Ask HN: How do you set a goal and stay focused? - <AUTHOR> How to stay focused is a recurring topic on HN. But my problem is more of how to set goals.
While I don't expect a definite answer that fits everyone, I'm interested in how others set their goals and believing in them without being distracted / giving up midway.
Goals can be side projects, startup ideas, hobbies etc. I tend to be tempted to try many different sorts of things at the same time outside work, and ultimately achieve very little. <comment><USER2> Start with Why.

If you have some idea for a goal, you should write down the reason you want it.

Frameworks that are useful for product management and communication are useful for personal-product management and communication-to-yourself:

\- [https://www.intercom.com/resources/books/intercom-jobs-to- be...](https://www.intercom.com/resources/books/intercom-jobs-to-be-done)

\- [https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs- inventory](https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory)

It is also often helpful to write down your worries and fears. Putting worries into words gives you power over them and helps you realize that you can build something overcome them. Fear-setting is one of the psychological benefits of Test Driven Development.

Note that holding thoughts about your motivations and worries in your working memory can be highly psychologically uncomfortable. Your impulse in response to this discomfort might be to get on reddit. For this reason, you might want to do this thinking by taking a paper notebook to the park or by talking with a friend you trust.

The result of this will be that when you re-examine your goal, you can see if you still think it aligns with your "why".

<comment><AUTHOR> Writing down worries and fears is new to me. Will definitely try that out. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your goal could be to lose weight. That's great but it's not actionable. An actionable goal is "go to the gym for 30 min today before lunch to run on the treadmill." So set that easy and actionable goal and go do it.

What works for me is focusing on at most two or three things at a time. Anything more than that becomes too difficult to keep up. Right now for me those are fitness, working on my startup idea, and reading.

As an example, for fitness I use the two day rule. If I didn't workout yesterday I have to work out today. If I worked out today then I can choose to workout tomorrow, or not. I never go two days in a row without working out. I also workout first thing in the morning so that it's not hanging over my head all day.

It's mostly about scheduling things that you want to do into your day and actually doing them. Give yourself days off if you need them, and plan things out ahead of time.

<comment><USER4> This is excellent advise and goes into the `Goals vs Systems` territory. A good sensible and enjoyable read for the same would be Chapter 5 'Goals vs Systems` from [1].

From personal experience, opting for the systems approach has helped me:

\- Focus on multiple activities (max 4) with time bucketing and ensuring the time bucket has a task that can be done, like the actionable gym example above

\- You are not worried about reaching the goal, instead you consistently put in the effort and don't feel the void when and if any goal is completed

\- Systems help a ton in tackling complex or difficult subjects.

YMMV and mind you, earlier I was goal focussed and IMHO, got lesser done.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still- eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still- ebook/dp/B00COOFBA4)

edit: added the ref [1]

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Do not set a goal that involves conquering the world, saving the world, or attaining personal glory. These goals have internal contradictions that will lead you away from doing good work.

2\. Find a theme and follow the theme to set the goal. This can come from your personal philosophy and inclinations, from something you observe in nature, or by remixing an existing idea.

3\. To help find the theme, keep a diary and try to build up a personal library of references. (Do not try to hoard data. Do tight curation.)

<comment><USER6> > 1\. Do not set a goal that involves conquering the world, saving the world, > or attaining personal glory. These goals have internal contradictions that > will lead you away from doing good work.

Can you maybe elaborate on this a bit more? Just curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As intelligent beings, we have two types of goals: Terminal Values/goals, which are things that we want to achieve for intrinsic purposes, and Instrumental values/goals, which are the signposts we use as we navigate towards our big goal. [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Terminal_value](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Terminal_value)

Figuring out which type your goal is will help you immensely. If it is an instrumental goal, then figuring out how it aligns with your terminal goal will give you the motivation to do it at any cost.

If it's a terminal goal, your brain will drive you to get there at any cost, automatically. You may feel overwhelmed, especially since terminal goals can be abstract, so you might try using other people's instrumental goals, and brainstorming your own, and seeing how they fit into your strategy towards achieving your terminal goals. It's particularly helpful if someone has already achieved an instrumental goal, as they can share that information with you so you don't have to figure it out as you piece your path towards your terminal goals.

<comment><USER8> I am not familiar with this terminology but it sound awfully like "means" and "ends" which I believe goes all the way back to Aristotle.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, they're probably the same concept!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Try different goals until you find a goal you don't want to stop working on.

Goal setting/discovery is a skill. You need to work on it like everything else.

The reasoning will sound tautological but it's true: If your problem is finding a goal you'll stick to, your goal should be to look for a goal you'll stick to.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't have drive/willpower/dedication whatever. I'm somewhat lazy. I am honest with myself so I know not to set unrealistic goals that would require studying or applying myself to a task. I do reach my goals though.

How?

I come up with a project that teaches me what I need to know. It "pulls me in" and makes learning the stuff I need to know fun. I call it "pull" vs "push". Another way to think of it is: Would you rather push yourself to hit the books to learn French or live in France for a few months and pick it up? (You'd have to study for both but the 2nd way would be more fun and effective.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think anything real gets done without making a commitment others need to depend on. Hence with some downside consequences for you! But such consequences can be calibrated...

A common example is committing to speak at a meetup on my side project. It gives me a deadline to focus and get organized around, but frankly is pretty mistake friendly.

Another strategy is collaborating with a potential client on an idea. It's like having a customer to go to market with. And not following through is not good for me (though still understood as a new/trial idea with the customer)

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing you can do to push yourself a bit is give your friends/family a heads up that you're building something. That can give you some extra motivation to keep going and not give up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed that the "pressure" from ones that actually care about what you do is a major driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do you really achieve very little? Or do you simply achieve less than you wanted?

Two very different things.

Maybe its a matter of setting lower expectations (smaller goals). You can add smaller goals once one is completed. After all, a centipede does not move all of its legs at once.

</comment><comment><USER14> Something that's helped me recently is trying out giving up on all my goals one at a time. There was one goal that I really started to miss working on once I gave it up, and that's how I knew I wanted to keep working on that goal. This exercise helped me establish my priorities.

</comment><comment><USER15> Two things that helped me \- Setting realistic goal. Implying Decide 5 things and then trimming them to top 3. Do everyday a little of each 3. \- Deadlift. I know there is no co-relation but it helps me keep a clear mind and get more focused on other aspect of life and goals.

</comment><comment><USER16> Rectntly I replied to what's your quarantine project a domain name I registered for when I get around to playing with it. That prompted me to follow through enough to make a prototype. Now I'm adding some sort of wiki- like editing expanding on the original goal.

</comment><comment><USER17> This was useful - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfdJS_8M8bY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfdJS_8M8bY)

</comment><comment><USER18> By and large, most people set unrealistic goals, or set goals that are too large to accomplish without setting smaller goals. They forget the psychological aspects of setting and reaching goals and set goals that are unattainable, then feel bad about themselves for not achieving the impossible goal they've set for themselves.

Most people want to lose weight and look sexy. So they set a goal of losing weight and looking sexy and leave it at that. But "lose weight and look sexy" isn't a very achievable goal - how do you know when you've lost enough weight and look sexy enough? Setting a goal of "losing 10 pounds in 2 months" is much more achievable and measurable. It accomplishes the goal of losing weight and looking sexier, and it's measurable.

Most importantly it's realistic. Most people actually want to lose 40 pounds, but it's too big of a task to take on reasonably. Instead of losing all 40 pounds, prove to yourself that you can lose 10 pounds. Figure out how to do it at a smaller scale and gain the confidence in yourself to meet your goals.

But it's still too big for most people. It needs to be broken down into 8 sub goals of: Lose 2 pounds of weight this week. How do you do that? eat 200 calories of food less per day. Exercise with weights 3 times a week. Weigh yourself at the same time every morning and track the measurements week over week.

The first week that you lose 2 pounds feels pretty okay. The second week feels better. The third week starts to feel like you're on to something, and by week four, you've realized that you have a system to meet your goals and all you need to do is follow it.

So the main takeaway is: make your goals more achievable, and design them in a way that attaining them gives you confidence and that confidence compounds as you do more. Then the goal becomes a self sustaining reaction.

tldr: start much smaller.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a practical method, but every now and then I sit down and review my own goals, and find they have changed after I achieved the first few smaller goals. I wonder if this is common at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is nothing wrong with trying out many things. Do you have fun doing it? Maybe you just need to adjust your point of view.

Try all the things, collect knowledge and see what sticks.</comment>


Nuts & Bolts of a Non-Compete Agreement (From both sides) - <AUTHOR> http://hitechanswers.net/non-compete-agreements

<comment><USER2> Yet another reason California reigns supreme in entrepreneurship. And I think a very big one, e.g. the evolution of Silicon Valley would have been tremendously slower if key people had been prevented from leaving Shockley and then Fairchild plus all the cross-fertilization from ... _job hopping_ (boo, hiss :-).</comment>


Hacking of Tax Returns More Extensive Than First Reported, I.R.S. Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/us/politics/hacking-of-tax-returns-more-extensive-than-first-reported-irs-says.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> The congress has been starving IRS of funding to reduce their effectiveness at tax collection. So it's not shocking that environment would create a situation where this type of systemic failure would occur.

A guy I know worked for an IRS regional office in an enforcement/audit role for something like 40 years. He had something like 75 co-workers in that role in 1999 and retired with 8. Technology actually increased their workload, but with less people, they only targeted the most egregious violations.

