Shepard Tone - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone <comment><USER2> Similar in concept is the Risset rhythm (it's briefly alluded to in the article), where the tempo of the rhythm seems to constantly speed up or slow down.

The song "Fold4, Wrap5" by Autechre is a cool example. It's not hard to see how it works, but it's a delightful effect regardless. Each bar has a point at which the beat shifts to a double-time version of itself, while the tempo of the track constantly decreases so that the double-time rhythm transitions back to the original rhythm.

<comment><USER3> That song makes me really uncomfortable, like anxiety inducing. Neat! Always cool to see how different music makes different people vibe certain ways.

Here's a youtube link if anyone else is interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLvFsP1izS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLvFsP1izS4)

<comment><USER4> I can't imagine listening to that style as a regular thing, but I could easily picture that as "alien music" for a movie or atmospheric background. Not 'musical' as I would think of it, but clearly recognizable as music for very different ears or mental structures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a way to figure out how they work:

Listen to Bach's Fantasia from Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542:

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

At about 3:54 you'll hear a famous section where Bach starts "circling" around fifths. The general pattern is that the notes of the chords in the hands "rise" while the feet descend.

Listen to the bass line. It seems to descend by step for thirty notes in a row. But try singing _any_ note and singing down a scale for thirty notes in a row. You probably can't do it. And if Bach did that in the bassline the final note would be really low and flabby.

So how does the bassline seem to continue descending by step while remaining in the same general range?

The answer is a two-word phrase that is usually met by profound boredom in first-year music theory classes. But that concept is what Bach uses in the pitch domain here to achieve his aim. And its analogous to what happens in the frequency domain to produce a Shepard tone.

<comment><USER6> I'm used to hearing the terms time domain and frequency domain. But I've never heard pitch domain as a separate idea. Isn't pitch just the same as frequency?

<comment><USER7> In this context, the term is just used to tell you to think in terms of pitch _classes_ — where all notes that are separated by an integer multiple of an octave belong to the same class — and not expect actual Shepard tone trickery related to absolute pitch.

However, the relationship between absolute pitch and frequency isn't always trivial. The latter is a physical phenomenon, but the former is psycho- acoustic. When you have sounds with a normal set of overtones that align with a harmonic series, the perceived pitch matches the fundamental frequency. But that frequency doesn't actually need to be audible. By weighting the amplitudes of the partials in a certain way, you can also construct a sound that will be perceived as different pitches by different listeners, or by the same listener under different circumstances.

With sounds whose frequencies aren't all harmonic, assigning a pitch can get more complicated.

<comment><USER5> > However, the relationship between absolute pitch and frequency isn't always > trivial.

Not only is it not trivial, it is undefined. For example, "middle C" can map to different frequencies depending on your tuning system, for just one example.

Pitch is the higher level abstraction. Especially on the organ, "middle C" may get interpreted as "middle C plus a C an octave below, plus another octave below for good measure" depending on context. I assume that's what Carpenter is changing when he's putting his hand on those pads where the stops should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a great example of Shepard Tones in Dunkirk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWTQcZbLgY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWTQcZbLgY)

<comment><USER9> Can't watch the video atm, but in case it's not mentioned - Nolan says he based the structure of Dunkirk on the shepard tone. Always rising in intensity, never ending. Great film!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favourite Shepard Tone example is Stephin Merritt's 'Project Song' video for NPR [1]. It's also way more playful than most.

[https://youtu.be/OfFtEfxhMEQ](https://youtu.be/OfFtEfxhMEQ)

</comment><comment> vincent-toups I feel like we're in a moment of cultural shepard tone - there is the sense that we are barreling towards something and yet also the sense that nothing can or is changing.

</comment><comment><USER11> What I'd like to see is the opposite effect: A keyboard where every note is generated using only combinations of Cs, but with the weightings chosen so that its average pitch is the one that that key usually has. This would have the strange consequence that nothing you played would sound dissonant and any piece you played would have the same affect as any other.

It would probably be boring to listen to all the time, but interesting to hear it playing a piece which usually makes use of lots of dissonance.

<comment><USER12> This is not quite that, but does have a piece that had a lot of chord motion converted to all C major:

(Coltrane's) _Giant Steps_ in C. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTYzYpb1MY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTYzYpb1MY0)

For jazz musicians it's very funny, in a horrifying kind of way, maybe listen to the 1959 original first if you don't know it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu0Lhysn_X8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu0Lhysn_X8)

And thank you! While getting the links I found this wonderful animation of a shortened version of the original: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh6WTAHKYTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh6WTAHKYTc)

p.s. Woohoo! Coltrane on HN! :-)

</comment></comment><comment> 1-6 Here's another one, built with Scratch. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx96CbjUZbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx96CbjUZbA)

</comment><comment><USER13> My favorite demonstration of this has to be the engine sound of the Batpod:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bpUSNZQAb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bpUSNZQAb4)

</comment><comment><USER14> The first example of this I can remember was the endless stairs music from Super Mario 64.

</comment><comment><USER15> i think it is worth to mention glenn branca, he used this technique a lot. good example is "The Tone Row That Ruled the World"</comment>


Is Social Media changing our relationship with Death? - <AUTHOR> http://puntofisso.net/techblog/2012/04/17/is-social-media-changing-our-relationship-with-death/

<comment><USER3> "Have you ever been at a cemetery, making a mass-visit to a dead loved one?" People do that all the time. Some cultures have a whole "day of the dead" to remember the deceased. The medium may be different (and the reach a bit farther), but the relationship with death is the same.

<comment><USER4> Yep, Chinese have a day devoted to this. We burn money and eat good tasting food.

<comment><USER5> It's not actual money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "As we have become less worried of posting photos of our children and to display our location to a level of accuracy that would have scared us ten years ago, so we have started experiencing death in unexpected ways." - I know I certainly haven't, and frankly the whole "memorializing" of someone's Facebook page is distasteful to me. Nothing like commoditizing my dead childhood-best-friend so that everyone can feel better. I wonder if Facebook will show ads for funeral services in my timeline after I die?

</comment><comment><USER7> The anime Ghost in the Shell approached this in a pretty interesting way. Making a superficial simulation of somebody is reasonably easy. But real people also have what GitS calls a "ghost", something similar to the concept of soul. It's the added depth of complexity which makes a simulation or a conversational AI radically different from a real person - or a real AI.

</comment><comment><USER8> My point was a bit different. The day of the deads is a day in which you remember the deceased as a whole. It's not the same, to me, as remembering that particular person, together with all your common friends, in a celebrative way (i.e. "Happy Birthday"). \--@puntofisso

<comment><USER9> At least in my (former) church, there's a tradition of having a mass for them on the anniversary of their death (first and tenth in particular), and family/friends would gather and make a social occasion of it, which was often quite a joyful affair.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I'm not discussing this. I'm suggesting that social media is making it a mass, public phenomenon such that is making people be willing to make arrangements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I dont know much about this Tupac dude other than that he was famous and died, and then yesterday a hologram was represented of him somewhat convincingly at a public performance on a stage. It makes me reflect that, of my superset of all friends, 99% of them I have not talked to in years, and they could very well be dead. A few actually _are_ and I found out only recently. To suppose there eventually will be a way of programming the states of our personality into some agent, and let others interact with it, I might say this surrogate might be enough to trick my brain that they are still alive. What if facebook could ask you 1500 questions, and emulate the first 80% of your psyche? It would be a weird way to remember someone, chatting with their agent like that. Like that mastergeek at the end of Serenity, perhaps. Some limited interaction thing. It's all damned weird to think about. I am uncomfortable with this thought experiment so far.

