_ as my _family name_, and the last 3 characters of my _given name_ as my... well, given name. They simply could not store my full name (17 bytes) to their database.

-ss

</comment><comment><USER17> The name from the article (i.e. 𬎆 ) is included among the 88,000-odd characters in the Unihan repertoire so there shouldn't be any technical problems in using it, only political problems.

<comment><USER13> Ironically, the character is just a box for me, presumably because it isn't supported on my Mac with Safari.

<comment><USER18> It's supported, you just don't have a font with a glyph for it.

<comment><USER13> Well since I'm using the default fonts, wouldn't that effective be the same thing?

<comment><USER18> No, because supporting a character means knowing all the metadata about it, not merely drawing it on the screen. You have to know whether it's a letter or a number or punctuation so that you can match against it in regular expressions, or do word breaking when you double click on it, etc. You have to know its bidi class so that you can render it in the right direction when putting it on the screen. You have to know the shaping rules so that apply when it's near other characters. None of that comes from your fonts; fonts just have glyphs in them. All the other metadata comes from the Unicode specification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would say that is hard to have an unusual name everywhere.

If I could receive some money each time I teach people how to write it I would be rich by now :) and my name is only mildly unusual. So, future parents of this world, think carefully before naming your children.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is really curious because this suggest that Chinese database does not have a unique identifying number for each individual. Can there even be a database without a unique identifier? There must be millions of individuals with the same name.

<comment><USER21> Huh? Why does this suggest that? After you create a bank account for instance a unique account number is generated for you. But usually they don't create these for each citizens on birth in each bank.

<comment><USER20> > My Ying character is also absent from the database used to make online > medical appointments...

I meant, in the above case, why can't he make an appointment using his identity number from his Resident Identity Card? [http://www.wiki- zero.co/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9lbi53aWtpcGVk...](http://www.wiki- zero.co/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9lbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnL3dpa2kvUmVzaWRlbnRfSWRlbnRpdHlfQ2FyZCNJZGVudGl0eV9jYXJkX251bWJlcg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I know in Japan it's fairly common to have unusual characters in your name that are only used in ceremonial situations, calligraphy and such. In everyday life, a more common version of the character is used.

</comment><comment><USER23> Other name restrictions across the world: [https://youtu.be/f5Y3cf3MFIw](https://youtu.be/f5Y3cf3MFIw)

</comment><comment><USER7> My last name always blows up when I get shipments from asian countries.

Sometimes I simply get Pler

Sometimes I get things like Pl#&!π¥er on my packages.

</comment><comment><USER24> For what it's worth, it's there in Unicode, but only in traditional Chinese, so it's 張㼆 or nothing.

<comment><USER24> Wow! I take it back! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623870) gives the character 𬎆. But for whatever reason, 㼆 and 𬎆 are not marked as variants of one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Somewhat related: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1]

[1] [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER26> From that, the scariest one is: "People's names are all mapped in Unicode code points." (i.e. some names are not doable in Unicode)

My god man, if you can't be done in Unicode, you'll have to live in a hut somewhere as 'the internets does not want you'. Might be an interesting idea for those who truly want off the grid, as they can't be 'on' the grid in the first place!

<comment><USER27> I would actually love to see an example of every list item he's presented. Well, except maybe the last one, might be disingenuous to ask for that.

<comment><USER28> [https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods- programmers...](https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names-with-examples/)

<comment><USER29> Last one still doesn't make sense as soon as you introduce anyone who doesn't already know someone from the "tribe" (or whatever) or isn't related to anyone.

You can't describe yourself as "my mothers oldest son" if I have no idea who your mother is. Or rather you can, but thats literally meaningless. How do these people even get someones attention? Is it always "hey you!", since you can't ask your mothers sisters oldest cousin to pass the meat at the camp fire if you have non family memebers present.

<comment><USER30> We do something similar when we say "hello Cousin" at a family event or address our parents (dad and mom).

If your community is small enough (100 people) it could easily be applied to every type of relationship, at the exclusion of individual name.

Also note that in many languages there is or used to be a dedicated word for very specific relationship to someone, with different word if the relationship is via the mother, the father, etc.

<comment><USER31> In India, in my language Punjabi, we have different words for

Sister of mother

Sister of father

Elder brother of father

Younger brother of father

Wife of elder brother of father

Wife of younger brother of father

Brother of mother

Wife of brother of mother

Son of brother

Daughter of brother

Son of sister

Daughter of sister

Husband of sister

Wife of younger brother

Wife of elder brother

Sister of wife

Brother of wife

Husband of sister of wife

Wife of brother of wife

Brother of father of husband or wife

Sister of father of husband or wife

Wife of son of brother

Wife of son of sister

Husband of daughter of brother

Husband of daughter of sister

In English, most of these are Uncle, Aunt, Cousin, sister-in-law, brother-in- law, mother-in-law, father-in-law, nephew, niece.

<comment><USER32> In Japanese, there are also distinctions like these, but only in characters, not words. For example:

\- 叔母さん and 伯母さん both read おばさん (obasan) and mean, respectively, younger sister of father or mother and elder sister of father or mother.

\- 叔父さん and 伯父さん both read おじさん (ojisan) and mean, respectively, younger brother of father or mother and elder brother of father or mother.

\- お母さん and お義母さん both read おかあさん (okaasan) and mean, respectively, mother and mother in law. etc.

<comment><USER33> These distinctions are imported from Chinese, where 叔母 and 伯母 are pronounced differently, although nowadays 婶婶 is much more common than 叔母 and both only refer to the wife of the father's younger brother, while 伯母 is an older brother's wife.

There are many more different terms for various fine distinctions of relatedness, but I only know those I had a need to use, and when I asked a Chinese friend for help, he told me that he can't remember all of them either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> why are there so many (and seemingly exclusively) negative posts about china on hacker news?

<comment><USER35> It's an economic superpower, and it does plenty of things worth criticizing.

<comment><USER36> This isn't even that kind of negative article, more like names are done differently there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> So this means, if you are in China, you cannot have English or Latin or other names, because they won't have a character for it? Not sure if I understand this correctly.

The very idea that you have to think about logistics before naming your baby is ridiculous.

<comment><USER2> It's the same logistics as an American thinking twice before naming their baby with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's a foreign language that will probably not play well with domestic systems.

<comment><USER26> With Cyrillic, because of it's proximity to Latin, there may be a way to have a 'standard transfer pattern' set of rules, whereby Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency. But we'd have to get our act together ...

<comment><USER38> ISO 9 was adopted 1954.

<comment><USER39> It's worth to note that it's _a_ standard, not _the_ standard - even that page includes multiple variations, and there are other transliteration standards officially used in various places (e.g. the Russian international passports transliterate names a bit differently than ISO 9), so you can't really do "Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency", you get different inconsistent transliterations of the same name and also it's not 100% reversible, especially if you don't know how it was transliterated.