He stuck around because he was really passionate & dedicated to his work. He was a guru on some very specific/arcane areas and wanted to transition it to somebody. That never panned out, so he gave up and left when his health declined.

<comment><USER3> I get that quality of IRS work falls with less staff, but on the other hand - maybe it is a good thing? May be it will force changes? While not the worst in the world, USA tax code is... complicated. Maybe it could be simplified.

<comment><USER2> There's a balance. I think for a system to work, it needs to be fair. If the rules suck, change the rules.

But by implicitly ignoring the rules through inattention, except when you don't, it creates a perception of corruption and arbitrary behavior.

<comment><USER3> current system appears to work as long as you pump people into system to do work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd really like to see a solution to how we validate ourselves to banks and other financial institutions as it becomes apparent that Social Security numbers are no longer an effective barrier to identifying a person. It would be nice if we could easily change our identifier and have a service which banks used to validate against.

Something similar to using Google to logon to certain services rather then creating a user name and password. Then you can make a single point much more secure and difficult to log into.

The downside of this is that I think the US government would have have an in person verification system to get an account. I.E. you go into the DMV, get an account and then you are connected to the service. You can then implement 2 factor authentication, and you link that service to your bank accounts.

I have no clue if this would actually be more secure then what is already in place, but it seems more then likely that hackers already have my Social Security number and my previous residences because of the OPM hack.

<comment><USER5> Sweden has a system similar to what you describe. It's called BankID and is issued by any bank. You can use it to file your taxes and sign various documents like address change online.

<comment><USER4> Just another reason I'd like to move to Sweden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to close the IRS. Like the (current) Fed, it's spent over 100 years stealing resources (with the threat of violence) from the American people and redistributing them to the top. The rest goes to bombing the 'enemy' of the day and bailing out their various ponzi schemes.

</comment><comment><USER7> And given an event like this sucking more resources out of the IRS, I guess I and others marked to be audited (they didn't believe I existed at first?) won't get our returns any time soon.

</comment><comment> bmir-alum-007 How many people will now try to file fraudulent tax returns and claim their identity was stolen in the hack?

<comment><USER3> That would be pretty silly thing to do and I hope no one actually act on this idea. Hackers enjoy it because they are using "mules" providing their checking accounts and then sending wires or western union transfers. Normal person will get caught. While it is possible to setup perfect crime, I bet most will not be able to and end up in jail if they try.

<comment> bmir-alum-007 Pretty silly to take things way too seriously and hate on a decent hypothetical gaming opportunity, don't you think?

With perfect security hygiene, more things are attainable.

But an even more perfect crime is hedging both sides of an option with phony identities, with different amounts, different enough times, different brokerages, different IP addresses, etc.

Feel free to try it out and report back.

<comment><USER3> people smart enough to pull it off, i believe, can make equal or more money doing legitimate things :) at least i want to believe they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, so who foots the bill for this one?

<comment><USER9> Who do you think? Taxpayers, of course.

<comment><USER10> At least the victims are getting letters. Corporations are required to do it, but governments often exempt themselves from the same employment and data handling requirements they place on business.</comment></comment></comment>


Justin Time - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/justin-time <comment><USER2> Justin doesn't just work with the media. Justin IS the media.

I think it's worth pointing out that Justin.tv led to the two largest YC exits to date, Twitch (Justin.tv pivot), and Cruise (founded by Justin.tv cofounder Kyle Vogt and Justin's brother Dan).

In 2008, Justin.tv co-founder Michael Seibel found Brian Chesky crashed on the floor of a hotel in Austin, offered him space in his room, began coaching him on how to build a startup, introduced him to the rest of the Justin.tv team, and ultimately brought them into YC! (and look where he is now: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6TH3pBPi8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6TH3pBPi8))

I look forward to more of the same :)

<comment><USER3> regarding the Obama clip, i'm impressed Obama can talk so clearly about how airBnB works, for someone who lives in a bubble of security and probably never thinks about where he's going to stay when he goes on holiday, he can describe very well the social reputation components of airBnB.

<comment><USER4> Presidents are extremely smart and can quickly pick up on topics. Combine this with advisers giving you a detailed run down and you get this.

<comment><USER5> >Presidents are extremely smart

Interesting. Is there a part of the democatic process that guarantees electing extremely smart people?

<comment><USER4> Is there a president you can think of that wasn't a genius?

Being president requires you to manage so many different things; it couldn't be done by someone who wasn't smart.

<comment><USER6> I have heard from a couple friends that George W Bush was smart, just bad in front of a camera. To be honest, though, my own radar from seeing him all those times - from heuristics and deduction - said he was actually not very intelligent in many areas that other presidents were intelligent in. I think his social intelligence was much higher than Gore's and Kerry's, though.

<comment><USER7> I've heard it hypothesized that Bush had early dementia. If you watch videos of his younger days, he spoke articulately. During his presidency, he kinda stuttered.

<comment><USER6> They also thought he was an alcohol syndrome baby

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations to Justin, and to Sam/YC for making a great choice.

On a tangential but related note, does anyone recommend any good follows on Snapchat, particularly anyone discussing tech/entrepreneurship? (There are obviously tons of entertaining celebrities, athletes, musicians, etc, but that's not really relevant here.)

Mark Suster (msuster on snap) of Upfront Ventures/bothsidesofthetable is good for at least a few 'snapstorms' a week covering a wide variety of VC topics. I've also really been enjoying the stories from Bobby Kim (bobbyhundreds), co- founder of seminal LA streetwear label The Hundreds, which tend to be a mix of standard day-in-the-life Snapchat fare as well as more introspective reflections on life and business. Bobby's a smart guy with diverse interests, even if you don't care about skateboarding or which overpriced, limited- edition collaboration is responsible for today's line out the door somewhere on Fairfax, it's still worth checking out Bobby's snaps.

<comment><USER9> I like following msuster, but every time he does a snapstorm I'm like "Dang! I wish I could share this."

He keeps promising that he's saving them and will release them, and I can barely wait.

Don't have any other good suggestions, unfortunately, thanks for the suggestions of bobbyhundreds.

<comment><USER10> I thought I saw that he had posted them somewhere but I just went looking and couldn't find anything. Hopefully he publishes them because I keep missing them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only reason I open snapchat daily is to watch Justin's stories. Nothing else. He's entertaining and has a good mix of fun stuff, great life advices and answers interesting startup questions.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hah! Just yesterday I was talking to someone about what an amazing stage presence Justin has. Couldn't have picked a better person.

</comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations to Justin Kan.

It is interesting that Snapchat is developing in a direction where people are promoting it for use in communicating with them in a business context. When calling people to follow someone on Snapchat you should include their username or QR code though.

<comment><USER14> I think Justin Kan is a bit of a special case here:

[http://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat](http://justinkan.com/why-i-love- snapchat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seconded.

I've interacted personally with him (he may not remember) and I would say he is quite thoughtful and effortlessly able to empathize and interact excellently.

My buddy in this YC batch has nothing but good words to say.

The YC network is a defensible asset I believe PG never saw coming.

Congratulations Justin!

<comment><USER16> Yea Justin's great. He sent my YC rejection and made it feel like landing on soft pillows. Then handled my objections with warmth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been following Justin for a while on Snapchat. He's always doing something interesting and offering helpful advice, as well as just providing some insight into the culture of YC. I think he's a great choice for managing PR at YC, seeing as he's already been doing that unofficially for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was a $BIGCO intern in 2011. I only hung out with Justin briefly at that time, but he more than anyone else got me into the startup scene. He came off to me as both rawly honest and friendly - attributes that are usually mutually exclusive. He'll make an awesome spokesman.

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats to Justin! Here is a clip he talked about himself his startup experience.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGvS3NvuLWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGvS3NvuLWU)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is nobody else surprised that a techie (Sam Altman) can use the term PR without qualifying that he doesn't mean github. In Swedish it's called 'yrkesskadad' \- occupational damage.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Follow him on Snapchat

What's his username?

<comment><USER22> <excised>

Edit: It's being suggested that the original article as posted didn't have the username, and it was added afterwards. So I've removed my snarky comment.

Apologies.

<comment><USER23> Surely it's possible that the post was edited to include the username, considering this isn't the only comment here asking about it.

<comment><USER21> That was indeed the case.

<comment><USER24> Well thank god that's sorted. The exact order of events regarding articles, comments and updates is of desperate importance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> have been following him on snapchat - this makes total sense. another great move, guys.

</comment><comment><USER26> This must clearly have come on the heels of YC being turned down by Brandon Content.

</comment><comment><USER27> I heard Justin Time was lazy... though is always there when needed.</comment>


This video makes me think I've been underestimating the consciousness of some animals. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LHoyB81LnE

<comment><USER2> The "mirror self-recognition task" used in cog dev involves placing children in front of a mirror with a red dot on their forehead. Up until a certain age the baby treats the image as if it's another child and tries to interact and play with it. However, the older babies will realize that they are looking at themselves and will reach up to pull the sticker off their forehead.

They have done the same thing with chimpanzees and elephants and it's really cool to watch the videos. You see the chimpanzee try to attack its reflection at first, but then it slowly figures it out and starts grooming its hair and checking out its teeth and stuff. (And then peeling the sticker off its forehead.)

