The Antidesktop (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20021201230839/http://palm.freshmeat.net/articles/view/581/ <comment><USER2> This is parenthetical to the discussion, but reading this article made me deeply nostalgic for 15 years ago, when we still had Freshmeat and Slashdot was decent and Mozilla was fresh and the web was largely full of information, not javascript.

Back on topic, I wrote this back in 2006: "What's old is new again, the quest for distraction-free writing" ([http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old- is-...](http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-is-New-Again- the-Quest-for-Distraction-Free-Writing.html)). The topic remains relevant, and maybe more relevant than ever. It's super hard to arrange time and materials and commitments so that you can concentrate deeply on the task before you. We are perhaps not making much progress.

<comment><USER3> Back then there was Freshmeat, now there is Github (et al). In that respect I think things actually improved, especially given the ease with which git allows others to fork repositories, safeguarding against site disappearance. Given the distributed nature of git even the eventual disappearance - or total sellout - of Github (et al) will not diminish this as those who want can host their own repositories in a few minutes using the likes of Gogs/Gitea or Gitlab.

Slashdot was fun while it lasted, there have been several attempts at a restart of similar communities (Soylent News etc.) but as far as I know none have managed to create the same 'feel of community'. Maybe that is because there is no real community?

Anyway, with more and more people getting access to true broadband the possibilities of decentralised hosting only increase so I still have some hopes for the future when it comes to building something interesting outside of the walled-and-fenced big-data farms so popular nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My setup is remarkably similar: Xmonad and tmux.

I only reluctantly leave the command line and feel like I only have X so I can have a reasonable browser.

And I kind of loathe all the popular browsers because I feel crippled without my cli tools and ability to script up solutions to my problems. Uzbl is the only browser that feels like I'm still in the cli but just happen to also have a window that renders the web.

<comment><USER5> I used to be a heavy tmux user on OSX but stopped since I started using xmonad. I was mostly using it to organise terminal windows and that was now xmonad's job. (I run everything locally on my laptop. I prefer not having to worry about maintaining multiple machines)

May I ask what you find yourself using tmux for within xmonad? I'm curious what I may be missing out on.

<comment><USER6> How do you use xmonad on OSX? From what I've seen, most people use native clients that re-create the functionality of xmonad.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I don't. I switched back to Linux.

<comment><USER7> story of my life

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's quite similar. I use i3wm, and usually keep most applications maximized. I have a bunch of keybindings to start Chrome, start new terminals etc., including some that start ssh sessions to specific servers and attached to a suitable screen session (my home server has several screen sessions with different configs and different coloured status lines running for different projects).

Every now and again I split the screen, but rarely in more than two.

With screen sessions running on my home server for most of my projects, I can also detach and close them and/or reboot my laptop and not lose state, so e.g. at the moment I just have one Chrome window and one screen session open (on separate virtual desktops).

I have a shortcut to bring up Nautilus to manage files, but I use it so rarely I often forget the shortcut (I've got a keybinding to bring up a help file).

<comment><USER9> I started using i3 back around 2012 I think. I had tried a couple of other tiling window managers (awesome, xmonad, etc).

I occasionally try new ones every couple of months if I start using a new machine or laptop, but I keep coming back to i3. It feels like it's the easiest to use/deal with and I like the tree/stack way it handles windows.

Having used a tiling window manager for years, I don't ever want to go back to overlapping windows. Even when I have to use my Windows machine, I tend to keep everything full screen in each workspace.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I used Ion for a year or so around 2000, but then went back to a more normal setup because I felt there were too many limitations (e.g. things like Gimp was a nightmare), but what has happened since is that I use fewer and fewer native apps, so I'm now down to mostly browser windows and terminals and that has made it a lot easier to get a tiling setup that works great, and now I don't want to give it up.

When I started using i3wm it was after a couple of years of realising I was running everything maximised anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started using EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager, a few weeks ago, and it is by far my favorite window manager yet. It is the ultimate anti-desktop: all windows just become Emacs buffers. Since terminal windows are just Emacs buffers, managing terminal windows is exactly like managing X windows.

After almost 20 years of: Enlightenment, Blackbox, Window Maker, StumpWM (only tiling window manager I could stand to use until EXWM), too much twm, Openbox most recently, and a few others I forget, EXWM feels really refreshing.

[https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm](https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm)

<comment><USER11> There's an Emacs WM, but not a decent text editor yet?

<comment><USER12> Linus has more polishing yet to do.

<comment><USER13> You mean RMS?

<comment><USER14> Possibly a reference to microEmacs, of which Linus maintains his own fork (though the last commit was in 2014) [1].

[1] [https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tried this a while ago - its okay so long as you are doing specific, limited activities.

If you need to explore beyond the things that you have already figured out for to do it slows you down. Websites you need don't work in lynx, Android dev is slower to pick up console first, etc. People expect you to see the pictures and word docs on your mail, or contact you via WhatsApp.

You figure your way round these one by one, or give up after an hour and use the normal tool. And then onto tomorrows new distraction.

Eventually this is a time sink.

<comment><USER16> Um.

He's running X with a minimalist tiling wm with only one window at a time, not trying to live through a VT100.

Of course, some Hackernews is now going to tell me about how this setup falls down hard when you need to do _real_ work and how sensible people just use KDE or GNOME -- or Windows.

<comment><USER17> It's probably a little difficult running GIMP for photo editing. GIMP wants a half-dozen windows open at the same time to get much done.

Personally, I like having a few widgets on-screen all the time - a clock, a volume control - and I enjoy having two or three things open on-screen: a terminal and a browser, for instance, or two terminals ssh'ing to different machines. Having lots of display area helps. Pretty much every window manager can handle this, and it's just a matter of figuring out which one gets out of my way fastest.

<comment><USER18> Many tiling WMs (e.g. i3, xmonad) support floating windows. Also, GIMP supports single-window mode these days.

<comment><USER19> Even dwm supports floating windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll chime in with a "met too!".

i3 + tmux (it's the only sane way to manage servers.)

I'm a sysadmin (not a developer like most of the HN crowd) so I usually have 10+ terminal windows open (depending on what project(s) I am working on.

I think it would make for an interesting poll to see what the demographics are like for the 'power-user' crowd that exists here.

<comment><USER21> I'm a software engineer, and I have many terminals open as well. I've been using iTerm2 (with splits) on OS X, but with the awful new Macbooks I'm finally looking at heading back to xterm and dwm on Linux -- I miss it dearly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> After ratpoison, there was a spiritual successor called stumpwm that is actively developed. [1]

Unfortunately, with most distros going to Wayland, it seems most window managers are going the way of the dodo. Very few have a sane migration path; Wayland's idea of what a compositor (the closest analog to window manager) does is pretty different. It's not like a libxcb/libx11 analog is a sane endeavor. I've found one thing that's a reimplementation of an existing, popular tiling window manager (i3): sway. [2]

I'll miss hacking the good hack.

[1]: [https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm](https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm) [2]: [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway)

<comment><USER23> One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver.

So if you want to use Sway, you better get used to configuring your displays in a config file.

What about applications that need to set environment variables (e.g. gpg- agent, gnome-keyring) how do you launch them if your compositor doesn't launch and export them for you? (That said, I still can't work out where gnome-shell decides to launch gnome-keyring-daemon on login)

Ideally, I'd like a DE that provides display/audio/power/menu management, but with a (manual) tiling compositor that supports window stacking/tabbing (like i3/sway). And bonus points if it has a sloppy floating-desktop mode.

Shelltile kinda works, but shits the bed when applications set window size hints, and there's no window stacking/tabbing.

<comment><USER16> > One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM > is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver.

A deliberate design decision intended to keep context switches off the hot path.

It's one of those "just trust me; this way really is better" things. You're sacrificing very little to get an improved graphics stack.

<comment><USER24> You're sacrificing composability, one of the biggest things that makes GNU/Linux so powerful in my mind. Right now, I'm running AwesomeWM embedded in a KDE session. As a result, I have a lean tiling window manager which I can configure to my liking, and a bunch of shit that I don't care about to that same level "just works" and is integrated in to the session like display management, network connectivity, even notifications daemon are a problem on other minimalist desktops that would have to be fully reimplemented for each Wayland WM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm similar, but with StumpWM instead of ratpoison (it was written by ratpoison's creator), tmux instead of screen, and st instead of gnome- terminal.

I will never, _ever_ go back to a windowed desktop. This just works way too well for me. I feel like I can focus, and I never, ever have to drag a window.

It's pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER26> So using screen or tmux means your non-gui apps keep running when you disconnect from your server, but what about X apps? I've been using xpra for the past few months for tmux-like functionality with GUI apps. It's /pretty/ good, but rough around the edges.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for mentioning xpra. I have always wanted something like that but hadn't ever thought about searching for "screen for X11".

<comment><USER8> It's great, but it's basically "VNC for individual windows" and suffers many of the same issues - window updates happens according to the redraw algorithm of XPRA, rather than in the sequence carried out by the application, and the application doesn't wait on the rendering. That said I've been able to play back full screen full HD video on my several years old laptop via XPRA with minimal jerking or tearing, so it's not a major problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think we are a lot here using "minimal" tilling window managers.

At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using minimal setups (not so representative I know).