For example, the (quite common) name Юрий has been transliterated as Yuriy, Yurij, Yurii, Yuri, Juriy, Jurij or even other options.

Also, you can't transliterate from _Cyrillic_ , you can transliterate from a particular language, since any phonetic transliterations will be slightly different between, for example, Russian and Ukrainian - even ISO 9 accounts for that, so a sequence of letters without context can't be sufficient for transliteration, the exact same sequence of cyrillic letters may have to be transliterated differently depending on its language.

<comment><USER40> Pedantry: I think you can _transliterate_ from _Cyrillic_. But you can't _transcribe_ from _Cyrillic_.

There are situations in which you have to transliterate, rather than transcribe, because you don't know what language it is. For example, it's a name in a list of names of people from different places.

<comment><USER39> Sure, you can do that if you want or have to, but you won't be able to do it _consistently_ or _properly_ \- you simply have to accept that some of your transliterations will be different than the official/proper transliterations of the same names, that the some of these people will have an official ID in Latin alphabet with a different name than what you wrote. And this is not a theoretical situation, such issues with wrong transliterations (and somebody missing a name because they're searching for a different spelling, or someone being offended because you wrote their name wrong) tend to appear ocasionally in various international sporting events, law enforcement and medicine/casualty situations.

<comment><USER40> There are no "official/proper transliterations" other than the ones you create for your institution, which is probably an academic library because I've not heard of anyone else caring about consistent transliteration. I've seen the same Greek and Russian names transcribed in all sorts of ways in government documents. Fortunately, all government documents have some kind of a number on them. That's what you use for your database key. Names aren't unique in any case, even with the extra variation introduced by whimsical transcription.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clojure needs a web framework with more momentum - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/tA2_IbU0unE

<comment><USER2> Newbie here. Are there any real web applications developed with Clojure?</comment>


Browser Bitcoin Miner - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate

<comment><AUTHOR> I've just finished a browser-based bitcoin miner, written in Java (as an applet).

I'd love to get some feedback on it.

Once the page loads, hit "Start generating" and it should start mining bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER2> This should be called GlobalWarming@Home because it's so inefficient; it's literally 200x slower than a GPU. The generated BTC are probably worth less than the electricity consumed.

<comment><USER3> Unless your office is paying for the electricity ;)

 _\--edit-- Really? I'm getting downvoted for a valid point?_

<comment><AUTHOR> True.

I've been thinking this over for a while. Right now, the general consensus is that the price of bitcoin will end up being related to the cost of electricity for computing, and in the long run transaction fees will have to go up or down to make that happen.

I think this will change.

When you have negative externalities like this, where people don't pay for electricity (they're renting, or in a condo/apartment building that has electricity included) or even free CPU power, as in an office, then the economics change. The price of bitcoin won't be tied to the price of electricity/CPU power, it will be tied to the cost of running a website like mine that lets people take advantage of free CPU power.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I think there will be a "base" of miners who basically have zero marginal cost, then a certain number of "suckers" who think that they'll make money even though they won't, and then "serious" miners whose number will vary according to profitability. Ultimately the base + suckers is probably enough to keep Bitcoin working in some form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I log into my account from multiple computers, I take it that it just does the right thing and accumulate work from all running miners?

<comment><USER5> I also wonder this. Also, say I have a highly trafficked site with a worthless customer base (say a puppy pictures site for 6 year olds) is there a way I can embed your applet into my site and have it generate me bitcoins invisibly to the six year old? I'd much rather do this than spam them with useless adwords.

Edit: I'm aware that this will only generate about half a cent per hour, but you would be surprised how long kids can browse useless pictures.

<comment><AUTHOR> That came up on the bitcoin forums (<http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8780.0>). I've got plans for doing something like that - let you embed the miner in your website so your visitors mine bitcoin for you. It's a really cool idea because you get money based on how long people stay on your page, rather than how many pageviews or click- throughs you have. Instead it's based on a more accurate measure of user interest - time spent on the page.

If anyone's interested in that, leave a reply here, or email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll let you know when it's ready.

<comment><USER6> Just my opinion, but this feels really scummy. I'd wonder why your site caused my CPU to spike, and probably consciously avoid it from then on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get where you're coming from. Here's an interesting thought: consider this as an alternative to advertising.

Which would you rather: a website use your mind by taking your attention to an advertisement, or a website using your CPU?

<comment><USER6> Advertising, no contest. Annoying, intrusive ads I have no qualms about adblocking, because they will never actually get me to buy a product. Helpful, non-invasive ads and clearly disclosed affiliate links? Feel free, since I'm getting some benefit too. There is no way for me to benefit from you using my cpu (ignoring the actual content in this comparison, obviously).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure any embeddable bitcoin miner will be added to adblock pretty quickly, so you won't have to worry.

Would it change your mind if you were given a portion of the bitcoins generated while you were on a site that was doing this?

<comment><USER6> For some people, yes. For me personally, no. I find them interesting, but I'm not investing in them really.

I think the best way to do it would be to ask, and be very clear about what you're doing. Some people would gladly help you, but others may be more wary.

<comment><USER4> Heres how I would do it: have a Bitcoin Plus (or whatever) widget box clearly visible on the website. Have it tell the user exactly what it is doing, including the current speed. Highlight the fact that it is an alternative to advertisement and that it only uses idle processing time (or if its used together with advertisement, state that its used to help pay for the site). Finally, provide a stop/pause button so that if it really annoys somebody or actually is causing cpu spikes, its easy to turn off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I understand it, the real Bitcoin mining money is in GPUs, right? Does this work with GPUs (I'm guessing not)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, GPUs are much faster than CPUs for mining. A top of the line GPU does 600 MHash/sec, on my graphics card it was doing I think 3 or 4 MHash/sec but the computer was unusably slow, and with a CPU miner I get 2 MHash/sec and my computer is perfectly usable. This is targeting the people who are interested in bitcoin (you can still mine a usable amount), but don't want to set up a dedicated mining machine.

Right now it doesn't use the GPU but I've got plans to do it too (it might be able to work with the new OpenCL stuff that's going on)

<comment><USER4> My GPU stably does 30 Mhash/s (when I underclock it a little bit), or 55 Mhash/s on stock speeds (about 65 is the max I can get overclocking) but then the GPU temperature increases quite quickly and if left for too long I've seen it do one of two things: automatically underclock to 30 Mhash/s or just crash.

Not sure how to best do it in a (non-obtrusive) applet, but would certainly be interesting to get it working!</comment></comment></comment>


Best books/ info sources on UI design - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not sure how advanced you are, but as a relative noob, I've been reading, among others, the following sites:

<http://www.smashingmagazine.com/> <http://uxmagazine.com/>

Smashing has really good books, most if not all you can buy as ebooks. If you want a good overall primer for less advanced UI/UX designers, read the Smashing Book #1

I also follow people like Paul Irish, but that's more for HTML5/CSS3 and front-end dev...