Here is a series of YouTube videos on this:

[http://youtube.com/results?search_query=mirror+self- recognit...](http://youtube.com/results?search_query=mirror+self- recognition&search_type=)

<comment><USER3> I've seen some of those videos before. I believe the chimp was called betty, but nevertheless, they gave it/her make up and it started drawing on itself using the mirror as a guide. Another clip showed it immitating one of the handlers putting make up on and it started using lipstick on its lip, instead of its face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Poor thing, they probably only pay him peanuts for his paintings!

</comment><comment><USER5> To be honest this is far less interesting than the things elephants do in the wild.

Aside from the usual stuff humans like about some animals, like pair bonding, raising their young and living as a family, and being very social with each other and even other species (including humans), there are a lot of other human-like traits of elephants. Elephants have astonishingly long memories (it's a wives tale that turns out to be true). They'll pause on the spot where loved ones have died, even many years later, and groups will console each other after a loss--having a funeral of sorts. They remember humans who have been cruel or kind to them in the past, and behave accordingly. They communicate vocally and are known to express a range of concepts this way--not just warnings, but also greetings, calls, and "names" (unique identifiers specific to each elephant). And, recently humans "asked" elephants to carry cameras into the forest for them, to help study tigers. Since elephants and tigers are on peaceful terms (what's a tiger gonna do to an animal that could crush it with one foot?) it worked well, and some amazing footage resulted.

Given all of this, it shouldn't be at all surprising that an elephant could be trained to paint a particular picture. It is rather unfortunate that it takes something like this to impress tourists of the intelligence of one of our closest intellectual peers, when elephants have so many more fascinating traits and ways of exhibiting impressive intelligence.

<comment><USER6> I agree 100%. The things animals do in the wild are much more fascinating especially when you consider techniques that humans do not grasp.

The video is interesting but misleading. I would highly doubt that the elephant has a clue as to what it's painting. Elephants have an incredible memory and amazing dexterity, those two things coupled together makes it likely that the elephant is painting from memory. The elephant also demonstrates some advanced painting skills that i'm sure it was taught. I would be more impressed of some cave paintings done in wild naturally by animals.

That being said, it's still a pretty neat video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazing... does anybody have any more information about this? Is this a trick where an elephant gets trained for many years to draw images, and gets used to the actions of moving the paintbrush across a canvas in a particular way (still an awesome feat)? Or do elephants naturally have drawing skills? Is there evidence that wild elephants draw things on cave walls, etc. by scratching on them with rocks or something?

<comment><USER8> Most likely, operant conditioning was used to build the behavior-set over time. There are 3 different videos where the elephant is painting the same picture, a raised trunk holding a flower, on different canvases and the elephant always starts with the same line.

Operant conditioning uses small rewards with increasing requirements to build behaviors. At first the elephant got a peanut for picking up the brush, then only for swinging it by the paint, then only for dipping it in the paint, etc.

The elephant likely does not have any conception of what it was drawing; most animals can't mentally translate abstract 2D images to 3D. Even humans, if they do not develop perspective during a critical period (if you were trapped in a small room for years, for example), will not understand perspective correctly.

<comment><USER9> The funny thing is that the elephants probably wouldn't regard this as particularly intelligent behavior. Well, except to the extent that a stunt that gets you peanuts can't be all bad.

On the other hand, if some elephants managed to use operant conditioning (and a special prosthetic, like a big drum) to teach a human how to subsonically tell another elephant ten miles away that the herd is gathering near the water hole, that human would be the star of the elephant world. The elephants would gather round to marvel at the human's astonishing front feet -- they aren't really very strong, but they can _pick things up with their toes_ , almost as if they were using a trunk!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This elephant can draw better than I can!

</comment><comment><USER11> That is awesome. Thank you for sharing that!

<comment><USER12> That sentiment is what the up arrow is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> it makes it a lot easier to eat them or force them to do work if you do that</comment>


Simple and secure random password generator - <AUTHOR> https://www.randompasswordgenerator.info

<comment><USER2> The generator: [https://www.randompasswordgenerator.info/js/custom.min.js](https://www.randompasswordgenerator.info/js/custom.min.js)

Is Math.random() a secure rng? [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5651789/is- math-random-cr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5651789/is-math-random- cryptographically-secure)

I wouldn't consider this password generator to be secure due to the use of a non-crypto grade rng, but it's certainly looks useful for quickly generating a password.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I have since updated the generator to use window.crypto.getRandomValues when available (older browsers does not support it) and then use Mersenne twister as a fallback. I hope it gets your recommendation :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If we can't view the source (or at least the algorithms and libraries used), its security is only hearsay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, you can via view source in browser. The passwords are generated via javascript in the browser.</comment></comment>


Verizon: net neutrality violates our free speech rights - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/verizon-net-neutrality-violates-our-free-speech-rights/ <comment><USER2> I realize this sentiment is unpopular, but net neutrality is bad for the operator and bad for the consumer. It is a policy of essentially regulating routing decisions, its like letting the government make you use a particular webserver or programming framework to use.

I agree that the large MSOs haven't done a great job of responding to customer demands, but that in itself doesn't warrant new legislation to strangle them.</comment>


A Murder over Mars? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/BvEW-P1WbbA <comment><USER2> A video of reading a blog post? Why not just post the blog post directly?</comment>


Wuhan to build special hospital in six days to receive patients - <AUTHOR> https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-01-23/Wuhan-to-build-special-hospital-in-six-days-to-receive-patients-NuQ9ulvAo8/index.html <comment><USER2> We made a simple tracker based off scrapped data. Will keep as up to date as possible and feel free to download it here:

[https://rose.ai/dashboard/china.coronavirus.tracker.notebook](https://rose.ai/dashboard/china.coronavirus.tracker.notebook)

</comment><comment><USER3> China built a Military style 1000-bed Field Hospital (Xiaotangshan)[1][2], 20 miles direct north of Forbidden city in May 2003 to accommodate SARS patients. From design to completion took a week, 4000 construction works working non- stop with 500 equipments from 6 construction companies finished it in just 7 days. It was eventually torn down in 2010.[2]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaotangshan,_Beijing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaotangshan,_Beijing) [2]: [https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E6%B1%A4%E5%B1%B1%E5...](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E6%B1%A4%E5%B1%B1%E5%8C%BB%E9%99%A2)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this the future of fighting super bugs. Tailored hospitals.</comment>


Ask YC: Why can't my iPod headphones retract into the iPod? - <AUTHOR>

Seriously. One on each side. Like a clothesline. <comment><USER2> As silencio said, it would not appeal to users who don't use the included earbuds. And it would also annoy lots of users who _do_ use the included earbuds. I for one would hate to have my iPod made bulkier simply to include a feature that a significant portion of the userbase wouldn't even use.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a feature I would use if I didn't keep losing my headphones. Also, the external headphone jack can stay.

<comment><USER2> There exists a third-party gadget that sticks to the back of your iPod and provides a place for you to wind up your earbuds so they don't get lost. Unfortunately I don't remember what it's called, but I'm sure you can find it if you look at iPod accessory sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Possibly because it wouldn't appeal to all the users who don't use the included iPod/iPhone headphones. I for one use a pair of Motorola S9-HD bluetooth stereo headphones with my iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> The headphone jack may remain.

<comment><USER3> The mechanism to retract and store would still have to take up some amount of space. Not all wired headphones have the same type or length of cable. Many of them would just not work ideally, unless it were some open (as opposed to retracting into the device) system to just wind the cable around - and at that point, it is just marginally neater than wrapping the cable around the iPod in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would happily take an iPod that is 1/4" wider with retractable headphones that don't get lost or tangled. I've lost three corded headphones, and two of those tiny wireless ear buds. I'm good at losing things.

<comment><USER4> Everyone's welcome to having their own ideal device. Unfortunately for you, the people at Cupertino who design the iPod's don't agree with your sentiments as to what would make the device better and haven't made retractable headphones.

Might I suggest you invest in a nice pair of bluetooth headphones instead? It gives you the same lack of a wire-y mess that retractable headphones do, without restricting your range of motion and possibly yanking your headphones out of your ears.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've already lost two of those little bluetooth headphones. How about a bluetooth headphone that snaps into my iPod? Then I'll always have a place to put it when I'm finished with it.

<comment><USER4> Why does this have to come built into the iPod? Whats wrong with a case that's retractable or has a dock? Why not have a pair of (sun)glasses with headphones built in or something along those lines?

There's a lot more generic ways to go about keeping wires untangled and from being a mess then having it built into the ipod. Plus by making it generic, it would work on a Zune or Zen or any other device out there. To avoid a "Why doesn't Microsoft do this too?" thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you look at the iPod carefully you'll see that they number of mechanical components is cut down to a minimum.

The most fragile components are the mechanical ones and the battery, if your iPod fails it is probably because of one of those.

The headphone wires are _the_ most fragile bit outside your iPod. I've had many of these fail, if they were an integral part of the iPod you'd lose the whole device, or you'd have to get it repaired.

</comment><comment><USER6> 3rd party retracting headphones exist in the market, no need to build that mechanical functionality into the device.

[http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/05/sonys-three-new-models- of...](http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/05/sonys-three-new-models-of- retractable-headphones/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a separate gadget, easily lost.

<comment><USER6> _That's a separate gadget, easily lost._

How is a coiling headphone a "separate" gadget? scratch that, I think you're onto something. Give Apple a ring, they're always looking for bright ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do headphones need to be wired anyways?