Personally I use dwm with some shell scripts: [https://github.com/kakwa/dwm- desktop](https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop)

It fits my need well and I adapt it to new version once in a while, not a lot of time spent maintaining my configuration.

By the way, I love suckless projects ([http://suckless.org/](http://suckless.org/)), one of my favorites is dmenu, so simple yet so efficient.

I also like surf, but I'm a bit too lazy to switch from chromium.

<comment><USER29> > At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are > using minimal setups (not so representative I know).

Agreed, but I know of precious few WM users who went back to a DE. It feels like it would be 100 more effort to do DE->WM then it was to do WM->DE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if this still have the same spirit.

<comment><USER31> "but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net"

I don't understand this comment ...

First, my experience is that most open source software is now on github.

Second, I feel that github is infinitely better in every way than freshmeat was.

<comment><USER9> Github is nice, but it's not quite the same. Freshmeat was more about new releases and discovery. It was the daily list of new ideas (some terrible ..) and software updates in the open source world. Today Github alone doesn't do that. It's more like GitHub + Hackernews or Reddit or some other aggregation site to show you what's new and neat or updated.

There was a lot of dreaming during that time (late 90s/early 2000s) of what we could accomplish in the OSS communities. Slowly community projects became part of foundations or startup/corporate controlled. Gimp never took the place of Photoshop, and many of the lofty ideas about open source really started to fade:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open- source-...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in- community-and-enterprise-software/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been using a tiling WM for a while now, and it's pretty great. Most of the programs I use are in the terminal (urxvt with a pretty color scheme and font, unlike the OP), switching workspaces for different programs is just nice to use, and everything is minimal. I'd encourage everyone to check out /r/unixporn at least once.

I use a fairly boring WM, too. spectrwm doesn't have a lot of config, it Just Werks, and lately I've been using a WM in wrote myself in Rust.

</comment><comment><USER33> Some less popular alternatives not seen in this thread yet:

\- twin, vwm (curses based window manager)

\- dvtm (similar to tmux)

There is plenty of stuff you can do without X. Some of them:

\- Web browsing (e.g: lynx, links, etc)

\- music (e.g: mp3blaster)

\- videos, surprisingly (e.g: mplayer + aalib)

<comment><USER34> aalib is amazing, but you can also use fbdev, which gives you regular video playback: [https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m](https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m)

<comment><USER33> Yes but this can be used in the context of terminals (e.g: inside a tmux pane)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There are currently 2 usable OSx tiling window managers :

\- KWM [https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm](https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm) \- Amethyst [https://ianyh.com/amethyst/](https://ianyh.com/amethyst/)

I stopped using Linux on the desktop before tiling WMs were a thing, and was kinda fascinated by what i read about them, as i've always seen the overlapping windows GUI idea as somewhat broken. (what's the use of a window if it's even partially hidden, appart from clutter ??)

Well those 2 projets really bring tiling to osx, not just as in "resize windows with a shortcut" like spectacles, etc, but as the real i3/xmonad deal : windows are mostly managed for you, using a BSP for kwm.

I use kwm, it's beta quality, it has a few issues and i spent a few evenings tinkering to wrap my head about the concepts but ... it works, and it rocks !

Suddenly I can have 10 usable windows on my dual screen setup, focus follow mouse, etc. It feels so much peaceful having everything on your screen that being searching for windows all the time...

</comment><comment> GuB-42 Minimalist window managers are cool but unless you have a very specific workflow it tends to create more problems than it solves.

X11 apps are usually designed with a typical, windows-like environment in mind and tweaks may be required to accommodate for an unusual desktop environment, if at all possible.

Typical problems can be :

\- The title bar isn't visible, and there is important information in it

\- No system tray, which can mean no menu and no notifications

\- Normally small windows displaying full screen (ex : GIMP)

\- Key binding conflicts between the window manager and the app in use

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow, I had a surprisingly similar setup almost exactly ten years after the author posted that - even down to the gnome-terminal. Recently though I've switched to i3 and xterm, because for some reason gnome-terminal has broken on my system.

For anyone who's reading this, I highly encourage you to try i3 (a tiling wm similar to that in the article.) It even gives you a guide on keystrokes on first setup, and it's by far the most efficient for me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reading this it makes sense as a highly productive system for a time when the screen size was small monitor.

I keep wanting an Apple/Windows/Linux manager that really embraces the flexibility and size of a giant 4k screen (I'm using a 55" 4k TV as a monitor that's cheap in both current and real dollars than the 21" monitor I had in 2002).

I've hacked together a system that works well for me on OS X with Divvy, but it still feels non optimal.

<comment><USER38> Tiling window managers on X11 are great on all sizes and number of monitors. They just allow to conveniently arrange windows on a grid, in a manual or dynamic fashion, with some handy functions to access and manage those windows.

You can try using one for terminals on xquartz for osx. There is nothing close for non-X windows. The hardest part is to pick one ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Surprised that no one has pointed out this is nearly exactly the experience you get with a tablet + keyboard - and in fact the viewable screen/real estate probably lines up quite well with what a desktop gave you in 2002.

That having been said, I tried using an iPad+bluetooth keyboard for a little while as a "workstation" and the inability to switch or launch apps from the keyboard doomed it for me.

<comment><USER40> You can use search (which is what I use to launch apps even on the desktop) and switch apps from a keyboard on the iPad. Could you not do it at the time you tried? Even my iPhone can do most of what I need—if only it had mouse support for Remote Desktop sessions my 7plus, at a native resolution of 1080p and with an hdmi adapter, would make a decent workstation (supported by remote Linux boxes, of course). They crippled keyboard support on it so I can't switch apps like an iPad can, but even so Search is a semi-serviceable app switcher.

</comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim I remember reading this back in the day and eventually winding up using a wm called ion3 instead of ratpoison. There wasn't much that set it apart from the other tiling wms and I forget why I liked it the best.

Apparently the dev had a bad experience with open source and refused to continue working on it or something like that. I don't think it's around anymore.

<comment><USER41> Iirc ion3 was one of few tiling WMs at the time, that handled multi window applications, such as GIMP in a usable way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Full size split screen in MacOS is where I spend my time doing dev work. Visual Studio Code with the terminal extension and Chrome (I only wish I could do something like the author shows to get iTerm2 in there). I find this keeps me focused and productive without things getting in the way or unnecessary windows causing a distraction.

</comment><comment><USER43> I ran an all-macho desktop with twm for a while. I rapidly went back to full- service KDE 3.

<comment><USER29> Why?

<comment><USER43> 'Cos it got to be a nuisance, and once I added another 512MB to the box full- service KDE 3.0 (this was 2002) wasn't an eternity of thrashing :-)

What I ask of a desktop is not to annoy me while I'm doing stuff. Presently very happy with Xfce and desperately hoping they don't fall prey to the awful concept of "desktop innovation".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I remember being at my most productive on a similar setup - ratpoison on a SparcStation 5. No distractions, no notifications and paging the web browser back in took about a minute, so no quickly checking Slashdot.

</comment><comment><USER45> Basically, he's using only full screen apps... hence the "window" manager is more of a "focus" manager. It's the perfect setup.

</comment><comment><USER46> ah the desktop/wm wars. sometime ago (> 15 years) i got fvmw working just so, and haven't looked back. though i have tried almost everything under the sun, including (but not limited to) afterstep, window-maker, litestep, cde, kde, gnome etc. etc.

i just keep coming back to fvwm again and again. the hobbit within me would say "there and back again" ;)

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, X is headed for the shitpile of history and fvwm has no Wayland equivalent.

<comment><USER46> this conversation in fvwm forum in 2k13 seems relevant: [http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010](http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010)

seems like even with wayland, X will not be ripped out, and window-managers can run alongsides (ref: [https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4))

<comment><USER16> This info is old. Right now the goal is to deprecate X and move everybody to Wayland, except for legacy Motif apps and the like which can't be migrated. The major modern toolkits -- GTK and Qt -- will remove X11 support some time in the future.

<comment><USER46> hmm, have you looked at this: [https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html) , where they talk about running _any_ Xclient on wayland ?

<comment><USER16> XWayland is only a stopgap/transition tool. Maintainers want to maintain as few code paths as possible; ideally one per platform. For toolkits that will be Wayland, not X11, once Wayland reaches critical mass.

X11 is deprecated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I use dwm for window manager, st(simple terminal) as terminal. They are more light weight than gnome-terminal and ratpoison.

</comment><comment><USER48> > there is an element of obscurity to the system that can protect from a > friend who wants to play a practical joke when I walk away. I keep xlock on > "^O x", but even if I step away from the keyboard without locking it, > someone stepping in tends to be confused by a screen that shows no "close" > buttons and a keyboard set to Dvorak.

Kinda reminds me of [https://xkcd.com/1806/](https://xkcd.com/1806/)

<comment><USER19> Yeah. Mildly funny story: a friend of mine and I installed dwm on our Linux users on the computers at university. Nobody else had a clue how to access them. We would constantly edit each others' PATH and bashrc in various prankish ways, which culminated in him accidentally locking himself entirely out of his own profile in an attempt to stop me from accessing it. Every command he tried, everything he tried to do, just got the rather succinct message 'Fuck off'. He had fun explaining that one to the sysadmins.

One of the nice things about Linux is that you can do this. Download and compile dwm, put it in $HOME/bin, edit ~/.xinitrc to run it, and Bob's your uncle.