<comment><USER10> Or to expound on that for a moment, think of Barkley in the holodeck - <USER2> are the ramifications of us programming our own psyches of people we know, to have virtual instances of them that we can interact with? How weird/wrong/fine is it to program up some girls you went to high school, but tweak them all to be friendly? I know this is a bit of a rant from the topic of social media familiarizing us with first-person death experiences. It just makes me stop for a moment to contemplate what we really are inside, or what we really _arent_.

<comment><USER11> Emulating the behavior of other people inside your mind is _normal_ ; there are folks who have tried to use that ability as part of the definition of human-level intelligence.

And trying to mentally simulate a world where those other people _like and admire you_ is also normal: This is how we figure out what to do, and why. Yeah, it verges on the crazy fantasy sometimes, but hey, if you can't dream _in your own dreams_ where do you dream?

You can't stop doing this, any more than you can consciously stop breathing.

What makes me want to watch that Barkley episode again, now, is that I wonder if it's really about privacy. Humans need privacy inside their own heads. They need privacy with their counselors. They need the freedom to work things out without other people taking their thoughts out of context. You need to be judged by the things that you _do_ , because your editor needs a chance to work before the raw footage gets plastered all over Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> no.</comment>


Icinga2 slack notifications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nisabek/icinga2-slack-notifications <comment><AUTHOR> We created an integration of icinga2 notifications with slack, using native NotificationCommand and just one dependency: curl. The cool thing is, you have it as a debian distribution ready for you to use from your icinga2 instance.

You can find it on github: [https://github.com/nisabek/icinga2-slack- notifications#insta...](https://github.com/nisabek/icinga2-slack- notifications#installation-using-debian-package)

And icinga2 exchange website [https://exchange.icinga.com/richardhauswald/icinga2-slack- no...](https://exchange.icinga.com/richardhauswald/icinga2-slack- notifications)

We would love to get feedback from you!</comment>


Ask HN: E-Book authoring tool for my dad using Chromebook - <AUTHOR> What are some good ebook authoring tool that a regular computer user can use? The demand should not be high, the complexity should be very low for my dad and at the same time should be capable of producing high-quality output? The later part is my requirement, as I want to sponsor the publishing of the book. <comment><USER2> Perhaps the Collaborate Knowledge Foundation can help?

[https://coko.foundation/](https://coko.foundation/)</comment>


What The Wire has taught me about business - <AUTHOR> http://www.benjohnson.co/blog/6-things-the-wire-taught-me-about-running-a-business

<comment><AUTHOR> Would like to know how I could make this post more valuable to readers like HN community. (writer)</comment>


Firefox Now Offers a More Private Browsing Experience - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/11/03/firefox-now-offers-a-more-private-browsing-experience/ <comment><USER2> Will this interfere with Privacy Badge and uBlock Origin? Unlike Chrome, Firefox doesn't have the option to disable addons for private mode.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone use Wix for enterprise level website? - <AUTHOR> I have a Fortune 100 client that has a few very simple websites within their portfolio.  They're currently part of the same pipeline, etc as their enterprise level APIs.  It's pretty heavy handed for what should be a simple blog for the company.<p>I'd love to lighten it up, be able to deploy quicker, etc but don't want to open the client up to any vulnerabilities.  Looking for others opinion on if using something like Wix is a terrible idea for this use case.  Small website but it's for a very large client with brand reputation to uphold. <comment><USER2> lttstore.com</comment>


Crash-Only Software - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20060110185854/swig.stanford.edu/~candea/papers/crashonly/crashonly.html <comment><USER2> Apple added a per-process "crash to shutdown more quickly" flag in Snow Leopard:

 _To support improved shutdown, your application needs to mark itself as "dirty" or "clean," depending on whether it has unsaved changes and needs to do work before quitting, or can be terminated without further notice. When the system shuts down, clean applications are terminated (via SIGKILL) without further interaction._

[http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/releasenotes/MacOSX/W...](http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_6.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008898-SW22)

<comment><USER3> Wow, thank you so much.

I have this application (uTorrent) that keeps aborting system reboots because it tries to gracefully close hundreds of connections and lags out. I just added "NSSupportsSuddenTermination" to the plist file, and now it shuts down instantly. No more cancelled reboots!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seemed like a good time to raise this again in light of the Mobile Multitasking discussion.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264119>

</comment><comment><USER4> See also this article on the topic:

 _Crash-only software: More than meets the eye_ by Valerie Aurora

<http://lwn.net/Articles/191059/>

<comment><USER5> these too,

[http://mazenharake.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/let-it-crash- the...](http://mazenharake.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/let-it-crash-the-right- way/)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This paper was one of the main inspirations behind the CouchDB design.</comment>


It's Time To Disqus (YC S07) Our Community - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/30/techcrunch-disqus-community/

<comment><USER2> I like Disqus and how easy it is to implement, but does anyone else feel like it is cluttered?

I don't want a commenting system that allows me to "like" comments, vote them up or down, subscribe via email, etc.

To be fair though, I'm sure all of those features can be hidden via CSS and Javascript. If you look at some custom Disqus implementations (like Engadget) they do a good job of this.

<comment><USER3> They can be hidden via CSS very easily. .dsq-options { display:none } Boom, gone!

Their implementation is very clean. Especially compared to past implementations, which were rife with buttons and links and all manner of interface foolishness. Every comment has only a few elements to it now: A user header, the comment itself, a like button, and a reply button. The reply screen is fantastically simple and can be further stripped down via CSS if you would like.

I don't get what you have against liking comments. It's the same thing as what goes on here, just without a downvoting mechanism. It surfaces quality content to the top in a democratic way.

Look at it in the context of the whole page. TechCrunch, like a lot of blogs, has a ton of "stuff" going on throughout the page. Compared to the ads on the article, the Crunchbase boxes, and the multiple areas of navigation on the site, the comments are relatively benign and simplistic. They've done a great job packing a lot of complex functionality into a clean package. I think it's already the killer app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One potentially bad thing for TechCrunch: it looks like their comments aren't indexable by search engines right now!

I read up on Disqus and their FAQ says if you use their API (through the Wordpress plugin) it can generate indexable comments. But from viewing the source on TechCrunch it looks like they are using just the normal Javascript comments, which means they aren't indexable.

[http://wiki.disqus.net/FAQ#Willsearchenginesstillindexmycomm...](http://wiki.disqus.net/FAQ#Willsearchenginesstillindexmycomments.3F)

Can anyone confirm this?

<comment><USER5> I remember reading a comment on Hacker News about Google waiting for 5 seconds before indexing the current DOM. I couldn't find any confirmation for this, other that the current Google Bot, Caffeine, is interpreting some of the Javascript code found on webpages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find the notion of using a third-party service for commenting a bit ridiculous. The commenting system and the way it works is an essential part of building a community around a website; treating it like a commodity is just wrong.

The way your comment system works is part of what defines your site, and if that part is not under your control, you'll be just an average website with an average community.

Think of all the VB/phpBB/IPB powered forums.

Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

For the same reason, I never use a CMS. If I want to build a website, I will build it from scratch. CMS powered sites tend to all look a like, you can often tell right away when a site is using a certain CMS; by the lack of polish in its design and the familiar menu to the left, or the familiar urls, or the familiar clutter and noise that always accompany sites powered by X (where X is some CMS).

Tumblr does a good job of providing high quality designs, so your tumblr blog will always look polished and professional. But it will also look like the other thousand blogs that use the same theme you're using. You can make your own theme, but if you're a control freak, you'll soon run into walls where there are certain things you want to do with your blog but you just can't.