<comment><USER5> Because of three things:

\- cost

\- otherwise they'd need a power source

\- sound quality will degrade if you modulate the audio for transmission and then demodulate again on the receiving side, especially channel crosstalk will increase

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why think small? Why I can't get bluetooth cochlear implants, so I can pair my ears to the iPhone, making headphones superfluous?

<comment><USER9> It should be possible but medical ethics probably prevents it if you're not deaf.</comment></comment>


Why white people see black boys as older, bigger and guiltier than they are - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/28/why-prosecutors-keep-talking-about-tamir-rices-size-36-pants/ <comment><USER2> The big question here, as with any statistic or analysis, is why the data is what it is.

Do police officers see more age in black children because of some facial feature, because of general assumptions, because they're justifying bias? Do they assume that african american children come frome lower incomes, and thus aren't as well-fed as their white peers, leading to the assumption of being older than they look? Or perhaps they're misclassifying children as adults because they're afraid the next Tamir's gun won't be a toy?

Above all else, we should not merely assume that it's "just racism" and condemn the cops for their vague crime. If we are to fix the problem, we must understand it thoroughly.</comment>


Ask HN: Good advice on writing VST Plugins? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, I'm trying to realize a plugin that combines samples based on pseudorandomly created patterns. We've decided to try going the VST route but have no experience with it. Since I'm not super familiar with C++ I just wanna find out if there are other ways to VSTs than the Steinberg SDK or JUCE, maybe python or Java wrappers that work? There's pyvst but it seems not to be maintained.<p>Glad for any input, have a good one. <comment><USER2> Use can use csound with this software called cabbage to generate amazing best without coding anything but csound.</comment>


Chrome overtakes all IE versions combined - <AUTHOR> http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-201120-201220

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess now we'll see what chrome's security model is really made of.</comment>


Nosotek -- North Korean software development - <AUTHOR> http://www.nosotek.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The most incredible part is that they developed two mobile phone games, "Big Lebowski Bowling" and "Men in Black: Alien Assault"... for a company that later became part of News Corp.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il- bowls-f...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il-bowls-for- murdoch-dollars-with-video-games-made-in-north-korea.html)</comment>


For many pregnant Chinese, a U.S. passport for baby remains a powerful lure - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/17/AR2010071701402.html?hpid=topnews <comment><USER2> "Birth Tourism" and "snakeheads" are both really interesting terms. It's fascinating when words cross language boundaries.</comment>


Belief in Hell makes economies grow - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/15/the_curious_economic_effects_of_religion/ <comment><USER2> Yes. That is why Pacific Northwest and Canada (less religious places) are lagging behind Bible Belt. Lagging behind in corruption, teenage pregnancy, crime and many other developmental indicators.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find public data? - <AUTHOR>

What are the best public data sources for a particular city (United States)? <comment><USER2> [http://www.datamob.org/datasets](http://www.datamob.org/datasets)

[http://www.data.gov/](http://www.data.gov/)</comment>


Google: "We're Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data" - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_were_not_doing_a_good_job_with_structured_data.php <comment><USER2> Brewster Kahle (Archive.org) made a small fortune by selling WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), which made each machine a search engine, and used a protocol to request from all engines. Developed in the 80s.

Unfortunately, the Web has gone down this road of having centralised search engines which somehow know their way through a maze.

It would be better to contact several sites in turn (NYT, FT, Archive, etc) and pull information. If you have to pay, you go through the credit card paywall. Then you don't have to worry about NYT's dark kilobytes.

Why aren't we using it? I guess that's what happens when you sell something like that to AOL. ;-)

I should also point out that Google could have a stream for the NYT, where the NYT feeds all its stories to Google on creation, and Google doesn't enable cache for the stuff people pay for. But for all I know, that's already being done.

But service-push-to-server is better than Google's pull-service-to-server.

<comment><AUTHOR> _which made each machine a search engine, and used a protocol to request from all engines. Developed in the 80s._

Peer-to-peer search is alive and well, though:

<http://sixearch.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a useful reminder of how distinctly unsolved the search problem is. Google has taken stabs at this area from different directions with Google Base and Product Search, but there's still a whole world of information "out there" which is inaccessible or not usefully organized.

</comment><comment><USER4> The long-delayed epiphany.

Google's weakness with structured data and its weakness in cultivating third- party developers are mutually reinforcing and seem to have arisen from the same hubris. In other words, bring back the search API already!

<comment><USER5> (What do you mean by bringing back the search API? Isn't <http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/> what you want?)

<comment><USER6> From that page: "The Google AJAX Search API lets you put Google Search in your web pages with JavaScript."

I've never understood why they call that an API. It's not. It's a web 2.0 widget.

Google used to have a SOAP-based API for natural search results, and it was sweet. I miss those days...

<comment><USER4> It seems the AJAX Search API now lets you get a machine-readable list of search results in a relatively straightforward fashion; I'm not sure that was true back when the SOAP API was canned. <http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje> But the terms and conditions still seem to prevent you from using structured data to do anything useful to the search results. <http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/terms.html> (see especially the start of 1.3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> if only there was a machine-readable semantic-based web everyone could use ;p

<comment><USER8> Actually, we're creating a way for developers to access the web really easily for the purposes of different kinds of analysis, including building semantic frameworks. The idea is that we give you really cheap, really fast access to millions of pages, and you use our platform to analyze Internet content how you want. $2 per 1 million pages crawled, $0.03 per CPU-hour used for any computing you want to do. Not yet at beta, but you can check our site: <http://www.80legs.com>.

<comment><USER9> Looks cool. How would it compare to Amazon/Alexa search service? In theory they allow you to build your own search engine, but in practice you can't really amend their ranking formula and don't get access to the raw inverted index (with tf-idf statistics and such). Yahoo BOSS is in the same league.

Your service would be cheaper, though.

<comment><USER8> Yes, in theory you could do something similar with AWS. However, you'd have to put in the work to handle all the complexities of parallel-computing and web crawling. We do that for you. And yes, our service is cheaper.

We'd love to see developers using our platform to build some very interesting indexes based on innovative concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Maybe Mechanical Turk could help with bulletin boards, etc.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you incorporate advice into your life? - <AUTHOR> We're constantly inundated with best practices, theories, lists about doing better in all aspects of life (being successful, a good manager, efficient, happy). How do you actually cut out the noise and make use of the important tips? <comment><USER3> This is paraphrased from The Lost World by Michael Crichton. I read it when I was in middle school and it has stuck with me for over 20 years:

"Most people are wrong about most things."

People give advice that is out of date, just plain wrong, irrelevant, self- serving, or otherwise generally useless. The key is to just ignore it and do whatever you want.

Over time you'll figure out what works and what doesn't. And in 30+ years of living, the only thing I've figured out that works is to ignore all the advice I receive.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think we have an innate fear of losing things forever and that's why we sometimes let information/advice overload inundate us - we're afraid that if we don't read that blog post, that we're going to miss out on a life hack and never see it again.

I don't really have a set way I cut out the noise - but I definitely try to in as many ways as I can. It helps me to look at it as a fear of loss/fear of missing things and when I make note of that fear - I can ignore the noise more easily.

</comment><comment><USER5> It usually comes down to time management and a solid routine / schedule.

Start with getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night, consistently. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Perform physical exercise for 45min - <USER2> a day. That alone will allow you to manage your time significantly better.

<comment><USER6> Spot on. Being able to carve a 60-90 minute chunk out of your day to hit the gym is a great way to cut low hanging wasted time.

A consistent wake up time anchors your sleep schedule, and prevents you from accruing a sleep debt. Most sleep debts gradually sneak up, and can be hard to diagnose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Find advice from people who are one step ahead of you. The advice from the CEO of a late state company doesn't have as much value to a first time founder trying to find product/market fit.</comment>


Why GraphQL? 8 Reasons After Reading 13 GraphQL Case Studies - <AUTHOR> https://shekhargulati.com/2019/12/21/why-graphql-8-reasons-after-reading-13-graphql-case-studies/ <comment><USER2> Reason 3 "Strong Typing" is not an inherent advantage of GraphQL over REST. RESTful services that adopt Swagger can provide a typed schema and clients can call GraphQL services without any notion of type checking. [http://glennengstrand.info/software/architecture/microservic...](http://glennengstrand.info/software/architecture/microservice/graphql) is a comparison between two feature similar microservices, one written in JavaScript on Express (REST) and the other written in TypeScript on Apollo (GraphQL). The RESTful service has a swagger spec and the load test application used to evaluate both performs no special type checking.</comment>


Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs, according to source [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-target-databreach-20131224,0,1031401.story <comment><USER2> More misinformation in the video: She mentions that the CVV on the back was "fair game". The CVV is on the magnetic strip, but the code on the back of the card is the CVV2 which is not on the magnetic strip.

<comment><USER3> I though the one on the mag stripe was the "CVV1", whereas "CVV" was ambiguous and could refer to either?

As far as most consumers are concerned, CVV or CVC is synonymous with CVV2, since that's what folks are asked to enter when shopping online. If you're not an engineer or work in the payment industry, you probably don't know CVV1 exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why were they storing the PINs?

<comment><USER5> I'm not familiar with the US system, but here in Canada you're not even supposed to _get_ the PIN in the first place. The keypad is supposed to encrypt it and use it for one transaction only. Then that information is discarded.

Storing PINs in any form is absolutely insane. People deserve to get fired for this.

<comment><USER6> It's the same here - pins must be encrypted by a tamper-resistant hardware pin pad (in this case Verifone's).