</comment><comment><USER3> I've read a few books about the subject. One of my favorites is Designing The Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr: [http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Obvious-Common- Approach-Appl...](http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Obvious-Common-Approach- Application/dp/032145345X)

It has a pretty good signal/noise ratio.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a pretty good article I came across a while back, more about the user testing side of Ui, but still helpful! [http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dont_test_users_test_hypo...](http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dont_test_users_test_hypotheses)

</comment><comment><USER5> What about <http://www.designforhackers.com/> ? I havent read it (im not an UI guy)

<comment><USER6> It actually exceeded my expectations, which were fairly high. It goes in-depth to the point where, if you are just _interested_ in the topic, you probably won't care for, but if you are looking to gain a more thorough understanding, it's great, especially for beginners.

Highly recommended.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Swifty – Learn how to code in Swift wherever you are - <AUTHOR> http://swifty-app.com

<comment><USER2> Why did you make all the text images? They're highly compressed as well, making them blurry. If fonts are a concern, there are a ton of freely available web fonts at [http://www.google.com/fonts](http://www.google.com/fonts).

You should also make the remaining images on the page retina resolution since almost 100% of your target market is gonna be on one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input, you're absolutely right! A responsive Retina-compatible website is already in the works. Be sure to check it out as soon as it launches!

<comment><USER3> We don't really need Retina-compatible, but merely readable and accessibility- friendly would suffice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "wherever you are" isn't the issue with swift. It doesn't matter where you are as-is.

The issue (for me, at least) is it's dependency on OS X. I'd love to learn swift, and potentially do some fun iPad stuff, but installing OS X is the largest turn-off for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there anything like this on Android, for Java/Android?

<comment><USER5> There's actually a Java and C# version for Android/Windows Phone in the works right now!

Source: I'm the developer of said versions :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's "funnified"? Cool app though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It means "made more fun" but it's not exactly an official word. But as soon as it becomes one, I'm gonna claim that I coined it! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did he re-write a swift compiler?? Or is there a way in swift to compile a string?

<comment><USER8> Looking at the screen dumps of the iOS app, I am not convinced that this app evaluates any Swift code at all.

Also, as far as I know, Swift on iOS doesn't have anything eval()-like [On the Mac, there is a REPL ([https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=20)](https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=20\))]

I would think the easiest way to evaluate Swift code 'on' a iOS device would be to send it to a Mac, but as said, I don't think this app evaluates Swift code.</comment></comment>


4 12seconds.tv invites available - <AUTHOR>

Post a comment with an email address if you would like one <comment><USER2> firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> sent

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> sent</comment></comment>


If Google had one engineer more, they would beat YouTube (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1288806397010903041 <comment><USER2> Shouldn't this technically be "(2005)"?</comment>


Optimization with NumPy and Rust - <AUTHOR> https://alexdelorenzo.dev/programming/2018/12/06/numpy <comment><USER2> I don't understand how a program in Python can be easily translated to a program in Rust that cares a lot about the lifetime and ownership of the references.</comment>


OsFree Project (Open Source OS/2 Clone) - <AUTHOR> http://www.osfree.org/ <comment><USER2> Yes IBM couldn't open source OS/2 because there were at least 300+ third party commercial licensed pieces of code that it used to make it happen. They would have to get permission from them all to open source their code.

Besides OSFree there is also the Voyager project: [http://voyager.netlabs.org/](http://voyager.netlabs.org/)

Voyager takes on a Star Trek name because OS/2 3.0 was named Warp and IBM tried to use Star Trek to market it.

I'd like to see the OS/2 API calls in a WINE type environment for GNU/Linux to run OS/2 code under Linux and other operating systems. It would be easier than providing driver support for modern hardware.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, I always liked OS2, but I wonder what the chances are for this to succeed? Even reactos is far from complete, and the window for Win2k-2003 compatibility needs is shrinking.

<comment><USER2> I once proposed that ReactOS, AROS, HaikuOS, OSFree, FreeDOS, and others all share source code to make a complete operating system that could run apps from different operating systems so they don't all have to reinvent the wheel each time a new OS is written.

Imagine an OS that can run DOS, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, AmigaOS apps and have them interact with each other.

The thing about OSFree is that it is an alpha test and not a full OS yet. Some other operating systems are farther along and if they shared source code they could make OSFree more complete. Using ReactOS source code on OSFree would add in Windows driver models and the ability to run Windows apps like Win-OS2 did on OS/2 2.0. It would make finding drivers a lot easier if they had a Windows Driver.

I've donated to Haiku and ReactOS in the past, I hope they finish one day.

<comment><USER4> That was Microsoft's original plan for Windows NT: Win32, OS/2, and POSIX would be different API servers running on the NT microkernel.

<comment><USER2> The OS/2 programs were command line only and didn't include the GUI ones.

Microsoft removed the OS/2 ability in future versions of NT. Originally it was Microsoft OS/2 NT 3.0 as Microsoft wrote their own version of OS/2 shared with IBM like they did for DOS. But they added the Windows GUI to it and re-branded it as Windows NT 3.1.

I think the POSIX was removed as well in a future version.

I remember Windows NT 4.0 for MIPS systems, it had some sort of DOS emulation level as well. Microsoft wanted NT to be cross platform and then bailed on it and went Intel only.

IBM tried OS/2 for PowerPC systems and it flopped as well.

<comment><USER5> Actually, MS did have something called the "Windows NT Add-On Subsystem for Presentation Manager" that permitted one to run 16-bit OS/2 GUI applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I liked OS/2 at the time - a lot - but I am not sure why would anyone want an OS/2 clone at this point in time. Besides the "because I can" and "it's fun" standard reasons for building an OS, there is little reason to do it.

<comment><USER7> OS/2 was still used in some finance sectors. The Parallels virtual machine software was supposedly originally created to provide virtual machines to continue to support OS/2\. (Porting Parallels to Mac OS X was an opportunity that came along later.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone still maintains an OS/2 port of Firefox. Mozilla removed the OS/2 files from the Firefox source repo just last year because they no longer compiled. IIUC the OS/2 maintainer couldn't upstream his fixes to Mozilla because he replaced Firefox's build system (autoconf + python DSL) with kbuild "in order to simplify maintenance and speed up the build process".

[https://github.com/bitwiseworks/mozilla- os2](https://github.com/bitwiseworks/mozilla-os2)

[https://bugzil.la/969757](https://bugzil.la/969757)

</comment><comment><USER8> Still waiting for 0.0.5. But i guess Dezember 2009 isn't to far off... Dead project!

</comment><comment><USER9> Now the ATM vendors that opposed Microsoft might get some security updates and improvements. And run on a microkernel, too. Interesting lol.