<comment><USER7> >Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

Depends on the focus of the site. Fact is, packages like VBulletin are very good at what they do, and I find I generally have a more pleasant experience on VB/phpBB powered sites that _behave_ like other forums I visit than I do on sites that try to reinvent the wheel and end up lacking basic functionality just to be different.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. I see no problem outsourcing functional components of your website- granted, the product you outsource to had better be good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Commenting is a ridiculously underserved market. It's so pathetic that I still enounter old barely usable bbs systems that are still thriving. How is there not a decent, usable threaded comment system, outside of forums? I've said it before: there needs to be a ubiquitous commenting system and it should work like a forum. Disqus only scratches the surface of this and still has seen remarkable success; somebody needs to take it to the next level. If disqus is the best we've got, there's certainly opportunity here.

Add up/downvotes. Even YouTube comments have been made bearable by this. Show/hide children. Easy registration. Multiple threads. Notifications when someone replies. It's 2010 and commenting systems have barely advanced beyond guestbooks.

<comment><USER10> You look at forums as a good example?

IMO, forums are the _first_ thing that needs to be fixed. Stack Overflow/Hacker News have shown us how much better information is when it's organized using tags, comments and the like. And yet, every day, I stumble into some old phpBB, which is terribly organized and impossible to find information in! Splitting up a forum into 10 different areas is so terrible - before I even start seeing information, I already have to understand how everything works and is organized, etc.

I've been waiting a long time for some startup to implement a modern forum system that actually works.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely I think forums are great. The biggest thing missing from forums is the up/down voting goodness that brings the best content to the top.

 _It's important to note that forums and comments facilitate two different things._ Forums are really, really good at facilitating discussion, whether or not the best content goes to the top is usually irrelevant (though, I'm claiming it could be made better). I think SO and HN generally suck at this, because I don't know when somebody has replied to one of my posts.

However, SO and HN excel at having great content, and having that rise to the top. I attribute this to moderation and the up/down voting.

I don't think it is impossible to have both features in a commenting system.

> Forums need to be fixed.

Really? There are thriving forums for nearly every topic imaginable. It's probably not due to forums being difficult to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How can we - politely, at first - tell Techcrunch to stop linking to us?

</comment><comment><USER12> So let me just understand this. They are going to hire someone to forge a community by tweeting back with the 1 mil followers?

First Twitter destroyed community by allowing people the insane number of followers through the Suggested Lists and now they what to mine a community in that spam pool?

Really now after all the years?

</comment><comment><USER13> Kind of surprised it took them this long to include Disqus. Then again, sometimes I wish HN had Disqus.

<comment><USER12> HN, is the best commenting on the Internet, not even close. The minimalist design and usability is superb, there is no match for HN comments period.

<comment><USER7> I do occasionally find myself wishing I could collapse threads here like on reddit.

<comment><USER14> I do too.

BTW If you didn't know already, this is a nice tool to solve this problem: [http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads- for-...](http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-hacker- news/)

I really hope pg would add this to the site (given that how easy it is to add the code).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really, moderators? I'm aware of the compulsive need to prepend (YC xxx) after every Y-Combinator company name, but it just seems like a bit much to do it even for word play like this title.

</comment><comment><USER16> nice hacker news shout out in here :)</comment>


Housekeeping on dev.emcelettronica.com - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/housekeeping-devemcelettronicacom <comment><AUTHOR> During the summer holidays 2008, we thought a little bit of housekeeping was due, based on our previous experiences and your advices.</comment>


Show HN: MadeiraCloud lets you draw AWS architecture and clone apps in minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.madeiracloud.com/ <comment><USER2> Sorry, your registration procedure is a failure. Make a live-demo available right on the front-page.

Nobody in their right mind gives you their AWS-credentials just to get a glimpse at your product.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. What type of app requires you to give up your credentials to something as sensitive as your infrastructures credentials?! No fucking way. Fix this asap.

Edit: Any admin that gives these up should probably not be in the role they are. I'd fire someone over something like this. The OP commented further down that "64%" gave up their credentials. I think their bosses need to know about that or their clients should be warned.

I don't care who this guys is and how much assurance he can offer; there is no reason for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Can I ask what you would suggest as an alternative for people wanting to try the product? Our app is useless without access to the AWS APIs, and although IAM credentials could be created (as people below have), for the app to be fully functional it would require near full access permissions anyway.

We definitely need to give more before users have to enter their credentials, like a tutorial and demo video which are in the works, but as far as actually using the product, I don't see a way around it.

As noted below, this is actually very common. RightScale, Scalr, OpDemand, NewVem, and all other AWS third party tools require this information.

Not trying to say you are wrong, you're not, it's rightfully a big concern for people, but unless AWS change the way their APIs work, what are we supposed to do?

<comment><USER4> Can't you give access to the UI, let people build out an infrastructure, and then if they want to actually launch it, ask for IAM credentials then?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea, although it would limit the features to just being a diagramming tool, but at least they can take a look. Really good suggestion, will give it some consideration, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are implementing this suggestion at the moment, thanks a lot for the fantastic feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are asking for AWS credentials, you should really provide a IAM template that is preconfigured with all the "READ ONLY" access API endpoints that you require.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because we launch instances and volumes, create AMIs, SnapShots, KeyPairs and security groups, read only access would not suffice. We have considered creating an IAM template, but it would need nearly the same permissions as full access. But it would probably still be a good idea for users who aren't comfortable, at least that way they can see exactly what is required. I'll revisit this, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks awesome.

I'm curious to see how well you guys get on asking for users to supply their AWS credentials. That used to be by far the most common feature request for S3stat, namely a way to use the thing without having to hand across your secret key.

I imagine you could allow your users to create IAM accounts with exactly the permissions they'd need for you to do your thing, but it seems like you pretty much need full control to be at all useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot!

It certainly has been an issue, lots of requests and suggestions to make entering AWS credentials optional, but as you say, without the right permissions it would be useless.

Fortunately, it's the same for all third party tools which rely on APIs, no way around it, so a lot of users are used to having to give them out.

I'll share some stats from our small sample size so far: 63% of users who requested an invite then logged in, then of those users 64% entered their credentials, albeit with quite a bit of coaxing and reassurance.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't call users being used to give out their full AWS credentials "fortunate". I know that's not exactly what you were trying to see, but still the thought makes me shudder ...

<comment><USER8> You can restrict access to an extent with IAM - unfortunately EC2 doesn't have fine-grained resources to apply policies to yet :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not saying this does, or does not mean anything, but here's the whois info for the domain:

Domain Name: madeiracloud.com Registered at <http://www.dynadot.com>

Registrant: INiT Inc. Peng Zhao HaiDianNanLu 12 Building 54, Room 110 Beijing, Beijing 100082 China

Administrative Contact: INiT Inc. Peng Zhao HaiDianNanLu 12 Building 54, Room 110 Beijing, Beijing 100082 China

+86 13911041736

Technical Contact: INiT Inc. Peng Zhao HaiDianNanLu 12 Building 54, Room 110 Beijing, Beijing 100082 China

+86 13911041736

Record expires on 2012/06/16 UTC Record created on 2011/06/16 UTC

Domain servers in listed order: ns1.dynadot.com ns2.dynadot.com

<comment><USER9> I guess they came from the ChinaBang conference?

<comment><AUTHOR> We did indeed! <http://goo.gl/PYNYB>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does MadeiraCloud let you set up anything other than EBS volumes & EC2 instances w/ firewall rules? Not sure how useful it is atm if that is all one can accomplish.

<comment><USER4> There's more shown on the site's home page than is currently available in the actual UI. Guessing a lot left to be implemented and we're seeing just the "here's what'll eventually be possible" view on the "features" screens.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct. We wanted to get something out to get feedback on and wanted to balance disappointing people with showing what we are working towards on the promotional site. The features on the homepage will all be available for use in the next few months, plus some additional ones not mentioned that we are very excited about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Impressive site and an innovative approach in what is only going to become a more and more crowded space.