Oh and the university also had xauth open on every computer, which meant that you could ssh into any other machine in the room and simply run 'DISPLAY=:0 firefox lemonparty.com' whenever someone turned their head away from their computer for a second. I wonder if they've ever fixed that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> awesome + tmux, spacemacs, and ff with vimperator. I can go hours without touching the mouse.

<comment><USER50> s/awesome\\(.*\\)perator/xmonad\1fx/ for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> "Copyright notice: All reader-contributed material on freshmeat.net is the property and responsibility of its author; for reprint rights, please contact the author directly."

Why would anyone care to print this out on the top of the page, right after the first sentence, destroying the text formatting?

</comment><comment><USER52> A lot of dev folks should (in theory) be able to get away with just having a browser on one side of the screen and a CLI terminal with tmux on the other. Both windows with tabs, and fixed in position.

What kind of setup should be used for this? I know I can do this with split screens on the Mac. But is there a minimal Linux setup which provides this kind of experience?

<comment><USER53> I work almost exclusively with this setup: Dual split screens, shell on left, browser on right.

The reason I comment is to share what took me too long to realize. If you want to resize the two full screen apps, the experience is much smoother if your browser is in focus first. Click browser, then drag to resize.

Something to do with the terminal trying to keep to character-width bounds, I think.

<comment><USER52> Are you using mac or Linux? If Linux, what window manager?

<comment><USER54> Cinnamon is a nice desktop environment. I figure if you like Mac window management, why not try Cinnamon? You get keyboard shortcuts for pushing windows around.

<comment><USER53> Someday I'll be back on Linux. Inertia keeps me where I am right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm drawn to this kind of setup, but I'm aware that there is an element of techno-machoism to it. It can seem more aspirational than useful.

<comment><USER8> If you want to avoid the techno-machoism (did you mean machoism or masochism? I thought you meant the latter, but realised it works either way though with different implications), find a tiling window manager that supports making windows floating, as that's really the one thing that is sometimes painful with some of them - if you e.g. start an application that opens tons of small windows (gimp used to be one of the great test cases for this - though now you can run gimp with few windows if you want).

But for me I picked a setup liked this because I was simulating it with a regular WM anyway by running almost everything maximised because that's how I liked it. I was happy to squint at tiny text when I was younger, and I used to care more about having a desktop that looked cool, and spent endless time on themes etc., but I got tired of it, and now I want functional. I still care that it looks good, but with less window-chrome there's less effort involved: I have a background image that's part visible behind my terminals; I have a theme I like for Chrome etc., and that's about it.

If you meant machoism: This kind of set up is far less flashy and in your face. If you mean masochism: For me at least this setup has removed friction and lowered the effort of managing windows, not increased it. I'm not using this setup to make this unnecessarily austere and minimal, but to remove stuff that got in my way.

I can understand the feeling though: It _used_ to be painful to run these kind of setups. When the article was written there was definitively more applications that worked poorly with that generation of tiling window managers etc.

<comment><USER52> I meant macho - as in a hairy-chested man hunting for animals with a simple spear (shell, tmux). Versus getting a microwave meal from the supermarket and slobbing out on the sofa (GUI). Such things are on my mind after I posted a couple of things about what approach was best:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890342)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13919186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13919186)

I'm starting to believe more in 'no pain, no gain'

<comment><USER8> See, the thing is I don't see the shell/tmux/screen/tiling window manager as the tough option. It's not depriving you of anything any more. There's no pain.

If I wanted pain, I'd use a desktop environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> why not directfb?</comment>


Julian Assange confirms Cambridge Analytica sought WikiLeaks' help - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/26/julian-assange-confirms-cambridge-analytica-sought-wikileaks-help <comment><USER2> Watch the Republicans claim Wikileaks is anti-republican, the democrats claim they're anti-Democrat...

Yet when the entire primary source is published the only bias is between your own ears.

Corruption on all sides is rife. You should be worried about that.

<comment><USER3> I think this idea is a serious, highly consequential error (when broadly accepted). It's the corrupt and criminal who say, 'everybody does it'.[0] If you study the professional practice of propaganda, you'll find that they use this argument too - it covers for them and attempts to paralyze their targets (which is commonly the true aim of propaganda - confusion and paralysis). There are very important, consequential differences between people and between organizations; some should be trusted, some supported, ignored, opposed, shunned, and some should be jailed. It's all the difference between a just, functional, prosperous and free society on one hand, and on the other hand a corrupt one where such things are despairingly accepted as inevitable. We can do and have done much better than that.

[0] To avoid any doubt: The parent commenter is not a criminal; the ideas are the same.

<comment><USER2> The point is not whether criminals are democrat or republican, the point is to weed them out either way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand that Julian Assange HATES HRC but I think 99% of other people don't understand the feud between the two.

How is this not a Cyber Watergate IF this is true?

<comment><USER5> Hillary (allegedly) said of Julian: "Can't we just drone this guy?".

Can you blame the guy for being a little sore about it? I might hold a grudge, too.

<comment><USER6> 'Drone this guy' in an embassy in the middle of London?

<comment><USER5> I wasn't there, so I don't know what happened, but the allegation is that Hillary said this in November 2010, when he was a free man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a trailer to a new documentary on this: [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/trumpingdemocracy](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/trumpingdemocracy)</comment>


On September 27th, 60+ techies will ride from Paris to London  - <AUTHOR> https://techbikers.com/

<comment><USER2> And just to let you know, that if you support the cause of increasing child literacy and gender equality in education then your donations are incredibly welcome.

One way to do so would be to go to this page: [https://believe.in/techbikers](https://believe.in/techbikers)

And perhaps surprise some cyclist by supporting him/her. Maybe some of the ones who haven't raised much yet... they're at the bottom of the page.

Believe.in are not taking any processing fees. And Stripe have waived their fees too.

So 100% of anything that anyone donates (from HN or elsewhere) is going to go to the charity Room to Read and make a real difference.

You might even notice a few names you recognise on that list, as some of the riders (inc myself) are active on HN.

We'd love your support. I won't kid anyone, it's not an impossible and massive thing, a cycle ride... but the cause is a really great one, and that's what matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> At the same time there is also Paris2Nice. In the two years it has been running they have raised over €750,000 for local Irish charities. The organisation team is led by a few serial entrepreneurs here, Paddy Holahan (New Bay) and Tom Kennedy (Hostel World).

[http://www.paris2nice.com/](http://www.paris2nice.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope they'll be using CycleStreets (from OpenStreetMap data):

[http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/38089596/](http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/38089596/)

</comment><comment><USER5> As a motorcyclist, I was hoping I had just stumbled on a community of geeky motorcycle riders.

<comment> __--__ I've found geeky motorcycle communities, but most of them are focused around electric motorcycles and most of them aren't software guys, they're hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good luck and enjoy, it's not quite as cheerfully warm as it was during the TdF but I'm sure cycling through France will be just as lovely anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well done, guys - you're all heroes! :)

</comment><comment><USER8> going to an island 26km across the sea by bike, that's an interesting proposition :)

good luck

</comment><comment> __--__ I got all excited until I realized they were talking about bicycles, not motorcycles.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER10> But they could ride buses and write something good? Like web sites/apps for charity or something. I don't understand why they would use bikes.

<comment><USER11> You think they'd get $75,000 in sponsorship to sit on a bus for a few hours?</comment></comment>


Electronics That Fight Infection and Dissolve Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/09/27.aspx <comment><USER2> Funny, my initial assumption before reading the article was that it was going to be something nano-scale.

Also, the article is focussing solely on the "this stuff dissolves in water and is bio-compatible" part of the equation, pretty much ignoring the "fight infection" part.

So I'm guessing that this is just a proof-of-concept of the "electronics that dissolve in the human body without killing you" part of a complete solution (which is very cool, don't get me wrong...). If so, is the fighting infection part a solved or trivial problem? I'm trying to figure out how a chip inserted into a single point in a body fights infection.

<comment><USER3> The article is based on a paper behind paywall at the Science website[0], whose abstract states that their proof of concept application is " _an implantable transient device that acts as a programmable nonantibiotic bacteriocide_ ".

So the problem is solved, but you'll have to pay to get the details. Here's the abstract:

> _A Physically Transient Form of Silicon Electronics_

> Suk-Won Hwang, Hu Tao, Dae-Hyeong Kim, Huanyu Cheng, Jun-Kyul Song, Elliott > Rill1, Mark A. Brenckle, Bruce Panilaitis, Sang Min Won, Yun-Soung Kim, > Young Min Song, Ki Jun Yu, Abid Ameen, Rui Li, Yewang Su, Miaomiao Yang, > David L. Kaplan, Mitchell R. Zakin, Marvin J. Slepian, Yonggang Huang, > Fiorenzo G. Omenetto, John A. Rogers

> _A remarkable feature of modern silicon electronics is its ability to remain > physically invariant, almost indefinitely for practical purposes. Although > this characteristic is a hallmark of applications of integrated circuits > that exist today, there might be opportunities for systems that offer the > opposite behavior, such as implantable devices that function for medically > useful time frames but then completely disappear via resorption by the body. > We report a set of materials, manufacturing schemes, device components, and > theoretical design tools for a silicon-based complementary metal oxide > semiconductor (CMOS) technology that has this type of transient behavior, > together with integrated sensors, actuators, power supply systems, and > wireless control strategies. An implantable transient device that acts as a > programmable nonantibiotic bacteriocide provides a system-level example._

\--

0\. <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1640.abstract></comment></comment>


Lost Languages Discovered in One of the Oldest Continuously Run Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-lost-languages-found-manuscripts-egyptian-monastery-180964698/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Hmm. There are people alive today who claim to speak Caucasian Albanian (they number in the 100s and are called Udi). Also random fact: out of this nano- ethnicity, one became a tech executive in the US and is a cofounder of Evernote.