Edit to note: _open-source_ updates and improvements rather than eComStation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a Python to Rexx transputer? :)</comment>


Ironman Game Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.nerdcommando.com/2015/02/10/x-caeli-ironman-game-development-part-1-setup/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! We've finished big chunk of work and released our game on Greenlight. Because from where I'm standing I think I can provide some useful (not prophetic though) tips about game dev I decided to start series of posts describing our experience. It's concentrated around idea that you're the only one engineer in the team. So this is part 1 of series - Setup. I'll be glad to have feedback. Cheers!</comment>


Show HN: Goto: CLI for teleporting with your terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CatEars/goto <comment><USER2> You really should learn how to use pushd and popd in your shell.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it similar to z ( [https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z) )? If so, why is it better?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for asking!

It is a bit similar to z, I actually looked a bit at autojump ([https://github.com/wting/autojump](https://github.com/wting/autojump)) before working on goto, which is quite similar to z. Z keeps track of where you have been and guesses where you want to go (I haven't tried it, but it probably is good). Goto works more like bookmarking where you can bookmark a single location and then later jump to it. I guess I would say goto and z solve the same problem but goto doesn't guess where you want to go, instead you have to enter the folders you want to use manually.

The reason I developed goto was to use profiles. Sometimes I want a certain set of locations to jump (and autocomplete) to. And other times I want a different set of locations to jump to. Profiles in goto solve this by allowing you to switch between them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ctrl-R ?

</comment><comment><USER5> cd ~

cd -

<comment><AUTHOR> ?

It's not just about going to your home folder...</comment></comment>


Nice Guys Never Win (Neither Do Mean Girls) - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/16/nice-guys-never-win-neither-do-mean-girls/

<comment><USER2> _Rather than a raving psychopath, a disagreeable person is "more likely than people high in trait agreeableness to behave disagreeably in certain situations by, for instance, aggressively advocating for their position during conflicts (van de Vliert & Euwema, 2004)."_

In other words, confidence and decisiveness is viewed as an attractive trait in males.

Nothing new here really.

<comment><USER3> True, but if you generalize to managers in corporations you get some interesting insight, which is to my surprise doesn't seem to be known or practiced by some managers.

Some managers in large corporations where many different project ideas and proposals compete, are in the mindset of "the good ideas will eventually win over the other ones". Experience (mine at least) have proven time and time again otherwise, the truth is more like the squeaky wheel gets gets the grease: i.e. people who aggressively push their ideas and use political maneuvering almost always (i) have their project funded and (ii) get promoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A valid point that was brought up in the discussion on the blog:

"I'm surprised no one has asked how the studies accounted for survivorship bias. One could easily imagine that while a certain number of, ahem, disagreeable men, stand out and increase their earning, it seems likely that this cohort is also terminated in greater numbers."

</comment><comment><USER5> Alternative title: successful men are seen as less agreeable.

<comment><USER6> Much better. This has more to do with income than "seduction" theory or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bad research, lousy generalizations, and crappy conclusions.

> The hypotheses were supported across four studies.

I wonder which study Warren Buffet, that disagreeable guy, fell into?

<comment><USER8> Regardless of opinion on the quality of the research, how does one person prove anything. What's that quote, "the plural of anecdote isn't data"?

<comment><USER7> > how does one person prove anything.

When the article includes the statement "Nice guys do not necessarily finish last, but they do finish a distant second in terms of earnings", it is a sign of either:

1\. Imprecise writing, or 2\. Wrong conclusions.

If their conclusions are wrong, then the article is a waste of bits. If their writing is imprecise, then just how imprecise are the generalizing statements that cannot be disproved with an obvious counterexample?

In either case, the article looks like all noise and no signal to me.

<comment><USER8> _If_ their conclusion is correct (and I have no idea if it is or isn't), the quite obviously that statement is a generalisation, and a perfectly fine use of one too. It quite clearly means "as a general trend", not "in absolutely every case". Did you honestly read that and think "aha, I can think of somebody who doesn't fit that statement, they're clearly wrong"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cited study .doc file in Google Docs viewer:

[http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freakonomi...](http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freakonomics.com%2Fmedia%2FAOM_Beth_Nice%2520v11%2520%282%29.doc)</comment>


Java 7 has "Commercial Features" - <AUTHOR> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out section G of [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html) and table 1.1 in [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/products...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/products/index.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I did a blog post outlining the issue in greater detail here: [http://www.spyfoos.com/index.php/2011/07/28/oracle- java-7-an...](http://www.spyfoos.com/index.php/2011/07/28/oracle-java-7-and- commercial-features/)</comment>


Fixing the core memory in a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2015/10/repairing-50-year-old-mainframe-inside.html <comment><USER2> I really need to go watch that machine run. They finally got four tape drives working, so now they can run a sort.

The 1401 is a strange machine. It's a direct descendant of IBM's electromechanical card machines, and it shows. It has a memory layout and ALU designed for fixed length strings of decimal digits of arbitrary length. The end of a number is indicated by a "word mark" bit, a special 7th memory bit on each 6 bit character.

In early computers, "business" computers had decimal arithmetic hardware, and "scientific" computers had binary. The IBM System/360 had both. This lives on in the binary-coded-decimal instructions in x86, which are used by almost nobody. (You can only do one digit at a time, because the x86 decimal instructions haven't been upgraded since x86 machines really were 8 bit.)

<comment><USER3> If they were 8-bit, shouldn't they have supported 2 digits at at time (4 bits per digit)?

<comment><USER2> 6 bits of data, one bit of mark, and 1 bit of parity only visible to the parity checking hardware.

<comment><USER4> That's not the format used by the x86 BCD instructions. x86 (and the 8080 before it) use 4-bit packed BCD so each byte contains two digits (x86 also has instructions for dealing with unpacked BCD, but the digits are still 4-bit). Additionally, the 8086 was a 16-bit processor (the 8088 had an 8-bit bus, but that came later and was still 16-bit internally) so I don't think the 8-bit limitation is due to the word size of the CPU in this case. It could be a holdover from the 8080 (8086 isn't binary compatible, but it was marketed as "source" compatible so there's a fair amount of similarity), but the 68000 (16-bit implementation of a 32-bit ISA) has the same limitation.

I think it probably comes down to cost. Just to support two packed digits, you need a fair bit of extra hardware (or a little extra hardware and a bunch of microcode) so you can properly calculate the correction factor. Expanding this to a full word means you need to be able to do that calculation for 4 nibbles instead of 2 which is about 3 times worse (you effectively get the most significant nibble "for free" so it's 3 extra nibbles to support instead of just 1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating detailed drilldown.