Would you be able to share an indication of the take up you've had so far? Secondly, are you seeing users move from a free account to the premium, as they understand the possibilities available with the higher capacity for apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! It is indeed, but we haven't come across anyone who takes our approach, so hopefully it will be enough to differentiate ourselves.

We launched our private beta in February and haven't done any paid marketing since then, all our users have been from word of mouth, media exposure and of course, the great HN. We 'launched' at an early stage and have been iterating since. Currently we have less than 700 free beta users and we are not offering the premium service yet until we have implemented our MVP feature-set and have ironed out any bugs our beta users report. I will be more than happy to share this information in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The site design looks very similar to Heroku.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it's too similar? I love the dark design of Heroku, and obviously we also have purple branding, but I didn't think beyond that it was too similar.

I'll take it as a compliment, Heroku has a brilliant site and I hope ours can be as good but not appear to be anything close to a copy. It wasn't actually a reference during the design.

Do you have any suggestions on anything to change to make it less similar in your eyes?

<comment><USER12> Its the overall product and packaging.

Herkou is famous as being the first Rails PaaS to gain traction that was really "easy" to get started and push live.

This experience felt very similar - an impressive feit indeed, a similar feeling to what Herkou instilled the first time I saw their service.

The drag-and-drop web architecture super-easy-deployathon has that same slick awesome vibe (which is a good thing!), but coupling that with a similar layout, color scheme, and information architecture and its the first thing I jumped to.

Not a bad connection per se, but the original thought was "the guy that did the www site sweats herkou hard".

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. Well I am the designer of the www, my and ide site, and whilst I like Heroku's site, I don't "sweat it hard"!

But seriously, thanks for this, I thought beyond the dark colour scheme and (very different shades of) purple there wasn't much more similarity. Next time I'm doing some redesigning I'll try and move it a bit further away.

Thanks for the compliments too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What UI toolkit was used to build MadeiraCloud? Anybody knows?

<comment><USER14> It looks like a version of one of the most popular drupal themes, Rubik.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good spot, the my site is Rubik > Ginkgo > Custom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I cant change my password without giving you access to AWS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, our app relies on the AWS APIs, so without your credentials there's not a lot you will be able to do. We combined the AWS and password forms because we were getting a lot of support requests from people not entering them, so we felt it was best to force it early on.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, no problem there, but when I first signed up and clicked the link in my email it said I wouldnt be able to use that link to login again. I wasnt ready to provide my AWS info at that time, because I didnt have time to do it but I did have time to make an account. Now I dont have a password and I cant get back into my account for good?

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha.. I see, great point, thank you. You are right, that definitely needs changing. You should still be able to reset your password, but obviously that's a pretty poor process. I'll look in to changing that right away, thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why Madeira? Are you from the Madeira? What's 'wooden' about your app :P?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not, no, but it is a beautiful word and also happens to be a South American river which is the largest tributary to some other river in the rainforest ;-)</comment></comment>


Ask PG: Why did YC add a "Non-Profit" track (as opposed to "Social Enterprise")? - <AUTHOR>

Congratulations on the new initiative to accept non-profit organizations/ideas into the Y Combinator program. I am sure this will inspire many social-minded entrepreneurs.<p>However, with the recent/growing focus towards for-profit social entrepreneurship, hybrid social ventures and patient capital, I am curious why YC chose to highlight only one end of the "social enterprise spectrum"? Or, does this mean YC has always been open to for-profit social enterprises? <comment><USER2> Yes, there have been for-profit "social-minded" startups such as Amicus (s12):

[http://amicushq.com](http://amicushq.com)</comment>


The USA has little to lose by confronting China's trade polices - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01krugman.html?hp

<comment><USER2> _If China were to start selling dollars, there's no reason to think it would significantly raise U.S. interest rates. It would probably weaken the dollar against other currencies — but that would be good, not bad, for U.S. competitiveness and employment. So if the Chinese do dump dollars, we should send them a thank-you note._

I'm not so sure about this. It might be true, but I think there is a lot more back story. A weakening dollar is bad for people who don't have debt, and it's bad for people who want to buy any good produced in foreign countries who's currencies aren't depreciating as quickly as the dollar. However, for anyone awash in mortgage and credit card debt, the weakening dollar is welcoming news, as it lowers the cost of the debt. The caveat is that you have to be able to support yourself, despite the weakening dollar, while still not falling further into debt. If you're able to increase your pay to match real inflation then you're in a real good position, but most people's income will lag far behind the increasing cost of goods.</comment>


Why I Use Suckless Tools - <AUTHOR> https://christine.website/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05 <comment><USER2> This post highlights many of the reasons why I've chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years.

Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness, or productivity that I save from just letting someone else choose the defaults for me?

I don't have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn.

But once you get used to an OS and set of tools—warts and all—I think the level of tweaks that are listed in this post are the equivalent of someone spending an hour each day prepping clothing and makeup.

For some people, that's a fun part of their day. For me, it seems like torture.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's about wanting to focus on troubleshooting toolchains or figuring out config files for each piece involved. I think the issue generally boils down to technical-minded users being empowered to unblock themselves.

I use tools like Linux and suckless because I am sick and tired of being blocked by shoddy software failing in an inexplicable, opaque way. If something goes wrong in Windows or Mac OS X, I might be able to file a bug off to into the void, and restart everything, to work around it. There's not much other choice. It's just a waste of time every time it happens.

With software I control, whether or not it's a waste of time is up to me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah exactly; I think "how easy is it when everything works?" is just part of the total question of "how easy is it?" Another part is "how easy is it to figure stuff out _if it doesn 't work?_" I think sometimes people forget to ask that second question. This applies to almost all software.

There's obviously a trade-off here, and no single right or wrong answer. Visual Studio is undoubtedly neat software with a lot of features that help people being productive; but it's indeed not as simple as the previous post made it out to be, IMHO, as it forgot about the second question.

Then again, if you're lucky nothing ever breaks and you win :-) But in my experience people usually aren't that lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If something goes wrong while using them, you can easily jump right into the > code that implements them and nail down issues using basic debugger skills.

I feel like we have very different conceptions of what 'easily' fixing a configuration issue looks like.

<comment><USER7> From the implementation POV, suckless software is very simple, and this makes it easier not only to tweak configuration (which is usually done C headers through defines), but also any kind of customization you might need.

Take their window manager dwm as an example. The codebase is only 2000 lines long, so any bug you find will have to be hidden in those 2000 lines. If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked from Dwm).

<comment><USER8> > If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely > understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be > in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking > it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked > from Dwm).

I don't think I have ever needed to do this "fix" any piece of configuration in any software.

While I understand the concept and approach, I don't think that this is a productive use of most people's time.

<comment><USER9> Be a little charitable to OP and this reply. The configuration is indeed in code but it's macro defines. It's essentially as simple as changing a text configuration file, it's not like you have to actually edit code (as in new functions, adding actual logic). Things like fonts and sizes and colors is changing defines, it's actually simple.

Now when it comes to more complex stuff, like hotkeys, well you're essentially programming already in most other wms that doesn't have such things build in. AwesomeWM, i3, qtile (not popular but I used it for years) basically is half- way to programming, although it's a line, so it isn't any worse. I think the thing people aren't getting is the code is actually simple, so editing it and recompiling it isn't a chore.

<comment><USER8> I actually am quite familiar with suckless tools and I do consider myself an advanced user, so I'm probably part of their target market as well. But to be honest, from a pragmatic point of view I just don't see how configuration through code is better/worse than configuration through dot/json/ini files in the average "suckless" use-case. Why must this even be something that I care about?