I don't think Target was storing pins, which is prohibited regardless of encryption. It sounds like the attackers sniffed encrypted pins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this saying then that it only affects cards that were used in debit mode, not cards that were used in credit mode?

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting detective work here on the target credit card compromise:

[http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/12/whos-selling-credit- cards...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/12/whos-selling-credit-cards-from- target/)

</comment><comment><USER9> So wait, do we know when this data breach started and this means that if I used my chase card (not target card) as debit it could of been comprised?</comment>


A Seismic Shift in How People Eat - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opinion/a-seismic-shift-in-how-people-eat.html <comment><USER2> Already posted yesterday. And the day before.

The original has lots of comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526729)</comment>


inDinero (YC S10) launches Mint.com for Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/02/indinero-launches-as-the-mint-com-for-small-businesses/

<comment><USER2> Do you have an iPhone app on the way? Currently I keep a Mint account for my business which I check frequently on my iPhone. That being said, Mint is just a toy for me; the real work gets done in Quickbooks.

Your pricing seems oddly segmented. Intuitively, I don't know how many transactions I run each month. I'm not even sure how I'd count them. I'm pretty sure it isn't more than 500, but who knows. At the 'enterprise' level (and I'm certainly not enterprise) I would have a tough time justifying a price nearly equivalent to buying a copy of Quickbooks Pro every single month. Especially when my accountant is still going to want a Quickbooks file to prepare my taxes.

<comment><USER3> "I would have a tough time justifying a price nearly equivalent to buying a copy of Quickbooks Pro every single month"

Three reasons why this pricing is clever: 1) The aim is to get you using the $30/month version, then when your business grows larger just start charging £100/month. It's so painful for a company to switch accounting software that they will gladly pay twice as much as if they had never heard of it before. 2) You can give out special offers like '25% off - only $75 per month'. This would probably sell better than a normal price of $75. 3) The £30 per month looks more attractive when it is placed directly next to a more expensive option.

<comment><USER4> I doubt that it is a "false option" since it is so clearly based on the number of transactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a suggestion for you.

I know I, and at least 15 other people will immediately switch if you make Citibusiness Online support work. Check out this thread from Mint's support forum: [http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/citi_business_not_a...](http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/citi_business_not_allowed_or_am_i_setting_it_up_wrong)?

To make a long story short, Citibank for business is a major bank and there's a lot frustrated people that would love to use Mint for their business, if only they made it work. Meanwhile, Mint has marked this issue as "complete" and doesn't look like they worked on this in 4 months.

I tried using it on your site and it also didn't work.. (stuck on 80% authentication). I realize this feature is in Beta but it looks like you guys already got further than Mint did - their interface doesn't even ask for right information.

I will sign up my business the second you make this work :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Alex,

We're on this. Would love to have you + 15 other people switch to us :)

Figuring out which banks we don't support (that people need us to support) is a pretty big challenge. We've already gotten requests to support canadian banks and even swiss banks.

\- Jess

<comment><USER6> This looks like it's going to be a kick ass product! To be able to get an up to date snapshot with all the information a non CFA could ask for is GREAT!

Who cares if the digital SLR is better, if its complexity makes you use it far less than the point and shoot then you'd be better off with a point and shoot. I rather a program less powerful than Quickbooks that gives me everything necessary that I can monitor every day to make crucial decisions than one I skim once a month because it's too complicated for my business needs!

One problem tough Jess - no banks outside US :(

I'm in the Cayman Islands, but I bank in different countries and a product that can help my business monitor everything at a glance would be GREAT!!!

Any word on new regions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on your launch :-)

I have a business that has grown from 0 to 500,000 pageviews / month in a little under 6 months. I haven't spent much money but my income is starting to be more significant.

I use two separate bank accounts that are personal accounts for my ad revenue deposits, and I use personal credit cards to pay for things. I understand the need, eventually, to incorporate and get separate accounts, but right now I don't have that.

So is inDinero useless to me? Should I use QuickBooks instead, as it allows for much more flexibility and manual transaction entry?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dave,

This is an interesting thought, because although you're "supposed" to have separate accounts, the reality is that many entrepreneurs never do.

For now, inDinero would only be able to show you the finances from your combined transactions -- that is, unless you had sub accounts that you used only for business transactions, in which case we can ignore your personal sub- accounts.

Will follow up via email to figure out a better solution to this. Thanks for the feedback, Dave!

\- Jessica & Co

<comment><USER8> Yeah I'd imagine many smaller freelancers like myself only have the one account, which is perfectly legal here in Australia for a sole trader as long as you track the business transactions.

So yes, without having a look at the app yet, maybe having the ability to mark each transaction as business or private would be great. An extension on that to would be automatically marking transactions with certain words in descriptions, transfers from certain clients and certain expenses will always come up the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With Wesabe announcing they're shutting down a couple days ago, this could be good timing. I'd been using Wesabe for our business accounts (Mint wouldn't work with one of our accounts, and Wesabe's downloader thingy did work, so it won by default). And, if it happens to address business needs a bit better than Mint or Wesabe, that's even better.

It's a huge market, but I think you've got an uphill battle. Quickbooks is so entrenched...I tried really hard to avoid it, but it does damned near everything, every accountant knows it, every tax preparer knows it, every bank exports for it, and it's cheap compared to all of the existing online double- entry products ($100 per year vs. insanely expensive monthly rates for everything I could find; I'm still using the 2009 edition so technically it's getting cheaper by the day). In the past, I didn't have a Windows box handy (Linux is my primary desktop/laptop OS and has been for a dozen years), and so I went to great lengths to deal with alternatives, like running my own SQL Ledger installation. But, now that I have a Windows partition on both machines, Quickbooks isn't a hardship.

But, given that Quickbooks requires me to babysit the transaction imports, and I only do that once every couple of months, having an automatic snapshot of all of our accounts would be awesome.

<comment><USER10> There's also Outright.com, I believe they have Yodlee integration as well too. They're also free for any size account :-)

I also believe they have a rest-based oauth 2.0 api in there as well.

<comment><USER11> Outright doesn't (or didn't seem to, when I tried it out a month or two back) support auto import of bank transactions. So it could handle credit card transactions but you had to enter all of your deposit account data manually. Dealbreaker.

<comment><USER10> I think that's what Yodlee is for right? Yodlee is what mint.com also used for their integrations with FIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got pretty happy when I saw you had support for my New Zealand bank, which even Xero (an NZ startup doing the same thing) does not have.

But I'm incredibly wary entering my internet banking details into your application, no offense.

Someone with my internet banking details could pretty much run off with 5 years of savings, screw up my investment accounts, run up huge credit card bills.

Are you planning on adding an API? Since I'd happily write my own scraper to pull transactions out of my online banking to submit to my account with you.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hm, it looks like the transactions aren't being linked to a sub-account.

I have 8 accounts with Bank of America, marked 1/2 as disabled, but the transactions from the disabled accounts still show up in my register. Even if I try to filter them out, it still shows all of them.

portman [dot] wills [at] gmail.com if you want more details of what I mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> on it, will follow up via email.

<comment><USER13> Amazing support. I got a Google Chat invite and a follow-up email within 5 minutes of posting.

If you guys can keep up that level of service as you scale, you will crush it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am checking it out now. I have had a Mint account for business too just because it is a better interface than my bank. InDinero looks great.

Unfortunately it pulled in my accounts and created a ton of notification messages. When I delete one it is a full page refresh. Might take a while for me to clean up my dashboard :(

</comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to Jessica, Andy, Borden, and Chris! Great job so far.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats! We really need a service like this for <http://hiidef.com>

The categories need a ton of work. It seems like you just used standard personal finance categories, much like Microsoft Money or Quicken. For instance, Income via Salary / Paycheck isn't applicable for a business. And there is no obvious category for salary on the expense side.

</comment><comment><USER16> I read this about 5 minutes after going to a bunch of different websites to export files for my accountant. So yeah, this fills a need.

</comment><comment><USER17> Really interesting- the cashflow analysis is killer! Totally worth paying for, if pricing was based around the product as a cashflow tool. The rest, though, is just a 10% Mint clone, without the flexibility.

I'd almost rather use it as a dedicated cash-flow analysis service- way more focused, way more valuable.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the awesome product and launch! I've been waiting for something like this for a while. I just signed up, and it looks really promising.

Thoughts/bugs:

\- I tried to add a category under "Bills," and it goes through. But the sub- menu doesn't show up on mouse-over, possibly because there's no built in categories under Bills.

\- I added just one account and clicked through to the dashboard, but it shows no accounts in the bottom left sidebar and so calculates a total of $0. The graph on the right is drawn based on my actual numbers, but then the figures displayed below it are all $0.

\- How about built-in categories for things web entrepreneurs commonly deal with, like legal bills or server costs?

Email me if you want screenshots/details on these.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is still mind-blowing to me everytime somebody launches such a potentially disruptive application on a $35,000 seed capital budget and it looks good and is still online after being TechCrunched! Good luck and nice work -

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to admit, we cheated a bit... we won $35k in grant money before getting YCombinator funded this spring. :)

Thanks for the compliments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Typo on your real-time slide: "nobody has to do manually data entry anymore."

</comment><comment><USER21> This is AWESOME...small typo on: <https://indinero.com/features/exporting>

Support for your current systems. Want to download your bank or credit card transactional data to you other data management systems? Easy - just click a link, and you can instantkly take your data with you to Microsoft Excel, Quickbooks, or any other application that takes .CSV files.

In the text above, 'instantly' is spelt wrong.