(I haven't heard of the 1401 called Mainframes before, though)

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you call the 1401 if not a mainframe? IBM refers to the 1401 as a mainframe: [http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/mainfra...](http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/mainframe/) [http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainfra...](http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP1401.html) The 1401 restoration team calls them mainframes: [http://ibm-1401.info/](http://ibm-1401.info/)

But whatever you call it, the 1401 is an interesting computer.

<comment><USER5> Yes, quite.

I am wondering if the mainframe tag is a more recent thing, as I don't remember that description back when it was still in production.

<comment><USER6> Interesting that it doesn't show up in any of IBM's literature until the S/360 which is referred to as a "mainframe". Most people I've talked with think of the 701 as the first mainframe computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is a blog of a guy trying to build core memory from scratch for fun:

Weekend Project: A Tiny Core Memory Array: [http://mikesmods.com/mm- wp/?p=556](http://mikesmods.com/mm-wp/?p=556)

Weekend Project: Determining Operating Parameters of a Memory Core: [http://mikesmods.com/mm-wp/?p=610](http://mikesmods.com/mm-wp/?p=610)</comment>


How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625968/rating-system-on-demand-economy-uber-olive-garden <comment><USER2> So many times I've been in a normal taxi and wanted to rate the driver. Knowing that if they were held accountable for the truly horrible service they would never drive again. This is part of why Uber is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Restaurants and traditional taxis did it first with tipping.

<comment><USER4> Tipping has been proven, through data, to not affect quality of service received. Better to simply pay staff a real wage.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ghostnote – Contextual notes and todo app - <AUTHOR> http://www.ghostnoteapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also a humble request.

I literally went through 3 developers and too much money until I was so luck to find @jimmyhoughjr.

Jimmys primary expertise is iOS but I convinced him to help me out on this project for the money I could afford.

Jimmy could use some freelance work as he has been out of work for while now (and live in the mid-west).

So if you need an extra hand on som iOS work don't hesitate to connect with him. He is a really nice guy and he is one of the main reasons Ghostnote even is anything today.

<comment><USER2> I know you probably don't want to publish his email here, but since his website doesn't seem to work, it makes it hard to contact him without twitter (which a lot of non dev guys) don't have.

May I ask, ballpark figure, how much was this project, or how much he charges per hour? I may have some projects in the future for him.

<comment><AUTHOR> pm me my contact info is in the profile

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone

I could write a whole book about this project and what i had to go through to get it out but finally I think its there.

Ghostnote allow you to add notes to almost anything on your mac. Files, folders, applications, websites and even documents open inside applications (ex a photoshop document).

I made it because I am not good at structuring and often just need notes for specific context but soon realized that this approach actually has quite a lot of potential.

Next update will have support for applescript so you can customize context.

Let me know if you have any kind of feedback. Everything is appreciated.

<comment><USER3> I like this. I may try it out in spite of having too many note-taking strategies already (and this wouldn't replace everything else). Please do share your story - it's good marketing and it makes people feel better about paying (a measly) $5 when they understand what and who is behind it. Given the value and the ongoing work you'll be doing to add support for different contexts, I think you could raise the price to $10.

Are you using the extended attributes to store notes in each file? If so, that'd make it easier to pass the notes along to other people. I could easily see this being useful across art departments.

You probably have this on your to-do list, but you could use the new capability to badge icons in the Finder so I know there's a ghostnote attached.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow some really great ideas there.

We will be using the ability to store notes in files and folders. This will be especially helpful if you use ex. dropbox. that way you can share notes and dropbox takes care of the syncing.

<comment><USER3> Where exactly would you be storing the note? Curious as to how durable/invisible it would be to the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the assets themselves

<comment><USER3> Sorry to be dense - I'm curious about the implementation. Can you give more detail? Is this in the extended attributes or file comments? Because I understand if the file moves to a non-HFS+ file system, you can lose those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple should buy you.

This is the kind of new feature that I want out of an OS update. It's incredibly useful, but requires deep system integration to work perfectly. Unfortunately, without access to private APIs, I imagine you're going to hit a wall sooner than later. For example, right now, moving a file breaks its relationship with a note, and an open file's notes aren't associated with the file's finder icon. I imagine those are both going to be tricky problems to solve.

With that said, congrats on an incredible idea, and a great early implementation. I hope it grows into something big.

<comment><USER5> >For example, right now, moving a file breaks its relationship with a note, and an open file's notes aren't associated with the file's finder icon.

That's interesting. Is there a workaround or quick way to transfer notes? I often rearrange files.

<comment><AUTHOR> There kind of are it just requires a little more work on our end. We will hopefully be able to share that with people soon.

Interestingly and anecdotally when moved around in dropbox it seems to keep it's relationship.

<comment><USER6> If you haven't already check out the 'bookmark data' methods of NSURL: [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSURL_Class/#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000301-SW34)

However, I'm not sure if you can use these without the user choosing the file with an open panel, or with drag and drop. That's what I had to rely on with my app Blik: [http://www.burntcaramel.com/blik/](http://www.burntcaramel.com/blik/)

Ghostnote looks great, by the way!

<comment><AUTHOR> hey thanks so much for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first reaction: How did another note taking app made it to the top of the Hacker News?

I went to the website and didn't see anything special. It was not until that I watched the video, the idea clicked for me and I am able to see the value of this app. I immediately wished that it was available on Windows.

I would suggest creating a GIF demo for the website. Something similar to how Shortcat App does. [https://shortcatapp.com/](https://shortcatapp.com/)

And yes, you should increase the price. 9.99$ should be the minimum for the tool considering the value it provides.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like something I'd use every day if executed properly.

Some things that I think would make this an awesome app:

1) IFTTT integration would be sweet. "If i get an e-mail about something, remind me to do it by putting it in my contextual note for an application"

2) iCloud integration would be sweeter. Unified notes for applications that exist in "desktop form" and "mobile form".

3) A "view all notes" option to be able to browse sans-context

4) The ability to clip media into a note easily

<comment><USER9> Definitely +1 on the "view all notes" options. Knowing full well that Ghostnote was intended for people like me that don't necessarily use structure for note-taking and need the context, I don't want to find my self in a position of not being able to find an important note because I'm not looking at that file/URL at that moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will add it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another fucking application that doesn't specify that it's only for osx. Fucking apple users man. What about Windows & Linux? Can I get this for those? I don't know... because it doesn't fucking say. _What... what are those?_ you ask? They're operating systems you don't need a fucking $1000 piece of hardware to run. Fucking apple users man.

Ok... I know, I know - swearing bad. But I'm a little sick of having to infer _the most important piece of information_ about software by looking at the fucking screenshots.

<comment><USER11> Hi,

It says available on mac store at the very top. The buy link redirects to the mac store. If those aren't clue enough, I doubt anything but 72point font size might get through to you.

Who is this rant aimed at anyway? The developer? S/he's perfectly within rights to make it for whatever platform they want.