If it's a case of their software being simpler to understand so which makes it easier to fix bugs, then sure, I get that. But in my experience, software that has been around forever just tends to have fewer bugs in general so it's also just something else that I simply don't need to care about. And how often does the average user of suckless tools actually have to fix bugs in the programs? If it's more than once, then does the label "suck less" even qualify?

Is it just because the software is extremely minimal and therefore less "bloated"? I get that too, but personally, why would I care if a piece of software is 70kb or 500kb in this age? YMMV.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to bash suckless or any other community here. I'm just very pragmatic about the tools that I use and my workflow. If you're the type of person that likes to tinker and customize every aspect from the ground up, sure then maybe suckless tools are for you. Tinker and mod away, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

<comment><USER10> > I get that too, but personally, why would I care if a piece of software is > 70kb or 500kb in this age? YMMV.

I'm torn on this because I am way, way over screwing around with my OS, but I also hate that all the modern standard desktop operating systems (macOS, Win10, Gnome3 or KDE) that you get if you don't want to jack with defaults and configure things or use some way-less-popular so likely to be (even more) janky distro or "spin" or whatever, want to take up a gigabyte or more (way more for macOS and Win10 especially, tens of GB) of disk and hundreds of MB of RAM, while delivering experiences that are _marginally_ better than what we had in the late 90s and early 2000s with sub-GB OS installations and low-tens of MB of memory use when idle.

<comment><USER11> All the more reason to not get worked up over including something as mundane as a TOML parser in your dependencies for a config file. So that, you know, you don't have to _recompile_ your WM whenever you want to adjust something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing I like about the suckless people and their tools is not breaking what works. Seriously, the _primary_ problem with software today in my assessment is churn. Things change way too fast and you wonder how people get anything done as aging things are constantly being deprecated instead of being considered stabilized. I'm not really a developer (I'm a computational scientist, so I am a different kind of developer), so I'm not sure if this is my place to complain but if I had the time I'd write a whole article about it, I just don't think anyone would care to listen.

On the other hand, the thing that I do not like about suckless and the minimal hacker types in general is just the staunch elitism. I think you'll get some level of elitism with any group but in this case, with the minimalism comes a bit of a sense of hostility to new users who just don't think your way. It feels like there is no in between in the foss world, either people seem to be friendly and kind with TOCs and all that but force churn every few years or are militantly minimal and just super unpleasant as people. Then again, I think the thing I want isn't really minimalism, stability to me is the thing that is lacking greatly in the open source world which is sort of a side effect of the minimalism.

<comment><USER12> > Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is > churn.

I agree. The machines are wicked fast, most of the needful algorithms are already sussed out, not to mention how ML solves another swath of problems. Today most "programming" should consist of picking and configuring existing software, and this should be seen as a big win and a sign of maturity.

(Instead we have Python 3 and Rust and... <rant omitted>)

So, yes, we need the outside view, please complain!

In re: elitism and hostility, remember that most of the old-school programmers are old enough to have grown up before nerds became cool, so some of that grows out of resentment and alienation.

<comment><USER11> Python 3 is a _great_ example of "picking and configuring existing software". If it's not in the standard library, it's on PyPI. A lot of my Python code is just gluing together high-level functionality from various libraries. It's beautiful.

You can complain about this or that aspect of language design, but then you also have to look at what a clusterfuck of historical accidents C and C++ are.

Like what you like, but at least be correct about why you like what you like (and why you don't like what you don't like).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup.

This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular.

Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments.

R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.

<comment><USER14> My problem is that I was pretty productive with Ubuntu + Unity, significantly more than with Windows or MacOS, or other Linux DEs. This was great because Unity was the default DE for one of the most common Linux distros, so it was well-supported and easy to find information about tweaks and settings online.

But then it got killed off due to a vocal minority constantly complaining about it, and now I'm trying to find an alternative that uses similar UI principles but nothing actually seems to get it right. For example, I often hear people (computer power users) praise OS X. When I see them use it, they're mostly operating it in a "casual" point-and-click fashion like the average casual user. What made the difference for me in Ubuntu/Unity were power user features, like extensive keyboard navigation, or dragging/resizing a window with the middle/right mouse button while holding Alt, or searching the window menu simply by pressing Alt.

<comment><USER15> Disclaimer: KDE dev

Did you try Plasma? You can drag a window while holding the Win key, there are tons of keyboard navigation, and your last point can be achieved by this extension: [https://github.com/Zren/plasma- hud](https://github.com/Zren/plasma-hud). There is even some global themes with the look of Unity.

<comment><USER16> I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, KDE seems to be the closest equivalent. However I still miss a nicely working global menu.

<comment><USER17> There are several global menu options for Plasma, some of which I think are better than the global menu on macOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This caters to a very specific audience though. This particular concept while labelled suckless sounds like hell to me.

To change a config I need to recompile stuff? Jikes

To each their own though. I can see how this could work well if one invested a mountain of time into learning & fine-tuning it all

<comment><USER19> > suckless tools having their configuration baked into the executable at > compile time, they start up instantly

I wonder how many milliseconds slower the startup of a C application will be, when it reads a config file from SSD first.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, reading a single file will not have a noticable impact, but we all know it will not stop at a single file. Before you know it a full blown web browser is included. The suckless philosophy is pretty extreme, but I'm grateful there are people exploring this space.

<comment><USER21> I think that's the key thing. It's not about config, it's the fact that the "plugins" are all compiled in as well— meanwhile over here in the real world we have there are entire programs and methodologies dedicated to managing directories of vimscript files, and sharing your personal dotfiles directory on github is a thing.

<comment><USER22> With suckless you don't have your dotfiles on GitHub, but your fork and then you have to keep close to upstream all the time. Else they might cause a merge hell later ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I get that people enjoy very minimalist computer experiences, but startup time is hardly that different between these programs and other slightly more ergonomic programs which offer conveniences like a config file.

If you look at my startup time for my system it goes something like this:

10s - waiting for monitor to wake up to pick OS at dual boot menu

15s - typing disk encryption password

15s - system uses disk encryption password to retrieve LUKS key

5s - Literally the entirety of my OS and window manager and autostart programs beginning.

I use i3 for my window manager, which manages to launch instantly, and alt- enter launches alacritty for my terminal, which also launches instantly. But even heavier terminals like xfce4-terminal launch very quickly. These programs are lightweight sure, but they don't need to be recompiled for configuration and have some ergonomics. I don't see the marginal benefit of maybe 4s at boot time being worth that hassle.

<comment><USER24> I don't see why you're focusing on speed (does the author even mention it? I skimmed TFA and didn't find it mentioned). Less bloat, simpler code means fewer bugs and it means that it's easy for a hacker/power user to dig into the code to understand and modify it, _that_ 's the killer feature. After one hour poking into DWM I understood how it worked and how I could modify it to fit my needs exactly.

I use a bunch of suckless tools, in particular DMW. I don't necessarily agree with all their choices but for me it's about configurability and reliability. I consider myself a power user, I know how things work, I don't need a gui to configure my keyboard or network interface. I don't want daemons running in the background and overwriting the settings I apply manually with the command line (a common issue I have with more fully fledged "desktop environments").

Ergonomics easily win too, sure I have to mess with C code to get the config I want, but then it's basically tailor-made vs. ready-made. All the functions I use the most are one key keystroke away, I use the mouse so little that I often find myself searching for it because it ended up buried underneath some papers. I want to focus the terminal? Win-C. I want to focus Vim? Win-E. Firefox? Win-w. I have special customization to sticky windows the way I like, placement rules etc...

Everything is fast, reliable, no pointless transitions, no cruft, no having to worry about the next update changing a behaviour that I use and me having to figure out how to revert the change or relearn how I do things. >I don't see the marginal benefit of maybe 4s at boot time being worth that hassle.