</comment><comment><USER22> Curious to know the backgrounds of the founders. What were they doing before this? Students/graduates?

<comment><USER23> They just graduated from Berkeley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would like to try this but I'm not prepared to pay $100 a month in addition to the $30 a month I'm paying for quickbooks online unlimited transactions. Switching will be a huge pain in the ass, but PayPal integration will be worth it, if everything else is the same.

</comment><comment><USER25> Congrats! Looking forward to using this! I've always said Quickbooks is like MS Streets 98, and inDinero can be Google Maps! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143179>

</comment><comment><USER26> Good job! It's really encouraging seeing a UC Berkeley grad successfully launching a start up. The support structure and culture here isn't quite geared for that but I'm super psyched to see someone persevering in spite of it.

</comment><comment><USER27> If this can correctly parse my credit cards, bank accounts, and merchant accounts I will be a lifetime customer.

At the moment though, it does seem to be having some problem dealing with understanding PayPal transactions.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow, looks pretty good. I've just been doing ad-hoc accounting, but this might convince me to get more organized.

Not sure what constitutes a "Transaction", though. Maybe include a tooltip or explanation underneath?

</comment><comment><USER29> Congrats Jessica and Andy! I remember testing the site many months ago, it looks like it's matured and grown quite a bit since then, I'll have to give it another try. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER30> Congrats jess & andy! Love that you got rid of flex ;)

<comment><USER23> But those graphs were sexy ;)

<comment><USER30> Oh def Dylan ;D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Guys should check out Xero - quality piece of software.

</comment><comment><USER32> I just signed up. This looks amazing. I had been using mint but mint is full of annoying ads and is clearly not designed for businesses.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love inDinero... but if I didn't know I have some decent check on their way I would shoot myself looking at the dashboard :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Congrats! Just signed up, but my co-founders didn't get the invite e-mails when I added them to the account... Any ideas?

</comment><comment><USER35> This looks so awesome, but I'm just so paranoid about entering in my bank account/Paypal info. Anyone else feel similar?

</comment><comment><USER36> I've run into some kind of infinite log-in-log-out loop in both Chrome and Opera when I try to sync PayPal. Known issue?

</comment><comment><USER37> Why, again, didn't mint just do this?

<comment><USER38> indinero is SaaS, mint is a consumer lead gen company. similar yet very different companies.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I understand that.

I meant, why hasn't mint expanded to SaaS for small businesses. It's a hugely under served market and they have a product that (seemingly) easily maps. Especially since they were bought by intuit.

All that being said I will likely end up using indinero. I've been waiting for this sort of functionality to show up somewhere. I think all of us business owners can agree quickbooks, excel, etc are all painful and antiquated.

My current solution is mint/tags + python script. And I much prefer it to previous experiences with quickbooks or excel.

<comment><USER15> Based on my initial test of inDinero, Mint/tags + python script seems like the better option. Their interface is more refined and auto-tagging is more powerful. Its not entirely clear how the inDinero product is different from Mint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> They already have thousands customers? How come if they only launched today? Thousands?

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats, looks great so far!

</comment><comment><USER41> Congratulations Jessica! It's looking AWESOME.

</comment><comment><USER42> Very nice layout

</comment><comment><USER43> Congrats Andy & Jessica!

</comment><comment><USER44> Congrats Jessica and Andy!

</comment><comment><USER45> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER46> congrats on the launch!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the best ways to self-host software? - <AUTHOR> I make and sell a few self-hosted web applications and I'm looking for additional options to provide my customers for self hosting. The application requires a LAMP stack, and generally installation is pretty simple, but some users still struggle. Those of you that self-host, what methods are you using to deploy your apps? Do you have any tips that I can use to ease installation for my users?<p>Here are links to the apps that I built and sell:<p>- https://duetapp.com<p>- https://theanchorapp.com <comment><USER2> Ok so, I guess it depends on who your users generally are. Personally, _I 'd_ prefer if you provided an apt repo so I can install the software (and updates) that way, and use debconf to configure the stuff you cover in your 'setup wizard'.

On a slightly off topic note: I'm a little confused how your two apps work together/cross over? Or are they two distinct tools to do similar tasks?

Coincidentally story time: I am actually in the market for a replacement time tracking/invoicing solution (current solution is halting support of their self-hosted version in favour of their 'cloud' service). I think honestly the biggest issue for me is that I'm reluctant to make myself/my business so reliant on a proprietary system like that again. Unfortunately most open source tools in this space also have no, or terrible native client support (i.e. desktop/phone apps) so I'm kind of stuck right now.</comment>


If iOS7 jailbroken, can apps peek at fingerprint data? - <AUTHOR>

Apple said they are talking to fingerprint scanner and the a7 directly. If ios7 jailbroken or grant root access, will it be possible for apps to access or peek at fingerprint data. <comment><USER2> My understanding is that Apple will store fingerprint information as a list of characteristics, scrambled with a one-way hash function.

This way, even if the stored data is accessed, you'll have a hard time reconstructing the original fingerprint _characteristics_ , and it'll be pretty much impossible to regenerate the fingerprint itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I'm far from being an expert but as soon as the phone grants a root access I think there is a possibility to get it.

Since it's stored on the phone, the print or the print informations are somewhere in your device. Encrypted or not I'm pretty sure someone is going to find out how to retrieve what he wants.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do when your tests are running? - <AUTHOR> Tests can take ages to run. It's pretty unproductive to just wait and it's hard to focus on something else in the meantime.<p>How do you spend this precious time? <comment><USER2> Read news/technology articles (hacker news) or work on a task for another client :). If I don't distract myself I find myself making changes in the code requiring me to stop and start my tests again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As you can see, personally I read HN. But I'm sure there are more productive things to do.</comment>


Phone Call Translator App to be Offered by Japan's NTT Docomo - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20004210 <comment><USER2> I would be really surprised if this service would work smoothly. I already feel bothered just by reading automatically translated text.</comment>


Wikimedia Foundation director resigns after uproar over "Knowledge Engine" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/head-of-wikimedia-foundation-resigns-as-tensions-with-editors-mount/ <comment><USER2> Why did the community react with such vitriol to the search engine product? I would like a free, open, privacy conscious search engine to exist.

<comment><USER3> Those search engines exist, among them

      -https://search.disconnect.me
      -Duck Duck Go

Look at it this way: they would try to create a competitive advantage, as they are also behind Wikipedia they could better use it, in the process they can create an API to access information in such a way that other search engines cant.

A better proposal would be to create a project to start adding semantics to the Wikipedia project, maybe a RFC and standards so all search engines can benefit of it.

Another option could be an open sourced project to host blogs making use of the above described tech.

Then you could perform a search based on the "intended meaning" instead of the words included and who reference it.

Edit: Removed Yandex per comment below after research.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, Yandex?

<comment><USER3> I stand corrected, I erronously implied that the fact DDG uses its results implied the same policy about privacy which does not.

" 2.3. Data collected by or transmitted to Yandex, the Company or Partners, in the course of accessing, interaction and operation of the Site and provision of the Services may include, without limitation, the following Data: (i) Internet Protocol (IP) address and location; (ii) cookie information; (iii) browser identification information; (iv) information on your software and hardware; (v) date and time of accessing the Site and the Services; (vi) information of third parties websites referred the Site or the Services; (vii) information related to your activity in the course of the Services use, including, without limitation, search queries history, search results provided to you in response to your query, web pages you visited by reference from the search results; (viii) other information."

[https://yandex.com/legal/privacy/](https://yandex.com/legal/privacy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As much as I value Wikipedia as a resource, I've personally never understood the culture behind it. Long-term, to me, it's unclear what the future holds for it.

<comment><USER6> It's both a never ending disaster and the greatest resource in the history of the world.

<comment><USER7> That's most of human nature you're describing there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Wikimedia Foundation should treat its treasure trove of donations as an endowment and use it to guarantee the survival of Wikipedia. If they just invested it, they may never need to do a donation drive again.

</comment><comment><USER9> Disappointing to see this die. I would really like there to be some open, public API with a knowledge engine backend that could be part of an open source alternative to Siri, Cortana, Echo, etc.

<comment><USER10> some projects like wikidata and dbpedia provide public APIs. You can query them using SPARQL for example.

<comment><USER11> Having actively looked into using Wikidata as part of a system... Hahaha ... yeah it's great for Wikipedia but pretty useless for anyone else. Don't get me started on how useless SPARQL is for "explorative search".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good riddance. Everything about her has been a disaster. From her single edit history to her statement that she was afraid to address the community.

She even has her name on a damn SOFTWARE PATENT. What were they thinking when they put her in charge?

<comment><USER3> If she has a software patent, it could mean she understands how the system works, you wouldn't hire a lawyer who doesn't have a title, on the other hand, one that has written a law would appear more knowledgeable.

What I suspect is the problem is this

"The Board tasked me with making changes to serve the next generation and ensure our impact in the future,"

I would suspect if this is not political correct wording for "let's make money".

<comment><USER12> > If she has a software patent, it could mean she understands how the system > works, you wouldn't hire a lawyer who doesn't have a title, on the other > hand, one that has written a law would appear more knowledgeable.

You're being too considerate. It's not like hiring a lawyer who's written a law or has a title. It's like saying a lawyer needs to commit a crime to be a better lawyer.

<comment><USER13> > It's like saying a lawyer needs to commit a crime to be a better lawyer.