Mac users in general? I think you could take some of your own advice from 23 days ago, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it would be useful if the ghost in the menu bar changes color if there's actually a note attached to the document/folder. So that you wouldn't have to constantly check if you actually wrote down notes for it

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree it in the list of things to do.

<comment><USER13> And for files/folders, maybe have the icon change to reflect that there's a note attached (in the same way Dropbox modifies icons).

I think it's a great tool but I worry I would just forget where I had attached my note: to the root folder for a project, to one of the many project files etc

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. We are def looking into some of these scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Holy crap. Looked at the site and thought, "hey, pretty cool. I don't know what I would use it for, though."

And then I watched the video and have been coming up with use cases non-stop. Starting with adding vim key-bindings I'm trying to learn to iTerm. Bye-bye yellow-stickies all over my monitor!

<comment><USER15> Question, though. What if your notes are _too_ context specific. So, for example, the note would bind to the specific file you are viewing in vim, whereas the contents of the note would be helpful for _any_ file opened in vim?

<comment><USER16> From the video it looks like you can have a note specific to a terminal window open to vim.

<comment><USER15> But how do you specify at what level the note should bind?

Sometimes, you'd want it at the file-level, sometimes at the vim-level, and sometimes at the terminal-level, I suppose.

<comment><USER17> One solution would be to have a hierarchy of contexts displayed in the note app. (Like breadcrumbs in file explorer). User could switch between context levels manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> $4.99 is an easy impulse buy for any productivity geek with a Mac. The only reason I haven't made the purchase is that I'm still living in the dark ages with Mountain Lion. I'll echo what others have said and suggest pricing this higher, right up there with Alfred and similar apps.

A couple of questions. Where is the data stored? Is it possible to retrieve or migrate data to a new Mac or new install?

</comment><comment><USER19> I was lucky enough to be a beta tester for this and it's really neat. You don't even think about it, but there is this massive cognitive overhead we all go through trying to sync up some notes that are "over there" where "there" is Evernote, a Google Doc, or a text file and toggling back and forth.

I don't use it for everything (no grocery lists) - but for lots of the computer based tasks I do it is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER20> Suggestions:

* View all notes and navigate to file or folder on click (or something). It should be easy to use a note to find the file.

* Backup to Dropbox (for example) and offline backup and restore.

* Attach multiple notes to a single file or folder.

* Categories or tag-based search.

</comment><comment><USER21> Love the app, just bought it today and recommended it to friends. I have found a few bugs though:

* In finder, if i press up and down, ghostnote doesn't recognize the focus change. Although if I go to another app, then tab back, ghostnote is focused on the right folder.

* In xcode it is quite hard to get ghostnote to focus on the right thing. a double click sometimes works. But clicking file a then file b causes ghostnote to focus on file a.

Thanks for an app that is sure to change my workflow!

<comment><AUTHOR> We will add support for keyboard.

Will have a look at xcode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome idea. Just bought it. Would have paid more too. This could become central to my workflow.

I've been using Trello or separate files for a lot of this type of stuff, but it's sometimes less than obvious where I took the note.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic and yes we do see this becoming central especially when you can customize the applescripts. (Next update)

<comment><USER5> Testing it now. Is there a way to have a note attach to any url on the same TLD?

For instance, there's some custom text I paste as my signature in a certain forum. For that forum, I'd like to be able to set the note to apply to the whole TLD.

Whereas for other pages, like say articles on a page, it would make sense to have notes apply to individual urls.

<comment><AUTHOR> not for now but we do have a solution for it as it's something we been finding our self needding too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Suggestion for the landing page: supplement video with screenshots or bulleted use cases for people who can't/don't watch the video (so users can get that aha moment)

Clarification: are notes attached to individual files, or can you also attach notes to file types or even specific file names? For example, any time I click on a .gitignore I see my note for useful git commands.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey

Regarding .gitignore not for now but we are building this concept of content zones into the app that would allow you to do that.

With regards to landing page yeah i realize that I should probably just have a video in the beginning. A lot of people think it's just another notes app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's slow to open the note. I click on the ghost, and it doesn't open right away. It's not long, but noticeable, and distracting. Also, there is no click feedback. This wouldn't be a problem if the note opened right away, but with no visible feedback, it feels like clicking does nothing.

<comment><USER24> I have the same issue. I also see a small cog icon in the menu bar whenever I do something like switch apps or chrome tabs. I guess it's an indicator of ghostnote activity, but its sometimes to the left of the ghostnote menu icon, sometimes right and sometimes a couple of app menu icons over...

Of more concern is that after installing I noticed moving finder windows around as sluggish and sometimes just the system cursor in general. If I quit the app, that goes away.

Those issue are making it unusable for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi diff_sky

That does sound weird. Do you mind sending me a mail (info at ghostnoteapp dot com) so we can figure out whats going on.

We are working on the cog wheel issue we just haven't been able to reproduce the bug on our screens so any look at the beast would help.

<comment><USER25> I also see the cog and am noticing the lag. I just sent you an email detailing my observations as well as a video of the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great.

It seems to be an issue with SIMBL which is installed with a lot of addware and older safari plugins. We are looking into the issues and getting back to each person with a solution.

For what it's worth its not related to our code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does ghostnotes work in jvm based apps as well? Like pycharm or intellij idea? Does it work on tabs in those programs?

I tend to make short todo lists when I code. Those lists are spread in a specific folder on my system. This is much better. I code in intellijidea and pycharm, which are jvm apps. Hope they are supported!

<comment><AUTHOR> all jvm apps no but we do have some support for intelliJ. We plan to add support for other JetBrains products in the next release and more granular support too.

You can either sign up to our newsletter to be notified when its there or you can buy the app and send us a mail. Then we will put you on the betal list and you will be able to help us make sure it caters to your needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a really great idea. I take a lot of notes on my desktop but they tend to end up in a stash of markdown files somewhere. Being able to contextually link my thoughts to what I was doing at the time is going to be a boon to productivity.

</comment><comment><USER28> I love this. I wasn't aware of how much context I have with each note, but now that I watched the video it is immediately obvious.

</comment><comment><USER29> This would probably be pretty useful for my team if it had a Dropbox integration where we can leave notes on shared dropbox files.

Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Besides bug hunting and applescript customization this is on the top of our list and we have an idea on how to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This looks really neat right now I use NVAlt hotkey'd to Cntr+1 to hide/show and that get's synced to Simplenote which I use on my iPhone. I have a "temp" note where I store short-lived snippets, urls, etc and I normally just do something like:

#Reason I have this saved

Saved data....

....

....

I'd be interested in trying this out though to see how it compares. The one thing I really like about my setup is everything is synced to my mobile phone but I rarely need my "temp" note on mobile so not having mobile access to notes left with this app might not be that bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know i keep repeating this but in our next update we get support for customizing applescript. Perhaps you can do something there.