It would be interesting to compare modern Udi with the discovered Caucasian Albanian text to see if there is any resemblance.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udi_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udi_language)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we crowdfund a militia to protect and secure archives for digitizing in conflict zones? We are losing too much priceless history to fools over ego.

<comment><USER4> This comment is a gem of colonialist thought.

Those "conflict zones" are also generally the sovereign territory of the people who live there, who are generally one half of the "fools" you mentioned (their neighbors being generally the other half).

The "ego" they have is generally a desire to keep their sovereign territory-- their homelands, which are frequently the same places in which their ancestors produced the "archives" you want to "protect and secure."

Those people have a right to decide what to do about the destruction of their cultural artifacts, because they are people and have agency. They can fight, they can ask for help from their allies, they can do any number of things.

If they don't prioritize the preservation of their culture, that's unfortunate, but it's also their business. If they decide to destroy artifacts of their culture rather than let them fall into invaders' hands (sound familiar?), that's tragic, but it's still their business.

Your suspicion of value in their cultural output does not entitle you to _pay armed men_ to swoop in and take their "priceless history," no matter how noble you think your intentions are.

<comment><USER5> This comment is a gem of nationalist thought.

When the Bamiyan buddhas were dynamited, exactly whose culture were the Taliban "preserving"?

It is entirely reasonable to believe that culture and history have an importance independent of petty, local squabbles. Crowd funding militia may well be questionable but to demean the sentiment as colonialist is pointlessly insulting.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you understand what nationalism is. I admit that my reply could be read as a tacit endorsement of tribalism, but there's nothing nationalist about it.

You should not presuppose that conflicts are "petty, local squabbles." Minimizing language like that reinforces the mindset that the mighty are justified in interfering in the sovereign destiny of a people.

Anyway, my reply was thoughtful, not pointlessly insulting. If you'd like to engage on this beyond the invocation of the Taliban bogeyman, I'm happy to. But if you're just gonna presume that I'm equating the exercise of sovereign rights with wholesale destruction, I'm not interested.

<comment><USER6> Whose conception of sovereign rights.

Sovereignty is the historic acquisition of power through violence in all cases that spring to mind (W. European bias).

How far back do you go. Does Russia now have sovereignty over Crimean history?

<comment><USER7> FYI, Crimea has been a part of Russia for over 200 years, except for the post Soviet Union period, which in and of itself was the result of a symbolic transfer of Crimea to the Ukranian SSR in 1954, marking the 300th year of the Ukraine under Russian rule. A move, which was supposed to have no strategic consequence, until the Soviet Union broke up and twenty years later NATO attempted to bring the Ukraine into their fold.

Of course Russia could not allow their warm water port to fall under NATO jurisdiction

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it only me who thought this was going to be about a programming language!

I visited St.Catherine's before, you can get there pretty easy from Sharm el- Sheikh in the Sinai on your way to climb mount Sinai. you can go there for sunrise, it involves an early rise and a bit of a hike but it's beautiful at sunrise. St. Catherine's is also host to what is considered the burning bush. bu[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_bush#Location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_bush#Location)

<comment><USER9> Someday in a Vernor Vinge-ish future, software archeologists could discover a dead programming language that is being used at the core of their ancient starship's libraries.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious what we would even use to run a true starship that needs to be 100% reliable for decades. Maybe Rust will be a good candidate some day? I think it needs to have that speed & safety, but be much higher level.

<comment><USER11> I doubt the language picked will have significant impact; reliability will mostly depend on the extensiveness/correctness of simulations. And presumably with sufficient coverage (and at the scale, we require it) memory bugs will be the least of our safety worries

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is a longer, more detailed article on this work at [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/sinai- pe...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/sinai-peninsula- hidden-texts/536313/).

The articles are similar enough they must originate from the same press release, but the Atlantic's take adds more.

</comment><comment><USER13> uncovering lost texts: michael phelps' secret to gold medals</comment>


New York Fed to conduct purchases across a range of maturities - <AUTHOR> https://www.forexlive.com/centralbank/!/new-york-fed-to-conduct-purchases-across-a-range-of-maturities-20200312 <comment><USER2> "Someone on CNBC noted that municipal bonds are being sold. That isn't mom & pop investors adjusting their portfolios: It's someone who needs liquidity."

People on investing forums often say that total bond and intermediate muni bonds are "the same, because the durations are the same", but the risk profiles are definitely different and that is not often discussed. Here's an example of why. I'd be curious if anyone here knows what's going on with munis.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really know much about the financial market in the US and after all the stuff that has been going down, I am really enjoying the education I am getting from so many sources on what exactly the market can do and how people are continuously trying to beat it (some winning) even as it heads to the ground. Having a 401k but not really knowing much about it, I really think I need to do some more research into all of this before I continue down that path.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1.5T is a big number, there must be significant liquidity issues</comment>


Java Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002285.html

<comment><USER2> That's Java in web browsers, not Java in general.

(I saw the headline and was ready to read some god-awful rant about the horrors of Java, and was delightfully surprised to discover it's a warning about the dangers of having Java running in a browser.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow this is the most uninformed FUD I've seen all week - author picks one Rhino browser security vulnerability and extrapolates to "Java Considered Harmful". Might as well say "All Software On The Internet Considered Harmful".</comment>


Looking for a Technical Cofounder - <AUTHOR> Looking for a technical cofounder for a reservation based site geared at overlanders. UX research completed. Working on wireframes and user flow.
Email me at: email@example.com if interested.
Thanks <comment><USER2> You'll get better responses if you state your background and your role in this new venture.</comment>


RockYou.com database breached, 32 million unencrypted passwords obtained - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockyou.com/help/securityMessage.php

<comment><USER2>
      Our users' privacy and data security have always been
      a priority for RockYou and we strive to keep them secure

No you don't

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is hacker's blog (hosted at PirateBay's blogging platform):

<http://igigi.baywords.com/>

He seems to be on a crusade against bad security practices - RockYou was just one out of many sites he hacked (other sites are mostly Czech and Slovak).

Here in Slovakia, it's almost weekly media event when he hacks yet another popular local site (mobile phone operator, insurance company, no.1 portal, etc).

He also likes to call bullshit on companies PR nonsense released in aftermath.

<comment><USER4> So long as he isn't taking advantage of the data, I might even applaud this sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know this is old, but in this day and age, it's surprising how many companies store plaintext passwords.

Pandora Radio, for instance.

<comment><USER6> Every time I create an account on some new website, I find myself wishing for some kind of law enforcing disclosure of whether or not my password will be stored in plaintext or encrypted.

<comment><USER7> I got super paranoid about that, so I created a system for creating quasi- random passwords for different sites, but based on the same rule:

salt+[reversed first four letters of site name]+[number of digits in site name] _not the actual rule I used, but you get the idea_

That was okay, but kind of annoying. Plus, I figured that the rule wouldn't be overly difficult to break, and then I'd be just as screwed as if I used the same PW for all sites.

Now I use 1Password to generate and store all of my passwords. I use dropbox to sync it across all my computers, and if I log in to dropbox, I can access a web interface. There's also an iPhone app, so it's not _completely_ annoying never knowing any of my passwords, and I don't have to worry about one site storing my PW plain text and being exploited. [Now I just need to worry about my dropbox account getting hacked... here's hoping they don't store in plain text ;)]

 _I don't have anything to do with 1Password, and there are a lot of other apps out there that do the same thing._

<comment><USER8> Wow, this is great! Worth paying for even though KeePassX is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The breach definitely sounds illegal, but why the hell were they storing unencrypted passwords in the first place?

When I first learned about databases, that is the very first thing I learned never to do.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, its not that simple of a problem. At the time, Facebook Connect didn't exist, Twitter didn't use OAuth, and I don't know what MySpace was doing. So if you wanted to give a 3rd party app access to your account, they had to store your password. Sure, they should have used some kind of 2 way cipher on it, but how much safer than plain text is that anyway?

Of course, once Facebook et all started using OAuth-like protocols they should have dropped the passwords. There's a lot of shame here for sure, but its not quite as amateur of a mistake as it sounds on first blush.

<comment><USER11> The post explains that no passwords to outside services were implicated in the breach. So this is just as amateur a mistake as it sounds - storing their own passwords in plaintext for no reason at all.

<comment><USER10> Not true. This press release may say that, but earlier accounts disagree:

"This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites."

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/rockyou-hack- security-m...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/rockyou-hack-security- myspace-facebook-passwords/)

Also, consider RockYou's initial statement, in which they would only say that no Facebook accounts were compromised:

"RockYou confirms that no application accounts on Facebook were impacted by this hack and that most of the accounts affected were for earlier applications (including slideshow, glitter text, fun notes) that are no longer formally supported by the company."