Before I used DWM I used StumpWM for more than a decade, an other tiling WM. Being written in Common Lisp it was quite slow to boot up from an image dump (especially 10+ years ago on HDDs and vastly less powerful CPUs). For me performance is highly irrelevant, the "hassle" is what I'm in it for. It's like learning to touchtype, at first it's immensely frustrating but once you're past the learning curve it gets really beneficial. Digging throw DWM's code is harder than clicking on Gnome's menus, but once you've got it working exactly like you want you probably won't have to touch it for a long while.

The last significant change I made to my DWM fork dates from July 27 2018. Since then I've only tweaked a couple of keybindings.

<comment><USER25> > I don't see why you're focusing on speed (does the author even mention it? I > skimmed TFA and didn't find it mentioned).

Second paragraph, second phrase.

> However as a side effect of suckless tools having their configuration baked > into the executable at compile time, they start up instantly.

<comment><USER24> Fair enough, I missed that. I agree that it's a rather minor advantage in this day and age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used st for a while but switched to kitty. kitty obviously has way more features (things like colour switching can be added to st, but requires messing with patches which I dislike, and dislike more than compiling on each configuration change).

I've been using kitty for a few months now and performance is great. in fact, the biggest performance gain I saw was when I switched away from "oh my zsh" to a manually written `~/.zshrc`.

<comment><USER27> Don't tell anybody where you placed your .zshrc- it's supposed to be a secret!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks like suckless tools work on X. I recently made the switch to Wayland and was wondering if a similar set of tools (with this minimalist philosophy) exist. Any idea?

<comment><USER29> I was trying to piece together a nobox successor for Wayland: [https://github.com/serprex/noway](https://github.com/serprex/noway)

250 lines of Rust should get you started

wayst in code refers to having gotten [https://github.com/michaelforney/st](https://github.com/michaelforney/st) to work at some point, seems there's also [https://github.com/majestrate/wterm](https://github.com/majestrate/wterm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the highlight of this story is seeing the open source workflow. She found a bug in the source code of the window manager; she was able to isolate it and make a meaningful report to the community/maintainers; and they fixed it quickly without any blowback. My takeaway from this post is that for open source to work well, it has to be as simple and clear as possible.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm on CrOS. And I feel like web based tooling is maturing to professional levels. I can give shout outs to: Piskel - for sprite generation, P5JS - texture synth and prototyping, Babylon and Three JS Editors - easy 3D modelling and scene graphs, ShaderToy - vertex and fragment shader development and debugging in webgl, Rayground - ray tracing experimentation, Nodes.io - creative coding, AudioMass - waveform manipulation. Now I wouldn't describe any of these environments as "suckless". At best maybe "experimental". But they are getting better every day ;)

</comment><comment><USER32> I think I agree generally with the thesis of this article.

In my view, the value of these types of tools (Suckless & friends) doesn't come from simplicity per se, but more from the fact that they can be debugged at all when they break, because it is possible for one person to have a decent handle on all the pieces and how they fit together.

I have tried to use and like more complex environments like macOS or GNOME in the past. If they actually worked, they would be great. However, something inevitably breaks, and now I have to unpick a twisted not of dependencies, IPC, libraries, languages, etc. At least when CWM breaks, it can be fixed at all rather than being forced to give up and deal with it being broken.

I think people saying "having to hack on the C sources isn't easy" and the counterpoint "it's just a four kLOC of C, it's easy to hack on!" are both right, but also missing the point.

GNOME, KDE, etc. are so complicated, that from the perspective of an individual person trying to fix a problem, they may as well be closed source unless you're willing to devote months just to learning the project.

I have no problem using complicated tools, as long as they are tools that I understand, because I can't fix things I don't understand. Alternatively, complex tools that work so well that they never break are also fine, since I never have to fix them.

</comment><comment><USER33> I found this section ironic, since the whole point is the lack of features:

" As dwm is configured in C, there's also a community of people creating patches for dwm that add extra features like additional tiling methods, the ability to automatically start things with dwm, transparency for the statusbar and so much more. I use the following patches..."

Eventually, enough users will want a particular patch, and it will be agreed to include for all users. At that time, is the product still suckless?

<comment><USER29> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seems like having to use a bunch of popular patches is counter to the author's other praises about how simple and minimal the software is. Why doesn't upstream integrate them and let everyone use them without having to patch?

<comment><USER35> I'm guessing it's because of their philosophy that more lines of code might be a liability: [https://suckless.org/philosophy/](https://suckless.org/philosophy/)

Note that you can use dwm just fine without any patches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The author primarily uses an iPad Pro, a dedicated remote server, and most work done with ssh, tmux, and Emacs. That is a simplified work environment!

<comment><USER10> I'm getting ready to move toward something like that, but with VMs for each sort of work or task I'm doing. My reasons:

1) I'm leaving Mac hardware for "pro"-tier computing because their gear's swung _way_ back into ZOMGWTF overpriced territory, especially if you want higher-than-basic-but-still-not-actually-that-much core counts, memory, or disk, while also getting worse in some ways (mostly the MBP line), and not keeping up with what ought to be standard base specs for "premium" hardware. I'll keep buying used Apple gear as terminals and light farting-around machines, and iPads are still the only tablets worth a damn and I use them for tons of stuff, so they've still got me for their iOS devices.

2) No software platforms support suspend/restore-this-entire-desktop- _session_ , with multiple sessions available at once (and the ability to run more than one at once), which is an _incredibly_ productive way of working for me short of having a dedicated machine for every purpose (which would be worse in a lot of ways anyway), so the only way I can get something like that is with a big-assed desktop machine with 4x as much RAM as any one of my tasks/sessions needs, running VMs. I'd rather just be able to suspend and resume user sessions, including desktop and application state, as a native OS feature, as that'd save me the PITA of keeping multiple VMs around and up-to- date and all that—alas, no platform supports that.

[EDIT] for the latter, if it's not clear, think "client 1 session", "client 2 session", "side-project 1 session", "side-project 2 session", "gaming session" (probably can't do that one with my set-up as I don't want to screw with gaming in a VM), "book 1 writing/research session", "porn session" (LOL), all isolated and able to suspend/resume from exactly where they were.

<comment><USER36> Using mosh instead of ssh, and tmux named sessions I get something like your different sessions.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that works great for terminal programs _as long as you leave everything running somewhere_ and there are even ways to kinda do what I want in the browser using groups of bookmarks as "sessions", it's just everything else that's the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Every time I see these screenshots of tiling window managers like dwm, there is always a browser window smooshed into a block that is barely big enough for a term.

I really don't get it. Who uses a web browser like that? I almost always maximize my browser on my desktop, and when i want to share the space with something I'm working on, I maybe will split the screen in half, or just have floating windows on top of each other. Alt+tab works pretty well.

<comment><USER5> I rarely use dwm's tiling: I almost always have most things maximized with perhaps one or two floating windows. I use workspaces/tags and alt-tab to switch between stuff.

I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.

<comment><USER38> >I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.

There's a subreddit for that r/UsabilityPorn

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> An erratum is a correction included with an already published work. Errata are multiple corrections.

Not sure what "All of these things control various errata." means.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems pretty sucky to me to have to debug your window manager or configure a half dozen apps just to do basic things like changing the sound volume or showing the time. If I didn't know any better, I'd think this was a parody. It's the complete opposite of what I'd call suckless tools. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy doing those things sometimes in my time off and playing with systems, but when I need to get work done, I want a system that requires as few changes as possible from the default and whose basic functionality I don't ever need to debug. OS X used to be this and I'm still using it despite the latest version, even on a brand new mbpro, being unstable. Some Linux distros are close but even in 2020, still require constant debugging of the core system (display drivers, DE bugs, stability, etc.). Windows looks promising but due to it being adware, I never got around to testing it properly.