The main idea though is to treat these notes a little more like real post-it- notes. I.e. forgettable things that truly live in the context and you only have to worry about in that context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This looks fantastic.

I watched through the video and looked on the feature page, but couldn't figure out two key things:

\- Is there a way to do a text search on all your notes?

\- Are your notes saved in any sort of exportable format?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bryan and thank you very much for your kind words.

To answer your quesitons.

\- not for now

\- not really they are archived objects

Now this will change in future updates so if you are on the fence just sign up for the newsletter to be notified.

Alternatively buy the app and send us a mail then we can add you to the beta- tester list so you get access to some of these things as soon as they are deployed for the betal build.

<comment><USER32> > \- not really they are archived objects

This is a deal-breaker for me. I don't want to risk putting years of effort into this and then have the app break when Apple decides to deprecate APIs in their next OS release.

Having said that, you should be charging much more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand but keep in mind that the idea behind ghostnote is not to store your precious quotes but more something like temporarily important notes.

Having said that however we will be making it possible to export/backup the notes into something like evernote or other much more accessible format.

<comment><USER32> *.txt will be the only format that mitigates the risk I'm talking about.

Evernote. Sigh.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will support customized appleScript so that means you can write a little script that outputs to .txt format.

This is coming in the next update.

<comment><USER32> Awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Nice idea and beautiful execution. One question though: If I detach and move between tabs in Chrome / Safari by keyboard shortcut, the note does not recognize the change of tab. Is this because I'm using 10.9 or is it a bug?

And you have a typo at [http://www.ghostnoteapp.com/appsuggestions/](http://www.ghostnoteapp.com/appsuggestions/) ("mailingist").

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a bug we will fix this.

Thanks for the catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just became a customer. So far so GREAT. I could really use some kind of keyboard binding and this will become a part of every day of my life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Coming

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow, this looks amazing. Shame I'm stuck with Windows for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> we are hoping to come out for windows too. Sign up to our newsletter we will discuss it there.

<comment><USER35> Great! Signed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I had a contextual note idea a while back that turned into a Chrome Extension. It had a lot of quirks and never really worked how I wanted it to, so I eventually stopped working on it.

Ghostnote takes that idea and puts it on steroids. I really like the concept and am going to check out the app. Kudos on shipping!

</comment><comment><USER37> Bought it, pretty cool.

The demo video shows notes contextual based on the current directory in a terminal. It isn't clear to me how to configure that to work - it doesn't seem to by default. Do I need to configure my terminal to change the window title based on current folder or something like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to make sure you installed the document detection in the beginning go to Settings icon and click the "Install Document Support" and click ok.

That should work. If not PM me and we will figure out whats going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The note should open upon clicking on something with a note (as an option, as I can see this annoying some users), or do some sort of indication on the icon that there is a note. I will forget to use it properly as it is, but I can see it having tremendous value otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> coming... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would love to see a software like this that would help me take notes from Google Books and reference back the book and page number. Then it would be able to give me my notes sorted by time, tags or book.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually tried to get it to work with ibook and kindle but no dice :)

Google Books doesn't seem to have any url differentiator between different pages so it might be hard unless we find some other way to detect different page numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm confused, the demo video showed a problem to me when the dev typed "simple but effective" on the iTunes connect site but when he switched back to his app site, it showed the same "simple but effective" message instead of the proper one. It should've said "as you can see it takes the basic...".

You can see it starting here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYQVyokbep0&t=117](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYQVyokbep0&t=117)

Not so effective..

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh now i see what you were talking about.

So sometimes you have to click twice on the tab in the browser its very rare and its being fixed in next update.

I did the video really fast and just didn't catch it but thanks for the heads up. I assure you it works as advertised :)

<comment><USER40> Ah, thanks. You might want to redo the video because first impression is important and you shouldn't rush through what people see the first time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree and I will :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Really great idea. Reminds me of Ember app by Realmac, except this is for the whole filesystem. A very useful addition would be ability to add tags and sort files/notes by tags.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks very useful, before I buy, two questions:

1\. Do you support any keyboard combinations to add or view notes while a folder or document has focus?

2\. Are the notes stored on disk or in a cloud account somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks.

1\. Not yet but coming up 2\. Stored on disk for now but will change later.

<comment><USER42> Thanks for the response - actually I'd personally prefer the stored-on-disk option :)

Just as a follow-up - would I get my contextual notes back if I'm backing up my disk to Time Capsule and have to restore from it?

<comment><USER42> Purchased! It's a great app! And I'm glad I can view the userscripts before I copy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's great so far. But...I, out of curiosity, flipped on the "Ghost Mode" switch. Now, clicking on the ghost doesn't do anything.

What is Ghost Mode? How do I get out of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's one of those "seems like such a good idea" things we probably just should have dropped until we had a better solution.

The idea is that the ghostnote app visually stays out of the way by going semi-transparent when your mouse isn't over it.

So I am guess it's just so low on transparency that you can't see it :)

Got to Preferences and turn it off then you should be able to see the window.

But yeah not the most useful feature for now.

<comment><USER43> Ohhhhh, OK. The problem was, the prefs were ALSO transparent/invisible, so I couldn't see them.

The note finally appeared in front of something with enough contrast that I could nab it and turn it off. Thanks!

"Ghost mode": Make me invisible :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is great. But two gripes:

1) No hotkey?

2) No support? The only thing you have is a form for me to suggest an App that is actually just a newsletter sign up. Not promising, especially for paid software.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Joel

1) Hotkeys will be coming 2) Just write me on twitter or on facebook. However I realize I don't have a mail address to write I will update that. Thanks for the catch.

info at ghostnoteapp dot com

<comment><USER44> Great news! Thanks Joel!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Not even going to hesitate buying this -- the price of a latte at Starbucks.

This is great work and even if I only use it a handful of times (which I doubt), it will be worth it.

Congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER46> This looks really clever and great.

I was confused at the end of the video, though. Why did the iTunes note come up when you switched back to the Ghostnote website?

<comment><AUTHOR> i think i might have mistakenly clicked on itunes outside the view.I will make a better video soon, had a 2 year old hanging on me while i did it :)

<comment><USER46> Not a big deal - again this looks great overall and I really like the concept. I will probably end up buying this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic.

Once you have let me know and I will put you on the beta list so you can get to play around with some of the cool new stuff we are implementing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It seems that chrome doesn't work at all for me? Any ideas? Everything else seems to be working fine...but not chrome.

The application just doesn't seem to register (the icon remains that of the last app recognized). No amount of focusing Ghostnote, then Chrome, then Ghostnote, changing tabs, or restarting Chrome seem to do any good either.

<comment><AUTHOR> try and detach the note from the menu bar and see if it still does not detect.

send us a mail at info@ our domain name and we see whats going on. It should work.