But you're right about them storing the internal passwords in clear text, which I did not know. That is absurdly dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _We are sorry for the inconvenience this illegal intrusion onto the RockYou system has caused our users. We will continue to advise our users of any information that would help them._

To me, this is a textbook case of a non-apology apology. Allowing (unencrypted!) passwords to be stolen isn't inconvenient to users, it's a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER13> It's less of a pain in the ass if you don't use the same password on multiple sites.

<comment><USER12> I completely agree with you, but the reality is that it unfortunately happens a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _one or more individuals illegally breached one of our databases_

I love the fact that they mention multiple times that it was an illegal breach as if that diminishes their culpability.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love how they follow "Our users' privacy and data security have always been a priority for RockYou and we strive to keep them secure." with a missive about how they don't follow the same security standards that every web app has used for 10 years. Their legacy system is presumably not older than their company, which has not been around since before even hobbyist web developers like myself learned not to store passwords in plain text.

Next we're going to find out that their system accepts the username "Delete from users WHERE"...

</comment><comment><USER16> I know this is beating a dead horse, but encrypting your user's passwords is one of the most important things you should be doing. Failing to do so shows a complete lack of respect for your users, and demonstrates that your site/service is probably not worth using.

There should be a list of companies/sites that don't encrypt passwords, so we know what services to avoid. That way, next time you use the Forgot Your Password feature and they email you your plaintext password, you can add them to the list to warn others.

<comment><USER17> Encrypted or not, the fact that a company is able to send you your original password shows that they are not playing with a full deck.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I suppose I should clarify. Instead of storing the plaintext or encrypted version of the password, they should store a hash of the password. Since, if/when the database gets compromised, it's even more difficult for the attacker to retrieve the passwords.

If the passwords are just encrypted, once the attacker figures out the algorithm, then all of the passwords will be compromised. A hash, on the other hand, would require each account password to be broken individually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From: sshconnection Date: Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 4:59 PM Subject: Engineering Lead for Social Applications To: firstname.lastname@example.com

Hi, I'm interested in your opening for Engineering Lead for Social Applications.

I made a PHP page as a high school project that let me log in and create blog posts. I required an admin account to log into the blog to write articles. My user table (I used MySQL as a database backend), had four columns: id, email, username, password. It sounds very simple, but please let me tell you some of the special technology I used for the password.

If someone used a password of "password", I would do something like this:

$plaintext = "password";

Then, I would use a function called sha1 to get a a new value of the password like this: $salt = sha1(md5($plaintext));

Then, I would get the final value to store as the password like so: $password = $md5($salt.$plaintext);

This way, the password is hidden behind what people call a hashing algorithm. That keeps people from figuring out the original password, even if they somehow got on my computer!

I know I have no professional programming experience, but I think that I could be a very valuable member of your team. If you're interested, please let me know!

-Scott

</comment><comment><USER19> isn't this like a month or two old?

<comment><USER20> 21 days-ish: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997488> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995634>

I really wish they would implement a feature that lists similar topics when you are about to submit a new one.

<comment><USER21> I'd like to see tags here.

<comment><USER22> I like the Stack Overflow system. The "Ask Question" form submit a search when you're finished typing out your question. It's helped me find answers to questions before asking them that didn't appear at the top of Google's Search Results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if this would be considered a "movie plot threat".

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=815264>

</comment><comment><USER24> _I am sorry we lost 32 million passwords, we will encrypt them so next time we lose them its not so bad_ \- RockYou

</comment><comment><USER25> You can hope that they encrypt your password; but never trust that they do. Use your own password database.

</comment><comment><USER26> Stay classy RockYou.

</comment><comment><USER27> /hugs 1Password</comment>


Show HN: ES2015 method polymorphism - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dosaygo/open-0/blob/master/decorators-and-type-checking-js/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> Made private because I chose to not show it now.</comment>


The whiteboard, reimagined for collaboration in the cloud – G Suite Jamboard - <AUTHOR> https://gsuite.google.com/products/jamboard/ <comment><USER2> 1\. I am a white board addict and almost cannot explain things without it.

2\. We have a small team that works in two locations primarily.

I've been imagining this for so long, I can't believe someone finally made.

The big question: does it work? Has anyone tried it?</comment>


Simone Giertz is okay (tumor was noncancerous) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SimoneGiertz/status/1005200679055454208 <comment><USER2> Must be a great feeling to have Chris Hadfield, himself, tell you he's happy to hear the good news.

Hell, I feel humbled by proxy just because I saw his tweet!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news!</comment>


Cat purr generator - <AUTHOR> http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/catPurrNoiseGenerator.php <comment><USER2> Dev here. So surprised to hear my cat purring a lot this morning, and then realised it was featured on HN today! :) To celebrate this, the Cat Purr IAP on myNoise's iOS App has been set to Tier 0, so you can all enjoy the same sound on your iOS device for free as well! ([https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/mynoise/id813099896?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/mynoise/id813099896?mt=8))

<comment><USER3> Hi there! Just wanted to say this would be amazing if you added in-time vibration.

<comment><USER4> Seconded

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I opened this tab and forgot about it.

Didn't realize it was a car purring, began doing smartctl tests on my hard disk.

Lol.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using this website for a while, even donated some money. There are endless possibilities of sound combinations, you should have a look at the other generators on the site: [http://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php](http://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php)

I enjoy "Spring Walk": [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/springWalkSoundscapeGenerat...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/springWalkSoundscapeGenerator.php) and "Jungle Life": [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/jungleNoiseGenerator.php](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/jungleNoiseGenerator.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great! I was hoping to get a reaction from my cats, but they were pretty indifferent, giving me a look that said "So what? I'm still hungry."

I am addicted to having the sound of a fan when I sleep. I can trace that back to the college dorm days where we would use this really old box fan at night to generate noise to drown out whatever else was going on in the halls. And by old, I mean it was made when it was still okay to make a fan with a grill you could reach your hand through.

That fan having long since disappeared, I now rely on a mobile app to meet that need.

<comment><USER2> Small : [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/fanNoiseGenerator.php](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/fanNoiseGenerator.php)

Big : [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/dataCenterNoiseGenerator.ph...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/dataCenterNoiseGenerator.php)

;-)

<comment><USER8> Data center noise??? Argh. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can hear the hum.

My worst nightmare would be not being able to turn this sound off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love this. Even though it doesn't sound 100% real, it's still just such a relaxing sound, it may well become be go to work music.

<comment><USER2> I agree with you, it doesn't sound as real as I wished it to be. Cat Purr was a request of many early myNoise users. At beginning, I kept explaining all the reasons why the myNoise sound player was not designed for playing a cat purr (it was initially designed to play random-phase and flat spectrum noises such as white noise and rain) and why I wouldn't implement a cat purr. Then, I gave up and programmed it, just to stop people asking :D It is not the myNoise sound I am the most proud of, but it seems that people like it (or the concept).

<comment><USER10> Which one are you the most proud of?

<comment><USER2> To serve as a noise blocking white noise machine (that is the main use of the site) but only with natural sounds, this one is my favourite (try with the Animate feature) : [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/windSeaRainNoiseGenerator.p...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/windSeaRainNoiseGenerator.php)

In general, all the latest ones have my preference, as I am perfecting my skills, day by day. I am quite happy with the last one added two weeks ago: [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/circularBreathSoundscapeGen...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/circularBreathSoundscapeGenerator.php)

Check this one if you like sung voices: [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/himalayanVoicesSongGenerato...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/himalayanVoicesSongGenerator.php)

<comment><USER11> our office has been listening to jungle life and absolute rain all week at work. we love your site. if/when an android app comes out i'll definitely buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A perfect complement for coffitivity[1], the cafe noise generator. Now I can get to work.

[1] [https://coffitivity.com/](https://coffitivity.com/)

<comment><USER13> I also like [http://www.rainymood.com/](http://www.rainymood.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are many excellent generators on that page, but Anamnesis is my favourite - a noir, sci-fi world awaits: [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/anamnesisSoundscapeGenerato...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/anamnesisSoundscapeGenerator.php)

<comment><USER15> Blade Runner-ish. I like it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty cute. But you're missing a golden opportunity to call it "Purrlin Noise".

</comment><comment><USER17> We don't need noise cancelling headphones. We need cat purr generating headphones!

</comment><comment><USER4> My cat noticed this. Normally, she is around, or sitting close. She investigated the Mac, gave me the "da fuck?" look and curled right up near the machine and joined in the purring.

I used this for a while today. Nice. I was relaxed.

</comment><comment><USER18> My laptop is even vibrating to the touch from the sound.

I'm typing on a cat!

</comment><comment><USER19> Even though I know this isn't a real kitty purring in my ear, I can sense myself feeling relaxed and soothed by this as if it were a drug. I've heard that petting a cat or dog lowers a person's blood pressure. I bet hearing cat purrs does, too. I recently read the book Influence which describes a myriad of ways people and animals have automatic responses to various stimuli; I wonder if this is that kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> While it's certainly no replacement for a purring cat pressing down upon your lap, the "sleeping" preset is SPOT-ON. Great work :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I like these kinds of concepts; simple and can really improve productivity when being played in the background. There is another app for coffee shops: [https://coffitivity.com/](https://coffitivity.com/)

Although you can't modulate SFX, its still nice to run in the background.