That's a ridiculous analogy. I am no fan of software patents either but likening them to a crime is just absurd.

<comment><USER14> a bit like file sharing then</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


If it's not written in PHP it's irrelePHPant - <AUTHOR> http://edorian.posterous.com/if-its-not-written-in-php-its-irrelephpant

<comment><USER2> I hope this article is sarcasm. (I am not sure; maybe because I'm not a native speaker)

<comment><USER3> It is sarcasm, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The post is funny, but is there really that much agitation in the PHP community to rewrite tech stacks in PHP? I'm genuinely curious about why someone would think that's a good idea - is it just NIH run amok?

</comment><comment><USER5> The writing style was rather annoying and detracted from the overall message.</comment>


Ask HN: Concerned Citizen - <AUTHOR>

Why don't all the really good hackers get together and remove all child pornography from the web.  Who better to do good for this country? <comment><USER2> why don't all the really good police officers get together to remove drugs from the country?

...oh wait

but seriously, the idea is noble, but the fact is that child pornography is already widely controlled. if you actually want to obtain it, you have to be on the inside of the situation, just like drugs. you can't buy heroin at walmart. you have to know who to go to in order to buy it and jump through some serious flaming hoops to get it. we can't police things on thumb drives and encrypted emails/connections. and if we could, would we even want to? it would be hugely big brother that would be removing the rights of the law- abiding many to prosecute the few. (which i guess isn't that foreign under the current administration)

but thats just my $0.02.

<comment><USER3> Why don't all the hackers get together and stop spam?

Why don't all the hackers get together and elect Obama?

Why don't all the hackers get together and stop terrorism?

This is fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I'm not sure if this a troll or not, but if it isn't, then it seems to hail back to the longstanding misunderstanding of what 'hacker' means. Hacker News is for people who want to a) build cool things, and b) make money. Not so much about vigilante justice.

</comment><comment><USER5> Die.</comment>


How Minimalism Brought Me Freedom and Joy - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2016/04/15/how-minimalism-brought-me-free.html <comment><USER2> At the moment, dealing with my inheritance from my mother, I am somewhat jealous of the author. There's a part of me that wishes I could just say "Take what you want" and walk away.</comment>


Xenon – The positive news App With JavaScript - ujjwal-kr https://medium.com/@ujjwalkr/day-2-xenon-the-positive-news-app-f04b97aeafdc <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting.. how'd you get the (.now.sh) domain?</comment>


Big Bets on A.I. Open a New Frontier for Chip Start-Ups - <AUTHOR> https://nytimes.com/2018/01/14/technology/artificial-intelligence-chip-start-ups.html <comment><USER2> We should expect that as Moore's law slows down specialized hardware will more and more often become a viable solution. As new process nodes take longer to come online the optimal number of different designs per node goes up. At some point computation will probably end up switching to a different substrate because we're not particularly close to the efficiencies allowed by physics. But I expect quite an interregnum after MOSFETS get as small as they can.

<comment><USER3> Sure, a few of these companies are going to win. But good luck picking the winners. Meanwhile, Nvidia has the deep pockets to build a custom chip of their own and a well-established ecosystem to drive it. And up until they decided to dictate where you can place their GPUs and to reserve the right to audit your usage of their GPUs and software, I believed they had already won the war before the first shots were fired.

<comment><USER4> Nvidia will keep focusing on GPUs to the detriment of anything else. That's how larger established corporations always work, they have a lot of institutional inertia.

<comment><USER3> So the thing is that as long as Nvidia tapes out a new architecture every single year, the best you can really do is beat them by a factor of two or so by matching them without the constraint of fixed function graphics transistors along for the ride.

And I think you need to beat them by a factor of 5 to 10 against currently shipping hardware (not last year's model or worse) to get traction. Also you have to deliver perf, not just perf/W. Those two constraints alone will eliminate 80% or so of these companies I suspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was reading rationale on Broadcom's hostile takeover of Qualcomm, the oft repeated mantra is - semiconductor growth has stagnated. So, now the industry is consolidating.

In which case, what exactly is the growth expected out of these companies?

</comment><comment><USER6> can someone fix the typo in the headline?</comment>


PhantomJS: Archiving the project, suspending development - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344 <comment><USER2> Chrome and Firefox gaining headless modes is the ultimate goal Phantom could've achieved.

So I consider it a complete success.

Kudos to all contributors.

<comment><USER3> Does headless chrome do PDF generation? That's the only thing I'm using phantom for at the moment.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

It's really easy to do using [puppeteer]([https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer)). The 2nd or 3rd example is PDF.

<comment><USER5> I just recently switched from using PhantomJS to pupeteer for PDF generation in a production application. Works like a charm and has a very clean API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This project has been effectively dead since April 2017, when Vitallium stepped down as maintainer as soon as Headless Chrome was announced [1]:

> Headless Chrome is coming [...] I think people will switch to it, > eventually. Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn't > eat memory like crazy. [...] I don't see any future in developing PhantomJS. > Developing PhantomJS 2 and 2.5 as a single developer is a bloody hell.

One potential path forward could have been to have PhantomJS support Headless Chrome as a runtime [2], which Paul Irish (of Google Chrome team) reached out to PhantomJS about. However, it seems there hasn't been enough interest/resources to ever make this happen.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs/9aI5d-LDuNE/5Z3SMZ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs/9aI5d-LDuNE/5Z3SMZrqAQAJ)

[2] [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14954](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14954)

</comment><comment><USER7> Timeline of what lead to this, from what I could gather:

• phantomjs is 7 years old, @pixiuPL has been contributing for about 2 months

• @ariya didn't respond to his requests for _owner_ level permissions

• @pixiuPL published an open letter to _the main page of phantomjs.org_ [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15345](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15345)

• the stress leads @ariya to close the repo.

• @pixiuPL intends to continue development on a fork

This is a good reminder of why non-technical skills are so important in OS and in general.

<comment><USER8> I don't know man, but look at @pixiuPL's commits [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commits?author=pixiuPL](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commits?author=pixiuPL)

Especially his own commits (non-merge commits)

<comment><USER9> What about them?

<comment><USER8> He committed:

\- Removing one whitespace and adding an unnecessary file [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/98272b9752b2d505f7...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/98272b9752b2d505f7fcb9ae0d10651a808ea79f)

\- Conflicted files [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/63a69d9e2e9c31baab...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/63a69d9e2e9c31baab90b9711d88a836dce60e85)

\- Personal build env [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/d57ff74f36c5b79d82...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/d57ff74f36c5b79d829e36ba7febaafcae3c9e3b)

\- Deleted the whole project while changing cloud provider [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/a242fb8d605d9aa4af...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/a242fb8d605d9aa4afe5bf8d1267c1ded15f157c)

\- then re-adding the whole project again [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/ddaaa09785d453e415...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/ddaaa09785d453e41554fd6133a2054c659a317f)

and other weird/careless commits

<comment><USER10> Now, he shows up at number 4 in the Github contributor list ([https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/graphs/contributors)) with 179,603 lines added, not a single one of which seems to be a meaningful contribution by him.

Are such incidences common in other open source software too, or does this one seem a rare case?

<comment><USER7> I doubt it, but the line count / commit frequency heuristics really shouldn't be taken too seriously anyways

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some people are mentioning headless Chromium, so I wanna mention another tool I've used to replace some of phantomjs' functionality: jsdom [0].

It's much more lightweight than a real browser, and it doesn't require large extra binaries.

I don't do any complex scrapping, but occasionally I want to pull down and aggregate a site's data. For most pages, it's as simple as making a request and passing the response into a new jsdom instance. You can then query the DOM using the same built-in browser APIs you're already familiar with.

I've previously used jsdom to run a large web app's tests on node, which provided a huge performance boost and drastically lowered our build times. As long as you maintain a good architecture (i.e. isolating browser specific bits from your business logic) you're unlikely to encounter any pitfalls. Our testing strategy was to use node and jsdom during local testing and on each commit. IMO, you should generally only need to run tests on an actual browser before each release (as a safety net), and possibly on a regular schedule (if your release cycle is long).

[0] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsdom](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsdom)

<comment><USER12> Cheerio [0] is fantastic for this as well...

[0]: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/cheerio](https://www.npmjs.com/package/cheerio)

<comment><USER11> I've tried Cheerio as well, but I prefer JSDOM since it exposes the DOM APIs. What I'll normally do is interactively test things out in the browser's console, and then transfer em over to my script. Browser dev tools are just super amazing.

<comment><USER13> Agreed - I find the Cheerio APIs to be awkward when traversing deep into the DOM. Last time I used Beautiful Soup I found it also had this problem. The DOM API that JSDOM provides is such much more natural to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those who haven't looked at some of the commits by @pixiuPL, the list is here : [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commits?author=pixiuPL](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commits?author=pixiuPL).

To summarize: It does not look like the guy has done a single commit with any meaning. His commits are basically the following:

1\. Adding his own name in package.json 2\. Adding and deleting whitespace. 3\. Deleting the entire project and commiting. 4\. Adding the entire project back again and commiting.

Just out of curiosity: How likely is that someone may be able to use a large number of such non functional commits(adding and removing whitespace) to a popular open source repository to boost their career ambitions.(e,g. Claiming that they made 50 commits to a popular project might sound impressive in an interview.)

<comment><USER14> Given that he hides those behind fake commit message (unless one counts removing a comment or a whitespace "code refactoring), I would say rather likely.