<comment><USER41> Its just a name, and an interesting project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Personally I use my computer like a person and not a programming robot

</comment><comment><USER43> Nice writeup. I have spent years on dvtm and dwm. Only problem for me is that as i get older i get less interested in bikeshedding my dev setup. I get the same feel from trying to get the right mix of ui programs as trying to manage a javascript frankenstack - just too much work for little gain, and that it breaks over time.

</comment><comment><USER44> > Their window manager dwm is just a window manager. It doesn't handle things > like transparency, compositing or volume control.

That is a strange division of labor. I thought transparency and composition were aspects of window management. What else would they be?

<comment><USER45> Composition should be domain of display server, IMO (like with Xsgi). Windows DWM.EXE also, AFAIK, keeps to drawing not policy.

Transparency _support_ falls under composition - the decision on applying the effect can be left to WM/app.

That's how world used to work, but it seems its going the way of dodo :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > For examples of beautiful dwm setups, see this search of /r/unixporn on > reddit.

Despite its NSFW name, /r/unixporn is a great subreddit of people posting their Linux GUI configs. It's mostly tiling WMs, but I learned a lot about how to heavily customize my setup there. The top posts are worth skimming for anyone who's a fan of beautiful UIs: [https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=all](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=all)

</comment><comment><USER47> > cabytcini to show the current time and weather in my dwm bar

...

> As of the time of this post being written, it uses only 11 megabytes of ram

I'm not a rust programmer. Is 11 megs for an app like this concidered small?

<comment><USER10> Wild guess: the web client it includes is most of that. Even if it cleans up the instance of it after, the code itself is still sitting in memory, and that may be quite large. It also seems to include a JSON parser, which might be a bit large.

I'd expect something like this grabbing some dead-simple format over a TCP socket, rather than importing a Web library, to be well under a MB, certainly, and even that seems not to be setting a very low bar, to me. Though those are expectations based on C, not Rust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like "tabbed". Traditionally I use terminal tabs on local machines, and tmux on remote. (tmux in tmux is just too much tmux for me)

After I've changed to alacritty, which does not supports tabs, I could easily recreate my old workflow with "tabbed".

(I've never heard of suckless previously, I just knew that I want some generic X11 tabbing SW (and I was sure it must exists somewhere, so have put a lot of effort in googling) - maybe I should check the other things there too...)

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm exactly the audience for this stuff. I've been using ratpoison as my WM for 15 years. But even _it_ reads a simple config file.

</comment><comment><USER50> I use some of the suckless suite with minimal configuration and it works well. The configuration isn't all that bad tbh, no worse than the mini-dsls many other non-trivial programs have.

I think people should give dmenu a try. It's an application launcher, but it's unix-y design allows for composition in ways that are very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER51> 11 megabytes of RAM to show the time? What?

</comment><comment><USER52> The suckless.org lists a couple of unmaintained distros under their rocks/ section.

However [https://sta.li/](https://sta.li/) (static linux, not "stalin"[:-1] ) appears to be in circulation.

</comment><comment><USER53> I've been using the same dwm config for nearly eight years at this point. Can't beat it :)

It's followed me from Arch to Ubuntu to Void

</comment><comment><USER54> > I have yet to integrate this meta-patch into my dwm fork, but I'll probably > get around to it someday.

famous last words. won't ever use dwm, got no time for this.

</comment><comment><USER55> As much as possible, I try to use software created by kind communities. The behaviours and attitudes in the "suckless" world come across as combative, exclusive, and unpleasant.

<comment><USER56> In what way are they combative or unpleasant? I've never experienced this. I enjoy the philosophy and opinionated approach they have to development. I setup an old thinkpad with openbsd and dwm and st and it all worked great and i learned some C along the way. I also used sent - their plaintext slide presentation tool to give a talk at work and it was a pretty cool way to put a presentation together quickly and focus on ideas. Anyway - I like their software and the opnionatedness makes it kinda fun to explore.

<comment><USER55> Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately. They present a lot of that opposition to projects and people, rarely stated kindly.

They could express a positive enthusiasm for simplicity, but that's not the way they go about it.

<comment><USER57> Accusations of "elitism" being what they may, the name is in fact a slice of humility: they advertise that their software "sucks less", not that it is "without suck".

<comment><USER58> That's not the way I understand the "-less" composition they use. "harmless" doesn't mean "poses less harm", it means "poses no harm". "colorless" doesn't mean "less color", it means "no color". And so on. So to me, "suckless" means "doesn't suck", no humility. Admittedly, it doesn't exactly follow the normal composition rules so the exact interpretation is more up in the air, but that won't change the fact that many people will read it the way I described above.

<comment><USER59> Well in this case, "software that sucks less" is on the top of every page of their website, so the intent behind their name is pretty clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Suckless is all about hacking your own tools. Totally unsurprising that "hacker" "news" doesn't get it.

[https://suckless.org/hacking/](https://suckless.org/hacking/)

<comment><USER61> Most of us have been there, done that since childhood. Once you reach a certain age, it's more important to get things done and not fuss over trivialities in life.

<comment><USER62> Counter point: as I get older, I find it harder and harder to put up with annoying little nags in the software I use (iow, I have less patience for crap). And boy does software today have a ton of that. I think I'm just about to cross the point where I'll dump the default gnome setup on my work laptop (ubuntu) and install dwm or cwm or whatever. Even with all the tweaking and customization, it doesn't take that long, but it makes work more comfortable every hour, every day, for years to come.

It's like ergonomics. When you're a kid, you sit on what you have and you've got more interesting things to worry about than the height of your desk? At some point in life you might just want a nice chair and roomy adjustable desk with a sizeable external monitor on a proper adjustable stand to make work comfortable. That's why you hack your window manager or shell or whatever. The defaults are always terrible and not tailored for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'm not familiar with this "suckless" philosophy, although I've seen it go by a couple times recently. I'm guessing that "suckless" means something different from what I might guess, given half of the article is about how great it is consists of having to debug some serious problem _yourself_ , and the rest of it is self-congratulation over having to recompile everything because "reading configs is hard".

To paraphrase Arthur Dent: "Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word 'less' that I wasn't previously aware of."</comment>


Don't F Up Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://amifuckingup.com <comment><AUTHOR> A serious initiative launching today to help entrepreneurs weed out the pitfalls in their technical and business strategy. Check it out.</comment>


Interactive Dynamic Video [video] - <AUTHOR> http://jnack.com/blog/2016/08/13/mit-shows-off-amazing-manipulation-of-objects-in-video/ <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224879)

And others. Still awesome, though.</comment>


Why supercars are doing away with windshields - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-supercars-are-doing-away-with-windshields-11584126355 <comment><USER2> Some downsides, though it also states at 60mph speed helped increase the air bubble and speech was fine:

 _> What about bugs? I asked. Will they be deflected too? "It depends on the mass of the bug,"_

 _> What about stones thrown up by trucks?_

 _> Overtalk…inaudible…. _

_> In any event, McLaren expects all occupants will be wearing helmets on piste and will only engage the AAMS bareheaded at moderate speeds._

<comment><USER3> Not sure what constitutes a moderate speed of rocks in the face.

<comment><USER4> Natural selection, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.is/eXHrF](https://archive.is/eXHrF)

</comment><comment><USER5> When I saw the headline the first thing I imagined was that the cockpit was completely sealed up and completely flat and the forward and rear view would be on a display so the driver would lay flat to reduce the drag. Sort of like the various SST designs.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's all fun and games until one ends up inverted.