<comment><USER48> I have the same problem with Sublime Text 3 — Ghostnote doesn't detect it at all. Detaching doesn't help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Send us a mail at info at ghostnoteapp dot com. Then we will help you solve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This product is awesome. I really appreciate the thought and effort that has gone into it. I wish you the best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER50> Looks great,

Is it possible for it to save the content as Markdown in a path of my choosing?

I like having my note data in plain text.

<comment><AUTHOR> not for now, but next update might have a solution for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Congrats on the release. This looks fantastic. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER52> What in the world does the start up message mean? I bought the app and when I opened it, I got a message about needing to open some folder. Was I supposed to go find that folder on disk and open it, or just click "Ok!"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just click OK but you can just go to ghostnote settings and click

Install Document Support and it will open it up again.

In the new version that part will be a little clearer.

<comment><USER52> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> i saw it randomly a couple of days ago on #macdev. looks interesting. a couple of questions though. is there a "all notes" place? what happens to the note if you delete the file to which it is attached?

<comment><AUTHOR> There isn't an all notes place for now.

It's the #1 request but the catch is from people before they have tried it.

We are still on the fence but will probable end up adding it (and normal context-less note taking) but it's going to change the app quite dramatically so for now no.

However next update we add the ability to customize via applescript and there you could in theory just make it add the notes to ex. evernote everytime you add somehting.

<comment><USER53> no dont add a contextless note mode. im just thinking that i will forget where i had notes..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> That is really very nice - well done! Any thoughts on Evernote integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes in next update you can add custom applescripts that should allow for evernote integration.

<comment><USER54> Neat! Thanks and keep up the great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I understand this apparently awesome application is only intended for Mac OS X, but it would be wonderful if the web presence marketing it wasn't totally unusable on a mobile device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey.

Can you elaborate a little? Not sure I understand what you are saying.

<comment><USER56> I believe he's saying you need to make your website more mobile friendly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh yeah ok, fair enough. Will put that on the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I was just looking for something like this the other day...

</comment><comment><USER58> Your logo looks similar to Ghostly's [http://www.theghostlystore.com/](http://www.theghostlystore.com/)

<comment><USER59> It also looks similar to a goodly proportion of the results of a Google image search for "cute ghost"... which I think is inevitably what happens when you use a generically recognisable device like that.

<comment><USER60> All of them are variations of Pacman's ghost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Great job Jimmy and Thomas! The app really looks great.

</comment><comment><USER62> Good thought but this simply would not work for me. Lots of context switching and I simply don't see myself making so many notes

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats interesting.

Can I convince you to just bullet point explain what you mean with context switching?

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I was expecting a Trial version to try out, whether it fits my workflow, but its not there.

Please consider adding a trial version.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know and I understand.

I wish Apple allowed you to do that but for now they don't.

I have talked to paddle.net and binpress.com about making it available through their services. You can sign up to the newsletter if you want to be notified about things like that.

<comment><USER63> Thanks.

I always bought Mac software from Paddle, as it supports trial versions.

Worth mention, very surprising that Apple doesn't allow Trial versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Any chance of stopping the automator workflow menu icon from popping up every 5 seconds?

<comment><AUTHOR> we are looking into this. Seems to be some thing around multiple monitors or displays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Very cool idea indeed. And here I thought what can people improve for a note app.

</comment><comment><USER65> How to save context with any note/todo app/list:

Just append a "#context"

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, this doesn't work if the you forget you applied the context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I've never liked the ghost as an logo cause it looks like a KKK hood.

</comment><comment><USER67> Does it store the notes in a way that I can easily make a backup of all the file names and their notes?

Or does it use undocumented xattr funny stuff that apps like Photoshop pay no mind to and promptly destroy?

<comment><AUTHOR> for now just objects, next update you will be able to export to other formats and ex evernote.</comment></comment>


Compound Interest Is A Lie - <AUTHOR> http://rationalconspiracy.com/2012/08/21/compound-interest-is-a-lie/

<comment><USER2> Compound interest seems insignificant when framed as the author has framed it, but consider all the people held hostage by the compounding interest on their credit card debt.

For the normal working people the author describes, it's fairly unlikely that they'll end up "rich" using such a risk-averse investment strategy. On the other hand, it's also fairly unlikely they'll end up poor, which is the actual motivation for most retirement saving.

Some people end up seeking more risk and in some cases it pays off. Others happen to retire when the historical rate of return on their retirment portfolio averaged 8-10% per year and feel rich because of that. Still others die earlier than expected and will the money to their kids who now have a $1M nest egg from an early age and stand a chance of turning it into real wealth.

It is interesting to think about the extremely high value of public sector pensions, which are an under-the-radar transfer, extracted via the power of public sector unions and kept strong thanks to state-enforced monopolies.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason people are held hostage to credit card debt is that a) they don't declare bankruptcy, and b) frequent bankruptcy is priced in to the interest rates, which are therefore crazy high. If the bank is owed $1 million, half of that is never repaid due to bankruptcy, and the other half is repaid over three years at 30% annual interest, the bank breaks even or makes a small profit. But if you're in the half that repays at 30%, you're screwed pretty hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bad article title -- compound interest is a simple truth. Investment counselors are the problem -- they try to claim they produce better results than simple, buy & hold investments (and they don't).

<http://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Investment>

</comment><comment><USER4> "$1.3 million for 25 years equals $52,000 a year."

But if you only spend $52,000 a year, the money that's left earns interest. With the 5% return assumption, you could spend a little over $92,000 a year for 25 years.

Accordning to the simple calculator at www.brkdirect.com, if you pay Berkshire Hathaway $1.3 million, they will guarantee a payment of $80,293 every year for as long as you live, assuming you are male, currently 65 years old, and living in Nebraska. If the annuity is bought with post-tax dollars, the after-tax amount will be $73,918 a year for 20 years and then $48,176 a year. Annuities are generally regarded as a bad deal for a variety of reasons, but this doesn't sound bad to me at all.

<comment><USER5> thought the same thing. In addition, once you're retired you have social security and medicare to help out (let's assume for a moment that we'll actually collect ss and medicare, I don't want to get into that debate). When you throw those on top of 92k a year, and no longer have dependents at that point (you're retired), that's not a bad retirement amount. The real question is whether people can save 10k a year for their entire working life....

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sensational headline.

Sure, money managers have a significant interest in lying about their likelihood of outperforming market averages (6.6% real return in the last 100 years, by the way, not 5%), but their fees don't mean that "compound interest is a lie."

Compound interest isn't magic, it's just pretty simple math.

</comment><comment><USER7> The title is inflammatory and misleading. The thesis of the article is that management fees hurt your investments' performance. (And a million dollars ain't what it used to be, but that's hardly news.)</comment>