<comment><USER10> It seems there are no limits to this madness.e,g [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/970edb9b683175a6b1...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/970edb9b683175a6b1f22fb77bff4fbbda957a19)

In this commit the guy deletes two spaces from a file, and adds copyright for his name at the top. Going through his commits has made me extremely shocked. I mean how did such low quality commits made it into the master branch of the repo. It is like these commits were invisible to all the visitors and users of the repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two alternatives:

Headless Chrome with Puppeteer: [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer)

Firefox-based Slimer.js: [https://github.com/laurentj/slimerjs](https://github.com/laurentj/slimerjs) (same API as Phantom which is useful if using a higher level library like [http://casperjs.org/](http://casperjs.org/))

<comment><USER16> I maintain a puppeteer-as-a-service repo here: [https://github.com/joelgriffith/browserless](https://github.com/joelgriffith/browserless). It's pretty feature rich at this point, allowing you to specify concurrency, sessions timeouts, and comes with a robust IDE (which you can play with here: [https://chrome.browserless.io](https://chrome.browserless.io)).

I'm working on building out a serverless model, which is the holy grail of headless workflows, but it's a bit more challenging to operationalize than one would think.

I'm hoping that these efforts will lower the bar for folks wanting to get started with puppeteer and headless Chrome!

<comment><USER17> Browserless seems awesome. Thanks for sharing your project!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As has been said, this point was somewhat inevitable with the advent of Chrome and Firefox's headless modes. However, as the project slips into the mists of history, let's not forget the vital stepping stone it provided in having access to a real headless browser environment vs a simulated one. I for one will remain grateful to Ariya, Vitallium and all the team for their efforts.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm super biased in this, having spend considerable time programming against PhantomJs, Selenium and now Headless Chrome / Puppeteer for my startup [https://checklyhq.com](https://checklyhq.com). This whole area of automating browser interactions is an extremely hard thing to get stable. In my experience, the recent Puppeteer library takes the cake but PhantomJs is the spiritual father here. I will not talk about Selenium for blood pressure reasons

<comment><USER20> Having dabbled with both selenium and phantom, I can vouch for both being PITA to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Within the issue @pixiuPL created, I listed some of the things that he has shown incompetence on: [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15345#issuecomment...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15345#issuecomment-370269460)

<comment><USER22> Nicely put github comment, well done. Thank you. I feel sick in my mouth seeing PL in his username, which clearly indicates my home country. I am beyond baffled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ariya wrote a bit about his reasoning here: [https://mobile.twitter.com/AriyaHidayat/status/9701730017013...](https://mobile.twitter.com/AriyaHidayat/status/970173001701367808) also mentioning an old post in [https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541)

</comment><comment><USER24> I still think it's premature. There is still couple of fields PhantomJS is better than Headless Chrome. Notably proxy support, and API aviability.

<comment><USER25> That's not really true. You can use proxies with Headless Chrome using the --proxy-server command line parameter. And the API is richer that PhantomJS. See the underlying API documentation here: [https://chromedevtools.github.io/debugger-protocol- viewer/to...](https://chromedevtools.github.io/debugger-protocol-viewer/tot/).

<comment><USER24> It's only for proxy without auth. So mainly local ones. There is no way to use username and a password right now for proxy with headless chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well with Chrome going headless there isn't a whole lot of place for PhantomJS anyway. Or is there? What is it still good for?

<comment><USER27> Legacy systems for one. The Cooperative Patent Classification group releases their classifications en masse as HTML (single zip download, which is great). I built a parser for a PHP project that could parse all several hundred thousand records from the HTML in a few minutes. In 2017, they switched to a system that loads in the data from JSON stored in Javascript in the HTML (it is every bit as terrible as you imagine). Obviously loading in the HTML and trying to use regex to match the JSON was a terrible idea (especially since it was encoded to boot...), so I instead used Phantom to load each file, render it, and save it to a temporary file which I then parse using the original pre-2017 parser. Like 10 lines of code in Phantom to do it.

Obviously with my situation, this is not the end of the world. I use the parser twice a year and Phantom will continue to handle that task just fine. But I also know that the switch to using headless Chrome would be an expensive one if necessary; we have to research it, we have to update local dev environments, we have to implement it, we have to write new tests for it, we have to test it, we have to updating our deployment strategy, update our server deployment configuration, and, worst of all, get all of these changes and new software installations approved by the USPTO which is a nightmare. My situation is simple, but would take several weeks to several months to actually deploy to production. As it stands, I will likely have to explain why we have a now-unmaintained piece of software on the server and may be forced to switch regardless.

I can easily imagine how this project sunsetting, even though there is a clear alternative and successor, could be a nightmare to a lot of people. It's not the end of the world, but it's definitely unfortunate

<comment><USER26> Why would you need PhantomJS for that? Can't you just parse the HTML files with Nokogiri and be done with it? That would be orders of magnitude faster anyway

<comment><USER19> Big misunderstanding in browser land. The HTML delivered to you over the wire, the stuff Nokogiri sees, is not the stuff you see on your screen or even when doing a "view source"

<comment><USER28> OK, obviously the stuff you see on your screen not matching the HTML delivered makes sense, but explain the HTML source not matching what's sent via the HTTP response. DOM can be modified, of course, JS can introduce more dynamic HTML, but view-source should always represent any non-redirected HTTP response. What is Nokogiri getting that the browser isn't (or vice versa)?

<comment> joatmon-snoo > view-source should always represent any non-redirected HTTP response

Not the grandfather, but generally in browsers you have two versions of HTML "source" \- the canonical source, the stuff pulled down over HTTP, and the _repaired_ source, the version that actually gets rendered.

I'm unfamiliar with Nokogiri, but I suspect that from context, it doesn't repair HTML in the same way that browsers do.

<comment><USER29> But it should be the same as "view source" right? The post replied to claims otherwise.

<comment><USER30> No it's not. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16514517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16514517)

<comment><USER31> It sounds like you are confusing View Source and the live developer tools DOM view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There is one thing about this that saddens me: PhantomJS still starts up much faster than headless Firefox or Chrome, at least for me, which makes some of our integration tests take a long longer than they should.

Has anyone here figured out any tricks to get headless Chrome booted fast?

<comment><USER33> Also PhantomJS was a single statically linked binary with no dependencies that you could literally drop into a server and run scripts at once.

<comment><USER34> For those who may struggle with using chrome headless on server, here is a dockerfile example to get your started : [https://github.com/oelmekki/chromessr/blob/master/Dockerfile](https://github.com/oelmekki/chromessr/blob/master/Dockerfile)

godet is the lib I use for chrome piloting, replace with your favorite one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> End of an era! Congratulation to team for all their hard work and excellent contribution to help teams build better software.

All the best to everybody!

</comment><comment><USER36> Somehow I am having issue to use both headless FireFox|Chrome. Unlike PhantomJS where all I had to do is to drop the binary and set the path, both FF and Chrome are not following same route thus I am happy to use PhantomJS for a while

</comment><comment><USER37> I would think PhantomJS is still quite heavily used so having some kind of migrator to puppeteer would be useful. I'm sure people would pay $$$ for it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Thank you, PhantomJS contributors. You built a life saver.

</comment><comment><USER39> Drupal dropped PhantomJS too [https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2775653](https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2775653)

</comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone here know if there's a way to set SSL client certs with Headless Chrome? With PhantomJS I could use

      --ssl-client-certificate-file and --ssl-client-key-file

</comment><comment><USER41> I do lightweight web automation via Chromiums "Snippets". It is super nice to work that way because you see on screen what happens and can check everything realtime in the console. Only problem is that they dont survive page loads. So when my snippet navigates to a new url I have to trigger it again manually. What would be a good way to progress from here so I can automate across pages?

<comment><USER42> Greasemonkey and its descendants (e.g. Violentmonkey) can run user scripts which work across pages.

<comment><USER41> Maybe it is even easier to write a Chrome extension?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I remember taking full page screenshots with phantom back in the day. Really cool project. Nightmarejs is another alt with a friendly api.

</comment><comment><USER44> One of the guys working on P-JS just linked from a GH issue to his open letter... He isn't very happy with the owner blah blah blah and is going to fork the master branch to make phantom great again, I'll just put this here:

"Will do as advised, as I really think PhantomJS is good project, it just needs good, devoted leader."

<comment><USER10> It does not look like the guy has done a single commit with any meaning. His commits are basically the following: 1\. Adding his own name in package.json 2\. Adding and deleting whitespace. 3\. Deleting the entire project and commiting. 4\. Adding the entire project back again and commiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Shoot, I was just planning to use this for generating PDFs out of a URL on nodejs. Does anyone know of any other library / module out there that is good at this?

<comment><USER46> You can generate pdfs with headless Chromium/Chrome pretty easily.

        chromium-browser --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=output_file_name.pdf file:///path/to/your/html

<comment><USER47> Sadly you get 0 control over headers and footers of the output PDF, meaning you get lovely crappy page numbers around the place with no way to turn them off. This is why, sadly, I have to keep my command line markdown -> pdf converter ([https://www.npmjs.com/package/mdpdf](https://www.npmjs.com/package/mdpdf)) using Phantomjs.

So this does work for very basic pdf printouts, but so far phantom is the only tool that offers full control over the PDF output. Even down to things like margins, paper size, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> is headless chrome's API just as easy to work with? Taking a screenshot or saving a page as pdf is stupid simple with phantomjs

<comment><USER49> yep, just as easy

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Thanks & Goodbye</comment>