</comment><comment><USER22> You can choose from a lot of other sounds on the website as well just take a look around. I really like the "Healing Water" one. Another site which was featured lately: [http://rain.today/](http://rain.today/)?

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a better generator at home :

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_bsCxOzsxqxOVhyWVdtUU4zUWM...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_bsCxOzsxqxOVhyWVdtUU4zUWM/view)

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know, this sound makes me very very angry.

</comment><comment><USER25> My cat immediately reacted! Must be pretty good...

</comment><comment><USER26> Suprisingly soothing :)

</comment><comment><USER27> Found this very unsettling for some reason.</comment>


ELF kickers -- tools and sample code for hacking ELF files in Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/elfkickers.html

<comment><USER2> heh, those helped me learn ELF and linux assembly almost a decade ago.

more tools are here <http://asm.sourceforge.net/></comment>


Is SEO actually detrimental to the web? - <AUTHOR>

SEO is driving site and web structure and limiting how some aspects of what is on the web actually evolves.  URL's are now sentences.  In an effort to satisfy the SEO (mostly Google) gods everything is looking the same.
Is this good in the long run?
Your thoughts? <comment><USER2> This is a really old conversation and it has steadily become less and less relevant over the past 5 years. The most effective SEO practices these days involve off-page and off site linking and on-page optimization is gets slightly less and less effective every year. Tricks like keyword stuffing URLs, title attributing everything, and no-follow sculpting, which used to actually make a difference at one point in time, essentially make no difference these days. For most SEO aware web developers these days, SEO is more and more about accessibility and usability, as it should be.

The most effective tricks these days mostly involve passing as much link juice to the site as possible, and matching it to good content that is based on sound keyword research and user demand. In order to do this in such a way that actually makes a significant difference in ranking without being penalized is usually beyond the the average developer "dabbling" in SEO. The blackhat term for this is "link laundering" and it's really the only way to get the huge traffic gains in a reliable and sustained manner. Most SEO companies fit into one of the 3 following types:

1\. Basic SEO is getting easier to execute with all the hand-holding that Google gives out to webmasters these days, however the benefits are minimal. Most of that realm is about making sure you're not screwing up your content, rather than optimizing it. The kinds of gains you get by doing this are maybe a 30% increase in traffic, assuming you site is not screwed up to begin with.

2\. On the other hand, using link laundering/pyramids even less talented SEOs can see somewhere in the area of a 400% increase in traffic without much risk of a penalty. This is a lot trickier though because imitating a strong, natural, niche link graph is a lot harder than most people think.

3\. The last strategy is commonly referred to as "turn and burn". This basically involves taking whatever content you have and link spamming the hell out of it which will cause it's traffic to spike briefly before being banned from Google's index. Ever seen all those spammy comments in you blogs that are pointing to a really crappy landing page? This is what they are doing.

Now granted I've made a lot of generalities here. Most of the time I see people discussing this topic they seem to not understand what SEO is compared to what it was 7 years ago which is why I'm taking the time here to explain this. The rules change a little when you start out with a valuable asset such as a large quantity of good content (such as any of the Q&A sites), or a set of very high quality links (anyone that's been covered by the major news outlets) because you can base your strategy on getting the most out of those assets.

Anyway, now that I've gone off on that tangent the easy answer is yes, good SEO is good for the web because it makes content more usable and accessible, and bad SEO is bad for the web because it means more spam.

<comment><USER3> I think his question was whether SEO overall, rather than the good or bad part of it, are good for the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Argument against: "search engine optimisation" is about optimising web sites for machines, not for people.

Argument for: the function of those machines is to help people, so a) optimising for the machines is indirectly beneficial to people because they're happier when the machines work better, and b) as the machines get better at understanding what's good for people, optimising for the machines becomes more directly beneficial to people because they both "want" the same thing.

The web would be better if everyone simultaneously stopped doing SEO and started thinking about people directly instead of indirectly via Google's ranking algorithms, but now that the arms race is in full effect and there are a million parasites making a living from it, the best case scenario is for Google to continue to close the gap between "good for machines" and "good for people" so that the satisfaction of the SEO gods translates as completely as possible into the satisfaction of human users.

<comment><USER5> "Thinking about people directly" misses the benefit of an objective, well- defined third-party evaluation (i.e googlebot).

If you think about "people" directly, I would imagine that those people, in your mind, all browse the web with your web browser, in your OS, with your abilities. These people all find content the same way you do.

Of course, we both know that many people do not browse the web in IE8, just as many do not browse the web in Windows at all. A great number (but perhaps a tiny percentage) don't have flash.

Having a nice objective measure of what makes a page accessible is a very useful thing for a web developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do not mind living on an Internet where blog post links last beyond the next update, URLs hint at content, StackOverflow crushes archived mailing lists on programming questions, the top result for "biology bingo" is not a blank page (it was in 2006), and content is created for demographics which are not content creators themselves. Hug a SEO, they're half the reason Google works these days (particularly at the fringes where the link graph is sparse and hence classic PageRank isn't oracular).

<comment><USER7> I agree with you overall, but we've also got eFreedom.com beating StackOverflow with duplicate content in some cases, purely through SEO. In a perfect world, it would be impossible for someone to take StackOverflow's CC data dump and then outrank them.

<comment><USER8> Do search engines actually try to "de duplicate" such content?

Are sites that duplicate content without proper attribution properly flagged?

What is the best interest of search engines? Is it the good of the people? Or is this another "tragedy of the common"?

In the later case, what is the best way to fight back?

<comment><USER2> To questions 1 and 2 the answer is yes. The only real way for most people to fight back is to report them to google: <https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1>

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, unless someone has some inside dirt on their contracts, unrepentant content-dupers like efreedom, nabble, osdir, mail-archive, etc are not able to be dealt with through that form.

I remain hopeful that Google engineers agree that situations like efreedom having a higher PR for content stolen from StackOverflow is not good for their users, but I still wish that little [X] link was still included with each search result. Until then, we'll have to be happy with these sites silently falling off SERPs, if in fact they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> White-hat SEO, or providing genuinely good content that's easy for both humans and algorithms to parse, complete site maps, etc. is unquestionably good. Gray- or black-hat SEO, which results in ad-spammed content farms reaching the top results when there are much better sources (in many cases sources which were scraped by the SEO sites without proper credit) is destroying the web. SEO agencies posting dozens of generated blogs to bury negative reviews of themselves are definitely evil.

<comment><USER3> In the end, they both play by certain rules, that is the algorithm, which rewards or penalises a certain behaviour. Nothing to say about the penalty, but the rewarding part, in both cases, simply leads to a gain not due to merit but due to technicality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Depends on what kind of SEO you mean. I've seen both ends of the spectrum -- some "SEO" is just good web practices codified, some "SEO" is just a code word for content spamming.

</comment><comment><USER12> If blackhats were not using SEO to game Search engine results and rankings, they would be using some other method to game other systems like webrings (remember those?), website directories or just good old email spam.

Silver lining: SEO rules are mandated by a Tech company like Google who can push an agenda for better web-standards.

The problem is the people that do black-hat SEO, they will always be around screwing things up for others through scamming and spamming.

</comment><comment><USER13> > URL's are now sentences.

Which is still better than [http://example.com/portal/servepage.asp?state=URHDA43FIDNWQI...](http://example.com/portal/servepage.asp?state=URHDA43FIDNWQIWD42UEFVE) (add 100+ chars) type of URLs we used to have before the SEO era.

Most SEO is nothing more than basic web concepts implemented right. People benefits from that, too.

<comment><USER14> fuck, sorry I downvoted you when I meant to upvote. Can someone _please_ implement an undo vote feature!?!? Also upvote Yaggo because he doesn't deserve to be on 0 points.

<comment><USER13> Happened to me, too, blame the 10x10 pixel icons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The long tail theory for URLs (i.e. where URLs make sense), combined with doing half of Google's job for them (i.e. making your pages index easier and in a more relevant manner) is nothing but pure gravy for the Internet. The gaming, the spam blogs, the autoposted crap of the world are scum, but it's an ongoing game of cat and mouse between google and the blackhat SEOs.

Personally I like the fact that someone can search for something rather specific and find something that's relevant, as opposed to the traditional mid-90s method of using 4 or 5 different search engines and 3 or 4 directories to hopefully find what you want.

</comment><comment><USER16> Real, SEO valuable in the long-term, is nothing more than another marketing channel. Saying SEO is bad for the web is much like saying leaflets you get in the mail are bad. As with everything marketing, there are good people/companies who get their message across without being sleazy or spammy, and then there are sleazeballs.

IMHO, Google had a few settings wrong (call them "bugs" if you want) in early 2000s which many techies capitalised on. It's no different than finding a loophole in the finance industry regulation and trying to get away with it. In the case of Google's bugs, Google eventually reacted and became much more stringent. Sadly, by then the reputation damage to SEO has been done.

As for sentences for URLs, I agree with you. There is a fine balance between saying domain.com/widgets/green and domain.com/buy-new-and-used-widgets-green . I always ask which one would you rather speak over the phone, and that gets the point across.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems like something of a zero sum game to me, since they're competing for rankings, rather than, IMO, creating much actual value. Once you've taken care of the basics that Google mentions on their site, more effort is just an "arms race" in some ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> And maybe it is this "arms race" issue that is at the core of the SEO problem. If you are a startup with SEO that just happens to intersect with that of a very large well-established organization you might as well not exist.