I guess this is like a convertible in that sense.</comment>


Songkick (YC summer 07) adds a round to the tune of $1.1M - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/24/songkick-adds-a-round-to-the-tune-of-11m/

<comment><USER2> This is great to hear, and just the begining for Songkick I'm sure. Ian and Pete are both very nice guys. Well done!

It is really good Ian and Pete organise YCombinator style hacker meets in London. There needs to be more things like this on this side of the pond.

<comment><USER2> the "this side of the pond" being UK not US. Sorry if that was unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> so are songkick moving to US?

<comment><USER4> we're still based in LDN but consider NYC our second home</comment></comment>


Ruby 1.9.1 Preview Released: Why This Is A Big Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-1-9-1-preview-released-why-its-a-big-deal-1280.html <comment><USER2> Does anybody know if they have a not-slow VM/interpreter now? I read that they were replacing the old-and-slow tree traversing for a VM or something, but i've not heard much about it.

<comment><USER3> MRI has been replaced with YARV, which is sometimes much, much faster, and sometimes a little bit slower.

With JRuby, MacRuby, Gemstone, and other things in the pipeline, there are plenty of choices to go around.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for Geocoding? - <AUTHOR> I find I have a requirement to take a description, such as one would feed to Google, and convert it to Lat/Long.  It need not be particularly accurate, a few miles is good enough.  Given the wide range of interests and experience here on HN, I thought I'd ask if anyone here has done this, what they've used, and how well it worked.
So for example, given "Lady Lever Art Gallery" it could produce something like "53.35,-3.00" and that would be good enough.  Or given something like "Golden Gate Bridge" it could return "37.81,-122.48"
Does anyone here do this?  What do you use?
Currently this is for personal use, and would be limited to at most a few requests per week.  I can use Google by hand, but if the project takes off then usage would increase, would need to be automated, and I would, of course, be willing to pay for an appropriate service.
Suggestions and comments welcome, especially descriptions of what you currently use, and your experience with it/them.
TIA. <comment><USER2> I've been looking at the CloudMade Geocoding API for a side project and they return good results in the UK. The POI search might also be helpful but I haven't tried it yet.

You get 100k free requests per month and then it's $15 per 100k.

Their APIs are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

[http://cloudmade.com/products/geocoding](http://cloudmade.com/products/geocoding)

[http://developers.cloudmade.com/projects/show/geocoding- http...](http://developers.cloudmade.com/projects/show/geocoding-http-api)

[http://cloudmade.com/api-terms-of-service](http://cloudmade.com/api-terms-of- service)

<comment><AUTHOR> So I've registered with CloudMade. That was painless.

Then ...

It appears with CloudMade that to get an API key I have to pretend I'm building an APP, and have to have a web site describing my awesome new product. Then when I try to ask a question, I get all the way through the tedious process of constructing my question in their model of how a customer should behave, only to have to login with a completely different account! Google, Facebook, GetSatisfaction, something, but not the account I just registered with them.

WTF?!?

<comment><USER2> It is a bit rubbish but not as bad as other APIs I've had to register for (API keys pending review/approval for several days). I just filled in the bare minimum of App name and google.com for the App URL. Where are you trying to ask questions? I've been using their support email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried clicking on the "Feedback" link on the left. When that didn't work, I've tried sending them email to their support address.

In the meantime I've factored out and lifted _all_ the GeoCoding from my application and added my own internal "API", so whatever service I end up using, I can switch fairly easily to another when necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have done something similar with with a python script that basically:

\- parsed locations from an html file and stored them in a list

\- parsed them into this url: '[https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s'](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s') % (location)

-parsed the html for an address

-parsed the address into this url: '[https://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=%s&sen...](https://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=%s&sensor=false') % (address)

-parse the coordinates

I used it to get oil refineries in the united states and it worked pretty well… i can put it on github if you would like.

It probably can also be done between the front-end and back-end with a little bit of trickery (the calls to google on the front-end, POST'ed html processing on the back from the front-end), so that users ip is using the service and not the servers.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very similar to what I've been doing so far, but it's broken again, so I'm looking for something less fragile and more "official" so I can stop having to fix it every few months, or every few weeks. I'll probably fix it this time while I'm searching for something more robust.

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Good luck with your search, everything seems so fractured when it comes to doing things like this.

I'm curious, how does your method break? Is it the query string not finding any results to a location, wrong locations, or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been sending query to:

        'https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s' % sanitise(location)

and then parsing the result to find the lat/lng. However, this isn't an "official" way of doing it, and the format of the html has changed. The result used to match this:

        'viewport_center_lat=([-0-9.]*);var viewport_center_lng=([-0-9.]*)'

but now it looks like this:

        'latlng:{lat:([-0-9.]*),lng:([-0-9.]*)}'

Yes, I'm using regexs to parse HTML.

However, now that's working again, but I might switch to the explicit two phase process used in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058751) \- or I might directly use the second link mentioned there, instead of calling the URL I currently use.

Does that all make sense?

<comment><USER3> Yeah it makes sense.

If you are getting locations in specific, then it makes more sense to just use the second url as you state.

I've been using BeautifulSoup, then searching for the span tags where the "class" attribute is set to "pp-headline-item pp-headline-address", and getting the formatted address of the possible locations that show up and using that in the query to the second url (I'm lazy so I only get the first result if multiple exist).

I don't know if that would work better than regexs because google could still change the html every so often (but maybe not as often as javascript).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two other options are the OpenStreetMap Geocoder (it's called Nominatim) and the FourSquare API.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - will investigate. Currently having a nightmare trying to find a registration service that actually works, and getting tired of creating new passwords for every login.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nokia HERE map/geocoding UI. Lots of features, good developer documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that, but in truth, I don't want lots of features - I want to send a piece of text to a URI and get back a string from which I can pick out the lat/long.

And you've given me no indication of how to find what you're recommending, apart simply from searching for the text "Nokia here map/geocoding". Is that what I should do to find it?

 _Added in edit ..._

So now I've done that search and found a description. Based on your recommendation I decided to try it, so I clicked on the link on how to get my API credentials, and I got this:

        404 Not Found

            Code: NoSuchKey
            Message: The specified key does not exist.
            Key: docs/maps_js/topics/credentials.html
            RequestId: 92390AF64837E443
            HostId: <omitted>

        An Error Occurred While Attempting to Retrieve a Custom Error Document

            Code: NoSuchKey
            Message: The specified key does not exist.
            Key: /error.html

This seems typical - things just don't work.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I don't have my code/notes with me, but I wanted to put the link out there. Nokia has tons of developer resources so it can be hard to find what you need.

I will try to remember to post more later, but for now here is a basic geocoding example: [http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/HERE_Maps_API_- _Us...](http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/HERE_Maps_API_- _Using_the_geocoding_service)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I'm so grumpy, but I'm getting various suggestions from various places, and my experiences are, to say the least, unhappy ones. This is a typical example. All looks well, then you follow a link to start using it, and you get a 404, or an access denied, or some other message that just brings you to a dead stop.

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll return to it later and see if it's been fixed.

<comment><USER5> Here are my notes/bookmarks, as promised:

      http://developer.here.com/
      http://developer.here.com/javascript_api
      Docs/examples: http://developer.here.com/javascript_api_explorer
      API: http://developer.here.com/maps_js
      Daily limits: http://developer.here.com/faqs#l&t</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


UI/UX References for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://cutecoder.org/career/11-books-resources-ios-developer-start-ui-ux/ <comment><USER2> I'll add all of Edward Tufte's books, which are excellent both in content and presentation. The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin was also formative for me.

They complement each other well; Raskin being more technologically/psychologically oriented and formal, while Tufte takes on information design in general at a higher level.

And I second The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, it should be required reading for anyone designing anything used by humans.</comment>