Maybe Google can fix this by splitting their search page into a top section of top SEO sites and a lower section for "the road less travelled".

Just thinking out loud here. I've seen neat sites with very useful and relevant content not show-up anywhere useful in a Goggle search.

Then there's the "evil" element. I'll call it inadvertent evil to be kind. If you've ever had the experience of having, for example, Google reject your site for the AdSense program with pretty-much a totalitarian approach to the issue you'll know exactly what I mean. I've had that happen and it was beyond frustrating. It took months to deal with it. No way whatsoever to engage with Google to figure out what was wrong. I've heard even worst stories from folks who had sites black listed by them.

If we, by extension, call Google a "totalitarian regime" that, without a doubt, has the power to decide what can succeed and fail on the web, I think that the issues created by such things as SEO algorithms are amplified.

I don't want to go to the "Google is evil" extreme --they are not-- but some aspects of their robotic approach to dealing with the massive tasks they undertake definitely have the potential to become auto-evil-ized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> White-hat SEO helps accessibility.

When client asks "can't we just Flashajax the hell out of it?" they won't listen to response that it won't be accessible, standards-compliant, etc. But they do listen to "No, Googlebot won't index it".

</comment><comment><USER19> It has been detrimental as soon as a suit heard about the <META> tag some time in the 90s. Then you had I dunno, a site selling lawnmowers with "ANNA KOURNIKOVA NEKKID" in its HTML and it was all downhill from there.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why doesn't HN use those sentence urls?

</comment><comment><USER21> Good SEO is about making your content as easy as possible to index, using semantically meaningful markup and keywords. Bad SEO is about using convoluted tricks to game search engines.

Good SEO is good for the Web, bad SEO is bad for the Web.</comment>


Handshake decentralized root zone launched - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615160/handshake-network-dns-live/ <comment><AUTHOR> Handshake airdropped coins to several hundred thousand open source developers on Github and Web of Trust strong set participants, predicated on the assumption those communities would be most likely to use the service to create and host new TLDs.

The airdrop is done in a novel privacy-preserving manner. Details here: [https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-airdrop](https://github.com/handshake- org/hs-airdrop)

Full developer docs here: [https://hsd-dev.org/](https://hsd-dev.org/)

<comment><USER2> Enter stage left: TLD squatting</comment></comment>


Bose is closing all of its retail stores N America, Europe, Japan, and Australia - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/15/21067715/bose-shutting-down-retail-stores-layoffs-north-america-europe-japan-australia <comment><USER2> Bose has an excellent brand name, akin to Rolls Royce in automotive(I understand there are more higher end audio companies, but they don't have general public reach of Bose).

But it does appear they are getting chipped away at by upstarts like Beats & Sonos on the low-end luxury slice.

I wonder if Bose will have to choose going the way of Leica & Zeiss and conduct more licensing deals?

I do find it odd that a company with a physical product that demands in-person experiential evaluation would remove the experience.

If I had to guess, I suspect they will follow with in-store experience kiosks with retail distribution partners, much like what is found in some key airport locations.

This does put a dent in the concept of experiential retail.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the 90s Bose speakers used to be _the_ thing for upper middle class men. They used to proudly show off their systems when you visited their houses. Is this still the case?

<comment><USER4> I don't think so...

My techie friends are buying Sonos.

Also, Sony has made some serious inroads to the noise canceling headphones lineup with the 1000XM series.

Adding to their injury, my brother in law is in the corporate av business, and they have a saying: Go Bose - no highs - no lows. (Basically, no one gets fired for buying Bose, but they are no longer the best)

<comment><USER5> There's a similar saying in the AV industry for BOSE: Buy Other Sound Equipment.

<comment><USER6> no highs no lows must be bose ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think this is about product quality or even competition. It is that retail is dying.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think some people even knew they had stores, so not sure if a big deal or not. I always thought Bose was the best though, but maybe I fell for the marketing. Then if you travel a bunch, some travel blogs recommend their headphones too. Only Bose thing I own is a the SoundLink Mini II which is a bluetooth speaker.

I know it seems people really like Beats too, which Apple bought out but never had any of those. I always though Beats were more just branding then anything, make a pair of headphones and slap Dr. Dre's name on them, so I figured more marketing driven then tech but maybe with Apple owning them that's opinion might be a bit dated then. Then I also seen people recommend JBL and Sony too, but I don't really have much of a opinion on either.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure that Apple owning a company is an endorsement of quality as much as an indication that it's a complementary product with a similar business model (high perception, high margin). I've owned one pair of Beats (wireless Studio headphones with noise cancelling), and a small handful of Bose products. I prefer Bose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bose is getting screwed by the competition and they know it. On the speaker side you've got Sonos and the smart speakers, plus tons of low cost home theatre systems that sound plenty good (heard a Visio system recently, sounded fantastic).

Then on the headphone front, everyone is going with first party systems like AirPods. And it's only a matter of time before Apple brings out over ear headphones. I've been a loyal QC customer for over 10 years, but the second Apple brings out its competitor I'll probably switch (and Bose knows it).

<comment><USER11> I worry a bit about the audio space. I think there's a lot of good competition out there but see it as becoming increasingly siloed due to network effects of connectivity standards. Maybe this has changed but it kept me from purchasing some Sonos equipment a few years ago and Apple seems hellbent on pulling everyone into it's system to lock them in (I say this as someone who owns Apple products).

I think the backlash against Bose is a bit undeserved. There's plenty of good products by other companies now, but Bose still makes some really great sounding equipment. A lot of the criticism of their products I think is a kind of contrarism due to the hype that existed at one time. I have one pair of speakers of theirs that every so often I become convinced I could find something better by now, but when I actually listen to the alternatives, they sound nowhere near as good (including Sonos and other, audiophile type brands).

It seems there's always these cycles of one or more brands being the hipster equipment to buy, some audiophile non-conformist backlash, and then the reintroduction of a new cycle.

That being said, it's hard for me to imagine any brand having standalone audio only stores, except maybe a couple of locations or something. People either buy blind online (which leads to really distorted statements about relative quality on the internet imho) or go somewhere to compare multiple brands' products in person.</comment></comment>


Iphone likely losing in DOD smartphone bid  - <AUTHOR> http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/06/14/iphone-likely-loser-for-dod-biz/

<comment><USER2> _The basic problem with iPhones, according to a Boeing source, is that Apple's produt uses proprietary software. Each app would carry a $200 charge, the Boeing official said, posing what could be a significant costs to the services._

Umm... someone care to explain this? Is that because the DoD is going to hand out a $40m contract to build iPhone apps?

<comment><USER3> Maybe they're referring to ad-hoc distribution, where you can only assign 100 devices to each developer account. They're testing on 200 iPhones and Androids, possibly more than 100 of which are iPhones, so they would need two developer accounts at $99 / year each.

But, the developer fee covers as many applications on those devices as you want, so the $200 / app figure is still unexplained.</comment></comment>


Tesla chrashes on highway in Netherlands - <AUTHOR> http://teslaclubsweden.se/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5024 <comment><USER2>
      > As I turn on the A2 I decide to drive at
      > the speed limits, without the autopilot.

...

      > The police told me that the driver of the
      > truck had gotten annoyed with a car driving
      > too slow in front of him, and started to
      > overtake. He didn't see, maybe he didn't
      > look, and had turned straight into us.

...

      > What is clear is that after a violent crash
      > we stepped out of the car on our own, pretty
      > much unharmed.</comment>


Apple Acquires Burstly, which owns Testflight (iOS beta testing platform) - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/21/apple-may-acquire-testflight/

<comment><USER2> With all the problems we're having with provisioning profiles and device limits, this could either be really good news, or really bad news...

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly enough Testflight dropped support for Android yesterday!

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/20/testflight-beta- test...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/20/testflight-beta-testing-and- deployment-service-is-dropping-android-support-march-21st/)</comment>


New businesses eye the opportunities in managing genome data - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21701143-new-businesses-eye-opportunities-managing-genome-data-all-about-base?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/all_about_the_base <comment><USER2> At least on the storage side, the data is very compressible. A LZ77 variant for genomic data called GDC [1] got a compression ratio of ∼9500, reducing the incremental size from 100GB to about 10 MB.

[1]: [http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/REFRESH/index.php?page=projects&proj...](http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/REFRESH/index.php?page=projects&project=gdc&subpage=about)

<comment><USER3> GDC isn't directly relevant for most of the large-scale storage needs in genomics. There are a handful of "most important" file formats in the kind of genomics discussed by the article:

\- FASTA: a sequence or set of sequences representing an entire genome. Usually used (in human genomics) to represent the "reference genome", but very rarely individual genomes.

\- FASTQ: a set of sequences with associated probabilities at each position (representing the probability that the base at that position is correct). Used to represent the output from a sequencing experiment, where you may get 100s of millions to billions of short reads (order of 100 to 10000 bases in length) from a biological sample.

\- BAM: "binary alignment map". Stores the data from the FASTQ (sequence and quality) in a way that "aligns" it to a reference genome -- identifying where the read "came from" (more formally, mapping each base in a read to the most likely corresponding base in the reference genome)

\- VCF/gVCF: "variant call format". You can think of this as a diff between the individual sequenced and the reference genome.

In most cases in human genomics you wouldn't construct a full FASTA from the individual (something you would do through a process called assembly). Instead, you would sequence the sample (producing FASTQ), align it to a FASTA reference genome (producing BAM), and call variants (producing VCF). The VCF is _much_ smaller than the other formats, and that size differential is most of where GDC would get its performance: all in all, we're usually not that different from the reference.

The big storage problem usually ends up being storing and manipulating FASTQ and BAM files, because these are the (almost complete) original data from the sequencing run, and occasionally there's a need to keep them around:

\- you may want to run a new analysis that wasn't done and so wasn't encompassed in the original VCF \- you may want to know the underlying quality of the data that created a variant call. Sequencing is a stochastic process, subject to a variety of types of error. Even though VCF calls typically have an estimate of quality, in many cases there's no substitute for looking at the original underlying data. \- you may have a legal or contractual obligation to maintain this data. (e.g., under CLIA regulations laboratories offering clinical sequencing may be required to store the raw data underlying a clinical result for a number of years).

So, how do you store FASTQ or BAM more compactly? BAM is already compressed -- block gzipped, to be specific -- but it still stores all the information explicitly. The obvious first step is reference-based compression (e.g., CRAM: [http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/software/cram- toolkit](http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/software/cram-toolkit)), which elides sequence data that is identical to the reference genome, and actually gets rid of almost all of the storage needed to store the sequences.

Other than some easily compressible stuff, like read names, the main thing left over is the quality scores -- the sequence of numbers telling you how "high-quality" each base sequenced was. In raw form, the qscores take an equal number of bytes as the sequence reads, but once we've used reference -based compression to elide the bases, they're by far the dominant component. Unfortunately, compressing quality scores well is a difficult problem. There's been a lot of work done in this area (e.g., [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832420/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832420/)), but it's by no means a solved problem.

So if you're into data compression, coming up with a better way to compress FASTQ/BAM files is still a valuable line of work.

<comment><USER4> As someone who works on DNA sequencing software the dirty secret is qscores are excessively precise. They technically span the range 0 to 99, but due to limitations in being able to predict qscores (you can't really get closer than +- 5) the real range is more like (0 to 7)*10. Using better bit-packing it should be possible to compress much better.

<comment><USER3> Range isn't an issue (any reasonable scheme won't assign codes to scores that never occur), but you're right that qscores are both precise but not necessarily accurate. Quantization of quality scores is a common solution (it is optional in CRAM, mentioned above). There's also recent work on better methods for doing it [1,2].

The problem is that if you have to maintain BAMs for regulatory reasons, lossy q-scores may not be sufficient for compliance, because you 1) have lost part of the original data 2) may not be able to exactly reconstruct your analysis results (unless, of course, you did the analysis on the quantized scores).

Thus, it would still be interesting to see better lossless compression methods.

[1] [http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/...](http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/02/bioinformatics.btu183.full)

[2] [http://web.stanford.edu/~iochoa/publishedPublications/2015_q...](http://web.stanford.edu/~iochoa/publishedPublications/2015_qvz_paper.pdf)

<comment><USER4> The qscores do occurs, just the error bars on them are quite large in practice. It certainly would be interesting to see if the analysis can be constructed from quantized q scores.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Roamad – The Voice Service Everyone Deserves - <AUTHOR> https://www.roamad.co/

<comment><USER2> Don't care about any of the features listed on the front page. GV does those fine, and I don't find them useful, anyway.

I do care about: ringing multiple phones, being able to receive/respond to group MMS, and integrating with Hangouts. Obviously the last one is impossible.

<comment><USER2> Coincidentally, Google _just_ announced a Hangouts update that fixes my MMS issue.

So I can't see any reason GV is inadequate, and it's also created/maintained by a large company that I know won't be dead in 6 months.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. But AFAIK GV is limited to US numbers. Roamad allows you to provision numbers globally. As someone who travels a lot that's important to me. Gmail like filtering is something I care about for my phone calls.

<comment><USER2> I understand spam filtering, but I'm curious what "Gmail-like" filtering means. Meaning different voicemail messages or screening settings for different callers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, different VM messages and screening settings for different numbers or callers. I've been using it to filter calls on an overseas number that reaches me only at certain times of the day.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meteor 0.9.2: Building iOS and Android mobile apps with PhoneGap - <AUTHOR> https://www.meteor.com/blog/2014/09/15/meteor-092-iOS-Android-mobile-apps-phonegap-cordova

<comment><USER2> 1\. What about the UI elements of Android and iOS? We still have to buy something like Kendo UI to work with Phonegap on Android/iOS.

I believe it will be better strategy for Meteor team to work and integrate their server with native Android/iOS app instead of Phonegap.

2\. Also it is difficult to understand how Latency compensation will work. Does local in-memory copy of database work with Sqlite or does meteor install mini-mango on Android/iOS?

3\. The author in the blog has written that they have improved the login by redirect based oAuth login in WebView. Webviews are surly not optimized for mobile devices and gives horrible user experience. If webviews would have worked there was no need for facebook to rebuild the HTML app.

Meteor team is far from providing a unified platform which can be used for Web and Android and iOS. It is good only for web.

<comment><USER3> From what I have seen, if you write PhoneGap apps, you simply don't care about UX or performances. It does not mean that it is useless, there are cases where UX & perfs do not matter, like corporate apps that will only be used by employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The meteor app gets packaged and deployed to a mobile device. The blog references code updates from "a" server. I'm confused- are you still running a server? How does the packaged app know where to pull these updates from? Does the client share persistent data with this server?

<comment><USER5> Meteor dev here. When you bundle a Meteor app, you specify a server which will handle updates (and server logic). You can push new versions of the application to this server, and all mobile devices will automatically be notified of the update and download the new code.

So the deployment process is two-part:

1\. Bundle a mobile application with JS/HTML/CSS which talks to a server at foo.meteor.com

2\. Run a server at foo.meteor.com. Whenever you push a new version of the application to the server, the mobile devices will download the new JS/HTML/CSS and refresh to run the new code.

The server and mobile device "share persistent data" in the sense that the mobile device will eventually contain the same client code as the server.

<comment><USER4> Ah, fantastic. Are collections that the mobile device subscribes to cached on the mobile device in any way?

<comment><USER5> Latency compensation works as usual, meaning that actions are immediately carried out on a local in-memory copy of the database, and then replicated to the server. There is no offline caching at the moment, but it's on our roadmap and there are some community solutions that you could try out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since Meteor utilizes a constant connection between client and server, how does that affect battery life for mobile devices?

<comment><USER7> If it really maintains an open connection for the duration of the app, then this will bleed power like you wouldn't believe.

<comment><USER8> I'd love to see evidence of that. I did some testing of the effects of websockets vs polling for iOS and saw negligible effects.

<comment><USER9> The OS doesn't power down the antenna while there are open network connections. Did your tests wait long enough to turn off the antenna, was the test environment clean (i.e., nothing else using the network on the device, including your tests)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Building for the ios sim doesn't work for me :( Get a cordova error, I filed a bug report here [https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2593](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2593)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure Apple will be happy that devs can bypass their approval process.

<comment><USER12> I have a Meteor app in the app store (built before this official support) and had no trouble with the approval process. The ability to update over the air is quite nice. The only time you have to resubmit to apple is when you update the objective c part of the phonegap project.

<comment><USER11> I get that, but I'm not sure Apple is aware of this advance yet.

Personally, I really like it. Waiting 6 days for an update sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This update is insane! Great job Meteor team!

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty surprised they are at 0.9 now. I worked with Meteor last year in June but we soon gave up using it on a project. I wonder what has changed since then, if it's actually scalable and stable to use.

I'm also curious as to how the mobile apps will run on older Android phones.

For real time I thought about using Firebase which seemed a lot more easier and reliable than Meteor, but now that they are closer to 1.0.0 I am keen to have a look at Meteor.js again.

<comment><USER15> I too have a simple app I built as a school project back when MeteorJS was at 0.6.2.[0]

I fell out of love with it then but I'd be keen to see what's changed. This mobile mindset looks pretty sweet.

[0] [http://booktrad.es](http://booktrad.es)

<comment><USER14> We used it to build an enterprise app for the fishing industry. Real-time was the key feature. 4mb downloads on simple table view with real time edits by multiple users. At the time we were reading Discover Metoer book by Sascha Greif and trying to figure things out using Atmosphere packages. Derby.js was another consideration but since Meteor was more popular we chose it.

Anyways looking back, we used so many exotic new tech stacks to do really simple applications which cost more and didn't really give other edge. I quit using Javascript on the server side and started to pick up Python.

I don't plan on going back to Javasscript from Python but Python really lacks a real-time framework like Meteor and still Python to Javascript compiler has not really picked up momentum from what I can see.

I think if Python does not bring itself to the browser soon it could mean trouble for future relevance. The fact that we have MEAN stacks and such pisses me off. You don't need that shit to write your god damn Facebook clone, just use Python or PHP. OR the famous writing a REST api before you write your website is the even crazier one. It's not too late to abstract out a restful backend from your web app until you decide to write blackberry, android, iphone apps.</comment></comment></comment>